Tag Archives: Everyone

It’s No Mystery That Donald Trump Isn’t Paying Much Attention to Immigration

by RebeccaBeasley8 Posted on June 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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From the Washington Post:

Lawmakers baffled that immigration getting short shrift in Washington

Meh. Trump never cared much about immigration. It was just a campaign tool, and he practically admitted as much at one point. That’s not to say he won’t try to get something done about it, but it’s never likely to be a huge issue for him. And without him putting a lot of energy behind it, it won’t go anywhere. There are too many Republican members of Congress who are opposed to highly punitive immigration rules.

Eventually the immigration hawks will learn the same thing as everyone else: it’s all just one long con. Trump doesn’t care about policy. Not immigration, not taxes, not abortion, not health care, not ISIS. He has vague inclinations on all these things, but that’s all. He’s mainly driven by whatever can keep him in the spotlight for the next week or two.

That’s probably the real reason he pulled out of the Paris climate accord. If he stays in, he gets nothing. If he pulls out, he gets a week or two of attention. It was an easy choice.

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It’s No Mystery That Donald Trump Isn’t Paying Much Attention to Immigration

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Trump still hasn’t decided whether to dump the Paris climate agreement or not.

by PriscilPapathan Posted on May 30, 2017

Born and raised in Oahu, Hawaii, Evan Weber went to the same K-through-12 school attended by future President Barack Obama. By the time Weber got to college, he was taking his fellow Punahou School alum to task for what Weber believed was an inadequate climate action plan.

Together, Weber, a college buddy, and one of their professors drafted their own climate agenda, a policy report they initially simply called “The Plan.” A direct response to Obama’s 2013 climate plan, this version called for the U.S. to go even further in reducing carbon emissions and proposed a set of financial and regulatory solutions to make it happen. Weber ran an Indiegogo campaign to drum up support around The Plan and started popping up as a climate evangelist in media outlets like the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, and Newsweek. Now his goal is to build the political power necessary to enact it.

Weber’s organization, U.S. Climate Plan, pushes for climate legislation on the state level and organizes campaigns supporting climate justice. Weber supports young activists by building partnerships between grassroots organizations, teaching statewide strategy plans, and advising college students. This, in Weber’s eyes, is how you build a generational front against climate change. “And morally, we know that we are going to win.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Trump still hasn’t decided whether to dump the Paris climate agreement or not.

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Check out what career government staff is doing to fly under Trump’s radar.

by itsmejenny Posted on May 26, 2017

A report on the employment practices of green groups finds that the sector, despite its socially progressive reputation, is still overwhelmingly the bastion of white men.

According to the study, released by Green 2.0, roughly 3 out of 10 people at environmental organizations are people of color, but at the senior staff level, the figure drops closer to 1 out of 10. And at all levels, from full-time employees to board members, men make up three-quarters or more of NGO staffs.

Click to embiggen.Green 2.0

The new report, titled “Beyond Diversity: A Roadmap to Building an Inclusive Organization,” relied on more than 85 interviews of executives and HR reps and recruiters at environmental organizations.

Representatives of NGOs and foundations largely agreed on the benefits of having a more diverse workforce, from the added perspectives in addressing environmental problems to a deeper focus on environmental justice to allowing the movement to engage a wider audience.

The most worrisome finding is that fewer than 40 percent of environmental groups even had diversity plans in place to ensure they’re more inclusive. According to the report, “Research shows that diversity plans increases the odds of black men in management positions significantly.”

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Check out what career government staff is doing to fly under Trump’s radar.

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CBO Agrees: Trumpcare Wipes Out Protections for Pre-Existing Conditions

by BrennaKGTB Posted on May 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Earlier this month I passed along a note from Matthew Fiedler of the Brookings Institution. Long story short, he suggested that the Republican health care bill would do more than eliminate community rating only for folks who failed to maintain continuous coverage.1 He theorized that once a separate set of rates was set up, insurers could open it up to anyone. Since this second rate schedule would be medically underwritten—i.e., based on health status—it would be very cheap for young, healthy folks. In the end, healthy consumers would all gravitate to the medically-underwritten rates while unhealthy consumers would be stuck with the higher community-rated prices. Over time, the difference between these rates would grow, which means that anyone with a pre-existing condition would end up paying much higher rates than similar healthy people.

This was an interesting suggestion, but since then I haven’t heard anyone else support Fiedler’s argument. Until today, that is. AHCA allows states to apply for waivers from two provisions of Obamacare. The first is the requirement to provide essential health benefits. The Congressional Budget Office describes the other waiver:

A second type of waiver would allow insurers to set premiums on the basis of an individual’s health status if the person had not demonstrated continuous coverage; that is, the waiver would eliminate the requirement for what is termed community rating for premiums charged to such people. CBO and JCT anticipate that most healthy people…would be able to choose between premiums based on their own expected health care costs (medically underwritten premiums) and premiums based on the average health care costs…(community-rated premiums).

….CBO and JCT expect that, as a consequence, the waivers in those states would have another effect: Community-rated premiums would rise over time, and people who are less healthy (including those with preexisting or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all….As a result, the nongroup markets in those states would become unstable for people with higher-than-average expected health care costs.

So the CBO expects precisely the result that Fiedler predicted. This is genuinely big news and deserves wider reporting. For all practical purposes, AHCA eliminates the requirement that insurers charge the same rates to everyone, even those with pre-existing conditions. They still can’t flatly turn you down, but they can do the next best thing: make insurance so expensive for those with pre-existing conditions that most people can’t afford it. That’s especially harmful since the subsidies under AHCA are so skimpy.

This provision of AHCA has no direct budgetary impact, so it ought to get tossed out by the Senate parliamentarian.2 We’ll have to wait and see how that turns out.

1“Community rating” is the requirement that everyone pays the same price for insurance, even if they have a pre-existing condition.

2AHCA is being passed as a reconciliation bill. These bills are only allowed to address issues that directly affect the federal budget.

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CBO Agrees: Trumpcare Wipes Out Protections for Pre-Existing Conditions

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I Talked to a Man on Alabama’s Death Row. The State Plans to Kill Him Tonight.

by MeghanBraund Posted on May 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Alabama has been trying to put Thomas Arthur to death for more than 30 years. The 75-year-old inmate, who has consistently maintained his innocence for a 1982 murder, has had three trials and survived seven execution dates since 2001. On Thursday, Alabama will attempt to execute him again.

“I didn’t have anything to do with this,” he tells Mother Jones from the Holman Correctional Facility, where Alabama houses most of those on death row. “I gave ’em hair and spit and everything…and they found nothing.”

I spoke with Arthur the week he is scheduled to die. His lawyers arranged for a 30-minute phone conversation to give him a chance to tell his story, maybe for the last time. He spoke rapidly, stumbling over some sentences in a rich Southern accent that sometimes blurred the clarity of his words. But there was no lack of clarity in his reflections of what it has been like to be one of the first inmates sent to death row in Alabama—after the practice was reinstated after a 1976 landmark Supreme Court ruling—and to live there for 34 years.

During that time, his health has deteriorated, and he has stood by while 58 other inmates were executed. Holman, like many of Alabama’s prisons, became overcrowded and crumbling and was the scene of a riot in 2016. He has watched the methods of execution change, from the electric chair to midazolam, a controversial drug that will be used on him, despite efforts his lawyers have made to convince the courts that given his heart condition, the drug might not be effective and would likely cause undue suffering. He has also had a lengthy education in the criminal justice system from three different trials and the seven times he believed he would die, only to have his execution postponed. At this point, Arthur still hopes for DNA evidence to prove his innocence. “If they just let my lawyers in a courtroom,” he says, “we wouldn’t be at this juncture.”

Arthur’s journey to death row began on February 1, 1982, when Troy Wicker was shot and killed in his bed in the northwest Alabama city of Muscle Shoals. On the day of the murder, his wife, Judy Wicker, told police that she came home after taking her children to school to find a black man in her home. She claimed that the intruder raped her, knocked her unconscious, and shot her husband. Police found bullets but no murder weapon. Wicker went to the hospital and her rape kit was subsequently lost.

Judy was a suburban mom and Arthur was a convicted criminal—he was serving time for having shot and killed his common-law wife’s sister in 1977. “When I took her life, alcohol was a factor,” he says. “I shouldn’t have shot that girl.” Arthur had been given a life sentence, but after just four years he was participating in a prison work-release program, where an inmate is let out of the prison facility during the day for employment and trusted to return to prison in the evening. That’s when Judy Wicker and Thomas Arthur began having an affair.

Police didn’t find Wicker’s description of the circumstances of her husband’s death credible and charged her with murder-for-hire. They also arrested Arthur and charged him with aggravated murder. At her 1982 trial, where Wicker testified that Arthur was not involved in the murder, she was given a life sentence. At a separate 1983 trial, prosecutors argued Arthur shot and killed Wicker for $10,000—part of the life insurance Wicker received upon her husband’s death. Despite his incriminating record, Arthur insisted he had nothing to do with this crime. Nonetheless, he was convicted, sentenced to death, and taken to Holman Correctional facility.

The Holman Correctional Facility is nearly 50 years old and located in rural Escambia County. On death row, the cells are tiny. “We’re, like, sandwiched in here,” Arthur says. “I live in a cell you can’t put a baboon in.” A heart condition prevents him from exercising or spending time in the yard like other death row inmates do. “I’m in here 24 hours a day. Been like that for 10 years.” He spends most of his days watching the news and daytime soap operas—Days of our Lives, for instance, and the Young and the Restless—on the TV that his lawyers bought for him in 2003. In its last session, the Alabama Legislature took up a bill to build up to four new state prisons by borrowing up to $800 million. “We got toilet water running down the walls all over death row,” Arthur claims. “They want to spend $800 million for new prisons when they could spend $200 million to fix the ones they already have!” he says incredulously.

Arthur was granted a retrial after his first conviction was overturned because details of his previous murder conviction were introduced in the trial. In 1986, while awaiting retrial, Arthur was held in a county jail. He escaped after shooting a jail official in the neck, but the guard survived. Arthur got as far as Knoxville, Tennessee, where FBI agents found him a month later after he robbed a bank. The following year, he was convicted and sentenced to death again.

His second conviction was overturned on appeal because in 1982 Arthur was interviewed by an investigator without an attorney present. He was granted yet another trial. According to Amnesty International, an international human rights organization that is against the death penalty, it was then that the prosecutor asked the state’s parole board if Judy Wicker could get an early release if she testified against Arthur. At the 1991 retrial, Wicker changed her story, implicating Arthur in the murder. She was paroled a year later, after serving just 10 years in prison.

In Furman v. Georgia, in 1972, the US Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that capital punishment was unconstitutional, halting executions nationwide. Four years later, the high court reversed course in Gregg v. Georgia and ruled that the death penalty was not cruel and unusual punishment.

The first time Alabama tried to put Arthur to death was in 2001, but he received a stay two days before the scheduled execution date so federal courts could hear challenges concerning the fact that he had no representation when his first execution date was set. This began a period of execution dates and stays of execution. After several legal challenges were dismissed, Alabama set another execution date for Arthur in September 2007. Once more he prepared himself to be executed, but he was spared when the state itself requested a 45-day reprieve in order to change its drug protocol for lethal injections. Around this time, various inmates had challenged lethal injection protocols in their states. A few months later, in December 2007, Arthur received another stay from the US Supreme Court because it was considering a challenge in Kentucky over a very similar lethal injection protocol. His fourth execution date was planned for 2008.

Then an inmate, Bobby Ray Gilbert, at another Alabama prison, confessed to the crime. Arthur filed a petition claiming innocence, and the execution was stayed so the court could hold a limited hearing. No physical evidence linked Gilbert to the crime, and the court concluded Gilbert was lying to protect Arthur. Prosecutors have long held that Troy Wicker’s killer wore a wig, but none of Arthur’s DNA was on that wig or on the clothes Judy Wicker wore on the day of the murder. “I am totally innocent,” Arthur insists. “And DNA could prove it.”

Until 2002, Alabama used the electric chair to execute inmates. “You could smell them,” Arthur says about the inmates being executed. “You could actually smell the flesh burning.” His next two scheduled executions in 2012 and 2015 were stayed because of Arthur’s challenges to the state’s drug protocol, which included the sedative, pentobarbital. But then came the introduction of the controversial sedative midazolam for executions. After multiple states faced a shortage of lethal injection drugs, Alabama began using midazolam early last year with the execution of Christopher Brooks in January. Nearly a year later, in December 2016, the state executed Ronald Bert Smith Jr. After administering the drug, Smith reportedly struggled for breath, coughed, heaved and clenched his left fist for 13 minutes.

Arthur’s seventh execution date was scheduled for November 3, 2016. His case claiming the lethal injection protocol used by the state could cause excruciating pain was dismissed by the federal court. Despite the widespread acceptance that lethal injection is humane, there is no scientific research to prove it.

Under the 2015 Supreme Court case Glossip v. Gross, the usage of midazolam does not violate the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment and rules that states must have a ready and available alternative if one form of execution falls into that category. In his appeal, Arthur proposed the use of firing squad. The court dismissed his case, saying that since Alabama law does not expressly allow firing squads, it was not a viable alternative.

That night, the Supreme Court granted a stay pending a review of his claims. But in February, it declined to hear his appeal. In an 18-page dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the use of midazolam could lead to “prolonged torture” of inmates. “Condemned prisoners, like Arthur, might find more dignity in an instantaneous death,” she wrote, “rather than prolonged torture on a medical gurney.”

In April, Arthur’s lawyers wrote to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey in hopes of getting further DNA testing. His counsel noted that more advanced technology was available and they would assume the costs of the test. Ivey turned down their request. A few weeks later, Arthur sent a handwritten note asking Ivey to spare his life. “Please do not let me die for a crime I did not commit,” he wrote.

The decades of confinement have taken a toll on him. “One time I was a halfway decent looking fellow,” he says with a laugh. “Now, I look like I’ve been hit by a truck.”

And now, as he faces his next and likely final execution date, Arthur says ruefully, “I laugh to keep from crying.” But he is troubled about the life he lost, how his four children never truly had a father, and how much he regrets not being there for them. “I want to publicly apologize in case they do kill me,” he says. “I want the public to know that I failed them as a father.” He also has no interest in the usual formalities accompanying executions in America. “I’m not going to the eat the last meal, which would come at taxpayer expense,” he says.

What is it like to face death so many times? “It’s the same thing every time,” he says with a sigh. “Everyone has a fear of dying…but the state of Alabama is going to—and I don’t use this word lightly—murder me for something I didn’t do.”

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I Talked to a Man on Alabama’s Death Row. The State Plans to Kill Him Tonight.

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Trumpcare Still Hasn’t Been Sent to the Senate

by AntoineEichmann Posted on May 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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As we all know, the Republican health care bill can’t survive a Democratic filibuster, so it’s being considered via reconciliation, which requires only 51 votes in the Senate. That means the bill has to obey reconciliation rules.

Normally, this is not a big problem. If some aspect of the House bill violates the rules, it gets removed in the Senate and life goes on. But what if the bill violates the prime rule of reconciliation—namely that it reduce the deficit? Then it’s dead and everyone has to start all over. This means the House has to be pretty careful that their bill does indeed reduce the deficit.

But how do they know if it reduces the deficit? Easy: the CBO scores the bill and tells them. But Paul Ryan famously rushed passage of the bill in the House before CBO had time to deliver a score, so no one knows for sure if it still reduces the deficit. Bloomberg reports on what this means:

House Speaker Paul Ryan hasn’t yet sent the bill to the Senate because there’s a chance that parts of it may need to be redone, depending on how the Congressional Budget Office estimates its effects….”I had no idea,” Dennis Ross of Florida, another member of the vote-counting team, said Thursday, adding that the prospect of another vote “does concern me.” GOP leaders never said publicly they were planning to hold on to the bill for two weeks or longer.

In the end, I imagine the bill will get scored as a deficit reduction and then be sent to the Senate. But the fact that Ryan is still holding onto the bill shows that he knew perfectly well how irresponsible it was to force a vote before the CBO delivers a score. In addition to being callous and malignant, the whole thing is also a massive FUBAR.

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Trumpcare Still Hasn’t Been Sent to the Senate

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Charles Murray Still Convinced That Whites Are Smarter Than Blacks

by Sheeritwern Posted on May 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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I didn’t realize that Charles Murray was still talking about his belief that African-Americans are genetically less intelligent than whites. But he is. Over at Vox, Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett report on a two-hour podcast he did recently with Sam Harris:

The consensus, he says, is that IQ exists; that it is extraordinarily important to life outcomes of all sorts; that it is largely heritable; and that we don’t know of any interventions that can improve the part that is not heritable. The consensus also includes the observation that the IQs of black Americans are lower, on average, than that of whites, and — most contentiously — that this and other differences among racial groups is based at least in part in genetics.

I’ve read The Bell Curve, so I’m not just talking out of my ass about it. And it’s a weird book. The vast bulk of it is about the first five bolded items above, which really are part of the scientific consensus. You can argue the details, but it’s safe to say that intelligence is real; it’s important; it’s partly genetically heritable; it’s difficult to change; and blacks score lower on IQ tests than whites. The evidence in The Bell Curve on these scores is fine. But then the book gets to a couple of chapters about the genetic basis of the black-white IQ gap, and suddenly the evidence gets very, very fuzzy. In fact, I want to share a brief boxed item included on page 310:

The German Story

One of the intriguing studies arguing against a large genetic component to IQ differences came about thanks to the Allied occupation of Germany following World War II, when about 4,000 illegitimate children of mixed racial origin were born to German women. A German researcher tracked down 264 children of black servicemen and constructed a comparison group of 83 illegitimate offspring of white occupation troops. The results showed no overall difference in average IQ. The actual IQs of the fathers were unknown, and therefore a variety of selection factors cannot be ruled out. The study is inconclusive but certainly consistent with the suggestion the B/W difference is largely environmental.

In one sense, I applaud Murray and his co-author for including this. At the same time, they spend no time engaging with it in the text of the book. But they should: it’s only one study, and as they suggest, it has some missing pieces. Still, it’s one of the very few studies of African-American and white American children raised in middle-class environments outside of America. The fact that it shows no difference between black and white children is pretty significant—especially since it’s highly unlikely that any of these children received any kind of special treatment.

I don’t want to pretend that this study is definitive. It’s not. But a single disconfirming case is all you need to demonstrate that the black-white IQ gap is entirely non-biological, and this one is pretty close.

It’s not impossible that there’s a biological difference in intelligence between blacks and whites. That’s fundamentally a scientific question, and it hasn’t been conclusively proven one way or the other. But the effect of American culture on blacks is so toxic that it’s all but impossible to believe that any conclusions drawn in a study of Americans can ever be free of environmental contamination. After all, the Irish used to have low IQs. Jews used to have low IQs. And everyone was quite sure it was due to biology. But when anti-Irish and anti-Semitic animus died out, their IQs increased to normal levels. Amazing, isn’t it?

Maybe eventually Murray will find his long-sought gene complexes for cognitive ability, and will be able to show that there really is a genetic difference between blacks and whites. But I doubt it. The evidence just doesn’t point in that direction. Maybe in ten or twenty years we’ll know for sure.

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Charles Murray Still Convinced That Whites Are Smarter Than Blacks

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No, China Didn’t Suddenly Stop Manipulating Their Currency When Trump Was Elected

by CarmineFenbury Posted on May 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here’s a snippet from the Economist’s interview with President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The subject is whether China is manipulating its currency in a way that hurts the United States:

Trump: They’re actually not a currency manipulator. You know, since I’ve been talking about currency manipulation with respect to them and other countries, they stopped.

Mnuchin: Right, as soon as the president got elected they went the other way.

It’s tiresome to hear Trump say this, and doubly tiresome to hear Mnuchin chime in like a toady about it. Yes sir, Mr. President, they stopped as soon as they realized a real man was about to occupy the White House!

Here’s all you need to know about Chinese currency manipulation:

All the way through 2013, China’s foreign reserves increased nearly every quarter. This was because they were buying lots and lots of dollars as a way of keeping the value of the yuan low, which made Chinese exports cheaper and American imports more expensive. In mid-2014 they stopped. Since then, they’ve mostly sold their dollar holdings, to the tune of a trillion dollars over the past couple of years. During this entire time the yuan has been falling on its own, and the Chinese intervention has had the effect of propping it up to prevent it from falling even faster. This makes Chinese exports more expensive and American imports cheaper, which is exactly what we want.

As for November 2016, nothing happened. I don’t know if Trump knows this, since he seems to live in some kind of alternate reality, but Mnuchin does. So does everyone else.

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No, China Didn’t Suddenly Stop Manipulating Their Currency When Trump Was Elected

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What Some of Our Greatest Writers Are Reading to Stay Sane in the Age of Trump

by LeolaPhilpott75 Posted on May 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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Almost as interesting as what our favorite authors write is what they read, and why. We asked more than two dozen—authors, bloggers, essayists, poets, comic artists—to recommend, in their own words, readings that bring solace and understanding in this age of political rancor. These are excerpts. Click on an author’s name or “more” to read their complete responses.

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed
In times of great anxiety, what could be better than The Lord of the Rings? A horrible tyrant. An obsession with power. Nine dead guys running errands for him. Small folks doing their bit. It’s okay to have pointy ears. And it comes out all right at the end. Or sort of all right. (more)

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
Anton Chekhov’s short stories, just because, in dark times, it’s important for people in resistance to fortify themselves with beauty, if only to remind ourselves that kindness, nuance, and ambiguity are real things. In particular: the beautiful trilogy consisting of “The Man in a Case,” “Gooseberries,” and “About Love.” (more)

Ana Castillo, Black Dove
Worth adding to any library is The Wind Is Spirit: The Life, Love, and Legacy of Audre Lorde, a collection of essays compiled by Gloria I. Joseph, Lorde’s romantic partner at the time of her death. It brings together memories from more than 50 contributors—such as Sonia Sanchez and Angela Davis—and reminds us not only of the significance of Lorde’s work but also of the importance of a writer’s perseverance in the face of political adversity. (more)

Daniel Alarcon

Daniel Alarcón, At Night We Walk in Circles
Sometimes I think dystopian literature is the only literature we can write these days. That Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, feels so resonant more than 30 years after it was published is singularly depressing. Read it as a cautionary tale. (more)

Phil Klay, Redeployment
I’ve been thinking increasingly about Teddy Roosevelt’s 1883 speech “The Duties of American Citizenship.” Though some of his positions are dated—”the ideal citizen must be the father of many healthy children”—so much of it holds up as solid, practical advice in how to go about creating political change. Roosevelt continually stresses the hard work of building up organizations and institutions as the key component of American political life. “A great many of our men in business,” he says, “rather plume themselves upon being good citizens if they even vote; yet voting is the very least of their duties.” Sadly, he has little to say on the possibility of tweeting your way to a greater democracy. (more)

Piper Kerman

Piper Kerman, Orange Is the New Black
When I read Jesmyn Ward‘s Men We Reaped, it absolutely gutted me. I return to it again and again in my mind because it so perfectly crystallizes what’s at stake until we establish equality for all Americans when it comes to safety and freedom. Ward’s writing is heartbreakingly beautiful. The book that actually does provide me with solace is Alice in Wonderland. When I was a child I wanted to change my name to Alice. I had a copy in my locker when I was incarcerated, and there’s one on my bedside table now. (more)

Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time (editor)
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism: Author Edward E. Baptist builds a very compelling argument that slavery made the foundation and growth of the United States, as an independent country, possible. This book is so necessary because it seems we live in a time where those in power are invested in willful ignorance, “alternative facts,” and a revisionist view of the kind of real pain, suffering, and dehumanization that actually allowed this country to ascend to “greatness.” We need books like this to shine light on the darkness that beats at the heart of America today. (more)

William Gibson

William Gibson, The Peripheral
Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior, by Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew, is a compendium of the workings of rumor, fear, and the madness of crowds. Baffled by Trump’s popularity? Read Evans and Bartholomew on lycanthropy and laughing epidemics. Seriously. (more)

Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
Fantastic Mr. Fox, by Roald Dahl, because he takes us into the world of imperfect but resolutely defiant characters who triumph in the face of impossible odds, and because no matter how powerful the mechanical shovels that come for us, we can always dig, dig, until we make a better world. (more)

Karen Russell

Karen Russell, Sleep Donation
Because, if everything we write and read becomes dire and reactionary, Trump will have truly won, here’s a book that celebrates the radical freedom of the imagination: Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino is brimming with recombinatory energy, play and joy. Light by which to see into many different futures. (more)

Reza Farazmand, Poorly Drawn Lines
Somehow, Cat’s Cradle still manages to present a fictional political setting stranger than the one we’re in now. I can reread Kurt Vonnegut’s absurd parody of Cold War politics and think, “Well, at least things aren’t this weird yet.” (more)

W. Kamau Bell, The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell
Lindy West, the author of Shrill, is a critical voice. If we all want to have any hope of not just surviving but thriving in the next four years to eight years and beyond, then we need to listen to her. Also, she’s funnier than probably everybody you know—unless you know her. (more)

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light: A Memoir
Poetry helps me contend with the smallness of spirit—the greed, the dishonesty, the disregard for the lives of others—at the root of American politics. When I feel beaten down by all of the wrongheadedness, I turn to the wisdom, on what often feels like a cosmic scale, running through The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. Clifton was one of America’s great poets, whose work throughout her lifetime was committed to chronicling and celebrating black lives. The honesty, joy, wisdom, and hope she brought to this task are regenerative. For years, I’ve been completely captivated by a poem cycle—”the message from the Ones (received in the late 70s)”—that appears in her 2004 collection, Mercy. What is the message? One we and our elected leaders need desperately to hear and to heed. (more)

Dave Eggers, Heroes of the Frontier
The Great Lie, edited by Flagg Taylor, collects essays by a wide range of writers who lived under tyranny, and the results are richly rewarding and surprisingly accessible. Taylor is a professor at Skidmore College and the book is about 800 pages, and yet it’s eminently approachable by anyone interested in seeing the parallels between our current flirtations with truthless fascism and those societies that were truly crushed by totalitarianism. Everyone you could think of is in there—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel, Hannah Arendt—and some lesser-known essayists like Aurel Kolnai and Waldemar Gurian get their due, too. The title, of course, references the sort of lie told by authoritarian governments that’s so outrageous and unbelievable that citizens feel it must be true. In our age of alternative facts, this collection is timely and deeply unsettling. (more)

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
How could one not choose the timeless Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People? A Norwegian doctor suspects that the municipal water in a town has been contaminated with toxins. He hesitates but ultimately follows his moral instincts to release the news to the public. He is dubbed an enemy of the people and publicly flayed. Perhaps the president forgot the irony of that title in using the phrase to describe the press. (more)

Rabbi Jack Moline, Growing Up Jewish
I can’t avoid including the Book of Psalms. Aside from the fact that it is the only book in the Jewish Bible that is of undisputed human authorship, it is a collection of essential yearnings and gratitudes that give me a sense that our current troubles, existential and political both, are neither new nor permanent. In addition, the melodies to which so many of the psalms have been set are inseparable from the words. And how can I not also hear Leonard Cohen in every “hallelujah.” (more)

Wendy C. Ortiz

Wendy C. Ortiz, Bruja
Handwriting, by Michael Ondaatje, lives in the drawer of my night table—it’s my antidote to despair of all kinds. The fragmentary nature and white space allow for breaths. I’ve memorized lines from this book over the years and consider it an influence on my prose, poetry, and my psyche. (more)

Kwame Alexander, The Crossover
There are so many incredible books that speak to our times, stories that take place in the past, present, and future. Stories that connect us to our ancestors or people who lived like our ancestors, or to the people who paved the way for our world today—stories like The Underground Railroad, All The Light We Cannot See, Freedom Over Me, March. Stories for adults, teens, and children. Stories that grab hold of us and show us all the pain and beauty that races through and weaves between covers—books like Speak, Pax, Brown Girl Dreaming, Radiant Child, Bridge to Terabithia, As Brave as You, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Tale of Despereaux. Selected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni (and Langston Hughes and Pablo Neruda). Books that will stick with us, comfort us, and strengthen us, long after we’ve read them. (more)

Peggy Orenstein

Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex
I’m reading My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris’ graphic novel about a 10-year-old Mexican-Irish-Cherokee girl growing up in 1960s Chicago, a social outcast who tries to solve the murder of her Holocaust-survivor neighbor. The radical politics of her present spiral with the fascism and kink of the Third Reich: The novel tackles race, gender, and what it means to be “monstrous” in big and small ways. It could not be more relevant to today’s climate. (more)

Joe Romm, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know
The last time this country was so divided, the greatest orator and writer ever elected president repeatedly shared his thoughts on what the country needed to do to preserve liberty. Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, edited by Roy Basler and Carl Sandburg, is one of the best collections. It includes classics like the Gettysburg Address alongside lesser-known gems like “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” in which a 28-year-old Lincoln explains the danger to the Republic of a demagogue just like Trump. (more)

Alex Kotlowitz, Never a City So Real
For all the obvious reasons (yes, Mr. Trump, history matters), I’m revisiting former Sen. Paul Simon’s Freedom’s Champion: Elijah Lovejoy. As if we need reminding what happens when good and decent people don’t stand up against the onerous assault on a free press. (more)

Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang, Secret Coders
Silence, by Shusaku Endo, is probably my favorite fiction book of all time. It’s about a Catholic missionary to 17th-century Japan who eventually loses his faith. The story reminds me that grace can be found even when things are horribly broken. (more)

Ayelet Waldman, A Really Good Day
It was as if Mohsin Hamid knew exactly what would convulse the world when he wrote Exit West. It’s a novel about refugees, about cruelty and empathy and compassion, and in the end—oddly—about the possibility of an odd kind of redemption. (more)

Bill McKibben, Oil and Honey
This Is an Uprising, by Paul and Mark Engler, is the best summary of all that the last 75 years has taught us about nonviolent organizing. It’s the book I wish I’d had a decade ago, because it would have saved a lot of trial-and-error experimentation as we got 350.org up and running. (more)

Darryl Pinckney

Darryl Pinckney, Black Deutschland
These days I turn to the consolations of poetry. James Fenton, his Yellow Tulips: Poems. (He’s my partner, my life.) I open the Donald Allen edition of The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara that I have had for decades. His poetry is a past I share with several friends. And then for the small hours there is Thomas Wyatt: “These bloody days have broken my heart.” (more)

Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop
Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics offers bracing commentary and vibrant analysis of the fringe political movements that have defined our nation in times of crisis, paying attention to the paranoia and conspiracy that fuel reactionary outlooks. That clearly helps us to put this Trumpian epoch in illuminating context. (more)

T Cooper

T Cooper, Changers (YA novel series with Allison Glock-Cooper)
I frequently find myself turning to Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig’s brave and stunning novel from the mid-1970s, but it’s hitting a little close to home just about now—what with the “freak” and the revolutionary locked in a cell together by a corrupt and repressive government. Molina and Valentin make strange but necessary bedfellows who run into some gender trouble and the usual wretchedness (not to mention betrayal), but also uncover unexpected tenderness and hope inside the walls of the prison where most of the novel is set. Running through it all (in the form of 1930s and ’40s movie plots that Molina recounts to Valentin to pass time and ease their suffering) is the promise of stories that are perpetually unfolding somewhere “out there” in another world, despite the horrors happening “in here” in this one. I’m grateful for the escapism, even if sometimes it feels there’s no real chance of escape. (more)

Illustrations by Allegra Lockstadt

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What Some of Our Greatest Writers Are Reading to Stay Sane in the Age of Trump

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Yeah, the Comey Firing Was All About Russia

by GeorgetTurney Posted on May 10, 2017

Mother Jones

Politico has a big “inside” look at the Comey firing tonight, and it is bananas:

Trump had grown enraged by the Russia investigation, two advisers said, frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said.

….Trump had grown angry with the Russia investigation — particularly Comey admitting in front of the Senate that the FBI was investigating his campaign — and that the FBI director wouldn’t support his claims that President Barack Obama had tapped his phones in Trump Tower.

….Trump received letters from Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, and Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, calling for Comey’s dismissal…A White House spokesman said Trump did not ask for the letters in advance, and that White House officials had no idea they were coming. But several other people familiar with the events said Trump had talked about the firing for over a week, and the letters were written to give him rationale to fire Comey.

Summary: The Comey firing had nothing to do with the Hillary Clinton email investigation. It was all because Trump was outraged over Comey’s public acknowledgement that the FBI was investigating his Russia ties. He wanted the investigation to disappear, and he began obsessing about firing Comey—presumably in hopes that this was all it would take to kill the case. And apparently Trump was shocked when Democrats didn’t line up behind him. They hate Comey too, don’t they?

Trump’s astronomical ignorance has finally caught up with him. He seems to have had no idea that firing Comey wouldn’t stop the investigation—nor that a new FBI director wouldn’t dare quash it. In fact, all the firing does is make the investigation untouchable. And Trump’s astronomical narcissism has caught up with him too. He has so little insight into other humans that he simply couldn’t conceive of anyone hating Comey but still defending his right to serve out his term. In Trump’s world, you reward your friends and punish your enemies and that’s that.

This is hardly unexpected from Trump, whose ignorance and narcissism are legendary. But does he really have nobody on his staff to warn him about this stuff? Reince Priebus surely knew how this would play out. Ditto for Mike Pence.

And one final thing: once again, we learn that many of Trump’s advisors are perfectly willing to portray him as an idiot. The Politico story is based on conversations with insiders who were happy to confirm that the Comey firing was all about Russia. This directly contradicts the White House narrative that it was about the fact that everyone had lost confidence in Comey because of the way he mistreated poor Hillary Clinton. Who are these people who work for Trump (?) but are happy to undermine him to the press on a regular basis?

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Yeah, the Comey Firing Was All About Russia

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