“big problem with Donald Trump’s signature plan to create a National Garden of American Heroes. And, for once, it has nothing to do with culture-war bickering about just who should be included in the national statue display.
Instead, artists, curators and critics who have reviewed the recent request for proposals have a more practical worry: America doesn’t have enough quality sculptors or museum-caliber foundries to make this happen on Trump’s speedy timeline.”
We do need a badass national statue garden, but Trump shouldn’t be in charge of it. It should be based on bipartisan agreed upon heroes.
“Pennsylvania’s 600,000 Latino voters helped send Donald Trump to the White House for a second term, played a key role in electing a GOP majority in the Senate, and kept the House in Republican hands by flipping two districts, including the ancestrally Democratic U.S. House seat that includes Hazleton.
But these voters, after turning sharply right in 2024, are strongly disapproving of the president’s performance several months into office, if recent polls are to be believed. April surveys showed cratering approval ratings among Hispanic voters who had shifted so dramatically, with just 27 percent approving of Trump’s job performance, according to the Pew Research Center. The New York Times/Siena College poll echoed these findings several weeks later, with just 26 percent of Hispanic voters approving of Trump’s tenure.”
““It’s been completely destructive to our lives,” Taylor said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine, adding that he and his family have faced increased security threats because of Trump’s order. “I don’t want to go out there and say this order achieved the president’s objective of destroying my personal life, but the reality is that I had to step away from work because I couldn’t do the work that I did anymore with this blacklisting in Washington.””
“Trump’s proclamation says the National Guard troops will play a supporting role by protecting ICE officers as they enforce the law, rather than having the troops perform law enforcement work.”
Trump inherited money and business from his dad, and made a lot of money through his celebrity, but as far as his actual businesses, he mostly spent a lot of money and then used courts to not pay debts he owed. He was a bad and dishonest businessman, and his image as a successful businessman is mostly false.
“Putin will never abandon his ambition of conquering Ukraine, and convincing him to do so shouldn’t be the aim of Ukraine’s global supporters. Instead, the goal should be to make it impossible for Putin to fulfill that ambition. In simpler terms: You can’t make Putin walk away from Ukraine; you have to put Ukraine out of his reach.
Trump and some of his top aides do not seem to understand this about Putin.”
“Tiananmen Square is a vast space in the center of Beijing with monumental, communist-era buildings along two sides and the mausoleum of Mao Zedong, who founded the communist era in 1949, on the south end.
University students occupied this symbolically important site in the spring of 1989. Their calls for freedoms divided the party leadership. The decision to send in troops marked a decisive turning point in the evolution of modern China, keeping the party firmly in control as it loosened economic restrictions.”
“Russia is catching up to Ukraine in drone production thanks to greater financial resources, production lines far from the front lines and especially help from China, a senior Ukrainian official told POLITICO.
“Chinese manufacturers provide them with hardware, electronics, navigation, optical and telemetry systems, engines, microcircuits, processor modules, antenna field systems, control boards, navigation. They use so-called shell companies, change names, do everything to avoid being subject to export control and avoid sanctions for their activities,” said Oleh Aleksandrov, spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Intelligence Service. “Yet officially, China sticks to all the rules. Yet only officially.”
Beijing has repeatedly denied supplying any drones or weapons components to Russia, calling Ukrainian protests “baseless accusations and political manipulation.” But Aleksandrov said Russia has a critical dependency on the supply of Chinese spare parts for both tactical and long-range drones.”
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“Pavlo Palisa, a former top military commander and now deputy head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, said in a statement that so far this year, 80 percent of the damage to Russia’s equipment and personnel has been done with drones. In May alone, Ukrainian drones destroyed 89,000 Russian targets.”
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“Kyiv says that its access to new drones has been curtailed by China, while Beijing has placed no such restrictions on Russia.”
“Burns noted it’s important to counter Beijing’s increasingly aggressive economic, diplomatic and military global footprint — but warned that Trump is going about it all wrong, particularly by using tariffs as a cudgel against longtime partners who otherwise might have allied with the U.S. against China.”
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“The fact that we’ve had trouble convincing the Chinese it’s in our interest to have our senior military leaders talking. My nightmare scenario as ambassador was not an intentional conflict, but an accident.”
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” I think the fundamental mistake that was made was that when we imposed tariffs on China, we also imposed high tariffs on South Korea, Japan, the European Union, Canada and Mexico. All those countries are on our side in the big issues that separate us from China. All of them have the same economic issues and trade problems with China. If we had highlighted China as the major disruptor of global trade, which China has been for the last couple of decades, and formed a coalition with the EU and Japan and the U.S. — that’s 60 percent of global GDP — we would have had leverage for these negotiations.”
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“The Chinese have been saying every day for the last several weeks that the United States is being unfair, that we’re a bully, that we’re disrupting global trade. In fact, they’re the biggest problem in global trade. Intellectual property theft against American and other nations’ companies; forced technology transfer; dumping of EVs, lithium batteries, solar panels on the rest of the world below the cost of production; disrupting global markets; trying to kill the manufacturing industries in places like the United States and Europe.”
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“I think what the American people need to understand — our government and both parties — is that China is a worthy competitor. Their science and technology talent is prodigious. The level of scholarship, of patents, of research in some areas exceeds us, or is equal to us. In some critical areas of technology transformation, they are putting massive amounts of state-directed money into their national champions like Huawei, with companies that they want to succeed in the world. They’re doing it on a consistent basis, and they plan over decades, so they have that advantage.
When I was leaving in January, the Chinese announced $15 billion of state money going into quantum computing alone. They want to beat us to the punch there. That’s something that’s not as well understood in American society and even in our press — people have older, conventional views of China that are outdated.”
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“The destruction of USAID was a catastrophic mistake for the United States. That was our agency that said to the rest of the world, “We’ll help you on vaccines. We’ll help you with HIV. Will help you with polio.” Elon Musk and company destroyed USAID in one week and laid off 8,500 people. That helped China.
The Chinese then went out with a massive propaganda blitz the next day all over the world saying, “The United States is not interested in you any longer.” I watched the Chinese do this in February and March. The way the cuts were done, the fact that it was done with so little thought, so little information, and so little respect for our career civil servants was disgraceful.”