The Weekly Arc: April 21, 2017

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Arc Digital

10 min readApr 21, 2017

Terror in Paris

A gunman opened fire on French police Thursday on Paris’s best-known boulevard, killing one officer and wounding two others before being fatally shot himself in an incident that raised the specter of renewed terrorism just three days before voters go to the polls to elect a new president.
The Islamic State, through its affiliated Amaq News Agency, quickly asserted responsibility for the attack, which sent panicked pedestrians fleeing into side streets and prompted police to seal off the renowned Champs-Elysees, close metro stations and order tourists back into their hotels. The terrorist organization said the attack was carried out by a Belgian national it identified only as Abu Yusuf al-Baljiki, a pseudonym. — The Washington Post

Elections in France

French voters will go to the polls on Sunday for the first round of presidential elections. In the wake of electoral upheavals around the world, including the victory of Donald J. Trump and Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, the vote is one of several in Europe being closely watched worldwide.
What is France deciding?
The president wields broad powers — although the prime minister, as the head of government, also plays an important role in the constitutional system, as does Parliament. Presidents are elected for a five-year term, for a maximum of two consecutive terms. The incumbent, François Hollande, a Socialist, has struggled to reduce unemployment and has had to deal with a string of deadly terrorist attacks.
The demands are high for the next president to keep the country safe, jump-start its economy and manage the sometimes competing goals of improving the labor market and the maintaining a social safety net. France’s role in the European Union is also in question.
Elections for the National Assembly, France’s lower and more powerful house of Parliament, are in June, and whoever wins the presidency will want to secure a favorable legislative majority. …
Only a few of the candidates are considered serious contenders:
■ François Fillon, a conservative from the center-right Republican party.
■ Benoît Hamon, of the mainstream left-wing Socialist Party, who has dropped to single digits in the polls.
■ Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front.
■ Emmanuel Macron, an independent centrist.
■ Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a hard-left candidate who created the France Unbowed movement.
Of the candidates, Ms. Le Pen has arguably drawn the most attention from journalists, because of her hard-line stance on immigration, her grim warning that a declining France is losing its identity and her party’s record with Jews and Muslims, among other communities.
Personal integrity and political corruption have become major issues: Mr. Fillon is enmeshed in an embezzlement scandal, and Ms. Le Pen has faced questions about her use of her position as a member of the European Parliament. These controversies have given lesser-known candidates the opportunity to jab and mock their counterparts during live debates.
Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen are slightly ahead, but the four front-runners are neck-and-neck in the latest polls, creating uncertainty about who will make it to the runoff. Up to a third of possible voters, according to the latest polls, are still undecided. — The New York Times

NBA Playoffs Begin

The blessed NBA Playoffs began this past week, and the storylines are already great.

At the end of it all, we’ll probably see another Cavs/Warriors matchup, but there’s a whole lot of incredible basketball to enjoy along the way.

Buy American and Hire American

When Donald Trump unveiled his latest executive order, titled “Buy American and Hire American,” he made only the barest effort to conceal the fact that the announcement was nearly entirely one of theatrics and not of substance. He held his talk in Kenosha, Wisconsin, at Snap-on Tools, a firm that buys Chinese and hires Chinese, Argentinian, Brazilian, and Swedish. Seventy per cent of Snap-on’s sales are in the U.S., but many of its plants are in other countries. There is nothing wrong with Snap-on putting its factories overseas, it just makes it an odd place to hold a Buy American announcement. It’s reminiscent of President Trump’s celebration of jobs at a Boeing plant while the company was laying off workers.
The executive order itself is even more puzzling. It’s not clear what, if anything, it will change. The order states that “it shall be the policy of the executive branch to maximize, consistent with law . . . the use of goods, products, and materials produced in the United States” without setting any measurable definition of “maximize.” This is followed by a confusing timeline — in sixty days, the Secretary of Commerce will lead a team, advised by the Secretary of State and others, that will issue guidance. Then, within a hundred and fifty days, the heads of agencies will explain what they are doing in keeping with that guidance. Sometime in mid-September, we will (or we won’t) hear what the hundreds of agencies in the federal government are doing to meet a confusing mandate, with no obvious targets, that will (or won’t) mean that more Americans have jobs. — The New Yorker

O’Reilly Out At Fox News

“The O’Reilly Factor” has been canceled amid a cloud of harassment allegations against the conservative broadcaster.
Rupert Murdoch and his sons James and Lachlan, who run 21st Century Fox, made the announcement Wednesday afternoon.
“After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the Company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel,” Fox said. — CNN

Berny Belvedere:

Bill O’Reilly was one of the most obnoxious personalities in a medium that requires, and even rewards, intolerable obnoxiousness. Despite his average intellect, or perhaps partially because of it, O’Reilly had a boundless capacity for self-satisfaction. He styled himself a tough interviewer, but his reflexive unwillingness to let a guest finish a thought was more contemptuous of truth than respectful of it. He wasn’t steering guests back on topic; he was making it impossible for a robust back-and-forth to be achievable. O’Reilly was perhaps most unwatchable whenever he’d address religion (his interviews with Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher are particularly legendary on this front). His best moment was his screamo mashup with Barney Frank, who deserved the treatment he got. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert trolled O’Reilly to perfection, and their guest appearances on his show will remain classic examples of how to skunk self-serious blowhards in comedically effective ways. I’m not surprised O’Reilly turned out to be a total creep, and I’m glad to see him out.

Ryan Huber:

Over the years, I watched “The O’Reilly Factor” off and on to see what Bill was up to. He was a populist, a capitalist, and a self-proclaimed traditionalist. The one plank in the O’Reilly platform that never seemed to fit was his clear preference for the company of beautiful women and a lack of traditional personal emphasis on marriage and family in the Mike Huckabee mold. In other words, O’Reilly seemed to embody a fairly moderate New York Republican ethos that included room for a less-than-totally-chaste lifestyle. His longtime friendship with Donald J. Trump was one indication that despite any kind of “culture warrior” credentials Bill may have had, he was never a true social conservative in a holistic sense. Ultimately, O’Reilly will be remembered for the things people often caricature Republicans with (though he claimed to be an independent): money, power, and patriarchal sexual mores covered over by a thin sheen of “traditional values” and “personal responsibility” talking points. And that’s the memo.