When I said that, “I expect to see double digit numbers of pardons on a weekly pardons moving forward,” last night, I thought I was describing a worst case.
I was wrong. Trump just issued 26 new pardons today, many for his co-conspirators.
He may break 3 digits for a week.
No, this is not The Onion.
Trump is demanding a repeal of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and he is objecting to changing the names of military bases named after traitors:
President Trump made good Wednesday on his repeated threats to veto a $741 billion defense spending bill, setting up what is expected to be the first successful veto override of his presidency during his last weeks in office.
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The House and Senate each passed the defense bill earlier this month with strong veto-proof majorities, rejecting Trump’s insistence that it be changed to meet his oftentimes shifting demands. Both chambers are expected to sustain the two-thirds majorities needed to override the president’s veto, despite pledges from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and other stalwart Trump allies not to cross the president’s wishes.
In his veto message, Trump complained that the legislation includes “provisions that fail to respect our veterans’ and military’s history” — a seeming reference to instructions that the Defense Department change the names of installations commemorating Confederate leaders. He also scorned the bill as a “ ‘gift’ to China and Russia,” slammed the bill for restricting his ability to draw down the presence of U.S. troops in certain foreign outposts, and excoriated lawmakers for failing to include an unrelated repeal of a law granting liability protections to technology companies that Trump has accused, without significant evidence, of anti-conservative bias.
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Trump and his advisers have repeatedly objected to various provisions in the behemoth defense legislation, including its mandate to the Pentagon to rename the 10 military installations bearing titles that honor the Confederacy and the bill’s limitations on reducing troop levels in Germany, South Korea and Afghanistan.
Trump’s insistence that the defense bill become a vehicle for a repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects companies from bearing legal responsibility for content third parties post on their websites, became a breaking point between the president and congressional Republicans during the final days of negotiations over the legislation. Trump views its repeal as a way to punish social media companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
It’s stupid and petty, but Trump does Stupid and Petty better than anyone.
And a partridge in a pear tree.
Donald Trump just issued a slew of Christmas pardons, and while I am not surprised at his pardoning potential witnesses agaisnt him, I am a bit disappointed that he also found time to pardon Blackwater’s war criminal mercenaries and the corrupt former Congressmen:
In an audacious pre-Christmas round of pardons, President Trump granted clemency on Tuesday to two people convicted in the special counsel’s Russia inquiry, four Blackwater guards convicted in connection with the killing of Iraqi civilians and three corrupt former Republican members of Congress.
It was a remarkable assertion of pardon power by a president who has disputed his loss in the election and might be only the start of more to come in the final weeks before he leaves office on Jan. 20.
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Among those pardoned was George Papadopoulos, who was a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and who pleaded guilty in 2017 to making false statements to federal officials as part of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
Also pardoned was Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer who pleaded guilty to the same charge in 2018 in connection to the special counsel’s inquiry. Both men served short prison sentences.
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Mr. Trump recently pardoned his former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who pleaded guilty twice to charges including lying to the F.B.I. in connection with the inquiry into Russian involvement in the election. The president in July commuted the sentence of Roger J. Stone Jr., his longtime adviser who was convicted on a series of charges related to the investigation. Both men have maintained their innocence.
Mr. Trump’s pardon list also included four former U.S. service members who were convicted on charges related to the killing of Iraqi civilians while working as contractors in 2007.
One of them, Nicholas Slatten, had been sentenced to life in prison after the Justice Department had gone to great lengths to prosecute him. Mr. Slatten had been a contractor for the private company Blackwater and was sentenced for his role in the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad — a massacre that left one of the most lasting stains of the war on the United States. Among those dead were 10 men, two women and two boys, who were 8 and 11.
The three former members of Congress pardoned by Mr. Trump were Duncan D. Hunter of California, Chris Collins of New York and Steve Stockman of Texas.
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A tabulation by the Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith found that of the 45 pardons or commutations that Mr. Trump had granted up until Tuesday, 88 percent aided someone with a personal tie to the president or furthered his political aims.
And by nullifying the legal consequences of convictions in the Russia inquiry, Mr. Trump escalated a long campaign, aided by his departing attorney general, William P. Barr, to effectively undo the investigation by Mr. Mueller, discredit the resulting prosecutions and punish those who instigated it in the first place.
I expect to see double digit numbers of pardons on a weekly pardons moving forward.
It appears that Trump is cutting off military support to CIA death squads: (Details on the whole child murdering death squads are here)
Years from now, we will forgive historians who, when documenting the Donald Trump presidency — its cold indifference to hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths, its pandemic denialism, its migrant family separations, its use of the Justice Department as a political cudgel and the attorney general as a Mafia lawyer, the president’s genuine attempt to subvert the 2020 election results, and his impeachment — fail to note a bureaucratic dust-up between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon in the waning days of the administration.
Last week, news broke that Trump’s acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, sent a letter to the CIA notifying the agency that the Pentagon would review the terms of its military support to CIA operations. News reports suggested that the Pentagon was planning to strip the CIA of its support for counterterrorism missions around the world almost immediately. Drones, elite soldiers, fuel, and medical evacuation of casualties, for example, would disappear almost overnight. CNN reported that the Pentagon was “planning to withdraw most support for CIA counter-terror missions by the beginning of next year.” The New York Times suggested that the purpose was to “make it difficult” for the CIA to conduct its covert war in Afghanistan as Trump reduces the number of U.S. troops there. ABC News described the decision as “unprecedented.” The cuts would leave CIA paramilitary officers to die should they suffer casualties, former officers told the press.
But interviews with six current and former national security officials, including some directly involved in the Pentagon’s review, suggest it is neither immediate nor controversial. Instead, the review serves as a coda for the Trump administration’s chaos — and as an unintentional gift to the incoming Biden administration.
Miller’s letter to CIA Director Gina Haspel informed her that the Pentagon would update a classified 2005 memorandum of understanding outlining the terms of Defense Department support to CIA missions. The Donald Rumsfeld-led Pentagon wrote the memo in the early years of what the George W. Bush administration called the global war on terror. In the immediate weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon discovered that it had neither the intelligence capability nor the nimbleness that the CIA showed in their quick deployment to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda conceived of and trained for the attacks; the CIA needed special operations forces to buttress their tiny paramilitary division.
As an aside, United States Special Operations Command (USSICOM) was established in 1987, so it appears that the need to use CIA paramilitaries, particularly given its extensive expansion over the intervening 33 years, is to ensure that those operations are not subject to the purview of any potential war crimes investigations.
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Fast forward to Donald Trump. He campaigned in 2016 on pulling out U.S. troops from the wars which began after 9/11 and later, as president, declared victory over the Islamic State. In 2018, the Pentagon, led by Defense Secretary James Mattis, published a new national defense strategy as a blueprint for a new era. Counterterrorism was no longer the country’s “primary concern.” The new strategy called long-term strategic competition with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran the top priorities.
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Trump reportedly tried several times to pull troops out of Afghanistan but was said to have been blocked or slow-rolled by the national security establishment. After he lost the November election, Trump fired Esper because he was said to have resisted the move. As a result, Miller replaced Esper and quickly went about announcing that troops were indeed coming home. As almost an afterthought, Miller and the acting undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, also pushed to update the 2005 sharing agreement to fall in line with the change in national security policy, several defense officials told The Intercept. They said that fears of resource cuts to the CIA are unfounded overall.
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A secondary justification for rewriting the agreement is to allow the Pentagon to answer a simple question that has plagued military officials for years: How much support do we provide to the CIA, and how is it used?
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For military officials, the support to the CIA has become just like any other part of the Pentagon’s self-licking ice cream cone: one with no end. The agreement has persisted for 15 years, even as national security priorities have changed. Two military officials who spoke with The Intercept said the Pentagon couldn’t answer congressional committees’ questions about how the CIA used the Pentagon’s resources. As a result, the new memo will insist that the CIA provide more information to the Pentagon on where and how their support, including forces, is used.
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According to the senior Pentagon official involved in the review, the Pentagon is asking the CIA to use military support in the so-called great nation competition and use fewer resources in their counterterrorism efforts. It is all part of a more considerable effort to move the military’s resources away from hunting suspected Islamic militants worldwide and toward the now two-year-old focus on other global powers. The military is letting the CIA know that they are ending its forever wars in a strategic sense.
“[Director Haspel] wants out of the war on terror,” the senior Pentagon official continued. “She thinks that takes the CIA away from its core mission of going after Russia and China. And it’s 20 years later, and we had to do [that] at the time, it’s 20 years now, and a shift has to be made.”
So Haspel is a moron who has never left the Cold War.
And people wonder why the Russians think that the war against them by the US never ended.
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CIA counterterrorism veterans believe the review stems from Trump making a last-minute effort to punish the CIA for various offenses, but mostly because the agency concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him become president. A retired senior intelligence official told The Intercept that a senior congressional aide on an intelligence committee asked the White House last week to explain Miller’s letter to the CIA. The retired official said the aide was told, “It’s because the president’s followers believe the agency played a role” in Trump’s election loss last month. The retired official said the White House acknowledged that the claim of CIA involvement in Trump’s election loss was unfounded, but the facts didn’t matter. The message from the White House, according to the retired official, was that “it matters what Trump’s supporters think, and they think that’s the case.”
Given Trump’s pettiness and thin-skinned demeanor, it may very well be that Trump ordered the Pentagon to take its toys away from the CIA, but it also doesn’t matter.
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But it does provide Biden with an unintentional gift. By forcing the incoming administration to respond to the review shortly after taking power, Trump’s team provides Biden with an opportunity to quickly take stock of 20 years of lethal operations, both in direct view and secret — and make a decision to end an unwinnable war.
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A lame-duck president agitating for a useful bureaucratic change as a parting shot at the deep state is the same delusional logic that came with much of Trump’s four years: occasionally doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
Given the nature of CIA paramilitaries, their primary benefits appear to be evading the laws of war, and to maintain a military presence in an area in defiance of civilian leadership (Syria most recently), reducing this capability is an unalloyed good, regardless of the motivations.
It turns out that Jared Kushner skimmed campaign funds which went to insiders.
I rather expect to see Trump pardon him, and Ivanka, and Don, Jr., and Eric, on his way out of the door.
In fact, my guess is that Melania and Baron will be the only ones not getting pardons:
President Donald Trump’s most powerful advisor, Jared Kushner, approved the creation of a campaign shell company that secretly paid the president’s family members and spent almost half of the campaign’s $1.26 billion war chest, a person familiar with the operation told Insider.
The operation acted almost like a campaign within a campaign. It paid some of Trump’s top advisors and family members, while shielding financial and operational details from public scrutiny.
When Kushner and others created the company in April 2018, they picked Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump to become its president, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence as its vice president, and Trump campaign Chief Financial Officer Sean Dollman as its treasurer and secretary, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations about the shell company.
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The shell company — incorporated as American Made Media Consultants Corp. and American Made Media Consultants LLC — allowed Trump’s campaign to skirt federally mandated disclosures. The tactic could attract scrutiny from federal election regulators.
Campaign-finance records showed Trump’s reelection effort and its affiliated committee with the Republican National Committee spent more than $600 million through American Made Consultants since its formation.
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From January 2019 through the middle of November, the Trump campaign and an affiliated political committee together spent $617 million through American Made Media Consultants.
It was almost half of everything they spent in the failed effort to reelect Trump, according to an Insider review of Federal Election Commission records and analysis provided by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
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Campaign-law experts have long accused the Trump team of using a corporate pass-through to hide payments.
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If the federal government suspects a “knowing and willful” violation of election law has occurred, the Department of Justice has the power to open a criminal investigation into a political actor.
While such investigations are relatively uncommon, several former Justice Department and FEC officials previously told Insider that Justice Department officials may already be discreetly investigating Trump’s reelection activity.
Some of Trump’s campaign leaders even seemed stumped by the AMMC arrangement. Generally, they knew that AMMC was being used to buy pro-Trump TV, radio, and digital advertising and pay for other media.
But they couldn’t discern precisely how much each AMMC vendor was keeping for itself.
The person familiar with AMMC said the rates its vendors charged the Trump campaign were often cheaper than what an outside political firm would have demanded. Using the shell company also allowed Parscale to keep Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle [As an interesting aside, Guilfoyle is the ex-wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, and got fired from Fox for sexual harassment] — the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr. — on his payroll, the person familiar said.
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“Nothing was done without Jared’s approval,” the former Trump campaign advisor said. “What [Trump campaign manager Stephen] Stepien doesn’t know is because Jared doesn’t want him to know.”
Something clearly corrupt was going on here, but Trump cheating his investors/campaign/contractors/wives/etc is pretty much par for the course.
That being said, I would expect an investigation, which is why I also expect a very broadly worded pardon before January 20.
In discussions with Republican lawmakers, there is a telling quote, where the Republican leader of the state senate unequivocally states that she and her family are at risk of violence if she does not support Trump’s claims of vote fraud.
We need to deal aggressively with the problem of stochastic terrorism.
This is far more corrosive to American society than anything that Osama bin Laden could have ever dreamed of:
Last week, allies of President Trump accused Republican leaders in Pennsylvania of being “cowards” and “liars” and of letting America down.
Mr. Trump himself called top Republicans in the General Assembly in his crusade to twist the arms of officials in several states and reverse an election he lost. The Pennsylvania lawmakers told the president they had no power to convene a special session to address his grievances.
But they also rewarded his efforts: On Friday, the State House speaker and majority leader joined hard-right colleagues — whom they had earlier resisted — and called on Congress to reject Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 81,000-vote victory in Pennsylvania.
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Kim Ward, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania Senate, said the president had called her to declare there was fraud in the voting. But she said she had not been shown the letter to Congress, which was pulled together hastily, before its release.
Asked if she would have signed it, she indicated that the Republican base expected party leaders to back up Mr. Trump’s claims — or to face its wrath.
“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said about signing the letter, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”
It is clear that there is a large undercurrent of right-wing terrorism in US society, and it is equally clear that law enforcement has been completely penetrated by these folks.
Dealing with this is going to be like peeling an onion, you have to do it layer by layer, and there will be lots of tears.
Donald Trump once again did the right thing for the wrong reason, because he fired one of the worst war criminals in American history from the Defense Policy Board in a fit of pique.
Why this ghoul still prowls the halls of power is an indictment the whole US foreign policy and defense establishments:
Several members of the top federal advisory committee to the U.S. Department of Defense have been suddenly pushed out, multiple U.S. officials told Foreign Policy, in what appears to be the outgoing Trump administration’s parting shot at scions of the foreign-policy establishment.
The directive, which the Pentagon’s White House liaison Joshua Whitehouse sent on Wednesday afternoon, removes 11 high-profile advisors from the Defense Policy Board, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright; retired Adm. Gary Roughead, who served as chief of naval operations; and a onetime ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman. Rudy De Leon, a former chief operating officer at the Pentagon once considered by then-Defense Secretary James Mattis for a high-level policy role, will also be ousted.
Madeline Albright, who was the strongest advocate of the sanctions on Iraq, which resulted in something approaching 100,000 deaths as well.
The board seems to be primarily to be a way to provide a veneer of historical wisdom, and most brutal, policies of the American empire.
Also booted in today’s sweep of the board, which is effective immediately, were former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and David McCormick, a former Treasury Department undersecretary during the George W. Bush administration. Both had been added to the board by Mattis in 2017. Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton administration deputy attorney general; Robert Joseph, a chief U.S. nuclear negotiator who convinced Libya to give up weapons of mass destruction; former Bush Deputy National Security Advisor J.D. Crouch II; and Franklin Miller, a former top defense official, have also been removed.
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The board, overseen by the Pentagon’s top policy official, the undersecretary of defense for policy, serves as a kind of in-house think tank on retainer for top military leaders, providing independent counsel and advice on defense policy. The Defense Policy Board includes former top military brass, secretaries of state, members of Congress, and other senior diplomats and foreign-policy experts. The status of two other members of the panel—or who would replace the ousted members—was not immediately clear.
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The White House had sought to add Scott O’Grady, a former Air Force fighter pilot shot down over Bosnia, to the board to prepare him to be nominated for a top Pentagon position, as well as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a close ally of President Donald Trump. The administration had also vetoed adding retired Adm. Eric Olson, a former U.S. Special Operations Command chief, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as well as Gordon England, a former deputy secretary of defense during the Bush administration, over perceived anti-Trump ties.
Like I said, the wrong reason to fire them all, but good riddance to this bastion of conventional (and wrong) thinking.
Ordered to pay Pennsylvania’s legal expenses. Jesus Christ.
— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) November 27, 2020
Honestly, if the poster did not have the alias, “Richard M. Nixon”, I might never have noticed the tweet.
I will note that in addition to the complaint being dismissed with prejudice, meaning that the Trump campaign cannot refile, they have also have been ordered to pay court costs.
It’s a f%$#ing clown show.
I do not approve of Wall Street rich pigs trying to dictate political outcomes, even if it is put a boot into Donald J. Trump’s flabby white ass.
Wall Street executives are threatening not to drop money on the Georgia Senate runoffs unless Trump concedes.
I get that they want this. I want Trump to die in flagrante delicto with Mike Pence, but that does not mean that I am entitled to this.
Get over yourselves. You are lucky and rich, and not better than anyone else.
You deserve no special favors:
Concerned that President Trump’s refusal to accept the election results is hurting the country, more than 160 top American executives asked the administration on Monday to immediately acknowledge Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect and begin the transition to a new administration.
Even one of Mr. Trump’s stalwart supporters, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of Blackstone, the private equity firm, said in a statement that “the outcome is very certain today and the country should move on.” While he did not sign a letter sent to the administration by the other executives, he said he was “now ready to help President-elect Biden and his team.”
Signatories to the letter included the chief executives of Mastercard, Visa, MetLife, Accenture, the Carlyle Group, Condé Nast, McGraw-Hill, WeWork and American International Group, among others. They included some of the most important players in the financial industry: David M. Solomon, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; Laurence D. Fink, chief executive of the asset management giant BlackRock; Jon Gray, Blackstone’s president; and Henry R. Kravis, a prominent Republican donor who is the co-chief executive of KKR, a private equity firm.
The letter was also signed by George H. Walker, the chief executive of the money manager Neuberger Berman and a second cousin to President George W. Bush, and Jeff T. Blau, the chief executive of one of New York City’s largest private developers, the Related Companies, who has been a major donor to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, filings show.
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As a way of gaining leverage over the G.O.P., some of the corporate executives who signed on to the joint letter Monday have also discussed withholding campaign donations from the two Republican Senate candidates in Georgia unless party leaders agree to push for a presidential transition, according to four people who participated in a conference call Friday in which the notion was discussed. The two runoff elections in Georgia, which will take place in early January, will determine the balance of power in the United States Senate.
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At least one participant, Rob Speyer, the chief executive of Tishman Speyer, suggested that some wealthy donors had already been considering withholding support, according to four people with knowledge of his comments.
Call me old fashioned, but I think that if you are going to chase a monster out town, it should be peasants with torches and pitch forks, not the princelings of finance.
It appears that Donald Trump’s efforts to f%$# with the US Census will come to naught, because there are data processing issues that will not allow them to get the final results in time:
In a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to strip unauthorized immigrants from census totals used for reapportionment, Census Bureau officials have concluded that they cannot produce the state population totals required to reallocate seats in the House of Representatives until after President Trump leaves office in January.
The president said in July that he planned to remove unauthorized immigrants from the count for the first time in history, leaving an older and whiter population as the basis for divvying up House seats, a shift that would be likely to increase the number of House seats held by Republicans over the next decade.
But on Wednesday, according to three bureau officials, the Census Bureau told the Commerce Department that a growing number of snags in the massive data-processing operation that generates population totals had delayed the completion of population calculations at least until Jan. 26, and perhaps to mid-February. Those officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from the Trump administration.
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Under law, the White House must send a state-by-state census tally to the House of Representatives next year that will be used to reallocate House seats among the states. On Mr. Trump’s order, the Census Bureau is attempting to compile a separate state-by-state tally of unauthorized immigrants so that their numbers can be subtracted from official census results before they are dispatched to the House.
Good.
— Tony Banks (@Banks429) November 10, 2020
This.
When Tony Banks, says to Trump supporters, “From the bottom of my ball sack, F%$# you!,” I feel like cheering.
It’s every day that the President of the United States calls the Republican members of a county canvassing board just to wish them well.
Also, it’s every day that the President of the United States calls the Republican leaders of a state legislature to lobby them about appointing their own electors.
We can make all the jokes we want about the efforts of his Evil Minions™ dissolving into a, “Nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putridity,” but this is an attempted coup, and should be confronted as such:
President Trump has invited the leaders of Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature to meet him in Washington on Friday, according to a person familiar with those plans, as the president and his allies continue an extraordinary campaign to overturn the results of an election he lost.
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Trump lost Michigan by a wide margin: At present, he trails President-Elect Joe Biden in the state by 157,000 votes. Earlier this week, the state’s Republican Senate majority leader said an effort to have legislators throw out election results was “not going to happen.”
But the president now appears to be using the full weight of his office to challenge the election results, as he and his allies reach out personally to state and local officials in an intensifying effort to halt the certification of the vote in key battleground states.
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Trump’s team appear to be increasingly focused on Michigan as a place where Republican officials — on the state’s Board of Canvassers and in the legislature — might be persuaded to overturn the results.
Earlier this week, Trump called a member of Wayne County’s Board of Canvassers after a contentious meeting in which she first refused, and then agreed, to certify election results from the state’s largest county. She subsequently released an affidavit seeking to “rescind” her vote for certification — a move that the secretary of state’s office said was impossible.
Legal experts condemned the president’s actions, saying he was trying to use the power of his office to alter the vote.
“To bring the weight of the White House and the presidency onto an individual county canvassing board commissioner about what to do with certification is an incredible assault on the democratic process,” said Richard H. Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University. “No question about that.”
Joanna Lydgate, the national director of the Voter Protection Program, said that “there is no basis in fact or law for failing to certify the election.”
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“It changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County,” he said. Wayne County includes Detroit, the state’s heavily Democratic, majority-Black largest city.
Also on Thursday, Trump’s efforts seemed to have gained some traction, with the news that Michigan’s GOP leaders appear willing to meet with him.
The Detroit News reported that the state GOP legislative leaders who plan to visit the White House on Friday are Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield.
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In Michigan, the high-water mark for Trump’s efforts so far came Tuesday night, during an hours-long meeting of the Wayne County board of canvassers. The board’s two GOP members voted against certifying the county’s results, which overwhelmingly favored Biden. But then, after three hours of angry comments from the public, the two GOP members changed their minds and voted to certify the results.
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Palmer and Hartmann said they had agreed to certify Wayne County’s results on the condition that they be audited by state authorities, to resolve small errors in the counts of voters at some Detroit precincts. The number of votes affected is believed to be in the hundreds, far less than Biden’s margin of victory in Michigan.
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Supervisors in rural Mohave County, a Republican stronghold bisected by the Grand Canyon, were set to canvass their county vote at a public meeting on Monday. Instead, they decided to delay their vote and take it up again on Nov. 23 — the deadline for certification.
The supervisors agreed that they didn’t question whether the results in their own county were accurate. Instead, one GOP supervisor said, they wanted to show solidarity with the president’s challenges elsewhere.
“It has nothing to do with our results,” Supervisor Hildy Angius said in explaining her vote. “It’s more of a big picture sort of thing.”
The big picture is called “Seditious Conspiracy,” and it is a felony.
Anyone with two brains cells to rub together and the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie knew that the Republicans were willing and able to resort to coups after the 1998 impeachment and the 2000 Florida debacle.
They view the Democratic Party as completely illegitimate, and because of this they feel justified in using corrupt means to seize power.
Once again, I will quote Robert Graves putting words into Germanicus Caesar’s mouth, with the Republicans fulfilling the role of the Teutonic Tribes:
Spaniards can be impressed by the courtesy of the conqueror, French by his riches, Greeks by his respect for the arts, Jews by his moral integrity, Africans by his calm and authoritative bearing, but Germans are impressed by none of these things. They must be struck into the dust, struck down again as they rise. Struck again while they lie groaning, while their wounds still pain them; they will respect the hand that dealt them.”
—Germanicus Caesar, Roman general
(15 B.C.- 19 A.D.)
They are melting like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy threw water on her.
It’s a sight:
Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer who is spearheading the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, held a bizarre news conference on Thursday that quickly devolved into chaos.
At one point, Giuliani’s hair dye could be seen running down his face. At another, the former New York City mayor quoted the comedy film “My Cousin Vinny” to support his arguments.
Much of the press conference consisted of Giuliani rehashing the same conspiracy theories the president has amplified: that mail-in ballots are fraudulent, that election machines were illegally tampered with, that ballots were secretly dumped, and that Democrats masterminded a vast election-rigging scheme to simultaneously win the White House and get destroyed in down-ballot and state legislative races.
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At one point in the news conference, Giuliani did an impression of Joe Pesci’s character from “My Cousin Vinny” to back up the Trump campaign’s claim that Republican election observers were not allowed to properly watch the ballot counting.
Later in the presser, Giuliani’s hair dye started dripping down his face.
This is a metaphor for something, but I am not completely sure what.
Trump held a campaign rally in Nebraska, at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, and because of a shortage of buses and traffic congestion his supporters were left on the tarmac in freezing weather for hours.
At least 5 of the MAGAts were hospitalized for exposure:
By the time President Trump finished speaking to thousands of supporters at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Tuesday night and jetted away on Air Force One, the temperature had plunged to nearly freezing.
But as long lines of MAGA-clad attendees queued up for buses to take them to distant parking lots, it quickly became clear something was wrong.
The buses, the huge crowd soon learned, couldn’t navigate the jammed airport roads. For hours, attendees — including many elderly Trump supporters — stood in the cold as police scrambled to help those most at risk get to warmth, and some were taken to hospitals.
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By the end of the night, 30 people needed medical attention, Omaha police spokesman Michael Pecha said, though that was over the course of the event. Seven were taken to hospitals “with a variety of medical conditions.” It was not immediately clear how many of those were related to the lengthy wait.
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After Trump’s speech, in which he promised that “we’re making that final turn” on the pandemic in a state where positivity rates exceed 20 percent, per the World-Herald, Trump flew away on Air Force One around 9 p.m. Attendees began lining up for buses to return to their cars.
By nearly 10:30 p.m., though, they were still waiting.
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The crowds didn’t fully clear the rally site until after 12:30 a.m. — more than 3½ hours after Trump departed. A spokeswoman at one hospital network, CHI Health, told The Post that five people were treated “with minor complaints” at the nearby by Creighton University Medical Center. She declined to release additional information.
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“Supporters of the President were brought in, but buses weren’t able to get back to transport people out. It’s freezing and snowy in Omaha tonight,” tweeted Nebraska state Sen. Megan Hunt (D). “He truly does not care about you.”
Seriously, you cannot make this sh%$ up.
Members of the Trump administration have discovered that with Donald Trump flagging in the polls, they have become toxic to future employers.
They aren’t getting calls returned.
Oh the humanity:
Four years ago, some Republicans who said unsavory things during the campaign about the new president worried that such remarks might ruin their chances of redemption via employment in the Trump administration.
Today, some of those same Republicans are now quietly on the job hunt as President Trump’s standing in the polls continues to slide against Democratic nominee Joe Biden with decision time in just 18 days. But now, these GOPers are hoping the Trump presidency isn’t a disqualifying blemish on their resumes or Google footprint as the door revolves the other way and they seek to land, once again, in the private sector.
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“There’s always a market for lobbyists, but look at someone like [former White House Press Secretary Sean] Spicer who had high-profile gigs in the White House and where did he land?” noted Amanda Carpenter, a Trump critic, CNN contributor and former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). “He’s a host on Newsmax right now. That’s not the kind of leg-up to high-profile communications in the corporate world that’s the typical path…. If he can’t do it, I think people with such a high profile will have similar problems.”
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Over a dozen Republican strategists, former Trump administration staffers, current Capitol Hill hands and associates close to the Trump White House predict that many graduates of the Trump administration could have a tough time sticking a landing in the private sector.
They say Trump’s shaky standing in the campaign — and his pull on down-ballot races — is already making Republicans especially nervous.
“Quiet conversations in Gmail are more active now than would be expected a month before an election,” said a senior Republican strategist who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. “I have a buddy in the administration who is starting to quietly move his resume around, and he’s noticed people who he thought would be quicker to respond to inquiries have been less so. He called it ‘the Trump stink. How much Trump stink is on my resume right now?‘”
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This strategist said more prominent White House aides such as Mark Meadows and Stephen Miller may have bigger hurdles than more anonymous mid-tier aides seeking a job.
“But I don’t think Stephen Miller ever foresaw a job on K Street,” the strategist added.
Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, is one of the most recognizable current Trump White House officials. Carpenter predicts she will have an even more difficult time than Spicer if and when she exits but adds that for someone like McEnany, who made her name defending Trumpism on cable news, the benefits of the job might have outweighed other prospects.
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Many of those interviewed for this story did not want to go on the record in order to discuss private conversations with candor. But they say concerns about hiring people from Trumpworld are real.
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The longtime GOP strategist who runs a public affairs firm recalled coming close to hiring a former Trump White House staffer until a Google search revealed the prospective hire’s track record defending Trump on race and immigration. It ground the interview process to a halt, the strategist said.
“A lot of people who came into this in 2015 and 2016, they knew that there would be a stigma going into this — and it’ll likely last for a very long time,” said a Trump campaign staffer. “Probably for the rest of their lives. I don’t think that’s lost on anyone.”
(Emphasis mine)
No sympathy from me.
You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
It what is marvelous piece of irony, it tourns out that Donald Trump’s Covid-19 treatment was derived from fetal cells from an abortion:
This week, President Donald Trump extolled the cutting-edge coronavirus treatments he received as “miracles coming down from God.” If that’s true, then God employs cell lines derived from human fetal tissue.
The emergency antibody that Trump received last week was developed with the use of a cell line originally derived from abortion tissue, according to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed the experimental drug.
The Trump administration has taken an increasingly firm line against medical research using fetal tissue from abortions. For example, when it moved in 2019 to curtail the ability of the National Institutes of Health to fund such research, supporters hailed a “major pro-life victory” and thanked Trump personally for taking decisive action against what they called the “outrageous and disgusting” practice of “experimentation using baby body parts.”
But when the president faced a deadly encounter with covid-19, his administration raised no objections over the fact that the new drugs also relied on fetal cells, and anti-abortion campaigners were silent too. Most likely, their hypocrisy was unwitting. Many types of medical and vaccine research employ supplies of cells originally acquired from abortion tissue. It would have taken an expert to realize that was the case with Trump’s treatment.
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The Trump administration has sought to block or curtail research that requires tissue from recently performed abortions. In August, for example, a new board created by the Department of Health and Human Services, and stacked with figures opposed to abortion, voted to withhold funding from 13 of 14 proposals.
Conservative values don’t actually apply when it’s THEIR ox is gored.
Trump is now demanding that Attorney General William Barr arrest his political opponents, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
The scary thing is that I’m not sure what the worst Attorney General Ever™ will do in response to that request:
Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.
Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration.
I did not think that it was possible for Donald Trump to lose his sh%$ any more, but it appears that Covid-19 and powerful steroids may have driven him over the edge.
A federal appeals court just called bullsh%$ on Trump’s attempt to use his being President* to prevent investigation of tax evasion and fraud.
The excerpts of the opinion indicate that the judges have no f%$#s left to give with either Trump’s lawyers or the DoJ obfuscations:
A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Manhattan’s district attorney can enforce his subpoena for President Trump’s tax returns, rejecting a bid by Trump’s lawyers to kill the request on grounds it’s a malicious political ploy and potentially setting up another high-stakes showdown at the Supreme Court.
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The unanimous ruling was issued by a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded, “We have considered all of the President’s remaining contentions on appeal and have found in them no basis for reversal.”
(emphasis mine)
That’s law speak for, “Your eyes are brown because you are completely full of sh%$.”
District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. is seeking eight years of the president’s tax returns and related documents as part of his investigation into alleged hush-money payments made ahead of the 2016 election to two women who said they had affairs with Trump years prior. Trump denies the claims. Investigators want to determine whether efforts were made to conceal the payments on tax documents by labeling them legal expenses.
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The panel that heard the president’s appeal shot down his claim that the district attorney’s investigation is limited only to the alleged payments made by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal — saying in their ruling that the “bare assertion . . . amounts to nothing more than implausible speculation.”
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Vance’s bid for Trump’s tax records has been stalled since last year, when he issued the subpoena to Mazars.
Trump’s lawyers, who have signaled that they would ask the Supreme Court to look at the case again, have already lost at the high court, which in July rejected their initial argument that, as president, Trump is immune from prosecution. The justices said, however, that Trump could try again with a different approach.
I am amused.
A group of people ignore a beloved woman’s dying wish and rush to take advantage of her death.They hold an event to announce their corrupt plan…
…and then one by one they start falling ill.
Gotta admit, it’s all very Stephen King.
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) October 3, 2020
Surely, I cannot be the only one who thinks that the entire scenario more closely resembles Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.
With his retinue at the center of an expanding Covid-19 outbreak, the parallels are striking.
Seriously:
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
President* Trump has been helicoptered to Walter Reed after testing positive for the Corona virus.
They are claiming that it’s moderate symptoms, but it’s only been about 24 hours since he started to showing signs of the infection, so it’s likely to get worse.
What’s more, it appears that there was a super-spreading event at the roll-out of his Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett, with numerous reporters, staffers, and a few Senators testing positive.
There seems to be a plethora of folks who are offering insincere. “Thoughts and prayers,” for Trump.
I will not be one of them.