Last Call For Anti-Immigration Nation, Con't

Trump's base loves his Muslim ban.  Everyone else hates it because it's illegal, immoral and unenforceable without a massive cadre of brownshirts, but hey, we don't exactly live in a representative democracy these days, do we?  So first, the good news from Greg Sargent:

A new Gallup poll brings some encouraging news. Solid majorities of Americans disapprove of all of the major moves on immigration that President Trump has made since taking office:

• 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s call for moving forward with a wall on the Mexican border, versus only 38 percent who approve.
• 58 percent disapprove of Trump’s indefinite suspension of entry by Syrian refugees, versus only 36 percent who approve.
• 55 percent disapprove of Trump’s order of a temporary ban on entry for people from seven Muslim-majority countries, versus only 42 percent who approve.

However, it turns out there’s a deep divide along educational lines on all of these proposals.

Well HOOCUDDANODE.

I asked the good folks at Gallup for a further breakdown of the numbers. The result: Non-college whites — who supported Trump overwhelmingly — approve of all three measures, while large majorities of college-educated whites disapprove of them:

This reprises a divide that we saw during the election, in which Trump over-performed among non-college whites, while under-performing among white college graduates relative to past GOP nominees. 

These numbers suggest that the first big moves of the Trump presidency, if anything, may be deepening this cultural and educational schism. Even as massive protests have erupted in major cities in response to Trump’s new policies, with protesters rallying behind the besieged minorities targeted by them, reporters from the Associated Press and Reuters talked to Trump voters and found them either unmoved by the commotion or actively supportive of what he’s doing. These new Gallup numbers would seem to confirm that this split is particularly pronounced along educational lines among white voters.

Which is the entire point.  Trump knows that any red meat he feeds his base multiplies his power and forces the rest of the GOP to go along or risk being devoured.  Even if the courts find the order unconstitutional, Trump wins and makes the case that the judiciary is the problem, not him.

He can't lose, because he's bet on America being full of racist assholes who want to keep their political power through racist assholery..  That's a bet that's paid off time and time again for more than 400 years, guys. Why stop now?

After all, if anyone does dissent, we know what will happen to them and where they will end up, as commenter Prup pointed out earlier this afternoon.

“Even as confusion, internal dissent and widespread condemnation greeted President Trump’s travel ban and crackdown on refugees this weekend, senior White House aides say they are are only getting started,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Trump’s top advisors on immigration, including chief strategist Steve Bannon and senior advisor Stephen Miller, see themselves as launching a radical experiment to fundamentally transform how the U.S. decides who is allowed into the country and to block a generation of people who, in their view, won’t assimilate into American society.” 

How broadly radical their vision is can be seen in “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” the companion order to the travel ban, which lists aliens for “prioritize[d] removal.” It includes those who “have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense,” and also aliens who have “abused any program related to receipt of public benefits.”

In other words, some targets can be deported because a DHS agent believes the person has broken a law of any kind, “regardless of whether that person has been charged with a crime,” as one analyst put it. And what does “abusing” a welfare-oriented program mean? Judges and lawyers could be fouled up with that matter alone for years. 

Other candidates for the Trump roundup include aliens who have made “a willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter or application before a government agency.” 

What is “any official matter”? 

“If these items were not broad enough,” noted Walter Pincus, the venerated former Washington Post national security reporter, “the final category for being detained for deportation is ‘in the judgment of an immigration officer, [the aliens] otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.’” 

“If ever a category encouraged racial profiling, that is it,” Pincus wrote for the Cypher Brief, a new publication by intelligence professionals covering national security issues.

Millions of Americans think this will just be used on the people they call "illegals".  It will be used against anyone who dares to stand up to Trump, eventually.  The whole point of this "criminal justice" reform is that in order to make money on these detention facilities, they have to be kept full.

They will find people to put in them.

History has taught us this again and again.

An Endemic Epidemic

The opioid epidemic in the Ohio Valley area of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, and neighboring West Virginia is about as bad as it comes in the US, and 2017 promises to be the worst year yet if January's grisly statistics are anything to go by so far.

Last year, it was refrigerated trucks. Now, it’s “temporary storage” in funeral homes. The Coroner’s Office in Montgomery County, Ohio, has been so overwhelmed by the death toll of the raging opioid epidemic that it has had to turn to makeshift morgues to keep up.

“We’re running at full capacity,” Kenneth Betz, director of the coroner’s office, told The New York Times in a phone interview. “We’ve never experienced this volume of accidental drug overdoses in our history. We now call funeral homes immediately," he said.

So far in 2017—just 33 days into the year—the Coroner’s Office has already handled 163 accidental overdose deaths. That’s more than half the yearly totals of overdose deaths from 2015 and 2016. In fact, in the last decade the number of yearly overdose deaths has quadrupled in Ohio and surpassed deaths from car crashes.

And the state is not alone—in fact, it may not even be the worst off. West Virginia had the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in 2015, reaching 41.5 per 100,000, according to the CDC. Ohio came in tied for third with Kentucky, at 29.9 per 100,000. New Hampshire was second with 34.3 per 100,000.

Those deaths and the increases are driven by widespread addiction to opioid pain killers.

The rest of the country, too, has seen dramatic impacts of the epidemic, particularly in the northeast and some in the south. The CDC reports that 91 people a day die from an opioid overdose in the US.

That's right, so far in Ohio in 2017 more people have died from opioid drug overdoses than car accidents.  Montgomery County is where Dayton is, just north of Cincy, and it's being ravaged so far this year.

Now consider two planned actions of the Trump regime so far: one to slash 80% of FDA regulations including on prescription drugs, and one to punish sanctuary cities by cutting federal law enforcement grants for programs like domestic abuse prevention and drug rehab.  Both of these would almost certainly help make the opioid crisis worse across the country.

But these states overwhelmingly voted for Trump and the GOP.  And Trump's policies will assuredly mean more people are suffering.  Yes, the crisis has gotten bad under the Obama years.  But I can already tell you that Trump's planned actions will do nothing to help.

The problem will only get worse.

The Bowling Green (Made-Up) Massacre

At this point we have a regime in charge of America trying to create a Reichstag fire event and they're not smart enough to be able to spell "Reichstag" correctly.

One of President Donald Trump's top White House advisers referred to a terror attack that never happened in an MSNBC interview that aired on Thursday night. 

Kellyanne Conway suggested that the so-called "Bowling Green Massacre" in Bowling Green, Kentucky, was one of the catalysts for Trump's executive order banning nationals from seven Muslim-majority states like Iraq. 

There was no such attack in the US. 

During her interview with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Conway described the false incident as two Iraqi refugees having come to the US, becoming radicalized, and masterminding the nonexistent attack. Conway offered no evidence to back up her claims and flatly suggested that "most people don't know ... because it didn't get covered."
Neither Conway, nor a White House spokesperson immediately responded to a request for comment. 

The only incident surrounding Iraqi refugees and Bowling Green, Kentucky, in recent history was a 2011 case in which two Iraqi nationals were indicted on federal charges on accusations that they tried to provide material support to terrorists and to al Qaeda in Iraq. 

The FBI's 2011 press release said that the two men, Waad Ramadan Alwan, 30, and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, 23, were former residents of Iraq who lived in Bowling Green at the time of their arrests. Alwan was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison in and Hammadi received a life term in 2013, the FBI said. 

Despite Conway's allegations, there was no massacre in Bowling Green, and, according to the FBI's statement on the matter, there was no plan for a terror attack in that city.

I mean what kinda of obvious nonsense is this?  An administration spokesperson is on the news citing a terrorist attack that never happened as proof that we need the regime's unconstitutional policies to remain in effect.  This is completely off the map, guys. It's fake news at its utmost.

Conway's game is obvious to the point of derisions, but how long before the "Bowling Green Massacre" somehow becomes "real" in the eyes of Trump and his nutjobs?  Will the media dare to say "We're no longer booking her as she's a complete liar?"

Where we go from here will say a lot about whether or not America survives.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime is expected to issue executive orders to review and eliminate Dodd-Frank banking regulations and to indefinitely delay Obama-era rules on financial advisers.
• Defense Secretary Michael Flynn is warning North Korea that "effective and overwhelming force" will be used against Pyongyang should Kim Jong Un turn to nuclear weapons.
• Several major US companies, including Dow Chemical, GE, Boeing and Oracle, are banding together to support a House GOP bill that would tax all US imports by 20%.
• A French soldier shot and killed a knife-wielding man with a suitcase at an underground shopping mall beneath Paris's famous Louvre museum.
• Microsoft is asking the Trump regime for employee exemptions to the Muslim ban, saying that tech workers don't pose a security threat to the US.

Last Call For Church And State Of Insanity

The Trump regime's version of the National Prayer Breakfast turned into a spat about how people should pray for Trump's TV show "Celebrity Apprentice" because replacement host Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't doing so hot in the ratings, ha ha ha what a card that Trump.

Also he promised to end the separation between church and state by eliminating the Johnson Amendment.

President Trump vowed Thursday to overturn a law restricting political speech by tax-exempt churches, a potentially huge victory for the religious right and a gesture to his political base. 

Mr. Trump said his administration would “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from engaging in political activity at the risk of losing their tax-exempt status. 

Repealing the law would require approval by Congress. Certain tax-exempt organizations — in this case, churches — are not allowed to openly endorse or campaign for political candidates. If they do, under existing law, they risk losing the benefits of their tax-exempt status. 

Speaking to a gathering of religious leaders, the president also defended his immigration policy, brushed aside concern about his harsh phone calls with foreign leaders, and ridiculed Arnold Schwarzenegger for his poor ratings in replacing Mr. Trump as host of “Celebrity Apprentice.” 

He did not mention an executive order on religious freedom, which critics said would restrict the rights of lesbians and gay men; a draft of the order has circulated, but administration officials have denied that it will be adopted. 

In addressing the issue of churches and political speech, Mr. Trump said, “I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.” 

He added that “freedom of religion is a sacred right, but it is under serious threat.” 

During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump promised to push for repeal of the law, which was passed in 1954 and named for then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, who proposed the change to the tax code.

Churches would then be free to endorse candidates and donate millions while still remaining tax-exempt, something that would certainly tip the balance of power in US politics permanently towards the GOP.  But hey, no difference between the parties, right?

Flag, Still Burning

So we've apparently solved that little mystery involving the military vehicle convoy here in Kentucky flying the Trump campaign flag and yeah, it's completely not cool.

The military convoy spotted on Sunday flying a Donald Trump flag near Louisville belonged to an East Coast-based SEAL unit, a Navy spokesperson told ABC News. 

Military officials have launched an inquiry to determine if any misconduct can be linked to the incident. Regulations do not permit an unauthorized flag on a military vehicle. 

Photos and a video of the convoy spread quickly on social media, with many questioning the identity of the occupants and whether the vehicles belonged to a military unit or were military surplus. 

The video shot on Sunday on a highway near Louisville showed the lead vehicle of a convoy flying a large blue Donald Trump flag from an antenna. 

The vehicles did not have any identifiable markings and the mystery deepened when local military bases in Kentucky said that the vehicles did not belong to their units. 

"The convoy were service members assigned to an East Coast-based Naval Special Warfare unit driving vehicles while transiting between two training locations," Lieutenant Jacqui Maxwell, a spokesperson for Naval Special Warfare Group 2, told ABC News. Naval Special Warfare Units is the official Navy term for its elite SEAL special operations teams.

So, yeah, nothing to worry about, except the guys who are supposed to stay under the radar are apparently super cool trucking around with a Trump flag on their ride to let everybody know who they're really loyal to,

Cult of Personality in the military praising a leader rather than a country they're sworn to protect? Gosh, that's never gone horribly wrong in world history, right?

Exit question: Does Trump hear about this story and start tweeting that he'll protect these guys? Where does that leave us?

Our Little Domestic Terror Problem Magically Goes Away

Did you really think the Trump regime was ever going to lift a finger to try to stop the next Dylan Roof when A) white people can't be terrorists duh have you heard and B) those who are most likely are already working for law enforcement and the military anyway?

The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government program designed to counter all violent ideologies so that it focuses solely on Islamist extremism, five people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

The program, "Countering Violent Extremism," or CVE, would be changed to "Countering Islamic Extremism" or "Countering Radical Islamic Extremism," the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.

Such a change would reflect Trump's election campaign rhetoric and criticism of former President Barack Obama for being weak in the fight against Islamic State and for refusing to use the phrase "radical Islam" in describing it. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for attacks on civilians in several countries.

You can thank our new DHS Secretary for that.  John Kelly has decided that since the white supremacists he knows of are kind of his bosses at the White House, it's best not to investigate them at all.

A source who has worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the program said Trump transition team members first met with a CVE task force in December and floated the idea of changing the name and focus.

In a meeting last Thursday attended by senior staff for DHS Secretary John Kelly, government employees were asked to defend why they chose certain community organizations as recipients of CVE program grants, said the source, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.

Although CVE funding has been appropriated by Congress and the grant recipients were notified in the final days of the Obama administration, the money still may not go out the door, the source said, adding that Kelly is reviewing the matter.

No, I wouldn't expect the program to see a dime and for it to be converted into the Trump regime's new anti-immigrant police force.  That's coming soon to a neighborhood near you, folks.

StupidiNews!

• The White House is denying reports that Trump abruptly ended a tense phone call with Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull over accepting refugees from America's Pacific ally.
• Thousands protested Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos speaking at UC Berkeley last night, campus police say non-student agitators arrived from off-campus to start violence.
• The Pentagon is looking into reports of multiple civilian deaths in a botched raid in Yemen last weekend that allegedly killed at least 30 civilians, including 10 women and children.
• Newly-confirmed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is vowing to Congress to keep his former company Exxon-Mobil out of decisions for at least two years, Democrats say that's not enough.
• Trump FCC officials are dropping the government's legal defense of limits on how much prison inmates can be charged for calling family members.

Last Call For The Resistance Department

Funny thing about Trump going on camera and online to say he's going to fire tens of thousands of federal employees and silence tens of thousands more: said federal employees aren't exactly going to stand around and just accept that with a smile.

Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make. 

And a few government workers are pushing back more openly, incurring the wrath of a White House that, as press secretary Sean Spicer said this week about dissenters at the State Department, sends a clear message that they “should either get with the program, or they can go.” 

At a church in Columbia Heights last weekend, dozens of federal workers attended a support group for civil servants seeking a forumto discuss their opposition to the Trump administration. And 180 federal employees have signed up for a workshop next weekend, where experts will offer advice on workers’ rights and how they can express civil disobedience. 

At the Justice Department, an employee in the division that administers grants to nonprofits fighting domestic violence and researching sex crimes said he and his colleagues have been planning to slow their work and to file complaints with the inspector general’s office if they are asked to shift grants away from their mission. 

“You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Through leaks to news organizations and internal complaints, he said, “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable.” 

The resistance is so early, so widespread and so deeply felt that it has officials worrying about paralysis and overt refusals by workers to do their jobs. 

Asked whether federal workers are dissenting in ways that go beyond previous party changes in the White House, Tom Malinow­ski, who was President Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, said, sarcastically: “Is it unusual? . . . There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.”

The thing with a federal bureaucracy designed to continue working past any single President is that most of the time it works as intended, and it doesn't turn on a dime.  Federal employees have families and pay taxes and grocery shop and go to worship and drop their kids off at school just like anyone else with a job.  There's also a lot of them, although the federal workforce as a percentage of the US population is actually under 2% these days, the lowest it has been in decades.

Still, given the more than 320 million Americans these days, that's still a lot of people, and they know how to fight from within the system.

The big weapon is leaks, and yes, before you go all "well, actually" on me I know the Obama administration took a very dim view of whisteblowers and leaks in general.  They also paid for it with massive espionage and data breaches.

I don't think Trump will be any better, and a whole lot more people are going to be motivated to leak frankly.  We're already seeing that with draft executive orders and other inside information hitting journalist's mailboxes daily at this point, and it's been less than two weeks.

Bottom line is to expect more leaks. A lot more.

Trump's Warren Terrah

From all reports it looks like Trump's first significant military action as President was ordering a raid in Yemen to get AQAP bad guys, and the raid went south in a New York minute.

Nawar Anwar Al-Awlaki, the 8-year-old daughter of former al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula leader Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in a joint American-UAE raid against the terror group Sunday, according to the girl's family. 

Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric who directed attacks against the US, was killed in a targeted drone strike in 2011. 

Multiple US officials told CNN that an assessment of civilian casualties is still ongoing and that there was no hard intelligence yet to suggest that al-Awlaki's daughter was killed. 

The raid also resulted in the death of US Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens who was fatally wounded in a firefight that saw three other US service members wounded and 14 al Qaeda fighters killed. 

Initial reports conducted by the elite special operations force that carried out the mission found no evidence of civilian casualties, but a US official told CNN that subsequent intelligence led the military to believe that there was a high likelihood that some civilians were killed. 

The official added that during the gun battle, al Qaeda fighters took up firing positions on the roof of a nearby building and that the US troops came under fire, calling in an airstrike against the building which likely led to the civilian casualties. 

The raid encountered more problems when an MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft was forced to undergo a "hard landing" which resulted in three additional service members being injured. The military opted to destroy the aircraft in an airstrike to prevent it falling into enemy hands. 

It was the first counterterrorism operation approved by President Donald Trump though US officials note that given the complexity of the raid, planning for the mission began during the administration of Barack Obama. 

An 8-year-old dead, a SEAL killed in combat, and a lost Osprey.  Had this happened as Hillary Clinton's first military order, we'd have House Republicans screaming about a second Benghazi investigation and vowing impeachment proceedings.

Instead, this story has effectively vanished.  Ask yourself why that is.

And Our Chief Export Is Pain

The Trump regime is apparently planning to make good on those threats to move forward on major immigration changes inside the US, and is now apparently sending around rough drafts of executive orders that will effectively end legal immigration as well as crack down with massive force on undocumented immigrants.

The Trump administration is considering a plan to weed out would-be immigrants who are likely to require public assistance, as well as to deport — when possible — immigrants already living in the United States who depend on taxpayer help, according to a draft executive order obtained by The Washington Post. 

A second draft order under consideration calls for a substantial shake up in the system through which the United States administers immigrant and nonimmigrant visas overall, with the aim of tightly controlling who enters the country, and who can enter the workforce, and to reduce the social services burden on U.S. taxpayers. 

The drafts are circulating among administration officials, and it is unclear whether President Trump has decided to move forward with them or when he might sign them if he does decide to put them in place. The White House would not confirm or deny the authenticity of the orders, and White House officials did not respond to requests for comment about the drafts on Monday and Tuesday.

If this is true, then bad, bad times are coming.

The administration would be seeking to “deny admission to any alien who is likely to become a public charge” and develop standards for “determining” whether an immigrant can be deported after five years if that person receives a certain amount of public assistance, including Food Stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid. 

The second order, titled “Executive Order on Protecting American Jobs and Workers by Strengthening the Integrity of Foreign Worker Visa Programs” calls for “eliminating” the “jobs magnet” that is driving illegal immigration to the United States, according to a copy obtained by The Post. The order would rescind any work visa provisions for foreign nationals found not to be in “the national interest” or in violation of U.S. immigration laws.

It weighs how to make America’s immigration program “more merit based,” calls for site visits at companies that employ foreign workers, and tasks the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with producing a report twice a year on the total number of foreign-born people — not just nonimmigrant visa holders — who are authorized to work in the United States.

It also instructs DHS and the State Department to submit a report on “the steps they are taking to combat the birth tourism phenomenon,” meaning instances in which noncitizens come to the United States to have children, who in turn gain citizenship, a popular conservative refrain but one that is dismissed by immigration experts as a relatively minor problem. 

Together, the orders would aim to give U.S. citizens priority in the job market from top to bottom by preventing immigrants from taking jobs and pushing some immigrants out of jobs they currently have. 

“The unlawful employment of aliens has had a devastating impact on the wages and jobs of American workers, especially low-skilled, teenage, and African American and Hispanic workers,” the draft order says.

If that last part sounds creepy, it's because "We have to get rid of them, they're taking your jobs" was used before about, oh, say 80 years ago by an unemployed Austrian painter who went into German politics.

Exit question:  Who exactly would enforce all this with Trump's "freeze" on federal hiring?  Because it sure sounds to me like the regime would need a whole hell of a lot of bodies to crack heads, raid houses, and roll up on businesses.  Think "a national version of Joe Arpaio's deputy posse".  You know, the guy currently facing all kinds of charges for failing to heed civil rights laws in his zeal for rounding up brown people.

And if a screaming populist demagogue who is demonizing a segment of the population for removal and wants legal reasons to create a force with the purpose of removing that segment doesn't get your hackles up, then you're way past gone.  These are actual Brownshirts, guys.  (Not to be confused with Browncoats).

This is moving remarkably quickly.  Understand that this is moving so fast because it's not only a top priority of Trump, but of the actual man running the White House: Steve Bannon, who has long been virulently anti-immigrant.  And again, the difference is Bannon's not just gunning for undocumented folks, he wants to drastically reduce legal immigrants into the country as well.

On a March 2016 episode, Bannon said that restoring sovereignty meant reducing immigration. In his radio shows, he criticized the federal H-1B visa programs that permit U.S. companies to fill technical positions with workers from overseas. 

The “progressive plutocrats in Silicon Valley,” Bannon said, want unlimited ability to go around the world and bring people back to the United States. “Engineering schools,” Bannon said, “are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. . . . They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, Bannon said, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because they are all foreign students. When they come out, they can’t get a job.” 

“Don’t we have a problem with legal immigration?” asked Bannon repeatedly. 

“Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?” he said, meaning the problem of native-born Americans being unable to find jobs and rising wages. 

In another show, Bannon had complained to Trump that so many Silicon Valley chief executives were South Asian or Asian. This was a rare time when Trump — normally receptive to Bannon’s ideas on-air — pushed back. “I still want people to come in,” Trump said. “But I want them to go through the process.”

There's no reason to believe that Bannon won't get his way on this, either.

America has a long history of letting immigrants in, but also of treating those immigrants like garbage. Scapegoating immigrants has long been the hallmark of America's nationalist movement. History teaches us these movements almost always become violent in the end.  We're entering another such period now, and there's no reason to believe that it will go any better this time around.

In fact, there's every reason to believe that it's going to get very bloody, and quickly.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime has selected 10th Circuit conservative Neil Gorsuch to be nominated to the Supreme Court, he is the son of Reagan's EPA chief Ann Gorsuch.
• The US Army Corps of Engineers is expected to grant final approval for the Dakota Access pipeline along Standing Rock Sioux lands today, opponents vow to go to court to block it.
• While just short of half of Americans approve of Trump's Muslim immigration ban so far, less than one-third believe it will make America "more safe" in a new Reuters poll.
• Thousands protested in Romania's capital of Bucharest on Tuesday as the government ended corruption investigations into several cabinet members and sought to pardon those convicted. 
• A Carnegie Mellon University AI named Libratus took on some of the world's best Texas Hold 'Em poker players and won $1.7 million in the "Brains vs Artificial Intelligence" tournament.

Last Call For Flag, Burning

Meanwhile, here in Kentucky, nobody seems to know who a military convoy that rolled through Lexington on Sunday flying a "Trump" flag actually belonged to, and nobody's taking responsibility for it.  Yet.

Flying a large "Trump" flag, a mysterious convoy of military vehicles rolled down Interstate 65 through Louisville on Sunday morning. But nobody is claiming it. 

A spokesman for Ft. Knox, Patrick Hodges, said it wasn't theirs. 

Same for the Kentucky National Guard, said Maj. Stephen Martin, director of public affairs. 

A Defense Department spokesman, Maj. Jamie Davis, who examined images of the four-truck procession for the Courier-Journal, said he doesn't think it belonged to any service branch — and that the vehicles may have been military surplus. 

Davis said it would violate regulations to fly such a flag on a military vehicle. “That is not standard procedure,” he said. He also said it would have been against the rules to run a military convoy without unit markings on the trucks. 

Chris Rowzee, a spokeswoman for indivisibleky, a new activist organization in Louisville, said that as a retired veteran who served 28 years in the Air Force, “I can't even begin to describe how disturbed I am by this.” 

While Donald Trump is president, she said, the military is supposed to be a nonpolitical organization in which servicemen and women swear an oath to the Constitution, not to any particular president. 

“To show a partisan political leaning on a military vehicle is very reminiscent of Nazi Germany,” she said.

 

Invisibleky posted photos and a video of the convoy on its website. Rowzee said the group thinks the trucks may have belonged to a military contractor, if they weren't being operated by the military.

So yes, this actually happened.  Somebody decided it would be really cool to drive around several military trucks with at least one of them openly flying a Trump regime flag.  Every alarm bell in the universe ought to be ringing in your head at this one, guys.  We know Trump has his own security team separate from the US Secret Service and that our military and police have a real problem with white nationalists in the ranks.

This is the kind of thing that will become more prevalent.

By the way, can you imagine the national freakout if a military truck was ever spotted flying an Obama flag?

The Fight For SCOTUS

I'll believe this when I see them actually do it, but apparently Dems are going to try to call Mitch McConnell's bluff and will filibuster Trump's expected Supreme Court nominee this week.

Senate Democrats are going to try to bring down President Donald Trump's Supreme Court pick no matter who the president chooses to fill the current vacancy.

With Trump prepared to announce his nominee on Tuesday evening, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said in an interview on Monday morning that he will filibuster any pick that is not Merrick Garland and that the vast majority of his caucus will oppose Trump’s nomination. That means Trump's nominee will need 60 votes to be confirmed by the Senate.

“This is a stolen seat. This is the first time a Senate majority has stolen a seat,” Merkley said in an interview. “We will use every lever in our power to stop this.”

It’s a move that will prompt a massive partisan battle over Trump’s nominee and could lead to an unraveling of the Senate rules if Merkley is able to get 41 Democrats to join him in a filibuster. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) also reminded her Twitter followers on Sunday night that Supreme Court nominees can still be blocked by the Senate minority, unlike all other executive and judicial nominees.

Any senator can object to swift approval of a nominee and require a supermajority. Asked directly whether he would do that, Merkley replied: “I will definitely object to a simple majority” vote.

Merkley's party leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, has said he will fight "tooth and nail" any nominee who isn't "mainstream." 

So the question is who cracks first here, the Dems or the Trump regime?  History tells us the Dems will probably be smashed into oblivion and will have folded by March 1, with Trump's nominee getting an easy confirmation vote before Tax Day.  The Dems folded on Samuel Alito and that was with the Christmas holiday, in a matter of three months.

I dearly hope I'm wrong, but Senate Dems continue to disappoint me at nearly every turn.

The Sinking Ship Of State, Con't

The Trump regime is discovering the problem with career State Department diplomats: they're pretty good writers with excellent skills of persuasion.

Numerous diplomats have drafted a memo of dissent denouncing President Donald Trump's executive order banning the resettlement of refugees and barring travel from seven Muslim-majority countries.

The current draft of the memo, which was obtained by the Lawfare blog, describes Trump's actions as "counterproductive" to its stated goal of protecting Americans from potential terrorist attacks. According to the memo, the order will instead exacerbate relations with the targeted countries.

The State Department confirmed the existence of the memo to Mother Jones on Monday.

"We are aware of a dissent channel message regarding the Executive Order titled 'Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,'" State Department spokesman Mark Toner said when reached for comment. "The Dissent Channel is a long-standing official vehicle for State Department employees to convey alternative views and perspectives on policy issues. This is an important process that the acting secretary, and the department as a whole, value and respect. It allows State employees to express divergent policy views candidly and privately to senior leadership."

The "dissent channel" was established in the 1970s for career diplomats to confidentially express opposition to the administration's foreign policy.

"We are better than this ban," the draft memo adds. "Looking beyond its effectiveness, this ban stands in opposition to the core American and constitutional values that we as federal employees took an oath to uphold."

From the memo:

The United States is a nation of immigrants, starting from its very origins. The concept that immigrants and foreigners are welcome is an essential element of our society, our government, and our foreign policy. So, too, is the concept that we are all equal under the law and that we as a nation abhor discrimination, whether it is based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Combined together, that means we have a special obligation to maintain an immigration system that is as free as possible from discrimination, that does not have implied or actual religious tests, and that views individuals as individuals, not as part of stereotyped groups. 

The Executive Order frames the ban as a 90-day suspension of entry for these nationals until their countries can set up arrangements to provide adequate information to determine that an individual seeking a benefit is who the individual claims to be and is not a security or public-safety threat. This is a high, vague, and nebulous bar. In some cases, the governments of these countries may be wholly incapable of providing this information; in others, the government may be unwilling. In either case, individual citizens will pay the price, a situation which runs counter to US. values of fair play and offering equal opportunities to all.

How long the State Department gets to keep its dissent channel, well that's really the question now, is it?

In all seriousness, this should be extraordinarily disturbing to folks.  State Department dissent channel stuff should be taken pretty seriously, it's there for a reason.  The Trump regime's official response?  If you don't like it, quit.

Asked about a memo signed by dozens of State Department diplomats opposing the temporary ban on refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the US, spokesman Sean Spicer encouraged the federal employees to "either get with the program or they can go." 

"The president has a very clear vision. He's been clear on it since the campaign. He's been clear on it since taking office, that he's going to put this safety of this country first. He is going to implement things that are in the best interest of the safety of this country prospectively, not re-actively," Spicer said at the White House. "And if somebody has a problem with that agenda then that does call into question whether or not they should continue in that post or not."

Once again, dissent will not be tolerated in the Trump regime.