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theliberaltony · 7 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

President Trump this week tweeted his intention to order the Department of Justice to investigate whether the FBI had “infiltrated” the Trump campaign for political purposes. He then met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray to push the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The episode, like many before it, set off alarms among legal and political commentators. Throughout the 2016 campaign, the outsider candidate demonstrated that he would not be bound by the usual unwritten rules of the game. Political scientists, in particular, have emphasized the decline of “norms” in their efforts to explain the danger posed by the Trump administration and the president’s possible role in the decline of liberal democracy in the U.S.

But as with any word that has picked up heavy traction in political discussions, “norms” has gotten a bit imprecise. What do we actually mean when we talk about norms? Why do such informal rules exist? And what norm violations should we really care about?

Why we need norms

Informal rules tend to emerge around things that we are anxious or doubtful about. Think about social manners. We have norms against cutting in line or eating all the cake at a birthday party precisely because humans don’t seem to be naturally inclined to be generous. We have to be taught to be considerate of other people and socially sanctioned into doing so.

This principle turns out to be especially applicable to presidential politics. Presidential power is vaguely defined in the Constitution, and the office is designed in a way that allows for very broad use of power. Presidents can make decisions about how to conduct foreign policy, fire executive branch officials who don’t do what they want, and make policy by executive order.

Because the executive branch concentrates substantial power and influence in a single person, there are plenty of opportunities for those powers to become political weapons — if they’re left unchecked. In “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe norms as guarding against just that, as preventing institutions from being used as “political weapons.” We have norms about when and how presidents use their “bully pulpit,” for example, as well as when they should use their power to fire executive branch officials.

Why do we have informal rules (norms) about some things and formal rules (laws and regulations) about other things? One answer that Jennifer Smith and I developed in our research on the topic is that informal rules emerge when there’s some agreement that a rule needs to exist but deep disagreement on the particulars. One example of this is the norm established in the country’s early years that presidents would serve only two terms. There was widespread agreement that there should be limits on how long a single person could hold the presidency. But there were enough objections to any specific time span to make it difficult to put a formal rule in place. Making formal term limits would have forced a difficult conversation about exactly how long presidents should serve and about whether the limits on public accountability were worth it. Adopting an informal rule allowed the country to skip these more difficult conversations and instead just follow George Washington’s lead. (Of course, it took only one violation of this informal rule — FDR’s four terms — to push things over the edge for a more formal change, and that happened only after the country had grown used to the informal two-term convention.)1

When we should actually care about norm violations

OK, we really need norms. But we don’t need all norms equally. In the Trump era, norms are invoked with dizzying frequency, and Trump won the White House while violating all sorts of unwritten rules of campaigning. So which norms should we really try to protect?

In short, some norms are more cosmetic and about tradition and convention, and some norms are really about “democratic values.” We care about the latter.

How can we tell which is which? Three categories of norms about presidential behavior tap into crucial aspects of democracy: respecting the independence of other institutions, acknowledging that political conflict is part of the process, and keeping private profit separate from government operations.

Independence of other institutions — American politics depends on the independence of the three formal branches of the national government. So any action that erodes that independence is worth worrying about. Of course, autonomy across branches has been a tricky subject. Presidents obviously try to influence Congress and even sometimes congressional primaries. Members of Congress try to influence presidential elections. You might remember the Supreme Court getting involved in a presidential election. Because interbranch meddling has such a long history, norms may be a less powerful guideline than thinking about whether the president is trying to do something that will weaken the ability of other branches to challenge him.

Political conflict — Let’s see if we can thread this needle. First, the idea of legitimate opposition — that people can oppose and criticize the government without posing a threat to the nation — is a fundamental tenet of democracy. Trump’s violation of that norm has primarily taken the form of tweets about the media and about his Democratic opponents. Journalists and opposition party members have very different roles to play here, and the implications of presidential criticism is different for each. Efforts to delegitimize criticism of the president by the media are alarming (well, I might have a bit of a vested interest here), as are threats to jail opponents. Attacks on congressional Democrats, however nasty, may violate norms of civility but don’t necessarily threaten core democratic values.

After all, it’s the peaceful resolution of political disagreement — not the absence of dissenting views — that’s central to democracy. Corey Robin points out that sometimes norms are actually quite repressive, such as the informal rules and expectations that allowed American slavery to persist in the 19th century until the abolitionists “polarized society.” It’s the criminalizing of political dissent — either by attacking the opposition or denying its standing — that should be worrying.

Public and private — Since Trump won the 2016 election, there have been numerous examples of his family’s private business interests becoming intertwined with government operations. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway drew criticism for advertising Ivanka Trump’s clothing brand during a televised interview. The real estate dealings of the Trump Organization across the globe have made critics nervous. Trump’s hotels and resorts have become part of official state and government business, making it difficult to separate the president’s private business interests from the work of governing. These potential conflicts of interest have thus far attracted many questions and at least one lawsuit. This kind of behavior is constrained through a mix of formal and informal rules. Thus far, it’s proved difficult to rein in, despite widespread agreement that public officials should not profit from their positions.

Thinking more carefully and precisely about norms might actually lead us to more pessimistic conclusions about the risks to U.S. democracy. We depend a great deal on informal rules to constrain the presidency, both because of the powerful nature of the office and because it’s difficult to find agreement about the kinds of formal rules that would limit presidential power. Much of the time when we’re talking about norm violations, we don’t so much mean a departure from standard practice as a breach in democratic principles. The ability to adopt informal rules has sometimes saved Americans from hard conversations about power and the tradeoffs that democracy requires. Those are exactly the kinds of hard conversations we might need to have now.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Julia Azari

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smartsport1 · 4 years ago

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Odds to Be Next Host of Jeopardy! Ken Jennings Listed as the Heavy Favorite added to SmartSport on Trello

Smart Sport added the card Odds to Be Next Host of Jeopardy! Ken Jennings Listed as the Heavy Favorite to the Odds to Be Next Host of Jeopardy! – Ken Jennings Listed as the Heavy Favorite list in the SmartSport board at November 13, 2020 at 02:24AM Odds to Be Next Host of Jeopardy! – Ken Jennings Listed as the Heavy Favorite https://www.sportsbettingdime.com/news/entertainment-props/odds-next-host-jeopardy-ken-jennings-listed-heavy-favorite/ With news of long-time Jeopardy! host Alek Trebek’s passing this week, the game show is searching for its next host Before his passing, Trebek pre-recorded episodes that will run through the rest of 2020 See below for odds on the many options for Trebek’s successor including good longshot bets The world lost a great on November 8 when Alek Trebek passed away. As the long-term host of Jeopardy!, Trebek charmed television audiences for over 35 years. With Trebek’s passing, the silver screen landscape has a huge void to fill. Naturally, while fans mourn Trebek, producers are scrambling to decide who should succeed the beloved host. A plethora of options would make worthy candidates. Previous Jeopardy! champions, renowned hosts of other programs, and various celebrities fill the list of odds. Let’s look at the list a bit further and see who actually has a chance to be the next Jeopardy! host. Odds for Next Host of Jeopardy! Host Odds Ken Jennings +100 George Stephanopoulos +325 LeVar Burton +900 Neil deGrasse Tyson +1400 Pat Sajak +1600 Alex Faust +1800 Laura Coates +1800 Ryan Seacrest +1800 Tom Bergeron +1800 Jimmy Kimmel +2000 Katie Couric +2000 Mina Kimes +2200 Jane Lynch +2500 Neil Patrick Harris +2500 Trevor Noah +2800 Wolf Blitzer +2800 Drew Carey +3300 Chris Harrison +4000 Howie Mandel +4000 Jon Stewart +4000 Piers Morgan +4000 Steve Harvey +4000 Erin Andrews +5000 Nick Cannon +5000 Al Michaels +6600 Joe Rogan +6600 Rosie Perez +6600 Oprah Winfrey +10000 James Holzhauer +25000 Donald Trump +100000 Odds taken Nov. 12 From Contestant to Host Ken Jennings presently has the best odds to succeed Trebek as the host of Jeopardy! Many fans of the game show will recognize Jennings’ name as one of the show’s most notorious contestants. Jennings first rose to notoriety as a Jeopardy! contestant in 2004 with a record-breaking streak. He went on to become the highest-earning American game show contestant of all time. Jennings has become synonymous with the show, and his likelihood of being the next host makes sense. Why Ken Jennings? He’s beloved in the Jeopardy! universe. Given how much fans loved Trebek, producers of the show are looking for the next best thing. They clearly want to emulate that fan-host bond as much as they can in the shadow of Trebek’s absence. Considering The Options Mere hours after Trebek’s death became public knowledge, there were already articles online guessing the next host. Former White House staffer and current ABC News journalist George Stephanopoulos is apparently gunning for the job. Stephanopoulos isn’t the most likely choice on paper, but his desire for the position have made his odds a lot more likely. But wanting something isn’t exactly enough. Given that Jennings is more associated with Jeopardy! he would make a better fit. But to find the next host, perhaps studio execs should listen to the person who knew best– Trebek himself. In a 2018 interview, Alex Trebek said he thought either LA Kings announcer Alex Faust or CNN legal analyst Laura Coates would make worthy hosts. 93rd Academy Awards Odds Tracker Read More Worthy Long Shots While there are definitely some familiar hosts whose names appear on the list of odds, there are some unlikely celebs here. Certain stars have poor odds for a reason– can you really imagine the sarcastic quip of Jane Lynch or nasty snark of Donald Trump being plugged in following Alex Trebek? Other stars have made interesting transitions to the game show world. Drew Carey famously replaced the also-beloved Bob Barker on The Price is Right. Steve Harvey has equally excelled on Family Feud. But these stars are too tied up for the gig. Neil Patrick Harris doesn’t have the best odds, but he’s a consistently appreciated celebrity with the chops for the gig. Betting on him could end up being a good bet. Similarly, Jon Stewart has been a strong beacon of light for television fans in the past, and he could make a great host despite his weak odds. Pick: Ken Jennings (+100) The post Odds to Be Next Host of Jeopardy! – Ken Jennings Listed as the Heavy Favorite appeared first on Sports Betting Dime. via Sports Betting Dime https://www.sportsbettingdime.com November 13, 2020 at 01:50AM https://tructiepbongda8.com/ https://tructiepbongda8.com/link-sopcast-bong-da/ View on Trello https://tructiepbongda8.com/ https://tructiepbongda8.com/link-sopcast-bong-da/

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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 years ago

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San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz sports "Nasty" shirt during TV interview

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz may have just started a new fashion statement. Yesterday she sported a brown T-shirt with a big "Nasty" written across the front while being interviewed on Univision's Al Punto .

"What is really nasty is that anyone would turn their back on the Puerto Rican people," she said to journalist Jorge Ramos, referring to the Trump administration's lackadaisical response to Hurricane Maria's devastation to the island.

"When it bothers somebody that you're asking for drinking water, medicine for the sick and food for the hungry, that person has much deeper problems than what we can discuss in an interview."

https://boingboing.net/2017/10/05/san-juan-mayor-carmen-yulin-cr.html

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go-redgirl · 4 years ago

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Tucker Carlson: The Media ‘Are Your Enemies’ — ‘They Are Misleading You So That You Will Obey’

Friday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson opened his program by highlighting what he described as a “secret alliance” between journalists those that journalists are expected to hold accountable.

The “Tucker Carlson Tonight” host concluded that ultimately the media were not acting in the best interest of the public at large, which he said made them our “enemies.”

Transcript as follows:

CARLSON: Well, for five years, we have watched the news media treat Donald Trump in a way that no American President has ever been treated. Richard Nixon himself disgraced, impeached, forced from office in the end got a pass by comparison to Donald Trump.

Reporters hate Trump with an all-consuming mania. They hit him so intensely that at times it’s been amusing to watch. If Donald Trump announced a cure for cancer at tonight’s rally in Minnesota, CNN would denounce him for fixing drug prices. That’s true.

If you’re a fair-minded person, it has been infuriating to watch this. It’s too dishonest. It’s also patronizing because it’s almost unbelievably stupid.

Trump spied for Russia. Trump works for Putin. Trump is a racist because he likes borders and doesn’t want to live in Haiti.

Yes, OK.

Clearly all the smart kids went in to finance. America’s websites and TV stations got the rest. Unfortunately, we’ve got to live with the consequences of that. But we should also say, if we are being entirely honest, that as grating as all of this is, unremitting hostility to the President of the United States is far from the greatest threat America faces.

Reporters are supposed to be tough on people with power. That’s why we have journalism: to keep a close eye on those who have outsized influence over our lives. The people we should watch carefully would include business moguls, the Intel agencies, prominent academics, cultural figures, military leaders, and most obviously, our politicians.

The rest of us can’t really know what these people, the people in charge are doing at all times. A reporter’s job is to find out and tell us. So in the end, the real threat to America isn’t too many nasty questions from reporters. It’s the opposite of that. The real threat is collusion.

When journalists strike secret alliances with the very people they are supposed to be holding accountable, we are in deep trouble. Lies go unchallenged. Democracy cannot function. And that’s what we are watching right now.

Yesterday — and this may be the starkest example of all — we learned that the FBI is conducting an active investigation into Joe Biden’s son for business deals that apparently included his father, the former Vice President.

Now that is not speculation, it is confirmed. Former Biden business partner, Tony Bobulinski sat for a five-hour interview with six FBI agents just the other day — a week ago. They asked him about his business dealings in China with the Biden family.

Now, we don’t know if this investigation will result in indictments, obviously. We know that it could. And that is significant because Joe Biden, as you may have heard is running for President. The election is on Tuesday.

So by any possible measure, this is a blockbuster, stop the presses news story. It’s not some naughty picture from somebody’s laptop. This is a criminal investigation into business deals that we know for a fact Joe Biden was party to.

So why haven’t you heard more about this? If you don’t watch this, you’ve likely heard nothing at all, not a word. And you know why? Because the media are collaborating. They are collaborating with the Democratic Party. They are collaborating with the Intelligence Agencies that spy on Americans with impunity.

They are collaborating with the tech monopolies that have choked off the average person’s access to legitimate information. We’re not overstating any of that we wish we were. Watch the people you’re supposed to be able to trust, dismiss a completely legitimate verified news story as quote, “a Russian plot.”

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Holding super spread super spreader events and giving Russian disinformation, spreading Russian disinformation.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Disinformation that he knows to be fabricated and supplied by a foreign Intelligence Service, and despite the warning, he is still doing it.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You have said this entire thing is so obviously a Russian plot.

JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: It’s sort of a crazy quilt at this point, which has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. That said, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Rudy basically functioning as a Russian asset by pushing Russian disinformation.

BRIAN STELTER, CNN CHIEF MEDIA CORRESPONDENT: CNN reported on Friday, the U.S. authorities are seeing if those emails we just talked about are connected to an ongoing Russian disinformation effort.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: I’ve got to tell you, Keith, it has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. These people wouldn’t know Russian disinformation, if it got into the shower with them. They know nothing.

Every word of what they just said was a lie. Russia didn’t forge these emails. Vladimir Putin didn’t invent the two separate meetings that Tony Bobulinski had with Joe Biden to discuss business in China, the business the FBI is now investigating and an active criminal investigation. That’s all entirely real.

It happened. It is happening now, and the people you just watched on the screen know that it did. Yet, they are you it is all fake, a concoction of a hostile foreign power.

So you have to ask yourself at some point, why would they tell you that? They know it’s not true, they are saying it any way. They are expecting you to believe it. Why are they doing that?

Well, because these people are not your allies. They are not trying to help you or inform you, just the opposite. These people are your enemies. They are misleading you so that you will obey and maybe it will work, honestly.

Maybe they will get Joe Biden elected President next week without even asking the most basic questions of the candidate, the most basic questions or vetting him in any way. That can work. That’s the gambit.

But what then? Many of these people you just saw on the screen will then go to work for Biden, officially. We’d expect that because without Donald Trump to hyperventilate over, the business models at many news outlets will collapse, and these people will need jobs.

But Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can’t hire everyone at NBC. Some of these people have to continue to be quote “journalists.” And the question is, can they really do that? Can they keep pretending on your screen live every night after everything we have just witnessed?

___________________________________

OPINION: Great, great observation of the Media these days that have turned their backs on the general public in bring truthful news to provide citizens with choices on any side of the isle or information just in general.

Its time for an ‘Unbiased’ News Organization that will provide the readers with accurate information so that they (I,e, readers or listeners) can make up their own minds from the truthful information at hand.

In other words, the News Organization just provide the truth and let the readers or watchers make up their own minds one way or another.

But, when they write/published information then they turn around and tell you how to come too a conclusion. That’s Not good or wise as a News Organization at all!

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gibsongirlselections · 4 years ago

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Bob Woodward: Stenographer of the Washington Establishment

At the end of Trump’s first term, there are scores of people the president has humiliated, fired by tweet, and excoriated publicly after nasty and public fallings out, and all of them have stories to tell. These angry, jilted rejects from the Trump administration, the presidential version of The Apprentice, have poured out their hearts, and their grievances, to Washington’s reporting angel, Bob Woodward. From national security heavyweights, to former and current senators and White House officials, to generals famous for their silence, the veteran Watergate journalist transcribes them all in his latest book Rage.

While Trump wasn’t interviewed for Woodward’s first book on the administration, the president picked up the phone and spoke to Woodward a total of 18 times for this latest offering. Yet even with that level of access, the book suffers from Woodward’s uncritical embrace of narratives spun by ex-officials transparently attempting to resuscitate their own reputations after Trump’s unceremonious defenestrations.

Rage is awash with an astonishing array of self-serving narratives: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein drafting the memo that justified firing FBI Director James Comey in May 2017; pious Marine Corps General Jim Mattis praying at Washington’s National Cathedral for the country’s fate under Trump’s command; oil executive and erstwhile Secretary of State Rex Tillerson bemoaning Trump not keeping his word and his fire-by-tweet; Jared Kushner opining on his brilliant father-in-law’s “great strength” of unpredictability, to name a few.

The biggest problem with Woodward’s books on the Trump administration is that he serves up these self-interested perspectives with far too much credulity. History is written by the winners, and everyone wants to be certain Woodward captures their version of events. Throughout both Fear and Rage, the reader can never be certain who is talking, because Woodward serves up his narrative in omniscient voice. Almost all the original reporting Woodward conducted is on “deep background.” Whomever it is that spoke to Woodward wasn’t willing to publicly put their names to what they told him.

But it’s not too difficult to guess who his sources are, because in their own telling, they are the heroes. And who, other than the people present in the room themselves, could tell Woodward the thoughts of central players or word for word what happened at private White House meetings, or on the golf course with Trump?

In Fear, a predictable bevy of former White House officials like Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, Rob Porter, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly and Chris Christie tell Woodward how lunatic, imbecilic, or angry Trump is, and how they personally stood between the president and disaster.

In Rage, Woodward has some new sources, and new heroes. In this passage from the Epilogue of Rage, see if you can guess who they are:

Mattis, Tillerson and Coats are all conservatives or apolitical people who wanted to help him and the country. Imperfect men who answered the call to public service. They were not the deep state. Yet each departed with cruel words from their leader. They concluded that Trump was an unstable threat to their country. Think about that for a moment: The top national security leaders thought the president of the United States was a danger to the country.

It’s Mattis, Tillerson and former director of national intelligence Dan Coats—coincidentally the very same people whom Woodward has heavily relied on for his Rage narrative.

In one particularly striking scene, Woodward writes that Mattis told Coats, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.”

It’s not clear what sort of action Mattis is referring to. After all, Mattis famously declined to dish any dirt on his former boss after resigning. Mattis said, “if you leave an administration, you owe some silence,” and “when the time’s right to speak out about policy or strategy, I’ll speak out.”

Mattis resigned in December 2018 after disagreeing with Trump on withdrawing troops from Syria, something the president had promised to do many times during the 2016 presidential campaign. As recently as June 2020, Mattis said he had just come to the realization that Trump was a threat to the Constitution as a result of Trump’s decision to deploy soldiers to quell the George Floyd protests in Washington, D.C. This means that Woodward’s account, in which Mattis calls Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” in 2019, can’t be true.

According to Woodward, Mattis disagreed with Trump on policy: Trump made “a terrible decision” on Syria; he “didn’t agree” with Mattis and crossed his “red line.”

“I was often trying to impose reason over impulse. And you see where I wasn’t able to, because the tweets would get out there,” Mattis said of Trump. He calls Trump’s attitude towards allies “indefensible.”

“It was jingoism. It was a misguided form of nationalism. It was not patriotism.”

When Mattis resigned, he reportedly told Trump, “You’re going to have to get the next secretary of defense to lose to ISIS. I’m not going to do it.”

The retired Marine Corps general tells Woodward he’s “buried too many boys” to risk Trump escalating violence in the Middle East. Trump is the first president that hasn’t either started a war or brought the U.S. into a new armed conflict in over 39 years. Yet Woodward doesn’t press Mattis on his conclusion that Trump is “dangerous,” “unfit,” and going to get boys killed.

In another chapter of Rage, Woodward writes uncritically that Tillerson and Mattis “had stopped or slowed some of Trump’s intentions in Afghanistan and South Korea, but their ambitious goal of directing foreign policy had largely failed.”

In another chapter, Tillerson is unceremoniously fired via tweet. Tillerson “was never told why he was fired. The president did not give him a reason.”

Maybe Tillerson was axed because he was, on his own admission, obstructing the president’s wishes on foreign policy?

None of these people were forced to work for the Trump administration. But by doing so, one would presume they all agreed to carry out Trump’s policies, not surreptitiously work to sabotage his agenda behind his back. They also all had the option of resigning and speaking out publicly about what they believed the dangers they saw were.

But that’s not what they did. They talked to Woodward, anonymously, and in his telling, people like Mattis and Tillerson are the “adults in the room”—even when they behave appallingly, openly flouting Trump’s policy goals, Woodward doesn’t seriously question their accounts.

Consider this scene Woodward describes: Gary Cohn, then-chief White House economic adviser, prevented President Trump from withdrawing from a trade agreement with South Korea by simply removing a letter announcing the withdrawal from the Resolute desk. Trump reportedly never noticed the letter was missing.

In conversations with former White House adviser Rob Porter, Cohn threatened to reprise his tactic and remove another letter in order to prevent Trump from leaving the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)

“I can stop this. I’ll just take the paper off his desk,” Cohn tells Porter.

It is shocking that Cohn felt empowered to literally take options off the table of the duly-elected president of the United States; and more shocking still, Woodward recounts this without putting any pressure on Cohn as to the story’s veracity or the narrator’s chutzpah.

While there’s an endless parade of self-serving accounts from disgruntled former staff in both books, there’s nothing about the deal President Trump helped facilitate between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. While the deal is only the third Arab-Israeli peace deal negotiated since Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, and the first time a diplomatic relationship has been established between Israel and a Gulf Arab country, it doesn’t merit a single word in the forty six chapters of Rage.

In the epilogue, Woodward abandons journalistic impartiality and weighs in on his opinion of Trump: he’s “the wrong man for the job” of president. But Woodward need not have written this for the reader to know his conclusion. Napoleon once said that history is “an agreed upon fable.” Through his unquestioning use of self-serving sources, Woodward allows Rage to be nothing more than a shockingly unabashed stenography of the Washington establishment.

The post Bob Woodward: Stenographer of the Washington Establishment appeared first on The American Conservative.

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garudabluffs · 2 years ago

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Cable carnage: Trump turns CNN town hall into televised combat MAY 10,2023

The former president’s town hall at CNN began with more 2020 denialism and went on from there.

A cherry on top

"One of the most testy exchanges between Trump and Collins came when she pressed him on the federal investigation into documents from the White House that were found at his Mar-a-Lago club. After Collins pushed back at his repeated assertions that Biden had taken more documents than he had, he went back at her.

“You are a nasty person, I’ll tell you,” Trump remarked.

READ MORE https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/10/trump-once-more-refuses-to-admit-election-defeat-00096352

"Wednesday’s town hall marked Trump’s first appearance on CNN since 2016. He had branded the network “fake news” and never granted any of its journalists an interview while president. Trump’s campaign said he was appearing on the network to step outside of a GOP comfort zone as he already starts to turn his focus to a potential 2024 general election rematch with Democrat Joe Biden."

#Trump Town Hall New Hampshire #St. Anselm College in Manchester #New Hampshire

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bookmania2020 · 4 years ago

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Gender and Politics in 2016 U.S. Election – Jean Robert Revolus

The 2016 Election in the U.S. left many people in shock. As the lead candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, competed for the race to become the 45th President of the United States of America, it was apparent that Clinton would most likely become the first woman to hold office. The polls had predicted it and she was fairly popular among different generations of Americans. But as their campaigning came to an end and the final day to vote had come, the results were far off from the initial predictions. Republican candidate, Donald Trump had unexpectedly won. This win marked a significant change in the history of American politics and the political environment. The entirety of the campaigns, scandals, and investigations surrounding the 2016 Election had been explored in author Jean Robert Revolus’s latest work,US Election 2016 NO COLLUSION?978-1-95-163003-4. Revolus has mentioned all the necessary information one must need to understand the possibility of collusion.

In the Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, author Pamela Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes, discuss gender and politics in the 2016 Election. Here is what they found while conducting their research:

The 2016 U.S. presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump also provides an opportunity for us to consider how this high-profile election confirms or contradicts what we know about gender and politics. Before 2016, we knew that the presidency is a highly masculine institution (Duerst-Lahti 1997). We knew that candidates for the highest office in the land often assert their masculinity, for example, by playing up their ties to the military, demonstrating their sex appeal, and emasculating their male competitors (Yates and Hughes 2017). And we knew that women candidates face crippling double binds: If women do not “act like men,” they are seen as poor leaders, but if they display stereotypically masculine behavior, they are criticized for not being feminine enough (Murray 2010). What we did not know is what would unfold when a major U.S. political party nominated a woman candidate to run for president for the first time.

Although we cannot enumerate all of the ways gender mattered in the 2016 election here, gender was highly visible throughout the electoral cycle. During the primaries, we saw “Bernie Bros” emerge, Trump attack Republican candidate Carly Fiorina’s looks, and Republican candidates repeatedly attempt to emasculate one another. In the run-up to November, Trump feuded with Fox journalist Megyn Kelly and called Clinton a “Nasty Woman”; the Access Hollywood tape was released, followed by a slew of allegations of sexual assault against Trump; and both Clinton and Trump were attacked widely in the media in explicitly gendered ways. After votes were cast, we also learned that the election produced the largest gender gap among voters ever in a U.S. presidential election. Given that these examples merely scratch the surface of gender’s place in and influence on the election, it is not surprising that many of the papers in this special collection focus on the 2016 U.S. election.

Overall, this timely special collection on gender and politics is broad in its scope, including a diverse selection of topics, research questions, and approaches. The collection includes global comparative research that offers a birds-eye view down to in-depth single-country studies that illuminate the mechanisms shaping our social and political worlds. Methodologically, the collection is also diverse, drawing from interviews, content analysis, survey and lab experiments, and longitudinal quantitative data. The authors understand politics in different ways: Although most of the articles center on formal politics, in particular the election of a U.S. president, others speak to politics at personal and interpersonal levels. The authors also engage with gender differently, some focusing explicitly on women’s candidacy and barriers to their inclusion, whereas others bring to bear research on masculinities and the ways in which patriarchy is embedded into the culture.

#US #election #2016 #no #collusion

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buffleheadcabin · 7 years ago

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"When it bothers somebody that you're asking for drinking water, medicine for the sick and food for the hungry, that person has much deeper problems than what we can discuss in an interview."

[I fall in love too easily.]

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johnabradley · 7 years ago

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HRH Prince William: BY ALASTAIR CAMPBELL

For years, Prince William found himself in a state of shock, unable to deal with the tragic death of his mother Princess Diana. As the nation wept that summer in 1997, in private William couldn’t allow himself to grieve. Quite simply, aged 15, he locked his emotions away, burying them beneath routine and a most dutiful, demanding public life. Until now. Recently, William has started talking about his loss, opening up and admitting his struggle and its effects - now he is passionately calling for all men to follow his example through his mental health campaign, Heads Together. In what is undoubtedly the most candid interview he has ever given, the 34-year-old future King talks exclusively to GQ about his mother’s death, his relationship with the media, his work, his family and how he is determined to lead by example. Oh, that my mother was alive to see me now, walking into Kensington Palace on a sunny spring day, to take tea with the future King William. Born in the same year as the Queen, 1926, and given the same Christian name, Elizabeth, my mother “Betty” was a fervent monarchist; indeed one of my earliest political memories is of the row provoked when, about half a century ago, I refused to listen to the Queen’s Christmas Day message. She and I also used to argue about Prince William’s parents as the disintegration of their marriage provoked a bitter propaganda war between them and their supporters. Once I got to know Princess Diana, in a series of extraordinary meetings (see my diaries, volume one) before Labour won power in 1997, despite the nasty columns I used to write about her as a journalist, I became something of a fan. I was smitten indeed, and so took her side in the Charles-Diana rows taking place in homes up and down the country. My mother was more for Charles, seeing as how he was going to be the next king. It is not a conversion from republicanism that has sparked this meeting with the Prince - though “President Trump” would challenge anyone’s faith in an elected head of state - but a common cause, namely the desire to eradicate the stigma and taboo surrounding mental illness. Prince William, his wife Catherine and his brother Harry, have chosen mental health as their main cause, and their Heads Together campaign has been successfully promoting the importance of being as open about our mental health as we are about our physical health. When they started off down this path, the republican in me was annoyed they could get so much traction for anything they did; but the Time To Change mental health campaigner was overjoyed. They have overseen the making of a series of short films showing the importance of talking about mental health problems rather than bottling them up. To my surprise, I was asked to take part in a film, talking with my partner Fiona about how my mental health troubles impact on us. Then, even more surprisingly, given how few extended interviews he gives, he agreed to be interviewed for GQ. I had met him a few times, on the British and Irish Lions rugby tour of New Zealand in 2005, for example, and more recently at a dinner where I asked him whether he would follow the lead of his grandmother when he became king, by never giving an interview as monarch. Here, I was keen to test two things in particular. One was whether his commitment to this cause was real and whether he had a proper understanding of the issues. You can make up your own mind on that, but after an hour and a half at the palace, mine was made up in his favour. Secondly, I wanted to see how close to the public persona the more private man in his own habitat might be. Would he speak with the same stilted style that seems to characterise his public speaking? He didn’t. Would he have a sense of humour? He did. Would he stand on ceremony? He didn’t. Was there any real passion behind the shy exterior? There was. Indeed, were she still here, I would have called my mum and told her, “Good news - I liked him.”

What son doesn’t miss his mother when she’s gone? As you shall see, almost 20 years on from that car crash in Paris, Prince William clearly misses Princess Diana intensely, saying it is only now he feels able properly to talk about her death, the extraordinary week that followed it, and the enormous impact it had on him and his brother. He doesn’t believe she had mental health problems, and nor does he think that he does. But the trauma he suffered losing her so young, and in such awful circumstances, partly explains why he is determined to get the nation talking more about our emotions, not least because, in life and death, his mother changed the way we express them.

AC: So what’s a nice future king like you doing with an old leftie republican like me?

PW: That’s a very good question Alastair [laughs]. To be honest, I really don’t care where people come from, I like meeting and talking to people from all backgrounds. And this is a good opportunity to talk about something that is very close to your heart, and very close to mine.

AC: And why is mental health so close to yours?

PW: Practically everything in my charitable life, in the end, is to do with mental health, whether it be homelessness, veterans’ welfare, my wife and the work she is doing on addiction; so much of what we do comes back to mental health. Also, if I think about my current job as a helicopter pilot with the air ambulance service in East Anglia, my first job there was a suicide and it really affected me. I have been to a number of suicides, self harms, overdoses.

AC: In what way did it affect you?

PW: Not just the person who lost their life, but the people they leave behind. One of the stats I was given was that, just in the area we cover in the east of England - my base is in Cambridge - there are five attempted suicides every day. Yet suicide is still not talked about. So people have the pain of loss, but also the stigma and taboo means they are sometimes ashamed even to talk about how a lover, a partner, a brother, a sister, a best friend, how they died. That stat - five attempted suicides in the East Anglia region alone - it blew my mind, I thought, “Oh my God, this is such a big issue.”

AC: I am a patron of the Maytree suicide sanctuary in north London, and you and your wife made a private visit there. What impact did that have?

PW: The thing that made an impression on me, it wasn’t just the feelings of the people, the pain they were going through and the care for them, it was that this is the only place of its kind in the UK. It may be the only one in the whole of Europe, and I thought, this is terrifying, it really is, there should be more places like this, where people can go when they’re desperate. I have spoken to suicide groups and having been through personal grief myself, I had an inkling of what to expect, but it was all so raw. When someone does end their own life, [there are] so many questions, people feeling guilty, why didn’t we see it, why didn’t we do more, and all surrounded by this massive taboo. I found it eye opening, so revealing as to what goes on in people’s minds.

AC: When you land in your air ambulance and you get out, what on earth do they say when they see you?

PW: We are only likely to be there if people are in deep trauma or unconscious.

AC: But the other people there?

PW: We are often the first on the scene. Also, I do hang back a little. We land, we secure the scene, I will be sorting the comms for the next flight, and then I might be running around helping with equipment and so on.

AC: Nobody ever has to explain, say, “Sorry, don’t worry about him”?

PW: Most people seem to guess, but I do keep as far back as I can and let the team do what they have to do. I maybe carry the stretcher, carry the kit, sort the comms for the next leg. It is all very fast paced.

AC: Why do the three of you work together on Heads Together?

PW: It is a bit of an experiment really. The Royal Family has not normally done this, three members of the family pulling together to focus on one thing. Normally things are quite disjointed, we follow our own interests and see where it goes, but we thought, well, if we tied it together and had a focused approach, how would that work? We wanted to see the impact we could have.

AC: You must get bombarded with approaches and requests? How do you decide what causes and events to support? Do you try to be strategic about it?

PW: Focused rather than strategic, I would say. When I settle on something, I want to dig deep, I want to understand what I am involved in, I want to understand the complexities of all the issues and, above all, I want to make an impact.

AC: Do you not get frustrated, though? Of course, there are advantages to your position but there are limitations too, because you cannot stray into politics. So you can’t do what I do and bang the drum for more resources and more action from government. Is that not really frustrating?

PW: It can be frustrating at times. I watch the political world, I am interested in it, at times I feel there are things going on I could really help with, but you have to understand where you sit and what the limits are; and with regard to what we do in our charity work, I like to think you can do just as much good but in a different direction.

AC: It’s great you guys are getting involved in mental health. Generally, my worry, though, is there is a danger that making improvements on stigma and taboos is seen as a substitute for services, not an accompaniment. Presumably you saying something like that goes beyond acceptable limits?

PW: No, not at all. I can say that. If I attack government policy, no, I can’t, but I can certainly make that kind of point. What we can do is convene, bring people together, organise private meetings, get experts in one room who might otherwise not always meet, they tend not to refuse an invitation, and we can thrash things out.

AC: Is it very much Harry on veterans, Kate on addiction and young women, you on men in general?

PW: A little bit. Harry has the Invictus Games and focuses a lot on veterans. But we are not stuck in our boxes. We are all three of us trying to understand the tentacles of mental health, which go everywhere. I do think if you are focused about general aims you can have a much greater impact. So we do try to stay focused, not splurge around.

AC: Are you in the mental health space for the long haul?

PW: Medium to long term, definitely. What we would love to do is smash the taboo. Getting the London Marathon as the mental health marathon, that was a big thing, and I hope we are reaching a tipping point. But it is a bit like wading through treacle. It is tough. We are now looking at a legacy programme. We are not going to rush, and the mental health sector has to believe in what we might propose, so we are getting expert opinion and then we will pick and choose and decide what we do.

AC: Why don’t you do the London Marathon yourself?

PW: I would love to, but from the policing point of view, they tested it and they were like, “What?” I am keen to do a marathon but it won’t be London.

AC: What about getting a treadmill in here and doing it while everyone else is pounding the streets?

PW: It would be so boring.

AC: Be great television.

PW: I think I would have mental health issues if I was just staring at that wall. I do want to do it though - and the training. In the military we did plenty of similar things to marathons, like yomping over the Brecon Beacons with a ton of kit on your back. I am just pleased we got London as the mental health marathon.

AC: Do you have specific goals and outcomes for the campaign?

PW: Smashing the taboo is our biggest aim. We can’t go anywhere much until that’s done. People can’t access services till they feel less ashamed, so we must tackle the taboo, the stigma, for goodness sake, this is the 21st century. I’ve been really shocked how many people live in fear and in silence because of mental illness. I just don’t understand it. I know I come across as quite reserved and shy, I don’t always have my emotions brewing, but behind closed doors I think about the issues, I get very passionate about things. I rely on people around me for opinions, and I am a great believer in communication on these issues. I cannot understand how families, even behind closed doors, still find it so hard to talk about it. I am shocked we are so worried about saying anything about the true feelings we have. Because mental illness is inside our heads, invisible, it means others tread so carefully, and people don’t know what to say, whereas if you have a broken leg in plaster, everyone knows what to say.

AC: This is my vested interest speaking here, but what with the marathon and the other things, do you think you might stay in this mental health space for good?

PW: We want to see what impact we can have.

AC: You are making an impact now.

PW: I feel we’re going in the right direction, but not making as much impact as we would like. You know what it is like, you want to get there, grapple with all the issues, get there quickly, make the change that is needed.

AC: But in your position, can you do that?

PW: You can, but you have to do it carefully. Maybe we do make change but the way we do it is slower. We get the benefits of more publicity for the things we do.

AC: I do remember when your father’s letters used to come into Number Ten. Will you go down that route, with his very frank letters to ministers?

PW: [Laughs.] Could you read them?

AC: It wasn’t the handwriting that was the problem.

PW: I have written to ministers but purely to point them towards people I think they should see. So a charity might ask me if I can help with someone and I can help get them access to the people in government.

AC: So you don’t lobby but you introduce?

PW: There are issues I am interested in and I am happy to connect people to ministers.

AC: But you’re perhaps not as robust as your father?

PW: My father has always come at this from a depth of knowledge and a desire to help. He only gets involved in anything when he has those two things: knowledge matched to a desire to help. He genuinely cares. We can argue till the cows come home about whether what he says is right or wrong, but he lives this stuff every day, goes into minute detail, wants to help inform opinion and provide knowledge. I would love to know what the public really think, whether they feel shocked or pleased he gets involved. He has done this for a long, long time, and I think he has used his role really well to raise a lot of questions that people need to ask.

AC: So what might this mental health legacy be?

PW: One idea is getting mental health first aiders in schools. Teachers are under such pressure, they face so many challenges every day. They cannot be expected to be mental health counsellors as well, so we thought there must be a way of having mental health first aiders who can be attached to one or two schools.

AC: Is that something you would promote or fund?

PW: That is what we need to work out. It is a bit of a challenge, but we have a whole range of ideas we are looking at.

AC: Now, tell me about the idea of the films - and thank you for asking me to do one.

PW: Thank for you doing it. I watched it this morning.

AC: What was the purpose of them?

PW: This was predominantly about the importance of the conversation. The point we wanted to get over was that, often, talking is the best thing you can do - it can start the whole process of recovery. For a lot of people things brew up, particularly men maybe, they don’t want to talk about problems.

AC: When you were growing up, when you were still at school, did you feel you were surrounded by people who couldn’t talk about feelings?

PW: Yes, I think so, but I do think a generational shift has gone on. If I look at my parents’ generation, there was a lot more stiff upper lip going on. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for the stiff upper lip, and, for those of us in public life, times when you have to maintain it, but behind closed doors, in normal everyday life, we have to be more open and upfront with our feelings and emotions. Mental health in the workplace is a huge issue, and a sensitive area, and leadership is important here. When you see people in high-powered jobs in the City and big corporations who got there despite their mental health problems, that is a huge success story and it shouldn’t be seen as anything else.

AC: Or maybe people get there because of their mental health problems too.

PW: Absolutely.

AC: I feel I owe mine quite a lot.

PW: Absolutely, but what is really important here is that we are normalising mental health, so if a CEO comes out and says, “I went through this, I got through these dark times,” that is amazing, it normalises, it has an impact then in that organisation and beyond. But without that kind of thing, people tend to make excuses, avoid talking about issues that may be affecting them, pretend everything is fine.

AC: So as an employer, if one of your staff came and saw you and said, “I am really struggling,” do you think you would deal with that properly?

PW: Definitely. I am not pretending I am an amazing counsellor, or a specialist, I’m not, but I would take it seriously and if they needed help I would find it for them.

AC: Now, on the stiff upper lip, I can see why there may be a place for that. But listen… my mother died when I was 56, she had a full life, died quickly, relatively painlessly, but it was very upsetting. I am not sure I could have walked behind her coffin with millions of people around the world looking at me, without crying.

PW: No.

AC: So how hard was that?

PW: It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But if I had been in floods of tears the entire way round how would that have looked?

AC: How can you not be in floods of tears if you feel like being in floods of tears?

PW: In the situation I was in, it was self-preservation. I didn’t feel comfortable anyway, having that massive outpouring of emotion around me. I am a very private person, and it was not easy. There was a lot of noise, a lot of crying, a lot of wailing, people were throwing stuff, people were fainting.

AC: As you were walking?

PW: Yes. It was a very unusual experience. It was something I don’t think anyone could have predicted. Looking back, the outpouring of grief and emotion was very touching but it was very odd to be in that situation.

AC: When you were up at Balmoral through the week, were you conscious of how big it all was down here in London?

PW: No, not at all. All I cared about was that I had lost my mum.

AC: So you were protected from everything happening on the Mall?

PW: Yes. I was 15, Harry almost 13, and the overwhelming thing was we had lost our mother.

AC: So when you came back, and you saw how big the reaction was?

PW: I didn’t take it in. I still didn’t realise what was going on, really.

AC: Did you grieve?

PW: That is a very good question. [Pause.] Probably not properly. I was in a state of shock for many years.

AC: Years?

PW: Yes, absolutely. People might find that weird, or think of shock as something that is there, it hits you, then in an hour or two, maybe a day or two, you are over it. Not when it is this big a deal; when you lose something so significant in your life, so central, I think the shock lasts for many years.

AC: My favourite soundbite of the Blair era was not from him, but your grandmother after 9/11, when she said, “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

PW: Yes, absolutely.

AC: But for you to say you felt you were in shock for years - how much harder is it when you are having to grieve or try to grieve with this extraordinary level of global scrutiny, and the endless ridiculous fascination in every detail of your and your mother’s lives.

PW: It does make it more difficult. It doesn’t make you less human. You’re the same person, it is a part of the job to have the interest. The thing is, you can’t bring all your baggage everywhere you go. You have to project the strength of the United Kingdom - that sounds ridiculous, but we have to do that. You can’t just be carrying baggage and throwing it out there and putting it on display everywhere you go. My mother did put herself right out there and that is why people were so touched by her. But I am determined to protect myself and the children, and that means preserving something for ourselves. I think I have a more developed sense of self-preservation.

AC: Yet the Heads Together campaign is all about saying we should talk, be more open about our emotions, out with the stiff upper lip, in with more talking.

PW: Absolutely.

AC: So is it different for you?

PW: Well, I am in the role I am in. But if I had mental health issues I would happily talk about them. I think the closest I got was the trauma I suffered when I lost my mother, the scale of the grief, and I still haven’t necessarily dealt with that grief as well as I could have done over the years.

AC: Who do you talk to?

PW: Family, friends, I talk to those around me who I trust.

AC: But it can’t be easy in your position to find people you can trust totally.

PW: It is hard. But I have always believed in being very open and honest. One of the few strengths I might have is I am good at reading people, and I can usually tell if someone is just being nice because of who I am, and saying stuff for the wrong reasons.

AC: Have you ever talked to people other than friends and family about your feelings?

PW: No I have not talked to a specialist or anyone clinical, but I have friends who are good listeners, and, on grief, I find talking about my mother and keeping her memory alive very important. I find it therapeutic to talk about her, and to talk about how I feel.

AC: So we are coming up to the 20th anniversary of her death. Are you looking forward to that? Or are you dreading it?

PW: I am not looking forward to it, no, but I am in a better place about it than I have been for a long time, where I can talk about her more openly, talk about her more honestly, and I can remember her better, and publicly talk about her better. It has taken me almost 20 years to get to that stage. I still find it difficult now because at the time it was so raw. And also it is not like most people’s grief, because everyone else knows about it, everyone knows the story, everyone knows her. It is a different situation for most people who lose someone they love, it can be hidden away or they can choose if they want to share their story. I don’t have that choice really. Everyone has seen it all.

AC: The first time I met your mother, in 1994, she said, “Why did you write those horrible things about me when you were a journalist?” I said, “My God, I can’t believe you read that stuff.” But she did. I was shocked that she had read it and also remembered it, it was years earlier. It made me think at the time that some people reach a certain level of fame at which media and public cease to see them as human beings. Do you think that is what happened to her, and do you think it has ever happened to you?

PW: Not with me, no. I think with her it was a unique case. The media issue with my mother was probably the worst any public figure has had to deal with.

AC: What? The intrusion, the harassment?

PW: Yes, but more the complete salacious appetite for anything, anything at all about her, even if there was no truth in it, none whatsoever.

AC: So you don’t have any sympathy with the argument that she cultivated her own friends in the media and fed the whole thing?

PW: I have been exploring this. Remember, I was young at the time. I didn’t know what was going on. I know some games and shenanigans were played, but she was isolated, she was lonely, things within her own life got very difficult and she found it very hard to get her side of the story across. I think she was possibly a bit naive and ended up playing into the hands of some very bad people.

AC: Media people?

PW: Yes. This was a young woman with a high profile position, very vulnerable, desperate to protect herself and her children and I feel strongly there was no responsibility taken by media executives who should have stepped in, and said, “Morally, what we are doing, is this right, is this fair, is this moral?” Harry and I were so young and I think if she had lived, when we were older we would have played that role, and I feel very sad and I still feel very angry that we were not old enough to be able to do more to protect her, not wise enough to step in and do something that could have made things better for her. I hold a lot of people to account that they did not do what they should have done, out of human decency.

AC: Were you not tempted to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry?

PW: We discussed it, but decided in the end not to. Remember, we were the first to expose the phone hacking.

AC: You seem to get a hard time from one or two papers these days. Do you think there is a bit of score-settling going on?

PW: I don’t know.

AC: Do you get followed and chased by paps on bikes?

PW: Not often. But there is a lot of quite sophisticated surveillance that goes on.

AC: So even if not phone hacking, which is far from guaranteed, the press have moved on to other things?

PW: I suppose the one glimmer of light is that because of what happened to my mother, we do not get it as bad as she did. We still have problems, for sure, but do have a little more protection because of the ridiculous levels it got to for my mother - the fact she was killed being followed, being chased, I think there are more boundaries to their actions.

AC: Really?

PW: It is a little better than it used to be.

AC: During the week of her death, Tony Blair spoke to your father and he said to me afterwards, “This is going to be a problem, those boys are going to need help, they are going to despise the media, blame them for her death, yet the media will be a part of their lives.”

PW: Yes, they are.

AC: When you were in Paris recently, posing for hundreds of photographers with President Hollande, did you look at them and wonder if any of them were among the ones who chased her that night?

PW: I’m afraid those are the kind of things I have just had to come to terms with. It is so hard to explain, using only words, what it was like for my mother. If I could only bring out what I saw and what happened in my mother’s life and death, and the role the media played in that, that is the only way people would ever understand it. I can try to explain it in words, but to live it, see it, breathe it, you can’t explain how horrendous it was for her.

AC: Do you think the reaction to her death was a big factor in diminishing the stiff upper lip approach, and changed the way we mourn? Do you think the kind of reaction we saw when, say, David Bowie died last year, would have been the same without that reaction for your mother?

PW: No it wouldn’t. The massive outpouring around her death has really changed the British psyche, for the better.

AC: You do think it is for the better?

PW: Yes, I do think it is for the better.

AC: How much did that week after your mother’s death bring you and Harry together?

PW: We are very close.

AC: And that feeling of shock, sadness, you never felt it strayed over to what I would know as an illness, depression?

PW: I have never felt depressed in the way I understand it, but I have felt incredibly sad. And I feel the trauma of that day has lived with me for 20 years, like a weight, but I would not say that has led me to depression. I still want to get up in the morning, I want to do stuff, I still feel I can function. Believe me, at times it has felt like it would break me, but I have felt I have learned to manage it and I’ve talked about it. On the days when it has got bad I have never shied away from talking about it and addressing how I feel. I have gone straight to people around me and said, “Listen I need to talk about this today.”

AC: Like when?

PW: Last week with the air ambulance, I flew to a really bad case, a small boy and a car accident. I have seen quite a lot of car injuries, and you have to deal with what you see, but every now and then one gets through the armour. This one penetrated the armour, not just me but the crew who have seen so much. It was the feelings of loss from a parent’s point of view, the parents of the boy. Anything to do with parent and child, and loss, it is very difficult, it has a big effect on me, it takes me straight back to my emotions back when my mother died, and I did go and talk to people at work about it. I felt so sad. I felt that one family’s pain and it took me right back to the experience I had. The more relatable pain is to your own life the harder it is to shake it off.

AC: How has the passing of time helped?

PW: They do say time is a healer, but I don’t think it heals fully. It helps you deal with it better. I don’t think it ever fully heals.

AC: Is there a part of you that doesn’t want it to heal fully because for that to happen might make her feel more distant? So you feel the need to stay strongly attached? If grief is the price we pay for love, maybe you want to keep the grief out of fear that loss of grief means you love her less?

PW: One thing I can always say about my mother is she smothered Harry and me in love. Twenty years on I still feel the love she gave us and that is testament to her massive heart and her amazing ability to be a great mother.

AC: How different do you think the country would be if she was still here?

PW: I have thought about that, but mainly from my own perspective. I would like to have had her advice. I would love her to have met Catherine and to have seen the children grow up. It makes me sad that she won’t, that they will never know her.

AC: What about the public Diana?

PW: I think she would have carried on, really getting stuck into various causes and making change. If you look at some of the issues she focused on, leprosy, Aids, landmines, she went for some tough areas. She would have carried on with that.

AC: She was an extraordinary woman.

PW: She was.

AC: How hard do you find the scrutiny? I mean you can’t even do a bit of bad dad dancing without someone taking a video?

PW: [Laughs.] Honestly, I can dance better than that. It’s true though, camera phones, Twitter, there’s not much privacy. I don’t think it was too bad. It wasn’t as if I was falling out of a nightclub, totally wasted. I think people realise everyone has to blow off a bit of energy and tension every now and then.

AC: So how did you feel when some of the papers said you don’t work hard enough?

PW: Criticism is part of the turf, I’m afraid. I think the public are much more nuanced. I have my air ambulance job, I carry out the duties the Queen asks me to, I have my charities and causes and I am raising a young family, so I can’t let that criticism get to me.

AC: A couple of the papers do seem to have turned against you, though?

PW: There is a certain element of Fleet Street getting fed up with nice stories about us. They want the past back again, soap, drama.

AC: Do you see it as part of your job to avoid giving them that? A bit of normality, stability.

PW: I couldn’t do my job without the stability of the family. Stability at home is so important to me. I want to bring up my children in a happy, stable, secure world, and that is so important to both of us as parents. I want George to grow up in a real, living environment, I don’t want him growing up behind palace walls, he has to be out there. The media make it harder but I will fight for them to have a normal life.

AC: But surely you must accept it is an abnormal life?

PW: Totally, but I can still try to protect them as children.

AC: The Queen, your father, you, now George. Four people on the planet who might one day be the head of state in the UK. It is fair to say republicanism has lost, not least thanks to your grandmother. The monarchy seems to have bucked the trend even though we live in a non-deferential, anti-establishment age. Do you feel that?

PW: I do feel the monarchy is in a good place and, like you say, my grandmother has done a remarkable job leading the country - her vision, her sense of duty, her loyalty, her steadfastness, it has been unwavering. We now have three generations of working royals, four altogether, and having that movement through the generations allows for the monarchy to stay relevant and keep up with modern times. You are only as good as your last gig and it is really important you look forward, plan, have a vision.

AC: Do you not look at the Queen, yet another garden party, yet another investiture, yet another state visit, and think how on earth can she keep going?

PW: Yes I do.

AC: Do you, your father and the Queen ever sit down, just the three of you, and just natter?

PW: [Laughs.] What, about Lady Gaga or something? [Prince William had recently recorded a Facetime chat with Lady Gaga for the campaign.]

AC: I was thinking more about being head of state. I mean, how do you learn?

PW: You learn on the job. There is no rulebook. I sometimes wonder if there should be, but in the end I think probably not. Having that difference in how we do things makes the Royal Family more interesting and more flexible. If we all followed the same line, it would all be quite stifled. Our characters are different and the different opinions are important to have.

AC: Your grandmother has always believed in there being a bit of mystique attached to it all as well.

PW: Absolutely.

AC: Never ever given an interview.

PW: No. Never. I seem to have sold the pass on that one.

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whatsonforperth · 6 years ago

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Troll Hunting review: Ginger Gorman goes in search of the online bullies

Troll Hunting, by Ginger Gorman It worked out OK in places. Knowledge systems are now laid bare to be mined by the curious or ignored by the determined. Facts are available, and mutable, as never before. And yes, we can talk to each other, almost all the others; that in itself being perhaps the biggest cultural revolution in history. In media, the corporatised core of legacy systems was all but crushed before new titans gathered themselves and worked out how to first control then monetise a democratised chaos of information. In politics? Well, the internet and social media have probably been a disaster, delivering a suddenly immediate and accusatory polity that needed to be gamed and so came to favour the gamers, political professionals who saw a new divide in social communication between fact and feeling and realised there were probably more votes in feeling. Slowly but surely earnestness has withdrawn from the game of power, replaced by an agile, precisely targeted, sometimes even subliminal, populism. And then there was the great truth that dawned as the social media age unfolded and became ubiquitous: a lot of us were not very nice. You could do worse than ask journalist Ginger Gorman about this last bit, she's been the target of invective, threats, the vilest of fearful abuse. The worst of it was some years back, a transcontinental tsunami of bile, and rather than cower, retreating quietly from the online fray as perhaps her online assailants hoped she might she has been consumed since by a determination to track down the perpetrators of this abuse, her trolls. To know them. To understand their methods and motivation. Troll Hunting documents that rather intense, and personal, quest. It was 2010 when Gorman, then an ABC journalist in Far North Queensland, got something badly wrong. "In retrospect the conversation was remarkable because of its ordinariness." Gorman was working on a cross-media project on discrimination against LGBTI people when she interviewed Peter Truong, Mark Newton, and their five-year-old son. Their image become the frontispiece for her ABC online gender project. Gorman writes of how she'd asked an awkward question of the men on their experience of the adoption process: " I was compelled to ask, 'Do you think there was a suspicion that this must be something dodgy? There must be some paedophilic thing going on here?' Both Newton and Truong smiled at the absurdity of the idea they might somehow be suspect. 'We're just a family like any other family.' " By 2013, in the United States, Newton had been sentenced to 40 years jail, Truong for 30, for conspiring to sexually exploit a child. Gorman limped away, confronted both by her unseeing proximity to such utter evil and by a sudden, vicious and unstemmable stream of online abuse accusing her, at best, of a politically correct blindness, at worst of being complicit. She was trolled mercilessly. She wrote Troll Hunting in catharsis; an attempt to reach an understanding of how that hounding happened, who its leading perpetrators were and why those men (almost only men) act to direct such hate-filled abuse to strangers, people only visible through the intimate, yet abstract, connections of social media. Gorman would discover that she is anything but alone. She worked with the Australia Institute to survey the incidence of Australian cyber abuse. The survey found that 44 per cent of the women among its 1557 respondents had experienced some form of online harassment, same for 39 per cent of men; add it up, extrapolate, and that is maybe 9 million Australians. Abusive language is the most common 27 per cent followed by unwanted sexual messages or images 18 per cent and death threats 8 per cent. In this online jungle of hunters and hunted the most vulnerable are the vulnerable, especially if they are women. Gorman walks us through the sad case of Charlotte Dawson, whose suicide in 2012 may or may not have been facilitated by online abuse pushing her toward that outcome, much of it gathered under the hashtag #diecharlotte. The questions rattle: who would send these snippets of hate to a stranger? Is it a behaviour that was always there, in pubs and kitchens, and has simply been amplified by the immediacy and anonymity of the internet? Have we always quietly hated? Or is this a new human paradigm created by a confluence of social collapse, institutional frailty and nihilistic disenchantment; a change facilitated by digital instantaneousness, sweeping us up at a speed that is probably a little outside the capacity for calm human adjustment. The last is probably true, and as Gorman interrogates trolls, victims and experts, she brushes against those issues: the online life connected yet alone the desperate inequality economics, the gender, sexual and racial politics that are the roiling soup of modern life. The troll's intention and effect, she discovers, is to shock and disturb, to push the recipient to either distress or response. Gorman goes in search of motive, pursuing celebrity trolls such as weev and meepsheep in pursuit of some logical explanation that would make sense of online nastiness so widespread it has almost become a normalised vernacular. In a way, to ask that question is to display a view of human conversation that lacks the nihilistic absence of empathy required to comprehend the answer. Trolling, they tell her, with what feels like a shrug, just is. For LOLS.The impact of those new formulas of discourse, however, are terribly real, for both individuals and the broader culture. In this book, Gorman tugs back from broader social movements' implications to return again and again to the predatory individual, the world of the troll it's a fascination driven by her own experience, but one that does this consideration of the dark side of online conversation the disservice of a nagging narrowness. She condenses what is now the dominant pattern of social, and therefore political, communication to a serial patchwork of isolated attacks. Yet it's so much worse than that. An attack on the individual, by winged hordes of unknown, vicious haters is horrific, cruel and stultifying. It has real-world consequence. But the greater real-world consequence lies in the assiduous appropriation of this new social mood to the ends of corporate and political power. That change has been transformative, a shift fatally disruptive to public civility in its broadest sense. This is a world in which "social justice warrior" is an insult, in which "Nazi" is a casual taunt thrown in fits of moral offence. A world in which the restless diversions and extremity of a Donald Trump are political exemplars. It is possibly an unreasonable expectation of Gorman's book so settled is it in the author's own quest for some glimmer of very narrow personal understanding but a more significant accounting of the trolling world would document not just its isolated prevalence, but also its sudden normalisation. Lone tweeters still flock to torment, threaten and tease, but they are stirred cynically by figures of the established media and politics, people promoting fear, loathing and, yes, even their opposites, for their own ends. Gorman and the other individual victims of idly malignant abuse are a little lost in the trees, but the forest, the sturdy trunks of civil culture, is quickly being clear felled. That's personal. But not. Jonathan Green is the editor of Meanjin. Most Viewed in Entertainment Loading https://www.watoday.com.au/entertainment/books/troll-hunting-review-ginger-gorman-goes-in-search-of-the-online-bullies-20190117-h1a6a6.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed

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visariga-blog · 7 years ago

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Rīga City Elections: 2017

With headlines dominated by major elections in the UK, US, and France in the past year and another major British vote just a month away, you might be surprised to hear that Latvia also underwent a significant vote as well on Saturday. Although national parliamentary elections are still a year away, voters throughout the cities and counties of Latvia spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday choosing their local officials. While city (and county) elections don't nearly get the same attention or excitement that federal and state elections do in the US, Rīga makes up somewhere between a half to a third of the entire country's population. While mayoralty of a major city is often a stepping stone to higher office in the US, the mayor of Rīga is a national political figure without parallel in the states (aside from possibly New York).

The city council's system is similar to Latvia's national proportional voting parliamentary system. Voters throughout the city choose one “party” to vote for, and parties get a number of representatives on the council proportionate to the amount of overall votes they got throughout the city. Unlike in American cities, there are no “wards” or “districts” that vote independently of one another. There is no councillor from Bolderāja, for example; all members are “at large.” The threshold for representation on the council is 5%, so as you can see below only three parties held seats after the 2013 election even though twelve parties competed overall.

This means that voters do not directly elect their mayor. The position of “mērs” works similar to that of “prime minister” in parliamentary systems, and whichever party or coalition of parties is able to hold a majority of seats and form a government gets to choose the mayor. In practice, this means that the leader of the winning party during the election becomes “mayor.”

Of course, just because mayors are not technically directly elected does not mean that individual personalities don't have an effect on the election. In fact, Latvian politics are quite personality-driven, with party advertisements and promotional materials often prominently featuring their would-be mayors.

Although technically eleven parties took part in the election, only the six that are described here were competitive in any way shape or form. Having only lived here for four years and only now reaching a level of Latvian competence required to watch and understand news programs and articles, I can't and won't claim to be an expert on Latvian politics. Instead, this post will mostly be my casual observations as a semi-outsider.

1. Saskaņa/Gods Kalpot Rīgai! (Harmony/An Honor to Serve Riga!)

We start with the incumbent coalition that has governed Rīga for the past eight years and was the odds-on favorite to win the election. Saskaņa is a continuation of the “Sakaņas centrs” coalition which originally formed in 2005 as an alliance between various “social democracy” parties and regional factions that generally represented the interests of the country's Russophone minority. Going into this election, Saskaņa was the largest single party not just on Rīga city council but also in Saema (the country's parliament).

Saskaņa is routinely accused of being a front for the Kremlin's interests in Latvia, as the party supports closer ties with Russia as well as issues important to the Russian minority such as official second language status and unconditional citizenship for the more than 11% of the country's “non-citizen” residents (most of which are ethnically Russian and migrated during Soviet times). Reports and investigations regarding Saskaņa's connections with Russian government money and influence are a regular occurrence in Latvian media, although like most of the Kremlin's alleged meddling attempts, it's been virtually impossible to prove anything of significance.

The party's national leader and incumbent mayor is the legendary Nils Ušakovs, who first came to office in 2009 at the age of just 32. In the decade before he became mayor, Ušakovs was an active and well-known journalist who worked for a wide range of Latvian media outlets. Having been married three times, his colorful personal life is a constant fixation of Latvian tabloids. You may have already seen him in a viral video that made the international rounds a few months back in which his interview was interrupted by one of his cats jumping onto the table and drinking from his coffee mug.

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Ušakovs is one of the few public figures in Latvian politics that inspires the same sort of vitriol or devotion that personalities such as Barack Obama or Donald Trump do in America. While I rarely hear anything but apathy regarding Prime Minister Māris Kučinskis, people generally think that the mayor is either an honest and competent public servant whose done the best for Rīga that the can, or a cynical and insidious mouthpiece of Russian government interests.

For the past two elections, Saskaņa has run on a unified ballot with the small regional party “Gods Kalpot Rīgai!” This party was founded by anti-corruption activist Andris Ameriks after his former “Reform Party” that previously ran city government in coalition with Saskaņa dissolved due to an ironic massive corruption scandal. As is expected by an incumbent party, much of the advertising and promotional materials throughout the city focused on getting out the vote and “not staying home.” It seems like Saskaņa seemed particularly interested in shedding it's image as the “Russian party,” as some of its advertisements featured supporters with clearly “Latvian” names extolling Ušakovs' supposed achievements in improving city life over the last few years.

Although the other major parties didn't particularly coordinate with one another, there was a general effort to paint the election as a referendum on Mayor Ušakovs, who they saw as vulnerable after eight years of incumbency and lower approval ratings than ever before.

2. Latvijas Reģionu Apvienība/Latvijas Attīstībai (Latvia's Regional Alliance/For Latvia's Development)

After incumbent Sasķana/GKR, the party that seemed to compete the most for Rīga city council was the new Latvijas Reģionu Apvienība, a party formed in 2014 as an alliance of various regional parties just a few months before the national parliamentary elections. The party advertises itself as “centrist” an pro-European, with a focus on developing regions outside of Rīga. Like virtually all major Latvian political parties, “family values” (marriage between only a man and a woman) is one of the “core values” listed on the “program” page of their website.

The party's leader since its founding in 2014 has been Mārtiņš Bondars, a veteran in Latvian politics as well as a former NCAA basketball player and president of the infamous Latvijas Krājbanka during the 2008 financial crisis. Bondars' image featured heavily in LRA campaign advertising, going by the quite optimistic name “Mērs Bondars.” Līga and I joked that he was so confident about winning the election that he legally changed his first name to “Mērs.”

In Rīga the party shared a ballot with Latvijas Attīstībai, Latvia's version of a libertarian party. Despite it's youth, LRA had already had some early success in the 2014 parliamentary elections with 6.66% of the vote and winning eight seats in Saema.

3. Vienotība (Unity)

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. When I first arrived in Latvia, Vienotība was the major player in national politics, and since then has been the largest governing coalition partner (Saskaņa has been the biggest single party in Saema, but has never been able to form a government due to other parties refusing to cooperate with them). Since then, due to a series of mis-steps and PR disasters, their reputation as a technocratic centrist party has been replaced by one of incompetence and inefficiency. Vienotība seems aware of this, and has gone through various attempts at re-branding lately. In case you weren't able to guess, “jaunā” means “the new” in Latvian.

For Rīga's elections, the party put up 36-year-old Vilņis Ķirsis and featured his picture heavily in advertisements throughout the city along with various campaign promises such as “4000 new rentable apartments for young families.” However, the material I got from “Jaunā” Vienotība in the mail a few days before the election painted a very different picture.

Nasty negative advertising is nothing new in politics anywhere in the world, but this pamphlet had me baffled. The very first comparison between “Mērs” Ķirsis and Mayor Ušakovs is that while Ķirsis supports Latvian as the only state language, Ušakovs supports Russian as a second official state language. These opinions should surprise virtually no one, but it was strange to see this as the very first issue that Vienotība wanted to highlight considering that roughly half of the population of Rīga is either ethnically Russian or Russophone, and around the same proportion supported a proposed constitutional amendment in 2012 that would have changed the language policy. Even more shocking is the very third point that highlighted how Ķirsis celebrates the patriotic holiday of Lāčplēša diena every year (the day that the Latvian army successfully held off an invading force of Germans and Russians in 1919), while Ušakovs celebrates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on May 9th each year. The issue of May 9th celebrations is one of the most emotionally raw for ethnic Latvians and Russians who see the day through two radically different perspectives, and drawing attention to it on a pamphlet sent around a city almost evenly divided between both ethnicities is a curious decision for a party whose name means “unity” in English.

This pamphlet seemed to me like somewhat of a white flag for this particular election, and I imagine that the party is looking forward instead to parliamentary elections next year. Even so, it's strange to me that a party that built its reputation on centrism and technocracy would dive so enthusiastically head-first into identity politics and have no problem completely alienating a large swath of the electorate. Is this what's “jaunā” about Vienotība? The lifecycle of the average Latvian political party is notoriously short, and Vienotība seems like it's just about ready to go to seed.

4. Nacionālā apvienība "Visu Latvijai!"—"Tēvzemei un Brīvībai/Latvijas Nacionālās Neatkarības Kustība" (National Alliance “All for Latvia!” — ”For Fatherland and Freedom/Latvian Independence Movement”)

Yes, this is actually the party's name that appears on the official ballot, although it sounds long and convoluted enough to be the title of a Japanese anime OVM (direct-to-video movie). The party's platform is a mix of far-right populism, social conservatism, environmentalism, and patriotism that appeals to a lot of nationalists. As you can tell from the long name, many smaller similar parties have been absorbed into what is most commonly called “Nacionālā Apvienība” (or, when written, “NA”). NA these days has a virtual monopoly on Latvian nationalist politics; an rival upstart party called “No sirds Latvijai” (For Latvia from the Heart) has failed to take off despite an impressive seven seats in Saema won in their first national election (2014), and is likely dead in the water after their candidate in the second largest city of Daugavpils released this infamous “rap” video:

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Before the parties that represented the Russian minority successfully consolidated into Saskaņa, NA's component parties controlled Rīga's mayoralty for much of the 90s and 2000s. These days NA seems content being a bit player in Latvian politics, having participated as a minor partner in the last few national coalition governments. Interestingly, mayoral candidate Baiba Broka is good friends with her nemesis Mayor Ušakovs' current wife (as you can see in this trashy tabloid photo of the couple attending her birthday featured in Latvia's version of the National Enquirer, kasjauns.lv).

5. Zaļo un Zemnieku Savienība (Union of Greens and Farmers)

Although ZZS currently controls the prime ministership and presidency of the country as well as many key ministerial positions thanks to an impressive 21 seats in Saema (opposed to Vienotība's 23), the party has never quite taken off in Rīga. This can be evidenced by the fact that although I received a newspaper in the mail printed by the party to introduce their candidates and platform, I didn't see a single poster anywhere in the city during the entire campaign. The party failed to qualify with more than 5% of the vote in the 2013 elections, and it didn't seem like they were expecting to do much better this time around.

While technically a member of the Europe-wide Green Party, ZZS describes itself as “center-right” which is odd for green politics to say the least. Since 2006, the party has been dominated by notorious oligarch and mayor of the 6th largest city of Ventspils Aivars Lembergs, with Lembergs even running for prime minister despite being technically barred from governmental duties in Ventspils due to numerous criminal activities. Aside from Ventspils, ZZS has been quite successful in many other local municipalities in the last decade, including the city of Jelgava where I work every day.

The Dark Horse: Jaunā konservatīvā partija (The New Conservative Party)

Although this upstart party founded in 2014 by anti-corruption advocate Juta Striķe had virtually no visible advertising throughout the city in the past month, there has been a bit of positive buzz about these guys. Their politics remind me a bit of the “liberal” wing of the US Republican party that used to exist prior to the “Tea Party Revolution” in the late 2000s, and they aim to fill the centrist void left by Vienotība's slow and steady implosion and provide an “anti-corruption” alternative to ZZS which is tainted in the eyes of many due to their affiliation with Lembergs.

Nepaliec Mājās!

Thanks to my Irish citizenship and being declared as a resident of Rīga, I was actually allowed to vote. Although I wasn't sure at first if I actually would, I decided that since I always tell my students that they should exercise their right to vote, I decided that I should probably exercise mine. Conveniently, our local precinct was located directly across the street from us at Rīgas 65. vidusskola (high school). I really had no excuse, especially since I was automatically registered to vote and only needed to bring my government-issued ID card.

I wasn't sure if I was allowed to take pictures inside the polling station and decided to play it safe, so unfortunately I don't have any photos to post for you from where the action was. Voting was quick and simple though; I simply handed my ID to the woman sitting at a table near the door, and she wrote down a number on a piece of paper and told me to give it to a man sitting at a different table down the hall. That man took my paper and handed me both an envelope and a stack of eleven different ballots that I could choose from. When I got to my “booth” (a table I sat at surrounded by two walls), there were instructions on the wall that told me to pick only one of the ballots and to add a (+) next to names of candidates that I particularly liked and to cross out any candidate I particularly disliked. This is to ensure that people can choose the party they prefer without having to endorse a specific party member they don't like. Finally, I needed to put that ballot in the envelope and drop the envelope in a large ballot box while throwing the other unused ballots in a trash can (or, I hope, a recycling bin). I waited a few minutes and watched a few other people drop their envelopes in the box before feeling comfortable that I would do it correctly. On the way out of the polling station, I noticed that around a half dozen election observers were standing around to make sure that there were no “irregularities.”

And The Winner Is...

Mayor Ušakovs! While this was the expected result all along, the election turned out to be a lot closer than commonly predicted. Earlier in the night before all of the ballots had been counted, Saskaņa/GKR had only around 42% of the vote and the “Latviskās” parties (as they were being called on TV) were beginning to talk about uniting in what would have been a Frankenstein-ish coalition to block Saskaņa from power. Of course, that talk was a bit premature, as the areas that hadn't been counted were heavily in favor of the incumbency.

A Few Takeaways:

Although the election was indeed a victory for Saskaņa, the 50.82% majority that they scraped by with is hardly a resounding mandate and a far cry from the 58.54% that they received in 2013. I don't want to begin to speculate on why their stock has dropped, but it will be interesting to see how they fare next year.

(Jaunā) Vienotība is officially on life support. While they passed the 5% threshold and haven't been completely locked out of city council representation, they received less than half of their 2013 total of 14.13%. News wasn't much better elsewhere, as they failed to win even a plurality in any of Latvia's nine cities. Things could change, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a mass exodus of top members to parties such as LRA and ZZS before next year's parliamentary election.

How about that Jaunā konservitīvā partija? With virtually no advertising throughout the city, they managed to tie for second place with the far flashier LRA at roughly 13.5% of the vote and 9 seats on city council apiece. The day after the election, one of their top officials boldly proclaimed on Latvian TV that they intend on winning parliamentary elections next year. With how quickly the winds change in Latvian politics, you just never know.

Turnout was higher than in 2013, with 58.72% of registered voters participating. According to various reports, the same was true throughout the country and it will be interesting to see if the trend continues for next year's elections.

So much for the social media campaign to “Gāžam Nilu” (overthrow Nils). When discussing the campaign, one of my friends who is a lifelong resident and lukewarm Ušakovs supporter asked, "are people so dumb that they believe that if they 'gāžam Nilu' that he will be replaced by anything better?” As is the case in so many other elections featuring incumbents, just enough of a majority of Rīdzinieki seem to have felt the same.

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