Sheriff Clarke, Terrill Thomas & Authoritarian Creep

Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke

Oxford defines authoritarian as: (adjective) 1. Favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority. 2. Tyrannical or domineering.

So let's hope that the troubling rumor reported by Politico last Friday, that the controversial Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke will soon be tapped for a position at the Department of Homeland Security, turns out not to be true.


If it does turn out to be true, then this nation will have stepped dangerously closer to the precipice of a dark authoritarian vision for this nation.

The really scary hyper-conservative version of America envisioned by Donald Trump, his attorney general Jeff Sessions and the cabal of right-wing extremist bigots like Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller and Michael Anton that now infect the White House like a dangerous ideological virus.  

Like a lot of Americans who are somewhat familiar with David Clarke's words and actions, I don't have anything against him personally, but my sense is that members of law enforcement must keep their personal politics and ideology separate from their duty to enforce the laws they are sworn to protect and uphold.

In the same vein as the recently fired Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona, Clarke views his position as sheriff as a platform to spread his own personal right-wing ideology; he's a regular guest on Fox News, at National Rifle Association conventions and on various right-wing radio programs.

And frankly speaking, this guy is totally off his rocker - and I'm not even talking about his penchant for dressing up like a cowboy.

Terrill Thomas at his son's HS graduation

Clarke, his department and employees of the Milwaukee County Jail are currently under fire for the April 24, 2016 death of 38-year-old Terrill Thomas.

As the New York Times reported, last week the Milwaukee County DA's office was conducting an inquest into Thomas' death after he died of dehydration after corrections officers turned off the water to his cell.

Testimony by investigators, inmates and corrections personnel will determine if criminal charges will be filed.

Inmates claim that Thomas, who suffered from bipolar disorder, could be heard begging for water and records show that he went without water for at least seven days before he died of dehydration.

That's torture folks, plain and simple.

He was brought there after being arrested for a shooting inside a casino, and initially ripped up a mattress to try and flood his own cell by clogging the toilet.

Because he was having a bipolar episode when corrections officers later placed him in a solitary confinement cell with no mattress, blanket or pillow, according to the New York Times, Erik Heipt, a lawyer retained by Thomas' family, Thomas "was not operating in a world of reality."

Once in solitary confinement, he had no access to medication to help him think and speak clearly, so he had no ability to ask for help, as Heipt told the Times, "They treated his mental illness as a behavioral problem and disciplined him."

According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article published last Thursday by Jacob Carpenter and Dave Umhoefer, a corrections lieutenant named Kashka Meadors testified under oath that she ordered the water to Thomas' cell shut off after he'd flooded a previous cell.

She claimed it was only supposed to be a temporary measure, but the water remained off for seven days and remarkably, no corrections personnel entered the cell to provide him with water to drink.

As the Times reported, Thomas was given a disgusting "food product" mashup that comes in the form of an unappetizing block called "Nutraloaf" which is given to some prisoners in America and Canada as punishment, watch people try to eat it.

But Thomas refused to eat it, and was given no water with the Nutraloaf and he subsequently lost at least 30 pounds - last week the medical examiner who ruled his death a homicide testified that Thomas lost 10% of his body weight while in custody.

But still the water in his cell was not turned on.

Corrections Lt. Kashka Meadors

Meadors testified that:

"I was under the impression that it was taken care of, and as well, I briefed my supervisor."

As the Journal Sentinel article reports, last week's testimony by corrections officers reveals what looks increasingly like a coverup.

For example, while footage of the incident was captured on videotape, and a captain and at least one other officer viewed it, corrections personnel apparently failed to properly download the tape.

So the section showing the incident is now gone.


Terrill Thomas was responsible for shooting a weapon in a public place, and by all rights should have faced charges for that in a court of law, but his reprehensible treatment at the hands of corrections officers is reflective of the kind of open contempt that David Clarke has for inmates in general.

As the Huffington Post reported last November, "At least four people, including a newborn baby, have died at the Milwaukee County Jail since April. (2016)"

The idea of Clarke going to Washington, D.C. to serve DHS's Office of Partnership and Engagement as an assistant secretary acting as the liaison between Trump administration and local law enforcement around the U.S. at a time when relations between many local communities and police is so fragile, is preposterous and scary.

He's been a frequent critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, calling them "sub-human creeps" and spreading bogus rumors that the group is aligned with ISIS.

Clarke called President Obama a "Marxist" on Twitter, even though he himself travelled to Russia on a trip partially paid for by a Russia-linked group called 'The Right to Bear Arms' with a delegation from the NRA to meet with Dimitry Rogozin, a deputy foreign minister under sanction by the U.S. government.

He publicly called former attorney general Eric holder an "asshole", and during an appearance on nut-bag conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' radio show he warned of a "second American Revolution" while fanning the flames of loony right-wing theories about the Obama administration wanting to take away people's guns.

Cowboy fetish? Clarke riding in a parade in 2103

Clarke has been in a longstanding feud with county executives over budget issues, and his overly confrontational approach to dealing with his enemies probably appeals to Trump.

Back in 2013, after  Clarke got upset over proposed budget cuts to the sheriff's department, as NPR reported, he aired PSA radio spots calling for local residents to arm themselves and warned that calling 911 was no longer a safe option.

Among other things he told members of the Milwaukee community:

"Once the wolf is at the door, once the intruder is inside your home, once you're on the street and someone sticks a gun in your face to take your car or your wallet, you don't have the option of calling 911."

A member of law enforcement who urges citizens not to call 911 to report emergencies has absolutely no business working in the federal government in a capacity where he would be advising local law enforcement on policy, training or tactics.

This is America, and Clarke has the right to say and think whatever he wants, but it's wrong for him to use his position as a civil servant to do it.

From my perspective, I find his willingness to be used as a complacent lackey by conservative right-wing media to legitimize quasi-racist beliefs in order to placate his massive ego to be somewhat pathetic.

As Gwen Moore, the Congresswoman who represents Sheriff Clarke's district observed back in 2015 in an op-ed on Urban Milwaukee, right-wing media outlets like Fox News use Clarke in part because they need "a black sheriff to give voice to the dog-whistle narratives its anchors dare not vocalize themselves."

If the Trump administration is looking to put this man into the Department of Homeland Security as an assistant secretary in the Office of Partnership and Engagement, you can be sure the bigots who advise Trump on domestic policy are eager to use him in the same capacity.

After all, the only black folks an American racist likes are those willing to lend a cloak of legitimacy to divisive theories based on ignorance that demean and dehumanize people of color.

With his overly-authoritarian approach to law enforcement, Sheriff David A. Clarke has demonstrated an ability and willingness to do just that.

Oil Uber Alles? Pipeline Mania & The Deep North

"Kayaktavists" surround a Shell Oil rig in Seattle's
Elliot Bay, May 15, 2015

With his 100th day in office approaching, and precious little to show for it save for his nomination of yet another conservative justice to the Supreme Court who believes the Constitution should protect corporations, El Presidente Loco took aim at the environment once again and fired off another fossil fuel-friendly executive order.

But ordering his toothless EPA to gut environmental protections apparently wasn't enough - not by a long shot.


Trump's executive order on Wednesday calls for a "review" of federal oversight of all state lands over 100,000 acres designated as national monuments by previous presidents since 1996.

He didn't stop there.

As Alessandra Potenza reported in an article posted on TheVerge.com, earlier today Trump signed yet another executive order that "instructs the Department of Interior to review locations for offshore oil and gas exploration and leasing that were put off limits by the Obama administration. That includes millions of acres in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans that Obama withdrew permanently from drilling in December 2016." 

As an alarming essay on Arctic drilling by Earth Justice notes, global warming is already impacting the Arctic at a rate twice that of other regions of the Earth, allowing offshore drilling there would be disastrous for the environment.

An analysis released by the Department of Interior in December, 2015 concluded that there is a 75% chance of multiple oil spills in the Chukchi Sea should drilling be permitted - in a pristine marine environment where weather conditions are so harsh that oil spill cleanup would be impossible.

Remarkably, as Potenza's article notes, today's executive order also "asks for a review of marine monuments and sanctuaries created in the past ten years, and prohibits the creation of new ones"

The idea that a politician can block the creation of new marine sanctuaries is simply absurd.

Environmental activist Winona LaDuke

So essentially, in an effort to demonstrate his willingness to be a total lackey to the fossil fuel industry, 45 is now attempting to open up millions of acres of pristine federal lands to drilling for oil, natural gas and other minerals to private corporations.

Who as we all know, care soooo much about the environment.

But why this perplexing rush to to extract more oil?

On Wednesday morning's Brian Lehrer Show, the noted Native American environmental rights activist Winona LaDuke called into question the need for this unprecedented expansion of drilling and pipeline capacity in the U.S., as well as the Trump administration and Republican Congress' obsession with elevating the fossil fuel industry's insatiable thirst for profit over environmental safety and the health of the American people.

Take a few minutes to click over to the WNYC.org Website and listen to the interview if you're
interested in some perspective on the aftermath of the Dakota Access Pipeline out in the remote stretch of North Dakota where the Standing Rock Sioux galvanized global support for their efforts to block a controversial stretch of oil pipeline from passing beneath land they consider scared.

She spent a year of her life living in the Oceti-Sakowin protest camp in North Dakota alongside hundreds of other Native American water protectors, and serves as the executive director of the Native American activist group Honor the Earth.

LaDuke, who graduated from Harvard and Antioch universities and is a globally recognized environmental justice advocate, is also the author of six books and a former board member of Greenpeace, USA.

The old elementary school in Fort Yates on the
Standing Rock Sioux reservation

During her interview on Wednesday, she noted the irony of the fact that Energy Transfer Partners spent about $1.3 billion dollars on the section of the Dakota Access Pipeline that runs through North Dakota to improve what Republicans are fond of calling "energy infrastructure and energy independence".

But all that money did little to improve life on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

Even though the DAPL threatens their water and environment.

For example, as a 2015 Al-Jazeera article by Chelsey Luger reported, meth and opiate addiction have surpassed alcohol as the source of substance abuse that represents one of the most significant dangers to the Standing Rock Sioux community.

Driven in no small part by the lack of job opportunities and federal and state funding as well as inadequate heath facilities and social services.

As LaDuke told Brian Lehrer on Wednesday, the clinic on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation is over 50 years old.

She noted that the main road that goes through there, Highway1806, doesn't even have a shoulder.

Perhaps all that fiery Republican passion for "energy infrastructure" doesn't include the roads and highways around the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

In fact, it was the Backwater Bridge on ND 1806 where DAPL protesters famously set up barricades and engaged in conflicts with members of North Dakota law enforcement - sections of ND 1806 were closed for long stretches by the Morton County Sheriff's Department during the protests.

Oh and speaking of which...

Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier

LaDuke had a few interesting things to say about Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier.

She accused him of being the principle architect behind the heavy-handed violent response to the peaceful DAPL demonstrations by members of the Morton County Sheriff's Department as well as other members of ND law enforcement who were called in to help quell peaceful protests.


LaDuke claims that Kirchmeier's overt bias and prejudice against Native Americans is so extreme that many have taken to calling him a "modern day Bull Connor".

In reference to the notorious white supremacist commissioner of public safety in Birmingham who, among other things, ordered Birmingham PD to stay away from the Trailways bus station so that members of the KKK could violently attack Freedom Riders riding through the south to protest segregation in 1961.

LaDuke noted that the treatment of Native Americans by some members of law enforcement in North Dakota, and the willingness of local and federal government to permit oil companies to run roughshod over Native American land have spurred some to refer to the region as "The Deep North."

One of the most interesting observations LaDuke made was that after the billions of dollars that Energy Transfer Partners spent to construct the DAPL, which is designed to transport crude oil from the Bakken Oil Fields, in some ways it's a pipeline to nowhere.

The oil boom that drew thousands of workers to the Bakken Oil Fields has long since turned to a bust, resulting in the loss of thousands of oil industry jobs and the closing of hundreds of oil rigs due to years of massive overproduction and the steep drop in global oil prices that prompted OPEC to announce cuts in oil production last year.

The global markets for the Bakken crude oil that the DAPL is supposed to transport to terminal port facilities in the Gulf for export to other countries, are drying up.

Trans Mountain Pipeline cuts through vast sections
of Canadian wilderness

Even as Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau have OK'd controversial pipeline expansion to transport Canadian Tar Sands oil across the border into the U.S.

Pipeline construction, like Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain Pipeline slated to transport crude from Alberta to terminals in British Columbia on Canada's west coast, is also taking place in other sections of the U.S., including in LaDuke's home state of Minnesota.



She lives on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota where the aging Enbridge Pipeline system has been a source of dangerous oil spills that threaten the Great Lakes ecosystem.

Canada's National Energy Board just gave Enbridge the go ahead to spend $7.5 billion to replace it's Line 3 Pipeline which stretches 1,660 kilometers from Hardisty, Alberta southeast to Lake Superior in Wisconsin - cutting across parts of LaDuke's White Earth reservation in Minnesota in the process.

With the global demand for oil flat and China starting to lead unprecedented expansion into the use of alternative energy sources like solar, it begs the question - does all this pipeline construction in Canada and the U.S. make practical sense for anyone but the oil companies?

On the eve of Donald Trump's 100th day in office, it seems that, like so many other White House initiatives launched since January 20th, this pipeline mania only makes sense from the isolated perspective of Trump himself - and the oil industry he seems so determined to please.

Monuments As Mirrors

Monuments to Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, the
Battle of Liberty Place & P.G.T. Beauregard

Following the Supreme Court's controversial ruling in the case of Shelby County v. Holder back in 2013, Republican state legislators in states like North Carolina, Florida and Texas literally rushed to pass restrictive voter ID laws designed to erect intentional barriers to block people of color from participating in the electoral process.

They argued (in part) that the entrenched systematic racism and overt bigotry that existed when the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, no longer exists.


In a remarkably ironic twist of logic, extremist conservative activists were able to begin reintroducing the same kinds of racially discriminatory voting restrictions common during the Jim Crow era by persuading the conservative majority of the Supreme Court that discrimination no longer existed.

And even if it did, they successfully argued, it was the states, not the federal government, who had oversight over changes in state electoral laws to address it.

Four years later, the undercurrent of racial tension that recently surfaced in the city of New Orleans over a rather unremarkable 126-year-old monument made of stone offers a window into the same sinister causes that ignited the racially-motivated struggle for power that still continues in parts of America.  

According to a Times Picayune article by reporter Beau Evans posted on NOLA.com early Monday morning, the atmosphere surrounding the removal of the first of four Confederate monuments from a park in downtown New Orleans was so tense that police snipers were in place on top of a parking garage across the street.

Contractors remove pieces of the Battle of Liberty 
Place obelisk early Monday morning in  

Workers wore helmets, flak jackets and masks, and the doors on cabs of the tractor-trailers that hauled all their equipment in were covered with cardboard and tape.

Those precautions might seem severe, but they were necessary because of death threats received back in January 2016 by the owner and some employees of H&O Investments, a Baton Rouge firm tasked with the removal of a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

H&O won the contract after the New Orleans City Council voted to remove the Confederate landmark from the city back in December 2015.

But after the company's owner David Mahler and his wife received not just death threats, but warnings that other clients would pull their business from the firm if they removed the statue of Jefferson Davis (unknown assailants burned his $200,000 Lamborghini - Really.) they backed out.

And the city's plans to remove the monuments were put on hold.

But as numerous news outlets reported yesterday, this time around the city took great precautions to keep the name of the contractor and the day and time of the monument removal secret - and the work began at about 1:30am Monday morning with New Orleans PD officers cordoning off an area to allow the long-delayed, and controversial work to begin.

The obelisk

The job at hand was the removal a 35-foot tall obelisk carved from blocks of granite from a quarry in Maine, the cornerstone of which was was first laid back on September 14, 1891. (Pictured left)

It was originally located on Canal Street to commemorate the efforts of an organization called the Crescent City White League, whose members briefly tried to overthrow Louisiana's Reconstruction government during the Battle of Liberty Place.

The White League was a paramilitary organization started in 1874 in Louisiana made up of former Confederate soldiers, Confederate sympathizers and southerners opposed to the reorganization of state governments in the south enforced by the federal government in the wake of the Civil War.

Like the KKK, they also sought to terrorize recently freed southern African-Americans and prevent them from voting or integrating into society.

The monument itself was designed and built by an interesting tomb and monument designer and architect named Charles A. Orleans. 

Orleans was born in Canada in 1839 and came to the city of New Orleans in 1878 after several business failures in the construction industry in Paris, New York and Chicago.

Compared to his ornate work on the famous Pizatti Tomb in New Orleans' famous Metairie Cemetery, the Battle of Liberty Place monument is relatively simple and unremarkable - but as many news reports yesterday made clear, it's not so much his design as what it represents.

As Evans' Times Picayune article notes, the obelisk, and three other monuments honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard, have been a source of friction, division and racial tension in the Big Easy since the New Orleans City Council voted 6-1 to remove them in December of 2015.

Personally speaking as a student of history, I don't think there's anything wrong with a monument recognizing the Battle of Liberty Place, it was a violent insurrection but it's an important part of American history - particularly when viewed in the context of a young, divided nation struggling to reunite itself after the bloodiest war in American history.

After all, it's just as important that there are monuments that recognize the violent insurrection on the night of October 16, 1859 led by the abolitionist John Brown in Harper's Ferry, Virginia.

The issue is the context in which the obelisk marking the Battle of Liberty Place was constructed in 1891; as a symbol to rally the cause of white supremacy.

41 years later in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression when economic struggles led some white Americans to scapegoat African-Americans and join white supremacist organizations like the KKK or "civic" organizations like White Citizens Councils, or Red Shirts, the New Orleans city government decided to add a plaque to the Battle of Liberty Place monument in order to reaffirm it as a symbol of white supremacy.

There's nothing ambiguous about the words on the plaque added in 1932:

Plaque on the Battle of Liberty Place monument
added in 1932 by the city of New Orleans

"McEnery and Penn having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people were dully installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored). 

United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the south and gave us our state."

Those are the words and ideals which have caused the obelisk, as well as the other three Confederate statues in New Orleans to become such a despised symbol of divisiveness and racial hatred to the people of the city - and the state.

The monuments, especially when viewed in the context of the racial divisions engineered by right-wing conservatives over the past 8 years, have come to represent a stain on the city of New Orleans to many people of all races and backgrounds.

They're generally loathed and constantly defaced with anti-racist graffiti; it's not the image that the mayor, city council and most city residents want to project to the thousands of tourists who visit every year.

On the other hand, the very idea or removing them has sparked protests, death threats and arson on the part of some people who see them as part of a "southern heritage" that's under threat in the same way that some people in South Carolina protested the permanent removal of the Confederate battle flag from atop the Statehouse in the capital.

To me that kind of backlash is entwined with the same kind of divisive rhetoric dredged up by right-wing media, it's offshoot the Tea Party, and later the Trump campaign - which essentially became a political movement rooted in the idea that what some perceive as "white culture" is somehow under threat by a cultural fabric in America that is becoming more diverse.

Seen in that context, those four monuments in New Orleans are not just monuments made of stone or metal; they're symbols of a darker period in America's past.

Mirrors through which we view a tumultuous, violent and bloody chapter of our nation's history, and ourselves as Americans.

Colectivos, MS-13 & Trump's War On Fact

Members of the Tupamaro colectivo in Venezuela 

An article in yesterdays New York Times written by Patricia Torres and Nicholas Casey offered chilling insight into groups of armed civilians in Venezuela who roam the troubled country acting as enforcers on behalf of embattled president Nicholas Maduro.

The article quotes a researcher named Dr. Oscar Noya who studies infectious tropical diseases, he noted that his laboratory has been vandalized more than 30 times.

The perpetrators are armed paramilitaries, leftist pro-government groups originally started by the former socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez known as "colectivos" (or collectives).

So why would colectivos trash the laboratory of a man researching tropical diseases?

Because he publishes information about epidemics of dangerous tropical diseases like malaria that President Maduro's government does not want made public.

Which is interesting considering that (according to Wikipedia) colectivos claim to be "dedicated to the promotion of democracy, political groups and cultural activities."

As the New York Times article notes, colectivos have also gunned down some of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who've recently taken to the streets of Venezuelan cities to protest the lack of food and medicine and demand new elections.

Colectivos on motorcycles shot 17 year-old protester Carlos Moreno in the head last Wednesday.

In 2016 a group of colectivos shot hospital union leader Eladio Mata in the back when negotiations with officials from University Hospital in Caracas ground to a halt.

One of more than 600 Marches for Science on Earth Day

These actions are reflective of a disturbing trend around the globe; government authorities who try to suppress information, journalistic freedom and political opposition.

As the first hundred days of the Trump administration have have demonstrated, it's a growing problem here in America as well.

Tens of thousands of people around the globe marched against the suppression of facts yesterday.

One of the good things about tens of thousands of people showing up to march in major cities and small towns around the world in support of scientific facts is that partisan Republican politicians can't simply dismiss it as some kind of "publicity stunt" cooked up by liberal interests who paid supporters to spend their Saturday marching in the streets.

Yesterday the thousands of protesters (including my sister and mother in Princeton!) who marched in support of science demonstrated that people are fed up with political organizations like the Republican Party that elevate rigid ideology and loyalty to corporate interests over facts and research.

Knowledge that's squarely in the best interest of humans, animals, plants and the environment in which we all live.

There's no question that the March For Science was a message aimed straight at the Trump administration and the scores of Republican lawmakers on the local, state and national level who pretend that human activity and the extraction and burning of fossils isn't damaging the atmosphere, land and water.

Adviser Kellyane Conway may have been relegated to the proverbial basement of the White House (notice her absence from the media for weeks?), but Trump and his administration continue to peddle "alternative facts" as truth.

Idiocracy? Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump

Last Tuesday the White House desperately tried to deflect focus from the embarrassing revelation that the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Carl Vinson was actually over 3,500 miles away from the coast of Korea operating in the Indian Ocean for joint naval exercises with the Australian Navy at the same time that Donald Trump was on Fox News boasting about "sending an armada" to North Korea.

AG Jeff Sessions tried to help his flailing boss out by using an all-too-common Trump administration tactic:


Blaming stuff on Obama and whipping up fears about immigrants.

It was insightful listening to Trump and the alarming right-wing extremist perjurer from Alabama he nominated as the nation's attorney general try to blame the Obama administration's immigration policies for the nationwide expansion of the violent street gang MS-13.

Clearly MS-13 is responsible for some pretty nasty stuff both here in the U.S., in places stretching from Long Island to Los Angeles, and in Central American nations like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras; including violent murders, rape and assault.

But unlike the factually-shaky claims made by Sessions in front of the Organized Crime Council last Tuesday, MS-13's expansion both here and abroad was a direct result of marginalized, traumatized and disenfranchised refugees fleeing the horrific violence of the civil war that raged in El Salvador for over twelve years between 1979 and 1993.

More disturbing than Sessions' and Trump's simplistic attempts to cast blame for the recent brutal slayings of four Hispanic teenage boys by MS-13 in Central Islip, Long Island on the Obama administration, are their efforts to try and harness the justifiable outrage over the killings to try and sway national opinion about Trump's draconian immigration policies and desire to construct his wall.

Heavily tattooed members of MS-13

If Trump and Sessions really cared about the violence unleashed by MS-13, they'd do something about the massive socioeconomic inequality that divided the people of El Salvador that lies at the root of the civil war and the eventual rise of MS-13.

A war fueled in no small part by the Carter, Reagan and Bush administration's support of El Salvador's government as it systematically tortured and murdered tens of thousands of innocent people.

MS-13 is the birth-child of the twelve-year reign of terror known as the Salvadoran Civil War.

Some of the more than 550,000 people who fled El Salvador in the 1980's to escape the killing eventually found their way to Los Angeles, where like many new immigrant groups arriving in new countries, they sometimes found themselves the targets of harassment and intimidation.

Young El Salvadorans in particular began to band together to protect themselves from the dense network of mostly Hispanic, Mexican and African-American street gangs in East Los Angeles and South Central LA - some of whom had existed since the 1940's.

Refugees from El Salvador who arrived in LA in the 1980's found themselves at the height of the city's gang epidemic when as many as 200,000 gang members in hundreds of different gangs fought for territory and control over the lucrative drug trade - particularly crack cocaine.

In contrast to Trump and Session's baseless assertion last week that the Obama administration's immigration policy is to blame for MS-13's rise in the U.S., ironically it was the deportation of members of MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha) by U.S. customs agents in the 1980's and 1990's that led to the expansion of MS-13.

Two MS-13 members charged with murdering a
15-year-old girl in Houston in March, 2017 

As experienced MS-13 gang members returned to El Salvador, they began recruiting heavily from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

As the gang has expanded their power and influence, they've migrated to San Francisco, Newark and Plainfield, New Jersey, parts of Queens, New York, Houston, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina and into the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. including Prince George's County, Virginia and parts of Montgomery County, Maryland including Takoma Park.



Despite Trump's empty hot-air rhetoric last week, a wall isn't going to keep MS-13 out of America, the reality is that they are already here and have been for years.

While MS-13 represents a danger to communities both here in the U.S. and abroad, Trump and Sessions are wrong to blame President Obama's immigration policy for it; organized crime experts like InSight co-director Steven Dudley and investigator Hector Silva Avalos have already categorically dismissed such claims as false and without merit.

MS-13 is a violent organization with a history of engaging in terror and bloodshed, but they are not the result of the Obama administration's immigration policy - they are a byproduct of a violent and bloody civil war conducted with the cooperation and assistance of the United States government.

The attempts by Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions to exploit fears of MS-13's violence to goad Congress into authorizing the spending of billions of dollars on a wall and morph America's immigration policy into a reflection of the Trump administration's racism, xenophobia and bigotry is reprehensible, opportunistic and petty - hallmarks of his first 100 days in office.

Archbishop Oscar Romero

According to various estimates, over 70,000 civilians were killed in El Salvador between 1979 and 1993 during the civil war; trauma that in turn spawned MS-13.

Heinous acts like the Sumpul River Massacre carried out by forces of the government of El Salvador on May 14, 1980 in which over 600 civilians including children, elderly and pregnant women were killed, triggered international outrage and helped draw attention to the conflict.

But few deaths were more high profile than the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.

He was shot on March 24, 1980 while celebrating Mass in a hospital just a day after he had publicly implored members of El Salvador's military and police forces not to obey orders to kill innocent civilians.


Just a month before his death he published an open letter to President Jimmy Carter asking him to stop supporting the government of El Salvador.

A passionate Jesuit advocate for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised, Archbishop Romero once observed,

"There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried." 

Obtuse self-serving narcissists like Donald Trump look at the violence committed by MS-13 and see only the opportunity to use it to justify bigotry, xenophobia and his own shallow political objectives.

He is unable and unwilling to look at the deeper socioeconomic factors including massive inequities in wealth and marginalization of the poor that spawned the U.S.-supported Salvadoran Civil War from which MS-13 was born.

Like too many Republican politicians in America today, Trump and Sessions close their eyes to the truths that do not serve their own personal agendas.

They willingly blind themselves to see only what they want to see.

My Military, My MOAB

A Fox News viewer's vehicle yesterday in NJ 

Today many Christians recognize Good Friday.

It marks the Friday before Easter when Jesus was crucified sometime in the 1st century between 30 and 33 AD in what was then known as Judea.

Today we learned that the president that many worried would use a nuke, may actually try and use one.

By the end of today, many more people will become familiar with the term MOAB.

America's president ordered the military to drop what's called (in typical military parlance) a Massive Ordinance Air Blast on what NPR is calling an ISIS target in the Achin district of Nangahar province in eastern Afghanistan.

This ill-advised bombing bugs me in part, because in America, weather-wise this is one of the most beautiful times of the year, when you actually think of errands to run just as an excuse to be outside.

Yesterday I was running one such errand, not far from my apartment I pulled up behind this SUV stopped at a light with two Trump-Pence stickers on the rear windshield and another one that read "Liberalism Is A Mental Disorder" (see photo above).

As I snapped a photo of it to be sure I wasn't in the midst of some kind of progressive-liberal nightmare, I thought to myself, Bill O'Reilly really deserves his extended vacation because he's clearly done his job well.

Trump wasted little time in preening about the bombing, as the New York Times reported, after the attack he bragged to reporters:

"What I do is authorize my military."

Note the use of the possessive, "my military". Like it's now "his."

This from the same guy whose daddy sent him to military school, then later got him a doctor's note that said he had bone spurs on both his heels which ensured he wouldn't get drafted in the 1960's and get sent to Vietnam.

The bone spurs later magically healed themselves once America's combat role in Vietnam ended.

In what would eventually become a disturbing snapshot of the actual presidency, back in August, the day after the New York Times published an article on the tough-talking war-hawk's sketchy military history (we see you W), Trump told a crowd that a conservative U.S. Vietnam veteran had conveniently approached the-then candidate and given him his Purple Heart medal.

Later, cradling the medal theatrically in front of a crowd, he had the gall to remark, "I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This way was much easier." 

U.S. soldiers chilling out with the MOAB

Yup. That's the guy who ordered the military to drop the MOAB - which sounds like some alien creature that Spock tried to mind-meld with on Star Trek.

According to Wikipedia, Trump's new friend the MOAB, or GBU-43/B, is just over 30-feet long and weighs about 22,600 pounds.

Developed in 2003, its only been used against a target once before. By Trump.

It's so big it has to be dropped out of a modified C-130 normally used to carry cargo; it contains explosive material equal to about 11 tons of TNT.

According to a former military adviser who served under George W. Bush named Marc Garlasco:

 "The U.S. never dropped the MAOB in Iraq due to collateral damage concerns. I was on the targeting term that considered it."  

Even the Bush administration, which arguably had a high tolerance for civilian casualties during military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, had misgivings about using the MOAB.

In the coming days, the likelihood of a violent improvised terrorist attack that kills innocent people was made more likely by the man who calls himself president, and the news will be dark.

It's already happened just outside of Jerusalem where a 21-year old British exchange student named Hannah Bladon was fatally stabbed by a 57-year-old Palestinian man named Jamal Tamimi from a mostly-Arab section of Jerusalem.

There's a ghoulish-narcissistic aspect to Trump's foreign policy, random reactionary military attacks with no apparent long-term strategy or cooperation with Congress coupled with an intentionally-defunded and understaffed Department of State headed by a press-shy former oil company CEO.

Using the military as a substitute for diplomacy, negotiations and state-craft is a recipe for disaster.

A MOAB test bombing in Utah

It's not my place to judge the global security experts, military personnel and politicians in terms of how to deal with terrorist groups like ISIS.

I couldn't begin to fathom how to draft a plan to defeat ISIS and eliminate their ability to take innocent lives.

But making the decision to drop the MOAB, on the start of one of the holiest times of the year for multiple religions borders on lunacy.

It's as erratic as the Trump White House.

It did not make us safer.

Trump's efforts to use his authority to order military attacks to dominate the news cycle and deflect attention on the ties to Russia between him, his family and an alarming number of his top advisors and staff, is going to get a lot of innocent people killed.  

If I didn't know better it looks an awful lot like the Trump administration wants to prompt ISIS to commit some kind of heinous terrorist attack in order for 45 to unleash the military industrial complex upon the mideast.

After campaigning by repeatedly lambasting other politicians and Hillary Clinton for the overseas military conflicts in the middle east.

As I write this I'm listening to a discussion on NPR about the implications of this bombing and as one of the guests observed, Trump has sipped from the cup of war and he clearly likes the taste.

Last week it was 59 cruise missiles, yesterday it was a MOAB.

God help us all.

Sessions Goes After Science

AG Jeff Sessions' next target? Science! 

Mondays are tough enough without the release of gloomy announcements heralding Department of Justice initiatives that reflect the disturbing dystopian worldview of attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III.

Last Monday a DOJ memorandum announced a "review" of the consent decrees signed between the DOJ and various police departments accused of racially-biased policing practices and systematic excessive use of force.

Yesterday (in addition to reviving Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" mantra) he announced he's going after the science behind DNA testing used to exonerate people wrongly accused or prosecuted for crimes they didn't actually commit.

A move with unmistakable racial and socio-economic undertones.

As Spencer Hsu reported in a Washington Post article on Monday, Sessions announced that the DOJ will not renew an independent advisory panel comprised of attorneys, judges, lab technicians and scientists known as the National Commission on Forensic Science.

Not only will Session's actions terminate a partnership with the NCFS, a community of experts dedicated to raising the standards of DNA use in criminal cases, it will also halt a review of FBI testimony on various types of scientific evidence

Effectively terminating a legal reform effort begun under the Obama administration in 2013 to ensure that DNA evidence is being used fairly and accurately in criminal convictions.

Innocence Project co-founders Barry Scheck
and Peter S. Neufeld

As one of the two co-founders (including Barry Scheck) of the Innocence Project, Peter S. Neufeld has been involved with efforts to use DNA evidence and science to help free and exonerate over 343 different people from wrongful convictions.

An astounding 20 of those people were on death row facing execution - take a minute to click the link above and read about some of those people.

As he observed in Hsu's WaPo article, the results of Sessions' decision are a mockery of the lofty ideals of the American justice system:

"the (DOJ) has literally decided to suspend the search for the truth. As a consequence innocent people will languish in prison or, God forbid, could be executed."

Session's reprehensible efforts to undermine the use of science to exonerate the innocent and free them from the bowels of America's prison industrial complex aren't necessarily all that surprising given the Trump administration's hostility towards journalists and facts, or the draconian cuts to the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.

But part of what's particularly troubling is that the Innocence Project, and widespread efforts to introduce DNA evidence in criminal prosecutions, were based
(according to Wikipedia), on a groundbreaking cooperative study conducted by the Department of Justice, the U.S. Senate and the Cardozo School of Law "which found that incorrect identification by eyewitnesses was a factor in over 70% of wrongful convictions."

In his book "Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong", author Brandon L. Garrett's in-depth study of the cases of the first 250 people to be exonerated by DNA evidence after being wrongly convicted, he found that a stunning 76% of those cases hinged on eyewitness identifications that were later proved to be false.

Darryl Hunt reacts after being exonerated in 2004
after serving 19.5 years for rape and murder  

So what would compel Jeff Sessions to terminate an independent advisory panel whose goal is to raise the standards of the science used to find and prosecute criminals?

Is he really willing to use his authority to try and quash science in order to reshape the Department of Justice to reflect the rigid ideology of the Trump administration and the modern Republican Party?

Is ideology more important than ensuring a justice system based on the pursuit of truth for this chaotic administration?

Even in the midst of the most politically divisive moments of the Obama presidency, when Republicans were unified in doing everything possible within their power to torpedo virtually every part of his legislative agenda, there was still an issue that had bipartisan support:

Meaningful reform of the American justice system.

In the wake of landmark works like "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In the Age of Colorblindness, a cross-section of conservative, libertarian, centrist, progressive and liberal lawmakers alike from around the nation joined legal experts, scholars, clergy, activists and concerned citizens of all races and from all socioeconomic backgrounds to support efforts to address the warehousing of men, women and children on a massive scale in the prison industrial complex.

Are there blocks of hardcore conservatives determined to ensure that mass incarceration continues?

Sure there are, including Donald Trump.

As CNN Money reported back on February 24th, stocks in the major private prison corporations are up over 100% since Trump took office, fueled in part by his fiery "law and order" rhetoric and efforts to ramp up the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants - efforts from which he'll profit personally from his own stock holdings.

The prison industrial complex, which includes private prison companies, prison guard unions, food suppliers, gun manufacturers and local municipal governments, is an imposing lobby in Washington with a vested interest in maintaining the pipeline that funnels non-violent people into U.S. prisons and jails.

And in Attorney General Jeff Sessions, they've certainly got a friend who's willing to undermine science to keep that human pipeline flowing.

It begs the question, just whose attorney general is this anyway?

Is Right-Wing Media Turning on Trump?

Jared Kushner & Stephen Bannon [Getty Images] 

From a political standpoint, my sense of humor is admittedly a bit tilted, so it's been amusing to watch the Republican Party's own chickens come home to roost this week.

But the reasons behind said roosting are no laughing matter.

The New York Times' Jeremy W. Peters and Maggie Haberman were two of the many political observers who reported on the internal rift between Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner.

With his erratic tweets, lies, hypocrisy and ethical quagmires, it's no secret that Donald Trump is the maker of his own bed.

No one forces him make outlandish statements unsupported by fact, send out snippets of incomprehensible nonsense to his Twitter followers in the middle of the night without consulting his own advisers and policy makers, or conduct himself like an amateurish diplomatic lout with no tact or understanding of the delicate subtleties of international relations.

But as his approval ratings plummet to historic lows and he struggles to right the chaotic ship that is his presidency, the focus of his ire has increasingly turned upon his top advisers.

To be fair to Trump, internal divisions among senior White House advisers are not unique to his administration, but ultimately he's the one who bears responsibility for the controversy that's dogged the two advisers who arguably hold the most influence over him - Bannon and Kushner.

Bannon, an unapologetic white nationalist and xenophobe with direct links to Neo-Nazi's who is the architect of the alt-right, is perhaps one of the most divisive White House advisers in modern history.

He's the brainchild of much of the virulent anti-immigrant hysteria and toxic racial divisiveness that has characterized the Trump campaign, and carried over into the Trump White House.

Religious wingnut Dave Daubenmire

By all accounts it was Bannon who was responsible for pushing the ill-advised and poorly planned executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from coming to the United States.

Even Republicans are growing concerned that Bannon's extremist worldview poses a danger to American foreign policy because of the influence he holds over Trump.

This morning Jeremy W. Peters wrote a front-page story for the New York Times about Bannon being influenced by the 1997 book, "The Fourth Turning", which theorizes America heading towards a catastrophic socioeconomic breakdown.

But recently the toxic intolerance that Bannon peddles in has come back to haunt the White House in the form of anti-Semitic attacks on Jared Kushner in response to the public feud between the two advisers.

For example, as Right Wing Watch reported, last Friday the "Religious Right" zealot Dave Daubenmire used a Webcast from a McDonald's in a remote Kentucky town to take the anti-Semitic attacks on Kushner to a whole new level.

The noted evangelical Christian extremist fanned the flame of right-wing conspiracy theorists that Israel drives American foreign policy by blaming the decision to fire 59 cruise missiles on Syria on the fact that Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump are both Jewish, telling his audience:

"Why is it in America today, the only group that you cannot criticize are the Jews? Everything we do is about Israel. The Jews are lost. Donald Trump's number one adviser, from what I understand, is his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Think Jared Kushner has got the Holy Spirit? No. Why? Jared Kushner is a Jew. He's a Jew. Donald Trump's daughter - what's her name? Ilanka? Ivanka? Ivanka - she converted to Judaism, alright? So Donald Trump has around him...those who love Israel."      

Are Daubenmire's views mainstream? Probably not.

But they do reflect the tone of some of the increasing criticism leveled at Kushner from within conservative circles worried that the wealthy scion of a prominent New York City real estate family whose vast holdings around the globe create an unprecedented ethical conflict of interest given his influence on domestic and foreign policy in the White House.

Will Bannon (next to lamp) continue to have a
seat at the table?

As Alyson Chadwick reported in an article posted on DirectExpose.com on Saturday, Bannon is still hugely popular with the alt-right and right-wing media.

While the much younger Kushner is more of a centrist moderate eager to reign his erratic father-in-law back from some the extremist views and polarizing positions he's taken.

Kushner is smart enough to know how reprehensible Bannon's views are.


As Dave Daubenmire's disturbing quote above demonstrates, many right-wing media figures have begun to worry that Kushner's being related to Trump, in addition to his having met with Russian political and business leaders in December (which Congress will soon grill him about) poses a risk for the Trump presidency.

After all, as Chadwick reported in her article, Bannon was supposedly against the decision to greenlight the attack on Syria while Kushner supported it; a position that likely played some part in Trump's decision to remove Bannon from the National Security Council last week.

The political danger for Trump is that Bannon was instrumental to his winning the support of hard right and fringe conservatives who helped propel 45 into the White House - and as the recent failure of the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act demonstrated, hard-line members of the far right Congressional Freedom Caucus have shown that they will oppose the de facto leader of the Republican Party.

But it also exposes the danger of Trump having tapped both his son-in-law and daughter as senior advisers, if it comes down to making staff changes as is rumored, will he be able to do what's best for his presidency?

Or will his notorious loyalty to his family blind him to the tough decisions that presidents must inevitably make?



With Congress home on spring break, Republicans are preparing to defend their House and Senate majorities in the upcoming 2018 elections with a public that's shown little tolerance for their domestic agenda, and a historically-unpopular president in office.

A president who could find himself, and his agenda, shackled by the extremist views that he himself cultivated and encouraged in order to get himself elected.

An unpleasant chicken that's come home to roost at a White House that wants nothing to do with it.

Publicly at least.

Cruise Missiles For Kids? Or Distraction From Russian Meddling?

5-year-old Syrian boy Omran Daqneesh in 2016 [AP]

Listening to Trump express his contrived personal agony over viewing photos of "beautiful babies" from Syria killed in the heinous chemical weapons attack on Tuesday strained the boundaries of hypocrisy.

As he used his fake moral outrage over Syrian children as justification to order U.S. Navy ships to launch 59 cruise missiles at the Al Sharyat airfield in Syria, the EPA announced plans to cut $17 million from two programs intended to protect American children from the effects of lead poisoning.

Back in August 2016, as the world reacted in horror to the photograph of shellshocked five-year-old Syrian boy Omran Daqneesh sitting in an ambulance covered in blood and dust after an airstrike on the Syrian city of Aleppo, the puffed-up anti-immigrant xenophobia that defined Trump's nationalistic presidential campaign rhetoric, made no mention of the hundreds of Syrian children being injured and killed.

One of Trump's very first bungled initiatives as president was the executive order banning Muslims from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. - a ban that included Syrian refugees fleeing the same horror of war that the erratic POTUS used as an excuse to bomb Syria on Thursday.

So was Trump really motivated by his concern for the welfare of children?

Or was his military order simply an excuse to try and shift public focus from the ongoing Congressional and intelligence probes into he and his top advisor's ties to Russia and Putin's interference in the 2016 elections?

Ethically-compromised GOP Rep. David Nunes

Remember folks, there were two major news stories released hours before the cruise missile attacks that cast even more clouds over the Trump administration's conspiring with Russia.

It was during the day on Thursday that the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Republican Congressman David Nunes, finally announced that he was stepping down from his role in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

Over the past two weeks, the Republican Party has taken serious heat over Nunes' role.

It's actually remarkable that it's taken Republican leaders so long to understand that the ethical minefield of a Trump advocate leading a bi-partisan Congressional investigation of Russian meddling has exponentially increased suspicion that the White House is engaged in a massive coverup.  

From a strategic political perspective, the Trump administration has been on the defensive in the wake of the failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to even vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act.

The monumental conflict of interest from Nunes having secretly travelled to the White House to brief Trump on intelligence information about the investigation, classified information that he had not shared with Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee investigating the White House, only seemed to magnify the political dysfunction of a Republican Party that controls the Senate, House and White House - but has yet to pass one single significant piece of legislation.

Remarkable? It gets even better.

As TheHill.com reported on Thursday: "(Nunes') announcement came moments before the House Ethics Committee announce an investigation into Nunes over potential 'unauthorized disclosures of classified information'."

On the very same day, Jo Becker and Matthew Rosenberg published an article in the New York Times about Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner having committed a felony by lying about meetings he had with foreign leaders on a questionnaire he filled out to grant him top-secret clearance for national security.

Were the cruise missile attacks a cover for
Kushner's lie about meeting with Kislyak?

As the Times reported, those meetings include two meetings in December "with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, and one with the head of a Russian state-owned bank, Vnesheconomobank, arranged at Mr. Kislyak's behest."

So after both the Nunes and Kushner stories were preparing to dominate the weekend news cycle, by Thursday evening, at a hastily-arranged press conference at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida, Trump announced his decision to order the cruise missile attacks on Al Sharyat airfield just south of the Syrian city of Homs.
 Coincidence?

Knowing Trump's well-known propensity for showing a willingness to do or say almost anything to deflect negative press coverage, I'd say no.

Shocking atrocities against Syrian children didn't start with Tuesday's chemical attack - and Trump's own policies haven't exactly made concern for children's welfare a priority of his administration.

As Yvette Cabrera reported in an article for ThinkProgress.org on Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services conducted a survey in 2011 that showed that up to a third of the approximately 106 million homes in the U.S. are contaminated with lead-based paint.

Contamination that will have an adverse impact on poor children, especially poor children of color.

The EPA voted to lift restrictions on
the pesticide chlorpyrifos last week

As Cabrera noted, the Washington Post first published a copy of an EPA memorandum sent by the agency's acting chief financial officer David A. Bloom outlining a 31% cut in the EPA's budget for fiscal year 2018.

Cuts which include the two programs intended to educate Americans about the dangers of lead poisoning, as well as 54 other programs targeting issues like pesticide safety.

Those cuts also include a 25% cut in staffing at EPA, cuts which will have a direct affect on the health and well being of the "beautiful babies" Trump suddenly seems so concerned about.

The EPA's own research showed the pesticide chlorpyrifos poses a risk to babies, but they lifted restrictions on it last week.

Where is Trump's concern about the babies whose neurological health will be impacted by the presence of chlorpyrifos on the fruit and vegetables they eat?

Most people would agree on a unilateral UN-supported global effort to stop the civil war in Syria, just as most people are outraged and horrified over using chemical weapons on civilians.

But launching 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield isn't going to stop Bashar Al-Assad from killing his own people - with chemical or other weapons.

Nor will a cruise missile attack quell the American people's demand for a thorough Congressional investigation into links between Trump and his top advisers, and Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections.

Syrian refugees arriving in Lesbos, Greece

Frankly if Trump really cares about the "beautiful babies" in Syria or anywhere for that matter, he should stop gutting the budgets of the Department of Education, HHS, EPA and cutting U.S. contributions to the United Nations.

If he hadn't signed executive orders banning Syrian families from coming to the U.S. in the first place, maybe some of those "beautiful babies" killed in chemical attacks in a rebel-controlled province in northern Syria would be alive today.

After all, Assad's decision to use chemicals against civilians in his own country (again) last Tuesday may well have been motivated, in part, by the White House's own decision last week to publicly announce that it had ditched the goal of removing Assad from power as part of its ambiguous "America first" foreign policy.

As White House press secretary Sean Spicer said just last Friday, "With respect to Assad, there is a political reality that we have to accept,"

What a sad and tragic difference a week makes.

Oh and by the way, Reuters is reporting that the $90 million worth of cruise missiles that were fired at Al Sharyat airfield did very little damage since Trump informed Putin before the attack and Putin in turn informed Assad - so the Syrians actually moved planes and other equipment before the cruise missiles hit.

As the British-based Syrian Observatory For Human Rights reported, Syrian planes took off from the base on Friday and attacked rebel-held areas in the northern Homs province.

$90 million to make a point and the airfield is still operational - par for the Trump presidency and bogey for the American people.