Fox News's appalling past 72 hours, analyzed

A data analysis shows how Fox News spun the Mueller indictment and Florida shooting into a defense of the president.

By Alvin Chang

https://www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17027456/fox-news-mueller-indictment-trump

[...]

The data paints a clear story of how damaging it is for a media outlet to prioritize its defense of the president. In the past 72 hours, Fox News:

Limited its coverage of what the indictment actually reveals: evidence of foreign organizations trying to undermine American democracy

Drastically reduced coverage of the Florida school shooting to push pundits onto TV to say this story actually vindicates President Trump, even though it does nothing of the sort

Used a detail of the school shooting to push the narrative that the FBI, and by extension the Muller investigation, is flawed — and gave cover to President Trump

It’s easy to just chalk all this up to Fox News being Fox News. But Fox News is the main source of news for 19 percent of 2016 voters, including 40 percent of Trump voters. There’s academic evidence that Fox News is more powerful than we ever imagined. It’s a network that allows conspiracy theorists to make hay out of baseless lies. And to top it all off, there is evidence that the hosts see their jobs as advising Trump — talking directly to him — and that Trump sees them as his main information source.

[...]

Do You Believe Her Now?

It’s time to reexamine the evidence that Clarence Thomas lied to get onto the Supreme Court — and to talk seriously about impeachment.

By Jill Abramson

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/the-case-for-impeaching-clarence-thomas.html

On the same fall night in 2016 that the infamous Access Hollywood tape featuring Donald Trump bragging about sexual assault was made public by the Washington Post and dominated the news, an Alaska attorney, Moira Smith, wrote on Facebook about her own experiences as a victim of sexual misconduct in 1999.

“At the age of 24, I found out I’d be attending a dinner at my boss’s house with Justice Clarence Thomas,” she began her post, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court justice who was famously accused of sexually harassing Anita Hill, a woman who had worked for him at two federal agencies, including the EEOC, the federal sexual-harassment watchdog.

“I was so incredibly excited to meet him, rough confirmation hearings notwithstanding,” Smith continued. “He was charming in many ways — giant, booming laugh, charismatic, approachable. But to my complete shock, he groped me while I was setting the table, suggesting I should ‘sit right next to him.’ When I feebly explained I’d been assigned to the other table, he groped again … ‘Are you sure?’ I said I was and proceeded to keep my distance.” Smith had been silent for 17 years but, infuriated by the “Grab ’em by the pussy” utterings of a presidential candidate, could keep quiet no more.

Tipped to the post by a Maryland legal source who knew Smith, Marcia Coyle, a highly regarded and scrupulously nonideological Supreme Court reporter for The National Law Journal, wrote a detailed story about Smith’s allegation of butt-squeezing, which included corroboration from Smith’s roommates at the time of the dinner and from her former husband. Coyle’s story, which Thomas denied, was published October 27, 2016. If you missed it, that’s because this news was immediately buried by a much bigger story — the James Comey letter reopening the Hillary Clinton email probe.

Trumps Budget Cuts Are Forcing Teachers and Nurses to Work as Federal Prison Guards

“It’s a Molotov cocktail about to explode.”

Samantha Michaels

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/02/trumps-budget-cuts-are-forcing-teachers-and-nurses-to-work-as-federal-prison-guards/

Twice in one week, Ray Coleman, a teacher at the Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution, reluctantly had to drop his lesson plans and go to work as a guard. “You show up in the morning and they say, ‘Hey, by the way, here’s your keys and radio—you’re going to work the compound today,” he says.

Because the low-security prison is short on staff, Coleman and his fellow teachers are regularly assigned to work as correctional officers in the units where inmates live. On those days, they either cancel their courses or leave the classroom open for inmates to fill out worksheets, unsupervised. “For the most part they’re just sitting there,” Coleman says.

Teachers aren’t the only ones assigned to guard duty—so are the prison’s nurses, case workers, and even accountants. And it’s not just happening in Florida. Federal prison employees across the country say staffing cuts made by the Trump administration have crippled their ability to provide services to inmates and keep prisons safe. “It’s very dire,” says Valerie Limon, a drug treatment specialist at the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex in California. (Limon and other prison employees spoke to Mother Jones on behalf of their union, the American Federation of Government Employees Council of Prison Locals.) “Morale at our institution is probably at an all-time low.”

NRA appears to be 'dialing down' high-profile appearance at CPAC

Source: The Guardian

The National Rifle Association (NRA) appears to be trying to “dial down” a high-profile appearance by its leader Wayne LaPierre near Washington this week.

LaPierre’s name is nowhere to be found on the official agenda for CPAC, the conservative conference which begins in Maryland on Wednesday. An NRA spokesman said that the firebrand executive vice-president and CEO had not cancelled his speech, but that he did not know when he would be speaking.

Donald Trump, Mike Pence and other key conservative figures are expected to speak at the conference.

For days, grieving high school students from Parkland, Florida, have spoken out publicly following the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school on 14 February, accusing politicians for having “blood on their hands” for voting with the NRA and opposing gun control.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/19/nra-appearance-cpac-wayne-lapierre-gun-control-florida

It's Even Worse Than You Think

On Friday I received my copy of David Cay Johnston's book, "It's Even Worse Than You Think | What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America". The news and discussion has been so hot on DU that I haven't had time to even open the thing.

Here's a video of Johnston interviewed on DemocracyNow.org (published 2018-01-18, seems like a year instead of a month):

Nigerian Women Bobsledders: The 'S***hole' Olympians Warming Hearts in South Korea

Every so often an Olympic team captures the the public imagination not because of their stellar performance, but because of the sheer audacity it takes for them to perform at all.

Barbie Latza Nadeau

https://www.thedailybeast.com/nigerian-women-bobsledders-the-shole-olympians-warming-hearts-in-south-korea?ref=home

At a send-off celebration in Lagos before heading to South Korea, the team had to give a demonstration of just what the sport was about, including a primer on how cold snow really is.

“Just because you don't know what it means to see snow or to understand temperatures that are equivalent to ice, that doesn't mean you have to shy away from it," Adigun said at the celebration, according to press reports. "That's what Africa is representing, that we can take those risks and still be able to compete with the best in the world."

All three bobsled team members grew up in America after their parents emigrated from Nigeria in the 1980s as part of the African diaspora that came over when the United States more readily welcomed people from third-world nations. They joke about being from a “shithole” country, as defined by President Donald Trump, saying they hope they can redefine the view of African immigrants.

Dinner with Donald Trump Jr offered to India's keen investors

[The grifting continues].

Investors in Trump Towers project near Delhi will be invited to dine with president’s son

[by] Michael Safi in Delhi

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/18/dinner-with-donald-trump-jr-offered-to-indias-keen-investors

Prospective investors in a Trump Tower project near Delhi are being offered the opportunity to have “a conversation and dinner” with Donald Trump Jr, the son of the US president, in the latest advertisements in a marketing campaign that has drawn criticism from corruption watchdogs.

Full-size advertisements reading “Trump is here. Are you invited?”, featured on the front page of three national Indian newspapers at the weekend ahead of the Trump scion’s visit to India this week.

Trump Jr, the executive director of the Trump Organization, is expected to arrive in Delhi on Monday, where he will be shown around one of the four construction projects in the country licensed by the family company.

Those who purchase an apartment before Tuesday in the towers in Gurgaon, a satellite site about an hour south of Delhi, will be invited to dine with Trump Jr on Thursday.

The Righteous Anger of the Parkland Shootings Teen Survivors

Students have mourned and rallied the public after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High that left 17 dead.

[by] Robinson Meyer

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/parkland-shooting-teen-survivor-tweets-righteous-anger/553634/

Something was different about the mass shooting this week in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three adults were killed.

It was not only the death toll. The mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High became the deadliest high-school shooting in American history (edging out Columbine, which killed 13 in 1999).

What made Parkland different were the people who stepped forward to describe it. High-school students—the survivors of the calamity themselves—became the voice of the tragedy. Tweets that were widely reported as coming from the students expressed grief for the victims, pushed against false reports, and demanded accountability.

https://twitter.com/Javier_Lovera__/status/964183117350297600
[ "We are too young to be losing friends like this." -- @Javier_Lovera_ ]

On television, on social media, they were unignorable. Many of them called for legislation to address the violence.

“We are children. You guys are the adults. Work together, come over your politics, and get something done,” David Hogg, a student who survived the killing, told CNN.

Another student was more pithy:

https://twitter.com/MiekeEoyang/status/964623903019749377
[ "OMG, teen from #MarjoryStonemanDouglas on @npr just now, “I’m not a Russian computer, so I can’t vote” but will push elected officials on gun control." -- @MiekeEoyang ]

It's Not Illegal Immigration That Worries Republicans Anymore

The Trump-era GOP cares more about the national origin and race of immigrants than the methods they used to enter the United States.

[by] Peter Beinart

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-the-new-gop-crack-down-on-legal-immigration-reveals/553631/

A few weeks ago, the contours of an immigration compromise looked clear: Republicans would let the “dreamers” stay. Democrats would let Trump build his wall. Both sides would swallow something their bases found distasteful in order to get the thing their bases cared about most.

Since then, Trump has blown up the deal. He announced on Wednesday that he would legalize the “dreamers,” undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, only if Democrats funded his wall and ended the visa lottery and “chain migration.” He would support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants only if Congress brought the number of legal immigrants down.

There’s an irony here, which was pointed out to me by CATO Institute immigration analyst David Bier. Until recently, Republican politicians drew a bright line between illegal immigration, which they claimed to hate, and legal immigration, which they claimed to love. Florida Senator Marco Rubio launched his presidential campaign at the Freedom Tower, Miami’s Ellis Island. Texas senator Ted Cruz, who in 2013 proposed a five-fold increase in the number of H1B visas for highly skilled immigrants, declared in April 2015 that, “There is no stronger advocate for legal immigration in the U.S. Senate than I am.” Mitt Romney promised in 2007 that, “We’re going to end illegal immigration to protect legal immigration.”

Trump has turned that distinction on its head. He’s willing to legalize the “dreamers”—who came to the United States illegally—so long as the number of legal immigrants goes down. He has not only blurred the GOP’s long-held moral distinction between legal and illegal immigration. In some ways, he’s actually flipped it—taking a harder line on people who enter the U.S. with documentation than those who don’t.

Activists pressure politicians to act on gun control

Activist organization have renewed calls for gun control in the US in the wake of the school shooting in Florida.

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, together with Everytown for Gun Safety, launched a campaign on Friday which it says will “empower voters to find out where candidates stand on gun safety”.

“Throw them out” will target members of Congress who are “beholden to the gun lobby”, Moms Demand Action said. They’ve set up five steps people can follow to pressure lawmakers, including how to get politicians on the record as committing to stricter gun control and a tool to encourage friends to vote.

The campaign uses a Washington Post interactive to help people track donations by the National Rifle Association. It means voters can understand which of their representatives have received money from the lobbying organization.

[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/17/the-resistance-niow-activists-gun-lobby