Chris Hedges's Blog, page 647

House GOP Ending Trump-Russia Probe, Finds No Collusion

WASHINGTON—Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee have completed a draft report concluding there was no collusion or coordination between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, a finding that is sure to please the White House and enrage panel Democrats.

After a yearlong investigation, Texas Rep. Mike Conaway announced Monday that the committee has finished interviewing witnesses and will share the report with Democrats on Tuesday. Conaway is the Republican leading the House probe, one of several investigations on Russian meddling in the 2016 elections.

Conaway previewed several of the report’s conclusions.

“We found no evidence of collusion,” Conaway told reporters Monday, suggesting that those who believe there was are reading too many spy novels. “We found perhaps some bad judgment, inappropriate meetings, inappropriate judgment in taking meetings. But only Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn or someone else like that could take this series of inadvertent contacts with each other, or meetings or whatever, and weave that into sort of a fiction page turner, spy thriller.”

The public will not see the report until Democrats have reviewed it and the intelligence community has decided what information can become public, a process that could take weeks. Democrats are expected to issue a separate report with much different conclusions.

In addition to the statement on coordination with Russians, the draft picks apart a central assessment made by the U.S. intelligence community shortly after the 2016 election — that Russian meddling in the campaign was intended to help Trump and support Democrat Hillary Clinton. Committee aides said they spent hundreds of hours reviewing raw source material used by the intelligence services to make that claim and that it did not meet the appropriate standards.

The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the intelligence material. Conaway said there will be a second report just dealing with the intelligence assessment and its credibility.

Democrats have criticized Republicans on the committee for shortening the investigation, pointing to multiple contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia and saying they have seen far too few witnesses to make any judgment on collusion. The Democrats and Republicans have openly fought throughout the investigation, with Democrats suggesting a cover-up for a Republican president and one GOP member of the panel calling the probe “poison” for the previously bipartisan panel.

According to Conaway, the report will agree with the intelligence assessment on most details, including that Russians did meddle in the election. It will detail Russian cyberattacks on U.S. institutions during the election and the use of social media to sow discord. It will also show a pattern of Russian attacks on European allies — information that could be redacted in the final report. It will blame officials in former President Barack Obama’s administration for a “lackluster” response and look at leaks from the intelligence community to the media.

It will include at least 25 recommendations, including how to improve election security, respond to cyberattacks and improve counterintelligence efforts.

The report is also expected to turn the subject of collusion toward the Clinton campaign, saying an anti-Trump dossier compiled by a former British spy and paid for by Democrats was one way that Russians tried to influence the election. Conaway did not suggest that Clinton knowingly coordinated with the Russians, but said the dossier clearly “would have hurt him and helped her.”

He also said there was no evidence that anything “untoward” happened at a 2016 meeting between members of the Trump campaign and Russians, though he called it ill-advised. Despite a promise of dirt on Clinton ahead of the meeting, there’s no evidence that such material was exchanged, he said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is also investigating the Russian intervention, and is expected to have a bipartisan report out in the coming weeks dealing with election security. The Senate panel is expected to issue findings on the more controversial issue of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia at a later date.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, also investigating the meddling, is expected to release transcripts soon of closed-door interviews with several people who attended the 2016 meeting between the Trump campaign and Russians. It’s unclear if the Judiciary panel will produce a final report.

The congressional investigations are completely separate from special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, which is likely to take much longer. Unlike Mueller’s, congressional investigations aren’t criminal but serve to inform the public and to recommend possible legislation.

The Willy Loman Presidency

One of President Trump’s favorite words is “strong.” His obsession with strength leads him to a love for unilateral announcements, denunciations of staff members by way of showing who is in charge, and Twitter wars designed to prove that he will not back down from any fight.

Yet Trump is also a pleaser who likes to make those in his immediate company happy by persuading them that he is absolutely on their wavelength. You could see this in his flip-flopping on policy toward both guns and immigration. Recall that the positions he took on any given day depended upon who was in the room with him.

Eventually, he will default to preserving his electoral standing. He was never likely to break with either the National Rifle Association or the hardline nativists who are at the heart of his administration and his political base. Trump has interests. He doesn’t have a philosophy.

But above all, he has needs, and the erratic nature of the Trump presidency can be explained by the interaction of his two compulsions—looking strong and being liked. They sometimes seem to collide, but they are actually of a piece. Both speak of a man for whom the personal is the only kind of political. It is impossible to know what his true policy commitments are because they are secondary. On any given day and at any given moment, his actions are dictated by what, in his eyes, will make him look forceful and bring him accolades.

Bear all this in mind in assessing the two major events of recent days: Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum, and his agreement to enter direct talks with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

The tariffs may, in fact, serve him well in the short-term. Note that Trump initially reached his decision to impose them when he was feeling “angry” and “increasingly isolated,” as Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey wrote on March 3. With the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller gathering steam and other scandals dominating the airwaves, Trump did what he always does: He sought to change the subject and shake up the news cycle.

But there is more. If Trump and the Republicans have reason to worry that the political energy of his foes could play out in substantially increased Democratic turnout in this November’s elections, there is a second danger almost as serious. His working-class supporters—the key swing group in the states that gave him his Electoral College victory—have little to show for his presidency.

While last Friday’s robust jobs report provided continued good news overall, it found that wages were nearly flat. And as Post blogger Greg Sargent observed last week, economic growth remains concentrated in the states that rejected Trump. “Trump Country” is not experiencing the renaissance he predicted, in part because he could not have kept his outsized promises in the first place.

Thus Republican nervousness about Tuesday’s special election for a Congressional seat in western Pennsylvania. If Republicans lose or win very narrowly, it will show they face decimation in suburban areas long hostile to Trump, but also in his heartland.

Trump scaled back the tariffs from his original proposal, but they still sent a loud message to his straying base: Remember the old me; I’m still here. He conveyed an aura of strength even as he curried favor with voters he badly wants to hold on to. Should the GOP prevail on Tuesday, count on Trump to tout the tariffs opposed by most of his party as what pulled it over the line.

His agreement to meet with North Korea’s brutal and erratic leader is an even bigger show-stopper. It was variously cast as a great triumph for Trump’s hard line, or a foolish and premature concession that enhanced Kim’s standing without gaining anything in return. On Friday the White House conditioned the entire initiative on “concrete steps” from North Korea without specifying them. But there was a Trumpian point to it all. He was doing something no other president dared do while casting himself in a starring role.

All presidencies are shaped by the personal proclivities of the occupant of the Oval Office. But we have not had a president who focused so much energy on appearing to be strong and who, like the playwright Arthur Miller’s salesman Willy Loman, so desperately wants to believe he is “liked.” These drives are the biggest threats to Trump himself, and, I fear, to our republic.

Chaos in 2 Towns as Turkish, Syrian Forces Close In

BEIRUT—Parallel offensives waged by Turkey and the Syrian government on two separate towns in Syria on Monday pushed residents into overcrowded shelters for safety as others tried to flee the advancing forces by road.

Residents and displaced families in the besieged town of Douma in the rebel-held Damascus suburbs of eastern Ghouta were sleeping in shops and in the streets as basements in the town filled up beyond capacity, said Haitham Bakkar, a local resident.

“We are afraid of the assault,” Bakkar said of the government’s efforts to take the town amid a ferocious campaign of shelling and airstrikes. Blasts could be heard as he spoke to The Associated Press via a messaging service.

Meanwhile, thousands of people were fleeing the northwestern town of Afrin as Turkish troops and Turkey-backed opposition fighters moved closer to completely encircling it.

Ebrahim Ebrahim, a Europe-based spokesman for the largest Kurdish group in Syria, the Democratic Union Party, or PYD, said those fleeing were heading toward government-controlled areas, fearful that Turkish troops and Turkey-backed Syrian opposition fighters might commit atrocities against the Kurds and minority Christians, Alawites and Yazidis in the town.

Turkish troops have destroyed water and power stations that supply Afrin, making it difficult for people to stay there.

“Water has been cut from Afrin for a week now. Everyone is very scared of what’s coming now that the Turkish occupying forces are getting closer to the town’s center,” said resident Serbest Hassan. He said 800,000 civilians in Afrin were now facing a humanitarian “catastrophe” amid food shortages and relentless Turkish airstrikes. There is real fear, he said, of massacres once Turkish troops and their allies reach the town.

Turkey launched the military offensive against the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as YPG, to clear its fighters from the enclave of Afrin. Ankara considers the YPG a terror organization linked to its own Kurdish insurgency.

Near the Syrian capital, meanwhile, a small group of civilians managed to flee eastern Ghouta for government-held areas, while the area’s largest armed rebel group said it had reached an agreement with Russian forces to evacuate the wounded from the besieged territory.

The local council of Douma said in a statement on Saturday that burials had been halted because of airstrikes on the town’s cemetery. It said the humanitarian situation was “catastrophic.”

State-run Syrian TV broadcast footage showing a group of men, women and children it says left the town of Madyara after it was captured by Syrian troops on Sunday. The TV showed several women carrying babies and welcoming the Syrian army, claiming the rebels were preventing civilians from leaving eastern Ghouta.

The civilians used a corridor established by the Syrian army amid military gains that have effectively divided eastern Ghouta into three parts.

Recapturing the enclave would mark one of the most significant victories for President Bashar Assad in the seven-year civil war. It would also be the worst setback for rebels since the opposition was ousted from the eastern half of the city of Aleppo in late 2016 following a similar siege and bombing campaign.

Eastern Ghouta is larger and more populated, with some 400,000 people believed to be living there, trapped under a relentless air and ground bombardment and a crippling years-long siege. More than 1,100 people have been killed since the large-scale government offensive began on Feb. 18.

In rapid advances over the weekend, Syrian government forces split eastern Ghouta in two — a northern and southern part — then cut off the key towns of Douma and Harasta from the rest of the enclave, further squeezing residents living there. Douma is eastern Ghouta’s largest settlement.

The largest rebel group in eastern Ghouta, the Army of Islam, said it had reached an agreement with government-allied Russian forces to evacuate the wounded from the enclave. Its statement said the deal with the Russians was reached through the United Nations.

The Army of Islam said the wounded will be evacuated in stages but made no mention of whether they are rebel fighters or civilians. The group also did not say when the evacuations would begin or where the wounded would be taken.

Also in Damascus, Islamic State militants besieged in a southern neighborhood of the capital launched an attack on a neighboring area, drawing a response from government forces and aircraft, according to a war monitoring group.

The militants in the Hajar al-Aswad neighborhood attacked the neighboring Qadam area, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. There were no reports of casualties.

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Associated Press writer Sarah El Deeb contributed to this report.

What We Can Learn About Human Rights From ‘Wise Fools’

Every year, World Storytelling Day is celebrated around March 20. The theme in 2018 is “Wise Fools.”

To commemorate the day, Storytellers for Peace—an international network of narrators who create collective stories through videos—made a video with 10 artists from five continents. Each of them tells a story about wise fools in his or her native language (with English subtitles).

Below are the artists and stories in order of appearance.

A Spanish proverb says that “Of poets and madmen, we all have a little.” And perhaps these two qualities, madness and poetry, are not two qualities different from each other. There is a brotherhood, a fusion, communicating vessels that connect creativity, storytelling, poetry, madness, the breaking of conventions and happiness. Baudelaire said the genius is the childhood recovered. Without a little madness added to wisdom, we would be nothing more than robots, machines without imagination. So, as a Spanish proverb says: To each fool, his own.

—Beatriz Montero, Spain

Sometimes, wisdom comes from a person who is not so much a fool but an innocent. They say, “Out of the mouths of babes.” There’s a story that is told all over the world in different ways—sometimes it involves a bowl, sometimes a basket, but most often a blanket. It’s always about a man and his wife, and they have a little boy, and the man’s father, who has grown old, comes to live with them. The man and his wife over time decide that the grandfather is too old and too useless—takes up too much space, eats too much—and so they send him off to live out in the shed or out in the woods. As winter comes on, the grandfather knocks back on the door, asking if he can be allowed into the home, but the man and his wife decide they can’t have that. So the man sends the son, the little boy, to go and get a blanket for the grandfather. The boy comes back with a blanket—and a knife. When the father asks, “Why did you bring me a knife?” the boy explains, “Well, father, I’ve brought you the knife so that you can cut the blanket in half, and that way, we can give half to grandfather to keep warm, and I will save the other half for when you are old and useless and I send you out to live in the shed.” The man realizes the folly of his ways and invites his father back into the warmth of the home, having been reminded by his son of the age-old wisdom to always honor our elders.

—Barry Stewart Mann, United States

The man is wise enough to play the fool, because to do it properly you need a special care. You must observe very wisely the mood of those who you’re going to mock, grasp well the type and the moment, and, like the hawk, catch on every feather that passes around. An equally arduous task, like that of the madman who plays the wise one, since the material he shows off must be a form of wisdom. While the wise men, who sometimes lose their wits, miss their mind forever. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.

—Cecilia Moreschi, Italy

Wisenheimer/A smart aleck

An old wise foolish man, living far in the bush, crazily blaming about the world, breaking bones like stone in word. Human beings lost in ruins, he says they’ve betrayed respect and humanity. There is no longer love in family. Love and marriage are now businesslike. Family heads get lost in bars. Wives say that’s their behavior. Returning home, claiming their wives, annoying their minds, disorganized ceasing to have any more space for peace. Even wives, with their female spirits live committed to hit bars, thinking that they’re unchaining barriers, kids in the home go without food, grow without precaution, parents rid themselves of their responsibility, chaos reigns in the home, girls lost in debasement. Boys stealing and begging in the streets, they end up returning home, they get lost outside, slowly the homes turn into houses, houses of ruins, but if my stay deters not ruinousness, when my ancestors come for me, may they take with me ruins, and perhaps then, love will reign.

—Hamid Barole Abdu, Eritrea

The wise speaks because he has something to say, and the fool speaks because he has to say something (Plato). The truth is that, nor the most foolish, nor the most wise, who speaks to speak. Storytellers will know, very well, that ancestral wisdom transfers from mouth to mouth. From family to family. Among grandpa and among grandma. Storytelling—wisdom or foolishness—it’s joy and one of the most important things. It is knowing to listen. Is it more wise who speaks, or who listens? Well, that’s the gift of storytellers. World storytelling day. Today I leave, here, greetings for you. For all my friends of storytellers for peace. And to all the storytellers who are listening to me.

—Sandra Burmeister G., Chile

One of the best storytellers I know, the Canadian Dan Yashinsky, tells in his book “Suddenly They Heard Footsteps,” how in Alaska and northern Canada, there always existed a kind of storytellers considered half-crazy and half-wise, called “the storm fools,” that appeared in those places where those who protected themselves from the storm took shelter, and entered with the cap covered with snow in the nights of blizzard—without warning, without knocking on the door, because it is not customary to do so—to tell stories, myths, legends, stories, jokes, or news from the tribe or from remote places. These intrepid narrators from northern Canada, who still did not know they were following the tradition started by Homer, were known as medicinal characters, wise elders, community connectors, and also, as “storm fools.”

—Enrique Páez, Spain

Without words … apparently.

—Katharina Ritter, Germany

Wise fools who invented the earth is round. Wise fools who sat their feet on the moon. Wise fools who invented the computer. Wise fools who made various kinds of viruses. Wise fools who perish dividing into groups.

—D.M.S. Ariyrathne, Sri Lanka

Every era has its wise men and its fools. Nowadays, the wise men are always less and the fools are almost all.

However, there are fools and fools, there are the normal ones and others.

Well, among the latter, there are some who are so crazy, so crazy to believe that they can save nature from the destruction by men.

And there are others so crazy, so crazy as to be convinced they can change the fate that awaits us with a story.

There are others so crazy, so crazy as to put their own life at risk, just to give a better example than what they have found coming into this world.

And there are those who are so crazy, so crazy to still have hope that the people of tomorrow will be able to remedy our mistakes.

Every age has its fools and its wise men.

Nowadays, the fools are almost all and the wise men are always less.

And the wisest among them are the craziest of all.

—Alessandro Ghebreigziabiher, Italy

The Woman and the Lion

There was a woman who lived in a farm in the high mountains of Ethiopia. She had a rich husband who’d bring her many jewels and dresses. But he’d started to neglect her, and he would stay away for weeks at a time.

The woman was really troubled by this, and she felt very foolish. So she went to the wise man finally, and she asked him, if he could give her some charms to bring her husband’s affection back. And the wise man pulled his white cape around him and stroked his beard and said: “Hmmm, yes, I can do that. But first you must get three hairs from an alive lion’s mane.”

Oh, the woman was so daunted and terrified at that. On sleepless nights, she would lie awake and hear the lion roaring in the ravine behind her house. But finally, she plucked up the courage, and one morning, she plucked up her courage, and she went to where there were the new lambs, and she picked up one, and she took the path down to the ravine, and she left it there for the lion.

Well, every morning at dawn, from thence, she’d bring an offering of food and leave it for the lion. And after quite some time, finally, she realized that the lion had come to trust her. Because one morning, as she walked down the path, she saw him with his head held high and wagging his tail.

And eventually, he would walk up to her and stroke her side with his mane, and she would pat him, and he would purr like a kitten. So it was easy for her to pluck the three hairs from his mane. And she did, and she took them to the wise man, and she said: “Here. I have the three hairs from the lion.”

And the wise man pulled his hood over his head and stroked his beard, and he said: “Hmmm, how did you achieve that? How did you get the three hairs?”

And the woman said: “Well, with my patience, and my affection, and with my understanding I won the lion over.”

The wise man said: “Yes, well, these are the charms I give you. Your charms. Use your patience and use your affection and use your understanding to win your husband back.”

—Suzanne Sandow, Australia

Alessandro Ghebreigziabiher—an Italian author, playwright, stage actor and director—started the Storytellers for Peace project in 2016 and coordinates all of the videos. His mission is simple: bring storytellers together from all over the world to speak about peace, justice, equality and human rights.

Other Storytellers for Peace videos have been produced for Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” International Day of Peace 2016, Human Rights Day 2016, World Storytelling Day 2017 and International Day of Nonviolence 2017.

Package Bombs Rock Texas Capital; 1 Dead, 2 Hurt

AUSTIN, Texas—Package bombs that killed a teenager and wounded two women Monday in Austin are probably linked to a similar bombing that killed a man in the city earlier this month, authorities said, and investigators are considering whether race was a factor because all of the victims were minorities.

The first of Monday’s attacks killed a 17-year-old boy and wounded a 40-year-old woman, both of them black. As Police Chief Brian Manley held a news conference to discuss that blast, officers were called to the scene of another explosion that badly injured a 75-year-old Hispanic woman. She was taken to a hospital with potentially life-threatening injuries.

Authorities suspect that both of Monday’s blasts are linked to a March 2 attack that killed a 39-year-old black man, and they urged the public to call police if they receive any unexpected packages.

The latest explosions happened during the South by Southwest music, film and technology festival, which brings about 400,000 visitors to Austin each year. The explosions happened far from the festival’s main events, and there was no immediate word from organizers about additional safety precautions.

Four years ago, a driver plowed through a barricade and into festival-goers, killing four people and injuring many others. Additional security measures were taken in the aftermath, including additional policing, tougher security checks and brighter street lighting, among others.

The three explosions occurred in different parts of Austin. Monday’s first explosion happened at a home near the city’s Windsor Park neighborhood and about 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the home where the March 2 package bomb killed 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House. His death was initially investigated as suspicious but is now viewed as a homicide.

Monday’s second explosion happened in the Montopolis neighborhood, near the airport and about 5 miles south of the day’s first blast.

In at least the first two blasts, the packages were left overnight on the victims’ doorsteps and were not mailed or sent by a delivery service. He said neither the Postal Service nor private carriers such as UPS or FedEx have any record of delivering the package to the home where Monday’s explosion occurred.

“There are similarities that we cannot rule out that these two items are, in fact, related,” Manley said.

Investigators have not determined a motive for the attacks, but it is possible that the victims could have been targeted because of their race, he said.

“We don’t know what the motive behind these may be,” Manley said. “We do know that both of the homes that were the recipients of these packages belong to African-Americans, so we cannot rule out that hate crime is at the core of this.”

Special Agent Michelle Lee, a San Antonio-based spokesman for the FBI, said the agency responded to both events and was assisting Austin police, who were leading the local investigation. She said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was leading the federal investigation.

A second package was discovered near the site of the initial Monday explosion, and some residents and media members were evacuated or pushed farther from the blast site as authorities determined whether it was a bomb, Manley said.

Police did not immediately identify the teenager who was killed. Manley said the woman who was injured in that attack is hospitalized.

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Associated Press Writer David Warren in Dallas contributed to this report.

Homeless UC Berkeley Student Takes Care of His Whole Family

Ismael Chamu refuses to let an inhumane housing system keep him from his dreams of a better life for his parents, his siblings, his future partner and himself.

“Developers and renters just exponentially raise the rent,” the 21-year-old son of a Mexican migrant worker tells the Los Angeles Times, “making living, being able to go to bed at night, a privilege instead of a right.”

After his family was evicted from their home as rental costs rose in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, the student and his three siblings moved to a small trailer in Hayward, south of Oakland. He spends most of his time and his student loans on helping his family.

Now in his final year at the University of California, Berkeley, one of the country’s elite universities, Chamu cares for his family while striving to get an education he hopes will someday allow him to have a house with bedrooms and a functioning sewage system. But Hayward has made it illegal to live in residential trailers, forcing Chamu to search desperately for alternative housing for his family.

And while Chamu’s story is stunning, he’s not alone in his struggles.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Financial aid covers tuition for the state’s growing number of low-income students, but doesn’t usually cover the full cost of housing. Many UC campuses are in some of the priciest real-estate markets.

A recent University of California study estimated that 13,000 of the system’s 260,000 students have struggled with unstable housing. That guess comes from two 2016 surveys, in which 5% of the nearly 70,000 students who responded said they had couch-surfed, lived on the street or found temporary shelter in vehicles, motels or campgrounds at some point since they had enrolled.

[California State University] estimates about 41,000 students have unstable housing; the Los Angeles Community College District, about 44,000.

UC President Janet Napolitano has a plan to build 14,000 affordable beds by 2020 and has given each of the system’s nine undergraduate campuses $3 million to help them meet housing needs. UC and Cal State campuses are trying to reach out to students with expanded food pantries, meal-sharing plans, campus gardens and emergency loans.

But most everyone agrees that the efforts are not nearly enough.

As for Chamu, he recently posted an update to his living situation on his Facebook account:

‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Forces Us to Think About the Universe in New Ways

Like many teenagers, Meg Murry (Storm Reid) is thin-skinned, self-conscious and isolated. If you don’t count her brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), who is 6, Meg is friendless. Not only do the other girls at James Baldwin Middle School scorn her, they make fun of the fact that her physicist father went missing four years ago. They joke that he left—because who would want a geeky daughter like Meg? Social angst has affected Meg’s classroom performance. Teachers whisper about her grades, which are racing to the bottom with her self-esteem.

In short, Meg is in critical need of a fairy godmother. Or, at least, Glinda the Good Witch.

In Ava DuVernay’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” based on the Madeleine L’Engle novel that might be described as “The Wizard of Oz” with physics, Meg gets three godmothers: Oprah Winfrey, typecast as an oracle; Mindy Kaling, an affirmation-spouting goddess of wisdom; and Reese Witherspoon, a mischievous guardian angel. Meg does not help others overcome their deficits like Dorothy. Rather, the godmothers help Meg overcome her own.

To help Meg surmount her social paralysis, the godmothers teach her how to “tesser.” That’s short for “tesseract,” a wrinkling or pleating of the space/time continuum that makes it faster to travel vast distances. With Charles Wallace and a school acquaintance, Calvin (Levi Miller), in tow, Meg tessers to different planets en route to rescuing her father.

Tessering requires neither spacecraft nor atomic energy, simply brainpower. On the first planet, the younglings learn about Camazotz, the dark place that sucks the life force out of its inhabitants. On the second, the characters experience an incomparably beautiful place where orangey-yellow flowers, resembling a cross between irises and monarch butterflies, flutter and gossip. The flowers, Meg learns, speak the language of color.

“Wrinkle” is not a paradigm-shifting spectacle on the order of “Black Panther,” to which it is, unjustly, being compared. Instead, “Wrinkle” is the often breathtaking story of a multiracial clan that looks like many in America and how a magical intervention in a young person’s life transforms her. This is more on the order of “Wizard of Oz” and “Bridge to Terabithia.” It’s rare that a teenage girl is the center of such stories, and that’s part of its enchantment.

Another bright spot is the effortless skills of DuVernay, who employs intimate closeups to put us into Meg’s skin and her shoes.

Storm Reid is a promising young actress. She wears her emotions on her face and suggests untold depths through mournful eyes. Physically, she conveys the sense that, without her father (Chris Pine), her family—Charles Wallace, her scientist mother (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), and herself—is a chair with three legs. This is why the three godmothers take Meg, her brother and Calvin to meet “The Happy Medium.” This would be a Yogi nicely played by Zach Galifianakis. He teaches Meg how to achieve physical balance, which makes it easier to realize the emotional kind.

And then to Camazotz (named for the Mayan bat god?), an inkblot on the Milky Way, where Meg literally and figuratively finds her feet. She knows that it dominates the planet. The youths are immediately frightened by the eerie conformity of children who live in a cul-de-sac, bouncing balls in unison, creating an unnerving, machine-like rhythm. These children regard Meg much as the mean girls at home. Maybe it’s not so bad to be a nonconformist? Before long Meg sees that everything on Camazotz is an illusion: Things that appear solid are not. Things that appear to have depth are flat. (The production design of Camazotz is both witty and deeply scary.)

For this daughter of physicists, can anything be more frightening than to learn that matter doesn’t matter?

In the end, there is more than one wrinkle to DuVernay’s enchanting film. There are the creases that tangle us in evil, those that enfold with love and maybe best of all, the new wrinkle that enables us to think about the universe—and connectedness—in bold, new ways.

A Footnote Looms Large in the Second Amendment’s Future

No one in American history is more responsible for elevating the Second Amendment to the status of holy writ than the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. His impact is still being felt today in nearly every important gun-rights lawsuit pending from sea to shining sea.

The conservative firebrand’s 2008 majority opinion in the court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller stood the prior judicial consensus on the Second Amendment on its head, holding for the first time that the amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. Prior to Heller, the great weight of scholarship and court opinions, including the Supreme Court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller, had construed the amendment, in keeping with the actual debates of the founding era, as protecting gun ownership only in connection with service in long-since antiquated state militias.

Two years later, in another 5-4 decision—McDonald v. Chicago—the Supreme Court extended Heller, ruling that the individual right to bear arms was incorporated by the 14th Amendment’s due process clause and hence was applicable to the states and local governments. The Second Amendment, as interpreted by Scalia, thus became the law of the land.

In the aftermath of Heller and McDonald, gun-rights advocates, from the National Rifle Association to the Second Amendment Foundation, rejoiced. Having funded and provided the lawyers for both cases, they were confident that many other gun-control measures across the country would soon be toppled, or at least severely curtailed, through subsequent litigation.

But they were wrong—ironically, as I will explain shortly, in no small measure because of a cryptic footnote Scalia added to his Heller opinion.

Both Heller and McDonald were perfect test cases for the NRA and its allies because they dealt with cities—Washington, D.C., and Chicago—that had enacted near-total bans on the ownership of handguns, even when kept in the home. If any cases had the potential to overturn the prior consensus on the reading of the Second Amendment, Heller and McDonald headed the list.

Gun regulations in other jurisdictions, however, were and remain far less stringent. Indeed, the vast majority of U.S. state constitutions protect some form of gun ownership. According to an NRA survey, only New York, California, Maryland, New Jersey, Iowa and Minnesota have no “right to keep and bear arms” provisions in their state charters. Still, even in those six states, state statutory law permits and regulates gun ownership.

As a result, following Heller and McDonald, most state and lower federal courts, with a few exceptions, have upheld state and local regulations on gun ownership that stop short of establishing complete bans, distinguishing such regulations from the total bans that were nixed in Heller and McDonald.

Most notably, over the past two years, three federal circuit courts—the 4th, sitting in Maryland; the 2nd, sitting in New York; and the 9th, sitting in California—have upheld restrictions, respectively, on personal ownership of AR-15s and other military-style weapons, local gun permit regulations, and the right to carry handguns outside of the home.

The reason courts have been able to hand down pro-gun control rulings is simple: Contrary to popular beliefs—fueled in large part by NRA propaganda mouthed by zealots like Wayne LaPierre, Rush Limbaugh, radio host Alex Jones and so many others—Heller by no means closed the door to constitutionally permissible gun control. In fact, and very much to the contrary, Scalia’s Heller opinion left the door quite ajar.

Toward the conclusion of his Heller opinion, Scalia wrote:

Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. … Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. 26

In footnote 26 of the opinion, placed at the end of the paragraph, he added:

“We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.”

As I reported in a 2015 cover story for California Lawyer Magazine, I have interviewed some of the nation’s most prominent Second Amendment lawyers and political historians at length about the Heller case. Almost without exception, they told me not only that footnote 26 is one of the most critical footnotes in the annals of the Supreme Court, but also that, legally speaking, it holds the key to the future of the Second Amendment.

“Post-Heller,” the NRA’s leading attorney in California told me at the time, “the race [is] on to clarify exactly what Scalia meant” in footnote 26.

Since Heller and McDonald, however, the Supreme Court has been reluctant to take up the challenge, although it has adjudicated a few narrowly focused gun cases. In 2014, for example, the court upheld a Virginia ban on “straw” purchases—the practice of buying of guns for those who may be prohibited from making direct purchases themselves. And in 2016, in a case from Maine, the court held that a domestic assault qualifies as a crime that prohibits convicted felons from possessing firearms under current federal law.

Still, the court hasn’t attempted to fill in the blanks left by Scalia’s footnote 26 in any comprehensive way.

When and if it does, it will have to address such weighty matters as whether the Second Amendment applies to the ownership of military-style weapons of war, such as AR-15s, or simply extends to less lethal weapons possessed for self-defense in the home. If assault weapons are found to be beyond the amendment’s purview, then state and local prohibitions against owning them likely will be upheld.

Also on the table will be the more esoteric but nonetheless crucial question about what kind of constitutional test, or “scrutiny,” in the language of legal scholars, should apply to gun-rights challenges. If the court employs “strict scrutiny”—the most exacting test it uses when constitutional rights are involved—many gun-control measures will be ruled invalid. On the other hand, if the court applies “intermediate scrutiny,” a lower standard, most measures will likely be upheld.

Last July, the court declined to hear the NRA-backed petition in the 9th Circuit case from California cited above that raised the issue of whether the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a handgun outside the home. However, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch—Scalia’s successor on the bench and by all indications even more right-wing than Scalia in his salad days—dissented. They urged the court to hear the case.

Writing for himself and Gorsuch, Thomas scolded his colleagues, saying that even if they thought the petition would fail on the merits, denial of review in the case “reflects a distressing trend: the treatment of the Second Amendment as a disfavored right.”

Had Gorsuch never been elevated to the court, it might be possible to dream of a future lawsuit that could lead the court to reevaluate Heller in its entirety. With Gorsuch in place, those dreams have vanished, at least for the near term. The best practical short-term legal strategy for gun-control advocates, therefore, is to urge the Supreme Court to maintain its current narrow approach to the Second Amendment.

The great danger is that with the aging of the court—four of its current members are over 79—and with President Trump wielding the power to nominate future justices, the Thomas and Gorsuch wing eventually will be able to forge a new and even more virulently pro-gun majority. If they do, they may well deliver an answer to the riddle left by Scalia’s footnote 26 that will lead to still easier access to weapons of war and even more mass carnage in our schools and streets.

In Tight House Race, Republican Leans on Trump and His Base

TRAFFORD, Pa. — President Donald Trump invoked “steel and business” Monday as he and his son make a final push to sway voters in a special election for a Pennsylvania House seat that will reverberate nationally.

Trump has already visited the district twice to try to buoy Republican Rick Saccone. On the last day before voting, Trump weighed in again as Republicans try to fend off an unexpectedly strong challenge by Democrat Conor Lamb in a district Trump won easily in 2016.

“The Pittsburgh Post Gazette just endorsed Rick Saccone for Congress,” Trump tweeted. “He will be much better for steel and business. Very strong on experience and what our Country needs. Lamb will always vote for Pelosi and Dems….Will raise taxes, weak on Crime and Border.”

Later on Monday, Donald Trump Jr. was expected to stump for Saccone at two separate events, becoming the latest in a line of senior Trump administration figures to appear with Saccone in the district.

The 60-year-old state lawmaker has struggled with an electorate that favored Trump by 20 percentage points just 16 months ago. He needs the residents of Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District to nationalize their choice and make him a proxy for what they already think about Washington, the president and the issues that define their party affiliation.

The outcome Tuesday of 2018’s first congressional election is being closely watched as a key test of support for Republicans ahead of November’s midterms. Democrats must flip 24 GOP-held seats to claim a House majority, and an upset will embolden them as they look to win in places where the party has lost ground in recent decades.

Republicans, meanwhile, would be spooked about their prospects in this tempestuous era of Trump, who most recently visited Saturday night on Saccone’s behalf.

The 33-year-old Lamb, a Marine veteran and former federal prosecutor, has crystallized the debate over whether a younger, charismatic Democrat appealing to win back traditionally Democratic voters can overcome Republican party loyalty in a GOP-leaning district at a time when Trump remains a divisive figure.

Barbara DeFelice, a 64-year-old retiree, said she decided months ago to back Republican Rick Saccone for one reason: opposition to abortion rights.

“He shares my values,” DeFelice said Sunday. “I just don’t understand that people say we shouldn’t put lobsters into hot, boiling water … but we can kill babies.”

Nearby in DeFelice’s upper-middle-class enclave outside Pittsburgh, engineer Carol Heinecke, 57, offered another absolute reason for supporting Saccone: President Donald Trump. “Rick’s going to support everything he’s doing,” she said.

Such attitudes will be the difference should Saccone emerge victorious.

Saccone has tried at times to make the race about experience, touting his four decades in the public and private sector, from an Air Force career and stint in North Korea to his current job as a college professor. He sometimes mocks Lamb as having “no record at all.”

But that, by itself, hasn’t given Saccone much traction against Lamb, who hails from an established Allegheny County political family and pitches himself as independent-minded. To back that up, Lamb opposes sweeping gun restrictions, endorses Trump’s new steel tariffs, avoids attacking the president, and tells voters he wouldn’t back Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California for speaker if Democrats won a House majority.

Asked why Lamb could win the district when Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton couldn’t, Bill Kortz, a former steel worker and a Democratic state lawmaker from Allegheny County, said it came down to Lamb’s opposition to more gun control. “He’s a Marine,” Kortz said. “He’s good with guns. He’s good with the Second Amendment.”

Lamb, however, keeps to party orthodoxy on unions in a district with a long history of coal mining and steel-making.

He blasts the new Republican tax law as a gift to the wealthy and a threat to Social Security and Medicare. “People have paid into these programs over the course of a lifetime,” Lamb told more than 300 retired coal miners and Democratic activists Sunday in Waynesburg, 40 miles south of Pittsburgh. “I do not believe, as (Republican House Speaker) Paul Ryan does, that these are entitlements or another form of welfare.”

At the Lamb rally, Cecil Roberts, the president of the United Mineworkers of America, delivered a rousing endorsement of Lamb, a noteworthy endorsement since the union sat out the 2016 election rather than back Clinton in 2016.

Boasting a more than 3-to-1 fundraising advantage over Saccone, Lamb has plastered his message on Pittsburgh television and animated Democrats who haven’t had recent reason to care.

The party didn’t even run opponents against the previous congressman, Republican Tim Murphy, in 2014 and 2016. Murphy resigned in October amid a sex scandal.

So Saccone and Republican forces have answered with their national arguments. Outside GOP groups have spent more than $10 million, much of it to paint Lamb as a Pelosi lackey. Democratic-aligned groups have spent about $1.6 million to help Lamb, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

On Sunday, with Saccone holding no previously announced public events, Republican volunteers distributed handbills that urged voters to “Stop Nancy Pelosi” and “Stop Hillary Clinton.”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s conservative editorial board added its own interpretation Sunday. The editorialists complimented Lamb as “an impressive young man,” but warned that he could become part of a Democratic majority that would try to impeach Trump. Neither Lamb nor Saccone has made the ongoing Russia investigation bedeviling Trump part of his pitch, but the paper insisted the country must not “dive into so great a distraction.”

The Republican argument is enough for voters like 54-year-old Jeffrey Snelling. “I don’t know much about Rick Saccone,” he acknowledged, adding that he remains skeptical about Trump. His bottom line, though: “I’m not voting for any liberal who’s going to advance the Democratic Party agenda.”

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Levy reported from Waynesburg, Pennsylvania.

White House Softens Stand on Age Rule for Assault Gun Buyers

WASHINGTON—The White House unveiled a new plan to prevent school shootings that backs off President Donald Trump’s support for increasing the minimum age for purchasing assault weapons to 21.

Instead, a new federal commission on school safety will examine the age issue as part of a package the White House announced Sunday in response to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last month that left 17 dead.

The administration also pledged to help states pay for firearms training for teachers and reiterated its call to improve the background check and mental health systems.

In a call with reporters Sunday evening, administration officials described the plan as a fulfillment of Trump’s call for action in the wake of the Parkland shooting.

“Today we are announcing meaningful actions, steps that can be taken right away to help protect students,” said Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who will chair the commission.

DeVos said that “far too often, the focus” after such tragedies “has been only on the most contentious fights, the things that have divided people and sent them into their entrenched corners.” She described the plan as “pragmatic.”

The plan was immediately panned by gun control advocates, including the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “Americans expecting real leadership to prevent gun violence will be disappointed and troubled by President Trump’s dangerous retreat from his promise,” said Avery Gardiner, the group’s co-president.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York described it as “tiny baby steps designed not to upset the NRA, when the gun violence epidemic in this country demands that giant steps be taken.”

Trump was deeply moved by the February shooting and convened a series of listening sessions in the weeks after the massacre. In televised meetings with lawmakers, survivors of recent school shootings and the families of victims, Trump made a strong case for arming teachers, but also increasing the age for purchasing long guns.

“I mean, so they buy a revolver — a handgun — they buy at the age of 21. And yet, these other weapons that we talk about … they’re allowed to buy them at 18. So how does that make sense?” he told school officials last month. “We’re going to work on getting the age up to 21 instead of 18.”

But Trump has also spoken repeatedly in recent weeks with the heads of the powerful National Rifle Association, which considers increasing the age of purchase to be an assault on the Second Amendment. The NRA on Friday sued Florida over a new gun law signed by Republican Gov. Rick Scott that bans the purchase of firearms by anyone under the age of 21.

Instead, the issue will be one of a list of topics to be studied by the DeVos commission, which will then provide recommendations to the president. Administration officials said they had not set a deadline for the commission’s recommendations, but expected they’d made in under a year.

During the meetings, Trump also advocated arming certain teachers and school staffers, arguing that gun-free schools are “like an invitation for these very sick people” to commit murder.

As part plan, the White House has directed the Justice Department to help states partner with local law enforcement to provide “rigorous firearms training to specifically qualified volunteer school personnel,” said Andrew Bremberg, director of the president’s Domestic Policy Council. The White House did not immediately say how much money would be made available.

Trump also called on states to pass temporary, court-issued Risk Protection Orders, which allow law enforcement to confiscate guns from individuals who pose risks to themselves and others, and temporarily prevent them from buying firearms. And he called for the reform and expansion of mental health programs, as well as a full audit and review of the FBI tip line. The bureau has been criticized for not following up on warnings about the suspect in the Parkland school shooting.

The White House is also calling on Congress to two pieces of legislation. One would improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check system by penalizing federal agencies that don’t properly report required records and reward states that comply by providing them with federal grant preferences.

The other would create a federal grant program to train students, teachers and school officials how to identify signs of potential violence and intervene early.

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Follow Colvin on Twitter at https://twitter.com/colvinj