We Resist: Day 763

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Thursday, February 21, 2019
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: Mueller Reportedly Close to Completing His Investigation and U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Arrested After Planning Mass Violence.

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

Let us start once again with some good resistance news:


Note: The reason it wasn't sooner is because the House was in recess last week.

Here is where I express once more how deeply fucking glad I am that Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House again. THANK YOU, MADAM SPEAKER.

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Nina dos Santos at CNN: Senate Investigators Pursue Moscow-Based Former Trump Associate.
Senate investigators want to question a Moscow-based American businessman with longstanding ties to [Donald] Trump after witnesses told them he could shed light on the President's commercial and personal activities in Russia dating back to the 1990s, multiple sources have told CNN.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is probing allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 elections, has been keen to speak with David Geovanis for several months, the sources say.

Geovanis helped organize a 1996 trip to Moscow by Trump, who was in the early stages of pursuing what would become a long-held goal of building a Trump Tower in the Russian capital, according to multiple media reports at the time.

Years later, Geovanis worked for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whose ties to Trump's 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort have also been of interest to investigators.
Asawin Suebsaeng at the Daily Beast: Trump White House Is Forcing Interns to Sign NDAs and Threatening Them with Financial Ruin. "Upon orientation, the interns signed their very own non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), with the envoy of the counsel's office warning them that a breach of the NDA — blabbing to the media, for instance — could result in legal, and thus financial, consequences for them. Interns were also told that they would not receive their own copies, these sources said. This was all a standard facet of the Trump intern orientation process, billed as an 'ethics training' — underscored by implicit legal threats from [Donald] Trump's in-house lawyers."

Brianna Sacks and Hamed Aleaziz at BuzzFeed: Trump Said He Ordered His Administration to Withhold Wildfire Aid to California; FEMA Says He Never Did. "Although [Donald] Trump tweeted that he had ordered his administration to cut off disaster aid to wildfire victims in California, federal officials confirmed on Wednesday that they never received any such directive. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps survivors of national disasters recover, told BuzzFeed News for the first time that Trump never issued an order to stop sending money to California. 'We never got any such directive,' Brandi Richard, a FEMA spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News. 'That's evidenced by the fact that work is still being done and we continue to support wildfire survivors across the state.'"

Tom McKay at Earther: Trump Wants Guy Who Compared Climate Science to the Holocaust to Head Climate Panel. "Donald Trump's administration is assembling a panel to determine whether climate change — which scientific experts broadly agree poses an existential threat to the safety and well-being of the world's population and is caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases — is really a threat to national security. ...According to the Post, a draft executive order on the proposed Presidential Committee on Climate Security says that it will be headed National Security Council senior director and physics professor William Happer, who thinks rising levels of atmospheric CO2 will be good for humans."


[Content Note: Nativism] Daniella Silva at NBC News: Migrant Families Still Being Separated at the Border, Report from Texas Group Says.
Migrant families are still being separated by the Trump administration, sometimes over "uncorroborated allegations" of crimes, according to a report published Thursday by a Texas civil rights group.

"Family separations are still very much happening in the southern border, they're still being torn apart by the U.S. government," Efrén Olivares, director of racial and economic justice at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told NBC News.

While the separations were not happening at the same scale as when the Trump administration announced the "zero tolerance" policy last spring, some occurred under troubling circumstances, Olivares said. The report, which looked at cases between June 22 through Dec. 17 in McAllen, Texas, comes roughly eight months since the government formally ended the policy.

The report said it found 38 cases of parents and legal guardians separated from their children.

One of those cases involved Mr. Perez-Domingo, an indigenous migrant father from Guatemala whose primary language is Mam, according to the report. Perez-Domingo was separated from his 2-year-old daughter in July after being accused by Customs and Border Protection of not being the girl's biological father and providing a fraudulent birth certificate, according to the report. He was not given an interpreter during his interview.

The civil rights group said it investigated the incident and discovered the birth certificate was authentic and a DNA test determined Perez-Domingo was the child's father. They were reunited in August.

"The lack of assistance of translators, in combination with aggressive questioning by the CBP agent, resulted in severe discrimination and traumatic consequences for this indigenous family," the report says, adding, had the group "not interviewed this father early in the process, it is highly likely that Mr. Perez-Domingo would have been deported without his daughter, and his child unlawfully orphaned in the United States."
[CN: Nativism; worker intimidation] Shani Saxon at Colorlines: Immigrant Teachers in Denver Threatened with Deportation for Striking. "As the wave of teacher strikes continues across the United States, immigrant educators in Denver, Colorado, have been uniquely targeted. According to the Guardian, public school officials sent letters in January warning them that they could possibly lose their visas if they decided to join the picket line. ...Lily Eskelsen García, the first Latina president of the National Education Association, spoke to the Guardian about the culture of intimidation immigrant educators endure on a regular basis. 'Things like that happen all the time,' García says. 'And it's reprehensible. That's not good faith bargaining — that is an intimidation tactic.'"

[CN: Nativism] Tina Vasquez at Rewire.News: No End in Sight for 'Retaliatory Immigration Raids' in North Carolina. "In the span of nine days, North Carolina has seen a barrage of immigration enforcement, reportedly in response to new sheriffs' 'lack of cooperation' with the U.S. government. The ramped-up enforcement appeared to begin with a workplace raid in Sanford on February 5, and continued Wednesday in the small town of Hendersonville, where advocates say federal immigration authorities posed as day laborers to detain undocumented immigrants. ...Advocates in North Carolina told Rewire.News they believe ICE may be using new tactics to detain and deport migrants, as immigrant communities are increasingly utilizing social media to alert others of ICE enforcement operations, sightings, and checkpoints in their area."

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