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This evening's music features musician Ry Cooder. Enjoy!

"Remember when the Democrats hired George Lakoff to help them “frame” neoliberal austerity measures so they’d sound more palatable for their base? Now the leadership of the party is attending seminars on how to “talk to real people.”"

-- Jeffrey St Clair

News and Opinion

Ok, it's been a week. Y'all deserve this:

A Bad Lip Reading of Donald Trump's Inauguration

Sadly, this is a "real" story, not something from the Onion:

Democrats hold lessons on how to talk to real people

Senate Democrats geared up for battle with President Donald Trump by preparing to talk to people who voted for him — and by hearing from one of his arch-nemeses.

Gathering in Sheperdstown, West Virginia, Democrats were scheduled to hear Thursday from liberal political operative David Brock, Center for American Progress CEO Neera Tanden and Priorities USA CEO Guy Cecil in a session called “Hold Trump Accountable.” Earlier in the day, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) moderated a “discussion with Trump voters," according to a draft schedule obtained by POLITICO. ...

Former Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear (D), along with Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), held a session on “speaking to those who feel invisible in rural America," according to the schedule. Other sessions were along similar lines: “Listening to those who feel unheard” and “Rising America — They feel unheard too.”

On Thursday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) will discuss political tactics for the midterm election and Democrats will strategize on how to define themselves and Trump. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) will talk about “Triangulating Trump,” emphasizing that they can go around Republicans by trying to work with Trump on infrastructure, outsourcing and trade.

Pfffffttt!!! Markos Moulitsas is pissed at Democrats for acting like Democrats. Wake up, Kos, this is who the Democrats are - spineless, craven, coin-operated corporate cattle. How's that Hopey Gatecrashy thing working out for you?

'Resistance Means Resisting': Dems Accused of Being Too Soft on Trump

From Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) backing unqualified Housing and Urban Development nominee Ben Carson, to 14 Senate Democrats voting to confirm torture supporter Mike Pompeo as CIA chief, to the looming possibility that any Democrat might support Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general, progressives have reason to fear that Democratic opposition to the Trump administration is weaker than it needs to be—even in the face of a fervent and growing resistance movement.

"Resistance means resisting," Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas wrote Thursday in response to Warren's committee vote on Carson. "All those people in the streets last Saturday didn't march for Democrats to make nice with the GOP. They marched to resist—whether it's Trump, or his acolytes like Carson. And if even progressive champions like Warren can't figure that out, we really are in trouble."

Do Corporate Democrats Like Charles Schumer Belong in a Progressive Movement Against Trump?

Voters who read little news think Trump had a great first week

In one short week in the White House, Donald Trump has managed to shatter the tradition of the honeymoon period enjoyed by new presidents. While predecessors eased themselves into the role and were showered with national adulation, he has prompted widespread criticism with a stream of provocations.

Trump has proclaimed war on the media, was accused of serial lying, declared open season on environmentalists and undocumented immigrants, outraged the Mexican president, begun stripping millions of Americans of healthcare coverage, and revived the prospect of torturing terror suspects. The pugilism of his pronouncements has left even Trump-hardened observers aghast, prompting speculation that such an adrenalin-charged opening to his term couldn’t possibly be sustained.

Tell that to the people of Macomb County in Michigan.

“Thank the Lord for Donald Trump!” exclaimed the waitress in Angelo’s diner when asked how she thought he was doing. “He’s awesome, he’s great,” said the car worker. “I absolutely love him,” the window cleaner said. “I’m 100% for Trump,” the pawn shop owner said.

Even for a country as accustomed to division as the United States, the split perception of Trump’s first week in office could not be more worlds apart. On the one hand, there is Trump as seen through the lens of the coastal mainstream media that has called him out with historic bluntness, epitomized by the lead story of the New York Times: Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote.

Then there is how residents of Macomb County, an overwhelmingly white working-class suburb of Detroit, see their new commander-in-chief. It is as if all the raging controversy of the week had somehow washed off him on the 600-mile journey from Washington to Michigan, leaving a cleansed and beatific Trump committed to creating jobs and putting America first.

Trump Adviser Steve Bannon Tells Press to "Keep Its Mouth Shut"

A top White House official told the media to 'keep its mouth shut'

Anyone who cares about language has been repeatedly appalled by the crudeness of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and by the thuggishness of the directives issued by Trump and his cohorts. They have instructed the American people on what to believe, whom to hate and how badly they can behave. And yet we continue to be surprised by each bullying pronouncement, most recently by chief White House strategist Stephen K Bannon’s suggestion that the “humiliated” media might do well to “keep its mouth shut.”

Now that our mainstream newspapers have given up on finding a fair and balanced way to report the president’s lies, now that the country has watched NBC’s Chuck Todd barely conceal his astonishment at Kellyanne Conway’s reference to “alternative facts,” it’s no wonder that the administration’s antipathy toward the press should have become more openly vehement and reckless. ...

By ordering the media to shut its mouth, Bannon is implying that what he would really like to do is discredit, censor and silence the press: to shut our mouths for us.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Bannon said, in an interview. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.” ...

History has shown us why totalitarian governments are such implacable enemies of the press, and why, on coming to power, their leaders have been so quick to impose strict censorship and criminalize dissent.

It’s easier to dominate and oppress a terrified population forbidden to read (or write or speak) the truth, people who have resigned themselves to being lied to, and who are further isolated by a lack of information.

How should the press cover a President who openly belittles them?

An interesting essay by Thomas Frank:

The intolerance of the left: Trump's win as seen from Walt Disney's hometown

Donald Trump doesn’t really reflect the moral values of middle America. He is a consummate city slicker, a soft-handed, foul-mouthed toff who lives in a 58-story building and has been identified with New York City excess his entire life. But people in rural areas are desperate these days. Many of them chose Trump, despite his vulgarity and his big-city ways, because he promised to make them “great again”.

What you will discover, should you choose to undertake this mission in the part of the midwest where I come from, is this: ruination, unless the town you choose to visit has a college or a hospital or a prison in it.

With a few exceptions, the shops on Main Street will be empty or in mothballs. There will be deindustrialization and despair. Places where stuff used to be made will be closed down. Population growth will be negative. There will be no local newspaper, or else just a sliver of one. There will be problems with meth. There will be hundred-year-old homes that would be millionaire’s palaces were they situated in popular urban areas.

And there will be Trump signs. ...

These are the basic facts, and yet if you think about it, they only deepen our mystery: there was a time when hard times and despair drove people to the left.

So why didn’t that happen this time around? ...

Why? One of the men present told me you could summarize it with a single word: “Hillary!” Another described it with a variant on Trump’s famous proposition to black voters, which these white people clearly felt applied to them, too: “Whaddaya got to lose by making a change?” ...

Everyone I spoke to that morning seemed to take for granted that liberals held some kind of unfair moral- or decibel-based advantage over conservatives. Hillary voters were “the vocal ones”, a man told me. “Conservatives were afraid to speak up because of criticism from liberals,” he continued, “and by God, we showed them.”

Jobs for all? In the US that idea is about to be tested to destruction

In the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Monday, Trump held talks with the leaders of US trade unions: among them, the presidents of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, the Smart (it stands for sheet metal, air, rail and transportation) Union, and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Despite US unions overwhelmingly backing Hillary Clinton – the carpenters, for example, recently warned that “Trump’s legacy will ruin America” – all was apparently warmth and cordiality. ...

Welcome, once again, to the element of Trump-ism that liberal dismay drowns out, but which partly accounts for the fact that this most unqualified of presidents is in office – and which, for all his dismal approval ratings, is surely playing pretty well in the post-industrial places whose support took him over the line in November. ...

Put simply, Trump and his people want to eat the American left’s lunch. At the same time, they intend to shred the Republican party’s ingrained belief in laissez-faire economics, reset rightwing politics – somehow bagging “60% of the white vote, and 40% of the black and Hispanic vote” – whereupon a new dawn will break and “we’ll govern for 50 years”. The quotes come from the interview Trump’s infamous strategist Steve Bannon gave to the writer Michael Wolff, a few days after Trump was elected. “Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he said. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy… With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up … It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution – conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.” ...

But Trump’s plans for a renaissance of manufacturing work are something else. Ford and General Motors, he said this week, were “gonna build plants back in the United States” and thereby “bring jobs back to America, like I promised on the campaign trail”. But how? It is one of the more overlooked facets of the modern American economy that many manufacturing businesses are already coming back to the US because automation means that labour costs are no longer a deal-breaker: a robot is even cheaper than a Chinese worker, so “reshoring” is a rational choice.

This is a truth that eludes dozens of politicians (including Trump’s new friend Theresa May, whose just-published industrial strategy is smattered with promises of “good” and “secure” jobs, but no credible idea of how they might be created). If Trump’s plans for jobs somehow work, he will become even more formidable. If they don’t, their failure will not just take down his political project, but arguably threaten a much bigger idea: that old-fashioned, secure jobs are still a viable economic option, and that politicians can deliver them.

If this is a delusion, it applies just as much to the Democrats as to the new Trumpite Republicans (witness the pledge in Clinton’s 2016 platform of “a full-employment economy, where everyone has a job that pays enough to raise a family and live in dignity”). ... Trump, of all people, may be about to test that idea to destruction. In other words, watch out lefties: this most reckless, nasty, dangerous man is playing not just with his chips, but yours too.

Mikhail Gorbachev: 'It All Looks as if the World Is Preparing for War'

More troops, tanks and armored personnel carriers are being brought to Europe. NATO and Russian forces and weapons that used to be deployed at a distance are now placed closer to each other, as if to shoot point-blank.

While state budgets are struggling to fund people’s essential social needs, military spending is growing. Money is easily found for sophisticated weapons whose destructive power is comparable to that of the weapons of mass destruction; for submarines whose single salvo is capable of devastating half a continent; for missile defense systems that undermine strategic stability.

Politicians and military leaders sound increasingly belligerent and defense doctrines more dangerous. Commentators and TV personalities are joining the bellicose chorus. It all looks as if the world is preparing for war. ...

President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said that one of the main freedoms is freedom from fear. Today, the burden of fear and the stress of bearing it is felt by millions of people, and the main reason for it is militarism, armed conflicts, the arms race, and the nuclear Sword of Damocles. Ridding the world of this fear means making people freer. This should become a common goal. Many other problems would then be easier to resolve.

The time to decide and act is now.

Trump poised to seek new military options for defeating Islamic State group

President Donald Trump is expected to ask the Pentagon for ways to accelerate the fight against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, and officials said the options probably would include steps the Obama administration considered but never acted on, from adding significantly more U.S. troops to boosting military aid to Kurdish fighters

Trump's visit Friday to the Defense Department's headquarters will start the conversation over how to fulfill his inauguration address pledge to eradicate radical Islamic terrorism "completely from the face of the Earth."

Among the possible options are sending in more Apache helicopters and giving the U.S. military broader authority to make routine combat decisions, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the ongoing discussions.

Syria rebels await action from Trump on safe zones, Damascus silent

Syrian rebels urged President Donald Trump to fulfill a pledge to create safe zones in their country, but analysts doubted he would proceed with a step that could drag Washington deeper into war, hasten Syria's fragmentation and risk conflict with Russia.

Trump told ABC News on Wednesday he "will absolutely do safe zones in Syria" for refugees fleeing violence and that Europe had made a mistake by admitting millions of refugees from Syria.

President Bashar al-Assad's opponents have long demanded safe zones to protect civilians who have fled government air strikes and bombardment of rebel-held areas. ...

There was no immediate word from Damascus, but it is sure to oppose such a move as Assad has vowed to regain control of all Syria. Iran, which backs militias in Syria including Lebanon's Hezbollah, would also oppose any U.S. intervention.

Russia said it had not been consulted on Trump's plan, warning that it should not "exacerbate the situation with refugees" and Washington should weigh up "all the consequences".

'Legitimising genocide': US congresswoman visits Syria, criticised for meeting Assad

Death of the Syrian ‘Moderate’ Fantasy

The neoconservative and liberal interventionist case for arming Syria’s rebels lost its last vestige of credibility this week with the routing of Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces by Al-Qaeda-linked Islamists in northwestern Syria. ...

In her memoir Hard Choices, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recounted her hope that “if the United States could train and equip a reliable and effective moderate rebel force, it could help hold the country together during a transition . . . and prevent ethnic cleansing and score settling.” ... The truth of the matter — exposed again this week — is that the FSA and other “moderates” never had the popular support or the grit to take on more fanatical warriors in Syria. ...

In September 2013, FSA forces in the northern city of Raqqa surrendered abjectly to Islamists, despite outnumbering them. One top rebel commander said, “There is no such thing as the FSA [here]. We are all Al Qaeda now. Half of the FSA has been devoured by ISIS, and the other half joined Jabhat al-Nusra.”

Many FSA commanders learned their lesson and began to collaborate with Nusra Front, essentially fighting under Al Qaeda’s command. Those that steadfastly remained “moderate” paid a heavy price. ... “At some point, the Syrian street lost trust in the Free Syrian Army,” the despondent commander told the Washington Post’s national security columnist David Ignatius. He explained, as Ignatius put it, that “many rebel commanders aren’t disciplined, their fighters aren’t well-trained and the loose umbrella organization of the FSA lacks command and control. The extremists of the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra have filled the vacuum.” ...

Joshua Landis, the respected Syria expert and head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, ... argues that trying to buy moderate allies with money and arms was doomed from the start.

As Landis told an interviewer recently, “Many activists and Washington think tankers argue that the reason the radicals won in Syria is because they were better funded than moderate militia . . . No evidence supports this. Radicals . . . fought better, had better strategic vision and were more popular. The notion that had Washington pumped billions of dollars to selected moderate militias, they would’ve killed the extremists and destroyed Assad’s regime, is bunkum.”

Bunkum it may be, but mainstream pundits continue to demand that Washington support anti-Assad forces in Syria — whether in the name of saving lives, fighting tyranny, or making life uncomfortable for the Russians. We can only hope that President Trump ignores them and confines his wars to Twitter.

Turkey faces long and difficult fight against Isis in Syria

The Turkish army is suffering unexpectedly serious losses in men and equipment as it engages in its first real battle against Isis fighters holding al-Bab, a small but strategically placed city north east of Aleppo. Turkish military commanders had hoped to capture al-Bab quickly when their forces attacked it in December, but they are failing to break through Isis defences. ...

Turkey had intended to make a limited military foray into the territory between the Turkish frontier and Aleppo city 40 miles further south which would make it a serious player in the Syrian conflict. It would drive Isis from its last big stronghold in northern Syria at al-Bab and, above all, prevent the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) from linking up their enclaves at Kobani and Qamishli with one at Afrin, north west of Aleppo.

The strategy has proven far more costly and slower to implement in the face of determined and skilful Isis resistance than Ankara had foreseen. It wanted primarily to rely on Arab and Turkman militiamen under Turkish operational control, though these would be nominally part of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) umbrella group. These proxies would be backed up by Turkish artillery, air strikes and a limited number of Turkish ground troops.

The plan seemed to work in the beginning as the Turkish forces took over the Isis-held town of Jarablus, where the Euphrates River crosses the Turkish border. But swift success here came because Isis did not fight, its men retreating or shaving off their beards and melting into the local population. But when the Turkish-backed FSA advance failed to break through Isis lines in and around al-Bab, Turkey had to reinforce them with its own units which now do the bulk of the fighting. ...

Turkey benefited at this week’s peace talks in Astana in Kazakhstan from being one of three foreign powers – the others being Russia and Iran – with ground troops in Syria. It had previously provided crucial aid, sanctuary and a near open border to the Syrian armed opposition. Reinforced by a diplomatic marriages of convenience with both Russia and Iran, Turkey has acquired significant influence over the outcome of the six-year long war in Syria. But the slow military progress at al-Bab shows Turkey’s growing military engagement in Syria is coming at a price – even in its initial phases.

Iraq considers retaliatory suspension of visas for US citizens

Baghdad is mulling a tit-for-tat response to Washington’s proposal to suspend issuing visas to a group of mainly Muslim countries, including Iraq, citing fears of terrorism. ...

Responding in kind, Baghdad is considering whether to halt issuing visas to US citizens.

“There is mutual treatment between Iraq and the US in terms of diplomatic relations and visa issuance. It is very likely that Iraq might suspend issuing visas to US citizens following the US president’s decision to suspend visas to Iraqi citizens,” Renas Jano, a member of the foreign relations committee in the Iraqi parliament, told Rudaw.

He warned, however, that Iraq has a lot to lose if it picks such a fight with the US.

“If Iraq responds the same way to Trump’s decision by suspending visas to US citizens, we will lose a lot, as there is a big American force here helping us in our war against ISIS. In addition, there are many US diplomats and business people here. The decision will also disfavor Iraqi students too.”

Trump's proposed ban on refugees in the U.S. will have global consequences

President Trump is expected to derail the United States refugee resettlement program amid the greatest refugee crisis since World War II and just days after the United Nations called for greater assistance in Syria specifically.

The move crushes the hope of reunification for refugees already here but whose family members remain abroad and throws into disarray the agencies that for years have quietly worked to help refugees settle into their new communities. Just as significantly, aid experts and humanitarians fear, it sends a stark message to other countries that the U.S. will no longer share the burden of the world’s most pressing humanitarian cause, and it could further embolden terror organizations that have found new inspiration and recruitment fodder in Trump’s rhetoric and actions.  

Chris George, director of the Integrated Refugee Resettlement Program in New Haven, Connecticut, said Trump’s decision will have a stark and immediate impact on the ground. “It means more refugees out of desperation placing their children in so-called boats that will sink in the Mediterranean,” he said, “more refugees languishing and sweating it out in refugee camps.”

Denver clears homeless camp despite controversy

A large homeless encampment was cleared in Denver on Thursday amid temperatures of -5C (23F), risking further controversy over the city’s approach to homeless people struggling with winter weather.

As in other western cities, activists are up in arms over rules that they say criminalize homelessness. Denver, whose homeless population is estimated at 3,700, banned “urban camping” in 2012. But in November, police faced intense criticism after a video that showed them confiscating people’s blankets and other outdoors gear, with bad weather imminent, went viral.

In response, Denver’s mayor, Michael Hancock, promised that police would not take survival equipment when enforcing the camping ban until the spring. The city and its officials are currently being sued by several homeless residents over such policies.

“It’s an atrocity,” said Ray Lyall, a 58-year-old homeless man and a member of advocacy group Denver Homeless Out Loud, said of the camping restriction.

'Over my dead body': tribe aims to block Trump's border wall on Arizona land

The Tohono O’odham Nation, a federally recognized tribe with a reservation that spans 75 miles of the US-Mexico border, announced on Thursday that it does not support the wall and criticized the White House for signing an executive order without consulting the tribe. ...

The Tohono O’odham tribe, which has roughly 28,000 members and controls 2.8m acres of a reservation in south-western Arizona, has long struggled with the militarized international border that was drawn through the middle of its traditional lands.

The O’odham people historically inhabited lands that stretched south to Sonora, Mexico, and just north of Phoenix, Arizona, and there are tribe members who still live in Mexico. The tribe today has the second largest Native American land base in the country, and indigenous people say the US Border Patrol has for decades significantly disrupted tribal communities and their day-to-day life.

“It cuts through our ancestral land, and it divides families that have been able to go back and forth freely since before the border line was drawn,” said Bradley Moreno, a Tohono O’odham member who grew up miles from the border. “Border Patrol is a way of life for us.”

The tribe has said that Border Patrol agents in the past have detained and deported Tohono O’odham people who were “simply traveling through their own traditional lands, practicing migratory traditions essential to their religion, economy and culture”. ...

“It’s going to affect our sacred lands. It’s going to affect our ceremonial sites. It’s going to affect the environment. We have wildlife, and they have their own patterns of migration,” he said. “There are just so many things that are wrong with this. The whole idea behind it is just racist.”

Are Trump & Mexican President Provoking Conflict to Distract from Low Approval Ratings at Home?

Netanyahu interviewed by anti-corruption police for third time

Israeli detectives have interviewed Benjamin Netanyahu for a third time as part of a series of investigations into his conduct in office.

Amid reports in the Israeli media that police are close to deciding whether to indict the prime minister, in a post on Facebook he accused his perceived enemies in the media and politics “of an attempted coup by undemocratic means”.

Israeli media showed images of officers from the Lahav 433 anti-corruption unit arriving at Netanyahu’s official residence just before 10am on Friday.

Chelsea Manning is safe from Trump, legal experts say

Chelsea Manning, it would seem, does not have a friend in the new president — nor in the many senior Republicans outraged over Obama’s decision to reduce her sentence by 28 years

Ungrateful TRAITOR Chelsea Manning, who should never have been released from prison, is now calling President Obama a weak leader. Terrible!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017

But even though plenty of lawmakers would like to see the imprisoned whistleblower — set to be released in May — serve out her original 35-year sentence, Trump can’t interfere, according to legal experts.

“The president’s pardon and commutation power is absolute,” said Stephen Presser, the emeritus law professor at Northwestern University. “A successive president doesn’t have the authority to change anything.” ...

“No matter what is permissible within the bounds of the law, we are staying vigilant in our monitoring of Chelsea’s conditions of confinement and ability to be released,” said Chase Strangio, Manning’s lawyer and a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT and AIDS Project.

Donald Trump Is Using a Private Gmail Account to Secure the Most Powerful Twitter Account in the World

The new American president's Twitter account isn’t a means of communication as much as it is a tool for confusion, propaganda, and unceasing assault. But Donald Trump has shown his tweets can move the stock market, provoke foreign powers, and dominate news cycles, so the account’s potential to shake the world is unprecedented. And all that’s stopping an outsider from seizing control of @POTUS could be someone’s personal Gmail password. ...

Trump’s account is an obviously juicy target for such an attack, representing what BuzzFeed’s Joe Bernstein described as “a national security disaster waiting to happen.” An unauthorized declaration of, say, imminent hostilities or economic sanctions coming from the president’s official account could destabilize the entire world.

According to hacker and Twitter user @WauchulaGhost, Trump’s account is set to email password reset requests to a personal Gmail account (it appears to be that of Dan Scavino, his social media chief), and it reveals the first two letters of the account (enough to surmise it’s probably Scavino’s). This signals to hackers that all they need to do to illicitly broadcast to the president’s 14 million online followers is get into said Gmail account, which may or may not be secured with some form of two-factor authentication. Even with such an extra layer of authentication, knowing the private email address of a senior White House employee would make them a target for spearphishing attacks like those that befell the DNC and John Podesta last summer.

US economic growth slows to lowest rate since 2011

US economic growth slowed in the fourth quarter as slowing exports were only partially offset by increases in consumer spending and business investment.

US national income (GDP) slowed to an annual rate of 1.9% from 3.5% in the third quarter, according to official figures, below analysts’ forecasts of a 2.2% increase.

Consumer spending increased by 2.5% and business investment nudged 2.4% higher, but the economy lost momentum as exports slumped by 4.5%. Most of the drag in exports came from falling soybean sales, which fired up GDP growth in the third quarter after a poor soy harvest in Argentina and Brazil.

For 2016, the economy grew 1.6%, slower than the UK’s 2%. It was the worst showing since 2011 and down markedly from 2.6% growth in 2015.

Donald Trump’s immigration orders will make private prison companies filthy rich

Private prison companies just hit the jackpot.

While attention was focused Wednesday on President Donald Trump’s orders to start building the border wall and cut federal funding to sanctuary cities, another aspect of his decree went mostly overlooked: Trump effectively gave the Department of Homeland Security carte blanche to expand immigrant detention.

His executive order authorizes the department to “allocate all legally available resources” to “establish contracts to construct, operate, or control facilities to detain aliens at or near the land border with Mexico.” That means paying private prison companies like CoreCivic and the GEO Group to open new facilities to keep up with the Trump administration’s draconian “enforcement priorities” on immigration. ...

“This is an enormous boondoggle for the private prison industry,” said Carl Takei, a staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “The people that will benefit from these executive orders are not American taxpayers but corporations that are making a killing off of jailing asylum seekers and other immigrants.”

Donald, don't be self-indulgent. Mexico has spoken, we will never ever pay for the #FuckingWall. https://t.co/a79WDY5vlv

— Vicente Fox Quesada (@VicenteFoxQue) January 26, 2017

Senator Demands Treasury Nominee Steve Mnuchin Tell the Truth About Robo-Signing

Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., has angrily responded to treasury secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin’s false responses to questions submitted for the record to the Senate Finance Committee, stating that Mnuchin’s “answers to basic questions are at war with facts.” The Intercept called attention to those responses on Wednesday. ...

Casey demanded that Mnuchin submit new answers to his questions. “The treasury secretary must have a basic level of credibility, yet his answers put that into question,” he said.

It’s unclear whether Mnuchin’s practice of lying and stretching the truth will sway any other senators to turn against his confirmation as treasury secretary — particularly the Republicans who hold his fate in their hands. Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., who asked tough questions about his state’s housing crisis that Mnuchin could not answer in the hearings, has not announced how he would vote.

If Heller voted against Mnuchin in the Finance Committee and all Democrats joined him, the committee vote would result in a 13-13 tie. However, in that case the Finance Committee could still report his nomination to the floor without a recommendation.

No vote has been scheduled on Mnuchin in the Finance Committee.

Trump Is Driving On Unsafe Bridges as His Wall to Nowhere Gets Priority

During his first week in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order stating that it “is the policy of the executive branch” to “secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border” with Mexico. Researchers have put the cost of the wall at $15 to $25 billion. That price tag would come to a nation with a staggering national debt of $19.9 trillion and a D+ rating on its critical infrastructure that plays an essential role in the country’s economic growth and ability to pay its debt.

Every four years the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) releases a comprehensive assessment of the U.S. infrastructure. The last report was released in 2013 giving a D+ rating to U.S. infrastructure. (The next report is due in March of this year.) The 2013 report found that drivers in the U.S. are making two hundred million trips daily across deficient bridges in the nation’s 102 largest metropolitan regions. The worst region for structurally deficient and/or functionally obsolete bridges is where the President of the United States tools around. According to ASCE’s 2013 report card, “the nation’s capitol tops all 50 states, with 77 percent or 185 of 239 bridges in the District of Columbia falling into at least one of these categories.”

Standing Rock Sioux tribe says Trump is breaking law with Dakota Access order

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe has called Donald Trump’s decision to push forward the controversial Dakota Access pipeline “utterly alarming”, and warned the president that rushing through the project would break federal law.

On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order instructing the army corps of engineers to “review and approve in an expedited manner” the Dakota Access project, an 1,100-mile pipeline that would take oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois. ...

Trump’s order asks the army to consider “whether to withdraw” the environmental review, despite the fact it is already under way, with a public comment period that closes on 20 February.

In a letter sent to Trump, David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock tribe, urged the president to not bypass the environmental analysis.

“This change in course in arbitrary and without justification,” he wrote. “The law requires that changes in agency positions be backed by new circumstances or new evidence, not simply by the president’s whim.

“The problem with the Dakota Access pipeline is not that it involves development, but rather that it was deliberately and precariously placed without proper consultation with tribal governments.

“This memo takes further action to disregard tribal interests and the impacts of yesterday’s memorandums are not limited to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

“This disregard for tribal diplomatic relations and the potential for national repercussions is utterly alarming.”

Fearing Protests, Pipeline Execs Show Muted Reaction to Trump's Dakota Access, Keystone Orders

If President Donald Trump expected to hear roars of approval from the pipeline industry after this week's executive orders pushing the Keystone XL pipeline and Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) forward, he might have been hugely disappointed.

Reaction at the Marcellus-Utica Midstream Conference and Exhibition in Pittsburgh on Wednesday was remarkably muted.

“We can be very thankful about announcements like we saw yesterday, about DAPL and Keystone,” said Alan S. Armstrong, President and CEO of The Williams Co., Inc., which owns or operates over 33,000 miles of pipeline systems across the U.S., “but I will tell you, that is not changing the opposition that we have at a local level.”

“And I'm going to tell you, it may even enhance [that opposition],” Armstrong, whose company is so large that it's involved with roughly a third of the nation's natural gas, added.

Public participation and protests — especially when it comes to lodging public comments with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and protests aimed at state and local governments — seemed to have these industry executives nervous, despite the Trump administration's aggressive moves to push pipeline construction.

“What is that total impact of public opposition?” asked Harry W. New, President of pipeline contractor Willbros Oil and Gas. “I think it's hard to really equate that — and I think it's huge.

After Trump's orders on the Dakota Access pipeline, hastily organized protests outside the White House drew a crowd that organizers estimated at over 1,000 participants on Tuesday. Nationwide, protests sprang up from New York City to Idaho.

Those protests have industry observers wary. “I don't know if you've all seen on your cell phones but this morning, Greenpeace unfurled a banner at the White House, a big big banner, against pipelines,” said panel moderator and Hart Energy executive editor Leslie Haines. “So you're right, it's going to be volatile. The more he promotes energy, the more people like Greenpeace are going to react.”

Climate change: Florida faces rising sea levels

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

James F on Hatred in Our Divided Nation: Anger at Flyover Country

Liberalism as Class Warfare

Tulsi Gabbard reveals she met Assad in Syria, without informing top Democrats

Donald Trump and His ‘Magic Mirror’

From pipelines to refugees, everything Trump does is connected

Trump pressured parks chief for photos to prove 'media lied' about inauguration crowd – report

Trump’s Obsession with Faux Election Fraud Sets the Stage for Federal Voter Suppression

Executive Orders Are Normal; Trump’s Are Only Appalling Because of What They Say

Roaming Charges: Populism With an Inhuman Face

A Little Night Music

Ry Cooder - Police Dog Blues

Ry Cooder - Little Sister

Ry Cooder & David Lindley - Mercury Blues

Ry Cooder, Sharon White & Ricky Skaggs - Pan American Boogie

Ry Cooder - It's All Over Now

Ry Cooder - I Got Mine

Ry Cooder - Get Rhythm

John Hiatt & Ry Cooder - Riding with the King

Ry Cooder - The Concert for New Orleans

Flaco Jimenez, Henry Ojeda, Ry Cooder - Austin City Limits