[barmar]

So two days after John Oliver aired a scathing report on the state of the immigration court system, the Justice Department has rolled out their "solution": quotas and other performance metrics for immigration court judges.

https://www.nbcnews....-judges-n862271

Quote

Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said immigration attorneys were deeply concerned that cases will be "rushed through."

"Subjecting judges to numerical goals undermines one of the core principles of our judicial system, which is really a fair day in court," she said.

Just a reminder: immigration courts are not part of the Judicial branch, they're in the Justice Department of the Executive branch. And immigration cases are civil, not criminal, so defendants do not have 5th amendment rights (e.g. no court-appointed attorneys to slow down the proceedings).

[Winstonm]

This is the president:

Quote

“The ‘Fakers’ at CNN, NBC, ABC & CBS have done so much dishonest reporting that they should only be allowed to get awards for fiction!”

If you like pro wrestling, tough-acting mobsters, and bullies you are probably happy with how this man acts; however, if you have slightly higher standards, you must find it appalling that the man occupying the country's highest office is so crass and personally insecure that he feels compelled to endlessly rail against any organization or person that refuses to conform to his will and that he tries to discredit truth itself while encouraging propaganda as a substitute. Sad!

Bob Newhart: (sort of)

Quote

I don't like country music this president, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music this president, denigrate means 'put down'.

[Winstonm]

Clint Watts in the NYT:

Quote

Evidence of Russia’s intent to interfere in the election is overwhelming, and documentation of Trump campaign members’ collusion not only exists but is growing. The special counsel’s investigation into collusion ultimately comes down to two questions. First, did President Trump or any member of his campaign willingly coordinate their actions with Russia? And did President Trump or any member of his campaign knowingly coordinate their action with Russia?

Trump campaign members certainly colluded with Russian influence efforts, some willingly, some possibly knowingly. The president denies the Kremlin’s hand, either still unaware or in denial of being manipulated by Mr. Putin’s minions. For Mr. Putin, it’s likely everything he hoped for — America riddled with political infighting and mired in investigations, a weakened NATO alliance vulnerable to aggression and a United States president seeking his adoration, obstinate and ignorant of the great caper the Kremlin just orchestrated.

The problem for the president is that ignorance is not immunity. The problem for America is that ignorance of Russian interference is vulnerability.

[RedSpawn]

Winstonm, on 2018-March-18, 12:13, said:

I rather like this NBC News analysis about the McCabe firing as it takes a larger view and speaks to the motivations:



Oh, look! It's another gigantic conspiracy - most likely Obama's fault - (who isn't, btw, a real American). And yet, there are still those who believe. Reminds me of a song.

If I listen long enough to you
I'd find the way to believe that it's all true
Knowing that you lied straight face
While I cried
And still I look
To find a reason to believe

Whatever is so necessary to hide from the past that the creation of all this faux ruckus becomes priority...could it be hiding something of a criminal nature...?

The firing of Comey makes sense when his agency stonewalls the discovery of evidence regarding the clandestine meeting on the Phoenix tarmac between Clinton and Lynch AND THE VERY strange announcement by Comey that he is reopening the email investigation a week before the Presidential election.

The media presented Comey's firing as if it was just a disloyalty matter and that was simply misleading and irresponsible.

Both actions taken as a whole demonstrate Comey's inability to lead the FBI in a prudent, unbiased, and disciplined manner. Comey consistently failed to follow protocol in dealing with the email scandal and demonstrated that his judgment was compromised.

Trump used the wrong reasoning for Comey's firing. But know this, Comey knew he had fu#$ed up big time and started taking extra contemporaneous notes of conversations with Trump on FBI letterhead to help a wrongful termination lawsuit should he get fired because the knucklehead knew his days were numbered and rightfully so.

Comey is a lawyer so he was covering his behind because he unintentionally left FBI $hit stains all over the federal election. Plus Comey was going to take Trump down with him if Trump fired him. That's a game recognize game move in the D.C. swamp.

Comey is no saint or victim in this matter.

Source: https://www.national...explain-timing/

[y66]

From You can’t do that in politics. (She just did.) by Stephanie Ebbert at the Boston Globe:

Quote

After an election that unleashed women’s fury and sexual harassment scandals that spawned a thousand hashtags, women are shattering traditional limits of gender decorum in campaign ads. No longer are they presenting themselves as tough-but-caring overachievers who are, incidentally, not men. Some of them are introducing themselves with images that are unapologetically in-your-face female.

“This year we have women that are running very boldly, and they typically are in districts where they feel like campaigning boldly as a woman will grab attention during this very chaotic, very partisan political environment,” said Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University.

What took so long?

[Winstonm]

RedSpawn, on 2018-April-03, 12:23, said:

The firing of Comey makes sense when his agency stonewalls the discovery of evidence regarding the clandestine meeting on the Phoenix tarmac between Clinton and Lynch AND THE VERY strange announcement by Comey that he is reopening the email investigation a week before the Presidential election.

The media presented Comey's firing as if it was just a disloyalty matter and that was simply misleading and irresponsible.

Both actions taken as a whole demonstrate Comey's inability to lead the FBI in a prudent, unbiased, and disciplined manner. Comey consistently failed to follow protocol in dealing with the email scandal and demonstrated that his judgment was compromised.

Trump used the wrong reasoning for Comey's firing. But know this, Comey knew he had fu#$ed up big time and started taking extra contemporaneous notes of conversations with Trump on FBI letterhead to help a wrongful termination lawsuit should he get fired because the knucklehead knew his days were numbered and rightfully so.

Comey is a lawyer so he was covering his behind because he unintentionally left FBI $hit stains all over the federal election. Plus Comey was going to take Trump down with him if Trump fired him. That's a game recognize game move in the D.C. swamp.

Comey is no saint or victim in this matter.

Source: https://www.national...explain-timing/

I notice you didn't mention this, that the Observer first published the account that raised doubts - offered by an anonymous source - about the tarmac meeting.: http://www.newsweek....ls-comey-749995

Quote

But after Observer published an article containing additional details about the encounter, citing an anonymous “security source” who had been present, the FBI and Justice Department moved from damage control to discussions about identifying the source and punishing that person, the emails show. At the time, the publisher of Observer was Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and one of his senior advisers.

And yet you find no problem with the source?

Still, I agree with the first line of the National Review article you posted: Comey made himself eminently fireable - but fireable for Obama. By the time Comey was fired, the tarmac meeting was no longer an issue.

[jjbrr]

redspawn is approaching pizzagate levels of stupid now. it's only a matter of time before infowars, 4chan, and t_d get posted in this thread.

[Winstonm]

I certainly will feel safer here in the good ol' U.S.S.A. with military checkpoints on the borders:

Quote

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he planned to use U.S. military forces to protect the nation’s southern border with Mexico until there is a border wall and “proper security.”

“We are going to be doing things militarily,” Trump told reporters at the White House, adding that he had discussed the idea with U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

[jjbrr]

Winstonm, on 2018-April-03, 17:07, said:

I certainly will feel safer here in the good ol' U.S.S.A. with military checkpoints on the borders:

Yeah?

Quote

The Posse Comitatus Act is a United States federal law (18 U.S.C. § 1385, original at 20 Stat. 152) signed on June 18, 1878 by President Rutherford B. Hayes. The purpose of the act – in concert with the Insurrection Act of 1807 – is to limit the powers of the federal government in using federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States. It was passed as an amendment to an army appropriation bill following the end of Reconstruction, and was subsequently updated in 1956 and 1981.

[ldrews]

jjbrr, on 2018-April-03, 19:33, said:

Yeah?

As I understand it, the Posse Comitatus law does not apply to the Marines, Coast Guard, or National Guard, only the Army and Air Force.

[Winstonm]

And they are certainly doing a great job as I haven't seen a Mexican battleship north of San Antonio in years.

[Winstonm]

Oh, look, another Trump accomplishment. From Yahoo:

Quote

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Rebecca Dallet won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, a victory for Democrats that gives more momentum for a potential blue wave in the November midterm elections.

State Supreme Court races rarely merit national attention. The Wisconsin election ― which gives justices a 10-year term ― was officially nonpartisan, but it was crystal clear where the partisan lines formed.

It’s the first time in more than a decade that a liberal candidate won an open Supreme Court seat in the state. Dallet was winning by double digits when the race was officially called in her favor.

Daily Beast confirms this great accomplishment:

Quote

The Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, has warned that a “blue wave” may be coming for the midterm elections in November after a Democratic-backed candidate won a seat Tuesday on Wisconsin’s supreme court.

[Winstonm]

Vox does a good job explaining the options a president has for using the military at the border.

Quote

Like Obama and Bush, he could call on the National Guard to go down to the border. But if that directive comes from the federal government, the guards legally can’t act as law enforcement. The Posse Comitatus Act forbids using the military in civilian law enforcement. It leaves Trump two options: have states send down their guards, which means states would have to foot the bill, or have guards on the border in non-law enforcement roles.

[y66]

From Fear Lurks Behind Trump's Amazon Vendetta by Timothy O'Brien:

Quote

Trump loathes Amazon because he conflates the company with the Washington Post. Bezos owns the Post and founded Amazon, but Amazon doesn't own the Post; Bezos purchased it himself for $250 million in 2013. Amazon is just a useful straw man for a president ticked off by the stellar reporting the Post has done over the last few years on the White House, public policy and Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump's ties to Russia. As the New York Times reported Tuesday, citing people close to Trump, "critical articles in the Post often trigger his public musings about Amazon."

Michelle Goldberg made the same point in her April 2 op-ed titled The Autocrats’ Playbook

Quote

In 2009, Turkey’s tax ministry imposed a $2.5 billion fine for alleged tax evasion on Dogan Yayin, a media conglomerate whose newspapers and television stations were critical of the Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Under financial and political pressure, the company began unloading some assets and closing others. Last month, the billionaire Aydin Dogan sold his remaining media properties, including the influential Hurriyet newspaper and CNN Turk, to a group of Erdogan loyalists.

Modern authoritarians rarely seize critical newspapers or TV stations outright. Instead, they use state power to pressure critics and reward friends. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors at Harvard, wrote in their recent book “How Democracies Die,” President Vladimir Putin of Russia turned the tax authorities on Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of an independent television network, NTV, which was considered bothersome. Gusinsky eventually signed NTV over to a government-controlled company. Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan authorities accused Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovisión, a TV station frequently critical of the government, of illegal profiteering. In 2013, Zuloaga sold Globovisión to allies of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.

Now Donald Trump is going after Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post.

...Meanwhile, Trump uses his platform to praise obsequious outlets like Sinclair Broadcast Group, which ordered news anchors on its nearly 200 local television stations to record Trump-style warnings about fake news: “Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’” After Deadspin produced a creepy viral video of Sinclair anchors reading their script in totalitarian unison, Trump came to the company’s defense, tweeting, “Sinclair is far superior to CNN and even more Fake NBC, which is a total joke.”

Sinclair’s regime-friendly propaganda, which seems meant to erode trust in competing sources of information, is also familiar from other nations that have slid into authoritarianism.

“When you look at many of these countries, it’s been a two-pronged attack on the media,” Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-born M.I.T. economist and a co-author of “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty,” told me. “Even before the attacks against the Dogan group started in Turkey, or even before the attacks against a few remaining independent TV stations and newspapers had started under Putin, you had these troll-like media outlets that were flooding the market with what we are now calling fake news.”

By the time those regimes moved against unsympathetic media companies, much of the population had been disoriented by disinformation. Under Trump, America has started down the same road. There are many reasons to be terrified of Amazon’s power, but Trump’s ability to undermine it with a tweet is far scarier.

Trump is a mere apprentice compared to Putin when it comes to mastering the autocrat's playbook. But you have to give him credit for aptitude.

[y66]

Quote of the day from We Must Reckon with the Terrible Realities Hidden in Plain Sight by Anjali Dayal, an international relations professor at Fordham University (via Amanda Taub and Max Fisher at NYT):

Quote

I teach international relations classes. The first thing I teach most students is Max Weber’s definition of the state — the disciplinary way of understanding what in casual speech we call countries. The state, they learn, is defined by violence — it guards for itself the means of violence; it deems what violence is and isn’t legitimate. The young black men in my classrooms have, in large part, found this concept intuitive; what could I really say to them that would shake the understanding that the state polices, the state kills, and the state finds its agents acted appropriately in taking lives? Students from authoritarian states, or whose families fled civil war, similarly require little convincing.

For students from more comfortable backgrounds, the concept can prove harder to grasp. How could a social order founded on violence inspire such deep affinity? So we turn to Thomas Hobbes, and we talk about the Leviathan — the biblical sea monster that Hobbes uses as his metaphor for the state. The world is violent, Hobbes tells us — so we surrender our rights to a sovereign, and in exchange the sovereign protects us, and even if some sovereigns devolve some of our rights back to us in the bargain, they might reclaim them if the security of the whole requires it.

Teaching the state this way is a process of denaturalization: You reach into the placid waters, you grasp a tentacle, and you drag out a horror that from the surface appeared to be nothing more than weeds. And once the Leviathan rises from the sea for us — once the state has exposed the implicit promise of violence that lies at its heart — how can we forget what it is?

So it is for me as a woman today.

...

Being constantly reminded of the violence that undergirds social order — having to look at it again and again — may never become easier for those who experience it — but making it ever-clearer for those who simply could not see it is a vital task of the moment. Tell the tide we won’t move.

And so it is for all of us here in the water cooler. Hey, it's just water.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2018-April-04, 07:23, said:

From Fear Lurks Behind Trump's Amazon Vendetta by Timothy O'Brien:


Michelle Goldberg made the same point in her April 2 op-ed titled The Autocrats’ Playbook


Trump is a mere apprentice compared to Putin when it comes to mastering the autocrat's playbook. But you have to give him credit for aptitude.

Sinclair? I think they meant RT (Real Trump).

[barmar]

y66, on 2018-April-04, 09:15, said:

Quote of the day from We Must Reckon with the Terrible Realities Hidden in Plain Sight by Anjali Dayal, an international relations professor at Fordham University (via Amanda Taub and Max Fisher at NYT):


And so it is for all of us here in the water cooler. Hey, it's just water.

This is historically true, but that's because of the nature of societies of the past. Read Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" and "Enlightenment Now", and you'll learn how much society has progressed in the past few centuries: more tolerant and inclusive, less violent. We don't have to define ourselves by where we've come from.

We still need armed police and military forces to provide the thread of force as deterrents, because things aren't perfect and never will be. But we can be hopeful that progress will continue.

[RedSpawn]

y66, on 2018-April-04, 09:15, said:

Quote of the day from We Must Reckon with the Terrible Realities Hidden in Plain Sight by Anjali Dayal, an international relations professor at Fordham University (via Amanda Taub and Max Fisher at NYT):


And so it is for all of us here in the water cooler. Hey, it's just water.

Quote

Teaching the state this way is a process of denaturalization: You reach into the placid waters, you grasp a tentacle, and you drag out a horror that from the surface appeared to be nothing more than weeds. And once the Leviathan rises from the sea for us — once the state has exposed the implicit promise of violence that lies at its heart — how can we forget what it is?

When the oppression, injustice, and violence is against minorities and women—who are classes of citizens whose rights weren't so inalienable upon the birth of this nation—the white male citizenry can forget what occurred. The white male citizenry can remain cocooned in the false reality that they are immune from this type of violence and aggression from the state. The larger public assumes that "those other people's problems" are not our own and the recipients of such violence probably deserved the heavy-handed punishment the state imposed. However, if our government becomes tyrannical and turns against us (white men) by denying our inalienable rights, wrecking havoc, and using violence in a wholesale fashion, we have the 2nd Amendment and 300,000,000 guns in our possession to bust a cap in our government's ass. Source: https://www.nraila.o...against-tyranny

People ignore the terrible realities inflicted upon others by the state because they believe they are protected from such treatment and that these realities don't apply to them. It's a cultural mindset.

Glorifying and defending the sovereignty of the Leviathan state is more comforting than defending the personhood of your fellow man when you believe the Leviathan can protect you better.

[jjbrr]

“Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower when I opened? Everybody said, ‘Oh, he was so tough.' I used the word rape,” the president said. “And yesterday it came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before.”

“In many places like California the same person votes many times. You’ve probably heard of that,” Trump said. “They always like to say, ‘Oh, that’s like a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory folks. Millions and millions of people. And it’s very hard because the state guards their records. They don’t want to see it.”

Completely off his rocker, but I have no doubt his base is loving it all over again.

[Winstonm]

jjbrr, on 2018-April-05, 15:07, said:

“Remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower when I opened? Everybody said, ‘Oh, he was so tough.' I used the word rape,” the president said. “And yesterday it came out where this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before.”

“In many places like California the same person votes many times. You’ve probably heard of that,” Trump said. “They always like to say, ‘Oh, that’s like a conspiracy theory.’ Not a conspiracy theory folks. Millions and millions of people. And it’s very hard because the state guards their records. They don’t want to see it.”

Completely off his rocker, but I have no doubt his base is loving it all over again.

His base can love it all it wants - what is important is that independents and disenfranchised Democrats are no longer falling for his schtick. And, of course, Bob Mueller is into his shorts. Tick-tock, tick-tock...