Category Archives: Donald Trump

New York Times

Fact Check: Donald Trump's Claims About Infrastructure New York Times Mr. Trump announced plans to turn over the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control responsibilities to a private nonprofit organization on Monday, a broad push for a $1 trillion infrastructure investment on Wednesday, and the creation of ... and more »

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Fact Check: Donald Trump's Claims About Infrastructure - New York Times

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. Ethan Miller Getty Images

Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that attending President Donald Trump's meetings with Silicon Valley leaders is like waterboarding yourself.

"If you dont get invited to this meeting and want to know what it was like, just drink a bottle of gin and then waterboard yourself," Costolo tweeted Friday.

The former Twitter chief, who ran the company from 2010 to 2015, was referencing news of Trump's impending meeting with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the tech space later this month, according to BuzzFeed.

Silicon Valley leaders have had a complicated relationship with the President since he was elected in November. A number of powerful industry leaders, including Apple's Tim Cook, Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Tesla's Elon Musk, met with Trump in December to smooth tensions following disagreements throughout his campaign.

Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick also participated in White House advisory councils. The latter came under fire amid company scandals to the point of his resignation due to pressure from Uber employees and outside groups.

The Tesla chief meanwhile opted to stay on until Trump vowed to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement at the beginning of June.

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Former Twitter CEO Compares Meeting With President Trump to Waterboarding - Fortune

Like many of Trump's tweets, this one immediately came to dominate the political conversation. Did he actually have a secret recording system in the White House? If not, why say it?

And, like many of Trump's tweets, it produced a chain reaction of events that backfired on Trump. The threat -- I guess that's the best way to describe what Trump did -- of the existence of recordings spurred Comey to pass along memos he had written detailing his conversations with Trump to a friend, with the express goal of them being leaked and, hopefully, triggering a special counsel to be appointed.

But, now, there's even more to the Trump tweet on "tapes" of his Comey conversations. Why? Because we have Comey and Trump saying absolutely contradictory things about the nature of those meetings and phone calls.

The easiest way to make this something other than a "he said, he said" situation is for Trump to authorize the release of any and all recorded conversations with Comey -- if, of course, they exist.

"Lordy, I hope there are tapes," Comey said in his testimony before the Senate intelligence committee Thursday. At another point, he added: "The President surely knows if there are tapes. If there are, my feelings aren't hurt. Release the tapes."

All of which makes the White House response to the question of whether a recording system exists all the more troubling. Asked Thursday about the possibility, deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she had "no idea" if there was a taping system in the White House. When a reporter questioned whether Sanders could find out the answer to that question, she joked: "Sure, I'll try to look under the couches."

That response is broadly consistent with how the White House has played this story since Trump's initial tweet. "The President has nothing further to add on that," White House press secretary Sean Spicer said about the possibility of a taping system in the immediate aftermath of Trump's tweet.

And Trump himself hasn't shed any more light on the tweet, either.

Given Comey's testimony -- under oath -- that stone-walling strategy is no longer sustainable. At least one person in the White House -- HINT: His initial are DJT -- knows whether or not the President has been secretly taping phone calls and meetings.

If such tapes exist, they need to be heard by both the congressional committees looking into Russia's meddling into the 2016 election and by Mueller's investigators. They are the one thing that could provide definitive evidence of whether Trump or Comey is telling the truth about their interactions.

If the tapes don't exist, we need to know that, too.

Past is usually prologue. If so, Trump and his senior staff will bunker down on the issue -- simply refusing to say anything either way about the existence of a recording system. At which point the ball will be in the hands of Congress and Mueller to get the tapes -- if any tapes actually exist.

The Trump tweet on "tapes" is now a central part of the investigation into what exactly happened between he and Comey. And that's not going to change until we get a clear answer on whether they actually exist -- and, if they do, what's on them.

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So is Donald Trump secretly recording conversations or not? - CNN

Things seemed rosier for both May and Trump when they met at the White House in January. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Just a few months ago, its worth remembering, we seemed to be careening to a new and possibly long-lived right-populist era in Anglo-American politics. In the U.S., Donald Trump had stunned the world and his own party Establishment by seizing the nomination of the GOP, and then defeating the overwhelming favorite, Hillary Clinton, to win the presidency. In Britain, a referendum on Brexit had shocked and overturned the British and European Establishments, and dispatched Prime Minister David Cameron to the bucolic shires whence he came.

The uninspiring but dogged Theresa May emerged as Camerons successor, after her Tory male rivals had out-machoed and out-plotted each other into mutual destruction. And both Trump and May seemed to have captured a restless, rightist mood in the American and British publics, as Reagan and Thatcher had before them. Trump had endorsed Brexit and May, in turn, had been the first foreign visitor to the White House, desperate for a new U.S.-U.K. trade deal. Although many of us believed that Brexit was understandable but irrational and that Trump was a catastrophe just waiting to unfold, the people of the two countries begged to differ.

Except they didnt entirely, did they? Trump, its always worth recalling, lost the popular vote 4648 percent. Brexit passed only narrowly, 5248 percent. Both countries, despite the top-line results, remained deeply divided riven by the cleavages of globalization and its discontents. And now, its clear, the divisions have not evaporated and the opposition has revived, with increasingly robust energy. This week, Trump slumped to the lowest approval ratings of his term in the upper-to-mid-30s while being called a liar by the former head of the FBI. And May was humiliated there is no other word for it by the British voters in a snap election. In the wake of Brexit and Trump, the forces of reaction in Europe have also seemed to recede. The far right gained but didnt triumph in the Netherlands; Le Pen, while winning a historic level of support, faded in the home stretch. And now the British have actually made it conceivable that Jeremy Corbyn the most left-wing leader in the history of the Labour Party, a sympathizer with Hamas and the IRA, and an old-school unelectable hard-line socialist could be prime minister in the not-so-distant future.

Maybe Bernie could have done it, after all? And maybe this result, just as Brexit foretold Trump, could presage a Democratic swing in the House next year? After this British turbulence, anything is surely possible. But there were some specific American parallels to Mays defeat that are worth noting. She ran an Establishment campaign shockingly like Hillary Clintons in an era when populism can swing in all sorts of unlikely directions. She began with the presumption that she would coast to victory because her opponent was simply unelectable, extremist, and obviously deplorable in every way. She decided to run a campaign about her, rather than about the country. She kept her public appearances to small, controlled settings, while Corbyn drew increasingly large crowds at outdoor rallies. She robotically repeated her core argument that she represented strong, stable leadership, with little else to motivate or inspire voters. She chose to run solely on Brexit and the hardest of Brexits on offer while Labour unveiled a whole set of big-spending, big-borrowing, big-government policies that drew a million new younger voters to the polls. It was Clinton 2016 all over again with the same dismal result.

Mays campaign compensated for her weakness by mercilessly trashing Corbyns record and politics, and was amplified by a chorus of near-hysterical tabloid anti-Corbyn excess. After a while, the Brits felt it was overkill, and the underdog Corbyn, always mild-mannered and never personal in his attacks, gained unlikely sympathy. And then she simply screwed up. She put herself forward as strong and consistent, and yet she had promised for months that she would not hold an early, snap election, only to break her word. She then swiftly reversed herself on a core policy idea that seniors would have to reimburse the government for home care from their own estates upsetting her elderly base, and then stupidly refused to admit shed performed a U-turn. She decided to skip the televised debates, and thereby looked defensive and weak. She came across as less authentic than Corbyn, and much less comfortable in herself. When you look at the polling, its no surprise to see the biggest shift in voting intentions in any election campaign in British history. From almost the moment the election was announced, Labour soared. The 20-point gap narrowed to a few within a little over a month. Hers might have been the worst campaign in modern British history just as Clintons was on this side of the pond.

And on the critical issue of Brexit, she underestimated the ambivalence in the country as a whole. She mistook 52 percent for a national consensus. In London and the Southeast in particular, those who voted Remain in the referendum or who intended to but didnt came out in force to oppose a hard Brexit. The millennials actually turned up this time. In a student town like Cambridge, for example, the Labour majority went from 599 to more than 12,000 a staggering leap. Labour, moreover, shrewdly didnt run to reverse Brexit, and were thereby able to siphon off some pro-Brexit working-class voters from the swiftly collapsing UKIP.

What all this means now that Article 50 has been triggered to kick off the Brexit process is anyones guess. But among those celebrating last night were surely Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and the EU elite. This could put Brexit back in play, and certainly destroys Mays credibility in the looming negotiations. Its therefore a near certainty now that she will be gone in short order. The tabloid press this morning is already after her, and the ruthless Tories will follow. A possible replacement: the young lesbian leader of the Tories in Scotland, Ruth Davidson, whose success north of the border may well have kept the Tories from an even worse result. And that, indeed, was another surprise: the parties in Scotland that favor keeping the union with England won twice as many votes as the Scottish Nationalist Party. This was a vote for keeping the entire country together and for less of a rush to get out of the EU (and even perhaps a second referendum). It was a populist wave for the recent past.

The populism weve seen bolster the right, in other words, is a fickle beast. What this election shows in Britain is that after years of austerity and neoliberal economics, there is also an opening for a left-populism, at least in Europe. Whether it can win outright is another question. But what it has been able to do is to tip Britain into an unexpected political impasse, to give it a parliament where the Tories will not be able to sustain a reliably pro-Brexit majority for very long, and to make it all but certain that another election will at some point have to be called, possibly in the fall. What the result of that will be is something I will not safely predict until the morning after except that Corbyn will be running, and May wont.

And there was a lovely resonance, dont you think, that this shocking reversal for right-populism came on the very same day that President Trump was definitively shown to be more than worthy of impeachment. Ive long been a skeptic of some of the darkest claims about his campaigns alleged involvement with the Russian government and possible evidence thereof but Im not skeptical at all of the idea that he has clearly committed a categorical abuse of his presidential power in his attempt to cover it up.

This sobering reality was not advanced by the Comey hearings yesterday, riveting though they were. We have long known that Trump colluded with the Russian government to tilt the election against his opponent because he did so on national television during the campaign, urging the Kremlin to release more hacked Clinton emails to help him win. We also know that he fired FBI Director James Comey in order to remove the cloud of the Russian investigation from his presidency because Trump said so on national television himself and then boasted about it to two close Putin lackeys in the Oval Office!

But the details to buttress this picture add weight and texture to all of it. Comey credibly asserted that the president asked for personal loyalty to him, and not to the Constitution; that Trump sought leverage over Comey in a highly inappropriate private dinner for two; that he cleared the Oval Office of everyone else so that he could ask Comey alone to drop the inquiry into former national security adviser Michael Flynns contacts with Russia; that when Comey refused to obey, the president fired him; that when asked why he fired him, the president openly cited the investigation into Russia; and that he then brazenly threatened the FBI director if he spoke the truth about their interactions in hearings or the press.

What else do we really need to know?

Or look at it this way: We now have a witness of long public service, clear integrity, with contemporaneous memoranda and witnesses, who just testified under oath to the presidents clear attempt to obstruct justice. Any other president of any party who had been found guilty of these things would be impeached under any other circumstances. Lying under oath about sexual misconduct is trivial in comparison. So, for that matter, is covering up a domestic crime. Watergate did not, after all, involve covering up the attempt of the Kremlin to undermine and corrode the very core of our democratic system free and fair elections. Even conservative commentators have conceded that if this were a Democrat in power, almighty hell would have already been unleashed. We wouldnt be mulling impeachment. It would already be well under way.

The defenses of the president are telling. Republican senators were attempting to parse the words I hope yesterday in a manner that made Trumps aspiration to get Flynn off seem like an innocent musing directed at no one in particular when it was directed alone in private to the man running that investigation. Please.

The Speaker of the House then tried this one on: The presidents new at this. Hes new to government and so he probably wasnt steeped in the long-running protocols that establish the relationships between DOJ, FBI, and White Houses. Hes just new to this. Excuse me? Someone who assumes the office of the presidency without knowing that we live under the rule of law, and who believes that the president can rig the legal and investigative system to his own benefit, has no business being president at all. This should not be part of some learning curve. Not knowing this basic fact about our constitutional democracy something taught in every high school is ipso facto disqualifying. If the president doesnt know this, he doesnt know anything. And if he can violate this clear, bright line, he can violate anything.

What chills me even more is how Comey of all people was clearly intimidated. He didnt threaten to resign; he didnt immediately cry foul; he appealed only to Sessions, who rolled his eyes. This cowardice to use Comeys own term is from a man who stood up to a previous president under great duress in the emergency of wartime. Imagine how many other functionaries, less established and far weaker and less pliable than Comey, will acquiesce to abuse of this kind, if it is ignored, enabled, or allowed to continue.

And yet Trump remains in office, hoping that our outrage will somehow be dimmed by his shameless relentlessness and constant distractions. In classic Roy Cohn fashion, he is now, through his thuggish lawyer, calling for an investigation into (yes) Comey for his leak of his (unclassified) memoranda as a private citizen. He will say or do anything and yes, lie through his teeth repeatedly to obscure the reality in front of our eyes. But we need to be clear about something. If we let an abuse of power of this magnitude go unchallenged, we have begun the formal task of dismantling our system of government. This is not a legal matter dependent on whether you can convict someone of a specific crime. This is a political matter and of the gravest kind about whether we wish to sustain our liberal democratic norms.

Do we Americans have sufficient integrity to do this, and to reverse the drastic error we all so recently made? Maybe the British have just showed us that, yes, we can.

Theres a group of guys in a back room somewhere that are making these decisions.

The First Daughter called her current plan a placeholder and is open to other approaches, according to a report.

After a horrific election, she is managing to form a minority government. But her political situation is fragile.

A White House pick voiced a certain view of who is eligible for salvation. The Vermont senator considered that disqualifying.

Comey made unauthorized disclosures to the press of privileged communications with the president, Marc Kasowitz said.

The president says that James Comey is a liar and also a reliable source who completely and totally vindicates him.

In which Jezzas high five goes spectacularly wrong.

Smart tech-boy Jared Kushner will try to modernize the government.

The nations most expensive House race just keeps getting pricier.

The attorney general has admitted to two meetings with the Russian ambassador. There may have been a third.

She called an election early to shore up her majority and now her political future is in doubt.

The U.K. election shows the populism weve seen bolster the right is a fickle beast.

Hes been uncharacteristically quiet, but aides worry this is just the calm before the tweetstorm.

Defying expectations, Theresa May did not buttress her majority and Labour did not fall apart under Jeremy Corbyn. Either could wind up in power.

Prosecutors claim she wrote, I want to burn the White House down in a notebook, and may have leaked other documents.

But Paul Ryans attempt to deregulate the big banks wont get anywhere in the Senate, where it will need Democratic votes to pass.

But so far hes gotten nowhere.

After a long day of Senate testimony, we all need a palate cleanser.

After calling Comey a liar, Trump attorney identifies him with the leakers some Trump fans believe are trying reverse the election.

A law allowing minors as young as 14 to get married will finally be changed.

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The Fall of Theresa May and Donald Trump? - New York Magazine

The last time Trump sent out a tweet was 8:17 a.m. on Wednesday. It said this: "Getting ready to leave for Cincinnati, in the GREAT STATE of OHIO, to meet with ObamaCare victims and talk Healthcare & also Infrastructure!" Between that moment and the time of this posting, roughly 37 hours have passed. That, according to calculations made by the one and only Philip Bump of the Washington Post, is the fifth-longest Twitter outage for Trump since he announced his candidacy in June 2015. To pass the fourth longest drought, Trump will need to stay away from Twitter for 2,312 minutes -- 38 total hours, or until 10:17 p.m. Thursday -- which looks doable. To break his all-time longest tweet drought, according to Bump, Trump would need to not tweet until 6:14 a.m. tomorrow.

What's fascinating about the past droughts is that they almost always have corresponded with slow news moments. Trump's longest break from Twitter, for example, came over the 2016 Thanksgiving Day weekend -- soon after he had been elected. The second longest was earlier that same month, the weekend after the election when Trump was, almost certainly, worn down from the just-concluded campaign.

If ever there was a time when you might expect Trump to take phone in hand and offer his own counter-narrative, this past 37 hours was it. And yet, nothing.

Theories abound to explain it.

The most common one is that someone took Trump's phone away, ensuring that he simply lacked the ability to tweet. I doubt it. He's the President of the United States. He's made clear -- in the face of much criticism -- that he isn't going to stop tweeting. I'm not sure anyone is in a position to simply tell the President to stop doing something and have him actually listen.

Or maybe Trump's staff, as they had hoped to do, successfully distracted the President over these past 37 hours -- keeping him from thinking too much, and therefore tweeting too much about the situation. But how is that even possible given that we know Trump is an absolutely avid news consumer and there has been so much (and so much bad) Trump news over that period of time?

The short answer is we don't know why Trump hasn't tweeted since 8:17 a.m. Wednesday. But with every passing minute of Trump Twitter silence, he edges closer to his own personal best (worst?).

One other thing we know: Silence isn't Trump's natural state. So when the drought breaks -- and it will break -- look out.

Excerpt from:

Donald Trump hasn't tweeted in a very long time - CNN

New York Times

Donald Trump Wrote a Cookbook New York Times The Kanamits are the space aliens who come to Earth in an old Twilight Zone episode. We ask only that you trust us, only that you simply trust us, the benevolent-seeming Kanamit emissary tells United Nations delegates while promising to foster the ...

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Donald Trump Wrote a Cookbook - New York Times

During his recent announcementaboutthe United Stateswithdrawalfromthe Paris climate agreement which makes our nation the third in the world to not be part of the accord, along with Syria and Nicaragua President Donald Trump repeatedly insistedthathis decision had to do with simple fairness. It was the same kind of sentiment that he frequently conveyed during his presidential campaign: The rest of the world has been disrespecting, mistreating and, worst of all, laughing atus for years.

At what point does America get demeaned? asked the president. At what point do they start laughing at us as a country? We want fair treatment for its citizens and we want fair treatment for our taxpayers. We dont want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore, and they wont be.

Like candidate Trump, President Trump seems to hearsnickering voicesin his head (presumablyforeign, non-English voices) and believes they are laughing at him and his country. In Trumps paranoid mind, every nation on the planethastaken advantage of America in one way or another, and the Paris agreement is just the latest example of this abuse.Ironically, the insecure man who constantlydemands respect from the rest of the worldis actually in the process of driving his countrys reputation into the ground, and the Paris exit is simply the latestembarrassment.

It is often said it is easier to destroy than to create, and over the past months Donald Trump has proven this maxim correct when it comesto governing. Trumps presidency has been like a violent wreckingball demolishing everything in sight. And nothing has been more grievously damaged by Trump than the United States credibility in the world. Americas global image has collapsed in record time, and with the presidents decision to pull out of the Paris agreement, the most powerful country in the world is well on its way to becoming an international pariah. As the former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson,declared,The U.S. reneging on its commitment to the Paris Agreement renders it a rogue state on the international stage.

As Americas standing in the world crumbles, many people will no doubt recall how Republican politicians regularly claimed during the previous administration that the country was no longer respected under the leadership of President Barack Obama. As with mostRepublican positions,this was flat-out delusional, and polling revealedthat the countrys global image steadily improved under Obama after having fallen to historic lows during George W. Bushs presidency.

One of the most vocal proponents of this fallacious line of attack was, of course, a conspiracy theorist named Donald Trump, who was convinced that everyone was laughing at his country because it had twice elected a Muslim foreigner as president. Today that unhinged man-child is making the world feel somewhat nostalgic for George W. Bushs America. According to Pew Research Center, countries around the world have almost no confidence in Trump(compared to theirhigh confidence in Obama), and the freshman presidenthas turnedthe U.S. intoalaughingstockthat can no longer be trusted by its allies, asGermanys Chancellor Angela Merkelindicatedlast week.

Of course, President Trump continues to maintain that he is restoring the countrys status in the world after the U.S. has been mistreated (and laughed at!) for so many years. For example, he claimed in his exit speech that the Paris agreement gives other countries an economic edge over the United States and handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our countrys expense. Not only that, continued Trump, but the nations that are asking America to stay in the agreement (that is, the rest of the world) are countries that have collectively cost America trillions of dollars through tough trade practices and in many cases lax contributions to our critical military alliance. Like most of his speeches, this one was full of falsehoodsand exaggerations, and the president cited industry-funded studies and misinterpreted other onesto make his harebrained case.

The great irony of Trumps begrudging speech (and his parochial worldview in general) is that America has long been the worlds leading imperialist force. If any country qualifies as a bully that has treated other nations unfairly over the past halfa century, it is the United States. This is evidencedby the many overseas coupsthat have been orchestrated by the U.S. government,often to serve the interests of American business,withthe classic case involvingthe United Fruit Company and Guatemala. The majority of Americans have not benefited personally from U.S. foreign policy; it has been themultinational corporations and the power elite, as C. Wright Millsonce called the countrys political and corporate establishments, that have benefited from such interventions.

Consider Americas economy, which Trump claims has been losing for decades because other countries have treated us horribly, stealing our jobs and thenlaughing at us to add insult to injury. This view is so facile and childishit seemsunworthy of comment. But, alas, it is espoused bya very powerful man. Itgoes without sayingthat American workers have suffered over the past 40 years due to numerous factors, including globalization andcorporatetrade deals; that doesnt mean the United Stateshas been losing to other countries. In fact, American businesses have done exceedingly well over the past three decades, as havethe top 1 percent of earners. Only working- and middle-class Americans have been losing in any real sense of the word and not because foreign governments are so cunning and inconsiderate but because of our capitalist economy.

In addition to arguing that the Paris agreement is designed to hurt Americaseconomy, Trump bitterly complained that it was unfair to the U.S. ascompared withthe fate of less-developed countries like China and India. China will be able to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years, said the president, claiming that the Chinese will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. The president then declared that the agreement doesnt eliminate coal jobs; it just transfers those jobs out of America . . .and ships them to foreign countries. This, in typical Trumpian fashion, is extremely misleading. China isactuallyin the process of canceling projects to build coal plants, and its coal consumption has declined since 2013, but such pesky facts are unwelcome in Trumps reactionary, zero-sum worldview.

Once again, the irony here is that America has contributed more than any other country in the worldto climate change and is responsible for nearly a third of the excess carbon that has built up in the atmosphere.In cumulative terms, we certainly own this problem more than anybody else does, saidclimate scholar David G. Victor to The New York Times. Furthermore, Americas per capita carbon emission is more than double that of China (and about eight times that of India).If one were truly interested in fairness, as Trump has claimedto be, thenthe U.S. would be doing much more than it agreed to in the Paris accords.

Withdrawing from the Paris agreement not only erodes Americas credibility and standing in the world, but is an importantstep toward dooming the planet or more accurately dooming the human species. It is somewhat fitting that the United States, under the leadership ofa vulgar and self-absorbedman who epitomizes the ugly American, may end up ensuring the collapse of human civilization. During the election campaign, many speculated that the narcissistic Trump was running for president because he had realized in old age that he would quickly be forgotten after he died. Whether that was true,Trumpwill doubtless be remembered now as the man who signaled the end of the American epoch and perhaps the human era as well.

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Donald Trump is destroying America's standing in the world and may end up destroying the world - Salon

Abipartisan group of senators has introduceda bill that would guarantee Americans the right to travel to Cuba.

Eric, 3, waves the V sign while posing in front of the Cuban and United States flags in Havana, Cuba, March 25, 2016. (Reuters / Ueslei Marcelino)

In late May, the conservative media outlet The Daily Caller reported that President Donald Trump was planning to make good on his campaign promise to terminate the Obama administrations opening of engagement with Cuba. Just two and a halfyears after the United States finally took steps to end more than a half-century of hostility and restrictions on trade and travel, President Trump wants us to go backward.

Luckily, theres some momentum pushing back. Lawmakers in Congress recently reintroduced the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act (Senate Bill 1287). The bipartisan bill now has 55 cosponsors and would guarantee Americans the right to travel to Cuba.

We need to expand, not contract, our engagement with Cuba. As Peter Kornbluh reported at The Nation, the economic impact of increased restrictions on travel would be dramatic: He cites a study that says the travel industry alone could lose $3.5 billion and over 10,000 jobs. And the damage goes far beyond that, as Kornbluh writes:

Trump is threatening to undermine years of concerted effortinside and outside of governmentto establish a civil, peaceful coexistence with an island neighbor after more than half a century of intervention, embargoes, and assassination plots. At stake is a model of responsible US foreign policyto be emulated, not repudiated.

1. The Nation is partnering with theLatin America Working Group to demand that senators cosponsor the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act. Click here to join us by writing to your senators today.

2. To have an even greater impact, call your senators about the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act. You can reach them at 202-224-3121 or find their direct numbers here. Follow our script below or craft your own message.

SCRIPT: I am calling to urge you to co-sponsor the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act. Currently co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of fifty-five senators, the bill would guarantee Americans the right to travel to Cuba.

Public opinion polls show that 81 percent of Americans support free travel to Cuba. A recent letter to Congress signed by 46 travel agencies stressed the economic benefits of free and increased travel to the country, claiming that it would lead to them hiring more American workers. They also asserted that tightening restrictions on travel, as the Trump administration is threatening to do, would lead to significant layoffs.

I hope that youll make a commitment to co-sponsoring the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act.

3. Read and share Peter Kornbluhs latest at The Nation, Trump Threatens to Rescind Obamas Cuba Engagementand Activists Fight Back. In it, he cites studies on the economic impact of restricting travel to Cuba and lays out the importance of resisting this wrongheaded change. Already read it? Share the article on Facebook or Twitter.

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Tell Your Senators: Don't Let Donald Trump Take Our Cuba Policy Backwards - The Nation.

In BriefAccording to sources, U.S. President Donald Trump has pitchedthe idea of building a wall along the Mexican border using solarpanels, which would generate clean power for the surrounding area.The announcement has proven extremely divisive. Trumps Solar Wall

President Trump has proposed using solar panels in the construction of a wall along the 3,200 kilometer (1,988 miles) border separating Mexico and America a key point in his election campaign. According to three individuals who have direct knowledge of the meeting with Republican leaders, Trump claimed he wanted to cover the wall segments with solar panels so theyd be beautiful structures.

Trump cited the walls economic benefits as well as its environmental ones. Thomas Gleason, managing partner of Gleason Partners LLC, the company that proposed the design, told Business Insider that each solar panel on the wall would produce 2.0MWp per hour of electricity, and, because of this, the wall would pay off the cost of its construction in 20 years through the energy it sells.

The cost of solar panels has decreased rapidly over the last nine years, from around $8 per watt in 2009 to roughly $1.50 per watt in 2016, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, and Gleason believes the cost will continue to diminish over time.

While the bottom of the wall would still be built out of stone, the solar panels situated on the Mexico-facing side would be double tiered, with the upper layer moving to capture maximum sunlight.

Though any wall between Mexico and the United States is likely to still be controversial, one equipped with solar panels would have benefits on both a small and large scale. It would provide those on both sides of the border, which is currently underserved by electricity companies, with greater access to power. On a larger scale, it would contribute to the amount of electricity the U.S. generates from clean energy sources, which would in turn contribute to fighting climate change.

Opinions on the proposal are split.

Wunder Capital CEO Bryan Birsic told Business Insider, While we would prefer a different location and purpose for a large solar installation, we strongly support all additional generation of clean power in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Nezar AlSayyad, a UC Berkeley professor of architecture and planning, told The Guardian that the wall was still indefensible and that trying to embellish it with a technical function or a new utility is a folly. Political theorist Langdon Winner was even more outspoken in his criticism: Im wondering what the solar electricity would be used for? Electrocuting people who try to climb the wall?

Although the wall itself is controversial, any move by the U.S. government to promote solar energy is positive as it would lessen the countrys own carbon footprint and help the world combat climate change.

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Donald Trump Proposes Covering Mexican Border Wall With Solar Panels - Futurism

George Washington had to have been the American President most hated by the British, but Donald Trump may giving the first president a run for his continentals (continentals being a term for dollars in Washingtons young country).

According to a poll by The Guardian around the time of Trumps inauguration, around 50 percent of British responders believed that Trump was dangerous.A GFK poll later found that around 60 percent of Brits disapproved of his presidency. This still tracks with the nearly 60 percent of Americans who currently disapprove of President Trumps job performance, according to Gallup.

Given this,it makes sense that it wouldnt be hard to find a group of British kids with negative opinions about Trump. And as British children have British accents, such a group would also inevitably be strangely cute.

For a Chelsea episode that will air on Netflix this Friday, Chelsea Handler visited England and successfully interviewed British children about the American president.

Most notable in this clip provided exclusively to HuffPost was a kid named Charlie, who first responded to Handlers question, What do you know about Donald Trump? with the line, Well, for start, hes got an orange face.

I know he doesnt like people with brown skin.

Thats right, Handler responded. You know what thats called?

Another kid started ooh-ing and tried to get Handlers attention. After he raised his hand, the kid matter-of-factly answered, Racism.

Never have you seen a more adorable takedown of the president. Stephen Colbert might be nuanced and biting in his attacks, but hell now need to get a British accent and reverse his age a few decades to compete in the anti-Trump late-night arena.

Heres Handler with the group of kids:

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