Monday, January 30th, 2017
Steve Peoples, Reporter - The Associated Press
Stephan: In October 2012 the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court legitimized political bribery, and over the next four years the country's congress has been sold to the uber-rich. And the process feeds on itself. As a result to remain competitive every congressperson has to raise about $15,000 a day, and they spent 3-4 hours a day doing it. And it is going to get worse, as this story describes. When you have this level of corruption you don't have a functioning democracy.
Credit:radio.foxnews.com
INDIAN WELLS, CALIFORNIA — The conservative Koch network plans to spend between $300 million and $400 million to influence politics and public policy over the next two years, intensifying its nationwide efforts in the initial years of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Network officials disclosed their rough spending plans Saturday as donors gathered at a luxury hotel in the California desert. The investment, backed by the organization’s extensive nationwide network, positions the billionaire industrialist family to play a major role in the debate over several Trump priorities — even those they oppose.
“We’re just getting started,” billionaire industrialist Charles Koch said at the opening reception for the weekend conference, which attracted more than 550 donors, each willing to donate at least $100,000 each year to the various conservative political and policy groups backed by the Koch brothers.
Koch and many of his top donors refused to support Trump in the run-up to his election, raising questions about both his readiness for […]
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Monday, January 30th, 2017
Sarah Kendzior, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: This is what we look like from England. This and the German article are some of the politer things I have read in the foreign press, and this trend of incompetent nativist governance is going to bear bitter fruit.
The Redwall section of the Grand Canyon National Park.
Credit: Alamy
Last Tuesday, for a few hours, Badlands National Park defied presidential orders. “Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years #climate,” it tweeted. The account went on to discuss ocean acidity, carbon dioxide and the founding mission of the century-old National Parks Service, which included an obligation to “leave [the parks] unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations”.
In Trump’s America, where national parks are forbidden from communicating through Twitter, this constitutes an act of radical subversion. This is not the America I was living in a week ago.
Following a pitiful inaugural turnout, Trump, the most unpopular president ever to take office, issued an unprecedented order, stating that US institutions including the National Parks Service, the Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency were forbidden to independently communicate to the public.
The diktat was in part a reaction to tweeted photographs showing the discrepancy between the massive crowds […]
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Monday, January 30th, 2017
David Edwards, - The Raw Story
Stephan: You can watch the First Amendment evaporating. And note that this happened in Denver a Blue value city.
There is a video you can click through and see it.
Denver Police Commander Tony Lopez
Credit: YouTube
Protesters at the Denver airport over the weekend were told by police that it was illegal to exercise “free speech without a permit.”
Denverite reported that over 200 people gathered at the Denver International Airport on Friday to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order banning travel from seven majority-Muslim countries.
In video posted to YouTube, Police Commander Tony Lopez can be seen advising demonstrators that they are in violation of the law.
“Stop doing anything that could be construed as free speech without a permit,” he explains.
Lopez warns in the video, which lacks context, that even carrying a copy of the U.S. Constitution was prohibited in the airport.
“I cannot carry the Constitution without a permit?” one protester asks.
“Correct,” the officer replies.
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Sunday, January 29th, 2017
Marcelo Rochabrun, - Alternet (U.S.)/Pro Publica
Stephan: This weekend we have seen half a century of carefully nurtured diplomacy discarded like a used tissue culminating in Trump's decision to violate the very principle written on the plaque in front of the Statue of Liberty. I knew Trump was a deeply vulgar man, but had no idea how truly incompetent he was.
Credit: ekapol sirachainan / Shutterstock
When details leaked earlier this week about a spate of immigration-related executive orders from President Donald Trump, much public discussion focused on a 30-day ban on new visas for citizens from seven “terror-prone” countries.
But the order signed this afternoon by Trump is actually more severe, increasing the ban to 90 days. And its effects could extend well beyond preventing newcomers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, from entering the U.S., lawyers consulted by ProPublica said.
It’s also expected to have substantial effects on hundreds of thousands of people from these countries who already live in the U.S. under green cards or on temporary student or employee visas.
Since the order’s travel ban applies to all “aliens” — a term that encompasses anyone who isn’t an American citizen — it could bar those with current visas or even green cards from returning to the U.S. from trips abroad, said Stephen Legomsky, a former chief counsel to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under President Obama.
“It’s extraordinarily cruel,” he said.
The order […]
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Sunday, January 29th, 2017
Mark Townsend, Joanna Walters and Cathy Otten, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The incompetency of Trump's immigration ban -- even putting aside the humanitarian issues, it is just incompetent diplomacy -- is going to reverberate across the planet. Support networks created to support American troops in Muslim countries will now crumble. American travelers in large parts of the world will now be exposed to risk; and everything from health programs to business deals will be affected. One doesn't often see a nation blunder so grievously harming its own self interest.
Protesters at JFK airport in New York on Saturday.
Credit: Stephanie Keith
Donald Trump’s decision to ban immigration from a string of Muslim-majority nations has sparked fury and anguish around the world as refugees and migrants were prevented from boarding flights to the US.
Holders of passports from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen were stopped at airports, while passengers already in the air were detained in the US. In one incident, five Iraqi passengers and one Yemeni, all holding valid visas, were barred from boarding an EgyptAir flight from Cairo to New York and instead redirected on to flights to their home countries.
A Yazidi woman, who fled an Isis massacre in Iraq in 2014, was stopped from boarding a flight in Baghdad, after waiting months for a visa to be reunited with her husband, who is already in the US.
President Trump has imposed a three-month ban on refugees from […]
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