30 May 20
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30 May 20
Frank Rich | Trump vs. Twitter Is No Contest
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "The only winner in this latest dumpster fire is Trump. The bland 'get the facts' labels Twitter is affixing to a couple of his tweets are but tiny snowballs buried in his daily avalanche of lies."
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "The only winner in this latest dumpster fire is Trump. The bland 'get the facts' labels Twitter is affixing to a couple of his tweets are but tiny snowballs buried in his daily avalanche of lies."
hortly after Twitter declined to delete Donald Trump’s conspiracy-tinged smears of Joe Scarborough, the company added a fact-checking link to subsequent tweets Trump used to push falsehoods about voting by mail — the first time it had done so — and Trump fired back, on Twitter, with a threat to “strongly regulate” or “close down” social-media companies. Is Twitter’s response in the public interest, or are they creating another distraction that plays into Trump’s hand?
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s czar, is a profile in courage only in comparison to the self-serving and spine-free Mark Zuckerberg, who has done more to facilitate Trump’s rise than any other media titan, Rupert Murdoch included. Meanwhile, Trump and his crybaby adherents can once again parade themselves as victims, preposterously claiming to be deprived of “free speech,” while the White House orchestrates another photo op in which Trump affixes his comic-book signature to a legally spurious executive order.
Trump’s real motive for his Scarborough sideshow, as always these days, is to distract our attention from actual victims — those who have succumbed to COVID-19 in an avoidable acceleration of American carnage that happened on his indolent watch. Though he has not expended an iota of emotion over the 100,000 who have died since March, he concocted a rip-roaring spectacle to dramatize his concern over the death of the woman whom Scarborough did not murder 19 years ago. On a Memorial Day weekend when many noted that the COVID body count exceeded the number of American combat casualties in Vietnam and the Korean War combined, Trump served up a buffet of alternative programming: tweets suggesting that Nancy Pelosi be silenced with duct tape, attacking Stacey Abrams’s physical appearance, and mocking Joe Biden for wearing a mask. He did stop short of calling Biden a pedophile — a tactic wielded by Trumpists against Hillary Clinton last time around, in the so-called “pizzagate” conspiracy — but then again Donald Trump Jr. had already done so on Instagram two weeks earlier.
Even were Twitter to take a far sterner stance on Trump and his accomplices, it wouldn’t matter. His followers are well past being interested in checking out any facts. Of all recent polls, none was more revelatory than this week’s Morning Consult finding that even now, even after repeated clinical tests showed that hydroxychloroquine increased the risk of death for COVID-19 patients, 41 percent of Republicans still support its use. If you are looking for further proof that Trumpism is a death cult, look no further.
As the election inches nearer, anything can happen. One of the wittier tweets of recent days was sent forth by Stuart Stevens, the GOP political strategist turned Never Trumper, who suggested that “Trump is moving into the late Elvis stage of his presidency. Everyone around him trying to make as much money as they can fast,” with doctors “giving him whatever he orders up.” A more sober take was posted Thursday morning in an essay titled “The Psychopath in Chief” by Tony Schwartz, who has been observing and thinking about Trump since collaborating with him on The Art of the Deal. Schwartz argues, powerfully and with facts, that he and many of the rest of us have been underestimating Trump’s destructive powers by focusing on his narcissistic personality disorder: “As I once did up close, we can observe every day which psychopathic traits Trump manifests in his behavior. The highly regarded Hare Psychopathy Checklist enumerates 20 of them. By my count Trump clearly demonstrates 16 of the traits and his overall score is far higher than the average prison inmate.”
Joe Biden apologized for saying, in an interview with “The Breakfast Club” host Charlamagne tha God, that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Does the stumble hurt his candidacy?
This is another story that Trump, his allies, and the so-called liberal media all inflated for escapist entertainment as the pandemic death toll approached 100,000. Biden made a lame wisecrack, he apologized for it, and as “stumbles” go, it is no more likely to hurt his candidacy than any of his other countless gaffes. If anything, it distinguished him from Trump on two salient personality attributes: Biden believes in apologizing for mistakes, and he at least aspires to a sense of humor. Trump never smiles, never laughs, and never tries to crack a joke unless you count his nasty mockery of the physical appearance of opponents, a disabled reporter, and virtually all women.
It was ludicrous as well as infuriating to watch Vichy Republicans like Nikki Haley and Ari Fleischer join the Fox News gang in taking contrived umbrage at Biden’s misfired gag. Haley, for instance, said that she “struggled” in dealing with his remarks and found them “gut wrenchingly condescending.” Neither she nor other GOP hacks show any signs of struggling with Trump’s weekly acts of racism, including most recently an all-out election-year war against minority voting rights and a regular public demeaning of female reporters of color at press conferences. What does it say about Fleischer that he went berserk over Biden’s words but said nothing when Trump last December said that Jews have “no choice” to vote for him so they protect their money from taxes? What does it say about Nikki Haley that she had a public meltdown about a misfired gag on a talk show at a time when a black man was hunted down in Georgia like a victim in a Jordan Peele horror movie and another was murdered in broad daylight in Minneapolis? And what does it say about those non-Fox Sunday morning talk shows that, as Brian Klaas of the Washington Post summarized it, “focused on Joe Biden’s recent bungled joke” but ignored Trump’s “false accusation of murder”?
The author, playwright, and activist Larry Kramer died yesterday, at 84. How do you view his legacy?
Larry was an American hero. The phrase “speaking truth to power” is bandied about too loosely, but it applies to him as much as anyone I’ve witnessed in my adult lifetime. Yet he didn’t actually speak truth to power, he shouted it — angrily, relentlessly — and with uncommon bravery. That’s the only way he could get the attention of governmental and media leaders who went AWOL during a devastating plague. Thousands of Americans, many of them gay men, were dying of AIDS, often alone and shunted out of public view. Almost no one in power wanted to help them. Ronald Reagan did nothing and said nothing (though the Reagans quietly secured an experimental drug regimen, denied to most others, for their dying friend Roy Cohn). Ed Koch, the mayor of New York, which was an epicenter of the virus, did nothing. The New York Times, then edited by a notorious homophobe, Abe Rosenthal, covered the outbreak in real time as tardily and egregiously as it had the Holocaust. Even as late as 1985 — four years after the first reported AIDS case — Rosenthal tacked an addendum on to my review of the original Public Theater production of Larry’s landmark drama, The Normal Heart, trying to discredit the play’s accuracy.
More than anyone else, it was Larry’s high-decibel shouts that forced these callous elites and America to pay attention. He never let up. He truly believed that one voice could make a difference, and he made that difference at a moment when life and death held in the balance.
Of course he could be exasperating. On ABC’s Nightline, Ted Koppel turned off his mike during one vociferous appearance. I’ll never forget being a fellow panelist on Charlie Rose, then broadcast live, when Larry was so infuriated by what he saw as public television’s inadequate AIDS coverage that he chastised some of Channel Thirteen’s gay executives by name. But he could also be hilarious — he’d not been a Hollywood screenwriter for nothing — and he could be generous and loving to all of those around him he had chewed out in a rage the week before, Anthony Fauci among them.
Over the last decades of his life, Larry had the kind of illnesses that would defeat most people. But he never gave up, never stopped working, never stopped shouting about the causes that mattered. His final words in the last, brief email I received from him, on May 1, banged out in bold face and large type, were “we’ve got to get rid of trump asap!”
News broadcasts in Hong Kong this week about China's plan to impose national security legislation. (photo: Lam Yik Fei/NYT)
Trump Announces Unprecedented Action Against China
Nicole Gaouette and Maegan Vazquez, CNN
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump launched a blistering attack on Beijing Friday, naming misdeeds that range from espionage to the violation of Hong Kong's freedoms, and announced a slew of retaliatory measures that will plunge US-China relations deeper into crisis."
READ MORE
Nicole Gaouette and Maegan Vazquez, CNN
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump launched a blistering attack on Beijing Friday, naming misdeeds that range from espionage to the violation of Hong Kong's freedoms, and announced a slew of retaliatory measures that will plunge US-China relations deeper into crisis."
READ MORE
A community-wide protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was held May 26 after the death of George Floyd. (photo: Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Getty Images)
Police Violence in America: Six Years After Ferguson, George Floyd's Killing Shows Little Has Changed
Tom McCarthy, Guardian UK
McCarthy writes: "After the African American teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, the epidemic of police violence against people of color in the US captured national and global attention, for a time."
READ MORE
Tom McCarthy, Guardian UK
McCarthy writes: "After the African American teenager Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, the epidemic of police violence against people of color in the US captured national and global attention, for a time."
READ MORE
A banner stating 'STILL HERE' hangs on the side of a Planned Parenthood building in St. Louis. (photo: Lawrence Bryant/Reuters)
Missouri's Last Abortion Clinic to Stay Open After Year-Long Legal Battle
Reis Thebault and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Missouri has narrowly avoided a return to a time before Roe v. Wade after an independent arbiter ruled that its last operating abortion clinic can continue offering the procedure."
READ MORE
Reis Thebault and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Missouri has narrowly avoided a return to a time before Roe v. Wade after an independent arbiter ruled that its last operating abortion clinic can continue offering the procedure."
READ MORE
Men sit in the sun in the health ward at an immigrant detention center. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
ICE Detainee Who Sued His Jailers Was Swiftly Deported. Now He's Missing
Matt Katz, Gothamist
Katz writes: "On May 15th, an undocumented Mexican immigrant locked up in a private New Jersey jail plagued by COVID-19 filed a class-action lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its contractor, CoreCivic, arguing that all 114 detainees held there were in mortal danger unless immediately freed."
Matt Katz, Gothamist
Katz writes: "On May 15th, an undocumented Mexican immigrant locked up in a private New Jersey jail plagued by COVID-19 filed a class-action lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its contractor, CoreCivic, arguing that all 114 detainees held there were in mortal danger unless immediately freed."
Four days later, without advance notice to the coalition of attorneys representing him, the 30-year-old laborer was put on a morning flight out of Newark Liberty International Airport to Laredo, Texas. At 5:44 pm that day, a federal judge intervened, ordering a stop to his deportation due to his pending legal claims seeking permission to stay in the United States.
Fifty-eight minutes later, Hector Garcia Mendoza was nonetheless escorted across the border. Garcia Mendoza’s attorneys say Mexican immigration authorities told them he was dropped off in the notoriously dangerous town of Nuevo Loredo, Mexico, where kidnappings are common.
Now, a week-and-a-half later, Garcia Mendoza is effectively missing. He has not called his family in either the United States nor Mexico. Lawyers have contacted shelters in Mexico and immigrant advocacy groups in Texas, but no one has seen him. Eighteen members of Congress are describing the expedited efforts to get Garcia Mendoza out of the country as “seemingly deliberate.”
“There’s a really serious concern that he could’ve been kidnapped by now,” said one of his attorneys, Ilana Herr, of the American Friends Service Committee in New Jersey.
Because he had been living in the United States for about 10 years, kidnappers might falsely believe Garcia Mendoza has access to money, according to a relative who didn’t want her name used because she fears retaliation due to her own immigration status. The relative has called hospitals, the Red Cross, and police in Mexico looking for him. She doesn’t believe he is carrying money or a cell phone.
“In Mexico, at the border, anything could happen—anything,” she said. “I just want to hear his voice say, ‘Hey Negrita’—he used to call me Negrita—‘Hey Negrita, I’m okay.’”
This relative also worries about Garcia Mendoza’s health. In the days leading up to his deportation, Garcia Mendoza complained to his attorney that he suffered from shortness of breath and chest pain, but did not receive adequate medical treatment inside the detention center. It’s unknown if he has COVID-19, but he has suffered from asthma since he was a boy, and the Elizabeth Contract Detention Center where he was held has at least 18 cases of coronavirus among its detainees, one of the worst breakouts in ICE detention nationwide. The day before Garcia Mendoza filed suit, a CoreCivic corrections officer there died of the disease.
Nationwide, 1,327 ICE detainees are positive for the virus, representing more than half of those tested. Scores of immigrants who contracted coronavirus in ICE detention have been deported, effectively exporting the disease to other countries.
In the class-action lawsuit filed with three other named plaintiffs, Garcia Mendoza described the converted warehouse where he was held as “filthy” and lacking cleaning supplies, PPE, and sufficient food. He said he washed his hands just with hot water because there wasn’t enough soap. The dorms are cramped, with just a few feet separating men eating and sleeping, and do not allow for social distancing.
A spokesperson for CoreCivic defended its care of detainees but said it does not comment on lawsuits.
Attorneys said his deportation occurred in an extraordinarily expeditious manner, raising suspicions that he was removed from the country as an intimidation and retaliation tactic by ICE. The class-action lawsuit he led was filed by a group of attorneys from the Immigrant Defense Project, American Friends Service Committee, and New York University School of Law Immigrant Rights Clinic, and was far wider in scope than dozens of others filed during the coronavirus crisis because it demanded every detainees’ release.
“If he got deported a few days after the lawsuit was signed, what else can you think?” asked his relative.
ICE’s field office in Newark said in a statement that his deportation had “no connection to lawsuit.” Contrary to the timeline laid out by his attorneys about when the federal judge intervened in the case, ICE said: “There was no judicial impediment in place when detainee was removed.”
In court papers, the agency said he both waived his right to an attorney and his right to an appeal at his most recent deportation hearing on May 4. But his attorneys said that at the time of his court appearance, Garcia Mendoza could not find an attorney and didn’t realize what he was agreeing to. Unlike those charged with crimes, immigrants in civil deportation proceedings lack a constitutional right to an attorney. And unlike detained immigrants from New York, not all of those in New Jersey get a government-funded lawyer.
At the hearing, Garcia Mendoza’s translator was on the phone, and he had trouble hearing the Spanish translation, his attorneys say. He suffered a head injury after an assault several years ago in Freehold, NJ, where he lived, and lost hearing in one ear. His attorneys argued that the assault made him eligible for a U-Visa, given to immigrant victims of crime.
Since the coronavirus pandemic, ICE shut down access to the detention center’s law library and a hotline to First Friends of New York and New Jersey, an advocacy group. Lawyers say that further limited Garcia Mendoza’s ability to fight his case.
A motion to force ICE to find Garcia Mendoza and return him to the United States was rejected by a federal judge this week. Attorneys argued that ICE violated a court order temporarily blocking the deportation, and they are considering an appeal.
Garcia Mendoza was born on July 4th, 1991, in Oaxaca. He was abandoned by his mother shortly after birth and his father was largely absent, so he was raised by extended family, according to his relative. As a child he was a bit hyperactive, and he didn’t get good grades, but he had a generous spirit, the relative said.
Garcia Mendoza entered the country without a valid visa about a decade ago in order to work. He settled in a Mexican enclave in Freehold, NJ, where there is a large community of Mexicans from Oaxaca. He worked in construction and landscaping, shared an apartment with friends, and attended the local Catholic church.
How Garcia Mendoza ended up in ICE custody is of concern to his attorneys. He was arrested in March for stealing a metal pipe in order to sell it to a scrapyard, and for lying about his identity during a prior encounter with police, according to Freehold Borough Police Captain Ronnie Steppat.
The charges did not warrant a trip to the county jail, but did lead to his detention and an order of deportation by ICE. That’s because when Garcia Mendoza left the police station, ICE agents were waiting for him in the parking lot. A state Attorney General directive forbids local police from tipping ICE off when undocumented immigrants are charged with low-level crimes.
“We did not call ICE on this guy,” Steppat said. “If he was picked up in our parking lot I have no idea how they got there.”
Immigration activists say ICE agents are known to lurk around town, and the undocumented population fears the local police. “We heard over the years the Freehold Police have a history of disbursing immigrant workers at the job-seeking sites, and doesn’t have a trusted relationship with the immigrant community there,” said Chia-Chia Wang, advocacy director for American Friends Service Committee in New Jersey.
After Garcia Mendoza’s deportation, an overnight vigil was held at the Elizabeth detention center, before it was broken up by police, and a rally was held in Nuevo Laredo. Eighteen Democratic congressional representatives also wrote a letter to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. “We are alarmed by ICE’s seemingly deliberate actions to expedite Mr. GarcÃa Mendoza’s removal despite ongoing legal proceedings and the apparent violation of Mr. GarcÃa Mendoza’s right to due process,” the letter said.
Meanwhile, his relative is waiting by the phone. “I won’t go anywhere. I will stay here waiting for his call,” she said.
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. (photo: Justin Tang/Canadian Press)
Trudeau: Canadians Watching US Unrest and Police Violence in 'Shock and Horror'
Leyland Cecco, Guardian UK
Cecco writes: "Canadians are watching unrest and police violence in the United States in 'shock and horror,' Justin Trudeau said on Friday - but the prime minister cautioned that his country also has entrenched problems with racism."
Leyland Cecco, Guardian UK
Cecco writes: "Canadians are watching unrest and police violence in the United States in 'shock and horror,' Justin Trudeau said on Friday - but the prime minister cautioned that his country also has entrenched problems with racism."
The city of Minneapolis has been rocked by a third night of violent protests over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, after a white police officer knelt on his neck as he lay on the ground following arrest.
“Many Canadians of diverse backgrounds are watching, like all Canadians are, the news out of the United States with shock and with horror,” Trudeau told reporters at a daily briefing.
“Anti-black racism – racism – is real. It’s in the United States but it’s also in Canada and we know people are facing systemic discrimination, unconscious bias and anti-black racism every single day,” said Trudeau, calling on the country to “stand together in solidarity” against racial hate. “We have work to do as well in Canada.”
Racial inequities continue to persist throughout the country – a grim reality that is often apparent during interactions with police.
In December 2018, the province of Ontario released a landmark report that found black residents in Toronto – the country’s largest city – are 20 times more likely to be shot dead by the police than white residents.
“It’s a very Canadian tradition to speak in platitudes, to refer to the underground railroad and to speak about Canada as a haven and a place that acknowledges its past mistakes,” said Robyn Maynard, author of Policing Black Lives. “But we continue to see similar structural harms and structural kinds of violence as we do in places where leaders make more overtly vitriolic statements towards black communities.”
Last month, 26-year-old D’Andre Campbell was shot dead by police inside his own home, north of Toronto, after Campbell himself called 911.
Earlier this week, the family of Regis Korchinski-Paquet said a police officer shoved the young woman over the balcony of the family’s 24th-floor apartment, where she fell to her death. The case is currently under investigation by an arms-length police watchdog.
Maynard also pointed out the coronavirus pandemic continues to have a disproportionate impact on black and indigenous residents, who are overrepresented in the country’s prison population.
“We continue to see prisons and jails being epicentres of outbreaks,” she said. “Yet there is failure on the part of the federal government to meaningfully release to release prisoners.”
Trudeau’s unprompted remarks marked a notable departure for a leader who has gone to great lengths to avoid irritating his US counterpart, Donald Trump.
Canadian prime ministers have traditionally refrained from discussing political and social turmoil in the US – Canada’s main ally and largest trading partner.
Justin Trudeau has long spoken about the need to tackle racism, but his re-election campaign was marred by pictures of him in blackface as a young man.
'It's the perfect moment to create a 21st-century jobs corps, with climate starring front and center.' (photo: Annette Riedl/Getty Images)
Coronavirus Put Millions Out of Work. A 21st-Century Climate Corps Could Be the Answer.
Sierra Garcia, Grist
Garcia writes: "The graduation speeches have been broadcast over Zoom, the final papers submitted digitally, and the diplomas shipped to students' homes. The next step is less certain."
Sierra Garcia, Grist
Garcia writes: "The graduation speeches have been broadcast over Zoom, the final papers submitted digitally, and the diplomas shipped to students' homes. The next step is less certain."
Across the nation, what typically comes after the pomp and circumstance for high school or college graduates — finding a job — is now a far more daunting prospect. Tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs in recent months, and ending shelter in place orders won’t bring them all back anytime soon.
It’s the perfect moment to create a 21st-century jobs corps, with climate starring front and center.
The concept is hardly original: Putting jobless Americans back to work with projects that need to be done was the goal of dozens of public works programs that were part of the New Deal of the 1930s, including the environmentally focused Civilian Conservation Corps. (Those programs’ legacy is unfortunately marred by their racism and sexism.) More recently, a national jobs program has emerged as a cornerstone of the Green New Deal and a plank of former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s climate platform.
But the idea’s progressive origins hardly necessitates that it suffer the same partisan strangulation in the Senate as other attempts at COVID-19 relief. After all, as recently as 2018 — before the phrase “Green New Deal” became widely known — nearly two-thirds of Republicans polled approved of the plan’s substance, which includes a green jobs guarantee. Support for a wide-reaching government jobs program has started gaining traction recently from unexpected sources like billionaire Mark Cuban, a member of Trump’s “Opening Our Country” council.
The price tag would undoubtedly be a partisan sticking point, but we are living in extraordinary times: Mere months ago, the thought of Republicans signing off on $1,200 government checks for nearly half the country was laughable. And any climate jobs program worth its salt would pay for itself over the long term by reducing carbon emissions and beefing up climate-resilient infrastructure, both of which will reduce the financial damage from future climate disasters. Projects could include things like planting mangroves, carbon-sucking coastal trees that shield coastlines from the worst effects of hurricanes and storms. Or building out low-carbon transit infrastructure. Or reclaiming wetlands, which act as natural water quality filters. There are hundreds of jobs to be done, and millions of Americans to fill them.
Across the world, other countries have already begun enacting jobs programs to nurse their economies back to health with climate-smart projects. In Pakistan, more than 63,000 workers who lost jobs in the pandemic were reemployed as tree planters in April. And New Zealand, which has made international headlines for one of the world’s most effective COVID-19 responses, is pushing a jobs package focused on rehabbing ecosystems to help people hurting from job losses in New Zealand’s normally bustling tourist sector.
Trump promised in January to join international efforts to plant a trillion trees, and measly (and disingenuous) as that is, it can be optimistically viewed as an acknowledgment that some climate-fighting actions are, frankly, not that hard to do. The New Deal jobs programs did not ultimately revive the U.S. economy during the Great Depression, and in today’s globalized world, it would be foolhardy to lay the credit or blame for the future job market on any single policy or program. But what a new jobs program could do is provide dignity and skills to millions of Americans who will otherwise languish in indefinite unemployment or join the gig-economy rat race. It would also get desperately needed projects off the ground for both preventing further climate change and protecting us from its effects.
Graduation speeches always urge college students, with their diplomas in hand, to go out into the world and create a better future. A modern jobs program would make that path easy.
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