Today's Reddit

Something something 30-foot wall - something something 35-foot ladder.

Something Of A Revelation

My heartiest congratulations go out to all those typically stoopid Republicans for their typically stoopid policies - this one centering around Immigration.

Republicans took a giant shit on the people who come here to help us, while doing nothing to stop the people they claim are trying to come here to hurt us.

Add it to the big steaming pile of "Gee - I wonder how that happened".

CATO Institute tries to spin it as even-steven - a win and a loss - it isn't. It's a FUBAR wrapped in a SNAFU with big bold labels - CLUSTER FUCK - on every side of the package.

President Trump entered the White House with the goal of reducing legal immigration by 63 percent. Trump was wildly successful in reducing legal immigration. By November 2020, the Trump administration reduced the number of green cards issued to people abroad by at least 418,453 and the number of non‐​immigrant visas by at least 11,178,668 during his first term through November 2020. President Trump also entered the White House with the goal of eliminating illegal immigration but Trump oversaw a virtual collapse in interior immigration enforcement and the stabilization of the illegal immigrant population. Thus, Trump succeeded in reducing legal immigration and failed to eliminate illegal immigration.

BTW, if 45* had understood anything but his need to fondle himself, he could've peddled his stoopid immigration shit in terms of COVID-19, which would've given him a real chance.

But he didn't, because it was never about immigration. And it was only "about the economics" in the sense that he always does whatever is necessary to put money in his pocket.

We have to stop thinking "a little common sense is all we need". We have to get back to where we know it's more complicated than it seems it should be, but we're going to need qualified professionals to run this place because it is, in fact, pretty fucking complicated.

Can we try that for a while - again?

Devolving

There's an obvious pattern to the way Cult45 operates.

First, always always always remember that no matter what else, putting money in Trump's pocket while ducking his responsibility is the whole fucking point of the exercise.

So the tactical distractions are becoming epic, and I think the level of the weirdness of those distractions is proportional to the panic 45* feels as we accelerate towards the revelation of damning and (hopefully irrefutable) evidence of depravities that make Dorian Grey look like Jefferson Smith.

Three things popped up in the last few days - the first of which is kind of a redux of an old scandal.

Forbes:

Like autumn leaves, sponsored Cadillacs, Ferraris and Maseratis descend on the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York, in September for the Eric Trump Foundation golf invitational. Year after year, the formula is consistent: 18 holes of perfectly trimmed fairways with a dose of Trumpian tackiness, including Hooters waitresses and cigar spreads, followed by a clubhouse dinner, dates encouraged. The crowd leans toward real estate insiders, family friends and C-list celebrities, such as former baseball slugger Darryl Strawberry and reality housewife (and bankruptcy-fraud felon) Teresa Giudice.

The real star of the day is Eric Trump, the president's second son and now the co-head of the Trump Organization, who has hosted this event for ten years on behalf of the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. He's done a ton of good: To date, he's directed more than $11 million there, the vast majority of it via this annual golf event. He has also helped raise another $5 million through events with other organizations.

The best part about all this, according to Eric Trump, is the charity's efficiency: Because he can get his family's golf course for free and have most of the other costs donated, virtually all the money contributed will go toward helping kids with cancer. "We get to use our assets 100% free of charge," Trump tells Forbes.

That's not the case. In reviewing filings from the Eric Trump Foundation and other charities, it's clear that the course wasn't free--that the Trump Organization received payments for its use, part of more than $1.2 million that has no documented recipients past the Trump Organization. Golf charity experts say the listed expenses defy any reasonable cost justification for a one-day golf tournament.

So we're right back to playing the donors for suckers - or worse, enlisting those "donors" in service of the scam that easily could include kickbacks and influence peddling.

Eric Trump is in the running for top honors in the Douche Nozzle Of The Year awards every fucking year. 

And then there's this one via WaPo:

Children born overseas to some American parents serving in the military or working for the federal government may no longer automatically claim U.S. citizenship if their parents had lived in the United States for less than five years, according to a new federal policy issued Wednesday. 

Instead, officials said, those parents must apply for citizenship on behalf of their children before they turn 18 years old.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes citizenship applications, said it rescinded a policy that had allowed some members of the military and government employees to easily transmit citizenship to children born overseas, because it conflicted with other policies and federal law.

Now, they do tell us they're not out to fuck people over with this, and that the change in policy doesn't affect anyone who's already a citizen, or people born before the effective date of the new policy.

So, you might ask, what's the point? Why change the policy?

Good questions. Especially when we know Cult45 lies all fucking day every fucking day.

Other good questions: 

Seein' as how the mother of my kids was born in Germany when her dad was active duty Air Force, and that she had to get some special declaration from the State Department to establish her citizenship (as an adult), could she be stripped of that citizenship?

Would my children then be considered anchor babies?

Are they subject to being rounded up and deported?

And now this, from VICE:

Families of kids receiving medical care in the U.S. got letters saying they have to leave within 33 days or face deportation and a temporary ban on returning

ICE will now be able to decide whether undocumented immigrants getting treatment for serious medical conditions can stay in the country, WBUR and the Associated Press reported Monday.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that handles matters like naturalization and adjustment of status, had previously handled cases through the "medical deferred action" program. But these requests — essentially a form of short-term deportation relief for people getting treated for conditions like cancer, cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy — are now being referred to ICE for “consideration,” a USCIS spokesperson told VICE News.

Massachusetts politicians slammed the recent change. “By no longer considering medical deferred action requests for immigrants, the Trump administration is now literally deporting kids with cancer,” Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey said on Facebook.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh called the decision “absurd and inhumane.”

Under acting director Ken Cuccinelli, USCIS has become increasingly politicized. Cuccinelli recently defended the Trump administration’s“public charge” rule, which intends to deny visas or green cards to immigrants who may rely on government assistance, by providing a reinterpretation of the famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

All of this weird shit - especially the weird shit they're doing with immigrants - has purpose.

They told us over a year ago. John Kelly mentioned it at least once when he was Sec'y of DHS, and I think again when he went to work as 45*'s Chief of Staff, that we were taking these actions as a means to deter immigration from Hispanic countries to our south.

We might as well be saying, "We will treat you like you're dog shit on the soles of our shoes - and we have no qualms about fucking up your kids in order to get what we want."

So the original point of the cruelty was to warn people away. But as is always the case with such things, the point of the cruelty became cruelty for its own sake, and the whole mess escalates practically all by itself.

Most people can be talked into the notion that it's OK to do bad things for good reasons. But good people won't go along with it for long. So eventually, you have to replace all those good people.

Inevitably, all you have left is a group of people who're not only willing to do those shitty things, but who want to do those shitty things because they like to do shitty things.

We've seen it before - we're now entering the phase where the point of the cruelty is cruelty - the point of bullying is bullying - the act of torturing people is the point of torturing people.

The kicker is that we have a "POTUS" who stokes the drive to abandon our sense of honor - our very humanity - by floating a presidential pardon in front of anyone willing to step up and do his dirty work.

All of which, while not part of some elaborate strategically-plotted 4-dimensional chess, is in fact deliberate, in that it's calculated to spread wave after wave after wave of bullshit across the media spectrum in order to: a) create opportunities to steal money, and b) provide cover for the crimes.

This is not a government - this is a fucking robbery. And it's 39 kinds of fucked up.

Off The Radar

So, quickly, about that Greenland thing: Trump wasn't just being his usual stoopid self. He wasn't just fuckin' around trying to create a distraction - even tho' all of that is part of it.

He's seriously talking about annexing territory. He intends to expand the empire, possibly because John Bolton &/or Mike Pompeo &/or the joint chiefs put a bug in his ear about growing concerns over Climate Change and the increased "strategic threat" posed by clear water in the Artic Ocean etc etc etc. But mostly because he's Putin's boy in more ways than one.

Anyway - in the meantime - happening out of sight:

The Independent is reporting on more shitty behavior at CBP.

At least three migrant children being held in detention centres have died after suffering from flu, but US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has said that it does not plan to vaccinate detained immigrant families as winter approaches. 

Further reports suggest children are being molested in some sites while in the care of the government.

“In general, due to the short-term nature of CBP holding and the complexities of operating vaccination programmes, neither CBP nor its medical contractors administer vaccinations to those in our custody,” a CBP spokeswoman said in a statement emailed to the CNBC news channel.

People you take by force into your custody are to be treated humanely.

And let's be clear - they are people.

The shitty things going on are intended to be shitty things so they can be used as propaganda; as a warning to potential immigrants that not only are they not welcome here, but that we'll do shitty things to them and their kids if they come here.

Cult45 is turning us into that which we claim to despise.

Run, Little Hamberders

Samantha Bee:

The Permission Slip

NOTE: Being in this country without legal documentation is more or less the equivalent of Public Intoxication - a class 4 misdemeanor (USC Title 8, Section 1325) - up to a year in jail &/or a $250 fine. We're not talking Crime-Of-The-Century here, kids.

If you're slagging immigrants on a technicality - ie: "I don't mind them being here, I just don't want them to be here illegally" - then you have to know what's legal and what's not.

And we have to agree on the basic premise that everyone has an obligation to follow the law, not just the orders of the boss.

Crossing our border without permission is illegal, except when you cross that border to ask for asylum.

We signed on to an international treaty that sets out the terms for immigration and asylum, and under our constitution, treaties carry the weight of law.

Beau Of The Fifth Column - Justin King

The rule of law is kinda the whole fucking point for "both sides" of this issue. We should be able to recognize that there's common ground here, agree on a set of facts, and move into a debate on how best to advance the greater good.

You'd think so anyway.

Unfortunately, we're dealing with a political phenomenon that depends on the suspension of objective reality.

We're up against a kind of "thinking" that has no use for consistency, rejects the concept of shame, and substitutes loyalty for truth.

So we can't expect to make much headway relying on well-reasoned argument, but we can't abandon the effort. It's what we've got - it's what differentiates us from the Daddy Staters.

An Anthem

Across The Borderline --Ry Cooder:

There's a place where I've been told
Every street is paved with gold
And it's just across the borderline
And when it's time to take your turn
Here's one lesson that you must learn
You could lose more than you'll ever hope to find

When you reach the broken promised land
And every dream slips through your hands
Then you'll know that it's too late to change your mind
'Cause you've paid the price to come so far
Just to wind up where you are
And you're still just across the borderline

Up and down the Rio Grande
A thousand footprints in the sand
Reveal a secret no one can define
The river flows on like a breath
In between our life and death
Tell me who's the next to cross the borderline

En la triste oscuridad (In the sad darkness)
Hoy tenemos que cruzar (today we have to cross)
Este río que nos llama más allá (this river which calls us farther away)
But hope remains when pride is gone
And it keeps you moving on
Calling you across the borderline

And when you reach the broken promised land
And every dream slips through your hands
Then you'll know it's too late to change your mind
'Cause you've paid the price to come so far
Just to wind up where you are
And you're still just across the borderline

Now you're still just across the borderline

(by Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, Jim Dickinson)

Here Comes Sunday

It's a test. A trial run. They need  to see how it goes operationally, but also to gauge our reaction to this next step towards Daddy State rule.

And like they say - if you've ever wondered what you would've done in 1930s Germany - you're doing it now.

Yesterday

Justin King, aka: Beau Of The Fifth Column

Asylum --Maaz 2018

Stand on graves and cast out the helpless.
They arrive in waves to the illusion of hope.
A 'caravan' of people,
All begging for freedom,
But fear not,
They shall be murdered
for they are evil.

How can they expect asylum, safety & security,
from a land built on death?
Where those in power face no scrutiny.
Where an orange haired buffoon can thrive & prosper,
But mothers & fathers cannot afford a doctor.

Yet still these people come here seeking a better life and
how dare they do?
With hands calloused from hard work,
hearts filled with grief,
spirits filled with belief;
Don’t they know?

This is a land built out of the flesh of martyrs,
On a charter that helps oppress its own population,
A country that thrives off devastation.

The Virtue Challenge

The New Colossus --Emma Lazarus 

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, 

With conquering limbs astride from land to land; 

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand 

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, 

and her name Mother of Exiles. 

From her beacon-hand 

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command 

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. 

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she 

With silent lips. 

“Give me your tired, your poor, 

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

#ThisIsVirtue

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years.
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.
America. America.
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.

Call It What It Is

It's a Trump-centration Camp

Konzentrationslager

Today's Tweet

I'll stand with these folks every day. Because they're the real Americans - not this phony made-up bullshit story about ignoring the workin' guy in flyover country and Wonder Bread and the heart-n-soul of blah blah fucking blah.

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best....They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems...”

Wrong. Hard-working immigrants like this family Make America Great and help put food on our tables. https://t.co/qzWJaIXWA9

— Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (@ananavarro) May 28, 2019

Beau Of The Fifth Column

aka: Justin King - on the silliness of Cult45 and Open Borders

The Un-Crisis

While what's left of the president's cabinet secretaries (Barr and Mnuchin particularly) are stalling, covering up, and stonewalling, Cult45 continues to pimp the fear - because they've got nothing else.

The Empty Wheel:

THE FACTS: THERE IS NO CRISIS AND NO EMERGENCY, JUST TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN

After mixing it up with a old conservative over spring break — someone who doesn’t watch Fox News but spends too much time with people who do — it’s clear Trump’s and Fox’s lies have deeply infected right-wing minds.

They believe Trump’s falsehoods about a crisis at the border, that there was reason for Trump to declare an emergency.

They’re also incapable of fact checking. They’re authoritarians and believe whatever current authority figure tells them; the motivation to validate authority doesn’t exist.

They appear unable to analyze what they do see to make an independent assessment of their own. It doesn’t occur to them to ask, What would be so bad a family with toddlers and infants would flee their home, walking over a thousand miles for more than a month and through a desert to escape?

They’re sheep — our country is regressing under the leadership of fascist sheep.

I wanted to cram a bunch of facts in this conservative’s head but I honestly don’t know if they’d bother to read anything I gave them because I’m not a Fox talking head.

Fact: Trend data from DHS’ Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) about so-called illegal immigrants border crossings indicates it has trended lower over the last 15 years:

A Closer Look

Seth Meyers and Senator Kennedy's wangdoodle.

Today's Beau

Beau Of The 5th Column

In Search Of Real Americans

The people at our southern border have come here because deep inside, they have a strong desire for freedom, a reasonable expectation of justice and a powerful instinct for democracy.

I think that says quite a bit about them - but it says even more about the people who see them as enemies, and want to keep them out.

Jesus Rodriguez, Politico Magazine:

The caravan migrants who arrived at the border nearly a month ago don’t have a country. But they do have a government.

In the time since the caravan left Honduras in mid-October, the asylum-seekers have fashioned a proto-democracy out of their group of some 6,000 migrants overwhelmingly from Central America, most of whom have walked for most of the trip, at times hitching rides in the backs of cars or trucks.

To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the caravan is nothing more than a “lawless” mob of potentially violent criminals. But dozens of phone interviews and WhatsApp conversations with advocacy groups and migrants, as well as social media updates from groups on the ground, show that the migrants have organized a surprisingly sophisticated ruling structure, complete with everything from a press shop to a department of public works.

When the migrants needed to make public announcements, debate the best routes and vote on different plans, they established a nightly general assembly as a forum open to all, Athens-style. Their legislative floor was an abandoned truck parking lot or an unused sports stadium. Some of the migrants even took turns as communications directors, drafting press statements that were transmitted through a media group of more than 370 journalists on WhatsApp.


- and -

Ask some on the right to define the caravan and they might conspire about highly organized hordes of criminals funded by the Venezuelan state or billionaire philanthropist George Soros who want to rush the American border. (“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Trump said Oct. 31 in reference to the Soros claim, one day after the migrants elected their Governance and Dialogue Council.) Some liberals, on the other hand, will try to convince you that this is a hapless, hopeless lot with no agency, no rights and no recourse for help.

- and -

The only U.S. government representative who has taken action so far has been Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who traveled to the border in early December and helped broker the passage of five asylum-seekers across the border. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) swiftly criticized Jayapal, blasting her as a “congressional coyote.”

(Walter) Coello, the Honduran migrant who once had to negotiate for his life with MS-13, thinks he could rise above the classic Washington mudslinging and appeal to a higher sense of humanity. He knows exactly how he would lobby Trump if he was sitting across from him.

“First, may God bless you,” Coello would say. “We want work. We are not criminals. We hope that God will soften your heart.”

You know we're going to see The Ten Commandments at some point between now and Year Year's Day. And you know I'm about to reference the scenes where Chuck Heston's saying let my people go and Ann Baxter's fucking with Yul Brynner "hardeneing Pharoah's heart", right?  And I knew you knew that.

Art Lesson

Othering. 

Nationalists and Exclusionists and Eliminationists need desperately to divide us; to keep us from seeing ourselves in each other...

...to be constantly suspicious of everybody. Small-minded, paranoid, insecure; looking to the Daddy State's reassuring authority to decide what's good for us, and even to do our thinking for us on a regular basis.

The Green Spot

Environmentalists refer to a problem with the basic mindset of people who don't get the concept of The Commons, and more particularly, The Tragedy Of The Commons - where people move to a place that has "plenty to go around" (land, resources, etc), and immediately start ruining it all for everybody by trying to monopolize whatever they can. When it's all used up - when it's depleted and brown - they move on, looking for the next Green Spot.

Considering Economics and Politics, there's never a shortage of Brown Spots - places where Plutocrats and their coin-operated politicians have turned the joint into a wasteland - little more than a system of lords and serfs.

(ed note: I wish there was another way to characterize the phenomenon, because I don't want to associate the "brown" in Brown Spots when I talk about environmental stuff, with the "brown" in Brown People when I talk about Econ and Politics)

So here we are again, faced with having to deal with some of our own shit coming back to haunt us (a hundred years of Gunboat Diplomacy, Shock Doctrine Economics, and Ollie North-style fuckery) all through Latin America.

We've helped to make it very difficult for brown people to survive in their own countries, so they're migrating to the Green Spot here in USAmerica Inc, and we're so freaked out that we're actually in process of turning this joint into the kind of Brown Spot that would be less attractive to them.

At the very least, we're doing everything we can think of to send the message that we're no different than the assholes they're risking their lives to escape. 

We're the bartender at some redneck dive at 2am. "Closin' time - you don't have to go home, but ya can't stay here." Then he turns on the light, and you make a mental note to get a tetanus booster, but that takes me off towards a slightly different rant.

The New Yorker:

Donald Trump, who’s been stumping for congressional Republicans, is now calling the November midterms the “election of the caravan,” and says that the Democrats support the “illegal immigration onslaught” because they “figure everybody coming in is going to vote Democrat.” For his Administration, the political rhetoric and the policy agenda are effectively indistinguishable. In the last several months, over the objections of regional experts and diplomatic staff, officials at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security have wound down a number of programs meant to provide legal relief to those seeking refuge in the U.S. This summer, Attorney General Jeff Sessions unilaterally redrew decades of jurisprudence to make it significantly more difficult for migrants fleeing gang violence and domestic abuse to seek asylum. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of migrants from Central America continue to stream north, fleeing conditions that the Trump Administration has dismissedas irrelevant.

For all the Administration’s avowals of toughness, none of its strategies has helped stem the flow. According to unpublished government data obtained by the Washington Post, Border Patrol has apprehended more than a hundred thousand migrant family members in the last year, which is about thirty thousand more arrests than the previous peak, in 2016. The rationale for the President’s harshest measures, from the indefinite detention of asylum seekers to the separation of families at the border, was that they would deter other migrants from making the trip. The government’s own data contradicts that, and so Trump’s enforcement policy is stuck in a feedback loop: he’s been defending actions that haven’t changed migration patterns, while simultaneously citing a “border crisis” as the reason to double down.


In the end - and we have news about it today - we'll do our usual bullshit "conservative" thing ('specially now that Cult45 is in charge) by announcing our intentions to punish those countries. 

We'll cut Foreign Aid. Because we're all about retribution, and the GOP likes nothing more than making people suffer.

We have a problem with immigration because people want to get away from the shit in their lives, but we refuse to do what needs done in order to make those people stronger in their own countries - so they have a real chance to make their own lives better wherever they are - so we don't have to sponsor them here.

(*) GOP politicians are always pushing to cut Foreign Aid
- for farmers, which means they have to resort to growing drug crops instead of food crops.
- for local schools, which means they fall further into the cycle of ignorance poverty and crime.
- for governments, which makes them vulnerable to the influence of terrorists.

Republicans are weak on Drugs
Republicans are weak on Crime
Republicans are weak on Terrorism

And it should be easier and easier now to see how weak Republicans are on Immigration.

(*) hat tip = The West Wing

Today's Cartoon

Non Sequitur 07-09-18