An Army official said green card holders cannot enlist in the Army Reserve “for the time being,” responding to a Mic report from Tuesday about previously unreported changes to Army recruitment policies.The change is due to a Department of Defense policy announced Friday, which requires green card holders to have completed background checks before shipping off to basic training. Kelli Bland, director of public affairs at the U.S. Army Recruiting Command, said green card holders can still enlist as active duty members of the Army. Read more.Source: mic.comGreen cardArmy ReserveArmyTrumpDonald Trump
Appearing before the press Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump announced he was considering lifting the so-called Jones Act, a 1920 maritime law preventing foreign ships from bringing much-needed aid to the storm-struck island of Puerto Rico. “We’re thinking about [lifting the Jones Act],” Trump said. “But we have a lot of shipments and a lot of people that work in the industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted, and we have a loft of ships out now.” Read more.
President Donald Trump’s approval rating is on the upswing, now standing at 41% in the RealClearPolitics average — an uptick pollsters say is attributed to how voters view his response to the recent spate of devastating hurricanes as well as bipartisan deals to fund the government.However, while Trump’s approval rating is better than the dismal 37% low he faced last month, it’s still bad compared to his recent predecessors.Read more.Source: mic.comTrumpDonald Trumppollinghurricanes
President Donald Trump will “totally destroy North Korea” if it threatens the United States or its allies, he said in his first address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump said. “‘Rocket Man’ is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime.” Read more. Source: ift.ttTrumpNorth KoreaUN speech
On Tuesday, the first president in generations to question whether America should be a world leader will offer his first address to the United Nations. President Donald Trump already said Monday he wants to, “make the United Nations great.” His speech will focus on reforming the U.N. to have more buy-in from member nations by urging “burden sharing” among the world’s countries. And a cornerstone of Trump’s speech will be a push for resolution of the North Korean threat. The White House said Trump will urge nations to not be “bystanders in history” and join the U.S. in pressuring North Korea to end its nuclear program. Read more.
It’s been 231 days since Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States. In that time, nearly half of Republicans in Congress have still not held a public town hall with constituents.That’s according to the latest data from Town Hall Project, a group that tracks when and if members of Congress hold a public town hall.The August recess, in particular, is typically a time when representatives and senators meet with constituents. Read more. Source: mic.comRepublicansDonald TrumpTrumptown hall
Through early August, grassroots groups helped face down four versions of health care bills supported by the White House and Republican leaders in both chambers of Congress. Though deeply unpopular with Americans, one of those proposals cleared the House and another came just one vote short of advancing in the Senate. Now, those same groups have six months to pressure Congress to pass legislation aimed at protecting the estimated 800,000 undocumented immigrants whose statuses have been thrown into limbo by the Trump administration’s recent decision to end the program designed to protect them. Read more.
Eleven states along with the District of Columbia filed suit against President Donald Trump on Wednesday over his decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to live, work and attend school in America.Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson — who sued the Trump administration earlier this year over the travel ban — announced the lawsuit, saying Trump’s decision to end DACA infringes on people’s constitutional right to due process and equal protection. Read more.Source: mic.comDistrict of ColumbiaTrumpDonald TrumpDACA
Voters who backed President Donald Trump are “uneasy” with the fact that the U.S. is “becoming more diverse and tolerant of different lifestyles, gender roles, languages, cultures and experiences,” according to an NBC/Wall Street Journalpoll published Wednesday. While 55% of all voters say they are comfortable with those changes, that number plummets among Trump voters and Republicans, according to the poll. Read more.TrumpDonald Trumpvotingdiversityrace
The significance of President Donald Trump’s recent remarks on deadly white supremacist violence in Virginia cannot be overstated.
After an attack at the “Unite the Right” rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, left one dead and more than a dozen injured, Trump condemned the rally’s Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi participants. But just a day later, he suggested that some of the Klansmen and Nazis were good people, and that the anti-racist counterprotesters also deserved blame for the chaos.
In several tweets, Trump has fawned over monuments to pro-slavery Confederates — statues that many communities have taken down in the wake of the Charlottesville attack. The president tweeted his compliments Saturday to an estimated 40,000 anti-racist counterprotesters in Boston who peacefully opposed a small-by-comparison “free speech” rally. Read more.
The Trump administration last week halted a government study regarding possible health risks associated with living near surface coal mining sites, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine announced on Monday.
“In an Aug. 18 letter, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement informed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that it should cease all work on a study of the potential health risks for people living near surface coal mine sites in Central Appalachia,” the NASEM said in a news release.
The NASEM had been given a $1 million grant last August from the Office of Surface Reclamation and Enforcement — a government agency within the Department of the Interior — for a two-year study of the potential health risks on those living near surface coal mines in central Appalachia. The grant came at the request of the state of West Virginia. Read more.
President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday to defend “beautiful statues and monuments” to the slave-owning confederate states amidst a national effort to remove those statues from public grounds.
“Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” the president tweeted Thursday. “You can’t change history, but you can learn from it.”
Echoing similar comments on the statues Trump made Tuesday, the president went on to suggest that removing those monuments to the confederate states — who rebelled to defend their right to own black people as slaves — was a slippery slope to removing statues of slave-owning founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Read more. (8/17/2017)
As outcry continues to mount over Trump’s comments, an outstanding question for many Americans is one about policy: What, if anything, will the federal government do to help combat far-right white extremism?
The Obama Administration had implemented at least the beginnings of such a plan but, in late June, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security eliminated a federal grant of $400,000 for Life After Hate, a nonprofit working to de-radicalize neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
The decision received only minimal attention at the time, but has now been thrust into the limelight as Trump’s comments on Tuesday raise renewed questions over how his administration will respond to the violence which directly led to one death and 19 injuries in Charlottesville over the weekend. Read more (8/16/17)
On Wednesday, Virginia Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam strongly condemned Trump’s Tuesdayremarks equating anti-racist counterprotesters with the violent white nationalists.
“They were deplorable,” Northam said of Trump’s comments. “White supremacists and neo-Nazis came to Charlottesville for violence. There’s no question about that. And for the president to say there were ‘different sides’ [responsible for] this — there was only one side, and that was the white supremacists that came into Charlottesville.”
Northam, who is running for Virginia governor on the Democratic ticket, said Trump revealed “his true colors” when he suggested a moral equivalency between the far-right demonstrators and what Trump termed the “alt-left.” Read more (8/6/17 4 PM)
Following a wave of high-profile resignation from Trump’s two primary CEO councils, Trump tweeted Wednesday he was dissolving both the American Manufacturing Council and the Strategic and Policy Forum.
“Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both,” he tweeted. “Thank you all!
The dissolution of the two councils deals a major blow to Trump’s mandate as a leader who would use his business acumen to steer the nation toward economic prosperity. Read more (8/16/17 2:05 PM)
Though Trump tweeted that the decision to disband the groups was his, the Wall Street Journal reported that the industry leaders had chosen to disband before the president’s tweet.
According to the Journal, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Blackstone Group LP Chief Executive and leader of Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, call the president on Wednesday to tell him the group was disbanding. Read more (8/16/17 4 PM)
