Month: March 2017

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) Doesn’t Like “Other People’s” Babies…

Are these the kind of folks we want running our nation? Does the nation of immigrants (USA – The melting pot) now want only white folks so we become totally homogenous? Has King noticed children of immigrants perform FAR better in science?  Are we really that fearful? Scared of shadows and people who don’t look exactly as we do? Really?

Enter the “Age of Trump”. His candidacy and eventual election to the highest office in our land has made it acceptable for white nationalists and white supremacists to go mainstream.

The Washington Post – Rep. Steve King’s game of footsie with the white nationalist arm of conservative politics reached a new level over the weekend, when the Iowa Republican tweeted new praise for the nationalist, anti-immigrant Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

White nationalists praised King’s phrasing, with supremacist-du-jour Richard Spencer recording a video shortly afterward lauding King’s comments, a sentiment he followed up with a tweet of support Tuesday. Despite that, King stood by his comment, telling CNN on Monday that he “meant exactly what I said.”

“We need to get our birthrates up or Europe will be entirely transformed within a half century or a little more,” King told CNN’s Chris Cuomo. He voiced his support for an American population that’s eventually “so homogeneous that we look a lot the same” and added that he’s “a champion for Western civilization and, yes, our English language is a big part of it. It’s a carrier of freedom.” In a radio interview, King insisted that he wasn’t talking about race, but that he was referring to “our stock” and that “we need to have enough babies to replace ourselves.”

King’s home state of Iowa is one of the most homogeneously white in the country. But census data show that his district is one where nearly 10 percent of the children younger than 18 live with at least one parent who was born overseas.

There’s a correlation between the foreign-born population in a congressional district and its politics. (Both of those things overlap with the percentage of the population that lives in urban areas.) If we use census data on the percent of the population that’s foreign-born and compare it to Cook Political Report‘s partisanship rankings for each district, the pattern is clear.

King’s Iowa district — the 4th — is embedded firmly in that clump of Republican-leaning districts that has a low foreign-born population. It’s near the bottom among all of the districts, when ranked by this metric. His ranks 337th on this metric. (There are 435 districts, but not all had census data available.)

More with graphs BELOW THE FOLD.

 

 

Trump Says “Very Interesting Items” To Be Revealed On Alleged Surveilance…

Again Trump defends his unsubstantiated claim that President Obama ordered surveillance on his phones.  Apparently another Trump alternative fact distraction.

Trump is saying that information could be revealed that could prove him right. Again he gave no evidence to support his allegations.

This is reminiscent of birther activities back in 2011 when he  claimed that “an ‘extremely credible source’” called him to tell him President Obama’s birth certificate was fake. If memory serves he was going to drop a real bombshell on that one. Result? A yuuuuuge nothing. Why, it wasn’t true. Just Trump BS.

So, anyone willing to place odds on this one? True, or, another Trump falsehood?

From The Washington Post:

President Trump on Wednesday defended his unsubstantiated claim that former president Barack Obama ordered surveillance on his phones at Trump Tower in New York during last fall’s campaign.

Trump again offered no evidence to support his wiretapping accusation, but he maintained in an interview with Fox News Channel that information would soon be revealed that could prove him right.

“Wiretap covers a lot of different things,” Trump said. “I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.”

Trump made his comments during an interview with Fox host Tucker Carlson that is scheduled for the cable channel Wednesday evening. {MORE}

We patiently await credible sources to substantiate his allegations. And, we likely will be waiting for a very, very, long time. If history hold…

Trump Told To Dump Ryan And Embrace Universal Health Care By Close Friend…

Vox – A key Trump friend and ally is urging the president to dump Paul Ryan’s Affordable Health Care Act and embrace something that sounds sort of like a lightweight version of a single-payer health care system. Christopher Ruddy, CEO of the conservative Newsmax brand, isn’t normally considered a major thought leader on policy issues, but he is a longtime friend of Trump’s, and counts as one of a relatively small number of conservative players who have closer ties to Trump than to congressional Republican leaders.

And he is warning loud and clear that Trump “could inherit the bad political baggage of both Obamacare and the House Republicans” if he insists on going along with Ryan’s version of repealing and replacing Obamacare.

Instead, Ruddy puts forward the rather radical notion that Trump should attempt to live up to his campaign promises on health care rather than signing on to legislation that betrays them all. To do it, he encourages Trump to ditch his effort to court the Freedom Caucus and instead come up with a bipartisan plan that accepts a large government role in providing insurance coverage.

WHOA! Finally. A sensible conservative voice who has El Presidente’s  ear?

In an op-ed published Tuesday, Ruddy argues that Trump “should be sticking to his own gut on healthcare reform.” He did this during the campaign, which helped him “win Democratic states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.”

And he offers the following seven-point “game plan for Trump to regain the initiative”:

  1. Ditch the Freedom Caucus and the handful of Senate Republicans who want a complete repeal of Obamacare. They don’t agree with universal coverage and will never be placated.
  2. Find a few parts of Ryancare II [i.e., the AHCA; Ryancare I refers to Paul Ryan’s longstanding desire to privatize Medicare] that can win passage in the House and Senate with either GOP support or bipartisan support. Declare victory.
  3. Rekindle the bipartisanship in Congress that President Obama destroyed. Impanel a bipartisan committee to report back by year’s end with a feasible plan to fix Obamacare.
  4. Reject the phony private health insurance market as the panacea. Look to an upgraded Medicaid system to become the country’s blanket insurer for the uninsured.
  5. Tie Medicaid funding to states with the requirement that each pass legislation to allow for a truly nationwide health care market.
  6. Get Democrats to agree to modest tort reform to help lower medical costs.
  7. While bolstering Medicare and improving Medicaid, get Republicans and Democrats to back the long-term fix of health savings accounts. This allows individuals to fund their own health care and even profit from it.

As a pure political strategy, the key elements here are probably the first three points. A commission probably won’t lead to any major changes, but that’s okay. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Affordable Care Act exchanges will probably stabilize in the next year or two even if nothing changes. Trump can do nothing and fix it.

But steps 4 through 7 do suggest a route to a possible future vision of American health care.

There’s more so do CONTINUE READING.

Trump Dropping Climate Change, No Longer To Be Included In Environmental Reviews../.

With republicans controlling both houses of congress and Trump in the Oval Office we knew environmental concerns, especially climate change, would be a very low priority. One of Trump’s stated first order of business was to cut regulations. Giving those businesses who have impact on our environment and climate a clearer path to profit, at the expense of us all. The scientific community’s consensus it that the climate is warming. A direct result of greenhouse gases.  Trump’s, and the GOP’s, denial that anthropogenic global warming is real shows their basic scientific ignorance as well as putting human life form at greater risk in the future.

Bloomberg – President Donald Trump is set to sign a sweeping directive to dramatically shrink the role climate change plays in decisions across the government, ranging from appliance standards to pipeline approvals, according to a person familiar with the administration’s plan.

The order, which could be signed this week, goes far beyond a targeted assault on Obama-era measures blocking coal leasing and throttling greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that has been discussed for weeks. Some of the changes could happen immediately; others could take years to implement.

It aims to reverse President Barack Obama’s broad approach for addressing climate change. One Obama-era policy instructed government agencies to factor climate change into formal environmental reviews, such as that for the Keystone XL pipeline. Trump’s order also will compel a reconsideration of the government’s use of a metric known as the “social cost of carbon” that reflects the potential economic damage from climate change. It was used by the Obama administration to justify a suite of regulations.

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Environmentalists said the president’s action will erode the international leadership the U.S. has played addressing climate change and encouraging other countries to limit the heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions that are the primary driver of the phenomenon.

The anticipated action “puts our country, our communities and our people at great risk,” said Paul Getsos, national coordinator of the People’s Climate Movement, a coalition of labor, civil rights and faith-based groups. “It also sends a dangerous message to the world that the United States does not care about climate change or protecting front-line communities.”

Trump’s coming order has been discussed by his staff since before he took office. Asked about when the executive order would be issued, White House spokesman Kelly Love said she had “nothing to announce at this time.”

It will set in motion some discrete policy changes designed to make coal easier to extract and more enticing to burn.

For instance, the directive will compel the Environmental Protection Agency to undo the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule that forced states to slash the use of coal-fired electricity. Trump also is set to direct Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to reverse an Obama administration order that blocked the sale of new coal-mining rights on federal lands to producers such as Cloud Peak Energy Inc. and Peabody Energy Corp.

The measure also is set to direct regulators to rescind Obama-era regulations limiting oil industry emissions of methane, a particularly potent — though short-lived — greenhouse gas.

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It is clear that Trump has zero concern for the environment and that he will keep his campaign promise to coal miners. After all his disregard fr the climate and the future IS one of the things that got him elected.

More BELOW THE FOLD.