Item 1: Somebody forgot to tell Trump the old title was “leader of the free world.” Not that he’s doing any leading.
President Donald Trump continues to tout the success of his North Korea summit last week — but it’s Kim Jong Un who’s taking the real victory lap.
On Tuesday morning, the North Korean leader made his third trip to China in as many months to meet with President Xi Jinping. Xi used the opportunity to praise Kim and say that the summit was an “important step toward the political solution of the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue.â€
And just the night before, the Pentagon announced that it would cancel a key military exercise with South Korea in August. That’s a big deal since that’s a significant concession the North Koreans have wanted for a long time. After all, they see these exercises as prep for an invasion and have protested against them every time they occur.
Xi Jinping is nobody’s fool. Trump is Xi’s fool.
Item 2: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is a fool for restricting the vote. But he had a bad day in court.
District Judge Julie Robinson (a George W. Bush appointee) decisively declared Kobach’s pet voter-ID law unconstitutional, and then ordered him to take some continuing legal education classes because he kept ignoring the basic rules of evidence and discovery during the proceedings in her court.
Poor baby.
Item 3: The United States is going to withdraw from the UN Human Rights Council. Of course.
Item 4: McClatchy reports that US officials likely lost track of nearly 6,000 unaccompanied migrant children. We could be living through one of the most egregious human rights calamities this country ever committed.
We are witnessing the authoritarian. I noticed it in November 2015. It was obvious to me. I have no idea how others could have not seen what this monster is.
The US government by presidential order is placing babies in jail. No politician or journalist is allowed to see them. 3 year olds are expected to go to court hearings alone with no legal representation and understand what is happening to them.
There is no systematic way to track who belongs to whom and where they are.
This dictator must be deposed. If a senator cannot be allowed to see the children, then we do not have 3 branches of government any longer.
This is the beginning of the dictatorship. They delight in creating outrage. Going after powerless first to see what they can get away with .
Wonder who they will go after next.
And trade: Congress has power over this and have ceded it . Soon we will be paying more and farmers manufacturers will lose. We are being eviscerated from within
That is the agenda of trump. The dismemberment of america.
Maha, this "losing track" of unaccompanied migrant children is what's supposed to happen to them. Mostly it means that the feds left a voicemail for the sponsor family and they didn't return the call. Often this is because the sponsor family put the child on a bus to go live with their relatives, and are trying to keep them off ICE's radar.
As far as I can tell, ICE is hoping to get everyone thinking about this as a crisis, to which they can present their plan of keeping children in cages as a solution.
Ah yes, Kobach is one of six R's running for governor of Kansas. I am rooting for the high school student to finish ahead of him in the primary. Perhaps by then the state bar association will have pulled his license and sent him to remedial problem identification classes also. I hope these remedial classes are on his dime for once and not, as usual, billed to the taxpayers of the state. We will see.
Imagine if Obama had cancelled military exercises with South Korea, with nothing to show for it other than a promise weaker than ones the North Koreans had previously broken. Not only would the media reporting not allow Obama the wiggle room they allow Trump to spin the “negotiations” as a success, however ridiculous that is in this case, they’d be fitting him for leg irons.
Since it’s worked so well in the Fox News court of public opinion, Kobach foolishly thought he could get away with the same stuff in front of a real judge and had his butt handed to him, deservedly so. Unfortunately, this won’t stop Kobach and others in continuing their efforts to disenfranchise voters with the voter fraud lie.
How can the US even show its face at the UN Human Rights Council in the wake of the gross human rights abuses going on at the border? We used to be a strong advocate against just this kind of outrage on behalf of the victims, and now we are the abusers. It is sad but even worse that a majority of republican voters support it. For these people, racism Trumps any semblance of decency and humanity.
Lastly, given the direction and trajectory of disasters being visited upon this country, if democrats don’t at least take back the House in November…I can’t even finish that.