Deportation Nation, Con't

Trump's been having it both ways on deportations lately, by slaking the thirst for blood by the base with headlines of ICE raids on soccer fields and school parking lots and by punishing sanctuary cities by cutting off federal law enforcement grants. But Trump has also continued Obama's DACA program, sparing some 750,000 people brought to the US as kids from deportation.

Trump's red state allies are now sick of this, and will sue the Trump regime to end DACA unless Trump ends the program and begins immediate mass deportations of hundreds of thousands of DACA enrollees.

President Donald Trump has been unusually cautious about his plans for so-called Dreamers, but he’s running out of time to make up his mind.

Ten conservative states have threatened to sue the administration in order to kill off the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a 2012 initiative that has granted work permits to nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants. They’re trying to replicate their legal tactic from more than two years ago, when a broader coalition of GOP-led states successfully stopped a more expansive program for millions of undocumented immigrants before it even began.

That means DACA, which President Barack Obama began five years ago this month, is confronting its gravest danger yet. And one of the biggest questions — will Trump defend the program in court — is still anybody’s guess.

Trump is facing pressure from his conservative allies to kill the initiative, but the hard-liner-in-chief has said that he wants to approach Dreamers “with heart.” Meanwhile, it’s also not clear how Trump would fare in court if he does defend the program, even as an early September deadline to act looms.

Legal experts believe if Texas and the nine other states do file a lawsuit to halt DACA, they’ll win — particularly if the same federal judge that blocked the broader immigration program under Obama, Judge Andrew Hanen, oversees the latest legal challenge.

Stephen Legomsky, who was chief counsel at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services when the Obama administration launched DACA, said Hanen’s “extreme, extreme hostility” to Obama’s 2014 executive actions on immigration “was a matter of public record.”

“If Judge Hanen allows them to tack on a DACA challenge, no doubt he will enjoin DACA,” said Legomsky, now a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “It is more difficult to disrupt an ongoing successful program. … All that said, given the judges they’re likely to have, I think they have a very tough challenge.”

Either way, I would expect the Dreamers to be in real trouble and soon.   No doubt Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott want headlines of mass deportations and fearful, angry immigrants saying that they'll never be stupid enough to trust the federal government again.

Which is the point.

StupidiNews!

• After strengthening to a Category 2 storm, Hurricane Harvey is expected to make landfall on the Texas coast as a Category 3 storm later today, bringing flooding rains and 120 Mph winds.
• Florida has carried out the state's first lethal injection execution in over a year with a new drug previously not used for executions.
• Ousted Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra has reportedly fled the country ahead of a possible 10-year prison sentence for negligence by the military junta that replaced her.
• Samsung heir Jay Lee faces five years in prison for his role in the bribery scandal that brought down former South Korean President Park Geun-hye.
• AT&T faces a formal FCC discrimination complaint over internet speed in Cleveland's poorest neighborhoods as Republicans in Congress consider getting rid of FCC protections entirely.

Last Call For Control The Systems Through Fear

The closer Trump gets to a major constitutional crisis, the more fear his followers are spreading.

Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign advisor and personal friend of the President says if Congress impeaches Donald Trump, there will be all-out Civil War in the U.S. 

"The people who are calling for impeachment are the people who didn't vote for him. They need to get over it," Stone said to TMZ in an airport baggage claim.

"They lost. Theire candidate had every advantage: They spent two billion dollars, we spent $275 million. Sorry, we whipped their ass. It is over. You lost." 

He added, warning: "Try to impeach him. Just try it. You will have a spasm of violence --an insurrection-- in this country like you have never seen before... Both sides are heavily armed, my friend."

"This is not 1974," Stone, who worked in the White House during Nixon's resignation, added. "People will not stand for [impeachment of President Trump]. Any politician who votes for it would be endangering their own life." 

He explained: "There will be violence on both sides. Let me make this clear: "I'm not advocating violence, I am predicting [violence]."

Asked if he is saying that Trump's removal from office would lead to a Civil War, Stone said: "Yes, that is what I think will happen."

 And Roger Stone will do whatever he can to create the atmosphere that leads to that (and already has for the most part).  The unsaid promise is that any attempt to remove Trump from office, or to even censure him, would lead to bloodshed on a massive scale, open warfare in the streets of American cities and towns, and lawmakers being targets.

Also, Stone is quick with the "both sides" rhetoric that Trump has used.  That's no accident either. This is a warning to Republicans who may be wavering as it is to Democrats investigating.

Whither The Bernsters?

John Sides at the Monkey Cage asks the data-driven question about whether enough Bernie Sanders voters flipped to Trump in order to cost Clinton the election.  It's a valid one, but the answer is complicated.

Two surveys estimate that 12 percent of Sanders voters voted for Trump. A third survey suggests it was 6 percent. 

First, the political scientist Brian Schaffner analyzed the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which was conducted by YouGov and interviewed 64,600 Americans in October-November 2016. In that survey, Schaffner found that 12 percent of people who voted in the primary and reported voting for Sanders also voted in November and reported voting for Trump. 

Schaffner examined only voters whose turnout in the primary and general election could be validated using voter file data. This excludes people who said they voted but actually did not — although it also excludes people who voted in caucuses or party-run primaries, for which validated turnout data are not as readily available. 

Second, the same 12 percent figure emerges in the 2016 VOTER Survey, which was also conducted by YouGov and overseen by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group (of which I am research director). In 2016, this survey interviewed 8,000 respondents in July, when they were asked their primary vote preference, and then in December, when they were asked their general election preference. This has the advantage of measuring primary preference closer to the primaries themselves and then tracking people over time. But their turnout in both elections has not been validated as of yet. 

The third survey is the RAND Presidential Election Panel Survey, which interviewed the same group of about 3,000 Americans six times during the campaign. Again, this survey has the advantage of tracking voters over time, but nobody’s turnout has been validated. Among voters who reported supporting Sanders as of March 2016, 6 percent then reported voting for Trump in November.

There is no way to know whether 12 percent or 6 percent or some other estimate is The Truth, and there are enough differences among these surveys that we cannot easily pinpoint why the numbers differ. So we should take these estimates with some caution.

6-12% isn't unusual compared to other election cycles too. The real issue turns out is the type of Sanders voter that voted for Trump.

Perhaps the most important feature of Sanders-Trump voters is this: They weren’t really Democrats to begin with. 

Of course, we know that many Sanders voters did not readily identify with the Democratic Party as of 2016, and Schaffner found that Sanders-Trump voters were even less likely to identify as Democrats. Sanders-Trump voters didn’t much approve of Obama either. 

In fact, this was true well before 2016. In the VOTER Survey, we know how Sanders-Trump voters voted in 2012, based on an earlier interview in November 2012. Only 35 percent of them reported voting for Obama, compared with 95 percent of Sanders-Clinton voters. In other words, Sanders-Trump voters were predisposed to support Republicans in presidential general elections well before Trump’s candidacy. 

Schaffner found that what distinguished Sanders-Trump voters from Sanders-Clinton voters wasn’t their attitudes about trade, but their attitudes about race. When asked whether whites are advantaged, Sanders-Trump voters were much more likely to disagree than were Sanders-Clinton voters. 

The same thing is true in the VOTER survey — and, again, this was evident well before 2016. When originally interviewed in December 2011, Sanders-Trump voters were actually more likely to favor increasing trade (59 percent said so) than Sanders-Clinton voters (48 percent said so). 

And, again, the bigger cleavage involved race. For example, in December 2011, 75 percent of Sanders-Trump voters agreed with this statement: “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.” Only 16 percent of Sanders-Clinton voters agreed. 

Similarly, when how they felt about whites and blacks on a 0-100 scale, Sanders-Trump voters rated blacks 9 points lower than Sanders-Clinton voters. But Sanders-Trump voters rated whites 8 points higher. 

The same thing was true for other minority groups. Compared with Sanders-Clinton voters, Sanders-Trump voters rated Latinos 21 points less favorably, Muslims 21 points less favorably, and gays and lesbians 22 points less favorably. 

In short, it may be hard to know exactly how many Sanders-Trump voters there were, or whether they really cost Clinton the election. But it doesn’t appear that many of them were predisposed to support Clinton in the first place.

In other words, the people that voted for Sanders in the primaries and Trump in the general weren't Obama fans, weren't Clinton fans, weren't Democrats, and were always going to vote for Trump, so Clinton couldn't "lose" what she never had. Can't blame Bernie for that any more than I can blame Jay-Z for keeping me from Beyonce' (the cad.)

But it is interesting to see how may Trump voters like Bernie, isn't it?

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Yet another attempted meeting between the Trump campaign and Russia, but this is something a lot bigger: there's a new name in the mix, current Trump Deputy White House Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn, and his role in trying to arrange a meeting between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin himself.

Congressional investigators have unearthed an email from a top Trump aide that referenced a previously unreported effort to arrange a meeting last year between Trump campaign officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. 

The aide, Rick Dearborn, who is now President Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff, sent a brief email to campaign officials last year relaying information about an individual who was seeking to connect top Trump officials with Putin, the sources said. 

The person was only identified in the email as being from "WV," which one source said was a reference to West Virginia. It's unclear who the individual is, what he or she was seeking, or whether Dearborn even acted on the request. One source said that the individual was believed to have had political connections in West Virginia, but details about the request and who initiated it remain vague. 

The same source said Dearborn in the email appeared skeptical of the requested meeting.
Sources said the email occurred in June 2016 around the time of the recently revealed Trump Tower meeting where Russians with Kremlin ties met with the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner as well as then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. 

While many details around the Dearborn email are unclear, its existence suggests the Russians may have been looking for another entry point into the Trump campaign to see if there were any willing partners as part of their effort to discredit -- and ultimately defeat -- Hillary Clinton. 

Dearborn's name has not been mentioned much as part of the Russia probe. But he served as then-Sen. Jeff Sessions' chief of staff, as well as a top policy aide on the campaign. And investigators have questions about whether he played a role in potentially arranging two meetings that occurred between the then-Russia ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, and Sessions, who has downplayed the significance of those encounters. 

Dearborn was involved in helping to arrange an April 2016 event at the Mayflower Hotel where Trump delivered a major foreign policy address, sources said. Kislyak attended the event and a reception beforehand, but it's unclear whether he interacted with Sessions there.

Yet another piece of the puzzle falls into place and remember, this is coming from the congressional investigation into Trump's Russia connections, not Mueller's investigation.  This all points the finger back to Jeff Sessions who led Trump's foreign policy campaign team in 2016.  We haven't talked too much about Sessions and his role in Trump's Russia mess, but this is likely to raise some uncomfortable new questions about that.

So who's "WV"?  The most obvious candidate is coal billionaire and recent party-switching GOP Gov. Jim Justice, who did business with Russian coal interests in West Virginia in 2015.  Justice buys the governor's seat and then stabs the Dems in the back at a Trump rally, well that's the kind of polticial opportunist with a crapload of money the Russians would love to recruit.  Whether or not Justice had access to Russian friends, well maybe somebody should be asking those questions too.

And some of those questions may be answered by the Steele Dossier.  Last week Fusion GPS president Glenn Simpson spent 10 hours testifying before Chuck Grassley and the Senate Judiciary committee, and Grassley said this week he didn't see why that testimony couldn't be released.  The Steele Dossier is the research into Trump's Russia connections, which turned up stuff so disturbing that the FBI got involved.  BuzzFeed published the dossier back in January but the caveat is that the documents weren't confirmed.

But now, seven months later, it's looking more and more like the dossier is correct: that the Russians had compromising blackmail on Trump and used it to secure his loyalty.  If Simpson's Senate testimony goes public and it backs up the validity of the Steele Dossier, that's going to be something Trump won't be able to recover from.

We'll see where this goes, but if Dearborn is being investigated, then so is Sessions.  That's pretty big.  The Steele Dossier could be even bigger.

We'll see.

StupidiNews!

• A single winning ticket for Wednesday's $759 million Powerball jackpot was sold in Massachusetts, if claimed it would be the largest lottery prize for a single ticket in US history.
• Wanted white supremacist Christopher Cantwell has turned himself into police in Virginia after being filmed illegally using tear gas for a Vice documentary about Charlottesville.
• Russian bombers remain on high alert after deploying near US/South Korean military exercises as tensions between North and South Korea rise.
• Tropical Storm Harvey could reach hurricane strength by the time it makes landfall on the Texas coast Friday, but the storm is expected to stall out over the weekend bringing feet of rain.
• The Federal Trade Commission says it won't oppose Amazon's buyout of grocery chain Whole Foods, but may investigate the $13.7 billion deal if "anticompetitive conduct" arises.

Last Call For Vote Of No Confidence

Late this afternoon a federal judge tossed Texas's voter suppression law 2.0 as unconstitutional.

A federal judge has tossed out a new law softening Texas’ strict voter identification requirements.

U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos on Wednesday ruled that Senate Bill 5, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, doesn’t absolve Texas lawmakers from responsibility for discriminating against Latino and black voters when they crafted one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws in 2011. The judge also ruled that the state failed to prove that the new law would accommodate such voters going forward.

The Corpus Christi judge’s ruling is the latest twist in a six-year battle over Texas’ laws restricting what forms of identification are accepted at the polls, and it sets up a round of squabbling over whether the federal government should once again pre-approve the state's election laws.

SB 5 was the Legislature’s attempt to wriggle free of consequences after courts found fault with its 2011 ID law.

Last year, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the 2011 law disproportionately burdened minority voters who were less likely to have one of seven forms of identification the state required them to show at the polls. Ramos upped the ante in April, ruling the state discriminated on purpose.

As Ramos weighed possible remedies for the state's violations of the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution, Texas leaders state pushed SB 5 as a solution and scrambled to get it to Abbott's desk at the end of the legislative session.

Ramos had temporarily softened the state's voter ID rules for the 2016 elections, and the new law somewhat followed her lead. It allows Texans without photo ID to vote if they present alternate forms of ID and sign affidavits swearing a “reasonable impediment” kept them from obtaining the proper ID.

Those voters could present documents such as utility bills, bank statements or paychecks to confirm their identification. Those found to have lied about not possessing the proper photo ID could be charged with a state jail felony, which carries a penalty of 180 days to two years in jail — which Ramos said "appear to be efforts at voter intimidation."

Under the new law, the permissible IDs remain the same as the earlier law: a state driver's license or ID card, a concealed handgun license, a U.S. passport, a military ID card, a U.S citizenship certificate or an election identification certificate.

Texas's goal was clearly to drag its feet until a remedy for 2018 was impossible, then repeat for 2020, then 2022 and so on.  It still may do that, but now the onus is on Texas to fix its problem, not wait for nebulous guidance from the courts.  Ramos has moved the clock forward.

Still, I fully expect Texas to push this to the US Supreme Court, which probably wouldn't rule until June 2018 at the earliest, with the court then saying Texas would have to have a real plan in place by 2020.

We'll see.

The Preacher And The Creature

Donald Trump's greatest con job (and with any great cons, it requires victims who are willing to believe) may have been convincing evangelical Christians that he was one of the faithful.  To that end, it's no wonder that megachurch-style "prosperity gospel" pastors have latched on to Trump as anointed by God to lead America.  You would think then that Trump's spiritual advisers would be the first to serve as a check on Trump's more authoritarian impulses and would act as a moral bulwark against the kind of raging darkness Trump was spewing last night in Phoenix.

If Trump advisers like Pastor Paula White are any indication however, you would be wildly incorrect.

One of President Donald Trump’s most trusted religious confidantes used ominous religious language to defend him this week, drawing on Christian nationalism to argue that resisting Trump equates resisting “the hand of God.” 

During a panel interview on the Jim Bakker show this Monday, pastor Paula White gave several full-throated defenses of the president. White, a wealthy faith leader who originally gained notoriety for preaching a much-maligned version of the “prosperity gospel,” has been described as Trump’s “God whisperer.” She is a longtime friend of the former businessman, was a regular surrogate for his campaign in 2016, and remains one of several evangelical leaders who currently advise his administration. 

But even compared to her brief stint on the campaign trail, White’s remarks this week were atypically political and represent some of the strongest statements yet making the Christian nationalist case for Trump. 

After insisting that America is more than 70 percent evangelical (a claim that is wildly false), White launched into a series of mini-sermons that described Trump’s presidency as “anointed” by God—and proclaimed that his opponents, by extension, are an affront to the Almighty. 

“We are more impressed with a Saul anointing than a David anointing because we are more impressed with what looks right than what is right,” White, whose ministries were once the subject of a failed Senate probe investigating possible financial improprieties, said. “Therefore, we choose things that we think should sound right, should act right. They say about our president, ‘Well, he is not presidential.’ Thank goodness. Thank goodness. Thank goodness … he is not a polished politician. In other words, he is authentically — whether people like it or not — has been raised up by God. Because God says that He raises up and places all people in places of authority.” 

She continued: “It is God who raises up a king. It is God that sets one down. When you fight against the plan of God, you are fighting against the hand of God.”

Now, I'm a bit rusty on my comparative theology studies from 20 years ago, but I'm pretty sure my civics lessons are still valid here, and my memory reminds me that the Constitution of the United States and the Founding Fathers who wrote it both possess a pretty dim view on monarchs in general.

Zandardad is the fellow you'd want to talk to about spirituality in general, but I'd fairly sure he'd tell you that holding up Trump as anointed by God would be incorrect on so many levels it would physically hurt to define them all.

Pastor White is coming across as fully supporting Trump's narcissism as the word of the Lord, and resistance to his rule as resistance to Him.  I wouldn't buy that nonsense even if I wasn't a lapsed Catholic, I know th difference between right and wrong and man, resisting Trump is about as right as it gets.

The Front Man For The Next Housing Crisis

The Trump regime isn't just repeating the mistakes of the Dubya years on housing by dismantling Obama-era protections, they're not just going down the same path with banks playing Big Casino games, they're gutting affordable public housing ahead of time through HUD and Ben Carson, so when this bubble does burst the pain is going to be astronomical.  Alec MacGillis:

The Trump cuts would mean that several programs would be eliminated entirely, including the home program, which offers seed money for affordable-housing initiatives, and the $3 billion Community Development Block Grant program that Carla Hills, Ford’s HUD secretary, had praised to Carson at the dinner. In New York, CDBG helped pay for, among many things, housing-code enforcement, the 311 system, and homeless shelters for veterans. But the grants were also relied on in struggling small towns, where they paid for sidewalks, sewer upgrades, and community centers. In Glouster, Ohio, a tiny coal town that went for Trump by a single vote after going for Obama two to one in 2012, officials were counting on the grants to replace a bridge so weak that the school bus couldn’t cross it, forcing kids from one part of town to cluster along a busy road for pickup. “Without those funds, it would just cripple this area,” said Nathan Simons, who administers the grants for the surrounding region. HUD, for all its shrinking stature and insecurity complex, has over time worked its way into the fabric of ailing communities throughout the country, a role that has grown only larger as so much of Middle America has suffered decline, and as the capacity of so many state and local governments has withered amid dwindling tax bases and civic disengagement. On my travels through the Midwest I’ve seen how many federally subsidized housing complexes there are on the edges of small towns and cities, places very far from the Bronx or the South Side of Chicago. People living in these places rely on a functioning, minimally competent HUD no less than do the Section 8 voucher recipients in Jared Kushner’s low-income complexes in Baltimore. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, the Great Society department actually plays an even more vital role than when it was conceived. 

But if Carson was troubled by the disembowelment of his department, he showed no sign of it. Even before the final numbers were out, he had assured housing advocates that cuts would be made up for by money dedicated to housing in the big infrastructure bill Trump was promising — a notion that his fellow Republican Kemp, among others, found far-fetched. “I’m not sure he understood how that would work,” Kemp told me. “He was probably repeating what had been told to him.” Then, a day after the budget was released, Carson downplayed the importance of programs for the poor in a radio interview with Armstrong Williams, saying that poverty was largely a “state of mind.” This, more than anything, seemed to be a crystallization of the Carson philosophy of HUD: that privation would be solved by the power of positive thinking, that his own extraordinary rise was scalable and could be replicated millions of times over. 

Two weeks later, Carson went to Capitol Hill to testify on the budget proposal before Congressional panels that would have the final say on the numbers. With Kasper perched over his shoulder, he told both the Senate and House committees that they shouldn’t get overly hung up on the cuts. “We must look for human solutions, not just policies and programs,” he said. “Our programs must reach out and so must our hearts.” The budget, he added, would “help more eligible Americans achieve freedom from regulations and bureaucracy and the ability to govern themselves.” 

Members of both parties on the panels seemed dubious. Even conservative Republicans challenged the elimination of CDBG and dismissed Carson’s repeated claim that those and other cuts would be made up for with “public-private partnerships,” noting that such partnerships depended on exactly the public seed money that the budget was jettisoning.
Carson remained unruffled. The cuts were made necessary by the “atmosphere of constraint” created by a “new paradigm that’s been forced on us,” he said, presumably referring to the desire for tax cuts for the wealthy and an even larger military. “The problem that faces us now as a nation will only be exacerbated if we don’t deal with them in what appears to be a harsh manner,” he told the Senate panel. “We have to stop the bleeding to get the healing.” 

As I watched the hearings, it occurred to me that Carson was the perfect HUD secretary for Donald Trump, the real-estate-developer president who appears to care little for public housing. He offered a gently smiling refutation to accusations from any corner that the department’s evisceration would have grave consequences. After all, Ben Carson had made it from Detroit to Johns Hopkins without housing assistance, a point of pride in his family. Not to mention that Carson’s very identity — theoretically — helped inoculate the administration against charges of prejudice. (Just last week, Carson said, in the wake of racially tinged violence in Charlottesville, that the controversy over Trump’s support of white supremacists there was “blown out of proportion” and echoed the president’s “both sides” language when referring to “hatred and bigotry.”) 

Even better, Carson could be trusted not to resist Mick Mulvaney’s budget designs. At one moment in the Senate hearing, Carson noted that Congress’s recent spending package for the current year had given the department more than it had been expecting. “I’m always happy to take money,” he said, smiling. 

Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committee’s top Democrat, was unamused. “You have to ask for it first,” he said.

The cuts are going to wreck the government's capacity for responding to the massive financial damage that is assuredly coming, at the time it will need it the most.  I don't know what else to say other than this country will be in a full-blown depression if Trump's GOP has their way, and what happens after that is anyone's guess.

StupidiNews!

• In a 77-minute speech at a Phoenix campaign rally last night, Donald Trump attacked the media, threatened a government shutdown over his border wall, and hinted at ending NAFTA.
• The US Navy has relieved the commander of the 7th Fleet, Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, of his post after two recent fatal collisions involving naval craft in Asia.
• As Jared Kushner heads to the Middle East, Egypt has canceled their meetings with him after the US decision to withhold $300 million in foreign aid over human rights violations.
• Harvard University research indicates that ExxonMobil, formerly headed by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, has spent over four decades undermining climate change research.
• Identity theft and fraud arrests by New York State law enforcement using facial recognition software reached 4,000 since 2010 and is expected to rise as technology has improved.

Last Call For Barron Of Stature

This was dumb when it was Amy, it was dumb when it was Ron Jr., it was dumb, sexist, and particularly mean-spirited when it was Chelsea, it was dumb  and sexist when it was Jenna and Barb, it was dumb, mean-spirited, sexist and racist when it was Sasha and Malia, and it's dumb when the press picks on Barron Trump.  He's 11.  Go away.

The conservative politics site The Daily Caller—founded by bow-tie aficionado Tucker Carlson—published a “mean spirited” article on Monday about Donald Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump. 

“It’s high time Barron Trump starts dressing like he’s in the White House,” the Caller’s “entertainment reporter” Ford Springer insisted, complete with a nostalgic look at how your parents probably “forced you to dress up when you were a kid for a special occasion.” 

“Is Barron just better than I ever was at rebelling against my parents?” Springer asked. 

“[Barron’s] dad is always looking dapper and his mom has become a worldwide fashion icon since becoming first lady [sic],” Springer insisted. “The youngest Trump doesn’t have any responsibilities as the president’s son, but the least he could do is dress the part when he steps out in public.”

I don't care guys, please leave the non-adult children of Oval Office inhabitants alone.  This includes Barron Trump, who didn't ask for any of this and deserves this nonsense even less.   Sure, he's a rich private school kid.  He also hasn't actually done anything to deserve the Daily Caller bitching at him for wearing a T-shirt in August.

Stupid as hell, is what this is.

By The Time Trump Gets To Arizona

Donald Trump is charging ahead on his racial gasoline and matches tour next campaign stop later today, despite being asked kindly by Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton to reschedule his visit to the Valley of the Sun in the wake of the tragic events of Charlottesville just nine days ago.  Now Mayor Stanton is being somewhat less kind about asking Donald Trump to stay away.

Nearly 50 years ago, moments after learning that an avowed racist had gunned down Martin Luther King Jr., a young presidential candidate took the stage in Indianapolis to break the news to a largely African American crowd. 

“What we need in the United States is not division,” Sen. Robert F. Kennedy implored. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.”

It was exactly what the grief-stricken crowd needed to hear. There were riots in many cities that night, but not in Indianapolis. 

President Trump’s response to Charlottesville reminds us that the words and actions of our political leaders in the wake of tragic events matter.

America is hurting. And it is hurting largely because Trump has doused racial tensions with gasoline. With his planned visit to Phoenix on Tuesday, I fear the president may be looking to light a match.

That’s why I asked the president to delay his visit. It’s time to let cooler heads prevail and begin the healing process.

Stanton's real worry is that Trump will show up with not only his usual divisive, hateful, and coded racist language, but he'll show up with a newly-minted pardon for former Maricopa County Sherriff Joe Arpaio.

Let’s be clear: A pardon of Arpaio can be viewed only as a presidential endorsement of the lawlessness and discrimination that terrorized Phoenix’s Latino community. Choosing to announce it in Phoenix — especially in the wake of Charlottesville — would add insult to very serious injury and would reveal that the president’s true intent is to further divide our nation.

For years, Arpaio illegally targeted Latinos in our community because of the color of their skin. Mothers and fathers lived in fear as they dropped off their kids at school. Kids lived in fear of their parents being arrested and taken away. 

A federal court ruled Arpaio’s tactics violated the law. After he defied a judge’s orders, he was convicted of criminal contempt. In convicting him, U.S. District Judge Susan R. Bolton noted that Arpaio “announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise.”

Even before his trial and conviction, voters grew tired of Arpaio’s brand of racism and blatant violation of the law. Last year, in an overwhelmingly Republican county, Arpaio lost by nearly 10 points. Although local Republicans helped defeat Arpaio, the white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other racists who shamed our country this month in Charlottesville would surely cheer a presidential pardon.

Our community is moving on and moving forward from Arpaio’s divisive legacy. A pardon won’t change the fact that Arpaio was convicted of a crime, nor will it shake our resolve to keep building a city that is welcoming, is inclusive and provides opportunities for anyone willing to work for them.

Stanton is correct, and there's no reason to make me think that Trump will take the hint, or even that he cares.  Rather, Trump will get to piss a bunch of liberals and Latinos off, and that's literally all that matters with his base.

The rest of us?  Well, we don't exactly count as "America" in Trump's version, now do we?

The New Strategy Is That There Is No New Strategy

Donald Trump's bold new plans for Afghanistan are that he doesn't really have any bold new plans for Afghanistan, but he can't really admit he's doing it the same way Bush and Obama did it.  He's fooling precisely no one, and the Democrats are calling him on it.

President Donald Trump's prime-time speech on his plan for Afghanistan split lawmakers along party lines, with Democrats criticizing the lack of real details and Republicans lauding the move away from arbitrary deadlines for drawing down troops. 

Democrats argued Trump was proposing an open-ended commitment with no exit strategy or ceiling on US troops there. 

"Tonight, the President said he knew what he was getting into and had a plan to go forward. Clearly, he did not," House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. "The President's announcement is low on details but raises serious questions."  

New York Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said Trump's speech was "terribly lacking" in details, substance and "a vision of what success in Afghanistan looks like." 

And Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and Marine Corps veteran, accused Trump of "repeating the mistakes of previous administrations." 

"Tonight, the American people should have heard a detailed, realistic strategy with achievable objectives and measurable benchmarks," Gallego said. "Instead, we got only vague promises and wishful thinking." 

Functionally, Trump is going to be sending in about 4,000 more troops, most certainly special operations troops and their support staff, in order to lead more targeted strikes on Taliban leadership and ISIS targets of opportunity, and help Afghan forces secure territory while oh yeah, going across the border to Pakistan and keeping an eye on the mess there.  He can't actually say that, but that's what's coming and everyone knows it.

So he's going to pretend that continuing Obama's strategy is his own brilliant idea.

Leadership for a new era or something, whee.

StupidINews!

• Donald Trump outlined a US strategy last night in Afghanistan that will "change dramatically" from the last 16 years, but he announced no specifics on troop levels, timelines, or locations.
• More Native American tribes in the US are looking to get into the legal marijuana growing business, but federal laws that govern reservation land could be a major problem for growers.
• US Navy divers continue to search for 10 missing sailors after the collision of a missile destroyer and oil tanker near Singapore over the weekend.
• Angola will hold elections on Wednesday as President Jose Eduardo dos Santos will step down after 38 years, the country faces the worst economic conditions since a 2002 civil war.
• Verizon will start throttling video on all mobile plans, limiting bandwidth on both new and existing unlimited data plans to 720p video starting on Wednesday.

Last Call For Total Eclipse Of The Brain

They told Trump not to look directly into the sun without special glasses during today's eclipse, so naturally...

...he looked right into the goddamn sun without his special glasses.

Because he's Trump.

You can't tell a clinical narcissist not to do something, you know.