Seemed like a good idea at the time.

tami-taylors-hair: Good morning! The Supreme Court ruled that its constitutional for crisis...

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 14:07:50 -0100

Good morning! The Supreme Court ruled that its constitutional for crisis pregnancy centers to lie to women, and for Donald Trump to have a Muslim ban. Both were 5-4 decisions.

But remember, voting doesn’t matter.

Me: (cozies into bed at a very reasonable hour, actually excited to get up early to go for a run)My...

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 02:31:00 -0100

Me: (cozies into bed at a very reasonable hour, actually excited to get up early to go for a run)

My brain: Psst. PSSSST. Hey. Hey. Hey. HEY. Oh my god hey.

I just held the door open for our VP of Operations and when he said “How are you?” I just...

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 19:39:57 -0100

I just held the door open for our VP of Operations and when he said “How are you?” I just responded “Sure!” because my brain was already expecting him to say “Thanks” first and so then I was like “Uhhh good!”

that thing of when you scour through your inbox and archives, with rising panic, sure that you...

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 18:41:43 -0100

that thing of when you scour through your inbox and archives, with rising panic, sure that you forgot to send an email that you should have sent nearly 3 months ago, because someone has sent a frazzled email asking about information that was contained in said email, and then you finally find that email, which you did in fact send.

thejunesky: tha–snazzle: bg5000: Oh my god I had no idea there...

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 13:32:03 -0100

thejunesky:

tha–snazzle:

bg5000:

Oh my god I had no idea there was a longer version of this. This is the greatest video on the internet. Cc @tha–snazzle

thought about this all day basically

the stilts made me laugh until my jaw hurt

Trump stokes immigration chaos with call for summary deportations

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 13:26:06 -0100

Trump stokes immigration chaos with call for summary deportations:

aka14kgold:

I know I’ve said it before, but y’all, I am so thankful for the Guardian writers at times like these:

Donald Trump called on Sunday for the US to abandon its judicial system and summarily deport people who enter the country.

The president attacked the rule of law amid sustained criticism of his administration’s handling of immigration at the southern border.

“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came,” Trump said in a tweet, while being driven to his golf course in Virginia.

The statement amounted to a proposal for the suspension of law by the country’s chief law enforcement officer. […]

The president continued to use the language of the far-right to describe immigrants on Sunday […].

Having created the child separation crisis with a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, Trump falsely said his administration was merely following a law Democrats in Congress needed to help to change. After saying he could not stop the policy by executive order, he then stopped the policy with an executive order, confirming that he had been lying. […]

Photo

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:10:05 -0100

brainstatic: Oh man, the All Lives Matter movement is going to...

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 22:50:13 -0100

brainstatic:

Oh man, the All Lives Matter movement is going to explode when they hear this.

topherchris:Register: turbovote.orgCheck your...

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 19:50:30 -0100

topherchris:

Register: turbovote.org
Check your registration: headcount.org/verify-voter-registration/
More info: usa.gov/voting

oh noooo

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 18:42:31 -0100

My work friend just gave me my new phrase/term to hate: “double-click”. As in, let’s talk more about a topic. As in, “Interesting idea, let’s double-click on that.”

marauders4evr: Listen I know that it’s the 2018-way to immediately compare every single American...

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 15:02:10 -0100

marauders4evr:

Listen I know that it’s the 2018-way to immediately compare every single American government corruption to the Nazis but uh, you actually don’t need to do an international comparison when trying to show the horrors of separating children from their families and putting them in “camps”.

Turns out America did that too:

(The above are pictures from Japanese Internment Camps in WWII, located right here in America. More info on the subject: x )

In fact, they did it more than once:

(The above are pictures of German-Americans who were also detained in American states. More info: x )

In fact, they did it a lot:

(The above are photos from the American Native-American “boarding schools” which separated Native American children from their families so that they could be brainwashed into embracing the white “Christian” American way. More info: x )

So when you see these appalling images in the news:

don’t start comparing America to WWII Germany.

Start comparing America to America.

Because we’ve always done this and, as long as we can get away with it, we always will.

I know I said I’d stop this. But.

Fri, 22 Jun 2018 02:01:09 -0100

I know I said I’d stop this. But.

is this? a thing that people think is correct?

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 20:16:40 -0100

I have several colleagues who don’t double-return between their paragraphs in emails. I know in Word you can set paragraph spacing so that you just have to return once, but I don’t think you can do that in Outlook?? Or is that what they think they’re doing but because that’s not how MY Outlook is set up, it doesn’t show up correctly?

Order To Stop Separating Families At The Border Is A Temporary Fix At Most

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 02:06:49 -0100

Order To Stop Separating Families At The Border Is A Temporary Fix At Most:

parentheticalaside:

“Republican Rep. Raúl Labrador told BuzzFeed News that at a meeting with members on Wednesday, Nielsen said the administration recognized that detaining families together now would violate the Flores settlement agreement, and that the Justice Department’s request to change the agreement would fail. But Nielsen said the goal of the order was to buy Congress time to pass legislation.”

This article is a pretty good explanation of the ass-covering executive order signed today that basically doesn’t fix anything (now they want to detain families indefinitely).

An immigration lawyer friend also explained this in so many words - that this was always a trap.

Photo

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 02:04:46 -0100

parentheticalaside: The news is starting to come out that Trump may sign an order today to end the...

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 16:19:21 -0100

parentheticalaside:

The news is starting to come out that Trump may sign an order today to end the family separations that he started.

Keep in mind that that does nothing to save the children who were already separated, who number in the thousands, and who were already harmed by this policy. Remember them.

The Trump administration hates brown and black people. Public outcry on stomach-turning policies is good, but it will not change the fundamental racism and xenophobia that guides Trump and his people. Your vote is what stops them.

Photo

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 23:39:00 -0100

Because I deeply, truly, profoundly resented having to do it.

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 19:10:28 -0100

….probably not a good answer to the question “why did this piece of work take you so long”

active-rva: Happy Juneteenth! This holiday marks the end of the...

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 17:53:05 -0100

active-rva:

Happy Juneteenth! This holiday marks the end of the official institution of slavery in the United States, and was historically widely celebrated by black Americans. The photo above is of a 1905 celebration in Richmond, Virginia.

On this day in 1865, enslaved people in Texas were informed of their freedom, two years following the Emancipation Proclamation. Also on this day, the Civil Rights Act of 1963 was passed, after an 83 day filibuster in the US Senate. This is the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth, meaning that official chattel slavery ended in the United States only six generations ago.

This is an important day to remember and honor all those who struggled against this titanic evil- those whose names we know, and the countless others whose resistance was not recorded and lost to history.

Border Separation Myths

Tue, 19 Jun 2018 16:04:12 -0100

sirfrogsworth:

Dr. Michelle Martin is a researcher and professor at California State University, Fullerton. She has a Masters of Social Work, Masters in Global Policy, and a Ph.D. in Peace Studies (Political Science). She teaches Social Welfare Policy in the Master of Social Work program.

The following is her write-up on the separation of families at the border. She dispells a lot of common myths going around and provides sources which are linked. This might be helpful in your personal debates and discussions.

———————————————-

There is so much misinformation out there about the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy that requires criminal prosecution, which then warrants the separating of parents and children at the southern border. Before responding to a post defending this policy, please do your research…As a professor at a local Cal State, I research and write about these issues, so here, I wrote the following to make it easier for you:

Myth: This is not a new policy and was practiced under Obama and Clinton.

FALSE. The policy to separate parents and children is new and was instituted on 4/6/2018. It was the “brainchild” of John Kelly and Stephen Miller to serve as a deterrent for undocumented immigration, and some allege to be used as a bargaining chip. The policy was approved by Trump, and adopted by Sessions. Prior administrations detained migrant families, but didn’t have a practice of forcibly separating parents from their children unless the adults were deemed unfit.

[ source ]

Myth: This is the only way to deter undocumented immigration.

FALSE. Annual trends show that arrests for undocumented entry are at a 46 year low, and undocumented crossings dropped in 2007, with a net loss (more people leaving than arriving). Deportations have increased steadily though (spiking in 1996 and more recently), because several laws that were passed since 1996 have made it more difficult to gain legal status for people already here, and thus increased their deportations (I address this later under the myth that it’s the Democrats’ fault). What we mostly have now are people crossing the border illegally because they’ve already been hired by a US company, or because they are seeking political asylum. Economic migrants come to this country because our country has kept the demand going. But again, many of these people impacted by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy appear to be political asylum-seekers.

[ source ]

Myth: Most of the people coming across the border are just trying to take advantage of our country by taking our jobs.

FALSE. Most of the parents who have been impacted by Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy have presented themselves as political asylum-seekers at a U.S. port-of-entry, from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Rather than processing their claims, according to witness accounts, it appears as though they have been taken into custody on the spot and had their children ripped from their arms. The ACLU alleges that this practice violates the US Asylum Act, and the UN asserts that it violates the UN Treaty on the State of Refugees, one of the few treaties the US has ratified. The ACLU asserts that this policy is an illegal act on the part of the United States government, not to mention morally and ethically reprehensible.

[ source ]

Myth: We’re a country that respects the Rule of Law, and if people break the law, this is what they get.

FALSE. We are a country that has an above-ground system of immigration and an underground system. Our government (under both parties) has always been aware that US companies recruit workers in the poorest parts of Mexico for cheap labor, and ICE (and its predecessor INS) has looked the other way because this underground economy benefits our country to the tune of billions of dollars annually. Thus, even though many of the people crossing the border now are asylum-seekers, those who are economic migrants (migrant workers) likely have been recruited here to do jobs Americans will not do.

[ source ]

Myth: The children have to be separated from their parents because the parents must be arrested and it would be cruel to put children in jail with their parents.

FALSE. First, in the case of economic migrants crossing the border illegally, criminal prosecution has not been the legal norm, and families have historically been kept together at all cost. Also, crossing the border without documentation is typically a misdemeanor not requiring arrest, but rather has been handled in a civil proceeding. Additionally, parents who have been detained have historically been detained with their children in ICE “family residential centers,” again, for civil processing. The Trump administration’s shift in policy is for political purposes only, not legal ones.

See page 18: [ source ]

Myth: We have rampant fraud in our asylum process, the proof of which is the significant increase we have in the number of people applying for asylum.

FALSE. The increase in asylum seekers is a direct result of the increase in civil conflict and violence across the globe. While some people may believe that we shouldn’t allow any refugees into our country because “it’s not our problem,” neither our current asylum law, nor our ideological foundation as a country support such an isolationist approach. There is very little evidence to support Sessions’ claim that abuse of our asylum-seeking policies is rampant. Also, what Sessions failed to mention is that the majority of asylum seekers are from China, not South of the border.

Here is a very fair and balanced assessment of his statements: [ source ]

Myth: The Democrats caused this, “it’s their law.“

FALSE. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats caused this, the Trump administration did (although the Republicans could fix this today, and have refused). I believe what this myth refers to is the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which were both passed under Clinton in 1996. These laws essentially made unauthorized entry into the US a crime (typically a misdemeanor for first-time offenders), but under both Republicans and Democrats, these cases were handled through civil deportation proceedings, not a criminal proceeding, which did not require separation. And again, even in cases where detainment was required, families were always kept together in family residential centers, unless the parents were deemed unfit (as mentioned above). Thus, Trump’s assertion that he hates this policy but has no choice but to separate the parents from their children, because the Democrats “gave us this law” is false and nothing more than propaganda designed to compel negotiation on bad policy.

[ source ]

Myth: The parents and children will be reunited shortly, once the parents’ court cases are finalized.

FALSE. Criminal court is a vastly different beast than civil court proceedings. Also, the children are being processed as unaccompanied minors (“unaccompanied alien children”), which typically means they are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). Under normal circumstances when a child enters the country without his or her parent, ORR attempts to locate a family member within a few weeks, and the child is then released to a family member, or if a family member cannot be located, the child is placed in a residential center (anywhere in the country), or in some cases, foster care. Prior to Trump’s new policy, ORR was operating at 95% capacity, and they simply cannot effectively manage the influx of 2000+ children, some as young as 4 months old. Also, keep in mind, these are not unaccompanied minor children, they have parents. There is great legal ambiguity on how and even whether the parents will get their children back because we are in uncharted territory right now. According to the ACLU lawsuit (see below), there is currently no easy vehicle for reuniting parents with their children. Additionally, according to a May 2018 report, numerous cases of verbal, physical and sexual abuse were found to have occurred in these residential centers.

[ source ]

Myth: This policy is legal.

LIKELY FALSE. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on 5/6/18, and a recent court ruling denied the government’s motion to dismiss the suit. The judge deciding the case stated that the Trump Administration’s policy is “brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency.” The case is moving forward because it was deemed to have legal merit.

[ source ]

Here is Michelle’s original Facebook post.

Michelle’s Social Media [ facebook | twitter ]