Blue Shoes
Blue Shoes's JournalDonald Trump, in Louisiana, Says He Will End Energy Regulations
Source: New York Times
BATON ROUGE, La. — President-elect Donald J. Trump promised on Friday that his administration would strip away “job-killing restrictions” on energy production and encourage the construction of refineries in the United States, as he campaigned for Republican candidates in a state heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry.
“We will cancel the job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy,” Mr. Trump said in an airplane hangar in Baton Rouge, the day before Louisiana voters go to the polls to vote for Senate and House candidates. “We haven’t had refineries built in decades, right? We’re going to have refineries built again.”
....
He also suggested that he would make broader cultural changes, arguing that desecrating the American flag should be outlawed or bring a penalty.
“I think it’s a disgrace, O.K.?” Mr. Trump said of burning or stamping on the United States flag. “I’m a big believer in free speech, but maybe we’re going to be putting something in” to address the issue, he said. “I think we’re going to have to do something about that.”
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/politics/donald-trump-in-louisiana-says-he-will-end-energy-regulations.html
Removing vital regulation protecting the environment. Check.
Unconstitutional rambling about punishing people who burn flags. Check.
Just another Trump rally.
Top National Security Figures Want Trump to Cancel the Michael Flynn Clown Show
Source: The Intercept
Opposition to retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, is spreading across Washington’s national security establishment. “You want the national security adviser to be a calming more than an exciting influence,” said Gen. Michael Hayden, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, at a luncheon on Wednesday held at the Fort Myers Officers’ Club. “Mike tweets more than his boss.”
Twitter is a source of ongoing controversy, both for Flynn himself and one of his sons, Michael Flynn Jr., who has used his account to propagate the “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory, which posits that Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizzeria, is a den of nefarious Democratic activity. After a man who claimed to be investigating PizzaGate fired a gun at Comet Ping Pong on Sunday, the Trump transition fired Michael Jr.
The elder Flynn has kept his distance from PizzaGate. But, as Hayden suggested, his own Twitter rants are even less statesman-like than those of the president-elect. On Twitter, Flynn has asserted that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL,” and claimed that Democratic Party emails contain evidence of “Sex Crimes w Children” and occult “#SpiritCooking.”
“You can’t be considered credible if you’re trafficking in bad information,” said David Rothkopf, CEO and editor of Foreign Policy, who once served in the National Security Council and wrote a book on its history. “Calling Islam a cancer is bad information. Trafficking in fake news, that’s bad information.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/09/top-national-security-figures-want-trump-to-cancel-the-michael-flynn-clown-show/
U.S. Kids Far Less Likely To Out-Earn Their Parents, As Inequality Grows
Source: NPR
The widening gap between rich and poor Americans has pushed the chances of children earning more money than their parents down to around 50 percent, economic researchers say. That's a sharp fall from 1940, when 90 percent of kids were destined to move up the income ladder.
Describing an American Dream that for many has faded into a less plentiful reality, Stanford economics Professor Raj Chetty said in a news release, "It's basically a coin flip as to whether you'll do better than your parents."
The downward trend held true across the U.S. — and the steepest declines were seen among middle class families, according to Chetty and his fellow researchers in the Equality of Opportunity Project.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/09/504989751/u-s-kids-far-less-likely-to-out-earn-their-parents-as-inequality-grows
The middle class is falling away and its doubtful Trump will do anything about it. We're looking at increasing rates of poverty, just as programs designed to help the poor are going to be slashed.
See no evil, hear no evil: Donald Trump is turning away his intelligence briefings
Source: Salon
President-elect Donald Trump has a disturbing habit of declining his daily intelligence briefings, and that’s causing politicians to be concerned.
“We find it particularly troubling that President-elect Trump has mostly declined to take the daily intelligence briefing,” wrote Sens. Ben Cardin of Maryland and Dianne Feinstein of California, both Democrats, in an editorial for USA Today on Thursday. “Presidents and presidents-elect going back decades have begun their day this way — understanding national security threats and opportunities, asking probing questions, and making tough decisions.”
The senators continue, “The information and analysis that our intelligence community provides to decision-makers is invaluable for developing a full and nuanced picture of the world.”
Read more: https://www.salon.com/2016/12/09/see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-donald-trump-is-turning-away-his-intelligence-briefings/
Well he wasn't joking when he said he thought he knew better then the generals. This surely couldn't go poorly.
Trump launches war on unions
Labor leaders, who spent tens of millions of dollars campaigning against Trump, said after the election they’d give him a chance to deliver on his pro-worker agenda. But the cease-fire eroded in just the past 24 hours.
First, Trump blasted an Indiana union boss personally on Twitter, prompting a blistering response from labor leaders. Then he announced his choice for secretary of the Department of Labor is fast-food executive Andrew Puzder, a union critic who’s even floated the idea of automating his restaurants to avoid worker costs.
“It’s part of a larger agenda, and you can see it playing out in terms of his picks, which is to destroy the labor movement,” said RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of National Nurses United. “They want to do away with democracy. That’s the problem. Labor is a check on the balance of power with corporations and they want labor out of the way.”
Just the tip of the iceberg. With his choices for Labor and Education, it can only get worse.
Donald Trump Will Produce Upcoming Celebrity Apprentice
Source: Huffington Post
President-elect Donald Trump is staying on as an executive producer of NBC’s “The New Celebrity Apprentice” despite his impending responsibilities as leader of the free world, Variety reported on Thursday.
The popular program, which propelled the businessman to national prominence and paved the way for his eventual presidential win, is set to begin airing again in January with its new host, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The show went off the air during Trump’s presidential bid.
MGM, which produces the show for NBC, confirmed to Variety that Trump will still be one of the program’s executive producers, and that MGM, not NBC, will pay the president-elect’s fees. (MGM did not return a request for comment from The Huffington Post.)
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks confirmed the news, noting that the president-elect has a “big stake” in the program, which has licensed several international editions
Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-apprentice-producer_us_5849e504e4b04c8e2baf082b
You know what. Fuck it I don't even know what to say.
Stop trying to make moderate Trump happen
On Wednesday night, Donald Trump was watching TV and he got mad at a guy he apparently saw on TV and so he tweeted to his 16,997,292 followers that this guy he’d apparently seen on TV had “done a terrible job” at his actual job, if not on TV.
Trump was apparently mad because this guy — Chuck Jones, the elected president of Steelworkers Local 1999 — had told CNN's Erin Burnett that Trump had misrepresented how many jobs had been saved by his intervention with Carrier in Indiana. Jones told The Post's Danielle Paquette that Trump had “lied his [three-letter slang term for a posterior] off” by suggesting that the deal had saved 1,100 jobs. But Trump apparently didn't like that he said that on television, so he tweeted, and Jones started getting death threats.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/08/stop-trying-to-make-moderate-trump-happen/?utm_term=.1296230497b2
America Belongs to White Men, Alt-Right Founder Says
Source: The Intercept
There were no Nazi salutes this time, at least. But Richard Spencer, the white supremacist Trump supporter trying to make racism cool by rebranding it “alt-right,” gave another rabble-rousing speech on Tuesday night, this time at Texas A&M University.
In case there was any ambiguity about his message, video posted on Twitter by Josef Winkler, a college sophomore who was repulsed by Spencer’s statements, showed him boasting that, because of the conquest of North America by European invaders, “America belongs to white men.”
Read more: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/07/america-belongs-white-men-alt-right-founder-says/
Before the election, I thought these sorts of beliefs had died out. It makes me pretty depressed to see that they haven't.
"Pizzagate" shooting suspect: "The intel on this wasn't 100 percent"
Source: CBS News
The man accused of firing an assault rifle inside a Washington restaurant said he regrets how he handled the situation but refused to completely dismiss the false online claims involving a child sex ring that brought him there known as “pizzagate.”
“I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way,” Edgar Maddison Welch, who’s been jailed since his Sunday arrest, told The New York Times in a Wednesday videoconference.
Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pizzagate-shooting-suspect-edgar-maddison-welch-intel-wasnt-100-percent/
"It just went the wrong way". What a damned idiot.
Giraffes at risk of "silent extinction," biologists warn
The giraffe, the tallest land animal, is now at risk of extinction, biologists say.
Because the giraffe population has shrunk nearly 40 percent in just 30 years, scientists put it on the official watch list of threatened and endangered species worldwide, calling it “vulnerable.” That’s two steps up the danger ladder from its previous designation of being a species of least concern. In 1985, there were between 151,000 and 163,000 giraffes but in 2015 the number was down to 97,562, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/giraffes-at-risk-of-silent-extinction-biologists-warn/
Another iconic species on the cutting block. However, One good thing to come from this may be increased awareness. Sometimes when species everyone is familiar with are on the line, people can rally around changing and saving them.
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