The Donald Trump administration wants to change the system that allows immigration into the US. At present, being a relative of a citizen or permanent resident counts for quite a lot but they want to change it to a so-called ‘merit-based’ system. This is because while family relationships were considered good qualities when the family members coming in were mostly white and from Europe, demographics in the US have changed and there are now many more people of color and efforts are being made to keep America white by making family relationships less salient. Trump himself has made no secret of the fact that while he talks of merit, in his mind that means ‘white’.
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I have written before about the abuse of taxpayer money by the head of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt who seems to not only have delusions of grandeur that makes him want to live in luxury at taxpayer expense, he also seems to be paranoid, demanding all manner of security protections despite being one of the more obscure cabinet members. But what is most dangerous in terms of public policy is that he is a religious extremist.
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It looks like Donald Trump’s choice to be ambassador to Germany has got off to a great start, peremptorily telling his host nation that they had better get in line or else. As Robert Mackey writes, Richard Grenell took up his post on Tuesday, the day that Trump announced his withdrawal from the Iran deal, and immediately sent out a tweet saying ” As @realDonaldTrump said, US sanctions will target critical sectors of Iran’s economy. German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.”
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A member of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, who happens to be a Sikh who wears the traditional turban, was singled out for extra scrutiny by US officials at the Detroit airport as he was returning to Canada after an official visit to the US.

Officials from the Trump administration issued an apology after a security agent at a Detroit airport repeatedly demanded that a Canadian cabinet minister remove his turban, the minister has revealed.

Navdeep Bains, the country’s minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, described the incident in an interview with the French-language paper La Presse on Thursday.

Bains was returning to Toronto after meetings with Michigan state leaders in April 2017 and had already passed through regular security checks, but because he was wearing a turban, a security agent told him that he would have to undergo additional checks, according to La Presse.

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Ray McGovern is a 27-year veteran of the CIA who worked at high levels in the White House of George H. W. Bush, but who has since become a vocal critic of what he sees as the wrong policies of the CIA and the US government. See what happens to him when he protests at the hearing for torture-lover and war criminal Gina Haspel’s nomination to head the CIA. The brutality and sheer excessive force shown to a 78-year old man simply for speaking out is disgusting to see.
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You would think that an election system that allows people to vote for the person who most closely represents their views would be the one that is preferred. A system that comes close to this ideal is the preferential voting system where people rank order their votes for the candidates. After the first round of counting of only first place votes, if no candidate gets an outright majority of 50% plus one vote, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated and the second choice votes of those who gave that person their first choice are then added to the totals of the remaining candidates. This process goes on until one candidate wins a majority. In this system, no vote is ‘wasted’ in the sense of people voting for someone who has little chance of winning, because their other preferences still count.
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Gina Haspel, a person with an infamous history or torture in the CIA, has been nominated to head that agency. Glenn Greenwald writes that it should be an easy call for Democrats to oppose her nomination and help kill it. But that may not happen because there will may well be a few defectors who vote with Republicans to confirm her.
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