News Day

You remember the Hans Christian Anderson story: the vain emperor orders the most beautiful suit of clothes from swindlers who dress him in exactly nothing. The sycophants around him exclaim over the beautify of his new clothes. And everyone agrees, afraid to say that they cannot see anything, because that would mean they are stupid or traitors. Finally, as the emperor parades through the city, a small child says, “But he hasn’t got anything on.”

This time a federal judge called out the sycophants and swindlers surrounding the emperor. 

The emperor called Portland “war ravaged,” as a chicken-suited protester with an American flag kept vigil outside ICE headquarters. The emperor ordered the National Guard federalized and deployed to Portland. 

Not a child this time, but a federal judge, a former prosecutor appointed judge by the emperor himself, delivered the message. 

Her language was a little different, but the message was clear.  Portland is not war ravaged. Protest is legal. Law enforcement is doing just fine without the military. The president is acting ultra vires, beyond his legal power or authority. The emperor has no clothes. 

U.S. District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, issued a scathing 161 page opinion telling the Trump administration that free speech is for everyone, and that their arrest, imprisonment, and attempted deportation of international students for pro-Palestinian statements violates the U.S. Constitution. 

Because we have so little good news from courts or Congress, and none at all from the executive branch these days, I am quoting at length from this opinion in tonight’s post. I fully realize that this is a district court ruling, subject to appeal and possibly even to reversal. But in these hard times, the judge’s ringing defense of the Constitution gives me, at least, some hope to continue fighting. 

“This case -– perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court –- squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally “yes, they do.” “No law” means “no law.” The First Amendment does not draw President Trump’s invidious distinction and it is not to be found in our history or jurisprudence.” [Opinion, pp. 4-5]

The Trump regime’s paramilitary troops pose a greater threat to U.S. democracy than its threats to deploy National Guard or regular military in U.S. cities. Merriam Webster says that “paramilitary” means “of, relating to, being, or characteristic of a force formed on a military pattern especially as a potential auxiliary military force.” That’s exactly how the Trump paramilitary task forces operate. 

Trump’s paramilitary forces include a wide array of federal law enforcement agents, drawn from multiple agencies, including the FBI, DEA, IRS, ATF, and many others. The Cato Institute reports that more than 28,000 federal law enforcement officers have been ordered to leave their work and focus instead on arresting immigrants. That includes one in five FBI agents and half of all DEA agents. As Cato’s David Bier dryly observes, “This diversion has significantly curtailed the government’s capacity to address criminal activity in the United States.”

A common thread connects the August school shooting in Minneapolis with the 2011 terror attacks by neo-Nazi in Norway and the 2019 mosque massacres in New Zealand. The guns carried by the Minneapolis shooter carried the names of the perpetrators of the other massacres. Their social media posts idolized the shooters, expressed hatred of almost everyone—black people, brown people, immigrants, Jews, Christians, children—children! (Contrary to Kash Patel’s wild-eyed imaginings, there is no evidence that the school shooting had anything to do with anti-Catholicism.) 

The thread that connects these shootings and other mass murders, is called accelerationism. Accelerationism is both racist and violent. Its white nationalist believers see the current system collapsing into a race war, which they sometimes call a second American Revolution or a second Civil War. They advocate violence to bring that day closer. Crazy? Yes–deadly crazy.

The Trump-declared “crime emergency” has no basis in fact. Crime in DC exists, but has been declining for two years. Many cities in the Republican states sending National Guard members to DC have higher crime rates than DC, as do many cities across the country. The whole operation has nothing to do with crime and everything to do with Trump’s authoritarian posturing.

The U.S. military has no business playing police on the streets of DC or ANY U.S. city. First, because the military’s job is to defend the United States and they are forbidden by law from engaging in civil law enforcement. That’s the job of civilian police. Our laws specifically prohibit the kind of military dominance that characterizes dictatorships. 

Second, the National Guard and other military forces are not trained in police work. That’s not their job, and they are not good at it. National Guard troops are mostly sticking to tourist areas like the Lincoln Memorial and National Mall rather than high crime areas. 

Trump and his cronies lie about crime. They lie constantly and shamelessly. Crime has been dropping across the United States, including Washington, DC since 2022. 

Violent crime has been falling across the country since 2022, according to FBI statistics. Violent crime peaked in the 1990s, and fell steadily until 2020 during the COVID epidemic. Although crime increased in 2020-2022, it came nowhere near the 1990s levels. 

Since 2022, violent crime rates have been falling again. 

Trump-appointed FBI chief, Kash Patel on August 11, speaking from the White House, standing next to Trump: ” “We are now able to report that the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in US history.”

I don’t think he’s right about that “lowest in US history” claim, but it is true that the murder rate is back down to pre-pandemic levels in the nation as a whole.

Crime Statistics

Talking about crime is complicated. When someone starts throwing crime statistics around, here are a few important things to remember.

Three items from this morning’s news show the real presence of waste, fraud, and abuse. 

Waste: Canceling U.S. foreign aid leaves tens of thousands of tons of food in warehouses, some already past its expiration date, while children starve in Gaza, Sudan, and other places around the world.

Fraud: Judd Legum reports that “Days after $5 million donation to MAGA Inc., Trump freezes Medicare waste crackdown.” 

And abuse: a former Geo Group official was appointed to high-ranking DHS position that oversees private prison contracts—with an ethics waiver and in a way that avoided Senate confirmation hearings.

One of Pete Seeger’s lesser-known songs is titled “My name is Lisa Kalvelage,” the words and story of a woman who grew up in Nuremberg during World War II. Emigrating to the United States as a GI bride, she was asked to account for what she did and what her parents did during the Hitler years. 

At first, she rejected any guilt for the crimes proved at Nuremberg. She was a child, or a teenager. And her parents? She did not know what they thought.  

Then she begins to understand “what that verdict meant to me, when there are crimes that I can see and I can know.” She becomes active in protesting the U.S. war on Vietnam. Pete Seeger’s song came from her statement to the court when she was arrested, with others, for trying to stop a shipment of napalm 

“And perhaps I can tell my children six
And later on their own children
That at least in the future they need not be silent
When they are asked, ‘Where was your mother, when?'”

And what, I wonder, can we tell our children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews, when they ask where were you, what did you do, while the people of Gaza were killed? 

Trump’s (latest) great ideas

 How about appointing an anti-Muslim “alpha male” influencer as ambassador to mostly-Muslim Malaysia? 

Or eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse by firing State Department employees working on counterterrorism, stopping drug trafficking, energy diplomacy and mitigating passport and visa fraud? 

Or refusing permission or funding to ship 800,000 doses of mpox vaccines, leaving them sitting in storage until their expiration dates? 

Or firing the watchdogs whose job it is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse? 

An occasional post in which I highlight some of the day’s most outrageous news. Today’s post includes Trump senility watch; on waste, fraud, and abuse; water, water, and AI; and more.