Protestors in front of Trump Tower in New York

In the nation’s capital and across the country food pantries and soup kitchens are making special efforts to help feed the hundreds of thousands of Federal workers that have not been paid for a month in a shutdown instigated by Donald Trump that he threatened might last “months even years” if he does not get $5.7 billion to build a wall on our border with Mexico.

On Saturday, for the second time in two weeks, Trump took to the airwaves and cast himself as the spaghetti-western protector-in-chief of a nation whose very existence was imperiled by a massive marauding migration of criminals from the south. He feigned an offer of compromise but he continued to insist that the only way to secure our border was with a  multi-billion dollar “powerful see-through steel barrier.”

He slipped into that Clint Eastwood “Dirty Harry” persona of his that you could imagine him assuming just before he took aim and shot someone […]

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Andrew Wheeler
Credit: Win McNamee/Getty

A few weeks after President Donald Trump moved into the White House, he received a memo from one of his biggest campaign donors: Robert Murray, the CEO of Murray Energy, America’s largest private coal company. Emblazoned with the words “Action Plan,” it was essentially a wish list of all the environmental regulations Murray wanted Trump to get rid of.

Nearly two years later, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is on track to fulfill almost all of Murray’s requests. And the Senate is on the cusp of allowing one of Murray’s most trusted former lobbyists to lead the effort.

On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held a confirmation hearing for Andrew Wheeler, Trump’s nominee to run the Environmental Protection Agency. Wheeler has been effectively running the agency as acting administrator since July, when Scott Pruitt resigned amid a deluge of ethical scandals. But Trump only formally nominated Wheeler to lead the EPA last week, triggering a confirmation process that Democrats […]

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Credit: Ted S. Warren/AP

As if the immigration news this week hasn’t been dystopian and depressing enough, Reuters published a report on Friday detailing all the ways private prison conglomerates are squeezing free labor and extra cash out of immigrants seeking asylum.

Reuters reported on several detention centers like the Adelanto Detention Facility in California, owned by the two billion-plus dollar corporation GEO Group, where inmates like Duglas Cruz can “choose” to work for as little as $1 a day in order to buy extra food and accessories. And how much, exactly, does that $1 get you?

A can of commissary tuna sold for $3.25. That is more than four times the price at a Target store near the small desert town of Adelanto, about two hours northeast of Los Angeles. Cruz stuck with ramen noodles at 58 cents a package, double the Target price. A miniature deodorant stick, at $3.35 and more than three days’ wages, was an impossible luxury, he said

Trump’s evangelical cabal is behind Republican attacks on women’s reproductive rights.
Credit: Google Images

With myriad national crises consuming the lion’s share of the news cycles since Trump shutdown the government to impress Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, with valuable assistance from Mitch McConnell, it was easy to miss what should be considered good news for women in 13 states – even if it is only temporary.

While many women, and the men who love them, are well aware that, spurred on by the Vatican, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the so-called personhood movement, Republicans are working feverishly to eradicate women’s reproductive rights.

Since the conservative Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling gave religious corporations the right to withhold contraception coverage from their employees, the Vatican-affiliated religious right has been on a tear to allow every employer to punish women, married or otherwise, who dare to have sexual relations “without consequences.”

Although Trump is not remotely religious, and certainly not a Christian by any measure, his administration has spent no small amount of energy to make a “substantial number of women lose access to birth control coverage” because it is contrary […]

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