blueseas
blueseas's JournalBorder Patrol Will Deploy Elite Tactical Agents to Sanctuary Cities
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/us/Border-Patrol-ICE-Sanctuary-Cities.htmlBorder-Patrol-ICE-Sanctuary-Cities.htmlhttps://www.thedailybeast.com/border-patrol-is-sending-tactical-agents-to-make-arrests-in-sanctuary-cities
he specially trained officers are being sent to cities including Chicago and New York to boost the enforcement power of local Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, according to two officials who are familiar with the secret operation. Additional agents are expected to be sent to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit and Newark, N.J.
The move reflects President Trumps persistence in cracking down on so-called sanctuary cities, localities that have refused to cooperate in handing over immigrants targeted for deportation to federal authorities. It comes soon after the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security announced a series of measures that will affect both American citizens and immigrants living in those places.
Lawrence Payne, a spokesman for Customs and Border Protection, confirmed that the agency was deploying 100 officers to work with ICE, which conducts arrests in the interior of the country, in order to enhance the integrity of the immigration system, protect public safety, and strengthen our national security.
The deployment of the teams will run from February through May, according to an email sent to C.B.P. personnel, which was read to The New York Times by one official familiar with the planning.
Autocracy: Rules for Survival
I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putins Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitlers anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putins press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: The police acted mildlyI would have liked them to act more harshly rather than those protesters liver should have been spread all over the pavement. Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they shouldboth in the Russian case, and in the American one. For all the admiration Trump has expressed for Putin, the two men are very different; if anything, there is even more reason to listen to everything Trump has said. He has no political establishment into which to fold himself following the campaign, and therefore no reason to shed his campaign rhetoric. On the contrary: it is now the establishment that is rushing to accommodate himfrom the president, who met with him at the White House on Thursday, to the leaders of the Republican Party, who are discarding their long-held scruples to embrace his radical positions.
He has received the support he needed to win, and the adulation he craves, precisely because of his outrageous threats. Trump rally crowds have chanted Lock her up! They, and he, meant every word. If Trump does not go after Hillary Clinton on his first day in office, if he instead focuses, as his acceptance speech indicated he might, on the unifying project of investing in infrastructure (which, not coincidentally, would provide an instant opportunity to reward his cronies and himself), it will be foolish to breathe a sigh of relief. Trump has made his plans clear, and he has made a compact with his voters to carry them out. These plans include not only dismantling legislation such as Obamacare but also doing away with judicial restraintand, yes, punishing opponents.
To begin jailing his political opponents, or just one opponent, Trump will begin by trying to capture members of the judicial system. Observers and even activists functioning in the normal-election mode are fixated on the Supreme Court as the site of the highest-risk impending Trump appointment. There is little doubt that Trump will appoint someone who will cause the Court to veer to the right; there is also the risk that it might be someone who will wreak havoc with the very culture of the high court. And since Trump plans to use the judicial system to carry out his political vendettas, his pick for attorney general will be no less important. Imagine former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie going after Hillary Clinton on orders from President Trump; quite aside from their approach to issues such as the Geneva Conventions, the use of police powers, criminal justice reforms, and other urgent concerns.
Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. Consider the financial markets this week, which, having tanked overnight, rebounded following the Clinton and Obama speeches. Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended. It is a fact that the world did not end on November 8 nor at any previous time in history. Yet history has seen many catastrophes, and most of them unfolded over time. That time included periods of relative calm. One of my favorite thinkers, the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow, breathed a sigh of relief in early October 1939: he had moved from Berlin to Latvia, and he wrote to his friends that he was certain that the tiny country wedged between two tyrannies would retain its sovereignty and Dubnow himself would be safe. Shortly after that, Latvia was occupied by the Soviets, then by the Germans, then by the Soviets againbut by that time Dubnow had been killed. Dubnow was well aware that he was living through a catastrophic period in historyits just that he thought he had managed to find a pocket of normality within it.
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter centurys accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.
[link:httphttps://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email|
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
[link:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email|
But while these shadowy outside forces preoccupied politicians and journalists, Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the worlds demagogues and strongmen in power.
Every presidential campaign sees its share of spin and misdirection, but this years contest promises to be different. Potemkin local-news sites, micro-targeted fearmongering, and anonymous mass texting. Both parties will have these tools at their disposal. But in the hands of a president who lies constantly, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and who readily manipulates the levers of government for his own gain, their potential to wreak havoc is enormous.
The Trump campaign is planning to spend more than $1 billion, and it will be aided by a vast coalition of partisan media, outside political groups, and enterprising freelance operatives. These pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history. Whether or not it succeeds in reelecting the president, the wreckage it leaves behind could be irreparable.
THE DEATH STAR
The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump electedwith its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Towerhis 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as the Death Star.
Presiding over this effort is Brad Parscale, a 6-foot-8 Viking of a man with a shaved head and a triangular beard. As the digital director of Trumps 2016 campaign, Parscale didnt become a household name like Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. But he played a crucial role in delivering Trump to the Oval Officeand his efforts will shape this years election.
Lessons for Life- Obit. of Republicans who opposed Nixon Impeachment.
Snip:
Obituaries reflect what the present thinks of the past, wrote journalism professor Kathleen McElroy.
What will the future think of President Donald Trump and two historic votes senators must take on his impeachment?
Snip:
Member Obituary
Edward Hutchinson (Michigan) Edward Hutchinson, Ex-Congressman, Dies, N.Y. TIMES, July 24, 1985, at B5.
Former Representative Edward Hutchinson, who was the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee in the debate on impeaching President Nixon, died Monday. He was 70 years old.
Mr. Hutchinson, who did not seek re-election to his Michigan seat in 1976, was first elected to the House in 1963. Long considered highly loyal to Mr. Nixon, Representative Hutchinson led the Michigan Republican delegation in August 1974 in calling for Mr. Nixons resignation or impeachment after the Watergate scandals.
Ex-Rep. Hutchinson Dies; On Watergate Panel, WASH. POST, JULY 24, 1985, at C4.
Former Rep. Edward Hutchinson, 70, a Michigan conservative who was the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee when it voted 27 to 11 to impeach President Nixon, died July 22 at a hospital in Naples, Fla.
Mr. Hutchinson voted against every article of impeachment brought against the president even after other Republicans had abandoned him. After the committee vote and further Watergate-related revelations, Mr. Hutchinson called for Nixon's resignation.
Read More:
https://www.justsecurity.org/68154/lessons-for-life-the-obituaries-of-republicans-who-opposed-nixons-impeachment/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email
Which tech companies are really doing the most harm? Here are the 30 most dangerous, ranked.
The Evil ListMaybe it was fake news, Russian trolls, and Cambridge Analytica. Or Travis Kalanicks conniption in an Uber. Or the unmasking of Theranos. Or all those Twitter Nazis, and racist Google results, and conspiracy theories on YouTube. Though activists, academics, reporters, and regulators had sent up warning flares for years, it wasnt until quite recently that the era of enchantment with Silicon Valley ended. The list of scandalsover user privacy and security, over corporate surveillance and data collection, over fraud and foreign propaganda and algorithmic bias, to name a fewwas as unending as your Instagram feed. There were hearings, resignations, investigations, major new regulations in Europe, and calls for new laws at home. There was an industry that insisted it now valued privacy and safety but still acted otherwise. There was WeWork, whatever that was.
Snip
What did we find? While the major U.S. tech companies topped the voteread on to find out which came in at No. 1our respondents are deeply concerned about foreign companies dabbling in surveillance and A.I., as well as the domestic gunners that power the data-broker business. No one thinks Twitter is the worst thing that could happen to a planet, but a lot of people worry about it a little. Companies with the potential to do harm can be as distressing as those with long records of producing it. Privacy people care a lot about misinformation, but misinformation people might not be so worried about privacy. Almost everyone distrusts Peter Thiel. And some people dont have a problem with Amazon or Apple or even Facebook at allwhich is why we included dissents for many of the top companies on our list.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/evil-list-tech-companies-dangerous-amazon-facebook-google-palantir.html
Time to dump some stock
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