monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Baldimo wrote:

Quote:

Regardless of what you believe, it is legal to present yourself to border officials and request asylum.

It is illegal to cross the border and then request asylum after you are caught... that's what taking place, none of these people are real asylum seekers.

That's not correct. If you cross the border and ask for asylum, that is what the law requires.

Baldimo wrote:

If they were coming across the border with their parents it would be one thing, a lot of these kids have come across on their own or with adults not their parents.

It doesn't matter how they are crossing the border, they are children, often infants or toddlers. There is no moral code that could justify ripping them from their parents or caregivers and putting them in detention. While every country fails to live up to their ideals, that is just outright barbarity.

Baldimo wrote:

We need to seal the border and fix our immigration system before we allow millions of people into our country.

Actually, it is the opposite, we need to fix our immigration system before we worry about the border. If you were fighting a gasoline fire and there was a pipe pouring gas on the fire, you would not say "I need to put out the fire before worrying about the gas line." That would be stupid. You would say "I need to shut off the gas before I can fight the fire." The fuel for our current fire is the completely broken immigration system that doesn't meet the needs of the US or the immigrants. We need a system that is safe, fair and adequate to the needs of US businesses (who need millions of immigrants, not thousands.)

That's not correct. If you cross the border and ask for asylum, that is what the law requires.

It doesn't matter how they are crossing the border, they are children, often infants or toddlers.

There is no moral code that could justify ripping them from their parents or caregivers and putting them in detention. While every country fails to live up to their ideals, that is just outright barbarity.

While every country fails to live up to their ideals, that is just outright barbarity.

Actually, it is the opposite, we need to fix our immigration system before we worry about the border.

If you were fighting a gasoline fire and there was a pipe pouring gas on the fire, you would not say "I need to put out the fire before worrying about the gas line."

That would be stupid. You would say "I need to shut off the gas before I can fight the fire." The fuel for our current fire is the completely broken immigration system that doesn't meet the needs of the US or the immigrants.

We need a system that is safe, fair and adequate to the needs of US businesses (who need millions of immigrants, not thousands.)

They aren't seeking border agents to turn themselves into, they only request asylum once they get caught, they cross the border and hope to disappear into the country. They should be showing up at the crossing stations, not finding a hole in the fence and just coming in.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2019/03/07/what-the-latest-border-statistics-really-mean/#4275305b7f67

he Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledges that due to families and children turning themselves in apprehensions data overstate illegal entry. “[A] large share of recent apprehensions are UACs [unaccompanied minors] and asylum seekers who are routinely apprehended, and therefore have no impact on the number of successful illegal entries,” stated a September 2017 DHS report. (Emphasis added.)

Equally important, the evidence indicates the number of apprehensions likely would fall significantly if family units, unaccompanied minors and others who want to apply for asylum were allowed to do so at a lawful port of entry.

Not allowing individuals to apply for asylum at ports of entry without waiting (“metering”) is encouraging illegal entry, as the Department of Homeland Security itself found in a September 28, 2018, DHS Office of Inspector General report. The report concluded, “According to one Border Patrol supervisor, the Border Patrol sees an increase in illegal entries when aliens are metered at ports of entry. Two aliens recently apprehended by the Border Patrol corroborated this observation, reporting to the OIG team that they crossed the border illegally after initially being turned away at ports of entry.”

In fact, the “metering” policy at the ports of entry – an administration policy choice – appears to be driving much of the illegal entry, including the higher February 2019 apprehensions numbers that have received so much attention. “One woman said she had been turned away three times by an officer on the bridge before deciding to take her chances on illegal entry,” according to the Office of Inspector General.

“Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a bipartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., said it is the administration’s own border policies that have spurred the surge of families crossing illegally,” reported the Houston Chronicle. “Since last summer, the administration has used a process called ‘metering’ to slow to a relative trickle how many migrants are allowed to seek asylum at legal ports of entry. The numbers have fallen to about 10 migrants a day in Brownsville, two in Laredo, and several dozen in El Paso. Between the start of the fiscal year in October and February, the number of families and children apprehended between ports of entry rose 53%.”

It’s clear many of those entering today, unlike individual men coming for work years ago, are not trying to evade U.S. authorities. “Families, mainly from Central America, continue to arrive in ever-larger groups in remote parts of the southwest,” reports the New York Times. “At least 70 such groups of 100 or more people have turned themselves in at Border Patrol stations that typically are staffed by only a handful of agents, often hours away from civilization. By comparison, only 13 such groups arrived in the last fiscal year, and two in the year before.”

During a speech to US troops at the Osan Air Base in South Korea on Sunday, President Donald Trump said that he had given them their first pay increase in almost a decade.

"And, you know, one thing I didn't mention: You also got very nice pay raises for the last couple of years. Congratulations. Oh, you care about that. They care about that. I didn't think you noticed. Yeah, you were entitled. You know, it was close to 10 years before you had an increase. Ten years," he said.

His claim isn't true.

Facts First: Members of the military have received pay raises every year since 1983 -- and if you ignore an administrative quirk in 1983, they have received raises every year since 1961.

Trump could accurately say that the 2018 pay increase he signed into law, 2.4%, was the largest in close to 10 years: It was the biggest raise for the troops since the 3.4% increase that President Barack Obama signed into law for 2010. The 2019 raise, 2.6%, was also the largest since 2010.

But these raises were certainly not the first in close to 10 years.

Military pay rose every year under Obama. For 2017, Obama approved a 2.1% increase. He also authorized a 1.3% increase for 2016, a 1.0% increase for 2015, a 1.0% increase for 2014, a 1.7% increase for 2013, a 1.6% increase for 2012, a 1.4% increase for 2011 and the 3.4% increase for 2010.

According to official military data, military pay has increased every calendar year since 1983. In that year, the government switched from introducing the raises at the beginning of a new fiscal year, on October 1, to the beginning of the new calendar year, on January 1.

In other words, members of the military did get a raise that covered 1983. It just started on October 1, 1982. Their next raise, after the switch to the calendar-year system, was introduced on January 1, 1984.

The last year that members of the military did not get a raise at all was 1961.
While it is possible to argue that Trump simply misspoke here, he has made versions of this false statement more than once before.

In October, for example, he told Fox Business, "President Obama starved the military. He didn't give them raises, he didn't give them anything. I gave them a 10% pay increase, they haven't had it in a decade." In December, he told troops in Iraq, "You haven't gotten one in more than 10 years -- more than 10 years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one."

Say this for Donald Trump. He may be transforming American politics into a kleptocratic fascist reality show and turning our once-great country into a global laughingstock, but at least he’s humiliating John Bolton in the process.

Many people who get involved with this president end up diminished, embarrassed or, in quite a few cases, indicted. Rex Tillerson, once known as a corporate titan, will now be remembered for his brief, ineffectual record as secretary of state. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, and Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, are in prison.

Bolton’s comeuppance is of a different kind. By taking to Fox News to kiss up to Trump, he became national security adviser, a job that no other president would have ever given to a discredited warmonger. His reward is that, after devoting his life to the expansion of American power globally, he’s a hapless party to its contraction. For a person to sell out his putative ideals for such a hollow victory would be like a Greek drama, if the Greeks had written dramas about such small men.

Bolton is sometimes described as a neoconservative, but that’s not really right. Neoconservatives purported to champion the expansion of American values, while Bolton just wants to impose American might. On the surface, he seems an excellent fit with Trump, who is also uninterested in human rights and contemptuous of multilateral institutions. Both are bellicose nationalists, dismissive of climate change, eager to empower the Israeli right, hostile to Islam but solicitous of Saudi Arabia.

But the uber-hawk Bolton, who still refuses to admit that the Iraq war was a mistake, has long believed that America’s most implacable enemies include North Korea, Russia and Iran. One multilateral organization he appears to value is NATO, a counterweight to Russia that he once called “the most successful political-military alliance in human history.” Now, at the summit of his career, he’s part of an administration that makes a mockery of his longtime foreign policy philosophy.

When the George W. Bush administration, in which Bolton also served, lifted some sanctions on North Korea in 2008, Bolton seemed almost heartsick. “Nothing can erase the ineffable sadness of an American presidency, like this one, in total intellectual collapse,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

So one can only imagine the ineffable sadness he felt over the weekend, when Trump stepped into North Korea to shake the hand of his friend Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s totalitarian leader. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was considering putting aside the goal of getting North Korea to surrender the nuclear weapons it already has, instead trying to get the country to stop making new nuclear material.

Given Trump’s limitations as a statesman, that’s probably the best that can be hoped for. But it’s almost certainly not what Bolton, who was calling for pre-emptive strikes on North Korea just before Trump appointed him, thought he was signing up for. In response to the Times article, Bolton tweeted angrily that he’d heard of no such plan, though he might have simply been out of the loop. After all, while Trump was flattering Kim, Bolton was in Mongolia.

Also on Sunday, Politico reported on a white paper prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff about expanding Russian power. “Russia has a growing and demonstrated capacity and willingness to exercise malign influence in Europe and abroad, including in the United States,” the paper said.

Bolton used to decry this influence. Vladimir Putin’s efforts in the 2016 election, wrote Bolton in 2017, was “a casus belli, a true act of war, and one Washington will never tolerate.” When Putin lied to Trump’s face during their first meeting in Hamburg, Germany, Bolton hoped Trump would take it as a “highly salutary lesson about the character of Russia’s leadership.” Obviously, Trump learned no such lesson. At the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, last week, the president joked with Putin about election interference and the murder of journalists, a scene that will now be part of Bolton’s legacy.

There is one major issue left on which Bolton could shape history. On Monday, news broke that Iran had breached a limit on how much nuclear fuel it can possess under the 2015 nuclear deal, which the Trump administration abandoned. That comes after months of escalation on both sides, and the threat remains that Bolton could goad an erratic Trump into war.

Standing between us and that apocalyptic possibility is the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has been urging Trump away from a military confrontation with Iran. Last month, Carlson used his opening monologue to eviscerate Bolton, calling him a “bureaucratic tapeworm” for whom war is “always good business.” In normal administrations, national security advisers have more authority than cable news hosts, but it was Carlson, not Bolton, who was with Trump at the Korean Demilitarized Zone this weekend. (Carlson later called into “Fox & Friends” and rationalized North Korean atrocities, said that leading a country “means killing people.”)

It’s nightmarish to live in a country where our foreign policy has been reduced to an intramural battle between Fox News reactionaries. And there’s still a danger that Bolton could outmaneuver the isolationists. But right now there is a thin, bitter consolation in knowing that he, like so many others who’ve worked for Trump, sacrificed his principles for power and will likely end up with neither.

Some 375 Holocaust scholars and other adademics from around the world urged the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. on Tuesday to reverse its position condemning comparisons between concentration camps and the detention camps established by the U.S. government on the Mexican border.

In an open letter addressed to Sara J. Bloomfield, the director of the museum, the scholars say that "The Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical."

Last week, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum published a statement saying the institution "Unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary," and that "The Museum further reiterates that a statement ascribed to a Museum staff historian regarding recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s does not reflect the position of the Museum."

The decision, the letter says, "has the potential to inflict severe damage on the Museum’s ability to continue its role as a credible, leading global institution dedicated to Holocaust memory, Holocaust education, and research in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies." The letter's signatories span the humanities and social sciences, many of whom study and publish on the Holocaust and genocide.

The museum "is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide," the letter states, "and it makes learning from the past almost impossible." The true purpose of Holocaust education, the author and signatories argue, "is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering," as identifying similar events is a fundamental part of this effort.

The museum's statement came in the wake of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's statements that the U.S. was "running concentration camps" on the Mexico border.

A concentration camp (or internment camp) is a place where a government forces people to live without trial. Usually, those people belong to groups the government does not like. The term means to confine (keep in a secure manner) "enemy citizens in wartime or terrorism suspects".

Some governments put people in concentration camps because they belong to a certain religion, race, or ethnic group.

Usually, people are sent to concentration camps without having had a trial or being found guilty of a crime.

Definition of holocaust

1 : a sacrifice (see sacrifice entry 1 sense 2) consumed by fire
2 : a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life especially through fire a nuclear holocaust
3a usually the Holocaust : the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II Several members of her family died in the Holocaust. a Holocaust survivor
b : a mass slaughter of people especially : genocide a holocaust in Rwanda

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that he informed U.S. President Donald Trump in advance of what Israel has described as a spy mission in Tehran last year to capture a secret Iranian nuclear archive.

Netanyahu said in April 2018 that Mossad operatives had spirited thousands of hidden documents out of Tehran that proved Iran had previously pursued a nuclear weapons program. Trump cited the Israeli findings in his decision, a month later, to quit a 2015 deal that had scaled down Iran’s nuclear project.

Iran denies ever seeking nuclear weapons and has accused Israel of faking the Tehran mission and documents trove.

Awarding an Israeli national security prize on Tuesday to the Mossad team credited with the so-called “Atomic Archive” capture, Netanyahu said he had discussed the planned operation with Trump when they met at the Davos forum in January 2018.

“He asked me if it was dangerous. I told him that there was a danger to it that was not negligible, but that the outcome justified the risk,” Netanyahu said at the closed-door ceremony, according to a transcript issued by his office.

Netanyahu said that, when he later presented main findings from an Israeli analysis of the documents to Trump at the White House, the president “voiced his appreciation for the boldness”.

“I have no doubt that this helped to validate his decision to withdraw from this dangerous (Iran nuclear) deal,” he said.

With the United States having reimposed sanctions on Iran, tensions have been soaring in the Gulf in recent weeks.

Mossad officials have said the Tehran mission took place in February 2018, but have not given details on how the documents were brought out to Israel.

Six Mossad officers - four men and two women - received Tuesday’s prize for leading the mission, which also involved “hundreds” of others, the intelligence agency’s director, Joseph (Yossi) Cohen, told an international security forum this week.

Unmasking the Antifa Hoodlums

There is … a simple and well-known legal reform that will go a long way towards deterring Antifa violence — even when police aren’t close by, but iPhones are. It’s called an anti-masking law. They’ve long existed in the South as a check on Klan violence, and they not only make it easier for police to immediately identify and arrest criminals, they also allow witnesses to preserve the pictures and videos of violent attackers for later criminal or civil action. … Anti-masking laws can be unconstitutional when applied to peaceful demonstrators seeking to protect their identities as a matter of personal safety, but that reasoning doesn’t apply to Antifa. Its members seek to engage in violence and destruction with impunity, and the mask protects them from legal accountability. … While anti-masking laws aren’t a perfect cure, one thing is definitely true — it’s hard to throw a punch when you’re hiding your face with your hands.

'(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee raised $105 million during the second quarter of the year and had $100 million cash on hand, Trump’s campaign manager said Tuesday, an ominous sign for Democrats in a crowded field of contenders seeking to challenge him in the general election.'

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-gop-report-105-million-120252727.html