"Ten years ago Hurricanes Katrina and Rita tore into the Gulf Coast and displaced over a million residents. For many of these people, trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency became their homes."
"The emailed response from the Guggenheim's chief curator to the White House was polite but firm: the museum could not accommodate a request to "borrow" a painting by Vincent Van Gogh for President Donald and Melania Trump's private living quarters. Instead, wrote the curator, Nancy Spector, another piece was available, one that was nothing like "Landscape with Snow," the lovely 1888 Van Gogh rendering of a man in a black hat walking along a path in Arles with his dog. The curator's alternative: an 18-karat, fully functioning, solid gold toilet - an interactive work entitled "America" that critics have described as pointed satire aimed at the excess of wealth in this country."
"The reference to an "audit" goes back to President Barack Obama, who issued a memo in April 2009 just a few months after taking office announcing that ICE raids at workplaces would focus less on the employees working the factory floors and picking crops and more on their managers and bosses. The move was widely seen as a reaction to the high-profile raids carried out under President George W. Bush, where agents dressed in tactical gear arrived by truck and helicopter and stormed the manufacturing plants and warehouses of major companies, arresting workers suspected of being in the country illegally by the hundreds."
"It may be early yet to tell which approach the Trump administration is committing to – the high-profile raids of the Bush administration or the audits favored by Obama. But this month's action suggests that both approaches are on the table. "What it seems is that they're doing a hybrid of those two investigations," Hahn says, at least so far as the raids at the 7-Elevens, which were carried out at 98 locations in 17 states. They also seem to indicate that employers, who some believe have long successfully deflected punishment for their hiring practices, are squarely in the crosshairs of immigration enforcement,"
"
"When Democrats think about their party’s problems on the political map, they tend to think of President Trump’s ability to win the White House despite losing the popular vote and Republicans’ potent efforts to gerrymander congressional districts. But their problems extend beyond the Electoral College and the House: The Senate hasn’t had such a strong pro-GOP bias since the ratification of direct Senate elections in 1913."
"Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats."
"This is partly attributable to the nature of House districts: GOP gerrymandering and Democratic voters’ clustering in urban districts has moved the median House seat well to the right of the nation. Part of it is bad timing. Democrats have been cursed by a terrible Senate map in 2018: They must defend 25 of their 48 seats1 while Republicans must defend just eight of their 52."
"In 1973, a brash young would-be developer from Queens met one of New York’s premier power brokers: Roy Cohn, whose name is still synonymous with the rise of McCarthyism and its dark political arts. With the ruthless attorney as a guide, Trump propelled himself into the city’s power circles and learned many of the tactics that would inexplicably lead him to the White House years later."
James Howard Kunstler remains a very astute observer of American politics today ...
"Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they actually dominate the scene on every side. A species of wishful thinking that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting magical rescue remedies that promise to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that makes up the armature of “normal” life in the USA. They chatter about electric driverless car fleets, home delivery drone services, and as-yet-undeveloped modes of energy production to replace problematic fossil fuels, while ignoring the self-evident resource and capital constraints now upon us and even the laws of physics—especially entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Their main mental block is their belief in infinite industrial growth on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish that it obviates their standing as technocrats."
