Since the doormat to my office no longer serves as a legal deterrent to raids by federal agents, Lola has taken up guard duty…

In 1934, Herman Göring arrived late to a dinner party in Berlin hosted by the British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Eric Phipps. The pompous president of the Reichstag offered this excuse for his tardiness: “My apologies, I was out hunting.” Phipps quipped in reply to a man he’d already pegged as a sadist, “Animals, I hope.” According to Richard J. Evans, the great British historian of the rise and fall of the Nazis, Göring, the planned successor to Hitler as leader of the Third Reich, was a closet transvestite, “who painted his fingernails, sometimes wore lipstick, and liked to dress as a Roman emperor, in a toga.” Caligula, no doubt. When Göring arrived at the Luxembourg palace, where high-ranking Nazis were held before the Nuremberg trials, the former head of the Luftwaffe brought with him “16 matched and monogrammed suitcases, a red hatbox, and his valet, Robert Krupp.” His fingernails and toenails were varnished a bright red, according to Colonel Burton C. Andrus, the US officer who ran the prison. (See Hitler’s People: the Faces of the Third Reich) Trump, Hegseth, Bovino and Vance, with their passion for facial makeup, fascist haute couture and cruelty, would have fit right in.

John Ganz: “The degree to which they want people to stop saying Nazi and Gestapo is striking. They are trying to do this blackmail where they say if you do it, you’re inciting violence, but even Joe Rogan is saying it, so it’s not working.”

Only days after TikTok came under the control of US investors close to Trump, the platform began suppressing posts on the killings and protests in Minneapolis.

Trump’s solution to what he perceives as his PR problem in Minneapolis is to replace the trigger-happy Gregory Bovino with Border Czar Thomas Homan, the man who created the child-separation policy under Obama and (allegedly) took grocery bags stuffed with cash from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen eager to secure ICE contracts under Trump.

Of course, the main PR advantage Homan gives Trump is that he can blame any of Homan’s “excesses” on Obama, who awarded the brutal immigration cop a Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service, which is like an Iron Cross for deportations.

A note on US geography: the Canadian border is 320 miles north of Minneapolis.

Trump continues to invoke the “insurrection” theme, telling Fox News on Tuesday that “these are paid insurrectionists.” Meaning the protesters, not the Constitutional insurrectionists under his own command. And there are rumors circulating among National Guard members in Minnesota that Trump is primed to invoke the Insurrection Act in the Twin Cities. If so, the Insurrection Act should be imposed against his own DHS, since the insurrection is entirely of their own making.

In the same interview, Trump said the changes in Minneapolis weren’t a “pull back” but merely a “little bit of a change.” He laid the blame for any perceived excesses squarely on Bovino, saying, “Maybe it wasn’t good” to dispatch the trench coat-wearing petty Oberführer to Minneapolis. “He’s a pretty out-there kind of guy.” Just the kind of guys Trump has boasted about in the past.

Two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis, have joined the calls for the ouster of Kristi Noem as Secretary of DHS. But who thinks Noem is really calling the shots? She’s little more than a monosyllabic, puppy-killing, hair-extended, lip-inflated brand model for Stephen Miller’s plan to purge the US of immigrants and dissidents. Rearranging the deck chairs isn’t going to alter the doomed course of this ship of state.

CBP waited nearly three days to confirm that two officers fired their weapons at the unarmed Alex Pretti and their report on the killing doesn’t mention Pretti threatening them with a weapon or attacking the officers, as Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller alleged.

CNN reported that the perjurious Border Patrol prima donna Gregory Bovino has been banned from his social media accounts, which he’ll no doubt find a more excruciating punishment than being exiled back to El Centro.

An infuriated Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the Minnesota Federal District Court, accused ICE of ignoring judicial orders, lying to the court and engaging in “rampant violations of federal law.” In a acidly-written three-page order issued on Monday, the Bush-appointed judge said the court’s “patience is at an end” and demanded that the head of ICE, Todd Lyons, appear before the court to explain the agency’s repeated refusals to abide by court rulings. “The practical consequence of respondents’ failure to comply has almost always been significant hardship to aliens (many of whom have lawfully lived and worked in the United States for years and done absolutely nothing wrong),” wrote Schiltz. “The detention of an alien is extended, or an alien who should remain in Minnesota is flown to Texas, or an alien who has been flown to Texas is released there and told to figure out a way to get home.”

In the latest trampling of free speech rights, FBI Director Kash Patel said this week that the Agency will begin investigating Minnesotans who use the Signal messaging app to track ICE movements.

A new website, “Combatting DHS Misinformation,” exposing lies and misinformation by Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, has been set up by employees of the Minnesota Department of Corrections. According to Minnesota Corrections official Safia Khan:

We are witnessing the machinery of propaganda operate at scale. So we fought back with facts. We released proof, footage, and records showing that ICE arrests being touted on federal websites were, in reality, routine, pre-scheduled state-to-federal custody transfers, not a result of Operation Metro Surge…The Department of Corrections alone has identified at least 68 false claims, and we have made every one of them public. Our team didn’t seek this fight, but we have met it with clarity and resolve.

According to private chats among ICE agents that fell into the acquisitive hands of Ken Kippenstein, one of them texted, “Ten versus one and somehow they couldn’t find a way to subdue the guy or use a less-than-lethal. They all carry belts and vests with 9,000 pieces of equipment on them and the best they can do is shoot a guy in the back?”

Clark Neil, a lawyer at Cato who was one of the attorneys in the Heller case before the Supremes, which expanded gun rights, backs my contention (Where the Sidewalk Ends, the Lies Begin) that this is a make-or-break moment for the pro-gun lobby…

Law professors Barry Friedman and Steve Vladeck writing in the NYT on the legal challenges of prosecuting federal officers for the shootings in Minneapolis:

A series of decisions by the Supreme Court has made it all but impossible to hold federal officers liable for damages in federal lawsuits for violating our constitutional rights, such as in a February 2020 decision involving a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed an unarmed teenager without provocation. Instead, the historical backstop for a lack of federal accountability, going all the way back to the founding, has been state law…[But] the ability to prosecute federal law enforcement officers who commit state crimes in the course of their duties would turn on whether a reasonable officer in their position would have believed that their actions were necessary to fulfill their duties. That standard may be appropriately strict, to maintain federal authority when it is needed (think of federal protection for civil rights protesters in the 1960s), but at least based on the videos so many of us have seen, it should not be impossible.”

Since July, the Trump administration declared 16 shootings by immigration agents justified before the investigations have even been completed. Some of the investigations hadn’t even started yet. Why waste time and money when the conclusion is foregone?

In defiance of Congress, ICE has failed to disclose information on the deaths of at least 8 people being held in its detention prisons since last........

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