We Resist: Day 602

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Thursday, September 13, 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: Hurricane Florence, Part 3 and Susan Sarandon Says Some More Despicable Sh1t and I Hate Him So Much.

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


Just a reminder that Donald Trump's fellow Republicans will tolerate absolutely anything, as long as they can continue their bid to consolidate power.

[Content Note: Displacement] Danielle McLean at ThinkProgress: FEMA Will Put 1,000 Displaced Puerto Ricans out on the Streets This Friday. "More than 1,000 Puerto Ricans, displaced by last year's hurricanes, have been living temporarily in hotels and motels throughout the country while they await more permanent housing alternatives — major repair to their own homes, for example, or help finding a new place to live. But they are now bracing for the likelihood they will become homeless this week. A federal judge in Massachusetts on August 30 allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to stop funding its Transitional Shelter Assistance (TSA) program, which allows hurricane-displaced people to live in hotels or motels throughout Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland."

This, of course, immediately after we found out that nearly $10 million of FEMA funding had been redirected to ICE to fund Trump's nativist abuses.

And it wasn't only FEMA whose funding was diverted, either. Tal Kopan at CNN: It's Not Just FEMA: ICE Quietly Got an Extra $200 Million. "The Trump administration this summer quietly redirected $200 million from all over the Department of Homeland Security to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, despite repeated congressional warnings of ICE's 'lack of fiscal discipline' and 'unsustainable' spending. The Department of Homeland Security asked for the money, according to a document made public this week by Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley. Of the $200 million, the document says $93 million will go to immigrant detention, a 3% budget increase that will fund capacity for an additional 2,300 detainees; and $107 million for 'transportation and removal,' or deportations, a 29% budget increase."

[CN: Child abuse] Meanwhile... Caitlin Dickerson at the New York Times: Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever.
Even though hundreds of children separated from their families after crossing the border have been released under court order, the overall number of detained migrant children has exploded to the highest ever recorded — a significant counternarrative to the Trump administration's efforts to reduce the number of undocumented families coming to the United States.

Population levels at federally contracted shelters for migrant children have quietly shot up more than fivefold since last summer, according to data obtained by The New York Times, reaching a total of 12,800 this month. There were 2,400 such children in custody in May 2017.

The huge increases, which have placed the federal shelter system near capacity, are due not to an influx of children entering the country, but a reduction in the number being released to live with families and other sponsors, the data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services suggests. Some of those who work in the migrant shelter network say the bottleneck is straining both the children and the system that cares for them.
Emphases mine. So, five times the number of children are currently being detained in "federally contracted shelters," which get paid by the federal government per child being held, so there is a financial incentive to keep the children in detention rather than releasing them to live with guardians. This is an enormous grift.

Specifically: It's thieving from U.S. taxpayers in order to profit from the exploitation of undocumented children. Absolutely sickening.

And one of the ways extended detention is being rationalized is with the mendacious argument that detention is necessary to keep track of undocumented immigrants and ensure they show up for court hearings. That is demonstrably false.


Finally on this subject today... Kate Riga at TPM: Trump Mulls Paying Mexico to Deport Immigrants Passing Through to U.S. "The Trump administration is considering redirecting $20 million in foreign aid funds to Mexico to help them deport immigrants passing through the country on the way to the United States, according to a Tuesday New York Times report. The money would pay for bus and airplane fare back to the immigrants' countries of origin. Per the New York Times, this would primarily affect Central Americans traversing across Mexico to the U.S. border."

It would also be a program rife for corruption. Which, naturally, is an unspoken feature of the proposal, not a bug.

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Don't know what this is yet (I bet you have a guess though and #MeToo, cough):


Seung Min Kim at the Washington Post: Kavanaugh Offers Details on Nationals Tickets Purchases That Led to Debt.
The Washington Post reported in July that Kavanaugh ran up credit card debt that the White House has attributed to his purchasing pricey season tickets for himself and a group of friends. The nominee's friends have since repaid Kavanaugh — an avid fan of the Nationals baseball team — according to the White House, and the issue did not surface during his two days of public questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But the issue arose in written follow-up questions submitted by members of the committee, and Kavanaugh submitted his answers in writing late Wednesday.

...In explaining the debt to members of the committee, Kavanaugh noted that he is a "huge sports fan" and said that he bought four season tickets annually from the Nationals' arrival in Washington in 2005 until 2017. He also bought playoff packages in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2017.

He split the tickets with a "group of old friends" through a "ticket draft" at his home, Kavanaugh said.

"Everyone in the group paid me for their tickets based on the cost of the tickets, to the dollar," Kavanaugh said in the written responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee that were made public Wednesday. "No one overpaid or underpaid me for tickets. No loans were given in either direction."

In 2016, Kavanaugh reported between $60,000 and $200,000 in debt, according to his financial disclosures, which was spread out over three credit cards and a loan. The debts were either paid off or dipped below the reporting requirements the following year.
None of this makes any fucking sense. It just doesn't add up. How does someone whose entire net worth is less than a million dollars carry $60,000 (or more) worth of personal loans? Something is very hinky.

In other Kavanaugh news...


[CN: Gun violence; death] Jessica Mason Pieklo at Rewire.News: The Teens Who Testified Last Week Want Senators to See the Human Cost of Kavanaugh's Confirmation. "Judge Brett Kavanaugh's appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court would help solidify conservative control of the federal judiciary for decades to come. And nothing reinforced that potential generational impact more than the panel of teenage witnesses who lined up to testify against Kavanaugh on the final day of his confirmation hearing. One of those witnesses was Aalayah Eastmond, who shared her experience as a survivor of the February shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Eastmond was in the third classroom attacked that day. She detailed for the senators who stayed to listen — and not all Republican senators did — what it was like to hide under the body of classmate Nicholas Dworet, who was killed right in front of her. She described saying what she thought were her final goodbyes to her parents, and the shock of having police pick body parts out of her hair."

Fuck every Republican Senator who refused to even listen to Eastmond. Cowards.

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Fuck.

[CN: Gun violence; racism; police brutality] Adam Serwer at the Atlantic: The NRA's Catch-22 for Black Men Shot by Police. "But the NRA's conspicuous lack of outrage after the shootings of Philando Castile, Jason Washington, and Alton Sterling, all black men killed by police while in possession of a firearm, suggests an impossible double standard. When armed black men are shot by the police, the NRA says nothing about the rights of gun owners; when unarmed black men are shot, its spokesperson says they should have been armed. ...There's also a catch-22 here: If Jean had been armed, Guyger would have a much more plausible defense. If innocent unarmed black men like Jean are shot, it's because they lack firearms; if innocent black men who are armed like Castile or Sterling are shot, it's because they had a gun. Heads, you're dead; tails, you're also dead."

[CN: Gun violence; toxic masculinity; white, male privilege] Meagan Flynn at the Washington Post: 'This Is the New Normal': Six Dead, Including Gunman and Wife, in California Shooting Rampage. "Six people are dead after a man in Bakersfield, Calif., went on a shooting rampage on Wednesday that began at a trucking business and ended about 15 minutes later with the suspect's suicide, a local sheriff said. 'Six people lost their lives in a very short amount of time,' Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said during a Wednesday night news conference. ...Youngblood said he would consider it a mass shooting, saying the string of shootings was 'certainly' connected. The Kern County sheriff said the motive was not immediately clear but that much of his department was working on piecing the shootings together. 'Obviously there's some type of situation that caused the husband to be completely upset,' he said."

"Upset." Wow.

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