Trump Land: blowing up

Russia Russia Russia Russia Russia....

Poll: Trump's support slipping among Republicans, white voters, men (TheHill)

President Trump's support among Republicans, white voters and men is dropping, according to a new survey….

mutable

Protests start anew as Cal State tuition vote looms today
(OC Reg)

LONG BEACH >> Protesters renewed their rallies in opposition this morning as Cal State University trustees were expected to take up a $270 tuition increase later today in Long Beach.
. . .
     The University of California’s Board of Regents has already approved a tuition increase. Assemblywoman Sharon Quirk-Silva, D-Buena Park, has introduced a bill that would prohibit the CSU and California Community Colleges from hiking tuition and enrollment fees until after the 2019-20 school year. The bill has been referred to the Assembly Higher Education committee….

Fired Assistant Professor Alleges Anti-Gay Bias at UC Irvine
(OC Weekly)

Aslan (@ UC Riverside)

     In March 2016, the University of California, Irvine issued a press release praising assistant professor Hung Duc Nguyen for receiving a prestigious National Science Foundation grant, but months later school administrators ignored overwhelming faculty recommendations for his tenure and instead terminated his employment….

Reza Aslan Thinks TV Can End Bigotry
(NYT)

Q: Apparently because you didn’t want people to know that you were from Iran, you used to tell people you were Mexican. 

A: Yeah, that tells you how little I knew about America. I didn’t realize you guys don’t like Mexicans either….

Before Trump job, Manafort worked to aid Putin
(AP)

Manafort

WASHINGTON (AP) — Before signing up with Donald Trump, former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly worked for a Russian billionaire with a plan to "greatly benefit the Putin Government," The Associated Press has learned. The White House attempted to brush the report aside Wednesday, but it quickly raised fresh alarms in Congress about Russian links to Trump associates....

Travel Ban Threatens a Lincoln Center Festival Play
(NYT)

     This summer’s Lincoln Center Festival is about crossing borders. But its plan to present the North American premiere of a work by the Syrian playwright Mohammad al-Attar risks being stopped at the United States border if President Trump’s travel ban is upheld....

And, from the recent past:

The Darkness Beneath Huell Howser
(Zócalo)

Reveling In California’s Joys Has Always Been Partly About Making Up For Broken Dreams
BY D. J. WALDIE — DECEMBER 3, 2012

...That Howser, in stepping away from his celebrity, has adopted Garbo’s pose of being gone but always around is of a piece with his portrayal of another type from the same Californian golden age. Howser was the best of the “folks.”
     Historian Kevin Starr, in his series Americans and the California Dream, traced the story of the “folks” who came to California beginning in the late 19th century and identified them as Protestant, fundamentalist, mildly Evangelical, prejudiced, narrow in conventional ways, and stoic but secretly yearning. The “folks” frequented the cafeterias downtown, worshipped at Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple, gathered at annual state picnics in Long Beach to reminisce about back home, and joined the “lonely clubs” that were a feature of Los Angeles and San Francisco until the 1950s. The “folks” were mostly lower-middle-class Anglos, many from the border south, who came here—particularly to Los Angeles—for health and happiness in the sunshine. They found sunshine, at least.
     The “folks”—however much they were mocked by later, big-city migrants for their provincialism—defined the everyday culture and politics of California past the mid-20th century in their expectation that the state would remain permanently theirs. They managed one last triumph: the passage in 1978 of the Proposition 13 property tax limitation measure....