Another step on the road to fascism.

The Trump administration plans to reinstate in full a program that provides local police departments with military surplus equipment such as large-caliber weapons and grenade launchers, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

Sure. Why would we not want a completely militarized police force? We have no history at all of cops abusing their power, so why not trust them with tanks, missiles, machine guns?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is expected to announce the changes to the program on Monday when he speaks at a Fraternal Order of Police conference in Nashville. It was not immediately clear why Mr. Sessions would announce changes to a Pentagon program, but he

Trump this morning. No tweets of his own yet, but he pointedly retweeted these three items.

Finally, as if by accident, the @washingtonpost breaks down & admits the truth about where the violence is coming from https://t.co/n9L1XclpDg

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 28, 2017

DSouza was retweeting the Post:

Black-clad antifa attack peaceful right wing demonstrators in Berkeley https://t.co/M5OxN2vaBR

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 28, 2017

Geddit? It’s not the far-right, it’s not white supremacists, it’s THE LEFT, just as he said at that press conference. There are no white racists, there are only Very Fine People; the bad people are all on the left.

Next.

Your boss pardoned a traitor who gave U.S. enemies state secrets, he also

A few days ago the UN condemned Trump’s racist outbursts since Charlottesville.

Without mentioning Mr. Trump by name, a body of United Nations experts on Wednesday denounced “the failure at the highest political level of the United States of America to unequivocally reject and condemn” racist violence, saying it was “deeply concerned by the example this failure could set for the rest of the world.”

Mr. Trump’s wavering responses to the violence — he has blamed “many sides,” but also singled out the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups and white supremacists for condemnation — has roiled his administration, but also unsettled rights advocates around the world.

“We were shocked and horrified by what happened,” the committee’s chairwoman, Anastasia

Elizabeth Williamson at the Times on Pres-i-dent Trump and the babysitters.

The epigraph:

“You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me?”

— Donald Trump to Paul Manafort in “Devil’s Bargain,” by Joshua Green.

Why yes, Don, of course you’re a baby to us. You act like a baby. You talk like a baby, you have no idea how to think, just as a baby does.

He lives in the White House, where he gets two scoops of ice cream instead of one for dessert. He is commander in chief, eating “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake” with the

Business Insider argues that Trump’s pardon of Arpaio, coupled with his asking Sessions months ago if he could get the case dropped, undercuts the claim by Trump allies that he didn’t actually order Comey to drop the Flynn investigation, he merely expressed a hope.

When Trump allegedly asked Sessions this past spring whether it would be possible to drop the federal criminal investigation into Arpaio, Sessions told Trump such a move would be inappropriate, but that Trump could pardon Arpaio if he was convicted, The Post reported, citing three people familiar with the conversation.

Trump ultimately granted the pardon on Friday evening, sparking fierce backlash from liberals and some conservatives.

But some legal analysts also pointed out that

This happened.

On August 24, the Trump administration’s Department of Energy censored a Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science proposal from Dr. Jennifer Bowen, an associate professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

She posted a screenshot of the email on Facebook, writing, “This just happened. I’m just going to leave this here for people to ponder.”

In the email, Dr. Bowen was told, “I have been asked to contact you to update the wording in your proposal abstract to remove words such as ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change.’ This is being asked as we have to meet the president’s budget language restrictions and don’t want to make any changes without your knowledge or

Philip Bump at the Post has drawn up a master list of all the protections and rules Trump has undone.

We’ve seen most of them before but a master list is always good to have.

Samples:

Revoked an executive order that mandated compliance by contractors with laws protecting women in the workplace. Prior to the 2014 order, a report found that companies with federal contracts worth millions of dollars had scores of violations of labor and civil rights laws.

Cancelled a rule mandating that financial advisers act in the best interests of their clients.

Repeal of a bill that mandated that employers maintain records of workplace injuries.

Rescinded an Obama effort to reduce mandatory sentences. Attorney General Jeff

Noah Feldman at Bloomberg says pardoning Arpaio would be an attack on the judiciary itself.

Arpaio was convicted this July by Judge Susan Bolton of willfully and intentionally violating an order issued to him in 2011 by a different federal judge, G. Murray Snow.

The order arose out of a civil suit against Arpaio brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, accusing him of violating the law by detaining undocumented immigrants simply for lacking legal status.

Snow issued a preliminary injunction that ordered Arpaio to stop running so-called saturation patrols — police sweeps that essentially stopped people who looked Latino and detained those who were deemed undocumented. The basic idea was that the profiling, warrantless stops and detention were

Who knew that Trump had a “spiritual adviser”? Let alone more than one, so that one among them is the chief. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a more of the earth earthy human. This is a guy who talks about “beautiful chocolate cake” in the same breath with missile strikes. But apparently he does.

Televangelist and pastor Paula White has known Donald Trump since the early 2000s, and she is thought to be the president’s closest spiritual adviser. She prayed at his inauguration, appeared with him when he signed his executive order easing restrictions on pastors engaging in politics, and told evangelical TV host Jim Bakker she is in the White House at least weekly these days. This

Don Lemon is knocked sideways.

CNN's @donlemon on President Trump's speech in Phoenix: "What we have witnessed was a total eclipse of the facts" https://t.co/qAxwCSSJfq pic.twitter.com/aPCwbyJTQ4

— CNN (@CNN) August 23, 2017

… Read the rest