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Paul Waldman: The death of the CIA Factbook and Trump’s war on usefulness

Wherever government does something helpful, the regime wants to kill it.

When the Trump administration closes down public access to yet another worthwhile resource, it doesn’t always make news. But the decision last week to shutter the CIA World Factbook stands out for what it reveals.

This administration has been fighting a sweeping information war meant to distort and suppress facts, ideas, and history that doesn’t “align with the president’s agenda,” in the phrase they so often use. But at the same time, they’re also waging a war on usefulness.

The CIA produced the Factbook, a concise roundup of facts and figures about every country in the world, since the 1960s; it started as an internal resource and then was made public so anyone could access it. If you wanted to know how many square miles Argentina is, or see a list of political parties in Belgium, or find out what the GDP of Cameroon was last year, the Factbook was a handy resource. But not anymore. Not only will the CIA stop producing new iterations, all previous versions have been removed from the web (though they can still be found at the Internet Archive).

It’s the latter part that gives away their intentions. What would the cost be of keeping the old versions of the Factbook online? Essentially zero. So what’s the point of deleting them?
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Andy Borowitz: Trump’s Racism Isn’t News

Donald Trump’s racist meme featuring Barack and Michelle Obama is shocking but utterly unsurprising. Trump has been a racist for decades—following in his father’s footsteps.

In 1971, Trump joined the real estate company founded by daddy Fred, and, in a move that every nepo baby would applaud, assumed the entry-level position of president.

His career as his father’s junior partner got off to an inauspicious but telling start.

In 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Trump Management for discriminating against prospective Black tenants, naming both Trumps as codefendants. “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City,” read the headline heralding Donald J. Trump’s first appearance on page one of the New York Times.

Countersuing, the Trumps unleashed their lawyer, Roy Cohn, the disgraced (and, eventually, disbarred) former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn advanced the Trumps’ claim that they were discriminating not against Blacks but against undesirable “welfare recipients.” A judge dismissed the Trumps’ countersuit. (The tradition of judges tossing baseless Trump lawsuits continues to this day.)
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Bulwark: Why Trump’s Attack on Refugees Could Hurt Grandma

Miami, Florida
MARYSE, 56, HAS BEEN A HOME CARE WORKER in the United States ever since she moved here from Haiti sixteen years ago. Over the years, she estimates, she’s cared for more than two dozen people. Most have been seniors in physical or cognitive decline—among them, a Purple Heart recipient who had served in the Army and a former pilot who had flown missions over France and Africa during World War II. She has also cared for younger people with physical disabilities, including one who had cerebral palsy and another who had suffered severe head trauma in a car accident.

It was not the career Maryse once imagined for herself, she told me last week. …

Maryse’s priority at that point was providing for her kids, and her English wasn’t good enough for media work in the states. At her sister’s urging, she says, she enrolled in classes to become a certified nursing assistant, following a well-worn path for Haitian immigrants who knew the high demand for caregivers meant it would lead to reliable employment—and who frequently saw caring for others as a calling, not just a paycheck.
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This is not a case of immigrants taking jobs from Americans, most economists say. It’s a case of immigrants taking jobs Americans don’t want, because there are easier ways to make a living. “There are these other jobs—even fast food sometimes—where you can have more predictability and stable hours, and make similar money,” …
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NY Times: Prosecutors Began Investigating Renee Good’s Killing. Washington Told Them to Stop.

Federal prosecutors had a warrant to collect evidence from Ms. Good’s vehicle, but Trump administration leaders said to drop it. About a dozen prosecutors have departed, leaving the Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office in turmoil.
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Cindy Burnham, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Minnesota, declined to comment for this article, as did Daniel N. Rosen, the U.S. attorney in Minnesota. Emily Covington, a Justice Department spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment.
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Steward Beckham: A Presidency of Racist Memes

This morning, I woke up to the news that the president had posted a social media video depicting the former and first Black head of state and his wife as chimpanzees. It was grotesque. It was also tragically unsurprising. We’ve had roughly a decade of this kind of political rot: a carnival barker’s politics of enrichment for the wealthiest, paired with racist shiny objects tossed to a sizable, influential slice of the working public like bait.

A few Republicans pushed back. Senator Tim Scott suggested it was racist, but also may have been a “mistake” by the president or his communications team. Congressman Mike Lawler also framed it as a possible mistake while admitting, plainly, that this wasn’t borderline anything, just raw racism. It was overt.

I grew up on a saying my mother repeated often: what happens in the dark comes to light. American politics has its own version of that law. Think of Ronald Reagan launching his 1980 general-election campaign with a “states’ rights” speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi, only sixteen years after the murders of civil rights workers there. On paper, “states’ rights” can sound like a tidy argument about federalism. In historical practice, especially in the post–Civil Rights era, it functioned as coded reassurance: desegregation went too far; the old order should reassert itself; separate but equal (that peculiar institution’s afterlife) deserved a second wind.
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Same with Reagan’s “welfare queen” trope.
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So when the president posts something like last night’s video, he’s not merely being tasteless or provocative. He’s reaffirming the bargain at the center of his rise: political power built on the destabilization of the country through racial grievance through the insistence that a Black president disproving racist stereotypes was not progress but an existential theft. …
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WSJ – Karl Rove: Republicans Have an Economy Problem

President Trump’s triumphal tone isn’t helping matters for everyday Americans.

It’s bad news for Republicans that recent coverage of President Trump has been dominated by topics ranging from invading Greenland and Immigration and Customs Enforcement killings in Minneapolis to trashing the Grammys and ordering a giant Jeffrey Epstein document dump. These aren’t as important to Americans as the economy.

To correct this problem, the president came to Iowa last month for an economic speech. His team hoped his appearance in a Des Moines suburb would recenter the discussion.

It didn’t. Mr. Trump made two mistakes.

The first was straying from the subject for almost half his speech. Victories and stolen elections. Immigration. Introducing politicians on the stage. Attacking his predecessor for multiple sins. Lots of different foreign issues. He went everywhere—and therefore nowhere.

The second problem was Mr. Trump’s triumphal tone. He congratulated himself on “the greatest first year of any administration in American history.” The “economy is booming,” he said. It’s been “the best first year of any president ever maybe.”
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Capitol News Illinois: ‘My own government attempted to execute me,’ Chicago woman shot by Border Patrol testifies

• Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by immigration agents last year, testified at a public forum on immigration agents’ use of force in D.C. on Tuesday, Feb. 3.
• Panelists and members of Congress called for immigration enforcement reform and civil liability of federal agents.
• This is the second forum hosted by two congressmen who opened an inquiry in October to investigate reports of immigration agents detaining U.S. citizens.
• Two other citizens who accused immigration agents of assault testified at the forum.

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Jennifer Rubin: The real ‘terrorists’ are in the Trump regime

The Trump regime calls those it kills and abuses “terrorists.” Renee Good was defamed as a “domestic terrorist.” She was a mother, a daughter, a wife, a neighbor. Alex Pretti was also labeled a “domestic terrorist.” He was a beloved ICU nurse at the VA. Approximately 125 people that the Trump regime illegally killed on the high seas were dubbed “narco-terrorists.” That too is a lie. Indeed, whenever you hear “terrorist” uttered by this administration, you should understand that means “someone a fascist government had no right to kill.”

The family of two innocent men murdered on the high seas have brought suit against the Trump regime.
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The complaint reminds us that Trump’s regime has never provided proof that the victims were doing anything wrong
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Business Insider: America’s economy is ‘driving through the fog’

The decline of economic data could end up with a lot of unemployed workers and increase the chance of recession
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For people who rely on the BLS, the past year has raised acute concerns. The first was President Donald Trump’s firing of BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in July. Revisions to that month’s jobs report showed that the US had created far fewer jobs than initially reported in the previous two months. Revisions are a standard part of the BLS data collection process, and the size of the adjustments was well within historical norms. Economists warned that the firing could be a harbinger of political meddling in the crucial job and price figures. Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Petersen Institute for International Economics, called the firing a “five-alarm intentional harm to the integrity of US economic data and the entire statistical system.” Skanda Amarnath, Executive Director of Employ America, a think tank, said, “public trust is permanently harmed when the BLS commissioner is fired after one bad jobs report.”
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Heather Delaney Reese: The Epstein files are a who’s who of Trump’s inner circle

With puffy eyes and a bruised right hand hidden under his left, Donald Trump sat hunched over on his leather chair behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Behind him stood Pam Bondi, Dr. Oz, RFK Jr., and a few others from his inner circle of elite enablers, all poised to give a false sense of power, control, and normalcy. Instead, it just showed how dazed and detached he was. …

This was not normal. And they all knew it, standing there with him.

It wasn’t the only sign that something was wrong. European leaders are openly saying what American officials won’t. Politico reported that Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, who’s actually been one of Trump’s closest allies in the EU, told other European heads of state that his recent meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago left him deeply alarmed. While at the summit in Brussels, he described Trump’s “psychological state” as “dangerous,” according to multiple diplomats who were in the room. Fico didn’t say that lightly. He’s backed Trump’s nationalist agenda for years. But after seeing him in person on January 17, he brought his concerns to other EU leaders during an emergency summit that next week.
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And what we keep learning with every release of the files that comes to us is that Epstein didn’t just run a trafficking ring. He ran a blackmail operation. …

That’s why you’re seeing Trump propped up like Weekend at Bernie’s.
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