As President Trump’s poll numbers slip four months before the election, he and his frenzied staff have launched an end game of wild thrashing that could bring further damage to a country they pretend to love.

The closer defeat looms, the more desperate the death throes of a deranged administration. It lunges for levers of power and propaganda. It undermines institutions that stand above politics. It smears physicians who work for the public’s health. It attempts to conceal pandemic data, Soviet-style. It issues absurd decrees to local school boards to open in the fall or else. It dispatches unidentified federal forces to kidnap peaceful protesters. It flails out against measures to ease voting. And these are only the omens. A final spasm—if it is final—seems likely.

Insurgencies, dictatorships, and the like often tend toward untamed outrages as they are backed into a corner and face annihilation. Similar impulses appear ascendant in Trump’s criminal government, where the rule of law is a minor irritation and self-enrichment at taxpayers’ expense is routine. He has shed his White House of responsible advisers, replacing them with cruel dogmatists whose ideology of ignorance is a plague on […]

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Stephan:  [caption id="attachment_53792" align="alignleft" width="300"] Trump's Meta-poll rating according to FiveThirtyEight as of 3:30 p.m. 24th July.[/caption] What really concerns me is that aspiring authoritarians don't get there alone; it requires the support and cooperation of thousands of people in official positions, a major party, and the support of a large demographic in a country's population. All of those are now in place. You don't hear stories of Trumpian storm troopers resisting orders, instead you hear the same thing we heard at the Nuremburg trials -- "I was just following orders". You see a Republican Party that is as silent as a nest of crickets, and you see a significant population who support the rising dictator. According to FiveThirtyEight although he is losing Trump's poll ratings have actually gone up over the last few days. The majority of Americans need to wake up. The America you think you know is disappearing like a morning mist.

Late on Wednesday evening, Portland, Oregon, Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) was tear-gassed in his own city.

Wheeler was visiting the main site of the city’s ongoing protests, which have devolved into violent clashes with the police for weeks, to try to understand their grievances. Seemingly out of nowhere, as-yet-unidentified law enforcement personnel unleashed gas on the crowd — while the mayor was still in it.

“I saw nothing that provoked this response,” Wheeler told a New York Times journalist on the scene.

According to the Times, the officers who launched the gas were not local police. Instead, they were part of the Homeland Security Department’s contingent in Portland, which the Trump administration has deployed over the explicit objections of both Wheeler and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D). The DHS officers operate in military-style gear without obvious identification. They have been extremely violent, using heavy-handed tactics that have escalated the conflict in downtown Portland. They have been filmed grabbing suspected protesters off the streets and throwing them into unmarked vans.

And now President Trump wants to send these detachments to other parts of the country — announcing, on Wednesday, “a surge of federal law enforcement” to Chicago and Albuquerque, language […]

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Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., on Thursday introduced a bill aimed at banning the Democratic Party for what he described as its historic support of slavery and the Confederacy one day after he voted in favor of keeping Confederate statues at the Capitol.

Gohmert, who joined more than 100 House Republicans to unsuccessfully oppose a resolution that would remove Confederate statues from the Capitol on Wednesday, responded to the defeat by introducing a resolution to ban organizations and political groups which historically supported slavery and Confederate states.

That list includes the Democratic Party, according to Gohmert. However, he did not mention that 72 Republicans who joined every Democrat in the House to vote to remove the Confederate statues.

While Democrats were for decades the preferred party of defenders of slavery and segregation in the South, Gohmert’s claims ignore the fact that the South overwhelmingly rejected the Democratic Party after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, switching in droves to the Republican Party. In contrast to the Democratic Party, […]

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On Thursday, The New York Times reported that a pair of Netflix filmmakers shooting a behind-the-scenes documentary about President Donald Trump’s immigration policy were threatened by federal officials, ordered to delete footage unflattering to Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers, and told to delay release of the documentary until after the 2020 election.

“In early 2017, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement prepared to carry out the hard-line agenda on which President Trump had campaigned, agency leaders jumped at the chance to let two filmmakers give a behind-the-scenes look at the process,” reported Caitlin Dickerson. “But as the documentary neared completion in recent months, the administration fought mightily to keep it from being released until after the 2020 election. After granting rare access to parts of the country’s powerful immigration enforcement machinery that are usually invisible to the public, administration officials threatened legal action and sought to block parts of it from seeing the light of day.”

“In heated phone calls and emails, they said, [an] official pushed to […]

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For much of the world, the past three months had a clear goal: “lockdown and avoid Covid-19 exposure.” But, in recent weeks, a restless public had already been transitioning haphazardly out of this stage, ranging from demands for continued isolation to massive pool parties and “liberate my state” rallies. With the addition of large gatherings and protests of the past week, confusion and anxiety have even further grown.

Which brings us to now — where we understand that for everyone, there is a need to balance their hunger to participate — whether in work, protest gatherings, or other events — with the realities of their health and safety. But that can be a challenging calculus. With that goal in mind, here then is an attempt at some quiet clarity — on both a population level, as well as to help individuals make their own choices.

In Phase 1, the collective goal was to hit pause on viral transmission, “flatten the curve,” and avoid an overwhelming demand on the medical system. To the extent this worked, we bought […]

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In a decision hailed as a win for refugee rights, a federal judge in Canada ruled Tuesday that the “Safe Third Country Agreement” between Canada and the U.S. is invalid because it fails to guarantee migrants’ rights to liberty and security, in effect an admission that the U.S. is not a safe country for those seeking refugee protection.

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East called the ruling “a victory for asylum seekers.”

The bilateral agreement known as STCA, which went into effect in 2004, requires migrants presenting themselves at official Canada-U.S. border points of entry to be returned to the country where they first arrived to present their claims under the assumption that claimants “could have found effective protection” in either of the two countries.

The Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR), Amnesty International, and the Canadian Council of Churches brought forth the challenge along with refugee claimants including Nedira Mustefa, an Ethiopian national.

Mustefa tried in 2017 to enter Canada from the U.S. but was returned to American soil where she was immediately imprisoned and held in solitary confinement for one […]

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A breach of judicial ethics may have prevented up to 1 million Floridians from voting in November. On July 1, a federal appeals court lifted an order that had blocked Florida from imposing a poll tax on people convicted of felonies. The U.S. Supreme Court then declined to step in. If two judges appointed by President Donald Trump had complied with the judicial Code of Conduct, Florida’s discriminatory and unworkable poll tax might well have remained blocked through Election Day. And Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are now demanding that these judges explain their justification for flouting their ethical duties.

The two judges in question, Barbara Lagoa and Robert Luck, have served on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since late 2019. Trump elevated them to the 11th Circuit from the Florida Supreme Court, where each had served for less than a year. During their brief time on the state court, the justices heard […]

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While anonymous federal agents have thrown protesters into unmarked vans and fired tear gas at Portland’s mayor in recent days, an Air Force surveillance plane designed to carry state-of-the-art sensors typically reserved for war zones has circled the Oregon city’s outskirts from above.

The plane, a DO-328 “Cougar,” was spotted via the open source flight tracking website ADS-B Exchange, allowing the public to monitor its course. The Intercept reviewed this flight data, confirming tight, circular flights consistent with surveillance operations in and around Portland.

The aircraft is a twin-engine plane built in a modular fashion that allows it to be outfitted with long-range surveillance equipment suitable for supporting U.S. Special Operations commandos on the ground, according to Air Force documentation and previous public reporting. It was in Colorado earlier this month, looping over Denver and Boulder, before flying to Portland on July 19, and has been circling above Portland and its […]

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