Champion of Truth
“The ruling was based on very narrow grounds that ducked whether or not DACA was originally legal (the Trump administration had claimed that it was not), or whether Trump was within his rights to eliminate it (there were good reasons to believe he was). Instead of answering those questions, today’s ruling focused on the question of whether Trump followed the requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act when he ended DACA.”
“President Donald Trump is not “fit for office” and doesn’t have “the competence to carry out the job,” his former national security adviser John Bolton told ABC News in an exclusive interview.
In an explosive new book about his 17 months at the White House, Bolton characterizes Trump as “stunningly uninformed,” ignorant of basic facts and easily manipulated by foreign adversaries.”
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“”There really isn’t any guiding principle that I was able to discern other than what’s good for Donald Trump’s reelection,” Bolton told ABC News chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz.
“He was so focused on the reelection that longer-term considerations fell by the wayside,” he added.”
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“Bolton was Trump’s longest serving national security adviser, accompanying the president to his two summits with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, his infamous meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and several key meetings with China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other world leaders on the sidelines of major events, like the G-20.
He departed the White House on Sept. 10 — saying he submitted his resignation letter after months of disagreement with the president, who countered that he fired Bolton first.”
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“Trump pushed back on Bolton’s criticism and defended his foreign policy decisions late Wednesday, telling the Wall Street Journal, “He is a liar,” and, “Everyone in the White House hated John.”
A hard-liner on North Korea who has advocated for a preemptive strike on the country’s nuclear facilities, Bolton was particularly aghast at Trump’s diplomatic outreach to Kim, writing, “I was sick at heart over Trump’s zeal to meet with Kim Jong Un.”
Asked about Trump’s three meetings with Kim in particular, Bolton told ABC News, “There was considerable emphasis on the photo opportunity and the press reaction to it and little or no focus on what such meetings did for the bargaining position of the United States.””
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“Trump has continually touted his strong relationship with Kim despite any progress on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and renewed military tensions between the North and America’s ally, South Korea.
Bolton blasts what he sees as Trump’s confusion of personal relationships with good foreign relations in his book”
“Bloomberg’s support grew more than three times as fast in markets where he advertised than where he didn’t, and in the week before his disastrous debate performance on Feb. 19, he registered 15 percent support in these markets compared with 6 percent in other markets.”
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“On its own, Bloomberg’s experiment shows TV advertising can’t swing an entire election. It could not overcome Bloomberg’s lack of charisma or skill as a debater. Bloomberg’s campaign did show, however, that advertising can have a measurable, double-digit impact on the polls and vault a candidate into the top tier. That’s not nothing.”
“protests, at their most basic level, raise awareness about issues that might not yet be in the mainstream. This might not sound all that important, but research by political scientist Deva Woodly of The New School shows that protest movements can fundamentally alter the way we talk — and think — about a specific issue.”
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“There does seem to be some consensus in the literature that many protests are successful in spurring institutional change, at least at the federal level.”
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“though protests may often be thought of as a last resort, they can also have important downstream consequences for elections. Wasow’s work and my own research shows that large, peaceful protests during the civil rights movement actually helped Democratic presidential candidates — a finding that Gillion and Stanford’s Sarah Soule have observed in more recent protests as well.
But of course, as we also know from Wasow’s research, protests can have unintended consequences”
“this delay of a state primary election, among others, understandably triggered fears that other officials, potentially even Trump, might take advantage of the Ohio precedent to postpone or cancel November’s election if it appears that Trump is likely to be defeated.
The good news is that’s not allowed — or, at least, it’s not allowed unless Congress allows it to happen. A trio of federal laws set Election Day for presidential electors, senators, and US representatives as “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November.” If Republicans want to change this law, they will need to go through the Democratic House.
The 20th Amendment, moreover, provides that “the terms of the President and the Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January.” Thus, even if the election were somehow canceled, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s terms would still expire as scheduled — although, as explained below, the question of who would succeed them is devilishly complicated.
A more realistic threat, as the Nation’s Elie Mystal writes, is that state officials could use the extraordinary powers available to them during a major public health crisis to manipulate who is able to cast a ballot. It’s not hard to imagine a circumstance, for example, where the heavily Democratic counties of Miami-Dade and Broward, in Florida, are placed under a “shelter in place” order on Election Day, while residents of Republican counties in the panhandle are free to head to the polls.
But an outright cancellation of the election is unlikely in the extreme.”
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“The picture for presidential elections is slightly more complicated. A federal statute does provide that “the electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed, in each State, on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November,” so states must choose members of the Electoral College on the same day as a congressional election takes place.
That said, there is technically no constitutional requirement that a state must hold an election to choose members of the Electoral College. The Constitution provides that “each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” So a state legislature could theoretically decide to select presidential electors out of a hat. More worrisome, a legislature controlled by one party could potentially appoint loyal members of that party directly to the Electoral College.”
“The basic income suffers from a number of flaws it can’t get away from. The first is that it’s either too big, so it’s unaffordable, or it’s too small, so it doesn’t make a difference. In Europe, certainly in the UK, most of the basic income schemes that are advanced here, we’re talking about something equivalent to $85 a week. While that’s going to make a difference to some people, it’s not going to fundamentally change the life choices of the people it’s supposedly targeting.
If the objective is to emancipate people, then [a UBI] has to be close to $1,000, possibly $2,000 a month. At those levels, we’re talking about tripling the federal budget. No one’s really considering that a reasonable proposal. So it suffers from a sort of catch-22.”
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“There are lots of factors that cause people not to reach their potential that are not solvable through a reasonable individual cash distribution, because they are social infrastructure.
Social infrastructure services flow naturally to basic needs. If low-cost social housing is available, it flows to people who need it rather than people who can afford a larger house. We have a free national health care service here in the UK — people don’t just turn up at the doctor for fun, because it’s free. They go when they’re sick. People go into education programs when they need retraining. Basic social infrastructure is accessed by people at the time of need.”
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“We defined seven basic categories of essential services that meet three criteria. For someone to meet their full potential, they need safety, opportunity, and participation. So that is individual safety, opportunity to use their skills and abilities to improve their own lives, and ability to participate in the democracy.
What does that take, in a modern sense? They need somewhere safe to live, access to food, health care access, education, access to digital information and communication systems, and access to a transport system. Our seventh category we call legal, by which we mean access to the institutional mechanisms of democracy and society.”
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“The proposal for universal basic services is not a proposal for universal [public] provision. It is not that everybody will live in highly energy-efficient, low-cost, government-provided housing. It is that access to housing is available.
If you go on to the average university campus, you will see what looks very much like a universal basic services system. The university is providing a room in a shared environment, where you share a kitchen with someone. If you’ve got more money and you want to go and live in independent housing, then you move out into a house down the street.”
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“There’s still a private market and it would probably be the majority of consumption, but the expectation is that you’re creating a base floor within that market. And that would stimulate the quality of the market and enable more innovation in the rest of the marketplace.”
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“We modeled our original proposal. For the vast majority of the population, everybody earning median incomes and below, there’s a net positive. People right at the bottom are having something like 60 to 80 percent of their normal costs replaced by public services. That leaves them money in their pocket.
Around the median, there’s a small net benefit, and then at the higher end, we’re talking about net contributions that are in the dozens of dollars a month. But to put society on a sustainable path, we need to get to a higher level of responsibility and pay for the society we want. That means slightly higher levels of tax.”
“A three-word slogan is not a detailed policy agenda, and not everyone using the slogan agrees on the details. The basic idea, though, is less that policing budgets should be literally zeroed out than that there should be a massive restructuring of public spending priorities.”
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“there are people, like Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale, who favor police abolition. In practice, however, while Vitale supports legalizing a wide range of currently illegal activity, he still envisions things like “sex work that’s regulated just like any other business.” At some level, the way business regulation works is that if you’re sufficiently defiant of the rules, the police will lock you up. And under questioning from Mother Jones’s Madison Pauly, Vitale is cagey about questions like how we are going to handle murders in a zero-police society.”
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“The “defund” slogan dances ambiguously between abolition-type schemes and just saying officials should spend less money on policing at the margins. The Black Lives Matters #DefundThePolice explainer page argues that “law enforcement doesn’t protect or save our lives. They often threaten and take them.” By contrast, a Justin Brooks op-ed at the Appeal titled “Defund the Police Now” is an extended argument for spending somewhat less money on crime control and somewhat more on social services, as a win-win resulting in less crime, less punishment, and less police violence against civilians.”
“The group found 26 studies on the use of rubber bullets around the world, documenting a total of 1,984 injuries. Fifteen percent of the injuries resulted in permanent disability; 3 percent resulted in death. When the injuries were to the eyes, they overwhelmingly (84.2 percent) resulted in blindness.”
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““Police are not required to document their use of rubber bullets, so there is no national data to show how often they’re used,” USA Today reports. But rubber bullet injuries have been piling up during the protests.”
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“Rubber bullets are hardly the only problematic “nonlethal” weapon used against protesters. Flash-bang grenades, or stun grenades, are another tool being deployed by police that explode with a bright light and incredibly loud sound to get people to scatter from an area. How loud? 160 to 180 decibels, according to Physicians for Human Rights.
These noise levels are “not safe for any period of time” according to the American Speech-Language Hearing Association. They can damage the eardrums and cause temporary deafness. The light can temporarily blind a person. Pieces of the grenade may fly off as shrapnel, injuring a person. These grenades can also burn people at close range. The North Carolina Supreme Court has even declared them a weapon of “mass death and destruction.””
” Believers in boogaloo ideology — a focus on visible gun ownership, with some advocating for a violent civil war against the federal government — have shown up to protests in Minneapolis, Las Vegas, and other cities, sometimes wearing Hawaiian shirts (based on a movement in-joke) and carrying large guns.”
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“members of the boogaloo movement are unlikely to be the majority of those arrested at either the protests or the violence. In Minneapolis, Seattle, Cleveland, Dallas, Atlanta, and elsewhere, the majority of those arrested during the protests and violence haven’t been outside agitators traveling the country to start fights and cause violence. Rather, they’ve been people largely from the same places where they are arrested.”
“We found that after controlling for education, crime, walkability, and many other metrics you might find on Zillow, homes in black neighborhoods are devalued by 23 percent. About $48,000 per home, about $156 billion in lost equity. Now, that’s the money people use to start businesses and to send their kids to college. In fact, that would have paid for more than 4 million black-owned businesses, based on the average startup costs that blacks had to start businesses. They would have funded more than 8 million four-year degrees at a public institution. It’s the money that people use to uplift themselves.
So throughout history, black people have been denied housing opportunities and have been subjected to predatory lending and other unsavory practices that have really disenfranchised them. And so when these police incidents occur, a lot of this frustration comes from not having an ability to influence policy. And a lot of that starts with a lack of homeownership.”
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“The devaluation goes beyond housing. We also did a study examining businesses in black communities. To get a sense of the quality, we scraped Yelp data from all businesses and compared those in black-majority communities and in white-majority spaces. We found a similar finding: Businesses owned by people of color in black-majority neighborhoods actually scored higher on Yelp, but received less revenue because of the neighborhood’s perception. People will bypass quality in black neighborhoods simply because it’s the black neighborhood.”