Sunday Long Read: A Situation Depp Ending

This week's Sunday Long Read is Stephen Rodrick's detailed Rolling Stone chronicle of actor Johnny Depp's decade-plus crash and burn routine, where in the era of #MeToo, there may not be anyone in Hollywood less prepared and less able to make the transition to the future of entertainment.

Johnny Depp isn't here yet. Still, his presence is all around the 10,500-square-foot rented mansion at 16 Bishopswood Road in London's Highgate neighborhood.

He is here in the busy hands of Russell, his personal chef working up the Peking duck. He is here in the stogie-size joint left by the sink in the guest bathroom. He is here in the never-ending reservoir of wine that is poured into goblets. And he is here in a half-done painting upstairs that features a burning black house, a child Johnny and an angry woman who resembles his mother, Betty Sue.

And then he is actually here. He is in the living room, crooning his entrance: "Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, my darling Clementine. You are lost and gone forever, my darling Clementine."

Depp has come from a photo shoot for the Hollywood Vampires, his sometime band that features Alice Cooper and Joe Perry. Trailing behind is his lawyer Adam Waldman. Depp is dressed like a Forties gangster, jet-black hair slicked back, pinstripes, suspenders and spats. His face is puffy, but Depp still possesses the fixating brown eyes that have toggled between dreamy and menacing during his 35-year career. Now, Depp's studious leer is reminiscent of late-era Marlon Brando. This isn't a coincidence, since Depp has long built his life by imitating his legends – buying an island like Brando, becoming an expert on quaaludes like Hunter S. Thompson.

"Hey, I'm Johnny. Good to meet you."

He reaches out a right hand whose fingers recently had their tats changed from "slim" – a reference to his ex-wife Amber Heard – to "scum."

"So are you here to hear the truth?" asks Depp as Russell brings him a glass of vintage red wine. "It's full of betrayal."

We move to the dining room for a three-course meal of pad thai, duck and gingerbread with berries. Depp sits at the head of the table and motions toward some rolling papers and two equal piles of tobacco and hash, and asks if I mind. I don't. He pauses for a second. "Well, let's drink some wine first."

This goes on for 72 hours.

It had taken a month and almost 200 e-mails for the message to become clear: Come to London; Johnny Depp wants to bare his soul about his empty bank accounts.

It's estimated that Depp has made $650 million on films that netted $3.6 billion. Almost all of it is gone. He's suing The Management Group, run by his longtime business manager, Joel Mandel, and his brother Robert for negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and fraud. The suit cites, among other things, that under TMG's watch Depp's sister Christi was given $7 million and his assistant, Nathan Holmes, $750,000, without his knowledge, and that he has paid the IRS more than $5.6 million in late fees. (Most of the ire is directed toward Joel, who had day-to-day responsibility for Depp's account.) There are additional charges of conflict of interest, saying that TMG invested Depp's money for its own purposes and returned it without profit. The suit seeks more than $25 million from TMG, accounting for "tens of millions" it claims TMG illegally took for its commission, plus any additional damages the court sees fit.

The Mandels categorically deny all wrongdoing and are countersuing, alleging that Depp breached his oral contract with the company. The suit suggests that Depp has a $2-million-a-month compulsory-spending disorder, offering bons mots like "Wine is not an investment if you drink it as soon as you buy it." Depp was continuing to "concoct malicious and false allegations" against the company, according to TMG's countersuit, because TMG had filed a private foreclosure notice on one of Depp's properties, claiming Depp owes TMG $4.2 million in unpaid loans.

Over the past 18 months, there has been little but bad news for Depp. In addition to the financial woes, there were reports he couldn't remember his lines and had to have them fed to him through an earpiece. He had split from his longtime lawyer and agent. And he was alone. His tabloid-scarred divorce from actress Heard is complete, but not before there were persuasive allegations of physical abuse that Depp vehemently denies. Depp's inner circle had begged him to not wed Heard or to at least obtain a prenup. Depp ignored his loved ones' advice. And there were whispers that Depp's recreational drug and alcohol use were crippling him.

During my London visit, Depp is alternately hilarious, sly and incoherent. The days begin after dark and run until first light. There is a scared, hunted look about him. Despite grand talks about hitting the town, we never leave the house. As Depp's mind leads us down various rabbit holes, I often think of a line that he recited as the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland: "Have I gone mad?"

His closest confidant seems to be Waldman, a lawyer he met less than two years ago. Waldman, 49, possesses an unlined face, sandy hair, a designer black leather jacket and a soothing voice that could make the bird-flu epidemic sound reasonable. He tells me he is married to the "world's number-one face doctor."

Depp seems oblivious to any personal complicity in his current predicament. Waldman seems to have convinced Depp that they are freedom fighters taking on the Hollywood machine rather than scavengers squabbling over the scraps of a fortune squandered.

One day, Depp shows me his artwork, and it strikes me that Depp is now a worn Dorian Gray. "I imagine Johnny doing a version of Jack Sparrow at 70, at 80," his friend Penélope Cruz tells me. "It will be as charming and as great." But the things that were charming when he was 28 – doing drugs and running around the scaffolding on a high floor of Atlantic Records' L.A. building – seem disturbing at 55. (Cruz ends our conversation by telling me about Depp trying to pull his own tooth at a London restaurant while having dinner with her and Stella McCartney.)

Maybe being a permanent Peter Pan is the key to Depp's onscreen charm. But time has passed. Boyish insouciance has slowly morphed into an aging man-child, still charismatic but only in glimpses. If his current life isn't a perfect copy of Elvis Presley's last days, it is a decent facsimile.

The guy is a walking bad decision, through and through.  As the "motivational" poster says, sometimes the point of your entire life is to serve as an example of what not to do, ass a warning to others.  Yes, Depp has been taken advantage of, but he still has nobody but himself to blame for the choices he's made, and the clear wrongs that he has done to others, the story does not gloss over the damage he has done to the people in his life.

It's a good piece, but far from a cheerful one.

Border Line Sociopaths

As I said Thursday, Donald Trump is losing the battle on child separation at the border to win his war on immigration.

No, the real issue here is Trump and Jeff Sessions and their zero-tolerance policy at the border, announced back in April.  This is the real outrage we should be fighting, it's immoral, inhumane, and illegal.  People are being detained at the border before they can even seek to apply for asylum.  Instead, Trump has shifted the argument and the outrage to child separation after families are detained, and yesterday shifted back to mass zero-tolerance detainment as seemingly more humane by comparison.

Trump lost this battle, but he lost it on purpose and in such a way that it gives him the opportunity to win the war.  It's a classic abuser tactic, and I'm afraid that the rest of us are the ones who will really end up caving as zero-tolerance at the border becomes zero-tolerance inside the United States for undocumented immigrants.

There's now additional evidence that this is true.  Trump has shifted the debate so far past whether or not his zero tolerance policy is acceptable that we're stuck debating whether we should detain everyone and keep them together as families, of if we should detain everyone and separate kids and parents.

We're still detaining everyone, and Americans are definitely letting Trump escape blame for his zero tolerance immigration stance.

The Trump administration’s contradictory responses to the outrage over its family separation policy may have clouded public opinion about why the families were separated and who bears responsibility, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds.

The White House has gone through more than a dozen rationales, changing its story repeatedly on whether separating undocumented children from their parents at the border was an administration policy, whether it was intended as a deterrent, whether it was mandated by law and whether it could be reversed by executive order. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, after defending the policy as a deterrent, claimed Thursday that the administration had never intended to separate families, noting that “the American people don’t like the idea.”

The concept of family separation does remain deeply unpopular. The latest survey, in line with past polling, found that fewer than a third of the public considered separations to be acceptable.

Those who thought the policy was acceptable were more or less evenly split between the 48 percent who said removing children from their parents was a good thing because it served as a deterrent and the 44 percent who said it wasn’t a good thing but it was necessary to carry out U.S. immigration policy. Among those who found it unacceptable, 79 percent said they were angry that the separations were happening. (The poll was conducted largely before President Donald Trump issued an executive order Wednesday tweaking the policy to detain the children with their parents.)

There was little consensus among Americans on who bears responsibility for the separations. Just 36 percent thought the Trump administration bore at least some responsibility, several points less than the 44 percent who put at least some of the blame on undocumented parents. Slightly over a third judged the parents to hold the most responsibility; slightly under a third said the Trump administration was most responsible.

HUFFPOST

That's right, less than a third of Americans blame Trump for his own stated policy.  The same amount blame parents bringing their kids, and one in ten people actually buy Trump's lies and blame the Democrats.

Responses to the unfolding drama were especially muddled among Trump voters. Nearly three-quarters of Trump voters said they found the practice of family separation acceptable, with those who did about evenly split over whether the separations were actually a good thing. Just 11 percent of them, however, thought the Trump administration was intentionally separating families, and under a quarter said the Trump administration considered the separations a good thing. Asked who should bear at least some responsibility, 83 percent named undocumented parents and 47 percent pointed at congressional Democrats, with just 8 percent blaming the White House.

No, the Trump cultists are still absolutely behind Dear Leader on this.  Only 8% -- eight percent, mind you -- of Trump voters think the White House bears any responsibility whatsoever.   That means 92% of Trump voters are willing to let Trump get away with child internment camps.

Clinton voters, on the other hand, basically the exact opposite.

Ninety-three percent of voters who supported Hillary Clinton, by contrast, considered the separations unacceptable. Ninety percent said the Trump administration was intentionally separating families and 81 percent said the administration deserved at least some responsibility for what was happening.

No, at this point Trump voters are still enslaved by the Cult of Trump on this.  More than 9 in 10 Trump voters refuse to blame Trump for Trump's policy, and Trump knows he can move on to the next stage in the plan as soon as the logistics are in place.

The U.S. Navy is preparing plans to construct sprawling detention centers for tens of thousands of immigrants on remote bases in California, Alabama and Arizona, escalating the military’s task in implementing President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy for people caught crossing the Southern border, according to a copy of a draft memo obtained by TIME.

The internal document, drafted for the Navy Secretary’s approval, signals how the military is anticipating its role in Trump’s immigration crackdown. The planning document indicates a potential growing military responsibility in an administration caught flat-footed in having to house waves of migrants awaiting civilian criminal proceedings.

The Navy memo outlines plans to build “temporary and austere” tent cities to house 25,000 migrants at abandoned airfields just outside the Florida panhandle near Mobile, Alabama, at Navy Outlying Field Wolf in Orange Beach, Alabama, and nearby Navy Outlying Field Silverhill.

The memo also proposes a camp for as many as 47,000 people at former Naval Weapons Station Concord, near San Francisco; and another facility that could house as many as 47,000 people at Camp Pendleton, the Marines’ largest training facility located along the Southern California coast. The planning memo proposes further study of housing an undetermined number of migrants at the Marine Corps Air Station near Yuma, Arizona.

The planning document estimates that the Navy would spend about $233 million to construct and operate a facility for 25,000 people for a six-month time period. The proposal suggests these tent cities be built to last between six months and one year.

A lot more immigrants are going to be detained.  And it will not be long before -- as I've said repeatedly now -- that the Trump regime will start rounding up immigrants already in the US to place in these internment camps.

Surely this is the bridge too far, right? And despite Chuck Pierce thinking this is a moment that could break America's Trump fever, I don't buy that for a second.

The country’s head is clearing. The country’s vision is coming back into focus and it can see for the first time the length and breadth of the damage it has done to itself. The country is hearing the voices that the cacophony of fear and anger had drowned out for almost three years. The spell, such as it was, and in most places, may be wearing off at last. The hallucinatory effect of a reality-show presidency* is dispersing like a foul, smoky mist over a muddy battlefield.

The migrant crisis is going to go down through history as one of the most destructive series of own-goals in the history of American politics. The establishment of the “zero-tolerance” policy made the child-nabbing inevitable. The president*’s own rhetoric—indeed, the raison d’etre of his entire campaign—trapped him into at first defending the indefensible and then abandoning what was perhaps the only consistent policy idea he ever had—outside of enriching himself and his family, that is. Then the cameras began to roll, and the nation’s gorge began to rise, and the president* couldn’t stand the pressure that was mounting around him. Of course, because he knows nothing about anything, including how to actually be president*, he bungled even his own abject surrender. He’s spent the days since signing his executive order railing against what he felt compelled to do and arguing against himself and losing anyway.

Unless he's losing on purpose, as I have explained.  If you're expecting Trump voters to start abandoning him over this, for the fever to break, then you simply haven't been paying attention.

Gina Anders knows the feeling well by now. President Trump says or does something that triggers a spasm of outrage. She doesn’t necessarily agree with how he handled the situation. She gets why people are upset.

But Ms. Anders, 46, a Republican from suburban Loudoun County, Va., with a law degree, a business career, and not a stitch of “Make America Great Again” gear in her wardrobe, is moved to defend him anyway.

“All nuance and all complexity — and these are complex issues — are completely lost,” she said, describing “overblown” reactions from the president’s critics, some of whom equated the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children and parents to history’s greatest atrocities.

“It makes me angry at them, which causes me to want to defend him to them more,” Ms. Anders said.

In interviews across the country over the last few days, dozens of Trump voters, as well as pollsters and strategists, described something like a bonding experience with the president that happens each time Republicans have to answer a now-familiar question: “How can you possibly still support this man?” Their resilience suggests a level of unity among Republicans that could help mitigate Mr. Trump’s low overall approval ratings and aid his party’s chances of keeping control of the House of Representatives in November.

“He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff,” said Tony Schrantz, 50, of Lino Lakes, Minn., the owner of a water systems leak detection business. “But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old. Give the guy a little.”

Republican voters repeatedly described an instinctive, protective response to the president, and their support has grown in recent months: Mr. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is now about 90 percent. And while polling has yet to capture the effect of the last week’s immigration controversy, the only modern Republican president more popular with his party than Mr. Trump at this point in his first term, according to Gallup, was George W. Bush after the country united in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

After 18 months of being in office, there is no sign Trump will moderate his behavior, no indication that he will "grow into the job", and no scintilla of a chance his followers will leave him.

They are a cult.  They are bound to him for better or worse.  The people in that NY Times account are using the language of those in an emotionally abusive relationship, in this case, with America.  They love America, but America doesn't love them back.

And there *is* no better.  Only worse.

Unless we prevail with an intervention in November, and even then...well, it all starts with that.

The War On The Impoverished

The latest UN report on world poverty is out and the Trump regime is livid that anyone would dare mention the fact that poverty not only exists in America but that the Trump regime is actively trying to lower to standards of living of Americans and working to destroy anti-poverty programs.

A United Nations report condemning entrenched poverty in the United States is a "misleading and politically motivated" document about "the wealthiest and freest country in the world," the Trump administration's top U.N. official said. 

U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley criticized the report for critiquing the United States' treatment of its poor, arguing that the United Nations should instead focus on poverty in developing countries such as Burundi and Congo Republic. The U.N. report also faulted the Trump administration for pursuing policies it said would exacerbate U.S. poverty. 

"It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America," Haley wrote in a letter to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday. "In our country, the President, Members of Congress, Governors, Mayors, and City Council members actively engage on poverty issues every day. Compare that to the many countries around the world, whose governments knowingly abuse human rights and cause pain and suffering."

The rebuke comes two days after Haley announced the United States' resignation from the U.N. Human Rights Council over that body's perceived bias against Israel and toleration of human rights abusers.

"There are really poor people in Africa you know!" is actually kind of funny coming from the former governor of South Carolina, a state constantly at or near the bottom in national poverty statistics, especially for black folk.  Sure, being poor and hungry in America isn't as awful as Yemen or South Sudan, but it doesn't mean people don't die in America because they can't afford to live here.

In May, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston released a report saying the United States has the highest rates of youth poverty, infant mortality, incarceration, income inequality and obesity among all countries in the developed world, as well as 40 million people living in poverty. Alston accused President Trump and the Republican Congress of deepening poverty and inequality in the country, citing the Republican tax law passed last fall.

"The policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege," Alston wrote in the report.

Haley pushed back in Thursday's letter, arguing that the administration had created a strong economy that would lift people out of poverty and that Alston's report was premised on misleading statistics. Haley said the U.N. special rapporteur had "categorically misstated" the progress America had made reducing poverty, but she gave no examples.

"I am deeply disappointed that the Special Rapporteur used his platform to make misleading and politically motivated statements about American domestic policy issues," Haley said. "Regrettably, his report is an all too common example of the misplaced priorities [of the U.N.]."

Haley's response is exactly what I'd expect out of China's Communist bureaucracy, North Korea's state media, or India's technocratic dog and pony show.  Poverty in the US is very real for tens of millions of people, but we live in the richest country ever to exist, and being poor here still means you can be homeless, you can go hungry, and you can die from not being able to afford basics.

Of course she's going to scream and pretend like that's not happening.

The Pendejo Soybean War

Another day, another piece on Real Americans In The Heartland who now have buyer's remorse over the racist crapsack they had no problem voting for in November 2016, but now that Trump's trade war is destroying their livelihoods, maybe it's time for a second look at those dirty hippies again.

"This isn't just numbers on a sheet or percentage of trade or dollar value," said Michael Petefish, a 33-year old Trump supporter and fifth generation farmer in southern Minnesota. 

Standing on the farm he will likely run for the next 40 years, he added, "This is multi-generational American families, your base, that you are now squarely putting into financial peril." 

Petefish is one of the thousands of farmers who have seen the price of their crops tank in the face of escalating trade rhetoric between the United States and China. Growers in the area talk of their farms losing over $200,000 in value as commodity prices slump, all while the back and forth between the two countries has played out like a game of chicken, with each side trying to one up each other by raising the size of tariffs they plan to implement on each other. 

After Trump announced that he planned to implement tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods last week, the Chinese Commerce Ministry accused the United States of starting a trade war and said it will retaliate. Trump and his top aides have said they are implementing the tariffs to protect American intellectual property, but farmers like those here in southern Minnesota who are now under the threat of Chinese tariffs feel like collateral damage in a fight full of unintended consequences. 

"I cringe," Dale Stevermer, a soybean farmer and pork producer, said when asked about President Donald Trump's tit-for-tat trade spat with China. "When a tariff even gets talked about, it makes both the buyers and the sellers jumpy. It's going to impact my bottom line, it's going to impact my business livelihood, and, to an extent, it becomes a mental outlook." 

Standing on the Easton, Minnesota farm he was raised on, near the apple tree where he met his wife and the fields where he made a living for himself, Stevermer took a long pause. 

"It's hard not to have some down days," he said, looking out on his 200 acres of soybeans. 

Dale Stevermer wouldn't say who he voted for in 2016, but his wife, Lori, said she voted Republican. 

Rural  voters knew exactly what they were voting for, and exactly who they were voting for. As I keep saying, best case scenario for every single person who voted for Donald Trump was that his overt racism, sexism, and vulgarity wasn't a dealbreaker and was an acceptable "character flaw" they were willing to overlook, so they rolled the dice.

Eventually you come up snake eyes and lose.

The political irony for people like Petefish and others in southern Minnesota is that they helped propel Trump to the White House, backing the businessman-turned-politician because, in part, they felt he understood their needs better than Hillary Clinton. Trump only lost Minnesota by 2% in 2016, coming close to becoming the first Republican to win it since Richard Nixon. 

Farmers in the area are not ready to say they regret their vote for Trump but are closely watching how they will fare in the intensifying trade fight as they consider whether to break with the Republican Party in November. 

"We have got about a month and a half where we can play with this thing and then after that, these prices have to be corrected, so we urge the administration to do what it has to do and do it quickly," said Tom Slunecka, the CEO of the Minnesota Soybean Association. "If we get into harvest with prices like they are, it will decimate much of farm country." 

And it is not just Minnesota that will be impacted. States like Iowa and Illinois, both of which feature top House races this November, produce millions of bushels every year.
"Right now, people are overcome with risk," said Dan Feehan, the Democrat vying to represent southern Minnesota in Congress come November. "Those who chose to vote for the President two years ago did so because they felt anxiety about what their future and have seen things get worse."

And yet, we're still pretending it was "economic anxiety".  I'm gonna say losing 200 grand off the value of your farm because of this guy might be much more of an economic hit than anything Clinton would have done, even worst-case, but of course the economics were never the real reason people perfectly okay with racism chose to vote for the racist.

When Mike and Dale and their wives and kids and parents and neighbors and friends all vote for Republicans in 2018 and 2020, with Hillary Clinton nowhere near being on a ballot, will we still be using that "economic anxiety" line?

Last Call For A Hard Six, Heading For Seven

It's an uncomfortable subject to say the least, but human rights group Genocide Watch has identified ten stages of any government-created genocide over the years, and I'll be damned if the Trump regime isn't more than halfway into the process.






So let's get this out of the way up front: the United States has done this before, with Native Americans it was flat out genocide all the way down, with black slave massacres and lynchings reaching genocidal levels in several instances and eight of ten nationally, we came very close on this list during internment of Japanese-Americans in WW II through seven steps, we got more than halfway down this list after 9/11 and you can make the argument that we never really went back up this list when it comes to black people or Muslims in this country.

If you look where the Trump regime is now on immigrants, particularly Latinx immigrants, we're marching our way down this chart yet again.

Trump was in the middle of number six there today with his awful White House rally where he exploited the families of victims of gang killings.  Numbers 1-4 have been in operation since Day One of the regime, Trump engages in those regularly along with members of his party, as well as the transformation of ICE into the fifth point. At the very least we are at a hard, hard six as evidenced by Trump's regular campaign rallies and events like this, broadcast freely.  Trump gets plenty of assistance from state media at FOX too.




The problem now is at least at the border, we're moving into step seven.  Kids in cages, detainment facilities are being set up, military bases being converted, private prison industries springing up to profit.  Seven is well under way and will continue as the Trump regime devotes more resources into logistics and infrastructure for mass detainment.

And again, the assist here is from state media, like Sinclair Broadcast Group.




I understand that it's a big jump to go from seven to eight, and of course an exponential leap from eight to nine, but again we're already into seven as of this spring, and completing that step is a current stated goal of this administration.  Again, there's no disputing we're at a hard, hard six, well into seven, which means eight really isn't that far behind, guys, especially the theft of property once these efforts are fully turned inward against people already in the US.  Once that infrastructure is in place, it's going to be used.

The actual killing part?  History says that's going to come, especially to those who resist this government detainment.  We're already seeing ICE raids by the new Brownshirts, the transition from detainment to violence will be necessary to maintain Trump's control.  There will be a key incident, something that goes horribly wrong, something that will become deadly violence during one of these future ICE raids or Border Patrol operations and once that line is crossed we're not going back.

Once that jump is made, nine is on the horizon.  It is absolutely happening here, now, in America.  There doesn't seem to be any effort at slowing it down or stopping it.  We have a chance to change that in November, but that's a long way away.

Trump knows he can use this to help the GOP in November, he's already doing it.  The only question is if he'll decide to go this far to make that jump, because that's definitely the plan.

I don't know if we can stop it, but this is as sobering as it comes, folks.  This is real.

Be careful out there.

Wrecking The Net

While America was focused on Trump's awful immigration detention policy, the White House quietly announced plans this week to make massive austerity cuts to social programs by eliminating the Department of Education by combining it with the Department of Labor, and then wrecking the budget of both.

President Trump, spurred on by conservatives who want him to slash safety net programs, unveiled on Thursday a plan to overhaul the federal government that could have a profound effect on millions of poor and working-class Americans.

Produced over the last year by Mr. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, it would reshuffle social welfare programs in a way that would make them easier to cut, scale back or restructure, according to several administration officials involved in the planning.

Among the most consequential ideas is a proposal to shift the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a subsistence benefit that provides aid to 42 million poor and working Americans, from the Agriculture Department to a new mega-agency that would have “welfare” in its title — a term Mr. Trump uses as a pejorative catchall for most government benefit programs.

That proposal, which includes an equally ambitious plan to merge the Education and Labor Departments to consolidate work force programs, is not likely to gain the congressional approval needed to make the changes, Mr. Mulvaney’s aides conceded in a phone call with reporters on Thursday.

If it doesn't have the votes, why bother?  Same reason the GOP had 50+ votes on destroying Obamacare: red meat for the base in order rally the troops ahead of midterms.

But the rollout has a bigger long-term purpose, said Margaret Weichert, one of Mr. Mulvaney’s deputies who drafted the proposal. She cast the proposal as a rallying cry for “small government” and said the audacity of the plan proved “why many Americans voted for this president.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, joked on Thursday that the plan was “extraordinarily boring” before TV cameras in the Cabinet Room.

But being boring in an all-too-exciting White House has provided cover for a small army of conservatives and think tank veterans who have been quietly churning out dozens of initiatives like the proposal to reshuffle the cabinet, with the ultimate goal of dismantling the American social welfare system from the inside out.

“Our guys have been in there since the start, grinding it out, and basically no one is noticing it except the smart liberals like Rachel Maddow,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former adviser, who believes the attack on social programs will be one of Mr. Trump’s most enduring policy achievements.

“It is one of the reasons Trump is at like 97 percent with the base. This is what the base wants,” he said. Referring to the right-wing conspiracy theorist who hosts a popular radio show and the progressive consumer activists allied with Ralph Nader, who became a force in Democratic politics in the 1970s, he added: “Trust me, it’s not Alex Jones that’s driving things. It’s these guys — they are our version of ‘Nader’s Raiders.’”

Philip G. Alston, a New York University professor and the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, agreed with Mr. Bannon’s assessment. “My sense is they are making very considerable progress, even though no one is paying much attention,” he said.

But Mr. Alston, author of a recent study on endemic poverty in American cities and the rural South, has a different view of what Mr. Trump’s aides are trying to do. “There is a contempt for the poor that seems to permeate the president’s inner circle that seems very worrying,” he said. “It’s done under the banner of providing opportunity and seeking long-term solutions but it all seems designed to increase misery.”

I've told you time and again that the chief goal of Trump's administration is to punish Obama voters by reversing every Obama policy he can find that ever helped people, helped people including Trump voters.  The biggest percentage of recipients of benefits like SNAP and cash assistance and school lunches are white, but the vast majority of white Americans and especially Trump voters believe the exact opposite.

So yeah, Trump and the GOP are coming to destroy these programs, and the people who benefit from them the most will cheer their demise, for the simple reason that they believe only those people will be hurt by the cuts, and that Trump will protect his white voters.

Unless we get rid of these guys in November, that will be the goal in 2019.

The Farm Team Strikes Again

House Republicans managed to accidentally pass a farm bill that has no chance in the Senate, which I guess makes GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan only 99.4% incompetent at his job.

A deeply polarizing farm bill passed the House on party lines Thursday, a month after the legislation went down to stunning defeat after getting ensnared in the toxic politics of immigration. 

The legislation, which passed 213-211, includes controversial new work rules for most adult food-stamp recipients — provisions that are dead on arrival in the Senate. The massive legislative package overseeing more than $430 billion of food and agriculture programs contains a host of measures aimed at strengthening farm subsidies, expanding foreign trade and bolstering rural development. 

The bill was championed by a dwindling number of farm-district Republicans who feel duty-bound to deliver farm supports to their rural constituents. On the first go-round last month, this group lost out to an increasingly powerful cohort of conservatives who are more interested in winning political points on welfare reform and immigration. 

The tense divide between the two camps has huge implications for the future of food and farm policy in the United States, as well as the Republican Party itself. Even as the bill advances from the House, political analysts said, the tensions revealed in its lurching, divisive journey are likely to persist. 

It's going to advance directly into a buzzsaw as it'll never get past a filbuster in the Senate, but sure.

“People think, ‘who cares about the Farm Bill? It’s so boring,’” said Adam Sheingate, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. “But it’s a window into contemporary politics right now, particularly among Republicans — the struggles they face balancing the responsibility of governing against their ideological commitments.” 

The most divisive element of the legislation passed Thursday are new, stricter work rules for most able-bodied adults in the food stamp program, the federal safety net that provides an average of $125 per month in grocery money to 42.3 million Americans. Under the proposal, adults will have to spend 20 hours per week either working or participating in a state-run training program to receive benefits. 

Democrats and anti-hunger advocates say most states do not have the capacity to scale up case management or training programs to this extent. As a result, they argue, hundreds of thousands of low-income adults could end up losing benefits. 

"Hundreds of thousands of adults losing benefits" is the entire point, guys.

The legislation also directs the Department of Agriculture to reevaluate school lunch nutrition standards adopted under the Obama administration. It proposes to expand who counts as a “farmer” for purposes of subsidies, the compensation USDA distributes when crop prices fall below predetermined references.

It eliminates much of the Conservation Stewardship Program — aimed at encouraging farmers to address soil, air and water quality on their land — and folds it into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which is oriented toward compensating farmers for one-off conservation projects. And despite efforts by some lawmakers to end them, it extends federal supports for the U.S. sugar industry through programs that control the amount of foreign and domestic sugar on the U.S. market and guarantee a minimum price for producers if sugar prices drop.

So massive sugar subsidies will continue while we stop paying farmers for actually being environmentally good farmers.  You know, the people that grow crops in soil might actually need clean water, air, and land free of toxic sludge but that's all a liberal trick anyway.

Cartoonishly evil and it's a waste of time to boot, that's your GOP.

StupidiNews!

• House Republicans have delayed a vote on a broad immigration bill until next week after GOP hardliners failed to pass legislation that would restrict legal immigration.
• Washington Post conservative Charles Krauthammer is dead at the age of 68 after battling cancer, he had recently announced he had only weeks to live.
• EU leaders will meet on Sunday to discuss migrant and immigration issues, but hopes are already being lowered for prospects of any major deal among EU member states.
• A federal judge has ordered former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to be held away from other prisoners, Manafort's bail was revoked after allegations of witness tampering in his upcoming trial.
• California's net neutrality bill seen many of its protections removed after AT&T and other cable company lobbyists convinced state House lawmakers to roll back several tough provisions.

Last Call For A Taxing Problem

Buying items online could significantly more expense as Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has authored a decision overturning the ban on states forcing internet retailers to collect sales taxes.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court overturned a longstanding precedent on Thursday that had barred states from requiring online companies to collect and pay sales taxes, delivering a victory for cash-strapped states and brick-and-mortar retailers. 

Online retailers have long enjoyed an advantage over brick-and-mortar stores because of a 1992 Supreme Court ruling in Quill v. North Dakota, which forbade states from interfering with interstate commerce by taxing companies that don’t have a physical presence within their boundaries. 

In the new case, South Dakota v. Wayfair, South Dakota had attempted to overturn that precedent, arguing that Quill was decided before the existence of internet commerce. (It dealt primarily with catalog sales.) The state, which argued it lost $50 million a year in sales tax, was supported by independent retailers such as bookstores that are forced to compete with online companies but whose products end up being more expensive because they must charge sales taxes. Even President Donald Trump has railed against the unfairness of online companies’ sales tax exemption.

Congress has wrestled with the issue for years, but fierce lobbying by online retail giants has prevented a legislative fix. A bipartisan group of senators filed a brief in the case supporting South Dakota’s effort to overturn the online sales tax ban, essentially acknowledging that the legislative body was too dysfunctional to fix the problem. 

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy had seemed sympathetic to the states’ plight, and he essentially invited the South Dakota case in 2015 in Direct Marketing Association v. Brohl. That case involved Colorado’s attempt to collect taxes from online retailers indirectly by making them report sales to the state. Online retailers sued over the scheme, and the Supreme Court allowed the case to proceed. But in a concurrence, Kennedy acknowledged the “startling revenue shortfall” suffered by the states because of the court’s Quill decision and invited them to try to find a better case in which to present the issue to the high court. South Dakota took him up on the suggestion.

I'm going to say that Kennedy is right here, and that internet retailers were getting away with not collecting sales taxes for decades, and that means we're going to see a lot of state battles over this, but I'm not sure that things are going to change too much.

Of course, this could be the kick in the pants that Congress needs to actually put together legislation on this, and I'm sure both sides of the argument are going to be spending a lot of money lobbying Congress to take their side.

But frankly, not every state is going to want to suddenly force new state taxes on people who buy things online, which is going to be more affluent folks, who tend to vote more.  Kennedy may have made the correct call here, but companies were already collecting sales taxes just to get state lawmakers off their backs, especially the big online retailers like Amazon.

On the other hand, there certainly are states that are going to want to make this happen as quickly as possible, so we'll see.  Besides, more money collected for state services is a good thing, not collecting taxes was basically a tax cut for the rich.

Israeli Serious Problem, Con't

Meanwhile in Israel, the fraud and corruption investigation into PM Benjamin Netanyahu has now expanded to include fraud charges filed against his wife Sara.

Sara Netanyahu, the wife of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was indicted on Thursday for alleged "systematic fraud" involving hundreds of thousands of shekels in connection with meal expenses incurred at the Prime Minister's Residence. 

Sara Netanyahu was charged along with Ezra Saidoff, a former deputy director general of the Prime Minister's Office. The two are charged in an indictment filed at the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court with aggravated fraudulent receiving of an item or items, fraud and breach of trust. Saidoff was also charged with falsification by a public servant. 

According to the indictment, the prime minister's wife instructed staff at the Prime Minister's Residence in Jerusalem to order meals consumed at the residence worth a total of 350,000 shekels ($96,000) from gourmet restaurants between 2010 and 2013 in violation of rules barring the residence from ordering meals from the outside during periods when there was a cook on its staff. 

Investigators in the case gathered evidence that purportedly shows that the prime minister's wife ordered that the employment of the cook be concealed and also showed that she was aware that ordering meals from the outside for the residence when it employed a cook was a violation of the rules.

According to the indictment, Sara Netanyahu directed staff at the residence, including the chief maintenance superintendent at the time, Meni Naftali, and another employee, Meir Cohen, to hide the fact that cooks were employed in the residence "so that this won't be found out by the treasury and the office manager." The indictment states that in accordance with her order, Naftali passed the message on to other residence staff. The prosecution alleges that the prime minister's wife ordered that the cook be listed at the residence as a maintenance staff person. 

In July 2015, a probe was initiated after the State Comptroller's Office issued a report on the Netanyahu family households. Its findings were turned over for criminal investigation by the national fraud squad at the Israel Police.

Part of the case against Benjamin Netanyahu is that he allegedly asked his Justice Minister to spike this case against his wife, and oh yes both Netanyahus are still being investigated in Case 3000, the major corruption investigation into the Prime Minister and his wife allegedly taking bribes.  That case is still in the investigatory stage, and indictments are expected in that in the coming months.

Of course, this is basically a fraction of the graft Donald Trump and his kids are currently getting away with on a daily basis, so there's that.

Trump Losing The Battle To Win The War

The headlines this morning are blaring that Donald Trump lost, caved, and gave in on his Dickensian child separation policy as he was "forced" to scramble to come up with an executive order that stopped the policy.  Politico has Trump caving in a "24-hour about-face".

In the face of protests at airports across the country opposing his restrictive travel ban last year, President Donald Trump defended the executive order as a necessary protection from terrorists.

When he was confronted with bipartisan outrage and criticism from his own aides after condemning violence on “both sides” of a white nationalist rally and counterprotest in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year, the president dug in his heels.

But on Wednesday, facing what has grown into the biggest moral and political crisis of his administration, the president whose default position is to double down, simply caved in.

Sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office flanked by Vice President Mike Pence and embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump signed an executive order temporarily halting his policy of separating children from their parents at the border.

“The border’s just as tough,” Trump told reporters. “But we do want to keep families together.”

But it took only hours for them to figure out that the "cave" wasn't the reality of what happened Wednesday.  At all.

President Donald Trump’s new executive order to keep migrant families together leaves his administration plenty of wiggle room to keep them apart.

The most urgent question is what will happen to thousands of children already separated from their parents under the administration’s “zero tolerance” border enforcement strategy.

Under that policy — fully implemented in early May — all suspected border crossers are referred for federal prosecution, with no exceptions for parents and asylum seekers. During a nearly five-week period in May and June, federal authorities separated more than 2,300 children from their parents at the southwest border.

“They’ve got to go find the parents and reunite the kids with the parents,” said one former Obama and George W. Bush administration official. “No aspect of this is easy, but they created this mess and they have to go back and fix it.”

But the executive order contains no language addressing how these children will be reunited with their parents, and Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, said Wednesday no changes are in store to the agency’s normal procedures.

“For the minors currently in the unaccompanied alien children program," Wolfe told POLITICO, "the sponsorship process will proceed as usual."

But Trump got the headlines he wanted: that he "ended" child separation and that America can go back to watching Netflix.  And now Trump has gotten what he wanted all along: an indefinite detention system for undocumented immigrants crossing the border.

For weeks, President Donald Trump and his administration claimed that they would prefer to keep families together in immigration detention — but had no choice but to separate them at the US-Mexico border so parents could be prosecuted for illegal entry.

Now, Trump’s executive order — which some in the press are reporting as a “reversal” or “relenting” on family separation — simply directs the administration to do the thing they said they couldn’t do: keep children along with their parents in immigration detention while the parents are prosecuted, and while the family’s immigration case is resolved. The Trump administration is hoping this will result in their speedy deportation, but if not, it’s now willing to detain the family indefinitely.

The executive order is titled “Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation,” and that’s not just wishful thinking. The Trump administration will need Congress to act quickly to validate the decision to keep families detained indefinitely. If Congress fails to act, it’s unlikely that the federal judiciary is going to allow this order to stand in its current form — because it appears to violate the 1997 Flores settlement that the administration cited as the reason it couldn’t detain families indefinitely to begin with.

The order doesn’t require Trump to stop separating families at the border — but it probably will end wide-scale family separation.

The Trump administration always said it wouldn’t waste the money and time to separate families if it could only detain them together. Now it’s going ahead and doing that, and waiting for forgiveness instead of asking for permission.

This is what Trump wanted all along: a bill he could sign that funded both his wall and these detention facilities, and he's presented the fact that he's willing to go back to the alternative of child separation.  He's going to soon start saying that if Congress doesn't give him the money to "keep these families together" then he'll have no choice but to separate them again.

Now the plan will be for Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to put an immigration bill up that gives Trump the money to build these facilities, and then put the pressure on Democrats to go along, otherwise Dems will be "responsible" for child separation.

That's hogwash, of course.  Trump is 100% responsible for it.  But he's now taking families hostage as well as children in order to get what he wants on immigration.  And now he can say that the policy he wanted all along, indefinite detention of migrants, is more humane than child separation.  See, he's the "good guy" now!

No, the real issue here is Trump and Jeff Sessions and their zero-tolerance policy at the border, announced back in April.  This is the real outrage we should be fighting, it's immoral, inhumane, and illegal.  People are being detained at the border before they can even seek to apply for asylum.  Instead, Trump has shifted the argument and the outrage to child separation after families are detained, and yesterday shifted back to mass zero-tolerance detainment as seemingly more humane by comparison.

Trump lost this battle, but he lost it on purpose and in such a way that it gives him the opportunity to win the war.  It's a classic abuser tactic, and I'm afraid that the rest of us are the ones who will really end up caving as zero-tolerance at the border becomes zero-tolerance inside the United States for undocumented immigrants.

I've long said that only logistical reasons are keeping Trump from rounding up and detaining millions, and that infrastructure is now being built with Trump holding migrants hostage in order to get more resources from Congress.  This is proceeding as planned, and Trump's "cave" yesterday is an integral part of it.

Trump signed an executive order yesterday in the hopes that people would move on:

There are still babies in cages

There are still 2500 kids who have been separated from their parents

There is no plan to fix any of this

Things are as bad today as they were yesterday.

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) June 21, 2018

This is still a humanitarian crisis of Trump's creation.

Immigrant children as young as 14 housed at a juvenile detention center in Virginia say they were beaten while handcuffed and locked up for long periods in solitary confinement, left nude and shivering in concrete cells. 

The abuse claims against the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center near Staunton, Virginia, are detailed in federal court filings that include a half-dozen sworn statements from Latino teens jailed there for months or years. Multiple detainees say the guards stripped them of their clothes and strapped them to chairs with bags placed over their heads. 

“Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me,” said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. “Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn’t really move. ... They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on.” 

In addition to the children’s first-hand, translated accounts in court filings, a former child-development specialist who worked inside the facility independently told The Associated Press this week that she saw kids there with bruises and broken bones they blamed on guards. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to publicly discuss the children’s cases. 

In court filings, lawyers for the detention facility have denied all allegations of physical abuse. 

Many of the children were sent there after U.S. immigration authorities accused them of belonging to violent gangs, including MS-13. President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited gang activity as justification for his crackdown on illegal immigration.

We have got to take Congress back in November.

StupidiNews!

• New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern has become the first world leader to give birth while in office since 1990 as she and her husband Clarke welcomed a baby girl on Thursday.
• Donald Trump will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin next month while Trump is in Europe for a previously scheduled UK visit and for the annual NATO summit.
• Beijing's expected retaliation to US tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods announced this week could start with heavy tariffs on three US coal shipments now headed for Chinese ports.
• US median home prices are the least affordable since the start of the Great Recession ten years ago, property values have outpaced wages in most of the country.
• Disney has beaten out Comcast for 21st Century Fox with a $71.3 billion buyout offer for Fox's cable TV, movie, and sports properties as well as a majority stake in streaming service Hulu.

Human Rights, Very Human Wrongs

America under the Trump regime continues the spiral into dangerous rogue nation status as we join countries like North Korea, Libya and Iran in refusing to be a part of the UN Human Rights Council.

The United States announced it is leaving the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission on Tuesday. 

The move comes at time when the U.N. Human Rights Commission (a 47-member body with rotating terms) and refugee agency have both condemned the president’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border before they get the chance to apply for refugee status. On Monday, the U.N. rights chief called the Trump administration of splitting migrant families “unconscionable.” 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley announced the U.S. departure from the U.N. rights body at the State Department. 

“We have no doubt there was once a noble vision for this council, but we need to be honest, the Human Rights Council is a poor defender of human rights,” Pompeo said. 

“For too long the human rights council has been a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias. Regrettably, it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded,” Haley said. At last year’s session, she announced that the United States would consider withdrawing from the council unless some changes were made and spoke about a “biased” stance against Israel.

In explaining the decision, both Pompeo and Haley also said that the council repeatedly singled out Israel. 

Haley has had a contentious relationship with many at the U.N., not only within the Human Rights Council (which is investigating U.S. ally Saudi Arabia for its killing civilians in the war in Yemen), but with the General Assembly as well, which Haley has accused of having an anti-Israel bias. 

With the exception of Libya, who was kicked off the U.N. rights council, no country has ever left the body, and the United States would be the first to drop out.

So yes, having the head of the UN HRC call Trump's child interment policy out as a human rights violation on Monday resulted in America leaving the council on Tuesday, this wasn't an accident.

As we continue to careen down the path towards authoritarian state, I wonder...

When will the rest of the world decide to do something about us?

Welcome To Gunmerica, Con't

Not only does the US officially have more firearms than people, but guns outpace people in America by nearly 20% as of 2017.

There are more than 393 million civilian-owned firearms in the United States, or enough for every man, woman and child to own one and still have 67 million guns left over. 

Those numbers come from the latest edition of the global Small Arms Survey, a project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. 

The report, which draws on official data, survey data and other measures for 230 countries, finds that global firearm ownership is heavily concentrated in the United States. In 2017, for instance, Americans made up 4 percent of the world's population but owned about 46 percent of the entire global stock of 857 million civilian firearms. 

With an estimated 120.5 guns for every 100 residents, the firearm ownership rate in the United States is twice that of the next-highest nation, Yemen, with just 52.8 guns per 100 residents. In raw number terms, the closest country to the United States is India, with 71.1 million firearms in circulation. These numbers do not include firearms owned by law enforcement agencies or militaries.

On gun ownership, the United States stands out among the world's wealthiest nations, with an ownership rate more than three times higher than the rate in the next-highest country, Canada. The gun ownership rate in the United States is more than six times higher than the average among similar wealthy nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

I'd say as of right now, we're well over 400 million civilian firearms in this country.  And lets remember the rate of firearm ownership among US adults has actually gone down over the last 30 years, meaning that more and more often we're seeing firearms as massive stockpiles in the hands of a few people.  Some charts:

That's not healthy for anyone, folks.  It's not like Japan or Belgium or the UK are third-world hellholes, guys.  They get by with literally a small fraction of the firearms we have.

No wonder everyone else thinks we're nuts.

StupidiNews!

• For the second time in less than a month, ICE agents have conducted a major raid on an Ohio business that allegedly employed undocumented workers and made over 100 arrests.
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says that the state will sue the Trump regime to stop the practice of separating migrant children from their families at the border.
• Pope Francis says that populism is no solution to immigration and is condemning separating children from families at borders, calling the practice "contrary to our Catholic values" and "immoral".
• The White House is declaring China's economic policy as "theft of intellectual property" and a threat to US economic security, and says America will take whatever measures needed to defend itself.
• Internet security experts are warning that the Satori botnet has resurfaced again, this time taking control of DSL routers in Brazil, South Korea, Italy, the US, and Russia.