Trump likes the fascist suppression of protests so much that he’s doing more of it.

Homeland Security officials said Monday they are making preparations to deploy federal agents to Chicago, while President Trump threatened to send U.S. law enforcement personnel to other Democratic-led cities experiencing spates of crime.

It’s up to governors to get medical supplies during a pandemic, but it’s up to the feds to police selected cities (the ones with too many black people and too many people who vote for the Democrats).

Trump made the pronouncement as he defended his administration’s use of force in Portland, Ore., where agents have clashed nightly with protesters and made arrests from unmarked cars. Calling the unrest there “worse than Afghanistan,” Trump’s rhetoric escalated tensions with Democratic mayors and governors who have criticized the presence of federal agents on U.S. streets, telling reporters at the White House that he would send forces into jurisdictions with or without the cooperation of their elected leaders.

Worse than Afghanistan ffs. Oh and by the way Mister Sir, since we’re on the subject, what about those bounties?

“We’re looking at Chicago, too. We’re looking at New York,” he said. “All run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by the radical left.”

Ya gonna firebomb them? Nuke them? Put lead in the water?

Three Department of Homeland Security officials said Monday that the agency has been making preparations to deploy agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Chicago, but the officials said operational details are not yet finalized.

Immigration agents are being deployed to Chicago to attack citizens protesting racial injustice. That’s where we are.

This is so infuriating.

Oh no, she’s too exact! She’s too good at talking about what she’s talking about and not something else! (Flowers? Babies? Baby flowers?) She’s too competent! Ewwwwwwwwwww. Women like that are gross, and we’re suspicious of them, because they might just find something better to do than flatter and placate us. In short they’re bitches.

When men do anger at work they’re seen as authoritative and in control; when women do anger at work they’re seen as bitches and ballbusters.

It would be nice if male news personalities didn’t casually endorse that double standard.

Well, he denies it, but the reporter says he heard it, and another Rep doesn’t deny it but rather says he was thinking about other things.

Not really f*cking bitch but fucking bitch.

When a man says something like that to a woman…it sounds to her as if he’s longing to follow up with a punch. It doesn’t sound just mean or rude, it sounds threatening.

Trump just can’t catch a break. Chris Wallace of Fox News asked him at the end of his interview the other day how he sees his presidency.

“I think I was very unfairly treated,” Trump responded. “From before I even won, I was under investigation by a bunch of thieves, crooks. It was an illegal investigation.”

Well…but…I mean…a presidency isn’t primarily about the mood of the president, it’s about bigger things. I don’t think Wallace was asking “has it been fun for you?”

Donald Trump is a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man. He is so gripped by his grievances, such a prisoner of his resentments, that even the most benevolent question from an interviewer—what good parts of your presidency would you like to be remembered for?—triggered a gusher of discontent.

I’m not sure that’s because he’s deeply unhappy though. I’d love to think he is, but I don’t think his saying “I was very unfairly treated” is a sign of that. I think that’s more a sign of his grandiosity and self-focus than of misery. Deeply furious, yet, but deeply unhappy…I’m skeptical.

Such a disposition in almost anyone else—a teacher, a tax accountant, a CEO, a cab driver, a reality-television star—would be unfortunate enough. After all, people who obsess about being wronged are just plain unpleasant to be around: perpetually ungrateful, short-tempered, self-absorbed, never at peace, never at rest.

It’s the self-absorbed bit that really counts. Can you think of anything more boring to be absorbed by than the self of Donald Trump? But more seriously, it’s the complete indifference to everyone else. The solipsism. Imagine being self-absorbed and being Donald Trump – it would be like being absorbed by an old grapefruit rind or something.

The fact that he is devoid of any moral sensibilities or admirable human qualities—self-discipline, compassion, empathy, responsibility, courage, honesty, loyalty, prudence, temperance, a desire for justice—means he has no internal moral check; the question Is this the right thing to do? never enters his mind.

It also means he has nothing of interest to think about or care about, it means he lives in a desert of nothingness.

One senses in Donald Trump no joy, no delight, no laughter. All the emotions that drive him are negative. There is something repugnant about Trump, yes, but there is also something quite sad about the man. He is a damaged soul.

One doesn’t just “sense” it – it’s completely obvious. We know perfectly well there is no joy or laughter in Trump because he makes it extremely clear.

That was fun! Power went out here at 4:12 a.m. and stayed out for just over 7 hours.

On the plus side, I got to watch a couple of tree workers cut down a very tall dead evergreen tree in the next block. They cut off the branches from bottom to near the top, lowering the bigger ones on ropes and dropping the smaller ones. Then they cut off the tops, with a few small branches left, by tying them up then making two cuts then pushing. Then they repeat that process all the way back down the tree.

One of the two on this job is a woman. I’m impressed.

Action misogyny:

The man authorities have said attacked the family of a federal judge, leaving her husband wounded and her son dead, had previously called her “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama,” and had fantasized about raping a different female judge who presided over his divorce case, NBC News reported.

A review of thousands of pages of self-published writing by Roy Den Hollander, an anti-feminist lawyer, found threats of retribution against the “feminazi infestation of government institutions” and the “feminist infested American judicial system,” NBC reported. The lawyer “was active in anti-feminist and misogynist groups on Facebook, including groups titled Humanity Vs. Feminism and Men Going Their Own Way, according to an analysis of accounts linked to him,” NBC News reported. It characterized his writing as “littered with language common among the most extreme anti-feminist communities on the web.”

Oh that’s exciting. I’ve been a target of some of those “communities on the web.” I think they’ve forgotten about me now, but it was creepy at the time. They were so obsessive about it.

I did wonder why they did the interview outside, in DC in July. I grew up in New Jersey, and summers there are steamy; DC is worse. It turns out it was Trump’s idea.

“Hot enough for you here, Mr President?” asked Chris Wallace.

“It’s hot,” said Trump. “It’s about, well, sort of almost record-breaking stuff.”

“You know, we wanted to do it inside,” replied Wallace. “This is your choice.”

Maybe he thinks outside looks good on him. It doesn’t. (Also, those chairs – he looked ridiculous on his chair, all bunched up.)

He claimed that people flying the confederate flag were “not talking about racism”. But when asked about removing the names of confederate generals from US military bases, Trump could only think about race. And some weird stuff about a couple of world wars.

“We’re going to name it after the Rev Al Sharpton? What are you going to name it, Chris? Tell me what you’re going to name it,” Trump sputtered.

No, they’re going to name it after Amos and Andy. Jesus christ.

Trump says hell yes he’s going to keep sending the feds in to trample on protesters’ rights.

Speaking in the Oval Office, the president brushed aside claims the officers are depriving people of their constitutional rights, and concerns such deployments could herald an attempt by Trump to rule without Congress.

Because he recognizes no legitimate limit on his power to do what he wants, because that’s who he is. It always has been.

In Portland, local media has stressed that the protests are not paralysing the city and are confined to a small area, and that much of life continues as normally as possible under the coronavirus pandemic.

Never you mind; it’s a pretext for Trump to bash heads and by god he’s going to bash heads.

On Monday, it was reported that agents were set to be sent to cities including Chicago. In the Oval Office, the president complained about cities including Chicago and his native New York.

“The police are afraid to do anything,” he said, though Portland police have reported some federal agents acting “under their own supervision and direction”, many while dressed in camouflage fatigues that make them look like regular troops.

Trump continued: “We’re not going to let New York and Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and all of these, Oakland in California is a mess, we’re not going to let this happen in our country. All run by liberal Democrats.”

Oakland. Huh. Not San Francisco, but Oakland. Why’s that?

Because like all the others he listed, it has a large black population. They’re all Great Migration destination cities, and Trump of course wants to kick the shit out of them for that reason.

“Nobody will have done what I’m doing in the next four weeks,” Trump told Fox News Sunday.

I think our verb tenses need a little work.

Describing actions against protesters which observers and officials have described as blatantly unconstitutional, Trump said: “No problem. They grab them, a lot of people in jail.

“These are leaders. These people are anarchists, they’re not protesters … These are people that hate our country and we’re not going to let it go forward.”

Yeah see that’s not how that works. He doesn’t get to just announce that they’re all “anarchists” (does anyone think he has the faintest idea what the word means?) and he’s going to send the feds to throw them all in jail.

That figures.

The Trump administration has been consulting the former government lawyer who wrote the legal justification for waterboarding on how the president might try to rule by decree.

John Yoo told the Guardian he has been talking to White House officials about his view that a recent supreme court ruling on immigration would allow Trump to issue executive orders on whether to apply existing federal laws.

Aka Trump’s view all along: he should be able to do whatever he wants.

Constitutional scholars and human rights activists have also pointed to the deployment of paramilitary federal forces against protesters in Portland as a sign that Trump is ready to use this broad interpretation of presidential powers as a means to suppress basic constitutional rights.

He’s always been ready; now he thinks he can get away with it.

There is nothing in Trump that tells him he shouldn’t do X. There’s a big empty space where that faculty should be.

Alka Pradhan, a defence counsel in the 9/11 terrorism cases against inmates in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, said: “John Yoo’s so-called reasoning has always been based on ‘What can the president get away with?’ rather than ‘What is the purpose and letter of the law?’

“That is not legal reasoning, it’s inherently tyrannical and anti-democratic.”

And that’s where we are.

Trump’s stormtroopers:

Pompeo the other day saw fit to bash the 1619 Project.

“The New York Times’ ‘1619 Project’—so named for the year that the first slaves were transported to America—wants you to believe that our country was founded for human bondage,” Pompeo said in his speech in Philadelphia on Thursday. “They want you to believe that America’s institutions continue to reflect the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding.”

And Pompeo wants you to think they don’t.

But they do. Of course they do. Policing, the prison system, the court systems (bail, plea deals, 3 strikes laws, harsh sentencing, capital punishment), schools, medical institutions, and on and on. Of course they do. We never rooted out the reflections of the country’s acceptance of slavery at our founding and continuance of it for more than two centuries. Of course our institutions still reflect that.

“They want you to believe that Marxist ideology that America is only the oppressors and the oppressed. The Chinese Communist Party must be gleeful when they see the New York Times spout this ideology,” he added. “This is a dark vision of America’s birth. I reject it. It’s a disturbed reading of history. It is a slander on our great people.”

He rejects it, does he. Easy for him. Of course it’s a dark vision of America’s birth, but that’s because it’s what happened. We as a people have been sweeping it under the rug all along and we really need to stop doing that. The white portion of America committed crimes against humanity in relation to the brown portion of America and it has still never paid reparations, never done anything like enough to compensate for the generations of harm. Instead we continue to treat brown people as either cheap labor for jobs like chicken processing (one of the worst jobs on earth) or criminals who must be stripped of all rights and locked in boxes for years. Pompeo is dead right that that’s a dark vision but it’s fucking well what happened and is still happening.

“The Secretary drew a sharp distinction between the view of the 1619 Project—that America was founded on repression—and his own view that America, uniquely, was founded on a then-new conception of universal unalienable human rights,” a State Department spokeswoman told Foreign Policy by email.

Ok but what about the repression part? The new conception of human rights was indeed a good thing, but most of the people men who came up with it didn’t even apply it in their own (cough) households. Most of them had slaves; none of them thought those rights applied to women. Pompeo’s “sharp distinction” works only if you think slaves and displaced indigenous people and women don’t matter.

“Secretary Pompeo is fully committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce representative of America’s devotion to the principle of equal opportunity. This commitment to diversity and inclusion reflects the Department’s professional ethos.”

Excuse me? Workforce? What about citizenry? Does Pompeo see us as just labor? He’s not the Secretary of Labor, he’s the Secretary of State (more’s the pity), why the hell is he referring to us as a workforce?

“Pompeo made it very clear where he stands and reaffirmed the purpose of the commission by denigrating the movement for equal justice and the call for racial reckoning and healing in America,” said one State Department official. “Everyone that I have spoken with is horrified and disgusted by the commission, his press conference, and [the] attack on 1619,” said the official.

…

“Everyone who works for Trump is under instructions to ramp up the culture war,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Foreign Policy in an interview. “I think Secretary Pompeo has been a loyal servant of Donald Trump for his entire tenure and he is following instructions.”

So I guess the instructions are to say that white people are the best and brown people deserved what they got.

Really? They can’t say what a woman is?

Not one of them answered the question.

Funny that the question wasn’t “What is a man?” I guess because that one’s easy, it’s just “woman” that can’t be defined?

I’d like to offer them some of my “attitude.”

Portland mayor to feds: gtfo.

The mayor of Portland in Oregon has renewed his call for federal troops to leave the US city, accusing them of abusive tactics against protesters.

“They are sharply escalating the situation,” Mayor Ted Wheeler told CNN on Sunday.

And they’re not invited. They’re imposed from above.

Sometimes that’s justified. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock when white mobs were attacking the nine students who were integrating the high school…but then the mayor had requested the troops. Kennedy sent troops to Oxford, Mississippi to quell riots meant to keep James Meredith out of the University (“Ole Miss”), over the governor’s objections.

It was a high-stakes showdown between President Kennedy and Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett. “I’m a Mississippi segregationist and I am proud of it,” the governor declared.

…

By Saturday, Sept. 29, 1962, Kennedy was deploying federal marshals to Oxford, and Barnett was making a fiery speech at an Ole Miss football game. “I love Mississippi! I love her people, our customs,” he said. “I love and I respect our heritage.”

Football and die-hard racism and male bravado; booya.

But this isn’t that. Trump isn’t sending the feds to protect black students from raging racist mobs; on the contrary; Trump is sending the feds to terrorize and mangle protesters who are protesting…racism. This is Little Rock turned inside out.

Speaking to CNN on Sunday, Mayor Wheeler said there were “dozens if not hundreds of federal troops” in the city, adding: “Their presence here is actually leading to more violence and more vandalism.

“They’re not wanted here. We haven’t asked them here. In fact, we want them to leave,” he said.

His comments echoed those of Oregon Governor Kate Brown, who described the presence of federal troops in the city as “purely political theatre” from the Donald Trump administration.

And the theater is theater of racism, theater of fascism – not that of We Shall Overcome or Eyes on the Prize or This Little Light of Mine.

Oregon is suing.

Oregon’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the federal government, accusing it of unlawfully detaining protesters.

In the lawsuit, Ellen Rosenblum requested a restraining order to stop agents from the Department of Homeland Security, US Marshals Service, US Customs and Border Protection and the Federal Protection Service from making any more arrests in the city.

…

The lawsuit said the actions of federal officers violated protesters’ ability to exercise their constitutional First Amendment right to assembly and, by seizing and detaining people without a warrant, also breached the Fourth and Fifth Amendment right to due process.

Protesting is allowed. Protesters have rights. Trump is a literal fascist.

Via Wil Wheaton:

Sean Ingle in the Guardian:

World Rugby is considering banning trans women from playing women’s rugby because of significant safety concerns that have emerged following recent research, a decision that would make it the first international sports federation to go down that path.

You know, you’d think the significant safety concerns would have been there all along, given the differences between male and female bodies.

The Guardian can reveal that in a 38-page draft document produced by its transgender working group, it is acknowledged that there is likely to be “at least a 20-30% greater risk” of injury when a female player is tackled by someone who has gone through male puberty. The document also says the latest science shows that trans women retain “significant” physical advantages over biological women even after they take medication to lower their testosterone.

No shit.

As World Rugby’s working group notes, players who are assigned male at birth and whose puberty and development is influenced by androgens/testosterone “are stronger by 25%-50%, are 30% more powerful, 40% heavier, and about 15% faster than players who are assigned female at birth (who do not experience an androgen-influenced development).”

Sanity at last. Other sports please note.

On the one hand it’s funny, but on the other more serious hand it’s appalling.

No no no no no, says Trump, the last 5 questions are very hard, I bet you couldn’t answer them, I bet Biden couldn’t answer them.

Well one of them, says Wallace, is count backward from 100 by sevens.

No no no that’s misrepresentation, says Trump.

93… says Wallace.

Trump apparently thinks it was an IQ test as opposed to a cognitive test. Maybe one of the questions on the cognitive test should be “What’s the difference between an IQ test and a cognitive test?”

Trevor Timm on the DHS coup in Portland:

Virtually all of Portland’s local leaders, as well as Oregon’s leading representatives in Congress, have condemned the situation and called for an investigation.

But so far, DHS and the Trump administration do not seem deterred. The acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, released a video statement Friday lamenting that Portland had declined the department’s “offer” of “support”. So DHS went ahead and sent in its thugs anyway. DHS’s list of reasons for invading Portland and implementing its terror operation, amid what it calls “rampant long-lasting violence”, consists mostly of graffiti incidents and minor property damage.

Watch the clip. It’s extraordinary.

How does he justify his refusal to do what the governor and mayor tell him to do? By talking melodramatic nonsense about having to “defend” the federal courthouse against “violent anarchists”…and then saying he’s seen the broken doors, the broken windows, the graffiti.

Vandalism at the federal courthouse means we need border patrol in rented cars kidnapping people off the street? I don’t think so.

Portland is almost 400 miles from the Canadian border and 80 miles from the Pacific ocean, by the way. It’s unclear what legal authority, if any, allows CBP to be terrorizing the streets to hunt down graffiti artists—even if they think they can operate anywhere that’s 100 miles from a border. In other words, it’s illegal, or it should be.

So many questions. What does border patrol have to do with breaking windows at a federal building? Is border patrol legally authorized to kidnap people off the streets? Does it have any accountability to local government? How does any of this work?

Also by the way this “statement” of the acting secretary’s was made to Fox News.

And who is Chad Wolf?

He previously served in several positions in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including as Chief of Staff of the Transportation Security Administration and Chief of Staff to DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. He was an architect of the Trump administration’s family separation policy.

From 2005 to 2016, he was a lobbyist, helping clients to secure contracts from the Transportation Security Administration, his previous employer.

Awesome. Corrupt and brutal.

Back to Trevor Timm:

DHS, even in the pre-Trump era, has been an enormous waste of taxpayer resources, full of massive government waste and abuse, and a civil liberties disaster to boot. Back in 2015, I called for it to be abolished in the pages of the Guardian. Under Trump it has reached new levels of depravity. Its disturbing anti-immigration actions have shown agents seemingly going out of their way to be as cruel as possible to those they apprehend.

Anyone only has to read the news from the past few weeks to witness DHS’s corruption and creeping authoritarianism: in one story, government auditors have found that the CBP spent money meant for food and medical supplies for detained migrants on ATVs and dirt bikes for themselves. In another, DHS deployed Predator drones, helicopters and airplanes to spy on Black Lives Matter protesters in 15 American cities.

None of this is ok.

The Guardian followed Trump’s Fox News interview with Chris Wallace.

The interview was recorded on Friday, however. Wallace said he did ask the president about the pandemic and efforts to tackle it. But they were speaking a day before the Washington Post and then the New York Times reported that as Congress and the Trump White House negotiate the next stimulus and relief package for an economy and a nation hammered by Covid-19, the White House is seeking to block funding for testing and tracing efforts, and other key areas of the pandemic response.

Meanwhile Trump is out playing golf again.

Trump is asked about his top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci. Reports indicate the White House is looking to discredit Fauci. Trump denies he has fallen out with Fauci, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. “I spoke to him yesterday at length, I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci” he says. He also says Fauci, who has emerged as a frank public voice on the pandemic, is “a little bit of an alarmist.”

By which he means Fauci doesn’t tell cheer-up lies.

Trump adds that he believes Covid-19 will “eventually disappear”.

Ah yes, “eventually.” No doubt it will, like for instance when the sun explodes, but we don’t live in “eventually.”

Trump is asked about enforcing a nationwide mandate for masks to be worn in public. “No, I want people to have a certain freedom,” says Trump. He later says he believes masks can help stop the spread of Covid-19 though.

That’s not a kind of freedom that matters though. That’s a cheap, selfish, dime store freedom. Besides which, he doesn’t in fact want people to have a certain freedom. There are a lot of people he wants to see in prison forever; he says so himself.

He is asked about rising crime in US cities in recent weeks. “I explain it very simply by saying they’re Democrat-run cities. They’re liberally run. They’re stupidly run.”

That is “very simply,” and very crudely and very inaccurately.

How about those Confederate flags sir?

“When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism. They love their flag, it represents the south,” says Trump. He then equates Black Lives Matters flags with Confederate flags, a staggering and offensive claim given that the latter represents a system that thrived on slavery.

It doesn’t “represent the south” – it represents the slave-owning south, the south that tried to secede in order to continue slavery, the south that reinstated racial oppression in the 1870s, the south that fought the civil rights movement every step of the way. It does not, for instance, represent the huge proportion of the southern population that is descended from slaves.

Then he talks a lot of nonsense about Biden.

Disturbingly, he then refuses to say he will accept the result of the election. “Can you give a direct answer you will accept the election?” asks Wallace. “I have to see … I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes,” says the president.

Oh brilliant. The law and order guy says yes he might well try to overthrow the government.

Trump couldn’t manage a more polite or serious tribute than “saddened to hear,” and Republican senators don’t even know who Lewis was…beyond “he was one of the black ones.”

Like many of their colleagues, GOP Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska) posted tributes to Rep. John Lewis on Saturday and aimed to include photos of themselves with the civil rights icon who died Friday. Rubio even made the image his Twitter profile picture.

There was just one problem. The photos they each posted were of Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, who died in October.

Well it’s not as if they’re colleagues or anything, not as if they ever had an opportunity to see them in person.

“It was an honor to know & be blessed with the opportunity to serve in Congress with John Lewis a genuine & historic American hero,” Rubio tweeted with the photo of himself and Cummings.

“A genuine hero but to be honest I don’t actually remember who he is.”

“It was an honor to have served alongside John for a small portion of his impressive career of service, and to have joined him at the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, a years-long effort of the congressman,” Sullivan wrote on Facebook with the photo of himself and Cummings outside the museum.

“Oh that’s the other black guy! Sorry sorry sorry. Make America great again.”

Oh, that’s interesting – Trump isn’t just looking the other way and trying to bully everyone else into looking the other way, he’s actively trying to help the virus kill us all.

The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.

I suppose this is tied to his firm belief that if you don’t test you don’t have as many cases.

The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said.

The administration’s posture has angered some GOP senators, the officials said, and some lawmakers are trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill. …

President Trump has repeatedly questioned the value of conducting widespread coronavirus testing, arguing that if there were fewer tests conducted, the number of infections would be lower.

Yes, that’s definitely how that works. If you don’t know X then X doesn’t exist. If you don’t test for termites then you don’t have termites. Even if the house is a pile of dust, you still don’t have termites – you know this because you know you didn’t test for them.

At the same time they push cuts in testing and CDC funds, administration officials are trying to use the spending package to fund priorities that appear not directly related to the coronavirus — including a new FBI building, which has been a longtime priority for Trump, according to people involved.

Awesome. Don’t spend our money on resisting the coronavirus, but do spend it on a new FBI building. That’s all fine.