It’s no secret that America’s star is fading on the world stage these days, under a president whose authoritarian tactics have outraged allies and enemies alike. But a recent audit by an international human-rights monitor reveals that, even before Trump’s buffoonery took over the White House, Washington was failing dramatically to live up to its reputation as a beacon of democracy. UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly Maina Kiai’sdissectionof the nation’s systematic betrayal of basic human rights centers on America’s shrinking public square.
Based on a year-long observation of the country’s governance and civic life that stretches from mid-2016 through the start of the Trump administration, Kiai, whose post recently ended with the publication of the report, sees a massive erosion of the right to freedom of assembly. The concept encompasses the right to organize and protest and other essential forms of civic and public activism. Though it is formally inscribed in the Bill of Rights, the precept has come under assault under the Trump administration, Kiai says, stoked by the president’s “hateful and xenophobic rhetoric during the presidential campaign” and blatant flouting of civil liberties in his policies and governing style.
Kiai concludes that over the past year a growing swath of communities of color, workers and immigrants, and other marginalized groups have felt deterred from engaging in social movements, staging protests and other forms of citizen action, or campaigning to defend community and workplace rights.
One overarching obstacle is the ingrained culture of racism, which has persisted since slavery through Jim Crow and the ongoing struggles with institutionalized discrimination. Citing police-community conflict as a primary illustration of structural oppression, Kiai argues, “Racism and the exclusion, persecution and marginalization that come with it affect the environment for exercising association and assembly rights.” [...]
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." ~Harry Truman, special address to Congress on internal U.S. security, August 1950
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—MA-Sen: Republicans humiliated once again:
Jim Ogonowski in Massachusetts was one of the top NRSC recruits for this cycle. An Air Force veteran and brother of one of the pilots who died in the 9/11 tragedy, Ogonowski lost a surprisingly close election for the U.S. House in 2007 to Democrat Niki Tsongas.
Ogonowski's six-point loss to Tsongas, whose husband was the beloved former Congressman and Senator Paul Tsongas, led the NRSC to believe that Ogonowski might just be the man to take down another Massachusetts institution, 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry.
Now, defeating 24-year incumbents who were very nearly elected President of the United States on their overwhelmingly Democratic home turf is never easy. But so feeble is the Republican condition these days that Ogonowski was heralded as a recruiting heist.
Ontoday’sKagro in the Morningshow: Trump thinks he’s found a new FBI chief.Greg Dworkingives us the chaos report. Yard signs vindicated at last! Eric Trump’s good thing turns to s#*t as soon as dad touches it.Joan McCarterhas one eye on Trumpcare. New scandal breaks, no one notices.
The Trump era has seen a rapid rise in the number of white nationalists eager to move beyond rhetoric to more concrete, targeted acts against their perceived enemies. The founder of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer is one of them; he organized a "troll storm" against a Jewish real estate agent in Montana who ran afoul of omnipresent white nationalist jackass Richard Spencer, posting her address, phone number, and other personal information and encouraging his neo-Nazi supporters to do what they will with that information.
The resulting harassment was severe enough that the Southern Poverty Law Center stepped in to help her file suit against the little Nazi prick, who is currently hiding out from their process server—but dodging process servers isn't stopping Andrew Anglin from raising a tidy sum from his neo-Nazi base for his (alleged) legal defense. He's raised $150,000 from his fans, which is, you know, pretty impressive considering that's going to be cutting into their tattoo and German memorabilia spendin' money.
Most of the Daily Stormer’s donors on WeSearchr are anonymous, with the exception of the comedian Sam Hyde, who pledged $5,000.
When contacted for comment, Hyde asked the reporter if he was Jewish and then boasted that $5,000 was nothing to him. [...]
“Don’t worry so much about money. Worry about if people start deciding to kill reporters. That’s a quote,” Hyde said in a phone interview [...]
Oh right, that guy. He's an alt-right "comedian" troll who briefly bootstrapped a career of petty pranks and "edgy" offensiveness into a 4chan-ish "comedy" show for Adult Swim. Well have no fear, neo-Nazi efforts to harass random Jewish Americans, Biff Whatshisface from that one thing has your back.
In any event, this is wonderful news. The SPLC is taking on racist ‘net-goblins and holding them responsible for their culture of harassment and intimidation; a prime advocate of that behavior is valiantly standing up for his right to be an asshole while simultaneously fleeing from the paperwork that would oblige him to defend that argument in our courts; a large collection of America's worst and dumbest people have been separated from their money and won’t even have a bin of survival seeds to show for it. And here we thought there was no good news anymore.
When it comes to big cases—major, career-propelling, history-making cases—nothing holds more of a draw than representing the president of the United States. It's an opportunity that under any other circumstances, attorneys would be exchanging Monte Negro shoves with one another to get to the front of the line.
But this circumstance, in particular, requires that you represent Donald Trump. And apparently no amount of money or fame is worth taking on that burden. Mike Isikoff of Yahoo News writes:
Top lawyers with at least four major law firms rebuffed White House overtures to represent President Trump in the Russia investigations, in part over concerns that the president would be unwilling to listen to their advice, according to five sources familiar with discussions about the matter.
The unwillingness of some of the country’s most prestigious attorneys and their law firms to represent Trump has complicated the administration’s efforts to mount a coherent defense strategy to deal with probes being conducted by four congressional committees as well as Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller. [...]
Among them, sources said, were some of the most high-profile names in the legal profession, including Brendan Sullivan of Williams & Connolly; Ted Olson of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Paul Clement and Mark Filip of Kirkland & Ellis; and Robert Giuffra of Sullivan & Cromwell.
Oh man, it's a desperate day in Washington when Paul Clement turns down an opportunity to represent some dodgy conservative enterprise.
They all have great excuses though—scheduling, upcoming trials, conflicts of interest, critical dental work, their childrens’ pee-wee sporting events, hair transplants, chewing glass, notes from their moms.
Meanwhile, outside the White House, special counsel Robert Mueller isn't having any trouble. Attorneys are practically throwing themselves at the opportunity to investigate this train wreck of an administration.
The Nevada state legislature has been working in fits and starts toward an innovative healthcare reform effort, and finally reached the milestone of passing it. The idea seems obvious in its simplicity—the option for everyone to buy in to Medicaid. Medicaid would become the public option on the state's health insurance exchange, if Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval signs the bill into law.
Nevada’s bill to allow a broader Medicaid buy-in is short, running just four pages. It would allow any state resident who lacks health insurance coverage to buy into the state Medicaid program, which would sell under the name the Nevada Care Plan.
“There is no way people can be productive members of society and take care of their families if health care is a privilege and not a right,” says state Assembly member Michael Sprinkle, who introduced the measure. “That’s really where this bill started, thinking through, how do we make health care a right in our state.”
Under his bill, people who qualify for tax credits under the Affordable Care Act would be able to use those credits to buy Medicaid coverage instead. People who don’t qualify for anything would be able to use their own money to do the same. The plan would likely sell on Nevada’s health insurance marketplace, making it a public option to compete against the private health insurance plans also selling there.
The buy-in coverage would be pretty much identical to the coverage traditional Medicaid provides, although it would not cover emergency medical transportation (a benefit of the program tailored to the low-income population it traditionally serves).
Things like premium levels or deductibles and copayments haven't been determined, expected to be hashed out with the governor's office and an existing legislative working group should Sandoval decide to approve the plan. It would also require a waiver from the Trump administration, and that's a big unknown. But the administration and congressional Republicans have continued to insist that what they're doing to Medicaid is to change it to provide more state "flexibility," so this plan would kind of force them to show whether they really care about state flexibility or that's just an excuse to gut the program financially.
From overhauling the tax code to releasing an infrastructure package to making decisions on Nafta and the Paris climate agreement, Trump has a common refrain: A big announcement is coming in just “two weeks.” It rarely does.
"Two weeks" is just one of Trump's reflexive lies. When you ask him about some subject he is all but illiterate on, he will respond that nobody cares about such-and-such more than me. When he's confronted with an uncomfortable fact or statistic, he'll angrily burp the words "fake news" or twist up his face and pout about a media conspiracy to make him look bad. And like a common business crook confronted with a client who's caught on to the discrepancy between the money paid and what the crook is actually delivered, whenever he's feeling pressured on something, he says wait "two weeks" and everything will be fine. It never happens, of course. The tell is that is that it's always "two weeks" and almost never one or three or six.
Trump’s habit of self-imposing -- then missing -- two-week deadlines for major announcements has become a staple of his administration as it’s struggled to amass policy wins. The president has used two-week timelines to sidestep questions from reporters or brag to CEOs at the White House. But his pronouncements have also flummoxed investors, Congress and occasionally even members of his staff.
Yeah, that's indeed how you know it's a lie. Somebody ask him about that new invisible flying Skittles-powered submarine the Navy said it would be delivering—he'll insist to your face that they told him they needed another two weeks.
Journalist Linda Villarosa’s sobering and comprehensive New York Times profile on “America’s hidden HIV epidemic” among gay and bisexual black men, particularly those living in Southern states, is one of the most important pieces you will read this year. Although life-saving medications and services have pulled gay and bi men in major cities like San Francisco and New York back from the brink of death, for gay and bi black men “the idea that an AIDS-free generation could be within reach” can feel like a largely white one:
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using the first comprehensive national estimates of lifetime risk of H.I.V. for several key populations, predicted that if current rates continue,one in two African-American gay and bisexual men will be infected with the virus. That compares with a lifetime risk of one in 99 for all Americans and one in 11 for white gay and bisexual men. To offer more perspective: Swaziland, a tiny African nation, has the world’s highest rate of H.I.V., at 28.8 percent of the population. If gay and bisexual African-American men made up a country, its rate would surpass that of this impoverished African nation — and all other nations.
Southern states are home to 37 percent of the population but account for more than one-half of all new HIV diagnoses, writes Villarosa, with Mississippi having the highest percentage of gay and bi men living with the virus, at 40 percent. In Jackson, population 170,000, six black gay or bi men find out they are HIV positive every month. “An unconscionable number of them are dying,” writes Villarosa. “Among black men in this region, the H.I.V.-related death rate was seven times as high as that of the United States population at large.”
While the George W. Bush-era federal government launched groundbreaking and lifesaving programs like Pepfar to expand HIV prevention, treatment, and care overseas, black America “never got a Pepfar.” Indeed, “while buckets of money went overseas, domestic funding for H.I.V./AIDS remained flat, and efforts to fight the disease here were reduced to a poorly coordinated patchwork affair.”
"He dropped you off at school that day, is that right?" I-Team lead investigative reporter Jayne Miller asked of Anderson.
"Yes," Anderson said.
"And then he drove off?" Miller asked.
"Yes," Anderson said.
"When did you find out he had been detained?" Miller asked.
"When my uncle went to pick me up, he told me," Anderson said.
Peraza has been in detention since, become one of the thousands of undocumented moms and dads with no criminal record to be targeted for arrest under the Trump regime. The man’s attorney said his asylum claim was unsuccessful, and ICE officials ignored pleas from community advocates and members of Anderson’s school, who asked the agency to take Pereza’s clean record and time in the U.S. into consideration. Now the immigrant dad fears returning to possible danger in Honduras.
According to local WBAL, it’s not just Peraza who stands to be uprooted, because it’s quite possible his entire family will be forced to leave the country as well. Like Peraza, the family’s mother is undocumented, and because Honduras is just too dangerous, the three may move to her native Guatemala in order to be together. Caught in that will be a ten-year-old U.S. citizen who shouldn’t have to leave his school and birth country, but that’s the reality our broken immigration system and nativist administration have handed to him.
Donald Trump joins dancers with swords at a welcome ceremony in Riyadh on May 20, 2017.
Donald Trump joins dancers with swords at a welcome ceremony in Riyadh on May 20, 2017.
If you marveled at Donald Trump giving Saudi Arabia an unusually warm embrace during a foreign trip in which he flipped the middle finger to all our of usual allies, there may be a very good reason for all that affinity. It amounts to $270,000 the Saudis dropped at Trump's Washington hotel as they lobbied against a controversial terrorism bill. The Wall Street Journalwrites:
The payments—for catering, lodging and parking—were disclosed by the public relations firm MSLGroup last week in paperwork filed with the Justice Department documenting foreign lobbying work on behalf of Saudi Arabia and other clients.
As part of a lobbying effort against the bipartisan Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, Saudi Arabia’s Washington lobbyists and consultants spent about $190,000 on lodging, $78,000 on catering, and $1,600 on parking at the Trump International Hotel. The Daily Caller website first reported on the payments.
JASTA is legislation that lets American citizens sue foreign governments for acts of terrorism, making Saudi Arabia vulnerable to lawsuits from family members of 9/11 victims. The Saudis made the payments to Trump’s hotel between Nov. 2016 and Feb. 2017, after Trump had been elected.
So when you think back on the Saudis’ red carpet treatment, Trump reveling in the sword dance, and his assertion that he wasn't there to "lecture" about human rights, his motivations take on more of a transactional quality than a genuine shift in U.S. doctrine.
This is very interesting. A major reason—probably the major reason—that Hawaii Democrats have been reluctant to float any kind of primary challenge to Rep. Tulsi Gabbard so far is the fact that she's long been very popular. That may now be changing. According to a new poll for Honolulu Civil Beat conducted by Merriman River, Gabbard's statewide favorability rating dropped from 64-19 two years ago to 50-29 today. Gabbard fares better in her home district (Hawaii’s 2nd), but she's still taken a bit of a hit there, too, falling from 67-17 to 58-25.
What matters most, though, is where Gabbard's support is—and isn't—coming from. Statewide, Gabbard earns positive marks from just 49 percent of Democrats, which is low given that we're talking about members of Gabbard's own party, while she gets a thumbs up from 48 percent of Republicans, a shockingly high score.
To put this in context, Hawaii’s other member of the House, Democrat Colleen Hanabusa, has a similar 48-27 statewide favorability rating, but with 65 percent of Democrats viewing her positively and just 24 percent of Republicans doing so. The state’s two Democratic senators look very much the same:
Depending on which Republican senator a reporter talks to, they are either ready to push through a Trumpcare bill that repeals Obamacare and ends insurance for millions, or they're not. After a conference-wide working lunch Tuesday, more are saying they're much closer.
Senators still lack an actual bill, and the compromises needed to pass the Senate could imperil the legislation in the House, which will also have to back it. But Tuesday was a pivotal day for discussions in the upper chamber ― and seemingly a positive one ― as Republicans try to build a 50-vote coalition to repeal Obamacare.
“We’re getting close to having a proposal to whip and to take to the floor,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters, after nearly three hours of closed-door meetings. […]
As for why they were increasingly optimistic, GOP senators wouldn’t offer very many details and McConnell suggested that some key issues linger. But the broad outline discussed among members points to a slower phaseout of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion than the House bill entails and a shifting of tax credits from younger people to older people. Unlike the House version, the Senate bill may not allow insurers to set higher prices for people with pre-existing conditions than for healthy people.
That legislative vision appeared to sway some on-the-fence members who could prove critical to cobbling together 50 GOP votes. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who had been outspoken in his opposition to the House-passed bill, signaled that he was comfortable with the broad strokes of the Senate legislation, though he warned that he hadn’t seen the final text.
McConnell can afford to lose two votes, and at the moment it appears that Sens. Susan Collins (ME) and Rand Paul (KY) are the two that will defect. But that's before there's any legislative text beyond the Zombie Trumpcare bill from the House (which has cleared the hurdle of complying with Senate budget reconciliation rules and can be considered) and before a Congressional Budget Office score, which the Senate can't proceed without, unlike the House.
About 250 demonstrators attended this 2004 rally to criticize President Bush's plan to expand abstinence-only education in the fight against sexually transmitted diseases.
About 250 demonstrators attended this 2004 rally to criticize President Bush's plan to expand abstinence-only education in the fight against sexually transmitted diseases.
Valerie Huber, a sexual abstinence propagandist and program coordinator, has been chosen by the Trump regime to be the chief of staff to the assistant secretary for health at Health and Human Services. Assistant secretaries and their deputies are the leaders who actually see that stuff gets done in the federal bureaucracy, so the COS job is an important one:
In an email to staff, HHS' acting assistant secretary for health Don Wright said Huber's "wealth of professional experience in the field of public policy will serve her well in this position."
That professional experience appears to be solely as an agitator for abstinence education though she herself is not an educator. The SexualityInformation and Education Council for the United States stated in a press release that Huber “pushed a religiously-motivated agenda to promote false and misleading information about sexual health and deny young people the education and skills they need to lead healthy lives”:
“The Trump Administration continues to demonstrate their complete disregard and disdain for science and human rights with the appointment of an individual who has an ethically questionable history and ties to anti-LGBTQ advocates in a leadership position within HHS,” says Chitra Panjabi, President & CEO.
“Liberal Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is at it again,” a narrator says in the spot targeting Blackburn. “But this time she has help — help from our Republican congresswoman, Marsha Blackburn. Warren and Blackburn have introduced hearing aid legislation that will eliminate states’ rights, expand the size and power of the federal government, resulting in higher prices for consumers. We expect these bait-and-switch liberal tactics from Elizabeth Warren, not Marsha Blackburn. Call Marsha Blackburn and tell her to represent our Tennessee values, not those of a liberal Massachusetts senator.”
The ad campaign is another example of Republican-allied organizations aiming to weaken Warren ahead of her 2018 re-election bid and any future run for the White House. (America Rising, a GOP opposition research group, alreadyhas made Warren a top target.) But in this case, a low-key policy issue is at the center of the fight, and Frontiers of Freedom is going so far as to signal that Republicans who work with Warren do so at their political risk.
This is how much Elizabeth Warren scares Republican groups. They’re willing to spend money against their own to scare congressional Republicans off of working with her even on issues as far from the usual partisan brawl as over-the-counter hearing aids. Damaging her before 2020 means just that much to them.
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