We Resist: Day 876

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, June 14, 2019
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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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Late yesterday and earlier today by me: Nancy Pelosi, What Are You Doing? and Today in Trump's Vile Nativist Agenda and Primarily Speaking.

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


CNN broke the news that former FBI Director Andrew McCabe is calling for Trump's impeachment last night, and it's already off their front page. There's barely any news coverage of it anywhere. If that doesn't convincingly illustrate the level of water-carrying the press is doing for this administration, I can't imagine what would.

Meanwhile, as pressure mounts on House Democrats to launch an impeachment inquiry, the Trump Regime ratchets up its manufactured case for war with Iran:


Iran has "dismissed as 'baseless' U.S. accusations that it carried out twin attacks that left two tankers ablaze in the Gulf of Oman," and naturally they would, but Yutaka Katada, the owner of the Japanese oil tanker hit in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, also says "the U.S. is wrong about the way the attack was carried out."
Speaking at a press conference in Tokyo on Friday, he contradicted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the U.S. Navy, which released a video that purports to show an Iranian patrol boat removing a limpet mine from the port side of the Kokuka Courageous.

Katada said his ship was attacked on the starboard side by a flying object, not by a mine. "It seems that something flew towards them. That created the hole, is the report I've received," Katada said, according to the Financial Times. "It seems there was a high chance they were attacked by a flying object. The impact was well above the water. I don't think it was a torpedo."
This morning, on Fox & Friends, Donald Trump referenced the video distributed by the U.S. Navy and said, "Iran did do it, and you know they did it because you saw the boat."

NPR further reports: "Calling Iran 'a nation of terror,' Trump did not discuss whether the U.S. plans to take action in response, saying only, 'We'll see what happens.'"

Sky News' Defence and Security Correspondent Alistair Bunkall why the events in the Gulf of Oman "could have massive global ramifications" (beyond the humanitarian crisis of the U.S. trying to start yet another war under false pretenses):

The two tankers that came under attack in the Gulf of Oman were the Norwegian-owned but Marshall Island-flagged Front Altair and the Japanese-owned but Panama-flagged Kokuka Courageous.

Now, U.S. Naval forces in the region said that they received two separate distress calls: One at twelve minutes past six in the morning — that's local time — and another at seven a.m., so shortly afterwards. The U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, the U.S.S. Bainbridge, responded to those calls.

Now, the U.S. Navy presence in the region is aimed primarily at warding off any Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key maritime choke point. The straits are one of the world's most important stretches of water, with one-fifth of the world's oil passing through that waterway, which, at its narrowest, is just 21 miles wide. And that includes crude oil and liquified natural gas from energy-rich countries in the Gulf Region, including Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

Conflict in the straits has the potential to create shockwaves across the world — and that could drive up the price of crude. Today's attack alone caused oil prices to surge by four percent.

During the 1980s, in the Iran-Iraq War — the so-called "Tanker War" — Kuwait's oil tankers were reflagged under a U.S. flag, so that oil could be transported safely through the straits.

And, more recently, Iran's president, Hassan Rouhani, threatened to close the straits, following the Trump administration decision to leave the Iranian nuclear deal.
National Security Advisor John Bolton has wanted a war with Iran — or, at minimum, an excuse to bomb Iran — for a very long time. And Donald Trump knows, as he has said as much on many occasions, that wars tend to increase president's approval ratings. And Vladimir Putin would be thrilled to see the U.S. go to war with Iran. (Indeed, the Kremlin may be helping to orchestrate the rationale for war.) We should all be very concerned about where this is headed.

Yesterday, just as Iran starting trending on Twitter, the point at which people had noted the headlines about an Iranian bombing and just as experts were beginning to scrutinize the administration's claims, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders resigned, after having not even held a press briefing for over three months. That was not a coincidence. The manipulation is frightening.

And if drawing Iran into a war doesn't work... Josh Israel at ThinkProgress: Lindsey Graham Wants to Invade Venezuela to Put 'Points on the Board. "Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wants the United States to use military forces to intervene in Venezuela to depose the country's contested president, Nicolás Maduro. His reason: it will scare other foreign countries like North Korea and Iran to see America put 'points on the board.' ...This is not the first time the senator has argued for invading Venezuela — or at least threatening to do so — as a strategy to stop Cuban influence there. But it is the clearest he's been that he wants to pursue a war-mongering approach for the optics it will create."

The Republican Party is truly a death cult full of sociopaths.

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Susan B. Glasser at the New Yorker: Forget "No Collusion." Trump Is Now Pro-Collusion. "On Thursday, [Trump] doubled down on this position [that he would and could accept materials on political opponents from foreign actors], arguing, in effect, that accepting help from Vladimir Putin would be no different from dining with the Queen of England and the 'Prince of Whales,' as he put it in a tweet. Trump, instead of proclaiming 'no collusion,' now seemed to be announcing that he is pro-collusion. ...The President's supporters often tell those who are alarmed about his words to skip the tweets and focus on the substance of his Administration's policies. But they are wrong. Trump is telling us exactly what he is going to do — and then he is doing it."

Greg Sargent at the Washington Post: The Trump Camp's Latest Lies Cannot Obscure What's Now Been Exposed. "Trump's allies are engaged in a new and frantic effort to spin away the true meaning of his comments on ABC News, in which he issued an open invitation to foreign powers to attack our political system again on his behalf and made it absolutely clear that he will not alert law enforcement if his campaign learns of such an effort. But that spin cannot obscure what is so devastating about this mess for Trump: the fact that it makes that bigger story unavoidable, and indeed throws it into new and sharper relief." Yes, but who's going to make it matter? From where will any consequences come?

Matthew Choi at Politico: McConnell Downplays Trump's Foreign Election Help Comments. "Speaking with Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Thursday night, the Senate majority leader spoke with exasperation over the backlash the president has received for saying he would hear out foreign assistance if offered in the 2020 election. McConnell portrayed the comments as a nonstory, saying Congress had legislative agendas to focus on." I hate him.

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

Tina Vasquez at Rewire.News: Immigration Officials Push Healthcare Providers to 'Clear' Pregnant Migrants for Detention.
Multiple times a month, U.S. Border Patrol arrives at Banner-University Medical Center Tucson with "noticeably pregnant women," according to an OB-GYN resident who works there. The hospital's obstetric triage department is essentially an emergency room for pregnant people, and officers with the federal immigration agency regularly bring in newly apprehended pregnant migrants for medical evaluations. Once the hospital visit nears its end, multiple health-care providers have said Border Patrol "pressures" them to provide a "cleared for detention letter."

"Because they are bringing these women to us almost directly from the border, inevitably we get asked for a letter because when [the pregnant migrants] leave the hospital, they are going to be detained," said Dr. Samantha Varner, the OB-GYN resident. "Basically they ask us to write these short letters that don't just say the person is 'fit for travel,' but that they are 'cleared for detention,' meaning they are 'healthy' enough to be detained."

Varner told Rewire.News in a May 20 phone interview that Border Patrol seems to be asking her to approve of a person's detention after they leave the hospital, or rather that the agency wants a health-care provider to put into writing that a migrant is "fit" for detention.

"I feel like [they are] asking us to sign off on allowing [immigration authorities] to do whatever they want with the person after they leave the hospital," Varner said.

[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Caitlin Dickerson at the New York Times: The Youngest Known Child Separated from His Family by the Trump Administration. "The youngest known child taken from his parents at the U.S.-Mexico border was a 4-month-old baby named Constantin Mutu. While he was sent to Michigan to live with a foster family, his father was sent to a detention facility and ultimately deported to Romania, uncertain when he would see his son again. ...Constantin, one of thousands of children separated under the Trump administration's 'zero-tolerance' border policy...spent five tumultuous months away from those who loved him most."

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