Vox: Why Colombia has taken in 1 million Venezuelans (Nov 27, 2018)

Colombia is currently dealing with a massive wave of refugees coming from Venezuela. Venezuelans are fleeing their home because of a severe economic crisis under President Nicolas Maduro. There are high inflation rates and there isn’t enough food available for people within Venezuela to even eat. Thousands of Venezuelans cross the Simon Bolivar bridge located at Cúcuta every day and Colombia doesn’t seem to be turning anyone way.

This borders episode looks at why Colombia doesn’t turn away these refugees, the shared history of the two nations and how there may be a limit to Colombia’s acceptance of incoming Venezuelans.

The Huffington Post: Trump Blew Up The Iran Nuclear Deal. Now He Wants Allies To Help Him Get An Iran Nuclear Deal.

Trump prepares to meet Thursday and Friday with leaders of the world’s largest industrial economies at the G-20 summit in Japan with the idea, according to the White House, of gaining their cooperation in lowering tensions with Iran. “This is a chance for the president to engage with a number of different international leaders, among our closest partners and allies, to obtain their support and to have discussions about how we can encourage Iran to enter into negotiations,” a senior administration official said this week on condition of anonymity. [...]

“He’s taken his usual tactic, which is aggravate everyone in advance, up the ante, be obnoxious, with the hope of then acting like the non-abusive parent in the face-to-face meeting,” said Wendy Sherman, the former State Department official who led the U.S. negotiating team for the Iran agreement that Trump scrapped. “What that gets him is not really clear at this point.” [...]

rump also turned his attacks against Vietnam for its tariffs — “Vietnam takes advantage of us even worse than China” — and Japan, also for purportedly taking advantage of the United States through its defense treaty: “If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III. We will go in and we will protect them and we will fight with our lives and with our treasure. We will fight at all costs, right? But if we’re attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us at all. They can watch it on a Sony television.” [...]

Adding to the difficulties, she said, is Trump’s tendency to swing from position to position, often undercutting his own administration’s work. Trump went from threatening “fire and fury” on North Korea to praising its dictator within weeks. He threatened to shut the border with Mexico, then reversed. He threatened tariffs on Mexico, then reversed on that, too.

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Slate: John Roberts Rejects the Census Citizenship Question Because Trump Officials Lied About It

The record shows that the Secretary began taking steps to reinstate a citizenship question about a week into his tenure, but it contains no hint that he was considering VRA enforcement in connection with that project. The Secretary’s Director of Policy did not know why the Secretary wished to reinstate the question, but saw it as his task to “find the best rationale.” The Director initially attempted to elicit requests for citizenship data from the Department of Homeland Security and DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, neither of which is responsible for enforcing the VRA. After those attempts failed, he asked Commerce staff to look into whether the Secretary could reinstate the question without receiving a request from another agency. The possibility that DOJ’s Civil Rights Division might be willing to request citizenship data for VRA enforcement purposes was proposed by Commerce staff along the way and eventually pursued. [...]

Theoretically, then, Ross can still find a way to insert the question into the census. But two factors work against him. First, the Trump administration has repeatedly told the courts that it must begin printing the census forms on June 30. It presented this deadline as essentially non-negotiable, apparently hoping to pressure SCOTUS into quickly upholding the question. That tactic may have now backfired, because the administration must print the forms in three days or else reveal it was lying about its timeline. (Census officials have said that the printing could be delayed until October, though that still may not leave the government enough time.) [...]

Thursday’s decision is complex and, at times, confusing. The liberal justices wrote separately to declare that the citizenship question should be blocked altogether as illegally “arbitrary and capricious.” The conservative justices wrote separately to assert that the court should afford more deference to the Commerce Department—an argument that reaches the heights of hypocrisy, especially in light of their recent assault on judicial deference to agencies. So neither bloc got exactly what it wanted. But make no mistake: Roberts’ compromise gives the liberals a qualified victory, one that should keep the citizenship question off the 2020 census. Ross’ own incompetence appears to have doomed his discriminatory scheme.

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Vox: 4 winners and 2 losers from the two nights of Democratic debates

Before the debate, there were basically three tiers of candidates in the polls. You had the top three in double digits (Biden, trailed by Biden and Warren), two runners-up around 6 percent (Harris and Buttigieg), and then a whole mess of candidates near the bottom. By the end of both nights, there were only two candidates who seemed like they may have performed well enough to move up a tier: former HUD Secretary Julián Castro and Sen. Kamala Harris. [...]

From that standpoint, he couldn’t have hoped for a better night than the one he had on Wednesday. Castro’s bold idea on immigration — to decriminalize illegal entry — was taken up by other candidates on stage, and then was endorsed by the vast majority of candidates on Thursday. He used his mastery of the issue to pounce on fellow Texan Beto O’Rourke, making O’Rourke look like an empty suit while elevating his own profile (O’Rourke had a really, really bad night in general, but Castro was the single biggest reason). [...]

Sanders’s 2016 presidential run appears to have played a major galvanizing role here, opening up space for a genuinely left-wing shift among Democratic leaders that produced a crop of progressive 2018 stars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In July 2018, YouGov asked self-identified Democrats whether they wanted candidates for the midterm elections to be “more or less like Bernie Sanders.” Fifty-seven percent said they wanted more Sanders-esque candidates; a scant 16 percent said less. [...]

Social justice, identity politics, wokeness — whatever terminology you want to call the modern left-wing approach to issues relating to historically disadvantaged social groups, it dominated the stage on both nights.

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Vox: Kamala Harris was the Democrat you could imagine taking on Trump

But it was in the middle of the debate that Harris changed the campaign. After Biden was confronted with a question about deportations in the Obama administration, Harris went where the other candidates had not. “This was one of the very few issues with which I disagreed with the administration,” she said, explaining that “as attorney general and the chief law officer of the state of California, I issued a directive to the sheriffs that they did not have to comply with detainers and instead should make decisions based on the best interest of public of the basis of their community. I was tracking it and saw that parents, people who had not committed a crime even by definition were being deported.” [...]

“I do not believe you are a racist,” she said. “But” — you knew there was a but — “it was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.” [...]

Buttigieg is a natural debater, and he offered about as good an answer on the South Bend shooting as was plausible, but it’s always hard to run for president from a place of apology. His bigger problem, to my ear, was the absence of an overarching theory connecting his answers. His responses are strong on their own terms, and I particularly appreciate his insistence that he’d prioritize restoring American democracy in his first year, but he’s offering individual answers rather than a clear message, and that’s tough in a field this big.

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