We Resist: Day 559

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Wednesday, August 01, 2018
a black bar with the word RESIST in white text

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Earlier today by me: On Day One of the Manafort Trial and Trump Supports Homegrown Election Meddling and We've Only Seen the Beginning of Foreign Meddling.

Here are some more things in the news today...

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse; trauma. Covers entire section.]

Cady Voge at the Guardian: Family Separations: Surviving Danger Only to Suffer Trauma at the U.S. Border. "Nine months after entering the U.S., [13-year-old] Aaron still stutters when he talks, and he refuses to speak to his father. 'The relationship we had is broken; the trust we had is broken,' Carlos says. Their story is a familiar one of leaving a homeland to avoid falling prey to gang violence, but ending up traumatised by their experiences arriving at the border. After facing widespread backlash over a policy of child separation at the border, the U.S. government is now seeking to reunite families. But parents and mental health professionals say the effects of the trauma of separation will persist long after parents and children have found each other again."

Rebekah Entralgo at ThinkProgress: HHS Official Says He Warned About the Trauma Family Separation Would Cause and Was Ignored. "Jonathan White, an executive director in the office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday about the family separation crisis. The former deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and a trained clinical social worker, White said he was involved in multiple discussions about immigration policies that could result in the separation of families throughout the course of a year and repeatedly 'raised a number of concerns…about any policy which would result in family separation.'"


Julie Hirschfeld Davis at the New York Times: White House Weighs Another Reduction in Refugees Admitted to U.S.
The White House is considering a second sharp reduction in the number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States, picking up where [Donald] Trump left off in 2017 in scaling back a program intended to offer protection to the world's most vulnerable people, according to two former government officials and another person familiar with the talks.

This time, the effort is meeting with less resistance from inside the Trump administration because of the success that Stephen Miller, the president's senior policy adviser and an architect of his anti-immigration agenda, has had in installing allies in key positions who are ready to sign off on deep cuts.

Last year, after a fierce internal battle that pitted Mr. Miller, who advocated a limit as low as 15,000, against officials at the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and the Pentagon, Mr. Trump set the cap at 45,000, a historic low. Under one plan currently being discussed, no more than 25,000 refugees could be resettled in the United States next year, a cut of more than 40 percent from this year's limit. It would be the lowest number of refugees admitted to the country since the creation of the program in 1980.
Rage seethe boil. I'm so goddamned tired of Stephen Miller. Fuck that guy.


Gabe Ortiz at Daily Kos: Trump Officials Refuse to Answer Whether They'd Put Their Own Kids in Migrant Family Jails. "Trump administration officials stammered and refused to answer U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono's question about whether they would send their own children to the migrant family jails that Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Matthew Albence tried to claim during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday are like 'summer camps.' 'You would send your child to these centers?' the bad-ass from Hawaii asked Trump officials who were testifying about the administration's barbaric 'zero tolerance' policy kidnapping children from parents at the border. 'Yes? No?' ...Watch their stammering in the video [at the link]."

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[CN: Class warfare] Sarah Varney at NPR: Puerto Rico's Wounded Medicaid Program Faces Even Deeper Cuts. "Blue tarps still dot rooftops, homes lack electricity needed to refrigerate medicines, and clinics chip away at debts incurred from running generators. Yet despite these residual effects from last year's devastating hurricanes, Puerto Rico is moving ahead with major cuts to its health care safety net that will affect more than a million of its poorest residents. The government here needs to squeeze $840.2 million in annual savings from Medicaid by 2023, a reduction required by the U.S. territory's agreement with the federal government, as the island claws its way back from fiscal oblivion." Goddammit.

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Tom McCarthy at the Guardian: Trump Pushes Jeff Sessions to End Mueller's Russia Investigation 'Right Now'. "Donald Trump appeared to order his attorney general Jeff Sessions to pull the plug 'right now' on special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Trump campaign ties to Russia with a tweet on Wednesday morning. ...The phrase '17 angry Democrats' is Trump's shorthand for a conspiracy theory imputing political bias to the special counsel's team. Mueller is a Republican, his direct superior is a Republican, and his teams includes members who have made political donations in the past to both Democrats and Republicans. Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, expressed alarm at the president's order. 'The President of the United States just called on his Attorney General to put an end to an investigation in which the President, his family and campaign may be implicated,' Schiff tweeted. 'This is an attempt to obstruct justice hiding in plain sight. America must never accept it.'"


Dan Mangan at CNBC: Trump Accuses Government of Not Telling Him Former Campaign Boss Paul Manafort 'Was Under Investigation'. "The tweet seemed to suggest that unnamed people in the government should have warned Trump about hiring Manafort before he did in 2016. ...He followed up his tweet about Manafort with another one in which he raged: 'Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign, one of the most successful in history, is a TOTAL HOAX.'"

So, everything is fine with the very stable genius currently occupying the Oval Office.

Speaking of people who work for Russia...

Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast: Accused Russian Spy Maria Butina Told American CEO: Send Cash to Moscow. "Maria Butina, the accused Russian operative, didn't just allegedly cultivate the National Rifle Association on behalf of the Kremlin. The 29-year-old Russian national also braced one of America's best-known businessmen, pushing him to increase his investments in his bank in Moscow — a bank that was also facing financial collapse. The encounter...indicates that courting American politicos wasn't her only mission. She also took a keen interest in contentious, complex matters involving international finance — all while attempting to influence the primary financier of what would become Washington's most Trump-friendly foreign-policy think tank."

Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier at BuzzFeed: Russian "Agent" and a GOP Operator Left a Trail of Cash, Documents Reveal. "Anti-fraud investigators at Wells Fargo flagged the transactions — by Paul Erickson, a conservative consultant from South Dakota, and Maria Butina, who is in jail awaiting trial on charges of secretly acting as a Russian agent — as 'suspicious,' noting in some cases that they could find no 'apparent economic, business, or lawful purpose' to explain them. Now counterintelligence officers say the duo's banking activity could provide a road map of back channels to powerful American entities such as the National Rifle Association, and information about the Kremlin's attempt to sway the 2016 US presidential election."

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Greg Sargent at the Washington Post: Trump Is Leading a 'Hate Movement' Against the Media. "On Tuesday, CNN's Jim Acosta — one of [Donald] Trump's favorite human targets — and other members of the media were abused and heckled by Trump supporters at a rally in Florida. Videos of the event — see here or here — show the crowd at one point loudly chanting 'CNN sucks,' with many angrily brandishing middle fingers in the direction of the living, breathing members of the press corps. Trump's son, Eric Trump, tweeted out video of the 'CNN sucks' chant, with the hashtag #Truth, while directly singling out Acosta. And the president himself retweeted his son. The president's son is actively encouraging Trump supporters to direct rage and abuse toward working journalists, and the president is joining in, helping to spread the word."


[CN: Sexual assault; coercion] Andy Towle at Towleroad: GOP Lawmaker Used Nude Photos of Ex-Girlfriend to 'Catfish' Men into Having 'Graphic Sexual' Discussions. "Illinois GOP state Rep. Nick Sauer has been accused by an ex-girlfriend of creating a fake Instagram account using nude photos of her in order to 'catfish' men into having 'graphic conversations of a sexual nature.' The Chicago Police Department is investigating. ...Kelly told Politico that she met Sauer, who is seeking re-election to a second term, on Tinder and the two began a two-year relationship which ended after she discovered he was cheating on her. She discovered that he had been using the nude photos she had shared with him on his fake Instagram account when a man who thought he had been communicating with her reached out to her and told her about it."

[CN: Violent misogyny] Cameron Joseph at TPM: Top House Republican: Man Killed His Wife 'Because The Woman Was Unfair'.
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), the chairman of the influential House Rules Committee, told a social conservative activist who was pushing him to support the end of no-fault divorce that the way the family court system in Dallas used to process cases had led to some tragic consequences. To illustrate his point that the system had badly needed change, he used a baffling example.

"Dallas County, a few years ago, went through a number of terrible shootings. And I gathered together, they were at the time Republican district judges, and I said 'guys, men, women, we've now had I think four or five shootings.' One of them was from a big-time guy in Highland Park, who went and killed his wife, just gunned her down. And that was because the judge was unfair, and the woman was unfair. And she demanded something, and he was out. And it was frustration," Sessions said during a local GOP event earlier this summer. "So now we go through the court system. And unfortunately lives have to be lost and there has to be tragedy — there now is a better system."
JFC.

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And finally:


Honestly, all I can do at this point is laugh all the mirthless laughter in the entire multiverse at people who still think this guy is the Flawless Progressive Immortal they keep insisting he is. He's a grifter, and his whole family is a bunch of grifters. Who each probably get paid in $27 checks every half hour.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
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