Trump Administration

Why Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III Is Unfit To Be Attorney General

April 24, 2017 Bill Blum, www.truthdig.com Educate! Attorney General, Trump Administration

By Bill Blum for Truth Dig - Judge Watson clearly had the authority to render his decision. After all, the principle of judicial review—the power of the courts to declare acts of Congress and the executive branch unconstitutional—has been a bedrock tenet of American constitutional law since Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803. I don’t fault Sessions for expressing his disappointment with the substance of Watson’s ruling. Lawyers and judges routinely disagree on matters of constitutional interpretation. All things being equal, I’d even give him a pass for apparently forgetting that Hawaii is a state, albeit one consisting of several islands. But things are rarely, if ever, equal when it comes to Sessions, especially when race, ethnicity or issues of minority rights enter the picture. Would Sessions have been equally dismissive if Judge Watson were white, or if the judge’s order had not benefitted Muslims, who comprise a statistically small but increasingly scapegoated religious community in the U.S.? Compare Sessions’ comments about Watson with the jubilation he expressed last June when the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 in the case of United States v. Texas regarding the Obama administration’s deferred deportation program for the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens (DAPA)...

The Unprecedented Danger Of Prosecuting Julian Assange

April 22, 2017 Kate Knibbs, www.theringer.com Educate! Julian Assange, Trump Administration

By Kate Knibbs for The Ringer - The U.S. is planning to seek criminal charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to a CNN report citing anonymous U.S. officials on Thursday. If this occurs, it will represent a radical change in how the government treats dissident speech, one that will endanger the media and empower the Trump administration to silence critics. Trump’s not the first president to loathe the press. Richard Nixon had a good run as media-despiser-in-chief, although he often came up on the losing end of challenges to the Fourth Estate, most notably in 1971, when the Supreme Court ruled on the legality of publishing the Pentagon Papers. The court allowed The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish classified documents about the Vietnam War, which had been leaked by a government whistle-blower, without the threat of prosecution. The Obama administration was notoriously aggressive in investigating leakers, and more successful than Nixon at punishing them. It pursued government whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and obtained a ruling to require journalists to testify about confidential sources during criminal cases.

Trump’s CIA Targets Wikileaks

April 18, 2017 Glenn Greenwald, www.theintercept.com Educate! CIA, Freedom of Press, Freedom of Speech, Trump Administration, Wikileaks

By Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept - IN FEBRUARY, after Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S. media were the “enemy of the people,” the targets of his insult exploded with indignation, devoting wall-to-wall media coverage to what they depicted as a grave assault on press freedoms more befitting of a tyranny. By stark and disturbing contrast, the media reaction yesterday was far more muted, even welcoming, when Trump’s CIA Director, Michael Pompeo, actually and explicitly vowed to target freedoms of speech and press in a blistering, threatening speech hedelivered to the D.C. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. What made Pompeo’s overt threats of repression so palatable to many was that they were not directed at CNN, the New York Times or other beloved-in-D.C. outlets, but rather at WikiLeaks, more marginalized publishers of information, and various leakers and whistleblowers, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Trump’s CIA Director stood up in public and explicitly threatened to target free speech rights and press freedoms...

Trump Administration Lost Again, This Time On Voter ID

April 17, 2017 Jessica Huseman, www.propublica.org Educate! Trump Administration, Voting

By Jessica Huseman for Pro Publica - A federal judge ruled that Texas’ voter ID was intended to discriminate against blacks and Latinos. The Department of Justice tried to argue otherwise. A federal court in Texas has again ruled the state’s 2011 voter identification law intentionally discriminated against minorities. It’s the latest loss in the case for Texas — which has spent years unsuccessfully defending the law. But it also has implications for the Trump administration. In February, the new administration abruptly abandoned the crux of the Justice Department’s opposition to the voter ID law. Government lawyers also asked the judge to delay her decision on whether the law intentionally discriminated against blacks and Latinos. Judge Nelva Ramos Gonzales rejected their request for a delay. And Monday, she ruled that the law “was passed, at least in part, with a discriminatory intent in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” When it passed in 2011, Texas’s law had the country’s strictest voter ID provisions. It required one of seven forms of Texas or federally issued IDs to vote and allowed exemptions only for disability or age. It allowed no exception for low income voters.

Good Thing People Saved Climate Research; It’s Being Removed

April 17, 2017 Kim Brown, www.therealnews.com Educate! Climate Change, Trump Administration

By Kim Brown for The Real News Network - Welcome to The Real News Network in Baltimore. I'm Kim Brown. Science, particularly climate change science, is under attack in the United States. As government rolls back regulations to protect our health and environment, they are also removing scientific data from public government websites. In response scientists are mounting a protest in Washington, D.C., on Earth Day, which this year falls on April 22nd, and our next guest says that her own citations have been removed by the Trump administration. Joining us today from New York City is Victoria Herrmann. She is the President and Managing Director of the Arctic Institute, where her research focuses on the intersection of both climate change adaptation and human development. She's also a National Geographic explorer; she's also a Gates Scholar at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University. Joining us today from New York, Victoria, thank you so much for being here.

Who Benefits From Regulation Rollback?

April 17, 2017 Heidi Shierholz and Celine McNicholas, www.epi.org Educate! Deregulation, Trump Administration

By Heidi Shierholz and Celine McNicholas for EPI - Research on the relationship between employment and regulations generally find thatregulations have a modestly positive or neutral effect on employment. How could regulations create jobs? Though regulations sometimes reduce jobs in one area, they create jobs in another. For example, factories making lead paint shut down after regulations banning lead paint were issued in the late 1970s, but enterprises manufacturing lead-free alternatives arose in their place. And some of the older factories hired people to retool their machinery to begin manufacturing lead-free paint. Mass layoffs are not caused by regulations. “Mass layoff events” are incidents in which at least 50 unemployment insurance claims are filed against an employer during a 5-week period. According to the latest data available (2011 and 2012), employers cite regulations as the reason for mass layoffs in just a tiny share of mass layoff events—one-quarter of one percent.

Twitter Is Suing The Trump Administration

April 15, 2017 Staff, www.happy-foxie.com Resist! Lawsuit, Trump Administration, Twitter

By Staff of Happy Foxie - The account is just one of the many “alternative” Twitter accounts that surfaced after Trump took office and began silencing certain agencies’ social media pages. (The National Park Service may come to mind.) In their lawsuit, Twitter claims that the government sent them a summons in March demanding they reveal the identity of the Alt Immigration account’s owners. They argue that compliance would violate the First Amendment. This could threaten other users’ ability to be critical of the Trump administration anonymously. It further argues that if the government is successful on this summons, it could threaten other users’ ability to be critical of the Trump administration anonymously. While the lawsuit is a massive step, it’s not Twitter’s first against the government. In 2014, Twitter sued the Obama administration over restrictions they imposed on posts about surveillance requests.

6 Ways Trump Administration And Congress Have Threatened Women’s Health In Just A Few Months

April 14, 2017 Miriam Berg, www.plannedparenthoodaction.org Educate! Congress, health, Trump Administration, Women

By Miriam Berg for Planned Parenthood - Since Ronald Reagan was in office, a harmful policy known as the global gag rule has been taken off the books by every Democratic president and put back on by every Republican president. It bans foreign NGOs that receive certain kinds of American aid from counseling on, referring for, or even advocating for abortion. It’s a policy that hurts the world’s most vulnerable women – and stifles free speech. In one of his first executive actions in office and surrounded by smiling white men, President Trump instated an even worse version of this already dangerous rule. His action will be catastrophic for communities around the world that rely on U.S. funding to fight against Zika and to provide HIV/AIDS and maternal health care. This expanded version of the global gag rule threatens to undermine and reverse progress that family planning has made in lowering maternal mortality rates and preventing unsafe abortion worldwide. In fact, it could endanger the lives of millions of women and girls, and their babies.

It’s Not Just Syria. Trump Is Ratcheting Up Wars Across The World

April 13, 2017 Trevor Timm, www.theguardian.com Educate! Donald Trump, Syria, Trump Administration, Wars and Militarism

By Trevor Timm for The Guardian - Donald Trump’s missile strikes on Syria have attracted worldwide attention (and disgraceful plaudits) in recent days. But much less airtime is being given to his administration’s risky and increasingly barbaric military escalations on several other fronts across the world. Let’s put aside, for the time being, that the Trump administration openly admits it has no clue what it is going to do in Syria next. Or that key members of Congress and in the administration are clearly eager for “regime change” in Syria with no plan for the aftermath. And the fact that hardly anyone seems to care that Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev said over the weekend that Syrian strikes put the US “on the verge of a military clash with Russia”...

Only One Of 47 Major Editorials On Syria Strikes Opposed

April 12, 2017 Adam Johnson, www.fair.org Educate! Airstrikes, Syria, Trump Administration

By Adam Johnson for FAIR - Of the top 100 US newspapers, 47 ran editorials on President Donald Trump’s Syria airstrikes last week: 39 in favor, seven ambiguous and only one opposed to the military attack. In other words, 83 percent of editorials on the Syria attack supported Trump’s bombing, 15 percent took an ambivalent position and 2 percent said the attack shouldn’t have happened. Polls showed the US public being much more split: Gallup (4/7–8/17) and ABC/Washington Post (4/7–9/17) each had 51 percent supporting the airstrikes and 40 percent opposed, while CBS (4/7–9/17) found 57 percent in favor and 36 percent opposed. A list of the editorials with quotes showing support or opposition can be seen here.

Energy Dept. Scrubs Paris Agreement From Climate Page

April 11, 2017 Brian Kahn, www.climatecentral.org Educate! Climate Change, Trump Administration

By Brian Kahn for Climate Central - The expunging of climate information from government websites under President Trump continues to march forward with the latest changes happening to the Energy Department. The agency’s climate change page once prominently featured a video about the Paris Agreement along with extra links to climate information. Now it’s a little more barren. While the main text has remained, the Paris Agreement video is gone, replaced by a stock photo of the earth on a patch of grass. The caption for the video, which linked to the Energy Department’s report from the 2015 climate talks and a page on how to solve climate change, has also disappeared, though those pages remain accessible.

Trump’s Missile Strike On Syria Changes Everything

April 11, 2017 John Wight, www.sputniknews.com Educate! Airstrikes, Syria, Trump Administration

By John Wight for Sputnik News - Two competing narratives on the same event and therefore grounds for an independent UN-led investigation in order to ascertain which one is accurate and which is false. Russia has called for such an investigation, as have the Iranians, yet in Washington those calls have been contemptuously dismissed, swept aside in service to a rush to judgement and, with it, a hail of tomahawk missiles. It is a rush to judgement that invites the question: what are the Americans afraid of? Is this a repeat of the UN investigation into whether Saddam possessed WMD back in 2003, when Hans Blix and his investigation team were precipitately withdrawn from Iraq at the point at which it had become obvious they were about to confirm that Iraq did not have any WMD...

Democrats, Neoconservatives Support Strikes In Syria

April 10, 2017 Kevin Gosztola, www.shadowproof.com Educate! Airstrikes, Syria, Trump Administration

By Kevin Gosztola for Shadow Proof - Amidst growing calls for greater military action in Syria in response to an alleged chemical attack, the United States military launched more than fifty Tomahawk missiles at the al-Shayrat airfield near Homs. Democrats along with neoconservatives, who long pushed for U.S. military forces to topple President Bashar al Assad’s regime, advocated for military force in response to alleged chemical attack. Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton called for strikes on airfields in Syria. “Assad had an air force and that air force is the cause of most of the civilian deaths as we’ve seen over the years and as we saw again in the last few days.” “I really believe we should have and still should take out his airfields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them,” Clinton added.

Has Trump Launched Next Mid-East Disaster With Syria Attack?

April 8, 2017 Jefferson Morley, www.alternet.org Resist! Donald Trump, Middle East, Syria, Trump Administration

By Jefferson Morley for AlterNet - It was that rarest of occasions when Barack Obama and Donald Trump were thinking very much alike. In September 2013, President Obama was besieged by demands to attack Syria over a ghastly chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta that killed 1,500 people. Obama's logic tracked with Trump’s. There was no upside to attacking Syria, only a tremendous downside. Obama reached that conclusion by careful study of his options. Trump reached that conclusion by the seat of his pants. Today President Trump faces much the same predicament as his predecessor, and has already ordered an initial military strike, launching 59 tomahawk missiles at a Syrian Government airbase.

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