So, who thought you'd ever go to an airport and feel good about it?

America, you're beautiful!

Airport after airport, city after city, nationwide and showing no signs of stopping THE PEOPLE protested.

Dallas:

Boston

Seattle

Muslim Ban Reviewed By No One

The New Yorker

The Presidential order that Donald Trump signed on Friday barring all refugees and citizens from seven Muslim countries from travel to the United States was reviewed by virtually no one. The State Department did not help craft it, nor the Defense Department, nor Justice. Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly, “saw the final details shortly before the order was finalized,” CNN reported. Early Saturday morning, there were reports that two Iraqi refugees had been detained upon their arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport. When a lawyer for the men asked an official to whom he needed to speak to fix the situation, the official said, “Ask Mr. Trump.” This sounded like a sign of straight goonery and incipient authoritarianism; maybe it was. But it also may have been the only reasonable answer. Few people understood what was going on.

The order claims to protect Americans from “foreign terrorist entry,” but that was no reason for it. A wealth of data shows that immigrants from those countries have not been responsible for fatal terrorist attacks in the United States. At first, the acting spokesperson of the Department of Homeland Security said that the order would not apply to permanent residents of the United States. This seemed to be a sensible assumption; as fevered as the talk over immigration has been on the right, few have threatened a mass revocation of the rights of green-card holders. But a senior White House official later said that green-card holders would have to undergo screenings. Morally outrageous scenes followed. Homeland Security officials said that at least a hundred people had been prevented from entering the country, and many more had been stopped from boarding planes to the U.S. Those detained at Dulles International Airport, before federal judges issued stays of the order, included an Iranian couple in their eighties, both with green cards. One was legally blind, and the other had recently had a stroke; their granddaughter said that officials at the airport “weren’t treating them very well.” At O’Hare, a couple with an eighteen-month-old was reportedly detained, after a trip abroad to introduce the baby to relatives.

On Saturday, the President announced three more executive actions, one of which changed the composition of his National Security Council. Trump reserved one seat on the Council for his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, the former chairman of the right-wing Web site Breitbart News, who has no experience in foreign relations. Trump also limited the roles of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of National Intelligence, with a memo that said they will only attend meetings when “issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed.” The erasure of the line between national security and Bannon’s politics, which have included an embrace of white nationalism, was deeply troubling. But the exclusion of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of National Intelligence was more surprising. The President can pick anyone he wants for those positions. Trump has nominated the former Indiana senator Dan Coats to be the director of National Intelligence; the term of the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, will expire this year. The President seems to be deliberately tightening the circle around him.

In the first week of the Trump Presidency, influence has run through a very select group of advisers—maybe as many as half a dozen, maybe as few as two. The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Bannon have consolidated their influence. Kushner, who has spent his brief career running his father’s real-estate empire, reportedly has been told to lead negotiations with Mexico. Kushner was also involved in a discussion with British officials, and denounced the United Kingdom’s support of a United Nations resolution opposing Israeli settlements. According to the Washington Post, some former campaign aides “have been alarmed by Kushner’s efforts to elbow aside anyone he perceives as a possible threat to his role as Trump’s chief consigliere.” But Bannon’s portfolio may be even broader. His hand was apparent in the President’s dark Inauguration speech, in his economic nationalism, and in his early, aggressive stances against Mexico and refugees.

The President’s isolation runs deeper than that. As the confusion around the immigration ban made clear, the vast government he oversees has little input on his actions. In an interview this week, Trump said that he reads the Times, the New York Post, and the Washington Post each day, but he seems to scan them as an actor does, for reviews of his own performance. His campaign made clear that he was not interested in the findings of scientists, social scientists, or the American government. Trump’s transition has alienated him from the American public. Gallup found on Friday that fifty per cent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s performance, the highest disapproval rating on record for any American President this early in his term.

In normal times, an Administration this isolated and divorced from public opinion would seem to be fatally weak. The argument made by the President’s first week is that these conditions, combined with the general assent of a Republican-controlled Congress, might in fact create the opposite situation, freeing him to do whatever he wants.

At times this past week, the theatre of the Administration has seemed to be as large as the Oval Office; at others, it has seemed smaller still, about the size of the President’s own head. “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on . . . I will send in the Feds!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday evening. In fact, a large team from the Department of Justice had recently been in Chicago, where it delivered an indictment of the excesses of the Chicago Police Department, connecting them to the collapse of trust between residents and officers, which in turn enabled a rise in crime.

But that report hadn’t prompted the President’s tweet. What had? It turned out that Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show had just aired a segment on crime in Chicago. The President had seen something that moved him on a news program, and then he had reacted. The tweet was one of the least significant Presidential gestures of the past week. But it served as prelude for some of the darker ones. At times, the only figure in the room may be Trump himself, with the blue glow of his television screen.

No regrets about leaving out Jews in Holocaust statement

HOW STUPID ARE THESE IDIOTS?

Facing criticism, Trump administration has no regrets about leaving out Jews in Holocaust statement

Facing growing criticism for failing to mention Jews in a statement marking the Holocaust, the Trump administration on Sunday doubled down on the controversial decision.

In a statement on Friday, President Donald Trump broke with the bipartisan practice of past presidents by failing to include any mention of the anti-Semitic views that fueled the Holocaust and left 6 million Jews and millions of others dead.

"I don't regret the words," said White House chief of staff Reince Priebus when asked to defend the statement on NBC News' "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

"Everyone's suffering (in) the Holocaust including obviously all of the Jewish people affected and miserable genocide that occurs - it's something that we consider to be extraordinarily sad," Priebus added.

Trump's 117-word statement was issued on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Trump remembered "the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust" without specifically mentioning the attempted extermination of Jewish people.

What might have been seen as an oversight was confirmed by White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks to have been an intentional decision.

"Despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered," Hicks told CNN on Saturday.

On Sunday, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., sharply criticized the White House for deploying a well-known tactic of Holocaust deniers.

"This is what Holocaust denial is," Kaine said on NBC. "It's either to deny that it happened or many Holocaust deniers acknowledge, oh yeah people were killed but it was a lot of innocent people, Jews weren't targets."

Conservative commentator John Podhoretz slammed the White House's defense of its actions in a column on Saturday, noting that Nazi ideology rested on the aim of exterminating Jewish people from the face of earth.

"The Nazis killed an astonishing number of people in monstrous ways and targeted certain groups - Gypsies, the mentally challenged, and open homosexuals, among others," Podhoretz wrote. "But the Final Solution was aimed solely at the Jews. The Holocaust was about the Jews.

"There is no 'proud' way to offer a remembrance of the Holocaust that does not reflect that simple, awful, world-historical fact," he added. "To universalize it to 'all those who suffered' is to scrub the Holocaust of its meaning."

In fact, the United Nations created the International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2005 in part to combat a growing wave of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial worldwide.

The tactic of minimizing the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish people is also closely associated with nationalist movements in Europe, including far right National Front Party in France now led by Marine Le Pen, whose father Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined for Holocaust denial.

The younger Le Pen has sought to make connections with Trump, calling his victory in the November election a "sign of hope" for her own political future.

Kaine tied Trump's move on Friday to bar the entry of travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries to the puzzling Holocaust statement issued on the same day.

"The fact that they did that and imposed this religious test against Muslims in the executive order on the same day, this is not a coincidence," Kaine said.

But Priebus noted that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is also a senior adviser in the White House, is Jewish. Trump's daughter Ivanka converted to judaism before the two married.

"You know that President Trump has dear family members that are Jewish and there was no harm or ill will or offense intended by any of that," Priebus added.

It begins. GOPers start to criticize and pull away from Trump. When GOP leadership does this, Trump is finished.

From ABC 

Handful of GOP Senators and Representatives Criticize Trump Travel Ban

A handful of President Donald Trump's fellow Republicans were part of the chorus Saturday slamming his executive order that bars entry into the U.S. by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries.

Most were concerned that the travel ban is too broad, and questioned its effectiveness in lessening the threat of terrorism.

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a statement Saturday titled "Border Security and Muslim Nations" in which he said the ban was too far-reaching.

"The President is right to focus attention on the obvious fact that borders matter," he said. "At the same time, while not technically a Muslim ban, this order is too broad."

Sasse also questioned if the ban was the most effective way to fight jihadism, and if it will actually fuel further terrorism.

"There are two ways to lose our generational battle against jihadism by losing touch with reality," he said. "The first is to keep pretending that jihadi terrorism has no connection to Islam or to certain countries. That's been a disaster. And here's the second way to fail: If we send a signal to the Middle East that the U.S. sees all Muslims as jihadis, the terrorist recruiters win by telling kids that America is banning Muslims and that this is America versus one religion. Both approaches are wrong, and both will make us less safe. Our generational fight against jihadism requires wisdom."

Arizona senator Jeff Flake also suggested that the travel ban is too broad.

"President Trump and his administration are right to be concerned about national security, but it’s unacceptable when even legal permanent residents are being detained or turned away at airports and ports of entry," Flake said in a statement Saturday "Enhancing long term national security requires that we have a clear-eyed view of radical Islamic terrorism without ascribing radical Islamic terrorist views to all Muslims."

As for GOP members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania echoed his Sasse and Flake's concerns that the ban is too far-reaching, as well as questioning how it will affect U.S.-based multinational companies.

"This order appears to have been rushed through without full consideration to the wide-ranging impacts it will have," Dent said in a statement to ABC News. "As a result, I fear that this order may imperil lives, divide families, and create uncertainty for many American businesses that operate internationally."

He added, "This is unacceptable and I urge the Administration to halt enforcement of the order until a more thoughtful and deliberate policy can be instated."

Dent also said that he had been working to assist a Syrian Christian family who held valid visas but were detained at Philadelphia International Airport and forced to leave the country.

Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan wrote a series of tweets Saturday slamming Trump and his executive order.

Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan wrote a series of tweets Saturday slamming Trump and his executive order.

"Like Pres. Obama's executive actions on immigration, Pres. Trump's executive order overreaches and undermines our constitutional system," he wrote, adding, "It's not lawful to ban immigrants on basis of nationality. If the president wants to change immigration law, he must work with Congress."

In another pair of tweets, Amash wrote, "The president's denial of entry to lawful permanent residents of the United States (green card holders) is particularly troubling ...Green card holders live in the United States as our neighbors and serve in our Armed Forces. They deserve better."

His final tweet read, "While EO allows admittance of immigrants, nonimmigrants, and refugees 'on a case-by-case basis,' arbitrariness would violate Rule of Law."