#tf usa

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Time Cover - Enough

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January 5, 1975: On Jan. 5, 1975, The Wiz, an all-black musical version of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz with songs by Charlie Smalls, opened on Broadway after a tryout in Baltimore – and it initially looked like it was going to be a flop. According to Variety, it was only a gamble on a four-week television promotional campaign – then a radical concept for New York theatre – that reversed the show's fortunes and turned it into a smash. The original cast included future R&B star Stephanie Mills as Dorothy – and a Munchkin played by Phylicia Rashad, who would later become famous playing Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show in the 1980s and became the first black actress to win a Tony Award for best actress in a play in 2004. Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and Lena Horne were all in the 1978 film adaptation – while Canada's Cirque du Soleil helped introduce the musical to a new generation in 2015, when it co-produced an NBC special called The Wiz Live! that featured Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah and Ne-Yo and had a cameo by Ms. Mills, the original Dorothy, now playing Auntie Em. – J. Kelly Nestruck

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5 Key Takeaways From President Trump’s Speech by Glenn Thrush - March 01, 2017 - https://www.nytimes.com/ WASHINGTON — In President Trump’s world, boring is disruptive. After five-plus weeks of gleefully setting the Washington establishment ablaze and declaring a new war with virtually every public utterance, Mr. Trump took the radical step on Tuesday night of delivering a soothing comfort food of an address to a jittery Congress and skeptical public. For the first time since his swearing-in in January, Mr. Trump seemed to accept the fetters of formality and tradition that define and dignify the presidency. And while he touched on all of the hard-edge elements of the economic nationalist agenda that has impelled his executive orders and calls for “revolution,” Mr. Trump brandished a blunter rhetorical ax and, for once, delivered on his promise to speak the Reagan Republican dialect of optimism and reconciliation. Why the sudden shift? Numbers. Mr. Trump’s approval rating is the worst for any new president in recorded history — between 38 and 50 percent at a time when many presidents are in the 60s. Slamming the news media or pro-Obamacare demonstrators energizes his base, but it’s hard to move much higher in the polls without making a less partisan pitch. The other key statistic spurring his sunshine-and-civility adjustment: $54 billion, the amount of federal funding he hopes to siphon from other departments to increase spending at the Pentagon — a budget proposal that is already half-dead on arrival, judging from its lukewarm reception on Capitol Hill this week. Presidents, even those commanding comfortable majorities in both houses, need to get Congress in line, and the only way to do that is to declare peace. Here are five takeaways from the most presidential speech Mr. Trump has ever given — delivered at precisely the moment he needed to project sobriety, seriousness of purpose and self-discipline. Which Donald Trump is real? The split-screen between Tuesday’s temperate Mr. Trump and the everyday Mr. Trump was striking, to put it mildly. “The time for trivial fights is over,” said Mr. Trump, a man who spent the first 48 hours of his presidency bickering about the size of the inauguration crowd. While that statement was meant as a challenge to his establishment critics, it also seemed as if he were coaching himself. All of the previous big-stage speeches delivered by Mr. Trump, from his nomination address in Cleveland last summer to his 16-minute inaugural speech, had a gloomy, mourning-in-America quality. His aides promised a Ronald Reagan-inspired invocation of America’s future in the days leading up to his swearing-in. What he delivered, thanks to his speechwriting team of Stephen Miller and Stephen K. Bannon, was an invocation of “American carnage.” Since his swearing-in, Mr. Trump roved the airwaves and Twitter, lashing out at anyone who opposed him, and many people who didn’t. In just the past couple of weeks, the president has reiterated his description of some news outlets as “enemies of the American people,” while taking his shots at Paris, Sweden, Hill Democrats, the F.B.I., government leakers, President Barack Obama and his own communications staff, among other targets. But on Tuesday, the president rolled the dice, and went for nice. In style, if not substance, Mr. Trump delivered an address that nearly any of his Republican primary opponents — whom he once savaged as establishment stooges — might have delivered had they been standing at the rostrum. “That torch is now in our hands,” Mr. Trump said within the first few minutes of his speech, echoing, if not entirely approaching, the wispy mountaintop oratory of more polished predecessors like Mr. Obama and Mr. Reagan. “And we will use it to light up the world. I am here tonight to deliver a message of unity and strength, and it is a message deeply delivered from my heart.” Mr. Trump has made immense progress sticking to a script, but Wednesday is a new day, and the presidential Twitter finger gets itchy in the middle of the week. The big question is whether his unifying tone represents the mythical, long-awaited pivot point — or was just part of a well-written speech efficiently delivered by a gifted politician learning his new trade. A swift denunciation of bigotry Mr. Trump has been criticized for his sluggish response to violence and vandalism against Jews, blacks and Muslims during his presidency. But the opening words of his speech were dedicated to tolerance and inclusion. “Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City,” he said, “remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.” Again, it’s hard to say if his statement reflected a genuine change of approach. Mr. Trump and some allies have suggested that recent bias-related episodes might be false-flag attempts by his opponents to embarrass him. But his words were welcomed in the House chamber, greeted by some of the most sustained applause of the evening. Spiking the football in the first quarter The polls have not been especially kind to Mr. Trump lately, but there is one distinct bright spot: 56 percent of voters in a Politico/Morning Consult poll released on Tuesday said that Mr. Trump was following through on his campaign promises. This is no small matter for a president eager to prove he’s no mere talker. For all its messaging, personnel and operational struggles, Mr. Trump’s team has relentlessly executed a branding strategy aimed at projecting the image of a man of action fighting against gridlocked and corrupt Washington elites. Every day, Mr. Trump appears before the cameras where he is shown doing stuff like signing executive orders or convening panels of business, labor or political leaders. “It’s been a little over a month since my inauguration, and I want to take this moment to update the nation on the progress I’ve made in keeping those promises,” he said, taking an extended bow for saving jobs at several factories across the country, renegotiating defense contracts, scrapping the Trans-Pacific Partnership, greenlighting two new fuel pipelines and cracking down on illegal immigration and criminal foreigners. Never mind that Mr. Obama, the man Mr. Trump says left him “a mess” to clean up, had accomplished much more at this point in his term — including the stimulus package and a gender pay-equity law. For all his newfound civility and message discipline, Mr. Trump cares most about this takeaway — proving he is an effective president at a time when his administration is being portrayed in the media as short-handed, adrift and conflict-ridden. A serious case of the vagues The president’s speech had admirable length (it clocked in at just over 60 minutes), the requisite number of ovations, about 90, and a succession of punchy pronouncements. What it didn’t have was very much of an explanation on how Mr. Trump plans to govern. There were hardly any details about his proposals on the big-ticket items that will most likely define his first term. That included his Obamacare repeal-and-replace pledge, his plan to overhaul the tax code, the big infrastructure package he’s vowed to ram through, or even his plan to shovel $54 billion into the Defense Department. What’s going on with immigration? Cracking down on illegal immigration is the central pillar of Mr. Trump’s election-winning popularity with white working-class voters, so much so that it was the subject of his most decisive action thus far as president: the bungled rollout of his executive order barring migrants from seven predominantly Muslim nations. But Mr. Trump and his team sent out some seriously mixed messages in the hours leading up to the address. “We will soon begin the construction of a great, great wall along our southern border,” Mr. Trump declared, to the delight of many Republicans in the hall, who gave him a hearty standing ovation. But earlier, in a sit-down with some of the country’s leading news anchors, the president seemed to soften his stance considerably, as he has done previously in private, suggesting that legal status be granted to millions of undocumented immigrants who have not committed serious crimes. Immigration hard-liners, led by his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have long considered such a stance “amnesty.” Mr. Trump never brought up the topic again — and didn’t touch on his prior reference to legalizing undocumented immigrants — raising questions about what position he’ll stake out in negotiations with Congress. Fact Check: Trump's First Address to Congress: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/28/us/politics/fact-check-trump-congress-address.html -- Steven Macdowall I am drawing the 'Umbrella' this month https://www.instagram.com/stevenhmacdowall

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Opinion Trump, Trapped in His Lies, Keeps Lying. Sad! by Lawrence Downes - January 09, 2017 - https://www.nytimes.com Photo I: Trump by Eric Thayer // Photo II:  Trump ‘Mocking’ Disabled Reporter / He hasn’t taken office yet, but Donald Trump is lost, wandering in a labyrinth of lies and trying to drag the country in with him. Witness his reaction to being called out on Sunday by Meryl Streep. Speaking at the Golden Globes, she said she had been stunned and heartbroken to see him mock a reporter with a physical disability. It happened at a speech in 2015 in South Carolina. Mr. Trump’s target was Serge Kovaleski, of The Times, who has arthrogryposis, a condition that leaves his right arm and hand bent and rigid. “You ought to see this guy,” Mr. Trump told his audience, flailing his own right arm and hand in the air, making spastic movements, disgracing himself. The act was contemptible, and in a way unbelievable: a future president showing the maturity and schoolyard viciousness of an 8-year-old. “I still can’t get it out of my head,” Ms. Streep said, “because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.” In early morning tweets, Mr. Trump attacked Ms. Streep and swore innocence: see Photo II & III Just more lies upon lies. It all goes back to Mr. Trump’s baseless claim that he saw Muslims dancing in the streets by the thousands after the towers fell on 9/11. Challenged over this, Mr. Trump seized on a 2001 article in The Washington Post, written by Mr. Kovaleski when he was a reporter there, that he said backed up his story. But the article did not do that. It merely reported that the authorities had questioned “a number of people” who were “allegedly seen” celebrating the attack. Nothing has ever come of that “allegedly” — there has never been any evidence to substantiate Mr. Trump’s claim, not then, not now. Mr. Kovaleski did not change his story — not “totally,” not at all. And he did not grovel. Mr. Trump’s mouthpiece, Kellyanne Conway, went on TV on Monday to defend her boss. “He has debunked this so many times,” she said, casually contorting the meaning of “debunked.” (She meant “pathetically denied.”) “Why is everything taken at face value?” she said. “You can’t give him the benefit of the doubt on this and he’s telling you what was in his heart? You always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.” This is where things got really weird. Ms. Conway’s quote is a glimpse into the heart of darkness that a Trump presidency portends. She wants us to swallow Mr. Trump’s reality without question. To accept only what he says now — not what he said then — over the evidence seen and heard by our own eyes and ears. She wants us to overcome the dissonance by looking for the “truth” in his heart. The truth is getting harder to see in the flickering gaslight of Mr. Trump’s America, but it’s there. Not “in his heart,” or out of his mouth, no matter how much this man and his minions say otherwise. -- Steven H MacDowall Next Thursdayfile will be out January 12 2015 sigh up at www.thursdayfile.com

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Cover - New York - The Corruption of Trump

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Note: Thomas Loren Friedman is an American journalist, columnist and author. He writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times and has written extensively on foreign affairs including global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues, and has won the Pulitzer Prize three times. ------------------------- "This is code red" by Brian Stelter and the CNN Media team - Feb 20 2018  "Our democracy is in serious danger," Thomas L. Friedman wrote. "President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy." That's a quote from Friedman's newest column, which came out on NYTimes.com Sunday night. His column normally appears in print on Wednesdays, so this one was just for the web. It has received an enormous amount of attention. More than 2,600 comments and still growing. As Friedman told me: "Not my day. Not in print. And it may be the most widely circulated column I've ever written." His column -- titled "Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All of Us Now" -- has been at the top of the NYT's "most emailed" and "popular on Facebook" lists all day. I noticed people who are usually virulent Friedman critics praising him for writing it. There's something about the last paragraph, in particular, that struck a chord. "This is code red," he wrote. "The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office." So I called Friedman to find out how the column came about... Friedman: Something about Trump is "deeply off" On Sunday morning Friedman was driving up to Baltimore for a golf lesson... On the ride, he was thinking about Trump's tweets reacting to the new indictments... And he felt like he had to write something... Friedman: "Mueller told us the core of our democracy -- our electoral system -- had been attacked by Russia. And Trump was focused exclusively on what Mueller's report said, or did not say, about him." "To me, it really crossed a line," Friedman told me. While Trump has "broken many norms as president," last weekend belonged in a different category. In Friedman's view, "he's no longer violating norms of the presidency, he's actually violating his oath to defend and protect the Constitution." So he emailed a paragraph-long pitch to Jim Dao and James Bennett -- saying he had to write a column, just for the web, to express himself -- something he's done from time to time. "Hey, go for it," was the response from the editors, he said. Later in the day, back at home, he wrote the column in two hours and ten minutes. "What I've learned as a columnist over the years is, when you write the right column at the right time, articulating a feeling that many people have but maybe didn't know quite how to express, you can get a big reaction." He cautioned: "This doesn't happen very often." Bottom line: Friedman said "there was something in Trump's reaction to Mueller that was deeply off." It was "so unpresidential, it was frightening..." -- Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All of Us Now https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/opinion/trump-russia-putin.html ------------------------------ Steven H MacDowall Join my Blog ‘The Thursday File’ every week. My next posting > February 22, 2018 > The Thursday File #712 - sign up today! > www.thursdayfile.com

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"Black Panther" reigns at the box office Frank Pallotta emails: "Black Panther" didn't just exceed expectations, it shattered them. ( http://money.cnn.com/2018/02/18/media/black-panther-box-office/index.html ) Through Sunday, Marvel's first film with an African-American director (Ryan Coogler!) has made an estimated $192 million in the U.S. and $361 million globally. That total is the second biggest opening for Marvel Studios behind only "The Avengers;" the largest opening in the history of February; and the largest opening for an African-American director ever. All hail the king... --> BTW: Those #'s are just through Sunday -- and Monday is President's Day -- Disney projects it will bring in $218 million domestically for the holiday weekend... -- Andrew Wallenstein tweeted: "Looks like Disney has itself another billion-dollar franchise. The question is, how far north of 10 figures will it end up by the end of its global run?" "Breaking down cinematic barriers" Paul Dergarabedian told Pallotta: "'Black Panther' exceeded even the grandest box office expectations while simultaneously breaking down cinematic barriers and marking a turning point in the evolution of the genre..." - CNN - Reliable Sources -- After ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Wonder Woman,’ It’s Time for the Myth of the Fanboy to Fade Hollywood studio executives who are overgrown fanboys need to stop using the young-male demo as an excuse to make whatever they want. ( http://variety.com/2018/film/news/its-time-for-the-myth-of-the-fanboy-to-fade-black-panther-wonder-woman-1202703426/ ) ----------------------- Steven H MacDowall Join my Blog ‘The Thursday File’ every week. My next posting > February 22, 2018 > The Thursday File #712 - sign up today! > www.thursdayfile.com

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Trump's courtroom battles over global warming -- Chart: Adapted from Adler, "U.S. Climate Change Litigation In the Age of Trump: Year One"; Note: Lawsuits studied are from 2017; Chart: Axios Visuals --     A newly published paper ( http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/files/2018/02/Adler-2018-02-U.S.-Climate-Change-Litigation-in-the-Age-of-Trump-Year-One.pdf ) from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law looks carefully at the many legal battles over climate change that got underway during President Trump's first year. Nearly three-fourths seek to uphold or advance climate policies.     Why it matters: The courts are an important battleground for climate policy, in part because unwinding or freezing a predecessor's policies often requires careful bureaucratic and legal spadework that provides opponents with avenues for litigation.     The study: Columbia Law School fellow Dena P. Adler explored 82 cases, most of which were filed last year, while a few were prior cases that "pivoted" in response to Trump's deregulatory push. >> The study breaks down the cases in numerous ways, including a look at the different policy areas the cases address (see chart above). >> 2 Overall, 73% are what she calls "pro" cases — that is, plaintiffs are seeking to advance or uphold climate policies and safeguards. The balance are "con" cases that she says are designed to "undermine climate protection or support climate policy deregulation."     What's next: "Though courts have issued a few decisions and litigation has pressured agencies to publish some outstanding rules, the 'stickiness' of these outcomes remains uncertain. Neither of these results preclude an agency from subsequently rolling back the policies at issue through the rulemaking process," she writes.

Read the full story here. https://www.axios.com/breaking-down-trumps-courtroom-battles-over-global-warming-1518781697-76a28a67-7148-4d89-9c58-3d3336c2ac1e.html ---------- Steven H MacDowall Join my Blog ‘The Thursday File’ every week. My next posting > February 22, 2018 > The Thursday File #712 - sign up today! > www.thursdayfile.com