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PostPosted: 12/02/17 9:32 am • # 1 
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Lest we forget ~ :ey ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell?: This week’s under-the-radar outrages
Joshua Holland / 02 Dec 2017 at 09:49 ET

Welcome to What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s new roundup of stories that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-reported – due to the daily firehose of political prank falls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

One would think that evidence suggesting that Russian spies may be using some kind of mysterious sonic weapon to scramble the brains of our foreign service officers would make front page news, but a report to that effect by CBS News this largely flew under the radar this week.

According to the report, a USAID official working out of our embassy in Uzbekistan, along with his wife, say they suffered the effects of some sort of acoustic attack similar to a series of mysterious aural assaults on US consular personnel in Cuba earlier this year, which left victims suffering from “hearing loss, brain injuries, cognitive issues and other conditions.”

A State Department spokesperson told CBS that nothing had happened to the couple, but “two US security sources say the September incident in Tashkent raises concerns Russia may be involved, and could have had a hand in the attacks targeting US government personnel in Cuba.”

That report came out on Tuesday, when we were all focused on Donald Trump calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “Pocahontas” during a ceremony honoring Native-American military veterans, and on right-wing ratf**ker James O’Keefe’s spectacular self-own when his Project Veritas (which has received support from Trump’s charitable foundation) clumsily tried to set up a couple of real journalists from The Washington Post.

*****

It’s quite likely that Donald Trump will go down in history as the least competent president in the history of the Republic, and also as the guy who managed to fundamentally transform the federal judiciary. And he’s not only shoving it to the right, but in typical Trump style, he’s also adding to it a heavy dollop of bigotry and derp.

This is not a testament to his strategic brilliance, or focus on the long game. He’s achieving this transformation with a huge assist from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who not only engineered an unprecedented theft of a Supreme Court seat from Trump’s predecessor, but also shut down the confirmation process for judges to the lower courts entirely for well over a year under Barack Obama.

The result: Trump entered into office with 105 vacancies – almost twice as many as Obama inherited — and another 33 opened up in his first six months as President of the United States Electoral College. He has nominated 27 federal judges in his first six months in office, triple the number that Obama put up over the same period and more than twice as many as Reagan, Bush the elder or Obama. And he’s nominated another 33 since then.

Under a typical Republican president, his nominees would be superficially qualified, doctrinaire conservatives grown in a test-tube in the basement of the Federalist Society. But Trump is no ordinarily bad president. Four of his judicial picks have been rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. That may not sound like many, but consider this: Over the course of last four presidencies, spanning 28 years, only two nominees had been similarly rated. If your name isn’t Lionel Hutz, and you can fill out the forms correctly, they rate you as qualified.

The latest entry in this pathetic group was confirmed this week. Thirty-six year-old Brett Talley, who has never tried a case in his young career, will now enjoy a lifetime appointment to a federal judgeship in Alabama.

During his confirmation process, Talley didn’t disclose that he’s married to a senior White House lawyer, a potential conflict of interest. Nor did he mention, as he was required to do on Senate disclosure forms, that he had authored a number of “provocative and disturbing” online posts, according to The Washington Times. They included fantasizing “about shooting death row inmates,” a defense of the Ku Klux Klan and a post making light of statutory rape (which might make him fit right in in Alabama). After 20 children were mowed down at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, Talley felt the need to pledge his fealty to the NRA, and wrote, “my solution [to mass shootings] would be to stop being a society of pansies and man up.” He should be a thoughtful jurist.

A number of Republican Senators said they had real problems with Talley’s lack of experience and failure to disclose all that important stuff, but of course they confirmed him anyway. So Talley will join a bunch of similarly extreme judges who will decide future issues of profound importance. And Trump’s nominees tend to skew young, so we’ll be living with their wingnutty brand of jurisprudence many years from now, when Republicans are calling the disgraced former president a liberal Democrat.

*****

The GOP tends to be not good at legislating, a fact that was brought into sharp relief this week when a dreadfully regressive tax bill that was supposed to fly through the Senate required two days of last-minute tinkering on the Senate floor before being passed in the dead of night.

Lost in the coverage of the anti-democratic process they used to get it through and frightening analyses of the bill’s impacts is the fact that Republicans didn’t just push through massively consequential legislation without hearings or markups, but they also did it without a long-promised economic analysis from the Treasury Department. That analysis was supposed to support their claims that cutting trillions in taxes for wealthy people and corporations was sure to unleash so much magical growth dust that it wouldn’t lead to ballooning deficits and deep cuts in public services.

Now, we know that big deficits are only an act of generational warfare that will leave our children hopelessly impoverished when Democrats are in power, but they nonetheless wanted some cover for betraying their fiscally conservative “principles.” And Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a Goldman Sachs alum, swore up and down that it was in the works. He said he had 100 people working on it. But no analysis was forthcoming, and Bloomberg reported that “the Treasury Department’s inspector general is examining whether political considerations interfered with… Mnuchin’s promised analysis.”

In a letter to the Inspector General, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) drew the obvious conclusion: “Either the Treasury Department has used extensive taxpayer funds to conduct economic analyses that it refuses to release because those analyses would contradict the Treasury Secretary’s claims, or Secretary Mnuchin has grossly misled the public about the extent of the Treasury Department’s analysis.”

*****

This week, Minnesota became the first state to run out of federal funds for its Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) since Congress missed a September deadline to renew it. The blue state will make up the loss out of state revenues, for now, but others will not. Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy and Financing sent letters to the Centennial State’s CHIP recipients warning that it will run out of funds by the end of January, and advising them to look into private insurance.

Renewing funding for the once-bipartisan program may become part of negotiations to keep the government running through the new year, but Politico reports that Republican leaders are considering a hardline approach to those talks, and according to The Washington Post, “President Trump has told confidants that a government shutdown could be good for him politically.” So it doesn’t look like anyone’s thinking of the children at the moment.

*****

Finally, Tina Vasquez reports for Rewire News that the Trump regime put an anti-choice zealot in charge of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), and the guy’s “obsession” with underage pregnant immigrants is “shaping federal policy” and making life miserable for some very vulnerable young women.

Scott Lloyd, who “has a history with so-called crisis pregnancy centers, or fake clinics, which provide people with false information to dissuade them from seeking abortion care,” made news in recent months when a minor identified in court documents as “Jane Doe” was “held hostage” by his agency because she wanted to terminate her pregnancy. A court sided with Doe, but the story didn’t end there.

Doe has remained in custody for months longer that most unaccompanied minors take to be released because the agency has refused to approve multiple families that were willing to sponsor her in their homes.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is waging a parallel court battle to share information about the young woman’s abortion with potential sponsors. Susan Hays, legal director for Jane’s Due Process, an organization providing legal representation to pregnant minors in Texas, told Rewire that she suspects Jane Doe’s sponsorship opportunities have been “sabotaged.”

“They want to tell any potential sponsor she’s had an abortion, that is what the federal government is fighting for… It is absolutely retaliation.”

Meanwhile, Lloyd, who Vasquez says doesn’t appear to be qualified to lead the agency, is an “ideological pick by the Trump administration as it ushers ‘anti-choice fanaticism’ into the immigration system.” He’s admitted to “counseling” young women in the agency’s custody against seeking an abortion – something else he’s not qualified to do. And under his watch, the agency has also notified shelters that minors must receive anti-abortion counseling as a condition of their release.

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/what-fresh-hell-this-weeks-under-the-radar-outrages/


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PostPosted: 12/02/17 11:15 am • # 2 
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Something else that was entirely missed and is probably bigger than anything above is that, until Tuesday (I think it was), a number of the Republican senators were so concerned about the impact the tax cuts are going to have on the deficit (far more than the reported trillion dollars) and insisted some sort of snap back provision be in the legislation to offer some protection. Grabem and the other had their lunch meeting with this group and managed to talk them into not only agreeing to allowing the legislation to proceed but to insert a guarantee that no matter how devastating the legislation is to the deficit the super rich and corporations will not receive a tax increase.

While everyone else was fixated on Matt Lauer giving some woman a pat on the bum the entire country got screwed into third world status.


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PostPosted: 12/02/17 12:52 pm • # 3 
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Quote:
While everyone else was fixated on Matt Lauer giving some woman a pat on the bum the entire country got screwed into third world status.


Too easy, isn't it.


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PostPosted: 12/02/17 6:32 pm • # 4 
jimwilliam wrote:
While everyone else was fixated on Matt Lauer giving some woman a pat on the bum the entire country got screwed into third world status.


The sad part is, most of the victims of this travesty won't be Americans. The whole world could end up going down that toilet.


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PostPosted: 12/09/17 12:07 pm • # 5 
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As I said in the op: "Lest we forget ~ :ey" ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? Trump’s deranged populism edition
Joshua Holland / 09 Dec 2017 at 11:39 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political prank falls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

Remember candidate Trump, the populist? He said that he didn’t need to bow to powerful special interests because he was already rich, so he would fight for the little guy. He was going to make coal great again, and bring jobs back to white people in towns that had once enjoyed vibrant, bustling main streets but as a result of NAFTA now have only an opioid bar and a couple of used condom stores. He railed against Wall Street. He attacked both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for being too close to Goldman Sachs.

So how’s that working out?

Well, he surrounded himself with Goldman Sachs alumni – Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) quipped that he had so many Goldman people the firm could open a new branch in the West Wing – who helped write a tax bill that would save the firm around $1 billion in taxes as well as putting more than that into the Trump clan’s own pockets.

That was widely reported, as were various other ways the bill would screw over Trump’s working-class supporters. But two provisions that speak directly to Trump’s populist shtick may not have gotten the attention they deserve. First, Steven Rosenthal, a fellow at the Tax Policy Center, explains that the biggest winners in the Senate bill, which still has to be reconciled with the version passed by the House, would be foreign investors.

Here’s a handy graph from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy…

Image

And then there’s another provision that allows companies to write off the entire cost of buying a machine or robot to replace a worker right away, which MIT economist Daren Acemoglu translates into “a huge handout from the government.” Populism!

*****

The populists of the late 19th century railed against railroad companies and banks and trusts controlled by big-city elites. The 1892 People’s Party platform called for eliminating national banks entirely.

On the campaign trail, Trump said, “Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us. I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder.” But now that he’s in office, his brand of populism seems to champion those same banks as the little guys, and promises to protect them from predatory regulators.

Toward that end, we should pause to appreciate just how hard Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s pick to serve as the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), is fighting to defend their right to rip you off.

Last year, Wells Fargo, which Bess Levin calls “the Usain Bolt of ripping off customers,” came to a settlement with the CFPB to pay 100,000 customers tens of millions of dollars for charging them unnecessary fees to lock in their mortgage rates. But Mulvaney put a hold on the settlement, and is currently reviewing its terms. He also reversed the agency’s position on cases involving three other financial firms that lied to or defrauded their customers, and Reuters reports that “a dozen other [cases] are in question now that Mick Mulvaney… has said he is reviewing the CFPB’s prior work.” He’s been in charge for less than two weeks.

Mulvaney, a former Rep. from South Carolina, has repeatedly trashed the agency he now leads. And David Sirota reported this week that when he was in Congress, he frequently urged the CFPB to back off of enforcement actions while his campaigns were being bankrolled by predatory payday lenders.

You may recall that Mulvaney took over the agency in a sort of administrative coup d’etat after Former CFPB director Richard Cordray quit. The law stipulates that an outgoing agency head can appoint his or her interim successor until Congress confirms a permanent replacement. Cordray did just that on the way out, tapping his deputy, Leandra English, to run the show. But the Trump regime, citing a different law, just sent Mulvaney over to take control even though he already has a job as Trump’s budget director. English sued, but a federal judge whom Trump had appointed two months earlier sided with the regime.

That legal fight isn’t over yet, and it could work its way up to the Supreme Court, where Neil Gorsuch might provide the deciding vote!

Image

via GIPHY

*****

The Trump regime took steps this week to repeal an Obama-era rule that regulates tip-pooling at restaurants and bars and other businesses with tipped workers. That’s when they collect everyone’s tips together and split them up with non-tipped workers, like kitchen staff. Fine and good, but economist Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute points out that, “under the administration’s proposed rule, as long as the tipped workers earn minimum wage, the employer can legally pocket those tips. And what we know for sure is that, often, they will do just that.” Nothing says populism like letting bosses rip off your tips.

*****

Meanwhile, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) told its staff that because they’ve gone through been such a tough year, they might get a bill in 2018 for working too hard.

Josh Eidelson reports for Bloomberg that federal law allows agencies to “recover” overtime pay that exceeds a certain annual cap. With so many disasters this year, a number of FEMA employees have blown right past that limit, and the agency informed them that not only might they have to work more overtime “without receiving further compensation,” but they’ll get an invoice for any pay over the cap that they got in their paychecks this year.

The agency says this is federal law and there’s nothing they can do about it, but a “different law grants it the discretion to waive the requirement that a particular employee pay back the excessive compensation,” according to Eidelson. Also, Congress could just waive the cap for FEMA workers, as they’re already in the process of doing for the Secret Service personnel who have been burned out guarding Trump as he jets back and forth to his tacky resorts.

*****

And while climate change is just a Chinese plot to undermine capitalism and is in no way related to the natural disasters we’ve experienced, it’s at least worth noting that earlier this week, the Trump regime “terminated a cross-agency group created to help local officials protect their residents against extreme weather and natural disasters,” and that the move was just “the latest in a series of federal climate-related bodies to be altered or terminated since President Donald Trump took office.”

*****

Of course, the government isn’t made of money. Did we mention that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke spent $6,250 in tax-payer funds on a helicopter ride from Virginia to DC in order to get back in time to go horseback riding with Vice President Mike Pence? Now consider how much you’d pay to get out of riding with Mike Pence?

*****

They say that personnel is policy, and on the stump, Trump vowed that he would hire only the best people. Here’s a story about an appointment to a relatively obscure government position that’s nevertheless emblematic of a trend in this regime: Hiring right-wing wackjobs with a history of extremely offensive behavior and putting them in somewhat sensitive positions.

Meet Patrick Murray, a twice-failed House candidate whom Trump nominated to serve as a high-ranking official under UN ambassador Nicki Haley. Among other things, Murray, if confirmed by the Senate, “would act as a fill-in for Haley in representing the US to the United Nations General Assembly when she is unavailable.”

According to CNN, Murray, who lists his vocation as “writer and commenter” and has no obvious qualifications for the job, is a big fan of Milo Yiannopoulos. And he appears to have devoted an unhealthy amount of time to “shar[ing] the kind of provocative political memes that were popular among supporters of Trump during the election.” These included such popular wingnut themes as African-Americans are lazy race-baiters who victimize cops, Muslims are bloodthirsty savages who kill “anyone who doesn’t have their bum in the air five times a day,” and transgender people are gross.

So that’s who will represent America and her values when Nikki Haley isn’t available. Let’s hope Nikki Haley remains available as much as possible.

*****

Relatedly, the Associated Press reported this week that 60 percent of Trump’s picks to fill “jobs dealing with complex science, environment and health issues… did not have a master’s degree or a doctorate in a science or health field.

“This is just reflective of the disdain that the administration has shown for science,” said former New Jersey governor Christie Todd Whitman, who served as EPA chief and is one of the last of a dying breed of GOP moderates.

*****

Sometimes, the Trump regime just leaves you scratching your head. We get that he’s obsessed with doing the opposite of whatever his predecessor did. Obama expanded insurance coverage to 22 million people, and Trump celebrated a bill that would have stripped it from 24 million. Obama cut a deal to reduce global warming, Trump pulled out of it. Obama said that his foreign policy doctrine could best be described as “don’t do stupid shit,” and this week Trump set the Middle East ablaze by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – possibly to fire up white Evangelicals in Alabama so they’ll go to the polls this week and vote for an alleged child molester.

But what are we to make of Trump scrapping an Obama-era rule requiring airlines to tell customers that they’ll have to pay a fee to check their baggage? Who benefits from this? Not the airlines – they’re “already required to disclose information about optional service fees on their websites.” Is it just a big fuck you to the consumer groups that “say it’s still difficult for passengers to compare airfare ticket prices, fees and associated rules, and have pushed for more transparency at the start of the process”? Maybe!

In any event, The Hill also reports that the regime is killing an Obama-era rule that required airlines to disclose how much they make by nickel-and-diming you for everything from checked luggage to a little bag of stale peanuts. Way to look out for the little guy.

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/what-fresh-hell-trumps-deranged-populism-edition/


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PostPosted: 12/16/17 12:35 pm • # 6 
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My new mantra for this thread: "Lest we forget ~ :ey" ~ "live links" to more/corroborating information in the original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell?: Trump hires only the best crackpots edition
Joshua Holland / 16 Dec 2017 at 10:34 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

On the stump, Donald Trump’s repeated vow to hire “only the best people” was important. It wasn’t just his typical self-flattery, it was meant to blunt concerns about the fact that he was a political neophyte whose knowledge of government made you think that he’d been one of those kids who hadn’t paid attention when Schoolhouse Rock interrupted the cartoons.

We tend to focus on the crackpots and half-baked ideologues he’s surrounded himself since taking office with not only because “personnel is policy” – and because presidential appointments don’t make big headlines — but also because competence and some knowledge should have value regardless of one’s ideology. And because the next normal president is going to have to deal with a bunch of white nationalist crackpots embedded across the government. Rooting them out is going to have to be high on the agenda – perhaps the first thing after completing that epic global apology tour.

Anyway, you’ve probably seen this viral video of Matthew Petersen, Trump’s pick for a lifetime appointment on the crucially important DC Court of appeals, being humiliated by Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), who had the audacity to ask him some basic questions about judicial procedure that any first-year law student could answer.

Quote:
MUST WATCH: Republican @SenJohnKennedy asks one of @realDonaldTrump’s US District Judge nominees basic questions of law & he can’t answer a single one. Hoo-boy. pic.twitter.com/fphQx2o1rc

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) December 15, 2017

In 2008, Matthew Petersen was hand-picked to serve on the Federal Elections Commission by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell because he doesn’t believe that campaign finance limits are legitimate. He has since formed a voting bloc with the other Republican appointees that has effectively neutered the watchdog agency and helped create the Wild West world of campaign cash we live with today.

And he represents a trend. We’ve mentioned previously that Donald Trump has nominated twice as many judicial candidates who were rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association (ABA) as the past four previous presidents combined.

If you’re a Republican lawmaker, you might follow Sen. Kennedy’s lead and demand that the White House send over less embarrassing nominees. Or you might attack the American Bar Association, claiming that it, like all those other supposedly neutral sources of knowledge, is hopelessly biased against conservatives. Those are the choices, and last month, Slate reported that “it now appears that at least one GOP senator, John Kennedy of Louisiana, is drawing a line in the sand over Trump’s most egregious picks.”

As for the rest, “Senate Republicans have declared war on the American Bar Association,” reported Seung Min Kim and John Bresnahan for Politico this week.

Quote:
Since 1953, the venerable legal organization has played a critical, behind-the-scenes role in assessing judicial nominees and their fitness to serve on the bench.

But with the ABA emerging as a major stumbling block in President Donald Trump’s effort to transform the courts, the GOP is accusing the nonpartisan group of holding a liberal slant and is seeking to sideline it.

When in doubt, shoot the referee…

******

Getting anti-terror policy right is tough enough for serious professionals. This week, Andrew Kaczynski, Chris Massie and Nathan McDermott profiled a guy named Frank Wuco for CNN. Wuco is a senior official with an important job: he’s the White House Advisor to the Department of Homeland Security, and he leads “a team tasked with helping to enforce President Donald Trump’s executive orders, including the administration’s travel ban.”

He’s also a nutjob.

According to the report, Wuco “previously promoted conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama’s birthplace, lamented the ‘Zimbabwe-fication of America,’ and mocked the LGBT community.”

A retired naval intelligence officer, Wuco’s previous job was hosting a right-wing radio show out of Florida. As such, he has “dressed up as a jihadist character named Fuad Wasul in videos to teach others about the dangers of Islam,” “said that gay people had hijacked the word ‘gay’ from happy people” and said Barack Obama wasn’t black enough to be called the first black president.

Now his job is to implement Trump’s totally-not-targeted-at-Muslims travel ban and otherwise try to keep us safe.

******

Meanwhile, Trump’s State Department is in chaos. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sidelined most of the agency’s career foreign service professionals, and surrounded himself “with an insular circle of political aides who are new to the State Department,” according to The Washington Post. There have been dozens of resignations – and a number of senior positions remain unfilled — and morale at Foggy Bottom is at an all-time low.

And what all this means is that those positions that that have a warm body occupying them have an outsized influence on policy formation.

Meet Andrew Peek, Trump’s choice for “a key position managing policy on Iran and Iraq, a move that will replace two civil servants with a political appointee.” Peek’s a former GOP staffer and captain in the US Army Reserve who lists his current profession as a columnist and political commentator and, according to Foreign Policy, “has no prior diplomatic experience and has not earned a reputation as an established expert on Iran or Iraq.”

Peek’s primary qualification appears to be that he’s a belligerent Iran hawk. As FP’s Robbie Gramar and Dan DeLuce write, “since Trump entered office, White House officials have privately expressed frustration with the career foreign service officers handling Iran policy in the State Department. In deliberations over the Iran nuclear deal, some officials on the National Security Council have clashed with their counterparts, arguing for a more aggressive stance toward Tehran and for laying out options to abandon the nuclear accord.” So Peek’s going over to State to make sure that they pursue a Breitbartian approach to Iran.

The nice thing about his appointment, from the White House’s perspective, is that deputy assistant secretaries don’t require Senate confirmation, so there won’t be an embarrassing Youtube video of this guy struggling to cite basic facts about the Middle East.

******

The EPA is another agency that’s being run into the ground under climate change-denying wingnut Scott Pruitt. This week, CNBC reported that the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General “will examine whether the head of the Environmental Protection Agency misused taxpayer money” by spending $25,000 on “a soundproof booth for making private phone calls from his office.”

When news of Pruitt’s renovations first broke, of course everyone referenced this…

[Video accessible via the end link.]

And maybe the bad publicity which followed explains another report this week. According to Mother Jones’s Rebecca Leber, Andy Kroll and Russ Choma, the EPA is “using taxpayer dollars” to pay “a cutting-edge Republican PR firm that specializes in digging up opposition research to help Administrator Scott Pruitt’s office track and shape press coverage of the agency.”

Quote:
According to federal contracting records, earlier this month Pruitt’s office inked a no-bid $120,000 contract with Definers Corp., a Virginia-based public relations firm founded by Matt Rhoades, who managed Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign…

The company… specializes in using the press and social media to “validate your narrative.” According to the company’s website, one of the tools to help do this is its “Definers Console” media-tracking technology. Reed said his firm contracted with Pruitt’s office at the EPA, which is the first governmental client to pay for the Definers Console. The technology promises “war room”-style media monitoring, analysis, and advice, according to marketing materials.

******

Finally, imagine being a scientist working at Trump’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). You’re a grown-up, you spent years obtaining a degree, and now you get a list of words that you’re not supposed to use in your official capacity.

The Washington Post reported this week that “the Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including ‘fetus’ and ‘transgender’ — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.”

The other forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.” Because you wouldn’t want a scientific agency to pursue science- or evidence-based policies – that’s no way to Make America Great Again.

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/what-fresh-hell-trump-hires-only-the-best-crackpots-edition/


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PostPosted: 01/13/18 2:41 pm • # 7 
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Another edition of "lest we forget" out of hibernation ~ :ey ~ "live links" in the original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell?: Sh**hole Countries Edition
Joshua Holland / 13 Jan 2018 at 13:02 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

This week, the political press acted as if questions about Donald Trump’s sanity were new, or newly relevant, following his unhinged reaction to Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, and the messy public divorce from Steve Bannon that it appears to have precipitated. That scandalette was then capped off with no small amount of shock at the realization that the man who launched his candidacy by ranting about Mexico sending us all their rapists and bad hombres thinks that non-white poorer countries are a bunch of shitholes, and isn’t ashamed to say so in polite company.

It’s hardly news that the people closest to Donald Trump think he’s a dangerous half wit, or that his views on immigration are roughly in-line with those of the median Breitbart commenter. So why did these “revelations” dominate the headlines? Was it because we’ve reached the one-year mark, and it’s no longer possible to believe that Trump might grow into the job? Were the last hold-outs forced to give up the fantasy that he may yet become “presidential,” or be reined in by Ivanka or Chief of Staff John Kelly? Was it the final realization that the Donald Trump who sits around in bed surrounded by moldy McDonald’s wrappers tweeting misspelled insults at Hillary Clinton is the brightest, most thoughtful Donald Trump there is? Or was it the recognition that such a man holds the power to destroy the planet several times over?

Whatever the case may be, while we were all distracted by the circus in the White House, the Republic suffered another week of truly awful governance, and here’s some of the fresh Hell you may have missed.

*****

Let’s begin by connecting a couple of dots. For years, Deutsche Bank was the only major bank that would finance Trump’s projects. It also settled a money-laundering case with federal regulators after admitting that it helped Russian oligarchs covertly move $10 billion out of their country between 2011 and 2014. Deutsche Bank also floated Jared Kushner’s real estate company a $285 million loan just one month before Election Day in 2016 that has become the subject of federal investigations.

Did the bank make a good bet on the infamously sleazy real estate developer and his clan? Well, this week, David Sirota reported for The International Business Times that “the Trump administration has waived part of the punishment for five megabanks whose affiliates were convicted and fined for manipulating global interest rates. One of the Trump administration waivers was granted to Deutsche Bank — which is owed at least $130 million by President Donald Trump and his business empire.”

And according to Bloomberg’s Greg Farrell, Trump’s new pick to serve as Manhattan’s interim U.S. attorney, and his new deputy, Robert Khuzami, are both former senior Deutsche Bank officials. Farrell reports that until recently, “Berman worked aggressively to defend the bank’s interests without running up excessive legal bills.” He will replace Preet Bharara, a hard-nosed prosecutor who Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, reportedly warned would “get” Donald Trump if he remained in office.

*****

Speaking of draining the swamp, Lisa Friedman reported for The New York Times this week that “a confidential memo written by the head of the country’s largest coal mining company,” Robert E. Murray of Murray Energy, “a longtime Trump supporter who donated $300,000 to the president’s inauguration, …presented Mr. Trump with a wish list of environmental rollbacks just weeks after the inauguration.” And low and behold, “nearly a year later, the White House and federal agencies have completed or are on track to fulfill most of the 14 detailed requests.”

So the next time some hippie claims that Trump’s energy policy must have been written by a wingnut Coal Baron, just look at him or her and say, “yep, and his name is Robert Murray.”

*****

This week, Buzzfeed followed up on previous reports that Donald Trump’s company has sold an exceptionally large number of high-end (in other words, tacky but expensive) properties in all-cash transactions to anonymous shell companies.

Thomas Frank (not the What’s the Matter with Kansas? guy) reported that while such sales are perfectly legal, the Treasury Department’s Treasury’s “financial-crimes unit has, in recent years, launched investigations around the country into all-cash shell-company real-estate purchases amid concerns that some such sales may involve money laundering.” And Treasury’s former financial-crimes chief Jennifer Shasky Calvery told Congress that federal investigations “continue to reveal corrupt politicians, drug traffickers and other criminals using shell companies to purchase luxury real estate with cash.”

Setting aside the potential for bribery, there’s also a domestic Emoluments Clause that bars the president “from receiving money or gifts above and beyond his mandated salary from governments right here at home,” according to Slate’s Joshua Voorhees.

*****

Meanwhile, on the other, less influential end of the political-economy, that Indiana Carrier Plant that Donald Trump used as a prop shortly after being elected issued another round of layoffs this week, sending another round of jobs to its facility in Monterrey, Mexico — that shithole where all the rapists come from, and where workers can be hired for $3 per hour.

Amanda Becker writes for Reuters that, “under pressure from the newly-elected Trump, Carrier and its parent company United Technologies Corp, dropped its plan in late 2016 to close the plant and move 1,400 factory jobs to Mexico. In return, the company received $7 million in state tax breaks to stay in Indiana.” The company did honor its commitment to keep 1,100 jobs in Indiana, but as Renee Elliott, a Carrier worker “who supported Trump in the 2016 election and was among those being laid off on Thursday” told Becker: “he saved jobs, but he didn’t save mine, he didn’t save manufacturing jobs. He saved office personnel.”

*****

Here’s a comforting thought: the president who brags about the size of the (nonexistent) nuclear button on his desk told a gathering of high-ranking national security leaders that “he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”

That’s one of the revelations from Ashley Feinberg’s story for The Huffington Post about the Trump regime’s Nuclear Posture Review, a draft of which breaks with precedent set by past administrations by calling for “new nukes, for no good reason.”

Feinberg notes that the report calls “for the development of new, so-called low-yield nuclear weapons — warheads with a lower explosive force”…

Quote:
The logic of those pushing for the development of smaller nukes is that our current nuclear weapons are too big and too deadly to ever use; we are effectively self-deterred, and the world knows it. To make sure other countries believe that we’d actually use nuclear force, the thinking goes, we need more low-yield nukes.

But official language around nuclear weapons is slippery and euphemistic. “Low yield” suggests a softer sort of weaponry, diet nukes, until you realize that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were technically “low-yield” weapons.

Trump’s NPR draft euphemizes the euphemism, referring to low-yield weapons as “supplements” that will “enhance deterrence.” The document claims that Russia is threatening to use these smaller nuclear weapons; the U.S. needs to match and deter the Russians in kind.

*****

File this one under politicizing the bureaucracy: “The Interior Department has adopted a new screening process for the discretionary grants it makes to outside groups, instructing staff to ensure those awards ‘promote the priorities’ of the Trump administration,” according to WaPo’s Juliet Eilperin. She writes that the directive “represents the latest attempt by Trump political appointees to put their mark on government spending. Last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency instituted a system requiring that a political appointee in the public affairs office sign off on each grant before it is awarded.”

The next normal president is going to face a Helluva job rooting embedded Trumpism out from these federal agencies.

*****

One silver lining to the Trump regime is that his lack of a filter has made it impossible for immigration hardliners to claim that they only care about undocumented immigration. “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” is now a mute argument.

The regime’s latest assault on legal immigrants was highlighted this week by Rewire’s Tina Vasquez, who reported that the Department of Homeland Security may revoke the citizenship of thousands of American citizens who were naturalized despite the fact that the US government couldn’t check their fingerprints against a database of people who had been ordered removed from the country because they hadn’t yet been digitized. Some have been Americans for decades, according to Vasquez.

*****

It turns out that the bipartisan deal to stabilize Obamacare’s markets fell apart last month after “anti-abortion groups appealed directly to Vice President Mike Pence at the 11th hour,” according to a new report by Andrew Desiderio at The Daily Beast.

He writes that “a group of pro-life activists met with Pence to lobby the Trump administration against supporting a health-insurance market-stabilization bill on the grounds that it does not contain sufficient language on abortion restriction.” As it stands, the tax bill passed last month will result in 13 million Americans losing health insurance, according to the CBO.

Relatedly, it’s been 106 days since the Republican Congress let funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program expire. Newsweek reports that “some states will run out of money by February 1 if an agreement is not made, according to estimates from Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute based in Washington, D.C., but more conservative estimates from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) suggest several states risk burning through the federal funds by January 19.”

*****

Meanwhile, John Feeley has had enough. The career diplomat and former Marine Corps helicopter pilot has resigned his position as US ambassador to Panama, “telling the State Department he no longer feels able to serve President Donald Trump,” according to The Telegraph.

His resignation letter says, in part, “as a junior foreign service officer, I signed an oath to serve faithfully the president and his administration in an apolitical fashion, even when I might not agree with certain policies. My instructors made clear that if I believed I could not do that, I would be honor bound to resign. That time has come.”

*****

Finally, Darryl Fears reports for the WaPo that P. Daniel Smith, “a former National Park Service official who improperly helped Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder cut down more than 130 trees to improve a river view at his Potomac, Md., estate, has been chosen by the Trump regime “to be one of the agency’s highest-ranking leaders.”

According to Fears, “Smith pressured lower-level officials to approve a deal that disregarded federal environmental laws, harmed the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park and left the agency vulnerable to charges of favoritism.” Only the best people!

http://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/what-fresh-hell-shhole-countries-edition/


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PostPosted: 01/13/18 3:16 pm • # 8 
American Democracy is dead. The only thing left to speculation is the time of its death.

Welcome to the world's newest plutocracy.


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PostPosted: 01/21/18 8:54 am • # 9 
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Another edition of "lest we forget" ~ :ey ~ "live links" in the original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell?: #TrumpShutdown Edition
Joshua Holland / 20 Jan 2018 at 11:43 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

Welcome to the government shutdown! Stan “The Budget Guy” Collender thinks it will be just the first of many. We’d just note that there are plenty of shithole countries that manage to keep their governments’ lights on, but here we are.

Fun fact: this week, federal agencies prepared for such a possibility for the fourth time in Donald Trump’s first year in office. It’s also the first time in history a shutdown has occurred when one party controlled all three branches of government. He did say he’d run the country like a business; he just failed to tell us that the business would be Trump Airlines.

Quote:
Members complaining to me that the House gym lacks enough towels this morning and they wonder if it’s because of the shutdown.

— Robert Costa (@costareports) January 20, 2018

Quote:
Honestly, how bad a politician do you have to be to complain the Post’s chief reporter covering the GOP about the House gym towel situation during the first hours of a shutdown. You can’t make this stuff up.

— Nick Gourevitch (@nickgourevitch) January 20, 2018

Before this new drama unfolded, we were all focused on a particularly unsavory Shiny Object this week when a previously unpublished interview with former porn star Stormy Daniels revealed that Trump is awful in bed — that may be the least surprising news in the history of unsurprising news — told her she reminded him of his daughter and made her spank him with a rolled up magazine that may or may not have had his face on the cover.

Unfortunately, we learned that this is Donald Trump making his moves…

Quote:
He kept rubbing my leg and was like, “You know, you’re so beautiful. I love your little nose, it’s like a little beet.” I go, “Did you say a beet? Like, what the f—?” I started giving him a hard time about it. And he goes, “No, no, no, no! It’s majestic. It’s a very smart nose, like an eagle.” I was like, “Just keep digging, dude. Keep digging that hole.”

And while all of this sturm und drang was going on, here are some of the stories you may have missed.

*****

Donald Trump and his supporters continue to tout his assault on regulations, as if an under-regulated market had ever functioned smoothly.

There were a couple of deregulatory doozies this week.

Much of their zeal is premised on the notion that Barack Obama was a mom jeans-clad tyrant who cared about nothing but the public interest and had no regard for the fragile multinational corporations he was crushing beneath his jackboots.

Education Secretary and fat cat GOP donor Betsy DeVos offered an example of this brutality during a private chat with “conservative allies” this week, citing an Obama-era guidance suggesting that allegations of campus sexual assault be weighed against a “preponderance of evidence,” the typical legal standard for civil cases. According to Rachel Cohen at The Intercept, DeVos called this “perhaps the most infamous example of the prior administration’s abuse” of its authority.” (Last year, DeVos’s top civil rights official, Candace Jackson, ” famously asserted that 90 percent of campus sexual assault accusations were due to drunken hookups and bad breakups.”)

Anyway, DeVos is doing the people’s work by rescinding another Obama-era rule that made it easier for students ripped off by fraudulent degree mills to apply to have their student loans forgiven.

*****

“In its ongoing zeal to nix regulations,” writes Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, “the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has yet another one in its crosshairs: a rule banning minors from applying pesticides on farms.”

What could possibly go wrong?

Quote:
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, early-life exposure to pesticides is linked to “pediatric cancers, decreased cognitive function, and behavioral problems.” Two recent studies of adolescent pesticide applicators in Egypt (here and here) have turned up evidence that the job causes neurological damage.

Oh.

*****

Not to be outdone, the Environmental Protection Agency, under climate change-denying crackpot Scott Pruitt, is “undermining new laws and regulations that Congress passed with overwhelming bipartisan support” by “quietly overhaul[ing] its process for determining whether new chemicals — used in everything from household cleaners and industrial manufacturing to children’s toys — pose a serious risk to human health or the environment.”

NBC’s Suzy Khimm reports that just “days before President Donald Trump took office,” chemical industry lobbyists told the EPA that they “are burdened by the delay of waiting for EPA to draft the orders, negotiating them with EPA, and then waiting for EPA to issue the orders.” So, so sad.

And what’s a little poison next to the inconvenience chemical manufacturers have to face while waiting for all that paperwork to go through?

*****

Meanwhile, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was taken over in a bloodless coup by former Congress-critter and current Trump Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, “is about to make business easier for loan sharks,” according to Linette Lopez at Business Insider. “Which is to say, the agency is going to re-write a regulation that made it easier for pay-day lenders — lenders who charge high interest fees on short term loans — to keep mostly poor Americans in cycles of debt.”

As we’ve previously noted here at What Fresh Hell?, Mulvaney’s congressional bids were bankrolled by predatory lenders. This is surely an unconnected coincidence — after all, the US isn’t some corrupt shithole.

Also this week, Mulvaney took the unusual step of requesting zero budget dollars to fund the agency that he runs and loathes. Michael Grunwald has more on that angle at Politico.

*****

In non-regulatory news, Danica Cotto reported for The WaPo this week that “a billion-dollar emergency loan approved by Congress to help Puerto Rico deal with the effects of Hurricane Maria has been temporarily withheld by federal officials who say the U.S. territory is not facing a cash shortage like it has repeatedly warned about in recent months.”

Quote:
Local officials have warned that Puerto Rico’s power and water and sewer companies will run out of money this month. Both companies say their funds have dwindled since the storm caused up to an estimated $95 billion in damage, knocking out power to the entire island. Nearly 40 percent of power customers remain in the dark.

If you gathered together the world’s greatest minds and tasked them with fucking over an island that had just been totally been devastated by a natural disaster, they wouldn’t be able to top the Trump regime and its GOP allies in Congress.

*****

This one is such an egregious example of Trump profiting from his office. “Prospective buyers of luxury apartments in the new Trump Towers project outside India’s capital are being lured with an unusual promise: If you buy a flat, we will fly you to the United States to meet Donald Trump Jr.”

Annie Gowan reports for WaPo that there appear to be a decent number of rich idiots in India who want to meet Donald Trump’s spawn: “The developers of the 600-foot high-rises… racked up $23 million in sales — more than 20 units — in the first day.

*****

This week, Alex Johnson reported for NBC that “nine of the 12 members of the National Park System Advisory Board resigned” this week, “saying the Interior Department has ignored it since President Donald Trump took office a year ago.”

The group said that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had refused to so much as meet with them over the past year.

*****

In other staffing news, do you remember back to the George W Bush administration, when there was a raft of stories about 22-year-old College Republicans whose fathers were big GOP donors or whatever were being put in charge of crucial reconstruction efforts in Iraq? We were reminded of those heady days when WaPo’s Robert O’Harrow Jr. profiled Taylor Weyeneth, a 24-year-old senior official in Trump’s Office of National Drug Control Policy.

In 2016, Weyeneth was a frat-boy organizing charity golf tournaments, then he worked on the Trump campaign, and now he’s Deputy Chief of Staff at a major federal agency. O’Harrow reports that Weyeneth’s rapid ascent is tied to the regime’s constant staff churn, and the fact that no normal person wants to work for the Tangerine Trujillo. “Nearly a year after his inauguration,” he writes, “the drug policy office, known as ONDCP, lacks a permanent director. At least seven of his administration’s appointees have departed, office spokesman William Eason said. Among them was the general counsel and acting chief of staff, some of whose duties were assumed by Weyeneth.” ONLY THE BEST PEOPLE!

*****

Finally, the big headline this week should have been that 2017 was one of the three warmest years on record, and the warmest year ever in a year without any El Niño activity. In other words, human activities are causing more warming than natural variations in the global temperature.

Damian Carrington reports for The Guardian…

Quote:
The data, published on Thursday, means the last three years have been the hottest trio ever seen, with 2017 ranking second or third depending on the small differences between the temperature records. Furthermore, 17 of the 18 hottest years recorded since 1850 have occurred since 2000.

Scientists from across the globe warned that the limit of 1.5C of warming, set as a goal by the international Paris climate change treaty, was being approached very rapidly and that it was more urgent than ever to slash emissions to avoid the worst impacts.

Nothing to see here, folks, so we can all go back to thinking way too much about POTUS clumsily banging porn stars.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/what-fresh-hell-trumpshutdown-edition/


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PostPosted: 01/27/18 6:27 pm • # 10 
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Another edition of "lest we forget" ~ :ey ~ "live links" in the original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell?: The Ugly American Edition
Joshua Holland / 27 Jan 2018 at 18:19 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

It was a relatively quiet week at the circus, in part because Trump’s spent a few days in Davos, wooing those elite globalists he always railed about. His act reportedly went over better than it has in other international fora, mostly because the kind of people who attend Davos will tolerate a deranged chaos monkey if he can deliver some sweet tax cuts.

The shiniest object this week may have been news that Trump already tried to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But that story merely confirmed earlier reports, and of course it’s all fake news anyway in Trump’s world.

The Washington Post ran a feature this week that got us thinking. It detailed how many African Americans fear cross-country travel today in a way that’s reminiscent of the Jim Crow era.

Rhonda Colvin writes…

Quote:
President Trump’s election in November 2016 coincided with a surge in reported hate crimes that month, according to federal data… reports of vocal white supremacists, high-profile fatal police encounters and caught-on-camera public racism are influencing where motorists of color are willing to drive.

These are citizens; immigrants – including authorized immigrants – are literally being terrorized on a daily basis as ICE continues to sweep people up in courthouses and schools and hospitals.

So, perceptions about what’s happening to this country are heavily influenced by one’s physical security. If you’re not a white, straight citizen, Trump and Trumpism is an existential threat. If you’re a member of the majority, and personally secure, Trump is first and foremost deeply, deeply embarrassing. It’s a national disgrace that the Electoral College elevated such a crackpot to the highest office in the land, and it’s humiliating every time he opens his pie hole in public.

*****

Last week, we had a laugh – and Fox News viewers had a scare – over a report from the Department of Homeland Security which purported to show that 73 percent of terrorists convicted in federal courts were foreign-born. The opposite is true – fringe right-wingers commit the lion’s share of terror attacks in the US — but the report simply excluded those who were convicted of domestic terrorism. So it was like saying that foreigners tend to be born in other countries.

This week, Spencer Ackerman reported for The Daily Beast that “the Department of Homeland Security did not perform that analysis. DHS’ analysts did not contribute to the highly controversial report….According to a government source familiar with the episode, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ office took charge of the report’s assemblage of statistics—which some terrorism analysts consider highly misleading—and sent it to DHS Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen for her imprimatur after it was all but finalized.”

We like a little levity around here, but in fact gaming terror statistics to demonize immigrants is pretty dangerous stuff. Turning the highest law enforcement agency in the land into a source of xenophobic propaganda really isn’t funny at all.

*****

Here’s an important story from Politico that may have gotten lost in the shuffle this week. According to Dan Diamond, “a small cadre of politically prominent religious activists inside the Department of Health and Human Services have spent months quietly planning how to weaken federal protections for abortion and transgender care — a strategy that’s taking shape in a series of policy moves that took even their own staff by surprise.”

Diamond writes…

Quote:
The agency’s devout Christian leaders have set in motion changes with short-term symbolism and long-term significance. One of those moves — a vast outreach initiative to religious groups … — came in October 2017 while the health department reeled from the resignation of former Secretary Tom Price and congressional Republicans struggled to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

That outreach initiative began a rulemaking process that could culminate in a rollback of Obama-era protections for transgender patients and allowing health providers more protections to deny procedures like abortion. It worried abortion rights and LGBT advocates, who acknowledge that while abortion laws and other regulations remain mostly intact, the groundwork is steadily being laid to revise them.

Let’s keep an eye on this one.

*****

Now for a couple of stories about politicizing the bureaucracy, which should serve as a blaring warning of emerging authoritarianism.

“The Trump administration is pushing a subtle change to a government form which could have profound implications for future elections and potentially violate the Constitution,” writes Ian Millhiser from Think Progress. The plan is to add a question on the upcoming Census form asking folks about their citizenship status, and the idea is to scare immigrants, many of whom live in households with mixed legal status from participating.

“A change to the census form that discourages these immigrants from filling it out will likely shift political power away from urban centers (where voters tend to prefer Democrats) and toward more rural areas (where voters tend to prefer Republicans,” according to Millhiser.

But the move may be unconstitutional, as the 14th Amendment specifies that the Census will count all persons, other than Native Americans, and “if the Census Bureau adopts a question known to discourage certain populations from filling out their census forms, that will prevent representatives from being allocated based on the ‘whole number of persons in each state’ because the number of people in states with larger undocumented immigrant populations will be systematically undercounted.”

The Census is also underfunded, and Trump’s nominated a new Census chief who’s written in the past that “competitive elections are bad for America.” You know what they say — ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, just cheat.’

*****

Meanwhile, beleaguered staffers at the State Department, which we’ve noted in the past has faced an exodus of career foreign service officers (who have been replaced in some cases by unqualified weirdos), are lawyering up, “charging they are being put in career purgatory because of their previous work on policy priorities associated with President Barack Obama,” according to CNN’s Elise Labott.

As has been reported elsewhere, Labott notes that “morale inside the State Department is at the lowest level in years, largely because of the perceived talent flight and an insular and distrustful approach from Tillerson and his team.”

*****

A staff photographer at the Department of Energy was fired for releasing a photograph of Energy Secretary Rick Perry reviewing an “action plan” put together by coal magnate Robert Murray, the head honcho at Murray Energy. According to Think Progress…

Quote:
Photographer Simon Edelman said Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray asked Perry for policy changes that would directly benefit his coal company and the executive’s personal financial position. The reason to release the photos “was to show the evidence of corruption that was taking place” …

Edelman, who stayed in the room for about 15 minutes, said it was unlike any other meeting he had photographed at DOE, including events attended by former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, Perry’s predecessor. “This was not an everyday meeting that happens all the time,” he said. “This was different because they knew each other and they knew each other well. Perry gave him that hug. And then Murray got right down to business and gave him the action plan.”

The really sad thing – aside from a whistleblower getting the ax — is that Rick Perry’s not quite bright enough to come up with his own give-away to Big Coal.

*****

You probably caught the story of the 19-year-old Trump fan who was arrested this week for threatening to shoot up CNN for peddling “fake News.” (“I’m smarter than you,” he claimed in one threat transmitted across state lines and duly intercepted by the FBI.)

Getting less notice was an analysis of data from US Press Freedom Tracker by Peter Sterne and Jonathan Peters for The Columbia Journalism Review which found that “the most dangerous place to be a journalist in America is at a protest,” and they attributed this, at least in part, to Trumpism.

Quote:
With his near-daily denouncements of the press, the president has helped normalize abuses against journalists by ordinary people. Public trust in the press is low, and a growing number of Americans see journalists as part of an elite coastal establishment that doesn’t understand them or share their interests. Those sentiments seem to be combusting at protests.

*****

Meanwhile, according to The Hill, “the United States joined Belgium, the U.K. and Japan this week in opting out of a new standardized test for students to determine whether children can spot and avoid fake news.”

Nothing to see here, folks. Just move along.

*****

What’s this? The House Science Committee wants to investigate a scientist for doing science?

That’s the take-away from a report by Sharon Lerner at The Intercept…

Quote:
Republicans on the House Science Committee are accusing Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, of lobbying. In letters sent to the Inspector General and acting secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Reps. Lamar Smith and Andy Biggs wrote that they were “conducting oversight” of Birnbaum’s activity in response to a editorial she wrote in a scientific journal.

Birnbaum’s editorial, which the journal PLOS Biology published in December, addressed the gaps in the regulation of toxic chemicals. Though there are more than 85,000 chemicals approved for use in commerce, she noted in the piece, “U.S. policy has not accounted for evidence that chemicals in widespread use can cause cancer and other chronic diseases, damage reproductive systems, and harm developing brains at low levels of exposure once believed to be harmless.”

Birnbaum called for more research on the risks posed by chemicals and, in the sentence that the representatives appear to consider lobbying, noted that “closing the gap between evidence and policy will require that engaged citizens — both scientists and non-scientists — work to ensure that our government officials pass health-protective policies based on the best available scientific evidence.”

*****

Candidate Trump did say he was “the most militaristic guy there is,” and he promised to run the country like a business, which means cutting corners and screwing over your workforce whenever possible.

These themes may come together in Afghanistan soon, and with potentially disastrous consequences, according to a report by Thomas Gibbons-Neff at The New York Times. He writes…

Quote:
They are being heralded as a key part of President Trump’s new strategy to resolve the nearly 17-year war in Afghanistan. But their training has been cut short by months, and units are still short-staffed, as some of the estimated 1,000 additional military advisers prepare to arrive in Afghanistan in time for the spring fighting season, officials said…

The advisers’ brigade was supposed to have around a year of training before deploying. Advisers in the new brigade are expected to begin deploying by early spring — roughly eight months after the brigade was created.

Additionally, a six-week Army course specifically for combat advisers was slashed to two weeks to more quickly cycle the American soldiers through training.

*****

From the ‘it’s all a big grift’ file, we learn from The New York Times that “a pair of groups supporting President Trump say they raised $30 million last year, then spent tens of thousands of those dollars at the Trump International Hotel here and on payments to a few Trump loyalists like the former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and the former Milwaukee County sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.”

We’re guessing that Clarke can buy a lot of bling for that kind of money.

*****

Speaking of embarrassing, let’s finish things off with an odd story from the ‘personnel is policy’ file. A woman named Cathy Stepp is Trump’s pick to head the Midwest Environmental Protection Agency. She previously served as secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources under Scott Walker – whom Charles Pierce has dubbed “the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin.”

For us, the story is Stepp’s “history of rolling back enforcement of antipollution laws, reducing funding for scientific research and scrubbing references to human-caused climate change from government websites during her time in Wisconsin state government.”

But The Chicago Tribune went with a different angle, noting that Stepp “took the unusual step of drafting her daughter, Hannah, 23, to humanize her by introducing her [to] her 200-plus staff.” Hannah broke the ice by recalling…

Quote:
“She put on a disguise of a fake nose and sunglasses and went to the DMV and followed someone taking the driving portion of the test so that she could learn the route, and then we practiced it,” Hannah continued. “I didn’t fail the second time!”

Stepp’s daughter said she took the test when she was 16, about seven years ago, which would place the time of the test to around the time Stepp was appointed to lead the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources by Gov. Scott Walker.

Hannah said she did not know where her mother got the false nose but that she “always has it with her.”

Really, the whole regime should be issued big red clown noses when they’re appointed. Or maybe a #MAGA hat serves the same purpose?

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/fresh-hell-ugly-american-edition/


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PostPosted: 02/03/18 12:49 pm • # 11 
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Here is this week's damning installment of "lest we forget" ~ :ey ~ "live links" in the original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell?: We’ve got your stupid memo right here edition
Joshua Holland / 03 Feb 2018 at 12:38 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

We’ve grappled with any number of bullshit distractions during Trump’s loooong first year in office, but the “Nunes memo” really takes the cake. The very idea that the FBI, of all institutions, is overrun by lefty partisans who would fabricate a national security investigation into a presidential campaign is transparently ridiculous – it’s like claiming that Democrats face brutal discrimination in Hollywood — but we nevertheless spent much of the week eagerly debating this talking-point’s merits and anticipating the memo’s release.

When it dropped on Friday, we all had a good laugh at the degree to which the memo undercut the Republican Scandal Machine’s narrative that the dossier on Trump prepared by former British spook Christopher Steele sparked the probe into Trump’s people running around to all these secret meetings with Russian operatives. The memo confirms previous reporting by The New York Times that it was George Papadopoulos blathering on about how the campaign was trying to get dirt on Clinton from the Russians to an Australian ambassador that launched the investigation. And then we found out that Nunes hadn’t even read the FISA applications on which he based his silly memo, which makes sense because reading the “intelligence” that supported his conspiracy theory would have required a colonoscopy.

Again, most of us had a good laugh at all of this, but in a parallel universe, it was really quite damning.

Quote:
.@TomFitton: FISA Memo Is ‘Devastating Blow’ to Mueller’s Russia Investigation #MemoDay #outnumberedot @OutnumberedOT @HARRISFAULKNER @JudicialWatch @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/Ypgei4URwI

— FoxNewsInsider (@FoxNewsInsider) February 3, 2018

Quote:
Laura Ingraham: Memo Shows Comey FBI, Obama DOJ & Clinton Campaign ‘Colluded’ Against @realDonaldTrump @IngrahamAngle https://t.co/1h6pZFGqDj

— FoxNewsInsider (@FoxNewsInsider) February 3, 2018

Quote:
.@michellemalkin: Surveillance Abuses Alleged in Memo Could Be ‘Tip of the Iceberg’ @foxandfriends https://t.co/RSc0GhPzsV

— FoxNewsInsider (@FoxNewsInsider) February 3, 2018

Their entire Twitter feed looks like that. And of course, that was the whole point: giving the rubes something to hang their hats on — some flimsy reason to believe that the FBI and DOJ are conducting a “witch hunt” against an entirely innocent sleazy real estate developer turned game show host president.

And what really made the whole exercise so pathetic is that Republicans somehow managed to convince a depressingly large number of neutral observers that it would have been somehow problematic for the FBI to pursue an investigation on the basis of the Steele Dossier. The reality is that the FBI launches investigations all the time based on information gleaned from drug dealers and arms traffickers and various fraudsters. Steel is none of those things – he’s a highly respected intelligence pro with a strong track record on Russia. The question of who paid him to dig into Trump’s past is entirely irrelevant, and it would be entirely irrelevant even if it had in fact been the thing that began #Russiagate.

Anyway, the Nunes Memo may be comical, but it’s no joke. And it’s not a “nothing burger.” He wasted a bunch of public employees’ time and taxpayer dollars, dominated the news for a couple of weeks — undermining public confidence in the rule of law along way – and may well have undermined national security in the process.

And while this circus may have been a welcome distraction from a bunch of pundits gushing about how Trump managed to read a speech on Capitol Hill without offending anyone too badly, it also sucked up a ton of media attention that might otherwise have been focused on a bunch of fresh outrages from the Tangerine Trujillo and his minions this week.

******

Speaking of the rule of law, Republicans in Pennsylvania are not happy with a state supreme court ruling that their wildly gerrymandered district map violates the state constitution and must be redrawn.

What to do? “In an audacious move by a political leader who could potentially be held in contempt of court,” writes Ian Millhiser at Think Progress, “Pennsylvania Senate President pro tempore Joseph Scarnati (R) informed the state supreme court on Wednesday that he will openly defy one of the court’s recent orders in a gerrymandering case.”

That’s one approach, we guess. But it’s not the only one…

Quote:
Breaking News: In a filing at PA Supreme Court, PA Republicans called for the disqualification of Justice David Wecht in partisan gerrymandering case, saying he has made previous public statements indicating his opposition to gerrymandering

— Sam Levine (@srl) February 2, 2018

******

Are they just trolling us? This is a question that we aren’t accustomed to asking of the White House under normal presidents, but we have to pose the question when we see things like Trump re-nominating Kathleen Hartnett White to direct the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality after she bombed in her first confirmation hearing last year.

Jay Michaelson reports for The Daily Beast that Hartnett, “a longtime fossil-fuel advocate” who has argued that “fossil fuels ended slavery” and that the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the better, enraged senators from both parties when “it was revealed that many of her written answers to the committee were apparently cut and pasted, word for word, from the answers submitted by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and his assistant Bill Wehrum.” Only the best… you know.

******

Speaking of the EPA, Politico’s Andrew Restuccia reports that some goombah named Steve Kopec, a “home improvement contractor married to one of Donald and Melania Trump’s former household staffers,” has been tapped for a high-level job at the agency. Restuccia writes that this is “the latest example of someone with a personal connection to the Trump family” but no experience in government or any relevant occupation finding work in the administration.

Quote:
His White House social media director, Dan Scavino, started working for him years ago as a caddy, and his first security director, Keith Schiller, traveled with him from the Trump Organization to the White House. In June, Trump appointed Lynne Patton, a party planner who arranged events at Trump golf courses as well as Eric Trump’s 2014 wedding, to head the New York office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

******

And from the This Is Not Normal files comes this fresh hell: According to Politico, “The Trump administration’s top public health official bought shares in a tobacco company one month into her leadership of the agency charged with reducing tobacco use — the leading cause of preventable disease and death and an issue she had long championed.”

Quote:
Buying shares of tobacco companies raises even more flags than Fitzgerald’s trading in drug and food companies because it stands in such stark contrast to the CDC’s mission to persuade smokers to quit and keep children from becoming addicted. Critics say her trading behavior broke with ethical norms for public health officials and was, at best, sloppy. At worst, they say, it was legally problematic if she didn’t recuse herself from government activities that could have affected her investments.

******

Trump’s appointees may be totally unqualified, but they seem to have a Rain Man-like gift for enacting truly awful public policies. They’re wingnut idiot savants.

And because they were so productive this week, let’s use some bullets…

* New York Times: “The Justice Department has effectively shuttered an Obama-era office dedicated to making legal aid accessible to all citizens, according to two people familiar with the situation.”

* Citylab: “The Trump administration may introduce minimum work requirements for some recipients of housing aid, while raising rents for others…”

* CNN: “The former chief of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the decision to cut 80% of its epidemic prevention activities overseas could pose a grave danger to the United States because it “would significantly increase the chance an epidemic will spread without our knowledge and endanger lives in our country and around the world.”

* Washington Post: “The Trump administration has stripped enforcement powers from a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unit responsible for pursuing discrimination cases…The move to sharply restrict the responsibilities of the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity comes about two months after President Trump installed his budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, at the head of the bureau. The office previously used its powers to force payouts in several prominent cases, including settlements from lenders it alleged had systematically charged minorities higher interest rates than they had for whites.”

* Bloomberg Law:“Labor Department leadership scrubbed an unfavorable internal analysis from a new tip pooling proposal, shielding the public from estimates that showed employees could lose out on billions of dollars in gratuities.”

* Vox: “The Environmental Protection Agency just took a dramatic step toward deregulating some major sources of toxic air pollution, which could have huge implications for public health.”

******

At least they’re doing what they can to keep up morale at these agencies…

Quote:
EPA has put these posters up at agency buildings. Celebrating regulatory rollbacks pic.twitter.com/vwGHy54oq9

— Eric Lipton (@EricLiptonNYT) January 25, 2018

******

Meanwhile, the endless war in Afghanistan – you remember that, right? – is going swimmingly. Last week, we mentioned that we’re “surging” with under-trained, hastily assembled units. But no worries — we’re winning so bigly that according to a (pay-walled) report in the Wall Street Journal, “the U.S. Department of Defense has classified a sweeping range of data used to measure its progress in Afghanistan, a government watchdog said, sealing much of the information from public view. Key indicators that are now being kept secret include figures on the size of the Afghan army and police force and the number of civilian airstrike casualties…. That data now will be made available only to senior U.S. officials in a classified index of the report.”

According to a study by the BBC, “despite waging nearly 17 consecutive years of war and spending up to $1 trillion, the U.S.-led attempt to defeat the Taliban has left the insurgents openly active in up to 70 percent of Afghanistan…. The report also found that a rival ultraconservative Sunni Muslim organization, the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), controlled more territory than ever, further complicating the beleaguered effort to stabilize the country,” reported Newsweek.

On a positive note, it’s entirely possible that our adversaries in Afghanistan are getting tired of winning so much.

******

Finally, if the media prioritized its coverage according to the seriousness of the issues at hand, the top story this week may well have been a Pentagon report finding that “nearly 50% of U.S. military installations across the globe face increased risk of a slew of climate change-related threats including extreme temperature, flooding and drought,” according to Time.

But don’t worry about all that boring science stuff – Trump will no doubt entertain and excite us by tweeting something really crazy in the next few hours. Stay tuned!

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/fresh-hell-weve-got-stupid-memo-right-edition/


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PostPosted: 02/24/18 12:46 pm • # 12 
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After a couple weeks' hiatus, here's another damning installment of "lest we forget" ~ :eek ~ "live links" in the original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell?: Let’s make Wyatt Earp teach algebra edition
Joshua Holland / 24 Feb 2018 at 11:51 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

It’d be crass to call this week’s debate over gun violence a “shiny object,” but Mango Mugabe somehow managed to turn a somber moment of reflection after yet another school massacre into a freak-show.

Arming teachers may make a little more sense than putting sharks with “laser beams” attached to their heads in every classroom, but not much.

Trump, a draft-dodger who once claimed that he should get a Congressional Medal of Honor for having unprotected sex while poor kids were dying in Vietnam, thinks that it’d be easy to train up 10 or 20 percent of teachers into dead-eyed John McClanes who would calmly dispatch any bad hombre who comes to the doors of their classrooms.

Most people who have real tactical experience think the idea is beyond ludicrous. Law enforcement and the military train regularly and extensively to overcome the natural stress reactions that occur in a combat situation. That adrenaline-fueled reaction includes freezing up, experiencing temporal and auditory distortions and suffering from tunnel vision, where you focus exclusively on a target and can no longer see innocent bystanders, responding officers, etc.

That training doesn’t just consist of some time on the range – they go through realistic scenarios that are designed to put them under significant stress in order to inoculate them against what they’re likely to experience when the bullets start flying. And despite that rigorous training, many soldiers still freeze up the first time they come under fire. They train to retain their situational awareness and shoot straight, yet according to one study, two-thirds of shots fired by the NYPD missed their marks.

We’re not only being held hostage to the gun manufacturer’s lobby, but also to the idea that the movies are just like real life.

Calling for arming teachers is another shiny object, but this time Tangerine Trujillo isn’t distracting us from the corruption or the staffing disasters or the awful policies being cranked out by Congressional Republicans. He’s distracting us from real measures to address the scourge of gun violence.

Quote:
Schumer: I’m “amazed” at how fast Trump caved to the NRA https://t.co/f5Qn6gJJbH pic.twitter.com/dwEGqhhbUu

— The Hill (@thehill) February 23, 2018

You shouldn’t be, Chuck. The rest of us saw that one coming from a mile away.

Anyway, let’s dig into some tales of turpitude and graft that may not have gotten the attention that they deserved this week.

******

Last month, Dan Diamond reported for Politico that a “small cadre” of American Taliban “politically prominent religious activists” were taking an increasingly aggressive role in steering policy at the Department of Health and Human Services. “The agency’s devout Christian leaders have set in motion changes with short-term symbolism and long-term significance,” wrote Diamond.

How’s that working out? Well, on one hand, Diamond reported this week that “the nation’s health department is taking steps to dismantle LGBT health initiatives, as political appointees have halted or rolled back regulations intended to protect LGBT workers and patients, removed LGBT-friendly language from documents and reassigned the senior adviser dedicated to LGBT health.”

Quote:
Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 14, 2016

And according to Anna North at Vox, documents from a whistleblower suggest that the HHS “let an anti-abortion group write its health care policy” — specifically a directive that signals that the regime will interpret the laws in such a way that will allow states to defund Planned Parenthood. So all of that’s going according to plan.

But when you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Jon Cardova, Spray-tan Stalin’s pick to oversee HHS’s Office of Human Relations, Office of the Chief Information Officer, Office of Security and Strategic Information, Equal Employment Opportunity Compliance and Operations Office and the Program Support Center – hey, they’ve left a lot of positions unfilled and someone has to do those jobs – was put on leave this week after CNN uncovered the guy’s social media posts.

And oh boy, is he a charmer. Cardova “pushed stories filled with baseless claims and conspiracy theories, including stories that claimed Gold Star father Khizr Khan is a ‘Muslim Brotherhood agent’ and made baseless claims about Sen. Ted Cruz’s personal life,” reported Andrew Kaczynski and Nathan McDermott.

Quote:
Cordova also repeatedly shared fake or conspiratorial stories, including one … with a photoshopped picture of a black man holding a sign that read, “No mother should have to fear for her son’s life every time he robs a store.”

In one tweet, Cordova called for a boycott of Budweiser because the company supported “jihadis” over white immigration.

In another tweet, Cordova speculated the reason the identity of the shooter at Umpqua Community College in 2015 hadn’t been made public was because he was a Muslim. The shooter was not a Muslim.

In another tweet, Cordova compared MoveOn.org and the Black Lives Matter movement to Nazis.

These are the people running your government now.

******

Speaking of which, Cantaloupe Ceaușescu appears to have picked some random con-man a low-level administrative assistant to head the Indian Health Service, which “provides care for 2.2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in 36 states.”

According to The New York Times, Robert Weaver, who claimed to have held a supervisory position at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Joplin, Missouri, withdrew his nomination this week after The Wall Street Journal reported that in reality, “hospital officials said that they did not recognize his name,… and that they believed Mr. Weaver’s role had involved entry-level duties, such as registering patients.”

Only the best people, etc.

******

It’s strange to have a Pepe-loving internet troll in the White House, but that’s where we are.

Quote:
Wow. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will remove “nation of immigrants” from mission statement https://t.co/FExlWhBHUm by @rdevro

— Jill Lawrence (@JillDLawrence) February 22, 2018

More consequentially, Ron Nixon reports for The NYT that “Border Patrol officers are working without permission on private property and setting up checkpoints up to 100 miles away from the border under a little-known federal law that is being used more widely in the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration.”

“The department said in a statement that the checkpoints were ‘strategically placed where illegal cross-border smuggling is most likely to converge,’” but “in New Hampshire, border officers working with state officials conducted what the American Civil Liberties Union described as illegal drug searches after residents were arrested at immigration checkpoints set up on a major interstate highway. One of the checkpoints was set up just before a local marijuana festival.”

******

According to Politico’s Nahal Toosi, “State Department officials have been ordered to pare back passages in a soon-to-be-released annual report on global human rights that traditionally discuss women’s reproductive rights and discrimination, according to five former and current department officials.”

Quote:
The move, believed to have been ordered by a top aide to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, reflects the Trump administration’s rightward turn from the Obama administration on family planning issues. It also appears to highlight the stated desire of Tillerson and President Donald Trump to make human rights a lower priority in U.S. foreign policy.

Some career State Department officials — particularly female staffers — are suspicious of the motives behind the changes, which they fear could undermine the report’s impact and integrity…

“This sends a clear signal that women’s reproductive rights are not a priority for this administration, and that it’s not even a rights violation we must or should report on,” one serving State Department official said.

I have tremendous respect for women and the many roles they serve that are vital to the fabric of our society and our economy.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2017

******

AP: “The Trump administration is once again calling for the complete elimination of a heating assistance program that helps to keep the homes of low-income families warm.”

This is happening just weeks after Congress gave five massive energy companies $24 billion in tax cuts over the next ten years.

Typically, conservatives attack food stamps by claiming that recipients trade them in for malt liquor or whatever other racist cliché they have at hand, but what’s the rationale behind this? The AP notes that the program “helps families pay their heating bills primarily in the form of a grant that’s sent directly to utility companies or heating fuel vendors” – it’s not fungible; it only provides warmth.

These people are just assholes.

******

Speaking of which, “US senators are planning to mark the 10th anniversary of Wall Street’s meltdown this year with a gift to the nation’s banks: a bill that would unravel regulations put in place after the crisis,” according to Politico.

This one, tragically, is bipartisan. Here are the Dems – and one independent who caucuses with them – who were supporting the bill as of Tuesday…

Heitkamp
Donnelly
Tester
Warner
Kaine
Coons
Carper
McCaskill
Manchin
King
Peters
Bennet
Jones

And these Dems are reportedly on the fence:

Stabenow
Nelson
Klobuchar
Murphy
Duckworth
Hassan
Shaheen

There’s more info about the bill at the link above. Let ‘em know what you think.

******

One has to read between the lines a bit with a report out this week by WaPo’s Juliet Eilperin. The story is that two senior officials at the U.S. Geological Survey quit when “Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke asked that they provide his office with confidential data on the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska before it was released to the general public.”

Eilperin writes that “there was no indication that either Zinke or any of his deputies intended to use the information for personal gain,” but Zinke, who previously sat on the Board of Directors of the oil pipeline company QS Energy, and his minions could potentially make a fortune if they had advance knowledge of what the data would show, and there’s no obvious reason why Interior officials would need the information a few days before it became public. One of the departing officials told Eilperin that “this is the first time we’ve had anyone insist we want that number.”

It’s just odd, is what we’re saying.

******

In case you missed David Farenthold’s latest scoop for the WaPo: “Two weeks after President Trump nominated Florida businessman Leandro Rizzuto Jr. to be ambassador to Barbados, Rizzuto pledged thousands of dollars to fund a gala at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the gala’s organizer said.”

Quote:
Trump Jr: ‘Nonsense’ that family’s profiting from presidency

See what he had to say about the concerns that the Trump family is using the presidency to profit from business ventures. >>> https://t.co/uXGOkgvMmv pic.twitter.com/VIhEtKbq4M

— WTVM News Leader 9 (@WTVM) February 21, 2018

Meanwhile, “federal investigators are probing whether former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort promised a Chicago banker a job in the Trump White House in return for $16 million in home loans,” according to NBC.

******

Speaking of scammers, you may recall that “United Technologies handed Donald Trump bragging rights in late 2016 when, just weeks after he won the election, the manufacturing giant publicly credited the soon-to-be president with striking a deal to save hundreds of Indiana furnace factory jobs that seemed destined to move to Mexico.” The company got some huge tax breaks, and of course offshored many of those jobs anyway.

And this week, WaPo’s Aaron Gregg and Danielle Paquette reported that “more than a year into Trump’s presidency, that federal money continues to flow to United Technologies’ subsidiaries. The Defense Department recently gave the company’s Connecticut-based aeronautics subsidiary a $2.5 billion contract without competition to provide propeller systems, wheels and brakes, landing gear, flight sensors and other equipment directly to the armed services.”

Sweetheart no-bid contracts handed out to companies that do political favors for the regime strike us as being kind of antithetical to draining the swamp, but we do we know? We’re just a bunch of libtards.

******

And from the “highly unusual but legal” file, Christina Wilkie reported for CNBC that, “soon after the Republican National Committee came under pressure for paying legal bills for President Donald Trump and his eldest son in the special counsel’s Russia probe, it started covering expenses for the president’s re-election campaign.The RNC is using campaign funds to pay Trump’s company more than $37,000 a month in rent, and to pay thousands of dollars in monthly salary to Vice President Mike Pence‘s nephew, John Pence.”

And MSNBC reports that “the Republican National Committee is paying a firm owned by Trump’s former bodyguard $15,000 a month for consulting.” Keith Schiller left the White House last fall, and has since received $75,000 from the RNC. “If the RNC continues paying Schiller at this rate until the 2020 Republican National Convention, his total fees will likely be north of $500,000.”

Quote:
Schiller’s fee comes out of the RNC’s convention fund, not its campaign fund, the official noted.

Campaign finance watchdog groups, however, were quick to cry foul.

“These sorts of party accounts are notorious for being operated as slush funds — lightly regulated and ripe for abuse,” said Stephen Spaulding, former special counsel at the Federal Election Commission and now chief of strategy at the nonpartisan advocacy group Common Cause.

It’s all a giant grift.

******

It’s been 26 days since a law sanctioning Russia for fucking with our elections – one passed with massive bipartisan majorities – went into effect, but the regime still hasn’t gotten around to implementing it. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Friday that they’re still working on it. They should come any day now, or maybe not.

Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies say Russia is still at it, and will mess with the upcoming midterms. So naturally “the head of a federal commission who has helped U.S. states protect election systems from possible cyber attacks by Russia or others is being replaced at the behest of Republican House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and the White House,” according to Reuters.

Matthew Masterson “has been a popular figure among state election officials, many of whom have praised his expertise and leadership on cyber security issues,” so of course he had to go.

“The action raises fresh questions over the degree to which Republican President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans who control Congress are taking steps to protect the security of American elections, and some state officials have accused them of doing too little to address the threat.” Yeah, it “raises questions.”

******

Finally, we’ll leave you with a reminder that “about a third of Puerto Rico’s residents — over 900,000 — are still living without electricity five months after Hurricane Maria battered the island on Sept. 20th of last year,” according to NBC. Officials won’t say when the power will be restored.

Vox adds that “calls to Puerto Rico’s suicide hotline have skyrocketed since Hurricane Mari,” and “reported suicide attempts have tripled in recent months.”

And in what should be front-page news, Arctic temperatures are currently running about 45 degrees above normal, and scientists are saying that this is really, really bad. “It was the warmest December on record in the Arctic,” writes Joe Romm at Think Progress, “and 2018 has already set a string of records for lowest Arctic sea ice.”

Quote:
“We are seeing what scientists have predicted for years,” professor of thermal sciences John Abraham told ThinkProgress via email. “The temperatures in the Arctic are off the chart. This matters for the rest of us because this is the time of year when the Arctic ice should be growing. But it isn’t growing like it should. So, this summer, there will be less ice and more open waters that will lead to more warming.” Abraham warns that “We’ve started a feedback loop that we cannot stop.”

The fact that that we’re doomed by our own greed and hostility toward science kind of puts Trump’s annoying tweets in perspective, so at least there’s a silver lining.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/02/fresh-hell-lets-make-wyatt-earp-teach-algebra-edition/


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PostPosted: 03/03/18 2:29 pm • # 13 
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YIKES!!! ~ :eek ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell?: Trumpism is just a massive grift edition
Joshua Holland / 03 Mar 2018 at 13:49 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

This week, we learned that Trump is capable of such depravity that the Republican establishment finally says, ‘enough is enough already.’ And that iniquity is… tariffs on tin and steel, of all things. The Wall Street Journal called it “the biggest mistake of his presidency.” It wasn’t cancelling DACA or blabbing highly sensitive Israeli intelligence to the Russians or tasking his idiot son-in-law to fix the Middle East — it was these tariffs. The move, according to The Journal has “rattled GOP lawmakers.” Economic advisor Gary Cohn, who didn’t resign when his boss said that Nazis marching through Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us” were fine and dandy people, warned that the tariffs may prove too much for him to bear. The policy, wrote David Frum without apparent irony, exposed Trump’s “Nixonian” side. Of course, Papaya Pol Pot didn’t help his case when he said that trade wars are “good” and “easy to win.”

Accusing Trump of hypocrisy is like complaining that water is wet, but just for the record, let’s pause here to note that “in at least two of Trump’s last three construction projects, Trump opted to purchase his steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers rather than United States corporations based in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. In other instances, he abandoned steel altogether, instead choosing the far-less-expensive option of buying concrete from various companies, including some linked to the Luchese and Genovese crime families.”

Anyway, the news out of Trumpland this week was dominated by reports of the president’s erratic moods. “Trump was angry and ‘unglued’ when he started a trade war,” according to NBC News. “When White House aides arrived at work on Thursday,” reported The New York Times, “they had no clear idea of what Mr. Trump would say about trade.” Trump’s announcement supposedly “blindsided” his aides.

Quote:
Another WH econ adviser told me re the tariff announcement: “I don’t understand what we announced, I don’t know what the policy is.” https://t.co/7Jgiggjt0X

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) March 2, 2018

But how does one square that picture of Trump impulsively shocking the global economy during a temper tantrum with the fact that his buddy Carl Icahn dumped $31 million in steel-related holdings a week earlier? We suppose it’s possible that Icahn, who had previously secured a White House advisory gig for the sole purpose of getting an obscure fuel standard that hurt his businesses changed – a matter that may have violated insider trading laws – knew that Trump was going off the deep end and simply made a bet that he’d impose new tariffs, but Occam’s razor says that he knew exactly what was coming and profited handsomely from it.

The White House may have become a reality TV show, with crazy staffers coming and going at a dizzying pace and Strawberry Selassie lurching from one conflict to the next, but keep in mind that there are competent people somewhere in this regime. The Heritage Foundation announced this week that “the Trump administration has already implemented nearly two-thirds of the 334 agenda items” the right-wing think tank called for, “a pace faster than former President Reagan,” according to The Washington Examiner. And according to a report in The Intercept, “the network of wealthy donors led by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch have taken credit for a laundry list of policy achievements extracted from the Trump administration and their allies in Congress.” Make no mistake: amid all the chaos, people are getting things done. Bad things, but things nonetheless.

And of course, there’s the grifting. Trump’s sycophantic minions are making fortunes large and small off his presidency. His appointees, ostensibly chosen to “drain the swamp,” are living high on the hog at tax-payers’ expense. It’s the nature of the regime: one of New York’s sleaziest real estate developers and his sordid spawn have brought with them exactly the kinds of chiselers and charlatans that you might expect.

The story that probably should have dominated the headlines this week was The Intercept’s report that Jared Kushner’s heavily indebted real estate firm “made a direct pitch to Qatar’s minister of finance in April 2017 in an attempt to secure investment in a critically distressed asset in the company’s portfolio,” and just weeks after the Qataris said no deal, “Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. Kushner, according to reports at the time, subsequently undermined efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff.” That was followed by NBC reporting that “federal investigators are scrutinizing whether any of Jared Kushner’s business discussions with foreigners during the presidential transition later shaped White House policies in ways designed to either benefit or retaliate against those he spoke with.”

This week, we’re going to do something a little different at What Fresh Hell?: We’re going to ignore the regulatory shenanigans and the unhinged things Trump’s clownish appointees have done and said, and focus exclusively on one week’s worth of corruption. Because in the end, it’s really all one giant grift.

******

Item: HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s $31,000 dining set certainly didn’t fly under the radar. It was big news. But we think the fact that Helen Foster, a senior HUD official, was “demoted and replaced with a Donald Trump appointee” for “refusing to break the law by funding an expensive redecoration of Ben Carson’s office.” According to The Guardian, Foster’s crime was pointing out that the agency can only legally spend up to $5,000 on renovations.

Quote:
I got my desk chair for $79 at Officemax. It’s pretty decent.

“Helen Foster said she was told ‘$5,000 will not even buy a decent chair’ after informing her bosses that this was the legal price limit for improvements to Carson’s suite of offices.” https://t.co/P7YAJu9KpT

— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) March 1, 2018

And here’s the larger story, also via The Guardian:

Quote:
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud) has agreed to spend $165,000 on “lounge furniture” for its Washington headquarters, in addition to a $31,000 dining set purchased for housing secretary Ben Carson’s office.

The revelations on Tuesday of Carson’s expensive decor spending come as Donald Trump’s administration has proposed a cut of $6.8bn to Hud’s annual budget, or roughly 14% of its total spending, which would lead to reductions in programs aimed at poor and homeless Americans.

******

Item: Brad Parscale, “the political strategist and online guru who was named President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Tuesday[,] has a close financial relationship with a penny-stock firm with a questionable history that includes longstanding ties to a convicted fraudster.” The AP has more.

******

Item: “Trump ally” Elliott Broidy, “a venture capitalist and prominent Republican fundraiser,” was “in talks to collect up to $75 million” if he could convince the Justice Department to drop “its investigation into the theft of billions of dollars from a Malaysian development fund.”

******

Item: “Internal Interior Department emails and memos” obtained by The New York Times “show the central role that concerns over gaining access to coal reserves played in the decision by the Trump administration to shrink the size of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by about 47 percent, to just over 1 million acres.

Quote:
From the start of the Interior Department review process, agency officials directed staff to figure out how much coal, oil and natural gas — as well as grass for cattle grazing and timber — had been put essentially off limits, or made harder to access, by the decision to designate the areas as national monuments.

******

Item: “A tiny Nebraska startup” that “lists just one employee in its Omaha office” was “awarded the first border wall construction project under President Donald Trump.” It is, according to Talking-Points Memo, “the offshoot of a construction firm that was sued repeatedly for failing to pay subcontractors and accused in a 2016 government audit of shady billing practices.”

******

Item: What Fresh Hell?

Quote:
i suppose “an actual barrel of hazardous waste” turned down the offer first https://t.co/w09rUwwN15

— Seth D. Michaels (@sethdmichaels) March 2, 2018

******

Item: The New York Times reported that Melania Trump “has parted ways with an adviser after news about the adviser’s firm reaping $26 million in payments to help plan President Trump’s inauguration. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who has been friends with Mrs. Trump for years, had been working on a contract basis as an unpaid senior adviser to the office of the first lady.”

Wolkoff established the firm “only weeks before the inauguration,” and pulled in $26 million bucks, which really stretches the definition of “unpaid advisor.”

Meanwhile, people are wondering how Melania, a mid-level fashion model, secured an “Einstein visa” that’s usually “reserved for people with ‘extraordinary ability.’” (Get your mind out of the gutter!) Mary Jordan reports for The Washington Post that Melania’s “ability to secure her green card not only set her on the path to U.S. citizenship, but put her in the position to sponsor the legal residency of her parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs… President Trump has proposed ending the sponsorship of relatives such as parents, slamming as ‘chain migration’ the decades-long ability of U.S. citizens to assist relatives in obtaining legal residency.” Oh well.

******

Item: The National Labor Relations Board vacated one of its most important pro-management rulings last year after the agency’s inspector general found that a Trump appointee, William Emanuel had a conflict of interest in the case. Turns out he had represented companies that gained directly from the ruling. “This is, so far as I’m aware, unprecedented,” former NLRB chair William Gould IV, a professor emeritus at Stanford’s law school, told Bloomberg. “There is no decision on a matter of such high import that has been vacated based upon a breach of conflict-of-interest rules.”

******

Item: Finally, “the president’s personal pilot is on the administration’s short list to head the Federal Aviation Administration,” according to Axios. “One industry insider equated this to the Seinfeld episode when Cosmo Kramer used his golf caddy as a jury consultant.”

That’s just one week’s worth of grifting. And there have been similar reports every other week of Persimmon Perone’s ridiculous shitshow of a presidency.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/fresh-hell-trumpism-just-massive-grift-edition/


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PostPosted: 03/10/18 11:57 am • # 14 
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More to add to our "lest we forget" collection ~ :ey ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell?: Time to build your TrumpⓇ fallout shelter edition
Joshua Holland / 10 Mar 2018 at 11:47 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Big news for the Korean Peninsula: Two notoriously thin-skinned authoritarian leaders who have been trading childish insults and comparing the size of their respective nuclear buttons for the past year will meet in a hastily arranged summit in a couple of months. A resolution to a decades-long conflict is all-but-inevitable, and Trump’s already making space in his curio cabinet for the Nobel Peace Prize. Or maybe not – the White House has issued three contradictory statements about whether they’ll put any preconditions on the proposed tete-a-tete.

The two men were both born of privilege and trained in the family business. Hair-Club Habyarimana learned the art of New York real estate scams – hiring undocumented workers, stiffing contractors, leaving investors holding the bag on bad deals. He learned about licensing the family name to gaudy buildings and shoddy products. Kim Jong Un, on the other hand, was trained in palace intrigue, the ruthless exercise of state power and international affairs.

Last September, The Washington Post reported that “North Korean government officials have been quietly trying to arrange talks with Republican-linked analysts in Washington, in an apparent attempt to make sense of President Trump.” On the other side of the table will be Trump, who may have watched some episodes of M*A*S*H in the 1970s and now refuses to take counsel from anyone other than Jivanka and the hosts of Fox and Friends. Let’s keep in mind that he’s also overseen an unprecedented exodus of career foreign service officers from the State Department.

We’ll happily acknowledge that any move toward détente is an improvement over the course that we’ve been on, but we suspect that it won’t end well. The most likely scenario – if there is a meeting between these venal narcissists – is that Kim Jong Un will flatter Trump’s ego, and perhaps halt nuclear weapons testing if he’s satisfied they work, and Trump will give up the farm for it. (The Pentagon announced this week that they’ll give Trump the stupid military parade he’s been pining for, but it won’t feature tanks – they’d damage DC’s infrastructure. We imagine Kim Jong Un won’t be similarly concerned.)

This is what North Korean leaders have wanted for the past 70 years: a presidential summit that puts them on equal footing with the US. It’ll be an unparalleled propaganda coup for Kim Jong Un — the image of him shaking hands with a smiling American president will be played on a loop by North Korean state media forever.

Quote:
He called in sick and is now building a bunker behind his house. https://t.co/CsuSNE3Ae7

— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) March 10, 2018

But again, maybe it won’t happen. In a week that began with former Trump aide Sam Nunberg melting down on national TV, this North Korean summit may yet come to nothing. If so, it’ll prove to be the shiniest object yet.

That said, here are a few stories you may have missed amid all the ruckus.

******

“As Alabama’s junior senator, Jeff Sessions was far more involved than previously known in helping two of his top contributors derail a federal environmental cleanup effort,” report Russ Choma and Nick Schwellenback for Mother Jones. “The stalled cleanup is now at the center of a federal bribery case spearheaded by the Justice Department, posing a serious conflict of interest for Sessions, who is now attorney general.”

Maybe he’ll recuse himself from the matter as he did with the Russia investigation. We kid.

******

Speaking of the Justice Department, this week it sided with an anti-vaxxer in Wisconsin who sued her employer for forcing her to get a flu shot despite her deeply held belief that the Bible told her not to put “certain substances” into her “Holy Temple,” according to Elie Mystal at Above the Law.

Here’s the thing: the woman, one Barnell Williams, works in a county-run nursing home. As Mystal points out, “In terms of natural predators for old people, the flu is right up there with step-ladders and the QVC channel.” And here’s another thing: Despite the obvious health hazard, the nursing home actually has a process in place for workers who object to vaccinations – they just need to get a note from a clergy member stating that it goes against their religion, which Williams refused to provide.

It should be a clear-cut case. We wouldn’t let devout Amish people work as bus-drivers if their conscience didn’t allow them to drive. But under Sessions, “anywhere somebody’s deeply held religious belief is in the position to hurt or humiliate others, the United States Department of Justice is there to provide legal cover.”

******

And speaking of the environment, EPA honcho Scott Pruitt, the high-flying climate-change denier who, as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, repeatedly sued the agency he now heads, wanted to troll America by “stag[ing] public debates challenging climate change science.”

Lisa Friedman and Julie Hirschfeld Davis report for the WaPo that “the idea of publicly critiquing climate change on the national stage has been a notable theme for Scott Pruitt…. For nearly a year he has championed the notion of holding military-style exercises known as red team, blue team debates, possibly to be broadcast live, to question the validity of climate change.”

Soon-to-be-former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly put the kibosh on the plan. Whether the decision made Trump sad is as yet unknown.

******

Juliet Eilpern and Brady Dennis report for the WaPo that the head of Pruitt’s security team, Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta, moonlights “as a principal of Rockville-based Sequoia Security Group,” and he “advised EPA officials to hire a member of the management team at Sequoia” to sweep Pruitt’s office for bugs.

******

Pruitt was also one of four Cabinet members who were “scolded” by White House lawyers last week at John Kelly’s request, according to CNN. Cristina Alesci reported that “internal watchdogs have launched at least nine audits, reviews or investigations across several Cabinet agencies, and stories about first-class travel, expensive office furniture, and internal strife have become commonplace.”

The other officials who received a stern talking-to were Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin.

It gets better:

Quote:
During the meetings, the White House officials asked agencies to flag any possible problems, including ongoing investigations or audits.

But shortly after the session with Zinke, CNN published a report with several examples that ethics watchdogs say raise questions about whether Zinke is misusing his travel privileges, despite receiving approval from the department’s lawyer and ethics officer.

The White House was disappointed after meeting with Zinke because his agency failed to mention the story, of which Interior was aware and quoted a department spokesperson on the record…

******

ProPublica has put together a valuable database of almost 2,500 Trump political appointees. In a story that we think should have gotten far more attention than it did, they report:

Quote:
At least 187 Trump political appointees have been federal lobbyists, and despite President Trump’s campaign pledge to “drain the swamp,” many are now overseeing the industries they once lobbied on behalf of. We’ve also discovered ethics waivers that allow Trump staffers to work on subjects in which they have financial conflicts of interest. In addition, at least 254 appointees affiliated with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and at least 125 staffers from prominent conservative think tanks are now working in the federal government, many of whom are on teams to repeal Obama-era regulations.

******

While most swamps only go up to ten, this one actually goes to 11.

The AP reports that “the former CEO of a payday lending company that had been under investigation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has asked to be considered for the top job at the watchdog agency.”

And Allied Progress, a progressive watchdog group, obtained a series of emails “that paints the picture of a cozy relationship between [CFPB interim boss Mick] Mulvaney and [Janet Lewis Matricciani,] the former head of World Acceptance Corporation, a predatory lender that showered him with thousands of dollars in campaign cash.”

******

For reasons that are elusive – perhaps it’s simply because New York and New Jersey are blue states that voted against Trump by large margins — Sunkist Stalin has threatened to veto any spending bill that funds a much needed tunnel project between the two states.

Meanwhile…

Quote:
INTERESTING: The Federal Government is helping build a ferry service from NYC to Jared Kushner’s resort in Long Branch [New Jersey]. This is expected to increase the value of Kushner’s property by up to 50%.

The Mafia Family strikes again!

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) March 9, 2018

Relatedly, Kayleigh McEnany, CNN’s relentlessly perky Trump surrogate, wrote a piece this week titled, “Jared Kushner is quietly tackling Washington’s swamp.” And we laughed so hard.

******

Finally, in what may be further evidence that the president is in fact a 4chan troll, we get this Fresh Hell via the Tampa Bay Times: “Trump blocks access to puppy mill inspections as Florida weighs dog store legislation.”

We will just note here that Donald Trump is the first president in 130 years to not have a First Dog.

Quote:
Never trust a man who doesn’t like dogs. pic.twitter.com/DmqmRJOPFK

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) May 29, 2017

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/fresh-hell-time-build-trump%e2%93%87-fallout-shelter-edition/


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PostPosted: 03/10/18 12:38 pm • # 15 
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Quote:
We will just note here that Donald Trump is the first president in 130 years to not have a First Dog.


Only temp ones who get $130,000.00 a pop.


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PostPosted: 03/17/18 3:46 pm • # 16 
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And still more for our "lest we forget" collection ~ :ey ~ FTR, I agree that every week of the DiC regime feels chaotic, but that this one definitely qualifies as "more manic" ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? Chaos Week is going swimmingly for Donald Trump edition
Joshua Holland / 17 Mar 2018 at 15:46 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Forget Infrastructure Week, this was Chaos Week for the Trump regime. OK, every week is, but this one seemed more manic, as Trump is reportedly becoming comfortable with his role as Great Leader, and is having a blast lashing out at his confused and perhaps traumatized minions. “Never in the 14 months of the Trump White House has there been such a mood of acute anxiety from within the West Wing,” reported Axios. “Nobody knows what exactly is happening, who’s about to be fired, or which staffer will next be frogmarched out the door by security for some shadowy clearance issue.”

This was, of course, capped off with the firing of former FBI Assistant Director Andrew McCabe just a day before he was set to retire, which could mean he loses his pension. One would think that a White House that wanted the Russia story to go away wouldn’t constantly push it front and center, but that’s where we are.

“Integrity is our brand,” said comedic genius Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions, who falsely testified under oath that he “did not have communications with the Russians” and lied on his application for a security clearance, says McCabe was fired because he “lacked candor multiple times.”

This isn’t a shiny object or a mere distraction; it’s a dangerous example of politicizing the federal bureaucracy. Patriots should be prepared to take action if, as seems increasingly likely, Trump moves to shut down Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Kremlingate probe. MoveOn.org and its allied groups have a site, Nobody Is Above the Law, with rapid response materials for that scenario. Check it out.

And let’s see what fresh Hell may gotten lost in the madness this week.

******

Speaking of Jefferson Beauregard, Jeff Hauser reported for Slate that “Jeff Sessions is abusing a little-used statute in an unprecedented way that is leading to an end run around the Senate’s advise and consent authority with respect to U.S. attorneys. Given what we know about the ongoing investigations into the president and Trump’s authoritarian instincts, this is a frightening and dangerous development.”

******

Among the 17 prosecutors Sessions has appointed without Senate confirmation are three who will make investigative and prosecutorial decisions in NY. One of them, Geoffrey Berman, is presiding over New York’s Southern district. While the district has a “history of exerting its independence from presidential administrations,” according to Law.com, Berman is a former colleague of Rudy Giuliani, “a high-profile ally of President Donald Trump.”

This may prove to be a consequential appointment, as Bloomberg’s Caleb Melby reported this week that, “two months after Jared Kushner joined the White House as a senior adviser, his family firm sold a stake in a Brooklyn building to a unit of a company whose largest shareholder is the government of Japan…

“Questions have been raised repeatedly whether Kushner, whose family business has been in search of overseas investors, might pursue a personal agenda while helping run U.S. policy. This is the first known deal with a government-affiliated firm since he entered the White House.”

Relatedly, The New York Times reported this week that “Jared Kushner’s family company recently began construction on an oceanfront development in this Jersey Shore city, a project that has the strong backing of local officials, who agreed to support it with $20 million in bonds.”

Quote:
But unknown to Long Branch officials, the Kushners have been in talks to team up with another family-run company that has an even bigger presence in the White House: the Trump Organization.

The long-running talks blur the line between family, business and politics in ways that lack precedent: Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, retain financial interests in their family businesses. The Trump Organization’s outside ethics adviser has raised questions about a potential deal — one reason the two-year-long discussions have not been completed.

******

Speaking of the swamp, “Donald Trump Jr. has a previously undisclosed business relationship with a longtime hunting buddy who helped raise millions of dollars for his father’s 2016 presidential campaign and has had special access to top government officials since the election,” according to the Associated Press.

******

And speaking of hunting buddies, the AP also reported that “a new U.S. advisory board created to help rewrite federal rules for importing the heads and hides of African elephants, lions and rhinos is stacked with trophy hunters, including some members with direct ties to President Donald Trump’s family.”

Quote:
Trump’s new International Wildlife Conservation Council is dominated by group who’s most famous member killed Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe https://t.co/kh9v5c1SX6

— Stephanie Mencimer (@smencimer) March 16, 2018

******

They really seem to have a disdain for animals. We’ve mentioned that Pineapple Pinochet is the first POTUS in 130 years not to have a first Pooch. And now this fresh Hell, via The Hill…

Quote:
The Trump administration has decided to withdraw an Obama-era rule that would have set new standards for the way animals should be treated if their meat is going to be sold as “certified organic.”

Finalized under the Obama administration in April 2016, the rule largely dictated how producers and handlers participating in the National Organic Program are required to treat livestock and poultry to ensure their wellbeing.

The rule stipulated, for example, that poultry must be housed in spaces that are big enough for the birds to move freely, stretch their wings, stand normally and engage in natural behaviors. Livestock, meanwhile, must be provided access to an outdoor space year round.

******

Speaking of chattel, did you catch that 18 Republican members of Congress came out in favor of slavery this week? Does that sound too crazy? Is there another, more charitable way to interpret this?

Quote:
Private-prison companies that force undocumented immigrant detainees to work for little or no money have a powerful new group of advocates: Eighteen members of Congress.

The members, all Republicans, sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Department of Labor, calling for them to help private-prison company GEO Group defend itself in lawsuits by former detainees.

Betsy Woodruff has more on that at The Daily Beast.

******

This item from The Huffington Post probably should have gotten more attention given the way the regime responded at the time to a domestic terror attack targeting Muslims…

Quote:
An Illinois contractor bidding to build President Donald Trump’s wall on the Mexican border was among three men arrested Tuesday in connection with the bombing of a mosque in Minnesota and the attempted bombing of a women’s health clinic in Illinois.

Michael B. Hari, 47, was arrested and charged Tuesday in federal court in lllinois with arson and possession of machine guns.

Remember how Seb Gorka said Trump hadn’t condemned the bombing of a Minnesota mosque because it could have been left-wing plot? Turns out it was a white guy who wants to build Trump’s border wall and get Muslims “out of the country” https://t.co/k4kD0bONqQ pic.twitter.com/c6floNSv6G

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) March 15, 2018

******

Experts on the subject say we shouldn’t worry about creeping totalitarianism or jackbooted thugs disappearing people in the middle of the night because modern authoritarian governments find that allowing some degree of dissent lets the population blow off steam. They find it easier to manage a country when they permit a veneer of democracy to continue – as long as they control the outcome of elections, that is. They say that in countries like Turkey, Russia or the Philippines, life seems pretty normal for most people. It’s the proverbial frog in the pot – you may not notice that you’ve lost a pluralistic, liberal democracy until you have.

So let’s take careful note of this story from Annie Linskey at The Boston Globe…

Quote:
President Trump would be able to dispatch Secret Service agents to polling places nationwide during a federal election, a vast expansion of executive authority, if a provision in a Homeland Security reauthorization bill remains intact.

The rider has prompted outrage from more than a dozen top elections officials around the country, including Secretary of State William F. Galvin of Massachusetts, a Democrat, who says he is worried that it could be used to intimidate voters and said there is “no basis” for providing Trump with this new authority.

The Senate did not include a similar provision in its version, so we’ll have to watch how this shakes out when the two versions are reconciled.

******

You probably heard about the mayhem at a Trump branded residential hotel in Panama. Investors appear to have staged a coup of sorts, declaring that the Trump Organization had failed to live up to its contract to manage the joint and keep it occupied – Trump’s brand is a stinking pile of dogshit in Latin America, as you might imagine – and physically removing its staff. There were assaults, people brandished guns, the cops made multiple visits to the property – it was a big mess.

Well, Betsy Woodruff reported this week for The Daily Beast that while the property was hemorrhaging cash, “Pentagon officials spent more than $17,000 at the Trump Ocean Club hotel in Panama in the first half of 2017, according to documents obtained by a government watchdog group. The money was spent to cover general lodging expenses, according to the documents. It isn’t clear why.”

That was just a fraction of the $140,000 the DoD spent at Trump properties in the first eight months of his presidency, according to CNN.

******

A few stories from the Only the Best People file…

Naved Jafry, who got a gig as a senior advisor to HUD, “said he was a multimillionaire – an international property developer with a plan to fix America’s cities through radical privatization,” reported The Guardian. “He felt that Donald Trump’s administration was where he was meant to work.” Turns out he’s just another grafter who resigned this week after The Guardian “asked him to explain multiple allegations of fraud as well as exaggerations in his biography.”

Andrew Kaczynski reported for CNN that Ken Isaacs, Trump’s “pick to head the United Nations organization that coordinates assistance to migrants worldwide regularly pushed anti-Muslim sentiment, including claims that Muslims were trying to impose Sharia law in the US.”

Kaczynski, along with Nathan McDermott, also reported this week that “the new advocacy director at a nonprofit group aligned with President Donald Trump shared an N-word laden post written by someone else on Facebook in December 2014.” Carl Higbie, who resigned from Americorps in January after an earlier report found that he had a history of saying wildly offensive things about Muslims and people of color, appears to have landed on his feet in Trumpworld.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/fresh-hell-chaos-week-going-swimmingly-donald-trump-edition/


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PostPosted: 03/24/18 12:36 pm • # 17 
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And still more for our "lest we forget" collection ~ :ey ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What fresh hell? Multiple puppeteers are pulling Trump’s strings edition
Joshua Holland / 24 Mar 2018 at 12:07 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

This week was… different. We usually keep tabs on minor outrages that didn’t get the attention they deserve because everyone was focused on the reality TV show that is the Trump regime, but this week, the tumult came at us so fast that major stories – stories that might ordinarily have become become high-profile scandals – were shoved off of the front pages by other reports of equal or perhaps even greater import.

The top story this week was Trump’s rapid-fire purge of a number of regime officials who had been described at various points as the “only adults in the room” – National Security Advisor HR McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, economic advisor Gary Cohn and Trump attorney John Dowd. It’s not that these were great people – Tillerson’s been a monumental disaster at State – what’s frightening is that they’re all being replaced with belligerent right-wing sycophants (or “psychophants”) Trump saw on cable TV, and they will encourage Trump’s worst proclivities. It’s not hyperbolic to suggest that with Mike Pompeo heading the CIA and John Bolton steering defense policy in the White House, the likelihood of us getting into a disastrous shooting war as a distraction from Trump’s domestic scandals has increased significantly.

Meanwhile, one could argue that the most significant story this week was a series of reports suggesting that while we were all wondering what the Kremlin may have on Trump to make him so compliant, it appears that the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE are also bending the regime to their will. It turns out that a seemingly inexplicable reversal on a long-standing US position in the Middle East was likely either an act of revenge against a longstanding ally for refusing to bail out the Kushner family’s deeply indebted real estate company or a result of a flood of money to Trump world coming in from deep-pocketed autocratic leaders in the Persian Gulf.

The short-version: Qatar is a key ally, and home to Al Udeid Air Base, where our Central Command and thousands of US military personnel are headquartered. It’s an important base for our endless campaigns in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last year, a diplomatic clash resulted in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Sunni-led countries to enact a blockade of Qatar, which the US vehemently opposed until Trump suddenly decided that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, condemned Qatar as a sponsor of terrorism and threw his regime’s support behind the blockade. That left observers scratching their heads.

But then The Washington Post reported that Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, confirmed earlier reports that he had sought funding from the Qataris shortly before Trump’s about face on the blockade. He had anticipated that a deal would be finalized to provide desperately needed financing to his company and was reportedly “crushed” when he learned that the Qataris wouldn’t bail out the Kushner family company. Then, “after the financing effort failed, Jared Kushner took a sharp turn against Qatar diplomatically, supporting a crushing economic blockade against the country,” reported The Intercept.

Then The New York Times revealed that George Nader, a key witness in the Mueller probe, “worked for more than a year to turn a top Trump fundraiser into an instrument of influence at the White House for the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.” Those efforts included funneling tens of millions of dollars in lucrative contracts to said top Trump (and RNC) fundraiser.

In either scenario, the most powerful country in the world turned on a crucially important ally for the regime’s personal enrichment or as an act of revenge for not getting a sweetheart deal. Either way, it spells corruption.

The Intercept also reported that Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi’s de facto ruler, told UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed that he had Jared Kushner “in his pocket.” (What would the MAGA crowd think of their “America first” hero selling out to a bunch of oil-rich Mooslims? It’s probably good for their mental health they don’t believe anything that isn’t reported by Fox.)

The longer version, if you have some time, is really worth exploring in this Rachel Maddow segment. It’s a devastating indictment.

And with that, let’s move on to some smaller indignities you may have missed this week…

******

Speaking of foreign emoluments, Anjali Kamat wrote a must-read exposé for The Investigative Fund and The New Republic about “how Trump’s business partnerships in India are creating conflicts of interest in the White House and corrupting the presidency.”

And Annie Gowan reported for The Washington Post that one of Trump’s business Indian partners cited in Kamat’s piece “has been accused of defrauding its foreign investors of at least $147 million.”

******

Here’s a frightening example of politicizing the bureaucracy: The State Department has a “dissent channel,” where career foreign service officers can register disagreement with department policy. But Alice Ollstein reports for TPM that “two State Department officials involved in an effort to sideline a civil servant suspected of disloyalty to the President” monitor the supposedly protected communications. This “gives them access to the names of U.S. diplomats and other agency employees who openly disagree with administration policy — information that independent watchdogs and members of Congress fear could be used in the effort to marginalize those deemed insufficiently loyal.”

******

Tangentially related, CNN reports that “whistleblowers have come forward to allege a plot to remove the current CEO of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency which controls US-funded media abroad, and push the agency’s journalism toward a viewpoint more favorable with the Trump administration.”

******

Secretary of Why We Need Education Betsy DeVos is in hot water for allegedly withholding key details of a sweeping agency “reform” plan that, according to Erica Green at The New York Times, includes “the consolidation of a number of administrative offices, cutting the number of regional offices in the Office for Civil Rights and acquiring several programs run by the Department of Labor.”

DeVos is also trying to impose what her staff calls an “illegal collective bargaining agreement.” “Union leaders believe the contract gutted all protections that would allow its members to defend themselves in the department’s overhaul,” writes Green.

******

We all know that red states tend to have higher teen pregnancy rates than blue states, and that’s largely due to their opposition to comprehensive sex ed — the idea being that if you don’t teach teens about sex, they certainly won’t figure it out on their own. Hormones? Never heard of them.

Now NBC reports that “the Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of a federal program to prevent teen pregnancy last year was directed by political appointees over the objections of career experts in the Department of Health and Human Services.”

Quote:
[Emails obtained by NBC show that] three appointees with strict pro-abstinence beliefs — including Valerie Huber, the then-chief of staff for the department’s Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health — guided the process to end a program many medical professionals credit with helping to bring the nation’s teen pregnancy rate to an all-time low.

We should note that 42 percent of unwanted pregnancies end in abortion, but whatever.

******

Relatedly, “an official appointed by President Donald Trump said during a closed-door United Nations meeting that the ‘US is a pro-life country,’ despite the fact both the law and public opinion support a woman’s right to access legal and safe abortion.” More at The Independent.

******

The Huffington Post found that two Trump political appointees – one a high-ranking official at Housing and Urban Development – joined the regime from Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the center of the Facebook data theft scandal. One is under investigation for “collecting private data from Facebook,” and the other omitted any reference to the company in his official bio. An innocent oversight, no doubt.

******

Tying some prominent headlines together, The New York Times reported that “the political action committee founded by John R. Bolton, President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica, which it hired specifically to develop psychological profiles of voters with data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook profiles.”

And Lee Fang reports for The Intercept that our incoming head of the NSC “has a long association with a group infamous for its role in publishing ‘fake news’ and spreading hate about Muslims.”

Quote:
[John] Bolton wears many hats… one role that has received relatively little scrutiny is his work as chair of the Gatestone Institute, a nonprofit that focuses largely on publishing original commentary and news related to the supposed threat that Islam poses to Western society. He has served in that role since 2013. (Bolton did not respond to an email seeking comment.)

A steady drum beat of vitriol is visible on the Gatestone website on almost any given day.

******

The least surprising news last week was the House Intelligence Committee releasing its final report on Kremlingate. Its conclusion could be accurately summarized as NO PUPPET! YOU’RE THE PUPPET!

But NBC reported this week that a study by the Center for American Progress’s Moscow Project found that “the House committee charged with investigating Russian involvement in the 2016 election obtained either no or incomplete information about 81 percent of the known contacts between Trump officials and Russians, or groups and individuals with strong Russia ties like Wikileaks.”

******

Finally, following up on a couple of stories we’ve discussed in the past, Politico reported that “Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his wife took a security detail on their vacation to Greece and Turkey last year;… one watchdog group said could be a ‘questionable’ use of taxpayer resources.” And according to The Daily Beast, Re. Claudia Tenney, a Republican from New York, explained to a radio show host why Ben Carson shouldn’t be held responsible for ordering that $31,000 dining set: “Somebody in the Deep State, it was not one of his people apparently, ordered a table, like a conference room table or whatever it was for a room…And that’s what the cost was.”

Poor Ben Carson – just another victim of the perfidious Derp State.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/03/fresh-hell-multiple-puppeteers-pulling-trumps-strings-edition/


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What Fresh Hell?: De-Trumpifying the federal government edition
Joshua Holland / 07 Apr 2018 at 15:35 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and threats of nuclear annihilation coming out of the current White House.

In 2003, the Bush administration hurriedly and haphazardly implemented a policy of “de-Baathification” in Iraq. Modeled on the de-Nazification program undertaken by the Allied Powers in Germany after World War II, it proved to be an utter disaster. With piss-poor planning and not much insight into Iraqi society, they unceremoniously fired everyone who had worked for the Sunni-dominated Iraqi government and permanently barred them from future work in the public sector. That included the country’s entire security apparatus, and those heavily armed, highly trained and newly unemployed officers and troops would go on to form the backbone of the Iraqi resistance, and later the leadership of the Islamic State.

Fortunately, our circumstances bear little resemblance to that of post-invasion Iraq. The incompetence and corruption that plagues this regime can be excised from within – no foreign intervention is necessary as long as we can still vote. If and when our long national nightmare comes to an end, a massive program of de-Trumpification will be required to excise the ugly strain of white ethno-nationalism that’s infiltrated the federal government. And we really have to ditch the grifters that Trump’s brought into the government with him.

The Washington Post reported last week that “an obscure White House office responsible for recruiting and vetting thousands of political appointees has suffered from inexperience and a shortage of staff, hobbling the Trump administration’s efforts to place qualified people in key posts across government.” And it really shows.

EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s performance hasn’t flown under the radar – it’s been front and center in the past couple of weeks. But it’s worth recapping some of the lowlights of his 15 months in office. We learned last year that a banker who was banned from the financial sector for life lent Pruitt almost $1 million when Pruitt was an Oklahoma state senator earning a salary of under $40k per year – he used $605,000 to buy a house in a gated community – and then that banker landed a cushy job under Pruitt at EPA. We know Pruitt has racked up unprecedented costs for first-class travel, claiming that he has to do so for security reasons. Yet, according to the Associated Press, “on weekend trips home for Sooners football games, when taxpayers weren’t paying for his ticket, the EPA official said Pruitt flew coach.” We know, via Maplight, that “as an Oklahoma politician, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt received $181,000 in political contributions from donors who lobbied the EPA last year.”

Pruitt defied the Trump White House to give “substantial pay raises” to “two of his closest aides,” according to The Atlantic, even as The New York Times reported that “at least five officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, four of them high-ranking, were reassigned or demoted, or requested new jobs in the past year after they raised concerns about the spending and management of the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt.”

And then there’s the apartment he was “renting” from a couple of DC lobbyists for $50 per night. It turns out that the cut-rate condo “also served as a hub for Republican lawmakers hoping to raise money for their congressional campaigns.” It was reportedly kept vacant and available for Pruitt and his fellow con artists when he wasn’t paying well below market rate for it, but he was nevertheless “slow to pay the rent on his $50-per-night,” according to Politico, “forcing his lobbyist landlord to pester him for payment.” Politico also reported that Pruitt “didn’t leave when his lease ended,” and the lobbyist couple “became so frustrated by their lingering tenant that they eventually pushed him out and changed their locks.”

Quote:
DC government issues citation to owner of apartment Scott Pruitt rented because they did not have proper license to rent the unit. Possible fine of $2,034

— Mark Segraves (@SegravesNBC4) April 5, 2018

Conservatives have been fiercely defending Pruitt. They cite the agency’s top ethics official, who said that Pruitt’s sweetheart deal “determined that Pruitt’s rental was within federal ethics regulations regarding gifts, which despite being issued after the fact seemed to clear Pruitt of wrongdoing,” according to CNN, but that very same EPA watchdog now says he didn’t have all the facts when he issued that guidance.

Meanwhile, Pruitt’s tenure has been marked by a notable disdain for science and fact-driven policy, and the appointment of a number of senior officials who have themselves been responsible for various degrees of environmental destruction in their past lives in industries the agency is supposed to regulate.

And here’s the ultimate Scott Pruitt story – one that may encapsulate the Trump era better than any other. Hiroko Tabuchi and Lisa Friedman reported this week for The New York Times that a group of executives from the Big Three automakers went to the Trump regime and asked them to roll back Obama’s new fuel efficiency standards, but they got much more than they asked for. “Automakers are coming to terms with a startling reality: Be careful what you ask of President Trump, because he could go further than you expect,” report Tabuchi and Friedman.

Quote:
The E.P.A.’s plan, which is likely to be formally launched in coming days, is widely expected to loosen regulations on greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy well beyond what the automakers themselves had sought.

In addition, according to a White House official with knowledge of the plans, the Trump administration is expected to formally urge California — which has special authority under the Clean Air Act to set its own air pollution laws — to go along with the rollback, something the state has already said it won’t do. That could spark a legal battle between the federal government and California, potentially dividing the United States into two automobile markets, each with a different rule book governing pollution and gas mileage.

“We didn’t ask for that,” said Robert Bienenfeld, assistant vice president in charge of environment and energy strategy at American Honda Motor, in an interview Thursday evening. “The position we outlined was sensible.”

Pruitt is just one grifter among many. And, alarmingly, the guy who would replace him if he gets the boot may be worse, if that’s possible. “The leading contender,” writes Emily Atkin, “is Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, EPA bureaucrat, and aide to the snowball-wielding Senator Jim Inhofe.” She adds that “Wheeler’s confirmation would be great news for the country’s largest coal mining company, [Murray Energy,] which will have secured one of its longtime lobbyists in a position of power over environmental regulation.”

If the much anticipated Blue Wave arrives this fall, and Democrats retake the White House in 2020, there will be no room for “let’s look forward, not back.” The next normal president is going to need to purge these sleazebags before going on a real global apology tour.

Here are a few other outrages you may have missed this week…

******

“Trump’s Cabinet chiefs have come under fire for their spending over the past year,” writes Vice’s Gabrielle Bluestone, “but more unusual is the role that the spouses of agency directors have played in both approving controversial expenses or benefitting from them.”

Quote:
Five Cabinet spouses are now connected to major and controversial expenditures of public funds, including Housing and Urban Development secretary Dr. Ben Carson’s $31,000 table, which he claims was chosen and ordered by his wife; CIA officers doing work on behalf of director Mike Pompeo’s wife, and federal protection for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and his wife on their vacation to Turkey and Greece.

******

Not to be outdone by Scott Pruitt at EPA, “Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s appointee to oversee the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has given big pay raises to the deputies he has hired to help him run the bureau,” reports the Associated Press. Recall that Mulvaney requested zero dollars in appropriations for the agency’s ostensible mission of protecting consumers from predatory lending.

******

In his brief, stormy tenure at the State Department, Rex Tillerson showed that “small government” can be really, really expensive when it’s overseen by grifters. Tillerson vowed to “redesign” the agency to be leaner and meaner, but Politico reports that, “now that Tillerson has been fired, the vaunted ‘Redesign’ initiative he launched faces an uncertain future, but at least one clear legacy: around $12 million spent just for private consultants who in some cases charged the State Department more than $300 an hour.”

******

Under the guidance of Ben Carson, the Trump regime “is attempting to scale back federal efforts to enforce fair housing laws, freezing enforcement actions against local governments and businesses, including Facebook, while sidelining officials who have aggressively pursued civil rights cases,” reports Glenn Thrush for The New York Times.

******

It’s not just Housing and Urban Development. Interior Department chief Ryan Zinke, who has repeatedly told agency officials that “diversity isn’t important” and “I don’t care about diversity,” raised eyebrows when he reassigned a huge number of career staffers, a disproportionate share of whom were people of color. “Senior Democrats are demanding that Congress’s investigative arm probe whether Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s mass reassignment of senior career civil servants last summer violated federal anti-discrimination laws,” according to Alice Ollstein at TPM

Quote:
ICYMI: the Interior Dept. replaced most of their webpage listing “African American Resources” with a giant picture of Zinke in front of the MLK memorial https://t.co/ElkSyZFY00 pic.twitter.com/PxOe3UC4Pw

— Alice Ollstein (@AliceOllstein) March 28, 2018

******

Meanwhile, “The Federal Election Commission is asking a leadership PAC previously affiliated with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to account for more than $600,000 of previously unreported contributions from the first six months of 2017,” according to Politico. “For most of the period in question, the committee, SEAL PAC, was overseen by Vincent DeVito, who is now a top aide to Zinke at the Interior Department, and this is the second time federal regulators have looked into discrepancies during his tenure.”

******

Darryl Fears reports for the WaPo that Zinke tabbed Susan Combs, “A fierce opponent of the Endangered Species Act,” to serve as acting secretary for fish, wildlife and parks.

Quote:
Zinke has teamed with lawmakers in the House in a bid to strip the Endangered Species Act of much of its power. Several bills would remove the act’s provisions to save species from extinction regardless of the economic impact, rely on peer-reviewed scientific data and reward conservation organizations that successfully sue to protect animals by paying their court costs.

******

Finally, Katie Benner reported this week for The New York Times that Kevin Carwile, who was appointed to run the Justice Department’s death penalty unit despite the fact that “he had never prosecuted or sat through an entire capital punishment case,” was “removed from his post after The New York Times inquired about a series of grievances against him, including complaints that he promoted gender bias and a ‘sexualized environment.’ He fostered a culture of favoritism and sexism, according to court records, internal documents and interviews with more than a half-dozen current and former employees. In one episode, his deputy groped an administrative assistant at a bar in view of their colleagues, according to some who were present. Mr. Carwile asked the witnesses to keep it secret, one said.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/fresh-hell-de-trumpifying-federal-government-edition/


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PostPosted: 04/14/18 1:36 pm • # 19 
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What Fresh Hell?: Trump’s wagging the dog edition
Joshua Holland / 14 Apr 2018 at 13:16 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

We were hoping that Donald Trump would be get distracted by some petty grievance and forget to bomb Syria, but those hopes were dashed late Friday night when the US, backed by France and the UK, launched Operation Desert Stormy*, and attacked several targets in Syria.

CNN reports that “there is a view among Trump’s national security team that the President’s tweets earlier this week — including one threatening US missiles ‘will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart’’ — forced their hand and made some type of strikes inevitable… ‘Once the President tweeted what he tweeted we have to go forward,’ one senior administration official said.”

The one silver lining is that the attack followed a week when Trump was so unhinged, and it is such an obvious case of wag the dog – this was the eighth suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria since Trump took office – that at least so far we’ve been spared the punditry about how Trump is finally acting presidential by blowing up brown people in some far-flung shithole country. Another potential comfort is that since Trump doesn’t give a damn about Syrian deaths or war crimes, perhaps we won’t see the usual escalation and mission creep. Let him declare mission accomplished and be lauded as a great hero by the conservative press. If he follows through on his desire to withdraw US troops, it might all end with a really bad but not catastrophic outcome.

Quote:
Let’s be very clear what Trump’s actual policy preference is: He wants to make a big show in Syria—but still leave “others [to] deal with” the broken pieces of an extraordinarily brutal civil war, and then continue shutting out as many refugees as possible https://t.co/Ui0k8lfPmx pic.twitter.com/XnWW29lOZg

— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24) April 14, 2018

“Within 90 minutes” of the attacks, reports The New York Times, “the Russian ambassador to the United States warned of ‘consequences’ for the allied attacks.”

The incident, capping a week that was unusually chaotic even for this regime, highlights something that we’d always taken for granted with other presidents – even bad ones: the ability to tune out what the president is doing. The White House has traditionally hummed along in the background, occasionally making news that normal people going about their business took notice of. This president, with his bizarre twitter rants, narcissistic rages and the sleazy characters with which he’s surrounded himself, is different. He is a constant presence in our lives, omnipresent on our TVs and in our newspapers. He is unpredictable to the extreme, leaving us all to wonder what the fuck he’s going to pull next. For half of the population – and much of the world – he’s a key source of stress.

A couple of years ago, I spoke with Stephen Bezruchka, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington’s Department of Global Health. He said that the medical community is only starting to understand how stress affects our health. “Stress is our twenty-first century tobacco,” he told me. “As we understand more about stress biology and the impact it has on our lives, we are going to have to wage a campaign to reduce the amount of stress in our lives.” In one survey, people in the US reported the fourth highest levels of stress in the world, and that survey was conducted long before Trump came down that gilded escalator and started blathering on about Mexico sending us their rapists.

It would be difficult to quantify the potential public health effect caused by Trump-related stress, but it must be significant.

And consider this: Fox News viewers must have felt the same way – felt the same sense of dread – about Barack Obama, a thoughtful and cautious center-left president who served for eight years without (real) scandal. For them, the guy who was known as “No Drama Obama” was a foreign interloper – a crypto-Muslim, or perhaps a Satanist – who was bent on destroying America as we know it.

I’ll confess that I’ve experienced a kind of low-level background hum of anxiety since the 2016 election. But I am privileged. I’m white, and I’m in the middle class. I can only imagine the stress Trump, and Trumpism, is generating among immigrant communities and communities of color. We may well see an entire generation of marginalized people suffering from PTSD.

Trump may break from Republican orthodoxy on trade, and he prefers air-raid sirens to dog-whistles, but in his treatment of the poor and people of color, he’s simply turned it up to 11. Here at What Fresh Hell?, we’ve noted that Trump’s Department of Education, Housing and Human Services and DOJ have all scaled back or simply stopped enforcing anti-discrimination laws.

Let’s look at some of the Hell he’s unleashed – or attempted to unleash – on the powerless just this week.

*****

Paul Waldman reports for The Washington Post that Congressional Republicans are expanding work requirements for food stamps, which offer food-insecure households and average benefit of about $33 per week (and is already limited to a three-month period for most non-disabled working-age adults without children).

Waldman says that while “there’s an intuitive appeal to the idea” of imposing work requirements for public benefits, “once you take a close look at this idea, you quickly realize just how incredibly cruel it is, and how it is specifically designed to get as many people as possible kicked off food stamps, which means more Americans going hungry.”

*****

On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order “that will force recipients of federal assistance—benefits for housing, food, and healthcare—to demonstrate their employment to be eligible for aid. The move, widely anticipated by welfare agencies and eagerly awaited by conservatives, represents a significant change to the social safety net,” reports Kriston Capps for Citylab.

Quote:
“The Executive Order’s main policy prescription is to take basic assistance such as Medicaid, food assistance, and housing away from people who are not working or in job training or other employment programs,” said Sharon Parrot, senior fellow for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in an email. “But the evidence shows that such requirements have few long-term positive effects on employment and often result in families losing help they need to afford the basics.”

The Center just released a paper showing how work requirements could cause Medicaid enrollees to lose their healthcare entirely—even among enrollees who are employed.

The regime is also considering drug-testing food stamp recipients, a stupid and punitive policy that has been demonstrated again and again to cost far more than it saves by denying benefits to people who use drugs.

*****

All of this is happening against a backdrop of Trump toying with the idea of trying to undo the spending bill he just recently signed to claw back billions of dollars from “foreign aid and nondiscretionary domestic programs targeted in the president’s recent budget” – read “programs that help the poor” – according to Politico.

*****

Meanwhile, right-wing provocateur and former member of Trump’s disbanded Voter Suppression Voter Fraud Commission is “facing a federal lawsuit… over dubious allegations of massive voter fraud in Virginia,” according to Pema Levy at Mother Jones.

Quote:
Adams…is the president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), which in 2016 and 2017 published two reports alleging that thousands of “aliens” had committed felony voter fraud in Virginia and, in indexes to the reports, published personally identifiable information about those people. But many of Adams’ would-be criminals are in fact eligible voters, including all of the plaintiffs.

In the lawsuit, a local Virginia chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens and four individuals allege that Adams and his legal firm violated state defamation laws, as well as federal civil rights laws that protect against voter intimidation. The lawsuit alleges that the reports Adams published are a form of voter intimidation against the people named in the report, and put them at risk by publishing their personal information alongside the allegation that they are felons.

*****

Akilah Johnson reports for The Boston Globe that “the ACLU of Massachusetts announced Wednesday that it had sued the Trump administration, alleging the federal government is pulling a ‘bait and switch’ by detaining and threatening to detain undocumented immigrants who are following a legal path to seek permanent residency through their American spouses.”

Yes, we are throwing people who are going through the legal immigration process into detention.

*****

But why? Who could be in favor of such a brutal policy?

Quote:
Just filed: We’re suing @ICEgov for refusing to produce the contract they awarded private prison contractor GEO, apparently in return for GEO‘s illegal super PAC contributions. pic.twitter.com/YAKOGuSXxm

— Adav Noti (@AdavNoti) April 10, 2018

Oh.

*****

What will these people experience? The Intercept reported this week that it had obtained over 1,200 complaints of abuses by immigrants in detention. Alice Speri writes, “The sheer number of complaints — despite serious obstacles in the path of those filing them, as well as the patterns they reveal about mistreatment in facilities nationwide — suggest that sexual assault and harassment in immigration detention are not only widespread but systemic, and enabled by an agency that regularly fails to hold itself accountable.”

*****

Before Trump took office, a study found that only 14 percent of detained immigrants have access to legal counsel. According to the National Immigrant Justice Center, “detained immigrants are 11 times more likely to pursue relief when they have legal counsel and are twice as likely to obtain relief than detained immigrants without counsel.”

This week, Maria Sacchetti reported for WaPo that the DOJ, under Jeff Sessions, is “temporarily” halting “a program that offers legal assistance to detained foreign nationals facing deportation while it audits the program’s cost-effectiveness, a federal official said Tuesday.”

This is a program run by non-profits that doesn’t actually offer legal representation, but simply informs detained immigrants of their rights and refers them to free or low-cost counsel.

*****

Meanwhile, since the regime seized control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in a kind of coup and handed the reins to Wall Street’s boy, Mick Mulvaney, “it has not recorded a single enforcement action against banks, credit card companies, debt collectors or any finance companies whatsoever,” according to an analysis by the Associated Press. Predatory lenders basically have a green light to rip off the poor under Trump.

*****

That’s just one week of stories about Trumpublicans’ war on the poor and foreign-born. And stories like these have come along virtually every week of Trump’s presidency.

* Credit to Bill Maher for “Operation Desert Stormy”.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/fresh-hell-trumps-wagging-dog-edition/


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PostPosted: 04/22/18 6:31 am • # 20 
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What Fresh Hell?: Utterly shameless Republicans edition
Joshua Holland / 22 Apr 2018 at 07:03 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Sometimes, you just have to pause for a moment to appreciate Republicans’ utter shamelessness. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-A Pond in Kentucky), accused Democrats of “historic obstruction” this week, and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Can’t Escape Quickly Enough), had a big sad over the fact that that they’ve turned their obstruction machine against the oh so very well qualified Mike Pompeo, Trump’s pick to replace the Secretary of State that he had fired while the poor bastard was sitting on the pot.

Quote:
Mike Pompeo is a highly qualified nominee. We used to have a tradition here in the Senate of overwhelmingly confirming people to important positions. Unfortunately, we’re in an atmosphere now where that is just not the case. pic.twitter.com/9LRCCffr8z

— Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) April 19, 2018

There are 47 Muslim-majority countries in this world, many of them key allies in unstable parts of the world, and Pompeo, an infamous Islamophobe – as well as an anti-gay climate change denier and all-around crackpot – is by definition unqualified to deal with them with respect.

Pompeo has also had no trouble with the media and his colleagues falsely claiming that he was a war veteran for the past couple of decades. That includes 51 Republicans who mentioned his nonexistent combat history in a letter urging their colleagues to confirm him. If he were a Democrat, his nomination would have been withdrawn a nanosecond after this lie was exposed. “Stolen valor” and all that.

But that’s really the least of it. It’s the sheer chutzpah of accusing Democrats of engaging in “historic obstruction,” when Republicans blocked more of Obama’s nominees (86) in his first term alone than Congress had rejected under all 43 of the country’s previous presidents combined (82). And then blatantly stole a Supreme Court seat that would have given the high court its first liberal/moderate majority since 1971.

And then, having blocked an unprecedented number of Obama’s judicial nominees, McConnell is now scrambling to pack the courts with Trumpers. “Mitch McConnell is making a last dash to stock the judiciary with conservatives this year as a hedge against the chance that Republicans lose the Senate in November,” Politico reported this week. Their capacity for hypocrisy is really kind of impressive when you think about it.

Even more aggravating is the fact that Obama tended to choose well-qualified moderates, but Trump has a well-established established penchant for doing the opposite of whatever his predecessor did.

******

We got a sense of how qualified Trump’s judicial nominees tend to be this week, when Judge James Ho offered his first judicial opinion for vitally important Fifth District Court of Appeals – actually the first in his life. Ian Millhiser wrote this week at Think Progress that newly minted judges usually “don’t use their very first opinion to burn down the distinction between law and political myth-making.” But Trump, as we know, hires only the biggest goofballs best people, so Ho stepped “away from legal argument entirely to launch into a political rant against big government — complete with a gratuitous swipe at Obamacare.”

******

Sixteen Dems voted to confirm Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Julie Turkewitz reported for The New York Times this week that Zinke “has torn up Obama-era rules related to oil, gas and mineral extraction and overseen the largest reduction of federal land protection in the nation’s history.” He’s selling off the public trust everywhere but… his home state of Montana. In Montana, “Mr. Zinke has struck a different note.”

Quote:
In the past year, Mr. Zinke has halted the sale of oil and gas leases near Yellowstone National Park, opposed gold mining in that area, and urged the president to protect one national monument, Montana’s Upper Missouri River Breaks, while creating another, the Badger-Two Medicine, just miles from his childhood home.

******

Four Dems voted to confirm Ajit Pai, Trump’s pick to head the FCC. Pai, as you know, immediately moved to kill net neutrality, and now we get this fresh Hell…

Quote:
A broadband adviser selected by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to run a federal advisory committee was arrested last week on claims she tricked investors into pouring money into a multimillion-dollar investment fraud scheme, according to The Wall Street Journal.

******

Cheetolini’s Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer flew through the confirmation process on an 82-14 vote with plenty of support from the Democratic Party of Unprecedented Obstruction. And if this headline from The New York Post doesn’t sum up the Trump era perfectly, I don’t know what would: “Trump’s trade rep spends $1M on new furniture, blames Obama.”

******

Let’s turn now to a few items that illustrate how the GOP is conducting “the people’s business.”

On Wednesday, Sen Joe Manchin (D-WV) and every Republican present in the Senate voted “to eliminate a 2013 consumer protection measure intended to combat discrimination in auto lending,” according to Politico’s Zachary Warmbrodt.

It gets worse. In a separate article, Warmbrodt explained that this move was just the first in “a new front in [the GOP’s] push to roll back regulations across the government, using a maneuver that could enable them to strike down decisions by federal agencies that reach back decades.”

The Congressional Review Act empowers Congress to kill new regulations, but “while Republicans in the Trump era have already taken advantage of the 1996 law to remove more than a dozen recently issued rules, this would be the first time that Congress will have used it to kill a regulatory policy that is several years old.”

This, too, is part of their mad dash to break as much as they can while they still control all three branches of government.

******

Relatedly, Alexia Fernández Campbell reported for Vox that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren’s signature achievement until it was taken over by the regime in a sort of palace coup, “is taking it easy on payday lenders accused of preying on low-income workers.”

We knew this generally, but here are the deets:

Quote:
In the agency’s first report to Congress since Mick Mulvaney took the helm in November, the CFPB said it is dropping sanctions against NDG Financial Corp, a group of 21 businesses that the agency, under President Obama, had accused of running “a cross-border online payday lending scheme” in Canada and the United States.

“The scheme primarily involved making loans to U.S. consumers in violation of state usury laws and then using unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices to collect on the loans and profit from the revenues,” the CFPB lawyers argued in the complaint filed in the Southern District of New York in 2015.

******

You know how conservatives used to say they cared about too much power being concentrated in the executive branch? The fine print always specified that they only meant it when the executive branch is run by a Democrat.

Anyway, The Los Angeles Times reported this week that, “without mentioning [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller,” the regime is pushing to “bolster” Trump’s power to fire government officials.

Quote:
The Supreme Court is set to hear a seemingly minor case later this month on the status of administrative judges at the Securities and Exchange Commission, an issue that normally might only draw the interest of those accused of stock fraud. But the dispute turns on the president’s power to hire and fire officials throughout the government. And it comes just as the White House is saying President Trump believes he has the power to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

******

Jared Kushner failed to solve the Middle East conflict, but at least…

“State Department strikes reproductive rights, ‘Occupied Territories’ from human rights report”

******

Meanwhile, from the Draining the Swamp file, Anita Kumar reported for McClatchy that “Donald Trump’s U.S. businesses have received at least $15.1 million in revenue from political groups and federal agencies since 2015,” much of it from his campaign. “The money went to Trump’s airplanes, hotels, golf courses, even a bottled water company during the presidential campaign and the first 15 months of his presidency, according to a compilation of known records of the spending by Public Citizen obtained by McClatchy.”

Quote:
This party, put on at @realdonatrump‘s hotel by a foreign govt, is on June 12.

One day before that, a federal judge will hear arguments in a lawsuit alleging @realDonaldTrump is violating the constitution….b/c his hotel takes payments from foreign govts. https://t.co/6ryWyjrm0V

— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) April 19, 2018

******

Finally, we’d like to say that we’re better than this – that this horror doesn’t reflect our values. We’d love to say that, but history would slap us upside the head if we did.

According to The New York Times, “members of Congress have been demanding answers about how many [undocumented] families are being separated as they are processed at stations along the southwest border, in part because the Trump administration has in the past said it was considering taking children from their parents as a way to deter migrants from coming here.”

Quote:
Officials have repeatedly declined to provide data on how many families have been separated, but suggested that the number was relatively low.

But new data reviewed by The New York Times shows that more than 700 children have been taken from adults claiming to be their parents since October, including more than 100 children under the age of 4.

Sorry to leave you on such a depressing note.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/fresh-hell-utterly-shameless-republicans-edition/


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What Fresh Hell?: The Church of Trump edition
Joshua Holland / 28 Apr 2018 at 14:45 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

This week, there was an unusual kerfuffle on Capitol Hill when House Speaker Paul Ryan quietly fired Patrick Conroy, the Catholic priest who had served as House Chaplain since 2011. Conroy’s crime, apparently, was committed during debate over the GOP’s tax scam, when he prayed for Congress to “guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.” Ryan, a Roman Catholic, apparently saw this anodyne suggestion as a grave sin against the holy texts of Ayn Rand.

Quote:
To talk about religious freedom and then fire the House priest because you didn’t like what he said about your bill is an absurdly perfect encapsulation of what has happened to the GOP.

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) April 27, 2018

The story then took an even odder turn when Rep. Mark Walker, an Evangelical Christian from North Carolina who’s leading the search for a replacement, said that he thought the next House Chaplin should be a family man. This, of course, eliminates the possibility that another “papist,” who took an oath of celibacy, could get the gig.

“Some Catholic Democrats erupted upon hearing Walker’s comments,” reported Scott Wong for The Hill. “Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said some lawmakers had surmised that Ryan’s move was designed to appease anti-Catholic sentiments in the GOP conference. Walker, Connolly said, ‘is now confirming our fears.’”

This little Thirty Years War is brewing in The House as Donald Trump — a pervy, foul-mouthed casino mogul who has five kids by three different women and screws porn stars on the side — continues to enjoy unprecedented support among devout Evangelical Christians. There have been a few theories offered to explain this apparent disconnect. In The Financial Times [paywall], Gillian Tett writes that some observers “point to the ‘prodigal son’ phenomenon. Yes, evangelicals know that Trump is ungodly, goes this argument, but we are all sinners — and Trump may yet repent.” Another theory, says Tett, is that “evangelicals are courting Trump because they fear they are losing political clout. Issues such as gay marriage have put them on the back foot, and the proportion of the population who call themselves evangelical plunged to 17 per cent in 2017, down from 23 per cent a decade ago.” So they’re sticking with him in the hope that Trump will Make Conservative Christianity Great Again.

Perhaps he can assign the task to Jared Kushner — he could get right on it after he solves the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the opioid crisis. Thankfully, it doesn’t require a security clearance.

Another theory, proposed by sociologist Francesca Tripodi, is that Evangelicals process all the daily horrors of this regime through a different lens than the rest of us. She wrote that Evangelicals she had observed in the field “consumed a wide variety of news sources and applied their critical interrogation of the Bible to what they were reading, watching, and listening to.” She argues that this is a group of religionists who not only have an abiding distrust for the media but are also taught to engage in “deep reading” of original Biblical texts rather than relying on interpretations of the scripture. Tripodi visited an Evangelical study group that was applying the same technique to the labyrinthian text of the GOP’s tax bill. “I’ve seen hundreds of Conservative Evangelicals apply the same critique they use for the Bible, arguably a postmodern method of unpacking a text, to mainstream media — favoring their own research on topics rather than trusting media authorities,” she writes.

But a paper published in January in the journal Sociology of Religion found a different angle. The authors of the study, titled “Make Christianity Great Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” argued that it’s all about Christian nationalism – “an ideology that fuses Christians’ love of God and country,” according to HuffPo’s Carol Kuruvilla. “It hinges on the narrative that the United States has a special covenant with the Christian God.”

Quote:
This ideology has emerged at various times in U.S. history, but a distinct, aggressive iteration seems to have materialized in the Trump era… This most recent version rejects secular society and seeks to restore America’s identity as a “Christian nation” by leveraging Christians’ influence in the public sphere. Some of Trump’s strongest evangelical supporters believe the president was divinely chosen by God to help them achieve the goal of a Christian nation.

[The] research indicates that Americans who believed in several key tenets of Christian nationalism had a strong likelihood of voting for Trump. This was true even when the research team controlled for other influences, like political ideology and party affiliation.

The findings suggest that Christian nationalism is a “unique and independent influence” that led to the Trump presidency.

It goes without saying that in the Christian nationalist’s view, America has no room for dirty atheists, Jews, Muslims and people who adhere to other faiths, and certainly no room for the LGBTQ community.

So that’s what we’re dealing with, and their belief that Trump will restore the kinds of values that he’s never adhered to in his long life of privileged debauchery is why they’ll stick with him until the Rapture takes them away, or he’s impeached, whichever comes first.

Quote:
The Senate just confirmed Kyle Duncan — a 45-year-old lawyer who built a career out of fighting abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights — to be a lifetime judge on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Every GOPer voted for him. One Dem did: Joe Manchin.

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) April 24, 2018

*****

Newly minted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Islamophobia and dishonesty about his military record got lots of attention during the confirmation process. But Ken Klippenstein reported for The Young Turks that when Pompeo was the CIA director, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) “received complaints from CIA personnel about Pompeo’s introduction of overtly religious behavior into the workplace, including Rapture references.” MRFF founder Michael Weinstein said, “He is intolerant of anyone who isn’t a fundamentalist Christian. The people that worked under him at the CIA that came to us were never confused—they never had time to be confused. They were shocked and then they were scared shitless.”

*****

Meanwhile, Amy Littlefield reports for Rewire News that in North Carolina, “crisis pregnancy centers” – phony clinics designed to lure pregnant women away from real healthcare facilities that may offer abortion services or referrals – are using federal funds to purchase religiously-tinted “educational materials” for pregnant women.

To truly appreciate the blatant hypocrisy of all this, you need to understand that the religious right has long claimed that any federal funds used for contraception, abortion or international family planning programs abridges their religious liberty by forcing them to subsidize things they find sinful. One group took a case all the way to the Supreme Court arguing that just signing a piece of paper saying that they object to Obamacare’s contraception mandate was itself a burden on their faith.

By their own logic, every public penny directed at these anti-choice “crisis pregnancy centers” is a violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty for every pro-choice tax payer. But don’t expect a “conscience clause” to be introduced for those Americans anytime soon.

*****

Robert Pear reported for The New York Times this week that the Trump regime “says it plans to roll back a rule issued by President Barack Obama that prevents doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies from discriminating against transgender people.” So the regime is objectively pro-discrimination. Let’s not mince words.

*****

Let me quote some scripture at you. “For the Lord your God…loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing,” reads Deuteronomy 10:18-19. “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Also: “Give the members of your community a fair hearing, and judge rightly between one person and another, whether citizen or resident alien.” [Deuteronomy 1:16]

Oh well…

“Federal agents ignored President Trump’s pledge to protect from deportation undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children by sending a young man back to his native Mexico,” according to USA Today. “After spending an evening with his girlfriend in Calexico, Calif., on Feb. 17, Juan Manuel Montes, 23, who has lived in the U.S. since age 9, grabbed a bite and was waiting for a ride when a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer approached and started asking questions.” This week, he was deported “back” to a country he barely knows.

At least ten other Dreamers are in federal custody awaiting deportation, according to the report.

*****

Let’s talk about family values for a moment. Maria Sacchetti reports for WaPo that “the nation’s top immigration and border officials are urging Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to detain and prosecute all parents caught crossing the Mexican border illegally with their children, a stark change in policy that would result in the separation of families that until now have mostly been kept together.”

*****

What happens to the kids who are separated from their families in the process of coming to this “country of immigrants”? In some cases, nobody knows. Ron Nixon reports for The New York Times that the Department of Health and Human Services has “lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children it placed with sponsors in the United States, raising concerns they could end up in the hands of human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.”

That is really some fresh Hell.

*****

Let me again speak clearly: ICE — Immigration and Customs enforcement — is a rogue agency that should be abolished.

The LA Times: “[ICE] agents repeatedly target U.S. citizens for deportation by mistake, making wrongful arrests based on incomplete government records, bad data and lax investigations,…”

Quote:
A Times review of Department of Justice records and interviews with immigration attorneys uncovered hundreds of additional cases … in which people were forced to prove they are Americans and sometimes spent months or even years in detention.

Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport; a New York resident locked up for more than three years fighting deportation efforts after a federal agent mistook his father for someone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen; and a Rhode Island housekeeper mistakenly targeted twice, resulting in her spending a night in prison the second time even though her husband had brought her U.S. passport to a court hearing.

They and others described the panic and feeling of powerlessness that set in as agents took them into custody without explanation and ignored their claims of citizenship.

One US citizen was locked up for almost four years — 1,273 days – trying to prove that he wasn’t an “illegal.” #AbolishICE

*****

According to a report by The Intercept’s Debbie Nathan, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has also been cooking the books, wildly inflating statistics tracking assaults on their officers in order to bolster Trump’s blather about how crazy criminal aliens are running amok in our heavily militarized Southern border region.

*****

Some people argue that Trump’s militarized xenophobia is “un-American,” or doesn’t reflect the values invoked on the Statue of Liberty — give us your poor, etc.. But that lady is French, for crying out loud, and the reality is that the children and grandchildren of immigrants and settlers have always been hostile toward newcomers. It’s really as American as apple pie.

The difference is that it’s 2018, we’re an increasingly diverse country, and, as with virtually every other negative aspect of American life, Marmalade Mugabe’s turned this shit up to 11.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/04/fresh-hell-church-trump-edition/


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PostPosted: 04/29/18 3:10 pm • # 22 
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The LA Times: “[ICE] agents repeatedly target U.S. citizens for deportation by mistake, making wrongful arrests based on incomplete government records, bad data and lax investigations,…”


Your papers, pleeze!

(And they hate America for it's freedoms. :rollin )


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PostPosted: 04/29/18 5:24 pm • # 23 
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jimwilliam wrote:
The LA Times: “[ICE] agents repeatedly target U.S. citizens for deportation by mistake, making wrongful arrests based on incomplete government records, bad data and lax investigations,…”


Your papers, pleeze!

(And they hate America for it's freedoms. :rollin )


By mistake or targeting Trump opponents?


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PostPosted: 05/05/18 1:13 pm • # 24 
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And here's another contribution to our "lest we forget" collection ~ :ey ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? Trump’s madness just broke the space-time continuum
Joshua Holland / 05 May 2018 at 13:24 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

The sheer madness that’s defined the Trump era appears to have broken the space-time continuum. The week began with a heated debate about whether a comedian had crossed the line at the White House Correspondent’s dinner when she called White House spox Sarah Huckabee Sanders a liar (mainstream pundits pretended it was a comment about her appearance because they think she’s ugly as sin and were projecting), and that Sunday conversation took place like a decade ago.

Then, in the intervening years – was it Tuesday? – it was revealed that the President of the United States had had a couple of goons raid the offices of his fancy quack doctor, apparently as a punishment for going public with the fact that Trump uses drugs to keep his hair long and silky. Then the quack retaliated by telling CNN that Trump had dictated — that is to say, falsified — the medical report his campaign made public in 2016.

Quote:
Trump falsified his medical report by dictating a letter describing his health to his doctor

This, under normal circumstances, would be a massive scandal that would dominate the political discussion for months

In the Trump era, it faded from public consciousness within hours

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) May 4, 2018

Then Kanye West said slavery was a choice and Ross Douthat pondered the idea of redistributing sex to the “incels,” a group of radical misogynistic weirdos who occasionally go on murder sprees because they hate some imaginary girl named Stacy. Then, later – days or months or perhaps years later – former America mayor Rudy Giuliani went on Fox News and told Sean Hannity about all the potential crimes the regime had committed in order to pay off a porn star who Trump obviously never slept with because that’s fake news. Legal experts were flummoxed, but then we later learned that confessing had been the plan all along, or maybe not.

And all of that occurred before Friday. Time itself has been compressed in order to fit all this bedlam into five days.

So, it was truly a banner week for shiny objects. Let’s take a look at some developments that may not have gotten the attention they deserved as the whole country asked itself, “what the actual fuck?”

*****

This week, we may have also finally reached Peak Scott Pruitt. We talk a lot about the EPA chief here, because Jesus Christ what a grifter that dude is. But there were a couple of new reports that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle.

We know Pruitt likes to travel first-class, surrounded by bodyguards, on tax-payers’ dime. And this week, The Washington Post reported that, “after taking office last year, Pruitt drew up a list of at least a dozen countries he hoped to visit and urged aides to help him find official reasons to travel.” Then he “enlisted well-connected friends and political allies to help make the trips happen.” Pretty blatant.

Then there was this:

Quote:
looks like Pruitt got reimbursed from both his campaign and from Oklahoma taxpayers for the same expenses.

it appears he either violated campaign finance law by converting donations to personal use, or he violated ethics law by pocketing taxpayer money. https://t.co/nwr7SOGQy8

— Brendan Fischer (@brendan_fischer) May 4, 2018

But wait – there’s more!

Reuters reported that Pruitt’s EPA “granted a financial hardship waiver to an oil refinery owned by billionaire Carl Icahn, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, exempting the Oklahoma facility from requirements under a federal biofuels law.” If you’ll recall, Icahn took a vaguely delineated job as a Trump advisor last year, and then quit when it became clear that he had taken the gig with one goal in mind: eliminating biofuel requirements that were hurting his refineries’ bottom lines.

In order to grasp just how brazen this week’s move really is, keep in mind that Icahn is “currently under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for his role in influencing biofuels policy while serving as Trump’s adviser.”

Now, this kind of corruption is nothing new for Pruitt. Hiroko Tabuchi and Steve Eder reported this week for The New York Times that while Pruitt “has attracted the attention of federal investigators because of his unusual association with lobbyists, including his rental of a condominium last year owned by the wife of a lobbyist with business before the E.P.A.,” back when he was an Oklahoma state Senator he went a step further and “bought a home in the state capital with a registered lobbyist who was pushing for changes to the state’s workers’ compensation rules — changes that Mr. Pruitt championed in the legislature.”

And the cherry on the top may be a story by Elaina Plott at The Atlantic. She reported that a Pruitt press aide named Michael Abboud was so desperate to take the heat off of his sleazy boss that he shopped a damaging story about Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke around to multiple news outlets. Hilariously, he wanted reporters to tell a story about how staffers at Interior were leaking damaging info about the EPA. It’s like projection, but through media cut-outs.

Meanwhile, two of Pruitt’s top henchmen – both of whom have made appearances here at What Fresh hell? In the past – decided to hit the doors before the indictments start rolling in, according to The New York Times.

*****

A story that hasn’t flown under the radar is HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s plan to triple the rent for millions of low-income residents of subsidized housing. This, says Carson, will give “poor people a way out of poverty.” No, we don’t understand that either because we’re not wingnuts.

Quote:
Less than 10% of the people in public housing are able-bodied adults who don’t work. But Ben Carson is proposing letting agencies impose work requirements on them — while also hiking the rent. https://t.co/maEHyCPfJt

— Southern Poverty Law Center (@splcenter) May 2, 2018

But another report, by WaPo’s Juliet Eilperin, probably hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves. She reports that a “once obscure” office in HUD, the Office of Manufactured Housing, has been the target of “an unusually intense lobbying effort, seeking to scale back regulations that they say are hampering an industry that could provide a market-based solution to the affordable housing crisis.”

Quote:
In the process, the groups are gaining influence with Trump administration officials trying to purge their ranks of holdovers from the previous administration and put their stamp on every part of government, no matter how obscure.

The growing clout of the industry came into sharp focus last summer, when a trade group demanded — and got — the ouster of an agency official who favored more regulation of the industry while serving in the Obama administration, and an underling who donated to the former president’s campaign.

Shortly after these lobbyists got government officials removed from their jobs – let that sink in for a moment – “the department kicked off a formal process to reconsider several new federal requirements [on the industry that] the office had advanced over the past two years.” Politicizing the bureaucracy is bad enough, but outsourcing the process to lobbyists for an industry you’re supposed to be regulating is really quite special. Way to drain that swamp.

*****

“Since the fall, the US Department of Justice has been overhauling its manual for federal prosecutors,” reports Zoe Tillman for The Daily Beast. “In: Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ tough-on-crime policies. Out: A section titled ‘Need for Free Press and Public Trial.’ References to the department’s work on racial gerrymandering are gone.”

Of course they are.

*****

Marshal Tweeto’s pick to serve on the Federal Elections Commission, Trey Trainor, “spent years fighting campaign finance disclosure,” according to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte. Because of course he did.

*****

Trump continues to run foreign policy with his own interests in mind. This week, we learned that Ukraine hired a Republican lobbying firm and then stopped cooperating with Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election shortly before the regime approved a sale of missiles to the country.

*****

You may recall how Trump reversed long-standing Middle East policy last year by calling Qatar, a key ally, a state sponsor of terror after Qatar’s adversaries in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates funneled tens of millions of dollars to Trump associate and GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy. (Brody was the guy who may have paid off a former Playboy model whom he got pregnant, and who then got an abortion, but maybe it was Trump who knocked her up? Doesn’t matter – those Trump-lovin’ Evangelicals wouldn’t care either way.)

Anyway, it’s safe to assume that Qatar will no longer be a wretched shithole country that supports terror because “the government of Qatar bought a $6.5m apartment in one of Donald Trump’s New York towers soon after the dismissal of a lawsuit that tried to stop the president benefiting from such deals.” More details at The Guardian.

*****

Here’s the story that probably should have been splashed across the front pages this week: “Temperatures reported to have cracked 50.2 degrees Celsius (122.3 degrees Fahrenheit) on Monday in Nawabshah, located about 127 miles northeast of Karachi,” reported Brian Kahn for Earther. “If confirmed, that could make the measurement not just the hottest ever recorded for April in Pakistan, but the hottest ever reliably recorded for April anywhere on Earth.”

Quote:
But Nawabshah is hardly the only sweltering locale. A vast area from Eastern Europe to South Asia is under a massive heat dome that’s been building since last week. Heat domes occur when an area of high pressure camps over a region, causing dry air to sink. As it sinks, that air gets compressed and releases heat, leading to sizzling temperatures. Burt also noted that Poltavka, Russia, located on the Kazakhstan border, recorded the warmest April temperature for the Asian portion of Russia when it topped out at 34.8 degrees Celsius (94.6 degrees Celsius) on April 29.

The heat dome may also have helped trigger wild weather in the Middle East last week, locking in low pressure that unleashed towering haboobs, huge hail, and deadly flash flooding in the region.

The recent eye-popping temperatures in Pakistan fall in line with a growing body of research showing how climate change is making heat waves more common and intense nearly everywhere. This is particularly dire news for what’s already one of the hottest parts of the world. Research published last year, for instance, shows that climate change is adding to the death toll in India by making heat waves worse and “will lead to substantial increases in heat-related mortality” in the coming century.

And on that happy note, have a great week!

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/fresh-hell-trumps-madness-just-broke-space-time-continuum/


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PostPosted: 05/12/18 11:31 am • # 25 
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Here's still more from the apparently UNending slime and graft being unleashed by the [hopefully temporary] PTB ~ :eek ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? Trump’s kleptocracy comes into sharper focus
Joshua Holland / 12 May 2018 at 13:07 ET

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or at least were under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Quote:
kleptocracy [klep-tok-ruh-see]

1. a government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal; rule by a thief or thieves.

The Original Sin that led to all of the grift and corruption we’re seeing from this regime occurred when the media and political establishments allowed Trump to run for the presidency without releasing his tax returns and take office without divesting his business interests.

Of course they were busy obsessing over Hillary Clinton’s emails. But not only did that signal to Trump and his minions that they could get away with just about anything, it also resulted in a degree of opacity that only law enforcement can penetrate. Soon after Trump was elected, The Wall Street Journal summed up this problem with a story about the labyrinthian web of front-companies that connected Trump to just one of his more modest assets…

Quote:
President-elect Donald Trump owns a helicopter in Scotland.

To be more precise, he has a revocable trust that owns 99% of a Delaware limited liability company that owns 99% of another Delaware LLC that owns a Scottish limited company that owns another Scottish company that owns the 26-year-old Sikorsky S-76B helicopter, emblazoned with a red “TRUMP” on the side of its fuselage.

We don’t really know the angles Trump’s played to enrich himself and his loyalists using the power of the White House, and depending on the outcomes of various investigations, we may never know. But we have gotten some insights into the Trump money machine, thanks to some good reporting and, in some cases, from court filings. And one consistent theme has been huge slush funds of various types paying out giant sums to people in Trump’s inner circle, and in some cases to Trump himself.

The writing was on the wall during the 2016 campaign, when the Trump Organization quintupled the rent it was charging the Trump Campaign as soon as donors started picking up the tab. And on the same day in 2016 that Trump cut a fundraising agreement with the RNC, “the campaign made payments to three Trump properties” totaling around $200 grand.

This has continued since the election. As Walter Shaub, a former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, wrote for The Washington Post this week, “we taxpayers are paying tens of millions for [Trump] to spend almost a third of his days in office visiting his properties. Some of the money goes into his pocket. We learned last fall that the Secret Service had paid him over $150,000 in golf cart rental fees for the privilege of guarding his life while he golfs. Last month, Public Citizen issued a report finding that Trump’s businesses had billed $15.1 million to campaign, political committee and federal government sources since he first launched his presidential campaign.”

The Republican National Committee has been paying almost $38,000 per month to rent a “basically empty” office space from Trump for his own 2020 campaign since late last year. The campaign itself paid the Trump Organization almost a half-million in inflated rent before the RNC took over the payments. According to The HuffPo, “in all, the Trump campaign spent $774,163 in donor money at Trump-branded businesses last year.”

We still don’t really know where the $107 million Trump’s grifter friends raised for his inauguration went. It was a cheap affair, but they managed to spend twice as much as Obama had for his star-studded inauguration in 2008. But we did know that a longtime friend of Melania’s, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, opened up a firm a month after the election that would grab $26 million of that sum for “planning” the event. This week, we learned that Mueller’s following the money, much of which came from foreign sources.

Wolkoff is by no means alone. A whole pack of grifters have been getting rich since Trump’s election. His former bodyguard, Keith Schiller, left the White House and has been raking in $15,000 per month from the RNC ever since for “security consulting.” (Schiller had already cashed in to the tune of almost $300,000 during the 2016 campaign from the Trump Organization, the Trump Campaign and the RNC.) Elliott Broidy, the GOP deputy finance chair and close Trump associate also managed to secure $200 million in new contracts from the UAE after the election, thanks to the shady middleman George Nader, who is now cooperating with Mueller. That was part of a coordinated effort to turn Broidy “into an instrument of influence at the White House for the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates,” according to The New York Times. And as we mentioned last week, one of those countries’ rivals, Qatar, has pushed back against their influence by buying four increasingly-hard-to-sell Trump properties, the most recent of which was purchased just after a judge dismissed a lawsuit against Trump for violating the Emoluments Clause.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowsky has opened up or partnered with no fewer than three DC lobbying firms since the election (he denies working for a fourth). Brad Parscale, the guy Trump hired to throw together a website for $1,500 and whose firm ultimately took in $94 million from the 2016 campaign, continued to get an average of $474,000 per month from the RNC after the election. Nobody really knows what Mike Pence’s nephew, John Pence, is doing for Trump’s reelection campaign, but he’s making in the neighborhood of $120,000 per year for something, according to financial disclosures. And this goes on and on – there are actually way too many of these kinds of stories to detail here in full.

And then this week, thanks to the Woodward and Bernstein of the Trump era — a porn star and her lawyer – we learned that Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime consigliere and bagman, used the shell company that he’d set up to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels — and to a Playboy playmate whom Trump probably knocked up before shifting the blame to Broidy — to… solicit payments from various corporations — including one tied to a Russian oligarch — for “access” to Trump which, at least in some cases, he didn’t even deliver.

Quote:
On the very same day Donald Trump promised a 5-point plan to “Drain the Swamp,” including preventing lobbyists from calling themselves consultants, Michael Cohen incorporated Essential Consultants LLC https://t.co/jUzaGqMx8y

— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) May 10, 2018

Everything in his history suggests that Trump himself has probably gotten a cut of at least some of these deals. Everything you’ve read above may be legal, but not if all this money was being shoveled around for corrupt purposes. Again, Trump’s long history of sleazy business dealings make this a pretty safe bet.

Let’s pause here to recall that Robert Mueller’s team includes some of the country’s top prosecutors and investigators specializing in fraud and financial crimes, and they have had most of this information long before we even knew it existed. It’s possible that these crooks will get away with it, but if I were them, I wouldn’t bet my freedom on it.

Quote:
Sarah Sanders says that the Michael Cohen payments from AT&T and Novartis are an example of draining the swamp because Trump didn’t take action to benefit those companies. pic.twitter.com/jGwlBAPEa6

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) May 11, 2018

And with that news, let’s consider some other outrages that may have been lost in the shuffle this week…

******

Remember Scott Pruitt’s luxurious $120,000 trip to Italy, very little of which was spent working? Remember the sumptuous dinner that he enjoyed at Rome’s Hotel Eden, which runs around $300 a head?

This week, we discovered that Pruitt dined that evening “with Cardinal George Pell, a prominent climate-science denialist and Vatican leader who was also facing sexual abuse allegations.” The EPA intentionally left Pell’s name out of its description of the evening, according to The New York Times. “Kevin Chmielewski, Mr. Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff for operations, said in an interview that top political appointees at the agency feared that the meeting would reflect poorly on Mr. Pruitt if it were made public. Twenty days after the dinner, authorities in Australia charged Cardinal Pell with sexual assault…” That would reflect poorly, but maybe more so for the alleged child molester than Pruitt.

******

It should probably come as no surprise that “top aides to Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency are screening public records requests related to the embattled administrator, slowing the flow of information released under the Freedom of Information Act — at times beyond what the law allows.” More on that one at Politico.

******

Will this ultimately add fuel the opioid crisis?

Quote:
The Labor Department plans to unwind decades-old youth labor protections by allowing teenagers to work longer hours under some of the nation’s most hazardous workplace conditions.

Only time will tell.

******

Here, via the Washington Post, is a great example of a bigoted policy that’s stupid even on its own terms…

Quote:
The Trump administration has moved to expel 300,000 Central Americans and Haitians living and working legally in the United States, disregarding senior U.S. diplomats who warned that mass deportations could destabilize the region and trigger a new surge of illegal immigration.

It’s a bit like anti-choicers favoring abstinence-only education, which leads to more unintended pregnancies and ultimately more abortions. Stop hitting yourselves, wingnuts.

******

Only the best… oh, you know…

Quote:
Remember the “pink slime” lawsuit? Trump has tapped the star witness in that case — a Texas Tech professor who testified that “pink slime” is safe, wholesome and “100 percent beef” — to oversee food safety for the USDA. https://t.co/xyvaVI5Jyt by @collins_reports #txlege pic.twitter.com/1sePLvStdG

— Kolten Parker (@KoltenParker) May 9, 2018

******

This story is consistent with the Trump regime’s relentless attempts to purge all information about climate change – which Marmalade Mussolini thinks is all a Chinese hoax – from the entire government.

Paul Voosen writes for Science Magazine:

Quote:
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. The adage is especially relevant for climate-warming greenhouse gases, which are crucial to manage—and challenging to measure. In recent years, though, satellite and aircraft instruments have begun monitoring carbon dioxide and methane remotely, and NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System (CMS), a $10-million-a-year research line, has helped stitch together observations of sources and sinks into high-resolution models of the planet’s flows of carbon. Now, President Donald Trump’s administration has quietly killed the CMS, Science has learned.

******

And yet another policy of ignoring real threats

Quote:
Trump’s national security team is weighing the elimination of the top White House cybersecurity job, multiple sources told POLITICO — a move that would come as the nation faces growing digital threats from adversaries such as Russia and Iran. John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish new national security adviser, is leading the push to abolish the role of special assistant to the president and cybersecurity coordinator, currently held by the departing Rob Joyce…

******

Finally, three ugly stories about what happens when you put white nationalists in charge of your justice system…

Sam Levin reported for The Guardian this week that Rakem Balogun, a father of three, “is believed to be the first person targeted and prosecuted under a secretive US surveillance effort to track so-called ‘black identity extremists.’” Balogun was held without bail for five months for being a vocal activist against police brutality.

The charges against him didn’t stand up, because we still have a more or less functional judicial system, but Balogun “lost his home and more while incarcerated.”

******

Meanwhile, in Houston, undocumented immigrants who are caught perpetrating low-level offenses make bail, and then are scooped up by ICE as they leave the courthouse. Seems brutal but straightforward. But according to the Texas Observer, “abysmal record-keeping and an increasingly secretive immigration force have created a catch-22” for these mostly poor workers: “as they languish in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, sometimes for months, they are asked to do the impossible: show up for their Harris County court hearings…. The penalties for missing court are serious: Bonds can be raised or revoked, and the court can issue arrest warrants or new citations in a revolving-door scenario reminiscent of a Kafka novel.”

******

Finally, The Intercept reported this week that Customs and Border Patrol appear to be targeting activists offering life-saving aid to undocumented immigrants.

“Nine volunteers with No More Deaths, an official ministry of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson, [have been] hit with federal charges in recent months for leaving water in a remote federal wilderness preserve where migrants routinely disappear and die,” writes Ryan Devereaux. The latest “arrest came just hours after No More Deaths published a report that documents evidence of Border Patrol agents destroying jugs of water that the group leaves for migrants in the desert.”

And here’s a key point:

Quote:
Border Patrol agents and humanitarian groups in Arizona, such as No More Deaths, have long operated with an understanding that spaces used to save human lives are generally off limits to law enforcement. The verbal agreement upheld by Border Patrol agents in the Tucson Sector and volunteers in the area is built on a set of written principles modeled after Red Cross guidelines on the treatment of humanitarian aid organizations, which include a passage that reads, “Medical treatment provided by humanitarian aid agencies should be recognized and respected by government agents and should be protected from surveillance and interference.”

Graft and cruelty: the twin hallmarks of the Trump regime. Make sure you register and vote this fall.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/fresh-hell-trumps-kleptocracy-comes-sharper-focus/


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