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You are here: Home / Open Threads / So, baby jails are a thing now.

So, baby jails are a thing now.

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Sweet fancy Moses:

I don’t know why this made me lose my shit. Maybe because Maddow is tough as nails, and seeing her break down makes it that much harder to keep it together.

A reversal of policy isn’t enough. Political defeat won’t be sufficient. Anyone associated with this atrocity should be afraid to show their faces in public. Forever.

Reader Interactions

198Comments

  2. 2.

    ruemara

    Yeah. Yeah, they are a thing. When you manage to exceed even my capacity to anticipate evil… you really are evil.

  4. 4.

    lamh36

    The entire MSNBC crew looks like they are read to burst in tears. From Lawrence w/red eyes, to Stephanie Rule and the other seeming to be holding back to do their reporting.

    Don Lemon on CNN is allegedly LIVE, but was talking to Melania’s former immigration lawyer and so far haven’t mentioned the AP’s new reporting.

  5. 5.

    Adam L Silverman

    It’s sad when a guy arrested and accused of stealing a car gets more consideration in saying goodbye to his Capuchin monkey than people seeking asylum in the US get when their kids are taken away:

    A Florida man had to be separated from his Capuchin monkey after he was arrested for reportedly driving a stolen vehicle into a ditch in Holiday.

    The monkey, named Monk, is seen clinging to the shirt of Cody Blake Hesson, who was arrested for auto theft. Sheriffs officials say Monk was wearing a diaper.

    Hesson did not have a permit for the animal and could face additional charges, officials said.

    The sheriff’s office posted Hesson’s arrest video on YouTube.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BybNlsx-H_Q

    In the video, Hesson and Monk share a goodbye hug before the animal was confiscated.

  9. 9.

    West of the Rockies

    Miller’s family should disown him. He authored this travesty, Kelly and Nielsen have enforced it, all to please toxic man-pig Trump.

  10. 10.

    Adam L Silverman

    @lamh36: The immigration lawyer, who is Jewish, went off yesterday while on air and made it very clear that as far as he was concerned this is what the NAZIs were doing.

  12. 12.

    Ruckus

    They should be unable to show their faces in public.
    Because they are in the same fucking jails after we get the kids out. And fucking indefinite detention would be just fine with me.

  14. 14.

    hilts

    Rachel Maddow is all of us

    And flag humper Donald J. Trump is the quintessential ugly American, physically repulsive and nauseating to look at and devoid of any redeeming human qualities.

  18. 18.

    rikyrah

    Peanut walked in on me crying after I watched Maddow. I had to explain why. She asked if she could be taken away, because she looks Mexican. I couldn’t stop crying as I held her.

  20. 20.

    lamh36

    @Adam L Silverman: I suspect Zucker doesn’t allow Lemon to do breaking news stories…because I promise you he did not mention AP once. We’ll see if the re-broadcast of AC360 interrupts the taping for the breaking news.

    At the very least, Maddow being unable to even get through the copy will make it hard for them to NOT cover it if they were planning not to

  21. 21.

    Yarrow

    The administration is right that we need to fix our immigration system. But if anybody is going to be in a cage while we wait for a comprehensive reform, let’s make it the politicians who don’t do their jobs in the cages, not innocent kids.— Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) June 20, 2018

  23. 23.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    trump tweeting out pictures of the standing O he got from House Rs today

  26. 26.

    debit

    I avoided the audio tape of the children crying yesterday until Rachel’s show. Then she played and I had to run from the room and vomit. Now I’m sitting here crying. Can’t stop. Cannot stop crying and I just want to know what to do, to make it stop, to fix this. Is it time to violently protest yet? Because I am there. I AM THERE.

  31. 31.

    joel hanes

    should be afraid to show their faces in public

    LGM is reporting that Nielsen went out to dinner at a DC Mexican restaurant and was driven from the premises by protestors.

  34. 34.

    magurakurin

    @debit: I listened to that audio yesterday. I couldn’t make it through. I wasn’t just sobbing but full on crying…and I am a crusty old guy at this point. I also speak Spanish, and as horrible as the sobs of the children are, if you understand what is being said it is utterly horrible. At this point, I don’t think any of us are safe…we are all going to burn in Hell for this one, all Americans everywhere…especially if we don’t turn the Congress over to the Democrats in November…

  37. 37.

    zhena gogolia

    AND SORRY FOR ALL CAPS BUT WHAT IS SO ENRAGING IS HOW UNNECESSARY ALL THIS SUFFERING IS.

  39. 39.

    MomSense

    Can’t stop crying. I also want to break things. I do t think I’ve ever felt this way before.

    I’m sorry but I want these evil NAZIs to hang for this.

  41. 41.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    Right-wingers are of course trying to claim that putting children in cages (chain link partitions) was an Obama policy and have pictures they say back it up. This is bullshit right? I know they didn’t separate families.

  43. 43.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    I don’t want to hear Truth and Reconciliation, I don’t want to hear about “moving Forward.” I want Stephen Miller in a cell block, with either a. La EME b.MS-13, C. Latin Kings. I want Corey Lewndowski with either a. Bloods, B. Crips, c. BGF

  46. 46.

    Teddys Person

    @rikyrah: I was holding it together until I read your comment. I’m sorry you had to explain the ugliness of this timeline to your beloved Peanut.

  47. 47.

    Yarrow

    @? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: During the Obama administration there were unaccompanied minors that got put in similar detention facilities. Families were not separated. There was also not a policy of shutting down legal points of entry to make it impossible for people to legally cross and request asylum. That is happening now under the Trump administration.

  48. 48.

    hilts

    @Yarrow:

    Crimes against humanity.

    Before the election, I thought Trump’s victory would be a crime against humanity and this bastard has proven me right.

    It will take a long time to repair the damage he’s done once he’s out of office.

  50. 50.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Maggie Haberman @ maggieNYT
    What Trump said about IvankaTrump in the Hill meeting – that she came to him and said “Daddy, what are we doing about this?” Trump said it’s a “tough issue,” pivoted to something else.

    Keith Hernandez @ keithrhernandez
    She’s 36 years old.

    and a senior something to the President of the United States

  51. 51.

    randy khan

    @sukabi:

    From that story:

    “The shelters aren’t the problem, it’s taking kids from their parents that’s the problem,” said South Texas pediatrician Marsha Griffin who has visited many.

    Precisely.

  53. 53.

    Adam L Silverman

    @West of the Rockies: The Glossers have done it pretty publicly. Apparently, from other reporting, he radicalized/reactionized his parents. So odds of them saying anything are slim and none.

  54. 54.

    Mary G

    @rikyrah: They scared Peanut. This means war. Let her know hundreds of Juicers, including a lot of lawyers, have your back, but you should not have to.

  56. 56.

    ? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?

    @Yarrow:
    That makes me feel a little better. It’s real fucking telling when one of the best rebuttals to criticism of this shit is “well, Obama did it too”. And? Granting for the sake of argument that he did, what difference does it make? It’s still wrong and inhumane.

  59. 59.

    randy khan

    @Yarrow:

    It’s a Mexican restaurant run by Todd English, so it’s not one of *those* kind of Mexican restaurants.

    I have mixed feelings about tracking people down to harass them (as that can go both ways), but if a terrible person shows up in front of you, well, you’re not required to be nice to her.

  61. 61.

    CaseyL

    I want to kill them all. I want them all to die. Not even to suffer, because they might somehow survive it and get out. I want them all dead.

    I may also kill anyone who tells me there’s no difference between the two parties. Berners and Steiniacs better not come anywhere fucking near me from now until forever.

  62. 62.

    Mnemosyne

    @Yarrow:

    She went there so she could get a hit of self-righteousness and self-pity. Republicans always have to play the victim.

  63. 63.

    feebog

    You could not make up characters who were this mean spirited, incompetent and tone deaf. The fact they are running this country is astonishing. And disgusting. .

  64. 64.

    Adam L Silverman

    @lamh36: I do not know why they haven’t been able to adjust Blitzer’s hearing aids going on fifteen years now. Dude you don’t need to yell all the time, just go visit the audiologist.

  70. 70.

    feebog

    @randy khan:

    No mixed feelings here. She, along with every other miserable excuse for a human in this administration, needs to be publicly shamed every time they appear in public. As somebody on this blog once said, fuckem.

  71. 71.

    Gemina13

    @rikyrah: Oh, my holy God. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

    This isn’t something new. We tore enslaved black parents from their children; we herded Native American children into schools intended to strip their heritage from them and make them “white.” But we do need to stop it. Just because there are racist shitheels willing to slip back to the days of Manifest Destiny and Jim Crow doesn’t mean we have to let them do it.

    I’m not a parent. But you would have to have a heart of stone, or none at all, to listen to the recording of children and babies crying and not feel the urge to storm those detention centers, free the little ones, and reunite them with their parents, all the while putting a few ICE heads on pikes. Or just to see the bereaved parents wondering, despairingly, if they’ll ever see their children again. To see Rachel Maddow break down in tears on air and not want to sob along with her. To hear Corey Lewandowski mock the fate of one child with Down’s syndrome, and not want to claw his face off his skull.

    MoveOn is sponsoring marches on June 30th. The ACLU and other organizations are fighting to reunite these kids and their parents. There are pending bills in the House and the Senate intended to put a stop to this atrocity. If Trump can’t see that there’s a wave of opposition facing him on this, it’s because Miller and the other racist shitheels are waving tweets from Trumpanzee and bots to make it look like he has overwhelming support.

  72. 72.

    lamh36

    So wait…the “tender age” shelters for babies and toddlers

    So we still don’t know where the girls are?

  73. 73.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    These fucking people…

    These fucking people. I just, I can’t even begin to… I don’t know what the fuck to say. This guy needs to go. I don’t know what Mueller is doing, but I had heard a few months ago that he would be coming out with his report sometime this month or next month. He needs to trot it out, like now. We need to run this shitstain and all his fellow traveler shitstains out of Washington and into the outer darkness they’ve been so committed to earning for themselves.

  75. 75.

    Mnemosyne

    @randy khan:

    It’s a Mexican restaurant run by Todd English, so it’s not one of *those* kind of Mexican restaurants.

    Yeah, but I’ll bet you that a majority of the cooks working in that kitchen are Latino — not just Mexican, but Guatemalan and Salvadorean and Nicaraguan.

    In Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain had a great essay about how a chef needed to understand Latin American politics, because if you put a Salvadorean who had escaped right-wing death squads on the line with an anti-communist Cuban, there would be blood before the end of the shift.

  77. 77.

    Mnemosyne

    @debit:

    I am avoiding the news coverage and getting it from you guys and print sources for exactly that reason. Actually hearing the sobbing kids would trigger me to a very dark place that would be bad for me to visit again.

  78. 78.

    Suzanne

    policy isn’t enough. Political defeat won’t be sufficient. Anyone associated with this atrocity should be afraid to show their faces in public. Forever.

    I do not know, if this ever works out to be okay, how to move forward making a country with so many terrible people. A truth and reconciliation commission is not going to be enough. Too many of my fellow Americans are monsters.

  79. 79.

    B.B.A.

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Mueller is a racist old Republican white man and can go ride a tumbrel with the rest of them once he delivers his anodyne report that “mistakes may have been made but there is insufficient evidence to charge.” He ran the FBI, he’s got plenty of innocent black and brown people’s blood on his hands. Fuckem.

  81. 81.

    West of the Rockies

    “This” is not who we are. This is who Republicans are. Tell a friend. Conservatives own this.

  84. 84.

    RedDirtGirl

    @sukabi: Just one quote from that article:
    “Children are biologically programmed to grow best in the care of a parent figure. When that bond is broken through long and unexpected separations with no set timeline for reunion, children respond at the deepest physiological and emotional levels,” she said. “Their fear triggers a flood of stress hormones that disrupt neural circuits in the brain, create high levels of anxiety, make them more susceptible to physical and emotional illness, and damage their capacity to manage their emotions, trust people, and focus their attention on age-appropriate activities.”

  86. 86.

    sukabi

    @Adam L Silverman: I don’t think he yells because he’s deaf, I think he yells because he can’t understand what he’s reading…and like Americans are prone to do when speaking to someone who doesn’t understand English, speaking slowly and loudly is the preferred solution.

  87. 87.

    debit

    @Mnemosyne: I feel a need to step back from news coverage, but I can’t. I just can’t. I can better deal with it by knowing as it happens, as opposed to being blindsided, or that’s what I tell myself, but that audio destroyed me. I can still hear it. Sorry, I’m debit+5 at this point tonight because I can’t imagine going to sleep unless my brain is too fucked up to process anymore.

  89. 89.

    efgoldman

    @B.B.A.:

    Mueller is a racist old Republican white man and can go ride a tumbrel with the rest of them once he delivers his anodyne report that “mistakes may have been made but there is insufficient evidence to charge.”

    Rant with no factual basis. Hasn’t he issued enough indictments and subpoenas already for you? You have no fucking idea what’s going on, and have become a troll.

  90. 90.

    MomSense

    Do we know who the contractors are? Can we go after them? Would that make things better or worse?

  92. 92.

    lamh36

    @EricHolder
    1h1 hour ago
    More
    Trump Administration is detaining babies and toddlers in “tender age shelters” who may never be reunited with their parents. Babies. Babies. You have brought shame to the nation. We are better than this.

  93. 93.

    Adam L Silverman

    @B.B.A.: I’d revise that opinion a bit.
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-robert-muellers-only-case-was-a-childs-murder

    Mueller had previously been the head of the criminal division at the U.S. Department of Justice—“main Justice”—supervising such cases as the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. He had left in 1994 with the departure of President George H.W. Bush and the arrival of President Clinton and he had gone to work at the Washington office of a fancy law firm, earning some $400,000 a year. At the criminal division and in private practice, he had a secretary who would answer his phone:

    “Mr. Mueller’s office.”

    But after just a few months of making big bucks, Mueller decided he needed to do something more meaningful, most particularly in a time when the nation’s capital had also become its murder capital, with more than 400 killings a year. He telephoned the District of Columbia’s U.S. Attorney, Eric Holder, and said he wanted to become a frontline homicide prosecutor.

    In 1995, at the age of 50, Mueller became the oldest and most improbable rookie in the history of the homicide bureau.

    The victim in Mueller’s first homicide case was 3-year-old Rhonda Morris, who had been battered, burned, choked, suffocated, and repeatedly thrown against a wall and punched hard enough to lacerate her liver while in the care of her mother’s 19-year-old cousin. Mueller visited the scene and studied the evidence and interviewed the witnesses. He impressed the victim’s mother as well as the detectives and his fellow prosecutors with his focus and energy and unfailing attention to the smallest details.

    “He takes a personal interest in whatever he is doing,” says the mother, Valerie Morris-Murdock. “He gave it his all. He didn’t take shortcuts. He didn’t hand it to his investigators.”

    Morris-Murdock and the others who dealt with Mueller say they never had to guess what he was thinking or whether he had some hidden agenda.

    “Bob is, I’ll call him a very straight-up guy,” says June Jeffries, a longtime and highly respected homicide prosecutor who had the Rhonda Morris case before being transferred to the appeals bureau. “He doesn’t play games.”

    Yet, as direct and no nonsense as he was, Mueller was not at all cold. He was gentle and supportive and reassuring with Morris-Murdock. He was all the more so with her surviving daughter, Remi, who witnessed the killing when she was just a year older than Rhonda.

    “Remi loved him,” Morris-Murdock says. “She still remembers him even though she was 4.”

    Remi instantly recognized Mueller when she saw a news report about the new director of the FBI in 2001.

    “She said, ‘Mom, did you see Mr. Mueller on TV? You know he’s the director with the FBI,’” Morris-Murdock recalls.

    Now that Mueller is the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the murdered child’s mother and the longtime homicide prosecutor as well as a host of detectives agree that we could have nobody better.

    “He’s probably the perfect person for what’s going on,” says retired Capt. Lou Hennessy, the head of the Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide squad in Mueller’s time. “Without a doubt, we know we’re going to get the truth.”

    “He crosses all the t’s and dots all the i’s,” Morris-Murdock says. “He checks things himself.”

    Morris-Murdock suggests that if President Trump is as innocent of collusion with the Russians as he insists, then he should be only glad that Mueller is the special counsel.

    “Mr. Mueller is an honest man,” Morris-Murdock says. “He’s going to tell the truth about whatever he finds.”

    If Trump fires Mueller, that would suggest the president finds the truth to be no more his friend than it has been in numerous other situations.

    “[Mr. Mueller] will give honest facts,” Morris-Murdock says.

    Morris-Murdock was lost in a crack addiction on the night in February of 1995 when she left her four young children in the care of her first cousin, Aaron Morris. She returned early the next morning to find little Rhonda unconscious and unresponsive. She called 911 and the police arrived along with paramedics who fought to revive the child.

    “He killed my baby!” court papers quote Morris-Murdock crying out.

    Rhonda was still not breathing and she still had no pulse when she was rushed to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Aaron Morris was arrested for homicide. One of the detectives initially felt certain that Morris-Murdock had been in the apartment during the killing and was therefore complicit.

    “The b–ch was in on it,” Morris-Murdock remembers hearing one of the detectives say. “I don’t care what you say.”

    But Remi proved to be an uncommonly good witness and said her mother had not been there. Mueller combined that with everything else he was able to determine.

    “He was like, ‘Even the pediatrician speaks highly of you,” Morris-Murdock recalls. “I said, ‘You talked to the pediatrician?’”

    The pediatrician had told Mueller that Morris-Murdock kept her kids current on their vaccinations and check-ups.

    Mueller decided that the accusing detective was wrong, that Morris-Murdock had not been present.

    “Mr. Mueller believed me,” Morris-Murdock says.

    Mueller also believed in her.

    “He took a personal interest in me getting through this ordeal,” she says. “I felt like not only is he prosecuting my daughter’s case, but he wants to be sure I’m OK. He didn’t have to be concerned about me. That isn’t why he was paid.”

    Mueller and Jeffries helped her get through rehab and stay off drugs and cope with the loss of her child at the hands of a family member.

    “They knew I was sensitive, knew I was very sensitive,” Morris-Murdock says. “It was almost like they were family. They took me in their arms and said, ‘You’ll get through this.’”

    She adds, “If it hadn’t been for them I don’t know if I could have stayed sane.”

    She stayed clean as well, even though folks of the street offered her free drugs out of supposed sympathy.

    “They said, ‘I don’t know how you deal with it,’” Morris-Murdock recalls.

    As he would in all his subsequent homicide cases, Mueller carefully examined the scene. He also personally interviewed every significant witness. That included Morris-Murdock’s mother and sister.

    “My mother took Rhonda’s death very hard,” Morris-Murdock says. “He knew the family was struggling.”

    Mueller’s manner and tone provided comfort even as he sought answers to all his questions.

    “Everybody fell in love with him,” Morris-Murdock reports. “It was his persona. It was how he presented himself. It was the interest he took.”

    Mueller told the assembled family that Aaron Morris’ attorney from the public defender’s office had asked for the charge to be lowered to manslaughter from murder 1, which requires the prosecution to prove the killing was intentional. Mueller said he felt the evidence and testimony would support the higher charge, but he would let the family make the call.

    “He said it would be his decision, but he would be willing to go with whatever we were comfortable with,” Morris-Murdock recalls.

    The family sat down and talked. Morris-Murdock telephoned Mueller.

    “I said, ‘Go for murder 1,” Morris-Murdock remembers.

    Morris-Murdock was often at the Triple Nickel as Mueller continued to build the case. Mueller came in early and kept working past usual business hours.

    “I’m looking out the window, thinking, ‘It’s getting dark,’” Morris-Murdock recalls. “He said, ‘Oh, don’t worry we’ll put you in a cab.’”

    Mueller then kept working.

    “In the office one day, I said, ‘Is this your only case? Don’t you have others?’” Morris-Murdock recalls.

    Mueller pointed to a stack of files on his desk, each a homicide.

    “He said, ‘I do, but this is the priority right now. I want to see this through to the end,’” Morris-Murdock remembers.

    The trial neared, and Mueller prepared Morris-Murdock for her testimony in two sessions, asking one tough question after another.

    “He made me cry,” Morris-Murdock says. “He told me, ‘This is what they’re going to do.’”

    He told her that these were the kind of questions the defense would ask in an effort to make her lose her composure.

    “He said if I break down, they’re going to ask for a dismissal,’” Morris-Murdock recalls.

    Mueller advised her that she might want stay away from the courtroom on the days when the autopsy photos were being introduced as evidence and discussed. He asked if she had a photo she could give him that had been taken of Rhonda in life.

    “He said, ‘Can we have a picture of her to show because I want them to see the vibrant little girl she was,’” Morris-Murdock remembers. “He said, ‘Rhonda will get justice.’”

    The surviving older sister, Remi, was an important witness. Mueller was able to arrange for her to testify on videotape and be spared the stress of appearing in court. She was precociously articulate and poised.

    “He said, ‘For a 4-year-old, she talks like she’s 24,’” Morris-Murdock reports.

    The trial commenced and the moment arrived for Morris-Murdock to take the stand. Mueller led her through her account.

    “He was calm but he was direct,” Morris-Murdock says. “I’m not going to say he took it easy on me. He asked certain questions because he knew [the defense] was going to ask.”

    On cross-examination, the public defender was as tough as Morris-Murdock had been warned to expect. Morris-Murdock began to cry and Mueller asked for a brief recess.

    “First thing [the defense attorney] did was jump up and ask for a dismissal,” Morris-Murdock recalls.

    The judge allowed Morris-Murdock a few minutes, with no guarantee that he would not grant a dismissal if she proved unable to collect herself. The public defender resumed the questioning.

    “She chewed me up pretty bad, but I was really prepared,” Morris-Murdock says. “I’m like, ‘Just remember what Mr. Mueller said, stay calm, don’t scream, don’t jump across the table at [the defendant].”

    Morris-Murdock stepped down having retained her composure.

    “Mr. Mueller can prep you really good,” she says.

    She took Mueller’s praise to be as straightforward and honest as he was in everything else.

    “He said, I did good,” Morris-Murdock says. “He always told me, ‘I’m proud of you. You did good.’”

    Along with Remi’s video testimony, Mueller played a half-hour video of the statement the defendant had made to the police in the immediate aftermath of the killing. Aaron Morris was recorded saying, “I might as well tell you what happened to Rhonda.” He said he had been “stressed out” and had lost his temper after Rhonda “used the bathroom on herself.” He described beating her and repeatedly lifting her up by her neck.

    “I put her in the tub with the hot water and it pulled the skin off her feet,” he reported on the recording.

    The situation in the courtroom was made all the more difficult by the presence of the defendant’s mother, the sister of Morris-Murdock’s own mother. Morris-Murdock decided to await the verdict at home. Mueller called to tell her that the jury had declined to convict the cousin of murder 1 and had instead found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

    “Mr. Mueller was more upset than I was,” Morris-Murdock remembers. “I thought he did a great job. No way could you think [Aaron Morris] didn’t intend to do this. Slamming her up against a wall three times. That’s intentional. This is a 3-year-old helpless child.”

    Mueller opted not to speak with the jurors, as attorneys often do after a trial. Their verdict indicated that they had bought the cousin’s insistence that he simply lost his temper.

    “He didn’t even want to interview them and talk to them because he felt, ‘This is ridiculous,’” Morris-Murdock says.

    At the sentencing, Aaron Morris got 11-to-35 years. Morris-Murdock recalls, “[Mueller] said, ‘The good thing is he got the maximum sentence. We already know he’s going to do at least 20 years.’”

    But after what seemed to Morris-Murdock to be no time at all, the cousin sought early parole. Morris-Murdock knew her children would be terrified by just the prospect of this monster being out in the street.

    “I said, ‘There’s no way!’” she recalls.

    Mueller helped her prepare her videotaped statement to the parole board.

    “He told me, ‘Just express how you feel and all you’ve been through and how you feel about him getting out,’” Morris-Murdock says. “I do remember saying I don’t feel comfortable with him coming out not just for my children but for everyone’s children, the neighbor’s child, the lady up the street, the man around the corner.”

    Parole was denied. Aaron Morris died behind bars of natural causes. His health could not have been improved by cellblock beatings that Morris-Murdock heard he had received.

    Morris-Murdock went on to work at the Department of Labor and to drive a bus, steering the big vehicle through the city streets.

    “I loved it,” she says.

    She remained resolutely drug-free.

    “I said, ‘I can’t go back,’” she recalls. “If I go back, then my daughter’s death would have meant nothing. I need to know something good will come out of this.”

    She was the most dedicated of mothers to her surviving children.

    “I don’t miss a PTA meeting. I don’t miss a doctor’s appointment. Flag football, basketball, t-ball, I was there,” Morris-Murdock says.

    In 2000, she married Clarence Murdock, a deeply decent man who worked at the elementary school her children attended. They had a daughter of their own, Victoria, who graduated from the eighth grade this year, prompting a sign to go up on the front door of their tidy home in northeast Washington, D.C.

    “YOU DID IT.”

    In the meantime, Remi had graduated high school early with honors. She served in the Navy and proceeded on to college. She now has three children of her own.

    On every July 6, the family celebrates what would had been Rhonda’s birthday.

    “Ice-cream cake every year,” Morris-Murdock says.

    Now 50, Morris-Murdock has “Rhonda” tattooed on her right calf. She remembers that the girl they called “Boom Boom” was altogether special.

    “She was kind of like the favorite,” Morris-Murdock says. “She was just a sweetheart. She was so quiet. She would just smile.”

    Morris-Murdock also says, “We still talk about what Rhonda would have looked like.”

    And she says, “I would never forget Rhonda’s murder. Some days it’s like it just happened. Some days I don’t think about it at all until I’m going to sleep.”

    Mueller sent her Christmas cards for five years, but they have since fallen out of touch. She has kept track of his career as he went to work other killings and become head of the homicide bureau and then U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and then the head of the FBI and now special counsel.

    “I still get so excited whenever I see him on TV,” Morris-Murdock says. “I’m following everything now… How do they go from him investigating them to them investigating him?”

    She has no doubt that for all the Trumpian craziness and dizzy speculation on cable TV news, Mueller is working the Russian-meddling case with the same steady, careful, focused diligence as he did with her daughter’s case. The innocent should be only glad.

    Morris-Murdock offers a high compliment to the Marine who was once decorated for his courage and devotion to duty.

    “He goes beyond the call of duty,” she says.

  94. 94.

    debbie

    Can’t watch this tonight or my sleep will again be ruined, but it may be anyway. This was on my local news just now. More than 100 workers marched out of a meat supplier onto buses.

    One of the townspeople ratted them out:

    Don Little, of Salem, said he called Homeland Security a year ago to complain about what was happening at Fresh Mark.

    “We’ve got a president in office who’s going to do something about it finally and now some things are going to get done around here.”

    Hope he chokes on his next steak.

  95. 95.

    cain

    None of us are safe. NONE. If you’re catholic, you’re fucked. If you’re non-white, jew, musilim, asian.. we are all fucked. If we don’t end this farce we are going to turn into dangerous evil on tihs planet. A horrible entity that has nukes.

  101. 101.

    burnspbesq

    There are times when being against the death penalty isn’t an easy position to hold.

  102. 102.

    efgoldman

    @debbie:

    Hope he chokes on his next steak.

    All of the mouth breathing, meth sniffing, cheap beer swilling racist flying monkeys are rushing to take those jobs that the spics kept them out of.
    Right?
    Rushing right in, RIGHT?
    Some people deserve to burn to death in a meth lab fire.

  103. 103.

    Mnemosyne

    @RedDirtGirl:

    This link has been posted multiple times already, but there are reports from pediatricians who have seen some of the kids who were sent to foster care come through their ERs (they have to go there even for minor things because of state reporting requirements).

    The foster parents are doing their best and are known to these doctors as having done well with other foster kids, but neither the doctors nor the foster parents have seen the issues these kids have. One toddler refused to allow her foster mother to put her down, even to give her a bath.

    They’re used to treating kids who have been abused or neglected, but these are otherwise normal kids who have been torn away from loving parents, and it’s HUGELY traumatic for them.

  104. 104.

    Jager

    Mrs J’s Aunt Bonnie was Down Syndrome. She was a delight, lived with Mrs. J’s grandmother her entire life and lived to be 61. Bonnie was happy, fun to be around, she ran in the first Special Olympics, she worked at Balfour putting ring boxes together. Bonnie bowled, Bonnie smiled, Bonnie made us all laugh and she had a wonderful life. Mrs J broke into tears imagining Bonnie being taken away from her mother. Fuck Corey Lewandowski, the rotten son of a bitch.

  106. 106.

    Chet Murthy

    @debbie: Fuuuuck. This was the Nazis secret weapon: ordinary Germans ratting out the vulnerable. B/c the Gestapo was incompetent otherwise. Ditto the regular cops. It took the complicity of the German populace to round up all the Jews (and other “offenders”).

  108. 108.

    JanieM

    @Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA):

    I despair, but then I think about how this ended for Hitler. It cheers me up.

    Sixty million people died before Hitler was done for. Apparently these assholes learned nothing from that. We had better hope we do better this time, and the rising tide of outrage does make me at least a teeny bit hopeful.

    I gave RAICES some $ last night, then today I saw this article. Wow.

  109. 109.

    bluefish

    The most incredible night of American news coverage I’ve seen in my 65 years of age. Not just Rachel, all of it tonight. Jaw dropping. I have new hope that we’ll get this criminal gang out of there. Tonight Trump and Co lost ALL ability to proceed further. It’ll take some time but for the first time since he was sworn in, I feel some real hope. It hurts that it’s on the backs of these innocents and that the situation is as horrific as it is. Terrifyingly evil. I think the Hague will be most interested in all this — We should help them by making certain these guys aren’t occupied with other activities, such as pretending to govern our country. An obscene, epic scandal for the ages. It’s going to take us a very very long time to recover and things will never be the same again. But we’ll get through it because we’re simply going to have to.

  110. 110.

    Dev Null

    @? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: open in an incognito / private window, or open in a “guest” persona, or create a new persona (in chrome, anyway.)

    It is generally pretty straightforward to get around monthly-limit fences. Paywalls require a bit more creativity.

    Or buy a 1-year digital subscription to the WaPost – I paid $20 for mine, figuring that for all its faults – their name is “legion” – WaPost has David Farenthold who did some seriously good investigative reporting. Unfortunately I didn’t notice that they roll you over into a full-priced subscription at the end of the year, so don’t make that mistake.

  113. 113.

    Ruckus

    @Adam L Silverman:
    I can’t listen. I know the tape is worse than my imagination. And I’m imagining very, very bad. Breaking things ragey bad. OK not things, breaking people ragey bad. And I’m a peacenik. I’m normally the guy that defuses the situation. There’s video of me doing that at a sporting event. And I’m not talking boxing or wrestling or ice hockey where it’s expected. Support people fined $5000 and banned for a year for less. Professional competitors kicked out of their livelihood for a year minimum and even bigger fines. We took non violence very seriously. Breaking People Ragey.

  116. 116.

    Chet Murthy

    @Dev Null: I subscribed to WaPo. Not for their coverage -today- and tomorrow. But rather, for their coverage last year, and the year before, when I wasn’t a subscriber. Yes, they’re not great. Not good enough. And yes, they still have that fucker Fred Hiatt. But OTOH, they’re doing better than any other major paper, and they have (as you said) Farenthold, Eichenwald, and a few others. They have Petri. They have Rubin (and sure, she’ll probably turn back into a Republican when this is over, but right now, she’s not equivocating about our national agony).

    I think they’ve earned my subscription fee for their work these last two years. Next year, I’ll see if they earned this year’s fee.

  117. 117.

    randy khan

    @Mnemosyne:

    She probably doesn’t know that most good restaurants in the U.S. are largely staffed in the kitchen by Latinos.

    I’m actually re-reading Kitchen Confidential now, in memory of Bourdain. There’s still a lot that will make you laugh, but I was taken aback in the introduction written for the paperback edition when he recounted the call he got from Eric Ripert with an invitation to come to La Bernadin for lunch. The introduction doesn’t say this, but they became great friends, and Ripert was the one who found Bourdain after he committed suicide.

  121. 121.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Jager: My granduncle (Dad’s dad’s older brother) moved to Chicago when he got back from serving in WW I. He was staying in a boarding house and became friends with the owner. The owner’s daughter, Jeanie, was developmentally disabled. It was Down’s Syndrome, but she was somewhere around what people would have once referred to as slow. The owner asked my granduncle to promise that if anything ever happened to him, my granduncle would take care of Jeanie. My granduncle made the promise. When his friend got ill and died my granduncle married Jeanie because he couldn’t square having her live with him and taking care of her if they weren’t married (this was sometime in the late 1920s/early 1930s). They moved back to Denver. Aunt Jeanie lived well into her late 80s/early 90s. He retired from a career in the post office. They had a good life. And he never broke his promise.

    The President’s pet sub shop manager has a lot of retribution coming to him!

  122. 122.

    Mnemosyne

    @debit:

    For me, restricting myself to reading stories is working. I’m still enraged, but it keeps pictures out of my head that I don’t need to have added to what’s already there. That might be an option for you, too.

  123. 123.

    cain

    @Adam L Silverman:
    I can’t.. I can’t imagine the burden that he has to endure on his shoulders. I don’t believe in God. But I’m going to send whatever good vibes we have that he does what he can. I think he needs to wait till we take over Congress. Because only then can we cleanse this nation.

  124. 124.

    Ruckus

    @ruemara:
    General strike.
    The concept is acceptable to me.
    But how many people think they would be or actually are unable to join in? In France this is an almost normal thing. People get a bit touchy but they understand it. I’m not sure it wouldn’t backfire. I mean if it was real and had a huge percentage of participation, there’d be no way everyone would suffer. But a good portion of the country wouldn’t participate and might get violent. Which would not be in their best interest of course, but when has that stopped them?

  125. 125.

    Steeplejack

    @Mr Stagger Lee:

    I don’t want to hear Truth and Reconciliation [. . .].

    Truth and retribution.

    I think (hope) that the one small bright spot in this whole “separating children” clusterfuck is that it is so heinous that once the immediate fire is put out it won’t be possible to stuff it down the memory hole and “look forward, not back.” These monsters and their quislings are not going to be able to get away with “Well, you know, stuff happened.” They will be called to account.

  128. 128.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Ruckus: I understand. You are aware of it and that’s all that matters at this point to keep yourself informed. Destroying yourself to stay informed isn’t going to do you or anyone else any good.

  129. 129.

    cain

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    @cain: Calm the fuck down.

    I’m perfectly calm. I just that tweet about from Valariekaur has alarmed me to the point that I need to be more emphatic. The thing is, as a non-whte, I feel like a target.

  130. 130.

    magurakurin

    @Ruckus: that audio is strange. It doesn’t hit you all at once, but at some point the awful reality of it overwhelms you and crushes your soul. You probably should go with your gut…and not listen to it. Truth is, we, here, aren’t the ones who need to be listening to it…it is the white suburban soccer moms who voted for Trump that need to listen to it…on a continuous loop, for days, while lying on a concrete floor…

  131. 131.

    trollhattan

    @Adam L Silverman:
    No kidding. Trump corner man throws in towel before round 1, cites unexpected bone spur flareup.

    Back in the dressing room, Trump tries to summon ring girl.

  133. 133.

    Adam L Silverman

    @B.B.A.: Take a break. Do something diverting/distracting. Dare I suggest fun. You’re no good to yourself or anyone else if you burnout. Or if you let them break you. The 3 meter targets are making what is being done at the border so toxic it backfires on the President, his supporters, and his enablers. And preventing the GOP in the Senate from resurrecting the Graham-Cassidy anti ACA bill while everyone is distracted. The 10 meter target is the midterm elections. You need to take care of yourself so you can assist as much as you can. Even if it is just calling your senators and representative, making sure everyone you know is registered to vote, and that they all vote.

  134. 134.

    Celebrity Bowling

    @randy khan:
    In my neck of the woods Latinos work in every back-of-the-house restaurant job, clean houses and pools, mow lawns, wash clothes, plant and pick food, care for children, clean hotel rooms, wash cars … work at all the jobs red-blooded Americans refuse to do … all the while paying state and federal taxes through their wages and purchases.

  135. 135.

    Adam L Silverman

    @cain: He didn’t get his Bronze Star in Vietnam as an end of tour award. He got his for gratuitous valor under fire.

  136. 136.

    Kay

    The Trump Administration put the loathsome and genuinely creepy Stephen Miller in charge of policy concerning small children.

    I wouldn’t place a goldfish in the care of any of them.

  137. 137.

    Chet Murthy

    @cain:

    The thing is, as a non-whte, I feel like a target.

    I feel you, brother (or, erm, sister). Got family in Texas. Fuck fuck fuck I’m worried all the time. Can’t convince ’em to move. Other family in Delaware, which is, I guess, OK (by comparison). Had to visit Texas recently, shit, hated that. The feeling of “don’t know what will happen, but some asshole could ruin my life”.

    And you’re right: these fuckers are just separating what the thought was the weakest, from the herd.

    But ALSO: these guys are further-along than 1933 on the timeline of the Nazis. I need to go back and read Gellately;s _Backing Hitler_ and see where they are, but it’s definitely further than Year One.

  138. 138.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman:

    And preventing the GOP in the Senate from resurrecting the Graham-Cassidy anti ACA bill while everyone is distracted.

    Thank you for mentioning this. I’m concerned because David’s post asking people to call their reps about it has only 14 comments. It’s gotten overlooked because of the horror of the migrant family separation. We can’t let them get away with this either.

  139. 139.

    Dev Null

    @Chet Murthy: And Gauleiter Thiessen, Lady Jane Galt, and that GOP git Rogers (?sp?).

    But they also have Sargent and Waldman and Drezner and (as you say) Petri and Rubin, both of whom have been on fire recently (in a positive way).

    And several other columnists who are sometimes quite good: Balz, Wemple, and even sometimes Gerson and Boot. ~shudders~

    And Bump and his associates aren’t bad.

    I didn’t know that Eichenwald contributes … I haven’t seen him on a byline.

    Anyway, not trying to sell subscriptions, but I second your evaluation. And $20 for the year was a steal. Playing games with browser personae to avoid monthly limits has its own cost (in time).

  141. 141.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Chet Murthy: They’re not farther along. But there are some unfortunate similarities. The difference is that the NAZIs didn’t get this type of pushback.

  142. 142.

    Peale

    @cain: yep. The focus is on the southern border, but if they are detaining large numbers South Asians, I’m thinking that the general war against asylum is everywhere.

    I’m concerned that the next line will be arresting TAP holders who try to apply for green cards or refugees who try naturalization even if they are eligible. He promised repeatedly to send the Syrians back. He’s stopped them from coming, but those who are here are probably next in line.

  146. 146.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman: I’m not sure we can. Like I said, David’s post got only 14 comments and several were multiple comments from the same people. I think it got overlooked. I hope he posts again tomorrow. We need to raise hell about it because they will use the migrant family separation furor to sneak everything through they can, including this. They are awful people.

  147. 147.

    Chet Murthy

    @Adam L Silverman:

    They’re not farther along.

    Adam, while it’s true that in 1933 the Nazis were beating up Communists and Socialists, they were not separating families of Jews, Roma, etc, imprisoning them all. And yet, here we are. True, there’s still resistance. But notwithstanding, they tried this, and we still don’t know if they’ll get away with it.

  148. 148.

    Steeplejack

    @debbie:

    Don Little, of Salem, said he called Homeland Security a year ago to complain about what was happening at Fresh Mark.

    “We’ve got a president in office who’s going to do something about it finally, and now some things are going to get done around here.”

    In a perfect world, one of those things would be that Don Little would be forced to work at minimum wage doing the shittiest job available at Fresh Mark.

    In other news, why aren’t they hauling off the Fresh Mark management for illegally employing non-citizens? Rhetorical question.

  149. 149.

    J R in WV

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Thanks for that story about Mueller. I feel a little better about that side of things now.

    But that DHS secretary, Reichsleiter K. Nielsen, I hope she can never go out to dinner again without people shouting at her, making sure she knows that she has passed beyond the pale. There’s a line, and these people have crossed it. Perhaps so ignorant they didn’t understand they were close to that line… perhaps they are so ignorant they don’t even know there’s a line to cross.

    But ignorance is no excuse!

  150. 150.

    Ruckus

    @burnspbesq:
    Look at it this way. With the death penalty they have an end to the suffering that is possibly a lot sooner than later. With life without parole they have to just sit there and take it. One day at a time. 30-40-50 yrs behind bars. I know someone who was sent to jail for murder in the 70s. I use to go to the same church, the same schools, I’ve been to her house and knew her parents and adopted brother and sister. She’s still in that jail, but she was on death row, but that sentence was overturned to life with possibility of parole. She’s lived decades longer in jail than she would have otherwise. And it’s possible that she’s earned parole. I’m not sure she’s ever going to get it. My life has had it’s ups and way downs since she went to jail but it’s been dramatically better than her’s.

  151. 151.

    Dev Null

    @Chet Murthy: Not sure who I should be responding to … you or Adam or cain … but responding to you because you mentioned “Nazi timeline”.

    If these guys aren’t stopped – if the Dems don’t take the House in November – we could be in serious trouble, even if Mueller delivers the goods on Трамп.

    Трамп has (so to speak) loosed demons… the oldest Irish pub in North America was defaced with anti-immigrant graffiti recently.

    It’s an isolated incident, sure … but with Трамп ranting in the language of genocide (“infest”), we could see a lot of blood spilled.

  152. 152.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Yarrow: David’s posts, for reasons I don’t understand, get very few comments. It is, perhaps, because of the nature of the posts are such that people are uncomfortable posting because he is providing a specialized type of important information to us all that is outside the comfort zone for commenting on by non-specialists.

    As opposed to my specialized national security posts where you all think you know more than I do…//

  153. 153.

    B.B.A.

    @Adam L Silverman: Good advice.

    But I also want to say this, now that I’ve taken a long shower and calmed down:

    During my abortive attempt to become an attorney, I was fortunate enough to be a law school classmate of one Scott Hechinger, now of the Brooklyn Defender Services. I’ve been following his endless, often futile attempts to get his clients a fair shake at justice in this city’s racist, unjust system. It’s depressing work that would have broken me many times over and I don’t know how Scott manages. The police and the prosecutors are rotten to the core. And from other stories I’ve heard, it’s the same everywhere else.

    So I get a bit of whiplash to see all the Mueller worship around here. Fine, he may be the most morally upstanding prosecutor in the country. But he’s still a prosecutor, still part of that rotten system, and he ran a very large part of it for years. And, lest we forget, he’s still a Republican. So I hope you can forgive my skepticism.

  154. 154.

    cain

    @Chet Murthy:
    Thanks Chet, (and yeah, it’s brother). The thing to understand is that for us non-whites, we definitely are the first to go. Who knows where things will go? Perhaps they will revoke citizenship for those who are naturalized based on whatever? Anything is possible.

  156. 156.

    Yarrow

    @Adam L Silverman: His posts asking us to call about previous attempts to overturn the ACA got lots of comments. I was surprised this one didn’t and it worries me. I hope he raises the alarm again tomorrow. Maybe more than once.

  157. 157.

    Chet Murthy

    @Dev Null: I. Am. 100%. With. You. I’m not physically brave enough to go to a Red State and canvass. But that just means I need to donate a shit-ton more money.

    Thank goodness though, Devin Nunes’ district isn’t in a red state, is it? It’s just up the road …..

  158. 158.

    cain

    @Peale:
    Exactly, when it comes to immigration, everything is in free fall. He’s got a his base who is against immigration. It isnt that big of a stretch that he can expand even with U.S. citizens that are already naturalized. Although I wonder if whatever shit happens it can be applicable to his wife.. but hey, why not? Threaten the wife too, right?

  159. 159.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Dev Null: From the article:

    Current owner Jon McClain

    Not to make light of this, but I’m pretty sure this wont end well for the vandals:

  161. 161.

    SC54HI

    Can’t listen to the entire Pro Publica audio — the few clips I’ve heard were excruciating. I have been enraged and sickened for days. Have been an ACLU member but donated to RAICES today — need to look into making that a recurring donation.

    What gutted me were the now-viral photographs of the toddler wailing next to her mother as CBP did a pat-down. The photo that broke my heart was the one of her mother nursing the child while standing in the vehicle headlights just before CBP took them into custody. As a nursing mom of long ago, tears came to my eyes on seeing the toddler’s hand reaching up to touch her mother’s face. This is as integral a part of nursing as the breast-feeding itself and most nursing babies begin to reach out to touch their mothers’ faces at about 5-6 months.

    The thought of her or any child being removed from her parent is unbearable. We must stop this and remove the monsters who are responsible for this and all the atrocities of this administration.

  162. 162.

    Ruckus

    @Chet Murthy:
    Not trying to argue here but to ask, did Hitler have people seeking asylum trying to cross into Germany in numbers every day? It’s not the same situation so the nazi’s solutions are not on the same timeline. Plus our nazis got to learn from the originals. And notice that Germany outlawed anything nazi in their country. Our nazis would be in jail in Germany. They got stomped and they learned. It’s our turn. The Germans learned from our Civil War and what we did afterwards. They didn’t make the same mistake. We shouldn’t this time.

  163. 163.

    Chet Murthy

    @Dev Null: It’s a national emergency. If this were 1941, we’d be buying war bonds. This is my version of that. Insurance premiums against becoming a refugee. Gotta go for the gold-level policy, b/c you sure don’t wanna max out your lifetime coverage cap.

  166. 166.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Dev Null: I know it’s spelled differently, but the minute I saw that in the article it was just too good a pitch not to swing at.

  167. 167.

    Dev Null

    @cain: Ran across an article today that ICE is setting up a denaturalization center to deal with naturalized citizens whose applications are now deemed flawed.

    So it’s not prospective, it’s happening. The article (sorry, no link) cited a guy who has been a naturalized citizen for decades. His application was a mess, unclear why, but IIRC his citizenship was revoked.

    Rare, the article says, but precedent exists.

  168. 168.

    Chet Murthy

    @Ruckus:

    Not trying to argue here but to ask, did Hitler have people seeking asylum trying to cross into Germany in numbers every day? It’s not the same situation so the nazi’s solutions are not on the same timeline.

    That’s a fair question, and I’ve read enough of your comments that I take seriously what you write no matter what. And Adam could be right, that the Trumpists aren’t as far along as the Nazis were in, say, late 1933. But I’d argue that the place of the Jews (then) is taken by (esp. hispanic & muslim) immigrants today. The same “othering” [I think somebody posted about Der Giftpilz (German for “Poisonous Mushroom”), a children’s book about the (hated, hideous, evil) Jews] that was done to the Jews, is being done to these classes today. So looking in that dimension, the Trumpists are a bit further along than the Nazis were in 1933 — there were no camps for Jews in 1933, after all. I could be wrong (and it could have been a little earlier) but the first Jews were sent to camps after Kristallnacht (9-10 Nov 1938).

    Now, Adam’s right, that by then the Nazis really had things under tight control — there was no opposition whatsoever. So in that sense, things are NOT as far along this time around. But we really don’t know what’s going to happen, do we? Sure, if Mueller comes thru, if we win back at least a house of Congress, maybe things will just trundle along at this level of awfulness. But as “Dev Null” notes, if not, things could degenerate quickly.

    It all depends on which dimensions you’re measuring. And these camps, for me, are pretty horrible. Worse than what the Nazis were doing in 1933. At least, to me.

  171. 171.

    MikeBoyScout

    “Anyone associated with this atrocity should be afraid to show their faces in public. Forever.”

    This is an effective and achievable approach.
    No really, this an effective and achievable approach.

    They’ve tried it with granite countertops.
    You don’t think we can do it for international crimes against humanity?

    Which side are you on boys?
    Which side are you on?

  172. 172.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Dev Null: There is an existing office that handles these. Usually a couple of hundred a year tops. Where evidence comes out in a divorce that the marriage was arranged solely to get a green card and then citizenship. Or someone lied about connections to violent extremist organizations in their applications that came to light later. Have evidence that the naturalized citizen hid that one is a NAZI or affiliated with a NAZI legacy or neo-NAZI organization or movement. Things like that.

    What’s funny about this is that technically Seb Gorka’s and Walid Phares’, both former foreign policy advisors to the President, should have their citizenship yanked as a result. Seb because of his membership in Vitenzi Rend and Walid because he was one of the senior planners and strategists of the Christian militia in Lebanon that was responsible for the Sabra and Shattila massacres.

  173. 173.

    dww44

    @Adam L Silverman: He annoys me as well. Always has and probably always will. I stop by though, cause I like some of the pundits, especially these days, Jeffrey Toobin. And John Dean.

  174. 174.

    Dev Null

    @Chet Murthy: What’s the line? “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme”, I think is how it goes.

    Too many differences to forecast events with any confidence.

    In 1933 Hitler was still to some degree constrained by Hindenburg. Трамп answers to no one (well, except possibly Putin.)

    OTOH, 2018 America is a much more mature democratic republic than 1930 Germany, blah blah blah.

    And Hitler was way more focused and energetic … and competent … than Трамп is. And smarter.

    You pays your money and you takes your chances… as you say, you take out an insurance policy.

  176. 176.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Chet Murthy: At this point we use the NAZIs as a warning sign. We look to what happened for guideposts of what do these warning signs may mean. There are a lot of differences, for as bad as things have been over the past week to ten days, between what is happening right now and what the NAZIs had pulled off by the mid 30s. And a lot of those differences are positive ones. The inability to cow the media, despite having pet media in Fox and Breitbart and the Federalist and right wing talk radio, the inability to prevent American elected officials from the opposition party from traveling and making a huge stink over what is going on. The inability to actually prevent the majority of Americans who don’t agree with what is going on from mobilizing to push back on it. They can’t stop the signal on the Internet either. They haven’t moved to disarm anyone from the identified out groups of undesirables. They haven’t closed the schools. Or mandated the schools teach a specific curriculum written by Stephen Miller and his merry band of misfits on the White House Domestic Policy Council. They haven’t shut down the courts. And they haven’t instituted martial law. And to be honest the President, for all that he thinks being president means being king or emperor, won’t do that. Because to be perfectly honest he doesn’t have the ability to pull it off. Even judges appointed by Reagan, Bush 41, and/or Bush 43 won’t go along. I’m not even sure the couple of dozen Federalist Society test tube baby judges McConnell’s rammed through so far would. At least 1/2 the states wouldn’t allow their National Guard to be federalized. A lot of municipalities, including the largest ones, wouldn’t allow their police forces to be impressed into service. And in places with sheriffs that do more than provide municipal building security, bailiffs, and run the jails, any sheriff that wanted to go along in these larger municipalities would be checked by the chiefs of police who aren’t elected and, by and large, aren’t wingnuts as they answer to the mayor and city executive and city council. And I don’t see the Joint Chiefs and the general officers/flag officers of each Service allowing the military to be subverted, mobilized, and directed against Americans expressing their 1st Amendment rights no matter how politically conservative they might be in their private lives.

    Are the President, AG Sessions, Secretary Nielsen, Acting Director Homan, Stephen Miller, the evening chorus on Fox News, as well as the morning crew of a Blonde with Two Boobs on a Sofa, and the radio talkers approaching NAZI adjacent? Yes. Is the GOP majority Congress supine? Yes.

    Again: the 3 meter targets are pushing back on this and the attempt to resurrect Graham-Cassidy and the 10 meter target is the midterms. If the first week of November ends and there is still a GOP majority in both chambers, then we will have crossed a very, very dangerous line. But let’s not borrow trouble we don’t need to deal with yet.

  177. 177.

    ruemara

    @Omnes Omnibus: Omnes, sometimes you are very, very white, male and removed from consequences. There’s nothing he said that isn’t wrong just because it hasn’t started yet.

  178. 178.

    Ruckus

    @Chet Murthy:
    There is no denying that this is fucking horrible shit. But I’ve seen the pictures of people in those camps, starved for years, till they couldn’t work or died. Men who had been fighting wars and become as hardened as it’s possible to be absolutely sick because of what they found. I am absolutely not defending these fucking assholes, may they all find comfort in an open grave with all of their best friends, but this isn’t that. Yet. There are no ovens, that we know of, although southern TX in the summer is fucking nice. We have to find a way to stop this long before it gets to anywhere close to what Hitler did. And these are kids. Stolen from their usually one parent, most often the mother. This is bad fucking juju. In my decades I’m sure this is by far the worst thing. Hell I’d bet there have been dictators who aren’t this fucked up. Of course I can’t name any right now.
    And given what you’ve said about yourself and what others have said, if it was me, I’d be worried. I’m not in your position, and I’m worried. Ten yrs ago I was think how nice retirement would be. Now? I have no idea if tomorrow is worth getting up for. It is worth fighting for, I do know that. And there are many ways to fight, never forget that, they aren’t all physical/illegal.

  179. 179.

    Adam L Silverman

    @ruemara: Despite what Bob Putnam thinks, American are not and have never been joiners unless forced to be by major societal upheavals.

  180. 180.

    Dev Null

    @Adam L Silverman: Hunh, didn’t realize there were that many cases.

    Ah. Here is the article – by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker.

    Looks like it’s USCIS, not ICE; and it’s a task force to facilitate denaturalization, not a new office (although I remember “new office” so clearly that perhaps there’s another article…)

    Anyway, money quote from her very short essay:

    Historically, denaturalization has been an exceedingly rare occurrence, for good reason: by the time a person is naturalized, she has lived in this country for a number of years and has passed the hurdles of obtaining entry, legal permanent residency, and, finally, citizenship. The conceit of naturalization is that it makes an immigrant not only equal to natural-born citizens but indistinguishable from them. So denaturalization, much like the process of stripping a natural-born American of citizenship, has been an extraordinary procedure reserved for very serious cases, mostly those of war criminals.

    Earlier this year, I wrote about a very different case, that of a forty-three-year-old man named Baljinder Singh, who was denaturalized after living in this country for twenty-six years. Singh was not a war criminal, or any other kind of criminal, but his immigration process had been a mess, and may have involved the intentional fudging of his first name. What was exceptional about Singh, though, was that he was ordinary, both as a one-time asylum seeker and as a resident of New Jersey. But he was clearly no ordinary citizen, for no one would call into question an ordinary, native-born citizen’s right to reside permanently in the United States, or to work, vote, and receive benefits. In effect, Singh’s naturalization was undone long before he was actually denaturalized.

    […]

    Question 26 on the green-card application, for example, reads, “Have you EVER committed a crime of any kind (even if you were not arrested, cited, charged with, or tried for that crime)?” (Emphasis in the original.) The question does not specify whether it refers to a crime under current U.S. law or the laws of the country in which the crime might have been committed. In the Soviet Union of my youth, it was illegal to possess foreign currency or to spend the night anywhere you were not registered to live. In more than seventy countries, same-sex sexual activity is still illegal. On closer inspection, just about every naturalized citizen might look like an outlaw, or a liar.

    I don’t know whether or not she’s right to be concerned, but …

    … I don’t see any reason to assume good faith on the part of the task force or the Administration. Several sources are reporting (e.g. the Atlantic) that Трамп and Miller plan to “heighten the contradictions” with ever harsher immigration regulations, on the grounds that this will get the base to the polls in the midterms. (I think they’re wrong about this, but we will find out.)

  183. 183.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Dev Null: She’s right to be concerned. What they’ve done is plussed up the staff and prioritized this office’s mission. This is a Stephen Miller Domestic Policy Council driven initiative. Prior to this this office, which often worked closely with the NAZI hunters and Special Envoy for Anti-Semitism and Extremism at State (the former of which is largely defunct as they and time put themselves out of work and the latter was shuttered by the President via Tillerson’s reorg of the State Department), was largely looking for NAZIs and other WW II fascists and war criminals who had lied to get in. Or equivalents from the Khmer Rouge who had remade themselves as refugees in order to flee to the US and start over. And, of course, a few egregious cases of sham marriages that came to light in the divorces.

    What is being done now is a small scale weaponization of the office and its mission. Whether that is to test the waters or just a slow roll out or just a slight extension and nothing more is still unclear. Given who we’re dealing with, my guess is that it is more likely a testing of waters and slow rollout.

  184. 184.

    Ruckus

    @Adam L Silverman:
    I think there are some on your lists who would go along. I’m not sure they’d get enough or reliable pushback. But I suspect large swaths of the country would not go along. I’ve been out of the military long enough not to know how it’s changed or if it really has but I have no doubt that some would go along. I do think that enough would not that while it would be bad it wouldn’t be near as bad as it’s possible to be. I’m white as you can imagine and I live in blue CA and I still don’t trust the cops. Because I just don’t know what they would do. I’d hope the right thing but still. And the shitgibbon? I trust him to make the stupidest and worst possible decision no matter what. But one that takes stones to stand up and take responsibility for? No, he has to hide behind his tiny dick and all the dicks he’s found to work for him, he’s too chickenshit to stand on his own.

  186. 186.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Dev Null: I know who Loomis is. We’ve even corresponded occasionally. His stuff on labor history is excellent.

  187. 187.

    Dev Null

    @Adam L Silverman: Responding out of order, sorry.

    Mostly in agreement with this. In addition to the very different social / economic situations, the American federal system is way stronger than 1933 Germany’s federal system. I don’t remember dates, but the Social Democrats held Prussia … yet Hitler was able to depose the elected (SD) Prussian government and install Nazi flunkies. I can’t see how that would happen here&now.

    OTOH … how many votes did active Russian interference sway in 2016? Would the supine Republican Party really do anything to keep Трамп from incremental encroachments on congressional power? Really? When will this start?

    Assuming Republicans hold the Senate, as currently seems likely, Трамп will continue to send incompetent / unqualified / bigoted judicial nominees to the Senate … and they will be confirmed. If a SCOTUS justice dies or retires, Трамп will put another Gorsuch onto SCOTUS.

    I’m not worried about “one fell swoop” Nazi-fication; you’re right, that won’t happen. That said, I am much less confident about gradual Nazi-fication.

    We need Mueller to come through with dirt not just on Трамп, but with dirt on the NRA and/or upper echelons of the GOP. And we also need Dems to take the House.

  188. 188.

    Suzanne

    @Lalophobia: I do not believe in the use of capital punishment, ever. Even for these people.

    But I definitely understand why others feel differently, at times.

  189. 189.

    Dev Null

    @Adam L Silverman:

    What is being done now is a small scale weaponization of the office and its mission. Whether that is to test the waters or just a slow roll out or just a slight extension and nothing more is still unclear. Given who we’re dealing with, my guess is that it is more likely a testing of waters and slow rollout.

    This is the sort of thing I had in mind when I wrote “incremental encroachments”, although in this case it’s an encroachment on norms rather than on congressional powers.

    This particular example is one reason I think cain and Chet Murthy are right to be concerned.

    Not at how things are, or even how they will be next January … but at how things will be if the years 3 & 4 of Трамп’s term are as unfettered as his first two years.

    I hope we don’t have to find out.

  190. 190.

    MisterForkbeard

    @Adam L Silverman: I try to read his posts, but I almost never have anything useful to say about them. Invariably my comments would be “This is really interesting” or “I’m glad it’s turning out better than we thought.” or “My god, the Republicans are really being assholes about this”.

    I feel kind of bad about it, because his expertise is fairly mind-boggling and incredibly useful for following health care in this country.

  191. 191.

    Dev Null

    @Ruckus:

    I’ve been out of the military long enough not to know how it’s changed or if it really has but I have no doubt that some would go along.

    There’ve been concerns about Kluxers / neo-Nazis infiltrating both police and military, a result of lowered entry standards for recruits… the Iraq War created a need for many warm bodies, and there weren’t enough warm bodies that met existing standards … or so I’ve read, anyway. I see these articles – none recently, so no links – but I’ve never seen a follow-up that quantifies the extent of the infiltration.

    Perhaps it’s a concern; perhaps not. I don’t know.

    I’m white as you can imagine and I live in blue CA and I still don’t trust the cops. Because I just don’t know what they would do.

    I have a relative who until recently worked in a labor action group. As such, my relative wound up as an Occupy organizer. And then there are the DC inauguration protest trials, in which the prosecutors threw the book at protesters who should have known that the peeps they were marching with were violent. Novel legal theory, that. And there’s this. And a similar Berkeley case, but I can’t find a first tier link.

    In the first two cases, the good guys (by my standards) won, at significant cost in time and money. Dunno about Sacramento. The Berkeley 5 were acquitted this past Monday.

    Shorter: trusting cops can be a dicey proposition.

  192. 192.

    Dev Null

    @Adam L Silverman: Yeah, not surprised, but I’ve run into the occasional case where a front-pager at one blog doesn’t recognize the name of a front-pager at another blog.

    Not competent to judge Loomis’ labor history articles at LG&M myself, but they’re interesting and well-written.

    I’ve found LG&M’s recent (1 year?) transition to (mostly) glossing other blogs rather disappointing, but their commenters are as entertaining as Balloon Juice jackals.

  193. 193.

    NotMax

    @Adam L. Silverman

    Most of them are of some interest, but he tends to get deep into the weeds and are jargon heavy. I for one lack the pith helmet and electric torch to traverse the terrain, a situation I suspect applies to more than a few.

  197. 197.

    jonas

    @? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: 1. The Obama policy was not to separate children from parents *unless* there was clear evidence that leaving them with the guardians was placing them in danger (e.g. had a sex offender record) or the people with them were not legit relatives or guardians. So they were placed in foster care until someone could be found to take them. 2. In 2014 during the huge wave of unaccompanied minors from Central America crossing the border, ICE and HHS had to scramble to find shelter for the thousands of young people being brought in and some temporary shelters had to be used. As soon as they were able, the kids were placed with relatives or foster families (and many have since gone underground out of fear of being deported)

    That’s what the dishonest fucks at Fox and elsewhere are now putting up. These kids were NOT ripped from their parents hands and put in indefinite detention.

  198. 198.

    jonas

    @Dev Null: The only time I’ve heard of that happening is in the case of Nazi war criminals who lied about their wartime record to enter the US after WWII. John Demanjuk comes to mind.

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