Sunday, February 24th, 2019
Jimmy Tobias, Jesse Coleman, - The Intercept
Stephan: Here is example 4. Don't you feel proud about the quality of people at the top of the Interior Department?
The Department of the Interior
Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty
Only a few short weeks after President Donald Trump nominated David Bernhardt, a former oil and agriculture industry lobbyist, to run the Interior Department, the agency is facing a slew of new allegations that top officials violated federal ethics rules by keeping cozy ties to their former employers.
A lengthy ethics complaint filed Wednesday by the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, outlines “a disturbing pattern of misconduct” at the scandal-plagued Interior Department, including meetings that violate the White House’s own ethical pledge and good governance standards.
The Campaign Legal Center used public records, some of which were first obtained by The Intercept, to lodge the complaint against six top Interior Department officials, including Benjamin Cassidy, a top official at the department’s external affairs office and former National Rifle Association lobbyist; Assistant Secretary for Insular Affairs Douglas Domenech; White House liaison Lori Mashburn, a former Heritage Foundation staffer; and others.
The officials are among a little-known but powerful group of Department of Interior political appointees […]
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Sunday, February 24th, 2019
Jordan Smith, - Reader Supported News/The Intercept
Stephan: And here we have example 5. Kavanaugh, who many believe lied under oath, is part of the mutli-year program on the part of the Republican christofascists to put women in their place -- subordinate to men, who have the right to control their bodies.
Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh
Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty
The most obvious thing about the Supreme Court’s decision to stay a Louisiana law that would have shuttered two of the state’s three remaining abortion clinics is that it was Chief Justice John Roberts who stopped that from happening. Roberts joined the court’s four more liberal justices to deliver a 5-4 majority that maintains the status quo, for now, and keeps the clinics open.
What is perhaps less obvious, at least at first glance, is the level of intellectual dishonesty baked into a four-page dissent penned by the court’s newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh voted along with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch to deny the stay, but was the only justice to try to explain his thinking in writing. If he wanted to maintain the fidelity-to-precedent fiction he peddled at his confirmation hearings, it probably would have been better if he had stayed silent. The document is a mess of omissions and misrepresentations dressed up to appear anodyne.
At […]
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Sunday, February 24th, 2019
Andrea Germanos, Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan: Example 6. There are so many forms of attack on the equality of women that I can hardly keep track of them. The various equality movements have really threatened the manhood of the christofascists.
Demonstrators in Chicago protest against Trump’s expected “gag rule” on May 24, 2018.
Credit : Charles Edward Miller/flickr/cc
Reproductive rights advocates sounded the alarm Friday after the Trump administration released a final draft of a rule critics have called an attack on women’s rights and dubbed a “domestic gag rule.”
The implications of the restrictive changes to Title X—on which over 4 million people rely—”are staggering,” said Dr. Leana Wen, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, adding that the move amounted to “an attack on poor women and people of color.”
The release (pdf) came from the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Population Affairs. It “would prohibit federally funded family planning clinics from being housed in the same location as abortion providers” and “bar taxpayer-funded family planning clinics from referring women for abortions,” as the Associated Pressreports. The changes would affect not only (pdf) Planned Parenthood clinics, but numerous other health centers across the nation.
Given the president’s previous implementation and expansion of the so-called Mexico […]
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Saturday, February 23rd, 2019
JOE ROMM, - Think Progress
Stephan: The appointment of Will Happer to lead the Trump administration climate panel signals that nothing of consequence is going to happen to deal with climate change as long as Trump and the Republicans are in power. I think history will be brutal in its condemnation of this period in American history, and the quality of governance.
Will Happer attacking climate change on CNBC in 2013
In his ongoing war with U.S. intelligence agencies, President Donald Trump is now challenging the military’s longstanding conclusion that climate change poses a serious national security threat to America, appointing a fringe climate science denier to lead the effort.
Trump has decided to assemble a Presidential Committee on Climate Security, spearheaded by William Happer, one of the president’s National Security Council (NSC) appointees, the Washington Post reported after obtaining an NSC discussion paper on the subject.
“It’s designed to try to scare our intelligence, defense and science professionals into doing and saying nothing about this pressing threat,” retired Rear Admiral David Titley said in a statement.
Titley, a former oceanographer of the navy who led its Task Force on Climate Change, called Trump’s new panel “an embarrassment” and said Happer holds “an extreme, fringe view even for the tiny number of scientists” who deny climate science.
How extreme is Happer? He has claimed that more carbon pollution “would be a benefit” to humanity, as he wrote in a widely […]
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Saturday, February 23rd, 2019
Katherine Jackson, - Reuters/Raw Story
Stephan: The real terrorism in the United States has nothing to do with Muslims. Overwhelmingly it is White Nationalist hate groups. In my opinion, Trump has actively given them permission to act out, and they have, as this report lays out.
Amid a rise in reported anti-Semitic acts in the US, neo-Nazis in the state of Georgia burned a swastika on April 21, 2018 Amid a rise in reported anti-Semitic acts in the US, neo-Nazis in the state of Georgia burned a swastika on April 21, 2018
Credit: AFP Photo/SPENCER PLATT
The number of hate groups operating in the United States rose 7 percent to an all-time high in 2018, reflecting an increasingly divisive debate on immigration and demographic change, the Southern Poverty Law Center said on Wednesday.
The SPLC, which has tracked hate groups since 1971, found there were 1,020 operating in the United States last year, breaking the 1,018 record set in 2011. It marked the fourth consecutive year of growth.
The group’s annual report on hate activities blamed the rise in part on Republican President Donald Trump, whose administration has focused on reducing illegal and legal immigration into the United States.
“The numbers tell a striking story – that this president is not simply a polarizing figure but a radicalizing one,” said […]
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