Politics
Portland “Riots”
Recently I moved to Portland, Oregon. Portland is a very clean and safe city, albeit one with a lot of homeless people allowed to camp out on the street. Crime here is miniscule by the standards of Chicago – rather than seeing murders every day (with multiple murders and shootings compressed into one story since it isn’t “news”), you can actually see leading news stories about a guy who got his bike stolen, with a picture of the thief from a security camera.
Now Portland is in the national news for a different reason. After the election, protestors have been taking to the streets. I was in a cab back from the airport Thursday night and my twenty minute ride became a 1 1/2 hour ride since the protestors were blocking bridges and highways. It was a bit unnerving because you were just sitting in traffic with no information and it could go on indefinitely.
The protestors have been walking through neighborhoods and shopping areas and blocking bridges and the police have mostly left them alone. They did break business windows in an area less than a mile from where I live such as this Bank of America ATM bank branch. They set a couple of fires in dumpsters too. But generally they were pretty calm and the police followed them and didn’t bust their heads, Chicago-style.
A few comments in response to Charles Lipson regarding Donald Trump
Professor Charles Lipson published a good article entitled What Happens After the Electoral Earthquake?.
I have a few disagreements with it, however.
Prof. Lipson assumes that the published position papers, policy speeches and the content of the stadium speeches Trump has been giving for months are irrelevant. This is incorrect. Contrary to what everybody says, Trump has been comparatively specific about what his policy positions are. The best-founded prediction is that Trump will try to do what he repeatedly and firmly said he would do in all the various policy areas.
Prof Lipson says: “… Republicans couldn’t simply say they would repeal Obamacare. They had to promise to replace it with some kind of health-care policy, probably one featuring nationwide insurance markets, health-care savings accounts, medical liability limits, and subsidies for the sick and poor.”
This is exactly what Trump ran on. Universal health care with a large competitive market component. This is actually the optimum position under current circumstances. Trump’s position on this was published early, and it is a top-line blueprint for what he will try to get through Congress, with elbow room for negotiation.
“Trumping the Elites”
She had it all—the pliant media, the tech oligarchs, Wall Street, the property moguls, the academics, and the all-around “smart people.” What Hillary Clinton didn’t have was flyover country, the economic “leftovers,” the small towns, the unhipstered suburbs, and other unfashionable places. As Thomas Frank has noted, Democrats have gone “from being the party of Decatur to the party of Martha’s Vineyard.” No surprise, then, that working- and middle-class voters went for Donald Trump and helped him break through in states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa—that have usually gone blue in recent presidential elections.
Yes, but. The Democrats also offer a vision of more taxes, more regulation for the ostensible benefit of unsubstantiated lefty causes such as global warming, more cronyism (see: more regulation), more divisiveness, more abuses of power against out-of-favor individuals and groups, and retrenchment in foreign affairs. Despite media spin, you don’t have to be an unemployed coal miner or small-business owner to oppose such things.
(Via The Right Coast.)