Daily Bread for 7.6.18

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 11m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 48.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1934, seven are injured in a riot at the Horlick plant:

On this day three policemen and five office employees of the Horlick Malted Milk Corp. were injured when a crowd of strike sympathizers stormed a motorcade of employees entering the plant’s main gate. Emerging from a crowd of 500 striking employees, the rioters overpowered police escorts, shattered windshields and windows, and pelted officers with rocks. Police blamed Communist influence for the incident, and former Communist congressional candidate John Sekat was arrested in the incident. Employees of the plant were demanding wage increases and recognition of the Racine County Workers Committee as their collective bargaining agent.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Victoria Ochoa writes I’m from the border. The news is getting it wrong:

I am from la frontera, meaning “frontier” in Spanish but translated in English as “border.” The news over the past few weeks might make you think that places such as my hometown — McAllen, Tex., in the Rio Grande Valley — are under siege from waves of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, a crisis of lawlessness so extreme that drastic measures are needed. Tearing children from their parents, or, when that proves too unpopular, corralling families in tent cities. Then there’s the $25 billion wall that’s needed to safeguard the United States from the threat of being overrun.

The view from down here is different. In a 2018 rating of the 100 most dangerous cities in the United States based on FBI data, no border cities — not San Diego, not Texas cities such as Brownsville, Laredo or El Paso — appeared even in the top 60. McAllen’s crime rate was lower than Houston’s or Dallas’s, according to Texas Monthly in 2015. The Cato Institute’s research consistently shows that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are markedly less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

In the U.S. borderlands with Mexico, our inherent duality is what helps our communities thrive. We work hard, attend school and worship just as Americans do all across the nation. Yet we are overwhelmingly Latino, and a quarter of us are foreign-born. We are here and there. Some of us were born here, and some of us were not. But it doesn’t matter — pero ni modo — all are welcome.

  Jeremy Raff reports Kids Describe the Fear of Separation at the Border (“Children who experienced the “icebox” say they didn’t know if they would see their parents again”):

Paulina, a 9-year-old girl, described her experience spending days in a detention center at the border. JEREMY RAFF / THE ATLANTIC

Paulina is one of the lucky ones. The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy separated roughly 2,500 children from their parents in recent weeks, but not all families were split up. In the absence of an official explanation, advocates speculated that border agents left some families intact for lack of detention space, instead releasing them with GPS ankle trackers and a court date. After release, Border Patrol sends some of them via bus to the Catholic Charities Respite Center, where they can get a hot meal, new clothes, diapers, and even new shoelaces, which authorities confiscate during incarceration as a precaution against suicide. Then, the immigrants board Greyhound buses for points north while they wait to see an immigration judge. Most will plead for asylum protection to stay in the country, a process Trump has derided as a “loophole” that his administration has sought to curtail even before migrants reach the U.S.

Before arriving at the respite center, Paulina and the other children spent days in a detention center like the one where an activist captured audio of children crying—a recording that quickly crystallized outrage against the separations. “They caught us,” a 5-year-old Honduran girl named Ashley told me. “They took us to a hielera,” an icebox, which is how migrants widely refer to chilly government processing centers. Ashley said agents held her in a different room from her mom. “I missed her and I cried for her,” she said, “I love her.”

  Will Wilkinson asks How Did We Get to the Savagery of ‘Tender Age’ Shelters?:

Perhaps you’ve come to wonder how tearing babies away from their mothers over a victimless misdemeanor came be the official policy of the United States government. It’s a question on a lot of our minds. Most of us are outraged and livid with shame that the savagery of “tender age” shelters was undertaken by our government, on our behalf.

If we’re ready to say “never again,” we need to be willing to expose the roots of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. We need to be willing to cut them out.

Blame Donald Trump’s ruthless bigotry, sure. But when the president walked into the Oval Office, he walked into a ready-made, bipartisan immigration policy framework poised for brutality. Militarized borders, deportation squads, an archipelago of internment facilities, hypertrophied executive power, a lurid body of national security and anti-trafficking law sprung from the rich manure of panic — none of this is Mr. Trump’s handiwork. It was an inheritance.

And now Mr. Trump has deployed this machinery of repression, bristling with Bush- and Obama-era upgrades, to take terrified innocents hostage. The administration sees the moral horror and basic decency of the American people as weakness it can exploit to extort concessions to its unpopular, hard-right agenda of ethnocultural population control. The president’s fresh executive order, falsely advertised as a reversal on family separation, is nothing but a ransom note. It amounts to a promise to continue ripping families apart unless settled legal protections for Mr. Trump’s child hostages are removed. Stephen Miller, the president’s trusted adviser, is enthusiastic about the possibility that scarring toddlers for life might rally the embattled president’s base and drive favorable midterm turnout.

  Victoria Clark writes Where the Heck Did the Term “Collusion” Come From?:

The term caught on, I think, because it captured the general suspicion that the campaign was somehow in on the hack or knowingly benefiting from it while carefully eliding the fact that no tangible evidence had yet emerged tying the Trump campaign to the Kremlin. (Remember that news of the Trump Tower meeting and other contacts between the campaign and Russian actors had not yet become public.)

….

The popularity of the term continued to wax and wane throughout the final months of 2016. When a big story would break about Trump, the campaign, or Clinton’s emails, the word “collusion” would appear in headlines. Not every story described the relationship as collusion. Some referred to it as “ties” with Russia. Others questioned whether Trump was “coordinating” with Putin. Collusion had not yet become the de facto term to describe the Russia connection. But it was very much in the mix.

On Dec. 9, 2016, the Washington Post reported that the CIA had concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in order to aid the Trump campaign. Although the Post did not mention the word “collusion” in its article, other media outlets such as the Economist, the Guardian, and CNN included the term when they picked up the story. After that day, the use of the word “collusion” spiked dramatically. It became the universally accepted term to describe any potential relationship between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. Even the individuals under investigation bought into the use of the word. In July of 2017, for example, Jared Kushner told reporters “Let me be very clear: I did not collude with Russia.” And in September of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. testified before Senate investigators “I did not collude with any foreign government.”

How ’bout some rabbit acrobatics: