Saturday, December 29th, 2018
D. WATKINS, Editor-at-Large - Salon
Stephan: Here is another one of those Trumpian ironies I see more and more of. The morons who voted for Trump, almost entirely White, are the ones most severely impacted by the Republican and Trump rape of the SNAP program of food support. But they still love him, his approval rating today on fivethirtyeight is 41.5%
Credit: David McNew/Getty
President Trump is planning on cutting The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which will take food out of the mouths of his most loyal supporters — white men.
“At the direction of President Donald J. Trump,” U.S. Department of Agriculture chief, Sonny Perdue, said in a press release issued last Thursday, “we are taking steps to restore integrity to SNAP and move people toward self-sufficiency.”
If you recall, the president received 62 percent of the white male vote back in 2016 — as he paraded around from rally to rally in his floppy red ball cap promising to return the country to them, or, “Make America Great Again.” His followers, mostly white, salivated at their chance to experience social mobility while Trump was in office. Now, many may be taking a huge step backwards: How can you work hard and advance your life on an empty stomach? And who knew white men relied on food stamps more than any other group?
I grew up in a low-income neighborhood in Baltimore — […]
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Saturday, December 29th, 2018
Spencer Ackerman and Adam Rawnsley, - Daily Beast
Stephan: Don't ever let anyone tell you that slavery has ended in the United States. America is a slave state, and one of the worst in the world. Here is some data on just one aspect of the new American slavery. We have five per cent of the world's human population and 25 per cent of the world's prisoners. For a few corporations this slavery is very profitable so, of course, they are in the business of routinely bribing politicians to keep this vile system legal and operating. As to ICE think SS. In my opinion, no ethical person could work for this agency.
For $3 a day, Yesica works the graveyard shift in the kitchens of the for-profit immigration prison where she is locked up.
Each morning, at 1 a.m., the guards of the Joe Corley Detention Facility in southeast Texas rouse Yesica and the 35 other women who share a dormitory-style room. Work begins an hour later and lasts through sunrise, ending at 8 a.m. Yesica does everything from cooking breakfast, to serving her fellow detainees, to cleaning up.
Even at $3, toiling in the kitchen pays better than sweeping prison corridors, which pays the Immigration and Customs Enforcement-stipulated minimum of $1 a day. The work, officially speaking, isn’t mandatory. But “since there’s absolutely nothing to do” inside, Yesica said, detainees work to keep at bay the stress of not knowing when they’ll be released—or if they’ll be deported.
Yesica, 23, fled her native El Salvador after MS-13 persecuted her for being a lesbian. The brutal gang, which the Trump administration uses to demonize immigrants like her, murdered her father, and she came to the United States to seek the safety of rejoining family here. […]
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Saturday, December 29th, 2018
Sarah Okeson, - DC Report
Stephan: The destruction and legal theft of our American heritage and public lands under Trump just goes on and on. Here is the latest depredation.
Citadel Ruins, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah.
Credit: BLM
Archeologists helped draft the law that presidents use to protect areas like the Grand Canyon, but today’s Republicans want to muzzle archeologists and others to keep them from weighing in on a lawsuit over Trump’s yanking protections from Utah sites that date back to the end of the last Ice Age.
Our nation’s Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 to protect ancient American Indian sites, but Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jean Williams asked a federal judge not to accept legal documents from archaeologists objecting to Trump’s largely dismantling two national monuments in Utah. She said the blitz of documents was “inherently prejudicial” to Trump and the other defendants.
“Federal defendants do not have adequate time or space to address every formulation of the arguments,” Williams wrote.
Williams works in the environmental division, led by Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who represented BP in lawsuits over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the nation’s largest oil spill.
The Hopi Tribe, other American Indian […]
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Friday, December 28th, 2018
NADJA POPOVICH, LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA and KENDRA PIERRE-LOUIS, - New York Times
Stephan: Our excursion into Trumpworld is literally killing us. Am I exaggerating? Consider this. How much longer are you prepared to put up with this? What are you prepared to do to change it?
Since his first days in office, President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has targeted environmental rules it sees as overly burdensome to the fossil fuel industry, including major Obama-era policies aimed at fighting climate change.
A New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts nearly 80 environmental rules on the way out under Mr. Trump. Our list represents two types of policy changes: rules that were officially reversed and rollbacks still in progress. Nearly a dozen more rules – summarized at the bottom of this page – were rolled back and then later reinstated, often following legal challenges.
The process of rolling back regulations has not always been smooth. In some cases, the administration has failed to provide a strong legal argument in favor of proposed changes or agencies have skipped key steps in the rulemaking process, like notifying the public and asking for comment. In several cases, courts have ordered agencies to enforce their […]
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Friday, December 28th, 2018
ABIGAIL GEIGER, Writer - Pew Research Center
Stephan: Yesterday I published the Gallup Organization's data based appraisal of 2018 trends. Today, here is what the Pew Research Center found notable. It is a good news, bad news story
Pew Research Center takes the pulse of Americans and people around the world on a host of issues every year. We explore public opinion on topics ranging from foreign policy to cyberbullying, as well as demographic trends, such as the emergence of the post-Millennial generation and changes in the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States. Here are 18 of this year’s standout findings, taken from our analyses over the past year.
1Post-Millennials – today’s 6- to 21-year-olds, also known as Generation Z – are on track to be the most racially and ethnically diverse generation yet. A bare majority of post-Millennials are non-Hispanic white (52%), while a quarter are Hispanic. And while most post-Millennials are still pursuing their K-12 education, the oldest members of this generation are enrolling in college at a significantly higher rate than Millennials were at a comparable age.
2There were 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2016, down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007. The total is the lowest since 2004 and is tied to a decline in the number of Mexican unauthorized immigrants during this […]
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