monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

17 States Sue the Trump Administration Over Census Citizenship Question

This is the third major lawsuit against the controversial new citizenship question

Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt’s concern with his safety came at a steep cost to taxpayers as his swollen security detail blew through overtime budgets and at times diverted officers away from investigating environmental crimes.

Altogether, the agency spent millions of dollars for a 20-member full-time detail that is more than three times the size of his predecessor’s part-time security contingent.

...The EPA official said there are legitimate concerns about Pruitt’s safety, given public opposition to his rollbacks of anti-pollution measures.

EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said late Friday that Pruitt has faced an “unprecedented” amount of death threats against him and his family.

“Americans should all agree that members of the President’s cabinet should be kept safe from these violent threats,” Wilcox said.

A nationwide search of state and federal court records by AP found no case where anyone has been arrested or charged with threatening Pruitt. EPA’s press office did not respond Friday to provide details of any specific threats or arrests.

Fox & Friends has spent less than two minutes covering Scott Pruitt’s scandals this week

So, Pruitt is blowing through taxpayers' money like it was his.

Trump administration planning to ‘monitor’ journalists and bloggers
DHS spokesman dismisses "tinfoil hat wearing" reporters who question the government's motives.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is looking to compile a database of journalists, bloggers and social media “influencers” here and overseas, Bloomberg reported.

A request filed on April 3 sought a contractor to gather information on people posting across all platforms — radio, print, digital, and television — in 100 languages. Bids are expected on April 13.

According to Bloomberg, the request came amid “heightened concern” about accuracy in media and the potential for foreigners to influence U.S. elections and government policy through “fake news.”

Broadcaster ZDF said police were searching his apartment and that he had contact with far-right extremists, but there was no evidence thus far that he was a far-right extremist himself.

The name Jens is a Swedish name. In Swedish the meaning of the name Jens is: gift from God'.

But I'm glad that you personally don't hide behind a screen name, Mr. coldjoint (are family commonly written in lower case in the USA?), but spread your insults and offenses openly - the courageous person you are.

best laugh of the evening

Count me among the swelling ranks of the infatuated. I, too, have been Beto-struck.

I have seen the alternative to Ted Cruz — Lord knows we need an alternative to Ted Cruz — and he’s a peppy, rangy, toothy progressive with ratios of folksiness to urbanity and irreverence to earnestness that might well have been cooked up in some political laboratory. Could that formula enable Representative Beto O’Rourke, a Texas Democrat, to wrest Cruz’s seat in the Senate from him in November?

...He’s quick to validate voters’ ill will toward federal lawmakers, and he said, during that town hall, that only 9 percent of Americans approve of Congress. “You know that communism has an approval rating of 10 percent,” he added. “Chlamydia is at 8 percent. So Congress is in the sweet spot. But watch out! The chlamydia lobby is working it hard and they are going to move up and surpass Congress soon.”

As Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin battled last month to keep his job, his fate hinged in part on a once-obscure advocacy group backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

In the end, Shulkin’s refusal to pursue greater outsourcing of health care for veterans — the top priority of the Koch-backed Concerned Veterans for America — further alienated him from the group’s allies in the Trump administration and contributed to his ouster, according to officials familiar with the situation.

The VA secretary’s fall underscores the growing clout that CVA is wielding in the Trump era through a national grass-roots network and sympathetic officials in the White House.

Scott Pruitt is not like past administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, just as Donald Trump is not like past presidents.

In both cases, it’s not that they’re conservatives. Conservatives have held those positions before. It’s that they seem to be engaged in something different than their predecessors — different not just in degree, but in kind.

They are governing on behalf of their allies and supporters, against their perceived enemies, with virtually no claims to anything more universal. That kind of tribalism in politics is not new, of course, but with the Trump administration, the US conservative movement has more or less abandoned any pretense of anything loftier. Respect for mutual norms and procedural neutrality have gone well out the window.

The GOP has become, in the immortal words of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Tribalism explains Pruitt...

That kind of [Let's find a compromise] talk is gibberish to a tribalist, just one of the pious bits of nonsense people in the opposing tribe use to impress one another. The tribalist does not begin with a pluralist conception of the good and work backward to policy. The tribalist begins with the good of the tribe and works backward to policy (and to everything else, including truth).