Hurricane Harvey by the numbers

We have no metric for the human suffering caused by Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath of floods, but here are some numerical estimates:

1.   27 Trillion (yes, that's a T) gallons of rainwater dumped on Texas and Louisiana over six days, enough to supply New York City's water needs for 50 years.

2.  35   47 storm-related fatalities confirmed thus far.

3.  51.88 inches of rainfall, the highest measured in any single storm in history in the continental U.S., and only slightly less than the U.S. record of 52.0 inches from Hurricane Hiki in Hawaii in 1950.   Compare:  Hurricane Katrina, 17 inches;  Superstorm Sandy, 7 inches.

4.  34,575 people forced out of their homes and currently in shelters;  224,227 customers without electricity.

5.  506 highways currently closed or flooded.

6.  30,000 to 40,000 homes estimated to have been destroyed, with a total of 100,000 affected by wind or water damage.

___________

Estimates reported by HuffPost, from various sources.

Floods -- a man-made disaster

Hurricane Harvey dumped over 50 inches of rain on some areas of Houston, more than they usually get in an entire year.  The Associated Press' Jason Samenow reports that: "This flood event is on an entirely different scale than what we've seen before in the United States."  The Wisconsin Space Science and Engineering Center has determined that it "is a 1-in-1000 year flood event that has overwhelmed an enormous section of Southeast Texas equivalent in size to New Jersey."

Such a wide flooded area has never before happened in the 100+ years that historical records have been kept.   A "1-in-1000 year event" means the chance of happening in any year is 0.1% -- or expected to happen once in a thousand years.  Of course, these estimates are difficult to validate, given the paucity of data at such extremes.

But here is a fact supplied by the authoritative author of "the" book on floods, Michael Grunwald, a guest on "All In With Chris Hayes" on Wednesday.  Grunwald pointed out that, while a "500 year flood event" would be expected once in 500 years, there have in fact been three "500 year flood events" in the Houston area in the last three years.   That's right:   one each in 2015, 2016, and now 2017.

So what's going on here?   Either this predictive scheme is way off -- or something is happening that is changing the weather.   Could that something be climate changes that are caused by the effects of our human activities?

There is near-unanimous agreement among scientists that our climate is being affected by man-made acvtivities and that rainfall has become more intense in recent decades.   That seems well-established, despite right-wing denial.  Grunwald, however, brings up another point that needs to be considered alongside climate change itself.  It also has to do with the effect of human activity.

Grunwald says:  "Storms are natural events, but floods are almost always man-made disasters."   He explains that, when a flood occurs where there is no human habitation, it doesn't matter.   Water overflows river banks, stays a while, and gets reabsorbed into the earth or flows back and moves on downstream.  That's it.

We have trouble when humans cover over large areas of water-absorbing earth with paved parking areas or buildings or shopping centers;   and then they put up structures that obstruct the natural flow of water, like dams, canals, or large drainpipes pouring water into containment areas that can overflow.    Floods cause trouble for humans, because humans have obstructed the natural flow and absorption of excess water.

This becomes especially problematic with growth of large cities, especially in low-lying areas near the coast.   Houston has rapidly grown to be the U.S.'s 4th largest city. It's downtown elevation has traditionally been considered to be 50 feet above sea level, but a recent study of the effects of rising sea level as a result of melting arctic ice, puts the elevation at 42 feet above sea level, with further shrinkage predicted if the sea level continues to rise.   Houston is about 50 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, with other bodies of water and rivers in and around the city.

Another problem discussed by Grunwald is the National Flood Insurance Program, ostensibly an effort to help people get flood insurance, which is required to get a mortgage for building in a 100-year flood zone.   The truth, however, is that despite the requirement, only about 15% of people actually continue the insurance.   The unintended consequence is that this program, meant to help, has in fact subsidized and incentivized living in flood plains, where land is cheaper.  But building there makes flooding more likely.

Back to Grunwald's original point:   the reason these floods are so devastating is that large numbers of people are living in areas likely to flood.   If people didn't build there, a flood would not be such a big deal.

So Houston hits all the wrong buttons:  they have the problem of rapid growth, low-lying and water-adjacent lowlands, near the Gulf coast, the great need for inexpensive housing, lax regulatory enforcement, and a federal assistance program that encourages building in risky places.   So Houston becomes inundated, again and again, by nature being nature -- and by humans being short-sighted.

Add to that the effects of a warming climate due to human activities, which melts arctic ice, raising sea levels, and warmer air meaning air over water becomes even more saturated -- all leads to these 50 inch rains.   Ergo, floods.

We should stop blaming nature . . .  and look in the mirror for the culprit.

Ralph

Trump's support erodes in MI, WI, and PA - the three states that tipped the election

An NBC/Marist poll, conducted August 13-17, shows that President Trump's job approval rating has fallen below 40% in the three rust-belt states in which narrow wins put him in the White House.

Michigan:   36% approve, 55% disapprove
Pennsylvania:  35% approve, 54% disapprove
Wisconsin:  34% approve, 56% disapprove

In all three states, 60% of voters say that Trump's conduct as president has embarrassed them;   while just 25% say he has made them proud.   And 60% in all three states say that the U.S.'s role on the world stage has weakened under Trump.

However, when it comes to the economy, Trump gets better ratings.  Those saying it has strengthened under Trump have a slight lead: MI (42% to 39%) and PA (45% to 38%) and are tied in WI (41% to 41%).

Correcting statement about FEMA leader

In my post on Saturday, August 26, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Harvey's devastating blow to southeast Texas cities, I incorrectly stated that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was without a permanent administrator and that President Trump had not even submitted a nomination to fill the post.

That was incorrect, and I apologize for relying on my memory rather than checking.   In fact, Trump did nominate the experienced, highly capable William "Brock" Long in April, and he was confirmed by the Senate in June by a vote of 95 to 4.

A former FEMA official under President Bill Clinton, Mark Merritt, says of Long that he is "probably one of the best prepared the country could ask for."  Long has nearly two decades of experience working in emergency management and planning, including the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and as regional hurricane leader for FEMA.

According to HuffPost's Chris D'Angelo, Todd has received accolades from environmental groups as one who "will work toward better preparing the country for climate change-driven extreme weather."

We can only hope that the example of his FEMA chief and the devastation from Hurricane Harvey on Texas will have an effect on President Trump.  His FEMA budget proposal for 2018 slashed funding for local and state programs by $667 million, and it cut $190 million from the National Flood Insurance Program.  In addition, he scrapped an Obama-era rule requiring that agencies consider the rising sea levels from climate change in construction standards for highways and infrastructure to withstand flooding.

So, while I apologize for failing to credit President Trump with having actually made a very good appointment to head FEMA, I now call on him to listen to this highly qualified FEMA head he has chosen and take his advice in his budgetary planning to deal with future climate-change-caused disasters.

Ralph

Trumps OK's handing out military battle gear to local police, reversing Obama ban

Sometimes I get the impression that President Trump is applying no discernment or judgment when it comes to reversing the regulations the Obama administration put on a wide range of areas -- to protect the environment, to ensure that banks maintain sound asset to loan ratios, to protect consumers from credit card excess fees, to protect workers from harmful conditions, to ensure standards for education and health care, to prevent local police from abuses of power, and a myriad other things.

True, nobody likes to deal with all the bureaucracy that regulations entail, least of all small business owners on whom it is an onerous task, relative to their staff size.

But Trump has gone "de-regulate" on a universal scale.  The only thing that comes to mind that he hasn't deregulated, or plans to, is air traffic control, and he's making noises about privatizing it.    Heck, his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, even had a plan he was pushing to privatize the whole Afghanistan War to Blackstone's mercenary soldiers.   Fortunately, that last crazy scheme died with Bannon's exit from the White House.

So I'm not sure how much it is that Trump just really hates regulations himself (he has one of the least regulated minds this side of insanity) -- and how much he just wants to erase Barack Obama, along with everything he accomplished and stood for.

Trump's unstated mantra seems to be:   "If Obama did it, I'll undo it."

His latest reversal (unless he does something else between now and the time I post this) is cancelling Obama's restrictions on what surplus military combat hardware could be acquired by local police departments.

This came to attention during the aftermath of the police killing of an unarmed young black man in Ferguson, Missouri, when peaceful demonstrating crowds were met by police in a heavily armored vehicle with a machine gun on top, using battlefield grenade launchers to fire tear gas canisters into the crowds.

The effect of such a show of military-style force was later analyzed by progressive experts on crowd control and handling of riots and deemed to be counter-productive.   It sends a message of an army fighting against invading insurgents.

It is the very antithesis of "community based policing" that has proved effective in Dallas and other cities, where policing has much in common with community organization work, along with its law enforcement. function.  One of its basic tenets is building trust between residents and police, so that people feel safe and motivated to cooperate with the police to keep their own neighborhoods safe.

Advances that were made over the past few years under Obama and his Justice Department are rapidly being undercut and destroyed by President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.   They are stuck in the past "law and order" mentality, such as ordering judges to return to giving maximum prison time sentences in drug trials.

Trump revels in feeding red meat to his dwindling right-wing base.   So he's pandering to them with rhetoric about "giving the police the equipment they need to do their job," and by pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was "convicted of doing his job" and "keeping our borders safe."

Even without the politics, I don't believe either Trump or Sessions is capable of seeing social problems through any lens but the authoritarian one.   While making military battlefield equipment available again does not, in and of itself, signal a move toward fascism, it certainly does nothing to assuage those fears that have legitimately emerged from statements, attitudes, and actions coming from Trump himself -- actions such as pardoning Arpaio for violating suspects' constitutional rights and  for his long-standing abuses of power.

Ralph

On experiencing eclipse "totality" . . .

photo by NASA

Eclipse fever has waned now.   It's full experience, I fear, got smothered  by other headline-grabbing news by our grabber-in-chief.   So let's revisit the experience, as described by two people who saw it in the path of total exclipse.

Tariq Malik, a 16 year veteran reporter covering space exploration, was asked by Space.com to describe his experience in the moment of "totality."  He was observing the eclipse from Carbondale, Illinois;  and he said that, in all his years of space reporting, he had never felt anything like this.

"I feel small.  I fell like the universe.  And connected to everything in between."

Writer Helen MacDonald described her previous experience of eclipse totality for a New York Times Magazine special eclipse section, August, 6, 2017.

"March 6, 2016.  I stood on a crowded beach in Turkey and waited until, at the allotted time, with a chorus of screams and cheers and whistles and applause, the sun slid away;  and impossibly, impossibly, we saw above us a stretch of black sky and in the middle of it a hole, blacker than anything I'd ever seen, fringed with a ring of soft, white fire.  My heart jumped up to my throat, and my face grew hot with tears.  I fell to my knees, feeling tiny and huge, and as lonely as I've ever been, but also astonishingly close to the crowds around me.

"Totality--that point of a solar eclipse where the sun is entirely covered by the moon--is incomprehensible.  Your mind can't grasp any of it, not the dark, nor the sunset clouds on the horizon, nor the stars, just that extraordinary wrongness, up there, that pulls the eyes toward it.  I stared up at the hole in the sky and then at the figures around me, and became gripped by the conviction that my life was over, that I was kneeling in the underworld in the company of all the shades of the dead.  It was bitterly cold.  A loose wind blew through the darkness. 

"But then . . . from the lower edge of the blank, black disk of the dead sun burst a perfect point of brilliance.  It leapt and burned, unthinkably fierce and bright, something absurdly like a word.  I'm not a person of faith, but even so,  the sun's reappearance as the moon drew away seemed like the first line of Genesis retold."  ["Let there be light."]

photo by bbc.com

"Is it all set to rights, now?  I thought.  Is all remade?   From a bay tree, stuck into existence a moment ago, a songbird, a white spectacled bulbul, called a greeting to the new dawn."

*   *   *   *   *

I'm struck by how both of them had what sounds like others' descriptions of "cosmic" feelings:  the simultaneous awareness of how tiny we are in the scope of the universe, but how -- as part of that universe -- we encompass the vastness, all boundaries erased in the exhilarating expansiveness of time and space.

Ralph

Divided America exemplified in two views of Trump's pardon of Sheriff Arpaio

Donald Trump did not create the division in America, but he has exploited it and amplified it, as he would say, bigly.   Nowhere is this division more sharply defined than in our attitudes toward racial minorities and undocumented immigrants.

In Trump's recent presidential pardon of former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, this divide screams loud and clear, not only in attitudes about the pardon, but in the sharp difference in what we read and believe are the facts.

Here are two contrasting editorials about the pardon:  one by the liberal New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman;  one published by FoxNews, written by James Fotis, former law enforcement officer and former executive director of the Law Enforcement Alliance of America.

====================

Paul Krugman, from "Fascism, American Style"

New York Times, August 28, 2017

As sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio engaged in blatant racial discrimination. His officers systematically targeted Latinos, often arresting them on spurious charges and at least sometimes beating them up when they questioned those charges. Read the report from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, and prepare to be horrified.

Once Latinos were arrested, bad things happened to them. Many were sent to Tent City, which Arpaio himself proudly called a “concentration camp,” where they lived under brutal conditions, with temperatures inside the tents sometimes rising to 145 degrees.

And when he received court orders to stop these practices, he simply ignored them, which led to his eventual conviction — after decades in office — for contempt of court. But he had friends in high places, indeed in the highest of places. We now know that Donald Trump tried to get the Justice Department to drop the case against Arpaio, a clear case of attempted obstruction of justice. And when that ploy failed, Trump, who had already suggested that Arpaio was “convicted for doing his job,” pardoned him.

By the way, about “doing his job,” it turns out that Arpaio’s officers were too busy rounding up brown-skinned people and investigating President Barack Obama’s birth certificate to do other things, like investigate cases of sexually abused children. Priorities!

,,

Let’s call things by their proper names here. Arpaio is, of course, a white supremacist. But he’s more than that. There’s a word for political regimes that round up members of minority groups and send them to concentration camps, while rejecting the rule of law: What Arpaio brought to Maricopa, and what the president of the United States has just endorsed, was fascism, American style.

So how did we get to this point?

Trump’s motives are easy to understand. For one thing, Arpaio, with his racism and authoritarianism, really is his kind of guy. For another, the pardon is a signal to those who might be tempted to make deals with the special investigator as the Russia probe closes in on the White House: Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.

Finally, standing up for white people who keep brown people down pleases Trump’s base, whom he’s going to need more than ever as the scandals creep closer and the big policy wins he promised keep not happening.

*   *   *   *   *

[Let me (RR) add from what I just heard discussed on MSNBC's "The Beat With Ari Melber."   The Supreme Court has ruled on a prior case that it is a violation of constitutional rights for people to be stopped and detained by police merely on the grounds of suspicion that they might be here in the US illegally.   There has to be some other reason for a police officer to ask them for identification.  What Arpaio had his men doing is exactly what SCOTUS has ruled unconstitutional.

[A letter writer to the New York Times, Greg Joseph, a long-time resident of Sun City, Arizona, wrote:
"The damage that Mr. Arpaio did to the state and to this community is incalculable, and he did it by flouting not only the law as set down in the Constitution but the law of human decency as well.

"It became a common sight to see his deputies harassing Hispanic-looking people for no other reason than their appearance.  The result was not only to terrorize that segment of our community but also to worsen racial tensions.  His widely reported and condemned inhumane treatment of prisoners . . . built a hatred and resentment in them . . ."]

=================

James Fotis, from "Trump's Pardon of Ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio Was the Right (and Courageous) Thing to Do."  FoxNews,com, August 26, 2017

President Trump stood up for justice and for enforcement of our immigration laws when he courageously granted a pardon Friday to Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. Despite knowing he would face criticism, the president did what was right.

Arpaio was convicted by a federal judge in July of criminal contempt after being charged with violating a court order that attempted to prevent suspected illegal immigrants from being targeted by the sheriff’s traffic patrols. The sheriff acknowledged continuing the patrols, but said that targeting was not the focus.

Arpaio’s conviction arose out of a lawsuit wrongfully accusing the sheriff’s office of violating the rights of Hispanics, allegedly using racial profiling tactics to identify people for traffic stops, and detaining convicts based only on the suspicion that they were illegal immigrants. Arpaio denied all wrongdoing.

I sat in the courtroom through Arpaio’s trial and concluded that he was wrongfully convicted. As a former law enforcement officer myself and former executive director of the Law Enforcement Alliance of America, I know that Arpaio was dedicated to protecting the public he served and that his highest priority was keeping his community safe.

Hearing testimony during Arpaio’s trial, I realized that any reasonable person who was there to pass judgment on this honest law-abiding man – who gave his life to the rule of law – could never have found him guilty on the evidence presented.

However, the only one who could pass judgment on the former sheriff was U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, because Arpaio was denied his right to a jury trial under the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The judge’s verdict convicting Arpaio was a travesty of justice.

Arpaio's critics have claimed for a long time that he is a racist and biased against Hispanics. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. . . . 

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said that he would be the voice for law enforcement officers everywhere and always fight to protect them when they protected the public.

President Trump held true to his promise by using his presidential pardon for Arpaio to set an important precedent: judges should interpret law and not try to rewrite it. And good men like Arpaio should not be prosecuted, persecuted and punished for doing their jobs. . . 
Arpaio’s case has been politically motivated from the beginning, when the Obama administration’s Department of Justice filed misdemeanor charges against him a mere two weeks before the election, contributing to Arpaio’s loss in his reelection bid. . . .  By pardoning the wrongly convicted former sheriff, President Trump has shown he stands with the law-abiding people of our great country, who have the right to live in peace and safety. And the president has shown he stands against criminals, including those who have crossed our borders illegally."

*   *   *   *   *

[President Trump defended the pardon, praising "Sheriff Joe" as a patriot and a good man, who kept his community safe and kept our borders secure.  Sure.  Fascistric states are usually "safe and secure" . . . for those in favor with the police.   But ask everybody else how safe they feel.   

Trump couldn't help adding the totally irrelevant point that the crowd at his rally in Phoenix very strongly approved of the pardon when he hinted that he would.  In effect, he turned his rally of supporters into a crowd-jury, presented a false case to them, and got their thumbs-up cheers.]

===================

There you have the two different stories about the same man's behavior.   And, largely, the audiences for Paul Krugman and for Fox News do not overlap.    Each hears only its side.  In fact, reading Fotis' piece was the first that I had heard that Arpaio was denied a jury trial.  So I did some research.

It turns out that Arpaio did request a jury trial.  It was denied by the judge, based on prior case law rulings (42 U.S. Code par. 1995) that, in cases of contempt where the fine does not exceed $1000, nor imprisonment exceed six months, there is no right to jury trial.

Some have argued, and I tend to agree, that in this case of contempt, this puts the judge in the position of being the accuser, the judge, and the jury.   It seems this would mitigate toward allowing a jury trial, even though the law is clear.   Arpaio had appealed the ruling to a higher court and was awaiting that ruling, which is now moot.

Having said this, however, the facts in the case seem clear.  Arpaio was violating constitutional rights of suspects, held them in horrible conditions;  and he did refuse to follow a court order to stop doing that.  And now the president has endorsed his flouting the law.

And, at the same time, probably sent a message to any of his people who might have to testify in the Russia collusion case, that he will pardon them as well.

My main point in citing the two editorials, however, was to illustrate how the public is so divided, at least in part, because we are operating on different versions of a story.   I do think the public should have available a wide range of freely expressed opinions.   But you have to evaluate the source, and not everyone does that.

I believe it was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who said that "People have a right to their own opinions.   But they don't have a right to their own set of facts."

Ralph

"For some whites, nothing changed with the end of slavery except slavery."

Just after I finished writing the previous blog, I picked up my copy of the New York Review of Books to read an article about my favorite author, William Faulkner.   Faulkner, who lived from 1897 to 1962, was a product of those years, growing up in Oxford, Mississippi in the shadow of a great-grandfather who had been a war hero of the Confederate army.

Faulkner was imbued with stories of the Old South, of the war, slavery, the KKK.  He emerged with an ambiguous, love/hate relationship with the South.   In some ways, he loved and respected some of the older Negro (the polite term at the time) men and women he came in contact with.   For example, perhaps the most important woman in his life was a black servant who helped raise him, and to whom he dedicated one of his novels.

At the same time, Faulkner often used the language and followed the customs of white supremacy and dominance.   But he was not insensitive to the suffering of slaves and the inhumanity of post-slavery Jim Crow laws that made conditions almost as bad. His fiction presented that whole panoply of white/black, love/hate in all its varieties of relationships and complexities of social structure.

The important thing, for literature, is that he was a great writer, and he wrote about the South, the good and the bad.  He won two Pulitzer Prizes as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.   His greatest work came in his writings of the 1920s and 30s.    His fiction recreated the Old South and the encroachment from outsiders that began to change the Old South.

In addition to being an innovative literary stylist, one of the early modernist writers experimenting with point of view and multiple narrative voices, his subject matter constituted a true microcosm of the South and its problems.

Going back to Faulkner is particularly appropriate right now, when we're debating the future of Confederate memorials, as well as our history and culture.   One of his four greatest novels, The Sound and the Fury, ends as a runaway horse drags the carriage carrying the retarded anti-hero of the novel round and round the Confederate statue that sits in the middle of the town square, completely disorienting and terrifying the feeble-minded Benjy into fits of screaming.  What a metaphor!

But now back to the article I wanted to read.   It's a review of a new book on Faulkner that examines the interplay of his life and his fiction:  William Faulkner:  A Life Through Novels.   The book's author is Andre Bleickasten, a French academic whom I once had the pleasure of meeting through my Georgia State literature professor friends, Tom and Pearl McHaney.   The review is written by novelist Thomas Powers.

Now, finally, here is the point I was aiming to get to:   In this review of Bleikasten's book on Faulkner, the reviewer, Thomas Powers, wrote this:

" . . . For many white southerners nothing changed with the end of slavery except slavery."

That strikes me as pretty profound in trying to understand the white supremacists.   Not, mind you, to excuse them.   But it sheds a ray of light on the their mind-set -- and on the current dilemma about Confederate memorials.

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was issued more than 100 years ago.   It formally ended slavery.   And when we elected Barack Obama to be our president, some of us foolishly thought that we were entering a post-racist era.

We aren't there yet.   You can change laws;  you can elect presidents.   But a closed mind doesn't change.   That takes something more -- some experience that reveals the Other in an empathetic way as a fellow human being.  That can open a mind and heart to change.

Ralph

Addendum to Trump's pardon of Arpaio

The New York Times weighed in with its editorial board opinion about the presidential pardon of Arizona's Sheriff Jo Arpaio.   It was published Friday morning, before President Trump issued the pardon on Friday evening.  But it is just as relevant now.   In it, the editors wrote that:

*   *   *   *   *

"Mr. Arpaio, an anti-immigrant hard liner who served 24 years in office before voters tossed him out last November, was convicted in July of criminal contempt of court for disregarding a federal judge's order to stop detaining people based solely on the suspicion that they were in the country illegally.

"Mr. Arpaio's sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 5.  He faces up to six months in prison, unless Mr. Trump gets to him first. . . . [which has now happened]

"Mr. Arpaio was an elected official who defied a federal court's order that he stop violating people's constitutional rights.  He was found in contempt of that court.  By pardoning him, Mr. Trump would [did] show his contempt for the American court system and its only means of enforcing the law, since it would be sending a message to other officials that they may flout court orders also. . . .

"Both men built their brands by exploiting racial resentment of white Americans.  While Mr. Trump was beginning his revanchist run for the White House on the backs of Mexican "rapists," Mr. Arpaio was terrorizing brown-skinned people across southern Arizona, sweeping them up in "saturation patrols" and holding them in what he referred to as a "concentration camp" for months at a time.

"It was this behavior that a federal judge in 2011 found to be unconstitutional and ordered Mr. Arpaio to stop.  He refused, placing himself above the law and the Constitution he had sworn to uphold. . . .

"Mr. Arpaio shows no sign of remorse;  to the contrary, he sees himself as the victim.  'If they can go after me, they can go after anyone in the country,' he told Fox News on Wednesday.   He's right -- in a nation based on the rule of law, anyone who ignores a court order, or otherwise breaks the law, may be prosecuted and convicted. . .  .

"What's remarkable here is that Mr. Trump is weighing mercy for a public official who did not just violate the law, but who remains proud of doing so.  The law-and-order president is cheering on an unrepentant lawbreaker.  Perhaps that's because Mr. Arpaio has always represented what Mr. Trump aspires to be:  a thuggish autocrat, who enforces the law as he pleases, without accountability or personal consequence."
                             New York Times editorial board opinion
                             August 25, 2017