Irma, DACA, and CNN: Today's News for September 6th

Fox News:

Hurricane Irma makes landfall in Caribbean islands

Hurricane Irma, the most powerful Atlantic Ocean hurricane in recorded history, made landfall early Wednesday in the Caribbean islands.

At the far northeastern edge of the Caribbean, authorities on the Leeward Islands of Antigua and Barbuda cut power and urged residents to shelter indoors as they braced for Hurricane Irma's first contact with land early Wednesday.

That is the problem when you live on an island: There is nowhere to evacuate to when a big storm hits.

As for what to expect:

These are times for the most likely arrival of winds too strong to continue hurricane #Irma prep actions. Prep now!https://t.co/EtEGhob4E6 pic.twitter.com/TgM8s76VjI

— NWS (@NWS) September 6, 2017

In other news...

Washington Post:

‘We are America’: DACA recipients, supporters say they are not going anywhere

They’d known it was coming, and feared it for months, but still the news landed like a gut punch: President Trump was killing a federal program that shields nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants from deportation.

“It’s right now official,” CASA Executive Director Gustavo Torres told a suddenly silent crowd of immigrants and supporters who, moments earlier, had been shouting, singing and banging drums outside the White House in defiance. “This administration just ended DACA.”

Monica Camacho Perez burst into sobs.

“Taking DACA away is taking us back to a really dark time for immigrants,” said the 23-year-old Maryland resident, who arrived in the United States from Mexico when she was 7. “This is our country. We are not going anywhere.”

The decision to rescind ­Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals ends a five-year reprieve for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children, a time when they didn’t have to worry about being deported and could legally apply for jobs.

In 2012, two years after legislation that would have given these immigrants a path to citizenship failed in Congress, President Barack Obama granted them work permits and the chance to get driver’s licenses and attend college. He said they would not be forced to leave just because their parents took them across the border illegally or allowed them to overstay their visas.

It is easy to feel bad for these illegal immigrants. How can you blame them for the actions of their parents?

But there is another way to look at this: Imagine an adult robs a bank, and then uses their ill-gotten gains over the years to raise a 7 year old child. When the child reaches adulthood, if the parent dies, should the child be entitled to the remaining funds from that bank robbery?

Aside from this, what President Obama did was illegal: A president cannot unilaterally make law in this country. If DACA had been challenged in court, it would have been tossed.

That said, there were protests all across the country about this action. But if this is going to be reinstated, then Congress needs to do it, not President Trump.

Finally, in the news today...

New York Times:

At CNN, Retracted Story Leaves an Elite Reporting Team Bruised

Late on a Monday afternoon in June, members of CNN’s elite investigations team were summoned to a fourth-floor room in the network’s glassy headquarters in Midtown Manhattan.

A top CNN executive, Terence Burke, had startling news: three of their colleagues, including the team’s executive editor, were leaving the network in the wake of a retracted article about Russia and a close ally of President Trump. Effective immediately, Mr. Burke said, the team would stop publishing stories while managers reviewed what had gone wrong.

It was a chilling moment for a unit that boasted Pulitzer Prize winners and superstar internet sleuths, and had been introduced at the beginning of the year as the vanguard of CNN’s original, high-impact reporting. Its mission statement — “Seek truth. Break news. Hold the powerful accountable.” — invoked the sort of exhaustive reporting that has become an increasingly coveted skill for news organizations in the Trump era.

But within months of its introduction, the unit, CNN Investigates, had been rocked by damaging reporting errors — including another flawed story about Mr. Trump and Russia earlier in June — and its mistakes had disturbed network executives who were already embroiled in a public feud with the White House.

....In the weeks since the story was retracted, the investigative team has been reshaped and redirected. Its members were told they should not report on perhaps the most compelling political story of the year: potential ties between the Trump administration and Russia. That subject is now largely handled by CNN’s reporting team in Washington. The political whizzes of KFile, a group of Internet-savvy reporters poached from BuzzFeed that was untainted by the retraction, were transferred out of the investigative team.

The remaining team members have resumed publishing, but with a narrower reporting scope; they now focus on topics less glamorous than Mr. Trump’s potential ties to Russia, like the opioid crisis and the environment.

If you read further, you will see they hugely dropped the ball here. There were steps and questions that were ignored in the investigative process.

The main problem here is they were so sure of a story that has no underlying TRUTH. It was inevitable they would fail. The whole Trump-Russia story line ignores a critical fact: Trump is a billionaire, without any desperate need for anything from Russia.

Journalism should be approached like science: Sometimes, experiments fail, and sometimes a story doesn't prove true.