Public school students in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest district, will begin the academic year remotely in September, leaving New York City as the only major school system in the country that will try to offer in-person classes when schools start this fall.…Wait, how can the New York Times say that NYC has "the only major school system in the country that will try to offer in-person classes," if 5 of "the nation’s 25 largest school districts" are going to have "in-person learning"? Don't the 25 largest school districts in the US all count as "major"? According to Wikipedia, each one has more than 100,000 students, and that list doesn't even include school districts as big as Denver, Austin, or Seattle.
Of the nation’s 25 largest school districts, only five now plan to open the school year with any form of in-person learning. Six of the seven largest will be online.
New York City schools, the nation’s largest district, are scheduled to reopen in about a month, with students having the option of attending in-person classes one to three days a week. But the city is confronting a torrent of logistical issues and political problems that could upend Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to bring students back to classrooms.
Among them: There are not yet enough nurses to staff all city school buildings, and ventilation systems in aging buildings are in urgent need of upgrades. There may not even be enough teachers available to offer in-person instruction. Some teachers are threatening to stage a sickout.…
In other parts of the country where schools have already opened, they have quickly encountered positive cases, with some having to quarantine students and staff members and even close down schools temporarily to contain possible outbreaks.
I’m not clicking on articles about Kanye. If you click on those articles, you’re encouraging more of them. If the articles get a lot of clicks, the websites will post more of them to get more advertising revenue. If the articles don’t get clicks, the websites will stop posting them for the same reason they didn’t post articles about certain Democratic primary candidates last year. If Kanye gets a lot of free advertising from the media, he’ll tend to get more votes if he turns out to be on some states’ ballots in November. If Kanye does get votes, he’ll split the anti-Trump vote with Biden, making Trump more likely to get reelected. I care more about preventing that from happening than I care about any curiosity I might have about Kanye.
When I said that on Facebook, someone asked if we should say the same thing about Trump and any number of other topics. My response:
If most Americans had started following this approach in 2015, Trump would have been deprived of attention and might not have been the nominee or the 45th president. The media gave Trump outsized attention because we loved to read about him and watch him. We gave Trump what he wanted, and he won as a result of people like us clicking on articles and videos. So Trump is a perfect example of my point.
Now that Trump is the incumbent president, there's no issue of how well-known he is — everyone's totally aware of his candidacy. So the idea that we have the power to deprive a candidate of recognition no longer applies to him.
There's a subtle but important distinction between "whataboutism" and legitimate criticism of bias.
For example, if you're a Trump supporter and your reflexive response to any unfavorable news about Trump is to bring up something Obama did long ago, with the goal of distracting from a current issue about Trump, that's "whataboutism." That's bad.
If you're not trying to distract from the current news and you're open to criticism of Trump, but you merely suggest that the media wouldn't have been so negative about something similar when done by Obama, that's a legitimate criticism of bias. That isn't "whataboutism," because you're not being dismissive of anything important. So that's OK.
You’ve probably heard the statistic: “On average, Americans think 28 percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, when it is about one percent.”
Reporters repeat versions of this “foreign aid” factoid all the time, sometimes with a certain anti-populist glee. As Ezra Klein notes, the foreign aid budget estimate is the “example budget wonks turn to when they want to underscore the public’s ignorance.” [Washington Post link.] ... A 2012 opinion piece in USA Today cited the foreign aid statistic to make the case that “not everyone should” vote.
In other words, the public’s foreign aid budget estimate underwrites an awful lot of doubt about the capacity of Americans to judge public policy.
The problem is, that statistic is quite misleading.... Americans commonly think of foreign aid as including military spending—and no surprise, given America’s enormous military budget, this inflates their estimates of the foreign aid budget....
When leaders use the language of humanitarianism to describe military endeavors, it is no wonder many Americans see defense department expenditures as a kind of foreign aid, and assume our foreign aid budget is enormous.
He put a few pancakes in his pocket.Could this be an impeachable breakfast buffet offense? See, the real crime isn't the pancake theft, it's the cover-up by hiding the pancakes in his pocket…
Donald Trump said all AR-15 rifles that are sold in America should be “made in America.” Progressives were aghast at Trump’s toxic nationalism.
I’m sorry, did I say Donald Trump? I meant Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris proposed a ban on imported AR-15 rifles. Progressives praised Harris for her bold stand against gun violence.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Supreme Court on Monday said it will consider three cases to decide whether federal law protects gay and transgender workers from employment discrimination.The Wall Street Journal says this is going to "put[] the spotlight squarely on Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the former Kennedy clerk who succeeded his former boss last year." But I see no reason to think Justice Kavanaugh is any more significant in this way than Justice Gorsuch (who isn't mentioned in the WSJ article). What matters is that they're the two who joined the Supreme Court after its 2015 same-sex marriage decision; it's irrelevant who replaced Justice Kennedy and who replaced Justice Scalia. The media made the same mistake when Justice Alito replaced Justice O'Connor, shortly after Chief Justice Roberts replaced Chief Justice Rehnquist; journalists would act as if Alito were especially important because his direct predecessor, O'Connor, was more often in the majority than Rehnquist. But that's magical thinking. When two judges replace two judges on a court, it doesn't matter who replaced whom, as long as the judges' votes all count equally.
The cases mark the first major consideration of gay rights by the justices since the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who led a closely divided court through a series of landmark opinions culminating with the constitutional recognition of same-sex marriage.
ABC News says this about Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, the latest Democrat to announce he’s running for president:
At 40, he's the second-youngest candidate, three years older than Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, whom Moulton has described as a friend and fellow veteran.Wait, Tulsi Gabbard and Eric Swalwell are both 38-year-old members of Congress who've announced they're running for president. Have they dropped out? No, Moulton is at most the fourth-youngest candidate, not the "second-youngest"; ABC News just didn’t bother to fact-check. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed the mainstream media getting a 2020 contender’s age wrong; as I posted before, a CNN article understated Joe Biden’s age. If the media isn’t going to be accurate about something as easy to check as the age of presidential candidates, you have to wonder how badly they’re getting the facts wrong in trickier areas.
This New York Times article argues that women don't "get comebacks like Tiger Woods" because "society" doesn't "allow . . . women to get high enough to fall." Ann Althouse (my mom) responds:
It seems to me, there's no one to compare to Tiger Woods — the ascent, the crash, the long time in the wilderness, the perfection of the big comeback win. You can't generalize to: Men can do that, women can't. . . .This is a pet peeve of mine: gender/race articles that claim men (or white men) "get" to do something or are "allowed" to do something while other people aren't. That kind of framing makes it sound like the writer is boldly announcing a discovery about how society's rules are discriminatory. But the supposed rule isn't real; it was created by the writer, not by society.
There are a lot of people who only care about golf to the extent that it's about Tiger. Who else has done that with a sport — made millions of people care about it only because of him (or her)? . . .
Getting that high means beating everybody else. There's no way for the rest of us to "allow" that. Women already enjoy the allowance of playing in separated women's sports. . . .
[The article] really does undercut women by insisting proactively that women be given something no man was given.
If you're offended by Rep. Ilhan Omar's use of the word "something," you don't get to mock anyone else for being a triggered snowflake.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says this short interview with a customer in a diner didn't "go quite as expected," and someone else says the interviewer seemed "confused." Really?
When your ‘gritty, guy-in-a-diner’ news profile doesn’t go quite as expected 😂— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 4, 2019
This week’s #GreenNewDeal MVP goes to... ⬇️ 🏆 https://t.co/gL5vBltpfX
C-SPAN first aired 40 years ago today, March 19, 1979.
C-SPAN is a great public service by a private organization. It is not a government entity in any way.
For decades, C-SPAN has been my go-to source for presidential debates and speeches, press conferences, congressional hearings, interviews, and more. While other stations selectively chop up these events, C-SPAN gives you the whole thing, from beginning to end and beyond, letting you feel like a fly on the wall before and after they’re aired by the for-profit channels.
C-SPAN is not just a TV station, but also a website that seems to have its whole 40 years online and accessible to everyone. You never have to pay or register for anything, and there are no commercials.
Nick Gillespie at Reason magazine says:
Long before reality TV shows like Real World, Survivor, Real Housewives, Big Brother, and Sober House, C-SPAN gave Americans direct access to one of the most powerful groups of people on the planet. For the first time in history, we could see our elected representatives debating, wheeling and dealing, freaking out, and occasionally falling asleep while debating government spending, foreign policy, and more.Click that link for a podcast interview with C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb, where he talks about "how working in the Pentagon during Vietnam inspired him to push for 'openness' in government, why he's still pushing for cameras to cover oral arguments in the Supreme Court, and how C-SPAN expects to weather its next 40 years."
David Gergen, writing at CNN, has 3 suggestions for former Vice President Joe Biden if he decides to run for president. The first suggestion:
[I]f and when he declares, Biden might break precedent by promising up front that he will serve for only a single term. . . . Unlike other politicians who always seem grasping for power, Biden would have a credible argument that he is truly putting country first. . . .I agree with Gergen: in a presidential race, age matters.
[C]ommitting to one term would also diminish the importance of his age issue. With a single term, he would step down at 81. People might accept that. But trying to go on till 85? That seems beyond the pale.
If someone made the pledge and then got elected, would they hold to it? A number of congressional candidates during and since the 1994 wave election made term-limit pledges -- and a number of them have broken them. Once president, it seems hard to think a politician would simply walk away.The article includes a tweet saying a one-term pledge "is like when that opera lover in your life insists you go but agrees you can leave at intermission."
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"2020 Democrats Agree: They’re Very, Very Sorry," reports the New York Times:
The most recent high-profile mea culpa came Thursday when Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts apologized for her controversial decision to take a DNA test to prove her decades-old claim of Native American ancestry.And the Times doesn't mention Tulsi Gabbard apologizing for her vile statements about "homosexual extremists."
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. recently lamented his role in crafting the tough-on-crime drug legislation of the 1980s and 1990s.
Senator Kamala Harris of California said she regretted some of the positions her office took while she was a state prosecutor.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said her past hard-line stances on immigration “certainly weren’t empathetic and they were not kind.”
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont apologized after reports of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in his 2016 presidential campaign.
As recently as 2006, national Democrats including former President Barack Obama expressed wariness about immigrants’ ability to assimilate into American culture and did not openly embrace gay marriage — two talking points that would probably be deeply damaging for any 2020 candidate."Why "[a]s recently as 2006"? That wasn't a presidential election year. And did Democrats stop doing those things before 2008? President Obama and Vice President Biden didn't "openly embrace gay marriage" until 2012.
[T]here's no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border — a sense that what's happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone on before. Not all these fears are irrational. . . . If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole . . . it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and puts strains on an already overburdened safety net. . . .
For most Americans, though, concerns over illegal immigration go deeper than worries about economic displacement and are more subtle than simple racism. In the past, immigration occurred on America's terms; the welcome mat could be extended selectively, on the basis of the immigrant's skills. . . . The laborer, whether Chinese or Russian or Greek, found himself a stranger in a strange land, severed from his home country, subject to often harsh constrains, forced to adapt to rules not of his own making.
Today, it seems those terms no longer apply. Immigrants are entering as a result of a porous border rather than any systematic government policy. . . . Native-born Americans suspect that it is they, and not the immigrant, who are being forced to adapt. . . .
I'm not entirely immune to such nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration. . . .
We have a right and duty to protect our borders. We can insist to those already here that with citizenship come obligations — to a common language, common loyalties, a common purpose, a common destiny.
In the novel 1984, George Orwell wrote about a dystopian future where “to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for instance) was itself a punishable offense.” It was called a "facecrime."
Julie Irwin Zimmerman writes in the Atlantic:
I watched with indignation Saturday morning as stories began appearing about a confrontation near the Lincoln Memorial between students from Covington Catholic High School and American Indians from the Indigenous Peoples March. The story felt personal to me; I live a few miles from the high school, and my son attends a nearby all-boys Catholic high school. I texted him right away, ready with a lesson on what the students had done wrong.Reason magazine has details based on about two hours of videos:
“They were menacing a man much older than them,” I told him, “and chanting ‘Build the wall!’ And this smirking kid blocked his path and wouldn’t let him leave.” The short video, the subject of at least two-thirds of my Twitter feed on Saturday, made me cringe, and the smirking kid in particular got to me. . . .
“Where were they chanting about building the wall?” my son asked. His friends had begun weighing in, and their take was decidedly more sympathetic than mine. He wasn’t sure what to think, as he was hearing starkly different accounts from people he trusted. I doubled down, quoting from the profile of Nathan Phillips that The Washington Post had quickly published online, in which he said he’d been trying to defuse a tense situation. I was all-in on the outrage. How could the students parade around in those hats, harassing a man old enough to be their grandfather—a Vietnam veteran, no less?
One student did not get out of Phillips['] way as he marched, and gave the man a hard stare and a smile that many have described as creepy. This moment received the most media coverage: The teen has been called the product of a "hate factory" and likened to a school shooter, segregation-era racist, and member of the Ku Klux Klan. I have no idea what he was thinking, but portraying this as an example of obvious, racially-motivated hate is a stretch. Maybe he simply had no idea why this man was drumming in his face, and couldn't quite figure out the best response? It bears repeating that Phillips approached him, not the other way around.Rep. Thomas Massie wrote:
And that's all there is to it. Phillips walked away after several minutes, the Black Hebrew Israelites continued to insult the crowd, and nothing else happened. . . .
Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites, who were lurking nearby. . . .
Phillips enters the picture around the 1:12 mark, but if you skip to that part, you miss an hour of the Black Hebrew Israelites hurling obscenities at the students. They call them crackers, faggots, and pedophiles. At the 1:20 mark (which comes after the Phillips incident) they call one of the few black students the n-word and tell him that his friends are going to murder him and steal his organs. At the 1:25 mark, they complain that "you give faggots rights," which prompted booing from the students. Throughout the video they threaten the kids with violence, and attempt to goad them into attacking first. The students resisted these taunts admirably: They laughed at the hecklers, and they perform a few of their school's sports cheers.
Would you have remained that composed at that age under those circumstances? . . . Even when taunted by homophobic bigots . . . they insulted no one.The Atlantic writer now realizes that her son was right to question the outrage. She says:
In the context of everything that was going on (which the media hasn’t shown) the parents and mentors of these boys should be proud, not ashamed, of their kids’ behavior. It is my honor to represent them.
Take away Twitter and Facebook and explain why total strangers cared so much about people they didn’t know in a confrontation they didn’t witness. Why are we all so primed for outrage, and what if the thousands of words and countless hours spent on this had been directed toward something consequential? If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed. . . .An update to that Reason article quotes the student's public statement about the event, which says: "I would caution everyone passing judgement based on a few seconds of video to watch the longer video clips that are on the internet, as they show a much different story than is being portrayed by people with agendas."
Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media, looking for the next outrage fix? Next time a story like this surfaces, I’ll try to sit it out until more facts have emerged.
I generally don’t watch this kind of online video that supposedly shows everyday discrimination. Video isn’t reliable. Video is a thin slice of a much larger thing. Video leaves out so much. Video can leave out context that would completely change your view of what you’re seeing. Getting outraged by video alone, without knowing the full story, isn’t the best use of my time.Yet many adults have been harassing this kid online. I can't believe some of the things people are willing to say in public! Some journalists have been deleting their earlier reactions to the incident:
Recode editor and New York Times contributing op-ed writer Kara Swisher, for instance, deleted one tweet saying she was thinking of “finding every one of these shitty kids and giving them a very large piece of my mind,” and other tweets throwing slurs like “Nazi” and “nationalist.” . . .But Reza Aslan still hasn't deleted this tweet, along with a photo of the kid:
The New Republic’s Jeet Heer deleted a tweet arguing the MAGA hat-wearing teens were “racist.”
CNN’s Bakari Sellers deleted a tweet suggesting the kids should be “punched in the face.”
Honest question. Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?Aslan is a prominent commentator on religion who's written a book about Jesus, but his tweet is the opposite of "Turn the other cheek." Instead, he's trying to incite people to hit a kid who had a nonviolent response to hate.
When is a smile a "smirk"? The dictionary says, when it's affected or simpering or silly and conceited looking.Just think how different the reaction would have been if the media had framed the story differently — if they had focused on other people hurling homophobic and racist slurs, instead of focusing on the kid's smile.
But I'd like a deeper psychological explanation of what is supposed to be in the mind of the smirker and how observers of smiles decide they have a window into that mind. My hypothesis is: People see what they want to see. That means: When people tell you what they think they see about the inside of another person's head, they are opening a window for us to peer into their head.
And, of course, that means that if we talk about what we think we see in the mind of the observer of another person, we too reveal ourselves. We express misunderstandings and expose ourselves to being misunderstood.
Tim Russert of Meet the Press died 10 years ago today. I did this blog post.
Here are "lessons" from how Russert worked.
In an article for the Atlantic called "Bill Clinton: A Reckoning," Caitlin Flanagan writes:
let us not forget the sex crimes of which the younger, stronger Bill Clinton was very credibly accused in the 1990s.I'm inclined to agree with all that. And yet, this article seems oddly incomplete: it talks a lot about "Democrats" and "feminists" . . . but says nothing about the media as a whole. The media is making a bigger story of a movie producer's sex offenses than the media ever made out of the 42nd President's sex offenses! The vast majority of articles I've read that mention Bill Clinton's sexual misconduct use relatively benign-sounding terms like "personal life," or "affairs," or "peccadilloes." A "peccadillo" means "a slight offense." I've seen the media use that kind of language to describe what Bill Clinton has done far more often than I've seen terms like "sexual harassment," "sex offenses," "sex crimes," "sexual violence," "sexual assault," or "rape."
Juanita Broaddrick reported that when she was a volunteer on one of his gubernatorial campaigns, she had arranged to meet him in a hotel coffee shop. At the last minute, he had changed the location to her room in the hotel, where she says he very violently raped her. She said she fought against Clinton throughout a rape that left her bloodied.
At a different Arkansas hotel, he caught sight of a minor state employee named Paula Jones, and, Jones says, he sent a couple of state troopers to invite her to his suite, where he exposed his penis to her and told her to kiss it.
Kathleen Willey said that she met him in the Oval Office for personal and professional advice and that he groped her, rubbed his erect penis on her, and pushed her hand to his crotch.
It was a pattern of behavior; it included an alleged violent assault; the women involved had far more credible evidence than many of the most notorious accusations that have come to light in the past five weeks. But Clinton was not left to the swift and pitiless justice that today’s accused men have experienced. . . .
The notorious 1998 New York Times op-ed by Gloria Steinem must surely stand as one of the most regretted public actions of her life. It slut-shamed, victim-blamed, and age-shamed; it urged compassion for and gratitude to the man the women accused. Moreover (never write an op-ed in a hurry; you’ll accidentally say what you really believe), it characterized contemporary feminism as a weaponized auxiliary of the Democratic Party.
Called “Feminists and the Clinton Question,” it was written in March of 1998, when Paula Jones’s harassment claim was working its way through court. It was printed seven days after Kathleen Willey’s blockbuster 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley. If all the various allegations were true, wrote Steinem, Bill Clinton was “a candidate for sex addiction therapy.” To her mind, the most “credible” accusations were those of Willey, whom she noted was “old enough to be Monica Lewinsky’s mother.” And then she wrote the fatal sentences that invalidated the new understanding of workplace sexual harassment as a moral and legal wrong: “Even if the allegations are true, the President is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb, and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. In other words, President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.”
Steinem said the same was true of Paula Jones. These were not crimes; they were “passes.” Broaddrick was left out by Steinem. . . .
The widespread liberal response to the sex crime accusations against Bill Clinton found their natural consequence 20 years later in the behavior of Harvey Weinstein: Stay loudly and publicly and extravagantly on the side of signal leftist causes and you can do what you want in the privacy of your offices and hotel rooms. . . .
The Democratic Party needs to make its own reckoning of the way it protected Bill Clinton. The party needs to come to terms with the fact that it was so enraptured by their brilliant, Big Dog president . . . that it abandoned some of its central principles. The party was on the wrong side of history and there are consequences for that.
John Dickerson asked this to Donald Trump on Face the Nation yesterday:
TRUMP: At the debate, you talked about H-1B visas. You said: "It's something I, frankly, use, and I shouldn't be allowed to use it." When you have talked about the bankruptcy laws, you talk about how you took advantage of them. When you and I talked about your taxes, you say you try and pay as little as possible. If you are president, why would anybody follow the laws that you put in place if they knew you were taking advantage of those laws when you were in the private sector?(That's from the transcript. You can see it in the middle of this video, starting at 5:18 — click the slider at the bottom of the video, a little more than half of the way through the interview.)
Trump claims that he followed the laws, and used them to his business advantage; he hasn't said he violated any laws. How is that inconsistent with the assumption that people will "follow the laws that [he] put[s] in place" when he's president? Presumably he'd to try to improve the laws, leading to better results when businesspeople followed them in a way that worked to their advantage (as businesspeople can always be expected to do).My mom, Ann Althouse, made the same point (and we hadn't discussed this with each other or seen each other's comments when we separately pointed this out):
What's Dickerson trying to say, that taxpayers should pay more than they owe? That businesspersons shouldn't understand the law, see what's to their advantage, and structure their transactions efficiently? Why wouldn't voters trust a businessperson who followed the law and figured out how to use it? Don't we want someone knowledgeable and competent? We're supposed to prefer someone who's so intimidated by law that he wastes money? Is Dickerson a fool or is he just trying to manipulate viewers into thinking ill of Trump?Here was Trump's response, with an odd interjection from Dickerson:
TRUMP: Because I know the game better than anybody, because I have been on the other side. I have built one of the greatest companies. I did a filing which shows one of the great companies, great assets, very little debt, tremendous cash flow, some of the greatest assets in the world. But let me just tell you, I use the bankruptcy laws just like other very successful people. I don't [want] to use their names, but I could name 10 people right now, the biggest people in all of business. We do it. It's the game we play. We use the laws of the land.My mom points out that Dickerson's follow-up was "weirdly obtuse":
DICKERSON: But why wouldn't people keep playing . . .
TRUMP: We use it. And that's the way we play the game. Wait a minute. As far as the visas are concerned, I'm not doing anything wrong. I think the -- those visas shouldn't be allowed. But they are allowed. They are part of the fabric of what you do. So, I'll use it. I mean, I'm a businessman. Now that I have turned politician -- I hate to say that, almost, about myself -- but now that I'm running for office, I know the game better than anybody. I'm the one that can fix all of this stuff. But when you start talking about -- I never went bankrupt. I never went bankrupt. You understand I never went bankrupt. But you take a look at the business leaders. Every once in a while -- I have 500 companies. I have so many different companies. And a very few, I will take advantage of -- frankly, by using the laws of the land, as every other major businessperson does.
"But why wouldn't people keep playing?" There's nothing wrong with "playing." The key is to put the right rules and regulations in place and then to enforce them. If you don't like what people are doing when they are following the law, then something's wrong with the law, not with the people who are finding effective ways to compete.My mom notes that she's in the legal field and she found Dickerson's question "very weird." I'm also in the legal field and had the same reaction. If a journalist as prominent as Dickerson, the host of one of the Sunday morning political shows, saw fit to ask this on the air, how much similar confusion about law, policy, and business is out there among the general public?
I don't see Trump as fomenting disrespect for the law. It's more the opposite. The law matters. Get it right. People using the law to their selfish advantage may reveal what's wrong with the law, and Trump is offering his services, as an expert player, in seeing and fixing the flaws so that the game produces a result that is in the general interest of the American people. There may be reasons not to trust him (and there are surely reasons to mistrust those who've played the law game from positions in government), but his use of the law isn't a good reason.
Good question. What I was trying to get at is where is he on the question of gaming the laws and abiding by them. Does he think laws exist to be maneuvered around and taken advantage of? In the case of companies like Apple and others he makes a moral objection to their taking advantage of tax and trade laws. But in his own business he says he plays every game he can even when he acknowledges (as he did with H1B visas) that it's a bad thing to do. (He's under investigation both for his use H1B visas and his tax filings) So what I was trying to get at is whether he expects everyone to game the system when he's trying to make the system better or whether he expected a different standard than the one he uses once he's on the other side-- since his view of standards is a moving target. (For example, he campaigns against foreign workers taking jobs but hires them; campaigns against foreign made goods but makes them). So where's' the line? How does he draw it? How will he draw those lines when he's president. He offered a lot of that in his answer. The point is to excavate his reasoning. The reason I asked about his event with Dr. Carson is that it's part of the same inquiry: what guides your behavior? Is politics a system to be gamed? Seems like a lot of people are upset about politics being turned into a game this election cycle. As the candidate who has achieved a special status because voters think he tells unique truths, how can he say something seemingly true one minute and then say oh that wasn't true it was just politics the next minute. There's no law against doing that. He's just playing the game. But I keep hearing that people are tired of the game playing. Also, it seems like a pretty shifting set of standards-- and campaigns are about whether what you're saying will still be true once you're elected. So why, if his standards are shifting now, should people not think he'll shift his standards when he gets into office. Nothing will be there to bind him in many cases but his personal set of standards. Thanks for asking!As I said in reply to Dickerson on Facebook: He keeps referring to Trump "gaming the laws," "maneuver[ing]," "tak[ing] advantage of" the laws, etc. Those terms might sound vaguely nefarious, but the bottom line is that they all seem to refer to a businessperson following the law. If the consequences of businesspeople following the law are bad, then the law should be changed. So I fail to see a contradiction, or even a tension, between what Trump says about what he's done as a businessperson and his stance that he'd improve the laws and the economy as president. After all, his argument is not that he expects businesses to suddenly act in the country's best interests out of the goodness of their hearts. His argument is that he knows firsthand, from decades of experience, what it's like to do business under a lot of laws and regulations, and he has ideas for improving those laws to get better economic results. That's all under the assumption that people who run successful businesses, who are advised by lawyers and financial advisors, will always work hard to do whatever they think will advantage themselves under the existing law.
The New Republic tells us it's "no longer true" that "you’re more likely to die in a car accident" than by being shot (in the United States). TNR's evidence is that the number of gun-related fatalities has just barely exceeded the number of deaths in car accidents.
But that conclusion is at odds with the evidence. TNR follows the standard practice of those who support stricter gun control in focusing on gun-related deaths in general, without pointing out that many of those deaths are suicides or killings in self-defense.
TNR links to a Washington Post blog post that says that about two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. So if you, like most people, are confident you're not going to intentionally kill yourself with a gun, then it's safe to say you're more likely to die in a car crash than by being shot.
I don't know how many of the gun deaths were killings in self-defense — I imagine it's difficult to come up with reliable statistics on that. But of course being fatally shot in self-defense is a serious concern only for those who attempt to commit serious crimes.
TNR also says that "gun deaths have inched up" (while fatal car crashes have declined), which gives the impression that you should be alarmed at your increasing likelihood of being fatally shot. After all, the TNR post is largely written in the second person, talking about "you." But the WaPo post clarifies that the increase in "gun deaths" has been driven by increasing gun-related suicides — not gun-related homicides, which have been decreasing.
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