Category: Politics

The New York Times studied significant overlap between right wing propaganda and the El Paso shooter’s manifesto: In the four years since Mr. Trump electrified Republican voters with slashing comments about Muslims and Mexicans, demonizing references to immigrants have become more widespread in the news media… Before the first groups of Central American migrants received heavy news media coverage in 2018, words like “invaders” or “invasion” were rarely used by American outlets. In the last year, the use of such terms has surged, with references to an immigrant “invasion” appearing on more than 300 Fox News broadcasts.

Here is a story about what happened to baby Paul Anchondo’s family before and after the shooting.

Scaramucci has fully defected from Trump due to recent events where Trump has used “so charged and so divisive rhetoric,” and is doing interviews saying the Republicans need to place someone else at the top of the ticket for 2020.

There was a lot of chatter about the likelihood of a recession next year based on new economic indicators, and world wide markets slumped on Wednesday.

More recession fears, via the Times: President Trump’s on-again-off-again execution of the trade war with China and other countries has fed uncertainty into businesses’ decision-making. Corporate investment spending is softening, despite the big tax cut that Mr. Trump said would boost it. And the combination of central banks that are at the outer limits of their ability to stimulate growth, and an inward turn by many countries, could make governments less effective at responding to a downturn.

The Washington Post reports that Trump is rattled by news of a recession that will hurt his reelection chances: “Trump has sought to use his Twitter pulpit to drown out negative indicators. On Thursday, he promoted the U.S. economy as “the Biggest, Strongest and Most Powerful Economy in the World,” and, citing growth in the retail sector, predicted that it would only get stronger. He also accused the news media of “doing everything they can to crash the economy because they think that will be bad for me and my re-election.”… Trump has a somewhat conspiratorial view, telling some confidants that he distrusts statistics he sees reported in the news media and that he suspects many economists and other forecasters are presenting biased data to thwart his reelection…”

Trump convinced Israel to bar Democratic Congress members Talib and Ohmar from entering the country: “By enlisting a foreign power to take action against two American citizens, let alone elected members of Congress, Mr. Trump crossed a line that other presidents have not, in effect exporting his partisan battles beyond the country’s borders.”

Former tea party Congressman Joe Walsh published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for credible conservative candidates to primary Trump.

Immigration

The Trump administration issued new rules for who gets a green card: “Poor immigrants will be denied permanent legal status, also known as a green card, if they are deemed likely to use government benefit programs such as food stamps and subsidized housing. Wealthier immigrants, who are designated as less likely to require public assistance, will be able to obtain a green card…. immigration advocates warned that vast numbers of immigrants, including those not actually subject to the regulation, may drop out of programs they need because they fear retribution by immigration authorities.”

ProPublica has a story about ICE making false claims against asylum seekers: “the system she’d once known, as flawed as it was, had turned into a black box she no longer understood, with an ever-shifting array of rules and policies that granted untold discretion to the government. She couldn’t even get ICE attorneys to comply with a fundamental tenet of a fair system: providing proof of their case, evidence they could fight against… [Pena] and her colleagues were counting hundreds of new cases of family separation along the border that occurred after the “zero tolerance” policy supposedly ended in June 2018. But no one could track what the government was doing with every case.”

Trade War

The Trump administration announced delaying some tariffs until after the Christmas buying season so that American consumers won’t be affected when doing their Christmas shopping.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.1%

A day after the El Paso shooting, there was another shooting in Dayton Ohio, killing nine.

The El Paso gunman’s manifesto echoed language Trump and other Republicans have used to talk about immigration: “The suspect wrote that his views “predate Trump,” as if anticipating the political debate that would follow the blood bath. But if Mr. Trump did not originally inspire the gunman, he has brought into the mainstream polarizing ideas and people once consigned to the fringes of American society.”

The National Review’s editorial: “the patterns on display over the last few years have revealed that we are contending here not with another “lone wolf,” but with the fruit of a murderous and resurgent ideology — white supremacy — that deserves to be treated by the authorities in the same manner as has been the threat posed by militant Islam.”

George Will: “It is not implausible to believe that Trump’s years of sulfurous rhetoric — never mind his Monday-morning reading, seemingly for the first time, of words the teleprompter told him to recite — can provoke behaviors from susceptible individuals, such as the alleged El Paso shooter. If so, those who marked ballots for Trump — we have had quite enough exculpatory sociology about the material deprivations and status anxieties of the white working class — should have second or perhaps first thoughts. His Republican groupies, meanwhile, are complicit.”

Trump delivered scripted remarks on the shootings from the White House. He denounced hatred in general terms. Trump visited shooting victims in Ohio and Texas, where he attacked Democrats and bragged about crowd sizes: “That was some crowd,” Trump says of his event. “We had twice the number outside. And then you had this crazy Beto. Beto had like 400 people in a parking lot, and they said his crowd was wonderful.” None of the shooting victims still being treated in the hospital agreed to meet with Trump.

Here is a good piece on the orphaned baby being photographed with a smiling Trump giving a thumb’s up: “A really exceptional work of obscenity, like a really exceptional work of beauty, exceeds the ability of its viewers to fathom what they just saw. Did that just happen? But … how? What sorcery created it? Words don’t arrive, and the stammering gives way to silence.”

Epstein was found dead in his cell on Saturday morning. Later that day Trump retweeted a conspiracy theory that the Clinton’s were behind the death.

Which prompted David Frum to write: “But it shouldn’t be forgotten, either, in the onrush of events. The certainty that Trump will descend ever deeper into sub-basements of “new lows” after this new low should not numb us to its newness and lowness. Neither the practical impediments to impeachment and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment process, nor the foibles and failings of the candidates running to replace him, efface the fact that this presidency shames and disgraces the office every minute of every hour of every day. And even when it ends, however it ends, the shame will stain it still.”

Nadler is saying he is currently doing an impeachment inquiry, and his committee may recommend articles of impeachment by the end of the year.

Immigration

A man who was born in a refugee camp and had been in America since he was 6 months old in 1979 was recently deported to Iraq, where he died two months later. According to ICE: “was ordered removed from the United States in May 2018 after at least 20 criminal convictions over the previous two decades, including assault with a weapon, domestic violence and home invasion. While awaiting deportation, he was released in December with a G.P.S. tracker, but he cut it off, the agency said. Local police arrested him in April on a larceny charge, and he was finally deported on June 2.”

On the same day Trump traveled to El Paso, there was a massive ICE raid in Mississippi. Over 600 immigrants were arrested. Many of their children were left without immediate caregivers.

Trade War

New York Times: “The trade war between the United States and China entered a more dangerous phase on Monday, as Beijing allowed its currency to weaken, Chinese enterprises stopped making new purchases of American farm goods and President Trump’s Treasury Department formally labeled China a currency manipulator.”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.1%

Dan Coats is stepping down as Director of National Intelligence.

On Monday Trump announced his DNI replacement, a partisan GOP congressman who has among other things attacked the Mueller investigation. By Friday, Trump withdrew the nomination.

The GOPs only black member of Congress, who is also from Texas, announced he would not run again in his competitive district.

A Jake Tapper source: “The senior national security official on those comments: ‘Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.’”

The Democrats had their second round of debates, this time in Detroit.

Immigration News

The New York Time reports: More than 900 children have been removed from an adult — usually a parent — with whom they arrived at the southern border since June of 2018.

Saturday morning a gunman shot and killed 20 people in an El Paso shopping mall.

He wrote and published a white nationalist manifesto minutes before the shooting began.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%

Russia Investigation

With Mueller set to testify on Wednesday, veteran Mueller watchers are publishing their advice on what questions Congress should ask him. First up is Wittes, who would get him to admit that he intended Congress to make a judgement on impeachable offenses; that there is the possibility for criminal liability after Trump leave office: “So, to summarize, I take your report to state that you found substantial evidence of presidential obstruction of justice, which you chose not to analyze, because you were deferring to Congress on questions of impeachment and to federal prosecutors after President Trump leaves office on questions of criminality. Is that a fair reading?”

Quinta Jurecic: Congress will be performing a valuable service if it can simply highlight the report’s findings to a public that has not had the opportunity to fully grapple with the contents of a 448-page document—whether by walking Mueller through a careful line of questioning, or by simply asking him to read through sections of the report out loud…. use the hearings to begin the process of forming opinions and judgments about what to do with the material Mueller has provided.

Mueller testified on Wednesday for five hours before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. “Here is a pretty comprehensive summary from Lawfare. Which ends with this: Schiff’s remarks were a kind of mustering call for the House, an acknowledgement to Mueller that the former special counsel’s role was over and that he had successfully passed the baton to the legislative branch…. Schiff did not stake out specific next steps, but there is an obvious follow-up move for Congress in the wake of the Mueller hearings: calling fact witnesses and hearing from them directly.”

Pelosi is still against impeachment: “My position has always been whatever decision we make in that regard would have to be done with our strongest possible hand, and we still have some outstanding matters in the courts,” Ms. Pelosi said after the back-to-back hearings. “It’s about the Congress, the Constitution and the courts. And we are fighting the president in the courts.”

The Senate released its first volume on Russian election interference, showing that all 50 states’ election systems were hacked.

Immigration News

The recent immigration raid targeted 2000 people but only 35 were arrested.

Also: “on Monday the Trump administration said that it would accelerate the deportation of undocumented immigrants who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years, enabling federal agents to arrest and deport people without a hearing before a judge.”

News reports of an autopsy done on a boy who died in a border patrol facility in May show that he died of the flu alone in a toilet stall.

Border Patrol detained an 18 year old American citizen for over a month because they believed he was an undocumented immigrant, despite the fact that he had “a wallet-sized Texas birth certificate, a Texas ID card and Social Security card.”

Here is a report about terrible conditions in a facility for children. A boy described his stay: “He describes them as filled with hunger and thirst, extreme temperatures and fear of the guards manning the facility. They refused to give him food when he asked, mocked him if he asked what time it was, and, on one occasion, punched another boy in the stomach, Abner said.”

Trump administration and Pelosi agreed to a budget deal to avoid hitting the debt limit.

On Saturday Trump advanced his racial political appeal by tweeting about Elijah Cummings: Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA…… ….As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.
Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this corrupt mess immediately!

According to the Washington Post: Trump’s advisers had concluded after the previous tweets that the overall message sent by such attacks is good for the president among his political base — resonating strongly with the white working-class voters he needs to win reelection in 2020. This has prompted them to find ways to fuse Trump’s nativist rhetoric with a love-it-or-leave-it appeal to patriotism ahead of the 2020 election, while seeking to avoid the overtly racist language the president used in his tweets about the four congresswomen…. The attack on Cummings underscores Trump’s penchant for undermining any attempts by other Republicans to steer clear of overtly racial attacks

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.5%

NOTE: Trump’s job approval reached 43% for one day on July 22, the highest since October 2018.

On Sunday Trump tweeted criticism of four members of Congress who are women of color: “So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!”

David French: “The near-total silence (at least so far) from GOP leaders is deeply dispiriting. Do they not understand the message the leader of their party is sending — especially to America’s nonwhite citizens? Do they not understand that racial malice as a political strategy isn’t just an ultimately losing proposition but also deeply divisive, picking at the scabs of America’s deepest political, cultural, and spiritual wounds?”

Adam Serwer: “When Trump told these women to “go back,” he was not making a factual claim about where they were born. He was stating his ideological belief that American citizenship is fundamentally racial, that only white people can truly be citizens, and that people of color, immigrants in particular, are only conditionally American. This is a cornerstone of white nationalism, and one of the president’s few closely held ideological beliefs.” On the way supporters are defending the tweet: “self-deceit is, in a sense, necessary for the president’s advocates: To reconcile the America they say they believe in with the one they actually do believe in, they cannot be honest with themselves about what the president actually said.”

The House voted to on a resolution condemning Trump’s racist comments. Here is the text: “strongly condemns President Donald Trump’s racist comments that have legitimized and increased fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color by saying that our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should “go back” to other countries, by referring to immigrants and asylum seekers as “invaders,” and by saying that Members of Congress who are immigrants (or those of our colleagues who are wrongly assumed to be immigrants) do not belong in Congress or in the United States of America.” Only four Republicans voted in favor.

At a rally in North Carolina, Trump inspired his crowd to chant “Send her home”: “His voters and supporters were having fun. The “Send her back” chant directed at Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was hateful but also exuberant, an expression of racist contempt and a celebration of shared values.”

Adam Serwer argues “we have never seen an American president make a U.S. representative, a refugee, an American citizen, a woman of color, and a religious minority an object of hate for the political masses, in a deliberate attempt to turn the country against his fellow Americans who share any of those traits. Trump is assailing the moral foundations of the multiracial democracy Americans have struggled to bring into existence since 1965, and unless Trumpism is defeated, that fragile project will fail.”… “To attack Omar is to attack a symbol of the demographic change that is eroding white cultural and political hegemony, the defense of which is Trumpism’s only sincere political purpose.”

Ronald Brownsteain suggests Trump’s strategy: “He has to double down on stirring turnout from his base through racial and cultural strife to offset his underperformance with swing voters alienated by exactly that behavior. It is as if Trump is on two diverging roads: He has already moved so far down the path of centering 2020 on American identity that he can no longer realistically cross back to focusing it primarily on the economy. He fights over American identity not only because he likes to, but also because, by this point, he must.”

On Thursday Trump said he was not happy with the chant and he falsely suggested that he tried to interrupt it. Thins comes after some Republicans were trying keep the chant from catching on. By Friday he walked this back, telling reporters: “No, you know what I’m unhappy with — the fact that a congresswoman can hate our country…. You know what’s racist to me, when someone goes out and says the horrible things about our country.”

By Saturday, Trump was praising the chanters: “As you can see, I did nothing to lead people on, nor was I particularly happy with their chant. Just a very big and patriotic crowd. They love the USA!” He retweeted far right anti-immigrant propagandist who wrote “New Campaign slogan for #2020? Don’t love it? Leave it. Send her back is the new lock her up. Well done to #Team Trump.”

The House voted to hold Barr and Ross in contempt over their handling of the Census case.

SDNY is not going to charge anyone else in the Trump campaign hush money payment scheme: “With Mr. Trump, the prosecutors were limited by more than just a Justice Department policy that bars charging a sitting president with a federal crime, one of the people said. Prosecutors also grappled with whether they had enough evidence to show that Mr. Trump had understood campaign finance laws and had intentionally violated them.”

Immigration News

Large-scale ICE raids failed to materialize over the weekend.

According to Washington Post: “there were few signs that ICE was out in force, with a smattering of reports of ICE activity…. New York City officials said Saturday night that ICE agents were spotted conducting “enforcement operations” in two neighborhoods but that no arrests were made after residents declined to answer their doors.”

NPR reports that border agents directed a 3 year old asylum seeker with a heart condition to chose which one of her parents she would be aloud to take with her into America. They dragged her father away. After legal intervention, the family was reunited and allowed to go to relatives in the US.

Personal Log: after reading that last news story I involuntarily bowed my head and prayed for God to give these people strength as they are forced to cope with these immigration challenges.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.7%

Jeffry Epstein was arrested for sex trafficking in his New York City mansion on Saturday. Here is are two articles of Epstein’s connections to Trump.

On Wednesday Labor Secretary Acosta defended himself for his 2008 Epstein deal. There are calls for him to resign.

Here is Ken White on the old Epstein plea deal and what happened this week.

Iran says it has breeched the 2015 nuclear agreement: “the country had surpassed a limit of 3.67 percent uranium enrichment, and was prepared to go further.”

An appeals court struck down the emoluments case against Trump saying Maryland and DC has no standing.

The British ambassador to the US resigned after his assessments of Trump were leaked.

On the census case, DOJ lawyers quit the case and asked to be replaced but the judge denied their request. At a rose garden press conference with Ross and Barr, Trump said he would no longer push for a citizenship question on the Census and that they would get the data by other means.

Immigration News

ICE is preparing to begin arresting immigrant families who are scheduled for deportation. The first wave or arrests are scheduled for Sunday. The DHS chief has opposed the plan on logistical ground, but the head of CBP Mark Morgan as pushed for the raids. One logistical problem: “If undocumented parents are found to have children who are United States citizens, for example, ICE agents will need to wait with the children in a hotel room until a relative in the United States can claim them.”

Pence visited two border detention centers this week, one which had the overcrowded conditions that has been reported on in recent weeks: “he instead described the conditions as the result of the migrant border crisis the administration has been warning about for months but demurred twice when asked if he was okay with the facility’s conditions.”

NBC News reports that numerous immigrant detention centers are forcing kids to sleep on concrete, using abusing language, and even sexually assaulting them.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.6%

Iran breached uranium enrichment levels mandated by the 2015 nuclear deal for the first time since Trump withdrew from the agreement.

The House has finally sued to get Trump’s tax returns.

Trump gave a speech about the military at the Lincoln Memorial on the 4th of July. Here is Frum’s analysis: Trump’s speech was written by people who did not know what they wanted to say. It was a litany of old glories, a shout-out to heroes carefully balanced by race and sex, but with no conscious theme or message.

Washington Post reports on the secret leaked total of taxpayer money that the Trump Administration is diverting from the Parks Department to pay for his July 4th rally on the Mall–$2.5 million: “The diverted park fees represent just a fraction of the extra costs the government faces as a result of the event, which will include displays of military hardware, flyovers by an array of jets including Air Force One, the deployment of tanks on the Mall and an extended pyrotechnics show.”

Immigration News

ProPublica reported on a batch of sexist and racist Facebook messages by current Border Patrol Agents. The private group has 9,500 members: “Group members posted offensive graphics, including a photo illustration of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being sexually assaulted by President Donald Trump; discussed plans to disrupt a congressional visit to a Border Patrol facility; and joked about the deaths of migrants.”

Homeland Security released an inspector general report about conditions at several Border Patrol facilities, with graphic pictures of overcrowding: “Its report describes standing-room-only cells, children without showers and hot meals, and detainees clamoring desperately for release.”

After losing in the Supreme Court, the Trump administration announced that they will print the 2020 Census without the citizenship question.

Trump pulled an about face when he heard that his DOJ was not pursuing the Census question, and said on Twitter that he was. He may use an executive order in an attempt to include the question.

More details are included in this NBC report: a border station in the El Paso sector that only four showers were available for 756 immigrants, over half of the immigrants were being held outside, and immigrants inside were being kept in cells maxed at over five times their capacity.

The report explains why this is happening. Border Patrol is supposed to transfer immigrants to ICE custody quickly since ICE is equiped for long-term detention: “In our discussions with ICE field management about this situation, they explained that their capacity to find additional bed space is strained. As a result, Border Patrol
continues to hold detainees for more than 72 hours in overcrowded
conditions while they await transfer.”

Here is a New York Times investigative report about the Clint, Texas facility.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.6%

By Monday DHS reported that the Clint facility had moved most of the migrants to other facilities. There is a decrease in migrants coming in, which this report by the New York Times attributes to Mexico cracking down on immigrants on their side of the border; and DHS has “scaled back a policy requiring fingerprints from family members who applied to sponsor children in its care, speeding up the children’s release from government facilities.” On child separation, in come cases this is still happening: “The infants there had either been separated from adult family members with whom they had crossed the border or were the children of teenage mothers who had also been detained there. Some of the minors had been held there for nearly a month.”

According to two lawyers who toured the Clint center: “Many, including children as young as 2 or 3, have been separated from adult caretakers without any provisions for their care besides the unrelated older children also being held in detention.”
“As we interviewed the two brothers, he fell asleep on two office chairs drawn together, probably the most comfortable bed he had used in weeks. They had been separated from an 18-year-old uncle and sent to the Clint Border Patrol Station. When we met them, they had been there three weeks and counting.”
“A second-grader we interviewed entered the room silently but burst into tears when we asked who she traveled with to the US. “My aunt,” she said, with a keening cry. A bracelet on her wrist had the words “US parent” and a phone number written in permanent marker. We called the number on the spot and found out that no one had informed her desperate parents where she was being held. Some of the most emotional moments of our visit came witnessing children speak for the first time with their parents on an attorney’s phone.”

A doctor reported out: “After assessing 39 children under the age of 18, she described conditions for unaccompanied minors at the McAllen facility as including “extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.”

All the children who were seen showed evidence of trauma, Lucio Sevier reported, and the teens spoke of having no access to hand washing during their entire time in custody. She compared it to being “tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease.”

The New York Times: “On Tuesday, the C.B.P. official said that those moves had alleviated overcrowding in Clint, and allowed for the return of more than 100 children there. The spokesman said that no additional resources had been provided to the children who were sent back.”
Also: “I personally don’t believe these allegations,” the Customs and Border Protection official.

According to Vox: The lone member of the team of legal investigators who visited the El Paso facility in which many children were sent from Clint — called “Border Patrol Station 1” — told Vox that conditions there were just as bad as they were in Clint, with the same problems of insufficient food, no toothbrushes, and aggressive guards.
Increasingly — as lawyers have been reporting, and as the investigators who interviewed children in detention last week confirmed — children are coming to the US with a relative who is not their parent, and being separated.

Here is a good explanation of what the government’s legal argument is behind the soap and toothbrush comments. Ken White doesn’t think it will work: The United States’s loathsome argument—that it is “safe and sanitary” to confine children without soap, toothbrushes, dry clothes, and on concrete under bright lights—is morally indefensible. It’s also a spectacularly foolish argument to raise in the famously liberal Ninth Circuit, where the United States should have expected exactly the reception that it got.

The House passed a $4.5 billion emergency border aid bill Tuesday.

A judge rules on Tuesday to reopen the Census question case, saying that new evidence suggests Republicans may have inserted the citizenship question to decrease the voting power of minorities: “It is becoming difficult to avoid seeing that which is increasingly clear,” he wrote. “As more puzzle pieces are placed on the mat, a disturbing picture of the decision makers’ motives takes shape.”

Trump continues to deny the Carroll allegation: “No. 1, she’s not my type. No. 2, it never happened. It never happened, O.K.?”

Russia News

Due to a subpoena, Mueller has agreed to testify before the House in two back to back session on July 17.

At the G20 Summit, Trump joked with Putin about election interference and agreed with Putin that it would be good to “get rid” of journalists (on the one year anniversary of the shooting in an American newsroom).

At the end of the G20 trip Trump flew to the DMZ and became the first sitting US president to step inside North Korea. He met with Kim there.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.3%

The Trump campaign fired two polling companies over leaked internal polling data that showed Trump losing to Biden is key states.

Trump gave a big rally in Florida which he said was his 2020 kickoff rally. He said his “radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice and rage. They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.”

Trump and ICE has announced there will be sweeping immigrant arrests and deportations next week.

Here is the New York Times story about the youngest child separated at the border, taken at four months, not reunited until he was nine months old

A legal team that helps enforce the Flores settlement was allowed to tour a detention center in Clint Texas. Here are some quotes from an AP article: “A 2-year-old boy locked in detention wants to be held all the time. A few girls, ages 10 to 15, say they’ve been doing their best to feed and soothe the clingy toddler who was handed to them by a guard days ago. Lawyers warn that kids are taking care of kids, and there’s inadequate food, water and sanitation for the 250 infants, children and teens at the Border Patrol station.”
“There were three infants in the station, all with their teen mothers, along with a 1-year-old, two 2-year-olds and a 3-year-old. There are dozens more under 12. Fifteen have the flu, and 10 more are quarantined.”
“Children told lawyers that they were fed oatmeal, a cookie and a sweetened drink in the morning, instant noodles for lunch and a burrito and cookie for dinner. There are no fruits or vegetables. They said they’d gone weeks without bathing or a clean change of clothes.”

The New York Times reports that some children have been there for over a month: “Children as young as 7 and 8, many of them wearing clothes caked with snot and tears, are caring for infants they’ve just met, the lawyers said. Toddlers without diapers are relieving themselves in their pants. Teenage mothers are wearing clothes stained with breast milk. Most of the young detainees have not been able to shower or wash their clothes since they arrived at the facility, those who visited said. They have no access to toothbrushes, toothpaste or soap.”
“children were being overseen by guards for Customs and Border Protection, which declined to comment for this story. She and her colleagues observed the guards wearing full uniforms — including weapons — as well as face masks to protect themselves from the unsanitary conditions.”
“Nearly every child I spoke with said that they were hungry,” Ms. Mukherjee said.

Government attorneys argued before the 9th Circuit that the Flores decree does not require detention centers to provide soap, toothpaste, blankets and sleeping conditions: “Fabian asked the Ninth Circuit to reverse Gee’s findings because they added new requirements – such as giving detainees soap and toothbrushes – that were not specifically included in Flores.

“One has to assume it was left that way and not enumerated by the parties because either the parties couldn’t reach agreement on how to enumerate that or it was left to the agencies to determine,” Fabian said.”

The acting Defense Secretary resigned due to a news about a messy divorce and family situation. It comes at a time when Trump has just sent 1,000 troops to the Middle East, and Iran has threatened to exceed limits on uranium enrichment:

Trump ordered and then called off an air strike of Iran targets after Iran shot down an American drone. Here is a good summary of the White House deliberations.

He claimed on Twitter that he called off the strike because the 150 deaths that would result would not be proportionate: “But an administration official informed about the discussions privately disputed that account. The 150-dead casualty estimate came not from a general but from a lawyer, according to the official. The estimate was developed by Pentagon lawyers drafting worst-case scenarios that, the official said, did not account for whether the strike was carried out during daytime, when more people might be present at the targets, or in the dark hours before sunrise, as the military planned.

That estimate was passed to the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, without being cleared with Mr. Shanahan or General Dunford. It was then conveyed to the president by the White House lawyers, at which point Mr. Trump changed his mind and called off the strike.”

“Meetings and memos aside, he trusts his instincts more than institutions, reaches out to unconventional sources of guidance and is willing to defy a roomful of advisers. He has not had a Senate-confirmed defense secretary for nearly six months, and the acting secretary resigned this week. And those advisers he does have were busy trying to outmaneuver each other.”

Trump is talking to people about replacing the Fed chair that he appointed, which would be an unprecedented power play to politicize monetary policy.

A writer, E Jean Carroll, has accused Trump of rape in an incident: during a chance encounter with the then-real estate developer at Bergdorf Goodman in late 1995 or early 1996, Trump attacked her in a dressing room. She said he knocked her head against a wall, pulled down her tights and briefly penetrated her before she pushed him off and ran out. Here is the Carroll book excerpt.

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.6%

After being briefed on a devastating 17-state poll conducted by his campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump told aides to deny that his internal polling showed him trailing Mr. Biden in many of the states he needs to win, even though he is also trailing in public polls from key states like Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And when top-line details of the polling leaked, including numbers showing the president lagging in a cluster of critical Rust Belt states, Mr. Trump instructed aides to say publicly that other data showed him doing well.

After reporting that Kim Jon Un’s brother was a CIA asset, Trump said today that he “wouldn’t let that happen.”

Trump said in an interview with ABC News that he is open to accepting opposition research from foreign governments during the 2020 election, and that he would not consider this election interference. He half way walked it back in another interview on Fox News, saying he would “look at it” but also tell the FBI.

This caused a brief uproar among never Trumpers, but as David Grahm writes: Trump’s declaration, though, is neither especially surprising nor especially irrational…. It’s no surprise, then, that Trump would not foreswear a tactic that worked for him then. Rather, every indication is that the president’s electoral behavior will be worse in 2020, and there will be fewer constraints on him.

Pompeo accused Iran of attacking oil tankers in the Straight of Hermuz: Thursday’s attacks were especially brazen because one of the targeted ships is Japanese-owned, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran at the time carrying a message from President Trump. As Pompeo put it, Abe’s mission was “to ask the regime to de-escalate and enter into talks.” Abe was rebuffed in person by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and, symbolically, by the attack on the tanker.

TheNew York Times reported that the DOD’s Cyber Command has imbedded cyber weapons deep in Russia’s power grids. New laws and rules give Cyber Command autonomy to operate without presidential directive: “under little-noticed new legal authorities, slipped into the military authorization bill passed by Congress last summer. The measure approved the routine conduct of ‘clandestine military activity’ in cyberspace, to ‘deter, safeguard or defend against attacks or malicious cyber activities against the United States.’ Under the law, those actions can now be authorized by the defense secretary without special presidential approval.” The article made a point of noting that Trump “Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid…. and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials…”

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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%