Harrison, Taylor, Harding, Trump

• I was doing one of those Rank-the-Presidents exercises and at first I had them like this:

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. FDR
3. JFK
4. James Garfield
5. William McKinley
6. William Henry Harrison
7. Zachary Taylor
8. Warren G. Harding
9. Donald Trump

Then someone was, like, Hey … be careful about including those first five because you don’t want to seem like you’re condoning or encouraging that. And that’s a fair point. I’m trying to be, like, “How long, Oh Lord?” and not, like, drive like Jehu. So OK, fine, shorten the list to account for that.

Just make No. 6 through No. 9 the new No. 1 through No. 4.

Harrison, Taylor, Harding, Trump.

Say it loud and there’s music playing. Say it soft and it’s almost like praying … 

Harrison, Taylor, Harding, Trump.

And then they were, like, “But he’s not on that list yet” and I was, like, “Well, yeah, but could someone get the guy some cherries and iced milk?”

• Checking in on a local news story and find Action News pulling a sleazy trick that goes back to press coverage of the Civil Rights Movement: “The police chief in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, is on leave amid an investigation into a student protest that turned violent.”

Not mentioned in that misleading euphemism is the fact — and it is a fact because everybody around here saw video from several different angles — that the “student protest that turned violent” only “turned violent” because the police chief in question showed up, out of uniform, and just started grabbing kids, putting one girl in a chokehold. Then — and only then — is when all the other girls started wailing on him, taking him to the ground.

So, yes, it’s technically true that this was a “student protest that turned violent” but it is more truthful and more  accurate to say that it was a peaceful student protest that the police chief turned violent by introducing violence — without a badge or a uniform or a warning — to a situation that up until then had been nonviolent.

The community response has been somewhat divided in that some people are insisting that the most important point here is that you should never, ever hit back when a cop starts beating you, while others are saying that the girls had a right to defend themselves from some crazy man that they had no way of knowing was a cop. But the one thing that all sides of this seem to agree on is that watching those girls take him down and ruin his day was, objectively, hilarious.

• On a very similar note, here’s a story from The Guardian last month: “DoJ cases against protesters keep collapsing as officers’ lies are exposed in court.”

Two of the men were arrested and charged, with a 16 January affidavit providing a vivid account of them attacking an officer identified as ERO 1, referring to ICE’s enforcement and removal operations. But on 12 February, prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss both men’s cases, saying: “Newly discovered evidence in this matter is materially inconsistent with the allegations in the complaint affidavit.”

The motion, which a judge granted, sought to have the cases dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning the government could not re-file charges.

ICE director Todd Lyons said ICE and the DoJ had opened an investigation into the case after videos revealed “sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements”, marking a rare acknowledgement of possible wrongdoing by DHS officials.

“It is very unusual for the government to move to dismiss its own case with prejudice,” Frederick Goetz, a lawyer for one of the men, said in an interview. He praised the government for launching investigations: “If you make false statements to a federal agent, that is a crime.”

Goetz said there were other similar cases stemming from the DHS’s “Operation Metro Surge” in the Minneapolis-St Paul region: “Anecdotally, you see a pattern: there are unreasonable uses of force by ICE agents and border patrol. You immediately have stories perpetuated to justify that force: ‘The officer was being attacked. This was an ambush.’ All of that spin is to cast the victims as violent perpetrators. Then the story falls apart once you get the facts.”

• The USS Gerald R. Ford, America’s largest aircraft carrier, is now in the Red Sea, supporting the war/not-“war” on Iran with a tremendous amount of firepower and with several sometimes functioning toilets.

Oh, and the fire in the laundry room was put out with minimal injuries to crew.

• “About 200,000 immigrant truck drivers — virtually all of them in the U.S. legally — will begin losing their commercial driver’s licenses under a Trump administration rule taking effect Monday.”

The distribution centers that supply our store were already struggling to find and keep drivers. This will make that harder for them.

What that means for me and my crew, specifically, is that those DCs will have to deviate from regular deliveries with regular-sized, manageable loads to less regular deliveries with bigger loads than our systems are set up or staffed up to manage easily. It means more 2,200+-piece trucks — more nights where we run out of cages and pallets to unload and sort everything on to. I’m getting tired and sore just thinking about it.

(Worst thing about nights like that isn’t that I’ll have to knock out 300-400 pieces myself, but that I’ll have to do it while also basically giving an inspirational half-time speech the whole time, maintaining the appearance of an upbeat, enthusiastic, optimistic, can-do demeanor for eight hours. Years of theater prepared me to do this but, still, eight hours on stage in character as a peppy extrovert is a long time. (Don’t tell the crew I said this. They already know, but not talking about it helps maintain the necessary illusion.))

I mean, no, the direct and damaging effect that this policy will have on me and my crew — or on our store and its ability to keep stocked with everything our customers need — is not the most important reason this new anti-immigrant trucking policy is bad. It’s not even in the Top 20 reasons this racist, white-nationalist, ethnic-cleansing, anti-immigrant, anti-solidarity, anti-neighbor policy is bad.

The 200,000 hard-working men and women about to lose their livelihood and the incomes their families depend on is a much bigger deal than the strain this is going to put on my bum shoulder and on Joe’s knees and on Ted’s back. And so is the direct assault this entails on the ideals of e pluribus unum, pluralistic democracy, equality under the law, universal human dignity, and love your neighbor and all the rights and freedoms made possible by the pursuit of those ideals.

But it ain’t good news for my shoulder or for Joe’s knees either.