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Author: New Neo

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New Neo

Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.

The first month of Trump's presidency has highlighted marked divisions in public opinion that have been building for many years. Do you remember Obama's 2004 DNC speech? It had a dramatic effect on many listeners, and helped to set him on the road to the eventual presidency. The lines that appeared to have resonated most were these, which spoke to a deep yearning that already existed in many Americans who were listening:

During recent decades, the left's Gramscian march has allowed it to conquer several institutions: education, media, religion, and entertainment. But at the same time, it has become clearer lately that (except for the charismatic Obama) the left has been losing at the ballot box, both on the national and state level. At the moment, the majority of state legislatures and governors are in GOP hands. Both houses of Congress are as well, and of course the presidency.

In his pre-presidential life, Trump was famous for saying, "You're fired!" to people on his TV reality show. But Trump's firing of acting AG Sally Yates was no reality show. In real life, an AG advises a president on the law, but if that AG refuses to enforce an order that has been "approved as to form and legality by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel," then a likely consequence would be that the AG could be fired. The NY Times reports Yates' motivation this way:
Ms. Yates, like other senior government officials, was caught by surprise by the executive order and agonized over the weekend about how to respond, two Justice Department officials involved in the weekend deliberations said. Ms. Yates considered resigning but she told colleagues she did not want to leave it to her successor to face the same dilemma.
But I would imagine that Ms. Yates understood that her successor would almost certainly face the same dilemma, whether Yates resigned or was fired. And although I grant that Yates and other government officials may indeed have been surprised by the speed of Trump's executive order, if they were surprised by the content of the order then they hadn't been paying much attention to Trump's campaign.

Today is a day of pomp and circumstance. It's also a day many people thought would never come: Donald Trump is now the 45th president of the United States. But as I type those words, they seem far less strange than they did a year ago. Some feel a sense of relief as they watch Obamas say good-bye and fly away. I am feeling that emotion plus a cautious optimism about what Trump will actually do as president. Quite some time ago I noticed that people tend to describe themselves in different modes. If you were to ask people to give a brief summary of who they are, the first one might use words of emotion and relationship: I am a kind person who likes to talk to people and hear what they say. I have a good sense of humor. That sort of thing.

Despite some initial hesitation by Chicago authorities to call the torture of a mentally disabled white man by four young black people a hate crime, they were charged with committing one, according to the Cook County State's Attorney's office. Additional charges were: "aggravated kidnapping, aggravated unlawful restraint, [and] aggravated battery...[one was also charged with] robbery and possession of a stolen motor vehicle...[and three] also were charged with residential burglary." Many of the details of what happened to the victim can be found in this post by Professor Jacobson. This would appear to have many of the elements of the type of offense known as a hate crime, obligingly documented and disseminated by the alleged perpetrators themselves.

Okay, now we've heard everything:
Sex therapist Kimberly Resnick Anderson claims Trump winning the presidency has led to a widespread loss of libido in the bedroom among her clients. Dubbing it 'The Trump Bedroom Backlash' Resnick Anderson says she has seen it time and again in her office... The certified sex expert told DailyMail.com: 'Since Trump won a common complaint in my office is that women get more easily annoyed when their husbands or boyfriends initiate sex.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently suggested the banning in Germany of the full-face veil. The idea that a Western country such as Germany might have a right to make such laws, and to do so with motives other than racism, has certainly not been universally accepted. For example, a few days later this editorial about Merkel's statement appeared in BloombergView:
Now, elections are coming up in Germany, and Merkel rightly wants to deny support to the far-right AfD party, whose anti-immigrant thinking is driven not by prudence but by outright racism. In response, Merkel’s newly hardened position is both weak on the merits and plain bad tactics.

By now you probably have read the stories about how Trump called a meeting with the press, only to give them a dressing down. If you don't care all that much---well, the press certainly does. Just as an example, read this from David Remnick of the New Yorker:
The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump—the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory—should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered. First came the obsessive Twitter rants directed at “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live.” Then came Monday’s astonishing aria of invective and resentment aimed at the media, delivered in a conference room on the twenty-fifth floor of Trump Tower...

There's long been speculation about what President Obama will be doing after January 20, 2017. Much of it has centered around ideas connected with the international scene, particularly the UN and the post of Secretary-General. But by custom, that position has never been filled by anyone who is a citizen of a Security Council nation, so it's a career trajectory that's highly unlikely for Obama. What's more, about a month ago Obama himself expressed some thoughts on the subject of his plans. To understand what he might have been referring to, it helps to take a look at the results of the Obama years, not on the international level but at the local level of the states. During Obama's presidency, the Republicans have pretty much taken over at the state level, as this chart illustrates:

Now that Donald Trump has become the president-elect, the reactions of Democrats seem to be sorting out into two camps: the optimists and the pessimists. The optimists are saying some version of "wait and see how it goes." The pessimists are saying that the political apocalypse is coming soon or is already here. Oprah Winfrey turns out to fall into the first camp, placing herself among the optimists:
The TV host tweeted on Thursday a picture of Donald Trump at the White House with President Barack Obama with the caption 'Everybody take a deep breath! Hope lives.' She also told Entertainment Tonight that seeing President Obama and President-elect Trump together had 'given her hope'.

Last Friday, in the civil suit regarding the Sabrina Erdely story about an alleged gang rape at UVA---the attention-getting piece that portrayed "Jackie" as victim extraordinaire---the periodical Rolling Stone and journalist Sabrina Erdely were found guilty of defamation with actual malice:
A 10-person jury in Richmond, Va., found that Rolling Stone defamed a university administrator who was in charge of handling student complaints of sexual misconduct at the school... In a lawsuit filed last year, then-UVA associate dean of students Nicole Eramo alleged that the article and interviews Ms. Erdely gave about her reporting cast the administrator as the callous villain of its tale and falsely asserted that she discouraged a student identified only as “Jackie” from taking her rape allegations to the police.

When Barack Obama took office in 2008, one of the most difficult things for conservatives was the fact that he soon had a compliant and Democrat-controlled Congress to do his bidding. With the defection of Arlen Specter in April of 2009 and the seating of Al Franken as a result of the disputed Minnesota senatorial race, the Republicans lacked even the 41 votes necessary to stop the Democrats in the Senate, although they finally gained exactly that number with the surprise election of Scott Brown of Massachusetts. However, after that point, the Republicans in Congress were able to stop some of the Obama agenda after gaining the ability to muster at least 41 votes in the Senate, and after they gained the House in 2010. That's why the Democrats in the Senate triggered the nuclear option for judicial appointments in November of 2013, when they still controlled both the presidency and the Senate but the Republicans had gained enough senators to block judicial confirmation under the old (non-nuclear) rules. But under the new nuclear option rules (see this for a full explanation of how it works), a simple majority of Democrats could successfully force a vote to confirm Obama's judicial appointments, rather than needing to gain 60 votes to close down debate.

In last night's debate, Donald Trump stated that if he were president Hillary Clinton would be in jail. If you look at the entire transcript, that was the last (and most extreme) statement of a much lengthier exchange that went like this:
TRUMP: When I speak, I go out and speak, the people of this country are furious. In my opinion, the people that have been long-term workers at the FBI are furious. There has never been anything like this, where e-mails — and you get a subpoena, you get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 e-mails, and then you acid wash them or bleach them, as you would say, very expensive process. So we’re going to get a special prosecutor, and we’re going to look into it, because you know what? People have been — their lives have been destroyed for doing one-fifth of what you’ve done. And it’s a disgrace. And honestly, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, I want to follow up on that.

Last Friday night a black man named Terence Crutcher was shot and killed by police officer Betty Shelby in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The case has already received a lot of attention as one of a line of recent incidents in which an unarmed black person was killed by police, and Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan has called the video of the incident "very disturbing" and "very difficult to watch." It is quite early in this case, and experience has shown that what we know about it at this point is probably based on incomplete information mixed with at least a sprinkling of false information. So right now it's not possible to come to any firm conclusions about what happened and whether Officer Shelby will face any legal liability for Crutcher's death. Of course, that won't stop many people from having very firm opinions about it. With those caveats, here are some of the events and allegations so far:

Hillary Clinton's wobble Sunday at the 9/11 ceremony has been the talk of the news cycle, and once her camp put out the word that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia there's been a great deal of speculation about the likelihood of that. Here's a summary of the medical announcement Clinton's doctor made:
Clinton has had an allergy-related cough for some time, and during an examination on Friday, the Democratic nominee was diagnosed with pneumonia, put on antibiotics, and told to take time out to rest. She became overheated and dehydrated during Sunday morning's event, which led her to collapse. She's now home in Chappaqua and on the road to recovery.
We have no way of knowing if this is true or another lie. Only a doctor who has examined Hillary Clinton and done the appropriate tests could answer that question. But let's take a look at some possibilities.

For a long time I've conceptualized Trump voters as falling into two camps: the enthusiastic and the reluctant. No doubt there are some who fall in between, too, but I think that mainly there are those two categories. The first group consists of people who supported Trump in the primaries, either as first or second choice. They believe he would be a good president, or at least that he was the very best or one of the very best of the lot of GOP candidates who originally threw their hats into the ring. The second group is composed of people who support Trump now only because he's running against a person they consider worse, Hillary Clinton. They don't always agree on why he would be better than she, but they agree that he probably would. Some of them even detest him otherwise and think that he would make a bad president, but are still willing to vote for him as the alternative to Hillary. Members of the first group sometimes appeal to members of the second group, urging them to make sure they vote for Trump. Their arguments can vary widely. Sometimes the argument is that Trump will be a good president and will do a number of good things for the country. Sometimes it's that Trump will do one or two good things, usually involving SCOTUS justice choices and/or immigration policy. And sometimes it's that even though we don't know what Trump might do, we know that Hillary would be awful and there's at least a chance that Trump would be better.

Donald Trump made a speech recently in an appeal to black voters. I've noticed many pundits on both left and right treating this as a very unusual thing for a Republican to do (see this, for example). And here's how one commenter on my blog described it:
Trump makes the best speech of the campaign, and is the one of the first, if not the first, Republican to reach out to the black community in 50 years, a brilliant move both substantively and strategically...
Let's put aside for a moment the question of how much difference a speech can make, and treat the question of whether this sort of outreach in a speech is unusual for a Republican. On what is that assertion based? Memory? But memory can play funny tricks; that's why Google is our friend.

Alzheimer's disease is a scourge that's so common that most of us know at least one person who has had it, and often considerably more than one. It's a tragedy and an ordeal both for the afflicted and for those who love them and care for them. I probably don't have to describe the details of the terrible and progressive dementia it causes in many elderly people and a few not-so-elderly; you all almost certainly know quite a bit about it from bitter personal experience, or from reading articles or watching documentaries and movies. That's why this is very heartening news. There have been reports of effective treatments before that haven't panned out, but this one seems a bit more promising: