Reflections across Grön
May 12, 2016
Trump does not need the GOP as much as they need him
May 11, 2016Reuters’ rolling poll on the Trump/Clinton battle now becomes something to monitor. It is still early days, but the Reuters’ poll suggests that things are much closer than the headlines in the US media over the last few days. I begin to think that many of the stories in the liberal/left media are more wishful thinking rather than any real understanding. In fact, nobody still quite understands why Trump is riding as high as he is. Trump seems to be within 1 percentage point of Clinton rather than the tens of percentage points difference that some were quoting just a week ago.
RR 10 May
I see no reason to change my opinion that this is an anti-establishment wave where the content of what Trump has to say is less important than how “anti-establishment” he is perceived to be. And that perception is directly related to how many establishment figures (including the media) are attacking him. Headlines against Trump in the Washington Post or Huffington Post or NYT are just as effective as attack speeches by GOP establishment figures in solidifying his support.
Chaos within the GOP is not necessarily a bad thing for Trump. In fact, visible opposition from establishment Republicans is probably a good thing for him. The GOP needs a Trump to rally around to keep the Party relevant, much more than Trump needs establishment GOP support to woo the electors.
For the Democrats Sanders is riding the same anti-establishment wave, and not a left-leaning socialist wave that some assume. There is very little chance for him to displace Hillary Clinton, but she has also misread the mood. She has been moving to the left to try and steal Sanders’ thunder but traditional “left” and “right” are not drivers. Just moving to the left in policy terms will not serve her and will not remove the stigma of being “establishment” to her bones.
The rejection of “establishment” is showing signs of being a global phenomenon. Anti-establishment views are helping candidates from both the left and the right all across the globe (Greece for the left, Philippines for the right …). It is the perception of offering a “new way” which challenges old, “politically correct” platitudes, which is, I think, the dominating driver.
2016 could be the Year of the Mavericks.
Who’s surprised? Facebook’s algorithms are dishonest and self-serving
May 9, 2016So who’s surprised that Facebook’s “trending” algorithms are far from objective. In fact they are blatantly dishonest and exhibit the biases of its owners and managers. They also suppress any unfavourable statistics about Facebook itself. They suppress favourable statistics on political viewpoints that Zuckerberg does not share and inject false statistics about political viewpoints that he supports.
Self-serving and dishonest, without a doubt. But no different to any lobby group or news outlet which has a particular point of view. The problem is that Facebook claims that its trending module is objective when it clearly is not. And that is fraud.
Gizmodo: Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.
In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”
Swedish Greens make Åsa Romson the scapegoat for Gustav Fridolin’s incompetence
May 9, 2016Breaking:
The feminist credentials of the Swedish Greens are going to take a real hit. The recent fiasco with radical islamists infiltrating the Greens is – to a large extent – the result of the incompetence of their male, co-leader, Gustav Fridolin. The Greens nominating committee (the same incompetent committee which proposed a radical islamist for a Steering Committee post) has just proposed that their female, co-leader Åsa Romson be replaced by Isabella Lovin.
It seems Åsa Romson, who has not distinguished herself, but who was not really responsible for the islamic fiasco, is to be the scapegoat and take the blame for Fridolin who, they propose, should remain. Certainly Fridolin’s popularity was low but Romson’s was even lower. The Greens have their conference at the end of the week. But there are few male contenders for the co-leader post to challenge Fridolin. Perhaps it is the lack of competent males which allows Fridolin to remain.
So it looks like Fridolin will escape the consequences of his incompetence. He has been pretty ineffective as Education Minister as well. But the Greens (or at least their nominating committee) seem to be rather sexist in the way in which they are protecting and favouring Fridolin.
The Greens nominating committee has little courage and their competence is already in question. But Fridolin should not be in government.
An anthem for Mona
May 8, 2016I just happened to be listening to this this morning.
Perhaps Mona could adopt it as her anthem (see previous post)?
Mona Sahlin’s mortgage affaire is now morphing into a “bodyguard” affaire
May 7, 2016Mona Sahlin resigned (again).
The basic story is given in The Local:
The Swedish newspaper Expressen revealed on Wednesday that Sahlin provided written certification that her bodyguard earned 120,000 kronor a month so that he could buy an apartment. The bodyguard, in fact, only earned 43,000 kronor a month.
When confronted by Expressen, Sahlin initially stated that she had paid the difference out of her own pocket, before retracting the statement when it was proven by Expressen to be false.
The Ministry of Culture and Democracy then announced that Sahlin had resigned with immediate effect.
There are new revelations every day and what seemed to be just a mortgage affaire where Mona Sahlin had tried to help her personal bodyguard to buy a very expensive apartment by falsifying his apparent income is now morphing into something else. And that something else is centered around the “personal bodyguard” and his relationship with Mona Sahlin.
- The “personal bodyguard” (PB for convenience though he cannot be named) was not actually her bodyguard. She had 6 personnel from the police seconded for her security.
- The PB was ostensibly employed by the Ministry of Culture as an “assistant” but at a salary far in excess of other “assistants” at Mona Sahlin’s request.
- At the Ministry he is recorded as being an assistant to Mona Sahlin for handling press enquiries.
- The PB was the only person at the Centre against Violent Extremism who did not report to the Chief of Staff but reported directly to Mona Sahlin.
- His duties at the centre were said to be to include “future security questions” which, presumably, is the justification for his being called a bodyguard.
- The PB was rarely to be seen at the Centre.
- Mona Sahlin accompanied her PB for the showing of the 10 million kronor apartment he later bought.
- A 50,000 kronor per year “VIP parking place” was paid for by the Centre but was only available to the PB (and Mona Sahlin). It was hired over the objections of the Head of Staff at Mona Sahlin’s insistence and nobody else at the Centre even knew where the parking was located.
- The PB drives a very hot set of wheels – a sports car in the $120,000 class – which is not out of place in the VIP parking.
Mona Sahlin and anonymous PB image Expressen
Speculation in the blogosphere is rife. Mona Sahlin and her PB have now resigned. There are reports of a very chaotic situation at the Centre. Mona Sahlin also sits on some other Boards – with quite generous remuneration – but her somewhat sporadic and ill-prepared attendance is now receiving scrutiny.
The Sahlin affaire is now the lead story and has relegated the travails of the Green Party (islamic infiltrators in the cupboard) and even Donald Trump from the top spot. I really don’t much care what politicians get up to in their private lives. But it is beyond the pale when public people are incompetent and think they can escape scrutiny. And when it is preaching politicians who trip up it only proves that they are all proponents of “Do what I say and don’t look at what I do”.
But the burning question – which she has brought on herself – is “What was her relationship with her PB”?
European Parliament was a CIA brainchild
May 7, 2016The European Parliament is the most useless organisation in the world – by a very long way. It provides a gravy train for failed or second rate politicians. Those who fail to make it in their own countries, but are in the good books of their parties, are the ones who get sent to the European Parliament. An undemocratic, wasteful, ineffective organisation and without any useful purpose – to be kind.
But I didn’t know that a single EU Parliament was all a CIA inspired idea from the 1950s. The basic thinking behind the CIA idea was that it would be easier for Washington to control one government, the EU, than to control many separate European governments.
Hardly surprising why Obama and Washington were against Grexit and are now against Brexit.
On September 19, 2000, going on 16 years ago, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Telegraph reported:
“Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.
“The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen. William J. Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.”
The documents show that the European Union was a creature of the CIA.
As I have previously written, Washington believes that it is easier to control one government, the EU, than to control many separate European governments. …. That is why President Obama recently went to London to tell his lapdog, the British Prime Minister, that there could be no British exit.
Why Trump couldn’t win – but did
May 6, 2016I have made this point before. Attacking Trump head on only fuels his anti-establishment support. It is only by occupying the ground he occupies that some of his support can be captured.
Attacking Trump – from any direction – only seems to strengthen his support. That suggests that his support is coming from those who feel that their fears are completely unrepresented by any of the other candidates. The 2016 election is dominated, I think, by the avoidance of worst fears and not by the meeting of aspirations. It could well be that nobody will be able to take away from Trump’s support unless they can articulate the same disdain for establishment politics and political correctness that he does and address the worst fears that exist.
The current headlines in the US media are now about how and why Clinton will trounce Trump. It all sounds exactly like the reasons given over the last year for why Trump couldn’t win the Republican nomination. Some of it – especially in the left leaning media – HuffingtonPost, Slate, Politico and Washington Post – are more like wishful thinking rather than analysis. They have not learned from their past mistakes and still haven’t understood the strength of the anti-establishment wave. Bernie Sanders is the only other candidate from either party who has begun to understand the mood abroad. To take away the “politically incorrect” territory from Donald Trump may be beyond Hillary Clinton.
My prediction for November is that Clinton support is more likely to collapse than that Trump’s campaign will implode. And therefore I will not be at all surprised at a very close run election and even if Trump wins.
I started compiling some of the articles since June 2015 which explained why Trump was not going to win the Republican nomination, but I found this had already been done by Moon of Alabama.
Pundits Knew It Early On – Trump Could Not Win The Nomination
- The Super-Quick Implosion of Donald Trump’s Candidacy – Huffington Post, Andy Ostroy, June 30 2015
- Donald Trump is surging in the polls. Here’s why he won’t win. – Vox, Andrew Prokop, July 2 2015
- Trump won’t win, but yes, he matters – CNBC, Ben White, July 17 2015
- Trump campaign implodes after McCain war hero insult – New York Post, Aaron Short, July 18 2015
- Trump won’t be the nominee: Want to bet? – Journal Sentinal, Christian Schneider, August 11 2015
- How Trump Loses – BloombergView, Jonathan Bernstein, August 13 2015
- Why Trump Will Never Make the Ballot – Daily Beast, Stuard Stevens, August 20 2015
- Here’s why Donald Trump won’t win the Republican presidential nomination – Guardian, Tom McCarthy, August 22 2015
- Nate Silver: ‘Calm down,’ Donald Trump won’t win the GOP nomination – Business Insider, September 10 2015
- 5 Reasons Donald Trump Can’t Win The GOP Nomination – US News, Brian Walsh, Spetember 15 2015
- Eight Reasons Trump Can’t Win – The Stream, Warren Smith, September 16 2015
- Mitt Romney: Donald Trump won’t win the GOP nomination – New York Post, October 1 2015
- Trump will lose, or I will eat this column – Washington Post, Dana Milbank, October 2 2015
- Why Donald Trump Won’t Win – Political Wire, Taegan Goddard, October 18 2015
- Numbers show why Trump can’t win – Yakima Herald, Cokie and Steven Roberts, November 30 2015
- No, Donald Trump Won’t Win – New York Times, David Brooks, December 4 2015
- Donald Trump Won’t Win Just Because More Voters Are Paying Attention – FiveThirtyEight, Harry Enten, December 4 2015
- The Donald won’t win as a Republican or as an independent – US News, Lara Brown, December 11 2015
- Yes, Donald Trump will implode. Here’s why. – Vox, David Roberts, January 8 2016
- Keith Olbermann Returns And Perfectly Explains Why Donald Trump Will Not Win – Politicus USA, Jason Easly, March 25 2016
And of course the reality is
Kasich Dropping Out Of Presidential Race; Donald Trump Assured GOP Nomination – NPR, May 4 2016
Clinton supporters started the Obama “birther” movement
May 5, 2016The level of ridiculous rhetoric is now going to rise in the US and it will be difficult for Clinton to match Trump. Yesterday he proclaimed (again) to the electorate that she had started the Obama “birther” movement. We can expect much more from Trump and Clinton’s staff may be hard put to keep up. In battles of exaggerated rhetoric, tempo is of critical importance. The person who makes the first claim always has an advantage. It is having the white pieces in a chess game.
But on the birther story, this certainly originated during the Clinton / Obama battle. There is still not much love lost between Clinton and Obama. The birther story was started, if not by Clinton, certainly by one or more of her supporters, and it was in 2008 during her primary battle with Obama.
The right wing is quick to point this out.
Hillary Team Started Birther Movement
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More than a full year before anyone would hear of Orly Taitz, the Birther strategy was first laid out in the Penn memo.
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The “othering” foundation was built subliminally by the Clinton campaign itself.
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Democrats and Clinton campaign surrogates did the dirtiest of the dirty work: openly spread the Birther lies.
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Staffers in Hillary’s actual campaign used email to spread the lies among other
Democrats (this was a Democrat primary after all — so that is the only well you needed to poison a month before a primary). -
The campaign released the turban photo.
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Hillary herself used 60 Minutes to further stoke these lies.
But even an objective review of the history does show that this narrative is essentially correct. The article reblogged below was published by FactCheck in July 2015, just after Trump had announced his intention to run for President.
Was Hillary Clinton the Original ‘Birther’?
by Robert Farley, Posted on July 2, 2015
Two Republican presidential candidates claim the so-called “birther” movement originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008. While it’s true that some of her ardent supporters pushed the theory, there is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with it.
In an interview on June 29, Sen. Ted Cruz said “the whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008,” and earlier this year, Donald Trump claimed “Hillary Clinton wanted [Obama’s] birth certificate. Hillary is a birther.”
Neither Cruz nor Trump presented any evidence that Clinton or anyone on her campaign ever questioned Obama’s birthplace, demanded to see his birth certificate, or otherwise suggested that Obama was not a “natural born citizen” eligible to serve as president.
For those unfamiliar with the controversy over Obama’s birthplace, it refers to those who contend that Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to be president.
At FactCheck.org, we have written about the issue of Obama’s birthplace on multiple occasions — indeed we were the first media organization to hold his birth certificate in our hot little hands and vouch for the authenticity of it. But facts have done little to squelch the conspiracy theories that continue to bounce around online.
The issue arose again this week in an interview with Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father. Yahoo News’ Katie Couric asked Cruz if he thought that was going to be an issue for voters.
“It’s interesting, the whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 against Barack Obama,” Cruz said (at about the 25:25 mark). Cruz then went on to say that he believes he clearly meets the constitutional requirement for a president to be a “natural born citizen.”
The claim about Clinton’s tie to “birthers” was made earlier by Donald Trump in February at the CPAC event (at 24:20 mark). Trump — who has a history of pushing bogus theories about Obama’s birth — said, “Hillary Clinton wanted [Obama’s] birth certificate. Hillary is a birther. She wanted … but she was unable to get it.”
We asked the Cruz campaign for backup, and it pointed us to two articles. The first ran in Politico on April 22, 2011, under the headline, “Birtherism: Where it all began.”
Politico, April 22, 2011: The answer lies in Democratic, not Republican politics, and in the bitter, exhausting spring of 2008. At the time, the Democratic presidential primary was slipping away from Hillary Clinton and some of her most passionate supporters grasped for something, anything that would deal a final reversal to Barack Obama.
According to the article, the theory that Obama was born in Kenya “first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s citizenship.”
The second article, which ran several days after the Politico piece, was published by the Telegraph, a British paper, which stated: “An anonymous email circulated by supporters of Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama’s main rival for the party’s nomination, thrust a new allegation into the national spotlight — that he had not been born in Hawaii.”
Both of those stories comport with what we here at FactCheck.org wrote two-and-a-half years earlier, on Nov. 8, 2008: “This claim was first advanced by diehard Hillary Clinton supporters as her campaign for the party’s nomination faded, and has enjoyed a revival among John McCain’s partisans as he fell substantially behind Obama in public opinion polls.”
Claims about Obama’s birthplace appeared in chain emails bouncing around the Web, and one of the first lawsuits over Obama’s birth certificate was filed by Philip Berg, a former deputy Pennsylvania attorney general and a self-described “moderate to liberal” who supported Clinton.
But none of those stories suggests any link between the Clinton campaign, let alone Clinton herself, and the advocacy of theories questioning Obama’s birth in Hawaii.
One of the authors of the Politico story, Byron Tau, now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, told FactCheck.org via email that “we never found any links between the Clinton campaign and the rumors in 2008.”
The other coauthor of the Politico story, Ben Smith, now the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, said in a May 2013 interview on MSNBC that the conspiracy theories traced back to “some of [Hillary Clinton’s] passionate supporters,” during the final throes of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. But he said they did not come from “Clinton herself or her staff.”
Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said Cruz’s claim is false. “The Clinton campaign never suggested that President Obama was not born here,” Schwerin wrote to us in an email.
It is certainly interesting, and perhaps historically and politically relevant, that “birther” advocacy may have originated with supporters of Hillary Clinton — especially since many view it as an exclusively right-wing movement. But whether those theories were advocated by Clinton and/or her campaign or simply by Clinton “supporters” is an important distinction. Candidates are expected to be held accountable for the actions of their campaigns. Neither Cruz nor Trump, whose campaign did not respond to our request for backup material, provides any compelling evidence that either Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with starting the so-called birther movement.
— Robert Farley
The US choice is now high risk with Trump or low gain with Clinton
May 4, 2016It is politically incorrect to see any good in Donald Trump. Even many of my Republican friends (and all who are Democratic) are dismayed at the thought of a President Trump, who – they assume – will inevitably lead the US to catastrophe.
I am not so sure.
After 8 years of a lack-lustre and indecisive, risk-averse Barack Obama who promised much only to deceive, Hillary Clinton offers “more of the same”. She is as “establishment” as it is possible to be. She represents the safe choice. There is no chance of any kind of greatness, only of a slight improvement or a gentle decline. She removes the possibility of a “high gain” scenario.
But I see two possible outcomes with Donald Trump. The first is that he will be the unmitigated disaster that the media and the politically correct expect. In this scenario, the US will become a harder, more bigoted country, less tolerant of minorities and less compassionate. It will become divisive in domestic affairs and inept and dangerous in its foreign policy. It will become a sin to remain poor.
But there is a second scenario and I think there is nothing in-between. The second scenario is that US domestic and foreign policy will become entirely “trade” oriented. International friendships and alliances will have to have a cost-benefit analysis. Public spending and government jobs will be drastically down-sized. Bureaucrats will be subject to performance indicators. It will not be a sin to be rich. The ideological shift will be to “people as they deserve” rather than to “people as they desire”.
In November, the US electorate are going to be faced with the safe choice of Hillary Clinton with no great upside or any catastrophe, or a highly risky choice of Donald Trump who could lead to disaster or could conceivably lift the country to new highs. It is high risk with Trump versus low gain with Clinton. I generally tend to associate socialistic Europe with low-risk (low gain) policies and the free-wheeling capitalism of the US with high risk (high gain) policies. Not unlike the distinction between Clinton and Trump.
I suspect that Trump’s chances against Clinton are being written off a little too soon. His chances are certainly better than the 5000:1 odds of Leicester City winning the English Premier League. Every pundit has so far grossly under-estimated the strength of the anti-establishment wave. That could be a tsunami for Trump in November.
If Leicester City could win the Premier League, Donald Trump could be elected President of the US.
