Remember when we heard about the government swooping down with black helicopters and scoping up Americans from the streets? Didn’t most of us think those were survivalist paranoid fantasies? I know I did. And, yet, now we have unmarked soldiers in unmarked vans grabbing protesters off the streets of Portland, Oregon, which, last time I checked, is part of the United States.
The Mayor and Governor want them to leave, but these federal forces have been deployed because the dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security, under the direction of Acting Deputy Director, Ken Cuccinelli, has decided that they needed to intervene. Their basis was essentially a political attack on the Mayor who, as a Democrat, is apparently fair game.
Where are the protests from conspiracy theorists on the Right? Would this happen in a town and state governed by Republicans? Can you even imagine what the response would be if Obama had done this?
I just wish the same concern would be shown toward the spiraling cases of COVID 19.
Oh, well. We have a whole host of things happening that are scary. As someone who finds the violence of some protesters abhorrent, it seems to me that local officials have a better sense of how to move forward in their own communities than an Acting Deputy Director who could never be confirmed by the Senate because of his past performance and public statements.
I will enjoy talking to the small-government crowd once there is a Democrat in the White House. As those of us who liked the growth of the power of the President when our party was in power have learned, the price of tinkering with power can be very high indeed.
From This Corner 
What do we think about the 200 federal agents en route to Kansas City?
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https://www.npr.org/2020/07/13/890539487/romeo-juliet-in-rwanda-how-a-soap-opera-sought-to-change-a-nation
In 1994, the Hutu-led government of Rwanda led a systematic campaign to wipe out members of the Tutsi minority. At first, the people participating were tied to the government—military leaders, local mayors and police. But soon, thousands of ordinary people were encouraged or bullied into taking part in the killing. Shopkeepers and farmers, fathers and husbands slaughtered their own friends and neighbors, using basic farm tools like hoes and machetes. Often they killed in broad daylight, in the most public of settings, like churches, hospitals, and even schools.
By the time the Rwandan Patriotic Front defeated the Hutu government, just 100 days after the mass executions began, the country was in ruins. As many as one million people were dead, including about three quarters of the Tutsi population.
For Ervin Staub, a Jewish psychologist who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust in Hungary some 50 years earlier, it all seemed eerily familiar. A genocide had unfolded, and yet again, the world had sat on its hands and done nothing. And now, after a lifetime of studying genocide and how to work toward reconciliation, Ervin felt he had to act. He wanted to know, how do you convince people who once slaughtered each other to join hands and make peace? Is it possible to change a person’s deepest beliefs?
His answer would take him to the Rwandan capital of Kigali. There, with a team of Rwandans, they would try an unusual social experiment on a national scale: a radio soap opera.
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I agree that if a Republican was in office in Portland this would not be happening. I find Trump to be mean, petty and truly evil. He covid-19 response has been horrible and his buddy the Florida governor is one of his greatest supporters which I hate. The disease is getting much worse in Florida as a result of his nor leadership.
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Where are those defenders of our freedoms from the armed right? Good question. I believe they are in their lawn chairs…getting sun,,,with the rest of the sunshine patriots, although even those guys would make these so called patriots look good.
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