On Thursday, Meghan McCain broke down on The View over the controversy surrounding Rep. Ilhan Omar's (D-MN) comments on Israel, which are being portrayed as having anti-Semitic undertones.
McCain may have picked the wrong day to take her stand. The Internet erupted in glee and outrage over her comments.
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) held a press conference to address the controversy over comments made by junior Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that some have perceived as anti-Semitic.
Pelosi also answered reporters' questions about the President's emergency declaration--noting that it's an abuse of executive power and in breach of the Constitution--as well as the investigations Democrats have launched into possible crimes committed by the Trump administration.
Asked if Democrats were "over-reaching" in their Trump probes, Pelosi retorted that they were doing their job.
"It's our constitutional responsibility to have oversight over the executive branch," Pelosi said.
"If we were to not exercise oversight over the executive branch, we would be delinquent in our duties."
Watch:
The teacher reportedly made the comment after the boy didn't participate in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Liliana Ruiz, the boy's mother, described how hurtful the comment had been to herself and her son.
"That comment that a substitute made to my son is not appreciated for any of my family members or myself," Ruiz said.
"She said, 'If you don't want to sing, go back to Mexico' and that made me feel really, really bad," the boy said.
A school district spokesperson said they would no longer use the teacher's services.
"We're really disappointed with what happened yesterday at Swegle Elementary," said Lillian Govus, district spokeswoman, in a statement obtained by KATU. "We pride ourselves on being a safe and welcoming school district. What that substitute said to that student doesn't align with our values."
The New York Times reported Wednesday on financial regulations in the Trump era. Perhaps not surprisingly, many regulations imposed after the catastrophic economic collapse of 2008 on big banks have slowly fallen by the wayside during the last two years. Naturally, few at the top, economically, are worried about a collapse happening again.
“Today’s actions reflect the stability of the financial system and the Fed’s growing experience with stress testing,” Jeff Sigmund, a spokesman for the American Bankers Association, which represents the nation’s largest banks, told the Times Wednesday of the new policies established regarding "stress tests" of financial institutions.
But the newspaper said not everyone is confident that big banks can be trusted to do the right thing, should another economic meltdown take place without proper federal regulations and regulators in place to protect the economy.
"Critics, however, argued that the relaxation of the rules, while financially beneficial to bank shareholders and executives, will lead to a less safe, less transparent financial system that is more vulnerable to a repeat of last decade’s devastating crisis," the Times wrote.
“It’s like if we all had to go to gym class and we all had to do the same things, now they’re saying half of you don’t even have to go, and the other half that have to go can do something easier,” Christopher Wolfe, a managing director at Fitch Ratings, which evaluates the creditworthiness of big companies, told the Times.
Read the full report here.
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that North Korea has begun rebuilding essential missile test facilities. The move comes at what was largely seen as a failed diplomatic summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam last week.
Writing in the Washington Post, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin is unsparing in her criticism of Trump's global policy, especially in relation to dictators around the globe.
"President Trump has been played for a sucker by many of the world’s most vile autocrats," Rubin writes.
"Give him a glowing orb and he’ll look the other way if you murder and dismember an U.S.-based journalist. Roll out the red carpet and Trump will be silent on China’s human rights abuses. Help Trump get elected and, soon, he’ll be spouting Cold War talking points to justify the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan."
She points to the President's defense of Kim Jong Un in the brutal treatment of Otto Warmbier, an American student who was tortured in a North Korean prison and died upon his return to the US.
Since they should be well aware of Trump's many shortcomings on the global stage, Rubin observes, the GOP should be doing a lot more to contain the President.
But she also allows that there's been positive pushback on North Korea. "Given the weak and dim president, it’s up to Congress to provide adult supervision. Fortunately, that is happening with regard to North Korea," she notes.
She points to the bipartisan legislation “Otto Warmbier Banking Restrictions Involving North Korea (BRINK) Act,” co-sponosored by Republican Senator Pat Toomey and Democrat Chris Van Hollen. The bill would impose sanctions on banks that do business with the North Korean government.
Rubin wonders if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will wrangle Republicans into support the bill, or once again concede to Donald Trump.
"I’m curious to see whether Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) allows a vote on that measure, or whether he would rather concede Kim a propaganda victory than cross Trump," she writes.
She concludes that Congress must do its job and not allow dictators to run roughshod over US democracy and global interests.
"Whether it is North Korea, China, Russia or other bad actors, it is incumbent on Congress (as many members have done in reassuring NATO allies, most recently at the Munich Security Conference) to remind the world that U.S. interests in supporting democracy, countering the proliferation of nuclear weapons, checking international aggressors and addressing problems of mutual interest (e.g., climate change) will outlive the Trump presidency — at least if the voters don’t sentence us and the world to another term. Congress can only hold the line for so long," she concludes.
NBC News is reporting that North Korea is pursuing the "rapid rebuilding" of their long-range rocket site.
The news outlet cites satellite photos taken just two days after the Trump-Kim Hanoi summit, that they say proves rebuilding at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station.
"The same day the satellite photos at Sohae were taken, President Trump touted his talks with Chairman Kim in Hanoi as 'very productive,' saying the two leaders have 'made great historic progress,'" NBC noted.
Trump has repeatedly touted his relationship with Kim Jong-Un as the reason there are "no more missiles" being launched by North Korea.
Read the full report here.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump addressed the Veteran's Administration, doubling down on claims that Democrats are wasting everyone's time by investigating possible crimes committed by Trump and his associates.
'They just haven't gotten used to the fact that we won a lot of states that Republicans hadn't won in a long time," Trump said about the 2016 election.
"They want to play games," he added.
"It's too bad, I'd rather see them do legislation .... things like infrastructure but they want to focus on nonsense," he concluded. The President refused to take questions.
Watch:
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump attacked Democrats for conducting investigations into potential misdeeds by the Trump campaign and administration.
“The greatest overreach in the history of our Country,” Trump tweeted. “The Dems are obstructing justice and will not get anything done. A big, fat, fishing expedition desperately in search of a crime, when in fact the real crime is what the Dems are doing, and have done!”
“PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT!” he added.
The attack on Democrats echoed his rambling speech at CPAC over the weekend, in which the President accused Clinton foundation staffers of being killers.
Raw Story spoke with Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee about the President's recent outbursts.
Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine who teaches at Yale Law School. She edited the New York Times bestseller, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” to be released in an expanded edition later this month. She is president of the World Mental Health Coalition and currently organizing an interdisciplinary conference with top experts of multiple fields from around the country, to happen in Washington, DC, on the date of the book’s launch.
Raw Story: President Trump’s CPAC speech seems to have brought his mental health back into the spotlight over the weekend. Lawrence O’Donnell even quoted from your book the other night. What are your thoughts about the speech?
Bandy X. Lee: A member of the public asked, “When Donald Trump wrapped his arms around the flag, it evoked Lennie from Of Mice and Men squeezing the mouse until it’s dead. Is the president going to destroy our country?”
I didn’t tell her this, but my answer would have been that he is well on the way, as long as we let him. How are we letting him? By colluding on the most basic point: by telling ourselves that the mental unwellness we see is not what we are seeing. Allowing him to give as long a speech as he did, allowing him to continue on Twitter, allowing him to remain in his position, and allowing his staff to turn over so that he has no one left but those who enable his illness—all this is the opposite of the proper treatment that he needs.
Containment and removal from access to weapons, urgent evaluation, and then the least restrictive means of management based on the evaluation, is the medical standard of care.
Even the president deserves medical standard of care, and he is not getting it. The natural course of disease is that it will engulf the afflicted persons and lead them to destruction, if left without resistance. In medicine there is no difference between physical and mental disease, but mental disease will be experienced differently in that the afflicted person willingly, even fervently, goes to her destruction, bringing others down in the process.
I have a colleague at the World Health Organization, Dr. Gary Slutkin, who approaches this human destructiveness as an infectious disease. If we do not treat this phenomenon as an affliction of the mind, a symptom, but rather as a political strategy or an otherwise “normal” process, then we will surely lose. Think about not containing an Ebola infection and allowing it to spread freely; the image may be horrifying, and yet we are dealing here with something much more dangerous than Ebola.
Raw Story: How do you tell disease apart from healthy choices?
Bandy X. Lee: Often it takes a specialist with a lot of experience to make the distinction, since disorders are usually not entirely new but are extremes of traits that many people normally have. You have to know to what degree that constitutes pathology.
You also have to know a little bit about what the different diseases look like. A cancer cell, on its own, looks very healthy and is very efficient in sucking up all the nutrients around it and reproducing rapidly—it looks like success, but it eventually depletes the organism supporting it and brings everything down, including itself.
Raw Story: Trump tweeted, “The Dems are obstructing justice and will not get anything done. A big, fat, fishing expedition desperately in search of a crime, when in fact the real crime is what the Dems are doing, and have done!” He calls it “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT.” What do you make of his words?
Bandy X. Lee: In mental disease, a useful clue is the level to which the person denies any possibility that something could be wrong with oneself. If one denies it vehemently, then that is already a clue. After a certain point, you start using the formula of taking the opposite of what the person is saying to be true, and taking all assertions to be projection—and by now I have more high-quality data on Mr. Trump than any patient I have ever treated. So what he is really saying is: “I will obstruct justice, since it looks like they are getting a lot done. I’m on a big, fat fishing expedition in search of a way out of this, since I know the real crime is what I am doing, and have done.”
You can test this method elsewhere: when he says he believes President Barack Obama “was ready to go to war…. Anybody else but me, you’d be in war right now,” you can interpret it as his saying he is ready to go to war and that we are likely soon to be in a war like nobody else but he would incite.
When he calls Democrats “angry, angry people…. All killers,” he is giving us information that he is an angry, angry person who is akin to being a killer. So when mental health professionals come out with assessments about the president’s dangerousness or mental impairment, we are not trying to call him names but applying scientifically validated formulations that make revelations about him, such as chaos in the White House, very unsurprising.
Seasoned professionals knew it all from the start. This is why the law in all 50 states gives us the right to contain someone who presents enough psychological evidence to be a danger, whereas law enforcement can only do so after something has happened.
This past week was symbolic of two of the greatest dangers of this presidency: those of nuclear war and of civil war. We cannot expect a leader who is highly attracted to nuclear weapons and war to continue efforts toward peace when they do not bring him distraction or accolades, and when his former fixer Michael Cohen said there may never be a peaceful transition were Mr. Trump to lose in 2020, I cannot say I disagree.
Raw Story: What can we do?
Bandy X. Lee: We really need to begin with a proper evaluation. Medical evaluations and legal investigations have a lot in common, as I have learned from teaching at a law school for over 15 years. You gather evidence to support each of your statements, make use of precedent for your current evaluation (in medicine, this is scientific research and observation over multiple similar cases), and dispense the right treatment based on your discoveries.
This is our grounding in reality, and the reason why Congress, it seems to me, is focusing heavily on the special counsel’s investigations, even though you do not need criminal indictment to proceed with impeachment, for example. Similarly, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment may not need a medical finding to be implemented, but medical evidence is what grounds it in reality and keeps it from becoming a purely partisan game.
Medical professional opinion is admissible in court as evidence; in other words, it has the status of fact. A former White House counsel told me that “Capacity” should be up there with “Corruption” and “Collusion”, and I thought that was a very astute observation. Just as there is the Robert Mueller investigation, there should be an evaluation of the president’s mental capacity. Yet, Mr. Trump’s new White House doctor, with his “11 different Board certified specialists,” did no valid mental health assessment.
The American Psychiatric Association—which I criticize often because the public needs to know what information it is being depriving of—confounded “professional opinion” (a diagnosis) with “any opinion of a professional,” blocking a whole profession from saying a word about this president (the rule used to prohibit only diagnosis). Even the New York Times selectively published a handful of psychiatrists willing to say that the president is “just a jerk” or “does not have narcissistic personality disorder” or that psychiatrists have nothing to offer—and they are all connected to the APA.
In fact, the whole Editorial Board came out with a statement early last year that mental health professionals have nothing to offer about the president—without being an expert, how do they know the limits of the expertise? The ethics of being an expert is first to state the limits of your knowledge—it is not for a newspaper to say. This is actually egregious, and I equate it to the moment when the paper failed to warn against Nazism by burying reports about it.
Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Mika describes tyranny as a “beast” that encroaches on us as a steady creep until it is too late.
Our public-service book, to which she contributed, had three warnings: that the president’s condition was worse than it seemed, that it would grow worse over time—either power granted to illness or frustration of that will to power will do that—and that he would eventually be uncontainable. We are beginning to enter the third stage, and what I meant by it was that his pathology would spread, through his influential position, so that the country would become no longer able to save itself. When a clinician has a patient who is growing psychotic—that is, losing touch with reality—the clinician examines what is called “reality testing.” If a patient can no longer look at facts and reality and adjust his perceptions and beliefs accordingly, then you worry about the patient literally becoming unhinged from reality. At that point, the person will run as far from evaluation and treatment as possible, and healing can only come from outside intervention. The growing conspiracy theories, false “news”, and the refusal to accept facts and expertise should worry us all—every day we are falling more deeply into it, and 2020 may be too late for us to recover.
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump addressed the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), making multiple misleading claims about the economy, the wall and his tax cuts. According to the Washington Post, the speech contained 104 misleading claims, bringing his total number of false or fishy statements to roughly 9,014 over the course of his administration.
Raw Story spoke with Dr. Henry J. Friedman, M.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, about why the President finds it so easy to lie and the unique dynamic he has with his base that lets him get away with it.
Friedman is a contributor to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” edited by Bandy X. Lee, the expanded edition of which is to be released this month. He brings a psychoanalytic perspective to understand the totalitarian mindset, which presents a multifold threat to the world.
Tana Ganeva: According to one report, Trump's CPAC speech contained 104 instances of lies. Why do you think the President finds it so easy to lie?
Dr. Henry J. Friedman: When facing an audience that responds to him with adulation, he is inclined to present his worst tendencies in excess because he knows it pleases his base if he is extremely opposed to established standards of truth and politeness.
Trump’s base love him for liberating them to hate illegal immigrants and indulge their hatred of social change, of same sex marriage or woman’s rights and the rise of African Americans as a powerful political and social presence in the United States. His stance against equality for disavowed minority groups is exactly what they find attractive in him. He liberates their worst inclinations and fights against those who want to see the best in humanity dominate our society.
Tana Ganeva: How is the President different in front of his supporters?
Dr. Henry J. Friedman: He is empowered by such an audience to state things he wants to believe in as facts, as truths. He flirts with open totalitarian positions because these please this particular audience who find his authoritarian positions compatible with what they desire in a leader.
His base prefers a leader who is authoritarian and ruthless about getting what he personally wants, as this often reflects their experience with parents, particularly fathers who insisted on obedience. Trump demands that the world operate as he wants it to be, not as it actually is. Authority isn’t authoritarianism, hence it is easy to confuse a strong leader who represents all of our citizens from an authoritarian leader who panders to the worst desires of some groups in terms of their destructive impulses directed at other less powerful citizens.
Tana Ganeva: Can you explain why the President still has such a fervent following, despite arguably breaking a lot of his campaign promises, such as having Mexico pay for a wall at the Southwest border?
Dr. Henry J. Friedman: They respond not to his campaign promises or even to his actual accomplishments, which may be against their actual interests, but because his grandiose paranoid character appeals to them.
He always is ready to attack anyone who opposes him. His enemies are constructed by him, but they are what many individuals personally do in their own relationships with those around them. What his followers want is his immoderate, rash and destructive “self directed against an enemy."
His followers are pleased with his leadership because they believe in the dangers that he insists are present when in fact they are non-existent except in his paranoid thinking. A grandiose paranoid leader appeals to and preys upon the paranoid fears of the many citizens who constitute his base.
Tana Ganeva: How does your psychoanalytic background inform you about what is happening?
Dr. Henry J. Friedman: Absolutely, this kind of grandiose paranoid character is frequently encountered in our work with patients, but in a much attenuated form or only directed at those in the grandiose paranoid individual’s family or who are employed by him or her. Those of us who work with paranoid patients understand the insistent need to find an enemy, to see an exaggerated form of danger coming from the hated others who will damage you unless they are contained and ultimately destroyed either by deportation or simply being kept out of the country.
Tana Ganeva: How can mental health expertise help the nation?
Dr. Henry J. Friedman: By giving words and concepts from our work that help the public in putting words and concepts to the anxieties that they feel, without being able to label it in such a way that they understand why Trump must be opposed, not allow to do his “Hitler routine” and destroy the free press and any criticism of his behavior and desires.
The more Trump is able to destroy the free press by denouncing it as fake news, the more he will be able to keep the public uninformed and unable to oppose his draconian approach to anything or anyone who threatens his domination and control. We in mental health can see more clearly what others see, because we recognize it from our work in treating and evaluating those who are fearful and aggressive because they are filled with hatred and loathing of all who are different from them.
Michelle Goldberg unleashed another blistering editorial in the New York Times on Monday.
In the opinion piece, she quotes House Judiciary Democrat Jamie Raskin (D-MD) who had some choice words for Trump (and his followers).
“To me it’s a thrilling moment,” Raskin told Goldberg of the oversight of Trump now underway in the House. "Finally," he told the Times, “we have an opportunity to discover what has been happening in our country over the last two years and several months.”
Then, Raskin unloaded on Trump's base.
"You have to think of the Trump phenomenon as a religious cult surrounding an organized crime family,” Raskin said. “But at the outer perimeters people are starting to melt away.....Michael Cohen’s departure is a signal moment in the evolution of the Trump phenomenon," he said. "He is the innermost sycophant to break ranks,” Raskin noted to Goldberg of Cohen's public break from Trump.
Read the full story here.
The New York Times published a new editorial Monday trashing Donald Trump, and praising House Democrats from the Oversight Committee.
"Things are about to get real." the Times' Michelle Cottle wrote.
"If you thought the past two years of inquiries into possible misbehavior by Trumpworld were brutal, brace yourself, [because] phase 2 is about to heat up," she continued, before predicting that the "next several months [will] be a nonstop pageant of subpoenas, hearings and court challenges."
But Democrats should not fear this, she wrote, but instead, should welcome the oversight.
"Political investigations tend to be marathons rather than sprints, requiring the slow, meticulous accretion of evidential layers," the editorial noted. "It’s easy to forget how slowly and painfully the Watergate investigation unfolded," Cottle reminded readers.
The editorial board member then hit Trump hard for his "shameless and lawless behavior" before imploring Democrats to stand strong as the House Oversight Committee does the hard work it needs to do in the coming months.
"This is what oversight looks like," she wrote. "It is not for the faint of heart."
Read the full OP-ED here.
Conservative author Jerome Corsi, who is currently a person of interest in Robert Mueller's Russia probe due to his possible involvement with Wikileaks and Roger Stone, has apologized for publishing an article on Infowars regarding Seth Rich, the Washington Post reported Monday.
"Corsi on Monday apologized for writing an article in which he falsely alleged that Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was killed in 2016, and Aaron Rich, his brother, had leaked thousands of emails to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks," the Post wrote.
Corsi posted his retraction Monday morning on corsination.com and the apology also ran Monday on Infowars' website.
The conspiracy theorist was formerly a writer for Infowars.
The apology, which said in part, "Dr. Corsi acknowledges that his allegations were not based upon any independent factual knowledge regarding Seth or Aaron Rich," was prompted by a defamation lawsuit from Seth Rich's family, filed last year.
Aaron Rich, the brother of Seth, told Rolling Stone in a statement Monday that: “I acknowledge the apology of Dr. Jerome Corsi for his false accusations about me, my late brother and my family, and I look forward to my day in court against others who have made similar false statements....my family and I miss my brother Seth terribly, and we are grateful to everyone who has supported us through this very difficult time.”
Read more here.
Steven Eric Mullins, the Alabama man convicted of murdering a gay man, was found stabbed to death at the St. Clair Correctional Facility, reports Birmingham Real-Time News.
Mullins, who was serving life without parole for the 1999 hate crime murder of Billy Jack Gaither, was found unresponsive and airlifted to a hospital.
50-year-old Christopher Scott Jones is a prime suspect in the killing.
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