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babylonsister's JournalKris Kobach Outed As A White Supremacist By Leaked Trump Vetting Docs
https://www.politicususa.com/2019/06/23/kris-kobach-white-supremacist.htmlPosted on Sun, Jun 23rd, 2019 by Jason Easley
Kris Kobach Outed As A White Supremacist By Leaked Trump Vetting Docs
Leaked Trump vetting documents list white supremacy as one of the red flags for Trump’s adviser on voter suppression Kris Kobach.
Axios got the vetting docs and wrote, “One heading in the document about Kris Kobach, in the running for Homeland Security Secretary, listed “white supremacy” as a vulnerability. It cited accusations from past political opponents that he had ties to white supremacist groups.”
Kobach was in charge of the commission that Trump appointed to try to federalize voter suppression. Kobach has been up for numerous jobs in the Trump administration, including Homeland Security Secretary and overseeing Trump’s immigration policy.
https://twitter.com/PoliticusSarah/status/1142959223527133184
The Trump Administration Welcomes White Supremacists
The White House has tried to squash reports of the president’s white supremacy, but even Trump’s own vetting documents show that a man who the president appears to be dying to give a job to is a white supremacist. It is not your imagination. The same president who defended white supremacists in Charlottesville, called Mexicans rapists, and wants to build a wall to keep nonwhite people out of the United States has no problem with hiring a white supremacist.
The current president has surrounded himself with racists most likely because he is a racist.
The Insulin Racket
The Insulin Racket
Natalie Shure
June 24, 2019
Insulin is a 100-year-old drug whose wholesale price has tripled in ten years. The reasons why explain everything wrong with America’s broken prescription drug market.
This article appears in the Summer 2019 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
snip//
THE ASTRONOMICAL COSTS STRAINING Lipska’s patients and all the others I’ve talked to stem from a very obvious problem. In the United States, drug companies have near-unilateral power to name their own price, and insulin manufacturers don’t face significant competition that might compel them to lower prices. In other industrialized countries, regulatory bodies are more stringent when it comes to which drugs they approve for sale, and aggressively negotiate prices with manufacturers. In the United States, drugmakers need only to prove their drug effective against a placebo rather than existing products, and the government is far less involved in pricing. In the case of Medicare Part D, government negotiating of drug prices is explicitly illegal.
Instead, U.S. drug-pricing negotiations are the responsibility of individual insurance plans, of which there are thousands. Each of them has relatively little leverage against price hikes, which drug manufacturers have every reason to push as high as possible to pay off shareholders, whose investments were predicated on the promise of some of the highest returns in the stock market. If you’re a pharma exec whose goal is to maximize short-term profits, then jacking up prices on a drug like insulin—whose millions of patients are practically captive—is a sensible strategy.
Because private insurers are fundamentally ill equipped to negotiate drug prices, another for-profit industry began to rise in the late 1970s promising to do better. So-called pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, act on behalf of multiple insurers to negotiate with drug companies as a group, which theoretically gives them more leverage to buy in bulk. But there’s mounting evidence that this isn’t how PBMs work—because they often get paid in rebates from drug manufacturers, they’re often incentivized to keep prices high, the opposite of what they exist to do. Lilly has claimed that, despite rising prices, the price it has been paid for Humalog fell over the past five years, because of all the rebates captured by the PBMs.
Finally, as insurance companies feel the squeeze of rising drug and health-care costs and strive to maximize profits of their own, they’ve shifted more and more health-care costs onto policyholders themselves. Average deductibles have quadrupled in the past decade, nearly half of all people with employer-based insurance have high-deductible plans, and co-pays have risen or been replaced with coinsurance, a frequently higher percentage of the overall price. Taken altogether, the deterioration of insurance quality and rising list prices mean that individual patients are bearing more and more of the brunt of high drug costs. In other words, $275 isn’t just the jumping-off point for an opaque back-and-forth negotiation between Lilly and insurers; it’s the amount that untold numbers of diabetics pay out of pocket for a few days worth of medication to stay alive.
more...
https://prospect.org/article/insulin-racket
Adam Schiff Warns Trump If He Defies Court Order Impeachment Is Next
https://www.politicususa.com/2019/06/23/adam-schiff-trump-impeachment-3.htmlPosted on Sun, Jun 23rd, 2019 by Jason Easley
Adam Schiff Warns Trump If He Defies Court Order Impeachment Is Next
Adam Schiff lays out what it would take for him to support Trump impeachment
Transcript:
SCHIFF: I don’t know the answer, Jake. Certainly, the administration and the president seem to be doing everything they can, everything they can to push us into an impeachment. And we may get there. We may get there. At this point, as you say, a third of our caucus is there, and two-thirds is not there. What would get me to that point is, if we get to a final court decision compelling administration to provide testimony and documents, and they still refuse, then I think we’re in a full-blown constitutional crisis that would compel that kind of remedy. I may get there before that point, Jake. So I continue to listen to people that I respect greatly within our caucus, constitutional lawyers like Larry Tribe and others, and weigh this, I think, every day, and have continued discussions with the speaker about it. But, at this point, I’m not prepared to recommend it.
Video at link~
Trump will have to comply with the court order or be impeached
Rep. Schiff is playing it smart. He knows that Trump doesn’t want to be impeached, so he is giving the administration a choice. After the court rules in favor of the House, which it will, Trump can either turn over witnesses and documents or face impeachment. Chairman Schiff is not alone. If Democrats go through the judicial process, and Trump defies a court order, look for a majority if not all Democrats to support opening an impeachment investigation.
The endgame is unfolding faster than Trump wanted. The president isn’t going to be able to run out the clock on the investigations, and impeachment could be here by the end of summer.
Texas Republican: Migrant conditions in his state the 'worst' he's seen
https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/449933-texas-republican-migrant-conditions-in-his-state-the-worst-hes?fbclid=IwAR0EA5MwngDxxeRC3zzO2bZgWfrCsFZrmRM4lFlmMm7QQD9OrvhZsZpN_L8Texas Republican: Migrant conditions in his state the 'worst' he's seen
By Zack Budryk - 06/23/19 01:31 PM EDT
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) said Sunday that conditions in migrant detention facilities in the Lone Star State were the “worst” he’s ever seen.
McCaul also expressed agreement with Vice President Mike Pence, who, during an earlier appearance on the show, said dangerous, unsanitary conditions in detention facilities were the fault of congressional inaction.
He added that while he would prefer to tie humanitarian aid to other border security measures, “if my choice on the minority side is to vote up or down on a compassionate, humanitarian package, that's what I'm going to do because it's the right thing to do.”
McCaul’s comments came in the wake of reports that four toddlers were sent to the hospital last week after being held at a detention facility.
House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who appeared on the CBS program before McCaul, said resolving immigration issues would require a “humane” approach that Democrats do not trust President Trump to implement.
Trump delays operation to deport migrant families
He is one cruel POS who is delighting in frightening and harming people.
Trump delays operation to deport migrant families
By Tal Axelrod - 06/22/19 03:08 PM EDT
President Trump announced he would delay for two weeks an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operation that would have deported as many as 2,000 migrant families.
Trump said the delay would allow for negotiations on Capitol Hill regarding immigration reform.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1142506687020130306
more...
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/449859-trump-delays-operation-to-deport-migrant-families
Nancy Pelosi Calls Out Hypocritical Evangelicals On Trump ICE Raids
https://www.politicususa.com/2019/06/22/nancy-pelosi-calls-out-hypocritical-evangelicals-on-trump-ice-raids.html
Posted on Sat, Jun 22nd, 2019 by Jason Easley
Nancy Pelosi Calls Out Hypocritical Evangelicals On Trump ICE Raids
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi reminded evangelical Christians of Ronald Reagan and their faith while urging them to oppose Trump’s ICE raids.
In a statement provided to PoliticusUSA, Pelosi said:
Families belong together. These families are hard-working members of our communities and our country. The President’s action makes no distinction between a status violation and committing a serious crime.
It is important that the President and our immigrant communities know that they have rights in America.
Yesterday, the President spoke about the importance of avoiding the collateral damage of 150 lives in Iran. I would hope he would apply that same value to avoiding the collateral damage to tens of thousands of children who are frightened by his actions.
The evangelical community has said that America’s refugee resettlement program is the crown jewel of American humanitarianism. I hope that they and other people of faith would convey that value to the President. As President Reagan said, ‘Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier… If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.’
Right-wing evangelicals sold out to Donald Trump long ago, but it is important for the Speaker of the House to be reminding them of their hypocrisy. Nothing will stop Trump from carrying out the raids, because he thinks that they are the key to his 2020 victory, but if evangelicals had any integrity, they would stand up to Trump and tell him that he will pay in 2020 if he carries out these raids.
Years Ago, the Border Patrol's Discipline System Was Denounced as 'Broken.' It's Still Not Fixed.
Years Ago, the Border Patrol’s Discipline System Was Denounced as “Broken.” It’s Still Not Fixed.
Gregory Bull/AP
By A.C. Thompson ProPublica
June 22, 2019 9:45 am
This article first appeared at ProPublica.
Perhaps the most far-reaching idea was to reclassify the more than 40,000 Border Patrol agents and customs officers as “national security employees,” just as all FBI agents and employees at a number of other Homeland Security agencies currently are. Taking away their status as civil servants, the thinking went, would make it easier to fire corrupt and abusive employees.
It was, to be sure, an extreme measure. But the panel, a subcommittee of a larger Homeland Security advisory council, had been created late in President Barack Obama’s second term because U.S. Customs and Border Protection seemed in crisis, and the panel subsequently determined that the agency was plagued by a system that allowed bad actors to stay on the payroll for years after they’d engaged in egregious, even criminal, misconduct. Because of civil service protections, a Border Patrol agent who’d been disciplined for bad behavior could challenge his or her punishment through four rounds of escalating appeals before taking the case to an arbitrator or a federal hearing board.
And the panel — headed by William Bratton, who had run police departments in Boston, New York City and Los Angeles — was deeply concerned about the persistent strain of lawlessness among CBP employees. In a preliminary 2015 report, the panel had noted that “arrests for corruption of CBP personnel far exceed, on a per capita basis, such arrests at other federal law enforcement agencies.” CBP, the panel’s members concluded, was “vulnerable to corruption that threatens its effectiveness and national security.”
snip//
Perhaps most significant: The panel recommended that CBP hire 350 internal affairs investigators over a three-year period and task them with looking into misconduct and corruption. So far, the agency has brought on only about 50 investigators.
Some experts on immigration and border protection fear that the prospects for lengthy and lasting reforms of CBP have dimmed under the current administration.
more...
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/years-ago-the-border-patrols-discipline-system-was-denounced-as-broken-its-still-not-fixed
Deported U.S. Veterans Feel Abandoned By The Country They Defended
Deported U.S. Veterans Feel Abandoned By The Country They Defended
Maria Ines Zamudio
June 21, 2019
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
snip//
Pérez is among hundreds of veterans who have been deported in recent years. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report revealed that an estimated 92 veterans were deported from 2013 to 2018. But the numbers are far higher, according to groups of deported veterans.
The GAO report also found that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “did not consistently follow its policies involving veterans who were placed in removal proceedings.”
Those policies include considering a veteran’s military service during removal proceedings. But Nicole Alberico, an ICE spokeswoman, said Pérez’s military service was taken into consideration when he was deported.
The U.S. Army declined to comment. A spokesperson said they don’t comment on specific cases.
Once deported, these veterans have been forced to organize and to help each other. Many say they’ve been forced to live in exile without medical care for the injuries they sustained in war. They’ve been deported to countries that feel foreign to them. It’s been decades since they’ve lived there, and some don’t even know the language.
more...
https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/deported-veterans/4bfad4a2-2407-42f2-9bf4-243fdad21510?fbclid=IwAR3_s7VP0oxZgKC_xDsh70_CrhYODyshVR4vdErD3RZU-Pz8EH9KZ6xZaFs
Cities Nationwide Refuse To Cooperate With ICE's Mass Deportation Raids
POLITICS 06/21/2019 11:04 pm ET
Cities Nationwide Refuse To Cooperate With ICE’s Mass Deportation Raids
Officials in major cities are taking a stand against President Trump’s threats for mass deportation in order to protect their immigrant residents.
By Carla Herreria
Mayors, city officials and police departments from across the country are refusing to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after seeing reports that the agency will launch sweeping deportation raids in at least 10 major cities over the weekend.
The raids, expected on Sunday, are targeting up to 2,000 migrant families who’ve received deportation orders, the Washington Post and Miami Herald reported on Friday.
ICE agents are expected carry out the deportations in cities with large immigrant communities, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York and San Francisco.
Mayors in cities that have asserted its status as so-called “sanctuary cities,” such as San Francisco, criticized the reported deportation plans and reached out to their immigrant residents offering support.
https://twitter.com/LondonBreed/status/1142178021534650370
more...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cities-nationwide-refuse-cooperate-ice-deportation-raid_n_5d0d7e80e4b07ae90d9d500e?fbclid=IwAR1pGB2j8_6TyKWNG_W5NsQKQwsobPwia7S1LMb1ask5HUsrRWS1olosQs8
Chicago mayor says city won't cooperate over reported ICE raids
Chicago mayor says city won't cooperate over reported ICE raids
By Tal Axelrod - 06/21/19 09:19 PM EDT
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) said she would take “concrete steps” to support immigrant communities after reports emerged that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would begin raids this weekend to round up families who have received deportation orders.
Lightfoot said in a statement Friday that she directed Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson to terminate ICE’s access to the Chicago Police Department’s databases related to immigration enforcement activities.
“Chicago will always be a welcoming city and a champion for the rights of our immigrant and refugee communities, and I encourage any resident in need of legal aid to contact the National Immigrant Justice Center.”
The ICE operation set to begin Sunday is reportedly expected to target up to 2,000 families facing deportation orders in up to 10 cities with large immigrant communities, including Houston, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles.
more...
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/449819-chicago-mayor-says-city-wont-cooperate-over-reported-ice-raids?fbclid=IwAR1oJnrtomAB70hjqahe5sF_7lPA0I9Kp7Srb_nMJAunV-KEuf129By21zE
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