Month: September 2017

Is there a chill in the air?
by Tom Sullivan

The Supreme Court’s fall session promises to be a consequential one for voting rights. In Texas, in North Carolina, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, who gets to vote and whose votes count equally is up for grabs.

Justice Samuel Alito oversees federal courts in Texas. Alito put a temporary hold Monday on a lower court ruling invalidating two of the state’s congressional districts as racial gerrymanders. He wants input from minority groups before allowing the Texas appeal to move forward.

Under court order, the North Carolina legislature’s GOP leadership just finished redrawing state district maps this week. A U.S. District Court threw out the 2011 maps as racial gerrymanders in 19 House and 9 Senate districts. Whether the new ones are any improvement Democrats find questionable:

Graig Meyer, D-Orange, thinks the new maps are just as bad, if not worse, than the old ones.

“The courts threw out their old maps for being racially gerrymandered,” Meyer said. “And instead of drawing more fair and representative maps, they drew maps that will either maintain their majorities or possibly give them a chance to increase their majorities.

If a panel of judges court doesn’t approve the new NC maps, the court could redraw them. Meanwhile, Republicans holding seats in those 2011 districts continue to vote on bills passed by super-majorities in both houses. Texas argues in its appeal for a stay that no new elections for gerrymandered districts should take place before 2020. That is, until after a full ten-year redistricting cycle has passed. “Stall and delay is the favorite tactic used by Attorney General Paxton,” Texas state Rep. Mary González, vice chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said of the actions in her state. That is a pattern across states.

In a case brought by Common Cause challenging North Carolina’s congressional districts as partisan gerrymanders rather than racial ones, a panel of federal judges decided Tuesday that case could move forward even as the Supreme Court examines the issue in another case from Wisconsin. At issue in that case is whether “packing” and “cracking” can result in gerrymandered districts so partisan as to be unconstitutional. From the Wikipedia entry:

Two principal tactics are used in gerrymandering: “cracking” (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party’s supporters across many districts) and “packing” (concentrating the opposing party’s voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts).

The New York Times this week highlighted how new mathematical tools have made the kind of “surgical precision” behind the gerrymanders in North Carolina common in state after state where Republicans control redistricting. In Wisconsin, for example:

In the next election, in November 2012, Republicans won only 47 percent of the vote but 60 of 99 seats in the Assembly. In the midterm year of 2014, they won 57 percent of the Assembly vote and 63 seats, and in 2016, they won about 53 percent of the Assembly vote and 64 seats. Wisconsin is a purple state: Barack Obama won it twice, and Donald Trump barely carried it, by 22,000 votes. But one-­party control continues to produce policies — more union busting, abortion restrictions and lately $3 billion in proposed tax credits for the electronics giant Foxconn — associated with a deep-­red electorate. “I’d never seen anything like that before,” Schultz said of the election results that followed the redistricting. ‘‘I started to see how powerful and unbelievable the redistricting process was.”

The Supreme Court will address in Gill v. Whitford whether the concept of a voting “efficiency gap” renders partisan gerrymanders unconstitutional. The court has so far never taken on the issue beyond racial gerrymandering.

The Democratic plaintiffs who are challenging Wisconsin’s map in Gill v. Whitford, represented by the Campaign Legal Center, will argue to the Supreme Court next month that partisan gerrymandering, like racial gerrymandering, violates voters’ rights to be treated equally. They will also offer a second argument, based on the First Amendment, that comes from Justice Kennedy. He suggested in Vieth v. Jubelirer that gerrymandering could violate the right to freedom of expression and association, by “subjecting a group of voters or their party to disfavored treatment by reason of their views.”

It is taken as a given in boxing matches that each fighter is hoping “to knock each other’s heads off,” write political scientists, Bernard Grofman of the University of California, Irvine, and Gary King of Harvard. Low blows are still impermissible.

Experts for the Gill plaintiffs used multiple metrics to show a high degree of bias in Wisconsin’s Assembly elections. In striking down the Assembly map, the three-­judge panel relied primarily on a metric called the efficiency gap, which measures ‘‘wasted votes,’’ as described by its creators, the University of Chicago law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos and the political scientist Eric McGhee. Wasted votes are those cast for a losing candidate or above the number a winning candidate needed to prevail. The efficiency gap is low statewide when the number of wasted votes in a given election is similar for both parties, and it’s high when one side wastes votes at a far greater rate, because its voters are densely concentrated or thinly spread. In other words, the efficiency gap tracks packing and cracking.

The addition of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court makes the courts less of a guardian for voting rights than they have been since the court in Shelby v. Holder invalidated the preclearance formula in Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act:

“There was some hope in the voting rights community, especially with a sympathetic Supreme Court, that courts would increasingly provide the role of being a back stop of more egregious limitations on voting rights,” Richard Hasen, a professor at UC-Irvine School of Law who also runs the Election Law Blog, told Talking Points Memo back in April just after Gorsuch was confirmed to the bench. “Now all of that is off the table.”

Gorsuch is now a wild card in how the Supreme Court might rule in voting rights cases.

For the time being, the fallout from the new state maps creates an opportunity for North Carolina Democrats to pick up seats if they can mount serious campaigns where Republicans have either resigned or gotten “double bunked” by the new maps. This will be an issue in other states where legislative maps have been challenged. With the 2020 census coming, Washington-focused progressive activists cannot lose sight of how important Democrats gaining control of state legislatures is for voting rights in states like Texas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, now controlled by the GOP. The left cannot win back a Congress using districts drawn to prevent them from doing so. Winning local district races is critical.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

New life!

A pair of Francois’ langur monkeys born over the summer at the Los Angeles Zoo made their public debut Thursday. 

The monkeys — which both have the same father — were born on June 23 to 8-year-old mother Vicki Vale and on July 12 to 5-year-old Kim-Ly.

This is the first week the babies have joined their mothers and 19-year-old father Paak in the outdoor habitat, and they will soon be introduced to the rest of the group.

“We’re very excited for guests to be able to observe this blended family in their new group dynamic,” said Roxane Losey, animal keeper at the Los Angeles Zoo. “Once the two boys are a little older, they will join their brother Tao and things will probably get a little rough-and-tumble when they play. These monkeys are very acrobatic and like to jump and leap from branch to branch.”

Francois’ langurs — also known as Francois’ leaf or Tonkin leaf monkeys or white side-burned black langurs — are slender black creatures with long tails that can be found in southern China and northeastern Vietnam.

Francois’ langurs are considered endangered and are listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List. According to the zoo, their decreasing population is due to both deforestation and the fact that they are hunted for their use in traditional Asian medicines. It is estimated that there are only a few thousand left in the world.

The babies will spend some time being passed around to other adult female members of the group through a practice called alloparenting, which helps the group bond but can also lead to conflicts, Losey said.

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Moment of zen

by digby

I’m not sure what this is all about but I think I like it:

Dinosaur suit-wearing protesters march on Washington to protest Pres. Trump’s plan to slash the budget for national service programs. pic.twitter.com/ozr2mHz8u5

— ABC News (@ABC) August 31, 2017

Can you blame them?


by digby

Other countries know that offering help to the US will only earn a slap in the face from Donald Trump whenever he feels he needs to assert his primitive dominance. It’s never been about the US needing the assistance but rather the gesture of solidarity. He’s blown that so badly that it’s not worth doing anymore:

As soon as Hurricane Harvey hit, Mexico — a country described by President Donald Trump as a source of rapists and drugs — stepped up to offer boats, food and other aid to the United States.

Another offer of help came from Venezuela, a country in severe political and economic crisis that has been repeatedly sanctioned by the Trump administration. It said it could give $5 million in aid.

The European Union has proudly noted that it is sharing its satellite mapping with U.S. emergency responders dealing the Harvey’s devastation. This despite Trump’s chastisement of European countries he views as overly dependent on the U.S. military.

Then there’s tiny Taiwan, which has reportedly offered $800,000 in aid — a number likely calculated to annoy China as much as to curry favor with Trump.

But compared with past crises, the list of foreign governments lining up to help the United States this time is relatively short for now. And the few countries that have raised their hand may get more out of it — politically, at least — than the U.S.

The relative dearth of global goodwill, some analysts say, may stem from anger at Trump over his “America First” approach to the world, which has irked even staunch U.S. allies.

“Foreign governments are holding back, and that hasn’t been the case historically,” said Markos Kounalakis, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. “They appear to be much more cautious, whether it’s for domestic political reasons or displeasure with President Trump. Do they want to be seen as helping Trump?”

by digby

Good-bye to Boris and natasha, world’s greatest no-goodniks:

Acrid, black smoke was seen pouring from a chimney at the Russian consulate in San Francisco Friday, a day after the Trump administration ordered its closure amid escalating tensions between the United States and Russia. 

Firefighters who arrived at the scene were turned away by consulate officials who came from inside the building.
An Associated Press reporter heard people who came from inside the building tell firefighters that there was no problem and that consulate staff were burning unidentified items in a fireplace. 

Mindy Talamadge, a spokeswoman from the San Francisco Fire Department, said the department received a call about the smoke and sent a crew to investigate but determined the smoke was coming from the chimney.
“They had a fire going in their fireplace,” she said. 

Talmadge said she did not know what they were burning on a day when normally cool San Francisco temperatures had already climbed to 95 degrees by noon. 

“It was not unintentional. They were burning something in their fireplace,” she said. 

The consulate’s workers are hurrying to shut Russia’s oldest consulate in the U.S. 

The order for Russia to vacate the consulate and an official diplomatic residence in San Francisco — home to a longstanding community of Russian emigres and technology workers — escalated an already tense diplomatic standoff between Washington and Moscow. 

The deadline for the consulate to close is Saturday.

lulz.

Moron or sadist? Why not both?

by digby

During his populist run for the White House, Trump had vowed to leave Social Security and Medicare alone. But Trump had also vowed to rein in America’s national debt, which Mulvaney didn’t think was possible without reining in the two biggest chunks of the federal budget. So Mick the Knife brought a cut list to his meeting in the Oval.

“Look, this is my idea on how to reform Social Security,” the former South Carolina congressman began.

“No!” the president replied. “I told people we wouldn’t do that. What’s next?”

“Well, here are some Medicare reforms,” Mulvaney said.

“No!” Trump repeated. “I’m not doing that.”

“OK, disability insurance.”

This was a clever twist. Mulvaney was talking about the Social Security Disability Insurance program, which, as its full name indicates, is part of Social Security. But Americans don’t tend to think of it as Social Security, and its 11 million beneficiaries are not the senior citizens who tend to support Trump.

“Tell me about that,” Trump replied.

“It’s welfare,” Mulvaney said.

“OK, we can fix welfare,” Trump declared.

Sure enough, the Trump budget plan that Mulvaney unveiled a few weeks later would cut about $70 billion in disability benefits over a decade, mostly through unspecified efforts to get recipients back to work. That may sound like welfare reform, but the program isn’t welfare for the poor; it’s insurance for workers who pay into Social Security through payroll taxes. The episode suggests Trump was either ignorant enough to get word-gamed into attacking a half-century-old guarantee for the disabled, or cynical enough to ditch his promise to protect spending when it didn’t benefit his base.

How about both?

Yes, he is too dumb to know that disability insurance is part of Social Security or that disabled people can’t work! So he calls it “welfare” and delights in cutting it.

And he’s cynical enough to want to cut the shit out of every last government program just to prove what a tough guy he is to his deplorable base.

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Trump’s war on kids

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

Vice President Mike Pence went down to the Hurricane Harvey disaster area on Thursday and, unlike his weird boss, behaved the way politicians typically behave in such a situation. He prayed with the locals and hugged the victims and promised that the administration will be there with whatever is needed. It was a standard performance. So far, members of congress have also pledged all the federal help they need and even the Freedom Caucus’s Mark Meadows said that the congress should not take the hurricane relief and reconstruction hostage to pay for Trump’s wall. (This probably means that the proposed 800 billion dollars in cuts to FEMA for the border wall is also off the table, thank goodness.)

It’s early days yet and we still don’t know if they will resort to the Karl Rove style “disaster capitalism” they tried after Hurricane Katrina but for the moment it appears that the federal government is doing what it’s supposed to do in a national emergency of this magnitude.

But, the administration and the GOP congress are also still hard at work back in Washington plotting their ongoing assault on the federal government. After having wasted the year with their failed attempts to repeal Obamacare there is almost no time left to raise the debt ceiling, pass the budget and shore up the ACA marketplaces all of which would be difficult in such a short period of time even under normal circumstances. And President Donald Trump is in the White House watching Fox and Friends and tweeting out every thought that passes through his mind which lately has been an obsession with insulting his congressional allies. Even with the disaster in Texas pulling people together temporarily, this could be another legislative trainwreck .

And unfortunately, an awful lot of the impending destruction seems to be aimed at children. The GOP congress has a series of must-pass bills in a very short space of time facing them when they return next week and one them is the reauthorization of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) which provides health coverage to millions of children in low-income families. The Wall Street Journal reports that Republicans may attempt to use the CHIP deadline as a vehicle to revive their effort to chip away at the Affordable Care Act, and could try to attach amendments to the bill to reauthorize its funding. Needless to say, any attempt to put some kind of poison pill in such important legislation is irresponsible in the extreme.

These are kids.It’s hard to wrap ones mind around the fact that it would even be controversial to fund such a program. But it has been, from the beginning. Republicans in congress are always looking for ways to defund it. They simply do not believe that the government should provide health care, not even for children.

But then their president is said to be getting ready, possibly as soon as today, to give the order to rip three quarter of a million kids from their country and their families and deport them.  After keeping these people who were brought here as children by undocumented parents on tenderhooks for months waiting to find out if their lives were going to be destroyed for no good reason except to please a minority of angry xenophobes, it was reported by numerous news agencies on Thursday that Trump has decided to end the DACA program.

That Trump would do this doesn’t surprise me. He originally promised that all undocumented immigrants would have to leave the country with no exceptions. Chuck Todd asked him what he planned to do about the DREAMers back in August 15, 2015

TRUMP: The executive order gets rescinded. One good thing about —

TODD: You’ll rescind that one, too? You’ll rescind the Dream Act executive order, the DACA?

TRUMP: We have to make a whole new set of standards. And when people come in, they have to come in —

TODD: You’re going to split up families. You’re going to deport children?

TRUMP: Chuck — no, no. No, we’re going to keep the families together. We have to keep the families together.

TODD: But you’re going to kick them out?

TRUMP: They have to go.

He also said that American born children of undocumented workers would have to leave with their parents and suggested that he would push to end birthright citizenship altogether. Deporting the DREAM kids was always on his agenda until late in the cycle when he suddenly decided that he needed to pretend to have a heart about something.

Just because he says he “has heart” doesn’t make it true. (After all, he also says that he’s very smart.) And Mike Pence unctuously assuring the nation that his boss is making the decision “with heart” doesn’t make it so either.

Trumps heartlessness has never been in question. After all, he already had DHS under General Kelly rescind the DAPA program last June, which allowed parents of DREAM kids to stay in the country under work permits.  This is just the other side of that coin.

From what we can gather he’s now made the decision about the DREAM kids with the only details left to decide being whether they will all be subject to deportation immediately or will be allowed to work through the end of their current work permits before they are thrown out of their country to go live in places with which they’re completely unfamiliar.

Apparently, they cynically believe they’re being very clever with the timing as well:

Forces w/in WH that support ending DACA may believe it will blow over due to Harvey aftermath but the ferocity of opposition will surprise.

— Adrian Carrasquillo (@Carrasquillo) August 31, 2017

The DREAMers had no choice in coming to this country and are now Americans in every way but technical citizenship.  The contribution they make to this country far outweigh any costs and the business community is begging the administration not to do it. Deporting them is cruel and immoral. It’s also stupid.

But what else is new in the Trump administration? At this point they seem unable to do anything else.

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Stanford all over
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Thomas Hawk via Creative Commons.

New York magazine’s Gail Sheehy presents a lengthy tribute to Heather Heyer, the young woman killed in the Charlottesville car attack. Frightened by Facebook videos of the Friday night torchlight march by Nazis, Klansmen, and white nationalists, Heyer had decided not to attend the Saturday counterprotest to the Unite the Right rally. But then she texted one of her best friends, “I feel compelled to go, to show solidarity.” What happened later, you know.

A working-class, white Southerner raised in a trailer by a single mother, Heyer suffered from a chronic lack of self-confidence. But she was compassionate and with a heart for the underdog, her mother Susan Bro told Sheehy. This passage captures Heyer’s sense of herself:

In 2012, not long after meeting Lindsey, Heather was suggested by a friend for a paralegal job at the Miller Law Group. The local firm is dedicated to helping struggling people fight foreclosure on their homes, deal with indebtedness after catastrophic illness, and utilize bankruptcy law to put their lives back together. Heather, convinced she wasn’t qualified, only went reluctantly to the interview with Alfred Wilson, manager of Miller’s bankruptcy division.

“I only have a high-school degree, and I’ve never worked in a law office,” Heather protested straightaway.

“Why is that important to you? It’s not important to me,” Wilson replied. He was more interested in an employee’s way with people than their credentials. A black man married to a Palestinian woman, he told me he looks for workers who know how to communicate with, and appreciate, all different kinds of people.

“I know you work as a bartender — how much do you make in tips?” he asked.

“Oh, I can make about $200 a night.”

Wilson suspected this bartender was exceptionally good with people.

Heather downplayed her strength: “I talk to a lot of drunk people.”

“My thinking was she could be compassionate with our clients and understand life itself,” Wilson said. He also knew she was juggling two jobs, evidence of a good work ethic. She had her own place and was taking care of herself. She possessed a good vocabulary and was on top of social and political issues. “I believed I could mold her into a good paralegal,” Wilson said. And he did so.

She later broke up with her boyfriend who was dismayed to learn she worked for a black man.

On the heels of that account of peaceful counterprotesters comes another look at the Antifa movement that has arisen to confront white supremacists in the streets. Mike Kessler writes for New Republic of his encounter with antifas in Black Bloc gear at the alt-right rally in Berkeley last weekend. A group of antifas were beating a photographer in the street. “Evidently, he’d captured something the antifas didn’t want him to document,” Kessler begins:

The melee stumbled and shouted its way to the street, where the man broke free, but the antifas kept after him, ignoring countless pleas of “nonviolence” and “let him go” from peaceful protesters. They hit the man with fists and a club, then took him to the ground, prey for wild dogs. Journalists, myself included, held our cameras high to capture the assault as the antifas circled, raising their shields, some decorated with the words “No Hate,” to block our view and push us away.

A masked woman ordered reporters to stop filming. A laughing man in a mask tried to land a kick to the prone photographer but missed.

The number of eager assailants grew, and the double standard of the moment became astonishing. The self-styled anti-authoritarians, who righteously (and understandably) complain about excessive use of force by police, were seemingly re-enacting some of this country’s worst episodes of police violence, on an unarmed civilian who by all appearances was not a white supremacist and who was decidedly outnumbered. Bystanders, peaceful protesters, and reporters shouted for the man’s release. Suddenly, from behind, someone knocked my camera out of my right hand, then did the same to my phone, which was in my left. I turned around to see a black leather boot stomping my phone (it survived—thanks, Otter case!), while another antifa picked up my camera, hurled it into the air, and got in my face. “No fucking pictures!”

Kessler’s camera was smashed. Dave Neiwert of the Southern Poverty Law Center provided a firsthand account of similar treatment by antifas in Seattle. Al Letson, host of the public radio program “Reveal,” used his body to shield another man being beaten by black-clad antifas.

It’s a strange way to protest a right-wing authoritarian movement and counterproductive, not a counterprotest.

Filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse was also on the scene in Berkeley on Sunday:

In one case, as a crowd of non-Black Bloc protesters yelled at the assailants to let their victim go, an Antifa activist yelled, “He’s a Nazi!” over and over again, justifying the assault. Then, abruptly, maybe after realizing that the victim was not, in fact, a white nationalist, he changed his mantra. “He doesn’t have to be a Nazi!” he now shouted. The suggestion was that even if the victim wasn’t a fascist, he still deserved to be beaten. For what was unclear. Maybe because he supported Trump? Or he objected to Antifa’s tactics? Or refused to do something they ordered him to do? Who knew? The only thing those of us watching from a few yards away could tell was that a man, by himself, was on the ground, with a bloodied face, covering his head with his arms, being kicked and punched by a group of masked people, who were shielded by dozens of their comrades. My guess is that a lot of the Antifa people in the crowd who were passively assisting in the violence, including the guy yelling that he was a Nazi, didn’t know anything more than that, either.

But behind the masks, Woodhouse finds a very different group of people. He interviewed some antifas for a documentary on the alt-right:

To a person, our interviewees cared deeply about egalitarianism and anti-racism, and spent much of their day-to-day lives either working professionally or volunteering for organizations and in activist groups that fought for the social and economic rights of the disenfranchised. They gave eloquent and persuasive explanations for why fascism must be confronted head-on, with tactics up to and including violence.

But parsing out the nuances of moral justifications for violence in a quiet room somewhere is an entirely different thing than standing in a park with a mask on and a flag in your hand, with hundreds of your comrades, and making snap decisions about whose ass to beat and whose not to. Or whether to back up your comrades when they start beating someone up, when you have no idea how the altercation even began, or who the victim is. Or whether to go online afterwards and claim that everyone who got beat deserved it because they were all Nazis.

Having spent time at Rev. Barber’s NC rallies, having had friends arrested (including my now-state senator) for civil disobedience in Raleigh, having watched the GOP flounder trying to paint Moral Monday protesters as “outside agitators,” and having seen a sitting GOP governor go down to defeat largely because of nonviolent protests, my experience is that nonviolence is a powerful tool.

Yes, the opposing force in these cases is capitol police, not armed neo-nazis. And yes, there are accounts from Charlottesville of nonviolent clergy appreciative of antifas who interposed themselves between them and the white nationalists. But antifa violence is wrong-headed and criminal.

One can be sympathetic to the notion of counterprotesters putting their bodies on the line like Ghandi’s supporters at the salt works without supporting them coming armed and masked for battle. (And yes, some antifas don’t.) For battle is just what the alt-right wants, and antifas are obliging in justifying them opening fire and giving the president license to crack down.

Perhaps as Woodhouse finds, these are just fine, caring people. But put anybody, anybody in black, quasi-Ninja gear, arm them with sticks and improvised weapons, inject them into a fraught situation primed to ignite, and hide their faces behind masks? You don’t have a peaceful protest. You’ve put good people in an evil place and reproduced Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, only worse. This one plays out in the streets with no professors or grad students to pull the plug and write up the study when the experiment goes horribly wrong.

On a country road I drive each week, a porta-sign outside a cafe displays right-wing aphorisms. Yesterday it was, “There is no such thing as peaceful protesters in masks.” For the first time ever, I had to agree.

It is unknown how many among the Antifa movement are anarchists, Black Bloc or other. For those who want to “hasten the revolution” and see society break down, the accounts above model that well. We pay police to handle policing. Officers who do not or who take sides with white supremacists have outed themselves. Protesters who take it upon themselves to be their own police are going the route of Patriot Prayer and the Three Percenters in helping create the breakdown of order they nominally oppose.

There are ways to oppose the resurgence of white nationalism and still honor the life of Heather Heyer. This isn’t it.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Like Arpaio, another dogwhistle to police and his base supporters.

by digby

He’s letting them know that he’ll back them if they take the gloves off:

David Clarke, the controversial outgoing sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, is expected to take a job in the Trump administration, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Clarke resigned as sheriff on Thursday. A regular presence on Fox News, Clarke has become a well-known figure in conservative circles in recent years. He is also an avowed supporter of President Donald Trump, and he spoke at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last year.

But he has come under fierce criticism amid a series of deaths in the Milwaukee County prison, including that of Terrill Thomas, who died of dehydration last year after guards turned off the water in his cell.

Trump has been one of Clarke’s most vocal cheerleaders, and even promoted his book on Twitter earlier this month.

It’s unclear what job Clarke will take in the administration, but one of the sources said he’s expected to join the White House. Clarke likely won’t be offered a Senate-confirmed role because his nomination would face opposition from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Joe Arpaio and David Clarke are the two most famous, sadistic law enforcement officers in the country. They re known for their brutality and defiance of the rule of law. Trump is rewarding both of them.

Here’s just one lovely story about Clark’s operation from 2016:

On July 18, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. strode onto the stage of the Republican National Convention. In a fiery speech, he called Black Lives Matter protests “anarchy,” praised Donald Trump’s “belief in our American system of justice,” and declared, “I would like to make something very clear: blue lives matter.”

Four days earlier, Shadé Swayzer was giving birth in the jail that Clarke runs. She went into labor in a solitary confinement cell, and when she cried for help, according to a recently filed lawsuit, a guard laughed at her and left her alone. By the time medical staff checked on her the next morning, the lawsuit reads, her newborn baby was dead.

Swayzer’s baby wasn’t the only person to die in the Milwaukee County Jail. Since April, as Clarke has campaigned around the country for Trump, three other inmates have died in his custody. One was a 38-year-old with mental health issues who died of “profound dehydration”—thirst—after guards apparently turned off the water in his cell.

I’m sure there are more like Arpaio and Clarke out there with much lower profiles. Trump is giving them a big thumbs up.

And, by the way, getting rid of Gorka and Bannon didn’t rid the White House of fascists. There are others. And he’s apparently hiring more every day.

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