While I have resigned myself to being treated to a blizzard of trivial issues during the Trump presidency that will sideline coverage of his actual actions, even I was surprised that the focus in his first weekend was on the absurd fuss over the sparse crowd at his inauguration compared to that of president Obama’s in 2009 and the Women’s March on Saturday.
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A federal judge has ruled that the US government must release photographs of the abuse that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that the Bush and Obama administrations have fought vigorously to suppress. The ACLU has been seeking the release of the photos under FOIA since 2004. While some of the infamous photos had leaked earlier, there are an estimated 2,000 still being kept under wraps. The US government had argued that their release would endanger its troops but the judge ruled that with only about 5,000 US troops still in Iraq and serving as advisors rather than in active combat, that danger had not been proven by the outgoing defense secretary.
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The current heating up of the rhetoric in US-Russia relations was triggered in the US by the events in the Ukraine that Cold War warriors in the US say is a sign that Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin are trying to expand the country’s borders and resurrect the Soviet empire, and it shows that they cannot be trusted.
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I didn’t watch the inauguration yesterday because displays of pomp and pageantry coupled with speechifying bores me to tears and having to listen to Donald Trump would just compound the irritation. So I was grateful to Stephen Colbert for providing the highlights.
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I was struck by the way the Washington establishment is responding to the way that Donald Trump is dismissing the leaks from the CIA that the Russian government has been manipulating US elections. Take these comments from Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Democratic party in the US senate.
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Followers of the NSA spying stories will remember Lavabit, the encrypted email service created by Ladar Levison. Its claim to fame is two-fold. One is that it was the service used by Edward Snowden. The other is that in 2013 Levinson chose to shut down the service entirely rather than hand over the encryption keys of the emails of his clients to the US government. I have written about this story before, as have many others.
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One of the biggest myths that has had a negative effect on American politics is that the US is a society with a lot of economic and social mobility and that simply by dint of hard work and other worthy qualities one can achieve success and become wealthy. It should not be surprising, then, that a full one-third of Americans think that they will be rich some day. More than half in the age group 18-29 think so, with the percentage declining with age as people begin to realize that time is running out on achieving that dream
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The Guardian has profiles of some new members of Congress, many who ran on progressive platforms and won. They also represent a diverse set of backgrounds. Let’s hope that they can influence the Democratic party away from its neoliberal policies and into a genuine alternative to the Republicans.
As president Obama’s term in office comes to an end, everyone seems to be evaluating his terms in office. We might as well start with the one issue that never goes away in America, and that is race. The president and his family carried the heavy burden of being ‘firsts’, people who are the first members of any community in a high office that they have not occupied before. Such people know that the members of their community are fervently hoping for just one thing: Don’t mess up. Because if they do mess up in any way, they know that those who oppose any advancement of their group will point to the failure as signs that they are incompetent and cannot be trusted with such responsibilities. Obama has undoubtedly passed that test, making it a little easier for the next person of color or another ‘first’, be it a woman or Latino or LGBT or atheist or member of some other group hitherto excluded, but they will still feel that pressure from their community.
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During the campaign we had numerous women alleging that Donald Trump assaulted them in many ways, charges that the Trump campaign furiously denied and for which many of the accusers were harassed by Trump supporters. But now one woman Summer Zeervos has said through her attorney Gloria Allred that she has filed a lawsuit against Trump for defamation because of the charges he made against her while denying her accusations.
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