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| Porn Users Forum » WHY DOESN'T POTUS ARREST BILL CLINTON, HILARY CLINTON, AND OBAMA? |
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| 06-18-18 12:32pm - 2336 days | #851 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User  Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Ann Coulter Smears Immigrant Children as ‘Child Actors’ She cited a supposed New Yorker article that does not seem to exist. Matt Wilstein 06.18.18 12:29 PM ET Ann Coulter has gone full Alex Jones on the immigrant families being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. During a Sunday night Fox News panel show that also included Donald Trump Jr.’s new girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle and former Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Coulter declared that any kids seen “weeping and crying” on TV are nothing more than “child actors.” “These child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right now—do not fall for it, Mr. President,” Coulter warned Trump. “I get very nervous about the president getting his news from TV.” As host Steve Hilton tried fecklessly to correct her smear against innocent children, Coulter plowed on, claiming that she was using as her source an article from The New Yorker—“not a conservative publication”—that supposedly described how “these kids are being coached, they’re given scripts to read by liberals.” She added, “Don’t fall for the actor children.” The New Yorker article in question does not seem to exist, though some have speculated that Coulter may have been referring to a New York Times article from May, which reported that Trump administration officials claim migrant children have been “coached on what to say to make fraudulent claims for asylum.” Instead of attempting to fact-check Coulter’s outlandish assertion, Hilton simply said, “Thank you for getting that off your chest” and moved right along. | |
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| 06-19-18 09:22am - 2335 days | #852 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen insisted detained kids are being treated well because detention centers have “videos” and “TVs.” My suggestion: arrest Donald Trump, his wife, children, and their children, and put them inside the detention centers that have videos and TVs. Then let them give interviews about how much the detention centers are like paid holidays. Maybe Trump and his relatives won't need to go to expensive Trump hotels in the future: they can stay at the detention center cages, at taxpayer expense. Which would save taxpayers a lot of money. ----------------- ----------------- Trump administration’s efforts to reject comparisons with Nazis are not going well "Simply enforcing laws." Aaron Rupar Jun 19, 2018, 9:09 am During separate Fox News interviews on Monday, acting ICE Director Thomas Homan and Attorney General Jeff Sessions both tried to reject comparisons between what the Trump administration is doing to undocumented immigrants — rounding them up, splitting up families, and sending them to camps — and what the Nazis did do Jews during World War II. Each of their respective efforts to dismiss the comparisons did not turn out well. First, Homan was asked to Tucker Carlson respond to respond to “prominent people” who have compared “your behavior to that of the Nazis, to that during the Roosevelt administration interning the Japanese during World War II.” Homan, without any sense of irony, responded with the same argument that was unsuccessful used by a number of prominent Nazis during the Nuremberg trials — the so-called “Nuremberg defense” about how law enforcement officers are just following orders. “I think it’s an insult to the brave men and women of the border patrol and ICE to call law enforcement officers Nazis. They are simply enforcing laws enacted by Congress,” Homan said. A couple hours later, Laura Ingraham asked Sessions to respond to the same comparison. “Nazi Germany, concentration camps, human rights violations — Laura Bush has weighed in, Michelle Obama, Rosalynn Carter, you’ve got all the first ladies going back to Eleanor Roosevelt, she’s apparently weighed in as well– [Attorney General] Sessions, what’s going on here?” Sessions replied by revealing profound ignorance about the history of Nazi Germany. “Well, it’s a real exaggeration,” he began. “Of course, in Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country, but this is a serious matter.” Sessions’ claim is false. The concentration camps Nazis detained Jews in were all inside the Greater Germanic Reich, which included the territories occupied by the Nazis during the war. It’s also worth noting that Germans were not explicitly told by the Nazi regime that the Jews who were being sent to the concentration camps might be murdered. As the U.S. Holocaust Museum details: The Germans attempted to disguise their intentions. They sought to portray the deportations as a “resettlement” of the Jewish population in labor camps in the “East.” In reality, the “resettlement” in the “East” became a euphemism for transport to the killing centers and mass murder. On Monday, ProPublica published an audio recording of Central American children wailing at a detention center in Texas after they were separated from their families, while a guard taunts them. But during a press briefing a short time later, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen insisted detained kids are being treated well because detention centers have “videos” and “TVs.” | |
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| 06-19-18 01:09pm - 2335 days | #853 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
President Trump not only admires dictatorships like Russia, China and North Korea, he wants to be one. In his heart, Trump is a Nazi. -------- -------- US poised to announce exit from UN human rights council Associated Press MATTHEW LEE and JOSH LEDERMAN,Associated Press 1 hour 45 minutes ago WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration is set to announce Tuesday its departure from the United Nations' main human rights body in its latest withdrawal from an international institution. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will deliver the verdict on the U.N. Human Rights Council in a joint appearance at the State Department, according to four officials familiar with the matter. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly preview the decision, the specifics of which are to be laid out by Haley. Haley threatened the pull-out last year, citing longstanding U.S. complaints that the 47-member council is biased against Israel. But the announcement will also come just a day after the U.N. human rights chief denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents. The move extends a broader Trump administration pattern of stepping back from international agreements and forums under the president's "America First" policy. Although numerous officials have said repeatedly that "America First does not mean America Alone," the administration has retreated from multiple multilateral accords and consensuses since it took office. Since Jan. 2017, it has announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, left the U.N. educational and cultural organization and pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. Other contentious moves have included slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum against key trading partners, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the U.S. Embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv. Haley has been the driving force behind withdrawing from the human rights body, which would be unprecedented in the 12-year history of the council. No country has ever dropped out voluntarily. Libya was kicked out seven years ago. The move could reinforce the perception that the Trump administration is seeking to advance Israel's agenda on the world stage, just as it prepares to unveil its long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan despite Palestinian outrage over the embassy relocation. Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, is visiting the Middle East this week as the White House works to lay the groundwork for unveiling the plan. Last year, Haley warned the Geneva-based council that the U.S. would withdraw if it did not end its systematic scrutiny of Israel and alleged Israeli rights abuses against Palestinians. She denounced the council as a "forum for politics, hypocrisy and evasion" and accused member countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, China, Burundi and Saudi Arabia of failing to fulfill their duties to "uphold the highest standards" of human rights, while emphasizing what she said was the council's anti-Israel bias. Since last year, Haley's office has also pushed the council and its chief not to publish a U.N. database of companies operating in West Bank settlements, a so-called blacklist that Israel is concerned could drive companies away and cast a further pall over its presence in the Palestinian-claimed West Bank. Israel is the only country in the world whose rights record comes up for discussion at every council session, under "Item 7" on the agenda. Item 7 on "Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories" has been part of the council's regular business almost as long as it has existed. The officials said the administration had concluded that its efforts to promote reform on the council had failed and that withdrawal was the only step it could take to demonstrate its seriousness. It was not immediately clear if the U.S. would remain a non-voting observer on the council. A full pullout by the U.S. would leave the council without one of its traditional defenders of human rights. In recent months, the United States has participated in attempts to pinpoint rights violations in places like South Sudan, Congo and Cambodia. Reaction to the anticipated move from human rights advocates was swift. "The Trump administration's withdrawal is a sad reflection of its one-dimensional human rights policy: Defending Israeli abuses from criticism takes precedence above all else," said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. "All Trump seems to care about is defending Israel," he said, adding that it would be up to the remaining members to ensure that the council addresses serious abuses. There are 47 countries in the Human Rights Council, elected by the U.N.'s General Assembly with a specific number of seats allocated for each region of the globe. Members serve for three-year terms and can serve only two terms in a row. The United States has opted to stay out of the Human Rights Council before: The administration of President George W. Bush decided against seeking membership when the council was created in 2006. The U.S. joined the body only in 2009 under President Barack Obama. A pullout could be largely symbolic: The United States' current term on the council ends next year, when it could revert to the observer status held by other countries that are not members. In that situation, the U.S. would be able to speak out on rights abuses, but not to vote. A key question will be where a U.S. pullout would leave Israel if its biggest and most powerful defender abandons its voting rights or drops out of the council altogether. The State Department's website says protection of fundamental human rights was a "foundation stone" for the United States' creation over two centuries ago and that promoting respect for human rights since has been a "central goal" of U.S. foreign policy. ___ Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten in Geneva and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed. | |
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| 06-19-18 10:44pm - 2335 days | #854 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
 President Trump swore to drain the swamp in Washington.Now it appears that Washington is paying millions in government contracts to run the shelters for young immigrants. So, some lucky businesses are now raking in the dough, while people protest the separation of children from parents. But don't worry: It's not Trump's fault: It's the fault of the slimy Democrats, who have forced Trump to behave like a Nazi. Trump, the slime-ball con man who is bringing America down in corruption and graft and immoral behavior. --------- --------- Businesses have made millions off Trump's child separation policy Hunter Walker 2 hours 57 minutes ago WASHINGTON — President Trump’s controversial child separation policy is being carried out with the help of private businesses who have received millions of dollars in government contracts to help run the shelters where young migrants are being held away from their parents. The government has released few photos of the shelters where the children are being detained and at times declined to allow media and even elected officials access to the facilities. Amid this secrecy, many of the businesses participating in the program have remained behind the scenes without being identified. However, by reviewing publicly available contracts data, Yahoo News was able to identify five companies that are participating in the operation of the shelters, including two companies that have not previously been tied to the program. And in response to inquiries, one of the companies said it would cease participation in a program that required it to “maintain readiness” to transport young migrants to government facilities. The Trump administration has given a series of conflicting explanations for the child separations with the president repeatedly falsely blaming it on Democrats. In reality, the situation is the result of a “zero tolerance” policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April that requires authorities to treat all border crossings outside official ports of entry as crimes. This means that adults are arrested when they cross the border and, typically, when a parent is jailed, their children are taken from them. According to Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Service’s Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the agency currently operates “100 shelters across 17 states.” Citing “the safety and security of children in the program,” Wolfe declined to provide further details about the locations where the young migrants are being held. As of Tuesday morning, Wolfe said 11,786 children were being held as part of the “unaccompanied alien children program.” This program, which is run by ACF’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, is designed to offer “unaccompanied alien children entering the United States” a variety of services including “classroom education, health care, socialization/recreation, vocational training, mental health services, family reunification, access to legal services, and case management.” While this program was designed for “unaccompanied” children, who are typically teenagers driven out of their homes in Central America by poverty, abuse or gang violence, since the beginning of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy, there have been widespread reports of children as young as toddlers being taken away from their parents and brought to shelters. Wolfe told Yahoo News his agency defines “unaccompanied” as “any minor referred by [the Department of Homeland Security] to HHS for our unaccompanied alien children program.” The data reviewed by Yahoo News was posted on the site GovTribe.com, which provides “real-time federal contract marketing data.” This information gives a glimpse of the recent growth of the government’s shelter system for young migrants and some of the companies who have lucrative contracts to participate in the program. Contract vehicles are one of the mechanisms the U.S. government uses to award contracts to vendors. The data reviewed by Yahoo News was for a contract vehicle called “Shelter Care for Unaccompanied Children 2022.” This included 10 different contracts for up to approximately $92 million that were awarded to five different vendors starting in September 2017. The contracts include plans to operate the shelters through September 2022. Comprehensive Health Services Inc. (CHSI), a Florida-based company that touts its experience with “immigrant shelter services” received the bulk of the contracts. According to GovTribe, the company was awarded three contracts worth up to about $65 million. The first contract awarded to CHSI through the vehicle kicked off in September 2017 and was for “emergency shelter operations.” It was worth at least $32.4 million. Later that month, the company was awarded a smaller $1.4 million contract for unspecified “emergency and other relief services.” In February of this year, CHSI was awarded a contract through the vehicle worth $30.9 million to operate an “emergency shelter” in Homestead, Fla., with “500 UAC beds,” an acronym referring to “unaccompanied alien children.” That contract was modified last month to double the number of beds in the shelter. This presumably was the same shelter described in this article by the Miami Herald. Pictures obtained by the paper show the shelter includes large tents, a fenced in soccer field and crowded rows of beds. Homestead Temporary Shelter For Unaccompanied Children Yahoo News contacted CHSI and the company’s President and CEO Gary G. Palmer to ask if it had any concerns about playing a role in the child separations. Palmer did not respond. Gail Hart, a CHSI spokesperson, referred all questions to the Department of Health and Human Services. The CHSI website claims its facilities are “compassionate” and boasts of its recent experience working on an HHS contract for a “rapid ramp-up of a large temporary shelter” for immigrants. Dynamic Service Solutions, a Maryland firm, was awarded a contract worth up to $8.7 million from HHS through the “shelter care for unaccompanied children” vehicle in September 2017. The company has posted job openings online indicating it is hiring Spanish-speaking “youth care workers” to work with “unaccompanied alien children” in Homestead. Darnell Armstrong, president and CEO of Dynamic Service Solutions, referred all questions about his role in the child separation policy to the Department of Health and Human Services. Southwest Key Programs was awarded two contracts through the vehicle in September 2017 worth up to $1.8 million each for “emergency shelter operations.” According to ABC News, Southwest Key, a nonprofit, runs 26 facilities for young migrants including Casa Padre in Brownsville, Texas. Casa Padre, located in a cavernous former Walmart, is the largest licensed facility for immigrant children with a capacity of 1,500. ABC also reported that children who are held there are allowed to make two calls a week. The news network was among a group of media outlets and lawmakers, including Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., that toured Casa Padre on June 17. They were admitted after Merkley had been turned away from the facility two weeks earlier. After Merkley’s first attempt, Southwest Key Programs spokesperson Cindy Casares released a statement describing itself as a “humanitarian first responder, caring for immigrant children arriving in this country without a parent or guardian.” “We provide round-the-clock services including: food, shelter, medical and mental health care, clothing, educational support, supervision, and reunification support,” the statement said. Casares and Southwest Key Programs President Dr. Juan Sanchez did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Yahoo News about whether they were concerned the nonprofit is aiding child separation. Dynamic Educational Systems, a subsidiary of the Arizona firm Exodyne, was awarded a pair of HHS contracts worth up to approximately $5.6 million for “emergency shelter operations.” One of the contracts specified it was for “unaccompanied children.” The company’s founder, chairman, and CEO Ralph Rockow, did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo News. A woman who answered the phone at Exodyne Inc. on Tuesday laughed when we said we were calling to ask if executives there had concerns they might be helping separate children from their parents. The woman said Rockow and another person who could answer questions were both unavailable. The fifth business with contracts through the HHS vehicle for “shelter care for unaccompanied children” is Virginia-based MVM. According to GovTribe, the company was awarded two contracts worth up to $9.5 million in September 2017 for “shelter operations” and for unspecified “emergency and other relief services.” Earlier this month, the Daily Beast reported MVM was looking to fill a number of positions, including a compliance coordinator to work in San Antonio on the “rapid deployment of an Emergency Influx Shelter for unaccompanied children.” | |
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| 06-20-18 06:50am - 2335 days | #855 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Jeff Sessions, Attorney General for Nazi President Trump, says US may use DNA tests to verify family relationships. It's a dangerous situation, Sessions states: letting all these scumbag children into our country, without knowing if the adults with them are their parents, or human traffickers, or drug-smuggling animals who should be executed. Why can't we just shoot all the adults and children who come to the US, instead of spending millions of dollars to take care of them in jails and cages? Cheaper to just shoot them. This is what God wants, says Nazi scumbag Donald Trump, the most corrupt President the US ever had. --------------- --------------- Jeff Sessions says US may use DNA tests to verify family relationships at border Veuer Rob Smith Jun 20th 2018 7:57AM X Attorney General Jeff Sessions may use DNA tests to verify the relationship between children and adults who cross the border illegally. The Department of Health and Human Services says 12,000 children are in custody after entering the U.S. at the border, and 10,000 of those are unaccompanied minors. The remarks came during an interview with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on his radio show Washington Watch. Sessions said: “We know for a fact that a lot of adults taking children along are not related to them. [They] could be muggers. They could be human traffickers. It’s a very unhealthy dangerous thing and it needs to end.” After the interview with Sessions, Perkins said in a statement: AdChoices “They are looking at how to use DNA tests in the field to verify they are parents and not traffickers. The reality is if American parents put their kids through what these immigrant parents have done to their kids — they would be charged with child abuse.” The Justice Department has yet to respond with any official announcements. | |
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| 06-20-18 02:24pm - 2334 days | #856 | |
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Drooler (0)
Disabled User  Posts: 1,831 Registered: Mar 11, '07 Location: USA |
Trump just signed an executive order ending the separation of children from their families at the border facilities. Well, I guess that makes voting Republican this November OK again, huh?  I wanted something new, so I left England for New England. | |
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| 06-22-18 09:19pm - 2332 days | #857 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: If you want to know the truth, just listen to President Donald Trump. He can tell the truth 100 different ways. Most of the truths are conflicting, but that's the way it is with Trump: you can't separate the truth from the lies and boasts and nonsense he keeps spouting. ---------- ---------- Trump declares N Korea still poses "extraordinary threat" Associated Press MATTHEW PENNINGTON,Associated Press 4 hours ago WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump declared Friday that North Korea still poses an "extraordinary threat" to the United States. In an executive order, the president extended for one year the so-called "national emergency" with respect to the nuclear-armed nation, re-authorizing economic restrictions against it. While expected, the declaration comes just nine days after Trump tweeted, "There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea," following his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. The order appears to undermine the president's claim. It states that "the existence and risk of proliferation of weapons-usable fissile material" and the actions and policies of the North Korean government "continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States." The national emergency has been in place since 2008 and is a sign of the enduring tensions between the U.S. and North Korea that spiked last year as the North moved closed to perfecting a nuclear-tipped missile that could reach American soil, but ebbed with the June 12 summit where Kim agreed to "complete denuclearization" of the Korean Peninsula. The two sides, however, still have to negotiate the terms under which the North would give up its nukes and win relief from sanctions — a goal that has eluded U.S. administrations for a quarter-century. Trump claimed at a Cabinet meeting Thursday that denuclearization had already begun, although Defense Secretary James Mattis told reporters a day earlier that he wasn't aware that North Korea had taken any steps yet toward denuclearization, and that detailed negotiations have not yet begun. Meanwhile, the Pentagon said Friday evening that it has "indefinitely suspended" a major military exercise with South Korea, known as Freedom Guard and scheduled for August, as well as two Korean Marine exchange training exercises. Officials had announced Monday that planning for Freedom Guard had been suspended in line with Trump's decision to halt what he called U.S. "war games" in South Korea. A Pentagon spokeswoman, Dana W. White, said further decisions about military exercises in South Korea "in support of diplomatic negotiations" led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will depend on North Korea "continuing to have productive negotiations in good faith." | |
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| 06-22-18 09:29pm - 2332 days | #858 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Trump pushes back against border separation uproar Associated Press BY JONATHAN LEMIRE and DARLENE SUPERVILLE,Associated Press 5 hours ago WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump tried to cast doubt Friday on wrenching tales of migrant children separated from their families at the border, dismissing "phony stories of sadness and grief" while asserting the real victims of the nation's immigration crisis are Americans killed by those who cross the border unlawfully. Bombarded with criticism condemning the family-separation situation as a national moment of shame, Trump came back firing, sometimes twisting facts and changing his story but nonetheless highlighting the genuine grief of families on the other side of the equation. "You hear the other side, you never hear this side," said Trump, standing with a dozen of what he calls the "angel families" who lost loved ones at the hands of people in the country illegally. He focused on the fact that young migrants separated from parents are likely to be reunited, unlike the victims of murders. "These are the American citizens permanently separated from their loved ones. The word 'permanently' being the word that you have to think about. Permanently — they're not separated for a day or two days, these are permanently separated because they were killed by criminal illegal aliens." Amid mushrooming bipartisan concern over depictions of terrified migrant children separated from their parents, Trump on Wednesday had abruptly reversed course and signed an executive order to overturn the policy, although up to 2,000 children are still believed to be separated from their parents. But that rare moment of public capitulation was brief from the president, who laced his remarks at a rally in Minnesota that night with hardline immigration rhetoric that continued Friday. In a tweet, the president raised questions about whether the migrants' hardships really existed. "We must maintain a Strong Southern Border," the president tweeted. "We cannot allow our Country to be overrun by illegal immigrants as the Democrats tell their phony stories of sadness and grief, hoping it will help them in the elections. Obama and others had the same pictures, and did nothing about it!" Trump's suggestion that the stories were erroneous was likely fueled by revelations Friday about one of the defining images to this point in the crisis, a 2-year-old Honduran girl crying as her mother was stopped by a Border Patrol agent. But the girl in the photograph, who ended up on the cover of Time Magazine this week, was not separated from her mother but detained with her, the child's father told the Daily Mail. Time Magazine said it stood by the image because it captures "the stakes of this moment." Trump has long chafed at the media's treatment, his fury only growing in the past week when he felt that he did not receive proper credit for his summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. He told the Trinity Broadcasting Network, in an interview with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee set to air Saturday, that he found the news coverage "almost treasonous." Some conservatives seized hold of the migrant photo faux pas to attack the media, and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted, "It's shameful that dems and the media exploited this photo of a little girl to push their agenda." Other Trump allies have gone even further. Ann Coulter, a conservative pundit, said Sunday in an interview on Fox News that kids at the border were "actor children" who were "given scripts to read by liberals." Coulter then turned to the camera and said to Trump, "Don't fall for it." A number of Democrats aggressively pushed back against Trump's claims. Rep. Peter Welch of Vermont said Friday that Trump's assertion was "bizarre" and that the border patrol processing center he visited in Texas in recent days was "nothing short of a prison." As part of his defense for his zero tolerance border crossing policy, Trump has frequently pointed to — and exaggerated — the threat posed by members of the violent gang MS-13 who have entered the United States. In what was likely not a coincidence, the Justice Department on Friday unsealed an indictment charging 11 suspected MS-13 gang members in connection with the killings of two teens in Virginia. All the suspects were from El Salvador. But the central piece of Trump's attempts to counter-program against the despairing images at the border was to stand with the "angel families," as he did repeatedly during his presidential campaign, including at the 2016 Republican National Convention. At the somber event at the White House complex on Friday, Trump introduced the families, who delivered heartbreaking tales of their loved ones' lives and, at times, gruesome descriptions of their deaths. Many of them held large photos of their loved ones, some of which the president autographed. Trump said that one of the victims looked like the actor Tom Selleck. "Your loss will not have been in vain," Trump said. "We will secure our borders, and we will make sure that they're properly taken care of." The president also rattled off a litany of statistics that indicated that illegal immigrants commit violent crimes at a far higher rate than U.S. citizens, saying "you hear it's like they're better people than what we have, than our citizens. It's not true." But his assertion has been contradicted by a number of studies, including one by the Cato Institute and another in the journal Criminology that found that places with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants do not have higher rates of crime. A Homeland Security report said there were 972 calls reporting crimes to its Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement hotline from April 26 through Sept. 30 last year. The hotline handled a total of 4,602 calls including general comments. The report said some of the calls were made for victim impact statements that lead to the deportation of someone who commits a crime. Victims also testified in immigration court proceedings, and their calls led to the arrest and detention of others. At the event, Trump also bashed "the mayor of San Diego" for warning citizens about immigration agent raids. But the mayor of San Diego, Kevin Faulconer, is a Republican who did not provide a tip; a mayor who did was Libby Schaaf, a Democrat from Oakland,. ___ Lemire reported from New York. Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed. | |
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| 06-25-18 12:13am - 2330 days | #859 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Donald Trump: No more Mr. Nice Guy. The gloves are coming off, and Trump is ready to rock and roll, crushing everyone in his way. Trump will fight to make America number one, and whoever does not bow down to his imperial power, will become a second- or third-rate power. Trump, Emperor-For-Life-Of-TrumplandUSA, the greatest country, the tallest country, and the whitest country in the entire world. Maybe even the entire universe. Go, Emperor Trump, hero of the divided masses, uplifter of the common good. ------- ------- Trump: Trading partners to face ‘more than reciprocity’ if trade ‘barriers and tariffs’ are not removed Geobeats Jun 24th 2018 6:52PM X President Trump on Sunday again issued a warning to the United States’ trading partners over the issue of trade tariffs. “The United States is insisting that all countries that have placed artificial Trade Barriers and Tariffs on goods going into their country, remove those Barriers & Tariffs or be met with more than Reciprocity by the U.S.A. Trade must be fair and no longer a one way street!” Trump wrote on Twitter. The tweet comes days after he threatened to impose new tariffs on the European Union. “Based on the Tariffs and Trade Barriers long placed on the U.S. & its great companies and workers by the European Union, if these Tariffs and Barriers are not soon broken down and removed, we will be placing a 20% Tariff on all of their cars coming into the U.S. Build them here!” Trump tweeted on Friday. CNN notes such an action would actually hurt many American jobs. “German automakers Mercedes, BMW, and Volkswagen all have plants in southern states and directly employ more than 20,000 US workers between them, primarily at those factories,” the outlet stated. “Volvo is just starting production at its first US plant in South Carolina.” Trump has long called for a change to the trade structure the U.S. has in place with its partners. “Because of the fact that the United States’ leaders of the past didn’t do a good job on trade…it’s going to change,” Trump said at a recent press conference. “It’s not a question of ‘I hope it changes.’ It’s going to change, a hundred percent.” “We’re like the piggy bank that everybody is robbing,” Trump added. | |
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| 06-25-18 11:36am - 2329 days | #860 | |
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Loki (0)
Active User  Posts: 395 Registered: Jun 13, '07 Location: California |
I wonder if President Trump slept through his economics classes at Wharton? "A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself." | |
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| 06-26-18 06:50am - 2329 days | #861 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: Trump mulls whether to nationalize Harley-Davidson because of its treasonous announcement: Harley plans to move production to Europe from America. Or else, Trump could seize the company and include it in his portfolio of investments. Which would be the better thing to do: with Trump leading the company, Harley's sales and profits would start to zoom-zoom-zoom (just like their roaring muffler sounds). ----------- ----------- Trump blasts Harley plan to shift U.S. production to avoid EU tariffs Reuters Reuters 14 hours ago By Rajesh Kumar Singh and Sanjana Shivdas (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday slammed Harley-Davidson Inc after the motorcycle maker said it would move production for European customers overseas to avoid retaliatory tariffs that could cost it up to $100 million (£75.4 million) per year. Trump said he has fought hard for the company and was surprised by its plans, which he described as waving the "White Flag." Harley-Davidson, the dominant player in the heavyweight U.S. motorcycle market said earlier on Monday it would not pass on any retail or wholesale price increases in the EU and instead focus on shifting some U.S. production. Harley shares closed down nearly 6 percent and analysts cut their profit forecasts on concerns about how quickly the company would be able to adapt to the 25 percent import duties the European Union began charging on June 22. "I fought hard for them and ultimately they will not pay tariffs selling into the E.U., which has hurt us badly on trade, down $151 Billion. Taxes just a Harley excuse - be patient!" Trump said in a post on Twitter. The United States earlier this month imposed tariffs on steel and aluminium imports from the European Union, provoking a "tit-for-tat" response from the trading bloc against U.S. goods. In a regulatory filing https://bit.ly/2tA1ru0, the 115-year-old Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based company said the retaliatory duties would result in an incremental cost of about $2,200 per average motorcycle exported from the United States to the European Union, but did not provide more details on current motorcycle costs. Harley's entry-level bike in France currently costs 7,490 euros ($8,766). The company said it expects the tariffs to result in incremental costs of $30 million to $45 million for the rest of 2018 and $80 million to $100 million on a full-year basis. "We think Harley's decision to protect EU demand is wise for the long-term health of the market," Baird Equity Research said in a note. "But we expect the near-term impact to weigh on estimates and sentiment until a clearer path to mitigation is outlined." Trump vowed to make the iconic motorcycle maker great again when he took office last year. But since then the company has been counting the costs of his trade policies. In late April, Harley said Trump's metal tariffs would inflate its costs by $15 million to $20 million this year on top of already rising raw material prices that it expected at the start of the year. White House trade and manufacturing adviser Peter Navarro said on Monday the administration wants Harley to make more motorcycles in the United States. "Remember, they came to us, for example, pointing out that India had a 100 percent tariff on Harley Davidsons. That's certainly not fair," Navarro told CNBC. "We want Harleys made here, more made here, and that's going to happen under the president's trade policies." In response to Navarro's comments, a Harley spokesman said the company has made its position clear in Monday's filing. EUROPEAN BUSINESS Harley has been aiming to boost overseas sales of its motorcycles to 50 percent of annual volume from about 43 percent. In January, the company announced the closure of a plant in Kansas City, Missouri, after its motorcycle shipments fell to their lowest level in six years. In 2017, Harley sold nearly 40,000 new motorcycles in Europe which accounted for more than 16 percent of the company's sales. The revenues from EU countries were second only to the United States. Harley said ramping up production overseas could take at least nine to 18 months. It has three assembly plants outside the United States - one each in Brazil, India and Thailand. The company decided to build the Thailand plant after Trump pulled out from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have lowered import tariffs on its bikes in some of the fastest-growing motorcycle markets in Asia. The company said it will provide more details on tariff-related plans when it reports second-quarter earnings on July 24. Analysts at Baird Equity Research cut its 2018 profit estimates for Harley-Davidson to $3.70 per share from $3.90 and now expect 2019 profit of $3.85, down from $4.20. CFRA Research lowered its 12-month price target for the stock to $47 from $49. Harley-Davidson shares have lost about 9 percent since early March when the trade skirmish between the United States and the EU started, and are down over 18 percent since end-December 2017. Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler last week cut its 2018 profit forecast citing growing trade tensions. Its German rival BMW said it was considering "possible strategic options" in view of the rising trade tensions between China and the United States. Trump has also threatened to crackdown on auto imports. Analysts at Moody's reckon a 25 percent tariff on imported vehicles and parts would be negative for most of companies including Ford Motor Co and General Motors Co. (Reporting by Sanjana Shivdas in Bengaluru; Editing by Bill Rigby and Meredith Mazzilli) | |
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| 06-26-18 10:03am - 2328 days | #862 | |
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Loki (0)
Active User Posts: 395 Registered: Jun 13, '07 Location: California |
Harley-Davidson is making a sound business decision. Maybe if our President spent less of his business career going bankrupt he might have learned some fundamental business principles. "A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself." | |
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| 06-26-18 01:59pm - 2328 days | #863 | |
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biker (0)
Active User  Posts: 632 Registered: May 03, '08 Location: milwaukee, wi |
But trade wars are easy. Warning Will Robinson | |
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| 06-27-18 03:31am - 2328 days | #864 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: Another victory of Trump's diplomacy: Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to create a safer world. Trump has started peace talks with North Korea. Has gotten North Korea on the road to stop its nuclear program. An achievement no other American president has ever made. However, it turns out that North Korea is tricky, just like Trump: Instead of destroying its nuclear testing facility, which North Korea promised, North Korea is actually improving the nuclear testing facility. North Korea can lie and cheat on its promises, the same as Trump. --------- --------- North Korea is 'upgrading its nuclear facility' despite denuclearisation pledge Yahoo News UK Matilda Long,Yahoo News UK 1 hour 1 minute ago North Korea is carrying out improvements at its nuclear testing facility, new research has discovered. The work at the facility comes despite a pledge by the country to completely denuclearise following the summit between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. New satellite images of the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Centre show that upgrades are being carried out ‘at a rapid pace’, according to North Korea analysis organisation 38 North. Pictures taken on 21 June show that modifications to equipment are ongoing, new buildings are being erected and a radiochemical laboratory is seemingly still active. Analysts at 38 North note that, despite the promises made at the summit, workers at the nuclear plant would be expected to continue as usual until specific orders to the contrary are made by Pyongyang. The new evidence pours water on Donald Trump’s claim last week that the process of ‘total denuclearisation’ was underway. The President told a White House meeting that the North had already blown up four of its biggest nuclear test sites, despite there being no evidence to support this. ‘They’ve stopped the sending of missiles, including ballistic missiles. They’re destroying their engine site,’ Mr Trump said. ‘They’re blowing it up. They’ve already blown up one of their big test sites, in fact it’s actually four of their big test sites. ‘And the big thing is it will be a total denuclearisation, which has already started taking place.’ Despite the President’s bluster, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted this week that there was no specific timeline for steps towards denuclearisation. Speaking to CNN, Mr Pompeo, who has been tasked with leading the negotiations, said that he planned to regularly assess the progress towards abandoning nuclear power by the regime. ‘I am not going to put a timeline on it, whether that’s two months, six months, we are committed to moving forward in an expeditious moment to see if we can achieve what both leaders set out to do,’ he said. Last week the President signed an executive order acknowledging that North Korea still poses an ‘extraordinary threat’ to the US. Mr Trump extended the ‘national emergency’ against the regime for a further year, allowing America to continue stringent economic sanctions. The executive order states that ‘the existence and risk of proliferation of weapons-usable fissile material’ and the actions and policies of the North Korean government ‘continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States’. Comment Guidelines | |
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| 06-27-18 08:59am - 2327 days | #865 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: The Trump white house has minimized civil rights protections in the federal government, cutting back funding for anti-discrimination. At the same time, Trump's white house has authorized increased spending on personal protections for its staff members In other words: the public poor are wastrels who do not deserve any protections from the government. But Trump's cronies and personal servants are getting secret service protection, at taxpayer expense, because of what reason? That their jobs expose them to the public? Supposedly, federal employees are public servants. Except, Trump believes that he is the master Nazi, who can transform America into his vision of greatness: graft, corruption, and lies. Note: the Supreme Court, in a win for conservatives, ruled it's OK for a restaurant to refuse service to a gay couple, on moral grounds. But Trump wants to demolish a restaurant that refused service to Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, on moral grounds that she is a liar and tool for Trump's attacks on LGBT rights. So, Trump can stomp on people, but if they fight back, he wants them destroyed. Can anyone say: Bully Trump? Neo-Nazi Trump. Corrupt Trump? --------- --------- White House spokeswoman Sanders to get Secret Service protection Reuters Reuters 34 minutes ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House press secretary Sarah Sanders will get Secret Service protection after she was asked to leave a restaurant in southern Virginia in protest of President Donald Trump's policies, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters. The source did not provide details. The Secret Service and the White House both declined to confirm the matter. NBC News, which first reported that Sanders would get protection, said security would be provided at her home on a temporary basis, citing a law enforcement official. Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, on Friday because she worked for Trump. The owner later confirmed the reasoning to media, and the incident drew praise and condemnation online for the restaurant. The incident prompted Twitter attacks from the president on Monday. Trump lashed out at Democratic U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, who told a crowd in California on Sunday that the Red Hen’s actions should be a model for resisting the president’s administration. Tensions have risen over the Republican president’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that initially led to migrant children being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, said the protection was related to other threats Sanders has received. "Well, it’s not so much related to the Red Hen as it is to other threats and you got to remember, she has three small children and there have been some nasty things," Mike Huckabee said in an interview with Fox Business Network. (Reporting by Steve Holland and Doina Chiacu; Editing by David Gregorio and Bernadette Baum) | |
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| 06-28-18 07:22pm - 2326 days | #866 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous says he is not responsible for the deaths of journalists, after he had called for "vigilante death squads" to kill journalists days before journalists were killed. "My comments were made in private" (although they were sent to journalists in emails). If people are killed, I am sorry. But I'm not responsible." Sounds like he is taking a message from Neo-Nazi Trump, who spews hate messages while saying he loves everyone. Even the people from shit-hole countries. Trump loves everyone, even the slime-ball Democrats he wants to bury. Trump is a lying con-man, yet his devoted followers love him. Just like Nazis still love Hitler, who promised to make Germany great again. Did Trump take a message from Hitler? ------- ------- U.S. Maryland shooting: Milo Yiannopolous responds to Annapolis attack after 'gun journalists down' comments The Independent Clark Mindock,The Independent 1 hour 43 minutes ago Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopolous has responded to claims linking comments he gave to reporters days ago and the shooting at a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland. Yiannopolous criticised liberal journalists in a Facebook post, who he said would try to “score political points against” him by noting that he had called for “vigilante death squads” to kill journalists days before the incident. “You’re about to see a raft of news stories claiming that I am responsible for inspiring the deaths of journalists,” he wrote. “The bodies are barely cold and left-wing journalists are already exploiting these deaths to score political points against me. It’s disgusting. I regret nothing I said, though of course like any normal person I am saddened to hear of needless death”. He continued: “The truth, as always, is the opposite of what the media tells you. I sent a troll about ‘vigilante death squads’ as a *private* response to a few hostile journalists who were asking me for comment, basically as a way of saying, ‘f*** off’”. Yiannopolous is referring to reports originally published on the Daily Beast website and the New York Observer — and later picked up by several blogs — in which he is quoted saying he would like to see journalists murdered. Others noted that he has previously sent anti-semitic and violent messages to members of the media. “I can’t wait fort he vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight,” he texted the reporter at the Observer, who said he received the message when he reached out for comment on a story from Yiannopolous. A least five people have been killed and many more were injured when a gunman opened fire at the joint offices for The Capital and the Maryland Gazette newspapers in Annapolis on Thu It was not immediately clear why the gunman had targeted that particular office building — which houses other businesses as well — and investigators said they expected to be working into the night, and potentially beyond then. Yiannopolous, hours after that shooting, published his Facebook post, and sought to put the blame for the publication of his comments on the journalists. He repeatedly insisted that the comments made to those reporters were intended to be private, even though he knew that he was speaking to reporters who were seeking public comment from the controversial conservative activist. | |
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| 06-28-18 08:28pm - 2326 days | #867 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: Sean Hannity blames Maxine Waters, Obama, and other slime-ball Democrats for the Capital Gazette murders. Democrats are slime. They are evil. When people shoot innocent people, it's the Democrats who are responsible. Never Republicans. Republicans, like our beloved President Trump, are God-fearing, upstanding young people who love everyone, even slime-ball Democrats who would be better off dead and buried. Love live Donald Trump, Neo-Nazi President-for-life of the United States of Trumpland. And may all Democrats burn in hell, where they belong. ---------- ---------- Sean Hannity Immediately Blames Maxine Waters for ‘Capital Gazette’ Shooting “Really Maxine?” Hannity asked on the radio, mere seconds after learning about a shooting inside an Annapolis newspaper’s offices. Matt Wilstein Matt Wilstein 06.28.18 4:36 PM ET Within seconds of learning Thursday about a shooting inside the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, Fox News host Sean Hannity laid blame at the feet of Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters. “It's so sad that there are so many sick, demented, and evil people in this world,” Hannity told his radio listeners, in a clip first reported by Media Matters. “It really is sad. You know, imagine you go to work and this is what you're dealing with today, some crazy person comes in... and I’m not turning this into a gun debate, I know that’s where the media will be in 30 seconds from now. That’s not it.” “You know, as I’ve always said, I mean honestly—I’ve been saying now for days that something horrible was going to happen because of the rhetoric. Really, Maxine?” he asked, referring to Waters. “You want people to create—‘call your friends, get in their faces,’ and Obama said that too. ‘Get in their faces, call them out, call your friends, get protesters, follow them into restaurants and shopping malls,’ and wherever else, she said.” Hannity has been talking for days about widely circulated comments made by Waters encouraging the Democratic base to confront Trump administration officials in public and “tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.” She did not, as Donald Trump has now falsely stated on multiple occasions, call for anyone to be physically “harmed.” But that did not stop Hannity and his fellow Fox News primetime hosts from railing against the California congresswoman night after night this week, calling her and others on the left “utterly psychotic and unhinged.” At the time of Hannity’s comments, authorities had released no information about the motivations of the Annapolis shooter. | |
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| 06-29-18 06:42am - 2326 days | #868 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Neo-Nazi Trump is a wuss. He should have obeyed his slime-ball instincts and had the mass protesters gunned down. This would have established his right to rule Trumpland USA with guts and glory. Hail Trump, the Neo-Nazi who wants to establish a rich, white-only Trumpland. Where his family will be free to ignore the laws of decency, and to make obscene profits from contracts with China, and other foreign nations. Trump under investigation for ties to Russia? Trump is proud to call Putin a friend. ---------- ---------- US immigration Almost 600 arrested at Washington protest over Trump immigration policy Demonstrators sat on floor of Senate office building to condemn treatment of migrant families, with more rallies planned Ed Pilkington in New York and agencies @edpilkington Thu 28 Jun 2018 19.38 EDT Last modified on Fri 29 Jun 2018 04.47 EDT Nearly 600 protesters, mostly women, were arrested on Thursday after they staged a non-violent action in the heart of a US Senate office building in Washington against Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy towards immigrants and separation of families at the border. The mass protest was one of several demonstrations that erupted across the country, providing a taste of what are expected to be much larger demonstrations on Saturday called by the Women’s March and the Center for Popular Democracy Action. The rallies are likely to get a further boost as a result of the announcement on Wednesday by Anthony Kennedy that he is retiring from the US supreme court, providing Trump with the chance to make a second ultra-conservative appointment to the nation’s highest court and prompting fears of a rollback of liberal protections. Demonstrators in opposition to the immigration policies of the Trump administration rally at the Hart Senate office building. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters The largest demonstration on Thursday saw the 90ft atrium of the Senate Hart office building overrun by hundreds of women who sat on the floor pumping their fists in the air. Many were draped in foil sheets as a statement on the flimsy bedding given to children and adults as they are held at US border detention facilities. The protesters chanted “abolish Ice” and “we care” – a jab at Melania Trump for wearing a jacket with the words “I really don’t care, do u?” painted on its back as she visited one of the immigrant detention centers in Texas last week. Among those arrested in the senate building were Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic member of Congress representing Seattle. She said in a video posted on social media that she had joined the action to protest “the inhumane and cruel ‘zero tolerance’ policy of Donald Trump and this administration, the separation of families, the caging of children, and the imprisonment of asylum seekers”. We will put our bodies on the line to stop Trump incarcerating children She added that she was proud to have been arrested among hundreds of others who believed that “the US is better and as a member of Congress I refuse to let this president and administration do what they are doing to children in my name”. Senator Elizabeth Warren cheers on demonstrators. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Daily images are still emerging of distraught immigrant children separated from parents and not yet reunited, despite an executive order last week ending the policy of summarily tearing families apart and arresting the adults after anyone is caught crossing the border illegally. In a written statement, the Capitol police said around 575 people were charged with unlawfully demonstrating inside the office building. The police said those arrested were being released after they were processed. Winnie Wong, political adviser for the Women’s March, said the crowd’s fervor would translate into “the energy we will need to see to at the ballot box in November”, when congressional control will be at stake. The actor Susan Sarandon, center, was among the activists protesting at the Hart office building. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP The Democratic senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who was one of the first to draw attention to children being held in detention camps along the border after being separated from their parents, appeared before the crowd. So did the Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Edward Markey of Massachusetts. “These folks are out here fighting for the core principles of our nation, and I applaud them for it,” Merkley said in an interview. Meanwhile, hundreds more people gathered at a rally outside a federal courthouse in Brownsville, Texas, in the Rio Grande valley. And dozens of protesters shut down a government meeting in Michigan in protest against a contract with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency to house detainees at a local jail. Eight people also were arrested outside an Ice building in Portland, Oregon, that has been closed because of a round-the-clock demonstration.  2018 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | |
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| 06-29-18 08:26am - 2325 days | #869 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Trump's top economic adviser is a liar just like Donald Trump. Kudlow lies with a smile, with a frown, with a straight face. Is that why Trump hired Kudlow? Because it takes a professional liar to recognize another professional liar? -------- -------- Trump’s top economics adviser lies about ‘rapidly’ falling budget deficit There's just one problem. Ryan Koronowski Jun 29, 2018, 9:33 am Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, said that the deficit is “coming down rapidly” in a Friday morning appearance on Fox Business. The problem for President Trump’s top economic adviser is that the deficit is actually rising. “As the economy gears up, more people working, better jobs and careers, those revenues come rolling in and the deficit, which was one of the other criticisms, is coming down,” Kudlow told host Maria Bartiromo. “It’s coming down rapidly. Growth solves a lot of problems.” However, the deficit is actually increasing, and is projected to do so well into the future. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected as of April 2018 that the FY 2018 deficit is $804 billion. Fiscal Year 2017’s deficit was $666 billion, increasing from $586 billion in FY 2016. This leads to an even worse projection for the federal debt. The CBO concluded in a report earlier this week: “At 78 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), federal debt held by the public is now at its highest level since shortly after World War II.” Trump has given up on his pledge to balance the budget One of the primary drivers behind the terrible deficit and debt projections is the Republican tax cut bill — the six-month anniversary of it being signed into law was the occasion for Kudlow’s interview on Fox Business — and the only glimmer of hope in the CBO’s analysis is the expiration of the tax cuts in 2026. But the White House and Republicans in Congress insist they won’t let the tax cuts expire. Instead, they’ve promised to extend them. Advertisement Kudlow also dismissed critics who apparently said “we could never get to 3 percent growth,” something that Donald Trump Jr. also argued in a tweet which also claimed “I don’t think Obama ever broke 2 percent.” In 2014, as the Obama administration was pulling the country out of the Great Recession, growth hit as high as 5.2 percent in a quarter. Trump’s new economic adviser is really bad at economics. Here are the receipts. That Kudlow does not present the best economic arguments is not shocking. He recommended buying stocks in September 2008, denied the existence of the housing bubble in 2005, lauded the “Bush Boom” on the eve of the Great Recession, and argued that unemployment benefits make people not want to work (which is not true). He also said the war in Iraq would be a huge boon to the American economy, even though the trillions it added to the deficit (not to mention the tens of thousands of lives it cost) helped to put future administrations, including the one he helps to lead, in a situation where boosting the deficit with tax cuts is even more perilous thanks to trillions more in debt. 2018 ThinkProgress | |
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| 06-30-18 02:44am - 2325 days | #870 | |
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Loki (0)
Active User Posts: 395 Registered: Jun 13, '07 Location: California |
I remember George W. Bush going to a factory and touted nationally that the owner was hiring. He had hired two employees. Some "Bush Boom." Bush always touted during the recession that the economy was "turning the corner." This from the same man who said "mission accomplished" after invading Iraq (before the sectarian civil war and the creation of ISIS), and that "The problem with the French is they don't have a word for entrepreneur." "A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself." | |
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| 06-30-18 03:53am - 2325 days | #871 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Presidents, like most politicians, try to put a positive spin on events, even when it's not true. But the current Republican administration is the most extreme example of lies, broken promises, corruption, graft, etc. of any federal administration in US history. It almost reminds me of a corrupt Southern state from the 1950s, which fought integration and civil rights for black people. | |
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| 06-30-18 06:24pm - 2324 days | #872 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Donald Trump isn't even trying to lie convincingly anymore By Adam Rosenberg 5 hours ago We're all tired of "Donald Trump tweeted more BS" stories, but the lie he dropped on Saturday is too much of a doozy to ignore. "I never pushed the Republicans in the House to vote for the Immigration Bill, either GOODLATTE 1 or 2, because it could never have gotten enough Democrats as long as there is the 60 vote threshold," Trump tweeted on Saturday afternoon. For those who need a refresher: The immigration bills Trump refers to were penned by Bob Goodlatte, the Republican representative presiding over Virginia's 6th Congressional District. Both bills were meant to provide a legislative fix for the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy. Unfortunately, rather than addressing the singular problem of migrant families being torn apart, the two bills added in an assortment of other immigration-related policies. The first bill, viewed as the one loaded with more of a conservative, hard-line approach to immigration, was defeated on June 21 in a 193-to-231 vote. The second bill, Goodlatte 2, was viewed as more of a compromise. It was still a conservative piece of legislation — Democrats weren't included in the process — but it wasn't as hard-line. Compromise or not, that second bill suffered an even greater defeat after a 121-to-301 vote last week. Here's how all of that ties back to today's tweet. Shortly before that second vote occurred — the day of, in fact — Trump weighed in on his favorite social media platform. His all-caps missive strongly, explicitly encouraged the GOP to "pass" Goodlatte 2 and send it along to the Senate (where it was expected to be defeated anyway due to the slim Republican majority there). Now. I'm no English language expert — granted, it's been the focus of my career for the past 15 years, whatever — but it seems to me that "HOUSE REPUBLICANS SHOULD PASS THE STRONG BUT FAIR IMMIGRATION BILL" actually does count as Trump having "pushed the Republicans in the House to vote for the Immigration Bill." Right now, today, he's claiming he didn't do the thing. But if you scroll down in his feed to just three days ago, you can plainly see he actually did do the thing. The current President of the United States is an unrepentant liar, and he doesn't even try to hide it anymore. I'm going to repeat myself, and I don't care: On Wednesday, he explicitly and emphatically encouraged Republicans to vote for Goodlatte 2. Now he's claiming that never happened. WTF. This may be small potatoes stuff when you look at the big picture of the travesties being visited upon the American public each day. But holy shit. Two diametrically opposed statements delivered just days apart. There's no amount of spin that can be applied to the earlier tweet to make this new one anything other than a bald-faced lie. As you might expect, folks on social media took notice. The man is a liar. Donald Trump is a liar. He lies. He lies all the time. Today's tweet is a lie. It's not the most offensive lie he's uttered, though in the grand pantheon of memorable Donald Trump lies this particular lie is an insult to every voter in America, regardless of their political affiliation. Say it over and over. Don't forget it, don't stop calling it out when you see it. Trump is not going to change, but the more that voters internalize moments like, the more likely it is that change will come when we all get our say this fall, and then again in 2020. | |
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| 06-30-18 08:41pm - 2324 days | #873 | |
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biker (0)
Active User Posts: 632 Registered: May 03, '08 Location: milwaukee, wi |
Hello lk2fireone: The sad truth is Trump's lies have become so common everyone just accepts them. The more outrageous the more they are ignored. Fox is no better. Hannity and that morning crew tie themselves in knots trying to spin Trumps agenda. Trump said he could kill someone and he wasn't kidding. Their are people who only get angry at him when he backs down. But he really doesn't. He just keeps making vague statements and sign vague executive orders to appease the wrath of the masses. We got two more years, unless we get enough votes to impeach him, because the spineless turds in Congress won't do it. Warning Will Robinson | |
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| 07-01-18 06:01am - 2324 days | #874 | |
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Loki (0)
Active User Posts: 395 Registered: Jun 13, '07 Location: California |
I read that the pace of Donald Trumps public lies has increased from about 4 a day in the first year to over 9 a day now. These are not interpretations of fact, they are flat-out falsehoods. This administration seems hell-bent on destroying America's representational liberal democracy. Not just through lying, but attacks on the judiciary, attacks on the press, and attacks on his own Justice Department. "A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself." | |
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| 07-01-18 08:46am - 2323 days | #875 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Trump should be nominated for the Nobel Peach Prize. His administration says that North Korea nuclear program can be dismantled in one year. (However, there are reports that not only did North Korea not stop their nuclear program after the talks with Trump, but that the North Koreans have actually strengthened their nuclear program.) But this is a sign of hope. All you have to do is believe the words coming from the Trump administration. Which happens to be famous for their lies, exaggerations, and false promises. That is why Trump should be given the Nobel Peach Prize, instead of the more famous Nobel Peace Prize. Because Trump is such a peach: a slimeball Neo-Nazi who is running the most corrupt Presidency in United States history. ---------- ---------- World White House's Bolton: North Korea nuclear program can be dismantled in year Reuters Reuters 1 hour 9 minutes ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) - White House national security adviser John Bolton said on Sunday he believed the bulk of North Korea's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs could be dismantled within a year. Bolton told CBS's "Face the Nation" that Washington has devised a program to dismantle North Korea's weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs in a year. "If they have the strategic decision already made to do that and they're cooperative, we can move very quickly," he said. "Physically we would be able to dismantle the overwhelming bulk of their programs within a year." He said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will likely discuss that proposal with the North Koreans soon. The Financial Times reported that Pompeo was due to visit North Korea this week but Reuters has not been able to confirm his travel plans. North Korea agreed at the summit to "work toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," but the joint statement signed by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S., President Donald Trump gave no details on how or when Pyongyang might surrender its nuclear weapons. Pompeo told reporters the day after the Singapore summit on June 12 that Washington hoped to achieve "major disarmament" by North Korea within Trump's current term, which ends on Jan. 20, 2021. Bolton said the United States was going into nuclear negotiations aware of Pyongyang's failure to live up to its promises in the past. "We know exactly what the risks are - them using negotiations to drag out the length of time they have to continue their nuclear, chemical, biological weapons programs and ballistic missiles," he said. "There's not any starry-eyed feeling among the group doing this," he said. "We're well aware of what the North Koreans have done in the past." (Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Lisa Shumaker) | |
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| 07-03-18 08:19am - 2321 days | #876 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Scott Pruitt, head of the EPA, spent over $1500 on tactical pants. That sounds like a lot of money. Taxpayer money. However, the details explain a lot: Pruitt spend over $1500 on 40 pairs of pants at about $40 a pair. Which seems more reasonable. What are tactical pants? "These are routine expenditures for our Criminal Investigative Division (CID) and Protective Security Detail (PSD) agents to have proper attire for search warrants, arrests, disaster responses and training." Why Pruit needs 40 pairs of these pants is beyond me. They should last, under normal use by Pruitt, maybe 20 years or more. After all, he would not be wearing them to formal occasions, such as a White House staff meeting. But maybe Pruitt has a second job, to earn extra money, where he volunteers to go out with law enforcement agencies to help enforce Environment Protection Agency rules, which he is rolling back for big business and lowering the standards for public health for ordinary citizens. In other words, big business can now dump harmful chemicals into the environment legally, under the Trump administration, far more than under the Barack Obama administration. | |
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| 07-04-18 01:44am - 2321 days | #877 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Michael Cohen, once one of Trump's most trusted advisors, is now a question mark. There are rumors Cohen might flip, and cooperate with the Mueller investigation. So Fox news, Trump's news organization mouthpiece, is now questioning Cohen's credibility. No longer seen as taking a bullet for Trump and his family, Cohen is now viewed as a slime-ball who is willing to turn on Trump. But Trump is a great man, and he will still hold out his arms to Cohen in love and friendship, and maybe even with a pardon if Cohen can find the strength to stay true to Trump. Only time will tell, what Michael Cohen reveals. --------------- --------------- Fox News Suddenly Questions Michael Cohen’s ‘Credibility’ He was once a welcome and trusted Trump surrogate for Fox News, but now the network’s hosts are seemingly starting to turn on Michael Cohen after his ABC interview. Matt Wilstein 07.02.18 2:10 PM ET Apparently all Michael Cohen had to do to lose Fox News was sit down with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Following an off-camera interview in which Cohen pledged his loyalty not to President Trump but to his family and his country, the hosts of Fox’s Outnumbered came down hard on the full-time fixer and sometime lawyer, openly questioning his “credibility” ahead of his potential cooperation with two separate investigations into the president. Delivering a major understatement, Harris Faulkner noted that Cohen “seems to be creating some daylight” between himself and Trump, for whom he once suggested he would “take a bullet.” Going against the president, Cohen told Stephanopoulos that he doesn’t think Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is a “witch hunt” and said that he trust the intelligence community’s “unanimous conclusions” about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. “If he knows something that is so important and yet he’s willing to sort of taunt the president by seeming to go against him, what does that say about this person as a witness?” Faulkner wondered aloud. “It gets difficult to kind of even see him as credible at this point. I don’t know what he knows, just based on the way he’s acting.” Later, she added, “The one thing we know about Michael Cohen is that he’ll throw anybody under the bus.” Faulkner pointed to the moment in court when Cohen gave up Fox News’ own Sean Hannity as his mystery “third client.” Beyond simply giving Fox News’ biggest star legal advice, Cohen was a frequent guest on the network for years. Before he hinted that he might flip on the president, he was a welcome and trusted Trump surrogate on Fox. “And if you’re willing to give an interview, if you’re willing to speak out publicly like he’s now done and go against the president,” co-host Abby Huntsman concurred, “I think we should all take that as a signal that he is in a dire situation, grasping for air, wanting any help he can get.” When Juan Williams noted that the one area Cohen refused to discuss was the hush payments to Stormy Daniels, Faulkner added, “That’s why I question his credibility, because what are his motives?” Matt Wilstein @mattwilstein matt.wilstein@thedailybeast.com | |
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| 07-04-18 01:48am - 2321 days | #878 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
But don't worry, fans of Donald Trump. If he can pack a few more Neo-Nazi conservatives on the Supreme Court, it won't matter what the Mueller probe finds. Because, not only can Trump pardon himself, but the Supreme Court, with a clear conservative majority, will ratify Trump's innocence of any charges of wrong-doing, and affirm his place as President for Life of the United States of Trumpland. Hail Donald Trump, the Neo-Nazi leader of the Great, White America of millionaires and billionaires. | |
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| 07-04-18 03:09am - 2321 days | #879 | |
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biker (0)
Active User Posts: 632 Registered: May 03, '08 Location: milwaukee, wi |
What I have come to accept is the other nations of the world are going to be careful about any future negotiations with us. We may remove Trump from office by impeachment or just voting him out in the next election, but even if the next president tries to repair the damage with of relations with other nations, these nations now know we can just as easily elect another swindler and all the agreements and treaties will be flushed down the toilet again. If you were Iran, would you ever trust the United States again? I don't think I would. Our reputation is ruined. Warning Will Robinson | |
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| 07-04-18 07:21am - 2321 days | #880 | |
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Drooler (0)
Disabled User Posts: 1,831 Registered: Mar 11, '07 Location: USA |
In front of Mike Pence: A bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's pancake syrup Playing in the background: "It's Only Make-Believe" by Conway Twitty Reference I wanted something new, so I left England for New England. | |
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| 07-04-18 07:59am - 2321 days | #881 | |
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pat362 (0)
Active User  Posts: 3,575 Registered: Jan 23, '07 Location: canada |
Being a member of one of those other Nations then I can assure you that our elected officials will no longer be in a position to trust any future President when he says or does something because those words are at best only good for four years and it's the same thing for treaties that were signed decades before. I've always known that a percentage of Americans are not that knowledgeable when it comes to the other Countries but if nothing else as come from the Trump Presidency. It is that they also really don't care when the President, his administration and his entire party take a giant shit on the head of those Countries. In fact it appears that quite many of them don't have a problem when he does the same thing to them. Long live the Brown Coats. | |
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| 07-04-18 08:12am - 2320 days | #882 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The Chinese government is rounding up Muslims and throwing them in camps Things are going from bad to potentially far worse in China's western region of Xinjiang. Casey Michel Jul 3, 2018, 5:58 pm In China’s remote western province of Xinjiang, the Chinese government has begun constructing a series of internment camps larger than anything the world currently knows. Meant to house upwards of a million — and potentially more — of the region’s indigenous Muslim minority, known as Uyghurs, the camps, according to one U.S. commission studying the region, present the “largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.” And they’re only just beginning. Technically called “Concentrated Education Transformation Centers” — with one even named, in a manner that would make George Orwell blush, as “the Loving Kindness School” — the camps span Xinjiang, a region known to Uyghurs as East Turkestan. Unsurprisingly, Chinese authorities have revealed little information about the camps: how many people are being detained, what crimes they supposedly committed, and when, if ever, these camps will be dismantled. Uighur (also Uyghur) ethnic minority worshipers take part in Friday noon prayers in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province in China in 2009. CREDIT: AP Photo/Elizabeth Dalziel China’s new policy tracking Muslims’ phones adds to rise in global Islamophobia The camps started appearing over the past few years, but details are scarce. Reporting on the region is tightly constricted, and Beijing has made a habit of arresting and disappearing the family members of American reporters who have attempted to cover the topic. “We heard at the beginning of this year that more than one million Uyghurs are currently in the camps,” Dolkun Isa, the president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress, told ThinkProgress. “But it’s already been six months, and we’ve never heard of anyone being released… [There] may be 1.5 million, maybe 2 million, in the camps. We don’t know.” “The world already promised ‘never again’ — but it’s happening again.” Given that there are approximately 8 million Uyghurs in the region, that would mean over 10 percent — and potentially as many as 25 percent — of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs are currently housed in these camps. These camps have rapidly formed the backbone of China’s broader “assimilation” effort: a set of policies aimed at banning Uyghurs’ religious education, language, and broader culture. Following a 2009 protest-turned-massacre in Xinjiang, China’s deadliest domestic event in decades, Beijing accelerated its policy of forced assimilation — actions ranging from banning the teaching of the Uyghur language to barring certain Islamic names, all while installing one of the most stifling security regimes this side of North Korea. Xinjiang, now under the thumb of party chief Chen Quanguo — who had previously stamped any dissent in Tibet — has become “a police state to rival North Korea, with a formalized racism on the order of South African apartheid,” Rian Thum, an associate history professor at Loyola University, recently wrote. One professor at Australian National University described Xinjiang, an area approximately half the size of India, as the testing ground for China’s looming “neo-totalitarian” model. And Adrien Zenz, a researcher with the European School of Culture and Theology, has estimated that the police density in Xinjiang has now likely surpassed what was seen in late East Germany. “What’s striking about this is that [Chinese authorities] manage to marry the kinds of methods which North Korea uses, which are based on a lot of manpower, a lot of ordinary people on the ground who are ready and willing to inform on you, and a bureaucratic architecture to process all that,” Thum told ThinkProgress. “And when you put those two things together, it leaves Uyghurs feeling that their only private place left is the inside of their head.” Concentrating in camps While little has trickled out about these camps — AP reporters writing on the camps were detained a few months ago by local police, accused of “not promot[ing] positive energy” — the few pieces of available information paint a stark, dystopic image. The prisoners are arbitrarily held, with no charge necessary and without any terms of release. The camps themselves are often ramshackle constructs, recently built to house those arrested. And as Thum told ThinkProgress, Chinese authorities are still putting out contracts to build new camps. Isa added that authorities have even begun retrofitting schools to hold incarcerated Uyghurs. The camps appear to be sparse. One account from a Uyghur student who had been studying in the U.S. — and who was imprisoned upon trying to return to Xinjiang — noted that his incarceration featured marching, chanting, and repeated viewing of “re-education” videos. Advertisement “I’m sure you may have had some ideological changes because of your unpleasant experience but remember: Whatever you say or do in North America, your family is still here, and so are we,” a member of a local neighborhood watch committee later told the student, who relayed his experience to Foreign Policy. “One prisoner said that at 6 or 7 A.M. you get up and sit down,” Isa told ThinkProgress. “You can’t move, you can’t run, you can’t talk. You have to sit and self-criticize yourself… At lunch time you have bit of space, but then after lunch you sit, and you self-criticize again. It is psychological torture.” Russia may grab the headlines, but China's campaign of censorship throughout the West is beyond compare. (CREDIT: AP/ANDY WONG) How China leads a campaign of censorship and intimidation throughout the West Fatalities, and worse While China hasn’t released any information internationally about its detention policies, Chinese authorities have had little compunction about imprisoning family members of those living abroad, and those who are critical of Beijing’s dictatorship. Not only have family members of American-based journalists languished in these camps, but Isa’s mother herself was detained over a year ago. And this week, Isa learned that his mother, Ayhan Memet, had died in one of the camps. She was 78 years old. “It is very, very difficult to get any information about what is going on in the camps,” Isa said. “But maybe I’m one of the lucky ones, because I got the news about my mother… So many people, so many Uyghurs who live in exile, they don’t know.” A report from Radio Free Asia last week noted that more than two dozen Uyghurs had already died in the camps. But those numbers come from just one county in Xinjiang. “Every single Uyghur abroad has relatives waiting for a slow death in these camps,” wrote Mehmet Tohti, a Toronto-based Uyghur human rights activist. Thus far, there has been negligible international outcry about the camps — although that may be symptomatic not simply of China’s economic clout, but also of just how little information has been revealed about the camps. Thankfully, though, things are starting to change. In April, U.S. officials threatened to implement sanctions against those responsible for Xinjiang’s security architecture. HBO’s John Oliver also highlighted Uyghurs’ plight in a recent episode of Last Week Tonight. While Washington debates potential sanctions for the swelling human rights disaster in Xinjiang, analysts and researchers have a more linguistic debate to deal with: just what to call these camps now metastasizing through the region. Beijing prefers the anodyne term “re-education camps,” but Thum referred to them as “internment camps,” noting that he’s also considering using the term “forced indoctrination camps” in the future. Noted Xinjiang scholar James Leibold condemned the camps last month as part of “China’s Muslim gulag,” presenting “one of the worst human rights abuses in recent times.” Isa, meanwhile, is fine with calling them something else entirely: “concentration camps,” a term Leibold has also used. But beyond what to call these facilities is the question of what comes next — and when, or if, we’ll know. “Even if it doesn’t get worse, it’s already one of the more frightening human rights abuses on the planet — but there are good reasons to worry about it getting worse,” Thum said. As another China scholar noted, the situation “smells of the pre-genocidal.” “The world already promised ‘never again’ — but it’s happening again,” Isa added. “Tomorrow may be too late. Maybe it’s already started. We just don’t know.” | |
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| 07-04-18 08:30am - 2320 days | #883 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Trump wants a war with Venezuela because he thinks the US can win. But what if Trump is wrong? Is it ethical to fire nuclear weapons at a country that does not have nuclear weapons? Of course it is. Might makes right. That is what US history has shown, time and again, with the native Indians and other savages we were forced to fight--including the rapist, scumbag Mexicans who slaughtered white US citizens at the Alamo. -------------------- -------------------- Trump pressed aides on Venezuela invasion, US official says Associated Press JOSHUA GOODMAN,Associated Press 1 hour 33 minutes ago FILE - In this May 22, 2018, file photo, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro holds up the National Electoral Council certificate declaring him the winner of the presidential election, during a ceremony at CNE headquarters in Caracas, Venezuela. As a meeting last August in the Oval Office to discuss sanctions on Venezuela was concluding, President Donald Trump turned to his top aides and asked an unsettling question: With a fast unraveling Venezuela threatening regional security, why can’t the U.S. just simply invade the troubled country? (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File) BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — As a meeting last August in the Oval Office to discuss sanctions on Venezuela was concluding, President Donald Trump turned to his top aides and asked an unsettling question: With a fast unraveling Venezuela threatening regional security, why can't the U.S. just simply invade the troubled country? The suggestion stunned those present at the meeting, including U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom have since left the administration. This account of the previously undisclosed conversation comes from a senior administration official familiar with what was said. In an exchange that lasted around five minutes, McMaster and others took turns explaining to Trump how military action could backfire and risk losing hard-won support among Latin American governments to punish President Nicolas Maduro for taking Venezuela down the path of dictatorship, according to the official. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussions. But Trump pushed back. Although he gave no indication he was about to order up military plans, he pointed to what he considered past cases of successful gunboat diplomacy in the region, according to the official, like the invasions of Panama and Grenada in the 1980s. The idea, despite his aides' best attempts to shoot it down, would nonetheless persist in the president's head. The next day, Aug. 11, Trump alarmed friends and foes alike with talk of a "military option" to remove Maduro from power. The public remarks were initially dismissed in U.S. policy circles as the sort of martial bluster people have come to expect from the reality TV star turned commander in chief. But shortly afterward, he raised the issue with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, according to the U.S. official. Two high-ranking Colombian officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing Trump confirmed the report. Then in September, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Trump discussed it again, this time at greater length, in a private dinner with leaders from four Latin American allies that included Santos, the same three people said and Politico reported in February. The U.S. official said Trump was specifically briefed not to raise the issue and told it wouldn't play well, but the first thing the president said at the dinner was, "My staff told me not to say this." Trump then went around asking each leader if they were sure they didn't want a military solution, according to the official, who added that each leader told Trump in clear terms they were sure. Eventually, McMaster would pull aside the president and walk him through the dangers of an invasion, the official said. Taken together, the behind-the-scenes talks, the extent and details of which have not been previously reported, highlight how Venezuela's political and economic crisis has received top attention under Trump in a way that was unimaginable in the Obama administration. But critics say it also underscores how his "America First" foreign policy at times can seem outright reckless, providing ammunition to America's adversaries. The White House declined to comment on the private conversations. But a National Security Council spokesman reiterated that the U.S. will consider all options at its disposal to help restore Venezuela's democracy and bring stability. Under Trump's leadership, the U.S., Canada and European Union have levied sanctions on dozens of top Venezuelan officials, including Maduro himself, over allegations of corruption, drug trafficking and human rights abuses. The U.S. has also distributed more than $30 million to help Venezuela's neighbors absorb an influx of more than 1 million migrants who have fled the country. For Maduro, who has long claimed that the U.S. has military designs on Venezuela and its vast oil reserves, Trump's bellicose talk provided the unpopular leader with an immediate if short-lived boost as he was trying to escape blame for widespread food shortages and hyperinflation. Within days of the president's talk of a military option, Maduro filled the streets of Caracas with loyalists to condemn "Emperor" Trump's belligerence, ordered up nationwide military exercises and threatened with arrest opponents he said were plotting his overthrow with the U.S. "Mind your own business and solve your own problems, Mr. Trump!" thundered Nicolas Maduro, the president's son, at the government-stacked constituent assembly. "If Venezuela were attacked, the rifles will arrive in New York, Mr. Trump," the younger Maduro said. "We will take the White House." Even some of the staunchest U.S. allies were begrudgingly forced to side with Maduro in condemning Trump's saber rattling. Santos, a big backer of U.S. attempts to isolate Maduro, said an invasion would have zero support in the region. The Mercosur trade bloc, which includes Brazil and Argentina, issued a statement saying "the only acceptable means of promoting democracy are dialogue and diplomacy" and repudiating "any option that implies the use of force." But among Venezuela's beleaguered opposition movement, hostility to the idea of a military intervention has slowly eased. A few weeks after Trump's public comments, Harvard economics professor Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan planning minister, wrote a syndicated column titled "D Day Venezuela," in which he called for a "coalition of the willing" made up of regional powers and the U.S. to step in and support militarily a government appointed by the opposition-led national assembly. Mark Feierstein, who oversaw Latin America on the National Security Council during the Obama administration, said that strident U.S. action on Venezuela, however commendable, won't loosen Maduro's grip on power if it's not accompanied by pressure from the streets. However, he thinks Venezuelans have largely been demoralized after a crackdown on protests last year triggered dozens of deaths, and the threat of more repression has forced dozens of opposition leaders into exile. "People inside and outside the administration know they can ignore plenty of what Trump says," Feierstein, who is now a senior adviser at the Albright Stonebridge Group, said of Trump's talk of military invasion of Venezuela. "The concern is that it raised expectations among Venezuelans, many of whom are waiting for an external actor to save them." ___ Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in Washington contributed to this report. | |
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| 07-04-18 08:46am - 2320 days | #884 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
The United States is based on flawed laws: President Trump is the leader of the greatest country on Earth. As such, his power is supreme: He has the right and duty to defend Democracy: He is the Supreme Leader of the Armed Forces of the United States. Therefore, he should have the Armed Forces round up all civilian protesters and have them shot. Let God sort out the innocent from the sinners. Seig Heil, mein Trump! ------------ ------------ Anti-abortion groups are mad that one of Trump’s Supreme Court finalists isn’t lawless enough The rule of law is for losers. Ian Millhiser Jul 4, 2018, 9:58 am Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a top contender for the Supreme Court, sided with the Trump administration in a case where the government literally tried to hold a woman prisoner to prevent her from having an abortion. But somehow, Kavanaugh’s opinion in this case branded him as insufficiently hostile to Roe v. Wade. Multiple outlets report that anti-abortion groups are “quietly lobbying senior White House officials against possible Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.” Much of the opposition stems from Kavanaugh’s opinion in Garza v. Hargan, the imprisoned pregnant woman case. When Garza reached Kavanaugh, his court was asked to decide the fate of a pregnant woman who was held in a facility for undocumented minors that enter the country without an adult guardian. The administration would not let the woman leave the facility to obtain an abortion. Nor would it release her to two family members who offered to take custody of her and become her “sponsor,” though it was unclear why these two potential sponsors were rejected. A majority of Kavanaugh’s court held that the woman must be allowed to have her abortion. As the Supreme Court held in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the government may not enforce a policy that has “the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.” Holding a woman prisoner to prevent her from having an abortion qualifies. Kavanaugh’s dissent did not try to argue that literally holding a woman in a locked facility to prevent her from reaching an abortion clinic does not place “a substantial obstacle in the path” of her receiving an abortion. Nor did he join a solo dissenting opinion by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, which claimed that undocumented immigrants rounded up at the border lack constitutional rights. Not even the Trump administration embraced Henderson’s position. Instead, Kavanaugh argued that the government could temporarily delay the woman’s access to an abortion while it searches for another sponsor who could take custody of her. The Trump administration, Kavanaugh argued, “has permissible interests in favoring fetal life, protecting the best interests of a minor, and refraining from facilitating abortion.” Admittedly, that’s a less maximalist position than simply proclaiming that Casey was wrong and that Kavanaugh’s court shouldn’t follow it. But there’s a reason why the Supreme Court is called the “Supreme” Court. Its decisions are supreme over the rest of the federal judiciary, and a lower court decision that openly flouted Casey would be lawless. | |
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| 07-04-18 05:13pm - 2320 days | #885 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: Trump has declared war on North Korea. He has his fingers on the box to send 1000s of nuclear missiles to North Korea, wiping out one of the most dangorous countries in the world. But loose lips sink ships. Do not repeat this, because if North Korea learns of Trump's firebombing, they will retaliate with nuclear missiles of their own. Hopefully, North Korea will attack South Korea, China, Japan, and other countries near them. So Americans can rest easy, because who cares what happens to South Korea, China, and Japan. Trump, leader of the free world. ------ ------ Trump brashly declares: 'If not for me, we would now be at War with North Korea!' Dylan StablefordSenior Editor Yahoo News•July 3, 2018 President Trump on Tuesday brushed aside questions over whether his assertion that he “solved” the crisis with North Korea was premature amid reports its leader, Kim Jong Un, is trying to conceal parts of its nuclear weapons program. “Many good conversations with North Korea — it is going well!” Trump tweeted. “In the meantime, no Rocket Launches or Nuclear Testing in 8 months. All of Asia is thrilled. Only the Opposition Party, which includes the Fake News, is complaining.” “If not for me,” he added, “we would now be at War with North Korea!” Trump’s brash declaration comes two days before Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is set to travel to North Korea to meet with Kim — his third trip to the rogue nuclear nation. President Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12, 2018. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Last week, NBC News reported that U.S. officials “believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months — and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration.” On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency “has concluded that North Korean officials are exploring ways to deceive Washington about the number of nuclear warheads and missiles, and the types and numbers of facilities they have, believing that the United States is not aware of the full range of their activities.” And on Sunday, Wall Street Journal reported that “new satellite imagery indicates Pyongyang is pushing ahead with weapons programs even as it pursues dialogue with Washington.” A North Korean missile production facility in the city of Hamhung is seen from a satellite image taken on June 29, 2018. (Photo: Planet Labs Inc/Handout via Reuters) Yet for weeks, Trump has been trying to check North Korea’s denuclearization off of his to-do list. Returning from his historic summit with Kim in Singapore, Trump declared via tweet, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” At their summit, Trump and Kim signed an agreement that stated North Korea would “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.” But the document did not specify exactly what that would entail. Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn two days later, Trump again said the nuclear threat is gone. “I have solved that problem,” he said. President Trump speaks to reporters on the North Lawn of the White House on June 15, 2018. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP) Appearing on CBS’ “Face The Nation” Sunday, National Security Adviser John Bolton seemed to distance himself from Trump’s “mission accomplished” talk. “We’re very well aware of North Korea’s pattern of behavior over decades of negotiating with the United States,” Bolton said. “We know exactly what the risks are of them using negotiations to drag out the length of time they have to continue their nuclear, chemical, biological weapons programs and ballistic missiles.” Bolton said the U.S. hopes to get North Korea to dismantle the bulk of its ballistic programs “within a year.” He added: “There’s not any starry-eyed feeling among the group doing this … we’re well, well, well aware of what the North Koreans have done in the past.” North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the launch of a Hwasong-12 missile in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Sept. 16, 2017. (Photo: KCNA via Reuters) At the White House Monday, press secretary Sarah Sanders said she would not “confirm or deny any of the intelligence reporting that’s out there.” But she also suggested North Korea had yet to commit to denuclearization. “If North Korea makes the decision to denuclearize, their ballistics programs could be dismantled in a year,” Sanders said. “We’re continuing to make progress,” Sanders said. “There’s great momentum right now.” President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un leave after signing documents at their summit in Singapore on June 12, 2018. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters) | |
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| 07-05-18 02:39am - 2320 days | #886 | |
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biker (0)
Active User Posts: 632 Registered: May 03, '08 Location: milwaukee, wi |
Hello Pat; It looks like North Korea took a shit on Trump. He is such a good negotiator./SARC I'm feeling better about the progressive candidates that are put forward. They are not just being critical of Trump, but actually have a platform. The Dems need to get the people know what they are going to get if they vote for them. Just running against Trump's shitty policies is not enough. We need people with backbone in office. Fortunately the Repubs are not showing any backbone when it come to Trump. They are just, "Yes sir"  , when he babbles his nonsense. Warning Will Robinson | |
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| 07-05-18 06:02pm - 2319 days | #887 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Tremendous news: Scott Pruitt has resigned. Will President Trump issue a pardon to Pruitt clearing Pruitt of any federal crimes Pruitt may have committed while in office? Because there are dozens of investigations into Pruitt's conduct while in office. ------------- ------------- Friday, Jul 6th 2018 12AM Disgraced Scott Pruitt FINALLY quits after months of scandals but tells Trump in bizarre letter: 'You are serving as president today because of God's providence' EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is finally resigning after a landslide of scandals and a dozen investigations President Trump tweeted the news saying Pruitt has 'done an outstanding job' Pruitt asked an aide to get his wife a job at the Republican Attorneys General Association that paid over six figures He was at the White House for Fourth of July celebrations Wednesday Democrats probing staff claims he falsified schedules Stayed at condo of lobbyists wife for $50 per night Demanded First Class flights and VIP treatment Asked aide to try to get a used Trump hotel mattress for his Washington home Pushed to get his wife a Chick-fil-A franchise Bulletproof desk and sound-proof room Meeting with cardinal charged with sexual assault kept off schedule Told top aide he spoke to Trump about potentially replacing AG Jeff Sessions Heckled at restaurant by mother holding her child Aides told congressional staff they warned Pruitt about his first-class travel Aides also said Pruitt asked them to review his personal condo rental agreement Another aide charges Pruitt asked staff to put his hotels on their credit cards Pruitt is under at least 13 federal investigations into his tenure at EPA Among the claims he was already facing are lavish travel and security spending and sending his security detail to a hotel to get his favorite moisturizer Used his post to try to roll back environmental regulations By Geoff Earle, Deputy U.s. Political Editor and Emily Goodin, U.s. Political Reporter and Francesca Chambers, White House Correspondent For Dailymail.com Published: 15:58 EDT, 5 July 2018 | Updated: 18:49 EDT, 5 July 2018 Embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt finally resigned on Thursday after an onslaught of scandals that led to more than a dozen investigations of his use of staff, VIP travel, and efforts to gain perks and boost his household income. But in an unexpected culmination to a one of the most remarkable accumulations of scandal in Washington lore, the disgraced cabinet official attributed his joining the Trump administration to divine providence. 'I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service,' Pruitt wrote Trump in his resignation letter as he faced more than a dozen investigations. In just one of a litany of scandals that swirled around Pruitt, aides say Pruitt asked them to help his wife find a job that would net her a salary that topped $200,000. But that report was just the latest in a string of reports of efforts to score tickets to top tier events, enjoy cut-rate lodging, fly first-class, meet lobbyists without a public record, blow through Washington D.C. traffic – and maybe even become the next attorney general with authority over the Russia probe. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt asked aides to help his wife Marilyn find a job that would net her a salary that topped $200,000. She was at his side when he was sworn in by Supreme Court Samuel Alito +6 EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt asked aides to help his wife Marilyn find a job that would net her a salary that topped $200,000. She was at his side when he was sworn in by Supreme Court Samuel Alito President Trump announced the long-expected news on Twitter. He hailed he top official who had caused a flood of humiliating headlines even as he praised Pruitt's 'outstanding' tenure. He told reporters riding with him on Air Force One on a flight to Montana that it was Pruitt's decision to resign and that it had been in the works for several days. 'It was very much up to him,' Trump said. 'Scott Pruitt did an outstanding job inside of the EPA. We’ve gotten rid of record breaking regulations and it’s been really good,' the president stated. 'You know, obviously the controversies with Scott, but within the agency we were extremely happy.' Congressional Democrats were probing staff claims he ordered them to falsify his official schedules to shield meetings with industry bigs. Pruitt's former chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski – who came to EPA from the Trump campaign – told CNN Pruitt held meetings to 'scrub, alter or remove from Pruitt's official calendar numerous records because they might "look bad."' He said close aides kept three different schedules – and one of them containing potentially revealing information was kept secret. He was already facing a dozen-plus scandals at the time. 'I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency,' President Trump tweeted on Thursday. 'Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this. The Senate confirmed Deputy at EPA, Andrew Wheeler, will on Monday assume duties as the acting Administrator of the EPA,' Trump wrote. 'I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda. We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!' the president concluded. Pruitt was at the White House for the Fourth of July celebration yesterday, in just the latest instance of him being held closely. President Trump tweeted that he has 'accepted the resignation' of Pruitt Trump said Pruitt had done an 'outstanding job' at EPA The party invite was a sign of Pruitt's proximity to Trump, who made not of his attendance in his Independence Day remarks, despite the obvious political cost of keeping a scandal-tarred administrator of a cabinet agency. Others departed following revelations of private jet use alone. Minutes after Trump confirmed Pruitt's departure from his Cabinet on Thursday, House Oversight Committee Democrats dropped a transcript with the exact language used by his longtime aide, Samantha Dravis, to describe a 2018 effort by Pruitt to become the nation's top law-enforcement officer. The transcript, which came in the form of a letter to the EPA's inspector general, also contained damning testimony from Pruitt aides on a host of other topics that agency's IG is said to have been probing. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee's top Democrat, wrote in an accompanying statement,'Scott Pruitt’s petty grifting and pervasive corruption are known far and wide, but it will take generations to fully reverse the widespread harm he inflicted on our air, our water, and the health of our people. 'President Trump’s decision to keep Pruitt on far too long—and to lavish praise on him even today for ‘an outstanding job’—is the opposite of draining the swamp,' he argued. 'It is a prime example of how the Trump Administration is zealously promoting the interests of oil companies, gas companies, and other industries at the expense of American families.' Trump continued to claim that Pruitt is a 'terrific guy' in a conversation with reporters on his presidential plane on Thursday. He said that Pruitt voluntarily left the administration. Democrats revealed on Thursday that Pruitt attempted to become attorney general before throwing in the towel at the EPA. While he may have simply wanted a promotion to the Justice Department in spite the onslaught of headaches he caused the administration, he was also likely cognizant of the Vacancies Act, which allows a Senate-confirmed official to run a cabinet department for a prolonged period should a vacancy occur. 'He had had conversations with me about media speculation around the possibility that he could become the next Attorney General,' Dravis testified. 'It’s my sense that that’s a position that he would be very interested in,' she told the committee. It is something Pruitt told her he spoke to the president about. 'He hinted at that some sort of conversation had taken place between he and the President. But he did not provide me with specifics. I was not present for the conversation. I don’t know what, if anything, was discussed,' she said. | |
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| 07-05-18 06:03pm - 2319 days | #888 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
In the letter released on Thursday minutes after Pruitt’s resignation, Democrats on the House Oversight committee included a partial transcript of testimony from Millian Hupp, the EPA administrator’s former director of advance scheduling, as well. She revealed that the agency knew about ‘issues’ involving Cardinal George Pell prior to a dinner in Rome with the Vatican official. Pell was charged by Italian police with sexual assault after the trip, and the dinner was scrubbed from Pruitt’s public schedule. Hupp hinted that an aide to Pruitt mentioned the allegations prior to the dinner, although she claimed not to remember what the concerns were that the aide brought forward to her privately and could not say if he told anyone else. She said it was Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, who ordered all references to the cardinal to be removed from the schedule after the fact. She said she could not recall whether Jackson provided a reason for the edit. Jackson in testimony says the dinner that he also attended was left off Pruitt’s public schedule because it was a ‘personal’ and not an ‘official function’ and that no one brought concerns about Pell to him prior to the trip. ‘There was no EPA business there. It was just a gathering of people,’ Jackson said. Pruitt’s chief of staff also admitted in his testimony that other ‘personal’ meetings would have been left off, too, including ones that may have included lobbyists. Dravis told investigators that she only recalls scheduling one lunch with a lobbyist for Pruitt that was deemed personal, though. The lunch was with Rick Smotkin, a former Comcast lobbyist who controversially set up a junket in Morocco for Pruitt that he accompanied him on in December. Smotkin won a lobbying contract from the Moroccan government in April that was retroactive to January 1. He registered after the fact as foreign agent in order to represent the African government. At a cost of $100,000 to the U.S. taxpayer, the trip garnered the attention of the EPA’s inspector general and prompted another investigation. The EPA said that trip was pursuant to an effort to lock in a trade deal with Morocco and the administrator was not aware that Smotkin had such close ties to the foreign government. For months, negative stories about Pruitt like the Morroco junket, the dinner with the cardinal and jobs the EPA administration tried to obtain for his wife were fed to reporters. And yet, the president kept him on, commenting to press in early June, 'Scott Pruitt is doing a great job within the walls of the EPA. 'I mean, we're setting records.' He remarked that Pruitt is 'being attacked very viciously by the press' outside of what he's doing for the EPA. 'I'm not saying that he's blameless, but we'll see what happens,' Trump said, hinting then that his patience with the official would not be endless. Pruitt vented about the personal 'attacks' on him in his resignation letter: 'It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring. However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us,' he wrote. Pruitt added: 'I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service. I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people,' he added. Dravis, the Environmental Protection Agency's former associate administrator for the Office of Policy, spoke to Republican and Democratic aides on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for several hours on Thursday where she made the allegation about the efforts to land a six-figure job for Pruitt's wife,The Washington Post reported. Dravis told the staffers that Pruitt asked her to contact the Republican Attorneys General Association — a group Pruitt had once led and Dravis had worked for before coming to the EPA — as part of the job search for his wife, Marilyn. Samantha Dravis, a former EPA aide, told investigators Scott Pruitt wanted her help finding his wife a job that paid over $200,000 +6 Samantha Dravis, a former EPA aide, told investigators Scott Pruitt wanted her help finding his wife a job that paid over $200,000 Pruitt served as attorney general of Oklahoma before President Donald Trump appointed him to the EPA. Dravis said she declined to make the call to avoid any potential conflicts of interest or possible violations of the Hatch Act, which limits federal officials' political activities. She also told congressional investigators Pruitt wanted his spouse to find a post with an annual salary of more than $200,000, one individual told The Post. Scott Pruitt's faith-filled resignation letter Mr. President, it has been an honor to serve you in the Cabinet as Administrator of the EPA. Truly, your confidence in me has blessed me personally and enabled me to advance your agenda beyond what anyone anticipated at the beginning of your Administration. Your courage, steadfastness and resolute commitment to get results for the American people, both with regard to improved environmental outcomes as well as historical regulatory reform, is in fact occurring at an unprecedented pace and I thank you for the opportunity to serve you and the American people in helping achieve those ends. That is why is hard for me to advise you I am stepping down as Administrator of the EPA effective as of July 6. It is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role first because I count it a blessing to be serving you in any capacity, but also, because of the transformative work that is occurring. However, the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us. My desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people. I believe you are serving as President today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service. I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people. Thank you again Mr. President for the honor of serving you and I wish you Godspeed in all that you put your hand to. Your Faithful Friend, Scott Pruitt Working with GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who is now heading up Pruitt's legal defense fund, Dravis did help find Marlyn Pruitt a job at the Judicial Crisis Network. The conservative group said it paid Marlyn Pruitt less than six figures to work as an independent contractor setting up their new offices. The arrangement ended earlier this year, the group told The Post. When Dravis raised the prospect of discussing the job search with an official in EPA's ethics office, Pruitt told her to consult with Mitchell instead, she told congressional staff last week. The ongoing investigation into Pruitt's tenure at the environmental agency has revealed repeated incidents of questionable behavior regarding his use of staff and government resources. The latest testimony from former aides shows an agency chief who tried to find his wife a well-paying gig, ignored aides objections to his first-class travel and used aides - who are paid with taxpayer dollars - for personal business. Pruitt also asked his staff to review his personal rental agreement regarding a condo in Washington D.C. Dravis said Pruitt asked her and another former top aide, Sarah Greenwalt, to review a rental agreement that he had decided to break. | |
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| 07-05-18 06:04pm - 2319 days | #889 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
SCOTT PRUITT'S SCANDALS IN BRIEF Ex-Oklahoma attorney-general Scott Pruitt had never lived in Washington D.C. until he became EPA Administrator last year. But his scandals now include how he: Paid just $50 a night to stay in a condo owned by an energy lobbyist's wife but only when he was in town (and called it 'market rent'  ;Had his door battered down by Capitol Hill Police because he wasn't responding and claimed he was 'napping' - on a weekday afternoon; Allegedly demanded flashing lights and sirens to get through traffic because he was late for dinner; Also allegedly demanded a bulletproof SUV with run-flat tires - and a bulletproof desk; Got a desk 'bigger than the Resolute' and a soundproof phone booth to stop officials hearing his calls; Had his security chief reassigned, allegedly for questioning his demands; Allegedly had other officials moved or reassigned for questioning his spending; Claimed to know nothing about pay raises given to two key aides he brought with him from Oklahoma; when the White House turned them down, officials found a loophole; Booked private jet flights and got authorization afterwards when it was too late to turn them down; Used flights through hubs so he could then get home to Oklahoma more cheaply from there; Got first class flights, with officials claiming he had 'threats' and needed to be kept from ordinary passengers - but only concrete example was someone shouting 'you're f***ing up the environment' in Atlanta Airport; Officials looked into getting him $100,000 a month private jet from NetJets; His spokesman falsely claimed he had a 'blanket waiver' to fly in first; Missed a flight en route to Morocco and spent a day and a night in Paris instead; Took his round the clock security detail on his vacation to the Greek islands and Turkey; When he was questioned about his $50-a-night deal by Fox News said it was 'unfair to ask.' Used an aide to help him shop for a used luxury mattress at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. Used 24/7 security detail to pick up dry cleaning and help him shop for lotion Had aides keep 'bad' information off his official schedule Asked a top aide to help get his wife a $200,000 job Sought to use contacts to get his wife a Chick-fil-A franchise Asked an aide to get him a used mattress at a Trump hotel in Washington Spoke to Trump about becoming attorney general in midst of Russia probe Pruitt and his wife lived briefly last year in Washington's U Street corridor before relocating to a new place — a move that forced them to pay a penalty. The EPA chief asked the two advisers, both of whom are lawyers, to examine the lease to see if there was a way to avoid the penalty, Dravis told committee staffers. Pruitt's chief of staff Ryan Jackson spoke to congressional investigators on Friday and confirmed he had helped connect Pruitt with fellow Oklahoman, lobbyist J. Steven Hart, to reach a housing deal in early 2017. The initial arrangement — under which Pruitt agreed to pay $50 a night only on the days when he stayed in the condo owned by Hart's wife, Vicki — was supposed to last six weeks, Jackson said. A spokesman for the Harts told the newspaper that Pruitt was initially supposed to stay in the Capitol Hill condo for 39 days. He lived there for six months, and the matter is now under review by lawmakers and the EPA's inspector general. Jackson said he, along with Dravis, also had raised concerns about Pruitt's decision to routinely travel first class. Pruitt, who has repeatedly said that agency security experts made the decision to switch him to first-class travel, returned to traveling coach earlier this year. Additionally, a current and former EPA official told the Post, Pruitt routinely asked his assistants — including then-executive scheduler Sydney Hupp — to put hotel reservations on their personal credit cards rather than his own. In one instance, according to former deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski, Hupp was stuck with a bill of roughly $600 for a booking she had made for the Pruitt family during the presidential transition process. Chmielewski said he was in Jackson's office when Hupp approached Pruitt's chief of staff to explain that the period for transition reimbursements had expired and that Pruitt had not covered the bill. Jackson ended up leaving $600 in cash in Hupp's drawer, according to Chmielewski. Agency spokesman John Konkus declined to comment to the Post on the latest testimony and allegations. 'EPA has not spoken with Mr. Jackson or Ms. Dravis about their testimony,' he said. Pruitt also kept a 'secret' calendar to hide controversial meetings or calls with industry representatives and others, a former EPA aide will soon testify. EPA staffers met routinely met in Pruitt's office to 'scrub,' alter or remove records from Pruitt's official calendar because they might 'look bad,' Chmielewski, who attended the meetings, told CNN. A review of EPA documents by CNN found discrepancies between Pruitt's official calendar and other records with more than two dozen meetings, events or calls being omitted from Pruitt's public calendar. Former EPA deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski said Scott Pruitt kept a secret calendars for meetings that might look bad +6 Former EPA deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski said Scott Pruitt kept a secret calendars for meetings that might look bad For example, Pruitt's public EPA schedule shows that his final meeting for the day of April 26, 2017, was with Australia's environmental minister, but an internal calendar shows that later the same day he attended a dinner at the BLT Prime restaurant inside Trump International Hotel hosted by coal producer Alliance Resource Partners and its CEO, Joseph Craft. Craft, who donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration and has given millions more to mostly Republican candidates and committees, has advocated for the rollback of former President Barack Obama's coal-industry regulations. Chmielewski said that some interactions were intentionally removed after they occurred, such as meetings in June 2017 between Pruitt and Cardinal George Pell, who was charged weeks later with multiple historical charges of sexual offenses. Pell has pleaded not guilty. 'We would have meetings what we were going to take off on the official schedule. We had at one point three different schedules. One of them was one that no one else saw except three or four of us,' Chmielewski told CNN. 'It was a secret ... and they would decide what to nix from the public calendar.' Chmielewski claims he was forced to leave the EPA in February after raising questions about Pruitt's management and spending practices. If the allegations about the secret calendar are true, the practice of altering or deleting records of meetings could violate federal law as either 'falsifying records' or hiding public records, according to legal experts interviewed by CNN. 'If somebody changed, deleted, scrubbed a federal record with the intent of deceiving the public or intent of deceiving anybody, it could very well be a violation of federal law,' Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission, told the network. Chmielewski said Pruitt's aides would print sections of the private calendar, gather around a table, and decide what would be omitted or altered. He said this often occurred under Pruitt's direction. Pruitt was approached at a D.C. restaurant Monday night by a young mother who urged him to resign +6 Pruitt was approached at a D.C. restaurant Monday night by a young mother who urged him to resign CNN said it reached out to EPA for comment. The controversy over his tenure has made the EPA chief a recognizable public figure. Pruitt was dining with a friend at Teaism restaurant in Washington D.C. on Monday, when he was confronted by local teacher who urged him to resign over the reported irreparable damage he is causing to the environment. Walking over with her two-year-old son in her arms, Kristin Mink told Pruitt: 'This is my son, he loves animals, he loves clean air, he loves clean water.' Pruitt faces at least 13 federal investigations into his spending and management practices regarding his tenure at the EPA. At least two of those are aimed at the circumstances surrounding his $50-a-night lease at a Capitol Hill condo owned by a person with ties to the energy industry. The agency chief is also under fire for directing an EPA aide to contact a senior Chick-fil-A executive as part of an effort to land his family a franchise, and a $2,000 payment to his wife from organizers of a conference the administrator then attended at taxpayer expense. He's also been criticized for using a staff for his personal activities, such ask asking an aide to help him buy a used mattress from the Trump hotel in Washington , and asking his security detail to pick up his dry cleaning and help find his favorite moisturizing lotion at Washington-area hotels. Trump has steadfastly defended Pruitt's job performance, but has recently become critical of the baggage his behavior has heaped onto the administration. 'Scott has done a fantastic job at EPA,' Trump told reporters last Friday, 'but, you know ... I'm not happy about certain things, I'll be honest.' 'He's done a fantastic job running the EPA,' the president reiterated, 'which is very overriding.' | |
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| 07-05-18 07:00pm - 2319 days | #890 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Politics Scott Pruitt’s Replacement Is Even Worse HuffPost Alexander C. Kaufman,HuffPost 2 hours 26 minutes ago Andrew Wheeler at his Senate confirmation hearing for the Environmental Protection Agency deputy administrator position in November. (Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works) Just one year ago, Andrew Wheeler worked as one of the coal industry’s most powerful lobbyists, serving as coal baron Bob Murray’s Capitol Hill muscle, challenging environmental regulations and casting doubt on the science behind climate change. On Monday, Wheeler will take over at the Environmental Protection Agency, after Administrator Scott Pruitt’s sudden resignation Thursday amid a five-month avalanche of ethics and legal controversies. Wheeler’s ascension, while expected to return stability to the scandal-struck EPA, demonstrates how the administration secured the future of its radical plan to dismantle the nation’s leading public health agency at the behest of the industries it regulates, amid the distractions of Pruitt’s humiliating final months as the agency’s second-shortest-serving administrator in history. “He will be potentially considerably more effective, both because you don’t have the daily drama that you’ve had for the last several months and because Andy knows how the system works,” said Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy EPA administrator who spent 39 years at the agency. “He could be more effective for the administration in achieving its policy objectives.” Pruitt left behind a considerable legacy of halting critical regulations, reshaping the EPA’s science advisory boards and provoking an exodus of talent from the agency that could take decades to reverse. Yet roughly one-third of the regulatory rollbacks Pruitt attempted were halted by legal challenges ― setbacks widely attributed to his brash style and overeagerness to antagonize environmentalists. Still, he proposed some of the most drastic changes to the agency in his final months. In April he proposed gutting auto emissions standards, which would essentially eliminate the only remaining major federal rule to curb greenhouse gases. Weeks later, he put forward a “transparency” rule that would dramatically limit the public health studies the EPA may use when writing regulations. By June, Pruitt kicked the effort up a notch, issuing a formal notice to solicit ideas on how the agency performs regulatory cost-benefit analyses, in a move widely seen as a giveaway to industry polluters, and proposed a regulation to replace a landmark Obama-era rule protecting drinking water for 117 million Americans. By taking these steps as formal rulemaking changes rather than executive actions, the processes will continue in his absence, likely with far less of the scrutiny that his notoriety invited. The EPA did not respond to requests for comment and an interview with Wheeler. “We have full confidence in acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler to carry President Trump’s important EPA reform agenda forward,” said Myron Ebell, a veteran climate change denier who led Trump’s EPA transition team. Two right-wing operatives who run separate climate denial blogs shared the same reaction to Wheeler’s promotion: “Winning.” Now former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt at the White House during a Fourth of July picnic for military families. His dismantling of environmental regulations will continue in his absence, likely with far less of the scrutiny that his notoriety invited. (Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images) Wheeler’s nomination to be the EPA’s deputy administrator came with little fanfare last October, announced just days after a gunman mowed down 58 concertgoers in Las Vegas, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. In November at his confirmation hearing before the Senate committee on environment and public works, he repeatedly dodged questions about climate change and critical environmental policies, couching his responses in fluent legalese and touting his four-year record serving as an agency staffer under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Wheeler skated by on his poise and familiar Beltway rhetoric as Kathleen Hartnett-White, the president’s pick to lead the Council on Environmental Quality, flamed out next to him, stammering over questions of basic science. The committee advanced his nomination to the full Senate for confirmation, but the vote didn’t take place before the end of the legislative session, and his nomination was returned to the Senate panel. In February, just before the committee voted again, The Intercept published a report detailing fundraisers that Wheeler held for Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.), his former boss, in May. The Sierra Club called on the Senate panel to delay the vote and open an investigation. But that didn’t deter Republicans, who held the vote on schedule, even as many federal employees in Washington delayed morning activities by two hours because of snow. Democrats put up little opposition, though the nomination advanced without a single one of their votes. The same month, the White House withdrew Hartnett-White’s nomination as Republican support waned amid a tireless campaign by Democrats and environmentalists to paint her as unhinged, highlighting past statements from her crediting coal with abolishing slavery and suggesting increased carbon dioxide emissions were good for the planet. | |
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| 07-05-18 07:01pm - 2319 days | #891 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Wheeler, meanwhile, plodded along quietly. Later that month, a state air pollution regulator accused Wheeler of “bullying” and “intimidating” the regulator’s nonpartisan organization in 2005, when Wheeler served as a top aide to Inhofe and counsel to the Senate environment and public works committee. The regulator said Wheeler demanded tax records as part of a “witch hunt” to punish his organization for opposing a bill Inhofe proposed that would have enshrined climate change denialism into air pollution law. In April, as Pruitt’s scandals began to mount, Democrats asked for more time to question Wheeler, since, as Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) put it, a full-chamber vote on his nomination would be “a shadow confirmation vote for the next administrator of the EPA.” Yet the Senate confirmed his nomination with more support than Pruitt received in February 2017, with the votes of three Democrats ― Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Joe Donnelly (Ind.) ― and of Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), the only Republican who had opposed Pruitt. This is like rearranging deck chairs on the environmental Titanic. Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch “There are going to be a number of senators with big regrets when all is said and done that they gave only lip-service opposition to Andrew Wheeler,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of the environmental group Clean Air Watch. “This is like rearranging deck chairs on the environmental Titanic.” Last year, Wheeler served as a lobbyist for Energy Fuels Resources, a uranium mining company with operations just outside Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. Last July, Wheeler and a top executive from the firm met with top Interior Department officials to discuss Bears Ears the same week Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke recommended that President Donald Trump dramatically shrink the monument, according to agency calendars. Pruitt’s flashy efforts to bolster the coal industry came after repeated meetings with Murray, the outspoken mining magnate who runs Murray Energy. Wheeler, by contrast, worked for him until mid-2017, helping deliver the Trump administration a so-called action plan that included a federal bailout of coal-fired plants, the repeal of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan and a challenge to the 2009 EPA endangerment finding that determined carbon dioxide pollution poses a risk to public health. The White House announced its plan to use an obscure Cold War–era law to prop up coal and nuclear plants in June. The EPA began the process of rolling back the Clean Power Plan in October and is now workshopping a draft of a rule to replace it with a dramatically weaker alternative — proof of the lasting power of the endangerment finding, which compels the agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions in some form. That could change under Wheeler. In March 2010, he accused the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of blurring “the lines between science and advocacy” and functioning “more as a political body than a scientific body,” suggesting the EPA could “reconsider its endangerment finding without almost exclusively relying upon the IPCC.” The remarks, previously posted to his former lobbying firm’s website, appear to have been deleted. Robert Murray, chief executive of Murray Energy Corp., employed Wheeler as a lobbyist until 2017. (Joshua Roberts / Reuters) At Wheeler’s November confirmation hearing, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate environment and public works committee, said Wheeler assured him privately that he “views EPA’s legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which is based on the endangerment finding, as settled law.” But Wheeler evaded questions about his belief in the overwhelming scientific consensus that the planet is warming primarily because of emissions from burning fossil fuels, industrial farming and deforestation. He deployed the same sort of ambiguous rhetoric used by much of the Trump administration, many other Republicans and Charles and David Koch. “I believe that man has an impact on the climate, but what’s not completely understood is what the impact is,” Wheeler said at his confirmation hearing when aggressively questioned about the findings of the federal government’s latest climate report. And things change quickly. Just a week ago, he abruptly gave a series interviews to a handful of mainstream and conservative-leaning news outlets. He repeatedly made the point that he had no plans to take Pruitt’s job. “No one feels great about [Wheeler], but no one thinks he will be as corrupt or disrespectful as Pruitt,” said an EPA staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. The staffer said Wheeler “doesn’t seem the leader type” and described him as “really awkward.” “He seems to hate the spotlight,” the staffer said. In a short email to EPA staff, Wheeler thanked Pruitt for “his service and leadership” and struck a conciliatory tone. “I am both humbled and honored to take on this new responsibility at the same agency where I started my career over 25 years ago,” he wrote in the email, which HuffPost obtained. “I look forward to working alongside all of you to continue our collective goal of protecting public health and the environment on behalf of the American people.” Wheeler would need to be confirmed in another Senate vote to become the permanent administrator, according to Bob Perciasepe, a former deputy EPA administrator who served for five months as acting administrator in 2013. But the acting rules are complex and riddled with loopholes that give the White House leeway over who commands a federal agency in the absence of its Senate-approved chief. It seems unlikely the administration will push for a hasty EPA vote as it attempts to confirm the next Supreme Court justice before the midterm elections in November. “This is a guy who shares all the ideology of Pruitt, except his style is totally different,” O’Donnell said. “He’s not a flamboyant, backslapping politician with a taste for scandal. He’s a relatively quiet, behind-the-scenes guy who will try to permit the kinds of industries the agency regulates to reshape the rules.” This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 07-05-18 07:49pm - 2319 days | #892 | |
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biker (0)
Active User Posts: 632 Registered: May 03, '08 Location: milwaukee, wi |
It's not that there is damage, it is the staggering amount of damage and how the Repubs let it occur during their watch. History will show just what this political party has become. There was a time I disagreed with some of their policies, but this is a scandal and not just on Trump, but the whole Repub party is in bed with this. If I ever considered myself independent, that has long past. I will never vote Repub. They sold our nation and our future. How do they face their children knowing they sold their children's future for a few gold coins. Warning Will Robinson | |
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| 07-05-18 11:46pm - 2319 days | #893 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
It's more than a few gold coins. The Republican's are making hundreds of millions in contributions. And the big businesses they are supporting are making billions in revenues, that would not have been allowed under the Obama rules. Damage to the environment? Lower health care standards? Who the fuck cares? Deny, lie, blame the Democrats and the immigrants for whatever problems there might be. | |
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| 07-08-18 04:50am - 2317 days | #894 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Fake news: Scott Pruitt, a God-fearing man, who served as President Trump's head of the EPA, is devastated he was forced to resign. How can we expect Christian soldiers to fight for our country, if they are not honored and respected? Shame on President Trump, for not defending Scott Pruitt more strongly, against the evil scum Democrats and others who helped to bring Pruitt down. ---------- ---------- Scott Pruitt Is Devastated That White House Forced Him to Resign EPA Post, Sources Say Bloomberg Bloomberg Fri, Jul 6 3:35 PM PDT Scott Pruitt resigned as EPA chief Thursday after White House Chief of Staff John Kelly delivered a message from the president that it was time for the scandal-plagued administrator to leave, according to two people familiar with the situation. Pruitt didn’t want to leave his post and was described as being devastated that he had to resign, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a personnel matter. President Donald Trump wanted Pruitt to leave, after revelations that the administrator’s public schedule had been altered to shield some meetings from public view, they said. Doctored schedules—which could be a criminal violation of the Federal Records Act—were effectively the final straw after a tenure marred by alleged ethical missteps. The administration knew that more damaging reports would emerge soon, one of the people said. Trump ultimately announced Pruitt’s departure on Twitter at 3:37 p.m. Thursday, saying the EPA chief had done an “outstanding job.” Later, Trump said Pruitt chose to resign because he felt he was a distraction. “It was very much up to him,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “We’ve been talking about it for a little while.” Top White House advisers have been encouraging Trump to dismiss Pruitt for months, amid mounting allegations of unethical conduct, improper spending and abuses of power. And Trump discussed the idea with people close to him several times, as he sharpened his public criticism of Pruitt’s activities. An early June disclosure that a top EPA aide helped Pruitt try to buy a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel was particularly embarrassing to the president, one of the people said. But Pruitt was caught off guard by Kelly’s call and flummoxed by his request to resign, one of the people said. Just one day earlier, Pruitt had been celebrating Independence Day at the White House. On Friday, his final day in office, Pruitt was back at the EPA building in downtown Washington to say goodbye to aides. Spokespeople for the EPA didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment. | |
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| 07-08-18 05:38pm - 2316 days | #895 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Stop the presses!!!! Justin Bieber is reportedly engaged to Hailey Baldwin. I thought Bieber was supposed to be sweet on Selena Gomez. But apparently they have both moved on. Will Bieber, now that he is engaged to be married, make a run for the White House? And why not? With a new-found maturity, he could be more qualified than Neo-Nazi Donald Trump. ------- ------- ET Online Scott Baumgartner Jul 8th 2018 6:58PM Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin just got engaged, according to multiple reports. The pop star reportedly popped the question on Saturday night while they were staying at a resort in the Bahamas. According to TMZ, who was first to report he news, 24-year-old Bieber and 21-year-old Baldwin were spotted at a restaurant where everyone in attendance was salsa dancing. Then, out of nowhere, the “What Do You Mean?” singer’s security detail told everyone in attendance to put their phones away because "something big was about to happen." That’s when Bieber reportedly got down on one knee. ET has reached out to both Bieber and Baldwin's reps for comment. Baldwin's father, Stephen Baldwin, congratulated the couple on Twitter on Sunday with a Bible passage. He has since deleted the tweet. "Sweet smile on my face!" he wrote. "Me&wife (Kennya) always pray 4 Gods will!! He is moving in the hearts of JB&HB. Let’s all pray for His will to be done. Love you 2 so much!!! #Godstiming #bestisyettocome Congrats  @JeremyBieber @pattiemallette #PraiseJesus."On Sunday, the singer’s father, Jeremy Bieber, posted a photo on Instagram that appears to be referencing the engagement. In the image, the singer is silhouetted against a tropical sunset. The older Bieber captioned the image, “@justinbieber Proud is an understatement! Excited for the next chapter!” Interestingly enough, in February, Bieber's ex-girlfriend, Selena Gomez, attended his father's wedding in Jamaica to Chelsey Rebelo. Bieber's mother, Pattie Mallette, also tweeted on Saturday night, writing, "Love Love Love Love Love Love Love." Meanwhile, a source tells People, “It’s kind of a surprise, but kind of not. Justin has been extremely happy these past few weeks. He has known Hailey for a long time. This might seem sudden, but they know each other very well.” In video taken by Instagram user @zoe_nicolee, Bieber is spotted dancing happily to his own song with Luis Fonsi, "Despacito," on the reported night of the engagement. In another video, he salsa dances with Baldwin. Bieber was also snapped planting kisses all over Baldwin's face during their getaway. Bieber and Baldwin have been spotted together constantly since rekindling their romance roughly a month ago, after dating in 2015. One particularly notable sighting included fans spotting them locking lips at a park in New York City. | |
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| 07-09-18 09:51am - 2315 days | #896 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Neo-Nazi Trump is a penny pinching boss who tries to pay his employees as cheaply as possible. All the while stealing millions in illegal deals. ------------- ------------- Trump's Personal Driver for 25 Years Sues for Unpaid Overtime Christie Smythe Christie Smythe 1 hour 31 minutes ago U.S. President Donald Trump exits Marine One and boards a sports utility vehicle (SUV) to visit First Lady Melania Trump at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S., on Wednesday, May 16, 2018. Trump is visiting Walter Reed where Melania Trump underwent successful surgery to treat a kidney condition on Monday. Photographer: Alex Edelman/Abaca Press Donald Trump’s personal driver for more than 25 years says the billionaire real estate developer didn’t pay him overtime and raised his salary twice in 15 years, clawing back the second raise by cutting off his health benefits. Noel Cintron, who is listed in public records as a registered Republican, sued the Trump Organization for about 3,300 of overtime that he says he worked in the past six years. He’s not allowed to sue for overtime prior to that due to the statute of limitations. “In an utterly callous display of unwarranted privilege and entitlement and without even a minimal sense of noblesse oblige,” Trump and his businesses exploited the driver, Cintron says in the complaint. Cintron says he was required to be on duty for Trump starting at 7 a.m. each day until whenever Trump, his family or business associates no longer required his services. He worked as long as 55 hours per week, but was paid a fixed salary of $62,700 in 2003, $68,000 in 2006, and $75,000 in 2010, according to the complaint. The wage bump in 2010 came with a catch, Cintron said. He was induced to surrender his health insurance, saving Trump approximately $17,866 per year in premiums, according to the lawsuit. "President Trump’s further callousness and cupidity is further demonstrated by the fact that while he is purportedly a billionaire, he has not given his personal driver a meaningful raise in over 12 years!" Cintron said. | |
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| 07-09-18 01:13pm - 2315 days | #897 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Joe Scarborough Calls Trump White House ‘Most Corrupt Administration in the History of Our Lifetime’ "Morning Joe" host rips into president's lawyer Rudy Giuliani in epic 10-minute rant Jon Levine Published 5:51 am PDT, Monday, July 9, 2018 Joe Scarborough had a lengthy rant about some of the biggest scandals of the Trump administration on Monday’s “Morning Joe." Joe Scarborough laced into Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani on Monday’s “Morning Joe” in a rant that included a lengthy list of some of his clients’ biggest scandals. The MSNBC host said it all added up to being corruption of historic proportions. “This is the most corrupt administration in the history of our lifetime, certainly over the first year and a half,” said Scarborough. “[Giuliani] will tell you he’s been knighted by the Queen of England.” Clocking in at nearly ten minutes, Scarborough’s rant included reminders of scandals like former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price’s private jets, the former energy contracts given to company from the same town as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Scott Pruitt’s extensive list of questionable activities. The White House has fired back after MSNBC host Joe Scarborough compared the Trump administration’s approach to undocumented immigrants crossing the U.S. border to the Nazis’ treatment of Jewish families. There was Trump University, and payments to Stormy Daniels, three indictments in the Russia investigation and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who is now currently sitting in solitary confinement. Scarborough’s listing of scandals was inspired by comments Giuliani made to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos saying that President Trump wanted to answer questions under oath, but how could he trust such a “corrupt” investigation. “He wants to testify,” said the former New York City mayor. “It’s hard to believe given all the things that have been shown about how tainted this investigation is. This is the most corrupt investigation I have ever seen.” Scarborough — as usual — defended special counsel Robert Mueller. “We certainly know that Robert Mueller is not corrupt.” said Scarborough “We certainly know he is a marine, a war hero, a guy who [unlike] Donald Trump didn’t skip out on serving this country, claiming deferments and bone spurs.” Since returning to Trumps’ orbit as his new lead attorney, Giuliani has become a fixture on television, occasionally making news and routinely promising anyone who will listen that he will bring the Russia collusion investigation to a close. | |
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| 07-09-18 02:16pm - 2315 days | #898 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Politics Scott Pruitt’s Loophole for Glider Truck Manufacturers Faces Backlash Renae Reints 20 hours ago Former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt dealt a final blow to clean air initiatives before resigning Friday, implementing a loophole that will allow the production of thousands of diesel freight trucks with high emissions. The decision effectively undoes an Obama administration move that intended to cap production of these trucks at 300 per year, beginning this year. These “glider trucks” use recycled engines built before new technology reduced the discharge of harmful particulates that pollute the air. These trucks emit as much as 55 times the amount of pollutants as trucks with modern engines, the New York Times reports. Companies like Fitzgerald Glider Kits lobbied for this loophole, which allows them to ignore the 300-truck cap at least until the end of 2019. Last year, Fitzgerald Glider Kits made 3,000 glider trucks. President Donald Trump met with the CEO of this company when he was campaigning in 2016, and then again after taking office, Vox reports. The move has been denounced by public health groups, environmental groups, and many in the trucking industry, including the United Parcel Service, the largest truck fleet owner, and Volvo Group, one of the largest truck manufacturers. “This recent proposal to repeal the glider production limitations is unreasonable, is contrary to the provisions of the Clean Air Act, and undermines the multi-million dollar investments Volvo Group and others have made toward achieving tremendous air quality improvements in this country,” said the Volvo Group in its statement. Vickie Patton, the general counsel at the Environmental Defense Fund, blames both Pruitt and new EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler for the effect the high pollutants will have on public health. “Pruitt and Wheeler are creating a loophole for super polluting freight trucks that will fill our children's lungs with toxic diesel pollution, ignoring public comments from moms and leading businesses across the country,” she told the Times. See original article on Fortune.com ======================================================= Suprising development: Ivanka Trump's Chinese-made products spared from Dad's tariffs. Of course, this must be legal, because the President of the United States would not favor his family before the American public. Everyone is equal under the law. Except some people are more equal than others. Trump and his family are the first among equals. As President, Trump has not separated himself from is private businesses. He still owns his private business while serving as President, which is a Trump first among US Presidents. -------------- -------------- Business Ivanka Trump's Chinese-Made Products Conveniently Spared From Dad's Tariffs Mary Papenfuss 10 hours ago Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods won’t touch Ivanka Trump’s foreign-made products for her fashion line. While Trump rails at Harley-Davidson motorcycles for moving some production to Europe to dodge EU tariffs, the first daughter and senior White House adviser has never manufactured a single product for her Ivanka Trump brand on American soil. Trump enacted tariffs Friday morning on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods, affecting hundreds of products from boats to medical devices and auto parts. Products spared include those manufactured by his daughter. That means Chengdu Kameido Shoes in Sichuan province can continue to supply shoes for the Ivanka Trump brand as it has in the past. It’s currently bidding for a new contract to manufacture 140,000 pairs of shoes for Trump’s company, a spokesman told The South China Morning Post. Hangzhou HS Fashion in Zhejiang province also said it’s filling orders for orders for the G-III Apparel Group, which supplies shoes to Trump’s brand. Until January 2017 all of Ivanka Trump’s products were made in factories in China and Hong Kong, research director Chris Rogers at Panjiva, a global trade data tracking company headquartered in New York, told Politico. Since then, some manufacturing has apparently been moved to other overseas factories in Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam. There have been no obvious shipments from China since mid-March, but Rogers speculated shipments may now be more difficult to trace because they could be moving under code names. Other enterprises and workers in the U.S., meanwhile, are already feeling the heat from a trade war. China’s retaliatory tariffs have targeted U.S. seafood, soybeans, dairy products, cars, apples, whiskey, pet food and cigarettes, among several other products. Farmers are fearful they won’t be able to sell products they had earmarked for China. They also worry that suppliers from other countries will pick up the valuable market — for good — that they have worked for years to cultivate. “Soybeans are the top agriculture export for the United States, and China is the top market for purchasing those exports,” Iowa soybean grower John Heisdorffer said in a statement. “The math is simple. You tax soybean exports at 25 percent, and you have serious damage to U.S. farmers.” Despite the president’s mantra to “buy American and hire American” the Trump family retains major business operations overseas, and the Trump Organization continues to manufacture most Trump products in foreign factories. The president even continues to profit from partnerships involving the Chinese government through state-supported companies and investments, including in developments in Dubai and Indonesia, notes the Washington Post. Ivanka Trump won a number of valuable trademarks in China just as her father was pushing to lift U.S. sanctions against Chinese telecom company ZTE, over the objection of congressional leaders. Trump announced his support for ZTE 72 hours after the Chinese government agreed to put half-a-billion dollars into the Indonesian project. The deal raised “serious ethical issues,” the head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics said. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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| 07-09-18 09:35pm - 2315 days | #899 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Neo-Nazi Trump pick for the Supreme Court. Bullshit from Trump, bullshit from Trump's nominee. Throw these bastards in jail. They are pieces of shit. Proud of being shit. Block any nomination from Trump. Preserve the constitution from these shithole people. ----------- ----------- Trump picks Brett Kavanaugh for Supreme Court Dylan Stableford 12 hours ago President Trump announced Monday night that Brett Kavanaugh, a federal appellate court judge based in Washington, D.C., is his pick to replace outgoing Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy — a nominee who, if confirmed, will cement a conservative majority on the nation’s highest court. Trump made the announcement from the East Room of the White House. “I’ve often heard that, other than matters of war and peace, this is the most important decision a president will make,” Trump said. “The Supreme Court is entrusted with the safeguarding of the crown jewel of our republic, the Constitution of the United States.” “Judge Kavanaugh has impeccable credentials, unsurpassed qualifications and a proven commitment to equal justice under the law,” the president continued. “Throughout legal circles he is considered a judge’s judge, a true thought leader among his peers. He is a brilliant jurist with a clear and effective writing style universally regarded as one of the finest and sharpest legal minds of our time.” Kavanaugh told Trump was “grateful” and “humbled by your confidence in me.” “Throughout this process I have witnessed first hand your appreciation for the vital role of the American judiciary. No president has ever consulted more widely or talked with more people from more backgrounds to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination,” Kavanaugh said. “Justice Kennedy devoted his career to securing liberty. I am deeply honored to fill his seat on the Supreme Court.” He added: “My judicial philosophy is straightforward: A judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law. A judge must interpret statutes as written and a judge must interpret as written, informed by history and tradition and precedent.” President Trump with Brett Kavanaugh, left President Trump announces Brett Kavanaugh as his Supreme Court nominee in the East Room of the White House on Monday. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP) Kavanaugh worked closely with independent counsel Kenneth Starr during the Whitewater investigation of President Bill Clinton. As documented in the latest episode of the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Kavanaugh debunked the conspiracy theories that the Clintons were responsible for former aide Vince Foster’s death before becoming the primary author of the report laying out the case for Clinton’s impeachment. Kavanaugh was concerned with the more explicit sexual details of the report and attempted to redact them just before its publication. One of the possible grounds for Clinton’s impeachment in Kavanaugh’s report was the fact Clinton lied to his aides and the American public via his press team. In a 2009 piece for the Minnesota Law Review, Kavanaugh said that he believed presidents should not be subject to civil lawsuits or criminal investigations in office because they were “time-consuming and distracting.” After assisting in George W. Bush’s efforts in the 2000 Florida recount, Kavanaugh joined the White House, first as a counsel to the president and then as a staff secretary. Bush nominated Kavanaugh for a position on the D.C. Circuit in July 2003, but his confirmation took nearly three years because Democrats contended he was too partisan for the federal bench. Kavanaugh was called an “unqualified judicial nominee” by the New York Times before his May 2006 confirmation on a 57-36 vote. In 2016, the conservative National Review wrote said that Kavanaugh’s opinions were “clear, consistent, thorough, and thoughtful” and had an “analytical clarity” that would make the late Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia proud. SCOTUSBlog, a news site about the Supreme Court, has described Kavanaugh as “generally bringing a pragmatic approach” to his decisions but with a conservative judicial philosophy. In analyzing him as a possible replacement for either Kennedy or Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the blog Empirical SCOTUS said Kavanaugh would most likely be to the right of either Kennedy or Ginsburg on the court, but not as far to the right as Justice Clarence Thomas. In his time on the bench, Kavanaugh has declared the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional and ruled against Obama-era environmental regulations. Kavanaugh’s name being floated as a nominee has caused some infighting on the right, with one group stating that the judge was not anti-abortion enough in a case involving an immigrant girl requesting the procedure. Multiple conservative writers have defended Kavanaugh against this claim. Trump interviewed a total of seven candidates last week and on Monday narrowed his list of finalists to a pair of federal appeals court judges, Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas Hardiman, the New York Times reported Monday. The announcement of Kennedy’s retirement last month sent shock waves across the nation, with Trump and his fellow Republicans poised to shift the court’s ideological balance to the right — and shape the country’s judicial future for generations to come. Abortion has emerged as a key issue in the looming confirmation battle, as Republicans hold a one-vote majority (51-49) in the Senate and need at least 50 to confirm Trump’s pick. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who supports abortion rights, said last week that she would not support someone who would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that protects a woman’s right to have an abortion. “I believe very much that Roe v. Wade is settled law,” Collins said on ABC’s “This Week.” “A candidate who would overturn Roe v. Wade would not be acceptable to me, because that would indicate an activist agenda that I don’t want to see a judge have.” Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, were among five GOP senators who met with Trump last month to discuss the Supreme Court vacancy. Both are seen as key swing votes. After Trump’s announcement, Collins issued a statement citing Kavanaugh’s “impressive credentials and extensive experience,” and vowed to “conduct a careful, thorough vetting.” “I look forward to Judge Kavanaugh’s public hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee and to questioning him in a meeting in my office,” she added. “Tonight the president begins a forced march back to the days when women’s health care choices were made by government,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a statement late Monday evening. “There can be no mistaking Trump’s Supreme Court nomination for anything but what it is: a direct attempt to overturn Roe. v. Wade.” “I am so disheartened that President Trump would choose such a radical, anti-consumer, anti-woman jurist to be his nominee for the Supreme Court,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in a statement. He added: “There is a fight coming, and I’m ready for it.” Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont issued a similar statement. “Let us be clear: President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will be a rubber-stamp for an extreme, right-wing agenda pushed by corporations and billionaires,” Sanders said. “The coming Senate debate over the replacement of retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is about the future of Roe v. Wade, campaign finance reform, voting rights, workers’ rights, health care, climate change, environmental protection and gun safety.” He added: “I do not believe a person with those views should be given a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court. We must mobilize the American people to defeat Trump’s right-wing, reactionary nominee.” Dozens of protesters gathered outside the Supreme Court on Monday ahead of Trump’s announcement, and the size of the crowd increased immediately after. The ‘McConnell rule’ Trump said he expects a swift confirmation of Kennedy’s replacement before the midterm elections. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to vote on Kennedy’s successor “this fall.” But many Democrats said the Senate should follow the standard set by McConnell and refuse to vote on Trump’s next nominee to the high court. President Barack Obama’s choice for Scalia’s replacement, Merrick Garland, was blocked by congressional Republicans, who argued that the seat should be left unfilled until after the 2016 election. “There should be no consideration of a Supreme Court nominee until the American people have a say,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., tweeted. “Leader McConnell set that standard when he denied Judge Garland a hearing for nearly a year, and the Senate should follow the McConnell Standard now.” | |
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| 07-10-18 04:51am - 2315 days | #900 | |
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lk2fireone (0)
Active User Posts: 3,618 Registered: Nov 14, '08 Location: CA |
Blame it on the evil Neo-Nazi Trump. Costco has dropped the $1.50 Polish dog and soda combo. I knew Trump was a slime-ball, when I read stories about his attacks on rapist Mexicans and border-crossers from shithole countries, but now it's hitting close to home, Trump's attack on the Great American Way: Costco is dropping the $1.50 Polish dog and soda combo. I am a loyal Costco member, and a special treat was visiting Costco and paying $1.50 ($1.64 with tax) for a Polish hot dog and soda combo. No more. Now I will have to get the $1.50 hot dog and soda combo, instead. I get the combo with a small side of sauerkraut (which is free), and a plastic knife and fork (also free), and a plate, with mustard and ketchup for the Polish dog. A very cheap meal, and convenient, since my local Costco is less than 2 miles from me. But Trump has forced Costco to eliminate the Polish dog. Another example of his hatred of foreigners. Impeach Trump, before he is able to destroy America completely. ------------ ------------ Lifestyle Costco Kills Beloved Food Court Item And People Are Doggone Furious HuffPost Ed Mazza,HuffPost 3 hours ago Costco just unveiled a new menu for its food court and one change isn't going Costco just unveiled a new menu for its food court and one change isn’t going over well on social media. The retailer still offers its famous $1.50 deal for a hot dog and a fountain soda, but the Polish dog combo ― also with a soda, and for the same price ― has been banished. The change is part of a food court makeover that includes the addition of a burger, an acai bowl and a meatless al pastor salad that even the company’s chief executive doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about. “This new plant-based protein salad, I know that excites you,” Craig Jelinek told shareholders earlier this year, according to the Seattle Times. “But it is healthy. And, uh, actually, it tastes pretty good, if you like those kind of things. I tried it once.” But it’s the exile of the Polish sausage that has put the company in the doghouse with some customers. While it’s still available to buy in bulk and make at home, the faithful are decrying the decision to ditch the dog from the food court. Some have posted complaints on the company’s Facebook page ― even on posts about cars and bottled water ― while others have taken to Twitter, in some cases using the #SaveThePolishDog hashtag: This article originally appeared on HuffPost. | |
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