Chris Hedges's Blog, page 216

American Cops Face No Repercussions for Their Islamophobia

“WELL, LOOK WHO THE DEMS HAVE AS A DEPUTY CHAIR!”

The message by Richard Crites, a sheriff’s deputy in Missouri, starts off like so many political posts on Facebook. Then there’s the kicker:

“A RAGHEAD MUSLIM.”

In New Jersey, prison guard Joseph Bonadio posted repeated insults about the Prophet Muhammad and shared memes of roasting pigs with the message “Happy Ramadan.” In Georgia, retired cop Claude Stevens Jr. railed against Muslims for months, posting conspiracy theories and Islamophobic memes.

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Bigoted Cops Show True Colors in Online Hate Groups



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They are among dozens of current and former American law enforcement officers whom Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting identified as members of Facebook groups dedicated to Islamophobia. With names such as “Veterans Against islamic Filth,” “PURGE WORLDWIDE (The Cure for the Islamic disease in your country)” and “Americans Against Mosques,” these groups serve as private forums to share bigoted messages about Muslims, and they have proven attractive for cops.

Reveal’s yearlong investigation found police officers across the country belonging to a wide spectrum of extremist groups on Facebook, such as Confederate groups filled with racist memes and conspiracies and groups run by the anti-government militias Oath Keepers and Three Percenters. Islamophobic behavior was notably brazen. While officers shared slur-filled jokes about African Americans, Latinos and the LGBTQ community behind the walls of closed groups, anti-Muslim comments often were posted on public pages for all to see.

“The problem with law enforcement officials engaging in this type of behavior is that it’s probably influencing the way in which they police in their communities,” said Madihha Ahussain, special counsel for anti-Muslim bigotry at the civil rights group Muslim Advocates. “If they hold these biases towards Muslims, we’re very deeply concerned about the ways in which that manifests itself when it comes to being a first responder or being somebody who is investigating crimes against Muslims.”

The findings come as hate crimes against American Muslims continue at historically high levels. Muslim places of worship across the country have been set on fire and had their windows broken. Islamophobes have left slabs of bacon and scrawled graffiti on the doorsteps of mosques. Muslims have been shot, stabbed and had their religious garments ripped off. They’ve been shouted at, kicked, threatened and spit on.

Islamic centers and places of worship across the country also have boosted security since the horrific attacks against two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, often asking local cops to stand guard during services.

Muslim Americans long have been the targets of discriminatory policing, most notably in New York City in the years after the 9/11 attacks. In 2018, the New York Police Department settled the last of three major lawsuits in which it was accused of spying on the local Muslim community for more than a decade, infiltrating mosques and creating a team of informants with the help of the CIA.

We notified nearly 150 departments about their officers’ behavior on Facebook and membership in extremist groups. Some departments launched immediate investigations, and one detective in Houston was fired for posting racist memes about African Americans, in violation of department policy.

However, other departments were unbothered by their officers’ social media activity. Some police leaders were angry that we even asked them about it.

Not a single department has said it disciplined an officer for Islamophobic posts or membership in an anti-Islam group.

‘This group is for those who wish to speak out about the evils of Islam’

We were able to identify cops in these groups by writing software to scour Facebook for connections between users who belonged to both extremist and law enforcement groups on the platform, then verifying the identities and professions of active-duty and retired officers. (Read more about our methodology here.)

Through that search, we found people such as Crites, a sworn member of the Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office in Missouri.

In addition to his 2018 “raghead Muslim” comment, which he used to introduce a news story about then-Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, Crites was a member of three different extremist Facebook groups, including one called “STOP OBAMA AND CRONIES : RADICAL LEFTIES, ISLAMISTS, MEDIA LIES,” which we joined. Inside the group, which was full of Islamophobic content, we saw Crites posting several times, including writing, “Stop Obama stop the Muslims.”

Lawrence County Sheriff Brad DeLay said Crites is a volunteer deputy but carries a gun and has arrest powers. Asked about Crites’ activity on Facebook, DeLay said he’s never heard any concerns from the community about his deputy’s work.

“I’m looking at disciplinary records now, and there aren’t any complaints,” he said.

DeLay wouldn’t provide us with those records, and Crites didn’t respond to numerous calls for comment.

Joseph Bonadio is a senior corrections officer for the New Jersey Department of Corrections. He also was a member of a group called “Infidel Brotherhood Worldwide.”

Islamophobic groups often use the word “infidel” as a dog whistle to attract people with similar views on Islam. Facebook is full of “infidel” groups, including “Any islamist insults infidels, I will put him under my feet,” “The Infidel Den – Anti Islam Coalition” and “Infidel Elite – Against Islam, by the Pen and/or Sword,” all of which count law enforcement officers as members.

Inside these groups, members often traffic in disproven theories that Muslims are invading the United States and plan to impose Sharia law and that this “Muslimification” already has happened across much of Europe.

Often, though, members just express their disgust with a religion practiced by about a quarter of the world’s population.

“The rabies that is islam being passed down from deluded parent to deluded and brainwashed child,” reads a typical civilian comment in “Infidel Brotherhood Worldwide.”

Bonadio, who works at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center, a prison in Woodbridge Township, New Jersey, hasn’t actually posted in the group. Instead, he posted openly anti-Muslim content on his public Facebook wall:

“Known fact Jesus is better then (sic) goat FUCKER Muhammad,” he posted in 2015.
“I love the smell of bacon on Ramadan … Smells like America,” reads a meme he posted in May, at the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
“Happy Ramadan,” he posted the same day, captioning a photo of a pig being roasted over a barbecue.

In addition to posting anti-Muslim content, Bonadio poked fun at the LGBTQ community, especially transgender people. He also has posted memes more than once that depict former first lady Michelle Obama as a man and questioned whether white Americans should be blamed for bringing slavery to the country.

After we sent screenshots of Bonadio’s Facebook activity to the New Jersey Department of Corrections, a spokesperson sent the following statement: “We are aware of the allegations referenced. These allegations will be investigated and appropriate disciplinary action will be taken, if warranted.”

Bonadio did not respond to a call for comment.

Many working police officers were careful to hide their identities on Facebook, using pseudonyms, not listing their place of work or sometimes claiming to work in nonexistent jobs. An officer in Chicago, for example, listed his job as “Bent Over at City of Chicago.” Several cops used variations of their real names, such as Texas State Trooper Kevin Lashlee, who called himself “KD Lash” on Facebook and posted in a group containing racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic content.

But retired law enforcement officers were far more brazen.

Claude Stevens Jr., who retired from the Waynesboro Police Department in Georgia in 2015, since has joined at least six closed anti-Muslim groups, including “DEATH TO ISLAM UNDERCOVER” and another named “Rage against the veil.”

Stevens’ personal Facebook page was awash with anti-Islamic memes, and he’s actively commented in at least two of the closed groups. For example, he wrote under a video of Islamic immigrants in Germany, “The Prophet Muhammad eat’s (sic) dog shit and is a follower of Satan/Allah” in March 2017.

When reached for comment, Stevens initially was defensive of his views. He called Islam “evil” and said America needs to be extremely wary of Muslim immigrants, who he claims seek to impose Sharia law in a Christian nation. However, he claimed that as a police officer, he always treated people fairly, no matter what their religion.

Asked how he could treat all people equally while at the same time posting about how Muslims are “filthy” and “animals,” he paused and said: “I would have to concede to you that I probably have to back off on my words and look at it differently.”

As a transit officer with the New York Police Department, John Intranuovo policed a city that’s home to more than 600,000 Muslims. Now that he’s retired, he has used a group called “Stop the War on Christianity and White America” to rail against Muslims.

Intranuovo had a simple reaction to a post about former President Barack Obama endorsing Amir Malik of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who was seeking election to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2018. “No muslims,” he wrote. In another comment, Intranuovo called Muslims “evil people.”

Intranuovo also was a member of two more anti-Muslim Facebook groups: “The Infidel Den – Anti Islam Coalition” and “THE VOICE OF THE AMERICAN INFIDELS,“ neither of which allowed us to join, but both of which contained openly anti-Islam sentiment in their public descriptions.

“This group is for those who wish to speak out about the evils of Islam. All members of this group want Islam removed from America,” reads the public description for “THE VOICE OF THE AMERICAN INFIDELS,” which can be viewed by anybody on Facebook.

‘These are law enforcement officers who are sworn to protect us’

Earlier this year, Facebook announced a big push against hate speech.

As part of founder Mark Zuckerberg’s pledge to turn around the social media behemoth, Facebook first promised to ban white nationalist and white supremacist content, then followed up by ousting several prominent purveyors of anti-Muslim rhetoric, including Milo Yiannopoulos and Laura Loomer. But anyone hoping these moves would mark an end to widespread hate speech on the platform was disappointed.

Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University in North Carolina who tracks hate groups on Facebook, frequently reports such groups and content to moderators. She said the social media platform acts only on reports of hateful speech, rather than proactively searching for content that violates policy. And even when groups and content are reported, Squire said, Facebook traditionally has been more accepting of “politicized hate” against Islam – that is, groups claiming to protest not Islam itself, but “radical Islam” or “creeping Sharia law.” Inside these groups, we found, slurs and hateful comments most often were directed at all Muslims in a blanket fashion.

“This horrifies me,” said Qasim Rashid, an attorney and author of several books on the Muslim experience in the United States. “These are law enforcement officers who are sworn to protect us. If a guy is in a group on Facebook called ‘Death to Islam’ or ‘Purge Islam as a disease,’ and they’re patrolling our neighborhoods and streets, then who are they really protecting?”

He said tropes linking Islam with terrorism or suggesting that Muslims plan to “take over” countries are unfair and misguided from the start.

“Terrorism has no religion. We’ve seen plenty of examples of so-called Christians who have committed mass shootings,” Rashid said. “If I started a page about ‘radical Christianity’ and started demonizing every Christian out there as a suspected ‘radical Christianist,’ I would be rightfully mocked and ridiculed and called a bigot.”

In a year of studying extremist groups on Facebook, we noticed how groups have adapted to content moderation practices on the platform. Openly racist groups such as those connected to the Ku Klux Klan don’t last very long on the site. The racist groups that survive have adopted the coded language typical of the alt-right movement or disguised themselves as Confederate history groups.

By contrast, Islamophobic groups are transparent in their intentions and even in their names. While in recent months Facebook has removed groups tied to white nationalist organizations such as the Proud Boys – like the group “Proud Boys Southern Chapter” – the social network continues to host groups that are openly hostile to Muslims, such as “DEATH TO ISLAM UNDERCOVER.” Every day, users post hateful content in these groups, often pledging violence against American Muslims.

Facebook denies treating anti-Muslim hate, in whatever guise, differently from other forms of hate speech.

“Our policies against extremist content/organized hate groups are longstanding. Our Community Standards are clear that we don’t allow hate groups to maintain a presence on Facebook,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

Ahussain said Muslim Advocates is just one of many advocacy groups pushing Facebook and other social media companies to take hate speech more seriously.

“Facebook provides a platform and a space where people feel like they can say these things,” she said.

That’s particularly true when it comes to hate speech directed against Muslims, Squire said. Islamophobia on Facebook can be a gateway to other forms of intolerance, she said.

The majority of U.S. hate crimes motivated by religious bias are anti-Semitic, and Reveal’s investigation found plenty of anti-Semitic activity in private groups. But the public nature of the Islamophobic activity on the platform resonates with Squire’s observation from years of monitoring Facebook: that anti-Muslim hate speech is “the last accepted form of bigotry in America.”

Researchers Daneel Knoetze and Michael Dailey contributed to this story. It was edited by Andrew Donohue and Matt Thompson.

Will Carless can be reached at  wcarless@revealnews.org, and Michael Corey can be reached at mcorey@revealnews.org. Follow Carless on Twitter: @willcarless.

Watch Kamala Harris Dismantle Joe Biden’s Record on Race

Sen. Kamala Harris directly confronted Joe Biden over his civil rights record during Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, highlighting the former vice president’s opposition to school busing as a senator in the 1970s and his fond recollection of the “civility” of notorious segregationists.

After saying it was “hurtful” to hear Biden offer kind words earlier this month about two senators who “built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country”—James O. Eastland and Herman Talmadge—Harris invoked “a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day.”

“And that little girl was me,” Harris said.

“So I will tell you that, on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats,” added the senator from California. “We have to take it seriously. We have to act swiftly.”

Watch the full exchange:

Biden responded by accusing Harris of mischaracterizing his record, claiming he “did not oppose busing in America.”

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“What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed,” Biden said.

But critics were quick to poke holes in the former vice president’s account of his past.

“Biden’s claim tonight that he only opposed federally mandated busing and did not generally oppose ‘busing in America’ was a flagrant misrepresentation of his position in the ’70s and ’80s,” tweeted CNN reporter Daniel Dale. “He’d made crystal clear he opposed busing as a concept, as a matter of principle.”

Biden’s remarks on busing in the 1970s were generally very unequivocal — “I oppose busing. It’s an asinine concept.” “A bankrupt concept.” “Busing does not work.” He expressed pride for making anti-busing sentiment “respectable” among liberals.

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 28, 2019

Responding to Biden’s claim that he only opposed busing mandated by the federal government, Harris again highlighted her personal experience, noting that she “was part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California public schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education,” the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

There was a little girl in California who was bussed to school. That little girl was me. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/XKm2xP1MDH

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 28, 2019

“There was a failure of states to integrate public schools in America… So that’s where the federal government must step in,” said Harris. “That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. That’s why we need to pass the Equality Act. That’s why we need to pass the [Equal Rights Amendment], because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people.”

Fiery Second Democratic Debate: Race, Age, Health Care and Trump

MIAMI—Democratic divisions over race, age and ideology surged into public view in Thursday night’s presidential debate, a prime-time clash punctuated by a heated exchange between former Vice President Joe Biden and California Sen. Kamala Harris.

It was one of several moments that left the 76-year-old Biden, who entered the night as his party’s fragile front-runner, on the defensive as he worked to convince voters across America that he’s still in touch with the Democratic Party of 2020 — and best-positioned to deny President Donald Trump a second term.

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“I do not believe you are a racist,” Harris said to Biden, though she described his record of working with Republican segregationist senators on non-race issues as “hurtful.”

Biden called Harris’ criticism “a complete mischaracterization of my record.” He declared, “I ran because of civil rights” and later accused the Trump administration of embracing racism.

The debate marked an abrupt turning point in a Democratic primary in which candidates have largely tiptoed around each other, focusing instead on their shared desire to beat Trump. But the debate revealed just how deep the fissures are within the Democratic Party eight months before primary voting begins.

Thursday’s debate, like the one a night earlier, gave millions of Americans their first peek inside the Democrats’ unruly 2020 season.

The showdown featured four of the five strongest candidates — according to early polls, at least. Those are Biden, Sanders, Pete Buttigieg of Indiana and Harris. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who debated Wednesday night, is the fifth.

There are so many candidates lining up to take on Trump that they do not all fit on one debate stage — or even two. Twenty Democrats debated on national television this week in two waves of 10, while a handful more were left out altogether.

The level of diversity on display was unprecedented for a major political party in the United States. The field features six women, two African Americans, one Asian American and two men under 40, one of them openly gay.

Yet in the early days of the campaign, two white septuagenarians are leading the polls: Biden and Vermont Sen. Sanders.

Thursday’s slate of candidates — and the debate itself — highlighted the unprecedented diversity of the Democratic Party’s 2020 class.

South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a 37-year-old gay former military officer, is four decades younger than Sanders, and has been framing his candidacy as a call for generational change in his party. Harris is the only African American woman to qualify for the presidential debate stage. Any of the three women featured Thursday night would be the first ever elected president.

Buttigieg faced tough questions about a racially charged recent police shooting in his city in which a white officer shot and killed a black man, Eric Logan.

Buttigieg said an investigation was underway, and he acknowledged the underlying racial tensions in his city and others. “It’s a mess,” he said plainly. “And we’re hurting.”

One of the lesser-known candidates on stage, California Rep Eric Swalwell, called on Buttigieg to fire his police chief, even though the investigation was only beginning.

Swalwell also took a swipe at Biden’s advanced age. Either Biden or Sanders would be the oldest president ever elected.

“Joe Biden was right when he said it was time to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans 32 years ago,” Swalwell jabbed.

Biden responded: “I’m still holding on to that torch.”

The party’s broader fight over ideology played a back seat at times to the racial and generational divisions. But calls to embrace dramatic change on immigration, health care and the environment were not forgotten.

Sanders slapped at his party’s centrist candidates, vowing to fight for “real change.”

Biden downplayed his establishment leanings. For example, the former vice president, along with the other candidates on stage, raised his hand to say his health care plan would provide coverage for immigrants in the country illegally.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper predicted that an aggressive lurch to the left on key policies would ultimately hurt Democrats’ quest to defeat Trump.

“If we don’t clearly define we are not socialists, the Republicans are going to come at us every way they can and call us socialists,” he warned.

Others on the stage Thursday night included Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Michael Bennet of Colorado, New York businessman Andrew Yang and author and social activist Marianne Williamson.

The showdown played out in Florida, a general election battleground that could well determine whether Trump wins a second term next year.

Biden sought to sidestep the intraparty divisions altogether, training his venom on Trump.

“Donald Trump thinks Wall Street built America. Ordinary middle-class Americans built America,” said the former vice president. He added: “Donald Trump has put us in a horrible situation. We do have enormous income inequality.”

Biden’s strategy is designed to highlight his status as the front-runner, and as such, the Democrat best positioned to take down the president at the ballot box. Above any policy disagreement, Democratic voters report that nothing matters more than finding a candidate who can beat Trump.

Their first round of debates is finished, but the real struggle is just beginning for most of the candidates.

All will work aggressively to leverage their debate performance and the related media attention to their advantage in the coming days. There is a real sense of urgency for more than a dozen candidates who fear they may not reach donor and polling thresholds to qualify for subsequent debates.

Should they fail to qualify, and many will fail, this week’s debates may have marked the high point for their personal presidential ambitions.

___

Peoples reported from Washington.

House Sends Trump $4.6B Border Bill, Yielding to Senate

WASHINGTON — The Democratic-controlled House voted Thursday to send President Donald Trump a bipartisan, Senate-drafted, $4.6 billion measure to care for migrant refugees detained at the southern border, capping a Washington skirmish in which die-hard liberals came out on the losing end in a battle with the White House, the GOP-held Senate and Democratic moderates.

The emergency legislation, required to ease overcrowded, often harsh conditions at U.S. holding facilities for migrants seeking asylum, mostly from Central American nations like Honduras and El Salvador, passed by a bipartisan 305-102 vote. Trump has indicated he’ll sign it into law.

“A great job done by all!” Trump tweeted from his overseas trip.

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As Immigrant Deaths Pile Up, We Need to Find Our Moral Compass



by Sonali Kolhatkar

Ninety-five Democrats opposed the bill, reluctantly brought to a vote by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., after her plan to further strengthen rules for treatment of migrant refugees ran into intractable opposition from Republican lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence. Many moderate Democrats split with Pelosi as well, undercutting her efforts, which faded shortly after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he would swiftly reject them.

The legislation contains more than $1 billion to shelter and feed migrants detained by the border patrol and almost $3 billion to care for unaccompanied migrant children who are turned over the Department of Health and Human Services. It rejects an administration request for additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention beds, however, and contains provisions designed to prevent federal immigration agents from going after immigrants living in the country illegally who seek to care for unaccompanied children.

The funding is urgently needed to prevent the humanitarian emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border from worsening. The government had warned that money would run out in a matter of days.

The Senate bill passed Wednesday by an 84-8 vote, with Democrats there pleased with the deal they cut with Republicans controlling the chamber.

The measure was initially only reluctantly accepted by the White House — which complained about elimination of the request for detention bed for immigrants facing removal from the U.S. — but GOP support grew after the measure presented an opportunity to outmaneuver Pelosi. Just seven Republicans opposed the bill.

“We could have done so much better,” Pelosi said in a floor speech. Earlier, Pelosi pushed a plan to ping-pong the Senate-passed bill right back across the Capitol with provisions requiring more stringent care requirements for detained migrant families and other steps. But confronted with splintering unity in the Democratic rank and file and intractable opposition from McConnell, Pelosi changed course.

Pence and Pelosi had an hour-long conversation on the legislation Thursday as the White House and Republicans kept pounding the message that the only way forward on the long-sought legislation was to pass the Senate bill.

Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short described the call as friendly and productive. Pelosi, a devout Catholic, appealed to Pence’s sense of faith.

Pelosi presented an effective case that House Democrats wanted more, Short said, but the vice president stressed that with the bipartisan vote in Senate and funding running out, now was not the time to be reopening the bill.

The leaders of the House Progressive Caucus, which includes almost half of House Democrats, immediately issued a statement calling the Senate bill — which had the backing of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. — “entirely insufficient to protect vulnerable children in our care.”

“Standing up for human rights requires more than providing money,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.

Thursday’s outcome was a victory for McConnell, who vowed that the GOP-held Senate would kill any “partisan” House changes that the Democratic-controlled House passed, and he appeared to hold a strong hand. All sides agreed that Congress wouldn’t leave for its Independence Day recess until the measure was passed in some form.

“The United States Senate is not going to pass a border funding bill that cuts the money for ICE and the Department of Defense. It’s not going to happen. We already have our compromise,” McConnell said. He called the Senate bill “the only game in town.”

McConnell said the White House might support making some changes administratively — which have less than the force of law — to address some Democratic concerns.

In fact, Pence agreed that lawmakers would be notified within 24 hours when a child died in custody, said people familiar with his call with Pelosi. The vice president also agreed to the 90-day time limit for migrant children to be housed in influx facilities.

Meanwhile, pressure built on lawmakers whose constituents are upset by accounts of brutal conditions for detained children. And with lawmakers eager to break for the 10-day July 4 recess, internal pressure built on Democrats to wrap it all up quickly.

“The Administration sent its request for emergency funding eight weeks ago, but there was no action,” said Sarah Sanders, outgoing White House press secretary. “We have already negotiated a broadly supported bipartisan funding bill. It is time for House Democrats to pass the Senate bill and stop delaying funding to deal with this very real humanitarian crisis.”

Lawmakers’ sense of urgency to provide humanitarian aid was amplified by recent reports of conditions in a windowless Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, where more than 300 infants and children were being housed. Many were kept there for weeks and were caring for each other in conditions that included inadequate food, water and sanitation.

The Border Patrol reported apprehending nearly 133,000 people last month — including many Central American families — as monthly totals have begun topping 100,000 for the first time since 2007.

At her weekly news conference, Pelosi choked back tears when asked about an Associated Press photo of a migrant father and daughter killed crossing the Rio Grande River as she pushed for stronger protections in a border crisis funding bill.

Pelosi told reporters Thursday she’s a “lioness” when it comes to children. She called it a “shame that this should be the face of America around the world.”

___

AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

As Immigrant Deaths Pile Up, We Need to Find Our Moral Compass

Nearly four years ago, the devastating photos of a Syrian toddler named Alan Kurdi, whose little body had washed ashore in Turkey, shocked the world. Kurdi’s story was tragically typical—his family had fled the Syrian war and attempted to cross the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Greece. All of Kurdi’s siblings and his mother died while crossing. Only his father survived.

Today, the photo of the bodies of Oscar Alberto Martínez and his two-year-old daughter, Angie Valeria, who drowned on the U.S.-Mexico border while crossing the Rio Grande, offers a heartbreaking analogy to Kurdi’s story. The two Salvadorans were forced to wait in Mexico, as per President Donald Trump’s demand, after they escaped their home country to try to seek asylum in the U.S.

Just as artists, activists and politicians the world over memorialized Kurdi’s death as a reminder of the injustice of the Syrian war and the barriers facing refugees, the deaths of Martinez and Valeria ought to serve as a reminder of the humanitarian catastrophes unfolding in Central America and driving large numbers of refugees northward.

Immigrants, including children, are suffering abuse and death on all sides of this battle for migration, and at nearly every step their harsh treatment is attributable to U.S. policies. The violence in their countries that is spurring northward migration stems from U.S. intervention in Central America. Coups such as the 1954 ousting of democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, as well as the removal only ten years ago of President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, are a signature part of Washington’s policies. Writing in the Guardian, reporter Julian Borger concluded, “The families in the migrant caravans trudging towards the US border are trying to escape a hell that the US has helped to create.”

Central American refugees are also facing abuse in Mexico, where the Trump administration has insisted that they be detained. An Associated Press report about Mexico’s largest detention center just north of its border with Guatemala found the facility to be “sorely overcrowded and filthy,” with “alleged repeated abusive treatment by agents tasked with running it.” Trump has threatened Mexico with harsh tariffs over the border crossings of Central Americans into the U.S. through Mexico.

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Farther north, at the U.S.-Mexico border, deaths like those of Martinez and Valeria are a tragically routine occurrence. On the same day that the father and daughter perished, three young children and a 20-year-old woman were also found lifeless from what appeared to be dehydration and excessive heat. The Texas Civil Rights Project placed the blame for the border deaths squarely at the feet of the Trump administration, saying, “When the government creates policies that make it harder to cross the border safely, people die. Children die.”

And here in the U.S., conditions facing immigrant detainees, particularly children, have made headlines in recent days with disturbing reports from Border Patrol facilities in Clint, Texas, which told of “dangerous overcrowding” and a total lack of access to basic hygiene for children as young as one year old. Children remained locked in cages, suffered from the flu with no treatment, and older children were tasked with caring for younger ones in what can only be described as a “concentration camp” environment. Although the children were moved out of the facility after the outcry, about 100 were relocated back to the same facility just days later. Another detention center, in Calexico, Calif., was found to be operating in a similarly dangerous fashion. In May, reports emerged of migrants needing medical attention being shackled while receiving treatment. So far, at least seven children have died in U.S. custody.

For those who remain outside of U.S. custody, the looming threat of deportation raids at Trump’s behest by the dreaded Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has generated mass fear.

There are countless historical analogies of Trump’s persecution of immigrants. Trump has used language reminiscent of Nazi Germany in that regime’s pogrom against Jews in claiming that the U.S. “is full,” and that there is no room for immigrants. His administration has detained immigrants in the same facility in Oklahoma that once housed 700 people of Japanese origin during World War II. In fact, a year before the 2016 election, Trump could not even bring himself to denounce the internment of 100,000 Japanese, saying in a 2015 interview, “I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer.”

Rather than take clear moral positions against the appalling mistreatment of immigrants, some of Trump’s supporters have decided to engage in semantics to insist that there are no concentration camps in the U.S. They understand the power of language to reflect on past horrors. For example, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen maintains that because Trump’s camps are not filling with the “screams of the dying,” they do not deserve the term “concentration camps.”

While the president and his supporters clearly lack the moral compass to recognize the abuse of human beings as wrong, much of the rest of the nation does not. Anna Lind-Guzik, writing in Vox, said, “I’m a Jewish historian. Yes, we should call border detention centers ‘concentration camps.’ ” She added, “It isn’t just accurate. It’s necessary.”

Some politicians have also taken a clear stand. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the term “concentration camps” to describe detention centers in mid-June and came under intense fire for it. Democratic presidential candidates such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, while gearing up for a debate in Miami this week, visited a nearby detention center in Homestead, calling attention to Trump’s cruelty toward immigrants. Others, like former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, responded to the photo of Martinez and Valeria’s lifeless bodies by saying unequivocally, “Trump is responsible for these deaths.”

Meanwhile, employees of the online furniture seller Wayfair are protesting their company’s decision to fulfill orders for detention centers holding migrants. One employee said to the press, “We’re walking out in protest of our leadership’s decision to sell to reprehensible concentration camps. … We want to make it clear that this is not a political issue—it’s a humanitarian issue, and we will not back down.” In using the term “concentration camps,” the workers are showcasing their humanity and their unequivocal stand on the side of morality.

Even Ravelry, a popular online knitting and crocheting website that I have used, has taken a stand. In a statement, the website eloquently and clearly explained which side it was on, saying, “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.”

To Trump and his supporters, immigrants are not human. Dehumanization is the first step toward exclusion, persecution and mass abuse. America needs to embrace Ravelry’s courage to articulate that white supremacy and Trump are no longer welcome and that there is no room in America for fascism.

Why Are Democrats Afraid to End Private Health Insurance?

Voters from both sides of the aisle are starting to support the idea of national health insurance, or Medicare for all, but just two of the ten candidates on stage for the first Democratic debate—Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren—were willing to say they’d abolish private insurance. Another candidate, Beto O’Rourke, had previously expressed support for national health insurance, and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., had been a co-sponsor of a Medicare for all bill. The rest were firmly against it.

According to a June Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 56% of Americans support a national health care plan, i.e., Medicare for all. Two 2018 polls, from Hill-HarrisX and Reuters-Ipsos found that nearly 80% of respondents supported the concept, although as the Kaiser poll indicates, many Americans are confused about the details, such as whether premiums, deductibles and co-pays would still exist, and if so, whether employers or individuals would pay for them.

Perhaps it’s that confusion that made eight candidates so timid. As Dylan Scott explains in Vox, “employer-sponsored insurance is one of the biggest challenges for single-payer health care.” As many as 150 million people get their insurance from their employers, Scott continues, and under the bill put forth by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., they’d be moved to a government-sponsored plan within a few years of the bill’s passage.

Democrats who want to keep private insurance argue that, as Scott writes, “it’s too big a political risk to disrupt health insurance for half the population.” Instead, he says, they’d prefer “Medicare ‘for all who want it’ or a public option for Obamacare’s marketplaces, allowing more people to voluntarily buy into a government plan, but wouldn’t make it mandatory.”

In the past, Elizabeth Warren has been more muted in her support for a national plan, telling The New York Times in its candidate survey that there are multiple paths to getting to Medicare for all. On Wednesday night, Warren was direct: “Look at the business model of an insurance company,” she said. “It’s to bring in as many dollars as they can in premiums and to pay out as few dollars as possible for your health care. That leaves families with rising premiums, rising co-pays, and fighting with insurance companies to try to get the health care that their doctors say that they and their children need.”

Beto O’Rourke, who, as Scott points out, previously supported Medicare for all, said Wednesday that he now supports the Medicare for America bill that would keep private insurance but would allow Americans to join a government plan if they’d prefer. He was challenged by Bill de Blasio, the only other candidate besides Warren to commit to abandoning private insurance. De Blasio said, “Congressman O’Rourke, it’s not working for tens of millions of Americans when you talk about the premiums and the out-of-pocket expenses.” The New York City mayor then asked, “How can you defend a system that is not working?”

Cory Booker declined to raise his hand to say he’d abolish private insurance. In fact, he remained light on details for anything health care-related, saying only that “Every single day I will fight to give people more access and affordable cost until we get to every American having health care.”

He, and any of the 20-plus Democrats running for president, may not be able to remain vague much longer. Among Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents, another KFF poll shows that 87% of those groups think it is “very important” for Democratic presidential candidates to talk about health care during their debates.

The second debate is scheduled for Thursday night.

Alabama Woman Charged in Fetal Death as Shooter Goes Free

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — An Alabama woman whose fetus died after she was shot in a fight has been charged with manslaughter, while the woman accused of shooting her has been freed.

AL.Com reports that 28-year-old Marshae Jones was indicted by the Jefferson County grand jury Wednesday. She was five months pregnant when 23-year-old Ebony Jemison shot her in the stomach during a December altercation regarding the fetus’s father.

Jemison was initially charged with manslaughter, but the same grand jury declined to indict her after police said an investigation determined Jones started the fight, and Jemison ultimately fired the fatal shot in self-defense.

Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid said at the time of the shooting that “the only true victim” was the fetus, who was unnecessarily brought into a fight and was “dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm.”

The Bessemer Cutoff District Attorney’s Office did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

Advocates for women’s rights expressed outrage.

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said women across the country have been prosecuted for manslaughter or murder for having an abortion or experiencing a miscarriage. She said Alabama currently leads the nation in charging women for crimes related to their pregnancies. She said hundreds have been prosecuted for running afoul of the state’s “chemical endangerment of a child” statute by exposing their embryo or fetus to controlled substances.

But this is the first time she’s heard of a pregnant woman being charged after getting shot.

“This takes us to a new level of inhumanity and illegality towards pregnant women,” Paltrow said. “I can’t think of any other circumstance where a person who themselves is a victim of a crime is treated as the criminal.”

Jones’ arrest also drew criticism from the Yellowhammer Fund, which raises money to help women have access to abortions.

“The state of Alabama has proven yet again that the moment a person becomes pregnant their sole responsibility is to produce a live, healthy baby and that it considers any action a pregnant person takes that might impede in that live birth to be a criminal act,” said Amanda Reyes, the group’s director.

The GOP’s Power Grabs Grow Bolder by the Day

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on two cases highlighting the collision between partisan power grabs and setting the ground rules for two of the most important elections in America—those for U.S. House and state legislative chambers.

One ruling concerns whether the Trump administration can add a question to the 2020 census that asks if anyone residing in that address is not a U.S. citizen. The other concerns whether hyper-partisanship is unconstitutional when state legislatures run by a single party draw electoral districts to maximize their party’s likelihood of winning elections.

Both cases pull back the curtain on political power plays that are built on segregating the public to determine which major party is more likely to win office, and which slices of society have elected representatives with power to act on their behalf. The Republican Party, more so than Democrats, has used the bluntest tactics on these fronts to shore up their power in recent years—and in anticipation of the decade beginning in 2020. Whether the U.S. Supreme Court will act to rebalance excessive partisanship is an open question. Most legal scholars are expecting the court’s conservative majority to side with the Republican Party.

Why the Census Question Counts

The Trump administration’s addition of the citizenship question to the census has become increasingly controversial as disclosures have revealed its partisan motives. Documents from Republican Party strategists that were not part of the Supreme Court case show the addition of the question is a deliberate attempt to undercount non-whites residing in mostly blue states. That undercount could shrink those states’ House delegations and cut into their federal subsidies throughout the decade following 2020. Academics estimate that 8 percent of affected populations could be overlooked because many households with visa-less occupants will not answer the survey.

How can one know the administration’s intentions? Information found on the computer files of a deceased GOP gerrymandering expert said that adding the citizenship question would boost GOP electoral power while offsetting the national trend of non-whites becoming the majority of residents in many states. (A federal appellate court this week sent the case back to a lower court for additional fact-finding based on these new documents.)

The citizenship question fight has remarkably cynical details. The administration has claimed that it needed to ask about citizenship to protect the voting rights of minorities, when, in reality, it is seeking to suppress representation of minority communities.

This gambit is part of a larger trend, as seen in the citizenship fight and other recent incidents, that Republicans apparently do not care how ruthless they are so long as they hold political power. This is not to say that Democrats are angels. The gerrymandering case awaiting a Supreme Court ruling Thursday comes from a singular blue state power grab in Maryland. (The court did not act in previous GOP extreme gerrymandering cases, where any censure would have affected the political maps in numerous red states.) But the national pattern of excessive partisanship lies with the GOP.

Party Before State and Country

Last Friday, the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin, which has a narrow conservative majority, ruled that laws passed after the 2018 election to undermine the power of an incoming Democratic governor, Tony Evers, were legal. The state court’s flouting of the separation of powers between different government branches was not unique. In North Carolina, a similar power grab unfolded after voters in that red state elected a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, in November 2016.

There are other examples that are more anecdotal—or possibly pending. Atop this list is Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying that he would confirm any U.S. Supreme Court nominee in 2020—a presidential election year—after blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland by then-President Obama in 2016; McConnell said it was not proper to consider a high court nominee in a presidential election year. President Trump keeps saying that he should extend his term to offset the investigation into his 2016 presidential campaign’s collusion with Russian agents.

But more seriously, the White House has exposed the GOP’s long-term strategy in its legal briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court over the citizenship question and the census. The basic strategy is to keep narrowing the metrics that determine how political power is allocated in the U.S. political system—in states and Congress.

Specifically, the Justice Department said that if states want to start drawing legislative districts only based on eligible voters who live there—called the CVAP or “citizen voting age population”—that would be fine. “That also would make any injury [to uncounted populations] not fairly traceable to the federal government,” the brief said, as highlighted on ElectionLawBlog.org. That quote relies on a states’ rights view of federal government—a state should supersede national laws and standards when it wants.

The blog’s publisher, UC Irvine election law professor Rick Hasen, added this headline, which sums up what’s going on: “DOJ Signals That If States Want to Start Drawing Legislative Districts on the Basis of Equal Numbers of Eligible Voters Not People (Which Will Shift Power to Republican Party and Against Hispanics), Trump Administration Will Support It.”

Thus, the citizenship question is the tip of a larger iceberg. If only the CVAP is counted, who else is excluded? Besides non-citizens, children and teenagers under 18—until they become eligible to vote—would not be counted. In short, this approach would be a return to the country’s founding era, when the government mostly served selected classes: typically white male property owners.

Fast-forward to today, and these GOP electorate-shaping strategies are serious power plays to preserve Republican power as the nation’s demographics shift toward a non-white majority society—which is seen as favoring Democrats. Many experts have tracked the anti-voter tactics, which are not new but have been more aggressively embraced by Republicans since Obama’s election in 2008.

The extreme partisan redistricting that followed the 2010 census, almost exclusively in red states, drew state legislative and U.S. House districts where Republicans had an average starting line lead of 8 percent among voters who reliably turn out for every election. The GOP achieved that advantage by drawing districts with boundaries that segregated Democratic Party strongholds, either cracking or packing blue voter population centers.

The gerrymanders created new red super-majority state legislatures, and House delegations led this decade’s right-wing fights against health care reform, reproductive rights, climate change and more. These legislatures also adopted stricter voter ID laws, which peeled off a few more points from perceived blue voter cohorts in typical election cycles. Last November’s federal midterm elections were not average elections, however, with some of the highest turnout rates in decades. As a result, it is not surprising that the GOP continues to seek ways to undermine opposition voters.

Thus, there is a potential citizenship question that could result in blue states like California losing House seats and federal funds. The Trump administration further embraces only counting the citizen voting age population, to further winnow representation. Meanwhile, conservative majorities on state supreme courts are becoming more brazen. The courts, which comprise the government branch that is intended to check and balance legislative and executive power, are instead ignoring electoral results and doing whatever is necessary to entrench Republican power.

The big picture goes beyond Trump and 2020. One of the two major parties is acting with increasing ruthlessness to preserve its power, regardless of changing demographics, election results and previously stated stances (i.e., McConnell on reviewing Supreme Court nominees). As time marches on, this trend probably will worsen—as more threats to Republican rule emerge.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Ralph Nader: Who Will Go After Trump’s Corporate Socialism?

Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election strategy is to connect his potential Democratic opponents with “socialism.” Trump plans to use this attack on the Democrats even if Senator Bernie Sanders, who proudly calls himself a “democratic socialist,” doesn’t become the presidential nominee (Sanders has been decisively re-elected in Vermont).

Senator Elizabeth Warren is distancing herself from the socialist “label.” She went so far as to tell the New England Council “I am a capitalist to my bones.”

Sanders and Warren are not what they claim to be. They are both updating Roosevelt’s New Deal and more closely resemble the Social Democrats that have governed western European democracies for years, delivering higher standards of living than that experienced by Americans.

“The gigantic corporations have been built with the thralldom of deep debt—corporate debt to fund stock buybacks (while reporting record profits), consumer debt, student loan debt, and, of course, government debt caused by drastic corporate and super-rich tax cuts. Many trillions of dollars have been stolen from future generations.”

The original doctrine of socialism meant government ownership of the means of production—heavy industries, railroads, banks, and the like. Nobody in national politics today is suggesting such a takeover. As one quipster put it, “How can Washington take ownership of the banks when the banks own Washington?”

Confronting Trump on the “socialism” taboo can open up a great debate about the value of government intervention for the good of the public. Sanders can effectively argue that people must choose either democratic socialism or the current failing system of corporate socialism. That choice is not difficult. Such an American democratic socialism could provide almost all of the long overdue solutions this country needs: full more efficient Medicare for all; tuition-free education; living wages; stronger unions; a tax system that works for the people; investments in infrastructure and public works; reforms for a massive, runaway military budget; the end of most corporate welfare; government promotion of renewable energies; and the end of subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power.

In my presidential campaigns I tried to make corporate socialism—also called corporate welfare or crony capitalism—a major issue. Small business is capitalism—free to go bankrupt—while corporate capitalism—free to get bailouts from Washington —is really a form of corporate socialism. This point about a corporate government was documented many years ago in books such as America, Inc. (1971) by Morton Mintz and Jerry Cohen.

Now, it is even easier to make the case that our political economy is largely controlled by giant corporations and their political toadies. Today the concentration of power and wealth is staggering. Just six capitalist men have wealth to equal the wealth of half of the world’s population.

The Wall Street collapse of 2008-2009 destroyed eight million jobs, lost trillions of dollars in pension and mutual funds, and pushed millions of families to lose their homes. Against this backdrop, the U.S. government used trillions of taxpayer dollars to bail out, in various ways, the greedy, financial giants, whose reckless speculating caused the collapse.

In May 2009, the moderate Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, said: “The banks—hard to believe when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created—are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”

Is there a single federal government agency or department that can say its most powerful outside influence is NOT corporate? Even the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board are under more corporate power than union power.

Who better than Trump, on an anti-socialist fantasy campaign kick, can call attention to the reality that Big Business controls the government and by extension controls the people?  In September 2000, a Business Week poll found over 70 percent of people agreeing that big business has too much control over their lives (this was before the horrific corporate crimes and scandals of the past two decades). Maybe that is why support in polls for “socialism” against “capitalism” in the U.S. is at a 60 year high.

People have long experienced American-style “socialism.” For example, the publicly owned water and electric utilities, public parks and forests, the Postal Service, public libraries, FDIC guarantees of bank deposits (now up to $250,000), Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, etc.

What the public is not sufficiently alert to is that Big Business has been profitably taking over control, if not outright ownership, of these public assets.

In the new book, Banking on the People, by Ellen Brown, readers can get an idea of the way large banks, insurers, and the giant shadow banking system—money market funds, hedge funds, mortgage brokers, and other unregulated financial intermediaries—speculate and shift deep risk and their failures onto Uncle Sam. These corporate predators gouge customers, and, remarkably, show a deep aversion for productive investment as if people matter.

Moreover, they just keep developing new, ever riskier, multi-tiered instruments (eg. derivatives) to make money from money through evermore complex, abstract, secret, reckless, entangled, globally destabilizing, networks. Gambling with other people’s money is a relentless Wall Street tradition.

The crashes that inevitably emerge end up impoverishing ordinary people who pay the price with their livelihoods.

Will the Democrats and other engaged people take Trump on if he tries to make “socialism” the big scare in 2020? Control of our political economy is not a conservative/liberal or red state/blue state issue. When confronted with the specifics of the corporate state or corporate socialism, people from all political persuasions will recognize the potential perils to our democracy. No one wants to lose essential freedoms or to continue to pay the price of this runaway crony capitalism.

The gigantic corporations have been built with the thralldom of deep debt—corporate debt to fund stock buybacks (while reporting record profits), consumer debt, student loan debt, and, of course, government debt caused by drastic corporate and super-rich tax cuts. Many trillions of dollars have been stolen from future generations.

No wonder a small group of billionaires, including George Soros, Eli Broad, and Nick Hanauer, have just publicly urged a modest tax on the super wealthy. As Hanauer, a history buff and advocate of higher minimum wages, says – “the pitchforks are coming.”

What to Watch on Debate Night: Biden, Bernie and Other Stars

WASHINGTON—Same stage. Same rules. But the Democrats’ second back-to back debate is fueled by star power.

Debate night No. 2 marks the first time top-tier presidential candidates will confront one another in person over who is best fit to lead the Democratic effort to oust President Donald Trump in 2020.

The sheer star power of the showdown Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern amps up the pressure on candidates to stand out, pile on, fend off attacks or just survive. It’s Joe Biden’s night to show he commands the field. But it’s Bernie Sanders’ chance to show he’s the one who understands today’s Democratic Party. Pete Buttigieg could try to sound like a leader on the national stage, and Kamala Harris may aim to make a more personal impression.

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by

For all 10 candidates on stage in Miami, the forum is a chance to make Americans picture them as formidable foes to Trump over two hours of lightning-round questions.

Here’s what to watch on the second night of the first presidential debates, airing on NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo:

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BIDEN VS. SANDERS

Ten candidates will be on stage. But two — Biden and Sanders — will most starkly represent the divide over the direction of the Democratic Party.

Sanders, a Vermont senator and democratic socialist, has proudly pushed the party to the left, arguing Democrats must embrace the progressive base that fueled his insurgent 2016 candidacy. Many of his 2020 rivals have paid attention, embracing proposals such as “Medicare for All” that have been on the fringe in prior elections.

Biden, however, has resisted the leftward rush. He rarely invokes Sanders by name, but bemoans the idea that to be seen as a liberal today, candidates must embrace socialism. He argues such moves will turn off the very working-class voters that moved away from Democrats in 2016 to embrace Trump.

Expect plenty of skirmishes between these two. Sanders has already knocked Biden for his vote backing the Iraq War and derided his big-money fundraisers. The former vice president has tried to stay above the fray — but that task could get harder under the glare of the debate stage spotlight.

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HARRIS AND GILLIBRAND

The other candidates on stage aren’t likely to let Biden and Sanders suck up all the oxygen. For White House hopefuls like Sens. Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, the debate offers a crucial opportunity to break through the crowded field.

Harris has successfully used her perch on Capitol Hill to spur viral moments that highlight her prosecutorial past, including her tough questioning of Attorney General William Barr. But she’s struggled to convey — in quick sound bites — who she is as a human being. She’s tried to get more personal recently, talking about watching her mother struggle with racism. Watch to see whether she goes further tonight.

For Gillibrand, the debate could be a make or break moment as she’s struggled to make inroads in polls and fundraising. She’s an unabashed feminist on the campaign trail and will likely try to rally women with passionate defense of reproductive rights.

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MAYOR PETE’S MOMENT

Pete Buttigieg has been the darling of the Democratic Party for months. The articulate mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who is both gay and an Ivy League-schooled military veteran, is seen as a potentially effective opponent against Trump.

But he walks onto the debate stage confronting some of the toughest issues in American life: race and policing.

He has been criticized back home for his handling of a fatal police shooting of a black man. He’ll likely be confronted about his record as mayor and his management of a largely white police department.

He seemed to test some potential debate night messages during a fundraiser this week.

“Leadership consists of facing reality,” he said. “And right now, I’m afraid our leaders at the national level are at war with reality.”

But just by being there, the 37-year-old Buttigieg makes age and the future of the party an issue. Watch for whether he can cast his challenges as experience that qualifies him to lead the nation.

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HEALTH CARE, IMMIGRATION

The future of health care split Democrats during the first debate, with only Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio saying they’d back the abolition of private insurance. Watch for more divides on Thursday. Sanders’ “Medicare for All” proposal doesn’t include private insurance, but Biden hasn’t been willing to embrace such an approach.

Meanwhile, the searing photo of a father and daughter face-down in the Rio Grande has dominated talk of the migrant crisis this week. Look for whether Democrats offer many detailed proposals of their own beyond criticizing Trump’s hardline immigration policy.

Biden released part of his immigration plan on Monday, proposing that Congress grant immediate citizenship to 800,000-plus U.S. residents who were brought to the country illegally as children. But his outline was heavier on barbs at Trump.

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MCCONNELL, MCCONNELL, MCCONNELL

The Senate majority leader said this week he’d rather watch a baseball game than the Democratic debates. But the Democrats and moderators couldn’t stop talking about him during Wednesday’s face-off, giving him as much or more airtime than Trump, who is their actual opponent in 2020. Key to the McConnell discussion was his drive to fill the bench and deny Democrats a chance to reshape the Supreme Court.

Listen for whether the Kentucky Republican makes another virtual star turn on Thursday night, hours after the high court dealt a huge blow to efforts to combat the drawing of electoral districts for partisan gain but also put a hold on the Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.