Presumptuous Politics : Nov 26, 2016

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Jill Stein Cartoons

Trump names deputy nat'l security adviser, presidential assistant

New York – U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Friday named Kathleen Troia McFarland as his future deputy national security adviser and Donald F. McGahn as assistant to the president and White House counsel.
The appointments were announced by the presidential transition office in New York, while Trump is away in Florida for the Thanksgiving holidays.
McFarland, whose appointment requires no Senate approval, will serve under retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who was previously picked by Trump to be his national security adviser. That designation must be approved by Congress.
The future deputy national security adviser is currently a security analyst for the Fox News television network.
She worked in that capacity for the administrations of Richard Nixon (1969-1974), Gerald Ford (1974-1977) and Ronald Reagan (1981-1989).
The statement announcing her new position included Trump's complimentary words about McFarland's "tremendous experience and innate talent."
For his part, McGahn, who is a partner in a Washington law firm, acted as an adviser to Trump during the electoral campaign and continues in that position as part of the presidential transition team.
Meanwhile, the transition office reported that Trump continues his telephone conversations with different foreign leaders who have congratulated him on his victory in the Nov. 8 election.
According to a statement by the transition team, he recently spoke with Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela and with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, among others.
Previous reports indicated that Trump spoke with no less than 30 heads of state and government, who congratulated him on his victory at the polls.

Jill Stein raises more funds for recount than entire presidential campaign

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein hauled in $4.8 million to help finance recount efforts in three states, a figure that eclipsed the fundraising total for her entire presidential campaign.
Late Tuesday, Stein issued a press release calling on supporters to raise $2.5 million to fund a recount effort in three states that Donald Trump won - Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Stein’s campaign said that amount would be needed to meet Wisconsin’s Nov. 25 deadline and $1.1 million filing fee. But it was soon clear that goal would easily be met.
The campaign had raised $4.5 million goal by 11 p.m. on Thursday, according to The Huffington Post.
By Friday morning, the fundraising effort was nearing $5 million, a figure that exceeded the $3,509,477 reported on Stein’s final October 19 campaign finance report.
Stein has enough to cover the $1.1 million fee to file before the Friday afternoon deadline to file recount in Wisconsin. Under Wisconsin law, Stein must also show cause for a recount to take place.
Wisconsin GOP Executive Director Mark Morgan issued a statement Friday calling Stein's decision to seek a recount "absurd" and "nothing more than an expensive political stunt that undermines the election process."
In the days following the election, the doctor-turned- Green Party nominee was the target of disgruntled Democrats and liberals who believed her candidacy contributed to Clinton’s loss.
For example, Steve Benen wrote on MSNBC’s website that if voters had cast ballots in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania for Clinton rather than for Stein or Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, the former First Lady would have won.
“But it’s nevertheless true that in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, third-party voters had an enormous, [2000 Green Party candidate Ralph] Nader-like impact – had those states gone the other way, Clinton would be president-elect today, not Trump,” he claimed.
Criticism began turning to support for Stein as rumors and theories about hacked voting machines and a rigged election bubbled to the surface.
The initial fuel flaming the recount fire was set by blogger Greg Palast, who claimed in a November 11 post that the election was stolen by Trump.
Another theory that voting machines were hacked was soon trending on social media even before Stein announced the recount campaign, reported The Washington Post.

Trump eschews Ivy Leagues in favor of business acumen for cabinet

Harvard crimson may be a prominent color in the offices of the Obama administration, but that looks to change as President-elect Trump transitions to the White House.
Unlike Obama – who mined the faculties of Harvard and other Ivy League schools to fill his cabinet and top level administrative posts – Trump has so far focused his search for help steering his administration policies on people he is more familiar with: wealthy businessmen and women.
Trump is expected to select billionaire investor Wilbur Ross as his commerce secretary and will likely choose Todd Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs whose father founded TD Ameritrade, as deputy commerce secretary. The president-elect last week named Betsy DeVos, the chairwoman of Michigan-based investment firm the Windquest Group, as education secretary. In addition, Mitt Romney, who before his time as Massachusetts governor was the founder of investment firm Bain Capital, is on Trump’s shortlist for secretary of state.
“Birds of a feather flock together,” Gary Nordlinger, a professor in the graduate school of political management at George Washington University, told FoxNews.com. “Trump wants to surround himself with people who he sees as successful in the real world and he has approached the entire cabinet appointment process as a businessman would.”
The move away from Ivy League academics and toward the titans of commerce appears not just to be one of comfort for Trump, but also to fulfill his campaign promise to root out Washington insiders, lobbyists and liberal elites, whom he sees as the main problem inside the Beltway.
While Trump has been criticized for keeping a number of former lobbyists on his transition team (he argued that selecting lobbyists was the only option he had), the appointment of ultra-wealthy conservatives to cabinet-level posts does align with his distrust of the presumed liberal elites who make up the Obama administration.
During his two terms in office, Obama – himself a graduate of Colombia University and Harvard Law School – filled his administration with Ivy League brethren. From Harvard’s faculty alone, Obama recruited Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and top economic aide Lawrence Summers to name just a few. Of the 22 cabinet-level positions in Obama’s White House, 13 of them are held by people with either undergraduate or graduate degrees – or both - from an Ivy League school.
“Obama is deep, deep down an intellectual,” Nordlinger said. “He is a product of the Ivy Leagues and it makes perfectly reasonable sense why he chooses to surround himself with these type of people.”
Despite his penchant for being the outsider, Trump can’t completely eschew candidates with Ivy League backgrounds – he himself graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, Ross holds a BA from Yale and earned his MBA at Harvard as did Romney. But he appears to be looking for people whose success lays in fields different than academia.
“Trump’s argument is that while the Ivy League faculty may have a bunch of accolades, they don’t understand real life,” Joe Trippi, a political strategist and frequent Fox News Channel contributor, told FoxNews.com.
It also does not appear that all Ivy League academics are opposed to actually working with the president-elect. Harvard lecturer Carlos E. Díaz Rosillo is helping him with his transition and school officials say that Trump can still find like-minded professors in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Summary

91 percent of donations made by faculty at Harvard in 2015 went to Hillary Clinton, according to the Harvard Crimson.

“To the extent that Harvard is both very committed to acceptance and integration and diversity and also is very committed to fact-driven policy, it’s not a natural fit,” Juliette Kayyem, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who served in the Obama administration, told the Boston Globe. “But I could see, at the agency level, a lot of good reasons for various experts here to join the administration.”
In the long run, whether or not Trump foregoes choosing Ivy League academics to join his administration and instead fills his cabinet with like-minded business people may not matter if he can’t fulfill his campaign promises.
“He’s just replacing one set of elites for a different set of elites,” Trippi said. “The difference is that he says these are people who have real-life experience in actually getting things done. We’re going to see very soon if that rings true.”

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro dies at age 90

Longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro, the bearded, cigar-smoking Communist revolutionary who infuriated the United States, inspired both loyalty and loathing from his countrymen and maintained an iron grip on Cuban politics for almost 50 years, died Friday at the age of 90.

Castro, who was the only leader most of his countrymen ever knew, outlasted 11 US presidents since he first took power in 1959.

Castro had been in declining health for years – he continued to spew his anti-American tirades almost until the end.
In October, 2014, Castro reprinted a New York Times editorial in state-run media that argued that the U.S. embargo on Cuba should end. The editorial ran almost verbatim, omitting one line about Cuba’s release of political prisoners.
In 2012 he wrote an opinion piece for a state-run media outlet in which he branded the Republican presidential primary race "the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance" the world has ever seen.
And just to show how much his volatile presence lingered in American politics, despite officially handing over power to his brother Raul in 2008, Castro also was the subject of a question during a Republican candidates' debate in Tampa, Fla. that same month.

When Mitt Romney was asked the first thing he would do as president if he found out Castro was dead, he replied, "Well first of all, you thank heavens that Fidel Castro has returned to his maker and will be sent to another land."

When it was his turn to answer, Newt Gingrich said, "I don't think that Fidel is going to meet his maker. I think he's going to go to the other place."

The lawyer, revolutionary and political leader who triggered such visceral reactions was born August 13, 1926 out of wedlock to a Cuban sugar plantation owner and a servant in his home (they eventually married). He was not formally recognized by his father until he was 17, when his surname was changed to Castro from Ruz, his mother's name.
Though he spent the better part of his life railing against capitalism and the rich, Castro enjoyed a wealthy and privileged childhood.
He attended Jesuit boarding schools, and developed a love for sports, pitching for El Colegio de Belen’s baseball team. He attended the University of Havana law school, where he joined groups that focused on Cuban nationalism and socialism.
After graduation and now a revolutionary, he took up arms against the government of President Fulgencio Batista, leading a failed 1953 attack on a military barracks in hopes of triggering a popular revolt.

Instead he was captured and at his trial, where he led his own defense, famously predicted "history will absolve me."

After spending time in prison, Castro went into exile in Mexico, where he met Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who became his confidante.

Castro established another guerrilla force and after several years of fighting, eventually defeated Batista in 1959, taking control of Cuba at the age of 32.

After being sworn in as prime minister, Castro began a series of reforms, many designed to end US economic power on the island. Relations between the two countries frayed and when Castro visited the US later that year, President Dwight Eisenhower refused to meet with him.

At the same time, Castro's government began to establish relations with the Soviet Union. In April 1961 Castro formally declared Cuba a socialist state just days before the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion that saw 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA unsuccessfully attempt to invade and topple his government.

Castro intensified relations with the Soviet Union and in 1962 US reconnaissance planes discovered Soviet missiles on their way to Cuban sites, precipitating a tense standoff between President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

But in the 1980s, Russia stopped taking Cuban sugar, causing widespread economic deprivation that resulted in thousands of Cubans trying to flee to the US by sea.
Castro often spoke with resentment and disgust of the Cubans who left the island because of his government, particularly those who went into exile in the United States.
He called Cuban exiles “guzanos,” the Spanish word for “worms,” and complained about the Miami Mafia that always sought his ouster.
Cuban exiles responded with equal disdain, with many forming organizations solely focused on getting Castro out of power.
Rumors of his death ran rampant in Cuban communities many times over the decades.
In a 1988 speech, Castro said: "I think I hold the dubious record of having been the target of more assassination attempts than any politician, in any country, in any era.”
"The day I die, nobody will believe it."
Castro served as prime minister until 1976, when he became president, serving in that position until 2008, when an ailing Fidel handed over power to his younger brother Raul.

He remained as First Secretary of the Communist Party until April 2011.

And even when officially out of office, he remained the best known figure in Cuba.

"Men do not shape destiny," he once said. "Destiny produces the man for the hour."

Along the way he was a prime enemy of the US and there were reports of the CIA trying to topple him in a variety of ways, although some suggestions – like an exploding cigar – seemed to border on the absurd.

Castro's personal life was complicated and private. He was believed to have one son by a first marriage, an illegitimate daughter from another relationship, five sons from a second marriage and another son by an unnamed mother.