Donald Trump told Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan he would grant McAleenan a pardon if he were sent to jail for having border agents block asylum seekers from entering the US in defiance of US law, senior administration officials tell CNN.
Trump reportedly made the comment during a visit to the border at Calexico, California, a week ago. It was not clear if the comment was a joke.
Uh… not a joke.
Two officials briefed on the exchange say the President told McAleenan, since named the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that he “would pardon him if he ever went to jail for denying US entry to migrants,” as one of the officials paraphrased.
…
During his visit to Calexico last Friday, Trump said on camera: “We’re full, our system’s full, our country’s full — can’t come in! Our country is full, what can you do? We can’t handle any more, our country is full. Can’t come in, I’m sorry. It’s very simple.”
Behind the scenes, two sources told CNN, the President told border agents to not let migrants in. Tell them we don’t have the capacity, he said. If judges give you trouble, say, “Sorry, judge, I can’t do it. We don’t have the room.”
I’ll try and remember that the next time I’m driving in Wyoming or one of those other big empty square States.
Oh, is this Obstruction of Justice? Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is coercing illegal behavior by explicitly promising there will be no consequence. Obstruction? It’s like hiring a Hit Man.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Imagine that the White House, instead of a fortress, were an opulent country club. If you pony up a $200,000 nonrefundable initiation fee, you can have the run of the place. Wander the halls. Drop in any time on the West Wing, the Oval Office, the Situation Room. Chat freely with the president’s family and advisers, listen in on national security conversations with foreign leaders, even snap a selfie with POTUS himself. Take it all in — actually, feel free to record it, if you’d like.
Welcome to the Mar-a-Lago Club, known in Trump circles as the winter White House, in Palm Beach, Fla. When Yujing Zhang, a 32-year-old Chinese national, was arrested there March 30 after breaching security, it was hardly surprising to learn from federal law enforcement authorities that she was in possession of five cellphone SIM cards, an external hard drive, nine USB thumb drives (one with malicious computer software installed) and a device for detecting electronic signals. Zhang, who has not entered a plea , is charged with lying to a federal agent and illegal entering. The FBI is investigating whether she is a spy for Chinese intelligence.
My personal experience as a counterterrorism agent tells me that Zhang’s alleged loadout is consistent with an effort to monitor computer systems while evading surveillance.
Unfortunately, Mar-a-Lago appears wide open to such operations. Zhang’s arrest is only the latest in a string of indications that the club is far from secure. Mar-a-Lago may present the worst counterintelligence nightmare the country has faced since the Cold War.
The Texas state legislature is debating a provision that wouldn’t just outlaw abortion, but legally qualify it as homicide. The repercussions are chilling
Do “pro-life” advocates care about life or do they care about punishment? The latest abortion debate out of Texas gives a clear answer: the goal is to hurt women, not defend life.
The Texas state legislature is debating a provision that wouldn’t just outlaw abortion, but legally qualify it as homicide. For context of how extreme that is, even in the United States before Roe v Wade made abortion broadly legal, the procedure was outlawed in most states but was not considered murder – abortion was its own crime. Texas in 2019 wants to be even more barbaric than that, and turn women who end their pregnancies into felons, killers, and even death row inmates.
That’s right: Texas, supposedly so concerned with the right to life, continues to execute its own citizens. And some members of the state legislature want to execute women, too, if those women end their pregnancies.
President Trump said on Friday that his administration was “strongly” considering releasing migrants detained at the border into mostly Democratic “sanctuary cities,” suggesting that the idea should make liberals “very happy” because of their immigration policies.
Ok, sure, fine, whatever. They contribute more to the Economy, cost less in Services, and are generally more Law Abiding than native citizens.
Please don’t throw me into that Briar Patch Bre’r Fox. Please, please, pretty please?
Better than ripping their children away and locking them up in concentration camps and dog kennels.
“We are looking at the possibility, strongly looking at it to be honest with you,” he said on Friday in response to a question about the proposal.
“We might as well do what they always say they want,” Mr. Trump said if Democrats do not agree to new immigration policies. “We’ll bring them to sanctuary city areas and let that particular area take care of it,” he said, adding that California welcomed the idea of more people coming to the state.
“We can give them a lot. We can give them an unlimited supply,” he said.
Bless your heart (in Dixie), bring it or shut your festering gob.
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
President Franklin Roosevelt dies; The American Civil War begins with the attack on Ft. Sumter; Yuri Gagarin is the first man to fly in space; Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off on its first mission; Late night TV host David Letterman born.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
President Harry Truman relieves Gen. Douglas Mcarthur of his command in Asia; Napoleon Bonaparte banished to Island of Elba; American soldiers liberate first Nazi concentration camp; Idi Amin deposed as Uganda’s President; Apollo 13 blasts off.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.
Those things are what Neo Liberal Economics produces and it’s quite obvious and logical really that if you take a good or service ordinarily provided by Government at cost and privatize it to benefit corporations and commercial interests this is going to be the result.
The dominant system of political thought in this country, which produced both the creeping privatisation of public health services and this astonishing attempt to stifle free speech, promised to save us from dehumanising bureaucracy. By rolling back the state, neoliberalism was supposed to have allowed autonomy and creativity to flourish. Instead, it has delivered a semi-privatised authoritarianism more oppressive than the system it replaced.
Workers find themselves enmeshed in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, centrally controlled and micromanaged. Organisations that depend on a cooperative ethic – such as schools and hospitals – are stripped down, hectored and forced to conform to suffocating diktats. The introduction of private capital into public services – that would herald a glorious new age of choice and openness – is brutally enforced. The doctrine promises diversity and freedom but demands conformity and silence.
Much of the theory behind these transformations arises from the work of Ludwig von Mises. In his book Bureaucracy, published in 1944, he argued that there could be no accommodation between capitalism and socialism. The creation of the National Health Service in the UK, the New Deal in the US and other experiments in social democracy would lead inexorably to the bureaucratic totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
He recognised that some state bureaucracy was inevitable; there were certain functions that could not be discharged without it. But unless the role of the state is minimised – confined to defence, security, taxation, customs and not much else – workers would be reduced to cogs “in a vast bureaucratic machine”, deprived of initiative and free will. By contrast, those who labour within an “unhampered capitalist system” are “free men”, whose liberty is guaranteed by “an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote”. He forgot to add that some people, in his capitalist utopia, have more votes than others. And those votes become a source of power.
His ideas, alongside the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and other neoliberal thinkers, have been applied in this country by Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron, Theresa May and, to an alarming extent, Tony Blair. All of those have attempted to privatise or marketise public services in the name of freedom and efficiency, but they keep hitting the same snag: democracy. People want essential services to remain public, and they are right to do so.
If you hand public services to private companies, either you create a private monopoly, which can use its dominance to extract wealth and shape the system to serve its own needs – or you introduce competition, creating an incoherent, fragmented service characterised by the institutional failure you can see every day on our railways. We’re not idiots, even if we are treated as such. We know what the profit motive does to public services.
So successive governments decided that if they could not privatise our core services outright, they would subject them to “market discipline”. Von Mises repeatedly warned against this approach. “No reform could transform a public office into a sort of private enterprise,” he cautioned. The value of public administration “cannot be expressed in terms of money”. “Government efficiency and industrial efficiency are entirely different things.” “Intellectual work cannot be measured and valued by mechanical devices.” “You cannot ‘measure’ a doctor according to the time he employs in examining one case.” They ignored his warnings.
Their problem is that neoliberal theology, as well as seeking to roll back the state, insists that collective bargaining and other forms of worker power be eliminated (in the name of freedom, of course). So the marketisation and semi-privatisation of public services became not so much a means of pursuing efficiency as an instrument of control. Public-service workers are now subjected to a panoptical regime of monitoring and assessment, using the benchmarks von Mises rightly warned were inapplicable and absurd. The bureaucratic quantification of public administration goes far beyond an attempt at discerning efficacy. It has become an end in itself.
Its perversities afflict all public services. Schools teach to the test, depriving children of a rounded and useful education. Hospitals manipulate waiting times, shuffling patients from one list to another. Police forces ignore some crimes, reclassify others, and persuade suspects to admit to extra offences to improve their statistics. Universities urge their researchers to write quick and superficial papers, instead of deep monographs, to maximise their scores under the research excellence framework.
As a result, public services become highly inefficient for an obvious reason: the destruction of staff morale. Skilled people, including surgeons whose training costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, resign or retire early because of the stress and misery the system causes. The leakage of talent is a far greater waste than any inefficiencies this quantomania claims to address.
New extremes in the surveillance and control of workers are not, of course, confined to the public sector. Amazon has patented a wristband that can track workers’ movements and detect the slightest deviation from protocol. Technologies are used to monitor peoples’ keystrokes, language, moods and tone of voice. Some companies have begun to experiment with the micro-chipping of their staff. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out, neoliberal work practices, epitomised by the gig economy, that reclassifies workers as independent contractors, internalise exploitation. “Everyone is a self-exploiting worker in their own enterprise.”
The freedom we were promised turns out to be freedom for capital, gained at the expense of human liberty. The system neoliberalism has created is a bureaucracy that tends towards absolutism, produced in the public services by managers mimicking corporate executives, imposing inappropriate and self-defeating efficiency measures, and in the private sector by subjection to faceless technologies that can brook no argument or complaint.
Attempts to resist are met by ever more extreme methods, such as the threatened lawsuit at the Churchill Hospital. Such instruments of control crush autonomy and creativity. It is true that the Soviet bureaucracy von Mises rightly denounced reduced its workers to subjugated drones. But the system his disciples have created is heading the same way.
Neo Liberalism is an evil, totalitarian doctrine. It’s also entirely discredited by its results. Its advocates should slink away in shame.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
A prestigious college packed with the children of wealthy and well-connected parents is now the launching pad into the stratosphere of big money.
Most Americans still cling to the meritocratic notion that people are rewarded according to their efforts and abilities. But meritocracy is becoming a cruel joke.
The Justice Department recently announced indictments of dozens of wealthy parents for using bribery and fraud to get their children into prestigious colleges.
But the real scandal isn’t how far a few wealthy parents will go to get their kids admitted (apparently $1.2 million in illegal payoffs), but how commonplace it has become for them to go almost as far without breaking any laws – shelling out big bucks for essay tutors, testing tutors, admissions counselors, and “enrichment” courses (not to mention sky-high tuition at private schools feeding into the Ivy League).
Inequality is lurking behind all this, and not just because the wealthy can afford it. Researchers Daniel Schneider, Orestes Hastings, and Joe LaBriola found that in states with the biggest gaps between rich and poor, well-to-do parents spend the most trying to get their children into elite colleges.
America’s unprecedented concentration of wealth combined with seemingly bottomless poverty have increased parental anxiety – raising the stakes, and the competition, for admission.
The president’s attack on every pillar of society jeopardises the US’s continued prosperity and ability to function as a democracy
Kirstjen Nielsen’s forced resignation as US secretary of homeland security is no reason to celebrate. Yes, she presided over the forced separation of families at the US border, notoriously housing young children in wire cages. But Nielsen’s departure is not likely to bring any improvement, as Donald Trump wants to replace her with someone who will carry out his anti-immigrant policies even more ruthlessly.
The president’s immigration policies are appalling in almost every aspect. And yet they may not be the worst feature of his administration. Indeed, identifying its foullest aspects has become a popular American parlour game. Yes, he has called immigrants criminals, rapists and animals. But what about his deep misogyny or his boundless vulgarity and cruelty? Or his winking support of white supremacists? Or his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, and the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty? And, of course, there is his war on the environment, on healthcare, and on the rules-based international system.
This morbid game never ends, of course, because new contenders for the title emerge almost daily. Trump is a disrupting personality, and after he’s gone, we may well reflect on how such a deranged and morally challenged person could have been elected president of the world’s most powerful country in the first place.
As regular readers remember I know a little about computers because it’s my day gig. From Linux to Windows, I often have to deal with different kinds of problems that the system faces – from a virus attack to a complete crash of the system. There are a lot of resources (like the one Linode might have) to read online which gives us a thorough information about how one can secure their operating systems, and in turn, their computers, but most computer users being the way they are, tend to turn to people like us for solutions One of the most common things I’m called on to do is Virus and Malware removal.
Almost every system has some questionable applications on it because Anti-Virus programs are picky and if you’ve installed any kind of downloaded software at all (and it’s the most popular form of distribution currently) the installer has a good chance of triggering the Heuristic warnings simply because it makes changes to your files and registry. Most working techs will let the A/V spin until it comes up with something (anywhere from 15 minutes to hours) and after exhausting your supply of chit chat and banter, when both of you are thoroughly bored, you shake your head and tsk tsk and say, “Well, it’s going to need an overnight scan.” This is simply so you can get rid of the customer and start really working.
I am excellent at this which is why I’m worth every bit of the $30 an hour I customarily charge which is quite a bargain anyway.
Now I’m not going to claim I use best practices. What I do instead is I have an A/V Master Drive with a bare bones Windows install and about 17 different kinds of Anti-Virus on it. When I’m preparing to work on a suspect machine I make a copy of it (actually have a part that does that in hardware so the Master hasn’t touched a computer since I set it up) and use that instead in case something catastrophic happens. Then I install it on my desktop, unhooking all my normal drives, updating the databases and installing any upgrades so the Diagnostic Machine is current.
Then I’ll yank the suspect Hard Drive, plug it in (if you do this through a USB 3.0 connection you can have all your A/V up and running before your machine even sees it) and start scanning the crap out of it.
It really is an overnight job, maybe several, but it’s not like you have to give it undevoted attention.
So that’s the way I do it because I’m lazy and Windows-centric and it’s good enough for most things. Were I serious, I’d use DEFT.
DEFT is an Ubuntu Linux based OS with a lot of live jive Forensic tools as part of the build (because it’s Linux you could pull them out of the repositories individually but it’s a pain in the ass). The Digital Evidence & Forensic Toolkit was developed in Italy and while the Five Eyes and other No Such Agencies may have improved, it’s light years ahead of most State and Local Police Departments.
Download here. You burn it to a CD or DVD so there’s absolutely no possibility that a Virus can infect it, read only.
I hate to brag, but I’m fairly bright, certainly on the right side of the Bell Curve. I would expect that FBI and Secret Service Agents have above average intelligence since they’re supposed to be “special” and “elite”.
Let me tell you what you should not do with a suspect Memory Card, Thumb, or Hard Drive- just slap it in your regular old unprotected computer.
A Secret Service agent investigating Yujing Zhang’s visit to Mar-a-Lago infected one of the agency’s own computers with the malware carried in by the unannounced Chinese national, a move that provoked wide derision Monday from computer security professionals.
“You don’t put an unknown USB into your computer,” said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at Veracode. “That’s in all the training everyone gets, even in your dumb corporate training. You even tell your mom that.”
Wysopal’s tweet highlighting the apparent gaffe earned more than 3,000 retweets Monday, as the computer security community executed a collective face-palm. “Whoa! Never seen that USB execution thing before!” quipped Kaspersky researcher Kurt Baumgartner. “Sounds like an agent trying to crack the case before the cyber team got there,” opined Eric O’Neill, a former FBI surveillance specialist.
In a sworn affidavit filed at Zhang’s arrest, the agency said it discovered the “malicious malware” during a “preliminary forensic examination” of the thumb drive. The new details that emerged at a hearing in West Palm Beach sound a lot more like the Secret Service just plugged the USB drive into one of its computers.
The biggest giveaway is that the review was cut short when the examining agent noticed “a file” installing itself on the agent’s machine. “He stated that he had to immediately stop the analysis and shut off his computer to halt the corruption,” testified the Secret Service’s Samuel Ivanovich, according to The New York Times. The thumb drive’s behavior was “very out of the ordinary,” Ivanovich added.
Forensics examiners don’t usually interrupt malware when it’s in the middle of giving itself away, security experts point out. “For all you know, if the thing is doing something, and you pull it out, it might detect that it’s been seen,” said Wysopal. “Forensically it makes no sense.”
“Let it run,” said Michael Borohovski, co-founder of Tinfoil Security and an intelligence-community veteran. Borohovski notes that a professional forensic environment runs within a virtual machine where there’s no concern of infection. “Watch it run. Attach a debugger. Then restore your safe snapshot and do it all over again to your heart’s content.”
The Secret Service didn’t respond to inquiries for this story.
Now “Preliminary Forensics” in this case pretty clearly means take a look for folders named “Kiddie Porn” and “Spying Stuff” or “Dr. Evil’s Master Plan To Kill All The Brown People (or Infidels or Capitalist Pigs, pick ’em), Destroy The Government, And Take Over The World”. You’d have to be an idiot to leave clearly labeled stuff like that lying around, yet people do.
I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
My point is that even the dimmest of dimwits should know that you don’t destroy the evidence at a crime scene by clomping all around it in Hobnail Boots.
