Category: Current Events

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Finally Some Good News

The Daily Beast reports:

Paul Manafort is going to jail. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled Friday morning to revoke his bail, meaning the president's former campaign chairman will be incarcerated until his July trial. The move came after Special Counsel Bob Mueller's team moved for the judge to change the terms of Manafort's bail. Mueller's team alleged that Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnick—a former Manafort colleague of Manafort's who the special counsel recently indicted—tampered with witnesses in the months after being charged with a host of crimes.

Hopefully his trial will be delayed a very. long. time.

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This is Not America

From NBC News:

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — The Trump administration has selected Tornillo, Texas, for the construction of tents to house the overflow of immigrant children, many of whom have been separated from their parents under a new "zero tolerance" policy, according to three sources familiar with the decision.

The Department of Health and Human Services will erect a "tent city," full of large tents whose walls touch the ground, that is estimated to hold 450 beds for children, say the sources.

It will not be the first time the U.S. government has erected tent cities to house immigrants. U.S. Customs and Border Protection used tents to house an influx of immigrants in 2014 and at the end of the Obama administration. But now the overflow of a particular immigrant population — in this case, children — is a government-created problem.

The increase of children who are alone and in need of care at the border is the product of a new Trump administration policy that on May 7 began criminally prosecuting all adult migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border between ports of entry. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security separates any children traveling with those adults before prosecution.

One shelter in Brownsville, holding nearly 1,500 boys aged 10 to 17, opened its doors to reporters on Wednesday. NBC News was among the first to tour the facility, which closely resembled a jail and allows children outside for only two hours per day.

The overflow of children at HHS facilities has caused backup at border stations, the first stop for immigrants crossing into the United States. As of last week, over 570 unaccompanied children were in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol, and nearly 300 of those had been held for more than 72 hours, the limit for holding an immigrant of any age at a border station.

Ron Vitiello, acting deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told MSNBC on Thursday that about 1,500 immigrants are being arrested each day for crossing the border illegally. Vitiello said the policy is meant to deter families of immigrants from coming to the U.S.

"If you apply consequence to illegal activity you get less of it," he said in defense of the policy. "They are only in these shelters long enough to be reunited with their family members. That's the purpose of them."

The facility in Brownsville is holding children for 52 days on average. They are sometimes sent to foster homes if relatives in the U.S. cannot be found.

"HHS is legally required to provide care and shelter for all unaccompanied alien children referred by [the Department of Homeland Security], and works in close coordination with DHS on the security and safety of the children and community," a spokesman for HHS said in a statement.

I don't mind telling you that after hearing of this news yesterday I had a knot in my stomach that still hasn't gone away.

This is what America has become.

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IF VOTING DIDN'T MATTER, THEY WOULDN'T BE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO DO IT.

Okay heads up for all Americans eligible to vote:

The Supreme Court just issued a ruling allowing Ohio and other states to purge voters from their election registration rolls due to their failure to cast a ballot in previous elections.

This is a major victory for the Trump administration and the GOP, and a direct consequence of the Supreme Court being stacked with more conservative judges (the votes were 5-4). This is also a huge part of what Trump/the GOP were counting on to save them in the 2018 midterm elections, which is where Democrats have been hoping to take back a majority in the House, giving them more power to combat Trump's abuses of power and Republican legislation.

What this means is YOU CAN NOT ASSUME THAT YOU ARE REGISTERED for the 2018 elections, just because you SHOULD be. Thanks to this decision, red states can purge voters' registration based on their not having cast a ballot in even just previous federal elections, NOT just the national Presidential elections. Effectively, if you haven't voted in previous senate races or for congressional representatives in the past few years, that's all they need now to say you're no longer registered and you will need to register again.

They're deliberately counting on people assuming they're still registered and so not checking until after registration deadlines have passed, or showing up to vote this November and only then finding out they're no longer registered, when its too late to do a damn thing about it.

And this is absolutely targeted at marginalized communities, low income voters, disabled voters, and basically anyone who simply can't always AFFORD to keep on top of every federal election and show up to vote in every senate race, etc. Which not so coincidentally happen to be all the communities and voters who have the most to gain from Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms and are the least likely to cast votes for GOP candidates at this point.

This was absolutely a calculated effort aimed specifically at keeping the GOP in power with a majority control of the government come November, and unfortunately, it has a DAMN good chance of accomplishing just that if it goes by unacknowledged. I'm not looking to alarm or panic anyone, simply to say:

If you are a registered voter in a red state at this point, please please please do not take your registered status as assumed. Check on your registration status, look up all relevant voter registration deadlines for your state and district, CIRCLE THAT SHIT ON YOUR CALENDAR, and check your registration status AGAIN right before those deadlines pass, so you can be sure of it before its too late to do anything about it til the next voting cycle.

Here's a Twitter thread with resources for voters in every state to check on their registration status:  https://twitter.com/AnaMardoll/status/1006221580458790912

Make sure you check it periodically because the newest voter roll purges likely haven't happened yet.

IF VOTING DIDN'T MATTER, THEY WOULDN'T BE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO DO IT.
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Teachers Are Superheroes

Again, from John Pavlovitz:

Comic books have lied to all of us.

Heroism isn't capes and costumes.

It doesn't come from radioactive spider bites or metal suits or gamma rays or distant planets.

It doesn't hang out in cavernous caves, palatial compounds, or hi-tech floating cities.

It isn't wielding tricked out all-terrain vehicles, gadget-laden utility belts, hammers from the heavens, or indestructible shields.

The real heroic stuff here on this planet is firmly seated in the chests of the ordinary people who embrace an extraordinary calling; those whose superhuman hearts beat quite differently than the rest of us mere mortals.

They rise before the sun does, and in the most counterintuitive fashion, they run directly, passionately, and purposefully into the thick of the flourescent-lit fray—and they simply save children.

They do this not in a grand single bound; not in some last-second, desperate flurry of force, not in the bombast and fanfare of spectacle—but through steady, loving attention to a methodical, repetitive, mundane string of a million seemingly insignificant decisions. They do this because they know how important each second is and how precious every child is. They see what we normal citizens don't see or choose to walk past.

Your kids are rubbing shoulders with superhumans.

Within a few miles of wherever you are reading this, a ragged army of sleep-deprived, woefully under supported, horribly underpaid do-gooders is willingly braving the daily bullets, bruises, and battles, so that your children can become the glorious adults they were designed to be.

To all you ordinary classroom superheroes on the planet, who may not hear it often enough, loud enough, or perhaps at all: Thank you.

Thank you for enduring the countless weird, individual quirks of dozens of kids, for learning how they specifically think and process things, and for seeking to speak their brain's personal language so that they feel heard and seen and known.

Thank you for the rest that you forfeit, the off-the-clock hours you give up, the money you take from your own pocket, and for the thousands of small sacrifices that no one will ever see from a distance. Thank you for the part of you that you give away to other people's children.

Thank you for continually fighting through defiance and shyness, through laziness and silliness, through absentee parents and violent home life, and getting intimately close to the hearts of your kids.

Though we often don't stop to say it, we know just how much you do and just how fortunate all our children are to have you battling for them every single day.

Thank you most of all, for the very heroic way that without cape or costume, you fly in and you literally save kids—and in doing so, you save the world.

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The Face of Tomorrow

They are afraid. And they should be. This is face of the future, regardless of what the knuckle draggers on the right want.

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Quote of the Day

The suggestion of arming the teachers in response to school shootings is really not that surprising As a nation we have hoisted pretty much every social problem onto teachers, expecting schools to be the solution for everything from unemployment to teen pregnancy and the war on drugs, all the while cutting their funding and lambasting them as being lazy and selfish when they demand to be paid. They are solution, scapegoat, and sacrificial lamb rolled into one." ~ Jason Read

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The Gun Is Our Moloch

From Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball:

THE GUN IS OUR MOLOCH

Garry Wills, writing for The New York Review five years ago, after the Sandy Hook grade school massacre:

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god's bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.

Our gun laws are insane. We, collectively, have agreed that regular mass shootings, often at schools — schools! — are a reasonable price to pay as a nation for unfettered access to military-grade killing machines for anyone and everyone who wants one.

It's sick. Everyone outside the U.S. knows this. A majority of Americans knows this and supports stricter gun control.

There are new gun laws being drafted. But you know what most of them are for? For making guns even easier to purchase legally, without background checks.

This idea of gun=god was actually explored in an episode of American Gods last year.