Another Disgruntled Misogynistic White Male Commits Murder

Yesterday’s murders of five newspaper employees in Annapolis, Maryland, along with serious injuries to two of their colleagues, has an all-too-familiar genesis.

The dead employees, four reporters and a sales assistant for The Capital Gazette—a daily paper with a pedigree that originates in the 18th century—were trapped behind a glass entry wall and their desks by 38-year-old Jarrod Ramos wielding a shotgun and homemade smoke bombs. The shotgun had been legally purchased a year earlier.

Prior to his deadly assault the shooter had barricaded the back door, preventing several victims from escaping. Several surviving Gazette employees huddled under their desks when the shooter paused to reload, at least two of them texting or twittering for help.

Ramos had some years earlier embarked on an online social media campaign against a former classmate from Arundel High School through Facebook and then by emails. Ultimately, after criminal charges were brought against him, Ramos pleaded guilty in July 2011 to criminal harassment. He was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation, therapy, and no contact with his victim or her loved ones.

A Gazette reporter Eric Hartley—who was not one of the five murdered Gazette employees—interviewed the victim and described in a 2011 column following the guilty plea how the Defendant had stalked his victim online, terrifying her and, she believed, causing her to lose her employment.

A year after publication of the Gazette article, the shooter sued Hartley, the Gazette, and the paper’s former editor and publisher for defamation (actually, essentially for not describing the harasser’s justification, such as it purported to be), but when the case came up for trial the court found in favor of all defendants and dismissed the action. Any attorney can tell you that the most common defense to a defamation action is truth, and the Maryland court apparently held that the Gazette article had been accurate and truthful.

The shooter’s appeal of the adverse civil defamation judgment ended ultimately in dismissal.

Refusing to let the matter rest there, in response to the failure of his court case the shooter then created a website further detailing his complaints against both the reporter and the Gazette. He also created a Twitter account that from time to time threatened the Gazette and rattled its employees.

Hence, in the seven years that elapsed between the shooter’s guilty plea in 2011 and the actual murders yesterday, the shooter seems to have been obsessed with his grievances against both the victim and more recently against the newspaper, and felt ultimately impelled to go on a killing spree.

After an intervening period of silence, the shooter posted a final message to the world from his twitter feed the day of the murders, i.e., “Fuck you, leave me alone.”

That’s what young red-blooded American men do in this country to justify their right to publicly pursue and harass women who reject them and to avenge their honor when they are held accountable:

Kill the bastards, as many of them as you can. Just pick up a gun and blow them all away.

The shooter made no effort to flee the crime scene but was apprehended hiding beneath one of the targeted Gazette desks in the midst of the five dead and two injured employees he had shot, and he surrendered his weapon to law enforcement with his hands up.

A coward to the end.

Trump Media Switcheroos in Action

            The Line-Ups

This past week, after agreeing to stop separating illegal immigrants from their minor children at the southeastern U.S. border as a condition of applying for refugee or asylee status (following a world-wide outcry and hundreds of demonstrations), Donald Trump publicly hosted “Angel Families” at a White House event focused on family members of U.S. children killed by illegal immigrants.

He didn’t mention, at the reality show-like event, that there are more murders per capita committed in the country by native-born individuals than by immigrants.

That would be truth telling, and when Donald Trump showcases grieving parents and throws a pity party, it isn’t to get to the full truth but just enough of it to sway or retain the loyalty of his base.

His stupid, faithful, blind, deaf, but certainly not silent base. Now there’s the real pity party.

The parents of the murdered children deserve our empathy and our support, but trotting them out before microphones only to trample all over the reputation of law-abiding immigrants who in recent months have simply tried to enter the country to claim asylum status is to misuse and abuse the sorrow of bereft parents.

That’s our Prez: Trafficking in the legitimate bereavement of parents of dead children:

Describing one dead child from his photo as “like Tom Selleck, but better looking.” Then bizarrely autographing all eleven of the enlarged photos of the dead children. I just can’t . . . .

We’ve seen the Trump bait and switch act before.

During the 2016 presidential election, just as Trump’s 2005 Access Hollywood tape hit the airways and Trump looked vulnerable, the showman responded with a similarly out-of-sync, offensive maneuver.

That is, first the country was treated to the taped Trump boasting to Billy Bush about oogling half-nude teenage beauty contest contestants in their dressing rooms and kissing and groping just about any woman for whom he had a yen: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

By now at least sixteen women have made public accusations against Trump for his illegal sexual groping and assaults. Several matters are currently being litigated in the courts.

Back in October 2016 when the Access Hollywood tape became notorious (efforts to out other tapes from similar shows have been met with a stone wall of purported copyright protections), Trump responded by dragging three women who had in the 1990s accused Bill Clinton of inappropriate sexual conduct to the television monitors just prior to his second debate with Hillary Clinton for an “interview”—in a manner of speaking.

On that occasion Trump also spotlighted a fourth woman whose purported rapist was briefly (and reluctantly) represented by Hillary Clinton as her court-appointed attorney at the beginning of her legal career in 1975. (Judges tend to do that: appoint attorneys who are either affiliated with public defender offices or have the bad luck to be present in the courtroom when appointed defense counsel is needed. In this case, the defendant also requested that his appointed counsel be a woman. All counsel are at risk of such appointments on occasion.) Here, the victim had a grudge against Clinton for doing her job and negotiating a reduced sentence.

The Trump campaign conspicuously placed the three Bill Clinton accusers behind the Trump party in the studio seating for the presidential debate. Obviously the reason for this seating was to rattle Hillary Clinton, who of course had nothing to do with the interactions—if any—that these three women had had two decades or more earlier with her husband.

And Hillary, to her credit, ignored these women (who seemed embarrassed to be trotted out by Trump) and concentrated instead on outdebating the unprepared Donald Trump, whose only other noticeable debate tactic was to hover menacingly over Hillary, looming over her shoulder and moving around the stage behind her like a giant voodoo shadow when she spoke.

An altogether eerie and ominous tableau.

Hence, we can easily point to two different line-ups of people rightfully suffering or claiming to have been wronged: dragged out into Trump’s reality television spotlight to abruptly change the subject (when it had become a danger to Trump) and upend serious concerns in the news before the American public.

            The Tweets

What Trump has done by such live presentations of aggrieved individuals, he has also frequently attempted to accomplish by disruptive tweets. Several come to mind.

— During March 2017 as reports about connections between the Trump campaign staff and Russian officials gained traction, Trump suddenly and without any evidence began accusing the Obama administration of having wiretapped his telephones in Trump Tower during the election.

This turned out after formal DOJ review to be completely FALSE.

— Then, in September 2017, as the GOP failure to pass a last-ditch healthcare bill exemplified Republican incompetence at enacting legislation and fulfilling major campaign promises, Trump fabricated an attack on the patriotism of NFL players who had undertaken a silent protest against racism on the playing fields during the National Anthem that originated peacefully with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

The President, who has publicly, ineptly, and unsuccessfully tried to mouth the words of the National Anthem during several televised ceremonies, again changed the subject on a national stage purely by design.

The accusation that the NFL players are unpatriotic is, of course, entirely FALSE. The players, black, Hispanic, mixed, and white, are clearly more patriotic than the manipulative Trump himself, who countered by bullying the NFL into enacting penalties for players who kneel on the field prior to a game.

— A few months earlier Jared Kushner’s efforts to create a “back channel” for communications between Trump officials and the Russians during a meeting with Sergei Kislyak, a senior diplomat and Russia’s former ambassador to the U.S., had caused a stir. Kushner had no security clearance and was attempting to subvert the usual diplomatic channels between countries at a time when Russian connections with the Trump campaign were not entirely understood and were deeply suspect.

Donald Trump then tweeted using the phrase “covfefe,” clearly just another of his many typographical (and spelling) errors, and he led the press on a merry twitter chase to decipher the meaning of the nonsense word. The Kislyak connection was briefly abandoned.

— Later in 2017, as the incendiary Roy Moore special Senate campaign in Alabama neared a conclusion, with explicit Trump support barely keeping it competitive, Trump secured the release—with much fanfare—of three U.S. basketball players who had shoplifted in China and been jailed there as a result. Trump used his twitter account to repeatedly attack the father of one of the players for his refusal to publicly thank Our Dear Leader.

Moore famously lost the election, and a Democrat took the seat for the first time in modern Alabama history.

— Not long before the basketball players’ shoplifting episode, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s description of Trump as a “moron” was described in a broadcast by NBC. Tillerson did not retract his description. He even became, briefly, something of a national hero for speaking truth to power.

Trump’s reaction was to threaten the license of NBC—which was beyond his presidential powers to accomplish—and thereby cause the news of Tillerson’s opinion of Trump to quickly fade from the headlines.

Avoiding scrutiny and dismay by diverting to another topic is an age-old tactic to change the subject. Switching the playbill and confusing the listener can throw an opponent’s objections into disarray, at least temporarily. And chaos and disarray are staples of the Trump presidency. What muddies the water for outsiders keeps secrets safer for insiders. At least so far in this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants administration.

Donald Trump’s record of avoiding or attempting to avoid blame for the breathtaking cruelty and equally breathtaking incompetence of his administration is well-established.

Ready for the next Trump Reality Television line-up, anyone? North Korean nuclear bomb-makers? Canadian whisky and washing-machine manufacturers? Roger Stone in full lying mode? Julian Assange with a day pass from the Ecuadorian embassy?  

Take your pick. You may even be asked to answer a few questions at the end of the show to gauge your gullibility and susceptibility. Inquiring minds want to know.

The “Missing” Warehoused Immigrant Children

The Trump administration, in addition to continuing the unconscionable separation of Latin American immigrant children from their parents and siblings at official border crossings and other places on the southwest border, has admitted it has no realistic plans to reunite those families. That is, border patrol and DHS officials have been swift to tear families apart and warehouse them separately in dozens of locations across the country but have failed to set up a system to ultimately reunite them.

It’s a question of priorities. Tearing apart is much easier for an autocracy than bringing back together. To rend asunder takes force or the threat of force. Keeping families separated merely requires incompetence of the most inhumane and appalling kind.

Which the Trump administration has perfected in the image of its Great Leader.

To date, there are as many as three or four child and “tender age” shelters for babies and small children located in south Texas and operated by private contractors. The exact locations of these shelters have been mostly undisclosed although enterprising reporters and insistent legislators have located some of them. In addition, foster care facilities all over the country have received children for care, many of whom were surreptitiously transferred in the middle of the night.

Most of the direct care personnel contractors have instructions not to touch the children.

Not to touch a toddler who is sobbing? An infant who needs cuddling? An abandoned child whose world has collapsed?

Over 11,000 children are now being held in those shelters, and this number could double in the next six weeks or so.

MSNBC newswoman Rachel Maddow indicated on air, in tears, about visits to the shelters from

“lawyers and medical providers who had visited shelters where migrant children were being held in the Rio Grande Valley, describing play rooms full of crying, preschool age children.”

One or more audiotapes and then videotapes smuggled out of those rooms reveal hopelessly desperate young children sobbing without avail. It was all too much for anyone with a heart.

Preparations are being made to hold some older children on military bases, and others are already living temporarily in tents in the desert where air conditioning is lacking and outside temperatures often rise to 100º or more.

As parents were denied their petitions for asylum and thence were swiftly deported, there have been no concurrent actions undertaken by DHS or HHS to reunite families torn apart at the border and held incommunicado from each other for days, weeks, or even months.

Most significantly, there is no one overall system with input by all the parties concerned—DHS, HHS, contractors, military, border control, social work employers—to connect families still in the States or deported back to Central or South America as their minor children wait anxiously for them in child internment camps all over the country.

The adjudication systems are not in sync. This means that once parents have gone through an expedited purported quasi-judicial hearing to determine if they are entitled to asylee status—and fail to convince the presiding fact-finder that their imminent fears of persecution in their countries of origin are justified—they have been hustled onto a flight south out of the country without generally being able to see, hear, or speak to their children. Few have the resources or the knowledge to retain legal counsel to appeal an initial negative finding.

All immigrant participants in this charade, adults and children, are assigned numbers (on armbands, like yellow stars?), but it would appear that the numbers of all individuals in the same family do not match and cannot be computer-syncronized. Older children know their names, their parents’ names, the locations of their previous homes, and very likely a telephone number or two. But babies haven’t even learned their own full names, let alone any other data, and a numbered armband is nothing but an obscenity to anyone attempting to keep a family together.

Finding historical parallels to this developing tragedy isn’t difficult.

The Argentinians did it with the newborn babies and small children of the “disappeared” or murdered young parents during their dirty war of 1976 to 1983. An estimated 500 of these children were “handed or sold to military families and to others considered ‘politically acceptable’” for adoption by the Argentinian junta which ruled the country without mercy.

Even with forensic genetic DNA testing, fewer than 25% of the disappeared Argentinian children have been identified. The rest continue to live a lie and their true families continue to search for them, with a new younger generation persevering in these efforts as the mothers, siblings, and especially the grandmothers—“the angels” of the missing children—age out and die.

And this in one self-contained country that is a quarter the size of the United States.

The Spanish also illegally adopted out as many as 300,000 newborn babies beginning in the decade following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and continuing even after the death of dictator General Francisco Franco in 1975. Babies were taken from vulnerable women who supported the Republican cause—i.e., women who were imprisoned or widowed or both. Some mothers were told that their babies had died. Others—prisoners who understood what was happening—were shot after their babies were forcibly removed.

The Catholic Church collaborated, including both nuns and priests. Lax Spanish adoption laws were easily circumvented. Court cases against elderly physicians plus DNA testing are continuing at the present time to reestablish family ties and uncover the truth about these infant abductions.

In Trump’s ethnocentric America, small children being stranded in the U.S. trace their heritage mainly to Central America, with some deriving from families even further south, hundreds if not thousands of miles from the U.S. border. Searching for the families of the detained immigrant babies and children is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Most of the home countries have become failed states and/or exceptionally violent. The families who flee are in fear for their lives. They are legitimately seeking refugee or asylee status.

We now know that the task of reuniting families torn asunder by the Trump policy is hopelessly beyond the capability of the wardens of these babies and children, the myriad U.S. caretakers including some foster families in northern cities, and government record-keepers. The speed and casualness with which separated children were whisked away from their parents and/or ports of entry now prevent quick detection of the children’s current circumstances.

The New York Times has reported that:

“In part because of the Argentine experience, international accords now recognize certain fundamental human rights. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989, asserts that nations must ‘respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity,’ a requirement that extends to one’s name and family relationships. In 2006, the General Assembly affirmed that a ‘forced disappearance’ that is part of a systematic attack on a civilian population qualifies as a crime against humanity.”

Hence, can we justifiably describe the internment of asylum seekers on our southwest border as “a systematic attack on a civilian population” and hence a “crime against humanity”?

Just ask the mothers, fathers, grandparents, and their tiny wailing children warehoused without understanding, without hope, without comforting arms.

Just ask the implacably determined Trump administration led by the execrable President himself—whose sole governing mantra has been to get his own way—if the future for these warehoused babies and children has promise. Just try to get an answer. He speaks in his usual roaring platitudes and twisted logic. He has now, under pressure, signed an “order” purportedly to unite families which fails to clarify how this can be accomplished.

He publicly labels immigrants “animals.” His base cheers.

Thousands of futures hang in the balance. They appear to be hopelessly compromised. The fragile emotional and psychological well-being of these young children is at stake.

Only the federal courts, which have been importuned by plaintiffs represented by the ACLU and at least 18 attorneys general of the states and the District of Columbia, have responded with initial injunctions for immediate communications between and swift reunification of family members. Let us hope that the hundreds of volunteer attorneys who have been on the front lines can assist the courts to reconnect these immigrant parents and children.

[Updated June 27]

The First Immigrant Child to Die

Will Rosalita from Ecuador, only eight months old and unsympathetically deposited in a Texas mass childcare facility, be the first to die?

There are only four caseworkers for every 1,000 children assigned to watch over the youngest children in many or most of the temporary DHS and HHS holding facilities, otherwise known as juvenile prisons, hurriedly set up to contain the young victims of Donald Trump’s wrath.

Will four-year-old Juan from Guatemala, heard crying on an audible tape from inside a former Walmart building near the border, begging over and over for his father (“Papa! Papa!”), will he be the second child who has been neglected just enough to die from dehydration and sorrow, alone in the night?

Which of the small children sobbing and ignored, deposited in some corner, and fitfully watched over by other immigrant children in the absence of adult caretakers, will die next, unfed, undiapered, unwashed, uncomforted even though loved dearly by parents who are either imprisoned hundreds of miles away or have already been refused asylum to our grand and glorious country and forced onto a plane back to Columbia, or Costa Rica, or El Salvador?

How many more times must the world watch President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jefferson Sessions and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen shamelessly lie to the American public with their claims that they are only following the law enacted by Democrats, have no need to apologize, and find Biblical support for their separation of tiny Latin American children from their parents?

Repeating a lie does not make it come true. “Playing to the base” of vehement Trump supporters does not alter the equation of the current administration, i.e.:

According to Trump and his mindless hate-filled followers, these obscene acts of violence against the poorest and most wretched of Latin Americans will end only if Congress enacts an immigration law that:

(1) caters only to “merit,” money, and a higher education, and not merely a willingness to work hard and/or a fear of violent, often deadly retribution in the homeland;

(2) cuts off “chain migration” of family members such as those of the Drumph/Trump family over several generations including Melania Trump’s parents;

(3) prohibits immigration lotteries to redress the dearth of immigrants from countries from which they were nearly completely banned from the U.S. for decades, even centuries; and

(4) appropriates $25 billion to build an unnecessary southern border wall that is, in much of its terrain, unbuildable and/or owned by private individuals who will fight in the courts for years to prevent acquisition by eminent domain.

This is BLACKMAIL to build a monument to the hatred and scorn of Donald Trump while the most vulnerable immigrant children weaken and yes, will soon begin dying, on his watch.

When will there be enough violence against innocent children to please the psychopath in the White House?

“How many deaths will it take ‘till we know

“That too many people have died?

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,

“The answer is blowing in the wind.”

Bound by Fear and Misery: New World Refugees and Old World Refugees

As Trump enjoyed his Father’s Day today, it is unlikely that he would give even a passing thought to the dilemma faced by refugee fathers and their children around the world.

The United States Department of Homeland Security tacitly permits illegal Latin American immigrants who avoid boats and planes on their way to the southern American border to make the trip north by land vehicles and/or on foot to the Rio Grande, southern Texas, and California. At which point DHS either turns them away altogether or, if they have the effrontery to claim asylum, detains all participants—separating many parents from their children in the process.

In this way at least 2,000 young Hispanic immigrant children have been summarily removed from their parents (who face delayed court proceedings) and housed apart from them in the past two months, many in an old repurposed Walmart building, some in a brand-new tent city. This has created a humanitarian crisis for children and parents, one of whom committed suicide in his anguish.

Alarms have been raised in numerous circles and the crisis is becoming worse every day.

Illegals who manage to cross the border unnoticed by federal or local officials often die in the desert from the dangerously hot weather conditions within huge areas managed by a finite number of U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints in the sparsely populated terrain.

The mandatory separation of families has been deemed by Donald Trump to be application of a “law” enacted during the Obama presidency (an outright lie). Trump’s proposal to avoid separating parents and children (which he claims to abhor) is to provide lukewarm enthusiasm for a GOP immigration bill that has been lackadaisically moving through the House for weeks (months?) and may never actually get to the floor for a vote.

That unlikely bill would provide, in addition to (1) a modification of the mandatory family separation policy—enforced by fiat of the Trump administration with Biblical underpinnings enunciated by Attorney General Jefferson Sessions without the slightest evidence of shame, (2) the resolution of the DACA crisis created entirely by Donald Trump and (3) a $25 billion Congressional appropriation to build Donald Trump’s much ballyhooed border wall.

Never a slacker when it comes to building his Wall of All Walls, Trump has made sure that his cult members in the House are including financing in their current draft bill for the damnable thing. (Vegas bookmakers still deem construction of more than a fraction of the wall to be a long shot.)

Hence, according to Trump, families can—“must”—be legally torn apart at the border, and the long-suffering DACA adults, brought to the U.S. as young children, can be left to continue living their American lives in fear and limbo so long as Trump can build in the style to which he has become accustomed: grandiose, exclusive, expensive, and one-of-a-kind construction that would shout his name to the world for decades to come (just imagine the future graffiti).

Marble or gold-plated, anyone?

Emblazoned with the Trump brand and phony family coat of arms/heraldic shield?

On the other side of the world, in the past four years smugglers from Libya have tried to ferry more than 600,000 North African migrants across the Mediterranean to Italy, claiming that the Geneva Convention requires the safe acceptance of the migrants by Italy.

Italy begs to differ, and “[v]essels chartered by an assortment of European NGOs have plied the waters off Libya . . . rescuing migrants [from leaking or sinking ships] . . . and transporting them to Sicily.”

Disputes over who is willing to accept these migrants rage across Europe, and in the process, traffickers continue to tow “rubber boats full of migrants” near Libya’s territorial waters “before setting them adrift.” Many migrants are subsequently pitched into the sea and drown.

Small dead children have washed up on nearby shores to international condemnation.

Hence, Trump is learning at least some of his migrant exclusion lessons from the often barbaric treatment of North Africa’s teeming refugee masses.

Hitler and Mussolini formed an historic evil partnership to decimate European Jewry and other minorities more than 70 years ago. Trump appears to be emulating the worst that 21st century Europe and Asia have to offer, including public adulation of deadly autocrats in Russia, Turkey, The Philippines, China, and North Korea.

The world judges the humanity of a country by its treatment of the most needy, generally its refugees and asylees.

Mr. Trump, the world is watching and it has a long memory.

When Michael Cohen Spills the Beans . . .

Donald Trump’s consigliere Michael Cohen purchased a cheap paper shredder for his moveable office space, and as a result the DOJ has painstakingly reassembled at least sixteen (16) of his shredded documents, sliced into strips prior to or during the recent federal raid on Cohen’s offices.

This is reminiscent of Iranian efforts to identify American diplomatic personnel—who were masquerading as Canadian movie staffers—by reassembling shredded passport photos (dramatized in the movie “Argo” based on actual events during the Iranian revolution involving the takeover of the American embassy and the kidnapping of embassy employees in 1979-1981).

Michael Cohen liked to save old cellphones, and at least two of his ancient Blackberries yielded oodles of old texts and other messages.

Michael Cohen didn’t seem to discard many of his files, requiring DOJ staff to determine which of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of documents and records he retained over the two decades plus he shilled for Donald Trump are protected by the attorney-client privilege. Only a tiny fraction of those files has been so designated, several hundred at last count.

Michael Cohen’s counsel fees have been spiraling out of control and his assets assessed for bail and potential forfeiture. The Trump campaign fund paid some of his attorneys but balked at putting up the cash for the long haul. Michael Cohen has been selling some assets and trying to imagine a world without a $50,000 per month slush fund payment from He Who Must Be Obeyed.

And Michael Cohen’s exposure appears to go well beyond federal pardonable crimes to the realm of nonpardonable state crimes, which most state attorneys general would salivate to prosecute.

So, where does this leave the hapless Michael Cohen, faithful counsel to the Cult of Mountebank, His Holiness The Clown?

Hoist, as they say, on his own petard. Skewered like some pork waiting to be barbecued for public consumption.

And mightily tempted to make things easier and simpler for himself and his family by spilling the beans on his erstwhile mentor in the Big House in D.C.

So, Donald, hear this: The man you so casually failed to hire for your Washington staff and then repeatedly belittled in the press will have his day.

At your expense.

And the American people just can’t wait.