G. Ronald Lopez via ZUMA

From judge Dana Sabraw of the Federal District Court in San Diego, in a ruling blasting the federal government’s separation of migrant children from their parents:

Under the present system, migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.

Sabraw was responding to the government’s admission that it didn’t know where it had placed all the children who have been separated from their parents, and that it might take a while to figure it all out. Because of this, they asked for more time to reunify them. He told them to get cracking instead. Good for him.

Michael Candelori/Pacific Press via ZUMA

The latest:

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is expected to receive Secret Service protection as soon as Wednesday, two sources familiar with the decision tell CNN, but they did not specify how long it will last.

Poor Sarah’s life is in danger from rude lefties! I believe my man Philippe has the right response to this:

FUCKING KNEW THEY’D PULL THIS SHIT

Me yesterday: “They’ll say Sarah Sanders needs to be protected by Secret Service.”

Trump now: “Sarah Sanders to receive Secret Service protectionhttps://t.co/I722O5fPf7https://t.co/dhKafkbcfA

— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) June 26, 2018

Keep in mind, though, that even if this is the right response, that doesn’t mean it’s the best response. Like the man says, nobody promised that life would always be fair.

Remember: Donald Trump won the presidency by hacking the media. He’s a genius at that and he still is. When you’re thinking about the whole incivility schtick and whether lefties ought to be “nicer” or whatever, this is all that matters. It doesn’t matter if conservatives are even worse than us or if they deserve what they’re getting or any of that. When there’s no substance involved—and this particular dustup is as substance-free as it gets—winning and losing is solely a question of which side is better at playing the media game. Given the events of the past couple of years, I’d say that liberals probably ought to have a bit of humility on that score.

This is an Ein Shemer apple being grown at the Great Park Farm + Food Lab. I’m not sure what makes it a lab, nor why they call it an Ein Sheimer apple, but they do. In reality, the apple is named after the Ein Shemer kibbutz, midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, where it was originally developed in the 1950s. According to their website, the kibbutz is so named because of the settlers’ hope of finding a spring (Ein) at the site, and because it’s situated within the area of the Biblical kingdom of Shemer, king of the Shomron, aka Samarians.

Nice church you have there. Does the archbishop have his own parking space? He does? The IRS will be in touch.Xinhua via ZUMA

Now here’s a sentence I’ll bet no one ever expected to read:

Republicans have quietly imposed a new tax on churches, synagogues and other nonprofits, a little-noticed and surprising change that could cost some groups tens of thousands of dollars.

Say what? Well, as you may recall, last year’s Republican tax cut on corporations and millionaires was actually considerably higher than the $1.5 trillion they budgeted, so they had to increase a bunch of other taxes to bring it in line. One of the ways they did that was to end tax breaks for fringe benefits. The problem is that churches don’t pay taxes. You can’t remove a tax break churches weren’t getting in the first place, so instead they simply imposed a brand new tax on fringe benefits for folks who work for churches. Politico explains further:

The main benefits affected are transportation-related, like free parking in a lot or a garage and subway and bus passes. It also targets meals provided to workers and, in some circumstances, may affect gym memberships….Churches and other groups want to know how they are supposed to go about calculating the value of things like parking spaces for employees. Some wonder if the garages provided as part of clergy residences are now taxable.

Evangelicals, like everyone else, are slowly learning that the Republican Party exists to serve the rich. If they can do stuff for their other constituencies, that’s great, but only if it doesn’t interfere with their primary mission. They’ll tax churches if that’s what it takes to balance their tax cut for the rich. They’ll ditch E-Verify if their business donors don’t like the idea of being prohibited from employing cheap undocumented workers. They’ll kill jobs in small companies that depend on cheap steel if that’s what it takes to provide big steel companies with profit-busting tariffs. They’ll blow away protections for pre-existing conditions if it will help big insurance companies and reduce Obamacare taxes on the rich.

Actually, though, I take that back: I doubt that evangelicals or anyone else are learning this. It’s been clear for decades and they still don’t seem to get it, after all. It’s amazing how long Republicans have been able to run this con.

Plenty of room for tents here, I suppose. Tear out a bunch of those useless buildings and you could put up even more.Google Maps

Because of problems with Tesla’s fully-automated assembly line, CEO Elon Musk has set up a second, completely manual assembly line in a tent pitched on a nearby parking lot. He calls it “pretty sweet,” but not everyone is impressed:

“Words fail me. It’s insanity,” said Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.’s Max Warburton, who benchmarked auto-assembly plants around the world before becoming a financial analyst.

….What gives manufacturing experts pause about Tesla’s tent is that it was pitched to shelter an assembly line cobbled together with scraps lying around the bricks-and-mortar plant….“The existing line isn’t functional, it can’t build cars as planned and there isn’t room to get people into work stations to replace the non-functioning robots,” Warburton said in an email. “So here we have it — build cars manually in the parking lot.”

….[Musk] described the new assembly line as “way better” than the one in the plant that cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. That tweet spoke volumes to Dave Sullivan, an analyst at research firm AutoPacific who used to supervise Ford Motor Co. factories. “To say that it’s more efficient to build this with scrap pieces laying around means that either somebody made really bad decisions with the parts in the plant inside, or there are a lot of other problems yet to be discovered with Tesla’s efficiency.”

….“It’s preposterous,” Bernstein’s Warburton said. “I don’t think anyone’s seen anything like this outside of the military trying to service vehicles in a war zone. I pity any customer taking delivery of one of these cars. The quality will be shocking.”

Musk is either a genius or a charlatan. As time goes by, there’s a lot less room for any kind of middle ground. But I’ll say this: I sure wouldn’t want to buy a Tesla Model 3. I’ll let Musk’s fanboys be the guinea pigs for this bold, new experiment in building cars less efficiently than Model Ts, thank you very much.

Today at the Supreme Court:

A state law requiring “crisis pregnancy centers” to supply women with information about abortion likely violates the First Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in blocking the law. The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s more conservative justices in the majority.

And this:

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that President Trump has the authority to ban travelers from certain majority-Muslim countries if he thinks that it is necessary to protect the country, a priority of the president’s since his first week in office. The vote was 5 to 4, with conservatives in the majority and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing the opinion.

And this:

With its five more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of American Express and its “gag orders” — which forbid merchants that contract with American Express from encouraging customers to use other credit cards — even though these restrictions are blatantly anticompetitive and raise prices for consumers.

It’s Mitch McConnell’s Supreme Court now.

I guess you’ve all seen this before, but here’s a multi-decade look at apprehensions of people illegally crossing the border into the United States from Mexico:

Why not just declare victory and go home? Whatever it is we’ve been doing over the past few years, it seems to be working: despite far more personnel and increased funding, the Border Patrol just isn’t catching very many people. That’s because far fewer people are trying to cross the border. The current rate of border crossings is about a quarter of what it was in 2000.

At this point, we already have the border itself pretty well in hand. The obvious thing to do if we want to reduce the number of undocumented immigrants even further is mandatory E-Verify, but neither Democrats nor Republicans nor Donald Trump seem to be very excited about pushing for this. This revealed preference suggests that no one is really all that unhappy about the current rate of border crossings. We should move on.

This is Sacramento, “America’s Farm-to-Fork Capital,” rising out of the Central Valley as you approach it from the north on Highway 99. Can you see it?

There are plenty of places to eat in Lexington, Sarah.Robert E. Lee Hotel

From Chris Hayes:

I’ve noticed an interesting patten that after particularly egregious moments of moral transgression by the Trump administration (Charlottesville, family-separation) there’s a brief, but intense media focus on why mobilization *against* these transgressions has Gone Too Far.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 25, 2018

Quite so. If you’re old enough—or maybe just read a book or two—you’ll remember that efforts to peaceably enforce civil rights in the 50s and 60s were invariably met with brutal terrorism and massive resistance by white folks. Nevertheless, there was considerable attention paid to the grim possibility that blacks might overreact and thus ruin everything. Eventually, urban riots gave conservatives the excuse they needed to declare that, in fact, it really was blacks who were at fault and it was finally time to restore a little law and order.

The lesson here is that conservatives will pull this “liberals have gone too far” schtick no matter what, and there will always be a few pundits of various stripes who will go along with it. This time around all it took was a trivial slight from a tiny restaurant located in deepest Virginia a few hundred feet from—the Robert E. Lee Hotel and the Stonewall Jackson House. But yeah, it’s the liberals who are being horrible.

That said, I’d at least recommend that everyone keep their eye on the family-separation ball here. That’s what kicked this off, and that’s why the Trump administration deserves the thrashing it’s getting. Forget the mylar blankets and the tents and all that, which merely provide conservatives with an opportunity to point out that Obama did it too. Stick like glue to the deliberate policy of separating families. That’s the truly odious policy and the one that’s unique to Donald Trump’s sense of public cruelty as a governing philosophy.

Where did these nails come from? Are they all-American nails from Poplar Bluff, Missouri? Or communist nails from mainland China?Image Source/ZUMAPRESS

Will the United States win its trade war with the rest of the world? Maybe, but there will be collateral damage in the meantime:

Mid-Continent Nail of Poplar Bluff, Mo., the largest U.S. nail manufacturer, cut 60 jobs on June 15 and plans to lay off an additional 200 workers in a few days, citing plummeting sales following the imposition of Trump’s metals tariffs….Mid-Continent Nail imports from Mexico most of the metal wire it uses to make nails. By driving up the company’s costs, Trump’s tariffs are making it nearly impossible for the 500-worker company to compete with cheap nails from China, [George Skarich, vice president of sales and marketing] said.

“The Chinese get a pass and we pay a price,” said Skarich. “Trump ran on jobs and making America great again, but he is making a decision that may help big steel, but it hurts downstream businesses like ours who employ a heck of a lot more people than steel does.”

“We didn’t see this coming,” says Skarich, echoing the words of farmers losing sales to Mexico, people in Kentucky losing access to Obamacare, working-class white folks losing their food stamps, and Harley-Davidson, which is moving some of its production offshore thanks to retaliation against Trump’s steel tariffs. And that’s just the start.

I’ll repeat my usual refrain here: Republicans can put a stop to this any time they want. But they won’t, even though they support free trade. This is how much they’re in thrall to Donald Trump. They won’t buck him even when (a) they disagree with him, (b) most of the public disagrees with him, and (c) his policies are causing pain to their own constituents. It kinda makes you wonder what the point of even having a Republican Party is these days.