Donald J. Trump | Chris Aldrich

Listened to The Daily: Why Russia Is Rooting for Both Trump and Sanders from New York Times

The Russian government is again trying to meddle in the presidential election. In doing so, they’re working to aid two very different candidates.

Listened to The Daily: Michael Bloomberg’s Not-So-Secret Weapon from New York Times

The media tycoon and former New York mayor has paid his way into a position of influence in the Democratic Party. But can he buy a presidential nomination?

Listened to Norm! from WNYC Studios

Another affront to executive norms, a new level of secrecy for CBP, and the 32-year story of one family's new life in America.

Attorney General Bill Barr appeared to spar with Donald Trump in the latest chapter of the Roger Stone case. On this week’s On the Media, why the apparent interference in the Justice Department’s work should cause concern. Plus, Customs and Border Patrol builds a new bulwark against disclosure and transparency. And, a family migration story three decades in the making.

1. Dahlia Lithwick, writer for Slate, on what the latest Dept. of Justice news tells us about the fragility of American justice. Listen.

2. Susan Hennessey [@Susan_Hennessey], executive editor at Lawfare, on the latest threats to "prosecutorial independence." Listen.

3. Ken Klippenstein [@kenklippenstein], DC correspondent at The Nation, on Customs and Border Patrol (CBP)'s re-designation as a "security agency." Listen.

4. Jason DeParle [@JasonDeParle], author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, on the 32-year process of reporting one family's migration story. Listen.

We really are allowing the very worst of us ruin so much of the basic values of being American. I worry that the “purity” requirements of both sides is going to be the downfall of us all.

Listened to How Rush Limbaugh Paved The Way For Trump from On the Media | WNYC Studios

And transformed the GOP.

A lot was reported about Tuesday night's State of the Union address. President Trump's characteristic self-congratulation, the fact-checking of his error-filled speech, and Nancy Pelosi's sensational paper rip stunt. Tuesday night also solidified Rush Limbaugh's ascent to Republican royalty. By awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Trump inducted Limbaugh into a gilded class of American history, featuring Norman Rockwell, Maya Angelou, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King Jr. According to Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, the award could be seen as the culmination of the GOP's transformation, precipitated by Limbaugh and solidified by Trump.

Watched How a Bible prophecy shapes Trump's foreign policy from Vox | YouTube

For an influential group of American Christians, support for Israel -- and hatred of Iran -- are based in a biblical prophecy.

When President Trump authorized the drone strike that killed the powerful Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, he wasn't just flexing America's muscle in the Middle East.

He was also acting on the advice of a politically powerful group of evangelical Christians who believe that the US and Israel are part of the Bible's plan to bring about the second coming of Jesus.

Once considered a fringe element of the religious right, evangelical Christian Zionists are playing an increasingly visible role in Republican politics. Today, unprecedented access to the Trump administration has given them an opportunity to reshape the Middle East.

Additional reading:
https://newrepublic.com/article/156166/pence-pompeo-evanglicals-war-iran-christian-zionism

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/14/half-of-evangelicals-support-israel-because-they-believe-it-is-important-for-fulfilling-end-times-prophecy/

https://www.vox.com/2018/11/5/18059454/trump-white-evangelicals-christian-nationalism-john-fea

A previous version of this video misstated, at 1:40, the percentage of Americans who are Christian but neither Evangelical nor Catholic. The error has been corrected.

The headline on this piece has also been updated. Previous headline: How the Bible shapes Trump's foreign policy

There’s religion, and then there’s just crazy pants.

📖 I’m 10% done reading Economy, Society, and Public Policy by CORE Team

Finished chapter one. I like that this text has so many linked resources, but some of the links to the sister texts make me think I’d be getting a deeper and more technical understanding by reading them instead of this more introductory text. Still, this has some tremendous value even as a refresher.

Annotations from Unit 1 Capitalism and democracy: Affluence, inequality, and the environment

Government bodies also tend to be more limited in their capacity to expand if successful, and are usually protected from failure if they perform poorly. ❧

They can expand in different ways however. Think about the expansion of empires of Egypt, Rome, and the Mongols in the 12th Century. What caused them to cease growing and decrease? What allowed them to keep increasing?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:50PM

Capitalism is an economic system that can combine centralization with decentralization. ❧

How can we analogize this with the decentralization of the web and its economy?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:50PM

Market competition provides a mechanism for weeding out those who underperform. ❧

Note how this has failed in the current guilded age of the United States where it is possible for things to be “too big to fail”.
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:50PM

First, because capital goods do not fall from the sky: all countries that have successfully moved from poverty to affluence have done so, of necessity, by accumulating large amounts of capital. We will also see that a crucial feature of capitalism is who owns and controls the capital goods in an economy. ❧

Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 03:11PM

Yet some things that we value are not private property—for example, the air we breathe and most of the knowledge we use cannot be owned, bought, or sold. ❧

Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:49PM

We should be sceptical when anyone claims that something complex (capitalism) ‘causes’ something else (increased living standards, technological improvement, a networked world, or environmental challenges), just because we can see there is a correlation. ❧

Great and ridiculous examples of this can be found at https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 08:59PM

Figure 1.16 ❧

Note the dramatic inconsistency of the scale on the left hand side. What is going on here?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:23PM

Firms should not be owned and managed by people who survive because of their connections to government or their privileged birth: Capitalism is dynamic when owners or managers succeed because they are good at delivering high-quality goods and services at a competitive price. This is more likely to be a failure when the other two factors above are not working well. ❧

Here is where we’re likely to fail in the United States by following the example of Donald Trump, who ostensibly has survived solely off the wealth of his father’s dwindling empire. With that empire gone, he’s now turning to creating wealth by associating with the government. We should carefully follow where this potentially leads the country.
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:31PM

In some, their spending on goods and services as well as on transfers like unemployment benefits and pensions, accounts for more than half of GDP. ❧

What is the Government’s proportion of the US GDP presently?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:34PM

James Bronterre O’Brien, told the people:‘Knaves will tell you that it is because you have no property, you are unrepresented. I tell you on the contrary, it is because you are unrepresented that you have no property …’ ❧

great quote
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:53PM

Yet some things that we value are not private property—for example, the air we breathe and most of the knowledge we use cannot be owned, bought, or sold. ❧

Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:49PM

Read Why the media is so polarized — and how it polarizes us by Ezra Klein (Vox)

The following is an excerpt from Ezra Klein’s new book, Why We’re Polarized, published by Simon & Schuster and available January 28. We talk a lot about the left/right divide in political media.

Okay, I’m in. Ordering the book.

Originally bookmarked on January 29, 2020 at 06:42AM

Added annotations

This is a damning result: The more political media you absorb, the more warped your perspective of the other side becomes. ❧

Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 01:51PM

Chris Hayes, who anchors MSNBC’s 8 pm newscast and is among the most thoughtful, civic-minded journalists in the industry, referenced a Will Ferrell joke from Anchorman 2 on his podcast, saying, “What if instead of telling people the things they need to know, we tell them what they want to know?” That is, he says, “the creation story of cable news.” ❧

Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 01:57PM

But we don’t just want people to read our work. We want people to spread our work — to be so moved by what we wrote or said that they log on to Facebook and share it with their friends or head over to Reddit and try to tell the world. That’s how you get those dots to multiply. But people don’t share quiet voices. They share loud voices. They share work that moves them, that helps them express to their friends who they are and how they feel. Social platforms are about curating and expressing a public-facing identity. They’re about saying, “I’m a person who cares about this, likes that, and loathes this other thing.” They are about signaling the groups you belong to and, just as important, the groups you don’t belong to. ❧

Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 01:59PM

When we talk about political media, we tend to cut a sharp line between the political elites who create the media and the audience that consumes it. But that’s a mistake. No one consumes more political, and politicized, media than political elites. This is part of the reason political media has an enormous effect on politics, even though only a small fraction of the country regularly consumes it. ❧

Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 02:08PM

Politics is, first and foremost, driven by the people who pay the most attention and wield the most power — and those people opt in to extraordinarily politicized media. They then create the political system they perceive. ❧

How can we push it back so that the power stems from the people? How could we up-end the current system?
Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 02:10PM

Listened to The Daily: ‘We Followed the President’s Orders’ from New York Times

In highly anticipated testimony, a top envoy said the operation to extract a political favor from Ukraine was done at the direction of the president, vice president and secretary of state.

Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, has evolved from a loyal Trump campaign donor to a witness central to the impeachment inquiry. But his testimony has been contradicted on multiple occasions.

Today, we look at how both Democrats and Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee handled their most complicated witness to date.

Listened to The Latest: The Irregular Channel from New York Times

Testimony from Fiona Hill, a former top White House adviser, showed that even the witnesses in the impeachment inquiry may only now be learning the full picture of the part they played in the Ukraine story.

Throughout the impeachment inquiry, an image has surfaced of the Trump administration’s two policymaking channels on Ukraine — one regular, one not. Today’s testimony from Fiona Hill, President Trump’s former top adviser on Russia and Europe, raised the question: Which was which?

Listened to The Latest: ‘Everyone Was in the Loop’ from New York Times

Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified that President Trump ordered a pressure campaign on Ukraine and that senior-most administration officials knew about it.

In explosive testimony, Gordon D. Sondland, the United States ambassador to the European Union, directly implicated President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top administration officials in what he said was a push for a “clear quid pro quo” with the president of Ukraine. But during questioning, things got complicated.

Why is it that Sondland testified but others in the administration did not?

Read Why Elizabeth Warren's question on John Roberts may have backfired by Ariane de Vogue, CNN Supreme Court Reporter (CNN)

In announcing that she would vote against the Senate calling witnesses, Sen. Lisa Murkowski suggested that her decision was made in part to spare Chief Justice John Roberts from having to face a 50-50 tie, allowing him to avoid a legal and political storm.