Tag Archives: united-states

Spring just keeps getting earlier. Guess what’s behind it?

by WhitneyMcChesne Posted on March 2, 2017

In some parts of the country, the season just breezed in three weeks ahead of schedule. Balmy weather may seem like more good news after an already unseasonably warm winter, but pause a beat before you reach for your flip-flops.

According to the “spring index,” a long-term data set which tracks the start of the season from year-to-year, spring is showing up earlier and earlier across the United States.

The culprit behind the trend? Climate change. And it’s bringing a batch of nasty consequences. Early warmth means early pests, like ticks and mosquitoes, and a longer, rougher allergy season. Agriculture and tourism can be thrown off, too. Washington D.C.’s cherry blossoms usually draw crowds in April, for instance, but they’re projected to peak three weeks early this year.

Spring isn’t shifting smoothly, either. It’s changing in fits and starts. Eggs are hatching and trees are losing their leaves, but temperatures could easily plunge again, with disastrous consequences for new baby animals and plants.

Play this out another 80 years, and it’s easy to imagine a world out of sync. Sure, your picnic in December sounds nice. But bees could lose their wildflowers, and groundhogs may never see their shadows again.

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Spring just keeps getting earlier. Guess what’s behind it?

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Farmers Are Cheering Trump’s Repeal of an Environmental Rule That Doesn’t Affect Them

by hrzy86j5 Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump rose to power amid solid support from the agricultural heartland—he gained endorsements from dozens of farm-state pols and agribiz execs and polled well among farmers. Since the inauguration, however, things have been rocky. Trump’s anti-immigrant and anti-refugee machinations amount to an attack on Big Ag’s labor pool, and his moves to kill trade pacts endanger much-needed export markets. But with the stroke of a pen on Tuesday, the new president delivered a gift that delighted his ag supporters.

But did Trump serve a real policy triumph, or an empty gesture?

To answer that question, you’ll need a bit of background. What the president did was sign an executive order commanding the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the Waters of the United States Rule, a policy put into place by the Obama administration. WOTUS, as it is known, is a kind of addendum to the Clean Water Act of 1972, designed to define the kinds of waterways that are under EPA regulation. It was triggered by a split 2006 Supreme Court decision called Rapanos v. United States over whether a developer could fill in a wetland to build a shopping center.

WOTUS has emerged as a major bête noire in some ag circles. Agribiz lobbyist Larry Combest, a former US rep from Texas, declared it “one of the biggest land grabs in American history.” The American Farm Bureau Federation, which represents the interests of Big Ag, has vilified WOTUS since its inception, charging that it gives the EPA massive power to regulate farms.

At his signing ceremony, Trump gave voice to these complaints. Deeming WOTUS “one the worst examples of federal regulation,” Trump insisted that “it has truly run amok” and is “prohibiting farmers from being allowed to do what they’re supposed to be doing.” Echoing the Farm Bureau, he said WOTUS meant that the EPA can regulate “nearly every puddle and every ditch on a farmer’s land,” and vowed that his executive order would “pave the way for the elimination of this very destructive and horrible rule.”

Just one problem with that rhetoric: WOTUS has very little to do with farming. The original Clean Water Act exempted agriculture, and WOTUS maintains that status, notes Scott Faber, senior vice president of the Environmental Working Group. “What’s so bizarre about the fight over WOTUS is that the only sector of commerce that’s clearly exempt from the rule has kicked up the most dirt about it,” Faber said. Granted, defining what constitutes a waterway worthy of regulation is a complex process, and even WOTUS’s supplementary introduction is 299 pages. But concerns about ag are dispensed with on page 8:

This rule not only maintains current statutory exemptions, it expands regulatory exclusions from the definition of “waters of the United States” to make it clear that this rule does not add any additional permitting requirements on agriculture.

In a January 2017 report, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service analyzed the WOTUS and came to the same conclusion as the EPA: The final rule “makes no change to and does not affect existing statutory and regulatory exclusions: exemptions for normal farming, ranching, and silviculture activities such as plowing, seeding, and cultivation.” The report notes that the Obama administration at one point proposed an interpretive rule that triggered confusion in the ag world about whether farm ditches might fall under regulation. But the EPA withdrew that particular proposal way back in January 2015, the CRS report states.

What’s more, says Faber, replacing WOTUS will be a long slog, requiring a lengthy rulemaking process. And once that process is done, he adds, the new rule will itself be subject to lawsuits from environmental groups that it’s deemed too weak.

So why did Big Ag fight so hard to kill WOTUS, and cheer so much when Trump moved against it? Faber declined to speculate.

I put the question to William Rodger, a spokesman for the Farm Bureau. He declined to talk but pointed me to brief the group filed in 2016 urging a federal court to overturn the rule. The document lists examples of farmers who, it insists, would run afoul of WOTUS.

One, in Oklahoma, had planned to clear a 50-acre plot next to his property for cattle grazing and farming. “But because the property contains a small creek bed—which is usually about 5-6 inches deep but ‘will often go dry’—the creek is likely to be deemed a ‘tributary’ under the Rule,” the doc states. As a result of the rule, the farmer “has therefore been forced to halt all plans for improving his property because the new regulation, if allowed to go into effect, will require him to obtain a costly jurisdictional determination from the Army Corps of Engineers and, depending on the outcome, a permit from EPA.” But an EPA fact sheet on WOTUS makes clear that such intermittent streams aren’t in fact regulated.

The Farm Bureau document also notes a farmer whose land has drainage ditches “that would also likely count as ‘tributaries’ under the Rule if it were allowed to come into effect.” But the EPA fact sheet states that “farmers, ranchers and foresters continue to receive exemptions from Clean Water Act Section…when they construct and maintain irrigation ditches and maintain drainage ditches.”

Even so, at an event after Trump signed the executive order, the Farm Bureau treated EPA Director Scott Pruitt to a “hero’s welcome” for his role in Trump’s WOTUS move, Bloomberg reports. In a statement, the group’s executive director, Zippy Duvall, insisted that the “flawed WOTUS rule has proven to be nothing more than a federal land grab, aimed at telling farmers and ranchers how to run their businesses,” and praised Trump for delivering a “welcome relief to farmers and ranchers across the country.”

Seems to me that by celebrating Trump’s attempt to dismantle a rule that so little affects agriculture, Big Ag is being a pretty cheap date—especially given what’s going on with trade and immigration.

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Farmers Are Cheering Trump’s Repeal of an Environmental Rule That Doesn’t Affect Them

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Trump on Israel: Whatevs

by StellaPoe56 Posted on February 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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So does President Trump support a two-state solution in the Middle East, which has been US policy for decades? Or has he given up on that and now endorses a one-state solution? Here’s his answer:

So I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like. Netanyahu laughs. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two, but honestly, if Bibi and the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.

Translation: I couldn’t care less. I’m not even sure what all this one-state and two-state stuff is about. I just want to make a deal.

I wouldn’t blame Trump if he ignored Israel entirely. It’s pretty obvious that no peace deal is anywhere on the horizon, and there’s nothing much the United States can do about it. But if he is going to talk about it, is it asking too much that he demonstrate even a minimal understanding of what the two sides disagree about?

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Trump on Israel: Whatevs

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Ruled Against Trump’s “Muslim Ban”

by TamikaBardon Posted on February 9, 2017

Mother Jones

A panel of three federal appeals court judges on Thursday dealt another blow to President Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily banning people from seven predominantly Muslim countries and all refugees from entering the United States. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled against the Trump administration and upheld a Seattle court ruling that blocked implementation of the ban. That means that travelers from the seven countries, as well as refugees, can continue to enter the United States as the case proceeds through court.

In a unanimous decision, the judges rejected the Trump administration’s argument that courts could not challenge the president’s executive order: “The Government has taken the position that the President’s decisions about immigration policy, particularly when motivated by national security concerns, are unreviewable, even if those actions potentially contravene constitutional rights and protections.” The judges argued there was no precedent to support this argument, saying that it “runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy.” It also noted “the serious nature of the allegations the States have raised with respect to their religious discrimination claims.”

President Trump immediately responded to the decision, tweeting:

Last Friday, a federal judge in Seattle temporarily blocked the ban in response to lawsuits by the state governments of Washington and Minnesota alleging the ban was discriminatory and harmful to its residents. The Trump administration filed an emergency motion opposing the decision, and judges heard oral arguments on Tuesday over whether to uphold the judge’s ruling. During the hearing, judges expressed skepticism of the Justice Department’s claim the executive order was justified and that courts should not be challenging the president’s assessment of national security risks.

Noah Purcell, the solicitor general for Washington state, argued the order caused chaos, urging the court to serve as a check on executive power. “It has always been the judicial branch’s role to say what the law is and to serve as a check on abuses by the executive branch,” said Purcell. “That judicial rule has never been more important in recent memory than it is today.”

Yet judges also grilled the solicitor general, pressing him to identify precisely how the travel ban discriminated against Muslims if the order didn’t affect the majority of the Muslim population, as well as to specify the number of people harmed. Purcell argued the state did not need to prove the ban harmed every Muslim, but that there was a clear intention to do so, citing Trump’s campaign promise to ban Muslim visitors. He also alluded to Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani’s comments about how Trump had asked for advice on how to legally implement a Muslim ban.

Trump lashed out against the courts on Wednesday, calling the hearing “disgraceful.” “I don’t ever want to call a court biased, so I won’t call it biased,” Trump told a gathering of law enforcement officials in Washington, DC. “But courts seem to be so political, and it would be so great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what’s right.”

He added, “I think it’s sad. I think it’s a sad day. I think our security is at risk today.”

The executive order, signed on January 27, led to widespread protests throughout the country and confusion among Customs and Border Protection officers over how to implement the directive. Hundreds of people were detained at airports or barred from entering the United States, and at least tens of thousands of visas were revoked. At least four states have sued the Trump administration over the order, in addition to dozens of lawsuits brought by civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council for American-Islamic Relations.

The decision will likely be appealed and head to the Supreme Court.

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A Federal Appeals Court Just Ruled Against Trump’s “Muslim Ban”

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State Department Reverses Visa Ban, Allows Travelers With Visas Into US: Official

by Teri2063yeqkquw Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. State Department will allow people with valid visas into the United States, a department official said on Saturday, in order to comply with an opinion from a federal judge in Seattle barring President Donald Trump’s executive action.

“We have reversed the provisional revocation of visas,” the State Department official said in a statement. “Those individuals with visas that were not physically canceled may now travel if the visa is otherwise valid.”

(Reporting by Yeganeh Torbati and Julia Edwards Ainsley; Editing by Bill Trott)

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State Department Reverses Visa Ban, Allows Travelers With Visas Into US: Official

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I’m an Iranian Woman Whose Dream Is to Study in America. Here’s My Message for Trump.

by MarcelBaehr Posted on January 29, 2017

Mother Jones

With a stroke of a pen, President Donald Trump threw Shadi Heidarifar’s world into a tailspin. The 23-year-old philosophy student lives in Tehran, Iran, and has spent years trying to get into a university in the United States. She was recently admitted to NYU, her top choice, and was preparing to apply for a student visa. (Each year, some 4,000 Iranians receive visas to study at American universities.) But with Trump’s executive order on Friday, the United States has put a temporary block on immigration from Iran and six other predominantly Muslim countries, which means Heidarifar may not make it to class this fall. I reached out to hear her story—told in her own words below.

My name is Shadi Heidarifar—in Persian, Shadi means “happiness.” I’m 23 years old, and I’ve lived my whole life in Tehran, the capital of Iran. My father recently retired from his job as a manager at a gas station, my mother is a housewife, and I have a younger brother in high school.

I was the first in my family to go to university—I finished my bachelor’s in philosophy at the University of Tehran—and I recently got admitted to NYU’s philosophy department, where I planned to get a master’s degree. It was very difficult to come up with the money for the application. Most American universities have an application fee of around $70 to $100, which is enough for a month of living expenses in most cities of Iran. Money can be tight sometimes, so I worked part time at a bookstore near my university for more than a year to pay the application fees.

I’m interested in studying ethics and political philosophy—questions like what should our values be in a modern society, how can we act morally, and what it’s like to have a democracy. I hope I can teach in these areas. I want to help this country and other countries come together and have good relations, by thinking about the choices we should make in social and political relations.

When I was accepted at NYU, I was over the moon. It’s the first-ranked university in my major, so every philosophy student dreams about NYU. I spent three years trying to get admitted, to improve my English, to keep in contact with the faculty there.

I’ve never been to the United States before because it’s too hard to get a tourist visa for Iranians, but since I was in high school, I’ve liked the idea of living in NYC. I think US culture is popular among most young people around the world—most people know Hollywood and watch lots of movies. I myself am interested in jazz music, like Sinatra and Armstrong. Of American food, pizza is most famous in Iran, and most fast food from the USA is popular. For me, NYC is among the greatest cities in the world—it is a big, crowded, modern city like Tehran, and its diversity is unbelievable.

And education is important in my family. “It will help you live a much better life than your parents lived,” my father says to me all the time. It may sound a little strange because people in most Western countries think differently about our life in the Middle East, but my father is my greatest supporter—he wants me to never give up. Still, while there have been many improvements, it’s hard for women to continue their studies here. In almost every major, it’s a priority for universities to choose men instead of women students. This situation gets worse at the graduate degree level, and this is one reason why I want to study abroad. Also, it is hard for women here to find work and get paid equally after they graduate.

At the end of August I’m supposed to start classes, but getting a student visa is so hard for us, so if we want to reserve an appointment with the US Embassy, we should do this now. Now I can’t, and I’m afraid I will miss the fall semester. In fact, I’m really worried I might not be able to go at all. If I cannot get a visa in time, I will enroll in another university—I’ve been admitted to schools in Canada, the UK, Germany, and Austria. But I believe NYU is a better place for me. I wanted to work there with the greatest philosophers in my major—David Chalmers, Ned Block, Paul Boghossian.

It’s not just me. A lot of Iranian students spend so much energy and time, studying hard to get admission to American universities. Some have gotten a visa but now cannot catch a flight, and some caught their flight but cannot enter the United States. Some Iranian men and women are in the USA and their spouse is in Iran; they cannot see each other. All of us are really hopeless. But here is one point that we strongly believe, even without visiting the USA: We Iranian students strongly believe that diversity in ethnicity, race, religion, and color is one of the greatest strengths of the United States. And Trump’s Muslim ban will destroy this.

I did not expect him to win the election. I thought Hillary Clinton would win. Anyway, I think he loves the USA, but his way of protecting the country is different. Building a wall, separating families from each other, and banning visas to people in Muslim countries just makes our world too scary. If he wants to make America great again—and I think it is already great now—maybe he should only sign orders that affect diversity in a democratic way that everybody feels is respectful. Remember that America is not a country just for Americans; there are lots of Iranians, Mexicans, Chinese. There are too many American families that have a foreign member, and his decision will tear so many families apart.

I don’t know how he could sign an order that doesn’t make sense. It is ridiculous to call a person a terrorist or a supporter of ISIS just because of her religion or nationality. Iranian students think the most prosperous universities around the world are in the United States. We don’t support ISIS or anything like that—we hate them. We also have so many different religions in Iran. Also, most of the Iranian students in the USA are really successful and help American society to become better in different ways, such as working in great companies, becoming businessmen, professors, etc. This will make us lose everything we built over the years to get admission to US universities.

I study philosophy because I think it can help us to know how to keep ourselves, how to keep our commitments to democracy, how to help make the world great. I think it’s unfair for Iranian students to lose our dreams, our hope, and our admissions just because we are Iranian and Muslim.

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I’m an Iranian Woman Whose Dream Is to Study in America. Here’s My Message for Trump.

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Chaos Breaks Out in the Wake of Trump’s "Muslim Ban”

by MackN1969983798 Posted on January 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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The impacts of President Donald Trump’s sweeping order to temporarily block refugees from entering the United States and ban immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days were felt immediately around the world on Saturday. Multiple refugees were detained by customs officials across the country, as lawyers scrambled to file lawsuits against the Trump administration, and protesters planned demonstrations outside airports.

On Friday, Trump signed an executive order requiring immigration authorities to:

Suspend all refugee resettlement for 120 days and reduce the number of refugees resettled in the country to 50,000;
Immediately deny entry to the United States to anyone from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen for 90 days;
Ban Syrian refugees from resettling in the United States;
Prioritize refugee claims “on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.”

Confusion reigned as details began to emerge about just how many people might be covered by the executive order—potentially throwing hundreds of thousands of travelers into legal limbo. The State Department issued a statement on Saturday afternoon saying that citizens from the seven banned countries who hold dual nationality would also be blocked from entering the US, according to the Wall Street Journal. (The dual-citizenship restriction won’t apply to those holding US passports.) The ban could also affect some 500,000 people from those countries already in the United States on green cards or other temporary visas, according to ProPublica.

The executive order also opens the door for immigration procedures to become even more restrictive in the future. Read the full order here:

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Donald Trump’s Anti-Refugee Executive Order (PDF)

Donald Trump’s Anti-Refugee Executive Order (Text)

So far, 12 people have been detained at JFK airport in New York, according to CNN. The New York Times reports that passengers were turned away at airports in Dubai and Istanbul, and at least one family was ejected from a flight.

Iran issued a swift response to Trump’s ban, saying it would ban all US citizens from entering the country. “The US decision to restrict travel for Muslims to the US, even if for a temporary period of three months, is an obvious insult to the Islamic world and in particular to the great nation of Iran,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “Despite the claims of combating terrorism and keeping American people safe, it will be recorded in history as a big gift to extremists and their supporters.” The ban would remain in place until the US lifted its restrictions on Iran, according to the statement.

Civil rights and refugee resettlement organizations are readying themselves for a fight against the order. On Friday evening, the Council for American-Islamic Relations announced it would file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the executive order. “There is no evidence that refugees—the most thoroughly vetted of all people entering our nation—are a threat to national security,” CAIR national litigation director Lena Masri said in a press release.

The American Civil Liberties Union also filed suit Saturday morning on behalf of two Iraqi men who were already on their way to the United States and had been detained at New York’s JFK airport. One, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, who had worked as an interpreter during the Iraq War, was released Saturday afternoon.

Protests broke out in New York Wednesday evening in response to leaked versions of the ban. More protests were planned across the country for Saturday afternoon.

Update: 6:25pm ET January 28, 2017: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put out the following statement indicating that he has directed the Port Authority (which controls JFK) to “explore all legal options to assist anyone detained at NY airports.”

This is a developing story. We will update the post as more details become available.

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Chaos Breaks Out in the Wake of Trump’s "Muslim Ban”

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A New Report Finds America Is No Longer a "Full Democracy"

by LillianaConey5 Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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For the first time, the United States has been downgraded from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” by the Economic Intelligence Unit, a group that annually measures the strength of democracies across the world. According to the EIU, the country’s decline as a liberal democracy can be attributed to the “further erosion of trust in government and elected officials”—the same factors that led to the election of President Donald Trump.

The report found similar score declines and patterns of lower “popular confidence in political elites and institution” throughout Europe, especially in eastern Europe. Shortly after the US presidential election, one Harvard lecturer warned that the United States and European liberal democracies were under such a serious threat of a democratic decline that current trends resembled Venezuela’s political climate before its own crisis.

The findings, which were released on Wednesday, come amid increased alarm over Trump’s continued demonstration of authoritarian tendencies, as he issues gag orders across federal agencies and signs an expanding list of executive orders during his first few days in office.

The new commander-in-chief added fuel to such concerns this week when he repeated the debunked claim that voter fraud led him to lose the 2016 popular vote. Government officials and voting experts slammed the president for the assertion, saying any investigation into the falsehood will only further undermine voter confidence in future elections and will likely lead the new administration to make policy changes that make it even more difficult for many people to vote.

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A New Report Finds America Is No Longer a "Full Democracy"

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At His Inauguration, Trump Signals No Break From His Politics of Fear and Loathing

by KeeleyOQWkv Posted on January 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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Today, as of noon, the president of the United States is a man who boasted of sexually assaulting women. The nation’s leader is a purveyor of fake news and conspiracy theories who led the racist birther campaign. The commander in chief in charge of the US nuclear arsenal is a fellow who was unfamiliar with the nuclear triad but who is obsessed with revenge. The head of the federal government is a businessman who vowed to “drain the swamp” but who has taken office loaded with troubling conflicts of interest and flouting multiple ethics norms. The defender of the Constitution is a record-setting prevaricator and fabulist who has repeatedly attacked journalists who challenge his false assertions. The guy who oversees national law enforcement is a dishonest developer who was sued for racially based housing discrimination and who lied about his mob ties. The person in charge of US national security is a foreign policy novice who has called for enhancing relations with a foreign power that covertly worked to subvert American democracy in order to benefit him and whose associates are under investigation by agencies he now oversees for possible contacts with that foreign power. The most powerful man in the world is a thin-skinned, arrogant, name-calling, bullying, narcissistic hotelier.

Thank you, America. Or, that is, the 46 percent of the electorate who voted for Donald Trump.

Their view of the nation and its current condition was diametrically opposed to the perspective of the majority, who voted for Hillary Clinton. Trump voters bought his spiel and his shtick. He portrayed the United States as a declining hellhole, a dystopia under siege by undocumented Latino immigrants, criminals, and ISIS, with Middle America workers played for rubes by uncaring, screw-you political, corporate, and media elites in league with international bankers. And Trump was the tough-guy white knight who would do whatever it took—disruption! chaos!—to restore the lives and dreams of hardworking folks and bring about the return of some mythical (whiter?) American greatness. (Details to come.)

And when he gave his first speech as president—his inaugural address on a dismal and gray day—Trump, no surprise, stuck with the simple and bumperstickerish themes that had brought him to this once improbable point: There is “carnage” across the land, the American people have been betrayed by a small group of elites, and it’s time for America First. Speaking to a sea of white people—who were being protected by a police force that is mostly black—Trump peddled the same big and bold promises he slung during the campaign: “America will start winning again, winning like never before. We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.” The crowd cheered wildly for the nation’s No. 1 salesman. And they hooted when Clinton appeared on the big screen, and many in the VIP section toward the front of the crowd jeered when Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the speakers before Trump, referred to gender identity equality.

Trump turned hate into a political tool. He’s not the first. But he effectively fueled and exploited long-established conservative hatred of Latinos, Obama, Clinton, the media, Muslims. He mocked a disabled reporter. He derided a federal judge who had ruled against him in the Trump University fraud suit as a “Mexican.” He described black communities as nothing but crime-infested and burned-out ghettoes. He encouraged voters to detest Washington and government. He made common cause with conspiracy nut Alex Jones. He won the support of the Ku Klux Klan and the alt-right (the fancy name for white nationalists). He encouraged violence at his rallies. He denounced his opponent as a treasonous criminal and called for her to be locked up. He obnoxiously insulted and openly feuded with, well…just about everyone: Miss Universe, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Carly Fiorina, Rosie. Spite was his meme.

Worse, Trump hitched hate to fear. He claimed that the nation was gripped by a crime spree (which didn’t exist), that ISIS was on the verge of invading the United States (not really), and that hundreds of millions of undocumented immigrants were poised to “pour” across the border (nope).

Most people who behave in such caddish and uncivil ways are dismissed as jerks—not embraced as the embodiment of the nation and its hopes and aspirations. In modern times, no candidate who campaigned so angrily has ever won the presidency. But early in the race, Trump’s team concluded that Trump was already widely known for his crass and abrasive public persona. (This was well before he was caught on video boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy.”) What was most important, one of his strategists told me this summer, was whether voters accepted Trump’s pitch that the country was in free fall (terrorism! no jobs! immigrants invading!) and were sufficiently freaked out to embrace a political novice who would promise extreme measures to deal with all this crap. Were the voters pissed off enough to accept a TV star businessman (forget the bankruptcies or mob ties—look at that jet) who didn’t give a damn about niceties and who would screw anyone who disagreed with him or got in his way? His only chance, his strategists knew, was if enough Americans wanted an asshole as president. As it turned out, a majority did not, but 63 million did—and that was enough for Trump to bag a win in the Electoral College.

After the election, Trump continued to act and tweet like Trump. As if the act had to continue. With inane tweets, he repeatedly dumped on Alec Baldwin and civil rights icon John Lewis. He referred to Americans who voted against him as the enemy. He compared the intelligence community—which concluded Vladimir Putin had meddled in the US elections to boost Trump—to Nazis and continued to make nice with Putin and to demonize Clinton. Having won the grand prize, Trump showed not a smidgeon of graciousness. He fibbed about matters large and small. (He claimed all the ball gowns were sold out in Washington because so many people would be celebrating his inauguration. High-end clothing outlets told reporters they had plenty of inventory.)

Trump demonstrated that his campaign trail populism was no more than an artifice. He appointed billionaires and Goldman Sachs vets to the Cabinet and did little to clean up the swamp he had denounced. His plan to deal with his own conflicts of interest was a sham. (He begins his presidency in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.) Trump empowered Republicans aiming to privatize Medicare and eviscerate Social Security—notions Trump opposed during the race. He vowed that his Obamacare replacement would entail “insurance for everybody”; then he backtracked. He demonstrated no core ideological convictions. He showed once again that he is 100 percent situational.

His approval rating plummeted to a record low for a president-elect. Yet congressional Republicans stood by him and waved a rubber stamp for his appointees. And it was unclear whether any of his missteps tainted him in the eyes of his die-hard supporters. At the inauguration, his supporters gasped with excitement when he gave the crowd a thumbs-up. Well-heeled folks in the big-donor section applauded his denouncement of the establishment and his vow to give government back to the people. Many went gaga when Melania Trump appeared on the television screens, wearing a fashionable blue coat.

During the campaign, one Trump aide told me that the Trump camp understood that many of his supporters were low-information voters. “They mainly just see the headlines,” he said. So if a headline said, “Trump Vows to Make America Great Again,” that was the message many of these people absorbed. By speaking in slogans and memes—”Lock her up!”—Trump was effectively communicating and connecting with a large group of voters. The specifics didn’t register—or matter.

This has continued during the transition period, with Trump issuing bold promises and boasting that his efforts have already saved American jobs. (The details, often more complicated, don’t reach many of his voters.) He did the same with his short inaugural address, which was light on compound sentences or sophisticated ideas. Consequently, there is no telling if his folks will sour on him, if he keeps insisting that he is doing one helluva job.

Trump now shifts from campaigning to governing. It’s unlikely he will change his tactics. He will continue to praise himself and his efforts and declare every step he takes a gargantuan win for America. He will continue to blame others, if anything falls short or goes wrong. He will keep on picking Twitter feuds and behaving in a juvenile and puerile manner—perhaps as a strategic distraction or perhaps because he simply cannot help himself. He certainly is not embarrassed by his behavior—and a man who cannot be embarrassed is a dangerous man.

So for the American majority who voted against Trump and his keep-it-simple politics of fear, hate, and insult, the nation begins the Trump era with no silver linings. A vain, vengeful, and erratic celebrity who has often acted in crude, bigoted, and ignorant fashion is in control. And, ultimately, he is not the problem. The real trouble is with the 63 million who voted for him. How long will they stand by him and buy his easy-answers, reality-defying pitch? In front of the Capitol, Trump told his supporters, “Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for years to come.” They have already made great progress on that path of hate and fear.

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At His Inauguration, Trump Signals No Break From His Politics of Fear and Loathing

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Cops’ Feelings on Race Show How Far We Have to Go

by johnsmithwindows Posted on January 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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This week, the Pew Research Center released a report entitled “Behind the Badge,” a comprehensive survey of nearly 8,000 law enforcement officials across the United States examining their attitudes toward their jobs, police protests, interactions with their communities, racial issues, and much more. The report states that it is appearing “at a crisis point in America’s relationship with the men and women who enforce its laws, precipitated by a series of deaths of black Americans during encounters with the police.”

According to 2016 University of Louisville and University of South Carolina study, police fatally shoot black men at disproportionate rates. Since the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the last few years have been marked with protests leading to a national discussion around race and policing. This report explores how law enforcement officers in the United States view the intersection of policing and race—often, not surprisingly, with very different perspectives between white and black officers.

Here are some of the highlights:

Racial equality: When asked about racial inequality in the country, 92 percent of white officers answered that the United States does not need to make any more changes to achieve equal rights for black Americans. Only 29 percent of black cops agreed. This is in sharp contrast to white civilians, the report notes: Only 57 percent of white adults believe that equal rights have been secured for black people; a mere 8 percent of black people agree, Pew found in a separate survey.
Demonstrations against police: Sixty-eight percent of the officers interviewed say demonstrations against police brutality are motivated by anti-police bias, and 67 percent say the deaths of black people at the hands of police are isolated incidents. Once more, there is a significant racial divide between the respondents: 57 percent of black cops think the high-profile incidents point to a larger problem, while only 27 percent of their white colleagues agree.
Police involvement in immigrant deportation: During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump supported local law enforcement having more of a role in deporting undocumented immigrants, and a small majority of cops agree. Overall, 52 percent of police officers believe they should have an active role in immigration enforcement; 59 percent of white cops agree, compared with 35 percent of black officers and 38 percent of Hispanic police officers.
Community policing: The idea of training police officers to work with community members to achieve better policing has become the center of the conversation surrounding police reform since President Barack Obama organized a task force around the “community policing” concept. But 56 percent of all police officers interviewed consider an aggressive approach to policing more appropriate in certain neighborhoods than the approach of being courteous. There was no racial breakdown for this result.
Physical confrontation: For most police officers, according to the report, physical confrontations do not occur every day, but one-third of those interviewed reported having a physical struggle with a suspect who was resisting arrest within the last month. Thirty-six percent of white officers reported having such an incident, while 33 percent of Hispanic officers reported the same thing. Only 20 percent of black officers said they had a physical altercation with a suspect.

The report also includes police officers attitudes on job satisfaction and police reform proposals. “Police and the public hold sharply different views about key aspects of policing as well as on some major policy issues facing the country,” the report concludes.

Read the full report here.

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Cops’ Feelings on Race Show How Far We Have to Go

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