Category Archives: Issues

‘The knives are out for Flynn,’ says Trump administration official

The Washington Post reports: White House national security adviser Michael Flynn is under increasing political pressure and risks losing the confidence of some colleagues following reports that he misled senior administration officials about his discussion of sanctions with a Russian envoy shortly before President Trump took office.

As White House aides scramble to get their stories straight about the exact nature of those communications and as Democrats call for Flynn’s security clearance to be suspended or revoked, neither Trump nor his advisers have publicly defended Flynn or stated unequivocally that he has the president’s confidence.

Privately, some administration officials said that Flynn’s position has weakened and support for him has eroded largely because of a belief that he was disingenuous about Russia and therefore could not be fully trusted going forward.

“The knives are out for Flynn,” said one administration official who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly.

On Sunday, the top White House aide dispatched to represent the administration on the political talk shows pointedly declined to defend Flynn. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

North Korean nuclear ambitions to be defining issue for Trump

Bloomberg reports: Trump will be forced to deal with ongoing threats from North Korea as that country gains the ability to threaten the continental U.S. with a nuclear strike, an official said on Sunday, hours after Pyongyang fired a ballistic missile into nearby seas.

North Korea will probably develop its ballistic missile technology enough to pair with its nuclear weapons to reach the U.S. during Trump’s tenure, said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Either the U.S. gets the Chinese to help increase pressure on North Korea through sanctions, or Trump will have “a truly consequential decision,” Haass said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on Sunday.

“Trump is going to have to face a truly fateful decision about whether we’re prepared to live with that, a North Korea that has that capability against us, or we are going to use military force one way or another to destroy their nuclear missile capability,” Haass said. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said the test, the first by the North this year, demonstrated the “maniacal obsession” of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, with developing a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile.

The test came less than two days after Mr. Trump said on Friday that defending against the nuclear and missile threats from North Korea was a “very, very high priority.” Mr. Trump made the comment at a news conference with Mr. Abe at the White House. In their joint statement, the two leaders had urged North Korea “to abandon its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and not to take any further provocative actions.” [Continue reading…]

David Wright writes: The missile was apparently launched eastward from the Panghyon air base near Kusong, northwest of Pyongyang and traveled 500 km, splashing down in the Sea of Japan. According to the South Korean military, it flew on a lofted trajectory, reaching an apogee of about 550 km.

A missile flown on this trajectory would have a range of 1,200-1,250 km if flown on a standard trajectory with the same payload.

That range is similar to that of the North Korean Nodong missile, which was first tested in the early 1990s and has been launched repeatedly since then. Another launch of the Nodong would not be particularly useful for advancing Pyongyang’s missile program, so if that was what was launched it would have had a political motivation.

However, as Jeffrey Lewis points out, the trajectory is very similar to the trajectory the submarine-launched KN-11 missile flew in its first successful test last August. While similar in range to the Nodong, the KN-11 has the advantage that it uses solid rather than liquid fuel, which means it would take less preparation time before a launch. The North is likely to be interested in developing and testing a land-based version of the missile.

If this is what was launched, it would represent a useful developmental step for North Korea, no matter what may have driven the timing of the launch. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. coastal cities could flood three times a week by 2045

Climate Central reports: The lawns of homes purchased this year in vast swaths of coastal America could regularly be underwater before the mortgage has even been paid off, with new research showing high tide flooding could become nearly incessant in places within 30 years.

Such floods could occur several times a week on average by 2045 along the mid-Atlantic coastline, where seas have been rising faster than nearly anywhere else, and where lands are sagging under the weight of geological changes.

Washington and Annapolis, Md. could see more than 120 high tide floods every year by 2045, or one flood every three days, according to the study, published last week in the journal PLOS ONE. That’s up from once-a-month flooding in mid-Atlantic regions now, which blocks roads and damages homes.

“The flooding would generally cluster around the new and full moons,” said Erika Spanger-Siegfried, a Union of Concerned Scientists analysts who helped produce the new study. “Many tide cycles in a row would bring flooding, this would peter out, and would then be followed by a string of tides without flooding.”

The analysis echoed findings from previous studies, though it stood out in part because of its focus on impacts that are expected within a generation — instead of, say, by the end of the century.

It showed high tide floods along southeastern shorelines are expected to strike nearly as often as they will in the mid-Atlantic, portending a fast-looming crisis for more than 1,000 miles of coastal America. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

American husbands are incomparably more deadly than terrorists

Nicholas Kristof writes: It’s true that Muslim Americans — both born in the United States and immigrants from countries other than those subject to Trump’s restrictions — have carried out deadly terrorism in America. There have been 123 such murders since the 9/11 attacks — and 230,000 other murders.

Last year Americans were less likely to be killed by Muslim terrorists than for being Muslim, according to Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina. The former is a risk of approximately one in six million; the latter, one in one million.

The bottom line is that most years in the U.S., ladders kill far more Americans than Muslim terrorists do. Same with bathtubs. Ditto for stairs. And lightning.

Above all, fear spouses: Husbands are incomparably more deadly in America than jihadist terrorists.

And husbands are so deadly in part because in America they have ready access to firearms, even when they have a history of violence. In other countries, brutish husbands put wives in hospitals; in America, they put them in graves. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Israel bulldozes democracy

Ayman Odeh writes: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is expected to visit Washington this week to meet with President Trump, presumably to discuss the political philosophy they share: power through hate and fear. A government that bars refugees and Muslims from entering the United States has much in common with one that permits Israeli settlers to steal land from Palestinians, as a new law that Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition pushed through Parliament last week did.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu used blatant race-baiting tactics to win his last election, in 2015. Since then, he has made discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel central to his agenda. This takes many forms; a particularly painful one is his government’s racist, unjust land use and housing policies.

Arabs make up one-fifth of Israel’s population, yet only 2.5 percent of the state’s land is under Arab jurisdiction. And since the founding of the state, more than 700 new towns and cities have been built for Jews, while no new cities have been built for Arabs.

In Arab towns, the government has made building permits so difficult to obtain, and grants them so rarely, that many inhabitants have resorted to constructing new housing units on their properties without permits just to keep up with growing families that have nowhere else to go. As a result, Arab communities have become more and more densely populated, turning pastoral villages into concrete jungles. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Michael Flynn’s deceptions present bigger problem than violation of the Logan Act

David Ignatius writes: Michael Flynn’s real problem isn’t the Logan Act, an obscure and probably unenforceable 1799 statute that bars private meddling in foreign policy disputes. It’s whether President Trump’s national security adviser sought to hide from his colleagues and the nation a pre-inauguration discussion with the Russian government about sanctions that the Obama administration was imposing.

“It’s far less significant if he violated the Logan Act and far more significant if he willfully misled this country,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, in a telephone interview late Friday. “Why would he conceal the nature of the call unless he was conscious of wrongdoing?”

Schiff said the FBI and congressional intelligence committees should investigate whether Flynn discussed with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in late December the imminent imposition of sanctions, and whether he encrypted any of those communications in what might have been an effort to avoid monitoring. Schiff said that if some conversations were recorded by U.S. intelligence agencies, “we should be able to rapidly tell if Gen. Flynn was being truthful” when he told Vice President Pence and other colleagues that sanctions weren’t discussed. [Continue reading…]

Flynn’s ongoing obfuscation around the content of his conversations would appear to be a delaying tactic driven by the fact that he doesn’t know how much more detail in his exchanges might soon be leaked.

It’s also, no doubt, a product of the reliable expectation that in a political climate flooded with too many controversies for the media to closely track, the Flynn story is likely to get overshadowed by yet another drama.

The 24/7 Trump soap opera is effective in both sickening and exhausting an audience that will soon transition from interminable distraction to mass catatonia.

Facebooktwittermail

Stephen Miller — Trump’s devoted xenophobic ‘warrior’

The New York Times reports: Staff members on Capitol Hill recall Stephen Miller, the 31-year-old White House adviser behind many of President Trump’s most contentious executive orders, as the guy from Jeff Sessions’s office who made their inboxes cry for mercy.

As a top aide to Mr. Sessions, the conservative Alabama senator, Mr. Miller dispatched dozens and dozens of bombastic emails to congressional staff members and reporters in early 2013 when the Senate was considering a big bipartisan immigration overhaul. Mr. Miller slammed the evils of “foreign labor” and pushed around nasty news articles on proponents of compromise, like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.

One exhausted Senate staff member, forwarding a Miller-gram to a reporter at the time, wrote: “His latest. And it’s only 11:45 a.m.”

The ascent of Mr. Miller from far-right gadfly with little policy experience to the president’s senior policy adviser came as a shock to many of the staff members who knew him from his seven years in the Senate. A man whose emails were, until recently, considered spam by many of his Republican peers is now shaping the Trump administration’s core domestic policies with his economic nationalism and hard-line positions on immigration. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

FBI counter-terrorism taskforce investigating political activists; Army veterans return to defend protesters at Standing Rock

The Guardian reports: The FBI is investigating political activists campaigning against the Dakota Access pipeline, diverting agents charged with preventing terrorist attacks to instead focus their attention on indigenous activists and environmentalists.

The Guardian has established that multiple officers within the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce have attempted to contact at least three people tied to the Standing Rock “water protector” movement in North Dakota.

The purpose of the officers’ inquiries into Standing Rock, and scope of the task force’s work, remains unknown. Agency officials declined to comment. But the fact that the officers have even tried to communicate with activists is alarming to free-speech experts who argue that anti-terrorism agents have no business scrutinizing protesters.

“The idea that the government would attempt to construe this indigenous-led non-violent movement into some kind of domestic terrorism investigation is unfathomable to me,” said Lauren Regan, a civil rights attorney who has provided legal support to demonstrators who were contacted by representatives of the FBI. “It’s outrageous, it’s unwarranted … and it’s unconstitutional.” [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: US veterans are returning to Standing Rock and pledging to shield indigenous activists from attacks by a militarized police force, another sign that the fight against the Dakota Access pipeline is far from over.

Army veterans from across the country have arrived in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, or are currently en route after the news that Donald Trump’s administration has allowed the oil corporation to finish drilling across the Missouri river.

The growing group of military veterans could make it harder for police and government officials to try to remove hundreds of activists who remain camped near the construction site and, some hope, could limit use of excessive force by law enforcement during demonstrations. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The fragile condition of Europe’s youngest democracies

Jan Kubik writes: On 31 January, during an evening session that was suspiciously secretive, the Romanian government adopted two ordinances changing the country’s penal code. The measures were immediately seen by many as a clumsy attempt to decriminalise certain corruption offences, with the main beneficiaries being the politicians of the ruling party. Street protests broke out during that night, culminating last Sunday in the biggest demonstration since the fall of communism.

These events bring into sharp relief the main features of a volatile situation in eastern Europe where three forces vie for dominance: disconnected and sometimes corrupt “traditional” politicians, increasingly impatient and angry publics and assertive demagogues.

The east central Europe that shed communism in 1989 is a convenient laboratory to observe the emergence of a new politics. It is not necessarily due to its politicians being more corrupt, its demagogues flashier (who can compete with Trump?) and its publics angrier. It is more because its democracies are still fresher, more “basic”, their institutions not yet wrapped in a resilient layer of protective pro-democratic cultures. The whole system is thus more exposed to pressure tests. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump is terrorizing America’s immigrant population

The New York Times reports: In Austin, Tex., undocumented women working in a laundromat cowered in the back of the room, petrified after seeing a video and a photograph of apprehensions outside a local grocery store and burger joint.

A day laborer and mechanic in Staten Island told his 17-year-old son where the list of emergency contacts were, including the name of the guardian who would take responsibility for him and his two younger siblings.

In Savannah, Ga., undocumented restaurant workers were asking for rides rather than walking home, afraid they might be stopped and questioned.

As reports of immigration raids and roundups have rocketed across Twitter, Facebook and texts around the country, undocumented immigrants, their lawyers and advocacy groups are bracing for the increased enforcement that President Trump has called for.

Susannah Volpe, a managing attorney at Ayuda, an immigrant legal services group in Washington, said she had noticed what seemed to be roundups of people, like those without criminal records, that the government had not previously paid much attention to.

“These are agents going into apartment buildings or agents going to worksites,” said Ms. Volpe, who had a client arrested, along with five others, at a construction site in Washington last week. “This is new.”

School principals in Los Angeles have been sent a checklist of things to do in case immigration agents turn up. The Mexican government even warned “the entire Mexican community” in the United States “to take precautions and to keep in touch with their nearest consulate,” after the deportation of a woman who had previously been allowed to remain in the United States. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Popular support for the rule of law and democracy has weakened across America

Austin Sarat writes: There is much to celebrate in the court decision against President Trump’s immigration ban. It was a stirring victory for the rule of law and reaffirmation of the independence of the judiciary. Yet America faces a serious problem which that decision did not address: the erosion of public faith in the rule of law and democratic governance.

While we have been focused on partisan divides over government policy and personnel, an almost invisible erosion of the foundations of our political system has been taking place. Public support for the rule of law and democracy can no longer be taken for granted.

In 2017, the rule of law and democracy itself are under attack by President Trump and his administration. This is as much a symptom as a cause of our current crisis. Public Policy Polling has released the startling results of a national survey taken this week. Those results show significant fissures in the public’s embrace of the rule of law and democracy.

Only 53% of those surveyed said that they “trust judges more than President Trump to make the right decisions for the United States.” In this cross-section of Americans, 38% said they trusted Donald Trump more than our country’s judges. 9% were undecided. Support for the rule of law seemed higher when respondents were asked whether they thought that President Trump should “be able to overturn decisions by judges” when he disagrees with those decisions. Here only 25% agreed, with 11% saying they were unsure. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Almost 90% of new power in Europe from renewable sources in 2016

The Guardian reports: Renewable energy sources made up nearly nine-tenths of new power added to Europe’s electricity grids last year, in a sign of the continent’s rapid shift away from fossil fuels.

But industry leaders said they were worried about the lack of political support beyond 2020, when binding EU renewable energy targets end.

Of the 24.5GW of new capacity built across the EU in 2016, 21.1GW – or 86% – was from wind, solar, biomass and hydro, eclipsing the previous high-water mark of 79% in 2014.

For the first time windfarms accounted for more than half of the capacity installed, the data from trade body WindEurope showed. Wind power overtook coal to become the EU’s second largest form of power capacity after gas, though due to the technology’s intermittent nature, coal still meets more of the bloc’s electricity demand.

Germany installed the most new wind capacity in 2016, while France, the Netherlands, Finland, Ireland and Lithuania all set new records for windfarm installations. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Dakota Pipeline greenlighted as fossil fuels move to fore

Climate Central reports: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cancelling an environmental review of the Dakota Access Pipeline and will grant approval of an easement that allows the final link in the pipeline to be constructed.

The decision on Tuesday makes good on President Trump’s executive order advancing the controversial project, which has been the subject of months of protests at the construction site in North Dakota.

The Obama administration shelved or postponed both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines because of public outcry about their environmental, cultural and climate impacts.

Though they will tap different oil fields, both pipelines will have a measureable effect on the climate because they will make it cheaper and easier to send crude oil to refineries — fuel that will reach consumers’ gasoline tanks in the U.S. and abroad.

In the U.S., the use of crude oil for transportation is now a larger source of the carbon dioxide emissions driving climate change than electric power generation, which has long been the country’s largest source of climate pollution.

Building oil pipelines may help companies tap more oil, but to prevent global warming from exceeding levels that scientists consider dangerous — 2°C (3.6°F) over pre-industrial levels — at least one-third of the world’s oil deposits need to remain untapped, said Jonathan Koomey, an earth systems scientist at Stanford University.

“Anything that makes extraction and transportation of oil easier and cheaper like building more pipelines to landlocked high-emissions oil sands, makes it harder to achieve that goal,” he said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

White House rocked by Flynn’s overtures to Russia

Foreign Policy reports: Bombshell revelations about National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s potentially illegal conversations with the Russian ambassador have sullied his credibility, jeopardized his status in the White House, and fueled suspicions that the Trump administration is intent on appeasing a resurgent Moscow.

The episode — in which Flynn reportedly chatted with the Russian ambassador about the possibility of lifting sanctions on Moscow before President Donald Trump took office — reinforces growing concerns among lawmakers in Congress and European allies about Trump’s apparently unshakable affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

With Flynn already mired in a power struggle with the president’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, and other officials, the embarrassing incident threatens to further undercut his influence and bolster Bannon’s role. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

CIA freezes out top aide as Flynn seen waging ‘a jihad against the intelligence community’

Politico reports: A top deputy to National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was rejected for a critical security clearance, effectively ending his tenure on the National Security Council and escalating tensions between Flynn and the intelligence community.

The move came as Flynn’s already tense relationships with others in the Trump administration and the intelligence community were growing more fraught after reports that Flynn had breached diplomatic protocols in his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

On Friday, one of Flynn’s closest deputies on the National Security Council, senior director for Africa Robin Townley, was informed that the Central Intelligence Agency had rejected his request for an elite security clearance required for service on the NSC, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation.

That forced Townley, a former Marine intelligence officer who had long maintained a top secret-level security clearance, out of his NSC post, explained the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

One of the sources said that the rejection was approved by Trump’s CIA director Mike Pompeo and that it infuriated Flynn and his allies. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Flynn holds call with Pence amid calls for national security adviser’s resignation

The Washington Post reports: National security adviser Michael Flynn spoke privately with Vice President Pence on Friday in an apparent attempt to contain the fallout from the disclosure that Flynn had discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia with that country’s ambassador and then allowed Pence and other White House officials to publicly deny that he had done so, an administration official said.

The conversations took place as senior Democrats in Congress called for existing investigations of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to expand in scope to scrutinize Flynn’s contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak weeks before the Trump administration took office.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that if the allegations are proved, Flynn should step down. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Salam Fayyad, Washington and Tel Aviv’s favorite Palestinian, does not meet Trump’s approval

Roger Cohen called him, “The most progressive and innovative Palestinian thinker on a Middle East peace settlement,” and Tom Friedman described him as belonging to “a new generation of decent Arab leaders whose primary focus would be the human development of their own people, not the enrichment of their family, tribe, sect or party,” but in the eyes of the Trump administration, Salam Fayyad is less noteworthy for the details of his résumé or the praise he has so often received across the Western political establishment than he is for the mere fact that he is a Palestinian.

It’s easy to imagine Trump’s response when he was informed that the UN is considering appointing Fayyad to head its mission in Libya. “A Palestinian? Not good.” And thus the dimwit sitting in the Oval Office directed his emissary at the UN to craft a statement voicing his displeasure.

Facebooktwittermail

On Air Force One, Trump flies into the cloud of unknowing

Trump didn’t know about Flynn’s conversations about sanctions with Russia’s ambassador and neither did Pence. Flynn himself can’t remember, and the FBI and intelligence agencies listening in couldn’t decipher the true significance of what may or may not have been said. It’s all a deep, deep, mystery.

It’s Friday. Surely by Monday the media will also have forgotten about this story.

CNN reports: President Donald Trump said Friday afternoon he was unaware of reports that his national security adviser, Michael Flynn, may have spoken about sanctions with the Russian ambassador before the inauguration.

Trump, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, said he will “look into that.”

A US official confirmed to CNN late Friday afternoon that Flynn and the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, did speak about sanctions, among other matters, during the call.

The context of Flynn’s side of the conversation wasn’t clear, even to the FBI and intelligence agencies that reviewed the content, and there’s nothing to indicate that Flynn made any promises or acted improperly in the discussion.

Flynn cannot rule out that he spoke to Kislyak about sanctions, an aide close to the national security adviser said earlier Friday.

Flynn, the aide said, has “no recollection of discussing sanctions,” but added that the national security adviser “couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

Earlier Friday, a senior White House adviser told CNN that Vice President Mike Pence did not know that Flynn may have discussed sanctions in the December conversation and believes “it’s a problem.”

Three administration officials said Pence only knew what Flynn told him — that he had not talked about sanctions — before Pence stood before cameras last month and vouched for Flynn. One official said Pence was trying to “get to the bottom of it,” and two senior administration officials said Pence was “very intentional” in asking Flynn about his communication with the Russians before speaking to the media.

A source with knowledge of the situation told CNN the only reason Flynn hasn’t been fired is that the White House doesn’t want to look bad. Adding to Flynn’s problems, the source said, is that this latest revelation reflects poorly on Pence. [Continue reading…]

Indeed, it is of the utmost importance that Trump and those around him maintain their flawless reputations.

Facebooktwittermail