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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Michael D. Shear, Katie Benner and Michael S. Schmidt, White House Correspondent - The New York Times
Stephan: Eventually, it all comes out, so let's go back to one of the most vile decisions of any administration in American history, the deliberate separation of young children, even nursing babies from their mothers and fathers. Jeff Sessions, remember Jeff Sessions, we now know was a fervent proponent. So was Rod J. Rosenstein, then Deputy Attorney General. What we see is that Trump appointed people who were just as cruel, racist, and vicious as he himself.
As attorney general, Jeff Sessions enforced a “zero tolerance” policy on immigration that separated children from their parents. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico, including three appointed by President Trump, recoiled in May 2018 against an order to prosecute all undocumented immigrants even if it meant separating children from their parents. They told top Justice Department officials they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare.
But the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, made it clear what Mr. Trump wanted on a conference call later that afternoon, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general into Mr. Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy.
“We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told the prosecutors, according to participants’ notes. One added in shorthand: “If care about kids, don’t bring them in. Won’t give amnesty to people with kids.”
Rod J. Rosenstein, then the deputy attorney general, went even further in a second call about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did […]
Emma Brown, Jon Swaine and Michelle Boorstein, - The Washington Post
Stephan: I don't think which religion a person affiliates with should be a factor in public service, but I do think that being a member of a bizarre cult, with bizarre beliefs should be. Read this report and reach your own conclusion.
Amy Coney Barrett, Handmaid in a Christian cult, and Trump nominee for the Supreme Court
While Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has faced questions about how her Catholic faith might influence her jurisprudence, she has not spoken publicly about her involvement in People of Praise, a small Christian group founded in the 1970s and based in South Bend, Ind.
Barrett, a federal appellate judge, has disclosed serving on the board of a network of private Christian schools affiliated with the group. The organization, however, has declined to confirm that she is a member. In recent years, it removed from its website editions of a People of Praise magazine — first those that included her name and photograph and then all archives of the magazine itself.
Barrett has had an active role in the organization, as have her parents, according to documents and interviews that help fill out a picture of her involvement with a group that keeps its teachings and gatherings private.
A 2010 People of Praise directory states that she held the title of “handmaid,” a leadership position for women in the […]
Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
Jair Bolsonaro, the President of Brazil, a kind of authoritarian Trumper clone is allowing Brazil's rain forest, so essential to the earth's biosphere, to be destroyed for short-term profit, saying it is an irresistible cultural transition. The Amazon rainforest is so essential to the balance of the biosphere, that its destruction will affect the entire world. Yet the world has no pathway for dealing with this. I picked this report because it describes this negatively transformative process the forest itself undergoes.
Smoke rises from an illegally lit fire in the Amazon rainforest reserve, south of Novo Progresso in Pará State, Brazil. Credit: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty
Much of the Amazon could be on the verge of losing its distinct nature and switching from a closed canopy rainforest to an open savannah with far fewer trees as a result of the climate crisis, researchers have warned.
Rainforests are highly sensitive to changes in rainfall and moisture levels, and fires and prolonged droughts can result in areas losing trees and shifting to a savannah-like mix of woodland and grassland. In the Amazon, such changes were known to be possible but thought to be many decades away.
Stephan: This is fact-based assessment of the Trump tax crimes.
President Trump speaks during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on September 27, 2020, in Washington, D.C. Joshua Roberts / Getty
The great white whale of Trump-era journalism was finally harpooned and boated on Sunday night — Tax returns, ho! — and the resulting product is a thunderclap of venality and greed astride a form of grasping self-interest unseen in the White House since the epic corruption of Warren Harding.
In 2018, The New York Times published an exhaustive report on the myriad ways the Trump family, going back to patriarch Fred Trump, used a variety of tax dodges to hide the family fortune. This latest Times report lays out what Donald Trump has done with that fortune, up to and including the years he has been in office.
“The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public,” reads the Times report. “His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses […]
Stephan: I can think of no other time in American history when a President did something that a court found to be illegal, and he just ignored the judgment and kept on doing it, and everyone just kind of went along with it.
A federal judge declared in September that William Perry Pendley had served unlawfully as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management for 424 days.Credit…Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily, via Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Holding a job unlawfully is not a reason to be fired in the Trump administration.
Last month, a Montana judge ruled that the acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, which holds sway over millions of acres of federal land, should be removed from his position because he was performing his duties illegally. The Interior Department’s response? Tweak his title.
Since March, William Perry Pendley is the third high-ranking administration official that the courts have found likely to be working in violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, a 1998 law governing how a president may appoint temporary officials. Such findings have been bolstered by the Government Accountability Office and other agencies.
In each case the administration has responded with defiance.
“We depend on an administration’s willingness to comply with the law, including judicial orders, findings of independent agencies, and congressional demands for information,” said Kathleen Clark, a government […]
Stephan: This is a very interesting essay on how White Supremacy has manifested itself through American history.
The Magnet, from Puck, 1911. Credit: Udo J. Keppler / Library of Congress
The average person may be forgiven for thinking that the South actually won the Civil War. Despite a brief experiment in interracial democracy during the Reconstruction years, for much of its history the region has upheld a regime of brutal racial subordination. In the late 19th century, after the overthrow of Reconstruction, many of its state governments disenfranchised Black men, instituted racial segregation, condoned racial terrorism and violence, and kept a majority of Black and white Southerners economically bound through sharecropping, debt peonage, convict lease labor, and tenancy. By the 20th century, Franklin Roosevelt called the South the nation’s No. 1 economic problem, resistant to unionization and social policies. Even today it leads in indices for poverty and weak educational systems. The Jim Crow South was upended by the civil rights revolution. Yet even in defeat, its language of oligarchy and its opposition to progressive political and economic policies through an appeal to racism has been adopted by the modern Republican Party.
Stephan: Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas, both of whom are completely out of step with the American culture, as endless polls have determined, in anticipation I think of Amy Coney Barrett being confirmed for the court, have come out formally stating their view that same-sex marriages should be made illegal in the United States. Absolutely amazing. Of course, they have also made it clear that they would vote to overturn Roe v Wade. These troglodytes are on the court as a result of the Republican decades' long campaign to restructure the nation's judiciary at every level to reflect the party's far-right fascist worldview. If Donald Trump is re-elected and Barrett is confirmed, I think you will see America's laws be pushed back to the 1930s. Basically, legislation by judicial fiat.
Associate Justices Samuel Alito (left) and Clarence Thomas Credit: The Advocate
On Monday morning, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito reminded Americans that marriage equality is in imminent peril at the Supreme Court. Thomas, joined by Alito, wrote a screed in defense of Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, painting her as a modern-day martyr. The two justices suggested that SCOTUS must overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized same-sex couples’ right to marry, in order to preserve religious liberty in the United States. “Davis may have been one of the first victims of this Court’s cavalier treatment of religion in its Obergefell decision,” Thomas warned, “but she will not be the last.”
It’s no secret that Thomas and Alito oppose equal rights for LGBTQ Americans. But their Monday opinion is still profoundly alarming. These two justices did not simply state that marriage equality has no basis in the Constitution. They wrote that marriage equality is an affront to the Constitution, one that trammels the First Amendment rights of Christians. And they did so just weeks before Election Day, as […]
Alex Kotch, - Truthout/ The Center for Media and Democracy
Stephan: Yet more proof that the Republican Party has become a christofascist White supremacy cult. These people do not like democracy, and this report explains how they create phony movements to advance their corporatist interests.
A man with a QAnon vest and US Flag joins hundreds of people protesting a mandate from the Massachusetts Governor requiring all children in grades K-12 to receive an influenza (flu) vaccine/shot to attend school for the 2020/2021 year outside the Massachusetts State House in Boston on August 30, 2020. Credit: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty
The FBI labeled the QAnon conspiracy theory a domestic terrorism threat in May 2019. But that hasn’t prevented members of the House Freedom Caucus, gun rights organizations, and a number of prominent Republican Party donors and business executives from donating to QAnon-friendly congressional candidates.
The primary QAnon theory imagines President Donald Trump as a selfless savior waging a secret war against a child sex trafficking ring led by his political enemies, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Eventually, Trump will conduct a military takeover and arrest Democrats en masse.
The bizarre theories emerged from the related “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory — that a D.C. pizza restaurant was the headquarters of a child trafficking operation run by Clinton and her associate John Podesta. QAnon proponents often assert that John F. […]
