Trump 19: Please Cry for Us Montenegro (and We Are so Sorry!)

[sawasdee]

@fraurosenaI can't snip your post!

But if France keeps the  American climate scientists engaged and employed throughout this time of darkness in the US - GO FRANCE!

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Well the US of A profited immensely from the mass migration of scientists from Europe many decades ago. It seems Trump is dead set in his will to reciprocate.

[apple1]

8 hours ago, Destiny said:

 

I am so deeply offended at this one. I'm not a Christian, I don't believe in your god (the separate issue of does he actually believe in that god notwithstanding), so how fucking dare you? HATE!

As a person who self-identifies as a Christian - I AM ALSO DEEPLY OFFENDED by that whole show.

Time for a re-post of an appropriate statement, because it expresses clearly what I have to say about this:

When you wrap a flag around the cross you make a moot point out of both of them. - Mark Lowry

I HATE my faith being co-opted by a man who, if he is Christian, shows zero evidence of even attempting to follow the teachings of Jesus. I also hate when people or groups like the "Faith and Freedom Coalition" demonstrate that their de facto "savior" is politics/politicians.

[onekidanddone]

9 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Yes! "New York attorney general ‘looking into’ Eric Trump’s foundation"

Good thing he is a New York attorney and TT can't fire him. However expect tweet storms from daddy which could only damage Ericpoos case.

[GreyhoundFan]

An interesting perspective: "The president whose ghost is haunting the White House"

Spoiler

The ghost of Andrew Johnson, America’s 17th president and the first to be impeached, is haunting the White House. Echoes of Johnson’s footsteps can be detected in the 45th president’s policies and conduct, including Donald Trump’s rash, ill-advised decision to unceremoniously fire FBI Director James B. Comey. That act is reminiscent of Johnson’s discharge of his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, in 1867, which led to impeachment by the House of Representatives. Whether Trump’s firing of Comey could contribute to a similar fate in the House remains to be seen.

Nonetheless, in thought, word and deed, Johnson may be a spirit manifested in Trump.

Johnson has been described by historian Eric Foner as “intolerant of criticism, and out of touch with political reality.” Labeling Johnson “self-absorbed,” Foner cited a one-hour Washington’s Birthday speech by Johnson in which he “referred to himself over 200 times.” Sound like anyone we know?

This much can be said: The crooked, nefarious pathways blazed by Johnson on enforcement of civil rights and justice are routes that Trump is faithfully following.

Johnson laid his tracks early.

Had Johnson’s policies prevailed for the past 150 years, the District of Columbia would never have had African American mayors or council members — or even any blacks among the city’s electorate. In 1867, Johnson vetoed legislation giving African American men the right to vote in the District. That precious right was, thankfully, granted three days later, but only because Congress overrode Johnson’s veto. (Johnson expressed his strong anti-black feelings in his message about a veto of the first Reconstruction Act: “The negroes have not asked for the privilege of voting; the vast majority of them have no idea what it means.”)

And no thanks to Johnson, Howard University and St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, in Foggy Bottom, are celebrating their sesquicentennials.

One hundred and fifty-one years ago, Johnson vetoed a bill renewing the charter of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was created to provide assistance to Howard University and the fledging African American colleges and universities in the emancipated South. Johnson described such assistance as “Africanizing the southern part of our territory.”

Howard’s charter, awarded by Congress in 1867, was signed by Johnson, but only because Congress overrode that Johnson veto, too, and forced the Freedmen’s Bureau down his throat.

St. Mary’s Church, the city’s first African American Episcopal congregation, also had a near-death experience with Johnson.

The church, located in the 700 block of 23rd Street NW, has the aforementioned Stanton to thank for its original building. Hearing about the newly formed congregation’s search for a place of worship, Stanton provided the chapel materials that became the first building exclusively for the city’s black Episcopalians.

Like Howard University, St. Mary’s had dodged a Johnson bullet. The church held its first service on June 9, 1867. It was just two months later, in August, that Johnson fired Stanton.

But Johnson was a scourge of America far beyond the District of Columbia.

Frowning upon giving full rights and privileges of citizenship to freed African Americans, Johnson vetoed a stream of civil rights bills, most of the vetoes were overridden by Congress.

He undercut the positive measures of Reconstruction. He gave former Confederate states freedom to manage their affairs, which allowed them to enact Black Codes that imposed plantation-like conditions on former slaves.

Now Trump, as boorish, undisciplined, racially insensitive and bullying as Johnson was, is not missing a beat when it comes to lax civil rights enforcement and ignoring racial, ethnic and religious injustices.

Under Trump’s agenda, states will be allowed to take protection of minority rights into their own hands. Trump’s administration will look the other way.

In Trump’s Washington, the Labor Department unit that monitors discrimination by federal contractors is being disbanded, the Education Department’s office that investigates discrimination complaints in school districts is being gutted, police departments that have whipped up on blacks will receive dialed-down Justice Department oversight, and environmental polluters may get the Environmental Protection Agency’s green light to contaminate minority communities .

White supremacists are as emboldened today as they were during Andrew Johnson’s era.

Discrimination is getting the same blind-eye treatment it received during the post-Civil War white Southern pushback. Acts of racially and religiously motivated violence are enjoying a resurgence reminiscent of the day the White House was ruled by Andrew Johnson — an apparition that seems to be making daily appearances in the Oval Office.

Agent Orange admires Jackson, but this piece is correct, he's much more similar to Johnson. Maybe he was confused because they were both named Andrew.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Donald Trump Is the Worst Boss in Washington"

Spoiler

Washington — Donald Trump should be on a major hiring binge right now. His government is uniquely underpopulated, with only 123 out of 558 key positions requiring Senate confirmation either nominated or confirmed. Some departments are almost entirely vacant of political appointees below the cabinet-level positions.

On top of that, Mr. Trump has actually shed a number of staffers, with a series of resignations and firings sweeping up his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn (Russia); his communications director, Michael Dubke (failed to spin coverage-dross into gold); and, most infamously, his F.B.I. director, James Comey, who as he reminded everyone in testimony on Thursday, learned the reasons for his firing on TV.

Even as summer approaches and the window shrinks for getting new confirmations through the Senate before its long August recess, the administration has announced just a trickle of new hires. Part of this is incompetence — a number of high-profile candidates have stumbled in the vetting process — and the undeniable fact that Mr. Trump doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to fill those positions. But people are also clearly put off by the fact that Mr. Trump, who ran on hostility to D.C.’s “swamp,” now seems like the worst boss in Washington.

As stories leak out about the president’s erratic and abusive behavior toward his staff, as his legal issues intensify, as the number of cautionary tales mounts (Comey, Sean Spicer, H. R. McMaster, Jeff Sessions), a new wariness has become apparent. Many candidates have refused to be considered for positions that would at any other time be highly coveted, including at least four candidates for Mr. Comey’s job before Christopher Wray was announced as the pick for F.B.I. director Wednesday; four law firms asked to represent the president in the investigation in Russia’s influence over last year’s elections; and the husband of Mr. Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway, who recently pulled himself off the shortlist to head the Justice Department’s civil division, responsible for defending the government.

At this point, the question may be, who would take any of those jobs? Talking to people who’ve held them in the past, the answer seems to be: just about nobody.

Perhaps you might wish to be White House communications director, filling Mr. Dubke’s vacancy? “Anybody who would go in now is nuts,” said Jennifer Palmieri, on the job she held under President Barack Obama and on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. The position, she said, is always difficult: extremely high profile, “the job with the highest risk and the least amount of control.” Under Mr. Trump, the position is where “truth — because the press demand that you live in reality — comes into conflict with Donald Trump’s version of the truth.”

In the Justice Department, potential appointees are watching Jeff Sessions’s striking trajectory as attorney general, entering the job as Mr. Trump’s ideological twin and nonetheless being harassed nearly into resigning after he recused himself from the department’s Russia investigation. Mr. Wray’s job as F.B.I. director — assuming he makes it past the confirmation process — is viewed as surprisingly secure. As a former Justice Department official pointed out, firing one F.B.I. director has been enough of a headache that Mr. Trump would likely avoid firing a second.

But in other Justice positions, there’s the challenge of having to defend in court a president who seems bent on tweeting away his own defense. “I would’ve thought until just recently that one would be willing to take the job of solicitor general even in a Trump administration,” said Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general. (Mr. Trump has announced a candidate for his solicitor general, but it is not officially filled.) Having watched Mr. Sessions struggle, “I would think a solicitor general today might worry about being asked to say all kinds of things and take all kinds of positions which are essentially unprofessional.”

There’s the State Department, where you’d have the opportunity to perform diplomacy under a president categorically uninterested in the practice. As Michael McFaul, former ambassador to Russia under President Obama put it, “Why would you want to go be the assistant secretary over there when a) it doesn’t look like you’re going to have much power or responsibility, and b] you do so at a tremendous cost to your reputation moving forward?”

Then there’s the national security team, whose leader, Mr. McMaster, was forced to defend the White House after Mr. Trump leaked sensitive intelligence to the Russian ambassador and then, it was recently reported in Politico, left stunned as Mr. Trump took crucial language about NATO out of a speech he’d labored over. “People I know, they look at what’s happening with McMaster and they think, well, if you’re the national security adviser and you can’t even get in that sentence, just an obviously low-hanging-fruit achievement, why should anybody assume you’ll have any control over major foreign policy decisions?” Mr. McFaul said.

Earlier on in the administration, there was a level of plausible deniability: You could tell yourself Mr. Trump had just been mouthing off during the campaign, but that he was likely to run like a normal business-friendly Republican. And there were many who felt a strong duty to serve, perhaps even more so if they had doubts about President Trump. Five months in, though, those people — both already hired and in the group that might be invited to be — are clearly feeling far more anxious.

Because of this, the field of potential job candidates — already restricted to those Republicans who hadn’t explicitly declared their opposition to Mr. Trump during the campaign — has severely shrunk. In terms of who might want her old job, Ms. Palmieri said, the most likely candidate now would be someone from Breitbart or Infowars, “a propaganda artist that you would normally not see in America at the very important position of the White House communications director.”

The people still willing to take political positions are likely to be more careerist, and in many jobs more ideological. They’re also likely to be older, Mr. McFaul said. Younger people are more likely to wait out the administration altogether and not get branded with a scarlet “T.” That may be overly optimistic — entirely avoiding the effects of President Trump’s bad management is not really an option for any of us.

 

"...a scarlet T..." -- yes, T is the new A.

[CTRLZero]

13 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

In terms of who might want her old job, Ms. Palmieri said, the most likely candidate now would be someone from Breitbart or Infowars, “a propaganda artist that you would normally not see in America at the very important position of the White House communications director.”

Before Trump, I had not even heard of these cringe-worthy "news" organizations, and now they are potentially in consideration as the spokesperson for our nation.  I wish we had good people surrounding Trump, but I don't think he even knows any honorable, qualified folks to fill these positions.  Anyone with a shred of decency, he kicks to the curb.  

[fraurosena]

26 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

T is the new A.

@Destiny: new thread title?

 

8 minutes ago, CTRLZero said:

Anyone with a shred of decency, he kicks to the curb.  

Anyone with a shred of decency, runs for the hills. 

[bashfulpixie]

8 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Well, any scientist seeking refuge from the anti-science sentiment in America has place to go now:

 

And the brain drain begins.

[GreyhoundFan]

Politico published a reminder that we have to be vigilant: "5 things Trump did while you weren't looking"

Spoiler

All eyes were on Washington this week as the Trump administration hosted a series of events to promote its infrastructure policy—highlighting the president’s proposals to cut red tape, reform air traffic control and rebuild America’s roads and bridges. The president held a signing ceremony Monday, took his message to the American people in Ohio on Tuesday and invited governors to the White House on Thursday. “Infrastructure week” dominated the news.

Just kidding. It’s true—he really did do all those things—but you’d be forgiven for having no idea they happened. The eyes on Washington were all glued to the drama around former FBI Director James Comey.

Infrastructure week didn’t contain any new actual policy proposals, despite an exultant tweet from Vice President Mike Pence calling it a “banner week for infrastructure,” and Trump didn’t sign a bill. Instead, he signed a purely symbolic document in support of Rep. Bill Shuster’s plan to create a nonprofit to oversee air traffic control, and released a vague list of infrastructure principles that had already been released in his budget.

But behind all the theater, stuff really is happening in Washington. Trump’s political appointees are—slowly—getting settled into their new jobs, reviewing Obama-era policies and leaving their fingerprints on the bureaucracy. These changes don’t make national headlines, and they probably won’t be mentioned in a tweet from the commander in chief—but they could affect the lives of everyday Americans.

So you don’t miss these changes, The Agenda is launching a weekly series highlighting five important policy changes that took place in the past week. It will track how Trump’s agenda is being implemented across the government, even as the White House remains politically bogged down by the Russia investigation and struggles to work with Congress. And what better week to begin than this one when Washington was fixated on one Senate hearing room, while Trump’s appointees continued to roll back Obama’s agenda and sweep in a new era of conservative policy.

1. A boost for Uber and McDonald’s.
It’s the most controversial question in the labor world these days: When is a worker an employee, and when is he or she an independent contractor? That question has been especially controversial for “gig economy” companies like Uber and Postmates. But increasingly, regular businesses are also opting to classify their workers as independent contractors, which can cut their labor costs sharply by not obliging them to offer benefits like health insurance or pay employer payroll taxes. According to one recent study, the percentage of workers employed as contractors grew by almost 30 percent from 2005 to 2015.

In 2015, the Obama administration gave workers a win on this one: It issued a guidance document explaining how the Department of Labor would interpret the law, outlining the economic tests it employed in determining whether an employer was misclassifying its workers. The agency had already been using that policy in enforcing the law, but putting it in writing sent a clear message to employers across the country that the Obama administration was serious about cracking down on worker misclassification.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration withdrew the guidance document. This was a win for business owners in any number of sectors—not just Uber, but industries such as farming and construction, which increasingly use independent contractors. The withdrawal of the document doesn’t change the underlying law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, or the DOL’s current interpretation of it but sends a strong signal to employers that Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta plans to interpret it differently than his predecessor. “The big story is not that, for whatever reason, they pulled down guidance,” said David Weil, who issued the document under Obama. “The real question is what else comes with this.”

Acosta also withdrew another Obama-era guidance document on how the department will determine whether a parent company, like McDonald’s or Subway, is jointly responsible for its franchises’ labor violations. As with worker misclassification, the Obama-era DOL interpreted the joint employment standard favorably for workers; its withdrawal is a victory for businesses.

2. A trade war with Mexico averted—for now.
Trump has stormed on about the North American Free Trade Agreement, calling it a “trading disaster” and vowing to rip it up, suggesting that a trade war with Mexico may be on the horizon. But on Tuesday, the United States and Mexico went the other direction and actually came to a deal, averting a potential trade crisis when they ended a dispute on Mexican sugar exports. The showdown was seen as a first test for the two countries as they, along with Canada, seek to preserve and update NAFTA later this year.

The sugar deal is a quintessentially in-the-weeds trade agreement: It raises the minimum prices for raw and refined sugar and cuts the percentage of Mexico’s sugar exports that are refined from 53 to 30 percent, while also redefining the purity level for refined sugar. The U.S. sugar industry objected to the deal, arguing that it did not address loopholes that give Mexican producers an unfair advantage in the U.S. market. It wasn’t the win that industry wanted, but many experts were encouraged that the administration’s first big dispute with a major trading partner had an amicable ending.

3. The end of a DOJ “slush fund.”
Three years ago, when the Department of Justice settled a $17 billion settlement with Bank of America over its mortgage lending practices, it came with a requirement: The bank had to pay $100 million to various legal and community groups, a sum intended to help homeowners hurt by Bank of America’s wrongdoing. Many other DOJ settlements with financial institutions during the Obama administration required similar payouts to outside groups.

Conservatives have long objected to this practice, which was used by Obama and, before him, George W. Bush: they see it as a way for a president to direct money to his favored organizations, illegally sidestepping the congressional appropriations process. The Obama administration argued that so-called third-party settlements were simply another tool for reparations: The money, they said, didn’t go to random organizations but instead to groups that could help repair the damage caused by financial misdeeds. Opponents called it a “slush fund.”

That ended Wednesday when Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo prohibiting U.S. attorneys from including such third-party payouts in any settlements. When the Department of Justice settles a case from now on, third-party groups won’t get a dime.

4. A win for nursing homes.
Last October, the Obama administration banned any nursing home that receives federal funding—which is most of them—from requiring that prospective tenants sign an arbitration agreement as a condition to be admitted, a common practice in the industry. Such agreements prevent residents from taking the facility to court, and instead require them to appeal to an arbitration tribunal. Nursing homes prefer arbitration because it’s usually cheaper than getting sued; critics say it’s unfair to residents, who often have no idea they signed away their right to sue in court until they actually try to sue, at which point the nursing home shows them the fine print.

The nursing home industry fought the rule, suing the Department of Health and Human Services. In November, it won a temporary injunction against the regulation, so it never actually took effect. And now it may be dead. On Tuesday, the Trump administration signaled its view on arbitration agreements: HHS issued a new proposed regulation that rolled back the Obama rule. Because it’s not final, the new rule doesn’t immediately overturn the ban on arbitration agreements; it has to go through the same process as any other rule. But it sends a strong signal for where the administration will ultimately land.

5. Get THAAD out of here.
Not every major policy change affecting America originates in Washington. On Wednesday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in blocked the deployment of an American missile defense system intended to block missile attacks from North Korea.

The Pentagon’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system became a hot-button issue in Asia: China sees the North Korea angle as a cover story for a system that’s really intended to block Chinese missiles, an incursion on its sovereignty. (The Pentagon disputes that argument.) It was already a delicate issue in South Korea; Beijing had been successfully using state media to persuade Chinese consumers to boycott South Korean stores and cancel vacation plans, which has hurt many Korean businesses. Then Trump rattled relations with its ally by insisting in April that South Korea foot the $1 billion bill for the system, an idea later walked back by his national security team.

Moon—a left-leaning leader who supports a more open dialogue with North Korea than his scandal-plagued predecessor—was already reluctant to host THAAD at all, but allowed its continued deployment until he discovered last week, to his surprise, that the Pentagon had sent four more launchers into the country. On Wednesday, he stopped any further deployment of the system—just a day before North Korea conducted its 10th missile test of the year.

Everything this administration does scares me. I can't begin to think about how hard it's going to be to reverse all the damage.

[Destiny]

Onward here:

 

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

T is the new A.

@Destiny: new thread title?

I didn't notice this til now. Oops. Sorry.