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Trump Signs Executive Order for Muslim Ban Part 2

Governing from behind the safe confines of the executive pen, Donald Trump signed a second version on his Muslim ban on Monday away from the cameras and glitzes used in his first Muslim ban order, and aiming to withstand court challenges while still barring new visas for citizens from six Muslim-majority countries and temporarily shutting down America’s refugee program.

The revised travel order leaves Iraq off the list of banned countries but still affects would-be visitors and immigrants from Iran, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Libya.

Trump privately signed the new order Monday while Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Attorney General Jeff Sessions formally unveiled the new edict. They did not take questions from reporters.

The low-key rollout was in contrast to the first version of the order, which Trump signed a week after his inauguration in a high-profile ceremony at the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes as Secretary of Defense James Mattis stood by.

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Beware the Idiocies of March

Yes, my friends, this is getting frighteningly Shakespearean. And we have a variety of dysfunctional, murderous, illegal and psychologically damaged examples to choose from. Is the Trump White House Macbeth? Hamlet (soon to be starring Jared Kushner as the prince)? Othello? Any of the histories? We know there’s no Falstaff because this really isn’t funny. The field is wide open.

As for reality, we have a mucking mess. President Trump (shudder) gave what many distracted and fooled pundits called a presidential speech last week where he created false realities and set himself up as the only person who could solve them.

  • Mexicans swarming the border? False, but let’s build a wall.
  • Public education failing? False, so let’s funnel money to private, religious and charter schools.
  • Unvetted radical Muslims crashing our shores? False, so let’s forget that we vet asylum seekers for two years and claim that our porous borders are swarming with terrorists.
  • Health care law failing? False, so let’s make sure that everybody has the freedom to have to pay for their care, whether they can afford it or not.
  •  Foreign policy failures from the Obama Administration? False, so let’s cut money to the State Department because, really, the only policy we need is what Trump tweets in the morning.
  • Anti-Semitism? True, though wait 6 months before tepidly denouncing the longest hatred, but only after you dress down an Orthodox Jewish press reporter who’s actually on your side at your head-scratching press conference.

Trump might have delivered his speech without devolving into a red-faced, spitting mess, but is that really our expectation from the leader of the free world? He then followed up for a few days with policy-laden tweets and pronouncements that sounded rather…normal. But that’s what this presidency is all about, has been all about and will be all about: Vacuous pronouncements and personality-driven drivel. The words of the speech came out well; the words themselves were hateful, deceitful,  and troubling.

And then came Jeff Sessions and the Trump Administration Two-Step: Lie at your hearings and hope the real media doesn’t pick up on it or hope that the leakers have taken a public sector job sick day. Looks like that’s not going to happen so much. When the Attorney General shades the truth (benefit of the doubt) or baldly lies (probably the truth), then your administration is in trouble. And the Russia stories just keep on coming, like bottomless cups of coffee at the diner. Served with a smile, but hyper-inducing nonetheless.

But the week couldn’t end without the president reverting to form, accusing President Obama of tapping his phones. Which is ludicrous. And not based on reality. And even more troubling because if Trump is basing his information on some security briefing, then he’s compromising national security. There’s always a source for his anger, and in this case it’s likely a Breitbart story he read. And now he’s calling for a Congressional investigation as part of the Russia probe to show what a fair-minded person he really is. Trump is going to do these types of things for the rest of his term, and they are decidedly not normal. He just can’t help himself.

Or the country.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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Donald Trump Donald Trump Featured

More Trump People Who Met With Russian Intelligence During Campaign – Video

J.D Gordon, a former adviser to Donald Trump who worked with the Trump campaign admitted that he too, met with Russian officials during Trump’s presidential campaign.

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Keith Olbermann on Trump – “He Will Die In Prison” – Video

Besides Donald Trump’s many wars – war on immigrants, war on the media, war on women, war on common decency to name a few – Donald Trump’s war against the intelligence committee has begun. It begun when the president of the United States foolishly decided that the very folks keeping him informed on national security and foreign threats to the United States, those people are the enemy. And from the looks of things, the intelligence committee is winning.

Keith Olbermann explains;

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Rep. Elijah Cummings Demands a Jeff Sessions’ Resignation – Video

Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions lied when he said he had no contacts with Russia officials during the 2016 presidential election.

“Give me a break!” Elijah Cummings said with the news that Jeff Sessions met with members of the ethics committee for directions on what his next move should be. Just 24hrs prior, news broke that Sessions did in fact meet with Russian officials during Trump’s campaign and hours after that news broke, Sessions recused himself from future investigations into the Trump/Russia involvement.

“Suddenly, now he says because he’s talked to the ethics people that he is going to recuse himself. They say they told him to do it because he was involved in the campaign. Give me a break! He is the number one law enforcement officer in the country. He has been a U.S Attorney for the state of Alabama, and as an attorney, he knows, and I know that there are certain things that you don’t to the ethics people about.”

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Donald Trump Donald Trump Featured

Trump’s White House Now Acknowledges Multiple Contacts With Russia

This just might go down as the most untrustworthy Administration in America’s history. This Trump administration is yet to be introduced to the simple concept of telling the truth.

After months and months of saying that no one in their campaign met or had any contact with Russia during or after the 2016 presidential election,  they’re now saying that previously held position was not true.

Michael T. Flynn, then Donald J. Trump’s incoming national security adviser, had a previously undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador in December to “establish a line of communication” between the new administration and the Russian government, the White House said on Thursday.

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and now a senior adviser, also participated in the meeting at Trump Tower with Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador. But among Mr. Trump’s inner circle, it is Mr. Flynn who appears to have been the main interlocutor with the Russian envoy — the two were in contact during the campaign and the transition, Mr. Kislyak and current and former American officials have said.

But the extent and frequency of their contacts remains unclear, and the disclosure of the meeting at Trump Tower adds to the emerging picture of how the relationship between Mr. Trump’s incoming team and Moscow was evolving to include some of the president-elect’s most trusted advisers.

The White House has repeatedly sought to play down any connections with Mr. Kislyak. Attorney General Jeff Sessions acknowledged this week that he had met twice with him during the campaign, despite previous denials.

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Obama White House Left Evidence Showing Connection Between Trump Campaign and Russia

Original reporting by The New York Times and NBC News report that in the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.

American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence. Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Mr. Trump’s associates.

Then and now, Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.

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Stephen Colbert Dissects Trump’s So-Called “Address to Congress” – Video

Donald Trump made gave an address to Congress on Tuesday, with a softer tone and a vision some conservatives would definitely disagree with. But even the softer tone was not enough for Stephen Colbert to cast a positive light on Trump.

“Now, technically, this was not a ‘State of the Union,’” Colbert said during a live taping of his show. “Because I think in this timeline, the Confederacy won.”

Citing Trump’s vow to cut government waste and eliminate “non-essential federal workers,” Colbert questioned whether that meant adviser Kellyanne Conway would soon be out of a job.

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On Video, Trump Admits to Having a Relationship with Vladimir Putin – Video

Of course the words coming out of Trump’s mouth does not matter. That is the only explanation to this video where Trump admits to having a relationship with Putin and his more recent conclusion that he does not know the Russian leader.

But this video says otherwise.

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Featured Health Care

Republicans’ Radical Plan to End Medicaid

The shiny object that has our attention is the latest nonsense spewing from Trump’s mouth at any given time. And while the media is focus on Trump and the Republican’s talk about repealing Obamacare, a move that will take healthcare away from 32 million Americans, and while the media is captivated by Trump’s dictator-style treatment of them, the bigger story is the Republican’s radical plan to end Medicaid.

This radical plan has nothing to do with the ACA and everything to do with conservatives’ long-standing ideological goal to cap and cut federal Medicaid spending. Medicaid has been a pillar of our health-care system for 52 years and now insures nearly 1 in 5 Americans. A per-capita cap (sending a fixed amount to the states for each beneficiary) or a block grant (sending a fixed amount to the states for their entire program) would be an unprecedented abandonment of federal responsibility by giving states substantially less federal funding than they would get under Medicaid today, with the cuts growing larger each year. That would pass the buck to the states, our health-care safety net and all Americans — and deny care to the most vulnerable among us.

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Mike Pence is Fighting In Court to Keep His Emails a Secret

Apparently, Hillary Clinton’s emails were fair game and public records. But not the emails on Mike Pence’s government account and he has taken his fight to the Supreme court trying to keep his emails secret.

Vice President Mike Pence is asking the Indiana Supreme Court to let him keep secret some documents emailed to him while he was the state’s governor.

The request comes after an Indianapolis lawyer earlier this month sought the overturning of a state appeals court decision denying access to emails sent to Pence in 2014 in which a staffer for Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott outlined a legal strategy for challenging then-President Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration.

The appeals court ruled the documents are privileged attorney-client communications.

Pence lawyer Joseph Chapelle argues in a Friday court filing that requiring the release of such documents would interfere with the governor’s decision making.

The state supreme court hasn’t yet decided whether it will consider the appeal.

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Keith Ellison and Tom Perez Mocked Trump’s Election “Win” – Video

The newly elected leaders of the DNC – DNC Head Tom Perez and Deputy Chairman, Rep Keith Ellison – made their first trip to MSNBC’s Hardball and was asked by Chris Matthews to respond to Donald Trump calling their election “rigged.”

“First of all a little levity here,” Matthews said. “Congressman Ellison, was this election rigged? Donald Trump said it was. Your thoughts.”

Ellison rolls his eyes and we all knew what his response was going to be.

“You know,” Ellison replied. “With a guy getting help from the Russians, well for him to call anything rigged is ridiculous.”

Tom Perez laughed and so did the rest of America at the lunacy of Trump questioning the DNC’s election result. With the level of interference Russia had in rigging the election in favor of Trump, he has balls questioning any election result.

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