The self-contradicting shopping list of a speech that The Donald delivered to Congress Tuesday would normally be the subject of media analysis for weeks at least. But this one only deserves smackdowns and move-ons. You can’t trust the man’s “facts” and you can’t trust his promises. It’s not that Trump won’t do some of what he says he’ll do (or try to at least). It’s just that, given his penchant for shameless lying, no way can we know for sure which things he has vowed to do he really plans to carry out and which things are just crowd-distracting bullshit, bluster and misdirection, the tossing of verbal chaff to shine on both his base and substantial hunks of the media.
Under the circumstances, a veteran Congresswoman has a good reminder:
Brian Beutler at The New Republic writes—The Worst Performance of Trump’s Presidency Now Belongs to the Press Corps:
In accepting his party’s nomination to seek the vice presidency, Ryan delivered a speech riddled with easily checked falsehoods and exaggerations. At a moment when reporters were scrutinizing him more closely than ever before, finding questionable assertions and padded resume lines, Ryan needed to play his convention speech unusually straight. Instead, among other things, he blamed President Barack Obama for the shuttering of a GM plant in his district that shut down before Obama took office, and for the failure of a fiscal policy commission that Ryan personally sabotaged.
Obviously the damage Ryan did to himself with his most powerful fanbase wasn’t permanent. It didn’t even last very long. But at least the political press corps took notice, and said something.
President Donald Trump has discovered, perhaps unwittingly, how to hack the Ryan problem. Where Ryan has built himself up as an honest, poised man of substance, Trump not only has never pretended to these particular virtues, he has delighted in demonstrating their political uselessness.
Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times writes—Trump's call for human space exploration is hugely wasteful and pointless:
Space exploration aficionados experienced the thrill of anticipation in the hours before President Trump’s speech Tuesday night, with advance word that he was going to call for a return to the human exploration of space.
Sure enough, in his closing words Trump declared that for a country soon to celebrate its 250th anniversary, “American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream.”
Trump’s brief, offhand comment had the tone of an impulsive notion that, like so many of his other policy pronouncements, won’t get any follow-through. Let’s hope so, because the idea of sending humans to explore distant worlds is loopy, incredibly wasteful, and likely to cripple American science rather than inspire it. And that’s assuming that Trump’s notion doesn’t have the ulterior motivation of diverting American scientists from their Job One, which is to fight climate change right here at home.
From the Pew Research Center: Most violent and property crimes in the U.S. go unsolved:
Only about half of the violent crimes and a third of the property crimes that occur in the United States each year are reported to police. And most of the crimes that are reported don’t result in the arrest, charging and prosecution of a suspect, according to government statistics.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes—Do vigilantes see Trump giving them a wink and a nod?
Henry Rousso knows about monstrous and horrible: He’s a leading French scholar on the Vichy regime and its collaboration with Nazi Germany. And Rousso, an Egyptian-born Jew, said he was detained for more than 10 hours after arriving in America last month to give a lecture. “The United States is no longer quite the United States,” Rousso wrote in the French Huffington Post.
A lot of Americans feel the same way.
Civil liberties groups report a broad increase in harassment by border officials. The ACLU says there has been a spike in hours-long detentions, interrogation about religion and the like. Though such practices predate the Trump administration, ACLU staff attorney Hugh Handeyside said border agents are “pushing the envelope” lately because “word has spread” that an aggressive posture is welcome.
This apparently isn’t related to Trump’s travel ban, which has been blocked in court, or any other explicit instructions. Rather, it appears that border officers, feeling emboldened by Trump, are taking it on themselves to act more aggressively.
And where would they get such an idea? Well, perhaps from the president’s tweet saying “I have instructed Homeland Security to check people coming into our country VERY CAREFULLY.” Or White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s claim that Trump wants to “take the shackles off” deportation officials.
James Alan Fox at the Daily Record writes: Trump’s crime plan? Make America scared again
Were there a Doomsday Clock on criminal justice issues, President Trump and his much-discussed small hands would be pushing the dial’s big hand toward midnight. It is hard to single out just one misguided idea from his array of proposals. So here are five not-so-easy pieces of Trump’s flawed agenda on crime control that make a criminologist like me rather uneasy […
Throughout the campaign and into the early days of his administration, Donald Trump has repeatedly characterized the nation’s crime picture in much darker terms than fit reality. By cherry-picking his statistics and narrowly focusing on short-term blips in crime data, he insists that crime levels are out of control when the crime rate is just about as low as it has been for decades. Although homicides have rebounded in a handful of major cities (including Trump’s favorite reference to Chicago), the nation’s murder rate is half what it was a quarter century ago.
Of course, Trump’s sly strategy of making America scared again has paid off handsomely. Not only did it help win him the White House, but fear tends to make for a populace far more willing to surrender fundamental rights for the sake of security (as in the post 9-11 passage of the Patriot Act)
Leehi Yona at The Nation writes—How Do We Find Hope Under Trump? We must assert, each and every day, that we are not living in normal times.
How do we survive?
As the final hours of COP21 unfolded in December 2015, I witnessed my youth delegation – the single most talented, passionate group of people I have ever metZ—deteriorate to the point of implosion. As youth, we struggled to find ways to hold the US government accountable for the Paris Agreement—an incomplete, non-binding, wholly insufficient text.
Tensions rose as we took out our sense of helplessness on each other. I still remember my despair in that moment, feeling trapped in that hostel. I remember how the dimmed hallways reeked from our three sleepless weeks there.
Of all living generations, mine is the one upon which climate change will inflict the most suffering. We as young people do not have the luxury of quiescence. And so, I picked my heart up off the floor, held it red and beating in my hands. Finding hope became a responsibility to my future children, even though I did not know how or where to find it. It became even harder on November 8.
How do we find hope under a Trump administration? Breathing communities.
Community is the bedrock with every sunrise. Community holds us steady as we face destructive policies that grow exponentially by the day.
Linda Greenhouse at The New York Times writes—Outsourcing the Constitution:
So the Trump administration is putting the welcome mat back out for private prisons, just as candidate Donald Trump said he would do, reversing the Obama administration’s policy of phasing them out for federal prisoners. It’s no wonder that shares in some of the nation’s biggest for-profit prison companies soared by double digits the day after the presidential election, making them among the biggest winners in the immediate post-election rally. [...]
The Indiana prison system has policies in place to require coordination of care in the treatment of inmates with chronic medical conditions. Corizon, which has contracts in 27 states and is the country’s biggest provider of outsourced prison medical care, didn’t follow those policies. Exactly what went wrong will presumably now come out at trial, unless Corizon settles this case, Glisson v. Indiana Department of Corrections, as it did a case in California two years ago. The $8.3 million paid in the California case to a dead inmate’s family by Corizon and Alameda County was the biggest civil rights wrongful-death settlement in the state’s history.
I have two reasons for focusing on the Indiana case. The first is to show the recklessness of President Trump’s wave-of-the-hand decision to retain the private prisons that a Justice Department study last year concluded “do not maintain the same level of safety and security” as those operated by the Bureau of Prisons. Sally Q. Yates, the holdover deputy attorney general whom President Trump fired last month for refusing to defend his travel ban, relied on that conclusion in announcing that private prison contracts would not be renewed and that the 22,000 federal inmates housed in those prisons would be cut to 14,700 by May 2017 and eventually to zero.
Abby Rabinowitz at The New Republic writes—Can the World Beat Climate Change Without the U.S.?
For anyone with an interest in ensuring our planet remains livable, the news of late could not be more dire. Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, questions the right of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions! CPAC conservatives hold a panel on “fake climate news!” President Donald Trump’s proposed budget will axe “tens of billions of dollars” from the EPA’s budget! And in a pending executive order that will nix most Obama-era carbon regulations, the only thing that kept the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement off the list was reportedly the whim of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.
Meanwhile, in the Antarctic, a record-size crack is growing in the continent’s fourth-largest ice sheet. In California, people are enduring record floods, and in New York City, we’re wearing shorts in February. Fresh off of 2016, yet another hottest year on record, Americans are worrying about climate change in record numbers.
To tackle the problem, we need an immediate, massive globalized mobilization on the order of World War II. Instead, we’ve got Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,”begun dismantling environmental protections against dirty coal, and installed cabinet heads whose “meh” stance on climate science is a new form of denial. The timing of Trump’s election, just days after the Paris Climate Agreement entered into force, is both tragic and absurd. Trump, after all, campaigned on a promise to “cancel” the accord. It has prompted an urgent question: Over the next four to eight years, can the world meet its greenhouse gas–cutting goals without—or despite—the U.S. federal government?
This is a complex and speculative question. But it is one worth exploring, if only to avert apocalyptic levels of despair. Because even a brief exploration suggests that all is not lost—at least, not yet.
Jessa Crispin at The Baffler writes—When the Meek Inherit the Movement:
If you asked me today if I am a feminist, I would not only say no, I would say no with a sneer.
Don’t worry—this is not where I insist I am not a feminist because I am afraid of being mistaken for one of those hairy-legged, angry, man-hating feminists who are drawn up like bogeymen by men and women alike. Nor will I now reassure you of my approachability, my reasonable nature, my heteronormativity, my love of men, and my sexual availability—despite the fact that this disclaimer appears to be a prerequisite for all feminist writing published in the last fifteen years. [...]
Somewhere along the way toward female liberation, it was decided that the most effective method was for feminism to become universal. But instead of shaping a world and a philosophy that would become attractive to the masses, a world based on fairness and community and exchange, it was feminism itself that would have to be rebranded and remarketed for contemporary men and women.
They forgot that for something to be universally accepted, it must become as banal, as non-threatening and ineffective as possible. Hence the pose. People don’t like change, and so feminism must be as close to the status quo—with minor modifications—as it can be in order to recruit large numbers.
In other words: It has to become entirely pointless.
Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—Steve Bannon lifted his mask of death at CPAC. It wasn't a pretty sight:
Bannon clearly shares Trump’s burning sense of resentment at being excluded from the establishment. For his boss, that reached a peak with the humiliation of President Obama’s jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
For Bannon, now safely inside the West Wing, that means still seeing the world through the lens of the Breitbart website that shocked the media conscience with so much alt-right trash. At one point on Thursday, Bannon even used the phrase “we at Breitbart”, as if there were no real difference between his old job in digital far-right media and his new job as a presidential adviser.
Bannon predicted the media would fight “every day” against the Trump agenda, and that the fight would not ease off, as Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, had just suggested. “It’s going to get worse,” he intoned. [...]
Bannon also described Trump as “the greatest public speaker … since William Jennings Bryan”. After four years of this kind of bluster, American history may never be the same again. Never mind that Bryan was a Democrat and a pacifist; he was also known as a great orator who preferred silver to gold. Then again, this is a White House that appears to think the career of Frederick Douglass has some ways to go.
Trevor Timm at The Guardian writes—Why Paul Ryan is just Donald Trump in better wrapping:
Nearly all the oxygen and outrage in DC is being sucked up by Donald Trump and his outrageous executive orders. But let’s not forget about the man without whom Trump could not accomplish his larger agenda: the spineless speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, Trump’s mainstream defender and apologist at every turn.
Ryan, who has cultivated a sham image as the “reasonable” Republican for years, has backed virtually all of Trump’s most controversial and cruel policies. Ryan manages to never buck Trump on anything of significance, while getting publicity for meaningless, quasi-critical statements. He is the biggest fraud in American politics.
That much was clear yet again over the weekend, as the New York Times’ Jim Rotenberg reported that Ryan’s office “declined to engage” with him on any questions about Trump’s despicable war on the press, which even Republicans who haven’t dared to break with Trump on much of anything decried as a move befitting a dictator. Instead, Rotenberg wrote, Ryan’s office said it “disputed the premise of the question”.
It’s just one in a long line of cowardly and slimy moves by Ryan, who is really just Trump in a more aesthetically appealing wrapper.
Gail Collins at The New York Times writes—The Three Donald Trumps Speak:
Dear Advice Lady [...]:
[Can’t Stand Trump]: The stock market is booming after that speech! Just because they didn’t have to haul him off in a straitjacket! There’s such a thing as setting the bar too low.
A.L.: The key to understanding our president is to realize there are three versions. Unscripted Trump is the one who obsesses about crowd size and expresses complete astonishment that constructing a national health care plan is hard. That’s the one we worry will start a nuclear war.
C.S.T.: So the Dow went up 300 points because Unscripted didn’t show up to address Congress?
A.L.: Yep. The second version is Reasonable Chatting Trump. R.C.T. is the one who had pre-speech gatherings with journalists in which he mused about passing immigration law reform and making the Dreamers legal. Everyone was very excited until it became clear this had no relation to anything he was actually planning to say in public. [...]