Billy Martin, the better choice, was apparently unavailable.
Ariel Edwards-Levy/HuffPost:
Americans Don’t Think The Government Needs ‘Experts’
Just 17 percent of Donald Trump voters want him to appoint people with government experience.
James Hohmann/WaPo:
The Daily 202: Trump over performed the most in counties with the highest drug, alcohol and suicide mortality rates
Jonathan Chait/New York Magazine:
We are all inclined to believe that great events must have great causes, which is why so many people refused to believe that a lone assassin killed John F. Kennedy. In politics, the temptation to attribute a political defeat to the errors of one’s ideological rivals is overwhelming, and liberal intellectuals are wantonly indulging the temptation. Many of the disputes are so abstract they only barely touch upon actual political choices that may have impacted this, or any, future election. Everybody is simply rebranding their own doctrinal beliefs as a political road map.
Not that that ever happens here. But there is seduction in the “politics is simple: I was right all along” school of thought.
Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:
Though last month’s election provided Trump and his fellow Republicans unified control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate for the first time since 2006, the latest Allstate/Atlantic Media Heartland Monitor Poll shows the country remains closely split on many of the key policy challenges facing the incoming administration—and sharply divided on whether they trust the next president to take the lead in responding to them.
In addition, on several important choices facing the new administration and Congress, the survey found that respondents who voted for Trump supported a position that was rejected by the majority of adults overall. That contrast may simultaneously encourage Trump to press forward on an agenda that energizes his coalition, while emboldening congressional Democrats to resist him.
Rick Perlstein/Washington Spectator:
America’s media establishment endlessly repeated Republican claims that Hillary Clinton was a threat to the security and good order of the republic, because she stored official emails on her own server, and erased about 33,000 of them she said were private. The New York Times ran three front-page stories about FBI director James Comey’s surprise review of another set of emails found on the computer of Anthony Weiner’s wife, Clinton aide Huma Abedin. This second review, however, like the first, ended up showing no wrongdoing.
Thomas E. Patterson/Shorenstein Center:
Negative news has partisan consequences. Given that journalists bash both sides, it might be thought the impact would be neutral. It’s not. For one thing, indiscriminate criticism has the effect of blurring important distinctions. Were the allegations surrounding Clinton of the same order of magnitude as those surrounding Trump? It’s a question that journalists made no serious effort to answer during the 2016 campaign. They reported all the ugly stuff they could find, and left it to the voters to decide what to make of it. Large numbers of voters concluded that the candidates’ indiscretions were equally disqualifying and made their choice, not on the candidates’ fitness for office, but on less tangible criteria—in some cases out of a belief that wildly unrealistic promises could actually be kept.
False equivalencies abound in today’s reporting. When journalists can’t, or won’t, distinguish between allegations directed at the Trump Foundation and those directed at the Clinton Foundation, there’s something seriously amiss. And false equivalencies are developing on a grand scale as a result of relentlessly negative news. If everything and everyone is portrayed negatively, there’s a leveling effect that opens the door to charlatans. The press historically has helped citizens recognize the difference between the earnest politician and the pretender. Today’s news coverage blurs the distinction.
Indiscriminate criticism also works against the party in power. If voters think everything is bad or going downhill, some of them invariably think that it’s time for a change. In our two-party system, that handicaps the in-party, whether a Republican or Democratic administration. It’s hard for those in power to maintain public support if their policy successes get little note and their shortcomings draw headlines.
Mother Jones:
We Talked to Experts About What Terms to Use for Which Group of Racists
Surprise: They don't always agree either.
White nationalist
- A person of white European decent who believes in a white nation for and run by whites. White nationalists believe race and IQ are related and that black people are inherently inferior in IQ. There is a dispute among white nationalists about whether Jews are an enemy to white people or are actually as white as any European. (SPLC)
- A term used by white supremacists as a euphemism for white supremacy. Some white supremacists try to distinguish it further by using it to refer to a form of white supremacy that emphasizes defining a country or region by white racial identity and which seeks to promote the interests of whites exclusively, typically at the expense of people of other backgrounds. (ADL)
Yoni Appelbaum/Atlantic:
How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?
Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.
In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.
