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Month: December 2018

Money for nothing by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 26, 2018

Money for nothing
by Tom Sullivan


A $73 million, twenty-mile section of border fence goes up near Santa Teresa, NM west of El Paso, replacing existing “post and rail” vehicle barriers.

A second migrant child has died in the custody of US Customs and Border Protection. Felipe Alonzo-Gomez, an 8-year-old Guatemalan boy, died late Christmas Eve in a hospital in Alamogordo, New Mexico. His death came just over two weeks after another Guatemalen child, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal, died from dehydration and shock a day and a half after being detailed along with her father and other migrants by border agents from the Antelope Wells, New Mexico port of entry.

CNN reports:

The boy was taken to the hospital Monday after a border agent noticed signs of illness, and the medical staff first diagnosed him with a common cold and later detected a fever.

“The child was held for an additional 90 minutes for observation and then released from the hospital mid-afternoon on December 24 with prescriptions for amoxicillin and Ibuprofen,” CBP said in a news release. Amoxicillin is a commonly prescribed antibiotic.

On Monday evening, the boy began vomiting and was taken back to the hospital for evaluation. He died hours later, the CBP said.

The cause of death in both cases is unreported at this time.

On the afternoon of December 18, border agents detained the child and his father 3.29 miles west of the Paso Del Norte Port of Entry in El Paso, Texas, according to a statement prepared by CBP. Two days later, CBP transferred the pair from the Port of Entry station to El Paso Border Patrol Station (EPS). Late December 22, they were moved again, this time to the Alamogordo Border Patrol Station (ALA) for final processing.

Early Christmas Eve, agents noticed the boy showing signs of illness and transferred him to the Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center where, after checks and a period of observation, they released him just before 3 p.m. as noted above. The boy had a fever of 103F. He died just before midnight after losing consciousness on the way back to the hospital. The pair had planned to travel to Johnson City, Tennessee:

Xochitl Torres Small, a Democrat who will represent the district [which includes Alamogordo] starting in January, called for a thorough and transparent investigation into the children’s deaths and more medical resources along the border.

“This is inexcusable,” she said in a statement Tuesday. “Instead of immediately acting to keep children and all of us safe along our border, this administration forced a government shutdown over a wall.”

Felipe Gonzalez, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, said Monday that the U.S. government’s detention of children due to their immigration status violated international law.

Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan announced the agency would conduct more health checks on children, focusing on children under 10. CBP is also exploring with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) additional custody options in the El Paso sector as well as additional medical support from “the Coast Guard, as well as possibly more aid from the Department of Defense, FEMA, Health and Human Services, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Meanwhile, the government is on shutdown until the sitting president gets his wall:

“I can’t tell you when the government is going to reopen,” he told reporters in an Oval Office appearance on Christmas morning. “I can tell you it’s not going to be open until we have a wall, a fence, whatever they’d like to call it. I’ll call it whatever they want. But it’s all the same thing. It’s a barrier from people pouring into our country.”

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi joked that Trump’s massive, 30-foot concrete wall has morphed into “a beaded curtain.” The section shown at the top is more of the 15-18 foot bollard fence design already in place in short sections of the 2,000 mile border. The auto gate Jakelin Caal and her father walked under at Antelope Wells has 3 miles of vehicle barrier to the east and west, then nothing.

Trump’s wall is resentment, wrapped in a fantasy, fueled by propaganda. The El Paso Times reported from an August summit that mayors from border towns in the El Paso area said in believe the “negative rhetoric from Washington that labels the area a war zone remains a challenge and agree a wall isn’t needed in the region.”

The insanity of Trump’s vision can be seen in some screen shots of empty and desolate places along the border taken from a 2017 USA Today survey.




Trump’s wall is a $600 hammer approach from haters of government waste, fraud, and abuse to an issue that is localized and manageable. Forget for a moment the cost in tax dollars. How many workers’ lives do government actuaries estimate will be lost simply building “wall” in such desolate places?

Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

The spirit of Christmas

Published by digby on December 25, 2018

The spirit of Christmas

by digby

Some good Christians doing Christian work:

A non-stop church service in the Netherlands — aimed at stopping an Armenian family from being deported — has become so popular it has issued tickets for the Christmas period to control numbers.

The service has been going around the clock since October 26 — more than 1,400 hours.

Under Dutch law, police officers are not permitted to enter a church while a religious service is taking place. So, church leaders hatched the idea of meeting non-stop to prevent the Tamrazyan’s from being removed from the country.

Since then, hundreds of pastors and volunteers have taken part in the service.

Hayarpi Tamrazyan (C) from Armenia attends a service in the Bethel church as it holds round-the-clock religious services to prevent

Axel Wicke from the Bethel church and community center in The Hague told CNN the service has become something of a “pilgrimage” for people across the Netherlands.

“We have had to account for so many people who want to visit during Christmas,” Wicke said, adding that two of the services are being streamed on Christmas eve and Christmas Day.

The Tamrazyans have lived in the Netherlands for almost nine years, but their claim for political asylum was rejected. The Dutch Minister for Migration, Mark Harbers, has so far refused to use his discretionary powers to intervene and allow them to stay. His office declined to specifically discuss the case when contacted by CNN.

The five members of the Tamrazyan family, who have been living in the Netherlands for nine years, took refuge in the church on October 25, 2018 after Dutch authorities turned down their request for asylum.

The five members of the Tamrazyan family, who have been living in the Netherlands for nine years, took refuge in the church on October 25, 2018 after Dutch authorities turned down their request for asylum.

“Just before Christmas, when we celebrate Gods humanity-loving and peaceful deeds, we feel strengthened not to forsake our responsibility for the Tamrazyan family,” Rev. Theo Hettema, chair of the Protestant Church The Hague, said in a statement.

He says the church provided an “extensive file with new information” to the Minister to help convince him of the family’s case.
21-year-old Hayarpi — the oldest daughter in the family of five — said on Twitter she has been encouraged by the full attendance at the church.

Speaking to Reuters earlier this month, she said: “I really don’t know what the outcome will be, but we hope we can stay here (in the Netherlands), because this is our home, this is where we belong. And my brother, my sister and I, we grew up in the Netherlands and we have been living here for almost nine years.”

This Christmas season, though, the family will spend time together holed up in a church that has offered them sanctuary, hoping and praying for a Christmas miracle.

That yearning sounds familiar doesn’t it? It seems to be a common refrain these days. People who have lived in a country for many years are being told they must leave the only home they know. Good people step up to help, thank God. But it’s not enough. There has to be a change in the policy.

I wouldn’t expect anything from this guy:

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

Santa is marginal

Published by digby on December 25, 2018

Santa is marginal

by digby

Why does he even bother?

Poor Baron.

Here’s something to make you feel better on Christmas day:

Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

Carols for the morning

Published by digby on December 25, 2018

Carols for the morning

by digby

I’ve been posting that every year since I started writing this blog. It’s got it all in my book.

But I have some other favorites as well from traditional to pop. I know carols get old fast but they always sound good on Christmas morning:

Merry Christmas everyone!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

.

Re-gifting this to you by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 25, 2018

Re-gifting this to you
by Tom Sullivan

My wife received this new music video the other day via IM from Robert Henderson, one of the songwriter/producers, an old acquaintance. The images are arresting and beautiful. The song is soothing and stays with you. It has been the best Christmas gift so far this year. We’ve played it over and over. (Watch the sun traverse at timestamp 1:35.)

Thanks for hanging in here with us. It means a lot.

Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

A year of living dangerously, straight ahead

Published by digby on December 25, 2018

This post will stay pinned at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down for newer posts. — d

A year of living dangerously, straight ahead

by digby

I know it’s hard to believe that things are going to get worse. But there’s every chance it will. All you have to do is look at what’s happened since the election. I knew it was going to be a turbulent lame duck session but I didn’t think it would go quite this way.

First, the good news is that he hasn’t fired Mueller. But he did fire Jeff Sessions and replaced him temporarily with a henchman whom he has already reportedly pressured about the Cohen investigation (and who likely has told him what he knows about the Mueller investigtion as well.) Now he’s nominated yet another to replace him who auditioned for the job by sending around memos railing against the Mueller investigation. So stay tuned on that one. With his erratic performance on everything else I don’t think we can’t be sure that he’s not going to wake up in the morning and fire Mueller with a tweet and take his chances. He seems to be in a “shoot the moon” kind of mood. (Or maybe it’s just “fuck all you people, I’m doing it.”)

Obviously this shutdown is a trainwreck. We’ve dealt with them before, of course. In fact this is the third one of Trump’s presidency. But because of this one is specifically the result of Trump’s base demanding that he hold his breath until he turns blue over that stupid wall, it’s a bit more dicey than usual. At this point he seems to have decided to keep it closed until the Democrats take over the House so he can pretend it’s all their fault. He’ll be able to call on some primal misogyny that has worked so well for him the past, with pelosi as his foil, so I expect he’s looking forward to it. It’s not going to be pretty.

It’s possible they’ll find a way to resolve this before then if they can convince him somehow that it’s in his best interest, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Then we have the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis (who Trump has now told to get out immediately), on top of the exile of Chief of Staff John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster and a whole list of others who left either because their corruption scandals got the best of them or they failed to properly lick Trump’s boots. It’s been a non-stop administration bloodbath with the instability actually getting worse rather than better as time goes by. And the stable genius is the head of the rotting fish of his administration.

And now Trump is about to be hit by a freight train called “The Oversight Express” and he doesn’t have a clue about what’s coming. The Democrats already have dozens of leads on corruption, collusion, and crimes that have been developed in the press over the last two years. But they are going to have to hit the round running in order to develop the case in a coherent form for the American people in time for the next election. The Mueller probe will likely put a lot of meat on that bone as well. (As I argued earlier, impeachment may be the best way to wrap everything up in a neat narrative, whether the Senate does its duty and convicts him or not.)

The president is losing what few moorings he ever had, living in a delusion wrought by the sycophants around him, Fox News and the foolish empty suits in the Freedom Caucus. He thinks his gut is leading him to a great victory in 2020 to validate his genius once and for all. It’s actually been destroying him — slowly at first and eventually all at once.

Unfortunately, he may take us all down with him.

We’ll be keeping a close on all these coming attractions here at Hullabaloo. It’s like one of those 20 car pile-ups on the freeway. You can’t avert your eyes even if you want to. Hopefully our analysis and synthesis will be of some use to you as you go about your lives trying not to feel like you’re going crazy.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

.

The truth won’t set us free? Damn…

Published by digby on December 25, 2018

The truth won’t set us free?

by digby

Damn:

In a modern democracy, peddling conspiracies for political advantage is perhaps not so different from seeding an epidemic.

If a virus is to gain a foothold with the electorate, it will need a population of likely believers (“susceptibles” in public-health speak), a germ nimble enough to infect new hosts easily (an irresistible tall tale), and an eager “Amen choir” (also known as “super-spreaders”).

Unleashed on the body politic, a falsehood may spread across the social networks that supply us with information. Facebook is a doorknob slathered in germs, Twitter a sneezing coworker, and Instagram a child returning home after a day at school, ensuring the exposure of all.

But if lies, conspiracies and fake news are really like germs, you might think that fact-checking is the cure, and truth an effective antidote.

If only it were that easy.

New research offers fresh insights into the stubborn role of ideology in maintaining support for those who peddle falsehoods, and the limited power of fact-checking to change voters’ minds. Even in the face of immediate and authoritative corrections, we humans don’t budge easily, or for long, from established opinions about politics, politicians and the coverage they receive.

And some of us — in particular, those who endorse conservative positions — are quicker to believe assertions that warn of grim consequences or of sinister forces at work.

The findings of three new studies suggest that fact-checkers had better be persistent, and that their expectations of changing people’s minds had better be modest.

But the research also suggests that if fact-checkers want the truth to matter, they should not be shy about touting the value of their services.

People believe what they want to believe. But some people really want to believe stupid things apparently.

This is a testament to the efficacy of propaganda. And I’d assume that Trump’s “fake news” crusade is having an effect too. The article discusses a number of studies recently about how this works and it won’t make you optimistic.

One study, in particular, was kind of scary:

It tested the idea that people are more inclined to believe unproven conspiracy theories when their party is out of power, a notion sometimes called the “conspiracy belief is for losers” hypothesis.

The study was led by UCLA anthropologist Daniel Fessler, who found that people whose political stances aligned them with American conservatism were far more likely than liberals to embrace falsehoods that warned of grim consequences.

Americans who hew to more progressive political stances were certainly credulous as well, the UCLA team found. But they were no more likely to believe a scary falsehood — say, that a drunken airline passenger could pry open a plane’s door in midair — than they were to buy into the far less terrifying myth that you can burn more calories by exercising on an empty stomach.

But were these inclinations real and enduring, or could they be explained by the fact that, when the experiment was run in October 2015 and September 2016, conservatives had been out of the White House for several years?

Fessler and Theodore Samore, a graduate student in UCLA’s anthropology department, repeated the experiment in 2016, after Donald Trump had won the presidential election, and in 2017, after Georgia Democrat Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore in a special election for a Senate seat. After Trump’s triumph, the researchers reasoned, conservatives should feel empowered and confident. After Jones’ victory, they presumed, liberals would likely feel hopeful once more.

But their original findings did not change: As they moved further right on the ideological spectrum, people were consistently more likely to believe frightening false claims, and found them more credible than emotionally neutral falsehoods. The results were published last week in PLOS One.

“It seems there’s just a fundamental difference in how credulous people are about hazards as a function of their orientation,” Fessler said. “How positively people feel about their party’s future doesn’t matter.”

That dynamic has worrisome implications: When believers of ominous warnings succeed at the polls, “they have the megaphone that power brings,” Fessler said. “And they use that — whether cynically or genuinely I can’t tell — to issue additional proclamations of danger.”

This, he said, has been Trump’s stock in trade — foreign powers are taking advantage of the United States, dangerous hordes are storming the borders, and we need to build a wall to keep would-be invaders at bay.

“That cycle is very difficult to break,” Fessler said. What’s more, warning people who are inclined to believe that kind of narrative that they’re being lied to seems more likely to reinforce the conspiracy theory than to induce a change of heart.

“I do worry,” he said.

It’s their worldview. And it’s always been a major characteristic of a certain conservative faction in American politics. We just haven’t a leader emerge full-blown from that toxic fever swamp before.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

Supreme Christmas

Published by digby on December 24, 2018

Supreme Christmas

by digby

The best hearing answer ever:

Today we have news that RBG is up and working so that’s good. You Supreme Court watchers may be interested in this piece about John Roberts. It may be a bit optimistic that he isn’t going to let the court go full wingnut but right now it’s all we’ve got:

In his first 13 years on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s main challenge was trying to assemble five votes to move the court to the right, though there were only four reliably conservative justices.

Now he faces a very different problem. With the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and his replacement by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the chief justice has the votes he needs on issues like abortion, racial discrimination, religion and voting. At the same time, he has taken Justice Kennedy’s place as the swing vote at the court’s ideological center, making him the most powerful chief justice in 80 years.

But all of that new power comes at a dangerous time for the court, whose legitimacy depends on the public perception that it is not a partisan institution. “We don’t work as Democrats or Republicans,” Chief Justice Roberts said in 2016, and he reiterated that position in an extraordinary rebuke of President Trump last month.

He seemed to underscore that point again on Friday, joining the court’s four-member liberal wing, all appointed by Democratic presidents, to reject a request from the Trump administration in a case that could upend decades of asylum policy. This month, he drew sharp criticism from three conservative colleagues for voting to deny review in two cases on efforts to stop payments to Planned Parenthood.

The Trump administration has tested the chief justice with a series of applications and petitions asking the court to ignore its ordinary procedures in cases on issues like the census and climate change. After what has often appeared to be intense behind-the-scenes negotiations, Chief Justice Roberts has so far assembled coalitions that mostly denied the requests, often over the dissents of two or three of his most conservative colleagues.

The court’s newest member, Justice Kavanaugh, did not note a dissent in any of those cases, suggesting that he was following Chief Justice Roberts’s lead. That changed on Friday in the asylum case, casting the new dynamic at the court into sharp relief.

Yeah, I know. Depending on John Roberts to save the Republic is pretty desperate. But there have been cases of judges changing with the times. Maybe he’ll be one of them.

If you find what we write here every day to be valuable, I hope you’ll consider putting some change in the Hullabaloo holiday stocking. If you’ve already donated, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven’t and would like to help support this blog for another year, the paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.

And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!

cheers — digby

Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405

.