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.

Last Call For It's Mueller Time, Con't

There's a number of developments today to review in the ongoing Trump/Russia probe led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and it starts with our old friend Erik "of Darkness" Prince and his interview with Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff.

[Woodruff]There’s been a lot of reporting that Mueller’s interested in some of the meetings you had in the lead-up to the campaign and after the election and I was just wondering if you could tell me if you’ve heard from anyone on Mueller’s team? 

[Prince]I certainly understand the intense interest in the investigation and certainly some of the wild-eyed reporting in the media. I have spoken voluntarily to Congress and I also cooperated with the special counsel. I have plenty of opinions about the various investigations but there’s no question some people are taking it seriously and I think it’s best to keep my opinion on that to myself for now. All I will add is that much of the reporting about me in the media is inaccurate, and I am confident that when the investigators have finished their work, we will be able to put these distractions to the side.

[W]You told the House intelligence committee that the Seychelles meeting [with Dmitriev] was unplanned, but ABC reported that George Nader briefed you on it beforehand. What do you make of that ABC reporting? 

[P]All I can say is, there’s been a lot of media reporting about me over the years and most of it is wrong. They get it wrong way more than they ever get it right. 

[W]What do you think the United States’ posture toward Russia should be? Do you support the president’s rhetoric about trying to thaw that relationship? 

[P]Absolutely. As I’ve said before, if Franklin Roosevelt can work with Joseph Stalin to defeat German fascism, Nazi fascism, national socialist fascism, then certainly Donald Trump can work with Putin to defeat Islamic fascism. And I think good statesmanship could even start to drive a wedge between Russian policy and Iran policy because we can disagree vehemently on their policy in Ukraine but we don’t have to be, certainly, their enemy in the Middle East. And even from a NATO perspective, I mean look, remember, 400,000 Americans died in World War II. Twenty-two million Russians died breaking the Nazi army. And from a Russian perspective, there are more unfriendly nations aligned on their borders now than at any time since May of 1940. So I don’t think we have to be provocative with NATO and I think it’s a good idea for the president to reach out diplomatically. I mean for heaven’s sakes, he’s sitting down and talking to Kim of North Korea. Putin is a much more rational actor and I think it’s totally appropriate for the president to sit down and try to thaw the situation.

Two things here:  Prince happily talked to both Mueller and Congress, and he's still convinced he's untouchable to the point of being fully available to advise the regime on coming military matters.  Nice guy.  Would hate for that notion to be disabused by a couple dozen US Marshals.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani now doing a 180 on calling for Mueller's head from last week.

President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said on Monday that he was actually just bluffing last week when he called for Justice Department leaders to suspend special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation within 24 hours. 

“I didn’t think it would,” Giuliani told POLITICO with a laugh when asked about the Mueller inquiry’s still being very much an active investigation. “But I still think it should be.”

So, apparently somebody had a nice long conversation with Rudy about his antics over the last week or so and is reining him in.  Whether it's Trump himself or somebody on his behalf I don't know, but the lesson to learn here is not to take anything Giuliani says at face value anymore, not that it should have happened in the first place.

That doesn't however mean that all of Trump's mouthpieces are easing off the Mueller probe, far from it as a matter of fact as the WSJ 's Bill McGurn is calling for Rod Rosenstein's head, as well as the head of Trump FBI Director Chris Wray.  It's a bit incongruous I know, but that's the Trump regime for you.  Hell, Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale is calling for Jeff Sessions's head along with Mueller.  These guys still want blood.

However, there's yet another piece of the money laundering/real estate puzzle in the Trump/Russia probe that has come to light this week as McClatchy's Anita Kumar explains.

Aleksandr Burman, a Ukrainian who engaged in a health care scheme that cost the federal government $26 million and was sentenced to a decade in prison, paid $725,000 cash for a condo at a Trump Tower I in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla. in 2009. 

Leonid Zeldovich, who has reportedly done extensive business in the Russian-annexed area of Crimea, bought four Trump units outright at a cost of more than $4.35 million, three of them in New York City between 2007 and 2010. 

And Igor Romashov, who served as chairman of the board of Transoil, a Russian oil transport company subject to U.S. sanctions, paid $620,000 upfront for a unit at a building adorned with the future U.S. president's name in Sunny Isles Beach in 2010. 

Buyers connected to Russia or former Soviet republics made 86 all-cash sales — totaling nearly $109 million — at 10 Trump-branded properties in south Florida and New York City, according to a new analysis shared with McClatchy. Many of them made purchases using shell companies designed to obscure their identities.

Once again, buying real estate properties in all-cash sales through shell companies is classic, classic money laundering 101.  Russian buyers purchased more than $100 million in Trump real estate with cash in this way.  This isn't the first time we've heard of this happening with Trump's real estate assets, but the fact that this keeps coming up should be setting off major alarm bells that Trump and his sleazy family have been engaging with criminal activity with Putin and the Russians long before the 2016 election.

Mueller's on it, believe me.

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.

Shutting Off The Leaks

The Trump regie's relationship with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange has taken a decidedly sour turn now that our old buddy Vlad is using them to keep Trump in line, and Trump has decided that the "deep state" is useful to him after all when it serves his purposes.

Federal prosecutors charged a former CIA employee Monday with violations of the Espionage Act and related crimes in connection with the leak last year of a collection of hacking tools that the agency used for spy operations overseas.

Joshua Adam Schulte, who worked for a CIA group that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries, was charged in a 13-count superseding indictment with illegally gathering and transmitting national defense information and related counts in connection with what is considered to be one of the most significant leaks in CIA history.

The indictment accused Schulte of causing sensitive information to be transmitted to an organization that is not named in the indictment but is thought to be WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks posted the hacking tools online last year in a release it called “Vault 7.” Prosecutors alleged Schulte stole the information in 2016.

Schulte had long been a suspect of investigators exploring the leak, but before Monday, he had been held on separate child pornography charges. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement that investigators looking into Schulte found the pornography in his residence. His personal computer, federal prosecutors alleged, held more than 10,000 images and videos of such material, protected under three layers of passwords.

Schulte was arrested on charges stemming from the porn in August 2017.

“As alleged, Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims,” William F. Sweeney Jr., the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York field office, said in a statement. “As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of Classified Information. To further endanger those around him, Schulte allegedly received, possessed, and transmitted thousands of child pornographic photos and videos.”

An attorney for Schulte did not respond to an email seeking comment Monday night. In a statement reviewed by The Washington Post previously, Schulte claimed that he reported “incompetent management and bureaucracy” at the CIA to the agency’s inspector general and to a congressional oversight committee. He asserted that cast him as disgruntled and that when he left the CIA, he became a suspect in the leak as “the only one to have recently departed [the CIA engineering group] on poor terms.”

The indictment accuses Schulte, 29, of exceeding his authorized access to CIA computer systems and altering systems to delete records of his activities and deny others access. Added together, the charges against him carry a statutory maximum penalty of 135 years in prison. Some officials have compared the leak of which he is accused to that of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who also revealed details about U.S. capabilities to spy on computers and phones around the world.

I've talked about WikiLeaks extensively on ZVTS as well as Julian Assange and their involvement with Russia as Putin's information clearing house, and how Russia has been yanking the strings of the website since Ed Snowden took his treasure trove to Moscow.

These guys were an integral part of Russia's operation to attack the 2016 US elections and help Donald Trump, and it worked better than anyone in Moscow could have hoped.  Now that WikiLeaks is a potential liability to Trump, or rather, now that Trump realizes that WikiLeaks was always going to be used against him by Putin, Trump is having the CIA go after the leakers.

We'll see where this goes, but my guess is that Schulte has already caused extensive damage to the CIA, meaning that both the NSA and CIA have been fatally compromised in the last several years, and Russia has reaped the benefit.  Like it or not, Putin has been holding all the cards on our counterintelligence services for quite some time now, and he has the Oval Office to boot.

Trump will at least go far enough to try to protect himself from WikiLeaks, but there's no way we can expect the US government to fix the massive Russian damage to the country with Trump at the helm.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump is threatening a major escalation in his trade war with China with a promise of new punitive tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, a move Beijing calls "blackmail".
• Former 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton weighed in Monday against the Trump regime's child-separation policy for immigrants crossing the border, calling it "cruelty".
• British PM Theresa May is expected to reject a plan to give lawmakers more control over Brexit as parliament wants assurances that the UK won't get stuck with a "no deal" situation in the future.
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the company's recent financial woes are the result of "extensive and damaging sabotage" involving a former employee and proprietary company data.
• Just days after a federal judge gave the green light to AT&T's buyout of Time Warner, the company says it plans a new mobile streaming service that's free for customers and $15 a month for others.