Saturday midday open thread: Special handling for special interests at EPA; Trump feeds the right
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114 days remain until the November midterms Have you picked a candidate or ballot issue to campaign for yet? • What’s coming up at Sunday Kos: • West Side Story—revisited, by Denise Oliver Velez • Trump-Putin summit: Vladimir giveSaturday midday open thread: Special handling for special interests at EPA; Trump feeds the right
114 days remain until the November midterms Have you picked a candidate or ballot issue to campaign for yet? • What’s coming up at Sunday Kos: • West Side Story—revisited, by Denise Oliver Velez • Trump-Putin summit: Vladimir gives Donald a performance review, by Sher Watts Spooner • Where do we go from here? The Supreme Court has been stolen, by Armando • Stop with the false hope. The Supreme Court is lost for a generation lest we …, by Egberto Willies • Damn right I am a liberal, by Mark E Andersen • Ken Starr, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump and the eroding rule of law, by Hunter • Trump would rather overturn Roe v. Wade than actually reduce the abortion rate, by Ian Reifowitz • After normalization comes collaboration, by Susan Grigsby • EPA chief of staff concedes that “politically charged” document requests get special handling: Some individuals and organizations have complained that requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act are often subject to long delays. Such foot-dragging seems to be part of the Trump regime’s overall effort to make what should be public information more difficult to access. This applies to everything from the WhiteHouse.gov website, which is far harder to navigate and contains far less substance than it did under President Obama, to documents that give insight into how policy is being made. EPA Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson told a congressional committee that he called on subordinates to respond to a document request from a pork group that was having difficulties with regulations, but described a request from the Sierra Club, as a “fishing expedition.” • “Abolish ICE” is getting little traction among Democrats: House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy wants a floor vote on an ICE bill because he thinks it’s bad news either way for Democrats. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin, introduced the bill in question. It would not immediately guarantee that ICE would be abolished, but the purpose of the bill as stated is “To establish a Commission tasked with establishing a humane immigration enforcement system, terminate Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and for other purposes.” The idea is popular among some immigration activist groups, and it seems to have gained more support because of the Trump’s regimes unconscionable long-term separation of children from asylum-seeking parents. But there is no groundswell of support among congressional Democrats. Neither Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the New York senator, or California’s Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, have voiced support for it. MIDDAY TWEETf xJust took a hiking town hall with hundreds of constituents. Was blown away how many of them are worried about @realDonaldTrump meeting alone with Putin. One said, âÂÂPutin is not worthy of meeting with our President. And our President is not trustworthy enough to meet with Putin.â— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) July 14, 2018 • Trump’s talk about changing European culture is a hat tip toward white supremacy: In an interview with the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun, a British tabloid, Pr*sident Trump said: “I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago.” “The way he put this argument about changing our culture ... about Europe becoming less nice than it is, in other words, these people are here and they are making the culture crappy and making the place lesser, that’s straight out of the white supremacist/white nationalist playbook,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. Claire M. Massey, a scholar at the Institute for British and North American Studies at Ernst-Moritz-Arndt Universität in Greifswald, Germany, said Trump’s comments were “awfully painful,” especially for the United Kingdom, where immigration has played a key role in rebuilding the country after World War II. “England and the United Kingdom wouldn’t be what it is today without immigrants,” she said. • Trump regime’s anti-breastfeeding stance isn’t new. But it could make matters worse: This week, in a move that contradicted decades of research proving that breastfeeding benefits babies and mothers, the Trump administration rejected a World Health Organization resolution limiting the misleading marketing of formula, which—if replaced with breast milk—could save more than 800,000 infant lives a year. Health officials were «shocked» and «stunned» by the news, The New York Times reported. But for the scholars who study this issue, nothing about this decision is surprising. The United States government, the largest purchaser of formula in the country, does more than market milk substitutes: It gives them away for free. • British authorities remove 400 items said to be tainted with poison: The poison, Novichok, killed a Wiltshire woman and left a man in critical condition. It is the same kind of poison as used in a March attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter, Sergei and Yulia Skripal. They survived. Experts say the poison used against the Skirpals has been definitively traced to Russia, but it’s unclear whether it’s from the same batch as did its damage in Wiltshire. LINK TO DAILY KOS STORE Read more