Danger-prone outside agitators provoke intended unrest in Portland, leading multiple metropolitan mayors to implore Congress for relief.

AP item carried by SeattlePI: "US attorney: Feds will stay in Portland until attacks end." And the Homeland Security deployed outside agitator thugs show no sign of lessening their attacks, so it will last until election day, and more. The money quote:

Local and state officials said the federal officers are unwelcome.

Meanwhile, the mayors of Portland and five other major U.S. cities appealed Monday to Congress to make it illegal for the federal government to deploy militarized agents to cities that don't want them.

Yes. Extend the Posse Comitatus restraint against use of the the federal military forces within our borders to include paramilitary undisciplined and hostile Homeland Security forces [aka Trump's private army of deployed thugs]. This request to Congress being necessitated by the derailed intentional actions of a super-divisive and inflammatory  DC administration.

Barr-Trump policy at its worse. Pissing all around and on sane norms of justice and treasured federal power limitations we enjoy per Constitutional Bill of Rights rule of law.

Key mid-item paragraphs:

“This administration's egregious use of federal force on cities over the objections of local authorities should never happen,” the mayors of Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Kansas City, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Washington wrote to leaders of the U.S. House and Senate.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty late called for a meeting with Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf to discuss a cease-fire and removal of heightened federal forces from Portland.

The city has had nightly protests for two months since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. President Donald Trump said he sent federal agents to Portland to halt the unrest, but state and local officials said they are making the situation worse.

Trump’s deployment of the federal officers over the July 4 weekend stoked the Black Lives Matter movement. The number of nightly protesters had dwindled to perhaps less than 100 right before the deployment, and now has swelled to the thousands.

[italics added] That's right. A situation being aptly handled locally was intentionally inflamed ten-fold by hoodlums from Homeland Security doing exactly what the Trump-Barr pair wanted, raising hell and distressing people. Especially distressed are local officials who want the hoodlums out, yesterday not being soon enough.

Vote the BASTARD out. He is a clear and present danger. Multiplying protests ten-fold is likely more than the reelection-challenged schmuck wanted, and he must be proud of his yet again failure. The man of a special talent - the unequaled ability to bankrupt a casino. That together with Trump's henchman Barr, the sick dissembling power-inventing private prep school's headmaster's son, with an authoritarian anti-protest ax to grind.

When a host of city mayors are compelled to have no option but to petition Congress to curb executive branch excessive use of force against citizens, things have reached a point where there is no sane option to voting Biden in, despite his historic level of conservative baggage and all. 

BOTTOM LINE: Gestapo tactics in the streets of Portland are anti-American. There is no other, better truth beyond that.

 

 

Digby writes. Salon publishes.

The link is here, and readers are strongly urged to simply go there and take the time to read it all AND follow the well-thought-out links. For those in a hurry, wanting only a taste, click this screen capture and read.

Having visited Portland only once for a half-day, getting a sense of the city's mood, things could not have been this bad or worse before Trump pulled another shallow stunt by delibrertely inserting federal disruption and havoc agents, thinking it might marginally aid his reelection.

It won't. This is what Trump's Portland stunt did.

It surpasses the Trump-Barr clearing of Lafayette Park for the Trump bible-waving stunt, which was obscene enough (as well as totally unnecessary), but his bible-waving BS was neither as destructive to citizens nor as costly in federal taxpayer dollars as the Rape of Portland, brought there by Trump's invading federal army. By an invading army never once wanted nor requested by local government officials familiar with the pre-invasion situation and how to handle it. It was the Trump equivalent of taking a blow torch to his iPhone because he thought it was too slow. Moreover, it was a conscious decision to be far more brutal than the way the Ammon Bundy grazing standoff was handled.

Courthouse News.

Tolerance and far less brutality was used against the Bundy insurrectionist crowd.

Different times. Different head of state. Sober and sane minds in 2014. Put differently, a reality TV mentality stoked with meanness really sucks. Especially a sick and perverted one. UPDATE: Make that sick and perverted pair, Bill Barr is the AG Trump wanted Sessions to be, but Sessions had too much honor to be a Bill Barr. Barr is as happy as a bear in a honey tree. As he was with the Bush family.

The packaging and sale of Val Demings. Done with suitable propagandistic panache, by your favorite Biden-Comcast crony network.

Making her look like other than a career cop, with brutality claims against the department she led. MSNBC is its own worse enemy. (Without justification nor with any Rupert Murdoch history to explain it's awfulness.)

The Trump Death Cult - Nobody can make me wear a silly mask.

A DWT mid-item quote

But the Americans who are now driving the pandemic are not sudden skeptics about masks or distancing or expert opinion because of street protests. Some of them reject expertise because of the previous “failures” of experts. This is always one of the reflexive explanations for the refusal to listen to the educated and experienced. Expert failures are real and happen every day, but the people who sullenly refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic are not doing so because the United States failed to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or because the housing market crashed in 2008.

Rather, they are doing so because they see endangering others as empowerment, a way of telling people whom they believe look down on them that no one, no matter how smart or accomplished, can tell them what to do. For these people, our national motto is not “In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus Unum,” but rather: “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”

[...]

On the same day that America hit a grisly new record, President Trump went on television to explain both that he must cancel his cherished plans for a political convention while insisting that children be sent back to school in the coming weeks. Millions of Americans nodded along with him, secure in the knowledge that scientists are quacks and that no one understands viruses like Donald Trump. They will likely still believe that even as they lie in a hospital bed and are given last rites with a ventilator down their throats.

If only the rest of us did not have to risk being in the bed next to them.

[...] The ending paragraph of the post links over to a NYT op-ed, "American Catastrophe Through German Eyes - Trump says he wants to protect law-abiding citizens. In 1933, Hitler issued his ‘Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State.’ By Roger Cohen - Opinion Columnist, July 24, 2020."

That item, itself, deserves an extended quote:

Michael Steinberg, a professor of history at Brown University and the former president of the American Academy in Berlin, wrote to me this week:

“The American catastrophe seems to get worse every day, but the events in Portland have particularly alarmed me as a kind of strategic experiment for fascism. The playbook from the German fall of democracy in 1933 seems well in place, including rogue military factions, the destabilization of cities, etc.”

Steinberg continued, “The basic comparison involves racism as a political strategy: a racist imaginary of a pure homeland, with cities demonized as places of decadence.”

Trump provokes outrage in a cascade designed to blunt alarm. He deadens reactions through volume and repetition. But something about the recent use of unmarked cars and camouflage-clad federal agents without clear identifying insignia detaining protesters shattered any inclination to shrug.

From the deployment of those federal units in Portland, Oregon’s largest city, where protesters have been demanding racial justice and police accountability, it’s not a huge leap to the use of paramilitaries (like the German Freikorps in the 1920s) to buttress a “Law and Order” campaign. The Freikorps battled communists. Today, Trump claims to battle “anarchists,” “terrorists” and violent leftists. It’s the leitmotif of his quest for a second term.

Perhaps the years I spent covering Argentina in the 1980s, in the aftermath of the military junta, made me particularly sensitive to the use of unmarked cars — in the Argentine case, Ford Falcons — to grab left-wing political opponents off the street. They were “disappeared,” a word whose lingering psychological devastation I measured in countless tear-filled rooms.

Most of us who are absolutely appalled by Trump's Portland Solution know history. Those "Nobody can make me wear a silly mask" ego-challenged people might likely overlap largely with those having the sentiment about Portland, "He's finally telling those niggers and nigger lovers what America is about and what they cannot get away with, with him as our President." Herr Drumpf in action.

"Basket of deplorables" was a term that, historically, failed to get recent positive traction. Yet virulent racists and authoritarian oriented people do inhabit the U.S. of A. along with you and me, and each has an equal vote to yours and mine.

Melancholia over ones such as Trump (or more sinister) has been explored:

I will tell you why. So shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king and queen moult no feather. I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air—look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Trump, his virus deceits and his will to bully and race-bait, can cause disdain, or if more inclined to emotion, a loss of mirth.  My brother-in-law once got a cookie fortune, "Life is a tragedy to those who feel. A comedy to those who think."

One of the cleanest, tightest bipartisan articles on the Biden - Ukraine activity during the Obama administration, authored by two governmental ethics experts.

It was a convincing explanation for me, so readers may find it helpful too. It was published a few months ago, but it is likely many readers may be unaware of it, as I was, until recently. Richard Painter was an ethics lawyer in the Bush-2 administration and Norman Eisen served a similar function during Obama years; so, bipartisan as one might want.

The Times Tribune: "Senate GOP investigates wrong family’s ties,"   By Richard Painter and Norman Eisen - Mar 15, 2020, is short and convincing, stating in part:

As bipartisan experts on government ethics, we are appalled to see that President Donald Trump and his GOP Senate enablers are reviving the canard that there are conflict issues that merit investigation relating to the Bidens and Ukraine.

As with his fabricated allegations against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump's election-year "alternative facts" misinformation machine is in high gear. This time it's Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, and the majority on his Homeland Security Committee that threaten a subpoena.

In fact, it is the Trump family that has ethics issues that should be investigated — not the Bidens.

Trump's sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are traveling the world at substantial cost to taxpayers while managing the president's businesses — enterprises that have racked up a stunning 3,000-plus conflicts of interest for Trump. That includes unconstitutional emoluments from the Chinese, Saudi, Kuwaiti, Malaysian, Philippine and many other governments. The president's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who as government officials are bound by federal ethics laws, have come in for criticism on the conflicts front.

Kushner is divesting his holding in Cadre, a real estate venture that profited handsomely from opportunity zones, a feature of the 2017 tax law that he and his wife worked on. Kushner and Ivanka Trump's very presence in the White House is illegal: Federal anti-nepotism law likely forbade their appointments.

Hunter Biden did not have any conflict of interest in his position with Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm, in 2014, when Joe Biden was in government. Unlike Ivanka Trump and her husband, Hunter Biden was not a government employee during the Obama administration. As for Joe Biden, there is no requirement that officials recuse from foreign policy matters because those matters might have a financial impact on a business that has hired the official's grown child.

Adult children are allowed to live separate lives under the ethics rules. Their independent career decisions are not imputed to their parent who works in the government. But for the entanglement of the Trump children with their father's ethics issues (if the president had fully divested his conflicted businesses and avoided nepotism), we would have no cavil with them.

As White House ethics lawyers in the Obama and George W. Bush White Houses, we would not have required the vice president to recuse from matters involving Ukraine simply because his son was on the board of a Ukrainian company. [...]

 In a key paragraph the authors examine circumstances:

President Barack Obama asked Joe Biden to coordinate important aspects of U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine. He never got involved in any particular matter involving Burisma. All of the vice president's actions were fully consistent with the policy of the State Department, Britain and the European Union, our allies on Ukraine matters.

There is more to the item, quoting already is extensive, and readers can decide how to regard it. Consider, Ginni Thomas has a business life apart from her spouse being on the Supreme Court, and Elaine Chao is Trump's Labor Secretary and served in previous GOP presidential executive capacities, while her husband is in the Senate. Spousal closeness and parent-child closeness exist, but that does not mean a disqualifying conflict of interest exists. Saudi royals spend lavishly in Trump's Washington Hotel, so consider, are they buying influence by doing so?

A link. It is easy to make allegations; consider this web search. Or this web search, where Kushner and his spouse, Trump's daughter, hold government posts in the Trump administration.  Such stuff can enter into a voter's mind in making a lesser evil decision in November. The opinion here is already set. Trump has to go. Biden is no great thing, but is the lesser evil. Trump is derailed.

Sirota posted, and how he wrote it yields a "how I read it" as: If you trust Biden to not be as bad as Trump you likely are right, but if you trust him for anything more you're whistling past the graveyard.

Link.

But Dan, Heller's Milo in Catch 22 had your answer, "Everybody owns a share."

Which is no answer at all. Dan Burns' post: Whimpering, groveling servitude to the war pigs

Michael Cohen's First Amendment rights were violated when he was ordered back to prison on July 9 after probation authorities said he refused to sign a form banning him from publishing the book or communicating publicly in other manners, U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said during a telephone conference.

The text is from AP, carried by Strib, with this additional text:

Hellerstein ordered Michael Cohen released from prison to home confinement by 2 p.m. on Friday.

"How can I take any other inference than that it's retaliatory?" Hellerstein asked prosecutors, who insisted in court papers and again Thursday that Probation Department officers did not know about the book when they wrote a provision of home confinement that severely restricted Cohen's public communications.

"I've never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at terms of supervised release," the judge said. "Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this ... unless there was a retaliatory purpose?"

In ruling, Hellerstein said he made the "finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory." He added: "And it's retaliatory for his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish the book."

Cohen, 53, sued federal prison officials and Attorney General William Barr on Monday, saying he was ordered back to prison because he was writing a book: "Disloyal: The True Story of Michael Cohen, Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump."

The Bureau of Prisons issued a spirited defense of its intentions after the ruling Thursday, calling any assertion that the reimprisonment of Cohen "was a retaliatory action is patently false."

[...] The Bureau of Prisons also said it was not uncommon for it to place restrictions on inmates' contact with the media. Still, it said Cohen's refusal to agree to those conditions or his intent to publish a book played "no role whatsoever" in his return to prison.

Were you the judge, would you buy that claim, the book and its likely impact was not a big thing? Were you born yesterday? This side play seems to serve to boost public interest in this tell-all thing to come out pre-election, with the history that after Cohen caved to pressures and cut a deal Trump/Barr left his twisting in the wind. Flynn and Stone got to walk, Cohen got a "sign this" and would you suspect that the request was anything but a top-down pressure attempt? A dumb one at that, but top-down does not originate at a particularly stable genius locale.

UNHINGED: Fred Trump mean, Fred Trump greedy, Fred Trump misanthropic. Damaged goods. In the White House. But Barr has no such obvious cause or excuse for being facilitator numero uno. Or does he?

 Unhinged | Definition of Unhinged by Merriam-Webster
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unhinged
Unhinged definition is - highly disturbed, unstable, or distraught.

That said, enough about Trump. What's the background that makes Barr the brigand turd that he is? The question hinges upon his being trained in the law to where he should know better. A starting point. That link gives a short list of who he is. But why? Does he have a Fred Trump in his insecurity closet? Who is he?

Such a question is not easy to unwind. Expect UPDATING of this post from time to time. However, just as a teaser, a doth protest too much wonderment:

https://opusdei.org/en-us/article/statement-regarding-u-s-attorney-general-william-barr/ - stating, no shit, really:

Statement Regarding U.S. Attorney General William Barr

A clarification regarding William P. Barr and the Prelature of Opus Dei.

Press releases and statements11/27/2019

Our normal policy is not to identify members (or non-members) of the Prelature, but rather to leave it to each individual to make known this information. Nevertheless, because there have been recent news accounts referring to the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, as a member of Opus Dei, we would like to clarify that Mr. Barr is not a member of Opus Dei nor has he ever been one.

Normal policy, but hey, gotta say? Well, what ties does he have to the organization? Strangely, it seems that is all Opus Dei has to say about Bill Barr, inciting more curiosity than it answers. (They could have said the same, "... not any official membership ..." about Jeffrey Epstein, but restraint is the better part of valor since nobody's speculating that way, yet at least.)

What? Some things are better left unsaid? Come on. Be real.

Read a speech Barr gave to the Notre Dame law community (posted online by the Barr "Justice" Department) and read a quite gentle short critique.

You have to wonder, or you can just go along to get along.

NOTE: As stated above, if the motivation remains at Crabgrass, there may be more posting here about Barr. If so, it would most likely be via UPDATING to this post. So check back from time to time.

Closing for now, a websearch; and a 45 sec YouTube video of Barr just before Layfeyette Park was brutally cleared for Trump's stupendously offensive backfiring bible stunt. Barr checking things out, surveying the lay of the land, before a gross curtailment of citizens exercising civil rights. That video gives the impression Barr dislikes citizens exercising civil rights and will reach for any lame excuse - even one the video does not validate. Or he was doing as told. It is not easy to distinguish, and overlap - dislike and lame excuse making while being an obedient toady - is not to be ruled out.

_________UPDATE_________

Church and State published about Opus Dei, and DC power forces, item title: "Opus Dei’s Influence Is Felt in All of Washington’s Corridors of Power" By Betty Clermont | 22 January 2019. With that claim, it is of interest that no other individual is known at Crabgrass to have been expressly disavowed by that operation, as was the case with Barr.

Sins of the father shaping the son? Vanity Fair published its lengthy chatty [i.e., very wordy] thing about Barr's father Donald Barr as headmaster of a tony New York private school, Dalton, and how he during Vietnam war days may have shaped son Billy.

Late in the VF item, you can search the all-CAPS heading, 'On watching William Barr testify: “I thought, This man cares deeply about his place in history. Billy has a score to settle.'" This quoting:

The year before, [Dalton headmaster Donald] Barr had made it clear how livid he was about the Columbia riots. His son William had been a freshman there, and in a column for Vogue, the elder Barr decried the middle-class students who “go to demonstrations by taxi,” dismissing the protests of Columbia’s radical Students for a Democratic Society and their opposition to a quasi-segregated gym the university wanted to build in Harlem. Donald Barr expressed his rage in print, noting that he was frightened of the anarchy and the mob tactics of the New Left as well as their moves at Columbia to try to stop ROTC funding from going to national defense. “Parents,” he wrote in a McCall’s essay, “are directly financing the New Left revolution and the drug cop-out, and indirectly they are supporting the black militants.” At the height of the Black Power movement, Barr came out against “the black militants…who are tired of asking for a little share and are going to take a big share of Whitey’s good life and education.”

Barr’s opposition to the chaos wrought by the protesters was echoed by his son. “Our next-door neighbor in our building was the acting president of Columbia,” William Barr would later tell an acquaintance. “He tried to take a tough stand and came under a lot of pressure from the attackers. I felt: If the leaders had taken a stronger stance, up front, it would not have degenerated so much. That year, 1968, was formative for me.”

The draft lottery, announced in 1969, had traumatized families with sons in college—including the Barrs. “Billy’s mother told me how upset she was that he might be going to war,” Semel remembered. “It was a time of body bags and students moving to Canada,” Friedan said.

Freedman, the editor of the Daltonian in 1970, tangled with the headmaster over the political slant of the school paper. “We had called for a strike in support of the moratorium,” Freedman said. “I was called into Barr’s office and he began to read me my college recommendation—this was before I applied. ‘Danny is not such an exemplary student but he is a real leader,’ Barr read in a tone that was both condescending and menacing. I pushed back and said he could threaten me, but I wasn’t calling off the strike. Then I ran out of his office and found the social studies teacher. I cried in his arms. I was that upset.”

“I would be called in periodically by Headmaster Barr,” Edelman remembered. “I would be interrogated about any number of things. I was having to constantly remind him that students had constitutional rights. There was a constant monitoring of our student press and of outside activities that involved going to demonstrations or organizing for demonstrations. One time, at the end of a harangue, he said, ‘Well, Marc, I would rather have a little Lenin like you than some of these little Timothy Learys we have got here.’ That was his way of saying that I was pretty terrible but at least I didn’t seem to be a big druggie.”

In November, Friedan and his friends took off for the Vietnam War moratorium, sleeping on church floors. When they came back, Barr was uncharacteristically quiet. Their college applications were in the mail. Friedan and Slon had assumed that as A students with superior SATs, they would have their choice of schools in the Ivy League. Their parents had been under the same impression. But how naive could they have been? It was a moment in America when colleges, worried about campus unrest, carefully vetted applications for would-be agitators. What’s more, Betty Friedan was a vocal member of a group of Dalton parents who were trying to have Barr dismissed.

In April, Jonathan Friedan, who had applied to eight schools, was rejected from each and every one, including his safety choices. Slon, the valedictorian, was admitted only to Swarthmore and one of his safety schools. The Slons and the Friedans immediately suspected Barr had sabotaged the boys’ applications, flagging their sons as agitators who had incited their peers.

“I was in shock,” Friedan recalled. “And Barr immediately called me into his office. He read me a glowing recommendation letter. The first thing he said was, ‘It wasn’t me.’?” Had Barr felt remorse? Did he worry about his own liability—or the school’s—and therefore want to deflect possible legal action? “My mother [Betty Friedan] worried that it was her fault—that her big opinions and personality had frightened the colleges. It was a traumatic period. My parents were going through a divorce, and my father wanted to sue Dalton.”

One of Friedan’s extracurricular activities had involved organizing an antidrug program, affiliated with Columbia. That summer, the university agreed to admit him, and though he attended for two semesters, he dropped out, thrown off his axis by what had happened to him at Dalton. He spent what he called a few “wandering years” working as a carpenter and a commercial fisherman in the Pacific Northwest. “It was a blessing in a way,” he told me. “I was able to confront life without the scrim of all the privilege I had grown up with.”

Later, Friedan went back to Columbia, where he finished his engineering degree, but his mother was determined to find out what happened. “A Harvard trustee somehow was able to penetrate the admissions office—at least this is what my mother told me,” Friedan said. (Betty Friedan died in 2006.) And what he discovered was shocking. “There was a long letter Barr had written accusing me of being a rabble-rouser and a troublemaker. He said I was ‘a latent homosexual’ and ‘could be a danger to the school.’?”

Years later, while working on a biography of Betty Friedan, writer Judith Hennessee confronted Barr about his possible role in her son’s college rejections. At first he denied it. Then he admitted that, in fact, he had had some input that was “laudatory.” Jonathan Friedan, looking back at the exchange between Hennessee and Barr, felt that Barr was trying to suggest that “it was Betty who had made all the trouble, meddling in the admissions offices. But my mother? Calling eight admissions offices? Out of the question.” Stories about the alleged sabotage circulated within the Dalton community. But by then, many of the parents, board members, and alumni had had enough. The man who had brought such prestige and robust innovation to Dalton had become insular, autocratic, and tone-deaf to the competing needs of the stakeholders in the school. It took Dalton parent Richard Ravitch—a real estate titan who later became the head of the city’s transit authority—to devise a strategy to get Barr out.

Ravitch, the head of the trustees, polled the parents and teachers and discovered, he would tell me, “a pattern of behavior that was troubling. I came on to run the board after Barr had won the right to stay at the school by a single vote. Many on the board resigned over it. The teachers hated him. The parents disliked him.” Barr, at the time, was backed by at least one influential trustee, a sympathetic litigator who challenged the bylaws of the school, discovering a loophole that allowed him a seat on the board. The mandate of the PTA was taken away. There were legal maneuvers meant to call into question the very authority of the board. “This actually went to court,” Ravitch recalled. “The head of the PTA was in favor of Barr and they litigated: Did the PTA have the right to impeach the PTA president? The courts said yes, they did.”

“There were frequent screaming matches at PTA meetings,” Sarah Crichton said. “One night,” Semel recalled, “all of these well-mannered parents were stomping their feet and pounding the floor.”

Ravitch recounted the denouement. “I brought in the dean of the Harvard School of Education and the head of Teachers College to evaluate Barr. They came back and said that Barr was not the right headmaster for Dalton.” It was a humiliating end to Barr’s years at the school. “I fired him. It took years to get him out, but we did it.”

Barr, as part of an arrangement, announced his resignation; the Dalton yearbook, playing nice, had this to say: “The whole of Dalton owes a great debt to Donald Barr…. We are all greatly saddened by his leaving.” Barr found a new job running Hackley, a more conservative private school in Westchester County. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “Kids up here are…better-natured and less bitchy.” It was a relief, Barr insisted, to be liberated from the “ego display and radical chic of private-school kids in Manhattan.”

William Barr was very much aware of the Dalton scandal; his father’s concerted campaign to save his job was covered widely in the Times and elsewhere. One can only speculate how much this saga affected Bill Barr in later life—or helped solder his father-son fealty.

Soon after Donald Barr left Dalton, he surprised many who knew him by publishing Space Relations, an odd sci-fi novel which imagined the kingdom of Kossar, a hellscape where power, drugs, and boredom have turned the ruling caste into vicious sexual predators. The hero, John Craig—“a rising young Earth diplomat” who is captured and enslaved—eventually triumphs, restoring virginity and monogamy to the colonized.

William Barr recently confided to an associate that he has never read the book, even as he pointed out that it was part of his father’s personality to be a renegade, often using earthy phrases to provoke—such as “the sneeze of the genitals.”

Barr was also said to have noted that of all the lessons he learned from his father, the most overriding one was the fierce pride he took in being a contrarian. Barr would later tell one colleague, “My father once said to me that we have been used to being different and it doesn’t bother us at all. I have always been in situations where I had no problem being politically different. I don’t govern my life by polls or by what other people think about what I do.”

Indeed. This, then, is the same Bill Barr who once argued that President Johnson, not Congress, had the overriding authority to determine the military course of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Twenty years later, during the Iran-Contra crisis that rocked Ronald Reagan’s second term, Barr, then a White House policy adviser, voiced the view that administration members should be granted pardons for their roles in the ill-fated arms-for-hostages deal. As assistant attorney general and then A.G. under George H.W. Bush, Barr pushed back against a proposed independent probe of Bush insiders, earning the epithet “Coverup-General” Barr.

In June 2018, he wrote a voluminous memo, unsolicited, that made the case that as chief executive, Donald Trump—if he had not committed crimes—should not be investigated for obstructing justice. (President Bill Clinton’s impeachment had been warranted, in Barr’s estimation, because Clinton had violated the law.) Then, after Trump appointed Barr as attorney general, his stiff-arm summary of the Mueller Report was firm and categorical—and consistent with his past stances. He cast aside the nuanced findings of the special counsel and declared that even if the Russian government had tampered with the U.S. presidential election, the nation’s chief executive and his team had basically been cleared of any complicity or wrongdoing. And finally, Trump’s depiction of Barr and Rudy Giuliani as his “personal envoys” (as described in the whistle-blower’s account) appears to be the coup de grâce: the president characterizing his attorney general and personal lawyer as conduits for foreign governments assisting Trump against his political enemies.

For Barr’s schoolmate Garrick Beck, there is no question how much Alfred Briggs—Horace Mann’s high school history teacher—would have approved of Trump’s Justice Department, which has seen defections of career federal lawyers who have refused to serve at the whims of a truculent president who publicly defies the rule of law, spews racists tropes, and shatters judicial norms. It was Briggs, after all, who was known to say, “We need more Roy Cohns in the world.” One statement of Barr’s from the 1990s bears repeating here. After a stint as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general, Barr participated in the Miller Center’s oral history of the administration. At one point, he spoke eloquently about the president that he and his cohorts had served, someone they considered to be “a man of honor, a man of character, and a man they were actually proud to have as the president.” One can only wonder: Does he now feel the same about his tenure with Donald J. Trump?

Dan Freedman remembered an encounter he’d had 20 years after he’d graduated from high school: the day he met William Barr, who was then George H.W. Bush’s head of the White House Office of Legal Counsel. At the time, Freedman was reporting for Hearst newspapers. “Barr,” he recalled, “had already written a famous legal memo asserting that presidents could not be indicted. I thought, This is Donald Barr’s son! I walked in to interview him and I said, ‘Your father was my enemy and we fought each other tooth and nail.’ He deadpanned and said, ‘I hope that won’t influence your coverage of the Justice Department.’ He was a straight shooter—and I respected him.”

The two would interact from time to time; Barr was once Freedman’s guest at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “When he was appointed by Trump, I thought, Trump isn’t getting the person he thought he was getting,” said Freedman, who respected Barr’s sincerity and his consistent positions on issues of law. “Now, I am not sure what to think.”

Freedman shared one final memory. On the day in 1991 that William Barr was sworn in as attorney general, Freedman was invited to the ceremony. There, he encountered Donald Barr, then in his 70s. It was the first time he had seen him since their Dalton days.

“Enough time had gone by,” Freedman recalled. “I went up to him and shook his hand. I said, ‘You must be very proud of your son.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I am very proud that all the things I stood for have come to fruition. Now the executive branch has finally embraced my way of thinking.’ It was clear to me that Donald Barr felt completely vindicated.”

The quote is long, the VF item much longer. While less the sheer bastard of a man Fred Trump was, housing discrimination anti-racism lawsuit in New York when Fred and Donald were represented by Roy Cohn with the suit settled, Donald Barr was a man with his own pride, pitfalls, and prejudices - such as against the Vietnam era Columbia U protest events.  Like father, like son? Lafayette Park civil demonstration worming under the AG skin much as dad had been afflicted over Columbia U being an earlier site of citizen unrest, openly expressed, to the dismay of some, dad included.

__________FURTHER UPDATE__________

How does this WaPo report grab you? Barr's respect for rule of law, and his respect for diversity of the U.S. population, when things go not his way, not Trump's way, so it's the highway back to the jug while Flynn and Stone skated free of doing a day of time:

Michael Cohen’s book to allege Trump made racist comments about Obama and Nelson Mandela, lawsuit says
By Shayna Jacobs - July 21, 2020 at 1:23 PM EDT

The lawsuit seeks Cohen’s immediate release from federal custody. He was rearrested July 9, less than two months after he was approved to serve the remainder of his sentence on home confinement because of the coronavirus pandemic. His attorneys allege that Cohen’s First Amendment rights were violated when he was detained at the federal courthouse in Manhattan during a meeting with probation officers, who had asked him to sign a gag order prohibiting him from speaking to the media or publishing a book while serving the rest of his sentence.

Cohen’s suit names Attorney General William P. Barr and Federal Bureau of Prisons officials, in their official capacities. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in the Southern District of New York, and an initial hearing was scheduled for Thursday.

Neither the Justice Department nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

In the court filings, Cohen said his book will contain “my firsthand experiences and observations based on my decade-long employment and relationship with Mr. Trump and his family, both before and after he was elected.” [...] “In particular, my book will provide graphic and unflattering details about the President’s behavior behind closed doors,” Cohen wrote as part of the court filings. The memoir “describes the President’s pointedly anti-Semitic remarks and virulently racist remarks against such Black leaders as President Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela, neither of whom he viewed as real leaders or as worthy of respect by virtue of their race,” Cohen wrote.

[...] Authorities have said Cohen was taken back into custody because he refused to wear an ankle monitor, a claim his legal team disputes. Cohen’s lawyers also contend he did not refuse to acknowledge the media policy presented to him before his arrest, but rather that he expressed concerns about it and asked for an amendment.

Cohen’s legal team, including lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and former federal prosecutor Danya Perry, allege that his home confinement was revoked because of his book plans. [...] The order he was asked to sign required “no engagement of any kind with the media, including print, TV, film, books, or any other form of media/news.” It also prohibited “all social media platforms” and barred family or friends from posting on his behalf.

The provision was crafted specifically for Cohen and was not part of any standard procedure, his lawyers argue.

Cohen’s lawsuit references recent efforts to block the publication of books by Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton and the president’s niece Mary L. Trump. Both accounts are intensely critical of Trump and disclose biting allegations of improper behavior. Cohen’s lawyers allege the effort to silence him is part of a pattern.

In Bolton’s case, the Justice Department had sued on behalf of the administration, [...]

Cohen recently received a cease-and-desist letter from Charles Harder, the attorney who challenged Mary Trump. Harder said Cohen was bound by a nondisclosure agreement, which Cohen disputes. One of Cohen’s lawyers asked for a copy of the agreement but it was never sent, the lawsuit says.

Harder could not immediately be reached for comment.

Cohen has been held in solitary confinement at a federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., since he was taken back into custody earlier this month, the court documents say. [...] 

[italics added] Barr has to know the law against prior restraint of speech, just as he has to know the law allowing freedom of peaceful assembly and the right to challenge government overreach. Protest against police brutality was, per order of Barr, reportedly suppressed by federal agent brutality immediately prior to the Trump bible stunt.

This, while the AG by law, is the government's lawyer, not the president's nor a personal advocate for any particular individual within the government. He is not Flynn's lawyer, nor Stone's. Nor Paul Manafort's.

In good measure it's about having competent leadership

Two recent web stories - only a few months old:

New Yorker:  What African Nations Are Teaching the West About Fighting the Coronavirus

LA Times:  ‘A mess in America’: Why Asia now looks safer than the U.S. in the coronavirus crisis

A websearch. Somebody farted out an insult a while ago, about "shithole countries."

The lesson? Avoid letting bozos get their hands on the levers of power. Another lesson, you can gigantically bungle responsibility but then you cannot escape accountability. Try as Trump might . . . he is responsible so hold him accountable.

Responsible for bungling coronavirus response, responsible for that ultra-sick bible waving act, and responsible for putting storm troopers into Portland, OR. Indeed, responsible for wanting storm trooper response to the people of the nation expressing dissent. Absolute irresponsibility needs a November fix.

Enemies of the people -

Oppose

Gestapo tactics in the streets of U.S. cities

People do not want rights breached by

armed anonymous war tacticians who

kidnap people into dark SUVs.

Oppose

liberty and rights being trampled

by two portly sick men.

The Trump Whitehouse being the cesspool it is, dismays good sense.

click the image to enlarge and read

The image is from Guardian, see link here (also here). Guradian's news stream.

Guardian's reporting posted links to NYT and WaPo.

NYT headlining and quote:

Trump Administration Aims to Block New Funding for Coronavirus Testing and Tracing

The resistance to a funding proposal drafted by Senate Republicans has angered several members of the president’s party on Capitol Hill. The F.D.A. has issued emergency approval for pooled testing, a method that allows for much faster tracking of new infections.

    Published July 18, 2020
    Updated July 19, 2020, 7:14 a.m. ET   
   
[Opening post caption]:
 The White House pushes to eliminate billions from a relief proposal drafted by Senate Republicans.
  
    The Trump administration has balked at providing billions of dollars to fund coronavirus testing and shore up federal health agencies as the virus surges across the country, complicating efforts to reach agreement on the next round of pandemic aid.

Senate Republicans had drafted a proposal that would allocate $25 billion in grants to states for conducting testing and contact tracing, as well as about $10 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and about $15 billion for the National Institutes of Health, according to a person familiar with the tentative plans, who cautioned that the final dollar figures remained in flux. They had also proposed providing $5.5 billion to the State Department and $20 billion to the Pentagon to help counter the virus outbreak and potentially distribute a vaccine at home and abroad.

But in talks over the weekend, administration officials instead pushed to zero out the funding for testing and for the nation’s top health agencies, and to cut the Pentagon funding to $5 billion, according to another person familiar with the discussions. The people asked for anonymity to disclose private details of the talks, which were first reported by The Washington Post.

The suggestions from the administration infuriated several Republicans on Capitol Hill, who saw them as tone deaf, given that more than 3.5 million people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and many states are experiencing spikes in cases.

With unemployment benefits and a number of other aid measures included in the stimulus package set to expire at the end of the month, Congress is rushing to pull together the measure within the next two weeks.

WaPo:

Negotiations are expected to kick off with increased urgency because of the rapid growth of cases — and steady uptick in deaths — in the United States. The number of cases began falling in April but accelerated sharply after Memorial Day, shattering records in the past two weeks.

In late May, there were fewer than 20,000 new cases of coronavirus reported each day. On Friday, there were more than 76,000 new cases reported.

The two political parties are far apart on a number of contentious issues, such as unemployment insurance, but the conflict between Trump administration officials and Senate Republicans on money for testing and other priorities is creating a major complication even before bipartisan negotiations get under way. Some lawmakers are trying to reach a deal quickly, as enhanced unemployment benefits for millions of Americans are set to expire in less than two weeks.

One person involved in the talks said Senate Republicans were seeking to allocate $25 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing, but that certain administration officials want to zero out the testing and tracing money entirely. Some White House officials believe they have already approved billions of dollars in assistance for testing and that some of that money remains unspent.

Roughly 3.7 million Americans have already tested positive for the coronavirus in the United States, according to a Washington Post analysis. Wait times for test results can vary by state, but in some places people have to wait more than a week to find out if they tested positive.

Trump and other White House officials have been pushing for states to own more of the responsibility for testing and have objected to creating national standards, at times seeking to minimize the federal government’s role.

The last major coronavirus spending bill Congress approved, in April, included $25 billion to increase testing and also required the Health and Human Services Department to release a strategic testing plan. The agency did so in May, but the plan mainly reasserted the administration’s insistence that states — not the federal government — should take the lead on testing.

Several Senate Republicans including Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) are exploring pushing a testing and tracing provision in the next stimulus package but are expected to meet resistance from the White House.

“Cases and deaths are now both rising again, including in many red states,” said Sam Hammond, a policy expert at the right-leaning think tank the Niskanen Center, which has been working with Senate Republicans on testing legislation. “Senate Republicans have asked for funding to help states purchase test kits in bulk. As it currently stands, the main bottleneck to a big ramp-up in testing is less technical than the White House’s own intransigence.”

[italics and bolding added]

This is Trump deliberately being himself: Trump funched up pandemic response from day one, big time, perhaps on purpose so that many would die, and it continues from then to now and into the foreseeable future. Trump would rather play golf than govern. He is trying to fob off responsibility for his ongoing obscene dereliction upon states. Here is a link to an image of a train wreck. If you do not understand how this link relates to Trump, his administration, and the rest of the post, then go read something else.

Gary Gross in his latest current post at his blog out of St. Cloud, MN, posts a fine and dandy stand-up-and-salute fluff quote, but . . .

. . . he does not post about Portland! Not one single word.  What he does post . . .

Newt Gingrich, the amphibian, blowing smoke, stringing words, bloviating as quoted here, from the quote, there:

Our national anthem says we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Our Founding Fathers risked their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to defend freedom. The Civil War generation lost 630,000 Americans fighting for the Union and to end slavery. The Greatest Generation went across the planet risking its lives to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. By the way, through all these events, Congress met in person.

    Now, we are told that our members of the House are too precious to risk their lives by coming to Washington.

    To these members I would say: If freedom isn’t worth the risk, quit the Congress. Someone with more courage will replace you in a special election. The emotion driving the proposal for remote voting is an expression of a kind of cowardice I would never have expected to see in America.
 

The amphibian - waving the flag, surprisingly not quoting Scripture, all as a prelude to shitting on safe and sane House voting during a pandemic. Likely too a vote by mail hater. Hell can be insinuated into Portland where it never was wanted nor needed, just because a puffball got elected president, and federal thugs who you have to wonder about will go out and Nazi the community for their paychecks. Fine with Newt. He does not want sane voting. By our Representatives. By us. That's his shtick. Get in the way, because you're Newt.

If that _________ [fill in the blank] Gingrich actually believed one word of that flag wave prelude to mischief, he'd be denouncing snatch and grab of citizens in Portland to where if white supremacists in St. Cloud, MN, were to begin snatching folks off the street, bloggers perhaps, into dark SUVs spiriting them away to wherever, bystander witnesses would say, "Oh, that's just Trump again."

Newt is a studied hypocrite, but you don't have to make yourself one by quoting.

Newt and Trump are twin sons of different - - - mothers. Talking puffballs, i.e., hollow talking yard funguses full of nothing besides millions of grey fungus spores.

And then there is Barr. And then there is Pence. November beckons.

“Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street we call it kidnapping,” said Jann Carson, interim executive director of the ACLU of Oregon. “The actions of the militarised federal officers are flat-out unconstitutional and will not go unanswered.”

Sleep tight, knowing you live under the rule of law, in the U.S. of A. where shit like that does not happen.

Trump is intent in turning us into one of his shithole countries. Lawless, run by brutality to quell dissent. Portland is a trial balloon.

The headline is a quote from here. An image, to show the meaning of the phrase, "dead from the neck up, with the rot setting in."

“COVID-19 has been likened to an X-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built,” Antonio Guterres said as he delivered the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture.

That is the lecture given on International Mandela Day. This one by the UN's Secretary General. Link.

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said she would file a lawsuit in federal court against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection and Federal Protection Service alleging they have violated the civil rights of Oregonians by detaining them without probable cause. She will also seek a temporary restraining order against them. The ACLU of Oregon said the federal agents appear to be violating people's rights, which "should concern everyone in the United States."

The headline is from AP, carried by Strib, and it is about Trump being yet again a provocateur, needing to be severely criticized, and curbed. November cannot come soon enough.

Note that because the military declined to be Trump's foil, he is deploying other federal employees to do his malign dirty work. Nobody in office in Oregon wants the idiot show on their turf. And they make it clear. With a raging pandemic, this sort of diversionary circus stunt really annoys. This clear uninvited misuse of government power is costly and aimed against citizens. It is Trump in his full nuisance mode.

BOTTOM LINE: Trump has got to go. If it has to be Biden serving the eviction notice instead of a progressive, that's politics. Bad politics, but essential nonetheless.

Bernie serving the eviction notice would have been more fun, but cutthroats waylaid him. Bloomberg and others. There will be a reckoning over that, but it can await the ouster and replacement by Biden, as marginally an incremental a reform as that will be.

___________UPDATE__________

Chemical weapon deployment is reported, and a breach of lawful norms rather than lawful conduct:

Federal agents, some wearing camouflage and some wearing dark Homeland Security uniforms, used tear gas at least twice to break up crowds late Friday night, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

Protests against systemic racism and police brutality have been a nightly feature in deeply liberal Portland since Minneapolis police killed George Floyd on May 25. President Donald Trump has decried the disorder and Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf blasted the protesters as “lawless anarchists” in a visit to the city, helping make the clashes between police and demonstrators a national focus.

The administration has enlisted federal agents, including the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and an elite U.S. Customs and Border Protection team based on the U.S.-Mexico border, to protect federal property. But Oregon Public Broadcasting reported this week that some agents had been driving around in unmarked vans and snatching protesters from streets not near federal property, without identifying themselves.

Tensions also escalated after an officer with the Marshals Service fired a less-lethal round at a protester’s head on July 11, critically injuring him.

[italics added] If you imagine it's fun and comfort to be hauled into an unmarked van by cammie wearing men without any badging; where it could be Pepe the frog's Boogaloo bois looking to lynch, as much as federal agents, then fun to you is a sick thing.

The House should pass a resolution of condemnation, and request that heads of agencies appear for hearings. If discipline is so lax that unmarked clothing and unmarked vehicles are used to snatch Americans off the street - we have an agency problem that needs sunshine.

Inspector Generals of any involved agencies should be tasked by House leadership to investigate who did what from the agency in Oregon, and then appear to testify.

Agency budgets need review. If there's money for that level of misadventure, then there's too much money for the agency to handle safely.

This is bullshit-trampling on citizens' rights far more than requiring a pandemic related face covering; but that band of assholes deriding a "masking infringement on rights" have fallen silent about governmental snatching people off the street into unmarked vans and with neither a warrant nor jurisdiction to be off federal properties causing civilian havoc. The army told the _________ in chief no, it was against the law for them to conduct war against citizens, so the __________ went and used other more pliant tools of government.

(fill in the blank)

Strib carrying an AP feed: "Biden: After intel briefings, warns of election interference By WILL WEISSERT Associated Press July 17, 2020 — 10:30pm." That story should be fleshed out in detail.

Opening Strib paragraphs:

WASHINGTON — Joe Biden said Friday night that he's begun receiving intelligence briefings as he warned that Russia, China and other adversaries were attempting to undermine the upcoming U.S. election in November.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee wasn't specific and offered no evidence while addressing a virtual fundraiser with more than 200 attendees. But, in the process, he confirmed receiving classified briefings after saying as recently as late last month that he wasn't getting them but might request one about reports of Russian bounties being offered on U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

"We know from before, and I guarantee you I know now because now I get briefings again. The Russians are still engaged, trying to de-legitimize our electoral process. Fact," Biden said Friday. "China and others are engaged as well in activities designed for us to lose confidence in the outcome."

The White House and National Security Council didn't immediately respond to requests for comment on Biden's statement. Reached by phone, a Biden spokesperson did not immediately provide further details.

If foreign interference is truly a burden to U.S. democracy, as implied, name the others. Why not? Some blowback? If a nation small enough with obvious financial ties that can be brought forward in quelling the "others" motivation and dedication, it should be done. Today, not later. I.e., step on their throats long enough and hard enough to get them to back off.

A few links:

Salon:  Expect three authoritarian regimes — Israel, Russia and Saudi Arabia — to get Trump reelected in 202 [sic]

mondoweiss.net:  Where’s the outrage over Netanyahu trying to interfere in the US election?

theleadersnews.com:  Does Israel Interfere in American Elections? Ask Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib

timesofisrael.com:  Redacted FBI document hints at Israeli efforts to help Trump in 2016 campaign

politico:  ‘Netanyahu is essentially an Israeli Republican’

usatoday: Trump, Netanyahu relationship erodes core values of U.S.-Israeli bond: Today's talker

https://foreignpolicy.com: The Trump-Netanyahu Alliance Is Endangering Americans and Israelis

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

The Israelis get $3.4 billion per year of U.S. taxpayer money, and if that is not leverage to make them better world citizens, then have we other leverage? And backstep, why give them money at all that could be spent making citizens' lives better here?

It is our election. Not theirs. If Russians are a worry, Bibi and crowd are a bigger one, based on effectiveness if nothing else.

Even Trump supporters should acknowledge that any foreign attempt to influence of fix the U.S. presidential elections is wrong and should be quelled.

UPDATE: Link. Biden wants an explicit position known.

A detatchment from reality is a gentle way to characterize a flat-out pathological liar.

He lied extensively in the last few days.

He lied even worse to get elected.

The blog title and sub-head historically relate to when local issues in City of Ramsey, Anoka County, Minnesota were a main concern. The blog has moved from that, but localized attention, agree or disagree, is worth consideration - if the question inspires interest. That said, Reflections in Ramsey, has a very new post, which inspired interest.

Link to the site. The most recent post there is a re-attentive look at "franchise fees."

Years ago while I was on the Charter Commission (before resigning over dissatisfaction about pathological indecision and moribund inactivity), the same question was trotted out by city officials as an indirect form of additional taxation;  the story being a franchise fee is imposed on a utility, and clearly passed on in pricing, to customers - i.e., an indirect tax, imposed on a pool of citizens having a very great Venn Diagram overlap with those paying property taxes, but with the two pools not identical.

As to fee and tax jargon games; see, Minn. Stat. Sect. 645.44, subd. 19(b), re "fee" and "tax" usage at law.

The Reflector authored:

It has been the opinion of the majority of the Charter Commission up to now, that this “franchise fee” is not in compliance with the City Charter, and implementing it would require a city wide referendum vote to change the City Charter to allow it.

Back when I was on the commission and the issue was diddled around by the Charter Commission without useful action, Harry Niska was a commission member who proposed making an explicit unambiguous change to Charter language to curb imposition of a franchise fee upon a utility to be passed on to customers as a hidden indirect tax on those customers. There was support for the change, but it ended up tabled. Statutes may have changed, but the current reading of Ramsey's Charter is explicit. Charter Chapter 10.4 is key:

Sec. 10.4. - Power of regulation reserved. Subject to any applicable state statutes, the council may by ordinance reasonably regulate and control the exercise of any franchise, including the maximum rates, fares, or prices to be charged by the grantee. [...]

Neither a franchise fee, nor royalties based upon number of meters, consumption by any consumer, or otherwise are expressly mentioned as part of Ramsey's Charter-based reserved city regulation powers over a franchisee, with only "rates, fares, or prices" enumerated as regulatory aims. Although the term "fares" is ambiguous and, hence, elastic.

Present statutory language of Minn. Stat. Sect. 451.07, subd. 6, is one instance found in searching the term "franchise fee" and usage is in terms of "the minimum franchise fee, if any, required by the city charter," suggesting express requirement in Charter language can properly be at issue. Ramsey's Charter has no express "franchise fee" requirement of any kind, by Charter.

Were I still on the Charter Commission I would argue at any meeting with franchise fees on the agenda, that amendment of the Charter to authorize franchise fees would be a prerequisite to imposition of any such fee on any utility serving Ramsey, whether a utility acquiesces of or disputes the imposition.

That focuses upon only a part of what the Ramsey Reflector recently and anonymously posted. Also, posts from 2019 might interest Ramsey folks reading this blog entry.

__________UPDATE_________

The amendment Harry Niska offered at past Charter Commission deliberation focused upon problematic statutory language :

216B.36 MUNICIPAL REGULATORY AND TAXING POWERS.

Any public utility furnishing the utility services enumerated in section 216B.02 or occupying streets, highways, or other public property within a municipality may be required to obtain a license, permit, right, or franchise in accordance with the terms, conditions, and limitations of regulatory acts of the municipality, including the placing of distribution lines and facilities underground. Under the license, permit, right, or franchise, the utility may be obligated by any municipality to pay to the municipality fees to raise revenue or defray increased municipal costs accruing as a result of utility operations, or both. The fee may include but is not limited to a sum of money based upon gross operating revenues or gross earnings from its operations in the municipality so long as the public utility shall continue to operate in the municipality, [...]

[emphasis added] Regulatory acts do not mean using a franchise fee for general revenue use, or earmaked, to evade levy limits re general municipal services due the public [such as road upkeep]. Yet the "... to pay to the municipality fees to raise revenue or defray increased municipal costs accruing as a result of utility operations, or both," language contradicts the "regulatory acts" restraint. Niska's proposal was to insert a sentence into Charter sect. 10.4 to the effect:

The City may require a utility franchisee to pay franchise fees to defray increased municipal costs accruing as a result of utility operations.

That eliminates "to raise revenue ... or both" wording in otherwise tracking statutory language, making it explicit that deferral of costs is authorized, but not a generic revenue grab (apart from actual regulatory acts) for non-regulatory use (other than by lawful taxation separate from any franchise fees).

It got tabled. Setting apart any Charter-city statutory-city dimension that might be argued, CITY OF BAXTER v. City of Brainerd, 932 NW 2d 477, 480-81 (Minn.App 2019) denied imposition of a franchise fee arrangement designed to raise revenue unrelated to regulation, for road work (Baxter is a statutory city). While arguably dicta, in that other grounds for decision existed, it is guiding law, at the least. No case construing that 2019 case was found.

All of that is background, and anybody can have an opinion about what the law is or should be, as policy, and not in any way as legal advice to anyone about anything, which is left by law to licensed lawyers to do.

Much ado about nothing? But an interesting nothing. End of this post.

FURTHER: To eliminate any doubt - The opinion here is that the entire franchise fee revenue grabbing possibility is the result of badly written law, or sneaky intent within the legislature to snake in an indirect tax on citizens, so that any city using franchise fees for anything but recouping costs of regulation and regulatory impact is a sneaky city. Elasticizing franchise fee imposition beyond such "actual regulation" bounds is otherwise an abomination against constrained good government, not being allowed to run amok.

(That is opinion, not legal advice.)

____________FURTHER UPDATE___________

City of Baxter, and Brainard are in the 9th Minnesota Judicial District, not in the 10th as is Ramsey [Anoka County]. That makes City of Baxter v City of Brainard guidance from another District but not binding precedent.

The earlier posts from 2019 on Reflections in Ramsey flesh out more basis for dispute with the imposition of utility franchise fees as a means to fund road work in Ramsey. They also indicate the franchise fee unrest is not recent in origin.

Joe Field continues to chair the Charter Commission, and as a lawyer his speaking at a council meeting [not at a work session alone] as Commission chair would help inform things. He might read the City of Baxter case in a way helpful for council and audience understanding of what the case was about and to what extent it decried and for what rasons franchise fee mis-levying. He might also be able to inform the process of the earlier franchise fee deliberation the commission had. He was chair then, Niska vice-chair. He might even call a Charter Commission meeting, to refresh members on the issue and see if there is any consensus.

It appears The League of Minnesota Cities was not party to the Baxter appeal so that consulting them would be of little help. On the other hand  John Baker of the Greene, Espel firm litigated the appeal. He previously was used by the city on a Charter question, and might be willing pro bono to supply the Charter Commission and council with briefing papers from the appeal relevant to franchise fee use for roadwork unrelated to actual regulatory costs to the city arising from a franchisee's operation and city regulation of same.

Were the city to not want to hear bad news and disapprove the messenger, that is politics, but not in any way good politics. The same would be true were the city to hire Baker, not to objectively inform, but to advocate in favor of franchise fee imposition of the kind the Baxter court appears to have found misguided.

Openmindedness is a public service virtue. The council should want to be maximally informed.

_____________FURTHER UPDATE____________

The City of Baxter case actually is of no help. While the evil at play was using a franchise fee - something in the statutes discouraging municipal restraint and accountability - i.e., an apparent bailout of towns like Ramsey that spend beyond their means, allowing them to cheat the people with franchise fee mischief, and can do a cramdown - apparently lawfully - even when the people of the city do not want it done. That's a dimension of the curse of Met Council, and planners, who attach to a town like crabgrass.

The focus in Baxter was that the service provider was a municipal utility. As a statutory city it needed no mention of franchise fees in a Charter providing for utility franchise regulation. It has a statute. The court opined:

A. Chapter 216B

Pursuant to Minn. Stat. § 216B.36, a public utility that furnishes utility services to a municipality "may be required to obtain a license, permit, right, or franchise in accordance with the terms, conditions, and limitations of regulatory acts of the municipality, including the placing of distribution lines and facilities underground." This requirement may include that the public utility "pay to the municipality fees to raise revenue or defray increased municipal costs accruing as a result of utility operations, or both." Minn. Stat. § 216B.36.

The legislature included a specific definition for "public utility" in chapter 216B applicable to section 216B.36, and that definition excludes municipalities. See Minn. Stat. § 216B.02, subds. 1, 4 (defining "public utility" as "not includ[ing] ... a municipality"). We have concluded that the statute's language, on its face, "mandates that municipal utilities are excepted from regulation under chapter 216B, `except as specifically provided herein.'"

Baxter acknowledges that the legislature excluded municipal utilities from regulation under chapter 216B but asserts two grounds for this court to extend the scope of the statute to permit the revenue-raising fee pursuant to chapter 216B: (1) BPUC is operating its utility outside its municipality's border, and (2) BPUC should not be recognized as a municipal utility.

Baxter's first theory—which challenges the legislature's policy decision —does not have support in the statute's language. he plain language of Minn. Stat. §§ 216B.02, subd. 4, and .36 unambiguously does not authorize the revenue-raising franchise fee imposed by Baxter in ordinance 2016-023 because BPUC is excluded from the definition of public utility by operation of section 216B.02, subdivision

Second, Baxter asserts that Brainerd's establishment of BPUC as an independent commission deprives BPUC of a municipal-utility status. The undisputed facts show that Brainerd established BPUC to control, operate and manage the electric system. Although BPUC can act on its own to institute, prosecute, and defend on behalf of Brainerd, Brainerd continues to exercise control over BPUC. The Brainerd treasury retains revenue from BPUC's operation, the Brainerd city council approves BPUC's exercise of power to appoint and employ individuals to perform BPUC's duties, and the Brainerd city council exercises authority to approve BPUC's budget. Given the manner by which Brainerd controls BPUC, its existence as a separate entity does not deprive its status as a municipal utility.

932 NW at 482-83 (citations omitted)

As Chap. 216B currently stands, co-op utilities are not exempted. Hence, Baxter is of no help to Ramsey's franchise fee opponents, except for the fact Baxter is a statutory city, not a Charter city. And Ramsey's Charter has Franchise regulation provisions in its Chap. 10, without any authorization of franchise fees, and the Charter appears to have been so written from its inception.

With this tax unauthorized anywhere in the Ramsey governing document, the Charter, the intent to infer is that such taxation was never favored in the City to have incorporated it into the Charter. when utility franchise regulation was expressly addressed. The Niska amendment would have made this intent express instead of implicit, i.e., implied by omission of a provision of known existence in long standing law. (The language dates unchanged from Minn. Laws  1974 chap 429 sect 36; i.e. from the time after the 1973 Israeli war when OPEC in retaliation drastically raised oil prices causing "stagflation" to where an extreme new indirect municipal revenue provision may have seemed wise).

BOTTOM LINE: Had the City ever wanted to authorize franchise fees in its Charter (where the Charter expressly addresses utility franchise regulation [Charter Chap. 10]) when first passed, or afterward, the opportunities were rampant. Such a step was never taken, and the only Charter Commission or Council thought known here of any proposed franchise fee language amending the Charter was aimed directly at curbing and forestalling franchise fee imposition to raise general revenue, for roads or other regularly needed municipal duty, making the levy the continuing sole authorized imposition for general revenue income to support regular town duties unrelated to "regulatory acts," per Charter Sect. 10.4 "reasonably regulate and control the exercise of any franchise," i.e., regulation, not extortion of a tax/fee was the inferred intent in keeping that language and never adding any general revenue generation language to the Charter when ample opportunity existed, had that been a municipal intent. The Charter's importance cannot be overemphasized. For Ramsey to have amended its Charter to allow franchise fee taxation such an amendent would have had to have been put to a citizens' vote. That simply never happened, over the entire time of history of Ramsey as a Charter city.

Last, it would stretch human imagination to the breaking point to read "exercise of any franchise" in the Charter to mean shaking down utilities for money known to represent a pass-through, and hence an indirect tax on citizens. Franchises exercising their business practices is a set of actions that does not include extracting an indirect tax from ratepayers. Statutory cities can do that, Charter cities providing expressly for regulation of utilties but not taxing fees cannot.

Clearly, if councilmembers want a franchise fee, put it to a popular vote.

Via proposing a Charter authorization where none exists now, and seeing how the people vote.

Ultimate sovereignty does, by Minnesota's Constitution, rest with the people.

_________LAST UPDATE__________

Ramsey's Charter over time has been amended several times. Citizen petition in the past has led to amendment, the process having followed along specified lines for such a petitioning option.

With an amendment history, together with there never being any amendment proposed to authorize imposition of a franchise fee, is strong circumstantial evidence of a likely true belief among officials that if such a change were to be proposed it would be voted down by the people.

Those opponents to franchise fee mischief do have the option of petition to cause a vote on the Niska amendment to nail shut the franchise fee question.

Likewise officials wanting to burden the citizenry with franchise fee taxation can put their idea to a Charter amendment popular vote.

So far, neither camp has moved to clarify the Charter's implicit bar to franchise fee imposition when regulation is all that the Charter authorizes, apart from any express authorization of that uncapped special tax/fee thing as a way to gain general revenue in avoidance of the State's lawful levy-limit constraint to overspending.

Whether being an ordinary citizen-taxpayer would lead to a person having standing to seek a declaratory judgment on the Charter's implicit bar to franchise fees, a Charter Commission member doubtlessly would have standing. The ball is in the Commission's court, as to going to court. A declaratory judgment, going either way, would bring certainty to a situation appearing against imposition of a franchise fee in Ramsey. The city and electric co-op are okay with the co-op passing through such a fee, so if the city were to seek a declaratory judgment, somebody would have to file to intervene, i.e., a spine would be needed among Charter Commissioners to intervene and argue the Charter's implicit ban on franchise fees, as the Charter now stands. Something more than grumbling or putting a view on the Internet.

Bountygate: Real or manufactured story? One fact: If in moving forward, Trump or Biden have the sense to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan as negotiated with the Taliban and promised, then, thinking about tomorrow, speculative "bounties" would not be attainable or paid. [UPDATED]

Without too much ado, a few links.

The story is owned by NYT, see, e.g., here.

BACKGROUND: July 10, 2020 - “I Could Live With That”: How the CIA Made Afghanistan Safe for the Opium Trade, by Jeffrey St. Clair" published by Counterpunch. That is a why we're still there explanation, or a what's up still item, from a cynic's perspective.

For skeptic posts suggesting Bountygate is a manufactured falsehood, and discounting the NYT "scoop" - see, e.g., here and here.

A websearch.

(An earlier post had been prepared, than lost via error in managing posting tabs. It's bottom line conclusion was that if we get troops out of there from then onward bounty reality, if any, is mooted. And the DoD budget can be downsized with money reallocated to useful domestic stuff, Social Security, Green New Deal, universal border to border broadband, Pharma price gouging constraint, and nationwide policing reform being a handful of examples. And who then owns the opium trade and how it is used will clearly not be a U.S. policy cause to remain in unending war in the Hindu Kush and other regional places.

LAST: If dollar hegemony is an issue, authorities should say so. Opium trade, if in dollars, substantially adds to hegemony as did eliminating Sadam and Qaddafi when they wanted their nations' oil priced other than in dollars. (Dollar based pricing currently is something the Saudis and OPEC  seem to find comfortable.) Iran, Russia and Venezuela affect oil pricing if not pegged by them in dollars, so there may be an at least sane policy basis for not endless but occasional incidental wars in strange and distant places. Calling the Afghan incursion and occupation a "Pipelineistan" issue may factor into understanding.

And for a hostility toward Russia on fossil fuel issues, clearly the Green New Deal is the policy answer to that as well as to curbing carbon emissions and climate change worries. And a Green New Deal with infrastructure jobs and housing and commercial green building practices in place will again mean an uptick in quality jobs that resist outsourcing.

Finally in closing, calling it a "Defense Department" instead of a "War Department" remains a misleading and ironic euphemism for one of several foreign policy alternatives a Deep State can use.

Revising the appearance and structure of the blog - almost finished.

The new template/theme for the page is set and in place. The latest Blogger posting engine is in use. It differs in ways from the legacy posting engine, but once used a bit, it works. However, any and all script blocking has to be disabled to use the new engine. Six of one, half dozen of the other. The sidebar has been revised, top to bottom, with much legacy stuff near the bottom - having historical value. Also, readers may find the sidebar DOES NOT tell one single coherent story. Things get added. Things get deleted. One hope is that sidebar items, and posts, are not hob-goblined by too many dead links. With the web an organic thing, dead links are unavoidable, and chasing them can waste time better spent.

Some readers may care: To switch between desktop view of a blogger site, and mobile view, there is a simple toggle.

As an example, this blog by default, with nothing on the URL entry beyond site address:

https://www.blogger.com/

To switch from default desktop view to mobile view, amend that to

https://www.blogger.com/?m=1

From there, as some may already expect, quick toggling back to desktop view

https://www.blogger.com/?m=0

For this blog, desktop view has the sidebar, which some may find interesting, while others may find the sidebar a distraction. With a narrow mobile window, main content (daily posting) only is displayed.

During the updating of this blog's template/theme the toggle allowed previewing both views, which is helpful without having to use two actual devices.

Loading a desktop browser tab to display one or the other of the toggles will show the difference.

Once mobile view is toggled on a desktop, opening a subpage keeps the formatting, e.g.,

https://zaetsch.blogspot.com/2020/07/karen-bass-has-wikipedia-page-why-not.html?m=1

Also, once toggling to mobile view, and selecting an image in any particular post via a right-click choice from the context menu, or viewing an image in another tab, the display may differ - same size as displayed in mobile view, full size in desktop view.

For a site not including extensive image use nor extensive sidebar use, the difference in view is minimal, e.g., Dan Burns' blog - in mobile view:

https://mnppannex.blogspot.com/?m=1

There, the post preview listings differ from the desktop view presenting full posts showing in sequence. Identically, preview listing occurs with Crabgrass, in mobile view.

Last, a sidebar entry as a reminder of the toggle has been published as a reminder to readers for after this post has scrolled into past-content oblivion.

A particular hope is that readers who also blog, while unaware of this easy toggle may find learning the info to be helpful.

_________________________

Hat tip to Martin Brinkmann's gehacks.net - this link - for the info.

The sooner AOC runs against Schumer and ousts the pompous, arrogant impediment to progress, the better.

Sirota's site, Perez writing.

For progressives, Schumer is a royal pain in the ass. The sooner retired to lobbying, [from outside the Senate, not as now, from inside], the better. Yesterday was not soon enough to dismiss him for a better human.

Money in politics is poison in politics, and with the two-party stranglehold, each party can hold up and shake down the donor class, charging a transit fee to move the law from bad to worse, but fat city for the influence buyers.

Shakedown Street is still the heart of town.

Karen Bass has a Wikipedia page. Why not read it now? In case ...

Intro part of the Wikipedia entry:

Karen Ruth Bass (/ˈbæs/; born October 3, 1953) is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for California's 37th congressional district since 2013. A member of the Democratic Party, she was first elected to Congress for the state's 33rd congressional district in 2010, which covered Culver City and parts of South Los Angeles until redistricting at the end of her first term.
On November 28, 2018, Bass was elected to chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) during the 116th Congress.^[7][8][9] She also serves as Chair of the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations and United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.
Prior to being elected to Congress, Bass represented the 47th district in the California State Assembly (2004–2010). In 2008, she was elected to serve as the 67th Speaker of the California State Assembly, becoming the first African American woman in United States history to serve as a Speaker of a state legislative body.^[10][11] For her leadership during the worst recession California had faced since the Great Depression, she, along with three other legislative leaders whom she worked alongside, was awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2010.^[12]

Why should you care? The question pivots upon who else may care. The Atlantic, July 13, 2020 - by: Edward-Isaac Dovere - Why Joe Biden Has His Eye on Karen Bass - The California representative’s low-key manner and progressive credentials could strengthen Biden’s campaign when he needs it most.:

The first time Representative Karen Bass heard Joe Biden talk about the car crash that killed his wife and infant daughter, she dropped into her chair, overwhelmed.

It was 2008, and Bass was watching the Democratic National Convention video introducing Biden as the party’s vice-presidential nominee. Less than two years earlier, Bass’s daughter and son-in-law had died in a car crash on the 405. Bass, then in her 50s, had thrown herself into her job as the speaker of the California assembly and hoped to get past the pain. But there was Biden, 36 years after the tragedy that shattered his family, still talking about the magnitude of his loss. “I had this moment,” Bass told me, “where I had to come to grips with the fact that losing my daughter and son-in-law was always going to be a part of the narrative of who I am.”

Four years later, as Biden and Barack Obama were being reelected, Bass won a seat in the House, representing parts of Los Angeles. But she didn’t tell Biden what he’d meant to her until this March, when she introduced him at a Super Tuesday chicken-and-waffles event. “We both just shared that you learn how to get up in the morning,” she told me. “You learn how to live, but your life is fundamentally changed, dramatically changed.”

Now, much to Bass’s—and pretty much everyone else’s—surprise, Biden’s team is taking her seriously as a potential vice-presidential running mate. One theory is that she’s being vetted to help Biden win favor with the Congressional Black Caucus, which she chairs. Another is that Biden is trying to use the process to elevate as many black women as he can. Yet another is that he’s looking to distract people from speculating about some of the more likely choices. But inside the Biden campaign is another consideration: Over the next month, he’s effectively going to decide whether there will be a competitive Democratic primary in 2024 (or maybe 2028, if he wins and tries to serve until he’s 86 years old). He’s the leader of the party now. Will he decide its future by anointing a successor, or pick someone, like Bass, who’s less likely to run for president?

Biden has wanted to be president for almost 40 years. Now that the White House finally seems within reach, he does not want to be outshone, according to people who know him. He wants to win, but he wants the win to be about him, not his running mate.

[... Bass is 66 years old.] When Barack Obama picked Biden as his running mate in 2008, Biden was also 66. Obama told Biden to think of the job like “the capstone of your career,” and the assumption that Biden wouldn’t be angling to run for president himself was part of the rationale for putting him on the ticket.

Bass came up as a community organizer in Los Angeles and worked as a physician assistant in emergency rooms during the AIDS crisis. She was at the infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie as the sun set in 1992 during the LA riots, and almost got hit by bricks. For the past month, she’s been shepherding a policing-reform bill through the House without losing a single progressive or moderate vote.

She “was not high on the list that the team had initially proposed,” a donor who’s spoken with Biden about the deliberations told me. But she seems to have moved up as the vetting committee has looked at her record and considered her upsides against the little obvious baggage she’d have. In this case, being largely unknown nationally means that she wouldn’t start out as polarizing. “He wants what he did for Obama,” the donor told me. “He sees that as what that job is: You speak truth to power; you step out there on the edge when it’s an existential issue. He sees her and her record as proven and time-tested—though she’s not known among large voter blocs, and not lifted up with a strong media presence.”

[...] At the end of May, Bass flew to Houston to attend George Floyd’s funeral. She looked at the picture of him with the dates of his life underneath, and realized that the year Floyd was born, 1973, was when she’d first become active in her L.A. neighborhood, pushing for police reform. Now Floyd was dead, and she was in charge of a bill he inspired. She felt humbled. “And then, of course, it saddens you in the sense that, 47 years later, people discover, ‘Gee, there’s a problem.’”

[... much more]