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President Trump’s sweeping new immigration policies — which include efforts to shine a harsh national spotlight on cities that released undocumented immigrants who went on to be accused of serious crimes — are sharply increasing the legal and political risks confronting local law enforcement officials.

That kind of public-relations warfare is almost certain to escalate. This week, the Department of Homeland Security ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release weekly reports of crimes committed by immigrants who were the subjects of detainer requests that went ignored.

Governors face uncertainty in the Trump era

But it was Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson who may have best encapsulated the governors’ view of the entertainer-turned-President. “I don’t agree with his style, but he’s shaking it up,” he said.

Some issues saw more of a partisan division. Trump’s plans to rapidly ramp up the deportation of undocumented immigrants, including those who had committed only minor crimes, alarmed Democrats but won plaudits from Republicans.

Taken alone, it would appear both sides share equal blame for the present political paralysis as each shifts to their ideological poles.

while both sides may be guilty of running to their respective corners, one is clearly more liable for putting the kibosh on negotiation deal-making.

one gets more liberal, the more he or she wants elected officials who compromise.

the way this was covered reveals ever more starkly that we are in a new era now of the kind of paranoia and terror that sees a terrorist conspiracy behind any and every act of violence, that seeks to equate the acts of this disturbed and violent man as somehow indicative of the many Muslims in that community who were as appalled as anyone by this murder, and that is fast becoming national hysteria that shows no sign of abating.

it is now and always has been a place where deep-seated fear and paranoia have always simmered below the surface – where McCarthyism once stalked the land, where recent hysteria justified the American president authorizing appalling torture of hundreds of people (with complete impunity), where civil liberties were shredded in a period when more people were killed by lightning than by terrorism, where refugee children as young as eight or nine are treated as terrible dangers to the republic, where undocumented immigrants are left in permanent limbo and where legal immigrants are treated as threats first and assets second, and where our leaders, whom one might expect to calm the public, instead fan the flames of panic for short-term political gain.

Welcome to America, no longer the land of the free or the brave, but the land of the paranoid and terrified.

unpeople fall into several categories. There’s, first of all, the indigenous population, either in the territories already held or those that were expected to be conquered soon. It didn’t apply to them. And, of course, it didn’t apply to those who the Constitution declared to be three-fifths human, so therefore unpeople. That latter category was transferred into—theoretically, into the category of people by the 14th Amendment, that—essentially the same wording as the Fifth Amendment in this respect, but now a person was intended to hold of freed slaves. Now that was in theory. In practice, it barely happened. After about 10 years, the category of three-fifths human were returned to the category of unpeople by the divisive criminalization of black life, which essentially restored slavery, maybe something even worse than slavery, actually went on 'til the Second World War. And it's being reinstituted now, past 30 years of severe moral and social regression in the United States.

Well, the 14th Amendment was recognized right away to be problematic. The concept of person was both too narrow and too broad, and the courts went to work to overcome both of those flaws. The concept of person was expanded to include legal fictions, sustained—created and sustained by the state, what’s called corporations, and was also narrowed over the years to exclude undocumented aliens. That goes right up to the present, to recent Supreme Court cases, which make it clear that corporations not only are persons, but they’re persons with rights far beyond those of persons of flesh and blood, so kind of super persons. The mislabeled free trade agreements give them astonishing rights. And, of course, the court just added more

But the crucial need to make sure that the category of unpeople includes those who escaped from the horrors we’ve created in Central America and Mexico, try to get here—those are not persons, they are unpeople. And, of course, it includes any foreigners, especially those accused of terror, which is a concept that has taken a quite an interesting conceptual change, an interesting one, since 1981, when Ronald Reagan came into office and declared the global war on terror,

Given the House's rejection of the Senate's work in 2013, a strategy is emerging for 2015 to have the House take the lead in the hope of making better progress.

McCain said bills improving border security, establishing an online system for companies to check their workers' immigration status and expanding visas for high-tech foreign workers could be first out of the gate. The latter two are important to U.S. businesses.

Obama warned business leaders this week that "it's going to be hard, I think, for me and for other Democrats" to support piecemeal legislation that deals with the concerns of business but does not address undocumented Americans.

GOP offers a lesson on how not to respond to terrorism

About 10 months ago, after terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, killing 11 people, congressional Republicans quickly began looking for ways to blame American leadership

Republican field is dominated by candidates with no meaningful experience in or understanding of foreign affairs, and nearly all of whom continue to think the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was a great idea.

“The people who are supporting Trump represent a significant portion of the Republican base, which has always been less ideological and more about trust of the person,” Mr. Domenech said. “It is something both the Republican leadership in Washington and conservative ideological elites have underestimated.”

many people at his rallies agreed with Mr. Trump on the issue. “I oppose abortion, but I think Planned Parenthood does a lot of good for people who can’t afford birth control,” said Kim Wells, a schoolteacher and Trump supporter in North Augusta.

Mr. Trump rejected attacks from Jeb Bush and other candidates that he was not a conservative. He dismissed ideological labels altogether, a sentiment endorsed by the 10,000 people in the arena, who thundered their approval over and over. Instead of calling himself conservative, Mr. Trump said, “I’m a guy with common sense that’s going to make us a fortune.”

Donald Trump has been condemned by many on the left and some on the right as being beyond the pale, a toxic virus that exists on the fringes of the political mainstream. But where do his policy views actually fit when compared to his fellow presidential candidates - and past Republican commanders-in-chief?

Tax-cutting has been a much-loved tune in the Republican hymnal for decades, and this year's crop of candidates are humming along. John Kasich, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio all promise various combinations of capital gains tax cuts, income bracket simplification and lower marginal rates. Mr Rubio's proposal also includes a significant boost to the tax credit given to those with children.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump touts increased spending on national defence as a key part of his "make America great again" programme and generally supports broad government surveillance powers. Marco Rubio does as well, and stakes out the far-right position, promising to boost military spending by $1tn (£710bn) over 10 years.

Tea Party Turns on ‘Megalomaniac Strongman’ Donald Trump

Now, “may” is the operative word, since rumors of Trump’s demise, as you might have noticed, have been a touch overstated.

Rep. Dave Brat, a Virginia Republican who defeated then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a shocking primary upset due in large part to his tough-on-undocumented-immigration stance, also criticized Trump’s approach.

The junior senator from Florida sold his soul in North Charleston, South Carolina, for a shot at winning over the supporters of Donald Trump. 

It began early in the night when Rubio said, “Barack Obama does not believe that America is a great global power. Barack Obama believes that America is a arrogant global power that needs to be cut down to size.”

His problem is that in a party in which more than 60 percent of the voters don’t think Obama loves America, disagreeing is not enough. So Rubio has begun suggesting that Obama is some kind of Manchurian (or perhaps Mauritanian) candidate, actively seeking to do America ill

People who have studied the extremist right as a historical and sociopolitical phenomenon in depth are acutely aware of a simple truth: America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political movements.

Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of America's DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars - particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.

Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans, as well as the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow regime in the South (on which the Nuremberg Race Laws were modeled) and the threat of the lynch mob embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler was "passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own." And indeed it was.

Fukuyama sees citizen identification with their own nation state as an important part of liberal democracy. In contrast to most progressive leaders, he does not view multiculturalism and the celebration of different ethnicities and sexual orientation as a step forward to more personal freedom. Instead, he sees these new demands for individual identity as destabilizing to modern nation states. 

Fukuyama states that “demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today.”

This demand for recognition of individual identity, whether based on race, religion or gender, has been accelerated by the explosion in international trade and travel and the rise of the Internet and social media. The latter communication tools have “facilitated the emergence of self-contained communities, walled off not by physical barriers but by belief in shared identity.”

The tariffs are the only surviving piece of his agenda of economic nationalism. That may be, but there is another way to understand this: Trump is sticking to it because it is a key feature of his agenda of xenophobic nationalism, which is, at bottom, the only nationalism he really cares about.

This lack of a serious economic rationale makes more sense if you accept that Trump is wedded to an agenda of xenophobic, not economic, nationalism. It’s no accident that the only surviving elements of his nationalism are the immigration and trade crackdowns: Both further his largely fabricated grand narrative that U.S. workers’ struggles are the fault of undocumented immigrants from “shithole countries,” snooty Euro-weenie elites and the Chinese menace.

Throwing a bomb into the insurance markets, Trump now owns the broken health-care system

THE BIG IDEA: President Trump took two giant steps Thursday to disembowel the Affordable Care Act.

The administration announced late last night that he will immediately halt cost-sharing reductions. These $7 billion in annual subsidies to health insurers allow around 7 million low-income Americans to afford coverage.