February 7, 2017

Trumps loose talk about Muslims gets weaponized in court against travel ban

Source: Washington Post

Throughout Donald Trumps campaign and now into the first weeks of his presidency, critics suggested that he cool his incendiary rhetoric, that his words matter. His defenders responded that, as Corey Lewandowski said, he was being taken too literally. Some, like Vice President Pence, wrote it off to his colorful style. Trump himself recently explained that his rhetoric about Muslims is popular, winning him standing ovations."

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The states of Washington and Minnesota, which sued to block Trumps order, are citing the presidents inflammatory rhetoric as evidence that the governments claims its not a ban and not aimed at Muslims are shams.

In court papers, Washington and Minnesotas attorneys general have pulled out quotes from speeches, news conferences and interviews as evidence that an executive order the administration argues is neutral was really motivated by animus toward Muslims and a desire to harm a particular group.

His words, the two states say in their brief, show that the President acted in bad faith in an effort to target Muslims. The courts, they say, have both the right and duty to examine Trumps true motives.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/02/07/words-matter-trumps-loose-talk-about-muslims-gets-weaponized-in-court-against-travel-ban/?utm_term=.9adcea272856

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The DOJ is essentially arguing that President Trump is publicly lying and should be ignored. Instead, the court should accept the pretext given by the federal government for targeting Muslims, er engaging in extremer vetting.

If the DOJ wins, then all a government needs to do is offer a non-discriminatory pretext that the court must accept regardless of actual evidence of animus.

February 7, 2017

Vox - The big lesson of Trump's first 2 weeks: resistance works

The question is whether the people can continue to maintain the pressure or will we eventually succumb to facism and fear. You know Trump is ready to go full Wag the Dog at the slightest hint of a terrorist attack involving someone with a foreign sounding name. I am sure the terrorist attack in Canada got Trump's hopes up, but it was committed by a Trump fan on a mosque.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/6/14473482/resistance-works-anti-trump-protests

It’s easy to miss amid Donald Trump’s frenetic pace of activity and nonstop media coverage, but the most important story in American politics right now isn’t about what Trump is doing: It’s that the opposition is working.

The millions of people who marched in Washington and other cities around the world on inauguration weekend and then demonstrated again at airports the following weekend are making a concrete difference in the world. So are the tens of thousands who’ve called members of Congress or showed up in person at their events.

Trump is getting things done, but all presidents do that. Look at what he’s not getting done. A Republican-controlled Congress bowed to public outrage over an attempt to water down an ethics office. Trump dramatically downscaled his own executive order barring entry to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries. He’s having unprecedented difficulty getting his Cabinet nominees confirmed, even though the Senate’s rules have changed to make confirmations easier than ever. Conservatives in Congress have put their big plans to privatize Medicare and public lands on hold. And the drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act is running into very big trouble.

None of this is based on the discipline and self-restraint on the part of the White House. It’s thanks to bold acts of resistance. The result is lives have been saved, many more lives have been demonstrably improved, and the proven template for future success has been created.

February 6, 2017

How Trump's policies and rhetoric are forging alliances between U.S. Jews and Muslims

Ironic that Trump has unified American Muslims and Jews . . . against him with his Anti-Semitic and Islamophobic rhetoric, policies and staff.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-jew-muslim-2017-story.html

Donald Trump may not be able to forge peace in the Middle East, but he is doing wonders for relations between Jews and Muslims in the United States.

Jewish and Muslim activists in the United States are forging alliances like never before in reaction to the president’s rhetoric and action toward Muslim immigrants.

Many Jewish organizations have interpreted Trump’s executive order banning entry by citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries as a call to arms. Jewish delegations turned out en masse for a 10,000-strong demonstration Sunday night in New York. (“Granddaughter of Holocaust survivors standing with refugees, Muslims immigrants,” read one sign.)

Almost every day in New York this last week there was an interfaith conference or prayer service — involving Christian groups as well as Muslims and Jews — devoted to the current crisis over predominantly Muslim immigrants and refugees.

February 4, 2017

Is The Trump Administrations Federal Website Purge a Modern Day Nazi Book Burning?

In the 1930s, the Nazi conducted ceremonial book burnings. The books targeted for burning were those viewed as being subversive or as representing ideologies opposed to Nazism. These included books written by Jewish, pacifist, Religious, classical liberal, anarchist, socialist, and communist authors, among others:

Last month, a meteorologist explained why he was trying to preserve federal climate data before Trump takes office in the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/12/13/why-im-trying-to-preserve-federal-climate-data-before-trump-takes-office/?utm_term=.b9ee14e410a8

President-elect Donald Trump has been a purveyor of conspiracy theories when it comes to climate science for years. He’s called human-caused climate change a Chinese hoax and refused to acknowledge the existence of the California drought, promising farmers there that, as president, he would “open up the water.” He’s vowed to eliminate the EPA and the Energy Department and “cancel” the Paris Agreement.

Since the election, Trump has been relentlessly converting those anti-science messages into action, wrongly believing that doubling down on fossil fuel production will help boost long-term economic growth. (That Trump’s pick for secretary of state — ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson — is among the least extreme of his appointments is chilling.)

According to a Sierra Club report, when he assumes the presidency on Jan. 20, Trump will be the only head of state in the world to deny mainstream climate science — and yes, that even includes Kim Jong Un of North Korea.

In recent weeks, by surrounding himself with outspoken allies of the fossil fuel industry, promising cuts to NASA’s earth science research and sending a threatening questionnaire to Energy Department staff, there is no remaining doubt that Trump is serious about overtly declaring war on science. This isn’t a presidential transition. It’s an Inquisition. It’s a 21st-century book burning.

These fears turned out to be prophetic as the Trump administration has begun a campaign of deleting climate data from federal websites, as well as other data deemed liberal or subversive.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-epa-climatechange-idUSKBN15906G

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama's climate change initiatives.

The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA's communications team to remove the website's climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. The page could go down as early as Wednesday, the sources said.

"If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear," one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it.

The sources asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

February 3, 2017

Propublica - How Jeff Sessions Helped Kill Equitable School Funding in Alabama

A lawsuit in the 1990s had Alabama poised to fund poor black school districts as fairly as wealthy white schools. As state attorney general, Sessions fought the effort passionately.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-jeff-sessions-helped-kill-equitable-school-funding-in-alabama

In the early 1990s, children across Alabama’s large rural stretches still attended faltering public schools, some with exposed wiring and rainwater leaking into classrooms. The education was in disrepair, too. Teachers couldn’t assign homework for lack of textbooks. A steel mill announced it would no longer hire local high school graduates because most tested below the eighth grade level. In short, Alabama’s most economically disadvantaged students, primarily black children and those with disabilities, were missing out on a basic education.

Then, for a moment, change seemed possible. A civil-rights lawsuit challenging the system for funding Alabama’s schools succeeded, and the state’s courts in 1993 declared the conditions in the poor schools a violation of Alabama’s Constitution. Gov. Guy Hunt, who had battled the litigation, accepted defeat, and vowed to work with the courts to negotiate a solution for equitably funding all of Alabama’s schools.

“This is a unique and timely opportunity to make historic improvements in Alabama’s public schools for our children,” Hunt said at a news conference in 1993, “and we will not miss this opportunity.”

Jeff Sessions had other ideas. Sessions, elected Alabama attorney general just a year after the courts had begun review of reform measures, didn’t think the state’s courts should have any role in deciding how Alabama educated its children. He hired expensive private lawyers to fight the findings of the court — first at the district level, later at the state Supreme Court level. He succeeded in removing a judge sympathetic to the plight of poor students from the case. He filed appeal after appeal, insisting he be heard even after the state’s highest court issued final decisions. He fought every effort by the court to require that schools in the state’s poorer communities be funded at the same levels as its wealthier ones.