Fucking hell, Trump just appointed Sheriff Clarke to the Department of Homeland Security

[octoberlib]

Link to tweet

BREAKING: @SheriffClarke announces he will "accept an appointment as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security."

[PsychoBabble]

1. But of course ... because

What is a day without further induced unnecessary chaos ...

Ooops, I meant, sunshine.

[ProudLib72]

2. Please tell me this is a bad joke nt

[hwmnbn]

3. Message deleted by DU the Administrators

[Arkansas Granny]

4. Message deleted by DU the Administrators

[enough]

5. The more we hate it, the more he loves it. I think that's 95% of his

motivation for everything he does.

[octoberlib]

10. Agree. Bannon just revels in this shit.

[BannonsLiver]

6. Saved the chickenshit the indignity of losing his re-election.

[octoberlib]

16. This.

[oasis]

7. "All Hat No Cattle" Clarke will run a Keystone Cops version of KGB.

[demmiblue]

8. I can't say that I am surprised, but still...

[Tanuki]

9. Heckuva job, Trumpy

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thinkprogress.org/amp/p/fc62122ec9cd

"On July 2016, a newborn baby died at the Milwaukee County Jail after the mother was forced to give birth on her cell floor. Now, three months after Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke’s Office was sued over the baby’s death, the controversial law enforcement leader is being sued for additional jail abuse of pregnant women.
According to a federal lawsuit filed on March 14, plaintiff Melissa Hall was shackled before, during, and after childbirth at a local hospital in 2013. A “belly chain” was allegedly wrapped around her waist when she needed to use the restroom, and she had “her wrists attached to the waist and her legs attached to one another by leg-irons.” Hall claims the jail deputies also denied medical providers’ request to take the chains off her during childbirth, which made it difficult for those providers to give her an epidural.
.....

The misconduct described in this Count was undertaken with malice, willfulness, and reckless indifference to the rights of others, and was objectively unreasonable,” Hall’s lawsuit says. Her allegations are the most recent in a long line of abuse accusations lodged at Clarke and his jail. In June, Clark will appear in court as a defendant in a class action lawsuit regarding the jail’s shackling of additional pregnant women from February 2010 on.
The Milwaukee jail is also known for an alarming number of deaths in 2016. Four people died within its walls last year, including the newborn baby and a male detainee who died of thirst.
Clarke himself is an enthusiastic supporter of President Donald Trump and a proponent of vigilante justice. In the past he encouraged violence against Trump’s opponents and said Black Lives Matter activists are “black slime” who should be “eradicated from American society.”

[octoberlib]

11. +1

[oasis]

18. Clarke says BLM activist are "black slime"?

[gratuitous]

12. Confusing

Has Clarke been offered an appointment, or is Clarke just fishing for one?

[octoberlib]

13. He's on his way to D.C. I'm assuming this position doesn't have to be confirmed?

He's an assistant something or other.

[octoberlib]

14. Here we go. He doesn't have to be confirmed.

Link to tweet

[gratuitous]

15. No surprise

Clarke isn't expected to survive a re-election run. He needs a sinecure so he can keep going on the teevee wearing his ersatz cowboy hat. There's no way he'd get through a confirmation hearing, so he gets some phony-baloney job that he has no intention of showing up for or doing anything in.

[Archae]

17. Message deleted by DU the Administrators

[dalton99a]

19. Message deleted by DU the Administrators

[Glimmer of Hope]

20. Just when you think you have seen it all.

[muriel_volestrangler]

21. Trump Nominates Actual Fascist David Clarke for Department of Homeland Security

It is not surprising that Clarke rejects out of hand any criticism of police misconduct. But his disdain for criminal-justice reform is not merely avocational. Clarke’s mind is organized around a worship of the virtues of physical force, combined with a seething intolerance for democratic dissent. In his book, Clarke proposes that the Department of Homeland Security — the department that he has been nominated to serve — assume police-state powers to round up internal enemies. “I suggest that our commander in chief ought to utilize Article I, Section 9 and take all of these individuals that are suspected, these ones on the internet spewing jihadi rhetoric … to scoop them up, charge them with treason and, under habeas corpus, detain them indefinitely at Gitmo,” he writes. Clarke estimates that the number of people to be rounded up in such fashion runs into “hundreds of thousands,” or “maybe a million.” Clarke is clear in his belief that the legal principles that have served as a bedrock against state abuse for centuries should be discarded. He would “hold them indefinitely under a suspension of habeas corpus” because “bold and aggressive action is needed.”

It is important to understand that these policies, even as extreme as they are, cannot be understood even merely as a radical extension of anti-terror policies, or misplaced fear of the terrorist threat. Clarke’s understanding of domestic terrorism runs far beyond radical jihadists. He has predicted that Black Lives Matter will “join forces with ISIS,” and on multiple occasions described the group as a terror organization. The protesters do not “care about black lives. They care about their own radical ideology of terrorism: anarchy.” Clarke insists Black Lives Matter “needs to be crushed.”

And while Black Lives Matter occupies a special place in his paranoid ideology, Clarke has increasingly applied his fervor for crushing dissent to any of Donald Trump’s critics. Attacking protesters who appeared at Trump rallies during the campaign, he told Tucker Carlson:

They only understand one thing, Tucker. And that is force. And I am talking about reasonable force by law enforcement. But I’m also talking about law-abiding citizens standing up for their constitutional right and not have their constitutional right trampled on at these rallies. I’m not encouraging them to start the fight, but I’m one of those that comes from the school, if the fight is inevitable, hit first, and hit hard.

...
In early October, when Trump appeared to be bound for defeat, he denounced the political system as rigged, while either literally or symbolically calling for insurrection. “It’s incredible that our institutions of gov, WH, Congress, DOJ, and big media are corrupt & all we do is bitch. Pitchforks and torches time.” The seeming contradiction between his extreme intolerance of political dissent and attribution of insurrectionary motives to his political opponents, along with his own use of revolutionary discourse, is well-explained by Clarke’s own thinking. Fascists view politics as an inevitably violent struggle in which normal bargaining and compromise are impossible.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/david-clarke-actual.html

[Vinca]

22. Isn't he another Trumpian under threat of indictment for something?

They might as well block off an entire wing of a prison for these people.