You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.- 16 April 1963

What you need to remember about these people is that not only are they spectacularly corrupt, inveterate liars, and actual factual traitors, they’re also a-ok with ripping babies from their mothers arms and sending them off to Concentration Camps.

Trump is not Hitler. Hitler was a patriot and had a mustache.

And all his Goebbels and Himmler’s and Goerings? Spare me not your Snowflake tears.

They taste delicious.

From Kellyanne Conway to Stephen Miller, Trump’s advisers face taunts from hecklers around D.C.
by Paul Schwartzman and Josh Dawsey, Washington Post
July 9, 2018

“Better be better!” a stranger shouted at Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser and the architect of his zero-tolerance immigration policy, as he walked through Dupont Circle a few months ago. Miller’s visage subsequently appeared on “Wanted” posters someone placed on lampposts ringing his City Center apartment building.

One night, after Miller ordered $80 of takeout sushi from a restaurant near his apartment, a bartender followed him into the street and shouted, “Stephen!” When Miller turned around, the bartender raised both middle fingers and cursed at him, according to an account Miller has shared with White House colleagues.

Outraged, Miller threw the sushi away, he later told his colleagues.

On Saturday, as Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, browsed at an antiquarian bookstore in Richmond, a woman in the shop called him a “piece of trash.” The woman left after Nick Cooke, owner of Black Swan Books, told her he would call the police.
…
Before Vice President Pence’s swearing-in, his neighbors in Chevy Chase, where he was renting a house, hung rainbow banners to protest his opposition to equal rights for gay men and lesbians. When Pence went to the musical “Hamilton” in New York, the actor playing Aaron Burr concluded the evening by announcing from the stage that he was afraid that Trump wouldn’t “uphold our inalienable rights.”

A White House reporter, once on the phone with Sean Spicer while the then-press secretary was standing in his yard in Alexandria, said he could hear a passing motorist shouting curses at him. By then, Spicer had become a regular inspiration for mockery on “Saturday Night Live,” along with Trump, Conway, and Bannon.

Spicer said he spent his free time at home in those days because he didn’t want to deal with strangers’ interruptions — friendly or not.

“We were very deliberate about what we did and where we went because of the increasing notoriety,” Spicer said. “When we went out, the goal was not to make a spectacle.”

More recently, Trump appointees have starred in a flurry of in-your-face encounters that ricochet around social media for days on end.
…
A week ago, it was a Sidwell Friends teacher who interrupted her lunch at Teaism in Penn Quarter to tell Scott Pruitt — eating with an aide a few feet away — that he should resign as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

By last Thursday morning, nearly half a million viewers had clicked on a video of the confrontation that the teacher, Kristin Mink, had posted on Facebook. By late Thursday afternoon, Pruitt quit.

“I would say it’s burning people out,” said Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former communications director. “I just think there’s so much meanness, it’s causing some level of, ‘What do I need this for?’ And I think it’s a recruiting speed bump for the administration. To be part of it, you’ve got to deal with the incoming of some of this viciousness.”

On at least two occasions, demonstrators have assembled outside the Kalorama home of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Both like to attend early-morning spin classes at Flywheel, a nearby studio, where the room goes dark when the class starts — the better to pedal unobserved.

At the conclusion of a recent session, Kushner, a baseball cap pulled down over his face, headed quickly outside to a chauffeur-driven SUV that whisked him away.
…
In recent weeks, say senior administration officials, Trump has voiced dissatisfaction with aides who have backed down during public confrontations, including his spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia last month by the establishment’s owner.

Two weeks ago, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen walked out of a downtown Mexican restaurant after demonstrators followed her inside to rail against the administration for separating children from migrant parents.

“Shame!” the protesters shouted while Nielsen remained in her seat, her head down as she typed messages on her smartphone.

If my Poker game has a weakness it’s that I play extremely tight and never bluff.

To the pain means the first thing you will lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists. Next your nose.

And then my tongue I suppose, I killed you too quickly the last time. A mistake I don’t mean to duplicate tonight.

I wasn’t finished. The next thing you will lose will be your left eye followed by your right.

And then my ears, I understand let’s get on with it.

WRONG. Your ears you keep and I’ll tell you why. So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, “Dear God! What is that thing,” will echo in your perfect ears. That is what “to the pain means.” It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever.

I think you’re bluffing.

It’s possible, Pig, I might be bluffing. It’s conceivable, you miserable, vomitous mass, that I’m only lying here because I lack the strength to stand. But, then again… perhaps I have the strength after all.

Except when I do and then it’s very effective.

Some News

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.

William Jennings Bryan gives his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech; Britain’s Princess Elizabeth engaged; Boxer Mike Tyson punished for biting Evander Holyfield’s ear; Actor Tom Hanks born; Actor Rod Steiger dies.

Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.

Dean Koontz

Continue reading

CRISPR is an abbreviation of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It’s a virus that targets certain DNA sequences effectively chopping large genes into shorter, more simply sequenced bits.

Or that’s what it was designed for.

With the addition of Cas9 (not to be confused with Ice 9, an arrangement of ice crystals that remain solid at normal temperatures and agent of the apocalypse in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle) technology CRISPR can be used to easily and cheaply modify genomes.

“Easily” is somewhat of an exaggeration because without expert design most modifications either have no tangible effect, result in the elimination of the modification through natural repair processes, or kill the host in gruesome ways. Also, some traits are distributed across several genes and are thus hard to change.

No Pink Elephants for you!

However “cheap” is totally true. You can go on Amazon today and buy a deluxe kit for under $100 which, because it’s mostly Petri dishes and Pipettes, is still incredibly overpriced.

So any idiot can buy one and some of them are. Perhaps CRISPR has more in common with Ice 9 than I led you to believe. John Oliver certainly thinks it’s a twisted idea.

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.

Terror bombings strike London’s transit system; Oliver North testifies at Iran-Contra hearings; Sandra Day O’Connor nominated for U.S. Supreme Court; Author Robert Heinlein and musician Ringo Starr born.

May you live as long as you wish and love as long as you live.

Robert A. Heinlein

Continue reading

It is clear the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health an Human Services are going to be unable to comply with Judge Dana M. Sabraw’s orders to-

1. Allow all separated families to contact each other no later than July 7th (tomorrow folks).
2. Reunite all children under 5 years old with their families by July 11th (next Tuesday).
3. Reunite all other children with their families by July 27th.

So they have sent lawyers to Court to beg for leniency and extended deadlines. Judge Sabraw should refuse.

What we have found is that there was never any system to reunite the children Trump stole from their parents and in fact Customs and Border Patrol has done its level best to eliminate any documentation of family links.

Think it’s ok to call Trump and his partners in crime ratbag Nazis and “Good Germans” yet?

And that’s my question. If Sabraw turns down the request how does she enforce her order? You can’t fine the government, the money goes in one pocket and out the other and besides we print $541 Million a day anyway and that’s just physical bills.

I think we’re going to have to arrest some people. This of course can’t include The Donald but no other Cabinet Secretary or lesser officer connected with this is immune from a knock on the door in the middle of the night by a U.S. Marshall. Nacht und Nebel.

Trump admin admits it can’t reunite migrant families by court deadline, hours after it said it can
by Amanda Michelle Gomez, Think Progress
Jul 6, 2018

Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Alex Azar told reporters Thursday afternoon that the federal government will reunite migrant families it had separated by court-mandated deadlines — but just several hours later, lawyers with the Department of Justice (DOJ) contradicted Azar, asking the judge to extend the deadline.

A California federal court told the Trump administration last week to reunite children under five within 14 days, meaning by next Tuesday, and to reunite all others within 30 days. The judge also told officials to make sure parents can contact their kids within 10 days if they haven’t already been able to find them.

This was a tall order, but Azar said officials were working expeditiously and could meet the court-mandated deadlines. He said this even after admitting that they were still verifying which of the 11,800 migrant minors in its custody were separated from their parents at the southwest border as part of the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of criminally prosecuting asylum-seeking parents. Azar was able to provide a ballpark figure, saying under 3,000 kids were rendered “unaccompanied” due to this policy and approximately 101 of those children were under the age of five.

“We will comply with the artificial deadlines created by the court, deadlines that were not informed by the process needed to vet parents, including confirming parentage, as well as confirming the suitability of placement with that parent,” Azar told reporters Thursday.

In filing submitted to U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw just before midnight Thursday Pacific Time, Trump officials sought clarification, asking which families it needs to reunify to comply with court order. The government asked whether the deadline applies to parents who’ve already been deported, arguing that this is an especially difficult task. The Justice Department lawyers also asked the court to clarify the start date for separations, as some families were separated before the official start date of the “zero tolerance” policy in May 2018.

The process of verifying which child belongs to which parent is time-consuming, as officials were not properly documenting this information in case files.
…
So now, the department is playing catch up, as HHS grantees are “swabbing the cheeks of the children” in its custody while Department of Homeland (DHS) and some HHS personnel are in ICE detention swabbing the cheeks of parents, looking to make a DNA match. This costly process, devised to protect children from being placed in the hands of potential human traffickers, takes no less than a week, lawyers said. Meanwhile, immigration advocates have voiced concerns about the lack of consent on the part of children and about what the government may do with such sensitive human data.

The Trump administration is also “observing communications or interactions” between families to confirm a relationship. They claimed that this is done for the kid’s safety, citing a few outlier cases in which parents posed a danger to kids.

Officials asked for a deadline that takes these factors into consideration, but provided no specific suggested date.

“Given the possibility of false claims of parentage, confirming parentage is critical to ensure that children are returned to their parents, not to potential traffickers,” DOJ lawyers wrote in the court filing. “The Government…seeks clarification that in cases where parentage cannot be confirmed quickly, HHS will not be in violation of the Court’s order if reunification occurs outside of the timelines provided by the Court.”

Government lawyers also informed the judge that when they reunite kids with parents who are in ICE custody undergoing immigration court, they’ll do so by detaining the families together. That’s how they’ll comply with last week’s injunction against a family separation case, Ms. L v. ICE.
…
It’s unclear whether that’ll satisfy the judge’s order, as indefinite family detention violates another court order, Flores v. Reno or the “Flores settlement”, that states “accompanied” children must be detained in the least restrictive settings and for no longer than 20 days. Azar told reporters on Thursday that no child has been sent to any ICE facility, but that last week’s injunction forces officials to do this.

Spandau. For Life.

Now we all know that everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth is a lie including the articles “A”, “An”, and “The”. The principle difference is that he’s openining it more.

Shortly after inaguration it was a moderate 3 whoppers a day rising in 2018 to 5. Still, single digits. Over the last 2 weeks however Trump has decided to up his game, spouting a record 103 the week before last and a slightly more temperate century last week.

This week? It’s only Friday.

In case you can’t find your calculator (it’s under “Accessories” in your Start/Programs Menu) that’s over 14 a day.

Trump Spewed a Mind-Blowing 100 False Claims In One Week
By Cody Fenwick, AlterNet
July 6, 2018

In the last seven days, the Toronto Star reported, Trump made 100 false claims in public, coming just under his total of 103 false claims the previous week.

“As usual, part of the explanation for the barrage of lies and other dishonesty was simply that Trump talked a lot,” explained the Star’s Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Dale.

But this rate represents a huge upsurge nevertheless. Dale reports that in prior months, Trump has never exceeded more than 60 falsehoods per week — an impressive sum itself by any measure.

Overall, his rate of dishonesty is accelerating.

“The pace of the president’s dishonesty has increased significantly in 2018,” Dale writes. “After averaging 2.9 false claims per day in 2017, he is averaging 5.1 per day in 2018.”

It’s easy enough to write these findings off as obvious. Every reasonable observer will conclude that Trump is a liar, and even when he’s not actively lying, he clearly has little regard for the truth of his statements.

And yet the increasing rate of Trump’s dishonesty surely tells us something important. As he plows through his second year in office, he appears to be more prone to making wild and untrue claims, perhaps suggesting an underlying anxiety about his myriad failures as president, the looming special counsel’s investigation, and the upcoming midterm elections that will be seen as a referendum on his time in the White House.

While Trump has always felt compelled to obscure the truth, he seems to think it’s important to mislead the public now more than ever.

La fuerza del destino

Not the Opera by Verdi (that would be Forza and so 1862) or even the Mexican telenovella that broadcast its last episode in 2011.

No, I’m talking about the Star Wars animated shorts designed to sell action figures.