The AP's Flawed Immigration 'Round-Up' Scoop and the White House Response
The Associated Press dropped a big scoop Friday morning on a draft memo in which the Trump administration, as the AP put it, “considered a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants.”
The AP’s characterization of the memo touched off some harsh reactions from critics of the administration — myself included — who spied the beginnings of Trump’s long-promised “deportation force” in the wire service’s reporting. The White House, meanwhile, dismissed the entire AP report as false and gave ammunition to its supporters to rev up the now-familiar “fake news” refrain.
Well, it turns out everyone screwed up a little bit on this one. Let’s break down a few things about this proposed idea, the AP’s reporting on it, and the White House’s response to the AP’s report.
First and foremost, the White House cannot just call up the National Guard to go round up undocumented immigrants, and that is not the proposal that was laid out in the DHS memo. The draft memo explores the possibility of using section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to deputize National Guard members as immigration officers. That statute allows the federal government to reach agreements with state governments empowering “an officer or employee of the State… to perform a function of an immigration officer in relation to the investigation, apprehension or detention of aliens in the United States.”
As Vox’s Dara Lind wrote, these arrangements were used extensively during the George W. Bush administration to give state and local police forces the authority to participate in immigration raids. Using them to empower the National Guard to arrest and detain undocumented immigrants would represent an expansion of that policy. Doing so would raise thorny legal questions over who would have command over those troops, and you can bet more than few governors would balk at the idea of militarizing immigration enforcement in this way. There’s also the real chance that such a plan would run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits military personnel from performing civil law enforcement duties (unless expressly authorized by Congress).
So the fact that the Trump administration even considered this possibility is definitely newsworthy, but the AP got out over its skis in reporting on the memo. The lede of the AP story states that “the Trump administration considered a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants” but the memo does not explicitly say so. It states that National Guard troops (no specific number is given) could be empowered to perform duties of immigration officers. That could mean apprehension and detention, but it could also mean helping with intelligence and investigations.
The distinction may be fine, but it matters given that the draft memo did not lay out any sort of guidance for how National Guard members would be used under this proposal. Having military personnel provide logistical support to immigration enforcement operations is a very different thing from “mobilizing” uniformed soldiers to “round up unauthorized immigrants,” as the AP put it.
Now let’s turn to the White House’s reaction to the story, which encompassed a swift denial and attacks on the AP for even reporting it. Shortly after the AP story dropped, White House officials began telling reporters that is was completely false. White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters in the press pool that the story “is 100 percent not true. It is false. It is irresponsible to be saying this.” He said “there is no effort at all to round up, to utilize the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants” and added, “I wish you guys had asked before you tweeted.”
The story is not “100 percent not true,” nor is it “false.” The memo is real, and it floated a proposal to partially militarize immigration enforcement — that’s important and worthy of reporting. As for Spicer’s lament that no one had “asked” about the report before tweeting about it, the AP story notes that “the AP had sought comment from the White House beginning Thursday and DHS earlier Friday and had not received a response from either.” If the story were false, as Spicer insists, then he or one of his colleagues should have taken up the AP’s offer to comment before publication. Instead, Spicer waited until the story went live and then attacked the AP’s credibility by claiming no one had asked for comment.
Now the whole issue has been consumed by the relentless toxicity that is the basis for the relationship between the Trump administration and the press. The AP’s imprecise language became the hook the Trump administration and its defenders needed to dismiss out-of-hand the otherwise important story.
But I suppose that was bound to happen anyway. The good news here is that the Trump administration is publicly and forcefully rejecting the notion of deploying the military to enforce immigration laws. The word of this administration obviously is not worth much and it very well may be lying, but for the time being I’ll take what I can get.
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4 Nasty Ways Federal Prohibition Hurts Pots Smokers—Even Where It's Legal
With the ascension of California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada to the ranks of the legal marijuana states after last November's election, nearly a sixth of the country now lives in places that have freed the weed.
Still, even though it may be legal under state law, marijuana remains prohibited under federal law. Pot smokers in California or Colorado don't have to worry about a DEA agent breaking down their doors and taking them off to federal jail—there just aren't enough DEA agents to actually enforce prohibition on the individual level. But the fact is, they are using a federally illegal substance, and there can be consequences to that.
1. Jobs
Most employment in the U.S. is "at will," meaning employers can fire employees for any reason they like—or no reason at all—unless it violates anti-discrimination laws. That means employers can fire or refuse to hire marijuana users even where marijuana is legal, just as some companies have done with tobacco users.
For many employers, having a "no marijuana" provision is merely a choice, one that can be changed by changing norms and attitudes or, perhaps, by a paucity of applicants willing to work for a company that intrudes on their personal liberties. But for other employers, federal marijuana prohibition means they must bar marijuana use. That includes all federal agencies, many companies that contract to do federal work and sectors like the transportation sector, where federal law mandates drug testing and the firing of people who use federally illegal drugs.
2. Housing
Federal marijuana prohibition means no one living in Section 8 or other federally subsidized housing can use marijuana. Typically, housing authorities do not drug-test or otherwise attempt to screen residents or applicants for marijuana use, but they do see and act on reported violations or arrests reported to them, and the pot-using residents get evicted.
And residents don't even have to be using marijuana themselves. There are many federal housing horror stories of long-time, elderly residents being evicted from their homes because their children or grandchildren got caught using or possessing pot on the premises. Young stoners: Do not get your grandma thrown out on the street by getting caught with weed at her place!
But it isn't just residents of public housing. Renters, condo owners and mobile home park residents can all be subject to codes or codicils that no local, state, or federal law be violated. And smoking pot in a legal state is still a violation of federal law.
3. Gun Ownership
A federal appeals court has ruled that marijuana users do not have a Second Amendment right to gun ownership because federal law does not allow selling guns to "illegal" drug users. That ruling came in a case involving a medical marijuana patient, but it applies to all marijuana consumers because Congress thinks that marijuana use "raises the risk of irrational or unpredictable behavior with which gun use should not be associated." (Alcohol, which certainly fits that criteria far more closely than marijuana does, is not included in the ban because it is a federally legal substance.)
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms wrote that decision into its rules last month, adding a new line to the gun ownership application form that states that marijuana is still illegal under federal law. For some reason, the National Rifle Association has not bestirred itself over this particular assault on gun owner rights.
Under current law and federal pot prohibition, would-be gun buyers face a dilemma: Lie about marijuana use and be able to get a gun, or be honest about marijuana use and be barred from buying one.
4. Military Service
Though marijuana has shown promise in treating conditions such as PTSD and chronic pain, active military members can't use it without jeopardizing their careers. Facing social reality, some branches of the service are no longer barring recruits with a history of marijuana use, even if current, but it will still get service members in trouble and possibly booted from the service.
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesGOP Strategist Steve Schmidt: Trump's Constant Lies and 'Endless Self-Pity' Are Unlike Any Other American President
Steve Schmidt, campaign director for John McCain’s 2008 presidential run, had some choice words for Pres. Donald Trump after the president’s wild and unhinged press conference on Thursday.
On Thursday night, Schmidt appeared on The Eleventh Hour with Brian Williams to call out Trump’s habit of cloaking himself in “the mantle of victimhood” and his constant lying.
During Thursday’s presser, Schmidt tweeted, “NO American President has EVER comported themselves like this. Endless self pity , Dishonest assertions and scapegoating.”
NO American President has EVER comported themselves like this. Endless self pity , Dishonest assertions and scapegoating .
— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) February 16, 2017Then on Thursday night, he told Williams, “You’ve never seen an America president, the commander-in-chief, the head of state of the United States of America, the most powerful person in the world use this mantle of victimhood.”
“As disturbing as this performance is to me,” Schmidt said, “maybe to some of the other panelists, to foreign leaders, to senior members of the intelligence community, the armed forces internationally, in the country, I think Donald Trump was not talking to the people in the room, he was talking to his voters.”
Trump’s supporters, Schmidt said, believe that “if the leader says it’s true, it must be true.”
“The constancy of the lying is pernicious in a democracy,” he said.
Watch the video, embedded below:
Steve Schmidt on Trump's embrace of the “mantle of victimhood”—and bigger stakes: “the constancy of the lying is pernicious in a democracy” pic.twitter.com/mCdVQsVdj8
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 17, 2017Click here for reuse options! Related Stories
Trump's Inside Team Tightens Travel Ban to Avoid Constitutional Objections; Leaves National Security Council Out in the Cold
Donald Trump’s controversial executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries is being tightened up to get around legal and constitutional objections with minimal input from the National Security Council, the Guardian has learned.
The White House policy director, Stephen Miller, is at the helm as the process for refugee and immigration policy is going through the domestic policy council, which does not include most of the government’s foreign policy or security-related agencies.
Trump made clear at his chaotic 77-minute press conference on Thursday “we’re issuing a new executive action next week that will comprehensively protect our country” at the same time as fighting the executive order which was blocked by the courts.
The goal of the new order is to bolster a signature initiative against ongoing legal and constitutional scrutiny, rather than revise it in a substantive fashion, relax its restrictions or consider any deleterious consequences it has on national security, according to Guardian sources.
The process means domestic political concerns are given greater priority and consideration of their national security impact is marginalized despite the impact on US relations with much of the world.
Observers consider the NSC’s diminished role symptomatic of Trump’s approach to governance and expressed alarm that Trump has not corrected course.
More than 1,000 US diplomats have signed a dissent to the travel ban Trump issued last month, which is currently blocked by the courts, objecting on the grounds that it will have a deleterious impact on the US’s security and international reputation. Their signatures came before the current process of revision through the DPC, on which the state department does not have a seat.
Though sources cautioned that deliberations on the new order are fluid and ongoing, the initial discussions of the imminent order contradict the justice department’s promise to the ninth circuit court of appeals of a “substantially revised executive order”.
Activists have been bracing for revisions that add more countries to the ban, either from the Muslim world or from outside it, in order to soften its edges. But the early White House deliberations on a revamped executive order have focused on the seven nations already included in the ban, not additional ones or fewer. Those countries are Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Sudan.
Officials working on the next order have signaled their intent to make a stronger case for why the ban needs to apply to the seven countries. That intent stems from an attempt to overcome mounting legal scrutiny and make the order seem both less arbitrary in its particulars and something other than a “Muslim ban” in its effect.
Officials are also belatedly examining refugee screening procedures worldwide, both as they existed under Barack Obama and currently.
In addition to the legal hurdles Trump’s ban faces, it has led to substantial international acrimony. Both Iraq and Iran have publicly mulled retaliatory measures against Washington.
Some see the reduced role of the National Security Council over the issue as a contributing factor behind the haste in the order’s drafting and the international opposition it has received.
“If an action is taken domestically that has an international consequence, it should be flowed through the NSC. By not doing so, you end up exactly where you did the last time, with the alienation of allies in Europe and the Islamic world,” said David Rothkopf, author of a history of the NSC, who considered the NSC’s diminishing relevance a sign that “a small clique of loyalists” dominate Trump’s policymaking process.
“The state department takes a strong stance on the immigration issue and the White House, when it sort of goes to immigration 2.0, cuts them out altogether.”
Ronald Newman, the former director for human rights and refugee protection on the National Security Council under Obama, said that refugee policy took “months” to craft each year, with the NSC convening the intelligence agencies and a variety of foreign and domestic-focused departments, from the Department of Health and Human Services to the state department.
Considering the new administration’s approach, he said: “It does sound more political. The worrisome thing is, it’s hard for me to believe that any process that factors in the relevant concerns, the foreign policy or the domestic ones, could have occurred in the five days it took to issue that executive order,” said Newman, who left the NSC in October.
Beyond the executive order process itself, the National Security Council is in turmoil.
Trump on Monday fired Michael Flynn, his national security adviser and the council’s chair, following revelations that Flynn discussed sanctions easement with Russia’s US ambassador and misled Vice-President Mike Pence about the conversation. An intended replacement, retired vice-admiral Robert Harward, turned down the job, citing family issues in a statement; CNN reported Harward had privately called the position a “shit sandwich”.
The White House strategy chief, Steve Bannon, denounced as a white nationalistwho used to run the hard-right Breitbart news service, runs another internal group within the White House. It is called the Strategic Initiatives Group (SIG), and is considered a rival power center, one that has left current and former officials wondering where the true policymaking authority for vital security challenges lies. At one point SIG was listed on an internal White House organization chart as connected by a parallel line to the NSC.
Before Harward took himself out of the running for national security adviser, Colin Kahl, the former security adviser to Joe Biden, said the effectiveness of the next national security adviser depended in part on “how successful he is in shutting down parallel national security structures in the West Wing, most notably Bannon’s Strategic Initiatives Group”.
Rothkopf added: “The NSC is being marginalized in favor of Bannon, [Trump son-in-law Jared] Kushner, the SIG, et cetera, and in favor of a handful of domestic policy advisers.”
White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.
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Donald Trump's Approval Rating Slides to Historic New Low
President Trump loves numbers as long as they tell him what he wants to hear. During a Thursday press conference, he was all too eager to tout a right-leaning Rasmussen poll that had his approval rating hovering at 55 percent. This despite the fact that his top national security advisor resigned in disgrace just three and half weeks into his term.
The Pew Research Center might beg to differ. A separate poll released the same day finds the president's approval rating has plummeted to 38% in the wake of Michael Flynn's resignation.
Trump down to 38% in Gallup, in first poll entirely post-Flynn pic.twitter.com/d884tVCweY
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) February 17, 2017To put this in perspective, it took George W. Bush over six years to become that unpopular with the electorate. And while Trump is still hugely popular with Republicans, fewer than 1 in 10 Democrats hold a favorable opinion of the president.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama holds a 39% approval rating with Republicans, one percentage point higher than Trump's with the whole of the country.
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesFormer Harvard Education Dean: Why College-in-Prison Programs Work
The following is an excerpt from the new book Liberating Minds: The Case for College in Prison by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann (The New Press, February 2017):
On a hot June day in 2008, I sat with about one hundred other visitors in the yard of the Woodbourne Correctional Facility in upstate New York. We had come for the graduation of the first cohort of students from the Bard Prison Initiative to receive bachelor’s degrees. It was an exciting moment because up to this point students in Bard’s prison program had earned only associate’s degrees. As several student speakers walked to the podium, their classmates cheered, clapped, and yelled encouragement. Each spoke powerfully about the sense of personal efficacy and the intellectual confidence his Bard education had given him. “All I knew before was the street,” the first speaker remarked. “I was tied to its rules and expectations. Now I have read Plato and Shakespeare, studied history and anthropology, passed calculus, and learned to speak Chinese. I know the world will be what I make of it. I can make my family proud.” They all spoke of their determination to contribute to society. “With this education,” another speaker announced, “I not only understand my debt to society, but I am also now in a position to repay it.”
While I listened to these well-spoken men and watched them walk up to the president to shake his hand and receive their diplomas, I thought back to the last commencement ceremony I had attended, some years earlier. I was dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education then, and the ceremony took place in Harvard Yard. As the name of each graduate or professional school was called, its dean would stand up and tip his or her hat to the president and then extol the superb leadership qualifications of his or her students. The students roared their approval and waved something symbolic of their particular school. The ed school students waved children’s books; the business school students waved dollar bills.
The two ceremonies were much alike, even though one took place within the wire-topped walls of a prison yard and the other in the shade of Harvard Yard’s stately elm trees. The academics in robes, the pomp and circumstance, and the smiling faces of family members were all just the same. But the routes the students had taken to graduation were worlds apart.
The graduates of the Bard Prison Initiative had all been convicted of felonies and were nearing the ends of relatively long sentences. Few had finished high school before being sent to prison, yet all of them had met the full curricular requirements of a regular Bard College bachelor’s degree. In their lack of prior schooling, these men were entirely typical of the prison population. The men and women incarcerated in the United States are among the least educated among us. Most have not gone beyond tenth grade. But the Bard graduates are not typical in their post-prison lives. While the national rate of return to prison is over 50 percent, the recidivism rate for graduates of the Bard Prison Initiative is 2 percent, and for those who have taken some classes but did not complete a degree the rate is 5 percent. Most alums of the program move on to good jobs, many in social service agencies and in public health organizations, although graduates have also found jobs in publishing, real estate, and legal services. Many have pursued graduate degrees, including in New York University’s master’s program in urban planning, Columbia University’s master’s programs in public health and social work, and Yale University’s master’s program in divinity.
Recidivism rates for prisoners who have graduated from other college-in-prison programs are comparably impressive. Hudson Link, which offers associate’s and bachelor’s degrees through several different colleges at five correctional facilities in New York State, reports a return rate of 2 percent. The Cornell University Prison Education Program reports a 7 percent recidivism rate for students who have completed fewer than three courses upon release, and zero percent recidivism for those who have gone on from Cornell to complete an associate’s degree. The Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison, north of San Francisco, reports recidivism rates for its students of 17 percent after three years as opposed to a state rate of 65 percent.
Moving from Harvard to Bard, where I have been deeply involved in the prison program, has demonstrated to me how vitally important it is to offer opportunities to go to college to those who are incarcerated. Today, prisons are schools for crime. They must become schools for citizenship. The Bard program and others around the country offer powerful evidence that most people in prison who earn college degrees are both prepared and highly motivated to return to society and use their talents in positive ways.
Today more and more people are working to make “college for all” a reality in the United States. Doing so is important in helping individuals realize their full potential, which advances not only their personal well-being, but also the greater good of society.
As President Obama has argued on several occasions, ensuring that all men and women complete at least two years of college is critical for the economy. Once the leader of the world in rates of college completion, the United States has slipped markedly in comparison to other countries. Because good jobs today require high levels of knowledge and skill, the decline in college graduation rates in recent years threatens our economic competitiveness. So does the fact that there are not enough college graduates to meet the demands of the labor market. On the positive side of the ledger, the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity of the Center for American Progress noted in a 2015 report that even a 1 percent increase in a state’s college graduation rates raises wages for all workers, even high school dropouts, more than 1 percent. In light of the indisputable role college-going plays in the nation’s economic well-being, Congress is considering legislation that would help finance at least two years of college, which makes good sense. Other hopeful signs are financial aid programs in place in a number of states, including Tennessee and Oregon, as well as in cities such as Chicago, designed to make college affordable for all students. The movement to ensure both college access and completion gains adherents every day. It is in the best interests of all of us that people in prison be included in such plans.
In addition to providing direct economic benefits, college in prison is cost-effective. The expense of incarceration is staggering, and by significantly lowering recidivism, thereby reducing the number of men and women imprisoned, college programs promise to lower the costs substantially. On average, between 2009 and 2015, American taxpayers spent nearly $70 billion a year on prisons, and due to a dramatic increase in the size of the prison population and consequent boom in the building of prisons, the costs have been escalating. According to the National Association of State Budget Officers, between 1986 and 2012, overall state spending for corrections increased by 427 percent, from $9.9 billion to $52.4 billion. The rising cost of prisons is siphoning vital funding away from more productive uses, including investments in public education, health care, and infrastructure. Spending on prisons has come to rank second after health care in its rate of growth, and that increase has necessitated spending cuts in other areas. Higher education and K–12 education are among the biggest losers. Reversing the tide, so that less is spent on prisons and more on education, is critical for the nation’s economic future. Research indicates that cutting the recidivism rate in state prisons by even
10 percent could save all fifty states combined $635 million from their expenses on corrections—and that does not include the potential savings from reducing recidivism in the extensive federally run prison system.
In addition, college in prison can reduce crime. Estimates suggest that spending $1 million on correctional education, which includes basic adult education, GED instruction, and vocational education as well as more traditional college programs, would prevent 600 crimes from being committed, while spending the same amount on incarceration alone would prevent only 350 crimes. The benefits of reducing crime are manyfold, from alleviating the harm done to victims, to lowering the costs of lost property and bringing down the expense associated with policing and prosecution.
College-in-prison programs have a powerful positive effect on the quality of life inside prisons, both for people in custody and for officers. A large national study by the nonpartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons confirmed widespread claims that violence is a serious problem in both jails and prisons, perpetrated not only by those who are incarcerated, but also by corrections officers. While officers live in fear of being attacked, men and women in custody, in turn, fear abuse at the hands of officers as well as attacks by those imprisoned with them.
Overcrowding contributes to violence. In 2014, the prison systems of seventeen states imprisoned many more people than they were designed to hold. According to a 2012 report about federal prisons, they, too, are over capacity, by 39 percent. Overcrowding results in double or even triple bunking, waiting lists for education and drug treatment programs, limited work opportunities, and higher inmate to staff ratios, all of which intensifies tensions and leads to flare-ups. By reducing recidivism so dramatically, college programs are a reliable means of alleviating this problem.
Higher education is a powerful antidote to the sense of purposelessness and the intense boredom many of the incarcerated describe in prison memoirs. The poet Dwayne Betts, a recent graduate of Yale Law School, explains that during his eight years in a Maryland prison his “occupation was time.” There were apparently no opportunities for education available, although, on his own initiative, Betts found considerable pleasure in reading. The dearth of advanced education is unfortunate for many reasons, not least the fact that college programs are said to give students focus and goals to reach for, which has a positive impact on the atmosphere of a prison.
Many wardens and officers remark upon the improvements in behavior college-in-prison programs can promote. Some participants have confirmed that going to college had a positive effect on their behavior. For example, one woman explained in an interview that when she first arrived at Bedford Hills, where she was being held, she was “a chronic discipline problem.” She was often rude and broke many rules. Then, when she enrolled in college, her behavior changed. Because she had something to care about, she became less angry and aggressive and managed to avoid getting in trouble. A study conducted by the Urban Institute to evaluate the effects of college-in-prison programs found that participants had formed supportive associations with other students and were now motivated to avoid conflicts.
The Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons argues in its report that it is important to create safe and productive environments in correctional facilities not only because it is the just thing to do, but also because “what happens inside jails and prisons does not stay inside jails and prisons. It comes home with prisoners after they are released and with corrections officers at the end of each day’s shift.” In this way, conditions in prisons affect us all. With more college offerings in prisons, more people would be sent home empowered to become skilled employees, responsible family members, and productive citizens. This would help mitigate the untold “collateral damage” done to families and communities by the incarceration of so many people.
The most direct advantage for families and communities that results from college-in-prison programs is financial. Men and women who go to college in prison are more successful in finding well-paid jobs after they are released. As a result, they are able to provide considerably more financial support for their families. In addition, when men and women leave prison with a college credential, or even just a few college credits, they are more likely to help improve life in their neighborhoods than to contribute again to its dysfunction. Many among those who have been to college in prison are active in community renewal work or activities with young people.
Beyond the direct financial benefit to a family, having a father, mother, or sibling go to college in prison can become a source of pride and inspiration for others in their family. Some family members of people in prison report a keen sense of shame about having a close relative behind bars, and the pride of a son or mother or spouse going to college can help counteract that pain. Imprisoned college students are often the first in their families to seek postsecondary education. Many boast that as a result of their pursuit of advanced education, a relative, maybe a sister or a nephew, is now also enrolled in college. Many also proudly announce that they are asked to help with homework assignments. Students in the Bard Prison Initiative talk constantly of their determination to ensure that their children graduate from high school and move directly to college.
Helping members of the next generation avoid prison is a goal for many incarcerated college students. Such commitments show that, while incarceration is designed to remove prisoners from participation in society, college-in-prison programs can help to kindle a wish to reengage with society in positive ways as well as enhance a student’s capacity to do so. If asked about how going to college has empowered them, many respond that the experience has helped them develop the capacity to give back and make restitution for the pain and harm they caused. Researchers who have studied the outcomes of college-in-prison programs have documented these sentiments in interviews. One participant in a college program at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women told a team of researchers, “After having time to reevaluate how many people were hurt and the ridiculous choices I made... the process of going to college [turned] my remorse into wanting to make amends. Wanting to make things better. Helping others not make the same mistakes.”
Students also frequently talk about the importance of college classes in teaching them about the way society operates and in helping them understand the complexities of the social conditions in which they grew up. A large number come from impoverished, dangerous neighborhoods, and many come from homes where there has been domestic violence. The new skills and perspectives they gain lead some to pursue work in social services, community development, and criminal justice, often advocating for reform. Their civic engagement can help to heal deep wounds in our society and strengthen our democracy. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “When an individual is no longer a true participant, when he no longer feels a sense of responsibility to his society, the content of democracy is emptied.”
At a time of increased attention both to criminal justice reform and to the need for greater access to higher education, this book makes the case for new support for college in prison. College programs were scaled back dramatically in the past few decades. While virtually all state correctional departments offer, or even require, schooling that leads to a general education diploma, and many offer some vocational training and classes designed to prepare people to go home, only a few offer higher education. That is the result of a misguided decision made by Congress, and approved by President Bill Clinton, as part of the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill, to end Pell Grants for prisoners. The action marked the culmination of several decades of “tough on crime” policies. The Pell Grant program, named after Senator Claiborne Pell, who sponsored the legislation establishing the program, provides need-based grants to low-income students to help them attend college. When prisoners were no longer able to pay for college courses with Pell Grant money, support for college-in-prison programs all but dried up. While in the early 1990s 772 college-in-prison programs operated in 1,287 correctional facilities across the United States, almost all of them were closed down after passage of the 1994 bill.
Copyright © 2017 by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. This excerpt originally appeared in Liberating Minds by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
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Nordstrom's Decision to Ditch Ivanka Is Really Getting to These Women Trump Voters
Earlier this month, Nordstrom dropped Ivanka Trump's line of clothing, citing declining sales. For Grab Your Wallet co-founder Shannon Coulter, the retailer's decision was nothing short of a triumph.
Big news everyone. You did this. I am in awe. https://t.co/q9vwmyfpbn
— Shannon Coulter (@shannoncoulter) February 2, 2017Following the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, Coulter drew up a list of companies carrying Trump family products, including Ivanka's. "We have to wait until they don't carry these products anymore," Coulter says of Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, Dillard's and Macy's, among others.
A week after Nordstrom had ditched Ivanka, President Trump was still fuming:
My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person -- always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 8, 2017A Nordstrom spokesperson has reiterated the move was purely a financial decision. But now Trump supporters are picking up the demagogue's mantle, as evidenced by a new viral video of shoppers descending on the department store.
"No money for Nordstrom," declares Laurie Ray, a resident of Maricopa County, Arizona, which just so happens to have given Trump more votes than any other county in America. "Because they caved."
Meanwhile, Trump voters' "cash-waving rampage" gave Ivanka the number-one selling perfume on Amazon this week.
Watch:
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Religious Freedom Is a Progressive Value
To read press coverage about it, one might think that religious freedom is a concern only for religious and political conservatives, and not one of the most liberatory ideas in history. One would also think religious freedom and civil rights are at odds with one another. Indeed, U.S. history is filled with examples of such competing claims, as resistance to everything from African American civil rights to marriage equality have been cast as matters of religious freedom. But stepping back from the heat of our political moment, there is a different, more fully accurate, story to be told, one I think that as progressives, we need to know and be able to tell.
Religious freedom is a powerful idea—the stuff from which revolutions are sometimes made. It includes the right of individual conscience—to believe or not believe as we choose, without undue influence from government or powerful religious institutions, and to practice our beliefs free from the same constraints. It’s no surprise that the first part of the First Amendment guarantees freedom of belief. The right to believe differently from the rich and powerful is a prerequisite for free speech and a free press. Grounding our politics, journalism, and scholarship in a clear understanding of what it means and where it came from could serve as both an inoculation and an answer to the distorted, self-serving claims of the Christian Right.
It was religious freedom that allowed for Quakers, evangelicals and Unitarians to lead the way in opposition to slavery in the 19th Century. Religious freedom also allowed Catholics and mainline Protestants to guide society in creating child labor laws early in the 20th Century, and later made it possible for religious groups and leaders to help forge wide and evolving coalitions to advance African American Civil Rights and women’s equality, to oppose the Vietnam war, and eventually fight for LGBTQ civil and religious rights.
Such coalitions aren’t always easy. When North Carolina Disciples of Christ minister Rev. Dr. William Barber, a leader in the progressive Moral Mondays movement, was asked about squaring religious freedom and marriage equality, he looked to the lessons of history and the wisdom of his own religious tradition. Working within a coalition that had long included LGBTQ advocates, Barber noted that the Christian Right was trying to “divide our ranks by casting doubt either among the LGBTQ community or among the African American community about whether our moral movement truly represented them.”
In the last century the NAACP had faced a similar challenge over the question of restrictions on interracial marriage. They ultimately opposed the bans, he wrote, as a matter of upholding “the moral and constitutional principle of equal protection under the law.” Faced with yet another fear-based tactic today, Barber wrote, “our movement’s response had to be the same.” He found his response in the First Amendment, which guarantees the right of churches, synagogues, and mosques to discern for themselves “what God says about marriage,” free from governmental attempts to enforce its preferred religious doctrines.
The Revolutionary era Virginians who created our approach to religious freedom, understood religious freedom to be synonymous with the idea of the right of individual conscience. James Madison wrote that when the Virginia Convention of 1776 issued the Virginia Declaration of Rights (three weeks before the Declaration of Independence), the delegates removed any language about religious “toleration” and declared instead “the freedom of conscience to be a natural and absolute right.” Madison was joined in supporting the rights of conscience by evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists who also insisted on a separation of church and state for fear that mixing would corrupt both.
Invoking the words of the Founders may seem hokey or sound archaic to some. But they knew that the freedom they were seeking to establish was fragile, and likely to be opposed in the future. Understanding the thru-line that connects the struggles for religious freedom at the founding of the country to today’s helps us fight to defend the principle from redefinition and cooptation.
Such an understanding helped the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 2016 when it issued a major report on issues involving religious exemptions from the law. "Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion over other religions or a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others," said Commission Chair Martin R. Castro, who also further denounced the use of religious liberty as a "code word" for "Christian supremacy."
The Commission found that overly broad religious exemptions from federal labor and civil rights laws undermine the purposes of these laws and urged that courts, legislatures, or executive agencies narrowly tailor any exemptions to address the need without diminishing the efficacy of the law.
Religious freedom advocates of the colonial era faced powerful entrenched interests who actively suppressed religious deviance and dissent that might upset their privileges. In the Virginia colony attendance was required at the Sunday services of the Church of England, and failure to attend was the most prosecuted crime in the colony for many years. Members of church vestries were also empowered to report religious crimes like heresy and blasphemy to local grand juries. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy planters and business owners who comprised the Anglican vestries were able to limit access to this pipeline to political power. Dissenters from these theocratic dictates were dealt with harshly. In the years running up to the Revolution, Baptists and other religious dissidents in Virginia were victims of vigilante violence. “Men on horseback would often ride through crowds gathered to witness a baptism,” historian John Ragosta reports. “Preachers were horsewhipped and dunked in rivers and ponds in a rude parody of their baptism ritual… Black attendees at meetings –– whether free or slave –– were subject to particularly savage beatings.”
This was the context in which Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777, which took nearly a decade to become law. The statute effectively disestablished the Anglican Church as the state church of Virginia, curtailing its extraordinary powers and privileges. It also decreed that citizens are free to believe as they will and that this “shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.” The statute was the first in history to self-impose complete religious freedom and equality, and historians as well as Supreme Court justices widely regard it as the root of how the framers of the Constitution (and later the First Amendment) approached matters of religion and government.
The principle of religious equality under the law was a profoundly progressive stance against the advantages enjoyed and enforced by the ruling political and economic elites of the 18th Century. Then, for example, as John Ragosta writes in Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed, “Marriages had to be consecrated by an Anglican minister, making children of dissenters who failed to marry within the Church of England (or pay the local Anglican priest for his cooperation) subject to claims of bastardy, with potentially serious legal consequences.”
Such abuses may seem like a relic of the past, but in recent years some Christians have tried to outlaw the religious marriages of others. In 2012 Christian Right advocates in North Carolina sought to build on existing laws limiting marriages to heterosexual couples by amending the state constitution, using language that would effectively criminalize the performance of marriage ceremonies without a license. This meant that clergy from varied religious traditions, from Judaism to Christianity to Buddhism, would be breaking the law if they solemnized religious marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples. And the motive was explicitly religious. State Senator Wesley Meredith, for example, cited the Bible in explaining, “We need to regulate marriage because I believe that marriage is between a man and woman.”
This issue was part of the 2014 case General Synod of the United Church of Christ vs. Resinger, wherein a federal judge declared that laws that deny same-sex couples the right to marry in the state, prohibit recognition of legal same-sex marriages from elsewhere in the United States, “or threatens clergy or other officiants who solemnize the union of same-sex couples with civil or criminal penalties” were unconstitutional. It was an historic victory for a progressive version of religious liberty but one soundly rooted in the history of religious freedom. Clergy could now perform same-sex marriage ceremonies “without fear of prosecution," said Heather Kimmel, an attorney for the UCC.
Jefferson and his contemporaries saw religious freedom as the key to disentangling ancient, mutually reinforcing relationships between the economic and political interests of aristocrats and the institutional imperatives of the church: what Jefferson called an unholy alliance of “kings, nobles, and priests”—meaning clergy of any religion—that divided people in order to rule them. His Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was “intended to put down the aristocracy of the clergy and restored to the citizens the freedom of the mind.”
A quarter-millennium later, we are still struggling to defend religious freedom against erosion and assaults by powerful religious institutions and their agents inside and outside of government. Aspiring clerical aristocrats debase the idea of religious freedom when they use it as tool to seek exemptions from the generally applicable laws of the United States—particularly those that prohibit discrimination.
Religious freedom and civil rights are complementary values and legal principles necessary to sustain and advance equality for all. Like Rev. Barber, we must not fall for the ancient tactic of allowing the kings, nobles and priests of our time to divide and set us against one another.
We have come a long way since the revolutionaries who founded our country introduced one of the most powerfully democratic ideas in the history of the world. The struggle for religious freedom may never be complete, but it remains among our highest aspirations. And yet the kinds of forces that struggled both for and against religious freedom in the 18th Century are similar to those camps today. We are the rightful heirs of the constitutional legacy of religious freedom; the way is clear for us to find our voices and to reclaim our role.
This article will appear in the Winter issue of The Public Eye magazine.
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21 Facts That Explain Exactly Who Stephen Miller Is
Even among the right-wing ideologues doing the actual presidenting in this administration, Stephen Miller stands out for the copious amounts of Kool-Aid he mainlines. Speaking to the New York Times, a Trump team colleague described Miller as “fiercely loyal” to the president, “a true believer in every sense of the word.” Though he joined the campaign in its early days, penning many of the apocalyptic speeches that won fear-drunk Republican hearts and minds, Miller recently got a lot more visibility after a string of television appearances in defense of the Muslim ban. At each stop, Miller showed a flair for the dramatic: he lied, he dodged, he put on his best tyrant’s voice and proclaimed the executive branch above the law. It seemed contrived and forced, like a politically precocious, weasley teenager’s idea of how to command a crowd. According to those who know Miller’s history, that’s not so far off the mark.
Dating back to junior high school, Miller has been the unwavering right-winger now before us. Though the internet, and some of his family members, were quick to compare him to Joseph Goebbels, this reporter saw a resemblance to Roy Cohn—a Trump mentor—down to the sartorial details. Miller wears retro skinny suits, only recently ditched a chain-smoking habit and has the kind of cockiness that reads as unexamined, unsympathetic self-hatred. His barked orders and put-on baritone are all part of the package, and can strike an observer as funny. At least until you remember this guy is trying to turn the country into an all-white gated community.
The Trump administration is the natural place for Miller to end up. He’s been writing racist, anti-immigrant rants for half his life and he’s only 31. He’s worked for some of the most deplorable U.S. politicians out there, only to become the voice for the worst of all. By all accounts, he is as terrible—and dangerous—as he seems, which is why he’s no laughing matter. And in that way, he is exactly like his boss. As one of his high school classmates told the Daily Beast, “People laughed at [Miller] because he was a buffoon, he was a performer, he thrived on spectacle. I’m very conscious now, looking back, that he was treated the same way that Trump was—he wasn’t taken seriously.”
Here are 21 facts that explain who Stephen Miller is.
1. The National Rifle Association was his first right-wing love.
Miller grew up in Santa Monica, a coastal city long regarded as a progressive bastion in L.A. County. A Los Angeles Times profile states Miller, along with two siblings, was raised in a “Jewish family of longtime Franklin Roosevelt Democrats.” Somewhere around eighth grade, Miller’s politics took a hard right after reading Guns, Crime, and Freedom, penned by National Rifle Association head Wayne LaPierre.
2. He dumped a childhood friend because he was Latino.
According to Jason Islas, in the summer between middle and junior high, Miller told him, “I can't be your friend anymore because you are Latino.” According to Islas, the two never spoke again, though he hasn’t lost much sleep over the demise of their friendship. “[It] didn't bother me, because the fact that Miller rejected me because I am Latino showed me he was pretty much worthless,” he told Univision.
3. He was the ' best-known and least-liked conservative activist' in his liberal high school.
Miller was in the racial and political minority at Santa Monica High, where 30 percent of students were Latino, 12 percent black and 5 percent Asian. Oscar de la Torre, a counselor at the school who remains active in the community, describes Miller as being “on a crusade against liberalism and liberals.”
Student body president Justin Brownstone says Miller “enjoyed saying things that were perceived as racist. The more he offended, the happier he was.”
“He had a lot of grudges,” de la Torre told Fusion. “He didn't go out of his way to go to dances or to have girlfriends. I don't remember ever seeing him smile.”
4. He started as a right-wing mouthpiece in high school.
Julia Ioffe writes that Miller reached out to conservative talk radio host Larry Elder while at Santa Monica High, mostly to complain about pervasive liberalism in his school. He also started writing articles for the Santa Monica Lookout. Miller leveraged his role as local conservative media maven to win unilateral wars against what he imagined were lefty enemies in his school.
“Thus began a cycle that would repeat itself over and over in high school and college,” Ioffe writes, “Miller would clash with school administrators over a perceived leftist conspiracy...then escalate the conflict by taking it to a conservative talk show, infuriating the administrators but yielding a compromise in Miller’s favor.”
In a column written just after graduation, Miller noted that just “since his Junior year in High School, he [had] been a guest on local and national radio over thirty times.”
5. He spent months fighting to reinstate the Pledge of Allegiance in his high school.
In a letter to local media outlet the Lookout decrying “political correctness out of control,” 16-year-old Miller complained that “our school refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance in classrooms for years,” proof that “they only adhere to the liberal guidelines.” For months, Miller pestered school administrators to “bring back the pledge” even dragging the superintendent into the fight. The pledge was ultimately reinstated, though Miller moaned in his letter that “it is still only said twice a week, while policy dictates it should be said every day.”
6. Some things Miller’s classmates have said about his attitudes on race.
Charles Gould, whom the Daily News describes as Miller’s schoolmate from first to 12th grade, wrote, “[Miller] was an unabashed racist. No, I’m not being over sensitive and no, I’m not using the 'r' word where it doesn’t apply. In private conversations he was constantly making disparaging remarks about the African-American, Latino and Asian students at our school.”
Classmate Natalie Flores, who wrote a Huffington Post piece about growing up with Miller, told Univision that Miller seemed to have “an intense hatred toward people of color, especially toward Latinos.” She added, “I think his big problem was the Latinos. He thought they lived off welfare.”
“[It] was not just that he targeted minority students, and played a victim on a regular basis, but was an asshole,” Ari Rosmarin, the editor of the student newspaper who now works at the ACLU, told the Daily Beast. “Most people knew him because he made it his business to have everyone hear his vile rhetoric on a regular basis.”
7. His high school writings demonstrate his budding right-wing views.
In that same letter, Miller writes, “When I entered Santa Monica High School...I noticed a number of students lacked basic English skills. There are usually very few, if any, Hispanic students in my honors classes, despite the large number of Hispanic students that attend our school. Even so, pursuant to district policy, all announcements are written in both Spanish and English. By providing a crutch now, we are preventing Spanish speakers from standing on their own...”
He goes on to gripe about condoms in his school (“Legally speaking, sex between minors is statutory rape”), the presence of a student LGBT group (“[W]e have a club on campus that will gladly help foster their homosexuality”), reverence for Native Americans (“excusing their scalping of frontiersmen as part of their culture”) and the lack of praise for the U.S. military (“Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”)
In another article he wrote, “We have all heard about how peaceful and benign the Islamic religion is. But, no matter how many times you say that, it cannot change the fact that millions of radical Muslims would celebrate your death for the simple reason that you are Christian, Jewish or American.”
Here’s what he used for his senior yearbook quote, citing Teddy Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”
Stephen Miller is nationalist from way back! Check out his yearbook quote! WHEW! pic.twitter.com/hEdTtAkcoy
— SenateTracker (@DaveNYviii) February 13, 20178. He actively tried to undermine student groups focused on Latino and black issues.
Oscar de la Torre, his former high school counselor, says Miller frequently claimed that because he—a white male—didn’t experience racism or sexism, students of color were making it up. “He didn’t believe the oppression existed,” de la Torre told the Times. “This guy is 17 years old, and it’s like listening to someone who’s 70 years old—in the 1930s.”
During a summit to address African American and Latino issues, Miller showed up with the message that the room was delusional and he knew better. “He wanted to sabotage us,” de la Torre told the Times. “He confronted everyone, denying that racism existed. He said that was a thing of the past.” (In a column about the meeting, Miller would later indicate the real problem wasn't racism but “leftist victim mentality.”)
9. He was once booed off the stage for making a racist joke about the school janitors.
While running for student council, Miller made a speech complaining about having to pick up his garbage when there were janitors for that. The incident, which survives in the video below, was funny because the janitors were black and brown people who got paid almost nothing to pick up garbage. Get it? Haha, right?
“It was a racist remark because we all knew that our janitors were people of color,” Flores told Fusion.
“He was booed unanimously by the student body off the stage. People were disgusted,” Rosmarin, of the ACLU, told the Daily Beast. “That kind of incident with the janitorial staff—everyone, no matter what your background is, understands why that is an awful thing to say.”
(A bit of aughts trivia: the winner of that election was Mark Hunter, the guy behind the Cobrasnake party photo empire.)
10. He attended Duke University, where people remember him, though not fondly.
Here is how Miller was recently described by John Burness, the former senior vice president of public affairs and government relations at Duke: “He’s the most sanctimonious student I think I ever encountered. He seemed to be absolutely sure of his own views and the correctness of them, and seemed to assume that if you were in disagreement with him, there was something malevolent or stupid about your thinking. Incredibly intolerant.”
A college classmate told the New York Times that at a freshman orientation event, he introduced himself by announcing, “My name is Stephen Miller, I am from Los Angeles, and I like guns.”
11. In college, he greatly expanded his portfolio of right-wing hate pieces .
In a column lamenting “multiculturalism” at Duke and other colleges, Miller listed all the cool things that make America great:
“We are the nation of cinema and radio, crooning and jazz, convertibles and diners, the Old West and New York City. Our culture includes Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jackie Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Douglas Macarthur, Milton Friedman, Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Edison and again, for emphasis, Elvis Presley.”
Neat-o! He only forgot to include Pat Boone and racism.
In another article, Miller accused Maya Angelou of “racial paranoia” and said her “legendary wisdom” amounted to “tired, multicultural clichés.” Another piece finds Miller finally breaking the right wing’s longstanding silence on the liberal media, asking why there aren’t any movies “about the evils of the Islamic holy war, the merits of capitalism…[o]r, dare I say it, a movie with a positive take on the Bush administration?”
For good measure, Miller also gives voice to the Angry Adult Virgin Lobby, noting that “shows like Queer As Folk, The ‘L’ Word, Will & Grace and Sex and the City, all do their part to promote alternative lifestyles and erode traditional values.”
12. He helped found and lead a campus group called the Terrorism Awareness Project.
CNN reports Miller served as “national campus coordinator, president, and co-founder” of the group, launched by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. (Horowitz is a vocally anti-black, anti-Muslim xenophobe and Zionist.) The project claimed its mission was to end “the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country as it attempts to defend itself in a time of terror." Miller promoted events like "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week”—which didn’t catch on, for some reason—and videos with gross titles like The Islamic Mein Kampf. He also tried to get other college newspapers to run ads, like this one, which was reportedly designed by Richard Spencer. When colleges turned them down, Miller took his case to the only show that would have him, “Fox & Friends.” You can watch that appearance; note that Miller was still using his real voice, not his now-famous King of the D&D Virgins voice.
13. He palled around with white supremacist and recently punched neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.
When Miller was an undergrad and Spencer was working on a Ph.D. he was too racist too finish (no really, he dropped out to found a racist “think tank”), the two became buddies as members of the Duke Conservative Union. Together, they worked on an event featuring Peter Brimelow, founder of the virulently xenophobic VDARE and a notable hate-scene fixture with his very own SPLC page. Spencer told the Daily Beast he was a “mentor” to Miller, saying he “spent a lot of time with him at Duke...I hope I expanded his thinking.”
Spencer, who has lauded Miller as “very bold and strong,” said ahead of the election, “It's funny no one's picked up on the Stephen Miller connection. I knew him very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one's talked about this because I don't want to harm Trump."
For the record, Miller has said the two were merely members of the same club and that they fell out of touch after graduation.
14. Another white nationalist is also a big fan, as is David Duke.
In a piece titled “Stephen Miller is David Duke’s Favorite Jew,” Forward picks up recent tweets from the former Klansman applauding Miller. “I can’t help it, I like this guy,” Duke states in one message.
Jared Taylor, whose anti-black output was a favorite of racist murderer Dylann Roof, reportedly also namechecked Miller. The Washington Post points to a post by Taylor which notes that Trump’s lack of white racial consciousness is helped by “men close to him — Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller — who may have a clearer understanding of race, and their influence could grow.”
15. He worked for noted racist Jeff Sessions.
After a stint working for Michelle Bachmann, Miller took a communications job with Senator Jeff Sessions in 2009. Sessions' office—where Miller could could help the racist, xenophobic sausage get made—helped elevate his visibility among conservatives, though initially, he was known mostly for his emails (see #16).
Politico notes the up-and-comer played a pivotal role in crushing the Gang of Eight’s 2013 bipartisan immigration bill. The outlet points out that “when the bill passed the Senate...Miller literally wrote the 23-page handbook that House members were given on how to fight the deal.” As you may already know, after being deemed too racist for the federal bench in the 1980s, Sessions was judged perfectly racist for the Trump administration and confirmed attorney general.
16. As you might imagine, he is a super annoying emailer.
A recent New York Times article describes Miller as “a man whose emails were, until recently, considered spam by many of his Republican peers.” The Times goes on to say:
As a top aide to Mr. Sessions, the conservative Alabama senator, Mr. Miller dispatched dozens and dozens of bombastic emails to congressional staff members and reporters in early 2013 when the Senate was considering a big bipartisan immigration overhaul. Mr. Miller slammed the evils of “foreign labor” and pushed around nasty news articles on proponents of compromise, like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. One exhausted Senate staff member, forwarding a Miller-gram to a reporter at the time, wrote: “His latest. And it’s only 11:45 a.m.”
17. On the campaign trail, he warmed up the crowds for Trump.
Miller’s job was to toss small bits of red meat for the audience to gnaw on while they waited for Trump to hit the stage and throw them the rest of the bloody carcass. In the video below, shot at a rally in Wisconsin, he rails against “foreign workers,” telling the audience they’re “competing against you, and your children, and your grandchildren, and your brothers, and sisters and neighbors for jobs. Low-wage foreign workers being brought in to take your place at less pay.”
He talks about “uncontrolled migration from the Middle East,” and “illegal immigrants being arrested...for the most heinous crimes imaginable,” and hails Trump as the candidate “who will protect our cities, who will protect our communities, who will save our families.”
18. He wrote Trump’s RNC and 'America First' inauguration speeches.
Miller is reportedly responsible for penning Trump’s ominous RNC speech, in which he declared, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
While there was the option of going lighter for the inauguration—some presidents do not use the minutes after being sworn in to share a vision of the country as a dystopian hellscape—Miller stuck with fearmongering:
"Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
19. He’s considered the brain behind the travel ban.
Though he denies it, Miller is believed to have written a significant portion of the travel ban, with some help from Steve Bannon and congressional aides sworn to contractual secrecy. Multiple sources have reported that the Steves have refused to consult with other agencies that might have necessary insights or legal expertise, leading to disastrous rollouts. In order to counter the negative press around the Muslim ban (we’re calling it what Trump calls it, because that’s what it is), Miller was sent on a Sunday morning press tour last weekend.
20. Infamous quotes from Miller’s tour of the Sunday morning shows last weekend.
“Our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
“The president’s powers...represent the apex of executive authority.”
“We will have unquestioned military strength beyond anything anybody can imagine.”
“That’s the story we should be talking about and I’m prepared to go on any show anywhere anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct 100 percent.”
21. His family is mostly not proud of him.
Buzzfeed News rounded up posts from Miller’s extended family, who seem not particularly keen on his new role. His mother’s brother, David Glosser, posted on the wall of a local media outlet, “With all familial affection I wish Stephen career success and personal happiness; however I cannot endorse his political preferences. I am not a Trump supporter.”
Glosser's letter, which is fairly long, goes on from there:
Mr. Trump is trying to sell you something...He sells fear of immigrants, contempt of our daughters, sisters, and wives, and sows discord and anger. He knows the dictator’s disgraceful sales tricks of challenging the integrity of democratic elections, he finds an unpopular outside group to blame our troubles on, cooks up false electoral fraud theories if he doesn’t get his way, threatens and bullies his opponents, and tells us that he is the only one that can lead the nation ahead. He’s trying to sell you something, and it’s not a good product. For the first time in my memory a major American political party’s presidential candidate has proposed that laws and regulations be established solely on the basis of a person’s religion and ethnic background. The legitimization of this as a basis of serious political discussion is a terrible step into darkness. Remember, what goes around comes around. If today it’s “them,” then tomorrow it may be you.
Finally, my nephew and I must both reflect long and hard on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.”
Another family member, commenting on the post, wrote, “At least he [Miller] doesn’t share our last name.”
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What's New: A letter from North America – Trump and After
Republicans Bar Latino Lawmakers From Meeting With ICE
“I’m pretty shaken,” Illinois Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez said after he and Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., were asked to leave a meeting on Capitol Hill with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials on Thursday afternoon.
“I’ve been here 25 years and I’ve never been told by the Speaker of the House that I can’t attend a meeting I’ve requested,” Gutierrez said afterward, Politico reported.
According to the lawmakers, both members of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus were barred from entering a meeting between congressional leaders and the federal agency that has ramped up its immigration enforcement following the inauguration President Donald Trump.
While eight Democrats — including Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) — were eventually allowed to attend Thursday’s meeting with ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan about deportation raids, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told reporters that no invite was initially extended to members of the Hispanic Caucus. No members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus were invited either.
“Members of the CHC expressed interest in attending, and to accommodate the request, we welcomed the chair of the CHC to join on behalf of the other members,” House Speaker Paul Ryan’s spokesperson AshLee Strong told Politico. “We are confident that the CHC chair is capable of representing the views of her caucus, and this arrangement was made very clear to the CHC ahead of time.”
Ryan, who did not attend Thursday’s meeting, organized the briefing after ICE abruptly canceled a meeting with Democrats and members of the Hispanic Caucus previously scheduled for Tuesday. ICE officials said the agency canceled the initial meeting because the Hispanic Caucus attempted to invite too many people.
“Oh my God! That room is big enough. They have not filled it to capacity,” Rep. Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., who was not allowed to attend the meeting, complained to reporters outside.
According to the Huffington Post, Pelosi complained at the meeting that she had “never been in a meeting where an agency can designate who can attend.” She also called Ryan’s move “highly unusual.”
“It was the speaker’s staff that came to me, and I know her very very well, and she said she was speaking on behalf of the speaker, that there were a limited number of seats,” Gutiérrez said. When Reps. Gutierrez and Torres showed up, Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-VA, asked them to leave, the Huffington Post reported:
Before [Torres] left, she asked ICE officials when she could get answers to questions about the raids. She said the officials did not answer; instead, Goodlatte told her that Republican leadership could get information to them.
“I was asked to leave and I was told that if we would like to have a meeting with ICE, that we need to go with the leadership of the majority party here and ask them to schedule a meeting and ask them to schedule a meeting for us with ICE,” Torres told her colleagues waiting outside the room.
“I speak English ― I don’t need a translator,” Torres told reporters afterward. “My constituents elected me to represent them here. I should be able to participate and hear firsthand what ICE is saying and what ICE is doing in my communities.”
Aside from Guitierrez and Torres being booted from the meeting, Reps. Grace Napolitano and Juan Vargas, both democratic representatives from California, were not even allowed in.
I was expecting to get let in, we’re the ones who were asking for this meeting, now we’ve been barred from the meeting,” said Vargas. “I want to know what they’re doing, and now we’ve been barred from this meeting that we called for.”
I was asked to leave the meeting with #ICE by @SpeakerRyan staff. Never before in 20 plus years has this happened. pic.twitter.com/Vbe0BnsZNK
— Luis V. Gutierrez (@RepGutierrez) February 16, 2017Goodlatte defended his decision and told reporters that the arrangement was “agreed upon ahead of time.” He added that there were more Democrats than Republicans in the meeting.
Rep. Linda Sanchez, a Hispanic Caucus member who did attend the meeting, said lawmakers were told by Homan that they “can and should expect many more arrests and removals this year.”
Nearly 700 undocumented immigrants who were arrested in ICE raids across multiple states over the weekend — only 75 percent had a criminal record, according to ICE officials. One such raid, in the so-called sanctuary city of Seattle, resulted in the detention of a 23-year-old Mexican immigrant who has received protection under president Obama’s Deferred Action Program twice.
“It was hard to not leave that meeting and believe that the Trump administration is going to target as many immigrants as possible,” Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-TX, who attended the meeting, told reporters.
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VANCOUVER — Garfield Mahood has spent 30 years fighting for the Canadian government to require plain packaging for cigarettes. So, the long-time non-smokers’ rights activist says he doesn’t have much faith in the government’s ability to regulate and restrict the marketing of marijuana. “They identified tobacco products as a cause of disease back in the 1950s,” said Mahood, president of the Campaign for Justice on Tobacco Fraud. “They’ve never been able to bring this epidemic close to a conclusion. “What would give you faith that health departments are going to effectively regulate any health problems related to these other drugs?” As the Liberal government prepares to introduce legislation to “legalize, regulate and restrict access to marijuana” before this summer, one […]
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Armed Services Committee Democrat: Gen. Mattis Might Resign Because Trump Is 'So Crazy'
Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, told MSNBC’s Greta Van Susteren that he’s worried President Donald Trump’s Sec. of Defense James Mattis will eventually resign because “his boss is so crazy.”
“It seems like Democrats and Republicans like Mattis,” Van Susteren noted.
Mattis has worked under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
“We’re lucky to have Mattis there,” Moulton said. “He’s one of the only sane people in the administration. My only concern with Gen. Mattis is that he’s going to resign because his boss is so crazy.”
Moulton also talked about the problem with Trump’s immigration ban, which impacts some of the Arab translators who help soldiers overseas.
He “is putting lives of our troops in danger about his action,” Moulton said. “His Muslim travel ban is hurting our — I have to work with these translators overseas.”
Earlier this week, Moulton attacked Gen. Michael Flynn and Trump’s administration for lying about Russian contacts. “That’s the definition of treason,” Moulton told CNN about the Trump administration.
Sources said late Thursday that retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward has turned down Trump’s offer to serve as National Security Council chair. According to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Harward sees the White House as “too chaotic” and called the offer “a sh*t sandwich.”
Moulton is a former Marine who fought in the Iraq war.
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5 Scary Ways Trump Mirrors Some of the Worst Leaders in History
Based on reliable news sources, his biographer and his own writings, the most powerful man of his era has been referred to as an "egomaniac" and a "narcissist," possessing a "big mouth" with an "impulsive style," unable to differentiate between truth and falsehood, preferring emotion over facts, focused on national greatness and law and order, fearful of "foreignization," prone to coarseness and put-downs in speeches, and fond of "mantralike phrases" filled with "accusations, vows of revenge and promises for the future."
1. Depravity
The man described above is Adolf Hitler. All of the descriptions were attributed to the Nazi leader: some by news media in the 1930s, some by modern historian and biographer Volker Ullrich, some by Hitler himself in Mein Kampf.
Eerily familiar to the present day.
2. Racism
Donald Trump placed a painting of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office, apparently feeling pleased that, in his own words, "a lot of people, they compare the campaign of Trump with the campaign of [Jackson]."
Andrew Jackson may have been our most racist president. To him, Native Americans were only "savages" standing in the way of progress. For 10 years Jackson arranged so-called treaties with Indians in the American southeast, setting up his own friends as land agents, traders and surveyors while encouraging white squatters to take over the land. Eventually recognizing Florida as vital to "national security," he initiated raids on Seminole villages, burning down homes and forcing out residents, in the name of the "immutable laws of self-defense." The result was the Trail of Tears, where thousands of sick and starving Cherokees were driven from their homes and forced to walk 1,000 miles in the middle of winter to unfamiliar and unproductive land far from home.
Indian removal, according to Jackson, would help the Native Americans to "cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community." He hypocritically added, "Say to the chiefs and warriors that I am their friend...[their land] they shall possess as long as grass grows or water runs."
Jackson didn't reserve his enmity for Native Americans. He was the only president to have driven a "coffle" of chained slaves to work in faraway locations. As a reward for returning one of his runaway slaves, he promised "ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him."
3. Simplemindedness
Ronald Reagan said, "Government is the problem." Donald Trump said, "Good people don't go into government."
There are other similarities, many of them reported by historian William E. Leuchtenburg, author of The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Says Leuchtenburg, "No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed." A Reagan presidential aide remarked, "He made decisions like an ancient king...passively letting his subjects serve him, selecting only those morsels of public policy that were especially tasty."
Reagan provided entertaining moments that Trump is beginning to emulate with newer technology. According to Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, during a meeting on the MX missile, "Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before." On the day before a global summit meeting he was given a briefing book, which he never opened, and when asked about it by chief of staff James Baker, Reagan replied, "Well, Jim, The Sound of Music was on last night."
Reagan had his movies, Trump his television, which he watches for hours, apparently searching for news about himself and at times turning it into official policy. According to Fortune, "At least five times since he took office on Jan. 20, Trump has tweeted about policy ideas and thoughts that seem directly related to news that was being shown on channels such as Fox News."
Through the 1980s, Reagan's staff "protected him by severely restricting situations where he might blurt out a fantasy" while "keeping the press at shouting distance or beyond." Yet he "alarmed members of his staff by flying into a rage if the press reported that he had changed his position on an issue, even when he undoubtedly had."
4. Ecocide
Stalin destroyed not only people, but also the environment. In An Environmental History of Russia, it is stated that "During the Stalin era, state-mandated programs...ensured that economic development was the sine qua non of decision making. Those who stood in the way of the programs...were often labeled 'wreckers.' The 'wreckers' included some of the nation’s most able biologists, forestry and fisheries specialists, agronomists, and ecologists. Officials...came to consider nature itself an 'enemy of the people.'"
"We cannot expect charity from nature," said Stalin. "We must tear it from her."
Donald Trump has shown the same disdain for the earth with statements like, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." His new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is an obfuscating climate change denier whose company, Exxon, has been linked to the great majority of other climate change deniers.
5. Corruption
Historian Kevin Kruse might be providing some insight into Donald Trump's mind in his summation of Warren G. Harding, considered by many to be the worst president: "He felt woefully underqualified for the job...so he surrounded himself with old friends...who themselves were unqualified for the jobs they held and many of them corrupt."
Historian Eric Foner goes on to discuss Harding's and Coolidge's corruption in office, and their penchant for "channeling money and favors to big business." The two presidents, says Foner, "slashed income and corporate taxes and supported employers' campaigns to eliminate unions."
"Never before," said the Wall Street Journal at the time, "has a government been so completely fused with business."
Until today.
'Morning Joe' Reveals the Secret Panic of GOP Lawmakers After Trump's Unhinged Press Conference
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski weighed in on Trump's alternative press conference early Friday. Horrified by the president's narcissism and deceit, the "Morning Joe" hosts also revealed why Trump's "fake news" battle has just begun.
“That would have been a really funny hour or so of television if he weren’t president of the United States,” Scarborough remarked. “It was one of the most chaotic, rambling press conferences anybody has ever seen.”
"I do get good ratings, you have to admit that," President Trump said from the podium, offering his own brand of "fake news" with easily debunkable claims.
While broadcast media helped Trump get elected, Trump's disdain for the media only stems from the media finally catching up with his lies. Although it's too little, too late.
"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," CBS chairman Les Moonves said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco in February 2016. A Harvard Kennedy School report issued four months later also revealed that "the volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls.... The Democratic race in 2015 received less than half the coverage of the Republican race."
Still, Trump's addiction to chaos probably hasn't yet hit his supporters.
“They were laughing, and they weren’t laughing at Donald Trump — they were laughing at the media,” Scarborough said, with regards to the 70-minute presser.
On the other hand, "everybody I talked to on (Capitol) Hill, including a lot of Republican senators and congressmen, were scared to death by what they saw, and more than one said, ‘This just isn’t going to last long because he just doesn’t have control of reality,’” Scarborough pointed out.
MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle added that “The No. 1 story is the stability of the president of the United States."
“The first 35 minutes of that press conference was watching a president of the United States who has lost a grip on reality,” Barnicle said. “It was as if he performed for himself because he needed to perform like that because he needed to convince himself he was president.”
Brzezinski noted that Trump "throws out shiny objects and lies to distract us," warning other journalists not to fall for Trump's tricks.
.@JoeNBC on Trump’s press conference: One of the most chaotic, rambling press conferences anybody has ever seen https://t.co/k32N2yzdzV
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) February 17, 2017 Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesRobert Harward Turns Down Trump's Offer to Be National Security Adviser
Robert Harward, a respected former Navy Seal who earned high marks for his management skills, has turned down Donald Trump’s offer to replace Michael Flynn as national security adviser.
Reached by the Associated Press on Thursday evening, Harward, who is a senior executive at Lockheed Martin, cited family and financial reasons for opting not to take the job to replace Flynn, who was asked to resign on Monday after a brief and turbulent tenure.He said that the Trump administration was “very accommodating to my needs, both professionally and personally”.
“It’s purely a personal issue,” Harward said. “I’m in a unique position finally after being in the military for 40 years to enjoy some personal time.”
Two sources familiar with the decision told Reuters that Harward turned down the job in part because he wanted to bring in his own team. That put him at odds with Trump, who had told Flynn’s deputy, KT McFarland, that she could stay.
During a freewheeling press conference on Thursday in which Trump claimed his administration was running like a “a fine-tuned machine”, the president implied that he was able to let Flynn go in part because he already had a replacement in mind.
“I have somebody that I think will be outstanding for the position – and that also helps, I think, in the making of my decision,” he said.
Harward, a retired three-star admiral with deep experience in Afghanistan and the Middle East, emerged from the same special-operations circles as Flynn.
Flynn was forced to step down over contacts with the Russian ambassador to Washington and his subsequent attempts to cover up the true nature of those contacts, which included misleading Vice-president Mike Pence.
Harward was under consideration for a senior White House position even before the national security adviser job came open, the Guardian has learned.
FacebookTwitterPinterest The downfall of Michael Flynn: a timelineInitially, Trump had discussed making Harward, who is close to defense secretary James Mattis, one of his five special assistants to the president, a job that offers substantial access to the Oval Office.
But when Flynn was forced to resign on Monday, the job discussions with Harward recentered on the national security adviser role.
Former officials who worked with Harward considered his amiable temperament, bureaucratic competence and lack of discernible ideology a notable contrast to Flynn.
Donald Trump's first 100 days as president – daily updates Read moreThey said an early test for Harward would have been restoring the primacy of the National Security Council (NSC), the traditional interagency forum for foreign and security policymaking. Under Flynn, the NSC had been challenged by competing bodies, particularly one helmed by Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and a white nationalist.
Harward is said to share Mattis’ view of Iran as a primary security threat, though with less ideological fervor: he spent much of his youth in pre-revolutionary Iran, where his father, also a navy officer, was stationed.
Colin Kahl, the former national security adviser to Joe Biden and before that a senior Pentagon official, called Harward a “hard-charging patriot” who would have stabilized a volatile White House.
One of the rumored replacements for Flynn is the former CIA director and retired four star general David Petraeus, a man far more amenable to the intelligence agencies than Flynn.
But Petraeus resigned as director of the CIA in 2012 and is still on probation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor violation of mishandling classified information, which he provided to his biographer – a woman he was having an affair with.
The other name floated is Keith Kellogg, the acting national security adviser.
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New Republican Bill Calls for Israeli-Style Spying on Social Media of All U.S. Visa Applicants
Freshman Republican Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana introduced legislation on February 16 requiring the Department of Homeland Security to monitor the social media activities of all visa applicants including their Facebook and Twitter accounts. The bill explicitly mandates DHS agents to interrogate children as young as 11 years old.
The legislation is titled the Visa Investigation and Social Media Act of 2017 and is the first bill submitted by the new congressman. The language, which was reviewed by AlterNet, states that no visa applicant will be admitted “unless a background check to determine whether or not the alien is a national security threat or is otherwise ineligible for such visa or admission is completed.”
According to the text of the bill, this background check should include “view of the alien’s publicly available interactions on and posting of material to the Internet (including social media services).” In a press statement, Banks specified that social media subject to such surveillance includes “public tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook photos and posts.”
However, the bill does not state the specific criteria for denying entry to visitors. The vague language underlining Banks' proposal leaves open the possibility that DHS could act based on its own arbitary judgments about social media postings. It also expands the Trump administration's currently frozen travel ban, which scrutinized foreign entrants based on their religion and national background, into the realm of political speech.
The ground rules laid out by Banks requires an in-person interview for visitors as young as 11 years old. For children 10 and younger, “The Secretary may waive such requirement,” the language states. However, it was not clear how an individual would go about attaining such a waiver, indicating that the default would be to interrogate everyone. Banks’ office did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.
The legislation goes on to impose the sweeping and prohibitive requirement that “No document submitted in support of a petition or application for a non-immigrant or immigrant visa may be accepted by a consular officer if such document contains information in a foreign language, unless such document is accompanied by a full English translation.”
Banks' bill outlines a procedure that is remarkably similar to the kind employed by Israel's Shin Bet general security services at Ben Gurion International Airport and other points of entry along Israeli-controlled frontiers. Foreign visitors, particulary those of Arab descent or suspected of pro-Palestinian sympathies, are routinely forced to provide agents with access to their social media and email accounts. In 2013, then-Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein confirmed the practice and admitted it was used to deny entry to visitors on explicitly political grounds.
Gary Spedding, a British activist with ties to grassroots Palestinian human rights groups like the Holy Land Trust, was denied entry to Israel in 2014 on the basis of his Facebook and Twitter posts. Israeli authorities provided no explanation beyond the vague suggestion that Spedding advocated online against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
Origins under Obama
Ryan Costello, a policy fellow at the National Iranian American Council, told AlterNet, “This is in line with the knee-jerk reaction that Trump has been pushing. This seems more in line with keeping people out by being overly burdensome. I’m certainly concerned about this being used to discriminate against individuals from Muslim-majority countries, and it’s in line with Trump’s proposals to do just that.”
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, senior counsel for the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told AlterNet that the bill, if passed, would chill speech in the United States as well. “This would have a self-censoring effect,” she said. “If you have a friend or family member who is coming to visit, or you want to collaborate with colleagues, you might think, If I interact with them, my social media will be scrutinized."
The proposed legislation has precedent in Obama-era policies. In the aftermath of the San Bernardino, California mass shooting, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress called for the intensified surveillance of social media accounts belonging to refugees and visa applicants. In response, DHS began expanding its powers to surveil this information, by unrolling a series of pilot programs, one of which “screens the social media accounts of applicants for the so-called fiancé visa,” according to the New York Times.
In December 2016, the U.S. government began requesting that travelers from countries on the visa waiver program provide their social media accounts, including Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. While the invitation to “enter information associated with your online presence” is billed as “optional,” critics warned that individuals may feel pressure to hand over personal information, or simply be confused by the already cumbersome process of entering the United States.
This Obama administration policy has another precedent in Israel, where security forces at Ben Gurion airport routinely monitor the online communications of travelers.
In a joint statement released in August 2016, after DHS first proposed the change, civil liberties groups warned that “The scale and scope of this program would lead to a significant expansion of intelligence activity.” They continued, “The risk of discrimination based on analysis of social media content and connections is great and will fall hardest on Arab and Muslim communities, whose usernames, posts, contacts, and social networks will be exposed to intense scrutiny.”
“Our concern at the time, was that it would quickly transform into something much broader,” Levinson-Waldman underscored. “We’re seeing that now.”
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesKrugman Floats a Far Scarier Possibility Than a Trump-Putin Axis
Rand Paul summed it up best when he explained: “We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans."
There it is in a nutshell. The hard-liners in the Republican Party are not going to let the little whiff of the possibility that Americans are being governed by a man taking his cues from Moscow get in the way of depriving millions of healthcare, demolishing the safety net and letting polluters pollute freely again.
Paul Krugman boils down the story so far in his Friday column:
A foreign dictator intervened on behalf of a U.S. presidential candidate — and that candidate won. Close associates of the new president were in contact with the dictator’s espionage officials during the campaign, and his national security adviser was forced out over improper calls to that country’s ambassador — but not until the press reported it; the president learned about his actions weeks earlier, but took no action.
Meanwhile, the president seems oddly solicitous of the dictator’s interests, and rumors swirl about his personal financial connections to the country in question. Is there anything to those rumors? Nobody knows, in part because the president refuses to release his tax returns.
Maybe it's all perfectly kosher, but an awful lot of reasonable and knowledgeable people think it merits a little looking into. One would think the uber-patriots in Congress, who endlessly investigated Hillary Clinton for the Benghazi raid might cock an eyebrow. But no, Ryan, Chaffetz, Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and company are all ready to move on for apparently the precise reason that Paul laid out. They've got other things to do.
There will likely not be an investigation into a scandal that has the potential to dwarf even Watergate. Watergate, as Krugman points out, "took place before Republicans began their long march to the political right, so Congress was far less polarized than it is now." Back in those seemingly quaint olden times, there was some actual agreement between the parties, certainly about holding a lawless president accountable.
"The polarization of the electorate also undermines Congress’s role as a check on the president: Most Republicans are in safe districts, where their main fear is of primary challengers to their right," Krugman continues. "And the Republican base has suddenly become remarkably pro-Russian. Funny how that works."
Krugman, like many others, wonders how this unprecedented crisis will end? How indeed a president who already lacks legitimacy can be allowed to send American troops to die, or be permitted to shape the Supreme Court for years to come. The depth of the rot goes beyond Putin. As in any horror movie, the villain is in the house with us. A few Republican legislators willing to demand the truth no matter where it leads is all that it would take, a seemingly small ask. Are there enough "people of conscience" in the modern GOP?
Krugman suspects not, concluding that this fact is even "scarier than the Trump-Putin axis."
Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesTrevor Noah Hilariously Nails Trump's Clear Fear of Easily Google-able Facts
Donald Trump's first solo press conference as President of the United States was a smack down for the ages. After lamenting over the "mess" he'd inherited, Trump continued his crusade against "fake news", which consisted of dodging questions while repeating his long held lies.
"Tomorrow they will say 'Donald Trump rants and raves at the press'," Trump predicted from the podium. "I'm not ranting and raving."
Having observed the President doing just that, Trevor Noah then likened Trump's total defensiveness to that of a drunken party host.
"I'm not drunk, you're all drunk... This my motherf*cking house," the "Daily Show" host opened after showing a clip of Trump's statement.
"Now, I can't, I can't play you the entire press conference, we only have 30 minutes and [Trump] spoke for, like, six days," Noah joked. "So, let's instead focus on some of the moments where Trump actually completed a thought, starting with the most important part of his presidency, how much he won."
"I put it out before the American people, got 306 Electoral College votes. I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan," Trump had said.
It was the quintessential Trump lie, repeated over and over; only to be easily debunked by a reporter in the room moments later.
"This is not true, in fact it's not even complicated," Noah exclaimed. "You don't even need numbers to understand this; all you need to know is the map with the two colors, that's all you need to know."
"Trump's been repeating this lie since Election Day," he noted. "And we've been waiting so long for him to get called out on it, and finally today it happened."
President Trump first thwarted criticism by insisting he'd only meant Republican presidents.
"George H.W. Bush [received] 426 when he won as president," the reporter retorted.
He then proceeded to ask Trump why Americans should trust him, given his penchant for falsehoods.
"I was just given that information," Trump said.. "I don't know... actually I've seen that information around."
Noah marveled.
"Oh, damn. I don't know who that reporter is, but he just shoved Trump's face in that like it was a pile of bullsh*t and he was training a bad dog," he remarked, before asking the big question, "How does Trump even think that's a valid excuse? 'That's the information I was given? That's the information?' You're the president."
"If you can't trust your president to get the right information on a Google-able fact, then can you really trust him with the harder stuff?" Noah asked, horrified. "Which, by the way, is everything else the President of the United States has to deal with."
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Click here for reuse options! Related StoriesColbert Demolishes Trump's Biggest Press Conference Lie
Donald Trump's first solo press conference as President of the United States was more like a stress conference. Being surrounded by journalists, or rather the "opposition party," appears to have triggered a meltdown of epic proportions.
"This was just him, by himself," "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert said Thursday night soon after. "Evidently, he didn't even bring his meds with him."
Thursday's press conference, which lasted well over an hour as Trump maniacally and mendaciously raved on and on, initially left Colbert speechless.
"Words fail me; how about CNN?" he asked, before showing a clip of White House correspondent Jake Tapper calling Trump's rant "unhinged."
"OK Jake, nice try," Colbert mused, mocking Trump's longterm feud with the network. "That's the lying, fake media. What did 'Friends' over at Fox News say?"
Trump's favorite network, as he noted in the press conference, wasn't crazy about his performance either. In fact, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith later slammed Trump for the spectacle and even defended CNN's Jim Acosta, a frequent target of Trump's.
"Your opposition was hacked and the Russians were responsible for it, and your people were on the phone with Russia on the same day it was happening, and we're fools for asking the questions?" Smith shot back during his program, demanding answers from Trump.
"You owe this to the American people... We have a right to know, we absolutely do, and that you call us fake news and put us down like children for asking these questions on behalf of the American people is inconsequential," Smith hammered.
Colbert couldn't help but marvel at Trump's talent for getting negative coverage, even from a network he'd just praised.
"With friends like that, who needs Fox and Friends?" he asked, referencing Trump's shoutout earlier that day.
Trump also claimed he had "inherited a mess" from the Obama administration. Colbert had a teeny tiny correction about that as well.
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