President Trump pardons former Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff/infamous racist Joe Arpaio, convicted of ignoring a judge's order to stop detaining Latinos merely on suspicion of having immigrated to America illegally. But you know, this is the kind of thing that won't hurt Mr. Trump or his fellow Republicans at the polls, as long as Democrats keep trotting out these little Ossoffs who stand for nothing and stand up to nothing. 2018 won't be the year the "sane" politicians strike back; it'll be another year for "shoot from the hip" outsiders to clean up, and weakling establishment Democrats will realize this too late, if at all.
President Trump prepares to give formal instructions to the Department of Defense in re his plan to ban transgendered folks from serving our country in the military. But, in what he may imagine to be a compromise, he'll leave it up to the military to decide whether to expel transgendered folks based on how readily they'll be able to fight wars or complete lengthy missions, which sure sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Again, heckuva job, establishment Democrats who counted on Donald Trump to lose the Presidency all by himself!
FAIR finds too many "liberal" media types still getting all hot and bothered about how "Presidential" Mr. Trump was when announcing his expansion of the Afghanistan war. It isn't as bad as it was the last time Mr. Trump dropped some bombs (or didn't yell at the top of his lungs on TV!), but any amount of enthusiasm over war-making is too much -- a lot of folks who make war for a living will tell you that, too! -- and slamming the "liberal" media for forgetting all about Mr. Trump's enthusiasm about Afghanistan mineral resources is of course entirely appropriate.
Eric Katz at Government Executive reports that the EPA has lost about half of its criminal investigators over the last decade. Folks who constantly shout about law-and-order should be quite upset; if they're not, I guess that means they don't think pollution is really a crime -- or they're buying into New Democrat bullshit about the technology for this kind of crime detection being so much better than it used to be. Call me old-fashioned, but I think people are the best "technology" for crime-fighting.
On that note, we learn that Google's Artificial Intelligence (or AI) project aimed at curbing toxic online commentary isn't very good at what it tries to do. To the degree that we should be doing this, why in the world aren't we hiring people to do it? People are, after all, a lot more subtle than the subtlest computer, and the number of people who alienate everyone around them is actually very small. Maybe they use AI because they don't have to pay AI. But if you want nice things, you have to pay workers to maintain them.
Finally, Randall Balmer at the Los Angeles Times instructs us that "Under Trump, Evangelicals Show Their True Racist Colors." His business roundtables have abandoned him in Charlottesville's wake, but his big-name evangelical supporters haven't, except for the one Clinton/Obama voter who had one foot out the door anyway. Good, also, to be reminded that racism, not abortion, was the original driving force behind right-wing evangelism -- and a lot of these old school evangelicals are still with us. Maybe we could isolate their supporters from them?
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