We Resist: Day 796

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, March 26, 2019
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One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Late yesterday and earlier today by me: Trump Wants His Revenge and Trump Justice Department Moves to Strike Down ACA and Pentagon Informs Congress $1B Authorized to Start Building Trump's Border Wall; Democrats Object and Primarily Speaking.

Here are some more things in the news today...

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted out a graphic made by the New York Post that identified members of the media who have the unmitigated temerity to believe that Donald Trump colluded with Russia and called them "angry and hysterical [Donald Trump] haters." This on the same day that she casually reminded everyone that the punishment for treason is death.


[Content Note: War on agency] Julian Borger at the Guardian: Trump Expands Global Gag Rule That Blocks U.S. Aid for Abortion Groups.
The Trump administration has expanded its ban on funding for groups that conduct abortions or advocate abortion rights, known as the global gag rule, and has also cut funding to the Organisation of American States for that reason.

The new policy was announced on Tuesday by secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who declared: "This is decent. This is right. I am proud to serve in an administration that protects the least among us."

The Trump administration has already expanded the reach of the funding ban which dates back to the Reagan administration, to apply to all US healthcare assistance, totalling about $6bn.

The extension of the policy announced by Pompeo would not only cut funding to foreign non governmental organisations directly involved in abortions or abortion rights advocacy, but also those who fund or support other groups which provide or discuss abortion.
RAGE SEETHE BOIL. I hate this administration so fucking much.


[CN: Reproductive coercion] Katelyn Burns at Rewire.News: Trump Officials Attend Hungarian Conference to Promote Women Having More Babies. "Trump administration officials and prominent anti-choice activists appeared at a conference hosted by the Hungarian Embassy earlier this month designed to promote government policies to encourage women to have more babies. The 'Make Families Great Again' conference, which was held at the Library of Congress on March 14, promoted far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's seven-point 'Family Protection Action Plan.' The plan is 'designed to promote marriage and families and spawn a baby boom' through financial incentives... White House special assistant Katy Talento, White House Strategic Communications Director Mercedes Schlapp, and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Senior Advisor Valerie Huber spoke at the event."

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[CN: War; death] D. Parvaz at ThinkProgress: U.S. Airstrikes Kill 10 Children in Afghanistan as Trump Envoy Negotiates Taliban 'Peace' Deal.
As the Trump administration continues its 'peace talks' with the Taliban — with the latest round taking place earlier this month in Qatar — there's been an uptick in fighting between U.S. forces and our would-be partners, with the latest U.S. airstrikes killing ten children and three adult civilians, and wounding three other adults.

On Monday, the United Nations said that the children were all part of the same extended family, and were killed on Saturday as U.S. and Afghan forces fought Taliban fighters for nearly 30 hours in the northern province of Kunduz.

...A Taliban stronghold, U.S. airstrikes in the province have sent families fleeing the area, adding to the mass internal displacement crisis facing the country.

The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) noted that the children and their family had already been displaced from another area, fleeing fighting elsewhere in the country.
Goddammit. Sob.

[CN: Indefinite detention] Charlie Savage at the New York Times: Testing Novel Power, Trump Administration Detains Palestinian After Sentence Ends. "Swept up by authorities after the Sept. 11 attacks, Adham Hassoun, a Palestinian computer programmer who lived in Florida, served 15 years in prison for sending support to Islamist militants abroad. His sentence completed, he then waited in immigration detention more than a year and a half while the government fruitlessly hunted for a place to deport him. Finally, a judge ordered him temporarily released in the United States. But instead, the Trump administration, citing a little-used immigration regulation issued after 9/11, notified Mr. Hassoun last month that he was being declared a security risk and would be kept locked up indefinitely."

Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube at NBC News: Mike Pence Talked Dan Coats out of Quitting the Trump Administration. "The country's intelligence chief was on the verge of resigning at the end of last year over his frustrations with [Donald] Trump but was talked out of it by his closest ally in the administration, Vice President Mike Pence, according to current and former senior administration officials. ...Similarly, whenever Trump is souring on the DNI he privately calls 'Mister Rogers' — because he won't implement a directive or has left the impression he thinks the president is irrational — Pence has encouraged Trump to stick with Coats, according to the current and former officials." What a giant collection of assholes.

Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post: Stephen Moore Could Inflict More Long-Term Damage Than Any of Trump's Other Nominations. "[Donald] Trump has made a lot of ill-advised nominations. But perhaps no single choice could inflict more long-term damage than the one he announced Friday: Stephen Moore, Trump's pick to join the Federal Reserve Board. Moore's many economic claims over the years have revealed him to be, shall we say, easily confused. ...It's not only his forecasts for the future that have proved chronically incorrect; it's his characterizations of past and present, too." He sounds great.

Brian Kahn at Earther: The Republicans' Upcoming "Green Real Deal" Sounds Like Green Real Bullshit. "Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican whose biggest environmental claim to fame is introducing a bill to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, is reportedly planning to put forth the (I kid you not) 'Green Real Deal.' Politico scored a leaked copy of the resolution, which it says has been circulating among energy lobbyists and it could be officially introduced in the 'coming days.' I am sorry to report the Green Real Deal is not, in fact, the real deal. The five-page draft resolution — which could change when or even if it gets introduced in the House — is light on policy specifics, timelines, and goals." Huh!

[CN: Anti-Semitism] Isaac Stanley-Becker at the Washington Post: GOP Congressman Quotes Hitler's Mein Kampf to Slam Trump's Adversaries as Liars.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) took to the House floor on Monday to portray [Donald] Trump's detractors as Nazis but ended up slurring them using an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory drawn verbatim from Adolf Hitler's writings.

It's 2019, and the Führer's magnum opus, Mein Kampf, has become a playbook for political combat in Congress, at the very moment that Trump is calling the Democrats "anti-Jewish."

Brooks, a five-term Republican, accused Democrats and members of the media of propagating a "big lie" about collusion. The expression was coined by Hitler to describe how Jews used their "unqualified capacity for falsehood" to blame a top German military commander for the country's losses in World War I. A lie could be so big, Hitler claimed, that it perversely defied disbelief.

It was unclear if Brooks grasped that by leveling charges of the "big lie," he had inverted his own analogy, making Democrats the equivalent of interwar German and Austrian Jews. He set out to compare the other side to fascists, but he was the one employing a fascist smear — one that, ironically, came to define Nazi propaganda.
It was no coincidence. Trust that Mo Brooks knew exactly what the fuck he was saying.

[CN: Gun violence; abuse] Staff at the Daily Beast: NRA Instructed Far-Right Group to 'Shame' Anti-Gun Activists After Massacres. Representatives of Australia's One Nation party reportedly sought advice from the U.S. gun lobbyist on how to go about loosening their country's very strict gun laws. ...The best method to handle media inquiries in the wake of a massacre was to 'say nothing,' according to Catherine Mortensen, an NRA media liaison officer, on the video [secretly recorded by Al Jazeera]. But if the media inquiries about gun control persist, another NRA comms official, Lars Dalseide, said to 'shame them to the whole idea,' adding: 'If your policy isn't good enough to stand on itself, how dare you use their deaths to push that forward? How dare you stand on the graves of those children to put forward your political agenda?'" Scum.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
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