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Month: June 2018

Clueless optics

Clueless optics

by digby

Right. It just didn’t “feel right” to have a group of white Republicans and their kids frolicking and having fun at a time like this.

President Trump on Wednesday said he was calling off the annual congressional picnic scheduled for Thursday evening as his administration grapples with the furor over its hardline practice of separating migrant families crossing at the border.

“I was just walking over to the Oval Office and I said, you know, it doesn’t feel right to have a picnic for Congress when we’re working on doing something very important,” he said in a meeting with lawmakers at the White House. “It didn’t feel exactly right to me.”

The president — who last night attended a high-dollar fundraiser at his Washington hotel — did not specify when the congressional picnic would be rescheduled. “We’ll make it another time when things are going extremely well,” he said.

Somebody told him that the “optics” wouldn’t be good.

Too late:

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Michael Cohen sends a message

Michael Cohen sends a message

by digby

His new lawyer seems to be having an effect:

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime confidant and former personal attorney, has resigned from his post as deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee’s Finance Committee, sources close to the RNC told ABC News.

In his resignation letter to Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chair, Cohen cited the ongoing special counsel investigation as one reason for his departure. ABC News has reviewed the email.

“This important role requires the full time attention and dedication of each member. Given the ongoing Mueller and SDNY investigations, that simply is impossible for me to do,” he wrote.

Cohen also criticized the administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, the first time he’s distanced himself from the president.

“As the son of a Polish holocaust survivor, the images and sounds of this family separation policy is heart wrenching,” Cohen wrote. “While I strongly support measures that will secure our porous borders, children should never be used as bargaining chips.”

Cohen on Tuesday hired New York lawyer Guy Petrillo to represent him in a federal investigation into his business dealings.

He didn’t have to say a word about the immigration policy. But it seems he feels the need to let everyone know that he’s not in lockstep with his former boss for some reason …

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Trump supporters are just like their Dear Leader

Trump supporters are just like their Dear Leader

by digby

The voters are not any better. They have no response to anything except to point fingers at their enemies and whine about how everyone is always unfair to them.

How did people so old get through their lives being so immature?

President Donald Trump’s supporters see themselves as victims of a manipulative media reporting on child detention camps for young migrants taken from their parents at the border.

“He should enforce the laws like he’s doing, and our Congress needs to abide by the laws and follow the laws and enforce the laws — not go against our president,” said Ron Carroll, a 69-year-old from Mesa. “I blame it on the parents for letting it happen because they bring them up and know they can’t get across there legally.”

Carroll, a retiree from St. Louis, said he wasn’t troubled by government agents ripping children from their parents and detaining them in separate facilities.

“Like I said earlier, it’s the parents that bring them up, and they already know they’re going to take them away, so to me there’s no issue there,” Carroll said.

Carroll’s wife complained that media reports about traumatized children and babies were emotionally manipulative.

“I think people need to stop constantly bringing up the poor children, the poor children — the parents are the problems, they’re the ones coming in illegally,” said Madeline Carroll. “Quit trying to make us feel teary-eyed for the children. Yes, I love children a great deal, but to me, it’s up to the parents to do things rightfully and legally.”

She overcame the twinge of guilt those reports stirred up by summoning outrage toward the parents.

“To be perfectly honest, I’m angry at the parents,” she said. “I feel very honestly that it’s their fault that the children have been separated, because they’re bringing them in illegally. And the other thing is, the law that has been put on the books was not put on recently. It was put on back many years ago, and I think very seriously that they need very firmly to say enough is enough.”

Illegal entry to the U.S. has long been a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison, but previous administrations generally chose not to prosecute adults who crossed illegally with children and instead referred them to immigration courts.

“It’s not just involving separating the families — we’re trying to secure our borders to stop the drug trafficking, the sex trafficking and I think it goes a little deeper,” said Renee Padilla, a Trump supporter who works in human resources. “At the end of the day, to make America great again I think both sides of the aisle need to come together.”

An 84-year-old Trump supporter admitted he felt nothing for the children taken from their parents and compared the family separation policy to a citation he once got for illegal swimming.

“Here’s how I feel about it: When I was a kid, 16 years old, I got fined for swimming in a lake ’cause I didn’t follow the rules,” said retiree Carl Bier. “These people that we have coming across the border illegally are breaking the rules. I have no feelings for them at all.”

I know I don’t have to point out that a two year old doesn’t know about their rules. Neither do we usually punish kids for the sins of the mothers (who are facing horrible gang violence that we’ve helped create in their home countries.)

Trump now says he’s going to sign a new executive order to put all families indefinitely in detention camp together. So that’s nice.

Think Progress tracked some of the Republican officials who have spoken out against the policy. They have lots of blame to go around, of course. But they can’t bring themselves to say a negative word about their Dear Leader.

The problem isn’t Trump.

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Damn lies and statistics

Damn lies and statistics

by digby

Trump says millions of people are pouring into the country illegally. In fact, the last time a million people poured into the country was over a decade ago. Last year it was the lowest it’s been in 46 years.

There is no illegal immigration crisis. This issue is made up to give Trump voters a sadistic thrill.

And they are loving it, starting with Trump’s unctuous factotum Stephen Miller:

White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller has all but become the face of the issue, a development that even supporters of Trump’s “zero-tolerance” position say is damaging the White House. “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border,” an outside White House adviser said. “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.”

He’s not the only one.

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Don and Ann sittin’ in a tree: she wants that wall and she wants it now. The crying kids are just a bonus.

Don and Ann sittin’ in a tree

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Everyone likes to say that the people who go on Fox News really only have an audience of one — the president. But when President Trump speaks about immigration, he only has an audience of one as well. A couple of months ago I wrote a column about the growing rift between Trump and his most ardent admirer, Ann Coulter. She has been very upset that he hasn’t yet built the border wall he promised during the campaign. To her, and Trump supporters like her, that is the most important issue beyond all others.

In that column I noted that Trump, his immigration adviser Stephen Miller also whispering in his ear, was starting to sweat. Two days later, he called for state governors to send National Guard troops to “protect the border.”

Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been absorbing insult after insult from the president for his decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation back in 2017, all so that he could fulfill their shared goal of closing the borders and deporting as many people as possible. Two days after Trump called out the Guard, Sessions distributed a new border policy requiring that anyone crossing the border illegally must be prosecuted:

Essentially, he said that because Congress had failed to “fully fund” the wall, immigration had become a crisis. That was nonsense. The only crisis was that Ann Coulter was having a fit because Trump hadn’t built it yet. And because she is not afraid of Trump, she was calling him out on a daily basis.

Homeland Security must have dragged its feet, because on April 26, ICE Director Thomas Homan, Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan sent a memo to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen telling her she needed to immediately detain and prosecute all parents with children, resulting in the separation of families, in order to send a message:

In a memorandum that outlines the proposal and was obtained by The Washington Post, officials say that threatening adults with criminal charges and prison time would be the “most effective” way to reverse the steadily rising number of attempted crossings.

Sessions himself gave a couple of speeches on May 7 saying essentially the same thing:

If you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that. . . .

We’re not going to stand for this. We are not going to let this country be invaded. We will not be stampeded. We will not capitulate to lawlessness.

That’s the kind of language that makes Ann Coulter swoon. But it’s not enough. She still wants that wall.

Over the past few weeks, this “zero-tolerance” policy and all it implies has resulted in thousands of kids being separated from their parents. It’s considered a humanitarian disaster everywhere on the planet — except on Fox News, where they speak to that audience of one in the White House.

Tucker Carlson has been using blatant white nationalist rhetoric on his show for some time, making the claim this week that people who are critical of this policy are “elites” who want immigrants “to change your country forever and they are succeeding.” Brian Kilmeade on “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite program, went off on a furious rant on Monday morning, culminating in this odious comment:

These kids get fanned out to working-class neighborhoods, into our society, and then they have to be paid for English as a Second Language and then they have got to be schooled and a lot of them — sadly, in my neighborhood — turn into MS-13.

Laura Ingraham agrees with Kilmeade that the children being incarcerated at the border are “fresh recruits” for MS-13. As a measure of just how far gone they are, Ingraham’s interview with Sessions on Monday night cleared up the difference between the Trump administration and the Nazi persecution of Jews when Sessions pointed out that the Nazis wouldn’t let the Jews leave the country.

But the person who really takes it to the next level is the president himself. He’s been using increasingly eliminationist language to talk about immigrants in public. Lately Trump’s vocabulary has included such words and phrases as “infest,” “thugs,” “infiltrate,” “killers,” “criminals,” “under siege,” “massive crime,” “crime-infested,” “breeding,” “pour into our country” and “animals.” We know that in private he has said he doesn’t want people coming in from “shithole countries” and worries that those who come in won’t “go back to their huts.”

Coulter loves that too, but she remains unsatisfied.

Trump was supposed to deliver a speech about the economy on Tuesday to the National Federation of Independent Businesses and instead turned it into a Trump rally where he demagogued American allies and immigrants alike. It was a typically ugly display but what was startling was the audience lustily cheering.

Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” had the same reaction I did:

The NFIB, a small business association, I’ve never associated with that kind of nativism. I just — it shocked me a little bit. Maybe it’s just individual members, maybe it’s a handful of people. I am shocked by that kind of reception.

It wasn’t just a handful of people.

Trump’s unctuous factotum Stephen Miller thinks being cruel to children is a winning electoral issue and Trump agrees. (He’s comparing it to what he believes was a fantastically successful NFL-kneeling achievement.) It looks like we’re going to find out if they’re right.

But Coulter still wants her wall. And that’s really what this is about, at least for Trump.

He is holding all those kids at the border for ransom. According to Politico, Trump is beside himself over the fact that Congress won’t consider his request for $25 billion up front to build his wall and is instead planning to appropriate the mere $1.6 billion his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, requested. Trump is not only holding those kids hostage, he’s also threatening to shut down the government in September if he doesn’t get his $25 billion.

If Congress capitulates to his demands, there will be no end to it. Ann Coulter’s wish list is as long as it is awful, and Trump will do anything to keep her happy. She and her fellow extremists have him wrapped around their little fingers.

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A look in the mirror by @BloggersRUs

A look in the mirror
by Tom Sullivan


Left: Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) chokes up reading news of immigrant toddlers imprisoned in federal ‘tender age’ shelters in Texas, 06/19/18.
Right: Walter Cronkite (CBS) chokes up announcing death of JFK in Dallas, 11/22/63. (h/t Chuck Clark)

It is significant that the sitting president invokes a home-grown violent gang of Central American immigrants as the bogeyman for whipping his xenophobic base into a froth. Because what underlies anti-immigrant fervor is a battle over turf.

So many of the political disputes in this country and in this world come down to that. We dress up turf battles as ideological and policy disputes, but in the end what they come down to is control. Turf.

For example, the “Christian nation” argument one hears among conservative Christians. This is a Christian country, they assert. Founded of, by, and for Christians. The argument is not about the founders. Nor about our founding documents. Nor about American history, and certainly not about Jesus. It is about turf. About whose God is the Big G in the United States of America. About which faith will, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, dominate all the “lesser” faiths. We tolerate them so long as they know their places and don’t breed too rapidly.

So it is now with the growth of white nationalism embodied by our sitting president and his political base, 27 percent or so of the electorate. The group feels threatened by demographic changes that threaten its status both as an ethnic majority and dominant political plurality in the country. All that happy talk about melting pots and e pluribus unum and land of the free is the thinnest veneer covering darker, baser instincts: tribal and clan loyalties. Patriotism backed by bluster has always been a mile wide and an inch deep. And values? Please. They elected Donald J. Trump.

The sitting president yesterday deployed eliminationist rhetoric against immigrants and asylum seekers on the southern border, describing them as an infestation. New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer cautioned, “before the Rwandan genocide, the perpetrators used mass media to define the future victims as ‘cockroaches.'” Author David Neiwert reminded Twitter users, “Eliminationism is the belief that one’s political opponents, or the object of their political ire are a cancer on the body politic that must be excised, either by separation from the public at large, through expulsion or outright extermination, to protect the nation’s purity.”

Yesterday on “Here & Now,” American Family Radio’s Sandy Rios argued that the problem is not toddlers separated from their mothers. The problem is a flood of bad mothers from Central America who fled violence in their countries and unconscionably sent or brought their children with them on a dangerous journey to break our laws (illegal entry is a misdemeanor; entry to request asylum is not a crime).

Grab ’em by the babies

So now one nation under Trump is, essentially, detaining toddlers in warehouses and incarcerating parents with no criminal backgrounds over the federal equivalent of a parking ticket, and with no plan for reuniting them. Many of the children may never see their parents again. The Trump administration is bringing back jobs … manufacturing orphans.

“The prosecutions for illegal entry while preventing people from coming legally appear to be part of a pincer movement intentionally designed to choke off asylees attempting to come into the country,” Chris Hayes reported from McAllen, Texas. Turn away asylum seekers at ports of entry, then arrest them if they enter illegally.

It’s not Gandhi at the Dharasana salt works. Not yet.

In no particular order, a sampling of how the rest of the world sees us.

Israel
No clear plan yet on how to reunite parents with children separated at US border

MEXICO CALLS MIGRANT CHILDREN SEPARATION ‘INHUMANE,’ ‘RACIST’

Ireland
Government to convey ‘grave concern’ to US ambassador about migrant separation

Australia
‘Don’t leave me, Mum’: Detainee tells of separation from son

Rachel Maddow breaks down on air over Trump immigration policy

Japan
Opposition to family separation grows; Trump defends actions

India
52 Indian asylum seekers detained in US under Trump’s zero-tolerance policy

News anchor breaks down while reporting story on infants being ‘detained’ at US-Mexico border

Trump aggressively defends border family separation

England
Trump says immigrants will ‘infest our country’ in Twitter tirade, as US border row rages on

Child migrants: Trump promised a wall against immigration but now he may have gone too far

Rachel Maddow breaks down in tears while reporting news that immigrant babies are being held in ‘tender age’ shelters after being forcibly separated from their parents at the border

Trump defends separating immigrant families amid outcry

France criticises Trump’s policy of separating immigrant children from parents: ‘We don’t share certain values’

New Zealand
Rachel Maddow breaks down over babies being sent to ‘tender age’ shelters

Saudi Arabia
Trump, Republicans lawmakers to meet as outrage grows over family separation

South Africa
Trump ‘zero-tolerance’ policy: Youngest migrants held in ‘tender age’ shelters

Qatar
Trump doubles down as anger grows over child separation policy

France
Trump doubles down on family separations as border crisis rages

China
Donald Trump says he ‘has to take children away’ from migrants amid global outcry over his immigration policy

Canada
Toddler migrants held in at least 3 shelters in Texas
U.S. officials sending migrant children separated from parents to ‘tender age’ Texas shelters

Thailand
‘Quit separating the kids!’ Trump faces Democratic rage on immigration

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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.

Speechless by tristero

Speechless

by tristero

They are doing this to children. To Babies.

Maddow says “they want this,” meaning that Trump’s strategists — not Trump himself, he’s just a racist with no strategy — are thrilled about the outrage. That’s because in November, it will enable them to paint the Trump-ish candidates as people who tried, and were thwarted, to do something about immigration. They’re counting upon a fundamentally racist and xenophobic voting demographic being motivated to go to the polls — and a feckless Democratic opposition, of course, who will promote  candidates who inspire as much interest in the populace as the announcement of a new Snapple flavor.

I think she’s probably right. In trying to understand this, I’m reminded of John Mitchell during Watergate who said somewhere in his testimony that he felt that the defeat of Richard Nixon in 1972 would lead to the destruction of the US and therefore Nixon must be re-elected by any means necessary.

It’s got to be something close to that mad logic that drives the Trumpians. Like if a few thousand dark-skinned babies and children are traumatized, it’s a price worth paying for America to survive. And so we get back to the main moral point:

They are doing this to children. To Babies. I don’t see where an America that would do something like that is anything worth preserving.

What is wrong with these people?

Stable genius at work

Stable genius at work

by digby

Another Canadian criminal

He’s fine. No need to worry that there’s anything wrong with the mental stability of the most powerful man on earth:

Time for drink.

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Michael Cohen is getting anxious

Michael Cohen is getting anxious

by digby

Looks like somebody’s getting frustrated with the president:

Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen has signaled to friends that he is “willing to give” investigators information on the President if that’s what they are looking for, and is planning on hiring a new lawyer to handle a possible indictment from federal prosecutors.

“He knows a lot of things about the President and he’s not averse to talking in the right situation,” one of Cohen’s New York friends who is in touch with him told CNN. “If they want information on Trump, he’s willing to give it.”

Cohen is planning to hire Guy Petrillo, a former chief of the criminal division of the US attorney’s office in Manhattan and an experienced trial lawyer, a source familiar confirmed. The source said all the paperwork and retainer may not have been finalized just yet.

The shift in legal strategy and signals of potential cooperation with investigators come as Cohen feels increasingly isolated from the President, whom he has been famously loyal to for more than a decade. Last week, CNN reported Cohen has indicated a willingness to cooperate to alleviate pressure on himself and his family.

“He feels let down by him and isolated by him,” another friend of Cohen’s told CNN. Cohen has famously said he would take a bullet for Trump and he has fashioned himself as Trump’s “fixer,” willing to help handle situations quietly. Cohen facilitated a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels weeks before the 2016 election to keep quiet her allegations of an affair a decade earlier with the then-candidate. The White House has denied any affair.

The mounting pressure on Cohen and his family since the April FBI raid of his home, hotel room and office has been weighing on him and his family, sources say. Cohen has not been charged with any wrongdoing but his attorneys have been combing through 3.7 million files and hundreds of encrypted messages that were swept up in the raid.

Vanity Fair has more:

News of Cohen’s legal shake-up has inevitably fanned speculation about whether he would flip. The conjecture appeared to weigh on Donald Trump, who distanced himself from his former personal attorney when asked by reporters outside the White House last week if he thought Cohen would cooperate with the government. “I always liked Michael,” he told reporters.

The use of the past tense was not lost on those close to Cohen. These people say that Trump has been foolishly careless with how he has publicly talked about Cohen, who they believe holds all the cards in the situation. “That one line had to be the dumbest thing [Trump’s] ever said,” one person familiar with his thinking told me. And that, indeed, would be quite an accomplishment.

He also said, “I haven’t talked to him in a long time. Trump’s narcissism may get him into big trouble this time. If Cohen spills, it won’t help Trump to pardon him after the fact. He should be very, very careful. But that’s not him.

But it isn’t just about hurt feelings:

Mr. Cohen has frequently told associates in recent months he is frustrated that the president hasn’t offered to pay his legal fees, which he has said are “bankrupting” him, according to one of the people. He has said he feels that Mr. Trump owes him after his years of loyalty to the former real-estate developer, whom he served for nearly a decade at the Trump Organization.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment, and there has been no indication Mr. Trump is planning to pay for his former longtime lawyer’s legal fees.

The Trump campaign had been footing the bill for some of Mr. Cohen’s legal expenses, paying nearly $230,000 to McDermott, Will & Emery LLP between October 2017 and January 2018, according to Federal Election Commission records and a person familiar with the matter. But those payments helped cover Mr. Cohen’s legal representation in the separate Russia investigation, not in the probe of his business dealings.

The money issue is serious for Cohen. He obviously can’t take money from Russians anymore. Trump won’t pay. Who’s left to pick up the tab for him?

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Taking their ball and going home

Taking their ball and going home

by digby

They can dish it out but they sure can’t take it…

The Trump administration withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday, making good on a pledge to leave a body it accused of hypocrisy and criticized as biased against Israel.

“For too long, the Human Rights Council has been a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said Tuesday at the State Department in Washington. She said the decision was an affirmation of U.S. respect for human rights, a commitment that “does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights.”

The 47-member council, created in 2006 and based in Geneva, began its latest session on Monday with a broadside against President Donald Trump’s immigration policy by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights. He called the policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegally “unconscionable.”

Yeah, it’s all about Israel. Sure it is.

Let’s put this one in the Nikki Haley file. We may need it.

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