US Politics, June 2018: This is a total goat rodeo.

god it must be so fun to work for this jagoff

Background on Trump’s Space Force: he idly came up with the idea, the Pentagon thought it was dumb, so he got mad and just announced it was happening https://t.co/3qXrJNdx6Q

— Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) June 22, 2018

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/crying-migrant-girl-in-heartbreaking-photo-wasnt-separated-from-her-mother_us_5b2cd289e4b0321a01d02a91?utm_medium=facebook§ion=politics&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013&utm_source=politics_fb&utm_campaign=hp_fb_pages

Obviously if this photo is not representing what it was supposed to be because the mother & child weren't actually separated after their arrest the whole protest against the current process must be invalid innit?
Shame the photographer isn't omniscient & not sure how he could have factchecked taht beforehand. BUt god hate to think that taking a stand not to separate mothers and young children has been shown to be a lie by this.
But Then again thankfully I'm not a republican so I don't think like that.

oh great, looking forward to snide morons pointing that out all over my FB feed

We really just need to learn how to shout 'FAKE NEWWWWWS!' right back at 'em.

Like, leave the well-argued appeals to reason to those arenas where there's a chance they might resonate. The GOP playing field is the elementary school playground, and every time we try to elevate the conversation with them, we lose.

xpost

re: stupidity of space force, trump "idly coming up with idea"

i've heard the idea of a new military space branch floated for a while now, outside of trump. Mike Rogers (R - AL) was promoting it heavily last year when he co-authored legislation to create a new "Space Corps" within the Air Force: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a27317/space-corps-military-branch-approved-by-house/

I will sign off on Space Force if we also get a Volcano Force and Ocean Floor Force who can be sent to other places where only an eight-year-old boy staging fantastic battles with his action figures might conceivably think we would ever need a military force.

By which I mean: fuck you Donald Trump (the general subtext of most things I say these days).

dinosaur force is STRONGEST xp

everybody makes fun of space force, but it kind of seems obvious to me that militaries from across the world will be in space, sooner or later. i think it's a bad idea and i wish it wouldn't happen, but it's probably going to happen. if the bottom of the ocean was more accessible we'd have ocean floor force too

the fear of sputnik hovering over the united states in the 50s, the immense amounts of money poured into the space race - was this not an early battle for supremacy in space, strongly motivated by strategic/militaristic considerations?

I thought it was mostly a combination of Red Scare and 'Uhhhh, not fair! They did something before we did it!'

nah we were legit freaked

What is this conservative brain disease that translates a plea for humane treatment into a shrill liberal edict to place the needs of the disadvantaged far above the needs of everyone else?

i mean, if you want to talk about full scale overreactions to “please don’t kill us”...

It seems to be an age-old issue, fueling much of the backlash to the civil rights movement, etc. I mean, I guess it's just Whitenationalistitis, but the symptom set is insanely broad.

i love how Dems take a break from breathlessly condemning the outrageous abuse of state power to sign over one of the biggest military budgets ever

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/u-s-military-budget-inches-closer-to-1-trillion-mark-as-concerns-over-federal-deficit-grow/

xpost I'd have to read up on conservatism pre-'64 to know if it went any further back, but that tendency has definitely been baked into the DNA of the GOP since then.

Is that the definition of the word reactionary?

I might call it 'reactioperbole'.

I think it betrays an unconscious awareness of what actually will need to happen (i.e. white people losing a lot of their status and power and capital and stuff) if brown people are ever to be truly treated equitably in this country.

The huge ass military budget = the best jobs for most will be military service or become a dependapotomaus so you can be assured adequate healthcare/safety nets.

dependapotomaus

I like this word which I had never before heard.

I only learned it a couple of months ago. It's been a thing for a couple of years.

I was reading all the dependapotomaus definitions and stories on reddit or something and just really laughing because it's a shitty term but I kind of appreciate someone coining it because a lot of it was spot on.

Here's the official list of the people to whom Trump is giving a speech in a couple minutes. ICE and Border Protection agents are also in attendance. pic.twitter.com/kjtJuCCTql

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 22, 2018

yes I'm sure that tripling down on the immigrants = crime thing is sure to turn the tide around on this negative press cycle

its kinda starting to appear like Trump was legitimately blindsided by the revelation that people actually care about ILLEGAL ALIEN kids too

ICE should ban cars next. Fight the real enemy.

what the

Everything Trump touches turns tacky. Each parent of a kid slain by undocumented immigrant is holding poster of the kids’ face… with a big ol’ Donald Trump autograph. pic.twitter.com/HTKgboORa9

— Andrew Kirell (@AndrewKirell) June 22, 2018

boy I wonder if we're gonna hear "permanent separation" another 10,000 times from this administration to justify the kiddie jails

If we're preemptively locking up all undocumented immigrants to prevent those with criminal intent from indulging their baser impulses, doesn't it make sense to go ahead and lock up the entire population of the country lest we fall victim to the bad guys in our midst?

I'm gonna have a chat with Space Force about this.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4737024/rep-ted-lieu-plays-audio-detention-center-house-floor

god this administration is just so fucking gross

not that it is relevant to how we treat infants, but ...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DgUYy62V4AAN55g.jpg:large

hands down the #2 thing texas could do to reduce crime is replace all the texans with immigrants. #1 is ban guns, of course.

data there from noted leftist propaganda mill the cato institute

The people who are most vocal about “crime” are always the least likely to be the victims of property crime or violent crime.

Same with "terrorism". There was a neat graphic that showed the scale to which it was skewed as such.

c/p'd from my friend's fb feed:

"As I type this I can already sense people getting mad at me but please read to the end. I am troubled by the constant reference of where children are being held as "concentration camps". That is not what they are. Believe me when I say that I am not trying to soften the injustices that the Trump Administration is perpetuating. Instead, I am trying to defend the Flores Settlement, which is being attacked by Trump's newest executive order that purports to end family separation. The Flores Settlement was not created to separate families. It was created to protect kids from being put into federal detention indefinitely. The rules are that when they are detained by ICE (in those god forsaken cages, yes that is ICE and border patrol doing that), they cannot be kept long and have to be put into the custody of Health and Human Services and the Office of Refugee Settlement. Once they are there, because of the Flores Settlement, those agencies' job is to place them, with no unnecessary delay, with family members or friends so they are out of detention. Ostensibly, they are tasked with taking care of them while they get them as far as possible from federal detention. The whole thing is inarguably wretched. A nightmare. It is an awful bureaucratic mess and there has to be seriously high standards of care and oversight and human rights monitoring put on those agencies and it is certainly upsetting that there are private contractors getting rich off of the misery. But they are not concentration camps. Their whole reason of the Flores Settlement and these camps is to get kids away from the horrific conditions of detention and into safe sponsor's arms as quickly as can be. But you wanna see a concentration camp? Go to a family detention facility. Check out the South Texas Family Residential Facility in Dilley, TX, for one. The aim of these facilities is not to keep kids comfortable while they find a safe place for them. In family detention children are detained, yes with their parents, in horrific conditions while the government seeks to deport them back to the hell they came from. The effect of Trump's executive order is to validate using family detention to indefinitely detain and eventually deport families and pretend it is humane because it is "keeping families together". I 100% agree that families belong together. That is why we should never, ever detain immigrants or refugees whether they are adults or children. I don't think any scheme where anyone is detained is humane. I think an interesting thought exercise, though, when considering if family detention is better than "family separation" is to imagine if you were on the border with your own children and your option was to be detained with them in a federal family detention facility for a long time while facing detention, or to get them out of there via the Flores Settlement and send them to a relative who can hug them and feed them and give them love and care. Obviously both choices stink. I don't have an answer for which is better but I know we can't automatically assume that keeping families together in a horrifying family detention facility is automatically preferred to getting the kid to safety of a sponsor. The good thing is we don't have to do either. We can just not detain anyone. And to me, that is the only acceptable change that Trump can offer."

heard a podcast with andrea pitzer about https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316303593 and it was interesting.

actually it's here? http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/trumpcast/2018/06/are_detention_centers_concentration_camps.html

I think an interesting thought exercise, though, when considering if family detention is better than "family separation" is to imagine if you were on the border with your own children and your option was to be detained with them in a federal family detention facility for a long time while facing detention, or to get them out of there via the Flores Settlement and send them to a relative who can hug them and feed them and give them love and care. Obviously both choices stink. I don't have an answer for which is better but I know we can't automatically assume that keeping families together in a horrifying family detention facility is automatically preferred to getting the kid to safety of a sponsor.

question on the "finding relatives" part of this: do we know how often HHS is able to identify a relative or friend who can take care of them, vs how often they're sent to a foster family?

the autographing of the dead peoples' portraits is incredible

yeah, that floored me. what a fucking prick

good question, karl, i'm not really sure! i can ask

i'd kind of guess that no one knows? i'm not sure. in the midst of all this media coverage, somehow it took me a couple days ago to realize that these children were being sent to relatives/foster families, and that immediately made me wonder how many of these kids end up on the foster side of the equation. it's a dilemma with zero good options - like your friend said, it's not like we would want to send the children back to whatever dire situation they were trying to escape from. and i don't doubt that most of the foster families are very good people who want to do a good thing. but still, some of these immigration courts have backlogs until 2021. that means a child placed into a foster family could be there for 3 or more years before...what? before they're reunited with their convicted parents somewhere? before they all get deported together? honestly, i'm not even sure what typically happens after the migrants are prosecuted.

Ohhhhhh, I misunderstood and thought people were posing with signed photos of Trump, which was just weird. Now I understand: it's actually full-bore sociopathic.

"Sorry about your kid. Here, have an autograph. Wow, she was really attractive...really attractive. Not quite an Ivanka, but certainly a Tiffany or just above. Just above. Alright, let's get some people thrown out the country!"

He is so clearly not fit to serve. Shame the next in line is pretty bad too.
Also shame you can't declare the 2016 election null and void and have another go with immediate results.

In a world that actually functioned, I'd think that simply spending any time in the presence of Donald Trump would be the the most watertight anti-Trump argument imaginable.

'Oh christ...this malfunctioning Skynet robot in an ill-fitting human suit who can't disguise his naked contempt for even his staunchest supporters is the guy I've been championing?'