Month: February 2017

A new hope
by Tom Sullivan

Four hundred new activists in Asheville, NC prepare to engage the state Democratic Party.

You will need some good news after the horrific events that didn’t happen this week in Sweden. There is some. But let’s back up a moment first. This happened last night in Melbourne, Florida:

“You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this. Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

That, from a president of the United States you never thought possible.

The media tried to make some sense of Donald Tump’s fake news. The Independent:

One of the country’s official Twitter accounts, controlled by a different citizen each week, reacted with bafflement.

Its current administrator, a school librarian, said: “Nothing has happened here in Sweden. There has not [been] any terrorist attacks here. At all.”

Or it might have been Pakistan. Who knows? Mediaite went on the hunt:

A quick Google search turns up a whopping zero results for any combination of the search words “incident,” “attack,” Sweden,” and “February 18.”

What Trump seems to be referencing is actually a segment that aired last night on Tucker Carlson about a documentarian and the film he made regarding immigration in Sweden. (If we’re splitting hairs, the interview actually took place earlier this week but the segment only aired last night. But there’s no need to nitpick.)

turns out "what happened last night in Sweden" actually just means "last night I was watching Tucker Carlson talk about Sweden" pic.twitter.com/6z5pfOJ7Yv— Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) February 19, 2017

Somebody tell Tucker Carlson he’s Trump’s new national security advisor.

The good news is that in the wake of electing a president of questionable mental stability who gets his national security updates from Tucker Carlson, people who never considered engaging in political action suddenly find it imperative.

While Trump was on Air Force One headed to Florida, four hundred people crammed into the Rainbow Community Center here for a briefing on what to expect next week at their first Democratic precinct meetings. The meet-up was organized by the local Our Revolution chapter. While there were a few familiar faces, the organizers included first-time activists, a couple of Bernie Sanders convention delegates and a former Hillary for America (HFA) staffer. The stunned HFA veteran observed, as with the Women’s March on Washington and here, all it took was launching a Facebook page and people came without further prompting.

It wasn’t superior organizing skills. People are on edge. Neighbors I had not seen in years walked up and announced, “We’re back.” When I arrived, the line was wrapped around the building. People in this “independent” town are re-registering as Democrats to have more say in the political process. While some online colleagues were fretting about the reappearance of Obama’s Organizing for America blamed for undermining state parties across the country, OFA never managed to draw a crowd anything like this.

Third party talk was all but nonexistent. Expediency and urgency is the order of the day. Fighting gerrymandering, taking back the majority in the state legislature from Republicans, and turning the Democratic Party back into a party that represents students and working people is the focus. The groups is teaming up with the large Indivisible group that has formed here for a rally next week. It is one of thousands. Local activists are organizing their own town hall event on saving the Affordable Care Act from the Republican axe and effectively daring their congressmen and senators to show up.

Daily Action gives activists directives for action every day. A Capitol Hill mom started it. Emily’s list is encouraging thousands of women to run for office as “part of an activist wave that began with the election of President Trump.”

Can’t imagine what has got everyone so spooked, can you?

The guy Trump invited on stage has a 6 foot cardboard cut out of Trump that he salutes and prays to/for every day. pic.twitter.com/Ldpx0MOvE2— John Aravosis (@aravosis) February 19, 2017

I found it. https://t.co/Wfpc6SPZQK pic.twitter.com/UFV4INf0Xb— John Aravosis (@aravosis) February 19, 2017

Saturday Night at the Movies

by digby

Uday and Qusay celebrating their fresh kill of an endangered species

This breaks my heart:

The Endangered Species Act is endangered.

The 43-year-old law is under attack from the Republican Party and it’s not clear if and how it will survive the onslaught, especially with President Trump in power. Conservative members of Congress already deny climate change, dismiss the EPA, and are itching for more fossil fuel production—but what could they possibly have against a law designed to protect imperiled plants and animals? This is the very law credited with saving the Bald Eagle—the national emblem of the United States—from extinction, after all.

On Wednesday, Feb. 15, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works is holding a hearing entitled “Oversight: Modernization of the Endangered Species Act”; the latest development in an ongoing GOP campaign to try and rollback the power of the Endangered Species Act. Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, an outspoken critic of the law, is the new committee chairman, and he’s likely to pick up where his predecessor, climate change denier Jim Inhofe (R-OK), left off.

The Senate hearing comes during the same week that the chamber could potentially vote on the nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General, Scott Pruitt, to serve as EPA Administrator. Pruitt is no friend of the environment, and has made clear that he aims to limit the EPA’s scope, a position that falls in line with rest of Trump’s fossil fuel-friendly cabinet. The ESA panel adds to a long list of worries environmentalists and conservationists have with the Trump administration.

The Endangered Species Act is one of the government’s most powerful conservation tools, and that’s what Republicans don’t like about it. It can obstruct economic development and be burdensome for landowners and others to accommodate.

“I’m not sure what people really mean by ‘modernizing’ in this era of political double-speak.”

“I’m not sure what people really mean by ‘modernizing’ in this era of political double-speak,” said Amy W. Ando, an agriculture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “It surely would depend now on whether a Republican or Democrat was talking. Republicans once supported common sense environmental protection and nature conservation—Teddy Roosevelt created the National Parks, Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law, and George H.W. Bush signed the reauthorization of the Clean Air Act that created the innovative new provisions to cut acid rain.”

Ando said the current slate of environmental bills in Congress presented by the GOP “have taken an ideological stance against all conservation and environmental protection.”

“I don’t think any sensible progress on improving conservation policy is possible under the current administration and Congress,” she said. “A thoughtful revision of the ESA would require a Congress and executive branch that is genuinely interested in limiting the harm done to nature by unfettered use. Until we have such a government in place, the best we can do is to hold on to the law as it currently exists.”

This is just plain evil.  But then what isn’t with these people?

 A poll released in January shows that the people don’t support this by the way:

According to the poll results, 70% of voters opposed policy initiatives to target iconic species like the gray wolf or greater sage-grouse for removal from protection under the Endangered Species Act, compared with only 22% of poll respondents who supported such initiatives. This ranks legislative efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act second in unpopularity only to the sell-off of federal public lands among environment-related initiatives opposed by the American public.
“Clearly, the public isn’t buying the anti-endangered-species rhetoric that is being peddled by the industries that stand to profit from gutting protections for endangered wildlife,” said Erik Molvar of Western Watersheds Project. “Protecting our native wildlife, and preventing the irresponsible land uses that cause the extinction of rare native species, continues to be a core American value.” 

Fine-scale tabulations from the polling reveal that public opposition to dismantling protections for at-risk wildlife cuts across party lines, with majority opposition in every voter category. Some 75% of swing voters opposed dismantling protections for at-risk wildlife, compared to 81% of Clinton voters and 55% of Trump voters.  Some 65% of voters expressed concern that the policies of President-elect Trump and the GOP Congress would result in increased extinctions and weaker wildlife protections, with 55% of voters rating this a “very big concern.”

Even 55% of Trump voters aren’t in favor of the wanton killing of animal life on the planet.  But 100% of his sons are bloodthirsty killing machines and a vast majority of the Republican congress are in the pockets of businessmen who really want to be able to destroy everything in their path to make an extra buck so it doesn’t matter.

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On any given weekend, you might catch President Trump’s son-in-law and top Mideast dealmaker, Jared Kushner, by the beachside soft-serve ice cream machine, or his reclusive chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, on the dining patio. If you are lucky, the president himself could stop by your table for a quick chat. But you will have to pay $200,000 for the privilege — and the few available spots are going fast.

Virtually overnight, Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s members-only Palm Beach, Fla., club, has been transformed into the part-time capital of American government, a so-called winter White House where Mr. Trump has entertained a foreign head of state, health care industry executives and other presidential guests.

But Mr. Trump’s gatherings at Mar-a-Lago — he arrived there on Friday afternoon, his third weekend visit in a row — have also created an arena for potential political influence rarely seen in American history: a kind of Washington steakhouse on steroids, situated in a sunny playground of the rich and powerful, where members and their guests enjoy a level of access that could elude even the best-connected of lobbyists.

Membership lists reviewed by The New York Times show that the club’s nearly 500 paying members include dozens of real estate developers, Wall Street financiers, energy executives and others whose businesses could be affected by Mr. Trump’s policies. At least three club members are under consideration for an ambassadorship. Most of the 500 have had memberships predating Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, and there are a limited number of memberships still available.

William I. Koch, who oversees a major mining and fuels company, belongs to Mar-a-Lago, as does the billionaire trader Thomas Peterffy, who spent more than $8 million on political ads in 2012 warning of creeping socialism in America.

Another member is George Norcross, an insurance executive and the South Jersey Democratic Party boss, whose friendship with Mr. Trump dates to the president’s Atlantic City years, when Mr. Norcross held insurance contracts with Mr. Trump’s casinos, and Mr. Trump wrangled with the state’s Democratic leaders over tax treatment of the properties. Yet another member is Janet Weiner, part owner and chief financial officer of the Rockstar energy drink company, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying federal officials to avoid tighter regulations on its products.

Bruce Toll, a real estate executive who co-founded Toll Brothers, one of the nation’s largest home builders, and who is still active in the industry, owns a home nearby and frequently sees Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, he said. While they did not discuss any of Mr. Toll’s specific projects, he said, the two would occasionally discuss national issues, such as Mr. Trump’s plans to increase spending on highways and other infrastructure projects.

“Maybe you ought to do this or that,” Mr. Toll said of the kind of advice that Mr. Trump got from club members.

Mr. Trump’s son Eric, in an interview on Friday, rejected suggestions that his family was offering access to his father and profiting from it. First, he said, only 20 to 40 new members are admitted per year, and second, the wealthy business executives who frequent the club, among others, have many ways to communicate with the federal government if they want to.

“It assumes the worst of us and everyone, and that is unfair,” Eric Trump said.

Porr little boo boo. Yes, it’s very unfair to assume the worst of people isn’t it? Kind of like this bullshit that Eric Trump spewed during the campaign over and over and over again:

“The question I always ask is, what product were they selling? If we make a buck, we sold a bottle of wine or an apartment, or we sold a hotel room. What product were they selling to make $150 million,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”

Host Ainsley Earhardt suggested: “Favors? The government?”

“Of course,” responded Mr. Trump.

Donald Trump’s son told CNBC on Wednesday the latest revelations about the Clinton Foundation proves “pay to play” and “corruption at the highest level.”

“It should not be happening. It makes the whole world question our system. We are leaders of the free world. Why are we doing it?” Eric Trump said in an interview on “Squawk Box.”

Anyway —

Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman, said the president had no conflicts of interest, a reference to the fact that federal law exempts him from provisions prohibiting federal employees from taking actions that could benefit themselves financially.

“But regardless, he has not and will not be discussing policy with club members,” she said in a written statement.

Mar-a-Lago, she added, is “one of the most successful private clubs in the world,” and it “was intended to be the Southern White House, and the president looks forward to hosting many world leaders at this remarkable property.”

But unlike the real White House, it has no public access, and no official visitor log is available. When members of the White House press corps accompanied Mr. Trump to the club and nearby golf course last weekend, they were housed during part of the trip in a room whose windows had been covered with black plastic.

Mar-a-Lago members and their guests, on the other hand, had a front-row seat to a brewing foreign policy crisis, when Mr. Trump and his aides huddled on the dining patio to devise a response to North Korea’s launch of an intermediate-range ballistic missile in the middle of a dinner with Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, and his wife.

“No one needs to have a long sit-down with Donald Trump,” said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “If you can whisper in his ear for 40 seconds, that can be decisive on your policy.”

Mr. Koch — the estranged brother of his better-known siblings, Charles G. and David H. — owns a home in Palm Beach and hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump during the campaign. His company, Oxbow Carbon, is among the world’s largest sellers of petroleum coke, an oil byproduct, and would be a significant beneficiary of the Keystone XL pipeline, construction of which is now a Trump administration priority.

Brad Goldstein, a spokesman for William Koch, said that he did not know whether the two men had ever discussed policy matters. “If I did know,” Mr. Goldstein added, “the answer would be that I decline to comment.”
[…]
Mr. Trump’s weekend White House appears to be unprecedented in American history, as it is the first one with customers paying a company owned by the president, several historians said.

“Mar-a-Lago represents a commercialization of the presidency that has few if any precedents in American history,” said Jon Meacham, a presidential historian and Andrew Jackson biographer. “Presidents have always spent time with the affluent,” he added. “But a club where people pay you as president to spend time in his company is new. It is kind of amazing.”

Presidents always hang around with rich people. It’s an unfortunate reality in our system. But we’ve never had people literally paying into the president’s family’s personal coffers large sums of money to buy access.  This is just outright bribery.

But according to the White House counsel the president cannot be corrupt so it’s all good.

These people might as well be handing Trump bags full of cash. So, let’s just dispense with any notions that the presidency is anything more than a branding opportunity for the Trump family. They should just put the Trump name on the White House and call it a day.

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Nice little network you have here. Be a shame if anything happened to it.

by digby

Just a little chat between the President’s son-in-law and the president of a news network. Nothing to see here …

Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and close adviser, met with a senior Time Warner Inc. executive in recent weeks and expressed the administration’s deep concerns about CNN’s news coverage, according to a White House official and other people familiar with the matter.

In a meeting at the White House, Mr. Kushner complained to Gary Ginsberg, executive vice president of corporate marketing and communications at CNN’s parent Time Warner, about what Mr. Kushner feels is unfair coverage slanted against the president, the people said.

The Trump administration’s hostile posture toward the news media, especially CNN, has been evident in the president’s own statements and those of his press secretary and top aides. On Thursday, Mr. Trump lashed into CNN once again at a news conference, calling it “very fake news” with expert commentary that is “almost exclusively anti-Trump.”

But the anti-CNN push isn’t just a public display meant to rally Mr. Trump’s supporters. Behind the scenes, Mr. Kushner, the real-estate scion who until recently owned the New York Observer newspaper, has been pushing the issue with Time Warner executives including CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker.

“Our journalism has never been stronger as we continue to hold the administration’s feet to the fire. Those are the facts,” said a CNN spokeswoman.

While the administration is battling a large swath of the media, the fight with CNN has special intrigue because its parent company has a massive piece of business awaiting government approval: a proposed $85.4 billion sale to AT&T Inc. Messrs. Kushner and Ginsberg, who have been friends for a decade and whose discussion covered a variety of issues including Israel and the economy, didn’t discuss the merger in their recent meeting, said the people familiar with the matter.

In the final stretch of the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump said he would block the agreement and singled out the news network in his statement. “AT&T is buying Time Warner, and thus CNN, a deal we will not approve in my administration,” he said. The deal will be reviewed by government agencies including the Justice Department.

Such rhetoric from a presidential then-candidate and meetings such as the one between Messrs. Kushner and Ginsberg are unusual, according to Mark Feldstein, journalism historian at the University of Maryland.

“Lord knows that every president has been angered by their news coverage, going back to George Washington,” said Mr. Feldstein. “But to engage in that kind of bare-knuckled tactics is extraordinary.”

Mr. Kushner has taken issue with specific CNN contributors including Van Jones, a Democrat who served in the Obama administration, and Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist, who have each criticized Mr. Trump in harsh terms, the people familiar with the matter said.

CNN’s panels often include a few Mr. Trump supporters, such as Reagan administration veteran Jeffrey Lord and conservative commentator Kayleigh McEnany, a few critics, and journalists who cover the administration.

A White House official said: “It’s no secret that the President and his team have been critical of CNN’s dishonest coverage of the President both during the campaign and since his inauguration, and it’s obvious their ratings have suffered as a result. FOX on the other hand provides mostly fair, and more complete coverage of the Administration and their ratings have never been better.”

After publication of this article, the White House official told The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Kushner’s discussion of CNN with Mr. Ginsberg was not in-depth. The official also said Mr. Kushner denies specifying panelists by name, and said those complaints date back months to the campaign.

The CNN spokeswoman said, “Once again, the White House has their facts wrong. CNN’s ratings are up 50%.”

Oh, ok then. They just tried to get the black guy and the Latina fired during the campaign.

This is very creepy stuff. Not unprecedented, of course. I remember the Bush White House calling CBS president Andrew Hayward on the carpet after the Bush National Guard story blew up and the news network made a sharp right turn. (They seem to have gotten back on track recently.) And Johnson and Nixon both had their beefs with the media. But this is something else.

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Bannon doesn’t know what he’s talking about

by digby

Andrew Sullivan is right about this:

Steve Bannon, on the other hand, is quite something. I’ve read and reread his 2014 speech at the Vatican to see if I can find any coherence in it, and I confess I failed. It’s a hodgepodge of melodrama, hysteria, and a defense of some kind of “enlightened capitalism” along Judeo-Christian lines, in the face of an imminent Islamist takeover of the planet. It’s the 1950s versus jihad, an attempt to convey the gist of the entire Drudge Report every day and turn it into a thesis. He argues that we are just “at the very beginning stages of a global conflict” that could eradicate 2,000 years of Western civilization. It reads like the apocalyptic, paranoid fantasies of someone who writes letters to the editor, single-spaced, in all caps.

I felt the same way but thought I must be missing something important since everyone seemed  to think he was saying something profound.


Here it is. Decide for yourself.

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“You are the special people”

by digby

Politico obtained a recording of Trump at his golf club in New Jersey (the above is Mar-a-Lago) where he interviewed all the cabinet members during the transition talking to his club members:

“We’re doing a lot of interviews tomorrow — generals, dictators, we have everything,” Trump told the crowd, according to an audio tape of his closed-press remarks obtained by POLITICO from a source in the room. “You may wanna come around. It’ll be fun. We’re really working tomorrow. We have meetings every 15, 20 minutes with different people that will form our government.”

“We’re going to be interviewing everybody — Treasury, we’re going to be interviewing Secretary of State,” he continued. “We have everybody coming in — if you want to come around, it’s going to be unbelievable….so you might want to come along.”

[…]

So, this is my real group,” Trump said at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, on November 18, according to the audio tape. “These are the people that came here in the beginning, when nobody knew what this monster was gonna turn out to be, right?”

He added: “I see all of you. I recognize, like 100 percent of you, just about.”

Trump had a packed schedule of meetings that weekend less than two weeks after the election. On the Saturday after the cocktail party, Trump met with Mitt Romney, Michelle Rhee, Betsy DeVos, Todd Ricketts, Bob Woodson, Lew Eisenberg and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. On Sunday, John Gray, Kris Kobach, Wilbur Ross, Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, Robert Johnson and David McCormick all schlepped out to Bedminster for meetings.

Trump often appears to want to include his friends in the decision-making process.

Turning to a longtime club member that night, he said: “We were just talking about who we [are] going to pick for the FCC, who [are] we going to pick for this, who we gonna accept — boy, can you give me some recommendations?”

The supportive crowd ate it up as the relaxed Trump, in his element, gave them a close-up view of how he was setting up the government. “You are the special people,” he told the crowd of about 100 members, who mingled around a sushi station served by a waiter wearing a camouflage “Make America Great Again” cap.

I’m sure the servant felt very special too so it’s all good. Trump had created a job for him, after all.

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He’s a liar

by digby

Either here:

Letterman: Have you had any dealings with the Russians?

Trump: I’ve done a lot of business with the Russians. I know the Russians very well pic.twitter.com/u3FyvcXeoq

— Lauren Werner (@LaurenWern) February 17, 2017

Or yesterday:

I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia. President Putin called me up very nicely to congratulate me on the win of the election.

He then, called me up extremely nicely to congratulate me on the inauguration, which was terrific. But so did many other leaders, almost all other leaders from almost all of the country. So that’s the extent.

Russia is fake news. Russia — this is fake news put out by the media. The real news is the fact that people, probably from the Obama administration because they’re there, because we have our new people going in place, right now.

[…]

I have nothing to do with Russia. I told you, I have no deals there, I have no anything.

[…]

Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia. Not that I wouldn’t. I just have nobody to speak to.

I spoke to Putin twice. He called me on the election. I told you this. And he called me on the inauguration, a few days ago…

I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge no person that I deal with does.

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Making America ashamed again
by Tom Sullivan

Refugees making their way across the East German border in 1962.

You know that world “apology tour” conservatives accused Obama of making that he never made? Donald Trump owes the world and real “real America” one and right now. Reuters:

Nine asylum-seekers, including four children, barely made it across the Canadian border on Friday as a U.S. border patrol officer tried to stop them and a Reuters photographer captured the scene.

As a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer seized their passports and questioned a man in the front passenger seat of a taxi that had pulled up to the border in Champlain, New York, four adults and four young children fled the cab and ran to Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the other side.

One by one they scrambled across the snowy gully separating the two countries. RCMP officers watching from the other side helped them up, lifting the younger children and asking a woman, who leaned on her fellow passenger as she walked, if she needed medical care.

Nine people flee U.S. border patrol to seek asylum in Canada https://t.co/fouWpjQ5yI pic.twitter.com/j1vALkOHi1— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) February 18, 2017

@BloggersRUs pic.twitter.com/PUZ64KNy7o— Quinn MacKeen (@quinnesq) February 18, 2017

Atlantic has the backstory to the photos by Reuters photographer Christinne Muschi:

Muschi reports that “in Quebec, 1,280 refugee claimants irregularly entered between April 2016 and January 2017, triple the previous year’s total.” and that “the Canada Border Services Agency said in January that 452 people made a refugee claim at Quebec land border crossings.” Canadian advocacy groups say they are preparing for even more asylum-seekers, following increased anti-Muslim rhetoric in the U.S., and public expressions of welcome made by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

There are several more photos at the link.

This particular crossing place is a regular route now for refugees fleeing the United States of America to seek asylum in Canada. The country road on the American side dead ends at the Canadian border where the two countries are separated only by a low ditch and an orange marker. Kathleen Masterson of Vermont Public Radio went there to see for herself:

It’s so well-known that, according to people who live on the road, the Canadian police stay parked on their side of the border most days. In New York state, taxi drivers follow a protocol where they contact U.S. Border Patrol if someone requests drop-off there — the person is still granted their ride, but U.S. officials often stop the cab to check the person’s paperwork.

Wednesday, an officer in a U.S. Border Patrol car parked at the end of Roxham Road said that by 11 a.m. already two families had walked across illegally. They knowingly walked into arrest by the Canadian police waiting on the other side.

Refugee advocates say the reason so many are crossing illegally is because of the Safe Third Country Agreement signed by the U.S. and Canada in 2002. The pact is meant to prevent “shopping for asylum” in both countries; it requires refugees seeking asylum to do so in the country they reach first.

Since the United States is not looking very welcoming about now, refugees already here are looking for another way to find asylum. The Voice of America website explains that per the the agreement they would be turned back at the U.S. border, “However, if they sneak across at an unofficial location, they may apply for asylum in Canada even if they are caught. They may spend a night or two in custody, but upon release, they are free to pursue their claims.”

So they’re exploiting a loophole. Except for their complexion problem, you’d think Trump would welcome them as his kind of people.

People living along the road offered North Country Public Radio differing opinions of the refugees:

ZH: I spoke with Gino Ramirez, an Army veteran who’s lived on Roxham Road for only about four or five months. He was suspicious of these migrants crossing the border right near his trailer. He said if they’re leaving the U.S., they probably did something wrong.

“If they’re running away from the problem then they have something to hide,” Ramirez said. “That’s just the bottom line. If they don’t want to be here, just go.”

ZH: But not everyone sees it that way.

Melissa Beshaw said she’s lived there for two decades. And she’s watched some people cross into Canada over the years, but she’s seen a lot more make the trip since Donald Trump was elected. And she feels sorry for them.

“Now that Trump wants all the immigrants to be sent back or whatever, it’s not right. They’re running for their lives, for their freedom. And it’s an awful thing. Even families come up here with their kids. And I feel so bad for them, you know?” Beshaw said.

While most border crossings sound less dramatic than the Reuters story at the top implies, the images of refugee families fleeing the United States of America leave me deeply saddened. In fact, they remind me of the one from Berlin at the top of the post.* “Strength” is not what comes to mind, or Lee Greenwood’s sappy song. Trump’s promised “big, fat, beautiful wall” to keep immigrants out could as easily serve a different function altogether. Officially, East Germany’s “Anti-Fascist Protective Wall” in Berlin was there to keep out the wrong kinds of people. No amount of propaganda or “alternative facts” could conceal the ugly truth.

A big, beautiful wall. View from West Berlin in 1986.
Photo by by Thierry Noir via Wikipedia Commons.

* There are many more such photos out there, but they all seem owned by Getty. Here is a selection of them.

Friday Night Soother: a little orange goodness for a change

by digby

A bright orange, endangered Francois’ Langur was born February 6 at Lincoln Park Zoo and is now on exhibit at Helen Brach Primate House.

The infant is the seventh successful offspring for Lincoln Park Zoo’s breeding pair, Pumpkin (dam) and Cartman (sire), and a part of the Francois’ Langur Species Survival Plan ® (SSP), which cooperatively manages the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) accredited-zoo population. Lead Keeper Bonnie Jacobs serves as Vice-Chair of the Francois’ Langur SSP and has been managing the studbook for this population in the AZA for the past 15 years.

The sex and measurements of the infant are yet to be determined, as the newborn is still clinging tight to mom.

“Pumpkin is an experienced and attentive mother and the entire troop is being supportive,” said Curator of Primates, Maureen Leahy. “We recently updated the Langur exhibit to include more dynamic elements such as vines, sway poles and pulley feeders, so it will be exciting to see the newest addition of the troop grow more independent and explore the habitat.”

Francois’ Langurs (Trachypithecus francoisi) are classified as “Endangered” on the IUCN Red List due to habitat degradation and hunting. They’re native to the southern Guangxi province of China, northern Vietnam and west-central Laos.

Adults display black body coloration with a white marking from ear-to-ear and a black crest atop the head. Infants are born with a bright orange hue, which scientists believe encourages alloparenting, or ‘aunting behavior,’ among females in the group. Infants’ fur turns black within the first three to six months of life.

With its parents, the Langur infant joins sisters Kieu and Orla, brothers Vinh and Pierre, and adult female Chi on exhibit at Helen Brach Primate House, open daily from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Lincoln Park Zoo. For more information, visit www.lpzoo.org .