What's going on with the Executive Departments

[fraurosena]

WUT of the day:

In his quest for the dumbest choices for his administration, he's now resorted to hiring his son Eric's wedding-planner. 

President Trump chooses inexperienced woman who planned his son Eric's wedding to run N.Y. federal housing programs

--- QUOTE ---

She’s arranged tournaments at Trump golf courses, served as the liaison to the Trump family during his presidential campaign, and even arranged Eric Trump’s wedding. Now President Trump has appointed longtime loyalist Lynne Patton — who has zero housing experience and claims a law degree the school says she never earned — to run the office that oversees federal housing programs in New York.

Patton was appointed Wednesday to head up the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Region II, which includes New York and New Jersey, where she’ll oversee distribution of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Patton’s tight relationship with the Trump clan dates back to 2009, when she began serving as the family’s “event planner.”

“Responsible for organizing, executing and assisting with upscale events and celebrity golf tournaments,” her LinkedIn profile says. “Handle celebrity talent acquisition for various marketing projects, philanthropic events and golf tournaments.”

From 2011 through January, she also helped run the Eric Trump Foundation, a charity that's now under investigation by state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

She also claims on her LinkedIn page to have obtained a juris doctorate degree in 2000 from Quinnipiac University School of Law in Connecticut. Next to the J.D. notation is written (N/A) without explanation. On Thursday school registrar Jim Benson said Patton attended for two semesters but did not graduate. She also listed Yale University but HUD officials couldn’t explain why that was there. Patton, who begins her Region II job July 5, did not return calls seeking comment.

As head of the biggest HUD regional office in the U.S., Patton will oversee distribution of billions in cash to public housing authorities — including NYCHA — as well as tens of thousands of rental vouchers and block grants that fund housing inspections and senior citizen programs.

[...]

Last month she paid a surprise visit to NYCHA but never actually entered a NYCHA apartment. During the May 5 visit, she asked to see a community center that had fallen into disrepair at the McKinley Houses in the Bronx. NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye said the agency staff who escorted Patton said she was “less interested in the actual infrastructure and more interested in an old clipping of the community center that was all glass and steel and now is struggling.”

“I think the reaction was surprise, maybe a little bit horrified,” Olatoye said.

[...]

--- end QUOTE ---

 

[Flossie]

Well, Ms. Patton has worked for the Trump family since 2009, first as an event planner.  Then, from 2011 to January she worked for the Eric Trump Foundation, which is being investigated for "misusing assets in ways that cause assets to be used for non-charitable purposes."  

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/06/09/new-york-attorney-general-looking-into-eric-trump-foundation/#7c0ff0941075  (Sorry, couldn't get the link feature to work.)

She's served as the liaison to the Trump family during Cheeto's presidential campaign.

She lies about her education and degrees.

And she's unqualified for the job she's taking on.

Ms. Patton is a perfect fit.

[CTRLZero]

Quote from the article @frauosena posted above:

Last month she paid a surprise visit to NYCHA but never actually entered a NYCHA apartment.

Between Ben Carson and Lynne Patton, my sympathies to HUD.  Trump just can't attract qualified people to his administration.  I wonder why...

[GreyhoundFan]

2 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

Quote from the article @frauosena posted above:

Last month she paid a surprise visit to NYCHA but never actually entered a NYCHA apartment.

Between Ben Carson and Lynne Patton, my sympathies to HUD.  Trump just can't attract qualified people to his administration.  I wonder why...

Exactly -- his administration is basically all billionaires and/or leghumpers. I wonder when Barron's nanny is going to be named to be Pruitt's deputy.

[GreyhoundFan]

I am leaning towards "all of them": "Name Your Pick for TrumpWorld’s Worst Cabinet Member"

Spoiler

Who do you think is Donald Trump’s worst cabinet member?

In a normal world we would never be asking this question because, of course, you would have no idea. In a normal world, an American who could come up with two cabinet names besides the secretary of state’s would be regarded as an unusually dedicated citizen.

But this year, every appointee is a potential star. For one thing, cabinet officials are particularly important in an administration in which nobody else — not the president, not the White House staff, not the kids — knows what they’re doing.

For another, they’ve been given an unprecedented number of early opportunities to make public spectacles of themselves. Trump held his first full cabinet meeting this week and the nation gaped as his team jumped into a cutthroat competition for the title of Top Toady. (“Mr. President, what an incredible honor it is to lead the Department of Health and Human Services at this pivotal time under your leadership. I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me and the leadership you’ve shown.”)

And every day there’s an attention-getting surprise. Under normal circumstances we do not talk a whole lot about, say, the secretary of housing and urban development. You would be forgiven for forgetting that this one is Ben Carson. Until you heard that the new head of the department’s massive New York-New Jersey office is going to be the woman who planned Eric Trump’s wedding.

So, got to say Ben’s a comer.

Still, everybody can’t be a Worst finalist. I’d cross off low-profile contenders like Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, even though Perdue sent out a press release promising to “Make School Meals Great Again,” and he seems to have some unusual nutrition preferences. (“I wouldn’t be as big as I am today without chocolate milk.”)

One definite possibility is Tom Price, secretary of health and human services — he of the “Mr. President, what an incredible honor …” quote. This is the guy who’s got a woman who doesn’t believe in contraception in charge of a government program on family planning.

Price also has a sleazy history of advocating legislation that could boost profits for health care companies whose stocks he was betting on. And I haven’t even mentioned that he’s supposed to be the administration’s titan of Trumpcare.

How about Betsy DeVos? The secretary of education showed promise from the moment she was named and delivered what Senator Al Franken called “perhaps the worst performance by any nominee in the history of nomination hearings.” This was the one where she appeared not to realize there are laws on the education of disabled students and floated the theory that schools might need guns to protect the kids from grizzlies.

DeVos has a weakness for any school that isn’t public. This week she froze Obama-era reforms aimed at protecting students who enroll in for-profit schools, an area in which her family happens to have significant investments.

Champions of other nominees for Worst Cabinet Member argue that DeVos is so out of her depth that she may not be able to accomplish much. You have to give extra attention to the people who actually appear capable of getting a load of terrible things done, like Scott Pruitt of the Environmental Protection Agency. “The problem is that Pruitt knows what he’s doing,” said Stephanie Schriock of Emily’s List.

Pruitt, of course, helped prod Donald Trump into dropping out of the Paris climate accord, although chances are the big guy didn’t need a whole lot of urging.

Norman Eisen, a longtime ethics expert and government watchdog, was tempted by DeVos and Price, but decided in the end that “the pick of the litter is [Budget Director Mick] Mulvaney by a nose.” You may remember that when Mulvaney introduced his first budget, observers discovered he had counted the same $2 trillion twice.

“So many choices,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. At first Ornstein refused to pick for Worst, arguing that the contest for most awful cabinet member should be treated like a kid’s athletic competition where everybody’s a winner. In the end, however, he went for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. (“Racist on voting rights and more, bringing back mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, promoting the cancer of private prisons.”)

Sessions, I have to say, was a super-popular choice among cabinet-watchers I talked with. “His views are just terrible and he runs into so much trouble,” one senator understated. This is, of course, the Jeff Sessions who once advocated capital punishment for marijuana dealers and who spent Tuesday at a Senate hearing in which he humiliated himself while attempting to protect a president who won’t even offer him a word of support.

In fact, Jeff Sessions would probably be Donald Trump’s least favorite cabinet member. Does that make you want to vote for him more or less? Tell me your top Worst, people.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh: "Education Dept. closes transgender student cases as it pushes to scale back civil rights investigations"

Spoiler

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights this week closed a long-running discrimination case involving a transgender student and withdrew its earlier findings that the girl had suffered discrimination at school, a move that comes amid the Trump administration’s push to scale back civil rights investigations in public schools.

The agency communicated its decision in a letter this week to lawyers representing the girl, an elementary-school student in Highland, Ohio. The letter provided no reason or legal justification for withdrawing its 2016 conclusion that the girl’s school wrongly barred her from the girls’ bathroom and failed to address the harassment she endured from classmates and teachers, who repeatedly called her by male pronouns and the male name she was given at birth.

Candice Jackson, acting head of the civil rights office, said the department closed the case because the student has filed a legal challenge against the school district, and the matter will be settled in court.

Officials withdrew the findings of discrimination, Jackson said, because those findings were based on guidance that directed schools to allow transgender students access to bathrooms matching their gender identity. The Trump administration rescinded that guidance in February.

Civil rights advocates see the closure of the Ohio case — and especially the unusual withdrawal of federal investigators’ legal conclusion — as a troubling sign of retreat from civil rights enforcement.

“This is so dangerous,” said Shannon Minter of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which is representing the Ohio transgender student, identified only as Jane Doe, in a lawsuit against the school district. “They have just sent a message to schools that it’s open season on transgender students.”

The agency also this month closed a different long-running case involving a transgender student’s complaint about locker room access in Palatine, Ill., according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the student in that case. Issues from that case are also now before the courts, and the student who brought the complaint has graduated.

ACLU’s John Knight said there are other transgender students in Palatine who are struggling to be treated fairly and could benefit from continued federal oversight.

Education Department cautioned against construing the closure of the cases as any statement about the Trump administration’s view of or approach to transgender students’ rights.

The previously unreported moves came just days after the Education Department issued an internal memo describing how to handle transgender students’ civil rights complaints given the rescission of the guidance on school bathrooms. Education officials said they wanted to emphasize that transgender students may still have valid discrimination complaints despite the rescission of that guidance.

The memo said officials should continue to investigate complaints about bullying and harassment. But it was vague about the polarizing issue of transgender students’ access to bathrooms, saying that such cases could be dismissed, but stopping short of saying that such cases should be dismissed.

Catherine Lhamon, who helmed the Education Department’s civil rights office when it reached its conclusion in the Ohio case, said she worries that the case closures show that the memo should be understood as a sign that the Trump administration does not intend to investigate bathroom-access complaints.

Lhamon also said she could think of no legal basis for closing the Ohio case or withdrawing previous findings, which were based on an interpretation of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination, that was adopted by the Obama administration and was recently affirmed for the first time by a federal appellate court.

“It’s renegade law,” she said.

Others, who believe that students must use bathrooms according to their biological sex rather than their gender identity, have welcomed the Trump administration’s change of course on complaints involving transgender students. And some of them, too, see the decision to close the Ohio case as an important sign.

“Hopefully they’re backing off this agenda of intermingling sexes in locker rooms, bathrooms and other facilities,” said Gary McCaleb, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, which argues that allowing transgender students to use bathrooms matching their identity violates the privacy of other students.

The organization is representing the school district in Highland, Ohio, in the ongoing dispute with Jane Doe over her bathroom use, and parents in Palatine, Ill., in pending litigation over that district’s locker room policy.

As the Education Department charts a new course on transgender students’ complaints, it is also seeking to scale back enforcement in other areas.

Jackson, the acting head of the civil rights office, has directed lawyers to narrow the scope of investigations into sexual assault and discriminatory school discipline policies, according to a June 8 memo first reported by ProPublica.

Under the Obama administration, the civil rights office sought to determine whether any one student’s complaint about those issues was symptomatic of a broader problem, in part by examining at least three years of past complaint data.

The Trump administration is discontinuing that practice and will not regularly seek to identify “systemic” problems, according to the memo.

Elizabeth Hill, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the change in approach is meant to confront the agency’s infamous complaint backlog and ensure that investigations are resolved more quickly. “Justice delayed is justice denied, and justice for many complainants has been denied for too long,” she said.

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called it an “abdication of the Education Department’s responsibility to protect the rights and dignity of our nation’s vulnerable children during the most crucial years of their lives.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The radical idea behind Trump’s EPA rollbacks"

Spoiler

The Trump administration isn’t just pushing to dramatically shrink the Environmental Protection Agency, chop a third of its budget and hobble its regulatory powers. It’s also trying to permanently limit the EPA’s mission — while portraying doing so as a return to the agency's roots.

What Administrator Scott Pruitt calls his “Back to Basics” agenda would refocus the agency on narrow goals such as cleaning up toxic waste and providing safe drinking water — the kinds of issues that inspired the EPA’s creation in 1970 amid a public outcry about burning rivers and smog-filled skies. But it would abandon the Obama administration’s climate regulations, along with other efforts that Pruitt argues exceed the agency’s legal authority.

President Donald Trump has endorsed this notion as well, promising that the U.S. will have “the cleanest air” and “the cleanest water” even in his speech this month repudiating the Paris climate agreement.

Pruitt has labeled this vision “EPA originalism,” in a nod to some conservatives’ long-running arguments that judges should interpret the Constitution as the Founders understood it. But several former EPA chiefs say Pruitt and Trump have it wrong — and that the agency’s mission was never as narrow as the current administration wants it to be.

“I don’t personally think you can say, ‘I’m somehow going back to what the basic responsibilities of EPA are,’” said Lee Thomas, who led the agency during Ronald Reagan’s second term. “That’s not what EPA is, that’s not where the laws are, and that’s not where the risk is.”

Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush’s first EPA administrator, disputes Pruitt’s decision to focus on a limited set of EPA programs, such as the toxic-waste cleanups it carries out under the 1980 Superfund law.

“I don’t think it has to be an either-or, nor should it be,” Whitman said, adding: “Superfund is not the only issue for human health. Water pollution is a huge issue and very important and you need to work on it, but it’s not the only issue. Air is an issue, too. Even if you don’t want to believe in climate change, you've got to believe that carbon and mercury are not good for you.”

EPA did not make Pruitt available for an interview, but he told Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel that his aim is for EPA to achieve “tangible” results through “a restoration of its priorities,” such as cleaning up the nation’s 1,300 Superfund sites.

“These are issues that go directly to the health of our citizens that should be the absolute focus of this agency,” Pruitt told Strassel, who was the first to praise him as an “EPA originalist.” Pruitt added: “This president is a fixer, he’s an action-oriented leader, and a refocused EPA is in a great position to get results.”

Pruitt has also defended Trump’s proposal for a 31 percent budget cut at his agency in fiscal year 2018, which would force it to shed about a fifth of its workforce — saying EPA’s core functions would survive. "I believe we can fulfill the mission of our agency with a trimmed budget, with proper leadership and management," he said at an appropriations hearing that had him fielding complaints from Republicans and Democrats alike.

On the other hand, Trump’s proposal would slash many of the same toxic-waste and clean-water programs that Pruitt has put at the center of the agency's mission.

The tension highlights disputes over EPA’s role as environmental threats have evolved, as well as the Trump administration’s efforts to achieve lasting reductions in the government’s regulatory powers.

So far, Pruitt has launched rollbacks of Obama’s greenhouse gas rules for power plants, delayed deadlines for polluters and slowed agency work on new regulations, and most recently helped persuade Trump to withdraw from the Paris deal.

Pruitt has also placed a greater emphasis on considering economic concerns in the agency's decisions. He has cited that reasoning when he has rolled back regulations on climate change, air pollution and clean water, even in cases where the Supreme Court has said costs cannot factor into a regulation.

“We’re going to improve the environment in this country, protect our water, protect our air, but at the same time do it the American way,” Pruitt said in an April speech at a coal mine in Sycamore, Pennsylvania. “Grow jobs and show the rest of the world that we can achieve it.”

But the powers of the EPA administrator are limited: While he or she can have huge influence over the agency’s direction, Congress has laid out its scope and responsibilities in laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

That means Pruitt cannot act like a "tinhorn dictator" by deciding which laws to avoid "in favor of economic development," said Thomas Jorling, a former Senate Republican staffer who co-authored the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the Clean Water Act in 1972. Jorling, who filed a court brief last year defending the Obama EPA's landmark climate regulation, accused Pruitt of being “disingenuous" by focusing the agency on a limited set of priorities.

“It’s all basically a smokescreen to their real intention, which is kind of a moral and ethical corruption, to … restore the dependence of the United States energy system on fossil fuels,” Jorling said.

Pruitt maintains that the agency’s Obama-era leaders vastly overstepped EPA’s authority by issuing regulations such as its greenhouse gas limits for power plants. Pruitt previously made that argument while waging legal fights against the EPA when he was Oklahoma attorney general.

Pruitt said last month that he has not yet decided whether to craft new climate rules after repealing the Obama versions.

But his Republicans critics say it’s wrong to reject climate change as an EPA priority, even if there’s room for debate on the scope of Obama’s actions. The Supreme Court has ruled that EPA must regulate greenhouse gases if they threaten human health and welfare, which the agency has concluded they do.

States say Superfund sites are big issues in their communities, said Thomas, the former Reagan administration EPA leader, but the risks of climate change are "significantly higher."

"There’s a lot more uncertainty around [global warming], but that doesn’t mean you don’t deal with it," he said.

Meanwhile, the rollbacks under Pruitt go well beyond climate change. Pruitt has ordered a rewrite of the Obama-era Waters of the U.S. rule, a sweeping regulation that sought to define which waterways and wetlands fall under the federal government’s purview. And he remains critical of the Obama administration’s efforts to tighten smog standards when much of the country has yet to meet previous limits — even though the Clean Air Act says EPA is supposed to base those decisions solely on the latest health science.

In addition, Pruitt has said his philosophy will involve fewer instances of the federal government overriding state cleanup plans it deems insufficient. And he says EPA will use fewer consent decrees — settlements negotiated with companies that have violated regulations — a practice Republicans have long criticized as “regulation by litigation.”

Instead, Pruitt aims to focus on the Superfund program, cleanups of polluted “brownfields,” and drinking water infrastructure, all of which involve economic development. He has also placed an emphasis on implementing last year’s bipartisan chemical safety reforms, especially the process that approves new chemicals for use in products.

Myron Ebell, a longtime critic of climate change science and the Trump administration’s former transition leader for EPA, supports Pruitt’s originalism mission because it dials back the agency’s reach.

“It seems to me EPA has fairly clear statutory responsibilities under a number of statutes, and those statutory responsibilities should come first,” said Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and the Environment.

“But over time and particularly in the Obama administration, they have taken on a whole lot of things which are entirely discretionary, that they don’t have to do, they’re not required by law to do it, but they decided to do it anyway,” Ebell added.

But Jorling, the former Republican staffer, said people like Ebell have their history wrong.

Jorling said he and Leon Billings, his late Democratic counterpart in writing the landmark air and water laws that Pruitt is now entrusted to enforce, believed that the statutes they wrote were not static. Instead, they were designed to adapt to new situations.

“It’s a complete misreading of those statutes and it really denigrates the senators and members of Congress that I worked for and with at the time,” he said of the arguments Pruitt and his supporters make. “They were very concerned that you don’t just write a statute for the past. You write a statute for the future.”

Georgetown environmental law professor William Buzbee agreed that the laws’ legislative history shows they were "not written to be frozen in time, but to give EPA important protective roles that will evolve in light of improved science and understanding of emerging risks."

For example, the Clean Air Act includes a catch-all provision, Section 111, that allowsd the agency to address newly discovered pollutants not covered elsewhere in the law. EPA had used that provision just five times over the decades, mostly on obscure pollutants, before the Obama administration wielded it to target carbon dioxide from power plants.

Gina McCarthy, Pruitt’s immediate predecessor as EPA administrator, said it’s "crazy" to believe that the agency’s role was not intended to evolve to include new problems like climate change.

“Is EPA supposed to respond and say, ‘We’re really busy cleaning up Superfund sites from the ’60s. We really can’t address the problems that you’re facing today?’” McCarthy asked. “Is that what they’re really suggesting? And as long as we catch up with the damage that was in place when these laws came in, that we’ll have done our job? That doesn’t make any sense.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The State Department just broke a promise to minority and female recruits"

Spoiler

Dozens of young minority and female State Department recruits received startling and unwelcome news last week: They would not be able to soon join the Foreign Service despite having been promised that opportunity. Their saga is just the latest sign that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s rush to slash the size of the State Department without a plan is harming diplomacy and having negative unintended effects.

The recruits, who are part of the State Department’s Rangel and Pickering fellowship programs, have already completed two years of graduate-level education at U.S. taxpayers’ expense plus an internship, often in a foreign country. The deal they struck with the federal government was that after completing their educations they would be given an inside track to become full-fledged U.S. diplomats abroad if they also satisfied medical and security requirements. In turn, they promised to commit at least five years to the Foreign Service.

These minority and female candidates already went through a competitive application process, meaning they are some of the best and brightest young graduates around. It also means they have other options. Young stars don’t join the State Department for the money or the glory; they want to serve and represent their country and are willing to make sacrifices to do it.

Many were shocked when they received a letter telling them they had one week to decide if they wanted to take a much less appealing job — stamping passports in a foreign embassy for two years — with the prospect but no guarantee of becoming a Foreign Service officer even after that.

“This is no way to treat our next generation,” one Foreign Service officer serving overseas told me.

In Capitol Hill hearings last week, several lawmakers pressed Tillerson to explain why the State Department won’t waive the administration’s self-imposed hiring freeze for these few dozen recruits. Is the State Department still committed to diversity? Did Tillerson realize that the federal government has already spent tens of thousands of dollars educating each of these fellows?

Questioned first by Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) last Tuesday, Tillerson didn’t have all the facts at his fingertips. By the time he got the same questions the next day from Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (D-N.Y.) Tillerson and the State Department had figured out what they wanted to say.

The department decided to delay the entire class of new Foreign Service officers, and the fellows were just caught up in that decision, Tillerson said. State wants to cut 8 percent of the State Department foreign and civil service workforce by the end of next year, so onboarding new diplomats didn’t make much sense.

Apparently unsatisfied, Meeks and Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) wrote to Tillerson on Thursday to ask him to issue waivers that would make exceptions for the Rangel and Pickering fellows. It was Congress that authorized these programs and Congress intended to see them succeed, they said.

“There is substantial bipartisan and bicameral support for these fellowships and the talented young people who earn them,” the letter stated. Offering the fellows temporary consular positions “does not meet Congressional intent.”

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert defended the treatment of the fellows in her Thursday briefing, saying that the consular positions, although temporary and non-tenured, represent the best State can do.

“There’s a hiring freeze. But we are keeping our commitment to these fellows,” she said. “Look, it’s not an ideal situation.”

Coons, in an interview, said that the State Department’s explanation doesn’t hold water because the situation that officials are decrying is of their own making. The State Department set arbitrary personnel reduction goals before its own internal organizational review is even complete.

But the larger concern, he said, is that State’s treatment of the fellows is only the latest in a series of actions and decisions that are causing deep unhappiness and uncertainty across the department’s workforce. He pointed to the fact that almost all senior State Department political positions remain unfilled and that Tillerson has supported draconian budget cuts for diplomacy and development.

“These signals and decisions are beginning to have a genuine negative effect on morale and on our operating capacity,” said Coons. For America’s diplomats, “there is real lack of certainty about the path forward, about their careers. I’m concerned we are going to lose the very best of our Foreign Service,” he said.

There is certainly fat to be trimmed in the State Department’s budget. But the correct tool is a scalpel, and Tillerson’s method so far has been a hatchet job. His decisions might also ensure that the Foreign Service, to paraphrase former senator Bob Graham, remains largely “white, male and Yale” for years to come.

Gee, what a surprise. NOT.

[GreyhoundFan]

"State Department issues unusual public warning to Saudi Arabia and UAE over Qatar rift"

Spoiler

The State Department issued an unusual public warning to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday over a diplomatic rift with fellow U.S. ally Qatar, and suggested that the Saudis may have provoked a crisis and drawn in the United States on false pretenses.

Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the administration was “mystified” that — two weeks after announcing a diplomatic and economic embargo against Qatar over alleged support for terrorism — Saudi Arabia and the UAE have not publicly detailed their complaints.

“The more that time goes by, the more doubt is raised about the actions taken by Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” Nauert said.

“At this point, we are left with one simple question: Were the actions really about their concerns about Qatar’s alleged support for terrorism, or were they about the long-simmering grievances between and among the GCC countries?”

All three nations are part of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, a loose diplomatic confederation of mostly wealthy Persian Gulf states. Of them, Saudi Arabia is the most powerful.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, along with Egypt, severed diplomatic ties with Qatar this month and blocked trade and passenger traffic through their territory and airspace in protest of what the three said was Qatar’s backing of extremist Islamist organizations, as well as its ties to Iran.

The diplomatic crisis has been a test of the new U.S. administration’s pull with Arab allies, and has pitted President Trump’s public support for the Saudi-led action against Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s preference for quiet, backroom diplomacy. Tillerson has had more than 20 calls and meetings devoted to helping resolve the crisis, Nauert said, but now sees little further room for U.S. mediation.

But, she said, he wants “results,” and is now saying: “Let’s finish this. Let’s get this going.”

The blockade was announced shortly after Trump last month made Saudi Arabia the first stop on his first overseas trip. He received an extravagant welcome, and lavished his hosts with praise. He also met with leaders of the UAE and Qatar individually, as well as at a GCC gathering, and signed a unity agreement with them.

Within days after his departure, Saudi Arabia announced the Qatar blockade. Trump tweeted his support. In their conversations with him, he said, the others had “pointed” at Qatar as a source of terror financing. He implied that his Riyadh visit had inspired the Saudi-led action.

Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, however, called for mediation and a quick resolution of the dispute. Qatar hosts the regional headquarters of the U.S. Central Command and launches air operations to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan from a massive base there.

On June 9, Tillerson asked reporters to the State Department to read a prepared statement calling for the blockade to be eased, saying it was causing humanitarian and business hardships, and hindering U.S. military actions against the Islamic State.

The same day, Trump, speaking at a Rose Garden news conference, called the blockade “hard but necessary” and appeared to reinforce his backing for the Saudi view of Qatari culpability.

Last week, Mattis hosted Qatar’s defense minister here to finalize a $12 billion sale of 36 F-16 fighter jets. Two U.S. naval vessels made a port visit to Doha, the Qatari capital, and participated in an unscheduled military exercise with Qatar.

At a high-level White House meeting on the crisis Friday, officials expressed frustration at the failure of Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis and the others to present a promised list of their demands of Qatar. “It’s been two weeks,” said one senior administration official, who spoke Tuesday of the sensitive issue on the condition of anonymity. “We still haven’t seen this list.”

Over the years since the 9/11 attacks, the Treasury Department has accused virtually all of the GCC members of supporting terrorism in some fashion. Three successive U.S. administrations have tried to deal with the issue, with varying success. Although none of the governments is now believed to finance terror groups, Saudi Arabia continues to spread its extreme version of Islam throughout the Muslim world while Kuwait, and especially Qatar, are believed to turn a blind eye to individuals in their countries who engage in such funding. Qatar denies being the source of terror funding, and has said that the United States has not supplied evidence of its charges.

Nauert referred to “alleged” Qatari support for terrorism but would not go into detail at the State Department briefing about whether Trump or Tillerson have changed their minds about the veracity of the Saudi claims.

Tillerson had made the Qatar crisis his main priority and cleared his travel schedule this week. The former Exxon Mobil chief executive has said that he hoped to use his longtime contacts with leaders of all three countries to defuse tension.

But as the crisis drags on, the Trump administration risks looking like a pawn in an old dispute over differing approaches to extremism, free expression and potential challenges to Arab authoritarianism.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have long objected to Qatar’s more liberal support for political Islam, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar has also used its wealth, as the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, to support groups such as Hamas.

Although all the GCC countries are members of the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, and Qatar is part of the Saudi and Emirati campaign against Iran-backed rebels in Yemen, Qatar also favors dialogue with Iran, the Shiite power that Saudi Arabia considers to be its chief rival.

In a briefing last week for reporters, Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to Washington, said that Trump had different “equities” in the region from Tillerson and Mattis, who want to “maintain the war” against the Islamic State from the Qatar base. He said they had been assured no action would be taken to impede U.S. military operations.

“When was there a crisis when the State Department did not say we need to de-escalate?” he said. In his own communications with the White House, Otaiba said, he had gotten no pushback.

Sigh.

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh. "Interior chief wants to shed 4,000 employees in department shake-up"

Spoiler

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told lawmakers Wednesday that he plans to shrink his department’s sprawling workforce by 4,000 employees — about 8 percent of the full-time staff — as part of budget cuts to downsize the government’s largest public lands agency.

Zinke, testifying before a Senate panel on the White House’s proposed budget for Interior for fiscal 2018, said he would rely on a combination of attrition, reassignments and buyouts to make the cuts. Depending on how fast and effective those strategies are, the department “will determine the need for further action to reduce staffing,” he said in prepared testimony, a reference to possible layoffs.

In back-to-back hearings Tuesday and Wednesday in which he defended the White House’s plan to slash his department’s budget by 13.4 percent, Zinke offered no additional details on whether the cuts will be concentrated in some offices or spread across Interior’s nine agencies. Nor did he specify whether he hopes to make them over a year or a longer period.

But 1,000 jobs would be lost at the Bureau of Land Management — which manages hundreds of wilderness areas, two dozen national monuments and other protected lands in addition to issuing leases for livestock grazing and oil and gas extraction — according to an email its acting director sent to employees last Friday.

The contraction at Interior, which manages a fifth of all U.S. land, is one of several plans to downsize the number of employees across the government since President Trump took office. Departments from Health and Human Services to Transportation are coming up with plans to fulfill the president’s campaign pledge to reduce the size and reach of the federal bureaucracy.

Zinke’s disclosure to lawmakers comes 10 days before a June 30 deadline for all department leaders to submit initial plans showing the White House how they intend to reorganize, reduce their workforce, assess which programs are necessary and look for changes that save money.

The White House in April lifted a governmentwide hiring freeze the president had imposed in January but told Cabinet secretaries they must start “taking immediate actions” to save money and reduce their staffs.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to shed more than 1,200 employees by early September through buyouts and early retirements. Secretary Scott Pruitt has pledged to cut a total of 3,200 positions, more than 20 percent of the agency’s 15,000 employees.

A similar plan is unfolding at the State Department, where Secretary Rex Tillerson wants to lose 2,000 Foreign Service officers and other staff through attrition over the next few years, a spokesman said.

At a House budget hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) pressed Energy Secretary Rick Perry on reports that the president’s proposed budget could eliminate “about 1,000 jobs” at the department’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Newhouse’s district. That lab employs 4,500 people, according to the Energy Department’s website.

“I am comfortable that we will manage these labs in a way that continues to keep the employment levels at the level to deliver the innovation and technology that this country is going to need,” Perry said, stopping short of promising there would be no job losses. He said proper management could help retain more of those positions.

Perry’s predecessor as secretary, Ernest Moniz, said in an interview that he found it “rather unlikely” the proposed cuts would not lead to significant job losses unless the agency saved money by curtailing outside researchers’ access to the department’s high-end, experimental equipment.

Interior employs a total of 50,500 full-time and 20,000 part-time people, from scientists to park rangers, from its Washington headquarters to its nine departments, including the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Zinke took a big first step to reorganizing the department late last week when he informed dozens of career officials there of reassignments. The shake-up appeared to be much broader than previous administrations have pursued and includes Interior’s top climate policy official, several Fish and Wildlife leaders and reassignments at the Bureau of Land Management.

In his memo to staff, BLM acting director Michael Nedd said the agency could shed 1,000 positions through “normal attrition” and would turn to buyouts and early retirement offers later this year if that number was not reached.

“While the FY 2018 budget is not final, we must heed the staffing levels that it calls for,” Nedd wrote. His email, with a subject line reading “Defining Our Priorities in a Time of Change,” was obtained by the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch called the cuts a “starvation diet.’’

“According to Trump’s fantasy plan, BLM is supposed to achieve ‘energy independence’ before its coffee break, stimulate rural ‘job creation’ by lunch and do it with substantially less resources,” Ruch said. He predicted that reductions of that magnitude would likely require layoffs.

Jane Lyder, a deputy interior secretary who oversaw parks and the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Obama administration, said shrinking the number of Interior employees will create hardships, given other proposed cuts to the budget.

“Those agencies are already pretty strapped, especially the Park Service,” Lyder said. “The Park Service itself says it will curtail visitor services and might cut hours of operation to compensate.”

Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift declined to provide details on the departments targeted for workforce cuts or the timing. “The Department has nothing further to announce about personnel right now,” she said in an email.

More moves to hurt Americans.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Jeff Sessions’s new war on drugs won’t be any more effective than the old one"

Spoiler

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is right to be concerned about recent increases in violent crime in some of our nation’s largest cities, as well as a tragic rise in drug overdoses nationwide [“Lax drug enforcement means more violence,” op-ed, June 18]. But there is little reason to believe that his response — reviving the failed “war on drugs” and imposing more mandatory minimums on nonviolent drug offenders — will do anything to solve the problem. His prescription contravenes a growing bipartisan consensus that the war on drugs has not worked. And it would exacerbate mass incarceration, the most pressing civil rights problem of the day.

Sessions’s first mistake is to conflate correlation and causation. He argues that the rise in murder rates in 2015 was somehow related to his predecessor Eric Holder’s August 2013 directive scaling back federal prosecutions in lower-level drug cases. That policy urged prosecutors to reserve the most serious charges for high-level offenses. Holder directed them to avoid unnecessarily harsh mandatory minimum sentences for defendants whose conduct involved no actual or threatened violence, and who had no leadership role in criminal enterprises or gangs, no substantial ties to drug trafficking organizations and no significant criminal history. (Mandatory minimums can lead to draconian sentences, as in the case of Ramona Brant, a first-time offender sentenced to life imprisonment for her part in distributing drugs at the direction of an abusive boyfriend). Individuals who met the stringent criteria of Holder’s policy would still be prosecuted, but they would be spared overly long mandatory minimums. Sessions offers no evidence that this policy caused the recent spikes in violent crime or drug overdoses. There are three reasons to doubt that there is any significant connection between the two.

First, federal prosecutors handle fewer than 10 percent of all criminal cases, so a modest change in their charging policy with respect to a subset of drug cases is unlikely to have a nationwide impact on crime. The other 90 percent of criminal prosecution is conducted by state prosecutors, who were not affected by Holder’s policy.

Second, the few individuals who benefited from Holder’s policy by definition lacked a sustained history of crime or violence or any connections to major drug traffickers.

Third, the increases in violent crime that Sessions cites are not nationally uniform, which one would expect if they were attributable to federal policy. In 2015, murder rates rose in Chicago, Cleveland and Baltimore, to be sure. But they declined in Boston and El Paso, and stayed relatively steady in New York, Las Vegas, Detroit and Atlanta. If federal drug policy were responsible for the changes, we would not see such dramatic variances from city to city.

Nor is there any evidence that increases in drug overdoses have anything to do with shorter sentences for a small subset of nonviolent drug offenders in federal courts. Again, the vast majority of drug prosecutions are in state court under state law and are unaffected by the attorney general’s policies. And the rise in drug overdoses is a direct result of the opioid and related heroin epidemics, which have been caused principally by increased access to prescription painkillers from doctors and pill mills. That tragic development calls for treatment of addicts and closer regulation of doctors, not mandatory minimums imposed on street-level drug sellers, who are easily replaced in communities that have few lawful job opportunities.

Most disturbing, Sessions seems to have no concern for the fact that the United States leads the world in incarceration; that its prison population is disproportionately black, Hispanic and poor; or that incarceration inflicts deep and long-lasting costs on the very communities most vulnerable to crime in the first place. As of 2001, 1 of every 3 black male babies born that year could expect to be imprisoned in his lifetime, and while racial disparities have been modestly reduced since then, African Americans are still a disproportionate share of the prison population. Mass incarceration has disrupted families, created even greater barriers to employment and increased the likelihood that the next generation of children will themselves be incarcerated. Advocates as diverse as the Koch brothers and George Soros, the Center for American Progress and Americans for Tax Reform, the American Civil Liberties Union and Right on Crime agree that we need to scale back the harshness of our criminal justice system.

Rather than expanding the drug war, Sessions would be smarter to examine local conditions that influence crime and violence, including policing strategies, availability of guns, community engagement and concentrated poverty. Responding to those underlying problems, and restoring trust through consent decrees that reduce police abuse, hold considerably more promise of producing public safety. Sessions’s revival of the failed policies of the past, by contrast, has little hope of reducing violent crime or drug overdoses.

He is ridiculous.

[Childless]

8 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Jeff Sessions’s new war on drugs won’t be any more effective than the old one"

  Reveal hidden contents

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is right to be concerned about recent increases in violent crime in some of our nation’s largest cities, as well as a tragic rise in drug overdoses nationwide [“Lax drug enforcement means more violence,” op-ed, June 18]. But there is little reason to believe that his response — reviving the failed “war on drugs” and imposing more mandatory minimums on nonviolent drug offenders — will do anything to solve the problem. His prescription contravenes a growing bipartisan consensus that the war on drugs has not worked. And it would exacerbate mass incarceration, the most pressing civil rights problem of the day.

Sessions’s first mistake is to conflate correlation and causation. He argues that the rise in murder rates in 2015 was somehow related to his predecessor Eric Holder’s August 2013 directive scaling back federal prosecutions in lower-level drug cases. That policy urged prosecutors to reserve the most serious charges for high-level offenses. Holder directed them to avoid unnecessarily harsh mandatory minimum sentences for defendants whose conduct involved no actual or threatened violence, and who had no leadership role in criminal enterprises or gangs, no substantial ties to drug trafficking organizations and no significant criminal history. (Mandatory minimums can lead to draconian sentences, as in the case of Ramona Brant, a first-time offender sentenced to life imprisonment for her part in distributing drugs at the direction of an abusive boyfriend). Individuals who met the stringent criteria of Holder’s policy would still be prosecuted, but they would be spared overly long mandatory minimums. Sessions offers no evidence that this policy caused the recent spikes in violent crime or drug overdoses. There are three reasons to doubt that there is any significant connection between the two.

First, federal prosecutors handle fewer than 10 percent of all criminal cases, so a modest change in their charging policy with respect to a subset of drug cases is unlikely to have a nationwide impact on crime. The other 90 percent of criminal prosecution is conducted by state prosecutors, who were not affected by Holder’s policy.

Second, the few individuals who benefited from Holder’s policy by definition lacked a sustained history of crime or violence or any connections to major drug traffickers.

Third, the increases in violent crime that Sessions cites are not nationally uniform, which one would expect if they were attributable to federal policy. In 2015, murder rates rose in Chicago, Cleveland and Baltimore, to be sure. But they declined in Boston and El Paso, and stayed relatively steady in New York, Las Vegas, Detroit and Atlanta. If federal drug policy were responsible for the changes, we would not see such dramatic variances from city to city.

Nor is there any evidence that increases in drug overdoses have anything to do with shorter sentences for a small subset of nonviolent drug offenders in federal courts. Again, the vast majority of drug prosecutions are in state court under state law and are unaffected by the attorney general’s policies. And the rise in drug overdoses is a direct result of the opioid and related heroin epidemics, which have been caused principally by increased access to prescription painkillers from doctors and pill mills. That tragic development calls for treatment of addicts and closer regulation of doctors, not mandatory minimums imposed on street-level drug sellers, who are easily replaced in communities that have few lawful job opportunities.

Most disturbing, Sessions seems to have no concern for the fact that the United States leads the world in incarceration; that its prison population is disproportionately black, Hispanic and poor; or that incarceration inflicts deep and long-lasting costs on the very communities most vulnerable to crime in the first place. As of 2001, 1 of every 3 black male babies born that year could expect to be imprisoned in his lifetime, and while racial disparities have been modestly reduced since then, African Americans are still a disproportionate share of the prison population. Mass incarceration has disrupted families, created even greater barriers to employment and increased the likelihood that the next generation of children will themselves be incarcerated. Advocates as diverse as the Koch brothers and George Soros, the Center for American Progress and Americans for Tax Reform, the American Civil Liberties Union and Right on Crime agree that we need to scale back the harshness of our criminal justice system.

Rather than expanding the drug war, Sessions would be smarter to examine local conditions that influence crime and violence, including policing strategies, availability of guns, community engagement and concentrated poverty. Responding to those underlying problems, and restoring trust through consent decrees that reduce police abuse, hold considerably more promise of producing public safety. Sessions’s revival of the failed policies of the past, by contrast, has little hope of reducing violent crime or drug overdoses.

He is ridiculous.

What is the GOP's obsession with the war on drugs?  It's been proven to be ineffective and a waste of money.

[GreyhoundFan]

53 minutes ago, Childless said:

What is the GOP's obsession with the war on drugs?  It's been proven to be ineffective and a waste of money.

Because it targets minorities. Sort of like everything the Repugs do.

[bashfulpixie]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Because it targets minorities. Sort of like everything the Repugs do.

Not only does it target minorities, but it also populates their for profit prisons. 

[Cartmann99]

On 6/19/2017 at 8:32 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

The recruits, who are part of the State Department’s Rangel and Pickering fellowship programs, have already completed two years of graduate-level education at U.S. taxpayers’ expense plus an internship, often in a foreign country. The deal they struck with the federal government was that after completing their educations they would be given an inside track to become full-fledged U.S. diplomats abroad if they also satisfied medical and security requirements. In turn, they promised to commit at least five years to the Foreign Service.

I hate to give them any ideas, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump administration gave the recruits a bill for what the government spent on their education. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Another "you couldn't make this shit up" situation. "‘How else can a Kenyan creampuff get ahead?’ is just one of the disturbing tweets sent by this Trump Energy Department agency head"

Spoiler

Before William C. Bradford was appointed by the Trump administration to run the Energy Department’s Office of Indian Energy, he tweeted a slew of disparaging remarks about the real and imagined ethnic, religious and gender identities of former president Barack Obama, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, TV news host Megyn Kelly and Japanese Americans during World War II.

Bradford was recently appointed director of DOE’s office in charge of assisting Native American and  Alaska Native tribes and villages with energy development. Before joining the department, he was attorney general of the Chiricahua Apache Nation. He has also been a faculty member at the U.S. Military Academy, the National Defense University, the Coast Guard Academy and the United Arab Emirates National Defense College. According to his online biography on the department’s website, he holds a doctorate, a law degree and a master’s in business administration.

While Bradford has been at the center of controversies in the past, these missives sent from his now-deleted Twitter account have not been previously reported. In an email on Thursday, Bradford acknowledged the Twitter account and apologized for his comments.

“As a minority and member of the Jewish faith, I sincerely apologize for my disrespectful and offensive comments,” he wrote to The Washington Post. “These comments are inexcusable and I do not stand by them. Now, as a public servant, I hold myself to a higher standard, and I will work every day to better the lives of all Americans.”

The Energy Department did not comment on Bradford on Thursday evening.

The Trump official’s tweets came before he joined the administration and include a response to a story about Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, urging Iowans to vote against Trump ahead of a 2016 presidential caucus there, in which Bradford said: “Who is this little arrogant self-hating Jew to tell anyone for whom to vote?”

...

Bradford also had some choice words for Obama in December 2016 — one month after Trump beat Hillary Clinton to become president. Referring to an unclear “mission in Tehran,” Bradford asked, “How else can a Kenyan creampuff get ahead?”

...

The reference to Obama’s Kenyan heritage — his father hailed from the African country — echoes the repeatedly debunked notion behind the so-called “birther movement” once supported by Trump, which stated that Obama wasn’t actually born in the United States. (He was — in Hawaii.) Trump finally admitted in September 2016 that Obama was born in the United States but accused Clinton of originally floating the rumor (which is also something rejected by fact checkers).

...

Bradford, whose Twitter handle at the time was @Brute_Bradford, also seemed concerned that Obama might try to stay in office past January 2017 and need to be forced out.

...

Before joining DOE, he sent tweets more directly relevant to the department’s work. In December, after Trump’s election, Bradford wrote: “Soon, ‘climate change’ cultists will be pitied as the nuts they always were.” Under the Obama administration, the Energy Department emphasized developing and promoting relatively carbon-neutral forms of energy, such as nuclear, solar and wind power.

...

At DOE, Bradford is charged with helping Native Americans and Alaska Native tribes and villages obtain electricity and reduce energy costs. But his tweets before joining the Trump administration display a lack of sensitivity to issues of race and gender. His position does not require confirmation from the Senate.

Bradford took aim at Japanese Americans on the anniversary in 2016 of the opening of internment camps to detain them during World War II, saying, “It was necessary.”

...

And in at least two Twitter messages, he wrote that women should not serve in the military and referred to then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly as “MegOBgyn Kelly.”

...

This would not be the first time Bradford courted controversy — except that it previously concerned a lengthy, 95-page law journal article rather than several short, 140-character-or-fewer tweets. In 2015, he resigned from his post at West Point after writing an academic paper arguing the United States should threaten to destroy Muslim holy sites in war “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage.”

Bradford also called for legal scholars “sympathetic to Islamist aims” to be imprisoned or “attacked.” He dubbed such academics “critical law of armed conflict academy,” or CLOACA, which is also a term for the orifice out of which some animals defecate. He suggested journalists with whom such scholars speak could also be targeted.

After resigning from his position as an assistant law professor at West Point in 2015, Bradford told The Post that he left “because I did not want the cadets or U.S. Military Academy to be exposed to any increased risk as a result of the backlash over my article, and I did not wish the institution to be burdened by this or by any other distractions.”

He defended his academic work to The Post at the time, saying the “article indicates that only true propagandists inciting attacks could be subjected to the sanctions I mention, and this parallels existing case law I reference as well as emerging customary international law.”

In 2005, Inside Higher Ed reported that Bradford resigned from Indiana University’s law school after it was revealed that he exaggerated his military service. Bradford denied that accusation, too, in a 2015 interview: “I never exaggerated my military service and any claims to the contrary are false.”

Yet another repugnant biped in this administration.

[CTRLZero]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

In 2005, Inside Higher Ed reported that Bradford resigned from Indiana University’s law school after it was revealed that he exaggerated his military service. Bradford denied that accusation, too, in a 2015 interview: “I never exaggerated my military service and any claims to the contrary are false.”

Looks like another whacko lying liar approved by Trump.  The Higher Ed article (linked in the article posted by @GreyhoundFan) is interesting and points to some issues with this gentleman's character (i.e., SEVERE lack thereof).  The article is from 12 years ago, but he has not mended his ways:
 

Spoiler

 

Web of Lies

A law professor who became a conservative cause célèbre resigns after parts of his story unravel.

By

David Epstein

December 6, 2005

27 Comments

When several of his colleagues expressed doubts about whether they would eventually want to tenure him, William Bradford, an associate professor of  law at Indiana University in Indianapolis, went public with his complaints. He posted on blogs, he talked on the radio, he talked to this Web site, he hit "The O’Reilly Factor." His message: Liberal faculty members were pushing him out because he is conservative, a war veteran and a Native American who didn’t fit a liberal mold for Native Americans.

But as Bradford’s complaints grew louder, his story unraveled. It has now become clear that Bradford lied about, among other things, his military service. University officials confirmed Monday that Bradford -- who did not respond to e-mail and voice messages and who hasn't commented on the latest events -- has resigned, effective January 1.

Bradford appeared on the national radar this summer, after five faculty members on a review committee, which did authorize his reappointment, said they did not think he deserved tenure at the time. Bradford, whose degrees include one each from Northwestern and Harvard Universities, railed against what he claimed was a liberal conspiracy against him.

Bradford had refused to sign a petition in support of Ward Churchill, a professor from the University of Colorado whose comments on 9/11 infuriated people nationwide, despite the advice of Florence Wagman Roisman, an Indiana law professor who did sign the petition. Bradford labeled Roisman as one of the leaders of the push to oust him, and began slinging discrimination and defamation claims around the blogosphere, most prominently on Indy Law Net, a blog for the Indiana law school.

Bradford drew vigorous support not only from the likes of Bill O’Reilly, but also from students and colleagues who noted his prolific publishing, his general popularity as a teacher, and his status as a war hero -- he claimed to have fought in Desert Storm and Bosnia, and to have won a Silver Star. A petition in support of Bradford was even passed around students at the law school. While Bradford took to the pulpit, Roisman and others he criticized had to stay silent, citing the confidentiality of review committees.

But the more attention Bradford got, the more people started asking questions, and the more peculiarities arose. In September, Lucas Sayre, a second year law student and the head of Indy Law Net, noticed that Bradford’s comments were coming from the same IP address as posts from other user names. Sayre, who had taken a course with Bradford and said he was a great professor, questioned Bradford about it, and Bradford admitted to using fake names to post “cheap shots, schoolyard bickering,” Sayre said.

In October, Bradford promised the blog audience that the person who endowed Roisman’s chair was upset at her behavior and would strip her of the chair, and that Judge David J. Dreyer of Marion Superior Court had issued a temporary restraining order barring professors from speaking ill of or taking any actions against Bradford. Roisman did not lose her chair, and there never was a restraining order.

Naturally, some of the law buffs who frequent Indy Law Net went searching for the restraining order. When a user identified as “me” posted that he or she could not find it, Bradford objected. “Who are you, me? I ask because if you're on the other side or working for them, which is my presumption unless you tell me otherwise and tell me who you are, I'm not going to give you any more guidance,” he responded in a comment.

Court records and sources both indicate that Bradford never filed for any sort of injunction.

One part of Bradford’s offensive involved talking with Ruth Holladay, a columnist for The Indianapolis Star who wrote a column supporting him in June. Holladay wrote about Bradford’s impressive military service. On his faculty profile, Bradford is identified as having served in the Army infantry from 1994 to 2001, and he had claimed to have been a major in the Special Forces.

Some of Bradford’s deceptions seem obvious. For example, Desert Storm ended in 1991, and Bradford got a Ph.D., a J.D., and an L.L.M. during his supposed years of combat. Other deceptions were less easily penetrated. That’s why it took Ret. Army Lieut. Col. Keith R. Donnelly contacting Holladay with his suspicion that Bradford did not win a Silver Star to bring clarity to that issue. Both Donnelly and Holladay independently requested Bradford’s military records. In her column Sunday, Holladay reported that Bradford had seen no active duty, had won no awards, was discharged as a second lieutenant, and was not in the infantry. Bradford had been in the Army Reserve from September 30, 1995, to October 23, 2001, but saw no active duty.

Roisman said she was told that any complaint Bradford had filed against her and other professors with the university would be withdrawn. But Roisman said that neither she nor another professor plan to withdraw their complaints that Bradford had trumped up discrimination accusations against them. “As far as I’m concerned,” Roisman said, “why should they go away?”

Sayre said he has contacted Bradford recently, but that Bradford would only confirm his resignation. Once deafening on Indy Law Net, Bradford would tell Sayre nothing more.

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"I worked on the EPA’s climate change website. Its removal is a declaration of war.'

Spoiler

This spring, political officials at the Environmental Protection Agency removed the agency’s climate change website, one of the world’s top resources for information on the science and effects of climate change.

To me, a scientist who managed this website for more than five years, its removal signifies a declaration of war on climate science by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. There can be no other interpretation. I draw this conclusion as a meteorologist with a specialization in climate science and as an independent voter who strives to keep my political and scientific views separate. I concede that this specific issue is personal for me, given the countless hours I spent working on the site. But it should be obvious to anyone how this senseless action runs counter to principles of good governance and scientific integrity.

Some 20 years in the making, the breadth and quality of the website’s content was remarkable. It lasted through Democratic and Republican administrations, partly because its information mirrored the findings of the mainstream scientific community, including the National Academy of Sciences, other federal agencies and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It “presented the current understanding of the science and possible solutions in a fair and balanced way,” says Kerry Emanuel, a world-renowned atmospheric scientist at MIT and a political conservative.

The site’s overarching conclusion, informed by these scientific organizations and reports, was that recent warming is largely a result of human activities, specifically the burning of fossil fuels, which releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Yet Pruitt, a lawyer who has spent much of his career fighting climate change mitigation efforts, decided that he knows more than the thousands of scientists whose decades of work support this conclusion. These are his words about the impact of human activity: “I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” Pruitt has championed the administration’s decision to exit the Paris climate agreement and called for a debate on the fundamentals of the issue, even though there’s virtually no disagreement about it among scientists. He then effectively cleansed the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors, a steering committee for the agency’s research.

The EPA’s official line is that it is “updating” the climate change website to reflect new “priorities” under Pruitt and Trump. It has archived the old site but put nothing in its place nor announced a timetable for “updating” it. Pruitt may not accept mainstream climate science conclusions, but if he wanted to promote his alternative views, a much more defensible and transparent action would have been to leave the site up while posting his perspective as well. Instead, one of the world’s best climate science sites has vanished.

In its heyday in the early 2000s, if you Googled “climate change” or “global warming,” the EPA’s site was the first hit. The site not only presented climate science , it was also a portal to data on warming’s effects and greenhouse gas emissions, along with guidance and tools to help people, municipalities and states reduce their carbon footprints. It included a vibrant kids’ site treasured by educators, featuring interactive teaching tools and videos, which was also taken down.

While the George W. Bush administration attempted to exert some control over the site, it was never so drastic. When Bush’s political appointees filed into the EPA in 2001 — coinciding with when I began managing the site — updates were put on hold for several months. For a while, we were permitted to update only one page a month, which first went through an onerous White House review process. As the site contained several hundred pages of content at that time, this was effectively a “let it rot” policy. But at least the site wasn’t trashed.

During Bush’s second term, the constraints on updating were lifted, and we resumed regularly posting new material. That carried on through the Obama administration (I left the EPA in 2010 to join The Washington Post). 

To be perfectly clear, it is any administration’s prerogative to revise or archive Web pages that relate to policies and programs it is no longer pursuing. For example, Pruitt’s move to archive material on the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan was totally justified; the Trump administration has shelved the policy. 

But there is no justification for political interference with authoritative, carefully vetted scientific information. Neither the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration nor NASA has altered its online climate science content — which is not substantively different than material on the EPA’s site. They are not currently run by political appointees.

It is refreshing that governments in several cities, including Chicago, Boston and San Francisco , have published replica versions of the EPA’s now-defunct site to keep it alive.

Pruitt’s order to delete the site feels purely spiteful, as if he simply couldn’t abide knowing that the agency he leads was publishing information he doesn’t believe. But science is not about belief — it’s about evidence. Of all people, the head of the EPA should have the utmost respect for this evidence and its transparent communication. Pruitt’s choice to destroy carefully vetted scientific information rather than preserve it is a reckless and dangerous abdication of his responsibility.  

I shudder to think how long it will take to undo all the damage being done by this sham administration, if that damage can be undone.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Where Trump Zigs, Tillerson Zags, Putting Him at Odds With White House"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON — When Rex W. Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, arrived in Washington five months ago to become the secretary of state, his boosters said he brought two valuable assets to a job that had usually gone to someone steeped in government and diplomacy: a long history managing a global company, and deep relationships from the Middle East to Russia that enabled him to close deals.

But his first opportunity to use that experience — as a behind-the-scenes mediator in the dispute between Qatar and Saudi Arabia — has put Mr. Tillerson in exactly the place a secretary of state does not want to be: in public disagreement with the president who appointed him.

Mr. Tillerson tried to position himself as an intermediary and sought for all sides to put their demands on the table. But President Trump openly sided with the Saudis, first on Twitter, then again at a news conference. Mr. Trump called Qatar a “funder of terrorism at a very high level” just as the State Department was questioning whether the Saudis were using the terrorism charge to cover for “long-simmering grievances” between the Arab nations.

Some in the White House say that the discord in the Qatar dispute is part of a broader struggle over who is in charge of Middle East policy — Mr. Tillerson or Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior adviser — and that the secretary of state has a tin ear about the political realities of the Trump administration. Others say it is merely symptomatic of a dysfunctional State Department that, under Mr. Tillerson’s uncertain leadership, does not yet have in place the senior political appointees who make the wheels of diplomacy turn.

But criticism from Mr. Trump’s aides is not Mr. Tillerson’s only problem. In recent days, each of his top priorities has hit a wall. His effort to enlist China to force North Korea to give up its nuclear and ballistic missile programs has gone nowhere, as the president himself acknowledged last week. The Russians, angry about a congressional move to impose new sanctions, disinvited one of his top diplomats — leaving that crucial relationship at its lowest point since the Cold War.

And in Congress, where Mr. Tillerson once found members willing to give deference to his efforts to reorganize and shrink the State Department, there is now anger and defiance about the extent of those plans.

In a remarkable series of hearings this month, Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, declared Mr. Tillerson’s proposal for a 30 percent cut in the department’s budget a “waste of time” that he would not even review, and he expressed disbelief that the reorganization plan for the department would not be ready until the end of the year, at the earliest.

“It’s not that he’s a weak secretary of state or a strong one — he’s in a different category,” said Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is writing the second volume of his history of American foreign policy. “I have a hard time thinking of one who has come in with little foreign policy experience and has less interest in surrounding himself with the people who know something about the regions and issues that he has to deal with.”

In fact, Mr. Tillerson’s determination to rationalize the State Department structure, which many applaud, and his refusal to appoint under secretaries and assistant secretaries until he has it all figured out have created policy gridlock. Three foreign ambassadors — one from Asia and two from Europe — said they had taken to contacting the National Security Council because the State Department does not return their calls or does not offer substantive answers when it does.

Mr. Tillerson, for example, recently shut down the office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan — whose role had been diminished since Richard Holbrooke had the job during President Barack Obama’s first term — and has yet to appoint an assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, at a time when the Taliban’s return and Pakistan’s instability are major concerns.

When he attended a series of recent meetings on Afghanistan, Mr. Tillerson was accompanied by only his chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin, who is a former United States Patent and Trademark official and technology executive with no diplomatic experience.

There is also no one in line for the Asia policy job, just when there is talk about whether the North Korea crisis will be defused by negotiation or steam toward conflict.

Through it all, Mr. Tillerson, a Texas native and an engineer by training, has remained publicly stoic, proceeding at his own pace, though colleagues from his Exxon days say they have seen little evidence he is finding much joy in the job.

Running one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, Mr. Tillerson had complete authority. At the State Department, he finds himself negotiating with other power centers — from a White House with conflicting factions and priorities to the Defense Department — and managing a bureaucracy that largely cringes at the president’s approach to the world. Some senior diplomats have resigned over the administration’s policies, and many have signed letters of protest.

Accustomed as he is to having the final word, it was clearly jarring for Mr. Tillerson, during a recent trip to Australia and New Zealand, to be out of sync with Mr. Trump’s tweets on the Qatar crisis. “I’m not involved in how the president constructs his tweets, when he tweets, why he tweets, what he tweets,” the secretary said.

Foreign governments do not know whether to believe Mr. Tillerson’s reassuring words or Mr. Trump’s incendiary statements. But there is also evidence of more substantive disagreements between Mr. Tillerson and the small cadre of White House officials who have taken a strong interest in setting Middle East policy, starting with Mr. Kushner.

In dealing with the Saudi leadership, which Mr. Tillerson knows well, Mr. Kushner argued for cultivating Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the 31-year-old son of King Salman, who was emerging as a rival to the crown prince at the time, Mohammed bin Nayef.

Mr. Tillerson warned against showing favoritism in the succession, and viewed the treatment of the young Prince Mohammed during a White House trip as too lavish. Mr. Kushner, it turned out, was betting on the right horse: The son displaced Mohammed bin Nayef last week as the crown prince, and will probably be the leader of Saudi Arabia for decades to come.

The rift widened when Mr. Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, argued for backing Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries that had imposed an embargo on Qatar, ostensibly to punish it for financing the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist groups. Mr. Tillerson, who had relationships in Qatar dating from his time as the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, argued for the United States to take a neutral position in the dispute in order to keep the Gulf Cooperation Council, a loose association of mostly Sunni Arab nations, together.

But the secretary’s efforts to play peacemaker were undercut by Mr. Trump’s statement. When the administration pressed Saudi Arabia and Egypt to draw up a list of demands for Qatar, a senior official said, Mr. Tillerson asked Qatar to do the same. Officials at the White House were nonplused.

Mr. Tillerson does have his supporters, such as James Jay Carafano, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Frankly, the biggest criticisms really amount to he works for Trump and he doesn’t act like Kerry or Clinton,” he said. “He doesn’t like pandering to the media, and he is perplexed by Trump’s tweeting. That’s pretty vapid stuff.”

But usually by this point in their tenure, secretaries of state have made their focus clear. Hillary Clinton focused on the empowerment of women; John Kerry focused on a nuclear deal with Iran and a failed effort at Middle East peace; and Condoleezza Rice made the spread of American democracy the theme of her term. If Mr. Tillerson has a larger vision beyond shrinking and reorganizing the State Department, he has offered no hint.

His rough beginning has led to a quiet effort by senior Republican officials from past administrations — including Henry A. Kissinger, Ms. Rice and Robert M. Gates, a former defense secretary — to reach out with advice. He has been told to lean more on the experience of career professionals, to become more confident in taking initiatives separate from a White House preoccupied by investigations and, above all, to move more quickly.

The closest Mr. Tillerson has come to articulating a strategic vision for his tenure came during a session with department employees in early May. In a freewheeling talk, operating without notes, Mr. Tillerson ran through each region of the world where the State Department is active — including the Middle East, Europe and Asia, touching on China and North Korea — asking how to “advance our interests in Afghanistan” and how to keep terrorism from spreading through North and Central Africa.

“Let’s talk first about my view of how you translate ‘America First’ into our foreign policy,” he said, and then went on to describe an era in which American economic and security interests would be paramount.

To many in the department, Mr. Tillerson’s speech was notable for what it did not include. Over the previous five presidencies, questions of how to use American influence to advance the rights of minorities around the world, to negotiate a new arms control deal or to set norms of behavior for nations that attack each other with cyberweapons had become the focus of American diplomacy. Not anymore.

And when Mr. Tillerson spoke of human rights, it was to caution that while the United States always treasures “freedom, human dignity, the way people are treated,” those values would often not be reflected in policies. Values, he warned, cannot be allowed to “create obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.”

The issue became pointed during a congressional hearing this month, when Mr. Tillerson conceded that during dealings with Russia’s leaders, he had never discussed the torture and murder of gay men in Chechnya. “Those are on our pending list,” he said.

When asked to specifically condemn such targeted attacks in Russia, he said, “That is our position globally.” And when pressed further, he snapped, “Last time I checked, Russia is part of the globe.”

To many State Department employees, Mr. Tillerson is something of a phantom who says little in staff meetings, rarely leaves his seventh-floor office — where he is surrounded by Ms. Peterlin and a small group of protective aides — and does not solicit their views.

Since he became secretary, the torrent of words that once flowed from the State Department in daily briefings, speeches and statements — helping to refine and set policy in embassies around the world — has slowed to a trickle. Mr. Tillerson has rarely held “background” briefings with reporters to explain his positions.

His reticence has become so well known that even the president gently ribbed him about it when the two were in Saudi Arabia, volunteering the secretary to conduct a briefing where no American reporters were present.

Mr. Tillerson’s aides say his approach is as refreshing as the new décor in the State Department’s seventh-floor offices, where the art and colors of the American West now hang, rather than paintings of long-dead diplomats.

“He thinks like a cowboy,” Mr. Tillerson’s strategic adviser, R. C. Hammond, said recently. Likening words to ammunition, Mr. Hammond added, “You carry a revolver with only six shots, and you don’t waste your bullets.”

This whole administration is just ridiculous.

[47of74]

I see former Sheriff Joe Arpaio (R-Douche) wanted Jeff Sessions to testify at his contempt trial.  Judge said nope.

Spoiler

A judge quashed the subpoena of Sessions because “his testimony is neither relevant nor meets the demanding standard required to compel the testimony of a high-ranking official.”

The prosecutors didn't want the Racist Keebler Elf and all around douchenozzle testifying.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Tillerson has only himself to blame"

Spoiler

Politico reports:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s frustrations with the White House have been building for months. Last Friday, they exploded.

The normally laconic Texan unloaded on Johnny DeStefano, the head of the presidential personnel office, for torpedoing proposed nominees to senior State Department posts and for questioning his judgment.

The story continued: “Tillerson also complained that the White House was leaking damaging information about him to the news media, according to a person familiar with the meeting.” (Well, someone leaked about him complaining about leaking so yes, the White House, which is supposed to reject anonymous sources, is using one or more to bloody its secretary of state.) “Above all, he made clear that he did not want DeStefano’s office to ‘have any role in staffing’ and ‘expressed frustration that anybody would know better’ than he about who should work in his department — particularly after the president had promised him autonomy to make his own decisions and hires, according to a senior White House aide familiar with the conversation.”

Tillerson is understandably frustrated dealing with a pack of inexperienced grudge holders who veto qualified candidates who have previously criticized the president. Nevertheless, he has only himself to blame for a host of reasons.

First, Tillerson must have known exactly what he was getting into when he signed up with a dilettante president who hired relatives and cronies. Surely he knew President Trump operates out of resentment and spite. He can hardly be surprised that Trump is acting like Trump and Trump’s minions are acting as advertised. He cannot complain that he was unaware of the prominence of the president’s son-in-law, who was given broad authority over foreign policy and possesses even less experience and sophistication in international diplomacy than Tillerson.

Second, Tillerson set the pattern of subservience by allowing the White House to veto as his deputy someone with superb qualifications and bipartisan support, Elliott Abrams. Once you roll over on that post, you’ve given the White House leverage.

Third, Tillerson has been excruciatingly slow in conducting his internal reorganization. He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he wouldn’t get around to filling many slots until next year. Both Democrats and Republicans were aghast.

Fourth, Tillerson took a job for which he was not remotely qualified and which demanded skills he never developed as chief executive of an oil company. His role now includes public diplomacy, but he shuns the press. His effectiveness depends on demonstrating the president’s support, but he ludicrously defends a budget that would eviscerate his department. And he wonders why he doesn’t have influence?

In sum, he’s being denied staff and budget. He is regularly undercut by the White House and in particular Jared Kushner. He has to play catch-up to the president’s errant tweets. In other words, he has less influence and visibility than millennial staffers. He has a choice: Put up with it or quit. And if he should do the latter, he’d do a great service by warning the country about the dangers of a shockingly ignorant commander in chief who foreign leaders can manipulate by appealing to his massive and fragile ego. He could explain the dangers of depriving the State Department of budget and staff at a time when threats are intensifying and multiplying. He could tell the country that Trump’s inability to concede that Russia, directed by Vladimir Putin, interfered with our election is indicative of a narcissist who puts his own emotional needs ahead of the country’s. He might even shine some light on Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s massive conflicts of interest and whether their international businesses drive policy choices.

Former State Department employees tell a similar story after visits to Foggy Bottom. “State is being quickly gutted. Offices closing; Sr. and mid-level career experts fleeing or being axed,” tweeted Max Bergmann. “Tillerson is now clearly one of worst Sec States in American history. Few have done more to weaken America.”

Come to think of it, Tillerson could do far more for his country by quitting and telling the truth than by remaining in a job in which his boss prevents him from succeeding. Does he really want the capstone of his career to be “marginalized as secretary of state”? Better to be known as “the patriot who had the courage to quit and sound the alarm.” And by the way, the Friday before a July 4 weekend is an excellent time to announce you are leaving and make one’s getaway.

Yeah, I don't feel sorry for him. He is contributing to the downfall of democracy.

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Tillerson has only himself to blame"

  Hide contents

Politico reports:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s frustrations with the White House have been building for months. Last Friday, they exploded.

The normally laconic Texan unloaded on Johnny DeStefano, the head of the presidential personnel office, for torpedoing proposed nominees to senior State Department posts and for questioning his judgment.

The story continued: “Tillerson also complained that the White House was leaking damaging information about him to the news media, according to a person familiar with the meeting.” (Well, someone leaked about him complaining about leaking so yes, the White House, which is supposed to reject anonymous sources, is using one or more to bloody its secretary of state.) “Above all, he made clear that he did not want DeStefano’s office to ‘have any role in staffing’ and ‘expressed frustration that anybody would know better’ than he about who should work in his department — particularly after the president had promised him autonomy to make his own decisions and hires, according to a senior White House aide familiar with the conversation.”

Tillerson is understandably frustrated dealing with a pack of inexperienced grudge holders who veto qualified candidates who have previously criticized the president. Nevertheless, he has only himself to blame for a host of reasons.

First, Tillerson must have known exactly what he was getting into when he signed up with a dilettante president who hired relatives and cronies. Surely he knew President Trump operates out of resentment and spite. He can hardly be surprised that Trump is acting like Trump and Trump’s minions are acting as advertised. He cannot complain that he was unaware of the prominence of the president’s son-in-law, who was given broad authority over foreign policy and possesses even less experience and sophistication in international diplomacy than Tillerson.

Second, Tillerson set the pattern of subservience by allowing the White House to veto as his deputy someone with superb qualifications and bipartisan support, Elliott Abrams. Once you roll over on that post, you’ve given the White House leverage.

Third, Tillerson has been excruciatingly slow in conducting his internal reorganization. He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he wouldn’t get around to filling many slots until next year. Both Democrats and Republicans were aghast.

Fourth, Tillerson took a job for which he was not remotely qualified and which demanded skills he never developed as chief executive of an oil company. His role now includes public diplomacy, but he shuns the press. His effectiveness depends on demonstrating the president’s support, but he ludicrously defends a budget that would eviscerate his department. And he wonders why he doesn’t have influence?

In sum, he’s being denied staff and budget. He is regularly undercut by the White House and in particular Jared Kushner. He has to play catch-up to the president’s errant tweets. In other words, he has less influence and visibility than millennial staffers. He has a choice: Put up with it or quit. And if he should do the latter, he’d do a great service by warning the country about the dangers of a shockingly ignorant commander in chief who foreign leaders can manipulate by appealing to his massive and fragile ego. He could explain the dangers of depriving the State Department of budget and staff at a time when threats are intensifying and multiplying. He could tell the country that Trump’s inability to concede that Russia, directed by Vladimir Putin, interfered with our election is indicative of a narcissist who puts his own emotional needs ahead of the country’s. He might even shine some light on Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s massive conflicts of interest and whether their international businesses drive policy choices.

Former State Department employees tell a similar story after visits to Foggy Bottom. “State is being quickly gutted. Offices closing; Sr. and mid-level career experts fleeing or being axed,” tweeted Max Bergmann. “Tillerson is now clearly one of worst Sec States in American history. Few have done more to weaken America.”

Come to think of it, Tillerson could do far more for his country by quitting and telling the truth than by remaining in a job in which his boss prevents him from succeeding. Does he really want the capstone of his career to be “marginalized as secretary of state”? Better to be known as “the patriot who had the courage to quit and sound the alarm.” And by the way, the Friday before a July 4 weekend is an excellent time to announce you are leaving and make one’s getaway.

Yeah, I don't feel sorry for him. He is contributing to the downfall of democracy.

And getting paid to do so by the American taxpayer... sigh.

[candygirl200413]

I will forever hate people who said a country needed to be ran like a business cause it will fuck us over. Remember he didn't want the job but did it anyway cause his wife said too

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s administration wants to hide colleges that have problems with sexual assault"

Spoiler

On a blisteringly hot day nearly four years ago, we and dozens of other student survivors of sexual assault descended on the Education Department’s plaza in Washington with a bullhorn. We carried boxes containing a petition with 200,000 signatures demanding that the agency responsible for enforcing Title IX — the federal civil rights law that protects student victims of sexual assault — actually do so. One of our demands was that the department release a list of the colleges and universities under investigation for sexual assault-related violations of Title IX.

With investigations kept secret, the public couldn’t understood the scale of the campus sexual assault problem or universities’ reluctance to address it directly, and students were left in the dark about investigations at their own schools. At Tufts University, for instance, individual student survivors had filed year after year the same complaints concerning mishandling of reports by the very same administrators — and had no idea the other student complainants existed, let alone that they were having the very same problems. At the University of Virginia, the Education Department had multiple investigations ongoing, but almost no one on campus knew, including the complainants.

Almost a year after our protest, the Obama administration finally relented and published its list of investigations, which the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights periodically updated. But on Tuesday, the Trump administration announced plans to hide it again.

Candice Jackson, acting assistant secretary of Education for Civil Rights, told a group of university lawyers that she considered the list we fought so hard for a “list of shame.” “Our job at OCR is to do our job,” she said. “Our job isn’t to threaten, punish, or facilitate drawing media or public attention.”

Jackson doesn’t seem to understand the purpose of her office or of government transparency. As we learned from our own grass roots research in the months before our 2013 protest, college students rarely even knew their schools were under investigation until we forced the government to disclose open cases. As a result, the Office of Civil Rights often missed the opportunity to hear from survivors with similar experiences to the complainant; because those survivors had no idea their schools were under investigation, they didn’t realize they should come forward to speak about how their own assaults were mishandled. Students, like those at Tufts, sometimes put time and money into filing duplicative, unnecessary complaints, wasting their own resources and the government’s. Department investigations dragged on for years — but no one knew it unless they were tapped into our informal network of student survivors.

The Office of Civil Rights’ job is to enforce federal law so students can learn regardless of who they are or where they come from. And yes, part of that responsibility is investigating and cracking down on schools that violate the law — for example, those that refuse to investigate reports of sexual assault or provide key accommodations, like housing changes and mental health care, to survivors. Part of that responsibility is making clear to schools that the Office of Civil Rights means business, so that administrators don’t think they can get away with violating students’ civil rights.

But that’s not the purpose of the list. By informing students and their families about schools under investigation, the Obama administration simply made accessible information to which the public is already entitled under the Freedom of Information Act, information crucial for survivors seeking help and change when their schools violate their rights. Thanks to the list, students know what to look out for on campus and, if they are mistreated, that they are not alone. Transparency also improves government enforcement by inviting students to contact the office about their experiences on investigated campuses.

The list is also essential for the public’s efforts to hold the department accountable. Jackson tells us she’s doing her job, but how can we know? (Recently, the National Women’s Law Center had to sue the department for its failure to provide records responsive to a FOIA request related to Title IX enforcement.) Jackson has been critical of the Obama administration’s delay in resolving complaints, but the only reason we knew about those delays was because of the list we pushed for it to release.

Jackson’s comments earlier this week offer a promise to university administrators: Under my watch, we’ll be nicer. We won’t embarrass you. We can all get along. But the government’s job isn’t to protect university administrators from public relations headaches; it’s to protect students. And if the department isn’t committed to that mission, we’ll be back on that plaza with boxes and boxes of signatures. We still have that bullhorn, and we know how to use it.

Just one more bad move by a bad administration.

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump’s administration wants to hide colleges that have problems with sexual assault"

  Reveal hidden contents

On a blisteringly hot day nearly four years ago, we and dozens of other student survivors of sexual assault descended on the Education Department’s plaza in Washington with a bullhorn. We carried boxes containing a petition with 200,000 signatures demanding that the agency responsible for enforcing Title IX — the federal civil rights law that protects student victims of sexual assault — actually do so. One of our demands was that the department release a list of the colleges and universities under investigation for sexual assault-related violations of Title IX.

With investigations kept secret, the public couldn’t understood the scale of the campus sexual assault problem or universities’ reluctance to address it directly, and students were left in the dark about investigations at their own schools. At Tufts University, for instance, individual student survivors had filed year after year the same complaints concerning mishandling of reports by the very same administrators — and had no idea the other student complainants existed, let alone that they were having the very same problems. At the University of Virginia, the Education Department had multiple investigations ongoing, but almost no one on campus knew, including the complainants.

Almost a year after our protest, the Obama administration finally relented and published its list of investigations, which the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights periodically updated. But on Tuesday, the Trump administration announced plans to hide it again.

Candice Jackson, acting assistant secretary of Education for Civil Rights, told a group of university lawyers that she considered the list we fought so hard for a “list of shame.” “Our job at OCR is to do our job,” she said. “Our job isn’t to threaten, punish, or facilitate drawing media or public attention.”

Jackson doesn’t seem to understand the purpose of her office or of government transparency. As we learned from our own grass roots research in the months before our 2013 protest, college students rarely even knew their schools were under investigation until we forced the government to disclose open cases. As a result, the Office of Civil Rights often missed the opportunity to hear from survivors with similar experiences to the complainant; because those survivors had no idea their schools were under investigation, they didn’t realize they should come forward to speak about how their own assaults were mishandled. Students, like those at Tufts, sometimes put time and money into filing duplicative, unnecessary complaints, wasting their own resources and the government’s. Department investigations dragged on for years — but no one knew it unless they were tapped into our informal network of student survivors.

The Office of Civil Rights’ job is to enforce federal law so students can learn regardless of who they are or where they come from. And yes, part of that responsibility is investigating and cracking down on schools that violate the law — for example, those that refuse to investigate reports of sexual assault or provide key accommodations, like housing changes and mental health care, to survivors. Part of that responsibility is making clear to schools that the Office of Civil Rights means business, so that administrators don’t think they can get away with violating students’ civil rights.

But that’s not the purpose of the list. By informing students and their families about schools under investigation, the Obama administration simply made accessible information to which the public is already entitled under the Freedom of Information Act, information crucial for survivors seeking help and change when their schools violate their rights. Thanks to the list, students know what to look out for on campus and, if they are mistreated, that they are not alone. Transparency also improves government enforcement by inviting students to contact the office about their experiences on investigated campuses.

The list is also essential for the public’s efforts to hold the department accountable. Jackson tells us she’s doing her job, but how can we know? (Recently, the National Women’s Law Center had to sue the department for its failure to provide records responsive to a FOIA request related to Title IX enforcement.) Jackson has been critical of the Obama administration’s delay in resolving complaints, but the only reason we knew about those delays was because of the list we pushed for it to release.

Jackson’s comments earlier this week offer a promise to university administrators: Under my watch, we’ll be nicer. We won’t embarrass you. We can all get along. But the government’s job isn’t to protect university administrators from public relations headaches; it’s to protect students. And if the department isn’t committed to that mission, we’ll be back on that plaza with boxes and boxes of signatures. We still have that bullhorn, and we know how to use it.

Just one more bad move by a bad administration.

Of course it does. When the Groper in Chief brags about grabbing and kissing women and grabbing them by their bits, what can you expect from his commissions?