Reckon Trump gulags are next with slave labour to produce cheap goods for the oligarchs. Murrica is quickly becoming Sovietised under Putin.

This installment just overtook 1st place on the "worst yet" list ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? The Trump crime family’s grifts are right in front of our noses
Joshua Holland / 19 May 2018 at 13:50 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.

Perhaps the oddest story from this long and depressing week – one that culminated in the 22nd school shooting in the first 20 weeks of 2018 — may have been the government of the tiny, oil-rich nation of Qatar giving DC $100,000 to keep the Metro open for an extra hour following the Washington Capitals’ playoff game on Thursday.

We’ve been following the story of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE vying to influence the Trump regime by throwing piles of money its way because while it hasn’t exactly flown under the radar, the Trump-Russia story has gotten so much more attention.

There was plenty of news on this front in the past week. The big one was that the Kushner Company – the real estate firm that Jared Kushner continues to own a large stake in, according to The Intercept — managed to secure a sweet deal from Qatar to bail out its underwater sky-scraper located at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York. It turns out that the third time is a charm; the Kushners first sought out Qatari financing beginning in 2014. Jared then thought he had cut a deal with a shady Chinese company shortly after the election, and when that fell through, Kushner’s father, Charles, met with the Qataris and again pitched them on an investment deal.

The Washington Post reported that “Charles Kushner was ‘crushed’ when the deal fell through,” and a month later, Trump reversed longstanding US policy in the region by claiming that Qatar, a key ally that was in the midst of a regional conflict with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was a state sponsor of terrorism.

In March, The New York Times reported that the Saudis and the UAE had funneled millions of dollars in lucrative contracts to RNC fundraiser and close Trump ally Elliott Broidy in order to “turn [him] into an instrument of influence at the White House.” Right around that same time, the publisher of The National Enquirer, who’s very close to Trump, published an odd, 100-page, ad-free magazine touting the wonders of Saudi Arabia – and insisted that this just happened organically. “The Saudis say they don’t know how it came to be,” reported Spencer Ackerman at The Daily Beast. “AMI, which publishes The National Enquirer, insists it had no outside editorial or financial assistance, from the Trump administration or otherwise.” OK, sure. Why not?

And that brings us to this week, when The Washington Post reported that Michael Cohen, Trump’s bagman and fixer, “solicited a payment of at least $1 million from the government of Qatar in late 2016, in exchange for access to and advice about the then-incoming administration.” The man Cohen tried to squeeze a million bucks out of was Ahmed Al-Rumaihi, a former diplomat who now oversees Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. And this interaction reportedly went down on the sidelines of the infamous Trump Tower meeting at which the Trumpers attempted to obtain damaging info on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. (A certain prominent porn star’s lawyer was the first to reveal Al-Rumaihi’s presence at Trump Tower that day.)

Now, Al-Rumaihi is an… interesting figure. He’s at the center of a lawsuit by Ice Cube – because nothing is normal in 2018 – alleging that he and four other Qataris with close ties to the royal family promised to invest $20 million in a new basketball league in order to get close to Steve Bannon. No, we don’t quite get how that might work either. But the key point here is that in court testimony, Ice Cube and a business partner testified that Al-Rumaihi “was a shadow representative of the Qatari government, and boasted about bribing ‘several Washington politicians.’ One of these individuals was allegedly General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor who pled guilty in December 2017 to lying to the F.B.I. about his contact with the Russian government during Trump’s transition to the presidency,” according to The Fader.

And here’s where this convoluted story may connect with Russiagate. Jeremy Stahl reported for Slate this week that Al-Rumaihi’s appearance at Trump Tower occurred just days “after news broke of the multibillion-dollar sale of 19.5 percent of the Russian fossil fuel giant Rosneft to Swiss trading firm Glencore and Qatar’s sovereign investment fund.” A central claim of the infamous Steele Dossier was that “Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, during an alleged meeting with Rosneft officials in summer 2016, promised that a Trump administration would undo sanctions against Russia, in part, in exchange for brokerage of the Rosneft deal. In May 2016, Al-Rumaihi reportedly took over as head of a major division of the wealth fund ultimately involved in the Rosneft deal.” Stahl adds that “the allegations in the Steele dossier, made in October 2016, suggested a future quid-pro-quo deal between Russia and the Trump campaign.”

And then The New York Times dropped another bombshell on this relationship, reporting on Saturday that “three months before the 2016 election, a small group gathered at Trump Tower to meet with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. One was an Israeli specialist in social media manipulation. Another was an emissary for two wealthy Arab princes. The third was [Erik Prince,] a Republican donor with a controversial past in the Middle East as a private security contractor.”

Bob Brigham has more details on this latest revelation.

What does all of this mean? We don’t know exactly, but on its face, it certainly seems shady as Hell. And you can be pretty sure that Special Counsel Robert Mueller does have a pretty good handle on all of this.


Unfortunately, this isn’t the only story out this week that just reeks of corruption.

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There were conflicting reports about the Chinese government negotiating with the Trump cabal to purchase some $200 billion in US goods so that Trump and the bobbleheads on Fox News could claim that he’d reduced the trade deficit. Chinese officials later denied that story.

But Josh Rogin reported for The Washington Post that China gave Trump “a list of crazy demands, and he caved to one of them.” That demand was reflected in a rather odd Tweet, in which Trump suddenly expressed concern for a Chinese company after blathering on for the past two years about how “Ginah” keeps ripping us off…


A few days earlier, the AP reported that “a Chinese government-owned company has signed on to build a theme park in a vast development in Indonesia that also features a Trump hotel and condos, a deal that stands to benefit President Donald Trump’s company just as top Chinese envoys head to Washington for trade talks.” China’s investment will total $500 million, in case you wondering how much it costs to get Trump to pull an about-face on an issue he’s been talking about for years.

This is happening right in front of our noses, but Trump knows that he enjoys immunity by Congressional majority and can get away with anything as long as Republicans control the other branches of government.

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Speaking of Trump properties, the DC hotel he leases from the government enjoyed revenues of $40 million last year, more than double what it took in during 2016, according to Bloomberg. The Washington Post listed all the foreign governments, business associations and lobbyists that have pumped cash into the property, in case you’re wondering who’s buying Trump’s loyalty.

And The Scotsman reported this week that “Donald Trump’s flagship Scottish resort received thousands of pounds in US taxpayers’ money to host VIP visits by officials from his administration.” And nobody really knows why US officials were staying there. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Bryan Lanza, “a former senior campaign and transition aide to President Donald Trump, recently inked a deal to help a Russian oligarch’s conglomerate shed sanctions the Trump administration slapped on them last month,” according to CNN. That oligarch is Oleg Deripaska, “a billionaire who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin” and is reportedly a central player in #Russiagate. Nothing to see here, move along.

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Also from the Drain the Swamp file, USA Today reported that “lobbying firms managed by former campaign aides, fundraisers and others with ties to President Trump and Vice President Pence have collected at least $28 million in federal lobbying fees since Trump assumed the presidency.”

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A senior Department of Education official named Robert Eitel was “hired straight out of the for-profit college sector,” according to ABC News. As soon as he got the job, his first order of business was to “dismantle regulations designed to protect students defrauded by for-profit colleges into taking out five-figure loans on promises that they would get good jobs — a move that could benefit his former employers.”


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The White House worked with Scott Pruitt’s EPA “to block publication of a federal health study on a nationwide water-contamination crisis, after one Trump administration aide warned it would cause a ‘public relations nightmare,’” reported Politico this week. The study found that chemicals which “contaminated water supplies near military bases, chemical plants and other sites from New York to Michigan to West Virginia… endanger human health at a far lower level than EPA has previously called safe.” Bad news — or as they see it, bad PR — so they just spiked it. To be honest, that’s really the only way to Make Toxic Water Supplies Great Again. Yes, we’re tired of winning too.

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Speaking of pollution, “the Trump administration is considering forming an organization to promote coal and natural gas,” according to TPM. “Citing a document it obtained from a Trump administration source, E&E News described draft talking points for a ‘Clean and Advanced Fossil Fuel Alliance.’ The publication reported that the proposal came in response to a coalition of more than 20 countries, launched at the United Nations climate conference in Bonn, Germany last year, aiming to phase out coal power.”

Don’t worry, it’s all good when you understand that the real problem has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels…


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We want to make sure you caught several stories this week that suggest we’re no longer dealing with “creeping” authoritarianism because it has arrived in force at Trump’s White House.

First, if you missed Evan Osnos’s New Yorker report about how the regime consigned senior, non-political government officials to a kind of bureaucratic purgatory in retaliation for doing their jobs during the Obama years, you should definitely read it. Politicizing the bureaucracy is a giant red flag, and they’re doing it with gusto.

Relatedly, The Washington Post reported that Trump “personally pushed U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon.com and other firms to ship packages,… a dramatic move that probably would cost these companies billions of dollars.” Translation: Trump is happy to use the levers of government to pursue a vendetta against Jeff Bezos, and is just as happy to screw over whoever it takes to do so.


Also this week, it was revealed that ICE is blatantly lying to judges, claiming without evidence that undocumented immigrants, including Dreamers, whom the rogue agency wants to deport are members of MS-13. Mark Joseph Stern has more on this extremely disturbing story at Slate.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that the regime “is making preparations to hold immigrant children on military bases, …the latest sign the government is moving forward with plans to split up families who cross the border illegally.” They’re just talking about camps, where these people who only committed misdemeanors or civil offenses might be concentrated. Nothing to worry about.

Finally, Talking Points Memo reported this week that, “as the Trump administration moves aggressively to allow more states to impose mandatory work requirements on their Medicaid programs, several states have come under fire for crafting policies that would in practice shield many rural, white residents from the impact of the new rules.”

Because this week’s edition of What Fresh Hell? was so bleak, we’ll leave you with a short and delicious video of “racist lawyer bro” Aaron Schlossberg dodging reporters in the streets of New York City. Sound on, and enjoy!


https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/fresh-hell-trump-crime-familys-grifts-right-front-noses/

Here's a new installment ~ the subtitle, "The Trump Show is just exhausting", says it all! ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? The Trump Show is just exhausting
Joshua Holland / 02 Jun 2018 at 11:24 ET

Marmalade Mobutu would probably be a used car salesman in Queens if his father hadn’t been such a successful slumlord. He’s a good salesman, but not the sharpest tack in the box. He is, however, a towering genius – or perhaps idiot savant is more appropriate – when it comes to manipulating the news cycle and shifting our focus from his disastrous presidency to various shiny objects. (Some believe that he’s just a rambling old man who watches too much Fox News and doesn’t to do this intentionally, which would make the feat even more impressive.)

There was no better example of this talent than his impulsive pardon of belligerent hate-chipmunk and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza. This executive action, announced by Tweet, came just as the stock market was tumbling after the European Union and Mexico announced that they were preparing to levy countervailing tariffs on US goods; a landmark study which found that 4,600 American citizens in Puerto Rico had died in Hurricane Maria, a figure 70 times greater than the official estimates, had first been reported two days earlier and was at that point starting to gain traction across the media. Outrage over the administration’s policy of tearing families apart at the border – including asylum-seekers who crossed legally – had also been gaining steam but was immediately diverted by Trump doing his thing.


We saw something similar with the contrived outrage over Samantha Bee calling Ivanka a “feckless cunt.” The White House demanded TBS cancel Bee’s show because they don’t give a shit about how it looks for the executive branch to make such authoritarian demands and because they wanted a scalp to retaliate for the cancellation of “Roseanne” – never mind the fact that Roseanne was shown the door not because she said something offensive, but because she refused to stop tweeting offensive, embarrassing shit after management repeatedly asked her to. It was the Mother of All False Equivalences, but Trump got us all talking about Bee’s supposed transgression rather than the dumpster-fire-burning-on-top-of-a-trainwreck that is this presidency.

We’re not sure anything can be done about this. It’s easy to say that the media — and those of us on social media – shouldn’t constantly take the bait, but that’s not really possible. Trump may be a 4chan-style internet troll, but he’s also the president of the United States. When the guy with the nuclear football offers up some batshit-crazy conspiracy theory, you really can’t just ignore it.


Now let’s turn to a few stories that might have gotten lost amid the chaos.

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“A day after President Donald Trump announced he would consider easing penalties against a controversial Chinese electronics company, that company enlisted a Trump campaign veteran to make its case in Washington,” reports Lachlan Markay for The Daily Beast. “The Mercury consultant working on the [ZTE] account is Bryan Lanza, a veteran of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign. Less than two weeks after Lanza’s work began, the Trump administration announced that it had reached a tentative deal to ease those penalties

The dots surrounding Trump’s sudden decision to bailout ZTE are pretty easy to connect. China has been granting Trump and his family valuable trademarks – including some that they had previously rejected — since shortly after the 2016 election. A Chinese state-run firm also sunk $500 million into an Indonesian resort project that Trump has a big stake in. So presto! — the guy who rants about “Jina” ripping us off all the time is suddenly concerned about Chinese jobs.

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Evan Halper reports for The Los Angeles Times that Scott Pruitt’s EPA is moving “to unleash on freeways a class of rebuilt trucks that spew as much as 400 times the choking soot that conventional new big rigs do.”

And here’s the kicker:

“Trump’s EPA has tried to justify the move by citing a privately funded study that claimed the trucks did not cause more pollution, but even the university that conducted the research has now cast doubt on the findings.”

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Speaking of ripping families apart at the border, The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that “Trump nominated Ronald W. Mortensen, a fellow with the anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), for Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.”

This is a pattern. Julissa Arce reported for Crooked this week that “Trump has stacked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the State Department with former staff and leadership from FAIR, [another SPLC-designated hate group,] and CIS mostly in positions that do not require congressional confirmation. In April, the administration tapped Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of FAIR to advise the acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”

Buzzfeed’s Adolfo Flores offers one story among thousands about how this ugly dynamic impacts real people. “A Salvadoran mother who applied for asylum as part of a caravan of Central Americans who traversed Mexico for the United States this spring has had her two sons removed from her custody and placed in the care of the federal government in New York,” he writes. “Officials offered no explanation for removing the children.” We can’t stress enough that this woman entered the country legally, in order to request asylum, as is her right under US and international law.

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Three more from the Only the Best People File…

“The White House official who will shape a large part of the administration’s drug price plan worked on many of the same issues as an industry lobbyist, raising questions about whether he violated President Donald Trump’s ethics rules,” reports Politico’s David Pitman. “Joe Grogan — who has sweeping authority over drug pricing, entitlement programs and other aspects of federal health policy at the Office of Management and Budget — didn’t obtain a waiver from a directive Trump issued during his first week in office that imposed a two-year cooling-off period between lobbying and regulating on the same ‘specific issue area.’” He violated Trump’s own “ethics rules,” which, wow, must be a pretty tough thing to do.

War-mongering Islamophobic wingnut John Bolton “is remaking the National Security Council in his image,” reports Eric Levitz at NYMag. This week, he installed “Islamophobic wingnut…[and] former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz as his chief of staff.” At the link, Levitz offers a rundown of this guy’s long, kooky background.


And finally….


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“Step by methodical step, the Trump administration is remaking government policy on reproductive health — moving to limit access to birth control and abortion and bolstering abstinence-only sex education,” according to the AP.

What makes this so maddening is that Trump used to be “very pro-choice” – those are his words — and only reversed himself to pander to the Evangelical right.

“Most of the changes involve rules and regulations under the administration’s direct control, such as a proposal to forbid federally funded family planning clinics from referring women for abortions and separately allowing more employers who cite moral or religious reasons to opt out of no-cost birth control for women workers. Trump also is appointing numerous new federal judges endorsed by anti-abortion groups.”

In summary, everything is horrible. But that’s no reason not to Be Best until the next edition of What Fresh Hell?

ICYMI, we’ll leave you with the “buff cat” that stormed the internet this week…

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/fresh-hell-trump-show-just-exhausting/

Another installment ~ makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? Trump’s diplomacy for idiots
Joshua Holland / 16 Jun 2018 at 12:17 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.

What an embarrassing, aggravating week to be an American — or at least one who hasn’t been lured into Trump’s crackpot cult of personality.

The big stories this week were simply depressing. It began with a presidential tantrum at the G7 meeting in Quebec — it looks like the bromance between Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to an ugly end with a barrage of obnoxious tweets. But the low-light might have been Tangerine Trujillo telling Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, “I can send you 25 million Mexicans and you’ll be out of office very soon.” According to Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, a senior regime official defined the Trump Doctrine this week as, “We’re America, bitch.” Quite a departure from Obama’s “don’t do stupid shit.”

There was a jarring juxtaposition between Trump shitting all over our closest allies and his fawning attitude toward North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Talking is better than shooting, but it was painful to see Trump being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize after getting totally rolled by KJU, who orchestrated a propaganda coup that was greater than anything he might have imagined. “A North Korean government video released Thursday shows Trump returning the salute of a North Korean general,” according to The Washington Post. He even got Trump to make a cheesy sales video on his behalf. And all for some vague agreement to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, someday, details TBD.

WaPo also reported that Trump tried to woo KJU with the kind of incentive that has marked his entire business career: Making a profit with other people’s money…


And the dystopian soundtrack accompanying this wretched week were the cries of children being ripped away from their families, an abomination that Attorney General Jeff Sessions justified by citing the same Bible passages that his forefathers used to defend slavery.


Which led to some of the most egregious lies this singularly mendacious regime has ever uttered…



If you haven’t registered to vote in November, please do so. Get some friends to the polls as well.

Now let’s turn now to some less prominent outrages…

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It’s hard to piss off Canadians, but Trump’s antics appear to have done the trick. Justin Wise reported for The Hill this week that some MPs are floating the idea of sanctioning Trump’s businesses directly rather than punishing Americans as a whole. Appropriately, “the politician who posed the initial question, MP Erin Weir, invoked the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act as a way to sanction foreign nationals.”

And be sure to check out Catherine Rampell’s column about how Trump’s attempts to protect US washing machine manufacturers from foreign competition is backfiring as laundry equipment prices have jumped by 17 percent this spring, “the biggest increase on record.”

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Speaking of immigration, and investment deals, the Associated Press reported that a Florida immigration firm tapped Michael Cohen to help stop a federal crackdown on EB-5 visas that allow wealthy foreigners to gain permanent residency if they invest in certain real estate projects, and the company “appears to have gotten nearly everything it wanted.”


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In any normal administration, competition for White House jobs is intense. But in this regime, which has become infamous for its back-stabbing and where you’re as likely to get subpoenaed as promoted, an “exodus” of staffers has left Trump’s team desperately looking for warm bodies.

“The White House – which has been having trouble filling positions as it bleeds staffers – is now trying to find recruits at a conservative job fair on the Hill,” reported Annie Karni for Politico. “The fair is being hosted by the Conservative Partnership Institute, an organization founded by former Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint last year…”

“‘CPI’s mission is to support conservatives in Washington and we are excited about giving hundreds of qualified, experienced conservatives an opportunity to meet with Trump administration officials and learn about career opportunities,’ Rachel Bovard, senior policy director at Conservative Partnership said in an email.”

Relatedly, Robert O’Harrow profiled What Fresh Hell alumnus Taylor Weyeneth for the WaPo. Weyeneth, you may recall, was a 24-year-old Trump campaign intern who ended up being promoted six times within the regime before being fired for being totally unqualified for the senior position he ended up in.

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The latest of so many damning stories about serial grifter and EPA chief Scott Pruitt was from the WaPo, which reported this week that “the head of an Oklahoma-based public relations firm with a large energy practice helped Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt secure tickets for his family to go to the Rose Bowl in January.”

A number of recent reports suggest that Pruitt’s uniquely corrupt style is wearing thin at both the White House and among Republicans on Capitol Hill, and The New York Times reported that he’s going to do as much to destroy the environment as possible on the way out. According to Coral Davenport, Pruitt is preparing to roll back two key Obama-era initiatives — one to protect water from pollution and another to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. “While Mr. Pruitt has initiated the rollback of dozens of environmental rules over the past year and a half, the latest one-two push comes as he is battling allegations that he improperly used his government post to secure a job for his wife,” wrote Davenport.

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“A company run by former officials at Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm brought down by a scandal over how it obtained Facebook users’ private data, has quietly been working for President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election effort,” reported the AP.

Meanwhile, according to The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard, Donald Trump is more popular with his base than Obama, JFK or Ronald Reagan were with theirs at this point in his presidency. It turns out he could in fact shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they’d stick with him.

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We hate to call things “Orwellian” because it’s such a tired cliché, but it really is the best word to describe a report in Foreign Policy about Mari Stull, “a former food and beverage lobbyist-turned-wine blogger” who recently got a gig as a senior State Department official and has since “been quietly vetting career diplomats and American employees of international institutions to determine whether they are loyal to President Donald Trump and his political agenda.” According to the report, “she has researched the names of government officials to determine whether they signed off on Obama-era policies — though signing off does not mean officials personally endorsed them but merely cleared them through the bureaucratic chain. And she has inquired about Americans employed by international agencies, including the World Health Organization and the United Nations, asking their colleagues when they were hired and by whom.”

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Finally, in what should probably have been much bigger news, a group of researchers warned this week that if their habitats continue to diminish at their current pace, orangutans and chimpanzees could be extinct by the end of the century. They say that 60 percent of all primates could be wiped out if the primates with the most smarts don’t get serious about preserving them.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/fresh-hell-trumps-diplomacy-idiots/

I can only repeat what I said in my prior post: here's another installment ~ makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? Trump’s best month will be a nightmare for the US
Joshua Holland / 30 Jun 2018 at 11:53 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.

If you feel like a ragtag bunch of the most venal, ignorant and obnoxious people in America just scored three touch-downs on you, you’re not alone. “One has to go back almost half a century to find a month like the past one, so devastating to the left and its values,” wrote Todd Gitlin at The Washington Post. “Consider that immigrant children taken from their parents at the border are still penned up… Consider the Supreme Court’s ruling that guts public sector unions. Consider the court’s decisions to uphold gerrymandering and voting rights restrictions, to permit ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ to stand mute about the option of abortion, and to allow whole populations to be banned from our shores.”

Also consider that we’re now in a series of notably stupid trade wars with our closest allies. Canada announced $12.6 billion in retaliatory tariffs on US products this week. The President of the Electoral College has been haranguing Harley Davidson on Twitter for moving production overseas to get around the EU’s retaliatory tariffs. “General Motors warned Friday that if President Trump pushed ahead with another wave of tariffs, the move could backfire, leading to ‘less investment, fewer jobs and lower wages’ for its employees,” reported The New York Times. Reuters reports that BMW is warning that it might also cut its US workforce. Jobs president!

And it’s all going to get worse when Trump replaces Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy with a soulless, reactionary android grown in the Federalist Society’s basement. One of the candidates reportedly on Marshal Tweeto’s shortlist “has argued that presidents should not be distracted by civil lawsuits, criminal investigations or even questions from a prosecutor or defense attorney while in office,” according to The Washington Post.

Another…


It would be easy to feel demoralized. But do pay heed to some words of wisdom from Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights icon who’s faced down firehoses and police dogs and nevertheless kept at it for over 60 years. “Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” he wrote this week. “Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” We don’t have the luxury of despair.

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Let’s begin the roundup with a seemingly minor story of administrative negligence that’s actually pretty troubling when you think about it.

Gabriel Sandoval reported for Propublica that a number of Trump staffers, including a former NRA lobbyist, left their financial disclosure forms blank, and ethics lawyers reviewed and signed off on the forms, certifying that they conform with federal law, which “requires nearly all executive branch employees to submit reports intended to reveal and resolve conflicts of interest that might arise from their personal finances.”

There are substantial problems with these kinds of omissions, but what struck us is just what a ‘fuck you’ to the American public this represents. It says so clearly that these people believe that the law doesn’t apply to them. And with their immunity-by-Congressional-majority, they haven’t been wrong so far.

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There were a couple of other troubling examples of authoritarianism this week. CBS was interviewing James Schwab, a former ICE spokesperson who quit because while he was comfortable spinning the media – shading the truth – he refused to repeat and egregious lie that Attorney General Jeff Sessions [told], and in the middle of the interview two real-life Men in Suits from the Department of Homeland Security barged in and interrogated him about whether he had leaked information about ICE operations.

Schwab said the timing of the visit made it clear that it was “absolutely” an intimidation technique. “Why, three months later, are we doing this?” Schwab said. “This is intimidation. And this is why people won’t come out and speak against the government.”

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The 4,736th investigation into uber-grifter Scott Pruitt is looking into charges that the EPA chief “retaliated against a handful of employees who pushed back against his spending and management,” according to Politico.

These were career staffers, but Pruitt also seems happy to punish his own people if he feels like they crossed him…


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Pruitt’s been locked in a heated competition to be the most corrupt and embarrassing Cabinet member with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

This week, Bloomberg reported that his agency’s inspector general “will review… Zinke’s involvement in a land deal with a property development group backed by Halliburton Co. Chairman David J. Lesar.” Lesar met Zinke in his office to discuss a development deal that “would substantially increase the value of the land owned by Zinke” if it goes through. “Zinke’s official calendar for that day, which is routinely released to the public, withholds the meeting’s attendees and the subject matter,” according to the report.

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Let’s not count out the possibility that Mick Mulvaney will ultimately take the prize for grifting.

“Mulvaney, head of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, cut in half a fine that his Obama-era predecessor sought against a payday lender and dropped some of the agency’s earlier claims in the case,” according to Reuters.

The pay-day lender, Security Finance, donated to Mulvaney’s Congressional campaigns in the past.

Reuters:


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James Melville, the US ambassador to Estonia, became the latest among “many senior U.S. diplomats who have resigned — some quietly, some not — because of Trump’s policies,” according to Foreign Policy.

Blockquote: “A Foreign Service Officer’s DNA is programmed to support policy and we’re schooled right from the start, that if there ever comes a point where one can no longer do so, particularly if one is in a position of leadership, the honorable course is to resign. Having served under six presidents and 11 secretaries of state, I never really thought it would reach that point for me,” he wrote in the post, which was obtained by Foreign Policy.

“For the President to say the EU was ‘set up to take advantage of the United States, to attack our piggy bank,’ or that ‘NATO is as bad as NAFTA’ is not only factually wrong, but proves to me that it’s time to go,” he wrote, citing Trump’s reported comments in recent weeks that have unnerved U.S. allies.

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Another reflection of the regime’s priorities…

A Trump “appointee to the State Department tore into standard UN documents that condemn racism as a threat to democracy,” reported CNN’s Michelle Kosinski. Andrew Veprek, “the deputy assistant secretary for refugees and migration, a foreign service officer promoted by the White House to an unusually senior position for his rank, disputed the idea that leaders have a ‘duty’ to condemn hate speech and incitement, and repeatedly rejected use of the words nationalism, populism, and xenophobia.” There are good people on both sides.

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Robert Wilkie, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, is a neo-Confederate Jesse Helms acolyte who’s had “a career spent working shoulder to shoulder with polarizing figures in U.S. politics and often defending their most divisive views,” according to The Washington Post.

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First they sabotage the Affordable Care Act, and then…

“The White House is proposing to reduce by nearly 40 percent the uniformed public health professionals who deploy during disasters and disease outbreaks, monitor drug safety and provide health care in some of the nation’s most remote and disadvantaged areas,” according to The Washington Post.

******

“For the first time in recent memory,” wrote Katherine Burgess for the Wichita Eagle, “an official from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spoke at a conference of the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization.

“Our president is fearless when it comes to life and conscience,” said Roger Severino, who directs the Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights. “We’re just getting started.”

Burgess notes that “the department’s strategic plan also now includes language that says, ‘A core component of the HHS mission is the dedication to serve all Americans from conception to natural death.’”

******

Finally, we have a new policy going forward: Each week, because everything sucks so badly, we’re going to try to leave you with a positive story that may have flown under the radar.

A story like this one:

“A federal judge blocked Kentucky’s Medicaid work requirements on Friday, ruling that the Trump [regime] did not adequately consider before approving the state’s proposal whether work requirements would violate the program’s purpose of providing health care to the most vulnerable Americans,” reported Dylan Matthews at Vox.

Kentucky is one of 11 states that have either had such work requirements approved by the regime or that have similar schemes awaiting approval. “The ruling puts the future of Medicaid work requirements in doubt,” wrote Matthews. “The Trump administration has made them a priority.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/06/fresh-hell-trumps-best-month-will-nightmare-us/

Yet again, I can only repeat what I said in my prior post[s]: here's another installment ~ makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? Trump just wants to set the world on fire
Joshua Holland / 07 Jul 2018 at 14:00 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, Republican lawmakers visited privately with their Russian counterparts during the Fourth of July holiday. Some tweeted patriotic messages suggesting that they were celebrating like good patriots back home. The group had promised to have what diplomats call “frank discussions” with the Russians, but The Washington Post reports that “on Russian state television, presenters and guests mocked the U.S. congressional delegation for appearing to put a weak foot forward, noting how the message of tough talk they promised in Washington ‘changed a bit‘ by the time they got to Moscow.” One Russian military official said, “we need to look down at them and say: You came because you needed to, not because we did.”

While they were being humiliated in Moscow, Trump was back home trashing NATO and the #MeToo movement, and ratcheting up his cockamamie trade wars. Some of our most important trading partners continue to target Trump’s constituents. Trump is reportedly rambling about blowing up the World Trade Organization, which would likely cause “global stock markets to crater and economies to dive into recession.”

Mike Pompeo claimed great progress upon his return from talks with the North Koreans, only to have them trash him. This diplomatic push is turning out exactly how most sentient beings predicted: Trump got totally rolled.


Let’s note that none of this madness we see day in and day out — the incompetence, the governance by graft and trolling — would be possible if not for over 40 years of conservative investments in a dedicated alternative information ecosystem. Convinced that all of society’s professional distributors of knowledge — the academy, the media and even science itself — were hostile to their worldview, deep-pocketed conservatives started investing in academic chairs, think-tanks and a slew of media outlets dedicated to combatting liberalism and politicizing their troops in a way that was rarely the case in the post World War II era.

As a result, the reality of Trumpism is lost on Trump supporters who get their information from the internet or from Fox or Sinclair broadcasts. For them, everything’s great. They’re tired of so much winning. Any bad news is fake news. And because the base continues to love Trump, Republicans on Capitol Hill continue to grant his crime family impunity-by-Congressional-majority.

Give the right credit for playing the long game. But there’s an irony here that shouldn’t be overlooked: Many of the early funders of the conservative movement — blue-blooded families like the Scaifes, Olins and Bradleys — were not themselves wild-eyed reactionaries, at least not by today’s standards. Their generation had a certain sense of civic duty — an American style of noblesse oblige. They may have been furious about what they saw as the dirty hippies destroying America, but in most cases they were in favor of pluralism. They certainly valued stability and US-led multilateralism. The post-war order that Trump seem intent on uprooting was very good for business. They wanted to combat an increasingly liberal culture, cut taxes and limit regulations, and they ended up creating a monster.

******

Speaking of crackpot trade wars, and hypocrisy, the WaPo reported that even “as the Trump administration initiates a possible trade war with China, the president’s businesses continue to benefit from partnerships involving the Chinese government, via state-backed companies and investors.”


******

Last month, we learned that Jared and Ivanka had pulled in at least $82 million in outside income last year as they were (supposedly) working for the American people. It’s all a big grift, and this week, NBC reported that even Melania is getting a piece of the action. “Since her husband took office Melania Trump has earned six figures from an unusual deal with a photo agency in which major media organizations have indirectly paid the Trump family despite a requirement that the photos be used only in positive coverage,” according to the report. “It’s not unheard of for celebrities to earn royalties from photos of themselves, but it’s very unusual for the wife of a currently serving elected official.” Licensing them exclusively for positive stories has a nice Kim Jong-Unian touch.

******

On his way out the door, disgraced EPA Chief Scott Pruitt offered a final fuck you to the environment, according to Eric Lipton at The New York Times. “In the final hours of Scott Pruitt’s tenure as administrator, the Environmental Protection Agency moved on Friday to effectively grant a loophole that will allow a major increase in the manufacturing of a diesel freight truck that produces as much as 55 times the air pollution as trucks that have modern emissions controls,” he wrote.

A gift to Big Freight, right? Well, yes and no. In January, when Pruitt first proposed the rule change, the Environmental Defense Fund noted that “every segment of the freight industry — truck manufacturers, fleet owners, freight shippers and other stakeholders — has spoken out to oppose this rollback. These industry stakeholders recognize that Pruitt’s proposal would undo decades of progress in cleaning up pollution from heavy-duty freight trucks. Moreover, it would undermine their significant investments in pollution control innovation.”

We have to confess that we’ll miss Pruitt here at What Fresh Hell?, simply because his unique blend of sanctimony, entitlement and lawlessness embodied the Trump regime’s perfidy so perfectly.


******

Speaking of the EPA, Politico reported this week that the Trump regime “is suppressing an Environmental Protection Agency report that warns that most Americans inhale enough formaldehyde vapor in the course of daily life to put them at risk of developing leukemia and other ailments.” #MAGA!

Pruitt’s acting successor, Andrew Wheeler, “also has a history with the chemical. He was staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2004, when his boss, then-Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), sought to delay an earlier iteration of the formaldehyde assessment.”

******

Meanwhile, Jeff Sessions “rescinded an extensive set of guidelines put in place under President Barack Obama that had called on colleges and universities to consider race as a way of promoting diversity,” according to Reuters.

And…


******

The regime has assembled a “denaturalization taskforce” to revoke the citizenship of people who ostensibly gave false information during the application process. At Esquire, Jack Holmes reported that the last time such a taskforce was assembled was during the Red Scare. He also put the move in context, writing that “this administration cannot be trusted to restrict the task force’s operations to investigating people who allegedly lied during the naturalization process.”


Meanwhile, Aura Bogado, Ziva Branstetter and Vanessa Swales reported for Reveal that a defense contractor called MVM Inc. “quietly detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with dark windows, no kitchen and only a few toilets during three weeks of the Trump administration’s family separation effort.” According to the report, “the building is not licensed by Arizona to hold children, and… MVM Inc., has claimed publicly that it does not operate ‘shelters or any other type of housing’ for children.”

******

Finally, we will leave you with some positive news in these otherwise bleak times. You may recall that immediately after the 2016 election, the government freaked out civil liberties advocates by charging 234 people who protested Trump’s inauguration with serious felonies. Zoe Tillman reported for Buzzfeed that after several trials in which prosecutors failed to get a conviction, this week they dropped all charges against the remaining defendants.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/fresh-hell-trump-just-wants-set-world-fire/

That's been going on for a long time. After all there has to be a reason for the US to have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries

Must be Obama's secret FEMA camps. So secret even the US government doesn't know where they are. They're full of Mooslims getting geared up for a jihad.

And yet again, I can only repeat what I said in my prior post[s]: here's another installment ~ makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

What Fresh Hell? Our Manchurian President shows his true colors
Joshua Holland / 21 Jul 2018 at 14:32 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.

What a long, tough year this past week has been.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s White House had come up with “a well laid-out plan” to take the indictments of 12 Russian intelligence officials for hacking the Dems and “shove it in Putin’s face and look strong doing it.” He was supposed to confront Putin both during his private meeting with the Russian leader “and in the public news conference afterward.” In other words, they wrote in big block letters, DO NOT COLLUDERATE. Unfortunately, said one White House aide, “he did the exact opposite.”

As usual, Tangerine Trujillo is his own worst enemy. He has done more to keep Kremlingate front and center than the fake news media or the Derp State ever could.


The striking thing about the debacle in Helsinki is that it would have been so easy for Trump to simply offer up some hollow, boilerplate “tough talk” for public consumption, even if he kissed Putin’s ass in private. It’s politics 101. During their presser, one had the sense that Putin himself was trying to get Trump to stand up to him a little bit. He was trying to give Trump some cover, but the egoist wouldn’t take it. Jeremy Shapiro wrote for Foreign Policy this week that “Putin seems to have already noticed that winning Trump amounts to a sort of catastrophic success. The extent of Trump’s isolation on Russia within the United States is a problem for Putin and one that he surely recognizes.”

All of this brings us to Adam Davidson’s New Yorker piece on “kompromat,” a Russian word for using compromising information to gain leverage that many Americans are learning for the first time as we contemplate the possibility that POTUS is a Russian asset. “There is no need to assume that Trump was a formal agent of Russian intelligence to make sense of Trump’s solicitousness toward Putin,” he wrote. “It is natural to assume that [kompromat] must be a big, rare, scary thing, used in extraordinary circumstances to force compliance and achieve grand aims. But… kompromat is routinely used throughout the former Soviet Union to curry favor, improve negotiated outcomes, and sway opinion.


At The Washington Post, Anne Applebaum considered another potential source of kompromat for Vlad. She argued that last week’s indictments suggest a scenario in which Russian hackers obtained not only risotto recipes and embarrassing campaign gossip, but also the Clinton campaign’s precious voter data, which they then handed over to the Trump campaign. If that could be proved, it would be a massive conspiracy against the government of the United States.

One thing is clear: Russian information and cyber warfare is already underway for the 2018 midterms. Meanwhile, we’re going to have a fight over the Supreme Court during the next two months, and Robert Mueller is reportedly trying to wrap up at least one part of his sprawling investigation – into whether Trump obstructed justice in the Oval Office – before mid-September.

Hang on, because the next few months look like they’ll be a pretty wild ride.

*****

Speaking of the security of the upcoming midterms, after House Republicans “voted down a Democratic effort to increase election security spending, as Democrats accused the GOP of refusing to stand up to Russia over interference in U.S. elections,” The WSJ reported [$$] that “three of the top cybersecurity officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation are retiring from government service, [even] as cyberattacks are a major concern for the country’s security agencies.”

Meanwhile, John Bolton has axed Richard Hooker from the National Security Council. Hooker was a “pro-Nato” Russia-hawk and “the sort of consensus defense official common in both Republican and Democratic administrations in the pre-Trump era,” and his departure – the circumstances of which are in dispute – came just before Trump’s Helsinki summit. The Daily Beast has more on that.

*****

Kathy Kraninger, Trump’s pick to head the embattled Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, had a tough confirmation hearing this week. “Kraninger, who has worked as a congressional aide and at the departments of Transportation and Homeland Security, has a short paper trail and no clear experience in financial policy. The bureau’s critics see her nomination as a way to keep acting Director Mick Mulvaney, her boss at the Office of Management and Budget, in the loop at the CFPB,” according to Politico.

*****

In other corrupt nomination news, Tom Philpott reported for Mother Jones that “while most media were still digesting President Donald Trump’s extraordinary travels abroad, the White House quietly named a long-time pesticide executive as chief scientist for the US Department of Agriculture.” Philpott added that if he’s approved by the Senate, Scott Hutchins “will be the third major player from Dow Chemical’s pesticide/seed division…to hold a high post in Trump’s USDA.”

*****

Meanwhile…


*****

We have noted the Trump regime’s Dickensian assault on child labor laws in the past. They want to roll back rules that “prohibit 16- and 17-year-old apprentices and student learners from receiving extended, supervised training in certain dangerous jobs. The list includes roofing work, as well as operating chainsaws, meat slicers, and various other power-driven machines that federal law recognizes as too dangerous for those younger than 18,” according to Bloomberg Law.

The rule change, writes Ben Penn, is now just “one procedural hurdle from public release.”

*****

It’s not creeping authoritarianism; it has crept.

“Ahead of Robert Wilkie’s likely confirmation to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, Trump loyalists at the agency are taking aggressive steps to purge or reassign staff members perceived to be disloyal to President Trump and his agenda for veterans,” reports Lisa Rein for the WaPo.

And then there was this scene from Pyongyang Trump’s Washington…


*****

The GOP-led Senate continues to confirm our Manchurian President’s judicial nominations at a furious pace. This week, they gave Andrew Oldham the nod for a lifetime appointment on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund said the following in a release: “In confirming Andrew Oldham, the Senate ignored his clear anti-civil rights record and his unacceptable failure to endorse the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Such antagonism towards pillars of our justice system should be disqualifying, but senators continue to shirk their obligation to ‘advise and consent’ on the judicial nominees before them.”

*****

There’s not much on the good news front to leave you with this week.

Senate Democrats were able to pick off a Republican – the only black one in the chamber – to block a blatantly racist judicial nominee. That’s good.

And then there was this tiny shred of Schadenfreude, via Business Insider: “Trump-themed flags and hats made in China are reportedly being held up at US customs amid an intensifying trade war.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/07/fresh-hell-manchurian-president-shows-true-colors/

Trump is a coward. He sends others to do the confrontations.

Very glad to see the return of this semi-regular commentary! ~ and yet again, I can only repeat what I said in my prior post[s]: here's another installment that makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Is Donald Trump just a liar or has he lost his grip on reality?
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 01 Sep 2018 at 13:25 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.

It violates a whole bunch of norms to suggest that the president of the United States may be suffering from serious mental illness. It’s long been considered inappropriate for professionals to diagnose someone from afar. It’s also harmful to stigmatize people with mental illnesses, who are, statistically speaking, no more likely to become a corrupt white nationalist buffoons than anyone else.

But a problematic result of those sensible prohibitions is that, as a society, we’re underestimating the possibility that a guy who has access to the nuclear football is off his rocker.

We bring this up in the context of Trump’s latest eye-raising nonsense: His tweet suggesting that his infamous interview with NBC’s Lester Holt was somehow manipulated to make it appear that he had stupidly blurted out a confession that he’d fired former FBI Director James Comey to put an end to the Russia investigation.

This followed an earlier tweet in which Trump claimed that Google had a team of Antifa elves, maybe, sifting through news stories and demoting those that said nice things about Trump.

Most observers see this stuff as an example of the Big Lie technique, and that may be correct. Virtually every word out of Trump’s mouth is a lie, and always has been, yet his base continues to believe that he’s the sole arbiter of truth. It hasn’t hurt him with Congressional Republicans, in part because they know their constituents like Trump more than them, or their party. So he just offers up an endless stream of happy bullshit, and this claim about the Holt interview is just one more example.

But the Big Lie is for public consumption, and Trump makes similar claims in private. Recall a report from The New York Times last year that, “despite his public acknowledgment” that the Access Hollywood tape that captured Trump bragging that he could grab ‘em by the pussy was real, “and his hasty videotaped apology under pressure from his advisers,” Trump began “raising the prospect with allies that it may not have been him on the tape after all.” According to the report, shortly before the inauguration, “Trump told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate the recording that had him boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.”

Which brings us to a serious question: Does he actually believe this stuff? It’s one thing to peddle it to his gullible, perpetually pissed-off supporters for political gain, but what if the pressures of the office – and the myriad investigations closing in on him — have caused a legitimate break from reality? According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, psychosis is best understood “as disruptions to a person’s thoughts and perceptions that make it difficult for them to recognize what is real and what isn’t.”

While we at What Fresh Hell aren’t psychologists, you don’t need a degree to see that trump displays all of the classic symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. In addition to having trouble empathizing with others and displaying “a sense of entitlement” and the need for “constant, excessive admiration,” per the Mayo Clinic, people who suffer from this disorder “have trouble handling anything they perceive as criticism,” and can “experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change.”

Trump’s 71, and it’s hard to imagine a more stressful change than shifting from the lifestyle of a sleazy business man and game show host who’s always surrounded himself with sycophantic yes men to that of a POTUS dogged by scandals and hemmed in by investigators.

We can’t know what he believes is real and what’s just spin, but we should probably take the possibility that he’s gone nuts more seriously than we tend to. He’s no longer just a reality TV star.

*****

One story that certainly didn’t fly under the radar this week was Friday’s indictment of Sam Patten, an associate of Paul Manafort with ties to Cambridge Analytica, for illegally funneling cash from a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch to Trump’s inauguration fund.

But we wanted to take the opportunity to remind you that Trump had a cheap, bare-bones inauguration that raised and supposedly spent almost twice as much as Barack Obama’s, and nobody knows what happened with the cash — $107 million of it. In March, George Jenkins, who oversaw George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural (for $42 million) told ProPublica, “It’s inexplicable to me. I literally don’t know. They had a third of the staff and a quarter of the events and they raise at least twice as much as we did,” Jenkins said. “So there’s the obvious question: Where did it go? I don’t know.”

We have known since May, when ABC broke the story, that Robert Mueller’s team was trying to get to the bottom of it, asking “questions about donors with connections to Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.”

*****

Speaking of Qatar, The WSJ reported this week that the embattled Gulf state targeted 250 “Trump influencers” in a sprawling lobbying campaign designed to change US policy in the region. Among others, the Qataris feted Allan Dershowitz and Mike Huckabee (who got $50,000 to visit the country). Steve Bannon was paid $100,000 to speak at a conference.

Julie Bycowicz wrote that, “because Mr. Trump often shuns traditional policy-making processes, relying on advice of friends and associates, interest groups have spent the past 19 months reorienting their lobbying. New approaches include advertising during the president’s favorite television shows and forming ties with people who speak to him.”

This is not normal.

*****

There’s an old saying that “personnel is policy,” and with that in mind, we’d like to connect a couple of dots.

In June, we mentioned that the regime had placed a number of people connected to anti-immigrant hate groups in senior positions in DHS and in the relevant agencies that deal with refugees.

Now we get this fresh Hell…


Welp. (Smith resigned after emails he’d exchanged with acknowledged white supremacists were obtained by reporters.)

Which brings us to this genuinely fascistic move by the regime: According to the WaPo’s Kevin Sieff, the Trumpers are denying the citizenship of (brown) Americans in the Southern border region. “In some cases, passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings,” wrote Sieff. “In others, they are stuck in Mexico, their passports suddenly revoked when they tried to reenter the United States. As the Trump administration attempts to reduce both legal and illegal immigration, the government’s treatment of passport applicants in South Texas shows how U.S. citizens are increasingly being swept up by immigration enforcement agencies.”

(Your wingnut uncle may tell you that the Obama administration did the same, but that’s not true.)

Meanwhile, Laura Morel and Aura Bogado reported for Reveal that the regime “is seeking to end court oversight of how it treats immigrant children, more than 20 years after a landmark lawsuit over mistreatment of children in the nation’s immigration system.” The Flores settlement assures some minimum standards for how the government cares for immigrant children, and provided the legal basis for a court to order the reunification of families. This move comes as “federal officials report that more than 500 immigrant children remain separated from their parents in the wake of President Donald Trump’s ‘zero-tolerance’ policy.”

The Los Angeles Times reported this week that “three children from El Salvador who were separated from their families after immigrating to the U.S. were sexually abused in detention centers in Arizona,” the latest in a series of similar stories.

With “literal Nazis” and lesser nativists embedded in relevant government agencies, all of this should be unsurprising – shocking but unsurprising.

*****

ICYMI…


Not normal!

*****

“For much of last year,” wrote WaPo’s Juliet Eilperin, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s deputy chief of staff, Downey Magallanes, “pursued his agenda with vigor,” leading “an effort to cut the size of two vast protected areas in southern Utah, opening public lands to possible development and energy exploration. She participated in deliberations over how to scale back safety monitoring rules for offshore oil and gas operations. And she helped develop a leasing plan that would permit drilling in most U.S. continental shelf waters.”

You can see where this is heading, right?

“As of next week, Magallanes will have a new job: working for the energy giant BP, on its government affairs team.”

*****

This week, one career public servant had enough. In a “scathing resignation letter,” Seth Frotman, “the federal official in charge of protecting student borrowers from predatory lending practices,” blasted CFPB head Mick Mulvaney, according to NPR. In it, he said that the “current leadership ‘has turned its back on young people and their financial futures.

“Unfortunately, under your leadership, the Bureau has abandoned the very consumers it is tasked by Congress with protecting,” it read. “Instead, you have used the Bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America.”

*****

We have to give it to Republicans: They are pretty creative when it comes to shrinking the voting pool.

“The state of Georgia has blocked all foreign internet traffic to its online voter registration site, BuzzFeed News has learned, a move that would do little to deter hackers but blocks absentee voters.”

*****

Over the past 18 months, Donald Trump has signed a series of bills passed by the Republican Congress that are projected to add $2.7 trillion to federal deficits over the next ten years. Deficits are only “generational warfare” when Democrats are in office.

It was always clear that they would turn around and cite those very deficits to push for cuts to programs that help ordinary people, and they’ve followed through with gusto.

“House Republicans are holding the farm bill hostage by insisting on stricter work requirements for millions of people who depend on food stamps to supplement their meager incomes,” wrote Merrill Goozner for Modern Healthcare this week. “Never mind that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program already has the strictest work requirements of any federal program for low-income Americans. Never mind that the food stamp rolls have fallen by 2 million people in the past year or that average payment to households still receiving aid fell $20 a month over the past five years. The average individual benefit is down to $1.40 a meal.” Goozner doesn’t mention it, but a number of Republican lawmakers have said that this is being driven by the need to reduce the massive deficits they created.


“Donald Trump is canceling pay raises due in January for most civilian federal employees, he informed Congress on Thursday, citing budget constraints,” reported The Associated Press. The move may ultimately cost more than the pay raises by forcing some federal workers into the private sector and forcing the government to rely on more contractors to keep things functioning.

*****

We try to leave you with something positive, and it wasn’t easy this week. But we’ll go with NAACP president Derrick Johnson writing about some potentially important new research…


Perhaps we’re seeing the makings of a backlash against the backlash against the first black president.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/09/donald-trump-just-liar-lost-grip-reality/

And still yet again, I can only repeat what I said in my prior post[s]: here's another installment that makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Is Donald Trump the leader of the resistance inside the Trump administration?
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 16 Sep 2018 at 07:15 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.

Here’s a thought that should keep you awake at night: What if there’s a president in our future with all of Donald Trump’s fecklessness, corruption and authoritarian instincts, but with the discipline typical of a serious and accomplished leader?

Trump has proven again and again that he’s every lawyer’s worst nightmare as a client and his own worst enemy as the president of Twitter. We saw the most recent example of that this week when he claimed that 3,000 Americans hadn’t in fact died in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria, and, even more ludicrously, that the independent study which tallied that number represented some kind of Democratic plot to make him look bad. This nonsense came just a week after the GAO issued a report which found, among other things, that the federal response to the disaster had been woefully insufficient. Officials lacked necessary equipment, contractors fell down on the job and over half of FEMA’s personnel were working “in a capacity in which they did not hold the title of ‘Qualified.’”

The report didn’t get much media attention until Trump made his wacky claim, and then pretty much every outlet ran a story about it. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico’s disaster was once again a central part of the national conversation. It was the Streisand Effect in action.

This is a consistent pattern with Trump. Nobody’s done more to keep Russian interference in the 2016 election in the headlines than the “president.” Vanity Fair reported this week that former Trump henchman Michael Cohen appears to be cooperating with the Mueller probe in part because he “listened as Trump railed against anyone who makes a plea deal” on Fox News, and Cohen “bristled at the feeling that he has taken the fall for a man who has refused to take any responsibility or face any consequence himself.” Remember that there would be no Mueller investigation in the first place if Trump hadn’t fired FBI director James Comey and then told NBC’s Lester Holt that he did so to derail the Russia investigation.

There is such a thing as bad publicity, as Trump makes clear almost every day. But that’s not the only way that he’s hobbled his regime. His childish and erratic behavior has fueled a shit-ton of damaging leaks from disaffected staffers, as well as that anonymous New York Times op-ed detailing how they’ve pulled off a soft coup in order to protect the country, or more likely to safeguard their future job prospects. That story is reportedly driving Trump completely batty, or battier than usual.

The Trump regime’s teetering on the precipice because of Donald Trump. One could plausibly argue that nobody has done more for the anti-Trump #resistance than the Orange Shitgibbon himself.

Consider how different things might be if he were articulate, displayed some rudimentary knowledge of how the world works, didn’t make headlines with outlandish lies every day and had a modicum of self-control. Vox’s Zach Beauchamp wrote this week about how Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has become de facto one-party state, morphing from democracy to a “soft” authoritarianism justified by the government’s relentless attacks on Muslims and immigrants. Read it because it certainly could happen here.

*****

The one area where the regime has displayed a ruthless competence is in its immigration policies. You may have heard that they shifted $10 million from FEMA to ICE, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg, according to CNN. Tal Kopan reported that “the Trump administration this summer quietly redirected $200 million from all over the Department of Homeland Security to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, despite repeated congressional warnings of ICE’s ‘lack of fiscal discipline’ and ‘unsustainable’ spending.”

*****

Malign Elf Attorney General Jeff Sessions set off a firestorm this week when he “warned incoming immigration judges that lawyers representing immigrants are trying to get around the law like ‘water seeping through an earthen dam,’” and then “cautioned the judges against allowing sympathy for the people appearing before them.” Hamed Aleaziz has more on that at Buzzfeed News.

*****

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that “the overall number of detained migrant children has exploded to the highest ever recorded — a significant counternarrative to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the number of undocumented families coming to the United States.” There’s been a lot of attention on family separations but when you include kids who are locked up with their families, the total is almost 13,000.

According to The Washington Post, the regime is tripling the size of a “a tent camp for migrant children in the desert outside El Paso” in order to accommodate all the kids the xenophobic fuckers running our government are detaining.

*****

Scott Pruitt, former EPA chief and eternal poster-boy for kleptocracy, is looking to cash in once again. According to The New York Times, Pruitt “is in discussions to work as a consultant to the Kentucky coal mining tycoon Joseph W. Craft III,” a “major Republican donor [who] enjoyed a close relationship with the E.P.A. during Mr. Pruitt’s tenure.”

*****

Pruitt’s legacy lives on at the agency he headed until his overt corruption made him a liability.

According to The Financial Times, “plans to roll back regulations on leaks of methane from US oil and gas installations have been published by the Trump administration in its latest move to dismantle climate policies put in place by former president Barack Obama.” The EPA “admitted the changes would lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions, which it estimated would be the equivalent over the next seven years of putting an extra 260,000 cars on the road.”

And E&E News reported that “the Trump administration’s plan to soften methane standards for the oil and gas industry is the first step in a larger effort to dismantle greenhouse gas rules for the booming sector.”


*****

Speaking of corruption…


*****

Marshal Tweeto’s pick to be U.S. ambassador to Romania, Adrian Zuckerman, “could face scrutiny over claims that he sexually harassed a legal secretary while he was a partner at a large firm,” reported New York Law Journal. Only the best people.

*****

“For the first time, the U.S. government wants demonstrators to pay to use our parks, sidewalks and streets to engage in free speech in the nation’s capital,” wrote The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund’s Mara Verheyden-Hilliard and Carl Messineo in the WaPo this week. “This should be called what it is: a protest tax. This is a bold effort by the Trump administration to burden and restrict access to public spaces for First Amendment activities in Washington. If enacted, it would fundamentally alter participatory democracy in the United States.”

*****

David Dayen reported for The Intercept that “an unnamed foreign country communicated with planners of the now-scrapped Veterans Day military parade, according to documents obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request.” Has to be North Korea, right?

*****

Finally, we leave you with this good news: A series of recent polls suggests that the Senate is very much in play this November. It was long viewed as nearly impossible for the Dems to take the upper chamber, but handicapper Stuart Rothenberg wrote this week for Rollcall that “Democratic prospects have improved noticeably, giving the party a difficult but discernible route for control.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/09/donald-trump-leader-resistance-inside-trump-administration/

Here’s a thought that should keep you awake at night: What if there’s a president in our future with all of Donald Trump’s fecklessness, corruption and authoritarian instincts, but with the discipline typical of a serious and accomplished leader?...……..Consider how different things might be if he were articulate, displayed some rudimentary knowledge of how the world works, didn’t make headlines with outlandish lies every day and had a modicum of self-control. Vox’s Zach Beauchamp wrote this week about how Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, has become de facto one-party state, morphing from democracy to a “soft” authoritarianism justified by the government’s relentless attacks on Muslims and immigrants. Read it because it certainly could happen here.


Impeach Grabem, toss him out of office, install Pence and we'll all find out what it would be like.

What jim said.

Repeating myself from prior posts yet again: here's another installment that makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Is Trump starting a Constitutional crisis to shift our attention from the Kavanaugh dumpster fire?
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 22 Sep 2018 at 14:46 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.

The torrent of sleaze surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination has become too voluminous for a mere mortal to process.

Just one very long week ago, the political world was obsessed with the implications of Paul Manafort flipping on Donald Trump. But that story was largely forgotten by Sunday, when Hurricane Ford descended on the capital, and a roiling, mostly idiotic debate about whether just drunkenly trying to rape someone as a 17-year-old should disqualify someone from a lifetime appointment to the highest court of the land.

And then, while Christine Blasey Ford’s reps and the Republicans running Senate Judiciary Committee were sparring over her testimony before the committee, Ed Whelan, a close friend of Kavanaugh’s who heads the Ethics and Public Policy Center – because irony is dead, its corpse cremated and its ashes shot into the sun – offered a bizarre tweet storm in which he alleged that some other preppie douchebag had in fact assaulted Ford. (Adding to the surreal nature of the charge, the preppie douchebag in question, Chris Garrett, “was one of [the] witnesses for Kavanaugh’s character in a letter submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee in July.”) Whelan is also tight with Federalist Society Leonard Leo, who’s been a central player in the push to install Kavanaugh on the court.

Whelan isn’t some random wingnut concocting QAnon fantasies in his mom’s basement. According to Politico, “CRC Public Relations, the prominent Alexandria, Virginia-based PR firm, guided Whelan through his rollercoaster week of Twitter pronouncements that ended in embarrassment and potentially a setback for Kavanaugh’s hopes of landing on the high court.” And The Washington Post reported that “Kavanaugh and his allies have been privately discussing a defense that would not question whether an incident involving Ford happened, but instead would raise doubts that the attacker was Kavanaugh.”


In the days leading up to the tweetstorm, Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee and other Kavanaugh allies told reporters that they should keep an eye on Whelan’s account for a bombshell that would prove the nominee’s innocence. One of those staffers was Garrett Ventry, Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley’s top spokesman who had been coordinating much of the messaging around the nomination.

While flacking for Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, Ventry was also working for CRC Public Relations — he took a leave of absence to work the nomination. CRC counts the Federalist Society as a top client and was also behind the Swiftboating of John Kerry. Ventry was a key player in all of this until this morning…


It appears that the Federalist Society asked CRC to send someone to The Hill help Senate Republicans usher through the nomination of an alleged rapist, and they chose an alleged sexual harasser. Remember that this is the party of family values.


And then, while we were all still trying to process this whole mess, The New York Times dropped a “bombshell” story claiming that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the beleaguered official overseeing Robert Mueller’s investigation, had told colleagues that he had considered surreptitiously recording his conversations with Donald Trump and organizing an effort to remove him via the 25th Amendment. When several other outlets followed up by reporting that Rosenstein, who is apparently infamously sarcastic, had been joking, many observers concluded that the Times had been played by the White House, which had leaked the story in order to come up with a premise for firing Rosenstein and ultimately Robert Mueller. This theory was given credence by the large number of pro-Trump conservatives suddenly deciding that The Times is a credible media outlet rather than a failing fake-news organization.


Whatever the case may be, this new shiny object at least momentarily got us talking about something other than Kavanaugh. Again, this all occurred in the space of a single week in Trump’s America.


So here’s where we are: Brett Kavanaugh may or may not be guilty of attempting to rape Blasey Ford 35 years ago, but it is pretty clear that he lied repeatedly to Congress, which is a felony and should be disqualifying. There are also financial irregularities in his past.


That he is being rammed through by the same people who blocked Merrill Garland for a year on behalf of an illegitimate President who is himself the subject of multiple criminal investigations is a kind of soft Constitutional crisis. If Trump does fire Rosenstein in an attempt to get to Mueller, it will bring about an explicit one. How that plays out is anyone’s guess.

And this is all happening seven weeks before the crucial midterm elections, which Trump is reportedly convinced will be better for Republicans than all of the available data would indicate. One can only dread what Fresh Hell, or Hells, may be in store for us before November 6, especially if Kavanaugh goes down in flames.

*****

There were a few significant stories that got lost amid all of the mishegas this week.

Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen “has spoken with Special Counsel Robert Mueller multiple times over the past month, for several hours each time. The sources said the men discussed topics including Trump’s financial and business dealings in Russia and collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials — the focus of Mueller’s ongoing investigation.” More on what shouldn’t have been a one-day story over at Think progress.

*****

“Florence’s floodwaters breached a dam holding back a large reservoir at a Wilmington power plant Friday, and coal ash from an adjacent dump could be flowing into the nearby Cape Fear River,” reported the AP. “Duke Energy spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said the company does not believe the breach at the L.V. Sutton Power Station poses a significant threat for increased flooding to nearby communities because the river is already running high after the hurricane.”

Coal ash often contains cadmium, chromium, arsenic, mercury, boron, thallium and other nasty elements. Duke Energy, having basically captured state regulators, has been dumping this crap in vulnerable holding pits for years. Florence’s death toll is currently at 43, but depending on the amount of toxic crap that’s released before this is over, that number could rise, as it has with 9/11 first-responders, for years to come.

*****

ProPublica reported this week that “much of what [former FBI Director James] Comey said in his infamous press conference 11 days before the 2016 election “was inaccurate.”


In other words, we should be living in an alternate timeline in which we’d be engaged in huge fights over Hillary Clinton’s SCOTUS nominees.

*****

“The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters,” reported The New York Times. “The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year.”

*****

Meanwhile, ICE is arresting undocumented immigrants who come forward to take in these traumatized children, confirming “the worst fears of immigrants and their advocates: that a recent move by President Donald Trump’s administration to more fully vet people who come forward to care for undocumented immigrant children who are alone in the US has been a way for the administration to track down and arrest more undocumented immigrants.” CNN has more on that story.

*****

“Officials at a privately run immigration jail in Tacoma, Washington, have apparently obtained permission from a federal court to force-feed prisoners staging sustained hunger strikes, according to documents filed in federal court.” Mike Ludwig reports for Truthout.

*****

Who would do such awful things to people trying to make a better life for themselves and their families? Politico’s Ted Henson profiled an under-the-radar figure in the regime, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director Lee Francis Cissna, “the son of an immigrant, the son-in-law of a refugee” and a guy who has been at the center of the Trump regime’s war on legal immigrants.


Related: “The Department of Homeland Security’s investigative office in Hampton Roads is ‘clearly rife with offensive and racially hostile behavior,’ the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said in a decision” obtained this week by The Virginian-Pilot.

*****

“The Trump administration says that modern-day slavery and child labor are terrible. Not necessarily because millions of people across the globe are forced to work in abusive conditions, but mostly because the practice makes US businesses less competitive and costs Americans jobs,” wrote Vox’s Alexia Fernández Campbell. “In the US Department of Labor’s 2018 report on modern-day slavery and child labor, released Thursday, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta framed the practice as an economic issue, rather than the urgent human rights problem global leaders have long considered it.

*****

Speaking of urgent human rights problems, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put subtext into text this week when the WSJ reported that he certified to Congress that “the governments of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are undertaking demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians” in Yemen in order to keep those sweet weapons sales coming.

According to the report, multiple State Department officials said the claim that Saudi and UAE forces are respecting the laws of war was bullshit, but Pompeo soldiered on “after being warned that a cutoff could jeopardize $2 billion in weapons sales.”


*****

In related news, The Daily Beast reported that “the U.S. government has paid Sallyport Global, a military contracting company, over$1 billion since January 2014” despite allegations that it’s sprawling private military base in Iraq features “animal abuse, racism, pro-Apartheid social media posts, theft, misuse of money, security failures, rigged security inspections, the Iranian militia, procurement issues, generator explosions, confiscated passports, and HR complaints. It is also suing for defamation two former employees, who alleged Sallyport tolerated smuggling, theft, and a prostitution ring.”

*****

Ben Carson’s HUD “awarded promotions and pay increases to five political operatives with no housing policy experience within their first months on the job, demonstrating what government watchdogs and career staff describe as a premium put on loyalty over expertise,” according to The Washington Post.


*****

Finally, our good news this week is very good indeed. This week, the Supreme Court “let stand a lower court ruling forcing politically active nonprofit groups to disclose the identities of any donor giving more than $200 when those groups advertise for or against political candidates,” according to The Center for Public Integrity. This is huge. “Until now, such nonprofit organizations — generally, those of the 501(c)(4) ‘social welfare’ and 501(c)(6) “business league” varieties — could keep secret their donors under most circumstances.


https://www.rawstory.com/2018/09/trump-starting-constitutional-crisis-shift-attention-kavanaugh-dumpster-fire/

YAYYY!!! ~ another edition for this thread ~ but I must repeat myself from prior posts yet again: here's another installment that makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

An unhinged crackpot leads the world’s only mega-power — and now the wheels are coming off
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 13 Oct 2018 at 14:32 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 presidency of Donald Trump has been hilarifying–as hilarious at times as it has been consistently terrifying throughout. Remember how we laughed when that photo came out of Trump gazing into that glowing orb as he gathered with his Saudi business partners counterparts? It’s not so funny now.


The alleged murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi–a legal resident of the US –by a Saudi hit team in Turkey is just the latest blaring warning that the world is becoming dangerously destabilized as a result of the US electing a crooked reality TV star who’s famously incurious about how the world works. For better or worse, the US has long served a stabilizing role in the international order, and as it withdraws from that role, chaos is breaking out all over.

A bipartisan group of Senators sent Cheetolini a letter that, under the Global Magnitsky Act, in theory forces the regime to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance and impose sanctions on any parties found to have been involved. We say “in theory” because on Thursday, feeling some pressure, Trump said, “We have investigators over there, and we’re working with Turkey, and frankly we’re working with Saudi Arabia,” but that appears to be a lie.

If Trump had his way, the Saudis would face no consequences. That’s how they saw it, according to a friend of Khashoggi’s. Yahoo News reports that the friend, a Middle East analyst, “believes the crown prince and the Saudis may well have felt emboldened by Trump’s attacks on journalists as the ‘enemy of the people.’ Trump’s “rhetoric against journalists probably encouraged the Saudis to do it,” said [the friend], with the Saudis concluding:’Trump hates journalists and he would not react if we kill one journalist.’”

Then there’s the conflicts of interest. Trump said this week that while he’s oh-so-very-concerned about the incident, “I think [blocking $110 billion in arms sales to the Saudis, as some have called for,] would be hurting us.”

What he can’t say out loud is that during the campaign, he cut eight business deals with Saudi Arabia, “the oil-rich Arab kingdom that Trump has said he ‘would want to protect,’” according to WaPo. And of course, there was the story of Trump’s top fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, securing $1 billion–with a “B”—in lucrative contracts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE in return for reshaping Trump’s Middle East policy.


Meanwhile, WaPo reports that Trump’s official withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership (which was all but dead in Congress anyway), “set in motion a political and economic storm that is still reverberating here in Vietnam.”


The head of Interpol has disappeared in China. His wife “made an impassioned plea…for help in bringing her missing husband to safety, saying she thinks he sent an image of a knife before he disappeared in China as a way to warn her he was in danger,” according to the AP.

“As the world’s two largest economies exchange tit-for-tat tariffs, military relations between Beijing and Washington suggest that the mounting trade war has spilled into the battlespace,” reports CNBC.

We’ve pulled out of multiple treaties and multilateral fora. Trump and his fellow Republicans dismissed an IPCC report released this week warning that the world must take aggressive action to combat global warming in the next 12 years or it will face a catastrophe. Meanwhile, the EPA is being run by a racist doofus.


Europe is fraying at the seams. Russia is crossing redlines left and right, sending clumsy hit teams to the UK to poison dissidents. As the Philippines faces an economic crunch, their Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, appears to be escalating his attacks on political opponents and the press.

The thread that ties these stories together is that this would be a really good time to have a president who, at a minimum read some books and didn’t need his daily briefings to be dumbed down because he has the attention span of a gnat.

Presidenting is serious business, is what we’re saying. And this would be a really good time to have a real one in the White House.

*****

Trump is violating the Constitution to sabotage the Affordable Care Act.

“The Trump administration is planning hours-long downtimes for maintenance on healthcare.gov during the coming ObamaCare sign-up period,” according to The Hill.

If that sounds familiar, consider this story from KFF News at this time last year: “The Trump administration plans to shut down the federal health insurance exchange for 12 hours during all but one Sunday in the upcoming open enrollment season.”

They tried to repeal Obamacare, and after public outcry, they failed. It’s still the law of the land. Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This one doesn’t give a shit.

*****

We’ve talked about the regime’s efforts to rig the Census by adding a question about citizenship. It’s an attempt to frighten foreign-born residents from taking the nationwide survey. CNN reported this week that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross lied to Congress about that effort.


Reminder: It’s a felony to lie to Congress. Punishable, at least in theory, by up to five years in prison.

*****

Congress prohibits the Bureau of Land Management, the agency primarily responsible for managing most public lands, from rounding up wild horses and selling them to slaughterhouses abroad. So The Forest Service, which Congress didn’t mention, appears set to do just that, according to The Intercept.


*****

Tangentially related?


*****

In Missouri, “voters can cast a normal ballot without a valid photo ID if they sign a statement and present another form of acceptable identification such as a voter registration card, utility bill or bank statement,” according to The St. Louis Dispatch.

So Republican election officials came up with this one simple trick to suppress the vote: They’ve been telling voters that they can’t cast a ballot without a photo ID.

A Missouri judge was not happy with this. “No compelling state interest is served by misleading local election authorities and voters into believing a photo ID card is a requirement for voting,” he ruled this week.

Related:


*****

Like father like…son-in-law?

“Over the past decade, Jared Kushner’s… personal stock investments have soared. His net worth has quintupled to almost $324 million,” according to The NYT. “And yet, for several years running, Mr. … appears to have paid almost no federal income taxes.”

*****

Drain that swamp…


*****

We’ve got a few immigration-related stories this week. #AbolishIce

HuffPo:


*****


*****

The Intercept reports that far more families were separated by immigration officials than previously thought.

Related: “Attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement were restricted from granting reprieves for certain immigrants facing deportation, ordered to review and potentially reopen previously closed cases, and told that nearly all undocumented immigrants were priorities for deportation, according to a previously unreleased memo obtained by BuzzFeed News.”

*****

For the current regime, the war on brown people appears to take precedent over the war on drugs, according to USA Today.



*****

Finally, via Buzzfeed News, regime officials are deporting three men, one of whom is a witness to a fatal shooting of a young migrant woman by a Border Patrol officer and disputes the agency’s account of the incident.

*****

We don’t really have any good news to leave you with this week, but in just 24 days we’ll have a shot at restoring some degree of sanity to the government.



https://www.rawstory.com/2018/10/unhinged-crackpot-leads-worlds-mega-power-now-wheels-coming-off/

As I've noted before, I yet again must repeat myself from prior posts: here's another installment that makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Trump clearly incited the MAGAbomber but not in the way most people think
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 27 Oct 2018 at 13:21 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.

In the conservative media, a few brave souls are making wan attempts to spin away the fact that a MAGA-obsessed loser mainlining right-wing hate-media in a van down by the river sent over a dozen bombs to the most frequent targets of presidential derp. At Red State, someone drew the short straw and had to write that it was the media and Democrats that pushed Cesar Altieri Sayoc over the edge. There’s some harrumphing over at Breitbart about how unfair it is that the media are portraying all Trump supporters as serial bombers, or something. But for the most part, they’re unusually silent today.

For most of us, it’s easy to draw a direct line between Trump’s seemingly endless invective against his perceived enemies and those pipe bombs. In a piece titled “Of Course Donald Trump Inspired Cesar Sayoc’s Alleged Terrorism,” Rick Wilson, the entertainingly sharp-tongued #NeverTrump conservative, wrote that “introspection isn’t exactly one of this president’s strong suits, and the discovery that the MAGA Bomber was one of the millions of creatures he created, inspired, and motivated to wage war against those he describes as Enemies of the People will never trouble the placid waters of his stunningly shallow intellect.”

Obviously, Trump’s rhetoric led to Sayoc snapping, but not necessarily in the way people think. Research into political violence by Nathan Kalmoe, a professor of political communication at the University of Louisiana, found that most people who engage in it have a history of aggressive, anti-social behavior, which was certainly true of Sayoc.

In an interview last year, Kalmoe told me that, regardless of whether one falls on the right, the left or somewhere in between, there’s “an important distinction to make between people who have more conventional views, versus people who have much more extreme views.” He thinks that, regardless of a person’s ideology, those who are at least within spitting distance of the mainstream “have a greater commitment to nonviolent approaches to politics and are socialized into nonviolent norms of how participation is supposed to work.”

In that sense, it’s not Trump constantly railing about his enemies that’s uniquely dangerous. It’s his consistent delegitimization of our political system. Before all the facts came out, it was easy to predict that Cesar Altieri Sayoc embraced at least elements of the QAnon madness that’s become popular among Trump supporters and is a direct extension of Trump’s own Deep State nonsense. It’s Trump’s persistent promotion of conspiracy theories about rampant voter fraud and the media making stuff up to damage him and Democrats welcoming Islamic terrorists into the country and a cabal of international jewry “globalists” trying to keep America down that can lead people like Sayoc to conclude that normal politics is a sucker’s game. What’s the point of trying when shadowy, all-powerful forces are dead set on destroying this movement?

The editors of The National Review were right when they argued that “harsh, overheated rhetoric is endemic to our political system, and it should not be confused with incitement to violence.” Honestly, you’ll probably find some harsh, overheated rhetoric in this very column most weeks. What isn’t endemic to our political system is a president relentlessly attacking that system–and the institutions that support it–nearly every day. That’s unique to Trump. And if you’re a bit unstable, and believe his claptrap, then you might just conclude that organizing and advocacy and voting are pointless, and maybe you just need to take matters into your own hands.

Keep in mind that wasn’t the first guy to lose his marbles over this stuff…


And the scary thing is that he may not be the last.

*****

Speaking of Trump’s ubiquitous nonsense, Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker reported for The Washington Post that across the federal government, agencies have repeatedly been sent “scrambling to reverse-engineer policies to meet Trump’s sudden public promises — or to search for evidence buttressing his conspiracy theories and falsehoods.”


What the story doesn’t contemplate is how much it costs taxpayers to soothe the Manbaby-in-Chief’s tantrums.

*****

“The Senate is in recess and nobody is around,” wrote HuffpPo’s Jennifer Bendery this week, “which means Republicans think it’s the perfect time to hold confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s controversial nominees to lifetime courts seats.”

Senate Judiciary chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) held a couple of hearings this week with zero Democrats in attendance. Grassley didn’t even show up himself. Bendery puts this one in context: “Not only are Republicans breaking from precedent by holding hearings while the Senate is in recess before an election, but their brazenly partisan move only intensifies the already toxic environment on Capitol Hill that couldn’t get much worse after this month’s ugly Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight.”

*****

Bros before… Lady Justice?

Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports for The Guardian that “Brett Kavanaugh, the new supreme court justice, counts the Trump administration’s solicitor general, who will be arguing cases before the high court on behalf of the president, as a close professional friend, according to emails that offer new insights into an all-male dinner club that Kavanaugh used to attend.

“Other attendees included a lawyer who is now a top strategic adviser to Rupert Murdoch; the author of the George W Bush-era ‘torture memos’ that were used to justify illegal interrogation techniques; and two lawyers who now frequently appear before the supreme court on behalf of corporate clients.”

They were almost certainly cheap tippers, and you just know they harassed their women servers.

*****

We shouldn’t overlook one of the most remarkable up-is-down moments this week…


He farted that tweet out on Wednesday. At HuffPo, Jonathan Cohn explained how the Trump regime launched a “new attack on [the] ACA’s pre-existing protections” on Monday.

*****

Trump’s third consecutive acting DEA chief is having a rough week. Kaiser Health News, citing a paywalled report in The WSJ, reported that “Uttam Dhillon had urged several candidates for Drug Enforcement Administration chief to withdraw from consideration, citing concerns about their background checks. Then, he accepted the job himself. Mr. Dhillon’s rise to the top of the world’s largest drug-fighting agency—after being closely involved in the selection process—has riled police groups that had pushed the White House to choose a DEA administrator with a law-enforcement background.”

*****

Meanwhile, Lenny Bernstein reported for WaPo that “the Food and Drug Administration is poised to approve a new form of a powerful opioid for use in hospitals and emergency rooms despite opposition from the head of the committee that reviewed the drug.”

It’s not like we have any issues with opioids in this country.

“Raeford Brown, a professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at the University of Kentucky who heads the FDA’s Anesthetic and Analgesic Drug Products Advisory Committee, sent his views in a letter to FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and other agency officials. He also made his opposition public, a rare step for an FDA advisory committee chairman.”

Gottlieb, the FDA boss, is a former fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where he wrote pieces decrying the Affordable Care Act and testified before Congress that regulation threatened to kill off pharmaceutical innovation. Before signing on with Trump, he was a partner specializing in the health care sector with a venture capital firm.

*****

According to The Hill, “the Republican National Committee (RNC) has spent more than $1.5 million at President Trump’s properties during the 2018 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.”

And The New York Post reported that our president is a comically ridiculous grifter.


*****

This week, we’ll leave you with some good news out of Georgia, where Republican Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp is furiously trying to steal an election: “A federal court on Wednesday blocked Georgia from throwing out absentee ballots and applications because of signature mismatches, a decision heralded by voting rights proponents 13 days before midterm elections,” reported USA Today this week.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/10/trump-clearly-incited-magabomber-not-way-people-think/

And still again I must repeat myself from prior posts: here's another installment that makes me want to crawl back into bed and pull my duvet over my head ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Unhinged press conferences, doctored videos and election conspiracy theories — Trump is spiraling out of control
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 10 Nov 2018 at 13:30 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.

In the past five days, we had a crucial midterm election – don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t a Blue Wave – and then Trump held a meandering, hostile press conference, after which his regime stripped a senior White House correspondent’s press credentials and circulated a doctored video suggesting that the reporter assaulted a young intern. Then the “President” replaced his racist, bootlicking AG with a griftier one. A guy shot up a bar, killing 12, including survivors of the Las Vegas massacre. Then multiple senior GOP officials started claiming that counting all ballots is a form of election fraud and half of California caught on fire.

So it was another slow news week in Trump’s America.

Matthew Whitaker, the new acting attorney general, may just be the perfect Trump appointee. He auditioned for the job of Jeff Sessions’ Chief of Staff by getting himself booked on cable TV shows to say that the Mueller investigation is an illegitimate witch-hunt and then stabbed his boss in the back by positioning himself to be appointed as his replacement. Meanwhile, the White House doesn’t appear to have vetted him, and were taken aback when reports emerged that he’d insisted that Russia didn’t interfere with the 2016 election—among other wacky claims — or that he was “involved in firm that scammed veterans out of [their] life savings.” Now the FBI is investigating not only the “President” and his family and business associates, but also the nation’s top law enforcement official.


We could have had taco trucks on every corner, is what we’re saying.

*****

On his way out the door, belligerent gnome outgoing Attorney General Jeff Sessions “has drastically limited the ability of federal law enforcement officials to use court-enforced agreements to overhaul local police departments accused of abuses and civil rights violations, the Justice Department announced on Thursday.”

Katie Benner reported for The New York Times:


*****

Donald Trump is bestowing the Medal of Freedom on Miriam Adelson, the wife of casino magnate and GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. We don’t really care – Elvis and Babe Ruth are getting the award posthumously too – but it raises eyebrows coming so soon after the couple invested close to $100 million in the Republicans’ midterm campaign.

That figure amounts to about 14 percent of what they reaped from the GOP’s #TaxScam in the first quarter of 2018 alone. We always tip at least 20 percent, and nobody ever gave us a medal for it.

*****

It’s always sweet to be an oligarch, but especially so in Trump’s America. “Across the corporate landscape, the Trump administration has presided over a sharp decline in financial penalties against banks and big companies accused of malfeasance,” according to an analysis by The New York Times. “The approach mirrors the administration’s aggressive deregulatory agenda throughout the federal government.” Trump refers to this as standing up for those “forgotten Americans.”

*****

There are rumors that toxic bigot failed Kansas gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach may replace embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in the near future. As we’ve documented here before, the Trump regime has installed quite a few anti-immigrant hardliners with ties to designated hate-groups at the agency. So Kobach would fit right in — Stephanie Kirchgaessner reported for The Guardian this week that Kobach’s campaign accepted donations from white supremacists and that he “has for over a decade been affiliated with groups espousing white supremacist views.”

*****

Scott Pruitt 2.0 Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has done a bunch of grifting in his official position and is now looking for a cushy landing spot, according to Politico. Ben Lefebvre and Eliana Johnson report that Zinke “has been exploring potential roles with Fox News, the energy industry or other businesses amid growing signs that he will leave President Donald Trump’s Cabinet as he faces investigations into his ethics.”

Are there any members of Trump’s cabinet who can’t accurately be described as “embattled” at this point?


*****

As was widely anticipated, the refugee caravan slowly working its way to our border through Mexico has largely disappeared from the news now that the midterms are over, but let’s not forget that thousands of troops remain on the scene, twiddling their thumbs and making busy-work. Will they remain deployed through the holidays?


*****

In somewhat related news, a federal court appeared to give Dreamers – young people brought to the US without papers at a young age – some good news this week, but Ian Millhiser reports for Think Progress that when you dig a bit deeper, it’s likely to be a devastating blow to their hopes for the future.

The judges upheld a lower court’s decision blocking the Trump regime’s move to end protections for Dreamers, but as Millhiser notes, “now that a federal appeals court has ruled on this issue, it has a straight shot to the Supreme Court,” where “the Republican-dominated Supreme Court is likely to back Trump along party lines.”

*****

And the Trump regime enacted a “temporary rule” – citing national security to get around the usual agency process – to sharply limit the number of people eligible to apply for asylum. The Texas Tribune reported that the move “will likely prompt legal challenges.”

*****

Among the many victories Democrats scored on Tuesday, knocking off Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was one of the most satisfying.

But now Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled legislature is considering stripping powers from the incoming Democratic Governor, Tony Evers, during the lame duck session. This follows a model established by North Carolina Republicans when they pulled off a similar “legislative coup” after GOP governor Pat McCrory lost his race in 2016.

Perhaps the most maddening thing about such norm-busting maneuvers is how asymmetrical they seem to be. The Milwaukee Sentinel noted that in 2010, Democratic lawmakers in Wisconsin “tried to rush labor contracts through the Legislature after Walker was elected but before he was sworn in,” but “the effort failed when two Democratic senators stunned their colleagues to vote with Republicans against the labor deals.”

*****

There was lots of good news this week on the electoral front, but we want to highlight one state legislative win in New Hampshire. Cassandra Levesque first got into politics when, as a high school senior, she mounted a campaign to raise the state’s minimum age for marriage from 13 for girls and 14 for boys to 18 for everyone. It was “part of a Girl Scouts project that ultimately earned her the organization’s gold award,” according to The Concord Monitor. Eventually, she got a bill passed raising the age to 16, and then she decided to run for the state assembly. On Tuesday, at age 19, she became a lawmaker.

*****

Finally, this week “a federal judge temporarily blocked construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, ruling late Thursday that the Trump administration had failed to justify its decision granting a permit for the 1,200-mile long project designed to connect Canada’s oil sands fields with Texas’s Gulf Coast refineries,” according to The Washington Post.


https://www.rawstory.com/2018/11/unhinged-press-conferences-doctored-videos-election-conspiracy-theories-trump-spiraling-control/

Here's another installment ~ it's equally damning to several of the above installments but I've learned that crawling back into bed and burying my head doesn't stop the idiocy and criminality this admin wears as a badge of honor ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Donald Trump is the most inept Commander-in-Chief in US history — and it matters
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 18 Nov 2018 at 10:23 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.

There’s rarely a moment of respite from the daily stress of life under the Trump regime. One might have thought that Normal America might have enjoyed a day of rest after delivering a midterm drubbing to Trumpism last week, but that would have been naïve, as Marshal Tweeto immediately launched another Constitutional crisis by firing Jeff Sessions and installing a grifty crackpot as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. Then this week, we were all once again sitting on the edge of our seats waiting for a widely anticipated slew of indictments that so far haven’t materialized from the Mueller investigation.


At least most of us will have an opportunity to kick back and celebrate our nation’s genocidal conquest over Native Americans with our families this week. That’s not the case for 14,000 migrant children still being held in cages and tent cities, a new record breaking the one “set just two months ago,” and “putting further strain on an already overburdened system,” according to The San Francisco Chronicle.

The army will no doubt provide turkey dinners to the 5,600 troops Trump deployed as campaign props along the Mexican border, where they’re now twiddling their thumbs, literally shoveling shit and, most importantly, laying out concertina wire to stop Trump’s mythical immigrant invasion. According to The New York Times, they’re currently living on combat rations, even though “Whataburger, a fast-food utopia” is nearby. It is, sadly, “off limits under current Army rules.”

To give you a sense of how absurd that bit of political theater really is, consider that they’ve erected 22 miles of concertina fencing near McAllen, Texas, which lies around 1,300 miles to the east of Tijuana, where the beleaguered members of that refugee caravan are heading, per the NYT. In other words, they could have just set up some random stretches of concertina wire near their home bases and called it a day.

As with Trump’s ridiculous quest for a North Korean-style military parade in his honor, there’s a comical element to this. But the reality is that Colonel Bonespurs has consistently ignored his responsibility as Commander-in-Chief of the world’s largest military, and that’s having some serious and dangerous effects.

The New York Times reported this week that “shortly after becoming commander in chief, President Trump asked so few questions in a briefing at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., that top military commanders cut the number of prepared PowerPoint slides to three — they had initially planned 18.” Two years later, “top Defense Department officials say that Mr. Trump has not fully grasped the role of the troops he commands, nor the responsibility that he has to lead them and protect them from politics.”

This may not rank high on a progressive list of problems with this regime, but it should. Lara Seligman reported for Foreign Policy that the DoD’s civilian leadership are demoralized and “disheartened” by Trump’s moves and feel increasingly ignored by Pentagon planners. As a result, many are “heading for the door, leaving key positions unfilled in a Pentagon increasingly run by active-duty or retired military officers.”


The Founders saw civilian control of the military as a vital bulwark against tyranny, and while we can laugh at some of Trump’s antics, this is no joke.

*****

Donald Trump wants to cut off relief funds to Puerto Rico. Axios: “Around 3,000 people died in Puerto Rico because of Hurricane Maria, according to government estimates. Trump, without evidence, has claimed this is fake news designed to make him look bad.”

*****

There was a lot of swampy news this week that didn’t get as much attention as it should have. Let’s review some of the ethical atrocities.

“An Environmental Protection Agency official appointed by the Trump administration was arrested on Thursday for multiple criminal ethics violations,” according to HuffPo.

Onis Trey Glenn was charged with “a scheme that took place when he worked as a lobbyist for the Drummond Company. At the time, Glenn helped the coal mining firm dodge a bill for an EPA-mandated cleanup of neighborhoods in Birmingham and Tarrant, Alabama, that were contaminated by emissions from smokestacks owned by a subsidiary.”

Of course Donald Trump made him the EPA administrator “in charge of eight states in the Southeast, including Alabama.”

*****

“Deregulation ace” is one way of describing Neomi Rao, Trump’s pick to fill Brett Kavanaugh’s seat on the all-important DC Court of Appeals. That’s what Politico went with, and it sounds better than, say, “e. coli champ.”

In any event, Rao is a 45-year-old who has led Trump’s assault on public health and safety regulations and if confirmed, she will enjoy lifetime tenure on a court that decides a lot of regulatory cases.


Great.

*****

We don’t tend to criticize high-ranking government officials for travelling on the taxpayers’ dime. That’s usually a cheap shot. It costs a lot to arrange high-level trips, and the security that comes with them.

We will make an exception for Melania Trump’s mysterious $174,000 day-trip to Toronto. She didn’t spend the night, and yet she blew that sum on hotel bills. That doesn’t include the costs of travel or Secret Service or anything else.

Did we mention that she didn’t stay the night? More details at Quartz.

*****

We will also call out the regime shelling out $100,000 for Trump spawn Don Junior’s business travel. WaPo reported that his “trip to India to sell his family’s luxury condominium projects cost U.S. taxpayers nearly $100,000… for hotel rooms, airfare, car rental and overtime for Secret Service agents.”

We should note that this project is scammy as Hell.

*****

Meanwhile, billionaire Betsy DeVos is a delicate snowflake and it’s costing us a fortune. According to NBC, “Education Secretary Betsy DeVos began receiving around-the-clock security from the U.S. Marshals Service days after being confirmed, an armed detail provided to no other cabinet member that could cost U.S. taxpayers $19.8 million through September of 2019.” It appears that the unusual security entourage was approved “a few days after DeVos was heckled and blocked by a handful of protesters from entering the Jefferson Academy.”

*****

And Donald Trump has nominated a fancy handbag designer and Mar-a-Lago member to be our ambassador to South Africa, a country with which we now have strained relations after our Crackpot-in-Chief embraced a white supremacist conspiracy theory about its government murdering white farmers en masse.

Lana Marks has no previous diplomatic experience. She is also, of course, a bit of a grifter, according to Buzzfeed, which noted that “Marks was evicted from her office in 2015 after failing to pay almost $26,000 in rent. She also has faced lawsuits in recent years for failing to pay $117,342 for ads in magazines and failing to pay contractors in Aspen, Colorado. She and her husband also got a tax lien for $360,641 in back taxes.” Only the best.

*****

Perhaps the biggest story this week was that the conflagration that has left large swaths of California scorched and thousands of climate refugees homeless is probably a new normal. At Grist, Eric Holthaus looked at the conditions that have made recent fire seasons on the Golden State so catastrophic.

And Julie Turkewitz and Matt Richtel reported for The New York Times that “the wildfires that have laid waste to vast parts of California are presenting residents with a new danger: air so thick with smoke it ranks among the dirtiest in the world.”


*****

We’ll leave you with some good news this week: As more late races from last week’s Blue Wave have been called, Republicans have been decimated in California, and according to The LA Times, some GOP strategists have come to the conclusion that they need to burn their party down and rebuild from scratch.

Also check out this Bloomberg report about the NRA getting its ass kicked in the midterms by gun violence reduction advocates.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/11/donald-trump-inept-commander-chief-us-history-matters/

Here's another installment ~ as I've repeated for the past several installments, this too is equally damning as virtually all prior installments ... but I've learned that crawling back into bed and burying my head doesn't stop the idiocy and criminality this admin wears as a badge of honor ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Trump’s wasteful government spending is massive — and uniquely stupid
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 22 Dec 2018 at 14:11 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.

Donald Trump wouldn’t be wrong to brag that his presidency has more wheels on it than any other in American history. Every other week, it seems, analysts warn that they’re finally coming off this “fine-tuned machine” and yet his approval ratings have remained stubbornly fixed within a narrow range for the better part of a year.

But it does feel like something’s different this time.

For one thing, his abrupt, seemingly spontaneous decision to withdraw troops from Syria and draw down our force in Afghanistan is freaking out Republicans (and hawkish Dems) in a way that Trump’s penchant for stomping all over the international diplomatic order for the past two years has not. “It’s one thing to have issues on the domestic side,” Sen Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, told The New York Times, but “when you start willy-nilly foreign policy moves that are against U.S. interests, that is a wake-up call for people in the Senate.”

This is also the first period of real crisis since Trump’s midterm shellacking, so his veneer of political invincibility has shown some cracks which weren’t obvious last year. And of course the stock market is tanking, which reportedly worries Trump more than the fallout over Mattis flipping him the bird on his way out or the political perils of shutting down the government during the holidays over funding for a stupid wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for.

Speaking of which, last year analysts at Standard and Poor’s estimated that shutting down the federal government cost the economy $6.5 billion per week in lost productivity and various downstream effects. As of this writing, we are experiencing the third shutdown this year, which is unprecedented with one party controlling all the White House and both chambers of Congress.

That the economy is tanking while the rats flee the sinking Trump Ship and our adversaries gloat over our increasingly incoherent foreign policy is unsurprising. In fact, it’s probably the least surprising thing about Trump’s first two years in office. Conservatives have been claiming that government is an inherently dysfunctional joke for generations, but it turns out that governing well requires some knowledge and skill. What we’re seeing is simply the entirely predictable consequences of putting a buffoonish reality TV star who doesn’t in charge of the world’s only mega-power.

*****

It’s impossible to overstate how wasteful Trump’s erratic government is, and his brand of wasteful government tends to be especially stupid. A case in point this week was the announcement that the Pentagon is preparing to stand up Trump’s Space Force, which will “reside” within the Air Force.

The important thing to understand here is that the Air Force was already tasked with serving as our military “space force.” So the agency protected its turf and will continue to have that mandate. But now this new sub-agency will have a whole new layer of bureaucracy — there will be all sorts of redundancies just as there are between the Navy and the Marines. And this new bureaucracy will of course protect itself moving forward. It’s relatively easy to create a new agency and almost impossible to get rid of one. Space Force will grow, and it will continue to cost us billions of unnecessary dollars every single year long after Trump’s presidency has become a bad memory.

And please note that the entire purpose of Trump’s Space Force was to change the subject from the revelations that his regime was putting immigrant babies in cages. That’s it.

*****

Impunity should be especially concerning within the judiciary itself.

“All of the ethics complaints filed against Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation proceedings were dismissed on Tuesday after a panel of federal judges concluded that Kavanaugh is no longer covered by the judiciary’s disciplinary process,” reported Zoe Tillman for Buzzfeednews. “Supreme Court justices are not bound by the federal judiciary’s code of conduct that applies to lower court judges, and the high court does not have its own formal internal disciplinary system.”

Meanwhile, ICYMI, it was reported this week that DOJ ethics officials urged “Acting Attorney General” Matt Whittaker to recuse himself from the Russia probe, to which he basically replied, “the only reason I’m here is to obstruct that probe so why would I recuse?” (We paraphrase.)

*****

Speaking of impunity: “U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross twice submitted sworn statements to ethics officials saying he had divested stock that he in fact still owned, a new document obtained by the Center for Public Integrity reveals.”

*****

This is happening…


The regime is unilaterally imposing “work requirements” on food stamp recipients, which sounds better than “making them file a ton of pointless paperwork” in hopes that they’ll just give up.

Meanwhile, according to The Arkansas Times, “almost 17,000 Arkansans have now lost their health insurance due to the state’s experimental work requirement for certain low-income adult Medicaid beneficiaries, according to a monthly report released by the state Department of Human Services on Monday.”

The regime is eager to approve similar “experiments” conducted by red state governments.

*****

According to MoJo’s Rebecca Leber, the Environmental Protection Agency (protecting the environment is right there in its name!) is now “fact-checking” the multi-agency, peer-reviewed National Climate Assessment with citations to… The Daily Caller. What could go wrong?

*****

In somewhat related news, HuffPo reported that a lawyer whose client list includes Exxonmobil “crafted comments in defense of a White House nominee for a top environmental post as if they were written by President Donald Trump himself” and the regime then disseminated those talking-points to reporters asking about the nomination of Kathleen Hartnett White, who is of course a climate change denier. The emails, wrote Itai Vardi, “further illustrate[] the powerful sway the fossil fuel industry and the Koch network has on Trump’s administration and its energy policies.”

*****

This year, Reporters Without Borders added the United States to its list of the five most dangerous countries for journalists to operate in for the first time.

*****

Each week, we try to leave you with some positive news, but we’re not sure this week’s Supreme Court ruling against the regime counts. On one hand, in a 5-4 decision, the court upheld a lower court’s block on Trump’s “asylum ban,” which is good. At the same time, four justices of the United States Supreme Court were willing to ignore very clear, black-letter law to give Donald Trump a win, which is really quite nerve-racking.

Less ambiguously, on Wednesday a different federal court “ruled that most of former attorney general Jeff Sessions’ decision from June making asylum claims more difficult to advance by those facing domestic or gang-related violence in their home country was illegal — issuing a broad order that also allows some would-be asylum seekers a second chance to make their claims.” Chris Geidner has the details on that case at Buzzfeednews.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/12/trumps-wasteful-government-spending-massive-uniquely-stupid/

This week's installment seems "mild" when compared to recent additions to this thread ~ ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Here is why Trump has to lose the dumbest government shutdown ever
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 05 Jan 2019 at 15:51 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 other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

As the dumbest government shutdown in memory drags into its third week, it’s hard to see how this all comes to an end. Donald Trump seems to have painted himself into a corner by first agreeing to a short-term funding bill with no money for the wall that he always swore that Mexico would pay for, and only after it passed Congress with big bipartisan majorities did he decide that he couldn’t take the heat he was getting over it from Ann Coulter and the dolts on Fox and Friends. So he kicked off this contrived budget crisis by taking full responsibility for the shutdown on national TV, and now believes, perhaps rightly, that his base will be forever demoralized if he backs down.

Meanwhile, Democrats – including the kind you would normally expect to be getting a bit panicky right about now – have zero incentive to offer him a single centavo for some dumb wall given these circumstances, and how badly Trump’s position polls. Dems know that they would face an uprising from their base if they cave in this situation, and don’t see an extended standoff blowing back on them after Trump said over and over again for two years that Mexico would pick up the tab.

Now, Congress could simply pass a budget and then override Trump’s veto, but the GOP knows that would be a crushing blow to the Trump regime and result in an uprising from their base. Meanwhile, Democrats know that if they let Trump blow up a deal after he signed onto its terms and it passed the Senate unanimously, then Ann Coulter and the dolts on Fox and Friends will have a veto going forward and even governing in a minimal sense – keeping the lights turned on – will be impossible. Five billion dollars may be a rounding error in the federal budget, but they can’t let him have it given the road we took to get to this point.

So far, the pain from the shutdown has been pretty abstract on Capitol Hill. Unlike the low-wage workers employed by federal contractors who will be completely screwed by this, most public employees will be made whole. But it’s going to get bad pretty quickly, as millions of households face delays in their tax refunds and other services. TSA workers are calling in sick all over the country, so expect long security lines while traveling. Soon, it will start showing some bad ripple effects across the economy.

Maybe we shouldn’t have put a mediocre reality TV star in charge of the world’s most powerful country, is what we’re saying here.

******

Under Obama, some conservatives falsely claimed that the administration was closing down national parks unnecessarily in order to punish Congressional Republicans. It was a popular conspiracy theory for a while back in 2013.

So given Trump’s penchant for doing the opposite of whatever Obama did, his regime is just keeping the parks open. Without staff.

In addition to the “garbage, feces” and “bad behavior” that have been piling up in parks across the country, The Washington Post reports that three people have died “as the Interior Department has halted most of its operations.”

******

The hypocrisy of this, via The NYT, is just stunning.


A pretty good example of things that are shocking but not at all surprising.

******

Last month, Donald Trump surprised pretty much everyone by announcing an immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Syria. Russia and Iran rejoiced at the news, Congressional Republicans and other governments panicked and Trump’s Secretary of Defense quit.

This week, multiple outlets reported that while the “President” hasn’t reversed his position, the Pentagon is saying that “troops could remain in southern Syria for an undetermined amount of time even as American forces withdraw in coming months from the northern part of the country,” according to NBC. Whatever one thinks of the merits of pulling out our troops, it seems problematic that the military doesn’t appear to be taking the Commander-in-Chief’s orders very seriously. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before.

******

“Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie did not disclose his associations with Confederate groups on a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee prior to his confirmation hearing last year,” according to CNN.


******

We refer to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke as “Scott Pruitt 2.0,” but perhaps we’ve been giving him too little credit as a grifter in his own right.


******

We’ll leave you with some good news this week out of Maine, where elections have consequences…


https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/trump-lose-dumbest-government-shutdown-ever/

Here's another installment ... seemingly working its way OFF the "milder" list ~ ey ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

Trump’s Benghazi: Did a treasonous White House get US troops killed?
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 19 Jan 2019 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.

The headline above is absolutely ludicrous. That should be obvious. But what if Donald Trump were a Democrat and we were writing this column for Breitbart or Fox Nation?

On Wednesday, a suicide bombing attack in Syria killed four American troops – the same number that died in a 2012 attack on a US consular compound in Benghazi, Libya. And unlike Benghazi, which 197 investigations – both serious ones and those conducted by Congressional Republicans – concluded was not the result of any decision made at the highest levels of government, some officials are tying this attack to Trump’s seemingly spontaneous decision to withdraw US troops from Syria without consulting anyone other than his doughy “gut.”

You don’t have to be a hawk to understand that this wasn’t a smart way to go. Brett McGurk, Trump’s former point-man for defeating ISIS who resigned as a result of the decision, wrote this week that “the president’s decision to leave Syria was made without deliberation, consultation with allies or Congress, assessment of risk, or appreciation of facts.”


This was the second time on Trump’s watch that four American troops – that same number – were killed in a poorly planned military operation in some far-flung country. In the fall of 2017, four Special Forces Operators were also among those killed in a deadly ambush in Niger. Most Americans didn’t even know we had troops in Niger at the time.

A Pentagon inquiry into the botched operation concluded, as The New York Times reported last year, that “the 11-member team had not undergone crucial training as a unit before it deployed to Niger because of ‘personnel turnover’ and had not rehearsed its mission before leaving its base.” The inquiry also found that the soldiers wounded in the attack “were not evacuated for more than four hours, far longer than the Pentagon had acknowledged.”

Like Benghazi, the Niger incident wasn’t linked to decisions made in the White House. Syria is a different matter. And yet, there are no conspiracy theories suggesting that Donald Trump ordered a rescue party to stand down. A regime that lies all the time isn’t being accused of lying to the fallen troops’ grieving family members. None of this is being turned into a partisan attack. (Let’s not forget that Benghazi was politicized during the 2012 presidential campaign in a desperate attempt by Mitt Romney to turn the polls around, and Romney’s decision to exploit it as a line of attack was widely condemned at the time.)

We’re not suggesting that Democrats should go around accusing Trump of murdering those soldiers like the right accused Hillary Clinton of killing Chris Stevens in Benghazi. We’re just noting that there’s a significant asymmetry between the parties as a result of the interplay between the traditional media and what Matt Yglesias called “the Hack Gap.”

And with that, let’s move on to this week’s roundup.

*****

We begin with a few items about the Dumbest Shutdown in US History® that you may have missed this week.

At Politico, Jennifer Scholtes explained how “the longest government shutdown in U.S. history will scar the federal bureaucracy and U.S. economy long after the doors are unlocked and workers return.” The damage that’s being done right now goes well beyond those furloughed federal workers, and is not going to be easily repaired.

According to The New York Times, “the federal courts are running out of money as the partial government shutdown continues with no end in sight, raising concerns that the legal system will be significantly hobbled if the standoff is not resolved soon.”

McKay Coppins reported for The Atlantic that “a grim but growing consensus has begun to emerge on Capitol Hill: There may be no way out of this mess until something disastrous happens.” Basically, they’re waiting for a commercial plane to crash because some air traffic controller was distracted thinking about how to pay his or her mortgage.

And while there was a raft of very lazy coverage of federal prison inmates eating steaks while their guards are working but not receiving paychecks, the reality is that inmates are suffering terribly as a result of the shutdown. Eli Hager has more on that for The Marshall Project. Bloomberg’s Amanda Albright and Danielle Moran report that local jails that house federal inmates are also experiencing lots of problems.

*****

Speaking of Syria, The Guardian reported that “a 16-year-old Syrian refugee who was disfigured in a bomb attack on her home has been refused a visa to get medical treatment in the US because of Donald Trump’s travel ban.”

And WaPo’s Eli Rosenberg detailed how a decorated Marine veteran who was born and raised in Michigan ended up detained by ICE and slated for deportation as an undocumented immigrant.

We are being governed by the worst people in the world.

*****

And speaking of being governed by the worst people in the world…


*****

We just want to make sure you caught that a federal audit revealed that the Trump regime has “separated thousands more migrant kids at the border than it previously acknowledged, and the separations began months before the policy was announced.” Politico has more on that.

Sen Jeff Merkeley (D-OR) charged this week that Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen lied to Congress when she said there was no official regime policy to separate families at the border. He’s asked the FBI to investigate. More at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

*****

Jonathan O’Connell and David Fahrenthold had quite an emoluments story for the WaPo this week. Just a day after T-Mobile announced a mega-merger with Sprint that would require federal approval, a whole gaggle of T-Mobile execs booked rooms at Trump’s DC hotel.

That’s become basically par for the course in Trump’s Washington, but the timing nonetheless raised eyebrows. But of course the “president” has so far enjoyed impunity for this stuff.


*****

There was actually quite a bit of good news this week.

A federal judge struck down several measures that Wisconsin Republicans passed in the lame duck that have been described as a “power grab.” And this:


Mark Joseph Stern reported for Slate that “the Supreme Court handed a victory to American workers, ruling unanimously that independent contractors who work in transportation may not be forced into mandatory arbitration. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who joined the bench after argument, did not participate.) The decision is a remarkable win for labor rights from a court that typically favors corporate interests over working people. And it will allow hundreds of thousands of contractors to vindicate their rights in court, collectively, rather than in costly and unjust arbitration.”

And big news on the Census story that we’ve been following here, as a federal judge held that a question about citizenship will be struck from survey. At Think Progress, Ian Millhiser wrote that this is yet another case in which the regime’s incompetence appears to have gotten in the way of its racism.


https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/trumps-benghazi-treasonous-white-house-get-us-troops-killed/

And it will allow hundreds of thousands of contractors to vindicate their rights in court, collectively, rather than in costly and unjust arbitration.”

I don't get this antipathy toward arbitration in the States. In Canada it's the preferred way to go. It's faster, and more efficient, far cheaper, uses the same rules of evidence as the courts and, best of all, usually involves an arbitrator who is not only cognizant of the law but is often expert in the field he is arbitrating. Mind you, when it comes to seeking damages, we Canadians seem to be a hardier lot than Americans. No matter what slight we've been offered we're still able to sleep and have sex. No Canadian man would ever admit to not being able to rise to the occasion.

Here's another installment ... this one is dangling over the edge of being fully OFF the "milder" list ~ ey ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

The longest, dumbest shutdown in history is over for now — here’s what Trump might do in three weeks
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 26 Jan 2019 at 13:34 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 other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

Donald Trump faced his worst nightmare this week when a woman – and not even a hot one, like his daughter — put him in his place in the most visible way possible. The longest and dumbest government shutdown in U.S. history ended on Friday with Mango Mugabe giving a rambling, semi-coherent presser in the rose Garden that was widely understood to mean he was accepting the Democrats terms but would ultimately prevail. We weren’t sure until he signed it last night.

Just to recap: Trump signed off on a short-term spending deal in late December, the Senate voted for it and everyone went home expecting the House to follow suit. But before they could, Ann Coulter called Trump a wimp and he pulled a 180-degree u-turn and demanded $5.7 billion for a wall — a seemingly arbitrary figure — and then shut the government down when he didn’t get it. For five weeks he insisted that he’d hold the line for as long as necessary, and Jared Kushner — who brought the same deft negotiating skills that he had used to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and convince opioids to stop killing people to the shutdown fight — kept telling him that he was winning, that the Dems would break. When that didn’t happen, air traffic controllers started coming down with some colds, and he ended up signing the same deal that was on the table before this all began. And Ann Coulter called him a wimp again anyway.

This was… predictable.


So where do we go from here?

Trump insists that he’s not done fighting. He threatened to declare a national emergency and go around Congress to find money for his dumb wall elsewhere if he doesn’t get what he wants by February 15. But what will be different in three weeks? Let’s see if we can game it out.

The Democrats have no incentive to fold on the wall. They won both the midterms and their first big fight after taking the House on this very issue. The polling is with them, they’re confident and they believe that this is really about making sure Trump understands that Congress is a co-equal branch of government and he can’t simply rule by temper tantrum.

Meanwhile, Trump’s weak and a caged animal can be dangerous. He might not recover from another loss. His instinct will be to break things. But he can’t shut down the government again just three weeks after his last outburst cost the economy billions of dollars. Congressional Republicans probably wouldn’t let him do so if he tried (Congress can always pass appropriations bills and override his veto if need be).

Something has to give, and there are two potential avenues to get past February 15 that one should keep an eye on over the next three weeks.

The first is whether a bipartisan committee of House and Senate lawmakers can come up with some combination of non-Wall border security measures that Trump can call a “virtual wall.” And if they can, will he think that it’ll be enough to get Ann Coulter off his ass? (It won’t be, but will he convince himself he can get past this without losing much of his rabid beloved base?)

That seems like it may be a tough lift. Trump thinks the threat of declaring an emergency gives him leverage that will force Democrats to crack. But Republicans may be more uncomfortable with that approach than the Democrats, who know that such a move is illegal on its face and would get Trump’s dumb wall tied up in the courts for the next year or two.

So if they can’t negotiate a wall-free deal that Donald Trump can swallow, we will see if he can be persuaded by members of his own party to give up on the idea because it’s a bridge too far and take a loss that he likely sees as an existential threat to his prospects of re-election, if not his presidency.

Nobody knows what’s going to happen. We think the most likely scenario is that Congress won’t come up with a bill without wall funding that he can live with and he declares an emergency. The wall then disappears from the national conversation while it’s being litigated and he tells his supporters that he won and is in fact in the process of building the wall. And they will believe it.

We’ll see.

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We’d like to begin this week’s roundup with an apology to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. We thought you were the second most corrupt grifter in Trump’s cabinet after Scott Pruitt.

Sorry, Ryan Zinke, you’re a conflicted sleaze, but you’re not Scott Pruitt 2.0 because that honor clearly belongs to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.

Dan Alexander reported this week for Forbes that while it may be “difficult to imagine the possibility that a man like Ross, who Forbes estimates is worth some $700 million, might steal a few million from one of his business partners” that does appear to be a consistent theme.


You really have to read the whole thing.

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Speaking of grifters…


David Dayen reported that, “somehow, two other state regulatory agencies, in Arkansas and South Carolina, assisted in the extraction of a single dollar bill from” the crook, and notes that this isn’t the first time CFPB, under the watchful eye of Mick Mulvaney, “has taken an inability to pay into account to reduce a fine for violations of consumer protection law.”

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You may recall a series of stories last year about the Trump regime packing the Department of Health and Human Services with religious right ideologues. We’ve been tracking some of the results.

As have others…


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Here’s a head-scratcher from Slate. Natalie Nanasi reported this week that, “without fanfare or even notice, the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women made significant changes to its definition of domestic violence in April.”


It’s unclear what their purpose was, but we’re way past giving this regime the benefit of the doubt.

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Why does Jared Kushner have a security clearance “after an FBI background check raised concerns about potential foreign influence on him”?

Well, his daddy-in-law is Prezdent. #SimpleAnswersToEasyQuestions

And he’s not the only potential security threat walking around with top secret clearance, according to NBC…


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Last week, The Washington Post reported that Trump had attempted to illegally cut off federal recovery assistance for Puerto Rico.


And Politico’s David Rogers reported that “additional food aid for the island’s poor will soon be exhausted without supplemental funds opposed by the White House.”


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Couple of related stories…

Josh Lederman at NBC: “Nearly three months after deeming Russia in violation of a chemical weapons law, the Trump administration has yet to impose tough new sanctions on Moscow required by the law and triggered by the poisoning last year of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.”

And the NYT’s Kenneth Vogel reports…


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“U.S. officials at the southern border will begin sending some asylum applicants back to Mexico on Friday as the Trump administration implements new measures preventing migrants from waiting in the United States while their cases are processed,” according to WaPo.

Mexico doesn’t have sufficient infrastructure for them either.

“Immigrant rights groups have opposed it, saying it violates U.S. and international asylum laws and could face court challenges. ‘The president thinks he can do this unilaterally,’ said Kevin Appleby, a senior director at the Center for Migration Studies. ‘But it’s a blatant rejection of current law.’”


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Finally, because elections matter and the courts are still functioning, we have several positive items with which to leave you this week.

Big news out of Virginia, where “a panel of federal judges has chosen a redistricting map for Virginia’s House of Delegates that could shift some districts toward Democrats and help the party gain control in this year’s election.” Details at TPM.

Ginger Gibson and Karen Freifeld reported for The Guardian this week that House Democrats made an obscure rule change that could really accelerate their investigations into the Trump regime.

In related news, now that the House Intelligence Committee is under Democratic control, they are sending transcripts from all of their Kremlingate hearings to Robert Mueller so he can determine if anyone lied to them and potentially charge them with a felony. Devin Nunes, the former Republican chair, had refused to authorize their release. Mueller has so far charged Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort with lying to investigators. Axios has (a little) more on that.

And finally, for all your Schadenfreude needs, we give you Will Sommer’s roundup of pro-Trump media stars melting down over this week’s deal. Via The Daily Beast.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/01/longest-dumbest-shutdown-history-now-heres-trump-might-three-weeks/

Here's another installment ~ still dangling over the edge of being fully OFF the "milder" list ~ ey ~ "live links" in original ~ Sooz

It’s not just Putin — Trump is Mitch McConnell’s puppet too
Joshua Holland - COMMENTARY / 02 Feb 2019 at 14:28 ET

The 39 percent of Americans who still approve of Donald Trump’s job in office are at a minimum OK with his rank bigotry, even if they aren’t actually rank bigots, but of course they tell themselves and the world a very different story. In their eyes, Trump may be erratic and kind of offensive, and he may spend too much time blathering about his enemies on Twitter for their taste, but they’re convinced that despite the drama, he’s delivered on his promises.

This would be the oddest belief Trump supporters embrace if not for the Pizzagate/ QAnon conspiracy nonsense. Trump’s supposedly “booming economy” is obviously a continuation of Obama’s. He got some deep tax cuts through Congress, but he’d promised voters that they’d benefit the middle class and hurt rich guys like himself and the GOP’s tax scam did the opposite. He renegotiated NAFTA, which he had called the “worst deal in history,” but his new NAFTA is just the old NAFTA with a fake Groucho mustache. He’s made immigrants’ lives Hell, including the Dreamers’, which was an implied promise. But on the campaign trail, he explicitly vowed to strong-arm Mexico into sending a one-time payment of $5-10 billion dollars for a border wall within his first three days in office, and two years later he shut down the government in an attempt to extort that money from US taxpayers.

But those are just some of his shattered promises on specific policies. His overarching pitch to MAGA Nation was that he would clean up Washington and be a different kind of President. He wouldn’t kowtow to “political correctness,” but he did promise to provide everyone with excellent healthcare. He swore that as a rich business guy, he would drain the swamp and give the little guy the same representation in Washington as the fat cats enjoyed. He said he’d make great deals for this country. He said he would be the last guy to get taken or outplayed by an adversary. This was his central promise to voters: Take a risk on me, and I alone will make everything right.

We don’t need to tell regular readers of This Fresh Hell that immediately upon taking office, Trump surrounded himself with a mix of GOP establishment types, corporate lobbyists and crooks, flaunted ethics rules and hamstrung government watchdogs and since then has basically presided over a kleptocracy. He didn’t promise to drain the swamp into his cronies’ offshore tax havens, but that’s where we are.

But according to Matthew Glassman, an expert on government affairs at Georgetown University, Trump’s betrayal of his base runs much deeper than most of us realized. While “many observers have concluded that Mr. Trump dominates the Republican Party, and his loyal base holds congressional Republicans tautly in line,” wrote Grossman in The Washington Post, the truth is that Congressional Republicans have played Trump like a fiddle.


And of course they’ve also convinced the weak “president” that he’s “in command.”

Trump’s overarching promise was that he’d be a savvy negotiator and a tough guy who wouldn’t get rolled by foreigners, politically correct liberals or the GOP establishment. The reality is that he’s got a huge ego and doesn’t know what he’s doing, and that’s made him an easy mark. He’s been artfully manipulated by the Russians, Kim Jong Un, the Saudis, the Israelis and the Turks, he was totally played by the Republican establishment and he looked like a complete doofus as Nancy Pelosi ran circles around him. The puppet has many masters holding the strings.

And with that, let’s move onto this week’s roundup…

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In the middle of the shutdown, Trump’s businesses appear to have fired their undocumented workers.

These weren’t all just seasonal workers, according to WaPo…


After the WaPo report, the NYT followed up with a similar story at a different Trump property.

Meanwhile, “a Virginia winery owned by President Donald Trump’s son Eric is once again seeking permission to hire foreign guest workers — this time, 23 of them,” according to Buzzfeed News.

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Is Trump an asset, or is he just trolling us? It’s not a question one should have to ask about the President.

Vox: “Trump met Putin without staff or note takers present — again.”

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If you caught Trump’s rambling press conference announcing that he was caving on the shutdown, you may have noticed some odd claims about human traffickers driving fast cars filled with women bound up in blue duct tape across the border.

Looks like the President of the United States of America got that nonsense from the 2015 flick Sicario.


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Meanwhile, this:


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Somewhat related news…


Here’s that Texas Tribune story. Four days after it was published, the Associated Press reported that “officials with the Texas secretary of state’s office began calling county election chiefs… to warn about problems with its recent report questioning the citizenship of tens of thousands of registered voters, the latest example of a state backpedaling after raising alarms about potential widespread election fraud.”

The Waco Tribune reported that the Texas Secretary of State’s Office gave local election officials a list of 366 possible non-citizens on their voter rolls and all 366 turned out to be eligible US citizens.

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Meanwhile…


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File this one under nothing even matters anymore…

“A congressional aide who was key in crafting the controversial Republican House Intelligence Committee memo that accused FBI and Justice Department officials of abusing their surveillance authority is set to join the National Security Council.”

According to CNN, wingnut conspiracy theorist Kashyap Patel is a “hard-charging aide [who] will help craft policy involving the United States’ relationship with the United Nations and other international organizations.” Yeah, we’re doomed.

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Patel will be working under John Bolton, who reportedly played a key role in the Trump regime’s announcement last week that the US is pulling out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia, “ending a cornerstone Cold War agreement and raising fears of a new nuclear arms race in Europe and Asia,” according to WaPo.

Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione wrote this week that “John Bolton relishes in targeting nuclear arms treaties. He is very good at it… [and] his list of victims goes back decades.”


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We’re not sure if disgraced former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was the griftiest member of Trump cabinet, or if that honor should go to disgraced former EPA head Scott Pruitt or soon-to-be-disgraced current Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.

But thanks to a rather odd report by WaPo’s Darryl Fears, Lisa Rein and Juliet Eilperin, we do know that Zinke seems to have gone a bit batty under the glare of the media spotlight.


The short version is that Zinke had some bros over to watch a football game, one of whom was some unnamed big-wig whose bodyguard/ driver parked his SUV outside. He took up multiple spaces, as the bodyguard/ drivers of rich assholes are wont to do, the neighbors griped, and Zinke called the cops and concocted some story about a reporter becoming aggressive outside his home.

In addition to everything else, they are just really weird people.

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#MakeDrinkingWaterToxicAgain

“The Trump administration will not set a drinking water limit for two toxic chemicals that are contaminating millions of Americans’ tap water,” according to Politico.

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The story that probably should have dominated the news this week, via The Guardian: “Glaciers in western North America, excluding Alaska, are melting four times faster than in the previous decade, with changes in the jet stream exacerbating the longer-term effects of climate change, according to a new study.”

While we are freezing our respective asses off, Australia is burning. “This is weather in the age of extremes. It comes on top of multiple extremes, all kinds, in all kinds of places,” wrote Somini Sengupta for The Times this week.

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In good news this week, Americans from across the political spectrum came together in a rare moment of unity to tell former Starbucks CEO and current egomaniac Howard Schultz to fuck right off.


Colorado came one step closer to joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact this week. It would effectively sideline the Electoral College and give the presidency to the winner of the popular vote if it is passed by enough states. Details here.

And 100 girls were inducted into the Boy Scouts this week for the first time in the organization’s history. Via: ABC.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/not-just-putin-trump-mitch-mcconnells-puppet/