Category Archives: Government

Did Simple Nuclear-Triad Question Stump Trump?

The WORST Answer in Political Debate History? Luckily, Marco Rubio was there to teach Trump what a Nuclear Triad is…

(Source: The Young Turks / YouTube)

Washington (CNN) – Did a simple question about the nuclear triad stump aspiring commander-in-chief Donald Trump?

During Tuesday night’s CNN-hosted Republican debate, Trump gave a meandering response when conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt of Salem Radio Network asked about the U.S. nuclear capability.

“I think we need somebody, absolutely, that we can trust, who is totally responsible, who really knows what he or she is doing. That is so powerful and so important,” Trump said, before touting his opposition to the war in Iraq.

“But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ball game,” he added.

Hewitt followed up by asking which “of the three legs of the triad” was Trump’s priority.

“For me, nuclear, the power, the devastation, is very important to me,” Trump replied.

But “nuclear,” “the power” and “the devastation” aren’t the three legs of the U.S.’s nuclear triad.

So what are the components of the nuclear triad?

The nuclear triad refers to the three ways the U.S. is capable of firing nuclear weapons.

As Florida Sen. Marco Rubio explained during the debate following Trump’s mishmash of a response: “The triad is the ability of the United States to conduct nuclear attacks using airplanes, using missiles launched from silos from the ground and from our nuclear subs.”

To add a little more specificity, the planes are heavy bombers; the silos house intercontinental ballistic missiles and the submarines also use ballistic missiles to deliver a nuclear payload.

Rubio, who avoided attacking Trump on Tuesday, didn’t directly call out Trump for blanking on the national security question. Instead, he directed his explanation to the “people at home” who likely “have not heard that terminology before.”

The Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

So why does the U.S. need three ways of delivering nukes?

Rubio summed it up as: “All three of them are critical. It gives us the ability at deterrence.”

In more expansive terms, they’re all key components because they protect the U.S.’s ability to launch nuclear strikes should one or two of those capabilities be destroyed.

If the underground silos backfire and the planes capable of delivering nuclear weapons get destroyed, the U.S. would still have stealthy nuclear submarines to deliver crippling strike.

The U.S. and Russia are the only two nuclear powers in the world to have triad capabilities, and both countries are eager to maintain that edge going forward.

Makes sense. So what’s so pressing that this had to be included in the debate?

All three components of the nuclear triad are aging and the next president is going to have to address that issue.

America’s nuclear submarines are all more than 30 years old and its most dominant bomber jets remain the 60-year-old B-52s. The Pentagon has also called for upgrading the U.S. arsenal of ICBMs, or intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The Pentagon has estimated that it will need to spend as much as $18 billion per year over the next 15 years — for a grand total of $270 billion — to modernize the nuclear triad.

Amid budget cuts on Capitol Hill, it’s struggled to come up with the funding to get that job done.

Written by: By Jeremy Diamond via CNN

Donald Trump gets away with bullshit: The magical secrets that help him con the press

Trump simply isn’t concerned with the truth of anything he says. He’ll elude the media until they understand that

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz

Credit: AP/John Lochner

The reality of Donald Trump’s months-long dominance of the GOP primary race has suddenly started sinking in with political elites, as has a new willingness to openly talk about his pervasive lying.

After that, the willingness to start using the word “fascism” was not far behind. The phenomena are related, of course. GOP politics have been based on lies and authoritarianism since at least the time of Richard Nixon. But now it’s happening in a new key, in a higher register. The old system for managing the lies, manipulating their salience, directing and redirecting the anger and adoration they arose, that system has broken down badly in the last several years, and it now seems to have broken down irreparably.

Nate Silver makes a crucial point, however, tweeting, “One can coherently argue that Trump isn’t ‘lying’ so much as bullshitting, in the H.G. Frankfurt sense of the term.” Frankfurt’s book “On Bullshit” argues that bullshitting is a more radical attack on truth than lying is:

[B]ullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant.

Bullshitting is anything but new to politics, of course. So the question really is: how is Trump’s bullshitting different? Although David Roberts doesn’t use the term “bullshit”, he does keenly see the problem in similar terms. The establishment media “don’t mind being properly lied to; it’s all part of the game,” Roberts writes. “What they cannot countenance is being rendered irrelevant. Trump is not kissing the ring.” Trump’s contempt for the media is all part of the proto-fascist package, of course, as well as being the natural outgrowth of decades of media-bashing.

More on Roberts in a moment, but first a nod to what the alternative might be. Jay Rosen has a sharp analysis of how this breakdown in gatekeeping function reflects institutional problems connected to a vapid notion of objectivity, which he’s elsewhere critiqued as “the view from nowhere,” a term he’s been using since 2003. If asked “What’s your agenda in covering the campaign?” they would all reply, “No agenda, just solid coverage.” But the one journalist who’s perhaps done the best job of accurately portraying Trump, Univision’s Jorge Ramos, clearly has an agenda — representing his audience’s intense concern for comprehensive immigration reform — and yet, Rosen notes, that doesn’t prevent him from accurate, incisive reporting; in fact, it helps guide him in that reporting, which has pressured politicians of both parties:

The example of Ramos shows that knowing what you’re for doesn’t have to mean joining the team or taking a party line. It’s possible to maintain your independence, win trust with your audience, and gain a clear sense of purpose when you’re out on the campaign trail. But you have to break with the pack.

Of course, every news organization can’t be Univision, but there other ways to find a different agenda, one that actually connects with what people care about. Rosen links back to 2010 proposal he made for a citizen’s agenda approach, one that would start by asking the public, “What do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes in this year’s election?” and use that as the foundation to build on. Another approach could be built based on public interest polling of the sort developed by Alan Kay in the 1980s, which I wrote about in October. Alternatives exist. And they provide ways to reconnect media with the broader public they’re supposed to serve. But it takes real courage to pursue them.

That said, let’s return to the question of how things suddenly got so much worse this cycle with Trump. As Roberts points out, GOP truthiness long predated Trump, but the media’s power to restrain it has eroded precipitously. He notes that the right has long been working hard to erode the media’s critical power, with constant accusations of bias to stifle critical media judgments on the one hand, while on the other hand developing “a network of partisan think tanks, advocacy organizations and media outlets that provide a kind of full-spectrum alternative to the mainstream.”

The result, Roberts says, “has been a kind of fragile detente. A certain style of lying has become more or less acceptable, as long as it follows unspoken rules,” rules which Donald Trump is now breaking. Or, to rephrase it in Frankfurt’s terms, one framework of bullshit is being challenged by another. Roberts identifies three rules of lying that Trump has broken:

“1.) Lies about policy are fine; lies about trivial, personal or easily verifiable claims are not.” Trump, however, tells both kinds of lies with impunity.

“2.) Lies are fine as long as an ‘other side’ is provided.” But Trump doesn’t bother with this at all. “He rarely mentions studies or experts, other than occasionally name-dropping Carl Icahn. He rarely mounts anything that could even be characterized as an argument. He simply asserts.” Which leaves journalists fresh out of fig leaves. “He calls their bluff, forcing them to be with him or against him,” which clearly they can’t do using what Rosen calls the “view from nowhere” model they’ve lived within for so long.

“3.) Nine lies are fine as long as the tenth is retracted.” Call it the face-saving rule. In contrast to the constant flood of lies, “when a politician goes overboard and makes an obviously, verifiably false claim about a matter of recorded fact, the media will browbeat him or her into retracting it and apologizing.” It lets the press feel relevant, even powerful. “But Trump does not back down, retract or apologize, ever, not even for the most trivial thing. He refuses to allow journalists and pundits to validate their watchdog role.”

Roberts goes on to make additional significant points — that Trump is basically an opportunist beneficiary, “taking advantage of a faction of the electorate that has been primed to respond to someone like him,” over a period of decades, and that “the social and demographic trends driving the Trump phenomenon are far deeper than Trump himself. They will outlast him.” All that is true, and more. Both Roberts and Rosen deserve to be read and re-read in full.

But I believe that this list of ways that Trump breaks the rules is only a first approximation, primarily because it presents an even-handedness that never actually existed. For example, most of Bill Clinton’s presidency was plagued by ongoing rightwing conspiracist obsessions which filtered into the mainstream media. Most of the really wacky stuff (like the “Clinton body count”) never got through to the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post, but those two bastions of the “liberal media” did carry the torch for the Whitewater investigation, as Gene Lyons documented in Fools for Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater. They were instrumental in keeping the investigation alive, most notably by burying the results of the Pillsbury Report, commissioned by the Resolution Trust Corporation, which found the Clintons innocent of any wrongdoing in 1995.

So it’s not really true that the media polices “lies about trivial, personal or easily verifiable claims” whether on the left or the right. Indeed, the explosive growth of conspiracies in the 1990s helped to erode the distinction between such lies and lies about policy. Conspiracy narratives question, reinterpret or outright fabricate facts on the one hand and policies on the other. One hallmark of conspiracist thinking is its self-sealing nature: any evidence that appears to refute it is actually just evidence of an even-deeper conspiracy. The conservative embrace of global warming denialism is a major example of how such thinking has thrown the mainstream media into a semi-permanent state of disarray.

Still, the list Roberts offers is a decent first approximation. If not an iron law, it points to strengths and weaknesses of how the media has generally dealt with lies up till now. What’s more, it helps illuminate the way that Sarah Palin helped set the stage for Trump. In a broader sense, as David Neiwert touched on recently, Palin was a significant figure in the virulent growth of rightwing populism which Trump embodies today, and which is bringing dangerously close to outright fascism.

Perpetuating “lies about trivial, personal or easily verifiable claims” is hardly the worst or most central thing about a movement tending towards fascism, but it is an inescapable ingredient. The sense of grievance is a root sentiment such movements thrive on, and figures like Palin and Trump are master grievance collectors, who never let inconvenient facts stand in their ways: They simply invent new ones to serve their needs. Trump’s breaking of the second lie gets closer to the heart of the fascist direction he’s taking us in: the overthrow of all existing institutions, sweeping them aside as forms of weakness and disease.

With these thoughts in mind, we can look back at a scandal plaguing Sarah Palin as she stepped onto the national stage, and see it in a very different light — the Troopergate scandal. It concerned her abuse of office in pursing a vendetta against her former brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, attempting to get him fired as state trooper and letting her husband run wild in the process.

There were two more deeply troubling stories about Palin that the press overlooked at the time. The first concerned her long history of involvement with secessionists in the Alaska Indepenence Party, an excellent account of which appeared here in Salon, by David Neiwert and Max Blumenthal. It’s certainly hard to square Palin’s self-identification as a “real American” with years of palling around with folks who want nothing more than to leave America forever, but that’s exactly what Palin did. The second concerned her life-long association with an extremist religious cult movement, known as the Third Wave movement, or the New Apostolic Reformation. It’s part of a wider dominionist movement which seeks to take “dominion” over secular society and government in the U.S. and throughout the world. The mainstream media wouldn’t touch reporting on Palin’s NAR involvement; for that you had to rely on researchers like Bruce Wilson and Rachel Tabachnick at Talk2Action.org.

 

Written by  via SALON

How Hillary Clinton could win the White House by March

First, crush Marco Rubio, and then take the rest of the year off.

mw-dx468_arends_20151023161719_zh
(Source: Getty Images/ Chip Somodevilla)

Hillary Clinton’s only real competition among Republicans is Marco Rubio. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are too extreme for most Americans, and truly leave her unparalleled in experience and political clout.

If Hillary Clinton and her allies are smart, they’ll spend their $50 million-plus campaign war-chest over the next few months making sure Marco Rubio doesn’t get the Republican nomination.

They’ll run ads in the primary states trashing the Florida senator among conservatives — cleverly hiding the source of the ads behind secretive super PACs with conservative-sounding names.

They’ll encourage Democratic activists to cross over to GOP primaries to support Rubio’s extremist opponents.

Hillary herself may even help out by making a couple of high-profile speeches in which she praises Rubio for his “moderation” and “bipartisanship” — especially, she might say, “on the subject of immigration.” Nothing could hurt the young senator more with the GOP base.

Obama could take him golfing.

Following this week’s Republican debate, it looks increasingly like the race is down to three candidates: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, real-estate huckster Donald Trump and Rubio.

If the GOP goes ahead and picks Cruz or Trump, Hillary could probably take the rest of 2016 off to work on her inauguration speech. Both men are extremists, and are traveling with more baggage than Kim Kardashian. The only people who think they are remotely electable in a general election are the increasingly narrow group of people who make up the Republican party base.

We’re talking about people who think “Benghazi” is one of the top three issues facing America.

Who think global warming is a sinister “one-world” plot to take away our pickup trucks and make us all slaves.

And who think 300 million guns are making us all “safe” while 5-year-old Syrian refugees are going to kill us.

The biggest single fact: While individuals rise and fall from poll to poll, overall the four extremist candidates of Trump, Cruz, Rand Paul and Ben Carson have been consistently sharing about 65% in GOP polls.

It’s hard to credit, but the party of Abraham Lincoln has apparently become the party of Jefferson Davis. “Angry white men of the South, arise!” (Yes, Carson, an evangelical Christian, is African-American — showing that even the most conservative coalitions can evolve.)

Meanwhile, the party is losing millennials, professionals, the college-educated, women and Hispanics by wide margins. Good luck with that.

Rubio, on the other hand, could pose a serious challenge to Hillary. He’s a young, telegenic Hispanic American. Her best chance to stop him is now, not next fall.

Yeah, I know, people will say I’m only writing this because I’m part of the fancy-pants, pointy-headed elitist East Coast liberal media and therefore cheering for Hillary.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

As a member of the media, I stand to gain the most if America elects an extremist wacko who generates lots of news, most of it bad. Trump would be the best. Under President Trump, no journalist would want for a job, and no website for eyeballs — at least until he was impeached, America declared bankruptcy or nuclear war killed us all. Failing Trump, any of the other GOP extremists would be just fine. Among the Democrats, Bernie Sanders would be pretty good for the news business too.

For journalists, Hillary Clinton would be a terrible president. It would be four or eight years of guaranteed boredom — unless she divorced Bill, say, or had a fling with a male intern in the Oval Office.

Yet, facts are facts. At this point, it seems almost certain it’s going to be Clinton and Rubio. And if Hillary Clinton has smarts, she’ll make sure it isn’t Rubio.

Eight years ago, Rush Limbaugh and right-wing Republicans inserted themselves into the Democratic primary process by launching “Operation Chaos.” Perhaps some Democrats may feel it’s time to return the favor.

If pro-Clinton allies are smart, they’ll create new secretive super PACs with names like “Patriots for American Values” and “Veterans for American Families” and “Patriotic American Veterans for American Family Values.”

And then they’ll swamp the airwaves in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and elsewhere with ads trashing Marco Rubio among conservatives.

Say he’s soft on Hispanics, Muslims and other non-Aryans.

Say he’s for “amnesty.”

Say he’s a “career politician” who’s “never had a real job.”

And take a leaf out of the New York Times’ preposterous stories and say that he’s fiscally irresponsible because he had to pay late fees on his credit cards a couple of times. Oh, yeah, and he once leased a Lexus with his own money.

They’ll tie Rubio’s personal loans to the issue of the rocketing national debt. “If Marco Rubio can’t even handle his own finances, how can we trust him with America’s?” No, it makes no sense, but what’s that got to do with anything?

Stay tuned.

Published: Dec 18, 2015

Group Backing John Kasich Likens Donald Trump to Hippo in New Ad

HIPPO-CRIT

By NICK CORASANITI via NYTimes

New Day for America, a “super PAC” supporting Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, is aggressively attacking Donald J. Trump, now with a mocking commercial titled “Hippo-Crit” that suggests Mr. Trump belongs in the White House about as much as he belongs in a zoo.

On Screen

Mr. Trump and a hippopotamus, their mouths agape, alternate or share the screen, as a visual device resembles the bars of a cage. Both are seemingly “voiced” by the snorts and grunts of an indeterminate off-screen mammal. Unflattering images of Mr. Trump flip or spin away before surveillance-style images show Trump-brand neckties made in China and his “palatial D.C. hotel” being built by “illegal immigrants.” Available to save the day in the end is Mr. Kasich, shown in a contemplative pose beside an American flag and a large, Oval Office-like window.

The Message

Other attacks on aspects of Mr. Trump’s background have whiffed. But this ad pungently goes after Mr. Trump on two of the red-meat issues that have made him so popular with rank-and-file Republicans: illegal immigration and the outsourcing of American jobs.

Fact Check

Mr. Trump’s name-brand ties are indeed made in China, a decision he defended on grounds that China “has manipulated their currency to such a point that it’s impossible for our companies to compete.” The Washington Post found several workers at Mr. Trump’s Washington hotel project who had entered the country illegally. His campaign says the project is following all applicable laws.

Where

On New Hampshire television stations as part of a $2.5 million ad campaign against Mr. Trump.

Takeaway

Attacking Mr. Trump on immigration and jobs — issues on which he has based much of his campaign — and with the sort of ridicule that Mr. Trump has used on others, could gain Mr. Kasich some much-needed attention.

via IFTTT

NPR #News: No Government Shutdown Likely, But Here’s What’s In The Spending Bill

Published by Susan Davis via NPR

ap_149712644584_wide-86d5caa3df80eba377219de4e722551fc7917513-s800-c85

J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press

House Speaker Paul Ryan reached a deal late Tuesday on two major pieces of legislation: a $1.1 trillion spending package and a $645 billion package of tax breaks.

The $1.1 trillion spending bill includes $548 billion in defense spending, $518 billion in non-defense spending, and $73.7 billion in additional funds for the Pentagon for ongoing combat operations.

The package is made up of the 12 annual spending bills, which have been bundled into one “omnibus” spending deal that provides funding for the next fiscal year, through Sept. 30, 2016.

Democrats had the upper hand in spending talks because their votes will supply the bulk of support to pass it. They successfully swatted down Republican efforts to effectively block Syrian refugees from entering the U.S., defund Planned Parenthood, undo President Obama’s environmental regulations and repeal a campaign finance law.

The spending package includes two notable “riders” or unrelated policy provisions tucked into the must-pass bill.

The first overhauls the visa-waiver program, which allows foreign travelers from 38 nations to make short trips to the U.S. without a visa. The provision includes an added layer of security screening for those travelers if they have recently visited Iraq, Syria or other nations with significant terrorist activity. A stand-alone bill on the same provision passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support last week.

The second provision ends the 40-year ban on exporting U.S. oil. The provision is a victory for Republicans, although many Democrats from oil-friendly states, like North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, cheered its inclusion in the spending package.

Republicans rallied in support of the tax side of the deal. The package makes permanent many popular business tax breaks and delays new taxes on medical devices and high-end health insurance plans that are supposed to help pay for the Affordable Care Act. Many Democrats, particularly in the House, are expected to oppose the tax package, which will, in turn, rely on GOP votes for passage.

The House is scheduled to vote on the measures separately. The tax package will get a vote Thursday, while the spending package will get a vote Friday. The Senate is expected to then bundle the two packages together for a final vote before sending it to President Obama for his signature.

Here are some additional highlights from the spending bill:

— A year delay on new menu labeling regulations for grocery stores and food retailers to give them more time to comply with new federal standards.

— $282 million in additional funds for the Census Bureau to prepare for the 2020 census.

— Extends the existing prohibition on the transfer or release of Guantanamo detainees into the U.S.

— A 1 percent military pay raise and $300 million to address a military housing allowance shortfall.

— $111 billion for new military equipment, including 68 F-35 Joint-Strike Fighters, 102 Black Hawk helicopters, 64 remanufactured Apache helicopters, 3 littoral combat ships, 2 attack submarines, 2 DDG-51 guided missile destroyers, 7 EA-18G Growlers, 5 F-18E/F Super Hornets and 12 KC-46 tankers.

— It largely freezes funding levels for the Internal Revenue Service, which is receiving $1.7 billion less than President Obama originally wanted.

— $45 million for school improvement in Washington, D.C., including $15 million for scholarships to low-income students in the District to attend private schools.

— A pay freeze for Vice President Biden.

— $1.9 billion for the U.S. Secret Service, which is an increase of $268 million above last year.

— Cuts $15 million in spending for the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created under the Affordable Care Act.

— An additional $2 billion in funds for the National Institutes of Health for a total of $32 billion.

— An additional $175 million for a total of $5.6 billion for U.S. embassy security.

— Zero funding for high-speed rail, but Amtrak grant funding holds at $1.4 billion with $50 million provided to improve rail safety.

Here are some additional highlights from the tax package:

— It makes permanent the $1,000 child tax credit.

— It makes permanent the American Opportunity tax credit, which helps pay for college. It’s indexed to inflation and helps cover qualifying expenses in the first two years of post-secondary education.

— It makes permanent the earned income tax credit for low- and moderate-income workers. For 2009 to 2017, the EITC is temporarily increased for those with three or more children.

— It makes permanent a $250 deduction for elementary and secondary school teachers who pay out of pocket for school supplies.

— It makes permanent the research and development tax credit.

— It makes permanent a 20 percent employer wage credit for employees called to active military duty.

— It extends through 2016 an expensing provision that covers up to $15 million of qualified film, television and live theater productions.

— It extends through 2016 the $13.25 per proof gallon excise tax for Puerto Rican and U.S. Virgin Islands rum.

— It extends through 2016 the 10 percent credit for plug-in electric motorcycles and two-wheeled vehicles, capped at $2,500.

— It extends through 2016 the tax credit for manufacturers of qualifying energy-efficient residential homes.

— A provision that allows an individual to exclude from gross income any payment received as compensation for a wrongful incarceration.

— A provision defines hard cider for levying alcohol excise taxes as a beverage made from apples or pears, with an alcohol content of 0.5 to 8.5 percent, and a carbonation level that does not exceed 6.4 grams per liter.

— A provision prohibiting IRS employees from using personal email accounts to conduct any official business.