Lazy Saturday Reads: Something Is Very Wrong
Posted: June 23, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics 43 Comments
Marek Okrassa
Good Afternoon!!
The Trump administration is torturing children. Please read this article; it’s not long. It’s an anecdote from an “emergency physician in South Texas,” Alicia Hart.
The New Yorker: A Physician in South Texas on an Unnerving Encounter with an Eight-Year-Old Boy in Immigration Detention.
Last week, on a day when Hart was on duty, the charge nurse called her over to examine a child who needed clearance for psychiatric treatment. He was eight years old, and he sat hunched in a recliner chair next to the nurses’ station. Four men, who had brought him from an unidentified holding facility for migrant children, hovered around him….
“The guardians didn’t step more than two feet away from the kid. One of the four was an armed police officer. I thought, Does it take an army of adult men to take care of one elementary schooler? I walked over to the boy, crouched down, and asked him, in Spanish, ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Sad,’ he said.
Carl Theodor von Blaas, Austrian, (1886-1960) Woman Reading
“The boy had been in custody for over a month. One of his guardians told me that he had been ‘acting out’ and threatening to harm himself, by jumping from his bed. This man told me, ‘I’m his clinician,’ but he was definitely not a doctor. I don’t know if he’s a social worker, a medical assistant, a housekeeper. I have no clue. But he obviously had been granted some sort of authority in regard to assessing children and determining what their needs are. He wouldn’t provide basic background. I couldn’t find out any information because he would say, ‘I’m not at liberty to tell you that’ and ‘You don’t need to know that,’ even though a lot of my questions were relevant to taking care of the child. I was asking things like ‘Where are his parents?’ [….]
“I asked the clinician, ‘When is this child going to be reunited with his parents?’ He was evasive. First it was ‘Oh, well, we don’t know.’ And then it was ‘Well, he won’t be reunited with his parents unless he behaves.’ The lack of compassion was scary, and it didn’t seem like there was really a plan.
“This boy seemed devastated—quiet and withdrawn. He barely spoke. I asked if he needed a hug. I kneeled down in front of the recliner, and this kid just threw himself into my arms and didn’t let go. He cried and I cried. And to think he’s been in a facility for a month without a hug, away from his parents, and scared, and not knowing when he’ll see them again or if he’ll see them again. While I held him, I heard the men standing behind me muttering that I was ‘rewarding his bad behavior.’ Thankfully, it was in English, so I don’t think the boy understood what they were saying, but it just revealed their attitudes toward these kids.
Hart recommended the boy for inpatient psychiatric treatment in order to get him away from his “caretakers.” She worried that he might be given antipsychotic drugs, but she felt she could send him back to the place where he had obviously been mistreated.
Michael Pracht, Girl reading
Can anyone doubt that something similar is happening to thousands of refugee children? This is an outrage. We truly do need UN intervention. I’ve heard that UN and Red Cross inspectors have been turned away from Trump’s child concentration camps. This cannot go on.
This morning Putin biographer Masha Gessen appeared on MSNBC’s AM Joy. Joy Reid asked her, “Is it too much to call this fascism? Gessen replied, I don’t think it’s too much. I don’t think we have fascist rule in this country, but what we have is a fascist leader. We have a nativist, nationalist leader…”
Gessen writes at The New Yorker: By Separating Families at the Border, the Trump Administration Enforces the “Rule by Nobody.”
Donald Trump said that the Democrats made him do it. Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, said it was the Bible. Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said it was the law. They all said it wasn’t them. In their unified defense of the policy of separating children from their families at the border, Administration officials have adopted a technique of deflection that renders victims and critics powerless: they have depersonalized the violence.
This is how violence works in the world’s most cruel and terrifying societies. The victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass deportations, mass incarceration, man-made famines, and other disasters that humans intentionally visit on the “other” are always anonymous….But in the Administration’s telling, it’s not only the victims who are anonymous—it is also the perpetrators. When Trump blames the cruelty at the border on the Democrats; when Sessions says that God made him enforce the law indiscriminately; or when Nielsen claims, in effect, to be just following orders, the nation’s top officials are not merely lying; they are de-personifying the perpetrators. They are not merely refusing to be held accountable but are saying that no one will account for the violence.
Gina Brown (USA)
The Trump Administration didn’t invent this tactic. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has perfected it over the years….But, of course, Putin didn’t invent this deflection technique, either.
Writing about the relationship between violence and bureaucracy, Hannah Arendt said, “In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted.” She called bureaucracy the “rule by Nobody.”
Thank goodness Americans rose up and expressed their outrage at Trump’s cruelty and racism. But we have to make sure that every single one of the children who have been effectively kidnapped by this administration is reunited with his or her family.
At Vanity Fair, Peter Hamby writes that Trump lost this round because of pictures: “The Images Are Out Of His Control: How Trump Lost His Grip On The Child-Detention Narrative.
Rarely has Donald Trump been on his heels as he has over the past week. Even during the hottest-burning controversies and scandals of his administration, Trump is usually the stick-and-move president: provoke, evade, pivot to the next thing. The media has a hard time keeping up, and congressional Democrats are too busy holding limp-dick press conferences like it’s still 2006. They’re about as effective as those digital finger-waggers who tweet “Sir!” at the president every time he burps. As I wrote previously for the Hive, Trump is absolutely curb-stomping his opponents in the battle for attention.
But the wrenching story of migrant children being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border has unfolded differently. Trump has been forced to play defense. It’s not just because the policy is cruel, inhumane, and an ugly stain on our country’s moral integrity. It is all of those things. But Trump has done plenty of ugly things. What’s different this time, and the handful of times Trump has found himself losing, is that there are pictures.
Marius Borgeaud, Swiss (1861-1924), Woman Reading at the Window
Think of the handful of moments when Trump has been subjected to a sustained drubbing that’s lasted more than just a day or two: the Access Hollywood tape. Sean Spicer’s lie about the size of the inauguration crowd. The massive airport protests around the travel ban. Trump’s “very fine people” comment about neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville. The Rob Porter domestic-abuse allegations fiasco. (Porter has denied the allegations.) And now the gross panorama of migrant children being separated from their desperate parents. All of these stories were accompanied by images—pictures or video—that either tilted public opinion against the president or blatantly contradicted the dubious claims of Trump and his allies.
We don’t yet have photos of the missing girls and babies; Trump is hiding them because he know those images could be even more shocking than the ones we’ve seen up till now.
And so far Trump and Sessions have not ended their “zero tolerance” policy. USA Today reports that as a result of that policy, the feds are not dealing with serious drug smuggling cases.
Federal prosecutors warned they were diverting resources from drug-smuggling cases in southern California to handle the flood of immigration charges brought on by the Trump administration’s border crackdown, records obtained by USA TODAY show.
Days after Attorney General Jeff Sessions instructed prosecutors to bring charges against anyone who enters the United States illegally, a Justice Department supervisor in San Diego sent an email to border authorities warning that immigration cases “will occupy substantially more of our resources.” He wrote that the U.S. Attorney’s Office there was “diverting staff, both support and attorneys, accordingly.”
The email, sent by the lawyer who runs the office’s major crimes unit, said prosecutors needed to streamline their work on smuggling cases. He said that would mean tight deadlines – sometimes just a few hours to produce reports and recordings – for those that would land in federal court. Going forward, the lawyer, Fred Sheppard, warned, if agents can’t meet that high bar, “the case will be declined.” [….]
Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, 1900
Still, there are signs that border authorities are seeking to prosecute drug smugglers in state courts instead, even though the possible sentences typically are harsher in the federal system.
The District Attorney’s office in San Diego said Friday that the number of cases submitted to them by border authorities had more than doubled since the administration started its border crackdown.
Read more at USA Today.
One more recommended read, and it’s a long one. The Financial Times: Donald Trump and the 1930s playbook: liberal democracy comes unstuck.
“I really don’t care. Do u?” said graffiti on the back of Melania Trump’s coat as she boarded the plane for Texas to visit encaged child migrants. No one, except Donald Trump, who tweeted that her garb was meant as a criticism of the “fake news” media, could be sure whom the First Lady was targeting. Some thought she was channelling her husband’s views. Others believed she was telling the world what she thought of her marriage. Either way, it captured the nihilism of a week in which the west’s liberal democratic glue appeared to be coming unstuck. It was hard to miss the echoes of the 1930s.
“Make no mistake, there is a concerted attack on the constitutional liberal order,” says Constanze Stelzenmüller, a German scholar at the Brookings Institution. “And it is being spearheaded by the president of the United States.”
Mr Trump started the week by trying to undermine a key American ally. He attacked Angela Merkel’s “tenuous” coalition government in Germany for “allowing in millions of people who have so strongly and violently changed their culture”. It followed a summit between the premiers of Austria and Bavaria in which they called for an “axis of the willing from Berlin to Vienna to Rome” to stop migration. Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, called for a “census” of Roma citizens evoking Italy’s fascist-era registry of Jews. “Unfortunately, we have to keep” those with valid resident permits, he said.
Back in Washington, public outrage forced Mr Trump to pause his policy of corralling “tender age” migrants into separate child detention centres. He nevertheless ordered the Pentagon to prepare camps to house up to 20,000 children. Last weekend Mr Trump called Hungary’s proudly “illiberal” Viktor Orban to issue a joint call for “strong national borders”.
The differences with the 1930s are obvious. No one expects war to break out today. There is no Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany nor fascist Italy egging each other on to plunder the old order. Nor is the US standing aloof. But the parallels are too troubling to ignore. In Europe, the forces of disintegration are on the march. The status quo is struggling to come up with a defence.
Read much more at the FT link.
What else is happening? What stories are you following today?
Monday Reads: Right now, we can choose between keeping our Republic or losing it
Posted: June 18, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Jeff Sessions, New Orleans, Sheriffs 58 Comments
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
I placed a call to Boomer last night to make sure she had the phone numbers down here for some criminal attorney friends of mine because I was deep into working with folks to start planning protests in New Orleans and an opportunity popped up for this morning. I wasn’t actively planning on getting arrested but it seemed likely that there would be arrests.
I was getting ready to head out when I was stopped by the reminder of a meeting that I had completely forgotten but had to attend. During the meeting helicopters flew low over the house heading downtown. I was really startled. I’ve attended protests and rallies before but I know how important these would be. My spidey sense knew there were going to be arrests and there were. Some guy also tried to run over a protester with a pick up truck.
This sky is still that weird yellow color indicating bad weather approaching as I start looking for local news. The insidious mix of bad policing practices, racism, and an Administration marching us towards Fascism means it is rightly lit. The sky is a sick color.
AG Jeff Sessions–the oldest living confederate widow–and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen–who is sounding more like a character from an Orwell book each passing day–are in New Orleans addressing Monday’s opening session of the National Sheriff’s Association annual conference. Law enforcement and immigration were the topics. Protests were the order of the day. There were 5 arrests.
There was a woman hit and injured by a cursing truck driver who took off unarrested and unfollowed. I rabbled the troops last night so I’m probably back on some list. It’s been since the Nixon years I’ve had that distinction except now I’m on social security and semi-retired. The tits are getting saggy but the ability to know right from wrong has never been stronger. I’m not a university student any more. I am a university professor.
The DHS Secretary is doing what all the women employed in this administration are doing. Lying for the big guy. Gaslighting for the big guy. Signing on to the Direct Express to the lowest hell realm for the big guy.
From HuffPo: “DHS Secretary Says There’s No Family Separation Policy ‘Period’. Last week, DHS announced that nearly 2,000 kids had been separated from their parents during a six-week period ending last month.” It’s mislead the Sheeple Monday. Trump must be assigning them to either Putin or Kim Jong Un for training sessions on Despot Support and Propaganda Techniques.
“This misreporting by members, press and advocacy groups must stop,” Nielsen wrote in a series of tweets Sunday evening. “It is irresponsible and unproductive. As I have said many times before, if you are seeking asylum for your family, there is no reason to break the law and illegally cross between ports of entry.”
We do not have a policy of separating families at the border,” she continued. “Period.”
The Convention Center is about 2 miles down the river road from me. It’s a short bike ride or bus ride there. Louisiana Sheriffs are living up to their image per Raw Story. New Orleans protesters are fierce.
A woman hit by a truck driver while protesting a speech given by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in New Orleans Monday said the man driving was shouting about the demonstrators — and that he wasn’t stopped after colliding with her.
https://twitter.com/MichaelDeMocker/status/1008718005176537094
John R. Stanton, a national correspondent for BuzzFeed News, tweeted that Sarah Morrison, the woman struck by the truck, told him the driver “was cursing at protesters before he hit her.” “[New Orleans Police Department] didn’t stop him,” Stanton continued, adding that they took a report from the woman who is shaken by alright after the ordeal.
Here’s some background information from the Raw Story link.
The woman, identified by the New Orleans Times-Picayune as “Sarah Morris,” said she was protesting Sessions’ speech in light of the Trump Justice Department‘s recent policy changes that separate children from their parents when detained by immigration officials.
“This isn’t what our country is about, taking children and caging them and they are doing this in our land,” the woman said. “Where does it go from here? Where does it end?”
The woman also told the Times-Picayune she doesn’t believe she was hit intentionally, and that she suffered a hit on the head and had cuts on her knee that drew blood.
Demonstrators didn’t find out about the attorney general’s speech at the National Sheriffs’ Association or the planned counter-protest until hours before it was slated to begin. He appeared alongside Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).
Subsequent reports from the protest revealed that police from multiple Louisiana parishes had begun arresting demonstrators.
Raw Story has now included an update.
UPDATE: In a statement to Raw Story, NOPD said it is investigating the driver hitting the protester outside the Sessions speech. Although NOPD interviewed the driver, “no charges have been filed nor have any arrests been made at this time.”
Meanwhile, Sessions took the opportunity on stage to show his support for law enforcement, call for longer sentences for criminals and address to controversy at the US-Mexico border where families are being separated by authorities as they illegally enter the country.
“There’s an important conversation in this country about whether we want to be a country of laws or if we want to be a country without borders,” Sessions said. “We cannot and will not encourage people to bring their children – or other children – to the country illegally by giving them immunity in the process.”
Sessions directly addressed the controversy surrounding new video and images of children being detained in cells and cages after their parents are arrested for illegally crossing the border.“We do not want to separate children from their parents, we do not want parents to bring their children in illegally,” he said. “We can not and will not encourage people to bring their children or other children to the country unlawfully by giving them immunity.”
Sessions continues to gaslight us on the process and existence of asylum.
Over the weekend, I pasted the links and quotes to the Immigration and Custom site where it clearly stated this as the way to seek asylum.
To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States. You may apply for asylum status regardless of how you arrived in the United States or your current immigration status.
You must apply for asylum within one year of the date of their last arrival in the United States, unless you can show:
- Changed circumstances that materially affect your eligibility for asylum or extraordinary circumstances relating to the delay in filing
- You filed within a reasonable amount of time given those circumstances.
You may apply for affirmative asylum by submitting Form I-589, Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal, to USCIS. See Form I 589, Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal for instructions on how to file for asylum,.
If your case is not approved and you do not have a legal immigration status, we will issue a Form I-862, Notice to Appear, and forward (or refer) your case to an Immigration Judge at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). The Immigration Judge conducts a ‘de novo’ hearing of the case. This means that the judge conducts a new hearing and issues a decision that is independent of the decision made by USCIS. If we do not have jurisdiction over your case, the Asylum Office will issue an I-863, Notice of Referral to Immigration Judge, for an asylum-only hearing. See ‘Defensive Asylum Processing With EOIR’ below if this situation applies to you.
Affirmative asylum applicants are rarely detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). You may live in the United States while your application is pending before USCIS. If you are found ineligible, you can remain in the United States while your application is pending with the Immigration Judge. Most asylum applicants are not authorized to work.
I felt I needed to capture all this as it seems disappeared at times.
Former First Lady Laura Bush has penned an editorial. She knows what this policy represents. All good people do of faith and of reason alone. This a take from CBS.
Former first lady Laura Bush criticized the Trump administration over the practice of separating undocumented migrant families, taking children from their parents at the border. “I live in a border state,” Bush wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that was posted Sunday evening. “I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.”
She continues, “Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso.” She called the images “eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.” (While the images may be similar, the Japanese Americans were, in fact, U.S. citizens who already lived in the United States when they were forcibly removed to internment camps)
For Bush, the practice of separating families threatens our national identity as “a moral nation.”
“We pride ourselves on believing that people should be seen for the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We pride ourselves on acceptance,” she writes. “If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place.”
Though everyone agrees that the U.S. immigration system “isn’t working,” she says, “the injustice of zero tolerance is not the answer.”
It is very rare for Bush, the wife of ex-President George W. Bush, to wade into political controversies, but perhaps this exception is less surprising because it is in keeping with her longtime advocacy for children. In her op-ed, she writes that while the material needs of the migrant children are being met with “beds, toys, crayons, a playground and diaper changes,” at shelters run by by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, “the people working at the shelter had been instructed not to pick up or touch the children to comfort them. Imagine not being able to pick up a child who is not yet out of diapers.”
It reminded her of her late mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, who picked up and comforted a young child dying of HIV/AIDS. “She, who after the death of her 3-year-old daughter knew what it was to lose a child, believed that every child is deserving of human kindness, compassion and love,” wrote Laura Bush. “In 2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate and more moral answer to this
You may read her words at WAPO.
It’s clear to nearly ever one that this is a deeply immoral and indefensible position. Yet, every administration official and Trump cult follower are doing everything they can to avoid directly discussing the situation. I’ve never seen such Orwellian pretzel twists of logic and words in my life. If any of this stands, we’re clearly on the road to an autocratic, fascist, dictatorship what ever laws our on our books. The new meme is “come to the table” which buys into the lie that this is a law passed by democrats. What it asks for is a negotiation with a kidnapper, asking for ransom, and demanding an apology for making him do the deed.
Each Republican elected official–including the ones that preface their surrender with some form of objection–is leading us down the path to ruin and evil. What causes this illness? This acceptance of pure unadulterated evil?
Nearly every day, voters have been confronted with heart wrenching stories about immigrant children being separated from their parents upon crossing the border into the United States.
The president incorrectly blames his administration’s policy on Democrats, but regardless of his attempt to pass the responsibility, self-identified Republicans have his back, according to a new Ipsos poll done exclusively for The Daily Beast.
The poll of roughly 1,000 adults aged 18 and over, and conducted June 14-15, asked respondents if they agreed with the following statement: “It is appropriate to separate undocumented immigrant parents from their children when they cross the border in order to discourage others from crossing the border illegally.”
Of those surveyed, 27 percent of the overall respondents agreed with it, while 56% disagreed with the statement. Yet, Republicans leaned slightly more in favor, with 46% agreeing with the statement and 32 percent disagreeing. Meanwhile, 14 percent of Democrats surveyed supported it and only 29% of Independents were in favor.
The sample, according to Ipsos, included 339 Democrats, 335 Republicans and 204 Independents.
On Saturday, President Trump continued to falsely assert that Democrats were to blame for the horrific stories of families being torn apart.
You may watch the speeches from Sessions, Nielsen, and the shame of Louisiana, Congressman Steve KKK Scalise here.
You may read about the even more shameful Trump words here.
Trump continued to cast blame on Democrats Monday, as he detoured from planned remarks on U.S. space policy to defend his administration’s policies. “I say it’s very strongly the Democrats’ fault,” he said at the White House.
“The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” he added. “Not on my watch.”
The one Republican taking action is the Republican Governor of Massachusetts. From WGBH: “Baker Cancels National Guard Deployment To Border, Citing ‘Inhumane’ Treatment Of Children And Families.”
Governor Charlie Baker is canceling the deployment of Massachusetts National Guard troops to the border in light of recent reports about the Trump Administration’s practice of separating immigrant children from families.
“Governor Baker directed the National Guard not to send any assets or personnel to the Southwest border today because the federal government’s current actions are resulting in the inhumane treatment of children,” said Baker communications director Lizzy Guyton in a statement sent to WGBH News.
State officials announced early in June that Massachusetts National Guard troops would be deployed to the border to support in security operations. One helicopter, aircrew, and military analysts from Massachusetts were set to head to the border at the end of June.
The crew was to “provide aviation reconnaissance to offer an additional tool for observation and tracking of unlawful activity in the region,” according to the Mass National Guard.
The cancellation comes amid increased scrutiny over the Trump Administration’s practice of separating children from families at the border, in some cases detaining children in makeshift facilities and, in one facility in Texas, cages. The practice has been condemned by the United Nations, a coalition of Catholic bishops, and numerous public officials, including former First Lady Laura Bush.
Previously, when asked about the Trump Administration’s practice of separation of children and families on Boston Public Radio in May, Baker said he had “ a huge problem with that.”
The deployment was a response to a proclamation signed by President Trump in April calling on National Guard troops to assist in securing the border. The request was made by invoking a statute of U.S. law known as “Title 32,” which allows governors to review requests for National Guard troops and deploy at their own determination, and troops remain under state control. (A “Title 10,” request, on the other hand, is involuntary and troops operate under federal control.)
It’s raining now but that odd yellow color remains. Maybe the wisdom beings are pissing on the Convention Center roof. It would be an irony given it would likely enthrall the wanna be despot planted by Russia and angry WiPiPo. Golden showers on his police state.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: An Emotionally Exhausted Nation watches Despot Worship and a Frog March
Posted: June 15, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Cohen, Collusion, Comey, Manafort, obstruction of justice 23 Comments
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
My day started with a disaster. I knocked the coffee pot full of water straight to the floor where it shattered into pieces. I’m hopeless before coffee. Just ask any of the attendees of my early morning lectures. I did not plan on having to arrange a trip to Dollar Ghetto for a new one. Fortunately, my friend Michelle did that deed while I cleaned up the mess. I did not want to face the day with out my coffee. I knew I’d have the news on during my Friday grading session. Yes! Summer school started! At least my class size is it’s usual smaller size. But, it’s going to be an insane news day for me and many weary Americans.
So, I got about a half a cup of coffee in when the news broke that Manafort’s ass is in jail and he’s facing obstruction of justice charges which are a BFD. Bye Felicia!
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort will await his trial for foreign lobbying crimes from jail.
Two weeks after Robert Mueller’s prosecutors dropped new accusations of witness tampering on him, a federal judge Friday revoked Manafort’s current bail, which allowed him out on house arrest.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s order marks an end to months of attempts from Manafort to lighten his house arrest restrictions after he was charged and pleaded not guilty to foreign lobbying violations.
Three US marshals led Manafort out of the courtroom into the prisoner holding area immediately after the judge’s ruling. He was not placed in handcuffs. Before he disappeared through the door, he turned toward his wife and supporters and gave a stilted wave.
Minutes later, a marshal returned to give his wife, Kathleen, still standing in the courtroom’s front row, Manafort’s wallet, belt and the burgundy tie he wore Friday.
We’ve got one more court appearance today by Micheal Cohen. I stocked up on popcorn and I have red wine for later. We have some interesting gossip on that front. Cohen appears to be signal willingness to cooperate and KKKremlin Caligula told the press that Cohen is no longer his lawyer.
President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen has indicated to family and friends he is willing to cooperate with federal investigators to alleviate the pressure on himself and his family, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Cohen has expressed anger with the treatment he has gotten from the President, who has minimized his relationship with Cohen, and comments from the President’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the source said. The treatment has left him feeling isolated and more open to cooperating, the source said.
Asked by reporters Friday if he was worried about Cohen cooperating, Trump said, “I did nothing wrong, nothing wrong.” He also said he hasn’t spoken with Cohen “in a long time,” adding, “I always liked Michael and he’s a good person.”CBS News reported Thursday that Cohen believes Trump and his allies are turning against him.
Again, tRump is indicating Cohen was just a covfefe boy and isn’t his lawyer.
President Trump on Friday sought distance from Michael Cohen, his longtime personal attorney, who is under criminal investigation in New York.
“I haven’t spoken to Michael in a long time,” the president told reporters outside of the White House.
“No, he’s not my lawyer anymore, but I always liked Michael. And he’s a good person,” Trump added.
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani told Politico last month that Cohen was not representing Trump, following an FBI raid in April on Cohen’s home, office and hotel room.
Trump was furious over the FBI raid, calling it a “disgrace” and “an attack on our country in a true sense.”
Sing little birds! Sing!
Meanwhile, industrialized gaslighting and weaponized lying emanates like nuclear waste from the White House. We’re also getting the impression KKKremlin Caligula masturbates daily to the pinup boyz in Despots Today.
https://twitter.com/apblake/status/1007660622316756992
So the first shocking quote this morning was this: “Trump says he wants “my people” to sit at attention for him like people do for Kim Jong Un”.
President Trump declared in a spur-of-the-moment interview with “Fox and Friends” Friday morning that he wants people to sit at attention for him like they do for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
It was just one of the surprising things the president said in the roughly 50 minutes he spent on the White House lawn speaking to the Fox News show and other reporters in a surprise appearance. The spur-of-the-moment White House lawn interview was, in the memory of those present, unprecedented.
Here are the highlights from Friday morning’s surprise free-for-all press availability and TV interview:
Kim stands accused of leading a murderous regime that starves its own people. But Mr. Trump has heaped praise on Kim since meeting with him in Singapore, saying repeatedly that the two have “good chemistry.”
“Hey, he is the head of a country and I mean he is the strong head,” Mr. Trump told Fox News’ Steve Doocy on the White House lawn Friday. “Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
Pressed by a reporter about those remarks moments later, Mr. Trump said he was “kidding.”
F”I’m kidding, you don’t understand sarcasm,” the president said.
This latest Burning Despotman him so charged up he’s gung ho on a similar Putin Summit.
Fresh off his showy Singapore summit with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, President Trump is pushing his team to arrange another dramatic one-on-one meeting, this time with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, as soon as this summer. Negotiations with the Kremlin have bee under way for weeks. “There’s no stopping him,” a senior Administration official familiar with the internal deliberations said. “He’s going to do it. He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.”
Ever since Putin’s reëlection to another six-year term in March, Trump has been pressing for a Putin summit, dismissing advisers’ warnings about the political dangers of such a meeting, given the ongoing special counsel investigation into whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia as it interfered in the 2016 U.S. election on Trump’s behalf. With the Russia allegations swirling, Trump never had the formal meeting he wanted with Putin last year—settling for just two brief encounters on the sidelines of international gatherings—but he has clearly never given up on his campaign vision of closer ties with the Russian strongman, whose autocratic rule he has often praised. The North Korea summit this week, which Trump jubilantly declared a “historic” encounter that will lead to the end of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, has likely sealed the deal for an equally high-profile Putin meeting. Now Russia experts inside and outside the U.S. government are bracing themselves for a formal announcement of the summit, which is likely to happen as early as July, when Trump will be in Europe for the annual meeting of the nato alliance that Putin considers his country’s mortal enemy.
And, of course, our policies are going beyond Orwellian to throwbacks to our worst acts in history. From WAPO: “Sessions cites Bible passage used to defend slavery in defense of separating immigrant families”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday used a Bible verse to defend his department’s policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border from Mexico, suggesting that God supports the government in separating immigrant parents from their children.
“I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes,” Sessions said during a speech to law enforcement officers in Fort Wayne, Ind. “Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves. Consistent and fair application of the law is in itself a good and moral thing, and that protects the weak and protects the lawful.”
Government officials occasionally refer to the Bible as a line of argument — take, for instance, the Republicans who have quoted 2 Thessalonians (“if a man will not work, he shall not eat”) to justify more stringent food stamps requirements.
But the verse that Sessions cited, Romans 13, is an unusual choice.
“There are two dominant places in American history when Romans 13 is invoked,” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. “One is during the American Revolution [when] it was invoked by loyalists, those who opposed the American Revolution.”
The other, Fea said, “is in the 1840s and 1850s, when Romans 13 is invoked by defenders of the South or defenders of slavery to ward off abolitionists who believed that slavery is wrong. I mean, this is the same argument that Southern slaveholders and the advocates of a Southern way of life made.”
Scott Pruitt’s grift and quid pro scam is moving right along coupled with his plan to roll back all kinds of laws in place to protect the environment. Say goodbye to the 21st and 20th century in America!
Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected on Friday to send President Trump a detailed legal proposal to dramatically scale back an Obama-era regulation on water pollution, according to a senior E.P.A. official familiar with the plan. It is widely expected to be one of his agency’s most significant regulatory rollback efforts.
And, as soon as Monday, the same official said, Mr. Pruitt is expected to publish another major change: his agency’s legal proposal to gut President Barack Obama’s rule to reduce climate-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes. That proposal risks triggering a court battle with California and raises the prospect that the American car market could be split in two, with different groups of states enforcing different pollution rules.
Mr. Pruitt’s two moves come as he is dogged by allegations of legal and ethical violations and is seeking to burnish his reputation in the eyes of his boss, the president. While Mr. Pruitt has initiated the rollback of dozens of environmental rules over the past year and a half, the latest one-two push comes as he is battling allegations that he improperly used his government post to secure a job for his wife.
This week, the chorus of critics calling for Mr. Pruitt’s resignation swelled to include the conservative National Review, which once championed his appointment. And on Wednesday, Mr. Pruitt’s onetime political mentor, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, told the conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham that Mr. Pruitt needed to move past his management blunders and that it may be “time for him to go.”
There seems to be not one iota of conscientious or morality in this twit. From WAPO: “Energy PR executive helped get Scott Pruitt and his family Rose Bowl tickets”.
The head of an Oklahoma-based public relations firm with a large energy practice helped Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt secure tickets for his family to go to the Rose Bowl in January, agency officials confirmed Friday.
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) detailed the transaction Friday morning in a letter he sent to Renzi Stone, a member of Oklahoma University’s Board of Regents and head of the communications firm Saxum, requesting information “regarding your actions in assisting EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in obtaining highly sought-after tickets to attend the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day.” The Oklahoma Sooners played the Georgia Bulldogs that day in the national semifinals.
Cummings cites Millan Hupp, Pruitt’s former director of scheduling and advance, who told House Oversight Committee staffers during an interview last month that Stone had provided Pruitt’s family with the coveted tickets. EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox confirmed Friday that Stone had put Pruitt in contact with Oklahoma University’s athletics department so that he could purchase the tickets “at face value.”
Trump’s popularity has plummeted since his election in all fifty states no matter what he says.. He’s less popular overall but it really varies state to state. He’s been pacing on the White House lawn and attacking the FBI and Comey over the release of the IG Report.
There were several juicy revelations in the report, including critical insight into former FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. But Trump chose to first rebuke the text exchange between two former agents, in which former agent Peter Strzok said “we’ll stop” Trump from winning the election.
I have no idea who buys Trumps’ complaints other than his idiot cult followers since TWO Comey actions basically elected him. But, the right wing state media is desperate to keep him in office.
This report directly plays to those of us that believe–along with the reasonable data and minds supporting this–that Trump’s presidency is illegitimate. My guess is that trump will spend days ruminating over this and might sing his own little song of total
Matthew Miller is right when he says that this is infuriating.
But couple that with the fact that 23 days later, on October 28th, Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing that the Clinton email investigation had been re-opened. Apparently, the windows hadn’t closed for an official statement on that one.
There are two other ways Comey could have gone. He could have applied his standard on the Trump/Russia investigation to the one about Clinton’s emails and not announced either one. Or, he could have made statements about both of them. But he chose the lopsided route that gave Trump a pass and hurt Clinton. Data guru Nate Silver documented the results.
What a clusterfuck!
So, all day we’re going to be deep in birdie do do. Let’s hope a few have useful songs to sing! What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: “It’s All Too Much and We Still Have To Care.” — Dahlia Lithwick
Posted: June 14, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics 64 Comments
Le Jardin, Henri Matisse
Good Afternoon!!
The next few days are going to be insane in the political world, as the DOJ Inspector General’s report is released today and tomorrow Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen will both be in court. As a counterpoint, I’m illustrating this post with some restful Matisse landscapes.
There already is more breaking news from New York. Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood. This is from AG web page:
NEW YORK – Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood today announced a lawsuit against the Donald J. Trump Foundation, and its directors, Donald J. Trump (“Mr. Trump”), Donald J. Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump. The petition filed today alleges a pattern of persistent illegal conduct, occurring over more than a decade, that includes extensive unlawful political coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing transactions to benefit Mr. Trump’s personal and business interests, and violations of basic legal obligations for non-profit foundations. The Attorney General initiated a special proceeding to dissolve the Trump Foundation under court supervision and obtain restitution of $2.8 million and additional penalties. The AG’s lawsuit also seeks a ban from future service as a director of a New York not-for-profit of 10 years for Mr. Trump and one year for each of the Foundation’s other board members, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump. The Attorney General also sent referral letters today to the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission, identifying possible violations of federal law for further investigation and legal action by those federal agencies.
Henri Matisse, The Sea Seen from Collioure (La Mer vue de Collioure) spring-summer 1906
As alleged in the petition, Mr. Trump used the Trump Foundation’s charitable assets to pay off his legal obligations, to promote Trump hotels and other businesses, and to purchase personal items. In addition, at Mr. Trump’s behest, the Trump Foundation illegally provided extensive support to his 2016 presidential campaign by using the Trump Foundation’s name and funds it raised from the public to promote his campaign for presidency, including in the days before the Iowa nominating caucuses….
The Attorney General’s investigation found that Trump Foundation raised in excess of $2.8 million in a manner designed to influence the 2016 presidential election at the direction and under the control of senior leadership of the Trump presidential campaign. The Foundation raised the funds from the public at the nationally televised fundraiser Mr. Trump held in lieu of participating in the presidential primary debate in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 28, 2016. In violation of state and federal law, senior Trump campaign staff, including Campaign Manager Corey Lewandowski, dictated the timing, amounts, and recipients of grants by the Foundation to non-profits, as evidenced by communications between Campaign staff and Foundation representatives.
Note the portion I highlighted–whose tax returns do they have? There’s much more to absorb at the link, which goes to the NY Attorney General’s web page.
The Washington Post reports: New York files suit against President Trump, alleging his charity engaged in ‘illegal conduct.’
The New York attorney general on Thursday filed suit against President Trump and his three eldest children alleging “persistently illegal conduct” at the president’s personal charity, saying Trump repeatedly misused the nonprofit — to pay off his businesses’ creditors, to decorate one of his golf clubs and to stage a multimillion dollar giveaway athis 2016 campaign events.
In the suit, filed Thursday morning, attorney general Barbara Underwood asked a state judge to dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation. She asked that its remaining $1 million in assets be distributed to other charities and that Trump be forced to pay at least $2.8 million in restitution and penalties.
Henri Matisse, The Bank, 1907
Underwood also asks that Trump be banned from leading any other New York nonprofit for 10 years — seeking to apply a penalty usually reserved for the operators of small-time charity frauds to the president of the United States.
In the suit, Underwood noted that Trump had already paid more than $330,000 in reimbursements and penalty taxes since 2016. New York state began probing the Trump Foundation in response to an investigation by The Washington Post.
But she asked the judge to go further, and require Trump to pay millions more. She said a 20-month state investigation found that Trump had repeatedly violated laws that set the ground rules for tax-exempt foundations — most importantly, that their money is meant to serve the public good, and not to provide private benefits to their founders.
Trump is tweeting lies about this, but I’m not going to post his garbage. It sounds like the evidence of wrongdoing is abundantly clear. Much more at the link.
Here’s rational tweet:
This morning, CNN broke a story out of North Korea. North Korea’s state media has released a video in which Trump is seen saluting a North Korean general.
Un-fucking-believable! Read more about the propaganda video at the CNN link above.
The Daily Beast: Trump Salutes North Korean Army General.
President Trump saluted a uniformed North Korean military officer, according to footage broadcast by North Korean state TV this week and unearthed by CNN. After Trump shook North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s hand, the president then offered his hand to the regime’s Gen. No Kwang Chol, who instead salutes Trump, causing the U.S. president to awkwardly return the gesture. The pair then shake hands. It is typical, The Hill reported, for presidents to salute members of the U.S. military as a sign of respect, but it is not normal to salute members of other countries’ militaries—especially countries described by CNN as “one of the most oppressive regimes on Earth.” Trump also saluted members of Singapore’s military while visiting for the summit. “It was an inappropriate thing for him to do from a protocol perspective,” retired Rear Adm. John Kirby told CNN. “He’s played right in to the North’s propaganda about their legitimacy on the world stage.”
Last night reporters were allowed into the former Walmart building in Texas where at least 1400 boys are incarcerated without their parents. One deeply disturbing revelation from that visit was that the first thing those poor kids see on entering the “shelter” prison is an Orwellian mural of Big Brother Donald Trump. MySanAntonio: Donald Trump mural inside Texas shelter sparks debate.
AUSTIN — One of the largest shelters for unaccompanied minors in Texas includes a wall-sized mural of President Donald Trump.
“Kids would tell me it was an odd image to see, that it scared them. They didn’t like it,” said Diana Gomez, who conducted legal screenings inside the shelter for several months in 2017.
Place des Lices, St. Tropez – Henri Matisse
The mural appears inside Southwest Key Program’s Casa Padre shelter in Brownsville, where Democratic U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon was denied entry earlier this month. The shelter, located inside a former Walmart, held more than 1,000 children as of mid-May, according to state data.
A spokeswoman for Southwest Key said the mural has been there “since shortly after the shelter opened” and that there are paintings of many U.S. presidents.
Painted by a Southwest Key employee, the mural depicts President Trump’s head floating above the White House and in front of an American flag. The mural appears at the entrance to a hallway that leads from the cafeteria to more rooms, Gomez said. While other presidents, including Barack Obama, are painted inside the hallway, each of those is accompanied by an “inspiring quote” about immigration, while Trump’s is not, Gomez said.
A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said a quote in Spanish and one in English now accompany Trump’s mural, one of roughly 20 depicting presidents. One says, “Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war”; he couldn’t read the note in Spanish.
You’ve probably seen the mural already. Even in the painting, Trump looks like he’s smirking.
Here’s Dahlia Lithwick on the horrors we are having to absorb in Trump World and the need to keep awake and aware: It’s All Too Much, and We Still Have to Care. What’s going on at the border is horrifying, but we can’t go numb and turn away.
As a purely descriptive matter, it’s surely true: We are all going numb. As Donald Trump makes war with Canada and peace with dictators and human rights abusers, the narrative is that everyone’s lost all feeling. Polls show the public believes that Trump paid off a porn star, and they don’t care. They believe that he lies habitually, and they also don’t care. A Pew poll released last week showed that nearly 7 in 10 Americans “feel worn out by the amount of news there is these days,” which is how we end up with real journalists like Chuck Todd pushing a humorous pharmaceutical solution to the problem of constant breaking news destroying our minds.
Landscape of the Midi – before the Storm Henri Matisse – circa 1921
On Monday alone, we learned that the Trump administration is planning to denaturalize U.S. citizens who—it claims—fraudulently obtained citizenship. Also on Monday, America witnessed a change in immigration policy that will deny asylum to women fleeing domestic abuse, on the grounds that it’s a “private” harm. We witnessed a ramping up and coordinated defense of a Trump administration policy of separating families seeking asylum. That policy is resulting in children being warehoused in cages and ripped away from their parents, as their mothers are told they are bathing. Their. Mothers. Are. Told. They. Are. Bathing. A Honduran father seeking asylum hanged himself in a Texas jail after his wife and 3-year-old were separated from him at the border.
Jeff Sessions tells a horrified Hugh Hewitt that this forced separation policy is purely instrumental because we must “send a message” to future asylum-seekers that “if people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them. We’ve got to get this message out.” As Jessica Winter observes, this is the “I only beat her because she made me do it” logic that domestic abusers use to blame their victims.
No one should be surprised that a White House that downplayed and even defended Rob Porter’s abuse of women would trivialize the abuse of women victimized abroad. Women are not real to this administration. They are instead being returned to the stereotypes of supplicants and enablers. Female lawyers are being erased from the federal judiciary and U.S. attorneys’ offices. An awful lot of women in America have felt erased since we heard Trump brag about sexual assault and then saw him elected president anyhow. None of us should have expected brutality toward women to be treated as a serious matter by the Trump White House.
Olive Tree, Henri Matisse 1898
Most of the women I know are as heartsick about the obscene actions taking place at the borders as I am. I think a year ago we would have been out on the streets, were the government stealing the children of asylum-seekers and refugees and sending them halfway across the country or stacking them up like lumber in detention facilities. But today, I worry, we are horrified but numb. We want to be told what to do.
Read the rest at the Slate link above.
Just one more, and then I’ll add some links in the comment thread. Greg Sargent at The Washington Post: Trump’s gaslighting is about to get a lot worse.
Today, the Justice Department’s inspector general is expected to release a report scrutinizing the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email arrangement. I’m going to predict that President Trump is going to lie about this report — a lot — as part of his broader ongoing campaign to delegitimize special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into his campaign’s collusion with Russia’s sabotage of our election on his behalf.
But the nature of Trump’s lying in this particular case, I think, will command special attention, and it’s not clear that we in the news media are up to dealing with it. The most likely scenario is that Trump will tell a series of lies that aren’t merely dishonest in any conventional sense, but add up to a broader feat of gaslighting that is so spectacularly absurd and self-undermining that it will be hard to adequately convey to news consumers just how deeply saturated in bad faith it really is.
The report by the inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is expected to be highly critical of the FBI’s treatment of the Clinton email investigation, with a focus on decisions made by former FBI director James B. Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe and former attorney general Loretta Lynch.
Today the New York Times previews Horowitz’s findings. Trump has been alleging that the FBI is actually a hotbed of pro-Clinton, anti-Trump sentiment. In Trump’s telling, the FBI corruptly cleared Clinton of criminality and launched an illegitimate investigation into Trump. (Horowitz is looking separately at the FBI’s treatment of Trump, and those results will come later.) The Times notes that Horowitz is unlikely to find evidence backing up Trump’s narrative, but Trump is likely to try to spin it his way, anyway.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
What else is happening? What stories have you been following?
Friday Reads: Put on a Happy Face!!!
Posted: June 8, 2018 Filed under: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Afternoon Reads, Injustice system | Tags: suicide in America 57 Comments
there was always light by Amanda Blake (contemporary), American
Good Morning Sky Dancers
I wish I could be your little ray of sunshine this morning but I don’t know how that’s possible given the utter daily chaos and destruction that the 2016 election brought us. The chickens are definitely coming home to roost and the banty rooster is a crazy and mean little bird.
I woke up today to the sad news of a second celebrity suicide. First, we had Kate Spade whose handbag designs were wonderful. Now, it’s Anthony Bourdain. Both have left behind young daughters.
Celebrity suicide always starts a conversation that never reaches the ears of the our policymakers who could provide necessary things to solve problems but instead choose to exacerbate them. But more about Trump and the Republicans in Congress and the yanking of funds from the Children’s Health Program last night in a stealth, decidedly one sided vote. Any one with young ones in their life should spend time with them now.
According to several studies, publicity surrounding a suicide has been repeatedly linked to a subsequent increase in the act, particularly among young people.
After Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962, the cause listed as probable suicide, the nation mourned — publicly. In the month that followed there was sweeping news coverage, public memorials and a 12% increase in suicides. That month saw an additional 303 suicides in comparison to the year prior, according to a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health.
When Robin Williams died in 2014, the world reacted similarly. The comedian’s image was everywhere, details of his untimely passing spawned countless news articles and think pieces. His death is also similarly associated with a 10% increase in suicide across the United States in the five months after his passing, according to a study published in the journal, PLOS ONE, in February.
The phenomenon is often referred to as “suicide contagion,” defined by the Department of Health and Human Services as an increase in suicides due to “the exposure to suicide or suicidal behaviors within one’s family, one’s peer group, or through media reports of suicide.”
And the overwhelming influence of a celebrity or high-profile suicide is far from a new discovery. Following the 1774 publication of Wolfgang Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” — a book in which a young man ends his life after a failed love affair — Europe also saw a spike in suicides, particularly in men the same age as the protagonist.
The outbreak prompted the novel to be banned in several European locations.
PAUL RAFFERTY, American (contemporary)
Hydrangeas Contre Jour
Suicide, however, has been on the rise in the US since 1999. Like most mental illnesses, it receives less preventative attention than it should. It does, however, generate a lot of revenues for pharmaceutical companies. It’s less likely the pills are accompanied by human help and counselling.
I’ve struggled with depression for like 50 years. Some of my youngest memories are of my dad, my baby sister, and me in Kansas City waiting in the car outside a small hospital while my mother sat with her mother during her shock treatments. My mother lived with it too. They put her on antidepressants the last year of her life and I saw a happy, cheery woman I had never known before. I personally rely heavily on my Buddhist practice which grew from my adult-in-process practices of the relaxation response and positive affirmation. I hurl mantras like I live in a gompa some where up in the Himalayas with shaved head and nun vows. I only wish more people had access to learning meditation. It also helps me to stay away from mean, nasty people which is proving challenging in the Trump era.
But, actual science and properly funding and staffing the CDC is not a priority at all right now.
Suicide rates increased by 25% across the United States over nearly two decades ending in 2016, according to research published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Twenty-five states experienced a rise in suicides by more than 30%, the government report finds.
More than half of those who died by suicide had not been diagnosed with a mental health condition, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the CDC.
“These findings are disturbing. Suicide is one of the top 10 causes of death in the US right now, and it’s one of three causes that is actually increasing recently, so we do consider it a public health problem — and something that is all around us,” Schuchat said. The other two top 10 causes of death that are on the rise are Alzheimer’s disease and drug overdoses, she noted.
In 2016 alone, about 45,000 lives were lost to suicide.
“Our data show that the problem is getting worse,” Schuchat said.
surprise!! chickens! roosting! crazy ass rooster!!!
The Daily Wire has some more of these stats.
Bourdain is just the latest in a string of prominent celebrities suffering from depression who have taken their own lives. Last week, Kate Spade committed suicide; she was reportedly fixated on Robin Williams’ suicide. And suicide rates across America have been spiking: as of 2014, American suicide rates had skyrocketed to their highest rate in three decades, all the way to 13 people per 100,000, even as death rates from other causes declined markedly. Suicide was particularly common among middle-aged white people. The overall suicide rate climbed 24 percent from 1999 to 2014; in 2014, over 14,000 middle-aged white Americans committed suicide. Between 2006 and 2016, the suicide rate for white children jumped 70 percent, and the suicide rate among black children (while lower than that of white children overall) jumped 77 percent. According to USA Today:
A study of pediatric hospitals released last May found admissions of patients ages 5 to 17 for suicidal thoughts and actions more than doubled from 2008 to 2015. The group at highest risk for suicide are white males between 14 and 21.
What’s causing this uptick? Traditional theories regarding poverty don’t seem to hold much water – the economic recovery was well underway by 2014, and more poverty-stricken demographic groups in the United States had lower suicide rates than whites did on a consistent basis. And theories regarding bullying don’t seem to solve the question either – bullying isn’t worse in 2017 than it was in 1999, and studies seem to show that once depression and delinquency are factored out, bullying does not rate as an independent variable changing suicide rates.
Suicide is a complex social phenomenon, and it’s difficult to pin down cause and effect. Surely rising rates of opioid abuse have contributed to the suicide increase, but that wouldn’t explain the jump among young people. There’s a case to be made that decline of religiosity in wealthier societies has led to an uptick in suicide(poorer societies tend to have far less of a suicide problem than wealthy societies, so religious differences matter less statistically). We are suffering a crisis of meaning in the West, and it’s having a significant impact on suicidality.
Hendrick ter Brugghen, Old Man Writing by Candlelight, c. 1626-27, Dutch Baroque painter and leading member of the Utrecht followers of Caravaggio
I don’t think religiosity necessarily connects to leading a meaningful life. But, I’d say constantly be sent off to war is one factor because suicide rates for Vets is off the wall. I’d also say feeling helpless to change things in your work life and community leads to some of that too. (From Foreign Policy, September, 2017)
Veterans are about 20 percent more likely than nonveterans to kill themselves, according to a Veterans Affairs press release issued on Friday afternoon at the close of business. (Traditionally, that’s when Washington public affairs types put out bad news they don’t wish to discuss. Mainly they hope to see it tucked into Saturday newspapers that no one reads.)
Also, the suicide rate for female veterans is 250 percent that for female non-vets.
Then, there’s death by abhorrently racist federal policy. There’s a surge in that. From the daily paper of my childhood days The Des Moines Register: “Des Moines DREAMer dies within weeks after being sent back to Mexico’s violence.”
Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco should have graduated from high school in Des Moines last month. The oldest of four siblings should have walked across a stage in a cap and gown to become a proud symbol to his sister and brothers of the rewards of hard work and education.
Instead, Manuel died a brutal death alone in a foreign land, a symbol of gang supremacy in a country plagued by violent drug cartels. It happened three weeks after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement returned him to Mexico, a country he had left at age 3 when his parents brought him here without a visa.
The fact that America was the only home he has known made Manuel eligible to apply for and be granted DACA status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program initiated by former President Barack Obama. It exempted from deportation certain young people, referred to as DREAMERS, who were brought to the U.S. without papers as children.
But that status didn’t protect Manuel when he came to immigration authorities’ attention after being stopped for speeding last fall and charged with driving under the influence. An ICE spokesperson said in a statement that ICE officers arrested him in Polk County Jail and a federal immigration judge terminated his DACA status because of two misdemeanor convictions.
The statement from Shawn Neudauer, ICE public affairs officer, also said Manuel wasn’t technically deported, but was escorted to Mexico by ICE deportation officers at the Laredo, Texas border this past April 24. He called it a voluntary departure process that doesn’t carry the penalties of a formal deportation. But the impact was the same: Manuel had no choice but to go back, either as a deportee or in a “voluntary departure.” He chose the “voluntary” route.
The Glasgow Rose, Charles Rennie MacIntosh, Scottish, Glasgow School
You may read more about this young man’s short life at the newspaper’s link.
Other Republican policies will be cutting the lives of children short if this bill passes the US Senate. It moved through the House like a stealth fighter. Funny, how Republicans can get it done when it involves propping up their give-aways to the rich and powerful.
The House voted along party lines late Thursday to pass a White House proposal that would claw back nearly $15 billion in previously approved government funding.
The House approved the measure in a vote of 210-206, with conservatives calling it a step in the right direction after they ripped into the price tag of the $1.3 trillion spending bill President Trump signed earlier this year.
“President Trump and this Administration are fully committed to protecting taxpayers, and Senate passage of this legislation is critical to reducing wasteful, unnecessary spending and making our Federal Government more efficient, effective, and accountable,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement late Thursday.
Trump had pushed lawmakers earlier this week to vote in favor of the clawback plan, known as the Spending Cuts to Expired and Unnecessary Programs Act, which GOP leaders have been working on for two months.
“The HISTORIC Rescissions Package we’ve proposed would cut $15,000,000,000 in Wasteful Spending! We are getting our government back on track,” Trump tweeted Tuesday.
The push to slash spending stemmed from conversations between Trump and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in April, weeks after Trump signed the omnibus into law.
“The President’s rescissions request is a straightforward approach to begin cleaning up a bloated federal budget and respecting hardworking taxpayer dollars,” McCarthy said in a statement Wednesday.
While the move was welcomed by fiscal hawks, Democrats and a handful of moderates argued it could hinder future budget negotiations and drain unused funds that may prove necessary for programs down the road.
Opponents blasted the administration’s decision to target unobligated funds within the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) –– which make up nearly half of the $14.7 billion in rollbacks –– alleging the cuts could lead to a loss of coverage if enrollment is higher than expected.
“The nearly $15 billion in rescissions cut numerous efforts to create jobs, grow our economy, and strengthen our communities. It cuts funding for the economic development administration, and for community development financial institutions. Both of which create jobs in rural areas and distress communities,” Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), the ranking member on the House Appropriations Committee, said on the floor.
Officer with a Laughing Girl: ca 1657, Johannes Vermeer, Dutch Baroque Painter
Then, there’s a stab at Obamacare again. This time it’s by the Oldest Living Confederate widow as she attempts to get people with preexisting conditions thrown out and re-establish womanhood as a preexisting condition. From Forbes Magazine: “The Trump Administration Is Using a New Tactic to Dismantle Obamacare. What You Need to Know About It”
The Trump administration is trying out a new tactic to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare): calling at least one provision of it unconstitutional.
In a brief filed Thursday, the Justice Department sided with Texas and a coalition of other Republican-led states that had filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare. While it is uncommon for the Justice Department to go against federal law, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that he acted with the “approval of the President of the United States.”
Here’s their argument, and what they want.
The filing declares unconstitutional the so-called individual mandate—which requires almost all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a “tax” if they don’t—and calls for several elements of ACA to be invalidated. These include a “ban on insurers denying coverage and charging higher rates to people with pre-existing health conditions.” The Justice Department reportedly also wants to repeal limits on insurance costs based on gender and age.
Nevertheless, the Justice Department’s position did not go quite as far as the Texas suit. In it, the states deem the entirety of Obamacare and its regulations invalid.
Childe Hassam, The Goldfish Window, 1916,
The DOJ will not defend the cases brought by GOP state. This why we have a spate of crazy obviously unconstitutional shit coming up from the states. The DOJ is deciding which cases to defend based on religious and ideological whims instead of actual legal grounds.
The Trump administration said Thursday night that it will not defend the Affordable Care Act against the latest legal challenge to its constitutionality — a dramatic break from the executive branch’s tradition of arguing to uphold existing statutes and a land mine for health insurance changes the ACA brought about.
In a brief filed in a Texas federal court and an accompanying letter to the House and Senate leaders of both parties, the Justice Department agrees in large part with the 20 Republican-led states that brought the suit. They contend that the ACA provision requiring most Americans to carry health insurance soon will no longer be constitutional and that, as a result, consumer insurance protections under the law will not be valid, either.
The three-page letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions begins by saying that Justice adopted its position “with the approval of the President of the United States.” The letter acknowledges that the decision not to defend an existing law deviates from history
- Horse’s Skull with Pink Rose
Georgia O’Keeffe (United States, Wisconsin, Sun Prairie, 1887-1986)
United States, 1931but contends that it is not unprecedented.
Stacking the benches with unqualified judges is a good way to get a decision based on total ignorance of law and precedent and even the Constitution.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee released a report Friday accusing their Republican colleagues of conspiring with President Donald Trump to reshape the federal judiciary by appointing judges whose only qualifications are youth and conservative ideology.
“President Trump and Senate Republicans are stacking our courts at record-breaking speed,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the committee and one of several signatories on the report. “Nominees have been largely controversial and incredibly young, allowing them to shape our courts for generations.”
The 61-page report titled “Review of Republican Efforts to Stack the Federal Courts” details both the pace and volume of the nomination and confirmation process, as well as the obstruction and filibustering of President Barack Obama nominees that afforded Trump the opportunity to shift the balance of federal courts.
“President Trump entered office with 112 judicial vacancies, compared to just 53 vacancies when President Obama entered office,” the report states. “To fill these vacancies and change the nature of the federal judiciary for decades, President Trump and Senate Republicans have been rushing nominees through the Senate at a breakneck pace by changing the process for consideration and eliminating traditions that had been followed for over a century.”
The “blue slip” tradition referred to in the report is an unwritten rule in the Senate process, honored by both parties for decades, meant to simultaneously preserve a more bipartisan approach to the judicial nomination process and make sure both home-state senators approve of judicial nominees.
The tradition is named after a blue form that is given to the two home-state senators asking for their assessment of the nominee. If the senator has no objection, the blue slip is returned to the committee chairman with a positive response. If they don’t approve of the nominee, the blue form is withheld or returned with a negative response.
Friday’s report says Republicans used blue slips to block 18 Obama court nominees, including six nominees for federal appeals courts, which rank just below the U.S. Supreme Court and have a huge hand in determining some of the most important matters of law in the nation.
After Trump was elected, Senator Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, eschewed the blue-slip tradition, according to the report.
Michael Brennan was confirmed to the Seventh Circuit on Thursday over the objection of Tammy Baldwin, the home-state senator from Wisconsin. Similarly, Ryan Bounds was nominated to fill a vacancy on the Ninth Circuit over the objections of Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, Democratic senators from Oregon.
Republicans can only get things done by sneaking stuff through in thoroughly undemocratic and crooked ways.
And here’s why Germaine Greer is trending.
Speaking in a BBC documentary that will be aired on Saturday, called Germaine Bloody Greer, and reported in the Sun and the Mirror, she says: “Someone like Beyoncé – who I think is a fantastic musician, a beautiful voice as true as a bell – why has she always got to be fucking naked and have her tits hanging out? Why?
“I’m not saying you have to keep your clothes on, but why is sexual display part of the job? I might as well ask that question to a barmaid who says she doesn’t get any tips if she doesn’t show cleavage.”
Greer also criticises female athletes, saying: “Why do women athletes have to be naked? I watched bloody figure skating and the woman is virtually naked. She has got a few wisps of cloth and the man is in evening dress. You think nakedness is usually a sign of submission, it’s a sign of inequality.”
She describes her own nude photos, taken for Suck magazine in 1971, as “revolutionary” and a “disruptive gesture”.
Accused of transphobia having repeatedly declared that people who have undergone gender reassignment surgery are not women, Greer caused further outrage recently when she said that “most rapes don’t involve any injury whatsoever”.
Oh, yeah there’s more. She’s written a book “Rape” due out in September. I actually think she and Bernie Sanders should take up knitting. Oh, and Susanne Sarandon can join them too!
I think I’ve had enough sunshine for one day! Did the paintings help?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
jjlo
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Recent Comments