E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Trump’s accidental moment of truth:
Progress in many areas where the parties could work together is being blocked because of the need for Trump and the Republican Party to kowtow to conservative ultras.
In his unguarded moment, Trump simply reflected the belief of the vast majority of Americans that it is ridiculous and cruel to deport the dreamers.
Trump has acknowledged this before. It was ironic that hours after Trump’s triple axel on the question, Judge William Alsup halted the president’s original effort to end DACA by citing Trump’s own words to make the case against him.
“Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military?” Trump had said in September. Well, the other Trump seemed to want to do just that.
Mei Fong is a former China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and the author of One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment. At The New York Times she writes—What We Lose When We Lose Female Reporters:
It is a truth increasingly acknowledged that many men are paid more than their female counterparts. How much more?
About 50 percent, in the BBC journalist Carrie Gracie’s case. Over the weekend, Ms. Gracie quit as the broadcaster’s China editor and announced she was returning to London. “Enough is enough,” she wrote, in an astringent open letter, describing how she discovered last year that the BBC paid two of its four international editors — men, of course — 50 percent more than the female editors. [...]
Foreign correspondents of Carrie Gracie’s caliber, who are fluent in the language and have several decades of experience, are rare. Spanning 10 years, her stories on a rural farming community’s transformation into a huge city is one of the definitive narratives of China’s urbanization process. Foreign correspondents of her caliber who are women, who have spent their careers underpaid and faced challenges their male peers never had to, are rarer still.
The case for equal pay is the case for better reporting. Pay women equally to men and more women will stay in the business; more women lessens the preponderance of male viewpoints and allows a clearer presentation of how things are. Certainly female reporters who covered the Vietnam War have made the case that their gender frequently helped them look beyond a near-fetishistic coverage of guns and bombs to the real costs of war.
Randal Eliason teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School. He blogs at Sidebarsblog.com. At The Washington Post he writes—Trump says an interview with Mueller is ‘unlikely.’ That’s wrong:
At his news conference Wednesday, President Trump pointedly declined to say whether he would agree to answer questions from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — but then suggested that such a session wouldn’t be warranted in any event. “When they have no collusion — and nobody’s found any collusion at any level — it seems unlikely that you’d even have an interview,” he observed.
The president is wrong. What is unlikely — unimaginable, in my assessment — is that Mueller would conclude his investigation without seeking to interview the president.
The president’s repeated insistence that he did nothing improper does not mean an interview is unnecessary. After all, if prosecutors decided there was no need to speak with every subject who proclaimed his own innocence, they would never get very far. Mueller, of course, is not required to take the president’s word for it on the question of collusion.
Equally misguided is the president’s claim that no one has found “any collusion at any level.” We simply don’t know whether that’s true. [...] Due to the secrecy surrounding grand jury investigations, we don’t know exactly what Mueller has found. Trump may repeat this denial as frequently as he likes (as he did again Wednesday on Twitter), but the grand jury is still out on the question of collusion (or, more accurately, criminal conspiracy).
At New York Magazine’s “The Cut,” a writer goes public—I Started the Media Men List. My name is Moira Donegan:
In October, I created a Google spreadsheet called “Shitty Media Men” that collected a range of rumors and allegations of sexual misconduct, much of it violent, by men in magazines and publishing. The anonymous, crowdsourced document was a first attempt at solving what has seemed like an intractable problem: how women can protect ourselves from sexual harassment and assault.
One long-standing partial remedy that women have developed is the whisper network, informal alliances that pass on open secrets and warn women away from serial assaulters. Many of these networks have been invaluable in protecting their members. Still, whisper networks are social alliances, and as such, they’re unreliable. They can be elitist, or just insular.
As Jenna Wortham pointed out in The New York Times Magazine, they are also prone to exclude women of color. Fundamentally, a whisper network consists of private conversations, and the document that I created was meant to be private as well. It was active for only a few hours, during which it spread much further and much faster than I ever anticipated, and in the end, the once-private document was made public — first when its existence was revealed in a BuzzFeed article by Doree Shafrir, then when the document itself was posted on Reddit.
A slew of think pieces ensued, with commentators alternately condemning the document as reckless, malicious, or puritanically anti-sex. Many called the document irresponsible, emphasizing that since it was anonymous, false accusations could be added without consequence. Others said that it ignored established channels in favor of what they thought was vigilantism and that they felt uncomfortable that it contained allegations both of violent assaults and inappropriate messages. [...]
None of this was what I thought was going to happen. In the beginning, I only wanted to create a place for women to share their stories of harassment and assault without being needlessly discredited or judged. The hope was to create an alternate avenue to report this kind of behavior and warn others without fear of retaliation.
Varshini Prakash and Steven O’Hanlon at In These Times write—If Democrats Want the Support of Millennials, They Should Cut Ties with the Fossil Fuel Industry:
Following a slate of progressive wins in late 2017, all eyes are on the 2018 elections. Many across the political spectrum now think the midterms could be a “Blue Wave”—with Democrats sweeping into office up and down the ballot. But amid all the buzz, a critical question remains: Which Democrats will ride the Blue Wave into power? Will it be those who accept campaign contributions from and act on behalf of wealthy oil and gas executives and lobbyists, or will it be those willing to take a stand against that industry to guarantee a safe and secure planet?
From issues of land sovereignty to environmental racism, there are myriad reasons why we need elected officials to reject the influence of this dirty money. But the conversation becomes all the more urgent when considering the existential threat of climate change, caused in large part by the burning of fossil fuels. To stop record-breaking, life-shattering events like Hurricanes Irma, Maria, and Harvey, and the California wildfires from becoming the new normal, scientists say industrialized countries like the United States must take massive action by the early 2020s to transition our economy away from oil, gas and coal-based energy.
Oil and gas executives strive to maintain company profits, which means holding back this very transition. They are adept at using their deep pockets to pressure politicians into carrying out their pro-fossil-fuels agenda. If Democratic candidates choose to let Big Oil ride the Blue Wave this year, the prospects for action at the scale we need are grim. Partnering with these oil and gas executives would not only be disastrous for our society’s ability to stop climate change, it would also be deadly for millennial voter turnout.
Mark Hertzgaard at The Nation takes note in New York City vs. Big Oil that the city’s just-announced lawsuit against five of the world’s biggest oil companies for damages caused by climate change associated with oil’s greenhouse gas emissions as well as funding for building resilience against that change is a very big deal. In making the announcement, Mayor Bill DeBlasio said “This city is acting, and we want other cities and states to act. People watch what New York does. We are going to lead the fight against climate change as if our lives depended on it. Because they do”:
“This is one of a handful of the most important moments in the 30-year fight against climate change,” said Bill McKibben, the 350.org activist and Nation contributor, who joined de Blasio in addressing the press conference. “Today, the mightiest city on our planet takes on its richest, most powerful, and most irresponsible industry. Science and economics and morality are on the side of the city, and so eventually it will win. We hope it will win in time.”
“The bar for being a climate leader has just been dramatically raised,” author and Nation contributor Naomi Klein told the conference. Invoking the imperative of climate justice, she noted that “the costs of sea level rise and ferocious and unprecedented weather events are being offloaded onto the public with taxpayers stiffed with the ever ballooning costs,” leaving less money for social needs, while “the extravagant profits from destabilizing our planet’s life support system are systematically privatized…. It is a world upside down, but today we take a major step in turning it right side up.”
Nick Turse at TomDispatch writes—Special Ops at War: From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More:
After more than 16 years of combat, US Special Operations forces remain the tip of the spear in Afghanistan, where they continue to carry out counterterrorism missions. In fact, from June 1st to November 24th last year, according to that Pentagon report, members of Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan conducted 2,175 ground operations “in which they enabled or advised” Afghan commandos.
“During the Obama administration the use of Special Operations forces increased dramatically, as if their use was a sort of magical, all-purpose solution for fighting terrorism,” William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, pointed out. “The ensuing years have proven this assumption to be false. There are many impressive, highly skilled personnel involved in special operations on behalf of the United States, but the problems they are being asked to solve often do not have military solutions. Despite this fact, the Trump administration is doubling down on this approach in Afghanistan, even though the strategy has not prevented the spread of terrorist organizations and may in fact be counterproductive.”
The Editors at Bloomberg nix coal and support nukes in their editorial—Energy Policy Should Focus on Climate:
Good sense on energy hasn't fled Washington entirely. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has struck down the Trump administration's bewildering proposal to subsidize coal-fired power for its "resilience" in the event of big storms or natural disasters. Making coal cheaper would have damaged health and cost lives by boosting air pollution, and made energy markets less efficient to boot.
FERC also saw no "resilience" rationale for subsidizing nuclear power, and its reasoning was again correct. Yet nuclear power is indeed needed -- not for its dependability, but for its lack of greenhouse-gas emissions. Energy policy ought to support nuclear power, though in the right way and for the right reasons.
Nuclear power is crucial to the effort to stop climate change. It safely provides about 20 percent of electricity in the U.S., and some 60 percent of clean energy. This share is poised to shrink.
Five plants have closed before their time in recent years, and half a dozen more may also soon shut down. [...]
The best way to keep clean nuclear power in the mix would be to include its climate value in energy prices by enacting a substantial national carbon tax. Unfortunately, political polarization and willful blindness to the harms of climate change make that option impossible for the moment.
Lola Okolosie at The Guardian writes—Emma Watson’s willingness to face the truth about race is refreshing:
It was there when in 1851 abolitionist Sojourner Truth asked the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, “Ain’t I a Woman?”. There she was demanding that white feminists include black women’s struggles in the fight for women’s rights. It was there, too, in Audre Lorde’s open letter to Mary Daly in which she wrote that “the history of white women who are unable to hear black women’s words, or to maintain dialogue with us, is long and discouraging”.
It is a reality actor and activist Emma Watson acknowledged this week. To have a prominent British feminist question, as the result of a black woman’s words, “What are the ways I have benefited from being white?” and consider how she is implicated, as all white people are, in white supremacy by asking, “In what ways do I support and uphold a system that is structurally racist?”, has felt almost unthinkable.
Over five years ago Chitra Nagarajan and I, both members of an activist group called Black Feminist, wrote: “The feminist story belongs to all women everywhere but that is not the impression you would receive from the mainstream media, where it seems that all feminists are concerned about is a particular type of woman.” That woman was invariably white and middle-class. We were, along with our fellow black feminist activist Reni Eddo-Lodge (whose book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race sparked Watson’s epiphany), merely stating the blindingly obvious.
Lauren Collins at The New Yorker writes—Why Did Catherine Deneuve and Other Prominent Frenchwomen Denounce #MeToo regarding an opinion piece in Le Monde that 100 women co-signed defending “a freedom to bother, indispensable to sexual freedom:
“A freedom to bother”—it was the first time I’d heard that one. (The word that the women used, “importuner,” ranges in connotation from bugging someone to really disturbing her. Whatever the level of offense, the behavior is clearly unwanted.) Was this some bold new European liberty, like the right to be forgotten?
One didn’t have to read far to figure out that the statement was just another apologia for sexual assault and harassment. “Rape is a crime,” the piece in Le Monde began. “But hitting on someone insistently or awkwardly is not an offense, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression.” When the second sentence of an argument makes a turn against the wrongness of rape, you know you are not in for a subtle debate.
Deneuve and her co-signers run through a series of tired arguments, conflating the censure of sexual violence with censorship, and misconstruing #MeToo feminism as “a hatred of men and of sexuality.”
The movement, they write, renders women “eternal victims, poor little things under the influence of demon phallocrats, as in the good old days of witchcraft.” [...]
The Le Monde hundred find the concept of informed consent ridiculous. They defend Roman Polanski, sound a few notes on the dog whistle of “religious extremists,” and talk about the touching of knees while remaining silent on men demanding blowjobs and masturbating behind locked doors. It’s the small jabs that betray a hostility to the entire #MeToo project, not just its excesses.
Jeet Heer at The New Republic writes—The Republicans Killed Anti-Trumpism:
David Brooks describes himself as a “proud member” of “the anti-Trump movement” in his latest column for The New York Times, but as the title suggests—“The Decline of Anti-Trumpism”—he’s ashamed of what’s become of the president’s opposition. The anti-Trump movement, he argues, “seems to be getting dumber. It seems to be settling into a smug, fairytale version of reality that filters out discordant information. More anti-Trumpers seem to be telling themselves a ‘Madness of King George’ narrative: Trump is a semiliterate madman surrounded by sycophants who are morally, intellectually and psychologically inferior to people like us.” Brooks contends that while anti-Trumpers obsess over the president’s fitness for office, “the White House is getting more professional” and “briskly pursuing its goals.”
It’s almost as if there are two White Houses. There’s the Potemkin White House, which we tend to focus on: Trump berserk in front of the TV, the lawyers working the Russian investigation and the press operation. Then there is the Invisible White House that you never hear about, which is getting more effective at managing around the distracted boss.
I sometimes wonder if the Invisible White House has learned to use the Potemkin White House to deke us while it changes the country.
David Frum, himself an anti-Trump conservative, implicitly responded to Brooks in a column at The Atlantic, where he warns that anti-Trumpism only seems to be in decline because Americans are becoming numb to the president’s depredations. “We have gotten used as well to the publicly visible consequences of that reality: the lying, the bullying, the boasting,” Frum writes. “We have gotten used, too, to a routine level of disregard for the appearance of corruption: the payments from lobbyists and foreign hotels to Trump-branded properties; the flow of payments to the presidential family from partners in Turkey, the Philippines, India, and the United Arab Emirates; the nondisclosure of the president’s tax returns.”
Frum is much closer to the mark than Brooks; complacent acceptance of Trump’s norm-breaking is a bigger problem than knee-jerk opposition to the president. Yet Brooks does have a point that there are diminishing returns in the singleminded focus on Trump’s personal failings, which reached new heights (or lows) with the publication of Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s salacious and questionable insider account of the first year of the Trump White House. Highlighting Trump’s manifest unfitness for office made sense when he was a candidate, but now that he’s president, his personal flaws are only part of a broader, distinctly partisan crisis.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist and founder of Ocean Collectiv, a consulting firm for conservation solutions grounded in social justice. Jeff Orlowski is a filmmaker and director of the recent Netflix Original Documentary “Chasing Coral.” At the Los Angeles Times they write—What the Trump administration doesn't understand about ocean conservation:
The Trump administration announced last week that it would open 90% of our coastal waters to oil and gas drilling. It declared last month that it would shrink or eliminate several national monuments — both terrestrial and marine. Last year, it rolled back safety requirements that prevent spills like the Deepwater Horizon, and it stated it would reconsider protections of national marine sanctuaries. The reigning principle here, to the extent that there is one, is to put short-term economic gains first, way ahead of the environment. [...]
Fishing provides work for 11% of the world’s population. Seafood accounts for 17% of the world’s protein. Reefs, mangroves and marshes create coastal storm protection worth billions of dollars. In the U.S., the ocean economy employs more than 3 million people — more than farming, telecommunications and construction combined. If ocean ecosystems collapse, we’ll lose all of these benefits.
That’s why we must protect the principal. This means we must increase marine protected areas, not demolish them. The scientific consensus is that to create a fully sustainable ocean, we need to fully protect at least 30% of it. Currently, the U.S. protects 13.5% of coastal waters; we’ll drop to a small fraction of that if the Trump administration has its way. That’s going in the wrong direction.
Marcy Wheeler at The New Republic writes—Congress’s Absurd Quest to Curb the Surveillance State:
It says nothing good about the state of surveillance reform that Congress is considering flipping the Fourth Amendment on its head. In a bid to put a patina of reform on a key spying program, Congress is poised to make it harder for the FBI to spy on those whom the agency has probable cause to believe have committed a crime. But while this provides a layer of protection against invasive searches to those suspected of wrongdoing, there is no such protection for anyone else, which means it would be easier to spy on a completely innocent person than a suspected criminal.
The spying program—known as Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—authorizes one of the sweeping, warrantless surveillance programs first exposed by Edward Snowden. It gives the government the power to make American telecommunications and tech companies turn over the communications of foreigners located overseas for purposes like counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterespionage.
Under one part of the program, often called PRISM, the government asks providers like Google, Microsoft, and Apple for the emails, texts, chats, stored documents, and other associated records of a target. Under another part of the program, called Upstream, telecommunications companies search for emails and other internet communications as they transit through the backbone of those companies’ networks. Under both programs, the government obtains the messages of the target (including any statements about American citizens) and the messages of any people the target might be speaking to.
The government calls the collection of those speaking to a target, which includes significant amounts of emails and other communications from Americans living in the U.S., “incidental” collection, though it is not at all incidental to the way Section 702 is designed to work.