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What it's been like fact-checking Joe Biden through 100 days - CNN Politics - 0 views

  • Things have been quieter around here in presidential-fact-check land. Not because President Joe Biden is accurate all the time. He certainly isn’t. But through his first 100 days in the Oval Office, Biden has given us intermittent false claims rather than the staggering avalanche of daily wrongness we faced from his predecessor.
  • Biden has made 29 total false claims in his first 100 days, about one every three-and-a-half days on average. That’s not cause for celebration. But I counted 214 false claims from Trump over his own first 100 days in office, more than two per day on average – and that was a very slow Trump period compared to what came later.
  • Biden said about 28% fewer public words than Trump through April 29 of their respective terms.
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  • When Biden does make public remarks, he is much more likely to be reading from a prepared text than the famously freewheeling Trump was. Biden’s prepared texts have been quite factual.
  • Trump used the social media service to deliver off-the-cuff and oft-inaccurate boasts and attacks. Biden prefers to post conventionally presidential messages, a large number of which do not contain checkable claims of any kind.
  • Biden claimed that the majority of undocumented immigrants in the US are not Hispanic (experts put the actual figure at two-thirds or more Hispanic), that China has more retired people than working people (it has hundreds of millions more working people than retired people), that community health centers would be sent one million Covid-19 vaccine doses a week (the plan was to send one million in the “initial phase” of the program, not every week), and that the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage would be $20 per hour today if it had been linked to inflation upon its creation (Biden was not even close – the White House said Biden got mixed up with another statistic).
  • Biden claimed the US was sending back “the vast majority of families” who arrived at the southern border. While the US was indeed expelling the majority of all migrants encountered at the border, it was sending back less than half of the families in particular.
  • In late March and early April, Biden weighed in on the hot-button issue of the new Georgia elections law. And he either deceived or didn’t have his facts straight – wrongly suggesting that the law requires polling places to close at 5 p.m. (You can read a detailed fact check here.) While the new law does reduce voter access in other ways, Biden gave the law’s supporters ammunition to argue that the law’s opponents were being dishonest.
  • Biden’s push for additional gun control measures, he exaggerated about gun manufacturers’ immunity from lawsuits
  • Biden has sometimes been inaccurate in his attempt to favorably compare himself to Trump.
  • And Biden has repeatedly claimed that Trump signed a tax law that gave 83% of the benefits to the top 1%. In reality, that 83% figure is a think tank’s estimate for what would happen in 2027 if the law’s corporate tax cuts remained in place but its individual tax cuts expired as scheduled after 2025. Between 2018 and 2025, conversely, the think tank estimated that the top 1% would get between 20.5% and 25.3% of the benefits.
  • Boasting of how well he knows Chinese President Xi Jinping, Biden claimed three times in office that he has traveled 17,000 miles or more than 17,000 miles “with” Xi. As the Washington Post first noted, that number is nowhere close to accurate. Biden could have accurately made the same point by saying he has spent a lot of time with Xi.
  • In an impassioned flourish at the CNN town hall in February, Biden claimed the US spends almost $9 billion on a tax break “for people who own racehorses.” Experts have no idea where Biden got that figure for this tax break, and the White House declined to explain.
  • In my first fact check of Biden’s presidency, in January, I noted Biden was wrong when he told reporters that when he initially announced his goal of 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days, “you all said it’s not possible.” Biden switched to softer, accurate language in subsequent comments on the subject – saying in March, for example, that his goal was initially “considered ambitious” and that “some even suggested it was somewhat audacious.”
  • We aren’t throwing a party for the Biden team here; it would have been better if the administration hadn’t gotten it wrong in the first place. But after four years dealing with a Trump White House that appeared not to care about fact-checking at all, the Biden White House’s response was a welcome development.
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Texas lawmaker: Biden administration didn't cause influx of migrants at border - POLITICO - 0 views

  • Rep. Veronica Escobar on Sunday pushed back on claims that the Biden administration's rollbacks of Trump-era immigration policies have caused a surge in undocumented migrants at the Southern border, saying such an argument "obscures the bigger picture."
  • The number of migrant children detained at the border has tripled in recent weeks; host Jake Tapper pointed out that more than 4,000 children are currently in Border Patrol custody.
  • Escobar said. She cited administration officials at Health and Human Services and other departments working to reduce the number of days children are detained before being moved to licensed facilities reunited with their families.
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  • Biden rolled back a number of Trump-era immigration policies, including the “Remain in Mexico” policy that advocates say gutted the nation’s asylum system and the "zero tolerance" policy of separating families at the border.
  • "Fox News Sunday" blasted the Biden administration's immigration policies, saying "empirically, [they're] entirely" responsible for the surge in unaccompanied minors at the southern border.
  • "As I mentioned in April of 2020, under the harshest of conditions, a Trump administration and Covid, we still saw people arriving at our front door," Escobar said. "Even the president of Mexico, that comment, obscures what we have to do, which is what I believe President Biden finally will achieve — which is address the root causes of migration. We're going to be having this conversation year in and year out until we have leaders in this hemisphere who are willing to work together."
  • "This is a challenge that we've been seeing for several years. It's not going away — until we fix it," Escobar said.
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Biden to sign executive orders rejoining Paris climate accord and rescinding travel ban... - 0 views

  • President-elect Joe Biden plans to sign roughly a dozen executive orders, including rejoining the Paris climate accord and ending the travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries, on his first day in office, according to a memo from incoming chief of staff Ron Klain.
  • He'll also sign orders halting evictions and student loan payments during the coronavirus pandemic and issuing a mask mandate on all federal property in an effort to either roll back moves made by the Trump administration or advance policy in a way that was impossible in the current administration.
  • Beyond executive actions in his first days in office, the memo outlines that Biden plans to send Congress a large-scale immigration plan within his first 100 days in office. The plan would offer a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrations currently in the United States.
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  • Biden rolled out his first legislative priority this week, announcing a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that included direct payments to Americans. Biden made clear during a speech on the plan that he wanted it to be the first issue Congress takes up after he is inaugurated on January 20.
  • "Full achievement of the Biden-Harris Administration's policy objectives requires not just the executive actions the president-elect has promised to take, but also robust Congressional action," Klain wrote.
  • And on January 22, Biden will direct his Cabinet agencies to "take immediate action to deliver economic relief to working families bearing the brunt of this crisis," Klain writes.
  • Biden will also order the federal government to determine how to reunite children separated from their families at the US-Mexico border, as well sign additional orders aimed at tackling climate change and expanding access to health care.
  • "Of course, these actions are just the start of our work," Klain writes. "Much more will need to be done to fight COVID-19, build our economy back better, combat systemic racism and inequality, and address the existential threat of the climate crisis. But by February 1st, America will be moving in the right direction on all four of these challenges — and more — thanks to President-elect Joe Biden's leadership."
  • Because Biden routinely promised to take action on "Day One" of his administration, hosts of interest groups and advocacy organization have put public pressure on Biden to live up to his promises.
  • "There is a lot riding on Biden ending the ban on the first day of his presidency because this is something he has campaigned on," said Iman Awad, national legislative director of Emgage Action, an advocacy organization for Muslim Americans. "With that, we understand that we are facing so much during this political moment: A current president making this transition nearly impossible, the insurrection, and the pandemic. Nevertheless, Muslim American communities are hopeful that the Biden Administration will fulfill that promise, despite the crises happening."
  • For climate change activists, Biden's promise to take swift action on an array of climate issues was a key part of why progressives rallied around Biden once he cleared the Democratic field, said Jared Leopold
  • "I do expect that the Biden-Harris administration will take affirmative steps within the first day or so of taking office to satisfy their campaign pledges," David said in an interview with CNN, highlighting the need to "ensure that the rights of LGBTQ students are enforced under Title IX."
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Migrant Caravan, Now in Guatemala, Tests Regional Resolve to Control Migration - The Ne... - 0 views

  • Wielding truncheons and firing tear gas, Guatemalan security forces on Sunday stepped up their efforts to stop a caravan of thousands of Central American migrants who have surged in from Honduras in recent days in hopes of reaching the United States.
  • as many as 7,000 people. Many are fleeing poverty and violence made worse by the pandemic and two major hurricanes that pummeled the region late last year.
  • In recent years, the Trump administration has put considerable pressure on the governments of Central America and Mexico to stop these large-scale mobilizations of migrants before they reach the southwest border of the United States.
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  • But over the course of several days, the Mexican government dismantled the caravan, which at one point numbered about 4,000 people, using persuasion and force.
  • ut in the spring of 2018, a migrant caravan that formed near the southern border of Mexico and came to include upward of 1,200 people at its peak — a record at that time — got President Trump’s attention and became a volatile flash point in the immigration debate.
  • In 2019, Mr. Trump put further pressure on Mexico, as well as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, to crack down on illegal northbound migration, freezing American aid and threatening tariffs. Pressure on Mexico led to the deployment of thousands of Mexican security forces to help detain undocumented migrants as they traveled north.
  • The Trump administration also signed deals with the three Central American nations allowing the United States to send asylum seekers to those countries to apply for sanctuary there.
  • “They have no heart,” one Honduran migrant, Dixón Vázquez, 29, told the Agence France-Presse news service, speaking about the Guatemalan authorities. “We are risking our lives. There is no work in Honduras, especially after the two cyclones and the pandemic. We are going to hold out until they let us continue.”
  • While poverty, violence and government corruption appear to be the main drivers of the latest caravan, the change in American leadership this week may also be a factor. Migrants’ advocates and scholars have warned that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory over Mr. Trump could inspire a surge of migrants hopeful that his administration will significantly relax migration policy, making it easier for them to get into the country.
  • Mr. Biden said he would move quickly to undo the tougher restrictions on asylum enacted by the Trump administration, including a policy that has forced many asylum seekers to wait in Mexico pending the outcome of their cases.
  • On his first day in office, Mr. Biden plans to ask Congress for a broad overhaul of immigration laws, changes that would include a pathway to citizenship for 11 million immigrants now in the United States illegally, plus aid for damaged Central American economies and plans to help people fleeing violence.
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Opinion | We Spoke to 430 Former Immigrants in Mexico. This Is What They Shared. - The ... - 0 views

  • A week into his term, President Joe Biden is already making good on his campaign promise to reverse President Donald Trump's immigration policies, confront the nativism that infuses our treatment of immigrants, and pursue comprehensive reform that would provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
  • The vast majority were brought to the United States as young children, by parents fleeing poverty and violence. In their journeys to become Americans, they tried hard to fit into a society that could be unwelcoming. They often forgot how to speak Spanish.
  • More than half graduated from high school; a quarter obtained a college degree.
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  • Many of those who return face a different kind of stigmatization in Mexico. They are often singled out for the way they dress; teased for their halting, accented Spanish; and stereotyped as arrogant, as failures, as criminals.
  • Some find the resilience to start over and pursue new dreams in Mexico.
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'The disappeared': searching for 40,000 missing victims of Mexico's drug wars | World n... - 0 views

  • It has been six months since José Barajas was snatched from his home near the US border, for reasons that remain obscure.
  • Jesse, the eldest of seven siblings, said US-based relatives had implored José to join them north of the border as the cartels tightened their grip on a region notorious for the smuggling of drugs and people.
  • We told him how big a monster is organised crime. It is a huge monster that nobody knows where it is hiding
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  • He was a man that believed in Mexico,” said Jesse, who left Mexico as an undocumented migrant aged 14 and is now a US citizen. “He chose to stay here because he thought that he could change things, you know?
  • The disappeared are perhaps the dirtiest secret of Mexico’s drug conflict, which has shown no sign of easing since leftist leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power last December promising a new era of peace.
  • In August Mexican authorities, who after years of public pressure are beginning to demonstrate greater interest in investigating such crimes, acknowledged over 3,000 clandestine burial sites. More than 500 had been discovered since López Obrador took power.
  • As Jesse marched on – shadowed by a rifle-toting police agent – the hidden perils that lay behind his brother’s disappearance became clear. Pickup trucks, apparently sent by cartel bosses to monitor the search party, rattled past on the country lane down which José’s abductors fled. “These assholes are halcones,” Jesse complained, using the Spanish slang word for lookouts.
  • This kind of activism is about patience, not speed
  • “We all have the same goal, which is finding our missing ones,” said Ocegueda who became a campaigner after his own son was taken, in 2007, and has recovered more than 120 bodies since.
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Raphael Warnock wins Georgia runoff, CNN projects, as control of US Senate comes down t... - 0 views

  • The Rev. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, will be the first Black senator from Georgia,
  • Control of the US Senate now comes down to Republican David Perdue, who is trailing in his fight to keep his seat against Democrat Jon Ossoff.
  • Ossoff declared victory Wednesday morning, though CNN hasn't yet projected a winner
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  • Warnock is the first Georgia Democrat elected to the Senate in 20 years, and his election is the culmination of years of voter registration drives conducted by former state House Democratic leader Stacey Abrams and other activists.
  • "I am an iteration and an example of the American dream," the senator-elect told CNN's John Berman Wednesday morning on "New Day." He added, "When I think about the arc of our history, what Georgia did last night is its own message in the midst of a moment in which so many people are trying to divide our country, at a time we can least afford to be divided."
  • fter no Georgia Senate candidate received 50% of the vote in November, the races turned to two runoffs.
  • rump's ongoing onslaught against the Republican officials in charge of the elections pressured the two GOP senators to make a choice: Join the President in seeking to overturn the democratic outcome or risk losing Trump supporters, some of whom have become disenchanted with the electoral process. Trump recently appeared to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on a private call, urging him to "find" enough votes to reverse the results. Raffensperger refused.
  • Republicans hoped their message that Georgia should be a check on Washington would prove successful, noting that if Warnock and Ossoff win, Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer will be in charge.
  • The American people deserve a platform in Congress, permitted under the Constitution, to have election issues presented so that they can be addressed," said Loeffler
  • Warnock told CNN Wednesday that his opponent "has consistently put what she perceives to be her own short-term political interests over the concerns of ordinary people."
  • Georgia is a rapidly diversifying state, the Republican candidates came into the Senate runoff elections with an advantage.
  • In November, Perdue received over 88,000 more votes than Ossoff, while Loeffler and the other Republican candidates received more votes than Warnock and the other Democratic candidates in the special election (Warnock received most of the vote -- 33% -- overall).
  • We've seen tremendous enthusiasm in the early voting numbers, both in person and by mail, and we know that while Democrats will have a lead when polls open ... Republicans are expected to have a strong Election Day," said Seth Bringman
  • Loeffler and Perdue decided to join the President in objecting to Congress' certification of the Electoral College's results in a final, deluded display of devotion to Trump supporters.
  • "Senator Perdue and Senator Loeffler are being whipsawed by the President on one side and by the Democratic money on the other side," he said.
  • Perdue's closing message in a recent video was littered with attacks, saying that if Republicans lose, undocumented immigrants will vote, Americans' private health insurance will be "taken away," and Democrats will pack the Supreme Court and defund the police.
  • The Democratic candidates counter that they would "demilitarize" rather than defund the police,
  • They argued they would do a better job ending the health care crisis over the coronavirus, which has infected more than 20.8 million Americans and killed at least 354,000, in order to reopen the economy.
  • Warnock told CNN Wednesday that he believes tackling the pandemic by effectively distributing the vaccine and passing $2,000 stimulus checks should be the new Senate's top priority.
  • After no candidate received 50% of the vote, the runoffs turned even more vicious, as Loeffler portrayed Warnock an anti-police Marxist who would destroy America in the Senate.
  • "Kelly Loeffler spends tens of millions of dollars to scare you," said Warnock in an ad. "She's trying to make you afraid of me because she's afraid of you. Afraid that you understand how she's used her position in the Senate to enrich herself and others like her. Afraid that you'll realize that we can do better."
  • Perdue, a 71-year-old former Fortune 500 CEO, has dismissed Ossoff, a 33-year-old media executive, saying the Democrat does not know how to create a job
  • The Georgia US Senate races have attracted enormous attention due to the stakes for the first years of the Biden administration and the state's shift from red to purple. Dr. Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia political science professor, told CNN that the Senate elections could be the first in which urban Georgia casts more votes than rural Georgia.
  • epublicans are worried that Trump's unwillingness to concede jeopardizes the party's hold on the Senate,
  • Political groups spent about $520 million to advertise in the two runoff races, according to Kantar Media/CMAG, averaging more than $8 million per day. Republicans outspent Democrats by tens of millions of dollars.
  • Biden said electing Ossoff and Warnock would end the gridlock in Washington and allow Congress to provide $2,000 stimulus checks to Americans. Trump urged the state to elect Perdue and Loeffler, and claimed that Biden would not take the White House.
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Opinion | Biden Can Fix Latinos' Disappointment With Democrats - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For Joe Biden to make sure he gets more Latino votes than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 — for him to defeat President Trump and win the White House — he has to convince millions of Latinos that he won’t make the mistakes that Barack Obama made during his presidency. And he doesn’t have much time left to do it.
  • More than three million immigrants, many without criminal records, were deported during the Obama administration.
  • Nor should he back the prison system that has been locking immigrants and their children behind bars. During an interview with Mr. Biden in February, I showed him a photo of an 8-year-old boy from Honduras inside what looked like a metal cage in a detention center in McAllen, Texas. It was taken not during the Trump administration, but in 2014. These inhumane practices must stop.
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  • The big promise that Democrats failed to keep was the passage of an immigration reform bill that would legalize the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
  • Latinos haven’t forgotten Mr. Obama’s promise. That’s why Democrats have a “Latino problem.”
  • Now it falls to Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to overcome this lack of trust within the Latino community. “I think it was a big mistake,” Mr. Biden said of the Obama administration’s mass deportations during our interview. “It took too long to get it right.”
  • Mr. Biden’s second promise is specifically for Dreamers. “I will also legalize Dreamers again,” he said during our February interview, “making sure they are not deported. These are already Americans.”
  • Mr. Trump’s policies have had a profound effect on immigration: From 2016 to 2019, annual net immigration to the United States fell by almost half, to about 600,000 migrants per year.
  • It’s possible that Mr. Biden’s policies could send the wrong message to people in the Southern Hemisphere. So, in order to discourage new caravans of people from traveling to the United States from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Mr. Biden has said he plans to invest $4 billion to create jobs in Central America and tackle the root causes of migration.
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Opinion | Conservatives Try to Lock In Power - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The death of the iconic Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has shocked the political world, altered the contours of the upcoming election and induced an overwhelming dread among liberals who fear some basic rights could now be in jeopardy.
  • it remains unclear whether the Senate will hold a vote before Election Day. If it did, it would represent a colossal act of hypocrisy since many of the same senators refused to even give Barack Obama’s last nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing, arguing that it was inappropriate to fill a seat on the court in an election year.
  • But Republicans have the power to force a vote, and barring defections, they could exercise it.
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  • 78 percent of white evangelical voters are Republicans or lean Republican. So are 62 percent of white men without a college degree, 60 percent of rural southerners and 57 percent of people who attend religious services weekly.
  • the percentage of Americans who are not affiliated with a religion keeps rising — up 9 percentage points since 2009, to 26 percent in 2019 — and the percentage of people identifying as Christians keeps falling — down 12 percentage points, to 65 percent over the same decade
  • Lastly, the percentage of Americans with college degrees keeps rising, moving from 4.6 percent in 1940 to 36 percent in 2019.
  • Conservatives see all of these trends, and they are alarmed. So, they want to freeze time, or even turn it back. Their reading of the Constitution is stuck in the understanding of it when it was written. It is the same for religious texts. They want to return to a pre-1960s era, before the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement and the gay rights movement, before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and Roe v. Wade, before the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage, before there was a Black president and a browning country.
  • This is why they happily cheer Trump’s attack on immigrants — both legal and undocumented. It is why they encourage efforts to disenfranchise voters. It is why Trump’s attacks on cities resonate, as does his MAGA mantra.
  • Social progress is now on the chopping block. In this way, for many of us, Donald Trump’s legacy will likely be with us for the rest of our lives.
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Texas Vaccination Site Apologizes For Refusing COVID-19 Shots To 2 Eligible People : Co... - 0 views

  • The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley is apologizing for turning away two people eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations on Saturday because they could not prove they live in the United States.
  • Proof of residency and citizenship are not required to get the vaccine, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services — as stated in guidance on the agency's website. UT-RGV spokesperson Patrick Gonzalez confirmed the university did not follow state protocol.
  • "[Dad] said that [the health worker] told him in front of everybody, 'you don't have a social, so we can't help you at all. And it's only for U.S. citizens,' "
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  • The Rio Grande Valley is located near the U.S.-Mexico border and is a majority Hispanic region with a large number of undocumented and mixed-status families.
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Congress rocked by consequential battles that will shape Biden's presidency - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • The future of the Biden presidency, the terrain of the midterm elections and the fate of the Republican Party will all be shaped by a series of early battles unfolding on Capitol Hill.
  • The White House is standing firm behind Neera Tanden, its pick for budget director, though her nomination seems doomed. Aides to Joe Biden know this first big fight will help set the terms of the new President's relationship with Congress. Other bitter confirmation hearings are turning into early de-facto fights on the great issues of the Biden era, like climate change and expanding access to health care.
  • Republicans are meanwhile beginning to mobilize against Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid rescue package in the hope of billing it as an example of massive liberal overreach and winning a political payoff.
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  • The Covid relief plan is meanwhile stretching the papered over unity observed by Democrats in their election-year zeal to beat Donald Trump, with a split widening over including a minimum wage hike in the huge plan.
  • The Republican Party is even more divided than Democrats. While some senators like Mitt Romney are working through principled objections to Biden's policies and nominees, Trump loyalists like Sens. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Ron Johnson are performing for their watching leader in exile and, perhaps more critically, his base of supporters.
  • "These criminals came prepared for war," said former US Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund.The next big point of tension between the President and his Capitol Hill adversaries comes Wednesday when two key Senate committees are expected to vote on whether to advance Tanden's nomination.
  • Another under pressure Biden nominee, New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, who would become the first Native American Cabinet member if she makes it to the Interior Department, faced fierce attacks from Republicans during her confirmation hearing Tuesday.
  • In a fresh sign of tensions inside the Democratic Party, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a standard bearer for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, rebuked Manchin after his office said he had "remaining questions" for Haaland, noting that the West Virginian voted to confirm Trump's first Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who she called "openly racist."
  • The GOP, with a clear eye on midterm elections that are usually tough for first-term presidents, is driving a case that Biden's climate policies -- including a pause on new leases for oil and gas extraction on federal lands -- are a massive job killer.
  • Elsewhere in the Capitol on Tuesday, Republican senators worked through the intricacies of the budget procedure known as reconciliation, which Democrats plan to use to ease the Covid rescue bill past filibuster attempts.
  • In one possible troublemaking maneuver that would double as points on the board ahead of congressional elections in November 2022, Romney and Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton are working on a plan to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour on condition that there are mandatory requirements on business to discourage the hiring of undocumented migrants.
  • Their gambit followed Manchin's proposal to hike the rate to $11 per hour over two years. Neither suggestion is likely to be acceptable to progressive Democrats who are seeking to include a $15 per hour minimum wage in the Covid rescue plan. This could all be academic -- at least for now -- since both sides are waiting from a ruling from the Senate parliamentarian on whether including minimum wage changes is allowed under reconciliation rules.
  • Tugs of war over economic policy and the shape of relief legislation -- and ideological fault line issues like abortion -- are necessary features of the adversarial democratic process. But some Republicans, who abetted the ex-President's assault on America's political system fraud, can't break the habit
  • Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who led the charge in the Senate to stop Biden's legitimate election win, tried to re-up Trump's misleading claims that Biden wanted to "defund the police"
  • "I would say that's absolutely outrageous and an utter lie and no one I think who knows any of the facts alleges any such thing," he said.
  • And Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, one of Trump's favorite senators, on Tuesday used the Senate hearing into the insurrection to imply on the thinnest of evidence that the rioters who desecrated the Capitol were not Trump supporters at all, in referring to an article that suggested that security forces might have overreacted to the violence.
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Biden Revokes Trump's Pause on Green Cards - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Biden reopened the country on Wednesday to people seeking green cards, ending a ban on legal immigration that President Donald J. Trump imposed last spring, citing what he said was the need to protect American jobs during the pandemic.
  • the ban did “not advance the interests of the United States,”
  • “To the contrary,” Mr. Biden said of his predecessor’s immigration ban, “it harms the United States, including by preventing certain family members of United States citizens and lawful permanent residents from joining their families here. It also harms industries in the United States that utilize talent from around the world.”
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  • At the time, Mr. Trump described his action as a way to protect Americans, millions of whom lost their jobs as the threat of the coronavirus shut down the economy.
  • “By pausing immigration, we will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. So important,” Mr. Trump said. “It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker.”
  • Critics of Mr. Trump accused him of using the pandemic as an excuse to further advance his agenda of severely restricting immigration.
  • An analysis by the Migration Policy Institute at the time estimated that the policy could affect as many as 660,000 people.
  • In his legislation, the president would provide an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
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Opinion | Rod Rosenstein Was Just Doing His Job - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Rosenstein’s complicity in this machine was ugly, but it was by no means unique. Top officials at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services all played a role. They were all sowing chaos, inflicting cruelty and causing unfathomable trauma at the behest of a small, vicious cadre up top
  • his argument was this: The jail time for these misdemeanors was usually a matter of days. So why were these parents not being reunited with their children afterward? “What became clear,” he told me, “is that they never had any intention of reuniting them until the parent gave up and was deported, if ever.”
  • The federal judge in San Diego agreed, saying the government’s behavior “shocks the conscience,” that the separation policy violated due process and that all separated families had to be reunited within 30 days.
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  • what galls Gelernt now, after seeing the Times report about the inspector general’s investigation, is that his suspicions were right all along: Separating families was the objective of the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy, not a byproduct. The children were the targets of the policy, not collateral damage. “We need to take away children,” Sessions reportedly told the local U.S. attorneys.
  • When the number of immigrants surged at the border in 2014, President Barack Obama responded by building more detention facilities and holding families indefinitely — though still together — and faced a legal backlash.
  • But Trump’s policy was something altogether different. It was child abuse, plain and simple. “That’s why it’s so chilling,” Gelernt told me. “D.O.J. officials apparently declined to exempt even cases with a baby.
  • note what Rosenstein did not deny: That he refused his U.S. attorneys permission to automatically exempt undocumented immigrants with young children from prosecution.
  • what we have lately learned about Rosenstein is that he is a very canny political operator. He has a gift for threading needles that even a tailor would envy.
  • While serving in the Trump Justice Department, for instance, he wrote a memo recommending the removal of James Comey as the head of the F.B.I., and he later defended his boss, William Barr, after he misled the public about the results of the Mueller investigation
  • But he also had the presence of mind to appoint Robert S. Mueller in the first place — and, though he has denied it, to question Trump’s own presence of mind. (It has been reported that he suggested secretly recording Trump’s ravings in order to expose him as unfit to lead.)
  • when it was Rosenstein’s turn, he did nothing to stop government-orchestrated cruelty. Instead, he simply did his job.
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Trump Deflects Questions About Taxes, but First Debate Has a New Issue - The New York T... - 0 views

  • The disclosure that President Trump paid little or no federal income taxes for years, including while in the White House
  • While Mr. Trump tried to deflect the news about his taxes, and his Republican allies generally kept their silence, Democrats pounced and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the party’s presidential candidate, posted a video noting that the president paid less in income taxes than everyday Americans like teachers, firefighters and nurses.
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      Wow that is horrible. I dont understand why they let him get away with everything. As rich as he is he should not be paying less taxes than teachers thats ridiculous
  • so the tax revelations are not likely to shift the election in any fundamental way,”
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  • Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes for 11 of the 18 years examined and just $750 in 2016, the year he won the presidency, and $750 in 2017, his first year in office. Mr. Trump wrote off more than $70,000 paid to style his hair during “The Apprentice” and collected $72.9 million in refunds challenged by I.R.S. auditors. He owes hundreds of millions of dollars due in the next four years.
  • Mr. Trump, who unlike other presidents since Watergate has adamantly refused to release his tax returns and fought efforts to obtain them all the way to the Supreme Court, attacked the Times report on Monday on Twitter without actually denying any of its particulars.
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      clearly its not in his favor if hes going that far to hide it
  • The Fake News
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      HE ALWAYS SAYS FAKE NEWS WHEN HES DEFLECTING
  • taking advantage of the tax code is simply “smart” for a business person, while also painting himself as a jobs creator.
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      we talked about how he was a bad business man in class
  • Tim Murtaugh, the campaign spokesman, called the report inaccurate because the president has paid “tens of millions in taxes,” without specifying whether they were federal income taxes or directly denying that there were years he paid none.
  • Fox News.
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      bias towards trump
  • hairstyling expenses
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      IM CRYING HIS TOUPEE LMAO
  • Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted that she paid thousands of dollars in federal taxes in 2016 and 2017 — when she was still working as a bartender in New York City. “He contributed less to funding our communities than waitresses & undocumented immigrants,” she wrote.
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      This example rly puts it into perspective
  • Mr. Limbaugh said on his show on Monday that Mr. Trump’s penchant for minimizing his taxes was something to be proud of, not scorned. “He’s a master at this,” Mr. Limbaugh said. “These tax returns show that he is a master at using the tax code legally. If Trump had done all of this illegal stuff after all of these years, it would have caught up with him by now.”
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      its the ignorance for me. How is that something to be proud of?
  • “These folks are scraping to make a living and they’re going to wake up to find out this incredible mogul paid $750? I don’t care what his excuses are,” Mr. Kasich told CNN. “It doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s not going to disrupt those people who were for him totally. They’ll still be for him. But it’s those people on the fence.”
  • In his tweets, the president seemed to be as upset about the perception that he is not as wealthy and successful as he claims to be.
  • Fake News
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      he says fake new a lot
  • n fact, as the article noted, Mr. Trump is heavily in debt, and much of what he owes to lenders will have to be paid back in just a few years.
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The rise of American authoritarianism - Vox - 1 views

  • Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses
  • it wasn't just Trump but his supporters who seemed to have come out of nowhere, suddenly expressing, in large numbers, ideas far more extreme than anything that has risen to such popularity in recent memory
  • CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn't have freed the slaves.
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  • MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders.
  • He polled a large sample of likely voters, looking for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism.
  • Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.
  • He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina's Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump's rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized.
  • That year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.
  • This trend had been accelerated in recent years by demographic and economic changes such as immigration, which "activated" authoritarian tendencies, leading many Americans to seek out a strongman leader who would preserve a status quo they feel is under threat and impose order on a world they perceive as increasingly alien.
  • What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator
  • According to Stenner's theory, there is a certain subset of people who hold latent authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies can be triggered or "activated" by the perception of physical threats or by destabilizing social change, leading those individuals to desire policies and leaders that we might more colloquially call authoritarian
  • What we found is a phenomenon that explains, with remarkable clarity, the rise of Donald Trump — but that is also much larger than him, shedding new light on some of the biggest political stories of the past decade. Trump, it turns out, is just the symptom. The rise of American authoritarianism is transforming the Republican Party and the dynamics of national politics, with profound consequences likely to extend well beyond this election.
  • a small but respected niche of academic research has been laboring over a question, part political science and part psychology, that had captivated political scientists since the rise of the Nazis.
  • How do people come to adopt, in such large numbers and so rapidly, extreme political views that seem to coincide with fear of minorities and with the desire for a strongman leader?
  • They believe that authoritarians aren't "activated" — they've always held their authoritarian preferences — but that they only come to express those preferences once they feel threatened by social change or some kind of threat from outsiders.
  • a button is pushed that says, "In case of moral threat, lock down the borders, kick out those who are different, and punish those who are morally deviant."
  • Authoritarians prioritize social order and hierarchies, which bring a sense of control to a chaotic world. Challenges to that order — diversity, influx of outsiders, breakdown of the old order — are experienced as personally threatening because they risk upending the status quo order they equate with basic security.
  • . The country is becoming more diverse, which means that many white Americans are confronting race in a way they have never had to before.
  • If you were to read every word these theorists ever wrote on authoritarians, and then try to design a hypothetical candidate to match their predictions of what would appeal to authoritarian voters, the result would look a lot like Donald Trump.
  • But political scientists say this theory explains much more than just Donald Trump, placing him within larger trends in American politics: polarization, the rightward shift of the Republican Party, and the rise within that party of a dissident faction challenging GOP orthodoxies and upending American politics. More than that, authoritarianism reveals the connections between several seemingly disparate stories about American politics. And it suggest that a combination of demographic, economic, and political forces, by awakening this authoritarian class of voters that has coalesced around Trump, have created what is essentially a new political party within the GOP — a phenomenon that broke into public view with the 2016 election but will persist long after it has ended.
  • This study of authoritarianism began shortly after World War II, as political scientists and psychologists in the US and Europe tried to figure out how the Nazis had managed to win such wide public support for such an extreme and hateful ideology.
  • Feldman, a professor at SUNY Stonybrook, believed authoritarianism could be an important factor in American politics in ways that had nothing to do with fascism, but that it could only reliably be measured by unlinking it from specific political preferences.
  • Feldman developed what has since become widely accepted as the definitive measurement of authoritarianism: four simple questions that appear to ask about parenting but are in fact designed to reveal how highly the respondent values hierarchy, order, and conformity over other values. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved? Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?
  • Trump's rise. And, like them, I wanted to find out what the rise of authoritarian politics meant for American politics. Was Trump just the start of something bigger?
  • In the 1960s, the Republican Party had reinvented itself as the party of law, order, and traditional values — a position that naturally appealed to order- and tradition-focused authoritarians. Over the decades that followed, authoritarians increasingly gravitated toward the GOP, where their concentration gave them more and more influence over time.
  • Stenner argued that many authoritarians might be latent — that they might not necessarily support authoritarian leaders or policies until their authoritarianism had been "activated."
  • This activation could come from feeling threatened by social changes such as evolving social norms or increasing diversity, or any other change that they believe will profoundly alter the social order they want to protect. In response, previously more moderate individuals would come to support leaders and policies we might now call Trump-esque.
  • Ever since, political scientists who study authoritarianism have accumulated a wealth of data on who exhibits those tendencies and on how they align with everything from demographic profiles to policy preferences.
  • People do not support extreme policies and strongman leaders just out of an affirmative desire for authoritarianism, but rather as a response to experiencing certain kinds of threats.
  • when non-authoritarians feel sufficiently scared, they also start to behave, politically, like authoritarians.
  • a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.
  • Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.
  • This theory would seem to predict the rise of an American political constituency that looks an awful lot like the support base that has emerged, seemingly out of nowhere, to propel Donald Trump from sideshow loser of the 2012 GOP primary to runaway frontrunner in 2016.
  • If this rise in American authoritarianism is so powerful as to drive Trump's ascent, then how else might it be shaping American politics? And what effect could it have even after the 2016 race has ended?
  • The second set asked standard election-season questions on preferred candidates and party affiliation. The third set tested voters' fears of a series of physical threats, ranging from ISIS and Russia to viruses and car accidents. The fourth set tested policy preferences, in an attempt to see how authoritarianism might lead voters to support particular policies.
  • If the research were right, then we'd expect people who scored highly on authoritarianism to express outsize fear of "outsider" threats such as ISIS or foreign governments versus other threats. We also expected that non-authoritarians who expressed high levels of fear would be more likely to support Trump. This would speak to physical fears as triggering a kind of authoritarian upsurge, which would in turn lead to Trump support.
  • We asked people to rate a series of social changes — both actual and hypothetical — on a scale of "very good" to "very bad" for the country. These included same-sex marriage, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants living in the United States, and American Muslims building more mosques in US cities.
  • If the theory about social change provoking stress amongst authoritarians turned out to be correct, then authoritarians would be more likely to rate the changes as bad for the country.
  • Authoritarianism was the best single predictor of support for Trump, although having a high school education also came close.
  • people in this 44 percent only vote or otherwise act as authoritarians once triggered by some perceived threat, physical or social. But that latency is part of how, over the past few decades, authoritarians have quietly become a powerful political constituency without anyone realizing it.
  • More than 65 percent of people who scored highest on the authoritarianism questions were GOP voters. More than 55 percent of surveyed Republicans scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians.
  • People whose scores were most non-authoritarian — meaning they always chose the non-authoritarian parenting answer — were almost 75 percent Democrats.
  • this is not a story about how Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus. It's a story of polarization that increased over time.
  • Democrats, by contrast, have positioned themselves as the party of civil rights, equality, and social progress — in other words, as the party of social change, a position that not only fails to attract but actively repels change-averse authoritarians.
  • Over the next several decades, Hetherington explained to me, this led authoritarians to naturally "sort" themselves into the Republican Party.
  • It is not for nothing that our poll found that more than half of the Republican respondents score as authoritarian.
  • Our results found that 44 percent of white respondents nationwide scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians, with 19 percent as "very high." That's actually not unusual, and lines up with previous national surveys that found that the authoritarian disposition is far from rare1.
  • among Republicans, very high/high authoritarianism is very predictive of support for Trump." Trump has 42 percent support among Republicans but, according to our survey, a full 52 percent support among very high authoritarians.
  • Trump support was much lower among Republicans who scored low on authoritarianism: only 38 percent.
  • But that's still awfully high. So what could explain Trump's support among non-authoritarians? I suspected the answer might lie at least partly in Hetherington and Suhay's research on how fear affects non-authoritarian voters,
  • Authoritarians, we found in our survey, tend to most fear threats that come from abroad, such as ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats, the researchers point out, to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian ayatollah. Non-authoritarians were much less afraid of those threats. For instance, 73 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians believed that terrorist organizations like ISIS posed a "very high risk" to them, but only 45 percent of very low-scoring authoritarians did. Domestic threats like car accidents, by contrast, were much less frightening to authoritarians.
  • A subgroup of non-authoritarians were very afraid of threats like Iran or ISIS. And the more fear of these threats they expressed, the more likely they were to support Trump.
  • that non-authoritarians who are sufficiently frightened of physical threats such as terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.
  • That's important, because for years now, Republican politicians and Republican-leaning media such as Fox News have been telling viewers nonstop that the world is a terrifying place and that President Obama isn't doing enough to keep Americans safe.
  • Republican voters have been continually exposed to messages warning of physical dangers. As the perception of physical threat has risen, this fear appears to have led a number of non-authoritarians to vote like authoritarians — to support Trump.
  • But when establishment candidates such as Marco Rubio try to match Trump's rhetoric on ISIS or on American Muslims, they may end up deepening the fear that can only lead voters back to Trump.
  • pushing authoritarians to these extremes: the threat of social change.
  • This could come in the form of evolving social norms, such as the erosion of traditional gender roles or evolving standards in how to discuss sexual orientation. It could come in the form of rising diversity, whether that means demographic changes from immigration or merely changes in the colors of the faces on TV. Or it could be any changes, political or economic, that disrupt social hierarchies.
  • What these changes have in common is that, to authoritarians, they threaten to take away the status quo as they know it — familiar, orderly, secure — and replace it with something that feels scary because it is different and destabilizing, but also sometimes because it upends their own place in societ
  • Authoritarians were significantly more likely to rate almost all of the actual and hypothetical social issues we asked about as "bad" or "very bad" for the country.
  • an astonishing 44 percent of authoritarians believe same-sex marriage is harmful to the country. Twenty-eight percent rated same-sex marriage as "very bad" for America, and another 16 percent said that it’s "bad." Only about 35 percent of high-scoring authoritarians said same-sex marriage was "good" or "very good" for the country.
  • Non-authoritarians tended to rate same-sex marriage as "good" or "very good" for the country.
  • The fact that authoritarians and non-authoritarians split over something as seemingly personal and nonthreatening as same-sex marriage is crucial for understanding how authoritarianism can be triggered by even a social change as minor as expanding marriage rights.
  • A whopping 56.5 percent of very high-scoring authoritarians said it was either "bad" or "very bad" for the country when Muslims built more mosques. Only 14 percent of that group said more mosques would be "good" or "very good."
  • The literature on authoritarianism suggests this is not just simple Islamophobia, but rather reflects a broader phenomenon wherein authoritarians feel threatened by people they identify as "outsiders" and by the possibility of changes to the status quo makeup of their communities.
  • This would help explain why authoritarians seem so prone to reject not just one specific kind of outsider or social change, such as Muslims or same-sex couples or Hispanic migrants, but rather to reject all of them.
  • Working-class communities have come under tremendous economic strain since the recession. And white people are also facing the loss of the privileged position that they previously were able to take for granted. Whites are now projected to become a minority group over the next few decades, owing to migration and other factors. The president is a black man, and nonwhite faces are growing more common in popular culture. Nonwhite groups are raising increasingly prominent political demands, and often those demands coincide with issues such as policing that also speak to authoritarian concerns.
  • the loss of working-class jobs in this country is a real and important issue, no matter how one feels about fading white privilege — but that is not the point.
  • mportant political phenomenon we identify as right-wing populism, or white working-class populism, seems to line up, with almost astonishing precision, with the research on how authoritarianism is both caused and expressed.
  • It all depends, he said, on whether a particular group of people has been made into an outgroup or not — whether they had been identified as a dangerous other.
  • Since September 2001, some media outlets and politicians have painted Muslims as the other and as dangerous to America. Authoritarians, by nature, are more susceptible to these messages, and thus more likely to come to oppose the presence of mosques in their communities.
  • , it helps explain how Trump's supporters have come to so quickly embrace such extreme policies targeting these outgroups: mass deportation of millions of people, a ban on foreign Muslims visiting the US. When you think about those policy preferences as driven by authoritarianism, in which social threats are perceived as especially dangerous and as demanding extreme responses, rather than the sudden emergence of specific bigotries, this starts to make a lot more sense.
  • authoritarians are their own distinct constituency: effectively a new political party within the GOP.
  • Authoritarians generally and Trump voters specifically, we found, were highly likely to support five policies: Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States Changing the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants Imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorism Requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism Allowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism
  • What these policies share in common is an outsize fear of threats, physical and social, and, more than that, a desire to meet those threats with severe government action — with policies that are authoritarian not just in style but in actuality
  • The real divide is over how far to go in responding. And the party establishment is simply unwilling to call for such explicitly authoritarian policies.
  • There was no clear correlation between authoritarianism and support for tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 per year, for example. And the same was true of support for international trade agreements.
  • he way he reduces everything to black-and-white extremes of strong versus weak, greatest versus worst. His simple, direct promises that he can solve problems that other politicians are too weak to manage.
  • That's why it's a benefit rather than a liability for Trump when he says Mexicans are rapists or speaks gleefully of massacring Muslims with pig-blood-tainted bullets: He is sending a signal to his authoritarian supporters that he won't let "political correctness" hold him back from attacking the outgroups they fear.
  • Rather, it was that authoritarians, as a growing presence in the GOP, are a real constituency that exists independently of Trump — and will persist as a force in American politics regardless of the fate of his candidacy.
  • If Trump loses the election, that will not remove the threats and social changes that trigger the "action side" of authoritarianism. The authoritarians will still be there. They will still look for candidates who will give them the strong, punitive leadership they desire.
  • ust look at where the Tea Party has left the Republican establishment. The Tea Party delivered the House to the GOP in 2010, but ultimately left the party in an unresolved civil war. Tea Party candidates have challenged moderates and centrists, leaving the GOP caucus divided and chaotic.
  • Authoritarians may be a slight majority within the GOP, and thus able to force their will within the party, but they are too few and their views too unpopular to win a national election on their own.
  • the rise of authoritarianism as a force within American politics means we may now have a de facto three-party system: the Democrats, the GOP establishment, and the GOP authoritarians.
  • It will become more difficult for Republican candidates to win the presidency because the candidates who can win the nomination by appealing to authoritarian primary voters will struggle to court mainstream voters in the general election. They will have less trouble with local and congressional elections, but that might just mean more legislative gridlock as the GOP caucus struggles to balance the demands of authoritarian and mainstream legislators. The authoritarian base will drag the party further to the right on social issues, and will simultaneously erode support for traditionally conservative economic policies.
  • Norms around gender, sexuality, and race will continue evolving. Movements like Black Lives Matter will continue chipping away at the country's legacy of institutionalized discrimination, pursuing the kind of social change and reordering of society that authoritarians find so threatening.
  • The chaos in the Middle East, which allows groups like ISIS to flourish and sends millions of refugees spilling into other countries, shows no sign of improving. Longer term, if current demographic trends continue, white Americans will cease to be a majority over the coming decades.
  • t will be a GOP that continues to perform well in congressional and local elections, but whose divisions leave the party caucus divided to the point of barely functioning, and perhaps eventually unable to win the White House.
  • For decades, the Republican Party has been winning over authoritarians by implicitly promising to stand firm against the tide of social change, and to be the party of force and power rather than the party of negotiation and compromise. But now it may be discovering that its strategy has worked too well — and threatens to tear the party apart.
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Trump crosses a crucial line - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.
  • According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill. (A rare benefit of his disordered character is that his defensiveness and pettiness likely continue to limit the size of his personality cult.)
  • We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
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  • Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans
  • Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words.
  • ere I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word.
  • He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse
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We Know Enough About Omicron to Know That We're in Trouble - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • A lot has changed for Omicron in just two weeks. At December’s onset, the variant was barely present in Europe, showing up in 1 to 2 percent of COVID cases. Now it’s accounting for 72 percent of new cases in London, where everybody seems to know somebody with COVID.
  • The same exponential growth is happening—or will happen—in the United States too, just in time for the holidays.
  • Here is some simple math to explain the danger: Suppose we have two viruses, one that is twice as transmissible as the other. (For the record, Omicron is currently three to five times as transmissible as Delta in the U.K.
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  • And suppose it takes five days between a person’s getting infected and their infecting others. After 30 days, the more transmissible virus is now causing 26, or 64, times as many new cases as the less transmissible one.
  • Not every case will be mild, though, and even a small hospitalization rate on top of a huge case number will be a big number.
  • Now, as my colleague Ed Yong reports, Omicron could push a collapsing health-care system further into disaster. Hospitals are already dealing with the flu and other winter viruses. They’re already canceling elective surgeries.
  • If there are no changes to behavior or policy, this year’s winter wave would peak at about double the hospitalizations of last winter at its worst, and 20 percent more deaths, according to the most pessimistic of projections
  • The most optimistic projection sees a caseload similar to last winter’s, but hospitalizations and deaths at about half of where they were back then, assuming the vaccines keep up their very high protection against severe illness.
  • If that holds, it’s a “huge decrease,” Meyers says, and one that matches the assumptions of her team’s grimmer—but not grimmest—projections. When they modeled scenarios where vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization dropped by about that much, they saw a difference of tens of thousands of deaths.
  • Very preliminary data from South Africa’s largest health insurer suggest that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were 70 percent effective at preventing hospitalization from Omicron infections, down from 93 percent before.
  • Vaccine protection against severe illness should be more durable than it is against infection, but may still take a hit
  • The available evidence on Omicron’s inherent severity is likely to be biased in ways that make it appear more promising. First of all, hospitalizations lag infections.
  • Second, the first people infected may skew young and are thus more likely to have mild cases regardless of the variant
  • third, some of the mildness attributed to the virus may result instead from existing immunity. In South Africa, where doctors are reporting relatively low hospitalizations compared with previous waves, many cases are probably reinfections
  • The South Africa health-insurer data suggest that Omicron might carry a 29 percent lower risk of hospitalization than the original virus, when adjusted for risk factors including age, sex, vaccination status, and documented prior infection—but many prior infections may be undocumented, which would make the reduction in risk seem bigger than it really is. (A recent analysis of early U.K. cases found “at most, limited changes in severity compared with Delta.”)
  • Either way, in the short run, we will have a massive number of Omicron cases on top of a massive number of Delta cases. Together they will infect huge numbers of people, vaccinated or not
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What Was Stonehenge For? The Answer Might Be Simpler Than You Thought. - The New York T... - 0 views

  • While it was built at roughly the same time as the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Giza, we know far more about those Egyptian sites. Incomplete knowledge of Stonehenge has turned it into a riddle that is now part of its identity.
  • a new exhibition at the British Museum, “The World of Stonehenge,” which runs through July 17. The show strives to lessen the mystery around the monument by focusing on recent discoveries and putting them in the context of life in Britain, Ireland and northwestern Europe before, during and after Stonehenge’s construction.
  • He described the site as a mix between a town hall and a cathedral, where people mingled for both religious and social reasons.
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  • a structure that preceded Stonehenge: a stone circle built on the same spot some 500 years earlier, which, according to archaeologists, was a cemetery. It was constructed with large bluestone pillars — each of them transported from Wales, more than 200 miles away
  • Five centuries later, Stonehenge as we know it was built using some of those existing bluestones, as well as more than 80 towering “sarsen” stones, the monument’s vertical pillars, and horizontal lintels, or capping stones.
  • Each sarsen stone needed at least 1,000 people to transport it over a distance of 15 miles. The process took generations, and many were killed and maimed as a result, according to the exhibition wall text.
  • some of the pilgrims who helped build Stonehenge stayed at Durrington Walls, a nearby settlement which, at its peak, contained around 1,000 temporary houses.
  • Stonehenge was built at a time of drastic population decline and dispersal,
  • There were few, if any, villages, and society was “trying to create a sense of unity and collaboration among its members,” he explained.
  • Stonehenge was a “monument of remembrance,” he said, and an “expression of unity” that pulled people together in the pursuit of a common endeavor.
  • writing did not exist in England until the Romans arrived 2,500 years later — so there is no written history of Stonehenge and the people who put it up,
  • Nor did the people of prehistoric England leave any representations of human figures, said Wilkin, the curator. They had “an almost secretive attitude towards their religion,” perhaps with the intention of “excluding others from it,” so their spiritual practices are undocumented as well.
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Opinion | The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez You Don't Know - The New York Times - 0 views

  • First impressions are hard to erase, and the obstinacy that made Ms. Ocasio-Cortez an instant national celebrity remains at the heart of her detractors’ most enduring critique: that she is a performer, out for herself, with a reach that exceeds her grasp.
  • In straddling the line between outsider and insider, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is trying to achieve the one thing that might just shore up her fractured party: building a new Democratic coalition that can consistently draw a majority of American support.
  • In some ways, she’s asking the obvious questions: What’s broadly popular among a vast majority of Americans, and how can I make it happen? To achieve progress on these issues, she has sought common ground in places where her peers are not thinking to look. Her willingness to forge unlikely alliances, in surprisingly productive places, has opened a path to new voters — for her party, her ideas and her own political ambitions if she ever decides to run for higher office.
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  • Since 2016, there have been two competing visions for the Democratic Party. One is the promise that began with Barack Obama of a multiracial coalition that would grow stronger as America’s demographics shifted; the other is the political revolution championed by Bernie Sanders as a way to unite nonvoters with the working class
  • Ms. Ocasio-Cortez bridges the gap between the two
  • what’s clear is that at a time when Democrats are struggling, she is quietly laying the groundwork to build a coalition broader than the one she came to power with, unafraid to take risks along the way.
  • After five years in Congress, she has emerged as a tested navigator of its byzantine systems, wielding her celebrity to further her political aims in a way few others have.
  • Three terms in, one gets the sense that we’re witnessing a skilled tactician exiting her political adolescence and coming into her own as a veteran operator out to reform America’s most dysfunctional political body.
  • To grasp what sets Ms. Ocasio-Cortez apart from many of her colleagues, you have to understand where she finds allies
  • In 2019, she and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas considered joining forces to write a bill that would bar former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists. Asked why she would consider an alliance with someone so loathed by liberals, she said, “I will swallow all of my distaste in this situation because we have found a common interest.”
  • It was a window into the politician she would become: pragmatic and results-driven, willing to work with people she considers her political adversaries, at least on legislation that appeals to her base
  • She has attributed the success of these efforts at least in part to her role as the second most powerful Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, which she said has “opened many windows” for collaboration.
  • while these bills may seem like small victories, they are more than that because, in a sense, she is redefining what bipartisanship looks like in Washington.
  • For decades, bipartisanship has meant bringing together moderates, lobbyists and establishment insiders to produce watered-down legislation unpalatable to many voters in both political partie
  • What Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is doing is different; she’s uniting politicians on the fringes of American politics around a broadly popular set of policies.
  • Americans in both parties overwhelmingly say that they don’t trust the government to do the right thing and that donors and lobbyists have too much sway over the legislative process.
  • more than 8 in 10 Americans believe politicians “are more focused on fighting each other than on solving problems.” One-fifth of respondents said lack of bipartisan cooperation was the biggest problem with the political system.
  • Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s efforts to reach out to Republicans are offering what a sizable portion of Americans want from Congress: a return to getting things done.
  • The few policy matters on which progressives and conservatives align often boil down to a distrust of politicians and of big corporations, particularly technology companies and pharmaceutical giants.
  • Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has shrewdly made those causes her passion, building alliances with conservative colleagues interested in holding these industries accountable.
  • Last spring, she cosponsored a bill with, among others, Brian Fitzpatrick, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, and Matt Gaetz, the Florida rabble-rouser who has become one of Mr. Trump’s most steadfast allies. The legislation would bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks, a measure that as of the fall of 2022 was supported by nearly 70 percent of voters across party lines.
  • On Gaza, too, she has been willing to buck other members of her party to pursue an agenda that a majority of voters support. She was one of the first Democrats to call for a cease-fire; within weeks, nearly 70 percent of Americans said Israel should call one and try to negotiate with Hamas.
  • In March, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was accosted by a handful of protesters who demanded that she call Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.
  • Less than three weeks later, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did accuse Israel of genocide and chastised the White House for providing military aid to the country while it blockaded Gaza. “If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in a speech on the House floor, “open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.”
  • Last month, she voted against providing additional funding for Israel. Those were unpopular positions in Congress, where unconditional support for the country remains the norm, but they put her in line with a majority of Democratic voters.
  • These stances haven’t been enough to quell the doubts from a faction of the left that helped get her elected. Over the past few weeks, some have accused her of caving in to pressure from moderate Democrats
  • . Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has taken much of the heat from leftist activists who see her as a symbol of the contradictions and compromises inherent in the political system. It may not be realistic to expect absolute purity from her; she is, after all, a politician. But these critiques overlook the promise of what she’s doing behind the scenes.
  • Democratic pollsters and strategists are searching for ways for Mr. Biden to win back Muslims and Arab Americans in swing states such as Michigan and Georgia, recent college graduates who hoped to have their student debt forgiven, immigrant-rights activists and Latinos.
  • Some of the betrayal these voters feel was hardly the president’s fault; he was hampered on student loan debt by a federal judiciary stacked with judges sympathetic to conservative legal arguments, and Congress refused to pass the comprehensive immigration bill he supported in 2021, which would have provided legal status to as many as 11 million undocumented immigrants.
  • A more gifted orator might have been able to make the structural impediments in his way clear to voters, while also putting forth a proactive vision for dismantling the core problems baked into our politics.
  • In that, someone like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Mr. Biden for re-election in 2023, may be able to help. She’s the Democratic Party’s most charismatic politician since Barack Obama and its most ardent populist since Bernie Sanders.
  • she can offer voters something more substantial than a hollow rebuke of Trumpism
  • Last month, when the journalist Mehdi Hasan asked her how she’d respond to “a young progressive or Arab American who says to you, ‘I just can’t vote for Biden again after what he’s enabled in Gaza,’” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said a vote for Mr. Biden didn’t necessarily mean an endorsement of all his policies. “Even in places of stark disagreement, I would rather be organizing under the conditions of Biden as an opponent on an issue than Trump,” she said. It was a shrewd political maneuver, designed to distance herself from Democrats who support Israel unconditionally, while meeting voters — some of whom have lost family members in Gaza — where they are
  • There are, of course, limits to this strategy. Some on the left see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Mr. Biden as a betrayal of progressive values, particularly in the wake of the climbing death toll in Gaza.
  • The moderate Republicans who turned out for Mr. Biden in 2020 might shrink from a Democratic Party led by someone they consider an outspoken progressive.
  • But for every moderate or leftist voter lost with a strategy like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, the Democratic Party may be able to win someone new — from the pool of disillusioned Americans who feel shut out of the political process.
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Trump's Campaign Has Lost Whatever Substance It Once Had - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign was, among other things, one of the most impressive displays of branding on a large scale, in a short time, ever. There were hats. There were flags. And above all, there were slogans.
  • “Make America Great Again.” “Build the wall.” “Lock her up.” And later, “Drain the swamp,” which Trump conceded on the stump that he’d initially hated. No matter: Crowds loved it, which was good enough for Trump to decide that he did, too.
  • One peculiarity of Trump’s 2024 campaign is the absence of any similar mantra. At some recent rallies, neither Trump nor the audience has even uttered “Build the wall,” once a standard. Crowds are reverting instead to generic “U-S-A” chants or, as at a recent Phoenix rally, “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!,” which has a winning simplicity but doesn’t have the specificity and originality of its predecessors.
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  • In their place, Trump’s stump speech has become dominated by grievances about the wrongs he believes have been done to him and his promises to get even for them. It doesn’t quite create the festive atmosphere of eight years ago, when many attendees were clearly having a great time. Where the new, more prosaic feeling lacks the uplift of the past, though, it has still managed to generate enough enthusiasm
  • The lack of catchy slogans might not matter if they were just slogans. But in 2016, they were a symbol of Trump’s willingness to talk about things that other candidates, including other Republicans, shied away from.
  • Regarding the war in Gaza, he has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the conflict to end quickly—but on Israel’s terms.
  • He had several such policy positions, including breaking with the bipartisan consensus on free trade, pledging to protect Social Security and Medicare, and claiming to have opposed the Iraq War from the start.
  • The focus on the wall also showed that he was willing to deploy (putatively) “commonsense” ideas that other politicians weren’t. This helped Trump to appeal not just to Republicans but to disaffected voters of all stripes
  • Where Trump once trumpeted his appointment of justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he is now fumblingly trying to formulate a position on abortion that doesn’t alienate either his base or swing voters, mostly relying on ambiguity
  • Trump is emphasizing fewer big transformational ideas compared with 2016. His promises are a scattershot collection of ideas targeted at particular segments of the electorate: ending taxes on salary earned from tips, defending TikTok (a platform he once tried to ban), declassifying files on John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rolling back fossil-fuel regulations. Although he promises to clamp down on the border and deport undocumented immigrants, you won’t catch a “Round ’em up” chant at his rallies. And Project 2025, his allies’ proposal to overhaul the federal government by massively expanding political patronage, doesn’t lend itself to a bumper sticker.
  • Trump allots a great deal of his stump speech to mocking Biden as incoherent and senile (sometimes awkwardly) while also warning that Biden’s administration has made the United States a failed nation, and that his reelection could be fatal to the country. The disconnect between the images of Biden as doddering fool and as evil schemer is one that Republicans have struggled to reconcile but that Trump has concluded doesn’t need resolving.
  • Grievance is not a new note at Trump rallies, but four and eight years ago, he used to talk about other people’s grievances and promise to redress them. Now the grievances are largely his own
  • One big problem for Clinton was the criticism that she had no compelling goal for her candidacy other than that she wanted to be president. Trump’s campaign now is about nothing so much as his desire to be president.
  • Even Project 2025 is about the accumulation of executive power itself, rather than any particular policy goal
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