Amy Klobuchar gets a second chance to say the name of the president of Mexico, and she still can't say "Andrés Manuel López Obrador."

She pronounces "Andrés" as "Andre" — no "s" and the accent on the first syllable:



It's like Ron Blagojevich trying to prove to Donald Trump that he can name the houses in Harry Potter's Hogwarts School:



He says "It's Slithering and it's Hufflepuff and it's Ravencloth." But it's Slitherin and Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw.

Blagojevich only needed to impress Trump. (He failed.) There were no Hogwarts voters to feel alienated by his inability to pronounce Hogwarts names.

Klobuchar needs to impress Hispanic voters, and saying "Andre" for "Andrés" feels as though you have no experience with people who speak Spanish.  Or even just the Spanish language, with its super-simple pronunciation rules. The way she grins while saying it wrong is so disturbing.

ADDED: If you keep watching the Klobuchar clip — which I finally did — you'll see she proceeds from her proud pronunciation of the name to blathering about why she got it wrong, and it's the worst possible answer! She says she'd had a very long busy day, and she was tired. She lists events "ending about 2 or 3 in the morning."

3 in the morning! That's the precise time that we've been saying a President needs to be ready to go, completely up for the most challenging tasks!

"[I]t’s fair to say that Mexico is now on a trajectory to become a vast gangland governed more by warlordism than by the state."

"The last time this happened was a century ago, during the decade-long Mexican Revolution, which eventually triggered the invasion and occupation of northern Mexico in 1916 by the U.S. Army, including the mobilization of the entire National Guard and a call for volunteers. Before it was over, U.S. forces attacked and occupied Nogales, Sonora, in 1918 and Ciudad Juarez in 1919.... What’s different today is that Mexico, despite its corrupt and incompetent government, has a rising middle class and a growing economy. Unlike the Mexican state, the Mexican people have shown themselves to be more than capable of industrious and liberal self-government, not just in the success millions of them have achieved in the United States but also in the success of local governments throughout the country. Set against the Mexican people is a Mexican state incapable of governing and a cartel insurgency that now controls vast swaths of both territory and industry. President Lopez Obrador will not push back on the cartels.... He has said he wants to tackle the 'root causes' of crime and violence, which he has said are poverty and lack of opportunity, and campaigned for president on slogans such as 'hugs, not gunshots,' and 'you can’t fight fire with fire.'.... The idea that a nation of 120 million people with whom the United States shares a 2,000-mile border and ever-increasing economic ties might spiral into collapse has not seriously occurred to the American people."

From "A Drug Cartel Just Defeated The Mexican Military In Battle" (The Federalist).

"More than 6 in 10 Mexicans say migrants are a burden on their country because they take jobs and benefits that should belong to Mexicans."

"A 55 percent majority supports deporting migrants who travel through Mexico to reach the United States. Those findings defy the perception that Mexico — a country that has sent millions of its own migrants to the United States, sending billions of dollars in remittances — is sympathetic to the surge of Central Americans. Instead, the data suggests Mexicans have turned against the migrants transiting through their own country, expressing antipathy that would be familiar to many supporters of President Trump north of the border.... [President Andrés Manuel] López Obrador holds a 70 percent job approval rating... While he took office as a lifelong populist, López Obrador quickly had to respond to threats from Trump, mostly about immigration enforcement. Many expected López Obrador — who once compared Trump’s hostility toward Mexicans to the way Adolf Hitler spoke of Jews — to condemn the U.S. president. Instead, he has largely submitted to Trump’s demands on migration.... Mexicans continue to have an overwhelmingly negative opinion about Trump. More than three-quarters of Mexicans dislike Trump, according to the survey, and over 8 in 10 say he treats their country with disrespect."

WaPo reports on a WaPo/Mexico’s Reforma poll.

MEANWHILE: "Support for U.S. President Donald Trump increased slightly among Republicans after he lashed out on Twitter over the weekend in a racially charged attack on four minority Democratic congresswomen, a Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll shows... [H]is net approval among members of his Republican Party rose by 5 percentage points to 72%, compared with a similar poll that ran last week.... Trump’s overall approval remained unchanged over the past week. According to the poll, 41% of the U.S. public said they approved of his performance in office, while 55% disapproved," Reuters reports.

It's ridiculous for a mainstream news organization to apply the phrase "racially charged" to Trump's tweets (which didn't even mention race). A strong position on controlling illegal immigration isn't necessarily "racial," as WaPo's Mexican poll indicates. Journalists should keep a professional distance from the characterizations purveyed by politicians and political activists.

What is it time to start worrying about?

Click to enlarge and clarify:



The headlines on the front page of the Washington Post are: "U.S. and Mexico reach deal, averting tariffs, Trump says," "U.S. hiring slows sharply as trade war starts to bite," and "Perspective: It’s time to start worrying about the economy." Maybe later this morning the "perspective" will change. Or perhaps I should worry that Trump is lying about a deal with Mexico. Is he just manipulating the perspective?

From the "U.S. and Mexico reach deal" piece:

The agreement, which came just two days before Trump had vowed to impose a 5 percent, across-the-board tariff on one of the United States’ top trading partners, called for the Mexican government to widely dispatch its national guard forces to help with immigration enforcement, with priority in the south, on its border with Guatemala, according to a joint statement.

In addition, the two countries would expand a program known as the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), created this year, that allows the United States to return Central American migrants to Mexico while they await the adjudication of their asylum hearings in U.S. immigration court, a process that can take months....

On Friday, Mexican finance officials said they had frozen the bank accounts of 26 people because of their alleged involvement in human trafficking, another sign of escalating enforcement efforts....

I see that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has tweeted about the agreement as well,  but Chuck Schumer, WaPo tells us, "reacted sarcastically":

“This is an historic night! @realDonaldTrump has announced that he has cut a deal to ‘greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico, and into the United States,’ ” Schumer wrote on Twitter. “Now that that problem is solved, I’m sure we won’t be hearing any more about it in the future.”

So he's telling us to worry that it's a phony claim of a deal — fake news. Or does he sound like a sarcastic jerk, hearing about progress dealing with a problem and snarking about how it's not actually completely solved? But what's the poor man to do? His party suffers if there is an immigration problem and if Trump has any success solving it. Oh, I don't know, he could be gracious and hopeful.

Here's the top-rated comment at WaPo, which went up 20 hours ago on a version of the article that did not include Trump's announcement of the deal: "My opinion: There are not going to be any tariffs on Mexico. There never were going to be any tariffs on Mexico. Mexico will change something, Trump will proclaim victory and the charade will be over."

That's prescient, except to the extent that the charade will never be over.

"López Obrador’s win comes after widespread disillusionment with outgoing Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s ruling PRI party, which was in power from 1929 to 2000..."

"... and regained the presidency in 2012. Mexico’s other establishment party, the conservative National Action Party (PAN), has also had a hard time shaking off criticism for not handling the country’s widespread violence and official corruption. PRI's José Antonio Meade and candidate Ricardo Anaya, a former president of the PAN party who represented a coalition of left- and right-wing parties, both conceded the election to López Obrador on Sunday night."

Love that name, Meade.

That's from the Politico article on the Mexican election. The winner, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, founded a new political party only 4 years ago.

López Obrador’s victory leaves the two traditional parties reeling, as candidates from his Morena party were also poised to gain a stronger foothold in local, state and congressional elections....

“It conceptually makes sense — Mexican voters say, ‘We’ve tried the PRI, we’ve tried the PAN, let’s try something new,'” Carlos Gutierrez, former Commerce secretary during George W. Bush’s administration, told POLITICO. “It’s the allure of change, because people are fed up.”

From the Wikipedia article about the Morena party:

The National Regeneration Movement (Spanish: Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, MORENA) is a left-wing political party in Mexico...

The 2018 Mexican general election will be the first presidential election where MORENA will participate. MORENA is in a coalition with left-wing Labor Party (PT) and right-wing Social Encounter Party (PES) under the name "Juntos Haremos Historia."

"Juntos Haremos Historia" means "Together We'll Make History." How does it work to have a right-wing party in a coalition with a left-wing party? "Social Encounter Party (Spanish: Partido Encuentro Social, PES) is a Mexican conservative political party established on the national level in 2014":

The Social Encounter Party was founded in 2006 by Dr. Hugo Eric Flores Cervantes, a pastor of a Neo-Pentecostal church that supported Felipe Calderón in the 2006 presidential election.... The party is primarily composed of evangelical Christians, though it has declared itself as "not religious" in character.... The PES tends to include many strands of Christian humanist thinking and is generally socially conservative, though Flores has stated that it is a "family" party....It opposes same-sex marriage and was responsible for reforms to the Baja California constitution in 2008 that established marriage as "between one man and one woman".... Likewise, it opposes abortion and pornographic magazines....

ADDED: From the NYT article about the election results:

Mr. López Obrador will inherit an economy that has seen only modest growth over the last few decades, and one of his biggest challenges will be to convince foreign investors that Mexico will remain open for business....

Though political rivals have painted him as a radical on par with Hugo Chavez, the former socialist leader of Venezuela, Mexico’s president-elect has vowed not to raise the national debt and to maintain close relations with the United States.

Mr. López Obrador, who is commonly referred to by his initials, AMLO, has a history of working with the private sector, and has appointed a respected representative to handle negotiations the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Today AMLO is a much more moderate, centrist politician who will govern the business community with the right hand, and the social sectors and programs with the left,” said Antonio Sola, who created the effective fear campaign that branded Mr. López Obrador as a danger to Mexico in the 2006 election he lost. “The great difference between then and now is that the dominant emotion among voters is fury,” Mr. Sola said. “And anger is much stronger than fear.”