Mediaboss Marketing

The New York Public Theaters presentation of William Shakespeares 400-year-old play, Julius Caesar was embroiled in controversy this month, with protests over a choice to costume the titular character as President Donald Trump. This wardrobe decision was controversial because senators plot to stab Caesar to death in the play.

Now that this run of Julius Caesar has come to an end, actor Corey Stoll has written a piece for Vulture about what it was like to star in the play. Stoll had the role of Marcus Brutus, a reluctant assassin of Caesar.

Although the play is explicitly about the pitfalls of assassination, Stoll wrote that following through with the play amid the protest eventually felt like a contribution to the resistance. These days, that term is loaded to evoke the phrase #resist which refers to a rallying cry against Trump.

The protesters never shut us down, but we had to fight each night to make sure they did not distort the story we were telling, wrote Stoll in the piece that was published Friday. At that moment, watching my castmates hold their performances together, it occurred to me that this is resistance.

Watch video of two protestors disrupting a performance:

Stoll, who memorably played an eventually murdered politician in the first season of House of Cards, said that he had no idea this production would portray Trump so explicitly before signing on to the role.

Stoll was frustrated by the choice at first, as he feared involving Trump would overshadow the rest of the performance.

A passage from Stolls piece:

When I signed on to play the reluctant assassin Marcus Brutus in this production, I didnt know Caesar would be an explicit avatar for President Trump. I suspected that an American audience in 2017 might see aspects of him in the character, a democratically elected leader with autocratic tendencies. I did not think anyone would see it as an endorsement of violence against him. The play makes it clear that Caesars murder, which occurs midway through the play, is ruinous for Brutus and his co-conspirators, and for democracy itself ...

After four weeks in the rehearsal room, we moved to the theater and I saw Caesars Trump-like costume and wig for the first time. I was disappointed by the literal design choice. I had little fear of offending people, but I worried that the nuanced character work we had done in the rehearsal room would get lost in what could seem like a Saturday Night Live skit. I was right and wrong.

chudakov2 via Getty Images

After the presidents eldest child,Donald Trump Jr., blamed this production for the actions of the gunman who fired on a baseball team made up of Republican congressmen, Stoll began to fear for his own life.

Like most Americans, I was saddened and horrified, but when the presidents son and others blamed us for the violence, I became scared, wrote Stoll.

The production was plagued with disruptions from protestors, but fortunately had none that caused physically critical harm.

Read the whole piece at Vulture.

More here:
'Julius Caesar' Star Considered The Play To Be Donald Trump 'Resistance' - HuffPost

While in Russia, Stephen Colbert sent a tweet to President Donald Trump and announced he was considering a White House run.

"I am here to announce that I am considering a run for President in 2020, and I thought it would be better to cut out the middle man and just tell the Russians myself," Colbert said on the Russian late-night show Evening Urgant on Friday.

As the American TV host continued poking fun at allegations that President Trump's campaign may have colluded with Russia , Colbert added, "If anyone would like to work on my campaign, in an unofficial capacity, please just let me know."

Russian host Ivan Urgant joined in on the fun saying, "Its a pleasure to drink with the future U.S. President. To you, Stephen. I wish you luck. We will do everything we can so you become President."

Colbert tweeted a picture of himself in Russia to the President Thursday with the caption, "Don't worry, Mr. President. I'm in Russia. If the 'tapes' exist , I'll bring you back a copy!"

Go here to see the original:
Stephen Colbert Tweets at Donald Trump and Mulls 2020 Run - TIME

View Caption Hide Caption

Just in time for the renewed, fast-tempo debate over health care in Washington, public health researchers at Georgia State University have produced a pair of studies that help underline just whats at stake.

The more provocative of the two papers has intriguing national implications: In large swaths of the United States, swing areas that handed the presidency to Donald Trump last year, a white womans chances of dying from breast cancer have skyrocketed.

One common factor linking politics and womens health is suggested but unproven: a fatalistic despair that better times will ever come.

First, some background.

After much secrecy, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Thursday unveiled the Senate version of the Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. There are multiple differences that are still being analyzed, but the Senate plan walks much the same path as the one passed by House Republicans in May.

Protections for those with pre-existing conditions would be weakened. Government-assisted coverage for those with lower incomes would shrink and eventually be subject to a cap.

Obamacare had put us on the road to health care as a right, paid for by the wealthy. The current Republican effort would return us closer to the status quo ante. A safety net would remain in place to help the most abjectly poor, but the rest of us would again have to prove ourselves economically worthy of good health.

Rural Georgia would continue to be a desert of health care, and thus economic development. Earl Rogers, a good Republican and president of the Georgia Hospital Association, referred to the proposed Senate cuts to Medicaid as devastating.

Which brings us to that first study by GSUs School of Public Health. A team led by Lia Scott has discovered a cluster of an aggressive form of breast cancer in South Georgia. Its one of four in the nation. Inflammatory breast cancer cant be detected through mammograms and thus is often caught only in its late stages.

African-American women are at greater risk. Poverty may lie at the root of the situation. In that sense, the cluster fits a well-worn stereotype of breast cancer victims.

It is the second GSU study that shatters the breast cancer clich. Lee Rivers Mobley, the lead author, also had a hand in the first study.

The science of public health is the study of disease and treatment outcomes in community settings. Mobleys team realized that while many researchers had examined the health care access made available to minorities in largely minority neighborhoods, something was missing.

Mobley looked at hyper-segregated communities in which 90 percent or more of the residents are white. Few of them are in the South. We are a racial jambalaya that way. Rather, the 522 counties in 40 states that Mobley looked at stretch from the tip of Maine, run through Appalachia, then shift to the upper Midwest and West.

These arent poverty-stricken counties far from it. But neither are they home to big cities.

What Mobley has found turns breast cancer assumptions upside down.

If you just look at someones race or ethnicity, the white person is less likely to be diagnosed late, she said. But if they live in one of these hyper-segregated communities, theyre more likely to be diagnosed late.

And thus more likely to die from the disease.

Im really wondering, what is it about the lifestyle of these females in these highly segregated white communities that is detrimental to their health? Mobley said.

Mobley isnt a student of politics, but I am. So let me be the one to say that, Southern states aside, her map of highly segregated white communities in the U.S. looks very much like the coalition of Rust Belt states that Trump united last year to win the White House.

Source: Georgia State University School of Public Health

One year before Trumps victory, two Princeton University economists completed a study, since updated, that showed mortality rates among Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and most age groups in healthy decline.

The study found only one exception, a group in which deaths by suicide, alcohol, drug poisoning and liver disease were increasing at a rate unseen anywhere else in the world.

That group: middle-age white Americans whose educations went no further than high school and thus were most likely to be displaced by automation or watch their jobs moved overseas. People who thought they had nothing more to lose became the backbone of the Trump electorate. When Trump said, Make America great again, they were his primary audience.

In an interview, Mobley said more research is needed to figure out why so many of these women are dying of breast cancer. Going in on the ground is expensive, but its really the only way to know whats going on, she said.

But her teams paper hints that a resigned attitude toward breast cancer and its treatment may be just one more symptom of death by despair. It is peculiarly limited to white communities. In highly segregated Asian communities, for instance, residents have lower instances of late-stage breast cancer diagnoses.

The GSU paper identified one theory worth exploring:

In recent decades, whites have gained less relative to their parents while minorities have gained more, which has eroded the relative position of whites, and may explain why whites, who actually have more in the U.S. than minority groups, may feel that they are losing ground.

This sense of pessimism can lead to despair and a sense of failure, which can manifest in unhealthy behaviors and a fatalistic attitude.

Thats just a theory. But its also a solid reminder that health care, economic development, politics and individual self-worth are all of a piece. Theyre all tied together.

The question is whether these pockets of despair, this deep well of Trump support, will be helped by the Obamacare repeal measure that now sits in the U.S. Senate. One suspects not.

Like Loading...

Previous

Georgia 2018: Begala says Evans reminds him why Im aDemocrat

Next

Georgia 2018: Gov candidate struggles with healthcare question onCNN

Here is the original post:
A new health care debate, Donald Trump, and a spike in breast cancer deaths - Atlanta Journal Constitution (blog)

Qatar is home to the USs largest military base in the Middle East and a long-time US ally. Since its Gulf neighbors, led by Saudi Arabia, imposed a blockade two weeks ago, president Donald Trump has enthusiastically praised the blockade and attacked Qatarcontradicting the messages from his own Defense Department, State Department, and Senate Republicans. His ex-ambassador to Qatar, who abruptly stepped down last week, this week took to Twitter to cheer the State Department for chiding the Saudis.

That same day, Trump chastised Chinas attempts to rein in North Korea, tweeting that it had not worked out. That must have made for an uncomfortable meeting, just hours later, between top Chinese defense officials and diplomats and the US secretaries of State, Rex Tillerson, and Defense, James Mattis.

US foreign policy experts who spoke to Quartz, many of whom work or worked in the National Security Council, State Department, or Pentagon in the past, say theyve rarely seen such a wide-open divide between what a US president is saying and long-stated US government agenda, or between the president and his own top policy and security advisors. It looks like we have two governments at the moment, said Edward Goldberg, a professor at New York Universitys Center For Global Affairs, and author of The Joint Ventured Nation: Why America Needs A New Foreign Policy.

Aside from contradicting his own officials, Trump has made a habit of bypassing them. This week his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and the Trump Organizations former legal counsel are in Israel for peace talks with Israeli and Palestinian authoritiescutting out the State Department and its decades of experience. Kushner will brief Trump, Tillerson, and national security advisor HR McMaster on his return, according to the White House. During Trumps last visit to the Middle East, Kushner sat in on a meeting with Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, while McMaster was left outside, reportedly for hours.

White House officials seem to have given up trying to reconcile the conflicting approaches. Asked on Air Force One on June 21 how the presidents tweets affected Mattis and Tillersons meeting with Chinese officials, a spokeswoman had only this enigmatic response: The president is not going to project his strategy. And tweets speak for themselves. While Trump has focused on a few hot spots, the result is that the bureaucrats and generals are running much of US foreign policy.

Traditionally, the National Security Council (NSC) is supposed to serve as the presidents chief advisory body on foreign policy, funneling information from State, Defense, and intelligence agencies into a cohesive action plan. Some tensions are normal; in the Barack Obama administration, friction between the Oval Office, NSC, State, and Defense ran high over how to respond to ISIL and the Russian invasion of Crimea, among other topics.

But this time is different. Mattis, McMaster, and usually Tillerson are increasingly united around traditional US policy goals, as in Qatar. Trump, backed by a tiny group of personal confidantes with no foreign-policy experience, including Steve Bannon and Kusher, is disregarding them.

Not only are officials from these agencies openly contradicting the president; more quietly, some are recommending that his public statements be ignored. US foreign policy still works fine if the international community realizes they dont have to react to every Trump tweet, explained one defense department official, who asked not to be named.

The message to the rest of the world is that it is not a systematic policy development process, said Stephen Biddle, a defense policy expert at the Council of Foreign Relations and a former advisor to the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is poorly managed, poorly coordinated, and is going to be a challenge for any US embassy to try to understand and explain. You cant take a garden variety statement from the president or the secretary of State as US policy, said Biddle.

In the worst case, this confusion could cause the US to bumble into a war. We might find ourselves in a major military conflict with Assad, Iran, or Russia, without knowing why, exactly, or what US interests are, said Ilan Goldenberg, a director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, and a former State Department chief of staff.

Some military heads of command have already had a conversation about what to do if Trump gives an order they cant comply with, said a former National Security Agency analyst who still consults for the US government, citing direct conversations with military agency personnel. If it gets to a point beyond their comfort level, theyre well trained by the military not to disobey, said the defense official. Instead, expect the military leaders to just say Im out.

Kushners close relationship with Saudi prince Mohammad bin Salman, the 31-year old who has just been named successor to the aging King Salman, has shaped Trumps embrace of Saudi Arabia, analysts say. He has also helped moderate the presidents views on China. Because he has the presidents ear at any time, his influence has proven hard to counteract. Kushner has proven tough to work around, one lobbyist in DC with foreign clients said.

But Kushners foreign-policy inexperience is a risk for the situation now developing in the Middle East. Its much more dangerous than other previous spats, said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. What the Saudi royal family is doing is arguing whether the ruling family of Qatar has legitimacy, he said. If the Saudis want to push it all the way to its logical end, this could become a very dangerous crisis in the Gulf.

Moreover, the special prosecutor investigating the Trump campaigns possible ties to Russian election hacking is now investigating Kushners business dealings. If he becomes a bigger focus of the probe his star, and his influence, is likely to fade.

One Washington, DC consultant to Middle East governments compares Trumps stance on Qatar to a car with no driver but only a set of brakesin the form of State, Defense, and the NSC. The brakes are all that is stopping the tensions around Qatar turning into an all-out war against a US ally.

One emerging outcome of this is that foreign policy in general is increasingly under the control of the military. Mattis has a tremendous amount of autonomy, billions of dollars of weaponry at his disposal, and political capital, said Goldenberg. He can make decisions and back them up with real action. In particular, Mattis has been given full responsibility for troop levels in Afghanistan, normally something the president decides.

Described as both deeply thoughtful and extremely aggressive, Mattis earned a fearsome reputation for leading Marine troops in the bloody 2004 attack on Fallujah, but said last year he thought the Iraq war was a strategic mistake. Since taking the Defense job, he has urged for the US to provide more military support for anti-Iranian forces (paywall) in Yemen, and has armed Syrian Kurdish fighters.

McMaster, himself a general with experience in the Middle East and Afghanistan, has ex-Army officials Derek Harvey and Joel Rayburn on his team, giving even more heft to the military point of view. In contrast, Tillerson, as a civilian voice on foreign policy, is hampered by running a department with large numbers of senior posts and ambassadorships still unfilled, while trying to defend its budget, which Trump has targeted for nearly 30% cuts.

Taken together, the team is smart and well-respected, said Goldenberg. But, sometimes things cant be figured out with a military solution, he said. Sometimes they are grayer and murkier and uglier than good guys and bad guys.

A White House spokesman, Michael Short said that questions about a disconnect between the presidents words and the State and Defense departments actions were nebulous claims. Trump and Tillerson, he said, have both stated publicly that there are steps that Qatar needs to take to address concerns about support for terrorists and extremists. Given the high stakes involved, the United States is disappointed that this dispute between our partners in the Gulf has not been resolved.

The State Department is still pointing to a diplomatic solution. The president and the secretary both want to see the Qatar dispute resolved quickly, one official said. Through the secretarys phone calls and meetings, he believes it can be resolved.

Follow this link:
Under Trump, US foreign policy is increasingly being left to the generals - Quartz

By NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images.

Even before Donald Trump was sworn in to office, he began declaring victories on behalf of the American worker. The bizarre public relations campaign began in November, at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, where he announced that his Art of the Deal-style negotiating skills had prevented 1,100 jobs from being sent to Mexico. In January, after Ford canceled plans to build a plant in Mexico, he tweeted, This is just the beginningmuch more to follow. Weeks later, he delivered a speech in front of a South Carolina Boeing plant, during which he managed to make a sexist joke about how airplanes, unlike women, can still look good at the ripe old age of 30, and boasted, My focus has been all about jobs, and jobs is one of the primary reasons Im standing here today as your president, and I will never, ever disappoint you. Seven, five, and a mere four months later, how are things working out at those companies? Lets take a look!

Carrier, CNBC reported this week, will be laying off 600 employees over the next five months. Ford announced on Tuesday that it would be producing its Focus line in China. And Boeing, 16 weeks after Trump stood in front of a Boeing Dreamliner and declared himself the savior of the Working Man, confirmed Friday that it would be cutting 200 jobs at that very South Carolina plant.

Of course, its hardly fair to blame Trump for global, cyclical, and secular economic trends that are largely beyond his control. But then, it was hardly fair for Trump to try to take credit for every alleged bit of good job news, either. And hey, were willing to give Trump a pass on Carrier, Ford, and Boeing, so long as he can admit that all of his previous bogus JOBS announcements were fake news, too.

Dont hold your breath: Trump, after all, cares about appearances first and substance last, or never, which is why he tasked his chief economic adviser and treasury secretary with rushing out a one-page, double-spaced bullet point tax plan so that he could claim to be making progress on tax reform (the theoretical bill, which has yet to be written, has been delayed until mid-September). Its why hes made a huge showing of signing a dozens of executive orders, which are mostly just directives for government agencies to review rules. Its why his big, much-touted Infrastructure Week amounted to, essentially, a call to privatize air-traffic control and a speech in which he held up a big binder then dropped it on the floor for effect. Its why he took credit for saving 20,000 jobs that were actually saved months before he was elected. Its why he strangely claimed that his trip to Saudi Arabia saved millions of jobs (a stat he upgraded from thousands in a matter of 24 hours, because why not.)

Still, its actually sort of amazing to behold the pace at which his stunts have fallen apart. Memo to the employees of the next company at which he shows up: take cover.

If you would like to receive the Levin Report in your inbox daily, click here to subscribe.

Of course Trumps commerce secretary built a wall that violated zoning laws in the Hamptons

We apologize if were started to sound like a broken record but on John Jacob Astors grave, billionaire Wilbur Ross is one of Donald Trumps most perfect Cabinet picks: a real life, time-traveling 19th-century robber baron who for the life of him still cant wrap his head around why history treated Marie Antoinette so unfairly. To recap, Ross, whose net worth hovers around $2.5 billion:

Tried to kill a story about his secret Wall Street fraternitys annual event, which consisted of off-color jokes, hazing rituals, and a drag show that involved singing about seven-figure bonuses;

Commissioned a pair of custom-made $500 velvet slippers with the Commerce Department stitched on the toes;

Complained on Bloomberg TV that the 1 percent is picked on . . . for political reasons, and that poor people could easily join his tax bracket if they wanted to (Education is the way that people get out of the ghetto);

Described a U.S. airstrike as after-dinner entertainment for the paying guests at Mar-a-Lago;

Returned from Trumps big trip abroad to praise the lack of protesters in Saudia Arabia, where protesters are executed;

And, just this week, pitched an evening of cocktails and hors doeuvres as a way to convince people to work in factories.

So while its a relatively small signifier of being a wildly out-of-touch rich person, we were thrilled to learn Friday that Ross had previously ticked that all-important box of pissing off ones neighbors in the Hamptons by violating zoning laws. Per the New York Daily News:

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross once built an illegal wall on the perimeter of his swanky Southampton estate to block the noise from the American Indian reservation across the street and the traffic along Montauk Highway. When the billionaire Cabinet member was told he couldnt have the wall, he waged a three-year legal battle with the local zoning board of appeals that he ultimately lost . . . The wealthy investor applied for a variance with the towns zoning board of appeals in January 2001, shortly after purchasing the home for $1.35 million. To bolster his case, he hired an acoustic expert, who found that noise levels in his yard were as much as four times louder than the local ordinance would permit at night. When the board took too long to hear his application, Ross pre-emptively built the barrier a 6-foot fence on top of a 3-foot berm along the property line adjacent to Montauk Highway.

Naturally, that didnt sit well with the board, and Ross ultimately sold the house for $4 million, $2.65 million more than what he paid for it.

Al Gore cant catch a break, quote of the day edition

Al Gore has come into you fellas business . . . He has made $3 or $400 million in your business. And he's not very smart," Warren Buffett's business partner Charlie Munger reportedly told a small group of investors at the annual Daily Journal meeting. He had one obsessive idea that global warming was a terrible thing . . . So his idea when he went into investment counseling is he was not going to put any CO2 in the air . . . he found some partner to go into investment counseling with and says we're not going to have any (carbon dioxide). But this partner is a value investor and a good one. So what they did is, is Gore hired staff to find people who didn't put CO2 in the air. Of course that put him into services. Microsoft and all these service companies were just ideally located. And this value investor picked the best service companies. So all of a sudden the clients are making hundreds of millions of dollars and they are paying part of it to Al Gore. Al Gore has hundreds of millions [of] dollars in your profession. And he's an idiot. It's an interesting story. And a true one.

Hedge fund managers attempt at humor lands . . . poorly

Yikes, Bill Ackman:

The altercation occurred at this years SkyBridge Alternatives (SALT) Conference, a popular Wall Street confab held in May and started by hedge-fund impresario Anthony Scaramucci. Both Joe Biden and Ackman were featured speakers during the event. During a private V.I.P. dinner that night the question of why Biden didnt run for president in 2016 was raised once again, by former Florida governor and 2016 G.O.P. presidential contender Jeb Bush, who asked Biden, Why didnt you run?

Biden explained that part of the decision stemmed from the death of his son Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015. The room grew quiet as Biden became emotional, and said: Im sorry . . . Ive said enough. Thats when Ackman blurted out Why? Thats never stopped you before.

The formal, and understated dinner conversation suddenly turned tense, according to three people who were present and confirmed both the substance and the wording of Bidens responses.

Biden, these people say, turned to someone seated near him, and asked, Who is this asshole?, referring to Ackman.

Ackman was most recently in the news for losing $4 billion on his Valeant investment, so perhaps this is a sign he should just sit out the rest of 2017.

Elsewhere!

Steven Mnuchins fiance accidentally makes the case for higher taxes (The Hive)

Britains Financial Power Is Already Seeping Away (Bloomberg)

Big Banks Clear First Phase of Federal Reserve Stress Tests (N.Y.T.)

Short-Seller Nailed Home Capital, Then Got Stung by Buffett (Bloomberg)

Can Uber Ever Make Money? (Financial Times)

Has Silicon Valley Finally Jumped the Shark? (The Hive)

Madoff Clients Fighting for Their Fortunes Get a Hand From Madoff (Bloomberg)

When Helicopter Parents Hover Even at Work (N.Y.T.)

NASA Fact Checks Goop Over Wearable Body Stickers (Vanities)

Octopus, Seal Duke It Out in Ocean Fight (Toronto Sun)

Excerpt from:
Does Everything That Donald Trump Touches Die? - Vanity Fair