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It Always Comes Down to Abortion |
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Sunday, 07 January 2018 09:33 |
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McDonough writes: "In the final months of 2017, the Trump administration tried and failed to block three undocumented teenagers from getting abortions while in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement."
A rally against reproductive rights. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
It Always Comes Down to Abortion
By Katie McDonough, Splinter
07 January 18
 n the final months of 2017, the Trump administration tried and failed to block three undocumented teenagers from getting abortions while in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. In each case, the young women sought access to the procedure only to be refused by the agency, which cited a policy issued in March barring “any action that facilitates” abortion for unaccompanied minors, including “scheduling appointments, transportation, or other arrangements,” unless approved by agency director Scott Lloyd.
That approval would likely never come, even in cases of rape, because, according to a letter from Lloyd, to allow minors in ORR custody to terminate their pregnancies would be the equivalent of “being asked to participate in killing a human being in our care.”
The argument that the ORR had such authority did not hold up in court, and a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that allowed the women to end their pregnancies. What followed from the administration seemed like retribution. Just days before the new year, the DOJ argued to the same judge that the ORR had a right to disclose the abortion of one of the unaccompanied minors, a 17-year-old identified as Jane Poe, to doctors and potential sponsors, including family members who had threatened to beat her if she terminated her pregnancy. The judge once again ruled against the DOJ, extending the restraining order and gagging the state.
These were essential but ultimately palliative victories. The ORR policy remains in place as the American Civil Liberties Union tries to file a class action lawsuit to reverse it, and it’s unclear what will happen next.
The experiences of these young women are about as blunt an articulation of this administration’s cruel logic as you can get, and an alarming glimpse at what state intervention in a healthcare decision looks like when anti-abortion ideologues are empowered at all levels of government. Which is precisely where we are right now.
This administration’s framework—that an immigration official could act as a gatekeeper to healthcare or that an early draft of the tax bill could include a provision that subtly established fetal personhood—is in some ways a perverse mirror of what reproductive justice advocates have been saying for decades: namely, that you can’t isolate reproductive freedom as a single issue that happens inside an abortion clinic. That it touches everything.
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In the last decade or so, the pregnant person has been reimagined in the conservative narrative around abortion. As activists realized that condemning women as murderers and threatening punishment was bad optics and that the broad strokes of the law were not entirely on their side, the mainstream anti-abortion movement shifted to softer language about women as “victims” of abortion and began focusing on legal concepts about the rights of a fetus, dry regulatory language about the square footage of recovery rooms, and marginal science about pain in order to accomplish their political goals.
All of this has amounted to layers of political abstraction: Roe v. Wade is still intact, still establishes a constitutional right to an abortion, but women, particularly women of color and low-income women, are left to parse what that actually means if they can’t afford the procedure, get themselves to a clinic six hours away, or take off work for the multiple visits some states now require.
In the recent ORR cases, we have the same practical barrier—a right denied by the circumstance of structural inequality—but the context of state custody is specific, more direct. The government literally tried to restrict the movement of these young women to keep them out of the clinic, as Judge Tanya S. Chutkin noted in her decision:
If defendants are not immediately restrained from prohibiting shelter staff from transporting [Jane Roe] and [Jane Poe] to abortion facilities or otherwise interfering with or obstructing their access to an abortion, [Roe] and [Poe] will both suffer irreparable injury in the form of, at a minimum, increased risk to their health, and perhaps the permanent inability to obtain a desired abortion to which they are legally entitled.
The hand that holds women back doesn’t always show itself in this kind of daylight. The government bringing its full weight to bear on three teenagers seeking a basic medical procedure is a bit of mask slippage and an honest reflection of where the United States is heading.
“There’s an escalation of everything that is about white supremacy and that is about male supremacy,” Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, tells me. “There is no question that it is more explicit and more destructive than we have seen in our lifetime.”
Donald Trump is a poor actor when it comes to mimicking anti-abortion fervor or even getting the talking points right, but he has nevertheless made good on many of his campaign promises to the anti-abortion movement. He nominated a conservative justice in the model of Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court and will likely get a shot at another seat before his term ends. He has placed anti-abortion ideologues in the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the Department of Health and Human Services, on various lower court benches, and in the office of the vice president.
The result is that this administration sees abortion everywhere and acts accordingly. “The anti-women’s health movement has never been shy about taking on these issues anywhere they can,” Amy Friedrich-Karnik, senior federal policy adviser at the Center for Reproductive Rights, tells me. “We’ve seen that at the state level in the last several years, and now doubled down at the federal level.”
Republicans are going after “not just abortion, but also access to contraception,” Friedrich-Karnik says. “You see them going after the no-copay guaranteed coverage for contraception and trying to dismantle that under the guise of religious liberty. You see what’s happening with the office of Refugee Resettlement. You see Congress is emboldened. You saw the ‘unborn child’ language in [a previous version] of the tax plan. You saw, for the first time in the House, a hearing on a bill that would ban abortion as soon as a heartbeat is detected.”
What we are facing, she says, is an administration that is going after “women’s autonomy and women’s rights however and wherever they can.”
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Earlier this week, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a position paper calling for the decriminalization of self-induced abortion. This is a long-held position among many reproductive health advocates, but the timing feels heavy, pointing us ominously to a past in which the procedure was illegal and so often performed illicitly, a present in which women have been prosecuted and imprisoned for attempting—or being suspected of attempting—to self-induce an abortion, and a future that may see more of the same.
“History tells us restrictive or punitive measures do not end abortion or reduce unintended pregnancy,” Daniel Grossman, a physician and lead author of the position paper, said in a statement. “Many physicians can still recall a time before Roe v. Wade when thousands of women died each year from attempting to self-induce abortion. Historical and contemporary data also supports the understanding that these barriers increase instances of women resorting to unsafe means to end an unwanted pregnancy, including self-inflicted abdominal and bodily trauma and reliance on unqualified abortion providers.”
A lot of the activism and policy proposals right now seem to have this kind of weight: a focus on damage control, harm reduction, bracing for the long fight.
“We know that banning abortion doesn’t work,” Paltrow says. Women still had abortions before Roe v. Wade, but “many more died, many more lost their capacity for reproduction. Much more horror and suffering occurred.”
According to the Guttmacher Institute, estimates about the number of illegal abortions performed in the 1950s and 1960s range from 200,000 to 1.2 million each year. There were also clear disparities faced by poor women and women of color, who were disproportionately likely to attempt self-induction.
But with the rise of medication abortion, increasingly being used at home in places where abortion is criminalized, the fallout of restricted access may look different now than it did in the 1960s. Rather than returning to the era of the coat hanger abortion, the threat of this kind of prosecution for attempting to have an abortion outside of a clinic context may be the more pressing threat. The same could be said for the consequences of forcing women to carry pregnancies to term when they are not ready or able to support a family, particularly as congressional Republicans may be gearing up to slash our already threadbare safety net.
“At a moment when we are looking at a tax bill that is part of a very deliberate step by step strategy to end Social Security, to end Medicaid, to end food stamps—all of those things cost lives, devalue life,” Paltrow says. “But you can create the illusion that you are for life by trying to control women and prevent them having abortions. It’s the perfect distraction.”
And all the while, this administration will continue its intersectional approach to eroding women’s bodily autonomy, whether at the site of immigrant detention centers or women in states with growing clinic deserts. The extreme right has managed to learn a lesson about reproductive freedom that the Democratic Party still hasn’t grasped: It’s bigger than just the clinic, bigger than the Supreme Court. Now they’ve turned that insight into a weapon.
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Israel Implements a Deliberate Policy to Terrorize Palestinian Children |
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Sunday, 07 January 2018 09:30 |
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Hawwash writes: "In recent years, Gaza's children have suffered repeatedly at the hands of the Israeli army, particularly during the past three major wars."
Palestinian children ride their bike past Israeli soldiers patrolling in the old city of Hebron in the West Bank in December 2005. (photo: AFP)
Israel Implements a Deliberate Policy to Terrorize Palestinian Children
By Kamel Hawwash, Middle East Eye
07 January 18
Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion once said about the Palestinians: 'The old will die and the young will forget.' How wrong was he about the Palestinian people
 t the start of the second intifada in 2000, an iconic image emerged of Muhammad al-Durra, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, as he was being shielded from Israeli fire by his father who begged the soldiers to stop shooting. The bullets, however, continued and al-Durra died from the wounds he sustained.
Almost a month later, another image of a Palestinian child, caught in the conflict, went viral.
Fares Odeh, 14, was caught on camera fearlessly throwing stones at an Israeli tank in the Gaza Strip. Odeh was killed by Israeli forces on 8 November that same year.
Sheer hatred
On Wednesday, the Israeli army killed Musab Firas al-Tamimi, 17, from the village of Deir Nitham, in the West Bank, making him the first Palestinian to be shot dead by Israeli forces in 2018.
Israeli cruelty, and what Palestinians view as sheer hatred for their children, was epitomised by the killing in 2004 of 13-year-old Iman Darweesh Al Hams. She was shot by Israeli army soldiers from an observation post in what Israel claimed was a "no-man" zone near the Philadelphi Route in Rafah.
As if that was not enough, the Israeli army commander of the soldiers fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into Hams's body. A year later, that commander during trial expressed no regret over his actions and said he would have "done the same even if the girl was a three-year-old".
He was cleared of all major charges.
According to the Defence for Children International-Palestine (DCIP), 595 children were killed during the second intifada, during which the above killings took place.
In recent years, Gaza's children have suffered repeatedly at the hands of the Israeli army, particularly during the past three major wars. The 2008-9 war resulted in the death of 280 children. The death toll in the 2012 war was 33 children and in the most recent war, in 2014, 490 children were killed by Israeli fire.
In the period between 2000 to 2017 the DCIP reports that 2,022 Palestinian children lost their lives at the hands of the Israeli forces, an average of 25 per month. During that same period, 137 Israeli children were killed by Palestinians.
It is of course not about counting numbers but this does give an indication of the terrible impact of the Israeli occupation and repeated wars on the Palestinians, particularly on the children.
It is important to note that unlike Israeli children killed in the conflict, most Palestinian children killed by Israel are anonymous and become part of the death count. Israeli media ensures the names and images of dead Israeli children are transmitted as widely as possible. Palestinians do not have the same reach.
Children in military courts
There are currently no Israeli children being detained by Palestinians. However, there are some 450 Palestinian children who have been placed in detention by Israel. They are tried in military courts, brought to face the military judges in shackles - as the world saw after 16-year-old Ahed al-Tamimi was abducted in the early hours of 20 December last year.
According to the DCIP, 500 to 700 Palestinian children are detained by Israel every year. The most common charge is stone throwing. The DCIP, however, says that since 2000 at least 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested and prosecuted in the Israeli military detention system.
The DCIP reports that in 590 cases documented between 2012 and 2016, 72 percent of Palestinian child detainees reported physical violence and 66 percent faced verbal abuse and humiliation.
According to Khaled Quzmar, DCIP's general director, "despite ongoing engagement with UN bodies and repeated calls to abide by international law, Israeli military and police continue night arrests, physical violence, coercion, and threats against Palestinian children".
Once bundled into an Israeli army vehicle, they are manhandled and in some cases are taken into Israel which is against international humanitarian law. They are often interrogated without the presence of a parent or a lawyer and are often asked to sign confessions in Hebrew which they cannot read.
Disproportionately targeted
Children in Jerusalem and Hebron seem to have been disproportionately targeted. A video of the Israeli army detaining a five-year-old boy in Hebron made headlines around the world. Another six-year-old child was detained for five hours in Jalazun refugee camp in the West Bank.
Tareq Abukhdeir, a Palestinian-American teen who was beaten savagely by Israeli police, was not offered any assistance by the US consulate in East Jerusalem. His cousin Mohammed was burnt alive by Jewish terrorists earlier that year.
It seems that Israel is implementing a deliberate policy to terrorise Palestinian children to dissuade them from engaging in Palestinian resistance as they grow into adulthood.
However, in many cases the arrest process begins with the first abduction in the early hours, snatching them from their beds.
A child's bed, his/her home are the place where children should feel secure, but not Palestinian children. The knock on the door, the shouting of a name, the forced entry into a bedroom, can happen to any Palestinian child and without warning. No regard for age or circumstance is given.
Many Palestinian children are now on "Israel's books". This makes it easier for Israel to call on them at any time either for suspicion of involvement in stone throwing or to extract evidence against others.
A long list
Palestinian teen Ahed Tamimi now joins a long list of detainees. Instead of trying to understand why Ahed lashed out at the soldier who came uninvited into her illegally occupied village, the Israeli education minister suggested she and other Palestinian girls should "spend the rest of their days in prison".
While prominent Israeli journalist Ben Caspit wrote that "in the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras".
Israel often accuses Palestinians of incitement that encourages children and young adults to resist the occupation, including through violence. Ending incitement has been added to an ever growing list of Israeli demands they place on the Palestinians.
However, children need no incitement from anyone when they experience occupation and humiliation on a daily basis.
While many Palestinian children inspire others through their steadfastness and resistance, other Palestinian children also represent a beacon of hope as they struggle on different fronts, by winning international competitions. Seventeen-year-old Afaf Sharif beat 7.4 million contestants to win this year's title as the champion of the Arab Reading Challenge.
In 2015 Dania Husni al-Jaabari, 14, and Ahmad Ayman Nashwieh, eight, won first and second place respectively in the Intelligent Mental-Arithmetic Competition in Singapore, beating 3,000 other children. Two years earlier, 14-year-old Areej El Madhoon won the same competition.
Palestinian children born in the diaspora have also inspired others. Fifteen-year-old British-Palestinian Leanne Mohamad won a 2015-16 Speak Out regional challenge in London speaking about the effect of the Nakba on Palestinians. We will never know if she would have won the main competition as her award was withdrawn by the organisers under pressure from pro-Israel groups.
Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion once said about the Palestinians: "The old will die and the young will forget." How wrong was he about the Palestinian people.
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Fighting Fake News Is Not the Solution |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46742"><span class="small">Masha Gessen, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 January 2018 15:00 |
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Gessen writes: "Despair pervaded American newsrooms following the 2016 election. It wasn't just that most of the media had failed to foresee the outcome of the vote; it was the realization, as one colleague put it, that 'nothing we do matters.'"
Opinion data on the tax-reform measure that Congress passed last month is real-life proof that most Americans share a fact-based view of reality. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Fighting Fake News Is Not the Solution
By Masha Gessen, The New Yorker
06 January 18
 espair pervaded American newsrooms following the 2016 election. It wasn’t just that most of the media had failed to foresee the outcome of the vote; it was the realization, as one colleague put it, that “nothing we do matters.” Out of this despair, a new resolve and many a subscription drive were born, based on the widely shared belief that if more people consume more-accurate stories, American democracy may be saved.
In the popular imagination, the public is divided into two segments of roughly equal size: the “liberal bubble” and the “right-wing bubble.” In fact, there has never been much evidence that this picture was true, and two recent data points contribute to disproving it. One is a large study of the reach and impact of fake news; the other is opinion-poll data on the tax-reform bill that Congress passed and President Trump signed into law in December. Together, they burst the two-bubble theory by showing that most Americans are better informed and less gullible than you might think. That, in turn, suggests that fighting “fake news” is not the solution, or perhaps even a solution, to our current political problems.
For the fake-news study, three political scientists from three different universities—Andrew Guess, from Princeton, Brendan Nyhan, from Dartmouth, and Jason Reifler, from the University of Exeter—combined data on Web traffic in the month before and one week after the election with responses to an online public-opinion survey by 2,525 Americans to determine who consumed fake news, and how much. For their definition of “fake news,” the authors relied on an earlier study by the economists Hunt Alcott and Matthew Gentzkow, who looked at stories that are “intentionally and verifiably false and could mislead readers.” The economists’ study suggested that every American adult had been exposed to at least one fake news story in the leadup to the 2016 election, but relatively few people—roughly eight per cent—actually believed them.
The economists’ study was based on what people recalled seeing; the new study by the political scientists uses more and harder data. The conclusions, however, are fairly similar. First, they found that Trump supporters read fake pro-Trump stories while Clinton supporters read fake pro-Clinton stories, but the latter group consumed a lot less fake news than did the former. The study did not directly address the question of how far in advance of reading the fake stories these voting preferences had been cemented; the authors concluded that “the ‘echo chamber’ is deep .?.?. but narrow.” The biggest news, in other words, is that while many people were exposed to fake news stories, few were taken in by them as measured by how many similar articles they went on to read. About ten per cent of news consumers sought out more fake news, and they read an average of 33.16 fake stories, according to the political scientists.
An earlier study that used a different approach to data collection—combining social-media sharing, hyperlinking patterns, and language use—yielded similar results. In an article published in the Columbia Journalism Review last March, scholars and researchers from Harvard, Ritsumeikan, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that, in media consumption, “polarization was asymmetric.” In other words, rather than two bubbles, there was one, positioned far to the right of the political spectrum. A majority of Americans, the study showed, get their news from a variety of different media. They are routinely exposed to opinions they don’t share; they do not live in an echo chamber.
A second important observation in the study by Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler concerns the effectiveness, or, rather, the ineffectiveness, of fact-checking as a genre of article or Web site unto itself, such as the Washington Post’s Fact Checker or PolitiFact. “Not only was consumption of fact-checks concentrated among non-fake news consumers,” the authors wrote, “but we almost never observe respondents reading a fact-check of a specific claim in a fake news article that they read.” The study published in CJR, on the other hand, observed that while audiences of right-wing-bubble media and the rest of the media hardly overlapped, language had a way of migrating from Breitbart into the mainstream media. The authors identified the two topics that dominated false conspiratorial narratives—Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the threat posed by immigration—and traced the mainstream media’s disproportionate focus on these topics to the fake-news sites’ obsession with them. Together, these observations suggest that those ineffectual fact-checking pieces might have been a primary vehicle of that migration—such as, for example, when the Post fact-checked Trump’s claim, made in an interview with the conspiracy-theory purveyor Sean Hannity, that Clinton’s e-mails caused the death of an Iranian defector.
Still, the most salient, consistent, and counterintuitive result of these studies is that the image of the American public as divided into two equal partisan bubbles is wrong. Opinion data on Trumpian tax reform is real-life proof that most Americans share a fact-based view of reality. Poll after poll showed that voters opposed the tax bill, and that they did so on the basis of accurate information: they believed that it would benefit the rich. If there were indeed two equal-sized information bubbles in this country, one might reasonably expect half the population to buy Trump’s incessantly repeated line that the bill constituted a tax cut for the middle class. One would also expect roughly half the voters to support repealing the Affordable Care Act. That a majority of Americans support Obamacare and do not support the tax law is proof that accurate reporting still matters—sort of.
Members of Congress who voted for the tax bill, which will disproportionately benefit the very wealthy and will gut Obamacare, may be justified in assuming that they can afford to make their donors happy at the expense of their voters: partisanship and gerrymandering, they reckon, will keep their seats safe. In other words, an informed public is a necessary condition of democracy, but not a sufficient one. Democracy may indeed die in darkness, but light is no guarantee that it will survive.
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The Ghost of the Deepwater Horizon Returns |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5641"><span class="small">Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone</span></a>
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Saturday, 06 January 2018 14:25 |
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Goodell writes: "Like a hurricane or a trip to the frontlines of a war, seeing an oil spill up close is something you never forget. In 2010, a few days after the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that sent 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf."
Smoke billows from a controlled burn of spilled oil off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico, June 13, 2010. Millions of gallons of oil poured into the Gulf following the April 20, 2010 explosion on an offshore rig that killed 11 workers and ruptured BP's deep-sea well. (photo: Sean Gardner/Reuters)
The Ghost of the Deepwater Horizon Returns
By Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone
06 January 18
Trump's secretary of the interior just unveiled the largest single expansion of offshore drilling activity ever proposed
 ike a hurricane or a trip to the frontlines of a war, seeing an oil spill up close is something you never forget. In 2010, a few days after the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico that sent 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf, I boarded a small plane and flew out over the still-burning wellhead. It was an apocalyptic sight: flames shooting into the sooty sky, oil shimmering on the water for miles in every direction. A few days later, as the oil started to wash up on shore, I walked along the coast in Grand Isle, Louisiana. "On the worst days, the oil flowed up on the beaches in ribbons, sticking to the sand like big black cobwebs," I wrote. "The smell was bad, too – a heavy, metallic, stomach-churning odor of volatilizing chemicals, of benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. It was the smell of cancer." Later, while I was out on a small boat, a pod of dolphins surfaced in the middle of an oil slick nearby. I could actually hear them coughing.
By any measure, the Deepwater Horizon blowout was a human and environmental catastrophe. Eleven workers died from the explosion. Thousands of dolphins, sea turtles and other marine animals were killed, hundreds of cleanup workers and other Gulf residents were exposed to toxic chemicals. The spill prompted a six-month shutdown of all deepwater drilling in the Gulf while the Obama administration established new rules to limit the scope of offshore oil exploration and make drilling safer.
On Thursday, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke conjured up the ghost of the Deepwater Horizon when he unveiled the largest single expansion of offshore drilling activity ever proposed. The controversial plan would permit drilling in most U.S. continental-shelf waters, including protected areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic. Under the proposal, only one of 26 planning areas in the Arctic, Pacific and Atlantic oceans and the Gulf of Mexico would be off-limits to oil and gas exploration between 2019 and 2024. Zinke accurately described the plan as a sharp departure from the Obama administration's effort to protect areas rather than exploit them. "This is a clear difference between energy weakness and energy dominance," Zinke said, casting the proposal in almost sexual terms.
The proposal sparked immediate outrage. "President Trump is once again defying a majority of American citizens, states, and businesses," former Vice President Al Gore tweeted. "His offshore drilling proposal threatens our coastal communities, just to prop up a dying fossil fuel industry."
Pushback from Democratic governors, senators and politicians in coast states was equally blunt. As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island put it, "Not on my watch. Not in Rhode Island."
What was more surprising was the pushback from Republicans. Yes, there was some rah-rah from the Koch brothers crowd, including House Majority Leader Paul Ryan. But there was also a lot of dissent. "Protecting our environment and precious natural resources is a top priority for Governor Hogan and exactly why he has made clear that he opposes this kind of exploration off our coastline," said Douglass Mayer, a spokesman for Maryland's Republican Governor Larry Hogan. Mayer said Hogan directed his attorney general "to take any legal action necessary against the federal government to prevent this possible exploration." Even stalwart Republican pals of Trump like Republican Governor Rick Scott of Florida, a pioneering climate denier who has had a long romance with fossil fuels, said Thursday that he adamantly opposes drilling off the state's coast and requested a meeting with Zinke. Why? Simple economics: beach tourism on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts generates nearly $50 billion and a half-million jobs annually, according to a Florida Atlantic University report. Even Scott understands that a Deepwater Horizon-like spill off the coast of Florida would be a catastrophe that his state would not soon recover from.
The fact that the Trump administration would push this forward, even with strong Republican opposition in important states like Florida, just shows you how much sway Big Oil has in the Trump administration. This is a wet dream proposal for Big Oil – it is exactly the kind of proposal they would write themselves, if they had the chance. (Which, if you think about it for a moment, is not surprising, given the sway the Koch brothers have over Republicans.) It is also in keeping with Trump's goal to Make American Great Again by taking us back to 19th Century-style fossil fuel capitalism, in which riches are acquired by those who are most shameless in their desire to rape and pillage the earth and exploit workers. Just last week, the Interior Department's rollback of drilling safety regulations after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill cited their "unnecessary … burden" on industry.
Another way to think about this proposal is as a political move masquerading as energy policy. Zinke, Ryan and the other clowns who are backing this move know that a massive rollout of offshore drilling rigs in not going to happen. This is showboat stuff designed to impress his fossil-fuel-loving base, grab headlines, distract from the Russia investigation and Steve Bannon's betrayal and troll liberal elites in coastal cities who think burning fossil fuels is cooking the planet and putting the future of civilization at risk.
Most likely, both interpretations of this proposal are part of the calculation here. But the real motivation behind this proposal is probably more practical: By rolling out a big, splashy initiative like this, it creates negotiating room that may help build political momentum to open small areas of Alaska and the Gulf to offshore drilling in the coming years. It's a classic negotiating gambit: Ask for the moon, settle for a moon pie.
In the end, however, the future of offshore drilling in the U.S. will be driven mostly by the price of oil. Right now, with oil about $60 a barrel, no oil company is going to brave the harsh conditions in the water, the risk of environmental catastrophe, the lawsuits, the public protests and the marginal returns in order to start drilling deep off the continental shelf. It's just not worth the risk. In 2015, Royal Dutch Shell pulled out of its Arctic drilling campaign after spending $7 billion because of the rising cost, loud public opposition and extreme difficulty of exploring in rough, icy water. If oil hits $100 a barrel, that calculation might change. But until it does, no matter how loudly Zinke or Trump wants to crow about energy dominance, we're unlikely to see an armada of oil rigs off America's coasts.
What this proposal really demonstrates is that the best way to stop offshore drilling and prevent another Deepwater Horizon is not through regulatory reform, but with technological innovations like electric cars, which are capable of having a powerful impact on the demand for oil. Regulatory reforms can always be rolled back, watered down or ignored. But when oil is obsolete, the drilling will stop.
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ost of the world seems to have concluded that the lunatic chaos described in Fire and Fury, the "bombshell" new book about the Trump White House by Michael Wolff, foretells the end of civilization. 
