Why comparing Trump's and Obama's immigration restrictions is flawed →

To refresh, Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 27 barring citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan and Libya from entering the United States for 90 days. It also puts Syrian refugee admissions on hold indefinitely. (We go over some of the key issues in this explainer.)
In 2011, Obama’s state department stopped processing Iraqi refugee requests for six months, though it didn’t disclose the policy like Trump did, ABC reported in 2013.
So, are the policies similar as Trump claimed?
In the most superficial of ways, yes. They both limit immigration into the United States on a temporary basis. But there are two significant differences that Trump omits.
First, Obama’s suspension was in direct response to a failed plot by Iraqi nationals living in Bowling Green, Ky., to send money, explosives and weapons to al-Qaida. The two men were arrested by the FBI in May 2011 for actions committed in Iraq and trying to assist overseas terrorist groups...
Second, the scope of the two policies is slightly different. Obama’s 2011 order put a pause on refugee processing, whereas Trump’s halt in entries applies to all non-U.S. visitors...

Immigration Orders and Odd Tenders →

I'm not keen on the article as a whole, but this is worth pondering:

More than that, though. One upshot of Trump's executive order is that United States lawful permanent residents, who have jumped through years of hoops to comply with the intricate immigration rules enshrined in U.S. law, are no longer protected by that law. They can be deported at the whim of the President, or his advisers, or a Border Patrol agent. (The order originally barred lawful permanent residents, though after some confusion, now it will not, unless the Secretary of Homeland Security wants it to. On the other hand, soon it may apply to citizens.) The nation of laws that they immigrated to is gone, replaced by a nation of arbitrary rule. 
If the president can, without consulting the courts or Congress, banish U.S. lawful permanent residents, then he can do anything. If there is no rule of law for some people, there is no rule of law for anyone. The reason the U.S. is a good place to do business is that, for the last 228 years, it has built a firm foundation on the rule of law. It almost undid that in a weekend. That's bad for business.

Trial Balloon for a Coup? →

I'll start by saying take this article (especially the title and conclusion) with a grain of salt. It's written by an engineer at Google, not a journalist, or intelligence analyst, or social scientist whose job is carefully thinking through this kind of stuff, and vetting the different pieces for authenticity (although perhaps that's his main hobby). Nevertheless, what's mentioned in this article is... dangerous. These kinds of actions go straight to trust in civil and legal society. The Trump administration is opening the door on coup--whether a self-coup as the author surmises, or a regular coup where another faction seizes power (and, as to the latter, why now, and not under any previous administration, many of which took actions just as rash or extreme? my answer: large, frequent, visible protests; high government or military factions tend not to commit coups unless there's a plausible public demand). However, the framing of this article assumes a pretty high level of careful thought as to what the Trump administration is doing and why, regardless of the potential outcome. Instead, it could simply be as chaotic and bumbling as it appears at a quick glance. Or some combination of both.

Please take the time to read the numbered list of recent actions (not least of which is the most interesting note on possible Russian collusion I've seen, though it's as tenuous as anything else). And again, remain skeptical and openminded.

Note also the most frightening escalation last night was that the DHS made it fairly clear that they did not feel bound to obey any court orders. CBP continued to deny all access to counsel, detain people, and deport them in direct contravention to the court’s order, citing “upper management,” and the DHS made a formal (but confusing) statement that they would continue to follow the President’s orders. (See my updates from yesterday, and the various links there, for details) Significant in today’s updates is any lack of suggestion that the courts’ authority played a role in the decision.
That is to say, the administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored.

 

How the Media Influences Our Fear of Terrorism →

Good article that crunches the data and shows that the press's coverage of terrorism is disproportional to its comparative risk.
This isn't new. I've written about it before, and wrote about it more generally when I wrote about the psychology of risk, fear, and security. Basically, the issue is the availability heuristic. We tend to infer the probability of something by how easy it is to bring examples of the thing to mind. So if we can think of a lot of tiger attacks in our community, we infer that the risk is high. If we can't think of many lion attacks, we infer that the risk is low. But while this is a perfectly reasonable heuristic when living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 BC, it fails in the face of modern media. The media makes the rare seem more common by spending a lot of time talking about it. It's not the media's fault. By definition, news is "something that hardly ever happens." But when the coverage of terrorist deaths exceeds the coverage of homicides, we have a tendency to mistakenly inflate the risk of the former while discount the risk of the latter...

Divining Trump’s Military Strategies →

Anticipation of the direction of policy ordinarily can be discussed in terms of grand strategies and schools of thought, but not so with Trump. With most presidents, attracting crowds and support and votes in a campaign is a gauntlet that must be run to serve the nation in its highest office. With Trump, attracting the crowds and support is what it’s all about.
A good take on what makes the new president tick, and what this does or does not mean for protecting the nation’s interests during the next four years, is an interview with three Trump biographers (Gwenda Blair, Michael D’Antonio and Tim O’Brien) in Politico. The biographers agreed that there has been no indication Trump can separate the interests of the country from personal pique.
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There is a long history of political leaders, especially demagogic ones, who face weakening domestic support looking to foreign adventures to divert attention from problems at home, to rally nationalist sentiment, and to reap the benefits of popularity for the leader who is doing the rallying...
Similar dynamics could come into play with a domestically beleaguered Donald Trump. Trump’s comments during the campaign suggesting a less interventionist orientation than previous administrations were just like many other of his campaign comments in appealing to discontents of the moment. He was especially trying to capitalize on dissatisfaction with the disastrous Iraq War, going so far as to lie about his own purported opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
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Right now all of this is speculation. But so has been projection of a less interventionist future based on the tweets and blurts and campaign speeches. What actually transpires will depend not only on the vicissitudes of presidential narcissism but also on interplay yet to develop between the President and his most influential subordinates.
 

Trump’s Incoherent Anti-Terrorism Policy →

As for terrorism, the anti-Muslim nature of this order is likely to increase anti-U.S. terrorism rather than decrease it. The order is music to the ears of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other violent groups that portray in their propaganda and recruitment pitches a world engulfed in a war between Islam and a Judeo-Christian West that is led by the United States and is out to persecute Muslims. Persuading other governments, especially in the Muslim world, to cooperate with the United States in the name of counterterrorism will be made more difficult. And Americans will be more, not less, likely to fall victim to terrorism perpetrated by Islamist extremists.
The designation of the nationals of seven states (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) for the most sweeping prohibition on entry to the United States (i.e, for all travelers, not just refugees) for at least 90 days reinforces the anti-Islam flavor of the executive order, given that these are all Muslim-majority countries. This grouping of states was first named in legislation that the Republican-controlled Congress passed last year as “countries of concern.” But that legislation had to do with which countries were or were not to be eligible for the visa-waiver program. The new executive order is instead a blanket ban on all travel to the United States, visa or no visa.
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Conceivably this list of seven could dilute the anti-Islam flavor of the order somewhat, given that other Muslim-majority countries are not so listed. But looking closely at who was listed and who wasn’t only underscores how far divorced this matter is from counterterrorism. No one from any of the seven countries on the list has killed anyone in a terrorist attack in the United States. By contrast, the hijackers who perpetrated 9/11 came mostly from Saudi Arabia and the rest from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon; none of these countries are on the list.
To the extent any distinction is being made between Muslims the administration most wants to keep out and others to whom it will be a little more tolerant, the distinction seems to be made for unrelated reasons that some regimes get favored and others don’t. The reasons not only don’t have to do with terrorism but also don’t relate to democracy or human rights either.
And maybe there’s an additional explanation, very much in the realm of the ignoble. It has not escaped the notice of media that some of the principal countries — including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt — that legitimately could be objects of worry as exporters of terrorists but aren’t on the no-travel list are ones in which Trump in his private capacity has done business or sought to make deals. Thus this matter will be one of the first of what are likely to be many presidential decisions about which, as long as Trump flouts ethical principles and refuses to divest himself of his business interests, understandable questions will be raised about his motives.

The Real Story Of 2016 →

Excellent series of articles on where and how the US presidential election predictions went wrong (and right).

Of note:

Another myth is that Trump’s victory represented some sort of catastrophic failure for the polls. Trump outperformed his national polls by only 1 to 2 percentage points in losing the popular vote to Clinton, making them slightly closer to the mark than they were in 2012. Meanwhile, he beat his polls by only 2 to 3 percentage points in the average swing state.3 Certainly, there were individual pollsters that had some explaining to do, especially in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where Trump beat his polls by a larger amount. But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.

Why, then, had so many people who covered the campaign been so confident of Clinton’s chances? This is the question I’ve spent the past two to three months thinking about...

How I turned a traffic ticket into the constitutional trial of the century →

Some towns and cities are using a new combination of legal definitions in a way that makes contesting robo-issued speeding tickets nearly impossible to contend in court, which pretty clearly appears to be un-Constitutional:

Traffic camera laws are popular in part because they appeal to a law-and-order impulse. If we are going to stop those nefarious evildoers who jeopardize the health of the republic by sliding through yellow lights when no one else is around and driving through empty streets at thirty miles per hour in twenty-five zones, then we need a way around such pesky impediments as a lack of eyewitnesses.
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In short, municipal officials and their private contractors have at their disposal the powers of both criminal and civil law and are excused from the due process duties of both criminal and civil law. It’s a neat trick that would have made King George III blush.