Tag Archives: trump

This Rookie Chicago Politician Is Ready to Resist Donald Trump’s Deportation Fervor

by GSCClarita Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel held a press conference Wednesday to assure anxious residents that Chicago would remain a “sanctuary city”—meaning local law enforcement won’t help federal agents with President Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants, a plan that just got a lot more real. In December, Emanuel told Trump to his face that he should rethink his proposed policies—specifically, that he should retain the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought here as young children (and for all practical purposes are Americans) to stay in the United States.

Yet even as Emanuel gets recognition as a mayor willing to stand up to Trump on immigration, 27-year-old rookie Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa has been pushing for stronger legal protections in the city—especially given the White House’s reported intent to engage state and local police in its deportation efforts. “What we really need,” the alderman told local reporters “is less symbolism and more action.”

Ramirez-Rosa is a Chicago native, the son of a Puerto Rican dad and a Mexican-born mom. He grew up in the Lakeview neighborhood on the city’s North Side and went to a magnet high school before attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After graduating, he become an aide to Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, running his boss’ social-media efforts and working directly with families facing deportation. Just two years later he managed to unseat Rey Colon, the four-term 35th Ward incumbent, to become one of the youngest members of the City Council and its first openly gay Latino.

As an alderman, Ramirez-Rosa has made immigrants’ rights his main focus, and the overwhelming message he hears from affected families is that the city hasn’t done enough to protect them. “I’ve been fighting this mayor since before I took office,” Ramirez-Rosa told me. “I wasn’t elected to cozy up with the rich and powerful. I was elected by my constituents to represent their interests.”

Chicago’s 2012 sanctuary city law, the Welcoming City Ordinance, prevents city police from detaining undocumented immigrants on behalf of federal authorities. But the law contains several exceptions: for immigrants who have a criminal warrant out on them, who have been convicted of a serious offense, who are defendants in a criminal case, or who have been identified as part of a gang. Some of these carve-outs mean that people who haven’t been found guilty of a crime could be refused sanctuary. A Chicago Police Department spokesman told me that, to his knowledge, the police have not acted on any of the exceptions, and that they were intended for extreme circumstances. Still, Ramirez-Rosa and his constituents want those carve-outs removed to give legal backup to the city’s commitment to not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ramirez-Rosa wants Chicago, with its 183,000 undocumented immigrants, to be a model for immigrant protections. While Chicago’s law is already stronger than those of many sanctuary cities, it falls short of Philadelphia (which has no exceptions, barring extreme circumstances) and Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco (which have only a couple). He has been busy organizing and educating immigrant communities to be ready for the Trump administration. “The focus right now,” he said, “is preparing the community.”

Back in 2015, Ramirez-Rosa and more than a dozen local immigrants’ rights groups joined forces to create the Chicago Immigration Working Group, which has come up with six key policy goals. Bolstering the Welcoming City ordinance is one of them. They’ve also persuaded the city to launch an ID program that’s open to undocumented immigrants and helps them access city services. Emanuel has committed just over $1 million to a legal defense fund for would-be deportees, although Ramirez-Rosa points out that San Francisco, with a fraction of Chicago’s undocumented population, has just proposed a $5 million legal-defense fund. The alderman also co-sponsored an amendment that makes it illegal for police to threaten people with deportation during a confrontation, or to verbally abuse them. (During a 2013 raid, a Chicago cop famously yelled at a naturalized Chinese American man that he’d “put you in a UPS box and send you back where the expletive you came from!”)

This week, Trump signed orders to begin construction on a Mexican border wall and add detention centers and federal agents to the deportation effort. He also doubled down on his threat to rescind federal funding from sanctuary cities that won’t cooperate with the feds on deportations. If Trump follows through, Chicago stands to lose an estimated $1.3 billion—Congress would need to approve the cut. Trump’s attorney general pick, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, is in favor of repealing DACA and opposes a path to citizenship to undocumented immigrants. Democrats in the Senate have delayed his confirmation vote, which is now expected to take place in February.

Given all the uncertainly about what will happen, Ramirez-Rosa and his office are making it a priority to educate the immigrant community. Earlier this month, he started a door-to-door outreach effort and “know your rights” trainings to teach undocumented families what they can do to fight deportation attempts. Next up: a “cop-watch” type network in his ward so neighbors can alert one another if federal immigration agents are in their area. In an act of solidarity, Ramirez-Rosa has even declared his office a sanctuary location, a move he hopes other aldermen will copy.

Ramirez-Rosa was in talks with Emanuel’s office last year. The mayor wasn’t always such a full-throated defender of immigrant rights, the alderman notes; as chair of the House Democratic Caucus, Emanuel once called immigration the “third rail of American politics,” and he actually pushed to ramp up deportations while working under President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. “We know the history of this mayor,” Ramirez-Rosa says. “He just wants the sound bite on TV where he says ‘I’m your champion.'”

But the alderman is feeling more hopeful of late. The talks with the mayor have gone well, he says, and Emanuel even asked for a memo outlining the working group’s proposals. Emanuel’s office wouldn’t comment on plans to alter the carve-outs. But it pointed out in a statement that the mayor started a task force (“Chicago Is With You”) with Rep. Gutierrez and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) late last year to provide legal and mental-health services to immigrants and others in need, and he’s involved in other efforts to help immigrants.

But Chicago leaders have to do much more, Ramirez-Rosa insists. The measure of progress, he says, “is in the actual ordinances and resources that the city is bringing to bear. And we’re nowhere near the other cities that are actually national leaders on this.”

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This Rookie Chicago Politician Is Ready to Resist Donald Trump’s Deportation Fervor

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Here’s a New, Simpler Unemployment Rate For Our New, Simpler President

by BonnyMcclellan8 Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump thinks the official unemployment rate is “fiction,” so Jordan Weissmann suggests we judge him by a different metric. Instead of a complicated measure that tries to divine whether someone “wants” to work, or whether they “want” full-time work but can’t get it, or any of that nonsense, let’s use a simpler measure for this new, simpler era:

The BLS even produces a data point that Trump himself might like: The employment-to-population ratio for adults between the ages of 25 and 54—or “prime-age EPOP.”…It gives us a raw look at the employment rate, without any fancy caveats about who is and isn’t part of the labor force. And because it only tracks workers 25 to 54, it isn’t really distorted by the wave of retiring boomers or growing college attendance. It’s a simple snapshot of the portion of the population we most need to worry about….Best of all, from Trump’s perspective at least, prime-age EPOP has plenty of room for improvement….If Trump wants to argue that Obama left him an economy that was still hurting, this is one stat that will easily help make the case.

Fine. But we don’t really want to know how many people are working, we want to know how many people aren’t working. So here’s the inverse prime-age EPOP, since 1990:

IPA-EPOP1 fell steadily during the postwar period as more and more women left the (unpaid) household workforce and entered the (paid) market workforce, but it’s been relatively stable since 1990. That means we can think of the period from 1990 until the start of the Great Recession as sort of a baseline for normal. The average during this period was 20.2 percent, and right now we’re still 1.6 percentage points away from that. As Weissmann says, this gives Trump some room to show improvement.

Now, naysayers are going to complain that this doesn’t really make sense. After all, this number includes lots of people who don’t want to work, mostly stay-at-home mothers and fathers. Shouldn’t we take them out of this calculation? Sure, we should, but then we’re back to that whole tedious discussion of who’s in the labor force and who’s just given up and all that stuff. We want simple: working or not working, end of story. And in fairness, when the economy is hot, wages go up and more stay-at-home parents are drawn back into the workforce. That makes this an OK measure of economic hotness.

So there you have it. Trump’s starting point is an IPA-EPOP of 21.8 percent. In four years we’ll see if he’s managed to bring that down.

1Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?

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Here’s a New, Simpler Unemployment Rate For Our New, Simpler President

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A leaked list of Trump’s infrastructure priorities looks pretty surprising.

by CecileMerideth Posted on January 25, 2017

That’s how new news site Axios described it Monday morning, and the news has just gotten worse since then.

A leaked copy of the Trump team’s plan for the EPA calls for slashing its budget, “terminating climate programs,” ending auto fuel-economy standards, and executing “major reforms of the agency’s use of science and economics.”

The Trump administration has frozen EPA grants and contracts, cutting off funding for everything from cleanup of toxic sites to testing of air quality.

EPA employees have been ordered not to share information via social media, press releases, or new website content, Huffington Post reports.

It’s unclear which of these changes are temporary — just in place until Trump’s nominee to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, gets confirmed — and which might be put in place more permanently.

More bad news for the EPA will be coming: A new team that Trump has put in place to shift the agency’s direction includes three former researchers from Koch-funded think tanks, one former mining lobbyist, and a number of people who have argued against climate action, according to Reuters. And Trump is poised to issue executive orders to weaken pollution rules and cut agency budgets, Vox reports.

Link – 

A leaked list of Trump’s infrastructure priorities looks pretty surprising.

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Donald Trump’s Foreign Business Partners Got VIP Treatment During the Inauguration

by KOPManuela Posted on January 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump vowed to wall himself off from his business interests when he became president—but at least two of his wealthy foreign business partners attended his inauguration as VIPs, where they watched the swearing-in from prime seats, partied with Trump insiders, and posed for pictures with Trump’s children and grandchildren. Here’s just one example of their incredible access during the inaugural festivities: The wife of one of Trump’s partners, Indonesian billionaire Hary Tanoesoedibjo, posted a video from inside a vehicle driving the locked-down parade route after the ceremony, as police officers stood at attention and spectators waited behind barricades for a glimpse of the new first family.

Penjagaan ketat dan ratusan ribu penonton memadati pinggir jalan protokoler untuk melihat “inaugural parade”

A video posted by liliana tanoesoedibjo (@liliana_tanoesoedibjo) on Jan 20, 2017 at 2:52pm PST

Despite repeated warnings from ethics experts that he needed to take dramatic steps to separate himself from his sprawling business empire, Trump entered the Oval Office with unprecedented conflicts of interest, including lucrative partnerships with a slew of rich foreign developers around the globe. At a press conference on January 11, Trump announced he would place his assets in a trust controlled by his sons—though not a blind trust, as experts had recommended—and that his company would cease cutting new deals with foreign interests during his time in office.

But Trump made clear that existing foreign deals would remain in place. Partners in two of those projects—Tanoesoedibjo, with whom Trump is developing a pair of luxury resorts in Indonesia, and Hussain Sajwani, a Dubai-based real estate developer who has licensed Trump’s name for luxury villas and lush desert golf courses—attended the inaugural festivities.

The conflict-of-interest laws that govern all other federal employees don’t apply to the president, but Trump’s foreign entanglements take him into ethically murky terrain. Some experts, including the lawyers who advised George W. Bush and Barack Obama, believe some of his dealings with foreign partners could violate the Constitution. Days into his presidency, in fact, Trump was hit with a lawsuit spearheaded by prominent ethics lawyers alleging that he is in breach of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which prohibits federal officials from receiving financial benefits from foreign governments. The clause typically applies to payments or gifts from foreign officials and governments, but Tanoesoedibjo offers a good example of just how convoluted Trump’s conflict issues could become. Tanoesoedibjo, who has previously run for office in Indonesia, has formed his own political party and, in the wake of Trump’s victory, is contemplating his own presidential run.

Both Tanoesoedibjo and his wife, Liliana, documented their trip to the inauguration on Instagram, starting with a pre-inauguration visit to New York, where the couple met with Donald and Eric Trump at Trump Tower and then lunched with Donald Jr.

In Washington, the couple posted photos of themselves at their room at the Trump hotel, at a reception where they mingled with a Trump resort executive, and on the steps of the US Capitol at the inaugural ceremony, where Tanoesoedibjo gave an interview to Voice of America. In the interview, Tanoesoedibjo dismissed conflict-of-interest concerns over Trump’s business dealings with foreign partners.

Trump’s inaugural committee offered major perks to donors who contributed at least $100,000 toward the event, including a complimentary shuttle service to ferry them and their guests to and from events. But as foreign nationals, the Tanoesoedibjos—and the Sajwanis—are prohibited by law from contributing to this or other political committees. Neither the White House nor the Trump Organization responded to requests for comment about the Tanoesoedibjos’ and Sajwanis’ attendance at the inauguration.

After the swearing-in ceremony, the Tanoesoedibjos posted more photos of the festivities, including some showing them posing with the families of Eric and Donald Trump Jr.

The Tanoesoedibjos’ social-media posts also show that Hussain Sajwani attended Trump’s inauguration. Sajwani is a wealthy Middle Eastern businessman, based in Dubai, where he is the chairman of DAMAC Properties, a real estate development firm that has partnered with Trump to open Trump-branded golf courses and luxury villas in Dubai. The newest course is set to open early next month. At Trump’s New Year’s Eve celebration at Mar-a-Lago, he praised Sajwani, who he said was in attendance.

At his January 11 press conference, Trump said he was so committed to eliminating possible conflicts of interest that he had recently turned down a new deal with Sajwani.

“Over the weekend I was offered $2 billion to do a deal in Dubai with a very, very, very amazing man, a great great developer from the Middle East,” Trump said. “Hussein, DAMAC, a friend of mine, a great guy. I was offered $2 billion to do a deal in Dubai, a number of deals, and I turned it down. I didn’t have to turn it down because as you know I have a no-conflict situation because I’m president.”

But he didn’t address his ongoing deals with Sajwani. According to Trump’s last personal financial disclosure, filed in May, the president earns between $2 million and $10 million a year from his licensing deals with DAMAC.

Bersama Hussain Sajwani, Chairman & CEO Damac Group, perusahaan properti dari Dubai, partner Trump Organization

A photo posted by Hary Tanoesoedibjo (@hary.tanoesoedibjo) on Jan 21, 2017 at 1:38am PST

In an interview earlier this month, Sajwani reportedly said he thought Trump’s election would be good for his business. “Naturally, I think we will benefit from the strength of the brand going forward,” he told CNBC.

In an Instagram post just hours after the inauguration, Ali Sajwani, Hussain Sajwani’s son, was more effusive, writing that “the world is looking forward to a lucrative eight years ahead!”

With the man who will #MakeAmericaGreatAgain !

It’s not clear whether the younger Sajwani (who describes himself as an owner of DAMAC on his LinkedIn page and public bio) attended the inauguration or if the photo is from an earlier encounter. A spokesman for DAMAC did not return a request for comment.

Update: A third foreign business associate attended Trump’s inauguration and posted photographs of the festivities on Instagram. Joo Kim Tiah, the son of one of Malaysia’s wealthiest men, is Trump’s partner on his new Vancouver hotel tower, slated to open in early February.

A photo posted by Joo Kim Tiah (@jookimtiah) on Jan 20, 2017 at 9:39pm PST

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Donald Trump’s Foreign Business Partners Got VIP Treatment During the Inauguration

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Trump Is Reportedly Considering Reopening CIA "Black Site" Prisons

by CarsonBrownell Posted on January 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump is considering reopening the notorious CIA “black site” prisons, undoing the ban imposed by President Barack Obama, after his new CIA director suggested he’d be open to using torture methods on detainees.

The administration’s plans were reported by the New York Times on Wednesday after the paper obtained a draft executive order titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants.” The order would roll back many of the restrictions on detainee interrogations and detention that Obama put in place, including one that gave the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all detainees in US custody. But in his daily press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the draft was “not a White House document.”

The CIA’s black sites were a series of facilities located in various countries around the world where the CIA detained, questioned, and often tortured detainees with practices including waterboarding, confinement in small boxes, beatings, and extreme sleep deprivation. They were exposed in 2005 by the Washington Post’s Dana Priest.

The draft doesn’t direct the CIA to reopen the sites immediately, but it requests policy reviews to make recommendations to Trump. As the Times‘ Charlie Savage notes, Trump pledged during the presidential campaign to reinstate waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” and said that even if torture tactics didn’t work, the detainees “deserve it anyway.”

Throughout the draft, phrases such as “jihadist” and “global war on terrorism” are crossed out and replaced with “Islamist,” “radical Islamist terrorism,” and similar phrases.

Shortly after news of the order broke, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) released a statement condemning the use of torture. “The President can sign whatever executive orders he likes,” McCain said. “But the law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of America.”

The draft order comes five days after Mike Pompeo, since confirmed as CIA director, suggested he was open to torture techniques. In written answers to the Senate Intelligence Committee after his January 12 confirmation hearing, Pompeo seemed to leave the door open for a review of the ban on torture methods such as waterboarding. During his hearing, Pompeo had given a seemingly contradictory answer, saying he would “absolutely not” restart the CIA’s use of such techniques and adding that he couldn’t “imagine he would be asked by the president-elect or then-president” to have the CIA torture someone.

The full three-page draft, posted in full by the Washington Post later Wednesday morning (and later by the Times), lays out the rationale for the review:

Our Nation remains engaged in a global armed conflict with ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other associated international jihadistIslamist terrorist groups. This conflict is not of our choosing, but was declared against us by the jihadistterrorist organizations groups that have plotted and carried out mass attacks against the United States, its citizens, and its allies beginning well before the atrocities of September 11, 2001, and continuing to this day…Experience has also shown that obtaining critical intelligence information is vital to taking determined offensive action, including military action, against those groups that make war on us and that are actively plotting further attacks.

While there have been continuity in many of the military and intelligence policies of the United States in the global war on terrorism,fight against radical Islam, the United States has refrained from exercising certain authorities critical to its defense.

The draft, which contains extensive editing notes, would rescind two of Obama’s executive orders: one to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the other to give the Red Cross access to all detainees. It also orders the director of national intelligence, the attorney general, and the director of the CIA to “recommend to the President whether to reinitiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States and whether such program should include the use of detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”

This story has been updated to include the statement from McCain and the comment from Spicer.

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Trump Is Reportedly Considering Reopening CIA "Black Site" Prisons

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Trump moved to push through the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, but it’s not a done deal.

by ToneyMarra Posted on January 24, 2017

That’s how new news site Axios described it Monday morning, and the news has just gotten worse since then.

A leaked copy of the Trump team’s plan for the EPA calls for slashing its budget, “terminating climate programs,” ending auto fuel-economy standards, and executing “major reforms of the agency’s use of science and economics.”

The Trump administration has frozen EPA grants and contracts, cutting off funding for everything from cleanup of toxic sites to testing of air quality.

EPA employees have been ordered not to share information via social media, press releases, or new website content, Huffington Post reports.

It’s unclear which of these changes are temporary — just in place until Trump’s nominee to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, gets confirmed — and which might be put in place more permanently.

More bad news for the EPA will be coming: A new team that Trump has put in place to shift the agency’s direction includes three former researchers from Koch-funded think tanks, one former mining lobbyist, and a number of people who have argued against climate action, according to Reuters. And Trump is poised to issue executive orders to weaken pollution rules and cut agency budgets, Vox reports.

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Trump moved to push through the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, but it’s not a done deal.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Green Light, ONA, ProPublica, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump moved to push through the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, but it’s not a done deal.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is on the way out, so why aren’t greens cheering?

by LidiaHowchin Posted on January 23, 2017

That’s how new news site Axios described it Monday morning, and the news has just gotten worse since then.

A leaked copy of the Trump team’s plan for the EPA calls for slashing its budget, “terminating climate programs,” ending auto fuel-economy standards, and executing “major reforms of the agency’s use of science and economics.”

The Trump administration has frozen EPA grants and contracts, cutting off funding for everything from cleanup of toxic sites to testing of air quality.

EPA employees have been ordered not to share information via social media, press releases, or new website content, Huffington Post reports.

It’s unclear which of these changes are temporary — just in place until Trump’s nominee to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, gets confirmed — and which might be put in place more permanently.

More bad news for the EPA will be coming: A new team that Trump has put in place to shift the agency’s direction includes three former researchers from Koch-funded think tanks, one former mining lobbyist, and a number of people who have argued against climate action, according to Reuters. And Trump is poised to issue executive orders to weaken pollution rules and cut agency budgets, Vox reports.

Taken from – 

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is on the way out, so why aren’t greens cheering?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, ONA, ProPublica, Ringer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Trans-Pacific Partnership is on the way out, so why aren’t greens cheering?

On TV, Trump’s Inauguration Was the Worst in 40 Years

by JohnieBaugh490 Posted on January 22, 2017

Mother Jones

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I guess we’ve moved on from crowd size at Trump’s inauguration to TV audience size. Interestingly, Trump has apparently decided not to lie about this, but only to mislead. Just for the record, then, here’s the share of the population that has tuned in to watch first-term inaugurations over the past 40 years:

Ratings here. January population here.

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On TV, Trump’s Inauguration Was the Worst in 40 Years

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Wayne Barrett Exposed The Real Trump. Now There’s Only One Way To Honor Him.

by ShastaTRQqlvqx Posted on January 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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He must have been exhausted. We have all been exhausted, watching America shout down common sense and set ablaze the last few defensible vestiges of circa-1787 political and economic philosophy. But as much as it all weighed on many of us, he carried extra baggage. He had literally written the book on Donald J. Trump’s bent psyche and business. He had forgotten more dirt on Trump than reporters of my generation ever dug up.

But Wayne Barrett, longtime Village Voice investigative political reporter and mentor to hundreds of journalists, wasn’t tired. He wanted to work, man; and work he did, even as he was driven away to the hospital for the last time, dying there at 71 late Thursday. Wayne needed all the time allotted to him, because America needed him.

When it became clear a year ago that Trump actually might ascend to lead the nation’s oldest political party, Wayne’s 1992 investigative biography, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, got a reprint—and an instant audience among other journalists. Based on digging Wayne had done since the ‘70s, it’s the keel on which a great deal of the best Trump reporting was built.

Trump was only one of the big whales Wayne hunted, though. He wrote two books on Rudy Giuliani, scorching his largely bogus 9/11 heroism, along with his relationship-wrecking and influence-peddling. In 37 years at the Voice, and recently in other fair corners of the internet, Wayne put the screws to Ed Koch, Al D’Amato, Mike Bloomberg, and multiple Cuomos.

Over the past 18 months, Wayne fielded a steady stream of calls and emails. Reporters asked for help with a distant mob name, a defunct company, a disgruntled counterparty. “I got some stuff on it in the basement,” he told me on the phone last year when I ran a very specific bit of ‘80s Trump trivia past him. “Come on up and dig.”

Lots of reporters took him up on similar offers, a steady queue of them making the pilgrimage to the Brooklyn house he shared with his wife, Fran, to chitchat and sift boxes on boxes of notes and clippings downstairs. He was there for all of us, even if it the scheduling occasionally had to be done by one of his research interns.

Ah, the interns. Wayne maintained an army of them to dig through databases, cajole sources, connect dots, and frequently co-author pieces with him. Like the paper’s size, the Voice’s office space shrank over the years, and six of us at a time might pile into Wayne’s cube for a quick confab. I once tried to spread out into the mostly empty next-door cubicle, which worked fine for a week until Nat Hentoff ambled in and cussed me out for a good three minutes, yelling to have his goddamn desk back.

The interns of Barrett Nation. You know them, even if you don’t realize it. They shape Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Politico, ABC News, every major New York paper, and certainly this magazine, as my former colleague Gavin Aronsen and I have written. We are not all journalists now, and those of us in the profession aren’t all investigative reporters—one of my cohort is a book reviewer of some note and another is a fast-paced entertainment reporter, but goddamn, if you are hiding dirt, they will find it.

I loved Wayne, even when he was screaming at me, a rite of passage any of his interns can describe. He pursued truth and exposed sin with the zeal of a young Jesuit, which was fitting, since he’d considered taking up the cloth before a debate scholarship sent him to St. Joe’s College in Philly. I’d had a similar upbringing, joining the military instead of the church, debating in school, and seeking an outlet for my inflamed sense of justice.

Wayne had that fire, and lighting up other people was how it manifested sometimes. We were in a serious business. We had to be thorough, accurate, fairâ&#128;&#145;even when we were breaking shit.

But it was all to an end. If Wayne burned for justice, he practiced it, too, singing his protégés’ praises to recruiters, offering a crash weekend at his beach place down the shore in Jersey, taking a sincere interest in his charges’ spouses, children, money and family issues. “He was a family man” is often a hollow note in these kinds of tributes. But family—his and everybody else’s—truly was Wayne’s greatest pleasure, and the reason he couldn’t not needle the greedy who screwed the rest of us.

For more than a year, we watched Republicans slouching toward Trump Tower, saying that yes, seriously, they believed this debauched tycoon with a rambling sales script and an unadulterated id could handle the nukes. We saw Russia tossing gasoline on the fire, beheld our media colleagues collapsing under the weight of takes and think pieces on how maybe facts don’t matter. Now we watch the Queens-bred Caligula begin to rip up the things that make America an idea worth defending. And Wayne’s illness, exacerbated by his all-consuming work, has chosen this moment to take him from us.

We are allowed to be exhausted and dispirited and fearful. This has all really happened, and the ineptitude and malice of the incoming administration will cost lives and livelihoods. But we are not allowed to stop. Wayne wouldn’t let us.

I worked for Wayne when Rudy Giuliani was making his last serious stab at a presidential bid, and we spent a lot of time running down new stories on the candidate. His campaign had looked formidable early on, but hizzoner flamed out spectacularly and retreated into private consulting.

Was it bittersweet, I asked Wayne? His white whale, the subject of years of his life’s work, was finished and never coming back.

Wayne laughed. It was the laugh of a man who wasn’t about to retire from the truth-digging, shit-kicking business, no matter how good or bad it might get. “He’ll come back, man,” he said. “These guys always come back.”

The fun part, Wayne said, was that the good guys came back, too.

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Wayne Barrett Exposed The Real Trump. Now There’s Only One Way To Honor Him.

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Science is under assault. On Inauguration Day, scientists speak out.

by LesliPlunkett Posted on January 20, 2017

On Friday, Donald Trump was sworn in as president. He and his cabinet nominees have expressed views on climate and other aspects of science that are far outside the norm.

Scientists are spending Inauguration Day reminding the public that science has been a cornerstone for society. Their tweets using the hashtag #USofScience highlight the vast scope of scientific knowledge and the diverse group of researchers helping to build our understanding of the world each day.

Through years of meticulous research, scientists have developed a clear view of climate change and its impacts. They’ve tracked the global temperature using thermometers and satellites, studied the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and gauged how fast ice is melting and oceans are rising, to name just a few areas of research.

It’s clear from that research just how much carbon pollution has altered the climate, and how it’s impacting society. Scientists are continuing to work hard to better understand what comes next for our planet if carbon pollution isn’t checked. And yet their work will likely be under assault by the Trump administration and a Republican-controlled Congress.

That’s why they’re using the inauguration to show the value of science, their contributions, and the contributions of their predecessors. It’s a rallying cry for policy based on sound science and a reminder to the public that a lot of what we know about the world wouldn’t exist without dedicated researchers.

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Science is under assault. On Inauguration Day, scientists speak out.

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