From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian... corrected

 "Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men"

- tweet, State Department Under-Secretary Darren Beattie 

Trump is more than a racist. He's a white supremacist trading on "white racial antipathy". His goal seems to be positive discrimination and assistance for ostensibly-oppressed white males. How else to explain blocking USAID for dark people overseas (with devastating consequences) while creating special refugee status for White Afrikaners who aren't poor or persecuted, or asking for help?

It was left to the Department of Education's "Civil Rights Office" to say the quiet part out loud. In a Dear Colleague Letter (here), sent to educators at every level, recipients were essentially directed to no longer honour, respect or distinguish student minorities. They were told, "treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal". 

Who knew that social justice and equity were contentious things? They are to Trump supporters, who want the freedom to be cruel, hateful and intolerant.

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The Cabinet meets with Musk

For the felon Donald Trump, a successful crime is no crime. A cheat and bigot himself, he's never been comfortable punishing crimes of peculation and prejudice. In cases of self-dealing, bribery, payoffs and financial plunder, and violence against women, Trump doesn't believe a crime has even occurred, or should be punished. 

In Elon Musk, presently deep in criminal heists throughout the public service, Trump has a soul mate, instinctively greedy and of equally-ambitious criminal intent. Their joint crime is the biggest scandal no one is mentioning: the new age of  bribery and corruption they have unleashed in American politics.

The interests of the two men seem to particularly coincide where corporate, financial or other white collar crime is involved. A good example is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

Pending cases brought at the CFPB that were begun under Biden are now being dismissed with prejudice by the (business-detested) regulatory agency's new hirelings. 

Who paid off whom - or whether it was free - is not yet known, but banks and finance companies were involved, and they have a lot of loose money lying around, especially when it can be directed to those in a position to drop expensive and image-damaging litigation. 

The Musk-Trump political philosophy is that anything "liberal" or humane (especially "DEI") has to go. Instead, arms shipments to repressive regimes must be re-allowed; police misconduct tolerated and covered up; ghost guns legalised; assassination targets expanded; and cruelty to asylum-seekers resumed. Medical research will be blocked and great universities silenced. Overseas, there will be inhumanity, starvation, disease and death. 

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There have been alarming sackings of the top career Pentagon lawyers, Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents. 

At Justice, AG Pam Bondi seeks more amenable, "loyal" lawyers, ready to tell the Trump administration what it wants to hear, i.e, do as directed, like GW Bush's "torture lawyers". 

They will be closely watched by politically-appointed legal officers, who, in their Senate confirmations, refused to commit to obeying court orders (the supine Senate confirmed them anyway).  

READ THE REST HERE

A lot going on.

 And  many heroes along the way.  Let me leave you with this as I process and share what I have been learning. 

Guantanamo today... or was it yesterday?

 Whatever is going on at Guantanamo is like everything else this administration is doing- in flux and in chaos. This NY Times article was gifted to me and is shows was a clusterfuck this idea of turning Guantanamo into  a place for holding maybe undocumented individuals at the base.

Even more disturbing is the placing of these maybe undocumented individuals into the prisons that were set up for the Guantanamo detainees. Those conditions are deplorable. Even reading the accounts from the men that were held in these conditions for a period of two weeks - until transported back to their homelands- brings back to me the harsh reminder of what we did to my clients and so many other men. Men who were held indefinitely and never accused of a crime.

I (of course) no longer have a subscription to the Washington Post. However if you are still supporting that paper (why, I might ask?) you can read this in full here.

But here are a few quotes from the article that should give you chills as to what we are doing to these men:

He couldn’t tell when the days started and ended within the windowless, peeling yellow four walls of his prison cell in Guantánamo.

Diuvar Uzcátegui kept track of them by putting a small tear in the last, blank page of a Bible after every third meal. The book was given to him by the military guards along with a blanket and a ¾-inch foam pad to sleep on. He went to the bathroom in a bucket connected to a tap in the cell.

And though he couldn’t see his fellow detainees, he could hear them.

Some of the men screamed. Others threatened to kill themselves. One interviewed by The Washington Post said he attempted it.

During his two weeks at the Guantánamo Bay naval station, Uzcátegui, 27, said he was rarely let outside. Both times, he was shackled and placed in what he described as a cage. It was the only sight of the blue Cuban sky he got, so otherworldly it felt like a dream.

“They didn’t treat me like a human being,” he said, his voice flustered with indignation. “They threw me in a cage.”

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The Trump administration flew nearly 180 migrants from the United States to Guantánamo and deported all of them to Venezuela on Thursday. The Post spoke with three men who were detained in the U.S. military prison that has been used to house suspected terrorists since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. All had crossed the border illegally, and although Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem called the migrants transported to Cuba the “worst of the worst,” The Post could find no other criminal record for those interviewed.

Uzcátegui, José Daniel Simancas and Franyer Montes said they were denied calls to lawyers or loved ones after repeated pleas. They said they were subjected to humiliating and invasive strip searches. They described prolonged periods in isolation, with only two one-hour opportunities to go outside over two weeks.

Their testimonies echoed the fears expressed by human rights groups — that migrants transferred to a place known for its isolation and history of torture allegations could be vulnerable to abuse.

Of course this is all a dog and pony show for the trump people to show their base... and yes, the cruelty is the point.

Supposedly the latest group to go down there- after the above group was moved on- has now supposedly been moved out too. There is litigation going on and pressure by lawyers to get down there and interview these men. Meanwhile the trumpers are establishing the same procedures that they had in place for the war on terror captives held at the base- making it difficult for attorney to communicate and get down there to check out the conditions and figure out who is actually there.

The defense department pushes back UPDATED

 A few days ago I opined about how the defense department would view the destruction of the U.S. posed by trump and his ilk. Today the defense department pushed back on the directive to fire a bunch of civilian employees- it does not seem the incompetent secretary of defense has joined in on this push back so it is not clear who is leading it at the defense department. 

according to CNN:

"However, it seems that the until Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel can carry out a more thorough review of the impacts such firings could have on US military readiness, two defense officials familiar with the matter told CNN.

That law says that the secretary of defense “may not reduce the civilian workforce programmed full-time equivalent levels unless the Secretary conducts an appropriate analysis” of how those firings could impact the US military’s lethality and readiness. The law also says that mitigating risk to US military readiness takes precedence over cost.

  A senior defense official told CNN on Wednesday that such an analysis had not been carried out before military leaders were ordered to make lists of employees to fire.

The office of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declined to comment.

This could get interesting... imagine that, someone is actually looking at the law!

Last night the head of the joint chief of staff was fired. Hmmmmm. I wonder if that will teach the pentagon to stop looking at the law.