#_author:Jerry Adler

[jerryadler-blog]

140 characters in search of an editor: The tweets that could bring down a president

Early Thursday morning — 6:55 a.m., to be precise — President Trump was at it again,  tweeting his thoughts about the news that he is now personally under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller for obstruction of justice.

They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2017

Whatever one thinks of the logic or accuracy of his mini-screed, the near unanimous reaction from the legal and political worlds was that Trump was only digging his hole deeper. Every lawyer in the country, presumably including Trump’s personal attorney, Marc Kasowitz, knows to tell his client to keep his mouth (or phone) shut, because he only makes things worse for himself.

But no one has ever had much success telling Donald Trump what he can’t do.

In approximately 35,000 posts since his first Twitter missive on May 4, 2009, to promote his appearance on David Letterman’s show, Trump has used the platform to hurl insults, ranging from “awkward” (Mitt Romney, Seth Meyers, Ellen DeGeneres) all the way down to “disgusting” (Fox News, Bette Midler, Barney Frank’s ill-fitting shirt) at enemies ranging from China to Whoopi Goldberg; to boast about how rich he is, how smart he is and how he is the “least racist person there is”; and to promote everything from his plans for peace to the Middle East to the quality of his branded neckties. He has written “hearby” for “hereby” and said he was “honered” by his election. He misspelled “counsel” (as in “special counsel”), writing “councel” instead, after earlier confusing the word with “council.” And, as some have surmised, he seems to have fallen asleep in the middle of a late-night rant about media “coverage,” inadvertently adding “covfefe” to the lexicon. But while his opinion of, say, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (“highly neurotic”), won’t matter in the long, or even short, run, a relative handful of tweets from his campaign and now from the White House have the potential to make history — or, at the least, come back to haunt him as he engages in what may be the early stage of a fight for his political survival.

In the burgeoning scandal over possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, surely the most damaging statement by Trump came in his interview with NBC, not on Twitter. In that exchange, the president demolished his own administration’s carefully constructed cover story for the dismissal of James Comey as head of the FBI — that it was prompted by his public comments about the Hillary Clinton email investigation — admitting that he actually fired Comey over his unhappiness with the Russia investigation. But there is no mess so deep that Trump can’t make it worse with Twitter, so he dug a whole new hole for himself with his now infamous “tapes” tweet.

James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

The White House has refused to say whether such tapes exist, giving rise to suspicions Trump was bluffing. If so, Comey called his bluff in his testimony to the Senate intelligence committee (“Lordy, I hope there are tapes”). In fact, it was seeing the tweet that prompted Comey to get out first with his own version of his dealings with Trump by leaking the contents of memos describing their meetings. That was the sequence of events that led to the appointment of the special counsel now bedeviling Trump. But either way, the tweet sounded to some in Congress very much like Trump was trying to intimidate Comey, who is a potential witness against him, something that — if Mueller sees it that way — could play into the obstruction-of-justice investigation. At least several lawmakers expressed openness to sending a subpoena for the hypothetical recordings.

Many of Trump’s most ill-considered tweets have involved the judicial system in some way. The most recent example came less than a week ago, in a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the second version of the administration’s executive order restricting immigration. In ruling that the president overstepped his authority in seeking to bar entry to nationals of six majority-Muslim countries, the judges quoted and even embedded a link to Trump’s tweet from a week earlier, which — contradicting White House spokesman Sean Spicer— explicitly referred to the contested executive order as a “travel ban.” In the end — which will probably involve the Supreme Court — it might not matter what the order is called. That’s a question of politics and public relations, not law. But, in an illustration of why amateurs shouldn’t get involved in these things, Trump played into his opponents’ hands by casually referring to the object of the order as “certain DANGEROUS countries,” rather than people who might be linked to terrorism, a significant distinction cited in the appellate decision.

And although Spicer and other White House officials including Kellyanne Conway have tried to have things both ways on the question of how much weight to give Trump’s tweets, the court chose to side with Spicer’s statement earlier this month that the freewheeling Twitter posts are in fact “considered official statements by the president of the United States.”

Most of the fights he picked with Twitter were inconsequential to begin with:

. @BarbaraJWalters made a great decision in firing @JoyVBehar from @theviewtv. The show will be better without her!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 14, 2013

or have long since blown over.

.@oreillyfactor, why don’t you have some knowledgeable talking heads on your show for a change instead of the same old Trump haters. Boring!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 22, 2015

It was just announced that @MacMiller’s song “DonaldTrump” went platinum—tell Mac Miller to kiss my ass!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 6, 2013

But one group of targets stands out both for his consistency in attacking them, and the foolhardiness of taking them on: federal judges. With little to gain and much to lose in the Trump University fraud lawsuit last year, Trump nevertheless preemptively went on a rant against the otherwise obscure, utterly uncontroversial judge in the case, Gonzalo Curiel:

I have a judge in the Trump University civil case, Gonzalo Curiel (San Diego), who is very unfair. An Obama pick. Totally biased-hates Trump

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2016

And when the courts ruled against the original version of his travel ban, he seemed unable or unwilling to recognize that taking on an independent branch of the federal government is qualitatively different than, say, mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on “The Apprentice”:

Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017

The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 4, 2017

The judge opens up our country to potential terrorists and others that do not have our best interests at heart. Bad people are very happy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017

It is different not only because attacking the judiciary threatens the foundations of American democracy, but because federal judges, although less famous than television personalities, wield great power in the real, as opposed to “reality,” world. And while one expects them to hold themselves above a petty desire to retaliate against those who attack them, they are, like Trump himself, only human. And it seems likely he will have much more business before the federal courts before his term expires.

And his future is also, in part, in the hands of Mueller, who appears to be broadening his investigation in ways that bode ill for Trump. So it would seem prudent to avoid antagonizing the special counsel with a provocative tweet — like the one that went out Thursday morning, an hour after @realDonaldTrump tweeted about “obstruction of justice on the phony story.”

You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history – led by some very bad and conflicted people! #MAGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2017

Read more from Yahoo News:

NYT issues correction to editorial linking Giffords shooting to Palin

Pelosi: It’s ‘outrageous’ for Republicans to blame Scalise attack on Democrats

GOP Rep. Sanford on Va. shooting: Trump partially responsible ‘for the demons that have been unleashed’

Trump lashes out after report says he’s being investigated for possible obstruction of justice

Photos: Shooting at GOP baseball practice in Alexandria, Va.

[jerryadler-blog]

The Ever-Trumpers: Revisiting his backers from 2016, we find they still like him

Every president embarks on his term with a honeymoon, a reservoir of goodwill with voters, Congress and the press that lasts weeks or months, until the glow of electoral victory is dimmed by the inevitable disappointments of governing. For Donald Trump, his romance, or at least truce, with the media came to an abrupt end within hours of his inauguration, when he dispatched press secretary Sean Spicer to browbeat reporters into accepting Trump’s claims about the size of the crowd that witnessed his swearing-in. Various parts of his constituency began falling away thereafter, disillusioned by his failure to pass an Obamacare repeal (or, contrariwise, by the specifics of his proposal for a replacement), by his suspected squishiness on immigration (or, on the other hand, by instances of heavy-handed heartlessness in pursuing deportations), by his confusing and contradictory positions on foreign trade, currency exchange rates and numerous other topics.

But as we head into the symbolic, albeit meaningless, 100-day marker of his administration, there are many for whom the honeymoon never ended, who cannot imagine it ending, who by and large have adopted Trump’s own view of himself as a good man, a strong leader, a shrewd negotiator and a brave truth teller who has somehow been stymied by a cowardly Congress, a lying press and a treacherous bureaucracy. Call them the Ever-Trumpers.

A year ago, as Trump was surprising even himself — not to speak of the media and the Republican establishment — with his remarkably resilient popularity, Yahoo News interviewed a half-dozen Trump supporters from around the country to get at the secret of his appeal. Beyond the stereotype of angry working-class white men, we found a range of backgrounds, beliefs and values that drew voters: conservative, but less so than supporters of his rival Sen. Ted Cruz; concerned about immigration, but not as racist as the handful of well-publicized altercations at his campaign rallies led some to suspect; worried about the economy, although it’s hard to think of a time in recent American history when that hasn’t been true.

As part of our 100-days reporting, we went back and interviewed five of these six voters again. (The sixth, a young Cuban-American lawyer named A.J. Delgado, went on to work for Trump’s election but left for personal reasons.) The five we did speak to are Rick Cruz, a 63-year-old small-business owner from Michigan; Nell Frisbie, an 80-year-old real estate agent in Mississippi; Justin Neal, a 41-year-old mechanic at a Marine base in Virginia; Eileen Schmidt, a 47-year-old nurse from Iowa; and Ron Vance, 60, a Nevada insurance agent.

Click on the banners below to see their stories.

Anyone either hoping or fearing that the stumbles of Trump’s young administration have shaken the faith of his core backers will find little support here. There is certainly disappointment, especially around Trump’s inability to deliver on his signature promise to get rid of Obamacare, but in almost identical words they blame someone else for it, specifically congressional Republicans. (Cruz: “Why didn’t they have a plan?” Neal: “I don’t like that we still have rogue Republicans that are just not supporting.” Frisbie: “Why haven’t they been working for the last eight years planning on what they’d do if they got control again? They should have had a plan.”)

But among these confirmed Trump supporters, slashing environmental regulations in the name of bringing back the coal industry is popular, and his tough talk on immigration is just what they wanted to hear. (Frisbie: “When I think of sanctuary cities, I think they need to cut them off at the knees.” Schmidt: “This is about keeping us safe, and I support that.”)

Schmidt, whose young son was wearing a button saying “Bomb the s*** out of ISIS” when she was interviewed last year, was equally enthusiastic about Trump’s bellicose stance against terrorism, citing the use of the 10-ton MOAB bomb against an ISIS complex in Afghanistan. (“Progress! This is a wake-up call to people that [Trump] isn’t messing around, that he is moving forward and he’s doing what he can to keep America safe.”) But that was one of the few actions that engendered some unease. Vance wasn’t pleased to see so many former generals in Trump’s cabinet. (“The military always thinks there’s a military solution to these problems. … I don’t want to see us going down a rabbit hole, dropping big MOAB bombs every week over in Afghanistan.”) And Frisbie, while supporting Trump’s missile attack on Syria as a way for America to show it means business in that part of the world, worried about getting embroiled in another endless Mideast war — at least insofar as it might affect her grandson, who is interested in applying to become a Navy SEAL.

Among the subjects that did not come up in the interviews: Russia, the Trump family and business dealings, golfing, Dodd-Frank, the 3 million illegal votes that Trump claimed were cast for his opponent. But everyone we spoke to had an opinion on Trump’s tweets, even if it was hard to decipher or based on suspect premises, such as Cruz’s assessment that since becoming president Trump has “toned down quite a bit” in his use of Twitter to insult and bait his opponents. The other four were split 2-2 on their feelings about the presidential tweets. Readers can go to the interviews and see for themselves.

Read more from Yahoo News’ coverage of Trump’s first 100 days:

  Donald Trump’s Russian riddle

The contrarians: They didn’t vote for Trump, but they would now

Trump foreign policy at 100 days: The downside of unpredictability

Twitter, Mar-a-Lago and Obama bashing: The 45th president’s 100 days of norm-busting

Photos: From inauguration to 100th day: President Trump’s rocky ride in pictures

[jerryadler-blog]

‘The least of these’: Meals on Wheels, the Trump budget and the struggle over Matthew 25:40

  A fresco of St. Matthew the Evangelist by artist Josef Kastner. (Photo: Getty Images)

It’s one of the best-known passages in the New Testament, even — or especially — among people who don’t usually read the Bible. And by last week, the conservative commentator and radio host Erick Erickson was getting tired of having it quoted to him: Matthew 25:40 (“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’), an evocative and stirring call to charity and compassion.

The sainted Mother Teresa herself was fond of quoting the verse to explain why she devoted her life to serving the poor. Even before the inauguration, a progressive faith group was promoting what it called the Matthew 25 Movement, seeking online signers to a pledge “to protect and defend vulnerable people in the name of Jesus.” In early March, when House Speaker Paul Ryan described the repeal of Obamacare as “an act of mercy,” Rep. Joseph Kennedy III, D-Mass., retorted that Matthew “reminds us that we are judged not by how we treat the powerful, but by how we care for the least among us.”

Throughout American history, momentous events (the Civil War, the civil rights movement) have had Biblical passages associated with them. The leading candidate for the Trump era so far seems to be the one whose alleged misinterpretation irked Erickson, the former editor in chief of RedState who now runs another conservative news site, The Resurgent.

And so when Erickson defended President Trump’s draft budget, specifically including cuts to programs that fund Meals on Wheels, Twitterdom responded with a deluge of tweets on the theme of his heartlessness in general and ignorance of Scripture specifically. Erickson responded by denouncing what he regarded as the secular-humanist tendency to quote Scripture only when it suits a progressive agenda (“If you don’t support Meals on Wheels, you’re not a good Christian, according to people who aren’t Christians and don’t believe in Jesus.”), and then delving into textual analysis, tweeting, “In Matt 25, when Jesus talks about caring for ‘the least of these,’ he isn’t talking about the poor in general, but fellow Christians.”

That touched off another wave of denunciations.

Matthew Dowd, the ABC analyst who was the chief political consultant for the 2004 Bush campaign, tweeted: “Please stop. You embarrass all of us who call ourselves Christians” (or, presumably, Matthews.)

In fact, I tweeted something mildly sarcastic myself.

Only afterward did I stop and ask myself: How did I know Erickson was wrong?

Matthew 25:40, it turns out, is a famously difficult and controversial passage, the subject of at least one book, numerous articles and contentious disagreements among biblical scholars. According to biblical scholar Diana Butler Bass, the “inclusivist” interpretation — that Jesus was referring to the poor and outcasts — was favored in the Eastern Catholic tradition and began gaining ground in the West with the ascendance of humanist beliefs and the rise of the Social Gospel in the 19th century.

But in an email exchange with me, Erickson referenced an older “exclusivist” tradition in Western Christianity:

“The prevailing wisdom in the early, renaissance, and reformation church era from Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant writers was that the ‘least of these’ refers to Christians, particularly ministers and those sharing the gospel.”

Erickson cited an influential 2015 blog post by Denny Burk, a professor of biblical studies at Boyce College. Burk’s article was prompted by a “Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty” at Georgetown University, at which, he wrote, “I think every speaker on the panel — including President Obama — used the phrase ‘least of these’ to refer to our fellow citizens who live in poverty and who need help.”

Burk thinks that’s a misreading of the passage. As with any difficult biblical verse, you have to read it in context, he wrote. “In Matthew 18, Jesus refers to his disciples three times as “little ones” (vv. 6, 10, 14) with a term closely related to “the least of these” in Matthew 25:40, 46. So when Jesus talks about feeding, clothing, and caring for the “least of these” in Matthew 25:40, he’s talking about his disciples.”

And then Burk put it in a contemporary context: “This text is not about poor people generally. It’s about Christians getting the door slammed in their face while sharing the gospel with a neighbor. It’s about the baker/florist/photographer who is being mistreated for bearing faithful witness to Christ. It’s about disciples of Jesus having their heads cut off by Islamic radicals. In other words, it’s about any disciple of Jesus who was ever mistreated in the name of Jesus.”

Erick Erickson and Jeannine Brown, PhD. (Photos: Courtesy of WSB Radio and Jeannine Brown)

Leaving aside Burk’s contentious views on the rights and obligations of a Christian wedding photographer, his broader point is a perfectly respectable — probably even majority — view among biblical scholars. But it is by no means universal. Jeannine Brown, a professor at Bethel Seminary in San Diego and a leading Matthew scholar, responded to Burk with an article titled “Where did the poor go?” In Brown’s view, the proper context for Matthew 25:40 is the surrounding passage, 25:31-46, which begins with Christ on his throne, dividing people into categories of the just and the unjust “as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”

Why — to paraphrase Brown’s argument — should the righteous need to be reminded of what they did for the Lord? If they had given shelter or food to a disciple of Jesus — the people Burk and Erickson think the passage is about — that should stick in their minds, and their heavenly reward shouldn’t require an explanation. “It is this element of surprise that confounds a straightforward reading of ‘the least’ as Christian poor,” she writes. “The element of surprise makes most sense if those who received aid were not transparently believers in Jesus.”

In an interview, she adds: “The surprise helps keep us a little on our toes, and not so sure that we have it exactly right. … The point of the parable is we should be where Jesus is — in poor communities, in prisons. We’re supposed to be where Jesus is in these really surprising places.”

What is striking about this intense and passionate debate is that no one is disputing the larger point of Christ’s compassion for the poor, which is found throughout the New Testament. As Erickson told me in an email:

“I made clear in both prior and subsequent tweets that the Bible does require Christians to care for the widows, orphans, poor, and refugees (one reason I oppose the President’s immigration stance), but Matthew 25 does not.

“Using Matthew 25 is a case of using the wrong text to defend the right doctrine.”

Of course, Erickson is no liberal, and his view of caring for widows and the poor does not require paying taxes for it. He told me: “There is no dispute on helping the poor. The Bible commands it, but does not lay out how or if government programs are required. It is clearly a personal obligation of believers and the church community.”

But even with all good Christians on the same side of the larger question, what Brown calls “the tug of war” over Matthew 25:40 continues to play out. “The text is such a lightning rod, it’s such a powerful phrase. There’s a tug of war over this text, who gets to own it,” she says. Its power is what drew Mother Teresa, and countless missionaries throughout the centuries who devoted themselves to caring for the bodies as well as the souls of the “least among us.” Perhaps Trump, who has called the Bible his “favorite book,” could find inspiration in it as well.

Read more from Yahoo News:

Democratic Sen. Manchin cautions against Gorsuch filibuster

GOP Sen. Roberts: I ‘deeply regret’ quip about insurance coverage for mammograms

Trump supporter: My husband is being deported

Photos: Remembering the victims of London’s terror attack

[jerryadler-blog]

Want more climate change, faster? The White House reportedly has a plan to help.

  Seven weeks into the Trump presidency, the coal industry and electric utilities are getting restless for their promised relief from the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which regulates carbon dioxide emissions. But they might not have to wait much longer, according to the authoritative energy news site E&E News, which is reporting that the administration is preparing to set the repeal in motion with an executive order as early as next week.

And there is no “… and replace” in the administration’s reported plans, which also include instructing the Justice Department to stop defending the rule in a case before a federal appeals court. The intention, according to E&E, is to rescind the controversial regulation and replace it with… nothing.

That approach is consistent with Trump’s promises during the campaign to revive the coal industry, and with EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s insistence that the science linking global warming to emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is uncertain. Pruitt said as much in his confirmation hearing, in a testy exchange with Sen. Bernie Sanders, and again Thursday morning on CNBC, where he cited “tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact” from human activity.

As Sanders pointed out, the “disagreement” on this question, as measured by peer-reviewed scientific publications, is actually a 97% consensus in favor of the view that global warming is a human artifact. Each of the last three years has been, successively, the warmest on record.

A January report by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded, “The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 2.0 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.”

Trump himself has not been especially worried about global temperature rises throughout the years. Before he became president, he frequently called for additional warming.

“It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal. Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!” he tweeted in October of 2015.

The year before, Trump quipped: “It’s late in July and it is really cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING??? We need some fast!”

[jerryadler-blog]

The cyberwar that never happened: How Obama backed down from a counterstrike against Russia

Photo-illustration: Yahoo News

In the summer of 2016, as evidence mounted of Russian meddling in the U.S. election, a team in the White House began work on a far-reaching counterstrike against Russian media, the Kremlin oligarchy, and Putin personally — plans that were shelved when President Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, ordered the staffers to “stand down.”

The details of the project, and the debate within the administration of how aggressively to confront Moscow, are told in a new book, “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump,” by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones.

Excerpts from the book are being published this week by Yahoo News and Mother Jones. The book goes on sale Tuesday, March 13.

The counteroffensive was the brainchild of Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, and Celeste Wallander, the chief Russia expert in the National Security Council. One proposal was to unleash the NSA to mount its own series of far-reaching cyberattacks: to dismantle the Russian-created websites, Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks, that had been leaking the emails and memos stolen from Democratic targets; to bombard Russian news sites with a wave of automated traffic in a denial-of-service attack that would shut them down; and to launch an attack on the Russian intelligence agencies themselves, seeking to disrupt their command and control nodes.

“I wanted to send a signal that we would not tolerate disruptions to our electoral process,” Daniel told Isikoff and Corn. “The Russians are going to push as hard as they can until we start pushing back.”

Wallander proposed leaking snippets of classified intelligence to reveal the secret bank accounts in Latvia held for Putin’s daughters — a direct slap at the Russian president that would be sure to infuriate him. Working with Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, Wallander drafted other proposals: to dump dirt on Russian websites about Putin’s money, about the girlfriends of top Russian officials, about corruption in Putin’s United Russia Party. The idea was to give Putin a taste of his own medicine. “We wanted to raise the cost in a manner Putin recognized,” Nuland says.

But the “signal” Daniel had intended was never sent; the plans were scrapped by Rice and Lisa Monaco, the president’s homeland security adviser, who worried that if news of the project leaked it would “box the president in” and create pressure for him to act. One day in late August, according to Isikoff and Corn, Rice called Daniel into her office and ordered him to “stand down” and “knock it off.” The White House was not prepared to endorse any of these ideas. “Don’t get ahead of us,” Rice warned.

Daniel walked back to his office. “That was one pissed-off national security adviser,” he told one of his aides.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, CIA director John Brennan, President Barack Obama and national security adviser Susan Rice. (Photo-illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP (7), Getty Images)

At his morning staff meeting, Daniel matter-of-factly told his team to stop work on options to counter the Russian attack: “We’ve been told to stand down.” Daniel Prieto, one of Daniel’s top deputies, recalled being incredulous at the decision. As Prieto saw it, the president and his top aides didn’t get the stakes. “There was a disconnect between the urgency felt at the staff level” and the views of the president and his senior aides, Prieto later said. When senior officials argued that the issue could be revisited after Election Day, Daniel and his staff took strong exception. “No — the longer you wait, it diminishes your effectiveness. If you’re in a street fight, you have to hit back,” Prieto remarked.

The series of decisions — and nondecisions — made by Obama and his top aides in response to the Russian attack have been the subject of intense debate ever since. In “Russian Roulette,” Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, defends the president’s handling of the issue, saying Obama was concerned that escalating the conflict with the Russians could feed Trump’s narrative that the election was rigged. “The first-order objective directed by President Obama,” McDonough recalled, “was to protect the integrity of election.” Obama wanted to make sure whatever action was taken would not lead to a political crisis at home — and with Trump the president feared the possibility for that was great.

After the stand-down order, according to Isikoff and Corn, Obama and his senior advisers decided on a different approach — one that would frustrate the NSC hawks, who believed the president’s team was tying itself in knots and looking for reasons not to act. Rather than striking back, the president would privately warn Putin and vow overwhelming retaliation for any further intervention in the election. Obama delivered the threat at a private meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit that September. The president later informed his aides he had delivered the message he and his advisers had crafted: We know what you’re doing. If you don’t cut it out, we will impose onerous and unprecedented penalties. One senior U.S. government official briefed on the meeting was told the president said to Putin in effect: “You f*** with us over the election and we’ll crash your economy.”

White House officials believed for a while that Obama’s warning had some impact: They saw no further evidence of Russia cyberintrusions into state election systems. But as they would later acknowledge, they largely missed Russia’s information warfare campaign aimed at influencing the election — the inflammatory Facebook ads and Twitter bots created by an army of Russian trolls working for the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.

On Oct. 7, 2016, the Obama administration finally went public, releasing a statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security that called out the Russians for their efforts to “interfere with the U.S. election process,” saying that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” But for some in Hillary Clinton’s campaign and within the White House itself, it was too little, too late. Wallander, the NSC Russia specialist who had pushed for a more aggressive response, thought the Oct. 7 statement was largely irrelevant. “The Russians don’t care what we say,” she later noted. “They care what we do.” (The same day the statement came out, WikiLeaks began its month-long posting of tens of thousands of emails Russian hackers had stolen from John Podesta, the CEO of the Clinton campaign.)

Nearly two months after the election, Obama did impose sanctions on Moscow for its meddling in the election — shutting down two Russian facilities in the United States suspected of being used for intelligence operations and booting out 35 Russian diplomats and spies. The impact of these moves was questionable. Rice would come to believe it was reasonable to think that the administration should have gone further. As one senior official lamented, “Maybe we should have whacked them more.”

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:

Democrat reiterates doubts about Jared Kushner’s loyalty to the U.S.

A new generation of anti-gentrification radicals are on the march in Los Angeles — and around the country

In exile with Bill Kristol, the Republican resister-in-chief

Seven days in Trumpland: Confusion, scandals and indictments

Photos: Women march on International Women’s Day

[jerryadler-blog]

President Oprah? President Zuckerberg? The rich and famous seem to be asking: Why not me?

Once upon a time in America, being a rich celebrity was considered its own reward. A whole television franchise was devoted to their fabulous lifestyles, houses and airplanes. No one suspected that anything was lacking in the lives of tech billionaires, Hollywood moguls or famous talk-show hosts.

Then came Donald Trump, and suddenly the wealthiest .01 percent was confronted with a new standard of personal achievement to be measured against. Increasingly they are being asked, often but not exclusively by themselves: “Are you running for president?”

The latest household name to be mentioned in the same sentence as “2020” is the inescapable Oprah, who if elected would be the first woman president, the first one-name president, and in many ways the natural heir to President Trump: a household name steeped in tabloid culture, prone to eschewing fact-checking in the cause of a higher, or more marketable, truth. She could, for instance, expand Trump’s crackdown on crimes by undocumented aliens to include alien abductions.

To be fair, it’s not clear that Oprah is seriously, or even casually, considering running for president; the speculation stems from an interview with David Rubenstein on Bloomberg Television that was recorded in December but just aired Wednesday. Rubenstein asked: “Have you ever thought that given the popularity you have, we haven’t broken the glass ceiling yet for women, that you could actually run for president and be elected?” Oprah seemed nonplussed by the question, admitting that “I never considered the question, even the possibility… I just thought, I don’t have the experience, I don’t know enough… now I’m thinking: Oh!” — an answer that could be merely equivocal, or a subtle plug for O, the name of her magazine.

Disney’s Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger holds a news conference at Shanghai Disney Resort as part of the three-day Grand Opening events in Shanghai, China in 2016. (Photo: Aly Song/Reuters)

Another name from the media world getting some attention this week is Robert Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, whose “Hollywood friends” are said to be “nudging” him toward a race, according to the Hollywood Reporter. As recently as last June, the Los Angeles Times ran an article asserting that “Disney’s new theme park in Shanghai may be the capstone to CEO Robert Iger’s career.” But he may have his eye on scaling greater heights than Splash Mountain. Iger, according to the Hollywood Reporter, has consulted with publisher and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg (a billionaire who has flirted with a presidential run himself) about the practicalities of making the transition from media heavyweight to political novice. Although not as rich as Trump (or Oprah), Iger was paid a reported $44.9 million in 2015

Investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban arrives prior to the start of the third U.S. presidential debate at the Thomas & Mack Center on October 19, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

One billionaire known to be at least toying with the idea is Dallas Mavericks owner and “Shark Tank” host Mark Cuban, who has had a years-long off-and-on Twitter feud with Trump and, according to the New York Post, is the potential rival the president most fears. Undaunted by Trump’s taunts about his golf game, his looks, and his intelligence, Cuban gave a not-quite-Shermanesque reply (“we will see”) to a question from Business Insider about a possible future run. Trump beat two Cuban-Americans — Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz — in the Republican primary last year, but Mark Cuban, who was born in Pittsburgh, is actually Jewish. A recent poll showed him almost neck-and-neck with Trump, despite his relative obscurity. “I think Cuban is pretty competitive given his comparatively low level of name recognition at this point,” Tom Jensen, the director of Public Policy Polling, told the outlet.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz speaks at the coffee company’s annual shareholders meeting in Seattle in 2016. (Photo: Ted S. Warren/AP)

If none of those make a run, perhaps there’s an opening for Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks. Schultz raised the possibility of running for president — an idea that presumably came as a surprise to most Americans — while at the same time renouncing the ambition in a 2015 op-ed in the New York Times that didn’t exactly set a high bar for modesty: “Despite the encouragement of others, I have no intention of entering the presidential fray. I’m not done serving at Starbucks. Although we have built an iconic brand while providing even part-time employees with access to health care, free college education and stock options, there is more we can do as a public company to demonstrate responsible leadership.” Schultz is stepping down as CEO this spring, although remaining with the company as executive chairman. As the Times reported, “At an all-hands employee meeting at the company’s headquarters on Thursday, Mr. Schultz was greeted with tears and a standing ovation. ‘For me, perhaps there are other things that are part of my destiny,’ he told them.

If America is ready for a president in a hoodie, then Mark Zuckerberg may be ready to heed the call to serve, considering that he will turn 35 — the age requirement for president — a full year and a half before the 2020 elections. Zuckerberg, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of Facebook, is embarking on a 50-state “listening tour” this year, and authorized an SEC filing that would allow him to retain control of the company even if he were “serving in a government position or office.” And Zuckerberg, who was raised Jewish but long identified as an atheist, wrote on Facebook recently that “now I believe religion is very important.” (He didn’t specify which religion, but said he was celebrating Christmas with his family.)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at the F8 Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco in 2016. (Photo: Eric Risberg/AP)

The events have caught the eye of political professionals, including the sharp-eyed observers of The Hill: “Donald Trump’s victory changed the narrative in American politics,” said Texas-based Republican digital campaign strategist Vincent Harris. “We’ve seen a complete blending of entertainment and politics in America, and a potential Zuckerberg candidacy would play very well into what the public has come to desire.” Not only that, but he would have access — at least until he actually became an active candidate — to an incomparable trove of real-time information on what the public wants, thinks and talks about. And given Silicon Valley’s stake in immigration reform, which Zuckerberg helped formalize as a founder of the advocacy group FWD.us, his platform isn’t just about awkward encounters with college acquaintances anymore.

So did Trump’s unlikely success plant the seed of his own undoing, at the hands of an even more ambitious and famous, perhaps even richer, outsider candidate in 2020? The public will decide, but there’s an alternative view that the chaotic first few weeks of his presidency — if they set a pattern for the next four years — will make a strong case for a candidate whose resume includes more time in public office and less in front of a TV camera.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:

Trump’s address boasts of ‘new national pride’ sweeping nation

Bomb threats are scary and costly to Jewish centers

Rubio evicted from Senate office over noisy demonstrations

[jerryadler-blog]

Ballot access and voting rights at risk

A woman walks by banners of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump during an election watch event hosted by the U.S. Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, on Nov. 9, 2016. (Photo: Lee Jin-man/AP)

Donald Trump is in the White House, and Yahoo News is taking a look at the top stories to watch in his first 100 days. From the unusual role family members will play as White House advisers to his promises to aggressively transform U.S. trade policy, and from investigations into Russian interference in the election to his relationship with Paul Ryan, we’ll be rolling out 15 stories over five days — signposts for the road ahead.

_____

THE STAKES

President Trump’s universally debunked claim that the 2016 popular-vote tally included 3 million to 5 million illegal ballots, all for Hillary Clinton, continues to shadow last year’s election results. But the real issue going forward is ballot access, especially for minorities, in states where the protections of the Voting Rights Act have been lifted. Expect intense legislative and legal battles over “voter suppression” activities in swing states, especially in the South and Midwest.

_____

THE STORY

Long after the results of the 2016 election were in, Donald Trump continued to publicly seethe over losing the popular vote to Clinton by the not insubstantial margin of nearly 3 million. At a meeting with Congressional leaders, and on Twitter, he claimed that as many as 5 million ballots were cast by noncitizens, unregistered voters, people voting more than once, or “those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time).” He also claimed to know, somehow, that all of those votes went for Clinton.

When Democrats pointed out that Trump was alleging the most far-reaching criminal conspiracy in the history of American democracy, the White House said Trump would issue an executive order for a Justice Department investigation. The signing was announced for Jan. 26 but was canceled at the last minute, and as of a week later, had not been rescheduled.

Except for a handful of fringe conspiracy buffs, almost no one else believes anything like this occurred. It seems certain there are many, probably millions, of Americans still on the voting rolls after their deaths, or who are registered in two states after changing their residence — including, it turned out, at least five of Trump’s top aides and family members. But the number who actually voted illegally is vanishingly small in an electorate numbering well over 100 million. The big investigation Trump promised — if it ever actually takes place — may be no more productive than that of the investigators he once claimed to have sent to Hawaii to prove that President Barack Obama wasn’t born there.

The real news about last year’s vote was the ongoing tug-of-war over voter-identification laws between mostly Republican governors and legislatures, on the one hand, and voting-rights activists on the other. Toughening the requirements to register or to vote — for example, by requiring a driver’s license or equivalent form of photo identification — are described by one side as a necessary precaution against fraud, and by the other as a cynical maneuver to suppress turnout by minorities and the poor.

Notably, this was the first presidential election since the Supreme Court decision in 2013 that struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The section required nine states with a history of racial discrimination, mostly in the South, to get “preclearance” from the Justice Department for any changes in their voting laws or legislative district boundaries. Texas and North Carolina were among the previously covered states that moved aggressively to tighten voting requirements, but other states outside the South, such as Wisconsin, also followed suit. It is not clear how big a difference these laws actually made in the results, but statisticians will be poring over voting rolls and records to come up with estimates. Judges struck down some of these laws, but others survived, and appeals and further legal challenges will be playing out for months or years.

_____

THE PLAYERS

The next attorney general will presumably run the administration’s investigation into Trump’s allegations of vote fraud, and, more important, will be in charge of voting rights enforcement. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee, has a record that many civil rights activists find troubling. One thing to watch for will be his key appointments, including his choice to run the Civil Rights Division.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia formed part of the 5-4 majority in the Voting Rights Act case. The Supreme Court is unlikely to revisit the issue anytime soon, but if other voting rights cases come before it, Scalia’s replacement could swing the court either way. Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee, is regarded as a conservative who will emulate Scalia on most issues.

The source for Trump’s claim that more than 3 million illegal votes were cast appears to be a self-appointed watchdog named Gregg Phillips, who has been advocating for a crackdown on voting fraud for years. In an interview with Chris Cuomo of CNN, he said he would be able to prove his allegations, but that he needed “another few months” to prepare a report for the public.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:

Lady Liberty’s flame extinguished on New Yorker cover

Conservationists rally and kill bill to sell off federal land

Senators flooded with calls, letters ahead of DeVos vote

[jerryadler-blog]

Stories to watch: The war on regulations

President Trump has vowed to dismantle much of the federal regulatory state, which could include measures such as rules governing food safety. (Photo: Getty Images)

Donald Trump is in the White House, and Yahoo News is taking a look at the top stories to watch in his first 100 days. From the unusual role family members will play as White House advisers, to his promises to aggressively transform U.S. trade policy, and from investigations into Russian interference in the election to his relationship with Paul Ryan, we’ll be rolling out 15 stories over five days — signposts for the road ahead.

The stakes: During the campaign, Donald Trump made extravagant, if vague and sometimes contradictory, promises to dismantle much of the modern regulatory state, specifically targeting the Environmental Protection Administration and the Department of Education. Could this be the year it actually happens — and what would that mean for American society?

The story: Promises to roll back federal regulations and even eliminate entire agencies have been a staple of Republican rhetoric for decades. Rick Perry, Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of energy, ran in 2012 on a pledge to eliminate three Cabinet departments — including the one he has now been named to run.

Eliminating an entire Cabinet department almost never happens. The federal regulatory bureaucracy survived two terms of Ronald Reagan’s assaults largely intact, reflecting either its remarkable tenacity or the fact that while regulations are unpopular in the abstract, the public generally likes to have government protecting it from things like disintegrating tires and drugs that cause birth defects. A position paper that appeared on the Trump campaign website promising to relax federal food-safety regulations was quickly removed. Just as Republicans are discovering that repealing Obamacare may be more popular as a slogan than a policy, they may not want to campaign on a platform of letting kids eat undercooked hamburgers.

Government agencies, and their broad policy mandates, are established by law. Eliminating or changing them would require legislation, which Democrats could block in the Senate either with a filibuster or by peeling off some Republican votes. Agencies can modify or eliminate specific regulations on their own, but there’s a process for this that can run for months or years; that’s how they got on the books in the first place. During the campaign Trump pledged to get rid of “70 percent” of federal regulations, but he’d probably need to be in office for the rest of the century to achieve that. And his count presumably was inflated by his ignorance of how the government actually works; he and other candidates loudly promised to get rid of the unpopular Common Core education standards, ignoring the fact that the federal government doesn’t impose or enforce them.

There are some categories of regulations that seem particularly vulnerable, however, and worth watching in 2017. That includes those with a high symbolic value, such as gun-control measures. Trump has signed on to all of the National Rifle Association’s agenda, although he chose not to keep his promise to sign an order ending gun-free zones in schools “on his first day” in office.

Another category includes rules with a large economic impact concentrated on a powerful industry, especially where the regulations are complicated and hard for the public to understand. That’s a long way of saying “Dodd-Frank,” the banking-regulation bill that Trump has said he wants to repeal, a position many Republicans agree with. Dodd-Frank is likely to undergo some tinkering, if not outright repeal. How much ordinary Americans will notice or care in the short run is unclear — although they may take notice if and when there’s another banking crisis.

Also vulnerable are regulations on extracting, transporting and burning fossil fuels, where even minor changes could have a disproportionate impact on the profits of a handful of coal and oil companies and utilities. That they could also impede efforts to combat climate change is of concern only to those who believe that global warming is a problem, which seems not to include Trump or most of his Cabinet. Trump’s appointees could fulfill his campaign promise to revive the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Midwest, and, over time, open up more offshore areas for drilling, projects that, carbon emissions aside, almost inevitably will result, sooner or later, in major oil spills.

The players: The key figures in these battles will be second-tier Cabinet officials and sub-Cabinet officials. Precisely because some of these changes may be unpopular, they are likely to take place out of public view, leaving it up to the press and public-interest groups to keep the public informed.

Scott Pruitt: Named to head EPA. The attorney general of Oklahoma, he has been described as a climate-change denier and a frequent opponent of EPA in court over regulations affecting energy, water and air pollution.

Betsy DeVos: Trump’s nominee for education secretary. DeVos, a major Republican and right-wing donor from Michigan, is a strong supporter of opening public education to competition from private, religious and charter schools.

Richard Cordray: Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Appointed in 2012 by Barack Obama to run the agency charged with protecting customers in their dealings with banks, mortgage lenders and other financial institutions, he has been under criticism from Republicans for being too tough on business. At least two Republican senators have called on Trump to remove him, although it’s not clear he has that authority.

Tom Price: Nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Price, a surgeon and Republican congressman from Georgia, will be in the spotlight over the administration’s plans for repealing Obamacare. But he also belongs to a physicians’ group that has opposed virtually every federal health care initiative and raised questions about the safety of childhood vaccines.

[jerryadler-blog]

Neil Gorsuch on the future of assisted suicide

Within hours of Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, a statement calling him a “threat to patient-centered health care for millions of Americans” went up on the website of Compassion & Choices, an advocacy group “working to improve care and expand options for the end of life.”

The “options” it wants to expand are for terminally ill patients to obtain a lethal dose of barbiturates to take if and when they decide to die. This is an issue on which Gorsuch is an expert, as the author of a book on the subject, an essay on constitutional law and moral philosophy titled “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia.” To save time for the senators who will have to vote on his confirmation: He doesn’t care for the idea.

The issue may not have a lot of current salience at the Supreme Court; a 2006 ruling basically said the states can decide this question for itself, upholding Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law on physician-assisted dying. Five other states — Washington, Montana, Vermont, California and Colorado — have passed similar laws, and there are bills pending in at least 16 others. In Vermont, a suit seeks a religious exemption for doctors from the requirement to inform terminally ill patients of their “end-of-life options.” Compassion & Choices is opposing the suit, although it is undoubtedly a long way from reaching the Supreme Court.

But C&C’s director of legal advocacy, Kevin Diaz, is already worried. Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion in the 2013 Hobby Lobby case, holding that businesses could refuse on religious grounds to refuse to pay for contraceptive care for their employees. “A judge who is willing to allow others, including corporations, to impose their religious beliefs on individuals making personal health care decisions at the end of life would be a dangerous addition to the nation’s highest court,” Diaz says.

  “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia” by Neil M. Gorsuch. (Amazon.com-Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The crux of Gorsuch’s argument, which he pursues through thousands of years of Western philosophy and centuries of American jurisprudence, is summed up pithily in his first chapter: the idea “that all human beings are intrinsically valuable and the intentional taking of life by private persons is always wrong.”

The phrase about “private persons” is crucial; it allows him to pursue his argument without grappling with the morality of the death penalty — or, for that matter, war. So is the word “intentional;” he allows that a doctor or family member may honor a terminally ill patient’s wishes to stop receiving treatment, as long as the intent was to stop suffering, and not to hasten death — even if death was the certain result. (In an aside that should reassure the National Rifle Association, he uses a similar line of reasoning to argue that “the gun shop owner who sells a gun is likewise absolved from being his brother’s keeper.”)

In fact, there’s more agreement here than perhaps meets the eye. Gorsuch’s title refers to “assisted suicide and euthanasia,” but those are mostly straw men in the context of the debate, at least in the United States. (European countries such as Holland and Belgium see things a little differently.) Euthanasia — killing someone without his or her conscious request and assent — is widely regarded as immoral and is illegal almost everywhere. Nor do states as a rule permit “assisted suicide” for people who just want to end their suffering, mental or physical.

Compassion & Choices is fighting for what it calls “medical aid in dying,” which means the provision of lethal drugs to people who are, in fact, dying, typically with a life expectancy of six months or less. Many — a third to a half, by some estimates — never even take the pills. Just having the pills in their possession provides comfort.

Gorsuch’s position here might seem like boilerplate conservative thinking; certainly it would resonate with the religious right, although Gorsuch himself is a mainstream Protestant Episcopalian. And his argument is directed, in part, against another well-known conservative judge who has appeared on many shortlists of potential Supreme Court nominations, Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit. Posner, whose political views tend toward the libertarian, has argued in favor of permitting some form of assisted suicide. But he has also, uncharacteristically for a judge originally appointed by President Ronald Reagan, upheld in some recent rulings a right to abortion.

Is there a correspondence between how a justice might view “medical aid in dying” and abortion? Last fall, in assessing President-elect Trump’s list of possible Supreme Court nominees, National Review approvingly quoted a blurb for Gorsuch’s book that said it “builds a nuanced, novel, and powerful moral and legal argument against legalization [of assisted suicide and euthanasia], one based on a principle that, surprisingly, has largely been overlooked in the debate — the idea that human life is intrinsically valuable and that intentional killing is always wrong.”

“Gee,” the magazine went on to speculate, “might that principle have any application to abortion?”

[jerryadler-blog]

Trump's Supreme Court pick, and his (in)famous mother

Anne Gorsuch in 1984. (Photo: Ed Maker/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

Neil Gorsuch, nominated by President Trump to the Supreme Court, bears a name many Republicans would just as soon forget: that of his late mother, Anne Gorsuch, a controversial administrator of the Environmental Protection Administation under President Ronald Reagan and the first Cabinet-level official to be cited for contempt of Congress.

Anne Gorsuch, who died in 2004, was a little-known Colorado state legislator when she was tapped by Reagan in 1981 to head the EPA. Together with her fellow Westerner, James Watt — Reagan’s pick for secretary of Interior — she personified the “Sagebrush Rebellion” of the 1970s and 1980s, an attempt by ranchers, farmers, miners and oil interests to overturn federal land-use and environmental regulations.

She did her part, cutting her agency’s budget by 22 percent, curtailing research and enforcement activities and scaling back regulations on air and water pollution. (Carbon dioxide and climate change, the most contentious issues facing EPA today, weren’t on anyone’s agenda yet.) She even attempted to relax limits, imposed in the 1970s, on lead additives to gasoline, regulations that are credited now with preventing the poisoning of large numbers of children. A New York Times editorial in 1983 said she had taken one of the most effective government agencies and left it  “reeking of cynicism, mismanagement and decay.”

She lasted less than two years in the job, brought down by a series of congressional investigations — the House was controlled by Democrats then — into her management of the Superfund program to clean up toxic-waste sites. She refused to comply with subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege — and evidence suggested that key documents had been shredded — and in the ensuing showdown was cited for contempt of Congress. Months later she resigned, thrown under the bus, she contended, by an administration that lacked the spine to defend her.

In her 1986 book, “Are You Tough Enough?” Ms. Burford called the episode her “expensive mid-life education.”

[jerryadler-blog]

Clinton, Trump, and the downside of 'loyalty'

Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, August 2016. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

As Hillary Clinton left the Capitol after Friday’s inauguration, she was accompanied by a familiar figure, her longtime aide and confidante and vice-chair of her presidential campaign, Huma Abedin. The campaign, and almost certainly Clinton’s political career, had ended months earlier, but it was not surprising to see Abedin, who has worked for the former First Lady since joining her White House staff as a 19-year-old college intern, still at her side. Whatever you think of the competence of Clinton’s staff, there is no questioning the loyalty of the men and (mostly) women in her inner circle. They will be with her, to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, until the last dog dies.

And it has been an article of faith in political circles that this loyalty is one of the great strengths of the Clinton political operation. Surrounding yourself with battle-tested confidantes minimizes the risk of self-serving leaks or staff infighting spilling into the media, which can derail a political operation. Indeed, just two days later, the world got a glimpse of the opposite, in the form of a Washington Post account of a “visibly enraged” President Trump demanding, over the reservations of his staff, that his spokesman, Sean Spicer, push a demonstrably false assertion about the size of his inaugural crowds. The article, based on “interviews with nearly a dozen senior White House officials and other Trump advisers and confidants,” also gave a vivid description of infighting in the Trump White House, including son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “efforts to elbow aside anyone he perceives as a possible threat to his role as Trump’s chief consigliere.”

That was par for the course for the Trump campaign, transition and administration so far. Trump went through three campaign managers in 2016, and a rumored romance between two key staffers erupted into a messy public scandal during the transition. His combative aide Kellyanne Conway mounted a public Twitter campaign to derail Mitt Romney’s possible nomination as secretary of state. Never having held public office, Trump doesn’t have a cadre of longtime aides to draw upon, so his inner circle is heavy on family members, including Kushner, and veterans of his real-estate business. Many of his close aides—like Conway, who joined the campaign after working on behalf of Trump’s rival Ted Cruz through most of the primary– are relative newcomers, who make up in ferocity and sycophancy for their lack of deep personal connections to him. Many observers remarked that Spicer looked uncomfortable delivering his blustery pronouncement Saturday afternoon, forced to defend his boss’s obsessions to the detriment of his own professional reputation with the media.

It is hard to imagine that happening in a Hillary Clinton administration. Not because there was no dissent among her advisers: As we now know thanks to the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, Clinton’s staffers argued heatedly among themselves about campaign tactics and questioned Clinton’s judgment and her reluctance to apologize for mistakes. To what extent these disagreements reached Clinton’s ears, we don’t know, but thanks to the loyalty of her people, almost none of it was made public at the time. Conducting internal arguments through leaks to the media is almost always disruptive and demoralizing to a well-run campaign. On the other hand, it’s possible that reading about it in the Times or the Washington Post might have brought home the magnitude of the problem to Clinton herself, and moved her to fix it. That, indeed, is one reason staffers sometimes resort to a quiet meeting over drinks with a reporter in just these situations.

Unlike many politicians, for whom loyalty is a one-way street, Clinton is loyal in return. And one of the lessons of her catastrophic defeat is the potential downside of loyalty. Clinton stuck by her husband through years of humiliating sexual scandals, and is sticking by him still, although a case could be made that his decision to stroll across the Phoenix airport for a chat with Attorney General Loretta Lynch effectively cost his wife the election, not only by reinforcing the public perception of the Clintons as inveterate string-pullers and corner-cutters, but by setting in motion the chain of events that led to FBI Director James Comey’s intervention in the campaign.

And Clinton stuck by Abedin through the series of scandals touched off by her husband’s habit of sending sexually suggestive pictures to strange women. In retrospect it was all too predictable that this association would blow up eventually, as it did when the FBI examined a laptop used by both Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner, and discovered a trove of emails to and from Clinton. If anyone on her campaign staff foresaw the potential for this kind of disaster, they evidently didn’t bring it up to Clinton, or if they did, she didn’t act on it. Cutting ties with Abedin in the midst of that ghastly embarrassment would have been emotionally wrenching for Clinton, who has described Abedin as like a second daughter. It would have been cruel to Abedin, and it would have been, above all, disloyal. But it might have saved the election.

Clinton’s insistence on loyalty and discretion was shaped, no doubt, by her early experience in politics, in the 1970s and 80s, when she was a lightning rod for her husband’s opponents, frequently on the defensive about imaginary scandals and invented conspiracy theories. The lessons of those years is that you minimize trouble by surrounding yourself with people who know how to keep their mouths shut. But that’s not how the world works now. You can build a wall around your headquarters, and hackers will penetrate it with ease; you can pen journalists inside a rope corral, but anyone with a smartphone can Tweet a photo out to the world in seconds. You can’t control the news cycle any longer, so your best hope is to use all the tools of social and electronic media in a 24-hour race to get ahead of it. For all their vaunted expertise, the Clinton campaign never seemed to grasp that. And for all its internal chaos, the Trump team—or Trump himself—evidently did.

[jerryadler-blog]

White House falsely claims recent 'dramatic expansion of the federal workforce'

White House spokesman Sean Spicer. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer was only a few minutes into his press conference Monday afternoon before he made a statement that on its face appears unsupported by the facts.

Listing three executive orders signed by President Trump on Monday morning, Spicer said the president “issued a memorandum outlining executive branch hiring … that counters the dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years … in particular it prevents filling vacant positions and creating new positions except where necessary to meet national or public security responsibilities.”

The order, he said, does not apply to military personnel and “ensures that the American taxpayer gets effective and efficient government.”

It is an article of Republican faith since the New Deal that Democrats have expanded the federal workforce, but statistics do not bear this out, at least in recent years. According to this chart from the Office of Personnel Management, federal civilian employment was 2.094 million in 2009, President Obama’s first year in office, and 2.079 million in 2014, the most recent year reported. Excluding the Department of Defense, the work force remained almost exactly steady at 1.357 million.

Spicer is under fire after he denounced the press last Saturday for tweets that supposedly downplayed the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd size. While attacking reporters, Spicer offered a number of false statements, including that Trump had the largest in-person crowd size in history.

Spicer says there's been a "dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years." This is unequivocally false. pic.twitter.com/Gu8P2z9FZu

— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) January 23, 2017

[jerryadler-blog]

Obama exits, taking his dignity with him

Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Historians will one day pass judgment on the Obama administration, and those who lived through it can only guess at how his legacy will be viewed. But as the tributes to the outgoing president have accumulated, one word stands out as a symbol for everything he has represented and embodied. The word is “dignity.”

Times columnist Timothy Egan expressed this theme last summer, writing: “No matter what you think of Obama the executive branch, it’s hard to argue that Obama the human being has been anything less than a model of class and dignity.” Egan actually was wrong; however obvious Obama’s class and dignity were to most Americans, it was a common trope on the far right to mock the first African-American president and his wife by comparing them to animals. But as he prepared to leave office, even political adversaries such as Sen. Tom Cotton, D-Ark., paid tribute to Obama’s “quiet dignity.” Shepard Fairey, creator of the iconic “Hope” image, which encapsulated the spirit of Obama’s first election, chose “Defend Dignity” as one of the slogans for his series of 2016 inauguration posters.

In part, of course, praising Obama’s “dignity” is a way of calling attention to the qualities that set him apart from his successor, who has famously boasted about his sexual conquests and who delights in insulting his opponents with mocking Twitter posts. One could no more imagine Obama doing any of those things than, say, wrestling WWE impresario Vince McMahon as a promotional stunt.

But the word also conveys something essential about the man: his impeccable personal life and financial probity, his fierce loyalty to his family, an uncanny inner serenity that allows him to rise above insults even when few would have faulted him for an outburst of anger. When a Republican congressman interrupted him by shouting “You lie!” during his 2009 address to Congress, Obama responded mildly, “That’s not true,” and went on with his speech. His commitment to civil discourse, his deference to the traditions and forms of democracy, have few parallels in recent history.

“He is the slowest person to anger; the least vindictive I’ve ever known, inside politics or out,” wrote Obama’s longtime confidant and aide David Axelrod in an email to Yahoo News Deputy Editor Dan Klaidman. “I don’t remember him saying much after Joe Wilson shouted ‘you lie.’ He even greeted the birther stuff more with incredulity than anger because he viewed it as absurd. … And attacks on Michelle always raised his ire.”

Axelrod acknowledged “moments when he got angry, like when Congress balked on gun legislation after New Town. [Senate Republican leader Mitch] McConnell’s cynical and implacable opposition angered him because it was an impediment to progress.

“But when Joe Biden got out ahead of him on gay marriage, there were folks in the White House who were really irritated, but Obama wasn’t one of them.He told me he couldn’t ‘get angry at Joe for being big-hearted.’

“Obama just has this incredible equanimity that was essential, given the challenges and provocations he faced. The tougher the moment, the calmer and more focused he was. And that evenness served the whole operation well.

He has a great sense of history and [of] the fact that the presidency is a trust, and democracy a commitment, that [have] to be constantly tended.

“And I think he’s always felt a special responsibility, because of his own place in history, to conduct himself with dignity and integrity.”

Obama’s “place in history,” of course, was as the first African-American president. The dignity and restraint that came naturally to him were also prerequisites for his success on the national political stage; for the epithet “angry black man” to be attached to him would have been fatal to his reputation and career.

It was a lesson brought home to him in his first year in the White House when his friend Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested after a confrontation with a Cambridge, Mass., police sergeant. (Gates had been accidentally locked out of his own home and was attempting to force open the door; a neighbor, suspecting a burglary, called the police.) Obama’s offhand remark that the police “acted stupidly” touched off a racially charged uproar that he had to quell by inviting Gates and the officer to the White House for a meeting that has gone down in history as the “beer summit.”

It’s worth noting that personal dignity wasn’t always, even in recent history, a necessary quality for a president. Lyndon Johnson, as chroniclers have determined, was a compulsive womanizer and sexual braggart who famously showed off to the public a surgical scar on his abdomen. The sainted Harry Truman wrote from the White House to threaten — perhaps not entirely seriously — a punch in the nose to a music critic who had panned Truman’s daughter Margaret’s singing. But they were white.

And, of course, as admirable a man as Obama has shown himself to be, dignity can be an equivocal virtue in a president, especially in highly partisan times. An essay in Slate by Michelle Goldberg criticized Obama for remaining above the fray in relation to Russian meddling in the election: “He has his dignity and his faith in civic norms. Republicans have the government.” Goldberg argues that a more assertive approach to governance would have better served his party and the causes he believed in. The times, she believes, called for a different kind of president. And now the country is getting one.

Courtesy of the Amplifier Foundation

[jerryadler-blog]

Make America Rhyme Again

Madame Tussauds’ designers apply the final touches to the wax figure of President-elect Donald Trump, as they unveil the figure just days ahead of the American’s Presidential Inauguration in Washington in London, Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2017. The figure will now reside in Madame Tussauds’ London Oval Office alongside fellow famous politicians and global icons also immortalised in wax. (Photo: Frank Augstein/AP)

For a few hours this week, the internet was captivated by the thought that Donald Trump, whose triumphs are famously chronicled in books (his own), in art on television and Twitter, was about to conquer the last bastion of celebrity: poetry.

In ten stanzas that critics almost universally described as turgid beyond even the standards of the Congressional Record, a poem titled “Pibroch of the Domhnall” honored Trump’s maternal Scottish ancestry, paid tribute to “the flower of Europe, Melania the fair” and celebrated how “With purpose and strength he came down from his tower/ To snatch from a tyrant his ill-gotten power.”

Based apparently on a misunderstanding — that it had been commissioned by the transition team and would be read at the Inauguration — the poem, appearing on a little-known website and attributed to the hitherto unsung Joseph Charles MacKenzie, went viral for a few hours, until fact-checkers determined that it did not appear on the official inaugural program.

Nor did any other poem. In fact, the tradition of commissioning Inaugural poems is a fairly recent one, dating from Robert Frost’s reading at the 1961 swearing-in of John F. Kennedy, and has been observed only sporadically since.

But for those who feel that an event of such importance deserves a poetic tribute, Yahoo News presents an original work inspired by the occasion:

All hail the mighty Donald, presidential billionaire!

His glory lights the heavens like a giant solar flare!

More honest than Abe Lincoln, and smarter than Voltaire

He is the biggest TV star that ever went on air

Handsomer than JFK, tougher than a grizzly bear

More eloquent than Churchill, and also has more hair.

  His voice is like Bing Crosby’s and he golfs like Tiger Woods

And like Mahatma Gandhi he eschews all worldly goods.

More Jewish than a rabbi and more Catholic than the Pope

He reads the Bible daily and he lives by faith and hope

His face is turned to Heaven, like a giant cantaloupe.

  Ask not what your country can do for you, you snobs.

God created Donald Trump so he could make more jobs.

The only thing we have to fear is Mexico, and Trump

Will build a wall with his bare hands no Mexican can jump.

  And so with malice toward no one, except the Times and Post

And all the lying media that one day will be toast

And all the crooked pollsters that got themselves blindsided

When Donald Trump won so big-league, steamrollered and landslided

With hands outstretched in friendship, uniting this great nation

We ask you to contribute to the Donald Trump Foundation.

[jerryadler-blog]

The debate over jailing women for abortions

Rigorous intellectual consistency has not been a hallmark of Donald Trump’s career in public life, but on at least one notable occasion, he pursued an argument to its logical conclusion. Unsurprisingly, it turned out badly.

That was during the 2016 presidential campaign, when pressed by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to elaborate on his ardent, if comparatively recent, opposition to abortion, he agreed that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have one.

Instantly, the guardians of conservative orthodoxy descended to inform him of his error: Women are actually the “victims” of abortion, as well as a much more numerous voting bloc than abortion providers, who are the real villains. Within hours, his campaign had issued a recantation. But the idea lived on, and even seems to be gaining support in some quarters of the antiabortion movement.

In fact, the idea of prosecuting women for abortions has been kicking around on the fringes of the antiabortion movement for some time.  Back in 2014, conservative provocateur Kevin Williamson recommended (in a tweet and a podcast) execution, preferably by hanging, as the appropriate punishment. When those remarks surfaced last week, they cost Williamson, formerly with National Review, a plum job as a columnist for the Atlantic, whose editor found them “contrary to The Atlantic’s tradition of respectful, well-reasoned debate, and to the values of our workplace.”

Williamson’s fate fueled a spirited debate over the suppression of conservative views in the mainstream media that played out all up and down the Acela corridor. But meanwhile, far from the living rooms of Georgetown and Park Slope, an Idaho lawmaker and candidate for lieutenant governor, Republican Bob Nonini, endorsed legislation that would make abortion a capital crime, for both providers and the women who have the procedure. “There should be no abortion, and anyone who has an abortion should pay,” Nonini said at a candidate forum — before partially retracting, or at least obfuscating, his position, with the observation that “for practical reasons, as well as for reasons of compassion,” women as a rule haven’t been prosecuted, even in the years when abortion was illegal.

Idaho seems to be a hotbed of this kind of thinking; last year, another legislator, state Sen. Dan Foreman, introduced a bill to classify abortion as first-degree murder, on the part of both the woman and the provider. Foreman’s bill, which did not advance, made an exception to save the mother’s life, a compromise that some Republicans in the Ohio legislature obviously consider a sign of weakness: They are backing a bill to prosecute women who obtain an abortion even to save their own lives.

Politically, a platform of arresting women for homicide — there were around 20,000 abortions in Ohio in 2016 — could easily backfire on the GOP if executions were to start. As a legal strategy, it is part of the antiabortion movement’s broader effort to find a case that can give the Supreme Court an excuse to revisit, and hopefully overturn, its ruling in Roe v. Wade. But as a matter of principle, Williamson is far from alone in believing that women who seek an abortion are just as culpable as the physicians who perform the procedure. In fact, it is the only logical position to hold, in light of the movement’s endlessly repeated mantra that abortion is murder: Treat her as you would a woman who pays a hit man to kill her husband.

That was just the point Justice Blackmun made in his opinion in Roe, writing (in a footnote): “When Texas urges that a fetus is entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protection as a person, it faces a dilemma. … If the fetus is a person, why is the woman not a principal or an accomplice? Further, the penalty for criminal abortion … is significantly less than the maximum penalty for murder. If the fetus is a person, may the penalties be different?”

Maintaining that precise distinction has been the work of the mainstream antiabortion movement ever since. In response to Foreman’s bill, the Idaho chapter of Right to Life hurried to reassure the public that it “does not support any legislative action that would subject women to criminal penalties for an abortion.

“[W]e are convinced that abortion is most often a tragically desperate act,” the statement continued. “Available research indicates that coercion is often a factor in over 64% of the cases when women experience abortion. Despite rhetoric from advocates of abortion on demand, abortion is most often NOT freely chosen by women.”

Even taking this at face value, that leaves more than a third of women who did freely choose abortion. Should they get off scot-free? You could, if that’s your concern, pass a law making abortion a crime and specifically allow coercion as a defense. All in favor, say aye.

A different group, Abolish Abortion Idaho, which supported Foreman’s bill to criminalize abortion, has a more straightforward take on it: “[P]ro-life organizations like Right to Life of Idaho have never understood that they undermine their position by treating abortion as something less than what it is — murder. … The actual historical pro-life position, in contradiction to Right to Life of Idaho’s claim, is found in one of the oldest and most well supported documents on the planet, the Bible. In Genesis 9:6, we find this:

“‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.’”

Well, that’s clear enough. As Nonini, the Idaho candidate for lieutenant governor, claimed, “In the history of the United States, long before Roe was foisted upon this country, no woman has ever been prosecuted for undergoing abortion.” That happens not to be true: It has happened many times, as a rule when women attempt to self-induce abortions, typically because they can’t find or afford a clinic to perform the procedure. And it is happening right now in a number of other countries, including El Salvador, where a woman was recently freed from prison after serving nearly 11 years for an abortion. The judges decided that, as she’d said all along, she had actually suffered a miscarriage.

Luckily for her, she wasn’t hanged. But some people would like to see that changed.

_____

Read more from Yahoo News:

Ken Starr: Justice Department should evaluate claims by Stormy Daniels

Advocates fear ICE is targeting immigrants who speak out

Trump isn’t the first president to politicize the census

While others march, these teens shoot. At targets.

Photos: Chappaquiddick: A tragedy that changed the course of American history

[jerryadler-blog]

Elizabeth Warren, Cherokees and 'Pocahontas': Why it matters

Pocahontas, 1595-1617, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. (Photos: Getty Images, Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

By now, most Americans have heard that Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, scourge of Wall St. and liberal hero, falsely claimed to have French ancestry, leading President Trump to mock her as “Joan of Arc.”

Wait, that’s not right.

It was Native American ancestry, specifically Cherokee, that Warren claimed, and the nickname Trump bestowed on her, in a dozen tweets and numerous speeches, was “Pocahontas.”

In principle, the situations should be equivalent. But they’re not. Being mistaken about a French great-grandmother would barely rise to the level of a presidential tweet, even from Trump. But laying claim to Indian blood is taken very seriously in the United States, which tells us not much about Warren, but a great deal about how Native and non-Native Americans view their shared history, four centuries after their first fateful encounters.

Let’s leave aside Trump’s boorishness in bullying Warren over this obscure peccadillo, his utter lack of decorum and decency in bringing it up at a ceremony honoring Native American veterans, and even the fact that Trump himself claimed Swedish descent on his father’s side, when in fact his grandfather was German. If he wants to call her Pocahontas, she should be able to call him Olaf.

We can stipulate — as Warren herself admits, although without quite retracting the original claim — that there is no evidence to support it. Her ancestry has been researched thoroughly, including by Twila Barnes, a freelance genealogist specializing in the Cherokee tribe. Since Warren’s first Senate run in 2012, Barnes has been debunking her claims in dozens of blog posts under headlines like “Indian or Pretendian?” The usual media fact-checking websites have weighed in, and concluded that Warren’s claim appears based on little, or nothing, more than family legend.

Warren has rejected calls to submit to a DNA test that could, in theory, shed light on her lineage. “I know who I am,” Warren said recently in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That’s the story that my brothers and I all learned from our mom and our dad, from our grandparents, from all of our aunts and uncles. It’s a part of me, and nobody’s going to take that part of me away.”

In fact, DNA is a blunt tool to determine Indian descent, especially going back more than four or five generations, by which time the genetic signature may be undetectable. Moreover, Indian ancestry is meaningful mostly insofar as it ties one to a specific tribe, but DNA tests don’t (yet) distinguish among tribes. The leading commercial DNA services generally treat “Native American” as a unitary category covering the entire Western Hemisphere. Indian tribes set their own criteria for membership, typically requiring a documented paper trail. DNA tests don’t qualify.

Warren never sought membership in the Cherokee tribe. Why would she? Politically, there wouldn’t have been much to gain even if she were a full-blood Cherokee; there are only around 350,000 enrolled Cherokees in the world, and not many of them live in Massachusetts. (Shiva Ayyadurai, the Mumbai-born tech entrepreneur who boasts of having invented email when he was in high school, is running against Warren for the Senate as the “real Indian” in the race.) Trump accused Warren of inventing an Indian background to gain an edge in her career. It’s true that in the 1990s, when she taught at Harvard Law School, the university cited her as a Native American to demonstrate the diversity of its faculty. This is information, or misinformation, that could only have come from Warren herself, who also, beginning in 1986, listed herself as a minority in a directory of law-school professors. But she was a recognized authority in her field when Harvard recruited her, and her heritage “simply played no role in the appointments process,” according to Charles Fried, who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general and sat on the law school committee that selected her. “Let me be clear,” Warren said in a campaign ad during her first Senate run. “I never asked for, never got any benefit because of my heritage.”

By contrast, when Trump claimed Swedish ancestry he was perpetuating a lie invented by his father for a very specific purpose. Trump’s biographers claim that Fred Trump, a New York City real estate developer, sought to hide his German background during and after World War II so as not to complicate his business relationships, especially with Jews.

And contrary to what some people seem to believe, tribal citizenship is not a quick way to get rich. A few, mostly small, tribes distribute casino profits to their members in impressive amounts, but on the whole Indians are the poorest ethnic group in the country, according to the Native American Rights Fund. The Cherokee Nation, by far the largest of the three bands comprising the Cherokee tribe, has a territory that covers 14 counties in northeastern Oklahoma. (Warren was born in Oklahoma City, which is outside the territory.) The tribe provides certain housing, health and educational benefits to members within those 14 counties, but Warren would have had to move there to take advantage of them. For the majority of Cherokees who live elsewhere, says Barnes, “the benefit is the acknowledgment of your ancestry, the kinship, the link to your history, your ancestors’ sacrifice.”

Of course, those are the same motivations that drive people to research ancestors from anywhere, including those who never moved more than 20 miles from Ellis Island after getting off the boat. But you don’t often hear about people inventing, or imagining, or repeating false family legends about, say, Russian ancestry, except for those trying to get their hands on the Romanov family’s crown jewels.

It’s different with Indians. The No. 1 question among clients of AncestryDNA is “where is my Native American ancestry,” according to genealogist Crista Cowan, who guesses that if all the Americans who claim to have Indian forebears were right, they would make up half the population. She mentions some of the ways such legends get started, including ancestors who happened to look Indian, or who lived in what was called “Indian territory” before it became the State of Oklahoma. In Cowan’s own family, the myth began with a photograph of a long-ago aunt dressed like an Indian; on investigation, it turned out to have been taken at a novelty booth in a fair. Barnes notes that over the years there have been promises, or actual payments, to compensate Cherokees for the seizure of their lands. This created an obvious incentive to apply to join the tribe. “People see records of those applications, they say, oh, great-grandpa wouldn’t have lied. But maybe he did.”

And the legends persist, because almost every American, whether or not he saw “Dances With Wolves,” wants to feel a kinship with Indians. “One of the top five genealogical myths is ‘My great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess,’” Barnes says. “There is no such thing.” Being able to claim Indian blood is a way of being rooted in the very soil of America, the stuff that lies beneath the grass of Trump’s golf courses. “Let’s face it, being part Native American is cool,” “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah remarked last fall, apropos of the Pocahontas controversy —  “but just part, enough that you’re interesting at a party, not so much that they build a pipeline through your house.” In progressive circles, to claim Indian blood is a form of one-upmanship, a way to show you’ve pre-checked your white privilege. It inoculates you against the charge of being a colonizer. When Europeans are accused of stealing the Indians’ land, you can say, not me.

But, of course, Europeans did steal the Indians’ land, which may help explain why Cherokees like Barnes are so outraged by what otherwise might be excused as a harmless retelling of a family legend. (“Yep, I’m full-blooded Russian. Want to see my Cossack dance?”) It adds the insult of cultural theft to the injury of ethnic cleansing under the Indian Removal Act, which displaced Cherokees and other tribes from their homes in Georgia and Alabama on a journey remembered as the Trail of Tears.  Rebecca Nagle, a Cherokee writer and activist, wrote a harsh takedown of Warren recently that was especially notable for where it appeared, on the left-leaning website Think Progress. She wrote, imagining the apology she would like to see from Warren: “I am deeply sorry to the Native American people who have been greatly harmed by my misappropriation of Cherokee identity. … Native Nations are not relics of the past, but active, contemporary, and distinct political groups who are still fighting for recognition and sovereignty within the United States. Those of us who claim false Native identity undermine this fight.”

Warren has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2020, although she recently announced she was not running. If she did run, Cherokee voters might face a difficult choice between the woman Republicans have been calling “Fauxcahontas,” and Donald Trump, who has adopted as his role model Andrew Jackson — the president who signed the Indian Removal Act.

Read more from Yahoo News:

GOP lawmaker knocks Trump for Putin call but refuses to distance himself from president

What’s behind Trump’s charges about Andrew McCabe’s wife?

On gender, candidates in the Trump era negotiate a changed landscape

Why aren’t Western sanctions stopping Putin?

Photos: Scenes from ‘March for Our Lives’ rallies from around the world