Month: June 2018

Which 2 year olds would Jesus lock up?

by digby

White, conservative Evangelicals are all in:

First, polling on white evangelical Protestants has shown that they’re more likely than any other religious group to support hardline immigration policies and to have negative views of immigrants overall. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that 70 percent of white evangelical Protestants are in favor of expanding the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, compared with only around half of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics and much lower shares of other religious groups. Another Pew survey, conducted last year, found that while majorities of nearly every religious group agree that immigrants strengthen our country, white evangelical Protestants are more divided, with a plurality (44 percent) saying that immigrants are a burden.

These findings line up with results from other surveys too, like a 2017 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute that found that white evangelical Protestants were the only religious group in which a majority (57 percent) said they’re bothered when they encounter immigrants who don’t speak English. They were also the likeliest to say that they have little or nothing in common with immigrants.

Daniel Cox, the research director at PRRI,2 said these findings help explain why evangelicals aren’t likely to abandon Trump over the child separation crisis, even if they’re troubled by it. “More than other groups, white evangelical Protestants seem to perceive immigrants as a threat to American society,” he said. “So even if they don’t like this particular policy, they’re on board with Trump’s approach to immigration in general, and that makes it likelier that they’ll see this as a tactical misstep rather than a breaking point.”

That’s also how some evangelical leaders have responded; for example, Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia megachurch pastor who serves on Trump’s evangelical advisory council, criticized the family separation policy in an interview with FiveThirtyEight but blamed Congress — rather than Trump — for failing to act. “The president really cares for these families, but to permanently fix the problem, he needs Congress to do their job and work with him on border security,” Franklin said, adding that many evangelicals were drawn to Trump because of his emphasis on reducing the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

And while many other Christian leaders, including the Catholic bishops, have criticized the policy based on the biblical injunction to care for the poor and the stranger, several prominent evangelicals have emphasized the need to obey the law and defer to the president’s authority. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of Dallas’s First Baptist Church and a strong Trump supporter, told FiveThirtyEight that the separation of children from their parents was “disturbing” but quickly added that Trump has the “God-given responsibility” to secure the border in the way he deems appropriate and punish people breaking the law, even if it appears harsh.

That deference to law and order is fundamental to the way evangelicals think about immigration policy. A 2015 poll by LifeWay Research, a Baptist-affiliated research organization, found that although a strong majority (72 percent) of evangelicals agreed that “immigration reform should protect the unity of the immediate family,” even more believed that “immigration reform should respect the rule of law” (88 percent) and “guarantee secure national borders” (86 percent). Partisanship and racial anxieties are also likely playing a role, said Janelle Wong, a political scientist at the University of Maryland and the author of a new book on evangelicals and immigration.

Ya think?

I don’t think fear of MS-13 provides any rationale for an allegedly moral person to think it’s ok to rip 2 year olds from their mothers because they crossed an invisible line on a piece of land. It’s ridiculous on its face.

This issue blows the lid off their alleged family values. The people who think this is ok are bigots. That is all there is to it.

They like Trump and everything he does because he hates and he isn’t ashamed to say it. All these excuses are just nonsense.

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Poor Melania had nothing to wear today

by digby

From the “you cannot make this stuff up” files

Be Best.

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Driving while Canadian

by digby

Man, Hillary’s deep state is really on a tear these days:

U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents set up a checkpoint Wednesday on Interstate 95, stopping drivers and asking them questions about their citizenship before letting them proceed.

The random checkpoint shut down the southbound lane between the Penobscot County towns of Howland and Lincoln. Several agents set up cones blocking the highway, and then asked vehicle occupants questions about their citizenship. Southbound drivers could not avoid the roadblock.

“If you want to continue down the road, then yes ma’am. We need to know what citizen — what country you’re a citizen of,” an agent said Wednesday evening. When questioned about what would happen if a driver declined to answer, he said the car would only be able to keep going if, after further questioning and upon the agent’s judgment, “the agent is pretty sure that you’re U.S. citizens.”

These routine checkpoints are similar to immigration checks that border agents are performing at Maine bus stops, where agents have been captured on video asking riders about their citizenship, said Stephanie Malin, a CBP spokeswoman.

In recent months, the bus stop checks have come under fire from the Maine American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the federal agency for records to learn more about the practice. Lawyers for the Maine ACLU said they have questions concerning “the intrusive operation,” and whether it infringes on the Fourth and Fifth amendment rights of bus passengers.

The legal advocacy organization has gone after highway checkpoints in the past, having previously requested records from the agency and calling them examples of government harassment, according to BDN archives.

On Wednesday, attorney Emma Bond said the Maine ACLU was also interested in learning more about the highway checks as it pursued records about the bus checks.

“People have the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, whether at a bus station or on the road,” she said.

These are shock troops, exercising their power in a one-on-one way with the population. This isn’t some abstract abuse of internet “privacy” as important as that is. These are uniformed cops rousting people for their papers at both borders.

Better not wear scuffed shoes or the government might jail you for smuggling.

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There is no border crisis. There is a Trump crisis


by digby

My Salon column this morning: 

A few days ago, fresh from what he thought was a triumphant summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, President Trump took a stroll on the White House lawn and talked to reporters about the family separation program at the border. This is what he said:

Trump blames Democrats for his administration’s policy of separating immigrant families at the border, again falsely characterizes it as “a law.” (It’s not a law.) pic.twitter.com/v85iN54YMa

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 15, 2018

You will note that he said he had to have 10 Democratic Senators to change the law and when asked if he would take executive actions he declared,”you can’t do it through an executive order.”

We knew that was a lie since his administration had called for all people crossing the border at anything but designated ports of entry to be arrested, requiring their children to be taken from them, but he said it repeatedly. Recall this from Monday:

President Trump: “We want to solve family separation. I don’t want children taken away from parents, and when you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally — which should happen — you have to take the children away.” https://t.co/KtOSwpYQIS pic.twitter.com/dH8qySE0IG

— CNN (@CNN) June 19, 2018

Under pressure from Republicans, yesterday he did what he said could not be done. He signed an executive order requiring that families be kept together and proclaimed himself a hero for saving all the children as his minions Kirstjen Nielsen and Mike Pence stood behind him like a couple of potted plants. The truth is that the Executive Order was just another PR stunt. He could have just told Nielsen and Sessions to do it.

The devil is in the details. No one is entirely sure how the new policy will be implemented since he has not rescinded the “zero-tolerance” policy that requires all these people to be prosecuted and there is little current capacity for housing all these families. But apparently, they don’t intend to hold them together for long:

JUST IN: Senior Justice Department official Gene Hamilton confirms the Flores settlement still controls, and that unless Congress or the court acts, the government can only detain families together for “up to 20 days.”

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) June 20, 2018

The plan seems to be to detain the families for 20 days after which Trump will say they have to be separated again because the court made him do it. That would mean we are back to square one, with Trump demanding that Democrats fork over 25 billion for the wall and provide billions more for border security or the kids will get it.

It’s possible that the court will step in and find another reason to make him keep these families together. And the politics of this are fluid so none of this may come to pass. But it looks as though they either planned this to unfold in stages or are simply moving to plan B after the outcry. The only thing that matters to Trump is being able to say he built his wall and the rest of the anti-immigrant right want to remove as many immigrants from American soil as they can, by any means necessary, for reasons I spelled out earlier this week.

To that end Trump’s shock troops are deporting law abiding undocumented workers and searching out long time legal residents for crimes committed in the distant past. They are using laws that have only been used on war criminals in the past to rescind citizenship from naturalized Americans. (Trump also supports ending birthright citizenship because he believes it is a “magnet for illegal immigration.”)

And they have created a crisis at the border where none exists — illegal border crossings in 2017 were actually at a 46 year low. And while Trump engages in his usual fear-mongering in places like Duluth Minnesota, reports from the border towns in Texas, Arizona and California are that this influx of families seeking asylum is actually quite modest.

They are almost all seeking asylum for the first time:

Before this policy roughly 90% of prosecutions in McAllen federal court were of detained immigrants with criminal records. Since the new policy it’s flipped!

90% of those being prosecuted have no record and are facing misdemeanor charges for first time entry.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 20, 2018

Before the administration adopted its zero-tolerance policy, these families would have been allowed to come into the country, apply for asylum and, contrary to right wing propaganda, nearly all of them do come back for their hearings at a later date. They don’t want to be undocumented. They want to be safe.

These refugees’ lives are hell in their home countries because their home countries are in the grips of criminal gangs and corrupt police. Women, girls and LGBT people are particular targets for violence and rape, with boys being forcibly conscripted into gangs or killed. Michael O’Hare described these countries in this op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle in terms that explain why Trump has no empathy for any of these people:

On one side are the gang leaders and corrupt, murderous police in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. These guys are the real thing, cut from the same cloth as Trump’s better-known heroes Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duerte. They kill, imprison, dismember and rape as a conscious managerial/motivational technique. They are about making money and making people fear them, just like Trump. 

That may sound extreme but consider this quote from a Trump associate given to Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair about Trump’s top immigration adviser Stephen Miller:

Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border. He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. There’s always been a way he’s gone about this. He’s Waffen-SS.

The journey from these countries to the American border is just as dangerous with thugs and criminals all along the way.  (One national security professional characterized as so dangerous he would rather backpack across Syria than do it himself.)  And there are plenty more gathered in the border towns where these people are supposed to wait their turn for a chance to request asylum on the other side of the border. That danger is a big reason why many of them would rather just cross at other places and get arrested.
They are far more afraid of what they have behind them than what lies ahead. Even risking losing their children to this cold and heartless bureaucracy is preferable to losing them to violence and death.

If that isn’t depressing enough the Trump administration is ending Temporary Protected Status program — a protection given to people in the wake of humanitarian disasters  — to tens of thousands of people, many of whom have lived in the US for decades, from these very same countries. They will all be deported into that violence and mayhem.

On MSNBC yesterday Chris Hayes explained why being cruel and inhuman to these refugees as a “deterrence” is leading us down a very dark path:

What that ends up being is you get into a kind of bidding war with the cartels about who can be more monstrous…You end up having to do monstrous things so that the tip of judgement tips in your favor.

I have little doubt that Trump, Sessions, Miller and the others are happy to keep upping the ante. Trump has always been in favor of the crudest violence as a means of getting his way.  But the horrified reaction of the American people to this odious family separation policy has shown that there just might be some limits to what this country will put up with after all. It isn’t over yet but today there is reason to hope that Trump will lose this one.

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Portland’s Got The Right Idea 

by tristero

The list of things to like about Portland has just gotten a lot longer:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Portland office temporarily shut its doors due to ongoing protests against the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy which leads to children being separated from their parents.  

“ICE operations at this location have been temporarily halted due to security concerns,” an ICE spokesman said Wednesday in a statement reported by Oregon Public Radio. “Normal operations will resume once security concerns have been addressed.”

It’s a start.

QOTD: the dotard

by digby

At his rally last night:

“You ever notice they always call the other side ‘the elite.’ The elite! Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do. I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than they are. I became president and they didn’t.”

His cult followers cheered wildly.

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United States of insecurity
by Tom Sullivan

Addictive drugs start out delivering a quick, pleasing euphoria. Then life quickly spirals downhill. This story comes from one recovery website:

“I remember the first time I did heroin,” Parker says, thinking back to his first experience. “I felt like a God. Nothing could mess with me, I couldn’t do anything wrong and everything was how it was supposed to be.”

What Donald Trump promises supporters is just that: a shot-lived sense that everything is how it is supposed to be. He was going to make America great again. Not an improved now, but the way things are supposed to be in whatever imagined alternate reality. In the family separation policy the administration put into place on the southern border, in the tears and cries of toddlers and mothers, what the world saw was the weak restoring American “greatness” on the backs of the weaker.

But Trump’s caving to pressure and reversing his cruel policy is not a “come-from-behind victory for human decency,” Eric Levitz cautions. “It is very difficult to demonize immigrants who are still in diapers.”

Yet the White House, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security tried. They tried whipping up support by demonizing infants as future violent gang members. They suggested desperate “families” fleeing violence at home were a false front for criminals bringing an infestation of drugs and crime and diseases. They condemned mothers and fathers as lawbreakers and poor parents for seeking safer homes and futures for themselves and their kids. Prejudice always tries to conceal itself behind socially acceptable pretext. Law and order. The Bible tells me so.

Trump’s fiddle is not just the politics of fear, but insecurity. What he is pushing to treat it is not opioids, but authoritarianism. President George W. Bush once quipped, “If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… as long as I’m the dictator. Hehehe.” That wasn’t a joke. It was a Kinsley gaffe. Trump is not joking.

A study The Atlantic highlights confirms what the work of Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deaton suggested. “The failure of life to turn out as expected,” they wrote, “[is] consistent with people compensating through other risky behaviors such as abuse of alcohol and drug use.” Or authoritarian politics, I’d add unscientifically, speaking of compensating:

The authors of this paper, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, relied on a survey called midus—Midlife in the United States—that interviewed American adults about their mental health in 1995–1996 and again in 2011–2014. They found that for the poorest whites in the sample, mental health consistently declined between those two times, suggesting low-income white Americans became less happy over the years. Meanwhile, higher incomes were “consistently associated with less distress and greater well-being,” the authors, Noreen Goldman of Princeton and Dana Glei and Maxine Weinstein of Georgetown University, write.

There is “substantial social stratification” indicated in the mental health of Americans. The authors speculate, “increasing income inequality and wage stagnation for the working class; long-term deterioration in employment opportunities that have led to intergenerational decline in economic security; reduction in stable marriages … increasing work-family strain; and weakening interactions within communities and associated social isolation” are to blame.

But these are effects of income inequality, not their causes. Poor immigrants who weren’t in the country did not produce it. The weak, the powerless, and non-natives are simply easy scapegoats. Cheap labor and (future) political competitors make them “threats” who could make a bad situation worse for those already insecure about their stations.

A notoriously needy and insecure president knows all about that. And as a veteran salesman, he knows how to exploit it.

But what this week’s family separation debacle proved (it’s not over) is that a country that professes all are created equal practices “kick down, kiss up.” As Jay Michaelson details, “It’s the law, and that’s what the law states” from White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cannot hide how the distribution of justice is just as inequitable and capricious as income:

If the Trump administration were really enforcing laws without exceptions, it would have enforced them against Wells Fargo, Exxon Mobil, Devon Energy, Bank of America, and Equifax. In fact, the government chose not to enforce the law against each of them and many others, on numerous occasions over the last year.

“If you don’t have Borders, you don’t have a Country!” Trump tweeted again yesterday. But where there is one law for the poor and another for the rich, you don’t have a country either. You have a kingdom.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Why Was Melania given credit for Trump’s change on child snatching?

By Spocko

An NPR story today called Melania Trump, “a private lobbying force behind President Trump’s change of heart on his controversial policy that resulted in thousands of family separations at the southern U.S. border.”

A White House official confirmed to NPR’s Sarah McCammon that Mrs. Trump pressed her husband to act to keep undocumented immigrant families together.

“She’s been talking to him about it from the very beginning,” the official said, who declined to speak on the record due to the sensitivity of the issue. The first lady’s “Be Best” initiative is focused on the well-being of children. 

          NPR: Melania Trump Pressured President Trump To Change Family Separation Policy,
          by Jessica Taylor

Mrs. Trump, shown here during a viewing of the caged children.

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When Trump gets busted for something bad, he usually finds a scapegoat to take the heat. When he makes a change in a bad policy he doesn’t want to acknowledge that any outside force caused him to change his mind.  Trump doesn’t want anyone to think that his mind CAN be changed, especially by protests from Democrats.

Trump also doesn’t want to give credit to Republicans who asked him to change his mind. That would be giving them perceived power over him. He won’t acknowledge the actual reason, a disastrous public response.

Remember the change in policy after Trump saw the photos of kids in Syria? Was it really Ivanka who showed him the photos that changed his mind, or was she simply given CREDIT for it?

In general Trump doesn’t want to acknowledge what leverage works on him. It would be admitting weakness.  By giving the credit to Melania, it makes her look like a person with power over the President.  Yes, she might have some influence, but saying Melania convinced him is really just an acceptable excuse to use for  the media instead of the actual reason. Plus, it helps push her her #beBest initiative. She’s probably still pissed at him and giving her credit for this change is one way to appease her.

Baby Gitmo is Bad PR
We know that Trump watches a lot of TV, but it wasn’t until images of the kids in cages reached him and his remaining staff, did he finally get the, “This is bad.” feeling.

The reason that we never saw the girls who were separated from their parents? It’s the same reason that factory farms pass Ag Gag laws.  They don’t want people to see atrocities on their TV screens.

Going forward we should note that reaching Trump involves creating the images that get to him.  This is why everyone in the White House goes to Fox and Friends to reach him. To reach Fox and Friends you have to give them something to show, even it is so they can downplay it or lie about it or justify it.

Activists know the importance of photos and video. The media aren’t going to get these images and videos by themselves.  We need to help them.

Sometimes we need to make our own videos, other times we need to tip off the media so they can get the images.  Now is the time for insiders or people who know insiders at the Baby Gitmos to act.  Here’s a tip. Find a third party to get the story to the media.

For example, maybe you know the guy who delivers diapers to your local Baby Gitmo. You don’t want to be the whistleblower, but if the diaper delivery guy gets the idea, totally out of the blue, to call his local TV station with what he noticed… well it’s not your fault he noticed, you just work in shipping and receiving!

An apostate takes the big step

by digby

Steve Schmidt, who was senior adviser to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and later an MSNBCcontributor, said on Wednesday that he is leaving the Republican party, citing the Trump administration’s border separation policy as a factor in his decision.

He wrote on Twitter that “29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of The Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life. Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.”

He wrote that the GOP has “become a danger to our democracy and our values.

Schmidt, who has been a critic of the Trump administration, said that he’s urging the election of Democratic majorities in the midterms.

“Season of renewal in our land is the absolute and utter repudiation of Trump and his vile enablers in the 2018 election by electing Democratic majorities. I do not say this as an advocate of a progressive agenda,” he wrote. “I say it as someone who retains belief in DEMOCRACY and decency.”

He said that the border separation policy is “connected to the worst abuses of humanity in our history

Here’s his whole rant:

Schmidt is the first of these never Trumpers I’ve heard say explicitly that he is going to vote for the Democrats instead of some vanity candidate. That’s important. If they don’t make that pragmatic choice they are just washing their hands of the situation instead of trying to change it.

So good for him. Maybe he’ll do a full conversion and help the Democrats win. Ex-Republicans are particularly good at doing battle with Republicans. They know where to stick in the metaphorical shiv.

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Their hero

by digby

I guess the dupes who listen to Hannity now think Trump “stepped in” and saved the day.

.@SecNielsen kisses up to Trump: "I just thank you for your leadership, sir."

Then Trump portrays himself as the hero: "You're going to have a lot of happy people…this has been going on for 60 years…nobody has had the political courage to take care of it, but we will." pic.twitter.com/zgEtBIBsgF— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 20, 2018

Jesus H. on a pogo stck. How stupid are they?

Never mind …