#In a February 14 tweet, Trump attacked three of his favorite targets, by referring to the " 'disgraced' McCabe [Andrew] pretends to be a 'poor little angel' when in fact he was a big part of the crooked Hillary Scandal & the Russia Hoax and a puppet for Leakin' James Comey."
#The New York Times reported that Trump called Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign chief, over last year's Fourth of July weekend, to pressure Attorney General Jess Sessions to resign. Lewandowski said on MSNBC's "The Beat" that he was going out with his children to get ice cream, or something like that. The trip for ice cream doesn't account for the entire weekend.
*Again, according to The New York Times, President Trump asked Matt Whitaker if he could put Geoffrey Berman, a Trump ally, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, as the head of the widening investigation of Trump's possible crimes.
*Max Boot, a Never Trump Republican, has listed five Trump crimes: 1.) Conspiracy to defraud the U.S. based on Trump's speakerphone conversation with Roger Stone about WikiLeak's email dump; 2.) Lying to the FBI and the Department of Justice about Trump's claim that Roger Stone did not tell him about WikiLeaks; 3.) Suborning perjury based on Michael Cohen's assertion that Trump indirectly told him to lie; 4.) Campaign finance law violations; and 5.) Bank, wire and tax fraud based on Trump's inflating and deflating his assets.
*President Trump has called on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn) to resign: "I think she should either resign from Congress or she should certainly resign from the House Foreign Affairs Committee." Rep. Omar suggested that U.S. support for a Jewish state is the result of money flowing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Omar also said: "It's all about the Benjamins, baby," referring to money.
*Donald Trump had a different view of declaring national emergencies when Barack Obama was president. Trump's tweet of November 20, 2014 said: "The pubs must not allow pres Obama to subvert the Constitution of the US for his own benefit & because he is unable to negotiate w/Congress."
*President Trump has had an effect of influencing others to upend democratic norms. Although Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell probably doesn't need much coaching in ignoring democratic norms, he has advised Trump to use every legal means to get funding for the border wall. McConnell is urging, in effect, Trump to stretch the rationale for finding other money to the breaking point. This effort is similar to the effort of Republican senators to find some way to get around the House resolution calling for the termination of Trump's national emergency declaration.
*Sen McConnell has a rule that he will not hold a vote on any bill that President Trump will not sign. This means that Trump can veto in advance any bill that comes before the Senate. Thus, Trump has usurped the power of Congress.
*In the realm of Trump putting in place officials who make socially destructive decisions, Kathy Kraninger, head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), announced that the CFPB will rescind the most important part of an Obama-era rule on payday lenders: The part that would force lenders to confirm if someone has the ability to repay a loan, instead of tipping them into further debt.
*The U.S. Department of Agriculture has paid out $7.7 billion in aid to farmers to offset the effects of tariffs, Trump has imposed. Blake Hurst, a soybean farmer who is president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, appreciates the payout, but says "it's not enough in the sense that it in no way makes us whole for what we suffered from these trade disputes." Unfortunately, six interviewed Iowa farmers acknowledged that the tariffs on China were hurting them economically, yet they continued to support Trump.
Thursday, March 14, 2019
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Focus on the Border Wall
#Facts on Border Security: 1.) Arrests of migrants crossing the border illegally have declined precipitously over the last two decades, from a high of 1.6 million in 2000 to 396,000 in fiscal 2018. 2.) The largest number of "illegals" are individuals who remain in the U.S. after their visas expire, with Canadians at the top of the list. 3) According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 17,000 "criminal aliens" crossed the border in 2018. The vast majority were convicted only of non-violent crimes, traffic offenses and entering the U.S. illegally. Nor has anyone who crossed the border ever been found to be responsible for a terrorist act. 4.) The number of asylum seekers jumped from 55,5984 in 2017 to 92,959 in 2018. The vast majority of them are families traveling from Central America to present themselves to authorities at the border, as the law entitles them to do. 5.) Most illicit drugs enter the U.S. through cars or trucks passing through points of entry, or are smuggled in from the sea.
#National Emergency Was Unnecessary: In his rambling speech announcing a national emergency, President Trump said: "I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this. But I'd rather do it much faster." "And I didn't have to do it for the election -- 2020. And the other reason we're up here talking about this is because of the election -- because they want to try to win an election, which it looks like they're not going to be able to do."
#National Emergency Flip-Flop: Donald Trump had a different view of declaring national emergencies when Barack Obama was president. His tweet of November 20, 2014 said: "The pubs must not allow pres Obama to subvert the Constitution of the US for his own benefit & because he is unable to negotiate w/Congress."
In going the national emergency route, Trump is proposing to get $3.6 billion from military construction funding; $2.5 billion from the Department of Defense drug-interdiction program; and $600 million from the Treasury Department's asset-forfeiture fund. He may also tap disaster-relief funding to get to a total of $8 billion. Tapping military construction funding may be an act of bad timing, as a shocking report has recently come out revealing severe deficiencies in the housing of military families. The Pentagon has pledged to find the money to fix the many problems being faced by the military families.
#National Drug Control Strategy: The National Drug Control Strategy report says nothing about building a wall on the border. As "Newsweek" points out, the words "wall" and "barrier" are never mentioned in the context that Trump uses them.
#No Military Threat: Air Force Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy told a Senate committee that he sees no military threat coming from the southern border.
#Trump on Wall Building Progress: Trump boasted on December 11, 2018 that: "Our Southern Border is now secure and will remain that way." On January 2, 2019, he claimed that "much of the wall has already been fully restored or built." On February 1, 2019, Trump said: "The chant should be 'Finish the wall.' "
President Trump told his El Paso rally attendees that "right now" the border wall was being built on the Rio Grande River. No such wall was being built.
#Safety of El Paso: In his State of the Union speech, President Trump said the following about El Paso: "The border city of El Paso Tex. used to have extremely high rates of violent crime --one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation's most dangerous cities. Now, immediately upon its building, with powerful barriers in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country." El Paso never had "one of the highest" violent crime rates in the country. The drop in El Paso's crime rates (as did crime nationwide) occurred before the wall was ever built.
#Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has warned every Republican that "if you don't stand behind this president, we're not going to stand behind you, when it comes to the wall. This is the defining moment of his presidency. It's not just about a wall, it's him being treated different than any other president." Trump is being treated "different": He is being treated more leniently than any other president.
#Border Wall Polling: According to a Gallup poll published this past month, 60 percent oppose significant new construction border walls -- 81 percent support a path to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. illegally; 61 percent oppose deporting all immigrants in the U.S. illegally back to their home country -- 75 percent favor hiring more Border Patrol agents.
#National Emergency Was Unnecessary: In his rambling speech announcing a national emergency, President Trump said: "I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this. But I'd rather do it much faster." "And I didn't have to do it for the election -- 2020. And the other reason we're up here talking about this is because of the election -- because they want to try to win an election, which it looks like they're not going to be able to do."
#National Emergency Flip-Flop: Donald Trump had a different view of declaring national emergencies when Barack Obama was president. His tweet of November 20, 2014 said: "The pubs must not allow pres Obama to subvert the Constitution of the US for his own benefit & because he is unable to negotiate w/Congress."
In going the national emergency route, Trump is proposing to get $3.6 billion from military construction funding; $2.5 billion from the Department of Defense drug-interdiction program; and $600 million from the Treasury Department's asset-forfeiture fund. He may also tap disaster-relief funding to get to a total of $8 billion. Tapping military construction funding may be an act of bad timing, as a shocking report has recently come out revealing severe deficiencies in the housing of military families. The Pentagon has pledged to find the money to fix the many problems being faced by the military families.
#National Drug Control Strategy: The National Drug Control Strategy report says nothing about building a wall on the border. As "Newsweek" points out, the words "wall" and "barrier" are never mentioned in the context that Trump uses them.
#No Military Threat: Air Force Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy told a Senate committee that he sees no military threat coming from the southern border.
#Trump on Wall Building Progress: Trump boasted on December 11, 2018 that: "Our Southern Border is now secure and will remain that way." On January 2, 2019, he claimed that "much of the wall has already been fully restored or built." On February 1, 2019, Trump said: "The chant should be 'Finish the wall.' "
President Trump told his El Paso rally attendees that "right now" the border wall was being built on the Rio Grande River. No such wall was being built.
#Safety of El Paso: In his State of the Union speech, President Trump said the following about El Paso: "The border city of El Paso Tex. used to have extremely high rates of violent crime --one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation's most dangerous cities. Now, immediately upon its building, with powerful barriers in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country." El Paso never had "one of the highest" violent crime rates in the country. The drop in El Paso's crime rates (as did crime nationwide) occurred before the wall was ever built.
#Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has warned every Republican that "if you don't stand behind this president, we're not going to stand behind you, when it comes to the wall. This is the defining moment of his presidency. It's not just about a wall, it's him being treated different than any other president." Trump is being treated "different": He is being treated more leniently than any other president.
#Border Wall Polling: According to a Gallup poll published this past month, 60 percent oppose significant new construction border walls -- 81 percent support a path to citizenship for immigrants in the U.S. illegally; 61 percent oppose deporting all immigrants in the U.S. illegally back to their home country -- 75 percent favor hiring more Border Patrol agents.
Monday, March 4, 2019
Ocean Gyres; White Supremacy; and Guns in the City
I. The Widening Gyre
"There are four ocean gyres in the world, but scientists believe that the one in the North Pacific contains the most trash -- nearly two trillion pieces of plastic, weighing nearly eighty thousand metric tons, according to a study that scientists working with the Ocean Cleanup, published in the online journal Scientific Report last March." "Of all the waste created, only about nine per cent rests, forgotten, in landfills, dumps, forests, rivers, and the ocean." "A major concern of scientists is that chemical toxins in the microplastics may leach off during digestion, gradually building up in animal and human tissues." [1]
Marcus Ericksen, cofounder of the nonprofit called the 5 Gyre Institute, says that only one percent of the plastic entering the ocean is on the surface of the North Pacific gyre. Scientists still don't know where, exactly, the rest goes.
II. White Supremacy
" ' White Supremacy' was the motto of the Alabama Democratic Party until 1966. Mississippi did not satisfy the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery until 1995." "When the South began instituting Jim Crow, after the end of Reconstruction, laws mandating separate cars on trains appeared across the region. One of the first such laws was passed in Florida, in 1887, followed by Mississippi, in 1889." [2]
"In Dred Scott, the Chief Justice, Roger Taney, had said that, constitutionally, black people were 'a subordinate and inferior class of beings,' with 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect.' " "There were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896; in 1904, there were 1,342. In Virginia that year, the estimated black turnout in the Presidential election was zero." "Between seventy-eight and a hundred and sixty-one black men were lynched every year in the decade from 1890 to 1899."
"Jim Crow required a constant reminder of who was in charge. Its mania for racial separation was insatiable." "As many historians have pointed out, one of the reasons the South was able to exercise a stranglehold on race relations in national politics was the supervention of the famous three-fifths clause, once the focus of abolitionist attacks on the Constitution. When the former slaves were counted as full persons, the former slave states gained twenty congressional seats, a twenty-five per cent bump. They also gained seats in the Electoral College." "After 1900, the South had Jim Crow, a legal regime of separation, but the rest of the country had ghettos, redlining, gerrymandering, quotas, and exclusion systems, and the artifice of the local school district."
III. Guns in the City
As an appeals court judge, in a 2011 dissent, Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the District of Columbia should not be allowed to ban semi-automatic assault rifles, largely because they were "in common use." He added that asking people to register their guns is unconstitutional. "An overriding issue at stake, then, is whether the Court will decide that the right to 'bear' arms is tantamount to a broad right to travel with them." "A far greater risk to public safety than leaving handguns in empty apartments is the nationwide effort to satisfy the right to carry weapons, concealed or openly in public places." "Kavanaugh, for his part, has written that public safety should not be a determining factor -- only 'text, history, and tradition' really matter." [3]
"According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, forty members of Congress who had been regarded as N.R.A. stalwarts lost their seats."
ADDENDUMS:
*A recent Hill-Harris X poll shows 61% of all voters; 74% of Democrats; and 50% of Republicans support Sen. Warren's Ultra-Millionaire Tax. There wold be a 2% tax on people with assets over $50 million, and 3% on people with assets over $1 billion.
*Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has ordered LA police to scale back on vehicle stops. Metropolitan District officers stop black drivers at a rate more than five times their share of the population.
*University of California economist Gabriel Zucman has found that 0.00025 of the U.S. population owns more wealth than the 159 million adults in the bottom 60%. Those in the bottom 60% of the wealth distribution saw their their share of the nation's wealth fall from 5.7% in 1987 to 2.1% in 2014.
*Trump missed the deadline for him to identify and punish those behind the death and disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi.
Footnotes:
[1] Carolyn Kormann, "The Widening Gyre," The New Yorker, February 4, 2019.
[2] Louis Manard, "In the Eye of the Law," The New Yorker, February 4, 2019.
[3] Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Guns and the City," The New Yorker, February 4, 2019.
"There are four ocean gyres in the world, but scientists believe that the one in the North Pacific contains the most trash -- nearly two trillion pieces of plastic, weighing nearly eighty thousand metric tons, according to a study that scientists working with the Ocean Cleanup, published in the online journal Scientific Report last March." "Of all the waste created, only about nine per cent rests, forgotten, in landfills, dumps, forests, rivers, and the ocean." "A major concern of scientists is that chemical toxins in the microplastics may leach off during digestion, gradually building up in animal and human tissues." [1]
Marcus Ericksen, cofounder of the nonprofit called the 5 Gyre Institute, says that only one percent of the plastic entering the ocean is on the surface of the North Pacific gyre. Scientists still don't know where, exactly, the rest goes.
II. White Supremacy
" ' White Supremacy' was the motto of the Alabama Democratic Party until 1966. Mississippi did not satisfy the Thirteenth Amendment which outlawed slavery until 1995." "When the South began instituting Jim Crow, after the end of Reconstruction, laws mandating separate cars on trains appeared across the region. One of the first such laws was passed in Florida, in 1887, followed by Mississippi, in 1889." [2]
"In Dred Scott, the Chief Justice, Roger Taney, had said that, constitutionally, black people were 'a subordinate and inferior class of beings,' with 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect.' " "There were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896; in 1904, there were 1,342. In Virginia that year, the estimated black turnout in the Presidential election was zero." "Between seventy-eight and a hundred and sixty-one black men were lynched every year in the decade from 1890 to 1899."
"Jim Crow required a constant reminder of who was in charge. Its mania for racial separation was insatiable." "As many historians have pointed out, one of the reasons the South was able to exercise a stranglehold on race relations in national politics was the supervention of the famous three-fifths clause, once the focus of abolitionist attacks on the Constitution. When the former slaves were counted as full persons, the former slave states gained twenty congressional seats, a twenty-five per cent bump. They also gained seats in the Electoral College." "After 1900, the South had Jim Crow, a legal regime of separation, but the rest of the country had ghettos, redlining, gerrymandering, quotas, and exclusion systems, and the artifice of the local school district."
III. Guns in the City
As an appeals court judge, in a 2011 dissent, Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the District of Columbia should not be allowed to ban semi-automatic assault rifles, largely because they were "in common use." He added that asking people to register their guns is unconstitutional. "An overriding issue at stake, then, is whether the Court will decide that the right to 'bear' arms is tantamount to a broad right to travel with them." "A far greater risk to public safety than leaving handguns in empty apartments is the nationwide effort to satisfy the right to carry weapons, concealed or openly in public places." "Kavanaugh, for his part, has written that public safety should not be a determining factor -- only 'text, history, and tradition' really matter." [3]
"According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, forty members of Congress who had been regarded as N.R.A. stalwarts lost their seats."
ADDENDUMS:
*A recent Hill-Harris X poll shows 61% of all voters; 74% of Democrats; and 50% of Republicans support Sen. Warren's Ultra-Millionaire Tax. There wold be a 2% tax on people with assets over $50 million, and 3% on people with assets over $1 billion.
*Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has ordered LA police to scale back on vehicle stops. Metropolitan District officers stop black drivers at a rate more than five times their share of the population.
*University of California economist Gabriel Zucman has found that 0.00025 of the U.S. population owns more wealth than the 159 million adults in the bottom 60%. Those in the bottom 60% of the wealth distribution saw their their share of the nation's wealth fall from 5.7% in 1987 to 2.1% in 2014.
*Trump missed the deadline for him to identify and punish those behind the death and disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi.
Footnotes:
[1] Carolyn Kormann, "The Widening Gyre," The New Yorker, February 4, 2019.
[2] Louis Manard, "In the Eye of the Law," The New Yorker, February 4, 2019.
[3] Amy Davidson Sorkin, "Guns and the City," The New Yorker, February 4, 2019.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)