What's going on with the Executive Departments

[47of74]

Sam Brownshirt was talking to Congress today

Quote

 Governor Sam Brownback (R-KS) is in Washington pleading his case for a new job. 

President Donald Trump nominated Brownback to become the Ambassador-at-large for Religious Freedom, a post that would put the governor in charge of combating religious persecution worldwide. Brownback faced a Senate Committee Wednesday to answer questions about the job. 

"Look, this is a fundamental right that you have," said Brownback. 

The Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs questioned the governor on his ability to combat religious persecution around the world.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

8 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

"Look, this is a fundamental right that you have," said Brownback. 

"...if you are a white evangelical Christian..."

[47of74]

14 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"...if you are a white evangelical Christian..."

Exactly.  These fornicate faces only care about religious freedom is said freedom is for reich wing Christians.  Everyone else can go fornicate themselves - including those who practice a form of Christianity anywhere to the left of Himmler.

[GrumpyGran]

13 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Sam Brownshirt was talking to Congress today

 

Huh? This is the most ridiculous made-up job I've ever seen. Good god, what did this crook do for Dumpy to get a fake job created, just for him? What's next, an ambassador to save high fashion and persecuted Eastern European models?

[JMarie]

On 10/5/2017 at 10:49 AM, GrumpyGran said:

Huh? This is the most ridiculous made-up job I've ever seen. Good god, what did this crook do for Dumpy to get a fake job created, just for him? What's next, an ambassador to save high fashion and persecuted Eastern European models?

"Combating religious persecution worldwide."  Does this mean ALL religions worldwide, or just the various Christian denominations?

[GrumpyGran]

14 hours ago, JMarie said:

"Combating religious persecution worldwide."  Does this mean ALL religions worldwide, or just the various Christian denominations?

Those white American prosperity gospel 'Christians'. They're having such a hard time. I heard that just last week one of them had to let an employee go because she refused to pray at the morning meeting. It's heartbreaking. 

[WiseGirl]

Every day....oh fuck it, I should realize by now nothing is too stupid or asinine for the TT.....WiseGirl leaves to fill the swear jar while muttering expletives about orange man, made up jobs to protect the right kind of Christian, and wonder how every day this orange idiot can come up with something new for her to be aghast, alarmed, and beyond irritated about.....

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess Zinke now thinks he's Queen: "Where’s Zinke? The Interior secretary’s special flag offers clues"

Spoiler

At the Interior Department’s headquarters in downtown Washington, Secretary Ryan Zinke has revived an arcane military ritual that no one can remember ever happening in the federal government.

A security staffer takes the elevator to the seventh floor, climbs the stairs to the roof and hoists a special secretarial flag whenever Zinke enters the building. When the secretary goes home for the day or travels, the flag — a blue banner emblazoned with the agency’s bison seal flanked by seven white stars representing the Interior bureaus — comes down.  

In Zinke’s absence, the ritual is repeated to raise an equally obscure flag for Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt.

Responding this week to questions from The Washington Post, a spokeswoman for Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander, defended the Navy flag-flying tradition as “a major sign of transparency.”

“Ryan Zinke is proud and honored to lead the Department of the Interior, and is restoring honor and tradition to the department, whether it’s flying the flag when he is in garrison or restoring traditional access to public lands,” press secretary Heather Swift said in an email.

Zinke, a Stetson-wearing former Montana congressman who has cultivated an image as a rugged outdoorsman, has come under a harsh spotlight in recent weeks for behavior criticized as extravagant for a public official. The agency’s inspector general opened an investigation after he ran up bills for travel on chartered jets and mixed business with political appearances, sometimes accompanied by his wife, Lola. It’s one of five probes underway of Cabinet secretaries’ travel.

Zinke upset some of the 70,000 employees at the agency that manages public lands by stating that 30 percent of the workers are “not loyal to the flag” in a speech to oil and gas executives. It is unclear whether the reference was literal or figurative.

Zinke rode to work on horseback on his first day in office and displays animal heads on his wood-paneled office walls. For a while, he kept a glass-case display of hunting knives but was asked to remove them because of security risks, according to people familiar with the decision.

He has commissioned commemorative coins with his name on them to give to staff and visitors, but the cost to taxpayers is unclear. Zinke’s predecessors and some other Cabinet secretaries have coins bearing agency seals, but not personalized ones.

The flag ritual is unique in President Trump’s administration. The White House does not raise the presidential flag when Trump alights at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. There is no Defense secretary’s flag atop the Pentagon.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, like his predecessors, has a personal flag that flies beside the U.S. flag in front of the department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters. But it’s there whether Tillerson is in the building or not.

“We’re talking about Cabinet members and federal buildings, not the Queen of England and Buckingham Palace,” said Chris Lu, deputy Labor secretary in the Barack Obama administration, referring to the British tradition of announcing the queen’s presence by raising her personal heraldic flag.

“If we had a secretarial flag at the Obama Labor Department, we never bothered to locate it or use it,” Lu said.

Retired Army Col. Steven Warren, who ran the Pentagon’s press operation before retiring this year, could not recall the place in Washington hierarchy represented by the raising of a federal official’s personal flag.

“Is he trying to send a message?” Warren wondered. “Is he big on pomp and circumstance, or is this a case of ‘Look at me?’ ”

Personal flags for federal government officials have a proud, if arcane, history that originated with the secretary of the Navy in 1866, to help sailing ships in the fleet recognize which one carried the naval commander. The Coast Guard and secretary of war wanted one, too.

By the early 20th century, the civilian heads of the Treasury, Commerce and Labor departments had flags. The first one for Interior was adopted in 1917.

“If you were the secretary of agriculture, you asked yourself, ‘Hey, the secretary of war has a flag, how come I don’t have one?’” said Joseph McMillan, a retired Defense Department official and student of flag history from Alexandria who is president of the American Heraldry Society.

The flags proliferated by World War Two, with banners for subordinate officials from undersecretaries to assistant attorneys general.

Back when security was not a concern, official government vehicles would display a high-ranking official’s personal flag on its left front fender, with the American flag flanking the right. They were considered pretentious, McMillan said, and eventually went out of fashion.

At Lady Liberty Flag and Flagpole in Austin, one of the largest flag vendors for federal offices, Sandra Dee Merritt said she sells 300 to 500 department flags a year to various Interior offices.

Secretarial flags are no longer in demand. “I haven’t sold any of those individual secretarial flags to any agency in forever,” Merritt said.

Raising a personal flag to mark an official’s presence remains a custom in the military. Field commanders often display their unit’s flag when they are at headquarters to signify that the boss is in.

But the personal flag, whether belonging to a general or a Cabinet secretary, stays behind the desk, if it’s there at all.

By flying his flag, Zinke is doing exactly what the flag was designed for, McMillan said. Yet he’s skeptical. The Interior Department is not the Navy.

“I’m all about tradition,” McMillan said. “But I kind of have an aversion to militarizing everything in our government. The world doesn’t need to know the secretary of the Interior is in the building.”

 

[fraurosena]

I just don't get why this administration is so hell bent on destruction. What do they think they stand to gain? 

Here's another example of seemingly random destruction, just for the sake of keeping people in prison unnecessarily long.

Donald Trump's administration is quietly reducing support for prisoner rehabilitation programmes

Spoiler

The administration of President Donald Trump has been quietly cutting support for halfway houses for federal prisoners, severing contracts with as many as 16 facilities in recent months, prompting concern that some inmates are being forced to stay behind bars longer than necessary.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesman Justin Long confirmed the cuts in response to an email inquiry from Reuters, and said they only affect areas with small populations or underutilized centres.

“The Bureau remains firmly committed to these practices, but has had to make some modifications to our programs due to our fiscal environment,” Long said. Halfway houses have been a part of the justice system since the 1960s, with thousands of people moving through them each year. For-profit prison companies such as Geo Group Inc (GEO.N) have moved into the halfway house market, though many houses are run directly by government agencies or non-profit organisations.

A Geo spokeswoman declined to comment for this article.

The bureau, which falls under the U.S. Department of Justice, last year had about 180 competitive contracts with “residential reentry centres” run by non-profit and for-profit companies, such as Geo.

The International Community Corrections Association says on its website there were about 249 separate halfway houses in communities nationwide that are covered by the 180 contracts.

Federal judges who spoke to Reuters said the cuts are having an impact in their districts, particularly in states with fewer facilities or larger geographic areas where the nearest centre might be several hundred miles away.

Judge Edmund Sargus of the Southern District of Ohio said it was a real “stumper” when in July the government ended its contract with the Alvis facility serving the Dayton area.

Long said that the cuts have not reduced referral rates or placements, and only impact “about 1% of the total number of beds under contract.”

However, the changes coincide with other major criminal justice policy shifts by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has pushed for more aggressive prosecutions of drug offences and a crackdown on illegal immigrants who commit crimes.

In May, Sessions ordered prosecutors to charge defendants with the highest provable offence, a move that is likely to trigger lengthy prison sentences.

In 2016, of the 43,000 inmates released from federal prison, 79 percent were released into a halfway house or home confinement, according to the trade association.

“We need to improve re-entry services ... This move flies in the face of that consensus,” said Kevin Ring, whose non-profit Families Against Mandatory Minimums has recently launched a Twitter campaign to raise awareness of the problem.

Sessions is scheduled to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ring said he hopes lawmakers will ask Sessions about the changes underway for halfway houses.

“Is cutting re-entry opportunities really going to make us safer? Congress needs to ask the Justice Department if this is part of their strategy,” he said.

For Kymjetta Carr, the cuts have had a personal impact. The 30-year-old from Cincinnati said she had expected her fiance Anthony Lamar to get out of prison and go to a halfway house in November, after serving seven years on a drug charge.

But she now has to tell their 10-year-old son his father won’t be out for Christmas or his birthday because Lamar’s release to a halfway house will not come until late July.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

@fraurosena -- Jeff Sessions is a racist and by pushing for more prison time and fewer rehabilitation programs, he's sticking it to people of color, because, unfortunately people of color are frequently more likely to be sentenced to prison time than white defendants. He is also pushing hard for higher mandatory minimums, again, to screw over people of color. He always has that smarmy grin on his face and it just makes me want to scream because he is one of the nastiest pieces of work that has ever drawn breath.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Undocumented pregnant girl in Texas tests Trump policy to stop abortions"

Spoiler

AUSTIN, Texas — The Trump administration is preventing an undocumented, pregnant teenager detained in a Brownsville refugee shelter from getting an abortion in a policy shift with big implications for hundreds of other pregnant, unaccompanied minors held in such shelters.

She is not the first to be stopped, according to advocates who work with undocumented teenagers.

For the last seven months, the Health and Human Services Department has intervened to prevent abortions sought by girls at federally funded shelters, even in cases of rape and incest and when the teen had a way to pay for the procedure. The agency has instead forced minors to visit crisis pregnancy centers, religiously affiliated groups that counsel women against having abortions, according to documents obtained by POLITICO, interviews with sources involved in the Brownsville case and those familiar with the agency’s policy.

In some cases, a senior HHS official has personally visited or called pregnant teens to try to talk them out of ending their pregnancies.

“There is a pattern of unconstitutional overreach of power in a minor’s abortion decision,” said the teen's lawyer, Brigitte Amiri of the ACLU.

The ACLU brought suit on Friday on behalf of the 17-year-old in the Brownsville shelter, contending HHS has barred the girl, now about 14 weeks pregnant, from getting the abortion even though she got a judge’s permission to have it without parental consent and has obtained the money to pay for it. Abortions after 20 weeks are illegal under Texas law.

The girl, identified in court papers only as Jane Doe, obtained a judge’s permission on Sept. 25 and had an initial abortion appointment scheduled for Sept. 28, at the end of her first trimester, Amiri said.

But officials at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of HHS, refused to transport her to her abortion appointment, instead taking her to a crisis pregnancy center, and calling her mother in her home country to tell her about the pregnancy, according to the ACLU suit and Amiri.

“What’s especially disturbing for us about this case, is that the child is in the custody of ORR [the Office of Refugee Resettlement], so she has no other choice, and she is stuck in a form of custody or detention,” said Michelle Brane of the Women’s Refugee Commission.

The Trump policy represents a sharp departure from the Obama administration, when the government reviewed an undocumented teen’s request for an abortion when she sought federal funding to pay for it, said Robert Carey, director from April 2015 until January of this year.

The funds were approved in cases of rape or incest or when a mother’s life was in danger, according to the agency’s guidelines. HHS didn’t get involved if the teen got funding for the procedure from another source, he said.

“I wasn’t approving their right to have the procedure,” Carey said.

The ACLU estimates that several hundred pregnant minors are currently in federal shelters throughout the country. Most are from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and immigration experts believe many are victims of rape and sexual violence, either in their home countries or during the perilous journey here. If they are apprehended after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, they are housed in HHS shelters separate from adults until they are reunited with relatives or other sponsors, or else deported.

The Trump administration policy shift appears to have begun in early March, in the weeks leading up to Scott Lloyd, a lawyer with Knights of Columbus, a Catholic charitable organization, taking the helm of the refugee resettlement agency. On March 6, he and two HHS employees sent an internal memo detailing three cases of minors held in federal custody asking for abortions, according to documents shared with POLITICO.

They say that federally funded shelters must “provide immediate and continuing information” to the agency regarding abortion requests, that neither the agency, nor the facilities, may authorize the procedure and that punitive action would be taken against facilities that violate the protocol. The email also said the girls in those cases had changed their stories about whether the pregnancies resulted from rape or consensual sex with a boyfriend. The document also had “talking points” but they were blacked out in the copy shared with POLITICO.

Later, as director, Lloyd wrote in a March 30 email to another staffer: “Grantees should not be supporting abortion services pre or post-release; only pregnancy services and life-affirming options counseling.”

Lawyers who work with the teens say the policy appears to have been disseminated informally through email, rather than being formally codified in the agency's policy guide.

They also note that Lloyd has personally visited and called pregnant girls in shelters, directed them to a list of approved crisis pregnancy centers, instructed staff to block minors from meeting with attorneys and told shelter operators to call a minor’s parents even if she receives permission to go to a judge to obtain authorization for an abortion without their consent. In many cases, parents are hundreds of miles away in their home countries, or minors worry that parents won’t approve of the procedure.

Susan Hays, an Austin attorney who helped the girl in the Brownsville shelter get a judge’s permission to have the procedure, said that the girl was worried about telling her parents because they had beaten her sister when she became pregnant out of wedlock.

Lloyd has also threatened to pull funding from shelters, which are under federal contract, for failure to comply, Hays said. “Shelters are scared,” she added.

Access to abortion has long been an issue for girls detained in refugee shelters, because many are religiously affiliated institutions that oppose the practice. But Amiri, Hays and others who work with refugees tell POLITICO that it’s unprecedented for an ORR director to personally attempt to dissuade minors from ending a pregnancy.

“Imagine you are an unaccompanied minor and this bureaucrat from Washington, D.C., in a suit comes to visit you,” Amiri said. She called it an “abuse of power to coerce and use immigration status as a bargaining chip.”

HHS did not to respond to questions about the agency’s policy regarding abortions among undocumented pregnant minors. Lloyd referred repeated calls and emails to the HHS communications team.

Calls and emails to several ORR staffers were unanswered. In response to questions about the Brownsville case, a spokesperson for HHS’ Administration for Children and Families said in an emailed statement “our paramount concern is the child’s safety and well-being.”

“While the child is in our custody, our goal is to provide food, shelter and care to her under federal statute,” the spokesperson said. “We are providing excellent care to the adolescent girl and her unborn child, who remain under our care until the mother’s release.”

The policy regarding what to do with undocumented minors in shelters that request abortions was first laid out in a 2008 Bush administration memo. That came at the end of the administration, so the Obama administration interpreted the policy.

“A considerable amount of time and energy was put into the development of that policy,” Carey said.

Carey estimated that he signed off about three or four times a month on the use of federal funds to help girls terminate their pregnancies in case of rape or incest or when her life was threatened.

“They were entitled to family planning services and left [on their own] to make those decisions to terminate those pregnancies,” he said about the decision of a pregnant minor in a federally funded shelter to have an abortion.

The new policy could have far-reaching consequences on all aspects of rules around pregnant unaccompanied minors, from how long they are held in federal shelters to how they are counted, say lawyers and advocates who work with them.

For example, HHS may keep girls until they can no longer legally get an abortion or release them to families that would also discourage abortions, rather than to family members or sponsors. In addition, HHS is considering counting fetuses as unborn children, which could change federal funding at shelters that house pregnant teens, according to sources.

The emergence of the policy is documented in a series of emails between Lloyd and other officials and shelters since March.

In one case, acting ORR director Kenneth Tota tried to stop a medication abortion, which involves taking two prescriptions in sequence. He asked that the girl be sent to the emergency room for an exam to determine if the fetus was still viable after she had taken the first pill, but before she took the second drug to complete the procedure. In the end, the agency let the procedure continue.

In another case, about 10 days before his official appointment, Lloyd visited a Honduran girl in a San Antonio shelter and sent an email to the shelter operator asking to accommodate her request for bananas and soup and a more comfortable mattress, according to the emails. He added that if things get “dicey” with her sponsor, a relative in the U.S., he knew families that would take her in and see her through her pregnancy and beyond. That potentially violates an agreement in which the government must quickly reunite the minor with family or other sponsor.

In another case this spring, described in the emails, Lloyd said he spoke with a girl requesting an abortion at a Southwest Key shelter in Phoenix. He directed ORR staff to send the girl to a specific crisis pregnancy center for an ultrasound and to keep her from meeting with an attorney regarding her desire to get a judge to give her permission for an abortion. Neither the shelter nor the crisis pregnancy center responded to requests to comment over the weekend.

Although the ACLU’s lawsuit applies only to one teenager, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a news release that he worries a decision in the case could have broad-ranging implications.

"No federal court has ever declared that unlawfully-present aliens with no substantial ties to this country have a constitutional right to abortion on demand," he said. "If 'Doe' prevails in this case, the ruling will create a right to abortion for anyone on earth who enters the U.S. illegally. And with that right, countless others undoubtedly would follow. Texas must not become a sanctuary state for abortions."

Chipping away at women's rights.

[GrumpyGran]

18 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Undocumented pregnant girl in Texas tests Trump policy to stop abortions"

  Hide contents

AUSTIN, Texas — The Trump administration is preventing an undocumented, pregnant teenager detained in a Brownsville refugee shelter from getting an abortion in a policy shift with big implications for hundreds of other pregnant, unaccompanied minors held in such shelters.

She is not the first to be stopped, according to advocates who work with undocumented teenagers.

For the last seven months, the Health and Human Services Department has intervened to prevent abortions sought by girls at federally funded shelters, even in cases of rape and incest and when the teen had a way to pay for the procedure. The agency has instead forced minors to visit crisis pregnancy centers, religiously affiliated groups that counsel women against having abortions, according to documents obtained by POLITICO, interviews with sources involved in the Brownsville case and those familiar with the agency’s policy.

In some cases, a senior HHS official has personally visited or called pregnant teens to try to talk them out of ending their pregnancies.

“There is a pattern of unconstitutional overreach of power in a minor’s abortion decision,” said the teen's lawyer, Brigitte Amiri of the ACLU.

The ACLU brought suit on Friday on behalf of the 17-year-old in the Brownsville shelter, contending HHS has barred the girl, now about 14 weeks pregnant, from getting the abortion even though she got a judge’s permission to have it without parental consent and has obtained the money to pay for it. Abortions after 20 weeks are illegal under Texas law.

The girl, identified in court papers only as Jane Doe, obtained a judge’s permission on Sept. 25 and had an initial abortion appointment scheduled for Sept. 28, at the end of her first trimester, Amiri said.

But officials at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is part of HHS, refused to transport her to her abortion appointment, instead taking her to a crisis pregnancy center, and calling her mother in her home country to tell her about the pregnancy, according to the ACLU suit and Amiri.

“What’s especially disturbing for us about this case, is that the child is in the custody of ORR [the Office of Refugee Resettlement], so she has no other choice, and she is stuck in a form of custody or detention,” said Michelle Brane of the Women’s Refugee Commission.

The Trump policy represents a sharp departure from the Obama administration, when the government reviewed an undocumented teen’s request for an abortion when she sought federal funding to pay for it, said Robert Carey, director from April 2015 until January of this year.

The funds were approved in cases of rape or incest or when a mother’s life was in danger, according to the agency’s guidelines. HHS didn’t get involved if the teen got funding for the procedure from another source, he said.

“I wasn’t approving their right to have the procedure,” Carey said.

The ACLU estimates that several hundred pregnant minors are currently in federal shelters throughout the country. Most are from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and immigration experts believe many are victims of rape and sexual violence, either in their home countries or during the perilous journey here. If they are apprehended after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, they are housed in HHS shelters separate from adults until they are reunited with relatives or other sponsors, or else deported.

The Trump administration policy shift appears to have begun in early March, in the weeks leading up to Scott Lloyd, a lawyer with Knights of Columbus, a Catholic charitable organization, taking the helm of the refugee resettlement agency. On March 6, he and two HHS employees sent an internal memo detailing three cases of minors held in federal custody asking for abortions, according to documents shared with POLITICO.

They say that federally funded shelters must “provide immediate and continuing information” to the agency regarding abortion requests, that neither the agency, nor the facilities, may authorize the procedure and that punitive action would be taken against facilities that violate the protocol. The email also said the girls in those cases had changed their stories about whether the pregnancies resulted from rape or consensual sex with a boyfriend. The document also had “talking points” but they were blacked out in the copy shared with POLITICO.

Later, as director, Lloyd wrote in a March 30 email to another staffer: “Grantees should not be supporting abortion services pre or post-release; only pregnancy services and life-affirming options counseling.”

Lawyers who work with the teens say the policy appears to have been disseminated informally through email, rather than being formally codified in the agency's policy guide.

They also note that Lloyd has personally visited and called pregnant girls in shelters, directed them to a list of approved crisis pregnancy centers, instructed staff to block minors from meeting with attorneys and told shelter operators to call a minor’s parents even if she receives permission to go to a judge to obtain authorization for an abortion without their consent. In many cases, parents are hundreds of miles away in their home countries, or minors worry that parents won’t approve of the procedure.

Susan Hays, an Austin attorney who helped the girl in the Brownsville shelter get a judge’s permission to have the procedure, said that the girl was worried about telling her parents because they had beaten her sister when she became pregnant out of wedlock.

Lloyd has also threatened to pull funding from shelters, which are under federal contract, for failure to comply, Hays said. “Shelters are scared,” she added.

Access to abortion has long been an issue for girls detained in refugee shelters, because many are religiously affiliated institutions that oppose the practice. But Amiri, Hays and others who work with refugees tell POLITICO that it’s unprecedented for an ORR director to personally attempt to dissuade minors from ending a pregnancy.

“Imagine you are an unaccompanied minor and this bureaucrat from Washington, D.C., in a suit comes to visit you,” Amiri said. She called it an “abuse of power to coerce and use immigration status as a bargaining chip.”

HHS did not to respond to questions about the agency’s policy regarding abortions among undocumented pregnant minors. Lloyd referred repeated calls and emails to the HHS communications team.

Calls and emails to several ORR staffers were unanswered. In response to questions about the Brownsville case, a spokesperson for HHS’ Administration for Children and Families said in an emailed statement “our paramount concern is the child’s safety and well-being.”

“While the child is in our custody, our goal is to provide food, shelter and care to her under federal statute,” the spokesperson said. “We are providing excellent care to the adolescent girl and her unborn child, who remain under our care until the mother’s release.”

The policy regarding what to do with undocumented minors in shelters that request abortions was first laid out in a 2008 Bush administration memo. That came at the end of the administration, so the Obama administration interpreted the policy.

“A considerable amount of time and energy was put into the development of that policy,” Carey said.

Carey estimated that he signed off about three or four times a month on the use of federal funds to help girls terminate their pregnancies in case of rape or incest or when her life was threatened.

“They were entitled to family planning services and left [on their own] to make those decisions to terminate those pregnancies,” he said about the decision of a pregnant minor in a federally funded shelter to have an abortion.

The new policy could have far-reaching consequences on all aspects of rules around pregnant unaccompanied minors, from how long they are held in federal shelters to how they are counted, say lawyers and advocates who work with them.

For example, HHS may keep girls until they can no longer legally get an abortion or release them to families that would also discourage abortions, rather than to family members or sponsors. In addition, HHS is considering counting fetuses as unborn children, which could change federal funding at shelters that house pregnant teens, according to sources.

The emergence of the policy is documented in a series of emails between Lloyd and other officials and shelters since March.

In one case, acting ORR director Kenneth Tota tried to stop a medication abortion, which involves taking two prescriptions in sequence. He asked that the girl be sent to the emergency room for an exam to determine if the fetus was still viable after she had taken the first pill, but before she took the second drug to complete the procedure. In the end, the agency let the procedure continue.

In another case, about 10 days before his official appointment, Lloyd visited a Honduran girl in a San Antonio shelter and sent an email to the shelter operator asking to accommodate her request for bananas and soup and a more comfortable mattress, according to the emails. He added that if things get “dicey” with her sponsor, a relative in the U.S., he knew families that would take her in and see her through her pregnancy and beyond. That potentially violates an agreement in which the government must quickly reunite the minor with family or other sponsor.

In another case this spring, described in the emails, Lloyd said he spoke with a girl requesting an abortion at a Southwest Key shelter in Phoenix. He directed ORR staff to send the girl to a specific crisis pregnancy center for an ultrasound and to keep her from meeting with an attorney regarding her desire to get a judge to give her permission for an abortion. Neither the shelter nor the crisis pregnancy center responded to requests to comment over the weekend.

Although the ACLU’s lawsuit applies only to one teenager, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a news release that he worries a decision in the case could have broad-ranging implications.

"No federal court has ever declared that unlawfully-present aliens with no substantial ties to this country have a constitutional right to abortion on demand," he said. "If 'Doe' prevails in this case, the ruling will create a right to abortion for anyone on earth who enters the U.S. illegally. And with that right, countless others undoubtedly would follow. Texas must not become a sanctuary state for abortions."

Chipping away at women's rights.

Ok, they don't want these girls to come here and have a baby, right? But they don't want them to come here and have an abortion. In light of current law and procedure, is there another option I'm missing?

[GreyhoundFan]

"Mr. Trump Outdoes Himself in Picking a Conflicted Regulator"

Spoiler

President Trump has made a habit of filling important jobs with people dedicated to undermining the laws they’re supposed to administer while pampering the industries they’re supposed to regulate. His nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency’s top clean air post, William Wehrum, is a retread from the George W. Bush administration with a deep doctrinal dislike of clean air regulations. His choice to run the White House Council on Environmental Quality is borderline comical: Kathleen Hartnett White, a former Texas official who believes that the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is harmless. Yet no nomination has been as brazen, as dangerous to public health and as deserving of Senate rejection as that of Michael Dourson to run the E.P.A. office in charge of reviewing chemicals used in agriculture, industry and household products.

Mr. Dourson is a scientist for hire. A toxicologist and a professor at the University of Cincinnati, he has a long history of consulting for chemical companies and conducting studies paid for with industry money. He frequently decided that the compounds he was evaluating were safe at exposure levels that are far more dangerous to public health than levels recommended by the E.P.A., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies. His nomination is enthusiastically endorsed by the chemical industry. It horrifies environmental groups, public health advocates, firefighters and scientists and has inspired many letters in opposition to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which may vote as early as Wednesday.

Among the chemicals that received a favorable nod from Mr. Dourson is 1,4-dioxane, which is used by paint and coating manufacturers and is also found in shampoos and other personal care products. His analysis recommended a safe level that was 1,000 times higher than the E.P.A.’s recommended level; the agency considers the chemical “a likely carcinogen.”

Another is PFOA, a chemical used by DuPont to make nonstick surfaces. The compound has been linked to cancers, thyroid diseases and other health problems. Working for West Virginia on the recommendation of DuPont, Mr. Dourson in 2002 helped establish a safety threshold of 150 parts per billion for PFOA in drinking water. That is substantially higher than the standard of 1 part per billion that DuPont’s own scientists had recommended more than a decade earlier, and higher still than the health advisory level of 0.07 parts per billion set by the E.P.A. last year.

More broadly troubling is that Mr. Dourson, if approved, will set back an arduous, yearslong effort to improve the regulation of chemicals. Last year, after many false starts, Congress passed a bipartisan bill that updated the Toxic Substances Control Act, a 1976 law that had made it very hard for regulators to ban or regulate chemicals because industry could easily keep data about its products hidden from the E.P.A. by claiming that the information was a “trade secret.” The new law simplified the task by streamlining it, directing the E.P.A. to review at least 20 substances at a time, giving priority to the riskiest chemicals. The money to do this work will come from up to $25 million in annual fees paid by chemical manufacturers and processors.

Experts fear that if confirmed Mr. Dourson will put a much greater emphasis on pleasing the chemical industry than on protecting public health. He could, for instance, order his staff to cherry-pick studies and data that in turn would lead to lax standards or even allow the continued use of chemicals that ought to be banned outright. In March, the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, rejected a staff recommendation to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which scientists believe has harmed farm workers and children. Any decisions Mr. Dourson would make would most likely remain in place for years or even decades. E.P.A. reviews take several years to complete, and the agency has a long list of chemicals it needs to study.

It would take just a few Republicans to block the nomination. There’s hope that Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who showed during a recent hearing an awareness of Mr. Dourson’s controversial work on chemical safety in her home state, will vote against him in the Environment and Public Works Committee, where Republicans have an 11-to-10 majority. Even if he wins there, Ms. Capito and her colleagues ought to think hard about the impact their votes could have on the health of Americans for years to come.

Scary stuff.

[SnazzyNazzy]

Since I have now downed my bottle of Malbec, I will tell you what is wrong with the executive department. Unless you are one of the elite 1%, the US government doesn't give a hoot about you. Let me explain...

Both parties, have managed to find the middle America line.

I have been raised Democrat, since I was born, because back in the day, all the people that worked in a union were Democrats. Besides being a union family, my family was very "if it makes you happy, so be it". We never wanted to infringe on anyone's right to be a happy soul. We didn't care if you were gay, or straight, black or white, we just wanted you to be happy, and have the opportunity to at least try to achieve that happiness.

What the main problem was for the Democrats, was this. Us Democrats, in middle America, were left ignored. I don't know how many times, I have got shit as a Hoosier Democrat, from an east coast Democrat. Seriously, I have the EXACT same beliefs and morals, and ideals, as some Democrat from NY. Whenever I had a political discussion with them, I was not a "good enough" democrat for them, simply because I was from Indiana, and had differing views, on some topics, from them

I'm sorry, but..., even though I DID vote for Hillary, as a Democrat from Indiana, I can totally understand, why Hoosier Dems voted for him. It wasn't because we liked him, or thought he was charming (I just gagged), BUT it was because he was saying the things us Hoosier Dems, so desperately wanted to hear.

Honestly it really beats you down, when you are a midwest liberal, constantly hears that you AREN'T a liberal, because you aren't suffering the same "problems" as some liberal in NY. 

If the Democrats want to get some sort of "foothold" against the Republicans, the realllllllly need to pander, to the midwest liberals A New Yorker's "problems", will never equal to my "problems" here in Indiana. I legitimately do not give a fuck, about people's retirement accounts, when I have to struggle every November/December, on what bills to pay/not pay, so I can get my kids a good Christmas.

I'm sorry, but it REALLY seems like, on the party line, that I "can't" be a Democrat, because I have all the problems Republicans piss and moan about. Oooh, I'm "poor", so my opinion doesn't "count". Yes, I may be "poor", but I have a soul, and compassion, and a conscious. Fuck me, for wanting to uphold the "stupid" constitution about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".

Seriously, if you are from one of those "well-to-do" east coast states, there are MILLIONS of us registered Dems, in the Midwest and Great Plains states, that are being ignored, simply because of where we live. If you want to change the state of America, let it be known that we exist. A lot of us voted for Trump (not me), because he was saying what we wanted to hear. We aren't "liberal", because it can benefit us for some reason. We are liberal in predominately red states, because we give some sort of shit, about our fellow man. We have a voice here in the midwest, but it's not being heard, because we aren't "good enough", or because we have poor people problems.

People want to fix what's broken. It's time to open your eyes, and see that there are allies where you least expect it. If Hillary would have bothered to went to the states, where unions are a big thing, she would have won. She didn't bother to go there, and well.....look at what we got.

[SnazzyNazzy]

Haha...I just drunk emailed my Dem. Senator, my post above motivated me to....lol.

I even asked for a job, for shits and giggles, even though politics and/or office work seems like a fate worse than death.

I am pretty sure HSA/FBI/CIA, will not be coming a knockin.

[candygirl200413]

Racist Keebler Elf is currently in a hearing, and my eyes are just stuck in permanent eye roll

[GreyhoundFan]

Seriously. "Sessions tells lawmakers he will not discuss his conversations with Trump on Comey firing"

Spoiler

Attorney General Jeff Sessions rebuffed repeated requests from Democratic lawmakers to detail his conversations with President Trump on the firing of former FBI Director James B. Comey at a contentious oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday.

Democratic senators peppered the nation’s top law enforcement officer with questions on Comey, Trump and the ongoing investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential race, but for the most part, Sessions declined to say anything of real substance.

He would not say what Trump told him before Comey’s firing, offering only that the president asked for his advice in writing. He said he had not been interviewed by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is leading the probe that is exploring, in part, if Trump obstructed justice leading up to Comey’s removal.

Sessions lambasted the former FBI director, saying he did not believe “it’s been fully understood the significance of the error that Mr. Comey made” on the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. But he would not say if the president, in deciding to remove Comey, mentioned the Russia case in their discussions.

The hearing marks the first time Sessions has appeared before the Judiciary Committee since his confirmation hearing in January. Lawmakers pressed the attorney general on a variety of topics — including his legal opinion on the DACA program for immigrants who came to the U.S. as kids, his threat to strip “sanctuary cities” of federal grants and even his stance on those wanting to grow marijuana for research. But as with most political affairs in Washington in 2017, much of the hearing was spent talking about Russia.

Sessions is recused from the Russia case because of his role on the Trump campaign, though he could be someone with whom Mueller wants to speak. He said he would be willing to cooperate with the probe — a spokesman said he has yet to even be approached about an interview.

Of his personal confidence in Mueller, Sessions said: “I think he will produce the work in the way he thinks is correct, and history will judge.” He said he didn’t know if it “was appropriate” for Trump to pardon people who were under investigation by Mueller, but added that the “pardon power is quite broad.”

Democrats, in particular, have long been interested in Sessions own meetings with Russians, after The Post reported in March he had spoken twice last year with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and did not disclose the encounters when asked about possible contacts between members of Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during his confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

Sessions offered a slightly new wrinkle Wednesday, asserting he may have discussed Trump campaign policy positions in his 2016 conversations with Kislyak. The attorney general said it was “possible” that “some comment was made about what Trump’s positions were,” though he also said, “I don’t think there was any discussion about the details of the campaign.”

The Post reported in July that Kislyak reported back to his superiors in the Kremlin that the two had discussed campaign-related matters, including policy issues important to Moscow. Sessions has previously said he didn’t “recall any specific political discussions,” though at the time he allowed that most ambassadors are “pretty gossipy” and it was “campaign season” when he and Kislyak talked.

In one of the testiest exchanges of the hearing, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who had asked Sessions about Trump campaign and Russia contacts at the confirmation hearing, accused the attorney general of changing his story over time.

While Sessions first asserted he “did not have communications with the Russians,” he now seemed to be only denying that he had inappropriate discussions about election interference, Franken said.

Sessions shot back that Franken’s question came with a “very, very troubling” lead up, and he answered “in a way that I felt was responsive to what you raised in your question.” The two men interrupted each other, and at one point, Sessions erupted, “Mr. Chairman, I don’t have to sit in here and listen to his charges without having a chance to respond. Give me a break.”

Democrats had warned Sessions they expected him to answer questions about his conversations with Trump, especially as they might relate to the firing of Comey and the Russia investigation. Sessions, though, said in his opening remarks that he wouldn’t, nor would he honor Democrats’ request that he detail the particular topics on which Trump would assert executive privilege and block his testimony.

“I can neither assert executive privilege, nor can I disclose today the content of my confidential conversations with the president,” Sessions said.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in June, Sessions also refused to detail his conversations with the president. But Democrats have questioned his rationale for not providing at least some information. In a letter to Sessions last week, they said the attorney general needed to formally identify the topics over which Trump would assert executive privilege — and Sessions thus could not address — and fully answer questions about the others.

“We expect that when you appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 18th, you will have determined whether the president will invoke executive privilege as to specific topics and will be prepared to answer completely all questions in those areas on which he has not,” the Democrats wrote. “As to the former category, we will expect you to provide the Committee with a list of issues over which the privilege has affirmatively been asserted.”

Sessions also used the hearing to defend Trump’s travel ban, saying it could help prevent terror attacks in the United States. He called the directive — which was blocked by two different federal judges Tuesday and Wednesday — an “important step” in the fight against terror.

“It’s a lawful, necessary order that we are proud to defend,” Sessions said, adding, “We are confident we’ll prevail, as time goes by, in the Supreme Court.”

He said that military leaders had told him to expect an “increase in attacks” as the Islamic State is pushed out of strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

Sessions sparred with Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) over his attempts to withhold federal grant money from Chicago over the city’s so-called “sanctuary” policies. A federal court recently blocked Sessions from doing so, and Durbin said the attorney general was wrong to harp on the city’s rise in violent crime while at the same time trying to take resources.

“You want to cut off federal funds to that city, and come here and criticize the murder rate. You can’t have it both ways,” Durbin said.

Sessions shot back that federal authorities “can’t take over law enforcement for the city of Chicago,” and that they needed city officials to notify them when illegal immigrants were scheduled to be released from jail.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told Sessions that she is concerned about several actions he has taken as attorney general, including his reversal of DOJ positions on voting rights and LGBT rights.

The attorney general this month issued a memo opining that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not protect transgender people from workplace discrimination, and his Justice Department came down on the side of a Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding. Civil liberties advocates say his recent memo offering guidance on religious freedom essentially amounts to a license for discrimination. Under his leadership, the department dropped its long-standing position that Texas intended to discriminate when it passed a strict voter-ID law.

Sessions has taken the department in a significantly different direction than did his predecessors in the Obama administration — especially on his interpretation of federal law as it relates to the DACA program, the Affordable Care Act and discrimination against transgender people.

Sessions was the public face of the decision to wind down the DACA program, which granted a reprieve from deportation to people who came to the U.S. without documentation when they were children. He has asserted the program could not withstand legal challenges.

Sessions also laid out the legal underpinnings for the Trump administration to create broad exceptions to the Affordable Care Act’s no-cost contraceptive coverage, and he paved the way for another decision days later to stop certain payments to insurers under the act.

Sessions, too, has ordered lawyers in his department to review all reform agreements it has with police departments nationwide, and he has implemented a sweeping new charging policy that instructs prosecutors to pursue the most serious, readily provable crimes, even if those might trigger stiff mandatory minimum sentences. He has been especially aggressive in cracking down on illegal immigration — even threatening to take certain grant money from certain so-called “sanctuary cities,” though his efforts to do so have largely been blocked by federal courts.

Sigh. I wish we could get him out as AG.

[GreyhoundFan]

Aw, poor Jeffy isn't happy: "‘Give me a break’: Sessions gets testy with Franken over his shifting Russia denials"

Spoiler

It was an exchange with Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) that started Attorney General Jeff Sessions's Russia problems earlier this year. And the bad blood between the two men spilled over in Round 2 on Wednesday.

They got into a testy exchange during Sessions's testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, with Franken accusing Sessions of repeatedly “moving the goal posts” on his denials of contacts with Russians, and Sessions accusing Franken of being “totally unfair.” The normally understated Sessions appeared visibly angry at certain points, at one point exclaiming, “I don’t have to sit here and listen to his charges without having a chance to respond. Give me a break.”

Let's break down the key points in their exchange:

FRANKEN: First it was, “I did not have communications with Russians,” which was not true. Then it was, “I never met with any Russians to discuss any political campaign,” which may or may not be true. Now it's, “I did not discuss interference in the campaign,” which further narrows your initial blanket denial about meeting with the Russians. Since you have qualified your denial to say that since you did not, quote, “discuss issues of the campaign” with Russians, what in your view constitutes “issues of the campaign?”

SESSIONS: Let me just say this without hesitation: That I conducted no improper discussions with Russians at any time regarding a campaign or any other item facing this country.

At this point, Franken tries to interject, apparently worried that Sessions is about to filibuster until Franken's time is up so that Franken can't ask any more questions. Franken notes that GOP Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) went over his allotted time and assures he has several questions for Sessions. It's amid this exchange that Sessions says, “Give me a break.”

FRANKEN: Go ahead. Take whatever time you want.

SESSIONS: It was not a simple question, Sen. Franken.

FRANKEN: I'm sorry?

SESSIONS: It was not a simple question. The lead-in to your question was very, very troubling. And I answered to you in a way that I felt was responsive to what you raised in your question.

Sessions then details how he was asked in his confirmation hearing about a CNN story that had just published, and he starts reading from the transcript of that hearing. When he adds commentary to the transcript, Franken dryly implores him to “keep reading.”

“You make a lot of allegations, senator; it's hard to respond in the time that I've got,” Sessions says. Franken responds: “That, to me, is moving the goal posts every time. We're starting off with an extra point, and by the end we're going to a 75-yard field goal.”

Franken adds at another point, “The ambassador to Russia is Russian.” Sessions adds toward the end: “You have gone through this long talk, which I believe is totally unfair to me.”

First off, it's completely true that Franken was going at him hard and in very accusatory ways that you usually don't see in these hearings. The “was not true” and “may or may not be true” line were points of emphasis, and they seemed to set Sessions off.

But it's incontrovertibly true that Sessions's answers on his contacts with Russians have shifted. In his confirmation hearings, he told Franken, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and I did not have communications with the Russians.” When it was revealed that he had met with the Russian ambassador, Sessions stressed that it was in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and argued that his confirmation-hearing response was clearly in the context of the campaign.

Eventually he recused himself from the Russia investigation, and now we have special counsel Robert Mueller -- a series of events for which President Trump apparently may never forgive Sessions.

Even if you believe Sessions that he was initially talking in the context of the campaign, though, his denial shifted again in June. At that point, he told the Senate Intelligence Committee the he “never met with or had any conversation with any Russians or foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election in the United States.” So suddenly it wasn't just a denial about any campaign discussion, but rather a denial about any discussion of campaign interference. And sure enough, a month later The Washington Post reported that the ambassador, then Sergey Kislyak, had reported to Russia that he and Sessions had discussed the campaign.

Wednesday's denial, on its surface, would seem to broaden the denial from “interference” to anything “improper.” But improper is also such a subjective term. And for all of Franken's efforts over their 15-minute exchange, he didn't really get Sessions to expand upon much.

Not that it wasn't entertaining.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Ooh, related to the article I posted Monday: "Judge orders Trump administration to allow abortion for undocumented teen'

Spoiler

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the U.S. government to allow an undocumented teenager in its custody to have an abortion, after saying she was “astounded” the Trump administration was trying to prevent the procedure.

Lawyers for Attorney General Jeff Sessions signaled to U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Washington that the 17-year-old, who crossed the border from Mexico illegally last month, did not have a constitutional right to an elective abortion in federal custody, unless it was a medical emergency.

Chutkan, an Obama administration nominee, said the government appeared to be presenting the teenager identified in court papers as “Jane Doe” with two options: Voluntarily return to a nation she fled to procure an abortion, or carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

“I am astounded by that position,” Chutkan said in a 40-minute hearing that was mostly consumed by a back-and-forth between the judge and Scott Stewart, a deputy assistant attorney general.

She ordered the government to transport the teenager to have the procedure — or allow her guardian to transport her — “promptly and without delay.”

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the girl, asked Chutkan for an emergency restraining order to prevent the government from blocking the girl’s plan to have an abortion. They also sought a preliminary injunction to protect others seeking abortions.

The judge said she would issue a ruling by 5 p.m.

ACLU lawyer Brigitte Amiri argued that it was “out of any sort of constitutional bounds” for the U.S. government to block the teenager’s legal right to an abortion, which is preserved in the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade ruling. A federal magistrate judge in California agreed with the ACLU earlier this month but said she could not rule in the case because the girl is detained in South Texas.

But Stewart told the judge that pregnant undocumented minors from other countries are not entitled to abortions, and said in court records that opening the door to that right “would significantly infringe on the government’s interests in preserving life and protecting national boundaries.”

“I respectfully disagree that she’s entitled to an abortion” facilitated by the government, he said, noting that the girl’s case was not a medical emergency. In court filings, the government said it has “strong and constitutionally legitimate interests in promoting childbirth, in refusing to facilitate abortion, and in not providing incentives for pregnant minors to illegally cross the border to obtain elective abortions while in federal custody.”

Chutkan countered that the teenager does not need a medical emergency to exercise her right to an abortion. She said the girl had followed state and federal rules: She obtained permission from a state judge in Texas to have an abortion and would cover the expenses herself or with help through her court-appointed guardian.

All the government had to do, the judge said, is process the paperwork to let the girl visit the clinic, just as they would if she needed to have her tonsils removed.

Stewart said the girl could also voluntarily leave the United States and find another way to have an abortion, and said the girl had chosen to remain in federal custody instead of returning home.

That claim appeared to irk the judge, who pointed out that the federal workers took the girl, against her wishes, to a Christian pregnancy facility for counseling and also informed her mother about the abortion. Both steps potentially violated the girl’s constitutional right to privacy and other protections, Chutkan said.

“The government certainly had no problem taking her against her will to receive pregnancy counseling, which was designed to change her mind,” Chutkan said. “The government didn’t seem to have any problem facilitating that.”

The judge and Stewart also sparred over whether some aspects of the law remain undisputed.

Chutkan asked Stewart if he thought illegal immigrants had constitutional rights and if he believed that Roe v. Wade, which guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion, is still the “law of the land.”

Stewart acknowledged the Supreme Court’s ruling but said the government views this case differently because the teenager is an undocumented immigrant in federal custody.

He also said undocumented immigrants have “minimal” protections in this country.

“I’m not going to give you a concession on that your honor,” he said.

The judge laughed. “This is remarkable,” she said.

During the hearing, Chutkan also answered her own questions, saying the girl’s legal status was “irrelevant” and that “despite the fact that she’s in this country illegally, she still has constitutional rights.”

The teenager is 15 weeks pregnant, and Texas bars most abortions after 20 weeks.

The girl’s native country was not identified during the hearing, and it is not clear that abortion is legal in her homeland if she were to return home. She was apprehended in the United States in September after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

I'm worried because the TT and Repugs are getting more and more hyper-conservative judges in place in lower courts, which will impact us for decades. I can't imagine a judge approved by the Repugs would have ruled as Judge Chutkan did.

[JMarie]

{taking a big breath in} 

Not a member of an executive department, but the wife of the former head of HHS (fired because he took too many expensive plane trips)

http://www.newsweek.com/tom-prices-wife-georgia-lawmaker-says-people-hiv-should-be-quarantined-689836

Quote

People with HIV should be quarantined, and the U.S. would be safer if they “died more readily,” according to Betty Price, a Republican state representative and wife of former Health Secretary Tom Price.

The Georgia-state lawmaker and former anesthesiologist, who now represents people who live in the northern Atlanta area, was asked in a hearing what the U.S. is “legally able to do” to limit the spread of HIV throughout the state.

“It’s almost frightening, the number of people who are living that are carriers with the potential to spread,” Price said during a Georgia House of Representatives committee meeting on access to health care in the state (around the one-hour mark of the video). “Whereas in the past, they died more readily, and at that point they’re not posing a risk. So we’ve got a huge population posing a risk if they’re not in treatment.”

Price also said that while she didn’t necessarily want to quarantine people with HIV, that is exactly what she wants to do.

“I don’t want to say the quarantine word—but I guess I just said it,” Price said to Dr. Pascale Wortley, director of the Georgia Department of Public Health’s HIV epidemiology section, according to STAT News.

“Is there an ability, since I would guess that public dollars are expended heavily in prophylaxis and treatment of this condition, so we have a public interest in curtailing the spread. … Are there any methods legally that we could do that would curtail the spread?”

In 2014, about 50,000 people were diagnosed with HIV in the state—the second-highest rate of new diagnoses among all states the following year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Price’s “incredibly disturbing” comments were condemned for perpetuating “the stigma that still exists around HIV,” Jeff Graham, executive director of Georgia Equality.

“It’s very troubling to hear comments like that,” he told STAT News. “It shows the amount of work that still needs to happen to educate elected officials on the reality of the lives of people living with HIV. I’m hoping Representative Price would be open to sitting down, meeting with folks, hearing how those comments sound and recognizing that’s not the direction we need to go in.”

Price's husband, Tom, was the health secretary under President Donald Trump who has faced his own share of condemnation. Price, who served less than a year, was forced to resign after facing criticism for taking private planes at the taxpayers' expense.

Price did not immediately respond to calls from Newsweek.

And she's a doctor???????

[WiseGirl]

On 10/14/2017 at 10:40 AM, fraurosena said:

I just don't get why this administration is so hell bent on destruction. What do they think they stand to gain? 

Money from someone (country, corporation, your pick) somewhere is my best guess.....

Make America great again pfffft....more like line my pockets and fleece America..... 

[Howl]

8 hours ago, JMarie said:

And she's a doctor???????

Yes, I just came running over to post this.  She's an anesthesiologist, so apparently is high on fumes.  Let's consider some alternatives to quarantine.  Aids education beginning in high school, needle exchanges, more funding for outreach programs of every kind, better funding for community clinics,  free medication and I could go on (and on and on). So glad her hubby has resigned as Sec. for Health and Human Services. 

Back to the 17-year-old in Texas -- this is a legal tennis match right now.  I just read a CNN update and couldn't figure out what the hell is actually going on, but this is the most current: 

Quote

 

A federal appeals court Friday ruled that an undocumented teenage immigrant held in detention in Texas may obtain an abortion, but it delayed the process, giving the Trump administration 11 days to find a sponsor to take custody of the girl beforehand.

The ruling set a deadline of October 31 for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to get a sponsor for the girl, who is a minor. 

 

Legal maneuvering  still going on.  This being Texas I don't have a lot of hope for her.   I have a feeling that there will be stalling and delaying until she is 20 weeks pregnant and then an entirely different set of delaying tactics will kick in. 

[Ali]

The same people fighting this abortion are the ones screaming about illegal immigrants crossing the border to have babies in the United States.

[Audrey2]

4 minutes ago, Ali said:

The same people fighting this abortion are the ones screaming about illegal immigrants crossing the border to have babies in the United States.

Oh no. These "compassionate conservatives" will wait until she is in labor, then drive her across the border and drop her off along the side of the road in Mexico, then celebrate that they did their duty and saved the baby.

[fraurosena]

I am completely dumbfounded, even though I shouldn't be surprised at all. 

Jeff Sessions Just Confessed His Negligence on Russia

Quote

The headlines from Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday focused on his refusal to answer questions about his conversations with President Donald Trump and his declaration — dragged out of him with all the elegance of a tooth extraction — that he had not yet been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller. Lost in the back-and-forth and amid focus on his testy exchange with Sen. Al Franken about Russian contacts, however, was a truly damning moment about Sessions’s tenure at the Justice Department thus far.

That moment came not in the context of hostile questioning from a committee Democrat but in a perfectly cordial exchange with Republican Sen. Ben Sasse.

With Midwestern gentility, the Nebraska senator told Sessions that he wasn’t going to grill him about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Rather, he said, “I would like to continue talking about the Russians but in the context of the long-term objectives that Vladimir Putin has to undermine American institutions and the public trust.… We face a sophisticated long-term effort by a foreign adversary to undermine our foreign policy and our ability to lead in the world by trying to undermining confidence in American institutions.”

Russia will be back in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, Sasse argued. “We live at a time where info ops and propaganda and misinformation are a far more cost-effective way for people to try to weaken the United States of America than by thinking they can outspend us at a military level.… So as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and as a supervisor of multiple components of our intelligence community … do you think we’re doing enough to prepare for future interference by Russia and other foreign adversaries in the information space?”

You’d think this question would be a golden opportunity for Sessions. After all, if you’re a man who has had some — ahem — inconvenient interactions with former Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, you might relish the chance to answer a question about what you are doing to prevent Russian interference in the future, as a chance to go on offense and show how serious you are about tackling a problem that has undermined your reputation.

But Sessions’s answer did not inspire confidence: “Probably not. We’re not. And the matter is so complex that for most of us, we are not able to fully grasp the technical dangers that are out there.”

Sessions acknowledged “disruption and interference, it appears, by Russian officials” and noted that it “requires a real review.” But he said nothing about what the department is doing to ready itself.

Sasse followed up, giving him an explicit chance to spell it out. “So what steps has the department taken,” or should it take, “to learn the lessons of 2016 … in fighting foreign interference?” he asked.

Crickets from Sessions.

The department, he said, is specifically reviewing commercial, rather than political, interference from foreigners and the theft of trade secrets and data — an enforcement priority that in fact long predates the Trump administration. “We’ve got indictments that deal with some of those issues,” he said, perhaps not even realizing that he was not talking about the same subject Sasse was asking about. He noted that the department’s national security division has some “really talented people” — which is true but hardly constitutes a step he is taking to combat the Russia threat. And he touted the FBI’s experts, too. Then he acknowledged that, despite all this, the department’s capabilities are still not at the appropriate level yet.

As to a specific answer to Sasse’s question — that is, what has the department done or is planning to do to confront information operations threats from Russia in the future? Not a word.

Sasse returned to the point a few minutes later, and Sessions’s answer got even worse. Sasse asked: “Do you think the Department of Justice has a proactive role in looking at hardening our democratic process against foreign interference?”

Sessions responded that Sasse had made a “valuable point” and that if Sasse had any thoughts toward legislation, he was eager to hear them. But as to any proactive role on the Justice Department’s part, Sessions made only the following remarkable admission: “I am not sure we have a specific review underway at this point in time.”

You read that right. According to the attorney general, the Justice Department is not even reviewing the specific question of what policy or bureaucratic changes might be appropriate in establishing an active role for the department concerning the most basic defense of democracy.

Later in his five hours of testimony, Sessions had a chance to revisit the matter under similarly cordial questioning from Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar. “Are you aware,” the Minnesota senator asked, “of any efforts between the department and other federal agencies to assist states in this upcoming election to protect our elections from hacking?” Sessions responded blandly that the FBI has “capabilities and experience in many of these matters” and that he does “think it is an important matter,” and he insisted that electronic alteration of vote totals would be a “stunning disaster” and cannot happen. But as to any initiatives of the department he again offered not a word.

In short, the attorney general of the United States, though acknowledging and expressing confidence in the intelligence community’s assessment of foreign interference in the 2016 election and admitting that the government isn’t doing enough to guard against such activity in the future, could not identify a single step his department is taking or should take in that direction. He could not suggest a proactive role the department might play against foreign information operations. He could not even identify a policy review currently underway on the subject, though he agreed that one was appropriate. He could not identify legislation that might be helpful. And he could not name any departmental activity, beyond the FBI’s having capabilities, in support of states that might be targeted in upcoming elections.

This was a frank display of ignorant complacency in the face of a clear and demonstrated threat. The question of what exactly the Justice Department should be doing, what proactive role it should be playing, is a complicated one. But here’s a suggestion to begin with: DOJ should be at least thinking about the problem that Sasse posed. The attorney general’s testimony Wednesday gave no indication that the department is even doing that.