No Room at This Inn

Border Blues:  Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, the cabinet member who testified that the Trump administration didn’t have a policy of separating children from their parents as they were torn from their arms and that the children and parents held in metal cages weren’t held in those cages when they were resigned last night or so she said in the hastily prepared resignation letter that accompanied her notification tweet. In reality she was fired just days after accompanying Trump on trip to the border, where he celebrated the building of his wall, the one that isn’t being built and referred to the women and children seeking refugee status as murderous, tattooed drug traffickers.  He also said that the country was full, that there was no more room for refugees, a message that is particularly hollow in the run up to Easter week. That Nielsen was forced out isn’t all that surprising, last week without seeking her input, Trump pulled the nomination of Ron Vitiello a long term border official who was half way through his confirmation process to serve as the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) saying that he was “going in a tougher direction.”  Apparently Nielsen, hardly a snowflake when it came to following Trump’s abhorrent policies, had earned Trump’s displeasure by repeatedly pointing out to him when some of his “tougher” policies like closing the border or violating refugee laws were illegal and/or down right ignorant.  As to the border, despite screaming that he was closing it down, pushback from Republican leadership and his economic advisors was so uncharacteristically forceful that Trump deferred those plans for a “year” just days after he announced them. Refusing to acknowledge that his border closing plans were ill formed and stupid, he attributed his change of mind to Mexico’s increased efforts to halt immigrants, even though Mexican officials insist that they aren’t doing anything different.  Though a number of names have been floated as possible replacements for Nielsen, including Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Trump’s like-minded election fraud conspiracist and failed Kansas Gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach, Trump hasn’t yet selected a permanent replacement.  For now he’s elevated Kevin McAleenan, a US Border and Control commissioner to serve as acting Homeland Secretary.   According to the Washington Post McAleenan is "generally well-liked by leaders in both parties and is viewed as a neutral, technocratic law enforcement official, rather than an immigration hawk” so it’s fair to assume that he’ll be replaced as soon as Trump finds someone more aligned with his and immigrant hawk Steve Miller’s hateful policies to step into the role.

Democrats:  While Joe Biden’s “touching problem” continued to dominate the news cycle, feeding the SNL skit machine and providing Trump with some more fodder, a few other Democrats threw their names into the already very crowded Democratic presidential ring.  Colorado Senator Michael Bennet revealed that despite needing to delay a formal announcement until he gets some unanticipated surgery to deal with a recent prostate cancer diagnosis behind him he still plans to run.  On Thursday Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan who may be best known outside of Ohio for challenging Nancy Pelosi’s leadership in 2016 announced on The View that he’s running too.  The increasingly popular Stacey Abrams continues to publicly ruminate about her next move, a move that could involve running to unseat David Perdue, Georgia’s current Senator, running again for Governor or running for president but won’t involve running for VP because why running for second place? And though he hasn’t gotten a lot of attention tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang is also running.  He advocates a universal basic income policy that would provide every American with a $1,000 guaranteed monthly income, a plan that has been much written about and is actually in place in Alaska that  he believes would help "solve the problems that got Donald Trump elected in 2016." On the money raising front Senator Cory Booker announced that his campaign raised $5 million in the first quarter; while competitive, that number puts him behind former Congressman Beto O’Rourke, Senators Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris and the surprising overachiever South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

International and Domestic:  Brexit is still puttering along, Prime Minister May is now canoodling with the Labour Party in an effort to find still another compromise Brexit plan while at the same time seeking another deadline extension from the EU.  The good news from Israel is that their Beresheet rocket ship has moved into orbit around the moon and seems well on the way to landing on the moon’s Sea of Serenity on April 11.  The not so good news is that the nation’s elections, scheduled for tomorrow, remain far from serene.  There are a lot of parties in Israel and the country’s parliamentary system awards seats in the Knesset, Israeli’s parliament,  to any party who manages to obtain at least 3.25% of the vote with the Prime Minster “prize” going to the candidate whose party manages to cobble together the largest coalition.  To increase his chances and to solidify his increasingly right wing base Prime Minister Netanyahu announced over the weekend that he would begin extending sovereignty to parts of the West Bank if he is “lucky” enough to get reelected.  We won’t know until after the results are in whether or not Netanyahu’s strategy has worked.  However one thing is for certain, despite his controversial and provocative promise, Netanyahu has got Trump in his camp.  Over the weekend while speaking at a Republican Jewish Conference, Trump reiterated his support for Israel, not because he cares all that much for Israel but because he wants to keep the Christian voting blocks who do care firmly on his side, he hopes to persuade Jewish voters in Florida, the one swing state that matters to vote for him over any member of the Democrat party, the party that he called out as anti-Semitic, and because he wants their money for his 2020 campaign.  Additionally, he attacked Representative Ilhan Omar who got into bigly trouble for questioning the “dual” loyalty of American Jews. The irony of Trump telling Jews to vote for the “good people on both sides” guy because he’s better for their “first priority” Israel while slamming Omar’s comments just a day after a Trump supporter was picked up for threatening to “put a bullet in her” is hard to miss, although many in the crowd did manage to miss it.  Ignorant or not, Trump is a savant when it comes to crowd manipulation and the exploitation of the “weaknesses” of his opponents.  Sadly he continues to find plenty of opportunities to ply those skills, all too effectively and Beto O’Rourke may have just fallen into one of Trump’s traps.  While saying that the US-Israeli relationship is among the most important "on the planet" Beto called Netanyahu out as a racist a reference to his alignment with Israel’s far right anti-Arab parties.  Of course the press picked up on the second part of his statement, and you know that Trump will be running with that fragment.