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

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

Lawrence: DHS Secretary 'trying to protect Trump' with falsehoods | MSNBC

Lawrence: DHS Secretary 'trying to protect Trump' with falsehoods | MSNBC

Kelly calls some of Trump’s campaign pledges on immigration, wall ‘uninformed,’ meeting attendees say - The Washington Post

"

(Via.). Kelly calls some of Trump’s campaign pledges on immigration, wall ‘uninformed,’ meeting attendees say - The Washington Post

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., delivered a speech from the Senate floor Wednesday denouncing President Donald Trump's attacks on the media and comparing his inflammatory rhetoric to phrases used by Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator. Read Senator Jeff Flake's full speech on Trump's media attacks - NBC News

Fearing DACA’s Return May Be Brief, Immigrants Rush to Renew - The New York Times

"The Department of Justice filed a notice of appeal on Tuesday afternoon in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, saying it intended to ask the Supreme Court later in the week to review the Federal District Court’s ruling, which had enjoined the federal government from ending the DACA program, as it had planned. .



With their fates split in the courts, in the halls of Congress, and, seemingly, the White House, DACA recipients across the country scrambled to do what was in their power.



Lawyers were urging their clients to apply as soon as they could, given the short window of opportunity that only seemed to get shorter on Tuesday. “We’re trying to schedule events as fast as we can,” said Camille Mackler, the director of legal initiatives at the New York Immigration Coalition, an advocacy group.



In New York, the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs was partnering with CUNY Citizenship Now! to offer two free clinics on Thursday and next Tuesday, while Make the Road New York, another immigrant advocacy group in the city, had filled all its slots for three Saturday events."



Fearing DACA’s Return May Be Brief, Immigrants Rush to Renew - The New York Times

Republicans, do you want a race-based immigration system, too? - The Washington Post

"President Trump’s intent could not be more explicit: He wants immigration policies that admit white people and shut the door to black and brown people. That is pure racism — and the Republican Party, which traces its heritage to the Abraham Lincoln era, must decide whether to go along.



Silly me. The GOP seems to have made its choice, judging by the weaselly response from most of the Republicans who were in the Oval Office on Thursday when Trump made vile and nakedly racist remarks.



Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) heard the president clearly: Trump referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” the shocked senator reported. At another point, while discussing potential relief for groups of immigrants — including Haitians — who are losing their temporary permission to remain here, Trump reportedly said, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”





Republicans, do you want a race-based immigration system, too? - The Washington Post

Inside the tense, profane White House meeting on immigration - The Washington Post

"When President Trump spoke by phone with Sen. Richard J. Durbin around 10:15 a.m. last Thursday, he expressed pleasure with Durbin’s outline of a bipartisan immigration pact and praised the high-ranking Illinois Democrat’s efforts, according to White House officials and congressional aides.



The president then asked if Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), his onetime foe turned ally, was on board, which Durbin affirmed. Trump invited the lawmakers to visit with him at noon, the people familiar with the call said.



But when they arrived at the Oval Office, the two senators were surprised to find that Trump was far from ready to finalize the agreement. He was “fired up” and surrounded by hard-line conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who seemed confident that the president was now aligned with them, according to one person with knowledge of the meeting.



Trump told the group he wasn’t interested in the terms of the bipartisan deal that Durbin and Graham had been putting together. And as he shrugged off suggestions from Durbin and others, the president called nations from Africa “shithole countries,” denigrated Haiti and grew angry. The meeting was short, tense and often dominated by loud cross-talk and swearing, according to Republicans and Democrats familiar with the meeting.



Trump’s ping-ponging from dealmaking to feuding, from elation to fury, has come to define the contentious immigration talks between the White House and Congress, perplexing members of both parties as they navigate the president’s vulgarities, his combativeness and his willingness to suddenly change his position. The blowup has derailed those negotiations yet again and increased the possibility of a government shutdown over the fate of hundreds of thousands of young undocumented immigrants known as “dreamers.”



Inside the tense, profane White House meeting on immigration - The Washington Post

How the U.S. Is Making the War in Yemen Worse | The New Yorker

How the U.S. Is Making the War in Yemen Worse | The New Yorker

How the U.S. Is Making the War in Yemen Worse | The New Yorker

How the U.S. Is Making the War in Yemen Worse | The New Yorker

CNN Anchor Can't Hold Back Her Tears Reacting To Trump's S***hole Statem...

CNN Anchor Can't Hold Back Her Tears Reacting To Trump's S***hole Statem...

Trump Is a Racist. Period. - The New York Times

"I find nothing more useless than debating the existence of racism, particularly when you are surrounded by evidence of its existence. It feels to me like a way to keep you fighting against the water until you drown.



The debates themselves, I believe, render a simple concept impossibly complex, making the very meaning of “racism” frustratingly murky.



So, let’s strip that away here. Let’s be honest and forthright.



Racism is simply the belief that race is an inherent and determining factor in a person’s or a people’s character and capabilities, rendering some inferior and others superior. These beliefs are racial prejudices.



The history of America is one in which white people used racism and white supremacy to develop a racial caste system that advantaged them and disadvantaged others.



Understanding this, it is not a stretch to understand that Donald Trump’s words and deeds over the course of his life have demonstrated a pattern of expressing racial prejudices that demean people who are black and brown and that play to the racial hostilities of other white people.



It is not a stretch to say that Trump is racist. It’s not a stretch to say that he is a white supremacist. It’s not a stretch to say that Trump is a bigot.





Those are just facts, supported by the proof of the words that keep coming directly from him. And, when he is called out for his racism, his response is never to ameliorate his rhetoric, but to double down on it.



I know of no point during his entire life where he has apologized for, repented of, or sought absolution for any of his racist actions or comments.



Instead, he either denies, deflects or amps up the attack.



Trump is a racist. We can put that baby to bed.



“Racism” and “racist” are simply words that have definitions, and Trump comfortably and unambiguously meets those definitions.



We have unfortunately moved away from the simple definition of racism, to the point where the only people to whom the appellation can be safely applied are the vocal, violent racial archetypes.



Racism doesn’t require hatred, constant expression, or even conscious awareness. We want racism to be fringe rather than foundational. But, wishing isn’t an effective method of eradication.



We have to face this thing, stare it down and fight it back.



The simple acknowledgment that Trump is a racist is the easy part. The harder, more substantive part is this: What are we going to do about it?



First and foremost, although Trump is not the first president to be a racist, we must make him the last. If by some miracle he should serve out his first term, he mustn’t be allowed a second. Voters of good conscience must swarm the polls in 2020.



But before that, those voters must do so later this year, to rid the House and the Senate of as many of Trump’s defenders, apologists and accomplices as possible. Should the time come where impeachment is inevitable, there must be enough votes in the House and Senate to ensure it.



We have to stop thinking that we can somehow separate what racists believe from how they will behave. We must stop believing that any of Trump’s actions are clear of the venom coursing through his convictions. Everything he does is an articulation of who he is and what he believes. Therefore, all policies he supports, positions he takes and appointments he makes are suspect.



And finally, we have to stop giving a pass to the people — whether elected official or average voter — who support and defend his racism. If you defend racism you are part of the racism. It doesn’t matter how much you say that you’re an egalitarian, how much you say that you are race blind, how much you say that you are only interested in people’s policies and not their racist polemics.



As the brilliant James Baldwin once put it: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” When I see that in poll after poll a portion of Trump’s base continues to support his behavior, including on race, I can only conclude that there is no real daylight between Trump and his base. They are part of his racism.



When I see the extraordinary hypocrisy of elected officials who either remain silent in the wake of Trump’s continued racist outbursts or who obliquely condemn him, only to in short order return to defending and praising him and supporting his agenda, I see that there is no real daylight between Trump and them either. They too are part of his racism.



When you see it this way, you understand the enormity and the profundity of what we are facing. There were enough Americans who were willing to accept Trump’s racism to elect him. There are enough people in Washington willing to accept Trump’s racism to defend him. Not only is Trump racist, the entire architecture of his support is suffused with that racism. Racism is a fundamental component of the Trump presidency."




Trump Is a Racist. Period. - The New York Times

STASI: Trump's W.H. is real s--thole after racist remarks - NY Daily News

"What a s#!thole the White House has become with a f#!%ing moron in charge.



What? You think the language is rough and disrespectful? Then don’t complain to me, send your complaints directly to your President and tell him to stop using that kind of language about other countries (and maybe drop a note to Rex Tillerson about using that kind of language about Trump).



That’s the level of low that the porn star-loving, p---y-grabbing, white supremacist-defending, climate change-denying, truth-averting, freedom of the press-despising, global warming-loving, free speech-hating, conspiracy-believing, history-twisting, strongman-admiring, race-baiting combover king has brought the U.S. to in one short year.



We’re in some deep s#!t when even the UN denounces our President for making racist “shithole” comments about Africa, Haiti and El Salvador and its immigrants (who are mostly people of color) while asking why we don’t have more immigrants from Norway, which is so white you could go snow-blind just from staring too long at the people. And oh, by the way, since Norway for the past 13 years has been designated by the UN as the best country in which to live and the U.S. the 11th, Norwegians probably won’t start breaking down our borders to get here. They even rank Iceland as a better place to live than the U.S. Of course, they have Björk, but still ...



GOP, Dem senators confirm Trump used racist language at meeting



Wasn’t this Hitler’s dream too? A country with a master race of white people? Good thing Trump’s beloved daughter Ivanka has converted to Judaism, or he might be after them instead of sending his dopey son-in-law to negotiate Middle East peace because he’s the Jew in the family. If only his sons would have married Africans, instead of just thinking it’s a place to slaughter endangered species on rich-boy Safari, Trump might like Africans, too.



Tragic truth: In one year Donald J. Trump alone has turned the White House into a sinkhole of ignorance, bigotry and hatred against anyone who isn’t a white man in a suit. True, he used to welcome Steve Bannon, who showed up looking like an out-of-work gym teacher, but that’s because he thought Bannon had his back. Ooops.







OK, I’m not being fair. The Donald does allow people of color to show up on occasion, and he did appoint brain surgeon Ben Carson as HUD secretary even though his qualifications for housing secretary are that he lives in a house.



But yes, on the anniversary of one of the greatest natural disasters in modern times, the Haitian earthquake that killed 230,000 human beings, our President denounced Haiti. Then he invited several token African-Americans to watch him sign a proclamation and to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life after denouncing the continent from which their ancestors came.



Trump has history of racially charged Oval Office remarks: report



They probably shouldn’t have even shown up, but while they were there I wish they would have taken a knee in protest. In fact, on Monday, MLK Day, we all should protest the racist comments of our President by taking a knee whenever he shows up on TV.







DON TALK NOT FIT FOR KING



Not everyone believes that our President is not only off-track but has gone off the rails completely. To get a view from the other side of the train, I turned to my favorite Republican, Congressman Pete King.



“Tell me, Congressman, do you think President Trump is sane?” I asked.





Congressman Pete King says he thinks Trump is sane and that he can't be making these "tough-guy remarks" as President.



“I think he’s sane,” he answered. “He’s iconoclastic. But by not having the discipline to say or not say what’s appropriate, he creates problems. He makes these tough-guy remarks, and you can’t do that as President. It’s 1960s bar humor.



“But the people who came here through TPS came here legally. I think I have the first- or second-highest number of Salvadorans in my district who came here under TPS. There is absolutely no issue — they have mortgages, their kids go to school, they work hard, pay taxes and are a very vibrant, active part of this community.



“Priests have told me that Catholic parishes on Long Island have been kept going strong by the Haitian (immigrants).”



But does the President appreciate this?



“I’ve been in a number of meetings with him and he’ll suddenly start talking about DACA and how were have to take care of these immigrants’ kids,” King said.



Martin Luther King Jr.'s son says Trump's speech rings hollow



Then why does he project a different image to the public?



“I can’t explain it,” the congressman said. “When I hear him say this stuff I feel like I’m back in a bar in the 1960s. I can imagine him sitting in a bar in Queens back then.”



The problem is that Archie Bunker with the bar humor has become the President.



XXX-CELLENT NEWS







It’s hard to keep a porn star down. Literally.



Trump’s Dutch ambassador apologizes for anti-Muslim remarks



After horny porny star Stormy Daniels denied that she’d taken $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election in exchange for shutting her trap about an alleged sexual tryst she had with Donald Trump over a decade ago, another porn star popped up on Friday.



Adult film actress Stormy Daniels said she did not take $130,000 in exchange for remaining mum about the sexual tryst she had with Donald Trump over a decade ago.



Porn actress Alana Evans told the Daily Beast that just one day after the alleged Stormy tryst, Trump chased her around a hotel room “in his tighty-whities.” Oh God. Make it go away.



And please, call your local suicide hotline immediately if you experience the inability to unsee that image and have lost the will to live.



Front page of the New York Daily News for Jan. 13, 2018.



HELP WANTED ON UFOS







The secret airline of Area 51, which sort of doesn’t exist at a U.S. military base and supposedly housing a crashed alien aircraft that sort of don’t exist with dead aliens, is looking for flight attendants for Janet Airlines, an airline that also sort of doesn’t exist.











The secret Las Vegas airline is looking for flight attendants to take trips to Area 51.



Photo by: (homeworks255/Getty Images/iStockphoto)



According to several news sites, including Newser, the “Air Force-owned planes operated by defense contractor AECOM,” which ferry government employees and contractors from Las Vegas to Area 51, is advertising for flight attendants. Applicants “must be level-headed and clear thinking while handling unusual incidents and situations…” The unusual incidents don’t include dealing with gray aliens who refuse to return their seat backs to the full and upright positions).







UFO expert and best-selling author Whitley Strieber (“Afterlife Revolution” and “Communion”), who knows more aliens from outer space than Trump wants to deport from Earth, said, “It cannot be to fly personnel who have always worked there. Something different must be happening.”



Ya think?



SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T SMELL RIGHT



One of the President’s favorite white guys — and there are a lot of them — is stinking up the joint with his tremendous B.O.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is enjoying a five-year standoff at the Knightsbridge embassy in Ecuador, has such horrible personal hygiene (or make that no personal hygiene) that the embassy staffers are creating a big stink over his bad smell.

Embassy staffers at the Knightsbridge embassy in Ecuador are saying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange



You’d think that a guy who sleeps in the embassy’s former women’s bathroom would at least have learned how to use the indoor plumbing.



What a s#!thole the White House has become with a f#!%ing moron in charge.



What? You think the language is rough and disrespectful? Then don’t complain to me, send your complaints directly to your President and tell him to stop using that kind of language about other countries (and maybe drop a note to Rex Tillerson about using that kind of language with Trump).



That’s the level of low that the porn star-loving, p---y-grabbing, white supremacist-defending, climate change-denying, truth-averting, freedom of the press-despising, global warming-loving, free speech-hating, conspiracy-believing, history-twisting, strongman-admiring, race-baiting combover king has brought the U.S. to in one short year.



We’re in some deep s#!t when even the UN denounces our President for making racist “s#!thole” comments about Africa, Haiti and El Salvador and its immigrants (who are mostly people of color) while asking why we don’t have more immigrants from Norway, which is so white you could go snow-blind just from staring too long at the people. And oh, by the way, since Norway for the past 13 years has been designated by the UN as the best country in which to live and the U.S. the 11th, Norwegians probably won’t start breaking down our borders to get here. They even rank Iceland as a better place to live than the U.S. Of course, they have Björk, but still ...



Wasn’t this Hitler’s dream too? A country with a master race of white people? Good thing Trump’s beloved daughter Ivanka has converted to Judaism, or he might be after them instead of sending his dopey son-in-law to negotiate Middle East peace because he’s the Jew in the family. If only his sons would have married Africans, instead of just thinking it’s a place to slaughter endangered species on rich-boy safari, Trump might like Africans, too.



Tragic truth: In one year Donald J. Trump alone has turned the White House into a sinkhole of ignorance, bigotry and hatred against anyone who isn’t a white man in a suit. True, he used to welcome Steve Bannon, who showed up looking like an out-of-work gym teacher, but that’s because he thought Bannon had his back. Ooops.



OK, I’m not being fair. The Donald does allow people of color to show up on occasion, and he did appoint brain surgeon Ben Carson as HUD secretary even though his qualifications for housing secretary are that he lives in a house.



But yes, on the anniversary of one of the greatest natural disasters in modern times, the Haitian earthquake that killed 230,000 human beings, our President denounced Haiti. Then he invited several token African-Americans to watch him sign a proclamation and to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life after denouncing the continent from which their ancestors came.



They probably shouldn’t have even shown up, but while they were there I wish they would have taken a knee in protest. In fact, on Monday, MLK Day, we all should protest the racist comments of our President by taking a knee whenever he shows up on TV."



STASI: Trump's W.H. is real s--thole after racist remarks - NY Daily News

STASI: Trump's W.H. is real s--thole after racist remarks - NY Daily News

"What a s#!thole the White House has become with a f#!%ing moron in charge.



What? You think the language is rough and disrespectful? Then don’t complain to me, send your complaints directly to your President and tell him to stop using that kind of language about other countries (and maybe drop a note to Rex Tillerson about using that kind of language about Trump).



That’s the level of low that the porn star-loving, p---y-grabbing, white supremacist-defending, climate change-denying, truth-averting, freedom of the press-despising, global warming-loving, free speech-hating, conspiracy-believing, history-twisting, strongman-admiring, race-baiting combover king has brought the U.S. to in one short year.



We’re in some deep s#!t when even the UN denounces our President for making racist “shithole” comments about Africa, Haiti and El Salvador and its immigrants (who are mostly people of color) while asking why we don’t have more immigrants from Norway, which is so white you could go snow-blind just from staring too long at the people. And oh, by the way, since Norway for the past 13 years has been designated by the UN as the best country in which to live and the U.S. the 11th, Norwegians probably won’t start breaking down our borders to get here. They even rank Iceland as a better place to live than the U.S. Of course, they have Björk, but still ...



GOP, Dem senators confirm Trump used racist language at meeting



Wasn’t this Hitler’s dream too? A country with a master race of white people? Good thing Trump’s beloved daughter Ivanka has converted to Judaism, or he might be after them instead of sending his dopey son-in-law to negotiate Middle East peace because he’s the Jew in the family. If only his sons would have married Africans, instead of just thinking it’s a place to slaughter endangered species on rich-boy Safari, Trump might like Africans, too.



Tragic truth: In one year Donald J. Trump alone has turned the White House into a sinkhole of ignorance, bigotry and hatred against anyone who isn’t a white man in a suit. True, he used to welcome Steve Bannon, who showed up looking like an out-of-work gym teacher, but that’s because he thought Bannon had his back. Ooops.



OK, I’m not being fair. The Donald does allow people of color to show up on occasion, and he did appoint brain surgeon Ben Carson as HUD secretary even though his qualifications for housing secretary are that he lives in a house.



But yes, on the anniversary of one of the greatest natural disasters in modern times, the Haitian earthquake that killed 230,000 human beings, our President denounced Haiti. Then he invited several token African-Americans to watch him sign a proclamation and to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life after denouncing the continent from which their ancestors came.



Trump has history of racially charged Oval Office remarks: report



They probably shouldn’t have even shown up, but while they were there I wish they would have taken a knee in protest. In fact, on Monday, MLK Day, we all should protest the racist comments of our President by taking a knee whenever he shows up on TV.



DON TALK NOT FIT FOR KING

Not everyone believes that our President is not only off-track but has gone off the rails completely. To get a view from the other side of the train, I turned to my favorite Republican, Congressman Pete King.



“Tell me, Congressman, do you think President Trump is sane?” I asked.





Congressman Pete King says he thinks Trump is sane and that he can't be making these "tough-guy remarks" as President.

Photo by: (Susan Watts/New York Daily News)

“I think he’s sane,” he answered. “He’s iconoclastic. But by not having the discipline to say or not say what’s appropriate, he creates problems. He makes these tough-guy remarks, and you can’t do that as President. It’s 1960s bar humor.



Haitians rip Trump's ‘s--thole’ remark at Brooklyn quake memorial



“But the people who came here through TPS came here legally. I think I have the first- or second-highest number of Salvadorans in my district who came here under TPS. There is absolutely no issue — they have mortgages, their kids go to school, they work hard, pay taxes and are a very vibrant, active part of this community.



“Priests have told me that Catholic parishes on Long Island have been kept going strong by the Haitian (immigrants).”



But does the President appreciate this?



“I’ve been in a number of meetings with him and he’ll suddenly start talking about DACA and how were have to take care of these immigrants’ kids,” King said.



Martin Luther King Jr.'s son says Trump's speech rings hollow



Then why does he project a different image to the public?



“I can’t explain it,” the congressman said. “When I hear him say this stuff I feel like I’m back in a bar in the 1960s. I can imagine him sitting in a bar in Queens back then.”



The problem is that Archie Bunker with the bar humor has become the President.



XXX-CELLENT NEWS

It’s hard to keep a porn star down. Literally.



Trump’s Dutch ambassador apologizes for anti-Muslim remarks



After horny porny star Stormy Daniels denied that she’d taken $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election in exchange for shutting her trap about an alleged sexual tryst she had with Donald Trump over a decade ago, another porn star popped up on Friday.





Adult film actress Stormy Daniels said she did not take $130,000 in exchange for remaining mum about the sexual tryst she had with Donald Trump over a decade ago.

Photo by: (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

Porn actress Alana Evans told the Daily Beast that just one day after the alleged Stormy tryst, Trump chased her around a hotel room “in his tighty-whities.” Oh God. Make it go away.



And please, call your local suicide hotline immediately if you experience the inability to unsee that image and have lost the will to live.





Front page of the New York Daily News for Jan. 13, 2018.

Photo by: (New York Daily News)

HELP WANTED ON UFOS

The secret airline of Area 51, which sort of doesn’t exist at a U.S. military base and supposedly housing a crashed alien aircraft that sort of don’t exist with dead aliens, is looking for flight attendants for Janet Airlines, an airline that also sort of doesn’t exist.





The secret Las Vegas airline is looking for flight attendants to take trips to Area 51.

Photo by: (homeworks255/Getty Images/iStockphoto)

According to several news sites, including Newser, the “Air Force-owned planes operated by defense contractor AECOM,” which ferry government employees and contractors from Las Vegas to Area 51, is advertising for flight attendants. Applicants “must be level-headed and clear thinking while handling unusual incidents and situations…” The unusual incidents don’t include dealing with gray aliens who refuse to return their seat backs to the full and upright positions).



UFO expert and best-selling author Whitley Strieber (“Afterlife Revolution” and “Communion”), who knows more aliens from outer space than Trump wants to deport from Earth, said, “It cannot be to fly personnel who have always worked there. Something different must be happening.”



Ya think?



SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T SMELL RIGHT

One of the President’s favorite white guys — and there are a lot of them — is stinking up the joint with his tremendous B.O.



WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is enjoying a five-year standoff at the Knightsbridge embassy in Ecuador, has such horrible personal hygiene (or make that no personal hygiene) that the embassy staffers are creating a big stink over his bad smell.





Embassy staffers at the Knightsbridge embassy in Ecuador are saying WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

Photo by: (JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty Images)

You’d think that a guy who sleeps in the embassy’s former women’s bathroom would at least have learned how to use the indoor plumbing.



What a s#!thole the White House has become with a f#!%ing moron in charge.



What? You think the language is rough and disrespectful? Then don’t complain to me, send your complaints directly to your President and tell him to stop using that kind of language about other countries (and maybe drop a note to Rex Tillerson about using that kind of language with Trump).



That’s the level of low that the porn star-loving, p---y-grabbing, white supremacist-defending, climate change-denying, truth-averting, freedom of the press-despising, global warming-loving, free speech-hating, conspiracy-believing, history-twisting, strongman-admiring, race-baiting combover king has brought the U.S. to in one short year.



We’re in some deep s#!t when even the UN denounces our President for making racist “s#!thole” comments about Africa, Haiti and El Salvador and its immigrants (who are mostly people of color) while asking why we don’t have more immigrants from Norway, which is so white you could go snow-blind just from staring too long at the people. And oh, by the way, since Norway for the past 13 years has been designated by the UN as the best country in which to live and the U.S. the 11th, Norwegians probably won’t start breaking down our borders to get here. They even rank Iceland as a better place to live than the U.S. Of course, they have Björk, but still ...



Wasn’t this Hitler’s dream too? A country with a master race of white people? Good thing Trump’s beloved daughter Ivanka has converted to Judaism, or he might be after them instead of sending his dopey son-in-law to negotiate Middle East peace because he’s the Jew in the family. If only his sons would have married Africans, instead of just thinking it’s a place to slaughter endangered species on rich-boy safari, Trump might like Africans, too.



Tragic truth: In one year Donald J. Trump alone has turned the White House into a sinkhole of ignorance, bigotry and hatred against anyone who isn’t a white man in a suit. True, he used to welcome Steve Bannon, who showed up looking like an out-of-work gym teacher, but that’s because he thought Bannon had his back. Ooops.



OK, I’m not being fair. The Donald does allow people of color to show up on occasion, and he did appoint brain surgeon Ben Carson as HUD secretary even though his qualifications for housing secretary are that he lives in a house.



But yes, on the anniversary of one of the greatest natural disasters in modern times, the Haitian earthquake that killed 230,000 human beings, our President denounced Haiti. Then he invited several token African-Americans to watch him sign a proclamation and to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life after denouncing the continent from which their ancestors came.



They probably shouldn’t have even shown up, but while they were there I wish they would have taken a knee in protest. In fact, on Monday, MLK Day, we all should protest the racist comments of our President by taking a knee whenever he shows up on TV."



STASI: Trump's W.H. is real s--thole after racist remarks - NY Daily News

The Heartbeat of Racism Is Denial - The New York Times

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"When our reality is too ugly, we deny reality. It is too painful to look at. Reality is too hard to accept.

Mental health experts routinely say that denial is among the most common defense mechanisms. Denial is how the person defends his superior sense of self, her racially unequal society.

Denial is how America defends itself as superior to “shithole countries” in Africa and elsewhere, as President Trump reportedly described them in a White House meeting last week, although he has since, well, denied that. It’s also how America defends itself as superior to those “developing countries” in Africa, to quote how liberal opponents of Mr. Trump might often describe them.

Mr. Trump appears to be unifying America — unifying Americans in their denial. The more racist Mr. Trump sounds, the more Trump country denies his racism, and the more his opponents look away from their own racism to brand Trump country as racist. Through it all, America remains a unified country of denial.

The reckoning of Mr. Trump’s racism must become the reckoning of American racism. Because the American creed of denial — “I’m not a racist” — knows no political parties, no ideologies, no colors, no regions.

On Friday, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, affirmed that Mr. Trump did use the term “shithole” during a White House meeting on immigration with lawmakers. Mr. Durbin rightfully described Mr. Trump’s words as “hate-filled, vile and racist,” and added, “I cannot believe that in the history of the White House in that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday.”

But Mr. Trump is no exception. In framing Mr. Trump’s racism as exceptional, in seeking to highlight the depth of the president’s cruelty, Mr. Durbin, a reliably liberal senator, showed the depth of denial of American racism.

Begin with the eight presidents who held slaves while in the Oval Office. Then consider how Abraham Lincoln urged black people to leave the United States. “Even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race,” Lincoln told five black guests at the White House in 1862. So “it is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

Raging then as we are raging now, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison responded, “Can anything be more puerile, absurd, illogical, impertinent, untimely?” He added that “had it not been for the cupidity of their white enslavers, not one of their race would now be found upon this continent.”

Presidential history also includes the social Darwinism of Theodore Roosevelt, the federal-government-segregating, “Birth of a Nation”-praising Woodrow Wilson — and the bigotry that came from the mouths of presidents who are generally seen as essential to racial progress. President Lyndon B. Johnson said “nigger” nearly as often as Ku Klux Klansmen did.

This denial of racism is the heartbeat of racism. Where there is suffering from racist policies, there are denials that those policies are racist. The beat of denial sounds the same across time and space.

I grew up to the beat of racist denial in Queens, not far from where Mr. Trump grew up. I was raised in the urban “hell” of neighborhoods he probably avoided, alongside immigrants from countries he derided last week. In school or elsewhere, we all heard recitals of the American ideal of equality, especially on the day we celebrate the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Those events often feature recitals of the words “all men are created equal,” which were written by a slaveholder who once declared that black people “are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

Thomas Jefferson was not a founding father of equality. He was a founding father of the heartbeat of denial that lives through both Mr. Trump’s denials and the assertion that his racial views are abnormal for America and its presidents.

Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon transformed this historic heartbeat of denial into an intoxicating political philosophy. His presidential candidacy appealed to George Wallace-type segregationists while also attracting Americans who refused to live near “dangerous” black residents, obstructed the desegregation of schools, resisted affirmative action policies, framed black mothers on welfare as undeserving, called the black family pathological and denigrated black culture — all those racists who refused to believe they were racist in 1968.

Nixon designed his campaign, one of his advisers explained, to allow a potential supporter to “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by” the “racist appeal.”

A new vocabulary emerged, allowing users to evade admissions of racism. It still holds fast after all these years. The vocabulary list includes these: law and order. War on drugs. Model minority. Reverse discrimination. Race-neutral. Welfare queen. Handout. Tough on crime. Personal responsibility. Black-on-black crime. Achievement gap. No excuses. Race card. Colorblind. Post-racial. Illegal immigrant. Obamacare. War on Cops. Blue Lives Matter. All Lives Matter. Entitlements. Voter fraud. Economic anxiety.

The denials using these phrases come from both conservatives and white liberals who think people of color are stuck in cycles of unstable families and criminal cultures, and that the deprivations of poverty and discrimination spin out bad people.

Mr. Trump opened his candidacy with racism, calling Mexicans criminals and rapists. Since taking office, he has looked away from the disaster zone in Puerto Rico, he has called some violent white supremacists “very fine people,” and he has described Nigerians as living in “huts.”

When someone identifies the obvious, Mr. Trump resounds the beat of denial as he did before he was president: “I’m the least racist person that you’ve ever met,” that “you’ve ever seen,” that “you’ve ever encountered.”

These are ugly denials. But it’s the denials from those who stand in strong opposition to this president that are more frustrating to me: denials that their attacks on identity politics are racist. Denials that the paltry number of people of color in elite spaces marks racism.

Those denials echo the same ones that frustrated Dr. King in 1963 as he sat in a Birmingham jail cell and wrote, “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

Mr. Trump, I suspect, will go to his grave with his heart beating in denial of the ill will of racism. Many others will as well.

Because we naturally want to look away from our ugliness. We paint over racist reality to make a beautiful delusion of self, of society. We defend this beautiful self and society from our racist reality with the weapons of denial.

Denial is fueled by the stigma associated with being a racist. Feeding the stigma is how “racist” is considered almost like an identity, a brand.

But a racist is not who a person is. A racist is what a person is, what a person is saying, what a person is doing.

Racist is not a fixed category like “not racist,” which is steeped denial. Only racists say they are not racist. Only the racist lives by the heartbeat of denial.

The antiracist lives by the opposite heartbeat, one that rarely and irregularly sounds in America — the heartbeat of confession."

The Heartbeat of Racism Is Denial - The New York Times

Trump asked why 'pretty Korean lady' analyst wasn't in North Korea negotiations | US news | The Guardian

"NBC News reported the exchange between the president and a “career intelligence analyst who is an expert in hostage policy”. The analyst, the report said, was briefing Trump last fall on “the impending release of a family long held in Pakistan”.



Citing two officials with direct knowledge of the exchange, NBC said the president asked the analyst where she was from, to which she said New York City. Trump reportedly pressed, asking where “your people” were from.



The NBC report said the analyst said her parents were Korean, leading Trump to ask an adviser why the “pretty Korean lady” was not involved in negotiations with nuclear-armed North Korea.



NBC said it did not interview the analyst, whose identity and agency it did not reveal, citing concern for her privacy. The White House did not immediately comment.



On Twitter on Friday morning, Trump denied having made the “shithole” remark. The senior Democratic senator Dick Durbin, who was in the meeting, subsequently said that he had.



According to NBC, the officials who discussed the “pretty Korean lady” remark “said the president likely meant no harm with his inquiry, but it raised concern of a lack of cultural sensitivity and decorum”.



The NBC report listed other instances of the president speaking with an apparent lack of sensitivity in formal surroundings, in meetings with members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and with Navajo code talkers.



The president reportedly expressed surprise that no CBC members knew Ben Carson, the housing and urban development secretary who is the only black member of his cabinet.



At the code talkers event, in November, Trump joked about the Massachusetts Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, whom he has nicknamed “Pochahontas” over her claim of Native American ancestry."



Trump asked why 'pretty Korean lady' analyst wasn't in North Korea negotiations | US news | The Guardian

Trump’s Immigration Remarks Outrage Many, but Others Quietly Agree - The New York Times

"LONDON — The Czech president has called Muslim immigrants criminals. The head of Poland’s governing party has said refugees are riddled with disease. The leader of Hungary has described migrants as a poison.



This week, Austria’s new far-right interior minister suggested “concentrating” migrants in asylum centers — with all its obvious and odious echoes of World War II.



So when President Trump said he did not want immigrants from “shithole” countries, there was ringing silence across broad parts of the European Union, especially in the east, and certainly no chorus of condemnation.



In fact, some analysts saw the remarks as fitting a pattern of crude, dehumanizing and racist language to describe migrants and asylum seekers that has steadily edged its way into the mainstream. Coming from the White House, such words may be taken by some as a broader signal that racism is now an acceptable part of political discourse.



“What we see now is a conscious policy to reintroduce language that was previously not acceptable in debate,” said Gerald Knaus, the director of the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based research organization that has played a leading role in forming recent European migration policy.



To be sure, Mr. Trump’s choice of words drew condemnation from around the world. Botswana and Haiti asked for meetings with American diplomats to clarify what Mr. Trump said and what he believes. The president of Senegal, Macky Sall, was one of many who saw racism in the remarks. “Africa and black people deserve the respect and consideration of all,” he wrote on Twitter.



Even the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, weighed in, declaring Mr. Trump’s comments “particularly harsh and offensive.”



But the political reality is that migration has become a salient issue — and not only for right-wing, populist and nativist politicians. Across many affluent societies, people are anxious about technological change, rising inequality and stagnant wages, and they have focused their ire at the global flows of capital and, especially, labor. There are also concerns about demographic change, as the world becomes less white and as western societies age.



Moreover, the chaos and violence that have driven people from the Middle East, Southwest Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to seek to live elsewhere, even as far away as Australia and Canada, have also raised fears about refugees who do not appreciate the values of the countries hosting them — or even worse, fears of terrorists taking advantage of humanitarian policies to infiltrate societies and then carry out attacks.



Hours before the news of Mr. Trump’s comments broke on Thursday, the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, spoke about the need for more “safe, orderly and regular” migration.



He implored nations to “use facts, not prejudice” to address the challenges of migration.



“Globally, migration remains poorly managed,” he acknowledged. “The impact can be seen in the humanitarian crises affecting people on the move, and in the human rights violations suffered by those living in slavery or enduring degrading working conditions. It can be seen, too, in the political impact of public perception that wrongly sees migration as out of control. The consequences include increased mistrust and policies aimed more at stopping than facilitating human movement.”



Mr. Knaus, of the European Stability Initiative, was one of several commentators who expressed fear that Mr. Trump would only embolden xenophobic rhetoric.



“This will have consequences because it’s widely followed,” he said. “In every Austrian and German village, they follow what the U.S. president is doing.”



Trump’s Immigration Remarks Outrage Many, but Others Quietly Agree - The New York Times