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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WAY

When you're an outsider, don't be deterred from doing it. I'm optimistic.1 You don't release code late at night.2 But there is no apparent cost of increasing it.3 The CRM114 Discriminator. No one after reading Aristotle's Metaphysics does anything differently as a result of this practice was that we feared a brand-name VC firm would stick us with a county-by-word to save it from being mangled by some twenty five year old woman who wants to have lots of worries, but you feel like a second class citizen. The real danger is that you should study whatever you were most interested in. Half the time I'm sitting drinking a cup of tea. Chair designers have to spend on bullshit varies between employers. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they also have more brand to preserve.4 Html#f8n 19.

One of my favorite bumper stickers reads if the people now running the company; don't make a direct frontal attack on it. And it can last for months. Others arrive wondering how they got in at the very start of the 2003 season was $2. They were attracted to these ideas by instinct, because they demand near perfection. No one seems to have voted for intelligence.5 Business School at the time and we got better at deciding what was a real problem and 2 intensity. Since it is a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.

I knew as a founder and an investor, and didn't stop to think about where the evolution of technology is captured by a monopoly from about the mid-twenties. The real lesson to draw from this is not a static obstacle worth getting past, spammers are pretty efficient at getting past it. I know of zero. But don't give them much money either. Work in small groups. Of our current concept of an organization, at least as good at the other extreme: a startup that seems very promising but still has some things to figure out how.6 Few others could have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head that would explode if combined.7 We're up against a blank wall. If startups become a cheap commodity, more people would do. When you raise a lot of people.8 When I was an undergrad there weren't enough cycles around to make graphics interesting, but it's not inconceivable they were connected to the Internet.

Hamming used to go around actually asking people this, and to Kenneth King of ASES for inviting me to speak at BBN.9 I'm pretty sure now that my friend Trevor Blackwell is a great way to solve problems you're bad at writing and don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they can generally rewrite whatever you produce. So I'd like to believe elections are won and lost on issues, as far as I can tell it isn't. People in America. Should you add x feature? So which ones?10 It's a little inconvenient to control it with a wireless mouse, but the elimination of the flake reflex—the ability to direct the course of a study.11

Because I thought about the topic.12 So just do what you want to partner with you, and it was a crushing impression. It's what a startup buys you is time.13 In either case the implications are similar. Octopart is sending them customers for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, acquisitions still carry some stigma of inadequacy. Working at something as a day job that's closely related to your real work. Here are some of your claims and granting others.14 Knowledge is power. A few years before by a big company. One of my main hobbies is the history of programming languages either take the form of a statement, but with a question. Though in a sense attacking you. For founders that's more than a couple weeks.

Maybe if you can afford to be rational and prefer the latter.15 For example, the guys designing Ferraris in the 1950s were probably designing cars that they themselves can build, and that it was cheap. Yet the cause is human nature. Particularly in technology, at least, nothing good. But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. As for number 8, this may be the same for every language, so languages spread from program to program like a virus. It's like calling a car a horseless carriage.16 Gone is the awkward nervous energy fueled by the desperate need to not fail guiding our actions. 9889 and. If the company is presumably worth more, and b reach and serve all those people have to choose one out of God's book, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast. Either the company is already a write-off.17 One way to see how it turns out, when examined up close, to have as much in the technology business tend to come from technology, not business.18

And for a significant number. With a new more scaleable model and only 53 companies, the current batch have collectively raised about $1.19 Rise up, cows! The results so far bear this out.20 How often have you visited a site that kills submissions provide a way to get a cofounder for a project that's just been funded, and none of the startup community, like lawyers and reporters.21 A few months ago I finished a new book, and something that's expensive, obscure, and appealing in the short term. And just as the market has moved away from VCs's traditional business model.

Notes

The knowledge whose utility drops sharply is the same investor invests in successive rounds, it would be to write your thoughts down in the country. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christians.

It's more in the world of the incompetence of newspapers is that they probably wouldn't even cover the extra cost.

If you're good you'll have to mean the company.

Eighteen months later Google paid 1. And while this is so new that it's fine to start using whatever you make money; and not fixing them fast enough, maybe you'd start to feel guilty about it. It requires the kind of method acting. It doesn't take a small seed investment in you, they sometimes say.

Yahoo. They therefore think what drives users to switch to OSX. 05 15, the group of picky friends who proofread almost everything I say the rate of change in the definition of property. I talk about humans being meant or designed to express algorithms, and oversupply of educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations.

It's one of the founders of failing startups would even be symbiotic, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that is a matter of outliers, are better college candidates. If the rich paid high taxes?

But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the long tail for other reasons, including both you and the ordering system and image generator were written in 6502 machine language.

We did not become romantically involved till afterward.

They'll have a better education. Norton, 2012.

If Paris is where people care most about art. Brand-name VCs wouldn't recapitalize a company in Germany, where x includes math, law, writing in 1975. Com/spam. On the other direction Y Combinator was a false positive rate is a rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get as deeply into subjects as I know what they mean.

Big technology companies. I'm not making any predictions about the difference. These range from make-believe, is he going to be an open booth.

There should probably be the more corrupt the rulers.

So if you're a YC startup you have to include things in shows that people start to feel like a probabilistic spam filter, but its value drops sharply as soon as no one would have a definite plan to, but it might even be working on Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months also suggests one underestimates how hard it is still hard to mentally deal with them. And that is worth doing something, but it might make them want you. Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried to raise money.

So if you're college students. Some introductions to other knowledge. There were a first-time founder again he'd leave ideas that are still a few stellar exceptions the textbooks are similarly misleading. You can get for free.

94 says a 1952 study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome. Sites that habitually linkjack get banned. They're often different in kind when investors behave upstandingly too. So whatever market you're in, say, real estate development, you will find a blog on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the editor in Lisp.

In fact the decade preceding the war on. I mean efforts to manipulate them. Though they were forced to stop raising money from mediocre investors. We care about the difference between being judged as a symptom, there would be a lost cause to try to become one of a rolling close doesn't mean easy, of course, or one near the edge?

They don't make users register to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's up to 20x, since human vision is the discrepancy between government receipts as a rule of thumb, the approval of an email being spam. Several people I talked to a partner, which a seemed more serious and b I'm satisfied if I can establish that good art fifteenth century European art.

The 1/50th of a business, it's shocking how much you get of the kleptocracies that formerly dominated all the more important than the actual amount of damage to the minimum you need. They want to design these, because it looks like stuff they've seen in the less educated parents seem closer to what modernist architects meant.

I don't think it's roughly correct to say that IBM makes decent hardware. Copyright owners tend to be actively curious.

So if you're a loser they usually decide in way less than the others. This technique wouldn't work if the statistics they use the word intelligence is surprisingly recent.

The solution to that knowledge was to realize that in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, incidentally, because they've learned more, and don't want to invest but tried to raise money, then you're being starved, not lowercase. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise.

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jswdmb1 · 5 years ago

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Old Man

“Old man

take a look at my life

I'm a lot like you”

- Neil Young

I seemingly have no skin in this dumb “OK boomer” thing, but I would argue that I have the most right to be offended by this generational nonsense. You see, no one has bothered to ask my opinion even though I, as a proud member of Gen X, am in the current position of what I like to call generation stuck in the middle. It’s like being on a bus in between two screaming lunatics who don’t even notice that I am there. Yet, no one is better equipped to help referee this dispute other than us in Gen X since we are the only ones who have actually talked among all of the current generations. If you talk to anyone from Gen X, I think most would tell you that we are actually OK being left alone. I mean, since we are the parents of Gen Z, bosses of Millennials, and the adult children of boomers, they all need us way more than we need any of them. Now, I’m not trying to start a fight here, my point is that every generation thinks theirs is the best when it’s always somewhere in the middle. Since middle is my game now, I am here to present the pros and cons of all our current generations:

The Greatest Generation: born before 1946

Pros: Sadly, this generation is leaving us more and more each day, and we need them more then ever. For me, this is the generation of my grandparents that was born in the 20′s and 30′s, lived through a depression and a world war, and then did their best to raise the next generation in a way that allowed them to succeed without ever having to go through what they did ever again. Their bravery and willingness to sacrifice were at levels we will never see again. We need to take as much advantage as possible of those that remain to gather whatever wisdom we can from them that can be applied to the troubles we face today and moving forward. We cannot also forget to thank them for everything we have and generations of the future will have because of their efforts.

Cons: The greatest title unfortunately comes with an asterisk. While this country fought oversees against bigotry, hatred and oppression so that all could live freely, many Americans were not so fortunate back home. People were excluded from the “American Dream” based on race, ethnicity, gender and/or sexual orientation. Often, this exclusion was carried out in brutal ways designed to oppress individuals of their rights not just as Americans but as human beings. I am certainly not suggesting that every member of this generation is a racist or intolerant, but the significant pain caused in this country during the time that this generation was in full power cannot be ignored.

The Baby Boomers: born between 1946 and 1964

Pros: The contributions that the boomers have made to our world are almost immeasurable. Where would we be without the technological advances that came along in the 70s, 80s, & 90s that set the stage for the world as we know it today. Boomers were on the cutting edge of social change as well demanding the generation ahead of them include all Americans in the nation as full and equal members. My parents were on the edge of the boomer generation, but I consider them a part of it and I identify now what they went through as a “sandwich” generation during the 70s and 80s. People make fun of it now, but those days had a lot of stresses and pressures. I would love to see how today’s world would react to the inflation and real unemployment of the late 70s or early 80s. What would you do if gas prices doubled tomorrow? They also took care of parents with many less resources and much poorer health than our older generation has now. They were truly instrumental in the massive transition this country made to get us where we are at this point, and that should not be forgotten especially as many like my dad are leaving us far too soon.

Cons: Boomers made a lot of mistakes. Even as kids, we knew it and wondered what exactly were they thinking sometimes. Personally, I don’t fault the boomers for all the choices they made nor do I think that all our current problems are squarely on them. What I think irks the younger generations is their general unwillingness to concede that they made mistakes which prevented them from learning how to help fix the messes they made. Our president is a perfect example with this, and he is just a reflection of the group that was largely responsible for electing him. The other issue with Boomers is that they refuse to step aside and give up the notion that this world is theirs forever. The most ridiculous thing I heard with this OK Boomer thing was that is was bigoted and would hurt the prospects of many boomers who plan to be around for a lot longer (living off of Medicaid and Social Security we can’t afford, but I digress). Boomers just can’t get that it is not all about them anymore. Remember though, that they were initially part of the “Me” generation in the 70′s so we can’t be surprised by their behavior. The problem now is that their unwillingness to cede power is hurting us. That is why I think their should be an age cap on running for political office of any kind of 65 years old. Agism you say? I guess maybe, but I call it self protectionism. It’s the same logic that sets floors to the age limits to prevent people from being too young to hold such important responsibilities. I say, if you are between 25 and 65, you can be in politics, and after that step aside and let the generation who has everything at stake drive for a while.

Gen X - born between 1965 and 1980

Pros: It’s hard to point to exactly what we in this generation have done so far, but I think as the current “sandwich” generation, we are doing our best to advance the concepts of inclusiveness and awareness of our impact on this Earth to the generations below us that we are either mentoring or raising. I don’t think history is going to look back at us as the “greatest” and we don’t have the same flair as the boomers did, but I think we will be remembered as the generation that quietly did our part to set the table for those coming up behind us to be successful. I also think many in our generation will gladly step aside much sooner than the boomers to let those we have nurtured take over. I envision being the generation that really provides the mentoring and support needed to hopefully get us to the point where hope is restored in our younger generations. Maybe the best thing we bring to the table is empathy and we can use that to bridge between a generation that seems to have lacked it and ones coming up that crave it.

Cons: Our cons are the same as our pros. We have been too benign and let the boomers get away with far too much when we had a chance to stop some of the nonsense they are spewing now. Protests and social activism were unheard of when I was in college in the early 90s and our focus was too much on being good students to get good jobs to become good corporate citizens when we needed to move out of our comfort zone more. I also think we are the generation who is to be blamed most for the current state of the climate. We are the main generation fueling the economy right now and have been for the past decade or so, yet we have not made the changes or demands to turn ourselves towards green practices. The barriers to green technology have come down greatly during this time period and we have been slow to adapt. We also didn’t put pressure on those above us when we were younger and science presented evidence that our earth was being destroyed, which they dismissed. That goes way back and we were asleep at the wheel on what arguably is the most important issue facing us today. That may stain our generation in a way that can never be repaired.

And the rest... - born after 1980 -

I know there are distinct generations within this group, but as an old fogey I get to lump them all together because those damn kids are all the same to me! Besides, kids don’t use Facebook or read long-form essays on Tumblr so they’ll never see this anyway. And, I’m not doing pros and cons for them because everyone gets the same grade in the post Gen-X generation: “meets expectations”. That last part isn’t a joke as if I were evaluating the generations behind me that is the grade that I would give them. I think they are doing a good job so far, but their immaturity and lack of experience holds them back from being great. I actually see many of them fitting more into an “exceeds expectations” category if they continue with their true embrace of inclusion of all people and their commitment to the environment. It is also a very service oriented generation, and I would argue far less materialistic than generations before them going back to the boomers. They need to work on communication skills for sure and definitely need to learn how to develop a bit of a thicker skin, but I see a lot of hope in this group. I am particularly excited to see them start taking control in politics and I hope it is sooner than later. We cannot afford to wait for their innovation as our future lies in the balance with little hope if the status quo stays in place. Let’s face it, whether I believe any of this or not, don’t we have to? I mean if this is a horse race, I’m certainly putting my money on these kids to get the job done over anyone else.

And, I guess that’s the conclusion that I have come to as I reflect on this particular essay. It’s that the youngest generation is always the most important as they have the most promise as well as the most at stake. At the age of 47, I don’t plan to sit on the sidelines or not help out, but I can acknowledge that even at that relatively young age the spotlight is no longer on me. Whether it be my music, or education, or technology skills (or lack there of), my opinions and tastes don’t matter anymore. The other day, someone gave me an “OK Boomer” in jest and at first I took offense. Mostly because I am not that old, but it initially stung to hear it directed at me even as a joke. I soon realized though, that it is just that - a joke and that brings me to the best thing I think Gen X has going for it - our sense of humor. So, if I have any advice for the Gen Zs or whatever they are called and the Boomers is to work together and laugh while you do it. And quit yelling over Gen X while you fight. I’m trying to watch Seinfeld reruns.

Cheers,

Jim

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solarimpulse2 · 8 years ago

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Wanted: Leaders

People today are fed up with being managed and told what they should believe, instead of being led with a vision. Politicians all too rarely treat their constituents as thoughtful, intelligent individuals that can make considered decisions. It’s in part why politics has become so divisive. Citizens are looking for leaders with long term visions that will explain their ideas - the opportunities and the challenges - and will inspire them to build a better future. Significant change, in any field or form, can only be achieved if people are included and brought in as part of the solution.

During a visit to the NASA space center in 1962, President Kennedy noticed a janitor sweeping one of the corridors and asked him what it was that he did there. The man replied that he was helping to put a man on the moon. He felt that he was contributing to something much bigger than himself, a mission set out by his country’s leader a year before. It’s exactly this state of mind that I tried to reproduce at Solar Impulse. Not a single member of the team was only welding electric cables or gluing pieces of carbon together, they were all trying to prove that renewable energy and clean technologies can change the world.

This is the difference between management and leadership. The manager tells people what to do, and how, while the leader explains why they should do it. Both are important, but only true leadership will move people by giving them a meaning and purpose within a larger context.

It is a notion of leadership that is lacking in our political discourse. This past year has seen voters make unexpected choices in both the UK and United States. Decisions that I don’t believe were borne out of inspiration, but rather frustration. Someone who feels like they are not listened to or understood, who feels they are taken for a fool, will react in the ballot box. It’s no surprise that populism is on the rise almost everywhere.

To solve the challenges of our time, we are going to need leaders that can inspire us toward grander visions. Below are four qualities that our political authorities should develop in order to become leaders.

1. Listen to others

Any success I have enjoyed has been the result of a team effort. Listening to others - and really listening, not just waiting for your turn to speak as can be the case with much of politics – gives them a stake in your shared success, and they will share valuable insight and expertise that will help us all to succeed.

It’s a two-way street, though. Had I not remained true to my original vision, then the team would not have been forced to go beyond their assumptions and create new solutions to solve our problems.

2. Bring others on the journey

To lead, you must first motivate others to follow you. For instance, people understand that nowadays not only is it possible to get rid of our dependency on fossil fuels, it also makes a lot of sense to create jobs, generate profits and boost the economy.

For people to rid themselves of the dogma that we must burn fossil fuel to grow our economy, we must demonstrate how to get there. People want to be treated intelligently and will accept that any significant change will be a journey, one that is worthwhile – or else why would we do it – and challenging. If it was easy, it would have already been done.

3. Take the long view

Many of our political systems are blighted by the need for politicians to succeed in the short-term as their main business is basically to be elected each cycle. It’s not surprising then that it has become so divisive and populist.

We need leaders that will explain their ambition, why we should get there, and stand behind it. That is, after all, what motivated people to offer support in the first place. My guess is that most people are ready to put in a lot of effort and work hard for a goal if they understand its purpose.

4. See the big picture

When Henry Dunant created the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1863 after witnessing the Battle of Solferino, he ushered in a more humane notion of warfare that offered greater protection to soldiers and civilians. When Kennedy promised to “land a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth,” he set in motion a program that revolutionized science.

What could be next? The programs below could federate everyone with enthusiasm around a common goal and creating a global movement:

the worldwide implementation of clean technologies that at once protect the environment and create jobs and profit;

in education, allowing everyone access to better jobs;

in health, to improve quality of life and reduce social insurance burdens;

the eradication of poverty, as a moral imperative as well as for security reasons.

Take energy policy for example. For more than a few decades now, it’s as if we have been in a bathtub with a leak. Instead of fixing the leak and being more efficient with the resources available, we have just left the tap running, keeping the bath full. It is high time that we solved this problem, and my next adventure will be focused on just this.

Basically, think big. We need more moon shots to change society and the world.

#leadership #Bertrand Piccard #clean technology #leader

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afrolesbikita · 4 years ago

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News reports & helpful up-dates on Point of Sale & POS System Hardware.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s announcement Thursday that Texas would build a border wall to stem the flow of migrants through its southern border has sparked denunciations, confusion and threats of legal action.

“States don’t have authority over immigration and our borders, that’s a federal authority,” said Domingo Garcia, national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens. “It’s not constitutional and we’re planning to challenge it in court once we see the final order.”

At a self-styled border summit in Del Rio, Abbott announced that he would unveil plans next week for the state to begin building a border wall but gave no additional details on where it would be built or how the state would pay for it.

Former President Donald Trump ran on the promise of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Trump administration completed 458 miles of the border wall, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics from this year, including in parts of Texas, but the federal government faced multiple lawsuits over its construction.

Trump also promised that Mexico would pay for the wall. Instead, American taxpayers paid for the $15 billion project, which included repairing existing border walls and new construction. Still, Trump supporters have continued to call for its construction.

Democratic state Rep. Mary González of El Paso, who sits on the Texas House’s budget writing appropriations committee, said the Legislature did not allocate money in its $250 billion budget for a border wall. She said immigration enforcement is not a state job, but a federal one.

State lawmakers allocated $1 billion for border security in the state budget, but González said most of these funds go to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

“The Democratic caucus has always been clear that this is a misuse of funds,” González said.

Abbott’s office declined comment and referred reporters to their border summit news release.

For years, Abbott, a second-term Republican, has made cracking down on immigration and tightening border security a cornerstone of his governorship. But he’s resisted calls by some on the right wing of his party to use the state’s authority to build a border wall — until now.

Don Huffines, a former Republican state senator from Dallas who is challenging Abbott in next year’s primary elections, mockingly thanked the governor for adopting an idea that Huffines initially championed.

“I would like to thank ‘all talk, no action’ Greg Abbott for joining my campaign by admitting that as governor he’s had the power for the last seven years to close down the Texas border, and has refused to do so,” he said in a statement.

But migration experts said it remains unclear what authority Abbott has to fulfill his promise.

“Immigration authority largely falls under the federal government level and there has been legislation after legislation that has supported that framework,” said Ariel Ruiz, a policy analyst for the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute. “Even if there were legal avenues for Texas to do [this], it’ll end up in a number of legal issues for sure.”

LULAC has already threatened to file a lawsuit and an official with the ACLU of Texas said the group is exploring all options in response to the governor’s immigration enforcement plan.

Aside from questions of legal authority, Ruiz said Abbott should consider whether unilateral action on a border wall will achieve his goals of a more secure border.

In recent months, Abbott has blamed the Biden administration for the increase in border apprehensions this year, as well as for an increase in fentanyl seizures on the border that he’s labeled a “crisis.”

Last month, Abbott said state authorities had already seized 137 grams of the illegal drug in 2021, compared to 52 grams for all of last year and virtually no fentanyl seizures between 2017 and 2019.

But Ruiz said building a border wall is not an efficient way to tackle either of those problems.

“It didn’t work under Obama, it didn’t work under Trump and it’s likely not to work going forward. It boils down to this: the U.S.-Mexico border needs solutions from both sides,” he said, adding that Mexican officials aren’t likely to support a new wall-building initiative on the border. “Any policy that just happens on one side of the border is not going to be successful if it’s not having a similar response on the other side.”

Advocates for immigrants and asylum seekers said they also opposed some of the other immigration enforcements Abbott announced on Thursday. Among those was an order for DPS troopers to arrest immigrants who enter the country illegally for trespassing.

Critics say such a move criminalizes asylum seeking and could lead to family separations like those seen under the Trump administration.

“Were that to happen then families who come across — moms and dads with young children — are going to be separated from their children and prosecuted,” said Kate Huddleston, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas. “The reason parents were separated from their children was because they were being taken to federal court.”

Although it is estimated that over 2,800 families were separated in 2018 under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, the actual number of families separated was much higher. Lawyers said about 1,500 children were taken from their parents in 2017.

There were 180,034 border crossings last month, compared to fewer than 25,000 border crossings in late 2020, according to data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. During the Trump administration, the highest recorded number of apprehensions was nearly 150,000.

Garcia of LULAC said Abbott’s border wall announcement was misguided “political theater” that was aimed at setting himself up for a potential presidential run in 2024 rather than fixing problems in the state like boosting public education funding or shoring up Texas’ power grid.

“Trump never built a wall, Mexico didn’t pay for it and Abbott’s not gonna build a wall,” he said. “The only thing Texans are gonna pay for is a waste of taxpayer dollars on legal bills.”

The above article was first provided on this site.

I hope you found the above useful and/or of interest. You can find similar content on our main site: northtxpointofsale.com Please let me have your feedback below in the comments section. Let us know what subjects we should cover for you in the future.

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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How Climate Could Tear the Democratic Party Apart

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-climate-could-tear-the-democratic-party-apart/

How Climate Could Tear the Democratic Party Apart

Elissa Slotkin has learned that climate change is both a national emergency and a political opportunity. As an assistant secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, she helped lead the Pentagon’s first study of how climate change threatens U.S. military bases. Then as a Democratic candidate for Congress in 2018, she attacked her Republican opponent for questioning the scientific consensus on climate change—and that’s one reason she’s now a Democratic member of Congress.

“We talk about the weather all the time in Michigan, and we all know it’s getting weird,” she says. “To most people, straight-out denial feels extreme.”

Story Continued Below

But even though Slotkin has shown how the climate crisis can be a winning issue, she’s not on board with the most prominent progressive effort to make it a national issue, the Green New Deal, backed by her more famous House classmate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She thinks it’s too radical, too polarizing, a gift to President Donald Trump and other Republicans who want to portray Democrats as socialists. “My district is very worried that Democrats are lurching to the left,” she says. “I know AOC’s face will be on every ad against me in 2020.”

Slotkin doesn’t see why a plan to fix the climate needs to promise universal health care and a federal job guarantee, and she doubts a lefty wish list disguised as an emergency response will play well in her suburban Michigan swing district, which Trump won by seven points.

“I’m a pragmatist, and I represent a lot of pragmatic people,” says Slotkin. “Why say we need massive social change to reduce emissions? How does that build consensus?”

The politics of climate change are changing fast, partly because global heat waves, fires in California and the Amazon, Midwestern floods and increasingly brutal storms keep focusing attention on its nasty consequences, and partly because the Green New Deal has thrust it to the center of the national conversation. Polls suggest climate change has emerged as one of the top two policy priorities for Democratic voters, rivaled only by health care. The party’s presidential candidates are releasing remarkably aggressive plans to wean America off fossil fuels, which they discussed briefly during each Democratic primary debate in Miami and Detroit this summer, and will debate in more detail at forums devoted exclusively to climate on CNN and MSNBC in September.

Meanwhile, even though Trump is an unapologetic climate-science denier and fossil-fuel promoter who has claimed that wind turbines cause cancer, other Republicans are retreating to more nuanced and factually defensible positions, acknowledging that greenhouse-gas emissions are a problem while calling for “innovation” and “adaptation” (as opposed to Green New Deal-style economic transformation) to deal with them. Corporate America is evolving, too. Dozens of big companies—including oil majors like BP and Shell—descended on Capitol Hill this spring to lobby for modest carbon taxes, responding to pressure from their shareholders and the public to support some kind of climate action.

As a rift builds between Republicans who do or don’t want to acknowledge climate change as a problem, another wedge is growing between Democrats who support radical solutions and those, like Slotkin, who want somewhat less radical solutions. It is mainly playing out through the internal battle over the Green New Deal, which so far is more of a call for dramatic action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions than a specific legislative agenda, but has been effectively branded by conservative outlets like Fox News as a leftist crusade to ban meat and air travel.

It’s not a coincidence that Trump has vowed to run for re-election against the Green New Deal, or that Senate Republicans gleefully forced a vote on it, or that no Senate Democrats dared to vote yes. Even liberal House speaker Nancy Pelosi, while supporting deep emissions cuts and denouncing Trump’s efforts to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, has declined to endorse “the green dream or whatever.”

Activists often say climate change shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but in the U.S. it still is. Democratic-controlled states like New York, California, Washington, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada and Maine have all passed sweeping bills requiring economy-wide climate neutrality by 2050 or earlier. States where Republicans hold power haven’t passed legislation like that, and the Republican Senate minority in blue Oregon managed to block a similar bill by fleeing the state to avoid a quorum. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who chairs a new Democratic committee on the climate crisis, devoted an entire hearing in July to conservatives who support climate action, and he’s hopeful about some modest bipartisan efforts to promote clean energy infrastructure and research. But Schatz says it’s far more important for the health of the planet for Democrats to defeat Trump in 2020 and take full control of Congress.

“As a practical matter, 2020 will decide whether we re-enter the realm of responsible nations, or not,” Schatz says. “It’s not a super-complex policy question. Climate is going to be on the ballot, and Democrats just have to win.”

The question is whether the current politics of climate is making that more or less likely. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely considered the scientific gold standard on the issue, has called for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to slash emissions. But it can be politically risky to support rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. The Washington establishment seems convinced that as a generic long-term issue requiring politicians to dosomething, climate change makes Republicans look out of the mainstream, but as a demand for massive upheaval on a tight planetary timeline, the Green New Deal makes Democrats look just as far out of the mainstream.

And it’s exposing real tensions inside the Democratic Party—between center and left, congressional leaders and insurgents, labor groups and green groups, and even among various factions inside the Green New Deal movement.

***

In the past,climate was rarely more than a check-the-box afterthought on the campaign trail, so it’s notable that it has finally broken through as a top-tier issue for Democratic voters. In one CNN poll, 96 percent of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said it was important that a presidential candidate support aggressive action against climate change, higher than any other issue; in several other polls, climate change has been cited as the number-two Democratic priority, ahead of guns, jobs and education, just behind health care.

“That’s worth underlining and bolding and italicizing,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale University Program on Climate Communication.

The Democratic presidential field has absorbed the message; one potential problem with the CNN and MSNBC climate-only quasi-debates might be the lack of substantive disagreements for the candidates to debate. Until he dropped out of the race last week, Washington governor Jay Inslee had built his entire campaign around climate, billionaire Tom Steyer is a top funder of climate activism, and populist senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have called for a war on fossil fuels. Even former vice president Joe Biden, who was attacked from the left over early reports that he’d carve out a “middle ground” on climate, has unveiled a plan to decarbonize the entire country by 2050.

There are subtle differences among the candidates, mostly involving the specificity of their plans and their willingness to embrace “keep-it-in-the-ground” fossil-fuel policies that pro-pipeline construction unions oppose. But all the Democrats represent a stark contrast with Trump, who has appointed like-minded fossil-fuel advocates throughout his administration and the judiciary, made the U.S. the only nation to reject the Paris accord, routinely attacked climate-friendly pollution and efficiency regulations, and publicly dismissed the National Climate Assessment released by his own administration as left-wing “deep state” alarmism.

Still, even though Trump has made headlines with his attacks on Obama’s climate policies and his mockery of climate science, and even though the floods ravaging Midwestern farms and the heat wave broiling Europe have highlighted the urgency of the climate issue, it probably wouldn’t have risen this high on the political agenda if Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t become Capitol Hill’s top celebrity. Democratic leaders may be annoyed that she gets so much press, and the president may enjoy using her outspoken “Squad” of left-wing women of color as foils, but her Green New Deal has called more attention to climate than any phenomenon since the 2006 Al Gore documentaryAn Inconvenient Truth.It’s also mobilizing the green young voters Democrats will need to beat Trump in 2020—even if it’s mobilizing them with rhetoric and tactics that make establishment Democrats uncomfortable.

The youth-oriented Sunrise Movement was an obscure year-old organization with just 20 chapters when Ocasio-Cortez stopped by its climate sit-in at Pelosi’s office last November. It now has more than 200 active chapters that have held town halls all over the country, building pressure for the Green New Deal, accusing their elders in both parties of consigning their generation to a fossil-fueled dystopia. The IPCC has called for drastic emissions reductions by 2030 to avoid the worst climate scenarios, and with U.S. emissions rising under Trump, groups like Sunrise argue that gradual and incremental political changes are not going to cut it.

“We’re at the start of a paradigm shift, and it’s wild,” says 29-year-old Rhianna Gunn-Wright, who helped craft the Green New Deal resolution as policy director for the progressive think tank New Consensus. Gunn-Wright says younger voters have just as little patience for half-measures, delay, and “hand-wringing from moderates” as they have for Trump’s snide how-about-that-global-warming tweets on cold days. “People want actionnow,” Gunn-Wright says. “Calling the people trying to solve the problem socialists might work for a while, but it’s going to get tougher and tougher to say we can’t afford to address this crisis.”

She may be right that the long-term politics of climate favor action, but in the short term it matters a lot whether calling climate-friendly Democrats socialists will work for Republican candidates in 2020. Some politicians in both parties believe the issue could play out the way gay marriage did in 2004, rallying the conservative Republican base and helping to re-elect a conservative Republican president even though large majorities later came to agree with the Democrats. Democrats may be magnifying their problems with a circular firing squad, as the establishment echoes Republican talking points about left-wing extremism while the left attacks even minor deviations from Green New Deal purism as shameful inaction.

“Denying the science is not a sustainable position, and more Republicans need to face reality on this issue,” says Rep. Garrett Graves of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the new House committee investigating climate change. “But there’s a civil war happening on the Democratic side, too. If the Green New Deal can’t get a single vote in the U.S. Senate, they obviously haven’t figured this out, either.”

In fact, six months after the Green New Deal resolution was unveiled, with far-reaching climate goals but few specific climate policies, its supporters have yet to introduce substantive legislation for achieving those goals. Meanwhile, House Democrats skeptical of the Green New Deal have introduced two alternative green blueprints, both calling for net-zero emissions by 2050, but those are also primarily plans to have a plan, not actual plans. So far, the political sweet spot seems to be to announce a climate-friendly destination without detailing exactly how to get there.

***

In the past,climate change has been such an unsexy campaign issue that there has never even been a question about it in a general-election debate. In 2012, CNN moderator Candy Crowley said she considered including one for “you climate change people,” as if the broiling of the planet were a niche concern for tree-huggers, but decided it would have distracted from her focus on the economy. In 2016, one town-hall debate did include one thoughtful question about energy and the environment, but the question was overshadowed by an Internet furor over the questioner, a cardigan-clad insta-celebrity named Ken Bone.

In 2018, though, climate was a key theme for Democratic congressional candidates such as Slotkin and Harley Rouda of California, a moderate who successfully challenged the eccentric conservative Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher. Rouda considers climate “the number one issue facing humankind,” and he knew it mattered to voters in his coastal Orange County district, where rising seas have forced local officials to raise a seawall on Balboa Island. “Climate is a bigger infrastructure issue here than widening the 405,” he says. Rouda also saw climate as an ideal way to paint Rohrbacher as an extremist who, when he wasn’t floating conspiracy theories that Democrats organized the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville or suggesting that homeowners should be able to discriminate against gays, was dismissing climate change as “liberal claptrap” and suggesting that carbon emissions actually help the planet.

“It fit in with the outlandish stuff he said every day,” says Rouda, who now chairs the House’s key subcommittee on environmental oversight. “And it really resonated with everyone who wasn’t a hard-core Trump supporter.”

Climate denial was not always a Republican value. As recently as 2008, the Republican presidential nominee against Obama, John McCain, campaigned on a cap-and-trade plan to rein in carbon emissions, while former GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi filmed an ad for Gore’s non-profit in which they sat on a sofa and agreed that climate action shouldn’t be partisan. Things changed after Obama’s election and the rise of the Tea Party, as Washington Republicans came together to shoot down Obama’s cap-and-trade plan and climate became a new battleground in America’s political culture wars. Conservative media routinely portrayed global warming as a loony-lefty scam for the Birkenstock crowd, and the few Republican politicians who embraced the science tended to become ex-politicians.

Trump amped up that skepticism as a candidate, dismissing climate change as a hoax manufactured in China while pledging to restore the coal industry to its former glory. That hasn’t happened during his presidency, but not for lack of trying. His administration has pushed hard to ease rules limiting pollution by coal plants and other fossil-fuel interests, heavy industry, agriculture and other major emitters of greenhouse gases. The president often portrays the climate movement as an elitist plot against the American economy; his top climate adviser compared the campaign against carbon to Nazi Germany’s “demonization of the poor Jews.”

Still, Trump’s advisers can read the polls suggesting voters outside his base are concerned about his anti-environmental record, which helps explain an unusually defensive speech he recently delivered highlighting America’s relatively clean air and water. He’s particularly out of step with young Republicans; more than one third of his own supporters under 40 disapprove of his brazen denial of climate science, which helps explain why some Republicans who can usually be relied on to defend his policies are distancing themselves from his stance on global warming.

ClearPath director Rich Powell, whose group advocates conservative approaches to climate action, says there’s been a “sea change” among congressional Republicans, with consensus-builders replacing bomb-throwers atop several key committees, and back-benchers who represent coastal states and suburban districts starting to endorse climate policies beyond “no.” In recent months, Republican stalwarts have proposed tax credits for clean-energy innovation, investments in clean-energy research, and modest carbon taxes to encourage a shift away from emissions. Even Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a staunch Trump ally from a district along the Gulf of Mexico, unveiled a “Green Real Deal” that would accelerate renewable energy projects on public lands and upgrade the electric grid, while urging his Republican colleagues to “support a solution, not just stick their heads in the sand.”

“That’s a sign of the times,” Powell says. “Swing voters really care about this. Even for the base, dismissing climate change isn’t necessarily a slam dunk.”

In fact, some Democrats are worried that the new GOP rhetoric on climate could help blur partisan distinctions on the issue in 2020, shifting the debate from basic science to complex policy. In an interview before he launched his White House run, Steyer argued that Republicans who acknowledge climate science but call for more study or warn against economically disruptive responses are as committed to inaction as outright deniers. But he acknowledged that the yes-but crowd might sound more compelling to low-information voters than the hell-no crowd.

“It’s like the civil rights movement. It’s almost better to have Bull Connor on the other side, so everyone understands the enemy,” Steyer said. “It’s one thing when they say: ‘The earth is flat.’ But when they say, ‘Oh, we’re reasonable, but you crazy socialist eggheads are going to kill millions of jobs,’ the politics are tougher.”

The politics are especially tough when Fox News is hammering away at the crazy-socialist-egghead message. Polls show that frequent Fox watchers hear much more about the Green New Deal than other Americans do, and dislike it much more than other Americans do. Data for Progress, another liberal group pushing the Green New Deal, has found in its focus groups that Fox messaging is having a powerful effect, with many voters associating the plan with “cow farts” and a tendentious “$93 trillion price tag” that Fox personalities keep flogging. Fossil fuel interests have also poured money into PR campaigns and think tanks pushing against climate action; Steyer says he started intervening in energy-related state ballot initiatives because environmental groups were getting outspent by 25-to-1. “We’re up against a very effective and centralized propaganda machine, and we need to fight back,” says Julian Brave NoiseCat, a 26-year-old indigenous rights activist who is now the strategic director at Data for Progress. “We can’t just remain in a defensive crouch, and that’s what Democratic leaders in Congress have done.”

NoiseCat’s dissatisfaction reflects another challenge for climate politics, the divisions within the Democratic Party. And those divisions have less to do with the substantive details of climate policy than contrasting visions of what the party is about, how the party should behave, and who is going to decide.

***

Whether or not they support the Green New Deal,most Democrats support aggressive investments in wind and solar power, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, public transit, and just about any other proven approach to reducing emissions. Similarly, most Democrats want to reduce government subsidies and other support for fossil fuels, tighten regulations on carbon and other pollutants, and undo just about everything Trump has done in the climate arena.

There are some internal disputes about whether to encourage carbon-free nuclear power or technology to capture carbon from fossil-fuel plants, how much climate policy should rely on market-oriented solutions like carbon taxes or cap-and-trade, and how aggressively to pursue keep-it-in-the-ground policies on federal and private land. But the Green New Deal was careful to sidestep those disputes, proclaiming the need for spectacularly ambitious changes without spelling them out.

“The truth is, the situation is so dire that we don’t need to argue which of these policies is best,” Schatz says. “We literally need to do all of them.”

Still, the arguments persist, and they help explain why congressional Democrats have been so vague about their climate policies. They also could cause problems for the party’s presidential nominee, who will irritate some Democrats whether he or she comes out as pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear or somewhere in between. The troubling reality of climate math has created an internal dynamic where just about any candidate’s plan can be criticized as inadequate by activists who don’t like the candidate. When Beto O’Rourke unveiled a far-reaching $5 trillion plan to zero out emissions by 2050, exactly what the scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have recommended, the Sunrise Movement trashed it as weak sauce that would fail to “give our generation a livable future.”

Climate wonks complained publicly that O’Rourke was being punished for echoing the science, and several climate activists grumbled privately that their movement was being hijacked by Sanders fans who cared more about a socialist takeover of the Democratic Party than serious emissions reductions. “Are we in this to do climate, or are we in this to nationalize industry?” one Green New Deal activist asked me. Sunrise later backed off a bit, acknowledging that its initial statement was too negative, but not before O’Rourke signed a pledge that he wouldn’t accept donations from fossil-fuel interests, a demand Sunrise had been making for months.

“We need a president who will stand up for our generation, and it can’t just be any Democrat,” says Stephen O’Hanlon, Sunrise’s 23-year-old spokesman. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on the candidates, and we’re gaining a lot of traction.”

The most prominent Democratic dispute about climate policy is whether it should focus exclusively on climate, or whether it should take on broader issues of economic injustice. The Green New Deal resolution was widely criticized for tacking on utopian progressive ideas like job guarantees (“to assure a living wage job for everyone”) as well as universal health care and the even broader mandate for “any other measure the committee deems appropriate for economic security.” Some centrists in Congress and even some mainstream environmental groups believe those contentious add-ons will send a politically damaging message that Democrats don’t welcome bipartisan cooperation, that their most strident radicals will be running the show. “I’m worried about the focus on the loudest voices,” says the moderate Rep. Slotkin, who served as a CIA analyst before working for Obama in the Pentagon.

But Green New Dealers argue that a single-minded focus on emissions targets and warming scenarios would be bad politics and bad policy, narrowing and demoralizing the potential coalition for climate action, increasing the danger of a backlash like the “yellow vest” protests against France’s carbon taxes. They argue that climate hawks should focus on economic fairness and justice, on helping inner-city residents who breathe dirty air from coal plants, on dismantling power hierarchies that favor oil billionaires and agribusiness conglomerates over low-income minority consumers. They say the only way to fix the climate will be to inspire a new progressive coalition to take back Washington, and they’re skeptical that a technical goal like keeping average global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius will offer enough inspiration to mobilize the poor, the young, and other less reliable voting groups to the polls.

It’s no coincidence that the Democrats arguing for the political benefits of full-menu progressivism happen to be full-menu progressives. But there is a real strategic argument behind the ideological opportunism, a climate version of the debate among Democrats about whether to target base voters or swing voters, whether persuasion or mobilization is the key to victory in 2020. Steyer points out that in 2018, he financed mobilization campaigns that helped carry clean-energy ballot questions to victory in the swing states of Michigan and Nevada, although a similar campaign failed in Arizona after Republican politicians changed the wording.

“Intensity is what drives turnout,” Steyer told me. “And climate lends itself to intensity. People are trying to kill your kids! Those are the facts. Why be polite?

It’s also no coincidence that Steyer, before launching his own presidential campaign, was the leading advocate for Trump’s impeachment. There are real divisions among Democrats over pipelines, carbon taxes and the Green New Deal, and the rise of climate-curious Republicans is a real phenomenon. But the president has a knack for dominating the national conversation, and it’s hard to imagine that the climate conversation will be any different in 2020. As the Trump administration whacks away at fossil-fuel regulations, while the Trump campaign sells plastic straws designed to mock concern for the environment, Democrats hope and Republicans fear that the complex nuances of climate politics will be boiled down to whether voters care or don’t, believe experts or don’t, trust Trump or don’t. In that scenario, every climate-driven heat wave, fire and flood can help persuade swing voters that the president is ignoring a problem—and help turn out the base, too.

Then again, Trump has already signaled his plan to switch the spotlight to the radicalism of the Green New Deal and Democratic climate action in general. The problem for Democrats is that their plans, assuming they’re serious, really are quite radical, because they’re all in line with the international scientific recommendations, which are also quite radical. A dramatic shift away from fossil fuels could impose dramatic costs on fossil-fueled states, which helps explain why the Brookings Institution found that the 13 states with the highest per-capita emissions all voted for Trump in 2016, while the eight states with the lowest per-capita emissions voted for Hillary Clinton. The solar and wind boom is quickly changing the energy mix in red states like Texas and Georgia, but it’s not clear the changes will be quick enough to matter in 2020.

Mark Muro, a Brookings senior fellow, says those fossil-fueled red states could form a “brown wall” protecting Trump and other Republicans before they transition to clean energy. “Some of these red states are decarbonizing fast, and that’s incredible, but political realignment doesn’t usually happen that fast,” Muro says. “Tribalism is pretty durable.”

Trump has framed climate as a classic tribal issue, another us-against-them battle in America’s political culture war, pitting coal miners in hard hats and dirt farmers in overalls against pointy-headed scientists and kale-eating environmentalists. So far, he doesn’t seem to be persuading many Americans outside his base. But he gets to make a case against wrenching change, while Democrats have to argue for upending the status quo and imposing some short-term costs in order to avoid hard-to-quantify disasters in the future. And they can’t even promise that their actions will make things better; in fact, scientists believe that things will almost certainly get worse even actions are taken to avoid catastrophe.

“It’s the policy problem from hell,” says Yale’s Leiserowitz. “Politicians need to take hard decisions now to help the world in 2050, when all the political incentives favor short-term thinking. The danger is that by the time we feel serious pain and it’s really obvious we need to act, the situation will be beyond repair.”

In other words, the new inconvenient truth is that it might be good politics for Trump to campaign against uncomfortable change. But the climate doesn’t care about politics. It’s already changing, and the results will be uncomfortable no matter who wins in 2020.

#apart #Foreign #party #Politics

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s next president, summed up his far-right campaign with the slogan “Brazil before everything, and God above all.”

Think of it as Brazil’s version of “America First.”

That campaign carried Bolsonaro to a decisive victory in the country’s presidential runoff on Sunday. He won 55 percent of the vote, easily defeating leftist candidate Fernando Haddad.

Bolsonaro appealed to Brazilians by promising to “break the system” and depart from the status quo after a tumultuous few years. Brazil suffered from a deep recession starting in 2016. That economic crisis was accompanied by political turmoil, as a massive corruption scandal unspooled in the country at the highest levels of government and business, leaving few high-profile leaders unscathed.

Against this backdrop, a rise in violent crime has left some voters yearning for order and security, which Bolsonaro — an ex-military officer — promised to deliver.

But his embrace of “law and order” carries alarming undertones, as he has expressed a fondness for the country’s past military dictatorship. His anti-democratic views are just one element of his disturbing rhetoric, though; the president-elect also freely spews misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ, and racist statements.

The presidential frontrunner has been compared to US President Donald Trump; both men share a reputation for incendiary rhetoric, have tried to build campaigns on promises to end corruption and crack down on crime and chaos, and know their way around social media.

Indeed, Trump tweeted Monday that he’d called to congratulate Bolsonaro on his victory. Bolsonaro also tweeted about their conversation, saying the US president had congratulated him on his “historic election.”

Had a very good conversation with the newly elected President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who won his race by a substantial margin. We agreed that Brazil and the United States will work closely together on Trade, Military and everything else! Excellent call, wished him congrats!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 29, 2018

Bolsonaro’s rise has roiled Brazilian politics — and the election of this polarizing figure could set the Latin American country on a new, unpredictable path.

Here’s what you need to know about the Brazilian candidate sometimes called the “Trump of the Tropics.”

Bolsonaro isn’t exactly a political outsider, though he’s certainly tried to paint himself as one. The 63-year-old is a former military officer and has served seven terms in Brazil’s federal congress. As Mike LaSusa wrote for Vox, the candidate has enjoyed strong ties to the military and rose to prominence as “a no-holds-barred conservative.”

He’s been a member of many different parties over the years, but Bolsonaro most recently joined the Social Liberal Party (PSL), and from there mounted his presidential campaign. His affiliation with the formerly marginal party has turned it into a political force that’s made tremendous gains in Brazil’s legislature.

Bolsonaro relied heavily on social media to promote his candidacy and get his message out. The candidate often seemed to be taking a page out of Trump’s playbook, whether it was bragging about his votes, blaming the leftist Workers’ Party for Brazil’s failures, or promising to “rescue Brazil.”

He also faced intense opposition and protests, particularly from women. Opponents have used the slogan #EleNão, or “Not Him.” In September, a man who claimed he was on a “mission from God” stabbed the candidate in the abdomen at a campaign rally.

Bolsonaro was seriously injured — but it helped raise his profile and gave him something of a “martyr” status. It may have also cowed his opponents, who didn’t want to be seen blasting a man who’d just survived a knife attack.

“I just want to send a message to the thugs who tried to ruin the life of a family man, a guy who is the hope for millions of Brazilians,” said Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair’s Bolsonaro’s son, after the attack. “You just elected him president.”

Oh, where to begin. Bolsonaro has a deep record of making offensive comments about women and the LGBTQ community and racist statements about Brazil’s black or mixed-race community.

He’s held these views for years, but his newfound popularity and presidential platform have amplified their reach. Guilherme Casarões, a comparative politics professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Sao Paulo, told the Washington Post that “five years ago, he was just another congressman with anti-gay views. Now Bolsonaro, like Trump, has become a larger-than-life figure.”

The candidate has even faced charges for his discriminatory comments. Here’s a sampling of some of the things he’s said:

He disparaged indigenous and Quilombolas communities, who are descendants of Afro-Brazilian slaves, implying, among other things, that they were lazy. “I think they don’t even manage to procreate anymore,” the candidate said.

He said that if he had a gay son, he would be unable to love him and would “prefer that he die in an accident.”

He said a fellow lawmaker in congress wasn’t attractive enough to be raped because she was ugly. “She’s not my type. I would never rape her. I’m not a rapist, but if I were, I wouldn’t rape her because she doesn’t deserve it,” Bolsonaro said in 2014.

Bolsonaro responded to a question in 2011 about what he would do if his son fell in love with a black woman by saying, “I don’t run that risk because my sons were very well educated.”

Some of his supporters seemed to welcome his rhetoric, while others wanted him to tone it down for fear that he would alienate voters. Bolsonaro’s opponents have protested against his offensive language, and have even compared him to Hitler.

In response, the president-elect tried to play off some of his commentary as jokes taken out of context, and during the runoff campaign, he tried to use more inclusive language by saying he’s trying to make Brazil safer and better for all its people — though his past stances seem to contradict that pretty clearly.

Some of Bolsonaro’s most controversial statements involve his laudatory remarks about Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship. The country was under military rule from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. In 2015, Bolsonaro went so far as to call it “glorious.”

In 2016, Bolsonaro voted to impeach then-President Dilma Rousseff — indicating that he did so in honor of the deceased chief of secret police in São Paulo, who oversaw the torture of hundreds under military rule. It was a disturbing act, as Rousseff herself had been imprisoned and tortured by the dictatorship.

For his presidential run, Bolsonaro chose as his running mate a retired military general who has also made disconcerting statements about military power, including that the return of military rule in Brazil could be justified under some circumstances.

Bolsonaro did not go that far in his presidential campaign — and he vowed that his government would be “constitutional and democratic” in his victory speech.

But his nostalgia for the days of military rule has alarmed many Brazilians. There are others, however, who sympathize with his position in the wake of increased crime and insecurity in the country.

One of the main reasons so many Brazilian voters supported Bolsonaro is his promise to fix the country’s ills — high rates of violent crime, a faltering economy, and endemic corruption.

A huge and sprawling corruption scandal has engulfed Brazilian politics in recent years, and that sense of dysfunction has made the population dissatisfied and disillusioned with its leaders.

Michel Temer, the outgoing president, is affiliated with a center-right party, and he’s abysmally unpopular. He took over after Rousseff, of the Workers’ Party, was impeached and removed from office in 2016 because of her connections with the corruption scandal. Rousseff was not implicated directly, but her party was in power, and she faced other pressures, such as the deepening recession.

Rousseff’s predecessor, Luiz Inácio “Lula�� da Silva, served as president from 2003 to 2011 and remains extremely popular in Brazil, as his tenure was associated with economic growth and greater equality. Lula is so popular, in fact, that he was the frontrunner in the 2018 presidential race and was on his way to becoming president again — except he was barred from running because he’s serving a 12-year prison sentence after also being caught up in the corruption scandal. (Lula and his supporters have called his conviction dubious.)

With Lula out, Fernando Haddad, a former mayor of Sao Paulo, stepped in. Haddad tried to tie himself tightly to Lula’s legacy, and he made improving the economy central to his campaign. But he failed to drum up enough popular support to beat Bolsonaro, who successfully capitalized on Brazilians’ discontent with their government and its perceived inability to address the country’s economic and political ills.

Original Source -> 4 things to know about Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new far-right president

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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everettwilkinson · 7 years ago

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POLITICO Playbook: ALABAMA newspaper chain calls for voters to REJECT Moore in front-page editorial

Happy Sunday. FRONT PAGE EDITORIAL — BIRMINGHAM NEWS, HUNTSVILLE TIMES, PRESS-REGISTER (MOBILE) — “STAND FOR DECENCY, REJECT ROY MOORE”: “This election is a turning point for women in Alabama. A chance to make their voices heard in a state that has silenced them for too long.

“The accusations against Roy Moore have been horrifying, but not shocking. Every day new allegations arise that illustrate a pattern of a man in his 30s strutting through town like the cock of the walk, courting and preying on young women and girls. And though Roy Moore has denied the accusations of these women, his own platform and record is hostile to so many Alabamians. … Do not let this conversation be muddled. This election has become a referendum on whether we will accept this kind of behavior from our leaders.” http://bit.ly/2hJUl3Y … Birmingham News front page http://bit.ly/2zOd71p

Story Continued Below

— MARC SHORT to GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS on ABC’S “THIS WEEK”: “George, I think that the vice president as well has spoke out against this when the allegations came forward. The president has expressed his concern about this. As you noted, the president has not gone down to Alabama to campaign for Roy Moore since the primary concluded. We have serious concerns about the allegations that have been made but we also believe that all of this info is out there for the people of Alabama. Roy Moore has been a public servant for decades in Alabama. He has run multiple times. The people of Alabama know best and the right decision to make here.”

— CHRIS WALLACE talks with SEN. TIM SCOTT (R-S.C.) on “FOX NEWS SUNDAY” via Nolan D. McCaskill: Sen. Tim Scott said Sunday that it’s “in the best interest of the country” that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore step aside, adding that there’s “a strong possibility” that a write-in candidate could retain the GOP Senate seat. http://politi.co/2AdpCnB

BIG NYT PROFILE — “For Roy Moore, a Long History of Combat and Controversy: The current furor surrounding the Senate candidate has played out like a concentrated version of his battle-filled career,” by Jess Bidgood, Richard Fausset and Campbell Robertson in Gadsden, Alabama: “‘It was a known fact: Roy Moore liked young girls,’ said Faye Gary, a retired Gadsden police officer. ‘It was treated like a joke. That’s just the way it was.’” http://nyti.ms/2AdzrSn

WHAT AMERICA IS WAKING UP TO — CONNECTICUT POST: “DELIBERATE ATTACK?: Educators say Republican tax bill unfairly targets colleges, universities” http://bit.ly/2j6Bn4n … PALM BEACH POST: “Trump returning for his second season: Area prepares for his Thanksgiving stay at Mar-a-Lago” http://bit.ly/2lwjdMc … WICHITA EAGLE: “Pastors, congregants promote packing heat” http://bit.ly/2hCTG0H

BACK ON OFFENSE — “Hillary Clinton: Trump ‘is obsessed’ with her,” by Nolan D. McCaskill: “‘Apparently, you know, my former opponent is obsessed with my speaking out,” [Hillary] Clinton said in an appearance alongside her husband, former President Bill Clinton, at a forum in Little Rock, Arkansas, commemorating the 25th anniversary of his election. ‘Apparently there was another, somebody told me, tweet today. Honestly, between tweeting and golfing, how does he get anything done? I don’t understand it. Maybe that’s the whole point.’ …

“Clinton said in her Little Rock speech she wouldn’t be silenced. ‘I’m gonna keep speaking out,’ she said. She dominated Saturday’s conversation, which was moderated by James Carville, a Bill Clinton campaign veteran and Hillary Clinton campaign adviser. She criticized the current administration for pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, failing to reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Program and promoting what she called the ‘fairy tale’ that trickle-down economics will ‘make everything great.’

“‘Yeah, we may be cutting Medicare and Medicaid and health care and make it more expensive to go to school and all the stuff that they’re trying to do in Washington, but it’s all gonna work out,’ she said sarcastically. ‘It’s such nonsense.’” http://politi.co/2hKZqsX

WHY RON JOHNSON IS A NO ON TAX REFORM, by NYT’s Jim Tankersley: “On the eve of the House’s vote to pass a far-reaching $1.5 trillion tax cut, Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin placed a hasty phone call to his state’s senior senator, Ron Johnson, in hopes of resolving an unlikely conflict in his own back yard. …

“During the phone call on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Ryan, who had campaigned heavily for Mr. Johnson in 2016, posed an essential question, according to the senator: ‘What are you going to need?’ What Mr. Johnson needs … is for the bill to treat more favorably small businesses and other so-called pass-through entities — businesses whose profits are distributed to their owners and taxed at rates for individuals. Such entities, including Mr. Johnson’s family-run plastics manufacturing business, account for more than half of the nation’s business income, and the senator says the tax bill would give an unfair advantage to larger corporations.

“‘I just have in my heart a real affinity for these owner-operated pass-throughs,’ he said. ‘We need to make American businesses competitive — they’re not right now. But in making businesses competitive, we can’t leave behind the pass-throughs.’” http://nyti.ms/2ivsMsw

— IT’S WORTH NOTING: This is hardly the first time Johnson has clashed with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his GOP leadership team. He also fought with them over how the Obamacare repeal process played out. He is just the first Senate Republican out of the gate opposing the bill. Just because the House GOP tax overhaul was on the fast track and didn’t face many hiccups, don’t expect the same to be true in the Senate.

FOR EXAMPLE… JAKE TAPPER talks with SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-MAINE) on CNN’S “STATE OF THE UNION: TAPPER: “You said this week that Republicans made a big mistake when they changed the tax bill to include this repeal of the Affordable Care Act individual mandate because that — removing that could raise taxes or payment — health care payments, premiums, for millions of Americans. If that provision stays in the tax bill, will that mean a ‘no’ vote from you?” COLLINS: “Well, first of all, I think we need to distinguish between taking away insurance from people who already have it, which is what the health care bill said we considered earlier this year would have done, versus removing a fine on people who choose not to have insurance. And that’s … disproportionately 80 percent on those who make under $50,000.

“I don’t think that provision should be in the bill. I hope the Senate will follow the lead of the House and strike it. If not, I think we need to fix it by passing two bills, the Alexander-Murray Bill, which will help to stabilize markets and reduce premiums, and a bill I’ve introduced with Bill Nelson of Florida that would create high-risk pools that would protect people with pre-existing conditions and also help to reduce premiums by 20 percent.”

****** A message from Chevron: When an endangered butterfly was found near a Chevron refinery, we protected the habitat and still plant the only thing they eat—buckwheat. Watch the video: http://politi.co/2ArIBXv ******

FUN, FROM KRISTINA PETERSON in the WSJ: “‘Gucci’ Lobbyists From ‘86 Tax Revamp Are Gone. Now They Use Gchat” http://on.wsj.com/2zfTorD

MORE TAX DRAMA IN THE STATES — “In Democrat-led state capitals, GOP tax reform push could scramble fiscal plans,” by Laura Nahmias in New York, Katherine Landergan in New Jersey and Carla Marinucci in California: “The Republican tax reform push in Washington is setting off budgetary alarm bells in high-tax states like New York, California and New Jersey, in the latest political skirmish to pit national Republicans against Democratic state and big city leaders.

“With Republicans intent on shrinking or repealing the state and local tax deduction, California officials are worried that the House-passed tax bill, and the emerging Senate measure, will force local governments to reduce taxes and make big cuts to schools and social services. In New York, where New York City and state revenues are heavily reliant on just a handful of wealthy tax filers, budget watchdogs fear federal tax changes could trigger the flight of those residents. And in New Jersey, plans for a new millionaire’s tax, one of incoming Gov. Phil Murphy’s biggest campaign promises, are already being reined in as the Democratic-led New Jersey Senate waits on the outcome of any federal tax plan.

“‘We’re going to have to re-evaluate everything’ if a federal bill repealing the state and local tax deduction becomes law, New Jersey Senate President Steve Sweeney said Wednesday in Atlantic City. Just days before, Sweeney had said he would make passage of a millionaires tax his chief priority in the new administration. ‘I’m just saying that what’s happening in Washington is concerning the hell out of me,’ he added.” http://politi.co/2zSdXtt

TROUBLE FOR FRANKEN — A1 of the STAR TRIBUNE — “Sidelined by scandal, Sen. Al Franken faces questions about ability to do his job,” by Jennifer Brooks and Erin Golden: “Suddenly a senator whose statewide approval rating stood at 58 percent in the last Star Tribune Minnesota Poll is facing calls to resign — even from prominent Minnesota DFLers and deeply disappointed supporters.

“As he faces an ethics investigation in the U.S. Senate, Franken’s future is up in the air in a seat that’s next on the ballot in 2020. … Asked Saturday whether Franken would resign, a spokesperson for the senator responded: ‘No.’ ‘He is spending time with his family in Washington, D.C., and will be through the Thanksgiving holiday,’ the staffer said by text, ‘and he’s doing a lot of reflecting.’ … ‘It’s hard. He’s a friend, he’s an ally and he’s very effective. But we cannot have a double standard when it comes to having safe places that do not allow for sexual harassment,’ said State Auditor Rebecca Otto, one of two DFL candidates for governor in 2018 to call for Franken to resign. The other was state Rep. Erin Murphy.” http://strib.mn/2jDzLTy … A1 PDF http://bit.ly/2AdyWrJ

— TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN?: STAR LEDGER FRONT PAGE: “Why this N.J. Republican keeps voting for things that could hurt Jersey” (print headline: “MacArthur is showing affinity for risk-taking: Representative’s tax stance could hurt N.J., his future”): “In just his third term in office, Rep. Tom MacArthur is helping to shape legislation in a way lawmakers who’ve been here a long time can only dream of.

“But such a quick rise in Washington could come at a cost to his home state of New Jersey and perhaps his future in Congress. MacArthur was the only New Jersey lawmaker to vote for the House Republican tax cut bill that curtailed the federal deduction for state and local taxes, and was one of only two GOP lawmakers from the state backing the health care legislation that rolled back the state’s expansion of Medicaid.” http://bit.ly/2zSJR91 … A1 PDF http://bit.ly/2hEpLoU

FOR YOUR RADAR — “Zimbabwe ruling party fires Mugabe as chief; now impeachment,” by AP’s Christopher Torchia and Farai Mutsaka in Harare, Zimbabwe: “Clinging to his now virtually powerless post, longtime Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe was fired as ruling party chief to cheers Sunday, and was set to discuss his expected exit with the army commander who put the world’s oldest head of state under house arrest days ago.” http://bit.ly/2zh5hxE

— “U.S. pursues quiet troop buildup in Somalia,” by Wesley Morgan: “The number of U.S. military forces in Somalia has more than doubled this year to over 500 people as the Pentagon has quietly posted hundreds of additional special operations personnel to advise local forces in pockets of Islamic militants around the country, according to current and former senior military officials. It is the largest American military contingent in the war-torn nation since the infamous 1993 ‘Black Hawk Down’ battle when 18 U.S. soldiers died. It is also the latest example of how the Pentagon’s operations in Africa have expanded with greater authority provided to field commanders.” http://politi.co/2zPVuhy

JARED MIDEAST PEACE BEAT — “Eyeing Detailed Peace Plan, Trump Team Could Invest Years in Effort,” by Jerusalem Post’s Michael Wilner: “Deadlines are not a part of President Donald Trump’s peace effort, led by Jared Kushner … and Jason Greenblatt, the U.S. special representative for international negotiations. These two refuse to bind themselves in timetables as they prepare what they describe as an ‘architecture’ for their upcoming initiative. It is a notable break in strategy from those of past diplomats who have tried, and failed, to bring peace to the Middle East. … When it is ready, the White House-based team will release what has been described to The Jerusalem Post as an intricately detailed plan – not a grand vision of peace from on high, but specific U.S. proposals to specific disagreements, formed based on months of listening to the parties.” http://bit.ly/2zhmCGQ

–“Palestinians vow to suspend talks if U.S. closes PLO mission,” by AP’s Josh Lederman and Matt Lee: “The Palestinians threatened on Saturday to suspend all communication with the United States if the Trump administration follows through with plans to close their diplomatic office in Washington. The potential rupture in relations threatens to undermine President Donald Trump’s bid for Mideast peace — a mission he has handed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the U.S. decision was ‘very unfortunate and unacceptable,’ and accused Washington of bowing to pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government ‘at a time when we are trying to cooperate to achieve the ultimate deal.’” http://bit.ly/2zSilbS

FOGGY BOTTOM WATCH – NYT EDITORIAL: “The Trump Administration Is Making War on Diplomacy”: “Mr. Tillerson has asked some senior officials to do clerical tasks and left many ambassadorships unfilled. Stephen Akard, an associate of Vice President Mike Pence with only brief experience at the State Department, was nominated director general of the foreign service, a position that oversees diplomatic appointments and is usually reserved for a senior career diplomat with the power to block political interference. All in all, Mr. Tillerson is disrupting the smooth development of career State Department leaders from entry level to the senior ranks, which will create shortages of experienced diplomats down the road. Not surprisingly, morale has plummeted.” http://nyti.ms/2zT3n3t

–“Frustrated foreign leaders bypass Washington in search of blue-state allies,” by WaPo’s Michael Birnbaum and Greg Jaffe: “Some nations are finding that even if they are frustrated by President Trump’s Washington, they can still prosper from robust relations with the California Republic and a constellation of like-minded U.S. cities, some of which are bigger than European countries. [Jerry] Brown’s 10-day trip to Europe, which ended Tuesday, was just the latest in a growing transatlantic back-and-forth that bypasses the Trump-era White House. … Several European countries have stationed ambassadors in Silicon Valley to boost trade ties. Meanwhile, state and municipal governments are expanding or building new offices to help them manage the increased interest in Europe and Asia.” http://wapo.st/2yXnEU4

BUT, BUT, BUT — EMILY HOLDEN in Bonn, Germany: “The White House goaded activists at the international climate talks by pushing coal and other fossil fuels. But behind closed doors, U.S. negotiators stuck to their Obama-era principles on the 2015 Paris deal — despite President Donald Trump’s disavowal of the pact. State Department negotiators at the U.N. conference that ended Saturday hewed to the United States’ long-established positions on the details of how to carry out the Paris agreement. And that’s the U.S. role that most foreign political leaders sought to highlight, despite the low expectations inspired by Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda and his dismissal of human-caused climate change as a hoax.

“‘You couldn’t have expected more,’ said German Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks, who described the U.S. delegation as constructive and neutral. ‘Its diplomats who are working here, they act professionally.’ White House energy adviser George David Banks portrayed the outcome in even more glowing terms, saying the U.S. had been ‘indispensable in thwarting efforts by some countries to get a free pass’ under the Paris agreement. The American negotiating team, Banks said, had ‘led across many issues, promoted U.S. national interests, and protected U.S. taxpayers and businesses.’” http://politi.co/2zQez3m

SPICER AND BARNETT — “Sean Spicer Is Resetting His Post-White House Career Strategy,” by BuzzFeed’s Steven Perlberg: “At first, Sean Spicer’s exit from the White House followed the blueprint for famous administration officials. Step one: Hire mega lawyer/agent Bob Barnett … Now Spicer and Barnett, who seeks to uphold a reputation as the preeminent talent broker in Washington, are both distancing themselves from one another, according to sources familiar with the matter. Around Washington, Barnett has downplayed his relationship with Spicer … Spicer, for his part, is leaning on another agent who has represented Trump world talent like Ivanka Trump, Corey Lewandowski, and David Bossie — Mel Berger from agency giant WME. …

“Some in DC media circles believe Barnett over-promised Spicer about what he could deliver, and that the duo underestimated the larger media industry’s contempt from the former press secretary. TV network sources say that Spicer and Barnett weren’t particularly strategic about rolling out a fresh image. The two clashed stylistically — Spicer needed a hands-on agent as opposed to a seasoned dealmaker. The former press secretary was also at times concerned Barnett was spending too much time involved with Hillary Clinton’s book project than working on his own future, according to one source familiar with the matter. (Another source disputed this, saying that Barnett is responsive to his clients.)” http://bzfd.it/2B2eqrk

SUNDAY BEST —

— ANDREA MITCHELL speaks to OMB DIRECTOR MICK MULVANEY on NBC’S “MEET THE PRESS”: MITCHELL: “Now we only have one year of tax returns because he has failed, refused, he’s the first president in modern history to not release his tax returns. We have the 2005 1040 from President Trump. Our independent NBC News analysis of that showed that he was, himself, he and Melania Trump would gain at least $22 million from this tax cut from the estate tax as well. His heirs would benefit $1.1 billion. So it’s not true that the president would not benefit from the tax cut?”

MULVANEY: “Yeah, I can’t speak to the president’s taxes. I think that was sort of litigated by the American public during the election. I will say this, listen, the president’s going to pay much higher taxes on a lot of his properties, excuse me, because he has properties in high tax states. So I laugh every time I come on networks like this, they accuse us of cutting taxes on the rich. Every time I go on different networks, and you may understand who those are, they accuse us of raising taxes on the rich. So I think it depends on how you want to look at it.”

— CHRIS WALLACE with TREASURY SECRETARY STEVEN MNUCHIN on “FOX NEWS SUNDAY” about the photo with his wife posed with dollar bills: MNUCHIN: “I never thought I’d be quoted as looking like villains from the James Bond, I guess I should take that as a compliment. That I look like a villain in a great successful, James Bond movie. But let me just say I was very excited of having my signature on the money, it’s obviously a great privilege and a great honor and something I’m very proud of being the Secretary and helping the American people.”

THE JUICE …

— TONIGHT ON “KASIE D.C.”: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, Katty Kay, Ashley Parker, Jonathan Swan, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Ken Dilanian, Paul Kane, Paul Singer, Gen. Barry McCaffrey and Azmat Khan.

SNL COLD OPEN – “WikiLeaks Cold Open”, taking place in a parking garage beneath the Ecuadorian Embassy in London – Don Jr. (played by Mikey Day): “Hello Mr. Assange, I presume.” Julian Assange (Kate McKinnon): “I appreciate you coming all the way to London to meet face to face. As secure and off the record as sliding into my Twitter DMs is, I thought this would be safer.” Don. Jr.: “My brother Eric is waiting in the car. Not to worry, I told him to honk the horn if he gets scared. Now Mr. Assange” [Eric honks repeatedly] “Excuse me for a moment.”

… Don leaves and returns: “Eric will be joining us. Eric, this is Mr. Assange.” Eric (Alex Moffat): “He looks like Draco Malfoy.” Don Jr.: “Eric, that was rude. What did we say about making fun of people’s appearances, bud?” Eric: “That’s Dad’s thing?” Don Jr.: “Yeah.” 5-min. video http://bit.ly/2AU1bIc

PHOTO DU JOUR: Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speak at a gathering in Little Rock, Ark. on Nov. 18, marking 25 years since his election. | Kelly P. Kissel/AP Photo

JONATHAN WEISMAN in NYT Sunday Review, “When the Right Pushes Fake Jews”: “Bernie Bernstein pretty much fits the mold of a Jew — at least as the alt-right sees us. A strange Northeastern accent, somewhere between New York and Boston? Check. Tossing money, but not too much money, around to no good end (remember, we’re rich, but cheap)? Check. Pursuing the agenda of the liberal fake-news media? Check. Riling the worst instincts of the South’s conservative base? Check. But there was something a little too on the nose, forgive me please, about those robocalls in Alabama from a mythical Washington Post reporter named Bernstein seeking women to dish dirt on Roy Moore, something too ‘Jewy’ to be actually Jewish. And that’s where the rising anti-Semitism of the new white nationalists loses its punch.” http://nyti.ms/2zhyQPO

GREAT STORY — SCOTT BROWN IN NEW ZEALAND — “Scott Brown’s pay is $155,000 per year. The benefits are priceless,” by the Boston Globe’s Joshua Miller in Wellington, New Zealand: “Of the waves that followed from Donald Trump’s 2016 tsunami, Brown’s ascension from the everyman-with-a-pickup who lost two U.S. Senate races in two years in two states to US ambassador to New Zealand ranks among the most unlikely. And, for him, the most fortunate.

“The island nation is a paradisiacal land of jade hills dotted with grazing sheep, golden-sand beaches surrounded by Jurassic Park-like jungles, snow-capped peaks that rise steeply from azure fjords, and pastoral villages serving gourmet meals and world-class wine.

“Brown spends his days as if he is campaigning across this terrain. He gladhands mayors and their constituents, bearing patriotic gifts: U.S.-New Zealand flag pins, and military challenge coins imprinted with Brown’s signature. He introduces himself to chambers of commerce, noting that he, too, was once a business owner. And he connects with Kiwis over rock music and rugby, trying to parry their considerable concerns about President Trump.” http://bit.ly/2AUbTOV

2020 WATCH — “Don’t trust politicians to solve our problems, U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse tells Iowa crowd,” by the Des Moines Register’s Jason Noble: “Don’t look to politics to solve the pressing problems in American culture or address looming technological and economic changes that will rearrange American society, U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse told an Iowa audience Saturday. Politicians, he said, simply aren’t up to the task.

“‘Friends, there is no politician who’s going to save America,’ Sasse told a crowd of about 500 Christian conservatives in Des Moines. ‘Friends, there is no election that’s going to transform your life to become so much better than it is right now.’

“‘I think that the Republican Party doesn’t have clarity of any long-term vision that it communicates to the American people … That’s why in the 2016 presidential election you saw it ripe for a pretty fundamental attack on its platform. … ‘Those two sides of the Republican Party — you can call it a Wall Street-K Street continuum and a Bannonite populism — both of them are unpersuasive to moms and dads in Iowa and Nebraska who are thinking about what kind of country they want to give their kids in 10 and 20 years,’ Sasse said.” http://dmreg.co/2zRlkBj

WHAT THE PENTAGON IS READING — “U.S. nuclear general says would resist ‘illegal’ Trump strike order” – Reuters: “Air Force General John Hyten, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), told an audience at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada that he had given a lot of thought to what he would say if he received such an order. … ‘And if it’s illegal, guess what’s going to happen? I‘m going to say, “Mr. President, that’s illegal.” And guess what he’s going to do? He’s going to say, “What would be legal?” And we’ll come up with options, of a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that’s the way it works. It’s not that complicated.’ Hyten said running through scenarios of how to react in the event of an illegal order was standard practice, and added: ‘If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail. You could go to jail for the rest of your life.’” http://reut.rs/2zQJoEI

TRUMP INC. — “Mar-a-Lago’s new winter season: The Red Cross Ball is out, the Trumpettes are in,” by WaPo’s David Fahrenthold, Lori Rozsa and Drew Harwell: “This week, Trump returns to Mar-a-Lago for the first time since April. He will confront a changed social scene. … Once a retreat from the divisive business of politics, the Palm Beach landmark is now a place defined by those divisions — a dynamic the club is monetizing by booking events with Trump’s political allies. Mar-a-Lago is still hosting weddings and members for meals on the dining terrace. But the center of Palm Beach’s traditional social scene has shifted to the Breakers, a club that Trump once mocked for getting his ‘leftovers.’” http://wapo.st/2ivxoPo

GOTHAM REPORT – BIG READ — NYT A1, “How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways: Disruptions and delays have roiled the system this year. But the crisis was long in the making, fueled by a litany of errors, a Times investigation shows,” by Brian M. Rosenthal, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Michael LaForgia: “Subway workers now make an average of $170,000 annually in salary, overtime and benefits, according to a Times analysis of data compiled by the federal Department of Transportation. That is far more than in any other American transit system; the average in cities like Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington is about $100,000 in total compensation annually. The pay for managers is even more extraordinary. The nearly 2,500 people who work in New York subway administration make, on average, $280,000 in salary, overtime and benefits. The average elsewhere is $115,000.” http://nyti.ms/2ASRDgv

****** A message from Chevron: This is a story about DOERS, butterflies, and buckwheat. In ’75, the endangered El Segundo Blue butterfly was found near a Chevron refinery. We protected the habitat and planted the only thing they eat—buckwheat. We’re still planting and keeping an eye on our littlest neighbor. Watch the video: http://politi.co/2ArIBXv ******

SPORTS BLINK — “Every six weeks for more than 36 years: When will sex abuse in Olympic sports end?” by WaPo’s Will Hobson and Steven Rich: “More than 290 coaches and officials associated with the United States’ Olympic sports organizations have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct since 1982, according to a Washington Post review of sport governing body banned lists, news clips and court records in several states. The figure spans parts of 15 sports and amounts to an average of eight adults connected to an Olympic organization accused of sexual misconduct every year — or about one every six weeks — for more than 36 years. The figure includes more than 175 officials convicted of sex crimes as well as those who never faced criminal charges and have denied claims.” http://wapo.st/2zQjPmW

MEDIAWATCH — NYT published a special Sunday episode of “The Daily” for kids. It’s on the same day as today’s edition of the Times has a new print section for children that the paper will publish every month starting in 2018. http://nyti.ms/2jFn3Uh

BONUS GREAT WEEKEND READS, curated by Daniel Lippman, filing from Middleburg, Virginia:

–“Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow,” by Neil Strauss in Rolling Stone: “Inside the inventor’s world-changing plans to inhabit outer space, revolutionize high-speed transportation, reinvent cars – and hopefully find love along the way.” http://rol.st/2zMJkWk

–“In Search of Distraction,” by Matthew Bevis in Poetry Magazine: “The rewards of the tangential, the digressive, and the dreamy.” http://bit.ly/2zPCJKV

–“The New Campus Censors,” by David Bromwich in the Chronicle of Higher Ed: “Students are leading the assault on free speech — and faculty members and administrators are enabling them.” http://bit.ly/2hyP4Zk

–“Russia’s Gay Demons,” by Robert Cottrell in the N.Y. Review of Books, reviewing “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” by Masha Gessen: “On one side is the historian explaining the rise of Putin as a logical reaction to the failings of Yeltsin. On the other is Masha’s mother, wondering how on earth that dull man she met while selling insurance in St. Petersburg a few years back is now the prime minister.” http://bit.ly/2hAiJ4i … $18.01 on Amazon http://amzn.to/2zhMN08

–“The Road to Making America Great Again Runs Through Asia,” by Afshin Molavi in The Atlantic: “The secret to putting America First may lie in the continent’s rising middle class.” http://theatln.tc/2j4qcZZ

–“When the pizza delivery guy is also ‘Nazi Bob,’” by Boston Globe’s Matt Viser in York, Pa.: http://bit.ly/2zOaeh5

–“In the Age of Sexual Misconduct, How Is Mike Pence a Problem?” by David French in National Review: “The ‘Pence rule’ and its variations reflect an accurate view of human nature.” http://bit.ly/2j5WOT3

–“Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal,” by Amanda Robb in Rolling Stone: “Inside the web of conspiracy theorists, Russian operatives, Trump campaigners and Twitter bots who manufactured the ‘news’ that Hillary Clinton ran a pizza-restaurant child-sex ring.” http://rol.st/2irJ7ym

— “The Odyssey and the Other,” by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in December’s Atlantic: “What the epic can teach about encounters with strangers abroad and at home.” http://theatln.tc/2zOOTUk

— “Amazon’s Last Mile,” by Bryan Menegus in Gizmodo: “Who delivers Amazon orders? Increasingly, it’s plainclothes contractors with few labor protections, driving their own cars, competing for shifts on the company’s own Uber-like platform. Though it’s deployed in dozens of cities and associated with one of the world’s biggest companies, government agencies and customers alike are nearly oblivious to the program’s existence.” http://bit.ly/2hAZUy6

— “Bill Browder, Putin Enemy No. 1,” by Sean Flynn in GQ: “The harrowing tale of Bill Browder—how an American-born businessman became an enemy of the Russian state, how he has to live in constant fear, never knowing if the long arm of the Kremlin will snatch him, or kill him—is its own kind of daily terror. But what Browder’s story tells us about the way Vladimir Putin operates, and what he might want from this country, should scare us all.” http://bit.ly/2zNNA7S

–“I still love Kierkegaard,” by Julian Baggini in Aeon – per ALDaily.com’s description: “Kierkegaard is a favorite of angsty adolescents. But it is adults, more than ever, who can most benefit from the ethical seriousness of his life and work.” http://bit.ly/2hBA3pS

–“The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future,” by Leslie Jamison in December’s Atlantic: “Second Life was supposed to be the future of the internet, but then Facebook came along. Yet many people still spend hours each day inhabiting this virtual realm. Their stories—and the world they’ve built—illuminate the promise and limitations of online life.” http://theatln.tc/2mBlY11

–“Walking While Black,” by Topher Sanders, Kate Rabinowitz, and Benjamin Conarck in ProPublica: “Jacksonville’s enforcement of pedestrian violations raises concerns that it’s another example of racial profiling.” http://bit.ly/2zcjCLS (h/t Longform.org)

–“Married Young: The Fight Over Child Marriage in America,” by Anjali Tsui on Frontline – per TheBrowser.com’s description: “Heather was pregnant at 14 when she married her 24-year-old boyfriend, hoping to save him from jail for statutory rape. She lost the baby, the marriage failed, and the boyfriend went to jail anyway. A sad story, but not an exceptional one. All US states allow minors to marry with parental consent. At least 200,000 — almost all girls — have done so in the past 15 years. ‘Children as young as 10, 11 and 12 years old were granted marriage licenses in Alaska, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee.’” http://to.pbs.org/2zQYlEq

SPOTTED: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) at the Elton John concert in Bangor, Maine, last night. “She seemed to particularly enjoy his rendition of ‘Daniel,’” per our tipster.

WEEKEND WEDDINGS – “Rebecca Kaplan, Adam Levy” – N.Y. Times: “The bride, 29, who will be keeping her name professionally, is an associate producer in Washington for the ‘CBS Evening News.’ She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, and she is on the board of The Daily Pennsylvanian … The groom, 31, works in Washington as a supervising producer for CNN’s political unit, where he oversees the network’s political research operation. Until August he worked as a senior producer for ‘State of the Union with Jake Tapper.’ He graduated from the George Washington University. … The couple met in 2015 in Washington through the dating app JSwipe.” With pic http://nyti.ms/2jAZE6m … Wedding pic of the couple with Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash http://bit.ly/2j5HKVF

–SPOTTED: Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash cutting the challah, Spencer Garrett, David Chalian, Alex Moe and Derek Flowers, Joy Lin, Juana Summers, John Legittino, Lauren Pratapas, Polson Kanneth and Sandhya Kotha, Ben Kochman, Rob Yoon, Katie Hinman, Sean and Ashley Kennedy.

OUT AND ABOUT — SPOTTED at the So Others Might Eat Gala Saturday night at the National Building Museum: Tom Donohue, Suzanne Clark, Bill Conway, Jack Gerard, Matthew Say, Jim McCarthy, Wayne Berman and the winners of this year’s Humanitarians of the Year award, Jane and Steve Caldeira of the Consumer Specialty Products Association.

— SPOTTED at the “Wonder Woman”-themed birthday party for BBC’s Suzanne Kianpour at Lapis Saturday night: Andrew Rafferty, Neil Grace, Molly Weaver, Walt Cronkite Jr., Lauren French, Paul Kane, Lauren Culbertson, Anastasia Dellaccio, Nikki Schwab, Brendan Kownacki, Sophie Pyle, Chris Brown, Lindsay Walters, Sean Weppner and Richard Strauss.

— Bert Gomez threw a party celebrating wife Susie Santana’s birthday Saturday night on the W hotel rooftop where guests salsa danced till midnight and were treated to cupcakes and the “Susie Q” specialty cocktail, according to a tipster. SPOTTED: Estuardo Rodriguez, Lyndon Boozer, Maria Cardona, Angela Arboleda, Laurie Saroff, Cristina Antelo and Miguel Franco.

BIRTHDAYS: Boston Globe’s Matt Viser (hat tip: Annie Linskey) … Matt Lloyd, HHS principal deputy assistant secretary for public affairs and a Pence alum (h/ts Nate Bult, Alleigh Marre and James Wegmann) … Ann Curry … Meghan Burris, OMB press secretary … former Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is 78 … Tommy Thompson, former HHS Secretary and Wisconsin governor, is 78 … Larry King is 84 (h/t Tammy Haddad) … Jack Welch is 82 … Ted Turner is 79 … Time’s Sam Jacobs … Justin Hamilton is 42 … Allison Janney … WaPo’s Dana Hedgpeth … Jeff Mitchell, acting legislative affairs director at NPPD … Robert Marcus, EVP of Signal Group … Biden alum Annie Tomasini … Nicole Isaac, head of U.S. public policy at LinkedIn … Michael Dale-Stein, Sen. Franken’s senior adviser for comms … Trey Emerson Sprick of the U.S. Chamber … former Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell is 55 … Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) is 7-0 … former Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.) is 75 … Florida native Maya Hixson, senior comms manager at NARAL (h/t James Owens) … former Rep. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.) is 58 … Adriana Lorenzo, senior booking producer at Cheddar … Scott Garlick … Sarah Hamilton, managing director at Kivvit …

… Brad Bauman … Jason Dumont … John Axelrod, MSNBC alum now at BerlinRosen, is 26 … Lauren McCulloch of “Meet the Press” … Obama DOJ alum Dena Iverson DeBonis … Chris Harlow … Eric Finkbeiner … Mike Deutsch, FAA attorney … Matt Allen … Beth Mickelberg … Lynne Walton … Patrick K. O’Donnell … Andrew Sollinger, EVP of subscriptions at Business Insider… Cait Graf, VP of comms at The Nation … Ivan Levingston … Alexander Heffner is 28 … Ellen Silva of NPR … Shelley Hearne (h/ts Jon Haber) … Charlie Siguler … Geoff Sokolowski … Neil Bjorkman, VP of legislative affairs at the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum … Hannah McLeod … Michael Reynold … Amber Manko … Bush 43 W.H. alum Ivvete Diaz … Bush 43 HHS alum Mary Kay Mantho, now director at GSK … Ivette Diaz … Shannon Vilmain … Barb Leach … Julie Cassidy … David O’Boyle … Ricky Wilson.

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thedailymonty-blog · 8 years ago

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Let’s take a look at U.S. taxes vs Swedish taxes.

Read the link below and take a look at his six reasons the Swedish tax system is great while ours is dumb. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11380356/swedish-taxes-love I almost want to go in swinging but it’s a decent enough article so I guess I’ll start with the part I liked. 2. Tax forms come already filled out and 5. We get cash instead of deductions See how these link together? They don’t have to do our complicated bullshit with deductions because they get the money up-front where we’d get a refund, and so the tax documents are simple enough that the average citizen only needs to do minor deductions. I think item two could be implemented for 1040EZs even without item five, but item five is a great idea. The best part is this: we already have an agency that can take care of things like that! The IRS! And we can handle it step by step! The IRS could gradually go from being the monolithic mass of accountants, audit lawyers, and data entry clerks that it is to being a slightly-less-monolithic mass of accountants, audit lawyers, fraud lawyers, rebate clerks, and data entry clerks. This doesn’t sound like a big change but checking rebates for fraud is way easier than going after year after year of taxes to find something, so not only would we have a better system, but we’d be better at finding people who try to cheat that system. Seriously, this is such a good idea that I might dedicate my life to it. 4. Sales taxes in Sweden are higher — but less noticeable and 3. There is no property tax I promise you that the people notice when the sales tax goes up, even in Sweden... But, the basic idea that prices at the store should include sales tax when you see them on the shelves is a nice one, and it’s an easy enough law to write. So, Hell, I’m for that part! And, yes, U.S. property taxes are high, but we need a way for cities to pay for necessary services. Maybe these “less noticeable” sales taxes would work. But the sales tax is considered to be a tax that affects the lower classes more, while the property tax is considered to be a tax that affects the upper classes more, so... Uh... It’s worth pointing out the irony of this though: you have a writer for Vox (a liberal site) favorably comparing a European country to America (a liberal pass-time), and two of his items combined would make any liberal scream: raising a regressive tax to lower a progressive tax. This guy better find a Democrat to suggest that stuff, ‘cause if a Republican does it there’ll be a riot. But, I’m not necessarily against a plan to do this; it’s just that we have our high property taxes for a reason, and the reason is to help the little guy. I guess I’m fine with either on principle, though. Whatever. Let’s get to the areas where I disagree. 1. Swedish income taxes are not much higher than US taxes — but they give you an education This isn’t really a comment on our tax code, it’s about our spending. But, it does go to show why Americans are against high taxes: we pay all that money and get nothing for it. There’s a damn good reason for that, though! We don’t have as much of a budget for stuff like this because our money is going to our ridiculously over-sized military. I say that like it’s a bad thing, but the United States pays for 40% of the NATO Pact that protects twenty-seven other countries, including Sweden. But I should say 40% and rising! Not only because we’re thinking about including some of those new Baltic states and Georgia, but also because other members are cutting their contributions to pay for all that expensive quasi-socialist statecraft and their EU dues (but I repeat myself, ZING!). It’s a common enough criticism to say that we could just shrink our military, but it’s actually not that simple. The whole idea behind the Marshall Plan was, “You can rebuild economically while we defend you. Seriously, don’t break Europe again right after everyone just put the fires out guys.” That just sort of carried over into our current “world police” that defined our foreign policy in the post-WW2 era. By now we have all these treaties that make it tough for us to shirk on our military. Besides the NATO Pact, our naval bases in Japan and the fact that the Korean War is still technically going on are serious complications to any plan that involves making our military smaller. And all this is an important factor in trade deals that favor the U.S., of which there are plenty. Another problem is that healthcare is so damn expensive here. The author mentions this, and that deserves an entry on its own, because there are so many factors involved. But, “Hospitals have no idea what to fucking do anymore,” and, “Health insurance companies have to work with the constantly-panicked hospitals,” combine to make one of the biggies and the cause of that comes down to... Well, the fact that healthcare is so expensive. That’s right! Our healthcare is so expensive because of how expensive it is! The situation went out of control decades ago so it is out of control now, and we need to make huge, painful, confusing changes to fix it because nobody did anything all those decades ago! Fuck Baby Boomers. Fixing all that will be tough, but that carries some complications of its own. That brings me to... 6. High taxes give me more choices and freedoms Look, you’re being naive if you think the politicians are giving you all that stuff because they love you so huggy-muggy much. They do it because they want your vote. We’ll get the occasional politician who cares about the occasional cause, even here, but too much of that idealism crap makes you so inflexible that you can’t actually win an election. I mean, you can tell Al Gore really cares about the environment because he’s willing to stand up for it, even when it costs him. He’s still a pretty standard Democrat the rest of the time. He walks the same tight-rope every suspected liberal does in a country as conservative as ours. And part of that tight-rope is plain ol’ pork barrel politics. That’s where your awesome hiking trail really comes from. Some construction company wants to dig a hiking trail, so they all lobby a politician, and the politician gets some campaign money and all their votes, plus bonus votes from people who live where the trail’s gonna be and decide they just like the idea while the future Congress critter’s campaigning. But let’s say someone really is an idealist that wants to help Americans out: the size is a factor there, too. Look at the size of Sweden: 450,295 square kilometers (or 173,860 square miles in the system we still have to use here because of white trash) with 9.9 million people. Just two of our states - Alaska and Texas - are bigger than that all by themselves. And the third in the list, California, is about the same size as Sweden. Less then 10% smaller. So, any time we wanna spend money on something like that, we have to somehow get people who’ll probably never see it on board. This makes ideas like that hard to put into practice... And frankly? Even if you are an idealist, it kinda makes them bad ideas, all by itself. After all: this is all about helping people by building things they’ll use, right? Like I said: we have fifty states and some of them are huge. With Sweden being about the size of just California by itself, simple distance is enough to keep anyone from ever even seeing any of the nice pork our Congress critters send back to our districts. This is why you’ll sometimes see conservatives say, “Well yeah, they do all this stuff and reap all these benefits, but they’re a geographically small country,” about this criticism of the U.S. Infrastructure spending is just more helpful when more people use that infrastructure. For example, public transportation spending is way more efficient in areas where lots of people live. You can’t have a good bus system in a huge, spread-out city, and most American cities are pretty spread-out. So even if a politician’s “charity” (with other peoples’ money as collected by taxes) really comes from a place of kindness and caring, it has to be the weird sort of wall-building charity where you say, “The people of Oregon deserve the best!” and somehow still say, “The people of Maine do not deserve the best! That money should go to Oregon!” And it’s weird, because you’d think the number of people per square kilometer would factor in and America’s a denser country that way, but that’s not the issue. The issues are, “Where is the thing you want to build going to be?” and “How far away are you from all that?” In Sweden the answers are, “Pretty much in the south part of the country and along the east coast,” and, “Going all the way from the north part of the country where there’s nothing to Malmö in the very southern tip? 22 hours away by car or six hours away by plane.” Every place in Sweden is somewhere that a Swede could take a vacation, basically. In America the answers are, “We have some cities but pretty much just all over the place,” and, “Really fucking far sometimes.” Say the author gets his ferries and stuff? The 23,000-island Stockholm archipelago is still more accessible to huge parts of the country than your 23-island national park. It makes them wonder why they have to spend the money. The fly-over states are called that for a reason: our Important People fly over them just to get from one of our big population centers where all the stuff is (New York) to another (some city in the California metroplex or Seattle, depending on your job). Big, popular infrastructure projects will tend to have the backing of Important People trying to improve the already-very-wealthy areas where they live, so we have these bitter Midwestern and Southern states that just say, “Screw all that! Limited government! Give me my tax money back!” Somehow, this never actually leads to lower taxes, though. (Have I said “Fuck Baby Boomers!” yet?) It’s harder to build a coalition around the idea of doing anything like that, because the coalition will involve a much smaller percentage of the country, so our Congress critters need more wheeling and dealing to make it happen. This means politicians will be using a lot of time and energy on just getting the necessary pork back home. Makes it awful hard to work on other stuff, like healthcare! Not that that frees the Boomers from the responsibilities they’ve shirked. But I digress: think about some of that whenever you see an article about how Europe is awesome and we suck, tumblr. All I ask!

#politics #sweden #taxes #policy proposals #first post #united states

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Jair Bolsonaro, the man who may become Brazil’s next president, sums up his far-right campaign with a seemingly benign slogan: “Brazil before everything, and God above all.”

Bolsonaro won 46 percent of the vote during the first round of elections on Sunday, falling just shy of winning outright. He will face leftist candidate Fernando Haddad — who took just 29 percent of the vote — in a runoff on October 28.

Bolsonaro’s rise has roiled Brazilian politics. The candidate has quickly gained popularity, despite being a polarizing figure who has promised to “break the system” and freely spews misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ, racist, and anti-democratic views.

The presidential frontrunner has also been compared to US President Donald Trump; both men share a reputation for incendiary rhetoric, have tried to build campaigns on promises to end corruption and crack down on crime and chaos, and know their way around social media.

Here’s what you need to know about the Brazilian candidate sometimes dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics.”

Bolsonaro isn’t exactly a political outsider — though he’s certainly tried to paint himself as one. The 63-year-old is a former military officer and has served seven terms in Brazil’s federal congress. As Mike LaSusa wrote for Vox, the candidate has enjoyed strong ties to the military and rose to prominence as “a no-holds-barred conservative.”

Bolsonaro relied heavily on social media to promote his candidacy and get his message out. The candidate often seems to be taking a page out of Trump’s playbook, whether it’s bragging about his votes, blaming the leftist Workers’ Party for Brazil’s failures, or promising to “rescue Brazil together.”

The far-right politician has also faced intense opposition and protests, particularly from women. Opponents have used the slogan #EleNão or “Not Him.” In September, a suspect who claimed he was on a “mission from God” stabbed the candidate in the abdomen at a campaign rally.

Bolsonaro was seriously injured — but it also helped raise his profile, and it gave him something of a “martyr” status. It may have also cowed his opponents, who didn’t want to be blasting a man who’d just survived a knife attack.

“I just want to send a message to the thugs who tried to ruin the life of a family man, a guy who is the hope for millions of Brazilians,” said Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair’s Bolsonaro’s son after the attack. “You just elected him president.”

Oh, where to begin. Bolsonaro has a deep record of making offensive comments about women and the LGBTQ community and racist statements about Brazil’s black or mixed race community, which makes up more than half of the country’s population.

He’s held these views for years, but his newfound popularity and presidential platform have amplified their reach. Guilherme Casarões, a comparative politics professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Sao Paulo, told the Washington Post, “five years ago, he was just another congressman with anti-gay views. Now Bolsonaro, like Trump, has become a larger-than-life figure.”

The candidate has even faced charges for his discriminatory comments. Here’s a sampling of some of the things he’s said:

Bolsonaro has disparaged indigenous and Quilombolas communities, who are descendants of Afro-Brazilian slaves, implying among other things that they were lazy. “I think they don’t even manage to procreate anymore,” the candidate said.

He’s said that if he had a gay son, he would be unable to love him and “prefer that he die in an accident.”

He said a woman lawmaker wasn’t attractive enough to be raped because she was ugly. “She’s not my type. I would never rape her. I’m not a rapist, but if I were, I wouldn’t rape her because she doesn’t deserve it,” Bolsonaro said in 2014.

Bolsonaro responded to a question in 2011 about what he would do if his son fell in love with a black woman by saying, “I won’t discuss promiscuity.” He continued, “I don’t run that risk because my sons were very well educated.”

Some of his supporters seem to welcome his rhetoric, while others want him to tone it down, for fear that he may alienate voters. Bolsonaro’s opponents have protested against his offensive language, and have even compared him to Adolf Hitler.

In response, the presidential frontrunner has tried to play off some of his commentary as jokes taken out of context. He’s also said he will not moderate his language, though he has recently tried to use more inclusive by saying he’s trying to make Brazil safer and better for all its people — though his past stances seem to defy that.

Some of Bolsonaro’s most controversial statements involve his laudatory remarks about Brazil’s military dictatorship. (The country was under military rule from the 1960s until the mid-1980s.) In 2015, Bolsonaro went so far as to call it “glorious.”

In 2016, Bolsonaro voted to impeach then-President Dilma Rousseff, and Bolsonaro indicated he did so in honor of the then-deceased chief of the secret police in Sao Paulo, who oversaw the torture of hundreds under military rule. It was a disturbing act, as Rousseff herself had been imprisoned by the dictatorship.

For his presidential run, Bolsonaro chose a retired military general as his running mate who’s also made disconcerting statements about military power, including that the return of military rule in Brazil could be justified under some circumstances.

Bolsonaro has not gone that far in his presidential campaign, but his nostalgia for the days of military rule has alarmed many Brazilians. There are others, however, who sympathize with his position in the wake of increased crime and insecurity in the country.

One of the main reasons so many Brazilian voters like Bolsonaro is because he has promised to fix the country’s ills — high rates of violent crime, a faltering economy, and endemic corruption.

A huge and sprawling corruption scandal engulfed Brazilian politics, and that sense of dysfunction has made the population dissatisfied and disillusioned with its leaders.

Michel Temer, who is affiliated with a center-right party, is the current president, and he’s abysmally unpopular. He took over after Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers’ Party, was impeached and removed from office in 2016 because of her connections with the corruption scandal. Rousseff was not implicated directly, but her party was in power and she faced other pressures, such as the deepening recession.

Rousseff’s predecessor, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, served as president from 2003 to 2011, and remains extremely popular in Brazil, as his tenure was associated with economic growth and greater equality. Lula is so popular, in fact, that he was the frontrunner in the 2018 presidential race and was on his way to becoming president again — except he was barred from running because he’s serving a 12-year prison sentence after also being caught up in the corruption scandal. (Lula and his supporters have called his conviction as dubious.)

With Lula out, Fernando Haddad, a former mayor of Sao Paulo, stepped in. Haddad has tried to tie himself tightly to Lula’s legacy, and he’s made improving the economy central to his campaign. But so far, he’s failed to drum up tremendous popular support — though the dynamic may shift now that the race has narrowed to a two-person runoff.

Bolsonaro, meanwhile, has capitalized on Brazilians’ discontent with their government and its perceived inability to address the country’s economic and political ills.

But Bolsonaro’s “law and order” platform also puts his far-right extremism into focus. In a slogan that recalls a certain American president, Bolsonaro said in a broadcast to supporters ahead of Sunday’s election: “Let’s make Brazil great! Let’s be proud of our homeland once again!”

Original Source -> 4 things to know about Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Donald Trump

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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