Another xenophobic action from the Trump administration:

The 2020 census will ask respondents whether they are United States citizens, the Commerce Department announced Monday night, agreeing to a Trump administration request with highly charged political and social implications that many officials feared would result in a substantial undercount.

In a statement released Monday, the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau, said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had “determined that reinstatement of a citizenship question on the 2020 decennial census questionnaire is necessary to provide complete and accurate census block level data,” allowing the department to accurately measure the portion of the population eligible to vote.

But his decision immediately invited a legal challenge: Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, plans to sue the Trump administration over the decision, a spokeswoman for Mr. Becerra said late Monday.

At the top there’s an update to that:

Multiple states say they will be taking legal action against the Trump administration’s decision to include a citizenship question in the 2020 census.

New York’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, plans to lead a multi-state lawsuit against the move, a spokeswoman for Mr. Schneiderman said Tuesday. Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, filed a separate lawsuit over the decision late Monday night, a spokeswoman for Mr. Becerra confirmed.

This is at a time when Trump and his fans have been stoking a hideous xenophobic racist panic about immigration, so a pointed question about citizenship is highly likely to motivate a lot of people not to fill out the census at all.

That would result in a severe undercount of the population — and, in turn, faulty data for government agencies and outside groups that rely on the census. The effects would also bleed into the redistricting of the House and state legislatures in the next decade.

And that’s not an accident or a byproduct, it’s the goal.

Ari Berman, who wrote the book on voter suppression, has more:

The Justice Department requested the citizenship question in December, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross wrote in a letter on Monday that it was needed for “more effective enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. (The Commerce Department oversees the Census Bureau.)

But Vanita Gupta, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama and is now president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, told me, “Voting rights enforcement has never depended on having that question on the [census] form since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act. That’s plainly a ruse to collect that data and ultimately to sabotage the census.” The citizenship question, she noted, is already asked on the longer American Community Survey, which reaches roughly 13 percent of American households and is used to enforce civil rights laws.

The census, unlike the American Community Survey, determines how many congressional seats and electoral votes states receive, how voting districts are drawn, and how $675 billion in federal funding is allocated to states and localities. The 2010 census failed to count 1.5 million people of color, including 1.5 percent of Hispanics, 2.1 percent of African Americans, and 4.9 percent of Native Americans. If immigrant communities don’t respond to the census for fear that it will be used to initiate deportation proceedings against them, the undercount of Latinos could grow much higher. That would deny federal resources and representation to areas with large Latino populations and shift economic and political power to whiter and more Republican areas. Internal focus groups conducted by the Census Bureau last year found that when it came to responding to the census, “fears, particularly among immigrant respondents, have increased markedly” under the Trump administration.

So, this is bad; bad bad bad.

In January and February, I interviewed Latino immigrants in five towns and cities in California’s Central Valley, around the Fresno area, for a forthcoming Mother Jones feature about the census. When I asked them whether they’d respond to the census if it included a question about citizenship, virtually all of them said no.

“I wouldn’t answer the form if that question is on,” said Ana, a farmworker and mother of three from Parlier, California, which is home to many migrant farmworkers. “The word ‘citizen’ scares us. There’s a lot of tension in the country right now.” At a community meeting in nearby Huron, California, another Latino immigrant named Erica told me, “Once they see that question, forget it. People will throw the form away.”

And Republicans will jump up and down for joy.

The Post also reports on BoJo’s casual everyday sexism along with his everyday everythingelseism besides.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has a habit of putting his foot in his mouth.

He once described Hillary Clinton as “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital” with “dyed blond hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare.” He said Barack Obama is “part-Kenyan” with an “ancestral dislike” of Britain. He joked about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “having relations” with a goat.

Check check check – sexism, racism, xenophobia.

And in Parliament on Tuesday, he referred to Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary for the opposition Labour Party, as Lady Nugee. Nugee is the last name of Thornberry’s husband, Christopher.

What does it say when a man ignores what a woman actually calls herself and substitutes the wife-of-man formula? That only men are real people, and women are just belongs-to-man shadows of real people.

That comment prompted a sharp admonition from the speaker of the House of Commons, who deemed it “sexist” and “inappropriate.”

“We do not namecall in this chamber,” John Bercow said to applause from Labour lawmakers. “We do not address people by the titles of their spouses. The shadow foreign secretary has a name, and it is not ‘Lady Something.’ ”

Bercow went on: “It is inappropriate and frankly sexist to speak in those terms, and I am not having it in this chamber. That is the end of the matter. That parlance is not legitimate, and it will not be allowed, and it will be called out.”

But free speech! What about free speech? BoJo has free speech like anyone else doesn’t he?

In response, Johnson said he would like to prostrate himself in front of Bercow and apologized for “any inadvertent sexism or discourtesy that you may have deemed me to have been guilty of.”

Yeah yeah yeah. Sorry if you were Offended, bitch. We know; we’ve heard it before.

Goodness, even the Speaker of the House of Commons is a Social Justice Warrior – that is to say he recognizes that a man referring to a woman as “Lady Husbandname” when she goes by her own name is (brace yourselves) sexist.

H/t Maureen Brian

The shoe might start to pinch now.

The United States and its European allies are expelling dozens of Russian diplomats in a co-ordinated response to the poisoning of a former Russian spy in the UK.

It is said to be the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history.

More than 20 countries have aligned with the UK, expelling more than 100 diplomats.

Russia says it’s going to “retaliate” – which is silly because it did its retaliating in advance, which is why the allies are responding.

President of the European Council Donald Tusk said the EU states had decided to expel Russian diplomats as a direct result of a meeting, held last week about the Salisbury poisoning.

“Additional measures, including further expulsions within this common EU framework are not to be excluded in the coming days and weeks,” he said.

The US state department said in a statement: “On March 4, Russia used a military-grade nerve agent to attempt to murder a British citizen and his daughter in Salisbury.

“This attack on our Ally the United Kingdom put countless innocent lives at risk and resulted in serious injury to three people, including a police officer.”

It called the attack an “outrageous violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and breach of international law”.

The US is expelling 48 envoys at the Russian embassy in Washington and 12 more at the UN in New York. It will also order the closure of the Russian consulate in Seattle.

Big turnaround for Don. Maybe he’s given up his dream of friendship with Vlad the Poisoner.

Well there’s a surprise, Trump has finally joined the move to rebuke Putin.

President Trump ordered the expulsion of 60 Russians from the United States on Monday, adding to a growing cascade of similar actions taken by western allies in response to Russia’s alleged poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.

Poland, Italy, Denmark, France and Germany were among 14 European Union member nations announcing plans to expel Russians from their countries in solidarity with Britain, which previously expelled 23 Russian diplomats after the poisoning. Canada also said it would expel four.

They’re kicking out 12 intelligence officers at the UN and closing the consulate in Seattle, with seven days to pack up and leave.

In a call with reporters, senior White House officials said that the move was to root out Russians actively engaging in intelligence operations against the country, and to show that the United States would stand with NATO allies. The officials said that the closure of the consulate in Seattle was ordered because of its proximity to a U.S. naval base.

The one in Bremerton, I suppose.

Kadri Liik suggests this may be the beginning of the end for Putin’s “plausible deniability” approach.

The attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent who was found unresponsive in southwest England earlier this month, poisoned with a deadly nerve agent, may be the moment when “plausible deniability” has reached its limits. In fact, it now looks as if it is turning against its masters in the Kremlin. The United States’ decision on Monday, alongside Canada and a number of European countries, to expel Russians in retaliation for the poisoning makes clear to Moscow that its actions have consequences, whether it denies them or not.

Since the annexation of Crimea, Russia has resorted to “plausible deniability” again and again. The interference in the American presidential elections was a classic case: Mr. Putin has repeatedly emphasized that Russia has not intervened “at the level of the government,” but he admits that some “patriotic hackers” or trolls with Russian citizenship might indeed have been active.

I kind of wonder how they’re using “plausible” in cases like that, but whatever.

This strategy isn’t an unmitigated success. In 2016, in a big embarrassment for Moscow, two Russian intelligence agents were indicted by Montenegro for plotting a coup that was supposed to take place under the cover of spontaneous anti-NATO protests. More tragic was the huge blunder of Russia’s proxies shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014. Moscow claims to this day that it had nothing to do with it, but it was nonetheless unable to escape reprimand from the international community.

There’s no such thing as “the international community”; there’s only the rest of the world, parts of which can work together all the time and parts of which can unite for particular purposes and parts of which go their own way.

Liik says it’s backfiring because the use of all these proxies means that now other countries are suspicious even of legit activities like business promotions.

Russia’s foreign ministry isn’t happy about this situation and neither are Moscow’s business circles. But they cannot raise the issue with the Kremlin: Because these activities are being denied, they can’t be brought up in normal policy discussions. So it’s effectively impossible for the different Russian institutions to come together and discuss what the country as a whole wins or loses by engaging in such actions.

So it might turn out that Vlad has been a little bit too clever, or too short-term clever, or too not even all that clever actually.

Moscow’s track record with “plausible deniability” — from Ukraine to the United States — makes things worse. The world does not yet know the full details of the Skripal poisoning, but it does not feel like waiting, as the expulsions make clear. Too often in the past, Moscow has denied its involvement in cases that later end up being traced to the Kremlin or its proxies. The result is that its denials lack credibility. Now, the successful use of “plausible deniability” in all the previous cases collides with the Kremlin’s current interests and contributes to the verdict: guilty until proven innocent.

Well, good.

Joan Walsh on yesterday.

Parkland high school shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez galvanized a student revolt against gun violence with a fiery speech calling out NRA-bought politicians, just a few days after a disturbed young man murdered 17 of her peers—in six minutes and 20 seconds. At Saturday’s March For Our Lives in Washington, Gonzalez galvanized a movement with silence.

She recited the names of all 17 Parkland victims, and then she stood mute, tears streaming down her cheeks, her eyes sometimes closed. The crowd, rooting for the poised young woman with the shaved head and wearing a braided choker, grew confused. A few minutes earlier, a nervous Parkland classmate had actually vomited on stage during her speech, and then recovered with world-class aplomb. “I just threw up on international television and it feels great!” the brave Samantha Fuentes told the crowd. Was Gonzalez having a case of nerves? Next to me, Parkland resident and substitute teacher Debbi Schapiro watched her anxiously, then shook her head and murmured, “This is too much responsibility for these kids.” In the crowd beneath Gonzalez, a few students tried to start the chant “Never again,” but it faded quickly. Spontaneously, they fell silent and simply held high their signs of protest. Behind us, people lifted their cellphones to record the unlikely silence.

Gonzalez finally spoke. “Since the time that I came out here, it has been 6 minutes and 20 seconds,” she said. “Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.”

In between the two sentences she pointed out that was how long it took the shooter to kill all those people, and that at 6.20 he put his rifle down and mingled with the fleeing students and escaped to walk free for an hour before he was arrested.

The second revelation of the day, for me, is how hard the Parkland students have worked to meld their cause to the cause of young black people who disproportionately suffer gun violence. I met Curtis Kelly, the father of 16-year-old Zaire Kelly, shot during a robbery in Washington, DC last year as he was coming home from a college prep class. He says the Parkland students have been working with students at Kelly’s Thurgood Marshall High School; his son Zion Kelly, Zaire’s surviving twin, spoke at the rally.

Zion got choked up talking about his brother. “Can you imagine what it’s like to lose someone that close to you?” The students on the stage cheered him on, as his father hugged one of the many friends who’d come out to the event. I have not done the kind of reporting that would let me say with certainty that the Parkland movement—and it is a movement—has done all it can to bring in gun violence victims of color. But Cullen says “behind the scenes,” that’s how many of the Parkland survivors spend much of their time. “They really see the bigger picture. They know there’s more power if they join forces with kids from Chicago, and everywhere—that’s where victory is.”

Meanwhile, the NRA…

Today’s protests aren’t spontaneous. Gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating and exploiting children as part of their plan to DESTROY the Second Amendment and strip us of our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones.

Billionaires and elites, is it. So the NRA is all about arming the poor so that they can rise up against the rich?

Well, great, Rick Santorum has the solution – tell the kids to stop whining and just learn first aid for when their shooter arrives. Right?! Goddam lazy kids expecting other people to pass reasonable gun control laws.

CNN commentator and former Pennsylvania GOP Sen. Rick Santorum on Sunday suggested students protesting for gun control legislation would be better served by taking CPR classes and preparing for active shooter scenarios.

“How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that,” Santorum said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Totally! Kids today are so spoiled, looking to legislators to pass legislation. Kids shooting up schools with automatic weapons are their problem, not ours! God, grow up, willya?

“They took action to ask someone to pass a law,” Santorum said. “They didn’t take action to say, ‘How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem? How am I going to do something about stopping bullying within my own community? What am I going to do to actually help respond to a shooter?’… Those are the kind of things where you can take it internally, and say, ‘Here’s how I’m going to deal with this. Here’s how I’m going to help the situation,’ instead of going and protesting and saying, ‘Oh, someone else needs to pass a law to protect me.'”

Absolutely. It’s the same with hurricanes, you know? People expect someone to help them when their city floods, instead of taking action to say, “How do I, as an individual, deal with this problem?” An individual can bail whole buckets full of water in a day. I have no idea where they would put all that water, but that’s their problem, as an individual.

Last week Mississippi passed a law making abortion illegal after 15 weeks.

On Monday, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant signed House Bill 1510 into law, making it immediately illegal for a woman to obtain an abortion after 15 weeks gestation. Mississippi’s previous law restricted abortion access within the state to 20 weeks. The state’s sole abortion clinic, Women’s Health Organization, located in Jackson, does not perform abortions past 16 weeks.

On Tuesday a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order to stop the law from going into effect.

Meanwhile, Mississippi is the poorest state in the country.

Organizers estimate 800 thousand student protesters in DC.

The protest stretches for miles.

John Lewis was there.

Rep. John Lewis who marched with MLK, speaking at #MarchForOurLives rally in Atlanta: "Never give up. Never give in. Keep your faith and you're going to have a victory."pic.twitter.com/2jpKExpE2V

— Black Girl Magic ✨ (@BlackGirlMagix) March 24, 2018

We march for those lost to gun violence. We march in solidarity with survivors across the country. We march for those in our schools and those not yet old enough to attend. Marching together, our voices rising together, we can be the change we need. #MarchForOurLives pic.twitter.com/4fqnVWuhZq

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) March 24, 2018

Photos from the #MarchForOurLives protests around the world https://t.co/FlH4sFfhhY pic.twitter.com/wOnW0db6Ql

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 24, 2018

Jennifer Hudson gave a moving performance at #MarchForOurLives

She lost her mother, brother and nephew to gun violence

pic.twitter.com/x1LRkDR9Jy

— ☇RiotWomenn☇ (@riotwomennn) March 24, 2018

38 degrees and rain didn’t stop hundreds of people from coming out in Salem, Oregon for the #marchforourlives. pic.twitter.com/nXGRYAZfKh

— Gingkogirl ☮ (@CASwinney) March 24, 2018

NEW: An emotional Emma Gonzalez stands in silence after reading out the names of her classmates who were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. #MarchForOurLives https://t.co/3kn1iCtJjo pic.twitter.com/92kFSH6Qxh

— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) March 24, 2018

Let’s go back back back in time to see why a Republican-led Senate committee in 2005 refused to approve John Bolton as Bush’s ambassador to the UN, because now he’s in a job that doesn’t need Senate approval.

One moment singularly derailed his nomination. Testifying before the usually staid Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 2005, Carl W. Ford Jr. — the former assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research — called Mr. Bolton a “kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy” and a “serial abuser” of people beneath him in the chain of command. Mr. Ford — a self-described conservative Republican and Bush supporter — made vivid an emerging portrait of Mr. Bolton as a bully who repeatedly sought retribution against career intelligence analysts with the temerity to contradict him.

No wonder Trump likes him. “Kiss-up, kick-down” exactly describes Trump. Smooch Pootie, kick almost everyone else.

Mr. Bolton, President Bush’s under secretary of state for arms control and international security, had a general disdain for diplomacy that rankled several Republican members of the committee, including George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Mr. Lugar had quietly counseled the administration not to nominate him.

That disdain, in and of itself, did not sink his nomination. Rather, it was the testimony we heard and evidence we uncovered that Mr. Bolton had a habit of twisting intelligence to back his bellicosity and sought to remove anyone who objected.

He insisted Cuba was developing biological weapons; people who knew more about it disagreed; Bolton tried to get them moved to other jobs.

Mr. Bolton also was accused of attempting to inflate the dangers of Syria’s biological and nuclear weapons programs, by trying to sneak exaggerated assertions into speeches and congressional testimony before being called on it by intelligence officials. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage reportedly issued an extraordinary decree that required Mr. Bolton to clear all of his public utterances with Mr. Armitage himself.

That sounds very Trump-like too. Trump tells shameless lies, and seems to have no qualms about it whatever.

Then in 2002, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bolton helped orchestrate the removal of the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (which would win the Nobel Peace Prize more than decade later). His crime? Trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Iraq. (Mr. Bolton said he was fired for “incompetence.”) Those inspectors might have debunked claims that Saddam Hussein retained a stockpile of chemical weapons and was pursuing a nuclear arsenal — the justification for the following year’s invasion.

He tried to get other people fired. He frequently demanded the identities of US officials whose names were hidden in sensitive intelligence; some on the Committee worried that was because he wanted to retaliate against them.

Other witnesses came forward to allege abusive behavior by Mr. Bolton during his time as a lawyer in the private sector — screaming, threatening, throwing documents and, in the words of one woman, “genuinely behaving like a madman.”

All of this ultimately proved too much for Senator Voinovich. In a remarkable speech to his colleagues on the committee, a visibly pained Mr. Voinovich explained his decision to vote against Mr. Bolton, effectively killing the nomination. We’ve heard, he said, that Mr. Bolton is “an ideologue and fosters an atmosphere of intimidation. He does not tolerate disagreement. He does not tolerate dissent.”

“This is not,” he continued, “the behavior that should be endorsed as the face of the United States to the world.” President Bush used a recess appointment to make Mr. Bolton the ambassador without Senate approval.

We are about to find out whether this sort of behavior is any more appropriate for a president’s national security adviser, arguably the most powerful, sensitive and demanding job in the administration short of the president’s — and one that requires an honest broker, willing to present the president with ideas and analyses he does not agree with.

Bad moon.