Immigration Nation, Con't

Deanna Paul at the Washington Post buries the lede all the way until the last paragraph, but Trump Regime Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it clear Monday that the regime will continue to take migrant and asylum-seeking families crossing the Mexico border and put their kids in cages until Trump gets what he wants from Congress.

As protesters gathered outside the convention hall where Sessions was addressing the National Sheriffs' Association in New Orleans, Sessions gave the game away:

According to Sessions, policies of the past eight years led law enforcement to begin arresting people who crossed the border illegally, yet gave effective immunity from prosecution to anyone who also brought a child. “Word got out about this loophole and the results were predictable: The number of aliens illegally crossing with children went from 14,000 to 75,000 in just four years. A fivefold increase,” Sessions said. 

Sessions said that this could not continue, in part, because of the “enormous cost” incurred by the government and the “enormous burden” on law enforcement, schools and hospitals. 

As Sessions defended his “zero-tolerance” policy, the chanting group outside the NOLA convention center grew. Demonstrators filled the sidewalks and blocked the streets. One woman was struck by a vehicle, and five people were arrested, according to WWL-TV, a local CBS affiliate. Protesters demanded that families be kept together and held signs: “Immigration detention centers are concentration camps for kids” and “Cage Jeff Sessions.” Some demonstrators, who came close to fighting local law enforcement, as seen in a video published by WWL, pushed against police and deputies guarding the building, bearing a banner that read, “Criminalizing our community,” according to one video. Other people displayed posters that read: “Imagine your children in a cage” and “Love has no border.” 

Although the federal government, according to Sessions, does not want to separate parents from their children, it does not want adults to bring children into the country unlawfully or place those children at risk, either. Thousands of unaccompanied minors have also crossed the borders, which, according to Sessions, has led to the resurgence of the MS-13 gang. 

President Trump wants to bring down crime and make this country safer, said Sessions, who says that’s what he’s doing. 

“If we build a wall, if we pass a legislation, if we close a loophole, we won’t face these terrible choices,” he said, adding that Trump will not allow this lawlessness to continue.

And there we have it.

You have to admit, this cartoonish level of inchoate evil is pretty effective.  The Trump regime is willing to use kids in cages to attack Democrats, but even Republicans aren't buying it when all parties know full well Trump's executive orders are solely responsible for the forcible separation of children from their families and putting them in internment camps.

Republicans know damn well that this is bad for them too, and that this is direct retaliation for House Republicans working with Democrats to force a vote on several immigration bills that don't meet Trump's standards.  He's not going to allow those bills to move forward, and he's willing to go this far in order to ensure that doesn't happen.

It's possible that Trump's plan if things get too hot for him is to use Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as a disposable lightning rod in order to take the damage, but at this point all the living former first ladies from both parties are scorching Trump over this, including Laura Bush.  I don't see how this doesn't become the issue the Democrats need to win and win big in November, especially since the Trump regime is promising to make things even worse.

Top aides to President Donald Trump are planning additional crackdowns on immigration before the November midterms, despite a growing backlash over the administration’s move to separate migrant children from parents at the border. 

Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and a team of officials from the departments of Justice, Labor, Homeland Security and the Office of Management and Budget have been quietly meeting for months to find ways to use executive authority and under-the-radar rule changes to strengthen hard-line U.S. immigration policies, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former administration officials and Republicans close to the White House.

The goal for Miller and his team is to arm Trump with enough data and statistics by early September to show voters that he fulfilled his immigration promises — even without a border wall or any other congressional measure, said one Republican close to the White House. 

Among the fresh ideas being circulated: tightening rules on student visas and exchange programs; limiting visas for temporary agricultural workers; making it harder for legal immigrants who have applied for welfare programs to obtain residency; and collecting biometric data from visitors from certain countries. 

Details of the ideas are still being worked out, one White House official said. 

In one of the most closely watched plans under discussion, DHS has proposed a new rule that former Obama administration officials and immigration advocates worry could be used as an end run around a 1997 court settlement that limits the time migrant children can be kept in government custody. Putting a formal government rule in place, lawyers and advocates say, could in effect supersede the settlement, allowing the administration to get rid of it altogether by dropping the rule a year or two later. 

“Once you rescind that regulation, then you go back to being able to do whatever you want and the detention becomes the complete discretion of ICE,” said Leon Fresco, former deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Department of Justice. “That is where people think this is headed.”

To recap, Stephen Miller and his merry band of white supremacist dudebros are happily planning indefinite detention camps for kids crossing the border as a deterrent to both people inside and outside the US.  This is of course on top of Jeff Sessions and the Trump regime's plans to effectively end legal immigration as well as plans to target naturalized citizens for deportation.  This has been planned out from the beginning, guys.

The partnership between Mr. Sessions and Mr. Miller began in 2009, when Mr. Miller, a conservative rabble rouser and contrarian who emerged from the left-leaning Santa Monica, became a spokesman for the senator. He sported sideburns and skinny ties as he often delivered long and passionate lectures to reporters, and anyone else who would listen, about the dangers of granting amnesty to illegal immigrants. 

Mr. Sessions, 71, had strong views shaped by his experience as a young politician in rural Alabama, where he saw immigrants take jobs at a poultry plant away from poor, unskilled Americans. 

During more than a decade as a federal prosecutor and state attorney general, and 20 years in the Senate, Mr. Sessions came to believe that immigrants, whether here legally or illegally, posed a direct threat to the country by depressing wages, committing crimes and competing for welfare benefits. He was deeply influenced by the work of George Borjas, a Harvard economist who has said that immigrants have an adverse impact on the economy. 

Mr. Miller, 32, had gone from California to Duke University. While a student, he met David Horowitz, a right-wing provocateur and the founder of Students for Academic Freedom, which opposed progressive thought on college campuses. After Mr. Miller graduated, Mr. Horowitz helped him get a job with Michele Bachmann, then a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, and recommended him highly to Mr. Sessions. 

Together Mr. Miller and Mr. Sessions often drew on the work of anti-immigration groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — some of which are derided as hate groups by immigration activists and civil rights organizations. 

The Southern Policy Law Center, which tracks white nationalists and other hate groups, describes FAIR as having “a veneer of legitimacy” that “hides much ugliness.” 

By 2013, Stephen K. Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News, invited Mr. Miller and Mr. Sessions to a dinner at the Capitol Hill townhouse that served as the headquarters for the conservative news outlet. The three bonded over an article titled “The Case of the Missing White Voters,” foreshadowing the case they would help Mr. Trump build during his presidential campaign.

These guys are absolute evil, and frankly I'm tired of them running this country.  I would think you guys are too.

Three People Outside Jefferson City, Missouri, Con't

Missouri's GOP Gov. Eric Greitens is facing the very real prospect of impeachment after a scandal involving sexual abuse and blackmail of a mistress surfaced in January. 

It got worse when it quickly became apparent that Greitens wanted state legislators to protect his private texts from investigators, and when that failed police found ample evidence to indict the governor on felony charges in February as state lawmakers launched their own impeachment probe.

Now, six weeks after Greitens's indictment, Missouri state lawmakers have released the findings and testimony of their probe, and it is devastating to say the least.  The description of what Greitens allegedly did is graphic, fair warning.

When she tried to leave, sobbing after a non-consensual sexual encounter, she says the man who would be governor physically stopped her.

What happened next, she testified under oath to a Missouri House committee investigating allegations of misconduct against Republican Gov. Eric Greitens, is spelled out in graphic detail in a 25-page report and transcripts of testimony that the lawmakers released Wednesday.

It’s the first time the public has heard sworn testimony from the woman at the center of allegations of misconduct against the governor.

The woman told lawmakers that in March 2015, as she tried to leave the basement of his St. Louis home, Greitens grabbed her in a "bear hug" and laid her on the floor. Then he started fondling her, pulled out his penis and coerced her into oral sex while she wept “uncontrollably.”

The woman told the committee that Greitens had led her down to the basement, taped her hands to pull-up rings, blindfolded her, spit water into her mouth, ripped open her shirt, pulled down her pants and took a photo without her consent.

He threatened to make the photos public if she ever told anyone about their encounter, and called her "a little whore," the woman told lawmakers.

After her hands were freed, she said she felt she had no other choice but to perform oral sex if she was going to get out of the basement.

The woman and Greitens had several sexual encounters over the next few months in 2015, she testified. Some were consensual. Others were not.

On at least three occasions he hit her.

The explosive allegations were among the findings of the bipartisan investigative committee of the Missouri House that has been looking into allegations of wrongdoing against the Republican governor. The committee also interviewed two of the woman’s friends who say she told them a similar story at the time, as well as the woman’s ex-husband.

The committee – five Republicans and two Democrats – concluded that the woman's testimony is credible.

The calls for Greitens to resign were coming from Missouri Democrats before.  Now they are coming from Missouri Republicans as impeachment is now moving forward.

Republican legislative leaders — including House Speaker Todd Richardson and Senate President Pro Tem Ron Richard — announced the report was enough to warrant a special session to consider disciplinary actions, including impeachment.

Attorney General Josh Hawley later issued a statement saying Greitens' alleged conduct detailed in the report "is certainly impeachable," and he called on the governor to resign.

Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, said the testimony in the report "is beyond disturbing. He later added: "The power given to the Missouri General Assembly to take disciplinary action or remove elected officials from office is one of the most serious and consequential powers the Constitution grants the legislature. We will not take that responsibility lightly. We will not act rashly, but we will not shrink from it."

The full report is online here at the KC Star, and it is utterly astonishing.  Greitens is done, the only question is how he chooses to go out, with whatever minuscule shreds of personal dignity he can muster, or like a petulant child in the age of Trump's petulant childishness.

Again, when your own party has a near 75% super-majority in both chambers of the state legislature and a three-fourths vote is needed to call a special session, and the legislature basically has the votes to do that should it be necessary (the current session goes through May 18) with the only issue being the timing of when impeachment and/or your resignation takes place, then you're basically a walking political corpse.

We'll see what happens, but there's a very good chance that Greitens doesn't survive the month as governor, let alone the week.

Last Call For Getting Your Priorities Straight

The latest monthly Gallup poll on Americans and the issues important to them finds Ebola now outranks racism, crime, and poverty as top concerns among We The People:

These results come from an Oct. 12-15 Gallup poll, conducted while dozens of people in the U.S. were still being quarantined after coming in contact with Thomas Eric Duncan, who died earlier this month from the virus. Two of the nurses who cared for Duncan have now been diagnosed with the virus. Most others who had contact with Duncan were quarantined for three weeks, which ended Monday. 

Separate Gallup polling about Ebola specifically finds more than one in five Americans saying they worry about getting the Ebola virus.

We're so very, very screwed.

Better A Racist Than A Pedophile Be, Apparently

It is a relentlessly cold and bitter country we live in when the defense of a Texas schoolteacher against a complaint that she fondled a seven-year old black girl in her class is basically "I'm proudly racist and I would never sully my hands to touch one of them."

A first-grade teacher at an Humble prep school cited her racial prejudice against black students in denying allegations that she fondled a girl in her classroom last month, according to court records.

Esther Irene Stokes, 61, of Montgomery, was charged with indecency with a child April 10, court records show.

The 7-year-old student told police that Stokes, her teacher at Northwest Preparatory Academy Charter School, sent all the students out of the classroom and touched her on her "private part" on the outside of her clothes on March 1, according to a criminal complaint filed in the case.

Humble police met with Stokes after she failed a polygraph examination. Stokes denied touching the girl "on any part of her body," prosecutors said.

"The defendant stated that she doesn't like black students because she was prejudiced," the complaint states. She told police that "she does not like the complainant" and has "very little to no interaction" with her.

Well, that makes things perfectly okay, right?  I mean from a hideously cynical standpoint, people don't spend long stretches in prison, have to register with law enforcement for the rest of their lives, and have to get special license plates for being bigoted racists.  It has the additional bonus of not actually being that bad to some people, unlike sexually abusing a child, a repulsive and universally reviled act by civilized humans.

The fact we have a teacher of small children invoking this particular social calculus is hideous, frankly.  What kind of human being, much less a person employed to shape the minds of young kids, decides "Well, this is a great idea for getting out of this sex offender thing, I'll just say I'm a racist.  Score!"  What's the lesson here for a first grader?  As a parent of a child in that class, or in that prep school, or of a child that age at all, how do you possibly explain that story to your kids?

In school I had an older white teacher in her 60's when I was in 2nd grade.  I grew up in a medium-sized town in western North Carolina.  She was my first real introduction in 1981 to institutionalized racism.  She thought I was a disrespectful little moron, that I should be held back, that I was stupid.  In reality I was bored out of my mind because I was spending seven hours a day being taught stuff I had already figured out (even back then I was the biggest nerd in the county.)

A gifted black kid was a Rodent of Unusual Size to her because we simply didn't exist.  So she made my life hell, marking my math answers wrong when they weren't, holding me up as an example of someone who was lazy and awful, putting me in the corner for misbehaving all the time when all I really did was sat there and tried to reconcile what the heck was going on.  My parents had told me to listen to my teachers, that they were there to help me, but this one wasn't doing so at all.

It was only after I told my dad that I got a D on a math test and I showed it to him that he figured it out.  He saw the answers were correct and marked wrong anyway.  My teacher assumed my parents were just as "lazy" as I was and that they weren't too bright either and would just simply accept it.  Fortunately for me, the complete opposite happened and the situation was rectified in near-record time.  I was lucky and still am.  She retired soon after.

And yet that year of struggle I went through was nothing compared to this poor girl being fondled by someone she was supposed to be able to trust, and then seeing her teacher claim racism as an excuse.  You have to be a soul-free husk in order to pull something like that.  It's 2013, and we're still committing these awful acts.

How can anyone do that?

The Merchant Of Menace

Adidas, you're horrible, horrible people.

Kevin Ware broke his leg during an Elite Eight game on Sunday. Louisville handled it in classic, major college athletic fashion, by exploiting sentiment for profit. “Rise Up # 5″ Final Four t-shirts are already for sale on the team website. Proceeds benefit…the Louisville Athletic Dept and Adidas. Just shameless.

Damn right there is.

Not Punishment Enough

Here is an update and a quick recap regarding the "Chair Lady."  It's one of the worst stories I heard from the whole year, it still haunts me.

Independence, MO — Prosecutors filed charges Wednesday in the death of an elderly Independence woman found in squalid and filthy conditions whose primary caretaker was her son.

James E. Owens, 52, faces a charge of first-degree involuntary manslaughter. His mother, Carol F. Brown, 74, died Nov. 1 after emergency crews removed her from her home five days earlier on Oct. 27.

Court records describe conditions so deplorable that the home had to be condemned. First responders had to don breathing masks due to the overwhelming stench of human waste. They called Brown a “living corpse.”

Owens told police he had not fed his mother in four days, when he gave her soup. He also told police that he believed his mother had suffered a stroke days earlier but had not contacted medical personnel because Brown did not like doctors or hospitals.

When paramedics arrived, Brown had not moved from a chair in the living room in four days. She had been sitting in a vinyl recliner for so long that her legs had become fused to the footrest. Medical staff found an open, maggot-infested wound on her ankle.

I say again: there is a special place in hell waiting for this man.  There is no way you can make his actions noble or caring.  At best he's a danger to people for gross inability to make judgments about right and wrong.  At worst he's a pitiful man who let his mother rot alive and cashed her checks.  I hope to post about this one more time, when he's sentenced to decades of hard time.

Ultimate Criminal Neglect- "The Chair Lady"

KANSAS CITY -- A suburban Kansas City woman was left sitting in a vinyl recliner for so long that her skin had fused to the chair and she had to be pried out to be taken to a hospital after suffering an apparent stroke, authorities said.

Carol F. Brown's adult son told a state official he had left his 74-year-old mother in the chair for five days without helping her get up to use the bathroom or bathe because he was honoring her wishes to die in her Independence home, according to court documents that described the woman as a "rotting corpse that was still breathing." Brown later died.

Brown's son, James Owens, told an official with the Missouri Division of Senior and Disability Services that his mother had been in the chair since Oct. 23 and that he was honoring her wishes to be left to die, the documents said.

Owens, who the documents said had started the application process to gain state aid to be his mother's caretaker, said he did give the woman tomato and chicken noodle soup.

I watched this develop and hoped it was dramatized.  It turns out it only gets worse.  This poor woman died, but the misfortune is how she lived until death rescued her from the filth and pain that had to be tormenting her.  Maggots were eating at open wounds, and the smell of her living but rotting body was brutal. The only addition has been that her son is now charged with forgery for cashing her Social Security check.

It's just upsetting beyond words.  I've seen elderly people come into nursing homes from such situations, and neglect so pitiful that it makes your heart hurt.  But this is hands down the worst neglect article I've read in years, and all I can do is feel sad for the woman who lived in agony and then died knowing her child wasn't going to help her.  There's just too much wrong here to even begin.

The Worst Thing I've Heard All Year

HICKORY, N.C. – The stepmother of a 10-year-old disabled girl was indicted Monday on charges she killed the freckle-faced child and then desecrated her remains to cover up the slaying, according to court documents.
A grand jury in Catawba County charged Elisa Baker with second-degree murder in the death of Zahra Baker. Authorities planned to discuss the case at a news conference later in the day.

Zahra, who used a prosthetic leg and hearing aids after being stricken with cancer, disappeared four months ago. No one had been charged in her death, though Elisa Baker had been charged with obstructing justice in the investigation. Police eventually found the girl's remains in different locations around western North Carolina. Authorities still have not said how the girl died.

 No matter what details come to light, the tragedy has already befallen Zahra.  I spent years working with handicapped and long-term disabled children, and  I understand the strength it took for her to fight for her life.  My heart goes out to this poor little girl, who survived cancer only to be stricken with something far worse.

The Worst Thing I've Heard All Year - I Quit Counting

Out of respect for the victim, the article was kept mercifully short.  In a rare exception, I am going to reprint it in its entirety.

On Friday, Feb. 11, the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a "60 Minutes" story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy.

In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.

There will be no further comment from CBS News and correspondent Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time.

This is a grim reminder, one of many in the news recently, that journalists face real danger when they travel abroad.  It's nice to see CBS huddle protectively around  Logan and take the high road.  My prayers are with her, and I hope she recovers as much as one can from something so terrible.

The Worst Thing I've Heard All Year Part V

A woman who desperately wanted to be a grandmother was arrested after allegedly arranging for her daughter to be raped.
The 51-year-old South African mother has appeared in court after being accused of employing a local man to carry out the attack in the hope that her 24-year-old daughter would conceive.

Both the woman and the alleged attacker were arrested when the victim reported the plot to police after she was raped on Sunday near her home in South Africa's Limpopo province.

That is so the front runner so far this year.  I'm just boggled and shaken. 

I'm Sorry, We're Fresh Out Of Basic Humanity

A 66-year-old woman froze to death while neighbors listened to her scream in distress.  She suffered from Alzheimer's and nobody knows how she got outside or why she was confused.  But neighbors heard her crying out and nobody bothered to call 911. 

Who are we if we don't offer that basic minimum protection for our fellow man?  I am sick at the idea of listening to someone cry, hearing those cries fade off as the woman froze to death, and not bothering to reach for a phone inside my warm, comfy home.  What lessons did parents teach their children?  What are they going to say to this woman's family? 

This isn't an isolated problem.  There was Ebony Garcia, only 21 years old when her boyfriend stabbed her.  A neighbor heard her scream that he had stabbed her in the neck, but dind't actually respond.  It isn't a new problem, either.  Kitty Genovese was raped and stabbed multiple times while her neighbors listened.  Her attacker was so bold that he ran and came back to finish the job when nobody checked out her screams.

We should be ashamed, collectively, for the ignorance and stupidity that led to this death.  It was horrifying, painful, and completely preventable.  Anyone who has been that cold knows how the nerves scream and there is no relief.  My thoughts go out to her family, and I pray her suffering was as short-lived as possible.