Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 151

How the Pentagon devours the budget

(Credit: Getty/icholakov)

Imagine for a moment a scheme in which American taxpayers were taken to the cleaners to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and there was barely a hint of criticism or outrage.  Imagine as well that the White House and a majority of the politicians in Washington, no matter the party, acquiesced in the arrangement.  In fact, the annual quest to boost Pentagon spending into the stratosphere regularly follows that very scenario, assisted by predictions of imminent doom from industry-funded hawks with a vested interest in increased military outlays.

Most Americans are probably aware that the Pentagon spends a lot of money, but it’s unlikely they grasp just how huge those sums really are.  All too often, astonishingly lavish military budgets are treated as if they were part of the natural order, like death or taxes.

The figures contained in the recent budget deal that kept Congress open, as well as in President Trump’s budget proposal for 2019, are a case in point: $700 billion for the Pentagon and related programs in 2018 and $716 billion the following year.  Remarkably, such numbers far exceeded even the Pentagon’s own expansive expectations.  According to Donald Trump, admittedly not the most reliable source in all cases, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis reportedly said, “Wow, I can’t believe we got everything we wanted” — a rare admission from the head of an organization whose only response to virtually any budget proposal is to ask for more.

The public reaction to such staggering Pentagon budget hikes was muted, to put it mildly. Unlike last year’s tax giveaway to the rich, throwing near-record amounts of tax dollars at the Department of Defense generated no visible public outrage.  Yet those tax cuts and Pentagon increases are closely related.  The Trump administration’s pairing of the two mimics the failed approach of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s — only more so.  It’s a phenomenon I’ve termed “Reaganomics on steroids.”  Reagan’s approach yielded oceans of red ink and a severe weakening of the social safety net.  It also provoked such a strong pushback that he later backtracked by raising taxes and set the stage for sharp reductions in nuclear weapons.

Donald Trump’s retrograde policies on immigration, women’s rights, racial justice, LGBT rights, and economic inequality have spawned an impressive and growing resistance.  It remains to be seen whether his generous treatment of the Pentagon at the expense of basic human needs will spur a similar backlash.

Of course, it’s hard to even get a bead on what’s being lavished on the Pentagon when much of the media coverage failed to drive home just how enormous these sums actually are. A rare exception was an Associated Press story headlined “Congress, Trump Give the Pentagon a Budget the Likes of Which It Has Never Seen.” This was certainly far closer to the truth than claims like that of Mackenzie Eaglen of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which over the years has housed such uber-hawks as Dick Cheney and John Bolton.  She described the new budget as a “modest year-on-year increase.” If that’s the case, one shudders to think what an immodest increase might look like.

The Pentagon Wins Big

So let’s look at the money.

Though the Pentagon’s budget was already through the roof, it will get an extra $165 billion over the next two years, thanks to the congressional budget deal reached earlier this month.  To put that figure in context, it was tens of billions of dollars more than Donald Trump had asked for last spring to  “rebuild” the U.S. military (as he put it).  It even exceeded the figures, already higher than Trump’s, Congress had agreed to last December.  It brings total spending on the Pentagon and related programs for nuclear weapons to levels higher than those reached during the Korean and Vietnam wars in the 1950s and 1960s, or even at the height of Ronald Reagan’s vaunted military buildup of the 1980s. Only in two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when there were roughly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or about seven times current levels of personnel deployed there, was spending higher.

Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy put the new Pentagon budget numbers in perspective when he pointed out that just the approximately $80 billion annual increase in the department’s top line between 2017 and 2019 will be double the current budget of the State Department; higher than the gross domestic products of more than 100 countries; and larger than the entire military budget of any country in the world, except China’s.

Democrats signed on to that congressional budget as part of a deal to blunt some of the most egregious Trump administration cuts proposed last spring.  The administration, for example, kept the State Department’s budget from being radically slashed and it reauthorized the imperiled Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for another 10 years.  In the process, however, the Democrats also threw millions of young immigrants under the bus by dropping an insistence that any new budget protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or “Dreamers,” program.  Meanwhile, the majority of Republican fiscal conservatives were thrilled to sign off on a Pentagon increase that, combined with the Trump tax cut for the rich, funds ballooning deficits as far as the eye can see — a total of $7.7 trillion worth of them over the next decade.

While domestic spending fared better in the recent congressional budget deal than it would have if Trump’s draconian plan for 2018 had been enacted, it still lags far behind what Congress is investing in the Pentagon.  And calculations by the National Priorities Project indicate that the Department of Defense is slated to be an even bigger winner in Trump’s 2019 budget blueprint. Its share of the discretionary budget, which includes virtually everything the government does other than programs like Medicare and Social Security, will mushroom to a once-unimaginable 61 cents on the dollar, a hefty boost from the already startling 54 cents on the dollar in the final year of the Obama administration.

The skewed priorities in Trump’s latest budget proposal are fueled in part by the administration’s decision to embrace the Pentagon increases Congress agreed to last month, while tossing that body’s latest decisions on non-military spending out the window.  Although Congress is likely to rein in the administration’s most extreme proposals, the figures are stark indeed — a proposed cut of $120 billion in the domestic spending levels both parties agreed to. The biggest reductions include a 41% cut in funding for diplomacy and foreign aid; a 36% cut in funding for energy and the environment; and a 35% cut in housing and community development.  And that’s just the beginning.  The Trump administration is also preparing to launch full-scale assaults on food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare.  It’s war on everything except the U.S. military.

Corporate Welfare

The recent budget plans have brought joy to the hearts of one group of needy Americans: the top executives of major weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. They expect a bonanza from the skyrocketing Pentagon expenditures. Don’t be surprised if the CEOs of these five firms give themselves nice salary boosts, something to truly justify their work, rather than the paltry $96 million they drew as a group in 2016 (the most recent year for which full statistics are available).

And keep in mind that, like all other U.S.-based corporations, those military-industrial behemoths will benefit richly from the Trump administration’s slashing of the corporate tax rate.  According to one respected industry analyst, a good portion of this windfall will go towards bonuses and increased dividends for company shareholders rather than investments in new and better ways to defend the United States.  In short, in the Trump era, Lockheed Martin and its cohorts are guaranteed to make money coming and going.

Items that snagged billions in new funding in Trump’s proposed 2019 budget included Lockheed Martin’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 aircraft, at $10.6 billion; Boeing’s F-18 “Super Hornet,” which was in the process of being phased out by the Obama administration but is now written in for $2.4 billion; Northrop Grumman’s B-21 nuclear bomber at $2.3 billion; General Dynamics’ Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine at $3.9 billion; and $12 billion for an array of missile-defense programs that will redound to the benefit of… you guessed it: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing, among other companies.  These are just a few of the dozens of weapons programs that will be feeding the bottom lines of such companies in the next two years and beyond.  For programs still in their early stages, like that new bomber and the new ballistic missile submarine, their banner budgetary years are yet to come.

In explaining the flood of funding that enables a company like Lockheed Martin to reap $35 billion per year in government dollars, defense analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group noted that “diplomacy is out; air strikes are in… In this sort of environment, it’s tough to keep a lid on costs. If demand goes up, prices don’t generally come down. And, of course, it’s virtually impossible to kill stuff. You don’t have to make any kind of tough choices when there’s such a rising tide.”

Pentagon Pork Versus Human Security

Loren Thompson is a consultant to many of those weapons contractors.  His think tank, the Lexington Institute, also gets contributions from the arms industry.  He caught the spirit of the moment when he praised the administration’s puffed-up Pentagon proposal for using the Defense Department budget as a jobs creator in key states, including the crucial swing state of Ohio, which helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016.  Thompson was particularly pleased with a plan to ramp up General Dynamics’s production of M-1 tanks in Lima, Ohio, in a factory whose production line the Army had tried to put on hold just a few years ago because it was already drowning in tanks and had no conceivable use for more of them.

Thompson argues that the new tanks are needed to keep up with Russia’s production of armored vehicles, a dubious assertion with a decidedly Cold War flavor to it.  His claim is backed up, of course, by the administration’s new National Security Strategy, which targets Russia and China as the most formidable threats to the United States.  Never mind that the likely challenges posed by these two powers — cyberattacks in the Russian case and economic expansion in the Chinese one — have nothing to do with how many tanks the U.S. Army possesses.

Trump wants to create jobs, jobs, jobs he can point to, and pumping up the military-industrial complex must seem like the path of least resistance to that end in present-day Washington.  Under the circumstances, what does it matter that virtually any other form of spending would create more jobs and not saddle Americans with weaponry we don’t need?

If past performance offers any indication, none of the new money slated to pour into the Pentagon will make anyone safer.  As Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has noted, there is a danger that the Pentagon will just get “fatter not stronger” as its worst spending habits are reinforced by a new gusher of dollars that relieves its planners of making any reasonably hard choices at all.

The list of wasteful expenditures is already staggeringly long and early projections are that bureaucratic waste at the Pentagon will amount to $125 billion over the next five years.  Among other things, the Defense Department already employs a shadow work force of more than 600,000 private contractors whose responsibilities overlap significantly with work already being done by government employees.  Meanwhile, sloppy buying practices regularly result in stories like the recent ones on the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency losing track of how it spent $800 million and how two American commands were unable to account for $500 million meant for the war on drugs in the Greater Middle East and Africa.

Add to this the $1.5 trillion slated to be spent on F-35s that the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight has noted may never be ready for combat and the unnecessary “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles at a minimum cost of $1.2 trillion over the next three decades.  In other words, a large part of the Pentagon’s new funding will do much to fuel good times in the military-industrial complex but little to help the troops or defend the country.

Most important of all, this flood of new funding, which could crush a generation of Americans under a mountain of debt, will make it easier to sustain the seemingly endless seven wars that the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.  So call this one of the worst investments in history, ensuring as it does failed wars to the horizon.

It would be a welcome change in twenty-first-century America if the reckless decision to throw yet more unbelievable sums of money at a Pentagon already vastly overfunded sparked a serious discussion about America’s hyper-militarized foreign policy.  A national debate about such matters in the run-up to the 2018 and 2020 elections could determine whether it continues to be business-as-usual at the Pentagon or whether the largest agency in the federal government is finally reined in and relegated to an appropriately defensive posture.

William D. Hartung, a   TomDispatch regular , is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of   Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex .

Arming teachers is not the answer

(Credit: Getty/Don Juan Moore)

I have hundreds of school visits under my belt. My literacy promotion journey has taken me into all types of high schools, from California to New York and everywhere in between. I’ve seen teched-out rich schools that pass out iPads like they’re #2 pencils and learning institutions so poor they can’t afford heat. What do these places have in common? They both remain in a constant state of danger from gun violence, and arming teachers as a deterrent would only make matters worse.

I had some time to sit with this after the shooting in Parkland, Florida, and I told myself that ignoring the response from the NRA would be healthy — we know they don’t care. I know that’s a heavy claim and saying a lot about that organization; however, we saw their response to Sutherland Springs, Las Vegas, Pulse Nightclub, Virginia Tech and many other mass shootings. We witnessed the NRA’s response to Sandy Hook’s children — if you can turn your head and act like those children weren’t murdered and offer nothing towards preventing this from happening again, then I must assume that the NRA, along with many of our elected members of Congress, do not care if children are murdered.

They blame the perpetrators but never blame the weapons. A gun, some ammo, plus a coward who wants to be remembered are the only ingredients needed to kill large groups of people. Outlaw assault weapons and make owning one a felony and I guarantee fewer people will die when the next mass shooting occurs. This should have been done a long time ago — nobody needs an AR-15, and shooters know this. But when the gun control conversation is broached, it switches quickly to “more guns” instead.

Last week, we heard President Trump offer zero intelligent solutions to mass shootings, just more of the same bad ideas. “Well-trained, gun-adept teachers and coaches should carry firearms in schools,” Trump told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I mean, I don’t want to have a hundred guards with rifles standing all over the school. You do a concealed carry permit. This would be a major deterrent, because these people are inherently cowards.”

Armed Educators (and trusted people who work within a school) love our students and will protect them. Very smart people. Must be firearms adept & have annual training. Should get yearly bonus. Shootings will not happen again – a big & very inexpensive deterrent. Up to States.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2018

President Trump is right about one thing — the shooters are cowards. What he misses, like most gun advocates, is that guns are a weak person’s tools. They are made to aid and protect the scared, and scared people normally don’t make rational decisions. I’m not a gun expert, and I didn’t conduct a nationwide study; however, coming from east Baltimore, one of the deadliest cities in the country­­, I’ve had a disturbing level of personal contact with firearms. They are everywhere.

From my experience, it’s always the guy who needs a little extra edge, the guy who lost the fight or lacks the support he needs to feel safe, who goes out and gets a gun. The gun offers instant power; he goes from being the quiet person who mixes in with the back of the crowd to the loudmouth standing in front, begging for conflict, looking for any and every reason to reach for that pistol and show that he’s the baddest person in the room. The flip side is that he’s emasculated without it, beyond paranoid and even worse off than before he discovered the power of a gun. And what happens when you mix this personality type with a frustrated teacher in an underfunded school where students, educators and administrators clash all of the time? Adding guns into the mix would be like tossing a piece of frozen fish into a pan of sizzling olive oil. (Don’t try it, your skin will fall off.)

Many poor schools already mirror jails. I’ve been in plenty with caged windows, gray walls, gray meat and drink for lunch and metal detectors. (It’s crazy how all of the poor black schools have metal detectors, but the white schools where many of these shootings happen don’t.) Either way, armed staff would completely strip away from the limited educational experience we have in our public schools, completing their transformation to a jail-like environment. If teachers have guns, more students will want to carry them, too, and we’d see even more conflict.

It doesn’t matter if the teachers are trained or not; the presence of guns makes everything uneasy. Who feels safe around loaded weapons? Do Mar-a-Lago members walk around and play golf with loaded pistols? Probably not.

“The dress” was the beginning of “alternative facts”

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Do you remember where you were three years ago? Do you remember laughing and then fighting over a ridiculous meme? Do you remember the day, in short, objective reality as we once knew it died? I’m not saying that “the dress,” as it swiftly and notoriously became known, is the reason for the current occupant of the White House. I’m just asking, but isn’t it?

I recall precisely how it unfolded for me — kind of like a Stephen King novel. It was the evening of February 26, 2015. Shortly after dinner. My elder daughter got a text from a classmate, looked at her phone — and then asked me a fateful question. “What color is this dress?” Within minutes she was moaning, “It’s tearing this family apart.” It was a social media post of a party dress, casually snapped by a Scottish mom and sent to her bride-to-be daughter. A friend of the daughter posted it on Facebook, and a storm was born. For the record, the Roman Originals dress, with its satin fabric folds and horizontal lace bands, is blue and black, and anyone who says otherwise (Kim Kardashian, B.J. Novak, my spouse) is literally insane. Unsurprisingly, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry saw it differently, with Perry adding the commentary that “I’ve read though there’s a vitamin d deficiency in people who see blue and black.”

Over the next day, the company that makes the dress got over 3.5 million hits and sold out of the sheath. Scientists soon rushed to explain the the ways that individual retinas perceive light. Photographers blamed the problem on a poor exposure. For a time, the world was dress, and only dress. And then, it seemed, the whole thing blew over.

But three years later, you can’t help noticing versions of the dress debate seemingly everywhere — only on an exponentially less entertaining scale. We’ll get Mexico to pay for a border wall! Chrysler is leaving Mexico to create jobs in the US! The economy is doing GREAT! DACA is dead! The inauguration audience was YUGE. The YUGEST! These are the kinds of statements that at one point would have been politely called “incorrect.” But shortly after the 2017 presidential inauguration, Kellyanne Conway casually told “Meet the Press” that then press secretary Sean Spicer simply “gave alternative facts” regarding the size of the crowd, and this new way of looking at the world officially entered the vernacular.

Your eyes perceive color differently than mine. Your views on key issues may be different from mine as well. But facts are immutable. The last two years have been an epic adventure in gaslighting, in living within the wobbly sensation of watching people debate and argue not what they perceive is true but truth itself, and of media outlets ramping up their practice of giving “equal time” to ” both sides” of important issues. It makes people who are wrong about objectively verifiable things believe they are entitled to go on being wrong, because hey, whatever, let’s just agree to disagree. What if I calculate pi to a different number? Who’s to say? But we degrade reality when we reuse to accept it. The earth is round. “Moonlight” won Best Picture. And that damn dress is blue.

The striking hindsight of “The Looming Tower”

Jeff Daniels as John O'Neill in "The Looming Tower" (Credit: Hulu/ JoJo Whilden)

Escalating threats, rivalries within the intelligence community and the resulting interagency paralysis during the years leading up to 9/11 create the narrative basis of Hulu’s “The Looming Tower,” out Wednesday on the streaming service. That makes the 10-episode series, adapted from Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer prize-winning bestseller, timely brilliant bait for viewers who can’t get enough of looking back at all the angles involved in the deadliest terrorism attack on American soil. Conversely, people yearning for an escape from current events may view “The Looming Tower” as repellent.

If you’re not up for an unflinching scripted examination of near history, one in part centered upon a figure whose life and death have a Cassandra-esque air of tragedy about it, direct your attention elsewhere. For in many respects, this is a series that quietly doubles as a warning about what can happen when the public’s attention is focused on trivial matters while the fuse to a cataclysmic act is steadily burning down.

As the CIA and FBI struggle to be taken seriously by leadership while clashing over which agency receives the power and resources to direct strategy, the government obsesses over what illicit deeds the president did and who he did it with.  In 1998 the misdirect centered around an intern, a cigar and a blue dress; twenty years later the gossip concerns collusion with Russia and flippant tweets that threaten our national security.

Only now we have a president openly questioning the credibility of the intelligence communities tasked with keeping the United States and our allies safe. Back then, “The Looming Tower” proposes, the failures were in part due to clashing egos. A longstanding professional enmity between the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge John O’Neill (Jeff Daniels), head of the FBI’s I-49 Squad, and CIA analyst Martin Schmidt (Peter Sarsgaard), chief of the D.C. based-“Alec Station,” fuels a dangerous level of dysfunction between the teams tasked with monitoring global terrorist activity.

Testimony by Muslim-American FBI Agent Ali Soufan (Tahar Rahim) as part of a 9/11 joint inquiry in 2004 sets up the series’ premise as Soufan informs the committee that the CIA’s testimony that it had shared intelligence information about al-Qaeda with the FBI was, in fact, a lie. Rahim says the line with a stony severity that sets the tone for all that follows.

From there “The Looming Tower” walks backward to 1998 and assembles the case, piece by piece, returning regularly to that 2004 hearing in order to place each missed opportunity in context, beginning with a tight focus on the embassy bombing in Nairobi that killed 213, including 12 Americans, two of whom were CIA employees.

The challenge with any appraisal of recent history, particularly one fresh enough in the memory to inspire debate over insufficiently answered questions and ever- evolving conspiracy theories, is that a large portion of the audience not only knows where this terrible path is headed but can still trigger a physiological response to the memory of it. Works like “The Looming Tower” can play into that emotionality by goosing the dialogue or manipulating the power of certain moments in the editing room.

But Dan Futterman, whose piercing sensibility rooted his Oscar-nominated scripts for “Capote” and “Foxcatcher” in a chilly clarity, allows the events themselves to sculpt the humanity of these characters. Under the direction of Alex Gibney, a filmmaker best known for his documentary work, the look and feel of the opening three episodes “The Looming Tower” favors verisimilitude over amplified sentiment. And this is truly an accomplishment given how much character serves as a plot catalyst.

Part of that devotion of realism means that “The Looming Tower” spends a lot of time in foreign spots doubling as the bases of the terrorist cells that would become the al-Qaeda network. Doing so this allows the series to employ the cinematic mechanisms of a spy thriller starting, in the very first scene, with the classic sidewalk follow of an object seamlessly handed off from person to person on its way to a dark secret room.

Sequences like these prove Gibney’s understanding of commercial entertainment structure although some who read Wright’s work may be less forgiving of the script’s omission, at least in the drama’s initial hours, of the author’s extensive examination of Middle Eastern history that created an environment for extremism to flourish.

Instead, Hulu’s production anchors the conflict within Soufan, a junior agent in 1998, whom Rahim ably  portrays with the passion and frustration of a man battered on two fronts: by those betraying his culture and religion, and the senseless hindrance of bureaucracy. Soufan is the skilled and as-yet unjaded stalwart in a gallery of characters whose personal agendas may get in the way of professional judgement. And Rahim’s skilled performance is one worth calling out in a stellar cast that includes prestige-television regulars Bill Camp and Michael Stuhlbarg.

The primary focus, of course, is the warring personalities between Schmidt and O’Neill. Those familiar with O’Neill’s biography may appreciate Daniels’ intense shading of his subject’s personality, a foul-mouthed boss who has no time for half-measures and yet inspires intense loyalty within his subordinates — including Soufan, to whom O’Neill grants his first professional break.

Sarsgaard’s CIA boss, in contrast, comes across as a patchwork of barely veiled contempt and jagged pragmatism, the iceberg standing against O’Neill’s frequent verbal conflagrations. In the episode made available to critics, Sarsgaard and Daniels’ rarely share a frame and yet compliment each other nicely. Contemptible as Sarsgaard makes Schmidt as he unapologetically obstructs FBI efforts, the actor enables us to understand his reasons for doing so come down to a simply matter of trust — in that he trusts his own expertise and his team more than anything else.

Daniels’ leads with O’Neill’s charm above all, which makes his incredible demands upon his team’s lives more palatable. He’s a workhorse who’s always on the move and has a temper set off by a feather’s touch, but he’s also smooth enough to lie his way into the hearts of several women at once.

Historical accounts go down more easily with a smattering of spice, but in O’Neill’s case there was little need to embellish (although in zooming in on his infidelities, Futterman does just that). His outsized image in life is only surpassed by the cosmically terrible happenstance of his story’s coda, lending a heart-rending close to one part of this story. We’re still living with the ramifications of everything else portrayed in “The Looming Tower,” a shrewdly rendered albeit streamlined tale worth paying attention to — if not for its cautionary aspects, then for the undeniably strong performances and direction.

From Facebook to campaign manager: Trump taps Brad Parscale

Brad Parscale; Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster/Evan Vucci)

President Trump announced Tuesday that long-time aide Brad Parscale will helm his 2020 re-election bid as campaign manager. This marks a second promotion for Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital efforts during the 2016 election after working for the Trump Organization as a digital strategist.

Among a team that included Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Paul Manafort, Brad Parscale was a name that remained largely unknown throughout 2016, despite his lofty influence. But the relative anonymity of the digital advertising and data guru began to chip away Tuesday as the Trump team touted its secret weapon.

The campaign announced the appointment on the president’s campaign website, saying Parscale, who has continued to lead the Republican National Committee’s digital strategy, will develop the campaign’s infrastructure and support Republican candidates in the midterm elections this coming fall.

Parscale’s designation seemed to come as no surprise to Trump’s inner circle. In a post shared to the president’s campaign website, Eric Trump, called Parscale “an amazing talent” who was “pivotal to our success in 2016,” while Jared Kushner said that Pascale was “essential to bringing a disciplined technology and data-driven approach to how the 2016 campaign was run.”

Parscale’s previous “digital director” title is somewhat misleading, because by the end of the 2016 campaign, his portfolio expanded to include overseeing advertising, data collection, and a significant portion of the campaign’s fundraising. By adding a “donate” button for people to click on in online ads, Parscale helped raise $240 million in small donations for the then-Republican candidate.

“I was like, ‘we can go in and get this,’ and I changed all the budgets around,” Parscale told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in a rare on-camera interview last year. “I took every nickel and dime I could out of anywhere else, and I moved it to Michigan and Wisconsin. And I started buying advertising, digital, TV.”

In the same interview, Parscale revealed that Trump had initial doubts about the power of digital advertising to reach voters, but he eventually embraced it.

“He looks at the TV, and he says, ‘This is what I believe wins a campaign,'” Parscale recalls. “So he starts laying into me about TV … and I don’t believe in this mumbo-jumbo digital stuff.”

While the president is known for depending on Twitter to get his message out, Parscale spent much of the campaign’s digital budget on Facebook. “I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win,” Parscale said. “Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won.”

Parscale also said that he created hundreds of micro-targeted advertisements for specific voter communities. He also embedded Republican employees of Facebook, Twitter, and Google into the campaign to maximize effectiveness across platforms.

The aforementioned tech leaders have been under scrutiny in Robert Mueller’s probe over Russian interference in the 2016 election. When asked what he thinks about the investigation, Parscale told 60 minutes that the Russia plot line is pushed by liberals who are upset by Trump’s victory. Parscale claimed the situation is ironic because, “These social platforms were all invented by very liberal people on the west and east coast, and we found a way to use it to push conservative values. I don’t ever think they ever thought that would happen. ”

Parscale insisted that allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia were “a joke.” Still, the House Intelligence Committee contacted him as part of its probe into Russian meddling.

 

 

 

Jared Kushner loses “Top Secret” security clearance: report

Jared Kushner (Credit: Getty/Brendan Smialowski)

There is still hope that the rampant nepotism that characterizes the Trump White House may yet be contained.

Jared Kushner, son-in-law of President Donald Trump, is one of many White House aides to have his security clearance downgraded, according to Politico. Kushner, along with other aides, received the news via a memo on Friday. The downgraded security clearance level will restrict access to highly classified intelligence, in contrast to the access Kushner enjoyed while operating under the highest interim security clearance – Top Secret/SCI-level.

Concerns around interim security clearances surfaced after White House aide Rob Porter resigned due to domestic abuse allegations. Porter was also operating under an interim security clearance.

Many insiders and pundits scratched their heads as to the reasoning behind Kushner receiving top secret security clearance in the first place. Indeed, Kushner’s background is in real estate and business; he has no previous government nor foreign policy experience. Democrats spoke of suspending his clearance back in 2017, after news leaked that Kushner omitted details of his meetings with Russians on his security clearance application.

On Feb. 16, Chief of Staff John Kelly wrote a five-page memo addressing ongoing security clearance concerns regarding White House staff, in addition to ordering actions that would impact those operating under interim security clearances. In this memo, Kelly decreed that those with interim security clearances whose background investigations had been ongoing since June 1 should see those clearances revoked on Feb. 23. However, it was unclear how this would impact Kushner — especially since his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, had the power to grant Kushner a permanent clearance.

Many suspected that the notoriously clannish president would intervene on behalf of his son-in-law. Yet Trump told reporters on Friday, according to Politico, that he would leave the fate of Kushner’s security clearance in the hands of Kelly.

“I will let General Kelly make that decision,” Trump said. “I have no doubt he’ll make the right decision.”

While Kelly did not sign the memo that was released on Friday that informed aides about the security clearance downgrades, Kelly’s previous memo from Feb. 16 was likely the trigger for the downgrades.

The White House has declined to comment on Kushner’s security clearance; White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders brushed past the issue when speaking to reporters on Tuesday.

“We actually haven’t commented on Jared’s issue indicated, but we have commented on his ability to do his job. Which, he’s a valued member of the team and he will continue to do the important work that he’s been doing since he’s started in the administration,” she told reporters.

Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell told Politico in a statement the changes would “not affect Mr. Kushner’s ability to continue to do the very important work he has been assigned by the president.”

However, others saw that as wishful thinking. Quoting exclusive sources, CNN reported:

“Republican sources close to the White House said the clearance downgrade could undercut Kushner’s ability to influence policy decision-making in the West Wing. Without a top-level clearance, Kushner will be unable to attend meetings where the most sensitive national secrets are discussed.”

Since Porter’s dismissal, Kushner’s security clearance has been scrutinized  — even by some Trump loyalists.

Fox News host Shepard Smith told viewers last week that there was “a Kushner problem at the White House.”

“Jared Kushner submitted his application – his ‘SF-86′ as they call it – and did not include 100 contacts with foreigners, and then later had to go back and include them. But then later he did not include the meeting at Trump Tower with the Russian lawyer and the Russian translator. He didn’t include that. So that was another amendment to this thing,” Smith explained. “And that took this past June.”

Officials can be imprisoned for omissions on a security clearance, as Salon previously reported.

Kushner has not been able to receive a full clearance in part because of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the dealings of Trump and his associates.

Warriors to visit African American History Museum instead of White House

The Golden State Warriors celebrate after winning the 2017 NBA Finals (Credit: Getty/Ronald Martinez)

Rather than visit the White House — as is customary for any NBA championship team — the 2017 NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors, will meet with local children in Washington D.C. and visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Tuesday. The team is in town for their game against the Washington Wizards on Wednesday — a trip, which, as reigning champions, would customarily include a White House visit.

All professional sports champion teams are invited to the White House to celebrate their titles. But in September, President Donald Trump rescinded the Warriors’ invitation after star player Steph Curry said he personally did not want to visit Trump’s White House. “Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team. Stephen Curry is hesitating,” Trump tweeted a day later, “therefore invitation is withdrawn!”

Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team.Stephen Curry is hesitating,therefore invitation is withdrawn!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2017

The Warriors revealed their new itinerary Monday night after beating the New York Knicks. “The White House is a great honor, but there’s extenuating circumstances that we felt that we’re not comfortable doing,” shooting guard Klay Thompson told reporters. “We’re not going to politicize anything, we’re just going to hang out with some kids, take them to an African-American museum and hopefully teach them things we learned along the way and life lessons, and we’ll still be getting some great memories.”

The Warriors also released an official statement, which said: “In lieu of a visit to the White House, we have decided that we’ll constructively use our trip to the nation’s capital in February to celebrate equality, diversity and inclusion — the values that we embrace as an organization.” The team’s coach Steve Kerr has been vocal about his criticism of the president, describing his statements as “racist” and “misogynistic.”

In response to Trump’s withdrawal, Curry said, “By not going, hopefully that will inspire some change in terms of what we tolerate in this country.” And given Trump’s very public feuds with black athletes, tirades against players protesting during the national anthem and other instances of the president spewing hateful rhetoric, many athletes have been opting out of this sports tradition.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ son, Levi Sanders, announces congressional run

Levi Sanders and Bernie Sanders (Credit: AP/Mary Altaffer)

In announcing that he is running for Congress in New Hampshire, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ son is keeping politics in the family.

WMUR first reported on the statement issued by Levi Sanders, Sen. Sanders’ only biological son.

“After much thought and consultation with my family, friends, and the people of New Hampshire, I am excited to announce today that I am running for Congress in New Hampshire’s 1st District,” Levi Sanders said in a statement. “This is a unique opportunity to listen to the hard-working men and women of New Hampshire about the issues that matter to them.”

Sanders is vying for the seat in New Hampshire’s first district, currently held by Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, who is not seeking re-election. Sanders currently lives in Claremont, New Hampshire, which lies in the second district; House representatives must reside in the state that they represent, though not necessarily in the same district.

“The majority of voters in New Hampshire, and around this country, agree that we need a Medicare For All healthcare system which guarantees healthcare to every man, women, and child without out of pocket expenses,” Levi Sanders said in his official statement on his campaign website. “We need an educational system which says that whether you are rich or poor, you have the ability to go to a public college and/or university tuition free. We need to demand that we have a minimum wage which allows people to work forty hours a week without being in poverty. It is urgent that we address the opioid problem which is at a crisis level in New Hampshire. We must demand that women finally earn the same pay as men. It is unacceptable that we haven’t found the political courage to pass sensible gun legislation.”

According to The New York Times, Levi is one of Sen. Sanders’ four children, though he is the senator’s only biological son.

In an interview with People magazine in January, Levi alluded to how anti-establishment and anti-authority tactics influenced his life from a young age.

“When I was a little kid, I started with B. Then it was Ber and then Bern and now it’s Bernard. Or the Bernster. I’ve never called him Bernie. And I never have called him Dad,” Levi told People. “Even when I was six years old, I thought it was childish. He was a friend, not an authoritarian.”

Levi Sanders served as an assistant manager at the Chittenden Emergency Food Shelf in Burlington, Vermont in 2001. According to The New York Times, he ran for City Council in Claremont, New Hampshire but finished seventh in a race of nine. He is also an advocate for social security.

According to CNN, Levi isn’t the only one of Sen. Sanders’ offspring to take up politics. Carina Driscoll, Sanders’ stepdaughter, is running as an independent to be mayor of Burlington, Vermont; Bernie once held the same position.

Sen. Sanders released a statement to WMUR on Tuesday expressing support for his son’s campaign.

“I am very proud of Levi’s commitment to public service and his years of work on behalf of low income and working people. Levi will be running his own campaign, in his own way, with his own ideas. The decision as to who to vote for will be determined by the people of New Hampshire’s first district, and nobody else,” Sen. Sanders said in the statement.

Supreme Court rules non-citizens can be detained indefinitely

Justices Alito, Roberts, Thomas and Breyer (Credit: AP/Reuters)

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that immigrants lacking U.S. citizenship who have been targeted for possible deportation can be detained without bond hearings — even if they are in the United States legally.

The case of Jennings v. Rodriguez involved whether it was constitutional for the government to detain immigrants indefinitely without allowing them to have periodic individualized bond hearings. This practice was even used on immigrants who had attained permanent legal status or were seeking asylum, raising questions about whether basic human rights were violated in cases where the detention lasted for months or even years. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had previously found that the government needed to provide individualized bond hearings for detained immigrants every six months. It also found that detaining someone past six months after their initial detention was only permissible if the government can prove doing so is justified, according to The Washington Post.

In overturning those rules by a 5-3 vote, Justice Samuel Alito explained on behalf of the majority that the law clearly gives the government the right to detain immigrants considered for deportation “until the end of the applicable proceedings” and insisted that “there is no justification for any of the procedural requirements” established by the Ninth Circuit.

By contrast, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote on behalf of the dissenting judges (himself, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) that “the many thousands of individuals involved in this case are persons who believe they have a right to enter into or remain in the United States, and a sizable number turn out to be right.” He added that it is wrong for the government to be “denying them the bail hearings that the law makes available even for those accused of serious crimes.”

Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from the case due to work that she had done as solicitor general under President Barack Obama, whose Department of Justice first appealed the Ninth Circuit ruling to the High Court. The Trump administration continued the appeal to the Supreme Court.

Legal experts expect the ruling to have a major impact on immigrants living in the U.S. today.

“The decision is a setback for immigrants and immigrant rights groups who have argued for years that these bail hearings are necessary. But the court left open the bigger question of whether the Constitution requires such hearings, meaning that these same plaintiffs can now make that claim in the lower court,” Stephen Vladeck, a professor of law at the University of Texas, told CNN on Tuesday.

“The Trump administration has asked Congress to increasing funding to detain more immigrants, thus even more immigrants may be detained in the coming months, and will have to wait even longer for their day in immigration court,” Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, a professor of Immigration Law Practice at Cornell Law School, also explained to CNN on Tuesday.

One in seven teens are “sexting,” says new research

(Credit: AP Photo/Karly Domb Sadof, FIle)

Sexting is known as the sharing of sexually explicit images and videos through the internet or via electronic devices such as smartphones.

One in seven teens report that they are sending sexts, and one in four are receiving sexts, according to our study of over 110,000 teens from around the world published today, Monday Feb. 26, in JAMA Pediatrics.

Teen-to-teen sexting has generated considerable media attention, with news headlines mostly warning of the dangers of sexting.

In January 2018, police in Châteauguay, near Montreal, launched a campaign called “sexts are porn” targeted at students aged 12 to 17. In the U.K., one police force recently warned parents they may be prosecuted if their children send indecent images over mobile phones.

Naturally, this has many parents worried. Is consensual teen sexting a cause for concern?

Girls and boys participate equally

Sexting over the last decade has been on the rise, which is consistent with the rapid growth in the availability and ownership of smartphones. Teen sex, on the other hand, has been on the decline over the last decade.

Our team conducted a meta-analysis of the research literature, drawing from 39 research studies on teen sexting internationally between 2009 and 2016.

We found that approximately 15 per cent of teens are sending sexts. Meanwhile, around 41 per cent of teens are having sexual intercourse, according to a 2018 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States.

Considerable evidence suggests that teen sexting is related to sexual behaviour. Older teens are also sexting more often than younger teens. Taken together, it is not surprising that older teens are both more likely to sext and have sexual intercourse.

Boys are often portrayed as the requesters, and girls as the senders, of nude images or videos. Findings from our study debunk this widely held assumption and show that boys and girls are equally likely to participate in sexting.

Our study found that the large majority of teens are using their personal smartphones versus their computers to sext. In 2015, approximately 92 per cent of teenagers aged 15 to 17 in the U.S. owned a cell phone.

Risk-taking or ‘normal’ behaviour?

With the ubiquity of smartphones and increasing digital usage across all age categories, parents should not be surprised that teens are engaging in sexting with other teens.

Researchers suggest that consensual teen sexting may be a normal component of sexual behaviour and development in the digital age. The increased prevalence of this sexual behaviour, in older youth in particular, corresponds to their increasing interest in sexual exploration and identity development.

Sexting has been linked to impulsive and risk-taking behaviours but, so far, the evidence for an association between sexting and poor mental health such as depression or loneliness is weak to non-existent.

The most consistent predictor of consensual teen sexting is actually whether or not they want to flirt, be romantically involved with another teen, or maintain intimacy with their partner.

Sharing without consent

Although girls and boys sext a similar amount, there are important differences in the perception of this behaviour among youth.

Compared to boys, girls report feeling more pressure to sext, and also worry they will be judged harshly for sexting (e.g., slut shaming) or for not sexting (e.g., being called a “prude”).

Boys, on the other hand, may see sexting as an opportunity to showcase their social status.

This double standard may create higher levels of distress for girls.

The moment the youth presses “send,” they are trusting that the receiver will not share the images or videos without their consent. Sexting can become a problem when this trust is violated.

In many countries, it is illegal for a person to distribute an intimate photo without the explicit consent of the individual in the photo. Nonetheless, our research suggests that 12.5 per cent of teens are forwarding intimate photos without the consent of the sender.

Coercion and ‘sextortion’

Taken together, several challenges can potentially arise. First, many teens may feel as though sexting is an expectation. Although likely not a warranted expectation, the idea that “my friends are doing it, then maybe I should do it” could be a strong peer motivator.

A second problem that may arise is when teens are coerced into sexting or when they are “sextorted” (when images or videos are used as a form of threat or blackmail).

Another problem is the idea of digital security. Teenage brains are still developing; their capacity to critically analyze the digital tools and apps they are using may not be enough to keep them safe.

Where are these images stored? Who, other than the intended recipient, has access to them? How long are they kept digitally? And, if I change my mind can I get them back?

These and many other questions are simply not at the forefront of the teenage mind — nor, arguably, are they always in an adult’s mind either, 53 per cent of whom engage in sexting themselves — especially when these thoughts are competing with sexual interest and intimacy.

Parents should be proactive

Parents can keep their teens aware and informed by having open discussions — about healthy dating relationships, peer pressure, digital security, sexuality and citizenship more broadly.

The general consensus is that parents and caregivers should be proactive, rather than protective and reactive, about talking to their teens about sexting. Preaching abstinence is not effective. As with the issue of safe sex, this should be an ongoing conversation with your child instead of a one off “talk.”

In these discussions, it is important to emphasize digital citizenship. Broadly, digital citizenship encourages individuals to act in a way that is safe, legal and ethical — in their online and digital interactions and behaviours.

This is also an opportunity for parents and caregivers to emphasize that digital citizenship applies to adults as well. And such conversations can provide an opening for discussing other sensitive issues with teens, such as sexuality.

It’s also important to discuss strategies for dealing with peer pressure to engage in sexting. And to discuss the potential consequences of sending sexts. Parents should emphasize cause and effect for teens. Once the videos or images have been sent, the teen forfeits control of who sees it.

Sex and the digital world are two topics that can overwhelm parents and caregivers. Fortunately, there are some excellent resources on these issues to help guide conversations with your teens, including Digital Citizenship: Guide for Parents and Common Sense Media’s Sexting Handbook.

If a parent or teen is concerned about videos and images being distributed without their consent, or if they are being coerced into sexting or sextorted, they should report their concerns immediately to their local police. In Canada, they can also consult needhelpnow.ca and send a report to Cybertip.ca. In the U.S., they can consult Stopbullying.org.

Sheri Madigan, Assistant Professor, Canada Research Chair in Determinants of Child Development, Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute, University of Calgary and Jeff Temple, Professor, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology; Director, Behavioral Health and Research, The University of Texas Medical Branch