Buzz Lightyear Of Spaced Command

Space.

The final frontier of grifting and resource exploitation, and taking it over is a top priority of the Trump regime.

President Donald Trump on Thursday formally established a new military headquarters for space operations as part of his efforts to ensure the Pentagon maintains an edge over potential adversaries like Russia and China.

The U.S. Space Command will be responsible for defending military satellites and other space systems and will draw on troops from other branches of the military as well as Trump's proposed Space Force, which is awaiting approval from Congress.

"It will ensure that America’s dominance in space is never questioned and never threatened because we know the best way to prevent conflict is to prepare for victory,” Trump said during a Rose Garden ceremony with his top national security team.

He added that the move "will soon be followed very importantly by the establishment of the United States Space Force as the sixth branch of the United States armed forces. That’s really something, when you think about it."

The new Space Command will be on par with other military headquarters that are responsible for different geographic regions of the world or have distinct missions such as cyber operations.

Gen. John Raymond, the current head of the Air Force Space Command who has also been tapped to run the new outfit, told reporters at the Pentagon earlier that a top priority will be to build new alliances with other militaries that similarly view space as a potential conflict zone.

“Historically, we haven’t needed allies in space," he said. "It was a benign domain. We absolutely are open for new partnerships.”

The Pentagon decided to reestablish the U.S. Space Command, which existed in another form between 1985 and 2002, after a review concluded the military's increasing reliance on space technologies required a dedicated "combatant command" due to advances in weaponry by China and Russia that could destroy satellites in orbit or disable them through other means such as cyberattacks.

Trump so badly wants to be remembered for US Space Force that it physically pains him that it'll never happen, but reestablishing Space Command to keep an eye on all the satellite junk in Earth orbit is useful up to a point, I guess.

Of course, considering how the Trump regime is more than happy to leave the door open to cyberattacks from Russia, one has to wonder what the point of Space Command actually is going to be, other than a cosmic joke.

Time To Whittle Down The Field

ABC News has announced the ten Democrats who have qualified for September's presidential primary debate.

Only 10 Democrats have qualified for the next presidential debate. They are:

🗣 Biden
🗣 Booker
🗣 Buttigieg
🗣 Castro
🗣 Harris
🗣 Klobuchar
🗣 O'Rourke
🗣 Sanders
🗣 Warren
🗣 Yang pic.twitter.com/ujvFlmhP5e

— NPR (@NPR) August 29, 2019

Anyone still in the race not on this list?

Time to drop out.  Jay Inslee and Kirsten Gillibrand have already done the right thing.  I don't expect Tulsi Gabbard or Marianne Williamson to do so anytime soon, because neither of them are actually in the race to do anything other than to directly help Donald Trump.

But Bill de Blasio?  Tim Ryan?  Steve Bullock?  Michael Bennet?

Door's that way.  Hit the showers.  You're done.

Thanks.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Dorian's path now takes it over the warm waters of the Atlantic, meaning it could be a 130 MPH Category 4 monster by the time it slams into Florida's east central coast on Labor Day.
• The Trump DHS wants to start DNA testing of all migrants to see if they are "truly related" in order to determine if families should be kept together or separated in detention camps.
• Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong is among three arrested by police ahead of planned protests in the city, Wong was released from a five-week detention before being immediately arrested.
• A federal judge has denied House Democrats' request to fast-track the case to subpoena Donald Trump's tax returns, the case is still expected to begin with filings next month.
• The Trump regime says it will end 2016 Obama-era EPA limits on methane emissions for oil and gas industry sources, claiming industry savings would exceed expected damage to the environment.

Last Call For It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

The Barr "Justice" Department has finally crapped out that special inspector general report on James Comey's misconduct, and Trumpistas are still calling for the former FBI Director's crucifixion.

Former FBI Director James B. Comey violated FBI policies in how he handled memos that detailed his controversial interactions with President Trump, the Justice Department’s internal watchdog found in a report released Thursday, both in engineering the release of their contents to the press and storing them at his home without telling the FBI.

The inspector general found that the memos — which described, among other things, how Trump had pressed Comey for loyalty and asked him about letting go an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn — were official records, and as such, Comey’s treatment of them broke the rules.

The former FBI director gave one of the memos — which included information the inspector general called “sensitive,” but unclassified — to a friend and authorized him to share its contents. He also stored four of the documents in a safe in his personal home and provided copies to his personal attorneys without FBI authorization, the inspector general found.

One of those memos shared with the attorneys was later determined to contain information, such as the names of foreign countries being discussed by Trump, that was classified as confidential, the lowest level of secrecy, the inspector general wrote.

On Twitter, Comey noted that the inspector general found “no evidence” that he or his attorneys released any classified information to the media.

“I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a ‘sorry we lied about you’ would be nice,” he wrote. “And to all those who’ve spent two years talking about me ‘going to jail’ or being a ‘liar and a leaker’—ask yourselves why you still trust people who gave you bad info for so long, including the president.”

The report is the second time Inspector General Michael Horowitz has criticized Comey for how he handled FBI business during his abbreviated tenure in charge of the bureau. Last summer, Horowitz lambasted Comey for his leadership of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state, accusing him of insubordination and flouting Justice Department policies in deciding only he had the authority and credibility to make key decisions on the case and speak about it publicly.

And yet all of this is sturm und drang because we know back from the first of the month that not even Bill Barr was going to try to prosecute a former FBI Director.

Senior Justice Department officials have concluded that former FBI director James B. Comey should not be charged in connection with his handling of memos documenting conversations with President Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

The determination comes amid ongoing internal reviews focused on federal authorities’ investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the Trump campaign. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is conducting one of the reviews, is unlikely to produce a final report on that subject for at least a month, but one aspect of his work is largely complete, these people say: Comey’s handling of the memos.

Deciding not to charge the former FBI director, who has become an outspoken critic of President Trump since Trump fired him in May 2017, was “not a close call,” said a person who was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In other words, nothing about this is new information.  The decision was made weeks ago not to prosecute, but Republicans are trying to work the refs on this anyway despite the fact the information was made clear four weeks ago.

Having said that, James Comey is still a shitbird grande whose interference in the 2016 race absolutely helped Trump, and if Trump ordered Bill Barr to abuse his powers as Attorney General, prosecuted Comey for mishandling classified info, and then chucked Comey in prison for a decade or so, I wouldn't lose a wink of sleep.

Deportation Nation, Con't

The Trump regime is already redefining who qualifies for US citizenship in a dangerous move involving children of US military and government employees, and we should expect more and more people to be excluded from automatic citizenship from now on.

Children born to U.S. service members and government employees overseas will no longer be automatically considered citizens of the United States, according to a policy alert issued by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Wednesday.

Previously, children born to U.S. citizen parents were considered to be "residing in the United States," and therefore would be automatically given citizenship under Immigration and Nationality Act 320. Now, children born to U.S. service members and government employees, such as those born in U.S. military hospitals or diplomatic facilities, will not be considered as residing in the U.S., changing the way that they potentially receive citizenship.

The change in policy was first reported by San Francisco Chronicle reporter Tal Kopan.

According to USCIS, previous legislation also explicitly said that spouses of service members who were living outside the U.S. because of their spouses were considered residing in the U.S., but "that no similar provision was included for children of U.S. armed forces members in the acquisition of citizenship context is significant."

That is one of the reasons why USCIS has now decided that those children are not considered to be residing in the U.S., and therefore will not be automatically given citizenship. Instead, they will fall under INA 322, which considers them to be residing outside the U.S. and requires them to apply for naturalization.

They will be allowed to complete all naturalization proceedings while living abroad, the new policy says.

"The policy change explains that we will not consider children who live abroad with their parents to be residing in the United States even if their parents are U.S. government employees or U.S. service members stationed outside of the United States and, as a result, these children will no longer be considered to have acquired citizenship automatically," USCIS spokesperson Meredith Parker told Task & Purpose.

"For them to obtain a Certificate of Citizenship, their U.S. citizen parent must apply for citizenship on their behalf."The process under INA 322 must be completed before the child's 18th birthday.

While children of service members will be allowed to complete the citizenship process outside of the U.S., Parker added, children of government employees "must enter the U.S. lawfully with an immigrant or nonimmigrant visa and be in lawful status when they take the Oath of Allegiance."  

Let's recap.

As of today, if you are a US citizen, and your child is born outside of the US, your child is not a US citizen.  You have to apply for the child's citizenship.  That citizenship can now be denied. That's wholly up to the Trump regime now.

Now, this lays the basis for denying US citizenship to a whole host of people. The Fourteenth Amendment means what Trump says it means. If the courts agree that the Trump regime can carve out exceptions for who gets citizenship when they are born, then a whole lot of people can be denied.

Think Puerto Rico or Guam.

Once you introduce the idea that US citizenship is not automatic, then you introduce the idea that citizenship can be revoked based on those exceptions.

Then the mass detainment and deportations of undocumented become mass detainment and deportations of undesirable citizens.

History tells us exactly where that leads to.

Boris Versus The Clock

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson yesterday asked the Queen to suspend Parliament for five out of the nine weeks left between now and the October 31 deadline for a Brexit deal, and the Queen has agreed.  Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is furious, calling the move a "coup" and saying Johnson will face a vote of no-confidence before the suspension starts.

Parliament will be suspended just days after MPs return to work in September - and only a few weeks before the Brexit deadline.
Boris Johnson said a Queen's Speech would take place after the suspension, on 14 October, to outline his "very exciting agenda".

But it means the time MPs have to pass laws to stop a no-deal Brexit on 31 October would be cut.

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said it was a "constitutional outrage".

The Speaker, who does not traditionally comment on political announcements, continued: "However it is dressed up, it is blindingly obvious that the purpose of [suspending Parliament] now would be to stop [MPs] debating Brexit and performing its duty in shaping a course for the country."

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said: "Suspending Parliament is not acceptable, it is not on. What the prime minister is doing is a smash and grab on our democracy to force through a no deal," he said.

He said when MPs return to the Commons next Tuesday, "the first thing we'll do is attempt legislation to prevent what [the PM] is doing", followed by a vote of no confidence "at some point".

And this is apparently only the beginning of Johnson's bag of dirty tricks to run out the Brexit clock and force a worst-case disaster scenario which would of course require emergency powers for his office to be granted in order to steer the country through the mess.

BuzzFeed News has learned that in the last few days, Johnson’s senior team — led by his chief of staff Dominic Cummings and director of legislative affairs Nikki da Costa — has explored a number of increasingly controversial proposals it could deploy depending on the success of rebel attempts to thwart Brexit. The ideas under consideration include the following:

• Attempting to disrupt a Commons debate on Northern Ireland power-sharing due on Sept. 9, a day which could be used by rebels to attempt to delay Brexit. It is described by Johnson allies as a “time bomb” set for them in the final weeks of Theresa May’s premiership.
• Determining whether Johnson would be breaking the law by ignoring any successful rebel legislation or refusing to resign in the event he lost a vote of no confidence.
• Using a variety of mechanisms, including a potential budget, to create new Commons debates and further reduce time for rebels to act.
• Using the prorogation of Parliament to “kill the bill” by rebel MPs and force them to table it again after the Queen’s Speech on Oct. 14.
• Creating new bank holidays to prevent the House of Commons from being recalled during the prorogation period.
• Filibustering any bill by rebel MPs attempting to force Johnson to delay Brexit when it reaches the House of Lords.
• Ennobling new pro-Brexit peers as a last resort to kill any such bill in the Lords.
• Exploring what the consequences would be if Johnson advised the Queen not to give royal assent to any legislation passed by Parliament delaying Brexit.

The measures were devised by the prime minister’s senior aides who have spent the summer in their Downing Street bunker war-gaming how to respond to potential parliamentary manoeuvres by MPs determined to block no deal. The rebels, by contrast, spent the August holidays debating whether they would back Ken Clarke as a potential caretaker prime minister in an unlikely government of national unity.

Number 10's prorogation plan was ready to go and be put into action on Tuesday evening, just hours after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn agreed to a pact with the so-called Remainer “rebel alliance” seeking to prevent a no-deal Brexit.

Downing Street’s official line is that it is not preventing MPs from debating Brexit policy, that it is routine for a new administration to hold a Queen’s Speech and for Parliament to be prorogued in the run-up, and that MPs will have sufficient time to scrutinise plans before and after the Commons is suspended.

But privately, Johnson allies admit their principal aim in the next two months is to reduce the number of days when MPs can act to stop no deal, in order to give the government the best-possible negotiating hand ahead of the European Council on Oct. 17, where it hopes to strike a new Brexit deal with the EU.

“Every sitting day, there is a risk of something going wrong,” a government source said.

One senior Brexiteer equated Downing Street’s strategy to a football team wasting time at the end of a match. “We are into the final 10 minutes, and we are holding the ball by the corner flag,” they said.

The European Union has made it painfully clear that Johnson's not going to get another extension or a better deal on October 17, but apparently his plan is "If the United Kingdom is literally on fire, the EU will give in."

So at this point the UK is barrelling down the "worst-case scenario" path at record speed, and the crash could leave the country unable to function come November.  At that point, I'd expect emergency powers to come into play, and at that point, the UK ceases to be a Western Democracy and becomes something I'd expect Donald Trump would very much like to see here in the States 15 months from now.

Here there be dragons, guys.  Big ones.

StupidiNews!

• Hurricane Dorian has shifted northwest after hitting Puerto Rico as a Category 1 storm as it is expected to gain strength to Category 3 and could threaten central Florida this weekend.
• A West Virginia state Republican senator was charged with soliciting a prostitute in connection with a sex ring investigation into seven men, according to officials.
• The Chinese People's Liberation Army made a show of rotating troops in its Hong Kong garrison on Thursday as protests continue across the city.
• New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is the latest 2020 candidate to drop out of the presidential primary race, Gillibrand failed to qualify for the third debate next month.
• The World Health Organization is close to revoking America's status as having eliminated measles as well over 1,200 new US cases have appeared in 2019 due to lack of vaccination and misinformation.

Last Call For Johnny Come Lately

Georgia Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson says that health issues are forcing him to retire at the end of 2019, meaning both of Georgia's senate seats will be up for grabs in 2020.

Isakson, a three-term Republican, said he decided to resign because of the “mounting health challenges” that include several falls from Parkinson’s disease and surgery this week to remove a growth on his kidney.
“It goes against every fiber of my being to leave in the middle of my Senate term, but I know it’s the right thing to do on behalf of my state,” the 74-year-old Isakson said in a statement.

Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, will appoint a replacement for Isakson, who was elected to a third term by a wide margin in 2016. Though Isakson’s term doesn’t expire until 2022, the timing of his retirement means the seat will be on the ballot next year.

Three Georgia Democrats have already announced challenges to U.S. Sen. David Perdue, a first-term Republican who is up for election in 2020. Isakson’s seat will likely draw several other Democrats, who see Georgia as increasingly competitive.

It’s not yet clear who Kemp will appoint to fill Isakson’s seat, though potential candidates include Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, state Senate Pro Tem Butch Miller, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

Among the potential Democratic contenders for the seat are the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church; Jon Ossoff, a former candidate for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District; Jason Carter, the runner-up for governor in 2014; and Michelle Nunn, who was defeated by David Perdue in the 2014 Senate race.

Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost last year’s race for governor and earlier ruled out a 2020 bid for Perdue’s seat, said through a spokesman that she would not run next year. Instead, she said, she’s focused on an expansion of her voting rights initiative.

“While she will not be a candidate herself, she is committed to helping Democratic candidates win both Senate races next year,” said the spokesman, Seth Bringman.

So to recap, Isakson is retiring, Brian Kemp gets to name a replacement for 2020, both Senate seats are up from grabs, and Stacey Abrams isn't running for either one.

Dems just got handed the opportunity of a generation here, a shot at two Senate seats in a rapidly purpling Southern state with a wildly unpopular Trump at the top of the ticket.

Let's see this done, guys.

The Great Wall Of Fascism

In any remotely sane section of the multiverse, this Washington Post story would be the end of the Trump regime.

President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.

Trump has repeatedly promised to complete 500 miles of fencing by the time voters go to the polls in November 2020, stirring chants of “Finish the Wall!” at his political rallies as he pushes for tighter border controls. But the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has completed just about 60 miles of “replacement” barrier during the first 2½ years of Trump’s presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.

The president has told senior aides that a failure to deliver on the signature promise of his 2016 campaign would be a letdown to his supporters and an embarrassing defeat. With the election 14 months away and hundreds of miles of fencing plans still in blueprint form, Trump has held regular White House meetings for progress updates and to hasten the pace, according to several people involved in the discussions.

When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying “take the land,” according to officials who attended the meetings.

“Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,” he has told officials in meetings about the wall.

“He said people expected him to build a wall, and it had to be done by the election,” one former official said.

I mean, that would be it right there.  Both House and Senate Republicans would say this is unacceptable and that they would expect Mr. Trump to resign immediately.

Sadly, nothing will happen.  Well, right up until armed troops come in and start taking people's land for the wall, that is.

But he's joking, right?

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

Donald Trump has repeatedly called for the prosecution of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for his involvement in the Muller investigation.  More than anyone else, Trump sees McCabe as a traitor, because to Donald Trump, the chief goal of the FBI is to protect DOnald Trump and his interests.  McCabe refused to play that game and was fired days before his retirement pension became effective.  Trump has been grumbling about McCabe on Twitter ever since.

But last week McCabe was hired by CNN as an on-air commentator, and that was Trump's final straw.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who became one of President Donald Trump’s top enemies within his own administration, is joining CNN as a contributor, a network spokesperson said. His first day is Friday.

McCabe spent two decades in the FBI before he was fired in March 2018 by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions just more than 24 hours before his planned retirement.

The CNN gig comes as McCabe is fighting that termination in court. Earlier this month, McCabe filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging that his removal was part of a scheme by the president to remove government employees “because they were not politically loyal to him.”

McCabe’s hiring was reported earlier by CNN’s senior media reporter Oliver Darcy.

The Justice Department said he was fired because he broke FBI rules by improperly disclosing information to the press related to an investigation into Hillary Clinton. A Justice Department inspector general report later found McCabe had “lacked candor, including under oath” in describing those disclosures to investigators.

Neither the Justice Department nor the White House immediately responded to a request for comment. A formal response to McCabe’s lawsuit is not due in court until October.

That was last week.  Over the weekend, Trump decided that McCabe is going to jail and his Justice Department is going to bury McCabe in a box somewhere.

Federal prosecutors in Washington appear to be in the final stages of deciding whether to seek an indictment of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director and a frequent target of President Trump, on charges of lying to federal agents, according to interviews with people familiar with recent developments in the investigation.

In two meetings last week, Mr. McCabe’s lawyers met with the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who is expected to be involved in the decision about whether to prosecute, and for more than an hour with the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie K. Liu, according to a person familiar with the meetings. The person would not detail the discussions, but defense lawyers typically meet with top law enforcement officials to try to persuade them not to indict their client if they failed to get line prosecutors to drop the case.

An indictment of a former top F.B.I. official is extremely rare and would be the latest chapter in the saga of Mr. McCabe, who was fired last year over the issue now under criminal investigation — whether he failed to be forthcoming with internal investigators examining the F.B.I.’s dealings with the news media.

An indictment would be certain to draw praise from Mr. Trump, who has made his attacks on Mr. McCabe a centerpiece of his yearslong campaign to discredit the Justice Department and the F.B.I. over the Russia investigation.

As Ben Wittes of Lawfare points out, the fact that this story made the NY Times means McCabe is now absolutely facing imminent political prosecution.

Let me translate this paragraph for you: Such meetings generally take place when indictment is imminent; they happen when the government plans to bring charges. You should thus expect charges against McCabe to be forthcoming any day. And if such charges don’t happen, that doesn’t mean they weren’t planned but, rather, that some extrinsic event has intervened.

Why is that shocking? Because as best as I can tell, the facts available on the public record simply don’t support such charges. The only visible factor militating in favor of the Justice Department charging McCabe, in fact, is that the department has been on the receiving end of a sustained campaign by President Trump demanding McCabe’s scalp.

To be sure, the inspector general’s report that prompted McCabe’s firing paints a deeply troubling portrait of McCabe’s conduct. It describes, in brief, how McCabe authorized an October 2016 disclosure on background to the Wall Street Journal and then misrepresented his role in the story on several occasions—including to the inspector general. I have no reason to disbelieve the inspector general’s account of this episode and no interest in defending McCabe’s alleged conduct. While McCabe has disputed the findings, he has not—at least not as of yet—presented a plausible alternative narrative that accounts for the facts the inspector general recounts. My point here is thus not to suggest that McCabe did nothing wrong.

But criminal charges? At least based on what’s in the inspector general’s report, this is very far from a criminal case. Criminal dispositions on false statements matters in internal investigations are exceptionally rare. Absent some gross aggravating factor, I struggle to think of any other examples. Workplace false statements are normally handled through internal disciplinary means, not criminal charges. There are countless public cases of gross misconduct and lies about that misconduct that are routinely declined as criminal matters.

But not this time, because Trump called up his Attorney General over the weekend and said "This McCabe asshole is not gonna be on CNN, you put him in prison or else."  You can make the argument that CNN messed up by hiring McCabe because he's too close to the news still and it probably did.

But sending him to prison is far worse and far more indicative of corruption and abuse of power. Bill Barr is doing what Trump hired him to do.

Expect more political prosecutions coming.  Lots more.  

StupidiNews!

• The Department of Veteran Affairs is investigating 11 deaths at a West Virginia VA hospital, with the state's Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin confirming at least one death is a homicide.
• GOP LGBTQ group Log Cabin Republicans has lost an Executive Director and several board members over the group's decision to endorse Donald Trump for 2020.
• A federal judge has blocked Missouri's ban on abortion procedures after 8 weeks of pregnancy, state GOP AG Eric Schmitt says his office will review the ruling before deciding on an appeal.
• German financial giant Deutsche Bank confirms it has tax returns sought by House Democrats, but will not confirm if the returns are that of Donald Trump.
• Indonesian President Joko Widodo has announced plans to move the nation's capital from Jakarta to Borneo as the city of 10 million faces flooding and sinking due to climate change.

Last Call For Deportation Nation, Con't

Under the Trump regime, where right-wing nutjobs are busy screaming about how college campuses are "indoctrination centers" and where "free speech" is supposedly no longer tolerated, if you're a university student here on a visa, your social media history is grounds for deportation now.

With classes scheduled to start next week, incoming Harvard freshman Ismail B. Ajjawi, like many of his fellow students, was set to arrive on campus for the first time this week. But the 17-year-old Palestinian’s hard-won education at perhaps the world’s preeminent university is now in doubt. American immigration officials stopped Ajjawi, a Palestinian resident of Tyre, Lebanon, at Boston Logan International Airport on Friday night, the Crimson reports, where he was held in custody for eight hours and subjected to invasive questioning by a female immigration officer, who then abruptly told him his study visa was being canceled and that he was being deported.

“Upon arrival, Ajjawi faced questioning from immigration officials along with several other international students. While the other students were allowed to leave, Ajjawi alleges an immigration officer continued to question him about his religion and religious practices in Lebanon,” according to the Crimson. “The same officer then asked him to unlock his phone and laptop, and left to search them for roughly five hours, Ajjawi alleges. After the search, the officer questioned him about his friends’ social media activity.”

“When I asked every time to have my phone back so I could tell [someone] about the situation, the officer refused and told me to sit back in [my] position and not move at all,” Ajjawi wrote in a statement. “After the 5 hours ended, she called me into a room , and she started screaming at me. She said that she found people posting political points of view that oppose the US on my friend[s] list.” University officials told the Crimson they still are trying to resolve the situation in time for Ajjawi—whose enrollment at Harvard was made possible by a scholarship from a nonprofit organization—to be in class when the semester starts Sept. 3.

“I have no single post on my timeline discussing politics,” Ajjawi wrote. “I responded that I have no business with such posts and that I didn’t like, [s]hare or comment on them and told her that I shouldn’t be held responsible for what others post.”

Doesn't matter though, he's a Palestinian coming to Harvard on a full ride, and white Christian America can't have that happen.  Not in a million years.

Free speech means whatever the Trump regime is willing to allow you to say.  And that goes for all of us these days.

Meanwhile, better hope there aren't any Atlantic hurricanes this season that his the US, because all of FEMA's disaster emergency funds just went to ICE for more concentration camps.

The Trump administration is pulling $271 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Disaster Relief Fund, to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum-seekers who have been forced to wait in Mexico, according to department officials and a letter sent to the agency by a California congresswoman.

To fund temporary locations for court hearings for asylum-seekers along the southern border, ICE would gain $155 million, all from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, according to the letter from Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., which was seen by NBC News.

The allocations were sent to Congress as a notification rather than a request, because the administration believes it has the authority to repurpose these funds after Congress did not pass more funding for ICE detention beds as part of an emergency funding bill for the southwest border in June.

Specifically, the Department of Homeland Security will lose $116 million previously allocated for Coast Guard operations, aviation security and other components in order to fund nearly 6,800 more beds for immigrant detainees, the officials said.

“We would not say this is with no risk but we would say that we worked it in a way to…minimize the risk. This was a must pay bill that needed to be addressed,” said a DHS official, who noted that the funds would begin transfer immediately to fund ICE through Sept. 30.

The only infrastructure in America that gets built these days are concentration camps for more undocumented.  Better hope there's no hurricanes, wildfires, or earthquakes in the next few months, because there are zero dollars for FEMA to respond with as of right now.

Not in Trump's America.

Time To Pound The Pavement, Dems

For the 2020 Democratic nominee to beat Trump, former Obama organizer Joy Cushman says Democrats are going to have to do what worked so well for Barack Obama in 2008 and for House Democratic candidates in 2018: go door to door and earn every single vote the hard way.

Republicans know how President Obama won, yet there is a contentious debate among progressives about how to run campaigns. One side says you engage your most excited supporters, organizing them into local leadership teams and helping them host trainings, house parties and voter registration drives so that they can build support and gather accurate data about their neighborhoods.

This creates the capacity for millions of authentic, person-to-person conversations about families’ experiences, and their hopes and fears — the kinds of conversations that can expand an electorate, energize a base and demobilize the opposition. Data and technology are tools to improve this work, not the machinery for controlling people. 

The other side, louder and better funded, says that data, technology and analytics should drive campaign strategies and voter outreach programs. So campaigns hire tech companies to create lists of potential supporters based on algorithms and statistical modeling. And they develop apps through which supporters are meant to blast, but not actually engage, their social networks. Staff members and volunteers parachute into communities to knock on doors and recite poll-tested scripts. 

Over the past decade, the party elites — consultants, strategists and donors — have caught the data-and-analytics fever and largely abandoned organizing. This has meant that entire neighborhoods have been politically redlined out of engagement in our most fundamental democratic practice.

Those of us who have spent our lives talking to regular folks on campaigns now walk around neighborhoods with lists created by someone at a computer far away. We have skipped many doors and missed entire families because the data experts didn’t have addresses or phone numbers for poor people, young people, people of color or people who moved a lot — many of those who carried Barack Obama to victory. 

Going into 2020, Democrats cannot fall into the trap of being overly seduced by shiny tech-only tricks. They must get back to the hard work of pounding the pavement to organize the people who already want to vote for them. That’s how we’ll create the power to build a movement that attracts others. In fact, data from 2016 and 2018 show that organizing increases voter turnout more than any other single outreach method, including mail, TV and digital advertisements, and twice as much as contact from a stranger. 

Part of the reason the debate has unfolded this way is because the story that took hold about how Barack Obama won, and has since permeated the voting industry, is that sophisticated data, technology and analytics twice won him the White House, not organizing or volunteers. That a few dozen tech nerds in the Chicago headquarters tipped the campaign to victory. This story, and the realignment of progressive interests and infrastructure around it, has baffled me and other top campaigners. 

People won Mr. Obama’s campaigns. From the black beauticians in South Carolina to the white and black retirees in Pennsylvania to the Latinx supporters in Nevada, hundreds of thousands of volunteers knocked on doors and made calls from the primaries through the general elections. And Barack Obama saw them, spoke to them and loved them.

Barack Obama used both data and organizing to win.  He did it better than anyone else. Dems need to get back to that era, where Obama took Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy and ran with it.  I'm tired of hearing about "battleground states" like the other 45 don't matter, because we're giving away state legislatures in a Census and redistricting year.

We have to contest everything in 2020.  Every seat, every vote, every legislature, every governor's mansion, everything.

Beshear Beatng Bevin Bigly

With ten weeks to go before the 2019 gubernatorial election here in Kentucky, the polls have Democratic AG Andy Beshear up substantially over GOP Gov. Matt Bevin.

An internal poll from the campaign of Andy Beshear shows the Democratic attorney general leading Gov. Matt Bevin by 9 percentage points in the race for governor, with a little over two months until the election.

The Courier Journal obtained a copy of the polling memo from the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, which surveyed 501 likely voters in Kentucky from Monday through Thursday last week.

The poll found 48% of respondents would vote for Beshear, while 39% said they would vote for Bevin. Libertarian candidate John Hicks picked up 6% in the poll.

Of the 501 people surveyed, 43% self-identified as Republican and 37% self-identified as Democrat, while 48% considered themselves as conservative and 22% as liberal.

The results closely resemble an internal poll conducted by the Democratic Attorneys General Association a week earlier, which found Beshear leading Bevin by the exact same margin.

The last independent polling of Kentucky's race for governor came from the Gravis Marketing Survey in June. It found Bevin leading Beshear 48% to 42%.

If anything the poll favors Bevin, and yet the numbers clearly show Bevin has burned a number of bridges in the last three-plus years: with state and local government employees, teachers, farmers, and miners.

Still, if anything, Bevin shouldn't be sweating in the least.

Polling of statewide races in Kentucky has been notoriously flawed in recent years, especially the race for governor in 2015, when the Bluegrass Poll found Democrat Jack Conway leading Bevin by 5 percentage points late in the race. Bevin wound up winning on Election Day by 9 percentage points.

Bevin is fond of bringing up the erroneous polling from 2015 whenever he is asked about surveys showing him with a low approval rating, saying they are not a true indicator of the support he has throughout the state.

He's not wrong.  That Bluegrass poll from 2015 was cataclysmically wrong, off by 14 points.  In every instance turnout was much, much higher than anticipated and Kentucky voters turned out for Matt Bevin.  Bevin doesn't feel the need to do anything differently because he simply dismisses all polls showing Beshear ahead.  He's counting on that to happen again.

But they can't all be wrong, can they?

StupidiNews!

• Tropical Storm Dorian is expected to become a minimal hurricane before threatening Hispaniola and Puerto Rico on Tuesday.
• Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania says universal firearms background check legislation has a "chance" of passing, but no votes have been scheduled on legislation in the Senate.
• Election security officials say the biggest threat to US election systems could be Election Day ransomware attacks that hold entire voting precincts hostage and throw voting into total chaos.
• Donald Trump says he won't risk America's energy sector on "windmill dreams" and is vowing again to increase coal, gas, and nuclear power plants across the US.
• The DEA confirms that the agency is planning increased cannabis research and that some -- emphasis on some -- CBD products sold in the US are indeed legal.