Physician, heal thyself

Feb 4th, 2017 11:55 am | By

Trump has a command for us.

“Get smart” meaning what? What sure-fire action does he think there is that would prevent that? Rounding up all the “radical Islamic terrrorists” and expelling them? What sure-fire intelligence operation is there that can do that? Does he think we should round up and expel all Muslims? (He probably does, yes. He hasn’t quit put it that way yet, but it’s consistent with a lot that he has said, and with his temperament and “values” and love of bullying.) That would … Read the rest



Down with this sort of thing

Feb 4th, 2017 11:20 am | By

That talk by Julie Bindel at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford (across the river from Manchester) went off without a hitch this afternoon. Friends who went say it was terrific.

There was a “protest” of sorts…but the sorts were pretty pathetic sorts.

They did get more than two people, eventually.

I’m told the library volunteers took them tea. It’s a chilly day.… Read the rest



Alternative words

Feb 4th, 2017 10:33 am | By

I encounter a survivor of the Bowling Green Massacre.

If only I had better reading skills.… Read the rest



So-called president

Feb 4th, 2017 10:29 am | By

Trump is raging on Twitter, but the restraining order is being heeded all the same.

The Department of Homeland Security said Saturday that it had suspended “any and all actions” related to President Trump’s travel ban on immigrants from seven mostly Muslim countries and his halt on refugees coming into the U.S.

The move came after a federal judge in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order against the major parts of Trump’s executive order, effective nationwide, in response to a lawsuit filed by the states of Washington and Minnesota.

“DHS personnel will resume inspection of travelers in accordance with standard policy and procedure,” the department’s statement said.

The State Department, which had “provisionally revoked” 60,000 visas since the president

Read the rest


Guest post: How to displace class consciousness

Feb 3rd, 2017 5:36 pm | By

Originally a comment by Jeff Engel on Treats for the Rich.

Class consciousness has been “un-American” since early in the Cold War – some sort of Commie plot. Instead, we’ve had ideological and race consciousness as mainstream, normal, familiar, unexceptional. Any time something rings a little like a class issue, it will either get squelched in popular political discussion, or it will morph into a race/religion/cultural issue.

Manufacturing jobs disappearing? Talk about technological changes won’t get far except among wonks; calls for retraining programs will draw complaints about the “nanny state”; suggestions that the profit-seeking behavior of corporations is an issue will be condemned. But if you can blame it on the differently-complected foreigners, you’ve got a hot-button issue … Read the rest



For a better planet and a better future

Feb 3rd, 2017 5:17 pm | By

Sweden’s Deputy Prime Minister and Climate Minister Isabella Lövin signed a proposal for Sweden’s new climate law today, and shared a photo of the signing.

The referral of the Swedish climate law is signed. All future governments will be obliged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For a better planet and a better future.

Some people were reminded of a photo of a certain bad hombre signing an action to deprive millions of women of access to reproductive health services around the world, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

H/t Rrr… Read the rest



Not so fast, Donnerz

Feb 3rd, 2017 4:31 pm | By

Take a bow, Seattle.

A federal judge in the city of that name has put a  temporary nationwide restraining order on Trump’s loathsome ban.

Seattle!

Forgive a spot of local patriotism.

A federal judge in Seattle has ordered a halt to enforcement of President Trump’s controversial travel ban on citizens from seven predominantly Muslim nations.

U.S. District Judge James Robart at a court hearing Friday ruled in favor of Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who filed a lawsuit to invalidate key provisions of Trump’s executive order. The order indefinitely blocks entry to the United States for Syrian refugees and temporarily suspends entry for citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries.

In a legal filing asking for the restraining order, Ferguson,

Read the rest


Dress like a wooomannnnnn

Feb 3rd, 2017 4:11 pm | By

Some #DressLikeAWoman.

https://twitter.com/emmaladyrose/status/827548980200538112

Read the rest


More dirt, more corruption, more secret bribery

Feb 3rd, 2017 3:41 pm | By

Streams? Oh who needs streams. Streams are just some hippy crap like candles and home-made bread and bicycles.

The Republicans have rushed to make sure that streams don’t end up being too clean.

Using an obscure law that allows Congress to review regulations before they take effect, the Senate voted to reverse the Stream Protection Rule, which seeks to protect the nation’s waterways from debris generated by a practice called surface mining. The Interior Department had said the rule would protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests by keeping coal mining debris away from nearby waters.

The Senate vote was 54 to 45, following a House vote for repeal on Wednesday.

“Make no mistake about

Read the rest


The staggering number

Feb 3rd, 2017 12:01 pm | By

Jeezus. More than 100 thousand visas have been revoked under Trump’s loathsome ban.

At least 100,000 visas have been revoked in a single week in response to President Trump’s executive immigration order, a lawyer for the Justice Department revealed in court Friday.

The number came to light in a Virginia courtroom as a federal judge granted the state’s motion to join a lawsuit challenging the immigration ban that caused chaos at airports over the weekend.

“The number 100,000 really sucked the air out of my lungs,” said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg of the Legal Aid Justice Center, who represents two brothers from Yemen who were detained after arriving at Dulles Airport on Saturday and filed the original lawsuit that Virginia just joined.

Read the rest


Treats for the rich

Feb 3rd, 2017 11:25 am | By

Two weeks in, and the greedy lying corrupt plutocrat wants to shred what financial regulations we have. Bernie Madoff was framed! Let’s have more and bigger recessions! Let’s see if we can top the Great Depression!

President Trump mounted an all-out assault on financial regulation on Friday, announcing an array of steps to tear down safeguards enacted to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis and turning to the Wall Street titans he had demonized during his campaign for advice.

After a White House meeting with the business executives on Friday, Mr. Trump signed a directive calling for a rewriting of major provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act, crafted by the Obama administration and passed by Congress in response

Read the rest


Two machetes

Feb 3rd, 2017 10:48 am | By

A guy – un mec – attacked soldiers guarding The Louvre and they shot him.

Police in Paris say a man attacked soldiers when they told him he couldn’t enter an underground shopping mall beneath the sprawling Louvre Museum with his bags.

Yves Lefebvre, a police union official, says the man tried to stab one of the soldiers. The attacker was shot five times.

Lefebvre says police found two machetes on the man.

There were about 1000 people in the museum; they were hustled into safer areas without windows if they weren’t already there. They were allowed to leave after a couple of hours.

Trump, of course, is overjoyed. He takes this to be a vindication of his … Read the rest



How to get noticed

Feb 2nd, 2017 5:55 pm | By

 

Jesse Singal points out that Milo Yiannopoulos is not nearly as edgy and interesting as he pretends to be.

A lot of people fail to recognize this, but Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart senior editor and right-wing provocateur, is much closer to being Sean Hannity than to being Adolf Hitler. It’s a bit of a secret, in part because Yiannopoulos devotes a great deal of time and effort to a form of ideological dress-up, pretending to be more edgy and out-there than he actually is. His college tour is called the “Dangerous Faggot” and his upcoming book is called Dangerous because Yiannopoulos wants to position himself as an incendiary liberal bête noire. He profits off of it — it’s

Read the rest


Testing

Feb 2nd, 2017 1:46 pm | By

John McCain has sent Trump a letter pointing out that Putin is testing him (Trump) and that he needs to not fail the test.

Russia is testing President Donald Trump with a surge of violence in eastern Ukraine and the U.S. president should give Ukraine the lethal aid it needs to defend against the attacks, Senator John McCain said in a letter to Trump on Thursday.

Renewed violence flared this week between Moscow-backed rebels and Ukraine government forces that has caused the highest casualty rate since mid-December and cut off power and water to thousands of civilians on both sides of the frontline.

“That this surge of attacks began the day after he talked with you by phone is a

Read the rest


Know it when you see it

Feb 2nd, 2017 1:04 pm | By

Milo. Why do we keep having to talk about Milo? Milo is ridiculous and we should never have to talk about him.

But we keep having to.

A speech by the divisive right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley, was canceled on Wednesday night after demonstrators set fires and threw objects at buildings to protest his appearance.

The university announced the cancellation on Twitter around 6 p.m. local time, about an hour after a section of the campus erupted in protest.

Look, he’s not “right-wing” – that’s not the right way to name him. He is right-wing, of course, but that by itself isn’t why people don’t want him giving speeches. “Divisive” doesn’t name him … Read the rest



Section 1504

Feb 2nd, 2017 12:13 pm | By

More corruption, more bribery, more secrecy, more fuck everything in the name of corporate Success. More filth.

Back in 2010, ExxonMobil’s then-CEO, Rex Tillerson, was deeply worried about Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms, a bipartisan amendment that required drilling and mining companies to disclose any payments they make to foreign governments. So Tillerson and one of his lobbyists paid a half-hour visit to the amendment’s Republican co-author, then-Senator Richard Lugar, to try to get it killed.

Tillerson argued that forcing U.S. oil firms to reveal corporate secrets—such as paying foreign governments—would put them at a competitive disadvantage. He also explained that the provision would make it especially difficult for Exxon to do business in Russia, where,

Read the rest


Violently Ideating About Punching Nazis

Feb 2nd, 2017 | By Anonymous

Disclaimer: If “Nazi” can be considered shorthand for actual “fascist”, then I’ve punched a Nazi. More than once. More than one Nazi, actually.

This sounds like braggadocio and I’m not sure how to convey it any better, but the reality of it all is, like a lot of violence, actually rather pathetic. A couple of years after some of the horrible incidents mentioned in my last anonymous guest post, during which I was probably dealing with undiagnosed PTSD, the brother of an acquaintance decided that I needed to take responsibility in protecting white women – namely my mother – from being raped by black men.

In practice, this supposedly meant that I needed to accept Nazi Bro as my … Read the rest



Damned out of his own mouth

Feb 2nd, 2017 11:15 am | By

Trump also used the National Prayer Rice Krispies to tell the assembled multitude not to worry about his belligerent phone calls to heads of state who have the bad taste not to be Putin.

Mr. Trump also went off topic in his address to the National Prayer Breakfast. He told the audience not to worry about reports that he had held tempestuous phone calls with the leaders of allies Australia and Mexico, saying a tough approach was long overdue.

“When you hear about the tough phone calls, don’t worry,” he said. “We’re being taken advantage of by countries around the world. It’s time for us to be a little tough. It’s not going to happen anymore.”

Yeah, that Australia, man … Read the rest



Without sufficient intelligence

Feb 2nd, 2017 10:20 am | By

Good god – how has this flown under the radar so long? Trump approved that commando raid in Yemen without due diligence.

The U.S. military said on Wednesday it was looking into whether more civilians were killed in a raid on al Qaeda in Yemen on the weekend, in the first operation authorized by President Donald Trump as commander in chief.

U.S. Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens was killed in the raid on a branch of al Qaeda, also known as AQAP, in al Bayda province, which the Pentagon said also killed 14 militants. However, medics at the scene said about 30 people, including 10 women and children, were killed.

U.S. Central Command said in a statement that an

Read the rest


Bad hombres down there

Feb 2nd, 2017 9:42 am | By

Then there’s the part about how he blustered at Mexico some more.

President Donald Trump warned in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart that he was ready to send U.S. troops to stop “bad hombres down there” unless the Mexican military does more to control them, according to an excerpt of a transcript of the conversation obtained by The Associated Press.

The excerpt of the call did not detail who exactly Trump considered “bad hombres,” nor did it make clear the tone and context of the remark, made in a Friday morning phone call between the leaders. It also did not contain Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s response. Mexico denies that Trump’s remarks were threatening.

The White House … Read the rest