Eh, there are other things to this piece and I could probably do a better job (Wikipedia here) with the History myself, but this is a fair enough summary.

The Last Time the U.S. Army Cleared Demonstrators From Pennsylvania Avenue
By GORDON F. SANDER, Politico
06/07/2020

The Washington D.C. authorities told him “that they can no longer preserve law and order,” the president’s statement declared. “In order to put an end to this rioting and defiance of civil authority, I have asked the Army to assist the District authorities to restore order.”

The author of the above presidential ukase was not the current, 45th occupant of the White House, Donald Trump, but his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, the 31st U.S. president. The year was 1932. And the authors of the aforementioned “rioting” were a scraggly, disgruntled group of World War I veterans who hoped to force the government to pay out their service bonuses. When Hoover sent in the troops to clear the protesters that July the newsreels showed U.S. Army troops wielding bayonets and tear gas as they brazened their way through the camps the demonstrators had built and set them ablaze. Time magazine called it the Battle of Washington.
…
Herbert Clark Hoover, who took office at the onset of the Great Depression, was one of the unluckiest men to occupy the Oval Office. Intelligent, competent, self-effacing to a fault, he had a stellar record of public service behind him when he was elected in 1928, most notably his acclaimed work as head of the life-giving U.S. Food Administration during World War I, and the American Relief Administration afterwards when he strove to provide food for the starving masses of Central and Eastern Europe. But unfortunately, the good will that Hoover had accrued quickly dissipated after the stock market crashed in October 1929. Matters were not helped by the former engineer’s stubborn opposition to involving the federal government in alleviating the human toll of the historic depression that followed. By 1931 unemployment had reached 15 percent, breadlines filled the country’s streets and hordes of miserable Americans were encamped in decrepit shantytowns, or “Hoovervilles” as they were called. Hoover’s name had become a synonym for indifference.

By 1932, the third year of the economic catastrophe, this national tableau of misery had set the stage for a dramatic confrontation.

In 1924, when the economy had been strong, Congress had passed the World War Adjusted Compensation Act, awarding bonuses to surviving veterans of the Allied Expeditionary Force, as the American servicemen who sailed to France to fight against the Central Powers during World War I were called, as a gesture of gratitude for their service. There was a catch, however: The “bonus” certificates, which would have been worth approximately $500 plus compounded interest, were not redeemable until 1945.

One former sergeant and combat veteran from the Great War, Walter Waters of Portland, Oregon, decided that wasn’t good enough. Like many, if not most of the surviving veterans, by 1932 Waters was unemployed. He wanted his money now. At a Portland veterans’ meeting in March, Waters raised the idea of descending on Washington en masse to pressure Congress to paying the bonus immediately.

Thus the so-called Bonus Expeditionary Force—also known as the Bonus Marchers or the Bonus Army—was formed. In the late spring of 1932, the ragtag “army” of 17,000 veterans and their families, led by the charismatic Waters, descended on Washington by foot, truck and train to demand their pay.

Most of the Army settled in Anacostia Flats, a muddy area across the Anacostia River south of the 11th Street Bridge. There they erected a sprawling network of camps—which they of course called Hoovervilles—to serve as their base to lobby Congress and make their presence known around the capital. A smaller group of veterans bedded down near the White House in a group of abandoned buildings on government property on Pennsylvania Avenue near Third Street.

The sprawling cluster of camps, which included sanitation facilities and even a library, were tightly supervised by “Commander Waters,” as he was now called, and his adjutants. Veterans were required to register and prove that they had been honorably discharged. Although there were doubtless a number of radicals among the ranks of the shambolic Army, most of the veterans were non-political and avowedly patriotic. There were a lot of American flags at Bonus City, the main Anacostia cantonment. Basically, the vets just wanted their money.

The Army was partly successful. On June 15, after an impassioned debate which caused one representative to drop dead of a heart attack on the floor of Congress, the House passed the $2.4 billion Wright Patman bill by which the Bonus Marchers and the other surviving doughboys would immediately be given $1,000. There was a lot of cheering in the House Gallery that afternoon.

The celebration was premature. Two days later, to general consternation, the Senate rejected the bill by a wide margin. Crushed by their defeat, the bulk of the BEF did an about face and skulked out of the capital. However a sizable number, estimated at 2,000, continued to hunker down, both at Bonus City and other sites around the capital, including the row of half-demolished buildings near the White House, hoping that somehow their presence would move the government to change its mind—and because they had nowhere else to go.

The government didn’t change its mind. Meanwhile, the remaining BEF holdouts got on Hoover’s nerves, a living testament to his failure to alleviate the Depression. Angry, brooding over his dimming chances in the forthcoming election, Hoover persuaded himself, with the aid of Douglas MacArthur, his Caesar-like Army chief of staff that the BEF had been infiltrated by Communists and was planning to stage a revolt. This was balderdash. In fact, Waters had made a point of ferreting out any Reds or would be Reds from his “troops.” No matter. As far as Hoover and MacArthur were concerned, the Marchers were a horde of criminals and Communist subversives.

Finally, on the afternoon of Thursday, July 28, 1932, under prodding from the White House, the commissioners of the District of Columbia ordered the D.C. police to clear the smaller, disheveled site near the White House, where several hundred of the Marchers were squatting. The police moved in. The veterans, who were armed with nothing more than bricks, resisted. The squatters were joined by several hundred of their comrades from Bonus City. Bricks were thrown. Shots rang out. When the brick dust and gun smoke cleared one veteran was dead, another was mortally wounded and a D.C. policeman also lay near death.

That is when the D.C. commissioners asked the White House for federal troops.

Unlike his jingoist successor, Hoover was hardly a militarist; if anything, he was the opposite. Just a month before, Hoover had startled delegates to the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva when he introduced a proposal which, if enacted, would have further reduced America’s already modest peacetime military forces by discarding submarines, tanks and military aviation.

That was then. Now, pacifist no longer, Hoover, fed up with the rabble outside his house, was happy to oblige the District commissioners’ request for reinforcements. The president passed the request to his Secretary of War, Patrick Hurley, who passed the request to strutting four-star General Douglas MacArthur, who also was happy to oblige.

Yeah. That Doug MacArthur.

In Hoover’s statement justifying sending in federal troops, which was carried on the front page of the New York Times and other major American newspapers, he asserted: “An examination of a large number of names discloses the fact that a considerable part of those remaining are not veterans; many are Communists and persons with criminal records.”

“Damned lie,” Waters raged. “Every man is a veteran. We examined the papers of everyone.” No matter: The then largely conservative American press trumpeted Hoover’s hollow, martial words. Waters’ protest was ignored.

What? You think something changed? People are always the same, always.

To say that MacArthur was eager to do battle with the Bonus Army is to understate the case. For weeks his men at nearby Fort Myers had undergone anti-riot training for just such a confrontation.

Still, there was neither need nor call for MacArthur himself to actually be on the scene that afternoon, as his aide, Major Dwight Eisenhower, reportedly told him. “I told that son of a bitch that he shouldn’t go there,” Eisenhower later recounted. MacArthur’s subordinate, General Perry Miles, was technically in charge.

But there MacArthur was, in his shiny jodhpurs, as the bayonet-wielding men of the 12th Infantry Regiment, and the mounted troops of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, supported by six M197 light tanks, marched up Pennsylvania Avenue while thousands of civil service employees left work to line the street and watch.

The New York Times reported what happened next: “Amidst scenes reminiscent of the mopping up of a town in the World War, Federal troops drove the army of bonus marchers from the shanty town near Pennsylvania Avenue in which the veterans had been entrenched for months. Ordered to the scene by President Hoover detachments of infantry, cavalry, machine gun and tank crews laid down an effective tear-gas barrage which disorganized the bonus-seekers, and then set fire to the shacks and tents left behind.”

After that, Hoover, whose aides were keeping him updated on the fracas, ordered MacArthur to stop.

But MacArthur had a fuzzy appreciation of the principle of civilian control of the military. Excited by the whiff of battle (even though it hadn’t been much of a battle) and convinced that the shoddy Bonus Marchers constituted a real and present threat to the government, the general disobeyed Hoover’s direct order and instead ordered his troops to cross the Anacostia River to Bonus City. There, as newsreel cameras rolled, his men proceeded to forcibly evict the remaining veterans and their families and torch their tents. Fifty-five veterans were injured and 135 arrested in the confrontation that day.

Hoover, for his part, was unrepentant. Twenty years later, by which time the storied general was commander of U.S. forces during the Korean War, MacArthur’s disdain for the string of command resulted in his relief by president (and former Army captain) Harry Truman. But in 1932 MacArthur’s gross insubordination went unheeded and unpunished. Instead the government called him a hero. “It was a great victory,” Secretary Hurley exulted the next day. “Mac is the man of the hour.”

Although Hoover himself never appeared on the scene, that night he could see the fires his men had set from his White House bedroom. So could all of Washington. So could all of America.

The Battle of Washington was over, and so, for all practical purposes, was the presidency of Herbert Clark Hoover. The Bonus March fiasco was seen by many as the death knell for Hoover’s re-election campaign, already facing long odds because of the cratering economy. The sight and sound of his and his top general’s troops tear-gassing the pitiful remaining tenants of Bonus City and their weeping families, as shown in biograph theaters around the country, certainly didn’t endear him to voters. In November, Hoover lost by a landslide to Franklin Roosevelt.

So it had a happy ending.

Kinda.

I realize we’re running a mite hot. There is the last 50 column on the right and at the bottom of the page don’t bother with ‘Fetch More Items’ and instead choose ‘Older Posts’.

Yes we’re working on it. Busy.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Islam’s Prophet Mohammed dies; James Earl Ray caught, wanted for killing civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.; Architect Frank Lloyd Wright born; The N.Y. Yankees retire Mickey Mantle’s number.

Right is its own defense.

Bertolt Brecht

Continue reading

Good.

Next Baquet, Dao, Rubenstein and Sulzberger.

New York Times editorial page editor resigns after uproar over Cotton op-ed
By Travis M. Andrews and Elahe Izadi, Washington Post
June 7, 2020

The New York Times on Sunday announced the resignation of its editorial page editor James Bennet, who had held the position since May 2016, and the reassignment of deputy editorial page editor James Dao to the newsroom.

The announcement comes three days after Bennet acknowledged that he had not read, before publication, a controversial op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton (R.-Ark.) headlined “Send in the Troops,” which called for military intervention in U.S. cities where protests over police brutality have ignited violence.

Dozens of Times staffers spoke out on Twitter on Wednesday evening to denounce their newspaper’s decision to run the essay shortly after it appeared online, calling it inflammatory and saying it contained assertions debunked as misinformation by the Times’s own reporting; several hundred later signed a letter objecting to it.

Bennet and the paper’s publisher initially defended the publication of the piece, arguing the benefits of an editorial page that includes diverse viewpoints. But by Thursday evening, a little more than 24 hours after it published, the Times abruptly said the op-ed was the result of a “rushed editorial process” and “did not meet our standards.” A lengthy editor’s note to the column was added.
…
Kathleen Kingsbury, a deputy editorial page editor, will assume the role of editorial page editor through the presidential election in November, the Times announced.

Bennet’s resignation is a stunning end to a tenure during which he expanded the editorial page roster and saw one of his writers win a Pulitzer. The younger brother of Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), he previously had a long career on the Times news staff, as White House correspondent and Jerusalem bureau chief. Bennet, 54, was considered one of the potential internal candidates in contention to succeed Executive Editor Dean Baquet, who plans to step down in a few years.

Bennet also oversaw the section through several high-profile controversies, including one that led to legal action by Sarah Palin, who accused the Times of linking her to the 2011 shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, and an op-ed by conservative columnist Bret Stephens, in which he seemed to compare a professor calling him a bedbug on Twitter to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

Bret Stephens endorses Race Based Eugenics (Genocide) and Charles Murray (also in favor of Genocide). Forget the petty “bedbug” crap.

The Times reported on Thursday that the Cotton op-ed was handled by an editor named Adam Rubenstein who shrugged off accuracy issues raised by a photo editor, and that Bennet had acknowledged in a meeting that he had not read it. Dao, Bennet’s deputy, told colleagues in internal messages reviewed by The Post that he had read the op-ed and that it had been fact-checked.

Oh by the way, Dao has been busted back to a Beat Reporter so expect his resignation too. Screw you. I hope you starve you suck up Racist Toady.

Dao, a well-liked personality in the newsroom and the highest-ranking Asian American at the paper, defended Rubenstein on Saturday night. “I oversaw the acceptance and review of the Cotton Op-Ed,” he wrote on Twitter, saying blame should be laid with the opinion section’s leaders and not with “an intrepid and highly competent junior staffer.”

You weasel. You sucked your way up the ladder (“intrepid and highly competent junior staffer? Deputy Editor!) signed off and now you’re trying to escape accountability. The fact that you’re Asian doesn’t make you any less Racist.

You’re a Coward and an Asshole.

Rubenstein should hit the bricks too. Not only is he Racist, he’s completely incompetent. Fact Checked?

Oh, you think I’m wrong about Sulzberger? Just because he’s Jewish doesn’t make him not a Racist Asshole.

In a phone interview Sunday, Sulzberger acknowledged that the turmoil over Cotton’s piece and Bennet’s subsequent resignation had been challenging for the entire Times organization — part of a tumultuous period that began before he was named publisher in January 2018 and has included the rise of misinformation, the attacks on the press by President Trump, and “the collapse of the news ecosystem.”

He gave Bennet warm praise for broadening the ranks of columnists at the Times, and of reinvigorating the staff-written editorials to lead crusades on issues such as privacy and economic inequality.
…
But he emphasized that the Times is not backing off from offering a wide range of viewpoints within its Opinion section — and that he won’t yield to those who don’t want to hear opposing views. “Independence is our most important strength and the thing I guard most zealously,” he said.

Is this a SJW scalp? Screw You!

These people are Assholes. Fire them all!

Quislings are not Allies.

Back Atcha Post

An update if you will.

Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms
By Ben Smith, The New York Times
June 7, 2020

Wesley Lowery woke up in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 14, 2014, his cheek sore from where a police officer had smashed it into a vending machine. He was also wondering how to get his shoelaces back into his boat shoes, after the police took them when tossing him in a holding cell the night before. Around 8:30 that morning, he dialed into CNN’s morning show, where a host passed on some advice from Joe Scarborough at MSNBC: “Next time a police officer tells you that you’ve got to move along because you’ve got riots outside, well, you probably should move along.”

Mr. Lowery responded furiously. “I would invite Joe Scarborough to come down to Ferguson and get out of 30 Rock where he’s sitting sipping his Starbucks smugly,” he said on CNN, describing “having tear gas shot at me, having rubber bullets shot at me, having mothers, daughters, crying, having a 19-year-old boy, crying as he had to run and pull his 21-year-old sister out of a cloud of tear gas.”

The outburst from a 24-year-old Washington Post reporter provoked eye rolls in Washington. But Mr. Lowery would go on to make his name in Ferguson as an aggressive and high-profile star, shaping a raw new national perspective on racial injustice. Six years later, few in the news business doubt Mr. Lowery’s premise: that American police are more brutal and dishonest than much of the media that came of age pre-Ferguson reported.

“I look at everything differently, and would never do that again,” Mr. Scarborough told me of his 2014 exchange with Mr. Lowery. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

Historical moments don’t have neat beginnings and endings, but the new way of covering civil rights protests, like the Black Lives Matter movement itself, coalesced on the streets of Ferguson. Seeing the brutality of a white power structure toward its poor black citizens up close, and at its rawest, helped shape the way a generation of reporters, most of them black, looked at their jobs when they returned to their newsrooms.

And by 2014, they had in Twitter a powerful outlet. The platform offered a counterweight to their newsrooms, which over the years had sought to hire black reporters on the unspoken condition that they bite their tongues about racism.

Now, as America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began in August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.

“Objective” Journalism is why politics have been so corrupt for so long. You’re an Asshole Ben. Sometimes reality is Manichean.

The conflict exploded in recent days into public protests at The New York Times, ending in the resignation of its top Opinion editor on Sunday; The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose executive editor resigned on Saturday over the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” and the ensuing anger from his staff; and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And it has been the subject of quiet agony at The Washington Post, which Mr. Lowery left earlier this year, months after the executive editor, Martin Baron, threatened to fire him for expressing his views on Twitter about race, journalism and other subjects.

Mr. Lowery’s view that news organizations’ “core value needs to be the truth, not the perception of objectivity,” as he told me, has been winning in a series of battles, many around how to cover race. Heated Twitter criticism helped to retire euphemisms like “racially charged.” The big outlets have gradually, awkwardly, given ground, using “racist” and “lie” more freely, especially when describing Mr. Trump’s behavior. The Times vowed to remake its Opinion section after Senator Tom Cotton’s Op-Ed article calling for the use of troops in American cities infuriated the newsroom last week.

Actually there’s a part in here that describes credulous and naive Reporters going to first discover Racism and Right Wing hostility to factual reporting in Ferguson which is complete bullshit because it’s been going on for at least a Century you ignorant moron.

Some of the lessons learned in Ferguson — about race and the particular experience of black reporters, among others — carried over into the next challenging era: the arrival of Mr. Trump, whose bigoted language and tactics shattered norms. Black reporters were joined by other journalists in pushing, inside newsrooms and on Twitter, for more direct language — and less deference — in covering the president.

That pattern continued last week, as Times staff members began an extraordinary campaign to publicly denounce the Op-Ed article written by Senator Cotton. Members of an internal group called Black@NYT organized the effort in a new Slack channel and agreed on a carefully drafted response. They would say that Mr. Cotton’s column “endangered” black staff members, a choice of words intended to “focus on the work” and “avoid being construed as hyperpartisan,” one said. On Wednesday evening around 7:30, hours after the column was posted, Times employees began tweeting a screenshot of Mr. Cotton’s essay, most with some version of the sentence: “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.” The NewsGuild of New York later advised staff members that that formulation was legally protected speech because it focused on workplace safety. “It wasn’t just an opinion, it felt violent — it was a call to action that could hurt people,” one union activist said of Mr. Cotton’s column.

Times employees sent the publisher a letter, which a reporter shared with me, saying Mr. Cotton’s “message undermines the work we do, in the newsroom and in opinion, and is an affront to our standards for ethical and accurate reporting for the public’s interest.” A NewsGuild spokesman said more than 1,000 Times employees signed the letter, but that the names weren’t being made public or shared internally.

The protest worked: The paper veered into internal crisis, and the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, decided he could not continue with Mr. Bennet running the Opinion section, which had repeatedly stumbled in ways that infuriated the newsroom.

Mr. Bennet acknowledged that he had not read the Op-Ed before it was published, which people at all levels of the Times saw as a damning admission. He said in a virtual meeting with nearly 4,000 Times staff members on Friday that he had long believed that for “ideas and even dangerous ideas, that the right thing to do is expose them on our platform to public scrutiny and debate, and that’s the best way, that even dangerous ideas can be discarded.” But, he said, he was now asking himself, “Is that right?” (Mr. Bennet declined to discuss the situation further with me.)

At the same meeting, Times executives thanked staff members for their public outrage, and later that day published an editor’s note atop Mr. Cotton’s article, saying that it contained allegations that “have not been substantiated,” its tone was “needlessly harsh” and that it should not have been published.

And while those angered by Mr. Cotton’s piece dominated the Twitter and Slack conversations and won the day, some staff members disagreed in private and public with the decision.

“A strong paper and strong democracy does not shy from many voices. And this one had clear news value,” Michael Powell, a longtime reporter and sports columnist at The Times, wrote on Twitter. He also called the editor’s note an “embarrassing retreat from principle.”

I have read Michael Powell. He’s not all that as writer and he’s a stone cold Racist. Why are you paying him again? I could be twice as bad at half the cost.

The fights at The Times are particularly intense because Mr. Sulzberger is now considering candidates to replace the executive editor, Dean Baquet, in 2022, the year he turns 66. Competing candidates represent different visions for the paper, and Mr. Bennet had embodied a particular kind of ecumenical establishment politics. But the Cotton debacle had clearly endangered Mr. Bennet’s future. When the highly regarded Sunday Business editor, Nick Summers, said in a Google Hangout meeting last Thursday that he wouldn’t work for Mr. Bennet, he drew agreement from colleagues in a chat window.

How long Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Baquet will put up with public pressure from their staff is not clear. In an earlier moment of social turmoil, A.M. Rosenthal, who led the newsroom from 1969 to 1986, kept a watchful eye and heavy hand on reporters he perceived to lean too far left. The words, “He kept the paper straight,” are inscribed on his gravestone.

Minutes after Mr. Sulzberger told the staff in an email that Mr. Bennet had resigned, he told me not to interpret the move as a philosophical shift. Mr. Rosenthal, he noted, had presided over a much less diverse newsroom, and one that focused on covering New York for New Yorkers.

“In this case, we messed up and hiding behind, ‘We want to keep the paper straight,’ to not acknowledge that, would have left us more exposed,” Mr. Sulzberger said.

And he told me in a separate interview on Friday: “We’re not retreating from the principles of independence and objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective about things like human rights and racism.”

Department of Redundant Redundancy- “Objective” Journalism is why politics have been so corrupt for so long.

Oh, and here is where we call the WaPo hypocrites (and they are actually but it doesn’t excuse your own hypocracy you sanctimonious jerk).

But the shift in mainstream American media — driven by a journalism that is more personal, and reporters more willing to speak what they see as the truth without worrying about alienating conservatives — now feels irreversible. It is driven in equal parts by politics, the culture and journalism’s business model, relying increasingly on passionate readers willing to pay for content rather than skittish advertisers.

That shift will come too late for Mr. Lowery’s career at The Washington Post. After Ferguson, he proposed and was a lead reporter on a project to build the first national database of police shootings and draw lessons from the results. It won The Post a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He seemed to insiders and outsiders the prototype of the precocious, nakedly ambitious, somewhat arrogant and very talented (though usually white and male) reporter who has risen quickly at American newspapers.

But Mr. Baron has been more sensitive than other newsroom leaders to reporters who push the limits on Twitter and on television, as Max Tani reported in the Daily Beast earlier this year. (At The New York Times, social media policy is usually enforced by a passive-aggressive email from an editor and rare follow-up.) Mr. Lowery said that when he hit back at a Republican official who criticized his Ferguson coverage on Twitter, he drew a lecture from Mr. Baron.

By 2019, the executive editor had gathered examples of what he saw as misconduct, from Mr. Lowery’s tweet mocking attendees at a Washington book party as “decadent aristocrats” to one tweet criticizing a New York Times report on the Tea Party.

And after a tense meeting last September, Mr. Baron handed Mr. Lowery a memo written in the wooden, and condescending, language of human resources:

Mr. Lowery was “failing to perform your job duties by engaging in conduct on social media that violates The Washington Post’s policy and damages our journalistic integrity,” the memo says.

“We need to see immediate cessation of improper use of social media, outlined above. Failure to address this issue will result in increased disciplinary action, up to and including the termination of your employment.”

Mr. Lowery responded with his own memo, defending himself point-by-point, pointing to specific errors, and arguing that in one case he was joining the “debate about a topic I cover directly — race and racism in America.”

“Generations of black journalists, including here at The Washington Post, have served as the conscience not only of their publications but of our entire industry,” Mr. Lowery said in the memo to Mr. Baron, which I also obtained. “Often those journalists have done so by leveling public criticism of both their competitors and their own employers. News organizations often respond to such internal and external pressure.”

Washington Post employees said the confrontation between America’s most famous newspaper editor — Mr. Baron is portrayed heroically by Liev Schreiber in the movie “Spotlight” — and his protégé was followed by a flurry of efforts by the Post’s national editor, Steven Ginsberg, and others to mediate the conflict. Mr. Baron declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the episode or its broader themes. “As editor, it would be inappropriate for him to speak about an individual employee,” the spokeswoman, Kris Coratti, said.

But six months later Mr. Lowery left The Post, for a “60 Minutes” project on the new streaming platform Quibi. It was, he said, a great opportunity. But “you have to live outside the realm of reality to think the executive editor of The Washington Post dressing me down in his office and inviting me to seek employment elsewhere didn’t contribute to me seeking employment elsewhere.”

He still has Twitter, though. On Wednesday, he tweeted that he’d canceled his subscription to The Times and demanded that Mr. Bennet resign. The next day, he broke some big news: George Floyd’s family and the Rev. Al Sharpton would lead a national march on Washington to mark the anniversary of the 1963 civil rights march.

“American view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed experiment,” he tweeted of the Times debacle. “We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of moral clarity.”

That argument is gathering momentum in key American newsrooms. At The Times, staff members are pressing for changes beyond the Opinion section. At The Post, a committee reporting to Mr. Ginsberg recently delivered a review of staff members’ attitudes toward social media policy. And at The Post’s own tense town hall on Friday, Mr. Baron apologized for failing in a recent email to address “the particular and severe burden felt by black employees, many of whom were also covering the story” of the protests, according to notes from a participant in the meeting. The Post’s union then sent an email to the staff criticizing Mr. Baron’s response. “Most striking of all was that the four voices the company chose to elevate in this moment belonged exclusively to white people. There could be no starker example of The Post’s lack of diversity in management.”

Perhaps most tellingly, reporters I spoke to at The Post said they wished Mr. Lowery was still there, breaking news from Minneapolis for the paper.

“When an organization loses a journalist as talented and as fiercely committed to the truth as Wesley Lowery, its leaders need to ask themselves why,” said Felicia Sonmez, a national political reporter who clashed with Mr. Baron over a different tweet. “We need more reporters like him, not fewer.”

Meow.

So you’re the lesser of two evils rather than good. Doesn’t make you not evil. I don’t buy it from “Democrats” and I don’t buy it from you either, you Rectum Licking Toady.

I once wanted to work at the Times.

Now it’s all about the price.

I mean, sure he was a rabid Anti-Semite, an avowed Propogandist, and instrumental to the Nazi takeover in Germany (and his wife a Family Destroyer Psychopathic Murderer), but he was a man of culture, refinement, and learning.

Paul Joseph Goebbels … was a German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler’s closest and most devoted associates, and was known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism, which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.

Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a Doctor of Philology degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924, and worked with Gregor Strasser in their northern branch. He was appointed Gauleiter (district leader) for Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Germany. He was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes.

He never held elective office that I recall.

(Thomas Bryant) Cotton was accepted to Harvard after graduating from high school in 1995, and majored in government. At Harvard, Cotton was a member of the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, often dissenting from the liberal majority. In articles, Cotton addressed what he saw as “sacred cows” such as affirmative action. He graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude in 1998 after only three years of study, having written his senior thesis on The Federalist Papers.

After graduating from Harvard, Cotton was accepted into a master’s degree program at Claremont Graduate University. He left in 1999, saying that he found academic life “too sedentary”, and instead enrolled at Harvard Law School. Cotton graduated from Harvard Law School with a J.D. degree in 2002.

Aw, shucks. Jes’ a good ol’ country boy.

Actually, I blame the Times and James Bennet. Everyone except Shulzberger should resign in disgrace and he should sell.

Bunch of Racist Asshole Nazi-enabling Idiots.

Well, it’s not Association Croquet where you get an extra stroke for striking another Player’s Ball and is a race to the Wicket, Golf Croquet is the fastest growing version of the sport in terms of popularity and is basically a first through the Hoop with a point for each.

To me that sounds a lot like Rounders, but whatever.

Here is 9 hours of the World Championships from New Zealand streamed 1/11/20.

You may have deduced from some of my past writing that I have sources who are pretty aware of the activities of the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. I have not talked to any of them in months and never about this, all my information comes from the Funny Papers.

I’m careful to use Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department because there are like about 15 or 20 competing Law Enforcement/Police Departments operating there all the time of which the largest in most circumstances is the United States Parks Police- just call me Ranger. It’s like the old days in NYC when you had Housing Cops and Subway Cops and I don’t know, about half a dozen others.

Anyway most of them are under the direct control of some Cabinet Official or other to use as their private Army and don’t answer at all to D.C. City Government.

This was a problem for me because I like my sources and early reports of the Police Riot in D.C. indicated it was a generalized thing. This is technically possible because D.C.’s Home Rule Law specifically allows for Federalization of the Police Department, but it hasn’t happened yet. MPD (well, they also call it Metro) hasn’t participated in the violence at all.

Phew.

Trump administration considered taking control of D.C. police force to quell protests
By Peter Hermann, Fenit Nirappil, and Josh Dawsey , Washington Post
June 2, 2020

The Trump administration on Monday floated the idea of taking control of the D.C. police force, ratcheting up tensions between the White House and the District over how much force should be used to quell protests that have sometimes turned volatile.

The unprecedented request sent District leaders scrambling to head off what they regarded as tantamount to a government overthrow, and to the legal books to come up with a way to push back.

In the end, the federal government did not follow through but did invoke its broad powers over the District to send the National Guard onto the streets, along with military helicopters that flew over the city and menaced demonstrators, which the police chief said he “did not find helpful.”

Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s administration on Tuesday confirmed the overture from the Trump administration, as the city entered a fifth day of demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The District of Columbia is a federal enclave governed by a mayor and city council, but the federal law granting self-governance allows the president to take control of local police officers in certain emergency situations.

Bowser (D), when asked generally about the provision granting the federal government such authority, said she would regard its use as “an affront to our limited home rule and to the safety of the District of Columbia.”

“I think you heard the president yesterday, that he wanted a show of force in D.C. . . . We all heard the ominous warning,” the mayor said in an apparent reference to President Trump’s statements about sending a federal force into the District and telling local leaders they should “dominate” unruly protests.

A takeover of one of the largest and most high-profile police agencies in the nation would have been yet another blow to a city fighting for statehood, forcing it to surrender control of all or part of a 4,000-member armed force to federal officials who do not answer to District residents and whose policies and practices differ from those of local leaders.

Bowser has repeatedly said she welcomes peaceful demonstrations and shares outrage over Floyd’s death. The mayor also this week expressed concern about outside police forces that are not accountable to her operating in the District.

Trump had signaled that he was prepared to take some kind of military action in cities roiled by protests over Floyd’s death. Although many of the demonstrations in Washington were peaceful, there were some instances of looting, property destruction, and rock and bricks thrown at police, who have made more than 300 arrests over three days.

Trump had sharply criticized the response by individual cities and states, accusing some governors of being “weak” and telling them they should “dominate” unruly protests.

D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham, a nearly 30-year veteran of the force, declined to say what he would have done had he been forced to answer to Trump.

“We are living in unprecedented times,” the chief said. “I work for the mayor of the District of Columbia. . . . I feel comfortable that I’m doing the best job I can possibly do to protect this city.”

D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) called the White House proposal “nothing short of despicable” and said that had the president followed through, “I would certainly hope that the D.C. police officers would object and stand down.”
…
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said federalizing the D.C. force would “make things worse” on the streets. “My understanding is the crowd is larger tonight than it was last night, and that’s all about Donald Trump,” he said. “He’s provoking the protesters. He’s provoking America.”

Officials said staff at the White House and at the Wilson Building, which is the District’s city hall, began discussing a possible takeover before federal agencies, including the U.S. Park Police and the National Guard, forcefully cleared Lafayette Square on Monday evening.

The move, which played out before the president walked to a nearby historic church, was quickly criticized by Bowser.
…
Bowser, at a Tuesday news conference, did not directly address specifics of what she described as a “flurry of conversations” with officials in the White House and Justice Department over Trump’s desire to deploy the National Guard, military troops and federal riot police to the District.

She said she “absolutely” pushed back against those proposals.

“We don’t want armed military, we don’t want any of those things on D.C. streets,” the mayor said.

The White House did not dispute the mayor’s account.

It also has an explainer about that “Home Rule” thing I mentioned.

Because of the city’s unique status as a federal district, the D.C. National Guard is appointed by the president and can be deployed without the consent of D.C. officials. In states, that power rests with the governor.

The 1973 Home Rule Act, which granted the District limited autonomous authority, contains provisions for the “emergency control of police” via a federal takeover of the D.C. police.

To invoke that act, the president would have to determine that “special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for federal purposes.” The takeover may last up to 48 hours and may be extended with approval of the members of Congress that oversee District affairs, the act states.

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has researched the District’s home rule provisions, criticized the language as overly broad and said it gives the federal government wide latitude in defining an “emergency.”

So, like who are all these Stormtroopers in Riot Gear?

The Story Behind Bill Barr’s Unmarked Federal Agents
By GARRETT M. GRAFF, Politico
06/05/2020

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily armed riot police around Washington in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or name badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for. “Tell us who you are, identify yourselves!” protesters demanded, as they stared down the helmeted, sunglass-wearing mostly white men outside the White House. Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

The images of such heavily armed, military-style men in America’s capital are disconcerting, in part, because absent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cosplaying as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied western Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Nearly all of these agencies are headquartered in and around the capital, making it easy for Attorney General William Barr to enlist them as part of his vast effort to “flood the zone” in D.C. this week with what amounts to a federal army of occupation, overseen from the FBI Washington area command post in Chinatown. Battalions of agents were mustered in the lobby of Customs and Border Protection’s D.C. headquarters—what in normal times is the path to a food court for federal workers. The Drug Enforcement Administration has been given special powers to enable it to surveil protesters. It is the heaviest show of force in the nation’s capital since the protests and riots of the Vietnam War.

As large as the public show of force on D.C.’s streets has turned out to be— Bloomberg reported Thursday that the force includes nearly 3,000 law enforcement— it still represents only a tiny sliver of the government’s armed agents and officers. The government counts up its law enforcement personnel only every eight years, and all told, at last count in 2016, the federal government employed over 132,000 civilian law enforcement officers— only about half of which come from the major “brand name” agencies like the FBI, ATF, Secret Service, DEA and CBP. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, which serves as the general academy for federal agencies who don’t have their own specialized training facilities, lists around 80 different agencies whose trainees pass through its doors in Georgia, from the IRS’ criminal investigators and the Transportation Security Administration’s air marshals to the Offices of the Inspector General for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Railroad Retirement Board. Don’t forget the armed federal officers at the Environmental Protection Agency or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Law Enforcement, whose 150 agents investigate conservation crime like the Tunas Convention Act of 1975 (16 USC § 971-971k) and the Northern Pacific Halibut Act of 1982 (16 USC § 773-773k).

Let’s not forget those guys from the NOAA. They’re uniformed members of the Armed Forces so there are probably some Posse Comitatus issues.

In and around D.C., there are more than a score of agency-specific federal police forces, particularly downtown where protests have played out over the past week, nearly every block brings you in contact with a different police force. A morning run around the National Mall and Capitol Hill might see you cross through the jurisdictions of the federal U.S. Capitol Police, the Park Police, the National Gallery of Art police, the Smithsonian Office of Protective Services, the Postal police, Amtrak police, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing police, the Supreme Court police, the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service, the Government Publishing Office police, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service. (Only recently did the Library of Congress police merge with the Capitol Police across the street into one unit.) Run a bit farther and you might encounter the FBI Police or the U.S. Mint police. And that’s not even counting the multistate Metro Transit police and the local D.C. Metropolitan Police.

The public has little understanding or appreciation for the size of some of these agencies, each of which has its own protocols, training, hiring guidelines and responsibilities. On the lighter side, few tourists know, for instance, that the National Gallery of Art—home to some of the world’s most famous artwork—has a shooting range for its police tucked away above its soaring central rotunda. On the darker side, the roughly 20,000 federal prison guards known formally as the Bureau of Prisons—whose riot units make up a sizable chunk of the officers imported to D.C. and who represent the single largest component of federal officers in the Justice Department—are concerning to see on the streets in part because they’re largely untrained in civilian law enforcement; they normally operate in a controlled environment behind bars with sharply limited civil liberties and use-of-force policies that would never fly in a civilian environment.

There are more gun-carrying agents employed across the federal government by inspectors general—the quasi-independent watchdogs responsible for rooting out fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars—than there are ATF agents nationwide; the roughly 4,000 inspector general agents nationwide, in fact, is roughly equivalent to the entire size of the DEA. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ police department, who guard the nation’s veteran hospitals, facilities and cemeteries, is larger than the entire U.S. Marshals Service.

Beyond those 132,000 federal civilian law enforcement, the U.S. has tens of thousands of military law enforcement officers, including military police units and investigators like the 2,000 agents of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the 1,200 agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service or the 900 agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division.
…
More broadly, though, many federal agencies exist with little sustained oversight and continue to struggle with training, recruiting and use of force incidents. The Department of the Interior’s Park Police, one of the agencies that has served as the front ranks of the riot security in Lafayette Park, has long been one of the capital region’s most troubled law enforcement entities, with complaints and questions about its use of force and even a five-year-long lawsuit over the firing of its police chief after she complained about inadequate staffing. (This week, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who thanks to the District’s odd nonstate status finds herself in the odd position of not controlling the police forces patrolling her own city, blasted the U.S. Park Police and officers from the Secret Service—normally tasked with guarding the White House and foreign embassies in D.C.— for clearing Lafayette Park Monday night to allow Trump to walk across the street for a photo op at St. John’s church.) The Federal Protective Service, which oversees security at 9,000 federal buildings across the country, has been reorganized and reshuffled numerous times since 9/11, rarely spending more than a few years in the same box on DHS org charts. And after a hiring surge caused it to lower recruiting standards, CBP has struggled with a decade of rampant crime and corruption in its own ranks— so much so that for most of the past decade, a CBP officer or agent was arrested on average every single day— and its use of force has been widely criticized, even by professional policing organizations. (For a period of time during the Obama administration, the FBI actually declared CBP’s corruption was the nation’s biggest threat at the border.)

The Bureau of Prisons has been dogged for years with questions about its management, training and tactics. Amid the protests in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, a federal inmate also with the last name Floyd (no relation) died this week in an encounter with guards in New York City after being pepper-sprayed in his cell.

Similarly, watchdogs have complained for years about the odd status of the U.S. Marshals Service, a federal agency with roots in the frontier and Wild West that today is in charge of protecting courts and judges, securing federal prisoners and hunting fugitives. The national service is still led across the country by 94 local politically appointed marshals whose posts are handed out as favors, not because of their law enforcement acumen. (The Boston Globe once famously surveilled for 10 days the U.S. marshal in Massachusetts, appointed after a stint on the security detail of the state’s governor, and found he worked an average of only four hours a day.)

Remember what I said about Cabinet Officers having their own Private Armies?

Under the Trump administration, Cabinet officials have come under scrutiny for using the government’s law enforcement agents as a sort of Praetorian Guard: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned amid scandals that included his unprecedented 20-agent round-the-clock security detail, who picked up his dry cleaning and moisturizing lotion; Education Secretary Betsy Devos is protected by a detail of U.S. marshals at a cost of roughly $500,000 a month, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is under investigation after a whistleblower complained he was using his Diplomatic Security Service agents to pick up Chinese food or look after his dog. Even obscure Cabinet secretaries who could pass all-but unnoticed on any street in the country now warrant security: Want to be the special-agent-in-charge of guarding the Agriculture secretary? The Executive Protective Operations Division of the USDA’s Office of Safety, Security and Protection is hiring right now!

Concerningly, under the Trump administration, many of these agencies have been rudderless— overseen by rotating series of acting officials. More than half of all federal civilian law enforcement right now is being led by temporary acting officials, everything from ICE and CBP to DEA. (That calculation doesn’t even count the thousands of special agents in inspectors general offices that have recently seen an administrationwide purge of the government’s watchdogs.) The Bureau of Prisons was being overseen by an acting director last summer when Jeffrey Epstein managed to commit suicide while supposedly under strict monitoring. The DEA, with its special temporary powers for the protests, is currently led by an acting administrator who has been on the job for just days.

Such leadership voids are not solely a recent problem of the Trump administration: Thanks to pressure from the National Rifle Association on Republican lawmakers about the agency’s firearms investigations, the ATF has had a Senate-confirmed director for a total of only two years since 2003. Last month, the Trump administration withdrew its most recent nominee to be ATF director, Chuck Canterbury, a former police union leader who had been deemed by Republican senators as too liberal on guns. (Yes, you read that right: The former head of the Fraternal Order of Police was considered too liberal for the GOP.)

The proliferation of federal officers across government— and the proliferation of watchdogs watching those government agencies— means that you might one day be woken up by a SWAT team-style raid by the Department of Education or the EPA. And the number keeps growing: Congress was surprised when the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction—known as SIGAR—began procuring its own ammunition, flashing lights and body armor for its special agents. Just like its laws, there are too many federal agents for the government to keep track of.

The bulk of the Brown Shirted Fascists who Roited this week in D.C. were National Guardsmen, you know, just like Kent State. Virgina, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina refused to Federalize so they got them from Georgia and Texas instead. D.C. has it’s own National Guard Units but they’ve never been under District control and are under investigation for abusing their Helicopters to threaten and harrass peaceful protesters, especially the Red Cross marked Evac Chopper (but then again we float Howitzers over MSF Hospitals for hours and shell them to pieces).

They also flew in Units of the 82nd Airborne and there was somewhat of a scandal about packing Bayonets, but they’re standard issue and your pack is inspected before you get on the plane. You might not want to get on the plane so this would be a good excuse but it’s not like they just send you back to the Barracks as if you had forgotten your toothbrush. If you’re lucky a month or two scrubbing the Latrine with it until everything shines like a mirror.

Or you could get a year or two in the Stockade.

The good news is they’ll be sending most of them home, so I feel a little less like we’re going to have a coup d’etat in the next 20 minutes but I am not much relived.

Well, except about my sources. I’m glad they were miles away from this.

Pentagon disarms guardsmen in Washington, D.C., in signal of de-escalation
By Paul Sonne, Fenit Nirappil, and Josh Dawsey, Washington Post
June 5, 2020

The Pentagon has told the District of Columbia National Guard and guardsmen from other states who have arrived in the nation’s capital as backup not to use firearms or ammunition, a sign of de-escalation in the federal response to protests in the city after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, according to officials familiar with the decision.

The Defense Department, led by Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, appears to have made the decision without consulting the White House, where President Trump has ordered a militarized show of force on the streets of Washington since demonstrations in the city were punctured by an episode of looting Sunday. Trump specifically had encouraged the National Guard to be armed.

Initially, a small group of the guardsmen deployed in the city had been carrying guns while standing outside monuments, but the bulk of the forces, such as those working with federal park police at Lafayette Square in front of the White House, didn’t carry firearms out of caution. Now, all of the roughly 5,000 guardsmen who have been deployed or are deploying to Washington have been told not to use weaponry or ammunition, according to four officials familiar with the order.

“The whole purpose behind that was a purposeful show of de-escalation,” said one U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an order that hasn’t been made public yet. “We’re here, but we’re walking things down.”

The White House was not involved in the decision, a senior administration official said. Trump has encouraged the National Guard to be armed as a show of force.

So it probably pisses him off a bit.

Good.

Trump’s response has included not only deploying guardsmen, as the mayor requested, but also calling up guardsmen from other states, amassing active-duty forces at sites outside the capital for possible operations and bringing in other federal law enforcement officials from agencies such as the Bureau of Prisons and Customs and Border Protection to patrol the streets. Bowser has decried the fact that some of those federal agents have not been wearing identifying uniforms or badges.

The situation grew particularly tense after helicopters from the D.C. Guard began doing military maneuvers to disperse protesters in the streets — including what’s known as a rotor wash, when a helicopter flies low to the ground to kick up air as a show of force.

Trump’s insistence on a militarized response in the nation’s capital has led to strains with Esper. The defense secretary announced publicly Wednesday that he wasn’t in favor of using the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty troops, even as the president threatened to invoke it.

Esper also said he was sending home some of the 1,600 active-duty troops outside Washington but later stood down on that decision after meeting with Trump. On Thursday, the administration said some of those troops would indeed be leaving.

Trump has battled with Esper about the military this week, with the president seeing the strong force in Washington as a deterrent to unrest but the Pentagon worrying about the militarization of the response. In particular, Trump had a heated conversation with his defense secretary about the possible use of the 82nd Airborne, the unit whose members Esper had partly sent home, according to the senior administration official, who said the president was unlikely to dismiss the defense secretary despite the tension.

It wasn’t clear whether the Pentagon was responding to pressure from the D.C. municipal government in its decision to disarm guardsmen. Bowser has been calling publicly for the guardsmen to be disarmed but has also pushed for disarming them in private conversations with federal officials, according to an official familiar with the matter.

In a letter sent to Trump on Thursday, Bowser informed the president that she had ended the city’s state of emergency and requested that he withdraw all extraordinary federal agents and military assets from the nation’s capital, explaining that the city was equipped to handle “large demonstrations and First Amendment activities.”

“I continue to be concerned that unidentified federal personnel patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C. pose both safety and national security risks,” the mayor wrote. “The deployment of federal law enforcement personnel and equipment are inflaming demonstrators and adding to the grievances of those who, by and large, are peacefully protesting for change and for reforms to the racist and broken systems that are killing Black Americans.”

Bowser posted a copy of the letter on Twitter on Friday and wrote: “I request that @realDonaldTrump withdraw all extraordinary federal law enforcement and military presence from our city.”
…
D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) has opened an inquiry into whether the federal government had the legal authority to call National Guard troops from other states into the District. In particular, he had asked the White House, the Pentagon and the Justice Department in a letter Thursday whether out-of-state Guard units brought into the city would be armed.

The mayor has repeatedly said she did not request assistance from other states. But Trump has brought or is bringing about 3,900 guardsmen from Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah to the city, in addition to the roughly 1,200 already activated in the D.C. National Guard.

The addition makes the number of guardsmen Trump has called to the city roughly equivalent to the number of U.S. forces deployed to Iraq. The district has a population of about 700,000.

Military leaders at the Pentagon are aware of the risks of armed guardsmen stepping in to a role traditionally played by police in an American city. In 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard who were called in to help control Vietnam War protests at Kent State University opened fire on demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine others. The situation prompted outrage nationwide and precipitated a crisis for the American military and its standing with the public.

What did I tell you about Kent State?

Mayor Bowser has her revenge though-

Washington, DC paints a giant ‘Black Lives Matter’ message on the road to the White House
By AJ Willingham, CNN
Fri June 5, 2020

Washington, DC is painting a message in giant, yellow letters down a busy DC street ahead of a planned protest this weekend: BLACK LIVES MATTER.

The massive banner-like project spans two blocks of 16th Street, a central axis that leads southward straight to the White House. Each of the 16 bold yellow letters spans the width of the two-lane street, creating an unmistakable visual easily spotted by aerial cameras and virtually anyone within a few blocks.

City workers began painting “black lives matter” in yellow paint on Friday on 16th Street in Washington, D.C.

The painters were contacted by Mayor Muriel Bowser and began work early Friday morning, the mayor’s office told CNN. Bowser has officially deemed the section of 16th Street bearing the mural “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” complete with a new street sign.

You really should click through to see the pictures.

Oh, and she lit it up with Floodlights last night too.

Ok, first of all you better watch this (or download it) quick because the National Theatre is going to pull it on Thursday.

What is it? It’s Coriolenus by Bill Shakespeare staring Tom Hiddleston (Loki), Mark Gatniss (Mycroft Holmes), Hadley Fraser (Young Frankenstein), and Alfred Enoch (like everything Harry Potter). It was recorded live at Donmar Warehouse in 2014.

Coriolenus–

The play opens in Rome shortly after the expulsion of the Tarquin kings. There are riots in progress, after stores of grain were withheld from ordinary citizens. The rioters are particularly angry at Caius Marcius,a brilliant Roman general whom they blame for the loss of their grain. The rioters encounter a patrician named Menenius Agrippa, as well as Caius Marcius himself. Menenius tries to calm the rioters, while Marcius is openly contemptuous, and says that the plebeians were not worthy of the grain because of their lack of military service. Two of the tribunes of Rome, Brutus and Sicinius, privately denounce Marcius. He leaves Rome after news arrives that a Volscian army is in the field.

The commander of the Volscian army, Tullus Aufidius, has fought Marcius on several occasions and considers him a blood enemy. The Roman army is commanded by Cominius, with Marcius as his deputy. While Cominius takes his soldiers to meet Aufidius’ army, Marcius leads a rally against the Volscian city of Corioli. The siege of Corioli is initially unsuccessful, but Marcius is able to force open the gates of the city, and the Romans conquer it. Even though he is exhausted from the fighting, Marcius marches quickly to join Cominius and fight the other Volscian force. Marcius and Aufidius meet in single combat, which ends only when Aufidius’ own soldiers drag him away from the battle.

In recognition of his great courage, Cominius gives Caius Marcius the agnomen, or “official nickname”, of Coriolanus. When they return to Rome, Coriolanus’s mother Volumnia encourages her son to run for consul. Coriolanus is hesitant to do this, but he bows to his mother’s wishes. He effortlessly wins the support of the Roman Senate, and seems at first to have won over the plebeians as well. However, Brutus and Sicinius scheme to defeat Coriolanus and whip up another riot in opposition to his becoming consul. Faced with this opposition, Coriolanus flies into a rage and rails against the concept of popular rule. He compares allowing plebeians to have power over the patricians to allowing “crows to peck the eagles”. The two tribunes condemn Coriolanus as a traitor for his words, and order him to be banished. Coriolanus retorts that it is he who banishes Rome from his presence.

After being exiled from Rome, Coriolanus makes his way to the Volscian capital of Antium, and asks Aufidius’s help to wreak revenge upon Rome for banishing him. Moved by his plight and honoured to fight alongside the great general, Aufidius and his superiors embrace Coriolanus, and allow him to lead a new assault on Rome.

Rome, in its panic, tries desperately to persuade Coriolanus to halt his crusade for vengeance, but both Cominius and Menenius fail. Finally, Volumnia is sent to meet her son, along with Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia and their child, and the chaste gentlewoman Valeria. Volumnia succeeds in dissuading her son from destroying Rome, urging him instead to clear his name by reconciling the Volscians with the Romans and creating peace.

Coriolanus concludes a peace treaty between the Volscians and the Romans. When he returns to the Volscian capital, conspirators, organised by Aufidius, kill him for his betrayal.

Eh, he should have sacked the City.

Act IV, Scene V-

Let me have war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night: it’s spritely waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mull’d, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

The D-Day invasion of World War II; Israel invades Lebanon to drive out Yasser Arafat; Remains of fugitive Nazi doctor Josef Mengele exhumed in Brazil; First drive-in theater opens in Camden, N.J.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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