What does it mean to be a good man? Rethinking masculinity in the age of Donald Trump — Quartz

This approach is not about furthering your personal ambitions; it is about learning to put others before yourself.

What does it mean to be a good man? The election of US president Donald Trump, and his subsequent inauguration, has led many of us to worry about the example that he is setting for boys and young men now coming of age in America. Trump’s style of leadership—bullying, narcissistic, violent, and indifferent to the natural world—is a caricature of the basest traits of conventional masculinity. So too is his definition of success, which involves objectifying women and equating people’s worth with their pocketbooks.

As wilderness guides and mentors who work closely with young men and teenage boys, we’re especially alarmed by the fact that, to some voters, these traits weren’t just flaws to be overlooked—they were Trump’s selling points. And it seems that Trump’s behavior may offer other Americans permission to indulge in the worst behaviors associated with masculinity. “The Trump Effect,” as a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016 explains, means that “students have been emboldened by the divisive, often juvenile rhetoric in the campaign,” and that “Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation.”

And yet, as the incredible mobilization of protestors over the past two weeks has shown, there is also reason to believe that Trump’s presidency can galvanize a new level of organized opposition and new horizons of personal growth. From the millions of people—including men—who joined the Women’s March, to those that showed up at airports across the country in support of Muslim refugees, a clear resistance is brewing. Now is the time for men, young men, and teenage boys to align their personal journeys towards manhood with this groundswell. It’s time for us to rethink masculinity—starting with a willingness on the part of men to understand that they don’t have all the answers, and to listen more than they speak.

Read the rest of the article here: What does it mean to be a good man? Rethinking masculinity in the age of Donald Trump — Quartz

Trump Voters Stand to Suffer Most From Obamacare Repeal and a Trade War – NBC News

by MARTHA C. WHITE

Donald Trump made it an early priority to dismantle the top domestic and economic achievements of his predecessor’s administration, pushing for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) and eschewing global trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

But his most ardent supporters might have a surprise coming: Many Americans who would bear the brunt of Trump-administration policies are the same people who chose the GOP candidate for president in November.

“I think you’re going to get a disproportionate impact on people who supported Donald Trump but maybe don’t realize that his policies may end up hurting them instead of helping them,” said Michael O. Moore, a professor of economics and international affairs at George Washington University.

Read the full report here: Trump Voters Stand to Suffer Most From Obamacare Repeal and a Trade War – NBC News

Message to Michigan’s Gov. Snyder: Invest in Education!

Source: Message to Gov. Snyder: Invest in Education | Superintendent’s Notes

Trump Orders on Immigration Rattle Some Educators – Education Week

Travel ban and uncertain fate for DREAMers stoke fears

By Corey Mitchell & Francisco Vara-Orta

February 3, 2017 | Updated: February 6, 2017

President Donald Trump’s sweeping order that halted residents of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States sent shock waves through some of the nation’s schools, leaving educators scrambling to assure frightened refugee and immigrant students that their schools should be safe places.

The effort to calm those fears comes as some educators grapple with uncertainty of their own: not knowing the next steps the White House will take on immigration and how it will affect their students. And that uncertainty had heightened even more over the weekend after a federal judge …

READ THE FULL BLOG POST HERE: Trump Orders on Immigration Rattle Some Educators – Education Week

Betsy DeVos Would Take Ed. Department’s Helm With Clipped Wings – Education Week

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of education, testifies in a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing before senators considering her nomination.

—T.J. Kirkpatrick/Redux for Education Week

By Alyson Klein

February 3, 2017

School choice advocate and billionaire GOP donor Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Department of Education, has been at the center of a social-media maelstrom and stirred more opposition than any other nominee to lead the agency in its more than three-decade-long history.

But regardless of those strong feelings, it remains to be seen whether DeVos—if confirmed, as appears likely—would have the clout to be an effective education secretary.

The litany of prohibitions on the secretary’s role in the year-old Every Student Succeeds Act means DeVos would take office with far less executive…

READ THE FULL BLOG POST HERE: Betsy DeVos Would Take Ed. Department’s Helm With Clipped Wings – Education Week

Stocks Fell. Are Investors Finally Taking Trump At His Word? | FiveThirtyEight

By Ben Casselman

Filed under Stock Market

During the runup to the election last fall, a vocal group of economists warned that a surprise win by Donald Trump would send financial markets into a tailspin.¹ Instead, the opposite happened: After initially tumbling as the results came in on election night, markets surged the day after, and have risen steadily ever since.

Until today, that is. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down more than 120 points, making for its worst day since the election. The broader S&P 500 and the tech-focused Nasdaq Composite were down sharply as well. (Markets rebounded a bit near the end of the trading day.) To be clear, the declines stopped well short of what most investors would consider a “crash,” but they were enough that many market-watchers are predicting the end of the post-election “Trump rally.”

So what happened? Explaining market behavior is a fool’s game. But at risk of being proven a fool, let me offer a theory: Investors are waking up to the fact that they need to take Trump literally, not just seriously.

Regular FiveThirtyEight readers are already familiar with this literally/seriously construct — my colleague (er, boss) Nate Silver wrote about it over the weekend. The basic idea is that during the campaign, many in the media failed to take Trump seriously (by, among other things, doubting he could win), but insisted on taking his pronouncements literally (obsessively fact-checking his claims). His supporters, this argument goes, knew to do the opposite: They took him seriously but not literally.

Trump won the election, so the “seriously” question is no longer in doubt. But whether to take him literally was more of an open question, at least until last week, when Trump began making good on many of his campaign promises.

Here’s where the markets fit into this:

READ THE FULL BLOG POST HERE: Stocks Fell. Are Investors Finally Taking Trump At His Word? | FiveThirtyEight

14 Versions Of Trump’s Presidency, From #MAGA To Impeachment | FiveThirtyEight

By Nate Silver

Filed under The Trump Administration

When faced with highly uncertain conditions, military units and major corporations sometimes use an exercise called scenario planning. The idea is to consider a broad range of possibilities for how the future might unfold to help guide long-term planning and preparation. The goal is not necessarily to assess the relative likelihood of each scenario so much as to keep an open mind so you’re not so surprised when events don’t develop quite as you’d expected.

This technique might be useful in the case of President Trump. He’s made so much news in his first two weeks that it feels as though he’s been president for two months — or two years. I worry that we, the community of Trump-watchers, may be making too many extrapolations from this small sample of data and have become too narrow-minded in our efforts to imagine what might come next. Play with a few variables — such as Trump’s relationship with Republicans in Congress, his approval ratings, and whether he’s a real authoritarian or just sort of a troll — and you’ll soon find yourself wandering down some interesting paths in which Trump’s presidency is variously a stunning success or a threat to the future of the American Republic — or both at once.

Take David Frum’s recent article at The Atlantic (“How to Build an Autocracy”) about one possible future Trump could build, for instance. Frum doesn’t rely on a straight-line extrapolation of what we’ve seen from Trump so far. Instead, he imagines a scenario in which Trump crosses Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and shifts toward a more populist economic program, with lots of spending on infrastructure and social welfare. Using that fairly popular agenda, Trump wins re-election. But Trump wouldn’t be some sort of Bloombergian center-left technocrat, Frum says. There would still be plenty of nationalism and social populism mixed in with his economic populism. He’d also continue to defy and disrespect democratic norms and institutions, using the presidency as a platform to bully the opposition and enrich himself. It’s a kinder, gentler, more insidious, more media-savvy form of authoritarianism: “a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland,” as Frum notes.

No, things probably won’t unfold in exactly this way. The point is that it’s a plausible outcome. If the past year and a half has taught us nothing else, it’s that things in American politics often aren’t as certain as people assume, especially when it comes to Trump.

Here, then, is a list of 14 plausible futures for Trump, grouped into a few broad categories. Some of them are mutually exclusive while others can be mixed and matched. And there are undoubtedly many possible futures that I haven’t considered.¹ But I hope that these make for a reasonably representative range of possibilities. If you find yourself feeling a strong urge to rule some of them out, ask yourself whether there’s really enough evidence to do that given that we’re just 1 percent of the way through Trump’s first term.

READ THE FULL BLOG POST HERE: 14 Versions Of Trump’s Presidency, From #MAGA To Impeachment | FiveThirtyEight

Under A New System, Clinton Could Have Won The Popular Vote By 5 Points And Still Lost | FiveThirtyEight

By Harry Enten

Filed under 2016 Election

 

Virginia’s House of Delegates has taken the first step toward awarding the state’s electoral votes proportionally, rather than via the current winner-take-all system. The move would make Virginia the third state, along with Maine and Nebraska, to allocate Electoral College votes by giving one to the winner of each congressional district and two to the statewide winner. The change, which was approved by a House subcommittee, still needs to pass the entire House. And even if that happens, it would face strong opposition from Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe and the state Senate, where an identical bill failed to make it through committee. But this isn’t the first time Republicans in Virginia and other states have raised the possibility of moving away from winner-take-all allocation. How much of an advantage could Republicans gain in presidential elections by moving states to a system that distributes electoral votes based on the number of congressional districts each candidate wins?

We can check by using Daily Kos Elections’ newly released data that breaks down presidential vote by congressional district. The main takeaway: In an Electoral College in which every state awards its votes by congressional district, Hillary Clinton could have won the national popular vote by 5 percentage points and still lost the White House.

Simply put, the way the country’s congressional districts are drawn maximizes Republican votes. Clinton won the national popular vote by 2 percentage points, but she won only 205 congressional districts, compared to 230 for Trump.¹ The median electoral vote (or tipping point state) in the current system was in Wisconsin, which Trump won by less than a percentage point. Trump won the median congressional district, meanwhile, by 3.4 percentage points.

But it’s not just that more congressional districts lean Republican than lean Democratic. Rather, many districts lean a lot more Republican. Clinton would actually have won a few more electoral votes in 2016 had all states used proportional allocation by district (though she’d still fall short of 270).

READ THE ENTIRE POST HERE: Under A New System, Clinton Could Have Won The Popular Vote By 5 Points And Still Lost | FiveThirtyEight

BATS: Making a difference!

Dear BATs and BAT Supporters

Thank you to the thousands who continue to speak out against the confirmation of Betsy DeVos.  No matter the outcome, we have made a difference!  There has never been, in the history of confirmations, this much backlash for a cabinet candidate.  Things must be so  bad for DeVos that an organization run by Bobby Jindal (former LA Governor) paid a half million dollars to run pro DeVos ads on T.V. today.  The American public, thankfully, will not be fooled!

BATs sent over 8500 letters, our exposure of a free fax system saw over 14,000 faxes sent to Sen. Toomey’s (PA) office, and national reporting that phone lines were jammed with calls from citizens telling their Senators to say NO to Betsy DeVos.

BATs have been busy on social media trending #DumpDevos and #TaketheDevosPledge on twitter – if you are on twitter check it out and tweet to those hashtags

Parents and Teachers in Colorado, Nebraska, and Ohio protested their Senators who had committed to voting for DeVos – check out Colorado https://www.facebook.com/BadassTeachersAssociation/posts/1200148876720652

We are hearing the vote on DeVos could happen either late Monday or early Tuesday – that is still a fluid announcement.

Once again, regardless of the outcome, we have fought hard and made a difference – now we unite and fight together!

Please wear all black tomorrow to protest Devos!

Check back with BATs and engage with us in the month of February.  Here is our calendar.  You can get event information here https://www.facebook.com/BadassTeachersAssociation/

Finally, we are beginning our February fundraising drive.  We are hoping you will consider becoming a $10 a month supporter! Empower BATs to make a difference. We rely on grassroots donations to sustain what we do. Read a statement from Executive Director      Marla Kilfoyle   https://www.facebook.com/BadassTeachersAssociation/photos/a.493503337385213.1073741827.492035944198619/1200943796641160/?type=3&theater

In Solidarity,

Marla Kilfoyle, Executive Director BATs

Melissa Tomlinson, Asst. Executive Director BATs

The BATs Board of Directors and Steering Committee Directors

Source: Badass Teachers Association

We Don’t Need a Permit to Resist: 2nd Week of Protests at the Kent County Airport in Solidarity with Muslims, Immigrants and Refugees

We Don’t Need a Permit to Resist: 2nd Week of Protests at the Kent County Airport in Solidarity with Muslims, Immigrants and Refugees
by Jeff Smith (GRIID)
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For the second week in a row, a good-sized crowd turned out to say no the President’s Executive Order that would restrict and ban certain refugees, immigrants and Muslims from coming into the US.

An estimated 300 people showed up at the Kent County Airport yesterday to resist the Federal government’s policy. This was about half as many people who came out last Sunday .

READ THE FULL BLOG POST HERE: https://griid.org/2017/02/06/we-dont-need-a-permit-to-resist-2nd-week-of-protests-at-the-kent-county-airport-in-solidarity-with-muslims-immigrants-and-refugees/

Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy

For the second week in a row, a good-sized crowd turned out to say no the President’s Executive Order that would restrict and ban certain refugees, immigrants and Muslims from coming into the US.

An estimated 300 people showed up at the Kent County Airport yesterday to resist the Federal government’s policy. This was about half as many people who came out last Sunday. 

The amount of people wasn’t the only difference at yesterday’s protest. The police presence was significantly larger that what was there last week, especially early on. There were nearly 20 police vehicles patrolling throughout the 2 hours the protest lasted, with law enforcement from the airport security, the Kent County Sheriff’s Department, the Grand Rapids Police Department and the Michigan State Police.

The same designated protest area was created, like last week, but most people refused to go to that space, instead, people initially…

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