 13 November 19 We Are Angry Too, Don't Abandon RSN
We are seeing the ruthless side of American politics rear its ugly head. Shocking and demoralizing to be sure. But in fairness certainly not surprising.
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13 November 19
Andy Borowitz | Republicans Demand That Everyone in Witness-Protection Program Appear on National TV
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Saying that 'enough is enough,' congressional Republicans demanded on Monday that the thousands of people in the nation's witness-protection program be required to appear on national television."
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Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Saying that 'enough is enough,' congressional Republicans demanded on Monday that the thousands of people in the nation's witness-protection program be required to appear on national television."
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Immigration rights activists take part in a rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Trump Attempts to Smear DACA Recipients as "Hardened Criminals"
Aaron Rupar, Vox
Rupar writes: "Hours ahead of the Supreme Court hearing arguments about President Donald Trump's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Trump on Tuesday morning attempted to smear DACA recipients as 'hardened criminals.' But his effort has no grounding in reality."
Aaron Rupar, Vox
Rupar writes: "Hours ahead of the Supreme Court hearing arguments about President Donald Trump's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Trump on Tuesday morning attempted to smear DACA recipients as 'hardened criminals.' But his effort has no grounding in reality."
EXCERPT:
In reality, however, “hardened criminals” are barred from receiving DACA protections. As Dara Lind explained for Vox last year, “[i]mmigrants aren’t eligible for DACA if they’ve committed a felony or significant misdemeanor, or three misdemeanors of any kind. DACA recipients who commit crimes can be stripped of their protections and deported.”
While it’s true that being arrested doesn’t necessarily bar someone from receiving DACA, contrary to Trump’s claim, there’s evidence DACA recipients are actually arrested at rates far lower than US residents.
According to a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) report released last year and estimates from social science research, the arrest rate for DACA recipients may be 78 percent below the national average, as the Cato Institute noted. So Trump’s attempt to smear them as criminals turns reality on its head. And while some DACA recipients are “no longer very young,” the most common age at which they entered the country was 3 — meaning that many of them have only lived as sentient humans in the United States, yet are now facing the threat of deportation to countries they’ve never known.
Trump’s tweet on Tuesday stands in contrast to what he’s said about DACA recipients earlier in his presidency. In September 2017, when he first announced he was ending the program, Trump said of DACA recipients that “I have a great heart for these folks we’re talking about. A great love for them.” Weeks later, he posted a tweet questioning why anybody would want to deport DACA recipients in the first place.
But now, just ahead of SCOTUS taking up the case, Trump is trying to generate a narrative that DACA recipients aren’t so great after all.
He’s also hedging his bets by saying that if SCOTUS goes along with his move to end the program, “a deal will be made with Dems for them to stay.” But if the recent past is precedent, Trump’s bargain will involve forcing Democrats to spend exorbitant amounts of money on his border wall in exchange for him signing a bill providing DACA recipients with long-term legal protection.
As my colleague Nicole Narea explained, there are nearly 670,000 DACA recipients in the country, but SCOTUS’s decision doesn’t just potentially affect them. It also impacts the 256,000 children of DACA recipients who could potentially lose their parents to deportation. Trump, however, has already proven that he’s willing to separate families toward the end of making America whiter.
A firearms training unit detective of the Connecticut State Police, holds up a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle, the same make and model of gun used by Adam Lanza in the December 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting. (photo: Jessica Hill/AP)
US Supreme Court Won't Shield Gun Maker From Sandy Hook Lawsuit
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt a blow to the firearms industry, rejecting Remington Arms Co's bid to escape a lawsuit by families of victims aiming to hold the gun maker liable for its marketing of the assault-style rifle used in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre."
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt a blow to the firearms industry, rejecting Remington Arms Co's bid to escape a lawsuit by families of victims aiming to hold the gun maker liable for its marketing of the assault-style rifle used in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre."
EXCERPT:
The US has experienced a succession of mass shootings in recent decades, including several that have staggered the public such as the 2017 attack at a Las Vegas concert that killed 58 and one at a nightclub in Orlando in 2016 that killed 49. Assault-type rifles have been a recurring feature in many of the massacres.
The US Congress has not enacted new gun control laws in the wake of the mass shootings largely because of Republican opposition.
The plaintiffs have argued that Remington bears some of the blame for the Sandy Hook tragedy. They said the Bushmaster AR-15 gun that Lanza used - a semi-automatic civilian version of the US military's M-16 - had been illegally marketed by the company to civilians as a combat weapon for waging war and killing human beings.
The plaintiffs said that Connecticut's consumer protection law forbids advertising that promotes violent, criminal behaviour and yet even though these rifles have become the "weapon of choice for mass shooters" Remington's ads "continued to exploit the fantasy of an all-conquering lone gunman". One of them, they noted, stated: "Forces of opposition, bow down."
Remington argued that it should be insulated from the lawsuit by a 2005 federal law known as the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which was aimed at blocking a wave of lawsuits damaging to the firearms industry.
The case hinges on an exception to this shield for claims in which a gun manufacturer knowingly violates the law to sell or market guns. Remington has argued that the Connecticut Supreme Court interpreted the exception too broadly when it decided to let the case go ahead.
Carlos Garcia. (photo: M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO)
Joe Arpaio's Surprising Legacy in Arizona
Fernanda Santos, POLITICO
Santos writes: "In the City Council chambers here, a squat, round room that evokes the traditional Navajo home known as a 'hogan,' Carlos Garcia is easy to spot."
Fernanda Santos, POLITICO
Santos writes: "In the City Council chambers here, a squat, round room that evokes the traditional Navajo home known as a 'hogan,' Carlos Garcia is easy to spot."
EXCERPT:
Garcia was born in Cananea, Mexico, about 30 miles south of the border, and lived without papers in the United States until age 14. For years, he ran the Puente Human Rights Movement, one of the most aggressive immigrant-rights groups in the state. But after five of his family members were deported beginning in 2009 and one was sent to Eloy, a privately run immigration detention center southeast of Phoenix, he says, “I got left with no options. And that’s what has pushed someone like me to actually run for office.”
He is not alone. In the past 10 months, Betty Guardado, a hotel housekeeper-turned-union organizer, took her seat on the nonpartisan Phoenix City Council alongside Garcia. Raquel Terán, the former Arizona director for the civic engagement organization Mi Familia Vota, joined the state House of Representatives as a Democrat. On Tuesday, Regina Romero, a child of Mexican immigrants who was the first Latina elected to the Tucson City Council, became that city’s first Latina mayor. To replace her on the council, voters chose Lane Santa Cruz, who grew up in one of the poorest and most heavily Hispanic corners of Tucson and, armed with a Ph.D. in education, worked for more than 10 years as an advocate for her neighbors, many of them undocumented as her parents once were.
Arizona, long considered the home base of tough-minded Western conservatism, has been drifting leftward for a few years now. In 2012, the Supreme Court significantly weakened the “show me your papers” law. Brewer left office in 2014, and in 2016, Arpaio was voted out and escaped prison only because Trump pardoned him a year later, after he was found guilty of contempt for defying a federal judge’s orders to stop singling out Latinos. (At 87, Arpaio is running for sheriff in Maricopa County again, but his candidacy is considered a long shot.) The state’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, has publicly rejected Trump’s idea of denying green cards to people who receive government benefits and questioned recent immigration raids in Mississippi food-processing plants.
Yet this new wave of Latino politicians represents another shift in Arizona politics. While Arizona has had a number of Latino politicians before, this new group has emerged specifically from the statewide push against undocumented immigrants. They have moved past the well-worn formula of increasing Latino participation in elections, though that too is part of their strategy. They’re building on their activism—protests, civil disobedience, grassroots organizing—to enter the halls of political power, and doing so largely without help from the Democratic Party.
“This is about stepping into the electoral space and saying, ‘Hey, not only can we put pressure from the outside, but we can infiltrate these systems and do something radically different,’” Santa Cruz says. “It sounds very subversive, but it is not. This is the way through the front door.”
Donald Trump Jr speaking at a signing event for his new book in New York. (photo: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images)
Donald Trump Jr's Disastrous Book Launch May Seem Funny - but There's a Very Dark Side to the Booing
Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian UK
Mahdawi writes: "The intolerant left is at it again. I regret to inform you that, in yet another case of political correctness gone mad, the woke brigade has shut down free speech and censored a courageous conservative intellectual."
Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian UK
Mahdawi writes: "The intolerant left is at it again. I regret to inform you that, in yet another case of political correctness gone mad, the woke brigade has shut down free speech and censored a courageous conservative intellectual."
EXCERPT:
It is tempting to have a good laugh about the disastrous book launch – and, believe you me, I have. Ultimately, however, there is nothing funny about the fact that the Trump administration has emboldened so many bigots that Maga-hat-wearing supporters are now coming after Jr for not being extreme enough. There has been a 30% increase in the number of US hate groups over the past four years, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center – a trend the civil rights organisation blames on Trump’s radicalising influence. Dangerous fringe groups have crept out of the shadows and are shouting at the top of their lungs.
Trump Jr’s book tour is also a reminder of the right’s limitless hypocrisy. One of the big themes of Triggered is, to quote Trump Jr: “A victimhood complex has taken root in the American left”. But let’s recap the situation shall we? Trump Jr (who describes himself as “hyper-rational” and “stoic”) has just published a book complaining that he is being silenced by the left. He is touring the US talking about how he is being silenced. He has been invited on primetime TV to talk about being silenced. And he is complaining about being silenced to his 4 million followers on Twitter. Maybe I am missing something, but that doesn’t exactly sound like being silenced to me.
And it is not just Trump Jr who loves to play the victim. A delusional victimhood complex is at the very heart of rightwing ideology. Immigrants are invading and stealing all the jobs. Jews are taking over the world. #MeToo is intent on destroying innocent men’s lives. Gays are destroying family values. The right never see themselves as racists or bigots; they see themselves as victims who are fighting back against the imminent extinction of western civilisation. Forget being stoic or silenced; they are constantly triggered and they never shut up.
Fatou Jallow, known as Toufah, says she was raped by former Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh after he noticed her in 2014, when at 19 she won a beauty pageant. (photo: TRRC)
#IamToufah: Breaking the Silence on Sexual Assault in Gambia
Louise Hunt, Al Jazeera
Hunt writes: "Sitting beside a banner with the words 'The truth shall set you free,' Fatou Jallow, known as Toufah, recounted the details of her alleged rape by Yahya Jammeh, the Gambia's former president."
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Louise Hunt, Al Jazeera
Hunt writes: "Sitting beside a banner with the words 'The truth shall set you free,' Fatou Jallow, known as Toufah, recounted the details of her alleged rape by Yahya Jammeh, the Gambia's former president."
READ MORE
EPA scientists survey aquatic life in Newport, Oregon. (photo: EPA)
EPA Proposal to Restrict Science Panders to Polluters
Climate Nexus
Excerpt: "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to significantly limit the use of science in agency rulemaking around public health, the The New York Times reports."
Climate Nexus
Excerpt: "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to significantly limit the use of science in agency rulemaking around public health, the The New York Times reports."
A draft of the proposed science transparency rule obtained by the Times instructs that scientists disclose all raw data involved in their studies before the agency would consider their conclusions. The new standards would also apply retroactively to existing regulations, and expands the original proposal to apply to all studies underpinning environmental protections. Many clean air, water and other public health rules are justified by studies using personal health data gathered under confidentiality agreements, so the datasets by law can never been made public. The proposal, which was originally conceived as a means to prevent regulations on second-hand smoking, "means the EPA can justify rolling back rules or failing to update rules based on the best information to protect public health and the environment, which means more dirty air and more premature deaths," Paul Billings of the American Lung Association told the Times.
As reported by The Hill:
Critics say that if implemented, the changes could be devastating to public heath.
"Let's call this what it is: an excuse to abandon clean air, clean water, and chemical safety rules. This new restriction on science would upend the way we protect communities from pollution and other health threats," said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"It doesn't just restrict the science that EPA can use to institute new rules — it works retroactively, allowing political appointees at the agency to topple standards that have worked for decades to deliver clean air and clean water."
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