Julian E. Zelizer writes:

The federal government released a devastating report last week documenting the immense economic and human cost that the U.S. will incur as a result of climate change. It warns that the damage to roads alone will add up to $21 billion by the end of the century. In certain parts of the Midwest, farms will produce 75 percent less corn than today, while ocean acidification could result in $230 billion in financial losses. More people will die from extreme temperatures and mosquito-borne diseases. Wildfire seasons will become more frequent and more destructive. Tens of millions of people living near rising oceans will be forced to resettle. The findings put the country on notice, once again, that doing nothing is a recipe for disaster.

Yet odds are that the federal government will, in fact, do nothing. It’s tempting to blame inaction on current political conditions, like having a climate change denier in the White House or intense partisan polarization in Washington. But the unfortunate reality is that American politicians have never been good at dealing with big, long-term problems. Lawmakers have tended to act only when they had no other choice.

It took a brutal Civil War to end slavery. Bankers avoided regulation until the financial system totally collapsed in the early 1930s. Americans saw southern police brutality on their television sets before civil-rights legislation could get through Congress. Widespread dissatisfaction with the health-care system has resulted in only a patchwork solution (the Affordable Care Act). Mass shootings have still not yielded effective gun control. [Continue reading…]

Bari Weiss writes:

Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin.

For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate.

Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is the place where in 2012 three Jewish children and a teacher were murdered at school.

Malmo doesn’t call to mind the Swedish coast so much as fire bombs planted outside a Jewish burial chapel. Copenhagen? Copenhagen is where a 37-year-old Jewish economist and voluntary security guard was gunned down as he was guarding a bat mitzvah at the city’s main synagogue in 2015. (The notion that synagogues require armed guards has long since stopped making us flinch.)

Brussels is where in 2014 four people were murdered at the Jewish museum. Berlin is a dateline we associate with news of people getting pummeled or harassed, for the sin of wearing a kippah or speaking Hebrew.

And this is to say nothing of the nonviolent attacks, which are impossible to keep up with. The desecration of cemeteries. Swastikas painted on synagogues and schools. Calling Jews “apes and pigs” at anti-Israel rallies.

On Tuesday, a CNN poll about the state of anti-Semitism in Europe startled many Americans — and confirmed what Jews who have been paying attention already knew about the Continent.

Not 74 years since the Holocaust ended, a third of respondents said they knew only a little or nothing at all about it.

The poll, which surveyed more than 7,000 people across Austria, France, Germany, Britain, Hungary, Poland and Sweden, didn’t only discover ignorance. It exposed bigotry. [Continue reading…]

Bryan Mealer reports from the migrant caravan:

María Cáceres’s son Javier, who is 15, has Down’s syndrome. He’s a tall, chunky kid, with short dark hair, a missing front tooth, and eyes that are permanently crossed.

María tells me how they fled San Pedro Sula after gang members constantly harassed her family for bribes and “taxes”. When they couldn’t pay, some men burned down their house, then murdered her two brothers. María had just finished burying them when – on 12 October – the caravan formed in the center of town. Traumatized, she left her two other children with relatives and told Javier it was time to go. The two of them joined the exodus with only the clothes on their backs.

The journey has been difficult for Javier, his mother says. In addition to Down’s, he was born with hydrocephalus, a condition where excess fluid collects in the brain. He easily gets dizzy and complains of headaches. Doctors have told María that he needs surgery, but she’s never had the money. He also suffers regular seizures, yet it’s been weeks since they could afford his anticonvulsant meds.

The previous day, Javier collapsed from the heat while walking the highway, and María worries he’ll have a seizure so far from a doctor. She points to his ankles that are swollen from wearing flip-flops, and says the food donated in the camps is making him vomit. He hasn’t been eating, she tells me. “He’s very weak. When he gets tired he just sits down in the road.”

Next to them is Juan Antonio and his six-year-old daughter Lesly, who has severe cerebral palsy. Unable to walk or speak, she’s bound to a stroller that’s too small and showing wear. Her big brown eyes slowly across the room, monitoring the action.

Juan is an aberration in the caravan – a single father traveling with so many women. A soft-spoken man, he hails from the mountains of western Honduras, where he worked in the coffee fields until the crops kept failing and forced his family to the city. In Ocotepeque, he found work as a security guard, but it paid little, and the streets where they lived were ruled by gangs and thieves. “One night they found us,” he says. “When I was at work, a man broke into my apartment and raped my wife.”

Lesly had sat in the room and witnessed the whole thing. For days his wife stayed home and cried. The rapist was a notorious gang member, and Juan knew that he would die trying to avenge her. Instead he called the police, who did nothing. When the man discovered Juan had snitched, there was no choice but to leave – but there was Lesly, who was all but paralyzed since she was two.

He’d recently gotten custody of the girl from her mother, his first wife, after he discovered she wasn’t being cared for properly. So along with his new wife and their one-year old baby, they latched on to the caravan. Lesly didn’t have a wheelchair or even a stroller, so Juan hoisted the long-legged girl in his arms and started walking.

When they reached Mexico several days later, his wife turned around and took their baby home. “It was too difficult for her,” he says. “The lack of food, sleeping on the ground. She went back to her family.” Now it was just him, Lesly, and Juan’s brother who’d joined them. They were trying to join their sister who lives in the United States, yet Juan isn’t sure where. He says this somewhat embarrassed – an admission I’d find common among asylum seekers.

Lesly sits in a stroller that someone had since donated, one of her feet scabbed from getting caught in the wheel. Just then, some kids set off some fireworks outside to celebrate the Día de los Muertos. The explosions send her into spasms. She arches her back and straightens her legs, then opens her mouth and emits a silent scream.

“Loud noises scare her,” Juan says, stroking her hair to calm her.

I look at this group, so fragile and helpless, and think how on Earth are they ever going to make it? [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports:

A little girl from Honduras stares into the camera, her young features contorted in anguish. She’s barefoot, dusty, and clad only in a diaper and T-shirt. And she’s just had to run from clouds of choking tear gas fired across the border by U.S. agents.

A second photograph, which also circulated widely and rapidly on social media, shows an equally anguished woman frantically trying to drag the same child and a second toddler away from the gas as it spreads.

The three were part of a much larger group, perhaps 70 or 80 men, women and children, pictured in a wider-angle photo fleeing the tear gas. Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon shot the images, which provoked outrage and seemed at odds with President Trump’s portrayal of the caravan migrants as “criminals” and “gang members.”

Trump officials said that authorities had to respond with force after hundreds of migrants rushed the border near Tijuana on Sunday, some of them throwing “projectiles” at Customs and Border Protection personnel.

The chaos erupted Sunday around the bustling San Ysidro border crossing, which Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said was closed “to ensure public safety in response to large numbers of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. illegally.”

But Democratic leaders, human rights advocates and others focused on the images of the two children in particular. Many pointed to the children left gagging from the gas attack as evidence that Trump’s push against a caravan of asylum seekers from Central America had gone too far.

“Shooting tear gas at children is not who we are as Americans,” tweeted Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “Seeking asylum is not a crime. We must be better than this.”

Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor-elect of California, argued that images of kids sprinting from tear gas run counter to American ideals.

“These children are barefoot. In diapers. Choking on tear gas,” he tweeted. “Women and children who left their lives behind — seeking peace and asylum — were met with violence and fear. That’s not my America. We’re a land of refuge. Of hope. Of freedom. And we will not stand for this.” [Continue reading…]

60 Minutes reports:

This past week, a federal judge struck down the president’s latest immigration order. It’s been a chaotic two years on the border as the administration imposed barriers with little consideration of their legality or consequences. The 2017 ban on travelers from Muslim countries was so abrupt it surprised the officers who had to enforce it. Before the midterm elections, President Trump ordered thousands of troops to Texas to stop what he called “an assault” by a caravan of Central Americans. That caravan is now at the border of California.

But the most tumultuous order of all, was this summer’s separation of children from their parents, which Mr. Trump had to quickly withdraw. Our investigation has found that the separation of families began far earlier and detained many more children than the administration has admitted. [Continue reading…]

Sabrina Tavernise reports:

As the country catches its breath after one of the most acrimonious midterm elections in years, it would be easy to conclude that all of America is hopelessly divided — a land where two angry tribes are at each other’s throats and everybody thinks about politics all the time.

But the reality is far less extreme.

A deep new study of the American electorate, “Hidden Tribes,” concludes that two out of three Americans are far more practical than that narrative suggests. Most do not see their lives through a political lens, and when they have political views the views are far less rigid than those of the highly politically engaged, ideologically orthodox tribes.

The study, an effort to understand the forces that drive political polarization, surveyed a representative group of 8,000 Americans. The nonpartisan organization that did it, More in Common, paints a picture of a society that is far more disengaged — and despairing over divisions — than it is divided. At its heart is a vast and often overlooked political middle that feels forgotten in the vitriol, as if the country has gone on without it. It calls that group the Exhausted Majority, a group that represented two-thirds of the survey.

“It feels very lonely out here,” said Jamie McDaniel, a 36-year-old home health care worker in Topeka, Kan., one of several people in the study who was interviewed for this article. “Everybody is so right or left, and you’re just kind of standing there in the middle saying, “What happened?’”

For Ms. McDaniel, who works full time and is raising a young daughter, politics is not a hobby but an obligation to be endured — more dental appointment than ballgame. She does not know her friends’ political persuasions, nor they hers, because it is not part of how they see themselves. Ms. McDaniel voted on Nov. 6, mostly for Democrats, in a church. But in an interview three days later, she said she had not checked to see who won. [Continue reading…]