Trump the comedian
by digby
John Oliver’s take on the latest Trump lunacy was awesome. But the best moment of all, one that should be turned into a meme for the ages comes at the three minute mark:
trivial arguments …
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"what digby sez..."
Month: March 2017
“If they want a war, let’s let them have it. “
by digby
by digby
Take a moment and watch this very popular wacko incite Trump (and his voters) to violence against Americans:
ALEX JONES: And the president’s super smart. When I say dog-like, I mean honorable, true, delivering on what he said. He’s like a Saint Bernard going and rescuing people in the frozen ice or something. I mean it’s sick to watch this guy being attacked by all the scum. And they’re just never going to stop, because they are after us, the bitter clingers, the Christians, the gun owners, the hard workers. They feed off us, and parasites always have disdain for the host. And Trump can’t even roll over, which he won’t. Mr. President, I know you’ll never roll over and compromise. But even if you did, they’re not going to stop. They’ve got to destroy you forever. I said this many times during the campaign, and now they’re saying it. It’s a death battle. We’re the resistance against their tyranny. They’re the resistance against humanity, and free markets, and open free societies.
And I feel so sorry for people that can’t see it, that have been caught by this weird demon spirit of the age, to just go along with evil and corruption and just thank god, Mr. President, that we’re not the scumbag Obama, the loser of eight years, the failure. Now who thinks he can be the big community organizer down the street from you, who brags it’s his plan to bring you down. Then The New York Times acts like it’s not true. Codify the data each day, go after them with their own words. Hold up where they admit they were wiretapping your Trump Tower and then show The New York Times saying they’re not doing it, just like you have been doing it, and they will fall.
But you need a set time every day that you go live. They try to say as the president, you shouldn’t have a Twitter. Hell, next you shouldn’t have blood flowing through your veins. I mean, god, everybody knows you can’t talk to foreign leaders as president, and god knows you can’t breathe oxygen, and god knows you can’t have a Twitter. They want to isolate you, they want to lie about you, and they’re not going to stop, you put your family, your treasure on the line, they’re going to destroy your family if you don’t win.
And let your family know this. I know they’re smart, I know your sons are strong. But let the people in your family know there’s no coming back from this. This is total war. They’re not going to let your family roll over, even if you’re destroyed. Oh, they will let them roll over at first and then destroy them as well. They’re going to destroy you, they’re going to destroy Barron, they’re going to destroy Eric, they’re going to destroy Donald Jr., they’re going destroy me, they’re going to destroy Matt Drudge, they’re going to destroy Ron Paul, they’re going to destroy anybody like [White House senior adviser] Stephen Bannon that actually stood up for the little people, because that example can’t be allowed. Because if you let one ant stand up, they might all stand up, and those little ants outnumber the parasites 1000 to one.
If they want a war, let’s let them have it. Now they’re getting their ass kicked in the economy, your approval ratings are going up. Sir, they don’t care. They’re going to intimidate and pay off and roll people in your second-level operation to try to burn you. You must go on the offense. This is war. You think George Washington kicked the Redcoats’ ass just with information? No. We tried to start this country peacefully; they wouldn’t let us. And the rebirth of this country — and I want peaceful resistance in the info war — but through your office and through the attorney general they’re already trying to broke-back and hamstring. These criminals are all on the Communist Chinese and Russian payroll. They’re the ones who sold us out to every foreign interest — that’s what globalism is.
He’s nuts. But then so is the president. And many of his followers. What could go wrong?
Conway’s world
by digby
They brought out the expert this morning with this exceptional spin:
“We have this double standard for anonymous sources. The media loves to use anonymous sources for anything and everything that could possibly be derogatory, negative for this president and his administration,” she told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Monday morning. “And yet, they refuse to give any credibility to such sources when it may be something positive or exculpatory.”
It was just last month that Trump, who has yet to identify the source for his allegation against Obama, accused reporters of inventing sources cited in stories critical of his administration. In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he condemned the use of anonymous sources and pledged to “do something about it.”
Conway explained the president’s unsourced allegation by telling Fox News that “He is the president of the United States. He has information and intelligence that the rest of us do not [have]. That’s the way it should be for presidents.”
The other double standard imposed upon the president, she said, comes from Democrats, who have been vocal through the opening weeks of the new administration that a special prosecutor should be appointed to investigate reported ties between individuals close to Trump and the Russian government. Those lawmakers, she said, so eager to dig deeper into connections between Trump and the Kremlin, have thus far not been equally vocal in calls to investigate the president’s allegation.
That ties between Trump allies and the Russian government have been steadily reported over weeks and months while there is not yet any proof of the president’s wiretapping accusation did not deter Conway from equating the two.
“The other double standard is investigations. You have Democrats every single day saying ‘investigate, investigate, special prosecutors, investigate,’” she said. “Well then, what are they afraid of here? Let’s investigate this and see where it leads.”
She is laying the groundwork for the Republicans to “investigate” president Obama using a “fairness” argument for which Democrats often fall. They may end up agreeing to run parallel investigations just to quiet the drumbeat if the GOP can make it loud enough. Then they’ll have the foothold to “find” something they can spin into a different scandal and cover up their own. (Think “emails.” )
That’s how this works. It’s the only thing they are competent at doing. It may not work this time because Trump is such a uniquely incompetent boob but they’re going to roll it out hoping they can create a “Benghazi/email” non-scandal out of this. Whether they succeed will entirely depend on whether the Democrats hold fast and the press doesn’t start chasing shiny objects. I would have a lot more confidence that this can’t go anywhere if I hadn’t seen the spectacle of the relief and joy at Trump’s ability to read a teleprompter last week among reporters and pundits alike. They are desperate to prove they are “fair and balanced.” And that’s when things go sideways. Conway knows that better than anyone.
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“Some things are strange”
by digby
An interesting twitter thread from national security analyst Colin Kahl on the Russian story:
I have no idea whether Trump and company colluded with Russians during the presidential campaign. There are many good reasons to be suspicious of his relationship with the country generally, however, due to his bizarre uncharacteristic defense of the Putin regime to his unwillingness to disclose his global business dealings and refusal to divest himself of them. There is ample evidence of suspicious financial entanglements that render him unfit to serve as president. This is unprecedented in our system and it deserves independent scrutiny no matter how one sees the intelligence community generally.
Trump is a corrupt, cretinous imbecile with tremendous power. The danger is existential. Perhaps the Russian connection is not the most serious aspect of the threat he poses to the US and the world, but it’s not good. In fact, it’s probably just one thread in a whole tapestry of conflicts and corruption and it’s important to unravel this as soon as possible.
Oh, and by the way, thanks Comey.
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Thoughts on Trump’s latest alternative fact
by digby
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| A real Trump follower at one of the sad demonstrations over the week-end |
I wrote about his latest misdirection for Salon today:
According to the Washington Post and CNN, President Donald Trump was very, very angry that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from any further involvement in the ongoing investigations into Russian involvement in the presidential campaign. He was so upset that he banned chief of staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser Steve Bannon from Air Force One and then stormed off fuming that his big, beautiful speech on Tuesday had been overshadowed by yet another “mini-disaster.” A senior White House official told ABC News, “we should have had a good week. We should have had a good weekend. But once again, back to Russia.”
And then all hell really broke loose. CNN’s Jake Tapper confirmed that on Saturday morning Trump read conservative talk show host Mark Levin’s sensational evolving narrative on Breitbart News and let loose a volley of tweets that exploded all over the media with shocking allegations that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower in the waning days of the election to interfere with our “sacred election.” He called him a “bad (and sick) guy.”
We have all been observing Trump long enough now to recognize his game. Whenever he’s accused of something, he throws the same thing back on the accuser. Calling Hillary Clinton “crooked” and “a world-class liar” are the two most obvious examples. Saying she was “pumped up” on drugs was one of the more obscure but revealing episodes. I would imagine that the minute he read that Breitbart story it spoke to him as if he’d come up with it himself.
It’s clever. After months of being under suspicion over the Russian government’s intervention on his behalf, he can now turn the tables and accuse Obama of intervening on Clinton’s behalf. Isn’t that convenient? Where people have been starting to see this growing Russian scandal as the biggest political imbroglio since Watergate, Trump and his right-wing minions will now deflect attention to this story in the hopes that their followers will treat it as the “real scandal” and if they are lucky, make everyone else’s heads explode. It is a bold misdirection and while it’s fatuous in the extreme, don’t assume that it won’t be effective.
It is almost certainly the case that Trump read the Breitbart story and blew it up on Twitter out of sheer feral instinct, but the story didn’t just appear out of nowhere. There have been rumblings about this for a while. Conservative commentator Eli Lake of Bloomberg has been complaining about the intelligence agencies overstepping their bounds in the Russian investigation, calling the firing of Michael Flynn a “political assassination.” He has long been a critic of the intelligence community’s surveillance powers, so his views on this are consistent, which is more than we can say about the former hardline national security Republicans who suddenly sound like card-carrying members of the ACLU.
The most hypocritical of that crew is House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who has been wringing his hands for weeks over the impropriety of a “private citizen” like Michael Flynn having his phone calls with the Russian ambassador intercepted by the government. As Nunes well knows, and as Flynn, a former director of national intelligence, surely should have known, it’s routine to monitor the conversations of foreign ambassadors. The monitors would presumably have ignored Flynn’s side of it if he hadn’t been babbling about spies and sanctions on the call.
In any case, this would be the first time in history that Nunes has ever expressed even the slightest concern for such niceties. Up until now he has always been one of the intelligence community’s most ardent defenders, insisting that people were being hysterical over the Edward Snowden revelations and fighting any restrictions to the NSA’s surveillance programs.
And for all his handwringing this past weekend, Trump himself has hardly been a surveillance state critic. Among other things, he has said he’s in favor of a Muslim “registry” and spying on Black Lives Matter activists. He even called for a ban of Apple when it refused to help the government unlock the encryption on the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino shooters. One of his most famous Twitter quotes is “CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!”
Everything we know about Trump suggests that he would be a great friend to the intelligence agencies and has already shown that he’s prepared to make the military-industrial complex richer than they ever dreamed possible. That raises the question of why in the world the “deep state” would be so hostile to Trump as to try to sabotage his presidency, as the White House and much of the right-wing press seem to believe. One would assume the deep-state apparatchiks would be thrilled to support him and help him in any way they could. If Trump wants to expand their powers and is simply being friendly with the Russians in the hopes of a new relationship — potentially opening the door to the return of Edward Snowden, so Trump can execute him as he’s promised — what’s not to like from their perspective?
The question now is whether the Republicans will be able to change the storyline from the Russian scandal to an Obama scandal. or at least sufficiently muddy the waters. According to the Washington Post, Trump was brighter Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story. He must have been very happy to see this:
My goodness, that sounds serious, doesn’t it?
Although the Sunday morning hosts were aggressive in questioning Trump surrogates, their equally aggressive questioning of President Obama’s spokesmen, such as the interviews by Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week,” at least partly legitimized Trump’s accusations and calls for congressional investigations, simply by the “he said/she said” nature of the format.
It seems ridiculous that Trump could actually create a counter-narrative out of this nonsense. But the Republicans managed to turn Benghazi into a major scandal without much to go on. And when they found out Hillary Clinton had a personal email server, they managed to get the media so excited they could hardly speak of anything else. That’s not likely in this case, since Trump’s administration is a dumpster fire that flares up on a daily basis. But it would be a mistake to think it’s impossible. Trumping up scandals are what Republicans do best.
A modern Dust Bowl would be just as devastating as the original (or, What kind of emergency will it take?)
by Gaius Publius
I’m presenting this for a different reason than the obvious one. It’s not actually a shock-people-into-climate-awareness piece. That’s just the set-up. What’s my actual point? Read on (or click here to jump to it).
A recent study at the University of Chicago took a look at the drought (actually, droughts plural) during the legendary and destructive Dust Bowl of the 1930s and applied those conditions to U.S. agriculture today. They expected to find U.S. farming systems to be much more resilient.
They didn’t. A modern Dust Bowl would have the same destructive force on U.S. food production (and the economy) as the original one did.
From Phys.org (my emphasis):
Dust Bowl would devastate today’s crops, study finds
A drought on the scale of the legendary Dust Bowl crisis of the 1930s would have similarly destructive effects on U.S. agriculture today, despite technological and agricultural advances, a new study finds. Additionally, warming temperatures could lead to crop losses at the scale of the Dust Bowl, even in normal precipitation years by the mid-21st century, UChicago scientists conclude.
The study, published Dec. 12 in Nature Plants, simulated the effect of extreme weather from the Dust Bowl era on today’s maize, soy and wheat crops. Authors Michael Glotter and Joshua Elliott of the Center for Robust Decision Making on Climate and Energy Policy at the Computation Institute, examined whether modern agricultural innovations would protect against history repeating itself under similar conditions.
“We expected to find the system much more resilient because 30 percent of production is now irrigated in the United States, and because we’ve abandoned corn production in more severely drought-stricken places such as Oklahoma and west Texas,” said Elliott, a fellow and research scientist at the center and the Computation Institute. “But we found the opposite: The system was just as sensitive to drought and heat as it was in the 1930s.”
The severe damage of the Dust Bowl was actually caused by three distinct droughts in quick succession, occurring in 1930-31, 1933-34 and 1936. From 1933 to 1939, wheat yields declined by double-digit percentages, reaching a peak loss of 32 percent in 1933. The economic and societal consequences were vast, eroding land value throughout the Great Plains states and displacing millions of people.
In the eight decades since that crisis, agricultural practices have changed dramatically. But many technological and geographical shifts were intended to optimize average yield instead of resilience to severe weather, leaving many staple crops vulnerable to seasons of unusually low precipitation and/or high temperatures.
As a result, when the researchers simulated the effects of the 1936 drought upon today’s agriculture, they still observed roughly 40 percent losses in maize and soy yield, while wheat crops declined by 30 percent. The harm would be 50 percent worse than the 2012 drought, which caused nearly $100 billion of damage to the U.S. economy.
There’s more in the piece, but you get the point. Note the idea above that these effects won’t be felt until “the mid-21st century” — in other words, after the current crop of citizens is dead. Don’t believe it. Everything’s happening way faster than anyone is willing to predict. If this tragedy is allowed to occur, most of us will see it.
But is it the right kind of emergency?
At this point, I usually ask, “Is it an emergency yet?” (That’s still a valid question, since it doesn’t look like we’re stopping our carbon emissions any time soon, and under President Trump, we’ll accelerate the already deadly pace.)
This time, though, I’d like to offer a different thought, something related to the “Easter Island solution” I sometimes propose. That solution goes like this:
You’re a villager on Easter Island. People are cutting down trees right and left, and many are getting worried.
At some point, the number of worried villagers reaches critical mass, and they go as a group to the island chief and say, “Look, we have to stop cutting trees, like now.” The chief, who’s also the CEO of a wood products company, checks his bottom line and orders the cutting to continue.
Do the villagers walk away? Or do they depose the chief?
There’s always a choice …
What would it take for enough of our nation’s “villagers” to get upset enough to “depose the chief” this time, just like they did during the Great Depression? Would regional devastation (with, of course, no lives lost; we always stipulate that) — something like a Haiyan-style hurricane sweeping through Florida, for example — wake people up nationally… get us to react as a nation? Or would we treat a Florida storm, no matter how severe, as a Florida problem with a Beltway (FEMA) solution?
In other words, what would actually wake up (freak out) this nation as a nation, to create a national mandate for radical change and radical solutions to the climate problem? What would it take for the nation to rise up and, yes, “depose the chief” — in the earlier case, President Hoover; in the latter case, President Trump? Because it will certainly take a national mandate to create the national Congress and a committed-to-an-emergency-solution the situation requires.
(And yes, I’m ignoring for now the timing, though that’s important. If you’re going to freak out effectively, best to freak out before there’s nothing but air beneath you.)
When it comes to panic, timing counts. His came a little too late.
I’ve pondered this question for a while, and I offer it as an exercise to you as well. What kind of emergency will do the job nationally?
In the 1930s, of course, it was the Dust Bowl, more so perhaps than the factory closures, bank closures and the mortgage foreclosures, though those were national events as well. It’s now the 21st century. Factory closures and the mortgage foreclosures have panicked the nation into trying Donald Trump on for size — but not with respect to climate. We’re still at ground zero, implementing “business as usual” policies on the climate issue, just as President Hoover did during the economic crisis of the 30s.
But a permanent 30-to-40 percent drop in U.S. crop yield — what would that do? Would it get the nation’s attention? It would certainly get mine, no matter where in the U.S. I lived. After all, we’re all the market for food, more or less daily.
Before you ask, “But hey, isn’t that cruel, that kind of thinking?” please consider the alternative. On the one hand, this generation wakes up — admittedly in a panic, but that’s not bad — and suddenly does the most it can do as fast as it can do it to fix the climate problem. Which means the climate problem has a chance to more or less stay fixed — admittedly with some loss in global livability, but not a total loss — for a thousand years.
Or … this generation lives in relative comfort (it hopes) for another ten years or so, and then the long, crushing, angry, deadly march back to the Stone Age begins, in full view of everyone in the world.
The making of stone tools began more than three million years ago. Before that our ancestors, those in our species line, hunted and lived using found objects only.
The Stone Age ended with the smelting of ore, about 6000 years ago at the earliest. That’s the span of time — more than three million years — our ancestors lived using stone tools only. Three million years in the Stone Age. It’s so long that it’s divided into parts, and its parts are divided into parts.
If human civilization devolves to the Stone Age again — and we survive without an extinction event — we could be there, chipping stone, having forgotten everything we think we call “knowledge” today, for a very long time.
So when we’re weighing our preferred event sequences — a timely, uncomfortable-but-head-clearing “climate event” today … vs. at most ten years of comfort (meaning, no one acts in any effective way), then a rapid, deadly collapse and millions of years living as stone-tool, skin-wearing animals, hunters and scavengers, smelling like the great unwashed, for millennia … let’s consider what we’re actually choosing, which outcome we’d actually find preferable.
Me, I’d much prefer that people figure it out today (not tomorrow, today) and act like it’s already urgent, with no painful nudging needed. If I had to guess, though, I don’t think that’s in the cards. Yet we do need a wake-up moment, relatively soon. Do you have a better pick for what would do it?
Just a thought.
(A version of this piece appeared at Down With Tyranny. GP article archive here.)
GP
Imagine if you will …
by Tom Sullivan
Here's a Trump supporter at one of the pro-Trump "rallies" thanking Russia for help winning the election.https://t.co/48yQFhdYPU pic.twitter.com/gGqO9Zmbto— Zac Petkanas (@Zac_Petkanas) March 5, 2017
You can’t see it from this angle, but just off-camera Rod Serling is smoking a cigarette and delivering a monologue. Maybe one like this:
The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street (1960)
Narrator: [Closing Narration] The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.
“Taking the shackles off”
by digby
I think it’s important to keep documenting the manifestations of Trump’s agenda as much as we document him. He’s rolling out of control and who knows where it’s going. But other things are happening. And they’re horrible.
Here’s a post from the Brennan Center about what “taking the shackles off” really means in terms of policy:
President Trump’s press secretary said last week that his boss wanted to “take the shackles off” federal immigration agents, giving them more freedom to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. Evidently, this is gleeful news to some rank-and-file agents who are grateful that their law enforcement jobs—separating parents from their children, for example—will be “fun” again.
We already have seen what this “fun” means. It means arresting, detaining, and deporting even those undocumented immigrants who are not violent criminals. It means disrupting the lives of millions of people who have lived here peacefully for decades: people who contribute billions to the American economy. (According to the non-partisan Insititute on Taxation and Public Policy, undocumented immigrants pay $11.6 billion in state and local taxes annually, and The New York Times wrote in 2013, “Nearly all economists, of all political persuasions, agree that immigrants — those here legally or not — benefit the overall economy.”)
It means custom officials now interrogate domestic air travelers at the door of a plane. It means that a U.S citizen like Muhammad Ali, Jr. the son of the iconic boxer, can be detained for hours at the Fort Lauderdale airport on his return to his native country and asked: “Are you a Muslim?” It means that a noted Egyptian-born historian from France can be detained and almost deported after he arrives in Houston to attend an academic symposium. “[T]he United States is no longer quite the United States,” the scholar, Henry Rousso, wrote on the French version of The Huffington Post.)
It means that federal immigration officials in Chicago can detain a U.S. citizen for three days and falsely accuse him of being an undocumented immigrant. It means that Mem Fox, a well-known children’s book author in Australia, can be detained and aggressively questioned at Los Angeles International Airport. “I am old and white, innocent and educated, and I speak English fluently,” she said later. “Imagine what happened to the others in the room, including an old Iranian woman in her 80s, in a wheelchair. The way I was treated would have made any decent American shocked to the core, because that’s not America as a whole, it really isn’t.” “
These episodes are not merely a series of coincidental errors. They are not just the results of an unwieldly bureaucracy. This sanctioned unleashing of aggressive immigration tactics is precisely what the administration seeks and what those law enforcement unions were hoping for when they backed Trump’s presidential bid last year. They evidently felt underappreciated even as the Obama administration deported a record 2.7 million immigrants. For these Trump supporters in uniform, the news just keeps getting better. Over the weekend, for example, we learned that the administration is so anxious to hire thousands of new Border Patrol agents that it is considering asking Congress to relax the job’s hiring requirements.
It is unclear whether this means fewer background checks, or fewer lie detector tests, or fewer entrance exams, or some combination of the above. It is equally unclear whether Congress will grant such a dubious request. But if it does, and the Trump team gets its way, the result is clear: federal immigrant agents will be even less qualified to properly perform their constitutional duties than they are today. And that means there will be even more unshackled “fun” at the expense of undocumented immigrants and anyone and everyone else caught up in the Trump’s administration’s ever-widening net.
Granting federal immigration agents more discretion and authority while at the same time guaranteeing that more sketchy candidates will join their ranks is patently bad policy that will result in a wave of unconstitutional (and no doubt deadly) incidents. This obvious corollary seems no more of a concern to administration officials than does the broader question of what will happen to the American economy once all these undocumented mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, are deported.
Take horse racing, for example. Insiders are already concerned about what will happen once the Trump team cleans out the hardworking immigrants who have the skill to care for horses. In California, meanwhile, the very farm owners who backed Trump now say they are shocked—shocked!—that he is doing precisely what he promised by emptying their fields of the immigrant farm workers upon which they depend.
In Florida, one prominent grower expressed a brave thought in a cowardly way. “You can actually make a good living– $15, $20 an hour if you’re good at this—but the truth is Americans don’t want to do this work,” said the farmer, who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal by our president and his team.
On and on the second-guessing and second thoughts go. Overseas travelers to the U.S. spent about $148 billion in 2015 and tourism is an industry that has a trade surplus. Now what does the world think about visiting the U.S., a country run by a hotelier? “Every time a story comes out about challenges at customs and border patrol, a potential tourist to the U.S. may get cold feet,” Jason Clampet, editor of the travel industry website Skift, told The Boston Globe.
There is no reason to think that anyone who matters within the Trump administration is working on how to deal with the adverse economic ramifications of the coming immigration sweeps. And there is no reason to believe that anyone who matters within the Trump administration is working on how to deal with the looming problem of handing badges and weapons to unqualified Border Patrol recruits. Just like there was no reason to think that anyone who matters within the administration had a clue about what to do about replacing the increasingly-popular Affordable Care Act.
But back to federal immigration enforcement. It says something significant that some local police officials are telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents not to identify themselves as “police” when they stage their raids. It says that veteran law enforcement officials understand what it means when government agents take “the shackles off” when treating civilians. It means abuse and neglect. It means harassment and humiliation. It means inordinate pressure on the judiciary, and the bar, to identify and remedy the coming excesses.
Nothing good will come from the unleashing of federal immigration agents. What makes it even worse is that those in charge seem to know but not to care.
They do care. They just think all these things are good. The suffering involved is a feature not a bug.
I don’t know who will pick the crops. Maybe it will be Americans if they pay a living wage. But one would be foolish not to suspect that’s going to be a problem once that’s factored into the cost.
But hey, Jeff Sessions wants to build a boatload of private prisons and fill them up with pot smokers. Maybe they’re thinking of free prison labor to replace undocumented workers? Makes economic sense. After all, Sessions’ part of this country was built on something very much like that …
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Trump is basically shutting down the state department
by digby
Right wingers have always hated the State department. It goes back to the days when they were sure it had been infiltrated by the commies after WWII. It’s just one of those ancient turf wars that never seems to end.
But this story in the Atlantic by Julia Ioffe about what’s going on at State under Trump is something else.It’s not about the old turf battles. It’s about … not giving a damn about the details of running the world’s only superpower. They think they’re running Breitbart or the Trump Organization and this is a department they want to cut.
An excerpt:
In the last week, I’ve spoken with a dozen current and recently departed State Department employees, all of whom asked for anonymity either because they were not authorized to speak to the press and feared retribution by an administration on the prowl for leakers, or did not want to burn their former colleagues. None of these sources were political appointees. Rather, they were career foreign service officers or career civil servants, most of whom have served both Republican and Democratic administrations—and many of whom do not know each other. They painted a picture of a State Department adrift and listless.
Sometimes, the deconstruction of the administrative state is quite literal. After about two dozen career staff on the seventh floor—the State Department’s equivalent of a C suite—were told to find other jobs, some with just 12 hours’ notice, construction teams came in over Presidents’ Day weekend and began rebuilding the office space for a new team and a new concept of how State’s nerve center would function. (This concept hasn’t been shared with most of the people who are still there.) The space on Mahogany Row, the line of wood-paneled offices including that of the secretary of state, is now a mysterious construction zone behind blue tarp.
With the State Department demonstratively shut out of meetings with foreign leaders, key State posts left unfilled, and the White House not soliciting many department staffers for their policy advice, there is little left to do. “If I left before 10 p.m., that was a good day,” said the State staffer of the old days, which used to start at 6:30 in the morning. “Now, I come in at 9, 9:15, and leave by 5:30.” The seeming hostility from the White House, the decades of American foreign-policy tradition being turned on its head, and the days of listlessness are taking a toll on people who are used to channeling their ambition and idealism into the detail-oriented, highly regimented busywork that greases the infinite wheels of a massive bureaucracy. Without it, anxiety has spiked. People aren’t sleeping well. Over a long impromptu lunch one afternoon—“I can meet tomorrow or today, whenever! Do you want to meet right now?”—the staffer told me she too has trouble sleeping now, kept awake by her worries about her job and America’s fading role in the world.
“I used to love my job,” she said. “Now, it feels like coming to the hospital to take care of a terminally ill family member. You come in every day, you bring flowers, you brush their hair, paint their nails, even though you know there’s no point. But you do it out of love.”
Some try to conduct policy meetings just to retain the muscle memory and focus, but, said another department employee, “in the last couple months, it’s been a lot more sitting around and going home earlier than usual.” Some wander around the streets of Foggy Bottom, going for long, aimless lunches. “I’m used to going to three or four interagency policy meetings a week,” the employee added, referring to the meetings in which policy is developed in coordination with other government departments. “I’ve had exactly one of those meetings in the last five weeks.” Even the torrent of inter-department email has slowed to a trickle. The State Department staffer told me that where she once used to get two hundred emails a day, it’s down to two dozen now. “Not since I began at the department a decade ago has it been so quiet,” she said. “Colleagues tell me it’s the same for them.”A lot of this, the employee said, is because there is now a “much smaller decision circle.” And many State staffers are surprised to find themselves on the outside. “They really want to blow this place up,” said the mid-level State Department officer. “I don’t think this administration thinks the State Department needs to exist. They think Jared [Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law] can do everything. It’s reminiscent of the developing countries where I’ve served. The family rules everything, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows nothing.”
That sounds like Trump. It’s all he knows and all he thinks he needs to know.
Rex Tillerson, on the other hand, has run one of the biggest corporations in the world. That’s not exactly like running the United States State department but it’s a closer than anything Trump has ever done. It’s hard to believe he would sign on to this. But then maybe he’s just looking out for the oil and gas industry as he always has and the rest is superfluous to him too.
This continues to be an emergency but we’re all still in so much shock we can’t move. It’s not getting better, people. It’s getting worse.
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Look what they’re teaching America’s kids
by digby
We’ve always had this ugly racist side. But there had, until recently, been some progress in changing it or at least making it less prevalent. That’s what made Trump voters so mad. In their minds, not being allowed to scare the hell out of little children simply because of their parentage is an encroachment on their rights as Real Americans.
And so we have this:
In early December, Joann Lee and her family were crossing the street in front of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A white van was stopped at the light. Out of nowhere, Lee says, the driver of the van, a white woman, said to Lee’s 7-year-old daughter, “You are the most disgusting girl in the whole world. Your family killed my family so you could enjoy a day at the museum.”
Lee was shocked. Her daughter Terin was confused. “It wasn’t overtly racist, but there were overtones. … We were clearly a large group of Asians crossing the street,” Lee said. Bystanders chastised the woman and unsuccessfully tried to snap a photo of her license plate. Meanwhile, Lee wasn’t sure what to tell her daughter.
“I think at that point it hit me,” Lee said. “My kids were born during the Obama administration. It was nice for them to have an African American president. And I was looking forward to them having a female president. … It kind of made me sad. It made me realize I really have to prepare myself for how to explain things like that to them without becoming bitter and hateful of certain types of people.”
In the wake of the presidential election, parents, guardians, and educators are grappling with how the political climate affects children and youth. In November, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report that found “the results of the election are having a profoundly negative impact on schools and students.” Ninety percent of the 10,000 K-12 educators surveyed reported that their school environment had been negatively affected. Eighty percent described increased anxiety on the part of students worried about the impact of the election on themselves and their families.
A surge in raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in February has heightened panic among immigrants living in Texas.
Lupe Mendez said this is true at his school. He teaches English at a private high school in Houston whose population is almost entirely students of color; about 70 percent are Latino, he said. Immediately after Donald Trump won the election, families started making emergency plans. One student said his parents showed him how to pay the rent and enroll his younger sister in high school in case they were detained by ICE.
“Here this child is trying to get through a reading of Shakespeare and some chemistry questions. And now [he has] this very real potential burden of being 15, 16 and having to take care of younger siblings. It’s such an immediate shock to the system that’s very difficult,” Mendez said. Another student came to Mendez’s class in tears because her father was scheduled to check in with ICE and she feared he would be deported.
Angel Ramirez teaches creative writing at a public elementary school located in a Latino neighborhood in Houston. Unprompted, students write about the border wall, deportations, their dislike of Trump, and their wish that Barack Obama was still president, he said. “One little girl said Donald Trump is going to get rid of all the Mexicans and ‘I’m going to learn how to grow vegetables and fruits in my yard so I can feed myself.’ She’s in second grade … and that was her verbalizing her understanding of what’s happening,” he said.
“A lot of [colleagues] say it’s their parents instilling fear in them, that their parents shouldn’t be telling them these things. I don’t think that’s really the case,” Ramirez said. “I think their parents are genuinely concerned and kids’ ears are open to all that’s said and felt in the home.”
Dena Simmons, the director of education at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, says it’s important that educators and caretakers don’t neglect emotions. “When we [as adults] understand how we’re feeling and identify what we’re feeling, then we can effectively regulate emotions,” she said.
Because adults dictate much of what happens in a school, it’s important for them to set a tone of emotional well being, she said. Teachers can help create safe spaces for discussion. It’s also crucial that students take part in deciding what safety means. “What do we need to create a safe space, what does that mean?” she said. “When we disagree, what does that look like? What do we need to be able to say how we’re feeling?”
Safety is a top concern for Christina Smith-Gajadhar, who teaches English Language Learners at a predominantly white public high school in Arlington, Va. She said that after the election, some students taunted immigrant students, asking if they had packed their bags because they would soon be deported. When some teachers in the school displayed signs meant to be welcoming, one student went on Fox News to say the signs were political propaganda. The signs read, “Facts are not political / Diversity strengthens us / Science is real / Women’s rights are human rights / Justice is for all / We’re all Immigrants / Kindness is everything.”
“I cannot teach reading and writing and U.S. history without my kids [first] feeling safe and welcome. … You have to attend to the lower brain functions before you can expect any higher brain activity,” she said. Even in a school without incidents of bullying and controversy, student morale can be low. Terry Ashkinos teaches civics and journalism to eighth-graders at a private school in San Francisco. While his students were initially energized after the election to work on petitions and participate in marches, lately he has observed that they seem numb and resigned. The girls are especially disheartened that a man who bragged about groping women is now president. “The girls are being made aware that being a woman is a different position in the world than a man,” he said.
Carol Young and Peter Kim try to keep their two boys, ages 7 and 9, engaged in politics because they want them to care about their community. They watched the debates with them, brought them to the voting booth, and walked with them in marches in Los Angeles after the election. Nine-year-old Hugo says he made a sign that read, “Don’t Trump my Future.” He says that although teachers at his charter school say that talking about politics is not school appropriate, he and his friends sometimes “talk politics in secret.”
After the election, he wanted to do something. He, his younger brother, and four friends set up a lemonade stand on a busy street to raise money for charity. His mother suggested they donate to the ACLU. Their signs read: “Come get fresh ice cold lemonade with snacks and support ACLU.” It was the weekend the travel ban went into effect and within two hours, they raised $406.
I’m glad to see parents doing the right thing. And some of these kids give you hope for the future. ($406 from a lemonade stand for the ACLU!) They seem a lot smarter than many of their elders.
But what a tremendous waste of energy to have to fight something so inane and unnecessary when there are such real problems and big opportunities they could tackle.
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