News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #2

Every Tuesday, during a one-hour lunchtime vigil downtown, I'm given about 5-7 minutes to offer some . “News Worth Knowing (which you may have hissed),” reporting on a few things outside the main headlines. I decided to post them here, particularly because the very nature of it being weekly means it doesn’t have to be breaking, up-to-the-moment news, and so is much more in the nature of this thing here. All they have to be is just, hopefully, worth knowing. So here is News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #2. Comments are always welcome.

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Stephen Miller’s version of “the great replacement theory.”

Last October, the administration of The Orange Overlord (TOO) said the US would admit just 7,500 refugees in all of 2026, a 94% cut from the previous year’s level of 125,000. Most of the few available slots were to be taken up by Afrikaners supposedly fleeing a non-existent “white genocide” in South Africa.

On May 18, TOO’s underlings said the total would be raised to 17,500 - with all the additional 10,000 slots allocated to white South Africans.

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Some dreams should die - immediately.

On May 18, Meidas Touch News, quoting a New York Times report, said that above and beyond the murderous attacks on boats off Venezuela, the death toll for which is now above 200, the US already has troops engaged in joint operations in Ecuador, Guatemala has now made a secret agreement to allow similar joint operations there, and Honduras is expected to follow.

The excuse is always “drug trafficking cartels,” but the real point certainly appears to be normalizing the presence of American troops across Latin America with a goal of forcing Mexico to accept a large-scale US military presence there. - all part of an overall dream of direct US military dominance of the whole of the Western Hemisphere. Kind of like the Monroe Doctrine on steroids without bothering with any claims about “defending” anyone.

Oh, and don’t worry, they’ve already war-gamed military attack plans to respond to what reports call “the potential collapse of Cuba’s totalitarian government as early as this summer.”

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PEPFAR is on life support.

Since its start in 2003 under George Bush, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is estimated to have saved tens of millions of lives by funding HIV prevention and treatment in poor countries.

On May 5, the TOO gang announced a restructuring of the CDC’s role in distributing funding and overseeing PEPFAR-related programs.

Instead of the current interactive programs, countries will receive funding under bilateral five-year agreements which will require some reciprocal benefit to the US - meaning US corporations - such as access to assets like mineral resources.

In other words, the program has gone from humanitarian assistance to a transactional arrangement based around “Nice country you got there; it’d be a shame if lots of people died unnecessarily.”

The result is to fracture the on-going coordination between the CDC and local health agencies, the very thing that made the program so successful.

Experts on global health say this is effectively the end of PEPFAR.

But then again, what do we care, they’re just LGB people from shit-hole countries and we have our own LGBTQ+ people to screw over.

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Speaking of which…

Colorado, Maine, Missouri, and Washington have a total of six anti-trans measures on their fall ballot. Mores are in the works in Arizona, Nebraska, and Nevada.

The Nevada example is noteworthy because the governor, one Joe Lombardo, openly admitted his administration is offering a proposed constitutional amendment to ban “Men in Women’s Sports” specifically because, quoting him “That’s going to get people out to vote.”

The thing is, the public still largely endorses equal treatment trans folks but that same public for several years has been under a relentless and coordinated political assault from a concoction of reactionary flakes, gender bigots, and most importantly right-wing operatives looking to maintain and expand their power by deliberately generating and maintaining a social panic - one which, like most social panics, revolves around some emotional issue, usually involving some combination of sex and children and one which, precisely because it is being promoted and maintained as part of a deliberate campaign, hasn’t burned itself out in a few years the way most do.

The result has been that public opinion has shifted toward the reactionaries on a carefully chosen narrow set of emotion-driven issues, primarily trans girls being playing on girls’ school sports teams, bathrooms (of course), and pediatric healthcare, particularly the eye-bulging, spittle-flecked rants about non-existent “genital mutilation of children.”

And by the way, this is an assault that has gone effectively unopposed by whole swaths of the supposedly progressive left, some of who have actively embraced parts of it and thank you Gavin Newsom, Seth Moulton, and others for making the whole thing harder.

Measures like those coming in the fall have been called “ballot candy,” done not because of any benefit to the public or even in response to public interest - when you ask people what their concerns are, trans issues always rank very low on that list - but rather to, as Gov. Lombardo acknowledged, drive right-wing turnout by preying on the very fears and fantasies that they have been creating.

But here I have to inject a bit of hope for the future. The effect of a good number of these proposals is to stick into a state constitution things that are already illegal under state law. So their immediate impact on the lives of trans people is effectively zero. Then why do it? Specifically and avowedly to make it harder to undo.

The gender thugs know things are changing. Ten years ago, there was open talk of a “revolution” in our understanding of gender and today demographic analyses of the US population show that overall, the younger the age group, the greater the support for trans and nonbinary people. The reactionaries know they are losing and these measures are part of their effort to be, in William Buckley’s famous description of conservatives, “standing athwart history, shouting ‘Stop!’”

Because we’re seen this before. We’ve seen it before. In 2003, when support for same-sex marriage was rising and headed for a majority, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts struck down that state’s ban on same-sex marriage as violating the state constitution.

In the desperate immediate reaction to hold off that prospect, between 2004 and 2008 24 states added bans on same-sex marriage to their state constitutions specifically to hold off the rising tide.

It was of course the Obergefell decision in 2015 that undid all those measures. I can’t imagine that this Supreme Court will do anything like that, but still, history will not be denied and I can and do look forward to a time when the train of history runs over the gender bigots, their allies, and their useful idiot followers.

I may not live to see it - but then again, I thought (and said) the same thing about same-sex marriage.

Footnote: A couple of places where I’ve addressed some aspect of social panics:
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2009/01/think-of-children.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/04/052-erickson-report-for-april-21-to-may.html (from roughly 17:30 to 23:10 in the video)
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2022/10/064-erickson-report-for-october-27-to_30.html

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Ending on an up note.

Finally for this time out, we have some good news on the death penalty.

For the second time in two weeks, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4. tossed out a death sentence.

In this case, coming out of Mississippi, the prosecution had removed four of the five Black jurors in the selection panel, claiming the removals were for “race-neutral” reasons. That is, it had nothing to do with them being Black oh no of course not perish the thought.

SCOTUS found the defense attorney wasn’t given opportunity to properly challenge the prosecution’s claims of “race-neutral” reasons, declaring that the District Court got the law right and the Mississippi state Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals both got it wrong.

Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor were joined by Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts in the majority.

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You have the best week you possibly can and we’ll see you then.

The Erickson Report - Page 3: A Longer Look at Immigration

A Longer Look at Immigration

Now we move to what I hope will be a regular feature of the show. It’s called “A Longer Look” and it’s where we examine a topic in somewhat more depth that we usually have time for.

This time, the topic is immigration.

We have been exposed to, have suffered through, been heartbroken by, the string of stories, extending over the past few years, of the cruelty, the bigotry, the casual indifference to the welfare of human beings, up to and including charging a man named Scott Warren with felonies for, in essence, refusing to allow immigrants to die in the desert, that is the reality of the policies of the Tweetie-Pie administration regarding immigrants and immigration.

We have seen the families torn apart, the children in cages, the dismantling of lives of people who have been in the US in some cases for decades, who have roots here, lives here, families here, some who came as children young enough that they have known no other home, we have seen increasingly furious attempts to deny legal rights to asylum seekers, all these people denied, degraded, dismissed because they are "illegal," more truly because they are "other," they are "not us."

Which at the end of the day should be no surprise since that's what it has always been about.

The very first US law touching on immigration, the Naturalization Act of 1790, limited naturalization - that is, the ability an immigrant to become a citizen - to "free white persons of good character," thus by definition excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks - and later Asians.

Starting in the 1850s, tens of thousands of Chinese laborers had been welcomed to the American West as a source of cheap labor, in particular to help build the railroads. When the demand for Chinese labor dried up, a racist anti-Chinese backlash quickly followed. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred the entry of Chinese laborers for 10 years and declared that Chinese could not become citizens. The act was renewed in 1892 for another ten years, and in 1902 Chinese immigration was made permanently illegal until the law was revoked decades later. Chinese remained ineligible for citizenship until 1943.

Our experience with Chinese exclusion provided a basis for later movements to restrict immigration by other "undesirable" groups such as Middle Easterners, Hindu and East Indians, and the Japanese - and, more recently, Muslims and people from, in the words of our president, "shithole" countries.

For example, the Immigration Act of 1924 barred immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere - that is, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The quotas for specific countries were based on 2% of the US population from that country as recorded in the 1890 census. So populations poorly represented in 1890 were heavily restricted, blocked from legal entry, which especially affected Poles and other Slavs along with Jews, Italians, and Greeks, the latter two groups also affected by the notion dating from the 1890s that "Mediterranean" people were inferior to northern, that is, whiter, Europeans. The purpose of the bill? According to the US Department of State Office of the Historian, it was "to preserve the ideal of US homogeneity."

Or, as one writer at the website OpenBorders.info noted, white supremacy has always been a central feature of US immigration policy.

There were some advances during the 60s and 70s, such as a 1968 act that eliminated immigration discrimination based on race, place of birth, sex, and residence along with abolished restrictions on immigration from Asia.

A 1976 law eliminated preferential treatment for residents of the Western Hemisphere, and a 1986 law included provisions through which over 2.6 million undocumented immigrants obtained legal status.

So let's be clear: While what we have seen these past couple of years may be something of a change from the most recent prior decades, it is not a real change, merely a reversion to the way we had always done things. It has always been about "preserving our homogeneity" in the face of "the other," the "not us."

By the way, know full well that I am not letting Barack Obama, the Amazing Mr. O, off the hook here: He deported more people than any previous president. But I also have to acknowledge that in the latter years of his presidency, it really does appear that efforts were focused on deporting people with actual criminal records, not just who they happened to come across.

But amidst all the news, I recall one case from two years ago that to me encapsulated all that is wrong with our national policies on immigration.

His name is Andres Magana Ortiz and he was an undocumented immigrant who had lived in the US for nearly thirty years. He has an American wife and three US-born children. During his time here he worked his way from migrant coffee farmer to owning his own land and being prominent in Hawaii's coffee industry, even to helping to run 15 other small farms and helping the US Department of Agriculture conduct a five-year study into a destructive insect species harming coffee crops.

He lost his fight to not be deported US despite letters of support from Hawaii's entire congressional delegation and the judge in his case, who, while legally unable to stop Ortiz's deportation, wrote a scathing opinion saying that that “the government decision shows that even the 'good hombres' are not safe,” that remark directed at Tweetie-pie, who had insisted that ICE would only go after the "bad hombres." On July 7, 2017, Ortiz "voluntarily" left for Mexico, just days before he was to be deported.

Here's the question that still haunts me: What was the point of this? What was gained by making him leave? What would have been lost by allowing him to stay? What was accomplished by this beyond satisfying the white-supremacist desires of the bigoted xenophobes occupying the upper reaches of Tweetie-Pie's administration? Just how sick are our national policies?

And consider this: Ignore for the moment that by the usual way such stories were told to us as we grew up, Ortiz is a classical, almost cliche, American success story, rising from migrant laborer to land owner, businessperson, and upstanding figure in the community. Ignore all that and for the moment just focus on the fact that he had been here for nearly thirty years. And it didn't matter.

Because there is no sort of statute of limitations on being an "illegal" immigrant. No matter how long you have been here, no matter how many and how thick are the roots you have set down, no matter how stable is the life you have established, no matter how much you have contributed to your community, it doesn't matter.

Think about that. There is no statute of limitations. Except for murder, terrorism, and sexual crimes against children, federal law has statutes of limitations for all sorts of crimes and all kinds of civil offenses. We have federal statutes of limitation for kidnapping, for fraud, for racketeering, for embezzlement, for all sorts of the most serious crimes. But not for being an undocumented immigrant. Not for crossing a border without the expected official permission. You did it two years ago, ten years ago, thirty years, fifty years, it makes no difference.

This is insane.

Even the notoriously anti-immigration - and note well that I didn't say anti-undocumented immigration, I said anti-immigration - the notoriously anti-immigration Mark Krikorian, even he a few years ago allowed as how even as he disagreed with it as a matter of policy, the idea that an undocumented immigrant who has been in the US for three years - that was his time frame - and has put down roots here should not be deported, that idea "at least makes a certain kind of sense." Even he was prepared to say that even though he disagreed with the idea, it was an arguable point.

So yes, as a first small step to bringing sanity to our policies there should be a time limit. There should be some sort of statute of limitations. There should be a point beyond which being able to show roots in the community and an established life will free you from the daily fear of discovery and deportation, the daily fear of the ripping up of your life and the ripping apart of your family.

Another small step is realizing that our borders have always been porous, that those who rant about "regaining control of our borders" ignore the fact that we have never had such control. I intend to talk more about this next time, more about how we have often found it necessary to recognize that there is a real limit to what could be done and we had to adjust to the facts on the ground - as we did to some extent in the 1986 law I mentioned.

There is one more, very dramatic, even radical step we could take, which again I intend to address next time, a step pretty much everyone on all points of this topic insists they are against but which deserves a hearing, because there is a case to be made - I won't say a genuinely persuasive case because I'm not entirely convinced myself - but there is a case to be made for open borders.

But instead, what we have is a thoroughly-broken system enforced by the well-named ICE because it is cold-hearted to its core, now directed by an administration chock full of bigoted xenophobes who don't care who they deport as long as they can eject and reject "foreigners," "them," "the other."

They are without mercy. They are without compassion. They are without understanding. They are without humanity. They and the system they oversee are an Outrage that must not be allowed to continue.

30.12 - Footnote: not enough immigrants

Footnote: not enough immigrants

After all that, a footnote.

On July 17 the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland announced that it will allow for a one-time increase of up to 15,000 H-2B nonimmigrant visas through the end of the 2017 fiscal year.

The reason is that after consulting with the Secretary of Labor, DHS Secretary John Kelly determined that there were "not enough U.S. workers who are willing, qualified, and able" to fill temporary and low-wage, non-agricultural jobs, including in landscaping, construction, and hospitality "to satisfy the needs of some American businesses."

In other words, it turns out that we don't have enough of the very sort of immigrants willing to do the jobs we won't that the dreamers of white sheets want to get rid of.

And irony scores another victory.

30.11 - Outrage of the Week: "Back to 1900"

Outrage of the Week: "Back to 1900"

This is our other regular feature and it is the Outrage of the Week.

Back in 1995, George Will, who isn't an intellectual but plays one on TV on behalf of the mouth-breathers of the right wing, wrote in his syndicated column that, quoting,

"'Back to 1900' is a serviceable summation of the conservatives' goal."

It appears that the the White House of Donald TheRump is taking that almost literally with its increasingly-obvious intent to roll back the social progress of decades. on a variety of fronts, trying to recreate a time that exists only in their fantasies.

There was, for one obvious example, the occasion the morning of July 26 when His High Orangeness tweeted that

After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.

Okay, to start off with, the part about consultation is a blatant lie. Top military brass were blindsided by the announcement. They had no idea this was coming.

In fact, they are sufficiently against it or at least resistant to it that Gen. Joseph Dunford, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a note Thursday to all service chiefs, commanders, and enlisted military leaders saying that US policy on transgender individuals in the military "has not - and will not - change" until Secretary of War Mattis receives TheRump's policy direction and Mattis determines how to implement it.

And "disruption that transgender in the military would entail?" Is he really that disconnected from the real world, is he really that much wrapped up in his own fantasies that he doesn't even know that there are already transgender members of the military?

The number is unknown but a RAND study suggested there could be over 6000 and a study at UCLA estimated there are nearly 9000 on active duty with 6000 more in the guard and reserve.

The issue supposedly arose in the House a few weeks ago. An amendment was introduced to a defense authorization bill would ban funding for gender reassignment surgeries and treatments for transgender active-duty personnel. The GOPper leadership was shocked when a group of 24 mostly moderate Republicans teamed up with 190 Democrats to kill the effort.

So they turned to Trump for help getting this bill through. He didn't hesitate, in fact, he went further than they were looking for.

But claim the issue was about "cost" is belied first by the reality that the cost involved is estimated to be about $1.2 million per year, an amount the government could save if His High Orangeness skipped just one golf weekend.

And belied, more importantly, by comments on issue. GOPper Trent Franks, for one, said

It's not so much the transgender surgery issue as much as we continue to let the defense bill be the mule for all of these social experiments that the left wants to try to [foist] on government

and

It seems to me that if someone wants to come to the military, potentially risk their life to save the country, that they should probably decide whether they're a man or woman before they do that.

It's not about money or "social experiments." It's about fear and hatred of transgender folks.

But of course it's not only transgender folks on who the clock is to be turned back. The same day as the infamous tweet, the Department of Injustice submitted a brief in a federal lawsuit claiming that a major piece of civil rights legislation banning discrimination in employment based on sex doesn't protect homosexuals from workplace discrimination.

The law is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and besides sex, it bans discrimination based on race, color, national origin, or religion. The case is that of Zarda v. Altitude Express. The case started in 2010 when Donald Zarda sued his former employer, claiming he had been fired for being gay.

When the case got to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, the court invited outside parties to weigh in. Note well because it's important, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the largely autonomous federal agency that is charged with enforcing anti-discrimination laws, had already filed a brief in support of Zarda and has held that position for several years, arguing that anti-gay discrimination is based on sex stereotyping, and therefore is discrimination on the basis of sex.

The DOJ of Jeff "I'm not a bigot, really I'm not" sessions didn't care. Despite not being a party to the case, despite the fact that the EEOC had already spoken, and despite the fact that the department doesn't normally weigh in on a case between private parties as this one is, they came storming in to say never mind what the EEOC says, they don't represent the government (even though that's their job). No, listen to us! And we say that Title VII only applies to cases where men and women are treated differently - which is the narrowest possible reading of the law - so it does not cover sexual orientation so Donald Zarda and every other gay or lesbian worker in the whole country is just screwed.

Because like George Will said, 1900.

The DOJ argued that the issue that Title VII does not cover sexual orientation has been "settled for decades" and there is an "overwhelming judicial consensus" apparently based on two cases from the 2000s and some others that were from before Lawrence v. Texas (which struck down state laws against sodomy in 2003) and Obergefell v. Hodges (which legalized same-sex marriage in 2015). In other words, cases from the good old days. It also ignored the fact that in April, the 7th Circuit ruled in favor of a lesbian who made the same claim of protection under Title VII.

Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, a staff attorney at Lambda Legal, said "There is no role for the DOJ to play" in the Zarda case and the Injustice Department was "going out of its way to harm LGBT people."

But LGBTQ people, of course are not the only ones standing between the hate-mongers and their dream of a purified white nation. There are also all those icky brown people, all those "illegal" human beings, those people whose existence is against the law.

I noted just two or three weeks ago that ICE agents, according to a directive from the head of its enforcement unit, are told to take action against any undocumented immigrant they encounter while on duty. Not that they "may" take action, which still allows for at least some degree of discretion, but that they "will" do so.

ICE is taking that to heart to the point where, as Splinter News put it, "ICE is just arresting everyone," a practice that prompted one ICE agent turned whistleblower to say "The plan is to take them back into custody, and then figure it out. We’re doing it because we can."

Here's an example: ICE recently announced that its officers arrested 650 people, including 38 minors, in a four-day operation in late July. But it turned out that over 450 of the people arrested - over 70% - weren't even the ones ICE was looking for in the first place. They just happened to be in the vicinity when the ICE-y cops showed up.

The goal here is simple: Label all undocumented immigrants as "animals," as "violent," as "criminals" (even though they commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens), claim they all "go on welfare" (for which they are not eligible and never have been), and otherwise dehumanize them in any way you can and then you don't have to care who you deport as long as you can eject "foreigners," eject "them," eject "the other," eject the "not us," eject the "not white."

But then it develops that "the other" has an even wider application.

Right now, the US grants about 1 million green cards per year; a green card marks a grant of permanent legal residence in the United States. The number of green cards issued in a year is the measure of legal immigration. Over the past half century US immigration laws have permitted a growing number of immigrants to come to the country to work or join relatives already living here legally.

One August 2, TheRump endorsed a new Senate bill intended to cut that legal immigration in half.

Not only that, the bill also proposes to completely end a visa diversity lottery that has awarded 50,000 green cards a year - out of 14 million applications - which go mostly to areas in the world that traditionally do not have as many immigrants to the United States, such as, I would say significantly, Africa. And the bill caps refugee admissions at the heartless level of 50,000 per year.

Under the bill, a new immigration system would award points to green card applicants based on such factors as English ability, education levels, and job skills. Note that while a rudimentary command of English is needed to become a citizen, it has never been a requirement for a green card and this "new system" would favor English speakers over others, trying to create a de facto version of what the US has never had: an official language.

It also favors more educated applicants and those with specialized skills, leading to the ultimate point as noted by Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy for the Center for Migration Studies. He called the bill "part of a broader strategy by this administration to rid the country of low-skilled immigrants they don't favor in favor of immigrants in their image."

And what is that image? Here's a way you can tell:

- The anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform said "it looks like the perfect bill."
- White nationalist William Johnson called it "a viable first step."
- Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, said the bill "sounds awesome."

Know them by the company they keep.

Because when Sen. Tom Cotton, one of the bill's sponsors, said that while immigrant rights groups might view the current system as a "symbol of America's virtue and generosity," he sees it "as a symbol we're not committed to working-class Americans," I for one am damn sure that the "working-class American" he was envisioning was not named Jesus or Laticia.

Transgender people, gays and lesbians, undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, all on the political chopping block for being "other," for being "not us," for being insufficiently - using the word here in a social rather than a literal sense - for being insufficiently white.

If rights must be denied, if families must be ripped apart, if dreams must be crushed, then in the minds of those harshly, cruelly, pursuing a nostalgia for a whiteness that never truly was and a national sense of commonality that existed only because of the oppression of other voices, so be it and you, back into the closet; you, back where you came from or at least back into the shadows; and you, you keep out.

It is a denial of who we are, a denial of who we have become, a denial of what we can be, a denial of what could in the best possible sense of the term be considered American. It is small, it is bigoted, it is a project of timorous, fearful people trembling in the face of the future, it is a project not bounded, not defined, by these examples but is illustrated by them and were it not driven by powerful people who fear the loss of their privilege, it would be an occasion for sorrow and pity.

But as it is driven by powerful people with positions and privileges to protect, it is a source not of pity but of outrage.

28.2 - Outrage of the Week: Enforcement of immigration laws cruel, based on bigotry

Outrage of the Week: Enforcement of immigration laws cruel, based on bigotry

Now for one of our regular features. This is the Outrage of the Week.

I had this as the Outrage of the Week just about maybe five or six weeks ago. It is making a return appearance because it is an ongoing outrage. It is immigration.

We start by noting that for several years the administration of the Amazing Mr. O enforced immigration laws so aggressively that they deported undocumented immigrants in greater numbers than any previous administration. By 2014, though, they apparently had a change of heart or they were just embarrassed by the increasing attention being paid to this stain on the Obama liberal escutcheon into taking a different road. Whatever the reason, the Obama administration instructed immigration officials to exercise more discretion in who they targeted for deportation.

At that time, in 2014, in deciding about moving for deportation, the agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or I.C.E. or ICE, were told to consider factors such as the length of time an immigrant had lived in the country, their family or community ties, and whether they had a young child or a seriously ill relative. TheRump's gang explicitly rescinded those guidelines almost immediately after the inauguration and told Immigration to enforce the law “to the greatest extent practicable.”

Despite that, agency officials insisted and still insist that "ICE prioritizes the arrest and removal of national security and public safety threats." Or, as TheRump put it, they're going after the "bad hombres."

A well-named agency

They are lying.

A recent article on ProPublica details how ICE agents, under a directive from the head of its enforcement unit, are told to take action against any undocumented immigrant they encounter while on duty. Not that they "may" take action, which still allows for at least some degree of discretion, but that they "will" do so.

David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, said "The memo explains what we have actually been seeing on the ground," that immigrants without criminal backgrounds are routinely being arrested and ordered deported.

People have been arrested for deportation on their way to their senior prom, on the way to the hospital to pick up their newborn child after emergency surgery, even at an ICE office when they voluntarily came in for what was supposed to be a routine check-in, even when they voluntarily came in to discuss how they could obtain legal status. Sometimes the arrests seemed designed to be mocking: A group of ICE officers had breakfast at a restaurant in Michigan - and after the meal arrested three of the restaurant's workers.

Andres Magana Ortiz was an undocumented immigrant who had lived in the US for nearly thirty years. He has an American wife and three US-born children. During his time here he worked his way from migrant coffee farmer to owning his own land and being prominent in Hawaii's coffee industry, even to helping the US Department of Agriculture conduct a five-year study into a destructive insect species harming coffee crops and helping run 15 other small farms.

He lost his fight to not be deported US despite letters of support from Hawaii's entire congressional delegation and the judge in his case, who, while legally unable to stop Ortiz's deportation, wrote a scathing opinion saying that that “the government decision shows that even the 'good hombres' are not safe.” On July 7, Ortiz "voluntarily" left for Mexico, just days before he was to be deported.

Jesus Lara Lopez is an undocumented worker in a Pepperidge Farm food packaging plant. Like many undocumented workers, he lived for years under the radar, working in the fields picking fruits and vegetables. He has no criminal record. He has supported his family. He has paid taxes. He has never used any form of public assistance, not even unemployment. He is being deported on July 18.

Francisco Javier Gonzalez came to the US, alone, when he was 15. He graduated high school and went to college but couldn't graduate because he couldn't prove he was here legally. He now manages a successful restaurant in Palm Beach, Florida. He has an American wife and three US-born children. He has no criminal record and yes, he pays all his taxes. He was to be deported to Mexico on July 14 but got an almost literal last minute 3-month delay.

What is the point of deporting people like these? What is the gain in throwing them out? What is the loss in allowing them to stay?

What is accomplished by this beyond satisfying the white-supremicist desires of the bigoted xenophobes occupying the upper reaches of the TheRump administration?

And the case of Ortiz raises something else: Ignore for the moment that he is by the usual way such stories were told to us as we grew up, a classical, almost cliche, American success story, rising from migrant laborer to land owner, businessperson, upstanding figure in the community. Ignore all that and for the moment just focus on the fact that he has been here for nearly thirty years. And it didn't matter.

Because there is no sort of statute of limitations on being an "illegal" immigrant. No matter how long you have been here, no matter how many and how thick are the roots you have set down, no matter how stable is the life you have established, no matter how much you have contributed to your community, it doesn't matter.

Think about that. There is no statute of limitations. Except for murder, terrorism, and sexual crimes against children, federal law has statutes of limitations for all sorts of crimes and all kinds of civil offenses - which by the way, is what being an undocumented immigrant is; it's a civil offense, not a criminal one. We have federal statutes of limitations for kidnapping, for fraud, for racketeering, for embezzlement, for all sorts of the most serious crimes. But not for being an undocumented immigrant. Two years, ten years, thirty years, fifty years, it makes no difference.

This to me is insane.

Even the notoriously anti-immigration - and note well that I didn't say anti-undocumented immigration, I said anti-immigration - the notoriously anti-immigration Mark Krikorian, even he a few years ago allowed as how even as he disagreed with it as a matter of policy, the idea that an undocumented immigrant who has been in the US for three years (his time frame) and has put down roots here should not be deported, that idea "at least makes a certain kind of sense."

So yes, there should be a time limit. There should be some sort of statute of limitations. There should be a point beyond which being able to show roots in the community and an established life will free you from the daily fear of discovery and deportation, the daily fear of the ripping up of your life and the ripping apart of your family. We can talk about what that limit should be, realizing that any limit would be somewhat arbitrary, and I do have my own idea for if you will an opening bid on that discussion, which I will hold aside for now to focus on the central point that there should be such a limit.

But instead, what we have is a thoroughly-broken system enforced by the well-named ICE because it is cold-hearted to its core, now directed by an administration chock full of bigoted xenophobes who don't care who they deport as long as they can eject "foreigners," eject "them," eject "the other," which they then have the unintentionally-revealing gall to call "enhancing public safety."

They are without mercy. They are without compassion. They are without understanding. They are without humanity.

They and the system they oversee are an outrage.

25.1 - Good News: 9th Circuit upholds block of travel ban

Good News: 9th Circuit upholds block of travel ban

Starting off with some Good News, we find that TheRump keeps trying to ban Muslims - and he keeps losing. His first attempt at a travel ban was a total whiff and his second attempt is faring no better.

Just as a reminder so we're clear on what we're talking about, that second order, issued on March 6 and supposedly designed to overcome the legal objections to the first one, was a 90-day ban on nationals from six Muslim-majority countries - Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen - entering the US, a 120-day ban on the entry of all refugees, and a reduction on the cap on admission of refugees from 110,000 to 50,000 for fiscal 2017.

First, on March 15, federal district Judge Derrick Watson in Hawai'i issued a nationwide injunction against the ban. On March 16, District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland issued his own injunction, finding that the proposal was "the realization of the long-envisioned Muslim ban" and noted that during the 2016 campaign TheRump had called for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."

On May 25, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Virginia, upheld Judge Chuang's order, finding that the ban "drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination" aimed at Muslims.

And now, on June 11, a panel of the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Judge Watson's order in a ruling that included a reference to TheRump's tweets calling the ban exactly what his lawyers had been insisting it isn't: a travel ban.

Interestingly, the 9th circuit panel ruled on narrow grounds and did not address the question of if it was unconstitutional discrimination against Muslims. Instead, the said His High Orangeness had violated existing immigration law

Under that law, the administration was required to make findings that entry of the people in question would be detrimental to the United States but failed to do so, the court said. Quoting the court:

The order does not offer a sufficient justification to suspend the entry of more than 180 million people on the basis of nationality.

Ruling on narrow grounds isn't surprising; courts often prefer to rule on narrow grounds, if they are there, rather than having to deal with broader questions.

Then again, it's possible it was done for another purpose: The case will likely wind up in the lap of the Supreme Court and Stephen Vladeck, a professor at University of Texas School of Law, said the 9th Circuit provided an easier path for the Supreme Court to uphold the injunctions against the travel ban, because it avoided entirely the controversy over TheRump's campaign statements and the question of if it is religious discrimination.

So thus far TheRump is a whiff in game 1 and 0-4 in game 2. Let's hope he keeps his string going and we have more Good News.

22.2 - From atheist Virginians to xenophobe GOPpers

From atheist Virginians to xenophobe GOPpers

Tom Hicks is a guy who lives in Chesterfield, Virginia. And he has a pickup truck. And on the gate of that truck he has painted a verse drawn from 1 Corinthians: "Women shall be silent and submissive."

To that, he added three crosses, the fish symbol, and the expression "Read The Bible." He, as you might expect, has gotten a fair amount of flack for his sexism and his retrograde attitudes toward women.

Here's the kicker, though: Tom Hicks is an atheist who put the phrase there to try to provoke Christians to think about what it is that their holy book actually teaches. It does remind at least me of how many times we get told, in effect, that the Bible means exactly what it says - except when it doesn't.

It also raises an interesting question apart from the one Hicks is trying to raise: Just how many atheists are there among us?

Pew Research and Gallup, two of the most reputable polling firms in in the country, both suggest that about 10 percent of Americans do not believe in God. But recent research indicates the number may be considerably higher.

University of Kentucky psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle noted that there is a social stigma attached to saying "I am an atheist" and that might make people reluctant to admit to it in a survey. So they tried to design an experiment in which a person could say that without the stigma.

As a very oversimplified explanation of the method, they created a questionnaire and distributed it to 2000 people. The survey included a number of simple statements such as "I am a vegetarian," "I own a dog," and, "I have a dishwasher in my kitchen." Respondents were asked how many of the statements are true of them. Not which ones, just how many.

A second version of the questionnaire went to another 2000 people. It was identical to the first except that it had one additional statement: "I do not believe in God." Again, respondents were asked how many, not which, statements were true of them.

The idea is that overall, there will be about the same number of vegetarians, dog owners, and so on in each of the two groups, so any statistically significant increase in the number reported in the second case arises from people finding that the statement "I do not believe in God" does describe them.

Based on the result, their best estimate was that 26 percent of Americans do not believe in God, more than double the number regular polling reports. Because the methodology is not the tightest, the error bar was rather wide: 11 percent to 35 percent. However, they reported 99% certainty that the proportion is greater than 11 percent and 80% probability that it is greater than 20 percent.

Which in its turn raised another, related, concern: In his commencement speech at Liberty University, which is likely one of the few places he can go these days without protests, TheRump declared that, quoting, "In America, we don't worship government; we worship God."

Which means, in essence, in his mind you can't be American if you're an atheist. Or an agnostic. Or an animist. Or a Jainist. Or a Buddhist. Or any of several varieties of Hindu. Or a Taoist or a deist or a follower of any number of other nontheistic beliefs.

In fact, to be an American you have to be Judeo-Christian and I'm not sure if all of them would include the "Judeo" part.

Oh, and Muslim, because as Muslims will tell you, Islam says that Allah and the Judeo-Christian God are the same being, it's just a different name. But wait, no, they don't count as Americans anyway because they are, well, you know, Muslims.

Which, again and in its turn, raises something else about TheRump and those around him, and the real reason I brought all of this up.

It's something that unites the Muslim ban with the wall with Mexico;

connects with the horror stories about Immigration and Customs Enforcement - ICE, which is an amazingly appropriate acronym - grabbing people in court, trying to get into schools to investigate children, deporting people who have green cards, targeting for deportation undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record;

connects with the White House slowness to condemn the wave of antisemitic and racist incidents that came in the wake of the election;

connects with the push to undo federal consent agreements with various violent and racist police departments and let them go back to being violent and racist;

connects on the state level with the state of Texas enacting a law to punish local police authorities with removal from office, fines, and up to a year in prison if they do not submit to demands for cooperation from federal immigration agents*, passed it despite the fact that every major police chief in the state opposed the bill;

something unites all of those strands and more:

It's that these people are not merely racists, who hate based on race; they are not merely religious bigots, who hate based on religion; no, they are truly, in the truest and worst sense of the term, xenophobes, they hate and fear everybody who is not them, who is "other," who is not, in their minds, "one of us."

And their xenophobia, the bigotry and fear they have expressed and acted on, has made it acceptable, more acceptable than it has been in decades, for people to be openly bigoted and even to feel pride in their bigotry.

And if right now, today, this instant, this bigoted boxcar of bozos were to turn on a dime and denounce all their former words and actions, that impact, that freeing up of hatred, will persist because it will take time to pound it back into the dank, fetid cave from which it arose.

And for that, whatever else happens, I will never forgive them. Never.

*Sidebar: A news article about the law said officials who face punishment are those "who do not abide by requests to cooperate" with the feds. Hey, idiots, if you can't say "no" without being fired, fined, and jailed, that ain't no request! Jeez, our corporate media stinks.

What's Left #22

What's Left
for the week of May 18-24, 2017

This week:

Good News: Chelsea Manning is out of prison
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/17/politics/chelsea-manning-release/index.html?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/us/politics/chelsea-manning-is-expected-to-leave-prison-28-years-early.html?_r=0
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/chelsea-manning-set-be-released-prison-still-not-free-n759676
https://www.luminairity.com/chelsea-release-statement/

From atheist Virginians to xenophobe GOPpers
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/16/atheist-paints-bible-verse-about-women-on-his-truck-to-encourage/22094262/
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/4/13/15258496/american-atheists-how-many
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/13/trump-mocked-after-mistakenly-tweeting-only-the-word-we/22084964/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheistic_religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_deities
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/queens/nyc-school-boots-federal-agents-seeking-child-due-no-warrant-article-1.3163244
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/07/texas-governor-signs-into-law-bill-to-punish-sanctuary-cities/22074471/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/opinion/sunday/why-is-this-hate-different-from-all-other-hate.html?_r=0
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/us/justice-department-jeff-sessions-baltimore-police.html?google_editors_picks=true&_r=0

Returning to the bad old days of the drug wars
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/attorney-general-sessions-orders-tougher-drug-crime-prosecutions-n758111
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/just-say-no-ag-sessions-cites-old-school-anti-drug-n733961
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trump-admin-to-effectively-kill-office-fighting-opioid-epidemic-w481648
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/congress-ties-jeff-sessions-hands-on-medical-marijuana-w480509

Donald TheRump is incompetent
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed-highly-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/2017/05/15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html?utm_term=.887a69f28a58&wpisrc=nl_p1most-partner-1&wpmm=1
http://nypost.com/2017/05/16/israel-was-source-of-classified-intel-trump-gave-to-russians/
http://fusion.kinja.com/white-house-aides-actual-defense-of-trumps-russia-leak-1795268625
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/16/some-trump-staffers-are-reportedly-afraid-to-leave-trump-alone-i/22094187/

Clown Award: Hillary Clinton
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/15/hillary-clinton-launches-new-political-group-supporting-trump-r/22089323/

Why you are not getting a raise
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/09/youre-not-getting-a-raise-and-nobody-knows-why/?utm_term=.f226e387b9eb&wpisrc=nl_p1most-partner-1&wpmm=1
https://www.aol.com/article/finance/2017/04/04/payless-has-filed-for-bankruptcy-and-will-immediately-close-400/22025961/
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/
http://www.povertyusa.org/the-state-of-poverty/poverty-facts/
http://www.alternet.org/economy/black-low-wage-workers-work-longest-hours
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2017/04/26/counties-where-the-american-dream-is-dead/?utm_source=AOL&utm_medium=CPC&utm_content=counties-where-the-american-dream-is-dead&utm_campaign=AOL

Outrage of the Week: militarism as national policy
https://cpc-grijalva.house.gov/the-peoples-budget-a-roadmap-for-the-resistance-fy-2018/
https://cpc-grijalva.house.gov/the-peoples-budget-a-roadmap-for-the-resistance-fy-2018/the-peoples-budget-in-the-news/
https://cpc-grijalva.house.gov/uploads/FINAL%20FY18%20FULL%20CPC%20BUDGET%20DOCUMENT.pdf
https://www.thebalance.com/u-s-military-budget-components-challenges-growth-3306320
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2017/04/185-outrage-of-week-militarism.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/03/15/u-s-military-probably-sending-as-many-as-1000-more-ground-troops-into-syria-ahead-of-raqqa-offensive-officials-say/?utm_term=.534ca0f18181
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/09/white-house-approves-arms-syrian-kurds-us-official/22078075/
https://www.local10.com/news/politics/flynn-rejected-obamas-offer-to-arm-syrian-kurds
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-poised-to-expand-military-effort-against-taliban-in-afghanistan/2017/05/08/356c4930-33fa-11e7-b412-62beef8121f7_story.html

13.4 - Clown Award: Bill O"Reilly

Clown Award: Bill O"Reilly

Now for one of our regular features, the Clown Award, given as always for an act of mertitorious stupidity.

There were a couple of nominees this week.

I thought about giving the award to Rep. Louis Gohmert, the man who puts the Gomer in Gohmert.

He has been refusing to hold in-person town hall meetings with constituents - and has referred to the shooting of former representative Gabby Giffords as justification for it.

Gohmert, it develops, is afraid of getting shot - or something, it's not clear - by someone "from the more violent strains of the leftist ideology," who are "preying on town halls." Because yeah, look at all those GOPpers who have been shot or physically beaten during their town halls of late.

And as a reminder, Gabby Giffords was one of 19 people shot at a public event she held in January 2011 by right-wing paranoid schizophrenic Jared Lee Loughner.

Rep. Louis "Gomer" Gohmert

So the assailant was both a rightwinger and mentally ill, but, yeah, it was at a public meeting, so Gomer says that's all he needs to be terrified of lefties coming to a town hall armed with questions.

Gohmert is a true clown, but this seemed more a case of gutless cowardice than clownishness, so we move on to the next nominee.

I was going to give the award to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who attended a so-called "listening session" with leaders of historically black colleges and universities - founded because for many years most institutions of higher learning would not admit blacks.

After that meeting she released a statement in which she called those institutions "living proof" of the importance of her program of promoting taxpayer supported private, profit-oriented schools because those historically black institutions were "real pioneers when it comes to school choice." Because, you know, it's like they had one.

She desperately tried to walk that back the next day after doubling down on it earlier, but the fact is, this was no off-the-cuff-remark-that-came-out-wrong, the kind of goof that any of us might make, this was a prepared press release. They thought about this. They said exactly what they meant to say. Trying to walk that back just makes it all the more clownish.

Betsy DeVos

But then I decided that, no, I couldn't do that, not after racist graffiti was found the next morning scrawled on a main sidewalk at Howard University, one of those historically black institutions.

The "message" read "Welcome to the Trump plantation. Overseer: Wayne A. I. Frederick." Wayne A. I. Frederick, as you knew or likely guessed, is the president of the university.

And I thought no, this is too important, the sort of off-handed, ignorant racism DeVos displayed, that sheltered, privileged ignorance where the meaning of your own words never occurs to you, the reality your words ignore, of which you remain unconscious even though it's obvious once someone points it out, the kind of casual bigotry that the entire TheRump campaign and administration has empowered, emboldened, and encouraged, is too important to toss off with the mockery of a Clown Award.

So again we move on. This time to our winner, and old champion making a return visit to reclaim the title. So this week, the Big Red Nose goes to the man with the world's most perfect initials, Bill O'Reilly.

You likely heard about TheRump declaiming at his campaign rally and yes that is what they called it, a campaign rally, in Florida last Saturday about "look at what's happening last night in Sweden! Sweden! Who would believe this, Sweden!"

Well, of course nothing happened that night in Sweden and it turned out that he had seen a Tucks Carlson interview with some rightwinger on Fox who has a quote documentary unquote claiming there is an immigrant-driven "surge in gun violence and rape" in Sweden which authorities are deliberately hiding, a piece TheRump apparently took to be breaking news.

Interestingly, since then there have been repeated attempts on Fox and other parts of the rightwing media swamp to cast Sweden as some sort of crime-ridden hellhole - because TheRump must be proven right! It is our duty!

Which brings us to Mr. B.O.

On his show on Fox on February 23, he had as a guest one Nils Bildt, billed as "a Swedish defense and national security advisor," there to engage in the predictable xenophobic slam of Sweden's immigration policies, touching on all the usual highlights about crime, "deviant activity," and "no-go areas."

Bill O'Reilly

Here's the problem: Neither Sweden's Defense Ministry nor its Foreign Office had any idea who the heck Nils Bildt is. They had never heard of him.

So who is he? It turns out this expert on Sweden moved out of that country in 1994 and changed his name from Tolling to Bildt in 2003. He says he is "based" in the US but Sweden says the last address they have for him is in Tokyo.

In 2015, he was one of the founders of a consulting firm called Modus World LLC, which according to its website specializes in "operations and management of possible kidnap and ransom situations" - not terrorism - and the website is now "unavailable."

Oh, and he is one other thing: a convicted felon, having been sentenced to a year in prison in 2014 for assaulting a cop, obstruction of justice, and just to make it a triple play, being drunk.

So let's see: Hasn't lived in Sweden for 23 years, has no connection of any kind to Swedish defense or national security, runs - or maybe ran - a business with only a tenuous connection to the issue of terrorism, and has no, not even a claimed, expertise in immigration.

That is who Bill O'Reilly thought would be the perfect guest to discuss immigration in Sweden.

Still in championship form, is Bill O'Reilly - clown.

6.8 - Update: DACA students advised to be in US on January 20

Update: DACA students advised to be in US on January 20

This is a relatively quick Update. The bare facts speaks for themselves. Or as much as they can in the fact-free world of Donald TheRump.

Two weeks ago, I noted that hundreds of college and university presidents from across the US had signed a statement calling for continuing the policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. That policy, begun by executive order in June 2012, allows certain undocumented immigrants who entered the country as minors to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation.

The Update is that advocates for immigrants are now advising folks covered by the program to make sure that they are not traveling abroad when President Xenophobe is sworn in on January 20 because they are afraid that he might immediately rescind the program, with the result that they might be barred from returning to the US.

That is how deep, how real, the fear is; how deep, how real, the threat it.

Because no one can say that fear is an irrational one. TheRump made immigration the cornerstone of his campaign, promising to build a wall along the Mexican border and to deport undocumented immigrants by the millions.

Then later it was oh, no, he wants to focus on those who have committed crimes - which is exactly the Obama policy that he denounced as too soft during the campaign, even though the Amazing Mr. O deported more people than any previous president.

Continuing his pattern of spewing whatever bilge happens to be flushing through his sewer system of a mind at a given moment, during a recent magazine interview, TheRump expressed sympathy for the 741,000 people in the DACA program - despite having called it "illegal amnesty" during the campaign.

On top of that, no matter what he said, his advisers would rush out to walk back his comments almost as soon as they were published.

All of which gives those who had lived in hope and tried to build a life in the country they knew as home good and legitimate reason to fear that they will be forced back into the shadows - or worse.

And it gives the rest of us good cause to stand with them - because as the saying goes, no human being is illegal.