3 Stories You Should Read 2/8/2019: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Matthew Whitaker, Michelle Lujan Grisham
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In the category of: Inquiring minds want to know.
In a tense exchange, Whitaker also says he has not talked to Trump about the special counsel’s probe.
“Mr. Chairman, as I said earlier today in my opening remarks, I do not intend today to talk about my private conversations with the president of United States,” Whitaker replied, “but to answer your question, I’ve not talked to the president of the United States about the special counsel’s investigation.”
Whitaker also said — in a similarly roundabout way — that he had not talked with senior White House officials about Mueller’s probe.
Many of the exchanges between Nadler and Whitaker played out this way, with Nadler asking a yes-no question and Whitaker answering with a circuitous statement. Each Congress member gets five minutes for questions, so whether it was an attempt by Whitaker to stall or run out the clock is unclear.
In the category of: A woman with power.
New Mexico Governor Pulls National Guard From Border, Rejects Trump’s ‘Fear-Mongering’
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said she rejects Trump’s contention that “there exists an overwhelming national security crisis” at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“New Mexico will not take part in the president’s charade of border fear-mongering,” Lujan Grisham declared Tuesday shortly before Trump’s State of the Union address, adding that she rejects the “federal contention that there exists an overwhelming national security crisis” at the border.
She elaborated during a news conference on Wednesday. “I’m not going to participate, nor do I think it’s appropriate in any shape or fashion to use the National Guard to attempt to militarize the border where we’re dealing with asylum seekers who their constitutional rights continue to be breached,” Lujan Grisham said, according to CNN.
In the category of: I have a green dream.
The Impossible Green Dream of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
The ‘Green New Deal’ will never happen the way it’s laid out—and that’s also kind of the point.
The official rollout of the Green New Deal on Thursday was met with a barrage of skepticism from well-intentioned fact-checkers, badly intentioned climate trolls, and desperate-to-look-savvy pundits, all focusing on the logistical and political impossibilities of transforming the economy as rapidly as the Green New Deal envisions. And they’re right: Its goals really do seem impossible to achieve.
But they’re all missing the point. If anything, they’re helping the Green New Deal’s backers to make their point, which is that climate change is an unprecedented emergency that requires unprecedented action, so America needs to try to do seemingly impossible things. Ocasio-Cortez likes to call it the modern moon mission—and in a radio interview, she compared it to another effective feat of political imagination, the wall that Donald Trump has used to focus public attention on immigration: “Here’s this hugely impossible thing that seems ridiculous, but I’m going to seriously push for it.”
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