Saturday, January 19th, 2019
Alexandra Villarreal, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: You're a child, say eight years old, maybe 10. You have walked a thousand miles, often hungry and footsore, to get to a country your mother tells you will be a kind of heaven. Instead, you have been captured by the heaven people. They speak a language you do not know. They lock you up with hundreds of others boys and girls, all strangers, all similarly traumatized. You get sick, or maybe you are already sick. This is what happens to you.
Never forget as you read this, that you personally are paying for all the inhumanity you are reading about. All this thanks to Donald Trump, and your tax dollars.
Those familiar with the ways in which DHS holds immigrant families say there is a long medical history of neglect, misdiagnoses and close calls associated with undocumented children.
Credit: Eric Gay/AP
At the Berks Family Residential Center, an immigrant detention facility in Leesport, Pennsylvania, advocates and former detainees say it’s normal for children held there to have health problems.
One mother, who asked to use her middle name Arely, told the Guardian that children often had fevers or vomited when she was detained at Berks. She said she watched helplessly as her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter threw up blood for three days.
Another woman – who asked to be referred to only by her middle name Fernanda because she still fears her antagonists in her home country – remembered children with the flu and respiratory illnesses, and how the on-site medical professionals would take their temperatures but never give out medicine. When Fernanda’s own daughter had fever, she had to go to the hospital just to get Tylenol, she said.
Since attorney […]
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Saturday, January 19th, 2019
TOM BOGGIONI, - Raw Story
Stephan: As is so often the case I think Paul Krugman has it right. The Republican members of Congress in both houses stand behind Trump because they are spineless and lack morality, and because they fear their "base." And their base stands behind Trump because nothing is more important to them than their racism.
Paul Krugman
In a series of tweets on Friday morning, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman accused “Trump loyalists” of knowing deep down in their hearts that the president committed treason, but they don’t care because he appeals to their racist instincts.
Taking the measure of the national zeitgeist, the popular New York Times columnist said the steady drumbeat of revelations about the Trump administration — including a bombshell report that claims the president may have suborned perjury — should leave no doubt that the president’s relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin is treasonous.
But, Krugman asserted, Trump’s biggest fans don’t care.
“A thought about where we are as a nation: We’re living in the age of the unsurprising revelation. Is there anyone who doesn’t already believe that Trump-Putin-treason is a real thing? Even Trump loyalists surely know it’s true, they just think it’s an OK price for the racism,” Krugman tweeted.
He then added, “The question instead is when and whether the evidence will become so dramatic, so blatant, that Trump’s defenders won’t feel able to keep pretending they don’t […]
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Saturday, January 19th, 2019
Stephan: Over the two years Trump has been in office the environment of the United States has been severely compromised, and you paid for it. You paid to make our lives unsafe, our children more at risk. How much longer must we put up with this evil troll and the zombies he has put into office? Ask yourself that. Maybe it's time to write your representative or senators. Maybe join a demonstration.
The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is mainly off the coast of Louisiana. This is a screenshot of a NASA animation of changes in the area from 1999 to 2008.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has proposed cuts in water pollution regulation that would increase the 5,772-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the area where fish and other living things must swim away or die.
Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s nominee to lead the EPA, wants to remove thousands of streams, swamps and other bodies of water from regulations approved under former President Barack Obama to curb water pollution.
Scientists think a 45% reduction in nitrate and phosphorus, much of it from fertilizer, running into the Mississippi River is needed to shrink the dead zone, which was the size of Delaware last summer. In 2008, a task force set a goal of reaching that target by 2015 which didn’t happen.
A rule published in 2015 under Obama could have restricted pollution from chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
“For […]
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Friday, January 18th, 2019
Mike Males, - Yes! Magazine
Stephan: I keep seeing Red state christofascists talking about secession. As with most things put forward by this cohort it is notable for its stupidity. The fact is that states like Mississippi, Alabama, or New Mexico, Kentucky, or Montana are dependent on Blue states for their survival. For instance, for every dollar Mississippi and New Mexico pay into the federal treasury they receive almost $3.00 in funding back. Whereas California for every dollar in gets back about $0.78.
The facts are clear, Republicans cannot produce successful governance. They can't even feed their populations as is clear by looking at the percent of each states' population on the SNAP food program.
So to all these angry White racists who want to secede, you might think again. And you should really fear Blue states also wanting to restructure the country because they are underwriting your failure. And then there is the "dependency ratio," read on for that explanation.
President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall, and the continuing shutdown of the federal government over it, is only the most recent symbol of the increasing schism in American public life. Despite extensive debate, there is no easy solution to reconcile the so-called red America–blue America divide.
Certainly, facts don’t seem to matter to Trump’s supporters. The wall won’t stop immigration, an outstanding analysis by the Cato Institute’s David Bier shows. Nor will it affect distribution of the deadliest drugs (by far) identified by the Drug Enforcement Administration, opioid pharmaceuticals. (We might as well shut down all travel to the U.S. from the U.K. and Ireland, and build separate walls around Connecticut and New Jersey, to cut off the largest pill suppliers.)
Trump’s wall is simply a $35 billion symbol: America’s reverse Statue of Liberty, a beacon of racist hostility illuminating his supporters’ goal ofreversing demographic change. It deserves uncompromising opposition.
As Trump’s hardcore Republican base of some 50 million to 60 million voting adults becomes more extreme and intransigent and the larger, anti-Trump resistance grows, will some sort of national partitioning be the only way to avoid […]
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Friday, January 18th, 2019
CASEY MICHEL, - Think Progress
Stephan: Christofascists have a worldview based on the concepts and thinking of the Middle Bronze Age; a time of authoritarian kings, when men were dominant and women submissive.
In today's world Putin and Russia closely mirror that and that may be why the christofascist homeschooling movement finds the Russian model so attractive. These are dangerous people, a fifth column in America; they do not like democracy or gender and racial equality.
The group and its origins sound innocuous enough. But the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — a right-wing group founded 36 years ago — has deepened connections between America’s religious right and Russians even as the latter have been sanctioned by the United States, according to a ThinkProgress investigation.
By networking with Russians, the HSLDA — now America’s largest right-wing homeschooling association — has provided the Kremlin with a new avenue of influence over some of the most conservative organizations in the United States.
And while investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, intelligence organizations, and congressional committees have focused on Russia’s efforts to influence U.S. elections, Russian ties to groups like the HSLDA demonstrate the Kremlin’s broader attempts to hold sway over American policies.
Other ties between sanctioned Russians and the American far-right are well documented. From Christian fundamentalists to white supremacists to secession movements to fascists in the so-called “alt-right,” the links are as diffuse as they are damning. Not only have these networks brought Russian agents into close contact with higher-ups in the Republican party, but they’ve presented some of the primary threads […]
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