I Take One Day off from Blogging, and the Whole World Goes Pear Shaped

Trump just issued an executive order banning entry from seven predominantly Muslim countries.  Rather unsurprisingly, given the motley crew of racists populating his senior administration, this applies to legal residents of the United States (green card holders) as well:

President Trump on Friday closed the nation’s borders to refugees from around the world, ordering that families fleeing the slaughter in Syria be indefinitely blocked from entering the United States, and temporarily suspending immigration from several predominantly Muslim countries.

In an executive order that he said was part of an extreme vetting plan to keep out “radical Islamic terrorists,” Mr. Trump also established a religious test for refugees from Muslim nations: He ordered that Christians and others from minority religions be granted priority over Muslims.

There's something that I think even Clarence Thomas would rule as unconstitutional before the ink was dry.

“We don’t want them here,” Mr. Trump said of Islamist terrorists during a signing ceremony at the Pentagon. “We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country, and love deeply our people.”

Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump explained to an interviewer for the Christian Broadcasting Network that Christians in Syria were “horribly treated” and alleged that under previous administrations, “if you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible.”

BTW, the Trump administration is now walking back applying the EO to green card holders.

This clusterf%$# was complete with Customs and Immigration refusing a federal court order to allow lawyers to talk to the detainees:

………

Early in the evening, a huge piece of news broke: Two federal judges, Ann Donnelly of the Eastern District of New York and Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, had made rulings that would stall the implementation of Trump’s anti-refugee executive order.

For the lawyers at Dulles Airport, Brinkema’s ruling generated a ton of excitement. She ruled that the travelers detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had a right to see lawyers. 

………

But lawyers who spoke to The Daily Beast said it’s also unheard of for government agencies like CBP to prevent people who have the legal right to live in the U.S. from seeing their lawyers. And that’s what was happening.

After Brinkema’s order came down, and lawyers at Dulles prepared to meet their new clients, the CBP balked, barring these lawyers from seeing their would-be clients. 

It's gotten so bat that Richard Bruce Cheney is calling it a bad idea.

And in the bad idea area, Trump Trump put Steve Bannon on the National Security Council, while dropping the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Director of National Intelligence from the Principal's Committee:

President Donald Trump is reshuffling the US National Security Council (NSC), downgrading the military chiefs of staff and giving a regular seat to his chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Mr Bannon, formerly the head of the populist right-wing, Breitbart News website, will join high-level discussions about national security.

The order was signed on Saturday.

The director of national intelligence and the joint chiefs will attend when discussions pertain to their areas.

Under previous administrations, the director and joint chiefs attended all meetings of the NSC's inner circle, the principals' committee.

I actually have mixed emotions on this, on one hand, he is clearly removing experienced voices in the American intelligence establishment from a major role, on the other hand, these American intelligence establishment has been a giant clusterf%$# of fail since well before the Bay of Pigs invasion.

And finally, and I am sure that Bannon had something to do with this. they issued a statement acknowledging Holocaust Rememberance Day which neglected to mention Jews at all.