This is the shameful, racist ad Trump and the Republicans have been disseminating. I have been saying this for years. Racial progress and regress is cyclical. Racists voted for this President. Racist support the Republicans in Congress who refuse to support DACA. Where is the outrage from middle America, from evangelicals? Franklin Graham expressed his support for Trump yesterday. These people are evil. Este es el anuncio vergonzoso y racista que Trump y los republicanos han estado diseminando. He estado diciendo esto por años. El progreso racial y la regresión son cíclicos. Los racistas votaron por este presidente. Los racistas apoyan a los republicanos en el Congreso que se niegan a apoyar a DACA. ¿Dónde está la indignación de la América central, de los evangélicos? Franklin Graham expresó su apoyo a Trump ayer. Estas personas son malvadas. - Complicit

The Shutdown Is About Who Gets to Be an American | The New Yorker

"Not many people wanted the government to shut down at midnight on Friday—surpassingly few Americans, according to polls, and not many more congressmen or senators. Still, no one could avert it. As negotiations progressed, morbidity set it. “They’re going to blame me no matter what,” the President told his advisers on Friday, according to Politico. Senator Brian Schatz, the Democrat of Hawaii, tweeted just after midnight, “No one is sure if they have leverage or are over a barrel. It’s as bad as it looks.” For two weeks, it had been clear that a resolution was unlikely to pass unless it resolved the status of the eight hundred thousand undocumented Americans brought here as children (the “Dreamers”) but the Republican Party kept watching the President to see if a deal was possible, and the President, conscious of his base, kept suggesting he was open to a compromise and then backing away. As the evening spooled on, the mood turned self-loathing. “This country was founded by geniuses,” the Louisiana Republican John Neely Kennedy said. “It’s being run by idiots.”

Yet our politics have been pointing toward the events of Friday evening for a very long time—not just since last Thursday, when the President rejected a proposed deal worked out by moderate senators of both parties, grumbling that it would invite in immigrants from “shithole countries.” And not just since September, when Congress passed the first of three consecutive continuing resolutions to fund the government in lieu of a full budget. Much of the intensity and the darkness of the 2016 Presidential campaign evolved from the challenge Trump and the Republicans raised to the basic matter of identity—of who counts as an American and under what terms, the central question regarding the Dreamers. The initial recriminations on Saturday morning focussed on contingencies: What if the President had better known his own mind? What if the Republican leadership in Congress had tolerated a short extension over the weekend? What if the summit between Trump and Schumer had included a second round of cheeseburgers, and not just one? But the real obstacle was deeper than tactics, talent, or personality. Neither party could set aside the Dreamer issue because it captures the essential argument of the Trump era, and on this the Republicans and Democrats do not agree.

For a time on Friday evening, the hopes for a compromise (and the hopes of the Dreamers) had rested in the bluff, enigmatic person of the South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who scurried back and forth between the offices of Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer. Reporters caught Graham in the hallway outside Schumer’s office around dinnertime and asked him what he was doing there. “Here for the food,” he said, crisply.

A week earlier, Graham and the Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin had taken a proposal for compromise to the Oval Office (the deal was permanent protection for the Dreamers in exchange for increased funding for border security) only to find that Trump had also invited some hard-liners: his own chief of staff, John Kelly, the Georgia Republican Senator David Perdue, and the ambitious Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. On Friday evening, Graham seemed to sense Cotton’s hand everywhere. “All I can say is we’re not going to end family immigration for daca—the Tom Cotton approach has no viability here,” Graham said. “He’s become the Steve King of the Senate”—a reference to the hard-line Iowa congressman, an immigration and racial demagogue. It’s still unclear exactly what happened, but Kelly, the chief of staff, may have mattered more. Schumer said that during a meeting in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon, he offered Trump funding for the border wall in exchange for permanent status for the Dreamers, and together they sketched out an outline. Afterward, according to Bloomberg News, Kelly called Schumer to say that the framework the two New Yorkers had worked out was “too liberal,” even with the Democrats’ “acquiescence” on the border. Trump himself, of course, may have decided yet again to appeal to his base.

The climate on the right had been sharpening for a few days. On Thursday evening, on Fox News, Tucker Carlson had assumed a look of urgent concern while his guest, the hard-right radio host Mark Steyn (an “actual thinker,” Carlson had noted in his introduction), warned against the “cultural transformation” that immigration would bring. “A majority of grade-school children in Arizona are now Hispanic,” Steyn warned. “The border has moved north,” he said, but the real line he was etching was an ethnic one, between Americans—Hispanics on one side, the rest on the other.

Ideas like this have circulated on the right for a long time. On Friday, the clip of the exchange between a racist radio host and his Fox News enabler circulated on the left. For liberals, much of the escalating menace of the past two years has followed the same line—the President’s insistence that America is less an idea than a specific heritage, that a judge of “Mexican” heritage is less than equal, that Haitian-Americans and African-Americans came from “shithole nations,” and that more Norwegian-Americans would be preferable. Yesterday, Schumer had more votes than he needed, and so four Democratic senators (all of them from states that had voted for Trump by large margins and three who have elections coming this year) voted for the House’s continuing resolution, which would restore health insurance but do nothing for the Dreamers. The rest of the caucus held together. Of course it did. To stand against an ethno-nationalist idea demands more from Democrats than simply calling the President a racist.

“Our country needs a good shutdown,” Trump had tweeted in May, “to fix mess!” It wasn’t clear then exactly what mess he meant—partisan intransigence, it seemed—or what tactical advantage he imagined. But in the shutdown debate his White House has had a clearer sense of the dividing lines. Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted that “lawful citizens” were being held hostage by Democratic demands on behalf of “unlawful immigrants.” On Saturday morning, Trump echoed Sanders, tweeting “Democrats are holding our Military hostage over their desire to have unchecked illegal immigration. Can’t let that happen!” Trump also tweeted, “#america first!” The question is, which #America?"



The Shutdown Is About Who Gets to Be an American | The New Yorker

Trump is a sick, dumb, inferior, White supremacist.

Trump launches new round of partisan attacks as government shutdown enters Day 2. "Trump praised Republicans for “fighting for our Military and Safety at the Border,” while he said Democrats “just want illegal immigrants to pour into our nation unchecked.”
http://wapo.st/2mXxJvr

Trump's 2018 Approval Ratings Show He’s The Most Unpopular President in History And Failing At His Job

"Asked to grade Trump's first year in office, more voters gave him an "F" than an "A" and "B" combined, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll published on Tuesday. Thirty-five percent of respondents said the president failed his first year in office while 34 percent gave him an "A" or "B." Meanwhile, 14 percent marked him a "C" and 11 percent graded his performance a "D."



The results were similar to a Quinnipiac survey published last Wednesday. When asked the same question, only 16 percent of Quinnipiac respondents in gave Trump an "A," while 39 percent gave him an "F" and 17 percent said he deserved a "D." Another 16 percent of voters gave him a "B" and the remaining 11 percent gave Trump a "C."



The new poll shows Trump remains more popular among men the women, with 38 percent of men giving him an "A" or "B" while just 31 percent of women did. Fifty percent of women said he earned a "D" or an "F" but only 42 percent of men agreed. "



Trump's 2018 Approval Ratings Show He’s The Most Unpopular President in History And Failing At His Job

Estúpido - So Stupid It's Not Funny: Trump's Crackdown on Legal Immigration: The Da...

The Real Reasons Why the Government Shut Down - DACA, This is the biggest cause of the shutdown

DACA

This is the biggest cause of the shutdown. Ever since Trump announced in September that he would end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program on March 5 unless Congress acted to extend it, Democrats in the House and Senate have been clamoring for a permanent legislative fix to protect the young immigrants known as Dreamers.

Prospects for a quick agreement brightened briefly in September after Trump appeared to sign off on a framework with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer; that plan would have traded the Dream Act for additional security at the border. But under pressure from immigration hard-liners, Trump backed away and added a whole new set of demands for a DACA deal, including funding for his border wall and significant changes to the legal immigration system.

Pelosi promised immigration activists that Democrats would not leave for the year without addressing DACA, but Senate Democrats agreed just before Christmas to punt the fight to January. With Friday’s funding deadline approaching and no immigration agreement in sight, Democrats in both the House and Senate this week decided to make a stand."


https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-real-reasons-why-the-government-shut-down/551027/

John Kelly, Deacon of Deportation - The New York Times

"People correctly direct their ire about Donald Trump’s hostile, racist, anti-immigrant policies at Trump himself because, after all, this starts at the top.



But there is someone else in the administration, behind the scenes and in the shadows, who deserves more scrutiny and more condemnation for this administration’s approach to immigration: Chief of Staff John Kelly.



Kelly is often referred to as the man who was brought to the West Wing to impose must-needed discipline on a chaotic White House. He was the access granter and mood regulator for Trump. He was the adult to Trump’s child. He was the former general who had honorably served his country, now brought in to save it.



In the most recent kerfuffle over Trump’s torpedoing of a bipartisan DACA deal, in which he made a racist attack against immigrants from African countries and Haiti, it became increasingly clear that Kelly was instrumental in influencing Trump to flip from a stance of openness and compromise back to a celestial alignment with immigration hard-liners.



As The Associated Press reported this week, after Trump requested a briefing on a bipartisan immigration deal sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham, a Republican, and Dick Durbin, a Democrat:



“Chief of staff John Kelly phoned Trump from Capitol Hill to advise him against accepting the proposal, and the president summoned conservative Republican negotiators to help build a united front against the plan, which would have provided some border security funding as well as protection from deportation for immigrants brought to the country as children and now here illegally.”



Graham was not happy about the ambush or the reversal and pointed out who he believed to be the source of the problem, telling reporters, “I think somebody on his staff gave him really bad advice between 10 o’clock to 12 o’clock on Thursday.” Graham went on to say that Kelly is “a fine man, but he’s part of the staff.”



Actually, Kelly is following the Kelly-Trump immigration doctrine.



This was just the latest incident in Kelly’s revealing track record on immigration since Trump has been in office.



Kelly is no angel. He’s more like the devil’s handmaiden. As The Times’s Glenn Thrush reported in October, Kelly seems to be “moving from the role of quiet backstage manager to open partisan.”



His hostility toward immigration has been evident from the beginning of his time in the administration.



When Kelly was brought on as chief of staff in July, The Nation warned, “John Kelly’s promotion is a disaster for immigrants,” pointing out that in just six months as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, he turned it into “a deportation machine.”



The Nation went on:



“Indeed, in the last six months, Kelly has turned the DHS into one of the most productive arms of the Trump administration. Kelly managed to translate much of Trump’s brazen anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric into actual policy. And if the numbers are any indication, Kelly has certainly flourished. Arrests since Trump took office in February increased by 40 percent over the prior year. But perhaps more important than the numbers is Kelly’s impact on immigrant communities, where apprehension and fear now reign.”



While at the D.H.S., Kelly even considered separating immigrant parents from their accompanying children if they enter the country illegally. As The Times reported:



“Still, the prospect of breaking a sacred bond between parent and child has not been an easy decision. Mr. Kelly said early this year that he was considering the move, but after an uproar from immigrant advocates and some members of Congress, he said that families would be separated only in extreme circumstances, such as when the child was in danger because of the parent.”



One of Kelly’s primary targets has been the Temporary Protected Status program.



As The Times has reported: “The protection for Haitians was most recently extended in May, by John F. Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary at the time. He allowed only a six-month extension, a shorter one than is typical, saying that the Haitians ‘need to start thinking about returning.’”



The Times also reported that in November, Kelly “unsuccessfully tried to pressure the Homeland Security Department to end a program that allows hundreds of thousands of people from countries affected by natural disasters or violence to live in the United States without fear of being deported, according to people familiar with the discussions.”



Many of those countries have populations that are either black or brown. Those were the countries Trump vulgarly disparaged. So why are Trump and Kelly so dogged in their opposition to these particular programs?



I, along with many others, have pointed out Trump’s obvious racism, but Kelly’s relationship to race is also troubling.



In October, Kelly said that “Robert E. Lee was an honorable man” and that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,” displaying a staggering ignorance about the conflict and a racial insensitivity that marginalized the centrality of slavery to the war.



Furthermore, while at D.H.S., Kelly appointed the Rev. Jamie Johnson to lead the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. It was later disclosed that in 2008 Johnson had said on a radio show that black people were anti-Semitic because they were envious of Jewish people. Johnson also said America’s black community “had turned America’s major cities into slums because of laziness, drug use and sexual promiscuity.”



I am no fan of John Kelly. As I have said before, I think he is one of the most dangerous men in America. On this issue of Trump’s racist immigration and deportation policy, he is not only complicit, he is a co-conspirator."



John Kelly, Deacon of Deportation - The New York Times

World's confidence in US leadership under Trump at new low, poll finds | US news | The Guardian

"The survey of opinion in 134 countries showed a record collapse in approval for the US role in the world, from 48% under Obama to 30% after one year of Donald Trump – the lowest level Gallup has recorded since beginning its global leadership poll over a decade ago.



The result comes after a separate Gallup survey found that Trump reaches the first anniversary of his inauguration with the lowest average approval rating of any elected president in his first year."



World's confidence in US leadership under Trump at new low, poll finds | US news | The Guardian

Prosecutors Had the Wrong Man. They Prosecuted Him Anyway. - The New York Times

"In the robbery, kidnapping and rape that began in the French Quarter of New Orleans on April 6, 1992, much of the evidence pointed to a man named Lester Jones.



He fit the description of the attacker down to his round-rimmed glasses. His car looked like the perpetrator’s. The rape took place near the housing project where he lived. And after the police arrested him on suspicion of other crimes in the French Quarter that same month, they found jewelry from the robbery in his possession.



Yet the Orleans Parish district attorney’s office chose to arrest a different man, 19-year-old Robert Jones — no relation — for the crime. Mr. Jones not only was convicted, but spent more than 23 years in jail before being cleared of those crimes and a murder he did not commit.



On Tuesday, Mr. Jones sued, charging that prosecutors had deliberately and repeatedly covered up evidence that would have undermined the case against him. More than that, he charged that he was neither the first nor the last victim of such treatment — that prosecutors had an unwritten policy of hobbling the legal defenses of accused citizens without their knowledge.



The New Orleans district attorney’s office has chalked up legal black marks for years, including a string of Supreme Court cases involving prosecutorial misconduct. But the lawsuit filed on Tuesday, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, is perhaps the most damning compilation of misconduct accusations to date.



In at least 45 prosecutions dating to the 1970s, the lawsuit says, the district attorney’s office possessed evidence that could have helped the accused, but failed to disclose it. In nine of those cases, appeals courts overturned convictions after the evidence was uncovered.



The cases include that of John Thompson, who was awaiting execution when investigators found that prosecutors had withheld the results of a blood test. John Floyd spent 36 years in prison for the murder of a newspaper proofreader before it came to light that someone else’s fingerprints and DNA had been found at the scene. Reginald Adams spent 34 years in prison for the murder of a police officer’s wife, only to be freed after a police report implicating a different man was found buried in unrelated case files.



The Jones lawsuit contends — and legal experts agree — that those 45 cases are likely a fraction of the actual number of instances in which favorable evidence was wrongly concealed. Most, they say, are simply never discovered.



Prosecutors are supposed to disclose any information they uncover that might help the defense. But enforcing that obligation — and punishing those who ignore it — has been no easy task. After Mr. Thompson was freed, he won a $14 million judgment, only to have the Supreme Court reverse the award in 2011, ruling that prosecutors can be held financially liable only if they are shown to have a pattern of unethical behavior. He received nothing.



Earl Truvia and Gregory Bright, freed after 27 years in jail for a murder they did not commit, also took a lawsuit over the prosecutors’ so-called Brady violations to the Supreme Court, which declined in 2015 to hear it.



This time, lawyers for Mr. Jones and experts at the Innocence Project have pored over court records to compile evidence of a pattern.



“This was a galling disregard for the constitutional rights of defendants,” said Michael L. Banks, a lawyer with the Philadelphia firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. “From the top of this office, there was a culture of winning. And winning meant getting convictions. And that’s why there’s such a striking pattern of wrongful convictions.”



A spokesman for Leon A. Cannizzaro Jr., the current Orleans Parish district attorney, declined to comment on pending litigation.



Prosecutors have been obligated to turn over favorable evidence to the defense since a 1963 Supreme Court decision, Brady v. Maryland, which said that failure to do so violated the right to due process. But the ruling left prosecutors to decide which evidence should be disclosed.



Lawyers and judges have complained that too often, prosecutors err in their own favor. In 2013, the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit at the time, Alex Kosinski, famously warned of an “epidemic” of Brady violations, adding: “A robust and rigorously enforced Brady rule is imperative because all the incentives prosecutors confront encourage them not to discover or disclose exculpatory evidence.”



Jennifer Laurin, an expert on civil rights and criminal law at the University of Texas School of Law, said she could not say there was evidence of an epidemic. “But what I do see is a system that is not well designed to ensure compliance with Brady,” she added. A handful of unscrupulous prosecutors may conceal information that undermines their cases, she said, but many more well-meaning prosecutors may simply misjudge the importance of evidence to a defendant’s case, or even be unaware that it is important at all.



When evidence is not properly disclosed, experts say, the omission is rarely discovered. The vast bulk of criminal cases never go to trial — 97 percent of federal criminal convictions are the result of guilty pleas. The accused often must decide whether to go to trial and risk the maximum sentence or plead guilty in exchange for a lesser punishment, all without knowing how strong the case against them is.



After conviction, the odds that favorable evidence will be discovered in prosecutors’ files is vanishingly small, because it can take hundreds or thousands of hours of legal work. Mr. Banks’s firm worked without pay to overturn Mr. Thompson’s conviction. “We literally put a couple of million dollars” in time into the Thompson case, Mr. Banks said, “because it was a capital murder case.” But “most of the time that prosecutors hide evidence, nobody ever knows.”



Robert Jones’s ordeal began with a telephone tip to the police. He was convicted in 1996 of the robbery, kidnapping and rape in a trial that lasted but two days. Although most of the evidence indicated that Lester Jones, not Robert, was responsible, two of the victims had identified Robert in a lineup. Prosecutors argued that Lester and Robert knew each other — Lester Jones had said so in a statement to the police — and that Robert had used his friend’s car and given him stolen jewelry as compensation.



Only years later, after the Innocence Project New Orleans took up Robert Jones’s case, did the truth emerge: A lineup from which Mr. Jones was selected had been tainted because it included people that the rape victim knew, thus narrowing the range of suspects. Days before trial, Lester Jones had recanted the assertion that he knew Robert. And Lester had been convicted of two similar French Quarter crimes that happened the same month.



None of that evidence was given to Robert Jones’s lawyer before the 1996 trial. Nor was a trove of other evidence favorable to Mr. Jones, including evidence that the rapist had told his victim he was taking her to his “neck of the woods;” the victims’ initial descriptions of the attacker, which pointed to Lester; and the fact that none of those descriptions included Robert’s most prominent feature: a mouth filled with gold-capped teeth.



The prosecution also failed to disclose the conclusion that New Orleans police detectives had reached long before the 1996 trial: The robbery and rape for which Robert Jones went to jail was part of a five-crime spree in the French Quarter that month, all of which appeared to have been committed by the same assailant.



When the fifth crime took place, Robert Jones was already in jail."



Prosecutors Had the Wrong Man. They Prosecuted Him Anyway. - The New York Times