Progressive Briefing for Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Farmers need a $12 billion bailout to offset Trump's tariffs, Ivanka Trump dumps fashion brand, new emails show the lies of Sarah Sanders, and more.

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Farmers need a $12 billion bailout from government to offset Trump’s tariffs

Donald Trump’s tariffs are having an adverse affect on farmers in the United States. As nations such as China, the European Union, Canada and Mexico have placed retaliatory tariffs on agriculture, the Trump administration’s trade war “is cutting the legs out from under farmers.”

The USDA calculated that farmers suffered close to $11 billion “as a result of ‘illegal’ retaliatory tariffs” from major nations around the world.

Ivanka Trump dumps fashion brand after her father issues security clearance threat

Shortly after White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders threatened to revoke the security clearances of former high-level officials for criticizing President Donald Trump, the president’s eldest daughter announced she is shutting down her fashion brand due to a potential conflict of interest. Instead of succeeding in bullying the intelligence community, the president merely created another wave of backlash by highlighting the difficulty of obtaining security clearances and conflicts of interest within his own administration.

Sanders says ‘big money interests’ and corporate Democrats ‘should be scared’

On the very same day that democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) rallied thousands behind two progressive congressional candidates in Kansas last week, around 250 corporate Democrats and Third Way strategists gathered behind closed doors in Ohio to discuss ways to counteract the progressive momentum embodied by Ocasio-Cortez, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, and others throughout the nation.

“There is a reason why the corporate Democrats are getting nervous,” the Vermont senator said, “and that’s because we are making real progress in transforming the party and the nation.”

Emails show Sarah Sanders lied about Pentagon being ‘fully aware’ of Trump’s warning to Syria

Newly-uncovered emails illustrate that not only was the Pentagon entirely unaware that President Donald Trump appeared to draw a new “red line” in Syria last summer, but that then-deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders lied about it.

The emails, acquired by BuzzFeed News through a Freedom of Information Act request applied for by the Democracy Forward watchdog group, confirm initial media speculation from late June 2017 that the Pentagon was left in the dark about the president’s threats to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over his alleged chemical weapons use on his own people.

Georgia lawmaker quits after dropping pants, shouting slurs on Sacha Baron Cohen show 

Georgia state Rep. Jason Spencer – who bared his buttocks and yelled racial slurs on camera in an episode of Sacha Baron Cohen’s satirical Showtime series Who Is America? – will resign from the legislature despite an earlier insistence that he would stay.

A spokesman for Georgia House Speaker David Ralston told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution late Tuesday that Spencer would step down.

In the episode of Who Is America? that aired Sunday, Spencer appears with Cohen, who poses as fictitious character ex-Israeli intelligence Capt. Erran Morad, who claims to be making an anti-terrorism video. Spencer is persuaded to use the N-word and drop his pants in what Cohen’s character describes as a demonstration of terrorism deterrence tactics.

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