Tuesday, November 22, 2016

America Love it or Leave it.





Trump Country: Michigan supporters want quick progress on trade, taxes


Donald Trump supporters are closely watching the president-elect’s first key policy decisions as he prepares to enter the White House.
Voters who backed the GOP nominee in southeastern Michigan say as the country moves past the election, Trump will need to stay on message.
“Donald Trump has got a fantastic opportunity to show the blue-collar and union workers that he does have the ability as an outsider to bring a lot of change,” Terry Bowman, an autoworker and chair of the Union Conservatives in the region, said.
“We want you to fight for us now, we want you to fight on trade, fight for secure borders, and we want you to get our economy going again,” Jamie Roe, partner at the Michigan-based political strategy firm Grand River Strategies, said.
Trump attributes his success in the Wolverine State to campaigning on his business career.
He made this appeal in Macomb County just days before the election. “I’m telling you, I’m the only one who going to bring their business back, I’m the only one who is going to get rid of all these ridiculous regulations, I’m the only who is cutting taxes,” he said.
Trump ended up winning the county by more than 10 points – compared to President Obama defeating Gov. Mitt Romney there in 2012.
“A place like Macomb County where Barack Obama four years ago won it by 25,000 votes and Donald Trump won it by almost 50,000 votes this time so it was an incredible turnaround,” Roe said.
Michigan currently has an unemployment rate of 4.6 percent -- slightly lower than the national average at 4.9 percent. Trump supporters though remain skeptical this is accurate.
“We’re not taking into consideration the thousands of people that have just  stopped looking for work altogether”, said Benjamin Roark, a local sales representative.
Brian Pannebecker, a Ford Motor Company autoworker added, “Michigan’s economy is not fine right now, a lot of people have dropped out of the labor force”.
Supporters say they need results in his first few months in office.
“He has to show some progress in the next couple years on trade,” said Roe.
“In the upcoming year I at least want to see progress towards the bulk of all the issues he brought up through the campaign trail”, said Roark.

Judge urges new citizens to leave US if can't accept Trump


A federal judge in San Antonio finds himself at the center of an uproar after telling newly sworn U.S. citizens that Donald Trump is "your president, and if you don't like that, you need to go to another country."
U.S. Magistrate Judge John Primono's comments were reported by KENS-TV in San Antonio, which covered the naturalization ceremony at which 500 immigrants took the oath of U.S. citizenship at the Institutes of Texan Cultures on Thursday.
"I can assure you that whether you voted for him or you did not vote for him," the television report quoted him as saying of the president-elect, "if you are a citizen of the United States, he is your president. He will be your president, and if you do not like that, you need to go to another country."
WATCH: UNDOCUMENTED YALE STUDENT SPEAKS OUT ON SANCTUARY CAMPUSES
He later told the station and the San Antonio Express-News that he meant his words to be unifying and respectful of the president's office, not political, and added that he did not vote for Trump for president.
"I wasn't trying to say anything for or against Donald Trump. I was just trying to say something hopeful and unifying, and unfortunately it was taken out of context," he told the Express-News.
PHOTOGRAPHER CAPTURES IMAGES OF IMMIGRANTS FROM ALL NATIONS
The television station also reported that Primono was critical at the ceremony of protesters who carried placards saying, "He's not my president," and said he detested the actions of pro athletes who kneel during the playing of the national anthem.
Primono, the son of German and Italian immigrants, has been a magistrate judge since 1988.

Summit meeting: Can there be a 'reset' between Trump and the media?


If Donald Trump can sit down with Mitt Romney, who called him a con man and failed businessman, it’s hardly shocking that he would invite a bunch of network executives and anchors to Trump Tower.
Even if he spent much of the campaign calling their organizations dishonest and corrupt.
I’m told it was a relatively pleasant session at which the president-elect made clear his unhappiness with certain negative aspects of the coverage. He reminded his guests that they misjudged the election and never believed, for instance, that he could win Michigan, where he campaigned in the final days.
Variety describes it as a "tough" sitdown, with Trump "reserving particularly harsh words for CNN and NBC News."
The New York Post has a more dramatic version, saying that Trump told CNN President Jeff Zucker--who worked with him at NBC during "The Apprentice"--“I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed."
“There was no need to mend fences,” Kellyanne Conway told reporters. “It was off-the-record meeting. It was very cordial, very productive, very congenial. It was also very candid and very honest. From my own perspective, it's great to hit the reset button.”
And if the network folks had a chance to express their concerns about media access, news conferences and press pools, all the better.
Trump will meet today with executives from what he calls the “failing” New York Times and other outlets.
Trump is going to be the 45th president, and the mainstream media aren’t going away. It would be good if they could find a way to work together, despite what is always an adversarial relationship.
After all, Trump was a gold mine for the cable networks during the primaries. He was the most accessible candidate in modern history when it came to granting interviews. The reality-show veteran understands what makes good television. There are opportunities here for both sides.
It’s not like other presidents-elect haven’t reached out to the press with informal dinners and schmooze sessions. It’s just that we’ve never been through a campaign where there was so much hostility between candidate and press corps.
Four years of outright hostility wouldn’t be good for him, for us, or the country.
Meanwhile, there seems to be a culture war brewing against Donald Trump as well.
Less than two weeks after his election, his vice president gets a stern lecture from the cast of “Hamilton.” At the American Music Awards, Model Gigi Habib mocks Melania Trump’s accent and demeanor.
These are entertainers and cultural figures who are offended that their preferred candidate lost the presidency, and they are refusing to “normalize” the 45th president, as I noted yesterday about many in the mainstream media.
To me this is a finger in the eye of the 60 million Americans who voted for Trump, at least in part because they didn’t like the way the elites—political, media and cultural—look down on them.
I have no problem with a president being comedically skewered. Alec Baldwin and “SNL,” have at it (with Kate McKinnon having to switch from the old-news Hillary to the rising star Kellyanne Conway).
I have no problem with critics opposing Trump’s policies or his appointments. That’s how democracy works. New presidents used to get a bit of a honeymoon—that’s now a thing of the past—but at a minimum a level of acceptance, even after a bitter campaign.
That’s not happening now.
Those of you who can’t stand Trump respond by telling me all the terrible things about him. But how would you feel if Hillary Clinton had won the election and Trump diehards remained hostile, Broadway actors lectured Tim Kaine and crowds chanted “not my president”?
In the political arena, one of the diehards is former attorney general Eric Holder, who was far more liberal than part of the country. At a funeral for PBS anchor Gwen Ifill, Holder asked media people paying their respects, “Will you cower? Will you normalize that which is anything but?”
At a funeral! Unlike Barack Obama, his former boss, Holder isn’t wishing the new president well.
And then Howard Dean called incoming White House senior strategist Steve Bannon a “Nazi.” I know Dean is running for DNC chair, but whatever the inflammatory nature of Bannon’s record—he insists he’s a nationalist, not a white nationalist—that kind of language is awful.
Here’s a hopeful sign. The new ombudsman at the New York Times, Liz Spayd, writes that “from my conversations with readers, and from the emails that have come into my office, I can tell you there is a searing level of dissatisfaction out there with many aspects of the coverage.
“Readers complain heatedly and repeatedly about the forecasting odometer from The Upshot that was anchored on the home page and predicted that Hillary Clinton had an 80 percent chance or better of winning. They complain that The Times’s attempt to tap the sentiments of Trump supporters was lacking. And they complain about the liberal tint The Times applies to its coverage, without awareness that it does.”
While partly faulting the candidates, Spayd says “the media is at fault too, for turning his remarks into a grim caricature that it applied to those who backed him. What struck me is how many liberal voters I spoke with felt so, too. They were Clinton backers, but, they want a news source that fairly covers people across the spectrum.”
Perhaps it’s time to move beyond the “grim caricature.”
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

'The house is burning down': Ryan, set to challenge Pelosi, fears for Democratic Party



The Ohio congressman running to unseat Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader said Monday that the Democratic Party is playing with fire.
Rep. Tim Ryan said on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria” that President-elect Donald Trump’s victory – combined with the GOP protecting its majorities in the House and Senate – sent a clear signal to lawmakers that “working-class” Americans had “flipped their middle finger to the establishment.”
“I am pulling the fire alarm right now, is what I’m doing in the Democratic Party,” Ryan said of his challenge to Pelosi. “I believe we are in denial of what’s happened, and I’m pulling the fire alarm because the house is burning down.”
FORTUNES RISE AND FALL IN BIDS TO LEAD CONGRESS
And despite Democratic President Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s close loss to Trump, Ryan said he fears for the future of his party.
“We better get our act together or we will cease being a national party,” Ryan said. “We are going to be a regional party that fails to get into the majority and fails to do things on behalf of those working-class people that were the back of the Democratic Party for so long.”
Ryan is talking about people in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio – part of the so-called “blue wall” that Trump knocked down on election night. While Republicans had an overarching message – and Trump, in particular, with his “Make America Great Again” slogan – Ryan decried the lack of a simple, coherent, national message to deliver in the lead-up to Election Day.
“The problem is they talk to people in segments,” Ryan told The Washington Post on Monday. “Here’s our LGBT community. Here’s our labor guy. That doesn’t work. You stop becoming a national party.”
Things were different in previous elections, Ryan said, because of the person at the top of the ticket.
“If we don’t have Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, we can’t win elections,” Ryan told The Post. “That is an unsustainable model.”
So Ryan, who launched his bid on Thursday, proposes changes such as elevating junior members to positions of leadership and giving members whose seats may be in danger more of a voice.
“I’m talking Democratic Party 2.0,” Ryan said.
Ryan, 43, was first elected to the House in 2002, after former Rep. Jim Traficant was convicted on federal corruption charges and expelled from Congress. A fierce critic of President Bush, Ryan also pressed – and failed – to place punitive tariffs on nations such as China that were guilty of currency manipulation – a topic Trump addressed on the campaign trail numerous times.
But Ryan faces an uphill climb to become the “other Ryan” in House leadership – joining House Speaker Paul Ryan, R.-Wis.
The 76-year-old Pelosi, who has been in the House since 1987, has led Democratic congressmen since 2002, when she replaced Rep. Dick Gephardt as minority leader. Pelosi in 2006 became the first female Speaker of the House when Democrats took back the majority from Republicans. During her tenure she helped spearhead the passage of ObamaCare, which Trump has promised to repeal. Pelosi lost the speakership in 2010 when Republicans won control of the House, but she remained in a marquee role as minority leader.
Democrats are set to vote for their leader on Nov. 30.

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