Meanwhile, as with this Medicaid ploy in Minnesota, so many things that aren’t surprising now. Notably, the number of people who believe that if you’re not a whitey whitey white white white white conservative Christian your day job is stealing from and threatening all those who are. Odd, too, that this belief seems to be most prevalent in a lot of places where these evil threatening non-whitey-white white immigrants are present only in small numbers…
From Pro Publica/via Salon; "When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county’s voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback.
'Lennon, who’d run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate.
'The flagged voters’ registration paperwork confirmed Lennon’s suspicions. The form for the second person on the list bore the initials of a member of her staff, who’d helped the man register — at his naturalization ceremony. It later turned out more than half the Boone County voters identified as noncitizens were actually citizens.
'The source of the bad data was a Department of Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.
'Once used mostly to check immigrants’ eligibility for public benefits, SAVE has undergone a dramatic expansion over the last year at the behest of President Donald Trump, who has long falsely claimed that millions of noncitizens lurk on state voter rolls, tainting American elections.
'At Trump’s direction, DHS has pooled confidential data from across the federal government to enable states to mass-verify voters’ citizenship status using SAVE. Many of the nation’s Republican secretaries of state have eagerly embraced the experiment, agreeing to upload all or part of their rolls.’
OT
I’ve been noticing recently that the language used by law enforcement in statements about “officer involved shootings” is getting weird. Then this morning, there was a joint statement by CBP, the Pentagon, and the FAA to explain the military using a laser to shoot down a CBP drone, shutting down airspace around El Paso (again).
From that joint statement:
the military “employed counter-unmanned aircraft system authorities to mitigate a seemingly threatening unmanned aerial system operating within military airspace.”
Weird. I mean you have work hard to write something that bad.
It’s not just about ensuring ICE/CBP recruits don’t work in local law enforcement later, though.
It’s also about discouraging people from joining ICE/CBP in the first place, by making sure they know, ahead of time, that there will be consequences for joining a fascistic paramilitary thug brigade.
I don’t see how you can make that clear without specifying up front that’s what you’re doing. Implying that’s the case by implementing and enforcing unrelated criteria they’re unlikely to fulfill may keep them out of local enforcement later, but it doesn’t do anything to prevent them from joining ICE/CBP beforehand.
Churchill’s memo: I recall hearing of this, but it’s fun to read the actual memo. I’m told he got this idea from Ike. This is hard to appreciate unless you’ve been in an environment with reams of reports and memos flying about.
