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FOCUS | DACA: Something Awful Is About to Happen. You Can Help Stop It. |
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Tuesday, 13 February 2018 11:42 |
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Graham writes: "If Congress doesn't act by March 5 - and most people are betting against their acting - all 700,000 DACA recipients will (gradually, over two years) lose their legal right to work."
Activists rallying to defend DACA in Washington, D.C. (photo: Andrew Stefan/RSN)
DACA: Something Awful Is About to Happen. You Can Help Stop It.
By Donald E. Graham, The Washington Post
13 February 18
 eader, something awful is about to happen. And you may be able to help stop it.
Let us suppose you are driving across the United States on a trip. You come to a city of 700,000 people — a city the size of Denver. But this city is surrounded by barbed wire. A group of courteous law-enforcement people are in charge, and when you stop and speak to them, they explain that everyone’s life there is about to become much harder.
You ask why. An official tells you: “These people are to be punished. They will never be allowed to work again legally. They’ll have to subsist on whatever income they can get from off-the-books jobs.”
You wonder: “Did they commit a crime?” “No,” comes the answer. “Not one of them has been convicted of even a semi-serious crime.” So what did they do?
“Well,” says the official, “their undocumented parents brought them to this country 10 or more years ago, when they were, on average, 6 years old. So they grew up here, most of them assuming they were Americans, but they are here illegally. They can’t change their status, no matter how badly they want to. About 75 percent of people in the country think they should be allowed to stay, work and pay taxes, but no one can figure out a way to change the law.”
Is one party for them and one against them? “No, the president wants them to be citizens. Most Republicans would at least let them become legal. But the Republicans want other things as well. The Democrats want to help these people and have for years, but they want other things, too. And they haven’t found a way to split the difference.”
Of course, my hypothetical city is called DACA. And I’m not exaggerating. If Congress doesn’t act by March 5 — and most people are betting against their acting — all 700,000 DACA recipients will (gradually, over two years) lose their legal right to work.
We know what will happen if they lose that right. Their lives will be ruined. Not damaged, ruined.
How do we know? Because that was the world before the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Roberto Gonzales of Harvard University studied about 150 undocumented teenagers in Los Angeles for his book “Lives in Limbo.” He met them in high school and followed them for years.
Some wanted to go to college, some did not. Many did go. Some graduated. Some were valedictorians.
It didn’t matter. They all wound up in, essentially, the jobs of their parents. They did dangerous construction work, cleaned toilets, worked in the underground economy. No law-abiding employer could hire them.
And that is what will happen to today’s DACA recipients if DACA goes away and is not replaced.
But some DACA recipients are already college graduates. They are teachers, nurses, medical students, accountants. Many, many more of them are college students.
To force law-abiding employers to fire these young people is crazy. It is worse than crazy: It is cruel. This is one of our wonderful country’s occasional fits of cruelty toward people with no money and no votes — just decency, talent, brains and motivation.
Reader: Do what you can to stop this from happening. You have a representative and two senators (unless you are a D.C. resident like me). Call them and tell them they must not just say the right words, but cast the right votes, too. Tell them they must compromise, even if it means they might face a primary challenge from some purist (and tell them you’ll round up your friends and support them in such a case).
Tell them not to ruin 700,000 lives for nothing.
If they tell you this all will be easily fixed in the future, remind them that the Dream Act was introduced in 2001.
It has never passed.
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The Silicon Valley Giant Bankrolling Devin Nunes |
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Tuesday, 13 February 2018 09:32 |
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Excerpt: "Weeks after they hired a controversial former Trump national security aide with ties to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), top executives at the tech company Oracle made substantial donations to Nunes' 2018 re-election campaign."
Devin Nunes. (photo: CNN)
The Silicon Valley Giant Bankrolling Devin Nunes
By Lachlan Markay and Sam Stein, The Daily Beast
13 February 18
Top executives at Oracle threw money to the controversial congressman just weeks after hiring a similarly controversial Nunes ally.
 eeks after they hired a controversial former Trump national security aide with ties to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA), top executives at the tech company Oracle made substantial donations to Nunes’ 2018 re-election campaign.
The donations, which totalled nearly $35,000 came from five executives, several of whom gave so much that they surpassed the legal limit and had to be refunded. What made the donations stand out, however, was not the size of them—$35,000 was a relatively small amount considering the more than $1.2 million that Nunes has raised so far this cycle. It was the timing of the giving.
Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who worked as a top White House intelligence aide linked to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, joined Oracle just weeks before its executives began writing checks to Nunes. Cohen-Watnick had arrived at the company under a cloud of controversy. During his time in the administration, he had been identified as having provided Nunes with reports that showed former National Security Adviser Susan Rice had requested the unmasking of several Trump aides listed in classified documents. That disclosure resulted in an ethics investigation into Nunes, who was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing.
The “unmasking” scandal turned out to be vastly overstated. And it raised additional questions about Cohen-Watnick’s qualifications for the job. He ultimately was let go from the administration in August as part of a staff cleansing by Flynn’s successor, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.
News that Oracle had hired Cohen-Watnick in its Washington DC office came in September. In early and mid-October, Oracle’s top officials began giving to Nunes. Edward Lloyd Screven, the company’s chief corporate architect, wrote two checks to the congressman for $2,700 each that month. On October 16, Kenneth Glueck, a senior vice president, wrote two checks to Nunes for $2,700 each. That same day, Safra Catz, Oracle’s president, wrote a check to Nunes for $2,500. In late November, she wrote three more worth $5,200 (she was later refunded $2,500). Mark Hurd, CEO, would donate $5,400 in late November as well. So too would Oracle’s billionaire chairman and CTO Larry Ellison. He had $2,700 of his $8,100 in contributions refunded.
Oracle is a Republican outlier in Silicon Valley, and its executives’ right-leaning politics (and political contributions) present opportunities in Trump’s Washington unavailable to competitors like Amazon, a frequent target of Trump’s ire. Catz and Hurd are particularly close to the Trump administration, having both advised his transition team. They’ve also enjoyed personal access to high-level Trump administration officials—most notably McMaster. Catz dined with him in July, a dinner over which the National Security Adviser reportedly called President Donald Trump an “idiot” and a “dope.” But neither Catz nor any of the other Oracle executives who gave to Nunes had donated to the the congressman before. Nunes does not represent the district where Oracle is headquartered.
The congressman does have influence over legislation involving government surveillance law, on which Oracle has spent a fair amount of money lobbying, including in the last quarter of 2017. Oracle has gone out of its way in the past to praise Nunes and his Democratic counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, California Rep. Adam Schiff, for their handling of cybersecurity issues. The company’s political action committee has donated to both congressmen. It would be slightly more than a month after the donations were made that Congress began seriously considering whether to extend, repeal or reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
But these five Oracle executives have not personally donated to Schiff this cycle or, for that matter, the chairmen or ranking members of the Senate Judiciary or Intelligence committees, all of whom would have played an outsized role in that debate over the 702 program as well. Indeed, for all but one of these executives, Nunes has been the only House member to whom they have donated this current cycle.
Oracle representatives did not return a request for comment. A source who works with the company said they were unaware of any fundraiser that would have been held by Nunes, at which the executives would have appeared.
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Reporters Should Leave Trump Alone, Argues America's Worst Media Critic |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10204"><span class="small">Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Tuesday, 13 February 2018 09:29 |
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Chait writes: "It is clear enough that Trump receives worse coverage in the mainstream news media than any other president since the invention of nonpartisan news. And yet it is simultaneously true that Trump is held to a more lenient standard than any other president."
Donald Trump. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Reporters Should Leave Trump Alone, Argues America's Worst Media Critic
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
13 February 18
 edia Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War Over the Truth, Fox News media reporter Howard Kurtz’s account of the first year of coverage of the Trump administration, opens with a now-famous episode from the administration’s very first days in office. Press Secretary Sean Spicer holds a special news conference to lambaste the media for reporting that Trump’s inauguration drew a smaller attendance than Barack Obama’s eight years earlier. In front of a disbelieving press corps, Spicer insisted Trump had actually drawn a much larger crowd. It was a staggering, preposterous lie that could be debunked with simple photographs, not to mention the National Park Service.
Kurtz, though, does not mention that Spicer’s claim was untrue. Indeed, he barely touches upon the claim at all, which occupies just one sentence, and which his readers only learn about through his quoting a reporter barraging Trump’s spokespeople with rude questions. Kurtz does not at any point quote the Spicer line — “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period” — that became so notorious Spicer performed a parody of it at the Emmy Awards. The episode, in Kurtz’s telling, has nothing to do with the administration’s lying. It shows instead how unfairly the media has treated the 45th president.
It is clear enough that Trump receives worse coverage in the mainstream news media than any other president since the invention of nonpartisan news. And yet it is simultaneously true that Trump is held to a more lenient standard than any other president. His administration produces so many errors, scandals, reversals, eye-popping meltdowns, and outright lies that it would be impossible for reporters to cover each of them the same way they would cover the same behavior under a normal presidency. Terrible stories about Trump are simply elbowed out of the news by other terrible stories about Trump. If it were revealed that another president had paid hush money to a porn star shortly before the election, you’d hear about nothing else for months. The Stormy Daniels news virtually disappeared.
To Kurtz, however, the “massive imbalance” between Trump’s coverage and coverage of other presidents can only be explained by media bias. He treats this premise as definitionally true — not defending it outright, but simply building his case as though no other explanation could even theoretically exist. And so the strange mission of his book is to analyze the hostile relationship between Trump and the mainstream news media without in any way acknowledging that Trump lies on a historic scale, or has in any other way departed from the historic norms of presidential behavior.
Kurtz does note that reporters often “call[ed] Trump a liar … [and this] was repeated like a mantra, as an established fact.” Is it a fact? Kurtz does not explore the question. To the extent Kurtz offers a theory as to why it’s wrong for the media to report on Trump’s falsehoods, it’s that Trump’s voters don’t like it when they do: “What many journalists fail to grasp is that Trump’s supporters love his street talk.” Most journalists I know do realize that Trump’s supporters are willing to forgive almost anything he says or does, in part because they get their news from propaganda organs that supply them with a worldview designed to encourage such thinking. These journalists believe they should try to report as objectively as they can anyway.
Kurtz, like Trump, presents the Republican base’s distrust of mainstream media as a decisive indictment. He does not consider the theory that a decades-long propaganda campaign by the conservative movement, and his employer in particular, to discredit non-party-controlled media has had any bearing on this reality. Instead he devotes his attention instead to media bias against the president.
***
Kurtz had been a somewhat right-leaning journalist for CNN and the Daily Beast. In 2013, Kurtz was fired from the Daily Beast for what editor Tina Brown called “serial inaccuracy.” That same year he moved to Fox News. In Kurtz’s telling, his unmitigated embrace of the right-wing line is one he arrived at sadly and reluctantly. “The last two years have radicalized me. I am increasingly troubled by how many of my colleagues have decided to abandon any semblance of fairness,” he tells his readers. “These are not easy words for me to write.” Luckily for Kurtz, his radicalization happens to dovetail with his change of employer. Indeed, it is a prerequisite for retaining his Fox News salary. Perhaps that makes it a little easier for him to write those words.
Given how many stories have been written about Trump, statistics would suggest it should be easy to produce a fair number that clearly indicate bias. Kurtz nevertheless fails to produce them. There is only one nugget of original reporting to bolster Kurtz’s accusation, and it is almost certainly false. Citing a Republican official, he claims New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin cursed out Trump as “racist and fascist” in a private conversation. Martin (who previously worked for National Review) vociferously denies that this occurred. Kurtz conjures the image of reporters celebrating openly at the travails of Steve Bannon — they “practically broke into cheers” and then, three pages later, were “practically high-fiving.” These imagined acts of bias have to substitute for his inability to describe actual ones.
The rest of the book’s evidence consists of Kurtz expressing indignation at what is actually fair coverage. For instance, Kurtz devotes a long (for him) section on Republican accusations that Obama administration national security adviser Susan Rice had improperly “unmasked” Trump campaign staffers. The charge briefly attracted a flurry of coverage, before (conservative) reporter Eli Lake discovered it to be false. Kurtz, of course, does not mention that the charge has been debunked. His takeaway is that the news media didn’t devote enough attention to spreading the accusation in the first place: “It wasn’t clear whether Rice had done anything improper, but some journalists had no interest in finding out.” (The irony, of course, is that Kurtz himself does not bother substantiating whether Rice had done anything wrong, yet accuses others of failing to care.)
Kurtz accuses the New York Times of publishing a news analysis of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord that “read like an editorial.” The offending passage in the news analysis stated Trump’s decision “would be a momentous setback.” He omits the rest of the sentence, which reads, “… for the effort to reduce climate change.” Of course, it is hard to dispute the fact that American withdrawal from the Paris agreement would be a setback for the move to reduce climate change. This result was a selling point for many conservatives who celebrated Trump’s decision.
Kurtz flays the media for reporting events he believes were unfounded, such as that Trump “allegedly mocked a disabled New York Times reporter.” (There is video.) “There was still no firm evidence,” he asserts, “that the Trump campaign had ‘colluded’ with the Russians.” Among other things, Trump’s adviser Roger Stone appeared to have advance warning of WikiLeaks email dumps, and several of his top officials had met in Trump Tower with a Russian said to be promising “dirt” on his opponent. Jared Kushner had been treated as the object of suspicion, Kurtz complains, “without any evidence of wrongdoing on his part.” That evidence of wrongdoing would include omitting multiple contacts with Russians on his disclosure forms, maintaining business interests from which he could profit through his role as Trump adviser, and setting up a secret back channel to communicate with Russia during the transition that he hid from American intelligence.
Kurtz describes the allegations that Trump hired Russian prostitutes “falsehoods” (they are actually unsubstantiated) and Trump’s claim that he really won the popular vote but for several million illegal votes in California “unsubstantiated” (it has actually been proven false).
The narrative obstacle Kurtz encounters in the crafting of his book is that he can’t list the alleged instances of reporters mistreating Trump without at least cursorily referring to the events they are covering. And many of those episodes are embarrassing, disgraceful, or otherwise impossible to brush aside. Kurtz’s solution to this problem is to treat the president as though he is responding to his critics, thus rendering his apparent failures into a projection of their irrational hatred.
So, for instance, the daily barrage of reports of internal dysfunction in the incoming Trump administration is conveyed thus: “[U]nnamed aides were out for themselves rather than worrying about what was best for the president-elect.” (Kurtz is a journalist who believes the public should know less.) Because of their selfishness, “what emerged was a portrait of a dysfunctional operation, which happened to jibe with the media’s predominant view that Trump knew next to nothing about running a government.” Kurtz blames leakers and reporters without actually disputing the accuracy of these reports.
This strange tic appears over and over. Trump’s failures are passive, and ultimate responsibility for all of them ultimately lands on the media. His grotesque insult of Mika Brzezinski “might reinforce the media indictment that he liked to denigrate women’s looks.” His demands for locking up his defeated opponent “allowed the press to depict Trump as fostering a banana republic atmosphere.” When Republican senators took the extraordinary step of charging their own party’s president with “debasing our country” (Bob Corker) and being “dangerous to our democracy” (Jeff Flake), Kurtz records the episode like so: “The media revelled in the narrative that leading Republicans were questioning Trump’s character.”
That this “narrative” was demonstrably correct — of course leading Republicans were questioning Trump’s character! Kurtz quoted them doing that very thing! — matters to him not at all. A literal description of undisputed public events is a “narrative,” and since the narrative serves the end of Trump’s enemies, describing it is biased.
Kurtz recounts one of his conversations, where Trump praises his work for its objectivity: “‘Your problem,’” he said in a friendly tone, looking me in the eye, ‘is that you’re too down the middle.’ I said that’s my job.”
Here Kurtz presents himself almost as a quiet cinematic hero who has saved the day, and humbly deflects praise — just doin’ my job — before walking off into the sunset. Perhaps the more telling takeaway from this exchange is what this tells us about Kurtz’s definition of real journalistic fairness: winning the admiration of Donald Trump.
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Rob Porter Is My Ex-Husband. Here's What You Should Know About Abuse. |
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Tuesday, 13 February 2018 09:26 |
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Holderness writes: "I was dismayed when Conway, appearing on CNN's 'State of the Union,' went on to say that she does not fear for White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, who has reportedly been dating Porter. 'I've rarely met somebody so strong with such excellent instincts and loyalty and smarts.'"
White House staff secretary Rob Porter has been accused of abuse by his ex-wives. (photo: WP)
Rob Porter Is My Ex-Husband. Here's What You Should Know About Abuse.
By Colbie Holderness, The Washington Post
13 February 18
hite House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Sunday that she has no reason not to believe statements that Jennifer Willoughby and I have made about our ex-husband, former White House aide Rob Porter. I actually appreciated her saying that she at least did not not believe us.
But I was dismayed when Conway, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” went on to say that she does not fear for White House Communications Director Hope Hicks, who has reportedly been dating Porter. “I’ve rarely met somebody so strong with such excellent instincts and loyalty and smarts.”
Borrowing Conway’s words, I have no reason not to believe her when she says that Hicks is a strong woman. But her statement implies that those who have been in abusive relationships are not strong.
I beg to differ.
Recognizing and surviving in an abusive relationship take strength. The abuse can be terrifying, life-threatening and almost constant. Or it can ebb and flow, with no violence for long periods. It’s often the subtler forms of abuse that inflict serious, persistent damage while making it hard for the victim to see the situation clearly.
For me, living in constant fear of Rob’s anger and being subjected to his degrading tirades for years chipped away at my independence and sense of self-worth. I walked away from that relationship a shell of the person I was when I went into it, but it took me a long time to realize the toll that his behavior was taking on me. (Rob has denied the abuse, but Willoughby and I know what happened.)
Telling others about the abuse takes strength. Talking to family, friends, clergy, counselors and, later, the FBI, I would often find myself struggling to find the words to convey an adequate picture of the situation. When Rob’s now ex-girlfriend reached out to both Willoughby and me, she described her relationship in terms we each found familiar, immediately following up her description with “Am I crazy?” Boy, I could identify with that question.
Then there is the just-as-serious issue of being believed and supported by those you choose to tell. Sometimes people don’t believe you. Sometimes they have difficulty truly understanding what you are trying to tell them. Both Willoughby and I raised our cases with clergy. Both of us had a hard time getting them to fully address the abuse taking place. It wasn’t until I spoke to a professional counselor that I was met with understanding.
Leaving and putting the pieces of your life back together take strength. Willoughby had to obtain a protective order as she was trying to extricate herself from her marriage. I had to take an extended leave from graduate school because I was depressed and unable to complete the work. When I finally left Rob for good, my self-confidence was so destroyed that I was too scared to apply to any jobs other than that of server at a restaurant. It has taken me years to get my professional life back on track.
Victims are often with their abusers for long periods of time. They marry them, become financially intertwined with them, have children with them. There are many reasons people find it difficult to leave. The bottom line is, it takes strength to pull yourself away and start over.
I never imagined myself in the situation I’m in now — no one could have. I’m not a partisan. I’m not an activist — far from it, in fact. Willoughby and I didn’t seek to tell our stories in such a public way. Rather, others sought us out in the course of investigating Rob.
I also never imagined I would be in an abusive relationship.
Being strong — with excellent instincts and loyalty and smarts — does not inoculate a person against abuse. It doesn’t prevent her from entering into a relationship with an abuser. Abuse often doesn’t manifest itself early on — only later, when you’re in deep and behind closed doors. The really ugly side of Rob’s abuse only came out after we married, following three years of dating.
Abuse comes in many forms. It is visited on the poor and the rich, the least educated and the most, people with a strong and deep network of friends and family and those without a support structure. And an abusive nature is certainly not something most colleagues are able to spot in a professional setting, especially if they are blinded by a stellar résumé and background.
Conway’s statements were made as she was trying to address the good wishes that President Trump sent to Rob, along with his tweets seeming to call into question the allegations and the #MeToo movement overall. Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders again declined to say whether the president believes Willoughby and me. While I cannot say I am surprised, I expected a woman to do better. But Conway and I definitely agree on one thing she said during that interview: “There’s a stigma and a silence surrounding all these issues. .?.?. Those who are in a position to do something about it ought to.”
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rump’s fantasy of a military parade and Trump’s choice to release or block congressional memos about the Russia investigation were the two big stories of last week. At first glance, they have nothing to do with one another. In fact, they are part of the same story: a grand cover-up of American defeat.
