Massive Women’s March turnout shows Trump’s opponents are done underestimating him

Vox

Every previous winning presidential candidate — and a good number of losing ones like John McCain and John Kerry — have been popular. Even Bill Clinton, who kind of limped into office with 43 percent of the popular vote in 1992, enjoyed approval ratings in the mid-to-high 60s during his post-election winter.

Donald Trump is not like that. While Barack Obama won the votes of a decent number of people who also had a favorable impression of McCain, Trump triumphed in the face of a badly divided opposition. Perhaps his most impressive political feat was trouncing Hillary Clinton 47-30 among the 18 percent voters who viewed both candidates negatively. He got 17 percent of the vote of people who said he wasn’t qualified to serve as president, 19 percent of the vote of people who said he lacked the temperament to be president, and 23 percent of the vote of people who wanted the next president to be more liberal than Obama.

A normal person would have responded to this kind of strange victory with some sort of effort to reassure people or shore up his support. But rather than pivot or mature, Trump spent his transition months feuding with the intelligence community, offered the most divisive inaugural address in memory, and then on his first full day in office went to Langley to deliver what amounted to a campaign rally in front of the CIA’s Memorial Wall.

These antics have taken Trump much further than anyone predicted they possibly could, and so he evidently has no intention of abandoning them. But in parallel on Saturday, millions of people took to the streets in cities and towns around the country to do the one thing his opponents never really did during the campaign — take the prospect of a Trump administration seriously. After benefitting mightily from a fractured opposition that systematically underestimated his candidacy, Trump is now finally in for the fight of his life.

Donald Trump won 46 percent of the popular vote on the way to victory — a victory driven by capturing the electoral votes of seven states in which he failed to capture a majority of the vote: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, and Utah.

He was elected anyway because many people who didn’t want him to be president couldn’t bring themselves to vote for his opponent. Some of that was her own fault. But some of it was because Trump, in an odd way, was the beneficiary of the perception that he couldn’t possibly win.

People who felt he’d be a bad president felt secure in dissenting from the Democratic Party to either the right (Gary Johnson) or the left (Jill Stein) because everyone knew Clinton would win anyway. Almost everyone who had any kind of serious policy doubts about Clinton invested vast time and energy in exploring them, regardless of whether or not they had much more profound doubts about Trump, because everyone knew Clinton would win anyway. Mainstream journalists spent more time poring over potential access-seeking at Clinton’s undoubtedly life-saving charitable foundation than they did detailing the fact that Trump’s foundation was a potentially criminal fraud that appears to have had no legitimate public benefit.

Everyone knew Clinton would win anyway.

That was, obviously, a miscalculation. But it’s important to be clear about what the miscalculation was. Trump’s opponents failed to unify around a single compelling alternative. He wasn’t popular on Election Day and he wasn’t popular on Inauguration Day. And he’s not doing anything to try to turn that around.

Like any sensible pundit looking back on 2016, I am getting out of the political predictions game. But what we saw in Saturday’s demonstrations is that nobody is taking Trump’s defeat for granted anymore. The women and men who marched in cities and towns all across the country undoubtedly have different opinions about taxes and foreign policy and government email server protocol and single-payer health care and bank regulation. They agree that Trump is alarming and that it is incumbent upon them, personally, to try to come together and do something about it.

The absence of that kind of attitude among the 54 percent of Americans who didn’t vote for him last November is one of the primary reasons he was able to win.

Now that it is present, he has lost one of his main advantages.

Trump is a president who is in many ways unusually vulnerable to protest. He’s not a policy wonk who has the disposition to tune out the street theater and focus on issues. And his policy agenda, as far as we can tell, consists largely of unpopular causes like cutting taxes on millionaires, deregulating banks, and stripping millions of their health insurance. His administration’s first policy action was to prevent homeowners from getting a small scheduled mortgage discount.

He’s also a president who is uniquely vulnerable due to his conflicts of interest. Past wealthy presidents have held their assets in diversified funds managed by blind trusts in part to avoid corruption. And his conflicts run both ways — a non-corrupt president wouldn’t want his political adversaries to be able to use his private business interests against him. Million-person mass demonstrations can’t be done every day. But even relatively small-scale demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience targeting Trump-branded hotels, golf courses, office buildings, and apartments can be dramatic and telling.[...]

He won because people didn’t take the threat of him winning — or if him trying to govern as he campaigned — seriously enough to go out and stop him.

This weekend, that ended.

Trump repeats lie that 3-5M illegal ballots cost him popular vote, cites no evidence

CBS News

At a small reception for a bipartisan group of congressional leaders, President Trump claimed that 3 to 5 million illegal ballots cost him the popular vote, CBS News’ Nancy Cordes and Catherine Reynolds confirmed on Monday night. The claim is unproven.

Mr. Trump made a similar claim before. After the election, he tweeted that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” but he cited no evidence to back up his claim.

Politico first reported Mr. Trump’s comments, which were made at the Monday evening White House reception for congressional leadership, his first meeting with them at the White House.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were among those who met with Mr. Trump.[...]

Advance notice: Disqus is switching to free version only with ads

Just letting you know that as of February 8 Disqus will be adding ads to their free version. Of course they also provide the option of ad free for $10/month. I will be going back to Blogger. Not sure what it will do to all the responses

Neil Postman: The End of Education

Rav Shmuel Kaminetsky's contribution to the welfare of Klall Yisroel: Measles outbreak grows in L.A.'s Orthodox Jewish community

Los Angeles Times

Six months after California’s strict vaccine law took effect, a measles outbreak has infected 20 people, most of them in Los Angeles County, prompting a search for others who may have been exposed to the highly contagious virus.

Most of the patients live in western areas of the county, including L.A.’s Westside, the Santa Monica Mountains and the San Fernando Valley. Santa Barbara and Ventura counties each reported one case.

At least 15 of the 18 L.A. County patients either knew one another or had a clear social connection, said Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, interim health officer for the L.A. County Department of Public Health. None of the 18 could provide proof of vaccination, he said.

Gunzenhauser said the first person was diagnosed in early December, followed by 16 cases in the last three weeks of 2016, and then one more case last week.

“I’m hopeful that we’re getting to the end of this,” he said.

Hershy Z. Ten, a rabbi who runs Jewish healthcare foundation Bikur Cholim in L.A.’s Beverly Grove neighborhood, said county health officials told him a measles outbreak was affecting the county’s Orthodox Jewish community. He convened a panel last week to discuss steps that Jewish day schools and synagogues could take to stem the outbreak and ensure unvaccinated children are immunized.

“Measles is very, very serious,” he said. “Those children are at risk and they put other children at risk.”[...]

The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it.

Washington Post      The presidency is not a reality show, but President Trump on his first full day in office made clear that he’s still obsessed with being what he once proudly called “a ratings machine.”

He cares enough about it to send his press secretary, Sean Spicer, out to brazenly lie to the media in his first official briefing.

“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said. And he added a scolding about widespread reports that differ from his evidence-free assessment: “These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.”

Crowd size experts estimate Trump’s audience at far fewer than the million or more that Trump is claiming, and at far less than the size of the following day’s women’s march, which the new president has said little about. And side-by-side photographs showed the contrast between the comparatively thin gathering for Trump’s inauguration and the record-setting one in 2009 for former president Barack Obama’s first.

Ari Fleischer, a former George W. Bush press secretary, saw Saturday’s bizarre session for what it was.

“This is called a statement you’re told to make by the President. And you know the President is watching,” Fleischer wrote. (MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski pegged it as “Sean Spicer’s first hostage video.”)

The mainstream media, including The Washington Post, appropriately made clear note of the falsehoods about crowd size. The New York Times called out “false claims” in a prominent headline, and many broadcast journalists challenged Spicer immediately — although they didn’t get a chance to do so to his face, since he took no questions.

CNN wisely chose not to air the briefing in full, but to report on it and to show parts, providing context. Fox News showed it in its full glory, infomercial style.

Some journalists, afterward, sounded stunned at what had transpired.

“Astonishing,” said Jim Acosta of CNN. “Jaw meet floor” was the reaction of Glenn Thrush of the New York Times.

The reaction is understandable. Some semblance of truth from the White House ought to be reasonable enough, especially on Day Two.

But nothing about this should shock.

Anyone — citizen or journalist — who is surprised by false claims from the new inhabitant of the Oval Office hasn’t been paying attention. That was reinforced when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told “Meet the Press” Sunday that Spicer had been providing “alternative facts” to what the media had reported, making it clear we’ve gone full Orwell.

Official words do matter, but they shouldn’t be what news organizations pay most attention to, as they try to present the truth about a new administration.

White House press briefings are “access journalism,” in which official statements — achieved by closeness to the source — are taken at face value and breathlessly reported as news. And that is over. Dead.

Spicer’s statement should be seen for what it is: Remarks made over the casket at the funeral of access journalism. [...]

Rabbi Marvin Hier speaks about his Inauguration Benediction

Published on Jan 22, 2017

The first Orthodox Jewish rabbi to give an invocation at a presidential inauguration said that the biblical passages included in his approximately two minute address were carefully chosen to convey specific messages.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said that he chose verses that, in addition highlighting the concepts of being actively involved and helping others, focused the spotlight directly on the State of Israel.

In a Saturday night radio interview on Zev Brenner’s Talkline radio program, Rabbi Hier said that his statements about Israel were directed not just at President Trump and the American public but the entire world and called Senator John Kerry’s remarks about Israeli settlements blatantly false.

Maharal - Listening to wife's advice lead to Gehinom/Satan was created with woman

Maharal (Bava Metzia 59a): All those who follow the advice of their wife fall into Gehinom – This is truly incredible. We explain this also in relationship to Avos (1:5), All those who talk a lot with their wives are idle from words of Torah and in the end they inherit Gehinom. You should know that the woman is compared to Substance while the man is compared to the Form in every place. And when the Form is not separated from the Substance but rather the Form follows after the Substance entirely – he falls in Gehinom. That is because it is well known that the deficit is attached and bound with the Substance. This is alluded to by the Sages when they noted that when the woman was created the Samech was created with her. Because we don’t find the letter Samech in the Torah until the woman was created. ויסגר בשר תחתנה Bereishis (2:21) and closed up the flesh. That teaches you that with the woman was attached the deficit which is Satan who is the Angel of Death. When the Form follow after the Substance the Form obtains the deficit. That is because Gehinom is only the complete deficit as we learn from the names Gehinom itself... But this is only when the husband listen to her regarding worldly matters. But regarding household matters, “He should bend down and listen to her”. That is because it is clear that the Form stands on the Substance and the Substance serves the Form and is like a house for the Substance. Therefore regarding household matters “He should bend down and listen to her”. In contrast in worldly matters, if the Form follows after the Substance – then such is loss and deficit for the Form. However according to the other answer of the gemora that a husband should listen to his wife also for worldly matters that is because the Form stands on the Substance and thus also advice worldly matters are relevant. It is only spiritual matters that should be avoided from the wife. That is because the husband is considered the abstract Form but not the Form in the Substance. In such a case if the man follows after the Substance it would be a deficit for him. That would mean that the Form which is the abstract Form is sunken in the Substance which is a completely negative for the Form. Understand these matters in depth because they a very clear.

Bereishis Rabbah (17:9):[[ R. Hanina, son of R. Adda, said: From the beginning of the Book until here no samech 3 is written, but as soon as she [Eve] was created, Satan4 was created with her. While should one quote, That is it which compasseth-sobeb (Gen. II, 11),5 answer him: the text refers there to rivers.6

Property prices are rising in some of the old Jewish quarters in Europe

Wall Street Journal

In Poland, Barcelona, Rome and Berlin, traditionally Jewish neighborhoods have recently seen an appreciation for their heritage and an upswing in real estate prices and development. Photo: Shutterstock

In the fall, Lane Auten, an American real-estate developer who lives in Barcelona, began marketing 10 condominiums in an early 19th-century building he restored in the Call, Barcelona’s medieval Jewish quarter.

Next door is a Jewish museum that opened in 2002 on the site of a medieval synagogue. So far, half of the apartments have sold for between $650,000 and $1.35 million, said Mr. Lane, managing partner of ARC Properties, a Barcelona-based real-estate developer.

The existence of a developer that would make Jewish heritage part of a marketing plan is a big change, said Adi Mahler, co-founder of Barcelona Dreaming, a tour company that specializes in the city’s Jewish history. “There was no awareness whatsoever about Jewish heritage” for many years, said Mr. Mahler, who noted that Barcelona’s Jewish history was largely erased after 1391, when Jews were massacred or forced to convert to Christianity.

Mr. Auten’s condos are one example of a new appreciation for traditionally Jewish neighborhoods in parts of Europe. Haunted by harsh conditions for Jews over the centuries and the specter of the Holocaust, these areas are now being embraced by both Jewish home buyers and non-Jews who value their unique character. Tourists are drawn by museums, guided tours and cultural events that explore Jewish history, and cafes, bars and restaurants have opened to cater to them.

In Rome, Andrea Colavita, 34, with the help of his father, Enrico Colavita, 71, purchased a $2.1 million, three-bedroom apartment in the Jewish quarter in November. The apartment overlooks the area’s main square and synagogue. The elder Mr. Colavita lives with his wife just down the street in an apartment he bought seven years ago. [...]

Trump's Administration begins with Blatant Lies: Attacks Media regarding Turnout and Intelligence Rift

NY Times

President Trump used his first full day in office on Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.

In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency intended to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Mr. Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago.

He also called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved.

Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where Mr. Spicer scolded reporters and made a series of false statements.

He said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.

The statements from the new president and his spokesman came as hundreds of thousands of people protested against Mr. Trump, a crowd that appeared to dwarf the one that gathered the day before when he was sworn in. It was a striking display of invective and grievance at the dawn of a presidency, usually a time when the White House works to set a tone of national unity and to build confidence in a new leader.

Instead, the president and his team appeared embattled and defensive, signaling that the pugnacious style Mr. Trump employed as a candidate will persist now that he has ascended to the nation’s highest office.

Saturday was supposed to be a day for Mr. Trump to mend fences with the intelligence community, with an appearance at the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Langley, Va. While he was lavish in his praise, the president focused in his 15-minute speech on his complaints about news coverage of his criticism of the nation’s spy agencies, and meandered to other topics, including the crowd size at his inauguration, his level of political support, his mental age and his intellectual heft.

On Saturday, he said journalists were responsible for any suggestion that he was not fully supportive of intelligence agencies’ work.

“I have a running war with the media,” Mr. Trump said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community.”

“The reason you’re the No. 1 stop is, it is exactly the opposite,” Mr. Trump added. “I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.”

Mr. Trump also took issue with news reports about the number of people who attended his inauguration, complaining that the news media used photographs of “an empty field” to make it seem as if his inauguration did not draw many people.

“We caught them in a beauty,” Mr. Trump said of the news media, “and I think they’re going to pay a big price.”

Mr. Spicer said that Mr. Trump had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” a statement that photographs clearly show to be false. Mr. Spicer said photographs of the inaugural ceremonies were deliberately framed “to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall,” although he provided no proof of either assertion.

Photographs of Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009 and of Mr. Trump’s plainly showed that the crowd on Friday was significantly smaller, but Mr. Spicer attributed that disparity to new white ground coverings he said had caused empty areas to stand out and to security measures that had blocked people from entering the Mall.

“These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong,” Mr. Spicer said. He also admonished a journalist for erroneously reporting on Friday that Mr. Trump had removed a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office, calling the mistake — which was corrected quickly — “egregious.”

And he incorrectly claimed that ridership on Washington’s subway system was higher than on Inauguration Day in 2013. In reality, there were 782,000 riders that year, compared with 571,000 riders this year, according to figures from the Washington-area transit authority.

Mr. Spicer also said that security measures had been extended farther down the National Mall this year, preventing “hundreds of thousands of people” from viewing the ceremony. But the Secret Service said the measures were largely unchanged this year, and there were few reports of long lines or delays.

Commentary about the size of his inauguration crowd made Mr. Trump increasingly angry on Friday, according to several people familiar with his thinking.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump told his advisers that he wanted to push back hard on “dishonest media” coverage — mostly referring to a Twitter post from a New York Times reporter showing side-by-side frames of Mr. Trump’s crowd and Mr. Obama’s in 2009. But most of Mr. Trump’s advisers urged him to focus on the responsibilities of his office during his first full day as president.

However, in his remarks at the C.I.A., he wandered off topic several times, at various points telling the crowd he felt no older than 39 (he is 70); reassuring anyone who questioned his intelligence by saying, “I’m, like, a smart person”; and musing out loud about how many intelligence workers backed his candidacy.

“Probably everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did,” Mr. Trump said. “We’re all on the same wavelength, folks.”

But most of his remarks were devoted to attacking the news media. And Mr. Spicer picked up the theme later in the day in the White House briefing room. But his appearance, according to the people familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking, went too far, in the president’s opinion.

Mr. Trump’s appearance at the C.I.A. touched off a fierce reaction from some current and former intelligence officials.

Nick Shapiro, who served as chief of staff to John O. Brennan, who resigned Friday as the C.I.A. director, said Mr. Brennan “is deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of C.I.A.’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes.

“Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself,” Mr. Shapiro added.

“I was heartened that the president gave a speech at C.I.A.,” said Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency. “It would have been even better if more of it had been about C.I.A.”

Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that he had had high hopes for Mr. Trump’s visit as a step to begin healing the relationship between the president and the intelligence community, but that Mr. Trump’s meandering speech had dashed them.

“While standing in front of the stars representing C.I.A. personnel who lost their lives in the service of their country — hallowed ground — Trump gave little more than a perfunctory acknowledgment of their service and sacrifice,” Mr. Schiff said. “He will need to do more than use the agency memorial as a backdrop if he wants to earn the respect of the men and women who provide the best intelligence in the world.”

Mr. Trump said nothing during the visit about how he had mocked the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies as “the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” He did not mention his apparent willingness to believe Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who is widely detested at the C.I.A., over his own intelligence agencies.[...]

Despite Sabbath, Ivanka Trump and Husband Celebrate Inauguration

NY Times    See Rav Moshe Feinstein regarding full observance by geirim

For Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, celebrating the presidential inauguration by attending the gatherings on Friday night posed an obstacle to their Orthodox Jewish observance of the Sabbath.

Ms. Trump, President Trump’s older daughter, and Mr. Kushner got special permission to break from strict religious laws that prohibit them from using technology or mechanized devices, such as cars, during the Sabbath, which begins on Friday evening.

A Jewish person who was briefed on the matter but not authorized to speak publicly about it said on Friday night that they were given an exemption under the principle in Jewish law of pikuach nefesh, which suggests preserving the safety of a specific person over any religious consideration.

In the case of Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump, that would have meant being outside security escorts once the Sabbath had started.[...]