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Month: February 2017

Making the country safe for white supremacy

Making the country safe for white supremacy

by digby

Luckily we only have violent Muslim extremists in Real America, so this will be fine:

The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a US government program designed to counter all violent ideologies so that it focuses solely on Islamist extremism, five people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

The program, “Countering Violent Extremism,” or CVE, would be changed to “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism,” the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.

Such a change would reflect Trump’s election campaign rhetoric and criticism of former President Barack Obama for being weak in the fight against Islamic State and for refusing to use the phrase “radical Islam” in describing it. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for attacks on civilians in several countries.

The CVE program aims to deter groups or potential lone attackers through community partnerships and educational programs or counter-messaging campaigns in cooperation with companies such as Google and Facebook.

Also, the House just passed this today:

The House on Thursday struck down an Obama-era regulation that sought to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.

The House voted 235-180 to roll back an attempt by the Social Security Administration to block disability recipients with mental disorders like schizophrenia and severe anxiety from owning guns.

What could go wrong?

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Leaking like the Titanic

Leaking like the Titanic

by digby

We have never seen anything like this. And the wingnuts and ring kissers can pretend this is part of some master plan or present it as a genius form of organization but it is not. It is incompetence and paranoia, which is probably even more dangerous. Politico reports:

A feeling of distrust has taken hold in the West Wing of Donald Trump’s White House and beyond, as his aides view each other and officials across the federal government and on Capitol Hill with suspicion.

The result has been a stream of leaks flowing from the White House and federal agencies, and an attempt to lock down information and communication channels that could have serious consequences across the government and at the Capitol, where Trump tries to implement and advance his agenda.

In the White House itself, one top aide tried to take the office slated for another aide, Steve Bannon is looking to hire his own PR guru, and the details of Trump’s calls with foreign leaders, typically closely held, are suddenly out in the open.

The starkest manifestation of the paranoia has played out with Trump’s executive orders, as many key players were left in the dark as the White House forged ahead with sweeping, controversial policies.

While reports have emerged in recent days about various officials blindsided by the orders, interviews with several people involved in the process reveal the extent of the secrecy and chaos. The highly controversial immigration and travel ban signed by Trump last Friday was so tightly held that White House aides, top Cabinet officials, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and other Trump allies had no idea what was in it even when it was signed — and that was just how top advisers and aides wanted it.

“Someone would have leaked it,” one administration official said.
[…]
Whether the chaos will actually hurt the president remains unclear. Trump’s pick of Judge Neil Gorsuch to be his Supreme Court nominee has heartened conservatives, and many say they are willing to look past the drama of the Trump orbit if he passes the kind of conservative policies they want. Lanhee Chen, a former top aide to Mitt Romney, said his supporters would label his presidency a “huge victory because they see a president who looks like he’s following through.”

Well sure.  Besides, Jesus really only cares about tax cuts and fetuses, dontcha know. Refugee children wouldn’t really rate with him.

Senior Trump aides say they don’t trust the agencies because they believe they are stacked with Democrats and people loyal to former President Barack Obama. “Every time something got to one of the agencies, it got out,” one person said about various memos that were sent during the transition.

Until the agencies are filled with Trump people, the agencies are unlikely to get information quickly, several people involved in the administration say. Agency officials have been specifically directed to not tell others outside Trump world about their plans, people with knowledge of the conversations say. “They are really limiting their contact with us,” one longtime government employee said.

Agency staff say the White House’s unwillingness to share information is also causing issues because it is difficult to implement their executive orders or policies or study effectiveness unless the contents are known in advance. For instance, officials at the Department of Homeland Security say they could have better prepared for the travel ban had they not learned about the restrictions in real time. Instead, foreign travelers were left in limbo for hours at airports and were given conflicting information about their entry into the United States, as protests raged outside.

State Department officials, meanwhile, likely would have flagged problems in the executive order on reversing the decision on the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. Experts say the order was flawed because it involved a company in the middle of suing the government.

It’s not just the agencies who feel left in the dark and distrusted by Trump’s White House. Capitol Hill leaders say they are trying to find “back channels” with policy experts and others to discern what the White House is doing. Last week, aides in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office tried to find out about the immigration order but couldn’t.

“We’d hear a little bit of it,” one senior GOP aide said. “We kind of knew it was out there, but we couldn’t figure out exactly what they were going to say, and when they were going to say it.”

They learned on TV, and “then we spent all weekend trying to clean up their mess,” one person said. It took almost 36 hours after the ban was announced for the White House to send talking points. Had they sent the talking points earlier, and trusted others, surrogates could have helped them defend their policy, several top GOP aides said.

The White House really doesn’t care because they don’t care whether something is legal. They plan to rule by edict. The rest is nothing more than a game.

Inside the White House, several Trump staffers said they were shocked at the number of leaks coming out of the operation having not worked in the Trump orbit before. “People are just knifing each other,” one of these people said.

“Trying to nail down who the leakers are is like trying to count the cockroaches under the couch,” said Michael Caputo, a longtime Trump adviser who keeps in touch with some Trump aides.

More leaks sprung up in the past 24 hours, as reports emerged that Trump made provocative statements to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull during phone calls with the foreign allies in recent days. According to a leaked transcript of his call with Peña Nieto, Trump threatened to send U.S. troops to stop “bad hombres down there” unless the Mexican military stepped up to control their domestic problems. On the Australia call, Trump reportedly blasted Turnbull for pushing the U.S. to honor an agreement to accept 1,250 refugees from an Australian detention center and then abruptly cut off the phone call.

While articles popped up about dismay within the White House at some of these calls, Trump’s counselor, Kellyanne Conway, insisted on Thursday morning that the leaks aren’t coming from inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

“Obviously, we’re not commenting on private conversations in that way. We give a readout to the media on most conversations but we don’t release transcripts and we certainly don’t mischaracterize them as some others have. This is the practice for us though. We’re the ones not leaking,” she told Fox News.

That would be what’s known in the vernacular as an “alternative fact.” She knows this stuff is coming from the White House. For all we know some of it’s coming from her. After all, until very recently, she was just another Villager hanging out with the DC in-crowd. Maybe she’s the one talking out of turn. In fact, I think she is. Someone should tell Trumpie.

Despite the attempts to project a functional, harmonious White House, sources say it’s far from that. People involved in the administration sometimes don’t trust each other because there are several camps that remain warring factions. Top Trump aides often travel with him to events they don’t necessarily need to attend because they want to be close to the power center and in the pictures.

Steve Bannon — who has a loyal cadre of aides and allies, like Stephen Miller, the White House top policy adviser — has been expanding his power base in the White House. Two sources said Bannon is looking to bring in his own PR adviser, Alexandra Preate, into the White House. Preate has previously served as both Bannon’s spokeswoman and a spokeswoman for Breitbart News. He’s also hired Breitbart immigration writer Julia Hahn and former Breitbart national security editor Seb Gorka, among others, bringing them into policy roles.

Other Trump staffers have been chafing at what they view as Miller and Bannon’s secretive behavior, including their tendency to keep information from others in the White House, like on their executive orders.

The paranoia in the White House is also driven by the fact that no one is quite sure who is up and who is down, and who is on their side. One person involved in the administration described the conflict like this: “There are four chiefs of staff, and that’s three too many.”

In the past week, memorandums have leaked, trickling out from agencies, that the White House has denied were official documents. The White House has denied the documents, but dozens are floating around, and even senior officials sometimes say they have no idea if a document will be signed.

Sometimes, executive orders are canceled at the last minute, or added at the last minute, or changed at the last minute, with little explanation as to why to others.

And the power silos may get worse. Bannon and Kushner, who has stoked envy among others because of his enormous clout with the president, are creating their own separate group in the White House to create strategy.

Meanwhile, Priebus has stacked much of the West Wing with Republican aides from his time as chairman of the Republican National Committee. And he controls much of the hiring across the government. But that often means little in Trump world, because the president will make a decision based on one conversation. He will tell several people he wants them to handle an issue, creating competition.

Priebus aides and allies are wary of aides like Miller, who they believe give the president bad information and then Trump “takes it in, every bit of it, and that’s just not good,” one person said. Yet Miller himself was caught off guard when “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on Monday launched into a broadside on his conduct and wondered what, or who, sparked the host to blame him, a person familiar with the issue said. 

Conway, Trump’s final campaign manager who initially resisted a White House role, has repeatedly referenced Valerie Jarrett and their parallel roles to show her influence on the president. She irked others last week when several long profiles of her emerged in the news media, including one that called her the “face of the movement.” A number of people close to Trump’s orbit say Conway has been a little on the outside since the team moved to Washington, but Conway’s supporters note other men have also had flattering profiles, and the president continues to like and trust her.

“If you see me on TV, it’s because the president wants me there,” Conway recently told The Hollywood Reporter. A Conway friend said the grumbling was “ridiculous misogyny.”

And Anthony Scaramucci, a Trump fundraiser who was expected to join the White House but now is unlikely to do so, has aligned himself with Bannon. People close to Scaramucci say the Wall Street executive believes Priebus or his allies are trying to damage him with bad stories in the news media, including about the ethics around the divestitures of his vast wealth. Priebus allies say that isn’t true, but the stories have continued to come out with leaks about his controversial business transaction. Scaramucci has told people this is “a tough town,” one person familiar with his comments said.

While he was in New York, Omarosa Manigault, another Trump aide, sought to take his office with a better view of the Washington Monument, according to people familiar with her move. Manigault now may get the office, since Scaramucci is now not expected to join the administration.

Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant, said Trump would be largely unconcerned with all of the gossip. “He is not going to stop being Trump. He doesn’t mind all the chaos,” Stone said.

Stone said there might be a “burnout rate” of working with Trump. “And if his first team isn’t getting the job done, if it’s not coming together, he’s perfectly capable of changing teams. You saw him do it three times during the campaign.”

Trump has never run anything bigger than his little branding and real estate family business. He literally has no clue how to run a large organization, how the government functions or, really, how anything works. And, by the way, neither does even one person in his inner circle.

They are crazy, to be sure. And they are very, very bold. But they are incompetent and they are stupid.

This is the most 3rd rate administration in American history. We will be lucky to get out of it alive.

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Bad dream

Bad dream


by digby

This guy was the CEO of Breitbart.com, which he personally called the platform of the “white nationalist “alt-right” just six months ago. Now he’s running the world.

I think this picture says everything. And it’s terrifying. It’s of President Trump (gulp) yelling at the Australian Prime Minister who he apparently thinks made a “good deal” for his shitty little country and is laughing at us for being fools and now Trump’s gonna reneg on the “bad deal” for America and show him what’s what.

He is treating the rest of the world like a bunch of painting contractors he’s going to stiff now that they’ve done the work. Let ’em sue, amirite?

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The Trump administration’s war on foreign children

The Trump administration’s war on foreign children

by digby

I wrote about it for Salon this morning:

One of the more inexplicable actions of last weekend, as the chaotic ban on travelers and immigrants from several Muslim countries lurched into effect without any planning or notice, was the detention at Dulles airport of a five-year-old boy arriving from Iran who was traveling home to Maryland. His mother was anxiously waiting for him in the arrival area, and CNN showed the footage of their eventual reunion, which illustrated the inanity of this blanket ban more perfectly than any words could have done.

Those images were seen all over the world and given President Trump’s obsessive cable news habit, one might have assumed the administration would be prepared to answer a question from the press about whether it makes sense to treat small children as potential terrorist threats. This was White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s answer:

You can go through and nitpick and say, “Well, this individual this,” but that’s why we slow it down a little and make sure, that if they are a five-year-old, then maybe they’re with their parents or they don’t pose a threat. But to assume that, just because of someone’s age or gender or whatever, that they don’t pose a threat, would be misguided and wrong.

This lack of common sense is one of the many factors that makes the Trump administration’s actions so chilling. It requires no more than a glance to know that a five-year-old child is not a terrorist. If we are now so paranoid as to believe he might actually be a walking time-bomb, they could take another 30 seconds and have him walk through the normal screening equipment used at every airport. All of this should take no more than a minute. Anything beyond that is completely ridiculous.

It turned out the boy in question was a U.S. citizen, and the authorities had been advised in advance of his arrival by Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. They held him anyway. This incident ended well; the little boy was finally reunited with his mother and they went back home. There are many children who won’t have such a happy ending, kids who have already been through hell. We, as Americans, are turning our backs on them.

There are dozens of stories all over the media about people in dire straits desperate to escape their war-torn countries and join relatives in the U.S. The worst, of course, are the Syrians, who find themselves in the middle of a living nightmare without much hope of waking up. An estimated 5 million Syrians have fled their homeland and millions more are displaced within the country. UNICEF calls it the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. And at least 2 million of these refugees are children.

Some of them are kids with serious medical problems, like those in this heartbreaking story which chronicles the tragic circumstances of a six-year-old cancer patient and this one about a four-month-old baby with a serious heart condition. They desperately need to come to the U.S. for treatment and won’t be able to under the travel ban. It’s part of the immeasurable human cost of this callous and unnecessary policy.

The Trump administration’s indifference to their plight by now is legendary. During the campaign Trump not only promised to ban Muslims altogether, he also said he would send back all the Syrian refugees. It sounded at the time as if he intended to round them up and deport them, in the same way he pledged to round up undocumented workers from Mexico. So far he has only sent back those who arrived with what they thought were valid visas. But you never know. The policy is expanding by the day.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reported on another group of children who have been banned under Trump’s executive order barring all refugees:

President Trump’s executive order on immigration has halted a government program that allows Central American children to seek refugee status in the United States … The program is available only to children who have a parent who is residing in the U.S. legally and in some cases a child’s adult relative. Applicants are screened in their home countries …

“This program was an important recognition of the very real violence in these countries,” said Maureen Meyer, who advocates for migrant rights with the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America. “Clearly the suspension of this program puts these children at more risk. A lot of people that are in danger could be killed.”

You will remember the crisis provoked a few years ago when thousands of kids from Central America made harrowing trips to the U.S. border to escape the violence of their home countries. (I wrote about that issue for Salon back in 2014.)

Trump’s order was justified as necessary for national security. It’s hard for decent people to imagine how stopping children from reuniting with a parent or adult relative will keep our nation safe. But the Trump administration is full of people, including the president, who believe that most foreigners are a destructive force in America society.

The Washington Post published a report on Wednesday about Trump’s powerful adviser Steve Bannon, quoting his candid comments from a radio show last spring:

“Don’t we have a problem with legal immigration?” asked Bannon repeatedly. “Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?” he said, meaning the problem of native-born Americans being unable to find jobs and rising wages.

Nobody agrees more with this worldview than Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s prospective attorney general. Trump himself may have hedged this issue slightly with his fatuous promise to build a “big, beautiful door” in his big, ugly wall. But his hostility toward foreigners and immigrants is palpable.

Rumor has it the administration may add Venezuela and Colombia to the list of countries whose citizens are barred from entering the U.S., possibly to fight off the legal challenges against the existing executive order based on its evident religious discrimination. The heinous Muslim ban may have to be withdrawn if the courts don’t buy it.

But denying refugees, even children, entrance to the United States for whatever reason they can conjure up is something leading figures in the Trump administration believe in for its own sake. They want to return this country, which was founded and populated by immigrants, to some imaginary state of purity. It’s absurd on its face.

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The cruelty is the same by @BloggersRUs

The cruelty is the same
by Tom Sullivan

“When they ask at school what you are, you tell them you’re an American.”

In echoes of the discrimination Irish immigrants faced in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it is a story my mother tells occasionally. It was something my grandmother told her, firmly, when she was entered grade school. My mother’s dad, my grandfather, was a Chicago fireman. And Catholic.

By the time I was a teen, my grandmother spoke disparagingly of “the blacks” on the South Side and, later in life, of Indian immigrants, as though whole families boarded a jumbo jet in New Dehli, flew half way around the world, and landed in America destitute and on “the dole.”

Will we ever learn?

But those are the good, old days of greatness President Donald Trump wants to resurrect. A lot of his followers do, too. As a showman, Trump knows to give the people what they want. The targets today are different, but the blind cruelty is the same.

In the New York Times, Masha Gessen and Martina Navratilova write about what Trump’s anti-immigrant jihad means for their families:

We wrote this together because we have a few things in common. Some are obvious: Both of us came to the United States as teenagers fleeing Communist regimes; both of us are queer. We are also both moved alternately to tears and to rage by the actions of the new American president. One thing that we share is less obvious: This anger and despair make both of us feel as if we are losing our home.

A young friend from Russia just received her American citizenship and voted for the first time in November. I wonder does she feel the same now?

After recounting their long road to acceptance (which this morning seems tenuous), Gessen and Navratilova conclude:

One in four people in the United States is an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. A majority of people in the country are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. If they — if we — do not continue to stand up against Mr. Trump, we will lose our home, too, even as we stay in our houses.

Let’s hope their mortgages are paid up, because even that is tenuous. Former OneWest Bank CEO Steven Mnuchin made a tidy living running a “foreclosure machine” known for throwing thousands of people out of their houses, wrongfully it is alleged. Ironically, Mnuchin faces a confirmation vote in the U.S. Senate to be Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury.

There are reports this morning that in a telephone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump labeled an existing refugee resettlement swap “the worst deal ever.” By some reports, Trump got testy, badgered the Turnbull as if he were a subcontractor, and hung up the phone:

“Do you believe it? The Obama administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!,” Trump tweeted. The resettlement plan involves sending refugees being held by Australia in offshore camps, many of them from the Middle East or South Asia, onto the U.S.

The message came after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull defended his relationship with Australia’s biggest ally in the wake of a Washington Post report that Trump berated him over the deal. Trump “abruptly ended” a phone call with the Australian leader on Jan. 28 after 25 minutes even though they had been scheduled to speak for an hour, the paper said. It cited unidentified U.S. officials who were briefed about the conversation.

This is Trump’s America. Ain’t it great to be great again?

Is Trump threatening a border war?

Is Trump threatening a border war?

by digby

Could be.

I’ve been joking on twitter for a while now that Trump is planning an invasion of Mexico. If this is true then my joke isn’t really all that funny anymore:

During a phone call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Friday, US President Donald Trump disparaged Mexico and threatened to use military force against the drug trade, according to Dolia Estevez, a journalist based in Washington, DC.

In an interview with the Mexican news outlet Aristegui Noticias, Estevez, who cited sources on both sides of the call, said, “It was a very offensive conversation where Trump humiliated Peña Nieto.”

Estevez said that while both the White House and the Mexican president have released information about the call, both sides characterized it as a “friendly” conversation and neither disclosed what was said.

Estevez said she “obtained confidential information” corroborating the content of the discussion.

“I don’t need the Mexicans. I don’t need Mexico,” Trump reportedly told the Mexican president. “We are going to build the wall and you all are going to pay for it, like it or not.”

Trump hinted that the US would force Mexico to fund the wall with a 10% tax on Mexican exports “and of 35% on those exports that hurt Mexico the most,” Estevez wrote in Proyecto Puente.

Before the call, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump was considering a tax on imports from Mexico to pay for the wall.

“He even complained of the bad role the [Mexican] army is playing in the fight against narco trafficking,” Estevez, who writes for Forbes and is close to the Mexican journalist and anchorwoman Carmen Aristegui, said during an interview with Aristegui’s eponymous news outlet.

Trump “even suggested to [Peña Nieto] that if they are incapable of combatting [narco trafficking] he may have to send troops to assume this task,” she said.

The US president “said he would not permit the drugs coming from Mexico to continue massacring our cities,” Estevez added. She said Trump went so far as to say, “I really didn’t want to go to Mexico last August,” referring to Trump’s visit to the Mexican capital last year.

Peña Nieto was accompanied on the call by people from his country’s foreign ministry, while Trump was joined by “the famous son-in-law,” likely meaning senior adviser Jared Kushner, and chief strategist Steven Bannon. Kushner is reportedly close to Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, and they were seen as the likely go-betweens for the two governments.

“Before this unusual onslaught, Peña was not firm,” Estevez said. “He was stammering.”

 Enrique Pena Nieto Luis Videgaray Mexico Trump foreign minister Mexico’s new foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, right, with Pena Nieto. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

Despite this confrontation, the Mexican government still believes in negotiating with the Trump administration, Estevez said.

She also reports that Videgaray met with US officials on Tuesday in Tapachula, near the Mexico-Guatemala border.

According to Estevez, the Mexican foreign minister met with Craig Deare, a member of Trump’s National Security Council handling the Western Hemisphere; Adm. Kurt Tidd, commander of US Southern Command; and Roberta Jacobson, the US ambassador to Mexico. The Mexican Foreign Ministry has made no mention of the encounter.

Estevez says the meeting was to address Mexican cooperation in deterring the flow of Central American migrants through Mexico to the US. However, neither US nor Mexican officials contacted by Estevez would confirm the meeting.

This will THRILL his followers. It’s exactly what they want to hear about their Dear Leader and his Big Swinging … ego.  Stickin’ it to Mexicans is one of the main reasons they voted for him. But this is an insane way to behave with our closest neighbor to the south and if Trump is really speaking this way, it’s not a sign of strength but of rank stupidity.

I will cling to the idea that this must be an exaggerated version of what went down because otherwise, things are even worse than I imagined. And what I imagined is really, really bad.

Update: It’s confirmed. Holy shit.

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Trump gets raves from one of his biggest fans

Trump gets raves from one of his biggest fans

by digby

That would be the white nationalist Richard Spencer, whose college protege and more recently Jeff Sessions’ staffer, Stephen Miller, now works at the highest level of the Trump administration:

Prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer lauded President Donald Trump’s statement commemorating International Holocaust Memorial Day that failed to mention Jews as a “de-Judification” of the Holocaust.

“President Trump’s press release was as seemingly banal as any other,” Spencer wrote in a post on his website. “But the kvetching came quickly.”

He complained that the Holocaust has become a standard rhetorical device in liberal “hyper-morality.”

“We can’t limit immigration, because Hitler. We can’t can’t be proud of ourselves as a Europeans, because Holocaust. White people can be Christian, but not too Christian, because Auschwitz,” Spencer wrote.

The Trump administration’s statement mentioned the “victims, survivors, heroes” of the Holocaust and “the innocent,” but broke from bipartisan tradition by failing to specifically mention Jews.

Spencer called the White House statement “especially Trumpian” for its “de-Judification” of the Holocaust. He argued that was “utterly defensible,” going on to claim it is “unimaginable for Jewish activists” to see the Holocaust, during which 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, treated as “just another genocide.”

It is “especially Trumpian” to say the Holocaust is “just another genocide.” Trumpian indeed.

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