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So, in order to prevent the removal of officeholders for political reasons, they can only be removed by politicians?

And the nominee is Kavanaugh. This corruption schtick is getting gauche in its transparency.

Who? All Republicans? NPR? I wouldn't bash ALL Republicans.

I would, if I were more inclined to bashing. If they haven't found anything fundamentally disturbing enough to make them jump ship from the party that is now and will ever be the Party of Trump, I do not want to determine empirically what will induce them do so, so it's probably more useful to think of them as a bloc that will remain in functional solidarity with Trump for the foreseeable future.

You know, if you're so overwhelmingly paranoid about people quoting you like this was some kind of forum or reading the advice in your posts as advice, you could always not post.

But what if it isn't some racial bigotry but instead a wish to stop cartels, coyotes, border-crossing rapes, children being abandoned by smugglers in the desert, or dead bodies and women's underwear showing in people's back yards? What if there is a genuine human compassion to stop all of the evils brought about by criminal enterprises enriching themselves on human smuggling and drug mules, and a desire to stabilize the countries they are fleeing from?

If that were so, we would expect a border enforcement strategy not based on deterrence -- and the Trump administration has repeatedly admitted that family separations and so forth are attempts at exactly that.

People do not cross the border on a whim; by the time they've reached our border they've already fled a long way and have in most cases very little to go back to. When we promise to make it painful for them to be caught, they have little alternative but to try not to get caught, and thereby provide the coyotes with more business. Similarly, our war on drugs has driven up the price of drugs and in so doing motivated the cartels and the drug mules, and you could make an admittedly more complicated argument that criminalizing prostitution enables if not drives sex trafficking, which is a larger portion of the human smuggling than you'd assume.

If you wanted a common thread running through all of this, you could do worse than to say that many of the crimes associated with the border are acts of desperation and people preying upon anyone desperate enough to do them. We have some sense of how to solve problems like that, mostly by providing people a path out that's more attractive than continuing criminality -- and recognizing that such a path has certain requirements to actually be financially feasible as an alternative and accessible to the people we're trying to help.

Instead, the Trump administration's actions have been congruent with a wish to make life as painful as possible for immigrants, despite that pain motivating a lot of what we wish they'd stop doing. It is therefore difficult to credit claims that they are somehow motivated primarily by security concerns.

Quote from: Shazbot on July 06, 2018, 10:33:52 pm

Maybe you should try the reverse....

You didn't answer the questions, you just smugly implied that everyone besides you is a media addicted sheeperson.

Permit me to try to shed some light on events. From the lawsuit and articles I previously cited, I get this order of events:

From this, we can glean that MAVNI was in trouble prior to Trump, possibly because of its association with DACA -- somewhere in the mess of articles above there was some mention of DACA folks not having the cultural/lingual familiarity one might want of an interpreter, as well as a mention of MAVNI recruits being used as mechanics and so forth. However, the blanket ban on MAVNI recruits in officer-producing programs only happened after his election, and the move to delay the MAVNI recruits entering basic training only happened after Kelly became chief of staff, and that's in concert with the bit that made it more difficult for them to acquire citizenship.

Thus, it would appear that the program itself died a partly expected death after having been forced to accommodate people it was never meant for (and being intended to fill a finite skills gap anyway), and Trump inherited it at that point. Now, there were better ways to handle the people already in the pipeline via executive order, but all Trump had to do for this particular outcome was to wait.

EDIT:

"Would a xenophobic bigot intent on purging the military in pursuit of his racist ideology be content at forty expelled following a rules change half a year ago?"

Yes, because it's not about 40. It's about finding one immigrant to perp walk in front of the Fox News cameras, or one denaturalization for Hannity to crow about, or one NFL player forced to stand, or whatever else reeks of xenophobia and mindless jingoism. Trump has decided that his best bet is to just appeal to the worst Americans and hope for a Republican majority across the board in the fall.

Heck yeah. If I recall you needed a super-advanced civ, and then had to..... irradiate it? Some manner of catastrophe occurring to a sufficiently advanced civ could result in machine life.

They would consume all else on the planet if not stopped quickly.

Yeah, I think nuking a Nano Age city would spawn robot pops.

Ah thank you, I must have missed that in the article. I had to start and stop a lot. However, according to all of these articles popping up it's not that they're failing it, it's that the guvmint is refusing to perform it. Others (claim that they) have been given no reason whatsoever.

Even Fox News has nothing nice to say about this. Ouch.

Yeah, like I said, they added requirements so onerous they couldn't possibly fulfill them and are now removing immigrants for failing to pass checks the government can't run in time.

At a wild guess, this might have something to do with John Kelly being both a blatant stratocrat (of the "the Corps is at war. America is at the mall" type) and xenophobic enough to invite Stephen Miller over for Thanksgiving. He started being chief of staff July 2017; this happened around October.