How easy is that. Just redefine News as “fake” and now redefine “povert” and problems all go way. (ODT)
This month, the administration signaled it would like to change how the government adjusts its official poverty threshold for inflation every year, which could result in millionsfewer Americans qualifying for a wide range of benefits over time.
It’s only the most recent of many unilateral moves Trump has made on social policy, which all seek to fulfill an Inauguration Day promise to “get our people off of welfare and back to work.”
After the redacted Mueller report was made public, Donald Trump tweeted, “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION.” But when the House Judiciary Committee asked to see Mueller’s full report, Trump said no way.
President Donald Trump seems to be making Americans hate the empire again, by embracing war – or maybe only pretending to do so – against Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and who knows where else.
After Mueller’s report came out, the former White House counsel was reportedly asked to say it wasn’t obstruction when Trump told him to fire the special counsel.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested Tuesday that President Donald Trump may well try to block special counsel Robert Mueller from testifying before Congress.
During testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Barr was again by turns evasive and openly partisan as he defended Trump against the report’s evidence of obstruction and defended himself against accusations that he had misled Congress and the nation. After his testimony in the Republican-controlled Senate, Barr refused to appear before the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee, setting up a potential battle over whether he is guilty of contempt of Congress.
Before the week was out, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had accused Barr of lying to Congress, an accusation that certainly endeared Barr to Trump.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers predicted the corporate tax cut would put an extra $4,000 in every worker’s pocket. They swore that corporations would use some of their tax cut money to hand out raises and bonuses to workers. That never happened. Workers got a measly 6 percent of corporations’ tax savings. In the first quarter after the tax cut took effect, workers on average received a big fat extra $6.21 in their paychecks, for an annual total of a whopping $233. Corporations spent their tax breaks on stock buybacks, a record $1 trillion worth, raising stock prices, which put more money in the pockets of rich CEOs and shareholders.
The complaining Trump demands that Judge Nepolitano be sacked off Fox News (ODT
Donald Trump is a conspiracy theorist, but not a kooky or harmless one. He is a far-right conspiracy theorist who made up 10,000 fictions and actively supports the scariest and worst elements of the American Far Right, from Alex Jones of InfoWars to more obscure and even more poisonous nightshades of the internet.
A US State Department official said the China is America’s first great competitor that is “not Caucasian”
Senior Australian government officials have been scathing of the comments
Analysts have warned this plays into China’s “race” narrative
Goodbye to the Hippocratic Oath after 2000 years (ODT)
Doctors, nurses and other health workers can opt out of procedures such as abortions and sterilizations which violate their personal or religious beliefs, under a rule issued by the US Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday.
When testifying before Congress, Barr was asked if he knew Mueller and what the latter thought of Barr’s summary. He pleaded ignorance, which we now know is a falsehood. Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe wonders whether the lie makes Barr himself eligible for impeachment.
What is then a “donation” and what is Paid for? Imagine if Murdoch pulled away from Trump (ODT)
Gabe Sherman reveals how it works: If Fox News tries to reign in their worst voices like Jeanine Pirro, Trump picks up the phone and calls Rupert Murdoch.
But a sequence of events around Jeanine Pirro’s suspension shows how much clout Trump has. Even though Lachlan Murdoch is the head of Fox News now, Rupert Murdoch has Trump’s ear, and he uses it.
According to Sherman and his sources, staffers thought Jeanine Pirro would be fired, but Trump intervened, calling Rupert Murdoch to complain about her suspension. Instead of firing her, Sherman reports that Fox allowed Pirro to return to the air, but took out her opening monologue where she rants and stirs a froth of anger with viewers. That prompted Trump to complain to Rupert again, which caused a compromise to be forged where she could deliver an abbreviated version of her monologue.
“Trump called Rupert, and Rupert put pressure on the executives,” a source told Sherman.
Washington: A former White House personnel security director has been instructed by the White House not to show up on Tuesday for questioning by the House Oversight Committee.
The move appears to be the latest effort by the Trump administration to push back against congressional inquiries of the White House, which have proliferated since Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in January.
When Trump caves into the law will he yell No Collusion? (ODT)
The myth of Donald Trump presents him as a man of authority, a leader loved and feared, a boss who demands loyalty – and gets it.
Trump tampered with witnesses. These Senate Republicans voted to oust Bill Clinton for doing just that
In fact, nobody much listens to what Trump says and that fact might have saved his presidency, according to one of the more startling passages in the 448-page report by special counsel Robert Mueller that was released on Thursday.
“The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful,” Mueller writes, describing potential criminal obstruction of justice, “but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”
Attorney General William Barr has just banned bail for migrants seeking asylum…which by the way, is not a crime..and they need somewhere to keep these people, to concentrate them if you will.
Dictionary.com defines a concentration camp as: “a guarded compound or imprisonment of aliens, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents … for the confinement and persecution of prisoners.”
Well guess what, America?!
We are now officially building and maintaining concentration camps for migrant families who have come to our borders seeking asylum. Even though the mainstream media is reporting that the Trump Administration is “considering” tent concentration camps, the truth is that they have already been erected. As The Daily Beast published just two days ago, these camps already exist in El Paso, TX. These camps are former military hospital facilities converted to prison camps. Representative Nanette Barragan (D-CA) said after visiting the camp that it was “filthy” and “heartbreaking.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday vetoed a resolution to end U.S. support of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign in Yemen, which has been blamed for tens of thousands of deaths in the region.
“This resolution is an unnecessary, dangerous attempt to weaken my constitutional authorities, endangering the lives of American citizens and brave service members, both today and in the future,” Trump said in a statement accompanying his veto.
“The thing that’s related that I’m more concerned about is, we will eventually face another recession,” says Oh, of UCLA. “And what we’ve done through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is use a bunch of the tools that we need to deal with the next recession, at a time when we don’t have a recession.”
1. Corporate taxes fell off a cliff, fueling deeper deficits
2. A short-term economic boost is fading
3. Rich people gained more than poor people
4. Most other impacts: Either too soon to tell or too hard to see
Trump is a President yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre in which there isn’t one. The Constitution of America doesn’t protect that as “free speech” (ODT)
Since President Donald Trump tweeted a video about Omar, she’s faced “a sharp increase in direct threats” to her life, according to her office.
Don’t ever let it be said that America isn’t driven and has to have war somewhere (ODT)
Since the brutal murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi last October, Congress has increasingly pressured the Trump administration to stop backing the Saudi Arabia-led coalition fighting in Yemen and halt U.S. arms sales to Riyadh. In response, President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that if the U.S. does not sell weapons to the Saudis, they will turn to U.S. adversaries to supply their arsenals.
“I don’t like the concept of stopping an investment of $110 billion into the United States,” Trump told reporters in October, referring to a collection of intent letters signed with the Saudis in the early months of his presidency. “You know what they are going to do? They’re going to take that money and spend it in Russia or China or someplace else.”
Lady Justice, the famous symbol of the US legal system, is depicted by a blindfolded goddess who wields a sword in one hand and a set of scales in the other. The blindfold is meant to convey the idea that all people are equal before the law, and everyone will be judged without bias or preconceived notions. Today, however, the blindfold appears to have slipped, and Lady Justice is increasingly meting out justice according to status and financial well-being of the person appearing before her.
In order to avoid imminent disaster, it’s time to firmly affix the blindfold and ensure that all Americans – not just those who can afford it – are seen as truly equal before the law.
The question about whether Trump’s love for the organization has endured is in reference to a comment the president made at a 2016 campaign rally after WikiLeaks released the bounty of hacked Democratic emails. “Oh, we love WikiLeaks,” Trump said, praising the release of the stolen materials.
It was only one of several occasions Trump commended WikiLeaks during the campaign. He mentioned it 141 times in the last month of the campaign alone as he sought to use the hacked emails to cast Hillary Clinton’s campaign in an unflattering light. “WikiLeaks is unbelievable,” he said at one rally.
Such a fixture was “WikiLeaks” in Trump’s stump speeches that several supercuts have been made of him relishing the damage the organization did to his opponent.
Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, as Max Blumenthal points out in his insightful book “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump,” was made possible not only by massive social inequality and concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the oligarchic elites but by the national security state’s disastrous and prolonged military interventions overseas.
Donald Trump has ordered the firing of Secret Service director Randolph “Tex” Alles, according to the White House, amid a shake-up in the upper echelon of the Department of Homeland Security. Key points:
The White House said Mr Trump has selected career Secret Service official James Murray to lead the agency Mr Alles’s departure stems from a personality conflict within the service, three officials say Mr Alles’s removal comes amid a Homeland Security overhaul that began last week
The firing was part of “a near-systematic purge happening at the nation’s second-largest national security agency”, CNN reported one official saying.
This is Anti-Semitism and Pro-Israeli Politics Israel is your country and America is protecting it F*****s Anti- Israel isn’t anti-Semitism. Netanyayu has just promised to annex the West Bank if only Israelis vote for him and he has the guns to do it. (ODT)
Addressing American Jews on Saturday in Las Vegas, President Donald Trump casually invoked the anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty by referring to Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, as “your prime minister.”
Given that Trump was speaking to Jewish Republicans — including Sheldon Adelson, the American casino magnate who is one of Netanyahu’s biggest donors — the president was not wrong to assume that the crowd was strongly pro-Israel, but the accusation that the loyalty of non-Israeli Jews to their home countries is somehow suspect has a long, ugly history.
Later in his address to the Republican Jewish Coalition gathering, Trump referred a second time to American Jews as if they were Israelis by saying that a victory for Democrats in the 2020 election “would cripple our country and very well could leave Israel out there all by yourselves.”
Trump never does anything for the nation. is this a reason for him stacking the judiciary with ultra-conservatives? (ODT)
President Donald Trump’s lawyers are pushing back against the idea of releasing his tax returns.
In a letter to the U.S. Treasury Department on Friday, a team of the president’s lawyers argued that requests for the release of his tax information “are not consistent with governing law.”
“We are confident that this misguided attempt to politicize the administration of the tax laws will not succeed,” they wrote in the letter, which was signed by William Consovoy, Trump’s personal attorney.
Friday’s letter suggests the president will fight hard to keep his tax information private. In the letter, Consovoy argues that Congress is attempting to violate Trump’s First Amendment rights.
“This far-reaching censorship system simply can’t be squared with the Constitution,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, said in a statement. “The government has a legitimate interest in protecting bona fide national security secrets, but this system sweeps too broadly, fails to limit the discretion of government censors, and suppresses political speech that is vital to informing public debate.”
The White House has not commented on the testimony for issues of security no doubt (ODT)
A White House whistleblower has told Congress that dozens of rejected security clearance applications were overturned by the Trump administration.
Tricia Newbold claimed applications that were denied for “serious disqualifying issues” were later reversed with little explanation.
The veteran White House security adviser testified to the Democratic-led House Oversight and Reform Committee.
Democrats have long claimed that White House officials have abused clearances.
Ms Newbold, who has worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations, claimed that clearances “were not always adjudicated in the best interest of national security”.
She added that rejections occurred due to a variety of reasons, including “foreign influence, conflicts of interest, concerning personal conduct, financial problems, drug use, and criminal conduct”.
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