The MAGA wish list is BS

They want us to be afraid as the dreaded MAGA inauguration comes. "Us" here means newcomers to the USofA, Brown people, and their friends who can be confident about our citizenship status; we're all in this together. They will give us plenty of reasons to fear, some of those reasons genuine. They can do bad things.

But not all that is threatened is possible. But they can't do everything they want without friction. Our job is to enhance that friction.

Perhaps most people shouldn't focus on the cruel possibilities the Trump immigration threats make possible. After all, inciting the fears is part of their playbook of forced deportations. But those of us who can bear knowing the possibilities can recognize the gamut these threats run.

David J. Bier [@davidjbier.bsky.social], Director of Immigration Studies at the pro-immigration, libertarian Cato Institute summarizes what Trump's immigration agenda might look like in the approximate order we might see it. In addition to what Trump has been saying about his plans, this list largely derives from Project 2025.

1) cancel the 2023 Biden-initiated Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) parole processes for refugees which have channeled 30,000 people/month into legal channels 

2) ban scheduling appointments for lawful entry from Mexico using the 2023 Biden-initiated CBP One app

3) suspend the refugee program for 100+ days & cut cap from 125K to 20K 

4) impose a visa/travel ban on a dozen countries 

5) impose new "extreme vetting" requirements on all countries 

6) possibly suspend all visas globally for 30 days

7) declare a national emergency at the border 

8) deploy the national guard to the border

9) redirect military funds to build detention camps

10) restart border wall construction 

11) invoke Title 42 health authority to expel migrants [legal ruse used during COVID]

12) restart family detention

13) declare an invasion 

14) invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport without due process 

15) use the military to enforce Alien Enemies Act 

16) revoke prioritization of criminals & security threats for deportation

17) let state/local police conduct immigration arrests & deportation

18) restrict federal funding for sanctuary cities 

19) conduct public raid in a sanctuary city 

20) instruct review of birthright citizenship 

21) review of public charge rule reinstatement 

22) review of TPS and DACA

For all MAGA's anti-migrant hysteria, this list of cruelty and stupidity is not going to happen in a day. In fact, most of it will never happen at all, because it is either illegal, impossible to implement, or they are too inept to mobilize a whole country around their hateful plans.

For all Donald's posturing, as recently as last July, Gallup found that most Americans appreciate the contributions of newcomers to the country.

Click to enlarge

Yet hard-pressed individuals and families who are very much part of our lives at going to be at risk under the Trump regime. Republicans have made promises of prosperity and stability they cannot and will not keep, especially while implementing an anti-immigrant panic. Who is going to harvest our food and wash the pans in the local fast food chain? For that matter, who is going to write computer code for the Musks and Zucks?

The first six months will be the worst; I still believe our fellow citizens will recoil as excesses pile up. Most of us like our neighbors and appreciate them. The job for those of us not currently at risk is to support vulnerable people and throw whatever sand we can conjure up into the gears of the deportation machine. Let's support the lawyers who care for the people. We know how to do this.

A national directory of non-profit, low cost immigration legal services.

Immigration law is rat's next of mysterious byways and dead ends. Several articles which communicate some of the horror which our politicians have made of immigration:

Dara Lind explains What ‘Mass Deportation’ Actually Means

Aaron Reichin-Melnick interviewed at Radly Balko's The Watch

Adrian Carrasquillo writes a column called Huddled Masses at The Bulwark. He has wide sources.

Friday cat blogging

We're home from our travels and the cats seem to enjoy their renewed seating options. Fortunately both Mio and Janeway are quite tolerant of laptops balanced on their backs if that's the price of occupying a warm human.

Up against a Crusader

Robert P. Jones is the founder and president at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) which studies our American religious varieties. He's also a recovering white Southerner out a Baptist faith tradition which he believes has a lot to overcome in the way of sexism, racism, and unfounded smug superiority.

The Senate hearing on TV pretty boy and macho poseur Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Secretary of Defense infuriated Jones. He concluded:

Not a single senator probed the most dangerous part of Hegseth's background: his support for white Christian nationalism.

Apparently, in addition to Hegseth's history of drinking and sleeping around fathering children, the guy is an acolyte of one of those crackpot little sects which white American Protestantism spawns, led by a patriarch with racist authoritarian politics. 

Hegseth is a member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a small newly-founded church that is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). The denomination was co-founded by Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist who embraces a theocratic vision of Christian dominance of all institutions in society. Wilson has written that slavery produced “a genuine affection between the races” and argues that homosexuality should be a crime. Wilson holds particularly rigid patriarchal views, asserting that giving women the right to vote was a mistake, that women holding political office “should be reckoned not as a blessing but as a curse,” and that women should not “be mustered for combat” (sound familiar?). 

As religion scholar Julie Ingersoll, who has studied this movement for years, points out, adherence to these theological tenets are not optional in CREC churches. Hegseth is a member in good standing and has called Wilson a spiritual mentor, explicitly saying that he is a disciple of Wilson’s teachings and learning from his books.

The Democratic Senators who might have questioned him about any of this (if they were informed enough) were stymied by our ingrained respect for the absolute right of people to adhere to any belief system they choose.

I get it; I believe quite a lot of scientifically unverifiable things too. But just because people adhere to seemingly oddball religious beliefs must not mean that they cannot be questioned about policy implications of what drives them. Hegseth is about to have much influence and some concrete power over the largest element of the national government. It was the right and duty of Senators to interrogate Hegseth about this.

Jones thinks the Senate is about to confirm someone who is committed to overturning the Constitutional principles that enable him to skate away from searching questions.

If it was not outright cowardice, the Democratic senators’ timidity was at best rooted in a desire to respect the Constitution’s important prohibition against instituting a religious test for office. But if this was the reason for their failures during the hearing, it reflects a serious misunderstanding of the purpose of that principle.

The Founders were primarily concerned about prohibiting the then familiar practice of reserving offices for members of religious groups favored by the state. But that Constitutional protection in no way prohibits lines of questioning related to whether a nominees’ publicly professed beliefs and worldview, whether religious or secular, are compatible with the fundamental principles of a pluralistic democracy and the oath of office they will take to defend and obey not a president but the Constitution.

The Republican Party—whose adherents are two thirds white and Christian in a nation that is only 41% white and Christian—has clearly given itself over to the white Christian nationalist vision that fuels Trump’s MAGA movement. If, over the next four years, if the Democratic Party continues to ignore the clear and present danger white Christian nationalism represents, history will judge them harshly for their naiveté and their abdication of duty to our nation in its time of need.

In [his book] American Crusade, Hegseth wrote, “Our American Crusade is not about literal swords, and our fight is not with guns. Yet.” With his nomination looking likely to succeed, that yet has arrived. And now, Trump will have his willing leader of an American crusade that will be fought—not just abroad but at home—with the most lethal forces and arsenal of weapons the world has ever seen.

I do not think Jones is being alarmist. Fortunately MAGA has internal contradictions as well as facing democratic (small "d") popular opposition that may constrain what the likes of Hegseth would like to do. Or not.

If the Dems were feeble, there were protesters in the house who Northern Californians might recognize.

Who's on the take?

The map shows the difference between the amount the federal government spends in a state and the amount the state pays in federal taxes. Blue means a state receives more than it gives, orange the reverse. Source.

Perhaps the creators of this visual should have rendered the orange as blue and the blues as shades of red and pink. (Click to enlarge.) The result wouldn't be a perfect fit with our political divisions; New Mexico, Hawaii, Vermont and Oregon are reliably Democratic. Still the map correlates all too well with Republican states being takers while Dems pay the federal bills.

I was a little surprised to see Texas and Florida so far on the taker side. There's some correlation between the size/population of a place with being a taker; the little places take more from the whole. By those measures, those two might be expected to contribute more to national wellbeing than they give. But apparently not.

Economist Paul Krugman explains the obvious:

High productivity in California (and New York, also included) plays a significant role in making America richer; the nation excluding these powerhouses would have about 6 percent lower GDP per capita.

California makes an especially large contribution to U.S. technological dominance. As I noted a month ago, 8 of America’s top 9 technology companies — all of them if you count pre-Cybertruck Tesla — are based either in Silicon Valley or in Seattle.

And while Hollywood doesn’t dominate films and TV the way it once did, Los Angeles still plays a major role in America’s cultural influence (and still generates a lot of income.)

Republicans are balking at providing disaster assistance to Californians burned out by the wild fires ... because, you know, Gavin Newsom, and something or other ...

In an additional post, Krugman catalogues how the country has rescued Florida and Texas in recent decades. He concludes: 

All indications ... are that Republicans intend to exploit the tragedy in Los Angeles, and in general turn the federal government into an extortion racket. Let’s not pretend otherwise.

Realtime apocalypse: alongside the devastation, the politics

Magazine journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff brings perspective to the Los Angeles hell fire. 

California's Fires Show How Climate Will Destabilize Our Politics and Daily Life

... Over the past few decades, we’ve spent most of our national focus thinking about climate change as a technology and economic challenge. Can we move away from fossil fuels and adopt renewables at a fast enough pace to change the arc of warming? How can we use tax incentives and industrial policy to drive the adoption of electrical vehicles faster? How can we better create batteries and power storage solutions to smooth out the variability of solar and wind energy? How quickly will the cost of solar panels continue to fall? How do we impose more appropriate costs on carbon?

... But the California fires underscore how, as we actually begin to live the effects of even that “better-than-it-could-have-been” era of warming, the tech and economic challenge is going to take a backseat to a bigger crisis. We are unprepared for how climate is about to be the main driver of our politics, nationally and internationally.

Climate change isn't just one more political priority on our already over-crowded list of national to-dos. It is a threat multiplier that affects every single other priority already on it, from the air we breathe to the food we eat to how much we pay for a house.

So much of the world is about to either have too much water or not enough. And that’s going to change and destabilize everything in our political calculations. 

The globe’s changing climate is about to put an enormous number of people in motion—people who find their homes increasingly unlivable, their local economies in collapse, or their houses simply destroyed.

Already, we’re seeing between 20 million and 30 million people a year displaced worldwide by climate disasters, from droughts and desertification to hurricanes and typhoons. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that just three regions — Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia — will generate 143 million more climate migrants by 2050. That’s an enormous number of people in motion in the world. Others have pegged that number even higher: A 2020 study by the Institute for Economics & Peace figured there might be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050.

... It’s been easy to overlook how much of our current national angst over immigration and the border is a story of how climate change is already destabilizing Central America. While there’s been a lot of attention to how drugs and gang violence have driven much of the migration to the US southern border, that flow is also heavily affected by climate. “Farmers in Central America have experienced multiple droughts since 2014, resulting in crop losses of 70 percent or more during some harvests and often affecting consecutive growing seasons,” the US Institute of Peace wrote in 2022. “Droughts were likely a key driver of large increases in family migration from Honduras and Guatemala to the United States in 2018 and 2019.”...

... Moreover, this is not a problem that stops at our borders.

... What happens when major cities and urban areas in the US simply become unlivable, too hot, too dry—or, even, entirely dry? [We're seeing in L.A.]

... Think of what this means for internal migration, political representation, dysfunction, taxes. Think of what this means for workforce talent and economic development.

Individuals may very well make choices to live in uninsurable places — the lure of a beachfront house is strong! — but that’s going to be a much harder sell for companies.

Thirteen million people represent, in the roughest math, somewhere between 20 and 30 electoral votes and seats in the US House of Representatives that may shift in the years ahead simply because of shifting climates.

... We don’t really know what will happen in the years ahead because we don’t understand what happens when you pile all these risks on top of one another. ... 

...We’re entering some really rocky waters. As I quoted former US intelligence leader Sue Gordon saying a few weeks ago: “Our institutions are not keeping up with the turn of the Earth, and they’re being devalued in the moment,” she told me. “Society requires government, yet we’re running out of the structures that make it work.”

As I often say, go read it all.

I sometimes muse that some shock will come to us here in the USofA that knocks us sideways and drives us toward more responsible humanity -- about climate, in politics, in sharing our unparalleled wealth. Instead we have given ourselves Donald and his merry band of cruel crooks and con men. Yet our better impulses persist. Ain't humanity great? The L.A. fire will produce heroes -- and knaves (looters?) -- that's who we are.

Choices in tough moments

Click to enlarge.

What's going on when you advertise your services as a chance to run away from the irritants of life at home? Apparently there is profit in scratching the itch of discontent.

We're a disheartened bunch. Former Congressman and former Republican Adam Kinzinger writes about the state of mind that goes with this:

According to a recent Gallup Poll measuring public confidence in institutions, the downward trend is striking:

Great deal of confidence:

    • Religion: 2001: 23% | 2024: 13%

    • Big Business: 2001: 10% | 2024: 6%

    • Supreme Court: 2001: 32% | 2024: 13%

    • Banks: 2001: 17% | 2024: 12%

    • Newspapers: 2001: 13% | 2024: 7%

    • Congress: 2001: 10% | 2024: 4%

    • TV News: 2001: 14% | 2024: 6%

    • The Presidency: 2001: 26% | 2024: 13%

Another report by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) compared Americans’ trust in each other. In 1972, 46% of respondents believed “most people can be trusted.” By 2022, that number had dropped to 25%.

This is where Trump’s influence looms large. His movement has been built on popular mistrust—not just in institutions but in fellow citizens. He reinforces his "only I can fix it" narrative, the foundation of his autocratic ambitions. ...

We can and should argue about what got us here, but we actually know the remedy: we can build trust among our own circles and among those with whom we live. Kinzinger concludes:

It starts with each of us, in our communities, rejecting fear and embracing compassion. Together, we can work toward a more united and resilient future. 

As Dr. Marin Luther King asked in another moment of choice: we must understand we face Chaos or Community?

National shame shuffles along expensively

The outgoing Biden administration has managed to make a tiny bit of progress on cleansing the national shame which is the US gulag at Guantanamo.

Andy Worthington, who has stayed on top of our criminal travesty of justice, explains: 

In what will forever be remembered as a truly significant day in Guantánamo’s long and sordid history, the Biden administration has freed eleven Yemeni prisoners, flying them from Guantánamo to Oman to resume their lives after more than two decades without charge or trial in US custody; mostly at Guantánamo, but in some cases for several years previously in CIA “black sites.”

All eleven men had been held for between two and four years since they were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, and, in one outlying case, for 15 years.

A deal to release them in Oman had been arranged in October 2023, but had been cancelled at the last minute, when a plane was already on the runway, because of what was described, when the story broke last May, as the “political optics” of freeing them when the attacks in southern Israel had just taken place — although Carol Rosenberg, writing for the New York Times about the releases yesterday, suggested that “congressional objections led the Biden administration to abort the mission.”

Nobody who paid attention claims these guys had done anything except be brown Islamic men from a no-count country who got swept up in the national US spasm of vengeance after 9/11. 

Rosenberg describes the back story of our Cuban prison:

Guantánamo’s detention zone today is an emptier, quieter place than it once was.

The remaining 15 detainees are held in two prison buildings with cell space for about 250 prisoners.

The prison opened on Jan. 11, 2002, with the arrival of the first 20 detainees from Afghanistan. At its peak, in 2003, the operation had about 660 prisoners and more than 2,000 troops and civilians commanded by a two-star general. The detainees were mostly held in open-air-style cells on a bluff overlooking the water while the prisons were built.

The operation now has 800 troops and civilian contractors — 53 guards and other staff members for every detainee — and is run by a more junior officer, Col. Steven Kane.

It was always madness; at this point, the insanity is all that is left. And a few remaining prisoners who are tied up in legal proceedings that never advance because American civilian lawyers continued to argue, accurately, that their charges, even if justified, depend on information extracted by illegal torture.

Jimmy

I thought I was done writing about former President Jimmy Carter back in 2023. He couldn't last much longer and I'd written much, especially about his faith and his early insistence that we must remember Palestinians.

But I'll indulge one last time by passing along some of Charlotte Clymer's account of mourning in DC for a president who represented something most such figures do not: an admirable character.

The Real Tribute Was Outside

... Steve Ford, the son of President Gerald Ford, whom Pres. Carter defeated in the 1976 election, delivered a beautiful eulogy in which he said to the Carter family: “God did a good thing when he made your dad.”

President Biden, in what is likely the final major public speech of his tenure, summed up President Carter in three words: “Character, character, character.”

It all felt right and good. It felt fitting. It felt rare and maybe fleeting. It felt like we may not see this kind of easy agreement across the political spectrum for a long time.

But with all due respect, it didn’t come close to matching the quiet and hardy adoration that could be observed in the previous 36 hours on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and surrounding streets.

... So, it was painfully cold and uninviting, and yet, even late into the night, there were thousands and thousands of people across all walks of life waiting in line outside for several hours just to enter the Capitol Rotunda for a few moments and walk around the flag-draped casket of one Jimmy Carter and pay their respects to a model human being.

There were those who were off for the federal holiday and those who came after a long day of work—suits and dresses and military uniforms—young and old, Democrats and Republicans and independents, the working class and the wealthy, entire families, all of them standing outside in the freezing cold for several hours.

That’s not an exaggeration. The wait was several hours. At best, one could reasonably hope to get through the line and the quick orbit within the Rotunda in just over three hours. Some folks waited longer, some as many as five hours depending on when they got in line.

... It wasn’t as though Pres. Carter could do anything for these thousands upon thousands of people who came to say goodbye beyond what he did for them in life, deeds already completed and offered without any assumption of reciprocity.

This man who hadn’t been president in more than four decades, who had a 31 percent approval rating the month he lost reelection, who was unfairly maligned for many years over his job performance, who was unjustly a punchline to much of the country afterward for so long after leaving office — it was this man they came to honor.

They stayed in line, freezing, probably hungry, probably needing to use the restroom at some point, many of them probably wishing they were at home with a hot beverage and blanket in hand.

They stayed in line.

This one-term president, who went back to his peanut farm after leaving office, who was detested by the bulk of D.C. political circles, who didn’t cash out and join a bevy of corporate boards, who didn’t feel it necessary to say what was popular or easy, who navigated his life thereafter as a private citizen with such grace and integrity that even his most ardent detractors had to tip their hats and acknowledge his decency.

I realize there are so many reasons to feel pessimistic about the future of our country at the moment, but if such decency is so honored as we’ve seen by everyday Americans on the ground in our Nation’s Capitol over these past few days, tell me that isn’t cause for hope.

Tell me that isn’t a glimmer of what we could still be.

The whole is deeper than the excerpt. Go read it all.

In which the roadside dispenses advice

 

I have no idea who is posting these Burma-Shave reminiscent displays of signs on a country road.

 

Nor do I know quite what to make of them.

 

They are succinct. But meaningful?

Clearly though, meant to encourage. Perhaps someone is recovering from an illness? We can use all we can get of laughter as winter settles in, locally and nationally.

How to come out of a punch drunk moment

Erudite Partner is out with a new essay for this moment, here available, among many outlets, from Professor Juan Cole's Informed Comment. 

Half of us got kicked in our heads and guts by the re-election of Donnie the dimwitted and his merry band of cowards and grifters. We're going to have to figure out how to live through and beyond this unmitigated disaster for the American republic.

Survival and hope will depend on learning to see and live in the gaps ...

Finding Hope in the Negative Spaces of the Trump Era

... What’s missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don’t mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person’s racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking — calling out — what’s best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.

In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I’ve fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle — reducing the negative space around it — to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold — and expand — the perimeter of that circle of personhood.

Go read it all.  

For myself, I'm coming out of the numbed phase and reconnecting with appropriate rage at the injustice, cruelty, greed and foolishness that characterize what appears to be on offer from the new regime. Let's figure out how to kick these dopes where it hurts -- in their bank accounts and in their over-valued balls (figuratively of course).

It's Election Day in Tisbury

One thing I've noticed about Martha's Vineyard island, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts generally, is that they go in for a lot of voting. Popular, participatory democracy is alive and well around here. I don't know if they'll have a big turnout, but the residents of the town of Tisbury are having their say today.

At Tisbury special town meeting on Dec. 17, voters approved a $4.4-million borrowing request to renovate and maintain the Vineyard Haven library. The next critical step in the process requires voters to approve the spending request at a special town election on Jan. 7. 

... Previously, the library board of trustees created a nonprofit organization, which raised $1.6 million for an addition to the library, but during construction, the older portions of the building continued to deteriorate. According to trustees, there are major issues with roofing, plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and overall integrity of the building, and those issues have continued to grow.

“We raised $1.6 million to build an addition that is paid for, but in the process, the building continues to deteriorate. We need to replace the roofs so we can put solar on it, replace the bathrooms, fix ceiling water leaks, and the exterior is rotting,” said Arch Smith, chair of the board of trustees. “In short, we have water coming in from the roof, and water coming in from the ground, and we don’t want it in the building.” 

If approved at the Jan. 7 special town election, bids for the construction project will be sent out to all possible contractors by late February, Smith said. -- MV Times

This island has wonderful libraries, though apparently the one in Vineyard Haven needs a lot of work.

I'll update here when we learn whether the voters are willing to go for these improvements and these costs to themselves.

January 8 update: The voters have spoken. "Tisbury voters on Tuesday approved a $4.8 million funding request that will be used for the addition and repair of Vineyard Haven Public Library. The ballot question passed by a vote of 305 to 130."