Tag: Newsweek

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Newsweek Offers Limp Apology For Birther Op-Ed Against Harris

Sen. Kamala Harris suspends her presidential campaign

Sen. Kamala Harris suspends her presidential campaign
Sen. Kamala Harris
Newsweek has offered a weak tea apology after publishing a racist op-ed by John Eastman meant to gin up birtherism against Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, in 1964 and fully eligible to run for and become vice president or president of the U.S. Instead of removing the op-ed, though, they left it intact with this disclaimer at the top of the webpage:

This op-ed is being used by some as a tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia. We apologize. The essay, by John Eastman, was intended to explore a minority legal argument about the definition of who is a “natural-born citizen” in the United States. But to many readers, the essay inevitably conveyed the ugly message that Senator Kamala Harris, a woman of color and the child of immigrants, was somehow not truly American.

The op-ed was never intended to spark or to take part in the racist lie of Birtherism, the conspiracy theory aimed at delegitimizing Barack Obama, but we should have recognized the potential, even probability, that that could happen. Readers hold us accountable for all that we publish, as they should; we hold ourselves accountable, too. We entirely failed to anticipate the ways in which the essay would be interpreted, distorted and weaponized.

As we said in our earlier note, this essay was an attempt to examine a legal argument about the difference between “natural born” and “naturalized,” the latter being ineligible to hold the office of president. In the days since the op-ed was published, we saw that it was being shared in forums and social networks notorious for disinformation, conspiracy theories and racist hatred. All of us at Newsweek are horrified that this op-ed gave rise to a wave of vile Birtherism directed at Senator Harris. Many readers have demanded that we retract the essay, but we believe in being transparent and are therefore allowing it to remain online, with this note attached.

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Trump Covers Newsweek: “Does God Believe In Trump?”

Very interesting cover story in this week’s Newsweek exploring just how and when Donald Trump, who wasn’t very known for his “deeply held religious beliefs,” came to be so warmly embraced by white evangelicals.

From spotlighting Trump’s relationship with televangelist Paula White, to a 2011 meeting with religious leaders exploring a possible run for president, to the actual birth of the “Moral Majority” movement, the author connects the dots between white evangelicals and their king, Donald Trump.

An excerpt:

It’s now obvious that Trump got an extraordinary return on investment when he cozied up to evangelicals in 2011, but what did they see in him? His biography until quite late in life would seem to be antithetical to everything they believe. (Robert) Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, thinks the answer lies in the 2015 Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. “Local Democrats and progressives wildly underestimated the nuclear event that the same-sex marriage decision was for conservative white Christians,” he says. “It was so at the heart of their political engagement. They had pushed all their resources into the fight, and they lost decisively in courts and in public opinion.”

Among the many miracles Trump performed during his campaign was exploiting white conservative Christian fear. White Christians really are losing demographic ground, if not power. America won’t be theirs for much longer because they are a shrinking portion of the electorate. But, as Trump showed to astonishing effect, they still turn out to vote at higher rates than other, larger demographic groups. And that gives their views greater weight. In 2008, white evangelicals were 21 percent of the population but made up 26 percent of the vote, Jones says. In 2016, white evangelicals had slipped to 17 percent of the total population, but they still constituted 26 percent of voters. Jones calls the 2016 election their “time machine,” Christian fundamentalists’ chance to resurrect the public opinion of 2008, when just 40 percent of Americans supported gay marriage, not the 60 percent who do now.

America’s white Protestant fundamentalist Christians are dwindling like the dinosaurs God put on Earth alongside humans 6,000 years ago before he mysteriously decided to take them away. (And who cut them out of Genesis?) “Our best estimate is that 2024 will be the first election where we have an electorate that is less than majority white and Christian,” Jones says.

I highly recommend reading the full piece over at Newsweek.

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Newsweek: Donald Trump Violated U.S. Embargo Of Cuba

The big story today in politics is the Newsweek cover story reporting that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump apparently engaged in illegal business dealings with Cuba despite the strict embargo that had been in place for decades that banned any such business

From Newsweek:

A company controlled by Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, secretly conducted business in Communist Cuba during Fidel Castro’s presidency despite strict American trade bans that made such undertakings illegal, according to interviews with former Trump executives, internal company records and court filings.

Documents show that the Trump company spent a minimum of $68,000 for its 1998 foray into Cuba at a time when the corporate expenditure of even a penny in the Caribbean country was prohibited without U.S. government approval. But the company did not spend the money directly. Instead, with Trump’s knowledge, executives funneled the cash for the Cuba trip through an American consulting firm called Seven Arrows Investment and Development Corp. Once the business consultants traveled to the island and incurred the expenses for the venture, Seven Arrows instructed senior officers with Trump’s company—then called Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts—how to make it appear legal by linking it after the fact to a charitable effort.

The payment by Trump Hotels came just before the New York business mogul launched his first bid for the White House, seeking the nomination of the Reform Party. On his first day of the campaign, he traveled to Miami, where he spoke to a group of Cuban-Americans, a critical voting bloc in the swing state. Trump vowed to maintain the embargo and never spend his or his companies’ money in Cuba until Fidel Castro was removed from power.

He did not disclose that, seven months earlier, Trump Hotels already had reimbursed its consultants for the money they spent on their secret business trip to Havana.

My questions are:

• Will this affect or be of interest to undecided voters?

• Could this possibly move the needle with Cuban-American voters in the vital swing state of Florida?

From last night’s Rachel Maddow Show:

UPDATE – The Hillary Clinton campaign released this statement on the latest Trump scandal:

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Newsweek: “Why Gay Marriage Is Good For Straight America”

Andrew Sullivan writes an excellent and heartfelt article for Newsweek Magazine regarding marriage equality and his own marriage.

They call it the happiest day of your life for a reason. Getting married is often the hinge on which every family generation swings open. In my small-town life, it was far more important than money or a career or fame. And I could see my grandmother’s point: the very lack of any dating or interest in it, the absence of any intimate relationships, or of any normal teenage behavior, did indeed make me seem just a classic loner. But I wasn’t. Because nobody is.

“In everyone there sleeps/A sense of life lived according to love,” as the poet Philip Larkin put it, as well as the fear of never being loved. That, as Larkin added, nothing cures. And I felt, for a time, incurable.

[snip]

Yes, the main stumbling block was religion. But we were not talking of religious marriage and were more than eager to insist, as in New York state, on the inviolable religious freedom of churches, mosques, and synagogues to retain their bans on gay marriage. We were talking about civil marriage—and in that respect, religious tradition had long since ceased to apply.

Civil divorce changed marriage far more drastically for far more people than allowing the small percentage who were excluded to be included. And no one doubted an atheist’s right to marry, outside of any church or any religion, just as no one doubted the marriages of childless couples, or infertile ones. In fact, every single argument against marriage equality for gays collapsed upon inspection. And when the data showed that in the era of gay marriage, straight marriage had actually strengthened somewhat, divorce rates had declined, and marriages lasted longer, even those who worried about unintended consequences conceded that the argument was essentially over.

I recommend reading the whole article.