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5/31/17

Hillary Clinton Serves Donald Trump's Covfefe Right Back At Him






Hillary Clinton is pouring some cold covfefe on President Donald Trump


Trump’s mysterious early-morning “covfefe” tweet was widely considered a typo, but White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer insisted later in the day that the word had a specific meaning. 


“The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant,” he said. 


So what did Trump mean? 


“I thought it was a hidden message to the Russians,” Clinton said during an appearance at the Code Conference


Later in the day, Trump took to Twitter to blast Clinton as a “terrible candidate.”


She fired back:  





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Police Release Video Of Tiger Woods' DUI Arrest






Police in Jupiter, Florida, have released dashcam footage showing the DUI arrest of golf great Tiger Woods.


The 41-year-old was found early Monday asleep in his Mercedes, which was stopped in the right lane of a road. The engine was running, the blinker was on and the car had two flat tires along with some other damage, CBS 12 in West Palm Beach reported. 


The newly released police video shows Woods being cooperative but having difficulty following instructions and showing signs of confusion: 





In the video, Woods tells police he had not been drinking, which was confirmed by a Breathalyzer test. However, the golfer released a statement saying he was on prescribed medication and having an “unexpected reaction.”


Woods apologized to his family, friends and fans, thanked police and vowed to “do everything in my power to ensure this never happens again.” 


The golfer is widely considered one of the greatest to ever swing a club, but his career has been derailed in recent years by a series of injuries as well as some well-publicized personal problems, including a divorce


He had a fourth back surgery in April, which ESPN reports will keep him out of golf for the rest of the year. 


Woods has a court appearance scheduled for July 5. 

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Open thread for night owls: People's Budget offers 'roadmap to resistance' against Trump budget

6 Relaxation Hacks For People Who Hate Meditating


If you suffer from stress and anxiety, odds are someone in your life has mentioned meditation as a way to cope with it. Psychiatrists often recommend this therapy, and for good reason — research based on 19,000 meditation studies found mindful meditation can in fact ease psychological stress.


Despite that data, however, meditation isn’t for everyone. And it may not serve some people who experience the most severe bouts of stress.


I have chronic generalized anxiety, which means I’m always experiencing a level of tension or stress. For the most part I can manage it, but every now and then, it’ll hit hard without warning, and uproot my day completely.


In college, my therapist recommended I try meditation to curb my anxiety. At first, I was happy to oblige. I tried a variety of styles, from Zen meditation, which has you focus on breathing, to primordial sound mediation, which involves, well, making primordial sounds.


It didn’t work. I’d often find myself more anxious at the end of a 15-minute meditation session than I had been at the beginning. And I’m not alone: In general, it can be more difficult for people with chronic anxiety to meditate, because they have more stress-ridden thoughts than the average person, according to clinical psychologist Mitch Abblett. 


That said, there are plenty of ways to achieve the same level of relaxation without sitting cross-legged on the floor. They’re all rooted in a technique called “the distraction method.” It’s part of Dr. Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy, which works under the assumption that a person’s way of thinking is intrinsically tied to their emotional functioning. 


The method consists of doing basic activities can help you take a step back from your anxiety. Psychologist Anjhula Mya Singh Bais explains the distractions can help people to “objectively view issues causing disturbances in a manner that is both pragmatic and helpful in a low intensity, low pressure and low stakes environment.”



What she means is by doing something simple and functional, you may be able to relax, regroup and perhaps reexamine the issue that was causing your anxiety from a much more levelheaded place.



Here are six suggestions for activities that may calm your brain without meditation, based on expert opinions and my personal experience


1. Arts and crafts — including but not limited to coloring, pottery and knitting


Working with your hands diverts energy into something productive, and often results in a cool or even beautiful creation.


“Being artistic calms the nervous system because when we’re focused on creative activities, our attention moves away from constant worrying,” New York therapist Kimberly Hershenson says. “This helps the nervous system regulate, allowing our brain to clear space to process difficult issues.”


2. All varieties of yoga


There are a multitude of benefits that come from practicing yoga, and a quieter mind is just one of them. It’s basically active meditation, which is great for the anxiety-prone, because it allows you to focus on your breathing and body without getting stuck in your head.


“Yoga helps build concentration and is a great way to improve overall focus,” explains Silvia Polivoy, clinical psychologist and co-founder of the Thevine Spiritual Center. “In addition, it enhances memory and improves brain power.”


If you’re new to yoga, I highly recommend starting with Lesley Fightmaster’s online videos.


3. Go for a walk


It may sound simple, but similar to yoga, walking outside (without your phone) allows you to refocus your anxious energy on a physical act and take in the world around you. Here’s a great way to start, courtesy of psychotherapist Melissa Divaris Thompson:


“The more you can get into nature the better. Walk with consciousness. Notice how your breath feels. Notice your feet walking on the surface with each step.”


4. Singing, humming and whistling


I often sing and whistle to bring myself back into the present. It automatically lightens my mood and regulates my breathing if I’m hyperventilating. The best part is you don’t have to be a good singer for it to work for you.


5. Free-writing before bed


This one’s especially great for people with anxiety that affects their sleep. David Ezell, the clinical director and CEO of Darien Wellness, recommends writing with a pen and paper to get away from distracting screens.


“The objective is to relieve the pressure of thoughts analogous to a water tank too full of H2O,” he writes in an email. “I tell my patients to see their arm as a pipe and the notebook the reservoir into which the water flows.”


6. Cooking


Cooking is filled with basic tasks that let you focus on all sorts of sights, smells, tastes and textures. Once you’re done, you can practice mindfulness while you eat.


Your personal distraction method may not be on this list. But if you keep experimenting with different strategies, you’ll be sure to find it.

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Why Trump's Evangelical Base Won't Much Care If We Leave The Paris Accord

President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, a move that is unlikely to ruffle his evangelical base.



Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. cannot officially withdraw until November 2019. But in signaling an exit from the deal, Trump would make good on one of his major campaign promises and win the favor of the 22 Republican senators who last week wrote him a letter urging him to do so.








Trump has said he believes climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese to compromise U.S. manufacturing.


The claim seems outlandish, but more than a third of white evangelicals agree that climate change probably isn’t occurring.


Among white evangelical Christians ― more than 80 percent of whom threw their support behind Trump in the election ― climate change is an issue of little import. According to Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are the least likely of any U.S. religious group to believe climate change is occurring.


Just 28 percent of white evangelicals believe the Earth is warming primarily due to human activity, compared with 56 percent of black Protestants and 41 percent of white mainline Protestants who say it is.


Thirty-three percent of white evangelicals say the Earth’s warming is mostly due to natural patterns, and 37 percent don’t believe that climate change is occurring.


Evangelical leaders were also among those who applauded Trump’s decision to nominate Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, despite the former Oklahoma attorney general’s track record of climate denial.


As attorney general, Pruitt sued the EPA more than a dozen times and once sent a letter on behalf of an Oklahoma-based oil company accusing the agency of overestimating the air pollution caused by fracking.





In a letter published in the Baptist Press in December, nearly 50 evangelical leaders said Pruitt “has been misrepresented as denying ‘settled science,’ when he has actually called for a continuing debate.”


The quotations around “settled science” point to another misconception white evangelical Christians tend to have about climate change. The group is roughly split in their perception of whether scientists generally agree or disagree that the Earth is warming due to human activity. Slightly more ― 47 percent versus 45 percent ― believe scientists disagree on this. 


In reality, more than 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that the Earth’s warming is due to human activity.


Climate skepticism among someChristians may be partly theological. Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) said during a town hall in Coldwater, Michigan, last week that God can solve the problem of climate change if the global phenomenon truly exists. 



The 66-year-old Republican, who is a climate change skeptic, said he believes “there’s been climate change since the beginning of time.”


“As a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us. And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”


Of course, there are many, many Christians ― including white evangelicals ― who accept that the climate is changing and who have urged the president to take measures to protect the environment.










Trump recently met with Pope Francis, who gave the U.S. president a copy of his 2015 encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si.” The encyclical is a fiery and urgent call to action on climate change.


Just days before his expected withdrawal from the Paris Agreement ― which the pope has passionately supported ― Trump promised the pontiff he’d be reading the encyclical.


The Paris Agreement has been signed by 195 nations, and 147 have ratified it.



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Is 'House of Cards' still relevant in a world with a President Trump?

The basis of most fiction is conflict and drama. The depiction of government and politics in fiction lends itself well to this idea. God knows there's enough conflict to go around, whether it's a conflict of philosophies, ideas, or personalities. And most fictional political conflict is usually based in corruption and egocentrism. For these reasons, more often than not, government in fiction is a tool of the evil used to perpetrate evil for power and control. Either the very nature of government is portrayed as evil, or its shown to be secretly run by a cabal of evil people (or evil aliens disguised as people) that are stealing taxpayer funds to use on hookers and blow.

Last week, I wrote about a right-wing, media-driven conspiracy theory and the types of people who wanted to believe it. Whether it be something like DNC hitmen roaming the streets, people who want to believe we faked landing on the Moon, the idea the United States government has flying saucers at Area 51, or the theory that the streets of Washington, D.C. were designed to represent a Satanic pentagram, it buys into the above notion hook, line, and sinker. Never mind that these would require a massive undertaking by which hundreds, if not thousands, of people have kept a secret with such precision and efficiency that all proof for such operations do not exist.

It also obscures the fact the reality we know is more Veep-like, usually. Instead of competent and evil, we’re ruled by people who are stupid and evil. And, honestly, maybe it’s a saving grace.

The return of Netflix’s House of Cards for its fifth season brings us back to the world of fictional U.S. President Frank Underwood, who is most definitely more of the evil bastard variety. Based on the novel by Michael Dobbs and the Andrew Davies BBC series of the same name, the series presents a Washington, D.C., populated by easily manipulated self-serving individuals, with Kevin Spacey's Underwood being manipulator-in-chief. With season five, new showrunners Frank Pugliese and Melissa James Gibson have taken over from Beau Willimon and continue the quest of the Underwoods to claim control of the United States government.

But much of the buzz around the series, especially now in the shadow of the Trump Administration, has included questions of whether the series, which teeters between whacked-out political soap opera and attempt to be a grand Shakespearean tragedy in which the Machiavellian moves of a protagonist continually expand out to envelop the world, now seems even more distanced from reality since we’re living under an egomaniac in the White House. 



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At Pro-Trade Think Tank, Wilbur Ross Soothes Business Fears Over NAFTA Talks






WASHINGTON ― Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said that a commitment to “do no harm” would guide efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and that elements of the now-defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership would serve as a “starting point” in talks with Canada and Mexico.


The remarks on Wednesday at the Bipartisan Policy Center, which supports international trade agreements, struck a marked contrast with President Donald Trump’s nationalist bromides on trade. The comments will undoubtedly allay the fears of big-business interests that support NAFTA, some of which were well-represented in the room.


But Ross’ pronouncements are also liable to vindicate the fears of liberal trade skeptics already worried that the Trump administration’s version of revising NAFTA will amount to simply expanding NAFTA’s reach to new sectors of the economy. That runs counter to their wishes for measures more likely to save the jobs of less-educated workers, whether in manufacturing plants or call centers.


The Trump administration’s first objective will be to “do no harm, because there were some things that were achieved under NAFTA and under other trade agreements,” Ross told Jason Grumet, founder of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which receives foundation, corporate and individual funding.


Grumet subsequently told Ross that a “lot of people in this room and others are really comforted by” that assurance.


Indeed, two business leaders who support NAFTA ― Chip Bowling, chairman of the Corn Board of the National Corn Growers Association, and Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry trade group ― were in the room.


Grumet had interviewed them just before Ross’ arrival, allowing them to deliver a swan song to the much-maligned trade deal. Bowling hammered home just how important NAFTA was in opening up export markets for U.S. farmers, while Gerard waxed lyrical about the efficient supply chains NAFTA has made available for U.S. oil and gas producers and refiners.


Both men suggested that the changes they’d most favor would involve streamlining NAFTA to further integrate the United States’ economy with those of Canada and Mexico.


“It works very well for us right now. You can always strengthen an agreement,” Bowling said.


Here, too, Ross seemed to suggest that the administration is open to a strategy that might please some in the business community who benefit from NAFTA.


Ross said that bringing NAFTA up to speed with TPP, which would have created intellectual property protections and removed barriers to digital trade, would be the first order of business. Mexico and Canada had signed on to TPP, a 12-nation Pacific Rim trade agreement, before Trump shelved it in his first days in office, after campaigning against both NAFTA and TPP. But many business leaders wanted those two TPP provisions, so now they could get their way with a “repaired” NAFTA.


According to Ross, “there were a number of concessions to NAFTA countries made in connection with the TPP. And so we would view those as a starting point for discussion.


“It’s an old agreement. It didn’t address digital economy. It didn’t address much in the way of services, especially didn’t address much in the way of financial services. So there are some big holes in it.”



The comments provide fuel for the fears of progressive trade critics, such as Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, who worry that the administration will revise NAFTA only to make it a more TPP-like accord, which they say would have expanded opportunities for business without protecting workers. Absent meaningful improvements in Mexican labor and environmental standards and a restoration of preferential treatment for U.S. goods in federal government procurement, Wallach and others argue, there is little chance that a re-negotiation will meaningfully benefit the American workers hardest hit by the 1994 trade pact.


Ross did note some of the priorities of groups like Public Citizen. He rattled off a list of NAFTA provisions in need of revision, including “intellectual property rights, customs procedures, sanitary and phytosanitary regulations, labor issues, environmental issues.” He also emphasized the importance of improving overall enforcement of trade treaties.


But Ross said that adding new provisions to NAFTA would be the “easiest” place to begin negotiations.


Wallach saw signs that the Trump administration might be using TPP as a model for NAFTA reform in a leaked March draft of a letter to Congress providing 90-day notice of NAFTA negotiation.


“They’d take the pieces of TPP that Mexico, the U.S. and Canada had agreed to and enact them bit by bit through the NAFTA renegotiation,” Wallach said in April.


The actual letter that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer finally sent to Congress earlier this month was a fraction of the length of the March draft and, as a result, lacked many of its detailed descriptions. But it included some language about modernizing trade that resembled wording in the letter the Obama administration sent to Congress in 2009 when it notified lawmakers it would begin negotiations over TPP.


At other points in the conversation with Grumet, Ross defied the views of his hosts.


After Ross mentioned that a major goal of trade talks would be to reduce the United States’ trade deficit with its NAFTA partners, Grumet asked him whether trade deficits are necessarily negative.


The Bipartisan Policy Center, like many centrist, business-friendly Washington think tanks, produces research arguing that trade deficits can often correspond to high economic growth and need not be viewed as inherently problematic. BPC senior director Steve Bell sent a letter on May 10 to the Department of Commerce’s Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee making exactly that point.


Ross flatly rejected the idea.


“There’s no question that trade surpluses are more beneficial to a country than trade deficits,” he said.

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Trump's communications director has resigned. Good luck finding a new one

The news that White House communications director Mike Dubke has resigned came as a surprise to most Americans, primarily because few of us were under the impression the Trump White House even had such a position. Someone was responsible for directing the tire fire? How long had that been going on?

But now the White House needs to fill the position all over again, and Republicans with the appropriate resumes are even less eager to join Team Trump than they were four months ago.

"Hell no!” said one Republican — one of the most common types of response BuzzFeed News got from operatives. “That would be career suicide.” [...]

"That's like asking someone who just witnessed a horrific bungee jumping accident whether they would like to go next,” one Republican source responded in a text message. [...]

"Sorry, I’m sorry," the source said between stifled laughs. "Oh, you’re being serious? Oh my god, I’m crying of laughter. Why would anyone in their right mind want to be his communications director?"

Republican Party stalwarts are willing to push Trump's agenda and tolerate mountains of grief and scandal for the sake of chipping away at their own. But working in the same building as the man is, for the same people that take on the job of making Paul Ryan look humane or deflect questions about Mitch McConnell's favorite sunning rock, right out of the question. And this leaves Team Trump a bit in the lurch:

The disclosures from investigations stemming from Russian meddling in last year’s election — coupled with the president’s habit of undercutting his staff — have driven away candidates for West Wing jobs that normally would be among the most coveted in American politics, according to people involved in the search.

Of the two—a scandal involving connections between multiple members of the Trump White House and foreign dealers who do not have our own nation's best interests at heart, and the presidential "habit" of treating his core team like dirt—which do we suppose is making prospective hires more wary? That’s a tough call.



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Deported U.S. military veterans commemorate Memorial Day in Mexico

You may have seen the viral photo: a group of deported veterans “who served in U.S. Army with the promise of becoming citizens” commemorating Memorial Day in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Yes, our nation deports veterans, and it’s been a stain on both Democratic and Republican administrations alike, with NBC News estimating that some 230 veterans have been kicked out after serving their country. Some of these vets have been relentless in lobbying U.S. elected leaders for justice, recently drawing the attention of Rep. Joaquín Castro (D-TX) and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who this week plan to visit them at the "Bunker,” a support house for deported vets in Mexico:

"Many of us believe that they should be allowed to become citizens," Castro told NBC Latino in a telephone interview Friday.

"Many, if not most, were legal permanent residents, who were eligible to become citizens and perhaps never applied - they stood up for their country and put their lives on the line," he said.

Castro acknowledged that getting laws changed to stop the deportation of veterans who are legal residents would be tougher under a Trump administration. But Castro said he thinks "there is strong bipartisan support among Americans to do right by these veterans."

"We would ask the administration to consider the service these veterans have rendered for the country and the fact they did put their lives on the line," he said.

Reasons for deportation can vary, and highlight our outdated and broken immigration system. “Legal permanent residents can be deported if they commit certain crimes, including ones that occurred many years in their past,” notes NBC News. Other veterans just assumed that enlisting and serving in the military meant an automatic path to citizenship.



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U.S. needs to accelerate growth in green jobs by treating climate change like the crisis of WWII

In this era when every day can bring another profoundly disturbing bit of news about climate change, it’s easy to miss the good news about what’s being done to keep it from becoming worse than it could be. What’s happening in the world of clean, green energy is one of those bright spots. Not that the gains in this field will rescue us entirely from the impact of global warming, but they will make a difference if we can elect enough right-minded people to accelerate the energy transformation that’s already underway and push a transformation of agriculture and transportation at the same time. 

The good news comes from the International Renewable Energy Agency’s annual review of jobs and clean energy for 2017, which was released last week. That review found that in the United States there are now 800,000 clean energy jobs, more than 360,000 of those in solar and wind alone. Just the 51,000-job increase in wind jobs over the past three years is equal to the total number of U.S. coal-mining jobs. Paul Horn at InsideClimate News reports:

In 2016, solar was creating U.S. jobs at 17 times the rate of the national economy, rising to more than 260,000 jobs in the U.S. solar industry today. In the U.S. wind industry, now with over 100,000 jobs, a new wind turbine went up every 2.4 hours this past quarter. One driver of this rush to build out solar and wind capacity over the past few years was the expected expiration of key federal tax credits, which were ultimately renewed but with a phase-out over time for wind and solar. [...]

The U.S. trails the European Union in renewable energy jobs, about 806,000 jobs to over 1.2 million, according to IRENA's numbers. (With hydropower excluded, the totals are 777,000 jobs to 1.16 million in the EU). Brazil also counts more renewable energy jobs, with 876,000, not counting hydropower.

All three are far behind China, the world leader in clean energy employment by far with nearly 4 million jobs, including hydropower. China's National Energy Administration has projected renewables growth of 2.6 million jobs a year between 2016 and 2020 with a massive investment plan for renewable power generation.

That is what the U.S. needs, too, a massive investment plan for renewable power. Call it a Green New Deal, a domestic Marshall Plan, Infrastructure Modernization for the 21st Century, or whatever, we need to take up The Climate Mobilization’s approach. That is, we need to treat climate change as a crisis at least equal to the crisis we faced in World War II. Few people at the time said “no can do.” We just did it. Or rather our parents and grandparents did.



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Trump's EPA Chief Aided Polluters For Years. Now Suddenly He Says The Mess Is A Priority






WASHINGTON — If you listen to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, the biggest environmental problem facing the United States isn’t climate change (he doesn’t think that’s real, anyway), or lead-tainted drinking water or brain-damaging pesticides. It’s that Barack Obama didn’t clean up the more than 1,300 most contaminated and hazardous sites across the country.


A Fox News headline earlier this month declared that Pruitt was here to clean up the Obama administration’s “toxic mess.” The former Oklahoma attorney general would have the American people believe that what the Superfund program really needs isn’t funding, it’s the right attitude.


“It’s not a matter of money,” Pruitt told Fox News. “It’s a matter of leadership and attitude and management.”


Pruitt has been fixated on the EPA’s Superfund, which is responsible for cleaning up highly contaminated sites, since taking over as agency chief in February. He’s called it “absolutely essential” and has repeatedly stressed that it’s part of EPA’s core mission. During an April visit to a lead- and arsenic-laden Superfund site in East Chicago, Indiana, Pruitt said he went there “because it’s important that we restore confidence to people in this community that we’re going to get it right going forward.” And he has blamed “poor leadership” and “poor focus” on the part of the Obama administration for there being more Superfund sites today than when Obama took office.



Superfund is an important part of EPA’s work, but Pruitt’s position fails to account for the history of the program. And every decision he’s made about it so far suggests he’s not serious about making it better. While he initially vowed to protect Superfund dollars, the 2018 budget the Trump administration released this month would slash EPA’s overall funding by 31.4 percent — to its lowest level in four decades — and cut Superfund from $1.09 billion to $762 million.


The administration argues that it can do more with less — that the EPA will “identify efficiencies in administrative costs” and “optimize” its use of settlements with polluters. The budget will also provide the agency with an “opportunity” to “identify what barriers have been preventing sites from returning to communities and design solutions to overcome those barriers,” the White House wrote in its justification for slashing Superfund.


Pruitt celebrated the budget proposal, saying in a statement that it “respects the American taxpayer” and “supports EPA’s highest priorities.”


But Superfund experts say Pruitt doesn’t seem to understand the basics of the program, which is designed to deal with expensive, complicated contamination cleanups that often have no responsible party and are not being handled at the state or local level.


“A cut to the program literally means longer exposure and preventing economic recovery for communities,” former EPA official Mathy Stanislaus told HuffPost. “The response should be fact-based. Tell me how the facts support cutting funding to a program that already has a backlog of sites?” Stanislaus oversaw Superfund as part of the EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management under Obama.



I don’t see how this program maintains its viability in any great way with these kinds of proposed cuts.
Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under President George W. Bush


Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, said Superfund is yet another issue on which the Trump administration’s words and actions don’t match up.


“I don’t see how this program maintains its viability in any great way with these kinds of proposed cuts,” Whitman told HuffPost during a press call last week that included former leaders of several federal agencies. “And it just doesn’t make sense when they are talking about trying to address this problem.”



Established in 1980 in response to several environmental disasters, Superfund — formally the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — is responsible for addressing areas contaminated with lead, radiation, mercury and other toxic pollutants, often left behind by industrial operations. The law authorized the federal government to force parties responsible for contamination to pay for cleanup costs and created a tax on the petroleum and chemical industries, two heavy polluters, to be pooled and used to clean up sites where a responsible party could not be found, called “orphan” sites. Areas requiring long-term remediation are put on the National Priorities List (NPL), but they often take years or even decades to clean up.


In many ways, Pruitt’s obsession with Superfund makes sense. As of 2015, 53 million Americans — 17 percent of the population — lived within three miles of a Superfund site. And the large number of toxic sites that remain on the NPL is something Pruitt has realized he can pin on past administrations for failing to address. 


Let’s look and think what the past administration achieved,” Pruitt said during a visit to a Pennsylvania coal mine last month, noting that there are still 1,322 sites. “Some of those have been on the list for 30 to 40 years.”  


It’s true that the number of NPL sites increased during Obama’s two terms, from about 1,260 at the end of fiscal year 2008. But for Pruitt to point his finger at Obama shows the EPA administrator’s willingness to ignore the Superfund listing process and the extent of contamination in many areas, as well as the challenge he now faces as head of the agency.


The number of sites proposed for and listed on the NPL simply reflects that those areas have been found to pose a risk to human or environmental health, and it “has nothing to do with ‘management,’” Stanislaus told HuffPost.


Superfund’s problems have almost everything to do with resources, which have all but vanished over the last two decades. In 1995, Congress allowed the so-called “polluter pays” tax — which generated billions of dollars to fund orphan cleanups — to expire. The trust fund dried up several years later, with cleanup costs now falling largely on taxpayers via federal budget allocations. As money for cleanups has shriveled, fewer sites have been remediated.


From 1999 to 2013, federal appropriations to Superfund declined from about $2 billion to $1.1 billion per year, according to a 2010 Government Accountability Office report. In 1999, the program completed 85 site cleanups, compared with just eight in 2014.



Over the years, several Democratic legislators have pushed for reinstating the Superfund tax, a move supported by the Obama administration, but the efforts failed.


Whitman fears the program won’t be able to function with additional cuts to staff and enforcement. She said enforcement is “critical” to get polluters to pay up.


But Pruitt, a longtime ally of the fossil fuel industry who sued the agency he now runs more than a dozen times as Oklahoma’s attorney general, insists Superfund will become self-sustaining under his watch. “The great thing about this is we have private funding. There are people out there responsible for these sites to clean up,” he told Fox News. “The moneys are there to do so.”


Stanislaus said there are some sites that provide the economic incentive for private interests to invest in redevelopment. “But to say that there’s this hidden pot of gold out there that can be brought to bear on a site, I don’t know what fantasy island that comes from, frankly.”


Nor does it seem likely that the Trump administration, which is stacked with industry lobbyists and fossil fuel allies, is going to be cracking down on polluters and forcing them to pay for cleanups. Ken Cook, president of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, said in a statement that “there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that polluters will be forced to pay for cleaning up their toxic messes that endanger Americans’ health” under Trump and Pruitt’s watch.


Those appointed to help Pruitt in his Superfund efforts so far have been less than inspiring choices. This month, Trump nominated Susan Bodine, chief counsel for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, whom The Intercept described as a “lobbyist for Superfund polluters,” to serve as assistant administrator of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. And Pruitt has chosen Albert Kelly, a longtime banker with no apparent experience in environmental policy, to lead a new Superfund task force.


The task force, which was announced last week, will provide recommendations to the agency on how to “streamline and improve the Superfund program” within 30 days. In a statement accompanying his announcement, Pruitt said he is “confident that, with a renewed sense of urgency, leadership and fresh ideas, the Superfund program can reach its full potential of returning formerly contaminated sites to communities for their beneficial use.”


Wilma Subra, a Louisiana-based chemist and Superfund expert, told HuffPost that it’s not clear what Pruitt means when he says he will reprioritize Superfund cleanups or if he will change the general understanding of what it takes for a site to be considered clean and thus eligible to be removed from the list. Until that’s more clear, Subra said, Pruitt’s claims are just a “talking point.”


“Is it going to be a little small slice of [Superfund] he’s going to prioritize, and the rest is going to sit there and languish?” she asked.


Stanislaus shares her concern that Pruitt may shortcut cleanups in order to cut costs. Doing so, Stanislaus said, would be “shortsighted” and come with health and economic consequences. Likewise, research has shown that investing in a Superfund site can increase property values and fuel job growth. Not to mention the positive effects that cleanup efforts have on human health.


Andrew Rosenburg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Pruitt’s Superfund talk is “smoke and mirrors.”


“To simply wave your hands and say ‘We’re going to clean it up’ at the same time as you’re reducing the resources, both people and money available to do it, is frankly nonsense,” Rosenburg told HuffPost.

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School segregation rises as black and Latino kids attend intensely segregated, high-poverty schools

In 2017, it is easy to look back on Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s 1963 “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever” speech and think of it as a relic of days gone by—an era in which backward thinking would ultimately give way to progress. Except sadly, several decades later and 63 years after the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional, it seems as if Wallace had a point after all. A new report released this week determined that the number of black students in the South attending “intensely segregated” schools is on the rise, up 56 percent from 1980.

A report released this week by UCLA's Civil Rights Project and Penn State University's Center for Education and Civil Rights finds that in 2014, more than one in three black students attended a school in the South that was intensely racially segregated, meaning a school where 90 percent of students were racial minorities—a 56 percent rise from 1980. The report also finds that the number of Latino students enrolled in public schools in the South surpassed black enrollment for the first time ever, making up 27 percent of the student body. That's significant, as the percentage of Latino students in the South attending an intensely racially segregated school is also on the rise—42 percent in 2014, up from 37 percent in 1980.

Research often touts that younger generations (millennials in particular) are defined by their diversity. However, this report notes that the typical public school student is facing a decrease in exposure to races other than their own. And as is to be expected, poverty also plays a huge role in segregated schools as black, Latino and low-income students have been more exposed to poverty than their white and Asian peers, particularly over the last decade. 

While the problem is getting much worse in the South, it's far from confined to the region. Last year, a US Government Accountability Office report concluded that nationally the number of high-poverty public schools—or those where at least 75 percent of students were black or Hispanic and at least 75 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-lunch—more than doubled between 2001 and 2014. The GAO report also found that the country saw a nationwide rise in the percentage of schools separated by race and class, from 9 percent to 16 percent, in the past decade and a half. These stats are further supported by a new report released on Thursday by the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, which finds that black and Latino students in the 2014-2015 school year disproportionately attended high-poverty schools; while 8 percent of white students attended high-poverty schools across the country, nearly half of black and Hispanic students did so.



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There is a Trump policy on how we should treat the world—and it's morally indefensible

Anyone who was expecting National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster to provide some voice of reason within the Trump regime can give up that dream. Not only has McMaster provided a ready defense for Trump’s worst outrages, his name appears on this May 25 editorial which is one of the most genuinely disturbing pieces of writing to emerge from the whole Trump era. Titled “America first doesn’t mean America alone,” the article, coauthored by Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, is intended to be a statement that the revived “America First” movement need not seem discouraging to allies or threatening to others. But both the tenor and the content of the editorial lay out a claim to authority that should be frightening to everyone, inside or outside the United States.

President Trump just returned from nine days in the Middle East and Europe that demonstrated his America First approach to ensuring security and prosperity for our nation. America will not lead from behind. This administration will restore confidence in American leadership as we serve the American people.

It’s hard to think about Trump’s foray into the world without thinking of his utter embarrassment before leaders of Europe, his awkward meeting with the Pope, and his surprisingly weak and tentative actions in Israel. But if McMaster and Cohn stopped with a defense of Trump’s often lackluster, sometimes laughable trip abroad, this would be a rather harmless addition to the mass of material produced in an effort to create a buffer between Trump’s bumbling and public perception. However, the editorial swiftly moves to the heart of an argument that’s little less than chilling.

The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a clear-eyed outlook that the world is not a “global community” but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage. We bring to this forum unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength. Rather than deny this elemental nature of international affairs, we embrace it.

Not only do the pair dismiss the idea of international cooperation in a passing sentence, invoking a world red in tooth and claw, they go on to declare that America possess “unmatched military, political, economic, cultural and moral strength.”  This is more than an announcement that America is the world’s policeman or the planet’s father. It’s a declaration of godhood.



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How Did This Happen?

For those of us lucky to be awake Tuesday night, for the semi-frequent late-night Twitter outburst from President Donald Trump, we received the gift of “covfefe.” Yes, Trump’s attempt to type the word “coverage” went somewhat awry, giving the Twitter wags a good chuckle before winking out for a good night’s sleep. You had the funny feeling that there would be a high-level meeting the next morning to “spin” this misspelling as a masterstroke of political letters (and that is apparently what happened), but that would surely be that. Right?


Wrong! Sometime between Trump’s tweet and the next morning, a think piece was penned, positioning “covfefe” as the unified field theorem of Donald Trump. Who wrote it? You know who wrote it. The man who writes the takes that make the whole world groan: New CNN hire Chris Cillizza.



This story is really super important to him!






”And ... they couldn’t!” Orchestra sting, curtain closes, END OF ACT ONE.  


Yes, the inability to come up with a “good answer” on a misspelled tweet really is something ― or at least it would be in an administration that isn’t a daily omnishambles. But let’s leave that aside for the time being and instead reflect upon this new “Peak Cillizza” era we seem to be entering and the way we find ourselves wondering, “How did this happen?” with increasing frequency. With the help of the Eat the Press telestrator, we shall meditate upon this question, until we are weeping.


So, then: How did this happen?




Per HuffPost’s Lydia O’Connor: “There’s zero evidence Ivanka Trump will help make the fight against climate change a pillar of her father’s administration, despite what some headlines may have led readers to believe.”



How did this happen?


 



How did this happen?



(In fairness, sociopaths usually are the biggest winners in Washington.)


How did this happen?  



How did this happen?




(See here for more on how Chris Cillizza ― who does not know any actual people ― constantly makes evidence-free assertions about them.)



How did this happen?



How did this happen?



How did this happen?


 



Hoooooly crap, you guys! How did this happen?



And how ― how on earth! ― did this happen? 



Meanwhile:






Keep leaking us the good stuff, Tiffany. 


In short: Congratulations to The Washington Post.


This has been: “How did this happen?”



~~~~~


Jason Linkins edits “Eat the Press” for HuffPost and co-hosts the HuffPost Politics podcast “So, That Happened.” Subscribe here, and listen to the latest episode below. 





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Mike Pence is hitting the campaign trail, perhaps with an eye on a Trumpless White House

Vice President and guy who always swears he was out of the room when everyone else on the president's senior team did all those things the FBI is now investigating Mike Pence is, four months or so after being sworn in, already heading back to the campaign trail. This may have something to do with Republican leaders being increasingly concerned that Tire Fire '18 is not, in fact, a winning ticket to keeping control of the House. Or it might be that Pence has been picking out new drapes for the Oval Office.

[T]he vice president’s increased electoral activity has stoked speculation that Pence is positioning himself for a post-Trump future in the party, something his advisers strenuously deny.

Pence has already formed a political action committee, the Great America Committee, enabling him to raise money for candidates who need help in 2018, an unusual move for a sitting vice president. And his upcoming effort to strengthen ties to the party’s rank and file and connect with key donors is likely to fuel the perception that Pence wants to fortify his position atop the party independent of his relationship to President Donald Trump.

That presumes, of course, that Mike Pence himself survives the Trump team downfall. As the person who was in charge of vetting ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, only to later profess to be downright surprised at the revelations of shady dealings that he had been warned about in writing, he may presume too much.

[T]he early intensity of Pence’s tour underscores the sudden urgency confronting Republicans. With Trump’s campaign under federal investigation, his approval ratings at record lows, and his agenda badly stalled, once-despondent Democrats have been jolted back to life — and are waging a serious bid to seize control of the House.


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Noose Found In African-American History Museum Exhibit In D.C.


For the second time in a week, a noose was found on the grounds of a Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C.


When visitors walked into an exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Wednesday, they saw a small noose lying on the floor. It had been left in an exhibit with galleries from the segregation era, Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas told HuffPost.


Two of the visitors who discovered the noose “were very upset,” St. Thomas said. The gallery was “closed pretty quickly” and remained closed for about an hour. 


It’s the second time in less than a week that a noose has been found on or around museum grounds on the National Mall. Last Friday, a noose was hanging from a tree outside the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, St. Thomas said.


“We don’t know how long that was there,” St. Thomas said of Friday’s discovery. “It was in a public space outside, but this [newly discovered noose] was obviously intended to be in the segregation exhibition.” 


St. Thomas said the museum has “full security,” including metal detectors and bag screening. But a small noose would not have set off any immediate alarms, she said.


The U.S. Park Police are now investigating the incident.


This is a developing story and will be updated.

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Toyota's next small crossover could be the TJ Cruiser

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The FT-4X is dead. Long live the TJ Cruiser?

Continue reading Toyota's next small crossover could be the TJ Cruiser

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Kansas lawmakers go full harassment mode: mandate typeface size, style for abortion disclosure forms

Kansas  legislators have reached a new low in meddling. They will soon be commanding abortion providers which typeface size and font they must use on disclosure forms given to patients. The bill, SB98, is awaiting the governor’s signature. 

Since 2011, state legislators nationwide have introduced more than a thousand bills to add new anti-abortion restrictions to the already long list. Governors have signed into law more than 250 of these. All these laws ultimately are meant to do one thing: control women’s sexuality by making it harder, more expensive, more time-consuming, and more privacy-invading to obtain what the U.S. Supreme Court has for 44 years said is a woman’s right. Nothing to do with a woman’s health, her safety, her physicians’ skills. 

As a Guttmacher Institute report pointed out early this month, a big proportion of the laws “lack a foundation in rigorous scientific evidence.” In fact, the authors write, a third of American women live in one of the 17 states where at least five of the restrictions imposed by forced birthers clash with scientific evidence, and more than 50 percent live in states with at least two such laws.

Much of this amounts to purely petty harassment.

Already under current law, abortion providers must provide biased and medically unnecessary information to each woman seeking an abortion in the state. SB98 will mandate that providers disclose information to patients that heart surgeons don’t: their credentials, medical school, disciplinary record, malpractice insurance, year they started working for the provider. To top it off, the bill requires that this information must be provided "on white paper in a printed format in black ink with 12-point Times New Roman Font.”

Advocates say this is necessary so that the disclosure form will be easily readable. Quite the claim when, for decades, the legislature’s own documents, including SB98, have been printed in a 10-point font. Does this mean they don’t want Kansans to read them?

John Hanna reports

Sen. Lynn Rogers, a Wichita Democrat, described the measure as “simply harassment” of abortion providers. Others saw the measure as an attempt to discourage women from having abortions.

Women often print out the informed-consent forms themselves at home before traveling to a clinic to terminate their pregnancies, abortion rights supporters said, and if they use the wrong color of paper they would have to reschedule their appointments.

That’s obviously a feature, not a bug.



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Trump Backers Share His Animosity Toward The Media, Poll Shows

Trump Expected To Delay U.S. Embassy Move To Jerusalem


WASHINGTON, May 31 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump is expected this week to delay relocating the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, U.S. officials and a diplomatic source said on Wednesday, despite his campaign pledge to go ahead with the controversial move.


With a deadline for a decision looming, Trump is likely to continue his predecessors’ policy of signing a six-month waiver overriding a 1995 law requiring that the embassy be transferred to Jerusalem, an action that would have complicated his efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the sources said.


Trump has yet to make his decision official but is required by law to act by Friday, according to one U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity.


Barring a last-minute surprise, Trump is expected to renew the waiver. His administration intends to make clear, however, that Trump remains committed to the promise he made during the 2016 presidential campaign, though it will not set a specific timetable for doing so, officials said.


Asked whether Trump would sign the waiver, White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters on Wednesday:


“Once we have a decision, we’ll put it out,” adding there would be “something very soon on that.”


While there have been divisions among Trump’s aides on the issue, the view that appears to have prevailed is that the United States should keep the embassy in Tel Aviv for now to avoid angering the Palestinians, Arab governments and Western allies while the president seeks to nurture peace efforts.


Trump avoided any public mention of a potential embassy move during his visit to Israel and the West Bank in May. Despite that, most experts are skeptical of Trump’s chances for achieving a peace deal that eluded other U.S. presidents.


The status of Jerusalem is one of the major stumbling blocks. Israel captured Arab East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed it, a move not recognized internationally. Israel considers all of the city its indivisible capital.


PRO-ISRAEL RHETORIC


The Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. Jerusalem is home to holy sites of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian religions.


Shifting the U.S. Embassy would be widely seen as Washington’s recognition of the Israeli position on Jerusalem’s status, which successive U.S. administrations have said must be decided in negotiations between the two sides.


Former President Barack Obama renewed the waiver in December, setting off a six-month clock for Trump. CNN was first to report that Trump was expected to sign the waiver.


On the campaign trail, Trump’s pro-Israel rhetoric raised expectations that he would act quickly to move the embassy. But after he took office in January, the issue lost momentum as he met Arab leaders who warned it would be hard to rejuvenate long-stalled peace efforts unless he acted as a fair mediator.


Some of Trump’s top aides have pushed for him to keep his campaign promise, not only because it would be welcomed by most Israelis but to satisfy the pro-Israel, right-wing base that helped him win the presidency. The State Department, however recommended against an embassy move, one U.S. official said.


“The president is still committed to moving the embassy,” one U.S. official said. “It’s not a question of whether but when it will be done.”


The Jerusalem Embassy Act passed by Congress in 1995 mandating relocation of embassy to Jerusalem allows the president to waive the requirement in accordance with U.S. national security interests.


(Reporting by Matt Spetalnick and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Yara Bayoumy and Sandra Maler)






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Iconic Photo Shows Mother Of Portland Victim Embracing Woman In Headscarf At Vigil


“Tell everyone on the train I love them.”


Those were the reported last words of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, 23, who died from a stab wound on Friday, May 26, according to a bystander. The recent college grad was one of the victims in a hate-fueled attack on a train in Portland, Oregon, that targeted two young women, one of whom was wearing a headscarf and was Muslim.


Friends and family described Namkai-Meche as having a “huge heart” and “a joyful and magical spirit” ― qualities he appears to have shared with his mother, Asha Deliverance.


Deliverance and hundreds of other Portlanders gathered for a vigil on Saturday to honor the lives of Namkai-Meche and Rick Best, 53, who was also killed in the attack after defending the young women. Micah Fletcher, 21, was also injured in the incident and survived.


During the vigil, Deliverance cried, embraced people in the crowd, and encouraged those gathered to “Give it up for love.”


A one point a woman wearing a white headscarf approached the grieving mother, who warmly leaned forward and embraced her.






On Monday, Deliverance penned an open letter to President Donald Trump, urging him to be a be a “President for all Americans.”


“Please encourage all Americans to protect and watch out for one another,” the letter reads in part. “Please condemn any acts of violence, which result directly from hate speech & hate groups. I am praying you will use your leadership to do so.”


Namkai-Meche, Best and Fletcher intervened on Friday when Jeremy Joseph Christian, the accused attacker, reportedly made anti-Muslim comments directed at the two girls, one of whom was wearing a hijab. All three were injured in the altercation, Namkai-Meche and Best fatally so.


Namkai-Meche was a recent college grad who worked at an consulting firm focused on environmental issues. The 23-year-old’s family released a statement on Saturday, urging people to “use this tragedy as an opportunity for reflection and change.”





Best, an Army veteran and a married father of four, worked for the city of Portland and was remembered as a “hero” by his family. “He couldn’t just stand by and do nothing. He died fighting the good fight protecting the innocent,” his eldest son, Erik, told KATU News.


Fletcher, a student at Portland State University, said he’s still “healing” and trying to make sense of what happened. “I got stabbed in the neck on my way to work, randomly, by a stranger I don’t know, for trying to just be a nice person,” he told USA Today.


A LaunchGood fund initiated by two Muslim nonprofit groups had raised more than $500,000 to support the victims families as of Wednesday afternoon.

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While You Obsessed Over Trump's Scandals, He's Fundamentally Changed The Country


On the morning of May 12, Attorney General Jeff Sessions revealed that he had instructed federal prosecutors to begin pursuing lengthier prison sentences for drug offenders.


It was a draconian change in approach that flew in the face of a growing bipartisan agreement on sentencing reform. “He’s completely discarded what has been an emerging consensus about how best to keep the country safe,” said Matthew Miller, a former Department of Justice spokesman. “[O]ne of the most extreme voices in the country on criminal justice policy just happened to be put into the most important job for shaping its future.”


The move was then largely buried under an avalanche of Donald Trump-related news.


Just hours after Sessions’ policy was revealed, the president tweeted that he may have taped conversations with his recently-fired FBI director, James Comey. With less than 140 characters, Washington was abuzz again over Trump’s potential ties to Russia, which Comey had been investigating.






This is a defining feature of the Trump administration: While scandal and squabble, palace intrigue and provocative tweets suck much of the oxygen out of the room ― and leave the impression of mass government disfunction ― a wide array of fundamentally Trump-minded reform is taking place.


“All of this smoke is missing the steady progress that the modern Republican Party is achieving,” said Grover Norquist, the longtime anti-tax advocate. “The idea that Trump isn’t getting anywhere is wrong. Those free market guys are picking up maybe not all the marbles in the world, but a large quantity of them. And we haven’t thrown away any marbles.”


One reason behind the perception that Trump’s agenda has largely foundered is that it’s made painfully little legislative progress. His efforts to push health care reform through Congress have advanced incrementally, but many hurdles remain. Tax reform appears unlikely to come before the summer, if at all. Trump’s budget won’t get a vote, and his relationship with Congress seems to fall somewhere between fractious and nonexistent.


But legislative progress is only one vehicle that moves a president’s agenda. And there have been profound policy changes on a variety of administrative fronts, often obscured by scandals emerging from the White House.



All of this smoke is missing the steady progress that the modern Republican Party is achieving.
Grover Norquist


Take reports that Trump will leave the Paris Agreement on climate change, the milestone global accord to lower carbon emissions in the face of overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming.


The president’s retrenchment will have immense, generations-long geopolitical ripple effects. Yet on Wednesday morning, it competed for media attention alongside the fallout from Trump’s bizarre Twitter typo the night before and the backlash against comedian Kathy Griffin’s vulgar depiction of a severed Trump head.


On regulatory policy, Trump’s impact has far outpaced the coverage it’s often received. He’s made it harder for workers to set up retirement accounts and has delayed the implementation of workplace safety rules. He repealed a regulation protecting workers from wage theft and allowed employers with spotty labor records to get government contracts. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has hit the brakes on a rule that would require firms to report worker injury data online. Trump has given coal companies permission to dump debris into local streams and canceled requirements for reporting methane emissions. Both the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines have been allowed to proceed, and coal companies have been allowed to again lease on public lands.


Elsewhere, Trump has made moves that will fundamentally alter the way our economy operates and individuals live their lives. His appointment of Ajit Pai to head the Federal Communications Commission is one of them. Pai is poised to dismantle net neutrality rules, moving away from treating online content as a public utility and toward a system that allows cable and telecom industry interests to control content and traffic. “That appointment,” Norquist said, “is [determining] 16 percent of the economy.”  


Much attention has focused on the way the courts and Congress have stymied Trump’s immigration policy. But even absent a travel ban or a border wall, he has dramatically altered the government’s approach. Deportations of undocumented immigrants have grown steadily under Trump’s watch, especially among noncriminals.


And Trump has had a profound impact on women’s health. He drastically expanded the so-called global gag rule, restricting a larger pool of funding from groups that mention or promote abortion, and he is poised to gut a mandate requiring employers to cover birth control for employees, broadening exemptions to the requirement that extend well beyond religious-affiliated groups.


These are just the domestic consequences of Trump’s presidency. On foreign affairs, his reach is far greater and restraint more limited.


Trump’s ability to do all this is not, as his administration would argue, evidence of an unappreciated wizardry at governance. He has simply utilized the powers afforded to the executive branch.


“He has a lot of leeway, and that’s why winning the White House is so important and losing it is so painful,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former top aide to former President Barack Obama. “The fact is, the bureaucracy is set up in the way that career professionals at government agencies are able to get things done in the way that the class of clowns around Trump aren’t able to.”


Indeed, the Trump administration has seemed to make the most progress when the epicenter of action is removed from the White House itself.


Kevin Ring, the president of the nonprofit Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said he was heartened to see Republicans and Democrats alike pushing back on Sessions’ sentencing guidelines. The impact of the policy change may be overstated, he says, as lawyers and judges could still determine they don’t want to abide by the tougher sentencing guidelines. But Ring concedes that Sessions had proved himself to be a competent and effective governing agent in ways that set him far apart from his boss.


“In every other battle, it is like, ‘Who is winning, Jared [Kushner] or [Steve] Bannon?’ Who is winning Trump’s blessing? And without it, they can’t go forward,” Ring said. “Sessions is at 950 Pennsylvania Avenue [where the DOJ is located] and doing whatever he wants. Which is not to say he isn’t doing what Trump wants. But he certainly has enough authority and discretion to move full speed ahead on all these fronts.”


At some point, Trump, Sessions and the rest of the Cabinet will run out of the low-hanging regulatory changes they can easily make. At that juncture, they will be limited in the policies they can promulgate. But by then, they will have already instituted substantial reforms, many of them without the public’s knowledge and hard to reverse.


Democratic operatives are waking up to the idea that the party should stop acting as if Trump is a rudderless president, desperately trying to pass an agenda as it’s anchored down by continuous scandal ― but rather, prosecute a case against Trump’s actual policy achievements.


“Democrats aren’t making a mistake by focusing on Russia, because it is potentially the biggest political scandal in U.S. history,” said Pfeiffer. “And the pressure they are putting forward has led to new revelations. But there will be a time when voters are interested in stuff beyond this. We aren’t there yet, but it would be incumbent upon the party to point this out.”


Want more updates from Sam Stein? Sign up for his newsletter, Spam Stein, here.

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