Retire, Breyer: another September 2021 US Politics thread

a 35-year-old REAL PERSON, i mean, like the millions of really cool young people i know who would never, ever, give the false pre-internet politician smile at the camera while defending the worst things

The thing is, I expected '90s-era policies from Biden. COVID and Trump and living in MDC have made me way more transactional. Should the Dems in Congress pass the two bills and Biden sign them, I'd weigh the Biden presidency more coldly in the way we do FDR + the internment camps. "You signed these big bills, now you must lose control of Congress for betraying a crucial constituency like the Haitians and fellow human beings."

Should the Dems in Congress pass the two bills and Biden sign them, I'd weigh the Biden presidency more coldly in the way we do FDR + the internment camps. "You signed these big bills, now you must lose control of Congress for betraying a crucial constituency like the Haitians and fellow human beings."

i would too, sadly. they pass those bills, they will get "punished", because americans are the fucking worst.

and now, those 2 bills are very much in doubt. just a fucking debacle.

he doesn't get those 2 big bills (or if manchin brings it down to a mediocre bill so that he might get re-elected in WV again), then what has he done? he's partly reversed a bunch of Trump policy/executive order stuff, he's got the agencies starting the rulemaking process for revising trump-era revised regulations (PUKE, just typing that). all of that stuff is either EO and quickly overturned, or takes years and years in the slow-motion federal system and will just be reaching "Final Rule" status just as president fascist returns to kill us all again.

the only incentive to vote is against Trump, still. vote against the guy who tries to kill us, so that we can put in a temporary ancient man to twiddle his fingers for a few years and compromise with republican "moderates" who are actually rich assholes who spend their lives in country clubs

then we all get to be excited about voting for the first female cop in 2024, if biden dies or gets pushed into a quiet room.

guess we'll all just bide our time until AOC is ready, at which point in time it'll be appropriate to raise the whole Tax the Rich dress episode, which will be another useful way to determine who is absolutely full of shit yet again

Karl, you're talking yourself into a corner again.

it's true. i'm eating a bagel and getting ready to buy a gigantic box from home depot. it's going to be ok.

ooh Home Depot on a Thursday afternoon

i'm going to buy a giant telescoping box, put a giant painting in there, then take it to fedex and send it to the big apple

#supportsmallbusinesses

i normally spam the immigration thread with this stuff but w/e, some words from my friend who is an immigration lawyer
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Newsletter #14- Del Rio
Before starting I am going to leave the donation page for my friends at Haitian Bridge Alliance right here. Follow them @haitianbridge on Twitter, Insta, or FB. They are a collective of activists and advocates that support Haitian immigrants in our borderlands and a voice that must be heard right now.

I wasn’t planning on writing a newsletter this week. Then on Sunday night when I was going to bed and scrolling through the apps on my phone, I started to see photos of border patrol agents on horseback in Del Rio charging and whipping at black migrants with horse reins, pushing them back into the Rio Grande. I knew there was a growing number of Haitians arriving at the US border this month and that trouble would be brewing, especially after I read DHS’ “Strategy to Address Increase in Migrants in Del Rio”. But I was still alarmed, as anyone would be, by the violence of those images and went to bed feeling shook. (If you haven't seen the pictures just google it. I can't bear to look even one more time)

My anxiety only increased the next day until it reached the point of panic. My heart wouldn’t stop racing and I started crying in Zoom meeting with colleagues. I couldn’t quite figure out what was causing the panic attack. Certainly I have witnessed violence against migrants before and I wasn’t even witnessing this, I was just refreshing Twitter in disbelief and feeling sicker and sicker.

It was only after I was able to have a drink and then sleep that I woke up and realized that I freaked out because we have been yelling about how unjust Title 42 is for months and not only is it still happening but the government is escalating their strategy. And I was freaking out because of how nakedly the government is lying about what they are doing in Del Rio and my deep worry that the public will believe them.
Here are some quick facts about the situation: over the last few weeks around 12 to 14 thousand people, some individuals and some families, have arrived at the US at the border at Del Rio Texas. A lot of these people are Haitian but not all. There are Central and South Americans too. Where the Haitians are concerned, news sources are rightly pointing out that a lot of them are not actually coming directly from Haiti but rather from other points in South America where they migrated and were working until economic issues pushed them to migrate again, this time to the US. The situation is apparently growing grave as there is no food or water or health services. There is a desperate need for a humanitarian intervention yet, the Biden administration’s response, now standard, has been to say “now is not the time to come” and promise that nearly everyone will be routinely expelled under Title 42 and to ramp up deportation flights to Haiti at an appalling speed.

To control your outrage and keep your vote , here is what our government needs you to believe:
1. The people camped in Del Rio did something illegal. They did not. Entering a country seeking humanitarian protection, regardless of whether you end up qualifying for it in the long run, is legal. There isn’t an exception. Previously, when the border wasn’t shut down due to the pandemic, there was the option to turn yourself in directly at the port of entry. This was often seen as the more legal way to do it but crossing between the ports is a completely sanctioned way to seek protection under US law, which is exactly what these Haitians are doing.
2. We do not have the resources to process them humanely. We do. In a matter of weeks, 60,000 Afghan refugees were brought into the US in a peaceful and orderly manner for processing. They are being held at military installments and processed humanely. There is no reason we cannot do this with arriving Haitians. Even if we wanted to use detention centers to hold Haitians (which we absolutely should not), we are currently paying private prison corporations nightly for around 20,000 unused beds.
3. It is safe to send people on flights to Haiti. It is not. Haiti is struggling right now. There was recent presidential assassination and an earthquake and hurricanes. The conditions in Haiti right now are so devastating that 5 weeks ago the Biden administration re-extended rarely used Temporary Protective Status to Haitians stopping all deportations to the country. In doing so they cited, “Haiti is grappling with a deteriorating political crisis, violence, and a staggering increase in human rights abuses”. Yet now that there is political pressure in the borderlands they are quick to abandon their own plans. It is appalling.
4. It is legal to expel people to Haiti. It is not. The government’s strategy of expulsion is not legal. Title 42, the public health order that has kept the border closed since March 2020, does not authorize the government to deport refugees to their country of origin without due process. The whole concept of mass expulsions was invented during the pandemic as a vicious tool of border control. Just last week a Federal judge enjoined the practice of expelling families under Title 42. The order was to go into effect in two weeks. The Biden administration will appeal it but they have been told the practice of mass expulsion is illegal and are squeezing dozens of flights in under the wire before they have to stop.
5. Deterrent strategies work. They do not. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things I have seen the government do to people in an effort to deter them from exercising their international right to seek humanitarian protection in the United States: make them cross deadly deserts in 110 degree heat; take their children from them; put them in detention centers; send them to live in the streets of Mexico while awaiting a hearing; detaining them in disgusting congregate settings during a deadly pandemic; detaining them with their children; and flying them to the Guatemalan border and telling them to start over again. Telling people not to come and hurting them fails as a policy when people are desperate enough to move no matter what. It is how we find ourselves staring at photos of border patrol whipping Haitian migrants on the banks of the Rio Grande.

The problem with these lies is that most media incorporates them into their reporting and makes room for them in their analyses. And we repeat them to each other and we build a framework to understand this situation on misinformation. And if we believe these things, then we accept that the Biden Administration is simply making “tough choices” and not actively violating international laws.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how the world faced our moral duty to help Afghan refugees as the only choice no matter how inconvenient to our governments. We need the same response to Haitians as well. Here is what that looks like: stop deportation flights to Haiti immediately; send in humanitarian workers to ensure that people have food and water and health services; actually process people by leading with the fact that they need protection and give them credible fear interviews with the asylum office but only after they have had time to rest and care for their health and secure counsel and interpreters provided by our tax dollars.

None of this is easy. Doing the right thing rarely is easy. And there will be political fallout from the right. But there will always be political fallout from the right. I mistakenly voted for a President last year believing “anything was better than Trump” and not realizing that if that were my standard then I wouldn’t get much better. In the borderlands that is playing out perfectly and this president might be worse than Trump if he doesn’t immediately course correct and do the right thing.

1) hi gbx!!!

2) what is the immigration thread? i couldn’t find an updated one so i started this one - Abolish ICE

Fucking fuming at this situation, though am not surprised that an absolute asshole white supremacist like Biden would sign off on these conditions.

hi tracer! there's a rolling immigration thread from, like, 2013 i think, i would post periodic updates there from my lawyer pal

rolling US immigration reform thread for 2013 and beyond

thanks gbx and aimless

suggestion to use the abolish ice thread for USA stuff now? so that we see the words “abolish ICE” all the time but hey who am i to tame the wild internet winds

Gbx, is that newsletter available online somewhere, cuz if it is I’d like to make it available on FB.

i'll have a look -- i c&p'd that from my friend's FB, but i'm not sure where she's publishing the newsletter

https://preview.mailerlite.com/k9d8v0?fbclid=IwAR3c2og7SiLCrtprpvsXYx92H_xNq7xjdFQK0VNlPhbulaL-HjrXuhzpFOc

Thanks

Final count on Iron Dome: 420 yes, 9 no, 2 present.
No's: Tlaib, Carson, Omar, Massie, Newman, Pressley, Garcia, Grijalva, Bush
Present: Hank Johnson and Ocasio-Cortez

— Marc Rod (@marcrod97) September 23, 2021

Ocasio-Cortez in giving a pass to an apartheid state shocker.

she's preparing a scarf about it

I'm guessing it won't be a khaffiyeh

Free Palestine scarf made by an Israeli settler

maybe Israel could pay for it themselves instead of providing universal healthcare to their citizens like suckers

But then Raytheon won't get paid.

And we all know who our secretary of defense serves.

Being completely transparent about my feelings here, but: I've never felt more hopeless about the political situation in this country than I do right now.

I thought that the low-level depression and dive into drug and alcohol abuse during the W. years was bad— it has nothing on this. Every day, I read something that makes me want to cry, rip my hair out, and bring out Mr. Choppy at the same time.

why the hell is AOC crying on the house floor over her "present" vote?

Being completely transparent about my feelings here, but: I've never felt more hopeless about the political situation in this country than I do right now.

― I'm a sovereign jazz citizen (the table is the table), Thursday, September 23, 2021 4:20 PM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I thought that the low-level depression and dive into drug and alcohol abuse during the W. years was bad— it has nothing on this. Every day, I read something that makes me want to cry, rip my hair out, and bring out Mr. Choppy at the same time.

― I'm a sovereign jazz citizen (the table is the table), Thursday, September 23, 2021

I've never not lived without simmering nervousness about politics; I can't even envy people who don't. Where I live and the people among whom I live inspire me to press on

Oh, I'm not despairing of anything going on in my own life— just everything else.

the heel turn, she really bout to do it

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/nancy-pelosi-says-australia-is-leading-the-way-on-climate-20210924-p58ude.html

WTF? Australia's a fucking mess on climate policy. this is a wildly irresponsible contribution to our dipshit domestic climate wars.

.@PressSec on Haitian migrants being sent back: "First of all, they're not deportations. People are not coming into the country through legal methods." https://t.co/1EIiTWxxkq pic.twitter.com/AsUWg1ANG7

— The Hill (@thehill) September 23, 2021

don't make me tap the sign, psaki

she's awful

no one reply that she's just doing her job, she could have gotten a different one

Israel is the 51st are. They have better representation than the District of Columbia.

51st state

Not prompted by this Israel vote but I agree with table that I have never been more pessimistic about the future of this country. A few years ago I thought the first Coup attempt would happen when I was old. I give it less than a decade for a successful one.

Or future of the world for that matter.

And I don’t think I’ll want to stick around past age 60.

fuck yes -- I want senior citizen discounts and to be driven around

As awful as it was, I had hope that 1/6 would be a wake up call and we'd pull ourselves back from the brink. To see how quickly that was spun, how those fuckers are viewed as martyrs or political prisoners or whatever the fuck, how Trump nor any of his associates has been held responsible for a fucking coup attempt has finally removed any hope I had.

*hasn't been held

fuck yes -- I want senior citizen discounts and to be driven around

Anyway who’s excited for the next federal shutdown?! I am!!!

Unitary government shutdowns always play well with voters IIRC

Good to see some cooperation across the aisle IMO

BREAKING: The House just passed the #FY22NDAA in a 316-113 vote. (After 7+ hours of votes.)
 
A big bipartisan vote for a bill that adds an extra $25 billion to Biden's defense budget. pic.twitter.com/t7cdOkeIiP

— Connor O'Brien (@connorobrienNH) September 24, 2021