Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross made a complete jackass of himself when, last month in Saudi Arabia—an authoritarian monarchy that strictly prohibits almost all dissent—he remarked that there were no protests there when Donald Trump visited, just "a genuinely good mood."
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross made a complete jackass of himself when, last month in Saudi Arabia—an authoritarian monarchy that strictly prohibits almost all dissent—he remarked that there were no protests there when Donald Trump visited, just "a genuinely good mood."
Following President Donald's Trump recent visit toSaudi Arabia, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross came under fire for his tone-deafremarksin which he lauded the lack of public protest he witnessed while in the country.
Areportpublished byHuman Rights Watchand Amnesty International on Tuesday offers a worrying explanation for why public dissent is so hard to find in the oil-rich kingdom.
In what Sarah Leah Whitson ofHuman Rights Watchcalleda ploy to "settle scores and crush dissent under the guise of combating ‘terrorism,'"Saudi Arabiais reportedly set to execute 14 protestors following trials rife with inequities and abuse.
"Court documents show that all defendants, including the 14 sentenced to death, were held in pretrial detention for more than two years before their trial began,"notedHuman Rights Watch. "In nearly all the trial judgments analyzed, defendants retracted their 'confessions,' saying they were coerced in circumstances that in some cases amounted to torture, including beatings and prolonged solitary confinement. The court rejected all torture allegations without investigating the claims." [...]
Of those set to be executed, four were deemed guilty of crimes committed when they were teenagers. All 14 are Shiites, apersecutedreligious minority in the kingdom. The report notes that there are 38 Saudi Shiites "currently sentenced to death." [...]
“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” ~James Baldwin, Collected Essays, published 1998
No one likes the idea of General Motors' collapse. GM executives don't like it. Workers don't like it. Dealers don't like it. Stockholders don't like it. Bondholders don't like it. Taxpayers don't like it. No one likes seeing so many who have worked for decades lose so much of their pensions and health care. No one wants to see a century old mainstay of the economy tottering on the brink.
But for the far right, there's a far bigger principle at work: government intervention is stinky. Once the government has invested in something, it's tainted by the unholy whiff of impure capitalism -- a smell that the farthest of the far right place just below catfish cheese bait. Worse, the government's largest partner in ownership of the new GM will be the United Autoworkers Union. In Wingnutia, that's like pairing cheese bait with roadkill possum (which every conservative knows is only proper in months containing the letter 'R').
So now that we are all investors in the comeback of GM, with billions riding on the company's resurrection, conservatives have developed a brilliant plan: We will boycott ourselves!
Ontoday’sKagro in the Morningshow: Kushner’s Saud-ish arms deal is fake. (KITMcalled BS on that right away.) Hell, Trump’s dating life was fake, too. Really, what isn’t fake at this point? Armando joins to discuss the emerging Qatar crisis, congressional probes and the latest Russian hacking story.
1. There is no news outlet in the world that genuinely wants you, Donald J. Trump, to stop using Twitter. Donald Trump on Twitter is a golden ticket to a Wonka-esque land of crackpot theories and loud burping noises. In past years CNN would have to shoot down a commercial airliner to get the same sort of consistent news fodder that you, Donald J. Trump, provide them on a daily basis. There are indeed people in the country who want you to stop using Twitter; many of them work in the same building you do.
2. So which idiot in Donald Trump's immediate line of vision is telling him that the "media" does not want him to tweet? How did this come up? Who was the poor sap that gently suggested to Donald Trump that his lawyers would greatly prefer he shut his enormous onion-scented trap for two sodding seconds, and how many seconds after that suggestion did it take for Donald Trump to deduce that this pitiable administration nobody was in fact a plant for his old nemesis, Mean Guy He Saw On TV?
3. What (and this is just idle curiosity at this point) is the "FAKE MSM"?
Top soccer stars have rallied around 8-year-old Mili Hernandez, a talented young athlete who was forced out of a soccer tournament when organizers thought she was boy due to her short haircut. According to Think Progress, Mili’s parents tried to fight the decision by showing them her insurance card and a medical form, but they claim “it did not change the minds of the tournament organizers.” “She was in shock, she was crying,” said Mili’s dad.
Mili wasn’t alone in getting disqualified thanks to the grown-up’s bullshit either, because her entire team was kicked out of the soccer tournament. Organizers told Mili’s family they could appeal the ruling to the Nebraska State Soccer Association, but the tournament came and went, leaving Mili to bravely dust off her shoulders and return to practicing—but not before getting some words of encouragement from some Olympic gold medalists:
“Listen, I’ve heard the news and all I can say is that your courage to want to stand up and talk about it and your bravery is going to help that next kid that’s put in this similar situation,” [Abby]Wambach said in the video. “You’re inspiring. You’re a natural born leader honey, and I’m so proud of you. I want to tell you a few things. First of all, you don’t look like a boy, you look like a girl, with short hair, and that’s okay.
“Also, I know somebody else who has short hair. She’s won gold medals and a World Cup and US Soccer Player of the Year and FIFA Player of the Year. You can do anything you want to do and you can be anything you want to be and guess what, you can look like whatever you want to look like to do it.”
Mia Hamm, another two-time Olympic gold medalist, tweeted “Hey Mili, we would love to host you at one of our camps@TeamFirstSA. Be you!” U.S. women’s national team player Lydia Williams tweeted a picture of herself as a child—also with a short haircut similar to Mili’s—with the caption, “Guess I should've been disqualified too. Keep doing you, Mili.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and DHS Sec. John Kelly
Attorney General Jeff Sessions and DHS Sec. John Kelly
Advocates and legal experts told New Jersey’s Assembly Judiciary Committee that ICE’s ongoing arrests at courthouses continue to terrify immigrant domestic violence victims and others seeking to access the justice system. Despite extraordinary pleas from two state Supreme Court chief justices, Jeff Sessions and Department of Homeland Security Sec. John Kelly refuse to back down their terror campaign and classify courthouses as “sensitive locations” that should be avoided by ICE. The experts told the panel “that the problem is much larger” than what the state’s chief justice told Kelly in his letter last April, because “the majority of such arrests are not happening in state criminal courts, but rather in and around municipal and family courts”:
“It’s not just that someone who’s a major drug dealer is now being arrested inside a courtroom, but it’s people … who have tickets for unlicensed driving and no other offenses other than being here without status,” explained Susan Roy, an officer with the New Jersey chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “So you sort of wonder at this point: Do the ends justify the means?”
The New York Times has published another of those scary stories about the epidemic in drug overdoses in the United States. Last year, the Times calculates, nearly 60,000 Americans died from overdoses of prescription and illegal drugs. That’s an increase over the previous year of 19 percent, a record. And 2017 looks to be worse.
Because official statistics from the Centers for Disease Control take months to compile, the Times did its own survey by contacting all 50 state health departments and, in the cases where those departments had not yet made their numbers available, selected counties or coroner offices:
The initial data points to large increases in drug overdose deaths in states along the East Coast, particularly Maryland, Florida, Pennsylvania and Maine. In Ohio, whichfiled a lawsuitlast week accusing five drug companies of abetting the opioid epidemic, we estimate overdose deaths increased by more than 25 percent in 2016. [...]
This exponential growth in overdose deaths in 2016 didn't extend to all parts of the country. In some states in the western half of the U.S., our data suggests deaths may have leveled off or even declined. According toDr. Dan Ciccarone, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an expert in heroin use in the United States, this geographic variation may reflect a historical divide in the nation’sheroin marketbetween the powdered heroin generally found east of the Mississippi River and the Mexican black tar heroin found to the west. [...]
“This epidemic, it’s got no face,” said Chris Eisele, the president of the Warren County Fire Chiefs’ Association and fire chief of Deerfield Township. The Narcotics Anonymous meetings here are populated by lawyers, accountants, young adults and teenagers who described comfortable middle-class upbringings.
In the 15-year stretch from 1999 to 2014, more than 165,000 people in the United States were counted as having died from overdoses related to opioid pain medication. The Drug Abuse Warning Network estimated that misuse or abuse of narcotic pain relievers were responsible for more than 420,000 emergency department visits in 2011, the most recent year for which we have data. While the leading causes of death—heart disease and cancer—have plummeted, the death rate associated with opioid pain has gone the other direction.
Trump demonstrates how much he cares about worker safety.
Trump demonstrates how much he cares about worker safety.
Donald Trump, populist hero of the working class. It’s a myth, but it’s an enduring one and, to the extent that Trump does or did have a minority of working-class supporters, he’s certainly bent on testing their loyalty. Under Trump, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has already put off enforcement of two key workplace safety protections the Obama administration put in place.
Beryllium exposure kills about 100 people a year. Silica exposure kills about 700 people a year. The people exposed to beryllium and silica at work are in blue-collar jobs like construction and manufacturing. And Trump stocked his Labor Department with alligators like this:
During the early months of the Trump administration, a former lobbyist for an industry group that has opposed the beryllium, silica and record-keeping rules served on the transition team at the Department of Labor, which oversees OSHA. That official, Geoffrey Burr, who has since moved to the Department of Transportation as chief of staff, had been a lobbyist for the Associated Builders and Contractors, which represents nonunion construction companies.
But don’t worry, Big Daddy Trump is going to magically make everything all better:
Asked about the Trump administration’s approach to occupational safety, a spokesman for the White House said, “The President and his administration care very much about worker safety, but believe the Obama administration’s approach was counterproductive, and we think we can do better.” He added that decisions to repeal and reduce specific OSHA regulations had not been made.
If limiting workplace exposure to substances that kill around 800 people a year is “counterproductive,” you have to ask what the goal is. It’s not like Trump’s people are proposing some other means of getting to the goal of fewer dead workers here—he’s not plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into medical research to prevent or cure the effects of exposure. It’s just “we’re going to allow exposure and still do better, bye.”
But who are we kidding. The productivity they’re looking for is corporate profit, workers’ lives be damned.
As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spins away on his health care hamster wheel with visions of tax reform dancing through his head, other Republican lawmakers are a tad frustrated the GOP-controlled Congress isn't getting much of anything done. They're also uniquely worried about the budget deal that's coming due in September with zero preparation being done in advance.
Let's take a turn with Politico through the halls of Congress, shall we? Oh, there's Lindsey Graham. Wonder what he thinks.
“I’m very frustrated ... we’re going to do all these things by Sept. 30? Give me a break. We’re going to cut taxes, pass health care, set aside sequestration?” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “We should have an agenda. We know we’re not going to pass a budget with sequestration caps. I’m not.”
Darn those sequestration spending caps House Republicans demanded back in 2011 as a condition of voting to raise the debt ceiling. Now it's gonna take actual leadership and forethought and negotiation—otherwise known as legislating—to change them.
Oh wait, there's Georgia Sen. David Perdue. Wonder how he feels about all that advance work on the budget.
“When are we going to do the appropriations? We’re not talking about that,” moaned Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.). “It’s gonna go to a [continuing resolution] or an omnibus. We get an up-or-down vote on the whole thing, which is what I’m yelling about.”
Ok, so there's no GOP budget, no funding levels, no appropriations process—what could go wrong? The always upbeat GOP Sen. John McCain saw this whole budget disaster coming from a mile off.
After seven years—seven years—of promising Obamacare repeal and replacement, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is doing precisely what House Speaker Paul Ryan did: slap together a plan in a matter of weeks and try to force it through his chamber on a party-line vote. Where the Zombie Trumpcare bill Ryan forced through was a slapdash cut and paste of Obamacare, with lots of tax cuts for the rich and decimated Medicaid, the Senate bill is likely to be a cut and paste of Zombie Trumpcare. Senate Republican leadership estimates that the Senate version will overlap the House bill by as much as 80 percent.
Which means it will still hurt the most vulnerable people the hardest. For example, children, according to a new study from Brandeis University, which estimates 4.7 million school-aged children would lose their Medicaid coverage under Trumpcare.
Black and Hispanic children would be disproportionately affected, according to the study, released last week. […]
The Brandeis study’s authors point to the GOP bill’s goal of returning the federal income eligibility limit to 100 percent of the federal poverty level (now $20,420 for a family of 3) for children ages 6 to 19, down from the current 138 percent threshold under the Affordable Care Act. […]
The decline in the number of black children eligible in Georgia would be 74,024, the second-largest decline in the country, the study says. States with the largest declines in the number of black children eligible for Medicaid under the AHCA include Florida (88,200); Georgia (74,024); Texas (66,872); North Carolina (52,628); and New York (48,449). The decline in the percentage of black children eligible in Georgia would be 12 percent.
The decline in the number of Hispanic children eligible in Georgia is estimated at 40,700. The states with the largest declines in the number of Hispanic children eligible for Medicaid under the AHCA include California (462,474); Texas (358,479); Florida (118,852); New York (90,639); and Arizona (71,580). Georgia ranks 8th. The decline in the percentage of Hispanic children eligible in Georgia would be 16.4 percent.
That's a feature, not a bug, for most Republicans. What's a few million brown or black kids' lives when they're getting their massive tax cuts?
As the White House braces for former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony Thursday, sources tell ABC News the relationship between President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has become so tense that Sessions at one point recently even suggested he could resign. [...]
Asked by ABC News if the attorney general had threatened or offered to resign, Justice Department spokesperson Sarah Isgur Flores declined to comment.
Jeff Sessions was one of Trump's most reliable backers, shares Trump's contempt for civil rights and the rights of immigrants, and has been on the job for less than four months—and the relationship is already going to hell.
Perhaps it does not matter how many sycophants and loyalists Trump surrounds himself with. Regardless of how much assistance they give him or how slavishly they attempt to cater to his rapidly shifting whims Donald Trump is simply incapable of carrying out the duties of the office.
Booking.com indicates that the cheapest room you can grab at the Trump International Hotel in Washington D. C. will run you $595 a night (discounted from $735). That may sound like a lot for a room that feels compelled to advertise that you get a “private bathroom” and “air conditioning,” but there are special features of this particular hotel that aren’t included between free toiletries and (really) toilet.
With the Trump administration’s hard push for increased fossil fuel production, it may come as little surprise that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke would address the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry trade group.
But the location of a March 23 API board of directors meeting, where Zinke was a guest speaker, is raising eyebrows. As a recently published log of the interior secretary’s scheduled meetings shows, the speech was held at Trump International Hotel in Washington, which has been at the center of conflict-of-interest concerns.
Way back 19 weeks ago, when Donald Trump was a new born autocrat whining about the under-reporting of his vast, huge, endless inaugural crowd, the whole idea of Trump’s conflict of interest in making money by leasing a historic federal building seemed like a concern. The idea that politicians both foreign and domestic might seek to curry favor with Trump by giving him a peek at their Trump International room keys even brought talk of how it was a violation of the Constitutions’ “emoluments clause.”
That was, by rough count, seventeen thousand scandals and a million casual dismissals of the law ago. With Jared peddling $500,000 visas and Trump tossing endless golden anchors to the drowning concept of American “leadership,” overcharging oil men for sickening cocktails seems like a throwback to more innocent times. Times when we thought “Sure, he’s an ignorant, racist, sexist jackass … but how bad can he really be?”
Anthem Inc. has announced it is leaving the Obamacare marketplace for 2018, the first of potentially several withdrawals in different states. Anthem is the only health insurance provider on the marketplace in 20 counties in Ohio. Why is it leaving? In a word: Trump.
In announcing the decision, Anthem said that setting prices and making decisions about ACA plans has become “increasingly difficult due to the shrinking individual market as well as continual changes in federal operations, rules and guidance.” The insurer said the market remains “volatile,” and it cited the uncertainty surrounding key issues including federal payments that help reduce costs for low-income ACA enrollees.
The insurer said an “increasing lack of overall predictability simply does not provide a sustainable path forward to provide affordable plan choices for consumers.”
Anthem is in 13 states and has filed its proposed offerings for 2018 in Virginia, Maine, and Connecticut. That leaves a bunch of states where it's operating watching with trepidation. For example Colorado, where it is the only Obamacare insurer in 14 of the state's counties. Or Missouri, where they still haven't decided if they'll stay on. Missouri has already lost Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, which covered about 67,000 people in the state.
There are about 13,000 people signed up in the Ohio counties Anthem is leaving, according to Kaiser Family Foundation's Cynthia Cox, accounting for about 6 percent of all enrollees in the state. But there are at least 275,000 people nationally for whom Anthem is the only option. Given the uncertainty Trump has created with his sabotage, it's not likely other insurers will step up to fill the voids left by bailing insurers.
This is all part of his plan to force Democrats to come to the table to, inexplicably, help him pass a bill that would leave millions more uninsured. But if the insurance companies are blaming Trump for this, their customers will, too. And Democrats sure as hell aren’t going to get in the way of that.
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