Category: Racist: Hispanic

DeVos ‘Not Going to Be Issuing Decrees’ on Civil Rights Protections

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos clashed with Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday over protections for LGBT students, balking when asked directly if she would ban private schools from receiving federal funds if they discriminate against these students.

The Trump administration wants to invest millions into an unprecedented expansion of private-school vouchers and public-private charter schools, prompting critics to worry that religious schools, for example, might expel LGBT students or, more broadly, that private schools might refuse to admit students with disabilities. Testifying before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, DeVos told Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., “Let me be clear: Schools that receive federal funds must follow federal law. Period.”

But after another Democrat, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, pointed out that federal law is “somewhat foggy” surrounding LGBT student protections, DeVos simply repeated that schools must follow federal law, adding, “Discrimination in any form is wrong.”

Merkley pressed again, asking DeVos point-blank whether private and charter schools receiving federal funds under Trump’s budget proposal could discriminate against students based on sexual orientation or religion.

She said the department “is not going to be issuing decrees” on civil rights protections.

Merkley asked Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who chairs the subcommittee, to note that DeVos refused to directly answer the question.

DeVos came under fire last month for a nearly identical exchange, refusing to tell a House Appropriations subcommittee whether she would block federal voucher funding to private schools that discriminate against LGBT students. U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., told DeVos, “To take the federal government’s responsibility out of that is just appalling and sad.”

DeVos’ spokeswoman later said the controversy stemmed from a “fundamental misunderstanding” by lawmakers about what the secretary was talking about. On Tuesday, DeVos sought to clarify that she wasn’t talking about a specific voucher proposal. “It is really appropriations language,” she said.

During the nearly two-and-a-half-hour hearing, DeVos defended the Trump administration’s proposed $9 billion cut to education, saying the planned 13% reduction in funding may seem shocking, but it’s necessary.

“I’ve seen the headlines, and I understand those figures are alarming for many,” DeVos told lawmakers, according to her prepared testimony. The proposed 2018 budget, she said, refocuses the department on supporting states and school districts in their efforts to provide “high-quality education” to all students while simplifying college funding, among other efforts.

Overall, Trump plans to eliminate or phase out 22 programs that the administration says are “duplicative, ineffective, or are better supported through state, local, or private efforts.”

The administration wants to cut teacher training, vocational training and before- and after-school programs, among others. It also wants to eliminate subsidized loans and a new loan forgiveness program for students who commit to public service after college. Trump wants to funnel the savings into several school choice proposals — including a $250 million fund for expanding public funding of private-school vouchers.

The proposal faces an uphill battle in Congress. On Tuesday, Blunt, a Republican, called it “a difficult budget request to defend,” saying deep cuts to programs like after-school would be “all but impossible” to get through the committee.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Trump’s budget request “can be summed up in one word: abysmal.”

As she has recently, DeVos on Tuesday took a swat at past federal efforts to reform education, noting that discretionary spending at the U.S. Department of Education quadrupled between 1989 and 2016, from $17.1 billion to $68.3 billion.

The “seemingly endless” reform efforts, she said, have been top-down and have generated “more publicity than results,” failing to close long-standing achievement gaps between white, middle-class students and their low-income and minority peers. They’ve also produced disappointing results for high school graduation and college completion rates.

While achievement has been mixed in recent decades, high school graduation and college completion rates have actually risen, sometimes sharply. Federal data show that in 2015, the graduation rate for public high school students rose to a record-high 83%. U.S. colleges also awarded more degrees — 961,167, up 35.2% from a decade earlier.

A GOP mega-donor and four-time chair of the Michigan Republican Party, DeVos previously ran an organization that promotes private-school choice. DeVos last month called school choice critics “flat-earthers” and said expanding families’ educational choices is a way to bring U.S. education “out of the Stone Age and into the future.”

On Tuesday, she said more choice would help families in more ways than one, noting that when parents decide proactively which school their child should attend, “there’s a lot more engagement, naturally, as a result of that.”

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Betsy DeVos Would Not Agree to Bar Discrimination by Private Schools That Get Federal Money

President Trump’s budget proposal includes deep cuts to education but funds a new push for school choice.

When pressed by representatives at a House appropriations subcommittee hearing on the budget, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos declined to say if, when or how the federal government would step in to make sure that private schools receiving public dollars would not discriminate against students.

She repeatedly said that decisions would be left to school districts and parents.

Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) stressed that Milwaukee’s school voucher program has resulted in years of failure. When he pressed DeVos on whether the federal government would hold recipients of public money accountable, DeVos punted.

“Wisconsin and all of the states in the country are putting their ESSA plans together,” said DeVos, referring to the Every Student Succeeds Act, a school accountability law. “They are going to decide what kind of flexibility … they’re allowed.”

“Will you have accountability standards?” Pocan asked.

“There are accountability standards,” DeVos said. “That is part of the ESSA legislation.”

That’s not true. ESSA’s regulations state that the law’s accountability rules do not apply to private schools.

Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) asked DeVos about a Christian school in Indiana that gets state dollars through a voucher program but explicitly states that gay students may be denied admission.  “If Indiana applies for funding, will you stand up and say that this school is open to all students?” Clark asked.

DeVos said states make the rules.

“That’s a no,” Clark said. Then she asked what if a school doesn’t accept black students.

“Our [civil rights] and Title IX protections are broadly protective, but when our parents make choices,” DeVos started.

“This isn’t about parents making choices,” Clark interrupted. “This is about the use of federal dollars.”

After a few more rounds like this, DeVos said that her “bottom line” is that “we believe that parents are best equipped to make decisions for their schooling.”

Clark said she was shocked by this response.

DeVos’ staff later came to her defense, saying that the line of questioning in the hearing concerned a “theoretical voucher program” and indicated a “misunderstanding” about the federal government’s role in education.

“When States design programs, and when schools implement them, it is incumbent on them to adhere to Federal law,” DeVos’ press secretary Liz Hill said in an email. “The Department of Education can and will intervene when Federal law is broken.”

[Los Angeles Times]

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Jeff Sessions Was Prepared to Call Illegal Immigrants ‘Filth’

During a speech at the U.S.-Mexico border on Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reiterated his and President Donald Trump’s commitment to cracking down on undocumented immigrants. But one thing was missing from his speech as it was delivered: a phrase referring to criminals who cross the border as “filth,” which appeared in his prepared remarks.

In the text that was published on the Department of Justice website, Sessions told a grim tale of immigrant hordes crossing the border and wreaking havoc on U.S. citizens — a myth that has been debunked time and time again.

“We mean criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones, that rape and kill innocent citizens and who profit by smuggling poison and other human beings across our borders,” the speech says. “Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks and beheadings. It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.”

But according to Catherine Thompson of Talking Points Memo, Sessions dropped “against this filth” while delivering the speech to border agents in Nogales, Arizona.

In the past, Sessions, like Trump, has enthusiastically expressed discontentwith immigrants and vowed to deport thousands of undocumented immigrants who he’s repeatedly painted as hostile and violent.

As an Alabama Senator, Sessions opposed immigration reform by arguing that immigration “takes jobs from Americans and can, in fact, create cultural problems.” He was one of the most vocal Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential campaign, and supported him after he described Mexicans as bad hombres, rapists, and criminals. And during his first speech as the U.S. Attorney General in February, Sessions said, “We need to end this lawlessness that threatens Americans’ safety and pulls down wages of ordinary Americans.”

Based on the glaring omission on Tuesday, it appears as though Sessions thought the term “filth” would’ve been a step too far.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

AG Sessions Says DOJ to ‘Pull Back’ on Police Department Civil Rights Suits

Donald Trump’s attorney general said Tuesday the Justice Department will limit its use of a tactic employed aggressively under President Obama — suing police departments for violating the civil rights of minorities.

“We need, so far as we can, to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness. And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“So we’re going to try to pull back on this,” he told a meeting of the nation’s state attorneys general in Washington.

Sessions said such a move would not be “wrong or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.” Instead, he said people in poor and minority communities must feel free from the threat of violent crime, which will require more effective policing with help from the federal government.

While crime rates are half of what they were a few decades ago, recent increases in violent crimes do not appear to be “an aberration, a one-time blip. I’m afraid it represents the beginning of a trend.”

Sessions said he will encourage federal prosecutors to bring charges when crimes are committed using guns. Referring local drug violations that involve the use of a firearm, for example, to federal court can result is often a stiffer sentence than would be imposed by state courts.

“We need to return to the ideas that got us here, the ideas that reduce crime and stay on it. Maybe we got a bit overconfident when we’ve seen the crime rate decline so steadily for so long,” he said.

Under the Obama Administration, the Justice Department opened 25 investigations into police departments and sheriff’s offices and was enforcing 19 agreements at the end of 2016, resolving civil rights lawsuits filed against police departments in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, New Orleans, Cleveland and 15 other cities.

On Monday, Sessions said he is reviewing the Justice Department’s current policy toward enforcing federal law that prohibits possession of marijuana, but has made no decision about whether to get tougher.

His opposition to legalization is well known, and he emphasized it during an informal gathering of reporters . “I don’t think America will be a better place when more people, especially young people, smoke pot.”

States, he said, can pass their own laws on possession as they choose, “but it remains a violation of federal law.”

The current policy, spelled out in a 2013 memo from former deputy attorney general James Cole, said federal prosecutions would focus on distribution to minors, involvement of gangs or organized crime, sales beyond a state border, and growing marijuana plants on federal land.

(h/t NBC News)

Trump’s DOJ Dropping Opposition to Texas’ Racist Voter ID Law

President Trump’s Justice Department is ending the government’s opposition to a controversial voter ID law in Texas, according to a group involved in the case.

Danielle Lang, the Campaign Legal Center’s deputy director of voting rights, told The Associated Press and Talking Points Memo on Monday that the Justice Department informed her group and others suing the state of the government’s change in position.

After six years of legal wrangling, the Justice Department will no longer argue that Texas intentionally sought to discriminate against minorities when it passed the law that mandates voters show certain forms of identification before casting a ballot.

“This signals to voters that they will not be protected under this administration,” Lang told Talking Points Memo.

“We have already had a nine-day trial and presented thousands of pages of documents demonstrating that the picking and choosing of what IDs count was entirely discriminatory and would fall more harshly on minority voters. So for the [Justice Department] to come in and drop those claims just because of a change of administration is outrageous.”

Lang said that despite the federal government’s change of heart, organizations challenging the Texas law will press on.

While a federal appeals court struck down the voter ID law a few months before the 2016 elections on the grounds that it had a discriminatory effect, it sent the question about intent back to the lower courts. The Supreme Court rejected Texas’s appeal earlier this year on the first question.

The Justice Department is expected to lay out its new position during a hearing on Tuesday. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a supporter of voter identification laws as long as they are “properly drafted” and has voiced skepticism about the Voting Rights Act.

Republicans argue that the limits are unnecessary burdens on a state’s right to make its own laws to protect the ballot box.

(h/t The Hill)

Trump Stands By Racist Claim That Exonerated ‘Central Park 5’ Are Guilty

Donald Trump has stood by his decades-old claim that the group of five men blamed for a 1989 rape and beating in Central Park before being exonerated were actually guilty.

In a statement to CNN as part of a retrospective on the case, the Republican presidential nominee maintained, despite DNA and other evidence to the contrary, that the men were guilty of raping and beating an investment banker who had been jogging in Central Park at night.

“They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous. And the woman, so badly injured, will never be the same.”

The five men, who became known as the Central Park Five, were exonerated in 2002 when an investigation by the Manhattan district attorney found DNA evidence linking the vicious crime to a previously convicted rapist. That man admitted to acting alone in the crime.

New York City settled with the five men in 2014, agreeing to pay them a collective $40 million for time spent wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. The hasty conviction of the men, who were ages 14 to 16 at the time, was widely viewed as a symptom of racial biases and the pressure prosecutors and law enforcement felt to find culprits amid fear of crime in the city amid a spiraling crime rate.

Trump, then as now a prominent Manhattan real-estate figure, took out a full-page ad in The New York Times shortly after the jogger was attacked calling for New York to revive the death penalty.

“I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” Trump wrote. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.”

Trump also previously complained in an op-ed article in the New York Daily News that the settlement between the five men and New York was a “disgrace,” saying the “recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city” to settle for an amount as high as $40 million.

Trump’s campaign has previously defended his demonization of the wrongfully convicted men.

Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, an adviser to Trump’s campaign, touted the ad earlier this year during an interview with an Alabama radio station, saying that it showed Trump was committed to law and order.

“Trump has always been this way,” Sessions said. “People say he wasn’t a conservative, but he bought an ad 20 years ago in The New York Times calling for the death penalty. How many people in New York, that liberal bastion, were willing to do something like that?”

(h/t Business Insider)

Reality

Donald Trump called for, and still today is calling for, the execution of five men for a crime they didn’t commit. How is that for “law and order?”

The case was notable for its racial politics: Four of the Central Park Five were black and one was Latino while the victim was a white banker.

Trump, Under Oath, Claimed Mexicans Are Rapists

Video footage from a legal deposition of Donald Trump released Friday suggests the Republican presidential candidate planned to call Mexicans “rapists” when he first announced his candidacy.

The offensive remarks were premeditated, Trump suggested under oath in a sworn video deposition taken June 16.

The deposition was part of a lawsuit Trump launched against a restaurateur who pulled out of a deal to open a restaurant in the billionaire businessman’s new Washington, D.C. hotel in response to his racism.

The deal fell apart after Trump made his offensive comments on the campaign trail.

It is one of two lawsuits Trump leveled against restaurants who said his nasty remarks were reason enough to end their business relationship.

“They thought I made statements that were inflammatory in some form,” Trump said, complaining of the response he’d received for his incendiary remarks.

Asked if he had planned “in advance” what he was going to say in that now-famous speech launching his campaign, he said “yes.”

“I mean, I’ve tapped into something. I’ve tapped into illegal immigration,” he said a minute later, bragging about his big primary win.

Trump’s team fought the video becoming public, but a judge ruled Friday that the candidate’s argument that it could be used in attack ads against him wasn’t enough reason to keep it sealed.

The GOP candidate said that he did “virtually nothing” to prepare for the sworn deposition, similar today his approach heading into the first presidential debate.

(h/t New York Daily News)

Media

Trump Tweets Americans Should Watch Miss Amercia’s Sex Tape

Twitter

Update: In the title we referred to Alicia Machado as “Miss America,” she was Miss Universe.

Donald Trump has doubled down on his attacks on a former Miss Universe in a stream of early-morning tweets.

Trump’s verbal barbs directed at Alicia Machado, who won the Miss Universe title in 1996, started after the first presidential debate Monday when Hillary Clinton mentioned her and claimed that Trump used to call her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.”

Rather than back away from the accusations, Trump has repeatedly defended his criticisms of the woman and her weight.

His latest came online this morning:

(h/t ABC News)

Reality

Researchers have looked and the so-called “sex tape” came from a reality television show called La Granja, which is nothing more than some grainy, night-vision footage of a couple of covered figures writhing in a bed, hardly qualifies as explicit. And reality television being what it is, the scene the tape depicts was quite possibly staged or fabricated.

Alicia Machado did pose topless for Playboy magazine, though.

However if Machado has a sex tape or not, this does not matter. The argument put forth at the first presidential debate was; Does Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump engage in bullying and sexism and are this qualities you would want in your President?  And by Trump attempting deflect charges of sexism and bullying by turning around and engaging in sexist attacks against a woman’s weight and acting like the textbook definition of a bully over several days does not help his defense.

In Post-Debate Interview, Trump Again Criticizes Pageant-Winner’s Weight

At the end of Monday night’s presidential debate, Hillary Clinton accused Donald Trump of taunting one of his former Miss Universe contestants about her weight.

Clinton said the Republican nominee’s criticisms of Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan who won the Miss Universe contest in 1996, was “one of the worst things he said” about women. “He called this woman Miss Piggy. Then he called her Miss Housekeeping because she was Latina.”

While Trump appeared to dispute Clinton’s accusation on the debate stage, he called into Fox and Friends Tuesday morning and once again called Machado fat.

“I know that person. That person was a Miss Universe person,” Trump told the Fox News morning show. “And she was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst, she was impossible,” he said. “She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem. Not only that, her attitude.”

With his past statements about Machado playing into critiques Clinton wanted to make at Monday night’s high-profile debate, the Clinton campaign was quick to pounce. An hour after the debate ended, her campaign tweeted a two-minute video about Machado’s experience with Trump.

“He was very overwhelming. I was very scared of him,” she says in Spanish. “He’d yell at me all the time. He’d tell me ‘you look ugly’ or ‘you look fat.’ Sometimes he’d ‘play’ with me and say ‘Hello Miss Piggy, hello Miss Housekeeping.’ ”

The Clinton campaign’s video also includes archived footage of Trump telling reporters “she weighed 118 pounds, or 117 pounds, and she went up to 160 or 170. So this is somebody who likes to eat.”

Articles at the time confirm Trump’s comments.

  • In 1997, Donald Trump told Howard Stern that Machado was an “eating machine” who “ate a lot of everything.” “You whipped this fat slob into shape,” the radio host told Trump. “I don’t know how you did it. I see all these diet plans, everything else. God bless you.” When asked if Trump had “gotten her down to 118,” he said she is going to be there soon.
  • Around the same time, Trump told Newsweek: “We’ve tried diet, spa, a trainer, incentives. Forget it, the way she’s going, she’d eat the whole gymnasium.”
  • Machado told the Washington Post at the time she was caught by surprise about reporters being present. “I asked him to please send me to a trainer or a nutritionist or something because I needed some orientation, and he sends me to a gym in New York,” she said. “When I get there, there are 80 reporters waiting to watch me sweat. I thought that was in very bad taste.”
  • Donald Trump wrote in his 1997 book Art of the Comeback, “I could just see Alicia Machado, the current Miss Universe, sitting there plumply. God, what problems I had with this woman. First, she wins. Second, she gains 50 pounds. Third, I urge the committee not to fire her. Fourth, I go to the gym with her, in a show of support. Final act: She trashes me in The Washington Post — after I stood by her the entire time. What’s wrong with this picture? Anyway, the best part about the evening was the knowledge that next year, she would no longer be Miss Universe.”

Machado told the campaign that the experience led to long-term eating disorders. “I wouldn’t eat, and I would still see myself as fat, because a powerful man had said so.”

“He always treated me like a little thing. He always treated me like trash,” Machado said Tuesday in a conference call organized by the Clinton campaign.

She said she was caught off-guard when Clinton talked about her Monday night. “I started to cry because I never imagined that someone so important would care about my story,” she said, speaking in Spanish.

“I’m very sorry that I might be an uncomfortable person for Mr. Trump,” Machado said, “but that’s how things happen, that’s how things go.”

(h/t NPR)

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Links

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/05/17/when_donald_trump_humiliated_miss_universe_for_gaining_weight.html

Trump Promotes Unconstitutional and Failed Stop-And-Frisk Policing

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump praised the controversial “stop-and-frisk” police tactic Wednesday, saying it “worked incredibly well” when it was used in New York City.

Trump was speaking at a town hall moderated by Fox News’ Sean Hannity at a mostly black church in Cleveland, Ohio when he was asked how he would stop violence in black communities.

In response, Trump pointed to “stop-and-frisk”, which allows police to stop and search any person officers deem suspicious.

“I think you have to [do it],” Trump said. “We did it in New York, it worked incredibly well and you have to be proactive.”

“Now, we had a very good mayor, but New York City was incredible, the way that worked, so I think that could be one step you could do.”

“Stop-and-frisk” drew complaints from New York City minorities, who claimed they were being disporportionately stopped for searches by officers. In 2013, a federal court ruled that the practice was unconstitutional and its use has since been scaled back.

(h/t Fox News)

Reality

Donald Trump isn’t the “law and order candidate,” but the “every failed police tactic that targeted minorities candidate.”

Trump failed to mention that in every city where stop-and-frisk was implemented, they have become case studies in the perils of such an approach. And it was quite brazen of Trump to promote it at an African American forum since it overwhelming targeted based om race, not reasonable suspicion, and caused African American, Latino, and other minority communities to distrust the police and avoid them when nearby.

Four of the five biggest American cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia — have all used stop-and-frisk tactics in an attempt to lower crime. Despite what Trump says, the results are mixed, and in each city the methods have been found unconstitutional for disproportionately targeting minorities.

For example, in Donald Trump’s hometown the NYPD’s practices were found to violate New Yorkers’ Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and also found that the practices were racially discriminatory in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Trump wants to take this nationally.

The most proven form of policing is when officers work with communities thereby gaining trust of a population. So when there is an issue in their neighborhood, residents are more likely to open up and offer evidence.

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