Category Archives: Landmark

It’s Not Every Day That a Federal Judge Pens a Tribute to a Transgender Teen

by AnalisaNaumann Posted on April 7, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Gavin Grimm, a 17-year-old transgender boy from Virginia, has had a rough few months. He’s suing for access to the boys’ bathroom at his high school, and in March the Supreme Court announced that it was kicking this landmark transgender rights case back to a federal appeals court.

Today, that appeals court rejected his request to expedite his case, which means it won’t be heard until after he graduates. But along with today’s order, Judge Andre Davis of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals penned a remarkable, must-read tribute to the teen, calling him a “brave individual” and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King:

Our country has a long and ignominious history of discriminating against our most vulnerable and powerless. We have an equally long history, however, of brave individuals—Dred Scott, Fred Korematsu, Linda Brown, Mildred and Richard Loving, Edie Windsor, and Jim Obergefell, to name just a few—who refused to accept quietly the injustices that were perpetuated against them. It is unsurprising, of course, that the burden of confronting and remedying injustice falls on the shoulders of the oppressed. These individuals looked to the federal courts to vindicate their claims to human dignity, but as the names listed above make clear, the judiciary’s response has been decidedly mixed. Today, G.G. adds his name to the list of plaintiffs whose struggle for justice has been delayed and rebuffed; as Dr. King reminded us, however, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” G.G.’s journey is delayed but not finished.

The tribute ends with a footnote of a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. Read the whole thing here.

Original article – 

It’s Not Every Day That a Federal Judge Pens a Tribute to a Transgender Teen

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It’s Not Every Day That a Federal Judge Pens a Tribute to a Transgender Teen

Republicans Just Went Nuclear. Neil Gorsuch Is Heading to the Supreme Court.

by MichealOIEB Posted on April 6, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Senate Republicans on Thursday voted to kill the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, invoking the so-called “nuclear option” so that a minority party will no longer have the ability to block a vote for nominees to the nation’s highest court. The rule change cleared the way for the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the empty seat of the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch is expected to be officially confirmed Friday.

Over the past two weeks, Democrats coalesced around a strategy of filibustering Gorsuch when all but three Democratic senators announced they would oppose him—even though it was widely believed that Republicans would respond by changing the rules to prohibit filibusters of Supreme Court nominees. The decision was risky because it means Democrats will now have even less leverage if one of the more liberal justices leaves the court while Trump is in the White House.

Democrats’ actions were in part a result of the party’s activist and donor base, which has been pushing lawmakers to resist Trump and his nominee to the fullest extent possible. Democrats want to keep their base energized, not demoralized. But Democrats had other reasons for filibustering, as well. There was the issue of Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court last year, whom Republicans in the Senate refused to even consider. The Garland episode helped persuade Democrats that temporarily preserving the ability to filibuster would be of little use, since Republicans were already prepared to do whatever it takes to put conservative justices on the court. As a progressive activist explained to Mother Jones, “Any vote that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans take is really just the icing on the cake—this thing has been cooked since Senate Republicans defied any sense of decorum in their treatment of Barack Obama.”

Democrats were also motivated by deep concerns about Gorsuch’s jurisprudence and his performance during his confirmation process. In his confirmation hearings, Gorsuch was so disinclined to reveal anything about his judicial philosophy that it took considerable cajoling to get him to express an opinion on Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that struck down segregation in public education.

What Democrats could ascertain from Gorsuch’s record suggested that he was an ultra-conservative jurist who would go out of his way to issue broad rulings rather than taking a narrow approach to decisions, including in a case that limited aid for special education children in public schools. In remarks on the Senate floor Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggested that Gorsuch could become the most conservative member of the Supreme Court.

Finally, Democrats were put off by how Gorsuch conducted himself in the meetings he held with senators. Three senators, all women of color, claimed Gorsuch had failed to meet with them after their offices had tried to schedule a meeting.

As Ian Millhiser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, explained to the Washington Post, Gorsuch hurt his chances with Democrats throughout the process: “He mansplained fairly basic concepts to women senators. He pushed way too hard on the ‘I’m not going to express a view about anything, ever’ fallback—much harder than previous nominees. And then, after the Supreme Court unanimously overturned one of his opinions, he defended himself by misrepresenting his own opinion.” On the third day of Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings, the Supreme Court handed down a unanimous opinion overturning Gorsuch’s approach to enforcement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, a piece of Gorsuch’s record that had particularly irked Democrats.

Gorsuch will soon be a Supreme Court justice, but his confirmation will go down as a major moment in the continued breakdown of the US Senate.

Read More:

Republicans Just Went Nuclear. Neil Gorsuch Is Heading to the Supreme Court.

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Republicans Just Went Nuclear. Neil Gorsuch Is Heading to the Supreme Court.

Jeff Sessions Does Not Think Your Local Police Department Is His Problem

by BeverlyWing203 Posted on April 4, 2017

Mother Jones

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday ordered a review of all reform agreements between the Department of Justice and police departments nationwide, such as a recent consent decree entered to overhaul the troubled Baltimore Police Department. In a memo to DOJ staff, Sessions wrote that “it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies.” The review—which will be led by Sessions’ two top deputies—was ordered as part of a broader assessment of all DOJ activities.

The move alarmed civil rights and police reform advocates. “We have a very serious problem in this country with the relationship between police and the communities they serve,” Jonathan Smith, who oversaw nearly two dozen investigations into police departments as head of the Special Litigation Section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama, told Mother Jones in a phone interview. Sessions’ memo signals “a retreat from the federal government’s commitment” to ensuring police departments comply with the Constitution, Smith said, adding that widespread misconduct in police departments is “not about bad police officers. It’s about bad systems, lack of accountability, bad policies, and bad practices.”

Under Obama, the Department of Justice opened 25 civil rights investigations into police departments and enforced 14 consent decrees, or agreements with departments that mandate reforms. All of them are all still active. In mid-January, the DOJ announced that it had reached a consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department and an agreement with the Chicago Police Department to pursue a decree just days before Trump’s inauguration. The investigation into CPD—and the negotiation process for BPD’s consent decree—were reportedly rushed to a close due to fear that both would stall under Trump. Sessions criticized the use of consent decrees during his confirmation hearings and has said the DOJ will “pull back” on police oversight efforts under his leadership.

A report released in February by Samuel Walker, a police reform expert at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, determined that most consent decrees enforced by the Department of Justice since 1994—when Congress passed legislation granting the DOJ oversight authority over local police agencies—have been successful in achieving long-term reforms. Consent decrees are binding legal agreements, and once signed, they are overseen by a federal judge and an appointed monitor. The DOJ’s ability to interfere with that process is limited, Smith said.

But there are things the DOJ can do to undermine it. It could ignore violations of decrees and stop taking police departments to court because of them. It could also seek to renegotiate the terms of a decree or to have it dropped altogether—though that would be difficult even with the cooperation of a police department, Smith said. “After all, these injunctions are entered to protect the public interest,” Smith said.

Sessions’ review calls into question whether the DOJ will follow through on enforcing a nascent consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department or enter into a decree with the Chicago Police Department at all. After Sessions sent out the memo calling for the review, DOJ attorneys asked a Maryland judge to delay a court hearing so that it could “review and assess” Baltimore’s consent decree. The city’s mayor and police chief said on Monday that they oppose any delay in the process. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the city’s police chief also said in a joint statement yesterday they are committed to following through on the police reforms recommended by the DOJ’s report whether or not the federal government is involved. The DOJ launched investigations into the Baltimore Police Department and Chicago Police Department in 2015 amid outrage over the police-involved deaths of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Laquan McDonald in Chicago.

Sessions has already suggested that the DOJ will stop opening new civil rights investigations into police departments. And President Donald Trump’s March budget proposal would cut more than $1 billion from the department’s resources. Funding for the department’s Civil Rights Division—which handles police reform work—is not addressed explicitly in the budget outline, but a blueprint drafted by the Heritage Foundation, from which parts of Trump’s budget appear to be lifted, would cut $58 million from the Civil Rights Division, or 33 percent of its current budget.

Christy Lopez, who also helped to oversee police reform investigations at the DOJ under Obama, said such a drastic budget cut would be a “silent killer” of the Civil Rights Division, including its work on police reform. “At that point it’s not a matter of will. You just don’t have the people” or resources to open new cases or follow up on existing consent decrees, Lopez said. “There were dozens of cases we wanted to do but couldn’t because we didn’t have the staff,” Smith said of his police reform work at the DOJ.

Given the tone Sessions and Trump have set, Smith thinks state attorneys general will now be crucial to ensuring police accountability and should exercise more oversight over their local police departments. “If the federal government is not going to do it, the states in general and other local bodies are critical to this process,” Smith said. States could mimic legislation like that in California, for example, that gives the state attorney general the authority to conduct DOJ-style investigations into local police departments and pursue a consent decree, Smith said. “There are 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. The US Department of Justice is never going to get to those. But an attorney general can really make an enormous difference in their state.”

Read article here:  

Jeff Sessions Does Not Think Your Local Police Department Is His Problem

Posted in FF, GE, Jason, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jeff Sessions Does Not Think Your Local Police Department Is His Problem

Clean Up On Aisle Trump

by JuanaPerryman80 Posted on April 3, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In early March, a procession of lawyers in boxy suits and overcoats crowded into a chandeliered dining room at Tony Cheng’s in Washington, DC’s Chinatown. Justice Department attorneys passed heaping plates of beef with broccoli and spring rolls to corporate law firm partners and think tank fellows in bow ties. A sign taped to the restaurant’s entrance announced the event was sold out, and regulars of the Federalist Society’s monthly luncheon marveled at the turnout. The featured guest was Donald F. McGahn II, who had recently ascended to one of Washington’s most influential legal perches, White House counsel.

After the fortune cookies were distributed, C. Boyden Gray, a former White House counsel to George H.W. Bush and a Federalist Society board member, approached the microphone. McGahn was stuck at the White House dealing with a “pressing matter,” he informed the disappointed audience. Gray didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to: The night before, the Washington Post had revealed that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had told the Senate that he had no contact with Russian officials during the presidential campaign, had in fact met twice with Russia’s ambassador.

Trump Might Be a Dream Come True for Megarich Campaign Donors

Hours after the Federalist Society luncheon let out, Sessions recused himself from ongoing investigations into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. President Donald Trump spent the next day fuming at his staff—particularly McGahn, who had to explain to the incensed commander in chief that Sessions’ recusal was the AG’s decision alone. Early the next morning, Trump rattled off a series of tweets accusing Barack Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower during the presidential campaign. McGahn was soon on a plane to Mar-a-Lago; his surreal task was to figure out how the administration might retroactively prove an explosive allegation that Trump had tossed out without evidence.

As the top legal adviser to the president, the White House counsel is one of the most vital positions in any administration. The counsel vets executive orders and nominees, reviews the legal aspects of national security matters, and monitors compliance with federal ethics laws. Rarely does an order or a memo leave the White House without the counsel’s sign-off. Gray says that during his time as counsel, his office received four times more paperwork than any other White House department. (This was before email.) A former Obama White House counsel told me, “People used to say to me, ‘You and the chief of staff are the only two people who really touch everything.'”

Above all, the White House counsel’s role is to keep the president out of trouble, legal or otherwise. With Trump, that’s a Herculean task. McGahn has represented scandal-plagued Republicans—Tom DeLay was a client—but the controversy and chaos engulfing the Trump White House are another order of magnitude. McGahn represents the most conflict-ridden commander in chief in the nation’s history. He has spent his short time in the White House constantly rushing to put out fires.

On paper, McGahn, who is 48, wasn’t an obvious choice for White House counsel. He has never previously worked in a presidential administration, and he has all the attributes of the Washington elites whom Trump has denounced. (One attendee of McGahn’s 2010 wedding says it was like “a convention for election lawyers.”) Trump vowed to get big money out of politics, while McGahn has spent much of his legal career helping candidates and donors stretch the limits of campaign finance laws. “The irony is that Trump campaigned on ‘draining the swamp,'” says Dan Weiner, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, “but it’s my impression that Don thinks the ‘swamp’—at least as many good-government types would define it—is necessary and constitutionally protected.” (McGahn did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Yet on another level, McGahn is ideally suited for a job in the Trump White House. The administration’s deregulatory agenda—the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as chief strategist Stephen Bannon put it—is perfectly in sync with McGahn’s libertarian views. To carry out that mission, he has put together a team of nearly 30 lawyers, many of whom are experts in federal law and how to unravel it. McGahn has plenty of experience dismantling the bureaucracy from within: That was precisely the program he pursued for five years while serving on the Federal Election Commission. “He didn’t care about the institution, and he seemed mostly interested in grinding its work to a halt,” says David Kolker, a former associate general counsel at the FEC who worked alongside McGahn. “Don had a blow-it-up mentality.”

Before recent renovations, visitors to the ninth floor of the FEC’s headquarters, where the commissioners have their offices, were greeted by a wall of black-and-white photographs—headshots of all 23 commissioners who had served the agency since its founding in 1975. All except one.

McGahn, who was on the FEC from 2008 to 2013, had refused to sit for his official photo. It was his way of dispelling the notion that he had any affinity for his employer. The way he saw it, he was reining in an overzealous bureaucracy that trampled the rights of ordinary Americans. No commissioner has done more to change the agency.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, McGahn carved out a niche as the go-to lawyer for House Republicans and spent nearly a decade representing the National Republican Congressional Committee, the political arm for House Republicans. When House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was accused of ethics violations, partly in connection with the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, McGahn led his legal defense. (DeLay resigned from Congress but was exonerated in 2013.) In 2005, McGahn hung his own shingle and built a modest practice focusing on election-related cases. (He’d convinced the NRCC to keep him on retainer as its general counsel—an unorthodox and lucrative arrangement.) He developed a reputation as a fierce ideologue with a deep understanding of the law, but within the clubby network of election lawyers, he cut an odd figure. He lacked an Ivy League pedigree, wore his hair long, and spent weekends playing guitar in local rock bands. (His latest, Scott’s New Band, which advertised itself as “one of the Mid-Atlantic region’s most exciting and flat-out FUN cover bands,” split up in December as McGahn prepared to enter the White House.) “He is kind of an iconoclast,” says James Bopp, a prominent conservative election lawyer.

Don McGahn and his band play in Ocean City, Maryland in 2011.

Republicans had floated McGahn in the 2000s to fill an open seat on the FEC. He never hid his disdain for the independent agency—a perspective that undoubtedly appealed to lawmakers who thought of the agency as a nuisance. “The original intent was for it to be a glorified congressional committee,” he said in 2001. Nodding to the fact that the commission is appointed by the same people—members of Congress—whom it regulates, McGahn acknowledged that “you have the charge of the fox guarding the hen-house.”

Congress designed the FEC to ensure bipartisanship, mandating that the six-member commission have no more than three members from either party. The commission can’t act without a four-vote majority. But in 2008, in what some commissioners call the “dark ages,” it was down to two members. Without a quorum, the agency could do little more than run its website and keep the lights on.

Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell cut a deal in the summer of 2008 to end the FEC’s impasse when they confirmed a slate of new commissioners, McGahn among them. From the beginning, McGahn made clear he felt no kinship with his new employer. “A lot of the staff said, ‘Welcome to the agency. It’s so nice to have you join us,'” recalls Eric Wang, an election lawyer who got to know McGahn while working for another Republican commissioner. “He made a point of saying, ‘I’m not joining you,'” making it clear that he was not there to collaborate with the career agency staff, but rather to serve as a check on them.

Watch Trump’s Top White House Lawyer Shred on the Guitar

The FEC has always suffered from partisan infighting. Still, former Democratic and Republican commissioners say they largely viewed their job as enforcing the law and finding four-vote majorities on the cases before them. That seemed to change with the arrival of McGahn and his two Republican colleagues, Caroline Hunter and Matthew Petersen, according to Ellen Weintraub, the FEC’s most senior Democratic commissioner, who recalls that they kept their deliberations to themselves and voted as a bloc. The first time Weintraub witnessed this, she thought, “What? You have one brain for the three of you?”

McGahn was seen as a domineering force on the commission. “There is no nice way to say it: At some point, McGahn will be an asshole,” conservative lawyer Steve Hoersting warned newly confirmed Commissioner Petersen in a 2008 email. “He’ll insist he knows the better course on an issue and will insist you go along. Don likes to employ the ‘trust me’ method of persuasion.”

Weintraub says it was nearly impossible to pry any information out of McGahn, who refused to return her messages or reply to her emails. He rarely seemed to be in his office. Once, Weintraub bumped into his executive assistant in the women’s restroom. “She looked at me, and without even a hello she blurted out, ‘He’s not in, I don’t know when he’s going to be in, I don’t know when I’m going to be talking to him.'”

To his critics, McGahn was on a one-man crusade to destroy the FEC from within. An analysis by the good-government organization Public Citizen found that the number of deadlocked enforcement votes spiked after his arrival, from an average of 1 or 2 percent in the early and mid-2000s to 15 percent in 2011. McGahn had no qualms about undermining the FEC’s nonpartisan lawyers—in one case, he posted a memo to the agency’s website contradicting the commission’s attorneys in an ongoing lawsuit. He bragged about disregarding parts of the law he disputed or saw as out of sync with court rulings. “I’m not enforcing the law as Congress passed it,” he told a group of law students in 2011, referring to the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002, which was partially invalidated by the 2010 Citizens United ruling. “I plead guilty as charged.”

Former FEC employees say McGahn’s hostility to the agency sometimes extended to its staff. Lawyers from the Office of the General Counsel—which issues recommendations to the commission and defends the FEC in lawsuits filed by outside parties—got the worst of it. When junior lawyers appeared before the commissioners in closed sessions, McGahn could be brutal, former FEC employees say. “I remember passing my boss notes saying, ‘Make him stop,'” one former executive assistant told me. “He would pick on not the supervising attorney, but the line attorney—like a cat would play with a mouse, swatting him.” McGahn, former colleagues recall, saw the career employees as liberal do-gooders, and he made it his mission to rein them in. “He would berate the staff,” says a former FEC lawyer. “He said they came to certain conclusions because they favored the Democrats.”

Don McGahn and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, conversing in the Oval Office. Stephen Crowley/New York Times/Redux

The FEC’s lawyers enjoyed an open line of communication with the Justice Department. The two agencies often worked different sides of the same cases—the DOJ handled the criminal side while the FEC handled the civil. Near the end of his tenure, McGahn pushed for changes to the agency’s enforcement manual so the Office of General Counsel couldn’t share information with other federal agencies without the commission’s approval. McGahn also sought to require FEC lawyers to get four votes on the commission before accessing publicly available information—such as news clips and old lawsuits—in enforcement matters. Allies of McGahn say these moves were intended to bring order to an out-of-control bureaucracy. (Both efforts were unsuccessful, though his proposals have since become de facto policy at the commission.) FEC lawyers saw McGahn’s efforts as an attempt to handcuff them. The FEC’s general counsel at the time, Anthony Herman, quit in frustration.

McGahn left the commission in September 2013 and returned to private practice. If his goal was to paralyze the nation’s election watchdog, he largely succeeded. Deadlocked votes continue. Enforcement actions and assessed fines have dropped. (The Republican commissioners tout these statistics as evidence that more candidates and committees are following the law, while Democrats say they’re proof of the agency’s failure to act.) The commission has gone more than three years without naming a new general counsel, and Congress hasn’t confirmed any new members since 2013, with one current member’s term having expired as many as 10 years ago. A 2016 survey of federal employees found that morale at the FEC was at its lowest ever. Ann Ravel, a Democratic commissioner, recently resigned two months early, weary of the FEC’s dysfunction.

McGahn is not solely at fault for the FEC’s sorry state—but those who worked alongside him or observed his time there say he deserves much of the blame. “He ushered in a strategic approach to gridlocking that agency,” says David Donnelly, president of the election reform group Every Voice, “because if an agency can’t do its job, it can’t enforce the law.”

In late 2014, McGahn met Donald Trump for the first time. He was now a partner at Jones Day and had taken on high-profile conservative clients, including the political action committee of the billionaire Koch brothers and Citizens United, the nonprofit group behind the monumental Supreme Court ruling of the same name. David Bossie, the head of Citizens United, had hired McGahn to spearhead a lawsuit against New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to block disclosure of its donors. (The suit ultimately lost.) As Trump mulled a presidential run, Bossie recommended McGahn as a campaign lawyer.

According to a person familiar with the meeting, McGahn reminded Trump that they had a personal connection. In the early 1980s, when the real estate mogul wanted to muscle his way into the fledgling casino industry in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he hired McGahn’s uncle Patrick, a local lawyer and political power broker. A three-time Purple Heart recipient nicknamed Piano Wire Paddy for his weapon of choice in the Korean War, Paddy McGahn and his brother Joe, a Democratic state senator, had been instrumental in bringing casino gambling to Atlantic City. Paddy, who died in 2000, paved the way for Trump’s Atlantic City expansion. When a Trump executive complained at the time about his high legal fees, Trump reportedly said, “Jack, I’m 13 and 0 with this guy.”

By the time Trump opened his first casino in 1984, however, the McGahns had undergone a conversion. Tired of operating under Paddy’s thumb, the state assemblyman for Atlantic City, Steven Perskie, had challenged Joe McGahn for his state Senate seat in 1977. The Democratic machine threw its weight behind Perskie (McGahn ran as an independent), and Perskie won the election—a betrayal in the eyes of the McGahn family. Thereafter, the McGahns were Republicans.

What the FEC?

Don McGahn, who grew up in Atlantic City, was one of Trump’s earliest campaign hires. The lawyer, though, didn’t bet entirely on Trump. In March 2015, he also took on another client: former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s leadership PAC, seen as a vehicle for a Perry presidential run. It is not uncommon for rival candidates to be represented by lawyers at the same law firm, but rarely does the same attorney work for more than one contender, according to election lawyers I spoke to.

McGahn was in attendance for Trump’s official campaign announcement in the rose-marble lobby of Trump Tower in June 2015. It was a landmark moment in a lucrative partnership. According to an election lawyer I talked to, a presidential campaign typically pays a flat fee in the range of $25,000 to $35,000 a month for legal representation. Jones Day, according to a former Trump staffer, instead billed the campaign on an hourly basis, racking up monthly bills of as much as several hundred thousand dollars. “For the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal, Trump got totally screwed on the deal with Jones Day,” the election lawyer told me.

McGahn came to play an integral role as the race wore on. In November 2015, he beat back an attempt by the former chair of New Hampshire’s Republican Party to keep Trump off the ballot in the state. As Trump delivered his victory speech in Manchester, a beaming McGahn stood onstage with the Trump family. And it was McGahn who introduced Trump to Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society executive who oversaw the Trump campaign’s assembly of two lists of potential Supreme Court nominees as a way to win over skeptical Republicans. Polls show that Trump’s picks played a key role in convincing social conservatives to hold their noses and vote for him.

For a campaign with no shortage of drama, McGahn proved remarkably adept at ducking attention. In a rare on-camera interview with a right-wing TV network called the One America News Network on the floor of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, he predicted that Trump would defeat Hillary Clinton and claim the presidency in November. Asked what Trump would say in his RNC acceptance speech, McGahn grinned. “I wouldn’t dare begin to guess.”

One day this winter, C. Boyden Gray passed the scrum of photographers camped out in the lobby of Trump Tower and rode the elevator up. McGahn, now the White House counsel-to-be, had sought his advice on how to represent the most unorthodox president in perhaps all of American history. Their conversation focused on the massive ethics conundrums facing President-elect Trump, Gray told me. He’d tackled ethics questions himself while working as White House counsel for George H.W. Bush, who made a fortune in the oil industry, but “I didn’t have anywhere near the complexities that Don McGahn had,” he says.

Those who know McGahn see his influence at play in the White House’s laissez-faire approach to ethics and its insistence that conflict-of-interest rules don’t apply to Trump. Trump has refused to divest from his business holdings, raising the possibility of self-enrichment by virtue of the office and violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which prohibits a president from accepting payments from foreign governments. Trump told the New York Times in November that a sitting president “can’t have a conflict of interest” and that the law was “totally on my side.” The idea that conflict-of-interest laws don’t apply to the president “is vintage McGahn,” a former colleague told me.

McGahn’s hiring choices to oversee Trump’s sprawling ethics portfolio may be telling. As his top deputy in charge of compliance and ethics, he brought on Stefan Passantino, a lawyer perhaps best known for representing former House Speakers Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert in their respective ethics scandals—Gingrich for using tax-deductible money for political purposes and submitting false information to House investigators, and Hastert for failing to properly disclose that he’d paid legal bills with campaign funds in connection with the congressional page scandal. (Years later, Hastert admitted in court to abusing young boys and was sentenced to 15 months in prison for illegally paying hush money to one alleged victim.) Under McGahn, as Politico reported, the White House eschewed the traditional ethics briefing for senior staffers. After the nonpartisan Office of Government Ethics recommended that Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway be reprimanded for promoting Ivanka Trump’s clothing business, Passantino refused, arguing that many federal ethics laws don’t apply to White House employees. OGE Director Walter Shaub Jr. countered that Passantino’s assertion “cites no legal basis” and “is incorrect.”

Follow the Dark Money

Ethics haven’t been the only issue dogging McGahn and the counsel’s office. The chaos surrounding Trump’s January 27 travel ban raised the question of whether McGahn was in over his head. His attempt to clarify the order via a legal memo in federal court was panned by outside legal experts, and his case was not helped when Trump went on a Twitter tirade against the “so-called judge” who had made a “ridiculous” ruling. (If McGahn did urge Trump to curb his attacks on the judiciary, Trump didn’t listen: After the administration’s revised immigration order was blocked in court in March, Trump called the ruling “terrible” and “done by a judge for political reasons.”)

A more experienced counsel, say ex-White House lawyers and other legal experts, would have consulted federal agencies before releasing such an explosive order and stopped the president from launching verbal assaults against members of the judiciary. “One person who must bear responsibility for the awful rollout of the EO is White House Counsel Donald McGahn,” Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general at the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, wrote on the website Lawfare. If McGahn had tried to restrain Trump and failed, Goldsmith argued, then he was ineffectual; if he had not attempted to corral Trump and correct the flaws in the immigration order, he was incompetent.

Still more questions were raised about McGahn’s judgment and the White House’s vetting process when the Washington Post reported that national security adviser Michael Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and that the Justice Department had briefed McGahn about it during the transition. The next day, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that McGahn had conducted his own review and “determined that there is not a legal issue.”

Former White House lawyers were stunned. “I wouldn’t have done that,” a former Obama White House counsel told me. “I don’t know what the FBI knows. I don’t know who they’re interviewing.” Goldsmith, the former senior Justice Department lawyer, questioned how rigorous McGahn’s review could have been. The White House counsels he knew, Goldsmith wrote, “were all tough-minded but extremely prudent in dealing with legal jeopardy related to the White House, especially if that jeopardy touched someone as close to the President as his National Security Advisor.” He added, “It is far from clear that the current White House counsel has acted in this fashion.” And McGahn’s judgment was once again called into question when news reports revealed that Flynn had worked as a foreign agent on behalf of Turkish interests at the same time he served as Trump’s national security adviser—a troubling conflict that the incoming White House counsel was briefed on but declined to address.

In late March, two of McGahn’s underlings in the counsel’s office were reported to have helped supply classified intelligence reports to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chair of the House intelligence committee, in an attempt to support President Trump’s unfounded allegation that his predecessor had wiretapped him. The revelation raised questions about whether McGahn had played any part in this effort.

The mark of a great White House counsel, experts say, is providing sound legal advice to the commander in chief whether he wants to hear it or not. But with McGahn, the evidence so far—the lax approach to Trump’s ethics problems, the execution of the immigration order, the Flynn imbroglio—suggests a loyal lieutenant eager to please the president. “Don is an expert. He is not a lawyer who says, ‘You simply are unable to do X,'” a former Trump campaign aide told me. “He’ll look for every single type of way to be able to do X.” Which, in the end, may be the last thing this president needs.

Original article: 

Clean Up On Aisle Trump

Posted in alo, Bragg, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Scotts, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Clean Up On Aisle Trump

5 Things We’ve Learned About Neil Gorsuch So Far

by LaraeThurgood Posted on March 21, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Two days into Neil Gosuch’s confirmation hearings, the proceedings have yielded little insight into the Supreme Court nominee’s views about important legal precedent or landmark cases. In keeping with the tradition of previous nominees, he has declined to give any opinions on past or future cases, or explain his personal views on controversial legal issues from abortion to gay marriage. And he’s sidestepped questions about his work in the Bush Justice Department, which included helping the administration defend torture and denying access to the courts for detainees at Guantanamo. But the hearings have unearthed some more obscure trivia about the 10th Circuit judge. Here are some of the most interesting tidbits that have emerged so far:

He likes David Foster Wallace: Waxing poetic about his view of the law, Gorsuch told the Judiciary Committee: “We’re now like David Foster Wallace’s fish. We’re surrounded by the rule of law. It’s in the fabric of our lives.”

Gorsuch was referring to the story the late writer told in a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. “There are these two young fish swimming along,” Wallace told the graduating students, “and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?'”

His confirmation hearing isn’t the first time Gorsuch has referenced Wallace’s fish. He’s invoked it at least once before, in an article for the Harvard Journal of Law and Policy. “If sometimes the cynic in all of us fails to see our Nation’s successes when it comes to the rule of law,” he wrote, “maybe it’s because we are like David Foster Wallace’s fish that’s oblivious to the life-giving water in which it swims.”

He thinks it’s OK for a women to be president even if the founders didn’t: Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked Gorsuch about his belief that judges should interpret the Constitution the way the Founders would have written it, better known as originalism, which would seem to make it difficult for the law to adapt to modern life. “I’m not looking to take us back to quill pens and horse and buggies,” Gorsuch told her. But Klobuchar pressed on. She wanted to know how he could square his originalist philosophy with the fact that the Constitution as first written didn’t allow women to vote. “So when the Constitution refers 30-some times to ‘his’ or ‘he’ when describing the president of the United States, you would see that as, ‘Well back then they actually thought a woman could be president even through women couldn’t vote?'” she asked. In response, Gorsuch growled, “Of course women can be president! I’ve got two daughters. I hope one of them grows up to be president.”

He loves The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) opened his questioning of Gorsuch by asking him: “What is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything?” The judge responded with a smile, “42.” Gorsuch explained that the question is a joke he uses to break the ice when swearing in nervous lawyers.

Gorsuch claimed everyone knew the answer to the question because it comes from Douglas Adams’ cult classic novel, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was clear that aside from Cruz, most of the senators on the Judiciary Committee had not read the book. “If you haven’t read it, you should,” Gorsuch told them. “It may be one of my daughter’s favorite books. And so, that’s a family joke.” Cruz gave Gorsuch a dreamy look and said that he saw Gorsuch’s Hitchhiker joke as “a delightful example of the humanity of a judge that your record has demonstrated.”

He had a pet goat: In his opening statement Monday, Gorsuch gave a shout out to his daughters, who were home in Colorado watching the hearings on TV. He reminisced about “devising ways to keep our determined pet goat out of the garden,” one of his favorite memories with them.

His kids have engaged in “mutton busting”: Cruz got Gorsuch talking about the Denver rodeo, where he takes his law clerks every year. The spectacle finishes up with the prize steer visiting the lobby of the Brown Palace hotel. As part of the festivities, the rodeo features something called mutton busting—a children’s version of bronco riding, done on sheep instead of bulls—which Gorsuch described like this:

You take a poor little kid, you find a sheep, and you attach the one to the other and see how long they can hold on. And you know, it usually works fine when the sheep has got a lot of wool and you tell them to hold on. I tell my kids hold on monkey style. Really get in there, right? Get around it. Because if you sit upright, you go flying right off. Right? You want to get in. The problem when you get in is that you’re so locked in that you don’t want to let go. Right? So then the poor clown has to come and knock you off the sheep. My daughters got knocked around pretty good over the years.”

Continued here:  

5 Things We’ve Learned About Neil Gorsuch So Far

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Oster, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 5 Things We’ve Learned About Neil Gorsuch So Far

In Fox’s New Police Shooting Drama, Even the Extras Cry

by BillieWayn Posted on March 18, 2017

Mother Jones

Shots Fired—a 10-part drama series that premieres on Fox on March 22—is a gripping examination of police violence and racial injustice in America. The show stars Stephen James (Race, Selma) and Sanaa Lathan (Love and Basketball, Alien vs. Predator) as Department of Justice officials called by the governor into a fictional North Carolina town to look into the fatal shooting of a young white man by a black sheriff’s deputy. The conflict escalates when the pair learn of another killing—of a black teen whose mother was warned by sheriff’s deputies to keep quiet—that has gone all but unnoticed by the town’s white residents. As the dual investigations unfold, the show offers sharp commentary on the human toll of violence and the role of race in the criminal justice system.

The series was created, written, and directed by husband-and-wife duo Reggie Bythewood (who most recently directed the TV series Gun Hill) and Gina Prince-Bythewood (director of Love and Basketball and The Secret Life of Bees). I caught up with Reggie earlier this week to talk about who inspired the show and what will happen to police accountability under the Trump administration. Watch the trailer, and then we’ll talk.

Mother Jones: Okay, this seems obvious, but I’ll ask anyway. What made you want to do a show about police shootings?

Reggie Bythewood: We have two boys. In July 2013, as the George Zimmerman verdict was being announced on TV, I sat down with my oldest son, then 12 years old. He got emotional when the verdict came back not guilty. Instead of hugging and consoling him, I pulled up an Emmett Till documentary on YouTube and made him watch it. Then I talked to him about the criminal justice system and how in many cases it doesn’t work.

It was the first real man-to-man talk we had. It was also the first time Gina and I felt like we wanted to be a part of the conversation. Not just as parents and black people, but as artists. We had been thinking about making a movie since then. But after Ferguson, Fox approached us about doing a series. We jumped at the idea, because a movie would have been a 90-minute version of the story instead of the 10-hour series we created.

MJ: One of the two shootings investigated on the show involves a white victim and a black cop. Usually we see the opposite. Why did you flip it?

RB: I want to stress that Shots Fired is not about a black cop who kills a white kid. It’s about the shooting of an unarmed white guy and an unarmed black guy. We wanted to create a narrative where we could look at both cases. But to answer your question, there were a lot of people who never saw Trayvon Martin as a kid. He was painted as the victimizer. And Zimmerman got donations from all over the country. So in doing a show that deals with police violence, the question was how do we make those people who sent in the donations see this kid as a human being? One of the things we came up with was to just make one victim white.

MJ: In Jesse’s case—he’s the white kid who is killed—you have these themes of grief and injustice projected onto a white family that are more familiar to a black audience. Then you have a black cop whose life is thrown into disarray—a notion that might resonate more with people who empathize with the police—and that idea is projected onto a black family. That seems instructive for people on both sides of the fence.

Reggie Bythewood created, wrote, and directed Shots Fired along with and Gina Prince-Bythewood. Courtesy Fox

RB: We wanted to let people understand what a mother feels when her son is killed and is painted as the victimizer. We also wanted every character to be three-dimensional and human. Some people are coming into it seeing things from the cop’s point of view who would not ordinarily think that way, but that’s an unintended consequence of the way we approached our primary goal.

MJ: Your research process has been grueling. Tell me about it.

RB: Our writers read articles. We watched the Jordan Davis documentary and several others. We had a two-hour Skype meeting with former Attorney General Eric Holder. We spoke with Ray Kelly, the former police commissioner of New York. He’s a proponent of stop-and-frisk—I’m not. But if you really want to do a good job, you can’t just talk to people who share your point of view. We spoke with Michelle Alexander author of The New Jim Crow, and we read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. We talked to people who have been victims of police misconduct. We talked to black cops and white cops. One of our staff writers, J. David Shanks, a black guy, was a police officer in Chicago for six years. One of the people whose words really resonated with us was Wanda Johnson, the mother of Oscar Grant.

MJ: What did she say?

RB: She came to the writers’ room and talked to us about what it’s like as a mother to see your child become a symbol—of civil rights for some, and of anti-law-enforcement, of hate, for others—and watch people lose sight of the fact that this is a human being. So part of our goal was to make the victims—all the characters, really—human, and to make people empathize.

MJ: The DOJ launched investigations into two police shootings while you were filming last summer—Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Did that affect production at all?

RB: It was emotional on set when these incidents happened. There was a day when we had a prayer circle because it was hard to continue with the subject matter. It was amazing to see the extras crying on set. But those shootings reminded us that we had a cause. Yes, we’re artists. Yes, we’re doing a TV show to entertain. But this is all for real.

MJ: Now we have an attorney general—Jeff Sessions—who indicates that the Department of Justice will pull back on investigating police abuses. Yet your main characters are DOJ people doing exactly that.

RB: We assumed Hillary Clinton would be the next president and that there wouldn’t be a drastic shift at the Department of Justice. But I think the show is more relevant now in a way that we didn’t expect, because it highlights the importance of having a DOJ that listens to the people it serves, the urgency of these cases, and the need to have a responsive DOJ. I hope we expand that conversation.

See the original post: 

In Fox’s New Police Shooting Drama, Even the Extras Cry

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Sterling, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on In Fox’s New Police Shooting Drama, Even the Extras Cry

The Crazy Theory About Smog That’s Gaining Ground in the White House

by AltonMrudqqjhwc Posted on March 18, 2017

Mother Jones

This story was originally published by The New Republic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It was known as the Great Pea Soup. In 1952, a thick, greenish-yellow fog smothered London, halting traffic and daily life. At the time, when households burned cheap coal for heat, factories spewed unregulated smoke, and buses burned diesel fuel, Londoners were used to a certain degree of greasy haze. But the Great Smog or Big Smoke, as this 1952 pea-souper was also known, was unprecedented. Bitterly cold air “soaked up the pollution and held it like a blanket over the city” for four days straight, according to the Daily Mail. Twelve thousand people died.

Sixty-five years later, our scientific understanding of air pollution has advanced immeasurably. We now know—because of events like the Great Pea Soup, but also a groundbreaking 1993 Harvard University study of smog-ridden U.S. cities and countless research papers since then—that short-term and long-term exposure to air pollution can kill people, particularly those with pre-existing conditions. “The evidence is so large,” said C. Arden Pope, a professor at Brigham Young University world-renowned researcher of air pollution’s impacts on human health. “There are very few people conducting this research and publishing it in the peer-reviewed literature who don’t think fine particles pollution can lead to death.”

There are, indeed, very few people who believe air pollution—specifically “fine particulate” pollution, or PM2.5—doesn’t cause death. Those who do, however, are getting louder and gaining influence in conservative political circles and inside President Donald Trump’s administration. These air-pollution deniers have just one hope: the repeal of clean-air regulations that have long protected Americans’ health.

At last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), during a little-noticed panel on climate change and environmental regulation, air pollution denial was rampant and went unchallenged. Steve Milloy, formerly a paid flack for the tobacco and fossil fuel industries and member of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, argued that excessive air pollution is not linked to premature death. “My particular interest is air pollution,” Milloy said, alleging that EPA’s scientists are inherently biased. “These people validate and rubber-stamp the EPA’s conclusion that air pollution kills people.” Milloy also said, baselessly, that EPA scientists are “paying for the science it wants,” and that Trump must change the research process at the agency.

It is extensively proven, and widely accepted, that air pollution can harm humans, which is why the government regulates it. PM2.5 refers to tiny particles that are 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter—small enough to penetrate deep into the circulatory system and potentially infiltrate the central nervous system. The particles range in composition, originating anywhere from cement dust to tobacco smoke to pollen. They are currently regulated under the Clean Air Act, a widely popular law passed in 1963 that has seen major amendments receiving unanimous or overwhelming support in the Senate. The CAA currently requires Congress to set what’s known as National Ambient Air Quality Standards for particulate matter.

Even Breitbart, the alt-right media organization with close ties to Trump, seems to accept that air pollution is bad for human health. It has published dozens of articles over the years—many from wire services, but some from its own contributors—that report, without opinion, about studies on the issue. “The chronic problem of pollution in China has been linked to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths,” Thomas D. Williams, Breitbart‘s Rome bureau chief, wrote in 2015. “The fine particles are believed to play a role in cardiovascular disease, lung problems, cancer, and emphysema.” Earlier this month, Breitbart senior editor-at-large Joel B. Pollack reported, “Air quality in some East Asian capitals is famously poor, with residents of Beijing taking extreme measures to avoid the health risks associated with heavy pollution.”

But Breitbart has also provided a platform for those leading the charge for air pollution denial. Last year, it published a column by Milloy titled, “How stupid is air pollution ‘science’?” And earlier this month, Breitbart columnist James Delingpole—who usually sticks to columns attacking climate science—joined the fray. In an article declaring that “The EPA’s Air Pollution Scare Is Just Another Fake News Myth,” Delingpole took issue with the most recent State of Global Air report, which found that air pollution contributed to 4.2 million deaths in 2015, because the study was partly funded by the EPA—while conveniently ignoring that it was also funded by 23 car companies and Exxon Mobil. Delingpole cited Milloy exclusively and extensively, linking to Milloy’s “fact sheet” on air pollution.

“Frankly, it’s full of stuff and nonsense,” said Janice Nolen, the assistant vice president of national policy at the American Lung Association, referring to Milloy’s fact sheet. “Particle pollution is one of the most researched topics in the scientific world, and has been reviewed extensively.”

There are pages of false claims in Milloy’s sheet, but a few are particularly egregious. He argues that two renowned air pollution studies that established the basic connection between PM2.5 and death—the aforementioned Harvard study and one by Pope, the BYU professor—have controversial methodologies that cannot be resolved because scientists refuse to make the raw data available. “For results to be considered to be scientifically credible, they must be capable of being independently replicated,” Milloy writes. This claim is the basis of a Republican-led bill currently being pushed through the House of Representatives.

There are several problems with this line of argument. The raw data Milloy seeks is private medical information on human subjects who were assured confidentiality when they participated in these studies. “There’s this issue if this data becomes public, will anyone be able to go and knock on these people’s doors?” said Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, an environmental health professor at Columbia University. Long-term health data is also difficult to reproduce because the people who participated in the study have grown up; many likely have died. This is why, scientists say, many public health studies simply can’t be replicated. (The Harvard study, however, was successfully replicated in 2001 by the Health Effects Institute, which is funded by EPA, the motor vehicle industry, and the oil and gas industry. A similar reanalysis was published in 2005.)

Milloy and Delingpole also claim that “not one single” epidemiological or toxicological study has ever shown that particulate pollution directly caused a death, either in the short term or due to prolonged exposure. Kioumourtzoglou says this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how scientists classify cause of death. When people die, they are given an International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code to signify what happened, and there is no ICD code for pollution. “If you died of a heart attack, you get the ICD code for a heart attack,” she said. “If exposure to PM2.5 has caused a heart attack, on your death certificate, it would still say heart attack, not PM2.5.”

Pope, whose study was one of the first to establish the connection between short-term exposure to fine particulate matter and death, also said Milloy’s claim misunderstands the type of person who dies from exposure. A perfectly healthy person is not going to croak from a short jog through haze. But people who are already unhealthy—who have asthma, or cardiovascular or heart disease—should be worried. “We often refer to it as triggering,” Pope said. “Particulates will trigger these acute events, such as heart attack.”

This is not to say that the research on this subject is flawless. Kioumourtzoglou, unlike Milloy, has lead and published studies on problems with the scientific methods surrounding the impact of particulate matter pollution on human health. Scientists cannot strap pollution monitors onto humans and follow them around for years at a time, so sometimes they rely on models that predict air pollution concentrations at certain locations and times. “We have to rely on less than perfect measurements,” she said. “And these are known to induce error.”

The error, however, is exactly the opposite of what Milloy claims. Kioumourtzoglou’s research has found that current air pollution measuring methods tend to understate the effects of air pollution. “In reality,” she said, “the effects are even worse than documented.”

The good news is, Milloy and Delingpole remain outliers in a sea of evidence. As ThinkProgress pointed out last month, “The Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Institutes of Health, the American Lung Association, and the United Nations all link air pollution to increased risk of asthma, heart disease, and stroke. In 2013, the WHO even concluded that air pollution could be categorized as a human carcinogen.” Even Breitbart, as indicated above, has published uncritical articles about these organizations’ findings.

The bad news is, we already know that outliers can have disproportionate impact on policy. Just look at the debate surrounding climate change. Despite near-consensus in the scientific community, one third of Congress are climate change deniers, as are Trump and his new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt. What’s more, they’re using their fact-free ideology to dismantle policies that slow climate change. Trump is expected to issue an executive order this week undoing the Clean Power Plan, which regulates carbon emissions from fossil fuel plants. He is also considering withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, the landmark international accord to stop global warming.

Milloy and Delingpole surely would like air-pollution deniers to have a similar impact on national policy. Given Milloy’s closeness to Trump’s inner circle, and Breitbart‘s growing influence on the White House, and it doesn’t seem so far-fetched. But even if that doesn’t come to pass, these deniers have already succeeded in shaping—or rather, creating—a debate that no politician or scientist should rightly entertain. And that debate is now a public reality. Milloy’s “fact sheet,” for instance, is the first result in a Google search of “PM 2.5 science.” A legitimate scientific article is second.

Google screenshot

Source:  

The Crazy Theory About Smog That’s Gaining Ground in the White House

Posted in Crown, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Crazy Theory About Smog That’s Gaining Ground in the White House

Trump’s “skinny budget” may slash EPA funding even more than previously reported.

by Ludie69E Posted on March 16, 2017

A self-described “anonymous environmental activist collective” spelled out “NO MORE TIGERS, NO MORE WOODS” in six-foot-high letters at the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

“It’s a protest piece against Trump’s administration’s handling of our environmental policies,” one of the activists told a local ABC affiliate, using a voice disguiser. “He’s been very aggressive in gutting a lot of the policies that we’ve had in place for a very long time. We felt it necessary to stand up and go take action against him.”

Plus the activists don’t like golf courses. “Tearing up the golf course felt justified in many ways,” one activist told the Washington Post. “Repurposing what was once a beautiful stretch of land into a playground for the privileged is an environmental crime in its own right.”

The Washington Post article originally called the action a “daring act of defiance.” Though accurate, the description irritated Eric Trump, the president’s second-oldest son:

The Post then changed its story to say the group “pulled off an elaborate act of vandalism.”

No comment from Tiger Woods, who has golfed with Donald Trump and said he plays pretty well for an old guy.

Originally posted here: 

Trump’s “skinny budget” may slash EPA funding even more than previously reported.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, ONA, PUR, Ringer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s “skinny budget” may slash EPA funding even more than previously reported.

For the first time ever, people have eaten chicken without killing a chicken.

by RoccoRaine9478 Posted on March 15, 2017

A self-described “anonymous environmental activist collective” spelled out “NO MORE TIGERS, NO MORE WOODS” in six-foot-high letters at the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

“It’s a protest piece against Trump’s administration’s handling of our environmental policies,” one of the activists told a local ABC affiliate, using a voice disguiser. “He’s been very aggressive in gutting a lot of the policies that we’ve had in place for a very long time. We felt it necessary to stand up and go take action against him.”

Plus the activists don’t like golf courses. “Tearing up the golf course felt justified in many ways,” one activist told the Washington Post. “Repurposing what was once a beautiful stretch of land into a playground for the privileged is an environmental crime in its own right.”

The Washington Post article originally called the action a “daring act of defiance.” Though accurate, the description irritated Eric Trump, the president’s second-oldest son:

The Post then changed its story to say the group “pulled off an elaborate act of vandalism.”

No comment from Tiger Woods, who has golfed with Donald Trump and said he plays pretty well for an old guy.

Original post: 

For the first time ever, people have eaten chicken without killing a chicken.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, ONA, PUR, Ringer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on For the first time ever, people have eaten chicken without killing a chicken.

Trump is sending Obama’s auto fuel economy standards back to the drawing board.

by Janette01B Posted on March 15, 2017

A self-described “anonymous environmental activist collective” spelled out “NO MORE TIGERS, NO MORE WOODS” in six-foot-high letters at the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

“It’s a protest piece against Trump’s administration’s handling of our environmental policies,” one of the activists told a local ABC affiliate, using a voice disguiser. “He’s been very aggressive in gutting a lot of the policies that we’ve had in place for a very long time. We felt it necessary to stand up and go take action against him.”

Plus the activists don’t like golf courses. “Tearing up the golf course felt justified in many ways,” one activist told the Washington Post. “Repurposing what was once a beautiful stretch of land into a playground for the privileged is an environmental crime in its own right.”

The Washington Post article originally called the action a “daring act of defiance.” Though accurate, the description irritated Eric Trump, the president’s second-oldest son:

The Post then changed its story to say the group “pulled off an elaborate act of vandalism.”

No comment from Tiger Woods, who has golfed with Donald Trump and said he plays pretty well for an old guy.

Link:

Trump is sending Obama’s auto fuel economy standards back to the drawing board.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, ONA, PUR, Ringer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump is sending Obama’s auto fuel economy standards back to the drawing board.