Comments Off on Donald Trump just insulted a union leader on Twitter. Then the phone started to ring.
Trump and Indiana-Still!! MA
The Washington Post
Danielle Paquette
4 hrs ago
Chuck Jones uses a flip phone, so he didn’t see the tweet. His friend of 36 years called him Wednesday night and said: The president-elect is smearing you on Twitter.
Jones, a union leader in Indianapolis, represents the Carrier workers whose jobs Donald Trump has pledged to save. He said the sudden attention from the country’s next leader didn’t feel real.
“My first thought was, ‘Well, that’s not very nice,’ ” he told The Washington Post on Wednesday night. “Then, ‘Well, I might not sleep much tonight.’ ”
Jones, president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999, told The Post on Tuesday that he believed Trump had lied to the Carrier workers last week when he visited the Indianapolis plant. On a makeshift stage in a conference room, Trump had applauded United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, for cutting a deal with him and agreeing to keep 1,100 jobs that were slated to move to Mexico in America’s heartland.
Jones said Trump got that figure wrong.
Carrier, he said, had agreed to preserve 800 production jobs in Indiana. (Carrier confirmed that number.) The union leader said Trump appeared to be taking credit for rescuing 350 engineering positions that were never scheduled to leave. Five hundred and fifty of his members, he said, were still losing their jobs. And the company was still collecting millions of dollars in tax breaks.
In return for downsizing its move south of the border, United Technologies would receive $7 million in tax credits from Indiana, to be paid in $700,000 installments each year for 10. Carrier, on top of that, has agreed to invest $16 million in its Indiana operation. United Technologies, meanwhile, still plans to shuttle 700 factory jobs from Huntington, Ind., to Monterrey, Mexico.
Jones, who said the union wasn’t involved in the negotiations, said he’s working to lift his members’ spirits. He said he didn’t have time to worry about Trump.
“He needs to worry about getting his Cabinet filled,” he said, “and leave me the hell alone.”
Representatives for Trump did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
Over the past two decades, the United States has lost about 4.5 million manufacturing jobs, a consequence economists ascribe to trade and automation. Jones said he has fought to keep work on U.S. soil, bargaining repeatedly with Carrier and Rexnord, another Indianapolis plant that plans to relocate jobs to Mexico.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence tweeted his support for Jones earlier this year:
Half an hour after Trump tweeted about Jones on Wednesday, the union leader’s phone began to ring and kept ringing, he said. One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We’re coming for you.
He wasn’t sure how these people found his number.
“Nothing that says they’re gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids,” Jones said later on MSNBC. “We know what car you drive. Things along those lines.”
“I’ve been doing this job for 30 years, and I’ve heard everything from people who want to burn my house down or shoot me,” he added. “So I take it with a grain of salt and I don’t put a lot of faith in that, and I’m not concerned about it and I’m not getting anybody involved. I can deal with people that make stupid statements and move on.”
Brett Voorhies, president of the Indiana State AFL-CIO, called Jones after Trump’s tweet caught his eye. Jones, he said, had just left his office in Indianapolis, where he manages the needs of about 3,000 union members.
“This guy makes pennies for what he does,” Voorhies said. “What he has to put up with is just crazy. Now he’s just got the president-elect smearing him on Twitter.”
Comments Off on ‘He got up there and lied his a– off’: Carrier union leader on Trump’s big deal
Another Face of The Carrier deal. MA
The Secret Service agents told the Carrier workers to stay put, so Chuck Jones sat in the factory conference room for nearly three hours, waiting for president-elect Donald Trump. He’d grown used to this suspense.
Seven months earlier, at a campaign rally in Indianapolis, Trump had pledged to save the plant’s jobs, most of which were slated to move to Mexico. Then the businessman won the election, and the 1,350 workers whose paychecks were on the line wondered if he’d keep his promise.
Jones, president of the United Steelworkers 1999, which represents Carrier employees, felt optimistic when Trump announced last week that he’d reached a deal with the factory’s parent company, United Technologies, to preserve 1,100 of the Indianapolis jobs — until the union leader heard from Carrier that only 730 of the production jobs would stay and 550 of his members would lose their livelihoods, after all.
At the Dec. 1 meeting, where Trump was supposed to lay out the details, Jones hoped he would explain himself.
“But he got up there,” Jones said Tuesday, “and, for whatever reason, lied his a– off.”
In front of a crowd of about 150 supervisors, production workers and reporters, Trump praised Carrier and its parent company, United Technologies. “Now they’re keeping — actually the number’s over 1,100 people,” he said, “which is so great.”
Jones wondered why the president-elect appeared to be inflating the victory. Trump and Pence, he said, could take credit for rescuing 800 of the Carrier jobs, including non-union positions.
Of the nearly 1,400 workers at the Indianapolis plant, however, 350 in research and development were never scheduled to leave, Jones said. Another 80 jobs, which Trump seemed to include in his figure, were non-union clerical and supervisory positions. (A Carrier spokesperson confirmed the numbers.) And now the president-elect was applauding the company and giving it millions of dollars in tax breaks, even as hundreds of Indianapolis workers prepared to be laid off.
“Trump and Pence, they pulled a dog and pony show on the numbers,” said Jones, who voted for Hillary Clinton but called her “the better of two evils.” “I almost threw up in my mouth.”
Spokespeople for Trump did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.
In exchange for downsizing its move south of the border, United Technologies would receive $7 million in tax credits from Indiana, to be paid in $700,000 installments each year for a decade. Carrier, meanwhile, agreed to invest $16 million in its Indiana operation. United Technologies still plans to send 700 factory jobs from Huntington, In, to Monterrey, Mexico.
T.J. Bray, 32, one of the workers who will keep his job, sat in the front row during the Dec. 1 meeting as Trump spoke. A corporate employee had guided him specifically to that seat, he said, so he suspected he might be part of Trump’s remarks.
On Carrier’s makeshift stage, Trump paraphrased the words of an unnamed Carrier employee who talked to an NBC reporter after the election. Bray was the only Carrier employee who had appeared on television that day. Apparently, he realized, Trump was saying he inspired the deal.
“He said something to the effect, ‘No, we’re not leaving, because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving,’ and I never thought I made that promise,” Trump said. “Not with Carrier. I made it for everybody else. I didn’t make it really for Carrier.”
In fact, Trump did make that commitment, and it’s on video. “They’re going to call me and they are going to say ‘Mr. President, Carrier has decided to stay in Indiana,’” Trump had said at the April rally. “One hundred percent — that’s what is going to happen.”
Last week, though, the president-elect told the Carrier crowd he hadn’t meant that literally.
“I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in,” Trump said. “Because they made the decision a year and a half ago. But he believed that was — and I could understand it. I actually said — I didn’t make it — when they played that, I said, ‘I did make it, but I didn’t mean it quite that way.’”
Trump asked if the employee he’d been referencing was in the audience. A woman yelled that her son was, and Trump began to compliment that son, though he hadn’t spoken in the television news segment. (Bray said that a United Technologies spokesperson later told him Trump meant to single him out.)
“I was confused when he was like, ‘I wasn’t talking about Carrier,’” Bray said. “You made this whole campaign about Carrier, and we’re still losing a lot of jobs.”
Bray clapped that day, anyway, for the 800 that would remain on American soil
Comments Off on Exclusive:CEO Who Just Went Toe-To-Toe With Donald Trump
This issue has many Faces. MA
Exclusive: CEO who just went toe-to-toe with Donald Trump says there was ‘no quid pro quo’ about Carrier
Abigail Stevenson,CNBC Mon, Dec 5 3:25 PM PST
Exclusive: CEO who just went toe-to-toe with Donald Trump…
United Technologies (UTX) CEO Greg Hayes told Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview on Monday about his conversation with Donald Trump last week, and says there was no “quid pro quo” with the president-elect.
“I think we came up with a relatively good solution for everybody … We still got to do the preponderance of the restructuring, which we were going to do anyways. So it’s — I would say no ‘deal,’ but at the end of the day a good deal for UTC,” Hayes told the ” Mad Money ” host.
United Technologies is the parent company of furnace and air conditioner maker Carrier, which was under fire by Trump on the campaign trail because of its plans to move some manufacturing operations to Mexico from Indiana. Trump used Carrier as an example to highlight the decline of manufacturing in America.
Ultimately, United Technologies agreed to receive $7 million in tax credits from the State of Indiana, issued at $700,000 per year for 10 years. Carrier also agreed to invest approximately $16 million in its Indiana facilities, and will keep more than 1,000 people employed in Indianapolis.
Hayes stated that he received a phone call from Trump a week before Thanksgiving, with a request from the president-elect to reexamine the decision to close the Indianapolis Carrier factory.
“He said, ‘We are going to do a lot of things in this country that are going to make it a lot more conducive to manufacturing. We are going to take the tax rate down; we are going to reduce all of this burdensome regulation. When all that happens you are going to be printing money, but I need you to relook at your decision to close the factory in Indiana,'” Hayes said.
Hayes confirmed that there is approximately 1 million manufacturing square feet in Mexico already, thus he considered it to be a natural evolution to close facilities in Indiana and move them to Mexico .
“Nor was there any, I would say, deal,” Hayes said about his conversation with Trump, “There was no quid pro quo for him to say ‘look, I am not going to tax you, if you don’t do this.’ He simply said ‘take a look at this.'”
And while Hayes did agree to keep employees in Indiana, he said he still considers free trade to be essential for the growth of the U.S.
“This country was founded on two principles, right – immigration and free trade. And that is what made America great over time because we had to develop and innovate in the U.S. and take those products and sell them around the world,” Hayes said.
Carrier will still close its Huntington, Indiana facility and move 700 jobs to Mexico
Comments Off on McConnell Cautions Replacement To Health Law To Take Time
This little article caught my attention because the current Congress (Dupublicans) have had years to alter the Affordable Care Act and have done nothing about it. Had the Congress done their job, the current Act would have been a better functioning LAW! It has surely helped millions but at the cost of others having no coverage and possibly dying for the lack of care. The time to act was sooner rather than later (now). MA
This article caught my eye while scanning news for this blog. Even though I already know that Racists do what Racist do, Bigots- religious, gender, ethnic or any other types do what they do. These are the folks emboldened by Mr. Trump. His tolerance of their actions before and now after the election amounts to abetting criminals as evidenced in the article below. This is not just about Race, this is about America as we want it to be and as the Constitution provides. MA
They said despicable things about the Obamas but say they’re not racists. Yes, they are
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama arrive for a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016, in Washington. Andrew HarnikAP
President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama arrive for a Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016, in Washington. Andrew HarnikAP
By Roger Guffey
(This column first appeared in the Lexington (Ky.,) Herald-Leader.)
Psychologists have long recognized rationalization as a defense mechanism that people use to excuse unacceptable or offensive behaviors by offering some pseudo-logical reasoning or self-serving explanations.
Perhaps we justify that sumptuous dessert because we have earned a reward for sticking to our diet. Or we tell our boss we are sick, when we really want to go to the last game of the season. Some of these excuses are harmless, but far too often they are not.
For the last eight years, people who have mounted despicable attacks on President Obama and his family have tried to rationalize their bigotries. Consider these examples:
A Republican candidate here in Kentucky won a legislative seat, even though he had posted images of the Obama family as a band of monkeys, but he says he is not a racist.
Yes, you are.
A public official in West Virginia said she will be glad to have a dignified white first lady, instead of seeing an ape in high heels. But she says she is not a racist.
Yes, you are.
In Sheridan, Ind., people made a parade float of President Obama in a toilet, but said they are not racists.
Yes, you are.
A mayor in Pennsylvania ran a picture of Michele Obama on a wagon of orangutans under the caption ‘Move-in day at the White House’, but denied being a racist.
Yes, you are.
The people who insist that President Obama is not a native-born American deny they are racists.
Yes, you are.
A candidate in Tennessee posted a billboard with the caption “MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN,” but he denied that he is a racist.
Yes, you are.
A mayor in Washington State ran an image of Michelle Obama as a gorilla, saying she could be attractive only to another monkey like her husband. Of course, he says he is not a racist.
Yes, you are.
When a gorilla escaped from a zoo in South Carolina, a GOP politician in South Carolina posted a Facebook page telling people to be on the lookout for Michelle Obama’s ancestor, but he says he is not racist.
Yes, you are.
After the 2008 election, some right-wing extremists circulated bumper stickers, quoting Psalm 109, that pray for God to kill President Obama, leaving his wife a widow and his children orphans, but they denied they are racists.
Yes, you are.
One of my favorite Abraham Lincoln stories relates his encounter with an elitist lawyer who, during a trial, dismissed him as a rustic bumpkin. Lincoln posed him a simple riddle. “If we call a tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have?’ The smug lawyer replied, “Five.” Lincoln corrected him. “No, he still has four legs, because calling a tail a leg does not make it one.”
People are free to engage in self-delusion if they wish, but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it is a duck, and these comments are racist. But perhaps these bigots should heed the poet Robert Burns’ advice in the poem “To A Louse.”
‘O would some power the gift give us to see ourselves as others see us.’
(Roger Guffey lives in Lexington, Ky., and is a math professor and a Sunday school teacher.)
Comments Off on We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here’s What We Learned
I am hoping enough people read this to understand how they are manipulated into poor choices and opinions, I have mentioned many times the way we are “advertised” into saying, thinking and acting in a certain way. MA
“The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right.”
A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide.” The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.
We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one.
We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. The site was registered anonymously. So we brought in some professional help.
By day, John Jansen is head of engineering at Master-McNeil Inc., a tech company in Berkeley, Calif. In the interest of real news he helped us track down the owner of Denverguardian.com.
Jansen started by looking at the site’s history. “Commonly that’s called scraping or crawling websites,” he says.
Jansen is kind of like an archaeologist. He says that nothing you do on the Web disappears — it just gets buried — like a fossil. But if you do some digging you’ll find those fossils and learn a lot of history.
The “Denver Guardian” was built and designed using a pretty common platform — WordPress. It’s used by bloggers and people who want to create their own websites. Jansen found that the first entry ever for the site was done by someone with the handle LetTexasSecede.
“That was sort of the thread that started to unravel everything,” Jansen says. “I was able to track that through to a bunch of other sites which are where that handle is also present.”
The sites include NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co. All the addresses linked to a single rented server inside Amazon Web Services. That meant they were all very likely owned by the same company. Jansen found an email address on one of those sites and was able to link that address to a name: Jestin Coler.
Online, Coler was listed as the founder and CEO of a company called Disinfomedia. Coler’s LinkedIn profile said he once sold magazine subscriptions, worked as a database administrator and as a freelance writer for among others, International Yachtsman magazine. And, using his name, we found a home address.
On a warm, sunny afternoon I set out with a producer for a suburb of Los Angeles. Coler lived in a middle-class neighborhood of pastel-colored one-story beach bungalows. His home had an unwatered lawn — probably the result of California’s ongoing drought. There was a black minivan in the driveway and a large prominent American flag.
We rang the front doorbell and a man answered, his face obscured by a heavy mesh steel screen. I asked for Jestin Coler. The man indicated that’s who he was. But when I asked about Disinfomedia, he said, “I don’t know what to tell you guys. Have a good day.”
We left Coler our contact information thinking he wasn’t likely to talk. But a couple of hours later he had a change of heart. He sent us an email and we set up an interview.
Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.
“The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction,” Coler says.
He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.
“What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened,” Coler says
During the run-up to the presidential election, fake news really took off. “It was just anybody with a blog can get on there and find a big, huge Facebook group of kind of rabid Trump supporters just waiting to eat up this red meat that they’re about to get served,” Coler says. “It caused an explosion in the number of sites. I mean, my gosh, the number of just fake accounts on Facebook exploded during the Trump election.”
Coler says his writers have tried to write fake news for liberals — but they just never take the bait.
Coler’s company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won’t say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry.
At any given time, Coler says, he has between 20 and 25 writers. And it was one of them who wrote the story in the “Denver Guardian” that an FBI agent who leaked Clinton emails was killed. Coler says that over 10 days the site got 1.6 million views. He says stories like this work because they fit into existing right-wing conspiracy theories.
“The people wanted to hear this,” he says. “So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional: the town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. And then … our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.”
And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn’t give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.
However, Coler insists this is not about money. It’s about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was “correct.”
Coler says he has tried to shine a light on the problem of fake news. He has spoken to the media about it. But those organizations didn’t know who he actually was. He gave them a fake name: Allen Montgomery.
Coler, a registered Democrat, says he has no regrets about his fake news empire. He doesn’t think fake news swayed the election.
“There are many factors as to why Trump won that don’t involve fake news,” he says. “As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage.
Coler doesn’t think fake news is going away. One of his sites — NationalReport.net — was flagged as fake news under a new Google policy, and Google stopped running ads on it. But Coler had other options.
“There are literally hundreds of ad networks,” he says. “Early last week, my inbox was just filled every day with people because they knew that Google was cracking down — hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites.”
Coler says he has been talking it over with his wife and may be getting out of the fake-news racket. But, he says, dozens, maybe hundreds of entrepreneurs will be ready to take his place. And he thinks it will only get harder to tell their websites from real news sites. They know now that fake news sells and they will only be in it for the money.
Below are highlights of NPR’s interview with Coler.
Interview Highlights
Tell me a little about why you started Disinfomedia?
Late 2012, early 2013 I was spending a lot of time researching what is now being referred to as the alt-right. I identified a problem with the news that they were spreading and created Disinfomedia as a response to that. The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly false or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.
What got you engaged in this?
My educational background is in political science. I’ve always enjoyed the ideas of propaganda and misinformation. Then I coupled that with an interest in what makes things go viral. So that led me to finding those groups and ultimately to finding contributors. But it was just something I had an interest in that I wanted to pursue.
When did you notice that fake news does best with Trump supporters?
Well, this isn’t just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin’s famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it as. This isn’t something that started with Trump. This is something that’s been in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his supporters. When we were coming up with headlines it’s always kind of about the red meat. Trump really got into the red meat. He knew who his base was. He knew how to feed them a constant diet of this red meat.
We’ve tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You’ll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out.
How many domains do you own and run?
Well, I would say there’s somewhere around 25 domains that I am currently managing. National Report has been my bread and butter, where I’ve spent most of my time. I have people who work with me and for me in developing and maintaining the other sites and social media kind of stuff. [Coler later said not all his sites are fake news.] So I, for the most part, focus on National Report, and a lot of the other stuff is run by other folks on the team.
So, you’re the publisher of an empire.
Well I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an empire but, yes, its several sites [chuckle].
How many people do you have writing for you?
It comes and goes, and as for actual employed writers, again these guys sort of make their own money through ad code. So I don’t say, ‘Hey, you have to write 10 stories this week’ and this and that. Really, we have a more free-form idea where people, when their creativity strikes them then they can write something. And if they’re in a slump then they just go dormant for a while. With that said, at any given time there’s probably 20, 25 contributors all over the country. …
Talk about the “Denver Guardian.”
Well, it’s kind of a side project. We have some people working on next steps in the fake-news industry, and that came from that whole discussion. We had purchased several domain names that sounded legitimate. … More local news sort of stories. The idea was to make the sites look as legit as possible so the home page is going to be local news and local forecast, local sports, some obituaries and things of that nature, and then the actual fake news stories were going to be buried off the home page.
We’ve tried lots of things in the past. The dot-com-dot-co domains were something I toyed in for a while. Those I quickly got away from because you don’t get away long with borrowing someone’s copyright or trademark. That was something that worked very well from a fake-news perspective. People were fooled into the domain name, but that wasn’t so much what we were after. So again, the next step was to go after more city-type sites. And the “Denver Guardian” was one of those sites.
You’re talking about the future of this (fake-news business) which looks more insidious because it’s more real?
That’s the way that it’s going to be. Not just from where I am. I mean, this is probably going to be my last run in the fake-news biz, but I can promise you that it’s not going to go away. It’s even going to grow bigger and it’s going to be harder to identify as it kind of evolves through these steps. …
Do you know who wrote the actual FBI Clinton story?
I do know who wrote the story, but only through an anonymous pen name. Privacy is something that we take very seriously in our writers group. The actual reasonings behind that story … it’s one of hundreds that have been written about mysterious deaths of Clinton associates or political foes. This one kind of took off more than others, I believe, just because of the nature of the story. The people wanted to hear this. So all it took was to write that story. Everything about it was fictional. The town, the people, the sheriff, the FBI guy. Then, we had our social media guys kind of go out and do a little dropping it throughout Trump groups and Trump forums and boy it spread like wildfire.
Why hide your identity?
This isn’t the safest business to be in, to be honest. Just the number of death threats I’ve received. I have a beautiful family, a beautiful life.
Some of these people that we … bait is probably the right word — are often — let’s call them the deplorables, right? They’re not the safest crowd. Some of them I would consider domestic terrorists. So they’re just not people that I want to be knocking on my door.
It seems like National Report is getting spoofier.
If you went to National Report today, it’s specifically satire. “Chris Christie nominated to Supreme Food Court.” “Sarah Palin Banning Muslims from Entering Bristol Palin.” They’re a little bit more offensive than some people care for their satire. I mean fat-shaming and slut-shaming isn’t something that is normally met with applause. But again, it’s a lot more fun in nature.
Do you make serious money?
It depends on what you would call serious money. I think I do pretty well.
Can you say how well?
I would rather not. There have been some people who have been reported on recently. The folks in Long Beach that were doing just all right stuff. They were reporting $10,000 to $30,000 a month; I think that’s probably a relative ballpark.
So you’re doing as well as those?
Yes.
You’re making money through the ads?
Yes.
Who do you work with?
We have several advertisers. Google was one, although they shut down my account last week. We’ve replaced them with other advertisers.
Can I ask who?
There are literally hundreds of ad networks. Literally hundreds. Last week my inbox was just filled everyday with people, because they knew that Google was cracking down — hundreds of people wanting to work with my sites. I kind of applaud Google for their steps, although I think what they’re doing is kind of random. They don’t really have a process in place for identifying these things. I happen to know a very successful site that, as of today, of this morning is still serving Google ads. So it seems to be a kind of arbitrary step that they’re taking either based on, I don’t know if it was my reputation within the industry or specifically the “Denver Guardian” site that angered them, or I don’t know what it is, but back to your question, there’s hundreds of people that will work with me.
What can be done about fake news?
Some of this has to fall on the readers themselves. The consumers of content have to be better at identifying this stuff. We have a whole nation of media-illiterate people. Really, there needs to be something done.
Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur?
Sure.
Are you one of the biggest in the fake-news biz?
If you look at someone who has specifically sometimes peddled in fictional news then I think that I would probably be considered one of the larger sites.
As a liberal, do you have any regrets?
I don’t. Again, this is something that I’ve been crying about for a while. But outside of that, there are many factors as to why Trump won that don’t involve fake news, right? As much as I like Hillary, she was a poor candidate. She brought in a lot of baggage.
You don’t feel responsible.
I do not.
Do you think you would have kept doing it if it wasn’t so lucrative?
Really, the financial part of it isn’t the only motivator for me. I do enjoy making a mess of the people that share the content that comes out of our site. It’s not just the financial incentive for me. I still enjoy the game I guess.
Would you do this all over again?
Well, I guess it came to a head here and we’re talking about it. It’ll be interesting to see what happens moving forward. If I had to, if I knew specifically the “Denver Guardian” situation, that would have been handled differently. But everything else, as far as the work I’ve done with National Report, I’m very proud of, and I’m going to continue doing it.
I’ve written a lot of pretty rough things about Donald Trump over the last 18 months. I’ve called him an entertainer and an emotional extremist, a guy with a black hole t his center. I’ve likened him to P.T. Barnum and a dime store Psychic.
Not once, though, have I suggested that Trump is, personally, a racist or an anti-Semite, which are labels people throw around too often these days. He’s always struck me as an opportunist more than anything else — an act in search of an audience, which he just happened to find in some of the darkest corners of the American psyche.
I figured that if a loud chunk of conservative voters had been anxiously agitating for someone to champion, say, antipoverty programs instead of a wall, Trump would have jumped on that horse just as quickly. Whatever his flaws, I didn’t take him for a devoted bigot.
It’s only now, after another staggering week in our fast unraveling society, that I find myself asking a question I really never imagined asking.
Does the president-elect of the United States feel some genuine kinship with the white nationalists he’s managed to embolden? Or does he just think it’s not a big deal if a bunch of crazy guys go around saluting him like Nazis?
To be clear, I’ve never managed to get very excited about the white power folks who pop up in the news sporadically, marching in parades or holding little conferences in some backwoods Best Western. They’ve always seemed more sad than menacing to me, like the clowns at some crumbling, last-ditch carnival.
But if you haven’t yet watched this video of white nationalists “heiling” Trump in Washington last weekend, you should, because it’s really something.
Here’s a recognized leader of the so-called alt-right movement from which Trump has drawn support and counsel, a guy who wouldn’t look at all out of place as a swastika-clad extra in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” doing a little Hitler impression in Trump’s honor and railing against the media in the original German. (“One wonders if these people are people at all,” he says, which sounds to me like an invitation to violence.)
And this isn’t in some drab Southern banquet room, but rather in the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, a few blocks from the White House. (You’d think these people would at least have had the decency to walk across the plaza to the building named for Woodrow Wilson, who would have agreed with them when it came to mixing races.)
To keep this in perspective, which is important, we’re talking here about maybe 200 white guys in a country of 300 million-plus; it’s not like they’re goose-stepping through the streets by the hundreds of thousands. It’s also not like Trump endorsed the rally or sent a video expressing his gratitude.
But it’s not as if Trump has nothing to do with the brazenness of it, either. Even Republicans have to acknowledge that in his rhetoric and rallies throughout the campaign, Trump relegitimized a kind of racism and xenophobia that had been finally relegated to the margins of public life. He behaved like a human Ouija board, unleashing spirits better consigned to the netherworld.
This is distinct from your run-of-the-mill resentment in white, working-class enclaves, your basic backlash to political correctness gone badly awry, for which I actually have some sympathy. This is taunting Jewish journalists about going to the ovens. This is swastikas popping up again in our cities and suburbs.
This is ordinary citizens walking down the street and being told to go back to their own countries because they aren’t white. This is grown men who run around bullying every guy who doesn’t accept the superiority of white males by calling him a “cuck,” whatever that means.
This is new, or at least resurgent, and it is profoundly frightening to an awful lot of Americans at the moment.
So what is Trump’s response, now that he’s taken on the task of making America great again?
Well, he certainly had no problem summoning outrage this week. On Twitter, he railed against the impertinent cast of “Hamilton,” which he called an overrated show, and against “Saturday Night Live,” which he thought one-sided and not funny. He found time to bitterly complain to the president of NBC News about a photo that made him appear to have a double chin. (Reality is rough, even for a reality TV star.)
But when it came to leading white supremacists raising stiff arms to him as if he were Hitler reincarnate, Trump at first said nothing, and then, under pressure, allowed his spokeswoman to release a terse statement tepidly disavowing their support.
Pushed repeatedly about this at a meeting with reporters and editors from the New York Times, Trump said, “Boy, you are really into this stuff,” as if surprised it should keep coming up. “It’s not a group I want to energize,” he said at one point, “and if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why.”
This, of course, was after he named Steve Bannon, an intellectual hero of the alt-right movement, as his top White House strategist — a pick he much more vehemently defended in the same interview. It was after he chose Jeff Sessions, who was kept off the federal bench because of his ignominious record on race, as the nation’s attorney general, and Michael Flynn, a general who regards all Islam as the enemy, as his national security adviser.
To be clear, Trump isn’t the only Republican who’s oddly reticent when it comes to white nationalists. Where’s Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell? How about loyalists like Rudy Giuliani, who ran the nation’s most Jewish city, or Chris Christie, who would never let this kind of thing go unanswered in New Jersey?
Where’s Jared Kushner, the omnipresent son-in-law, whom Trump apparently trusts with negotiating Middle East peace, and who is, incidentally, an orthodox Jew? Does he not think this might be a moment to exert some influence?
What about all those “Never Trump” leaders who were supposedly standing for a more enlightened Republican Party? I guess Mitt Romney can’t afford to get sidetracked denouncing racism, now that he’s trying to take back all the things he said about Trump and get himself appointed secretary of state.
(By the way, Mitt, when that phone finally rings, you’d better be prepared to hear laughter on the other end. This whole business of making you grovel is what they call payback in the big city.)
But Trump’s is the voice that matters most. He’s the one who ignited new hope for a racist, authoritarian renaissance — and if those hopes aren’t shared by some vast legion of white Americans, neither are they confined to a few hundred. He has some responsibility to curb that enthusiasm before windows and bones start getting smashed.
My guess is that Trump thinks these people are a little nutty, in the way that fervid supporters often are, but not really worth alienating just to please a bunch of people like me. I’m betting he believes that white men, generally speaking, have been abused by the cultural elite and overlooked by policymakers — but that’s a different thing from espousing white supremacy.
And yet if Trump really is more of an opportunist than an ideologue, then he ought to see the opportunity here, too. Some large segment of Americans voted to give him an audition in office, despite grave reservations about his temperament. The latest Pew Research poll found that a large majority of voters — including a sizable segment of those who voted for him — were disgusted by his campaign.
Trump’s success will depend a lot on how well he channels that emotion. He could do himself a lot of good right now by going after neo-Nazis and the like with at least the same fervor he reserves for Broadway actors and photo editors.
If Trump won’t assail hatred on moral grounds, then surely he can bring himself to capitalize on it.
Comments Off on The Real Reason Many Americans Dislike Obamacare
A long read but offers the reason Obamacare is not as successful as it should be MA.
Obamacare has quite a handful of critics, but the majority dislike it because of this reason.
Sean Williams
(TMFUltraLong)
Oct 25, 2014 at 10:11AM
Source: White House on Flickr
It’s no secret that Obamacare, known officially as the Affordable Care Act, is a polarizing law that has drawn a pretty strict divide between supporters and those who oppose it.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Health Tracking Poll, which takes a somewhat regular look at the public’s opinion of Obamacare, as of September 47% of respondents had an unfavorable view of the law, 35% a favorable view, and 19% were undecided or simply refused to answer. The unfavorable view percentage was down 6% from July, but the favorable view also fell 2%.
Glass half full versus glass half empty
Americans who favor Obamacare tend to focus on the ACA’s easier access to health insurance. In the 28 states that have chosen to expand Medicaid, lower-income citizens who were previously out in the cold now have access to covered medical care for the first time in their life. Additionally, those who favor the law prefer the beefed up minimum benefit requirements that insurers are to provide, as well as the fact that those with preexisting conditions can’t be turned down.
Source: White House on Flickr
On the flip side, Obamacare’s opponents don’t like the idea of being required to purchase health insurance, which is especially true for a younger generation of adults that feels invincible and is unlikely to utilize their physician or a hospital often. Also, some question whether or not Obamacare will really slow the rise in insurance premiums. Keep in mind the ACA wasn’t implemented to stop medical costs and health insurance premiums from rising, but merely to control the rate of inflation at which they rise.
Politics, of course, is one of the more common reasons cited as to why a majority of Americans oppose Obamacare. While there are some clear party divides on who likes Obamacare and who doesn’t, I don’t think this properly encapsulates why the law is viewed so unfavorably by the majority of Americans. Instead, I’d turn to a recent study from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research to get a more complete answer as to why Americans dislike Obamacare.
The real reason Americans dislike Obamacare
AP-NORC’s 1,004-person poll conducted between July and September focused on two key questions:
If offered a choice between the following to health insurance plans, which would you prefer: Option A, a plan with a relatively low monthly premium but higher out-of-pocket costs if you need healthcare. Option B, a plan with a relatively high monthly premium but lower out-of-pocket costs if you need healthcare.
How confident are you that you could pay for medical care if you or someone in your family had an unexpected medical expenses?
In response to the first question, 52% of respondents chose Option B (the plan with a higher monthly premium and lower out-of-pocket costs), 40% chose option A, and the remainder either didn’t know or refused to answer. For the second question, 36% noted that they felt “very confident” in paying for unexpected medical expenses, 39% were “somewhat confident,” and 25% were “not confident.”
Source: Flickr user Jim Simonson
The initial takeaway from this study is that at least one in four Americans (based on question two) find Obamacare to be unaffordable. An additional 39% are also in in a gray area of being “somewhat confident.” Furthermore, of the Americans that AP-NORC polled that had switched plans within the past year, 45% noted that they were paying more than they previously were prior to the ACA being implemented, 29% said they were paying less, and just 11% of respondents believed they were getting better value for their healthcare dollar. The implication here is pretty simple: Americans are unhappy with the price of their plan.
Plan cost is a big problem
As noted by the answers to the first question, more than half of the respondents would prefer a higher premium plan that would result in lower out-of-pocket costs should medical care be needed.
A typical bronze plan, the cheapest of the Obamacare tiered plans on a monthly premium basis, has an annual deductible of around $6,000. By comparison, the average silver plan has an out-of-pocket annual deductible of closer to $3,100, which is probably why it was by far the most selected plan in 2014. In other words, the more people pay upfront, the lower they’ll pay out of pocket should medical care be needed.
Source: Flickr user Dan Moyle
Yet herein lies the dilemma: not everyone can afford a gold or platinum plan. In fact, it would seem based on this poll that a good chunk of Americans (25% who are “not confident” and 39% who are in the gray area) are having a questionable time simply keeping up with their current plan, which is likely of the silver and bronze variety (these two tiers accounted for more than 80% of total plans sold in 2014).
Of course, AP-NORC’s findings also clearly showed that the inability to meet medical bills, or the need to make financial trade-offs in order to pay medical costs, is more pronounced in Americans with high-deductible plans.
Two interesting insurance implications
AP-NORC’s survey results may also have some unexpected implications for the health insurance industry.
On one hand, this survey has to instill some degree of concern in insurers like WellPoint (NYSE:ANTM) and Centene (NYSE:CNC), which have not been shy about targeting lower-income consumers. Thankfully, both companies netted a substantial number of government-sponsored enrollees via the Medicare expansion in slightly more than half of all U.S. states, but there’s clearly the potential here that consumers could run into issues paying their end of out-of-pocket costs should a medical emergency arise. That could leave insurers footing hefty consumer bills, or simply cause consumers to drop their coverage altogether, which would be bad news for these companies and the entire industry.
But if consumers trade up to higher premium, lower out-of-pocket plans it could also wind up stinging insurers. The initial inference would be that higher premiums would lead to healthier insurance profits. However, lower premium and higher out-of-pocket plans are actually bigger margin boosters for insurers since they require less initial money to come out of insurers’ pockets. In reality, silver and bronze plan sales are fantastic for insurers who stand to reap solid rewards as long as Americans continue to pay their bills.
In short, it’s going to be interesting from both an investor and consumer perspective to see whether consumers are able to successfully and affordably move toward higher premium plans in 2015, as well as determine whether or not consumers continue to stay current on their out-of-pocket obligations.
Ted Cruz sharply criticized those protesting the election of Donald Trump as hypocrites who cried foul when Trump suggested he might not accept the results if he didn’t win.
“This is hypocrisy on rank display,” the Texas senator said in an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Thursday morning. “All of the folks who jumped on their high horse and were lecturing to President-elect Trump, ‘You’ve got to accept the results of the election’ — look, these are now the idiots protesting in the street, laying their bodies down in front of cars and disrupting traffic.”
“We had an election,” Cruz continued. “The people spoke. Democracy is a powerful, powerful way of choosing. And I think Americans across this country — this is across the line of Republicans, of Democrats, of independents, of libertarians — I think Americans are excited about the opportunity to have an administration that actually protects our rights.”
Since Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in last week’s presidential election, anti-Trump protests have erupted in cities around the country, some turning violent. In Portland, Ore., on Saturday night, 71 people were arrested after a protest devolved into a riot, police said.
Cruz, whose name has been floated as a potential member of Trump’s administration, met with Trump at Trump Tower in New York City on Tuesday.
“I’m eager to work with the new president in any capacity I can,” Cruz said.
He wasn’t always so eager.
During the Republican primary, Trump frequently referred to Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted,” insulted his wife and suggested that Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. On the eve of the Indiana primary, Cruz unloaded on Trump, calling him a “bully,” a “narcissist,” a “pathological liar” and a “serial philanderer,” among other things. At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Cruz was booed when he gave a speech while declining to endorse his party’s nominee.
Cruz’s endorsement of Trump didn’t come until September — and it wasn’t exactly full-throated.
“I’ve made the decision that on Election Day I’m going to vote for the Republican nominee,” Cruz said at a GOP phone-banking event in Fort Worth, Texas. “Like a whole lot of voters here in Texas and across the country, this was not an easy decision for me to arrive on.”
Ted Cruz greets members of law enforcement as he leaves Trump Tower on Tuesday. (Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP)
Cruz insisted his endorsement had more to do with his commitment to the party, and his opposition to Hillary Clinton, than his support for Trump. He noted that he signed a pledge to support the nominee.
“A year ago, I stood onstage and promised to support the Republican nominee, whoever that was, and I am honoring my word,” Cruz explained in September. “Although I have long had significant concerns with Donald, by any measure, Hillary Clinton would be an absolute disaster as president.”
But on Thursday, the tea party firebrand sounded more like a Trump surrogate, dismissing reports of transition chaos as “complete silliness.”
“Nobody should be surprised that their are media critics trying to throw rocks at the president-elect and the transition team — they don’t want the president to succeed,” Cruz said. “What I saw from the president-elect on down to every person at the transition team was men and women working hard with an enormous task in front of them of putting together a new administration of hopefully talented principals, effective leaders — leaders who will be loyal to the president, and loyal to the agenda that he campaigned on and that we promised the American people.”
Sen. Ted Cruz phone-banked for Donald Trump at a GOP office in Texas. He has come a long way from his RNC speech this summer where he famously did not endorse Trump. He formally got behind Trump in September.
Comments Off on JFK’s warnings about television, money and politics ring true today
Interesting facts about elections and television. MA.
On November 14, 1959, TV Guide published a brief essay about politics and television by Senator John F. Kennedy that contained some prophetic words about the influence of money and public relations on presidential campaigns that still seem true today.
Ironically, within a year of the TV Guide article, Kennedy would be president-elect of the United States, in no small part helped by his ability to use television as a campaign tool. And Kennedy’s effectiveness as a “TV candidate” would become a template for future politicians.
But in 1959, Kennedy said that campaign contributions and the presentation of candidates for a mass television audience were two trends that voters needed to watch closely.
“It is in your power to perceive deception, to shut off gimmickry, to reward honesty, to demand legislation where needed. Without your approval, no TV show is worthwhile and no politician can exist,” concluded Kennedy.
Kennedy spent much of his essay stating how television, in the right hands, could help politicians bring out their best moments.
“Honesty, vigor, compassion, intelligence—the presence or lack of these of other qualities make up what is called the candidate’s ‘image,’” he wrote. Kennedy then states that despite a candidate’s public record on issues, “My own conviction is that these images or impressions are likely to be uncannily correct.” But in the wrong hands, television could be used for “manipulation, exploitation and gimmicks,” Kennedy said. “It can be abused by demigods, by appeals to emotions and prejudice and ignorance,” he said.
Kennedy then railed about the potential takeover of campaigns by public relations experts. “Political shows like quiz shows can be fixed—and sometimes are,” he said. The other problem Kennedy warned about was the item of “financial cost.”
“If all parties and candidates are to have equal access to this essential and decisive campaign medium, without becoming deeply obligated to the big financial contributors … then the time has come when a solution must be found to this problem of TV costs.” Kennedy was particularly upset that a total of $5.8 million had been spent on TV advertising during the 1956 presidential campaign.
In the following year, as a presidential candidate Kennedy would come under criticism for allegedly employing some of the tactics he warned about in the TV Guide article. Kennedy and Richard Nixon each raised and spent about $10 million in the 1960 campaign, about $2 million more than President Dwight Eisenhower needed in 1956. Kennedy, as the richest person ever elected president, also didn’t lack for resources.
In 1964, the price of a presidential campaign jumped to $16 million for contender Barry Goldwater and the era of big spending in campaigns started.
By 2012, the presidential campaign between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney cost an estimated $2.76 billion, with much of that money going into media buys. The 2016 contest featuring Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton cost about $2.65 billion.
To relate those numbers to the Nixon-Kennedy era, Nixon and Kennedy combined spent about $161 million in 2016 dollars on their campaigns, using the CPI to calculate inflation. It was the 1968 race featuring Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and a slew of primary candidates that set the tone for future campaign spending, with a total of nearly $600 million in current-dollar spending. It would be the most expensive presidential election on record until the 2004 Bush-Kerry race.
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