The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times concludes No matter how they dress it up, the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act is really bad policy:
While federal law establishes broad gun control policy, states set the rules under which people may carry concealed firearms. Some states, like California, set the bar high — sheriffs or police here may issue concealed carry permits only to legally eligible people who make a strong case for why they need to carry a firearm, such as those whose business involves carrying large amounts of cash. Neighboring Arizona, on the other hand, issues concealed-carry permits to anyone legally allowed to own a gun who has taken a gun-safety course.
Under the proposed reciprocity law, anyone with a valid permit from another state would be able to carry a concealed firearm in California, even if they do not meet California’s more stringent standards. This is a highly objectionable infringement on the responsibilities of state and local law enforcement to maintain public safety, and is clearly aimed at undermining gun control efforts nationally. What’s more, it will put guns into the hands of more people who shouldn’t have them.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Who are Republicans really? Look to Alabama:
Just how disordered have our politics become? And how off-the-rails is the Republican Party?
The good people of Alabama will help answer these questions in next Tuesday’s special election for the U.S. Senate. The whole world will be watching them decide whether party and ideology top decency and moderation; whether there is simply no end to the extremism Republican voters are willing to tolerate in their ranks; and whether a majority in their state believe that being a credibly accused sexual predator is better than being a Democrat.
They will also be telling us what they think the word “Christian” means.
Jonathan Capehart at The Washington Post writes—Time’s Person of the Year breaks silence on sexual harassment and changes our culture:
Time Magazine made it official. The “person of the year” is a group of people: “The silence breakers.” The #MeToo movement creators and the women who went public with complaints of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace were given the recognition for a cultural movement that has led to action in just about every industry. [...]
Time Magazine made it official. The “person of the year” is a group of people: “The silence breakers.” The #MeToo movement creators and the women who went public with complaints of sexual harassment and assault in the workplace were given the recognition for a cultural movement that has led to action in just about every industry.d me during an interview on the “Cape Up” podcast “that we have to make sure becomes conventional wisdom, is accepted and causes changes in behavior.” More to the point, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee said, “There is a big cultural bias that we have to confront and get over, and that men have to understand that that’s just not going to cut it any longer.” The transcript of what Clinton had to say on this subject is below. [...]
Ed Kilgore at New York magazine writes—What Precedents Will Democrats Set by Forcing Franken’s Resignation?
Al Franken is now under enormous pressure from his Senate colleagues (at first a series of women, but then men, and finally the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer) to resign over seven separate allegations of sexual harassment and/or inappropriate behavior towards women. Franken has called a press conference for tomorrow to respond, and it’s not entirely clear what he will do.
But if Senate Democrats do succeed in forcing Franken from office, they need to get ready to answer some questions about the standards they are applying to his case, and the precedent they might be setting for similar situations in the future, which might not be very far down the road given the explosion of revelations that are arising about the piggishness of powerful men. [...]
5. Should Democrats hold themselves to a higher standard in cases of sexual abuse of women, or does that make them chumps.
Chris Magnus at The New York Times writes—Sessions’s Anti-Immigrant Policies Will Make Cities More Dangerous:
As the police chief here, I’m deeply troubled by the Trump administration’s campaign against “sanctuary cities,” which refuse to turn over undocumented immigrants to federal authorities. Washington is trying to retaliate against them by withholding funding for things like crime prevention, drug treatment and mental health programs.
Tucson is not technically a sanctuary city. But we are close to the border with Mexico and take pride in being welcoming to immigrants. Yet the government has warned us that our grants are in danger.
Still, while federal judges in Chicago and San Francisco have ruled againstPresident Trump’s executive order to withhold money from sanctuary cities, the administration’s crackdown on immigrants is already having a chilling effect on police-community relations here. Many community members have told me that Latinos are not turning to us for help or working with us as often as they have in the past. Their growing sense of fear and distrust is clearly a consequence of the anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from Mr. Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Bob Borosage at The Nation writes—Donald Trump Is Just the Front Man for a Massive Heist. Republican elites are pushing through their agenda while the president acts a fool:
In the past few weeks, President Donald Trump has, in no particular order: tweeted out anti-Muslim propaganda, disgraced a ceremony honoring Navajo code talkers with a racist slur of Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” called Kim Jong-un “little Rocket man,” lied about not benefiting from the tax plan that will line his pockets, revived his bizarre birther claims about Obama’s birth, and questioned the authenticity of his infamous Access Hollywood bus tapes.
News coverage of this nonstop carnival barking has missed the real story of the past month, however. These antics are a distraction from the pernicious GOP agenda that is moving through Washington with amazing speed. [...]
Beyond the economy, Republicans are busy rigging the system in other critical ways. Young, right-wing, pro-corporate ideologues are packing federal courts at alarming rates. Trump makes the appointments, but he mainly draws from lists prepared by the right-wing Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation. After obstructing a record number of Obama nominees to the federal bench, Senate Republicans are now trampling over longstanding legislative procedures to get as many judges on the bench as quickly as possible.
What we face in Washington and in statehouses across the country is a right wing that’s ideologically committed to laying waste to the public sphere—the sinews of our economy, the comity of our politics, and the quality of our most basic public services. Trump isn’t the exception; he’s simply the sideshow. Right-wing populism was just the garb he donned for the campaign. What’s left of it is largely limited to his incoherent trade posturing and the wall.
I love the comparison below of dung beetles with investigative journalists. It can taking a lot of digging through shit to uncover stories that matter, that change things.
Mark Schapiro at The Nation writes—Investigative Journalism Can Still Make Bad Guys Squirm:
Stellar investigative journalism had already upended politics in South Africa when more than a thousand overseas colleagues assembled here from November 16–19 to plot further disruptions of business as usual the world over. Convened by the Global Investigative Journalism Network, some of whose member organizations helped bring us the Panama and Paradise Papers’ exposes of tax evasion by international elites, it was one of the largest international conferences of investigative journalists ever held.
In a keynote address, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who popularized the term “the 1 percent,” saluted investigative journalism for spotlighting the roots of economic inequality and dubbed Donald Trump the “money launderer in chief.” At a time when news organizations in the United States are besieged by collapsing revenues, shaky public confidence and bogus charges of “fake news,” to hear investigative reporters from 130 countries describe their latest revelations—and unpack how they did them and brainstorm their next targets—was a bracing reminder that bona fide journalism is capable of shaking establishment structures to the core. “We’re the backlash to the backlash,” David E. Kaplan, the global network’s executive director, told The Nation.
Perhaps the most striking success story was unfolding throughout the conference in the South African mass media: stunning revelations by the unforgettably named reporting outfit AmaBhungane. In Zulu, the name means “dung beetle,” an animal that “digs through shit”—as reporters must often do to uncover the truth. Under the motto “digging dung, fertilizing democracy,” this spunky nonprofit has been probing into the expansion of South African president Jacob Zuma’s financial empire since he took office in 2009.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—We Are All California. The nation's leader of the climate resistance is getting pummeled by global warming. Your state could be next:
On Wednesday morning, R.L. Miller woke up and went to Starbucks, where she and her neighbors stared at a bright orange sky and wondered whether it was safe to breathe. Usually, the Southern California native spends her days advocating for climate action as the president of Climate Hawks Vote, a grassroots super PAC. But on Wednesday, as catastrophic wildfires roared about 20 miles away from her home in Ventura County, she was a potential victim of climate change, too. “I’m scared,” she said, adding that one of the blazes north of her was moving south. “This is real.”
There have been many victims of the ongoing wildfires in Southern California, the largest of which is the Thomas Fire, a 101-square-mile monster blaze north of Los Angeles. [...]
California is uniquely aggressive in fighting climate change, but it’s not uniquely a victim. Eventually everywhere in the United States, not just the coastal regions, will suffer from severe climate impacts. Climate scientists have documented how global warming stands will hit the rest of America, whether it be through more extreme precipitation in the northeast or crop failure in the heartland. But reality has shown it to us, too. Hurricane Harvey brought Houston, Texas, its worst rainfall and flooding in recorded history. The risks of sea-level rise in Florida was made more apparent by Hurricane Irma, which flooded city streets and destroyed sea-walls. This summer, in Oklahoma, the temperature reached 100 degrees in the dead of winter.
Kate Aronoff at In These Times writes—Why the Sanders-Warren Plan for Puerto Rico Is a Model for Climate Legislation:
The plans laid out in the bill are wide-ranging. It stipulates that $51 billion would be devoted to economic development on the island, and $27 billion would go toward rebuilding downed, damaged and neglected infrastructure—including the island’s long-beleaguered electric utility. An additional $62 billion would go to repaying Puerto Rico’s at least $74 billion in municipal debt. Specific provisions cover everything from grants for local agriculture to parity for Medicaid and Medicare payments to additional funds for the Department of Veterans Affairs to financing for a rapid scale-up of the island’s renewable energy capacity. The plan also hands control of restoration programs over to Puerto Ricans, stating that “the people of Puerto Rico and their elected representatives should determine the long-term future of the island.”
Building in more democratic control of the Puerto Rican economy could also be a way to head off corporate interests that tend to swoop in post-disaster. “We’ve all read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine,” said Sanders’ climate and energy advisor Katie Thomas, who worked extensively on the bill. “[Sanders] said we need to do everything we can to prevent the Shock Doctrine-ization of this situation. He wanted information on what had happened after Katrina, when so much of the public infrastructure was either privatized or eliminated. We wanted to be clear that we don’t want anything like that to happen in the future in Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands.”
According to Thomas, the bill emerged in part from the Senator’s October trip to the island and a series of “really productive roundtable conversations with dozens of labor leaders, mayors and leaders wanting to rebuild Puerto Rico back stronger than it was before.” While the bill initially came about as a way to deal with the island’s electricity grid—virtually leveled during Maria and in dire disrepair before that—that visit and subsequent talks with people on the island pushed them to consider a broader strategy, Thomas told In These Times.
Henry A. Giroux at Salon writes—Gangster capitalism and nostalgic authoritarianism in Trump’s America:
There is more at work here than the kind of crass entertainment that mimics celebratory culture. As Byung-Chul Han argues, “every age has its signature afflictions.” Ours is an unprecedented corporate takeover of the U.S. government and the reemergence of elements of totalitarianism in new forms. At stake here is the power of an authoritarian ideology that fuels a hyperactive exploitative economic order, apocalyptic nationalism and feral appeals to racial cleansing that produce what Paul Street has called the nightmare of capitalism.
Trump engages in a culture war that militarizes the social media and in doing so creates a politics of diversion while erasing memories of a fascist past that bears an uncanny and terrifying resemblance to his own worldview. As Zygmunt Bauman observes in “Strangers at Our Door,” Trump’s endless racist discourses, taunts and policies cast blacks, immigrants and Muslims as “humans unworthy of regard and respect” and in engaging in the dehumanization of the Other shifts major social problems away from the “sphere of ethics to that of threats to security, crime prevention, and punishment, criminality, defense of order, and, all in all, the state of emergency usually associated with the threat of military aggression and hostilities.”
Hanan Ashrawi writes—Trump Is Making a Huge Mistake on Jerusalem:
Since Israel was established in 1948, the United Nations and the United States, like most countries, have refused to recognize any country’s sovereignty over Jerusalem, a city holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians.
For this reason, the United States has always maintained its embassy to Israel in Tel Aviv. Since Israel militarily occupied East Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the United States and the international community have rejected as illegal Israel’s attempts to cement its control over the city by expanding its boundaries, annexing it and constructing a ring of settlements on occupied Palestinian land around its outskirts to sever it from the rest of the West Bank.
With his announcement on Wednesday, Mr. Trump has legitimized Israel’s illegal actions and sent the message that the United States no longer has any regard for international conventions or norms, and that might and power prevail over justice and the law.
Perhaps this shouldn’t have been a surprise. Members of Israel’s hard-right government were overjoyed at Mr. Trump’s election, believing they would have a free rein to accelerate the expansion of settlements.
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—Trump’s Dangerous Pandering to White Evangelicals on Jerusalem:
There has been a lot of talk about why so many white evangelicals continue to support an amoral man like Donald Trump. Primarily that discussion has focused on the fact that he promised to appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court. In the background are issues like so-called “religious freedom” and promises to get rid of the Johnson Amendment, which bars nonprofits and churches from directly endorsing political candidates.
But the announcement from Trump today that the U.S. will recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and begin the process of moving our embassy there is a key ingredient to this president’s support among white evangelicals. This isn’t about supporting Israel, even though it is something Prime Minister Netanyahu has asked for. Rather, it is about the eventual destruction of that country according to biblical prophecy.
What I know from personal experience is that these people take their view of biblical prophecy very seriously. Factions have developed among fundamentalists over small differences in the timelines of various groups about the events that are predicted for the End Times. Even so, there are a couple of events related to this decision that appear in all of them: the rebuilding of the Jewish temple is Jerusalem and the battle of Armageddon. [...]
Jonathan Freedlund at The Guardian writes—Donald Trump’s Jerusalem statement is an act of diplomatic arson:
[T]he status of Jerusalem is the most intractable issue in what is often described as the world’s most intractable conflict. It is the issue that has foiled multiple efforts at peacemaking over several decades. Both Israelis and Palestinians insist that Jerusalem must be the capital of their states, present and future, and that that status is non-negotiable.
But it’s not just important to them. The Old City of Jerusalem contains the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest mosque in Islam, to say nothing of its enormous significance to Christians, meaning that even the slightest move there is felt by billions. It is a place where diplomats have learned to tread with extreme care. There is a reason why no US administration, no matter how pro-Israel, has changed its policy toward the city in the nearly 70 years since Israel’s founding.
But here comes Trump, oblivious to precedent and indeed history – even in a place where history is a matter of life and death – stomping through this delicate thicket, trampling over every sensitivity. The risk is obvious, with every Arab government – including those loyal to Washington – now issuing sharp warnings on the perils of this move, almost all of them using the same word: “dangerous”.