☠️🤮🤯 ‼️🆘 WARNING: TRUMP GOES “FULL HITLER” IN HATEFUL, UNHINGED VETERANS’ DAY RANT! — Why Aren’t The “Mainstream Media” & U.S. Voters Takng This Assault On Humanity, Decency & Democracy Seriously! 🤯

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-rally-vermin-political-opponents/

By Marianne LeVine

November 12, 2023 at 5:45 p.m. ET

Former president Donald Trump denigrated his domestic opponents and critics during a Veterans Day speech Saturday, calling those on the other side of the aisle “vermin” and suggesting that they pose a greater threat to the United States than countries such as Russia, China or North Korea. That language is drawing rebuke from historians, who compared it to that of authoritarian leaders.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said toward the end of his speech, repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”

Trump went on further to state: “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.”

The former president’s speech in Claremont, N.H., echoed his message of vengeance and grievance, as he called himself a “very proud election denier” and decried his legal entanglements, once again attacking the judge in a New York civil trial and re-upping his attacks on special counsel Jack Smith. In the speech, Trump once again portrayed himself as a victim of a political system that is out to get him and his supporters.

Yet Trump’s use of the word “vermin” both in his speech and in a Truth Social post on Saturday drew particular backlash.

“The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” said Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, said in an email to The Washington Post that “calling people ‘vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”

“Trump is also using projection: note that he mentions all kinds of authoritarians ‘communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left’ to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom,” Ben-Ghiat said. “Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

. . . .

*****************************

Doubt the comparison? Check this out:

Nazi propaganda and “vermin”

In 1942, Adolf Hitler described Jews living in Germany as an “inferior race that multiplies like vermin.”

“The Nazis dehumanized the Jews. Nazi propaganda is replete with references to Jews as vermin, rats or parasites,” according to Harriet Over, a researcher in psychology at the University of York.

“We are still creating [monsters]. We see it in … Russian attitudes toward Ukrainians, in Hindu Islamophobia, and in American racism against Black people,” psychologist David Livingstone, a professor at the University of New England in Maine, told EL PAÍS.

It wasn’t just Germany.

In 1909, a U.S. satirical magazine, Puck, published a cartoon that showed Uncle Sam as a pied piper leading a group of immigrants from Europe. The immigrants were rats. Sending them off: smiling, well-dressed White men.

. . . .

https://themoderatevoice.com/trump-channels-hate-and-hitler-in-veterans-day-speech-tells-supporters-those-others-are-vermin/

***********************

I appreciate that Marianne LeVine of WashPost was one of the few “mainstream journalists” with the guts to make the painfully obvious connection and comparison between Trump’s insane threats and Hitler, Mussolini, and other horrible dictators!

Even so, it was only “page 2” news in today’s Post, apparently being of far less concern to her editors than the plans of Middle Eastern countries to “upend global sports!” Harkens back to 1936, when participating in Hitler’s “Aryan Showcase Olympics” was more important to the U.S. and other Western Democracies than protesting and condemning Hitler’s ongoing persecution of Jews!

There was a time in the not too distant past when use of racist, neo-Nazi language like Trump’s would have earned an immediate forceful condemnation from politicians across the political spectrum, from the media, and would have ended a candidacy. Now, it’s “just another day at the office.” Hate, lies, racism, and threats by a powerful national politician, a former President no less, cause barely a ripple in our national political dialogue. Not even front page news! Not covered at all by most “legitimate” news outlets! Yet the threat to our nation is real! Very real!

And, in case anyone still doubts the existential threat to American democracy and civilization itself posed by Trump and his anti-American followers, his “plans” include politicization of government, economic chaos, increasing global warming, and destabilization of the U.S. and world economies. See, e.g., http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=019284ab-7357-40c1-91c7-112654eb687a.

Deranged, false claims of being a “victim,” turning vengeance into a “holy quest,” dehumanizing enemies, uber race-based nationalism, presenting personal grievances as national priorities, and complete disregard for the common good were staples of Hitler’s National Socialism as they are of Trumpism! The question remains whether the U.S. will be able to stand up for democracy, reject Trumpism, and prevent a return to the horrific time of 1939! See also, https://immigrationcourtside.com/just-say-no-to-1939-how-judges-can-save-lives-uphold-the-convention-and-maintain-integrity-in-the-age-of-overt-governmental-bias-toward-refugees-and-asylum-seekers/.

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

11-13-23

🤮🏴‍☠️ “AMERICA FIRST” HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT PUTTING MANY AMERICANS & AMERICAN VALUES LAST! — It’s An Ugly, Yet Long Standing, Part Of Our History Embodied In The Anti-Democracy MAGA Movement!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/09/09/america-first-american-dream-trumpism/

Sarah Churchwell writes in the WashPost:

. . . .

The phrase “America First” fell rapidly into disrepute during World War II, largely because the America First Committee (whose most prominent spokesman was Charles Lindbergh) had urged non-intervention and appeasement and been accused of anti-semitism and fascist sympathies. It was then consigned to temporary obscurity, but not everyone forgot. The slogan was periodically recalled to articulate resurgent right-wing nationalism, often explicitly white nationalism, from Gerald L.K. Smith, once known as “America’s most notorious antisemite,” who founded the America First Party in the 1940s, to Barry Goldwater, hailed by his supporters as an “America First” politician and described by the conservative National Review in 1963 as standing for “States’ Rights, strict construction, limited government, private enterprise, and America first, last and always.” It was used to describe David Duke and George Wallace, before being resuscitated by Pat Buchanan (“We are not isolationists. We simply believe in America first, last and always,” he declared in 2000) in his presidential campaigns. A certain Donald Trump flirted with making his own run under Buchanan’s Reform Party banner, then brought the phrase triumphantly back a century after Wilson popularized it.

[Competing visions of the American Dream are driving Democrats and Republicans apart]

Now the America First Policy Institute declares that its slogan is “America First, Always” and that its immigration policy will mean no longer putting “America last” — echoing the language of a March 1922 editorial from what was then the nation’s most popular weekly, the Saturday Evening Post, as it harangued its readers about the “immigration problem” caused by “our policy of putting the alien and his interests first, and America last.”

These “America First” initiatives go beyond attempts at excluding the “alien” that were already divisive, and futile, a century ago. One of the most prominent spokesmen for “America First” today is Nicholas Fuentes, a white Christian nationalist who organized the America First Political Action Conference earlier this year. Fuentes was also present at the storming of the Capitol, as were his “Groyper” followers, waving his “AF” flags. Fuentes declared: “It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world.” That is certainly what “America First” has meant in the past, as its leaders promise that only they can put America first, by inflaming divisions against nearly every other human being. But it is “America First” that endures, not its erstwhile leaders — and its history offers a pretty good indication of what to expect from Trumpism without Trump.

***********************

I highly recommend that everyone read Sarah’s full article at the link.

Immigrants are almost always the first target of this “confederacy of cowards” — because they are most vulnerable. U.S. courts have traditionally been unwilling to effectively enforce the constitutional and legal rights of “the other.” But, as pointed out in the article, the hate and resentment continues to pour out against additional groups and individuals until “almost every other human being” becomes a target.

We see it today in Virginia Governor Glenn “Junkman” Youngkin’s recent cowardly and unconstitutional “targeting and bullying” of transgender school kids under the ridiculously bogus rubric of “parents rights.” Just where does the “right” of neo-fascist parents to bully the children of others come from?

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Grimm case in 2020 already has found that “Junkman’s” scofflaw attempt to force transgender kids to use the wrong bathroom likely will be held unconstitutional. But, the Constitution and laws have never been anything but “convenient props” for America Firsters!” Compare the courage of the Grimm plaintiff with the ugly cowardice of the “Junkman” and his followers. (This following “Junkman’s” outrageous trip to Maine to campaign for notorious racist GOP gubernatorial candidate Paul LePage).

But, the Fourth Circuit might be an aberration. Often, getting reactionary judges who lack the character and guts to stand up against demonization of their fellow humans helps fuel and protect the “America First” movement from accountability. That’s certainly been at the core modern GOP mis-governance, and the Dems have been painfully “slow on the uptake” in countering it. You have only to look at Merrick Garland’s astounding mis-handling of the reactionary, weaponized, and totally dysfunctional Immigration “Courts” under his control to see just how slow!

In the end, it will be up to the upcoming generation to decide what kind of America they want to live in: An America that respects and honors the dignity, worth, and human potential of all of its inhabitants and serves as a model of tolerance and inclusion for the rest of the world? Or, an America where a minority of extreme right wing authoritarians are at war with the rest of us and, indeed, with humanity itself. Your choice!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

09-18-22

🆘🏴‍☠️RELIGION & ETHICS: HELP: TRUMP’S CLAIMS TO SUPPORT RELIGION ARE TOTALLY BOGUS — TRUMP ICE’S ATTACKS ON GENUINE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES ARE TOTALLY REAL! — Here’s An Example Of How ICE Disparages Christ’s Humane Message!

—–Original Message—–

From: Kara Scroggins <kara@glenmontumc.org>

To: congregation@glenmontumc.org

Sent: Tue, Sep 29, 2020 4:47 pm

Subject: Updates and Actions for Siahaan Family

Good afternoon everyone,

Thank you for your prayers and support this week. In the days leading up to Binsar’s habeas hearing on Friday, we are continuing to build momentum and raise our voices to God and to the people who hold secular power.

Today we gathered at the ICE Field Office in Baltimore and held a demonstration. Three of us were able to gain entry into the building and pressed the staff until they agreed to deliver our bix box of printed petitions to the Field Office Director. The District Commander that I spoke to said he had read about the case in the papers, and we should take it to the National Headquarters in DC. So we will (see below.)

Tomorrow, we are driving calls to elected representatives. Our Maryland Congressional Delegation has said that they are on board, yet in the last two weeks they have been reluctant to speak out publicly on Binsar’s behalf. We are asking them to put their names on the line and to stand with our church, regardless of whether they personally think it will affect meaningful change. I have pasted a script below. You can pass this on to other people, as the phone number lets people enter their zip codes and connect to their own state’s congresspeople.

Thursday, we are planning a faith march from Christ UMC in Southwest DC to the ICE National Headquarters. It is a 1 mile walk. We are inviting ecumenical and multifaith people to join us as we deliver four petitions with a combined total of more than 15,000 signatures. We’ll meet at 8:30am at Christ UMC and will leave for the walk at 9am, and will conclude by 10am.

Friday, Binsar’s habeas hearing is at 2:30pm. I implore you to fast and pray with me from sundown on Thursday through the hearing time on Friday. I have invited the Bishop and other conference leaders to do the same. We cannot be there physically because of the court’s restrictions, but we can be in absolute, focused solidarity.

Thank you again, and let’s keep going.

peace,

rev. kara

CONGRESSIONAL PHONE CALL SCRIPT

Universal Phone Number for Any State: 1-844-332-6361 (you can enter your zip code without listening to the whole message)

My name is __, from ___. I’m calling to ask Senator/Representative _________ to personally and publicly intervene to support a Maryland resident. Binsar Siahaan, an asylum-seeker from Indonesia, has lived in Maryland for over 30 years with his family, including two citizen children. ICE lied to Binsar and arrested him on church grounds. This is an unprecedented attack on faith communities and immigrants of faith.

I’m asking that the Senator call ICE Director Pham and express outrage at ICE’s treatment of Binsar, and ask for his immediate release and approval of his stay of removal. I also call on the Senator/Representative to initiate an investigation into ICE’s actions in this case, and hold ICE accountable to its sensitive locations policy.

—

Rev. Kara Scroggins

she/her/hers

*********************

Trump adheres to no religion except that of greed and “unenlightened self-interest.” Meanwhile, communities of faith actually engaged in carrying out Christ’s message of compassion, redemption, and outreach to the most vulnerable are being attacked by Trump’s ICE to carry out a corrupt, immoral political agenda of hate, racism, and dehumanization of ”the other.”

This is just the beginning! According to recent reports, Trump’s campaign appendage ICE plans to launch attacks on communities of color and “Democratic” cities in a perverted (and totally illegal and unethical) attempt to bolster Trump’s floundering re-election campaign!

Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out!

Vote for Biden,Harris and Democrats for the return of human decency, morality, reasonableness, and ethics to Government!

PWS

09-30-20

PWS

09-30-20

ASIAN AMERICANS FEEL THE STING OF TRUMP’S RACISM — THEY ARE FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE GOP’S CAMPAIGN OF HATE AND STUPIDITY — Once Targeted By The “Chinese Exclusion Act” & The “Asia-Pacific Barred Zone,” Later Dubbed The “Model Minority” By White Racists, Asian Americans Are Bonding With Other Targets Of Trump’s Program Of Dehumanization To Resist Racism in America: “The current protests have further confirmed my role and responsibility here in the U.S.: not to be a ‘model minority’ aspiring to be white-adjacent on a social spectrum carefully engineered to serve the white and privileged, but to be an active member of a distinct community that emerged from the tireless resistance of people of color who came before us.”

https://apple.news/AtFy-2-s8SviGlrVZK5m0ag

From Time:

‘I Will Not Stand Silent.’ 10 Asian Americans Reflect on Racism During the Pandemic and the Need for Equality

SANGSUK SYLVIA KANG

ANNA PURNA KAMBHAMPATY

Diseases and outbreaks have long been used to rationalize xenophobia: HIV was blamed on Haitian Americans, the 1918 influenza pandemic on German Americans, the swine flu in 2009 on Mexican Americans. The racist belief that Asians carry disease goes back centuries. In the 1800s, out of fear that Chinese workers were taking jobs that could be held by white workers, white labor unions argued for an immigration ban by claiming that “Chinese” disease strains were more harmful than those carried by white people.

Today, as the U.S. struggles to combat a global pandemic that has taken the lives of more than 120,000 Americans and put millions out of work, President Donald Trump, who has referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” and more recently the “kung flu,” has helped normalize anti-Asian xenophobia, stoking public hysteria and racist attacks. And now, as in the past, it’s not just Chinese Americans receiving the hatred. Racist aggressors don’t distinguish between different ethnic subgroups—anyone who is Asian or perceived to be Asian at all can be a victim. Even wearing a face mask, an act associated with Asians before it was recommended in the U.S., could be enough to provoke an attack.

Since mid-March, STOP AAPI HATE, an incident-reporting center founded by the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, has received more than 1,800 reports of pandemic-fueled harassment or violence in 45 states and Washington, D.C. “It’s not just the incidents themselves, but the inner turmoil they cause,” says Haruka Sakaguchi, a Brooklyn-based photographer who immigrated to the U.S. from Japan when she was 3 months old.

Since May, Sakaguchi has been photographing individuals in New York City who have faced this type of racist aggression. The resulting portraits, which were taken over FaceTime, have been lain atop the sites, also photographed by Sakaguchi, where the individuals were harassed or assaulted. “We are often highly, highly encouraged not to speak about these issues and try to look at the larger picture. Especially as immigrants and the children of immigrants, as long as we are able to build a livelihood of any kind, that’s considered a good existence,” says Sakaguchi, who hopes her images inspire people to at least acknowledge their experiences.

Amid the current Black Lives Matter protests, Asian Americans have been grappling with the -anti-Blackness in their own communities, how the racism they experience fits into the larger landscape and how they can be better allies for everyone.

“Cross-racial solidarity has long been woven into the fabric of resistance movements in the U.S.,” says Sakaguchi, referencing Frederick Douglass’ 1869 speech advocating for Chinese immigration and noting that the civil rights movement helped all people of color. “The current protests have further confirmed my role and responsibility here in the U.S.: not to be a ‘model minority’ aspiring to be white-adjacent on a social spectrum carefully engineered to serve the white and privileged, but to be an active member of a distinct community that emerged from the tireless resistance of people of color who came before us.”

Justin Tsui

“I didn’t think that if he shoved me into the tracks I’d have the physical energy to crawl back up,” says Tsui, a registered nurse pursuing a doctorate of nursing practice in psychiatric mental health at Columbia University. Tsui was transferring trains on his way home after picking up N95 masks when he was approached by a man on the platform.

The man asked, “You’re Chinese, right?” Tsui responded that he was Chinese American, and the man told Tsui he should go back to his country, citing the 2003 SARS outbreak as another example of “all these sicknesses” spread by “chinks.” The man kept coming closer and closer to Tsui, who was forced to step toward the edge of the platform.

“Leave him alone. Can’t you see he’s a nurse? That he’s wearing scrubs?” said a bystander, who Tsui says appeared to be Latino. After the bystander threatened to record the incident and call the police, the aggressor said that he should “go back to [his] country too.”

When the train finally arrived, the aggressor sat right across from Tsui and glared at him the entire ride, mouthing, “I’m watching you.” Throughout the ride, Tsui debated whether he should get off the train to escape but feared the man would follow him without anyone else to bear witness to what might happen.

Tsui says the current antiracism movements are important, but the U.S. has a long way to go to achieve true equality. “One thing’s for sure, it’s definitely not an overnight thing—I am skeptical that people can be suddenly woke after reading a few books off the recommended book lists,” he says.“Let’s be honest, before George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, there were many more. Black people have been calling out in pain and calling for help for a very long time.”

. . . .

************************

Read the other nine profiles and see Haruka Sakaguchi’s great photography at the link.

Racism, hate, cruelty, ignorance, dehumanization, inequality, and incompetence are the planks of Trump’s re-election “platform.”

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

06-28-20

CHRISTMAS & HANUKKAH WISHES & THOUGHTS FROM ROGER ALGASE, ESQUIRE

My holiday poem (in Japanese waka verse style):

In this holiday

Season of Hanukkah and

Christmas, let us hope

That we can live in a world

Which will be free from hatred.

See my blogging below about immigration, Hanukkah, and Human Rights, and have a wonderful holiday.

Roger

********************************

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ImmigrationLawBlogs started a blog post Before Hanukkah celebration of freedom and human rights, 25 Jewish Congressional members demand Stephen Miller’s ouster – while he launches vicious new attack against immigrant children By Roger Algase

12-22-2019, 12:53 PM

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As the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, which has been a symbol of liberty and freedom from oppression for 2,000 years approaches, 25 Jewish members of Congress, all Democrats, have signed a letter demanding the resignation of Donald Trump’s main architect of oppression and persecution against nonwhite immigrants. This is even as Miller is reportedly preparing a new secret plan to inflict more appalling cruelty and violations of basic human rights against detained immigrant children because he objects to the color of their skin.

For more on the Congressional members’ letter, which was in reaction to the shocking revelation of Miller’s almost 1,000 recent extremist white supremacist anti-immigrant emails, see CNN (December 20):

https://www.cnn.com/12/20/politics/jewish-members-of-congress-stephen-miller/index.html

The letter, addressed to Donald Trump (who will now forever be known as the third president in US history to be impeached by the House of Representatives) states in part:

“As Jewish members of Congress, we are calling on you to immediately relieve White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller of all government responsibilities and to dismiss him from your administration…His documentation of white nationalist and virulently anti-immigrant tropes is wholly unacceptable and disqualifying for a government employee.”

But even as the above letter was written a news item has now come to light about a secret new policy that Miller has reportedly launched that will make it harder for detained immigrant children to be released by ICE to the custody of family members or friends who are willing to come forward to take custody of them.

This vicious new policy represents a new low in the appalling cruelty that Trump and Miller have shown toward young children whom Trump and Miller do not think should be welcome in the US because, as Trump reportedly said almost two years ago (in January 2018), they are not from “Countries like Norway.”

Details of Miller’s plan, which has not been publicly announced are contained in a December 20 Washington Post article entitled:

Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts

htps://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/under-secret-stephen-miller-plan-ice-to-use-data-on-migrant-children-to-expand-deportation-efforts/201…

The Post reports that senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services:

“…agreed to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to collect fingerprints and other biometric information from adults seeking to claim children at migrant shelters. If these adults are deemed ineligible to take custody of children, ICE could then use their information to target them for arrest and deportation.”

The Post;s report also shows that this appears to be yet another attempt by the Trump-Miller regime to defy the intention of Congress, in keeping with the virtual dictatorship over immigration policy that America’s third president to be impeached by the House (and the second for abuse of power) is imposing under the authoritarian “unitary executive” theory which directly conflicts with the Constitution and with our basic principles of democracy.

The Post report states:

“The arrangement appears to circumvent laws that restrict the use of the refugee program for deportation enforcement. Congress has made clear that it does not want those who come forward as potential sponsors of minors in U.S. custody to be frightened away by potential deportation.”

But this is precisely what Stephen Miller is attempting to do, according to the above report.

How ironic that this appalling attack against children in pursuit of the Trump-Miller administration’s racial immigration agenda came to light just before the Hanukkah holiday This holiday, which began this year on the evening of December 22, celebrates the heroic resistance of the Maccabees, Jewish freedom fighters, against an oppressive ruler, Antiochus, king of Syria, in 169 B.C.

Rabbi Sid Schwarz explains the meaning of Hanukkah as follows:

“Hanukkah is the Jewish festival of religious liberty and freedom.”

But Hanukkah stands for more than just freedom of religious persecution – such as Donald Trump instituted within days after taking office ac president by imposing his Muslim ban – a blatant violation of the Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom which should have immediately led to impeachment proceedings at that time.

As Rabbi Schwarz also writes concerning the tradition that a small amount of oil for the temple lamp lasted for eight days, Hanukkah is also a celebration of Human Rights in general:

“Whether one believes literally in the miracle of the high-octane oil, on a spiritual level Hanukkah is about a much bigger miracle. It is the miracle of faith conquering fear. of the few overcoming the many, of liberty winning out over oppression.

Hanukkah falls close to Human Rights Day which we celebrate every year on December 10. We ignore this day at our peril. The date was based on the 1948 ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the general Assembly of the United Nations.

Enshrines in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are principles at the core of democracy: the right to life, liberty and security of person; equal justice before the law; protection against cruel and degrading forms of punishment…”

www.rabbisid.org/hanukkah-and-human-rights/

What could be a more cruel and degrading practice than keeping young children incarcerated while intimidating their parents or other family members against coming to pick them up because of fear of being deported? It would be hard to imagine any greater form of deliberate sadism.

Therefore I would like to make the following proposal to Stephen Miller, the great grandson of an impecunious early 20th century Jewish immigrant who would without any question be barred from entry to the US under Miller’s own vastly expanded Public Charge rules (if they ever go into effect).

I would ask Miller, who seems to be totally oblivious to the history of persecution and exclusion that Jewish immigrants were subjected to by the US government for much of the 20th century, including the 1930’s and 1940’s at the time of their most desperate need, whether he would be willing to agree to the following proposal:

If Stephen Miller and Donald Trump, who claims to be a great friend of the Jewish people and whose own daughter and son-in-law are Jewish, are unwilling to abandon their inhuman and arguably illegal practice of frightening parents or other relatives of detained immigrant children from coming to pick them up and arrange their release, through fear of action by ICE, would Trump and Miller be willing to suspend this barbaric practice for at least the eight days of Hanukkah as a gesture of good will, and in the spirit of the holiday?

Or would that be too much to ask?

With the above thoughts, I wish all readers a Happy Hanukkah and a very Merry Christmas.

************************************
Roger Algase
Attorney at Law

Last edited by ImmigrationLawBlogs; 12-23-2019, 10:25 AM.

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ImmigrationLawBlogs started a blog post Trump administration moves to deport Dreamers after giving assurances that it wouldn’t. Dreamers’ plight is not Obama’s fault By Roger Algase

12-25-2019, 10:09 AM

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At the time when President Barack Obama instituted DACA, there was a warning from the opposition side that one day, under a different president, DACA might make it easier rather than harder to deport immigrants registering for that program. The reasoning was that by registering for DACA, millions of unauthorized immigrants would be providing the government with personal information which could later be used against them for deportation purposes.

However, the fact that DACA information might later on be misused by a future malevolent president for a purpose opposite the the one intended was certainly no reason for scrapping the entire program. At least it is unlikely that the 800,000 immigrants who are now benefiting from DACA would agree. Almost any action that is taken with regard to immigration might have results in the future different from those initially contemplated.

To give an example of a different immigration program, at the time that Trump instituted the Muslim ban executive orders, supporters of the ban didn’t seem to realize that if a current president were given the power to defy the guarantee of religious freedom enshrined in our Constitution by banning immigrants from Muslim countries, a future president whose bigotry might run in a different direction form Trump’s bigotry, might use the same power to ban Jewish immigrants from Israel, or to ban Catholic immigrants from Europe (as was in fact done in the 1924 immigration law..

In any event, warnings about possible misuse of DACA in the future were not taken seriously, because at the time that he announced the termination of DACA, Trump put out the line that, of course, he would never dream of doing anything as nasty as actually deporting DACA recipients. Later on, during Supreme Court argument on DACA, Chief Justice Roberts bought into these assurances hook, line, and sinker, as Frank Sharry of America’s Voice describes in a December 23 press release entitled:

Chief Justice Roberts, You were wrong. Trump does want to deport DACA recipients

Sharry quotes Roberts during the Supreme Court’s oral argument on DACA as saying:

“…the whole thing [about DACA] was about work authorization and these other benefits. Both administrations have said that they’re not going to deport the people.”

Now, with a December 21 CNN report that the Trump-Miller administration is moving to reopen previously closed deportation cases against DACA recipients who have no or only minor criminal records, Trump’s assurances are turning out to be a hollow, if not actually fraudulent, as so many of his other statements on immigration have been.

For this reason, Roberts was either in denial, as Frank Sharry asserts, or was being misled by the Trump administration about the real issue involved in DACA. See CNN:

ICE reopening long-closed Dreamer deportation cases

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/21/ice-reopening-dreamer-deportation-cases-invs/index.html

Is this about-face (one might call it turncoat action) by Trump and Miller the fault of former president Barack Obama? That would seem to be an example of convoluted, if not Orwellian, reasoning at best – the idea being that a president who saved neatly a million immigrants from deportation through DACA really hurt them instead, while a different president who is actually threatening to deport them has no responsibility for this action.

CNN reports as follows:

“ICE confirmed to CNN that DACA recipients whose deportation cases have been administratively closed can expect to see them reopened. In an email, the agency states that ‘re-calendaring of administratively closed cases is occurring nationwide and not isolated to a particular state or region.'”

The same CNN report also states:

“The move to reopen deportation cases against Dreamers comes as the US Supreme Court considers whether to let the Trump administration end the program – and during oral arguments in November, at least some justices made it clear that they were accepting the president’s assurances that ending DACA would not mean deporting Dreamers.”

The only possible conclusion is that the Trump administration either deliberately misled the Supreme Court, whose Chief Justice and, as CNN also mentions, other justices as well, relied on its assurance that no Dreamers would be deported; or else that the no deportation assurance is now “inoperative” (to use a famous expression from the Nixon administration during the Watergate scandal).

The above raises a few questions:

1) Is this act of outright deception (worst case) or sleight of hand (at best) on the part of the Trump administration with regard to its intention to deport Dreamers if DACA is terminated the fault of former President Obama?

2) Full information about Dreamers whose deportation cases were closed was already known to the government at the time that President Obama established DACA. Otherwise, the deportation cases would not have been started in the first place. How could establishing DACA and closing their cases have put these deportation respondents at any greater risk than they already were subject to?

3) President Obama established DACA to try to save the “Dreamers” from being deported. Donald Trump is now trying to end DACA in order to deport them. If they are eventually deported, will that be President Obama’s fault? That kind of argument could only come out of a George Orwell novel.

4) Finally, we must ask, why is it so important to the Trump and Miller administration to deport the “Dreamers”? To answer that question, we need look no further than Miller’s recently revealed almost 1,000 emails contending that non-white immigrants are not welcome in the United States, with or without legal status.

Deporting 800,000 “Dreamers” would be only one part of Miller’s drive to accomplish this sweeping, white supremacist agenda, which would take America back to the 1924 Europeans-only immigration regime that Miller reportedly holds up as his ideal in the above mentioned emails, and which has very arguably become the basis of the Trump administration’s entire immigration agenda.

As The Atlantic states regarding Miller’s recently revealed immigration related emails (November, 2019):

” That Miller himself possesses a Jewish background is no obstacle to his believing that the racist and anti-Semitic restrictions of the 1920’s were a great achievement and that the law that repealed them was a great tragedy. These comments shed a great deal of light on Miller’s motives in shaping administration policy.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/stephen-miller-alarming-emails/602242/

Nothing could be clearer about who will be responsible for deporting up to 800,000 Dreamers if Chief Justice Roberts and the other Supreme Court “conservatives” buy into the Trump administration’s worthless assurances that the Dreamers will be safe from deportation even if DACA is terminated.

The president responsible for that exercise in ethnic cleansing will not be named Barack Obama.

Roger Algase

Attorney at Law

Last edited by ImmigrationLawBlogs; 12-26-2019, 10:23 AM.

*************************************

Thanks, Roger, for sharing your thoughts and for “telling it like it is!”

It’s pretty obvious that Solicitor General Noel Francisco lied to the Supremes about the Dreamers’ fate! He also misrepresented the dire consequences of depriving them of employment authorization and other aspects of being allowed to reside here “under color of law” as opposed to just “not being removed.” That’s in addition to his mental gymnastics of substituting a non-existent “policy” rationale (hint, there is no legitimate policy rationale for dumping on the Dreamers) for the original “bogus legal rationale” put forth by Sessions.

It’s by no means the first time that DOJ lawyers have lied to or mislead Federal Courts about immigration policies and the motives for actions by the Trump regime. How about the “Census Case,” providing bogus rationales for the Travel Ban, reprogramming money for “the Wall” based on a fabricated “national emergency,” denying the existence of a child separation program, claiming that reuniting children was “too difficult,” the “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” program, or papering over Session’s nativist bias and motives for the “A-B- Atrocity,” to name just a few of the more obvious and egregious ones? Essentially, it’s like claiming that “poll taxes” were about “raising revenue” or that “separate” was “equal.”

For most lawyers, lack of candor to a Federal Court would be a serious matter, putting their licenses to practice law at risk. Why are Francisco and the rest of his merry band at DOJ, all the way up to Barr and Sessions before him, exempt from the normal rules of ethics and professional conduct? Why do the Supremes continue to reward his dishonesty by time and again granting his largely frivolous requests to “short circuit” normal judicial procedures and get an immediate audience with the Supremes?

Since Trump and “Moscow Mitch” are stacking the Article III Judiciary with what they believe to be reliable Trump sycophants, it probably would be a mistake to think that “equal justice for all” will reappear in the Article IIIs any time soon.

PWS

12-26-19

“’DUH’ ARTICLE OF DA DAY” – Former FBI Acting Director McCabe Says “then–Attorney General Sessions [was] a Trump-like idiot and racist” – Gee, Seems Like That Was What Liz, Corey, & The Black Caucus Told Us – But McConnell Silenced The Truth & He & His GOP Cronies Subjected America To Perhaps The Worst & Least Qualified Attorney General In U.S. History!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/andrew-mccabe-book-jeff-sessions-irishmen.html

Molly Olmstead reports for Slate:

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s new book, which details his frustrations with President’s Trump administration, has made it clear that his “disdain for Trump is rivaled only by his contempt for [Jeff] Sessions,” according to an assessment from Washington Post reporter Greg Miller.

According to Miller’s review of the book, McCabe saw then–Attorney General Sessions as a Trump-like idiot and racist who had “trouble focusing, particularly when topics of conversation strayed from a small number of issues,” failed to read intelligence reports, and jumbled classified material with publicly reported news.

The strangest detail from the book, though, had to do with Sessions’ thoughts on the FBI’s hiring practices. According to the Post:

The FBI was better off when “you all only hired Irishmen,” Sessions said in one diatribe about the bureau’s workforce. “They were drunks but they could be trusted. Not like all those new people with nose rings and tattoos — who knows what they’re doing?”

According to a Wall Street Journal review of the book, McCabe wrote in his book that Sessions was only interested in immigration issues. He obsessed over the connection between crime and immigration, and he believed that Islam was an inherently violent religion, according to the Post. When presented with a counterterrorism case, he would first ask where the suspect was born or where the suspect’s parents were from. “He blamed immigrants for nearly every societal problem and uttered racist sentiments with shocking callousness,” Miller concluded from McCabe’s book.

McCabe’s assessment is surprising in only that it comes so bluntly from a man who once was acting head of the FBI but now seems intent on speaking out against the men who made his professional and personal life so difficult for 10 months (before he was fired just hours before his planned retirement, blocking him from receiving his full pension benefits). Sessions has a long, long history of making racist and anti-immigrant comments, while also implementing racist and anti-immigrant policies. A non-exhaustive list includes: allegedly warning a black lawyer to “be careful how you talk to white folks”; calling the NAACP “un-American”; reportedly joking that he used to think the KKK was “OK” until he discovered some smoked marijuana; praising an 1924 immigration act promoted by Nazi-style eugenics; denigrating a judge in Hawaii as “sitting on an island in the Pacific”; fondly remembered George Wallace, America’s most famous segregationist politician, as “one of the most formidable third-party candidates in this century; and lauding “the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement.”

As for actions, in Alabama, Sessions punished black activists, defended voter suppression tactics, and kept black judges off the federal bench. He opposed sentencing reform over the crack-cocaine disparity. He has opposed hate crime protections and defended the official display of the Confederate flag. He has regularly attended events hosted by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim groups, which he maintains a close relationship with. He touted falsehoods about DACA and immigrants in general. And of course, he pushed, relentlessly, for deportations and prosecutions of undocumented immigrants and even refugees fleeing domestic and gang violence.

****************************************

Sessions is a living example of how someone can spend a lifetime “on the dole” as a so-called “public servant” without providing any meaningful positive service or contributions to the public good.

Compare this “life not so well lived” with the “real world” contributions of the many decent, hard-working, honest, and dedicated civil servants who were screwed over by Trump’s shutdown. Or, compare Sessions’s squandered, anti-social life with the significant “real life” contributions of many of the immigrants, both documented and undocumented, who came before me in Immigration Court over 13 years.

I’m not sure even the worst of the aggravated felons that I ordered deported did as much lasting damage to our nation and its future as did Sessions! He was a child abuser on a grand scale, and someone who used knowingly false narratives to send deserving refugees, particularly abused women, back to torture or even death in the countries from which they had fled. He was the architect of both family separation and the unbridled expansion of the “New American Gulag.”

He promoted hate, intellectual dishonesty, ignorance, bias, and intolerance of all kinds, and was an avowed enemy of kindness and human compassion. He even had the absolute audacity to cite the Christian Bible, the compassionate, merciful, inclusive, and forgiving teachings of one of the world’s greatest “outcasts,” in support of his own perverted, bias-driven, and totally un-Christian world view.

Oh yeah, and he had no management qualifications going into the job and proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag. Seldom in modern times has there been a more demoralized, mission-less, and dysfunctional mess than today’s Department of Justice. Even Watergate didn’t do as much institutional damage.

Sessions’s only real contribution to justice, due process, and the public good was the day he walked out of the U.S. Department of Justice for the last time. But, it will take years, if not generations, to repair the damage he has inflicted on the rule of law, our Constitution, honest government, and humane values.

Truly, Liz was right! This was one supremely unqualified dude!

PWS

02-16-19

GOP BIGOTS “OUTED” IN MIDTERMS — Message Of Hate & Intolerance Directed @ LGBTQ Americans Being Rejected By Voters Across The Nation!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-gop-antigay-candidates-midterms_us_

Michelangelo Signorile writes for HuffPost:

Dana Rohrabacher, the 15-term Republican incumbent washed away by Democratic challenger Harley Rouda when the blue wave came ashore in Southern California’s 48th Congressional District last week, isn’t your average homophobic extremist.

He is, in fact, an architect of the decades-long battle against LGBTQ rights and a politician, among many others, whose bigotry is partly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people from AIDS.

Rohrabacher was a lieutenant of President Ronald Reagan throughout his two terms as a speechwriter and special assistant, helping Reagan court the evangelical right, which Reagan has been credited with bringing into politics. Reagan, bowing to the zealots from whom he helped amass enormous power (power they still wield with President Donald Trump), was among the most anti-gay presidents in history, ignoring the AIDS epidemic until far too late.

Rohrabacher was first elected to Congress in 1988, at the end of the Reagan administration, representing a district in Orange County, a bastion of conservatism in the ’80s and beyond. He was among a trio of California right-wing Republican congressmen ― including Bob Dornan and William Dannemeyer ― who demonized people with AIDS in that era, voted against efforts to stem the epidemic and battle discrimination and pushed legislation that was discriminatory against LGBTQ people.

Rohrabacher also teamed up with the virulently anti-gay Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina in attacking government grants to queer artists. Rohrabacher railed against the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 ― even as George H.W. Bush’s White House tried behind the scenes to get him to pull back ― for supporting artists who created “drawings of homosexual orgies, bestiality and a Statue of Liberty turned into a transvestite, complete with male sex organs.”

Over the years, Rohrabacher twice backed a federal amendment to ban same-sex marriage, voted against preventing anti-LGBTQ discrimination in employment and voted against legislation extending hate crime coverage to LGBTQ people. In 2009 he said allowing people with HIV to enter the country, even on tourist visas, was “humanitarianism gone wild.” And this year, Rohrabacher, who became a national embarrassment as a Vladimir Putin apologist in the Trump era, caused a national uproar when he supported allowing homeowners to turn away gay buyers.

Now, after 30 years, this bigot has finally been booted.

And he’s not the only one.

There has been much discussion in the aftermath of last week’s midterms about the rainbow wave, a record number of LGBTQ candidates elected in races across the country ― over 150 at last count. But on the other side of the coin, many ardent homophobes and anti-gay candidates were taken down too.

In Minnesota, Rep. Jason Lewis, a Republican who equated gay couples with rapists, lost his House seat to Democrat Angie Craig ― the first lesbian mom elected to Congress.

In another case of poetic justice, openly bisexual California Democrat Katie Hill defeated Republican House member Steve Knight, who supported Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, and voted against banning “ex-gay” therapy during his time in the California Senate. His father, Pete Knight, spearheaded a precursor to Prop 8 ― the anti-gay Knight Initiative, a 2000 ballot measure — as a state senator. Even after his own brother, David Knight, came out as gay, Steve Knight carried on his dad’s hateful tradition.

In Georgia’s now-famous 6th Congressional District, short-lived GOP incumbent Karen Handel, who said last year while running in a special election against Democrat Jon Ossoff that she didn’t support allowing adoption by gay and lesbian couples, was beaten by African-American Democrat and gun reform advocate Lucy McBath.

Texas GOP Rep. Pete Sessions, who claimed the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida ― the site of a 2016 gun massacre ― wasn’t actually a gay club (and who voted anti-gay every chance he got in his more than 20 years in Congress, garnering a score of zero every year from the Human Rights Campaign) was defeated by African-American civil rights lawyer Colin Allred.

In a huge upset in Oklahoma, Republican Steve Russell, who in 2016 introduced a bill that would have provided religious exemptions to President Barack Obama’s executive order banning anti-LGBTQ discrimination among federal contractors, lost to Kendra Horn, the first Democrat to win the state’s 5th Congressional District in 44 years.

Former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin took down Republican Rep. Mike Bishop in Michigan. He voted last year to deny transgender service members medically necessary transition-related health care and was an ardent opponent of marriage equality, seeking religious exemptions.

In fact, the list of GOP House members opposed to marriage equality who came crashing down last week goes on and on: Dave Brat and Barbara Comstock in Virginia, Iowa’s Rod Blum, Illinois’ Randy Hultgren, Mike Coffman in Colorado and Keith Rothfus in Pennsylvania.

In races that have yet to be called but where Democrats seem likely to prevail, GOP marriage equality opponents include New York’s Claudia Tenney, New Jersey’s Tom MacArthur and Utah’s Mia Love, who even sent out anti-gay emails during the campaign attacking her opponent’s support of marriage equality.

In the Senate, GOP marriage equality opponent Dean Heller went down in Nevada against Jacky Rosen. And in Arizona, Martha McSally, another equality opponent, lost in the fight for the open seat to replace marriage equality opponent Jeff Flake ― to openly bisexual Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema.

Far-right Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who once compared homosexuality to polygamy, was stopped from taking the governor’s seat and continuing the Kansas GOP’s anti-LGBTQ agenda. Democrat Laura Kelly flipped the state and has already vowed to reinstate protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender government employees, which were rescinded in 2015 by then-Gov. Sam Brownback.

In Wisconsin, anti-LGBTQ Republican Scott Walker lost his governorship to Tony Evers, after nearly eight years, in a major win for equality.

Democrat Gretchen Whitmer flipped Michigan in its governor’s race, preventing Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette ― who rejected the Michigan Civil Rights Commission’s expansion of state law to protect LGBTQ people ― from continuing GOP Gov. Rick Snyder’s hostile agenda. (In another boost, openly lesbian civil rights attorney Dana Nessel, who fought Snyder to overturn the state’s same-sex marriage ban in a case among those that eventually prevailed at the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2015 Obergefell ruling ― was elected Michigan’s new attorney general.)

And in the open governor’s race in Maine, Democrat Janet Mills flipped the state, ensuring right-wing extremist Gov. Paul LePage’s horrifically anti-LGBTQ agenda won’t continue under Shawn Moody, who similarly opposed marriage equality.

In many state legislatures, the blue wave washed away the hate last week. In Texas, where anti-LGBTQ Republicans in recent years introduced more than a dozen bills harmful to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people each session, Democrats flipped 12 House seats, in the biggest shift since 2010. In an upset, Ron Simmons, who authored an infamous anti-transgender “bathroom” bill ― which died in the Texas House last session but which conservatives vowed to bring back next year ― was defeated by Michelle Beckley.

There are more ― and I’m sure there are still others about whom I haven’t yet become aware. Just a couple of years ago, many queer activists and LGBTQ leaders would have grudgingly denied that these enemies of equality, several of whom they’ve fought for a decade or more, could have been defeated.

But the 2018 midterms showed that when progressives work together and organize with enormous drive, the possibilities are endless.

Michelangelo Signorile is an editor-at-large for HuffPost. Follow him on Twitter at @msignorile.

*************************************

Some of the slimiest politicians in America are on this list: Kris Kobach, Scott Walker, and Paul LePage are particularly “good riddance!” Intolerance seems to live in the GOP.

Another notorious GOP bigot, former AG Jeff Sessions, also was “outed,” in a somewhat different way, ironically by the “Bigot-in-Chief.”

PWS

11-13-18

MARK JOSEPH STERN @ SLATE: GONZO’S GONE! — Bigoted, Xenophobic AG Leaves Behind Disgraceful Record Of Intentional Cruelty, Vengeance, Hate, Lawlessness, & Incompetence That Will Haunt America For Many Years!

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/jeff-sessions-donald-trump-resign-disgrace.html

Stern writes:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned on Wednesday at the request of Donald Trump. He served a little less than two years as the head of the Department of Justice. During that time, Sessions used his immense power to make America a crueler, more brutal place. He was one of the most sadistic and unscrupulous attorneys general in American history.

At the Department of Justice, Sessions enforced the law in a manner that harmed racial minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. He rolled backObama-era drug sentencing reforms in an effort to keep nonviolent offenders locked away for longer. He reversed a policy that limited the DOJ’s use of private prisons. He undermined consent decrees with law enforcement agencies that had a history of misconduct and killed a program that helped local agencies bring their policing in line with constitutional requirements. And he lobbied against bipartisan sentencing reform, falsely claiming that such legislation would benefit “a highly dangerous cohort of criminals.”

Sessions’ attack on immigrants was equally ruthless. He compelled immigration judges to order the deportation of more unauthorized immigrants and punished them when they did not. He barred most victims of domestic violence from seeking asylum in the United States, deporting survivors back to their persecutors. He attempted to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, subjecting hundreds of thousands of young immigrants to deportation but was too inept to do so lawfully. He tried to prevent states and cities from protecting immigrants within their borders. And he implemented the “zero tolerance” family separation policy, imprisoning thousands of individuals at the border for the misdemeanor of unlawful entry, then seizing their children and locking them in cages. (Hundreds of these kids are still separatedfrom their parents.)

Meanwhile, Sessions mobilized the DOJ’s attorneys to torture immigrant minors in other ways. He fought in court to keep undocumented teenagers pregnant against their will, defending the Trump administration’s decision to block their access to abortion. His Justice Department made the astonishing claim that the federal government could decide that forced birth was in the “best interest” of children. It also revealed these minors’ pregnancies to family members who threatened to abuse them. And when the American Civil Liberties Union defeated this position in court, his DOJ launched a failed legal assault on individual ACLU lawyers for daring to defend their clients.

As he oversaw family separation, forced birth, and mass incarceration, Sessions found time to degrade LGBTQ Americans and their families. He issued a memo alleging that federal civil rights laws do not protect transgender employees, a position the Justice Department recently reiterated to the Supreme Court. He also argued that these civil rights laws do not protect gay people. His DOJ defended Trump’s ban on open transgender military service by claiming that trans people are disordered deviants. Under his leadership, the DOJ also asked the Supreme Court to rule that many businesses have a First Amendment right to turn away same-sex couples. (Sessions gave a speech to the anti-LGBTQ group that brought that case to SCOTUS, thanking them for their “important work” on behalf of religious liberty.)

The guiding principle of Sessions’ career is animus toward people who are unlike him. While serving in the Senate, he voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act because it expressly protected LGBTQ women. He opposed immigration reform, including relief for young people brought to America by their parents as children. He voted against the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He voted against a federal hate crime bill protecting gay people. Before that, as Alabama attorney general, he tried to prevent LGBTQ students from meeting at a public university. But as U.S. attorney general, he positioned himself as an impassioned defender of campus free speech.

While Sessions doesn’t identify as a white nationalist, his agenda as attorney general abetted the cause of white nationalism. His policies were designed to make the country more white by keeping out Hispanics and locking up blacks. His tenure will remain a permanent stain on the Department of Justice. Thousands of people were brutalized by his bigotry, and our country will not soon recover from the malice he unleashed.

His successor could be even worse.

*****************************

Can’t overstate the intentional damage that this immoral, intellectually dishonest, and bigoted man has done to millions of human lives and the moral and legal fabric of our country. “The Father of the New American Gulag,” America’s most notorious unpunished child abuser, and the destroyer of Due Process in our U.S. Immigration Courts are among a few of his many unsavory legacies!

The scary thing: Stern is right — “His successor could be even worse.” If so, the survival of our Constitution and our nation will be at risk!

PWS

11-06-18

THE UGLY SIDE OF AMERICAN HISTORY: Trump’s Paranoid Racist Midterm Campaign Evokes Memories Of Andrew Johnson’s 1866 Racist Rant!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-racist-midterm_us_5bdca52ee4b01ffb1d0228e1

Paul Blumenthal writes in HuffPost:

President Donald Trump has ramped up his inflammatory racist rhetoric in the final days before the pivotal midterm elections that will determine if his corrupt administration will face any oversight from Congress.

Betting that fears of racial minorities will drive Republican voters to the polls, he has centered his closing pitch on a caravan of Central American migrants fleeing violence and poor crop yields in their home countries. He said, without evidence, that the caravan is filled with “many gang members” and “unknown Middle Easterners,” dropping the previous pretense (“terrorists”) to reveal a fear of all members of a minority group. “Women don’t want them in our country,” he added, a not-so-subtle suggestion that the migrants are rapists (similar to a claim he made upon launching his presidential campaign).

Guests on Fox News have speculated that migrants are carrying diseases like leprosy and that the caravan is a plot conceived of by rootless Jewish financiers seeking global domination like George Soros — the latter a paranoid conspiracy the president has also entertained. The president followed this up with a blatantly racist advertisement blaming Democrats for murders committed by an undocumented immigrant.

This racist closing pitch is not just rhetorical. The president deployed thousands of U.S. troops to the country’s southern border to repel “an invasion.” He said that soldiers should shoot any migrant who throws rocks at them. He announced plans for indefinite detention of asylum-seekers. He expressed a desire to repeal the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship to all children born on U.S. soil.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Donald Trump rallies his fans in Columbia, Missouri, by blaming unknown forces for organizing the migrant caravan that he deems “an invasion.”

In all of this, Trump has emulated the outrageous, bigoted and violence-encouraging campaign waged by President Andrew Johnson in the 1866 midterms. In his “Swing Around the Circle,” the first time a sitting president campaigned around the country for candidates, Johnson made the election a referendum on himself, with unprecedented barnstorming speeches featuring paranoid conspiracy theories, racist demagoguery and incitement to violence.

Johnson, an accidental president who came to power after an assassin killed President Abraham Lincoln and another failed to kill him, was a boorish drunk, a former slaveowner and a racist who held sympathies with the now-defeated Confederates. He vetoed legislation establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, opposed the 14th Amendment, opposed giving freed black people voting rights in the South and mass-pardoned most Confederate soldiers and officials and offered them property while denying it to freed black people. All of this brought the ire of the Republican Congress, which overrode his many vetoes and passed the 14th Amendment.

And so Johnson took to the campaign trail to defeat congressional Republicans and replace them with proponents of white supremacy. Johnson’s tour began on the East Coast. As he moved westward and faced Republican-heavy districts in the Midwest that opposed his policies, he became increasingly unhinged.

He began by comparing himself to Jesus Christ and Thaddeus Stevens, the anti-slavery leader of the Republicans in Congress, to Judas Iscariot. He attacked Sen. Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, two abolitionists turned advocates for black suffrage. Then, at a stop in Cleveland, a heckler yelled out, “Hang Jeff Davis!,” a call to execute the former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis. Johnson could not resist a reply, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips? … Having fought traitors at the South, I am prepared to fight traitors at the North.”

The “Swing Around the Circle” degenerated from there. Johnson continued to call for the execution of his political opponents Stevens, Phillips and Sumner. He defended recent riots in Memphis and New Orleans where white mobs killed dozens of black Americans in a racist fury by claiming that his political opponents had radicalized black Americans. They had it coming, essentially.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States, was a white supremacist drunk who called for the execution of his political enemies.

“If you will take up the riot at New Orleans and trace it back to the radical Congress, you will find that the riot at New Orleans was substantially planned,” Johnson said at a stop in St. Louis.

Johnson roped in the famed and beloved Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to support him on his “Swing Around the Circle.” Grant, disgusted by Johnson’s speeches, fell ill and excused himself from the tour. According to a biography of Grant written by his aide Adam Badeau, the general believed the president “fostered a spirit that engendered massacre, and afterward protected the evil-doers.”

President Johnson’s defense of white massacres of black people as the product of his opponents supporting black civil rights only encouraged more violence — violence that would ultimately overtake the country and re-establish official white supremacy over the former Confederate states until the 1960s.

Much as Johnson’s rhetorical leniency toward white mobs killing black Americans inspired further violence, Trump’s racist midterm campaign has done the same.

The constant drumbeat of fear-mongering news about the Central American migrant caravan from the president’s mouth and amplified by conservative media triggered a virulent anti-Semite, who believed that Jews like Soros and the refugee resettlement nonprofit HIAS were funding the caravan, to take up arms and attack a synagogue, killing 11 people. It was the worst anti-Semitic attack in the history of the United States.

That same week, police arrested a Florida man for mailing bombs to a litany of political figures that Trump claims as his enemies and, in some cases, promised to jail, including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and, of course, Soros.

The president and his supporters claim to be outraged by assertions that their rhetoric and policies have in any way incited violence from right-wing terrorists. That same week, the lawyers for a Trump-loving right-wing terrorist who planned to bomb mosques in 2016 filed a brief asking for leniency from the court because their client was seduced into terrorism by Trump’s bigoted rantings.

GUILLERMO ARIAS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Two children who are part of the migrant caravan of Central American refugees that the president claims are attempting to invade the U.S. The caravan is currently stuck in southern Mexico.

“Trump’s brand of rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling heightened the rhetorical stakes for people of all political persuasions,” the lawyers wrote. “A personal normally at a 3 on a scale of political talk might have found themselves at a 7 during the election. A person, like Patrick, who would often be at a 7 during a normal day, might ‘go to 11.’ See SPINAL TAP. That climate should be taken into account when evaluating the rhetoric that formed the basis of the government’s case.”

None of this is pushing Republicans away from Trump. If anything, they are drawing closer to his brand of paranoid racist incitement. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declared on Friday that his Democratic opponent Rep. Beto O’Rourke may be funding the caravan with his campaign funds. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is running campaign ads fear-mongering about the “invasion” of migrants in an election in Tennessee, which is further away from the U.S.-Mexico border than the migrant caravan is currently.

Johnson’s campaign of racist incitement didn’t work in 1866. Instead, it became a referendum on the president’s reactionary encouragement of white supremacists in the South and the passage of the 14th Amendment. The Republican Party increased its congressional majorities and, having seen the worst of the president, impeached him after further fights over the future of black civil rights in 1868.

But Johnson survived impeachment, and the white supremacist regimes he helped foster in the South ultimately won full control and acceptance from the national government after a wave of terrorism and murder. “You will not replace us!” the white supremacists promised. A century and a half later, they marched on Charlottesville chanting the same thing. The president of the United States must’ve thought it sounded nice and decided to run on it.

******************************************

Donald Trump, the ugliest of Americans, and the leader of the kakistocracy, has brought out all the worst in contemporary America. He diminishes each of us and our country every day he is in office.

Start the democratic process for regime change by voting the GOP out of every office on Tuesday!

PWS

11-03-18

NO LONGER SUBTLE: Racism, Hate, Intolerance, Lies, Fear-Mongering Against Immigrants At Core Of Trump GOP’s Midterm Pitch! -– The Ugliest Side Of American History & Politics Rears Its Head!

https://apple.news/AxHra5TtoTEqR96pQ3ermwA

RUCKER AND FELICIA SONMEZ report for the Washington Post:

COLUMBIA, Mo. — President Trump, joined by many Republican candidates, is dramatically escalating his efforts to take advantage of racial divisions and cultural fears in the final days of the midterm campaign, part of an overt attempt to rally white supporters to the polls and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities.

On Thursday, Trump ratcheted up the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been the centerpiece of his midterm push by portraying a slow-moving migrant caravan, consisting mostly of families traveling on foot through Mexico, as a dangerous “invasion” and suggesting that if any migrants throw rocks they could be shot by the troops that he has deployed at the border. The president also vowed to take action next week to construct “massive tent cities” aimed at holding migrants indefinitely and making it more difficult for them to remain in the country.

“If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you better vote Republican,” Trump said at a rally here Thursday evening.

The remarks capped weeks of incendiary rhetoric from Trump, and they come just five days after a gunman reportedly steeped in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories about the migrant caravan slaughtered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in what is believed to be the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.

Trump has repeatedly cast the migrants as “bad thugs” and criminals while asserting without evidence that the caravan contains “unknown Middle Easterners” — apparently meant to suggest there are terrorists mixed in with the families fleeing violence in Honduras and other Central American nations and seeking asylum in the United States. The president also said Wednesday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if liberal donor George Soros had funded the migrant groups — echoing the conspiracy theory that is thought to have influenced the accused Pittsburgh shooter.

Trump questioned again at Thursday night’s rally whether it was really “just by accident” that the caravans were forming.

“Somebody was involved, not on our side of the ledger,” Trump told the crowd. “Somebody was involved, and then somebody else told him, ‘You made a big mistake.’ ”

He also called birthright citizenship a “crazy, lunatic policy,” warning that it could allow people such as “a dictator who we hate and who’s against us” to have a baby on American soil, and “congratulations, your son or daughter is now an American citizen.”

Many of Trump’s Republican acolytes, from Connecticut to California, have followed his lead in the use of inflammatory messages, including an ad branding a minority Democratic candidate as a national security threat and a mailer visually depicting a Jewish Democrat as a crazed person with a wad of money in his hand.

Trump and his supporters argue that the media and the president’s political opponents call racism or anti-Semitism where none exists as a way to demean him and divide Americans. At a campaign rally Wednesday night in Estero, Fla., Trump sought to link his supporters to the accusations.

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“We have forcefully condemned hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice in all of its ugly forms, but the media doesn’t want you to hear your story,” Trump said. “It’s not my story. It’s your story. And that’s why 33 percent of the people in this country believe the fake news is, in fact — and I hate to say this — in fact, the enemy of the people.”

Meanwhile, an online campaign video personally promoted by Trump this week was denounced by Democrats and some Republicans on Thursday as toxic or even racist.

The footage focuses on Luis Bracamontes, a twice-deported Mexican immigrant who was given a death sentence in April for killing two California law enforcement officers in 2014. The recording portrays him as the face of the current migrant caravan, when in fact he has been in prison for four years.

The 53-second video is filled with audible expletives and shows Bracamontes smiling as he declares, “I killed f—— cops.” With a shaved head, a mustache and long chin hair, Bracamontes shows no remorse for his crimes and vows, “I’m going to kill more cops soon.”

Trump shared the video Wednesday afternoon with his 55.5 million followers on Twitter, and it remained pinned atop his Twitter page the next day. As of late Thursday afternoon, the video had been viewed 3.5 million times.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), a potential 2020 challenger to the president, said Trump crossed a new Rubicon by posting the video.

“We all go through periods where we’re in a tough race and we’ve got to figure out what we should do, but at some point there’s just an ethical line that you should not cross, and I think it’s been crossed here,” Kasich said in an interview. “This latest ad is an all-time low. It’s a terrible ad, it’s designed to frighten people and it’s wrong.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sounded a similar note, saying in a statement Thursday that Trump and Republicans “are so desperate to distract voters from their failures on everything from health care to foreign policy, they have sunk to new lows with hateful rhetoric and racist campaign ads.”

Five days from Election Day, the video underscored the dilemma facing Democrats as they work to calibrate their response to the president’s increasingly incendiary language on race and immigration.

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said leaders of her party have two schools of thought about Trump’s video and his caravan rhetoric in general. She said they fear that reacting to it only allows the president to dictate the terms of the debate and “spread the toxins into the bloodstream of the electorate,” but that the tone is so appalling — especially coming from the president himself — that they feel compelled to speak out.

“Trump has opened up a whole new playbook to sow discord and to weaponize hate,” Brazile said. “Everyone has seen low politics. We’ve all done low politics. But Lee Atwater would be shocked at the vitriol we’re seeing today — and, man, Lee was scrappy. This is virulent. It’s bone-chilling. It’s like a toxin.”

Atwater, who died in 1991, was a Republican consultant who was known for crafting culturally divisive messages.

Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) described the video as a “horribly racist” attempt by Trump to “prey on people’s fears and lack of information about how the immigration system works.”

Some conservatives, meanwhile, cheered the president for ramping up his focus on an issue that helped push him to victory in 2016. “The clip of convicted cop murderer Luis Bracamontes laughing in a Calif. court is something every American should see,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote in a tweet.

Republican strategists say Trump’s immigration push is helping the party here in Missouri, where state Attorney General Josh Hawley is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. Race has been a sensitive issue in the state, which was rocked by unrest in 2014 after an unarmed 18-year-old African American man was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

Ahead of his rally here Thursday in Columbia, the speakers blared “We Are The World,” Michael Jackson’s ode to peace and inclusiveness. Several white supporters interviewed at the event rejected the notion that the president is racially divisive — and they said they resented the very suggestion.

“He’s not a racist president and I’m not a racist,” said Meredith Leon, 65, a retired small-business owner from Columbia. “We want law and order and justice for all people. I’m fed up with everything being race, race, race. Fed up!”

David Ewing, 59, a farmer in Tebbetts, Mo., said he supports Trump’s immigration agenda “100 percent.”

“I don’t think he’s racist,” Ewing said. “It’s just the far left trying to do anything they can to stop him. I ignore them, really.”

As Trump has intensified his rhetoric, a growing number of Republican candidates across the country have followed suit. Some feature graphic anti-immigrant messages and images in their campaign ads, while others have been accused of inciting anti- Semitic or anti-Muslim sentiment.

In Tennessee, a recent ad for Republican Senate nominee Marsha Blackburn features footage of the caravan and warns that it includes “gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists.” The ad also slams Blackburn’s Democratic opponent, Phil Bredesen, for stating that the caravan is “not a threat to our security.”

An ad released Thursday by Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Wagner features ominous music along with footage of the caravan. “A dangerous caravan of illegals careens to the border, two more behind it, and liberal Tom Wolf is laying out the welcome mat,” the ad declares, referring to the state’s Democratic governor.

A Facebook ad being run by the campaign of Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) features a photo of three heavily tattooed Latino men with the message, “I will protect Georgia from violent criminal gangs.”

And in California, the campaign of Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who has been indicted on charges of alleged misuse of campaign funds, has called his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a “national security threat” with “close family connections” to Islamist militant groups. The 29-year-old Democrat’s grandfather, who died 16 years before he was born, was a key planner of the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Campa-Najjar has condemned the attack.

“Instead of making an affirmative case for his own record, he’s trying to disparage the character of a fellow American,” Campa- Najjar said in an interview. “I think that speaks volumes about his policy record.”

The messaging has filtered down to local races as well. In Connecticut, a mailer recently sent out by Republican state Senate nominee Ed Charamut’s campaign depicts Democrat Matthew Lesser as holding a wad of money with a crazed look in his eyes. Lesser is Jewish, and the ad has been denounced for promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes.

After first defending the ad, Charamut’s campaign later issued an apology to Lesser, acknowledging that “the imagery could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.”

Some candidates who have long made inflammatory remarks on immigration and race have found themselves facing a backlash in recent days. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who met in August with representatives of a far-right Austrian party and declared that “Western civilization is on the decline,” was publicly rebuked Tuesday by Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. King, who previously retweeted a self-described “Nazi sympathizer” and endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate who appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast, has also seen companies such as Land O’Lakes withdraw their support for his campaign.

Trump’s rhetoric also has prompted outrage from a handful of lawmakers from his party, particularly those who are departing Congress or are in Democratic-leaning districts. Republican leadership has largely remained silent.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a frequent critic of Trump who is retiring at the end of his current term, said in a tweet Thursday that the ad featuring Bracamontes was “sickening” and that “Republicans everywhere should denounce it.”

Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), whose district was won by Hillary Clinton by 16 points in 2016, said on CNN that while he hadn’t seen the ad, it was “definitely part of a divide-and-conquer strategy that a lot of politicians, including the president, have used successfully in the past.”

“I hope this doesn’t work,” Curbelo said. “I hope that type of strategy starts failing in our country, but that’s up to the American people.”

Sonmez reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan, Matt Viser and Eli Rosenberg in Washington contributed to this report.

Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.

Felicia Sonmez is a national political reporter covering breaking news from the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. She was previously based in Beijing, where she worked for Agence France-Presse and The Wall Street Journal.

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I always find it interesting when individuals who support, promote, and enable racist agendas “bristle” when confronted with the truth about their actions. Jeff Sessions is one great example of that phenomenon. But, it is what it is. Trump and his brand of GOP are running on an overtly racist platform; support for Trump simply can’t be detached from the reality of what he promotes and stands for — hate, dishonesty, intolerance, and frankly, a very grim future for a country that can’t get its act together and celebrate and use the skills, creativity, dedication, and humanity of all of its inhabitants. Whether you are conservative or liberal, the Trump platform of racism and hate can’t possibly be the keys to success as a nation. We need responsible moral leadership in American. It certainly can’t come from Trump or the GOP at this time in our history.

Get out the vote! Start the long, methodical, democratic process for regime change and restoration of true American values! Before it’s too late for all of us!

PWS

11-02-18

APPROXIMATELY 700,000 TRANSGENDER HUMAN BEINGS LIVE IN THE U.S. – The Trump Administration Seeks To “Define” Them Out Of Existence!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html

Erica L. Green, Katie Benner and Robert Pear report for the NY Times:

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

The department argued in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.” The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by The Times. Any dispute about one’s sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.

“Sex means a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth,” the department proposed in the memo, which was drafted and has been circulating since last spring. “The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”

The new definition would essentially eradicate federal recognition of the estimated 1.4 million Americans who have opted to recognize themselves — surgically or otherwise — as a gender other than the one they were born into.

“This takes a position that what the medical community understands about their patients — what people understand about themselves — is irrelevant because the government disagrees,” said Catherine E. Lhamon, who led the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration and helped write transgender guidance that is being undone.

The move would be the most significant of a series of maneuvers, large and small, to exclude the population from civil rights protections and roll back the Obama administration’s more fluid recognition of gender identity. The Trump administration has sought to bar transgender people from serving in the military and has legally challenged civil rights protections for the group embedded in the nation’s health care law.

Several agencies have withdrawn Obama-era policies that recognized gender identity in schools, prisons and homeless shelters. The administration even tried to remove questions about gender identity from a 2020 census survey and a national survey of elderly citizens.

For the last year, the Department of Health and Human Services has privately argued that the term “sex” was never meant to include gender identity or even homosexuality, and that the lack of clarity allowed the Obama administration to wrongfully extend civil rights protections to people who should not have them.

Image
, now at the Department of Health and Human Services, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity.CreditAaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

Roger Severino, the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the department, declined to answer detailed questions about the memo or his role in interagency discussions about how to revise the definition of sex under Title IX.

But officials at the department confirmed that their push to limit the definition of sex for the purpose of federal civil rights laws resulted from their own reading of the laws and from a court decision.

Mr. Severino, while serving as the head of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, was among the conservatives who blanched at the Obama administration’s expansion of sex to include gender identity, which he called “radical gender ideology.”

In one commentary piece, he called the policies a “culmination of a series of unilateral, and frequently lawless, administration attempts to impose a new definition of what it means to be a man or a woman on the entire nation.”

“Transgender people are frightened,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign, which presses for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. “At every step where the administration has had the choice, they’ve opted to turn their back on transgender people.” After this article was published online, transgender people took to social media to post photographs of themselves with the hashtag #WontBeErased

The Department of Health and Human Services has called on the “Big Four” agencies that enforce some part of Title IX — the Departments of Education, Justice, Health and Human Services, and Labor — to adopt its definition in regulations that will establish uniformity in the government and increase the likelihood that courts will accept it.

The definition is integral to two proposed rules currently under review at the White House: One from the Education Department deals with complaints of sex discrimination at schools and colleges receiving federal financial assistance; the other, from health and human services, deals with health programs and activities that receive federal funds or subsidies. Both regulations are expected to be released this fall, and would then be open for public comment, typically for 60 days. The agencies would consider the comments before issuing final rules with the force of law — both of which could include the new gender definition.

Civil rights groups have been meeting with federal officials in recent weeks to argue against the proposed definition, which has divided career and political appointees across the administration. Some officials hope that health and human services will at least rein in the most extreme parts, such as the call for genetic testing to determine sex.

After more than a year of discussions, health and human services is preparing to formally present the new definition to the Justice Department before the end of the year, Trump administration officials say. If the Justice Department decides that the change is legal, the new definition can be approved and enforced in Title IX statutes, and across government agencies.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the draft health and human services proposal. The Justice Department has not yet been asked to render a formal legal opinion, according to an official there who was not authorized to speak about the process.

But Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s previous decisions on transgender protections have given civil rights advocates little hope that the department will prevent the new definition from being enforced. The proposal appears consistent with the position he took in an October 2017 memo sent to agencies clarifying that the civil rights law that prohibits job discrimination does not cover “gender identity, per se.”

Harper Jean Tobin, the policy director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, an advocacy group, called the maneuvering “an extremely aggressive legal position that is inconsistent with dozens of federal court decisions.”

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A transgender flag outside a bar in Brooklyn. The agency’s proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with.CreditAnnie Tritt for The New York Times

Health and human services officials said they were only abiding by court orders, referring to the rulings of Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth, Tex., a George W. Bush appointee who has held that “Congress did not understand ‘sex’ to include ‘gender identity.’”

A 2016 ruling by Judge O’Connor concerned a rule that was adopted to carry out a civil rights statute embedded in the Affordable Care Act. The provision prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, sex, age or disability in “any health program or activity” that receives federal financial assistance.

But in recent discussions with the administration, civil rights groups, including Lambda Legal, have pointed to other court cases. In a legal memo presented to the administration, a coalition of civil rights groups wrote, “The overwhelming majority of courts to address the question since the most relevant Supreme Court precedent in 1998 have held that antitransgender bias constitutes sex discrimination under federal laws like Title IX.”

Indeed, the health and human services proposal was prompted, in part, by pro-transgender court decisions in the last year that upheld the Obama administration’s position.

In their memo, health and human services officials wrote that “courts and plaintiffs are racing to get decisions” ahead of any rule-making, because of the lack of a stand-alone definition.

“Courts and the previous administration took advantage of this circumstance to include gender identity and sexual orientation in a multitude of agencies, and under a multitude of laws,” the memo states. Doing so “led to confusion and negative policy consequences in health care, education and other federal contexts.”

The narrower definition would be acutely felt in schools and their most visible battlegrounds: locker rooms and bathrooms.

One of the Trump administration’s first decisive policy acts was the rescission by the Education and Justice Departments of Obama-era guidelines that protected transgender students who wanted to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity.

Since the guidance was rescinded, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has halted and dismissed discrimination cases filed by transgender students over access to school facilities. A restrictive governmentwide definition would cement the Education Department’s current approach.

But it would also raise new questions.

The department would have to decide what documentation schools would be required to collect to determine or codify gender. Title IX applies to a number of educational experiences, like sports and single-sex classes or programs where gender identity has come into play. The department has said it will continue to open cases where transgender students face discrimination, bullying and harassment, and investigate gender-based harassment as “unwelcome conduct based on a student’s sex” or “harassing conduct based on a student’s failure to conform to sex stereotypes.”

The Education Department did not respond to an inquiry about the health and human services proposal.

Ms. Lhamon of the Obama Education Department said the proposed definition “quite simply negates the humanity of people.”

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 21, 2018 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump May Limit How Government Defines One’s Sex. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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Historical footnote: At one point in our “respective prior incarnations,” circa late 1970s, early 1980s, Robert Pear was the “immigration beat” reporter for the NY Times, and I was the Deputy General Counsel at the “Legacy INS.” I was sometimes asked by the Commissioner and the Public Information Office to respond to Robert’s telephonic inquiries. Smart, knowledgeable, incisive, and a “straight shooter” was how I would have described him in those days.

Moving on, I had a number of transgender individuals appear before me in Immigration Court. Almost all of them had been damaged by rejection, abuse, intentional cruelty, and humiliation inflicted by family, governments, teachers, and other community members who should have known better. The majority had either attempted suicide or admitted to having suicidal impulses. Yet, many appeared to have found the courage and determination to persevere.

Sadly, the attempt to deny the legal existence and humanity of transgender individuals seems to be something right out of the “Third Reich Playbook.” Using the law to “pick on,” target, and “legitimize” the dehumanization of already marginalized minorities was a “Hitler specialty.” And, in too many cases, lawyers and the judiciary were more than happy to help out. Some were even eager to “out-Hitler Hitler.”

History will deal harshly with the hate, racism, and intolerance being promoted by the Trump Administration. Where will YOU be recorded as standing! What have YOU done to remove these horrible individuals from public office and to resist their toxic and immoral programs and actions?

PWS

10/21/18

ADAM SERWER IN THE ATLANTIC: The Trump/Sessions/Miller White Nationalist Policies: It’s All About Cruelty & Hate!

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic:

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.

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The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.

Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

Further reading: The most striking thing about Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford

Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant childrenseparated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToomovement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Read Adam Serwer on why the white nationalists are winning

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

Further reading: I know Brett Kavanaugh, but I wouldn’t confirm him

A blockbuster New York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

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I could see it in the mindless clapping, revolting laughter, and sickening glee in the eyes of the ugly, overwhelmingly White crowd (many of them women, although a few of the women didn’t seem amused) behind Trump as he denigrated and mocked Christine Blasey Ford this week.

Also in the angry, distorted snarl of Sen. Lindsey Graham as he absurdly called the Kavanaugh hearings “the most unethical” performance (LG, my man, where were you when Mitch, you, and your colleagues totally stiffed a much better qualified Obama appointment, , without even giving him the courtesy of a hearing?).

Also in the incredibly arrogant, partisan, rude, condescending, and openly misogynistic way that Kavanaugh treated Senator Amy Klobuchar’s totally reasonable inquiry. Would Senator Susan Collins still have voted for “BKavs” if he had treated her that way? I doubt it! But, I guess her women colleagues don’t matter. And, it appears that “Chairman Chuckie” Grassley doesn’t really need or want any GOP women on his “Old Boys Club” (a/k/a Senate Judiciary Committee.) Only Democrat women can hack the stress and workload of serving on a daily basis with the GOP misogynists.

What do you call a party whose “base” glories in the pain and suffering of others? The 21st Century GOP!

It’s an existential threat to the future of our country! If decent folks don’t start using the ballot box to remove the GOP from power at every level, it might be too late for the majority of us to take our country back from the misguided minority who have taken power! Get out the vote in November!

PWS

10-07-18

AGENDA OF HATE AND INTOLERANCE: USDOE SCOFFS AT LAW, MOVES TO TRASH THE RIGHTS OF TRANSGENDER STUDENTS WHO WANT TO USE THE BATHROOM!

https://www.buzzfeed.com/dominicholden/edu-dept-trans-student-bathrooms?utm_term=.mlEGELBLKo#.mlEGELBLKo

Dominic Holden reports for Buzzfeed News:

“The Education Department has told BuzzFeed News it won’t investigate or take action on any complaints filed by transgender students who are banned from restrooms that match their gender identity, charting new ground in the Trump administration’s year-long broadside against LGBT rights.

It’s the first time officials have asserted this position publicly as an interpretation of law. No formal announcement has been made.

For nearly a year, the Trump administration took a less clear stance, with officials saying they were studying the issue. When the Education Department and Justice Department withdrew Obama-era guidance on transgender restroom access in February 2017, Trump’s officials said in a memo and court filings that they would “consider the legal issues involved.” Then last June, the Education Department issued another memo saying it was “permissible” for its civil rights division to dismiss a trans student’s restroom case. However, in those statements, officials never cemented their intent to reject all restroom complaints issued by trans students.

For the past three weeks, BuzzFeed News called and emailed Education Department officials attempting to pinpoint the agency’s position.

Finally on Thursday, Liz Hill, a spokesperson for the agency, responded “yes, that’s what the law says” when asked again if the Education Department holds a current position that restroom complaints from transgender students are not covered by a 1972 federal civil rights law called Title IX.

Asked for further explanation on the department’s position, Hill said Friday, “Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, not gender identity.”

She added that certain types of transgender complaints may be investigated — but not bathroom complaints.

“Where students, including transgender students, are penalized or harassed for failing to conform to sex-based stereotypes, that is sex discrimination prohibited by Title IX,” Hill said. “In the case of bathrooms, however, long-standing regulations provide that separating facilities on the basis of sex is not a form of discrimination prohibited by Title IX.”

The bathroom rule is the Trump administration’s latest step to rescind and undermine LGBT protections. Attorney General Jeff Sessions withdrew a policy protecting transgender workers, while he took the unusual step of jumping into a private lawsuit arguing that anti-gay discrimination was permissible in employment under federal law. Sessions has also argued religious business owners can refuse service to gay customers, even when anti-gay discrimination is banned by state law, and Trump has attempted to ban transgender people from all military service.”

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Homophobia, hate, White Nationalism, scoffing at the rule of law: that’s Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions and the rest of the alt-rightists (like DeVoss) who now represent the GOP. No wonder that these evil clowns were neck and neck in the balloting for the Worst Cabinet Member. Indeed, Gonzo is neck and neck with “John the Con” Mitchell for the worst AG of the “modern era.” And Gonzo hasn’t even been indicted (yet).

I just hope that decent folks will remember who’s pushing this agenda of hate and intolerance.

PWS

02-12-18

“AYATOLLAH ROY” APPARENTLY CAUGHT WITH HIS PANTS DOWN (LITERALLY) AS GOP REMAINS LARGELY IN DENIAL!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/dana-milbank

Dana Milbank in the Washington Post:

“So President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and fellow Republicans think Roy Moore, the GOP Senate nominee from Alabama, should quit his Senate run only “if these allegations are true.”

If true? Four women, on the record in The Post, say Moore, when he was in his 30s, tried to date them as teens, and one of the women says he had sexual contact with her when she was 14 and he was 32. Perhaps Republicans expect video and DNA evidence from 1979 magically to emerge, or a confession by Moore? (He denies the allegations.) More likely they are just dodging so that they can stick with Moore and keep the seat Republican — even if it means having an alleged pedophile join their caucus.

By comparison, there was more integrity in the defense of Moore offered by Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler, who told the Washington Examiner that, even if true, “there’s just nothing immoral or illegal here.” Indeed there’s biblical precedent for Moore’s alleged behavior.

“Take Joseph and Mary,” Zeigler said. “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!

Let us take seriously Zeigler’s justification, which is consistent with Moore’s view that “God’s laws are always superior to man’s laws,” and the Bible stands above the Constitution and other piddling laws of man. It is true that the Bible does not say “thou shalt not strip to thine tighty whities and kiss a 14-year-old and touch her through her bra and underpants.” The Bible also does not specifically prohibit colluding with the Russians, accepting emoluments, money laundering or conspiracy against the United States. So Moore, and for that matter President Trump and his administration, has nothing to worry about.

But if we are to accept the Bible literally as the legal standard (and not, say, age-of-consent laws), we will also have to accept as legal certain other activities in 21st-century America, including:

Sacrificing as a burnt offering your young son (Genesis 22:2) or your daughter, if she comes out of the doors of your house to meet you (Judges 11:30-1, 34-5).

Having rebellious children stoned to death by all the men of the city (Deuteronomy 21:18-21).

Purchasing slaves (Leviticus 25:44-46), selling your daughter as a slave (Exodus 21:7-8) and making sure they submit to their masters, even cruel ones (1 Peter 2:18).

Executing pagan priests on their own altars and burning their bones (2 Kings 23:20-25).

Cutting off the hand of a woman if she grabs the penis of a man who is fighting with her husband (Deuteronomy 25:11-12).

. . . .

There’s no allegation of sexual intercourse, he said, and “Roy Moore fell in love with one of the younger women.” That would be his wife, Kayla, who Zeigler says is 14 years his junior and whom he was dating around that time.

You don’t need a judge and jury, Republicans, to determine that there was something icky going on or that there is something dangerous in having as a senator a man who places God’s law over man’s — and then interprets God’s laws to suit himself.“

**************************

Read the full op-ed at the above link.

Let’s see, “Ayatollah Roy” by his own proud statements is a:

Bigot
Homophobe
Racist
Xenophobe
Scofflaw
Theocrat

He’d love to strip everyone who disagrees with him of their rights while denying their humanity and full citizenship.

In plain terms, “Ayatollah Roy” is total perversion of everything it truly means to be an American living under our Constitution. So, does it really make much difference if he’s also a sexual pervert? Perversion seems to make no difference to the so-called voters in the “GOP Caliphite of Alabama.” Their truly despicable past is prologue. So, there is little reason to believe that the latest Moore disgrace will make any difference to such out of touch and tone deaf folks.

PWS

11-10-17

Doubt the comparison? Check this out:

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

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Sarah Churchwell writes in the WashPost:

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

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Vote for Biden,Harris and Democrats for the return of human decency, morality, reasonableness, and ethics to Government!

PWS

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