From: david.j.worrell@gmail.com

On Thursday, June 21, 2018 at 12:16:31 AM UTC-7, thang ornerythinchus wrote:

On Tue, 19 Jun 2018 13:47:32 -0700 (PDT), "Jeremy H. Donovan" <jeremyhdonovan@gmail.com> wrote:

Donald Trump’s Small Hostages
By Frank Bruni

June 19, 2018

Why don’t we call the terrified children whose incarceration is riveting

the country what they are at this point?

Not migrants. Not detainees. Not pawns, although that comes closest to the

mark.

They’re hostages.

President Trump is using them as flesh-and-blood bargaining chips, hoping

that their ordeal and reasonable Americans’ disgust with it will get him what
he wants. This isn’t some theory that I’m basing on the whisperings of unnamed administration
officials whose candor the president can dismiss as fake news put out by a maleficent

media.

It’s the only conclusion reachable from his and his lieutenants’ own

words.

Falsely claiming that they are bound by law to separate families who cross

the border illegally, they say that they could and would gladly abandon the approach — if only Democrats joined them in supporting a package of new immigration legislation.

At a miserable White House news conference on Monday, Kirstjen Nielsen, the

head of the Department of Homeland Security, slithered around and away from reporters’ questions about the children’s suffering by saying, “What the president is trying
to do is find a long-term fix.”

Translation: He can live, in the meantime, with this short-term horror. Can

everybody else?

On Twitter, Trump himself expectorated that all of this is “the Democrats

fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime.” He equates random capital letters with virility. They’re typographical Viagra. In another spasm of
super-potency, he tweeted, “CHANGE THE LAWS!”

Translation: Give him his border wall and he’ll give the country relief

from the sight of caged children and the sound of their sobs. Deny him and his government will stay its heartless course, no matter how much trauma is inflicted on these kids,
no matter how much shame is heaped on America, no matter how profound the betrayal

of its promise, no matter how deep the interment of its soul. He’ll blame

the nightmare on his opponents and he’ll be persuasive, because he’s a better liar. He has had more practice at it.

When I say that we have a hostage crisis, I’m being provocative with my

language, but I’m not being loose with it.

I’m mindful that there’s supposed to be a limit to how many weeks —

about three — that most kids can be detained before they’re placed elsewhere. But there’s no cap on how long the Trump administration can continue to isolate children from
their parents by cleaving families in two.

That’s the president’s leverage, and leverage, along with his crude take

on muscular leadership, is his motivation for doing this. This is the art of the deal with human collateral.

And in one sense it’s familiar. Politicians commonly gum up important

nominations, tie up precious funds or let bad situations fester to get what they want. There’s a parlance for this. We say that they are holding something or someone hostage.

But the expression is figurative, and the practice tends not to include

chain link fences, makeshift blankets and cries in the night. That’s Trump’s new spin on it.

It could be a big political mistake. Sure, his most fervent supporters and

the most stubborn tribunes of his fugitive greatness — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter — are rallying behind him. Yes, 58 percent of Republicans in a CNN poll
said that they supported his current “zero tolerance” treatment of migrant families.

But that disquieting number is nonetheless well below his usual approval

ratings from members of his party. Note, too, that many Republicans in Congress
who are up for re-election in November — and thus especially sensitive to how
voters are
processing this — have denounced the actions of the Trump administration, exhibiting more

independence and defiance than they typically do. I’m not talking about

softies. I’m talking about Ted Cruz.

What these Republicans perhaps understand is that how we approach

immigration, legal and illegal, is about more than the economy, though that’s
an important part of the equation, and more than security, though that’s vital.

In a country of immigrants that has proudly held itself up as an exemplar,

it’s about morality. It’s about values. Few aspects of American policy define us in the eyes of the world as sharply as our treatment of immigrants does. Few define us as
sharply, period.

We can be tough, yes. But cruel? That’s not in our interests, not if we

care to maintain the global sway that we have. Not if we want to hold on to who
we are or mean to be: people of generosity and mercy. Not if we’re invested in that “shining
city on a hill” that Ronald Reagan so poetically evoked.

He and other presidents, both Republicans and Democrats, saw America as a

beacon. They trafficked in inspiration. Trump traffics in fear. That’s where the hostages come in. If they’re young and innocent, so be it. That only ratchets up their
utility.

***

This is exactly the kind of thing
people like Trump do. He'll stoop to
any tactic, however cruel and ignore
any fact, however significant. He is
100% ego-driven. It's not about doing
what the people want; it's always only
about getting his own way. No matter
who suffers or how. That's the kind of
person he is. And it was always obvious
from the start to anyone who truly thinks
and feels.

Even 42% of kool-aid drinking Republicans
do not support this shit. Bozo might
be cutting his own throat here.

You've been saying that about Trump since his inauguration. He still
stands. He will keep standing.

It would be nice if you'd just not talk to me because everything
you say is just so ignorant.

That 42% figure above and accompanying 'cutting his throat' remark
was specifically about the percent of Republicans who did NOT
support recent "zero-tolerance" treatment of migrant families.
So your remark didn't even make sense. I could not have "been saying
that about Trump since his inauguration" since it just happened.

Fact is, the US is full up.

Another truly ignorant remark. :)

Although you'll never be the kind of fake news creation champion
Trump himself is, a truly shocking amount of "fact is" fake news
comes right out'cho mouth on a regular basis.

It has a population of around 330 million
- it's the third or fourth most populous country in the world, after
China, India and possibly Indonesia.

It's FULL mate, doesn't need any more fucking migrants or drug
traffickers or Arabs, Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Nicaraguans, Afghans,
Viets, Chinese, or whatever. It's replete with people.

I understand where Trump is coming from. You would probably be
surprised how many people, the silent MAJORITY, in your country, agree
with his rough and hard policy of stopping illegal immigration.

You're the one who would be 'surprised' if you had any real facts.

Two-thirds of Americans disapproved of the Trump administration's
practice of taking undocumented immigrant children from their families
and putting them in government facilities on US borders, according to
a CNN poll. Only 28% approved.

But 58% of Republicans approved of it (thus 42% did not).
Outside the GOP there is much less support. Only 5% of Democrats
and 27% of independents approved.

Thus, 95% of Democrats disapprove. 73% of Independents disapprove.
Meanwhile, you use antiquated bullshit fake newsy phrases like
'the silent majority'. Yeah, right. In that territory, you're just
a step away from believing every conspiracy theory, like Slider.

Here in Australia we have a country roughly equal in area to the US
with only 25 million in it, but we have very strong policies which
stop illegal immigration because we, also, are full up now. Most of
our country is unliveable, desert and dust. The coastal fringe, which
is arable and hospitable, is FULL up. No vacancies.

Just like the US.

Again, I really don't want to talk to you, because you're just...
ignorant. Probably also a bigot, as Slider says. But below,
there are several facts as well as opinions. I wonder if,
like many Americans, you're incapable of telling them apart:

Return of the Blood Libel
By Paul Krugman

June 21, 2018

The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a
matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and
puts them in
cages.

What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here (and, in his mind,
refugees in Germany), are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just
sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.

And you know what this reminds me of? The history of anti-Semitism, a tale of prejudice fueled by myths and hoaxes that ended in genocide.

First, let’s talk about modern U.S. immigration and how it compares to those sick fantasies.

There is a highly technical debate among economists about whether low-education
immigrants exert a depressing effect on the wages of low-education native-born workers (most researchers find that they don’t, but there is some disagreement). This debate,
however, is playing no role in Trump policies.

What these policies reflect, instead, is a vision of “American carnage,” of
big cities overrun by violent immigrants. And this vision bears no relationship
to reality.

For one thing, despite a small uptick since 2014, violent crime in America is actually at historical lows, with the homicide rate back to where it was in the
early 1960s. (German crime is also at a historical low, by the way.) Trump’s carnage is a
figment of his imagination.

[Btw, these are both facts Trump has outright lied about.]

True, if we look across America there is a correlation between violent crime and the prevalence of undocumented immigrants — a negative correlation. That is, places with a lot of immigrants, legal and undocumented, tend to have exceptionally low crime
rates. The poster child for this tale of un-carnage is the biggest city of them
all: New York, where more than a third of the population is foreign-born, probably including around half a million undocumented immigrants — and crime has fallen to levels
not seen since the 1950s.

And this really shouldn’t be surprising, because criminal conviction data show that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are significantly less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.

So the Trump administration has been terrorizing families and children, abandoning all norms of human decency, in response to a crisis that doesn’t even exist.

Where does this fear and hatred of immigrants come from? A lot of it seems to be fear of the unknown: The most anti-immigrant states seem to be places like West Virginia, where hardly any immigrants live.

[Note: West Virginia is also a LOW population state in general.]

But virulent hatred for immigrants isn’t just a matter of rural rubes. Trump himself is, of course, a wealthy New Yorker, and a lot of the funding for anti-immigrant groups comes from foundations controlled by right-wing billionaires. Why do wealthy,
successful people end up hating immigrants? I sometimes find myself thinking about the TV commentator Lou Dobbs, whom I used to know and like in the early 2000s, but who has become a rabid anti-immigrationist (and Trump confidant), and who is currently
warning against a pro-immigrant plot by “the Illuminati of K Street.”

I don’t know what drives such people — but we’ve seen this movie before, in the history of anti-Semitism.

The thing about anti-Semitism is that it was never about anything Jews actually
did. It was always about lurid myths, often based on deliberate fabrications, that were systematically spread to engender hatred.

For example, for centuries people repeated the “blood libel” — the claim that Jews sacrificed Christian babies as part of the Passover ritual.

In the early part of the 20th century there was wide dissemination of “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a supposed plan for Jewish world domination that was probably forged by the Russian secret police. (History repeats itself, the first
time as tragedy, the second time as more tragedy.)

The fake document received wide dissemination in the United States thanks to none other than Henry Ford, a virulent anti-Semite who oversaw the publication and distribution of a half-million copies of an English translation, “The International Jew.”
Ford later apologized for publishing a forgery, but the damage was done.

Again, why would someone like Ford — not only wealthy, but also one of the most admired men of his time — have gone down this path? I don’t know, but clearly such things happen.

In any case, the important thing to understand is that the atrocities our nation is now committing at the border don’t represent an overreaction or poorly implemented response to some actual problem that needs solving. There is
no immigration crisis;
there is no crisis of immigrant crime.

No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred — unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done. And anyone making excuses for that hatred — who tries, for example, to turn it into a “both sides” story — is, in
effect, an apologist for crimes against humanity.

***

Washington Post

There’s no immigration crisis, and these charts prove it http://tinyurl.com/y7tdy4fe

[The charts are available at the link above]

By Christopher Ingraham
June 21

The humanitarian crisis involving immigrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border has, among other things, laid bare a number of falsehoods driving much of the Trump administration's immigration agenda.


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