Until last week, Joel Clement was director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the Department of Interior. He is now a senior adviser at the department’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue. At The Washington Post, he writes—I’m a scientist. I’m blowing the whistle on the Trump administration:
I am a scientist, a policy expert, a civil servant and a worried citizen. Reluctantly, as of today, I am also a whistleblower on an administration that chooses silence over science.
Nearly seven years ago, I came to work for the Interior Department, where, among other things, I’ve helped endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate. But on June 15, I was one of about 50 senior department employees who received letters informing us of involuntary reassignments. [...]
A few days after my reassignment, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke testified before Congress that the department would use reassignments as part of its effort to eliminate employees; the only reasonable inference from that testimony is that he expects people to quit in response to undesirable transfers. [...]
I believe I was retaliated against for speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities. During the months preceding my reassignment, I raised the issue with White House officials, senior Interior officials and the international community, most recently at a U.N. conference in June. It is clear to me that the administration was so uncomfortable with this work, and my disclosures, that I was reassigned with the intent to coerce me into leaving the federal government.
We must not look at the shooting death of a white woman by a black male police officer (both who seem to have been immigrants) and think to ourselves that somehow this tragedy is worse than the thousands of police shootings the nation has had to confront since Eric Garner was killed three years ago this week and Michael Brown was killed three years ago next month.
Police killings are not unusual in the US. They happen almost every day – on average about three times a day. Instances of people calling 911 to ask for help, only to have the cops show up and shoot them instead, are also not unusual. Just ask Charleena Lyles. (Actually, you can’t ... because police shot the pregnant woman dead when she called for help.)
And so the shooting death of Justine Damond is a tragedy, but it’s not more or less important than any of the other tragedies – even though it may evoke global sympathy in a way the killings of Jamar Clark and Philando Castile by police in Minneapolis did not.
It would be easy for the narrative to become “Wow, even a white woman can’t approach a police car without getting shot”, but nobody should be killed by police in this manner. We should seize this moment to rethink the assumed ubiquity of police violence in our society.
At The New Republic, Bryce Covert writes—Back to Work How Democrats can win over Americans left behind in the new economy:
If Democrats want to win elections, they should imbue Trump’s empty rhetoric with a real promise: a good job for every American who wants one. It’s time to make a federal jobs guarantee the central tenet of the party’s platform. This is the type of simple, straightforward plan that Democrats need in order to connect with Americans who struggle to survive in the twenty-first-century economy. And while a big, New Deal–style government program might seem like a nonstarter in this day and age—just look at the continuing battle over the Affordable Care Act—a jobs guarantee isn’t actually so far-fetched.[...]
A jobs guarantee isn’t new to the Democratic Party. Huey Long wanted one, Franklin Roosevelt called for one, and George McGovern proposed one when he ran for president in 1972. The promise to push the economy into full employment was a fundamental Democratic theme for decades. But when McGovern lost to Richard Nixon in a landslide, the newly ascendant neoliberal wing of the party blamed McGovern’s populism for his defeat. They turned the party toward the center—supposedly the only way to win elections—and mostly left it to the private sector to keep Americans gainfully employed.
Now, in the wake of Trump’s populism-fueled victory, Democrats may be ready to circle back to the idea of a jobs guarantee.
Eric Levitz at New York magazine’s “Daily Intelligencer” writes—Donald Trump Is a Victim of Congressional Republicans’ Incompetence:
Donald Trump has spent the bulk of his time in office livetweeting cable news, playing golf, and flirting with constitutional crises. During that time, he’s displayed an understanding of legislative procedure on par with the average fifth-grader’s command of quantum mechanics, and all the tact and message discipline of a stone drunk Archie Bunker.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party’s legislative agenda has gone nowhere. After seven years of promising to repeal Obamacare, and half a year of trying to, the GOP’s health-care bill was taken off life support this week — a loss that has discredited the party’s congressional leadership, and sown division in its ranks.
Many Republicans suspect there might be a connection between the president’s gross incompetence, and his party’s legislative woes. And they’re right about that — but only because a more competent president would have put less faith in Paul Ryan’s policy judgment.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times concludes—Avoiding War With Iran:
The last thing the United States needs is another war in the Middle East. Yet a drumbeat of provocative words, outright threats and actions — from President Trump and some of his top aides as well as Sunni Arab leaders and American activists — is raising tensions that could lead to armed conflict with Iran.
Tehran invites some of this hostility with moves like detaining Xiyue Wang, a Princeton scholar, and supporting the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. And for many American politicians, Iran — estranged from the United States since 1979 — deserves only punishment and isolation. But Iran and the United States also share some interests, like fighting the Islamic State. So why not take advantage of all the diplomatic tools, including opening a dialogue, used before to manage difficult and even hostile governments? [...]
Iran’s government continues to be torn between anti-American hard-liners and moderates like President Hassan Rouhani who are willing to engage with America. Mr. Trump would make a grave mistake if instead of trying to work with those moderate forces he led the nation closer to war.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Why Obamacare won and Trump lost:
The collapse of the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act is a monumental political defeat wrought by a party and a president that never took health-care policy or the need to bring coverage to millions of Americans seriously. But their bungling also demonstrates that the intense attention to Obamacare over the past six months has fundamentally altered our nation’s health-care debate.
Supporters of the 2010 law cannot rest easy as long as the current Congress remains in office and as long as Donald Trump occupies the White House. On Wednesday, the president demanded that the Senate keep at the work of repeal, and, in any event, Congress could undermine the act through sharp Medicaid cuts in the budget process and other measures. And Trump, placing his own self-esteem and political standing over the health and security of millions of Americans, has threatened to wreck the system. [...]
As long as “repeal Obamacare” was simply a slogan, what the law actually did was largely obscured behind attitudes toward the former president. But the Affordable Care Act’s core provisions were always broadly popular, particularly its protections for Americans with preexisting conditions and the big increase in the number of insured it achieved. The prospect of losing these benefits moved many of the previously indifferent to resist its repeal. And the name doesn’t matter so much with Obama out of office.
Ronald A. Klein at The Washington Post writes—The one area where Trump has been wildly successful:
For while President Trump is incompetent at countless aspects of his job, he is proving wildly successful in one respect: naming youthful conservative nominees to the federal bench in record-setting numbers.
Trump’s predecessors all slowly ramped up their judicial nominations during their first six months in office. Ronald Reagan named Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court and made five lower-court nominations in that period; George H.W. Bush made four lower-court nominations; Bill Clinton named Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the high court but no lower-court judges; and George W. Bush named four lower-court judges who were processed by the Senate (plus more than a dozen others sent back to him and later renominated). The most successful early actor, Barack Obama, named Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and nine lower-court judges who were confirmed.
What about Trump? He not only put Neil M. Gorsuch in the Supreme Court vacancy created by Merrick Garland’s blocked confirmation, but he also selected 27 lower-court judges as of mid-July. Twenty-seven! That’s three times Obama’s total and more than double the totals of Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton — combined. For the Courts of Appeals — the final authority for 95 percent of federal cases — no president before Trump named more than three judges whose nominations were processed in his first six months; Trump has named nine. Trump is on pace to more than double the number of federal judges nominated by any president in his first year.
At The Guardian, Russ Feingold writes—America steals votes from felons. Until it stops, our democracy will be weakened:
Proponents of felony disenfranchisement argue that as a felon or former felon, an individual has shown a disregard for the law, and therefore must demonstrate respect for the law before being able to vote on issues related to law. Yet felony disenfranchisement did not originate, nor is it being maintained, out of any high reverence for the law: quite the opposite.
It was invented after slavery, when white elites sought to diminish the power of newly freed slaves. White politicians tied disenfranchisement only to those crimes believed to be disproportionately committed by black people. The sole objective was to prevent black citizens from threatening the power of the white elite – an act fundamentally at odds with the very purpose of voting rights.
The discriminatory intent and impact of felony disenfranchisement is alive and well today. Those affected by disenfranchisement are disproportionately minorities and low-income citizens, voting groups that trend Democratic.
At The Guardian, Francine Prose writes—Nothing about the Trump presidency is normal. Keep remembering that:
Claiming that a female MSNBC commentator was “bleeding badly from a facelift” isn’t normal either. Nor is having one’s presidential campaign investigated for colluding with the Russians to sabotage democracy. And it is certainly not normal for the press to publish a list of verifiable lies – almost one daily – told by our highest official since assuming office.
Few of Trump’s detractors – or supporters – would argue that this is what was once considered normal. But one of the best and worst things about our species is how rapidly we adapt, how readily we learn to survive under changed conditions.
Most – if not all – of us have, despite everything, gone on with our lives. And inevitably, an updated version of normality has evolved, a “new normal” in which every day brings a barrage of bizarreness: the latest tweets, scandals, displays of bad manners, rumors of White House feuds and revelations about the Russians.
In six months, we have learned to function in perpetual states of distraction, checking our devices for today’s startling tweet or leak. I have yet to hear anyone say they feel more energetic, optimistic or secure since November.
Susan J. Douglas at In These Times writes—Why Toxic Masculinity Hurts Men as Well as Women:
Toxic Masculinity. Google the term—which refers to a version of manhood predicated on stoicism, domination of others, sexual aggressiveness, violence and misogyny—and more than 500,000 hits pop up. The concept has been gaining currency in the past year or so, what with our pussy-grabbing predator-in-chief installed in the White House, Bill Cosby eluding justice for serial sexual assault, cops getting away with murdering unarmed boys and men of color, chronic mass shootings by disturbed men with guns, a congressional candidate coldcocking a journalist and still getting elected, and a rogue, callous Congress seeking to further strip women, children, the poor and the elderly of whatever remaining control they might have over their health. In February there was yet another lethal fraternity hazing, when Timothy Piazza at Penn State was urged to overdose on alcohol and sustained fatal injuries after a fall because his “brothers” refused to call an ambulance. Virulent trolling of women, especially feminists, is now an accepted part of modern life. No surprise, then, that articles in Slate, Forbes, The Atlantic and Playboy, and features on ABC News and Fox News, to name a few, have noted the phenomenon.
While feminists are especially concerned about it, toxic masculinity was not a term we coined. It initially emerged out of the men’s movements of the 1980s and 1990s to refer to what they saw as a narrow, socially constructed version of manhood that compelled men to deny their true feelings and to compete with each other rather than bond.
But the concept also came to be used in social and clinical psychology to analyze how this extreme version of masculinity not only hurts others—especially women, children and gay men—but also how it hurts “toxically masculine” men themselves. Various studies have shown a link between men who embrace and act on toxic masculinity’s behavioral codes and a range of problems, from fraught relationships to depression, alcoholism, rage disorders, assault and other criminal behavior, and suicide. A 2016 Indiana University survey of 78 research projects involving nearly 20,000 participants found that men who embodied stereotypically macho behaviors were much less likely to seek help for such problems and had poorer overall mental health.
Scott Martelle at the Los Angeles Times writes—Trump's rendezvous with Putin could not look worse. Is he trying to be a political failure?
Seasoned political figures would immediately have seen how such a one-off meeting with Putin witnessed only by a Russian translator would play out in the perceptions of a public already wondering how much the Russians sought to meddle in the election, wary of coziness between the Russians and Trump’s inner circle, and suspecting that Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns is an effort to hide evidence of Russian business connections.
Trump and his handlers, though, failed to see the minefield they laid for themselves. Trump at the least should have been warned away from a meeting without his own translator to serve, if nothing else, as a witness to what was said. By treating Putin’s presence at the table like that of just another guest at one of his country clubs, somebody to be dropped in on and glad-handed, and not disclosing the talk, was an unforced error. [...]
And whatever spin the White House now embraces has little credibility, which is Trump’s largest self-inflicted problem.
Trump’s mendacity knows no bounds, and his serial lies make it impossible to put much faith in any pronouncements from Trump or his surrogates — including on such basic elements as how long the Trump-Putin meeting lasted.