How I Started Worrying And Hated The Ban

The Trumpies continue to be bad at this whole "pretending to be a legitimate administration" thing and just two weeks in, they already have dropped the "pretending" part.

Hours after a federal judge ordered customs officers to provide lawyers to travelers detained at Dulles airport last Saturday, senior Trump administration officials instructed the guards to give the travelers phone numbers of legal services organizations, ignoring a mass of lawyers who had gathered at the airport.

Most of the legal services offices were closed for the weekend, effectively preventing travelers with green cards from obtaining legal advice.

The move was part of what lawyers contend was a series of foot-dragging actions by the administration that appeared to violate court orders against the Trump’s controversial travel ban.

The contempt the Trump regime has for rule of law is staggering, but what do you expect when the place is run by people who have sworn to destroy America's political, legal, and social norms in order to reshape the country?

A little over 24 hours after Trump ordered the ban, federal judges in New York, Massachusetts and Virginia issued emergency rulings blocking parts of it. But at Dulles and other airports, customs officers refused to change their procedures until their superiors conveyed instructions from agency lawyers reviewing the court decisions, according to three lawyers familiar with the situation and a congressional staff member investigating the matter.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, at least four hours after the first of the court orders came down, Todd Owen, Customs and Border Protection's executive assistant commissioner, convened a conference call for field operations to deliver new guidance, according to a person briefed on the call.

But rather than allow the detained travelers to contact lawyers waiting to serve them, Owen’s team advised CBP officers at Dulles to give the travelers phone numbers for legal-services organizations.

“This is a runaround they’re trying to do on these orders,” said Sirine Shebaya, a civil rights lawyer who was on the scene. “This is an unchecked executive that thinks it’s above the judiciary.” 

Of course they hate it.

President Donald Trump lashed out on Saturday at "this so-called judge" who put a nationwide hold on the implementation of his travel ban denying entrance to the U.S. to refugees and people from seven majority-Muslim countries.

Meanwhile, federal agencies were already halting the implementation of the controversial order that appears certain to spark another weekend of protests as well as confusion for travelers and government officials.

Confronting the most serious setback of his young administration, Trump took to Twitter to complain about at the Seattle judge who halted his controversial executive order before heading to Trump International Golf Resort in West Palm Beach to hit the links.

"The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!" Trump tweeted, after writing several other tweets defending his immigration stance. He later added, "What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, can come into U.S.?"

Trump already attacking judges.  It's not even Valentine's Day, and we're already deep into the authoritarian playbook.

The End Of Nerd Prom

If these early indicators are true of the media as a whole, then the yearly White House Correspondents' Dinner may not survive the Trump regime at all.

The White House Correspondents Dinner has gone from a hoary ritual to the apex of Washington’s social calendar, replete with Hollywood A-listers, tuxedoed television stars and live coverage on the major news networks. 

But like many Washington traditions, things are changing now that President Trump is in town. 

The New Yorker is canceling the kickoff party that it usually holds at the W Hotel, according to a spokeswoman for the magazine, Natalie Raabe. Vanity Fair is pulling out of co-sponsoring the dinner’s most exclusive after-party, a celebrity-studded affair most recently hosted at the French ambassador’s residence that is considered the capital’s hottest ticket of the year. 

Vanity Fair’s co-sponsor, Bloomberg L.P., is proceeding with its plans for the party, but no final decision has been made on the event, a spokesman said on Thursday. (Bloomberg has previously sponsored the after-party on its own.) 

“We’ve taken a break from the dinner in the past,” Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, wrote in an email, adding that he planned to spend the weekend fishing in Connecticut instead. 

Mr. Carter, who has feuded with Mr. Trump for decades, was asked whether he had a particular reason for canceling this year’s festivities. “Trump,” Mr. Carter replied, “and the fish.”

Considering the Trump regime sees the Washington media as a enemy that needs to be completely exterminated off the face of the planet, I can't imagine the dinner will happen at all.

Compare that to any of Obama's WHCD proceedings, or even that of his predecessor.  (The Bush ones were tasteless, but they weren't "Off with his head!" affairs either.)  Who would want to perform at that as the host, other than dull, unfunny right wing comics who'll spend the entire night trashing Obama, black people, Latinx folks and anybody darker than a paper bag?

Even if the dinner happens, I sure as hell won't watch.

I don't think many other folks will either.

At least until Trump makes it mandatory next year.

Repeal, Delay, Destroy, Ignore

The GOP plan for repealing and "replacing" Obamacare remains in semi-permanent limbo, and it doesn't look like Republicans are going to move on getting rid of it anytime soon, despite heated rhetoric from the Trump regime.  Why?  Because several red states would be wiped out of the individual insurance market completely.  Greg Sargent explains:

For weeks now, Republicans have employed a range of tortured talking points designed to push one idea: The GOP repeal-and-delay plan will not leave anyone without health coverage, and is merely designed as a transition that will ultimately move us seamlessly to the new, improved health care system Republicans envision, with the details to be worked out later. 

But here’s the problem. If Republicans repeal the Affordable Care Act and delay the date that repeal takes effect, to give themselves time to develop their alternative, it could still create massive disruptions in the interim, even if you presume that the GOP replacement may materialize. 

For instance, many insurers might exit the market, even if repeal hasn’t yet taken hold, simply because there is no guarantee that this GOP replacement will ever come to pass. 

A new analysis suggests that some of the impact of these disruptions might end up concentrated in Republican areas. 

The Congressional Budget Office recently examined a version of the GOP repeal-and-delay bill — one passed by Republicans in 2015 and vetoed by President Obama — and concluded that, because of insurers exiting the market, some 10 percent of Americans might be left living in an area that had no insurers participating in the individual market at all. 

It turns out that 10 percent of the population might end up being concentrated in Republican areas. 

Jeanne Lambrew, who was a key Obama administration official involved in implementation of the ACA, conducted a new analysis designed to try to determine where that 10 percent reside. Using data furnished by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Lambrew singled out counties that fill two criteria: First, that they have low populations; and second, that they currently only have one insurer serving customers on the individual market.

And guess where the bulk of those counties that would have NO individual insurance market at all are?

...many of the counties in red are in states like Alaska, Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, and West Virginia. (Some counties are in swing or blue states like North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Illinois.) The study was conducted by Lambrew for the Century Foundation. 

Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, tells me that this analysis broadly tracks with what Kaiser believes is a reasonable projection of the outcome under repeal-and-delay. He emails that if the GOP repeals the ACA on a delay, it could very well leave large swaths of the country with no insurers in the individual market, and that this could strand a lot of people in those areas with no insurance — even those who continue to get subsidies in the interim before repeal takes hold

A dozen red states would have their insurance markets wiped out, and major swing states like NC, Ohio and Pennsylvania would be affected too.   But it's bad enough that entire states would be nuked, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Arizona, South Carolina and Alabama's individual markets would be eliminated totally.

In other words, it would be a guaranteed bloodbath for Republicans in the House and Senate in 2018.

And they know it.

It's looking more and more like Republicans are going to let Obamacare stay, because if they repeal it, they're done.  And if they don't repeal it, well...

Democrats can use this to take advantage here if they're willing to do it.  That question remains up in the air however.  We'll see.

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.