Louisiana profiting on its gleeful imprisonment of immigrants in Trump’s concentration camps is part of a long, long history of that state and the rest of the South seeing prisoners as a site of profit.

Louisiana’s commander-in-chief could hardly contain his glee on Fox News this week as he announced that Donald Trump’s Gestapo force would soon be entering New Orleans: “I will tell you that when ICE is ready, we certainly welcome them to come into the city and be able to start taking some of these dangerous criminal illegal aliens off of our streets,” said Gov. Jeff Landry, explaining that local police have already been working with the agency. 

But it was this next part that really made him smile: “And we’ve got a place to put them—at Angola.” 

The Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed “Angola” after the slave plantation that once stood in its place, is the largest maximum-security prison in the country. It has also been called “the bloodiest.” Angola gained national attention this September as the site of Louisiana Lockup, a new partnership between the state and DHS to “expand detention space by 416 beds” and “house some of the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens arrested by ICE.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the prison was specifically chosen for its notoriety—a place where inmates still toil in the fields, surrounded by armed guards on horseback and alligator swamps—in hopes that it might scare immigrants into self-deporting. The facility is also known for its racism; in an ongoing class-action lawsuit, one inmate reported a white officer telling him, “We need a good hanging because these boys are out of line.”

It is no surprise that Gov. Landry seems thrilled by the prospect of rounding up “criminals” in New Orleans and sending them there. The former cop’s tough-on-crime rhetoric has always been a thin veil for his sadism; in Landry’s first year in office, he passed a law allowing for the perpetrators of certain sex crimes to be surgically castrated, and added two new methods of execution: the electric chair and suffocation by nitrogen gas. (If you’re someone who believes the punishment fits the crime, remember that Louisiana has the second-highest rate of known wrongful convictions in the country and New Orleans, as a city, has the first.)

But the reason Louisiana has become the center of mass deportation goes further than our governor’s personal cruelty and racism. A significant factor is profit. 

When you take a look at demographics, ICE’s upcoming Operation Swamp Sweep doesn’t make much sense. Only about 6.5 percent of New Orleans’ residents are foreign-born, a paltry number compared to much larger cities like San Francisco (34 percent) or Dallas (23 percent), neither of which have been the focus of large-scale, publicly-branded operations. Yet according to documents obtained by AP News, DHS has plans to arrest 5,000 migrants in this next sweep—significantly more than the number arrested in Chicago, a city whose metropolitan area has nine times more people than New Orleans.

But like everything in this administration, Operation Swamp Sweep has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with pocket-padding: In Louisiana, migrant detainees are literally worth more money than ordinary inmates because their housing is federally funded. We also have a higher incarceration rate than anywhere in the world—besides, notably, El Salvador—and a track record for treating those inmates like filth. That means we have plenty of prisons to house people and we’ll do it at a fraction of the cost of other states. 

Fun times for America!

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Ryan Lizza on discovering that his now-ex was having a sexual relationship with old guy running a marginal presidential campaign even though he was the subject of profile and an ongoing source for their proposed campaign book:

“If I swallowed every drop of water from the tower above your house,” Olivia had written, “I would still thirst for you.”

Unfortunately, the lack of a water tower on our Georgetown home’s roof ruled me out as the note’s intended recipient.

I flipped to another page and saw a name and the first line of an unfinished love letter to him that included enough details to confirm a physical relationship and the hint of some kind of falling out.

My heart stopped when I realized who he was.

He was a famous politician, 32 years older than Olivia, and well-known for a sex scandal. But more importantly, he was a presidential candidate, a source, and the subject of Olivia’s recent profile for New York.

I started to build a mental map of the potential blast zone, ticking through the concentric circles of our lives that her recklessness could shatter: the privacy of my children, the wedding Olivia was pressuring me to plan, her journalism career, our book project.

I was not a perfect partner, but the scale of Olivia’s betrayal was devastating. She had an affair with someone who would provide the maximum level of humiliation and personal and professional ruin, perhaps for both of us.

She later explained to me that she became “infatuated” with him after their interview, that she couldn’t get him out of her head, and that as her obsession intensified, she sent him increasingly risqué pictures and texts, secretly followed him on the campaign trail when she told me she was out covering other candidates, and fantasized about a rendezvous, which was consummated at his home in South Carolina one night after she went dark on me and made up a story about how she was dealing with a crisis concerning her sick mother.

I was sure our relationship was over. And certainly our book project was dead. She had crossed a journalistic red line. How could we write a book about the presidential campaign if Olivia had a sexual relationship with one of the candidates?

I looked at the date on her aborted letter to “Mark”: March 5, 2020—just a few days ago.

I called my agent.

“We have a big problem,” I said. “Olivia is sleeping with Mark Sanford.”

Well, at least we know she didn’t do it for the money.

So, one of the ethical questions we’re now dealing with “how many article subjects seeking political power can you have a sexual relationship with without disclosing it and still keep your lucrative sinecure at Conde Nast?” The fact that “one” isn’t enough is depressing enough. Oh, I’m guessing we’ll be hearing more about this:

 She orchestrated a plot with the help of a senior Trump official to try to have me imprisoned, and now she’s written what appears to be a largely fictitious and self-serving account about it all.

This sequel to Eyes Wide Shut is becoming increasingly implausible.

The post Dispatches from the Appalachian Trail appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

1. There’s a turkey neck situation.

2. Is it four thousand degrees in the kitchen, or is it just you?

3. You love your family, but you also wish they’d leave you alone so you can watch Gilmore Girls and eat mashed potatoes.

4. You’re so bloated that you feel like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

5. Something that should be moist is instead very, very dry.

6. You’ve been obsessively trying to prepare for it, but who knows what will actually happen.

7. The placemats your kid made in kindergarten are making you tear up.

8. You need to go to an Orangetheory class for your own sanity.

9. There are tender breasts and big, meaty thighs.

10. You fall asleep on the couch at 4 p.m., then you’re wide awake at 3 a.m.

11. You swear you didn’t eat that much, but you look like you’re about five months pregnant, which you definitely are not. Or wait. Could you be?

12. There’s a bloodied history.

13. You’re debating whether to go the all-natural, hormone-free route or to just go for the hormones.

14. You’re not sure why you just walked into the kitchen.

15. For some reason, you are enraged about yams.

16. You spend a lot of time trying to keep skin from getting dry.

17. You hurt your neck and shoulder chopping onions.

18. No one really knows when it will end.

19. The turkey has been in the oven for six hours and is burnt on the outside, but somehow is still raw on the inside.

1–18: Both
19: Thanksgiving

Visiting Hamburg in 1878, Mark Twain heard a cuckoo calling in the woods.

“First cuckoo I ever heard outside of a clock,” he wrote. “Was surprised how closely it imitated the clock — and yet of course it could never have heard a clock.”

He added, “The hatefulest thing in the world is a cuckoo clock.”

(From his Notebook.)

Pasta lovers know there’s no such thing as too much pasta. Whether a craving calls for spaghetti, gnocchi, cacio e pepe, or a little bit of everything in between, the quest for the perfect plate of pasta is a never-ending journey. Luckily, the D.C. area is filled with plenty of options for getting that pasta fix, from cozy neighborhood eateries to traditional osterias.

Noodle newcomers to try include build-your-own pasta bowls at Gigi’s Pasta in Western Market and downtown’s dreamy trattoria Olio e Più out of NYC.

For this latest map update, we add: La Collina and Grazie Nonna, while now-shuttered Modena comes off the map.

Below, find the top Italian restaurants for pasta in D.C., and get all sorts of culinary inspiration for that upcoming date night or family outing. And for D.C.’s best pizza places, go here.