Who Makes Policy Campaign 2016 Edition

If Russia-US Relations Weren’t Already Strained, Russia Using Iranian Airbase Won’t Help

The state of play this weekend started to get interesting with respects to Russia-US relations. During the G20 summit in China this weekend news reports came out that Russia and the United States had come to terms regarding Syria.

But that lasted only a day at most when reports started to come in that Russia had backed away from some of its promises.

So, this is nothing new. Diplomacy is a slow thing sometimes.

However, reports started coming in today as the G20 leaders are leaving China that Russia is planning to resume its use of an Iranian air base.

My feeling is that this is not a good development. First, Iran is no friend of the United States. I cannot imagine that the Supreme Leader of Iran telling the Russians no because we don’t like it; in fact, I think the opposite is a likely driver for Iran. This also means that there is a possibility of a Russian-Iranian partnership in the area which will weaken US interests. I wonder if the Iran airbase deal is what was the precursor to Russia and the United States walking away from the negotiation tables on Syria.

For more on this see here and here.

Is the TPP and most trade deals stand-alone issues? Should they be?

For many labor unions,  defeating the TPP and electing politicians sworn to oppose it is the paramount objective of this election cycle. The TPP has also alienated individuals that are normally allies of free trade. The TPP is a flawed agreement at best with few outspoken supporters outside of the administration and some big business interests. So why is Obama still pushing hard for this agreement? The TPP is part of a much bigger strategy to deal with a resurgent China. The Obama administration recognizes that Isis and terrorism are not existential threats to the U.S., but that the growing influence of China with the second largest economy in the world could be. The president is not alone in this idea. The former head of the CIA and NSA, general Michael Hayden, agrees with this view. He believes that the preoccupation with terrorism has blinded the U.S. to a potential future threat. The facts are that China has been increasing it’s diplomatic activities within neighboring regions.  China has also begun to increase its military spending to boost its ability to project its military power. With every move, China has grown more confident as they demonstrated when they created artificial islands in the South China Sea for the purpose of expanding its territorial claims into international waters and airspace.  The concerns over China’s expanding influence go back before the formal discussion of TPP agreement began in 2010. During testimony before U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in March 18, 2008, concerns were raised over Chinese diplomatic moves and increased trade with potential allies. They fear that increased economic and diplomatic ties could weaken America’s influence in key parts of the world. For a detail look at the testimony go here. Later this week, look to see if there are any important developments on the TPP as Obama returns from visiting Asian countries after what was a tense and unusual G20 meeting in China. Obama strongly believes that the best way to check Chinese power and influence is through stronger economic ties between the U.S. and China’s neighbors. Is he right? Should we support flawed trade agreement for the sake of security and future American influence in the world? Do we have time to renegotiate the agreement before China cements its hold in the region? Obama doesn’t seem to think so.

Must See TV

If you’re feeling bombarded by empty calorie campaign ads, here are a few classics from the past that are must see political TV (and one that never made it to the screen).

Daisy, by the Johnson campaign, is the most famous attack ad of all times. It only ran once.

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Confessions of a Republican, also targeting Goldwater in the 1964 campaign, could run today if anyone had the attention span to listen at this length.

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I like Ike could have been made by the Disney JV team.

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Any Questions  Of the 13 people featured who said they had “served with John Kerry,” only one actually did. If you’ve heard the term “swiftboating,” this is it.

The Willie Horton ad was the racist masterpiece of Lee Atwater, the modern father of dirty campaigning.

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Morning in America for Ronald Reagan sounds like it’s pitching margarine or beef for dinner (is that the same narrator?). But it worked.

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Way back in 2008, there were still questions about whether Hillary Rodham Clinton, or any woman, could pass the ‘commander-in-chief test’. 3 AM was supposed to set those to rest–“It’s 3 AM. Who do you want answering the phone?”–while implicitly attacking Barack Obama’s lack of foreign policy experience. (Of course, at the time her 3 AM experience came primarily from being a First Lady. But never mind.)

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This 4 1/2 minute ad for Gerry Ford never ran, as the Times recounts today. It’s chilling references to the Kennedy assassination, contrasted with upbeat marching band music, was horrifying to focus groups. Check out his red shirt.

Laughter attacking Spiro Agnew (look him up if you don’t know who he is) is about as meta as you can get. They could have run it against Sarah Palin or Trump as well.

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Vlad and Boris singing “Mrs. Palin” is, of course, my favorite– even if it isn’t a political ad and they aren’t Russians. And here’s their background (I think) according to one of their professors.

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Useful websites on the U.S economy

 

Moody Analytics- www.economy.com

FocusEconomics- www.focus-economics.com

Bureau of economic analysis, Department of Commerce- www.bea.gov

Bureau of labor statistics- www.bls.gov

Yahoo Finance/Yahoo News- finance.yahoo.com/www.yahoo.com

Bloomberg Markets- www.bloomberg.com

Wall Street Journal- www.wsj.org

The Hill-www.thehill.com

National Public Radio- www.npr.org

 

Keep Your Friends Close, and Your Enemies Closer

It’s an election year and there is an overwhelming barrage of information being thrown at us from every angle. It’s difficult to know what to believe and what to dismiss as nonsense. As educated citizens we are more than capable of making that discernment – as long as we aren’t filtering out the articles we disagree with – thereby allowing ourselves to have a more holistic view of the current political environment. Immigration is one of the most talked about topics in U.S. politics at the moment, largely due to the dramatic and controversial stance Trump has taken on it. As outlandish as his statements might seem to us, there is clearly a large portion of the population with which his thoughts on the topic resonate. In order to combat his dangerous rhetoric intelligently, it is important to understand why the other side thinks the way they do, and so I’ve compiled a list of both conservative and liberal websites that have reported on not only immigration, but all the other relevant issues facing our nation today as well. Comparing and contrasting the stories that come out of these partisan news outlets, which span the entire political spectrum, will be helpful in shaping a more coherent and well-rounded view of what version of the news the various members of the public are being fed.

 

Conservative outlets:

Townhall.com

Nationalreview.com

Michellemalkin.com

 

Liberal outlets:

Dailykos.com

Liberaloasis.com

Moveon.org

Thenation.com

 

-Michelle

Presidential Campaigns

Ahead of today’s “Who Makes Policy?” class discussion I just wanted to quickly post about primary season. The book does a good job of providing us with detailed information about the nominating process and what candidates must do to secure their party’s nomination. John Oliver did an outstanding job at taking an in depth look at primary season and pointed out some of the serious flaws in our system. Give it a watch before class if you have a chance:

For those of you who don’t know, John Oliver is a comedian and former correspondent on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” who now hosts his own show on HBO called “Last Week Tonight.” Oliver takes long looks at specific issues and does a fantastic job a making complex issues accessible and easy to understand. If you are not so politically inclined, you will love Oliver for his humor and his ability to communicate these difficult issues effectively.

Trump’s Trip to Mexico…and then Phoenix

Trump has been wavering recently when it comes to his stance on Mexican immigration, as per this link Professor Robbins shared with us last week, and now his trip to Mexico has added yet another facet to the story. It seemed that he was softening his stance on Mexican immigrants, a move deemed unacceptable by most of his supporters…but in true Trump form, he quickly backpedaled just hours later during a speech in Phoenix and referred back to his original plan of providing no amnesty to undocumented Mexican immigrants and having Mexico pay to build a wall along our border. This article shows just how damaging Trump’s words are to our foreign relations with Mexico. Mexican President Nieto is not happy, and who can blame him?

Unfortunately, we missed a great opportunity to build the wall while Trump was in Mexico, since its purpose after all is to keep “undesirable” people from entering the U.S. Along that vein, here’s a quick satirical post from The New Yorker guaranteed to make you laugh.

-Michelle

 

Everything You Would like to Know and More about Climate Change.

First thing that I would like to point out is that climate change and global warming are not synonymous.  Global warming is just one symptom of the much larger problem of human-caused climate change. Global warming is the term used to describe the increase in the earth’s temperature and while climate change includes warming it also refers to changes in environmental factors such as wind, precipitation, the length of seasons as well as the strength and frequency of extreme weather events like droughts and floods. Which means I’ll have much more to write about 🙂

Some of the websites that I have noted to have great information are:

In preferential order…

https://www.theguardian.com/us/environment

http://climate.nasa.gov

http://www.skepticalscience.com

https://insideclimatenews.org (Non-Partisan)

http://www.desmogblog.com

http://grist.org

***Addition***

https://www.federalregister.gov/