Category Archives: Analysis

Inside the fringe national security worldview that now shapes U.S. policy — led by controversial adviser Sebastian Gorka

Business Insider reports: On a panel titled “When did World War III Begin?” at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, former Army special-forces commander Mike Waltz was talking about the long road ahead in the fight against terrorism.

“We’re in for a long haul, and I think our nation’s leadership needs to begin telling the American people, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t have a choice, we are 15 years into what is going to be a multigenerational war, because we’re talking about defeating an idea,'” Waltz said.

During his government career, Waltz was an Afghanistan policy director at the Defense Department and worked in the White House for Vice President Dick Cheney. He has since worked for think tanks such as New America and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

“It’s easy to bomb a tank, very difficult to defeat an idea,” Waltz said, referring to extremist ideologies. “And that’s exactly what we have to do.”

To this an audience member shouted out, “It’s impossible!” The crowd started to applaud.

But one of Waltz’s fellow panelists, senior White House official Sebastian Gorka, politely disagreed.

“I have to disagree mildly with my colleague and especially with the gentleman who just shouted out from the audience, ‘It’s impossible to defeat an idea,'” Gorka said. “Wrong, sir. Wrong.”

Gorka went on to reject an assertion that’s been common among counterterrorism analysts in previous administrations — that the West is in a multi-generational fight against terrorism.

“We jettison the idea that this is a generational war,” Gorka said. “We will defeat ISIS and we will defeat them rapidly. To undermine the ideology will take a little bit longer, but not generations, because remember one thing: In 1987, a man called Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and he said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'”

“Eighteen months later,” Gorka continued, his voice rising, “without a shot being fired, the people imprisoned on the other side of that wall took … it … down.”

The crowd cheered as Gorka concluded: “Ideas can be defeated!”

National-security analysts who emphasize the importance of defeating Islamic extremist ideology say they have struggled under several administrations to get a seat at the policymaking table and push their ideas into the mainstream.

But that’s changing under President Donald Trump.

This turning tide is illustrated by Gorka, a former editor at Breitbart News who is now a deputy assistant to the president for the Strategic Initiatives Group, a new White House organization that US officials have said is like a parallel National Security Council. Gorka has faced an onslaught of negative media attention in recent weeks.

Many well-respected national-security experts have come out publicly against Gorka holding a high-level position in the White House. They say he doesn’t have the qualifications or knowledge to be influencing government policy, and some say his ideas are even dangerous and Islamophobic. [Continue reading…]

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A violent attack on free speech at Middlebury

Peter Beinart writes: My fellow liberals, please watch the following video. It suggests that something has gone badly wrong on the campus left.

The events leading up to the video are as follows. One of the student groups at Middlebury College is called The American Enterprise Club. According to its website, the Club aims “to promote … free enterprise, a limited federal government, a strong national defense.” In other words, it’s a group for political conservatives.

This year, the AEI Club invited Dr. Charles Murray to speak. That’s crucial to understanding what followed. When leftists protest right-wing speakers on campus, they often deny that they are infringing upon free speech. Free speech, they insist, does not require their university to give a platform to people with offensive views. That was the argument of the people who earlier this year tried to prevent ex-Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley. And it was the argument of those who opposed Murray’s lecture at Middlebury. “This is not an issue of freedom of speech,” declared a letter signed by more than 450 Middlebury alums. “Why has such a person been granted a platform at Middlebury?”

The answer is that Middlebury granted Murray a platform because a group of its students invited him. Those students constitute a small ideological minority. They hold views that many of their classmates oppose, even loathe. But the administrators who run Middlebury, like the administrators who run Berkeley, consider themselves obligated to protect the right of small, unpopular, minorities to bring in speakers of their choice. Denying them that right—giving progressive students a veto over who conservative students can invite—comes perilously close to giving progressive students a veto over what conservative students can say. If it is legitimate for campus progressives to block speeches by Milo Yiannopoulos or Charles Murray, why can’t they block speeches by fellow students who hold Yiannopoulos or Murray’s views? [Continue reading…]

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Vice President Pence’s deep state

At a time when the White House obsesses about and promotes the idea that it is under threat from a Deep State of the kind that as a meme Glenn Greenwald has vigorously promoted, one of the many flaws in this narrative is the lack of a Deep-State-approved replacement for Trump if the “coup” was to succeed.

In reality, Trump’s replacement spends most of his time standing right at his side and perhaps more so than any other, Mike Pence is preparing not for the possibility but rather the likelihood that before long he will become president.

Josh Rogin writes: The role and influence of the vice president, not enshrined in any law, is determined in any administration by three things: his direct relationship with the president, his building of a personal portfolio of issues, and the effectiveness of his team. When it comes to foreign policy, Vice President Pence is quietly succeeding on all three fronts.

Inside an administration that is characterized by several power centers, Pence must navigate complex internal politics while serving a president who has an unconventional view of foreign policy and the United States’ role in the world. Pence, a traditional hawk influenced heavily by his Christian faith, is carefully and deliberately assuming a stance that fits within the president’s agenda while respecting the prerogatives of other senior White House aides who also want to play large foreign policy roles, according to White House officials, lawmakers and experts.

But Pence’s growing influence on foreign policy is increasingly evident. The vice president was deployed to Europe last month to reassure allies that the United States will stay committed to alliances such as NATO, despite President Trump’s calls for Europeans to pay more for common defense. During Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent visit, Trump announced that Pence and his Japanese counterpart would lead a new dialogue on U.S.-Japan economic cooperation.

“The vice president seems to be building on his foreign affairs experience, finding a niche in that arena,” said House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who served with Pence in Congress. “He brings a level-headed steady hand to the foreign policy of the administration. He’s also building up his own team.”

Inside the White House, Pence is in the room during most of the president’s interactions with world leaders. He receives the presidential daily brief. As head of the transition, he was instrumental in bringing several traditionally hawkish Republicans into the top levels of the administration’s national security team, including Director of National Intelligence-designate Dan Coats, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s Twitter feed is a gateway to authoritarianism

Ishaan Tharoor writes: Seemingly prompted by Trump’s Twitter outburst — where, to be clear, the current president accused the former president of committing a crime — the White House has now called for a full investigation into whether its own unsubstantiated allegations are true.


Needless to say, Trump’s critics are unimpressed.

“This may come as a surprise to the current occupant of the Oval Office, but the president of the United States does not have the authority to unilaterally order the wiretapping of American citizens,” said Josh Earnest, a former White House press secretary under Obama. He accused the Trump administration of trying to distract from the controversy surrounding its alleged contacts with Russian officials.

“We know exactly why President Trump tweeted what he tweeted,” said Earnest to the Post. “There is one page in the Trump White House crisis management playbook, and that is simply to tweet or say something outrageous to distract from a scandal. And the bigger the scandal, the more outrageous the tweet.”

Earlier this year, George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, crafted a “taxonomy” of how Trump uses Twitter to shift the conversation from unwelcome reports and subsume the news cycle with his own agenda. [Continue reading…]

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Inside Trump’s fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations

The Washington Post reports: President Trump spent the weekend at “the winter White House,” Mar-a-Lago, the secluded Florida castle where he is king. The sun sparkles off the glistening lawn and warms the russet clay Spanish tiles, and the steaks are cooked just how he likes them (well done). His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner — celebrated as calming influences on the tempestuous president — joined him. But they were helpless to contain his fury.

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad.

Trump’s young presidency has existed in a perpetual state of chaos. The issue of Russia has distracted from what was meant to be his most triumphant moment: his address last Tuesday to a joint session of Congress. And now his latest unfounded accusation — that Barack Obama tapped Trump’s phones during last fall’s campaign — had been denied by the former president and doubted by both allies and fellow Republicans.

When Trump ran into Christopher Ruddy on the golf course and later at dinner Saturday, he vented to his friend. “This will be investigated,” Ruddy recalled Trump telling him. “It will all come out. I will be proven right.”

“He was pissed,” said Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company. “I haven’t seen him this angry.” [Continue reading…]

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Federal prosecutors have brought charges in cases far less serious than Sessions’s

Philip Lacovara and Lawrence Robbins write: Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a seemingly false statement under oath during his confirmation hearing. Admittedly, not every potential perjury case gets prosecuted, and Sessions may well have defenses to such a charge. But as lawyers at the Justice Department and attorneys in private practice who have represented individuals accused in such cases, we can state with assurance: Federal prosecutors have brought charges in cases involving far more trivial misstatements and situations far less consequential than whether a nominee to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer misled fellow senators during his confirmation hearings.

Sessions’s problematic statement involves his response to a question by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) about what he would do as attorney general “if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign.” Sessions said he was unaware of any such activities, then volunteered, “I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.” In fact, then-Sen. Sessions (R-Ala.), a top Trump campaign adviser, met at least twice during the presidential campaign with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, The Post revealed.

As any number of witnesses have learned the hard way, it is a federal felony to lie to Congress. Under Title 18 of the U.S. Code, Sections 1001 and 1621, perjury before Congress is punishable by up to five years imprisonment. To prove that offense, a prosecutor would have to establish that Sessions’s answer was false, that he knew it was false when made and that the subject matter of the answer was “material” to the congressional inquiry in which he was testifying.

Those elements all appear to be present. [Continue reading…]

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Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portends huge carbon release

InsideClimate News reports: Huge slabs of Arctic permafrost in northwest Canada are slumping and disintegrating, sending large amounts of carbon-rich mud and silt into streams and rivers. A new study that analyzed nearly a half-million square miles in northwest Canada found that this permafrost decay is affecting 52,000 square miles of that vast stretch of earth — an expanse the size of Alabama.

According to researchers with the Northwest Territories Geological Survey, the permafrost collapse is intensifying and causing landslides into rivers and lakes that can choke off life downstream, all the way to where the rivers discharge into the Arctic Ocean.

Similar large-scale landscape changes are evident across the Arctic including in Alaska, Siberia and Scandinavia, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal Geology in early February. The study didn’t address the issue of greenhouse gas releases from thawing permafrost. But its findings could help quantify the immense global scale of the thawing, which will contribute to more accurate estimates of carbon emissions.

Permafrost is land that has been frozen stretching back to the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. As the Arctic warms at twice the global rate, the long-frozen soils thaw and decompose, releasing the trapped greenhouse gases into the air. Scientists estimate that the world’s permafrost holds twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. [Continue reading…]

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This stunningly racist French novel is how Steve Bannon explains the world

Paul Blumenthal and JM Rieger write: Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history.

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. … I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.

But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist. [Continue reading…]

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In Romania, faith in democracy survives

Mircea Geoana writes: A month ago, images of hundreds of thousands of Romanians protesting in front of the government building in Bucharest and in other Romanian cities started to spread around the world. It may have seemed just another popular turn toward right-wing demagogy in a time of receding faith in democracy. But that is not the case.

This protest movement is, in fact, a signal to the world that in this corner of Europe, democracy and its ideals are alive and well — that the civic fabric destroyed during decades of Communist oppression has healed, and the people want to perfect their democracy, not to weaken it.

The protests are aimed at an emergency ordinance from the government that would have reversed a national campaign against corruption, in which Romania has achieved significant but incomplete victories in recent years. Graft and nepotism still exist, and are blamed for high levels of poverty, polarization, social and economic injustice; those, in turn, have sent millions of young Romanians fleeing to other parts of the European Union, the United States or Canada. Still, enough young Romanians remained to take over the streets in freezing cold, and ultimately they forced the government to abandon the infamous ordinance.

These are not the first spontaneous protests here in the name of popular power. Those began three years ago with the end of the discredited presidency of Traian Basescu. They continued in opposition to attempts by foreign corporations to extract gold from Roman-era historic sites in the mountains of Transylvania. And they resumed against the government of the prime minister at the time, Victor Ponta, after a terrible fire in a Bucharest nightclub.

What Romania has been experiencing is an anti-elite political outpouring with a fury that resembles what we see in Europe and America, but whose origins and goals are 180 degrees opposite. These Romanian “indignados,” as the protesters are called, are not the blue-collar, rural, anti-globalization disgruntled who voted for Brexit or helped Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House. They are mainly young, urban, college-educated people with well-paid jobs at multinational corporations and banks, the main employers of local talent. So they are not protesting against globalization or the European Union. The solution they seek would be more globalization, a more solid Europe, more American and NATO involvement in our region. They are instinctively against any walls — physical or invisible — that may be erected in a vain effort to stop the free movement of people, ideas, capital or technology. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s many shades of contempt

Roger Cohen writes: This is a column about contempt. Let’s start with the utter contempt that President Trump has shown for the State Department since taking office six weeks ago. Some 70,000 American patriots across the globe, dedicated to the American idea as a force for good in the world, have been cast adrift.

Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, is a near phantom. He has no deputy, having seen his first choice nixed by Trump. No State Department press briefing, once a daily occurrence, has been held since Trump took office. The president has proposed a 37 percent cut in the State Department budget. An exodus of senior staff members continues. The State Department has taken on a ghostly air.

The message is clear. America has no foreign policy so nobody is needed to articulate it. All we have are the feverish zigzags of the president, a man who thinks NATO is obsolete one day and glorious the next. There is no governing idea, only transactional hollowness. One midlevel officer told Julia Ioffe of The Atlantic: “It’s reminiscent of the developing countries where I’ve served. The family rules everything, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs knows nothing.”

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, has become the foreign service of the United States of America. [Continue reading…]

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NOAA cuts could stymie research, put lives at risk

Climate Central reports: On Friday, the meteorology community was riding a major high as stunningly high-definition images came in from the nation’s newest and much-anticipated earth observation satellite. The high came crashing down that evening, though, as the first hints of significant cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began to emerge.

NOAA oversees weather forecasting and is a major funder of weather and climate research. If these cuts — which an Office of Management and Budget document obtained by the Washington Post pegged at 17 percent agency-wide — materialize, they could significantly hamper improvements in weather forecasting and climate modeling and put the public at risk, experts warned.

“Any weakening of our technological, scientific, and human capabilities related to weather and climate places American lives and property at risk,” Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric science program at the University of Georgia and a former president of the American Meteorological Society, said in a Forbes blog post. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s wiretap rant betrays ignorance of the law

Bradley P. Moss writes: President Donald Trump set the political and national security community on fire Saturday morning, starting the day with a four-part Twitter rant alleging that former President Barack Obama had “tapped” his phones during the presidential campaign. Trump invoked the specter of the Nixon and McCarthy eras, suggesting there were “bad” people involved in shady activities. If this latest early morning tirade shows us anything, however, it is that the president has a rather pedestrian understanding of how the law works.

There is no evidence – nor did the president provide any – suggesting the Obama administration “tapped” Trump’s phone lines at Trump Tower, or in general for that matter. Indeed, a spokesperson for President Obama denied he did any such thing.

There has been a growing body of evidence, however, dating back to a Heat Street article on the eve of the election, indicating that there is at least one FISA warrant targeting people affiliated with Trump. That article claimed a FISA warrant had been issued in connection with an ongoing investigation into suspicious activity between a server in Trump Tower and two foreign banks, SVB Bank and Alfa Bank. The warrant allegedly also encompasses at least four U.S. citizens, and includes the contents of their emails and communications.

Since the election, other outlets such as The Guardian, BBC and McClatchy have reported the existence of an ongoing counterintelligence investigation into potential financial improprieties between Russian financial institutions and Trump associates. According to the BBC and McClatchy, a FISA warrant was allegedly issued on Oct. 15, 2016, although they indicated the warrant does not pertain to any specific U.S. citizens but rather only access to financial records.

Curiously, none of the biggest U.S. outlets, such as the New York Times, have confirmed this reporting. And what has been left unresolved is a consensus on what type of FISA warrant was actually issued and whether it specifically targets U.S. citizens who are also Trump associates. This nuanced issue is important to understand in order to fully explain the ways in which Trump’s remarks were completely off-base. [Continue reading…]

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Was the first song a lullaby?

Tom Jacobs writes: Why do humans play, and listen, to music? The question has long baffled evolutionary theorists. Some suggest it had its origins in courtship rituals, while others contend it had (and has) a unique ability to bond people together to work toward a common goal.

Now, a couple of Harvard University researchers have proposed a new concept: They argue that the earliest music  —  and perhaps the prototype for everything from Bach to rap  — may just have been the songs mothers sing to their infants.

Maybe the first musical genre wasn’t the love song, but rather the lullaby.

“The evolution of music must be a complex, multi-step process, with different features developing for different reasons,” says Samuel Mehr, who co-authored the paper with psychologist Max Krasnow. “Our theory raises the possibility that infant-directed song is the starting point for all that.”

Mothers vocalize to their babies “across many, if not all, cultures,” the researches note in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior. Its ubiquity suggests this activity plays a positive role in the parent-child relationship, presumably soothing infants by proving that someone is there and paying attention to them. [Continue reading…]

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Tillerson wants to see State Dept budget slashed by more than one third

The Associated Press reports: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has agreed in principle to a White House proposal to slash foreign aid and diplomatic spending by 37 percent, but wants to spread it out over three years rather than in one dramatic cut.

Officials familiar with Tillerson’s response to the proposal from the Office of Management and Budget said Friday that Tillerson suggested the reductions to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development begin with a 20-percent cut in the next budget year. Tillerson sent his response to OMB director Mick Mulvaney on Thursday, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the budget publicly until it is presented to Congress.

Tillerson likened his approach to that of landing an airplane safely: a gradual descent rather than a precipitous one-time drop that would have far-reaching consequences for policy as well as political and human costs, according to the officials. The officials cautioned that Tillerson’s response was the beginning of a discussion with the OMB that could lead to a different figure, which would then go to Congress, where more changes could emerge. Some lawmakers, including senior Republicans, as well as current and former military commanders strongly object to steep cuts in foreign aid and diplomacy.

The combined State Department/USAID budget this year was $50.1 billion, a little more than 1 percent of the total federal budget. The White House is looking for massive savings across the non-defense portions of the total budget to offset a proposed $54 billion increase in military spending. [Continue reading…]

When he was Commander of U.S. Central Command, James Mattis said: “If you don’t fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition.” He wasn’t arguing for more defense spending and reduced diplomacy.

The Washington Post reports: Now is not the time to slash U.S. foreign aid, more than 120 retired generals and admirals said Monday in a letter to lawmakers, while citing past comments from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to buttress their case.

The letter was released by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, which includes business executives, foreign-policy experts and retired senior military officials, as the Trump administration signaled that it will slash international spending while boosting funding for the U.S. military. The signatories include several past service chiefs and combatant commanders. [Continue reading…]

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Trump team’s links to Russia crisscross in Washington

The New York Times reports: During the 2016 campaign, Donald J. Trump’s second campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, had regular communications with his longtime associate — a former Russian military translator in Kiev who has been investigated in Ukraine on suspicion of being a Russian intelligence agent.

At the Republican National Convention in July, J. D. Gordon, a former Pentagon official on Mr. Trump’s national security team, met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, at a time when Mr. Gordon was helping keep hawkish language on Russia’s conflict with Ukraine out of the party’s platform.

And Jason Greenblatt, a former Trump Organization lawyer and now a special representative for international negotiations at the White House, met last summer with Rabbi Berel Lazar, the chief rabbi of Russia and an ally of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

In a Washington atmosphere supercharged by the finding of the intelligence agencies that Mr. Putin tried to steer the election to Mr. Trump, as well as continuing F.B.I. and congressional investigations, a growing list of Russian contacts with Mr. Trump’s associates is getting intense and skeptical scrutiny.

Democrats see suspicious connections and inaccurate denials as part of a pattern that belies Mr. Trump’s adamant insistence that he and his associates “have nothing to do with Russia.” The president’s supporters say innocuous encounters, routine for any incoming presidential team, are being treated for political reasons as somehow subversive.

Mr. Trump denounced the furor over Russian connections on Thursday as a “total witch hunt” — but it may not have helped his case that the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, echoed his words on Friday, saying, “This all looks like a witch hunt.” [Continue reading…]

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The EPA used to enjoy bipartisan support

Kendra Pierre-Louis reports: The White House is preparing to reduce the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 25 percent, according to reports published earlier this week by Reuters and The Washington Post. In addition to targeting climate change related programs by 70 percent, the administration plans to eliminate 20 percent of EPA employees.

An agency whose total operating budget is .2 percent of the federal budget—and whose mandate is protecting human health and the environment—doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for fiscal reduction. After all, most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, tend to support environmental protections. Increasingly, Americans even agree on climate change, with 70 percent of Americans believing that climate change is real, according to Yale’s Program on Climate Change Communication. In fact, there are only two counties in the country—Grant County, West Virginia and Emery County, Utah—where less than half of residents believe in climate change.

But while the depths of the White House’s proposed cuts are unusual, that a Republican administration would move to curtail the EPA surprises no one who has paid even casual attention to 21st century American politics. Yes, the EPA was created by a Republican president, but bipartisan support of clean air and water proved to be a 20th century trend. Increasingly, the EPA’s mission of protecting human health and the environment has been bifurcated along political lines. So much so, in fact, that you might assume that support of the EPA has always been a liberal battlecry. But you’d be wrong.

“Under Reagan,” said former EPA employee Eric Schaeffer, “environmental issues were more regional than partisan. If you were John Dingell from Detroit, well, you were dragging your feet on car and truck standards. On the other hand, Dingell was great on enforcement and on hazardous waste legislation.”

“There was Guy Molonari, a Republican from Westchester,” Schaeffer added, “if you’ve ever seen pictures of Frankie Vallens and the Four Seasons, he looked like him. He always had this kind of satiny jacket, big white hair. He was very green—the environment was a big issue for him.”

Schaffer joined the EPA under George H.W. Bush and served through both of Clinton’s terms into George W. Bush’s administration. In 2001, Attorney John Ashcroft awarded Schaeffer, then the director of the EPA’s office of regulatory enforcement, the Justice Department’s John Marshall Award for public service for his work on settling oil refinery cases. And yet, this dedicated public servant only lasted a short time into George W. Bush’s administration. He wasn’t the only one. [Continue reading…]

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It’s easier to list the Trump officials who haven’t been caught lying under oath than those who have

Paul Krugman writes: The latest big buzz is about Jeff Sessions, the attorney general. It turns out that he lied during his confirmation hearings, denying that he had met with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. In fact, he met twice with the Russian ambassador, who is widely reported to also be a key spymaster.

Not incidentally, if this news hadn’t come to light, forcing Mr. Sessions to recuse himself, he would have supervised the investigation into Russian election meddling, possibly in collusion with the Trump campaign.

But let’s not focus too much on Mr. Sessions. After all, he is joined in the cabinet by Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, who lied to Congress about his use of a private email account; Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, who lied about a sweetheart deal to purchase stock in a biotechnology company at a discount; and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, who falsely told Congress that his financial firm didn’t engage in “robo-signing” of foreclosure documents, seizing homes without proper consideration.

And they would have served with Michael Flynn as national security adviser, but for the fact that Mr. Flynn was forced out after the press discovered that, like Mr. Sessions, he had lied about contacts with the Russian ambassador.

At this point it’s easier to list the Trump officials who haven’t been caught lying under oath than those who have. This is not an accident. [Continue reading…]

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Al-Qaeda likes Steve Bannon so much, they put him on the cover of their official newspaper

Amanda Erickson writes: The way al-Qaeda tells it, the West is locked in an existential war with Islam. This is how the terrorist group justifies its violence and its fundamentalist ideology. And now it has found a Westerner to back them up — top Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

Bannon graced the cover (above the fold!) of the most recent al-Qaeda-linked Al Masra newspaper. That prominence, University of Oxford researcher Elisabeth Kendall told Quartz, is “striking.”

The piece focused on Bannon’s views of Islam, saying he believes that “the forces of Islam cannot be stopped by peaceful means.” The paper cited a conversation Bannon had with a Danish journalist in May 2016. It also claimed that Bannon believes that the struggle is really between Christianity and Islam, not just Islam and the West. And it suggested that Bannon has “lost confidence in secular Europe, and sees Muslim immigrants as partially responsible for the retreat of traditional Christian values.” [Continue reading…]

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