How messed up are Trump Supporters?

[Angrboda]

Trump’s new immigration ad was panned as racist. Turns out it was also based on a falsehood.

The expletive-filled advertisement President Trump released this week, seemingly to raise fears about immigration in advance of the midterm elections, was widely denounced, with Democrats and even some Republicans criticizing it as racist.

But beyond the outrage, the ad was also reportedly based on a falsehood.

The 53-second video, shared by the president on Twitter, focuses on the courtroom behavior of Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant who was convicted of killing two sheriff’s deputies in California in 2014 — and repeatedly bragged about the slayings during his trial.

“Democrats let him into our country,” the ad’s script reads. “Democrats let him stay.”

Just one problem: It doesn’t appear to be true.

Bracamontes, who had been deported multiple times before his crime rampage, appears to have last entered the country while George W. Bush was president, sometime between May 2001 and February 2002, when there is a record for his marriage in Arizona, according to the Sacramento Bee.

He lived near Salt Lake City until 2014, when a methamphetamine-fueled road trip ended with him murdering two Sacramento-area deputies, according to the newspaper.

The ad also failed to mention that in 1998, Bracamontes was arrested on drug charges in Phoenix, then released by the office of then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio “for reasons unknown,” the Bee reported.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.

But in 2014, after Bracamontes surrendered in Northern California, Arpaio acknowledged that the killer had been arrested in his county, according to the Arizona Republic.

“He was booked into the jails I run for drug-related convictions,” Arpaio said at the time, according to the Republic. “He was evidently turned over to ICE and had been deported on two occasions.”

Bracamontes was deported under both Democratic and Republican presidents.

[Angrboda]

Trump’s border deployments could cost $200 million by year-end

The total price of President Trump’s military deployment to the border, including the cost of National Guard forces that have been there since April, could climb well above $200 million by the end of 2018 and grow significantly if the deployments continue into next year, according to analyst estimates and Pentagon figures.

The deployment of as many as 15,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border — potentially equal in size to the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan — occurs as the budgetary largesse the military has enjoyed since Trump took office looks set to come to an end.

Although the costs of the border deployments will be a tiny slice of a $716 billion annual defense budget, they arrive as the Trump administration is calling on the Pentagon to cut unnecessary expenditures. The White House recently ordered the Pentagon to slash next year’s budget for the military by about $33 billion in response to the largest increase in the federal deficit in six years.

Veterans and Democratic lawmakers have complained that Trump is wasting military dollars in a politically motivated stunt ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, at a time when the Pentagon budget is under pressure.

“Instead of working in a bipartisan manner to make comprehensive, common-sense, and humane reforms to our immigration system, the President continues to turn to politically-motivated fear mongering and uses [Department of Defense] resources and personnel as a means to drive his troubling anti-immigration agenda,” more than 100 House Democrats wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Nov. 1.

Retired Gen. Martin Dempsey, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the deployment as “wasteful” in a message on Twitter and said Marines and soldiers were already overstretched.

Administration officials have defended the deployment. Mattis said this week that the military doesn’t do stunts. The commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, argued that the deployment is necessary to “effectively and safely” handle the possible arrival of as many as 7,000 migrants walking toward the border in caravans from Central America.

But military planning documents, dated Oct. 27 and published by Newsweek, predicted that only 20 percent of the migrants, or about 1,400 at the higher end of estimates, were likely to complete the journey to the border, raising questions about the size of the deployment.

“The military has a lot of things that it needs to be doing these days,” said Susanna Blume, a former Pentagon official and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “Looking at estimates of the size of the caravan, you could ask the question as to whether this is the most appropriate use of U.S. active-duty forces.”

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"Hold my beer."

[arewethereyet]

GOP radio ads here are so sickening. (Here being Texas) If you were to believe them you would believe that the every single person who tries to cross the Mexican border is either a member of MS13, a rapist, or is running drugs (or some combination of the three). After all these things are listed as reasons not to let immigrants cross the border it is then pointed out that Democrats want open borders so that drug running, rapist, gang members can enter the country and terrorize the good law abiding MAGA citizens.

This has lately become the one talking point and is presented in nearly breathless, worried, mostly female voices to help spread fear.

[Amarok]

I love when they try and use the MS- 13 a group not even made up primarily of Latino's in America and ignore the fact there are gangs way bigger and just as violent . Not to mention the MS-13 aren't even drug traffickers in the states they are a street gang made up of poorer youths.

[Angrboda]

Mr. Trump’s biggest long-term challenge may be explaining how he can invoke new sanctions on Iran — which the International Atomic Energy Agency has declared is abiding by its commitments to halt nuclear production — while declaring that North Korea is “no longer a nuclear threat.”

(NY Times)

[Amarok]

Yeah considering North Korea far from disarming is expanding it arsenal .

[Angrboda]

No presidential candidate hit the isolationist drum harder than Donald Trump. His “America First” agenda reflects a belief that voters have tired of fighting wars and signing “bad” trade deals. Even Never Trumpers like the historian Robert Kagan maintain that Americans no longer want to lead, see little value in having allies, and oppose free trade. They just want to come home. As Charles Krauthammer once said, “Isolationism seems the logical, God-given foreign policy for the United States.”

There’s only one problem with the notion that Americans want to retreat from the world: They don’t. They tell pollsters they favor a broad and active role for the United States, and they have done so for decades. If anything, public support for American leadership abroad has increased as voters have seen firsthand what “America First” means in practice.

(Washington Post)

[Angrboda]

Federal judge blocks Keystone XL pipeline, saying Trump administration review ignored ‘inconvenient’ climate change facts

Morris, a former clerk to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, was appointed to the bench by President Obama.

His decision was one of scores of court rebukes to the Trump administration for decisions on the environment, immigration and transgender service in the military, among other issues, all made hastily and, in the opinions of dozens of judges, without the “reasoned consideration” required by federal law. Also on Thursday, a federal appeals court ruled that Trump cannot immediately end the program, DACA, that shields from deportation young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children.

The administration is appealing many of these rulings, and may challenge Thursday’s decision as well. The administration did not issue an immediate comment after the pipeline order.

[Whateverist]

I love when they try and use the MS- 13 a group not even made up primarily of Latino's in America and ignore the fact there are gangs way bigger and just as violent . Not to mention the MS-13 aren't even drug traffickers in the states they are a street gang made up of poorer youths.

*my bolding*

Like the white supremacist shock troops Trump applauded in Charlottesville, VA.

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Federal judge blocks Keystone XL pipeline, saying Trump administration review ignored ‘inconvenient’ climate change facts

Morris, a former clerk to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, was appointed to the bench by President Obama.

His decision was one of scores of court rebukes to the Trump administration for decisions on the environment, immigration and transgender service in the military, among other issues, all made hastily and, in the opinions of dozens of judges, without the “reasoned consideration” required by federal law. Also on Thursday, a federal appeals court ruled that Trump cannot immediately end the program, DACA, that shields from deportation young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children.

The administration is appealing many of these rulings, and may challenge Thursday’s decision as well. The administration did not issue an immediate comment after the pipeline order.

Finally some good news, not that winning back house seats wasn't appreciated mind you.

[Angrboda]

It seems that soldiers who were captured aren’t the only ones that President Trump doesn’t like. He also apparently doesn’t care much for the ones who died for their country.

On Saturday afternoon, the president was scheduled to attend a ceremony at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where 2,289 U.S. soldiers are buried — a small part of the 116,000 Americans who gave the last full measure of devotion during World War I. It was the sort of solemn occasion that U.S. presidents have considered an integral part of their duty at least since the Gettysburg Address. But Trump couldn’t be bothered.

The White House explained that bad weather grounded the helicopters that Trump and his entourage were planning to take. Yet somehow bad weather did not prevent French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from attending outdoor ceremonies commemorating the end of World War I that afternoon. Somehow bad weather did not stop Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired general John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, from attending the very ceremony that Trump could not make.

Rather than make the hour-long drive (Aisne-Marne is only 55 miles from Paris), the low-energy president remained behind at the U.S. ambassador’s residence.

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Trump shows what he really thinks of the troops by using them as political props. He deployed 5,600 troops just before the midterm elections to guard against the supposed threat posed by a few thousand unarmed refugees hundreds of miles from the U.S. border. He even suggested that the troops should commit the war crime of opening fire on migrants who threw rocks.

The Pentagon grandly dubbed this Operation Faithful Patriot and circulated pictures of troops in full “battle rattle” stringing barbed wire, only to quietly drop the ludicrous moniker amid Election Day. Conveniently enough, Trump and his friends at Fox essentially stopped speaking about the caravan once the votes were cast. But, as the New York Times reports, the troops are still in the field, without electricity or hot meals — or a mission. They will likely spend Thanksgiving away from their families.

Naturally, Trump will not bother to visit them, even though there is no risk in traveling to Texas. He still has not visited U.S. troops deployed to a war zone — although he has spent 72 days at Mar-a-Lago and 58 days at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club.

Trump shows his contempt for the men and women in uniform