What Fresh Hell?: The Ugly American Edition

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

It was a relatively quiet week at the circus, in part because Trump’s spent a few days in Davos, wooing those elite globalists he always railed about. His act reportedly went over better than it has in other international fora, mostly because the kind of people who attend Davos will tolerate a deranged chaos monkey if he can deliver some sweet tax cuts.

The shiniest object this week may have been news that Trump already tried to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But that story merely confirmed earlier reports, and of course it’s all fake news anyway in Trump’s world.

The Washington Post ran a feature this week that got us thinking. It detailed how many African Americans fear cross-country travel today in a way that’s reminiscent of the Jim Crow era.

Rhonda Colvin writes…

President Trump’s election in November 2016 coincided with a surge in reported hate crimes that month, according to federal data… reports of vocal white supremacists, high-profile fatal police encounters and caught-on-camera public racism are influencing where motorists of color are willing to drive.

These are citizens; immigrants – including authorized immigrants – are literally being terrorized on a daily basis as ICE continues to sweep people up in courthouses and schools and hospitals.

So, perceptions about what’s happening to this country are heavily influenced by one’s physical security. If you’re not a white, straight citizen, Trump and Trumpism is an existential threat. If you’re a member of the majority, and personally secure, Trump is first and foremost deeply, deeply embarrassing. It’s a national disgrace that the Electoral College elevated such a crackpot to the highest office in the land, and it’s humiliating every time he opens his pie hole in public.

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Last week, we had a laugh – and Fox News viewers had a scare – over a report from the Department of Homeland Security which purported to show that 73 percent of terrorists convicted in federal courts were foreign-born. The opposite is true – fringe right-wingers commit the lion’s share of terror attacks in the US --  but the report simply excluded those who were convicted of domestic terrorism. So it was like saying that foreigners tend to be born in other countries.

This week, Spencer Ackerman reported for The Daily Beast that “the Department of Homeland Security did not perform that analysis. DHS’ analysts did not contribute to the highly controversial report….According to a government source familiar with the episode, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ office took charge of the report’s assemblage of statistics—which some terrorism analysts consider highly misleading—and sent it to DHS Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen for her imprimatur after it was all but finalized.”

We like a little levity around here, but in fact gaming terror statistics to demonize immigrants is pretty dangerous stuff. Turning the highest law enforcement agency in the land into a source of xenophobic propaganda really isn’t funny at all.

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Here’s an important story from Politico that may have gotten lost in the shuffle this week. According to Dan Diamond, “a small cadre of politically prominent religious activists inside the Department of Health and Human Services have spent months quietly planning how to weaken federal protections for abortion and transgender care — a strategy that's taking shape in a series of policy moves that took even their own staff by surprise.”

Diamond writes…

The agency's devout Christian leaders have set in motion changes with short-term symbolism and long-term significance. One of those moves — a vast outreach initiative to religious groups … — came in October 2017 while the health department reeled from the resignation of former Secretary Tom Price and congressional Republicans struggled to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

That outreach initiative began a rulemaking process that could culminate in a rollback of Obama-era protections for transgender patients and allowing health providers more protections to deny procedures like abortion. It worried abortion rights and LGBT advocates, who acknowledge that while abortion laws and other regulations remain mostly intact, the groundwork is steadily being laid to revise them.

Let’s keep an eye on this one.

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Now for a couple of stories about politicizing the bureaucracy, which should serve as a blaring warning of emerging authoritarianism.

“The Trump administration is pushing a subtle change to a government form which could have profound implications for future elections and potentially violate the Constitution,” writes Ian Millhiser from Think Progress. The plan is to add a question on the upcoming Census form asking folks about their citizenship status, and the idea is to scare immigrants, many of whom live in households with mixed legal status from participating.

“A change to the census form that discourages these immigrants from filling it out will likely shift political power away from urban centers (where voters tend to prefer Democrats) and toward more rural areas (where voters tend to prefer Republicans,” according to Millhiser.

But the move may be unconstitutional, as the 14^th Amendment specifies that the Census will count all persons, other than Native Americans, and “if the Census Bureau adopts a question known to discourage certain populations from filling out their census forms, that will prevent representatives from being allocated based on the ‘whole number of persons in each state’ because the number of people in states with larger undocumented immigrant populations will be systematically undercounted.”

The Census is also underfunded, and Trump’s nominated a new Census chief who’s written in the past that “competitive elections are bad for America.” You know what they say -- ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, just cheat.’

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Meanwhile, beleaguered staffers at the State Department, which we’ve noted in the past has faced an exodus of career foreign service officers (who have been replaced in some cases by unqualified weirdos), are lawyering up, “charging they are being put in career purgatory because of their previous work on policy priorities associated with President Barack Obama,” according to CNN’s Elise Labott.

As has been reported elsewhere, Labott notes that “morale inside the State Department is at the lowest level in years, largely because of the perceived talent flight and an insular and distrustful approach from Tillerson and his team.”

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A staff photographer at the Department of Energy was fired for releasing a photograph of Energy Secretary Rick Perry reviewing an “action plan” put together by coal magnate Robert Murray, the head honcho at Murray Energy.  According to Think Progress…

Photographer Simon Edelman said Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray asked Perry for policy changes that would directly benefit his coal company and the executive’s personal financial position. The reason to release the photos “was to show the evidence of corruption that was taking place” …

Edelman, who stayed in the room for about 15 minutes, said it was unlike any other meeting he had photographed at DOE, including events attended by former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, Perry’s predecessor. “This was not an everyday meeting that happens all the time,” he said. “This was different because they knew each other and they knew each other well. Perry gave him that hug. And then Murray got right down to business and gave him the action plan.”

The really sad thing – aside from a whistleblower getting the ax -- is that Rick Perry’s not quite bright enough to come up with his own give-away to Big Coal.

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You probably caught the story of the 19-year-old Trump fan who was arrested this week for threatening to shoot up CNN for peddling “fake News.” (“I’m smarter than you,” he claimed in one threat transmitted across state lines and duly intercepted by the FBI.)

Getting less notice was an analysis of data from US Press Freedom Tracker by Peter Sterne and Jonathan Peters for The Columbia Journalism Review which found that “the most dangerous place to be a journalist in America is at a protest,” and they attributed this, at least in part, to Trumpism.

With his near-daily denouncements of the press, the president has helped normalize abuses against journalists by ordinary people. Public trust in the press is low, and a growing number of Americans see journalists as part of an elite coastal establishment that doesn’t understand them or share their interests. Those sentiments seem to be combusting at protests.

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Meanwhile, according to The Hill, “the United States joined Belgium, the U.K. and Japan this week in opting out of a new standardized test for students to determine whether children can spot and avoid fake news.”

Nothing to see here, folks. Just move along.

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What’s this? The House Science Committee wants to investigate a scientist for doing science?

That’s the take-away from a report by Sharon Lerner at The Intercept...

Republicans on the House Science Committee are accusing Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, of lobbying. In letters sent to the Inspector General and acting secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Reps. Lamar Smith and Andy Biggs wrote that they were “conducting oversight” of Birnbaum’s activity in response to a editorial she wrote in a scientific journal.

Birnbaum’s editorial, which the journal PLOS Biology published in December, addressed the gaps in the regulation of toxic chemicals. Though there are more than 85,000 chemicals approved for use in commerce, she noted in the piece, “U.S. policy has not accounted for evidence that chemicals in widespread use can cause cancer and other chronic diseases, damage reproductive systems, and harm developing brains at low levels of exposure once believed to be harmless.”

Birnbaum called for more research on the risks posed by chemicals and, in the sentence that the representatives appear to consider lobbying, noted that “closing the gap between evidence and policy will require that engaged citizens — both scientists and non-scientists — work to ensure that our government officials pass health-protective policies based on the best available scientific evidence.”

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Candidate Trump did say he was “the most militaristic guy there is,” and he promised to run the country like a business, which means cutting corners and screwing over your workforce whenever possible.

These themes may come together in Afghanistan soon, and with potentially disastrous consequences, according to a report by Thomas Gibbons-Neff at The New York Times. He writes…

They are being heralded as a key part of President Trump’s new strategy to resolve the nearly 17-year war in Afghanistan. But their training has been cut short by months, and units are still short-staffed, as some of the estimated 1,000 additional military advisers prepare to arrive in Afghanistan in time for the spring fighting season, officials said…

The advisers’ brigade was supposed to have around a year of training before deploying. Advisers in the new brigade are expected to begin deploying by early spring — roughly eight months after the brigade was created.

Additionally, a six-week Army course specifically for combat advisers was slashed to two weeks to more quickly cycle the American soldiers through training.

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From the ‘it’s all a big grift’ file, we learn from The New York Times that “a pair of groups supporting President Trump say they raised $30 million last year, then spent tens of thousands of those dollars at the Trump International Hotel here and on payments to a few Trump loyalists like the former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and the former Milwaukee County sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.”

We’re guessing that Clarke can buy a lot of bling for that kind of money.

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Speaking of embarrassing, let’s finish things off with an odd story from the ‘personnel is policy’ file. A woman named Cathy Stepp is Trump’s pick to head the Midwest Environmental Protection Agency. She previously served as secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources under Scott Walker – whom Charles Pierce has dubbed “the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin.”

For us, the story is Stepp’s “history of rolling back enforcement of antipollution laws, reducing funding for scientific research and scrubbing references to human-caused climate change from government websites during her time in Wisconsin state government.”

But The Chicago Tribune went with a different angle, noting that Stepp “took the unusual step of drafting her daughter, Hannah, 23, to humanize her by introducing her [to] her 200-plus staff.” Hannah broke the ice by recalling…

“She put on a disguise of a fake nose and sunglasses and went to the DMV and followed someone taking the driving portion of the test so that she could learn the route, and then we practiced it,” Hannah continued. “I didn’t fail the second time!”

Stepp’s daughter said she took the test when she was 16, about seven years ago, which would place the time of the test to around the time Stepp was appointed to lead the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources by Gov. Scott Walker.

Hannah said she did not know where her mother got the false nose but that she “always has it with her.”

Really, the whole regime should be issued big red clown noses when they’re appointed. Or maybe a #MAGA hat serves the same purpose?