Tracker

Trump’s Joint Chiefs vice chairman said the president ‘is an idiot’ who only cares about money — according to a retired Army Colonel A Washington Post profile on a retired Army Colonel reveals President Donald Trump’s Joint Chiefs vice chairman, Gen. John Hyten, thinks his boss is an “idiot,” and the First Lady is “smarter than the president.” Col. Kathy Spletstoser, who retired from the Army in 2019 after serving for 27 years, “has accused Hyten of sexually assaulting her more than half a dozen times while she was under his command,” The Washington Post reports, “and then retaliating against her — accusations that he has vigorously denied during a military investigation and in front of the Senate.” Spletstoser is trying to gain access to records she believes will help her case against Hyten. To support her point, she revealed to The Washington Post a conversation she says Hyten had with her, after he attended a dinner with the president and First Lady in October 2017. “The president is an idiot,” Spletstoser says Hyten told her. “He is just a businessman without the basic understanding of national security. Everything is a business transaction for him and making money is winning to him and the only thing that matters.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trumps-joint-chiefs-vice-chairman-said-the-president-is-an-idiot-who-only-cares-about-money-according-to-a-retired-army-colonel/

Trump And Barr Expand Surge In Federal Officers To Chicago, Albuquerque. WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr announced Wednesday that federal agents will surge into Chicago and Albuquerque to help combat rising crime, expanding the administration’s intervention in local enforcement as Trump runs for reelection under a “law-and-order” mantle. Hundreds of federal agents already have been sent to Kansas City, Missouri, to help quell a record rise in violence after the shooting death of a young boy there. Sending federal agents to help localities is not uncommon. Barr announced a similar surge effort in December for seven cities that had seen spiking violence. Usually, the Justice Department sends agents under its own umbrella, like agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or the Drug Enforcement Agency. But this surge effort will include at least 100 Department of Homeland Security Investigations officers working in the region who generally conduct drug trafficking and child exploitation investigations. DHS officers have already been dispatched to Portland, Oregon, and other localities to protect federal property and monuments as Trump has lambasted efforts by protesters to knock down Confederate statutes. Trump has linked the growing violence in the streets with protests over racial injustice, though criminal justice experts say the spike defies easy explanation, pointing to the unprecedented moment the country is living through — a pandemic that has killed more than 140,000 Americans, historic unemployment, stay-at-home orders, a mass reckoning over race and police brutality, intense stress and even the weather. And compared with other years, crime is down overall. Local authorities have complained that the surges in federal agents have only exacerbated tensions on the streets. The decision to dispatch federal agents to American cities is playing out at a hyper-politicized moment when Trump is trying to show he is a “law-and-order” president and painting Democratic-led cities as out of control. With less than four months to go before Election Day, Trump has been serving up dire warnings that the violence would worsen if his Democratic rival Joe Biden is elected in November, as he tries to win over voters who could be swayed by that message. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-expands-federal-surge-chicago_n_5f189cd4c5b6128e68202876 (And so it begins. Trump is doing what he said he would do- use a private militia to promote his power and ego)

Sadly, this is what happens all too often when a ruling party sees that there is no real opposition. Mark Twain said that governments, like babies, ought to changed often, and for the same reasons.

And they allow heavily armed anti-maskers to occupy public buildings but arrest nuns protesting children in cages and peaceful remostrators sitting on the lawn of a state attorney general.

Here’s why the White House is sending stormtroopers into Portland In one of the most alarming developments of Trump’s presidency, dozens of federal agents in full camouflage seized protesters and threw them into unmarked cars, taking them to locations unknown without specifying a reason for arrest. It appears that at least some of the agents involved belonged to the US Customs and Border Protection (colloquially known as Border Patrol), an organization that obviously has no business whatsoever conducted counterinsurgency tactics against peaceful American protesters in Portland, Oregon. Neither the mayor of Portland nor the governor of Oregon wanted them there; in fact, they specifically requested that they leave. And now a U.S. Attorney for the State of Oregon is calling for an investigation into the arrests, even as the Acting head of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, is vowing to ramp up these actions both in Portland and reportedly elsewhere. Needless to say, this is a chilling step toward police state authoritarian rule in the United States, one that was presaged by Attorney General Barr’s approval of an pre-curfew assault on protesters instigated in Lafayette Square to clear the way for a presidential campaign photo op. Few took it seriously when leftist organizers were warning that the border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being culturally and structurally converted into stormtroopers for the Trump regime, equally ready to be deployed against politically inconvenient American citizens as against undocumented immigrants seeking a better life. Those warnings should be heeded now. We should not allow ourselves to become numb to this. It is helpful psychologically–even if tired and stale as a rhetorical device–to remind ourselves what the reactions would be if a Democrat were acting similarly. Imagine if President Obama had sent in in military-garbed federal stormtroopers to round up Tea Party protesters into unmarked cars, over the top of the objections of local governors and mayors. It’s unthinkable. It’s the sort of thing that drove bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories like Jade Helm, but that if any shred of them were true would instantly have embroiled the country in a civil war. So why is Trump doing it? Many theories abound—none of them entirely convincing on their own, but all of them deeply disturbing.\ One explanation is that it’s a trial run for future police state actions, partly to push the window of the possible, partly to desensitize the public to further abuses, and partly to see precisely what they can get away with and what Americans will tolerate. This is no doubt true to a certain extent, but the challenge is that it also carries enormous downside risk. If Trump doesn’t win re-election he has less than six months left in his presidency–hardly time enough for a deeply unpopular and divisive president to engineer a police state coup. And just as with the outrage in Lafayette Square, the mere action itself will likely make Trump even more unpopular with the few undecided voters who remain. Another convergent explanation is that making a show of supposed toughness in conducting military counterinsurgency in Democratic-controlled cities that want no part of it will thrill Trump’s base. This is reasonable to assume, since Trump’s base takes no greater joy than in seeing authoritarian cruelty exercised against their political enemies. And it’s likely true, since Trump is obsessed with his base to the exclusion of all else beyond his own personal profit. But the problem is that almost everyone in the Trump campaign’s immediate orbit beyond the president himself knows that Trump must expand beyond his shrinking base to have any chance of winning re-election. The more Trump gives aging bigots dopamine hits, the more the rest of the country falls away from him. Camouflaged stormtroopers used against American citizens will almost certainly lose him more votes than he gains. But there is a third explanation, simultaneously dumber and yet more convincing: the Fox News effect. Trump spends endless hours watching garbage cable television, specifically One America News (OAN) and Fox News. Judging from Trump’s tweets, his entire political universe revolves around Fox News–and, more recently, the even more bizarrely propagandistic OAN when even Fox News fails to adequately toe the line. Ever since the beginning of the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Fox News has been portraying liberal American cities as hellscapes of violence in which the police and the Trump Administration played the role of hero against rampaging hordes. Most Americans, of course, didn’t see it that way. But if you live entirely in the Fox News bubble, then this narrative is as self-evident a truth as the rising of the sun in the east. Most recently, Fox News has been describing Portland in particular, in the words of former Media Matters for America contributor Oliver Willis, as if it were Baghdad circa 2003. This is not the case, of course. Crime rates in Portland have been on a steady decline for decades, with the last month being no significant exception. In fact, the worst Acting HHS Secretary Wolf could point to was literally a few instances of graffiti. But if Fox News were the sum of your reality, you would believe that emergency action needed to be taken before the residents started to erect a Thunderdome and the services of Snake Plissken would be required. You would send in the troops despite the potential cost out of a belief that relieved Americans would be desperately grateful for your embrace of “law and order” (even if it were heavy on the “order” and light on the “law.”) You would do whatever it took to bring the situation to heel, and figure the public approval would follow from the new Pax Trumpiana. After all, Fox News declared it must be so. This last scenario is admittedly ridiculous. But it’s also likely closest to the truth. While figures like Stephen Miller no doubt have a laser focus on instituting an authoritarian apartheid regime to save white supremacist Republican rule the demographic tsunami preparing to overwhelm them, they are not the president. Donald Trump is. Trump is a man of impulse, not of plans. His head is not set on the next 20 years of power, but on tomorrow’s cable news ratings. The constructed reality of Fox News is his reality. The rest of the authoritarian project follows from there. And that more than anything else likely explains why the president is precipitating a constitutional crisis by sending stormtroopers into Portland.

I consider that a compliment. I think.

A Century Ago, One Lawmaker Went After the Most Powerful Cops in Texas. Then They Went After Him. The Texas Rangers were vicious enforcers of white power. J.T. Canales was the only Mexican American in the legislature. He lost the fight, but the reckoning he sought is finally underway. https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/07/a-century-ago-one-lawmaker-went-after-the-most-powerful-cops-in-texas-then-they-went-after-him/

For the American right, masks are tyranny but Trump’s secret police aren’t Not long ago, heavily armed white men (and a handful of white women) stood on the steps of Michigan’s Capitol. They were protesting the governor’s lock down amid the spread of the new coronavirus. Gretchen Whitmer, they said, was infringing on their constitutional rights and liberties. They were showing they would not stand for it. It was a nice bit of political theater that has since grown nationally into a battle over wearing masks. Refuse to wear one, and you support the president. Wear one, and you don’t. But beneath the protests was something members of the press corps believed they should take seriously: a conservative ideology ever watchful of corrupt power. It should be clear to the press corps, and to a citizenry informed by the press corps, that those protests had nothing to do with the tyranny of government. It should be clear that when they said, “Don’t tread on me,” that didn’t include you. It should be clear, to everyone, that such protests weren’t principled. I’m not going to argue what they were really about. Maybe small men with small minds need to act up. What I do know: if there’s anything worthy of armed resistance, it’s the emergence of Donald Trump’s secret police force. Yet here we are. As far as I can tell, nothing but crickets. The secret police are real. Groups of heavily armed and unidentified federal agents in military dress have been gassing peaceful protesters in Portland, Oregon, under the guise of protecting “federal facilities,” meaning monuments. We now know they are with Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among other agencies under the US Department of Homeland Security. These are the same agencies that gassed peaceful protesters out of Washington’s Lafayette Square so the president could do a photo shoot with a Bible in front of a church. Videos online have shown officers in Portland taking protesters into custody without reading their rights, loading them into unmarked vans, and threatening to shoot anyone attempting to follow them. Its activity goes beyond disappearing citizens amid social upheaval. The Oregonian, the state’s paper of record, reported Monday that “protecting” monuments from protesters seeking justice for the murder of George Floyd, in addition to greater racial equality over all, now includes spying on them as well as infiltrating their ranks. It reported: “The court records provide a window into the tactics of federal agencies based at the courthouse in downtown Portland at a time when local, state and congressional officials from Oregon have roundly criticized the national law enforcement presence.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/for-the-american-right-masks-are-tyranny-but-secret-police-arent/

Leaked memo: Trump administration authorized domestic surveillance of protests to protect statues The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) authorized domestic surveillance to identify threats against monuments and statues in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting vandalism against federal memorials, according to a department memo obtained by Lawfare. The document, issued by the DHS Office of Intelligence & Analysis, described “Activities in Furtherance of Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, Statues and Combatting Recent Criminal Violence.” The document says DHS personnel are “collecting and reporting on various activities in the context of elevated threats targeting monuments, memorials and statues.” It also provides legal guidance on the “expanded intelligence activities necessary to mitigate the significant threat to homeland security” posed by threats to statues. Senior DHS official Ken Cuccinelli appeared to refer to intelligence gathering on protests during a Monday interview with CNN. “We got intelligence about planned attacks on federal facilities,” he said in response to questions about the administration’s controversial deployment of federal authorities to Portland. “If we get the same kind of intelligence in other places about threats to other facilities or officers, we would respond the same way.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/1151617/ (Sure as spit sounds like a dicatorial oversight on citizens exercising their right to protest)

Voters may see Trudeau as the lesser of two evils.

The sign on Ness at Ferry says "Sam's" restaurant.

The "troubles" in Ulster did not stop until ordinary women went out and started protesting and putting themselves in harm's way. That forced both sides to the table. What we are seeing is the emergence of a fascist state and if there is not a popular uprising, America will be in big trouble. All popular uprisings begin somewhere and Portland may be the flashpoint that dooms Trump and the racist parts of the GOP. Like what happened in Canada when Mulroney was PM, the right wing in the states will probably be split into the nutty and the insane factions. They will probably wander in the wilderness for a long time as well, and we had better hope that the Dems do not get drunk on power and succumb to the same excesses as the GOP.

The Cons have a larger problem- their unwillingness to expel members who openly voice racist comments. McKay is the only leadership candidate who has any credibility and he is as dynamic as a glass of warm milk.

There is a bit of an odd effect of the Coronavirus- the lumber mills in BC and elsewhere have had to cut production dramatically, so there is a shortage of lumber now.

Trump working with Bush torture lawyer to cut Congress out of lawmaking: report. Trump suggests he plans to exceed his legal authority to implement sweeping changes to health care and immigration President Donald Trump suggested in a Fox News Sunday interview that he planned to act beyond his legal authority to implement sweeping changes to immigration and health care policies based on an interpretation of a recent Supreme Court ruling granting him "powers that nobody thought the president had." Axios reported that the legally precarious strategy, which cuts Congress out of the lawmaking process, relies on a theory of executive power floated in June by John Yoo, the George W. Bush administration lawyer who drafted the memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique. The first of the controversial orders will cover immigration, per Axios. Trump told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace that he would also invoke the authority to create "a full and complete health care plan. "You heard me yesterday. We're signing a health care plan within two weeks — a full and complete health care plan that the Supreme Court decision on DACA gave me the right to do. So we're going to solve — we're going to sign an immigration plan, a health care plan and various other plans. And nobody will have done what I'm doing in the next four weeks." The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had by approving, by doing what they did — their decision on DACA. And DACA's going to be taken care of also. But we're getting rid of it, because we're going to replace it with something much better. What we got rid of already, which was most of Obamacare — the individual mandate. And that I've already won on. And we won also on the Supreme Court. But the decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we've never done before. And you're going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks. Yoo argued in a National Review article that a recent Supreme Court decision upholding the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program empowered the president to bypass Congress through prosecutorial discretion: choosing not to enforce federal laws. https://www.salon.com/2020/07/20/trump-working-with-bush-torture-lawyer-to-cut-congress-out-of-lawmaking-report/

Trump’s acting Homeland Security secretary just made a damning admission on Fox Appearing on Fox News Tuesday night, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf — who has not been confirmed to his position by the Senate — made a damning admission about his department’s conduct in Portland. Federal officials in Portland have prompted a fierce backlash for aggressive and legally dubious tactics against protesters in the city. Local officials have demanded that the federal officials, some of them using unmarked vehicles and wearing camouflage without identifying insignia, leave and let police handle law enforcement. But President Donald Trump and Wolf seem intent on using the Homeland Security forces to intimidate, rough up, and apprehend protesters to make the federal government appear tough. And while he was speaking to Fox Host Martha MacCallum on Tuesday, Wolf seemed to confirm what many had accused his agency of doing: making unlawful arrests. “The department, because we don’t have that local support, that local law enforcement support, are having to go out and proactively arrest individuals,” Wolf said. “And we need to do that because we need to hold them accountable. This idea that they can attack federal property and law enforcement officers and go to the other side of the street and say ‘you can’t touch me’ is ridiculous.” https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/trumps-acting-homeland-security-secretary-just-made-a-damning-admission-on-fox-news/

Trump Seen At Event Without Mask Hours After Saying It’s ‘Patriotic’ To Wear One President Donald Trump on Monday called face masks “patriotic” and said on Twitter “there is nobody more Patriotic than me.” Hours later, he was seen without his patriotism. Footage from a fundraiser at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, above, shows multiple people, including the president, mingling without a mask. Health experts have been calling on people to wear face coverings when in public to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. Trump has only rarely been seen in one, and has resisted calls for a national mandate. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/donald-trump-no-mask-fundraiser_n_5f1681f9c5b615860bb6a80b?ri18n=true (Shocking that Trump has been exposed as a liar and hypocrite)

Here's One For the WTF file: Trump horrifies viewers with warm wishes for accused sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell PBS NewsHour President Donald Trump horrified many viewers of his Tuesday coronavirus briefing — filled with many lies and distortions about the ongoing pandemic — when he was asked about the fate of Ghislaine Maxwell. The longtime girlfriend of the late Jeffrey Epstein, who was believed to have engaged in decades of sex trafficking and abuse of young girls, is now in federal custody. She faces multiple charges of participating in sex trafficking with Epstein, who was also a friend of the president before they reportedly had a falling out. A reporter asked Trump if he had any comment on the prospect that Maxwell might turn in powerful men as a part of her case. “I haven’t really been following it too much,” Trump said. “I just wish her well, frankly. I met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”

There is no way that Trump is going to admit he was wrong and back down. He would assume that would make him look weak, and his father taught him well that this was verboten. Yesterday, protesting women were gassed.

Ain't nuthin there unless it has happened int he last 24 hours. There is a vacant Robin's store there, though.

It would seemthat Ms. Payette has outstayed her welcome.

Aparty from the obvious racial slur, this has to be considered remarkable self-restraint for Trump. The clip was only 23 seconds, but that is usually enough for him to blame African-Americans for all the violence in the US, immigrants for all the STDs, Latinos for all the rapes and Obama for pretty much everything else that has gone wrong. And blame Joe Biden for the Russians making Trump look incompetent.

Trump Threatens to Send Federal Law Enforcement Into New York, Chicago President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to send federal law-enforcement officials into cities like New York and Chicago following his deployment of such forces to Portland, Oregon, over the weekend to crack down on protesters. “New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore and all of these—Oakland is a mess—we are not going to let this happen in the country, all run by liberal Democrats,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re going to have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you.” In defiance of both state and local governments, Trump over the weekend escalated operations against protesters in Oregon, with Customs and Border Patrol agents snatching demonstrators off the streets and putting them into unmarked vans for detentions. The state’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the feds, accusing them of unlawfully detaining protesters. The ACLU has also sued federal agents and local law enforcement, calling the situation a “constitutional crisis.” Nevertheless, Trump on Monday cheered the feds’ encroachment into Portland while threatening to do the same in other cities: “They’ve done a fantastic job, been there three days, and they have done a fantastic job in a very short period of time, no problem. A lot of people in jail, these are anarchists. These are not protesters. These are people that hate our country. We are not going to let it go forward.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-threatens-to-send-federal-law-enforcement-into-new-york-chicago (If this doesn't sound like dictatorial law enforcement, I don't know what it)

Trump Congratulates Self for Wearing Mask After Months of Refusing to Wear One A week after he publicly donned a face mask for the first time following months of refusal, President Donald Trump—who still opposes a nationwide mask mandate—posted a photo of himself with a face mask while declaring that “many people say” that it’s “patriotic” to wear a mask. “We are United in our effort to defeat the Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance,” he wrote. “There is nobody more Patriotic than me, your favorite President!” In an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, the president—who has only publicly worn a mask once and defied mask guidelines in the past—said he was a “believer in masks” while stopping short of endorsing a federal mandate, saying he’ll leave it up to the governors. On Monday morning, meanwhile, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams literally begged Fox News viewers to wear masks to stem the spread of the virus that’s killed over 140,000 Americans. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-congratulates-self-for-wearing-mask-after-months-of-refusing-to-wear-one?ref=home (Aaaand...Trump falls back to using racist terms again)

I think it is important to distinguish between those who live in close quarters and are not deliberately exposing themselves to the risk of infection and those who do. The second group deserve the name "Covidiots".