turbinetree
turbinetree's JournalBannon's security clearance a challenge outside the White House
Source: The Hill
Legal experts say Stephen Bannon may face a challenge in his security clearance as President Trump's now-former chief strategist returns to his pre-White House career as executive chairman at the media company Breitbart.
“People with Top Secret clearances are bound by a non-disclosure agreement for life,” said Bradley Moss, a partner at the Law Office of Mark Zaid specializing in national security and security clearance law.
“Any time Breitbart now prints classified information they might now be required to clear it with the government," according to Moss.
The Trump administration announced Bannon’s ouster midday Friday, and Bannon says he resigned. The move appears to be at least in part due to a long-standing, contentious internal rift between Bannon and other populists on Trump’s staff and more mainstream voices like Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.
Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/347206-bannons-security-clearance-a-challenge-outside-the-white-house-experts
Hill Democrats Demand Meeting With Trumps HHS Over Obamacare Sabotage
The top Democrats on an array of House and Senate committee that deal with health care have fired off a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price demanding a briefing before the end of the month on what the lawmakers call the Trump administration’s “ongoing efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act.”
The letter cites several news investigations—including TPM’s report on HHS abandoning its partnerships with Latino, African American, youth, and women’s groups—and asks the department to immediately explain what it is doing to uphold and promote the Affordable Care Act as the open enrollment period approaches.
“Rather than encouraging enrollment in the Marketplaces, the Administration appears intent on depressing it, which we fear will contribute to destabilizing insurance markets and drive up costs for consumers,” the lawmakers wrote, referencing the Trump administration’s decisions to cut the length of the open enrollment period in half, cancel $22 million in contracts that funded programs at local libraries that assisted people in signing up for insurance, and redirect funds meant for promoting the ACA towards messaging against it.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/democrats-letter-hhs-obamacare-sabotage
Climate change will likely wreck their livelihoods but they still don't buy the science
In 50 years, the region near where I grew up, Cameron Parish in south-west Louisiana, will likely be no more. Or rather, it will exist, but it may be underwater, according to the newly published calculations of the Louisiana government. Coastal land loss is on the upswing, and with each hurricane that sweeps over the region, the timeline is picking up speed.
As a result, Cameron, the principal town in this 6,800-person parish (as counties are called in Louisiana), could be the first town in the US to be fully submerged by rising sea levels and flooding. So it’s here one would expect to feel the greatest sense of alarm over climate change and its consequences.
Instead, Cameron has earned a different kind of fame: it’s the county that, percentage-wise, voted more in favor of Trump than any other county in the US in last year’s election. Nearly 90% of the population did.
Why would some of the people most vulnerable to climate change vote for a politician skeptical of climate change’s existence? Why would people in Cameron Parish support policies that could ruin them?
To get to the root of this question, I slipped my tennis shoes into knee-high marsh waders, navigated the ropes on a rusty shrimp boat, and ate mountains of fried seafood. I spoke to people living different and yet parallel lives in Cameron Parish, where timelines are defined as pre-storm or post-storm, and where people kindly addressed me as Miss Shannon.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/18/louisiana-climate-change-skeptics-donald-trump-support
How the Republican party quietly does the bidding of white supremacists
It takes approximately 30 seconds to send a tweet. A half hour to draft and release a statement. And the shelf life of both is only marginally longer. We should not commend Republican party elected officials who claim outrage on social media at Trump’s remarks, often without daring to mention his name. The phony claimed outrage becomes dangerous if it convinces anyone that there is a distinction between Trump’s abhorrent comments and the Republican Party agenda.
The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the neo-Nazis are. It is the unmasking of the Republican party leadership. In the wake of last weekend’s horror and tragedy, let us finally, finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda of voter suppression, renewed mass incarceration and the expulsion of immigrants.
There is a direct link between Trump’s comments this week and those policies, so where is the outrage about the latter? Where are the Republican leaders denouncing voter suppression as racist, un-American and dangerous? Where are the Republican leaders who are willing to call out the wink (and the direct endorsement) from President Trump to the white supremacists and acknowledge their own party’s record and stance on issues important to people of color as the real problem for our country?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/19/republican-party-white-supremacists-charlottesville
The New Depressus Readers' poems for Trump's America
The New Colossus
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
By
Emma Lazarus
When Stephen Miller, a senior Trump advisor, dismissed the famous poem at the base of the statue, many viewed his opposition as an attack on the American values of equality and opportunity.
In response, we asked Guardian readers to reimagine The New Colossus in a style that would be to Trump's liking. Below is a small selection of the 600 poems we received. We also asked 21 well-known poets to do the same. You can read their work here, including contributions from the Pulitzer prize winner Rita Dove and the Inuit poet Joan Kane.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/aug/19/the-new-colossus-readers-poems-trumps-america
Fourth time lucky? Former model Hope Hicks is Trump's new spin doctor in chief
It has eaten up and chewed out three Trump operatives, and now the job of White House communications director has fallen to Hope Hicks, a 28-year-old political neophyte and former PR professional.
Hicks, who has been working as Donald Trump’s director of strategic communications, was drafted into the administration’s most high-profile media relations job to replace Anthony Scaramucci, whose 11-day tenure as White House communications director ended after an expletive-filled tirade to a reporter.
Her promotion to the post on an interim basis comes during one of the biggest communications challenges in recent memory.
After Trump went off message and blamed “both sides” for deadly violence between white supremacists and counter-protesters at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, criticism of the president was strong.
Members of Congress in both parties urged a defiant president to more forcefully denounce the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who marched through the college town. Other lawmakers openly questioned the president’s competence and moral leadership. Business leaders whom Trump, a businessman himself, enjoyed inviting to the White House fled the advisory boards they had agreed to serve on, while leaders of the armed services denounced racism and hatred without naming their commander in chief.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/19/fourth-time-lucky-former-model-hope-hicks-is-trumps-new-spin-doctor-in-chief
Let's put this in total perspective, she supports a racists, bigot, misogynistic ass****, where are the principles
Trump administration eyes truck emissions standards for its next climate rollback
The Trump administration plans to revisit greenhouse gas emissions and efficiency standards for freight trucks just months before the standards are scheduled to take effect, a decision environmental groups view as yet another capitulation by the administration to industry demands.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation announced on Thursday formal steps to begin reconsidering the greenhouse gas pollution and fuel economy standards of large trucks, focused on the standards for freight trailers. The Obama administration designed the standards to make heavy-duty tractor-trailers more efficient and less polluting.
The standards received heavy criticism from the trucking industry, which argued the EPA did not have authority to regulate them under the Clean Air Act. On Thursday, the EPA said that in response to “concerns raised by stakeholders in the trailer and glider industry,” it would be taking another look at the standards.
https://thinkprogress.org/pruitt-rollback-freight-truck-emissions-b6ab9ad57636/
And then when someone that is put back into this agency to undo the damage this ass**** buddies is causing, in my opinion, they should pay the health bills of human being and destruction of wildlife, water, air, this is just f**king outrages
The sweet 16: Steve Bannon and everyone else who couldnt survive 7 months in the Trump White House
Friday marked seven months since Trump’s inauguration and last day for Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, in the White House.
Bannon is not alone. He is the sixteenth member of the Trump White House to hit the curb in the first 210 days. See who else didn’t last in the video above.
https://thinkprogress.org/the-sweet-16-steve-bannon-and-everyone-else-who-couldnt-survive-7-months-in-the-trump-white-house-7c53c0810a81/
The redistricting battle in Texas is just heating up
Source: Think Progress
Texas could be headed to the Supreme Court after a federal court ruled Tuesday that two of the state’s congressional districts violate both the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.
In a 107-page decision, three judges in San Antonio declared that the districts had been purposefully re-drawn to mitigate the electoral power of Hispanic voters. Texans of color have been denied “their opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice,” the judges said, pointing to District 27, which includes the city of Corpus Christi, and District 35, which runs from Austin to San Antonio. The panel also noted that if Texas lawmakers do not begin re-drawing the map as it currently stands, legal action will be pursued.
The decision was well-received by many voting rights activists. Brent Wilkes, chief executive of the League of United Latin American Citizens and one of the plaintiffs in the case, said the ruling was particularly important to Latinx Texans.
“It backs up what we’ve been saying, that the Texas Legislature intentionally diminished the rights of Latino voters in particular to elect the candidates of their choice,” he said. “We feel that we’ve been vindicated in the courts.”
Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/texas-redistricting-fight-7b6fd212024d/
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) -----------your a racist
Conservative faith leaders stand by Trump despite his defense of white supremacist rally
Source: Think Progress
As President Donald Trump struggles to manage the firestorm of criticism over his controversial remarks on white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, conservative faith leaders are sticking by his side — although his recent comments defending Confederate statues may be testing some of them.
The Trump administration has been caught in a whirlwind of negative press this week after the president initially failed to condemn the white supremacists who stormed Charlottesville on Saturday, saying the ensuing violence that left one woman dead was the fault of “many sides” (the man charged with mowing down the woman and other protesters is alleged to be a white supremacist). The president eventually condemned Nazi sympathizers by name after mounting political pressure, only to ignite a media frenzy a day later by telling reporters that some of those who protested with white nationalists were “very fine people” who wanted to protect an “important” statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
“Regarding any calls to resign from the advisory council, I’m not going to do that. I think that we have the heart of pastors. We have a pastoral heart. We don’t walk away in times of trouble. I believe that’s why we were called to our job.”
Read more: https://thinkprogress.org/conservative-faith-leaders-defend-trump-0771add0a415/
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