Wall Street Journal (subscription) | Westchester Beats Obama Wall Street Journal (subscription) Westchester County Chief Executive Rob Astorino spent seven years fighting Obama-era Department of Housing and Urban Development accusations that his county's zoning laws are racist. Now HUD has conceded that the suburban New Yorker was right ... |
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Westchester Beats Obama - Wall Street Journal (subscription)
In March of 2016, President Barack Obama granted Carol Denise Richardson a commutation of the life sentence she received in June 2006 after being convicted on two counts of conspiring to distribute crack cocaine and other drug-related charges. Her long criminal history included two previous felony drug offenses, which brought her a lifetime sentence for her later convictions.
Richardson was one of 1,715 federal inmates, including 567 others serving life sentences, selected by the Obama administrations far-reaching clemency program. A major focus of the clemency effort was easing punishments meted out to nonviolent drug offenders serving lengthy sentences.
When she was released through the clemency program from a federal prison for women in Aliceville, Alabama on July 28, 2016, Richardson had served almost 10 years of her sentence. A condition of her release was that she remain under court supervision for the next 10 years.
But less than a year later, on April 13 this year, Richardson was arrested in the Houston suburb of Pasadena for allegedly stealing $60 worth of laundry detergent. Her court-appointed lawyer said she planned to sell the detergent to buy drugs, since she had relapsed into addiction to crack. In addition to the theft arrest, federal prosecutors said Richardson had violated five other conditions of her release among them failing to tell the court of her arrest or her change of address, and having been fired from a job for not showing up for work.
Now 49, Richardson lives in the Galveston area and has four children and two grandchildren. Her former husband, Eskico Garner, 37 years her senior, died in prison after drawing a 30-year sentence (later reduced to 20 years) for heading up a drug operation.
At a June 8 hearing, federal district Judge Keith Ellison voiced disappointment that Richardson had squandered the new opportunity she had received when her former sentence was commuted. He ordered her back to prison for 14 months, to be followed by a five-year supervised release. The judge also noted that he would make successful completion of a drug rehabilitation program a condition of her release.
Richardsons lawyer requested that she be referred to a drug rehab program and questioned why she had not been allowed to take part in a 500-hour residential program offered in prison. The judge replied that, as an inmate serving a life sentence, she had not been eligible for that drug rehabilitation program while she had been incarcerated, under Federal Bureau of Prisons policy.
According to CAN-DO, a pro-clemency activist group which worked to gain clemency for Richardson and others, while incarcerated, the Texas grandmother completed a 40-hour nonresidential drug abuse program less than a year before receiving her presidential grant of clemency.
Amy Povah, the groups founder and herself a clemency recipient who spent over nine years in prison due to her husbands ecstasy-manufacturing operation, notes Richardson suffers from bi-polar disorder, has twice attempted suicide, and may have lost access to her medications after being released. Reportedly, after being released, she also became involved with a man who was a bad influence on her, resumed using drugs, and stopped keeping in contact with her family.
Richardson's case underscores the need for rehabilitative approaches to incarceration, and raises the question as to whether the simple use of illicit drugs should result in a prison sentence. Povah says clemency was not wasted on Richardson, because she "did not hurt anyone but herself," and asserted that society's attitudes toward addiction must change, unless we're willing to lock up tens of millions of addicts for the behavior associated with addiction. The current drug war, she says, is further fuelled by racial bigotry. "If Carol had been born into a white, affluent family, its doubtful she would be in this current situation," Povah wrote in a Huffington Post op-ed.
Christopher Zoukis is the author of Federal Prison Handbook: The Definitive Guide to Surviving the Federal Bureau of Prisons, College for Convicts: The Case for Higher Education in American Prisons (McFarland & Co., 2014) and Prison Education Guide (Prison Legal News Publishing, 2016). He can be found online at ChristopherZoukis.com and PrisonerResource.com.
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Texas Grandmother Freed by Obama Heading Back to Prison - HuffPost
Long before he became President Donald Trumps White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci was a simple hedge fund manager getting shut down by Barack Obama.
In 2010, as the nation was digging its way out of the 2008 financial collapse, Scaramucci took the microphone at a CNBC town hall to ask the then-president a former Harvard classmate and sometimes opponent on the basketball court whether he planned to stop whacking at the Wall Street piata.
Scaramucci didnt get the answer he was looking for.
I have been amused over the last couple years, this sense of somehow me beating up on Wall Street, Obama said. I think most folks on Main Street feel they got beat up on.
The line was met with applause.
In a four-minute response to Scaramuccis question, Obama discussed the need to nurture a vibrant financial sector, but to do so in a responsible way and took aim at critics who compared his practical financial reform efforts to Adolf Hitler storming Poland.
Me saying, Maybe you should be taxed more like your secretary, when youre pulling home a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars a year I dont think is me being extremist or me being anti-business, Obama said.
The White House appointed Scaramucci to the role of White House communications director on Friday. He had previously made donations to Obama, and has made anti-Trump comments in the past.
In a Twitter rant early Saturday morning, Trump said Scaramucci would have endorsed him early on if the hedge fund manager had known he was running.
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Scaramucci once asked Barack Obama on live TV if he'd be softer on Wall Street. It didn't end well. - Mic
ASPEN, Colo. Two former senior Obama administration intelligence officials on Friday expressed anger at President Trumps statements disparaging the intelligence community and disbelief at his embrace of Russia.
In remarkably strong terms and in their first extensive remarks on the topic since leaving office on Jan.20, former CIA director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. let loose on Trump, who before taking office had compared his intelligence community to Nazi Germany.
That was a terrible, insulting affront to the rank and file completely inappropriate, over-the-top, Clapper said at the Aspen Security Forum. He said he could not let that pass and had called Trump to register his displeasure.
Brennan said its interesting that Trump will invoke U.S. intelligence when it suits his foreign policy aims in North Korea, Syria or Iran. But when its inconsistent with ... preconceived notions as well as maybe preferences to what the truth would be and the analysts conclusions are disparaged, thats when Jim Clappers blood and my blood boils, he said.
A case in point is the intelligence communitys assessment made public in January that Putin ordered a campaign to meddle in the 2016 U.S. election, sow discord, undermine Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump win.
The intelligence chiefs, including then-FBI Director James B. Comey, briefed Trump on Jan.6 at Trump Tower in New York.
What we did do is give him the benefit of the evidence, which they could not share with the public, Clapper said. He added: I thought it was pretty compelling.
That day, Trump did not push back on it, Clapper said. But since then, Trump has expressed doubts that the intelligence showed Moscows culpability. I think it could very well have been Russia, but I think it could well have been other countries, Trump said at a speech in Poland a day before he met with Putin this month. Nobody really knows for sure.
That contradiction of his own intelligence community, Clapper said, put him at a great disadvantage in the run-up to his meeting with President Putin.
The veteran intelligence figures whose years of service together total more than seven decades were remarkably candid, with Clapper showing some gallows humor. I was kind of hopeful that after [Trump] got rid of the two chief Nazis John and me then maybe things would have improved.
He added: Its liberating to be a former official.
Brennan said he was dismayed by the photo op of Trump leaning over and telling Putin its an honor to be with you. That, he said, was not the honorable thing to say. The Russian leader assaulted one of the foundational pillars of our democracy our electoral system ... invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, has suppressed and repressed political opponents in Russia and has caused the death or killed many of them.
Said Brennan: For someone who knows the art of the deal, I thought it was a very, very bad negotiating tactic.
Asked by the moderator, CNNs Wolf Blitzer, why Trump seemed so uncritical of Russia, Brennan said that he found incongruous Trumps position toward the Kremlin and the negative things he says about U.S. intelligence agencies.
Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is conducting an investigation into whether Trump or his associates coordinated with Moscow in the election meddling. The probe has upset Trump, who in May fired Comey, who was then running the probe. Trump has accused Muellers team of having conflicts of interest that undercut their credibility, and he has not disavowed the possibility that he might fire Mueller.
If Trump attempts to fire Mueller, I hope that our members of Congress are going to stand up and say, Enough is enough, Brennan said.
He added that he thought it would be the obligation of executive branch officials to refuse to carry out such an order.
On Dec.29, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia over its election interference. The sanctions included the seizure of two Russian compounds that the administration said were used in part for spying. The Trump administration reportedly is considering returning them to Moscows custody.
What have the Russians done to deserve getting them back? Clapper said.
I dont see any earthly reason to do that, Brennan added.
At the end of their panel discussion, Clapper and Brennan received a standing ovation.
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Former Obama spy chiefs upbraid Trump for his remarks about his intelligence agencies - Washington Post
Barack Obama in 2008. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
This was a great week for conservatism.
I know, I know. That word as it has been reverse engineered by the modern GOP no longer means in America what it once meant across the West, and I should probably stop pretending otherwise. Im told repeatedly, and understandably, that my support for the long Anglo-American tradition of conservative political thought is quixotic, perverse, and largely counterproductive. Pragmatism, moderation, incrementalism, reform: These might be conservative virtues in principle, but in practice, the American right junked them years ago. Im told I should admit that, in the current American context, Im a de facto, Obama-loving leftist. To cheer the collapse of the brutal repeal of Obamacare has not an inkling of conservatism about it.
So let me explain a little why I found this past week so encouraging. It represented, in my view, the triumph of reality over ideology. And conservatism from Burke and Hume to Hayek and Oakeshott has always been, at its core, a critique of ideology in favor of reality. The world is as it is, the conservative argues. Any attempt to drastically overhaul it, to impose a utopian vision onto a messy, evolving human landscape will not just fail, it will likely make things worse. To pretend that the present exists for no good reason and can be repealed or transformed in an instant is a formula for ruin. The leftist vision of perfect social justice is therefore as illusory and as pernicious as the reactionarys dream of restoring a mythical past. And the great virtue of Americas deeply conservative Constitution is that it throws so many obstacles in the way of radical, ideological change to the left or right that it limits the harm that humans can do to themselves in moments of passion or certainty or in search of ideological perfection.
The utopia the GOP wanted was to return health care to the free market, where choice would be maximized and costs curtailed by consumers. You can see the ideological appeal. But health care is a product unlike any other, and that freewheeling vision had already been decisively rejected by a majority of Americans. Obamacare itself was, in fact, a response to that shift in opinion and the president was reelected after passing it. The personal bankruptcies, the soaring costs of treating the uninsured and very sick, the impossibility of getting insured with a preexisting condition: A huge majority hated that status quo ante. In the end, there was no going back.
And morally, American culture had already dispensed with the cruelty of allowing our fellow citizens to suffer and die because of a lack of resources. Ronald Reagan was in some ways the first to concede this. In 1986, he signed the law that made it illegal for hospitals to turn away the very sick if they could not pay for treatment. Once that core concession was made by the icon of the conservative movement that the sick should always be treatedin extremis the logic of universal coverage was unstoppable.
And if universal coverage was unstoppable, the most conservative response to that change was something very much like Obamacare. It was an incremental reform, it kept the private insurance market, and it attempted to create as big a risk pool as possible. No one argued it was perfect. But it adapted ideas from left and right into a plausible, workable synthesis. And yet the GOP still fixated on abstract ideology pretended none of this had happened. Caught in the vortex of their own talk-radio fantasies, they opted to repeal and replace 21st-century reality. And surprise! reality won.
Maybe if theyd made a case that this was essential unless we wanted the country to go bankrupt, they might have had a chance. But when they combined it with massive tax cuts for the rich, they were never going to win, except by diktat. So they tried diktat. They lied about their bill; they attempted to ram it through quickly; they suppressed public hearings and any semblance of a deliberative process; they all but ended senatorial debate; they made no compelling public case for the bill (because there was none); they passed it in the House before even scoring it; they tried to force it through by a reconciliation process that was never designed for such a thing.
They tried everything, in other words led by one of the wiliest Senate Majority Leaders in modern times, and a president with a cultlike hold on his own voters. They controlled the House and Senate and had a chief executive willing to sign literally anything he could call a victory. And they still failed. Rejoice!
Obama, in fact, was the conservative in all this nudging and amending, shaping and finessing as American society evolved while the GOP flamed out in a reactionary dead end. But Obamas conservatism has nonetheless brought about an epochal, defining achievement for American liberalism: a robust American consensus in favor of universal health insurance. Yes, he could.
It is hard to overstate the salience of this victory in Obamas long, long game and perhaps we are still too close to events to see it as clearly as we should. But here it is: a testament to the skills and vision and tenacity of our greatest living president, whose political shadow completely eclipses the monstrous, ridiculous fool who succeeded him. Like the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, weve seen this story many times before in the last eight and a half years. And we also know the ending.
Meep, meep.
Speaking of ideology versus reality, there is, it seems to me, a parallel on the left. That is the current attempt to deny the profound natural differences between men and women, and to assert, with a straight and usually angry face, that gender is in no way rooted in sex, and that sex is in no way rooted in biology. This unscientific product of misandrist feminism and confused transgenderism is striding through the culture, and close to no one in the elite is prepared to resist it.
And so we have the establishment of gender-neutral birth certificates in Canada; and, in England, that lovely old phrase, Ladies and Gentlemen, is being removed from announcements on the Tube, for fear someone might feel left out. We have dozens of new pronouns in colleges (for all those genders that have suddenly sprung into existence), and biological males competing in all-female high-school athletic teams (guess who wins at track). We also have irreversible genital alteration for minors, who believe, as many kids often have, that they are girls in boys bodies and vice versa. We have elections about who gets to go to which bathroom.
Worse, we have constant admonitions against those who actually conform, as most human beings always have, to the general gender rule. Boys who behave like boys have always behaved are suddenly displaying toxic masculinity and must be reprogrammed from the get-go. Girls who like pink and play with Barbies are somehow not fully female until theyve seen the recent Wonder Woman movie or absorbed the stunning and brave decision to make Doctor Who a woman. We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, annoying.
I say this as someone happily in the minority and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles. Its a free country, after all. But you cant subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesnt exist. And this strikes me as the core contradiction of ideological transgenderism. By severing the link between sex and gender completely, it abolishes the core natural framework without which the transgender experience makes no sense at all. Its also a subtle, if unintentional, attack on homosexuality. Most homosexuals are strongly attached to their own gender and attracted to traditional, natural expressions of it. Thats what makes us gay, for heavens sake. And thats one reason the entire notion of a common LGBT identity is so misleading. How can a single identity comprise both the abolition of gender and at the same time its celebration?
Exceptions, in other words, need a rule to exist. Abolish genders roots in biology and sex and you abolish gay people and transgender people as well. Yes, theres a range of gender expression among those of the same sex. But its still tethered among most to the forces of chromosomes and hormones that make us irreducibly male and female. Nature can be interpreted; it can even be played with; but it cannot be abolished. After all, how can you be queer if there is no such thing as normal?
Transgender people exist and should be treated with absolutely the same human respect, decency, and civil equality as anyone else. But they dont disprove traditional notions of gender as such which have existed in all times, places, and cultures in human history and prehistory, and are rooted deeply in evolutionary biology and reproductive strategy. Intersex people exist and, in my view, should not be genitally altered or fixed without their adult consent. But they do not somehow negate the overwhelming majority who have no such gender or sexual ambiguity. Gay people exist and should not be coerced into behaving in ways they find alien to their being. But the entire society does not need to be overhauled in order to make gay or trans experience central to it. Inclusion, yes. Revolution, no.
The added problem with this war on nature is the backlash it inevitably incurs. Theres a reason so many working-class men find it hard to vote for Democrats any more. And theres a reason why a majority of white women last year voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault if the alternative was a triumph for contemporary left-feminism. You cant assault the core identity of most peoples lives and then expect them to vote for you. As a Trump supporter in Colorado just told a reporter from The New Yorker:Ive never been this emotionally invested in a political leader in my life. The more they hate him, the more I want him to succeed. Because what they hate about him is what they hate about me.And one of the core things that liberals hate about Trump voters is their expression of their gender.
One of the features you most associate with creeping authoritarianism is the criminalization of certain political positions. Is anything more anathema to a liberal democracy? If Trump were to suggest it, can you imagine the reaction?
And yet its apparently fine with a hefty plurality of the Senate and House. Im referring to the remarkable bill introduced into the Congress earlier this year with 237 sponsors and co-sponsors in the House and 43 in the Senate which the ACLU and the Intercept have just brought to light. Its a remarkably bipartisan effort, backed by Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz, among many solid Trump-resisting Democrats and hard-line Republicans. And it would actually impose civil and criminal penalties on American citizens for backing or joining any international boycott of Israel because of its settlement activities. There are even penalties for simply inquiring about such a boycott. And theyre not messing around. The minimum civil penalty would be $250,000 and the maximum criminal penalty $1 million and 20 years in prison. Up to 20 years in prison for opposing the policies of a foreign government and doing something about it! And, yes, the Senate Minority Leader is leading the charge.
Look: Im not in favor of boycotting Israel when we dont boycott, say, Saudi Arabia. But seriously: making it illegal? Every now and again, you just have to sit back and admire the extraordinary skills of the Greater Israel lobby. Youve never heard of this bill, and I hadnt either. But that is partly the point. AIPAC doesnt want the attention writers who notice this attempted assault on a free society will be tarred as anti-Semites (go ahead, it wouldnt be the first time) and politicians who resist it will see their careers suddenly stalled. I doubt a single sponsor of this bill will go on the record to oppose it (so far, none has). Thats how complete the grip of AIPAC is. And pointing out this special interests distortion of democracy is not the equivalent of bigotry. Its simply a defense of our democratic way of life.
See you next Friday.
By excluding from Trumpcare indispensable features, the Senate parliamentarian has probably killed the bill unless McConnell nukes her rulings.
Like so many other media entities, Vice is making a stronger push into video.
Everybody is making the same dumb joke about Trumps new communications director.
U.S. passports used to travel to North Korea will soon be invalidated by the government.
Anthony Scaramucci doesnt seem concerned about all his old tweets.
The former White House press secretary was a glutton for punishment, and now hes gone.
At a time when the White House could benefit from a steady, respected hand to run the communications shop, Trump went in a very different direction.
Donald Trumps new communications director is a hedge-fund manager with a particularly crude nickname for Reince Priebus.
Hes finally had enough.
Farewell, Spicey.
Doug Elmendorf, who oversaw the CBO during the battle over Obamacare, on how the agency operates.
McConnell doesnt have the votes to pass any version of it. But, in theory, he does have an incredibly narrow path to success.
A car on a southbound Q train jumped the rails near Brighton Beach in Brooklyn.
The supermarket tabloid, run by a personal friend of Trumps, isnt the only media outlet turning its attention to the former secretary of State.
He (and it was mostly guys) could have been among the 175 hopefuls that showed up for open auditions at the Barclays Center on Tuesday.
The failure of the Republican health-care overhaul is a testament to Obamas skills, vision, and tenacity.
His family apologized for dropping his name several months ago.
His first White House job offer fell through, but now hes up for an even bigger gig possibly because no one consulted Reince Priebus.
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The Triumph of Obama's Long Game - New York Magazine