Authored by Satyajit Das, originally posted at Bloomberg.com, Around the world, a generational divide is worsening…   Edmund Burke saw society as a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. A failure to understand this relationship underlies a disturbing global tendency in recent decades, in which the appropriation of future wealth and resources for current consumption is increasingly disadvantaging future generations. Without a commitment to addressing this inequity, social tensions in many societies will rise sharply. Central to the issue is that the rapid rise in living standards and prosperity of the past 50Read More →

Meuller has a personal and professional relationship with Comey. They are and have long been allies. Comey regards his predecessor at the FBI as a mentor, while Mueller considers Comey his protégé.   The law governing the special counsel (28 CFR 600.7) specifically prohibits Mueller from serving if he has a conflict of interest in the case. The rule has been interpreted to mean that even the appearance of a conflict is sufficient for disqualification! So what constitutes a conflict;  “a personal relationship with any person substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution” (28 CFR 45.2). Comey is that person.  Mueller has no choiceRead More →

Vladimir Putin, when speaking in a live call-in show with the Russian nation, the Russian president likened Comey to Edward Snowden, who was granted asylum in Russia in 2013, and scoffed at James Comey’s disclosure of his conversations with U.S. President Donald Trump, saying the move has made Comey eligible for political asylum in Russia. “It looks weird when the chief of a security agency records his conversation with the commander-in-chief and then hands it over to media via his friend,” Putin was quoted by Russia’s Tass. “This is strange. How then is the director of the FBI any different from Snowden? He is notRead More →

Yes There Was “Obstruction Of Justice” And Much Worse!! The obstruction of justice occurred before and during the 2016 presidential election. The Obama Administration,  Barak Obama, Loretta Lynch, James Comey, and Hillary Clinton, not only conspired to obstruct justice, they did so to conceal treasonous bribery and nefarious deals that were at the expense of United States national security. Why a Hillary Clinton private email server? Employing and vetting an IT staff is not a convenience. It is obvious to all. The only reason to keep the email server in her house was to be able to make the incriminating 33,000 emails disappear. To beRead More →

Gold Near Post-Election Highs As Crude Tests 2017 Lows:: Bitcoin Extends Overnight Gains, Rises 200% Year-To-Date       With Treasury yields at their lowest since the election, it appears a shift towards safe-havens (or Trumpflation unwinds) is well underway. Gold is nearing $1300 this morning – its highest since the election. WTI Crude has sunk back to a $47 handle, ignoring dollar weakness. Bitcoin’s rally, with the value of the virtual currency doubling against the U.S. dollar since early May.     Redpilled Nation Thanks to the explosive growth of alternative media, the public has been able to educate themselves on topics such as high level collusion, MSM propaganda, the mechanicsRead More →

A newly released court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) found that the National Security Agency, under former President Obama, routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall.  In describing the violations, the FISA court said the illegal searches conducted by the NSA under Obama were “widespread” and created a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.” These new discoveries come from a recently unsealed FISA court document dated April 26, 2017 and center around a hearing dated October 26, 2017, justRead More →

“Adam Smith: “In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest.”   So saving a penny by purchasing a cheaper imported product and causing your neighbor to become unemployed necessitating you to either subsidize his existence at a cost greater than your savings or watch him starve to death reducing your ability to protect your nation is in your own best interest?   Let’s assume a very expensive complicated product with many inputs of labor. A jumbo jet, a fighter jet, or a locomotive engine.Read More →

Authored by Cyril Widdershoven via OilPrice.com, Political instability in Saudi Arabia is growing as King Salman bin Abdulaziz begins to overhaul the Saudi government, putting a long list of family members into positions of influence while increasing the power of his son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. These actions have the potential to lead to a direct conflict with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. The expected internal power collision, predicted by many analysts, finally seems to be heating up. The real surprise, however, is that it is taking place while King Salman is still alive rather than during the succession period. King Salman’s royalRead More →

1. Venn Diagram of the Day (above). Inspired by the March 6, 2013 article Salon article titled “Hugo Chavez’s economic miracle” (by David Sirota), here’s a slice: Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism at once represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics, and also delivered some indisputably positive results. As I wrote more than 20 years ago: In the same way that a Ponzi scheme or chain letter initially succeeds but eventually collapses, socialism may show early signs of success. But any accomplishments quickly fade as the fundamental deficiencies of central planning emerge. It is theRead More →

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, When “socialist” states have to impose finance-capital extremes that even exceed the financialization of nominally capitalist economies, it gives the lie to their claims of “socialism.” OK, so our collective eyes start glazing over when we see Marx and Orwell in the subject line, but refill your beverage and stay with me on this. We’re going to explore the premise that what’s called “socialism”–yes, Scandinavian-style socialism and its variants–is really nothing more than finance-capital state-cartel elitism that has done a better job of co-opting its debt-serfs than its state-cartel “capitalist” cronies. We have to start with the questionRead More →

Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com, The dwindling credit of Turkey and significant decline in its currency, has led to the new clever idea of confiscating gold with a smile. The Turkish Central Bank has come up with an idea of how to confiscate private gold while pretending they are helping you earn more money. Their objective is to make the private gold stocks of the citizens available to the financial system for themselves, but how to sell that to the people? The Turkish central bank is launching two new investment opportunities for physical gold, according to reports in the Daily Sabah. They are issuingRead More →

China Bans North Korean Coal! In a show of solidarity with the U.S. against North Korea, China has stopped buying coal from the communist regime after last week’s missile test. Now, they’re importing more coal from the United States. This decision comes after President Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last week, where the administration said North Korea’s missile tests would be a top priority in the talks, according to a report in the Washington Examiner. On Tuesday, it was reported that “China’s customs department ordered all companies that receive imports from North Korea to immediately return all coal cargoes,Read More →

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, Trying to reduce the carefully choreographed drama to one stage and one audience risks misunderstanding the signal. It seems many media observers are confused by events in Syria and the swirl of competing narratives. Did the Swamp drain Trump? Did the Neocons succeed in forcing Trump to follow their lead? Is the U.S. ramping up yet another endless war? Consider the possibility that none of these narratives actually get to the heart of what’s going on. To make sense of all this, we’re going to have to delve into topics far below today’s headlines. I think Ilargi (TheRead More →

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com, There is a really big crisis coming. Think about it this way. After 8 years and a 230% stock market advance the pension funds of Dallas, Chicago, and Houston are in severe trouble. But it isn’t just these municipalities that are in trouble, but also most of the public and private pensions that still operate in the country today. Currently, many pension funds, like the one in Houston, are scrambling to slightly lower return rates, issue debt, raise taxes or increase contribution limits to fill some of the gaping holes of underfunded liabilities in their plans. The hope isRead More →

Roger Bate Western regulators have found evidence of it, scholars unearthed empirical support for it, but now even the lead lobbyist for its industry admits it; most Indian medicines are not equivalent to the medicines they copy. People walk past a chemist shop at a market in Mumbai, India, June 24, 2014. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui. DG Shah, the head of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance has written an eye-opening column on the many failings of India’s laws and medicine. As Shah explains, Indian law stipulates that products launched within four years of first approval are required to establish bioequivalence. But after four years, any manufacture can launchRead More →

Once again it appears that Trump was right: the conspiracy theory that a close Obama associate worked to “unmask” the Trump team, resulting in the ongoing media spectacle over “collusion” between Trump and the Kremlin, has been confirmed, first by Mike Cernovich, and now by Bloomberg itself.   As noted last night, Journalist and author Mike Cernovich dropped an exclusive bombshell – naming Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice as the official responsible for the ‘unmasking’ of the incoming Trump team during ‘incidental’ surveillance. This was apparently discovered after the White House Counsel’s office reviewed Rice’s document log requests: The reports Rice requested to see areRead More →

Hillary Plans On Setting A Reporter Straight…. Recently released Huma Abedin State Department emails – acquired by Judicial Watch via FOIA request, reveal Clinton State Department staff planning to summon New York Times reporter David Brooks for an “OTR” (off the record) conversation over a “shot” he took at Hillary in a Feburary 2010 article. This isn’t the first time we’ve learned of the Democrat apparatus wrapping their tentacles around the MSM, and it’s the second time in weeks Judicial Watch has delivered a bombshell. They’re doing good work. In summary; Hillary Clinton – code named “Evergreen,” fired off an email on February 9th, 2010 to advisors Philippe Reines and Jake Sullivan regarding an articleRead More →

by Tyler Durden Apr 1, 2017 7:09 PM The Russian central bank opened its first overseas office in Beijing on March 14, marking a step forward in forging a Beijing-Moscow alliance to bypass the US dollar in the global monetary system, and to phase-in a gold-backed standard of trade. According to the South China Morning Post the new office was part of agreements made between the two neighbours “to seek stronger economic ties” since the West brought in sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine crisis and the oil-price slump hit the Russian economy. According to Dmitry Skobelkin, the deputy governor of the Central Bank ofRead More →

Evelyn Farkas admits that Trump Team was under Surveillance, “wiretapped” by Obama Administration!!!! EVELYN FARKAS: …that the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more. We have very good intelligence on Russia. So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues, and I knew that they were tryingRead More →

This month, Harvard Ph.D. Jerome Corsi of InfoWars (@jerome_corsi) and a CPA “who worked for two years for a major U.S. accounting firm as an outside auditor for Freddie Mac,” confirmed a 2012 scheme hatched by the Obama administration to funnel hundreds of billions in dividends from Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prop up the failing Obamacare program – by paying subsidies to insurers to remain in the system. In fact, House Republicans actually sued the Obama Administration in 2014 over the fact that the subsidies to insurers weren’t appropriated by congress and won, which the Obama administration appealed. In 2014, House Republicans sued the Obama administration over the constitutionality ofRead More →

Authored by Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at Wolf Street Here’s Why Italy’s Banking Crisis Has Gone Off the Radar For a country that is on the brink of a gargantuan public bailout of its toxic-loan riddled banking sector, or failing that, a full-blown financial crisis that could bring down the European financial system, things are eerily quiet in Italy these days. It’s almost as if the more serious the crisis gets, the less we hear about it — otherwise, investors and voters might get spooked. And elections are coming up. But an article published in the financial section of Italian daily Il Sole laysRead More →

As the Atlanta Journal Constitution points out today, the Trump administration has until May 22nd to decide whether they will continue to pursue the Obama administration’s appeal to provide subsidies to insurers who participate in the federal exchanges. Of course, any decision to remove those subsidies would likely result in yet another massive round of premium hikes and further withdrawals from the already crippled exchanges where an astounding number of counties across the country have already been cut to just 1 health insurance provider.  And, as we’ve pointed out before, higher rates = lower participation = deterioration of risk pool = higher rates….and the cycleRead More →

Since 1985, the state has provided healthcare for retired teachers through a plan called TRS Care. As of last year, 261,500 retired teachers, dependents and their surviving spouses, according to the State Comptroller. But in recent years medical costs have risen higher than what the state contributes to TRS Care leaving the fund with more than a billion dollar shortfall now. “At its creation in 1985, TRS-Care was expected to remain solvent for just 10 years, with the understanding that additional funding or benefit changes would be necessary to maintain the plan. Its funding formula hasn’t changed since 2005, however, and hasn’t kept pace withRead More →

John Podesta, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 national campaign chairman, may have violated federal law by failing to disclose the receipt of 75,000 shares of stock from a Kremlin-financed company when he joined the Obama White House in 2014, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. Joule Unlimited Technologies — financed in part by a Russian firm —  originally awarded Podesta 100,000 shares of stock options when in 2010 he joined that board along with its Dutch-based entities: Joule Global Holdings, BV and the Stichting Joule Global Foundation. When Podesta announced his departure from the Joule board in January 2014 toRead More →

Authored by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, No leader can reverse the dynamics of mutually reinforcing crises. Commentators seem split into three camps: those who see Trump as a manifestation of smouldering social/economic ills, those who see Trump and his supporters as the cause of those ills, and those who see Trump as both manifestation and cause of those ills. I think this misses the point, which is the overlapping crises unfolding in this decade– diminishing returns on skyrocketing debts, the demographics of an aging populace, the erosion of the social contract and the profound disunity of political elites–will continue expanding and feeding on eachRead More →

The story behind this Podesta-Russia link is explained in full gore by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog; dot connectors, Twitter diagram creators and newly minted Russia-conspiracy sleuths from sea to shining sea take note.   Since anything connected to Russia is now considered treasonous, I’ve got a great story for you to sniff out. It relates to John Podesta, but somehow I doubt you’ll be interested in this one… The Daily Caller reports: John Podesta, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 national campaign chairman, may have violated federal law by failing to disclose the receipt of 75,000 shares of stock from a Kremlin-financed companyRead More →

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Despite endless streams of Fed Speakers proclaiming, in one form or another, that “we are at, or close to, full employment;” many in America – judging by the election of President Trump – are not feeling as exuberant as the jobs data implies they should be. The SF Fed itself now agrees: “the labor market may not be quite as tight as the headline unemployment rate suggests.” As we detailed previously, between 1948 and 2015, the work rate for U.S. men twenty and older fell from 85.8 percent to 68.2 percent. Thus the proportion of American men twenty and older without paid work more thanRead More →

Authored by MN Gordon via Acting-Man.com, Onward vs. Upward Something both unwanted and unexpected has tormented western economies in the 21st century.  Gross domestic product (GDP) has moderated onward while government debt has spiked upward.  Orthodox economists continue to be flummoxed by what has transpired.   What happened to the miracle? The Keynesian wet dream of an unfettered fiat debt money system has been realized, and debt has been duly expanded at every opportunity.  Although the fat lady has so far only cleared her throat (if quite audibly, in 2008) and hasn’t really sung yet, it is already clear that calling this system careening towardRead More →

Along with the student loan debt bubble and other major financial factors, the looming pensions crisis is bound to be the death of us all. Because it’s based on a future promise to pay, it has long been a benefit dangled to solve strikes and union disputes – because, in the end, it is just more debt, whether private or public. With tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities, the weight of an avalanche remains dangling over our heads. An aging population is cashing in on needed retirement benefits while the younger generations must support multiples that are unsustainable financially. Somewhere between the retiree that needsRead More →

Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, has confirmed that it hired the consultancy of Tony Podesta, the elder brother of John Podesta who chaired Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for lobbying its interests in the United States and proactively seeking the removal of various Obama-era sanctions, the press service of the Russian institution told TASS on Thursday. “The New York office of Sberbank CIB indeed hired Podesta Group. Engagement of external consultants is part of standard business practices for us,” Sberbank said. Podesta is one of the Democrat’s highest profile lobbyists who enjoys close personal and business connections to former Presidents Obama and Bill Clinton. John Podesta wasRead More →

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The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has won the unfortunate award for “First Pension to Officially Run Out of Money.”  According to the New York Daily News, and a host of angry former truck drivers who’ve had their pension benefits slashed, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) has officially been forced to step in and take over payments to retirees of the Local 707, albeit at a much lower rate. Teamsters Local 707’s pension fund is the first to officially bottom out financially — which happened this month.   “I had a union job for 30 years,” Chmil said. “We hadRead More →

Humans beings appear to be hardwired to have a sense of fairness. This is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective, which you would have thought would mean we were predisposed to seek advantage for ourselves and our families wherever possible. But in fact a sense of fairness is important for humans to be able to help each other. Human cooperation is based on reciprocal altruism – we help people because they’ve either helped us in the past or they may help us in the future. This form of cooperation is only possible when individuals are able to keep track of other individuals’ efforts and payoffs –Read More →

Foreign and Defense Policy, Middle East, Terrorism Back in September, I testified before the House Financial Services Committee on the allegation that the Obama administration had paid Iran a ransom—at the time it was believed to be $400 million but it was later revealed that the figure was more than three times that amount—in cash for the release of American hostages held by Iran. At the hearing, it is now clear that State Department officials lied outright to the committee. But, lest there be any question about how the Iranian government perceived the payment received from the United States, Hossein Nejat, deputy Intelligence Director ofRead More →

Democrats Pick A Racist To Head DNC Perez Dropped Voter Intimidation Charges Against Black Panthers Who Brought Weapons to a Polling Place…Perez Doesn’t Think White People Are Protected Under the Voting Rights Act An investigation into the Civil Rights Division by the Department of Justice’s inspector general revealed extreme views held by Perez. He told investigators that white people were not entitled to protection under the Voting Rights Act. Perez revealed to investigators that he saw the Voting Rights Act as only providing protection to specific, historic minorities, not all citizens:Read More →

Submitted by Daniel Mitchell via The Foundation for Economic Education, Early last month, in a column on my hopes and fears for 2017, I fretted about fiscal chaos in Italy leading to default and bailouts. Simply stated, I fear that Italy, along with certain other “Club Med” nations, has passed the point of no return in terms of big government, demographic decline, and societal dependency. And this means that, sooner or later, the proverbial wheels are going to fall off the bus. And it might be sooner. On Shaky Ground I don’t always agree with his policy recommendations, but I regularly read Desmond Lachman ofRead More →

  Once a past CO2 cycle was started, what was the limiting factor that ended that then current warming cycle? Why has there been no “runaway” warming previously as the past self-feeding cycle of co2 took control? Since CO2 historically is a trailing “indicator”, it is a dependent variable to the change in temperature, with the world’s oceans acting as a reservoir, why do you now state that it is the independent variable and temperature has become the dependent variable. What caused the reversal? “Fifty five million years ago, there were more than 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” saidRead More →

The State Senate of Tennessee has laid the legislative groundwork for something that hasn’t been done in the United States of America since the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia.  With a vote of 27-3, the Tennessee Senate has voted to call a “convention of the states” in order to draft and pass an amendment to the Constitution that would require balanced budgets to be passed every year. For those who are little fuzzy on their high school U.S. history knowledge, the Tennessean explains that the U.S. Constitution can be amended in two ways.  The first would require a two-thirds majority vote in both chambersRead More →

For the past several months we’ve warned that the taxpayers of the City of Dallas, despite all of the tough talk coming out of their elected city council members, would ultimately be forced to bail out the failing Dallas Police and Fire Pension (DPFP) system.  And just last night the DPFP board voted 9-0 to approve a plan that would do just that. The plan to save the DPFP was proposed by Dan Flynn, chair of the pensions committee in the Texas House of Representatives, and calls for Dallas taxpayers to contribute 34.5% of police and firefighter salaries each year into the failing pension system,Read More →

This is How States Will Take Your Pension All emphasis ours written by Soren K and MarketSlant  with contributions by Vince Lanci of Echobay.com Are you watching closely CT, IL, NJ etc? The table is now set for you to have your pension violated for the greater good. Are you paying attention? Someone is deciding that you must decrease your standard of living on behalf of someone else because the state of CT in its infinite ignorance messed up. Will this proposal go thru? Probably not. But this is just the first salvo. Government bureaucrats always seek to make nice with everyone. Therefore a “compromise” will follow. LeadersRead More →

Thousands of WordPress Sites Hacked Using Recently Disclosed Vulnerability Tuesday, February 07, 2017 Swati Khandelwal  21.4K  3037  1158  26.1K Last week, we reported about a critical zero-day flaw in WordPress that was silently patched by the company before hackers have had their hands on the nasty bug to exploit millions of WordPress websites. To ensure the security of millions of websites and its users, WordPress delayed the vulnerability disclosure for over a week and worked closely with security companies and hosts to install the patch, ensuring that the issue was dealt with in short order before it became public. But even after the company’s effortRead More →

During a lively discussion centered on fears that President Trump is “trying to undermine the media,” MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski let slip the awesome unspoken truth that the media’s “job” is to “actually control exactly what people think.”   SCARBOROUGH: “Exactly. That is exactly what I hear. What Yamiche said is what I hear from all the Trump supporters that I talk to who were Trump voters and are still Trump supporters. They go, ‘Yeah you guys are going crazy. He’s doing — what are you so surprised about? He is doing exactly what he said he is going to do.’”   BRZEZINSKI: “Well, I thinkRead More →

Through the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party  (the major media, “fake news” providers) a narrative has emerged with the goal of foisting on the American people the idea that President Trump is in bed with Russia’s Putin plotting the destruction of America.. This is the definition of the lefts new catch phrase “gaslightening”…Trumps’ desire to get along and establish a dialogue with a nation that posses enough nuclear weapons to obliterate mankind a few times over would seem like the sane and responsible actions of a President.. ask your Democratic friends why this is wrong?  They will have no answer because there is noRead More →

If you are celebrating the political damage Flynn’s resignation represents to President Trump, you should rethink what just happened. The attack and plan to remove Flynn, the so called investigation conducted by the CIA, FBI, and NSA, began as soon as it was apparent that Flynn would be NSA Advisor. Flynn was the spear point to Trump’s national security policy. He was charged with and was enthusiastically about to attempt to reform the US Intelligence Community. The groups that gave us Weapons of Mass Destruction, ISIS, and decades  of Global American military adventurism.. They represent the Military – Industrial Complex Eisenhower warned us about. HeRead More →

Submitted by Shaun Bradley via TheAntiMedia.org, In the shadow of Donald Trump’s spree of controversial actions, the European commission has quietly launched the next offensive in the war on cash. These unelected bureaucrats have boldly asserted their intention to crack down on paper transactions across the E.U. and solidify a trend that has been gaining momentum for years. The financial uncertainty amplified by Brexit has incentivized governments throughout Europe to seize further control over their banking systems. France and Spain have already criminalized cash transactions above a certain limit, but now the commission has unilaterally established new regulations that will affect the entire union. TheRead More →

When Do We Begin To Hold The Teachers Union Accountable???   1. Table of the Day I (above) shows a comparison of some key statistics in 1980 and 2014 for public elementary and secondary schools in the US based on data from the National Center for Educational Statistics here. During the 34-year period between 1980-2014, the number of public school students increased by 22.6% (and by 9.25 million). Over the same period, total staff headcount increased by 50.1% (and by 2.1 million), led by an 88.1% increase in school district administrative staff and followed by a 54.1% increase in instructional staff which included a 63.1%Read More →

Because It Is Wrong. The Facts::: Trump, or any president can ban Muslims or any other group of people. He can do so by asserting powers under the United States Code and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which is the nation’s main immigration act. Under Title 8, Section 1182 of the U.S. Code, the president has authority to use a proclamation to suspend the entry of “any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States [who] would be detrimental to the interests of the United States,” for however long he deems necessary. This provision was included in the Immigration andRead More →

There is a reason the Constitution vests “the executive power” in a single person, the president. To read it otherwise is to invite the kind of chaos in executing the nation’s laws that the founders were determined to avoid. Ms. Yates’ correct path was to resign, if she felt as strongly as she did about the ban. However, she didn’t. She was canned because she refused to have the Justice Department defend the White House’s executive order temporarily putting a hold on entry into the US for citizens and refugees from seven Muslim-dominant countries. which was her job to do.. Although Ms. Yates stated sheRead More →