Trum's First of Many Flip Flops; There Will be No Mass Deportations!
Nov 23, 2016 15:32:43 #
ANALYSIS
Trump’s tweets deftly drive media toward distraction
BY CATHLEEN DECKER
Donald Trump’s Twitter wars with media sites and cultural institutions have been panned by opponents as overreactions by a thin-skinned president-elect who prefers rhetorical skirmishing to soberly building his administration.
But Trump is extending what helped him win the presidency — a battle against elites that secured the loyalty of v**ers outside the coastal metropolises, delivered directly to his supporters by bypassing the media he considers reflexively unfair.
It is also a tactic of distraction that he is likely to use throughout the t***sition and, come January, as the nation’s first Twitter president.
Over the weekend, Trump’s social-media blast against the cast of “Hamilton” deftly turned attention away from bad news — a $25-million settlement in a fraud case brought by former students at Trump University and accusations of conflicts between his business and political careers.
On Tuesday morning, a series of similar tweets criticizing the New York Times shifted attention away from new controversies over whether he or those close to him had used his influence to bolster his overseas business interests.
His tweets may have a downside, but unarguably deliver a benefit: Even as Trump works to staff a government that will inevitably include establishment figures some of his backers abhor, he is reasserting his disruptive bona fides to those who support him the most.
Trump’s use of Twitter as a communications engine is only one of the ways he has, since his surprise e******n, worked to maintain a direct line to v**ers.
On Monday, he released a video describing his plans for his first days as president. He asserted that his t***sition was moving “very smoothly, efficiently and effectively” to hire “patriots.”
“My agenda will be based on a simple core principle: putting America first,” he said. “Whether it’s producing steel, building cars or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here on our great homeland, America, creating wealth and jobs for American workers.”
The video was the first of many, he indicated, promising to “make America great again for everyone — and I mean everyone.”
Trump is hardly the first president to try to bypass traditional gatekeepers: President Obama often appeared on nontraditional formats while granting relatively few interviews to traditional media.
For Trump, that approach has become supercharged. He has not held a news conference since July; since he claimed victory in the early-morning hours of Nov. 9, he has sat for an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” one with the Wall Street Journal and, on Tuesday, with the New York Times. But he has offered no formal remarks or held a news conference, unusual for a president-elect.
That has given even more prominence to Trump’s social-media comments and the brief, tweet-sized remarks he made over the weekend as he bade farewell to visitors vying for Cabinet positions.
“The real deal,” he said of former Marine Gen. James Mattis as he departed Saturday. “He’s just a brilliant, wonderful man.”
Trump did not adopt Twitter as a preferred communications vehicle because of the campaign. He used the micro-messaging system well before he became a candidate (often to express views that were exactly the opposite of what he would later say while campaigning for president).
Twitter became a potent tool for candidate Trump because it dovetails with the demands of today’s political environment: delivering brief, blunt statements that because of their pithiness seem authentic — t***hful or not.
“He’s been very successful in developing an image of himself by tweeting,” said Pablo Barbera, a USC assistant professor of international relations who has studied the use of social media by politicians.
“In contrast to Hillary Clinton, who had a very professional look … Trump was more raw and authentic, and it helped him.”
In his “60 Minutes” interview, Trump called Twitter “a great form of communication” and bragged of adding 100,000 followers on the Thursday after the e******n. (He has 15.7 million Twitter followers; Clinton has 11.2 million.)
“I think that social media has more power than the money they spent [on ads], and I think maybe to a certain extent, I proved that,” he said.
It’s not been without stumbles: At times, Trump’s use of Twitter to nurse grievances can interfere with his broader goals. A month before the e******n, for example, Trump used Twitter to falsely accuse a former Miss Universe of starring in a sex tape. (Trump chastised her, at the time and during the campaign, for her weight when he ran the pageant.)
In the final weeks of the campaign, his top aides appeared to have taken control of his Twitter account to avoid controversies.
Days after the e******n, Trump tweeted criticism about protesters objecting to his victory, then followed the blast a few hours later with an uncharacteristic message praising them for exercising their right to free speech.
But much of the time his tweets seem strategic, both in the topics he addresses and those he avoids. He has not, for example, tweeted about the outbreaks of post-e******n violence against gays, women and others by people purporting to be his supporters. He has not tweeted any comment on the weekend meeting of white nationalists in Washington who praised his victory.
He has dev**ed more than half a dozen tweets since e******n day to criticizing reporting by the New York Times, a favorite target of Trump and his followers. The tweets included denials of statements that Trump clearly had made.
And he took on the multicultural cast of “Hamilton” — accusing it of harassing the incoming vice president, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
The incident began when Pence arrived at the play Friday night to a mixture of applause and boos. The cast did not join in the booing, instead distancing themselves from it. After the show, actor Brandon Victor Dixon read a statement from the stage thanking Pence for attending but adding that the cast represented “the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us.”
He told Pence he hoped the show “has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”
Pence later said that he was not offended by the booing or the statement and praised the show. But Trump began issuing tweets the next morning.
He insisted that “the cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated , should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior.”
Pence “was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing,” he said. “This should not happen!”
For Trump, teeing off on the cast allowed him to appear to oppose the New York elite he’s a member of — given his Fifth Avenue penthouse and self-described billionaire status — on behalf of someone who isn’t. The gesture symbolically aligned him with supporters who can’t afford a ticket to the hit show and who view New York as disdainful toward them.
“That’s a perfect culture war,” said UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser, who has studied candidates and social media.
“What Twitter allows him to do is speak directly to his base in the most stirring terms possible. Picking a fight with ‘Hamilton’ is picking a fight with the coastal intelligentsia. It’s a perfect platform for continuing to show his v**ers why he sticks up for them against the people they feel are down on them.”
Trump’s tweets about the play overshadowed an earlier tweet in which he defended settling the Trump University fraud lawsuit. And the one-way nature of Trump’s tweets meant he didn’t have to have to confront follow-up questions. Over the weekend, when a reporter shouted a question about Trump University, Trump did not respond.
Studies of other politicians who have used Twitter to communicate with their public have shown that is part of its appeal: it offers bite-sized news releases, delivered without any expectation of a back-and-forth.
Politicians from other countries who have relied on Twitter have moderated their comments once they took office. None of them, however, was Donald Trump.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, he nodded in the direction of becoming “more restrained,” but then defended his use of Twitter.
“It’s a modern form of communication,” he said. “There should be nothing you should be ashamed of. It’s — it’s where it’s at.” cathleen.decker
@ latimes.com
Twitter: @cathleendecker
ANDREW GOMBERT European Pressphoto Agency
PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump warmed up to staff at the New York Times shortly after criticizing the paper and canceling his meeting with them.
Trump’s tweets deftly drive media toward distraction
BY CATHLEEN DECKER
Donald Trump’s Twitter wars with media sites and cultural institutions have been panned by opponents as overreactions by a thin-skinned president-elect who prefers rhetorical skirmishing to soberly building his administration.
But Trump is extending what helped him win the presidency — a battle against elites that secured the loyalty of v**ers outside the coastal metropolises, delivered directly to his supporters by bypassing the media he considers reflexively unfair.
It is also a tactic of distraction that he is likely to use throughout the t***sition and, come January, as the nation’s first Twitter president.
Over the weekend, Trump’s social-media blast against the cast of “Hamilton” deftly turned attention away from bad news — a $25-million settlement in a fraud case brought by former students at Trump University and accusations of conflicts between his business and political careers.
On Tuesday morning, a series of similar tweets criticizing the New York Times shifted attention away from new controversies over whether he or those close to him had used his influence to bolster his overseas business interests.
His tweets may have a downside, but unarguably deliver a benefit: Even as Trump works to staff a government that will inevitably include establishment figures some of his backers abhor, he is reasserting his disruptive bona fides to those who support him the most.
Trump’s use of Twitter as a communications engine is only one of the ways he has, since his surprise e******n, worked to maintain a direct line to v**ers.
On Monday, he released a video describing his plans for his first days as president. He asserted that his t***sition was moving “very smoothly, efficiently and effectively” to hire “patriots.”
“My agenda will be based on a simple core principle: putting America first,” he said. “Whether it’s producing steel, building cars or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here on our great homeland, America, creating wealth and jobs for American workers.”
The video was the first of many, he indicated, promising to “make America great again for everyone — and I mean everyone.”
Trump is hardly the first president to try to bypass traditional gatekeepers: President Obama often appeared on nontraditional formats while granting relatively few interviews to traditional media.
For Trump, that approach has become supercharged. He has not held a news conference since July; since he claimed victory in the early-morning hours of Nov. 9, he has sat for an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” one with the Wall Street Journal and, on Tuesday, with the New York Times. But he has offered no formal remarks or held a news conference, unusual for a president-elect.
That has given even more prominence to Trump’s social-media comments and the brief, tweet-sized remarks he made over the weekend as he bade farewell to visitors vying for Cabinet positions.
“The real deal,” he said of former Marine Gen. James Mattis as he departed Saturday. “He’s just a brilliant, wonderful man.”
Trump did not adopt Twitter as a preferred communications vehicle because of the campaign. He used the micro-messaging system well before he became a candidate (often to express views that were exactly the opposite of what he would later say while campaigning for president).
Twitter became a potent tool for candidate Trump because it dovetails with the demands of today’s political environment: delivering brief, blunt statements that because of their pithiness seem authentic — t***hful or not.
“He’s been very successful in developing an image of himself by tweeting,” said Pablo Barbera, a USC assistant professor of international relations who has studied the use of social media by politicians.
“In contrast to Hillary Clinton, who had a very professional look … Trump was more raw and authentic, and it helped him.”
In his “60 Minutes” interview, Trump called Twitter “a great form of communication” and bragged of adding 100,000 followers on the Thursday after the e******n. (He has 15.7 million Twitter followers; Clinton has 11.2 million.)
“I think that social media has more power than the money they spent [on ads], and I think maybe to a certain extent, I proved that,” he said.
It’s not been without stumbles: At times, Trump’s use of Twitter to nurse grievances can interfere with his broader goals. A month before the e******n, for example, Trump used Twitter to falsely accuse a former Miss Universe of starring in a sex tape. (Trump chastised her, at the time and during the campaign, for her weight when he ran the pageant.)
In the final weeks of the campaign, his top aides appeared to have taken control of his Twitter account to avoid controversies.
Days after the e******n, Trump tweeted criticism about protesters objecting to his victory, then followed the blast a few hours later with an uncharacteristic message praising them for exercising their right to free speech.
But much of the time his tweets seem strategic, both in the topics he addresses and those he avoids. He has not, for example, tweeted about the outbreaks of post-e******n violence against gays, women and others by people purporting to be his supporters. He has not tweeted any comment on the weekend meeting of white nationalists in Washington who praised his victory.
He has dev**ed more than half a dozen tweets since e******n day to criticizing reporting by the New York Times, a favorite target of Trump and his followers. The tweets included denials of statements that Trump clearly had made.
And he took on the multicultural cast of “Hamilton” — accusing it of harassing the incoming vice president, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence.
The incident began when Pence arrived at the play Friday night to a mixture of applause and boos. The cast did not join in the booing, instead distancing themselves from it. After the show, actor Brandon Victor Dixon read a statement from the stage thanking Pence for attending but adding that the cast represented “the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us.”
He told Pence he hoped the show “has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”
Pence later said that he was not offended by the booing or the statement and praised the show. But Trump began issuing tweets the next morning.
He insisted that “the cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated , should immediately apologize to Mike Pence for their terrible behavior.”
Pence “was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing,” he said. “This should not happen!”
For Trump, teeing off on the cast allowed him to appear to oppose the New York elite he’s a member of — given his Fifth Avenue penthouse and self-described billionaire status — on behalf of someone who isn’t. The gesture symbolically aligned him with supporters who can’t afford a ticket to the hit show and who view New York as disdainful toward them.
“That’s a perfect culture war,” said UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser, who has studied candidates and social media.
“What Twitter allows him to do is speak directly to his base in the most stirring terms possible. Picking a fight with ‘Hamilton’ is picking a fight with the coastal intelligentsia. It’s a perfect platform for continuing to show his v**ers why he sticks up for them against the people they feel are down on them.”
Trump’s tweets about the play overshadowed an earlier tweet in which he defended settling the Trump University fraud lawsuit. And the one-way nature of Trump’s tweets meant he didn’t have to have to confront follow-up questions. Over the weekend, when a reporter shouted a question about Trump University, Trump did not respond.
Studies of other politicians who have used Twitter to communicate with their public have shown that is part of its appeal: it offers bite-sized news releases, delivered without any expectation of a back-and-forth.
Politicians from other countries who have relied on Twitter have moderated their comments once they took office. None of them, however, was Donald Trump.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, he nodded in the direction of becoming “more restrained,” but then defended his use of Twitter.
“It’s a modern form of communication,” he said. “There should be nothing you should be ashamed of. It’s — it’s where it’s at.” cathleen.decker
@ latimes.com
Twitter: @cathleendecker
ANDREW GOMBERT European Pressphoto Agency
PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump warmed up to staff at the New York Times shortly after criticizing the paper and canceling his meeting with them.
Nov 23, 2016 15:33:28 #
Trump’s effect on rights abroad and foreign aid
His early choices rattle the global development community
BY ANN M. SIMMONS
Over the last eight years, the Obama administration elevated engagement in global development as “a key pillar of American foreign policy.”
“If you care about human dignity,” Obama said at this summer’s White House Summit on Global Development, “if you care about reducing violence and terrorism, if you care about fighting c*****e c****e, if you care about addressing ine******y and creating trade and prosperity that works for all and not just some, then you’re going to have to pay attention to development and you’re going to have to make an investment.”
With the e******n of Donald Trump, those priorities seem set to shift.
Some development experts hope a Trump administration will continue the Republican tradition of promoting foreign assistance as a means to promote global health, democracy and economic growth around the world.
“President George W. Bush had no record of being pro-Africa or pro-foreign assistance and he left an absolutely stellar record,” said Todd Moss, chief operating officer and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration.
“We have a long tradition of American leadership on national security, and development is a foundation for all of the human progress we’ve seen over the last half-century,” Moss said. “There are obviously disputes over what’s the best way to do that and we will soon see what ideas are to come out of [Trump’s] administration. It’s too early to say anything with certainty.”
But the president-elect’s initial choices and the uncertainty over the makeup of his Cabinet are rattling some development professionals.
Trump has so far made his pick for three key posts: Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general, Michael Flynn for national security advisor and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) for CIA director.
Sessions, a former U.S. attorney, has vowed to crack down on i*****l i*********n and has been criticized in the past for making r****t comments. Flynn has called Islam a “cancer” and a “political ideology” masquerading as a religion. Pompeo, a businessman turned politician, shares Trump’s views on issues such as using controversial tactics for interrogation and pulling the plug on the landmark Iran nuclear agreement.
Many in the global development community are now concerned about what lies ahead for everything from refugee resettlement and women’s reproductive rights to foreign aid, and U.S. efforts to combat poverty, hunger and disease worldwide.
Foreign aid
Trump said very little about his foreign aid policy during the campaign, but did promise not to partake in nation-building and insisted during his p**********l announcement that “it is necessary that we invest in our infrastructure and stop sending aid to countries that h**e us.”
“Given what [Trump] said on the campaign trial about the need for our closest allies to pay their fair share, I don’t think it bodes well for foreign aid in general, and certainly not for development aid,” said Kal Raustiala, professor of law and director of the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA. “We might anticipate some more radical changes. His rhetoric has not been promising.”
U.S. foreign aid, which is currently less than 1% of the federal budget, has gone toward helping lift millions of people out of poverty, according to officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development. U.S.-sponsored programs are helping to boost the income of small-scale farmers in developing nations, improve the nutrition of women and children, and fight malaria and HIV/Aids.
Raustiala said continuing to help those in need is not just important for the humanitarian and moral reasons that have been held as a core aspect of U.S. foreign policy. It is also important for protecting U.S. interests and leadership on the world stage.
“If the U.S. is not an actively engaged member of the international community and assisting many countries with their development, somebody else will — and maybe in ways that are much less positive for us,” he said. “American engagement in the world is not about doing the world a favor. It’s been about securing our place and leadership in the world and engaging to ensure that a stable, liberal, rules-based order can persist, which is to everyone’s benefit.”
Refugees
During the p**********l campaign, Trump said he wants to stop taking in refugees fleeing violence in Syria and called for “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He later adjusted, saying he would consider allowing Muslims as long as they were “vetted strongly,” but the call for shutting out Muslims remains on his campaign website.
The U.S. is currently the world’s top resettlement country for refugees, and the Obama administration announced this year that it wants to increase the refugee intake next year to 110,000, up from 85,000.
Bipartisan legislation supporting refugees has recently been introduced to Congress, including the Middle East Refugee Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act that would provide an additional $1 billion in emergency funding for refugee protection, screening and resettlement. But advocates for refugees fear that such cooperation could end under Trump.
“We’re alarmed, because what’s going to happen for sure is that the system is going to be shaken up and the status quo will no longer be relevant,” said Neil Grungras, founder and executive director of the San Franscico-based Organization for Refuge, Asylum & Migration, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the world’s most vulnerable refugees. “The worst fear of the refugee community is that the Trump presidency will just stop the refugee program.”
Speaking from Ankara, Turkey, where his agency helps refugees present their cases for resettlement to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, Grungras said the anxiety was palpable.
“The refugees that are obviously at the end of the gun are Muslims,” Grungras said. “The level of desperation is indescribable for everybody. But L**T refugees could also be enormously hard hit.”
The U.S. funds more than half of UNHCR’s operations, and Trump has attacked the level of the U.S. contribution to the U.N.
“In a worst-case scenario … if the UNHCR is weakened and cannot process refugees, if it’s defunded, that mainstay of refugee protection is going to be harmed — and it may be very severely,” Grungras said.
Volunteer agencies that manage refugee resettlement in the U.S. also depend on government funding and could be forced to lay off staff if resources are cut. This could disrupt the processing of refugees already flowing through the resettlement pipeline, refugee advocates said.
Women’s rights
“Women around the world are alarmed,” said Francoise Girard, president of the International Women’s Health Coalition. “We’ve received many messages from all over the world following the e******n, expressing sadness, expressing shock, expressing anxiety and concern about the direction the U.S. government will take under a Trump administration.”
During the campaign, Trump promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who could potentially overturn federal legislation affirming a woman’s right to have an a******n. Such a move at home could have harmful reverberations worldwide, advocates said.
“The United States is of course a very important and influential country in global diplomacy,” Girard said. “It has also historically set the pace on women’s rights. What we’re afraid of [is] a regression on women’s sexual, reproductive and health rights.”
U.S. funding for programs such as the distribution of contraceptives in developing nations might also be at risk, and some rights advocates expect a renewed emphasis on abstinence until marriage as a method of HIV prevention, Girard said.
Human rights
Trump’s proposals to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally, possibly ban Muslims — and to potentially reintroduce the use of torture methods, such as waterboarding, during interrogations — have drawn widespread condemnation.
Human rights activists warned that promoting xenophobia, sexism and discrimination at home could embolden governments that the U.S. has criticized for such behavior to expand these practices, and they have called on Trump to reaffirm and abide by the principles the U.S. has up to this point promoted worldwide.
“From internment camps to the use of torture, we have seen disastrous results when those we elect to represent us flout the United States’ obligations to uphold human rights,” Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement. ann.simmons@latimes.com Twitter: @AMSimmons1
JOHN MOORE Getty Images
U.S. BORDER PATROL agents in San Luis, Ariz. Donald Trump’s proposals to build a wall along the border with Mexico and deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally have drawn widespread condemnation.
RICK LOOMIS Los Angeles Times
WORKERS unload cornmeal from the U.S. Agency for International Development in Dadaab, Kenya.
His early choices rattle the global development community
BY ANN M. SIMMONS
Over the last eight years, the Obama administration elevated engagement in global development as “a key pillar of American foreign policy.”
“If you care about human dignity,” Obama said at this summer’s White House Summit on Global Development, “if you care about reducing violence and terrorism, if you care about fighting c*****e c****e, if you care about addressing ine******y and creating trade and prosperity that works for all and not just some, then you’re going to have to pay attention to development and you’re going to have to make an investment.”
With the e******n of Donald Trump, those priorities seem set to shift.
Some development experts hope a Trump administration will continue the Republican tradition of promoting foreign assistance as a means to promote global health, democracy and economic growth around the world.
“President George W. Bush had no record of being pro-Africa or pro-foreign assistance and he left an absolutely stellar record,” said Todd Moss, chief operating officer and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration.
“We have a long tradition of American leadership on national security, and development is a foundation for all of the human progress we’ve seen over the last half-century,” Moss said. “There are obviously disputes over what’s the best way to do that and we will soon see what ideas are to come out of [Trump’s] administration. It’s too early to say anything with certainty.”
But the president-elect’s initial choices and the uncertainty over the makeup of his Cabinet are rattling some development professionals.
Trump has so far made his pick for three key posts: Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general, Michael Flynn for national security advisor and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) for CIA director.
Sessions, a former U.S. attorney, has vowed to crack down on i*****l i*********n and has been criticized in the past for making r****t comments. Flynn has called Islam a “cancer” and a “political ideology” masquerading as a religion. Pompeo, a businessman turned politician, shares Trump’s views on issues such as using controversial tactics for interrogation and pulling the plug on the landmark Iran nuclear agreement.
Many in the global development community are now concerned about what lies ahead for everything from refugee resettlement and women’s reproductive rights to foreign aid, and U.S. efforts to combat poverty, hunger and disease worldwide.
Foreign aid
Trump said very little about his foreign aid policy during the campaign, but did promise not to partake in nation-building and insisted during his p**********l announcement that “it is necessary that we invest in our infrastructure and stop sending aid to countries that h**e us.”
“Given what [Trump] said on the campaign trial about the need for our closest allies to pay their fair share, I don’t think it bodes well for foreign aid in general, and certainly not for development aid,” said Kal Raustiala, professor of law and director of the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA. “We might anticipate some more radical changes. His rhetoric has not been promising.”
U.S. foreign aid, which is currently less than 1% of the federal budget, has gone toward helping lift millions of people out of poverty, according to officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development. U.S.-sponsored programs are helping to boost the income of small-scale farmers in developing nations, improve the nutrition of women and children, and fight malaria and HIV/Aids.
Raustiala said continuing to help those in need is not just important for the humanitarian and moral reasons that have been held as a core aspect of U.S. foreign policy. It is also important for protecting U.S. interests and leadership on the world stage.
“If the U.S. is not an actively engaged member of the international community and assisting many countries with their development, somebody else will — and maybe in ways that are much less positive for us,” he said. “American engagement in the world is not about doing the world a favor. It’s been about securing our place and leadership in the world and engaging to ensure that a stable, liberal, rules-based order can persist, which is to everyone’s benefit.”
Refugees
During the p**********l campaign, Trump said he wants to stop taking in refugees fleeing violence in Syria and called for “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” He later adjusted, saying he would consider allowing Muslims as long as they were “vetted strongly,” but the call for shutting out Muslims remains on his campaign website.
The U.S. is currently the world’s top resettlement country for refugees, and the Obama administration announced this year that it wants to increase the refugee intake next year to 110,000, up from 85,000.
Bipartisan legislation supporting refugees has recently been introduced to Congress, including the Middle East Refugee Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act that would provide an additional $1 billion in emergency funding for refugee protection, screening and resettlement. But advocates for refugees fear that such cooperation could end under Trump.
“We’re alarmed, because what’s going to happen for sure is that the system is going to be shaken up and the status quo will no longer be relevant,” said Neil Grungras, founder and executive director of the San Franscico-based Organization for Refuge, Asylum & Migration, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the world’s most vulnerable refugees. “The worst fear of the refugee community is that the Trump presidency will just stop the refugee program.”
Speaking from Ankara, Turkey, where his agency helps refugees present their cases for resettlement to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, Grungras said the anxiety was palpable.
“The refugees that are obviously at the end of the gun are Muslims,” Grungras said. “The level of desperation is indescribable for everybody. But L**T refugees could also be enormously hard hit.”
The U.S. funds more than half of UNHCR’s operations, and Trump has attacked the level of the U.S. contribution to the U.N.
“In a worst-case scenario … if the UNHCR is weakened and cannot process refugees, if it’s defunded, that mainstay of refugee protection is going to be harmed — and it may be very severely,” Grungras said.
Volunteer agencies that manage refugee resettlement in the U.S. also depend on government funding and could be forced to lay off staff if resources are cut. This could disrupt the processing of refugees already flowing through the resettlement pipeline, refugee advocates said.
Women’s rights
“Women around the world are alarmed,” said Francoise Girard, president of the International Women’s Health Coalition. “We’ve received many messages from all over the world following the e******n, expressing sadness, expressing shock, expressing anxiety and concern about the direction the U.S. government will take under a Trump administration.”
During the campaign, Trump promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who could potentially overturn federal legislation affirming a woman’s right to have an a******n. Such a move at home could have harmful reverberations worldwide, advocates said.
“The United States is of course a very important and influential country in global diplomacy,” Girard said. “It has also historically set the pace on women’s rights. What we’re afraid of [is] a regression on women’s sexual, reproductive and health rights.”
U.S. funding for programs such as the distribution of contraceptives in developing nations might also be at risk, and some rights advocates expect a renewed emphasis on abstinence until marriage as a method of HIV prevention, Girard said.
Human rights
Trump’s proposals to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally, possibly ban Muslims — and to potentially reintroduce the use of torture methods, such as waterboarding, during interrogations — have drawn widespread condemnation.
Human rights activists warned that promoting xenophobia, sexism and discrimination at home could embolden governments that the U.S. has criticized for such behavior to expand these practices, and they have called on Trump to reaffirm and abide by the principles the U.S. has up to this point promoted worldwide.
“From internment camps to the use of torture, we have seen disastrous results when those we elect to represent us flout the United States’ obligations to uphold human rights,” Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement. ann.simmons@latimes.com Twitter: @AMSimmons1
JOHN MOORE Getty Images
U.S. BORDER PATROL agents in San Luis, Ariz. Donald Trump’s proposals to build a wall along the border with Mexico and deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally have drawn widespread condemnation.
RICK LOOMIS Los Angeles Times
WORKERS unload cornmeal from the U.S. Agency for International Development in Dadaab, Kenya.
Nov 23, 2016 15:34:50 #
Swastikas rattle New Yorkers
Residents rally against the N**i symbol’s increased use in graffiti since Donald Trump’s e******n.
BY BARBARA DEMICK
NEW YORK — Lisa Wolford picked up her 8-year-old twins at school Friday afternoon and had some time to k**l before rehearsals for their Christmas pageant, so she took them to the little playground near her apartment. They were in for a nasty surprise.
To her horror and the confusion of her children, somebody had spray-painted on the jungle gym something she would have never expected to see in Brooklyn Heights, especially not in this secluded neighborhood park: a pair of swastikas.
“It was surreal to see these children playing and laughing with the backdrop of the swastika,” said Wolford, 48. “I felt sick to my stomach.”
There have been 14 instances of swastika vandalism in New York City since the e******n, eight of them in the last week alone, according to news reports and the New York Police Department. No arrests have been made, police say. By way of comparison, last year there were about five to six incidents a month.
Civil rights groups attribute the N**i symbol’s proliferation to the triumphal mood of white nationalists who supported President-elect Donald Trump in the Nov. 8 e******n. In the incident last week in Brooklyn, vandals also scrawled “Go Trump” and other graffiti near the swastikas.
The incidents in New York reflect a surge in reports of h**e crimes and r****t graffiti around the U.S. The FBI reported a 6% increase in h**e crimes in 2015 from 2014, with most of the increase attributable to harassment of Muslims.
Such incidents are especially shocking to New Yorkers, who tend to take p***e in the diversity of a city whose harbor is watched over by the Statue of Liberty. New York is also home to about 1.1 million Jews, more than any other city outside Israel.
The Southern Poverty Law Center last week reported 701 incidents of harassment since e******n day, including 60 acts of vandalism involving the swastika.
Similar graffiti was reported Sunday on a New York subway car; somebody had used a permanent marker to draw a swastika on a seat and “Trump 2016” over a subway map.
Swastikas unaccompanied by references to the e******n were also found over the last two weeks in the dormitories of the New School, a progressive college famous for welcoming Jewish intellectuals fleeing Europe during and after World War II, and outside a synagogue in Crown Heights in Brooklyn.
Swastikas were carved into the elevator doors in the Greenwich Village apartment building of Brad Hoylman, a gay and Jewish state senator, last week. He also received a pamphlet in his mailbox Saturday with the warning, “False religious orders must perish…. That goes for Judaism.”
Hoylman blames Trump’s e******n and the appointment last week of Stephen K. Bannon as his strategic advisor. Bannon is outgoing executive chairman of Breitbart News, a purveyor of w***e s*********t “alt-right” ideology.
“That was an earthquake moment in American politics, and the aftershock is something we are experiencing in the form of bias, harassment and h**e crimes and a refusal by the president-elect to disavow his neo-N**i, white nationalist sympathizers,” Hoylman said.
When asked about neo-N**i supporters in a meeting with the New York Times on Tuesday, Trump said he disavows and condemns them. “It’s not a group I want to energize,” he said.
Trump has otherwise spoken little about the h**e-speech incidents since the e******n. In one interview with CBS’ Lesley Stahl, who asked him directly about attacks on Muslims and Latinos, he said, “I will say right to the cameras: ‘Stop it.’ ” He did not elaborate.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, has repeatedly defended his father-in-law against accusations of anti-Semitism, most recently in an interview with Forbes in which he said “if the country gives him a chance, they’ll find he won’t tolerate h**eful rhetoric or behavior.”
The swastika, adopted by the N**is from an ancient religious symbol found in Hinduism and Buddhism, has become so tarnished by its association with the Holocaust that its public display is banned in many parts of the world. There is no ban in the United States, but in New York state its use in graffiti elevates what would normally be a misdemeanor vandalism charge to aggravated harassment, a felony.
Melissa Garlick, civil rights counsel for the Northeast region of the Anti-Defamation League, says 45 states have laws governing h**e crimes, some of which include swastikas.
“The swastika is typically associated with anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews during World War II, but we call it an equal-opportunity h**e symbol … in that it is used as a universal symbol of h**e to instill fear and intimidation,” Garlick said.
At the Brooklyn playground, Wolford said her twins recognized the word “Trump” but not the swastika. “I had to give them a little history lesson later,” she said.
Wolford, a corporate communications executive, immediately took a photograph with her smartphone and distributed it to friends through social media. Within minutes, the photograph went v***l and New York police dispatched their h**e-crimes unit to investigate. By 9 p.m. — about four hours after Wolford sent out the photos — the graffiti had been painted over.
Over the weekend, children put flowers and heart-shaped decals on the jungle gym at the small park named for musician and activist Adam Yauch, the late Beastie Boys member.
By Sunday the neighborhood had organized a rally against h**e speech that attracted close to 1,000 people. The crowd included the Beastie Boys’ Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and actor Ben Stiller, as well as city and state officials, representatives of various ethnic communities, rabbis and imams.
“It was an amazing event where you really saw the diversity of the city on display,” said Jonathan Kopp, Wolford’s neighbor and an organizer of the rally.
Paraphrasing one of the imams who spoke at the rally, he said the graffiti had succeeded in one thing: “unifying Jews and Muslims.” barbara.demick
@ latimes.com
Twitter: BarbaraDemick
SPENCER PLATT Getty Images
HUNDREDS GATHERED Sunday for a rally at a Brooklyn Heights playground after it was defaced with spray-painted swastikas and “Go Trump” graffiti.
Residents rally against the N**i symbol’s increased use in graffiti since Donald Trump’s e******n.
BY BARBARA DEMICK
NEW YORK — Lisa Wolford picked up her 8-year-old twins at school Friday afternoon and had some time to k**l before rehearsals for their Christmas pageant, so she took them to the little playground near her apartment. They were in for a nasty surprise.
To her horror and the confusion of her children, somebody had spray-painted on the jungle gym something she would have never expected to see in Brooklyn Heights, especially not in this secluded neighborhood park: a pair of swastikas.
“It was surreal to see these children playing and laughing with the backdrop of the swastika,” said Wolford, 48. “I felt sick to my stomach.”
There have been 14 instances of swastika vandalism in New York City since the e******n, eight of them in the last week alone, according to news reports and the New York Police Department. No arrests have been made, police say. By way of comparison, last year there were about five to six incidents a month.
Civil rights groups attribute the N**i symbol’s proliferation to the triumphal mood of white nationalists who supported President-elect Donald Trump in the Nov. 8 e******n. In the incident last week in Brooklyn, vandals also scrawled “Go Trump” and other graffiti near the swastikas.
The incidents in New York reflect a surge in reports of h**e crimes and r****t graffiti around the U.S. The FBI reported a 6% increase in h**e crimes in 2015 from 2014, with most of the increase attributable to harassment of Muslims.
Such incidents are especially shocking to New Yorkers, who tend to take p***e in the diversity of a city whose harbor is watched over by the Statue of Liberty. New York is also home to about 1.1 million Jews, more than any other city outside Israel.
The Southern Poverty Law Center last week reported 701 incidents of harassment since e******n day, including 60 acts of vandalism involving the swastika.
Similar graffiti was reported Sunday on a New York subway car; somebody had used a permanent marker to draw a swastika on a seat and “Trump 2016” over a subway map.
Swastikas unaccompanied by references to the e******n were also found over the last two weeks in the dormitories of the New School, a progressive college famous for welcoming Jewish intellectuals fleeing Europe during and after World War II, and outside a synagogue in Crown Heights in Brooklyn.
Swastikas were carved into the elevator doors in the Greenwich Village apartment building of Brad Hoylman, a gay and Jewish state senator, last week. He also received a pamphlet in his mailbox Saturday with the warning, “False religious orders must perish…. That goes for Judaism.”
Hoylman blames Trump’s e******n and the appointment last week of Stephen K. Bannon as his strategic advisor. Bannon is outgoing executive chairman of Breitbart News, a purveyor of w***e s*********t “alt-right” ideology.
“That was an earthquake moment in American politics, and the aftershock is something we are experiencing in the form of bias, harassment and h**e crimes and a refusal by the president-elect to disavow his neo-N**i, white nationalist sympathizers,” Hoylman said.
When asked about neo-N**i supporters in a meeting with the New York Times on Tuesday, Trump said he disavows and condemns them. “It’s not a group I want to energize,” he said.
Trump has otherwise spoken little about the h**e-speech incidents since the e******n. In one interview with CBS’ Lesley Stahl, who asked him directly about attacks on Muslims and Latinos, he said, “I will say right to the cameras: ‘Stop it.’ ” He did not elaborate.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an Orthodox Jew, has repeatedly defended his father-in-law against accusations of anti-Semitism, most recently in an interview with Forbes in which he said “if the country gives him a chance, they’ll find he won’t tolerate h**eful rhetoric or behavior.”
The swastika, adopted by the N**is from an ancient religious symbol found in Hinduism and Buddhism, has become so tarnished by its association with the Holocaust that its public display is banned in many parts of the world. There is no ban in the United States, but in New York state its use in graffiti elevates what would normally be a misdemeanor vandalism charge to aggravated harassment, a felony.
Melissa Garlick, civil rights counsel for the Northeast region of the Anti-Defamation League, says 45 states have laws governing h**e crimes, some of which include swastikas.
“The swastika is typically associated with anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews during World War II, but we call it an equal-opportunity h**e symbol … in that it is used as a universal symbol of h**e to instill fear and intimidation,” Garlick said.
At the Brooklyn playground, Wolford said her twins recognized the word “Trump” but not the swastika. “I had to give them a little history lesson later,” she said.
Wolford, a corporate communications executive, immediately took a photograph with her smartphone and distributed it to friends through social media. Within minutes, the photograph went v***l and New York police dispatched their h**e-crimes unit to investigate. By 9 p.m. — about four hours after Wolford sent out the photos — the graffiti had been painted over.
Over the weekend, children put flowers and heart-shaped decals on the jungle gym at the small park named for musician and activist Adam Yauch, the late Beastie Boys member.
By Sunday the neighborhood had organized a rally against h**e speech that attracted close to 1,000 people. The crowd included the Beastie Boys’ Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz and actor Ben Stiller, as well as city and state officials, representatives of various ethnic communities, rabbis and imams.
“It was an amazing event where you really saw the diversity of the city on display,” said Jonathan Kopp, Wolford’s neighbor and an organizer of the rally.
Paraphrasing one of the imams who spoke at the rally, he said the graffiti had succeeded in one thing: “unifying Jews and Muslims.” barbara.demick
@ latimes.com
Twitter: BarbaraDemick
SPENCER PLATT Getty Images
HUNDREDS GATHERED Sunday for a rally at a Brooklyn Heights playground after it was defaced with spray-painted swastikas and “Go Trump” graffiti.
Nov 23, 2016 15:42:22 #
Trump had a lot to lose in fraud lawsuits
MICHAEL HILTZIK
Most of the press was preoccupied last week with a New York theater audience’s spontaneous decision to tell Vice President-elect Mike Pence what it thought of his record as a crusader against women’s reproductive and L**T rights. But the real news about the incoming administration was being made in court.
That’s where lawyers for President-elect Donald Trump reached a $25-million settlement of three lawsuits over Trump University. Trump depicted the settlement on Twitter as a victory.
“I settled the Trump University lawsuit for a small fraction of the potential award because as President I have to focus on our country,” he wrote Saturday morning.
New York Atty. Gen. Eric Schneiderman, who brought one of the lawsuits, would disagree that the settlement is “a small fraction of the potential award.” New York estimated that Trump University defrauded thousands of customers of a total of $40 million, and that Trump may personally have pocketed $5 million in profit. So the settlement comes to 62.5% of the total collected in the alleged s**m and five times Trump’s own alleged take. Nuisance lawsuits typically are settled for small potatoes, but a settlement of nearly two-thirds of the claim doesn’t fit into that category. It’s a sign that Trump faced genuine liability in these cases.
Schneiderman, in a statement announcing the deal, called it a “stunning reversal” by Trump, who had “fought us every step of the way, filing baseless charges and fruitless appeals and refusing to settle for even modest amounts of compensation for the victims of his phony university.”
Phony is right; one pillar of Schneiderman’s lawsuit was that Trump had not even bothered to get his “university” licensed by New York state as a bona fide educational institution. “More than 5,000 people across the country who paid Donald Trump $40 million to teach them his hard sell tactics got a hard lesson in bait-and-switch,” Schneiderman said when he filed his lawsuit in August 2013.
It is true, as Trump asserts, that the settlement was designed to put the Trump University case behind him. The settlement doesn’t include an admission of guilt. But the evidence assembled by Schneiderman and plaintiffs who brought two class-action lawsuits in California federal court painted a compelling picture.
Before it all vanishes into our collective memory hole, we should take note of how the Trump University affair reflects on how Trump conducted his p**********l campaign and what it tells us about whether to believe anything he says going forward.
It’s also proper to note, as does legal scholar Christopher Peterson of the University of Utah, that a finding against Trump on fraud or racketeering charges at trial might very well expose him to the risk of impeachment.
Trump University, it will be recalled, was pitched to the unwary as an opportunity to learn “the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market” from a cadre of Trump’s “handpicked” instructors. Schneiderman alleged that this was false. Of the instructors, “not a single one was ‘handpicked’ by Donald Trump.” Some had little real estate experience at all, and some actually had gone bankrupt in the business.
What they had been trained to do was “sell, sell, sell,” according to a Trump University “playbook” made public via court proceedings. What they were selling was an array of increasingly expensive generic seminars — topping out at $35,000 — developed not by Trump but by a company specializing in “motivational speakers and seminars and timeshare rental companies.”
The playbook was heavily dev**ed to marketing the program, not teaching the particulars of the Trump Way. Employees were instructed in hard-sell methods and equipped with pre-masticated rebuttals of their potential customers’ objections. Let one say, “I need to think about it,” and the answer would be, “You’ve already been thinking about this too long.… It’s time to commit to yourself and learn the TRUMP way to invest.”
A former sales manager testified that he was reprimanded for advising a prospect couple against signing up for the $35,000 “elite” program because they would have to use the husband’s disability income and drain equity in their apartment. Another salesman completed the sale instead.
Trump himself testified that he reviewed all the marketing materials — indeed, that was the basis of a ruling in August by San Diego federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel rejecting Trump’s motion for summary judgment against the class-action plaintiffs. There was enough evidence that Trump personally “participated in the operation or management of the enterprise,” Curiel ruled, to bring a racketeering charge against him before a jury.
As a candidate, Trump made Curiel, an Indiana-born jurist of Mexican descent, into a punching bag for his anti-immigrant campaign plank, claiming the judge had been unfair to him even though Curiel had been sedulously fair. As the Nov. 28 trial date for one of the lawsuits drew near, his lawyers asked the judge to exclude all of his intemperate comments about the case and the judge from the trial, on grounds that they were merely irrelevant campaign persif**ge. He also pledged not to settle.
Much more was at stake in the Trump University lawsuits than inconvenience. Utah’s Peterson observes that offenses as serious as fraud and racketeering, even if committed before a president’s assumption of office and aired in civil, not criminal, court, might qualify among the “high crimes and misdemeanors” for which the Constitution reserves impeachment.
“The most plain reading of the phrase,” he concludes, “is simply that impeachable behavior ‘is only that which would subject an ordinary person to criminal indictment and prosecution.’ ” But there’s no “clear legal hurdle” that would bar impeachment of Trump “simply because the … cases arose in civil court.”
So this was no trivial threat and the settlement not an effort merely to dodge a nuisance. The Trump University cases cast a major shadow over his presidency. Now that they’re settled, however, there’s no reason to forget them. They’ve already told us much about Trump that we should remember, every time he makes us another promise.
Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see facebook.com/hiltzik or email michael.hiltzik @latimes.com .
MICHAEL HILTZIK
Most of the press was preoccupied last week with a New York theater audience’s spontaneous decision to tell Vice President-elect Mike Pence what it thought of his record as a crusader against women’s reproductive and L**T rights. But the real news about the incoming administration was being made in court.
That’s where lawyers for President-elect Donald Trump reached a $25-million settlement of three lawsuits over Trump University. Trump depicted the settlement on Twitter as a victory.
“I settled the Trump University lawsuit for a small fraction of the potential award because as President I have to focus on our country,” he wrote Saturday morning.
New York Atty. Gen. Eric Schneiderman, who brought one of the lawsuits, would disagree that the settlement is “a small fraction of the potential award.” New York estimated that Trump University defrauded thousands of customers of a total of $40 million, and that Trump may personally have pocketed $5 million in profit. So the settlement comes to 62.5% of the total collected in the alleged s**m and five times Trump’s own alleged take. Nuisance lawsuits typically are settled for small potatoes, but a settlement of nearly two-thirds of the claim doesn’t fit into that category. It’s a sign that Trump faced genuine liability in these cases.
Schneiderman, in a statement announcing the deal, called it a “stunning reversal” by Trump, who had “fought us every step of the way, filing baseless charges and fruitless appeals and refusing to settle for even modest amounts of compensation for the victims of his phony university.”
Phony is right; one pillar of Schneiderman’s lawsuit was that Trump had not even bothered to get his “university” licensed by New York state as a bona fide educational institution. “More than 5,000 people across the country who paid Donald Trump $40 million to teach them his hard sell tactics got a hard lesson in bait-and-switch,” Schneiderman said when he filed his lawsuit in August 2013.
It is true, as Trump asserts, that the settlement was designed to put the Trump University case behind him. The settlement doesn’t include an admission of guilt. But the evidence assembled by Schneiderman and plaintiffs who brought two class-action lawsuits in California federal court painted a compelling picture.
Before it all vanishes into our collective memory hole, we should take note of how the Trump University affair reflects on how Trump conducted his p**********l campaign and what it tells us about whether to believe anything he says going forward.
It’s also proper to note, as does legal scholar Christopher Peterson of the University of Utah, that a finding against Trump on fraud or racketeering charges at trial might very well expose him to the risk of impeachment.
Trump University, it will be recalled, was pitched to the unwary as an opportunity to learn “the Trump process for investing in today’s once-in-a-lifetime real estate market” from a cadre of Trump’s “handpicked” instructors. Schneiderman alleged that this was false. Of the instructors, “not a single one was ‘handpicked’ by Donald Trump.” Some had little real estate experience at all, and some actually had gone bankrupt in the business.
What they had been trained to do was “sell, sell, sell,” according to a Trump University “playbook” made public via court proceedings. What they were selling was an array of increasingly expensive generic seminars — topping out at $35,000 — developed not by Trump but by a company specializing in “motivational speakers and seminars and timeshare rental companies.”
The playbook was heavily dev**ed to marketing the program, not teaching the particulars of the Trump Way. Employees were instructed in hard-sell methods and equipped with pre-masticated rebuttals of their potential customers’ objections. Let one say, “I need to think about it,” and the answer would be, “You’ve already been thinking about this too long.… It’s time to commit to yourself and learn the TRUMP way to invest.”
A former sales manager testified that he was reprimanded for advising a prospect couple against signing up for the $35,000 “elite” program because they would have to use the husband’s disability income and drain equity in their apartment. Another salesman completed the sale instead.
Trump himself testified that he reviewed all the marketing materials — indeed, that was the basis of a ruling in August by San Diego federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel rejecting Trump’s motion for summary judgment against the class-action plaintiffs. There was enough evidence that Trump personally “participated in the operation or management of the enterprise,” Curiel ruled, to bring a racketeering charge against him before a jury.
As a candidate, Trump made Curiel, an Indiana-born jurist of Mexican descent, into a punching bag for his anti-immigrant campaign plank, claiming the judge had been unfair to him even though Curiel had been sedulously fair. As the Nov. 28 trial date for one of the lawsuits drew near, his lawyers asked the judge to exclude all of his intemperate comments about the case and the judge from the trial, on grounds that they were merely irrelevant campaign persif**ge. He also pledged not to settle.
Much more was at stake in the Trump University lawsuits than inconvenience. Utah’s Peterson observes that offenses as serious as fraud and racketeering, even if committed before a president’s assumption of office and aired in civil, not criminal, court, might qualify among the “high crimes and misdemeanors” for which the Constitution reserves impeachment.
“The most plain reading of the phrase,” he concludes, “is simply that impeachable behavior ‘is only that which would subject an ordinary person to criminal indictment and prosecution.’ ” But there’s no “clear legal hurdle” that would bar impeachment of Trump “simply because the … cases arose in civil court.”
So this was no trivial threat and the settlement not an effort merely to dodge a nuisance. The Trump University cases cast a major shadow over his presidency. Now that they’re settled, however, there’s no reason to forget them. They’ve already told us much about Trump that we should remember, every time he makes us another promise.
Keep up to date with Michael Hiltzik. Follow @hiltzikm on Twitter, see facebook.com/hiltzik or email michael.hiltzik @latimes.com .
Nov 24, 2016 10:25:57 #
So PO; this is what you promoted, and still back?
Hillary Clinton Throws Podesta a BEATING on e******n night!
https://youtu.be/sjxuRz1XXIE
Hillary Clinton Throws Podesta a BEATING on e******n night!
https://youtu.be/sjxuRz1XXIE
Progressive One wrote:
Trump had a lot to lose in fraud lawsuits br b... (show quote)
Nov 24, 2016 15:55:59 #
eagleye13 wrote:
So PO; this is what you promoted, and still back?
Hillary Clinton Throws Podesta a BEATING on e******n night!
https://youtu.be/sjxuRz1XXIE
Hillary Clinton Throws Podesta a BEATING on e******n night!
https://youtu.be/sjxuRz1XXIE
you tube? hilarious.......
Nov 24, 2016 18:23:54 #
Fix It-Your Ball-In Your Court:
Drug costs surge for the elderly
Competition among insurers fails to hold down prices, spurring calls to let Medicare negotiate them.
BY MELODY PETERSEN
To avoid liver damage, Roberta Solar, a 71-year-old cancer patient, has to take a medicine called ursodiol, perhaps for the rest of her life.
Next year her annual out-of-pocket costs for the drug will jump from $93 to $1,878 — a rise of almost 2,000%, according to information that she and her husband recently received from the insurer that covers their medicines under Medicare.
The drug is just one of dozens of medications whose skyrocketing prices are increasingly hitting older Americans on fixed incomes. And that has renewed calls that the law be changed to allow Medicare, the government system that covers older Americans, to use its size and power to negotiate better drug prices.
“The cost of this generic drug has escalated beyond logic,” said Ken Solar, Roberta’s husband. The couple’s new out-of-pocket cost for ursodiol, he said, would consume more than a month of their combined Social Security checks.
When Congress added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare in 2003, the pharmaceutical industry did not just get millions of new customers. But Congress also placed language in the law explicitly banning Medicare from using its power to negotiate lower drug prices.
The argument for the ban on such bargaining was that each insurer offering a Medicare drug plan would compete and keep prices under control through their own negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies.
For years, Medicare drug costs have been lower than analysts’ initial projections, which seemed to confirm the system was working. Now, however, as is the case for prescription drugs covered by other programs, the cost to retirees is skyrocketing.
The cost of medicine per Medicare beneficiary rose 8.4% annually between 2013 and 2015, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that focuses on national health issues. That was more than twice as fast as the average 3.6% annual rise between 2006 and 2013, the group said.
In a Nov. 3 speech to pharmaceutical executives gathered at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C., Andy Slavitt, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, called the recent price hikes on dozens of drugs “unsustainable.”
“The more data that’s revealed,” Slavitt told the executives, “the more bad actors you find, and I’m telling you now: It’s too many.”
At a campaign rally on Jan. 25 in Farmington, N.H., Donald Trump told a crowd of hundreds of supporters that if elected he would seek to allow Medicare to negotiate on drug prices. He said such a change could save billions of dollars a year.
“We don’t do it. Why? Because of the drug companies,” Trump said then.
President-elect Trump’s staff did not return emails asking whether he still supported the change. His four-page policy statement on reforming the health system does not mention it.
The drug industry vigorously opposes any change. Companies say the current system of depending on insurers to negotiate with manufacturers is working to save on costs.
“Large, powerful purchasers negotiate discounts and rebates directly with manufacturers, saving money for both beneficiaries and taxpayers,” said Allyson Funk, a spokeswoman for the industry’s trade group, known as PhRMA.
She said proposals to change the program could end up “driving up premiums, reducing choice and restricting coverage.”
Funk pointed to a recent report paid for by PhRMA that found that actual medicine costs to patients and the government in the program officially called Medicare Part D were 35% below list prices in a dozen categories of widely used drugs. The report attributed the cost savings to discounts and rebates negotiated by insurers.
Earlier this month, however, Medicare officials released data showing that actual rebates and discounts were far less than those in PhRMA’s report. Officials said the Medicare drug insurers received $16 billion in rebates in 2014, or an average rebate of 17.5% off the list price, and that the program’s rebates were generally lower than what private employers’ and other insurance programs received.
“Part of the reason for this is that Medicare cannot harness its full purchasing power to negotiate for rebates across all Part D plans,” they wrote in the Nov. 14 report.
Medicare’s analysis also showed how the cost to taxpayers for the drug program is surging as prices continue to escalate. Taxpayers pick up 80% of a beneficiary’s medicine costs once they exceed a certain threshold. Total costs for the Medicare drug benefit above that threshold surged by 85% from 2013 to 2015 to $51.3 billion, according to the report.
In 2017, taxpayers will cover 80% of drug costs after beneficiaries have paid $4,950 out-of-pocket.
The drug that Roberta Solar needs shows how industry competition has failed to hold down some prices.
Ursodiol is a generic that has been sold for decades. It was available for a list price as low as 45 cents a capsule until May 2014 when one of the firms — Lannett Co. — raised its price per pill to $5.10. Lannett’s competitors quickly followed with their own price increases, with most offering the drug for about $5 a capsule.
“What did they do, put cocaine inside it?” asked Ken Solar, who lives with his wife in Garfield, N.J.
A spokesman for Lannett this week declined to comment.
Lannett executives have told shareholders that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating the company’s pricing practices.
Most Medicare patients were shielded from the rise in ursodiol’s price rise until this year.
Solar said his insurer, Coventry, which is owned by Aetna, changed the classification of ursodiol from a Tier 2 generic medicine, for which patients pay $9 for each prescription, to Tier 4, which includes mostly expensive specialty drugs. Under Solar’s plan, beneficiaries must pay 50% of a Tier 4 medicine’s price, shifting far more of the cost to the patient.
Walt Cherniak, an Aetna spokesman, said, “We moved it to a higher tier because of the rising price of the drug.”
Solar said he spent hours using the online tool at medicare.gov to find another plan whose annual out-of-pocket drug cost would be hundreds of dollars lower than Aetna’s, although the monthly premium will more than double. He said they will switch plans.
Medicare beneficiaries can use the online tool to research the cost of their medications and determine how their out-of-pocket expenses will change next year. Their cost for each drug can be sharply different under each plan. Patients have until Dec. 7 to change plans.
“The drug industry lobbyists’ influence over our healthcare system must stop,” Solar said. “Medicare has no say or control over rising drug prices when they should have everything to say.” melody.petersen
@ latimes.com
Drug costs surge for the elderly
Competition among insurers fails to hold down prices, spurring calls to let Medicare negotiate them.
BY MELODY PETERSEN
To avoid liver damage, Roberta Solar, a 71-year-old cancer patient, has to take a medicine called ursodiol, perhaps for the rest of her life.
Next year her annual out-of-pocket costs for the drug will jump from $93 to $1,878 — a rise of almost 2,000%, according to information that she and her husband recently received from the insurer that covers their medicines under Medicare.
The drug is just one of dozens of medications whose skyrocketing prices are increasingly hitting older Americans on fixed incomes. And that has renewed calls that the law be changed to allow Medicare, the government system that covers older Americans, to use its size and power to negotiate better drug prices.
“The cost of this generic drug has escalated beyond logic,” said Ken Solar, Roberta’s husband. The couple’s new out-of-pocket cost for ursodiol, he said, would consume more than a month of their combined Social Security checks.
When Congress added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare in 2003, the pharmaceutical industry did not just get millions of new customers. But Congress also placed language in the law explicitly banning Medicare from using its power to negotiate lower drug prices.
The argument for the ban on such bargaining was that each insurer offering a Medicare drug plan would compete and keep prices under control through their own negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies.
For years, Medicare drug costs have been lower than analysts’ initial projections, which seemed to confirm the system was working. Now, however, as is the case for prescription drugs covered by other programs, the cost to retirees is skyrocketing.
The cost of medicine per Medicare beneficiary rose 8.4% annually between 2013 and 2015, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that focuses on national health issues. That was more than twice as fast as the average 3.6% annual rise between 2006 and 2013, the group said.
In a Nov. 3 speech to pharmaceutical executives gathered at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C., Andy Slavitt, the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, called the recent price hikes on dozens of drugs “unsustainable.”
“The more data that’s revealed,” Slavitt told the executives, “the more bad actors you find, and I’m telling you now: It’s too many.”
At a campaign rally on Jan. 25 in Farmington, N.H., Donald Trump told a crowd of hundreds of supporters that if elected he would seek to allow Medicare to negotiate on drug prices. He said such a change could save billions of dollars a year.
“We don’t do it. Why? Because of the drug companies,” Trump said then.
President-elect Trump’s staff did not return emails asking whether he still supported the change. His four-page policy statement on reforming the health system does not mention it.
The drug industry vigorously opposes any change. Companies say the current system of depending on insurers to negotiate with manufacturers is working to save on costs.
“Large, powerful purchasers negotiate discounts and rebates directly with manufacturers, saving money for both beneficiaries and taxpayers,” said Allyson Funk, a spokeswoman for the industry’s trade group, known as PhRMA.
She said proposals to change the program could end up “driving up premiums, reducing choice and restricting coverage.”
Funk pointed to a recent report paid for by PhRMA that found that actual medicine costs to patients and the government in the program officially called Medicare Part D were 35% below list prices in a dozen categories of widely used drugs. The report attributed the cost savings to discounts and rebates negotiated by insurers.
Earlier this month, however, Medicare officials released data showing that actual rebates and discounts were far less than those in PhRMA’s report. Officials said the Medicare drug insurers received $16 billion in rebates in 2014, or an average rebate of 17.5% off the list price, and that the program’s rebates were generally lower than what private employers’ and other insurance programs received.
“Part of the reason for this is that Medicare cannot harness its full purchasing power to negotiate for rebates across all Part D plans,” they wrote in the Nov. 14 report.
Medicare’s analysis also showed how the cost to taxpayers for the drug program is surging as prices continue to escalate. Taxpayers pick up 80% of a beneficiary’s medicine costs once they exceed a certain threshold. Total costs for the Medicare drug benefit above that threshold surged by 85% from 2013 to 2015 to $51.3 billion, according to the report.
In 2017, taxpayers will cover 80% of drug costs after beneficiaries have paid $4,950 out-of-pocket.
The drug that Roberta Solar needs shows how industry competition has failed to hold down some prices.
Ursodiol is a generic that has been sold for decades. It was available for a list price as low as 45 cents a capsule until May 2014 when one of the firms — Lannett Co. — raised its price per pill to $5.10. Lannett’s competitors quickly followed with their own price increases, with most offering the drug for about $5 a capsule.
“What did they do, put cocaine inside it?” asked Ken Solar, who lives with his wife in Garfield, N.J.
A spokesman for Lannett this week declined to comment.
Lannett executives have told shareholders that the U.S. Justice Department is investigating the company’s pricing practices.
Most Medicare patients were shielded from the rise in ursodiol’s price rise until this year.
Solar said his insurer, Coventry, which is owned by Aetna, changed the classification of ursodiol from a Tier 2 generic medicine, for which patients pay $9 for each prescription, to Tier 4, which includes mostly expensive specialty drugs. Under Solar’s plan, beneficiaries must pay 50% of a Tier 4 medicine’s price, shifting far more of the cost to the patient.
Walt Cherniak, an Aetna spokesman, said, “We moved it to a higher tier because of the rising price of the drug.”
Solar said he spent hours using the online tool at medicare.gov to find another plan whose annual out-of-pocket drug cost would be hundreds of dollars lower than Aetna’s, although the monthly premium will more than double. He said they will switch plans.
Medicare beneficiaries can use the online tool to research the cost of their medications and determine how their out-of-pocket expenses will change next year. Their cost for each drug can be sharply different under each plan. Patients have until Dec. 7 to change plans.
“The drug industry lobbyists’ influence over our healthcare system must stop,” Solar said. “Medicare has no say or control over rising drug prices when they should have everything to say.” melody.petersen
@ latimes.com
Nov 25, 2016 14:54:01 #
Could another Scalia join the Supreme Court?
Trump may seek a more moderate nominee to avert a confirmation battle.
BY DAVID G. SAVAGE
WASHINGTON —President-elect Donald Trump will soon have the chance to make good on one of his most consequential campaign promises: fill the Supreme Court vacancy with a judge in the mold of conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February.
Any Trump nominee is almost guaranteed to be a conservative jurist who is antia******n and supports the 2nd Amendment’s right to bear arms.
But what kind of conservative he selects will determine whether his first nominee will be quickly confirmed or instead trigger a fierce fight in the closely divided Senate, potentially overshadowing the early months of Trump’s presidency.
If Trump opts for a Scalia-like justice, as he repeatedly said he would during the campaign, conservative lawyers say the betting favorite is Judge William H. Pryor Jr. from the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta, a former Alabama attorney general who called the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing a******n the “worst a*********n in the history of constitutional law.”
The 54-year-old Pryor believes in Scalia’s approach of interpreting the Constitution by its “original meaning” —one that has little room for gay rights, even women’s rights. His nomination would electrify Trump’s conservative base, but it would also set off a confirmation battle for which the outcome is not assured.
“His nomination would ignite a firestorm across the country,” said Nan Aron, president of Alliance for Justice, among the liberal activist groups that are already mobilizing to fight a Pryor nomination. “Our organization and others would pull out every stop to keep him off the court.”
Instead, Trump may opt for a less provocative nominee, such as Judge Diane Sykes of Wisconsin, 58, a moderate conservative who sits on the 7th Circuit Court in Chicago.
Sykes has ruled in favor of religious employers who challenged President Obama’s healthcare law and its requirement to provide free contraceptives, and she v**ed to uphold Wisconsin’s v**er ID law. But she has not taken sharply ideological stands or called for overturning liberal precedents.
Pryor and Sykes have been seen as top contenders ever since Trump mentioned them by name during a Republican debate shortly after Scalia’s unexpected death, which threatened to tilt the court’s ideological balance to the left.
But much will depend on the whether the GOP-led Senate moves to alter its filibuster rules.
If the new Senate maintains its current rules, it would take 60 v**es to cut off debate and set a final v**e on a Supreme Court nominee. That would allow the minority Democrats, v****g as a bloc, to prevent confirmation of a controversial pick such as Pryor. Republicans next year are expected to control only 52 seats.
But Republican leaders could simply change the rules to clear the way for Trump’s high court nominee to be confirmed with a simple majority. That’s what Democrats did in 2013 when they controlled the Senate and wanted to overcome Republican filibusters against Obama’s judicial nominees. At the time, Democrats exempted Supreme Court nominations from that rule change.
It remains unclear whether Republicans will agree on changing the rules to allow confirmations with just 50 v**es. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) has said he would oppose abandoning the filibuster rule, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has also been seen as resistant to changing long-standing Senate practices.
Even so, Pryor appears to have the inside track, according to conservative lawyers and advisors in touch with the t***sition team.
Before becoming a judge in 2005, Pryor drew attention with a series of outspoken, Scalia-like pronouncements on issues including a******n and gay rights.
He ended one speech in 2000 with a prayer for the newly elected George W. Bush, saying “Please, God, no more Souters.” It was a reference to Justice David Souter, a Republican appointee who disappointed conservatives during his19 years on the court by frequently siding with liberals.
No one on the right worries that Pryor would move to the center or the left if he were appointed to the high court. He is also a protege of Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator who is slated to become Trump’s attorney general.
This month, the conservative Federalist Society met in Washington, and Pryor was seen by many as the favorite for Trump’s first high court nomination.
“He would be great,” said Roger Pilon, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute.
Trump appears to share that view. Hours after Scalia died, Trump mentioned Pryor and Sykes as among the “fantastic people” who could replace Scalia.
“I hope that our Senate, Mitch [McConnell] and the entire group, is going to able to do something in terms of delay. We could have a Diane Sykes or a Bill Pryor,” he said, calling upon Senate Republicans to block Obama from filling the seat. The GOP-led Senate pursued such a strategy, refusing since March to consider Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland.
During the campaign, Trump put out two lists with a total of 21 potential Supreme Court nominees, and his aides say he will make his se******n from those lists.
Lawyers at the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society expect Trump will choose a federal appeals court judge who is under age 60 and has a conservative record. Other favored candidates include Judges Neil Gorsuch, 49, from the 10th Circuit Court in Denver, Steven Colloton, 53, from the 8th Circuit in St. Louis, and Raymond Kethledge, 49, from the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati and Thomas Hardiman, 51, from the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia.
Trump’s list also includes several state justices; the most talked about names are Joan Larsen, 47, a Michigan Supreme Court justice who was once a clerk for Scalia, and Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, 50, an avid tweeter who at times has criticized Trump.
At the Federalist Society meeting, panel talks included nine of the 21 potential Trump nominees to the high court. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas also delivered speeches.
Pryor moderated a panel on the “separation of powers,” and he echoed Scalia’s view that “real constitutional law” is about the “governing structure,” not the individual rights protected by the Constitution. “It’s a mistake to think the Bill of Rights is the most important feature of American democracy,” he said.
Pryor, like Scalia, believes issues such as a******n or same-sex marriage are not individual rights protected by the Constitution, but instead are matters to be decided by the states and their v**ers.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who spoke on the panel, said he has known Pryor since they were law clerks in New Orleans.
“Bill is extremely smart and committed to first principles of constitutional interpretation,” Turley said after the panel talk. “He strongly believes in the original design of the ‘dual sovereignty’ between state and federal governments. He believes that states must make the decisions in traditional areas” of responsibility, including a******n, the death penalty and gay rights.
In 2003, when the Supreme Court was hearing a challenge to a Texas law that made gay sex a crime, Pryor filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Alabama urging the court to rule for Texas.
He said the court should not be swayed by “political correctness.... Engaging in homosexual sodomy is not protected” by the 14th Amendment and its reference to liberty.
Upholding such a claim “must logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and p********a,” he added.
The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision struck down the Texas law as an unconstitutional invasion of liberty and privacy.
In dissent, Scalia wrote a passage similar to Pryor’s brief. The court’s ruling, Scalia said, has “called into question … state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity.”
Pryor grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Mobile, Ala., and graduated from Northeast Louisiana University in Monroe and Tulane Law School.
In 1996, Pryor was a 34-year-old deputy attorney general in Alabama when Sessions, his boss, was elected to the Senate. He took over as state attorney general and won a narrow e******n in 1998.
When George W. Bush became president, he picked Pryor for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, but his nomination ran into fierce resistance from Senate Democrats.
They blocked his confirmation, but Bush went around them and gave him a recess appointment. Then, in a bipartisan deal, the Senate agreed to hold v**es on several stalled judges, and Pryor won confirmation on a 53-45 v**e in 2005. david.savage@latimes.com
CLIFF OWEN Associated Press
JUDGE William Pryor of Atlanta believes in Antonin Scalia’s approach to interpreting the Constitution.
JOSE LUIS MAGANA Associated Press
JUDGE DIANE SYKES, another potential Trump nominee, has ruled in favor of religious employers who challenged contraceptive requirements, but has not taken strong ideological stands.
Trump may seek a more moderate nominee to avert a confirmation battle.
BY DAVID G. SAVAGE
WASHINGTON —President-elect Donald Trump will soon have the chance to make good on one of his most consequential campaign promises: fill the Supreme Court vacancy with a judge in the mold of conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February.
Any Trump nominee is almost guaranteed to be a conservative jurist who is antia******n and supports the 2nd Amendment’s right to bear arms.
But what kind of conservative he selects will determine whether his first nominee will be quickly confirmed or instead trigger a fierce fight in the closely divided Senate, potentially overshadowing the early months of Trump’s presidency.
If Trump opts for a Scalia-like justice, as he repeatedly said he would during the campaign, conservative lawyers say the betting favorite is Judge William H. Pryor Jr. from the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta, a former Alabama attorney general who called the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing a******n the “worst a*********n in the history of constitutional law.”
The 54-year-old Pryor believes in Scalia’s approach of interpreting the Constitution by its “original meaning” —one that has little room for gay rights, even women’s rights. His nomination would electrify Trump’s conservative base, but it would also set off a confirmation battle for which the outcome is not assured.
“His nomination would ignite a firestorm across the country,” said Nan Aron, president of Alliance for Justice, among the liberal activist groups that are already mobilizing to fight a Pryor nomination. “Our organization and others would pull out every stop to keep him off the court.”
Instead, Trump may opt for a less provocative nominee, such as Judge Diane Sykes of Wisconsin, 58, a moderate conservative who sits on the 7th Circuit Court in Chicago.
Sykes has ruled in favor of religious employers who challenged President Obama’s healthcare law and its requirement to provide free contraceptives, and she v**ed to uphold Wisconsin’s v**er ID law. But she has not taken sharply ideological stands or called for overturning liberal precedents.
Pryor and Sykes have been seen as top contenders ever since Trump mentioned them by name during a Republican debate shortly after Scalia’s unexpected death, which threatened to tilt the court’s ideological balance to the left.
But much will depend on the whether the GOP-led Senate moves to alter its filibuster rules.
If the new Senate maintains its current rules, it would take 60 v**es to cut off debate and set a final v**e on a Supreme Court nominee. That would allow the minority Democrats, v****g as a bloc, to prevent confirmation of a controversial pick such as Pryor. Republicans next year are expected to control only 52 seats.
But Republican leaders could simply change the rules to clear the way for Trump’s high court nominee to be confirmed with a simple majority. That’s what Democrats did in 2013 when they controlled the Senate and wanted to overcome Republican filibusters against Obama’s judicial nominees. At the time, Democrats exempted Supreme Court nominations from that rule change.
It remains unclear whether Republicans will agree on changing the rules to allow confirmations with just 50 v**es. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) has said he would oppose abandoning the filibuster rule, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has also been seen as resistant to changing long-standing Senate practices.
Even so, Pryor appears to have the inside track, according to conservative lawyers and advisors in touch with the t***sition team.
Before becoming a judge in 2005, Pryor drew attention with a series of outspoken, Scalia-like pronouncements on issues including a******n and gay rights.
He ended one speech in 2000 with a prayer for the newly elected George W. Bush, saying “Please, God, no more Souters.” It was a reference to Justice David Souter, a Republican appointee who disappointed conservatives during his19 years on the court by frequently siding with liberals.
No one on the right worries that Pryor would move to the center or the left if he were appointed to the high court. He is also a protege of Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator who is slated to become Trump’s attorney general.
This month, the conservative Federalist Society met in Washington, and Pryor was seen by many as the favorite for Trump’s first high court nomination.
“He would be great,” said Roger Pilon, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute.
Trump appears to share that view. Hours after Scalia died, Trump mentioned Pryor and Sykes as among the “fantastic people” who could replace Scalia.
“I hope that our Senate, Mitch [McConnell] and the entire group, is going to able to do something in terms of delay. We could have a Diane Sykes or a Bill Pryor,” he said, calling upon Senate Republicans to block Obama from filling the seat. The GOP-led Senate pursued such a strategy, refusing since March to consider Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland.
During the campaign, Trump put out two lists with a total of 21 potential Supreme Court nominees, and his aides say he will make his se******n from those lists.
Lawyers at the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society expect Trump will choose a federal appeals court judge who is under age 60 and has a conservative record. Other favored candidates include Judges Neil Gorsuch, 49, from the 10th Circuit Court in Denver, Steven Colloton, 53, from the 8th Circuit in St. Louis, and Raymond Kethledge, 49, from the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati and Thomas Hardiman, 51, from the 3rd Circuit in Philadelphia.
Trump’s list also includes several state justices; the most talked about names are Joan Larsen, 47, a Michigan Supreme Court justice who was once a clerk for Scalia, and Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, 50, an avid tweeter who at times has criticized Trump.
At the Federalist Society meeting, panel talks included nine of the 21 potential Trump nominees to the high court. Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas also delivered speeches.
Pryor moderated a panel on the “separation of powers,” and he echoed Scalia’s view that “real constitutional law” is about the “governing structure,” not the individual rights protected by the Constitution. “It’s a mistake to think the Bill of Rights is the most important feature of American democracy,” he said.
Pryor, like Scalia, believes issues such as a******n or same-sex marriage are not individual rights protected by the Constitution, but instead are matters to be decided by the states and their v**ers.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who spoke on the panel, said he has known Pryor since they were law clerks in New Orleans.
“Bill is extremely smart and committed to first principles of constitutional interpretation,” Turley said after the panel talk. “He strongly believes in the original design of the ‘dual sovereignty’ between state and federal governments. He believes that states must make the decisions in traditional areas” of responsibility, including a******n, the death penalty and gay rights.
In 2003, when the Supreme Court was hearing a challenge to a Texas law that made gay sex a crime, Pryor filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Alabama urging the court to rule for Texas.
He said the court should not be swayed by “political correctness.... Engaging in homosexual sodomy is not protected” by the 14th Amendment and its reference to liberty.
Upholding such a claim “must logically extend to activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography and even incest and p********a,” he added.
The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision struck down the Texas law as an unconstitutional invasion of liberty and privacy.
In dissent, Scalia wrote a passage similar to Pryor’s brief. The court’s ruling, Scalia said, has “called into question … state laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity.”
Pryor grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Mobile, Ala., and graduated from Northeast Louisiana University in Monroe and Tulane Law School.
In 1996, Pryor was a 34-year-old deputy attorney general in Alabama when Sessions, his boss, was elected to the Senate. He took over as state attorney general and won a narrow e******n in 1998.
When George W. Bush became president, he picked Pryor for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, but his nomination ran into fierce resistance from Senate Democrats.
They blocked his confirmation, but Bush went around them and gave him a recess appointment. Then, in a bipartisan deal, the Senate agreed to hold v**es on several stalled judges, and Pryor won confirmation on a 53-45 v**e in 2005. david.savage@latimes.com
CLIFF OWEN Associated Press
JUDGE William Pryor of Atlanta believes in Antonin Scalia’s approach to interpreting the Constitution.
JOSE LUIS MAGANA Associated Press
JUDGE DIANE SYKES, another potential Trump nominee, has ruled in favor of religious employers who challenged contraceptive requirements, but has not taken strong ideological stands.
Nov 25, 2016 14:55:49 #
Trump pick may exert clout over immigration
Jeff Sessions will have a big say on border issues if confirmed as attorney general.
BY BRIAN BENNETT
WASHINGTON — Tougher immigration judges. More prosecution of low-level immigration violations. And a cutoff of some law enforcement funds to cities that don’t hew to a harsher immigration policy.
Even without changing a single law, these are some of the major changes in immigration policy that Sen. Jeff Sessions could pursue if he is confirmed as U.S. attorney general.
While most enforcement of i*********n l*w rests with agencies in the Department of Homeland Security, offices in the Justice Department also play a major role in administering i*********n l*w, including how quickly migrants are deported.
President Obama used his executive authority to defer deportations for nearly 750,000 so-called Dreamers, migrants who were brought to America illegally as children. The incoming Trump administration can use the same authority to cancel the program and other priorities set by Obama.
But Sessions also will have broad discretion to change immigration policies under other laws.
A four-term Republican senator from Alabama, Sessions successfully led efforts to k**l immigration reform bills in Congress and is considered a fierce opponent of any pathway to legal status for the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally.
Those legislative battles, and his background as a former federal prosecutor, give him a mechanic’s knowledge of the inner workings of immigration policy.
“He can have a tremendous impact,” said John Sandweg, who was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2014.
The attorney general “has complete control over the immigration courts and whether to use criminal prosecutions against immigrants,” he said.
Immigration judges are chosen by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. The office sets standards for hiring and vetting judges, and for the training and instructions they receive on how to interpret i*********n l*w.
“Most people don’t realize we are not technically judges,” Dana Leigh Marks, president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, said from San Francisco, where she has presided over immigration cases since the 1980s.
“In terms of our technical employment status, we are attorney employees of the Department of Justice, which we believe does make us much more vulnerable to political influence than we would be in an independent court structure,” Marks said.
After immigration judges are hired, they can be fired for any reason during a two-year probationary period. After that, they are protected from dismissal by the same rules that shield other civil servants.
Immigration courts have been understaffed for more than a decade, creating a huge backlog of cases in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and New York.
In all, 522,000 deportation cases are pending in immigration courts, and cases may take three or four years to resolve in the most backed-up jurisdictions.
The Obama administration recently hired 61 immigration judges, Marks said, bringing the total to 294. But that is far below the 374 judges Congress has authorized.
Many judges are expected to retire in the next few years. That could allow Sessions to hire dozens of new judges who agree with his hard-line views.
Former aides to Sessions were instrumental in adding tough immigration proposals to the GOP platform at the Republican National Convention in July, including cutting federal funding to cities that don’t cooperate with immigration agents, and increasing penalties for migrants convicted of illegally reentering the U.S. after being deported.
As the nation’s top law enforcement officer, Sessions could implement those policies.
He would oversee the Bureau of Justice Assistance, which reimburses local jails for holding federal prisoners under the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program.
In Senate speeches, Sessions has repeatedly called for cutting those funds to push local authorities to identify migrants in the country illegally and hand them over to federal agents.
Trump’s t***sition policy team has drawn up plans to pressure so-called sanctuary cities — including Los Angeles — to help immigration agents identify those here illegally.
“The issue of sanctuary cities is substantially in the hands of the attorney general,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington that advocates for lower immigration levels.
Under Sessions, Justice Department lawyers could try to get federal court orders for local officials to cooperate with federal immigration agents.
“First thing you do is you file suit, then you get a judge to issue an injunction” to force cities to stop their policies, said Krikorian, who has submitted policy proposals to Trump’s advisors.
“The nuclear option is you criminally prosecute city council members and supervisors for illegally harboring i*****l a***ns, which they are,” Krikorian said.
Under Sessions, the Justice Department would likely support states that give local police authority to enforce i*********n l*ws. In 2012, after the Obama administration objected, the Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s so-called “papers, please” law on the grounds that the state was trying to enforce federal i*********n l*ws.
Sessions could also instruct federal prosecutors to be more aggressive in filing criminal charges against migrants for illegal entry and reentry after deportation, convictions that can speed up deportation orders.
In recent years, the Obama administration eased such prosecutions and focused chiefly on deporting individuals believed to be involved in crimes like human smuggling and gang activities.
Prosecutions of immigration violations dropped by 6% this year, according to an analysis by the T***sactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
On Sunday, another anti-immigration advocate, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, met with the president-elect at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., carrying a document called “Department of Homeland Security, Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 days.”
Trump’s t***sition team has floated Kobach’s name as a possible Homeland Security chief. In 2002, Kobach helped implement more-restrictive immigration policies at the Justice Department as an advisor to then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.
Cameras that zoomed in on the top page of Kobach’s document revealed proposals for a crackdown on several fronts.
The first item was titled “Bar the Entry of Potential Terrorists,” and called for blocking entry to all Syrian war refugees.
It also called for updating a screening system used after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to track migrants from “high-risk areas,” and for instructing border officers to ask visitors from designated countries questions about support for jihadism and the Islamic system of laws known as sharia, e******y for men and women, and the U.S. Constitution.
Kobach’s document also proposed a “rapid build” along the border with Mexico to expand the 386 miles of existing walls and other barriers to the entire 2,000-mile land border. brian.bennett@latimes.com Twitter: @ByBrianBennett
Jeff Sessions will have a big say on border issues if confirmed as attorney general.
BY BRIAN BENNETT
WASHINGTON — Tougher immigration judges. More prosecution of low-level immigration violations. And a cutoff of some law enforcement funds to cities that don’t hew to a harsher immigration policy.
Even without changing a single law, these are some of the major changes in immigration policy that Sen. Jeff Sessions could pursue if he is confirmed as U.S. attorney general.
While most enforcement of i*********n l*w rests with agencies in the Department of Homeland Security, offices in the Justice Department also play a major role in administering i*********n l*w, including how quickly migrants are deported.
President Obama used his executive authority to defer deportations for nearly 750,000 so-called Dreamers, migrants who were brought to America illegally as children. The incoming Trump administration can use the same authority to cancel the program and other priorities set by Obama.
But Sessions also will have broad discretion to change immigration policies under other laws.
A four-term Republican senator from Alabama, Sessions successfully led efforts to k**l immigration reform bills in Congress and is considered a fierce opponent of any pathway to legal status for the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. illegally.
Those legislative battles, and his background as a former federal prosecutor, give him a mechanic’s knowledge of the inner workings of immigration policy.
“He can have a tremendous impact,” said John Sandweg, who was acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2014.
The attorney general “has complete control over the immigration courts and whether to use criminal prosecutions against immigrants,” he said.
Immigration judges are chosen by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. The office sets standards for hiring and vetting judges, and for the training and instructions they receive on how to interpret i*********n l*w.
“Most people don’t realize we are not technically judges,” Dana Leigh Marks, president of the National Assn. of Immigration Judges, said from San Francisco, where she has presided over immigration cases since the 1980s.
“In terms of our technical employment status, we are attorney employees of the Department of Justice, which we believe does make us much more vulnerable to political influence than we would be in an independent court structure,” Marks said.
After immigration judges are hired, they can be fired for any reason during a two-year probationary period. After that, they are protected from dismissal by the same rules that shield other civil servants.
Immigration courts have been understaffed for more than a decade, creating a huge backlog of cases in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and New York.
In all, 522,000 deportation cases are pending in immigration courts, and cases may take three or four years to resolve in the most backed-up jurisdictions.
The Obama administration recently hired 61 immigration judges, Marks said, bringing the total to 294. But that is far below the 374 judges Congress has authorized.
Many judges are expected to retire in the next few years. That could allow Sessions to hire dozens of new judges who agree with his hard-line views.
Former aides to Sessions were instrumental in adding tough immigration proposals to the GOP platform at the Republican National Convention in July, including cutting federal funding to cities that don’t cooperate with immigration agents, and increasing penalties for migrants convicted of illegally reentering the U.S. after being deported.
As the nation’s top law enforcement officer, Sessions could implement those policies.
He would oversee the Bureau of Justice Assistance, which reimburses local jails for holding federal prisoners under the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program.
In Senate speeches, Sessions has repeatedly called for cutting those funds to push local authorities to identify migrants in the country illegally and hand them over to federal agents.
Trump’s t***sition policy team has drawn up plans to pressure so-called sanctuary cities — including Los Angeles — to help immigration agents identify those here illegally.
“The issue of sanctuary cities is substantially in the hands of the attorney general,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington that advocates for lower immigration levels.
Under Sessions, Justice Department lawyers could try to get federal court orders for local officials to cooperate with federal immigration agents.
“First thing you do is you file suit, then you get a judge to issue an injunction” to force cities to stop their policies, said Krikorian, who has submitted policy proposals to Trump’s advisors.
“The nuclear option is you criminally prosecute city council members and supervisors for illegally harboring i*****l a***ns, which they are,” Krikorian said.
Under Sessions, the Justice Department would likely support states that give local police authority to enforce i*********n l*ws. In 2012, after the Obama administration objected, the Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s so-called “papers, please” law on the grounds that the state was trying to enforce federal i*********n l*ws.
Sessions could also instruct federal prosecutors to be more aggressive in filing criminal charges against migrants for illegal entry and reentry after deportation, convictions that can speed up deportation orders.
In recent years, the Obama administration eased such prosecutions and focused chiefly on deporting individuals believed to be involved in crimes like human smuggling and gang activities.
Prosecutions of immigration violations dropped by 6% this year, according to an analysis by the T***sactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
On Sunday, another anti-immigration advocate, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, met with the president-elect at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., carrying a document called “Department of Homeland Security, Kobach Strategic Plan for First 365 days.”
Trump’s t***sition team has floated Kobach’s name as a possible Homeland Security chief. In 2002, Kobach helped implement more-restrictive immigration policies at the Justice Department as an advisor to then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.
Cameras that zoomed in on the top page of Kobach’s document revealed proposals for a crackdown on several fronts.
The first item was titled “Bar the Entry of Potential Terrorists,” and called for blocking entry to all Syrian war refugees.
It also called for updating a screening system used after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to track migrants from “high-risk areas,” and for instructing border officers to ask visitors from designated countries questions about support for jihadism and the Islamic system of laws known as sharia, e******y for men and women, and the U.S. Constitution.
Kobach’s document also proposed a “rapid build” along the border with Mexico to expand the 386 miles of existing walls and other barriers to the entire 2,000-mile land border. brian.bennett@latimes.com Twitter: @ByBrianBennett
Nov 25, 2016 14:58:11 #
How far can Trump’s win carry him?
RONALD BROWNSTEIN
COUNT STEPHEN K. BANNON, Donald Trump’s White House consigliere-in-waiting, as the latest political operative who has extrapolated a single, narrow p**********l victory into a blueprint for a generation of e*******l dominance.
“The g*******ts gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia,” Bannon recently told the Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff. “The issue now is about Americans looking to not get [screwed] over. If we deliver, we’ll get 60% of the white v**e, and 40% of the black and Hispanic v**e and we’ll govern for 50 years.”
That prediction may seem grandiose for a strategist whose candidate is on track to lose the popular v**e by more than any successfully elected president ever. On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton’s popular-v**e lead over Trump crossed 2 million; several analysts believe her final advantage will near 2.5 million. Trump will win a smaller percentage of the popular v**e than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
That doesn’t invalidate his victory. But it’s a fragile beachhead from which to reverse the public’s consistent reluctance over the past generation to grant either party a lasting hold on power. Except for 1988, when George H.W. Bush prevailed after two terms of Ronald Reagan, neither side has held the White House for more than eight consecutive years since 1952.
And while Republicans are understandably euphoric that they will control the White House and both congressional chambers next year, neither party since 1968 has maintained such unified control for more than four consecutive years. History suggests the best advice for Republicans might be three simple words: Don’t unpack everything.
Yet Bannon and Trump have reason for optimism. While Trump did not establish new patterns in political allegiance, he did squeeze more advantage out of the old patterns than many, myself included, thought possible — and suffered less backlash from the groups most resistant to his coruscating message.
Trump dominated blue-collar and non-urban white America. He beat Clinton among white men without a college education by more than Reagan beat Walter Mondale in his historic 1984 landslide, and he equaled Reagan’s margin among non-college-educated white women. Even in households that included w****s without a college degree who belonged to a labor union, Trump trounced Clinton by 58% to 32%, according to exit-poll figures provided by CNN’s polling unit. He crushed Clinton in mid-sized and small cities and rural hamlets. As important, Trump didn’t lose as much ground among college-educated w****s as polls predicted he would, while slightly improving over Romney’s anemic performance with non-white v**ers — at least according to exit polls, which are disputed by some minority analysts.
Yet all this still left Trump with no margin for error. He sealed his slim e*******l college victory with wins of only about 1 point or less in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump’s hold on those states could easily slip in a future e******n if he loses any ground among the constituencies who supported him, or if he further alienates the ones who opposed him.
Maintaining his standing with both groups will test the dexterity of Trump and advisers like Bannon. In his Hollywood Reporter interview, Bannon insisted that he, and by extension his candidate, is “an economic nationalist” and not “a white nationalist.” Both Bannon and Trump have, in fact, championed economic-nationalist themes aimed at foreign competitors and domestic elites. But the right-wing Breitbart website that Bannon formerly ran also unmistakably appealed to white racial anxieties. Trump — starting with his declaration that undocumented Mexican immigrants are “criminals” and “rapists” — consistently struck more racially d******e notes than any p**********l candidate since George Wallace.
Blending messages of economic and racial solidarity, Trump positioned himself to defend what historian Michael Kazin called “the virtuous, masculine middle of America” against threats from above and below on the income ladder. But delivering on that promise won’t be easy. Even if Trump pursues aggressively protectionist trade policies, it’s a heavy lift to reverse generations of decline in fading industrial cities. In office, he’ll also confront the contradiction that while he talks tough against elites, his agenda apart from trade offers them huge corporate and personal tax cuts, and a rollback of federal environmental and consumer-protection regulations.
If Trump can’t deliver the economic results his supporters expect, he might try to salve them with confrontational cultural policies like his pledge to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants. But that would virtually ensure a backlash among his white-collar white and minority v**ers, most of whom opposed those ideas and might not have believed Trump would actually pursue them in office.
Trump impressively swept every Rust Belt swing state and charted a new Republican path to the presidency. But his white working-class base is irreversibly declining as a share of the e*****rate, while the groups most dubious of Trump — millennials, minorities, and college-educated white women — are growing. Maximizing support from the shrinking groups, without provoking even greater resistance from the growing ones, is the puzzle looming over Bannon’s dream of a 50-year Trump imperium.
RONALD BROWNSTEIN is a senior editor of the Atlantic.
RONALD BROWNSTEIN
COUNT STEPHEN K. BANNON, Donald Trump’s White House consigliere-in-waiting, as the latest political operative who has extrapolated a single, narrow p**********l victory into a blueprint for a generation of e*******l dominance.
“The g*******ts gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia,” Bannon recently told the Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff. “The issue now is about Americans looking to not get [screwed] over. If we deliver, we’ll get 60% of the white v**e, and 40% of the black and Hispanic v**e and we’ll govern for 50 years.”
That prediction may seem grandiose for a strategist whose candidate is on track to lose the popular v**e by more than any successfully elected president ever. On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton’s popular-v**e lead over Trump crossed 2 million; several analysts believe her final advantage will near 2.5 million. Trump will win a smaller percentage of the popular v**e than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
That doesn’t invalidate his victory. But it’s a fragile beachhead from which to reverse the public’s consistent reluctance over the past generation to grant either party a lasting hold on power. Except for 1988, when George H.W. Bush prevailed after two terms of Ronald Reagan, neither side has held the White House for more than eight consecutive years since 1952.
And while Republicans are understandably euphoric that they will control the White House and both congressional chambers next year, neither party since 1968 has maintained such unified control for more than four consecutive years. History suggests the best advice for Republicans might be three simple words: Don’t unpack everything.
Yet Bannon and Trump have reason for optimism. While Trump did not establish new patterns in political allegiance, he did squeeze more advantage out of the old patterns than many, myself included, thought possible — and suffered less backlash from the groups most resistant to his coruscating message.
Trump dominated blue-collar and non-urban white America. He beat Clinton among white men without a college education by more than Reagan beat Walter Mondale in his historic 1984 landslide, and he equaled Reagan’s margin among non-college-educated white women. Even in households that included w****s without a college degree who belonged to a labor union, Trump trounced Clinton by 58% to 32%, according to exit-poll figures provided by CNN’s polling unit. He crushed Clinton in mid-sized and small cities and rural hamlets. As important, Trump didn’t lose as much ground among college-educated w****s as polls predicted he would, while slightly improving over Romney’s anemic performance with non-white v**ers — at least according to exit polls, which are disputed by some minority analysts.
Yet all this still left Trump with no margin for error. He sealed his slim e*******l college victory with wins of only about 1 point or less in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump’s hold on those states could easily slip in a future e******n if he loses any ground among the constituencies who supported him, or if he further alienates the ones who opposed him.
Maintaining his standing with both groups will test the dexterity of Trump and advisers like Bannon. In his Hollywood Reporter interview, Bannon insisted that he, and by extension his candidate, is “an economic nationalist” and not “a white nationalist.” Both Bannon and Trump have, in fact, championed economic-nationalist themes aimed at foreign competitors and domestic elites. But the right-wing Breitbart website that Bannon formerly ran also unmistakably appealed to white racial anxieties. Trump — starting with his declaration that undocumented Mexican immigrants are “criminals” and “rapists” — consistently struck more racially d******e notes than any p**********l candidate since George Wallace.
Blending messages of economic and racial solidarity, Trump positioned himself to defend what historian Michael Kazin called “the virtuous, masculine middle of America” against threats from above and below on the income ladder. But delivering on that promise won’t be easy. Even if Trump pursues aggressively protectionist trade policies, it’s a heavy lift to reverse generations of decline in fading industrial cities. In office, he’ll also confront the contradiction that while he talks tough against elites, his agenda apart from trade offers them huge corporate and personal tax cuts, and a rollback of federal environmental and consumer-protection regulations.
If Trump can’t deliver the economic results his supporters expect, he might try to salve them with confrontational cultural policies like his pledge to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants. But that would virtually ensure a backlash among his white-collar white and minority v**ers, most of whom opposed those ideas and might not have believed Trump would actually pursue them in office.
Trump impressively swept every Rust Belt swing state and charted a new Republican path to the presidency. But his white working-class base is irreversibly declining as a share of the e*****rate, while the groups most dubious of Trump — millennials, minorities, and college-educated white women — are growing. Maximizing support from the shrinking groups, without provoking even greater resistance from the growing ones, is the puzzle looming over Bannon’s dream of a 50-year Trump imperium.
RONALD BROWNSTEIN is a senior editor of the Atlantic.
Nov 25, 2016 15:01:09 #
Fear and loathing in the state
A rabbi, priest and social scientist dissect emotional reactions to Trump’s victory.
ROBIN ABCARIAN
This week, the president-elect was supposed to settle down, put aside his narcissistic bluster and start bringing together a deeply divided country.
Instead, we all learned a new vocabulary word: emoluments.
Here in blue, blue California — and how emotionally appropriate is that color right now? — resistance to the nascent Donald Trump presidency has begun to take shape.
In Los Angeles, the mayor and police chief have said they will refuse to toughen up policies about immigration enforcement despite Trump’s threats to cut federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities.
Chief Charlie Beck, bless him, didn’t even wait a week before pushing back. “We are not going to work in conjunction with Homeland Security on deportation efforts,” he said. “That is not our job, nor will I make it our job.”
In San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors passed a spectacularly in-your-face resolution, announcing that it would remain a sanctuary city that respects not just immigrants but women, L***Q people and those of all faiths. It further resolved that “black l***s m****r in San Francisco, even if they may not in the White House.”
Around the state, there is talk of secession. We’re the world’s sixth-largest economy. We’ve got the innovation, the industry, the tourism. (And the cannabis!) So why not break away? People have been suggesting it for years.
In normal times, you could laugh. But Brexit happened. Then Trump happened. Nothing is normal anymore.
Who could help me put this into perspective? I called a rabbi, a priest and a social scientist.
The rabbi told me to buck up. The priest counseled tenderness. The social scientist said, with regret, that it’s a good time to be a white male.
I probably should have stopped at the priest.
::
The moment he realized Trump had won, said Rabbi Steven Jacobs, “I went back to my deep religious roots. I said: ‘Oh my God.’ ”
Jacobs, 77, is a veteran civil rights activist whose mentors included the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He was the founding rabbi of Temple Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills. Now retired, he lives in Alameda with Democratic State Controller Betty Yee, whom he married in December.
When I reached him by phone in Sacramento, he was less disturbed than I expected by last weekend’s neo-N**i gathering in Washington, D.C. — where members of the National Policy Institute raised their arms and chanted, “Hail Trump.” A widely circulated video showed the group’s founder, Richard Spencer, extolling America as “until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity.”
“Richard Spencer just plays into what I have felt for a long time,” Jacobs said. “When Donald Trump was talking about making America great again, he was talking about making America white again. I believe that to my very core.”
On the other hand, Jacobs said, “You gotta say, ‘OK, get over it.’ Betty and I have been to several events in the past week, and people are talking about anger and stages of grief. This was an e******n. You didn’t lose a parent or a child, and you’ve got a job to do. If we are going to let Trump get us depressed, then he still has control of us. If he has control of us, and we continue to mourn and be angry, it will just leave us bitter. There is goodness every day. ”
::
I had some trouble reaching Father Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who is founder and director of Homeboy Industries. His voicemail was full. “It’s my own damn fault for giving my phone number to every gang member in L.A. County,” he joked when we finally connected.
The day after the e******n, while he was in the hospital receiving treatment for his longtime battle with leukemia, his phone blew up with text messages from many of the former gang members he works with. Some of the concerns were outlandish: “Will Donald Trump close us down immediately?”
But, he said, “the tenor of the fear and anxiety were real.”
“I have v**ed for presidents for 44 years,” Boyle said. “Half have lost and half have won. But that’s not what this is. This is not about being disappointed that your candidate lost. It’s the normalizing of things you spend your life fighting against — exclusion, r****m and meanness.”
Despite this shocking turn, he sounded hopeful.
“This is a moment to cherish the loss, actually, because then you know to what you ought to give your heart all over again,” Boyle said. “That’s what I tell folks here. We talk about the power of tenderness to ventilate our world. That is our defense, our defiance, our resistance, to safeguard against normalizing bigotry and exclusion.”
::
I’m not embarrassed to admit this: The other day, I Googled, “How to get over e******n disappointment.”
I found an article with a link to an academic paper called “Losing Hurts: The Happiness Impact of Partisan E*******l Loss.”
It was an analysis of the 2012 p**********l campaign, published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science. Three researchers discovered that the pain of losing an e******n lasts longer than the joy of winning — but that, just like when a favorite team loses, most people bounce back in a week.
That does not appear to be true in 2016, said the paper’s lead author, Lamar Pierce, associate professor of strategy at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis.
He has not yet analyzed all the data from a daily poll he uses, but he already sees a “tremendous difference” in how v**ers who opposed Trump are handling the aftermath versus v**ers who opposed Barack Obama in 2012.
“Republicans talked about Obama being the anti-Christ, but a week later, nobody cared,” Pierce said.
But for the plurality of American v**ers who supported Hillary Clinton, he said, “the response is not sadness or disappointment. It’s a forward-looking anxiety about what comes next, and for very valid reasons. The thing I keep coming back to as a straight white male: I am angry and disappointed, but I am kind of sadly OK with it [the e******n] in a way that bothers me. I don’t feel a personal threat to myself in the way many, many people do.”
In the coming months, Pierce said, social scientists probably will try to gauge the effect of Trump’s victory on “the normalization” of bad behavior.
“They’ll be interested to study whether in three or four months, grabbing people’s g*****ls or calling them the N-word or making fun of disabled people becomes socially acceptable in public.”
He added, “You will see less of that in California than you will in Missouri.”
Well, that’s a relief. I think. robin.abcarian @latimes.com
JEFF CHIU Associated Press
THE REV. Annie Steinberg-Behrman, right, listens to speakers at a meeting at San Francisco’s City Hall where city leaders and community activists reaffirmed San Francisco’s commitment to being a sanctuary city.
A rabbi, priest and social scientist dissect emotional reactions to Trump’s victory.
ROBIN ABCARIAN
This week, the president-elect was supposed to settle down, put aside his narcissistic bluster and start bringing together a deeply divided country.
Instead, we all learned a new vocabulary word: emoluments.
Here in blue, blue California — and how emotionally appropriate is that color right now? — resistance to the nascent Donald Trump presidency has begun to take shape.
In Los Angeles, the mayor and police chief have said they will refuse to toughen up policies about immigration enforcement despite Trump’s threats to cut federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities.
Chief Charlie Beck, bless him, didn’t even wait a week before pushing back. “We are not going to work in conjunction with Homeland Security on deportation efforts,” he said. “That is not our job, nor will I make it our job.”
In San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors passed a spectacularly in-your-face resolution, announcing that it would remain a sanctuary city that respects not just immigrants but women, L***Q people and those of all faiths. It further resolved that “black l***s m****r in San Francisco, even if they may not in the White House.”
Around the state, there is talk of secession. We’re the world’s sixth-largest economy. We’ve got the innovation, the industry, the tourism. (And the cannabis!) So why not break away? People have been suggesting it for years.
In normal times, you could laugh. But Brexit happened. Then Trump happened. Nothing is normal anymore.
Who could help me put this into perspective? I called a rabbi, a priest and a social scientist.
The rabbi told me to buck up. The priest counseled tenderness. The social scientist said, with regret, that it’s a good time to be a white male.
I probably should have stopped at the priest.
::
The moment he realized Trump had won, said Rabbi Steven Jacobs, “I went back to my deep religious roots. I said: ‘Oh my God.’ ”
Jacobs, 77, is a veteran civil rights activist whose mentors included the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He was the founding rabbi of Temple Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills. Now retired, he lives in Alameda with Democratic State Controller Betty Yee, whom he married in December.
When I reached him by phone in Sacramento, he was less disturbed than I expected by last weekend’s neo-N**i gathering in Washington, D.C. — where members of the National Policy Institute raised their arms and chanted, “Hail Trump.” A widely circulated video showed the group’s founder, Richard Spencer, extolling America as “until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity.”
“Richard Spencer just plays into what I have felt for a long time,” Jacobs said. “When Donald Trump was talking about making America great again, he was talking about making America white again. I believe that to my very core.”
On the other hand, Jacobs said, “You gotta say, ‘OK, get over it.’ Betty and I have been to several events in the past week, and people are talking about anger and stages of grief. This was an e******n. You didn’t lose a parent or a child, and you’ve got a job to do. If we are going to let Trump get us depressed, then he still has control of us. If he has control of us, and we continue to mourn and be angry, it will just leave us bitter. There is goodness every day. ”
::
I had some trouble reaching Father Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who is founder and director of Homeboy Industries. His voicemail was full. “It’s my own damn fault for giving my phone number to every gang member in L.A. County,” he joked when we finally connected.
The day after the e******n, while he was in the hospital receiving treatment for his longtime battle with leukemia, his phone blew up with text messages from many of the former gang members he works with. Some of the concerns were outlandish: “Will Donald Trump close us down immediately?”
But, he said, “the tenor of the fear and anxiety were real.”
“I have v**ed for presidents for 44 years,” Boyle said. “Half have lost and half have won. But that’s not what this is. This is not about being disappointed that your candidate lost. It’s the normalizing of things you spend your life fighting against — exclusion, r****m and meanness.”
Despite this shocking turn, he sounded hopeful.
“This is a moment to cherish the loss, actually, because then you know to what you ought to give your heart all over again,” Boyle said. “That’s what I tell folks here. We talk about the power of tenderness to ventilate our world. That is our defense, our defiance, our resistance, to safeguard against normalizing bigotry and exclusion.”
::
I’m not embarrassed to admit this: The other day, I Googled, “How to get over e******n disappointment.”
I found an article with a link to an academic paper called “Losing Hurts: The Happiness Impact of Partisan E*******l Loss.”
It was an analysis of the 2012 p**********l campaign, published in the Journal of Experimental Political Science. Three researchers discovered that the pain of losing an e******n lasts longer than the joy of winning — but that, just like when a favorite team loses, most people bounce back in a week.
That does not appear to be true in 2016, said the paper’s lead author, Lamar Pierce, associate professor of strategy at the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis.
He has not yet analyzed all the data from a daily poll he uses, but he already sees a “tremendous difference” in how v**ers who opposed Trump are handling the aftermath versus v**ers who opposed Barack Obama in 2012.
“Republicans talked about Obama being the anti-Christ, but a week later, nobody cared,” Pierce said.
But for the plurality of American v**ers who supported Hillary Clinton, he said, “the response is not sadness or disappointment. It’s a forward-looking anxiety about what comes next, and for very valid reasons. The thing I keep coming back to as a straight white male: I am angry and disappointed, but I am kind of sadly OK with it [the e******n] in a way that bothers me. I don’t feel a personal threat to myself in the way many, many people do.”
In the coming months, Pierce said, social scientists probably will try to gauge the effect of Trump’s victory on “the normalization” of bad behavior.
“They’ll be interested to study whether in three or four months, grabbing people’s g*****ls or calling them the N-word or making fun of disabled people becomes socially acceptable in public.”
He added, “You will see less of that in California than you will in Missouri.”
Well, that’s a relief. I think. robin.abcarian @latimes.com
JEFF CHIU Associated Press
THE REV. Annie Steinberg-Behrman, right, listens to speakers at a meeting at San Francisco’s City Hall where city leaders and community activists reaffirmed San Francisco’s commitment to being a sanctuary city.
Nov 25, 2016 15:03:07 #
*Many r****ts now feel emboldened*
Leaders vow to ‘send a strong message’ as h**e crimes surge
BY JAMES QUEALLY
As h**e crimes surge in California and across the country, Los Angeles law enforcement leaders came together Wednesday to promise they will not let the city fall victim to fear.
City Atty. Mike Feuer, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and county Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey spoke about the wide-ranging effects that bias crimes can have on the city and county, urging victims of crimes with a racial or religious motive to come forward immediately.
H**e crimes are often underreported. Feuer said victims should not fear speaking to police because of their immigration status.
“Acts of h**e tear at the fabric of who we are as a nation, and we want to send a strong message that no one should be reluctant or afraid to report a h**e crime,” he said. “None of us is ever going to re-victimize someone who is either a victim or a witness of a h**e crime.”
H**e crimes surged in California and across the nation last year, and a spate of bias incidents that followed Donald Trump’s victory have also drawn serious concerns from police and human rights activists.
Beck said h**e crimes increased in L.A. by 19% compared with last year, and the L.A. County Commission on Human Relations reported a 24% increase in bias crimes in 2015. The 483 reported h**e crimes in the county marked the largest total since 2011, according to the commission.
Bias crimes rose by 7% across the U.S. in 2015, according to FBI data, and crimes deemed “anti-Muslim” rocketed up by nearly 67%. There were 257 reported bias crimes against Muslims last year, compared with 154 in 2014.
Beck did not blame the local increase on any particular group, despite concerns that the recent e******n cycle has mobilized fringe white separatist and nationalist groups.
H**e crimes, Beck said, need to be combated swiftly because of the outsize effect they can have on victimized communities.
“The fear of other is very, very strong in humanity. ... This cannot stand,” he said. “This cannot be something we allow as a people.” james.queally@latimes.com
JAMES QUEALLY Los Angeles Times
Leaders vow to ‘send a strong message’ as h**e crimes surge
BY JAMES QUEALLY
As h**e crimes surge in California and across the country, Los Angeles law enforcement leaders came together Wednesday to promise they will not let the city fall victim to fear.
City Atty. Mike Feuer, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and county Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey spoke about the wide-ranging effects that bias crimes can have on the city and county, urging victims of crimes with a racial or religious motive to come forward immediately.
H**e crimes are often underreported. Feuer said victims should not fear speaking to police because of their immigration status.
“Acts of h**e tear at the fabric of who we are as a nation, and we want to send a strong message that no one should be reluctant or afraid to report a h**e crime,” he said. “None of us is ever going to re-victimize someone who is either a victim or a witness of a h**e crime.”
H**e crimes surged in California and across the nation last year, and a spate of bias incidents that followed Donald Trump’s victory have also drawn serious concerns from police and human rights activists.
Beck said h**e crimes increased in L.A. by 19% compared with last year, and the L.A. County Commission on Human Relations reported a 24% increase in bias crimes in 2015. The 483 reported h**e crimes in the county marked the largest total since 2011, according to the commission.
Bias crimes rose by 7% across the U.S. in 2015, according to FBI data, and crimes deemed “anti-Muslim” rocketed up by nearly 67%. There were 257 reported bias crimes against Muslims last year, compared with 154 in 2014.
Beck did not blame the local increase on any particular group, despite concerns that the recent e******n cycle has mobilized fringe white separatist and nationalist groups.
H**e crimes, Beck said, need to be combated swiftly because of the outsize effect they can have on victimized communities.
“The fear of other is very, very strong in humanity. ... This cannot stand,” he said. “This cannot be something we allow as a people.” james.queally@latimes.com
JAMES QUEALLY Los Angeles Times
Nov 25, 2016 15:05:15 #
Yeah Right:
Trump tweets he’s trying to save a factory
He says he was working Thanksgiving to keep Carrier plant from leaving Indiana.
BY JONATHAN O’CONNELL
President-elect Donald Trump tweeted Thanksgiving morning that he was trying to make good on a campaign promise that a Carrier air conditioning factory in Indiana, and its 1,400 jobs, would not move to Mexico in 2019 as planned.
“I am working hard, even on Thanksgiving, trying to get Carrier A.C. Company to stay in the U.S. (Indiana). MAKING PROGRESS - Will know soon!:” Trump tweeted.
Carrier, a division of United Technologies Corp. of Hartford, Conn., responded with a tweet about an hour later: “Carrier has had discussions with the incoming administration and we look forward to working together. Nothing to announce at this time.”
During the campaign, Trump called the planned closure of the Indianapolis plant “d********g” and “un-American” and made it a campaign rallying cry. At an Indianapolis event in May he went further, offering the crowd a “100% guarantee” the plant would not leave if he were elected.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Trump said, according to Bloomberg. “They’re going to call me and they are going to say ‘Mr. President, Carrier has decided to stay in Indiana.’”
“One hundred percent — that’s what is going to happen,” Trump added. “It’s not like we have an 80% chance of keeping them or a 95% — 100%.”
The Carrier back-and-forth was reminiscent of a similar exchange over manufacturing facilities that Trump began a week earlier, when the president-elect bragged on Twitter that he had received a call from Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Co., saying “he will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky — no Mexico.”
Trump’s claim was exaggerated, as Ford’s union contract prevented it from shutting down its Louisville Assembly Plant.
Ford clarified that it had merely decided not to relocate production of a single vehicle, the Lincoln MKC, from Kentucky.
Carrier announced its plans to shut down the Indiana plant in February, with the closure slated for 2019.
Chris Nelson, a Carrier president overseeing the unit, issued a statement at the time saying the move to Mexico would allow the company “to operate more cost effectively” because of the industry’s ongoing migration to that area as well as “cost and pricing pressures driven, in part, by new regulatory requirements.”
The closure could lead to the loss of more than $100 million to the Indiana economy and more than 1,000 other jobs that indirectly rely on the plant, according to some estimates.
Trump’s promise to save the plant was met with skepticism in some corners of Indiana, home state of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, but he carried the state easily over Hillary Clinton.
O’Connell writes for the
Washington Post.
Trump tweets he’s trying to save a factory
He says he was working Thanksgiving to keep Carrier plant from leaving Indiana.
BY JONATHAN O’CONNELL
President-elect Donald Trump tweeted Thanksgiving morning that he was trying to make good on a campaign promise that a Carrier air conditioning factory in Indiana, and its 1,400 jobs, would not move to Mexico in 2019 as planned.
“I am working hard, even on Thanksgiving, trying to get Carrier A.C. Company to stay in the U.S. (Indiana). MAKING PROGRESS - Will know soon!:” Trump tweeted.
Carrier, a division of United Technologies Corp. of Hartford, Conn., responded with a tweet about an hour later: “Carrier has had discussions with the incoming administration and we look forward to working together. Nothing to announce at this time.”
During the campaign, Trump called the planned closure of the Indianapolis plant “d********g” and “un-American” and made it a campaign rallying cry. At an Indianapolis event in May he went further, offering the crowd a “100% guarantee” the plant would not leave if he were elected.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Trump said, according to Bloomberg. “They’re going to call me and they are going to say ‘Mr. President, Carrier has decided to stay in Indiana.’”
“One hundred percent — that’s what is going to happen,” Trump added. “It’s not like we have an 80% chance of keeping them or a 95% — 100%.”
The Carrier back-and-forth was reminiscent of a similar exchange over manufacturing facilities that Trump began a week earlier, when the president-elect bragged on Twitter that he had received a call from Bill Ford, executive chairman of Ford Motor Co., saying “he will be keeping the Lincoln plant in Kentucky — no Mexico.”
Trump’s claim was exaggerated, as Ford’s union contract prevented it from shutting down its Louisville Assembly Plant.
Ford clarified that it had merely decided not to relocate production of a single vehicle, the Lincoln MKC, from Kentucky.
Carrier announced its plans to shut down the Indiana plant in February, with the closure slated for 2019.
Chris Nelson, a Carrier president overseeing the unit, issued a statement at the time saying the move to Mexico would allow the company “to operate more cost effectively” because of the industry’s ongoing migration to that area as well as “cost and pricing pressures driven, in part, by new regulatory requirements.”
The closure could lead to the loss of more than $100 million to the Indiana economy and more than 1,000 other jobs that indirectly rely on the plant, according to some estimates.
Trump’s promise to save the plant was met with skepticism in some corners of Indiana, home state of Vice President-elect Mike Pence, but he carried the state easily over Hillary Clinton.
O’Connell writes for the
Washington Post.
Nov 25, 2016 16:28:52 #
Should Americans give credence to what an anarchist professor has to share? Just beware from what perspective it is coming from.
Progressive One wrote:
yeah...I've been a professor for three different universities since 94...is that welfare also?
Who called that welfare. It is being on the public dole though.
A paid propagandist maybe?
Well now; you explained your back ground. ( A professor)
That is a start; now please answer the questions you have been avoiding for a month.
**********************
BTW; I know why you have not. You are ashamed of what the honest answers are. I would be also.
To see the hypocrite and phony, "the Progressive One" is; these quotes and questions have been presented;
Once he/she answers them; I will not have to show them again:
"You can tell that this is the wakeup call to action many needed.....you can see the new level of mobilization, awareness and consciousness. the freeways have been blocked with thousands out here in LA.....Trump has his work cut out for him and his r****t supporters in the sticks got him there.....will not be of any help to him…" - "Progressive?" One
So it is anarchy that Progressive One is behind!
At least he/she? is out in the open.
The professor is a Marxist.
No wonder the professor avoided responding to these questions!
“you stated I was behind anarchy, so you've answered your own question. Very good” – OP
Is that a sly way of admitting you support anarchy? I will take it as a yes.
PO; do you believe this should be what guides America?
“This system to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” - Insider, Professor Carroll Quigley – ‘Tragedy and Hope’,( p. 324)
Still waiting for the professor, "Progressive" One, to stand behind his/her beliefs.
To defend your positions, it would be good to explain why you align with the likes of George Soros, or if you don’t. Looks like that is a YES also.
SOROS ROTHSCHILD RACE WAR PROPAGANDA EXPOSED
https://youtu.be/lhqqz3QFQKE
George Soros: Evil Z*****t Puppet Master Exposed
https://youtu.be/1eRFTHD2CTg
10 Things You Didn't Know About George Soros
https://youtu.be/tfBHYxEojZk
Progressive One wrote:
yeah...I've been a professor for three different universities since 94...is that welfare also?
Who called that welfare. It is being on the public dole though.
A paid propagandist maybe?
Well now; you explained your back ground. ( A professor)
That is a start; now please answer the questions you have been avoiding for a month.
**********************
BTW; I know why you have not. You are ashamed of what the honest answers are. I would be also.
To see the hypocrite and phony, "the Progressive One" is; these quotes and questions have been presented;
Once he/she answers them; I will not have to show them again:
"You can tell that this is the wakeup call to action many needed.....you can see the new level of mobilization, awareness and consciousness. the freeways have been blocked with thousands out here in LA.....Trump has his work cut out for him and his r****t supporters in the sticks got him there.....will not be of any help to him…" - "Progressive?" One
So it is anarchy that Progressive One is behind!
At least he/she? is out in the open.
The professor is a Marxist.
No wonder the professor avoided responding to these questions!
“you stated I was behind anarchy, so you've answered your own question. Very good” – OP
Is that a sly way of admitting you support anarchy? I will take it as a yes.
PO; do you believe this should be what guides America?
“This system to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” - Insider, Professor Carroll Quigley – ‘Tragedy and Hope’,( p. 324)
Still waiting for the professor, "Progressive" One, to stand behind his/her beliefs.
To defend your positions, it would be good to explain why you align with the likes of George Soros, or if you don’t. Looks like that is a YES also.
SOROS ROTHSCHILD RACE WAR PROPAGANDA EXPOSED
https://youtu.be/lhqqz3QFQKE
George Soros: Evil Z*****t Puppet Master Exposed
https://youtu.be/1eRFTHD2CTg
10 Things You Didn't Know About George Soros
https://youtu.be/tfBHYxEojZk
Progressive One wrote:
ANALYSIS br br Trump’s tweets deftly drive m... (show quote)
Nov 25, 2016 16:29:21 #
Should Americans give credence to what an anarchist professor has to share? Just beware from what perspective it is coming from.
Progressive One wrote:
yeah...I've been a professor for three different universities since 94...is that welfare also?
Who called that welfare. It is being on the public dole though.
A paid propagandist maybe?
Well now; you explained your back ground. ( A professor)
That is a start; now please answer the questions you have been avoiding for a month.
**********************
BTW; I know why you have not. You are ashamed of what the honest answers are. I would be also.
To see the hypocrite and phony, "the Progressive One" is; these quotes and questions have been presented;
Once he/she answers them; I will not have to show them again:
"You can tell that this is the wakeup call to action many needed.....you can see the new level of mobilization, awareness and consciousness. the freeways have been blocked with thousands out here in LA.....Trump has his work cut out for him and his r****t supporters in the sticks got him there.....will not be of any help to him…" - "Progressive?" One
So it is anarchy that Progressive One is behind!
At least he/she? is out in the open.
The professor is a Marxist.
No wonder the professor avoided responding to these questions!
“you stated I was behind anarchy, so you've answered your own question. Very good” – OP
Is that a sly way of admitting you support anarchy? I will take it as a yes.
PO; do you believe this should be what guides America?
“This system to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” - Insider, Professor Carroll Quigley – ‘Tragedy and Hope’,( p. 324)
Still waiting for the professor, "Progressive" One, to stand behind his/her beliefs.
To defend your positions, it would be good to explain why you align with the likes of George Soros, or if you don’t. Looks like that is a YES also.
SOROS ROTHSCHILD RACE WAR PROPAGANDA EXPOSED
https://youtu.be/lhqqz3QFQKE
George Soros: Evil Z*****t Puppet Master Exposed
https://youtu.be/1eRFTHD2CTg
10 Things You Didn't Know About George Soros
https://youtu.be/tfBHYxEojZk
Progressive One wrote:
yeah...I've been a professor for three different universities since 94...is that welfare also?
Who called that welfare. It is being on the public dole though.
A paid propagandist maybe?
Well now; you explained your back ground. ( A professor)
That is a start; now please answer the questions you have been avoiding for a month.
**********************
BTW; I know why you have not. You are ashamed of what the honest answers are. I would be also.
To see the hypocrite and phony, "the Progressive One" is; these quotes and questions have been presented;
Once he/she answers them; I will not have to show them again:
"You can tell that this is the wakeup call to action many needed.....you can see the new level of mobilization, awareness and consciousness. the freeways have been blocked with thousands out here in LA.....Trump has his work cut out for him and his r****t supporters in the sticks got him there.....will not be of any help to him…" - "Progressive?" One
So it is anarchy that Progressive One is behind!
At least he/she? is out in the open.
The professor is a Marxist.
No wonder the professor avoided responding to these questions!
“you stated I was behind anarchy, so you've answered your own question. Very good” – OP
Is that a sly way of admitting you support anarchy? I will take it as a yes.
PO; do you believe this should be what guides America?
“This system to be controlled in a feudalistic fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.” - Insider, Professor Carroll Quigley – ‘Tragedy and Hope’,( p. 324)
Still waiting for the professor, "Progressive" One, to stand behind his/her beliefs.
To defend your positions, it would be good to explain why you align with the likes of George Soros, or if you don’t. Looks like that is a YES also.
SOROS ROTHSCHILD RACE WAR PROPAGANDA EXPOSED
https://youtu.be/lhqqz3QFQKE
George Soros: Evil Z*****t Puppet Master Exposed
https://youtu.be/1eRFTHD2CTg
10 Things You Didn't Know About George Soros
https://youtu.be/tfBHYxEojZk
Progressive One wrote:
Yeah Right: br br Trump tweets he’s trying to sav... (show quote)
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