Tag: Trump wants to be a dictator

Here’s the truth about America’s founding that Mike Pompeo doesn’t want you to hear

AlterNet logoIt is truly bizarre that, at a moment when the Trump administration is sending in federal stormtroopers to threaten peaceful protesters in Portland, Oregon, conservatives are claiming that it is liberals who threaten the foundation of our democratic republic. It all started with Trump’s speech at Mt. Rushmore on July 4th.

Seventeen seventy-six represented the culmination of thousands of years of western civilization and the triumph not only of spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy, and reason.

And yet, as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure.

Continue reading.

Graham Backs Masked Federal Agents Sent By Trump To Arrest And Assault Protesters

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) praised Donald Trump for sending federal law enforcement agents in full tactical military gear into Portland, Oregon, saying Trump “is right to demand that law and order be restored in American cities.”

“These protests and riots are getting out of hand, jeopardizing public safety and economic recovery,” Graham tweeted Monday afternoon. “If federal law enforcement officials are necessary to do the job and President Trump chooses to go down this path, I completely support him.”

Federal agents, dressed in camouflage, have been firing off tear gas and even abducting peaceful protesters off the streets in unmarked vans — leading to an uproar about federal overreach. Continue reading.

The dubious deployment of armed enforcers within the U.S. is central to Trump’s politics

Washington Post logoThere are constant protests in New York City.

Meaning daily. It’s a city of millions, including a large number of activists and activist organizations. There are labor protests, antiwar protests, protests focused on foreign policy, protests aimed at arcane legal changes, demonstrations about housing laws, demonstrations leveraging whatever happens to be in the news. At times those protests are massive, a coalescing of activism around a common theme, as they were following the death of George Floyd earlier this year after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. But even when the protests don’t involve tens of thousands of people, they exist as an undercurrent.

For several days, the protests in May and June over Floyd’s death spiraled into something else. As happened in other places in the same period, groups of looters and vandals used the protests as a jumping-off point for theft and property damage. That quickly faded. When the protests shifted to focus attention on tributes to leaders of the former Confederacy and those who had participated in the slave trade, New York — not exactly a hotbed of Confederate nostalgia — was not an epicenter. City leaders did agree to remove a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from outside a museum, but that was more because of the presentation of the statue itself than anger at Roosevelt specifically. Continue reading.

Trump Threatens to Send Federal Law Enforcement Forces to More Cities

New York Times logoAs federal agents patrol Portland and head to Chicago, Democrats call the president’s plan “an American crisis,” barely 100 days before the election.

WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to deploy federal law enforcement to Chicago and threatened on Monday to send agents to other major cities — all controlled by Democrats.

Governors and other officials reacted angrily to the president’s move, calling it an election-year ploy as they squared off over crime, civil liberties and local control that has spread from Portland, Ore., across the country.

With camouflage-clad agents already sweeping through the streets of Portland, more units were poised to head to Chicago, and Mr. Trump suggested that he would follow suit in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and other urban centers. Governors and other officials compared his actions to authoritarianism and vowed to pursue legislation or lawsuits to stop him. Continue reading.

Trump seizes on Bush-era torture memo author’s call for extralegal executive authority: ‘Intellectual bankruptcy’

AlterNet logoProgressives are raising alarm after news Sunday that President Donald Trump is reportedly looking to move forward with a series of extralegal maneuvers to further his agenda by bypassing Congress with use of a legal argument from John Yoo, the lawyer notorious for- helping craft the justification of torture in the George W. Bush administration.

“The fun part is that Yoo frames this as ‘making it easy for presidents to break the law,’” tweeted journalist David Dayen “and Trump jumps on it and says ‘yes let’s do that.’”

According to Axios, which broke the news of the new White House strategy Sunday evening, the president is relying on a legal argument in an article Yoo wrote in June for the National Review after the Supreme Court’s Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California ruling. Continue reading.

Portland’s disturbing events show why federal law enforcement must not be allowed to ‘morph into’ a ‘Stasi-like’ secret police

AlterNet logoThe images coming out of Portland, Oregon in recent days have been disturbing: federal law enforcement agents, wearing military fatigues and driving unmarked vehicles, have detained nonviolent George Floyd protesters — and Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has described the agents as President Donald “Trump’s secret police.” Much of the criticism of the agents has come from liberal and progressive website, but some conservative outlets are troubled as well, including The Bulwark. And in an article published in The Bulwark on July 20, Carrie Cordero — an intel/security specialist and former attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice — explains why having a “purely domestic security service” in the United States is a terrible idea.

“This past week, (Department of Homeland Security) personnel, including officers of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), were deployed by the acting secretary of Homeland Security to conduct domestic law enforcement activities in Portland,” Cordero notes. “But policing protest activity, in particular, requires a special sensitivity to and protection of constitutional rights. And the reports out of Portland indicate that DHS has provided an uncontrolled and over-militarized response. Moreover, these assignments of federal officers to control domestic unrest may be part of a broader slide toward a federal domestic security expansion that has neither been announced nor vetted either by the citizenry, the Congress, or the courts.” Continue reading “Portland’s disturbing events show why federal law enforcement must not be allowed to ‘morph into’ a ‘Stasi-like’ secret police”

A Navy vet asked federal officers in Portland to remember their oaths. Then they broke his hand.

Washington Post logoPORTLAND, Ore. — He came to the protest with a question. He left with two broken bones in a confrontation with federal officers that went viral.

Christopher David had watched in horror as videos surfaced of federal officers in camouflage throwing protesters into unmarked vans in Portland. The 53-year-old Portland resident had heard the stories: protesters injured, gassed, sprayed with chemicals that tugged at their nostrils and burned their eyes.

David, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and former member of the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps, said he wanted to know what the officers involved thought of the oath they had sworn to protect and defend the Constitution. Continue reading.

Trump law enforcement officials brush off pleas to butt out of Portland

The president praised the DHS officers whose aggressive treatment of protesters has drawn widespread scrutiny.

President Donald Trump’s top law enforcement officials on Monday defended the descent of militarized government forces upon Portland, Ore., rejecting pleas from local and state leaders to pull back the fusion of federal officers.

In an interview on CNN, acting deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli claimed the department deployed federal law enforcement personnel to Portland over the July 4 weekend after having received “locally generated” intelligence regarding “planned attacks” on federal facilities.

Cuccinelli said the federal agents have “been there ever since” on a mission to protect those U.S. government buildings, wearing the “very same uniforms” throughout their time in Portland. Continue reading.

Think you’ve heard the Cuccinelli name before?  You have: https://americasvoice.org/blog/ken-cuccinelli/
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/01/811023475/judge-says-ken-cuccinelli-was-appointed-unlawfully-to-top-immigration-post
https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/blog/top-five-things-you-need-know-about-ken-cuccinelli

Trump to send federal forces to more ‘Democrat’ cities

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Monday said he would send law enforcement to more U.S. cities, as a federal crackdown on anti-racism protests in Oregon with unmarked cars and unidentified forces angered people across the country.

Trump, a Republican, cited New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland, California, as places to send federal agents, noting the cities’ mayors were “liberal Democrats.” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot frequently blasts Trump on Twitter.

“We’re sending law enforcement,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let this happen to the cities.”

The Lincoln Project is out with a stark new ad on Portland, Trump’s ‘shadowy’ thugs, and your city

A dystopia is an imagined place, and the latest Lincoln Project ad, released Sunday night, rolls out like the trailer for a film about such a dark state. But, of course, Portland, Oregon, is a very real place, and the ad is based on a very real story unfurling right now, rendered in black and white and red with a pulp-noir sensibility.

“This is how it starts: A president out of control as polls forecast his downfall,” the narrator begins over an image of President Trump and a typically bad poll. “This is how it starts: In a small city far from the Beltway, shadowy men — no badges, no ID, deputized by a rogue attorney general — snatch so-called ‘enemies of the state’ off the streets. This is how it starts: Without a warning or a warrant, heavily armed paramilitary units shove their targets into unmarked vans and race away.”

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf gets a cameo, too, and the ad makes clear the federal incursion into Portland is designed for a national rollout: “Faceless enforcers say you don’t have the right to protest. Now Trump’s bureaucrats are promising to send their their thugs everywhere — your town, your neighborhood. This is how it starts, and how freedom dies — unless we stand up, unless we speak out, unless we demand justice.” Continue reading.