Is China Done?

An argument that they are, or soon will be.

Labor costs are skyrocketing, but productivity is not matching it.

For all the talk of the PLA growing in size and effectiveness, China's oil supply depends on the United States Navy to keep the peace. They don't have the power to protect it. A blue-water navy is not something that can be orderd from shipyards and put into service in five or ten years.

The United States would face similar demographic issues as does China (and Russia and Japan), but it doesn't. The reason for that is immigration. If immigration is choked off, then the United States will go down the road being trod by those other nations.

And that is the point that the Trumpanzees and the xenophobic lobby keeps willfully ignoring.

President Psychopath

This is immoral as fuck:

President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that he is using his administration's separation of families at the US border as a negotiating tool to get Democrats to cave on his immigration demands, which include funding for a border wall, curbing legal immigration into the US, and tightening the rules for border enforcement.

He proclaims that he "hates" to do it, but he's going to continue to rip families apart until he gets his way.

That is reprensible at best. Trump is an inhuman monster. Those who are "only following orders" are proving that in this century, "good little Americans" will be a long-standing epithet.

This is from the Book of Face:

“Through all the adversities we faced last evening with computer outages, cancellations and delays, nothing prepared me or my crew for 16 passengers. Sixteen. All dressed in black and gray cheap Walmart sweat suits, quietly boarding the 12:30am flight.

Children! Thirty-two scared eyes looking straight forward dazed. We try to speak, yet none speak English.

During the beverage service, one of the crew comes to me in tears. They can’t face these children that have been ripped from their families with a smile.

These children were probably ranging in age from 11, to the most adorable little girl maybe 6 years old. At 2:30 in the morning, deplaned here in Miami not knowing if they will ever see their loved ones again that they were separated from in Phoenix.

Those sweet innocent children, dressed as criminals silently deplaned with the same fear as our initial meeting. Except for the little girl. She looked up at me as she turned left for the main cabin door, with tears of fear streaming down her face. I’m not sure the protocol, but I leaned over hoping to offer some hope, she hugged me, which was returned - much to the scowl and comments from the adult escort.

I pray that these 16 scared little souls, as well as all the other thousands, find their way to reuniting with their loved ones.

We are trained yearly in hundreds of possible scenarios as attendants. Something like this isn’t remotely one of those. I had only met one of my crew a few years earlier, the rest never. Thank God, we had one another to lean on to not only get through the flight, but also maybe some glimmer of hope for those babies.”

This cartoon got Rob Rodgers fired from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

This is on point:

As is this:

Republicans, this is your guy. You are the ones who are best placed to voice disapproval and to vote for people who are not going to slavishly fall in line behind Caudillo Trumpo.

Republicans: Are you going to continue to be good little Americans, or are you going to take a stand?

If you don't, then this is on you. You will not be able to truthfully claim that you did not know the horrors that were being done in your name.

Trump Loses Again

A federal appeals court dealt another blow to President* Donald Trump's revised travel ban targeting six-Muslim majority countries on Thursday, siding with groups that say the policy illegally targets Muslims.

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that blocks the Republican's administration from temporarily suspending new visas for people from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Oh, Trump can appeal, but the Supremes don't have to take the case. And if the 9th Circuit also upholds the order in Hawaii which black the ban, then there is no dispute among the circuits.

My recollection is that the 4th Circuit isn't known for being a liberal one, but no doubt the Right will start screaming that it is. They'll also be bleating about "judicial activism," which is code for "when the courts don't agree with me."

Traveling Whilst Muslim

As a musician, Mohammed Fairouz travels to other countries frequently.

Usually, there’s no problem.

But recently, after getting off an eight-hour flight from London, immigration officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York stopped him, Fairouz said. He was told to go into a room, where he stayed for several hours without knowing why he was there.

Fairouz, an American who was born in the United Arab Emirates, told The Washington Post that he was given no reason for his detention, other than his Muslim name.

Apparently, Mohammed Fairouz is a very common name. Which means jack point shit. I've not heard of Customs goons detaining men named John Smith or Robert Brown because their names are common.

Next Step: Trump Will Appoint David Duke to the EEOC

A former director of an anti-immigration group, Julie Kirchner, is expected to be named as ombudsman to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Monday, according to a person with knowledge of the pending appointment.

Kirchner was from 2005 to 2015 director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that has advocated for extreme restrictions on immigration.

The ombudsman’s office at USCIS provides assistance to immigrants who run into trouble with the agency, such as immigration applications that take too long to process or applications that may have been improperly rejected.

I wish that this could provoke outrage on my part, but it doesn't. Not anymore. The Trump administration is ethically corrupt. They don't want government to function, they want to sabotage it at every turn. Anything that helps corporation, economic and environmental pirates is what they will do. Anything that helps people to make informed decisions is fought.

Trump, the Russians and the Neonazis

The hits keep coming for The Hair Furor.

First off, the payments that his former manager denied receiving from a Ukrainian political party that was a Russian puppet were, in fact, received by his lobbying firm. Now that he has effectively been caught red-handed, his denial is, in an older parlance, no longer operative.

Second, Trump's appointed people to high-level jobs in DHS, people who have links to hate groups. The groups were founded by some clown who believes in eugenics and forced sterilization of "undesireables".

Customs Continues Its Policy of Fucking With People Who Have Arab-Sounding Names

This time, it was a retired police chief.

What makes this even more damning is that Chief Aden has been cleared for PreCheck, so the Feds have already checked him out. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that he had been screened for the "Global Entry" program, as well.

But hey, if you have a Muslim-sounding name, all bets are off.

An Opportunity for Canadians to Eat Our Lunch

If your job is arranging and booking events in Canada, you've been handed a golden opportunity to poach events from the United States.

The irony isn’t lost on Mem Fox. The author of books advocating tolerance and acceptance was detained by U.S. immigration officials as she arrived in America to give a talk about the importance of tolerance and acceptance. ... Fox was on her way from Australia to a conference in Milwaukee on Feb. 6, scheduled to speak about this very theme, when she was detained by immigration officers at Los Angeles International Airport. She was held for just under two hours, she says, and aggressively questioned about her visa status.

Meanwhile, in Texas:

A French historian on his way to a conference in Texas was detained for 10 hours by US border officials and threatened with deportation.

Our country is presenting a very ugly face to the world.

Not counting Canada and Mexico, this country received over 38 million visitors in 2015. Those people spend money, about $4,400 per visit.

These stories have a ripple effect. The Customs goons are having a real economic impact, over what they already have had.

Ihre Papiere, Bitte. Also, Trump's de facto Muslim Ban

Passengers of a domestic Delta flight from San Francisco to New York were told to show their identity documents to uniformed agents of the Customs and Border Protection agency upon their arrival at John F. Kennedy airport on Wednesday evening.
...
Upon deplaning from Delta Flight 1583 in New York, passenger Anne Garrett tweeted, "We were told we couldn't disembark without showing our 'documents.'"I don't know where the Customs goons think they have the right to demand that everyone on a domestic flight show Customs their papers. It would appear that the only thing they lacked were black leather trenchcoats.

In other Customs goons news, they detained Muhammad Ali's son at the Ft. Laudersale airport and interrogated him about his religion. Let that sink in a little: Customs thugs thought it proper to detain a natural-born American citizen and subject him to inquiries about his faith.

We have become a country of small-minded, pathetic cowards if we tolerate this sort of shit.

Rotting in the Fields

As President* Trump (der Lügenführer) embarks on his crusade to deport millions of undocumented aliens, be prepared to pay a shitload more money for your fresh fruits and vegetables. For BadTux points out that the farmworker visa program will be of no help to California farmers. There aren't exactly a shitload of Millennials eager to leave their homes for the adventure of being a migrant farmworker.

(Also, being here without proper documentation is not a crime.)

You might want to read the memos for yourself. Going to be interesting to see how Customs can hire 10,000 new agents "expeditiously" without running afoul of the same issues that plagued the Border Patrol back when they tried to rapidly expand during Bush-II's tenure.

Why the implementation memo requires the heads of all executive departments to "identify and quantify all sources of direct and indirect Federal aid to the Government of Mexico" (implementation memo, section C, page 4) is a question nobody seems to be asking.

Basically, all of the shit in the original memo, which the Trump Administration denied (and which the Trumpanzees claimed was a "troll job") is contained in the two new memos.

If you are Hispanic, it would behoove you to always have proof of citizenship or legal residency on your person at all times. And yes, in certain areas of the country, this also applies to the Irish. You could end up being quickly dumped over the border into a makeshift and squalid refugee camp in northern Mexico (implementation memo, section H, page 7).[1] Everyone seems to be focusing on undocumented Hispanics in the U.S., but while they are a majority of the undocumented, there are undocumented aliens from all over the globe.
_________________________________
[1] Presumably, the refugee camps in southern Canada will be a bit nicer than the ones in Mexico.

More on Trump's Border Order

The memo is the biggest piece of governmental shit that I've read since Bush's first order establishing Kangaroo Courts in 2001.

Read the memo. On page three, Trump has ordered the heads of all government departments to identify all sources of aid, direct and indirect, to the government of Mexico, and to report those amounts for the last five years. You can speculate on a benign motive for that (if you're a Republican).

Section D, beginning on page 3: "Expansion of the 287(g) program to include the State Guard." That means sending out the National Guard as immigration cops. This is aimed at states bordering Mexico and those states bordering states bordering Mexico. That is: California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas. The total is over 100,000, if all were called up.

The order also bypasses the immigration goons to bypass any pesky legal requirements for hearing and dump anyone who arrived via Mexico back into Mexico "pending the outcome of removal hearings". (page 7) If that's not a fucking joke, it's about as Kafkaesque as it gets, for you tell me how any such hearing would be held.

And yes, the order calls for the building of what essentially are concentration camps. (Page 8, Section J)

At this point, between Trump's authoritarian tendencies and his bromance with Putin, I have to wonder if an old term should be applied to Trump's base. The word I'm thinking of is "Quislings".

Also, this as to why this idea even came up.

Don't Cross the American Border with Electronic Devices

A scientist who works for NASA at JPL was detained at the border and coerced into unlocking his phone. The scientist is a native American who had enrolled in the "Global Entry" program.

The CBP goons have the right to search your devices, but you also have the right not to unlock them.

More to the point, the Customs goons are working hard to make entering the Untied States as unfriendly, if not downright hostile, as crossing into East Germany or into the USSR once was.

Note to Customs: This wasn't supposed to be a training film.

This is not a new problem.

Dear CA Farmers: Fuck You.

Jeff Marchini and others in the Central Valley here bet their farms on the election of Donald J. Trump. His message of reducing regulations and taxes appealed to this Republican stronghold, one of Mr. Trump’s strongest bases of support in the state.

As for his promises about cracking down on illegal immigrants, many assumed Mr. Trump’s pledges were mostly just talk. But two weeks into his administration, Mr. Trump has signed executive orders that have upended the country’s immigration laws. Now farmers here are deeply alarmed about what the new policies could mean for their workers, most of whom are unauthorized, and the businesses that depend on them.
...
“If you only have legal labor, certain parts of this industry and this region will not exist,” said Harold McClarty, a fourth-generation farmer in Kingsburg whose operation grows, packs and ships peaches, plums and grapes throughout the country. “If we sent all these people back, it would be a total disaster.”

Let me see if I have this straight: The centerpiece of your guy's campaign, which was to crack down on immigration, as evidenced by what he said in his declaration of candidacy, you all thought that was just eyewash? The foundation of your business operation, cheap labor, depends on illegal immigration and you were willing to risk that because you thought you'd save a few bucks on taxes?

And you think that that the Trump staffers, many of whom are hostile to all immigrants, including legal ones, are going to go along with you in getting visas approved for your laborers?

I suspect that you guys are growing some other agricultural products and are partaking of them a little too often.

Courts to Trump: Drop Dead

A federal appeals court refused Thursday to reinstate President Donald Trump's ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations, dealing another legal setback to the new administration's immigration policy. In a unanimous decision , the panel of three judges from the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to block a lower-court ruling that suspended the ban and allowed previously barred travelers to enter the U.S.

This was reasonably foreseeable. Trump tried to bully the judges by running his mouth. They apparently weren't having any of it.

Lawyers pretty much always advise clients to keep quiet about their cases. With the number of times that Trump and his companies have been in court, one would think that he should have known better.

Apparently not. By the time he finishes running his Twitter-mouth, he'd be lucky to successfully fight a parking ticket.

CBP: Winning Friends Around the World.

Norway’s former Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik was detained for questioning at Dulles Airport in Washington, Friday.

Authorities held Bondevik, who served as prime minister from 1997-2000 and 2001-2005, for an hour on Tuesday because his passport showed he had traveled to Iran in 2014.

“There should be no reason to fear a former prime minister who has been on official visits to the country several times before,” he told Norway’s TV2.

Bondevik said it was obvious he was not a threat to the U.S.

“It should be enough when they found that I have a diplomatic passport, [that I’m a] former prime minister,” Bondevik said. “That should be enough for them to understand that I don’t represent any problem or threat to this country and [to] let me go immediately, but they didn’t.

American customs officials are acting with the intelligence and grace of East German border guards.

International diplomacy has an undercurrent of "I'll do unto you as you did unto me". If CBP keeps manhandling foreign diplomats, our diplomats (and tourists) may have a rough patch ahead.

Want to Come to the U.S. to Visit Disneyland or Yosemite Park? Want to Go to College Here? Best Apply Two Years in Advance for Your Visa

Apparently the Administration of President* Trump intends to make it almost impossible for tourists, students and otehr people to visit the U.S.

When President Donald Trump issued his executive order on immigration last week, it was the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries that dominated headlines—leaving hundreds of people in limbo, provoking airport protests, and raising questions about whether the U.S. was targeting religion in the guise of a new security rule.

But immigration lawyers who have read the order carefully are now increasingly concerned that one of its provisions could have much wider repercussions, affecting literally every foreign visitor to America, from tourists to diplomats.

The little-noticed section, appearing immediately after the travel ban, calls for the government to develop a “uniform screening standard and procedure” for all individuals seeking to enter the United States. As written, it appears to require all visitors to go through the same vetting measures, regardless of where they come from or how long they intend to stay.
...
More than 10 million people traveled to the U.S. on a visa in 2015—including immigrants and nonimmigrants—while tens of millions visited the United States without a visa. The section calls for the secretary of state, secretary of homeland security, director of national intelligence and FBI director to develop a “uniform screening standard and procedure” for all of them. That could slow travel to the U.S. to a crawl, upending the tourism industry and creating massive headaches for companies with foreign employees who frequently travel to the U.S. Foreign airline employees would have to go through significant vetting procedures every time they enter here.

Fifty million tourists visit the U.S. each year. Apparently Shadow President Bannon wants to choke that down to maybe fifty, by making it as hard to visit the U.S. as it is to visit North Korea (or it was to visit the USSR).

Trump Cribs From the Nazi Playbook

President* Trump plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in the Big Apple and all other sanctuary cities that do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

The list will inform citizens and others about “public safety threats associated with sanctuary” cities, according to an executive order Trump signed Wednesday.

“The [Homeland Security] Secretary shall utilize the Declined Detainer Outcome Report or its equivalent and, on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens,” the order said.

That's a page right out of Hitler's playbook. Which should not be much of a surprise, for the neo-nazis who are advising Trump would get their best ideas from their spiritual master.

And I guess we'll see what the cause of this fire was.

So Where's My Local Taco Truck?

A Latino surrogate for the Trump campaign warned Thursday that without tighter immigration policies from the Republican presidential nominee, "you're going to have taco trucks on every corner."

So when I don't feel like preparing dinner, I can walk 200' to the corner and get fresh tacos and a beer?

Sounds like a hell of a deal to me.

I presume that testing Trump's surrogates for at least a room-temperature IQ is not routinely done.

Did Donald Trump Run a Sweatshop Employing Illegal and Underage Immigrants?

That would seem to be the allegations surrounding some sketchy operation known as Trump Model Management. The like slumlord that he stated out as, Trump had no problems with charging extortion-level rents to young girls who had not alternatives.

But hey, don't worry. The Trumpanzees won't give a shit.

The Donald Now Open to Giving Amnesty to Illegal Immigrants

So much for what he's been saying over the last fifteen or so months.

Be interesting to see how The Donald's supporters, including these racists, will take such a monumental flip-flop. Trump flip-flopping on immigration would be like Hillary Clinton proposing to give all high-school graduates a free AR-15.

Of course he's denying that he's changing his mind, even though it's pretty clear that he's considering abandoning a core foundation of his campaign. But the Trump campaign is showing a talent for denying that he said what he said. Even when confronted with the evidence. The first trick for a new Trump hire is mastering the flip-flop. (The "new, non-insulting Trump" lasted less than a day.)

One of the signature verbal tics that Trump uses when his his speaking off-the-cuff is to say "I have to be honest with you". It's a pretty good clue that what comes next is going to be both hyperbole and a pants-on-fire lie.

Meanwhile, other than running ads, you don't hear much from the Clinton campaign. They're following the old political rule of "when your opponent is fucking up, don't stand in his way." They are, though, starting to measure the drapes a little too early for my taste.