There is a group of people who monitor deportation flights out of Boeing Field, and other airports.

The observation room at Boeing Field offers what is arguably America’s best real-time window into our vast network of privately run deportation flights, a system that has generated troubling reports of passenger mistreatment and in-flight emergencies.
…
While news organizations have reported on some of these incidents aboard what the government calls ICE Air, key details about how the system works would still be hidden were it not for a group of researchers who are now part of the work inside the observation room.

The people and organizations behind these flights have been playing dumb for years — they don’t want to talk about them. They drive busses loaded with people right up to the boarding stairs for these planes; they position jailers and vehicles to obscure any view of the people being herded into the planes. They don’t want us to know about them.

The Washington human rights center’s investigation of ICE Air began in 2018 with a modest goal: to prove that deportation operations took place at King County International Airport, as Boeing Field is officially known. Liberal local officials had enacted various “sanctuary” policies to insulate their residents from then-President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants, but they were unaware (or could at least claim to be unaware) of ICE flights at the county-owned airport. “They all played dumb,” said Maru Mora Villalpando of the immigrant rights group La Resistencia. “All of them were like, ‘Wait, what, there are deportations happening here?’”

Yes, we know they are, thanks to dedicated defenders of civil liberties who try to monitor these flights.

The center began gathering documents that proved it, and also hinted at the worldwide breadth of ICE Air’s network. Their investigation grew. Through records requests to ICE, and after interventions by Washington’s congressional delegation, researchers obtained an ICE Air database spanning eight years of global operations: 1.73 million passenger records from nearly 15,000 flights to and from 88 U.S. airports — Boeing Field indeed among them — and to 134 international airports in 119 countries around the world.

Those dang liberals in Western Washington state began shutting off support to these flights, and ICE began getting even more secretive about them.

A game of cat and mouse had begun, pitting the Trump administration — and later the Biden administration — against local sanctuary advocates.

First, ICE switched locations. It began charter operations out of a municipal airport in the small city of Yakima, located in the farming region about three hours east of Seattle.

But activists began showing up at the Yakima airfield, recording tail numbers and keeping count of people being deported.

Second, ICE changed its flight numbering system. The human rights center had disclosed in its 2019 report that it used the federally assigned prefix “RPN-” for “repatriate” to plug information into free flight-tracking websites and obtain a plane’s tail number and ownership. So ICE dropped the “RPN-” and adopted the call signs of its various charter companies.

Wait a minute…if these flights are perfectly legal, why is ICE trying to hide them?

I repeat: WHY ANY SECRECY AT ALL?

And why does ICE only release strongly edited, even blurred, images of detainees on flights? It’s almost as if they think we might see some brutality.

The 97 videos ProPublica examined, ranging in length from 22 seconds to almost 3 minutes, show signs of careful framing and editing. While detainees are commonly shown climbing the steps in handcuffs and the waist chains that secure them, the videos often cut to a new shot before leg shackles can make an appearance. When leg shackles are visible, they are typically out of focus, discernible only if you know to look for them.

It is common on ICE Air to place passengers in five-point restraints — wrists, ankles, and waists in chains — even as the agency’s own statistics show that less than half of the people deported in 2023 had any kind of criminal conviction, let alone for serious felonies that could suggest a possible risk to others on board.

What ICE’s online videos don’t show is revealing in its own right. In spring 2023, the center obtained a series of ICE Air incident reports detailing various accidents during charter operations, including the one in which a detainee in Alexandria, Louisiana, tumbled down the boarding stairs. Agency investigators recommended that contractors and subcontractors avoid such accidents in the future by placing a guard midway up the stairs to help detainees board and to catch any who lose their balance.

You will not be surprised that ICE has not bothered to place those guards, thanks to the diligent work of outside observers, documenting everything despite the best efforts of ICE to conceal them.

The flights continue. They will increase in numbers, if Republicans get their way.

But, you say, I am a native born American. I’m not at risk of deportation. Consider this: “A relatively overlooked set of companies whose shares have also seen stellar surges are the controversial American private prison firms. “

The immediate reading of the prison stock rally is that the Republicans have positioned themselves as ‘tough on crime’ – though former President Bill Clinton did much to bring the Democratic party to the game as well – meaning that the number of incarcerated persons under the Trump administration is likely to increase.

There are already about 1.9 million people in American prisons – about 0.5% of the U.S. population, estimated at 345 million in 2024 – per the data from the Prison Policy Initiative.

It is worth pointing out that the figure is comparable to incarceration rates in the USSR at the height of the infamous GULAG System. Adam Gopnik even wrote in 2012 that the U.S. has more people under ‘correctional supervision’ than the Soviet Union ever did.

(By the way, screw Bill Clinton, too.)

I think a clear sign of an expanding fascist state is the police hiding their activities, as well as an eager industry looking forward to building even more prisons.

I lived for 8 years under President Ronald Reagan, a shallow, stupid, evil man who wrecked the economy and laughed as gay men, and others, died of AIDS, who made deals with our enemies to get elected, and I said, “at least it can’t get worse than this.”

I lived for 8 years under President George W. Bush, a bumbling incompetent, a spoiled scion of Texan wealth, a man who got us into a wasteful, pointless war with the wrong country and killed over half a million people, and I said, “at least it can’t get worse than this.”

Then I lived for 4 years under President Donald Trump, a narcissistic grifter, a rapist, a racist, a convicted felon, a misogynist, a man who promised to deport 20 million people, a demagogue who threatened vengeance on Americans who opposed him, a senile monster, and we re-elected him.

I am now wise enough to finally say, “It will get much, much worse.” We have the president the American people deserve.

My deepest apologies to the millions who will suffer and die in the near future.

I went to the polls as soon as they opened. Here in small town America, voting is painless — no lines, no problems, just instant service and quick gratification.

However, it did feel a bit grim and unsatisfying. I felt like I’d been sent out to stop a raging, drug-addled hippopotamus with a hatpin, and my vote was just the tiniest little pinprick. I’ll feel better about it if everyone gets out there with their individually ineffectual hatpin and stabs the beast to the heart. We can do it!

The news is hideous and diseased — every new poll inspires a frenzy of speculation, and gets promoted heavily on the networks, depending on whether the results meet their biases or not. Unfortunately, that provides an incentive to the Poll Industry to do more polls and to found more polling companies, further undermining their credibility. The latest flurry of rabid prognostication was triggered by a poll that suggested Iowans might favor Harris.

I honestly don’t give a fuck. I have come to despise both polls and the media’s reliance on them to generate “news”.

I am pleased to see that Bob agrees with me.

P.S. Especially Nate Silver, you can just fuck off to the moon.

I guess we’ve fixed everything in this state, because the DFL has stuck a provision in our latest funding bill that prohibits beaver eating. It’s only under special circumstances, though: you can’t eat “nuisance beavers” that you killed to stop them from flooding your farm with their dams, but if you killed them because you trap them for their fur, yeah, go ahead, you can chow down on that fine furry beaver. Nuisance beavers can still be used for fur, castor oil, or taxidermy, just no eating allowed.

It’s a very peculiar law, because nobody can explain why this rule has been inserted. The Republicans are rightly peeved at this goofy and unnecessary regulation, and the DFL is being evasive and not explaining the purpose.

…a Senate DFL spokesperson issued a statement saying the conference committee dealt with “multiple provisions related to beavers coming from both chambers. This language emerged from many conversations between the House, Senate, DNR, and governor’s office.’’

It sounds like there was a lot of concern about beavers, and I wonder if maybe there might have been more significant issues to address. Apparently not; Minnesota has achieved policy perfection.

Why beavers? I have two hypotheses. One is that it was to give Minnesota Republicans something to do — it’s a distraction. They’re busy right now bragging about how they’ve all eaten beaver.

“I eat beaver. It’s fine,’’ Wesenberg said. “No one is going to get in trouble for doing it. I don’t know why it’s in the bill.’’

OK, dude, I’m happy for you.

My other hypothesis is that this is a cunning anti-Catholic ploy. The Catholic Church decided beaver was a fish and therefore you were allowed to eat all the beaver you want during Lent. This law will deny good Catholic farmers a traditional dish, apparently on a whim.

Don’t say I never criticize Democrats. This is a useless law that accomplishes nothing (they even say it won’t be policed or enforced) and justifies complaints that they’re going to pad the legal system with stupid regulations.

I thought that Americans were generally opposed to aristocracy and the concept of nobility. We even had the sentiment written into our Constitution!

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Some of us have that principle imbedded in our generally held principles, but to be real about it, there have always been Americans who desire and envy the label of an unearned title. They’re generally conservative and rich, but those snobs are honestly American. They’re just wrong.

So what kind of person would happily accept a title of nobility from a foreign organization? Would you believe it would be arch-“originalist”, worshipper of their interpretation of the Constitution, Founding Father cultist, and Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito?

The Intelligencer has a story today that actually happened several years ago but — not unlike Alito’s Upside-Down Flag nonsense — didn’t register with the public at the time. As we noted last week, Alito has been taking expensive gifts — as the conservative Supreme Court justices are wont to do! — from a right-wing German princess, but it turns out he’s been cultivating more ties to the European aristocracy.

It turns out the last time Donald Trump was president, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Dobbs decision setting women’s health care back a few centuries, added a knighthood to his own résumé, pledging an oath to the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George. The knighthood, bestowed in 2017, wasn’t widely reported at the time, but the order’s website was updated in July with Alito’s investiture on the front page.

Cool. I can see where Alito would find the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George appealing — it’s an extremely Catholic organization that fawns over the Papacy. It has only 3000 members and seems to be mainly about grandiloquent cosplaying with elaborate symbols and rituals (they also have a charitable angle of providing food aid to stricken communities in Europe, to their credit). It’s mostly harmless and just a kind of stupid posturing, but sheesh, a Supreme Court justice ought to avoid flagrantly violating the letter of the Constitution…

Oh. Wait. Our current crop of Supreme Court justices are all about partisan bias and shredding the egalitarian principles of the Constitution.

Never mind.

Here’s a doozy from the always reliable source of an anonymous far right nobody pontificating on Twitter.

The first part might be right — the economy will be devastated by a Trump victory followed by mass deportations and firings. The last bit? Where the economy will be magically restored by people realizing this will be good for us? That’s pure fantasy, wishful thinking, nothing but moonshine. But hey, the belief in an all-powerful head of state with total control of everyone’s lives worked for North Korea, so maybe we should give it a shot. It’s not as if Republicans haven’t given us sound financial advice since the Reagan years.

Something has sucked all the fun out of Hallowe’en. I wonder what it is?

Oh, yeah, goddamit.

You know what else it’s going to ruin? The echoes are going to wreck Thanksgiving, and also Christmas. Everyone, just go vote next week and then stay the fuck home.

While the Republican Party is busy covering the racism angle, Elon Musk is, in his @America account, making sure the misogynists know to vote for the convicted rapist.

It’s part of a misleading and suggestive ad.

Warning: This ad contains multiple instances of the ‘C Word.’ Viewer discretion is advised. Kamala Harris is a ‘C word.’ You heard that right. A big ole ‘C word.’ In fact, all of the other ‘C words’ think she’s the biggest ‘C word’ of them all. That’s right. She’s a tax-hiking, regulation-loving, gun-grabbing communist. And the worst part? She’s proud of it. Kamala Harris: the ‘C word America simply can’t afford. See you nationwide Tuesday, November 5th.

It ultimately reveals that the “C word” it is talking about isn’t the usual misogynistic slur (but you know you’re supposed to think it). She’s a communist. What stupid nonsense — I know communists, and I have to tell you, Elon, Kamala Harris is no communist.

The ad might be more persuasive if it used the correct “C word”: Kamala Harris is a capitalist, and yes, she is proud of it.

Only one week until the election, and a few months of bickering, lying, and phony lawsuits until we can possibly get down to the business of grabbing guns and imposing regulations, not that I think that will actually happen if the Democrats win.