general political shit

The United States of America is now a more imperfect union.

The Democracy Index has downgraded the U.S. from a full democracy to a flawed one, marking the first time the nation has fallen into the lower ranking.

Other flawed democracies include Botswana, India, Japan and Ghana, while much of Western Europe stayed in the full democracy category.

Americans’ growing distrust in their government, elected officials and the media prompted the demotion, the Economist Intelligence Unit — the UK-based economic firm that produces the annual index — wrote in a Wednesday report.

The revolution will definitely be tweeted. On Wednesday morning—a day after the official Twitter account for Badlands National Park went rogue and started dropping actual scientific facts—it seems that Death Valley National Park has joined the resistance.

At 7:09 a.m. this morning, the national park's account started talking about World War II-era internment camps:

Since the inauguration of Donald Trump to the White House on Jan. 20, various government bodies have, with varying degrees of subtlety, pushed back on Twitter against the new US president’s stances on certain issues. Trump has said that global warming is “bullshit,” and referred to it as a conspiracy created by China. Some arms of government have chosen to disagree with the president, stating provable facts on Twitter.

On Friday, the day of Trump’s inauguration, the National Parks Service (NPS) retweeted a series of tweets highlighting the relatively meagre turnout for the president’s swearing-in, and critiquing the White House for removing information from its websites on a range of issues.

A few hours later, it seems that someone within the Trump administration noticed. The retweets were removed, and the Parks Service Twitter account stopped tweeting for a while. It was resurrected the next day, apologizing for the retweets.

On Monday, Jan. 23, the Department of Defense sent out a tweet about the connection of social media activity to a person’s mental health that some on the internet believed might be an oblique reference to Trump...

But today, one federal agency seemed to be blatantly undermining Trump administration policy. Seemingly in spite of what happened to the main National Parks Twitter account, the account for the Badlands National Park (situated in South Dakota), tweeted out a series of facts about global warming: They ranged from the fact that the level of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere is at the highest it’s been in the last half-million years, to what burning gasoline does to the atmosphere, and how much more acidic our oceans have become as a result of climate change. Some Twitter users recognized the risk immediately:

In taking his first step towards building a US-Mexico border wall, US president Donald Trump begins an attack on a vanishing issue. Today, Trump signed an executive order to direct federal resources to build a wall intended to staunch the flow of Mexican immigrants entering the US illegally.
In reality, undocumented immigration from Mexico to the US is less of an issue that it has been in over 40 years. And more recently, due to a growing Mexican economy, the number of people attempting to cross the US-Mexico border fell precipitously over the last 15 years. Since 2007, the total number of Mexican immigrants in the US has actually been on the decline.

Flammarcos wrote:whatever happened to mexico paying for the wall

samoyed wrote:wasn't the paying for the wall plan supposed to be trump increasing prices on mexican goods and taking the cash that was being sent back to mexico
that would count as mexico paying
i doubt he expected them to cough up a lump sump

Flammarcos wrote:trump is aping out about mexico having no intention to pay for the wall though he says if they won't pay for the wall they shouldn't come to the meeting and it's like ok bitch bye because they have no reason to

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.

Tillerson was actually inside the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land. I reported Wednesday morning that the Trump team was narrowing its search for his No. 2, and that it was looking to replace the State Department’s long-serving undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy, who has been in that job for nine years, was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep that job under Tillerson, three State Department officials told me.

Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career Foreign Service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

[In his first major TV interview as president, Trump is endlessly obsessed with his popularity]

Kennedy will retire from the Foreign Service at the end of the month, officials said. The other officials could be given assignments elsewhere in the Foreign Service.

In addition, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr retired Jan. 20, and the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, Lydia Muniz, departed the same day. That amounts to a near-complete housecleaning of all the senior officials that deal with managing the State Department, its overseas posts and its people.

“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”