For the Record: Texas Trolls

Via National Women's History Museum.

Gish Galloped from Eleanor Roosevelt to Pudding Fingers DeSantis

That was a Democrat President that denied the Jews asylum. Many of the people at the border are being let in without court dates and the ones that are given dates are for the year 2030.

— Bluecaribe (@Bluecaribe2) May 21, 2023

I'm more concerned about Republicans in Congress today who are responsible for failure to pass comprehensive immigration legislation, especially Marco Rubio, who backed off it in one of the most cynical moves I've ever seen.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) May 21, 2023

For the Record: Del Rio

 

Screenshot from El Paso Times.

Thing that's not being mentioned now is that they were all Haitians, refugees from the 2010 earthquake, that's TWELVE years ago who had found communities in Chile and Brazil, where they were feeling unwelcome, and drawn by a rumor that Del Rio was a good place to crosss into US.

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

... deporting practically everyone without hearings on the bogus Title 42 policy that treated all migrants as likely COVID cases who would spread disease into Texas (where COVID was already raging worse than it was in Mexico, in other words it was a fraud)

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

N

And also very Trumpy in its complete arbritrariness, since some people did indeed make it into the courtry and had a chance to tell their story to a judge, and you could never tell why some did and most didn't—it felt completely random to tha Haitians And let's pause to note how extremely bad the situation in Haiti was at that point, just a few months after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, with a nonfunctioning parliament and an unelected prime minister governing by decree and the

loss of government control over strategic areas to the hands of dangerous armed gangs, widely believed to be financed by politicians and to have police officers on their payroll. Violence has worsened an already severe humanitarian crisis.

Well, of course, here we are in the US of A, where the governor of Florida seems able to commandeer the assistance of federal officials in the Department of Homeland Security and facilities at Lackland Air Force Base in his project of kidnapping 50 people in Texas—people whose asylum applications are already under consideration and who are thus not just legally in the US but officially under federal protection—maybe we've got a bit of a Haiti-style problem of our own. 

Becuase, angry as I might have been with Biden on this issue, he did try to get rid of the Title 42 idiocy and the "Remain in Mexico" imposture, and was repeatedly stopped by federal courts whose judges seem themselves to have lost interest in the rule of law. It's only now, a year after Del Rio, that he seems to have acquired some ability to have the law obeyed, and we've learned recently that there are now a million new asylum seekers in the country awaiting hearings (which, under the current situation, will be some seven years from now for most of them, during which they won't even it's a hit-or-miss proposition whether they'll even be able to get temporary working papers [see Redhand in comments], even as employers all over the country complain about a desperate shortage of workers, which is contributing the the inflation they all care so passionately about... Faugh.

On the American side too, hundreds found shelter in El Paso,https://t.co/Wgfv5raZOR but it was Mexico that really came through https://t.co/TmHgDeblkT

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

Anyway, it's clear that this small (but real) crisis of a year ago occupies an enormous place in Republican minds for one reason and one reason only: because these asylum seekers were Black. And that's why they keep bringing it up--it's a dog whistle.

/fin

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 17, 2022

For the Record: Punk'D by Ron DeSantis

That George Wallace–era prank Texas governor Greg Abbot has been playing and Florida governor Ron DeSantis has attempted to emulate rreally isn't any funnier than it was in 1962

There are no new ideas https://t.co/nLmASZYQQK

— big dicta energy (@BigDictaEnergy) September 15, 2022

if you recognize how frightened and bewildered the people they're using must feel, but that obviously doesn't bother DeSantis

Jeez, Ron, you don't act as if you take it seriously. You act like you're running an episode of Punk'D https://t.co/NShd37exnw

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 15, 2022

But it's re-raising a bunch of issues that haven't gotten the attention they really deserve; just summarizing:

For the Record: Whatever it is, Marquito is against it

Byzantine mosaic, 12th or 13th century, in the cathedral of Monreale; the two wayfarers Lot invites into his house in Sodom turn out to be angels, and warn him to get out of town. Photo by Ghigo Roli.

This wonderful move by the Biden administration  to compensate some of the horrors wreaked by the Trumpies deserves more attention than it's getting—

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Thursday that the Biden administration is in talks to offer separated migrant parents and children around $450,000 per person. That would mean that if a parent and a child were separated at the border, together they would be eligible for a combined payment of $900,000.

—and Republicans want to provide it, in the worst way:

For the Record: Twitter Wars

 

Bearers of Trophies and Bullion. From Andrea Mantegna, Triumphs of Caesar (1482-94, now Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace), via Wikipedia.

So much winning. Well, that's what I think.

Re Republican voting restrictions:

You compare them yourself, in order to make your case, so that's a completely ridiculous thing to say. And as you point out some proposals have similar motives (like 'the limit on Sunday voting... understandably considered an attack on the famous “souls to polls” events')

— Jumpin Jack Flash It's a Yas Yas Yas (@Yastreblyansky) March 23, 2021

Jim Crow measures also didn't seem overwhelming taken one at a time. What could be so bad about requiring a literacy test? It was the cumulative effect of all of them put together that made it work.

— Jumpin Jack Flash It's a Yas Yas Yas (@Yastreblyansky) March 23, 2021

Re filibuster:

Joe Did What? Carrizo Springs

 

Carrizo Springs after the Trump administration set it up for children in October 2019—nobody explains why they closed it after a month, perhaps it's because they'd succeeded in making all the children "Remain in Mexico" by that point. Via NBC News. 

There's a lot of frothing going on on the aspirational left over today's report by Sylvia Foster-Frau/Washington Post of the reopening of a facility for unaccompanied teenage asylum seekers at Carrizo Springs, TX, the first such place to be opened under the Biden administration, being regarded by everybody from Mehdi Hasan to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the return of the cages, which it isn't, let alone the return of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and his concentration camps.

It's in fact a pretty good thing, and a sign of much better to come: a serious effort to not get overwhelmed the way the Obama administration did in 2014 by a surge in the number of kids struggling without their parents through Mexico to the border, and make sure that every kid gets as quickly as possible to the sponsors awaiting them, mostly family members already established in the US, and that their cases get heard while they're in a safe place.

For the Record: Debate Takes

 

The Debate (2017), by the Filipino painter Gerry Joquico, via ArtAnton.

Earlier in the evening, I had a kind of kerfuffle with our dear friend Bos over the framing of our attack on Trump's China business, where I think the prevailing rhetoric emphasizes the points that aren't important at all for the sake of a sound bite that really doesn't end up meaning anything:

Hard to say how it means something important. Certainly the one thing he did with the account deserves a lot of investigation, but it's not ready to publish. pic.twitter.com/G7DmBxi9ao

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 22, 2020

I don't know. Many people have foreign accounts. He disclosed it to IRS. He pays more in taxes because Chinese law is more effective against tax dodging.

He doesn't keep a lot of money in it. Except that one time he seems to have laundered $15+ million. That part is interesting.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 22, 2020

I had a Singapore checking account for a couple of years after I came back to the States, and I really didn't mean any harm.

Two Cheers for Brooks

Well, two restrained cheers for David Brooks ("If It's Trump Vs. Warren, Then What?"): He's wrong about Warren in general, but he's right that he wouldn't want to vote for her if he understood what she was up to, and he's right that, if Trump and Warren are the nominees, he should vote for her nevertheless, for reasons that I think are pretty solid:

Politics is downstream from morality and culture. Warren represents a policy wrong turn, in my view, but policies can be argued about and reversed. Trump represents a much more important and fundamental threat — to the norms, values, standards and soul of this country.

I'd like to return the favor with an inverse pledge, but it's really hard to imagine a Democrat against whom I'd vote for, say, Willard Mitt Romney or even William Weld, because Democrats don't run like Trump. If Rod Blagojevic got nominated, I'd know he has a pretty bad reputation, but he has a sense that these institutions exist outside of him. If Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump was to run as a Democrat, I'd easily vote for Weld, but that's not going to happen either. Nor is empty-eyed cult member Tulsi Gabbard, for that matter. Nobody like that is going to get the Democratic nomination. Ever.

Everybody makes fun of Democrats for being obsessed with "electability", but it's true we always look for a candidate who only tells lies for a good reason and doesn't have a dangerous personality disorder. We're not going to nominate somebody like Blagojevic for the presidency, or even like Reagan, let alone Scrooge McAsshole and his brood of ducklings. We won't even nominate Steyer or Bloomberg. It might be interesting to ask why Republicans are so careless about electability and still exist as a party. They have such objectively horrible people at all levels, from Mitch McConnell to Matt Gaetz and Duncan Hunter, people you really wouldn't want to let in your house, and yet they carry on.

Laugh's on Me

From video at Washington Post.

Well, I was asking the right question:

I'll bite. Is it really already in effect without waiting for a court to rule at all? It seems transparently illegal.

— O'er the Airports We Watched (@Yastreblyansky) July 18, 2019

That's the new rule (borrowed from fascist Hungary) requiring asylum applicants coming to the US from a third country (such as Mexico) to show proof that they've tried and failed to get asylum status in that third country or someplace they went before (Belize or Guatemala for nearly all of those coming through Mexico), the clear intent of which is to enable CPB to send them all back without hearing their claims, in other words a plan to stop the Mexican border crisis by enabling the government to reject everybody. It looked extremely serious to me; it looked as if it was going to end asylum in the US, not just at the Mexican border, and cooperation with the 1951 Geneva Convention altogether, forever.

It clearly violates US statute:

Rectification: Roundups

While we've been talking about the correct use of the term "concentration camp" to describe the Customs and Border Patrol encampments at the Mexican border to hold thousands of people in illegal detention in unsafe and unsanitary conditions for weeks and months at a time (including children, who are required by law to be released within 72 hours), blogfriend Bethesda 1971 has been musing at Daily Kos on another word, "roundup", to refer to planned ICE activities across the country:

President Donald Trump said Monday that U.S. immigration officials will start raids after July 4 as part of a nationwide roundup of undocumented immigrants.  Bloomberg, July 1, 2019.

Trump says immigration roundup will start next week. Reuters, June 18, 2019.

Trump administration plans unprecedented roundup of 2,000 family members in deportation raids. ABC, June 22, 2019.

This has a Shoah pedigree too, as in one famous roundup in Vichy France, from July 1942:

Over 11,000 Jews were arrested on the same day, and confined to the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d’Hiver, known as the Vel’ d’Hiv, in Paris. The detainees were kept in extremely crowded conditions, almost without water, food and sanitary facilities. Within a week the number of Jews held in the Vel’ d’Hiv had reached 13,000, among them more than 4,000 children. Children between the ages of two and 16 were arrested together with their parents. Among those detained were Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia. .  .  .  .In the week following the arrests, the Jews were taken from the Winter Stadium to the concentration camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret region south of Paris, and to Drancy, near Paris. At the end of July and the beginning of August, the Jews who were being detained in these camps were separated from their children and deported.

Of course they weren't being deported to misery and lethal danger in the Central American Northern Triangle but to certain death in Auschwitz and other death camps, but the similarities are otherwise pretty striking. And yet we use the word "roundup" without a second thought. Anyway you should read the whole piece, linked above.

The Boy Who Cried "Invasion!"

The Los Laureles water reservoir, which supplies water to the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, except not when it doesn't have any water, as in this photo taken 10 March (by Orlando Sierra/AFP).

Cute headline from the Washington Post:
Power Up: Nielsen's ouster signals even tougher Trump border rhetoric

Rhetoric alert! We can expect severe invective storms over the next few weeks, with frequent outbreaks of junior-high sarcasm, malicious lies, and sweeping stereotypes.

One of the things about Trump's border policy that's not getting enough attention is that, while we're knee deep in rhetoric, the policy itself has been a huge fail in its own terms, in its key aim of discouraging asylum applicants from Central America, now arriving in record numbers and overwhelming the border authorities, who are driven to expedients like that El Paso encampment of the end of March:

Incompetence

Via Fake Posters.

This is rich:

The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed.

Jonathan White, who leads the Health and Human Services Department’s efforts to reunite migrant children with their parents, said removing children from “sponsor” homes to rejoin their parents “would present grave child welfare concerns.” He said the government should focus on reuniting children currently in its custody, not those who have already been released to sponsors.

The government's incompetence in the carrying out of their own stupid, cruel, and illegal policy has led to their being unable to rectify it for at least 2,737 children; they don't know which kids belong to which adults: Jallyn Sualog, deputy director of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, told the court in response to an ACLU suit, it's not "within the realm of the possible," and besides please give us more money:

“Even if performing the analysis Plaintiffs seek were within the realm of the possible, it would substantially imperil ORR’s ability to perform its core functions without significant increases in appropriations from Congress, and a rapid, dramatic expansion of the ORR data team.”

Now this Jonathan White, Executive Director, HHS/ASPR National Advisory Committees, is trying to suggest it's for the kids' own good. I don't think so.

Also, how many separated children that White wants his department to "focus on" are still in ORR custody since the court order of LAST JUNE required the agency to reunite them? In October, according to GAO, there were 437. WHY WOULD THERE BE ANY AT ALL?

Now we know those numbers were fraudulent; the administration began separating children from families almost a year before Sessions announced the policy in June 2018, and the GAO is unable to tell us how many children were separated altogether, but it could be thousands more than we were originally told. Don't you want to focus on finding the information you falsely claimed to have last fall before you start explaining which kids you're going to take care of as the law requires and which ones you're going to abandon?