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A new poll shows that voter expectations that Kamala Harris will deliver the best performance have surged ahead of the second Democratic debate.

  Reporting on one of Donald Trump’s Saturday tweets — where the president darkly warned that the stock market would collapse if he is not re-elected — a financial reporter for Bloomberg slyly pointed out that Trump financial successes since he became president are “middling” — and that his predecessor was more successful. According to […]

The Political Science Department at Harvard University was missing two luminaries today as Brian Kilmeade and Tomi Lahren took time to appear on Fox Nation. (I kid.)

The two were asked their learned opinion on Donald Trump's alleged floating of pardons for individuals accused of war crimes by their fellow Navy SEALs.

Here are the crimes Trump is considering pardoning:

MSNBC political analyst Bob Costa said on Monday that the White House was less worried about charges of colluding with the Russians to influence the 2016 election than it was about related charges of obstruction of justice for interfering with the probe. Host Andrea Mitchell asked Costa to describe ...

The post White House more worried about obstruction than the Russia probe: MSNBC political analyst appeared first on Raw Story.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo obtained a copy of the letter of intent rumored to exist about the Trump Tower Moscow project. During his Tuesday show, Cuomo showed a copy of the letter featuring President Donald Trump’s signature using his frequently preferred black marker to sign. During a Sunday in...

The post CNN’s Chris Cuomo proves Rudy Giuliani lied about Trump signing letter of intent to Trump Tower Moscow appeared first on Raw Story.

Some folks say Trump is just the logical extension of a white nationalist strain in the Republican Party that began with Nixon’s Southern strategy; inspired Reagan to kick off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi; germinated HW Bush’s Willie Horton ad; led W Bush’s dirty tricksters to spread rumors about John McCain’s adopted daughter; and culminated in the racist freak-out during President Obama’s two terms in office.

That’s all true. But there were exit ramps along the way. The Republican Party faced a hard choice after Romney’s defeat. They could adapt to changing American demographics or lose. Trump offered a third option: stop tinkering on the margins with voter suppression and dog whistles and go all in on racism, sexism and xenophobia and openly subvert American democracy to keep white folks in power by whatever means necessary.

The vast majority of the party chose door number 3. Now we not-Republicans face a choice: utterly defeat the Republican Party or watch as the U.S. morphs into an apartheid state and its law enforcement organizations engage in a never-ending ethnic cleansing project. Does that sound crazy or extreme? I don’t think it is.

A woman who personifies the shitty choice the Republicans made and the atrocities their leadership figures are increasingly willing to engage in is current Homeland Security Director Kirstjen Nielsen. Here’s an excerpt from an article in The Post yesterday that treats her as a sympathetic figure:

The president has chastised her on several occasions this spring, including a much-publicized meeting earlier this month when he attacked her in front of the entire Cabinet. He has grown furious because his administration has made little progress building the border wall, and his most ardent supporters have blamed Nielsen for not doing more to halt the caravan of Central American migrants whose advance Trump saw as a personal challenge.

He has also seen her as a proxy for Kelly, whose relationship with the president has frayed in recent months. Trump has decided, according to several aides, that Nielsen is a George W. Bush kind of Republican, the worst in his view.

Nielsen has complained that it is almost an impossible task working for Trump, according to administration officials and others familiar with her thinking, and that he doesn’t understand the nuances of immigration law…

“The president has a very rudimentary understanding of what the border is all about and how you secure it,” said a former DHS staffer who worked closely with Nielsen. “And she’s also not one of the border fire-eaters that have his ear right now. She’s in an impossible, no-win situation.”

There might not be a way to “win” on Trump’s terms, but there is a way to do what’s right: Resign, and go on every network and explain why you’re not willing to shit on the U.S. Constitution. But that’s not what Nielsen is doing. Instead, she is indulging the ignorant demagogue in his “shock and awe” scheme to demonize immigrants and rile up the racist, xenophobic base to consolidate (white) power:

The night before Trump delivered his first speech to Congress in February 2017, he huddled with Jared Kushner and Miller in the Oval Office to talk immigration… Trump reminded them the crowds loved his rhetoric on immigrants along the campaign trail. Acting as if he was at a rally, he then read aloud a few made up Hispanic names and described potential crimes they could have committed, like rape or murder. Then, he said, the crowds would roar when the criminals were thrown out of the country — as they did when he highlighted crimes by illegal immigrants at his rallies, according to a person present for the exchange and another briefed on it later. Miller and Kushner laughed…

Around the same time, Nielsen was complaining to colleagues — and her then-boss, DHS secretary Kelly — about how the administration botched its travel ban. She panned the president’s statement about the border wall, saying it was unlikely to ever be built. Kelly agreed. The two sometimes joked about it.

In early 2017, Nielsen told at least two colleagues that the president’s rhetoric made it more difficult to run the agency.

Now, five months into her tenure as Homeland Security secretary, the measures Nielsen has implemented — separating families, boosting arrests, increasing prosecutions — have made her a villain to many Democrats and immigrant rights’ groups.

You’re goddamned right it has made her a villain — to anyone with a conscience. Nielsen is a fucking monster for implementing policies that result in incidents like this courtroom scene described in GQ:

Alma Jacinto covered her eyes with her hands as tears streamed down her cheeks. The 36-year-old from Guatemala was led out of the federal courtroom without an answer to the question that brought her to tears: When would she see her boys again?

Jacinto wore a yellow bracelet on her left wrist, which defense lawyers said identifies parents who are arrested with their children and prosecuted in Operation Streamline, a fast-track program for illegal border crossers.

Moments earlier, her public defender asked the magistrate judge when Jacinto would be reunited with her sons, ages 8 and 11. There was no clear answer for Jacinto, who was sentenced to time served on an illegal-entry charge after crossing the border with her sons near Lukeville on May 14.

A yellow bracelet? Why not just make it a fucking yellow star? Fuck any bullshit reporting that tries to portray Nielsen as Trump’s victim. She’s one of his enablers. So is every goddamned Republican who isn’t denouncing Trump on a daily basis and resisting his attempts to destroy everything this country is supposed to stand for.

Earlier this week, Trump called immigrants “animals,” and the wingnut media and credulous, useless, both-sides jack-holes in the mainstream media leapt to his defense when folks pointed out how goddamned racist and literally dehumanizing that dangerous rhetoric is. He also said this at the same round-table (via GQ link above):

“We have the worst immigration laws of any country, anywhere in the world,” Trump said at the roundtable held at the Morrelly Homeland Security Center. “They exploited the loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien minors.”

Trump added: “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”

This is straight-up Nazi shit, friends. And anyone who works for Trump or defends his policies is helping a dangerous demagogue take the U.S. further down the road to ethnic cleansing and open white nationalism. No sympathy. Ever.

Trump’s efforts to subvert the Department of Justice and federal law enforcement agencies to cover up his and his cronies’ corruption and collusion has taken center stage in the news lately. But like Hitler before him, Trump is banking on stoking hatred against scapegoats to consolidate his hold on power. Via Salon:

While President Donald Trump recently rejected the notion that the 2018 midterm elections are even more important to Republicans than the 2016 election, his senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, has basically admitted that the president is so worried about this fall’s elections that he plans to spend the entire campaign season vilifying immigrants.

“The big fight this summer is going to be with the open borders Democratic caucus in Congress,” Miller told Breitbart News in a piece published on Thursday. “That is the fundamental political contrast and political debate that is unfolding right now. The Democratic party is at grave risk of completely marginalizing itself from the American voters by continuing to lean into its absolutist anti-enforcement positions.”

“MS-13” is now code for “murderous hordes of rapacious brown people,” and Republicans nationwide have responded enthusiastically to the dog whistle, with Georgia gubernatorial candidates trying to out-racist one another with competing deportation vehicle ads and a Florida GOP hopeful bringing the ultimate violent racist, sexist wingnut fantasy to life by depicting a brown immigrant man murdering a white woman on a suburban street.

I wish I were optimistic that openly racist appeals won’t work in large swathes of the country, but I know they will. I am optimistic there are enough sufficiently engaged decent people to start turning the tide in November. But I’ll be honest: The possibility of a Reichstag Fire scenario worries me. There’s only so much mileage Trump and Fox News can get out of waving poor Kate Steinle’s bloody shirt.

We’ve got to win. And meanwhile, we’ve got to protect the vulnerable among us. And when this is over, there must be a reckoning — not just for Trump and his co-conspirators, but for the whole rotten bunch, including Nielsen.

It's not just the electorate who has concerns about Trump's intellect. Evidently, some of those who've worked closely with him have drawn the same conclusions.

If anything good came from Monday’s revelation that Sean Hannity had concealed a massive conflict of interest from Fox News’ viewers, it was that his conduct was so egregious, and his network’s lack of interest in journalistic ethics so obvious, that it may have cleared things up for any mainstream reporter who still considers Fox a real news outlet.

As part of Hannity’s campaign against special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Donald Trump, the Fox host last week repeatedly denounced the FBI’s raid of the office of Trump personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen on the network’s airwaves. Only yesterday did the public learn of a secret tie between Hannity and Cohen -- Hannity had been Cohen’s legal client.

For many, including myself, this was simply confirmation of the obvious: Fox has no rules for the likes of Hannity. The network prioritizes keeping its top ratings star happy over its responsibility to the public.

But for others, this was an opportunity for the network to prove itself:

Bang your head.

Not all Republicans are sticking their head in the sand to support a suspected pedophile.

Joyce Simmons, a GOP member from Nebraska emailed the 168-member governing body Monday to tell them what disgusting pigs they are for deciding to throw their financial support to Judge Moore.

She didn't use those exact words, but you get her meaning.

My question is how will Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the White House throw her under the bus if they are asked to comment on her resignation?

I guess she doesn't buy into the despicable Federalist and their claims that in 1979, Alabamians were all lining up to have sex with fourteen-year-old girls to start up a big family -- as if it were the 1700's.

This had to be one of the weirder comments coming from a Republican not currently working in the Trump White House. Chuck Grassley, 83-year-old Senator from Iowa, defended his party getting rid of the Kardashian / Trump Children benefitting estate tax, saying:
.

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

.

It turns out Chuck Grassley, and this is true:

• has never tasted beer.
• has slept with only one woman in his entire life. (That's real nice for Mrs. Grassley, but it's not the way most people do it.)
• And how about movies, Chuck? Only post-code family pictures?

[embed eid="27096" /]

Speaking of movies, a lot of people pay monthly for Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime, and consider it worth it for access to the entertainment those services provide. (Not to mention cable!)

So what's it worth to you to have curated videos of the day's political news? Videos that won't go away just because Sinclair thinks they don't meet a conservative agenda?

read more

An unidentified woman and her daughter jumped off a local Indian train Saturday to escape a group of men attempting to harm the young girl. While aboard the Howrah-Jodhpur Express, the 40-year-old mother made numerous attempts to ward off the group of 10 to 15 men, but her efforts were futile....

"It doesn't matter what right-wingers think about something else. What matters is the prosecution and the evidence they're developing. And all your talk about distraction isn't going to help your side."

Campaign Action

White House chief of staff John Kelly on Thursday said he was "stunned" by the uproar over Donald Trump's phone call to the grieving widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed earlier this month in Niger. Kelly then proceeded to scapegoat Congresswoman Frederica Wilson for violating the sacred trust of a president.

"It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation," said Kelly, a former four-star Marine General whose son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010. "Absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred."

Let's just start by acknowledging that Rep. Wilson is not the one who started this conversation. If Kelly is looking for the culprit, he can walk straight into the Oval Office, because it's Donald Trump who has turned patriotism into a political weapon. It was Trump who in trying to explain his failure to contact the families of four fallen soldiers fumbled his way into falsely accusing President Obama of never having called Gold Star families. It was Trump who dragged Kelly's son, Marine Second Lieutenant Robert Kelly, into the political spotlight by pointing out that Obama hadn't called Gen. Kelly following his son’s death. It was Trump who in trying to cover his butt following the blowback over his lies and politicization of the issue made the clumsy call to a grieving widow in which he relayed that her husband “knew what he was signing up for." It was Trump who then lied again, tweeting that Wilson had "totally fabricated" his unconscionable comments and said he had "proof" that she had done so.

Well, that "proof" dissolved into the exceedingly thin air occupying Trump's head and so the White House sent Gen. Kelly out to address America about a story their boss has stoked all week. We can only take that as confirmation that Wilson's initial characterization of what Trump said was 100 percent accurate.

For his part, Kelly explained from the White House podium that Trump, who had supposedly already been making these calls, asked Kelly what he should say when he reached out to these four families. Trump also asked him if President Obama had called him and he told Trump, no. Kelly then relayed what he told Trump about these phone calls with the clear intention of explaining the terribly mangled sentiments Trump eventually delivered. Kelly quoted the person who had informed him of his son's death in 2010, his close friend Gen. Joe Dunford.

Bitcoin was back in the news over the summer as the world’s most infamous unregulated digital money, what analysts now refer to as a crypto-currency. We published an article briefly reviewing the mother of all crypto-currency earlier this year. But bitcoin is not alone in this brave new niche. These days cryptos are popping up faster than the colonial currencies issued by the original colonies in what would become the United States prior to the creation of the modern U.S. dollar. So many are in digital circulation that it’s hard to keep up, and more are coming every month.

Up until now, many have suffered in one way or another from being too much like bitcoin. Bitcoin became well-known in part because of its wild swings in value, swings that are irresistible to speculators willing to gamble on up or down moves. But the same volatility that attracts gamblers tends to scare off businesses and consumers who might otherwise use one of these new forms of money for routine day-to-day commerce.

The public introduction of a new crypto-currency is called an Initial Coin Offering, or ICO, and it works in some ways like the more familiar initial public offering of a new stock. I’ve been following the development and release of one such virtual currency that was recently made public and sounds like it could be more useful for ordinary consumers than some of its many competitors. Dive in to learn more about one ongoing ICO, and how some of those features might actually work in the real world.

What a difference a state makes.

Representative Pete Sessions of Dallas was on Morning Joe this morning to talk about the federal response to Hurricane Harvey.

First up, he wants the White House and the Senate to "do their job" and make and fill the appointments that are now empty and waiting.

I thought the whole purpose of Trump's so-called presidency was to dismantle the "deep state," Pete. It's clear Trump had no idea he was going to win the election, and since then has made no effort to fill positions in any level of the administrative branch.

Next, Sessions was asked about his "no" vote on Hurricane Sandy relief. He parsed and confused the issue and said that the relief aid had to meet the actual needs of Texas. I'm betting Texas will be happy to take a blank check from the Republican Congress. (It's shameful how Joe Scarborough let Sessions get away with pretending it was about fiscal responsibility in 2013.)

All it takes is a hurricane in the back yard for Texas Republicans to go all Big Government.

A post shared by @avec.possum on Aug 2, 2017 at 9:14pm PDT

tastefullyoffensive:

Cross-eyed possums munching on grapes.

HOST: What are the consequences of having Sinclair owning and such a big chunk of local television?

TYLER CHERRY: Well there's a few considerations. First and foremost it's just anti-trust, and like media consolidation issues, which I certainly am not an expert in, so that's about as much as I'll say about that, but there's a reason why there historically, and again this is -- this gets very complicated, but there's historically been a cap on what any one network provider or broadcaster can -- the amount of households they can reach. The Trump administration's FCC is in the process of, and has pretty much rolled that back. If you recall earlier in the segment, I said that Sinclair was about to own 72 percent of nationwide reach, which far exceeds what that cap should have been, but kind of putting federal regulations, communication regulations aside, it's just terrifying because most people, more Americans trust local news than they do national news, cable news, print news, and precisely because of that, when you're watching local news it's unsuspecting. You're not really on guard the way you are when you're watching a big CNN panel, for example, or a Fox news debate. When I go home and watch local news -- you -- and with Sinclair you are going to see pretty run of the mill local news about crime reports, and about the city counsel, or whatever it might be, but there is going to be these segments in there that include incredibly right-leaning right-wing and often misleading conservative propaganda-like segments. Whether that's what they call their "terrorism alert desk," which is nothing but just fearmongering and Islamophobia. Whether it's these "must-run" segments that are mandated to run on all local news stations featuring former Trump campaign administration officials. It's really the unsuspecting part of this that's incredibly dangerous because what you're thinking you're getting in local news is really mandated conservative right-leaning almost propaganda that local viewers have not been conditioned to look out for and therefore are not really on guard for.

Previously:

Don’t be fooled: Sinclair is trying to bring the Fox News model to your local news station 

A short history of the right-wing politics of Sinclair Broadcasting

On CNN, David Zurawik explains how local stations owned by Sinclair integrate pro-Trump “propaganda” with local news

President Donald Trump’s pettiness on social media is not only embarrassing, and petulant, and completely unbefitting anyone over the age of 12 – not to mention the “Leader of the Free World.”  It might also be unconstitutional.

According to the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, Trump’s spiteful practice of blocking users from commenting on his prolific tweets amounts to “speech suppression in a public forum,” a clear violation of the constitution’s free speech protections.

According to a Reuters report, the institute’s senior attorney “likened Twitter to a modern form of town hall meeting or public comment periods for government agency proposals, both venues where U.S. law requires even-handed treatment of speech.”

In short, if you’re an elected official, you can’t decide who can and can not comment on your tweets or Facebook posts, just like you can’t pick who can and cannot speak at a public hearing or an official gathering where questions and comments from constituents are being taken.  That principle holds even if your objections to those comments aren’t politically motivated, but rather that they hurt your feelings.

This has never been an issue in the past because we’ve never had a President so personally and emotionally invested in his Twitter account, to the point where he’ll block users who leave negative comments in his feed.

But President Trump is determined to make the virtual world match the real one he lives in.  

In that world, one built and bought over a lifetime, he’s carefully surrounded himself with yes men, sycophants, and his own children to ensure the only feedback he gets reaffirms what’s he’s already done or said.

That it might violate the constitution doesn’t appear to bother the President one bit.  Of course, that last statement can be applied to dozens of actions and statements made by our commander in chief.

Add your name to millions demanding Trump’s son-in-law cannot harm U.S. interests. REVOKE JARED KUSHNER’S SECURITY CLEARANCE!

The post Trump Just Got Terrible News About His Twitter Account appeared first on Occupy Democrats.

Last week, White House aides originally tried to dismiss the conversation in which Donald Trump urged former FBI director James Comey to end his Michael Flynn probe as simply Trump being Trump—that's just the way he speaks, one senior official said. But with Monday's Washington Post report that Trump also tried to separately persuade two senior intelligence officials to publicly deny the links between his campaign and Russia, what we have now is a broad and targeted campaign by Trump to halt the investigation into his campaign accompanied by an effort to sow doubt in the minds of Americans.

In response to that effort, intelligence officials—including Comey, director of national intelligence Daniel Coats, and director of the National Security Agency Adm. Michael Rogers—are diligently and loudly ringing alarm bells for all of us to hear. Trump may be one of the most impulsive presidents in our history, but he is laser focused on executing his disinformation campaign both behind closed doors and in his public tweets. As the Post reported:

Current and former senior intelligence officials viewed Trump’s requests as an attempt by the president to tarnish the credibility of the agency leading the Russia investigation.

A senior intelligence official said Trump’s goal was to “muddy the waters” about the scope of the FBI probe at a time when Democrats were ramping up their calls for the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel, a step announced last week. [...]

“The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,” a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats.

But it wasn't just Trump himself—officials around Trump were equally as invested. Ostensibly, when Trump's one-on-ones with Comey failed to stem the FBI inquiry, Trump officials tried to influence the agency by other means.

What exactly did Rudy Giuliani write to Donald Trump after Trump asked him to find a legal way to ban Muslims from entering the country? That's what U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts in Detroit wants to know, writes Kartikay Mehrotra of Bloomberg.

The Trump Administration was ordered by a federal judge to disclose a memo drafted under the guidance of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani that allegedly served as an outline to make the president’s travel ban look like it wasn’t aimed at Muslims.

While running for president, Donald Trump asked Giuliani to form a commission that would help draft a “Muslim ban” to “show [him] the right way to do it legally" after his initial proposal drew widespread public condemnation, according to a court filing by the Arab American Civil Rights League. The commission then recommended that “nationality be used as a proxy for religion,” the group said in the filing.

The Trump administration is in the midst of defending Trump's Muslim ban 2.0. A full appellate panel in the 4th Circuit heard oral arguments Monday and a 3-judge appellate panel in the 9th Circuit will hear arguments next Monday.

Judge Roberts ordered Donald Trump to turn over the document by May 19. This should be fun. Trump loves judges and being told what to do.

Ted Cruz is just asking for karma to bite him in the ass. This week, he introduced a bill to the Senate that would use money seized from Joacquin Archivaldo Guzman Loera, AKA El Chapo, to fund Trump's disastrous border wall.

But let's pause for a moment and think about this. Is it really a good idea? I don't have an issue with using seized drug assets. I do have a problem wasting that money on a wall named after a man that escaped heavily guarded prisons not once but twice. Twice!

The first time he simply hid in a laundry cart and comfortably rode through the gates. Like a poorly written movie plot, the guards were none the wiser. The second time, his cronies dug a tunnel under the prison. Yes, a freaking tunnel!

So to use El Chapo's money to fund Trump's wall is just asking for it. Should this actually come to fruition, it would only be appropriate as those attempting to enter the U.S. without inspection will not only jump over the top but will dig tunnels underneath it. How apropos.

Fox and Friends laughed at ABC News and others who exposed Trump's "Buy American, Hire American" hypocrisy re his own businesses, opining that it's too expensive to buy American!

I kid you not.

After briefly discussing Trump's Wisconsin speech and his signing an executive order declaring we must buy and hire "America First," Steve Doocy took aim at Democrats calling Trump out for not doing what he says. Doocy also mocked ABC News' for investigating Trump.

Doocy said, "So ABC sent Brian Ross, the investigative reporter, to a Trump hotel and he made a shocking discovery."

(Every product in Trump's hotels were not made in America.)

Doocy yelled, "Ah-ha!, they have soap from Canada."

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt replied, "If you put a camera in any of our bathrooms or any of our houses you will find stuff from other countries."

Doocy opined, "My soap's from Costco!"

Ainsley then went on a rant which she thought would help Donald, but actually exposed Trump's hypocrisy concerning one of his most sacred creeds.

Earhardt said, "President Trump is saying yeah, I would love for us to buy all of our soaps and our robes, we would all love to buy American-made, but the prices are much cheaper if you buy from other countries."

Yes, indeed! That's why saying it doesn't make it so.

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Trump’s lies aren’t just a problem for Washington insiders and the media.  They’re having a tragic effect on actual lives – even the lives of people who supported him.

One such supporter is Helen Beristain.  She believed Trump when he said he was only interested in deporting hard criminals.  This week, she learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) is scheduled to deport her husband, Roberto Beristain – owner of a popular restaurant in a conservative community in Northern Indiana – to Mexico tomorrow.

We know what you’re thinking.  Helen’s husband must be one of Trump’s ‘bad hombres,’ a drug dealer, perhaps, or maybe a rapist, or a gang leader.  Not exactly.

His crime that ran him afoul of Trump’s deportation force?  Accidentally entering Canada 17 years ago.

Roberto Beristain came to the the United States from Mexico City, Mexico in 1998.  The undocumented immigrant found steady work as a cook, started a family, and eventually bought the popular Eddie’s Steak Shed in Granger, Indiana.   I.C.E. detained him just weeks after ownership of the eatery was transferred over to him.

Back in 2000, Helen and Roberto were on vacation in Niagara Falls, New York, when their directions got mixed up and they found themselves driving into Canada.   Because Roberto was undocumented, he was detained on their way back into the U.S. and jailed.  He was released several weeks later under the condition that he self deport.

Helen was pregnant at the time, and Roberto was not going to leave her side.  He decided to defy the order and stay with his wife, and he would work over time to earn legal status.  17 years and 4 children later, Roberto grew to become what the Mayor of nearby South Bend, Indiana, called a “Model Citizen” in an open letter published in the Huffington Post.

Roberto filed for and received all the permits necessary to work in this country.  As a condition of this tenuous legal status, he had to maintain an impeccable record with law enforcement and check-in dutifully with I.C.E. each year.

Those “check-ins” were pretty routine during the Bush and Obama administrations, with both presidents de-prioritizing hardworking immigrants of all ethnicities, especially those with families and clean criminal records.

Helen had every reason to think that her husband would continue to enjoy this low priority status under the Trump administration.  She was so certain, in fact, that she actually voted for the bombastic billionaire despite his harsh rhetoric against undocumented immigrants.

In an interview in early March, Helen said she liked the Trump campaign’s promises on immigration, believing herself, too, that criminals should be kicked out.  She just never expected her husband would be swept-up in the zealotry of Trump’s new policies.

“[Trump] did say the good people would not be deported, the good people would be checked,” she said.

But no such luck.  In February, Roberto entered the I.C.E. offices for his regularly scheduled check-in, but never came out.  He was detained for violating the deportation order from the 2000 incident.  Earlier this week, Helen and her family learned that his deportation to Mexico had been set.

Despite Trump’s immigration orders ripping her family apart, Helen Beristain is trying to remain positive.  Roberto will have to work to reestablish legal status from Mexico – a process that will take at least 9 months – and Helen and her kids are making plans to visit their patriarch south of the border soon.

No word yet on whether President Trump has issued any kind of apology for breaking such a consequential promise to a supporter.

 

The post Trump Fan Who Believed Trump Would Only Deport ‘Bad Ones’ Just Got Terrible News appeared first on Occupy Democrats.

Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) accused Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) and President Donald Trump of trying to take President Obama's name off of Obamacare and call it their own.

It’s all tweets on deck in Trumpelstiltsland, where everything, everything, is being thrown at the wall by tiny, angry hands in a desperate effort to find anything that will stick. This isn’t an Alec Baldwin sized snit, it’s a full on (and ongoing) twitterfit.

It’s all fake.

The fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred. @MSNBC & @CNN are unwatchable. @foxandfriends is great!

It’s all a distractions from Hillary’s emails.

This Russian connection non-sense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton's losing campaign.

The real problem is snitches, who are the worst.

Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?).Just like Russia

The worst! 

The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by "intelligence" like candy. Very un-American!

And did I mention that Obama was weak? Obama was weak!

Sean Spicer, Donald Trump’s press secretary, is holding a press conference in the White House on Thursday, February 9. The event is scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. ET. Watch a livestreaming video of the daily media briefing below:...

While some major universities are advising their students that they are studying Trump's Muslim ban, the University of Michigan released a statement on Saturday that flatly refused to release the immigration status of their students. The Maize and Blue isn't playing along with Trump's Muslim prejudice.

Republicans think that threatening to shoot all the Obamacare hostages will bring Democrats around to helping Republicans clean up the mess they would make by repealing Obamacare. But there's good reason for Democrats to continue to resist—the actual part of "repealing" is looking more and more difficult for Republicans to pull off. One huge example—the vehicle Republicans will use to repeal the law has a major tax cut for the wealthy, and thus cuts out any revenue they would need to replace the law.

The large tax cut, which would go disproportionately to high earners, will seriously handcuff lawmakers as they try to cobble together a replacement plan to cover the millions of Americans dependent on Obamacare for health insurance, health care policy experts say. […]

“If all the taxes in the ACA are repealed as part of a reconciliation bill, that could be hugely consequential,” said Larry Levitt, vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “If you take all that revenue off the table, it means a replacement bill has to be very scaled back relative to the ACA or they have to find money from somewhere else to pay for it, both of which would involve difficult trade offs.”

And that means, as Greg Sargent astutely points out, any "replacement" plan Republicans come up with can't even come close to covering the same number of people as Obamacare, or do so as affordably. That's the bar a Republican replacement plan has to meet to get any Democratic support. It gives Democrats very real leverage to continue to tell McConnell to get fucked when he comes to them begging for their help.

Republicans have more than enough rope to hang themselves with this one. They could be calculating that, in the end, making even more uninsured people than there were before the law will be politically harmless for them since their callousness toward adult human lives hasn't hurt them much at the ballot box. Democrats have to be willing to let them find out.

Donald Trump took to twitter to attack CNN over Jeff Zeleny's report on Anderson Cooper's AC360, that there isn't any evidence of mass voter fraud of which Trump claimed stole the popular vote away from him.

Zeleny said, "Donald Trump is showing signs of being a sore winner. The president elect is suggesting with zero evidence to back up his claims, if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."

Vanity always seems to get the best of Trump and he took to his trusty twitter account to let the world know just how horrible CNN and Zeleny are.

As always, he doesn't need any evidence because it's up to the press to find evidence that there wasn't massive election fraud against him.

"@JoeBowman12: @jeffzeleny just another generic CNN part time wannabe journalist !" @CNN still doesn't get it. They will never learn!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2016

"@FiIibuster: @jeffzeleny Pathetic - you have no sufficient evidence that Donald Trump did not suffer from voter fraud, shame! Bad reporter.

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