Monday, July 8, 2019

Last Call For Trumping The Center

NY Times columnist Jamelle Bouie turns the tables on the whole "Why aren't Democrats moving to the center that Trump is leaving behind" nonsense in the Village press by being just about the first person to ask "Why isn't Donald Trump tacking to the center?"

What is President Trump going to do to win the voters who rejected him in 2016?

It’s a serious question. Roughly 137 million people voted in the last presidential election. Most of them — about 74 million people, or 54 percent of all ballots cast — did not vote for Trump. His self-proclaimed “massive landslide” rests on a thin margin of victory in just three states.

Once in office, Trump abandoned the heterodox Republicanism of his campaign for hard-right policies opposed by most Americans. He fought to repeal the Affordable Care Act. When that failed, he pushed for an unpopular upper-income tax cut. He reveled in cruelty toward immigrants and took the side of racist demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va. He governs for his base alone, with no sense or understanding of the collective good.

“I have a base that’s a phenomenal — it’s just a phenomenal base,” Trump said in a recent interview with Time magazine. “It’s a very loyal base and I’m loyal to them also.” When asked if he should reach beyond his supporters, he answered simply, “ I think my base is so strong, I’m not sure that I have to do that.”

As a result, the narrow coalition that put him in office is even narrower. The 2018 backlash that gave Democrats a majority in the House of Representatives was built on major gains in Republican-leaning suburbs throughout the country, as a small but still substantial number of 2016 Trump voters either cast a ballot for Democrats or didn’t vote at all.

Trump’s approval rating is nearly 10 points under water, meaning that over all, people disapprove of his performance as president by a large margin (52.3 to 42.7 percent); in several recent polls he loses hypothetical matchups with Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg; and as of April, 52 percent of registered voters said they “definitely” wouldn’t vote for him in 2020. He still has the economy on his side, but if the president doesn’t try to reach out to voters outside of his base — if he doesn’t try to appeal to Democrats and Republicans who rejected him in 2016 — there’s a good chance he’ll lose re-election.

It's a fabulous work, made all the more poignant by the fact that if we had a press actually capable of assigning agency and responsibility for Trump alienating the majority of Americans rather than assigning it solely to Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama.

Our press refuses to treat Trump like an adult, instead making it all the Dems' fault for not handling him.  Glad to see anybody, anybody at all, handling it differently.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Trump regime Attorney General William Barr says the White House can simply ignore last month's Supreme Court ruling stopping the government from adding a citizenship question on to the 2020 Census, and will promptly begin the process of doing so.

Attorney General William Barr said Monday that he believes the Trump administration can legally add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, though the Supreme Court ruled against its inclusion last month.


In an interview with the Associated Press, Barr said he has been in regular contact with President Trump about the question, which the president is determined to see featured on the decennial survey.

“I agree with him that the Supreme Court decision was wrong,” Barr told the AP. The attorney general added that he thinks there is “an opportunity potentially to cure the lack of clarity that was the problem and we might as well take a shot at doing that.”

Barr declined to provide further details to the wire service on how the question will be added to the census.

However, the AP cited a senior official who said President Trump is expected to issue a presidential memorandum to the Commerce Department directing them to include the citizenship question on the 2020 census. Action is expected to be taken in the coming days.

So unless the courts intervene again, we have zero rule of law anymore, and Trump will simply issue executive orders to do whatever he wants.  Even if SCOTUS does get involved, there's a better-than-even chance that Chief Justice Roberts will defer to the executive, and the plan to permanently rig the election in favor of the party of white supremacy will continue.

Deportation Nation, Con't


Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through hundreds of millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.

Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by Georgetown Law researchers and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state Department of Motor Vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure.
Police have long had access to fingerprints, DNA and other “biometric data” taken from criminal suspects. But the DMV records contain the photos of a vast majority of a state’s residents, most of whom have never been charged with a crime.

Neither Congress nor state legislatures have authorized the development of such a system, and growing numbers of Democratic and Republican lawmakers are criticizing the technology as a dangerous, pervasive and error-prone surveillance tool.

“Law enforcement’s access of state databases,” particularly DMV databases, is “often done in the shadows with no consent,” House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) said in a statement to The Post.

Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), the House Oversight Committee’s ranking Republican, seemed particularly incensed during a hearing into the technology last month at the use of driver’s license photos in federal facial-recognition searches without the approval of state legislators or individual license holders.

“They’ve just given access to that to the FBI,” he said. “No individual signed off on that when they renewed their driver’s license, got their driver’s licenses. They didn’t sign any waiver saying, ‘Oh, it’s okay to turn my information, my photo, over to the FBI.’ No elected officials voted for that to happen.”

Despite those doubts, federal investigators have turned facial recognition into a routine investigative tool. Since 2011, the FBI has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches of federal and local databases, including state DMV databases, the Government Accountability Office said last month, and the records show that federal investigators have forged daily working relationships with DMV officials. In Utah, FBI and ICE agents logged more than 1,000 facial-recognition searches between 2015 and 2017, the records show. Names and other details are hidden, though dozens of the searches are marked as having returned a “possible match.”

San Francisco and Somerville, Mass., have banned their police and public agencies from using facial-recognition software, citing concerns about governmental overreach and a breach of public trust, and the subject is being hotly debated in Washington. On Wednesday, officials with the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection and the Secret Service are expected to testify at a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security about their agencies’ use of the technology.

The records show the technology already is tightly woven into the fabric of modern law enforcement. They detailed the regular use of facial recognition to track down suspects in low-level crimes, including cashing a stolen check and petty theft. And searches are often executed with nothing more formal than an email from a federal agent to a local
contact, the records show.

“It’s really a surveillance-first, ask-permission-later system,” said Jake Laperruque, a senior counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. “People think this is something coming way off in the future, but these [facial-recognition] searches are happening very frequently today. The FBI alone does 4,000 searches every month, and a lot of them go through state DMVs.”

The good news is that both Republicans and Democrats seem pretty upset with the Big Brother surveillance state, but that's probably the extent of it.  We've been living in the era of facial recognition and tracking for several years now, and that's not going to change.

Expect it in fact to get worse as ICE comes in and uses this tech to track undocumented in real time. New Deportation Commissar Ken Cuccinelli is claiming ICE is now ready to conduct mass arrests and mass deportations in one of the biggest police crackdowns in history.

The Trump administration's top official at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said immigration authorities are ready to identify, detain and eventually deport approximately one million undocumented immigrants with pending removal orders.
"They're ready to just perform their mission, which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately one million people who have final removal orders," Acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) branch charged with removal operations.

Cuccinelli, an immigration hardliner who took the helm of the agency last month, said it is within ICE's discretion to determine who among those with final orders of deportation will be targeted in operations, suggesting the full pool of approximately one million immigrants might not face deportation after all.

"They've been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders. Who among those will be targeted for this particular effort ... is really just information kept within ICE at this point," he added. "The pool of those with final removal orders is enormous."

I've been warning about this for years now.  Trump got cold feet last month.  Next time he won't, and this country will erupt when he makes his move.

StupidiNews!

Back on track after a holiday weekend, so here we go with the news: