Thread: List of Anti-Trump Totalitarians To Be Remembered

Gates Slams Trump’s Foreign Policy: ‘He Doesn’t Listen to People’

By Jack Heretik May 1, 2016 12:48 pm

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates criticized Donald Trump’s foreign policy Sunday on ABC’s This Week,days after Trump gave a speech detailing his views on foreign policy in Washington, DC.

When host Martha Raddatz asked Gates what a Trump presidency would mean for American national security, Gates said that Trump “doesn’t understand the difference between a business negotiation and a negotiation with sovereign powers.”

“He doesn’t understand that there’s a give and take in international relations that is different than in the business community. And just one further comment: He talks about walking,” Gates said. “How do you walk away from China, a country that holds a trillion dollars in US treasuries and with which we have a half a trillion dollars in trade every year and at the same time say we’re gonna launch a trade war against them at the same time we’re asking them to pressure North Korea.”

Gates said that Trump’s policies appear unrealistic or do not include details.

“For example, he, on the one hand says we need to be a more reliable ally to our friends and in the next breath he basically says we’re gonna rip up all those burden-sharing agreements that we’ve had over the decades with them and make them go their own way if they don’t pay for everything,” Gates said. “He says some things that it’s hard to disagree with. The allies ought to be doing more. But how do you get them there when you’re dealing with 28 sovereign countries and, you know, nobody argued harder for them to do more than I did.”

Gates said that Trump does not listen, a problem that past presidents the former defense secretary worked with did not have.

“One of the things that worries me, Martha, is that he doesn’t listen to people. He believes that he has all the answers, that he’s the smartest man in the room. … I’ve worked for some very different presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, one of the things they all had in common was a willingness to listen to people who had experience and then make their own independent judgments,” Gates said.”Now they’ve gone in different directions, but they never assumed that they had all the answers and that’s one of the things that troubles me.”

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo Joins Growing List Of World Leaders Fed Up With Trump

“Mr. Trump is stupid. He’s very stupid,” the mayor said.

05/12/2016 08:23 am ET

Let’s hope Donald Trump wasn’t planning on taking his private jet to Europe anytime soon: The number of cities that would welcome him is shrinking by the day. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo became the latest head of a European capital to speak out against the presumptive U.S. Republican presidential nominee.

“Mr. Trump is stupid,” Hidalgo said this week while meeting with new London Mayor Sadiq Khan — also not a Trump fan. “He’s very stupid. My God.”

Paris Mayor Joins Growing List Of World Leaders Fed Up With Trump

A right jab at Facebook

But the government has no right to inquire into media bias

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES - - Thursday, May 12, 2016

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Some conservatives have “unfriended” Facebook, meaning they don’t want to be a “friend” or user anymore. Friendship is a two-way street, even as defined on social media, and the news, denied by its management, that Facebook routinely suppresses news that appeals to conservative audiences, shouldn’t surprise anyone. Many newspapers and radio and television networks have been doing this for decades, tilting coverage to favor liberal and left-wing candidates and values.

The technology blog Gizmodo reported this week that a former contractor claims that Facebook news “curators” (meaning “editors”) routinely manipulate the trending news feed found at the top right corner of its Internet home page. The practice is intended to eliminate stories from conservative news sources such as The Washington Times and Breitbart unless the topics are “validated” by coverage by the left-leaning, such as The New York Times and CNN. This frustrates grown-ups who want to decide for themselves what news is fit to print, but the possibility that bias creeps into the coverage of the news is old news.

Facebook defended its procedures with argle-bargle from its lawyers: “There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives.” The social network says computer algorithms perform most of the searching for the hottest topics, which may be true, but computers do not write their own software. Not yet. Humans do.

Facebook has an enormous audience — an estimated 1.6 billion users across the globe. Even a dash of its “like” or a smidgin of “dislike” can tilt public opinion in a powerful way. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune of South Dakota, a Republican, has written to Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman of Facebook, asking for an explanation of how trending topics are chosen.

Mr. Thune framed his inquiry as a matter of “consumer protection,” but other Republicans have been blunter. “Facebook must answer for conservative censorship,” says Republican National Chairman Reince Priebus.

Frustration and even anger is understandable, but the answer to suppression is not government intimidation. The Federal Communications Commission attempted in 2014 to plant “investigators” in newsrooms to see how editors make decisions about news coverage.

Broadcasters were to be asked such questions as, “What is the philosophy of the news station?”

Outrage followed, and the scheme was quashed. How editors, or even “curators,” do their jobs is none of the government’s business. Newspapers and radio and television networks must always be outraged at such attempts, whether from left or right, because government curiosity will always lead to suppression of whatever displeases the government and the bureaucrats who impose policy.

Censorship, correctly understood, can only be imposed by governments. Private suppression of opinion — the government that can’t infringe your right to say what you please can’t make you say something you don’t want to say, either — is protected by the

Constitution. The distinction is important. Facebook is a private company, and like a newspaper declining to print a letter to the editor, is entitled to choose whose speech to print, even if it distorts the debate. But it’s the best way to lose friends and squander influence.

EDITORIAL: Feds take a swing at Facebook for media bias