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Donald Trump Can't Hide From His DACA Decision |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Friday, 08 September 2017 08:35 |
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Rich writes: "Trump's talk about having 'great heart' and 'love' for the Dreamers is bogus. His attitude toward immigrants, as measured by his actions, is uniformly bigoted."
Demonstrators protest in front of the White House after the Trump administration scrapped the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Donald Trump Can't Hide From His DACA Decision
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
08 September 17
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today: Donald Trump’s DACA decision, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and Harvey recovery.
 dministration officials worry that President Trump, reportedly looking for “a way out” of making a tough decision on DACA by kicking it to Congress, “might not fully grasp” what the end of the program could bring. This Congress has so far failed at all attempts to pass major legislation — is there a chance they can fix the program on Trump’s six-month deadline?
Trump’s “way out” on DACA was to send it to the Dead Letter Office, otherwise known as the GOP-majority Congress, which couldn’t even deliver on its signature seven-year-plus crusade to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Trump’s additional “way out” was to delegate the public announcement of his egregious decision to Jeff Sessions, who then refused to take questions from the press. Our president knows one meaning of the word pussy. His own cowardice exemplifies another.
The Times reported that “aides have portrayed [DACA] as a difficult emotional decision for the president.” No doubt aides worked hard to portray it that way, but that hardly means Trump actually felt that way. He no more grasps DACA than any other issue that intrudes on his Fox News binge-watching in the White House. But apparently the political crisis his decision created — as measured by polls, demonstrations, corporate outrage, and (selective) opposition in his own party — dawned on him late yesterday when he tweeted that he might “revisit” the issue in six months. That he thinks a 140-character stab at damage control could contain this fiasco is yet another example of the bubble of ignorance and self-delusion he lives in.
Trump’s talk about having “great heart” and “love” for the Dreamers is equally bogus. His attitude toward immigrants, as measured by his actions, is uniformly bigoted: the pardoning of former sheriff Joe Arpaio, the brutal Bull Connor of xenophobia, was the policy prelude to this week. Sessions was the perfect mouthpiece for ending DACA because of his own past abetting Jim Crow as a U.S. Attorney in the same state where Connor reigned, Alabama, in the 1980s — a past he slipped away from during his confirmation hearings. Yesterday Sessions condemned DACA as an “unconstitutional exercise of authority.” It’s not. But Sessions’s language is a throwback to the invocations of unconstitutionality that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan used to try to derail the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (A similar argument tripped up Rand Paul in his ill-fated presidential campaign.)
Jennifer Rubin, arguably the most rousing of the conservative Republican pundits turned anti-Trumpers, put it this way in the Washington Post this week: “The party of Lincoln has become the party of Charlottesville, Arpaio, DACA repeal and the Muslim ban. Embodying the very worst sentiments and driven by irrational anger, it deserves not defense but extinction.” My only quarrel would be with the words “has become” — the GOP has been this party for some time, the fruits of the “Southern strategy” hatched by Richard Nixon in the late 1960s. Let’s not forget that it was Reagan who launched his 1980 presidential campaign by speaking on behalf of “states’ rights” near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil-rights workers had been slaughtered in 1964 — and who nominated Sessions to the Federal bench in 1986.
The only way DACA can be saved now is if Republicans in Congress have the guts to do so — and do so on top of their mountain of unfinished business (passing a budget, extending the debt ceiling, Harvey relief, etc. etc.). The odds hardly look great, and Trump hasn’t even specified what DACA bill he would sign. Meanwhile, the White House’s larger war on undocumented immigrants, sanctuary cities, and the rest, besides being a moral and humanitarian scourge, is also going to create practical havoc in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. As one undocumented immigrant in Houston, a carpenter from El Salvador named Samuel Enríquez, told the Post this week: “If they deport all of us, who will rebuild? We do more for less.” According to the Pew Research Center, the Houston metropolitan area has the third-largest undocumented population in the U.S. (575,000) closely followed by the area now in the path of Hurricane Irma, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach County (450,000). More than a quarter of all government-paid recovery jobs after Hurricane Katrina went to illegal immigrants, according to the Post. Good luck rebuilding Houston and possibly southern Florida during a Trump administration.
After its test last weekend, North Korea has seemingly joined the world’s “thermonuclear club,” unchastened by Trump’s threats and the “red line” warnings he’s posted on Twitter. Where does this escalation end?
I don’t know and neither does anyone else. In Kim Jong-un, we are dealing with a madman even more frightening than our own. Ours has no plan whatsoever, as manifested by his choosing this moment to threaten a trade war with South Korea, the ally we need most in the region. As for Trump’s threats to North Korea, they are “fire and fury” signifying nothing and accomplishing nothing beyond spending down whatever credibility abroad he has left. This week’s tweeted threat that the U.S. might stop “all trade with any country doing business with North Korea” was embarrassingly stupid or ignorant (your pick) given that among those who do business with North Korea are Germany, Saudi Arabia, and America’s own biggest trading partner, China. The world economy would go into a tailspin.
That the Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, was the public spokesman for that limp threat is another indication of what a useless tool he is. He will be no better at squiring this year’s impending economic legislation — tax reform (a.k.a. tax cuts) and managing the debt ceiling are both in his charge — than he is at managing his wife Louise Linton’s Instagram account. What mainly seems to be standing between Trump and a Korean apocalypse are his secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, and his chief of staff, John Kelly. When and if they bolt, the fallout on America, literal or figurative, could be severe.
It took Trump two trips to Texas to meet any Hurricane Harvey survivors, his EPA responded to criticism of recovery efforts by attacking an AP reporter by name, and a notoriously anti-bureaucracy state is now in dire need of federal aid. What will be the lasting legacy of this storm?
The lasting irony will be that it occurred when an American president and the collaborators in his party were engaged in full-scale climate-change denial, turning that toxic ignorance into actual governmental policy, as exemplified by the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accord. Harvey’s lasting legacy will be that it proved the hypocrisy of Texas Republicans, led by Ted Cruz, who refused to support disaster relief for the victims of Hurricane Sandy but now want the Treasury to open the spigots for their own state. This hypocrisy may soon have a second wave if Irma should devastate Puerto Rico and Florida.
If the storm does strike Palm Beach, no doubt Trump will follow Joel Osteen’s Christian example and open Mar-a-Lago to displaced storm victims only if shamed into it. And maybe not even then. There’s no reason to believe that he has written or ever will write that $1 million personal check he pledged to aid the displaced in Houston. Given that he judged the families he met at a Hurricane Harvey shelter as “happy,” Trump may regard his visit to Texas as reward enough.
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The Stunning Democratic Shift on Single-Payer |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=34029"><span class="small">Dylan Matthews, Vox</span></a>
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Friday, 08 September 2017 08:33 |
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Matthews writes: "In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might."
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (photo: Scott Eisen/Getty)
The Stunning Democratic Shift on Single-Payer
By Dylan Matthews, Vox
08 September 17
In 2008, no leading Democratic presidential candidate backed single-payer. In 2020, all of them might.
 or a bill that does not exist yet and whose details are not public, Bernie Sanders’s new single-payer health care bill sure is popular. First, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) announced her plans to co-sponsor it; then Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) joined in. According to reporting by my Vox colleague Jeff Stein, Cory Booker (D-NJ) has staff working with Sanders and others on formulating the bill.
Warren, Sanders, Harris, and Booker are arguably the most famous and most-admired Democratic senators in the country among the party’s base; the betting markets give a 55 percent chance that one of them will be the 2020 nominee for president.
Other contenders are getting on board with single-payer — or “Medicare for all,” where the federal government would provide health insurance for every American financed through taxes — as well. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) declared, “We should have Medicare for all,” at a rally against Republican attempts to roll back Obamacare. Meanwhile 117 House Democrats (over 60 percent of the caucus) have co-sponsored HR 676, the Expanded & Improved Medicare For All Act offered every Congress by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).
This is what an emerging party consensus looks like. Over time, some issues become so widely accepted within a party as to be a de facto requirement for anyone aspiring to lead it. No Democrat would run for president, or even for House or Senate minority leader, without supporting the DREAM Act. No Republican would try for a leadership position without supporting repeal of the estate tax.
And the way things are going, soon no Democratic leader will be able to oppose single-payer.
The dynamics making Democratic leaders endorse single-payer
This shift has occurred with astonishing speed. Even the left-most mainstream candidate in 2008, John Edwards, didn’t dare propose single-payer, instead backing an individual mandate, insurance exchanges with subsidies, and a public option (presaging the Affordable Care Act, at least as the Obama administration wanted it to be). Al Gore and John Kerry didn’t even pretend their health plans would lead to universal coverage. A few stalwarts in Congress, like Conyers or former Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), kept the flame alive, but in the mainstream of the Democratic party, the idea was dead.
And there are still holdouts to the new pro-single-payer consensus, for sure. Moderate Govs. Terry McAuliffe (D-VA), Steve Bullock (D-MT), and Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) have all hinted at presidential bids, and none have endorsed single-payer. Nor has Joe Biden, who would be 78 on Inauguration Day but is nonetheless putting out feelers for what would be his third run for president.
But if they want to win, the moderates are going to face the exact same pressures that have led Harris and Warren to embrace Medicare-for-all. Bernie Sanders came shockingly close to winning the 2016 primary with almost zero institutional support from the Democratic party, and he fell short in large part because of his failure to appeal to African-American primary voters, who despite preferring Hillary Clinton are more likely than white Democrats to support single-payer.
That tells prospective national candidates some important things about the primary electorate they’re trying to woo. First, it has a huge stock of voters who flocked to Sanders, a candidate who made Medicare-for-all a cornerstone of his campaign. Second, winning those voters while making more inroads among black voters is almost certainly enough to win the primary, and a populist economic message at the very least won’t hurt attempts to woo black voters.
Put it all together, and the best path to victory in the primary starts to look like mimicking Sanders on policy, and certainly on health care policy. What’s more, if Biden or Cuomo were to run and oppose single-payer, they’d be hit hard by all their opponents for being holdouts offering half measures rather than promising universal health care. By contrast, if they just got on board with single-payer, it would be more or less costless in the primary.
There’s more to elections than primaries, of course, and the crushing defeat that single-payer received when it was on the ballot in Colorado last year suggests that massive payroll tax increases of the kind that the Conyers bill and (from early indications) the Sanders bill would entail are not exactly popular with a general election audience.
But that might also be a fixable problem. Universal health care as a concept polls pretty well with the general public, and it’s possible to design a single-payer or de facto single-payer plan that doesn’t require massive tax increases. And while a victorious Democratic president who supports single-payer would have a hard time passing it, they’d have a hard time passing anything significant on health care. There’s little cost in going big.
This is a significant change. And the success of the Sanders primary campaign, along with his subsequent decision to parlay that organizing into an effort to move his colleagues to the left, deserves a lot of credit in effecting it. While he lost the nomination, Sanders appears to have succeeded in significantly shifting the Democratic consensus on one of the party’s bread-and-butter issues.
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Three Days in the Fox News Swamp |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38164"><span class="small">Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Hollywood Reporter</span></a>
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Thursday, 07 September 2017 13:44 |
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Abdul-Jabbar writes: "After three days of watching Fox and Friends, Hannity, America's News Headquarters, The Five, Fox Report, The Greg Gutfeld Show, MediaBuzz and others, I did better understand Trump's obsession with Fox News - and why his dependency on it is so dangerous for the country."
Donald Trump at Fox News Republican debate. (photo: Getty)
Three Days in the Fox News Swamp
By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, The Hollywood Reporter
07 September 17
"Everything will be OK; Trump is not crazy" seems to be the message when a THR columnist tunes in to TV's most toxic presidential reality show.
 n the movie Kingsmen, Colin Firth's sophisticated spy character proclaims, "Manners maketh the man." His point is that we aren't defined by social class or education or upbringing, but by our own will power to act rationally and respectfully. When it comes to understanding the actions of President Trump, we have to adjust Firth's philosophy slightly to "Media maketh the man." One small difference in wording, one giant leap in meaning.
When "media maketh the man," the result is someone whose perception of the world is manipulated by the media he chooses, causing him to act impulsively, with limited knowledge, and often with destructive results. Trump has made no secret that his most trusted source of media information is Fox News programming — particularly Fox and Friends, which, because of the president’s loyalty to the show, The New York Times called "the most powerful TV show in America." Therefore, I decided to immerse myself for three days in various Fox News shows to better understand how their influence maketh the president. After three days of watching Fox and Friends, Hannity, America’s News Headquarters, The Five, Fox Report, The Greg Gutfeld Show, MediaBuzz and others, I did better understand Trump's obsession with Fox News — and why his dependency on it is so dangerous for the country.
Fox News shows and Trump are in sync when they both complain about "mainstream media" and "fake news." The reason they both continue to use the phrase "mainstream media" is because it promotes their desired image as brazen outsiders who are marginalized by the brainwashed hordes because they speak the truth that other news outlets don’t dare. Yet, Fox News is the opposite of an outsider. As of Aug. 17, 2017, Sean Hannity had the No. 1 show in cable news primetime and Fox News was the top cable news channel. It doesn't get more mainstream than that. And let's remember that ratings translate into millions of dollars in profits. If the president disparages news outlets that simply report facts that expose discrepancies in his statements, yet promotes the network that consistently praises him, and they profit from that promotion, that’s a quid pro quo business relationship. Nothing is more mainstream than a news organization lavishly endorsed by the president of the United States. Other countries — like China, Russia, and North Korea — call that state-run news.
The alarm Trump and Fox raise about "fake news" is legitimate. This public debate over the accuracy of news outlets may be the most important issue the country faces. The survival of democracy depends on its citizens receiving clear, un-spun facts in order to make informed decisions about the future of the country. Americans have always been proud of their defense of the First Amendment rights of a free press because without it, Americans would — like the people of China, Russia, and North Korea — receive only news that supported and praised the government. Then our choices would be a façade — no choice at all.
But what if the president only received news that supported and praised him? How would he know what all the people think or what they want him to do? He wouldn't. He would only know what his friends want and then act on that.
Fortunately, we have found the elusive source of fake news that Trump and Fox News have been railing against and it turns out to be Fox News and Trump himself. Let's start with Trump. A fact-check by The Washington Post showed that as of Aug. 22, Trump has made 1,057 false or misleading claims since taking office. His Aug. 22 speech at his rally in Phoenix only added to that tally. He referred to the media as "truly dishonest people," then proceeded to offer several lies of his own. He said that "very few people showed up" to protest his rally, yet photos show there were thousands. He claimed the news media wouldn't show the size of the crowd of supporters, but U.S. News & World Report tweeted photos of that crowd. He also told the crowd that TV cameras were being turned off because networks didn't want to show his speech, even as his speech was being aired live on television and online.
Also among the misinformation the president passed on during that speech was his belief that "clean coal" means scrubbing the coal as it's mined rather than technologies that reduce harmful emissions when it's burned. How can a president who lacks basic information make decisions about our energy policies?
Fox News already has a reputation for inaccuracies, and my three days watching didn’t dispel that reputation. PunditFact's analysis shows that only 22 percent of statements made on air by Fox, Fox News and Fox Business are true or mostly true. The remaining 78 percent range from half true to "pants on fire," with 30 percent false and 9 percent pants on fire. The most egregious recent example is Fox News promoting a conspiracy theory about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. Despite the "evidence" mentioned on Fox being discredited, and Fox itself retracting the story, Hannity continued to pimp the story on his Twitter account until his bosses shut him down.
I watched the shows with some hope that things had changed at Fox News. I was disappointed to discover they had not. While I found much of the reporting in their news shows to be straightforward and professional, there were enough comments to show a distorted and inaccurate view of the country. The mantra at Fox seems to be: "Your enemy is anyone who doesn’t make you feel good about your beliefs." The underlying message is "Everything will be OK; Trump is not crazy."
If you worry that systemic racism might be a problem in America because of the hundreds of studies that say it is, don't worry. They're all wrong. That's what I learned when I tuned in to watch America’s News HQ, which I had on my DVR. There was still about a minute of the previous Fox show on, showing demonstrators marching in Boston. To which the female correspondent assured us: "America is not a racist country, absolutely not. We have moved so far and will continue moving forward. That is what we do as Americans." This shows such a fundamental lack of understanding of what systemic racism is that it's shocking. There is not a reputable sociologist, political scientist or economist who doesn't admit that there is racism built in to our political and social systems. It's to the country’s credit that most people recognize this and are working hard to eliminate it. Pretending it doesn't exist doesn’t move us forward, it moves us backward.
A few minutes into America’s News HQ, anchor Leland Vittert reported that counter-protesters marching in Boston were made up of "leftist groups like Black Lives Matter." Huh? Technically, a leftist group seeks to address social inequities against the disadvantaged. But if the average Fox viewer were asked if they would like to see those who are disadvantaged get a fair shake, they’d probably say yes. Yet, stick on that "leftist" label, which most conservatives (a group that makes up 60 percent of Fox News viewers) see as a synonym for radical revolutionaries, and you've biased the audience. Why not say "social advocacy groups like Black Lives Matter," which is more accurate?
On Mediabuzz, a news ticker at the bottom of the screen claimed "Media Trumpet Bannon's Ouster." This suggests that the "mainstream media" is cackling with delight over Bannon's removal. You'd expect headlines like: "Bannon Told Not to Let the Door Hit Him on the Way Out" or "White House Exorcism Finally Removes Bannon." Here are the actual online headlines reporting Steve Bannon's firing. Fox News: "Bannon Out at White House"; CNBC: "Steve Bannon Out at White House"; NPR: "Steve Bannon Out as Chief Strategist, White House Says"; CBS: "Steve Bannon Out at White House." There are more but they all say pretty much the same thing that Fox says. No trumpeting. No cackling. Just reporting.
I thought there might be some ray of hope when I saw that James Murdoch, the chief executive of 21st Century Fox and son of Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, pledged a million dollars to the Anti-Defamation League in response to Trump’s failure to condemn Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville. I was also heartened by Kat Timpf, of The Fox News Specialists, whose reaction to Trump's limp non-condemnation was "I have too much eye makeup on to cry right now." Naturally, she received a tweet calling her "a disgrace to the white race." But that ray was snuffed out on Thursday, Aug. 24, when I tuned into The Specialists to hear the anchors gleefully agreeing with Trump's pledge in Phoenix to shut down the government unless they fund his wall.
If you are what you eat and President Trump is being fed a steady diet of "alternate reality" by a popular mainstream news outlet, then that explains why he thinks he can get away with constantly broadcasting his own lies. More frightening, does he even know the difference? Which makes the Trump presidency less a variation of the Kingsmen and more like The Truman Show, the 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey as a man who doesn't realize that he’s being raised by a corporation entirely inside a television show. In The Trumpman Show, Fox gives Trump misinformation that makes him think his world is real: that he won the popular vote, that people don’t think he's a racist, misogynist, xenophobe. It's been reported that twice a day Trump is given a folder of only good news about himself, which some in the White House refer to as "the propaganda document." When those folders aren’t enough, he can tune into Fox and Friends, where he can hear this comment about the growing number of athletes joining Colin Kaepernick's sitting out the national anthem in protest over racism: "It puts us in a position of weakness to the outward world. People look at us and say, wow, they're divisive already." Trump can then believe that it’s a football player causing all that divisiveness, not his tacit endorsement of white supremacists in Charlottesville.
The Trumpman Show is one show that needs to be canceled.
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No, Donald Trump Is Not a Moderate Now |
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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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Thursday, 07 September 2017 13:36 |
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Chait writes: "Yesterday, an impatient and irritable President Trump undermined his own party's negotiations and agreed to a debt-ceiling increase on a timetable proposed by Democrats. At that point, all hell broke loose."
Minority Leader Schumer negotiating with President Trump. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
No, Donald Trump Is Not a Moderate Now
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
07 September 17
 esterday, an impatient and irritable President Trump undermined his own party’s negotiations and agreed to to a debt-ceiling increase on a timetable proposed by Democrats. At that point, all hell broke loose. The far-right wing of the Republican Party irrationally blamed Paul Ryan for the debacle. But just as irrational has been the response of the Republican Establishment, which has likewise used the deal as a pretext to unleash pent-up recriminations.
“Democrats got more done in a single Oval Office visit in one afternoon than the congressional Republicans have achieved all year,” complains one Republican operative. To conservatives who have distrusted Trump all along, this proved their suspicion that the president was not a true conservative. The deal is “a glimpse of how the ‘pivot’ to the center would work,” warns the Federalist’s Ben Domenech. “President Trump spent his first day as a Democratic president on Wednesday,” says Ben Shapiro. “At least we don’t have to suffer through any more earnest liberal think pieces about how Trump is actually an arch conservative,” argues Noah Rothman.
This point of view, which is close to the center of Establishment Republican thinking, has heavily inflected news coverage, which has amplified the intra-party backbiting. “President Trump, a man of few allegiances who seized control of the Republican Party in a hostile takeover, suddenly aligned himself with Democrats on Wednesday on a series of key fiscal issues,” blares the Washington Post.
These are not, in fact, “key fiscal issues.” Raising the debt ceiling is a pure mechanical operation that has happened with regularity under both parties. Trump may have submitted to the Democrats prematurely, but he was going to have to compromise with them eventually, since he needs their votes. (This is because a wing of the Republican Party refuses to vote for debt-ceiling increases.) Trump might have given them leverage to demand policy concessions down the road, but there is no reason to believe either that Democrats will actually win those concessions, or that Trump is aware that he might have enabled them. Trump’s compromising on a key fiscal issue would be something like agreeing to write a 1986-style tax reform that did not give rich people a net tax cut, or to support bipartisan negotiations to patch up Obamacare. He has resolutely refused to do anything like that.
What made the debt-ceiling compromise so noteworthy is that it represents the first time Trump bargained with the opposing party in any meaningful way. He has governed almost exclusively as an orthodox movement conservative. Trump has done nothing on trade, has abandoned his plan to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure, has thrown his support behind any repeal or rollback of Obamacare that Congress could pass (which turns out to be nothing), is trying to pass the largest regressive tax cut possible, and has diligently slashed regulations on business.
This has created a philosophical crisis of sorts for a certain brand of conservative, those who oppose Trump while trying to extricate conservatism from what they foresee as his failure. Proceeding from the premise that Trump is a hostile alien who landed on their party purely by accident, they have presented his failures as the result of personality flaws unrelated to substance. When Obamacare repeal collapsed in Congress, anti-Trump conservative John Podhoretz called it “the necessary end result of seven months in which the president of the United States ate up all the oxygen in Washington with his ugly, petty, seething, resentful rages and foolishnesses as expressed in 140 illiterate characters.” In truth, Trump did not help the cause, but the party’s clear inability to agree on a plan that did not have horrific humanitarian consequences was an obvious, unacknowledged culprit.
From the perspective of these conservatives, Trump’s fealty to right-wing orthodoxy was decidedly inconvenient. The debt ceiling presented a rare opportunity for them to present Trump as the figure they cast him as all along: the New York Democrat posing as a conservative Republican. The fact that they had to wait seven and a half months to find an example of his ideological heresy — and that the case they found was the picayune issue of a three-month debt-ceiling increase versus a six-month debt-ceiling increase — itself disproves their point.
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ew York's Civilian Complaint Review Board has substantiated two complaints against Daniel Pantaleo, the New York City policeman caught on tape in the infamous Eric Garner case. Rolling Stone has learned the board ruled that Pantaleo did in fact use a chokehold, and also ruled that Pantaleo restricted Garner's breathing.
