The official Thread for Trash/Repug CRAPICATION of America, the planet

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authoritarianism, unleashed. The Repugs REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY hate democracy and Americans



“The authority that I have now as acting director really should frighten people,”

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/budget-director-mulvaney-warns-his-new-consumer-financial-protection-powers-should-frighten-people/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaig n=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story%29

.

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Private gain, taxpayer loss

EPA passes on rule covering U.S. hardrock miners' cleanup costs

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday it would not act on a proposal to require hardrock mining companies to show they can afford to clean up their sites.

“EPA is confident that modern industry practices, along with existing state and federal requirements address risks from operating hardrock mining facilities,”

It would have required companies mining metals such as gold, silver, copper and lead to show they had the financial means to clean up their sites once they finished mining by issuing bonds or buying insurance.

It was partly aimed at taking the burden off Washington to clean up sites when miners declare bankruptcy.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mining-epa/epa-passes-on-rule-covering-u-s-hardrock-miners-cleanup-costs-idUSKBN1DW00J?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews

investors get rich mining, declare bankruptcy, dump the cleanup on taxpayers.

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such an example

Trump’s Favorite Catchphrase Is Now Being Used To Justify A Genocide

U Kyaw San Hla, an officer in Myanmar’s state security ministry, recently announced that

“There is no such thing as the Rohingya. It is fake news!”

But the six hundred thousand Rohingya Muslims who have been forced to flee their homes as the Myanmar army torches their villages and murders them en masse would beg to differ.

The Rohingya are an ethnic group from Myanmar’s Rakhine state who are commonly called “the most persecuted people on earth.”

http://verifiedpolitics.com/trumps-f...tify-genocide/

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The Atrocious Big Pharma Record of the New HHS Nominee

Billion dollar plus federal fines overseen by Eli Lilly exec. Alex Michael Azar II.

While serving as president of Lilly USA, Azar presided over a tripling of the price of its insulin. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Azar was vice president of Lilly’s U.S. Managed Healthcare Services in 2009 when the company paid $1.415 billion to settle criminal charges for illegally promoting its antipsychotic Zyprexa for off-label uses.

Only four years earlier the company had pleaded guilty for similar illegal promotion of its hormone drug Evista.

"The company made hundreds of millions of dollars by trying to convince health care providers that Zyprexa was safe for unapproved uses," "putting thousands and thousands of patients at risk."

Lilly admitted its counseling program was created to fight state efforts to cut use of its drugs and preserve tax dollars.

During Cymbalta clinical trials in 2004 in the Eli Lilly laboratory in Indianapolis the previously healthy volunteer Traci Johnson hung herself.

A year after Cymbalta hit drug store shelves, it was indicted for causing more than twice the rate of suicide attempts in women prescribed the drug for stress urinary incontinence–a use not approved in the US–according to the FDA.

https://www.alternet.org/personal-he...etary-material

The oligarchy, through their Repug s, have normalized criminal insanity as govt policy

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Mick Mulvaney’s mission: Sacrifice public protections on the altar of deregulation

The Trump administration has halted crucial public protections

in 2008, a combustible dust fire explosion at the Imperial Sugar Company in Port Wentworth, Ga., killed 14 and injured 38 others. After a government investigation determined that the explosion was caused by “massive ac ulations of combustible sugar dust,” the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) moved to create a standard on combustible dust.

The Trump administration ended that rulemaking.

29 miners died in an explosion in the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia. The CEO of the company was later sentenced to prison for his efforts to elude health and safety rules. The government performed a detailed investigation, pointed out multiple preventable hazards (including, again, combustible dust),and the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration began a rulemaking to address the hazards exposed by the explosion.

The Trump administration abandoned it.

, OSHA had been working on a commonsense rulemaking that would have required “employers to implement an Injury and Illness Prevention Program.”

The Trump administration ended the rulemaking.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began work on a rule that would ensure that same-gender spouses are afforded equal rights in facilities that participate in Medicare.

The Trump administration ended the rulemaking.

The administration’s leaders have cheered their withdrawal efforts. That’s their prerogative.

But if combustible dust causes another factory to blow up, or if another coal mine explosion occurs, those cheers may come back to haunt them.

https://www.salon.com/2017/12/03/mick-mulvaneys-mission-sacrifice-public-protections-on-the-altar-of-deregulation/

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BigRestaurant paying Repugs s to screw over tipped staff

The Trump Administration Just Launched a Plot To Screw Over Millions Of Service Workers

A new regulation proposed by the Trump administration would enable employers to commandeer the tips that their wait staff receives from their customers

The new rule being put forth by the Department of Labor would roll back current regulations restricting “tip pooling”, a system where rather than each server retaining all of the money offered as a gratuity, every server’s tips are put into a pool and divided evenly amongst all the wait staff, with cuts often being shared with the bussers and dishwashers as well.

The new rule does not actually require business owners to turn the tips over to their workers. In fact, it would make it perfectly legal for the owners to pocket all of the tips for their own benefit, as long as they are paying their staff at least minimum wage. Less like socialism,

According to a report released by the Economic Policy Ins ute (EPI), workers can expect their employers to take advantage of them under the new rule:

“Recent research suggests that the total wages stolen from workers due to minimum wage violations exceeds $15 billion each year, and

workers in restaurants and bars are much more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than workers in other industries.

With that much illegal wage theft currently taking place,

it seems obvious that when employers can legally pocket the tips earned by their employees,

many will do so.”

“Make no mistake:

as a result of this rule,

workers will take home less,

and

their loss will be employers’ gain.

And
TRump’s DOL is willing to break the requirements of the rulemaking process to attempt to hide that fact.”

http://verifiedpolitics.com/trump-ad...rvice-workers/


=======================Trump administration proposes rollback of tip-pooling rule


Tipped workers are among the most vulnerable workers in the country,

said Saru Jayaraman, president of the union-backed Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.

Repealing the rule would leave them even worse off, she said.

“By allowing employers to take control of their employees’ tips,

this regulation would push a majority-women workforce ... further into financial instability, poverty, and vulnerability to harassment and assault,”

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN1DY2JH

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Trump outlines big cuts to Utah monuments, environmentalists sue

President Donald Trump on Monday shrank two wilderness national monuments in Utah by at least half in the biggest rollback of public land protection in U.S. history, drawing praise from pro-development lawmakers and a lawsuit from environmentalists.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN1DY167

the "pro-development" Capitalists won't be building affordable housing or carefully avoiding their resource extraction from ing up pristine wilderness.

Trash gratuitouslyexercising power of office for his self-aggrandizement.

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Oliver North urging White House to build private spy army overseen by Betsy DeVos’ brother



The Trump administration is considering a scheme by a cast of shady characters to build a private network of spies to bypass U.S. intelligence services.

he plan would give the White House a way to counter “deep state” political enemies in the intelligence community and give the CIA director an army of spies with no official cover in countries such as North Korea and Iran, which are considered “denied areas” for American covert operations.

“(CIA Director Mike) Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the proposals told The Intercept. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books. The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/oliver-north-urging-white-house-to-build-private-spy-army-overseen-by-betsy-devos-brother-reports/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaig n=Feed%3A+TheRawStory+%28The+Raw+Story%29

Trash and Repugs are moving towards full dictatorship, with their private intelligence/police force.

The oligarchy is completely incompatible with democracy, so it is moving to create a one-party govt through corruption of the judiciary, voter suppression, gerrymandering, control of information by buying the media, destruction of public schooling, and privatization of everything with a good return.

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Trump Disbands Panel That Helped Cities Respond to Climate Threat

The president shutters group that, according to its chairman, was "one of the last federal bodies that openly talked about climate change in public"




a community resilience panel announced Monday that the president had terminated the two-year-old group.

Chairman Jesse Keenan, a Harvard University professor, told the other members of the Community Resilience Panel for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems on Monday that there would be no further meetings and the panel would dissolve, per President Donald Trump's orders.

"This was the federal government's primary external engagement for resilience in the built environment," Keenan told Bloomberg News.

"It was one of the last federal bodies that openly talked about climate change in public," he added. "I can say that we tried our best and we never self-censored!"

The panel was created in 2015 by former President Barack Obama of course!

https://www.commondreams.org/news/20...climate-threat

[AaronY]

thats it boo..let it all out. let it all out. no good to keep all that anger bottled up inside

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Senate Judiciary Committee Spits in Face of Tradition to Push the Courts Further to the Right

Kyle Duncan and David Stras are ultra-conservative judges who will probably land in the Fifth and Eighth Circuit courts of appeals, respectively.

The Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) broke with a 100-year-old tradition when it held confirmation hearings last Tuesday for Kyle Duncan and David Stras.

Duncan and Stras are ultra-conservative judges

who will probably land in the Fifth and Eighth Circuit courts of appeals, respectively, because: Trump picked them, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is a hypocrite,

For more than a century, senators have used a process known as “blue slips” to voice their approval of judicial nominees.

The idea is that a senator should have a say in the nomination of judges that will serve in their state.

According to the Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization led by former U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division head honcho Vanita Gupta, “No president will be compelled to listen to the advice of home state senators” if the SJC allows nominees to advance absent blue slips from home-state senators.

But that’s exactly what’s happened with these hearings.

https://rewire.news/ablc/2017/12/04/...08bc-111083417

the authoritarian, fascist oligarchy continues its coup d'etat by ing the Fed judiciary into a totally politicized lap dog.

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Here's racist, civil-right-violator Trash

baiting, insulting, degrading blacks

by attending, with all his Pres protection goons and security circus,

the Civil Rights Museum in ing racist slave state Mississippi.

President Trump Should Not Attend Grand Opening of Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

the NAACP criticized President Trump’s proposed visit to this weekend’s opening of the Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Mississippi.

“President Trump’s statements and policies regarding the protection and enforcement of civil rights have been abysmal, and his attendance is an affront to the veterans of the civil rights movement,”

“He has created a commission to reinforce voter suppression, refused to denounce white supremacists, and overall, has created a racially hostile climate in this nation,”

“As a freedom fighter and contemporary of Emmett Till, Trump’s visit is an insult. He has never been a supporter of civil rights or equal opportunity or justice,”

“He’s been silent on civil rights issues, and his silence speaks volumes,”

https://www.commondreams.org/newswir...-rights-museum

Bannon is laughing his ass off. the knitters. America is for Aryan superiority of pure white males.

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Gotta save money from the vets to give to the billionaires

Trump’s VA director cut a program that housed homeless veterans despite president’s pledge to take care of them

Amere two days after Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin renewed President Donald Trump’s promise to house the tens of thousands of homeless veterans in the US,

he reneged on the promise and announced the department is scaling back a program that does exactly that.

Shulkin and the VA are

“essentially ending a special $460 million program that has dramatically reduced homelessness among chronically sick and vulnerable veterans.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/tru...e+Raw+Story%29

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On his ing way to insult the Civil Rights Museum ....

Trump administration twists anti-discrimination law to claim the KKK is a protected class

In explaining why Jack Phillips, the bakery’s owner, should not be compelled to serve people whose lifestyles go against his religious beliefs,

Solicitor General Noel Francisco kept saying that a black sculptor should not be compelled to make art for the Ku Klux Klan.

As Imani Gandy at Rewire pointed out Wednesday, Francisco, who serves as the government’s lawyer, got at least one half of his argument right — no lawyer could successfully argue that it’s discriminatory for an African-American artist to deny service to a KKK member. But that’s because,

unlike LGBTQ people, KKK members are not members of a “protected class.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/tru...e+Raw+Story%29

Repug lawyers are such incompetent, politicized, lawless pieces of .

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Mulvaney takes another step in dismantling American financial regulations

In a move that can only be celebrated by big banks and financial companies, Trump undermines Obama-era protections

In September, a judge sided with the CFPB that

the Nationwide Biweekly Administration had misled over 100,000 mortgage customers,

according to the New York Times.

The Ohio-based company was ordered to fork over close to $8 million in penalties.

Lawyers filed for the company "to post an $8 million bond while the proceedings wrapped up," in an 11-page brief, the Times reported.

However, Mick Mulvaney was named as head of the CFPB, which launched a legal controversy over who the bureau's rightful leader was, and consequently, which direction it would head in. But a judge ruled in his favor last week, as the lawsuit continues, the Times reported.

Less than 48 hours after the lawyers filed for the $8 million, they put together a new brief.

That brief was two sentences long, and asked

"to withdraw their earlier submission and no longer take a position on whether Nationwide should put up the cash,"

the Times reported.

https://www.salon.com/2017/12/06/mic...l-regulations/

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Congressional Repugs preempting states rights

Bill letting people bring concealed guns across state lines passes U.S. House

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...litics+News%29

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6 Things President Trump Got Wrong When Decimating America’s National Monuments

1. “Public lands will once again be for public use.”

In actuality, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments are already American-owned public lands intended for public use.

open all newly unprotected lands to oil drilling, coal mining, uranium extraction, and other industrial activities.
If those extractive uses move forward, it will come at the expense of activities Americans now enjoy in the monument, such as hiking, hunting, and fishing.

2. “We have seen harmful and unnecessary restrictions on hunting, ranching, and responsible economic development.”

This is just flat wrong. The original monument proclamations explicitly allow for hunting, fishing, and the continuance of existing grazing. Furthermore, all national monuments honor existing leases for oil, gas, and coal.

3. “Previous administrations have … used the law to lock up hundreds of millions of acres of land and water under strict government control.”

Presidents of both parties have used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to protect some of America’s most prized outdoor spaces.

4. “We have seen how this tragic federal overreach prevents many Native Americans from having their rightful voice over the sacred land where they practice their most important ancestral and religious traditions.”

Bears Ears is a tribal monument, declared at the request of and with the support of five sovereign tribal nations with deep cultural and spiritual ties to the land. The five tribes worked tirelessly to conserve Bears Ears as a national monument, finally protecting around 100,000 cultural and archaeological sites, which had been under ongoing threat of vandalism and looting.

5. “Our precious national treasures must be protected. And they, from now on, will be protected.”

This is a sky-is-red, water-is-dry, upside-down argument from an alternate universe. With his action, President Trump ordered the largest elimination of protections for public lands in the country’s history. Eliminating 85 percent of Bears Ears National Monument, including lands with tens of thousands of Native American ruins and artifacts, will remove protections from national treasures.

6. “I don’t think it is controversial, actually. I think it’s so sensible.”

President Trump’s action to eliminate protections for national monuments is remarkably controversial, unprecedented, and will immediately face court challenges from the tribal nations and other groups. Legal experts overwhelmingly agree that no president has the legal authority to eliminate monument acres.

https://www.americanprogress.org/iss...nal-monuments/

As usual, Repug "justifications" nothing but LIES, eg above and how the tax cut will help non-wealthy Americans.

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Wife of Supreme Court Justice SEXUAL PREDATOR Clarence Thomas, @GinniThomas, presenting an award to @JamesOKeefeIII today for "defending liberty."


https://twitter.com/kenvogel/status/938506594245103621

goddamn, the Repugs are pure garbage

[RandomGuy]

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Time Person of the Year 2017: Chad

About Chad:

• Frequents the comment section of every Facebook article about feminism
• Veteran of the War on Christmas
• Tweets to “get the truth out there”
• Favorite movie is Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
• Hates vegetables
• Believes he’s single because he’s “too nice”
• Doesn’t believe in the female orgasm
• Thinks his mom is a
• Flies a confederate flag to honor his “heritage” but grew up in Cleveland
• Somehow still dresses exclusively in Hollister
• Believes “real news” only comes from his buddy Greg’s blogspot (Greg has a cousin who works “for the government”)
• Has TruckNutz
• Refers to self as “woke”
• Hasn’t read a book in seven years
• Calls tea “gay”
• Hates Obamacare but has insurance through the ACA
• Lives on Reddit
• Thinks Ghostbusters should have been men (doesn’t know about the original)
• Briefly involved in a pyramid scheme
• Thinks the phrase is “bone app the teeth”
• Believes people don’t laugh at his jokes because they’re “snowflakes” (he is not funny)
• Arrested four times for public intoxication
• Currently trapped in his basement

We’re so proud of you, Chad!

https://medium.com/@fullfrontalsamb/...d-285ec4010456[/COLOR]

rightwingnutjob assholes: Chad isn't a real person, but composite of the wonderful traits you all exhibit.

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The Ministry of Truth, BigCarbon dept, specialties: FAKE NEWS, lying

As “Climate Change” Fades from Government Sites, a Struggle to Archive Data

hen the Environmental Protection Agency’s website underwent an overhaul of climate change information on a Friday in late April, Toly Rinberg and Andrew Bergman, both Harvard Ph.D. students in applied physics, set off to figure out what was gone.

Sitting in their shared Washington, D.C. apartment, they started a spreadsheet to track the changes. Suddenly missing, they noticed, were scores of pages dedicated to helping state and local governments deal with climate change.

The EPA site where those pages lived, led “Climate and Energy Resources for State, Local, and Tribal Governments,” would disappear for three months, only to come back in July without the word “climate” in its le. The new website now focuses only on energy policy and resources, and is down to 175 pages from 380.

fact sheets on carbon pollution from power plants and the impact of those emissions on different groups across the country. In its place was a new site featuring a picture of President Donald Trump signing an executive order aimed at dismantling the Clean Power Plan.

groups like EDGI are grappling with how to preserve mass amounts of federal climate information that researchers fear is at risk.

While information is not being outright destroyed, researchers and environmental groups say that changes to federal websites have made information about climate change less accessible to the public, reflecting what critics deride as

an effort by the Trump administration to censor dialogue about climate change, downplay its risks and pushback against scientific consensus.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/a...-archive-data/

Pruitt going to a special place in for Truth Molester s

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Trump's chief of CFPB spent last six years trying to stop regulations of payday lenders

International Business Times put in a FOIA requestion to the CFPB and received hundreds of pages of correspondence between them and Mick Mulvaney. Guess what Mr. Mulvaney was asking them about?

During his congressional campaigns, Mulvaney vacuumed in more than $567,000 from donors in the commercial banking, credit and securities/investment industries, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

That includes more than $55,000 from donors in the payday and le loan industry, according to datafrom the National Ins ute on Money in State Politics.

The letters reviewed by IBT show that

much of Mulvaney’s criticism of the CFPB revolved around the agency’s attempts to regulate the payday lending industry,

which provides short term, high-interest loans.

There’s a treasure trove that IBT put together, of Mulvaney’s letters to the CFPB, along with other Republican colleagues, attacking things like mortgage regulations∏but mostly the payday loan protections.

Mulvaney and eleven other lawmakers wrote a letter to the agency asserting that the rule “has the potential to severely restrict access to credit that millions of Americans rely on” and arguing that “in an effort to keep unscrupulous actors out or the industry the CFPB will simultaneously be harming the very consumers it is trying to protect.”

Mulvaney’s campaign was compensated handily for those kind words. According to IBT, they received a quick $18,500 from payday lenders’ related outfits.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/1722599

Corrupt, avaricious, predator BigFinane has cheap in Mulvaney (yet another oligarchy is a ing Catholic)

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Echoing, or even leading, Trash's cruelty and inhumanity

Fox News fans cruelly attack Trump-critic Lindsey Vonn after she’s injured in skiing accident



News that Olympian Lindsey Vonn suffered a back injury while competing in the World Cup in Switzerland on Saturday was greeted with glee by Fox News fans still angered by her comments about President Donald Trump earlier in the week.In an interview aired in CNN on Thursday,

Vonn said she had no interest in visiting Trump at the White House should she win a gold medal at the Olympic Winter Games in South Korea in 2018.

“I was asked my opinion and I gave it,” Vonn explained on Friday.

“I mean, it’s not necessarily my place to be sticking my nose in politics, but as an athlete I do have a voice.”

Fox & Friends criticized Vonn, calling her “un-American,” and derided the Olympic gold medalist and four-time World Cup overall champion as “just another celebrity, another Hollywood person who doesn’t agree with the president.”

News that Vonn suffered a back injury on Saturday was celebrated by many Fox News fans on Twitter, with some calling it “karma” because they feel she attacked the president.

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/12/fox...e+Raw+Story%29

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As California burns, Congress plans to slash tax write-offs for fires and other disasters

The disaster write-off is one of the many little-known deductions set to be mostly wiped out in the GOP tax plan,

but it’s getting fresh attention because of the fires that have devastated parts of Southern California over the last week.

The House tax bill entirely eliminates the deduction that allows people to claim uninsured losses after all types of disasters;

the Senate version allows people to take the deduction only if the president declares a federal disaster.

So far this year, nearly 58,000 wildfires have burned more than 9 million acres in the U.S., according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Only a small number would qualify taxpayers for relief under the Senate bill.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-congress-tax-fire-20171210-story.html#nws=mcnewsletter

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“Thank goodness we finally have an Administration that speaks for those of us
who don’t care what happens to the planet in a hundred years because we’ll be dead.”