Saturday, June 29, 2019

Trump Gets Walled Off

A federal judge has issued a permanent injunction against the Trump regime, blocking use of military funds for Trump's border wall vanity project.

U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam issued the permanent injunction in a California federal court after initially ruling last month to temporarily halt the administration’s use of military funds for the border wall.

President Trump declared a national emergency earlier this year in order to divert roughly $6 billion in Defense Department funds toward border wall construction. Friday's ruling blocks the administration from using $2.5 billion in military funds for a border wall.

The injunction halts border wall construction at different sites in New Mexico, California, Arizona and Texas, expanding Gilliam's previous ruling.

Gilliam, an Obama appointee, made the ruling on the military funds in a lawsuit brought forward by several groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Sierra Club, challenging the diversion of the military funds under the scope of the national emergency order.

The Trump administration had argued that the use of the military funds was lawful under the scope of the national emergency, as the need for the funding was "unforeseen." And the lawyers claimed that if they are unable to award the federal dollars to contractors by the end of the fiscal year, they may lose the funding.

In his ruling Friday, Gilliam wrote that the administration lawyers "present no new evidence or argument for why the court should depart from its prior decision, and it will not."

"Because no new factual or legal arguments persuade the court that its analysis in the preliminary injunction order was wrong, [the groups’] likelihood of success on the merits has ripened into actual success," the ruling reads.

The judge also found that the groups suing to block use of military funds for the wall would suffer "irreparable harm" over border wall construction because it "will harm their ability to recreate in and otherwise enjoy public land along the border."

This was always going to head to the Supreme Court, but at least in the meanwhile Trump won't be able to build a couple of miles of "wall" and then claim that he's already done it and that he has to be allowed to finish.

Well, I take that back, HE'LL DO THAT ANYWAY.

The RIse Of Birtherism 2.0

You can tell Kamala Harris did well in the debate earlier this week because of the vile and near-instant counter-attack on her race by trolls, bots, and of course, Trump's dipstick racist son.

Kamala Harris broke out from the other nine Democrats onstage during the second Democratic presidential primary debate on Thursday, calling on her personal experiences of racial injustice as a black woman.

“As the only black person on this stage, I would like to speak on the issue of race,” Harris said.

That’s when she was attacked on Twitter by a conservative provocateur for not being an “American black.” It’s a play straight out of the racist birther playbook used against Barack Obama when he ran for president a decade earlier. This time, though, those kinds of allegations don’t have to circulate for years on obscure right-wing forums before they reach a mainstream audience. On Thursday night, spammers and even one of President Trump’s sons spread the attack to millions of people within hours.

Harris, 54, was born in Oakland, California to a father from Jamaica and a mother from India. She spoke of her experience growing up black in the debate, recalling a story about neighbors who wouldn’t let their children play with Harris and her sister because of the color of their skin.

The attacks on Harris’s background started Thursday when Ali Alexander tweeted she is not an “American black.”

“She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” Alexander wrote. “I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people. Freaking disgusting.”

Alexander’s claim was picked up by Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted it to his nearly 3.6 million followers.

“Is this true?” Trump Jr. wrote. “Wow.”

Trump Jr., who later deleted his tweet, wasn’t the only one using Alexander’s tweet to question Harris’s ethnicity.

Harris’s team denounced the comment as racist. “This is the same type of racist attacks his father used to attack Barack Obama. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now,” a Harris spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

More Twitter users copied and pasted Alexander’s message verbatim and tweeted it as their own, according to screenshots posted by writer Caroline Orr. Some of those accounts, like “@prebs_73,” have copy-pasted other popular right-wing tweets verbatim. Other accounts with right-wing references in their usernames and biographies piled on, accusing Harris of not being black.

“Ummmmm @KamalaHarris you are NOT BLACK. you are Indian and Jamaican,” wrote a Twitter user with a cross emoji, the word “CONSERVATIVE,” a red “X” emoji (a right-wing Twitter trope), and three stars (a QAnon symbol) in their username.

Some of these racist attacks incorrectly claim that Harris was born in Canada (and therefore not eligible for the presidency) on top of the attacks on her race and of course, the laeft-wing Sanders attacks of "Kamala is a cop" that the right has picked up.

It's the same thing as 2008, with the same goal as 2016: to depress black turnout and drive black voters away from caring enough to vote.

And yes, Trump's family is immediately jumping in on this.

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