the caravan

[11/27/18] Geraldo goes off-script

[10/31/18] Washington (CNN)With his decision to deploy more than 5,000 troops to the US-Mexico border, President Donald Trump has ordered more military personnel to the US southwest than he has serving in some of the world's most contentious combat zones.

Senior military officers have defended the deployment on national security grounds, but the mission -- dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot -- raises a slew of questions, with former officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations and some veterans condemning it as a political stunt by a President eager to fire up his political base just days away from the midterm elections.

"A military strained by 17 years of war and sequestration doesn't need this," tweeted David Lapan, a former Homeland Security spokesman for the Trump administration and a former Marine. "Service members who have repeatedly spent long periods of time away from home don't need this. And the US doesn't need its military to 'defend' against a group of unarmed migrants, inc. many women & kids."

five myths about cable news

After a heated exchange between President Trump and CNN reporter Jim Acosta during a post-election news conference Wednesday, the White House suspended Acosta’s credentials. Acosta and his network have been the administration’s primary targets for more than two years; the president watches hours of cable news daily, and CNN is the network he loves to hate. While far more Americans get their news from broadcast networks and local stations than from cable news, Trump’s devotion to cable has elevated the political importance of those networks, which remain plagued by myths.

Myth No. 1

Cable news spawned our pugilistic and polarized politics.

CNN’s “Crossfire,” born in 1982, has routinely been held up as the avatar of punditry, blamed for ruining American politics by reducing news to left-said-right-said coverage. In 2004, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” appeared as a guest and tore into hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, begging them to “stop hurting America” with their punchy, polarizing show. When CNN canceled “Crossfire” a few months later, network President Joe Klein sided with Stewart. “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise,” he said, pledging to give up on “head-butting debate shows.”

But “Crossfire” was a copy, not an innovation. Long before cable outlets began delivering round-the-clock coverage, network news programs pioneered left-right roundtables. In 1971, CBS’s “60 Minutes” introduced its “Point/Counterpoint” segment, pitting conservative segregationist James J. Kilpatrick against liberal Nicholas von Hoffman and then Shana Alexander. Other networks soon followed suit, experimenting with political punditry throughout the 1970s. Even the hallowed halls of public television beat cable news to the punch. In early 1982, PBS launched “The McLaughlin Group,” a roundtable show featuring pundits like Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift. If you want to lament, as Barack Obama did in 2010, that political commentary has devolved into “Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots,” you’ll have to start with the networks, not cable.

Myth No. 2

Conservatives can't get enough of Fox News.

The trope holds that conservatives mainline Fox News like a two-pack-a-day smoker inhales cigarettes. It’s even become a subgenre of confessional journalism, where people share their stories of parents radicalized by Fox News. As filmmaker Jen Senko described her own father’s addiction in an interview with the Daily Beast, “His entire life became consumed by the agendas that were inundating him on the radio, the television, and through the mail.” The news channel’s bright colors, attractive hosts and constant repetition of conservative talking points could be addictive for some, including the president, who is estimated to watch about five hours of television per day.

But with viewership on the very best days hitting 2.5 million in prime time, Fox News fans account for only a small fraction of conservatives in the United States. Those on the right are far more likely to tune into talk radio than cable news. Radio ratings work differently from television ratings, but Rush Limbaugh says he has the equivalent of 10 to 12 million listeners a day (he hits around 14 million per week). And the three broadcast network news shows draw a combined 22 million viewers a night.

Fox News is absolutely influential: It shapes what other outlets cover, feeds the conservative media ecosystem and gives the president his morning talking points. But when it comes to actually watching Fox News, only a fraction of conservatives imbibe.

Myth No. 3

Fox News drives the Republican Party rightward.

Fox is an easy scapegoat to blame for the GOP’s lurch to the fringe. “The right-wing echo chamber breeds extremism, intimidates Republican moderates and misleads people into thinking that their worldview is broadly shared,” Nicholas Kristof explained in the New York Times in 2013. Or, as commentator David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

It’s true that Fox makes conservative viewers even more conservative (and more likely to vote Republican). But overall, the outfit is more weather vane than bellwether, responding to the direction of the base and the GOP instead of setting a course for those groups to follow. Take immigration: In 2013, at the urging of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Fox News hosts gave favorable coverage to the immigration bill that Rubio hoped to push through the Senate. The conservative base resoundingly rejected Fox’s pivot, and hosts like Sean Hannity quickly scurried to anti-immigration positions. And in 2016, when Fox News hosts appeared lukewarm toward Trump, the presidential candidate pilloried them until they fell in line. After his election, the network dumped its anti-Trump commentators and built a prime-time lineup that reflected — rather than created — the new direction of the party.

Myth No. 4

MSNBC is the liberal response to Fox.

MSNBC, with its blue palette and its starring role for Rachel Maddow, seems awfully like the political opposite of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. Back in 2013, Dylan Byers wrote in Politico that “one of the great media stories of the 21st century is the rise of MSNBC as a counterbalance to Fox News and a powerful platform for the progressive agenda.” The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley dubbed the network “Fox’s liberal evil twin,” while conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin argued in The Washington Post that it was even worse: Fox News delivered real news, she argued in 2013, while MSNBC just dished out liberal pabulum.

But these parallels are wrong, both historically and in the present. While Murdoch and Roger Ailes founded Fox News with the intention of establishing a conservative network, MSNBC was launched as simply a chattier, more Gen-X version of NBC News. Even after the network “leaned in” and attempted to develop into a Fox News for progressives starting in 2006, it has never played the same role as Fox. That’s partly because the left doesn’t have the same suspicion of “mainstream media” and partly because MSNBC still tries to model balance. Its morning show is anchored by a conservative, former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough. (The reverse would be unthinkable for Fox.) And it has become whiter and more conservative in the Trump era. Melissa Harris-Perry and Al Sharpton are both out at the network, while Nicolle Wallace, White House director of communications under George W. Bush, now anchors the 4 p.m. hour.

Myth No. 5

Cable news is why Americans lost trust in journalism.

NBC’s Chuck Todd blames the “Roger Ailes-created echo chamber” at Fox for the dissolution of trust in American journalism. Trump blames CNN; in Wednesday’s news conference, he declared, “When you report fake news — which CNN does a lot — you are the enemy of the people.” But while faith has dropped sharply in the decades since the rise of cable news (CNN launched in 1980, Fox and MSNBC in 1996), the cable channels have not been the primary drivers of that decline.

Trust in journalism began to weaken during the Vietnam War, when reporters dutifully repeated the government’s lies about the trajectory of the conflict. It rebounded during Watergate, but it never returned to its 1950s and 1960s heights, when Walter Cronkite was dubbed the most trusted man in America. In the early 1970s, the share of Americans who said they trusted the media hovered between 68 and 72 percent, according to Gallup polls. By 2016 it had slumped to 32 percent.

That loss of faith was driven not by cable news but by a wholesale ideological attack from the right, which argued that the supposedly objective media was secretly liberal, and a smaller but still important critique from the left of the capitalist and conservative nature of news production. Richard Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, delighted in discrediting the press, picking up the “liberal bias ” arguments that conservatives had already been making for nearly 20 years.

By the 1980s and 1990s, it was a conservative article of faith that the only news sources that should be trusted were conservative ones. But the continuous cries of liberal media bias didn’t convince only conservatives; they convinced a plurality of Americans — 44 percent as of 2014 — that the news media was slanted and, increasingly, not to be believed. Fox News capitalized on that trend, but the network didn’t start it. All the negative attributes of media that cable exacerbates — manufactured urgency, polarized opinion, false equivalency — began well before CNN, MSNBC and Fox News became such prominent parts of the American political landscape.

Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.

2018 mid-term elections

By the time Nancy Pelosi took the stage in Washington—to chants of “Speaker, Speaker!”—it was nearly midnight. The House Democratic leader was there to tell her party that despite a night of equivocal results and occasional heartbreak, they had won, and she was the proof: Democrats, she said, “have taken back the House for the American people!”

If Democrats hoped the midterm elections would deliver a decisive rebuke to President Donald Trump and his Republicans allies, they did not quite get it. As of early Wednesday, the party was on track to capture the House of Representatives by a healthy margin, flipping more than 30 GOP-held seats and winning the total vote by about 9 percentage points. But the GOP gained ground in the Senate, easily defeating at least three Democratic incumbents in states Trump won in 2016. And while the Democrats elected a slate of new governors, chipping away at the GOP’s nationwide advantage, their gains in statehouses were less than party strategists had hoped.

In Washington, only the House will change hands, as voters elevated the Democrats to serve as a check on the scandal-plagued President and his party. Pelosi, the minority leader and former speaker, intends to again seek the speakership; if she is successful, the 78-year-old veteran pol will become Trump’s principal foil and foe. Democrats may not have gotten the sweep they yearned for, but they got what matters to Pelosi—power.

From their new foothold in Congress’s lower house—one-half of one-third of American government—the Democrats can engage in asymmetric warfare, seizing partial control of a political narrative that for two years has been dominated by Trump alone. Democrats are already drawing up plans for a panoply of investigations aimed at the President and his allies, who are bracing for the storm to come—including potential impeachment proceedings.

If all that makes the midterms a success for Democrats, it still wasn’t the censure party officials had hoped for. Instead of a sweeping rebuke to Trump that might signify the 2016 elections was an aberration, the results showed an intensification of the trends that put the President in office. Democrats racked up massive margins among women, young people, and nonwhite voters. They ran up the score among voters with college degrees and flipped seats in historically Republican suburbs of cities like Richmond, Chicago and Denver. At the same time, much of the country’s deep-red interior got redder, allowing the GOP to easily dispatch Democratic senators in Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota. Fresh-faced Democratic candidates whose candidacies vaulted them to national celebrity—Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Andrew Gillum in Florida — lost hard-fought contests that bitterly disappointed progressive activists.

This was not a normal midterm election: turnout surged to levels not seen in decades in a non-presidential contest. Often, a president’s party loses ground in midterms because the opposition is roused to anger. But in 2018, it wasn’t only Democrats who were riled up. Republicans, too, turned out at high levels, perhaps vindicating Trump’s strategy of ginning up his base voters with culture-war appeals. The nation didn’t come together in agreement; the fault lines running through it split further apart. Both sides rose up to register their objections to one another. As Trump revealed two years ago, America remains an angry and divided country whose citizens blame each other for its ills.

The new Congressional majority will look very different from the one that preceded it. For the first time in American history, more than 100 women may serve in the 435-member House, at least 28 of them newly elected and representing at least 18 of the districts Democrats flipped. The new Democratic majority will include the youngest congresswoman ever elected, 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York; two of the three first Native American congresswomen, from Kansas and New Mexico; and the two first Muslim congresswomen. Texas elected two Latina congresswomen, Iowa sent its first two women to the House and Massachusetts elected its first black congresswoman.

In a stark illustration of the demographic divides that increasingly define American politics, the Democrats’ side of the aisle appears set to be only about one-third white and male, while the Republican caucus is on track to be 90% white men. The Democrats’ center of gravity has moved leftward, but the new members come from a diverse array of ideological backgrounds. At least seven of the new members have said they won’t support Pelosi in the leadership elections set to be held in late November. But if she prevails—as expected—this young, diverse, potentially unruly big-tent caucus will incongruously be led by the same figurehead of the past 15 years.

The consequences for policy are likely to be small. While Pelosi called for bipartisanship in her election-night remarks, most observers expect divided government to produce more gridlock. The new Democratic House is unlikely to find common ground on legislation with the GOP Senate and President. That’s partly because many Democrats are in a fighting mood. But it’s also because the midterm results may tie the GOP even closer to the President. The Republicans who remain in Congress are the ones in the safest districts, who hewed closest to Trump. They embody a party now tethered to Trump’s polarizing closing message of racial provocation, anti-immigrant fervor and jingoistic aggression. The Democrats rode to victory on a wave of anti-Trump grassroots fervor two years in the making. When the Resistance comes to Washington, it will be up against a thoroughly Trumpified GOP.

Pelosi, in her victory speech, vowed to “find common ground where we can, and stand our ground where we can’t.” Elections, she said, “are about the future.” But as a new political chapter opens in the Trump era, the future looks like a pitched battle between two starkly different versions of what America should be.

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2016 exit polls

exit polls analysis

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Hawaii election 2018 / official election results

Ige wins re-election

Hirono, Gabbard, Case cruise to victories

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[11/15/18] Twitter reminds McConnell

U.S. reimposes sanctions on Iran

The Trump administration reinstated all sanctions removed under the 2015 nuclear deal, targeting both Iran and states that trade with it.

They will hit oil exports, shipping and banks - all core parts of the economy.

Thousands of Iranians chanting "Death to America" rallied on Sunday, rejecting calls for talks.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has vowed to sell oil and break the sanctions.

The military was also quoted as saying it would hold air defence drills on Monday and Tuesday to prove the country's capabilities.

The demonstrations took place on the 39th anniversary of the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran, which led to four decades of mutual hostility.

Before travelling to a campaign rally for the US mid-term elections, President Donald Trump said Iran was already struggling under his administration's policies.

He called the sanctions, "very strong", saying: "We'll see what happens with Iran, but they're not doing very well, I can tell you."

What started this?

Washington re-imposed the sanctions after Mr Trump in May pulled out of a 2015 accord aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Washington also says it wants to stop what it calls Tehran's "malign" activities including cyber attacks, ballistic missile tests, and support for violent extremist groups and militias in the Middle East.

"We are working diligently to make sure we support the Iranian people and that we direct our activity towards ensuring that the Islamic Republic of Iran's malign behaviour is changed," US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, told Fox News on Sunday.

"That's the goal, that's the mission, and that's what we will achieve on behalf of the president."

(no longer) poles apart

Unnecessary utility poles are all over Hawaii because two companies that share most of them often disagree about their responsibilities. Now that problem has been resolved.

In a move that will eliminate 14,000 unsightly poles, Hawaiian Telcom agreed to let Hawaiian Electric Cos. have sole ownership of about 120,000 utility poles on Oahu, Hawaii island, Maui, Molokai and Lanai.

The agreement ends nearly a century of joint pole ownership between the electrical utility and its longtime partner that was once just a phone company.

Under the new arrangement, Hawaiian Telcom will lease pole space for its telephone, internet and TV transmission lines. In return, Hawaiian Electric will provide Hawaiian Telcom with a $48 million credit, though $26 million of that covers disputed past costs of jointly owning poles.

John Komeiji, Hawaiian Telcom president and general manager, called the deal a win for both companies and the state.

“With this change, Hawaiian Telcom joins many other communications providers that lease space on poles, enabling us to channel more of our resources toward investment in fiber and expansion of next generation services statewide,” he said in a statement.

Sharing utility pole ownership historically was done to minimize the number of poles in communities and reduce expenses for companies that needed such infrastructure. On Oahu, joint pole ownership dated to 1922 with Hawaiian Electric, Mutual Telephone Co. and streetcar operator Honolulu Rapid Transit Co., according to Hawaiian Electric.

In more modern times, however, joint pole ownership was a source of discord for Hawaiian Electric and Hawaiian Telcom. Problems included how much Hawaiian Telcom should pay for new poles or even whether new poles were necessary.

As a result, sometimes two poles carried lines when only one was necessary. This occurred in cases where Hawaiian Telcom disagreed over the need for a new pole. Hawaiian Electric would install a new pole for its use and cut off the top of the adjacent old pole where its lines used to hang, while Hawaiian Telcom kept its equipment on the old pole.

The two companies figure 14,000 such “double poles” exist. The agreement calls for these old poles kept by Hawaiian Telcom to be removed within 10 years, with Hawaiian Telcom paying $650,000 a year for the work.