KevinC
4361
From the article, it sounds like it’s not her apartment, it’s the government apartment she lives in and it’s used for government work. Still seems wasteful to me but the way the information is presented feels very misleading. It opens with this:
The budget cuts were issued by Tillerson. The curtains were ordered during the Obama administration. They make it sound like Haley is slashing budgets while using what’s left to buy herself some sweet curtains.
This type of thing just pisses me off because it gives ammunition to the fake news crowd. There are a million grotesque things the Trump administration can be attacked for every single day, there’s no need for this kind of Fox News spin.
Fuck the New York Times.
Damn, that is shitty journalism.
She’s an ambassador, and ambassadors live in government-funded homes. The fact that it’s in NYC is interesting, but not all that relevant. Crappy reporting.
KevinC
4364
She’s the UN ambassador and given that’s where the UN is headquartered, I think it makes sense. I think it’s worse than crappy reporting, it’s intentionally misleading reporting. There’s no story here, other than the cost of curtains for a government facility. They mention security considerations for the curtains but no details on what that entails, so I’m guessing they can’t just run to Target and throw something up over the windows.
You can point a laser at a window and it can pick up the vibrations of the sounds inside. Aka, high-tech evesdropping.
I imagine these curtains are some kind of high-tech defense against that.
Last post math error, so never mind.
Interesting coincidence, though: Paul Manafort’s 4000+ sf brownstone in Brooklyn is going to be sold at auction as an asset forfeiture. The market price is estimated at something around $4 million, and the estimated rental rate is about $9,000. So, does seem like the state department is wasting money on a $58,000 monthly rental rate, they could buy a place like this one.
The “fake news crowd” doesn’t need ammunition. They’ll shoot from the hip no matter what the New York Times prints.
I’m trying to find some part of that article that’s misleading…it’s just stating facts. Whoever placed the order and whoever ordered the budget slashed, there’s no denying that the State Department paid a lot of money for curtains while cutting most everywhere else. Maybe the curtains were a necessary expense, who knows? Certainly no-one on QT3, though apparently there are plenty of opinions.
Anyway, both sides of Curtaingate2018 get a graf to present their argument. Seems about as much rigor as required for what will amount to a fart in hurricane.
KevinC
4369
Nah, I don’t buy that. The article is framed in a very misleading way, it’s only until 6+ paragraphs in that they let it be known that the order was placed not only before the budget cuts, but by a completely different administration. It has nothing to do with Nikki Haley, but her name is prominently displayed in the headline and the initial lead-in which implies a connection between her spending and the budget cuts. Like, “Look, everyone else is having to deal with budget cuts while Nikki Haley splurges on curtains for her apartment”. It’s bullshit journalism.
So I agree and disagree with you here, but let me elaborate. I think for the hardcore Trump support you’re absolutely correct. They’re so divorced from reality already that I don’t think this moves the needle much. Maybe there are a few straying few who begin to doubt and this reinforces their position, but they’re probably not statistically significant.
But this does have an impact on the type of people that I know that despise Trump, never voted for him, but are extremely cynical about the news media, the government, etc. It’s the crowd that the “both sides” arguments have been so effective against. Yeah, sure, Republicans are horrible but what are we to do? Both sides are bad. Similarly, various news articles about Trump sure sound bad, but what about all that fake news? You can’t really trust anybody!
That’s why this sort of thing pisses me off so bad. There are a million articles that could be written justly criticizing Trump and his administration of abominations. There’s no need to mislead in this case, or if you don’t believe that’s what they did, then click-bait the article at the very least.
Strollen
4370
The enemy of my enemy is an important concept to remember.
Strollen
4372
Terrific piece by Andrew Sullivan
[conservatism] Most of the time, it is about loss, and mourning it, while understanding that change is inevitable. Burke famously saw society not as a contract between individuals, but as a contract between generations: to pass on to the future the good and viable things we inherited from the past. This emphatically does not mean resistance to all change. In fact, it understands some change as critical to conservation.
To me, the ultimate hubris is when one group, especially young people, say we reject the collective wisdom of numerous society over hundreds or thousands of years, and seak to replace it with our cool new idea, that will solve XYZ problem. I’m happy to be the person, who says. “do you really understand why society as decided that we shouldn’t do that.” Before we ask the whole nation to changes, let’s slow down run some experiments at the state and local level. That’s true for gay marriage, legalization of pot, or prostitution, charter schools, single payer healthcare, or different ways of voting.
But are young people actually asking for something new, or are they seeing the examples of other nations succeed more than us?
Gun control was solved by Australia, so the idea of banning guns isn’t new or strange. It has been done by similar cultures.
Legalization of pot or Prostitution, the Netherlands has had both for decades. Again,. It something new or strange, and something that has been done by well established societies for years.
Universal healthcare, well take you pick. Germany, the Netherlands, France, Canada, Japan, Korea and so on. Pick you favorite.
Subsidized college education? Actually, we did that in the 60s and 70s, until the Boomers decided that they preferred tax breaks to paying for future generations, like their parents did.
Australia and Belgium have mandatory voting, and a few states have mail in voting. Nothing odd there, just conservatives trying their best to suppress the vote.
Seriously, these are only new or “liberal” ideas if you believe the world starts and ends at our borders.
KevinC
4375
Thanks for summing that up, @legowarrior. I thought along the same lines with the same examples when I read @strollen’s post. While I don’t agree with Strollen on some of the examples he used, I do agree with where he’s coming from. Sometimes there are good reasons for doing things the way we do them, sometimes not. A smart and intelligent Conservative party is important to represent the other view, we just haven’t had one for… well, pretty much my entire lifetime.
Sullivan, like Krauthammer, is a knob.
I’m terribly sorry the philosophy he built his entire worldview out of has turned out to be George W Bush.
jpinard
4377
To be perfectly honest, Republicans have been doing this for the last 20 years. They fail, then they try to force that failure from the state level to the national level, then from the legislative branch to the judicial branch in finitum. At this point we need to look at what works in other countries. I’d like to point out something rather important that kinda nullifies your entire argument. Republicans broke the system, and it’s not “young” Republicans who destroyed it. So saying we go back to something that works means you need to drag the entire Republican Party and half the independent parties back off the cliff.
We know what works in this world. I still say, Denmark is a model country we should fashion ourselves after, outside of the recent attempts to raid system for the wealthier classes.
Sullivan, like Krauthammer, is a knob.
I’m terribly sorry the philosophy he built his entire worldview out of has turned out to be George W Bush.
Quoted for truth.
Universal healthcare, well take you pick. Germany, the Netherlands, France, Canada, Japan, Korea and so on. Pick you favorite.
Britain’s my favorite. They’ve had universal health care for the last 70 years. Somehow, in poor benighted America, we’re still not quite ready for such a bold experiment. Best to make changes slowly and cautiously here. Maybe in another 70 years we will be ready for it.
At least another 150, you flaming radical!
Nesrie
4380
I also believe we need to slow the pace of demographic and cultural change. It is happening too fast, even for America, to sustain our society’s coherence and cohesion. The elite indifference to mass immigration — especially the illegal kind — is an ugly pact between Republican elites, eager for cheap, exploitable labor, and Democratic elites, who cynically encourage it because they think it will give them a reliable voting bloc.
It’s still peddling the same bullshit. You cannot wake-up and say hey everyone who is not white and doesn’t dream of going back to the 50s, please slow down, have less children and keep your culture to yourself. Oh, and the illegal immigrants, they’re not all from Mexico.
Conservatism, as it’s been seen for decades, only seems to defend the individual from the state if they’re white. If they’re not white, the state, the federal government, cops… they don’t care. You see proof of this over and over again. Where are all these conservatives trying to protect the individual who got shot in his home, the same group that would demand safety in their homes. This groups is gone. They’re not speaking up and their convictions mean nothing if they’re not willing to lose a little to retake what they claim his their political identity.
Conservatives have not and never will protect shit from shit other than capital from the people.
Calling Sullivan a knob is a calumny on knobs.
