Judge will temporarily halt deportations of reunited families
By TED HESSON, Politico
07/16/2018

A federal judge on Monday said he will issue a temporary halt to deportations of migrant parents who are reunited with their children.

U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw said during court proceedings in San Diego that he will stay deportations pending resolution of the issue.
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Justice Department attorney Scott Stewart said in court Monday that the Trump administration opposes delaying deportations and will file a briefing in response by July 23.

Sarah Fabian, another DOJ attorney in the case, suggested the stay of deportations could affect the process of reunifying families due to limited immigration detention space, but Sabraw rejected that idea.

“That’s not an option,” the judge said. “If space is an issue, then the government will have to make space.”

Sabraw excoriated the administration last week for its execution of his order to reunify migrant families who were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Trump administration faced a July 10 deadline to reunite 102 children under age 5 with their parents, but failed to reconnect 46 children due to security concerns and other logistical hurdles. Under Sabraw’s order, the administration must reunite a broader pool of more than 2,500 separated children by July 26.

Sabraw on Friday complained that HHS officials seemed to be using safety concerns as “cover” to avoid meeting the late-July deadline.
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In a filing Friday, (Chris) Meekins (Deputy Assistant Secretary of Preparedness and Response for HHS) argued a streamlined reunification process ordered by Sabraw “materially increases the risk of harm to children.”

Sabraw on Monday called the declaration “deeply troubling” and said it seemed to ignore that children had been separated from parents at the border and instead treated them as typical unaccompanied minors who arrived alone.

“Mr. Meekins, apparently, wants to hold children for months,” Sabraw said, calling such a decision “not in the best interest of children.”

During his court testimony Monday, (Jonathan) White (Deputy Director for Children’s Programs at the Office of Refugee Resettlement) said that ORR had identified 2,551 separated children in its custody ages 5 to 17. Of those, the refugee office has matched 2,480 to parents, which leaves the parentage of 71 still undetermined.

According to White, 1,609 parents of those children remain in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He said 1,317 have cleared ORR parentage and security checks.

ICE is conducting its own security checks after ORR, according to White. As of this morning, 918 parents had completed the ICE process, he said.

Fifty-one parents failed the ICE check and 348 have pending clearances, White said.

In its filing Monday, the ACLU argued that the situation of migrant parents has grown more complex in recent weeks, which required the judge to halt deportations.

In June, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an immigration law decision that restricts asylum eligibility for victims of “private violence,” including domestic violence and gang violence.

“As a result of the Attorney General’s (patently unlawful) asylum decision, it will be that much more difficult to advise families about whether a child will ultimately prevail in his or her asylum claim,” the ACLU said in the filing, “or instead will spend years by themselves in the United States fighting their case in the immigration courts, only to be removed at the end of the day.”

Look, The Last Jedi might not be the best Star Wars movie (upon reflection I don’t think any of them are really good as movies and my favorite is purely conventional, Empire Strikes Back) but the idea that what makes it bad is its diversity is nothing but racism and misogyny.

There is no doubt the sudden and unexpected death of Carrie Fischer has meant huge changes in the arc of the story, the next one was supposed to be her film and with all the big three fictionally or actually dead you’ll see a lot more Poe (reputedly gay), Finn (obviously Black), and Rose (female, Asian, and a maintainance worker).

Now there’s a lot of The Last Jedi that doesn’t work for me (Canto Bight? Couldn’t have shaved a minute or 20 out of that?). I actually like Snoke’s end, it’s like Chekov’s gun (you mean it’s just there? Not material to the plot in any way? If I wanted unscripted and unresolved drama I’d look out the window.) The failure is only in your imagination.

Toxic nerds are making “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” criticism impossible
by Matthew Rozsa, Salon
July 12, 201

I think “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” was a bad movie. That is a personal opinion, one with which other men and women of good will should feel comfortable disagreeing.

I also think the people who have been harassing Kelly Marie Tran, John Boyega, Rian Johnson and other creative individuals who helped make “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” are racist, sexist and all-around deplorable human beings (and I use the term “deplorable” quite deliberately here).

Before I get into the problem of the toxic nerd culture that has caused the harassment of “The Last Jedi” alums like actress Tran, however, I’d like to explain precisely why I think the movie itself was an epic misfire. Appropriately enough, the easiest way to explain my point is to compare “The Last Jedi” to the “Breaking Bad” antepenultimate episode “Ozymandias,” which, like “The Last Jedi,” was directed by Rian Johnson. Without spoiling the story, its purpose was to serve as the climax for all of the major characters viewers had gotten to know throughout the show — the moment when, for everyone from antiheroes Walter White and Jesse Pinkman to their adversary Hank Schrader, the proverbial chickens came home to roost. It was a powerful piece of television filmmaking and — because it was suitably epic while remaining rooted in what viewers had come to know and love (or hate) about the characters — felt like an appropriate culmination of their various story arcs. Frankly, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t instrumental in landing Johnson his “Star Wars” gig.

That said, “Star Wars” is not “Breaking Bad,” and the same narrative tricks that worked for the latter feel jarringly out of place in the former. (Johnson deserves to be commended for his boldness, but audacity is not the same thing as quality.) The problem with “The Last Jedi” is that it doesn’t logically connect everything we saw from the previous movies with what happens in this one. As Mark Hamill himself pointed out, Luke Skywalker’s (Hamill) abandonment of his belief in Jedi teachings directly contradicts his personality and actions from the original trilogy, and the backstory filled in here to explain his sudden turn is delivered in startlingly brief monologues instead of scenes that actually flesh out the character dilemmas they’re meant to reveal. Because the explanation for Luke’s loss of faith is critical to the film’s plot, the perfunctory execution makes everything we’re supposed to believe about his character’s transformation feel unconvincing. While his scenes training Rey (Daisy Ridley) are beautifully done, they can’t make up for the fact that the character performing the training feels less like Luke Skywalker than he does Johnson’s own original creation with the Skywalker name slapped onto him.

The other storyline isn’t much better. In Plot B we see Finn (John Boyega) team up with a maintenance worker named Rose Tico (Tran) to help Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) circumvent the seemingly incompetent leadership of Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo (Laura Dern). There are many problems here. First, Rose and Finn wind up abandoning their plan halfway through its execution for the flimsiest of reasons and, even worse, have all of their work rendered entirely moot by a betrayal from someone who it was blazingly obvious should never have been trusted in the first place. This is a shame, if for no other reason than the chemistry between Finn and Rose makes them easily the most likable and sympathetic characters in the film. Poe and Holdo have their charms as well — Poe is endearingly plucky and adventurous while Holdo has a quiet bravery and wisdom to her — but their conflict is marred by the fact that it winds up being pointless. After all the strategic Sturm und Drang between the two of them has subsided, it’s hard to see how the Resistance didn’t wind up back exactly where it started, despite Poe’s and Holdo’s various moments of character growth and/or sacrifice. It’s much ado that adds up to, if not nothing, at least less than the sum of its parts.
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This brings us to the problem of toxic nerd culture.

It’s one that we’ve seen pop up before. The watershed moment, as Johnson himself observed in a tweet earlier this week, was the Gamergate scandal of 2014. On that occasion, feminist critics of video games and women in the gaming industry in general were singled out for harassment by thousands of gamers who deplored what they felt was an intrusion into their domain by left-wing “social justice warriors.” They were particularly upset about attempts to criticize both games and the gaming industry as sexist, with writer Jenn Frank explaining in The Guardian that “they feel they are at war with a group of left-leaning games writers and developers who they refer to as ‘social justice warriors’ – this is effectively anyone who has ever questioned the patriarchal nature of the games industry or the limited, often objectifying depiction of women.”

Of course, the backlash of pop culture nerd bigotry was hardly limited to Gamergate. When the trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” revealed that one of the protagonists would be played by the African-British actor John Boyega, it led to a cry of outrage by many “Star Wars” fans. In 2016, there was a comparable outcry against the “Ghostbusters” reboot from the nerd community, with internet fans lashing out against a film they hadn’t even seen (or at least hadn’t seen prior to vehemently denouncing it) because it had replaced the traditionally all-male Ghostbusters cast with women. One year later, a so-called Comicsgate occurred that seemed to be sparked by a picture of female comics writers at Marvel going out for milkshakes.

And this is just the short list.

It isn’t difficult to draw a straight line from Gamergate and Comicsgate and the Ghostbusters backlash to the racist and sexist harassment that Tran experienced and which drove her offline altogether. On each of these occasions, a clear pattern of behavior emerged:

1. Some fans felt outraged that pop culture spaces that they believed should be specifically white, straight and male — whether mediums like video games and comic books or specific franchises like “Star Wars” and “Ghostbusters” — had been compromised by the inclusion of people who weren’t.

2. In order to reclaim these spaces for straight white men, they join likeminded people online and attempt to take down these properties by either (a) claiming that their outrage isn’t because of racism, sexism or other forms of prejudice but rather because the developments that just so happen to be associated with minorities are “ruining” their medium/franchise of choice or (b) being explicit in the fact that their motivations are racist and sexist, usually by harassing their targets with slurs and threats. Sometimes they also do (a) and (b) at the same time, never mind the fact that (b) pretty much proves the lie in the premise of (a).

3. They act like the injured party when they are criticized for their behavior. This point is absolutely crucial to understand: They do not perceive of themselves as bullies, or as bigots, but rather they pose as aggrieved parties. In the best case scenarios, it is because they claim that something they’ve loved all of their life has been taken away from them; in the worst case scenarios, it’s because they claim that pop culture is being used to attack them as straight white men (just look at the popularity of Jordan Peterson, who has described “Frozen” as “propaganda” because of its subversion of traditionally feminine narrative themes).It isn’t difficult to draw a straight line from Gamergate and Comicsgate and the Ghostbusters backlash to the racist and sexist harassment that Tran experienced and which drove her offline altogether. On each of these occasions, a clear pattern of behavior emerged:

1. Some fans felt outraged that pop culture spaces that they believed should be specifically white, straight and male — whether mediums like video games and comic books or specific franchises like “Star Wars” and “Ghostbusters” — had been compromised by the inclusion of people who weren’t.
2. In order to reclaim these spaces for straight white men, they join likeminded people online and attempt to take down these properties by either (a) claiming that their outrage isn’t because of racism, sexism or other forms of prejudice but rather because the developments that just so happen to be associated with minorities are “ruining” their medium/franchise of choice or (b) being explicit in the fact that their motivations are racist and sexist, usually by harassing their targets with slurs and threats. Sometimes they also do (a) and (b) at the same time, never mind the fact that (b) pretty much proves the lie in the premise of (a).
3. They act like the injured party when they are criticized for their behavior. This point is absolutely crucial to understand: They do not perceive of themselves as bullies, or as bigots, but rather they pose as aggrieved parties. In the best case scenarios, it is because they claim that something they’ve loved all of their life has been taken away from them; in the worst case scenarios, it’s because they claim that pop culture is being used to attack them as straight white men (just look at the popularity of Jordan Peterson, who has described “Frozen” as “propaganda” because of its subversion of traditionally feminine narrative themes).

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 hungover we’ve been bailed out we’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.

Test of the world’s first nuclear weapon; President Richard Nixon’s White House taping system revealed; John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and her sister die in a plane crash; Apollo 11 lifts off for Moon.

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.

Alexis de Tocqueville

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Vive Le Quatorze Juillet!

(An Annual Tradition)

The socially redeeming aspect of golf lies in the vast number of lawyers and bankers and managers who play it, and when you think of the damage they would do if they were at the job instead, you can see why golf courses are a wise investment for any municipality.

So Trump is at Turnberry filming an Emoluments Clause breaking Infomercial on yet another looming bankruptcy. One can, I suppose, take a small amount of satisfaction that his tiny hands and feeble mind are not fixed on some whim of greater destructive capacity.

In Trump’s U.K. Visit, Some See ‘Infomercial’ for Money-Losing Golf Resort
By Katie Rogers, The New York Times
July 14, 2018

Mr. Trump was ensconced at Trump Turnberry, the luxury Scottish resort where he is staying, from members of the American news media who traveled with him here — but not from British journalists, who captured protesters on a nearby beach shouting, “No Trump, no K.K.K., no racist U.S.A.” at him as he teed off on Saturday.

The group chanted across windswept grasslands and a protective buffer of dozens of law enforcement officials, some of whom were on horseback. According to footage captured by the BBC, the president appeared to wave at the crowd before turning back to his golf game.
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Before arriving in Scotland — the birthplace of his mother, as well as that of Mr. Trump’s preferred pastime — the president managed repeatedly to plug Turnberry, one of two Scottish resorts that bear his name, as he dealt with some of the most pressing diplomacy problems facing his administration to date.

It is a tactic that has alarmed ethics watchdogs, who say he is using his presidential platform to promote a resort that, according to financial filings, has been a burden on the family business.

While the president has blazed a chaotic streak through Europe this past week, Turnberry has received special recognition amid other Trump-issued sound bites that analysts say have undermined the United States’ relationships with close NATO allies.

At a hastily arranged news conference in Brussels, when asked to discuss his message for Britain on its exit from the European Union, Mr. Trump said he had none — a thought he would later undermine in stunning fashion in an interview splashed on the cover of the British tabloid The Sun. Then, Mr. Trump wove in a reference to Turnberry, on breathtaking bluffs and cliffs on the western coast of Scotland, calling it “magical” and “one of my favorite places.”
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Mr. Trump said he would be taking calls and meetings ahead of the planned gathering with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland. But around the time he hit one of the resort’s two golf courses on Saturday, his official account began posting on Twitter.

In two tweets, he blamed the Obama administration, not Russia, for the hacking and again suggested that a Democratic “deep state” was afoot.
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He also plugged the Turnberry golf course again: “The weather is beautiful,” he wrote on Twitter, “and this place is incredible!”

Ethics experts tend to be cynical about the president’s sentimental references to his resort: His arrival at Turnberry marks the 169th day during his presidency that he has visited a property owned, managed or branded by the Trump Organization. Financial records show the resort has lost money since Mr. Trump purchased it in 2014.

“I view this as kind of a forced subsidy of an infomercial for his properties,” Norman L. Eisen, the chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in an interview on Friday. “He’s attempting to utilize his trip to get beneficial P.R.”

Before Mr. Trump left for Scotland on Friday, he again brought up Turnberry during a news conference in England with Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain.

“I was opening Turnberry the day before Brexit,” Mr. Trump said, “and all they wanted to talk about was Brexit, and I said, ‘I think Brexit would happen,’ and it did happen.”

Mr. Trump, in fact, arrived at Turnberry the day after Britons voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, but he spoke about his resort for 15 minutes before he took questions on Brexit at a news conference. He also expressed skepticism when asked if the referendum would send shock waves through the global markets.

“Look, if the pound goes down, they’re going to do more business,” Mr. Trump said then. “When the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly.”

Although Mr. Trump has claimed to have spent at least 200 million pounds, about $264 million, on Turnberry to buy and renovate it since 2014 — a figure that has not been verified independently — the course has yet to turn a profit.

In fact, the Turnberry operation has lost tens of millions of pounds since he purchased it, filings in Britain show: about £17 million in 2016, the last year for which such comprehensive records are available. For 2017, Mr. Trump’s government ethics filing discloses only how much revenue the course generated — $20.4 million — not whether it had earned a profit.

This is not the first time that Mr. Trump has visited a Trump-owned resort while traveling in his capacity as president. On a 13-day trip through Asia, the president swung by the Trump International Hotel Waikiki resort for a 10-minute visit.

“The president stopped by the Trump Hotel on his way to the airport,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement at the time. “It has been a tremendously successful project, and he wanted to say hello and thank you to the employees for all their hard work.”

An analysis of that trip by The Associated Press showed that Mr. Trump’s stopover cost American taxpayers almost $141,000, or more than $100 a minute. The president’s hotel stop itself cost taxpayers $1,000.
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Mr. (Norman) Eisen, the chairman of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, takes a more skeptical view. He serves as co-counsel in a lawsuit accusing the president of violating constitutional anticorruption clauses intended to limit his receipt of government-bestowed benefits, or emoluments.

He sees the Trump family’s efforts this past week as part a broader and problematic effort to use the presidency to gin up interest in the property.

“Through this trip to Turnberry,” Mr. Eisen said, “the president is forcing his foreign hosts and the United States to spend enormous amounts of money so that he can get free advertising for his resort.”

“He’s the master of earned media,” Mr. Eisen added. “It’s an important part of the way he won the presidency, and that’s what he’s doing here.”

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 hungover we’ve been bailed out we’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.

Bastille prison stormed during the French Revolution; Outlaw ‘Billy the Kid’ gunned down; Richard Speck murders student nurses in Chicago; Mariner 4 probe flies by Mars; Folk singer Woody Guthrie born.

Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow. Woody Guthrie

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So over last weekend Theresa May had a big Tory summit at Chequers to reconcile the Hard-Brexit plurality with the reality of her new “Softer” Brexit policies. Policies that, soft as they are from a Tory point of view, are intolerably flawed according to the European Union and have been already rejected as insufficient.

As a blessing for her hard work and dedication her chief Brexit Negotiator, David Davies, and Foriegn Minister, Boris Johnson, have quit. Wait. This really is a good thing, Boris would be a dangerous incompetent if he wasn’t so lazy and David is an evil backstabber.

Still, May doesn’t have much of a margin and within her own caucus faces a majority of Brexiteers of varying degrees of obnoxiousness.

Having postponed the immediate collapse of her Government, May must have been extremely happy to have Trump deposit this great streaming turd-

May is not being nearly hard enough with the EU. Without a stronger abandonment of its ties with the EU the United States will not be inclined to cut a special trade deal to save the UKs ass. Alone, tossed on the tides of the World Trade Organization (which Trump wants to pull out of by the way), Brexit threatens to sink England as surely as the U-Boat.

Trump blows up Theresa May’s party in his honor
By Jack Blanchard, Politico
7/12/18

On his first official visit to Britain as the U.S. president, Donald Trump warned in an interview that Theresa May’s new Brexit strategy will “kill” any future trade deal with the U.S., backed her rival Boris Johnson for prime minister, accused the mayor of London of being weak on terrorism and said the whole of Europe is “losing its culture” due to mass immigration.

Trump’s caustic remarks to the Sun dropped online partway through a grandiose gala dinner at Blenheim Palace, which May had thrown on Thursday in the president’s honor. Things started badly. Trump arrived late, leaving the prime minister and her husband standing alone in front of the palace in silence for six full minutes before he finally rolled up.

As May, her husband Philip, her most senior Downing Street aides and half the Cabinet sat in black tie and ball gowns, just after the PM had delivered a big speech to Trump, his wife Melania and scores of U.K. business leaders on her proud hopes for Anglo-American trade, the Sun’s Tom Newton Dunn started tweeting out the top lines from the interview.

Trump said May had ignored his advice on how to negotiate Brexit and “went the opposite way” instead. “I would have done it much differently,” Trump told the Sun. “I actually told Theresa May how to do it, but she didn’t agree, didn’t listen to me.”

He added: “If they do a deal like that, we would be dealing with the European Union instead of dealing with the U.K., so it will probably kill the deal. Because we have enough difficulty with the European Union. We are cracking down right now on the European Union, because they have not treated the United States fairly on trade.”

A long-awaited white paper published on Thursday outlining her vision for the U.K.’s future relationship with the EU revealed that the U.K. will formally ask the EU for a post-Brexit “association agreement” including a “free-trade area” for goods, a looser arrangement for financial services, alongside a security partnership and continued membership of many EU agencies. The proposed relationship would require continued close cooperation with the EU, including “regular dialogue between U.K. and EU leaders.” May’s Brexit strategy led to the resignations of both her Brexit Secretary David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson earlier this week.
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Most brutally of all, according to the Washington Post, No. 10 was told about the interview on Thursday, but assured it would be positive.

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 hungover we’ve been bailed out we’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.

Live Aid concerts held in London and Philadelphia; A French revolutionary is stabbed in his bath; Civil War draft riots erupt in New York; A power blackout hits the Big Apple; Actor Harrison Ford born.

I guess one of the ways that karma works is that it finds out what you are most afraid of and then makes that happen eventually.

Cheech Marin

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