Early on in Trump's gov't shutdown -- biggest gov't shutdown ever! Nobody's ever had a gov't shutdown that came anywhere close! And the entire gov't shutdown belonged entirely to Trump, who very personally owned it, nobody ever personally owned a gov't shutdown like Trump did! -- I was made aware of the far greater effects on contract workers and I tried to make my acquaintances aware of it as well.
Government employees (GS-n ratings) at least had some promise of eventually getting back-pay at the end of the dark tunnel, though as it ended up going down there was the additional question of whether they would be able to survive to eventually make it out of that dark tunnel.
But the government also hires contractors for many services. To my knowledge, those contractors had no guarantee of receiving any back-pay -- any compensation for government shutdowns would have had to have been included in their contracts; having failed to become a SUPPO, I have no experience in those matters. A lot of janitors/custodians are contractor employed. When I was in the war (USAF-speak for "when I was serving in the US Air Force"), the mess halls were run by contractors. So during Trump's government shutdown, what did those mess hall contractors do? I have to assume that our troops were able to have something to eat, though I have no idea how.
I also remember my active duty service, 1976-1982. Somewhen in that time period, we had the threat of a government shutdown which either did not happen or only lasted a few days at most. The USAF made sure to communicate to us that their failure to pay us did not constitute breach of contract, so we still had to report for duty, even for non-pay (ironically, my last decade in the Navy Reserve was in the Voluntary Training Unit (VTU), a non-pay status, but we still accrued retirement points, which I exploited to the max).
So then the low-level government workers, those working for contractors, all got screwed over by Trump's government shutdown.
Deutsche Bank has to turn those over because Congress subpoenaed them, a power that Congress was given in the US Constitution.
Congress' subpoena power is another of its implied powers, repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court.
As a 35-year military veteran (6 years active, 29 reserve), I have been through this evolution so many times.
The very first lecture in every single NCO Leadership, CPO Indoctrination course was a grand tour through the entire legal justification for the authority of every non-commissioned officer (NCO) and petty officer (PO) and chief petty officer (CPO) to exercise command over subordinates.
We always started with the US Constitution. From that, we had laws based on the Constitution. From those laws and other laws derived from the Constitution, etc, we end up with our authority as NCOs or POs to exercise our leadership authority.
All other members of the government know what their Constitutional powers are derived from. Except for Trump, who has absolutely no clue.
Besides, the Russian interference didn't do anything for the Trump election anyway.
Trump tweeted an admission:
quote:Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax...And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,.....
quote:The president’s case for his own defense, however, was marred by his own contradictory statements on Thursday as he swung back and forth in his assessment of Russia’s actions during the 2016 presidential election.
“I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter before leaving the White House in the morning. While denying any involvement, the president’s comment was an acknowledgment that Moscow not only intervened in the campaign but also did so for the express purpose of helping elect him ” the consensus conclusion of the nation’s intelligence agencies.
But barely a half-hour later, Mr. Trump emerged on the South Lawn and took it back. “No, Russia did not help me get elected,” he told reporters as he prepared to depart for Colorado Springs. “You know who got me elected? I got me elected. Russia didn’t help me at all. Russia, if anything, I think, helped the other side.”
In fact, even President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has said publicly that he favored Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016, although he has denied orchestrating an influence campaign on behalf of the Republican candidate.
Plus, the Mueller Report did indeed find Russian interference in the 2016 election; Mueller issued many indictments for that. Even Trump admitted it in that tweet. It happened, no matter what the Fake News Network and Fakes & Friends tell you.
As for Mitch McConnell, he's back in the arch-obstructionist role that he had played for the past decade. Republicans keep trying to mischaracterize the Democratic House as not being able to do its legislative job, but the fact is that the House has passed several good bills which McConnell arbitrarily refuses to even allow the Senate to look at. That includes a voting-rights bill and another bill which explicitly requires a campaign to report to the FBI contacts from a foreign government -- you know, exactly what Trump's campaign failed to do in their hundred or so instances of collusion with Russia listed in the Mueller Report.
This particular obstruction of McConnell, blocking bills to protect our elections from foreign interference, could be for a few different reasons. The GOP already realizes that it has to lie, cheat, and steal in order to win elections and that really shows. One reason could be that the GOP realizes that it has to depend on that foreign interference, so they don't want to hamper that interference. Those bills might also block their own domestic election fraud efforts, so they cannot let that happen. Remember McConnell's reaction to HR 1, which would ensure that citizens with the right to vote could exercise that right: "This is a power grab!" Which it would appear to be for the GOP whose own hold on power depends almost entirely on keeping citizens from voting.
Of course, casting these pearls before you will not benefit you at all -- you are beyond redemption. Rather they are for everyone else.
Re: You really want me to take such fake news seriously?
All that is probably because of the failure of Congress to appropriate the necessary funds to improve facilities. Why isn't that mentioned?
These are prisons for profit. You know, the kind of travesty that the Obama administration tried to get rid of, but Trump brought back with a vengence.
They are being paid more than $700 per day per child. Private enterprise who's getting paid no matter what (even though it violates Trump's Prime Directive of never paying his bills). Yet giving each child a toothbrush or decent meals each day is far too much to expect of these prison capitalists who are too busy enriching themselves through human misery (rake in obscene amounts of profit or provide actual essential services? Easy choice: profits, profits above all).
BTW, US citizens have been caught up in these raids. There's the case I heard of on the radio (sorry, when I'm driving I can't write down names) of a young US citizen in Texas carrying with him all the documentation he should have ever needed to prove his citizenship (something that brown people in Texas routinely have to do in response to Trump's abuse of ICE), yet he still ended up in ICE custody for months. Just trying to communicate with the outside world was virtually impossible. He was a skinny kid to begin with, yet he still managed to lose 28 pounds while in custody.
Also, there is no mention of the fact that there are organizations putting together these gigantic caravans to come here and overwhelm our facilities, and they must have lots of money for that purpose since they have to sustain the people on the trek here.
Such as who. Who are these mysterious organizations? And just who are funding them? The "Jews wanting to replace us"?
Walk a mile in their shoes (Wow! What a novel and revolutionary idea for a Christian to even begin to consider!). You need to flee your own home country because of the intolerable level of violence that virtually guarantees the deaths of your children (BTW, since you obviously don't understand such human constructs, nothing surpasses a parent's concern for the welfare of his/her child) and the inability to make a living (I've been hearing reports of crop failures due to climate change causing food shortages). Trekking that far (far more than a thousand miles) by foot is extremely dangerous when done alone, where you find yourself and your children at the mercy of all kinds of thugs and far worse.
What is the solution? Safety in numbers; make the journey with others. Around some kind of starting area, gather with others thinking the same thing as you and you travel together as a group, everybody looking out for each other. Why would any of them seek to travel in a large group? Are you really unable to answer that question (knowing that your right-wingnut commentators upon whom you depend of all your thinking would never have discussed the question themselves)?
You say there are organizations putting all that together? Who are they?Name them! Are they supposed to be the unnamed Jews whom the neo-Nazis accuse of wanting to replace us? Or are they just shadows that your right-wingnut handlers are scaring you with? Or both?
And I keep hearing how conditions under Obama were just as bad. Why isn't that mentioned?
Yes, Obama did deport a lot of people. Throughout the US justice system, when a parent is jailed and there is no relative to take the child in, that child goes to Child and family services, not into a lockup of his own. Plus, that child is tracked so that reuniting that child with the parent is still possible.
This information is presented as simple fact but there are facts behind the facts that aren't getting included, which of course makes it look like Trump and his people are evil, that's the whole point, and of course to railroad the nation into accepting a political position most oppose.
...
And I keep hearing how conditions under Obama were just as bad. Why isn't that mentioned? Oh never mind I know why.
Well, what Trump has been doing is evil.
There are two federal statutes governing illegal entry into this country: the first time is a misdemeanor and the subsequent times are a felony. You normally don't jail somebody for a misdemeanor, but the Trump Administration (under the guidance of resident anti-immigrant white-supremacist Stephen Miller) has made that misdemeanor subject to incarceration and hence to separating children from their families. That is a Trump move.
As I learned in the military, every evolution requires planning -- from Senior Chief Malcolm Nance we get Nance's Law: "Coincidence takes a lot of planning." Under Trump, there was no plan in place for eventually reuniting the families they were separating. None whatsoever. Again, having been military for so long (35 years), my mind boggles at the sheer level of incompetence and lack of any kind of planning displayed by the Trump Administration here. Surely there must have been some veterans in their ranks who had some clue as to how to conduct this fuster-cluck Trump evolution in an even half-way proper manner. Sadly not, which given the qualities that veterans bring to their civilian jobs, could only have been because they were overridden by their superiors who were busy sucking up to the Trump Administration (the brown nose knows).
So then, what were the actual Obama conditions? What are the actual Trump conditions? Why don't you ever hear them mentioned? Oh never mind I know why. If your right wingnut handlers ever did that, then you might actually start to think and they cannot allow that to ever happen.
Everything about this is political but it's not treated as political, it's just supposed to be taken it as simple fact, no context, no explanation.
Yet again what you had run away from earlier. Your opinions are formed by listening to your right-wingnut propagandists. Our opinions are formed not only from what our commentators say, but also what the actual facts are. You see (or should see), our commentators also display the simple direct facts in their presentations. Do yours? I didn't think so.
Re: You really want me to take such fake news seriously?
Believe it or not there is often more than one side to any such story.
There are at least three sides: your side, our side, and the facts.
SOP is to compare the different sides with the facts in order to see which side aligns more closely with the facts.
So what do the comparisons show here? It is our side that aligns with the facts, because we formed our side by observing the facts. Your side conflicts with the facts because it was crafted to deny and to lie about the facts.
You believe your version, I believe mine, until further notice, having no reason to believe otherwise yet.
Well, if you were to observe the facts, then you would be able to change your mind.
For example, do you still believe that the Mueller report exonerated Trump? You were fooled to believe that because that's the lie that Trump and your right-wing commentators kept telling you. We knew from the start that that was not true, because we actually read what was written both in the report itself and in the portion directly quoted by Barr in his four-page summary misrepresentation of the report. IOW, the facts.
Re: You really want me to take such fake news seriously?
DWise1 writes:
There's the case I heard of on the radio (sorry, when I'm driving I can't write down names) of a young US citizen in Texas carrying with him all the documentation he should have ever needed to prove his citizenship (something that brown people in Texas routinely have to do in response to Trump's abuse of ICE), yet he still ended up in ICE custody for months. Just trying to communicate with the outside world was virtually impossible. He was a skinny kid to begin with, yet he still managed to lose 28 pounds while in custody.
I have no reason to take your account as the truth, you know -- it doesn't read like anything more than gossipy opinion really.
Not gossipy opinion, but rather a true report. Facts are facts.
quote:Francisco Erwin Galicia, the 18-year-old Dallas-born U.S. citizen detained by border officials, is speaking out about the conditions inside the facility where he was wrongfully held for more than three week. Galicia said conditions were so bad, he considered self-deporting just to get out even though he has a birth certificate proving he's American-born.
During the 23 days he was in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, Galicia was not allowed to shower, he told The Dallas Morning News, which first reported his story.
The teen said he lost 26 pounds during his time in the immigrant detention center, and said officers didn't provide him with enough food. He was crammed into an overcrowded holding area with 60 other men. They slept on the floor with aluminum-foil blankets some even had to sleep in the bathroom area, he said.
Some of the men were very sick and were bitten by ticks, but were afraid to ask for a doctor because CBP officers told them their stay would start over if they did, Galicia said.
"It was inhumane how they treated us. It got to the point where I was ready to sign a deportation paper just to not be suffering there anymore. I just needed to get out of there," he told the newspaper. "It's one thing to see these conditions on TV and in the news. It's another to go through them."
Galicia's brother Marlon, who was born in Mexico and is not a U.S. citizen, decided to agree to deportation after two days in the facility.
The brothers were not allowed to make phone calls while being detained. Marlon was deported to Mexico, but Galicia stayed until he was moved into ICE custody, where he was finally allowed to call his mother.
His lawyer, Claudia Galan, brought necessary documentation, including his birth certificate, to border officials, but they continued to hold him. She told the newspaper it appears he was detained due to conflicting information on a visa his mother had used for him as a child. Finally, on Tuesday, Galan announced Galicia had been released.
Galicia spoke to The Dallas Morning News one day after his release. He said when he and his friends drove up to a CBP checkpoint in Falfurrias, Texas, he presented his Texas I.D., Social Security card and a wallet-sized birth certificate. The agents refused to believe he was a citizen and took him into custody.
"I told them we had rights and asked to make a phone call. But they told us, 'You don't have rights to anything'," Galicia told the paper.
Galicia, his brother and friends were on their way to a soccer scouting event at Ranger College when they were stopped by CBP. He was hoping to earn a scholarship. "We're supposed to graduate from high school next year, and we wanted to do something to secure our education," he said.
The teen's plans were derailed when he was wrongfully detained. "Powerless. That's how I felt. How with all this proof that I was giving them could they hold me?" he said.
The facts, Faith. The facts. We keep showing them to you and you keep ignoring them.
Re: You really want me to take such fake news seriously?
Weird. Of course it exonerated him. Barr's statement made that clear.
No, it did not. It explicitly stated that it did not exonerate Trump. Barr directly quoted from the report where it explicitly stated that it did not exonerate Trump.
How do we know this? Because we have read both the report and also Barr's "summary".
Why do you still now know this? Because you have not bothered to read either the report nor Barr's "summary" of it, nor even the sections copied directly from the report that we have posted here for you to be able to read. Instead, you have only listened to the lies told by Trump and by his enablers.
We are informed by directly examining the facts. You are misinformed by avoiding the facts and listening to the lies.
Re: Planned Parenthood Refuses Federal Funds over Abortion Restrictions
That's a great solution. The government shouldn't be funding abortions with money paid in by people who object to abortion as killing an innocent human being, but citizens should be free to donate to such killings to their heart's content.
That's a commonly expressed sentiment, but as JonF pointed out in Message 2680, money is "fungible" and once money raised for different purpose go into a common pot, then there is no longer any way to tell which money was raised for which purpose. IOW, there is no practical way to do what you wish.
The only way I can think of would be to maintain separate pots of money, each with money raised for different purposes. Anyone who has had to deal with retirement finances should know the cardinal rule always keeping your pre-tax and post-tax moneys separate: your 401(k) and IRAs are pre-tax and your regular savings is post-tax, so you cannot deposit your 401(k) into your savings account and then take it out to put it into an IRA because you have mixed your moneys together and no one can tell anymore which is which.
Another example of keep moneys from different sources for different purposes separate would be the payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. Those taxes are raised for those specific purposes and are used for those purposes. Any of those moneys left over after having paid all the benefits go into a special trust fund, a separate one for Social Security and another for Medicare, such that those funds can only be used to pay for the programs' benefits in the future.
The general fund is how it's done now, with all revenues going into a common pot where all the different moneys commingle and any trace of special purposes or restrictions are lost. Even if you were allowed to specify what you don't want your own tax dollars to be spent on, once it goes into that common pot there is no way to fulfill your wishes.
So, the only way I can think of for you to get your wish is for each and every item supported by government spending be given its own personal revenue source that can only be used for that specific purpose. Not only would that be an accounting and administrative nightmare, but required funding levels would have to be determined at the time that tax law is created. Underfunding would starve the programs, defeating their purpose. Overfunding would result in a localized surplus that cannot be used in any other manner, especially not be diverted to any underfunded program (since that would cause your filthy lucre to go to something you disapprove of -- remember that even though you approved of it going into that one pot, once there it commingled with the money of others who would approve of diverting this surplus going to that underfunded program that you disapprove of; IOW, we'd be back to the same old problem again). At least in our current system of a one-pot general fund (Social Security and Medicare still being kept separate) there is the ability to budget that general fund and adjust spending where it's needed, though at the expense of the purity of your own filthy lucre.
And as has been pointed out to you already, government money is not and cannot be used to fund abortions. By federal law. Been that way for years.
Percy's Message 2664 was a general reply and hence the start of this sub-topic. One of the links he presented was for making a donation to Planned Parenthood.
That's a great solution. The government shouldn't be funding abortions with money paid in by people who object to abortion as killing an innocent human being, but citizens should be free to donate to such killings to their heart's content.
It was to that message that kjsimons' Message 2666 reply read:
kjsimons writes:
Faith, are you totally ignorant of the fact that the government is already not paying for abortions. Planned Parenthood is objecting to the fact that they aren't even allowed to tell patients about where to get an abortion (non government paid) if they take any federal money. Please educate yourself about his and pretty much everything else.
It was also to that same message of yours that kjsimons had replied that I wrote my reply, Message 2698, which explored what it would take to implement your dreamed of system of cafeteria tax paying and why it is unfeasible.
Your reply to kjsimons was your even-tempered Message 2670:
Faith writes:
So where do they get their funding for abortions? I thought they were funded by the government. I'm very happy to hear it if they are not.
JonF replied to that message of yours with his Message 2676, which was a simple statement of fact:
JonF writes:
They fund abortions through donations.
Neither you nor anybody else replied to that message, so that ended that thread.
So the simple facts are that I replied to your reply to Percy, to which kjsimons also replied. I did not reply to your reply to kjsimons, which was surprisingly civil.
What do you say to kjsimons?
What could I possibly say except that he was right? Anybody who has been following this issue for any length of time would know that federal law forbids using federal funds for abortion.
So why didn't you know that? JonF in Message 2701 blames your sources and I have to agree with him there. The Fake News Network wants to keep you misinformed, iggnruant, scared, and angry, feeding your amygdala and starving your neo-cortex, in order to keep you under their control. You need to draw your news from actual sources.
For example, you should have learned about no federal funding for abortions when you read that New York Times article Percy bare-linked to: Planned Parenthood Refuses Federal Funds Over Abortion Restrictions. The main problem are new rules by the government to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship and to prevent the doctor from discussing all the medical options with their patients. However, when you read that article for yourself, towards the end you would have read (my emphasis added):
quote:Organizations receiving Title X funds will still be able to perform abortions but will have to do so in a separate facility from their other operations and adhere to the new requirement that they not refer patients to it. Clinics have been prohibited for years from using federal money to finance abortion services, except in cases of rape, incest or when the pregnancy would endanger the woman’s life. The new rule goes a step further by ordering them to keep separate books for their abortion operations. Those changes are expected to take effect in 2020.
Re: Planned Parenthood Refuses Federal Funds over Abortion Restrictions
Robert Reich is an economist served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. He was Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997. He was a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. He has been publishing a series of videos on YouTube, one of which seems to respond to this message.
Robert Reich: Where Your Tax Dollars Really Go:
It turns out the really big Republican bugaboos that they claim are dragging us down and therefore must be cut out entirely for us to survive only amount to a few percent each. 54% of federal spending, more than half, is on the military. My understanding is that most of that is for projects for military contractors. BTW, your example of that $200M drone is minor compared to all that spending.
And FWIW, calls to cut Social Security and Medicare in order to deal with the deficit is complete and utter bullshit! That is mandatory spending of special taxes levied for those very specific purposes -- they have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the deficit which is instead due to not taxing the rich.
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