The Trump Presidency - how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hair

https://gizmodo.com/customs-and-border-protection-flew-a-predator-surveilla-1843758034

Customs and Border Protection Flew a Predator Surveillance Drone Over Minneapolis Protests Today


Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has flown a Predator drone above ongoing protests against police brutality in Minneapolis, according to flight logs.

An aircraft using the call sign CBP-104 took off from Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota—where CBP has drones stationed—at around 10:10 a.m. ET, reaching Minneapolis and entering a hexagon-shaped holding pattern at 20,000 feet over the city at 11:47 a.m. ET. At around 1:15 p.m. ET, it began heading back to Grand Forks.

Minneapolis is not inside the 100 air mile border zone where CBP has jurisdiction, an area that encompasses just shy of two-thirds of the nation’s population. The city is currently being rocked by massive protests against brutality and racism by the Minneapolis Police Department that have gone on to inspire other demonstrations around the country. Donald Trump referred to demonstrators in the city as looters and “thugs” while issuing a disgusting threat of lethal force by “the Military” on Friday.

CBP-104 was first spotted by flight-watching community ADB-S Exchange, according to Vice, and was flagged on Twitter by investigative reporter Jason Paladino. Predator drones are equipped with powerful cameras designed to capture clear video from as far up as 25,000 feet in the air and are capable of remaining airborne for dozens of hours.


The call sign CBP-104 is identified by numerous sources as a Predator drone operated by the agency, including a 2006 press release by manufacturer General Atomics, a 2007 Popular Science article, and CBP presentations and drone flight logs. The exact model in question is a Predator B, which is more typically identified by the model name MQ-9 Reaper.

CBP surveillance drones are cleared to operate within 100 air miles of the border, which is under more or less continual aerial surveillance. The entirety of CBP-104's holding pattern over Minneapolis falls outside of that zone, as does much of its flight path on Friday, at least according to a CityLab mapping project. However, CBP has often asserted expanded authority to redefine the boundaries of its jurisdiction, such as areas surrounding an international airport where Border Patrol can demonstrate a crossing occurred.

More at the link.
 

It shouldn't come as a surprise that we had been making progress with an Obama policy before it was shunned for it's Obamaness. It shouldn't come as a surprise but listening to Fox News you hear a "why didn't they protest peacefully" like the Vice President didn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to a football game in a luxury box and then leave because he was upset at protesting police brutality.
 
It shouldn't come as a surprise but listening to Fox News you hear a "why didn't they protest peacefully" like the Vice President didn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to a football game in a luxury box and then leave because he was upset at protesting police brutality.

One does not preclude the other.
 
Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over? Like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody—don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, O.K.?

Donald J. Trump pro police brutality
 
So, Mr. 'When the looting starts, the shooting starts' Trump, when is there going to be the action you threatened? The thing about threats is that you have to be prepared to back them up, or you look like a simpering little sissy.
 
That phrase is a dog whistle to the alt-right - he's not saying that he will be doing the shooting, but giving a quiet nod to alt-right/Neo Nazi extremists to retaliate against black neighborhoods and businesses. Once this calms down watch for hate crimes against people of color. It already started in my city, not far from where I live (fairly quiet suburb) we passed a house that had been tagged with a racial slur.

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There really is a Trump tweet for everything.
 
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Just a million WTF's

Gaslighting with a flamethrower.

Just to prove he is not still hiding in a bunker. Trump had a peaceful protest tear gassed and assulted with rubber bullets, for a photo op outside a boarded up church.


The Bishop was on CNN and said Trump had no permission to be there and what he did was against the teachings of the bible.

Questions over what the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff was doing in a Trump political photo op.

Trump threatens military force if violence in states isn't stopped
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/politics/donald-trump-national-address-race/index.html


Police use tear gas to clear protesters from a path the president took to visit a damaged church.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/floyd-protests-live.html#link-8b58f1c


America or Trump?
 
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...80ecf4-a425-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html

Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.

June 1, 2020 at 3:18 p.m. EDT
This unraveling presidency began with the Crybaby-in-Chief banging his spoon on his highchair tray to protest a photograph — a photograph — showing that his inauguration crowd the day before had been smaller than the one four years previous. Since then, this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron.
Presidents, exploiting modern communications technologies and abetted today by journalists preening as the “resistance” — like members of the French Resistance 1940-1944, minus the bravery — can set the tone of American society, which is regrettably soft wax on which presidents leave their marks. The president’s provocations — his coarsening of public discourse that lowers the threshold for acting out by people as mentally crippled as he — do not excuse the violent few. They must be punished. He must be removed.
Social causation is difficult to demonstrate, particularly between one person’s words and other persons’ deeds. However: The person voters hired in 2016 to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” stood on July 28, 2017, in front of uniformed police and urged them “please don’t be too nice” when handling suspected offenders. His hope was fulfilled for 8 minutes and 46 seconds on Minneapolis pavement.

What Daniel Patrick Moynihan termed “defining deviancy down” now defines American politics. In 2016, voters were presented an unprecedentedly unpalatable choice: Never had both major parties offered nominees with higher disapproval than approval numbers. Voters chose what they wagered would be the lesser blight. Now, however, they have watched him govern for 40 months and more than 40 percent — slightly less than the percentage that voted for him — approve of his sordid conduct.
Presidents seeking reelection bask in chants of “Four more years!” This year, however, most Americans — perhaps because they are, as the president predicted, weary from all the winning — might flinch: Four more years of this? The taste of ashes, metaphorical and now literal, dampens enthusiasm.

The nation’s downward spiral into acrimony and sporadic anarchy has had many causes much larger than the small man who is the great exacerbator of them. Most of the causes predate his presidency, and most will survive its January terminus. The measures necessary for restoration of national equilibrium are many and will be protracted far beyond his removal. One such measure must be the removal of those in Congress who, unlike the sycophantic mediocrities who cosset him in the White House, will not disappear “magically,” as Eric Trump said the coronavirus would. Voters must dispatch his congressional enablers, especially the senators who still gambol around his ankles with a canine hunger for petting.
In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation’s domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? Praying people should pray, and all others should hope: May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world’s most risible deliberative body.
A political party’s primary function is to bestow its imprimatur on candidates, thereby proclaiming: This is who we are. In 2016, the Republican Party gave its principal nomination to a vulgarian and then toiled to elect him. And to stock Congress with invertebrates whose unswerving abjectness has enabled his institutional vandalism, who have voiced no serious objections to his Niagara of lies, and whom T.S. Eliot anticipated:

We are the hollow men . . .
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass . . .

Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.
 
I just saw the Australian coverage which...

It's rendering me speachless... I truly don't know what to say.
 
I really want to hear from @LeVeL about what's happened over the last month; I hope that Trump's recent actions would have changed the opinion of some of his previous supporters.

Short list: Turning the lights out and hiding during a crisis, 100,000 Americans dead and counting, nationwide protests, gassing legal and peaceful protesters for a photo-op, being condemned by a church, the fact that The Lincoln Project exists, Biden being endorsed by prominent GOP figures, and now threatening to deploy the military on US soil against US citizens.

This is the image that will define Trump's presidency:
whit-house-dark.jpg

A vacant White House in a time of crisis while a coward hides in his bunker.
 
In Denver


Now they didn't even enter the statehouse building


This isn't about stopping looting
 
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