Trump Dump: Internal Policy (Thread I)

[FaxModem1]

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WH official: We'll say 'fake news' until media realizes attitude of attacking the President is wrong
By Chris Massie, CNN

Updated 6:44 PM ET, Tue February 7, 2017
CNN anchor, Trump aide spar over travel ban

CNN anchor, Trump aide spar over travel ban 02:50
Story highlights
Gorka says the administration will continue using the term "fake news."
Trump and his staff have repeatedly used the term "fake news" to discredit reporting on the presidential administration.
(CNN)Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, said Monday that the administration will continue using the term "fake news" until the media understands that their "monumental desire" to attack the President is wrong.

"There is a monumental desire on behalf of the majority of the media, not just the pollsters, the majority of the media to attack a duly elected President in the second week of his term," Gorka, a former Breitbart editor who also holds a PhD in political science, told syndicated conservative radio host Michael Medved.
"That's how unhealthy the situation is and until the media understands how wrong that attitude is, and how it hurts their credibility, we are going to continue to say, 'fake news.' I'm sorry, Michael. That's the reality," he added.


Trump and his staff have repeatedly used the term "fake news" to discredit reporting on the presidential administration from mainstream outlets such as CNN and The New York Times, often offering no evidence to back up their disputes with those outlets' stories.
Earlier in the interview, Gorka was asked by Medved whether he would acknowledge that the administration's controversial statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day was "at least questionable in being the first such statement in many years that didn't recognize that Jewish extermination was the chief goal of the Holocaust."
Gorka replied by calling criticism of the statement "asinine," arguing that it was motivated by the media's desire to attack Trump.
"It's a Holocaust remembrance statement," Gorka said. "No, I'm not going to admit it. Because it's asinine. It's absurd. You're making a statement about the Holocaust. Of course it's about the Holocaust because that's what the statement's about. It's only reasonable to twist it if your objective is to attack the President."
Gorka also sparred with a caller who contended that "every time you call everything fake news, it just turns everyone except your hardcore fans off."
"Not everything's fake news," the caller added.
"You know, I would beg to differ," Gorka shot back. "Every single organ that generates these kinds of stories comes from the same clique of media organs that predicted that Hillary (Clinton) would win and that Brexit wouldn't occur. I know what fake news is. And it's coming from those organizations. It's time that you yourself understood that as well."

"It's fake news because we don't like what is being said."

[FaxModem1]

Oh, and Sean Spicer doesn't like SNL's impression of him:

LA Times

Sean Spicer responds to Melissa McCarthy's 'Saturday Night Live' skit

Tracy Brown
It looks like Sean Spicer thinks Melissa McCarthy's impression of him needs a little work.

While speaking with "Extra" on Sunday during the Super Bowl, the White House press secretary was asked about his thoughts on McCarthy's guest appearance on "Saturday Night Live."

"I think Melissa McCarthy needs to slow down on the gum chewing," Spicer said. "Way too many pieces in there."

The skit, about the Trump administration’s contentious relationship with the news media, features McCarthy as an aggressive Spicer who appears in front of a room full of reporters "to swallow gum and take names." McCarthy then goes on to take questions about President Trump's executive order on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries as well as chief strategist Steve Bannon's role on the National Security Council.

RELATED: From Streep to McCarthy, why women are the ones getting under Trump's skin

Spicer said he learned about the skit from a flurry of text messages that led him to believe that "there was a national emergency or something really funny happening."

When asked about Alec Baldwin's recurring portrayal of Trump on "Saturday Night Live," Spicer replied that he thought the skits were "mean."

"He's gone from funny to mean and that's unfortunate," Spicer said. "'Saturday Night Live' used to be really funny and I think there's a streak of meanness now that they've crossed over into."

The skit in question:

YouTube

[Dragon Angel]

"It's fake news because we don't like what is being said."

It lines up so perfectly with Trump's tweet, saying any negative poll about him is fake news. Everyone who says bad things about him is lying!

[mr friendly guy]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-09/d ... ly/8254256

Donald Trump blasts department store Nordstrom for dropping Ivanka's line, raising new concern on business ties

US President Donald Trump's Twitter attack on Nordstrom for dropping his daughter Ivanka's clothing line has raised concerns about the use of his White House platform for his family's businesses.

In response to the Twitter comment Mr Trump posted criticising the department store, White House spokesman Sean Spicer characterised the company's action as a "direct attack" on the president's policies.

"My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!" Mr Trump tweeted.

It was re-tweeted more than 6,000 times in less than an hour, including from the official, taxpayer-funded @POTUS account.

Nordstrom shares dropped 0.7 per cent after the tweet but later recovered to trade up 3.7 per cent on the New York Stock Exchange.

Nordstrom said its decision to drop Ivanka Trump branded merchandise from its stores and online was based on the brand's performance.

"Over the past year, and particularly in the last half of 2016, sales of the brand have steadily declined to the point where it didn't make good business sense for us to continue with the line for now."

Nordstrom said it informed Ivanka Trump about its decision in early January.

A day after Nordstrom's statement, luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group also said it had stopped selling Ivanka Trump's jewellery line on its website and a store in New Jersey, according to Yahoo News.

The move by the retailers comes amid an ongoing campaign called #GrabYourWallet, which encourages shoppers to boycott products with ties to President Trump, his family and his donors.

'Totally inappropriate': Democrats flag ethics office

The President's comments underscore the complicated relationship that the wealthy New York real estate developer has with his sprawling family business interests amid criticism from Democrats and others about the ethics and legality of the arrangement.

During a White House briefing, Mr Spicer painted Nordstrom's action as an attack on the President's daughter.

"For someone to take out their concern with his policies on a family member of his is just not acceptable — the President has every right as a father to stand up to them," Mr Spicer said.

Ivanka Trump ran a clothing and jewellery business bearing her name, in addition to other work for the Trump Organisation, before saying she would resign when her father was sworn in as president last month.

A spokeswoman for the Ivanka Trump brand declined to comment.

The Republican President's complaint, however, drew swift criticism from Democrats.

US House of Representatives' minority leader Nancy Pelosi said the tweet was inappropriate, but that it was typical of Mr Trump.

"I think it's inappropriate, but he's a totally inappropriate President, so it's totally in keeping with who he is," Ms Pelosi said.

"What I think is more inappropriate, though, is for him to refer to a judge who made a ruling that he didn't agree with as a 'so-called judge'. Now we're talking about the separation of power, not the thin skin of an incompetent president," she said.

Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat, in a tweet indicated that the matter should be referred to the Office of Government Ethics.

The President has declined to sell off his businesses despite calls to do so from critics, instead turning his empire over to his adult sons.

Mr Trump's web of international companies remains a bit opaque since he has refused to release his tax returns, which experts have said would provide a clearer view of his business interests.

Since winning the US presidential election on November 8, Mr Trump has targeted specific companies on Twitter. But this is his first tweet criticising a business tied to his family since the victory.

It is also not the first time Mr Trump's tweets have at least temporarily affected a stock.

US carmakers, Boeing and Carrier have also suffered after his comments on Twitter.

Freedom. Except freedom to decide who to do business with.

[Lost Soal]

Another lawsuit has been filed,this time challenging Trumps 2 for 1 regulation EO.
Commondreams.org

Consumer, Environmental and Workers Groups File Legal Challenge to Trump’s ‘One-In, Two-Out’ Executive Order on Regulations

Public Citizen, NRDC and Communications Workers of America seek injunction barring agencies from following order

WASHINGTON - Public Citizen, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Communications Workers of America sued the Trump administration today to block an executive order signed by President Donald Trump on Jan. 30 that directs federal agencies to repeal two federal regulations for every new rule they issue.

The plaintiffs are asking the court to issue a declaration that the order cannot be lawfully implemented and bar the agencies from implementing the order.

The order requires new rules to have a net cost of $0 this fiscal year, without taking into account the value of the benefits of public protections.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, names as defendants the president, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the current or acting secretaries and directors of more than a dozen executive departments and agencies. The complaint alleges that the agencies cannot lawfully comply with the president’s order because doing so would violate the statutes under which the agencies operate and the Administrative Procedure Act.

"No one thinking sensibly about how to set rules for health, safety, the environment and the economy would ever adopt the Trump Executive Order approach – unless their only goal was to confer enormous benefits on big business,” Public Citizen President Robert Weissman said. “If implemented, the order would result in lasting damage to our government’s ability to save lives, protect our environment, police Wall Street, keep consumers safe and fight discrimination. By irrationally directing agencies to consider costs but not benefits of new rules, it would fundamentally change our government’s role from one of protecting the public to protecting corporate profits.”

“President Trump’s order would deny Americans the basic protections they rightly expect,” said NRDC President Rhea Suh. “New efforts to stop pollution don’t automatically make old ones unnecessary. When you make policy by tweet, it yields irrational rules. This order imposes a false choice between clean air, clean water, safe food and other environmental safeguards.”

CWA President Chris Shelton said, “It is unbelievable that the Trump administration is demanding that workers trade off one set of job health and safety protections in order to get protection from another equally dangerous condition. This order means that the asbestos workplace standard, for example, could be discarded in order to adopt safeguards for nurses from infectious diseases in their workplaces. This violates the mission of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers’ safety and health. It also violates common sense.”

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are represented by lawyers at Public Citizen Litigation Group, NRDC, CWA and Earthjustice.

“When presidents overreach, it is up to the courts to remind them no one is above the law and hold them to the U.S. Constitution,” said Earthjustice attorney Patti Goldman. “This is one of those times.”

A draft 2016 report to Congress from the White House OMB estimates that the annual benefits from all major regulations over the past 10 years for which agencies monetized both benefits and costs were between $269 billion and $872 billion, while the costs were between $74 billion and $110 billion, in 2014 dollars. OMB’s 2005 report to Congress estimated that major rules from the previous 10 years provided annual benefits of $69.6 billion to $276.8 billion, while costing between $34.8 billion and $39.4 billion.

[Thanas]

A hilarious take on Trump.

America has gone from the Obama Years to the Trump Years, like going from the West Wing to a sitcom where the incidental music involves a tuba. I actually think Donald Trump is going to prove a lot of people wrong, but sadly not George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, or whoever wrote the Book of Revelation. It says a lot about the man that building a giant wall isn’t even in the top five most Game of Thrones things about him. Of course, presidents always enter office with something to prove, it’s just rarely their sanity.

You look into Trump’s eyes and you see the fear and confusion of a man who has just been told he’s got stage-four cervical cancer. He is a super-villain in a world without heroes, a man so obnoxious and unhappy that karma may see him reincarnated as himself. You kind of wish he’d get therapy, but at this stage it’s like hiring a window cleaner for a burning building. It’s still difficult to classify him exactly: he’s not a classic Nazi, but would burn books if his supporters knew how to read. Hillary Clinton was obviously the preferred establishment candidate, and whoever was on the rota for this election cycle at the Illuminati really dropped the ball, but Trump is still very much someone that the permanent powers have assessed they can work with.

One of his first acts as president was an executive order to ban federal money going to international groups that perform or provide information on abortions. Making it clear that he’ll only provide billion-dollar funding to terminate young lives overseas if some kind of US-made drone is involved. This bill stops funding for birth control in countries where religion and culture mean women have no access to alcohol. Think it through – have you any idea how hard it is inducing a miscarriage just by drinking tonic? Call me a cynic, but when male politicians defund reproductive health centres, I always wonder how many abortions they’ve funded themselves. Is this just revenge for some clinic in the 1980s rejecting their idea for a loyalty card scheme? There’s probably business pressure behind this bill, too. Maybe American corporations are worried that fewer kids in the developing world means no one to do the detailed stitching on their clothing lines. I suppose everybody’s politics are shaped by the particular bubble they live in. Trump sees anti-choice arguments all the time; the only time he sees an argument for abortion is in a mirror.

Trump cares about the same things a member of noughties rap outfit G Unit cares about: women, money and vengeance. Yet, random though it seems, his fight with the judiciary could well be tactical. He will blame them for the next act of terrorism that occurs then declare a state of emergency where everybody has to stay indoors while his tweets are read out over a Tannoy. I’m in an unusual position in that I don’t support Trump being invited to Britain, but I do hope he comes. Britain is divided at the moment and nothing unites us like hating Americans. Britain is good at mockery, and it will hopefully be a bit like when David Blaine came and sat in that plastic box. Of course, Farage has gone full Lord Haw-Haw, correctly gauging that history wasn’t going to judge him very kindly anyway, and that there might not be any. If the Queen ever has to shake Trump’s hand, she will put on so many gloves she’ll look like Mickey Mouse. I find it amusing that the same people who think it’s ridiculous for Mexico to be asked to pay for America’s wall think it’s fine for us to pay for Trident. To be fair, I managed to get my neighbour to build a wall and pay for it, and all it cost me was the price of a thong to sunbathe in.

My best guess at the great man’s next move is the hoisting of an enormous burning eye above Trump Tower. It’s a building for which the words tacky and gaudy somehow seem too jolly and frivolous. Close up, it looks like the memory stick where some giant alien sex-killer stores his worst atrocities, or a version of the black slab in 2001: A Space Odyssey, sent to restore our consciousness to the level of chimpanzees. Trapped inside, Melania Trump has a look that I’ve never seen before, the eyes of someone waiting with increasing impatience for Stockholm syndrome to set in. The look of a woman frantically trying to unlearn English, appalled to find that this only makes her understand her husband more clearly. Perhaps women trapped in marriages with monsters resort to plastic surgery so that it becomes easier to leave a wax head in their bed while they work on their tunnel at night. Perhaps the manicures are to hide the endless digging. Perhaps it’s the secret of their figures. They’re not dieting, they’re eating those peanut butter and fried egg sandwiches Michael Phelps used to train on and spending their nights burrowing like a fucking gopher.

You have to say it’s surprising that, with so much to work with, the response from the Democratic establishment has been to suggest that Trump is a Russian spy. How could he possibly keep a secret? He almost never stops talking, seemingly delivering a live feed of his internal monologue, using national television appearances to ramble about murdering terrorists’ families and blurt out fantasies about torture. Admittedly, any expert psychologist will tell you that torture does work, but only if you first threaten them with bare electrical wires. I’m equally baffled that so much Democratic criticism focuses on his incompetence and instability. Competent, focused Nazis are absolutely the worst kind.

Equally, I don’t really understand commentators who say it’s vital not to normalise any of Trump’s actions. They have been normalised for eight years by Barack Obama while many of the same people looked the other way. Banks and corporations writing their own legislation; war by executive order; mass deportations; kill lists: it’s all now as normal and American as earthquakes caused by fracked gases being ignited by burning abortion clinics. Of course, there is a moral difference in whether such actions are performed by a Harvard-educated constitutional law professor or a gibbering moron, and the distinction goes in Trump’s favour. That’s not to say Trump won’t plumb profound new depths of awfulness, like the disbanding of the environmental protection agency set up by hippy, libtard snowflake Richard Nixon.

Obviously, the most important issue here is why America hasn’t done as well as in the past at capitalising on these horrors to create good music about the political turmoil. I mean, where is their Bob Dylan? Where are their anthems about drone warfare killing innocent civilians? Instead we’ve got Drake begging women via song to text him back after a fight at the Cheesecake Factory. Britain seems to be in an even deeper cultural torpor. Everything from Teen Vogue to young adult fiction has a more radical take than our press, and the Trump administration is satirised by American television with a venom that the British television industry, for its own government, does its best to avoid.

Trump is at war with Saturday Night Live. He thinks it’s horrible and yet he can’t stop watching. Pretty much the same as how the world feels about him. How can he expect to escape ridicule? Being on reality TV is the closest he ever got to reality. His children look like a teen movie about Wall Street vampires directed by Uday Hussein. He has cultivated a square face that’s the shade of a banned food colouring and the muscle tone of a coma patient. He looks like aliens came to Earth and made a human costume after seeing one commercial for a car dealership. Really, he seems like the sort of person that a competent leftwinger with a humane alternative offer should be able to beat at the next election. Sad, really, that the only way Bernie Sanders could return in 2020 is as a glass sliding about a ouija board.

During the campaign, Trump said he wanted to stop America from making foreign military interventions, possibly because he realised he would need the army for suppressing the domestic population. Yet someone so media-obsessed can’t help but realise that among all the gaffes and flak, his insane aggression towards China and Iran has escaped censure. The media and political establishment largely approve. They only fret that he doesn’t take the same planet-threatening posture with Russia. War sells papers, television advertising and arms. It makes politicians feel important. It provides nationalism with clear enemies to define itself against. Despite all the other failures this administration promises, the US might finally be on time for a world war.

So what do we do? I think, first of all, it’s worth noting that, under an authoritarian government, all protest will be vilified anyway. Even before Trump, people got very upset that quarterback Colin Kaepernick didn’t stand during the national anthem. You’d think that would fall under the list of White People Approved Forms of Protest, along with leaving a voicemail for your senator kindly asking them to stop shooting black people in the street. Personally, I think there’s limited value in moralising with, or fact-checking, regimes that don’t care about morals or facts. In Britain we also have an increasingly authoritarian government. We send them petitions telling them that we don’t want them reading our emails, which they presumably already know from reading our emails. We face a brief political period that, unchecked, will bring at least irreversible climate change and, at worst, nuclear war.

Morally, I think you have to look at what you can do to change your own country first, as that’s the bit you have most influence on. This is complicated in Britain as we have a government that has undergone what is known in the business world as “regulatory capture” by corporate and financial interests, and is, broadly speaking, a vassal state of the US. What can we do practically to influence our own government that would truly affect the Trump administration? Well, in a country supposedly filled with restored national pride, we could not renew Trident and refuse to be his missile base. That kind of strategic loss would damage him deeply. No amount of likes or memes or petitions can achieve this. Really, if we want to survive as a species, it’s time for organised civil disobedience. It’s time to stop writing to your MP.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... nkie-boyle

[Gandalf]

Frankie Boyle never disappoints, especially when it comes to talking about conservative politicians.

[FaxModem1]

More executive decisions from Trump, these apply to police abilities.

The Independent

The President has signed three orders to tackle 'public safety' moments after he swore in Jeff Sessions as Attorney General

Rachael Revesz New York @RachaelRevesz 3 hours ago296 comments


Mr Trump and Mr Sessions said the US faced ‘rising crime’, despite figures showing the opposite over the long term
POPULAR VIDEOS
Donald Trump has signed three executive orders to deal with “public safety”, including handing more authority to the police.

At the formal ceremony to appoint Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, the President outlined the new mandate that Mr Sessions would have, including tackling crime, drug cartels and terrorism.

He insisted that the US faced the “threat of rising crime” and that “things will get better very soon”.

“I am directing the Department of Justice to reduce crimes and crimes of violence against law enforcement officers,” he said.

“It’s a shame, what has been happening to our great, our truly great, law enforcement officers. That is going to stop today.”

One of the executive orders seeks to “define new federal crimes, and increase penalties for existing federal crimes, in order to prevent violence” against state and federal police.

In 2016, a total of 135 police officers were killed in the US, a five-year high, according to a report from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Around half of them – 64 officers – were fatally shot while on the job, including 21 who were killed in an ambush-style attack. The number also includes traffic accidents and job-related health issues, for example, heart attacks while working.

No mention was made by Mr Trump of the hundreds of people who die at the hands of law enforcement every year.

There were 968 deaths last year, according to The Washington Post, and more than 130 people so far in 2017, according to a database called killedbypolice.net

The executive orders were signed during Black History Month.


Graphiq
His speech comes just one month after the former administration's DoJ concluded that, in Chicago, residents had suffered a “pattern of excessive force” by police, experienced particularly within communities of colour. Chicago was just one city being investigated under former President Barack Obama’s government as shocking videos emerged that showed people such as Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland and Walter Scott being violently arrested or killed at the hands of police officers.

Civil rights campaigners say the new mandate under Jeff Sessions is unlikely to include continuing the former department's investigation on these deaths or follow through on policing reform.

The rate of police officers being indicted or convicted is extremely low.

At the swearing-in ceremony of Mr Sessions on Thursday, Mr Trump added that the three new executive orders, including ordering the Department of Homeland Security to “break the back of criminal cartels” and asking the Department of Justice to implement a task force to reduce violent crime, were giving a “clear sign” to criminals.

“Your day is over,” he declared. “A new era of justice begins and it begins right now.”


Mr Sessions, a longtime Senator from Alabama who was once deemed too racist to serve as a federal judge, told reporters that the US “has a crime problem”.

“I wish the rise that we're seeing in crime in America today were some sort of aberration or a blip,” he said.

“My best judgement, having been involved in criminal law enforcement for many years, is that this is a dangerous, permanent trend that puts the health and safety of America at risk,” he added.

The controversial orders Donald Trump has already issued
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show all
Mr Trump’s and Mr Sessions’s claims of permanent, rising crime have consistently been debunked.

Despite a slight rise in crime over the past two years, it has gone down significantly over several decades and is much lower than in the 1980s and 1990s.

Mr Sessions added that he would fight terrorism and implement a “lawful system of immigration”.

“We need to end this lawlessness that threatens the public safety and pulls down the wages of working Americans,” he said.


FindTheHome | Graphiq
Mr Sessions was widely reported to be one of the key architects of the Muslim ban, an executive order signed on 27 January which banned all travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries in the name of fighting terrorism, despite these countries having produced no terrorist who killed a single American on US soil as part of a terrorist attack since 2001. The order was signed on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Mr Trump was also criticised for beginning his pitch to black voters just a few weeks before the Presidential election in November.

He told black churchgoers in Ohio that communities of colour have crime-ridden inner cities, no jobs and their schools are “no good”.

“What the hell do you have to lose?” he asked them.

The next four to eight years will reveal the answer.

So, what exactly will these new powers give police?

[Lost Soal]

Read this earlier. Full of bullshit idiotic statements from those two but no real details

“I am directing the Department of Justice to reduce crimes and crimes of violence against law enforcement officers,” he said.

Wow, thank fuck you got Trump. Up until this moment the Justice Department has done nothing at all about crime.

Mr Sessions added that he would fight terrorism and implement a “lawful system of immigration”.

You already have one you dolt. Your bosses previous order was aimed at those who had used it.

“We need to end this lawlessness that threatens the public safety and pulls down the wages of working Americans,” he said.

I bet if we search your voting history your one of the people who have opposed minimum wage legislation.

[mr friendly guy]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38925753

Trump aide Kellyanne Conway 'wrong' over Ivanka plug

I am going to just give some snippets so you get the gist of it.

The standards chief of the US Congress says a senior Trump aide was "wrong, wrong, wrong" to promote Ivanka Trump products on live television.
Jason Chaffetz, a Republican who heads the oversight committee in Congress, said the promotion was "clearly over the line, unacceptable".
Trump aide Kellyanne Conway had said on Fox News: "Go buy Ivanka's stuff."

Federal ethics rules prevent White House employees giving an "endorsement of any product, service or enterprise".
Mr Chaffetz said the White House should notify the Office of Government Ethics so it could initiate an inquiry. There have been numerous concerns over possible conflicts of interest for White House staff.
He said he and his Democratic counterpart would write to Mr Trump.
"It needs to be dealt with," he told the Associated Press. "There's no ifs, ands or buts about it."

I thought drain the swamp meant to stop politicians being influenced by corporate interests. I am not surprise, although Trump supporters will most probably ignore it.

[Highlord Laan]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38925753

Trump aide Kellyanne Conway 'wrong' over Ivanka plug

I am going to just give some snippets so you get the gist of it.

The standards chief of the US Congress says a senior Trump aide was "wrong, wrong, wrong" to promote Ivanka Trump products on live television.
Jason Chaffetz, a Republican who heads the oversight committee in Congress, said the promotion was "clearly over the line, unacceptable".
Trump aide Kellyanne Conway had said on Fox News: "Go buy Ivanka's stuff."

Federal ethics rules prevent White House employees giving an "endorsement of any product, service or enterprise".
Mr Chaffetz said the White House should notify the Office of Government Ethics so it could initiate an inquiry. There have been numerous concerns over possible conflicts of interest for White House staff.
He said he and his Democratic counterpart would write to Mr Trump.
"It needs to be dealt with," he told the Associated Press. "There's no ifs, ands or buts about it."

I thought drain the swamp meant to stop politicians being influenced by corporate interests. I am not surprise, although Trump supporters will most probably ignore it.

You give the hooting primates too much credit.

[Flagg]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38925753

Trump aide Kellyanne Conway 'wrong' over Ivanka plug

I am going to just give some snippets so you get the gist of it.

The standards chief of the US Congress says a senior Trump aide was "wrong, wrong, wrong" to promote Ivanka Trump products on live television.
Jason Chaffetz, a Republican who heads the oversight committee in Congress, said the promotion was "clearly over the line, unacceptable".
Trump aide Kellyanne Conway had said on Fox News: "Go buy Ivanka's stuff."

Federal ethics rules prevent White House employees giving an "endorsement of any product, service or enterprise".
Mr Chaffetz said the White House should notify the Office of Government Ethics so it could initiate an inquiry. There have been numerous concerns over possible conflicts of interest for White House staff.
He said he and his Democratic counterpart would write to Mr Trump.
"It needs to be dealt with," he told the Associated Press. "There's no ifs, ands or buts about it."

I thought drain the swamp meant to stop politicians being influenced by corporate interests. I am not surprise, although Trump supporters will most probably ignore it.

Ignore it? Oh you poor dumb bastard.*
This will generate the Chick-Fil-A effect, where people who believe in human rights attacking the fast food chain (with the best food even I still get it) over their anti-gay donations triggered massive amounts of intolerant Christians literally standing in lines for hours to buy food on a set date to show their solidarity with gay bashing. So I'd expect people whose idea of a mall is a flea market to show up at Nordstroms to spend their entire welfare check buying a single unit of lipstick and wandering in vain trying to find "The South Shall Rise Again" bumper sticker to put on their truck right next to the mostly bleached out "These Colors Don't Run" bumper sticker.

* Not calling you a dumb bastard, was just a phrase for effect.

[Simon_Jester]

Stupid jackasses are going to be stupid jackasses, nothing to be done for it.

The point here, as always, is to flip as many as possible as the (casual estimate) 5-10% of American voters who (heaven help them) thought Trump would be some semblance of a normal president. And to mobilize as many as possible of the people who sat the election out because "South Park says they're all the same crap lol."

[Dragon Angel]

Trump administration abandons defense of Obama's order to protect transgender students' rights to enter their chosen bathrooms.

The Trump administration signaled Friday that it was changing course on the previous administration’s efforts to expand transgender rights, submitting a legal brief withdrawing the government’s objections to an injunction that had blocked guidance requiring that transgender students be allowed to use restrooms that match their gender identity.

The move by the Justice Department does not immediately change the situation for the nation’s public schools, as a federal judge had already put a temporary hold on the guidance as a lawsuit by a dozen states moved through the courts.

But it suggests that the Trump administration will take a different approach on the hotly contested issue of transgender rights, which many conservatives thought went too far under the Obama administration.

And how the Trump administration decides to proceed on the particular issue of transgender students and bathroom use would affect several other cases in which students are challenging their school districts’ policies, including one involving Virginia student Gavin Grimm, which is scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court later this spring.

[I’m transgender and can’t use the student bathroom. The Supreme Court could change that.]

Gavin Grimm: It’s surreal knocking on the Supreme Court’s door Play Video3:31
17-year-old student Gavin Grimm, a transgender male, was banned from using the boys' restroom by the Gloucester County School Board. Grimm gave The Washington Post his perspective on what led to the legal battle. (McKenna Ewen, Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
The brief, filed in the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, came as part of a long-running lawsuit by 12 states opposed to Education Department guidance issued last year directing the nation’s public schools to allow transgender ­students to use the bathroom of their choice. The Obama ­administration took the position that barring the students from ­bathrooms that matched their gender identity was a violation of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in public schools.

[Obama administration directs schools to accommodate transgender students]

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor had sided with the states and issued a temporary injunction blocking the guidance last year. The Obama administration appealed the decision and asked that the injunction apply only to those 12 states. Arguments in the case were scheduled to be heard Tuesday in Austin.

[States sue Obama administration over bathroom guidance for transgender students]

But the Justice Department and the suing states said in a joint brief Friday that they were ­withdrawing that request. The brief asked the court to cancel arguments, explaining that “the parties are currently considering how best to proceed in this ­appeal.”

The request was immediately granted, according to Equality Case Files, a nonprofit organization that provides legal updates on cases related to gay and transgender rights.

The decision drew immediate criticism from gay and transgender rights groups.

“Transgender students are ­entitled to the full protection of the United States Constitution and our federal non­discrimination laws,” Chad Griffin, ­president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “It is heartbreaking and wrong that the agency tasked with enforcing civil rights laws would instead work to subvert them for political interests. President Trump must immediately reverse course and direct the DOJ to uphold ­guidance protecting transgender students.”

That the Trump administration would reverse course on the previous administration’s efforts on behalf of transgender people is not exactly a surprise.

In an interview last May with The Washington Post, Donald Trump, then the front-runner for the Republican nomination for president, said it was important to protect the rights of transgender people but thought the decision of how to direct schools to deal with transgender students was best left up to the states.

“I don’t think so, because you’ve got to protect all people, even though it’s a tiny percentage of 1 percent,” Trump said. “I think from that standpoint, [states] should come up with a policy that’s going to work for everybody and protect people.”

He repeatedly said during the interview he thought most states would “make the right decisions.”

[Trump: Rescind Obama’s transgender directives, but ‘protect everybody’]

Grimm, a senior at Gloucester High in Gloucester, Va., sued his school board two years ago after it barred him from the boys’ ­bathroom. In April, the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit sided with Grimm, deferring to the Obama administration’s position that barring transgender ­students from bathrooms that align with their gender identity is sex discrimination.

The school board appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which is scheduled to hear arguments in March.

But it is unclear what will happen if the administration’s position on transgender students rights changes. Joshua Block of the American Civil Liberties Union, who is representing Grimm, said he believes the case still has grounds to move ­forward. But Francisco Negron Jr., chief legal officer for the ­National School Boards ­Association, said late last year that he is skeptical.

Anyone who claimed that Trump would respect the rights of LGBTQ people? You can go and fuck a monkey now.

[The Romulan Republic]

People actually trusted Trump to not rubber-stamp Republican homophobia?

[Dragon Angel]

People actually trusted Trump to not rubber-stamp Republican homophobia?

I can think of some family members and at least one person on this board who did.

[TheFeniX]

Anyone who claimed that Trump would respect the rights of LGBTQ people? You can go and fuck a monkey now.

I've been drinking so call me a stupid asshole if I got this wrong. But I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm saying this as a person with LGB (no T, personally) family and friends, and someone who has zero fucks to give about them getting married or what bathroom they feel comfortable using.

This is totally to be expected (duh). Republicans have nothing to lose throwing LGBT under the bus. It's not their voting base.

What I worry about is, without someone like Obama willing to burn political capital on helping the LGBT, Democrats are just as likely to not bother worrying too much about it while they focus on voter race rather than sexual orientation. Really hope I'm wrong here, but in general, LGBT is an already active group politically: they vote. Democrats, given the opportunity, have every (political) reason to ignore their issues as well and let the states hash it out. And no matter how much Democrats ignore them to focus on other issues such as fighting voter apathy and disenfranchisement of racial minorities they can still count on LGBT to show up and vote Democrat because... well, what you just posted: Republicans WILL TRY to destroy them if given the power to do so.

I expect 4 years of Democrats saving their big plays for other things and the LGBT community is going to get left behind for more than a few years.

[Dragon Angel]

I've been drinking so call me a stupid asshole if I got this wrong. But I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm saying this as a person with LGB (no T, personally) family and friends, and someone who has zero fucks to give about them getting married or what bathroom they feel comfortable using.

This is totally to be expected (duh). Republicans have nothing to lose throwing LGBT under the bus. It's not their voting base.

What I worry about is, without someone like Obama willing to burn political capital on helping the LGBT, Democrats are just as likely to not bother worrying too much about it while they focus on voter race rather than sexual orientation. Really hope I'm wrong here, but in general, LGBT is an already active group politically: they vote. Democrats, given the opportunity, have every (political) reason to ignore their issues as well and let the states hash it out. And no matter how much Democrats ignore them to focus on other issues such as fighting voter apathy and disenfranchisement of racial minorities they can still count on LGBT to show up and vote Democrat because... well, what you just posted: Republicans WILL TRY to destroy them if given the power to do so.

I expect 4 years of Democrats saving their big plays for other things and the LGBT community is going to get left behind for more than a few years.

Oh no, I completely expect so much of the Democrats (or at least, the establishment Democrats) to throw us under the bus. I like to mentally rename them as the Compromise(d) Party of the United States, all too willing to sacrifice constituents in exchange for political expediency. At least though, they aren't actively trying to harm me, as opposed to the other party. But I definitely see them dragging their feet on my rights if they ever get into power again, in the name of "bipartisan cooperation".

Whatever that is supposed to mean anymore. Because the people who think I shouldn't exist should totally be put equal to me, someone who thinks I should exist.

[Simon_Jester]

There's precedent; as far as I can recall we saw negligible progress on gay rights, and negligible effort from the left at the federal level, throughout the Bush administration.

I will note that gay marriage (which I'm using as a proxy for LGBT issues in general, and maybe I shouldn't) [url=https://xkcd.com/1431/]passed majority approval quite a while ago. There will be more Democrats now who view standing up for LGBT rights as being either 'safe' or 'a good risk' than there were in 2006 or 2001. But yeah, all the negative predictions I'm seeing here are basically true.

...

Also, I'm preeeetty sure I remember being suspicious of the claims that "oh, Trump will be okay with gays because he used to let them into his country club!" Because no, those were gays who paid him a lot of money. Trump cares about a very short list of things, and I'm pretty sure money and ego are the only two that really register on the list. Standing up for gay rights in the face of the Republican Party would not net him either of those, so.. nope. he's not going to do that. Even if he actually cares, which is highly unlikely because he's like such a cartoonish example of "psychopath" that they should put his face in the dictionary under "psychopath."

[madd0ct0r]

an extract from a brilliant (as usual) article in London Review of Books:
From: A Short History of the Trump Family, Sidney Blumenthal, freely available here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n04/sidney-bl ... ump-family

It focuses on Mob connections through three generations of Trump men, and Trump's obsession with rejection of him by New York.

Trump's claim to have risen Gatsby-like is the opposite of Gatsby's magical self-invention. Gatsby was careful to maintain the air of the gentlemen he wished to be taken for. Trump is the uncouth son of privelage for whom, as from Tom and Daisy [Buchanan], there are no consequences for 'smashing things up'. Trump is Tom Buchanan farcially playing Gatsby. Gatsby might have appreciated the audacity, but would have avoided the shabbienes. Both Gatsby and Trump, however, are chatacters enthralled by the possibility of recapturing the pas and reshaping it as they imahine it should have been.

What Gatsby and Trump also have in common are gangsters. Gatsby’s fortune is secretly derived from his bootlegging partnership with Meyer Wolfsheim, a character based on the mobster Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series. Trump’s business has been dependent almost from the start on real-life racketeers. There was Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul ‘Big Paulie’ Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime family, who owned the company that provided the ready-mix cement for Trump Tower, used in place of the usual steel girders. There was John Cody, the boss of Teamsters Local 282, who controlled the cement trucks and was an associate of the Gambino family. There was Daniel Sullivan, Trump’s labour ‘consultant’, who in partnership with the Philadelphia crime boss Nicodemos ‘Nicky’ Scarfo’s financier, sold Trump a property in Atlantic City that became his casino. There was Salvatore ‘Salvie’ Testa, ‘crown prince’ of the Philadelphia Mob, who sold Trump the site on which two construction firms owned by Scarfo built the Trump Plaza and Casino. There was Felix Sater, convicted money launderer for the Russian Mafia, Trump’s partner in building the Trump SoHo hotel through the Bayrock Group LLC, which by 2007 had more than $2 billion in Trump licensed projects and by 2014 was no more. There was Tevfik Arif, another Trump partner, Bayrock’s chairman, originally from Kazakhstan. Bayrock’s equity financing came from three Kazakh billionaires known as ‘the Trio’, who were reported to be engaged in racketeering, money laundering and other crimes. And so on.​＊

There was no art to these deals. Trump’s relationships with the Mob weren’t just about the quality of cement. In his defence it was said that doing business with the Mob was inescapable in New York, but the truth is that there were prominent developers who crusaded against the sorts of arrangement that Trump routinely made. From beginning to end, whether Cosa Nostra or the Russian Mafia, Trump has been married to the Mob.


---


* for the document trail, see Wayne Barret's Trump:the greatest show on earth (1992) and David Cay Johnston's the making of Donald Trump (Melville House, August 2016)

[MKSheppard]

While DOLAND's immigration halt order from 7 countries has been in limbo, the rest of his domestic agenda hasn't.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/02/09/pr ... grant.html

The detention of an illegal immigrant sparked a protest Wednesday outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs office in Phoenix that resulted in seven arrests as crowds blocked ICE buses on nearby streets.

Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, 36, arrived at the office for her routine check in, but instead of being released--under President Trump's illegal immigration crackdown-- she was detained.

Garcia de Rayos, 36, was considered a “low priority” for deportation under the Obama administration and had to check in with ICE officials every six months following a 2008 conviction for felony identity theft for having false papers, The Los Angeles Times reported.

She was joined Wednesday by her husband and son--both U.S. citizens-- and supporters, some of whom cried when she was taken in to custody, The Arizona Republic reported.

The family reportedly fears she could be deported to Mexico.

“Ms. Garcia de Rayos is currently being detained by ICE based on a removal order issued by the Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review which became final in May 2013,” and ICE statement read.

https://mobile.twitter.com/azdangonzale ... wsrc%5Etfw

Daniel Gonzalez‏ @azdangonzalez

Update: Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos deported to Nogales, Sonora this morning, per attorney Ray Ybarra-Maldonado, Mexican consulate called him.

Early Thursday, immigration attorneys in Los Angeles started getting calls from clients across the city. Some callers reported being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at their homes. Others were caught at their workplaces, including one man detained at a Target store. The first round of Trump-era deportation sweeps had begun.

The news quickly filtered back to immigrant rights activists, who confirmed the detentions and alerted their networks. According to Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), as many as 134 immigrants were detained in the sweep. Based on her conversations with lawyers, many of those detained had outstanding orders for deportation—and some were sent back to Mexico as early as Thursday afternoon.

...

In a Friday afternoon press release, ICE said 160 immigrants were arrested during what it called a "five-day targeted enforcement operation" in Southern California that was "aimed at at-large criminal aliens, illegal re-entrants, and immigration fugitives." Of the 160, ICE claimed that 150 had criminal histories, and that 5 of the remaining 10 had final orders of removal or had been previously deported. While the release said "many of the arrestees had prior felony convictions for serious or violent offenses," ICE did not give a full breakdown of those convictions.

Earlier Friday, an ICE spokeswoman told Mother Jones that "enforcement surges have been part of our operational play book for many years." The subsequent press release echoed that line: "The focus was no different than the routine, targeted arrests carried out by ICE's Fugitive Operations Teams on a daily basis."

The sweep was the second high-profile ICE action in two days. On Wednesday night, immigration agents in Phoenix found themselves swarmed by protesters when they attempted to deport Guadalupe García de Rayos, a 35-year-old Mexican immigrant with two teenage children who are American citizens. García de Rayos had been caught using a fake Social Security number during an ICE workplace raid in 2008.

García de Rayos' deportation sent shock waves through the immigrant rights community and dominated Spanish-language media on Thursday. Ever since the 2008 raid, she had checked in annually with ICE to review her case—brief meetings that always resulted in her walking free, even though she had been convicted of a felony and later had a deportation order against her. This partly reflected the Obama administration's emphasis on deporting serious criminal offenders. But her deportation to Nogales, Mexico, signals that the Trump administration plans to follow through with its plans to remove all undocumented immigrants who've committed "acts that constitute a chargeable offense"—which, as Vox's Dara Lind has pointed out, could include everything from entering the country illegally to driving without a license. (In a statement to reporters Thursday, ICE said it will "focus on identifying and removing individuals with felony convictions who have final orders of removal.")

Indeed, social media was abuzz Friday with rumors of deportation raids throughout the country. On a conference call late in the day, Dave Marin, ICE's LA field office director for enforcement and removal operations, confirmed that there were also operations in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York during the week. And Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) tweeted Friday afternoon about additional ICE activity in South and Central Texas:

...

"A lot of things have changed since January 20," says CHIRLA's Salas. She notes that during the Obama years, ICE would typically give groups like CHIRLA basic information such as names and the number of people detained following any large sweep or workplace raid. But Salas says she finds it troubling that following Thursday's actions, there was little to no communication with the agency. "It's important that we don't get used to the idea that they don't have to give out this information," she says.

CHIRLA is currently focusing on educating immigrant communities on civil and constitutional rights. According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, greater Los Angeles is home to 1 million undocumented immigrants—second only to the New York City area, which is home to 1.15 million. On Friday, the group ran hourly know-your-rights workshops, and it's also holding legal clinics where immigrants can get advice. Similar efforts have been happening nationwide: Earlier this week, for example, public school educators in Austin, Texas, handed out flyers to students in English and Spanish about what to do in an encounter with immigration officials.

Salas says that organizers' next step is to continue to engage elected officials. Notably, Rep. Ruben Gallegos (D-Ariz.) and California State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León have criticized ICE on Twitter over the last day.

....

"We have to set the tone," Salas says, "that this is not acceptable."

On a gun board, a poster said:

The Feds raided a ton of Chinese restaurants all across the state [of Wyoming] last week.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... 2304201801

National
Federal agents conduct immigration enforcement raids in at least six states
Hundreds of undocumented immigrants arrested in 'routine' U.S. enforcement surge Embed Share Play Video1:34
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation has netted hundreds of undocumented immigrants across the country this week in what officials called "routine" enforcement actions. (Reuters)
By Lisa Rein, Abigail Hauslohner and Sandhya Somashekhar February 11
U.S. immigration authorities arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants in at least a half-dozen states this week in a series of raids that marked the first large-scale enforcement of President Trump’s Jan. 25 order to crack down on the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally.

Officials said the raids targeted known criminals, but they also netted some immigrants without criminal records, an apparent departure from similar enforcement waves during the Obama administration. Last month, Trump substantially broadened the scope of who the Department of Homeland Security can target to include those with minor offenses or no convictions at all.

Trump has pledged to deport as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

Immigration officials confirmed that agents this week raided homes and workplaces in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, the Los Angeles area, North Carolina and South Carolina, netting hundreds of people. But Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said they were part of “routine” immigration enforcement actions. ICE dislikes the term “raids,” and prefers to say authorities are conducting “targeted enforcement actions,” she said.

Immigration protesters block L.A. freeway ramp Embed Share Play Video2:18
Protesters blocked an onramp to the 101 freeway in Los Angeles Feb. 9, objecting to what they claim is a rise in immigration raids. (The Washington Post)
Christensen said the raids, which began Monday and ended Friday at noon, found undocumented immigrants from a dozen Latin American countries. “We’re talking about people who are threats to public safety or a threat to the integrity of the immigration system,” she said, noting that the majority of those detained were serious criminals, including some who were convicted of murder and domestic violence.

[For years, immigration authorities gave this Arizona mother a pass. Now she has been deported.]

Immigration activists said the crackdown went beyond the six states DHS identified, and said they had also documented ICE raids of unusual intensity during the past two days in Florida, Kansas, Texas and Northern Virginia.

That undocumented immigrants with no criminal records were arrested and could potentially be deported sent a shock wave through immigrant communities nationwide amid concerns that the U.S. government could start going after law-abiding people.

“This is clearly the first wave of attacks under the Trump administration, and we know this isn’t going to be the only one,” Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream, an immigrant youth organization, said Friday during a conference call with immigration advocates.

ICE agents in the Los Angeles area Thursday took a number of individuals into custody over the course of an hour, seizing them from their homes and on their way to work, activists said.

David Marin, ICE’s field director in the Los Angeles area, said in a conference call with reporters Friday that 75 percent of the approximately 160 people detained in the operation this week had felony convictions; the rest had misdemeanors or were in the United States illegally. Officials said Friday night that 37 of those detained in Los Angeles had been deported to Mexico.

“Dangerous criminals who should be deported are being released into our communities,” Marin said.

Spanish language radio stations and the local NPR affiliate in Los Angeles have been running public service announcements regarding the hourly “Know Your Rights” seminars the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles scheduled for Friday and Saturday. By the time the 4 p.m. group began Friday, more than 100 others had gathered at the group’s office in the Westlake neighborhood just outside downtown.

A video that circulated on social media Friday appeared to show ICE agents in Texas detaining people in an Austin shopping center parking lot. Immigration advocates also reported roadway checkpoints, where ICE appeared to be targeting immigrants for random ID checks, in North Carolina and in Austin. ICE officials denied that authorities used checkpoints during the operations.

[The ‘sanctuary city’ on the front line of the fight over Trump’s immigration policy]

“I’m getting lots of reports from my constituents about seeing ICE on the streets. Teachers in my district have contacted me — certain students didn’t come to school today because they’re afraid,” said Greg Casar, an Austin City Council member. “I talked to a constituent, a single mother, who had her door knocked on this morning by ICE.”

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) said he confirmed with ICE’s San Antonio office that the agency “has launched a targeted operation in South and Central Texas as part of Operation Cross Check.”

“I am asking ICE to clarify whether these individuals are in fact dangerous, violent threats to our communities, and not people who are here peacefully raising families and contributing to our state,” Castro said in a statement Friday night.

Hiba Ghalib, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said the ICE detentions were causing “mass confusion” in the immigrant community. She said she had heard reports of ICE agents going door-to-door in one largely Hispanic neighborhood, asking people to present their papers.

“People are panicking,” Ghalib said. “People are really, really scared.”

Immigration officials acknowledged that as a result of Trump’s executive order, authorities had cast a wider net than they would have last year.

The Trump administration is facing several legal challenges to his executive orders on immigration. On Thursday, the administration lost a court battle over a separate executive order to temporarily ban entry into the United States by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries, as well as by refugees. The administration said Friday that it is considering raising the case to the Supreme Court.

[Federal appeals court rules 3 to 0 against Trump on travel ban]

Some activists in Austin and Los Angeles suggested that the raids might be retaliation for those cities’ “sanctuary city” policies. A government aide familiar with the raids said it is possible that the predominantly daytime operations — a departure from the Obama administration’s night raids — meant to “send a message to the community that the Trump deportation force is in effect.”

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group, said that the wave of detentions harks back to the George W. Bush administration, when workplace raids to sweep up all undocumented workers were common.

The Obama administration conducted a spate of raids and also pursued a more aggressive deportation policy than any previous president, sending more than 400,000 people back to their birth countries at the height of his deportations in 2012. The public outcry over the lengthy detentions and deportations of women, children and people with minor offenses led President Obama in his second term to prioritize convicted criminals for deportation.

A DHS official confirmed that while immigration agents were targeting criminals, given the broader range defined by Trump’s executive order, they also were sweeping up noncriminals in the vicinity who were found to be lacking documentation. It was unclear how many of the people detained would have been excluded under Obama’s policy.

Federal immigration officials, as well as activists, said that the majority of those detained were adult men, and that no children were taken into custody.

“Big cities tend to have a lot of illegal immigrants,” said one immigration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly because of the sensitive nature of the operation. “They’re going to a target-rich environment.”

Immigrant rights groups said that they were planning protests in response to the raids, including one Friday evening in Federal Plaza in New York City and a vigil in Los Angeles.

“We cannot understate the level of panic and terror that is running through many immigrant communities,” said Walter Barrientos of Make the Road New York in New York City, who spoke on a conference call with immigration advocates.

“We’re trying to make sure that families who have been impacted are getting legal services as quickly as possible. We’re trying to do some legal triage,” said Bob Libal, the executive director of Grassroots Leadership, which provides assistance and advocacy work to immigrants in Austin. “It’s chaotic,” he said. The organization’s hotline, he said, had been overwhelmed with calls.

Jeanette Vizguerra, 35, a Mexican house cleaner whose permit to stay in the country expired this week, said Friday during the conference call that she was newly apprehensive about her scheduled meeting with ICE next week.

Fearing deportation, Vizguerra, a Denver mother of four — including three who are U.S. citizens — said through an interpreter that she had called on activists and supporters to accompany her to the meeting.

“I know I need to mobilize my community, but I know my freedom is at risk here,” Vizguerra said.

Janell Ross in Los Angeles and Camille Pendley in Atlanta contributed to this report.

http://nypost.com/2017/02/11/hundreds-o ... ent-surge/

MORE ON:
IMMIGRATION

Trump says he might sign new executive order on travel ban

Actually, Trump has a duty to ban dangerous immigrants

Protesters try to prevent ICE from deporting illegal immigrant

Protesters arrested following deportation of illegal immigrant
U.S. federal immigration agents arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants in at least four states this week in what officials on Friday called routine enforcement actions.

Reports of immigration sweeps this week sparked concern among immigration advocates and families, coming on the heels of President Donald Trump’s executive order barring refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim nations. That order is currently on hold.

“The fear coursing through immigrant homes and the native-born Americans who love immigrants as friends and family is palpable,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, said in a statement. “Reports of raids in immigrant communities are a grave concern.”

The enforcement actions took place in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and surrounding areas, said David Marin, director of enforcement and removal for the Los Angeles field office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Only five of 161 people arrested in Southern California would not have been enforcement priorities under the Obama administration, he said.

The agency did not release a total number of detainees. The Atlanta office, which covers three states, arrested 200 people, Bryan Cox, a spokesman for the office, said. The 161 arrests in the Los Angeles area were made in a region that included seven highly populated counties, Marin said.

Marin called the five-day operation an “enforcement surge.”

In a conference call with reporters, he said that such actions were routine, pointing to one last summer in Los Angeles under former President Barack Obama.

“The rash of these recent reports about ICE checkpoints and random sweeps, that’s all false and that’s dangerous and irresponsible,” Marin said. “Reports like that create a panic.”

He said that of the people arrested in Southern California, only 10 did not have criminal records. Of those, five had prior deportation orders.

Michael Kagan, a professor of immigration law at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, said immigration advocates are concerned that the arrests could signal the beginning of more aggressive enforcement and increased deportations under Trump.

“It sounds as if the majority are people who would have been priorities under Obama as well,” Kagan said in a telephone interview. “But the others may indicate the first edge of a new wave of arrests and deportations.”

Trump recently broadened the categories of people who could be targeted for immigration enforcement to anyone who had been charged with a crime, removing an Obama-era exception for people convicted of traffic misdemeanors, Kagan said.

http://www.wusa9.com/news/local/ice-arr ... /406936295

ANNANDALE, VA (WUSA9) - Agents from the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency arrested an unknown number of people at a large apartment complex in Annandale, and at at least one other location in Alexandria this week, immigration activists say, as part of what appears to be stepped up enforcement actions around the country.

At the predominantly Spanish-speaking Fairmont Gardens apartment complex in Annandale, several people said they saw a large law enforcement presence earlier in the week. None wanted to be quoted or have their names used. One man turned and walked quickly away at a reporter’s mention of the very word “immigration.”

Immigration activists said ICE agents targeted people at the complex who already had orders of deportation, but also made so-called “collateral” arrests of other people who merely lacked proper documentation, but had committed no other crime.

Follow
Garrett Haake ✔ @GarrettHaake
A DHS official tells @wusa9 there was an immigration "targeted enforcement" operation in Annandale. Targeted & "collateral" arrests made
7:03 PM - 10 Feb 2017
137 137 Retweets 169 169 likes
The arrests in Virginia appear to be part of a broad effort to step up enforcement across the country, first reported Friday by the Washington Post.

A spokesperson for ICE responded to questions about the raids in Virginia with the a statement. The agency did not address the specific questions asked about the number or types of arrests made.

“Every day, as part of routine targeted enforcement operations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest criminal aliens and other individuals who are in violation of our nation’s immigration laws,” the statement read. “ICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement in compliance with federal law and agency policy. ICE does not conduct sweeps or raids that target aliens indiscriminately.”

An official at the Department of Homeland Security told WUSA9 the enforcement actions this week, which have drawn large protests in Los Angeles, and significant attention elsewhere, are not out of the ordinary, but may be getting increased attention because of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.

On Friday night, The Mexican Consulate of Austin confirmed 44 Mexican immigrants were detained in the past 48 hours, according to KVUE.

Spokespeople for the Fairfax County Police Department and Alexandria City Police Department each said their departments had no knowledge of the ICE actions beforehand.

Similarly, staffers for Democratic congressmen Don Beyer and Gerry Connolly, who represent the areas where the arrests were said to take place, had no knowledge of ICE’s action on Friday night.

A spokesperson for Governor Terry McAuliffe did not respond to questions about the arrests on Friday.

Basic word from the herd on boards is:

Sand_Pirate:
Gents, the REALLY good news is not in the stories at all.

For the last 10 years, immigration officers were not allowed to arrest, or in many cases even question anyone that not the target of the enforcement action. If you were looking for Juan Fulano DeTal, and found him in a stash house with 30 other people that didn't habla the English...they were off limits. The higher-highers considered them 'collateral damage.'

No more. Now they're considered 'bonus prizes', like they used to be back in my day. Word has been passed that any illegal is fair game for the most vigorous enforcement action they can be subjected to. Everyone gets sacked up.

BP, ICE, CIS, ERO....I say Irene. I say again, IRENE.

Another person who works in Dairy automation (robotics and feedlots) in Kansas said in a diffferent thread:

Found out immigration visited one of my customers today.

Sounds like they were mostly looking for criminals, they had a list of names. My customer was prepared and had already talked to his lawyer. They locked down the buildings and no one went outside.

They still had people working that were related to the criminals they were looking for so they pulled them out and gave them the info requested. Current location etc.

Things about to get interesting.

They showed them id requested but no one left the building and immigration didnt come in.

[several posts down]

Robots are the new goldrush in the dairy business.

The big 2 companies that make all the equipment have been masturbating for years about this day.

It took off a few years ago on the east coast bc white people won't milk cows for 15 or 20 an hour. The cost of living is too high.

For most it was either robots or sell the herd. Not saying that is bad though

I'm in LE. Approximately 3 years ago, I had an already-registered sex offender, refugee feller attempt to take a 14 year old girl into his vehicle while she was trying to walk home. Once this pillar of the community was apprehended, I contacted ICE because the guy had some federal issues going on too. Home country was Sierra Leone. When I asked ICE Man if they had any interest in this friendly citizen, as I believed he qualified for deportation. ICE Man laughed, literally. He said, "I wish, but..." Then proceeded to inform me that refugees who are from a number of countries (mainly those Northwestern African countries) are here on what is essentially political asylum, and thus, they could NOT be deported.

Curious if this policy has or will be changed?

ICE sup. man here. This will hopefully change soon. Under the Obama admin. and Jeh's Civil Immigration Enforcement Priorities, this sex offender had to have a new CONVICTION before we could even lodge a detainer. Did I mention morale was absolute shit! If a country will not take their people back, we are regulated by a myriad of high court rulings on these jackasses, habeous corpus, punitive detention, etc...

US DOS, under new mgmt., could change this issue quickly. Stop issuing new visas until you take your gems back. Quid pro quo.

The courts have said we are not GITMO and that we have to release these non-removable gems to the street unless we can PROVE they are a present danger to someone's life. We do. We have a lot of people in custody that will never see daylight in the US again. Several violent Laotian pedofiles in ICE ERO custody in Gadsden, AL. come to mind.

ICE ERO currently has nearly 43000 + or - detained and is congressionaly budgeted for 34000. 10 pounds of shit in a 5 gallon bucket.

Please pass on to your co-workers and other agencies to reach back out to ICE ERO and HSI again. Things have changed substantially for Immigration Enforcement for ICE in the last two weeks. There's a new Sheriff in town and he has directed his deputies to go out and kick ass and take names

Sand_Pirate:
Gents, this line right here is the REAL news: "Immigration activists said ICE agents targeted people at the complex who already had orders of deportation, but also made so-called “collateral” arrests of other people who merely lacked proper documentation, but had committed no other crime."

For a decade, that was not allowed. If you were even allowed to go after an illegal (big if), you were not allowed to bring back anyone else except the target. In most cases, you weren't even allowed to question anyone else as to their immigration status.

That line right there tells me that ICE has been let off the leash. This is VERY good news. Go get 'em, boys!

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/2 ... h-circuit/

A Southern California lawmaker floated the theory that a series of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids across the Los Angeles area Thursday were intended to distract from the Trump administration's loss at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals over its travel ban executive order.

Protesters demonstrated outside ICE offices on Thursday night after activists reported raids during the day in which 100 people or more were taken into custody.

“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportation officers conduct enforcement actions every day around the country and here in Southern California as part of the agency’s ongoing efforts to uphold public safety and border security. Our operations are targeted and lead driven, prioritizing individuals who pose a risk to our communities,” ICE told CBS News.

“Examples would include known street gang members, child sex offenders, and deportable foreign nationals with significant drug trafficking convictions. To that end, ICE’s routine immigration enforcement actions are ongoing and we make arrests every day.”

At a House Democratic Caucus retreat in Baltimore today, Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), vice-chair of the caucus, said "the timing of it is quite curious."

"He would never do anything like that," chimed in caucus chairman Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.). "The president would never do anything like that."

Sanchez said she "got word, initial reports of raids that took place in California in Downey, which is just outside my city, Santa Clara, and I believe San Bernardino County."

'We are looking into them. We understand that there are more than 100 people that were detained, that physically were removed from their homes and taken into custody. We don't know much more than that right now, so we're waiting for news to trickle down," she said.

"And somebody cynically suggested, although I'm not suggesting, that perhaps on the heels of a tremendous opinion by the Ninth Circuit -- which I think, you know, upholds the values of this country and makes clear the separation of powers in the system of checks and balances -- that perhaps on the heels of that, that was done intentionally to try and take attention away from a big loss by the Trump administration on what they want to do and what they want to turn America into," Sanchez added.

Crowley said "the timing is interesting, to say the least."

"But I want to say this as well, I don't think Linda nor I, nor any Democratic member of the House or the Senate or just about anyone in the United States would defend anyone who is being deported because they have violated our -- a law in a felony form or pose a threat to our nation," he added. "We just don't know enough about who the targets were in this. Our experience in the past has been that many families have been torn apart by similar raids in recent years. So, until we have more information, it's very difficult for us to make those observations."

"But in light of how the president does react in terms of when times don't go so great for him -- a distraction, take attention away from a loss, an incredibly important loss, but a win for the people of the United States that the Constitution and its values still stand," Crowley said.

Several dozen people were also swept up in Georgia raids Thursday, with Sarah Owings, chairwoman of the Georgia-Alabama chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, saying ICE is now going after people with traffic offenses instead of prioritizing violent criminals.

“They were using what limited resources they had on things they considered to be important, what was best to keep the country safe,” she said. “Now it’s going to be more like a fire hose. It’s going to go everywhere.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... e-shortage

Big Meat Braces for a Refugee Shortage
Trump’s immigration restrictions will leave more jobs unfilled.
by Lauren Etter and Shruti Singh
February 8, 2017, 7:00 PM EST

The starting hourly wage at Cargill’s Fort Morgan plant is $14.90, 60 percent higher than Colorado’s minimum wage. Joe Amon/The Denver Post/Getty Images
Word of President Trump’s executive order barring the entry of international refugees shocked Fort Morgan, a town of 11,000 on the snowy plains of Colorado, some 80 miles northeast of Denver. Many of the workers at a Cargill Meat Solutions plant that’s the town’s largest employer emigrated from Somalia and Myanmar and had been waiting months, if not years, for relatives to join them. Now they’re afraid that reunion might never happen. As a result, the plant in Fort Morgan and other meatpacking plants in the U.S. that have dozens of openings may have to scramble to find a new labor pool.

“The refugees that have family members, they’re worried that they’re never going to be able to come here,” says Ryan Gray, program director in the Greeley, Colo., office of Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains, a faith-based group that helps refugees and asylees obtain jobs, housing, and other services. Of the almost 450 individuals Gray’s office helped resettle last year, about 40 percent got jobs at the Cargill plant in Fort Morgan or a rival JBS facility in Greeley.

Trump’s decision to sharply curtail the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. may lead Big Meat to recalibrate its recruitment practices. While a federal court has temporarily suspended the administration’s four-month ban on new arrivals, not affected is Trump’s plan to slash refugee admissions from 110,000 to 50,000 in the current fiscal year.

Refugees have been a fixture within the meat processing workforce since 2006, when immigration officials under President George W. Bush raided plants in several states, leading to the arrest of about 1,300 undocumented workers. Companies “realized that their business model of hiring undocumented people was causing problems for them,” says Lavinia Limón, chief executive officer of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, a resettlement organization. “So they moved to the refugee population.”

Immigrants hold 35 percent of the 441,000 animal slaughtering and processing jobs in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Census data don’t specify what share of those immigrants are refugees; the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute estimates it’s about 3 percent. Cargill spokesman Mike Martin says about 12 percent of employees at Fort Morgan hail from East Africa.

In statements, JBS and Tyson Foods, two heavyweights in the $29.7 billion U.S. processed meat industry, said they are proud of their diverse workforces. Cargill CEO David MacLennan in a Feb. 3 online column called for “smart, inclusive policies on trade and immigration.” Barry Carpenter, CEO of the North American Meat Institute, a trade group, issued a statement on Jan. 27 that said, “As the administration pursues changes to the nation’s refugee policies, we hope it will give careful consideration to the ramifications policy changes like these can have on our businesses and on foreign-born workers.”

Cargill’s plant in Fort Morgan pays its workers a starting hourly wage of $14.90—60 percent higher than Colorado’s minimum wage—and offers health care and other benefits. Even so, a company spokesman says, “It remains a challenge to fully staff the plant.” Eric Ishiwata, an associate professor at Colorado State University who studies the refugee meatpacking workforce in the area, says, “The plants have no choice but to recruit workers outside the region.”

Twelve percent of workers at Cargill’s Fort Morgan plant are East African immigrants.

The issue took on new urgency after Dec. 12, 2006. On that day, U.S. immigration agents staged simultaneous raids on meat processing plants in six states—including one in Greeley. In the aftermath, area meatpackers began recruiting workers from Minneapolis, a city with a large population of Somali refugees. Almost overnight, Greeley was hosting more than 1,000 immigrants from East Africa who spoke little or no English and needed assistance finding housing and enrolling their children in school. Local officials reached out to the Colorado office of Lutheran Family Services, one of hundreds of local nonprofits across the U.S. affiliated with private refugee resettlement agencies that are contracted by the U.S. Department of State to help new arrivals become economically self-sufficient. The group immediately dispatched case managers to Greeley and within a year had set up a permanent office in town.

Limiting refugees alone may have a “marginal impact” on the meatpacking industry in the short term, says Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs at the Migration Policy Institute. Yet companies remain vulnerable to any actions that could further restrict the availability of low-skilled labor, he says: “It is one of the industries that stands the most to lose, depending on where the administration’s immigration policy goes in the future.”

Ann Corcoran, a Trump supporter who authors a blog called Refugee Resettlement Watch, says meatpackers would draw more native-born applicants if they raised their wages. She acknowledges that could lead to higher prices for consumers, but she says she and others could adapt: “I would be happy to eat less meat.”

The bottom line: U.S. meatpackers that have become dependent on refugee labor may have to raise wages to recruit workers.

[Zaune]

Also, I'm preeeetty sure I remember being suspicious of the claims that "oh, Trump will be okay with gays because he used to let them into his country club!" Because no, those were gays who paid him a lot of money. Trump cares about a very short list of things, and I'm pretty sure money and ego are the only two that really register on the list. Standing up for gay rights in the face of the Republican Party would not net him either of those, so.. nope. he's not going to do that. Even if he actually cares, which is highly unlikely because he's like such a cartoonish example of "psychopath" that they should put his face in the dictionary under "psychopath."

Even taking that into account, he's still managed to exceed expectations for how bad it would be. Nobody with half a brain really thought he cared enough about LGBT+ rights to put any effort into making the situation better, but you'd think he might be dimly aware that these bathroom bills are bad for business; doesn't he own at least a couple of hotels in Texas, the state that have just been warned by the NFL that if they pass such a bill, they will never host a Superbowl while it's in effect?

[Simon_Jester]

If Trump were good at realizing that Policy XYZ is bad for business, he wouldn't have managed to wind up four billion dollars in (corporate plus personal) debt on a one billion dollar casino.

[Zaune]

There is that, yes. Although even I have to admit that the economy shitting the bed shortly after the place opened probably had at least as much to do with that as Trump's own ineptitude; you'd have to be the Bloody Stupid Johnson of property management to single-handedly run a casino into the ground with no external factors working against you, and Trump hasn't got the imagination to be that creatively inept.

[Iroscato]

A hilarious take on Trump.

You look into Trump’s eyes and you see the fear and confusion of a man who has just been told he’s got stage-four cervical cancer.

Fuck. Fuuuuck. If there's a hell I just bought myself a first-class ticket there for laughing at that