Rules, We Don't Need No Stinking Rules
Destroying norms is the way petulant officials try and get their way
I wrote about Nebraska’s Mike Flood getting booed at a recent town hall, but the best question came from a woman in the audience that asked what she called a fiscal question. She said: “With 450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz, and 600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps, and ICE burning through $8.4 million a day to illegally detain people, how much does it cost for fascism? How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?” The crowd cheered wildly. Followed by chants of “vote him out.” That sums up the scam being perpetrated by the administration in a nutshell and the sound of America waking up.
We have heard so much about various detention facilities, but a former corrections officer for a private contractor who worked at the detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by supporters, said the detainees “have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days…. The bathrooms are backed up because you got so many people using them.” In the typically sloppy fashion of this administration, the state of Florida is running this facility expecting that the feds will reimburse them; this is not an administration I would trust, given how it withholds FEMA funds in real disasters. What DeSantis and his jack-boot lickers may not realize is that the state, unlike the federal government, can be sued for civil rights violations and punished with monetary damages.
As for a not surprising news flash, the GEO Group, one of the two major private prison and services providers, reported a better than expected second quarter today, thanks in part to two ICE contracts that, together, it expects will produce $145 million annually. The even bigger non-surprise is that the company announced a $300 million stock buyback, a process that increases the value of the stock held by remaining shareholders.
Meanwhile, there seems to be another facility that the feds want, but this one is in Indiana. HHS is now, gee this is just fucking gross, in the marketing business around its detention facilities (is it too soon to call them concentration camps?) by calling the Indiana facility its “Speedway Slammer.” Representatives of Penske that owns the speedway near the propose site noted “Consistent with our approach to public policy and political issues, we are communicating our preference that our IP not be utilized moving forward in relation to this matter.” This was in response to the HHS marketing that used a car from the speedway, which it just so happens is the one used by IndyCar’s lone Mexican driver, Pato O’Ward. You cannot make this shit up! Of course, DHS announced it has no plans to change its marketing, but it gets even better. DHS issued a statement reading, “An AI generated image of a car with ‘ICE’ on the side does not violate anyone’s intellectual property rights. Any suggestion to the contrary is absurd. DHS will continue promoting the ‘Speedway Slammer’ as a comprehensive and collaborative approach to combatting illegal immigration.” Again, only the best lawyers work in this administration.
ICE’s enthusiasm for a new camp in Indiana wasn’t shared by a group of citizens who gathered to pose questions about it to their Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith. In a video posted to the YouTube page of Vigo County, Indiana, a questioner can be heard asking Beckwith: “Are you going to make sure all the people coming to [the new facility] have due process?” And the questioner followed that question up with the appropriate declarative statement: “These people are not seeing a judge.” Proving that he enjoys his MAGA Kool Aid, Beckwith responded: “They don’t have a right to see a judge. They came here illegally! . . . When the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor, did we give them due process to actually see a judge?” A post racist America? Hardly; and perhaps he might look at the history of Korematsu and the decades later formal apologies.
Somehow, his response, failed to distinguish the obvious, that is, a premeditated, coordinated, violent act of war by an expansionist foreign power on the one hand, and immigrants who risked and sacrificed to get here to find work, pay taxes, raise families, and keep their heads down, on the other hand. Moreover, as if the hole he dug was not sufficiently deep, he also claimed that “every nation is a theocracy” and asserted that the cause of the Holocaust was excessive democracy. Not wanting to cast aspersions on the Lt. Governor, I recommend reading A Fever in the Heartland about the growth of the KKK in the 1920’s in….Indiana.
As DHS grows into the largest militarized force in the world, and as it seeks to recruit more storm troopers officers, in addition to signing bonuses I’ve discussed previously, they are offering help in repaying student loans, and now they have removed age limits and proudly proclaim that no undergraduate degree is required. I wonder if pardoned January 6 insurrectionists are first in line? And yet, there are two thing that I find even more troubling about populating this department: 1) probationary employees of FEMA have been ordered to report to ICE within seven days or lose their jobs; and, 2) in a post this week DHS promoted the calling with language that hearkens to Nazi ideology: “Serve your country! Defend your culture.”
As a matter of local note, a Penske rental van pulled up to a Home Depot today in Los Angeles, and a mass of ICE agents came pouring out of the back to arrest the men that were simply looking for work. I guess they’ve realize that crowds now disperse when fleets of unmarked Suburbans pull up.
I think that biggest rule breaking scandal is the one going on in Texas. The effort to gerrymander additional seats to Republicans has run into a huge problem: the Democrats needed for a quorum to pass this outrageous proposal have left the state. US Senator John Cornyn of Texas asked the FBI to find and arrest the Democratic legislators, state legislators, which is a wild overreach of federal power. Trump told reporters, (damn the law, I’m the Boss) the FBI might have to get involved. Of course, Texas Democratic lawmakers are not committing a federal crime by leaving the state to deny Republicans a quorum. It does, however, effectively block Texas Republicans attempts to put a thumb on the electoral scale to rig the state's congressional districts to give Republicans an additional five seats. Fearless Leader, asks and the lemmings leap off of the cliff.
MSNBC justice correspondent Ken Dilanian asked in a post on X “The key question here is on what grounds would the FBI be doing this. What is the crime they are investigating? The FBI can’t just use its vast surveillance powers to locate random citizens. In fact, that’s what conservatives have long been so concerned about re [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] authorities." JB Pritzker of Illinois has vowed to protect the Democratic lawmakers who fled to his state echoed this when he noted:
“There literally is no federal law applicable to this situation, none they can say that they’re sending F.B.I.," Pritzker said, adding that Republicans are "grandstanding."
Not surprisingly, facts and laws have not stopped Cornyn and other Republicans from threatening the Democratic lawmakers with everything from arrest to expulsion from office. One has to question the Senator’s actions and his motives, given that he is facing a tough battle from Texas AG Ken Paxton, an epic POS, who is saying Cornyn is not sufficiently conservative or loyal to Trump, for Cornyn’s Senate seat. The attempt to get the FBI involved seems to show that he really is working hard to get the Felon the outcome he wants with respect to the over-reaching gerrymandering being proposed. Yet, this fits into today’s theme, because rules be damned, he is seeking to weaponize federal law enforcement for his own political gain.
In what I see as a show of strength, or at least a moment where the Democrats shouted “bullshit,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a post on X. “Shouldn’t the F.B.I. be tracking down terrorists, drug traffickers and child predators?The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries. These extremists don’t give a damn about public safety. We will not be intimidated.”
Never being surprised by the absurdity of the President, and, perhaps, as a means of rigging more states and trying to protect his reign, he posted: “I have instructed our Department of Commerce to immediately begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures and, importantly, using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024,” he said, adding, “People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” Nice try, but, dude, remember when you swore on a Bible (how it did not spontaneously combust, I have no idea) to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution? Article I, Section 2, requires a census to be conducted every ten years to determine the apportionment of representatives in the House of Representatives among the states. As you may recall, back in Trump 45, he tried to prevent the census from being accurately taken, but now he wants to violate the Constitution and clearly not count “persons” but change the rules to count only citizens. NO!!
When it comes to rule breaking and the massaging thereof, how can we not talk about the team of Blondie and Patel. Two people, who if either told me the sky was blue, I might reply “nah.” It has been widely reported that after reviewing the Epstein files, these two high integrity clowns ordered FBI agents to black out every mention of Trump. After all, if Trump only pops up occasionally in the files as an innocent bystander, or as a subject of third-party hearsay with no supporting or corroborating evidence, why the need to blackout the mentions? If Trump did nothing of note while hanging out with Epstein, as Ghislaine Maxwell is reported to have told deputy AG Blanche before being moved to a far nicer federal prison facility, then what’s the problem? I mean, if this is a nothing burger, why not just release the files? Ooops. Could it be that the files disclose more about the Trump-Epstein relationship and what the Felon may want hidden?
As they say, the plot thickens. It was reported that VP Vance (remember him?) while not trying to get Ohio to gerrymander its districts, where it already holds a substantial lead, tried to have a dinner at his official residence with Blondie, Patel, et al., to brainstorm (with that brainpower, it would have been no storm!) on how to salvage their unraveling coverup. Fortunately, I guess, there was a leak and the dinner was cancelled. Playing a game of whack-a-mole is not how to govern. Breaking the rules, denying Constitutional proscriptions, and working to deny the legislative and judicial branches of our government their respective roles in the Republic, are what we must all fight against. Our voices must be strong and declarative. Let’s all channel Howard Beale in Network: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Get up. Stand up.