Saturday, June 30, 2018
The Fight For Separated Children Is A Fight For Our Humanity And The Rule Of Law
As we all prepare to march today, it's worth recapping what is happening in Trump's American gulag. We know that children are being separated from their parents and held in cages, although the media has not been given access to actually provide photos of the reportedly horrific conditions in which they are kept. And we still don't really know where all the children and young women are still being held, nor have an accurate number of how many there actually are.
We also know that members of Congress and state and local officials, some of whom have regulatory oversight over state-licensed facilities contracted with by ICE, are still being refused entry into these facilities, although it remains unclear on what legal grounds they could be denied.
We also know that children as young as three are being brought into immigration court without their parents and often without legal representation. According to a DOJ spokesperson, "Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) records show that there are respondents in removal proceedings who are juveniles, some as young as three -years-old, who do not currently have any attorney of record on file. Please note that this does not mean that these children will appear before an immigration judge alone or will be unrepresented during their proceedings. All immigration judges provide a list of pro bono legal service providers to respondents during the initial hearing and many of the respondents who are initially unrepresented obtain representation as removal proceedings progress."
That may sound somewhat reassuring, but Jeff Sessions actually won a case earlier this year in which the courts determined that immigrant children who come to the US with their parents are not entitled to a court-appointed lawyer. And even under Obama, there were immigration judges who believed that children as young as 3 and 4 years old could understand immigration law. So the chances that at least some children under the age of five who are going through deportation hearings without the benefit of any legal representation, pro bono or otherwise, is actually quite high.
In New York, ICE has suspended in-person hearings at immigration courts and instead the detained immigrants will only appear by video conferencing. Considering that many pro bono and court-appointed attorneys often meet with their clients for the first time just minutes before proceedings, this new policy will effectively deny that opportunity and significantly reduce those attorneys' effectiveness in court. In addition, any discussions with their client over video are not deemed confidential, as opposed to any in-person meeting.
These pro bono and regular immigration lawyers do tremendous, valuable work, with little monetary reward compared to much of the legal profession. And just like in the criminal defense area where lawyers briefly meet their clients just minutes before a hearing, it is often and understandably the case that the legal representation given is hardly robust. But imagine doing that work without being able to talk to your client at all, either because they are a three year old who is frightened and scared and unable to understand what is happening and only wants to be reunited with their mother or because you simply aren't allowed to meet with them at all.
We also know that parents are being blackmailed into signing deportation orders in order to be reunited with their children. In one case at least, a CBP agent threatened to put the separated child up for adoption if the parent did not sign the order.
We also know that the government never had any intention of reuniting these separated children with their parents. As many have noted, FedEx packages and personal property in prison are tracked far better than these children. And then yesterday we learned that the policy of family separation was instituted under a pilot program almost as soon as Trump took office, in July, 2017. This means that there are approximately 2,000 other separated children that we know nothing about.
John Kelly has proven himself to be a lying racist already during this administration. This pilot policy was set up and implemented during his tenure as head of Homeland Security. He lied to Congress when he told Claire McCaskill there was no plan to separate children from their mothers in April, 2017 when the policy was clearly being considered. He did not notify Congress when the pilot program began a mere two months later. And he lied to the American people when he claimed that the children would be "well cared for" under the "zero tolerance" (read intolerance) policy when he knew they were being held in cages and would never be reunited with their parents. He lied when he said a law passed by Democrats required family separation when he was the very one who instituted the policy change that began that process. In addition, it appears that government lawyers may have lied to the federal judge who ordered that the families be reunited by not notifying the court of these previously separated children.
We also now know that the government is going to use this reunification ruling to violate the Flores settlement and keep families in indefinite detention. Because of the backlog of cases and the length of the legal process, this means families may be held in detention for years before their case is finalized.
And lastly, we know that Donald Trump doesn't even believe that immigrants and asylum seekers should be entitled to any due process at all, a policy that would put at risk two-thirds of America's population for deportation without due process.
These policies are inhumane, cruel, abhorrent and represent institutional child abuse done by the Trump administration in our name. Even beyond this abject cruelty, which is hard to get beyond, the Trump administration's continual attempts to hide and obfuscate and intentionally deny due process for these immigrants and asylum seekers speaks to the authoritarian nature of this administration.
Forcing three year-olds to provide for their own legal defense, denying physical access to an attorney, blackmailing parents to get back their children, and simply holding families indefinitely are all policies of this administration. In many ways, this administration makes the old Soviet show trials look like a beacon of judicial rectitude. And history has taught us that when legal rights are stripped from one group, it won't be long before it happens to others.
We also know that members of Congress and state and local officials, some of whom have regulatory oversight over state-licensed facilities contracted with by ICE, are still being refused entry into these facilities, although it remains unclear on what legal grounds they could be denied.
We also know that children as young as three are being brought into immigration court without their parents and often without legal representation. According to a DOJ spokesperson, "Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) records show that there are respondents in removal proceedings who are juveniles, some as young as three -years-old, who do not currently have any attorney of record on file. Please note that this does not mean that these children will appear before an immigration judge alone or will be unrepresented during their proceedings. All immigration judges provide a list of pro bono legal service providers to respondents during the initial hearing and many of the respondents who are initially unrepresented obtain representation as removal proceedings progress."
That may sound somewhat reassuring, but Jeff Sessions actually won a case earlier this year in which the courts determined that immigrant children who come to the US with their parents are not entitled to a court-appointed lawyer. And even under Obama, there were immigration judges who believed that children as young as 3 and 4 years old could understand immigration law. So the chances that at least some children under the age of five who are going through deportation hearings without the benefit of any legal representation, pro bono or otherwise, is actually quite high.
In New York, ICE has suspended in-person hearings at immigration courts and instead the detained immigrants will only appear by video conferencing. Considering that many pro bono and court-appointed attorneys often meet with their clients for the first time just minutes before proceedings, this new policy will effectively deny that opportunity and significantly reduce those attorneys' effectiveness in court. In addition, any discussions with their client over video are not deemed confidential, as opposed to any in-person meeting.
These pro bono and regular immigration lawyers do tremendous, valuable work, with little monetary reward compared to much of the legal profession. And just like in the criminal defense area where lawyers briefly meet their clients just minutes before a hearing, it is often and understandably the case that the legal representation given is hardly robust. But imagine doing that work without being able to talk to your client at all, either because they are a three year old who is frightened and scared and unable to understand what is happening and only wants to be reunited with their mother or because you simply aren't allowed to meet with them at all.
We also know that parents are being blackmailed into signing deportation orders in order to be reunited with their children. In one case at least, a CBP agent threatened to put the separated child up for adoption if the parent did not sign the order.
We also know that the government never had any intention of reuniting these separated children with their parents. As many have noted, FedEx packages and personal property in prison are tracked far better than these children. And then yesterday we learned that the policy of family separation was instituted under a pilot program almost as soon as Trump took office, in July, 2017. This means that there are approximately 2,000 other separated children that we know nothing about.
John Kelly has proven himself to be a lying racist already during this administration. This pilot policy was set up and implemented during his tenure as head of Homeland Security. He lied to Congress when he told Claire McCaskill there was no plan to separate children from their mothers in April, 2017 when the policy was clearly being considered. He did not notify Congress when the pilot program began a mere two months later. And he lied to the American people when he claimed that the children would be "well cared for" under the "zero tolerance" (read intolerance) policy when he knew they were being held in cages and would never be reunited with their parents. He lied when he said a law passed by Democrats required family separation when he was the very one who instituted the policy change that began that process. In addition, it appears that government lawyers may have lied to the federal judge who ordered that the families be reunited by not notifying the court of these previously separated children.
We also now know that the government is going to use this reunification ruling to violate the Flores settlement and keep families in indefinite detention. Because of the backlog of cases and the length of the legal process, this means families may be held in detention for years before their case is finalized.
And lastly, we know that Donald Trump doesn't even believe that immigrants and asylum seekers should be entitled to any due process at all, a policy that would put at risk two-thirds of America's population for deportation without due process.
These policies are inhumane, cruel, abhorrent and represent institutional child abuse done by the Trump administration in our name. Even beyond this abject cruelty, which is hard to get beyond, the Trump administration's continual attempts to hide and obfuscate and intentionally deny due process for these immigrants and asylum seekers speaks to the authoritarian nature of this administration.
Forcing three year-olds to provide for their own legal defense, denying physical access to an attorney, blackmailing parents to get back their children, and simply holding families indefinitely are all policies of this administration. In many ways, this administration makes the old Soviet show trials look like a beacon of judicial rectitude. And history has taught us that when legal rights are stripped from one group, it won't be long before it happens to others.
Friday, June 29, 2018
This Will Not Pass
It's nice to see a large part of the media finally wake up to the fact that Mitch McConnell's refusal to even give Merrick Garland a hearing was one of the most destructive acts in American politics. Of course, that realization is two years too late. Like Trump's refusal to release his taxes, McConnell's attack on the spirit and conceivably the letter of the Constitution and our democracy should have been the focus of daily media outrage during the 2016 campaign. Instead we got Hillary's emails.
After a string of court decisions that take us back to the Gilded Age, where minorities aren't allowed to vote and corporations have all the power, and the belated recognition that abortion will soon be illegal, affirmative action will be killed as may marriage equality, voting rights will continue to be increasingly restricted, and corporate power will be allowed to increase at the expense of labor and the environment, the cry has now gone up to somehow stop almost whoever Trump nominates to the Supreme Court. The bloviating ignoramus Chris Matthews, having finally woken up to the dangers ahead, is now demanding that Democrats somehow bring the Senate to a halt in order to kill the nomination. That horse left the barn two years ago, Chris, when McConnell used his simple majority to deny Garland a hearing. (As a side note, it is remarkable to see members of the media finally admit that the signs of everything horrific we are seeing today were there, clear as day, in 2016 but still refuse to provide any mea culpa for their laser-like focus on EMAILS! and their general abysmal coverage.)
On the other hand, however, we have the Bobby McFerrin "don't worry, be happy" class of pundit who at least see the dark clouds above and the even darker ones on the horizon but see it all as a mere passing shower. Kevin Drum starts us off, writing, "When the histories are written, 2016 won’t be remembered as the start of an era of right-wing populism. It will be remembered as an example of the contingency of events. Brexit passed—barely—because the vote happened to come right after a short-lived refugee crisis. Donald Trump was elected president—barely—because James Comey happened to re-open Hillary Clinton’s email case ten days before the US election. Those two things were the shocks that launched a thousand op-eds about the end of liberal democracy in the West. But it was all a mirage. The world hadn’t suddenly undergone a sea change. It had just suffered from a pair of unlikely coincidences that we humans—as we do—insisted on interpreting as a pattern...I may yet be proven wrong. Maybe 2016 really was the start of a new era of harsh, right-wing populism in the West. But I don’t think so. Donald Trump and the others will go away, Brexit will get watered down, and liberal democracy will basically be fine." At least he admits the possibility he may be wrong.
Steve Brill, on the other hand, has identified the crux of the problem perfectly in his new book "Tailspin". As Sean Illing, in his interview with Brill, summarizes, Brill posits " the people with the most advantages in the American economy have used that privilege to catapult themselves ahead of everyone else, and then rigged the system — to cement their position at the top, and leave the less fortunate behind." In addition, Brill astutely divides the country into the unprotected class and the protected class, who have rigged the system in their favor. Says Brill, "For a country to work, you have to have balance between personal ambition and personal achievements and the common good. The way you do that is to have all kinds of guardrails on the system. In finance, you have regulatory guardrails. You have labor laws that produce something like a level playing field between employer and employee. You have consumer protection laws. You do all kinds of things to create these guardrails so that the winners can’t win in a way that hurts everybody else. That’s what we’ve lost."
Having accurately identified the problem, Brill goes on to state, "What the founding fathers wanted was a representative democracy, not a pure democracy. We have much more of a pure democracy today, and it has its virtues, but it also has its problems. When you combine that notion of pure democracy with the total monetization of that democracy by having no limits on what people can spend and no limits on what rich people or rich corporations can contribute, you have a democracy that just doesn’t work."
I find this idea that we are suffering from too much democracy as unfathomable elitism. It harkens back to Andrew Sullivan's column of two years ago where he argued that Trumpism was the result of too much democracy. Do these people honestly think that Senators appointed by red state legislators, who are easily bought and paid for political employees of corporate power, would be providing us with better Senators than the ones we have now. And is the fact that the last two Republican presidents actually received less votes than their opponent indicative of too much democracy. Is the fact that those two minority presidents will have soon appointed four of the nine justices on the most important court in the land and skewed its ideological bent for the next generation or two the result of too much democracy. Is the fact that Democrats can win the majority of the votes in certain states and still be a minority party in the state legislature an indication of too much democracy. Is the fact that Democrats could win the majority of the votes across the country by five or six percentage points and still not have a majority in the House of Representatives indicative of too much democracy. Is it too much democracy that will allow 30% of the population to control a super majority of 70 votes in the Senate by 2040. No. Rather, it seems to me to be a total failure and perversion of democracy.
Having properly identified our entire system as being broken and correctly identifying many of its causes, Brill says, "I don’t think we’re irretrievably broken. I think we can still fix things." When asked by Illing whether "we need new values, new institutions, new ways of doing politics", Brill responds "I think we need to redirect our old values. The values that were hijacked — the First Amendment, due process, meritocracy, the financial and legal engineering — they need to be redirected to undo some of the damage that’s been done. We have to demand leaders in Washington and state capitals who unite us, who will tell the frustrated middle class that they have more in common with the poor than with the protected class".
I understand that fighting the battles that Brill describes is the only option we have at this point. But that kind of ignores that this has been the Democratic message for at least a decade without much result. And, at some point, this is like telling someone on a basketball team where the referees have fixed the game against them that things will turn around if they only try harder. It's living in a fictional world. And not at least recognizing that our electoral system needs to be totally reconstructed root and branch means that very little will actually change.
I know a country where the person running the country is massively corrupt and continually lining his own pockets; where his senior advisers are massively corrupt and lining their own pockets; where elections are rigged so that only an overwhelming revolt by the people will dislodge the ruling party; where the government controls a large segment of the media in order to promote its propaganda and encourages violence against independent media outlets; and where the ruling party has stacked the judicial branch with partisans and ideologues. I could be describing Russia or an old South American dictatorship, or the PRI-dominated Mexico. Or today's United States. This is no passing storm. And if we don't all recognize this soon, it will be too late.
After a string of court decisions that take us back to the Gilded Age, where minorities aren't allowed to vote and corporations have all the power, and the belated recognition that abortion will soon be illegal, affirmative action will be killed as may marriage equality, voting rights will continue to be increasingly restricted, and corporate power will be allowed to increase at the expense of labor and the environment, the cry has now gone up to somehow stop almost whoever Trump nominates to the Supreme Court. The bloviating ignoramus Chris Matthews, having finally woken up to the dangers ahead, is now demanding that Democrats somehow bring the Senate to a halt in order to kill the nomination. That horse left the barn two years ago, Chris, when McConnell used his simple majority to deny Garland a hearing. (As a side note, it is remarkable to see members of the media finally admit that the signs of everything horrific we are seeing today were there, clear as day, in 2016 but still refuse to provide any mea culpa for their laser-like focus on EMAILS! and their general abysmal coverage.)
On the other hand, however, we have the Bobby McFerrin "don't worry, be happy" class of pundit who at least see the dark clouds above and the even darker ones on the horizon but see it all as a mere passing shower. Kevin Drum starts us off, writing, "When the histories are written, 2016 won’t be remembered as the start of an era of right-wing populism. It will be remembered as an example of the contingency of events. Brexit passed—barely—because the vote happened to come right after a short-lived refugee crisis. Donald Trump was elected president—barely—because James Comey happened to re-open Hillary Clinton’s email case ten days before the US election. Those two things were the shocks that launched a thousand op-eds about the end of liberal democracy in the West. But it was all a mirage. The world hadn’t suddenly undergone a sea change. It had just suffered from a pair of unlikely coincidences that we humans—as we do—insisted on interpreting as a pattern...I may yet be proven wrong. Maybe 2016 really was the start of a new era of harsh, right-wing populism in the West. But I don’t think so. Donald Trump and the others will go away, Brexit will get watered down, and liberal democracy will basically be fine." At least he admits the possibility he may be wrong.
Steve Brill, on the other hand, has identified the crux of the problem perfectly in his new book "Tailspin". As Sean Illing, in his interview with Brill, summarizes, Brill posits " the people with the most advantages in the American economy have used that privilege to catapult themselves ahead of everyone else, and then rigged the system — to cement their position at the top, and leave the less fortunate behind." In addition, Brill astutely divides the country into the unprotected class and the protected class, who have rigged the system in their favor. Says Brill, "For a country to work, you have to have balance between personal ambition and personal achievements and the common good. The way you do that is to have all kinds of guardrails on the system. In finance, you have regulatory guardrails. You have labor laws that produce something like a level playing field between employer and employee. You have consumer protection laws. You do all kinds of things to create these guardrails so that the winners can’t win in a way that hurts everybody else. That’s what we’ve lost."
Having accurately identified the problem, Brill goes on to state, "What the founding fathers wanted was a representative democracy, not a pure democracy. We have much more of a pure democracy today, and it has its virtues, but it also has its problems. When you combine that notion of pure democracy with the total monetization of that democracy by having no limits on what people can spend and no limits on what rich people or rich corporations can contribute, you have a democracy that just doesn’t work."
I find this idea that we are suffering from too much democracy as unfathomable elitism. It harkens back to Andrew Sullivan's column of two years ago where he argued that Trumpism was the result of too much democracy. Do these people honestly think that Senators appointed by red state legislators, who are easily bought and paid for political employees of corporate power, would be providing us with better Senators than the ones we have now. And is the fact that the last two Republican presidents actually received less votes than their opponent indicative of too much democracy. Is the fact that those two minority presidents will have soon appointed four of the nine justices on the most important court in the land and skewed its ideological bent for the next generation or two the result of too much democracy. Is the fact that Democrats can win the majority of the votes in certain states and still be a minority party in the state legislature an indication of too much democracy. Is the fact that Democrats could win the majority of the votes across the country by five or six percentage points and still not have a majority in the House of Representatives indicative of too much democracy. Is it too much democracy that will allow 30% of the population to control a super majority of 70 votes in the Senate by 2040. No. Rather, it seems to me to be a total failure and perversion of democracy.
Having properly identified our entire system as being broken and correctly identifying many of its causes, Brill says, "I don’t think we’re irretrievably broken. I think we can still fix things." When asked by Illing whether "we need new values, new institutions, new ways of doing politics", Brill responds "I think we need to redirect our old values. The values that were hijacked — the First Amendment, due process, meritocracy, the financial and legal engineering — they need to be redirected to undo some of the damage that’s been done. We have to demand leaders in Washington and state capitals who unite us, who will tell the frustrated middle class that they have more in common with the poor than with the protected class".
I understand that fighting the battles that Brill describes is the only option we have at this point. But that kind of ignores that this has been the Democratic message for at least a decade without much result. And, at some point, this is like telling someone on a basketball team where the referees have fixed the game against them that things will turn around if they only try harder. It's living in a fictional world. And not at least recognizing that our electoral system needs to be totally reconstructed root and branch means that very little will actually change.
I know a country where the person running the country is massively corrupt and continually lining his own pockets; where his senior advisers are massively corrupt and lining their own pockets; where elections are rigged so that only an overwhelming revolt by the people will dislodge the ruling party; where the government controls a large segment of the media in order to promote its propaganda and encourages violence against independent media outlets; and where the ruling party has stacked the judicial branch with partisans and ideologues. I could be describing Russia or an old South American dictatorship, or the PRI-dominated Mexico. Or today's United States. This is no passing storm. And if we don't all recognize this soon, it will be too late.
Thursday, June 28, 2018
Kennedy's Final Days Solidified His Legacy As Just Another Partisan Hack
I've been busy the last day or so but I have plenty to say and will eventually get around to saying it. But one thing that should not go unmentioned is just how partisan Anthony Kennedy had really become, and this goes far beyond his recent right-wing decisions.
It is clear that Kennedy was itching to retire a few years ago but he was damn sure not going to do it while Obama was President. Now, having watched Mitch McConnell refuse to even give a hearing to an eminently qualified jurist and steal one Supreme Court seat, Kennedy could have taken the option, as many other Supreme Court nominees have, and waited until after the fall elections and the swearing in of the new Congress next January and then announced his retirement. It at least would have allowed the voters to again express their will and perhaps given Democrats a chance at winning the Senate, which would force Trump to reach for a consensus nominee, if one is possible.
Instead, he announced his retirement now, giving McConnell the best possible options. Trump and the Republicans can motivate the base to hold the Senate, as they have already begun doing, in order to get that long-last vote to repeal Roe v. Wade and continue sending the country back to the Gilded Age and beyond. And even if ginning up the base isn't enough for Republicans to hold the Senate, McConnell can still go ahead and ram through Trump's nominee in the lame duck session. Does anyone think a Republican would stand up against that? Relying on Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski is about as useful as relying on the Supreme Court, and how has that worked out.
In the end, Kennedy watched McConnell steal a Supreme Court seat and, rather than being appalled, just gave McConnell another gift with the timing of his retirement. So, for his final acts on the Court, Kennedy just proved himself to be another extreme partisan hack, joining a string of logically inconsistent decisions that destroyed outstanding precedent, then timed his retirement decision to benefit a particular party, the Republicans, and again, like his voting rights decisions, denied the American people a voice in the process. Quite a legacy.
UPDATE: And now we learn that Kennedy was potentially exposed to being blackmailed by Trump. The NY Times is reporting that Kennedy's son was the global head of Deutsche Bank's (DB) real estate capital markets division. In that job, Kennedy's son worked closely with Trump and provided over $1 billion in loans for Trump real estate projects here in the US when no other bank was willing to touch Trump. Considering that DB is implicated in laundering at least $10 billion in Russian money, it does not beggar the imagination that Kennedy's son was laundering Russian money through Trump. And then, when you look at Kennedy's total capitulation to the conservatives on the Court this year, including many curious opinions that concurred with the majority but then decried the potential for abuse of those decisions as well as opinions that rejected Kennedy's own previously set standards, and combine that with Trump's modus operandi as a racketeer, you have to seriously wonder whether Kennedy was being softly blackmailed. As I say, quite a legacy.
It is clear that Kennedy was itching to retire a few years ago but he was damn sure not going to do it while Obama was President. Now, having watched Mitch McConnell refuse to even give a hearing to an eminently qualified jurist and steal one Supreme Court seat, Kennedy could have taken the option, as many other Supreme Court nominees have, and waited until after the fall elections and the swearing in of the new Congress next January and then announced his retirement. It at least would have allowed the voters to again express their will and perhaps given Democrats a chance at winning the Senate, which would force Trump to reach for a consensus nominee, if one is possible.
Instead, he announced his retirement now, giving McConnell the best possible options. Trump and the Republicans can motivate the base to hold the Senate, as they have already begun doing, in order to get that long-last vote to repeal Roe v. Wade and continue sending the country back to the Gilded Age and beyond. And even if ginning up the base isn't enough for Republicans to hold the Senate, McConnell can still go ahead and ram through Trump's nominee in the lame duck session. Does anyone think a Republican would stand up against that? Relying on Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski is about as useful as relying on the Supreme Court, and how has that worked out.
In the end, Kennedy watched McConnell steal a Supreme Court seat and, rather than being appalled, just gave McConnell another gift with the timing of his retirement. So, for his final acts on the Court, Kennedy just proved himself to be another extreme partisan hack, joining a string of logically inconsistent decisions that destroyed outstanding precedent, then timed his retirement decision to benefit a particular party, the Republicans, and again, like his voting rights decisions, denied the American people a voice in the process. Quite a legacy.
UPDATE: And now we learn that Kennedy was potentially exposed to being blackmailed by Trump. The NY Times is reporting that Kennedy's son was the global head of Deutsche Bank's (DB) real estate capital markets division. In that job, Kennedy's son worked closely with Trump and provided over $1 billion in loans for Trump real estate projects here in the US when no other bank was willing to touch Trump. Considering that DB is implicated in laundering at least $10 billion in Russian money, it does not beggar the imagination that Kennedy's son was laundering Russian money through Trump. And then, when you look at Kennedy's total capitulation to the conservatives on the Court this year, including many curious opinions that concurred with the majority but then decried the potential for abuse of those decisions as well as opinions that rejected Kennedy's own previously set standards, and combine that with Trump's modus operandi as a racketeer, you have to seriously wonder whether Kennedy was being softly blackmailed. As I say, quite a legacy.
Wednesday, June 27, 2018
Incivility And Insulated Elites
The latest media-created brouhaha over civility and the lack thereof actually reflects an inherent belief by our political and corporate elites that they should never actually be held accountable for their actions and that they should never have to be confronted by those harmed by the decisions they have made. They hide behind legalisms, blame underlings for their illegality, have remarkably timed bouts of forgetfulness, and even lie under oath, knowing full well the worst that will happen will be a slap on the wrist and another job elsewhere.
By all rights, directly confronting the architects and implementers of policies we might oppose seems like the most perfectly logical and effective way to make sure our voice is heard, especially when it is done in a calm and respectful manner. It is only logical that a face-to-face encounter is usually far more effective than a million people marching to oppose a policy when those architects are actually hundreds of miles away, although there is no doubt that a groundswell of opposition like that is powerful on its own. There is a reason that lobbyists and donors fork over mega-dollars to political figures and that is the very one-on-one access to express their views which that money provides and which is largely unavailable to the owner of a small business or individuals like you and me.
It certainly is indisputable that calmly and respectfully asking a person who is the mouthpiece for the policy of ripping months-old babies away from their parents to leave your restaurant is a far better example of the long and distinguished history of civil disobedience in this country than mowing down an innocent civilian who was protesting a march promoting hatred and racism with your car.
However, the reaction of the political elites, unfortunately on both sides of the aisle, seems to have almost conflated the two as being equally violent and uncivil, in essence equating having to deal with discomfort of being politely shunned with actual physical violence. This is reflective of the personal protective cocoon that these elites believe they are entitled to and the belief that the only repercussions for their actions should be political.
Similarly, to not understand the difference between shunning and shaming the architects of a clearly immoral policy and the refusal to serve someone who just happens to be black or gay simply denies the agency of power. That again allows the elites to escape responsibility for the actions.
Of course, this is exactly the direction that our country has taken over the last few decades. War criminals like Henry Kissinger, Elliot Abrams, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and George Bush walk free in this country and can even rehabilitate their reputations given enough time. Corporate criminals who nearly destroyed the world's financial system, people like Anthony Mozillo, Dick Fuld, Joe Cassano, and all the other heads of the major Wall Street banks, took their enormous payouts and walked away scot free. Some like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon continue in their jobs today.
The feeling of invulnerability in these elites is compounded by the security bubble so many of them live in in today's world. Scott Pruitt is the walking exemplar of that, requiring a full-time security detail to protect him from the uncomfortable moments of being confronted in an airline terminal by a man actually using an expletive. Last night Mitch McConnell was viciously attacked with a few angry words, such as asking how he sleeps at night, as he and his Cabinet secretary wife got into to their chauffeured Suburban wagon surrounded by security. And now Sarah Sanders has apparently been so traumatized by her inability to eat where she wants that she is receiving Secret Service protection.
Of course, the epitome of this unaccountability is Donald Trump himself. The six-times bankrupted narcissist and racketeer has never paid any real personal price for his criminality or venality. This is a man who is so weak he can not in reality actually endure the discomfort of firing anyone himself, face-to-face, despite pretending to do so weekly on TV; a man who spends hours each day abusing and belittling anyone and everyone but is so thin-skinned he apparently can not broach any direct criticism; a man who goes from one grift to another, stealing millions from millions, and never bats an eye or pays a personal price.
For all these people, including large segments of the pundit class, politics and business is sport, a place where you can shake hands and go have a beer after the game is over with full knowledge that there will be another game tomorrow. The victims of their actions, however, don't have that option when they are lying dead in the sands of Iraq or getting evicted from their foreclosed homes or bankrupted by illness or shot while attending high school.
But these elites don't want to see or hear from their victims; they just want to keep playing the game. That is why 1960s civil rights activists were called "uppity Negroes"; why Cindy Sheehan was called a "professional griever"; why Sandy Hook never happened; and why David Hogg is called a "crisis actor"; and why the owner of the Red Hen is being "uncivil".
The aversion to being politely asked to leave a restaurant and seeing it as an enormous act of incivility shows just how brittle and insulated these elites have come. Simply being personally confronted with the moral outrage of what they are doing is now too much for these people. Look, I don't condone any violence and I don't even think there should be protests outside these people's homes - family areas should be off limits. But I am old enough to remember when the Weather Underground actually bombed the Capitol building. Now that struck real fear in the hearts of the political elite. That was real incivility that physically threatened those who were implementing the immorality of the Vietnam War. Today's elites seem equally threatened by being simply shunned and shamed in a restaurant. But that's what happens when you have never been personally held accountable for your actions.
The remarkable irony is that, as Steve Bannon taught Trump, fear is the greatest motivator. And Trump is running the one of the most racist, fear-mongering campaigns for the midterm elections than we have probably seen since George Wallace. But those very same people peddling that fear are actually disturbed, frightened, and outraged by a few nasty words and some societal shaming.
By all rights, directly confronting the architects and implementers of policies we might oppose seems like the most perfectly logical and effective way to make sure our voice is heard, especially when it is done in a calm and respectful manner. It is only logical that a face-to-face encounter is usually far more effective than a million people marching to oppose a policy when those architects are actually hundreds of miles away, although there is no doubt that a groundswell of opposition like that is powerful on its own. There is a reason that lobbyists and donors fork over mega-dollars to political figures and that is the very one-on-one access to express their views which that money provides and which is largely unavailable to the owner of a small business or individuals like you and me.
It certainly is indisputable that calmly and respectfully asking a person who is the mouthpiece for the policy of ripping months-old babies away from their parents to leave your restaurant is a far better example of the long and distinguished history of civil disobedience in this country than mowing down an innocent civilian who was protesting a march promoting hatred and racism with your car.
However, the reaction of the political elites, unfortunately on both sides of the aisle, seems to have almost conflated the two as being equally violent and uncivil, in essence equating having to deal with discomfort of being politely shunned with actual physical violence. This is reflective of the personal protective cocoon that these elites believe they are entitled to and the belief that the only repercussions for their actions should be political.
Similarly, to not understand the difference between shunning and shaming the architects of a clearly immoral policy and the refusal to serve someone who just happens to be black or gay simply denies the agency of power. That again allows the elites to escape responsibility for the actions.
Of course, this is exactly the direction that our country has taken over the last few decades. War criminals like Henry Kissinger, Elliot Abrams, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and George Bush walk free in this country and can even rehabilitate their reputations given enough time. Corporate criminals who nearly destroyed the world's financial system, people like Anthony Mozillo, Dick Fuld, Joe Cassano, and all the other heads of the major Wall Street banks, took their enormous payouts and walked away scot free. Some like Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon continue in their jobs today.
The feeling of invulnerability in these elites is compounded by the security bubble so many of them live in in today's world. Scott Pruitt is the walking exemplar of that, requiring a full-time security detail to protect him from the uncomfortable moments of being confronted in an airline terminal by a man actually using an expletive. Last night Mitch McConnell was viciously attacked with a few angry words, such as asking how he sleeps at night, as he and his Cabinet secretary wife got into to their chauffeured Suburban wagon surrounded by security. And now Sarah Sanders has apparently been so traumatized by her inability to eat where she wants that she is receiving Secret Service protection.
Of course, the epitome of this unaccountability is Donald Trump himself. The six-times bankrupted narcissist and racketeer has never paid any real personal price for his criminality or venality. This is a man who is so weak he can not in reality actually endure the discomfort of firing anyone himself, face-to-face, despite pretending to do so weekly on TV; a man who spends hours each day abusing and belittling anyone and everyone but is so thin-skinned he apparently can not broach any direct criticism; a man who goes from one grift to another, stealing millions from millions, and never bats an eye or pays a personal price.
For all these people, including large segments of the pundit class, politics and business is sport, a place where you can shake hands and go have a beer after the game is over with full knowledge that there will be another game tomorrow. The victims of their actions, however, don't have that option when they are lying dead in the sands of Iraq or getting evicted from their foreclosed homes or bankrupted by illness or shot while attending high school.
But these elites don't want to see or hear from their victims; they just want to keep playing the game. That is why 1960s civil rights activists were called "uppity Negroes"; why Cindy Sheehan was called a "professional griever"; why Sandy Hook never happened; and why David Hogg is called a "crisis actor"; and why the owner of the Red Hen is being "uncivil".
The aversion to being politely asked to leave a restaurant and seeing it as an enormous act of incivility shows just how brittle and insulated these elites have come. Simply being personally confronted with the moral outrage of what they are doing is now too much for these people. Look, I don't condone any violence and I don't even think there should be protests outside these people's homes - family areas should be off limits. But I am old enough to remember when the Weather Underground actually bombed the Capitol building. Now that struck real fear in the hearts of the political elite. That was real incivility that physically threatened those who were implementing the immorality of the Vietnam War. Today's elites seem equally threatened by being simply shunned and shamed in a restaurant. But that's what happens when you have never been personally held accountable for your actions.
The remarkable irony is that, as Steve Bannon taught Trump, fear is the greatest motivator. And Trump is running the one of the most racist, fear-mongering campaigns for the midterm elections than we have probably seen since George Wallace. But those very same people peddling that fear are actually disturbed, frightened, and outraged by a few nasty words and some societal shaming.
Astronomy Adventure - Virgo Cluster Galaxies
I managed to lose my observing notes from a night of excellent dark skies in my heavily light-polluted area but I'm pretty sure these are pictures of at least three galaxies in the famed Virgo Cluster. The Virgo Cluster is part of the Local Group of galaxies of which our own Milky Way is also an outlying member. Many of these little fuzzballs, looking to him much like they do here, were discovered by Charles Messier in the late 1700s but were not identified as actual galaxies until the 1920s.
Obviously, the views of these galaxies are far less gratifying that what you would see with the exponentially more light gathering ability of an 8 or 12 inch telescope. But, with dark skies, many of the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster are within reach of even my small scope and, with patience, the thrill of at least finding them is the same as with a larger scope.
Obviously, the views of these galaxies are far less gratifying that what you would see with the exponentially more light gathering ability of an 8 or 12 inch telescope. But, with dark skies, many of the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster are within reach of even my small scope and, with patience, the thrill of at least finding them is the same as with a larger scope.
Technical details on my photos:
Scope: Starblast 4.5; tracking on
Magnification: ~30x
Camera: iPhone6 using NightCap Pro; ISO 8000;
Each photo: 1x~20secs.
Tuesday, June 26, 2018
The Robert's Court Destructive March To Infamy
The Roberts' Court continued its long, destructive march into infamy today, capping off a string of unprincipled, ideological decisions probably not seen since the end of Reconstruction. In yet another 5-4 decision with the deciding vote provided by Neil Gorsuch filling the seat that belongs to Merrick Garland, the Court once again overruled multiple lower court decisions and declared that a California law requiring that crisis pregnancy centers post certain informational messages was a violation of those centers' First Amendment rights.
The California law requires licensed facilities to post a message that the state of California provides free or low cost pregnancy services, including abortion, and provide a phone number to access those services. Unlicensed facilities must post a message that they are unlicensed to provide medical services. The conservative majority, in an opinion written by Justice Thomas, ruled that the licensed facilities had their rights violated because the informational messages were promoting state services that were contrary to the centers' beliefs and therefore is content-based forced speech. Unlicensed facilities need not post the required message, which was in thirteen languages, because it was an undue burden as well as a remedy for what the majority believes is a "purely hypothetical" problem. I don't know about you but I would want to know whether the quasi-medical facility I was entering was actually licensed by the state.
Now you would think that if requiring a message that the state provides low-cost pregnancy services is a violation of the First Amendment, then all those Republican state laws requiring abortion doctors to provide a whole litany of alternative services would also be unconstitutional. But Thomas has that attack covered by distinguishing between speech compelled by the actual practice of medicine and the passive messages here. In other words, states can compel forced speech for abortion doctors but cannot require unlicensed crisis pregnancy centers to post messages that inform patients they are unlicensed. This is not law, but ideology.
As Justice Breyer points out in his dissent, this divination of the difference between regulating professional speech and simple disclosure requirements puts virtually all government regulation at potential risk. Says Breyer, "Because much, perhaps most, human behavior takes place through speech and because much, perhaps most, law regulates that speech in terms of its content, the majority’s approach at the least threatens considerable litigation over the constitutional validity of much, perhaps most, government regulation. Virtually every disclosure law could be considered 'content based,' for virtually every disclosure law requires individuals 'to speak a particular message'."
The Court will thankfully end its session tomorrow with the final destruction of public sector unions in the Janus v. AFSCME case. At this point, Gorsuch is almost certain to once again cast the deciding vote and allow nonunion public sector employees to basically freeload off the union's collective bargaining and workplace grievance capabilities. Without being able to charge those nonunion members fees for those services, publican sector unions will be further weakened as will their ability to provide the very services those nonunion members receive.
The decisions by the Roberts' Court this year have been destructive and distressing enough. And with the potential retirement of Justice Kennedy, it is likely to get worse long before it ever gets better.
How Do You Solve A Problem Like Neil Gorsuch?
To repeat what I said yesterday, Donald Trump is a horrible person and a destructive President with autocratic ambitions but I think history will show that America's democratic project really ended when Mitch McConnell refused to seat Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court.
Today, Neil Gorsuch again provided the necessary fifth vote to uphold the Trump administration's third attempt to craft a Muslim travel ban that would do just enough to satisfy the Supreme Court's conservative majority. The effect of this ruling is that Trump can now ban entire nationalities of people as opposed to just those of a certain religion. Apparently, there is nothing that can now stop Trump from imposing a similar ban on every Central American country or even Canada for that matter as long as he bases it on some mythical national security concern.
The pathetic nature of this ruling was virtually admitted by Justice Kennedy in his concurring opinion when he wrote, "There are numerous instances in which the statements and actions of Government officials are not subject to judicial scrutiny or intervention. That does not mean those officials are free to disregard the Constitution and the rights it proclaims and protects". In other words, Kennedy is saying that Trump is allowed to implement the ban but then almost pleads with him not to abuse that power. How does he think that will work.
Once again, Sotomayor punches enormous holes in the fallacious arguments of the conservative majority. As she points out in her dissent, the Court put enormous weight on the mild expressions of religious hostility by members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in the case of the bake shop refusing to make a cake for a gay couple but Trump's for more blatant and egregious hostility to Muslims was something the Court desperately ignored in this case.
The problem that our country now faces is that the anti-democratic forces have so skewed our democracy that the only way to repair it is actually through anti-democratic measures, which, assuming we can even survive the age of Trump, runs the risk of creating a death spiral of retaliation as each party attains power.
For Democrats, there is really only one option remaining to reclaim the seat stolen by McConnell in the form of Gorsuch. Impeachment is a non-starter because it will require a two-thirds vote in the Senate and, because of the anti-democratic nature of that body, that is virtually impossible for Democrats to achieve. The only remaining option it to simply pack the Court the next time the Democrats control the White House and the Senate and create the liberal majority we should have had in 2016. Of course, the professional pundit class will be up in arms over this breach of etiquette. But it is an option Democrats really needs to seriously consider if our democracy is to be saved from gerrymandering, voter suppression, and legalized racism and intolerance.
Today, Neil Gorsuch again provided the necessary fifth vote to uphold the Trump administration's third attempt to craft a Muslim travel ban that would do just enough to satisfy the Supreme Court's conservative majority. The effect of this ruling is that Trump can now ban entire nationalities of people as opposed to just those of a certain religion. Apparently, there is nothing that can now stop Trump from imposing a similar ban on every Central American country or even Canada for that matter as long as he bases it on some mythical national security concern.
The pathetic nature of this ruling was virtually admitted by Justice Kennedy in his concurring opinion when he wrote, "There are numerous instances in which the statements and actions of Government officials are not subject to judicial scrutiny or intervention. That does not mean those officials are free to disregard the Constitution and the rights it proclaims and protects". In other words, Kennedy is saying that Trump is allowed to implement the ban but then almost pleads with him not to abuse that power. How does he think that will work.
Once again, Sotomayor punches enormous holes in the fallacious arguments of the conservative majority. As she points out in her dissent, the Court put enormous weight on the mild expressions of religious hostility by members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission in the case of the bake shop refusing to make a cake for a gay couple but Trump's for more blatant and egregious hostility to Muslims was something the Court desperately ignored in this case.
The problem that our country now faces is that the anti-democratic forces have so skewed our democracy that the only way to repair it is actually through anti-democratic measures, which, assuming we can even survive the age of Trump, runs the risk of creating a death spiral of retaliation as each party attains power.
For Democrats, there is really only one option remaining to reclaim the seat stolen by McConnell in the form of Gorsuch. Impeachment is a non-starter because it will require a two-thirds vote in the Senate and, because of the anti-democratic nature of that body, that is virtually impossible for Democrats to achieve. The only remaining option it to simply pack the Court the next time the Democrats control the White House and the Senate and create the liberal majority we should have had in 2016. Of course, the professional pundit class will be up in arms over this breach of etiquette. But it is an option Democrats really needs to seriously consider if our democracy is to be saved from gerrymandering, voter suppression, and legalized racism and intolerance.
Monday, June 25, 2018
SCOTUS Continues Its Destruction Of Voting Rights
Donald Trump is a horrible person and a destructive President with autocratic ambitions but I think history will show that America's democratic project really ended when Mitch McConnell refused to seat Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court.
Today, the Supreme Court basically gave states even more freedom to radically gerrymander electoral districts for racial and partisan advantage while making it even harder for that system to be challenged in court. The specifics of the cases involve the gerrymanders in Texas and North Carolina.
In Texas, the Court overruled lower courts' decisions that four districts were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, instead ruling that only one of those districts fit that criteria. The decision was remarkable for the way it breached existing protocol for determining the Court's judicial review. In addition, Alito's opinion established a new standard of assuming "good faith" on behalf of legislatures in drawing new districts. Normally, the procedure would then be to tell the lower court to revisit the case based on this new standard. Instead, the majority basically ignored the evidence presented at the lower court and decided that the Texas legislature did not discriminate based on their new interpretation.
Sotomayor, who has become the staunchest defender of voting rights on the Court, wrote another barnburner of a dissent, saying the majority "out of its way to permit the State of Texas to use maps that the three-judge District Court unanimously found were adopted for the purpose of preserving the racial discrimination that tainted its previous maps." For many voters in that one unconstitutional district at least, this ruling means that they will have been essentially disenfranchised by an illegal gerrymander for every election this decade. This is our democracy at work.
The decision was yet another 5-4 decision with the Court's conservative majority once again overruling the lower courts' decision. Neil Gorsuch, Garland's fill-in and the Federalist Society's million dollar judge, proved he is absolutely consistent in being hacktacular, joining Thomas in a concurring opinion declaring that the Voting Rights Act does not prohibit racial gerrymandering. That is remarkable in that the VRA was specifically written to address racial voter suppression. Most disturbingly, however, is the fact that Anthony Kennedy has voted with that conservative majority in every important case this year, including every one involving the suppression of voting rights.
Separately, the Court also unwound a lower court ruling that the North Carolina electoral maps were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. They ordered the lower court to revisit their decision in light of the Court's recent decision in the Wisconsin partisan gerrymander case in which the Court ruled the claimants did not have standing to bring the case. Presumably, that will be the case with the claimants in the North Carolina case.
While the Wisconsin ruling made it more difficult for partisan gerrymander cases to even be brought before the Court, the Texas ruling makes racial gerrymandering even more difficult to win. The majority ruling declares that the courts must now "presume good faith" by the legislature in their redistricting efforts.
As Rick Hasen writes, "because race and party overlap so much in places like Texas, what looks like racial motivation may be partisan motivation. The upshot of this analysis is that it is going to be well near impossible for plaintiffs to prove that states have engaged in intentional racial discrimination so as to put those states back under federal supervision for voting under Section 3. With this thumb on the scale in favor of states, and the ability to say they were just being partisan and not engaged in race discrimination, they will have a freer rein to engage in discriminatory action."
With the recent decision to allow Ohio to conduct voter purges, the Court is inviting states to use every available voter suppression tool to manipulate the vote going forward. The NY Times today illustrates the various tactics that the state of Alabama has taken to suppress minority and Democratic votes. Those tactics include photo ID, closing offices in minority areas where photo ID could be obtained, proof of citizenship for state and local elections, closing polling places in predominately minority areas, purging voter rolls, and restricting information on felon re-enfranchisement. Today the Court virtually invited the state to also engage in racial and partisan gerrymandering.
Our electoral system is fundamentally flawed as it is, just with the Electoral College. In state after state, election after election, Democrats win more votes than Republicans and actually lose political power. It's happened in Wisconsin, in Virginia, and in the country as a whole in 2000 and 2016. Today the Supreme court came very close to saying that there is no redress for this situation and is actually encouraging a process to make things worse. As Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, "The Court today does great damage to that right of equal opportunity. Not because it denies the existence of that right, but because it refuses its enforcement." That has been the Republican and the Court's strategy for at least a decade.
When a sufficient number of citizens become convinced that it is futile to fight for change within the system and that even winning elections will not provide the political power promised, then the political class will have much more to worry about than just not being served in some fancy food-to-table restaurant. Today's actions by the Court, along with Donald Trump's autocratic tendencies, may bring those days a lot closer than we think.
Today, the Supreme Court basically gave states even more freedom to radically gerrymander electoral districts for racial and partisan advantage while making it even harder for that system to be challenged in court. The specifics of the cases involve the gerrymanders in Texas and North Carolina.
In Texas, the Court overruled lower courts' decisions that four districts were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, instead ruling that only one of those districts fit that criteria. The decision was remarkable for the way it breached existing protocol for determining the Court's judicial review. In addition, Alito's opinion established a new standard of assuming "good faith" on behalf of legislatures in drawing new districts. Normally, the procedure would then be to tell the lower court to revisit the case based on this new standard. Instead, the majority basically ignored the evidence presented at the lower court and decided that the Texas legislature did not discriminate based on their new interpretation.
Sotomayor, who has become the staunchest defender of voting rights on the Court, wrote another barnburner of a dissent, saying the majority "out of its way to permit the State of Texas to use maps that the three-judge District Court unanimously found were adopted for the purpose of preserving the racial discrimination that tainted its previous maps." For many voters in that one unconstitutional district at least, this ruling means that they will have been essentially disenfranchised by an illegal gerrymander for every election this decade. This is our democracy at work.
The decision was yet another 5-4 decision with the Court's conservative majority once again overruling the lower courts' decision. Neil Gorsuch, Garland's fill-in and the Federalist Society's million dollar judge, proved he is absolutely consistent in being hacktacular, joining Thomas in a concurring opinion declaring that the Voting Rights Act does not prohibit racial gerrymandering. That is remarkable in that the VRA was specifically written to address racial voter suppression. Most disturbingly, however, is the fact that Anthony Kennedy has voted with that conservative majority in every important case this year, including every one involving the suppression of voting rights.
Separately, the Court also unwound a lower court ruling that the North Carolina electoral maps were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. They ordered the lower court to revisit their decision in light of the Court's recent decision in the Wisconsin partisan gerrymander case in which the Court ruled the claimants did not have standing to bring the case. Presumably, that will be the case with the claimants in the North Carolina case.
While the Wisconsin ruling made it more difficult for partisan gerrymander cases to even be brought before the Court, the Texas ruling makes racial gerrymandering even more difficult to win. The majority ruling declares that the courts must now "presume good faith" by the legislature in their redistricting efforts.
As Rick Hasen writes, "because race and party overlap so much in places like Texas, what looks like racial motivation may be partisan motivation. The upshot of this analysis is that it is going to be well near impossible for plaintiffs to prove that states have engaged in intentional racial discrimination so as to put those states back under federal supervision for voting under Section 3. With this thumb on the scale in favor of states, and the ability to say they were just being partisan and not engaged in race discrimination, they will have a freer rein to engage in discriminatory action."
With the recent decision to allow Ohio to conduct voter purges, the Court is inviting states to use every available voter suppression tool to manipulate the vote going forward. The NY Times today illustrates the various tactics that the state of Alabama has taken to suppress minority and Democratic votes. Those tactics include photo ID, closing offices in minority areas where photo ID could be obtained, proof of citizenship for state and local elections, closing polling places in predominately minority areas, purging voter rolls, and restricting information on felon re-enfranchisement. Today the Court virtually invited the state to also engage in racial and partisan gerrymandering.
Our electoral system is fundamentally flawed as it is, just with the Electoral College. In state after state, election after election, Democrats win more votes than Republicans and actually lose political power. It's happened in Wisconsin, in Virginia, and in the country as a whole in 2000 and 2016. Today the Supreme court came very close to saying that there is no redress for this situation and is actually encouraging a process to make things worse. As Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, "The Court today does great damage to that right of equal opportunity. Not because it denies the existence of that right, but because it refuses its enforcement." That has been the Republican and the Court's strategy for at least a decade.
When a sufficient number of citizens become convinced that it is futile to fight for change within the system and that even winning elections will not provide the political power promised, then the political class will have much more to worry about than just not being served in some fancy food-to-table restaurant. Today's actions by the Court, along with Donald Trump's autocratic tendencies, may bring those days a lot closer than we think.
Trump's Creeping Authoritarianism Hides Behind His Cruel Policies
I know I sound like a broken record on this, but I find the creeping authoritarianism from the Trump administration and the kind of grudging acceptance of it as just being part of what we have to live with under Trump to be highly disturbing.
Beyond the brazen and blatant lies that everyone in the administration has told about the policy of child separation, from Kirstjen Nielsen's briefing to lying to airlines about separated children on their flights, there has been an absolute refusal to provide any information or access to not only the media but also elected officials.
The government has provided no information about where the separated children are actually being held and has refused access to both the press and elected officials at various detention facilities. Even when reporters are allowed in, no cameras are permitted in a failed effort to make sure the government controls all the visuals around the policy. Similarly, separated children, some as young as 8 months old, are being transported in the dead of night in order to avoid scrutiny. Children are sent all over the country with no notification given to local officials. Incredibly, we are being forced to rely on crowd-sourced reporting to learn where these separated children are actually being held.
In addition, HHS is not allowing state officials, who actually license some of these facilities where the children are being held, to monitor the conditions under which these children are held, claiming that those facilities' contracts with HHS are separate from the licensed facility. This is presumably the same rationale that keeps members of Congress from also inspecting these facilities, even if they are state-licensed and/or non-profits. These are, essentially, federally run secret prisons at this point. And the government has, as far as I know, provided no legal rationale for why state officials, Congress, and the press can be prevented from inspecting them.
The administration has at least finally released the number of children that have been separated but it is unclear whether they actually have sufficient details on them, especially the very young, to match them back up with their parents. In fact, in court hearings for the parents, government prosecutors are actually objecting to questions about the status and whereabouts of the children who were also seized. As one judge noted, "If someone at the jail takes your wallet, they give you a receipt. They take your kids, and you get nothing? Not even a slip of paper?" Not anymore in Trump's America.
Having taken the children hostage, the government is now forcing these parents to choose between being separated from their children or being able to reunite with them by signing a "voluntary" deportation order. Tell me how this is that much different from the "voluntary" confessions we see under totalitarian regimes.
The President's executive order is actually knowingly going to violate the Flores agreement and, according to the Washington Post, Trump actually wanted the executive order to rewrite immigration policy in its totality before being persuaded out of that approach by White House lawyers who were forced to "explain" that he could not just unilaterally change existing law. Now, the administration is basically asking the courts to discard the Flores settlement and allow families including children to be detained indefinitely in unlicensed facilities. In addition, there apparently is a request to use military bases to imprison over 100,000 immigrants and their children.
Yesterday, the President tweeted, "When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came". Of course, since the "border" is really the 100 mile zone from the actual physical border and that area contains two-thirds of the US population, most American citizens would be able to be plucked off the streets and deported with no due process whatsoever.
We see a similar dynamic with the Trump's tariffs. Trump's rationale for the steel and aluminum tariffs varies from punitive, to crack down on Chinese imports, to coercive, to force better trade deals from China, Mexico, Canada and the EU. But neither of those can actually provide the legal rationale for imposing the tariffs. So the administration invents the legal claim of national security out of whole cloth, despite the fact that the Department of Defense clearly states that it already gets enough US steel and aluminum to fulfill its needs. And now Trump is threatening to put even larger tariffs on European cars, again invoking this bogus national security claim.
Today, at least, there is a broad pushback against Trump's desire to eliminate due process at the border, and rightly so. It is also understandable that the focus should be on the results of these policies, the child prisons, the long-term damage to those children, and, in the case of tariffs, the harm to existing American businesses. In addition, the clear illegality of some of these policies make them easier to challenge in court, just as with the Muslim ban. The violation of the Flores agreement will be litigated as will challenges to the tariffs at the WTO.
Inevitably, but worryingly, that focus on the results of these horrific policies detracts attention from the authoritarian means by which the policies are put in place to begin with. The refusal to allow certain facilities holding the separated children has no legal basis. The restrictions on media access is designed to force them to rely on the governments visual propaganda. The executive order violates existing law on its face, not to mention that Trump had to be dissuaded from using the order to clearly and illegally rewrite immigration law in its entirety. Forcing these refuges to choose between not seeing their kids ever again and signing a "voluntary" deportation order is essentially a forced confession. There is no real legal basis for any of Trump's tariffs. The policies are horrible but perhaps the larger danger is how they were enacted.
This kind of creeping autocracy actually further emboldens the President and is exactly what leads to further attacks on our democracy and the slippery slope of proposing the elimination of due process for most Americans. It will not stop there.
Beyond the brazen and blatant lies that everyone in the administration has told about the policy of child separation, from Kirstjen Nielsen's briefing to lying to airlines about separated children on their flights, there has been an absolute refusal to provide any information or access to not only the media but also elected officials.
The government has provided no information about where the separated children are actually being held and has refused access to both the press and elected officials at various detention facilities. Even when reporters are allowed in, no cameras are permitted in a failed effort to make sure the government controls all the visuals around the policy. Similarly, separated children, some as young as 8 months old, are being transported in the dead of night in order to avoid scrutiny. Children are sent all over the country with no notification given to local officials. Incredibly, we are being forced to rely on crowd-sourced reporting to learn where these separated children are actually being held.
In addition, HHS is not allowing state officials, who actually license some of these facilities where the children are being held, to monitor the conditions under which these children are held, claiming that those facilities' contracts with HHS are separate from the licensed facility. This is presumably the same rationale that keeps members of Congress from also inspecting these facilities, even if they are state-licensed and/or non-profits. These are, essentially, federally run secret prisons at this point. And the government has, as far as I know, provided no legal rationale for why state officials, Congress, and the press can be prevented from inspecting them.
The administration has at least finally released the number of children that have been separated but it is unclear whether they actually have sufficient details on them, especially the very young, to match them back up with their parents. In fact, in court hearings for the parents, government prosecutors are actually objecting to questions about the status and whereabouts of the children who were also seized. As one judge noted, "If someone at the jail takes your wallet, they give you a receipt. They take your kids, and you get nothing? Not even a slip of paper?" Not anymore in Trump's America.
Having taken the children hostage, the government is now forcing these parents to choose between being separated from their children or being able to reunite with them by signing a "voluntary" deportation order. Tell me how this is that much different from the "voluntary" confessions we see under totalitarian regimes.
The President's executive order is actually knowingly going to violate the Flores agreement and, according to the Washington Post, Trump actually wanted the executive order to rewrite immigration policy in its totality before being persuaded out of that approach by White House lawyers who were forced to "explain" that he could not just unilaterally change existing law. Now, the administration is basically asking the courts to discard the Flores settlement and allow families including children to be detained indefinitely in unlicensed facilities. In addition, there apparently is a request to use military bases to imprison over 100,000 immigrants and their children.
Yesterday, the President tweeted, "When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came". Of course, since the "border" is really the 100 mile zone from the actual physical border and that area contains two-thirds of the US population, most American citizens would be able to be plucked off the streets and deported with no due process whatsoever.
We see a similar dynamic with the Trump's tariffs. Trump's rationale for the steel and aluminum tariffs varies from punitive, to crack down on Chinese imports, to coercive, to force better trade deals from China, Mexico, Canada and the EU. But neither of those can actually provide the legal rationale for imposing the tariffs. So the administration invents the legal claim of national security out of whole cloth, despite the fact that the Department of Defense clearly states that it already gets enough US steel and aluminum to fulfill its needs. And now Trump is threatening to put even larger tariffs on European cars, again invoking this bogus national security claim.
Today, at least, there is a broad pushback against Trump's desire to eliminate due process at the border, and rightly so. It is also understandable that the focus should be on the results of these policies, the child prisons, the long-term damage to those children, and, in the case of tariffs, the harm to existing American businesses. In addition, the clear illegality of some of these policies make them easier to challenge in court, just as with the Muslim ban. The violation of the Flores agreement will be litigated as will challenges to the tariffs at the WTO.
Inevitably, but worryingly, that focus on the results of these horrific policies detracts attention from the authoritarian means by which the policies are put in place to begin with. The refusal to allow certain facilities holding the separated children has no legal basis. The restrictions on media access is designed to force them to rely on the governments visual propaganda. The executive order violates existing law on its face, not to mention that Trump had to be dissuaded from using the order to clearly and illegally rewrite immigration law in its entirety. Forcing these refuges to choose between not seeing their kids ever again and signing a "voluntary" deportation order is essentially a forced confession. There is no real legal basis for any of Trump's tariffs. The policies are horrible but perhaps the larger danger is how they were enacted.
This kind of creeping autocracy actually further emboldens the President and is exactly what leads to further attacks on our democracy and the slippery slope of proposing the elimination of due process for most Americans. It will not stop there.
Sunday, June 24, 2018
Saturday, June 23, 2018
Astronomy Adventure - Craters Plato And Clavius
The large crater Plato dominates the center of this photo and the division of the Mare Imbrium and the Mare Frigoris. Cape Laplace can be seen as the promontory at the center bottom and the mountains in the Mare Imbrium in between Plato and Laplace are the Montes Recti and Montes Teneriffe.
Crater Clavius, with the four smaller craters inside, is in the center right of this phots. Below it are the craters Scheiner and Blancanus.
Crater Clavius, with the four smaller craters inside, is in the center right of this phots. Below it are the craters Scheiner and Blancanus.
Technical details:
Scope: Starblast 4.5; tracking on
Magnification: ~140x
Camera: iPhone6 using NightCap Pro; ISO 32;
Friday, June 22, 2018
Trump's Beards
All afternoon long, I had to hear stories about how Ivanka and Melania apparently convinced Trump to reverse course on his separation policy. Don't believe it. I have no idea what Melania's politics really are or what message she was trying to send with her "I really don't care, do U" jacket, although I think the fact that she only wore it in DC meant the message was probably directed there.
What I do know is that we are still waiting, nigh on two years now, for that press conference that will prove that Melania herself was not working here illegally as a model before she met the Donald. And I know that her parents are apparently also in this country as part of the very "chain migration" process that Trump decries on an almost daily basis. I also know that the DOJ has now instructed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to review immigration cases going back to the 1990s looking for people who may have falsified information on their naturalization forms. I wonder if the USCIS be looking at Melania's file.
In addition, I don't think its too much of a stretch to say that Ivanka was more concerned about the political damage being done to Trump by this child separation policy than she was about the actual child abuse that the government was enabling. What is clear is that her media advisor is simply superb at always making sure Ivanka gets credit for anything that smacks of empathy and compassion coming from the Trump administration, despite her virtual silence while the abuses are occurring.
What makes these stories so ridiculous is that Trump has hardly ameliorated his position. It's still not clear whether child separation will actually start up again in another three weeks. And if they do not, the alternative is indefinite detention for the children along with their families. There is no plan for reuniting the already separated children with their families. But there are now plans to create internment camps that will hold from 20,000 to 100,000 people. And Trump's blood libel against immigrants reached a new level of vitriol today. If this is the result of Ivanka and Melania ameliorating Trump's worst instincts, I'd hate to see what happens when they urge him to get tough.
Melania and Ivanka are just beards for Trump, trotted out to cover up the fact that Trump himself has no empathy, no compassion, and no moral compass. So when Melania goes out to comfort these separated children, maybe someone might mention her own questionable legal status and how her family enjoyed the benefits of "chain migration". And when the media writes the next story about how Ivanka was responsible for some Trump change in policy, they might also might mention that it was usually preceded by absolute silence about the horrors the Trump administration was inflicting beforehand and that there is virtually no real evidence other than sources in the White House that she effected anything.
What I do know is that we are still waiting, nigh on two years now, for that press conference that will prove that Melania herself was not working here illegally as a model before she met the Donald. And I know that her parents are apparently also in this country as part of the very "chain migration" process that Trump decries on an almost daily basis. I also know that the DOJ has now instructed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to review immigration cases going back to the 1990s looking for people who may have falsified information on their naturalization forms. I wonder if the USCIS be looking at Melania's file.
In addition, I don't think its too much of a stretch to say that Ivanka was more concerned about the political damage being done to Trump by this child separation policy than she was about the actual child abuse that the government was enabling. What is clear is that her media advisor is simply superb at always making sure Ivanka gets credit for anything that smacks of empathy and compassion coming from the Trump administration, despite her virtual silence while the abuses are occurring.
What makes these stories so ridiculous is that Trump has hardly ameliorated his position. It's still not clear whether child separation will actually start up again in another three weeks. And if they do not, the alternative is indefinite detention for the children along with their families. There is no plan for reuniting the already separated children with their families. But there are now plans to create internment camps that will hold from 20,000 to 100,000 people. And Trump's blood libel against immigrants reached a new level of vitriol today. If this is the result of Ivanka and Melania ameliorating Trump's worst instincts, I'd hate to see what happens when they urge him to get tough.
Melania and Ivanka are just beards for Trump, trotted out to cover up the fact that Trump himself has no empathy, no compassion, and no moral compass. So when Melania goes out to comfort these separated children, maybe someone might mention her own questionable legal status and how her family enjoyed the benefits of "chain migration". And when the media writes the next story about how Ivanka was responsible for some Trump change in policy, they might also might mention that it was usually preceded by absolute silence about the horrors the Trump administration was inflicting beforehand and that there is virtually no real evidence other than sources in the White House that she effected anything.
Thursday, June 21, 2018
As Usual, Trump's Solution Doesn't Solve Anything
Let's be clear, Trump's executive order today does nothing to actually solve the problem of how to deal with all the people caught up in the zero tolerance (read intolerance) policy at the border. Because of a consent decree in the 1997 case of Flores v. Reno, the federal government can not detain unaccompanied minors and children accompanied by their parent or parents for more than 20 days. After that period, the government is required to release the child to a parent, relative, legal guardian, or an accredited entity willing to take care of the children. So, assuming the Flores settlement still applies, in three weeks time children will again be separated from their parents and Trump will blame it on the courts.
Moreover, there are presently not nearly enough facilities that aren't already full that will be able to handle the number of families that will have to be detained, just as there are not enough facilities at present to handle the separated children. In addition, the Flores agreement stipulates that minors must be held in the least restrictive environment possible. That would presumably mean that the present facilities for housing adults would not be eligible for use. It appears that the plan is to put these families in these new tent cities on military bases that may not be properly vetted and licensed as required by the Flores settlement.
What Trump has done is issue an executive order that he knows is on its face is illegal and actually unworkable on the ground. But Trump believes this solves his immediate political problem and buys time to create some sort of solution. That may come in the form of legislation that will override the Flores settlement or the courts will rule that families may be held together in detention for more than 20 days and possibly until their cases are finally adjudicated in unlicensed and unvetted military facilities. Neither of those is an especially positive outcome. And if neither of those comes to pass, then the children will once again start begin separated from their parents.
Because this new executive order was essentially crafted and signed within hours yesterday, there has been no ability for the bureaucratic and administrative functionaries to prepare for the changes required, just as there was no preparation for the zero tolerance (read intolerance) policy to begin with and just like most Trump policy pronouncements in general. In addition, there is absolute confusion at HHS and DHS about what will happen to the children who have already been separated. At present there is no plan for reunification of those children of those children already separate with their parents.
Lastly, it should be noted that the Trump administration has changed the process by which parents and relatives can have their related children released to them. Under prior rules, information on those parents or relatives was only held and processed by HHS, meaning that it was quite possible for undocumented immigrants to have their child relatives released to them. Under Trump's new policy, that information is now passed on to DHS and therefore ICE. This means that undocumented immigrants trying to get a minor released to them will potentially be putting themselves at risk of arrest and deportation by ICE. And that potentially means that a child could conceivably become orphaned twice by the Trump administration.
Moreover, there are presently not nearly enough facilities that aren't already full that will be able to handle the number of families that will have to be detained, just as there are not enough facilities at present to handle the separated children. In addition, the Flores agreement stipulates that minors must be held in the least restrictive environment possible. That would presumably mean that the present facilities for housing adults would not be eligible for use. It appears that the plan is to put these families in these new tent cities on military bases that may not be properly vetted and licensed as required by the Flores settlement.
What Trump has done is issue an executive order that he knows is on its face is illegal and actually unworkable on the ground. But Trump believes this solves his immediate political problem and buys time to create some sort of solution. That may come in the form of legislation that will override the Flores settlement or the courts will rule that families may be held together in detention for more than 20 days and possibly until their cases are finally adjudicated in unlicensed and unvetted military facilities. Neither of those is an especially positive outcome. And if neither of those comes to pass, then the children will once again start begin separated from their parents.
Because this new executive order was essentially crafted and signed within hours yesterday, there has been no ability for the bureaucratic and administrative functionaries to prepare for the changes required, just as there was no preparation for the zero tolerance (read intolerance) policy to begin with and just like most Trump policy pronouncements in general. In addition, there is absolute confusion at HHS and DHS about what will happen to the children who have already been separated. At present there is no plan for reunification of those children of those children already separate with their parents.
Lastly, it should be noted that the Trump administration has changed the process by which parents and relatives can have their related children released to them. Under prior rules, information on those parents or relatives was only held and processed by HHS, meaning that it was quite possible for undocumented immigrants to have their child relatives released to them. Under Trump's new policy, that information is now passed on to DHS and therefore ICE. This means that undocumented immigrants trying to get a minor released to them will potentially be putting themselves at risk of arrest and deportation by ICE. And that potentially means that a child could conceivably become orphaned twice by the Trump administration.
Wednesday, June 20, 2018
The Autocracy Behind The Separation Policy
So this is making America great again - separating babies from their parents and throwing them in cages. And simply because it's cruel and inhumane and only effects brown babies, the Trump base eats it up. What a show of strength!
While our thoughts and actions should rightly be focused like a laser on the abject cruelty and inhumanity of this government-sponsored child abuse supposedly done in our name, we should also not lose sight of the increasing autocracy that the Trump administration has engaged in during this crisis. Until the truly disturbing AP report last night, we did not know that the government had set up at least three secret prisons to house babies and young children. The Trump administration refused to provide the location of these secret detention facilities and has also refused to provide information on where girls are being detained. Inspections of these facilities have often been denied to members of Congress and the press, and ones that are set up are carefully controlled with no direct contact with the detainees and no pictures. Government officials routinely refuse and/or fail to answer some of those most basic questions about what is happening in these facilities and what the process for reunification would actually entail. Much of what we know about what really goes on in these detention facilities primarily comes from leakers and whistleblowers.
Most of these detention centers are actually not government facilities per se but supposedly non-profit facilities that have contracts with the government to handle immigrants and refugees awaiting some kind of adjudication. I have no doubt that some of these facilities are well run and staffed by competent and caring people. On the other hand, you have to have some doubts about some of these non-profits. Casa Padre, the facility Senator Merkley was barred from entering, is run by the non-profit Southwest Key. The husband and wife team that runs Southwest Key, president and vice president respectively, received over $1.7 million in compensation in 2016. That seems more in line with a private for-profit prison than an actual non-profit.
More importantly, these detention centers are not national security facilities nor are they technically even prisons, although they function effectively just like one, and there is no reason that members of Congress and the press should not be able to enter these facilities almost at any time. Certainly, the facilities should not be allowed to take weeks to set up inspections and images from these facilities should not be provided solely by the government. And now that these non-profit facilities are filled to capacity, there is no reason that the government should be opening up new facilities in secret and actively preventing journalists and members of Congress from being able to inspect them.
It has been reported that Trump refused to take any questions from Congressional Republicans when he went to Capitol Hill yesterday. The President loves the press gaggle where he can ignore questions he doesn't want to answer and continually lie when responding to the rest. He has held only one real press conference since his inauguration. He continually makes proclamations and policy without any of the proper legal and bureaucratic preparation required, as this policy of separation illustrates. In essence, he acts like a dictator. In addition, both Trump and his administration officials continually lie about the separation policy and refuse to provide even the most basic details.
Of course, the Republicans in Congress love to mouth opposition to the administration's abusive and authoritarian separation policy but they will do absolutely nothing to fix it. America's corporate leaders, still gorging on their massive tax cuts, take a similar stand as Republicans, condemning the policy but taking no action, such as withdrawing from contracts that facilitate this inhumanity. In fact some, like Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankenfein, are actually trying to put up a pathetic defense of this inhumane policy.
Secret prisons are hardly new for America. But in the past we have used the auspices of war and other primarily authoritarian regimes to provide those secret CIA prisons for us. Now that feature of authoritarian rule has come to the American mainland. And, whether under Trump or the next would-be dictator, you can be sure that the next set of inmates for those secret prisons will be far more threatening to the government than Central American babies. And that should scare us all far more than refugees fleeing violence and murder largely created by American policy.
While our thoughts and actions should rightly be focused like a laser on the abject cruelty and inhumanity of this government-sponsored child abuse supposedly done in our name, we should also not lose sight of the increasing autocracy that the Trump administration has engaged in during this crisis. Until the truly disturbing AP report last night, we did not know that the government had set up at least three secret prisons to house babies and young children. The Trump administration refused to provide the location of these secret detention facilities and has also refused to provide information on where girls are being detained. Inspections of these facilities have often been denied to members of Congress and the press, and ones that are set up are carefully controlled with no direct contact with the detainees and no pictures. Government officials routinely refuse and/or fail to answer some of those most basic questions about what is happening in these facilities and what the process for reunification would actually entail. Much of what we know about what really goes on in these detention facilities primarily comes from leakers and whistleblowers.
Most of these detention centers are actually not government facilities per se but supposedly non-profit facilities that have contracts with the government to handle immigrants and refugees awaiting some kind of adjudication. I have no doubt that some of these facilities are well run and staffed by competent and caring people. On the other hand, you have to have some doubts about some of these non-profits. Casa Padre, the facility Senator Merkley was barred from entering, is run by the non-profit Southwest Key. The husband and wife team that runs Southwest Key, president and vice president respectively, received over $1.7 million in compensation in 2016. That seems more in line with a private for-profit prison than an actual non-profit.
More importantly, these detention centers are not national security facilities nor are they technically even prisons, although they function effectively just like one, and there is no reason that members of Congress and the press should not be able to enter these facilities almost at any time. Certainly, the facilities should not be allowed to take weeks to set up inspections and images from these facilities should not be provided solely by the government. And now that these non-profit facilities are filled to capacity, there is no reason that the government should be opening up new facilities in secret and actively preventing journalists and members of Congress from being able to inspect them.
It has been reported that Trump refused to take any questions from Congressional Republicans when he went to Capitol Hill yesterday. The President loves the press gaggle where he can ignore questions he doesn't want to answer and continually lie when responding to the rest. He has held only one real press conference since his inauguration. He continually makes proclamations and policy without any of the proper legal and bureaucratic preparation required, as this policy of separation illustrates. In essence, he acts like a dictator. In addition, both Trump and his administration officials continually lie about the separation policy and refuse to provide even the most basic details.
Of course, the Republicans in Congress love to mouth opposition to the administration's abusive and authoritarian separation policy but they will do absolutely nothing to fix it. America's corporate leaders, still gorging on their massive tax cuts, take a similar stand as Republicans, condemning the policy but taking no action, such as withdrawing from contracts that facilitate this inhumanity. In fact some, like Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankenfein, are actually trying to put up a pathetic defense of this inhumane policy.
Secret prisons are hardly new for America. But in the past we have used the auspices of war and other primarily authoritarian regimes to provide those secret CIA prisons for us. Now that feature of authoritarian rule has come to the American mainland. And, whether under Trump or the next would-be dictator, you can be sure that the next set of inmates for those secret prisons will be far more threatening to the government than Central American babies. And that should scare us all far more than refugees fleeing violence and murder largely created by American policy.
