Showing posts with label Donald Trump. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Donald Trump. Show all posts

Monday, March 20, 2017

A Promise Kept, A Message Delivered: President Trump delivers a much-needed reality check on Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel re their longstanding failure to honor their NATO pledge. Trump bluntly says what Americans have wanted to hear: It's time for Germany to pay what they owe and live up to their promise. No more excuses!; Anne Applebaum continues to disappoint me

Screenshot of The Drudge Report of March 18, 2017: U Owe Us





Last Friday during her visit to the White House, German Chancellor Angela Merkel received a strong dose of unfiltered President Donald J. Trump, who delivered the reality check he promised to deliver to NATO allies during the 2016 election campaign regarding their longstanding failure to live up to their own past pledges to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their own defense spending. 

 Instead of doing what the U.S. foreign policy elites in Washington wanted him to do, which was to allow this unproductive behavior of Germany -and so many other NATO members- to continue, or, if brought up at all, to talk about it away from the prying eyes of cameras of the U.S. news media and the American people, President Trump delivered on yet another important campaign promise, and did so in an honest away that neither Presidents Obama, Bush or Clinton ever did, that left no room for any misunderstanding.
We are talking about you, Germany.











Spiegel
FEBRUARY 21, 2017
Germany’s Self-Imposed Obstacles to Increasing Defense Spending
Washington is threatening consequences if NATO member states don't increase their defense spending. Germany is the primary focus of the demand. But the Defense Ministry in Berlin is already having trouble spending the money it currently has at its disposal.


By Konstantin von Hammerstein and Peter Müller
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/germany-s-self-imposed-obstacles-to-increasing-defense-spending
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pressure-on-germany-to-increase-defense-spending-for-nato-a-1135192.html























Message to Brussels: People on the Left in the U.S. and Europe who think that Germany is right on this issue, and that a government foolishly spending money on #ClimateChange but NOT honoring its pledge to its own allies regarding the amount of money it will spend on its own self-defense, are dreaming if they think Americans will support defending any nation that consciously chooses NOT to defend itself.
They won't. Period!




Both before and after I lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area and was very much involved with then-current passing developments and perspectives from people involved with foreign policy and defense policy in DC, whether at the myriad Think Tanks and non-profits, Left and Right, or at the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was an admirer of Anne Applebaum, @anneapplebaum, and a longtime reader of her outstanding foreign policy/defense columns in the Washington Post.

 More times than I can count, Applebaum's column was the best thing in the entire newspaper that day, combining genuine insight, forthright candor and an original POV, relative to the stuffy/fussy and self-reverential nature of much of what passes for insight in 99% of the American Foreign Policy establishment, whose journals I subscribed to for years, with walls of past issues that lined my Arlington County garage in banker boxes.

For many years I was, in the abstract, Anne Applebaum's ideal reader: someone who not only devoured her Washington Post columns and shared them with friends around who were very involved in a direct way with foreign policy, but also someone who actually purchased multiple copies of her books with my own money as gifts for friends and colleagues, as opposed to people who bought them on a corporate account.
I even bought copies of the decidedly non-holiday-friendly books, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe and Gulag: a History.

 (As many of you longtime readers of this blog know, I have a longtime interest in Eastern European history and politics, especially Poland. My maternal ancestors fled Prussian-controlled Silesia and arrived in Texas right before Christmas of 1854, after a three-month boat trip from Bremen, eventually setting in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas and becoming Bandera County Pioneers.)

So, it's with all of that history in mind that I tell you now that it's been VERY disappointing to me the past few years that despite lots of opportunities for her to use her very important and very visible perch at the Washington Post to push for more honest and resolute critical thinking and reporting about the issue of NATO members finally delivering on their promises to pay 2% of their respective GDP for their own defense, she's punted.
Specifically, she's been far too quiet and NOT been publicly critical about Germany's failure.
Not that Gemany is alone, because only 5 of the 18 NATO members hit their marks.



Even worse in my mind, if possible, Applebaum has held her tongue about Germany's incredibly feeble response to the rise of ISIS (ISIL, IS) which I have talked to many of the people reading this blog post about over the years, as well as tweeted about when German-friendly individuals and groups seemed to be trying to give them a pass nd make excuses for them.

Instead of Applebaum being a leader for actively confronting manageable issues that a clear majority of Americans are quite justified in wanting to see FINALLY resolved, she has continued to champion the POV of the Foreign Policy elites in the U.S. and Europe, who are owners of so many broken Conventional Wisdom crystal balls that have not worked properly in many years. 
As Brexit proved to a fare thee well, as I predicted months before last year's June vote in the UK.

 She's exactly the sort of person who ought to be championing Trump on this issue because he happens to be right on the facts and right on the public's perceptions of it being an issue where supposed allies have failed to deliver.

 Plus, Applebaum's too smart to think that Trump and his supporters will simply allow the issue to evaporate. Trust me, Trump supporters like me will tell him that if Germany does not change course in tangible ways in the near-future that Americans can see with their own eyes, he will need to do something publicly to show his displeasure in a way that will leave no room for misunderstanding.

 Is that really what the folks at the German Embassy up on Reservoir Road NW, a place where I spent so much time in the late 1980's and the '90's, and the place that now continues to do such a consistently piss-poor job of public outreach to the U.S. public at large and Congress in particular, wants?
Because the truth is, that day where Trump is pushed into doing something is much closer than they think.
Every day Germany continues status quo brings it closer...

 I continue to be surprised at the large number of usually well-informed people who do NOT know that Germany's response to ISIS has been to dispatch, after more than a year's worth of debate in the Bundestag, 100 UNARMED men in non-combat positions located far from the fighting. 
That's the response of Europe's largest and most economically powerful country?
To place one-hundred unarmed men far from where the fighting against ISIS is? 
Really?

For many well-informed Americans who care about U.S. foreign policy and defense issues, regardless of their party preference, Germany's efforts of late, esp. vs. ISIS, seem incredibly underwhelming and not cause for thinking that cooler heads in Berlin are prevailing.
Just the opposite. :-(

In its own way, this Le Nouvel Observateur article makes the point.





 To which I replied with cool hard facts:

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sunday, November 6, 2016

#Trump voters' enthusiasm has consistently swamped #Hillary's at Liberal #SoFL stronghold of #HollywoodFL during #EarlyVoting 2016

#Trump voters' enthusiasm consistently swamping #Hillary's at Liberal #SoFL stronghold of #HollywoodFL during #EarlyVoting 2016. #SoFL election snapshot

Whether they wanted to or not, the public met a gantlet of candidates and their supporters while waiting in line in Hollywood, FL. 
Above, a small part of the larger scene late Wednesday afternoon.

Since Early Voting started in Broward County two weekends ago, with the usual fanfare and the obligatory local Miami TV newscast LIVE stand-up shots of reporters talking over panning shots of candidates talking to and glad-handing lines of voters, I've been at the Broward County Early Voting site in Hollywood at the Hollywood Library -next to Hollywood City Hall- for several HOURS a day, for all but three days of the past 13.

 I've talked to several hundred voters, dozens of candidates for local, county and state office -as well as their spouses, family members- and several former elected officials who were there to vote early themselves or to show support for friends who were running.
People whose names most of you recognize
Here's a quick election snapshot of two weeks of distilled observations an conversations at a site that's located in one of the most Liberal areas of a very liberal county in battleground Florida.

 Some self-evident facts can be ascertained by anyone walking around with their eyes wide open, but some of this is what's below-the-radar, and seen thru the prism of someone who knows lots of the parties involved, as well as their reputation for being straight-shooters, not BS artists, of which South Florida is currently over-supplied with, thank you very much..

----





Friday was just the latest day of the past two weeks where in one of most Liberal cities in the battleground state of Florida, people didn't see a single sign all day at its biggest site: .

 The point currently being missed by many of my friends and members of the South Florida media, as well as people who Follow me on Twitter, is this: supporters aren't just doing this once in awhile, but rather are CONSISTENTLY outnumbering 's visible and identified supporters in a Liberal redoubt in a very Liberal county, Broward County.
and they are doing it EVERY DAY.

Even though there is a Hillary Clinton-Tim Kaine campaign office less than three blocks away to the east on Hollywood Blvd.

That routine and apathy creates a visceral mood, and it's one that is quickly picked upon by people with some degree of experience in reading a room for a living: politicians.
But here's the fact that can't be rebutted: local Democratic Party politicians and ex-pols tell me that they are privately very dismayed at the optics of what voters and the public at large are seeing there: thus far, voter enthusiasm is GREATER than 's in a traditionally Liberal South Florida stronghold.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Thursday, June 2, 2016

That curious news re pro #Jeb, pro #amnesty, anti #Trump Miami TV host Helen Aguirre Ferré getting hired by the RNC sounds very, well, Dolphins-like. And when has that been good for fans or anyone since 2000?

That curious news re pro #Jeb, pro #amnesty, anti #Trump Miami TV host Helen Aguirre Ferré getting hired by the RNC sounds very, well, Dolphins-like. And when has that been good for fans or anyone since 2000?
Wow! Where to even start with this bit of curious news I could have never predicted.


















So, pro #Jeb, pro #amnesty, anti-Donald Trump Miami TV host Helen Aguirre Ferré's 
longstanding public criticism of Trump counts for little with the powers-that-be at the RNC these days, as they've now hired her for a task that she seems particularly ill-prepared for, and even worse, will make a bad situation worse, if possible.
It's like hiring a run-oriented head football coach when you have a young, healthy Dan Marino as your QB. A #disconnect.

 The story has gottten lots of traction in the national press, but so far, has stirred little public notice or critical commentary in South Florida where Ferré and her frequently condescending attitudes were not just tolerated but embraced, in large part because her Conventional Wisdom attitudes almost always were 100% in sync with those of the Miami Herald Editorial Board & the perpetually misfiring Downtown Miami Biz community's. :-(

That's why despite a mountain of self-evident facts that would show objective readers how true my criticism of Ferré and her style is, it's hardly surprising that Ferré, thus far, has received almost complete kid gloves treatment from many in the community and press who know better, including former Miami Herald reporter Beth Reinhard, now of the Wall Street Journal.
Reinhard is someone whom I have long criticized on this blog over the years for some very sound reasons about basic fairness, bias, clarity, context and accuracy, as anyone taking the time to check the blog's archives for past posts on Reinhard can discover for themselves.

See all the tweets about Helen Aguirre Ferré's hiring here, inc. the Reinhard tweet

Honestly, over the past dozen years, Helen Aguirre Ferré may've been the single most-over-rated and over-praised woman in all of South Florida, in or out of public policy. 
And for a TV show on a PBS affilate in Miami like WPBT-TV that 
a.) hardly anyone watches, including even me, and that 
b.) has often seemed more like a not-so-funny sketch comedy parody of a TV chat show, because of how often she and her guests are in almost complete agreement, regardless of the issue.

If Helen Aguirre Ferré was doing a good job, wouldn't I have mentioned the show more than once in the past nine years of doing this blog?
It's not been a show to take unpopular positions or inform and enlighten the South Florida electorate so much as it has often seemed to exist merely to hearten true-believers in whatever line the South Florida Establishment's status quo had taken, so Ferre could echo it like a cheerleader.
Usually against meaningful government or political reform of the sort that the South Florida Establishment was afraid of, regardless of party affiliation, geography, race or nationality. 
And forget about Ferré talking out-loud in detail about how truly awful the caliber of the South Florida media has become the past dozen years in simply covering local govt./issues/politics fairly and accurately, and why that was so. 
No, a truth-to-power, straight-talker Helen Aguirre Ferré is NOT.

That's why to me, her show has always seemed so terribly underwhelming, frustrating and disappointing, especially compared to what it could have been -and should have been for the part of the South Florida populace that actually wants to be well-informed, which to be sure, has never been a majority.

Ferré's hiring by the RNC seems destined to just draw more more media attention to her own personal track record in the public eye and her condescendning political attitudes, instead of the task at hand, which was not an easy one.
That is surely NOT what the RNC needs the next five months going into November's election.

Frankly, Ferré's hiring by the RNC has the feel of any of a hundred awful personnel moves the woebegone Miami Dolphins have made the past 15 years, to their fans' dismay. :-(

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Setting the record straight as #NeverTrump Rick Wilson engages in some selective historical revisionism right before our eyes to continue his anti-Trump machinations. #Rejected!

Setting the record straight as #NeverTrump Rick Wilson engages in some selective historical revisionism right before our eyes to continue his anti-Trump machinations. #Rejected!

 These three tweets of mine are in reverse-chron order:











What follows is what I hope will prove to be some useful context to better help you understand my tweets of this afternoon about voluble #NeverTrump's Rick Wilson attempts to engage the news media in some selective historical revisionism.

 Roll Call 
The Downfall of a Pragmatic Republican 
How the late Bob Bennett's ouster from the Senate foreshadowed Trump 
Posted at May 10, 2016 5:00 AM
By Niels Lesniewski

The death of the much-admired former Utah Sen. Robert F. Bennett just hours after Donald Trump effectively secured his party's presidential nomination reminded official Washington of the first visible stirrings of the unrest that Trump has now ridden to the top of his party.  

Before there was Trump’s "beautiful wall," or oath to make America great again, there was this: Bennett, a party stalwart with a reputation for pragmatism and deftness at the pork-barrel politics that made compromise possible, brought to tears at a 2010 nominating convention as he realized that his own party was ousting him after 18 years in the Senate. 

See the rest of the story at:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/downfall-pragmatic-republican


The Roll Call article concerns arrogant, condescending & patronizing longtime Utah Senator Bob Bennett, who, by almost any reasonable objective, was easily one of the least-liked people in D.C. for years in large part because of how badly he treated people, whether they were Congressional staffers, members of the news media, Capitol Police, other Senators or the general public.
Unlike what the article would have you believe, Bob Bennett was NOT a prince of a fellow, he was a prick of a fellow.

 I'm not exaggerating when I say that Sen. Bob Bennett was perhaps more genuinely loathed by more people on Capitol Hill than anyone I ever met between the 15 years I lived and worked in the D.C. area between 1988 and 2003. And trust me, there are many more legitimate contenders to that crown than you dear readers can possibly know, many of them people who, while no longer on the Hill, per se, are still part of the Washington firmament, either as lobbyists, Think Tank 'thinkers" or at supposed non-profits.

And that's regardless of party or ideology, since many Republican members and staffers I knew pretty well literally got a cold chill down their spine whenever they spotted Bennett coming towards them.
And did you forget that I knew who Julian Epstein was years before he became a regular face on MSNBC in the '90's after the Lewinsky scandal broke?
Now there was a guy who was loathed in a non-partisan way by a lot of people on Capitol Hill! 
And with good reason!!


Eventually, after 18 years in the Senate, enough average Utah GOP voters had had quite enough of Bob Bennett and his grating personality, sanctimonious ways and know-it-all persona to say "No thanks, we'll take it from here." 
Unlike the Beltway media, I was not at all surprised when news came that he had come in third place in the 2010 Utah GOP Convention, and was thus denied renomination to the Senate he had come to think was his birthright. 




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Bennett_%28politician%29

So, given that, dig this bit of selective historical revisionism from Wilson we get from Roll Call:
But it was six years ago that he became the first victim of the first strike of what has lately become a full-blown “civil war inside of the Republican Party,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican political strategist and media consultant.
“That was the rumblings, the preview of the beginning of the first act,” Wilson said. “Now we’re in the second, and it’s getting much louder, much uglier, deciding whether we’re going to be a conservative party or a nationalist, populist party in the image of Donald Trump. And it’s a very hairy moment for conservative Republicans.”
But it was six years ago that he became the first victim of the first strike of what has lately become a full-blown “civil war inside of the Republican Party,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican political strategist and media consultant.
“That was the rumblings, the preview of the beginning of the first act,” Wilson said. “Now we’re in the second, and it’s getting much louder, much uglier, deciding whether we’re going to be a conservative party or a nationalist, populist party in the image of Donald Trump. And it’s a very hairy moment for conservative Republicans.”
- See more at: http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/downfall-pragmatic-republican#sthash.kVe84Dpi.dpuf
Here's the reality: Bob Bennett was very rich, tall, enjoyed using that size differential of his to intimidate people, loved using political power to get what he wanted, and had a grand sense of entitlement that was completely out of proportion to anything he had ever actually accomplished while in office in 18 years.



To top it off, Bob Bennett was pushy and nasty to people whom he thought simply had to sit back and take it, take whatever he chose to dish out.

In that respect, Bob Bennett was completely UNLIKE former Florida Senator and Governor Lawton Chiles, a man I respected since I was a teenager precisely because of how well he treated all people, regardless of who they were, and how very hard he worked to do his job to the best of his ability. #diligent

(I've detailed this before on the blog but for some of you newcomers to the blog, here's a quick history lesson connecting me and former U.S. Senator and Florida governor Lawton Chiles. 
I first met and campaigned with Sen. Chiles in 1976, when he ran for re-election the first time. 
In fact, he and I were even filmed together one Saturday morning for about thirty minutes by the-then WCKT-TV, Channel 7 -the then-NBC-TV affiliate for Miami- as he and I walked door-to-door campaigning in a  middle-class North Miami Beach neighborhood just a few blocks away from the Dade County Carter-Mondale HQ, which was located in a strip mall behind the much-beloved and iconic Krispy Kreme donut shop on N.E. 167th Street and N.E. 6th Avenue. 
I picked up some donuts afterwards and ate them when the news segment with me came on! :-)

Many years later, in Washington, before he finally made the decision to run for governor, I had the good fortune to get to know Sen. Chiles and his wife Rhea a lot better, and to come to genuinely appreciate their many remarkable and sterling qualities. 
Many of those conversations with him came on the sidewalks between his Senate office and The Florida House embassy that the two of them had founded for Floridians visiting Washington.
Located right across the street from the U.S. Supreme Court, on East Capitol Street, it's a much-beloved institution among many Floridians who travel a lot to and from Washington, and is a place I personally have spent what seems like hundreds of hours at over the years. 
If not more... Plus, it's where I first had my photograph taken with then-Senator Bob Graham and THE Mickey Mouse. Really.)


Two years after Bennett's ouster, with Republican leaders in Washington still refusing to do what American voters wanted, most especially Tea Party voters, though Sen. Richard Lugar's personality and style were much more refined and professorial than Bennett's, he too was eventually rejected by generations of Indiana voters after serving 36 years in the Senate. Why?
Because he'd increasingly come to be perceived by voters as someone who was permanently disconnected from the pressing concerns of average Indiana citizens and Small Business owners.

As someone who actually lived in Indiana for over four years while Lugar was representing the state in Washington, I can tell you that Lugar eventually LOST the benefit of the doubt he had enjoyed with Hoosier voters for well over four decades, after becoming perceived -rightly I believe- as part of the permanent Washington establishment, not part of the group of hard-working citizen lawmakers assembled in D.C. trying to actually reform government and make it more accountable to American voters.

I believe that's why Lugar lost in a landslide, as I detailed in my last blog post about Richard Lugar, on May16, 2012: "Richard Mourdock: Precursor or anomaly? Greg Garrison and Charlie Cook adroitly pinpoint where Sen. Richard Lugar eventually lost his way, started losing the trust of Hoosier voters, then lost in a landslide due to the dis-connect. Points largely lost on a predictably apoplectic Beltway MSM"
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/richard-mourdock-precursor-or-anomaly.html

That a leading #NeverTrump leader like Rick Wilson -who is NOT identified as such in the Roll Call story by the way- tries to imagine that Bob Bennett's defeat presaged Donald Trump's rise this year, is so self-serving and transparent that it is simultaneously funny AND quite telling. 
But probably not in a way I'm sure that Wilson would appreciate.

Some of us who were living and working in DC then and who were pretty observant about how certain powerful people treated other people who weren't powerful or influential -just regular people- haven't forgotten what a complete boor and jerk Senator Bob Bennett was for many years.
Though Bob Bennett and his irksome personality were not on my to-do list when I woke up this morning, I'm happy to take some time here now to set the record straight and remind you of what the #truth is.

Dave 

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

That troubling Trump supporter as "authoritarian" poll you're hearing about today - More proof that U.S. presidential polling is biased, unreliable and full of ideoological traps designed to prove... "something." But showing something once in a poll is not PROOF, just a one-time result. Reliable polling is getting the same/similar results over and over consistently thru objective means





The One Weird Trait That Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter 

And it’s not gender, age, income, race or religion.

By Matthew MacWilliams
1/17/2016
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533
It's not so surprising that such an ideological survey would first appear in Politico.
But it naturally leads to the questions not asked or mentioned, like...well...
Question: What's the one trait that predicts whether you're a Hillary supporter?
Answer: They are NOT interested in that answer.

(Though it once was, "And in the 2008 Democratic primary, the political scientist Marc Hetherington found that authoritarianism mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in predicting whether voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama.")
 
Politico is no more interested in revealing that than they are in knowing and publicly disclosing whatever the supposed one magic trait about supporters of Bernie Sanders is.
Especially if that were to be something like, oh, people who despite saying very liberal and progressive things in front of strangers and the news media, when it comes down to it, do NOT want to live near people who are similar to them, which is the most plausible answer one can infer from facts like Sanders' support being strongest in almost entirely 100% White enclaves around the country, something Hillary is currently exploiting in South Carolina with its large Black population.

In case you did not know, the only state in the U.S. with a lower percentage population of minorities than the state Sanders represents, Vermont, is Maine.
I know because I checked it out via the latest census info a few months ago, and even found similar numbers on ye olde Wikipedia, though the latter says Montana instead of Maine, two states that could not otherwise be more dissimilar from one another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_African-American_population

It doesn't bother me, per se, that people with particular biases have opinions and want to sound off on them, since everyone is free to believe whatever they want, however crazy or different from my own POV it might be. After all, it's a long campaign...
But what I hate seeing and find troublesome is the way this story is already being played up nationally as evidence of... well, "something."
But all it really is is a SINGLE snapshot in time.

It's like predicting the Miami Dolphins making the NFL playoffs every year based on them frequently beating the Patriots the past few years when they have been one of the best NFL teams. 
But in those years when they do beat the Patriots -almost always at home- they STILL fail to make the playoffs, don't they? (This year proved that all over again!)
 
Experienced football fans who have some real knowledge and historical perspective, like political junkies with the same qualities, know that one result is often an outlier. 
What you need to see is consistency (of effort) and results.  
Results plural.

Right now it's a theory that will not be PROVEN until it can be successfully replicated in multiple objective polls. And the article doesn't even have any links to check the poll numbers and questions yourself.  
WTF?

We seem to be at the point where someone who wants the public to believe something in particular about a candidate, and try to be seen as above reproach, and merely relying on cold hard numbers, can write something ascribing far-reaching significance...after just one poll.
Well, it doesn't seem like anything resembling polling Best Practices to me.

And now that you think about it, if this sort of designed poll is such a great thing, how come we never heard from the U.S. news media about the results of the same designed poll in 2008 and what it supposedly "said" about Hillary's supporters?
Why am I only hearing about it eight years later?
Here's more irony. T
oday, hours after seeing lots of tweets about the above, I saw this:




Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)