Trump's America

[Jude]

I would change "cannot watch with comment" to "cannot watch without comment" (kommentarlos)...

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thank you, Nin. I look forward to hearing your further thoughts, when you get the opportunity.

[Frelga]

Thanks, Nin. I see Google is doing pretty well with German. It usually makes a hilarious hash out of Russian.

This person on Twitter collected the response of every Senator to the Executive Order banning travelers from Muslim countries.

https://twitter.com/SarahPinsker/status ... 2977383424

Google's co-founder Sergey Brin was at the SFO yesterday protesting the ban. Brin came to the US with his family from then USSR with refugee status in 1979
https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/825546620276088834

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The judge who issued the stay is an Obama appointee. I would be surprised if she doesn't make it permanent. Depending on the luck of the draw, who knows what a panel of the Court of Appeals will do. Ultimately, it will be up to Anthony Kennedy to decide, most likely, since Trump's SCOTUS pick will likely already be on the court by the time the issue reaches the high court, meaning that Kennedy will likely be the deciding vote of a 5-4 split.

[Frelga]

General Michael Hayden, former director of CIA and NSA, tweeted in support of the ACLU lawsuit challenging the EO.

@DavidColeACLU @ACLU @nytimes Imagine that. ACLU and I in the same corner.

Twitter being what it is, someone immediately and incorrectly told him that it was "ACLU and me". To which Hayden replied, "@gfradin ACLU and me are in the same corner. Me is subject. Therefore Nominative case. Not objective. Thus I. Not me. Diagram the sentence"

Faith in humanity justified.

Eta: Hayden also responded to a question about the level of concern for the changes to NSC with "Medium to high."

[Frelga]

I just took this screenshot of the Whitehouse.gov website. Can you spot what's missing?



And we checked, it has been there before.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The Judicial Branch?

Meanwhile, this is just funny:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =762135165 (go down to "number of extant species")

[River]

[Frelga]

I have lost all ability to find the situation amusing in any way.

[Primula Baggins]

I'm looking for hope. Here's some I found:

Kal Penn, the actor who took several years off to work in the Obama White House, was insulted on Twitter yesterday morning by a troll who told him he didn't belong in the United States. (He's the son of Indian immigrants and was born in New Jersey.)

In response, he tweeted:

To the dude who said I don't belong in America, I started a fundraising page for Syrian Refugees in your name.
https://www.crowdrise.com/donating-to-s ... er/kalpenn …

He set an initial goal of $5,000, which was blown through in minutes. As of the time of this posting, Penn's fundraising page for Syrian immigrants had brought in $496,386—almost half a million in less than 36 hours.

This and the genuinely spontaneous mass demonstrations make me think there is a lot of energy for resistance out there that is finding its own channel. That and (much of) the news media beginning to describe the Trump administration's lies and incompetence* in precisely those terms. Believe me, this is something new in American political media. I choose to see it as grounds for hope.

*I realize that this kind of language has rightly been discouraged on this board, and still is when it's being used rhetorically; but I'm using these terms in their exact sense and have seen plenty of objective evidence that they apply. I wish to God they didn't.

[Frelga]

Ok, I was wrong. This did make me laugh, when my attempts to confirm that it's for real led me to believe that it probably is.

[Jude]

Voronwë, you need to take a screenshot of that link because I'm pretty sure it'll be edited soon...

Frelga, I have no idea what's missing on that whitehouse.gov site because I've never visited it. Was Voronwë's guess correct?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Jude, it had been edited long since. At the top of the page you will see a note saying "This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 24.227.242.98 (talk) at 21:43, 26 January 2017 (→‎Number of extant species). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision." I had no idea that you could preserve old revisions, but I am far from a Wikipedia expert.

[River]

Frelga, I have no idea what's missing on that whitehouse.gov site because I've never visited it. Was Voronwë's guess correct?

Yeah, it was correct. There's a third branch to the US government the White House decided to disappear.

These things happen when people with no experience in civil service take up civil service.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't know if the omission was deliberate or not, but it is quite telling as the administration is apparently disregarding the various court orders regarding the immigration ban.

ETA: However, I don't believe that was known yet when Frelga pointed out the omission.

[Frelga]

I have heard about the border patrol detaining people despite the stay before I saw the screenshot of the White House site and went to check. The one I posted was taken by me.

The link to the Judicial Branch is back now.

[Inanna]

Yonatan Zunger on whether this move was a trial balloon for a coup.

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial ... .nzhj6lxf1

Maybe R and I should just leave. I'm feeling stressed and vulnerable. we don't even have green cards - because of the Indian quota.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Meanwhile, as mentioned in that Zunger column, the Trump administration put out a statement about Holocaust remembrance without making any mention of Jews or any other group targeted by the Nazis and then went out of their way to defend the statement. It is impossible for me to overstatement how offensive I find that.

[Impenitent]

? Vinnie, I can't parse your last post.

The Zunger article reads like a full blown conspiracy theory to me. I can see how bits of it play out (personal enrichment for example) but a total coup of government? Don't see how that could happen without the complete loyalty of the armed forces.

Posting on phone via Tapatalk

[Dave_LF]

And why would he need to? His party already controls everything.