Papers, please.

[jp1]

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017...omestic-flight

I wish I could say that I'm surprised. But actually the only surprise is that it took a whole month of comrade trump being president before this happened.

[bae]

This used to happen to us here when we took the ferry to the mainland. The ferry system is part of the WA State highway system, and the ferry here is an extension of State Highway 20/536. The ferry to the mainland from our county travels entirely within US waters.

Nonetheless, upon arrival in Anacortes, we were herded into a barbed-wire enclosure, and questioned. Sometimes they'd drag away a foreign national, or a US national with warrants outstanding.

This was in 2008.

The local community was a bit miffed at the whole thing.

You might want to look at how deep the "border region" extends inside the US, it's sort of scary.

[bae]

The funniest memory I have of this time was when the fellow in front of me was a bit upset at the questioning.

"Are you a US citizen?"

"I'm a citizen of the Samish Nation, this is our land, the Treaty of Point Elliot says ..."

The least funny memory I have was finding out the guy in charge of herding us into the camps, who was telling us at public meetings "trust me, this is for your own good", was actually not quite such a good guy...

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-...to-child-rape/

[jp1]

Until now I was not aware that the arbitrary 100 mile border area included the coasts. I was aware of the southern and northern parts of it, having watched a variety of checkpoint refusal videos on youtube a while back. According to the ACLU 2/3 of the US population lives within the faux border zone.

[LDAHL]

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017...omestic-flight

I wish I could say that I'm surprised. But actually the only surprise is that it took a whole month of comrade trump being president before this happened.

One of the more amusing aspects of the early Trump administration is the way people are trying to convince us of all the evils that are originating with one obnoxious guy. Every officious customs agent, every antisemitic vandal, every schoolyard bully have "gotten permission" to act from this orange serpent in the garden. It's as if the prior eight year years were a time of edenic innocence that were suddenly plunged into darkness by the Electoral College.

[razz]

Well, the cartoon in my local paper had a different view of Trump and I suspect that it is not unusual. It was a picture of a huge elephant with Trump's head followed by a very tiny Pence looking woebegone and dragging a dung bucket and a large pooper scooper. I wondered how long this go unchallenged and, sure enough, CBC http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-n...enal-1.3996556 announced that:

"U.S. President Donald Trump says he wants to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal to ensure it is at the "top of the pack," saying the United States has fallen behind in its atomic weapons capacity.

In an interview with Reuters, Trump also said China could solve the national security challenge posed by North Korea "very easily if they want to," ratcheting up pressure on Beijing to exert more influence to rein in Pyongyang's increasingly bellicose actions."

Not sure if that will convince North Korea and China but I have no answers and nothing else seems to have worked. Is the US falling behind in nuclear capacity? What will be the unintended consequences? Many of you are far better informed about such things.

[ToomuchStuff]

Fallen behind, no. We still can "blow up the world" (cause our own extinction), probably several times over. We removed several types of nuclear arms, via treaties (classes and locations of missiles).
Here, we have a facility that "makes non nuclear parts, for nuclear weapons", but you do have to have security clearances for several parts, and there is a trained staff of DOE police.

[jp1]

One of the more amusing aspects of the early Trump administration is the way people are trying to convince us of all the evils that are originating with one obnoxious guy. Every officious customs agent, every antisemitic vandal, every schoolyard bully have "gotten permission" to act from this orange serpent in the garden. It's as if the prior eight year years were a time of edenic innocence that were suddenly plunged into darkness by the Electoral College.

To be sure, life was not perfect pre-Trump. I wish I shared your optimism that he isn't going to attempt to make radical changes to the country. And given his well known opinions regarding immigration I seriously doubt that this event at JFK is just a fluke that happened to happen during his administration.

[creaker]

One of the more amusing aspects of the early Trump administration is the way people are trying to convince us of all the evils that are originating with one obnoxious guy. Every officious customs agent, every antisemitic vandal, every schoolyard bully have "gotten permission" to act from this orange serpent in the garden. It's as if the prior eight year years were a time of edenic innocence that were suddenly plunged into darkness by the Electoral College.

Wasn't that basically said by many of the previous administration? "Destroyed this country" I think was(is) a commonly used phrase.

[LDAHL]

To be sure, life was not perfect pre-Trump. I wish I shared your optimism that he isn't going to attempt to make radical changes to the country. And given his well known opinions regarding immigration I seriously doubt that this event at JFK is just a fluke that happened to happen during his administration.

As Bae points out, such incidents preceded Trump.

Where i do see some cause for (guarded) optimism is that despite his bombastic rhetoric Trump seems trending less authoritarian than the previous administration.

David French makes that argument here: http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...ritarian-obama