monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

In an interview the following day on KPCC 89.3’s Air Talk with Larry Mantle, De Léon expressed outrage that President Trump’s executive order would include those who possess fraudulent documents or committed identity theft to obtain a Social Security number.

[OUTRAGE, I TELLYA!]

De Léon replied: “I don’t think so … the vast majority of immigrants — hard working immigrants — have done that. I can tell you I have family members specifically who came here as undocumented immigrants, and they did the same thing. That’s what you need to do to survive in this economy.”

Mantle objected: “But of course the problem is, — and I know people too — who’ve had their Social Security numbers and identities stolen as a result of that….”

De Léon minimized the problem, saying it was not the same as “Russian” hacking.

Retail department store Nordstrom’s decision last week to cut first daughter Ivanka Trump’s fashion line has sparked a tremendous backlash from consumers—especially women—who say the company’s move has led them to boycott the store and cut up their Nordstrom’s cards.

A majority of millennial women, according to a study from BrandKeys highlighted by Forbes last year, are sticking with the Ivanka Trump brand even if they don’t support her father’s policies. Fifty-one percent of the millennial women surveyed said they were either “extremely likely” or “very likely” to purchase Ivanka Trump fashion products when asked: “In light of Ivanka Trump’s involvement with the Trump campaign for president, how likely would you be to consider buying her line of shoes or clothing?”

Another 32 percent added they were “somewhat likely,” meaning a total of 83 percent of millennial women still like Ivanka Trump’s line, even when considering her father’s presidential campaign and politics.

Fueling the fire against Nordstrom’s for the decision to drop Ivanka Trump’s line is a boycott from women all across the country. CNBC’s Berkeley Lovelace wrote on Wednesday. Lovelace’s piece notes that Nordstrom’s stock is seriously hurting this year overall, too: “With Wednesday’s drop, Nordstrom’s shares are down more than 10 percent year to date.”

“I’ve had enough of the pompous snobbery of the left and that it seeps through to our retail industry shows me a total lack of respect for the consumer and the patrons,” Wendy Burdette from Clifton, Virginia, said in an email. She said she plans to “shred” her Nordstrom’s card because he doesn’t “need” it anymore. "Nordstrom’s needs to figure out that their demographic is Christian women not snotty hoodlums wearing masks."

White House fires back at immigration order critics with list of terror arrests

U.S. District Judge James Robart, in questioning a Justice Department lawyer last week about the number of post-9/11 arrests of foreign nationals from those countries, incorrectly asserted: “Let me tell you … The answer to that is none...”

The White House moved Wednesday to counter critics who claim President Trump’s travel ban goes too far, circulating a list of terror cases involving suspects who came to the U.S. from the seven countries in question.

The list, obtained by Fox News, gave 24 examples of refugees and other immigrants from Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Libya who have been arrested on terror-related charges; most have been convicted.

The White House document itself names 10 individuals from Somalia, six from Iraq, one from Yemen, two from Sudan, two from Iran, two from Libya and one from Syria. The cases span the last eight years, and include most recently a case in June in which two Somali refugees were jailed for conspiring to commit murder in Syria on behalf of ISIS.

It also includes a case from March of last year, where a Yemeni native who became a U.S. citizen was sentenced to 22 years in prison for attempting to provide “material support” to ISIS and planning to shoot and kill members of the U.S. military who had returned from Iraq.

Top Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway used a Fox News appearance on Thursday morning to encourage people to buy items from Ivanka Trump's clothing and accessories line, just one day after the President slammed Nordstrom on Twitter for dropping it.

"Go buy Ivanka's stuff is what I would tell you," she said. "I hate shopping, I will go get some myself today."

"This is just a wonderful line," Conway continued. "I own some of it. I fully—I'm going to give a free commercial here. Go buy it today, everybody, you can find it online."

AND THIS IS NOT A CLEAR CASE OF CONFLICT OF INTEREST BECAUSE...?

The White House said Wednesday that anyone who questions the success of last week’s deadly U.S.-led raid in Yemen “owes an apology” to the Navy SEAL who was killed there. […]

Spicer said that “anyone who undermines the success of that raid owes an apology and [does] a disservice” to the life of Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, who was killed in a firefight…. Spicer repeated his declaration that the Jan. 28 strike – which also left an 8-year-old girl and an unknown number of other civilians dead – was a “huge success.”

There are a few key angles to this that are worth keeping in mind. The first is the Trump World’s increasingly dangerous approach to dissent: to hear the White House tell it, to accurately characterize a failed mission is to dishonor the troops. This was a common rhetorical ploy in the Bush/Cheney era, and it’s just as offensive now as it was then. There’s simply no credible way for an administration to equate honest assessments on matters of national security with criticisms of the servicemen and women who do their duty.

Second is the stunning hypocrisy surrounding the partisan circumstances. In Republican circles, the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi was one of the single most important moment of the post-9/11 era, and criticisms of what transpired have been ubiquitous on the right for years. By Spicer’s standards, are those who question the deadly violence in Libya dishonoring the sacrifices of the four Americans who died there?

And finally, Donald Trump has spent a fair amount of time pretending to have opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning, denouncing it repeatedly as a failure. According to the president’s press secretary, it sounds like Trump is now supposed to apologize for having done a disservice to those who died while serving in the war.