Kim Strassel at our home in Savannah at which some 60 plus people came to hear her talk about her new book. The pictures were taken by Sarah Noga, a SCAD photography major. This was an academic project for Sara,
https://drive.google.com/open?
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The mass media biggest losers? (See 1 below.)
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General Mattis, muddled?
There is every good reason for the United States to support Israel because Israel is a friend and longtime supporter of America whereas that is not the case when it comes to most every other nation in the Middle East. I would say the same about Great Britain and Australia. (See 2 below.)
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Educational hysteria. (See 3 below.)
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Soros plots.(Se 4 below.)
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Donald Trump won by defying the conventional. He was vulgar, he attacked his opponents in a churlish manner, he was accused of being everything from a racist to being a male chauvinist yet, he won by defying all the conventional odds. He has a lot of liberals and Hillary worshipers crying and scratching their head.
So how did this happen? There are many reasons but probably the most important was the anger that Trump voters felt they had been ignored for decades and decided they "would not take it any more. They also were fed up with being whip lashed by PC'ism.
Second, Trump's opponent was so establishment it was easy for those distrustful of the establishment to choose him over Hillary. Furthermore, Hillary proved to be a lousy campaigner - stiff, unfunny, untrustworthy, offering nothing but pandering platitudes.
Third, many Trump voters had become disaffected with Obama. He had lied to them, he had shoved legislation down their throats which was hurting them financially and his shtick had worn thin.
Finally, Trump voters did not trust the mass media and sensed, correctly, they favored Hillary and that offended them. Then Hillary told them they were jerks but used a more elegant expression - deplorables - and she also told coal miners she wanted them to lose their jobs.
So now a lot of liberals and college students, many who did not even register to vote, are bewildered and crying a river. The student's college professors are throwing them bones and excusing them from exams, attending classes etc. Everyone is making fools of themselves and to make matters worse they do not even understand this simple fact. To show you how out of touch they have become they believe rioting, stealing serves their purpose.
So Trump is in the cat bird seat and the no-Trumpers are getting skewered and deservedly so because underneath all the Trump bravado is a message of simple logic that appeals to those who are logical and not ideologues.
One day these no Trumpers might understand but I doubt they will change because growing up is not easy.
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The Happiest and best ever of Thanksgiving.My favorite holiday.
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Dick
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1)2016’s biggest loser
Of all the losers in this season of discontent, the mainstream media top the list. I don’t say this lightly, and I sincerely fear that loss of faith in journalism ultimately will cause more harm to the nation than any outside enemy could hope to.
Only 18 percent of Americans trust national news and just 22 percent trust local news, according to the Pew Research Center. That said, three-fourths of Americans think news organizations keep political leaders in line, though about the same percentage think the news media are biased.
Not surprisingly, Republicans more than Democrats think this way. It hasn’t helped that Republican politicos and conservative cable and radio outlets have convinced their constituents that the media are the enemy. It seems we’ve forgotten that the purpose of a newspaper, as Chicago Evening Post journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne put it in an 1893 column, is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Could there be a better reason to give Donald Trump a rough ride?
Nevertheless, distrust of legitimate journalism is no joking matter. What happens to democracy when an uninformed, misinformed or disinformed populace tries to make sound decisions? The simple and terrible answer is, democracy fails.
We’ve reached this critical juncture thanks largely to the digital revolution. Until relatively recently, most people relied on a limited number of trusted news sources, which provided a basis for what we referred to as “common knowledge.” The country more or less also shared a set of common values.
Today, of course, we have thousands of news sources — millions if you count social media. Everyone can pick his or her own outlet for consumption as well as a venue for invention. Personal journalists — that is, anyone with a smartphone to photograph or record video in real time — have created virtual newsrooms of one that can communicate with countless others through tweets, retweets and created buzz on fact or fiction.
If you’re suddenly put in mind of insects, you’re not far off. Deafened by the dizzying din, it’s hard to hear the angels sing.
To those who complain that Trump received more negative coverage than Hillary Clinton did, I would merely point out that correctly quoting the man was inherently negative. He said a lot of awful stuff and offered little of substance to offset the headlines. Moreover, the media have covered every follicle of Clinton’s scalp for 25 to 30 years. Her flaws and failures are well-known to anyone who’s been half-awake, while Trump was essentially new on the political stage.
Trump’s own criticism of the press was as trumped-up as many of his other campaign slogans, created to rile the crowd and deflect attention from, among other things, the fact that his manipulation of the media was the engine that propelled him to the top of the heap. But he knew that media bashing was popular among his base and gave them what they wanted.
Also contributing to the growing distrust is the perceived blurring of news and opinion, which can be a legitimate beef. Advocacy journalism, in this opinion writer’s view, belongs on the editorial and op-ed pages, though many news organizations subscribe to the notion that advancing a social cause or, perhaps, derailing an unfit candidate justifies aggressive, Page 1 coverage, objectivity be damned.
Thus, one shouldn’t wonder why so many have lost faith. It is worth noting, however, that when a mainstream reporter or editor is found to be deliberately dishonest, he or she is quickly dispatched to the outer darkness. The same can’t be said of the alternative news world or of social media. On Facebook, “fake” news creator Paul Horner recently marveled that his viral, made-up stories helped get Trump elected.
Fortunately, only 4 percent of Americans trust social media “a lot” as a news source, and 30 percent trust it “some,” according to Pew. But sometimes it’s hard to tell fake from true, or advocacy from propaganda, and therein lies perhaps the greatest challenge of our time.
What’s clear is that news consumers must be extra-vigilant in selecting news sources, while also being self-critical about those choices. The mainstream media need to work harder at presenting balanced reporting to rebuild trust. And education programs aimed at teaching students how to evaluate news, such as those created by the News Literacy Project, need greater public support and an accelerated timeline.
Words to this effect from our next president wouldn’t hurt. Trump would see headlines change quickly in his favor, the world would rejoice, and the Trump brand would be golden forever. Come on, do it.
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Retired Marine Corps general James Mattis, seen as front-runner for defense secretary post, also insisted the US pays a price in Middle East for its support of Israel
President-elect Donald Trump talks to the media as he stands with retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster clubhouse in Bedminster, N.J., Saturday, Nov. 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
WASHINGTON — One of President-elect Donald Trump’s leading candidates for secretary of defense has said Israel’s settlement project could turn the country into an apartheid state and that the United States pays a price for its support of Israel.
Retired Marine Corps general James Mattis met with the incoming president Saturday at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, to reportedly discuss a cabinet post.
Trump was extremely impressed by Mattis, who is now his top choice to run the Defense Department, a position whose power over the US military is second only to that of the president.
Mattis’s resume includes over two years heading the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) under President Barack Obama from August 2010 to March 2013, a post that has command authority for all US forces in the Middle East.
During Mattis’s tenure, he held a commanding presence in the war theaters on Afghanistan and Iraq, experiences for which Trump offered high praise after their hour-long meeting. “All I can say is he is the real deal,” he said. “The real deal.”
When Trump was asked by reporters if Mattis would have a role in the upcoming administration, he said: “We’ll see. We’ll see. He’s just a brilliant, wonderful man. What a career. We are going to see what happens, but he is the real deal.”
In July 2013, shortly after leaving his post running CENTCOM, Mattis said the current situation in Israeli was “unsustainable” and that settlements were obstructing the possibility of a two-state outcome between Israelis and Palestinians, comments that seem to fly in the face of Trump’s position as reported by his Israel advisers.
“The current situation is unsustainable,” Mattis told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during a panel discussion at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado when asked about the peace process. “It’s got to be directly addressed. We have got to find a way to make the two-state solution that Democrat and Republican administrations have supported. We’ve got to get there, and the chances for it are starting to ebb because of the settlements, and where they’re at, they’re going to make it impossible to maintain the two-state option.”
Mattis specifically warned that if Israel continued to expand its settlement presence, its long-term character as a Jewish and democratic state would be at risk, ultimately leading to Israel becoming an apartheid state.
“If I’m in Jerusalem and I put 500 Jewish settlers out here to the east and there’s 10,000 Arab settlers in here, if we draw the border to include them, either it ceases to be a Jewish state or you say the Arabs don’t get to vote — apartheid,” he said.
Marine Gen. James Mattis, commander, U.S. Central Command, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 5, 2013 (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
“That didn’t work too well the last time I saw that practiced in a country,” he added, presumably alluding to South Africa. “So we’ve got to work on this with a sense of urgency.”
In that same conversation, Mattis told Blitzer that the US paid a price for its support of Israel and the perception of bias it broadcasts to the rest of the Arab world.
“I paid a military security price every day as the commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel,” he said, “and that moderates, all the moderate Arabs who want to be with us, because they can’t come out publicly in support of people who don’t show respect for the Arab Palestinians.”
Trump’s position on Israeli settlements is unclear, but many in Israel and the US see him as willing to tolerate at least some Israeli settlement building in much the way past Republican administrations have.
In an interview in May, he seemed to back Israeli building in settlements.
During his campaign for the presidency, he said Jerusalem was Israel’s undivided capital and vowed to move the US Embassy there, a move that would break with Washington’s policy of not recognizing Israel’s de facto annexation of East Jerusalem.
A day after Trump was elected president, his adviser Jason Greenblatt told Israel’s Army Radio that the president-elect “does not view the settlements as an obstacle to peace.”
Mattis’s comments are not out of sync with others who’ve held his role. His predecessor, General David Petraus, once told the Senate Armed Services committee that the “conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel.”
If Trump selected Mattis to head the Pentagon, his 2013 retirement from the military would require a Congressional waiver to grant him eligibility for the position. US statutes require any retired officer to spend at least seven years outside the military before obtaining extensive responsibilities within the Department of Defense.
Given the Republican control of both houses of Congress, it is highly likely that permission would be granted.
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3) Higher education is awash with hysteria. That might have helped elect Trump.
Many undergraduates, their fawn-like eyes wide with astonishment, are wondering: Why didn’t the dean of students prevent the election from disrupting the serenity to which my school has taught me that I am entitled? Campuses create “safe spaces” where students can shelter from discombobulating thoughts and receive spiritual balm for the trauma of microaggressions. Yet the presidential election came without trigger warnings?
The morning after the election, normal people rose — some elated, some despondent — and went off to actual work. But at Yale University, that incubator of late-adolescent infants, a professor responded to “heartfelt notes” from students “in shock” by making that day’s exam optional.
Academia should consider how it contributed to, and reflects Americans’ judgments pertinent to, Donald Trump’s election. The compound of childishness and condescension radiating from campuses is a reminder to normal Americans of the decay of protected classes — in this case, tenured faculty and cosseted students.
As “bias-response teams” fanned out across campuses, an incident report was filed about a University of Northern Colorado student who wrote “free speech matters” on one of 680 “#languagematters” posters that cautioned against politically incorrect speech. Catholic DePaul University denounced as “bigotry” a poster proclaiming “Unborn Lives Matter.” Bowdoin College provided counseling to students traumatized by the cultural appropriation committed by a sombrero-and-tequila party. Oberlin College students said they were suffering breakdowns because schoolwork was interfering with their political activism. California State University at Los Angeles established “healing” spaces for students to cope with the pain caused by a political speech delivered three months earlier . Indiana University experienced social-media panic (“Please PLEASE PLEASE be careful out there tonight”) because a Catholic priest in a white robe, with a rope-like belt and rosary beads, was identified as someone “in a KKK outfit holding a whip.”
A doctoral dissertation at the University of California at Santa Barbara uses “feminist methodologies” to understand how Girl Scout cookie sales “reproduce hegemonic gender roles.” The journal GeoHumanities explores how pumpkins reveal “racial and class coding of rural versus urban places.” Another journal’s article analyzes “the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers.” A Vassar College lecture “theorizes oscillating relations between disciplinary, pre-emptive and increasingly prehensive forms of power that shape human and non-human materialities in Palestine.”
Even professors’ books from serious publishers are clotted with pretentious jargon. To pick just one from innumerable examples, a recent history of the Spanish Civil War, published by the Oxford University Press, says that Franco’s Spain was as “hierarchizing” as Hitler’s Germany, that Catholicism “problematized” relations between Spain and the Third Reich, and that liberalism and democracy are concepts that must be “interrogated.” Only the highly educated write so badly. Indeed, the point of such ludicrous prose is to signal membership in a closed clerisy that possesses a private language.
An American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) study — “No U.S. History? How College History Departments Leave the United States out of the Major,” based on requirements and course offerings at 75 leading colleges and universities — found that “the overwhelming majority of America’s most prestigious institutions do not require even the students who major in history to take a single course on United States history or government.” Often “microhistories” are offered to history majors at schools that require these majors to take no U.S. history course: “Modern Addiction: Cigarette Smoking in the 20th Century” (Swarthmore College), “Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl” (Bowdoin College), “Witchcraft and Possession” (University of Pennsylvania).
At some schools that require history majors to take at least one U.S. history course, the requirement can be fulfilled with courses like “Mad Men and Mad Women” (Middlebury College), “Hip-Hop, Politics and Youth Culture in America” (University of Connecticut) and “Jews in American Entertainment” (University of Texas at Austin). Constitutional history is an afterthought.
Small wonder, then, that a recent ACTA-commissioned survey found that less than half of college graduates knew that George Washington was the commanding general at Yorktown; that nearly half did not know that Theodore Roosevelt was important to the construction of the Panama Canal; that more than one-third could not place the Civil War in a correct 20-year span or identify Franklin Roosevelt as the architect of the New Deal; that 58 percent did not know that the Battle of the Bulge occurred in World War II; and that nearly half did not know the lengths of the terms of U.S. senators and representatives.
Institutions of supposedly higher education are awash with hysteria, authoritarianism, obscurantism, philistinism and charlatanry. Which must have something to do with the tone and substance of the presidential election, which took the nation’s temperature.
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4) Soros Gathering With Top Democrats in D.C to Plot Trump Resistance
Democracy Alliance seeks to combat 'massive threats' from Trump, Republicans
BY:
Liberal billionaire George Soros is meeting behind closed doors with top Democrats to plot a resistance strategy against President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans.
The three-day conference began Sunday at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington, D.C., and is sponsored by deep-pocketed liberal members of the dark money Democracy Alliance donor network, Politico‘s Ken Vogel first reported. The group will seek to pick up the pieces from the 2016 election, plot its strategy for upcoming elections, and map out a game plan to battle Trump during his first 100 days in office.
“The first 100 days of a new presidency has become an important measure of the early success of a new administration,” the group’s agenda reads. “It’s a period typically seen as a time when monumental change can occur as the president, armed with the good will and political capital that comes with being the new president, is able to marshal new legislation through Congress.”
The group will hold sessions mapping out intervention during upcoming elections at the national and state levels beginning in early 2017, with a goal of shifting “the terms of debate” and building “electoral capacity [and] candidate pipelines for 2018 and 2020.” Top Democrats such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), and Rep. Keith Ellison (Minn.) will make appearances at the conference.
“The 2016 election has upended much of what we thought we knew about American politics,” the agenda states. “It has shown a roiling discontent with the political establishment, and there is ferment in the air. Forces of reaction, caution, and progress will joust for power in the coming period.”
Panels are scheduled about combating climate change, using technological resources to cultivate citizen engagement, engaging millennials, ways to move a progressive policy agenda in 2017, LGBT equality, and strategy to win back the white working class vote in the future.
The group will also seek ways to form deeper and stronger alliances to advance a progressive agenda.
“Over the past several months, many events, including the summer’s tragic shooting in Orlando, have highlighted the myriad and complex ways that social identities and systems of oppression interact with one another. In order to advance our vision of a progressive America, we must understand the multidimensional nature of structural inequality and develop new ways of combating it.”
The Democracy Alliance donor network was created in 2005 and is the largest network of donors “dedicated to building the progressive movement in the United States.” The group is heavily involved in progressive policy making, funding causes to push a liberal agenda, and organizing grassroots activities.
George Soros’ foundation did not immediately return a request for comment on the gathering.
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