Last Call For Climate of Disaster, Con't

The Trump regime is gutting the Endangered Species Act across the board, eliminating protections for most species by subjecting them to cost-benefit analysis, as the Trump regime sets up death panels for birds, fish, mammals and plants.

The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law credited with rescuing the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from extinction.

The changes will make it harder to consider the effects of climate change on wildlife when deciding whether a given species warrants protection. They would most likely shrink critical habitats and, for the first time, would allow economic assessments to be conducted when making determinations.

The rules also make it easier to remove a species from the endangered species list and weaken protections for threatened species, a designation that means they are at risk of becoming endangered.

Overall, the new rules would very likely clear the way for new mining, oil and gas drilling, and development in areas where protected species live.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said the new rules would modernize the Endangered Species Act and increase transparency in its application. “The act’s effectiveness rests on clear, consistent and efficient implementation,” he said in a statement Monday.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement the revisions “fit squarely within the president’s mandate of easing the regulatory burden on the American public, without sacrificing our species’ protection and recovery goals.”

The new rules are expected to appear in the Federal Register this week and will go into effect 30 days after that.

Environmental groups denounced the changes as a disaster for imperiled wildlife. A recent United Nations assessment, they noted, has warned that human pressures are poised to drive one million species into extinction and that protecting land and biodiversity is critical to keep greenhouse gas emissions in check.

Climate change, a lack of environmental stewardship and mass industrialization have all contributed to the enormous expected global nature loss, the United Nations report said.

So yeah, kiss hundreds, if not thousands of species goodbye as we exterminate them so we can get oil and gas out of the ground and continue to exterminate the most endangered species on the planet, human beings.

The worst regime in American history continues unabated.

Deportation Nation, Con't

The Trump regime continues to target not just undocumented immigrants, but legal immigrants in order to drive them out of the country, and the latest effort at tightening the vice grip is automatically denying federal public benefits to legal green card holders if they live in a household that receives SNAP benefits.

Legal immigrants who use public benefits — such as Medicaid, food stamps or housing assistance — could have a tougher time obtaining a green card or U.S. citizenship under a policy change announced Monday that is at the center of the Trump administration’s effort to reduce immigration.

The new policy for “Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds,” which appeared Monday on the Federal Register’s website and will take effect in two months, sets new standards for obtaining permanent residency and U.S. citizenship. The Trump administration has been seeking to limit those immigrants who might draw on taxpayer-funded benefits, such as many of those who have been fleeing Central America, while allowing more highly skilled and wealthy immigrants into the United States.

Wealth, education, age and English-language skills will take on greater importance in the process for obtaining a green card, as the change seeks to redefine what it means to be a “public charge,” as well as who is likely to be one under U.S. immigration law.

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told reporters at a White House briefing that his agency is moving to more clearly define a long-standing element of U.S. immigration law.

“Through the public charge rule, President Trump’s administration is reinforcing the ideals of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility, ensuring that immigrants are able to support themselves and become successful here in America,” Cuccinelli said.

The move comes as part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to build new bureaucratic obstacles to the U.S. immigration system, at the same time that the president seeks to put physical barriers on the Mexico border. The administration has slashed the number of refugees admitted to the United States, tightened access to the asylum system and expanded the power of the government to detain and deport those lacking legal status.

Analysts say the public charge change could dramatically reduce family-based legal immigration to the United States, particularly from Mexico, Central America and Africa, where economies have been suffering and incomes are lower.

The rule effectively circumvents earlier, failed efforts by the administration to build support in Congress for a similar “merit-based” overhaul to the immigrant visa system, and fulfills a longtime goal of senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other immigration hawks who have sought new bureaucratic tools to reduce immigration levels. 

Understand that Stephen Miller's goal has two parts, one is to end immigration, legal and otherwise, for anyone who is not white.  The other half involves getting rid of as many non-white people already in the country as possible.

It's white supremacy as a national policy.  That's been the case for 400 years, on and off, but it's rarely been so blatant as this, at least in my lifetime.  And for tens of millions of our friends and neighbors and co-workers, that's exactly the policy they want and will vote for.

"But these are the same rules that plenty of other countries use to limit legal immigration."

Yeah, and those countries aren't America, a nation of immigrants.

We are a white supremacist nation ruled by a corrupt white supremacist government.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, A Brief History

I can't stress enough that the Department of Homeland Security called out our little white supremacist problem a good ten years ago, and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano was pilloried for it as I noted a decade ago...

If you think that's bad, check out CNN's report on Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano defending the report that right-wing domestic terrorists may pose a threat to the country. You get no mention that Obama has no plans for gun control legislation at all, only that the report "warned that the groups may use proposed restrictions on firearms" as "recruiting tools" without mentioning that there basically ARE no proposed additional gun control laws at this time. Then you get several paragraphs of verbatim Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage spouting lies, plus some pretty brutal attacks on Napolitano by the American Legion. Only at the very end of the article do you get the truth:

The Obama administration in January issued a warning about left-wing extremists. Both reports were initiated during the administration of President George W. Bush.

The right went berserk over that report.  At Wired back in 2012, Spencer Ackerman profiled Daryl Johnson, the DHS analyst behind that right-wing violence report, and how his career was destroyed as a direct result.

DARYL JOHNSON HAD a sinking feeling when he started seeing TV reports on Sunday about a shooting in a Wisconsin temple. "I told my wife, 'This is likely a hate crime perpetrated by a white supremacist who may have had military experience,'" Johnson recalls.

It was anything but a lucky guess on Johnson's part. He spent 15 years studying domestic terrorist groups – particularly white supremacists and neo-Nazis – as a government counterterrorism analyst, the last six of them at the Department of Homeland Security. There, he even homebrewed his own database on far-right extremist groups on an Oracle platform, allowing his analysts to compile and sift reporting in the media and other law-enforcement agencies on radical and potentially violent groups.

But Johnson's career took an unexpected turn in 2009, when an analysis he wrote on the rise of "Right-Wing Extremism" (.pdf) sparked a political controversy. Under pressure from conservatives, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repudiated Johnson's paper – an especially bitter pill for him to swallow now that Wade Michael Page, a suspected white supremacist, killed at least six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. For Johnson, the shooting was a reminder that the government's counterterrorism efforts are almost exclusively focused on al-Qaida, even as non-Islamist groups threaten Americans domestically.

"DHS is scoffing at the mission of doing domestic counterterrorism, as is Congress," Johnson tells Danger Room. "There've been no hearings about the rising white supremacist threat, but there's been a long list of attacks over the last few years. But they still hold hearings about Muslim extremism. It's out of balance." But even if that balance was reset, he concedes, that doesn't necessarily mean the feds could have found Page before Sunday's rampage.

What I'm trying to tell you is that the fact that the Obama DHS folded completely on the notion of tracking white supremacist terrorists in law enforcement, the military, groups like the Three Percenters and Promise Keepers and in neo-Nazi and skinhead hate groups as a major domestic terror threat isn't news.

Why the NY Times is reporting it as news, I don't know.

Not long after Barack Obama took office in 2009, a Homeland Security Department analyst produced a report presciently predicting that the deep economic downturn, the rise of social media and the election of the first black president would combine to make race-driven extremism a growing and serious threat to national security.

But when the report was made public, it ignited a storm of protest, mostly from the right. Mike Pompeo, then a Republican congressman from Kansas and now secretary of state, said focusing on domestic terrorism was a “dangerous” undertaking born of political correctness that denied “the threat that radical Islamic terrorism poses.”

Inside the Obama administration there was concern that highlighting the issue would only fuel white supremacist conspiracy theories or give unwarranted publicity to fringe figures, according to six former administration officials.

Within weeks, Janet Napolitano, then the homeland security secretary, rescinded the threat assessment. The report’s primary author left the government, and the department’s unit dedicated to tracking domestic terrorism was essentially disbanded.

A decade later, there is clear evidence that violence by white extremists is an undeniable and intensifying problem, especially after the racially motivated mass shooting in El Paso. But the question of how the government should attack domestic extremism, especially white supremacists, remains as politically fraught as ever, if for far different reasons, under President Trump.

Federal law enforcement has been tracking the rise of domestic terrorism. The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, told lawmakers last month that the bureau had arrested almost as many domestic terrorists as foreign terrorists this year. He said most of the racially motivated domestic terrorism cases were probably connected to white supremacy.

But a look at the experience of the Homeland Security Department, which is responsible for collecting data on and analyzing threats to the United States, shows how political considerations have constrained efforts to give the problem more prominence and develop policies to counter it.

During the Obama years, the pressure to minimize the problem came largely from outside the administration, primarily from Republicans who saw it as a diversion from fighting Islamic extremism but also to a lesser degree from people on the left concerned about the implications for the civil liberties of American citizens.

Under Mr. Trump, the skepticism is rooted inside the White House.

Officials at the department have felt they could not broach topics like domestic terrorism and white supremacist violence with Mr. Trump because he was not interested in those concerns, two people familiar with deliberations inside the administration said.

At one point, Kirstjen Nielsen, then the homeland security secretary, sought a regular meeting with Mr. Trump to brief him on a variety of topics including domestic terrorism, but her proposal was rejected by the White House, a person with knowledge of the effort said.

Ahh, and now we get to the root of the problem.

Republicans have been protecting white supremacists long before Donald Trump ever set foot in the Oval Office.

It's easy to blame Obama, and there's plenty of blame to share and fingers to point at Democrats.

But the GOP has been on the side of these organizations for years now.  And now, these guys are shooting up Walmarts and schools and streets and outdoor concerts and festivals, all in an effort to rack up a kill count in the name of white power.

One party sadly underestimated the threat and made the honest choice to bow to civil liberties issues.

One party actively sided with the terrorists.

There's a difference.

StupidiNews!

• More than 100 people were arrested in New York City over the weekend as protesters shut down parts of the West Side Highway over recent ICE raids across the country.
• Donald Trump says North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants to resume nuclear talks after Pyongyang tested a new missile over the weekend.
• Hong Kong police continue to deal with citywide protests as demonstrators plan to shut down the city's airport for a fourth day on Monday.
• Protests in Delhi over the status of Kashmir continue as internet and phone communication to the disputed region remain cut off by India's government.
• A new study sheds some light on the last time the Earth's magnetic poles swapped some 770,000 years ago by looking at lava flows in Chile, Tahiti, and Maui, among other volcanic areas.

Last Call For Buyer Beware

The Trump regime, if this were 40 years ago, would be telling the FDA not to put warning labels on cigarettes.  Since it's 2019, they're just telling the EPA not to put warning labels on weedkiller that causes cancer instead.

The Trump administration has told companies not to warn customers about products that contain glyphosate, a decision targeted at a California regulation that requires labels to warn consumers that the Roundup ingredient is potentially cancer-causing.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it will no longer approve labels warning glyphosate is known to cause cancer. The chemical, marketed as a weed killer by Monsanto under the brand Roundup, is currently the focus of lawsuits from thousands of consumers alleging it caused their cancers.

Such labels are "irresponsible," EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement. He cited the EPA's conclusions that the chemical doesn't.

The decision from the EPA highlights the growing debate over the safety of glyphosate, with scientific research often reaching contradictory conclusions. The World Health Organization's cancer agency has said that the chemical is "possibly carcinogenic to humans," yet on the other side of the debate are studies that refute reports of glyphosate's risks, such as a long-term study of agricultural workers that didn't find a link between Roundup and cancer.

Since Bayer bought Roundup maker Monsanto in June 2018, the company has lost lost three high-profile court cases that alleged the chemical caused cancer.

"It is critical that federal regulatory agencies like EPA relay to consumers accurate, scientific based information about risks that pesticides may pose to them," Wheeler said in the statement. "EPA's notification to glyphosate registrants is an important step to ensuring the information shared with the public on a federal pesticide label is correct and not misleading."

California wants to warn consumers about the risks of glyphosphate, and the Trump regime is specifically not letting them do so, to the point of ordering companies not to comply.

Because corporate profits are more important than dead people.

Make America great again!

 

Sunday Long Read: Beefeater Defeaters

Rowan Jacobsen argues that the beef industry as we know it won't be around much longer as technology gets better, and that America is going to get used to "alt burgers" pretty quickly as climate change makes ranching increasingly expensive.

There’s a famous Gandhi aphorism about how movements progress: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” That was actually written by the Workshop on Nonviolence Institute as a summary of Gandhi’s philosophy, but regardless, it’s remarkable how often it accurately describes the evolution of causes, from legal cannabis to gay marriage. I’ve been thinking about that quote since I wrote my first piece about plant-based meat (or alt meat, as I like to call it) for Outside in 2014. Back then, we were firmly in the “laugh at you” stage. Beyond Meat, the first of the Silicon Valley startups to use advanced technology to produce extremely meat-like burgers, had been ignored for its first few years, but in 2014, it released its Beast Burger, which was treated by the press and public as a slightly off-putting curiosity. What was this stuff? Would anyone actually eat it? Ewwww.

That product wasn’t very good—I compared it to Salisbury steak—and when Ethan Brown, Beyond Meat’s founder, announced his intention to end livestock production, you could almost hear the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association laughing in the background.

But I didn’t laugh. I knew it would keep getting better and beef wouldn’t. And I thought the bar was pretty low. Sure, steak is great, but ground beef makes up 60 percent of beef sales, and most of it is more Salisbury than salutary, a greasy vehicle for the yummy stuff: ketchup, mushrooms, pickles, bacon, sriracha mayo. I knew I wouldn’t object if my central puck came from a plant, as long as it chewed right and tasted right. I suspected others might feel the same.

In the following years, Beyond Meat was joined by Impossible Foods, a more sophisticated startup with even more venture capital. Its Impossible Burger was way better than Salisbury steak. All the cool cats started serving it, from David Chang in New York to Traci Des Jardins in San Francisco. My conviction grew.

Part of the appeal of the new burgers is their smaller environmental footprint. Beef is the most wasteful food on the planet. Cows are not optimized to make meat; they’re optimized to be cows. It takes 36,000 calories of feed to produce 1,000 calories of beef. In the process, it uses more than 430 gallons of water and 1,500 square feet of land, and it generates nearly ten kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions. In comparison, an Impossible Burger uses 87 percent less water, 96 percent less land, and produces 89 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. Beyond Meat’s footprint is similarly svelte.

Yes, a good argument can be made that small-farm, grass-fed beef production (in places that can grow abundant grass) has a very different ethical and environmental landscape, but unfortunately, that’s just not a significant factor. America gets 97 percent of its beef from feedlots. And feedlots are irredeemable.

Now there's a very good chance that the rancher industry will be able to regulate meat alternatives out of the marketplace for another ten years or so, but by then ground beef will be priced out of 90% of American households.   It's going to be a swift change when it happens, however, like "same-sex marriage is legal now" fast.

Besides, Impossible Sliders are actually really good.

The Eleventh Hour

ZVTS turned eleven this week.

I never thought I'd be doing this for one year, let alone eleven, but here I am.

And of course here you are, dear readers, as I wouldn't be here without you.

Thanks for sticking around.

The Trump Regime's Race To The Bottom, Con't

It's hard to defend the Trump regime as somehow not a bunch of racist white supremacists when Trump regime officials are actual, card-carrying white supremacists.

The State Department has placed one of its employees on leave following a Wednesday expose from the Southern Poverty Law Center linking the man with white nationalist beliefs, according to reports from Politico and NBC News.

The employee, Matthew Q. Gebert, worked as a foreign affairs officer for the department’s Bureau of Energy Resources.

A State Department spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment, and HuffPost was unable to reach Gebert.

The SPLC, which runs a blog monitoring extremism, outlined copious evidence tying Gebert to the white nationalist movement. He reportedly espoused alarming beliefs about his desire to see a white ethnostate in a May 2018 episode of “The Fatherland,” a white nationalist podcast.

“[Whites] need a country of our own with nukes, and we will retake this thing lickety split,” Gebert said under a pseudonym, Coach Finstock, the SPLC blog Hatewatch reported. “That’s all that we need. We need a country founded for white people with a nuclear deterrent. And you watch how the world trembles.”

Gebert, as Coach Finstock, also said he was prepared to lose his job over his beliefs because “this is the most important thing to me in my life” next to his family.

On another podcast in early 2018, Hatewatch reported, Gebert explicitly says that he considers himself a white nationalist, speaking under his alleged pseudonym.

According to Hatewatch, Gebert also led a Washington, D.C., chapter of The Right Stuff, a group founded by white nationalist blogger Mike Enoch. Sources told the blog that they had witnessed gatherings at Gebert’s northern Virginia home that included Enoch and another prominent white nationalist, the host of a podcast called “Fash the Nation.”

Gebert began working at the State Department in 2013, according to a note in the George Washington University alumni magazine.

Hatewatch reported that Gebert’s radicalization began around 2015, citing a blog post made under the pseudonym.
Gebert’s wife, Anna Vuckovic, was also linked to white nationalism by four sources who spoke to Hatewatch.

A Twitter account linked to her suspected pseudonym, “Wolfie James,” featured this post in 2017: “Still justifying that you live in a neighborhood bc it’s ‘safe’ or there are ‘good schools’? Admit it: you want to live near #WhitePeople.”

So about the same time Donald Trump started to become a serious contender for the Republican nomination, this guy turned into a white supremacist terrorist who wanted a separate white country with nuclear weapons.  Again, openly a white supremacist for years, somehow he survived the big 2017 State Department purge of non-Trump loyalists under Rex Tillerson, featured on white supremacist podcasts, hosted them in his home.

And he works for Donald Trump.  The only reason we know who he is happens to be because the SPLC started digging.  Guess what they found?  A white supremacist working for a white supremacist, voted in by white supremacists.

Last Call For The Cruelty Is The Point, Con't

The driving force behind everything Donald Trump does is cruelty towards people who he believes has wronged him.  There's no depths of petty vengeance that Trump won't sink to in order to humiliate and destroy his political enemies, even when those actions threaten to endanger those he hates.  

No wonder then that Trump's latest victims are House Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the only two black Muslim women in Congress, and Trump is now enlisting embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in order to inflict punishment.

President Trump has told advisers he thinks Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should use Israel's anti-boycott law to bar Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) from entering Israel, according to three sources familiar with the situation.

What he's saying: Trump's private views have reached the top level of the Israeli government. But Trump denies, through White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, ever giving any kind of directive to the Israelis. "The Israeli government can do what they want. It's fake news," Grisham said on Saturday.

Driving the news: Trump has told U.S. advisers, including senior Trump administration officials, that Israel should bar Omar and Tlaib's entry because the two congresswomen favor a boycott of Israel, according to sources familiar with Trump's private comments. In 2017, Israel's parliament passed a law requiring the interior minister to block foreign nationals from entering Israel if they have supported boycotting the Jewish state. 

Trump's reaction came days after the U.S. House overwhelmingly passed a resolution to condemn the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS movement, which Omar and Tlaib support. The resolution states that the global movement to boycott the state of Israel over its policies toward Palestinians "promotes principles of collective guilt, mass punishment and group isolation, which are destructive of prospects for progress towards peace." 

Omar and Tlaib voted against the resolution.

Between the lines: Trump told confidants he disagreed with Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer's rationale for Israel to overlook the law to let Omar and Tlaib visit Israel. Dermer said last month: "Out of respect for the U.S. Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America, we would not deny entry to any member of Congress into Israel." 

Trump said that if Omar and Tlaib wanted to boycott Israel, "then Israel should boycott them," according to a source with direct knowledge. 

Israeli officials say congressional Democratic leadership pushed Dermer to allow the congresswomen into the country. Their advocacy, per those officials, is a major reason why Netanyahu will allow the two women in.  

The Democrats had argued that if the Israeli government blocked Omar and Tlaib's entry, then other Democratic members would cancel a planned, AIPAC-sponsored Israel trip in solidarity, these officials said.

Both Omar and Tlaib were expected to arrive in Israel next weekend for a planned trip to the Holy Land, but now there's little chance that Netanyahu will allow that to happen. What will really seal the deal though is when Democrats go through with their AIPAC retreat in Israel anyway.

Neither party will risk pissing off Israel over two black Muslim women.  Not by a long shot.

Deportation Nation, Con't

The Trump regime continues to move quickly to remove obstacles in the path of mass arrests and deportations, and the next step on the list is to strip power from immigration judges, starting with decertifying the judges' union by reclassifying them as management, not employees.

The Justice Department moved Friday to potentially decertify the union that represents federal immigration judges, a spokesman said, a maneuver that could silence an organization that has been critical of some aspects of the Trump administration’s overhaul of immigration enforcement.

The department filed a petition asking the U.S. Federal Labor Relations Authority to examine whether it should revoke the certification of the National Association of Immigration Judges because, a Justice Department spokesman said, its members are “management officials” under the law.

Judge Ashley Tabaddor, the association’s president, said she thinks the petition’s intent is to “disband and destroy the union,” which has publicly pushed for judges to have more independence and sparred with the Justice Department over a quota system it imposed.

“It’s designed to take full control of judges without having a balancing force or a balancing voice,” Tabaddor said. 

Meanwhile the Trump regime will be directing ICE to conduct more massive workplace raids nationwide, leading to thousands, if not tens of thousands of more arrests.

The White House has told ICE officials to conduct dozens more workplace enforcement operations this year, a senior immigration official with knowledge of the conversations told CNN. 

The news comes on the same day that President Donald Trump said raids like those in Mississippi this week are a "very good deterrent" for undocumented immigrants.
Shortly after the raids in Mississippi that led to the detention of at least 680 undocumented immigrants, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement field offices across the country were instructed to identify at least two locations in their regions as potential targets for workplace enforcement operations, the source said. 

Those operations can include criminal investigations, business audits and raids. 

This week's raids led to a series of heart wrenching images and videos of family members -- including young children whose parents were detained -- reeling from the arrest of their relatives. 

Trump on Friday defended ICE's workforce enforcement strategy as well as the agency's strategy for dealing with the children whose parents were detained. 

Asked Friday why there wasn't a better plan in place to deal with the children after their parents' arrests, Trump told reporters outside the White House south lawn, "You have to go in, you can't let anybody know." 

"Otherwise when you get there, nobody will be there," Trump said. "The big factor is to let people outside of the country that want to come in legally," he continued. 

"I want people to know that if they come into the United States illegally, they're getting out," he said. "They're going to be brought out. And this serves as a very good deterrent." 

"When people see what they saw (earlier this week), like they will be for a long time, they know that they're not staying," he added.

The campaign of terror is the point.  Trump wants the undocumented in America to be terrorized and terrified.  He wants the safety precautions in the government removed.  He wants mass arrests and mass deportations playing out on TVs and monitors week after week, if not day after day.

But the biggest obstacle to mass deportations isn't in America at all, and it's not under Trump's control one bit. Guatemala, the Trump regime's potential dumping ground for millions of undocumented, is having elections on Sunday, with President Jimmy Morales not running for re-election.  That's a huge problem for Trump.

Morales is the one who signed a safe harbor agreement with Trump, but neither Guatamala's courts nor either of the candidates who could succeed Morales, Sandra Torres and Alejandro Giammatei, are expected to honor the agreement.

On July 26, the Morales administration signed a deal with the White House to establish Guatemala as a “safe third country” and require asylum seekers who pass through Guatemalan territory on their journey north to seek refuge there. However, the costly and time-consuming work of carrying out such an agreement would fall to the winner of Sunday’s electoral contest.

There’s good reason to believe Guatemala’s next government will not put the accord into effect. Giammattei has called Morales’s acquiescence to the Trump administration “irresponsible.” Torres also rejected any safe third country agreement, though she did meet privately with acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan during his bid to sell the agreement within Guatemala. Though Guatemala’s top business associations have supported the agreement under the threat of devastating tariffs, the deal remains widely unpopular among the rest of society, even triggering protests outside the Presidential Palace.

Guatemala’s constitutional court, moreover, has ruled that the agreement requires congressional approval. Guatemalan human rights ombudsman Jordán Rodas has lodged an additional legal challenge on the grounds that, per international law, “agreements signed under threats cannot take legal effect.”

But even if the next president agreed to implement the agreement, it’s unlikely he or she would be able to do so. The Trump administration wants Guatemala — a country that ranks among the most corrupt and ineffective in the world — to harbor refugees and to stop its citizens from leaving. That’s not going to happen, regardless of Sunday’s outcome.

Expect Trump to slap crushing tariffs on Guatemala if either Torres or Giammattei won't play ball.  The resistance to the Trump regime in Guatemala City will most likely evaporate by the end of the year, if not before then.

BREAKING: Jeffrey Epstein Dead By Suicide

The convicted felon facing new sexual assault charges and jail time was found unresponsive in cardiac arrest after hanging himself in his cell this morning in Manhattan.

Jailed multimillionaire financier and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has died by suicide, two law enforcement sources said Saturday, a day after a court unsealed new details of the claims against him.

Epstein, 66, was taken from New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center on Saturday morning in cardiac arrest and died at an area hospital, the sources told CNN.

An ambulance was called at about 6:40 a.m. Epstein was being treated by members of the detention center's medical unit and was administered CPR, and he died a short time later at an area hospital, one of the sources said.

Epstein had been jailed since early July, when he pleaded not guilty to charges by New York federal prosecutors after an indictment accused him of sex trafficking dozens of underage girls, some as young as 14 years old.

News of Epstein's death comes a day after hundreds of pages of court documents were unsealed in New York federal court, alleging new details of sexual abuse claims against Epstein and several associates.

A spokeswoman for the US Attorney's office in Manhattan, which was prosecuting Epstein, declined to comment on Saturday.

An attorney for Epstein, Reid Weingarten, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The cops are treating this as a suicide, and I would think given the fact that Epstein injured himself a few weeks ago trying to hang himself before and that he was on suicide watch, there was a critical failure in that process.

We'll see where the case goes.  Certainly the criminal trial is over, but the civil one will probably continue, and documents and testimony in that case could still be revelatory.

Big Orange Takes Over, Con't

And just like that, the war between Twitter and Mitch McConnell's social media team is over with a resounding and total victory for the Senate GOP leader.

After a Twitter blackout that lasted nearly two full days, Sen. Mitch McConnell's campaign account is back on the web.

The account, @Team_Mitch, reintroduced itself to the world just after 12:30 p.m. Friday with a GIF of the Senate majority leader's face fittingly imposed over Tim Robbins' face after his character breaks out of prison (spoiler alert) at the end of "The Shawshank Redemption."

Representatives from several Republican campaigns, including President Donald Trump and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, had said they would suspend spending on Twitter advertising until McConnell's campaign account was back up.

McConnell's campaign account was locked Wednesday after it shared a video from Monday of an obscenity-laced protest outside the senator's home in Louisville. That video made a reference to a hypothetical McConnell voodoo doll, which the person behind the camera suggested should be stabbed in the heart.

So Twitter's rules simply don't apply to Republicans anymore, and they will never cross Trump or his brood again, lest they lose millions in GOP ad revenue.  All congressional Republicans know they have free reign on Twitter now to post whatever they want, a status no longer reserved just for Donald Trump.

So no, Twitter will never stand up to Trump, and it will never stand up to white supremacist Republicans, and now Trump has his excuse for his new executive order regulating social media.  New information indicates Trump will be classifying social media as digital communications under the FCC.

The White House is contemplating issuing an executive order that would widen its attack on the operations of social media companies.

The White House has prepared an executive order called “Protecting Americans From Online Censorship” that would give the Federal Communications Commission oversight of how Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies monitor and manage their social networks, according to a CNN report.

Under the order, which has not yet been announced and could be revised, the FCC would be tasked with developing new regulations that would determine when and how social media companies filter posts, videos, or articles on their platforms.

The draft order also calls for the Federal Trade Commission to take those new policies into account when investigating or filing lawsuits against technology companies, according to the CNN report.

Social media censorship has been a perennial talking point for President Donald Trump and his administration. In May, the White House set up a tip linefor people to provide evidence of social media censorship and a systemic bias against conservative media.

In the executive order, the White House says it received more than 15,000 complaints about censorship from the technology platforms. The order also includes an offer to share the complaints with the Federal Trade Commission.

As part of the order, the Federal Trade Commission would be required to open a public complaint docket and coordinate with the Federal Communications Commission on investigations of how technology companies curate their platforms — and whether that curation is politically agnostic.

Under the proposed rule, any company whose monthly user base includes more than one-eighth of the U.S. population would be subject to oversight by the regulatory agencies. A roster of companies subject to the new scrutiny would include, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, Snap and Pinterest .

At issue is how broadly or narrowly companies are protected under the Communications Decency Act, which was part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Social media companies use the Act to shield against liability for the posts, videos, or articles that are uploaded from individual users or third parties.

Putting social media under the Trump FCC and Commissioner Ajit Pai will assure that it will be 100% weaponized against Democrats, and that social media will become the online arm of the GOP.

But what about the Roberts Court?

Well, who knows?  After Hobby Lobby, anything goes.  And after complaining for years about social media censorship, Republicans are about to turn the FCC into the internet speech police so that they can suppress dissent.

Dissent will not be tolerated online, citizen.

Last Call For Sugar Coats-ing The Problem

Donald Trump has found his yes man to dismantle the rest of the protections on our election system so that Russia can freely interfere, with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats resigning and now Coats's deputy Sue Gordon out as well.

President Donald Trump announced Thursday night that Joseph Maguire, the leader of the National Counterterrorism Center, is his new pick to be the acting director of national intelligence. 

"I am pleased to inform you that the Honorable Joseph Maguire, current Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, will be named Acting Director of National Intelligence, effective August 15th," Trump tweeted. 

The announcement came not long after Trump tweeted that Sue Gordon, the country's number two intelligence official and an intelligence veteran of more than 30 years, would resign. White House officials had been signaling such a move for days, saying Trump would prefer to have a political loyalist in the role. 

Under normal protocol, Gordon would have become acting director after outgoing Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats resigned. But administration officials told CNN that the White House was reviewing whether it could legally choose an acting director outside the line of succession. 

And two sources told CNN that Gordon was interviewed by some in the administration as the type of political loyalist Trump wanted in the role. Maguire will take over for Coats, whose last day with the administration is on August 15.

Maguire's first move will be to fire or otherwise neutralize Shelby Pierson as the DNI's election protection czar, the move by Coats three weeks ago was the impetus for his summary termination.  Trump can't have anyone looking into nationwide patterns of election security and possible interference, at least not until the 2020 election is over.

Both Coats and Gordon were fired because the were insufficiently loyal to to Trump.  Keep that in mind as Maguire moves forward as semi-permanent acting DNI. No Senate confirmation needed, he was already confirmed 95-1 in December, so he can basically keep the job as long as Trump needs him there.

Don't be surprised if Pierson is gone by this time next week.

Deportation Nation, Con't

A lot going on this week on the deportation front.

First, with ICE raids unpopular in blue state metro areas and police not cooperating, the Trump regime is now turning to rural red state America in order to ramp up mass deportations and to terrorize the undocumented public with size being the sheer intimidation factor, hitting a series of Mississippi chicken processing plants in the largest single day of ICE action yet.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents swept through seven work sites in six cities across Mississippi on Wednesday, arresting approximately 680 people the agency said were undocumented immigrants in what officials said is the largest single-state workplace enforcement action in U.S. history.

The raids targeted agricultural processing plants, part of a year-long investigation into illegal employment of immigrants in the state, officials said. They did not say how many individuals they were targeting in the operations, nor what proportion of those taken into custody were what ICE calls “collateral” arrests — those who were swept up along with those ICE was seeking.

ICE acting director Matthew Albence said at a news conference in Jackson, Miss., that some of those arrested will be prosecuted for crimes, others will be swiftly deported, and some will be released pending immigration court hearings. Albence said the raids were part of normal ICE operations that seek to enforce U.S. immigration laws.

The Trump administration has been openly stepping up pressure on the nearly 11 million immigrants believed to be in the United States illegally, threatening mass arrests of families who have arrived recently as part of an effort to deter migrants from coming to the country. The administration also has sought to turn away asylum seekers — forcing some to await their court hearings in Mexico — and now plans to deport some Central Americans to Guatemala to seek asylum there instead as part of an international agreement.

Although President Trump telegraphed the family raids several times, they have not gone forward in full force. But ICE has continued operations that it says primarily target immigrants with criminal convictions as well as those who have been deemed deportable in U.S. courts. The Mississippi raids were a stark reminder that the administration is continuing to press on immigration, with some of its largest enforcement efforts to date.

The clear signal is that this will be the new normal, and those arrested will be deported...even if it's to the wrong country.

A 41-year-old Detroit man deported to Iraq in June died Tuesday, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and two people close the man’s family.

The man, Jimmy Aldaoud, spent most of his life in the U.S., but was swept up in President Donald Trump’s intensified immigration enforcement efforts. Edward Bajoka, an immigration attorney who described himself as close to Aldaoud’s family, wrote on Facebook that the death appeared to be linked to the man’s inability to obtain insulin in Baghdad to treat his diabetes.

Aldaoud was an Iraqi national, but he was born in Greece and came to the U.S. as a young child, his family friend said. He had never lived in Iraq and did not speak Arabic, according to Bajoka.
“Rest In Peace Jimmy,” Bajoka wrote. “Your blood is on the hands of ICE and this administration.”

The Trump administration has sought to deport more than 1,000 Iraqis with final orders of removal, including Chaldean Catholics in the Detroit metro area, of which Aldaoud was one. Chaldeans are an eastern branch of the Roman Catholic church who trace their roots to ancient Mesopotamia in present-day Iraq, where they are at high risk of being tortured or killed by the the terror group ISIS, the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a related legal case.

"Jimmy Aldaoud ... should have never been sent to Iraq," Rep. Andy Levin (D-Mich.) said in a written statement. "My Republican colleagues and I have repeatedly called on the executive branch to cease deportation of such vulnerable people. Now, someone has died."

Meanwhile, any remaining internal resistance to Stephen Miller's white supremacist tactics are met with instant purges of those not loyal enough to the regime, the latest ouster being the State Department's top immigration official.

Kimberly Breier, assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere since October, has resigned, leaving a key vacancy at the top of the diplomatic office in charge of the Trump administration’s efforts to control immigration from Mexico and Central America and to build stronger partnerships in South America.

U.S. officials said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week accepted her letter of resignation, which cited personal reasons. Her departure is expected to be announced Thursday.

Earlier in her government career, Breier, who holds degrees in Spanish and Latin American studies, also handled regional issues as a CIA analyst and at the National Security Council under president George W. Bush. Immediately before becoming assistant secretary, she handled Latin American issues in the department’s policy planning office.

Breier, 46, referred questions about her status to the State Department press office, which declined to comment. Several senior administration officials discussed the matter on the condition of anonymity because it concerns personnel.

She is the latest in a steady turnover at the assistant secretary level. Although Pompeo has filled many of the jobs left vacant by his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, a number are still held by acting officials, and at least four have departed this year, including A. Wess Mitchell, the top diplomat in charge of European affairs.

It gets worse.

Officials said Breier, a Mexico expert, was not necessarily opposed to administration policies in the region but chafed at the level of control exerted by the White House over immigration and trade-dominated relations with Mexico and other matters.

One senior administration official said she had been chastised, in a particularly unpleasant recent email chain, by White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, who considered her insufficiently committed to publicly defending last month’s sudden agreement over asylum between President Trump and the government of Guatemala.

The safe third country agreement requires Central American migrants to seek asylum in Guatemala and be rejected there before the United States will consider their asylum requests here. Pompeo reportedly objected to the White House-negotiated deal on grounds that Guatemala, one of the world’s most violent countries, was not equipped to provide secure refuge for migrants fleeing Honduras and El Salvador.

Stephen Miller punched her ticket out.  It's clear that anyone standing in the way of the coming mass deportations to Guatemala will be expelled from the Trump regime.

And millions of undocumented will be expelled from the US.

Kentucky In Black And White

Kentucky's Republican candidate for Attorney General is Daniel Cameron, who is black.  If elected, he would be only the second black statewide officeholder in history, after current Lt. Gov. Jaenean Hampton.  Cameron is trying to make inroads with the black community in Kentucky, but it's not going nearly as well as it did for Hampton.  In fact, it's going disastrously wrong.

Kentucky Republicans are rallying behind attorney general candidate Daniel Cameron, who was labeled by a black civil rights attorney as a submissive race traitor for being endorsed by President Donald Trump.

"Liberals will stop at nothing to attack anyone and everyone who dares to think for themselves," said Sarah Van Wallaghen, the state GOP's executive director, in a statement.

But Dawn Elliott, who said Cameron needs to "stop eating the 'coon flakes' the White House is serving," isn't backing down. The outspoken radio show host said the association with Trump is a slap in the face to African Americans and that Cameron needs to explain his position to black voters.

"To sit there and be so proud of someone who is an open racist is shameful," said Elliott, an attorney who co-hosts a political talk show on WLOU 1350 AM. "Why would anyone of color want to side with someone who is trying to destroy us?"

Cameron, who worked as general counsel for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, also defended himself on Twitter.

"I am a proud lifelong Republican, part of a diverse Kentucky Republican Party ticket, and yes I support Donald Trump," Cameron tweeted Wednesday. "It's time to stop telling black Americans what we're allowed to believe."

Cameron, a former University of Louisville football player, is running against Democrat Greg Stumbo in an increasingly nasty contest filled with personal attacks and negative advertisements. 

Here's the thing.

Daniel Cameron is black.

And I wouldn't vote for him if he was the last black man on Earth besides myself.

Dawn Elliott isn't wrong, and Greg Stumbo shouldn't pretend she is.