July 17, 2019

3-Year-Old Asked To Pick Parent In Attempted Family Separation, Her Parents Say

https://www.npr.org/2019/07/15/741721660/follow-up-what-happened-after-a-border-agent-asked-toddler-to-pick-a-parent?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

At a Border Patrol holding facility in El Paso, Texas, an agent told a Honduran family that one parent would be sent to Mexico while the other parent and their three children could stay in the United States, according to the family. The agent turned to the couple's youngest daughter — 3-year-old Sofia, whom they call Sofi — and asked her to make a choice.

"The agent asked her who she wanted to go with, mom or dad," her mother, Tania, told NPR through an interpreter. "And the girl, because she is more attached to me, she said mom. But when they started to take [my husband] away, the girl started to cry. The officer said, 'You said [you want to go] with mom.' "

Tania and her husband, Joseph, said they spent parts of two days last week trying to prevent the Border Patrol from separating their family. They were aided by a doctor who had examined Sofi and pleaded with agents not to separate the family, Joseph and Tania said. [NPR is not using migrants' last names in this story because these are people who are in the middle of immigration proceedings.]


Tania and Joseph said they spent parts of two days last week trying to prevent the Border Patrol from separating their family.
Claire Harbage/NPR
Morning Edition reported last week on the Honduran family, who were sent back to Juárez, Mexico, after crossing into El Paso in April. They are part of a Trump administration program called Migrant Protection Protocols — also known as "remain in Mexico" — which requires thousands of Central American migrants to wait in dangerous cities in northern Mexico while their immigration cases are handled by U.S. courts.

July 17, 2019

Trump threatens to investigate Google for treason based on Fox clip "containing no evidence"

Trump’s threat to investigate Google isn’t based on evidence. It’s based on Fox News.

President Donald Trump threatened to launch a treason investigation into Google in a Monday morning tweet for allegedly working with the Chinese government — based on an 11-second Fox News clip containing no evidence whatsoever. Instead, the president cited unsubstantiated allegations made by billionaire investor and Facebook board member Peter Thiel on Monday’s installment of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.

Thiel, it’s worth noting, is a longtime Trump supporter and adviser — something of a rarity in left-leaning Silicon Valley.

At 7:46 a.m., Trump tweeted, “‘Billionaire Tech Investor Peter Thiel believes Google should be investigated for treason. He accuses Google of working with the Chinese Government.’ @foxandfriends A great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone. The Trump Administration will take a look!”

Trump’s tweet was posted about an hour after a Fox & Friends news segment featured an 11-second clip of Thiel’s interview with Carlson. Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America posted the clip Trump reacted to:https://www.vox.com/2019/7/16/20696131/trump-google-investigation-peter-thiel-fox-news

July 17, 2019

Trump makes 13 false claims in Cabinet meeting

President Donald Trump uttered a rapid series of false claims, at least 13 in all, during his Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. He made another claim for which there is no public evidence, and he offered positive words about an ally's accusation for which there is no public evidence.

Let's go through the 13 false claims first:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/donald-trump-fact-check-cabinet-meeting/index.html

July 17, 2019

Racist Trump Takes a Dump on the American Dream

Racist Trump Takes a Dump on the American Dream

The president delivered a mouth-breathing clod take on the majesty and magic of our country, our history, and our Constitution, and a middle finger to our immigrant ancestors.

Donald Trump’s performance these last few days show how powerful a man devoted to political and racial arson can be when he is beyond shame, reason, and dignity and possessed with the power and platform of the presidency.

In the scope of a half-dozen tweets, President Grievance managed to ignite a racial brouhaha designed to frame 2020, push his white-nat-adjacent audience into paroxysms of joy, and take a massive dump on the American dream. Trump was due for one of his periodic dog-whistles to the alt-reich segment of his base, and he delivered in spades.

The outburst came after a series of humiliating political losses in recent weeks. A failed G-20 summit that resulted in a sloppy photo-op handjob for Kim Jong Un and zero progress toward disarmament was followed by an episode of John Bolton’s Guns of August in the Persian Gulf.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-takes-a-dump-on-the-american-dream?ref=scroll

July 16, 2019

reaction from a MAGA to Trump's racist tweets

Trump racist-tinged tweets send stinging message to countless Americans

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Maribel Ortiz, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the president's comments were particularly hurtful to her as a native of Puerto Rico who grew up in Boston during more racially tense times in the city.

"Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and I've been treated like I'm from another country. I work and pay my taxes and contribute to this country like everyone else," she said.

The 50-year-old laundry worker declined to say who she voted for in the last presidential election but was blunt in her assessment of Trump, calling his ignorance "mind blowing" and saying he can't "even express himself like a decent man."

But Ryan Hanslik, a white 29-year-old from Waltham, Massachusetts, who was passing by jumped in to defend the president, chanting, "Make American great again" over and over.

An independent who voted for Trump, he argued that the president has free speech rights and that Democrats have used divisive rhetoric too.

"He's rough and tough, and I can totally see people's perspective on why they didn't like that, but we all express ourselves differently," Hanslik said. His argument with Ortiz ended with a perfunctory handshake.

Trump is "a different president, and we need to stop holding him to the standard of the office," Hanslik said. "We're in the 21st century. Times are a little bit different than JFK. We got to let him speak his piece."

https://www.witf.org/news/2019/07/trump-racist-tinged-tweets-send-stinging-message-to-countless-americans.php

July 16, 2019

By now, one would be only slightly surprised to hear the president simply use the N-word.

Trump is now doing something different. By attacking the black and brown women of the squad, he is not just pitting citizen against immigrant, but citizen against citizen. This is a significant shift. Politicians from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton have seen the utility of coded racial appeals to white voters, but over time they have also calculated that these appeals must be coded or else the political cost will outweigh the benefit. The late Republican strategist Lee Atwater captured the dynamic in an infamous 1981 quote:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Trump is going in the opposite direction. By now, one would be only slightly surprised to hear the president simply use the N-word. Perhaps he’s saving that until the general election.

The open embrace of racism as a political strategy is, however, a natural progression from the 2016 campaign. While the president’s bigotry in the first campaign was instinctive, a reflection of his long-held and -lived convictions, it also served a political purpose. He and his advisers understood the appeal it would have. After the violent white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Trump praised “very fine people on both sides,” causing a firestorm.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/racism-campaign-strategy/593962/

July 16, 2019

Trump's strategy in 2020 will be to sling as much filth as possible and hope his base comes out

Trump’s strategy in 2020 will be to sling as much filth as possible and hope his base comes out in sufficient numbers. This is what he knows how to do.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-racist-in-the-white-house-donald-trump-tweets-ocasio-cortez-tlaib-omar-pressley

Just last week, the President invited to the White House leading members of the far-right social-media crowd, including one “Carpe Donktum,” who recently made a nasty altered video of Joe Biden; Bill Mitchell, who ladles out the latest QAnon conspiracy theories; the oppo-research operative James O’Keefe III; and Ali Alexander, who, like the President’s own son, recently shared a tweet that called into question Kamala Harris’s racial background. A sterling bunch. At the meeting, Trump expressed the full knowledge that cyber-fuelled hatred and racism had helped him win the election. He honored the group with a White House invitation in the hopes that it will be there for him again in 2020. “The crap you think of is unbelievable!” he told them in bemused admiration. These were his people.

July 16, 2019

Fortune just released its list of the world's 50 greatest leaders. Trump didn't make the cut

https://twitter.com/RamonEGarcia2/status/1150895972035092480

Fortune just released its list of the world's 50 greatest leaders. President Trump didn't make the cut.

https://theweek.com/speedreads/688043/fortune-just-released-list-worlds-50-greatest-leaders-president-trump-didnt-make-cut

On Thursday, Fortune released its fourth annual list of the world's 50 greatest leaders, and there's one name glaringly absent from the list. Theo Epstein, whose Chicago Cubs broke their 108-year curse in November, tops the ranks of the greatest global leaders in business, government, philanthropy, and the arts, followed by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Pope Francis, Melinda Gates, and Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief and owner of The Washington Post. Not making the Top 50 is President Trump.

Trump's second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, made the cut, coming in at No. 7 with this question: "What will happen if and when his adamantly independent thinking conflicts with his duty of loyalty to the president"? Also in the Top 50: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), one of Trump's top Republican critics (No. 9); German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Western hemisphere's anti-Trump (No. 10); Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio), one of Trump's last GOP primary rivals (No. 12); and a chorus of other people who famously don't see eye-to-eye with Trump, including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (No. 31), comedian Samantha Bee (No. 19), and LeBron James (No. 11).

So how did the nominal leader of the free world not make the cut? "Remember as you scan our list that we evaluate each leader within his or her own field of endeavor," Fortune's Geoff Colvin says in his introduction. He began his introduction with the glaring visibility of "tarnished leaders" today, mentioning ousted Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump himself, whose "approval ratings are lower than those of any new president for whom such polling exists."

Colvin also listed the three characteristics that great leaders must promote, including that they "acknowledge reality and offer hope," and "build bridges." "As the acerbity of political discourse threatens to infect the whole culture," he writes, "the best leaders stay refreshingly open to other views, engaging opponents constructively rather than waging war." Well, there's always the new Forbes Billionaires List, where Trump at least made the Top 554. Peter Weber

July 16, 2019

basis of Trump's oft repeated lie that Ivanka created 10 million jobs

Ivanka has no problem accepting credit for achievements that are not her own. Her twitter account is non-stop this kind of BS - posting of economic successes as if she had something to do with it. someone called her on it today:

@IvankaTrump
“Accenture executives faced a decision: lay off a swath of the firm's workforce, or train employees to deliver new, higher-value services.” They chose the latter. More of this!


Jennifer
@jerseymom473
5h5 hours ago

Replying to @IvankaTrump @JulieSweet
Per the article, the company changed its approach to training 5 years ago.

Don’t you dare try to take credit.

-------------------------------------------------

And she never says "Daddy Trump, stop lying about my accomplishments"

Fact Check: Did Ivanka Trump create 'millions of jobs'?


Context
In July of last year, Trump signed an executive order creating the National Council for the American Worker, co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. One of the council's priorities is asking companies across the US to sign the Pledge to America's Workers. The pledge involves "committing to expand programs that educate, train, and reskill American workers from high-school age to near-retirement," according to the White House.
Two hundred companies have agreed to the pledge, with each providing different numbers of training opportunities. This brings the total number of opportunities pledged to just over 6.5 million. (See the full list.)
The facts
CNN's Senior Economics Writer Lydia DePillis checked out a similar claim made by Ivanka herself last year as she discussed the pledge. "We're up to 6.3 million new jobs," Ivanka said last October. That claim, DePillis found, was rather exaggerated

First, the pledge does not translate to millions of immediate training opportunities. In a press release from the administration, the pledge is described as a commitment to "new opportunities over the next five years."
Secondly, these are better understood as training opportunities, not necessarily "jobs." In the same press release last year, the White House described these opportunities as "apprenticeships and work-based learning, continuing education, on-the-job training, and reskilling." These opportunities can be for current employees.
Lastly, many of these opportunities pledged were already planned by the companies. As CNN previously reported, Walmart's pledged amount over five years would just about match the rate that its program Walmart Academies has trained since it started in 2016. The Associated Builders and Contractors provides a similar example as it pledged to provide roughly as many opportunities in five years as it trains in one year.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/25/politics/fact-check-ivanka-trump-create-millions-of-jobs/index.html

July 16, 2019

Trump's tweets show a keen understanding of America

Trump's tweets show a keen understanding of America

It's been said that Trump's comments about immigrants reveal that he really doesn't understand America. The US was built on the concept of a melting pot, and immigrants are making the nation stronger, some say.

But Trump's recent tweets could show that he understands America better than his critics realize.

These two Americas have long co-existed.

One is the country represented by the Statue of Liberty, and its invitation to poor and tired immigrants "yearning to breathe free."

The other is the one that virtually wiped out Native Americans, enslaved Africans, excluded Chinese immigrants in the late 19th century and put Japanese Americans in concentration camps.

From the rarified perch of the White House, Trump's racist tweets tap into the id of this other America.

And here's what's so frightening about this: It is not a big stretch to say that when a leader uses the kind of language that Trump uses against minorities, it may increase the chances of violence being used against them.

I recall what Mark Naison, a historian at Fordham University, told me after the Charlottesville violence in 2017 when talking about Trump's racial rhetoric.

He says most Americans don't realize how dangerous it is for a leader to talk about fellow citizens as if they're the enemy. But some people from other countries know.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/15/us/trump-tweets-two-americas-blake/index.html