January 1, 2019: Trump kicks off the New Year in the same fashion he ended the
last. That is, acting like an ass. All he has to do to stay out of trouble is
wish everyone, “Happy New Year,” and put Twitter to bed.
At 7:51 a.m. he blows it completely. In his
first tweet for 2019, he gives a shout out to Dr. Sebastian Gorka, a Fox News
regular. Gorka has written an actual book! Trump might actually read it if
Gorka praises him highly enough. I am going to predict what the author says
without bothering to read it: “Liberals are despicable. They don’t love
America, but our side does! Obama wasn’t born in America—and he was a Muslim,
too. Hillary Clinton chained up little kids in a pizza parlor basement and her
33,000 missing emails were all child pornography. You can’t trust the
government because that’s what liberals want, to rule your life. Now that
Donald J. Trump is in power, however, you can trust the government completely no
matter what he does!”
His second tweet, at 8:28 a.m. is petty (no
surprise) and includes one of his trademarked attacks on the free press (no
surprise). To make sure no one misses his point, he puts it all in caps, the
written equivalent of shouting.
HE SHOUTS:
HAPPY NEW YEAR
TO EVERYONE, INCLUDING THE HATERS AND THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA! 2019 WILL BE A
FANTASTIC YEAR FOR THOSE NOT SUFFERING FROM TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. JUST
CALM DOWN AND ENJOY THE RIDE, GREAT THINGS ARE HAPPENING FOR OUR COUNTRY!
Trump fans love that phrase, “Fake News,”
which the president used in 99 tweets in 2018 and 156 in 2017.
“Trump Derangement Syndrome,” is used much
less frequently, only three times in 2018, and not once in 2017.
So let me SHOUT BACK:
MR. PRESIDENT, YOU SEEM TO SUFFER FROM
MUELLER DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.
PLUS YOU SEEM TO ♥♥♥♥♥♥ PUTIN! PUTIN IS A KILLER, BY THE WAY.
AND THE SAUDIS? THEY MURDERED THAT JOURNALIST!
ARE YOU REALLY THAT DUMB NOT TO KNOW?
Sorry. I got a little carried away. At any
rate, Mr. President, did you see what the federal judge said to your boy, old
“Lock Her Up” Flynn?
The judge read the court documents, redacted so the rest of us
couldn’t see everything that was said—because Mueller is still hot on the trail—and
said to your first choice for National Security Adviser back in January 2017:
“Arguably, you sold your country out.”
Oops, sorry again. I’m not deranged, Mr.
President. I just hate people who sell this country out.
1/2/19: President Trump starts off 2019
with an approval rating, averaging all polls, of 42.9 percent.
Meanwhile, the partial government shutdown
continues. Trump, who has never bothered to read the U.S. Constitution, learns
that the “power of the purse” is vested in the House of Representatives. Rep.
Nancy Pelosi, who will take over as Speaker of the House on January 3, says
there’ll be no money for the wall. Trump wants $5.6 billion. Pelosi says she’s
going to meet him halfway at $0.00.
I know, because I use Facebook, that my
conservative friends are furious at this news. As far as I can tell, their
argument is that unless we build the wall immediately, dark-skinned immigrants will
pour across the border and kill them all in their beds the moment the sun sets.
I keep arguing that if we really want to keep America safe, we should build a
wall around all the drug companies that have spent the last decade claiming opioids
are safe.
My conservative friends only get angrier and insist
that liberals like me hate America.
So, to break the logjam, I do my civic duty.
First, I send a thoughtful letter to the Mexican ambassador in Washington, D.C.
I ask him to please pay for the wall, just as Candidate Trump promised Mexico would.
But we can’t wait! I don’t want to die in my
bed tonight. And if I only get injured, say the illegal immigrant merely cracks
my skull, I will have to get a prescription for painkillers and then like tens
of thousands of Americans annually, I might get addicted and truly die.
So I have a brilliant solution. President
Trump is going to want me to join the cabinet when he hears this.
He should order the IRS to add a special box
to 1040 tax forms this year. Here’s how it will look:
□ I would like to
pay an additional $88.91 in federal taxes, with that contribution going
directly toward building the Great Wall of Trump.
If every Trump voter from 2016 kicks in that
much—and I’m sure they all will, and some will even round up, because they
don’t want to be killed—Donald J. Trump will have the $5.6 billion he wants and
construction can begin at once.
Plus, Mexico will pay the United States back
and the IRS will refund all contributions in the end.
1/3/19: The president wakes early, stretches
his 6' 2" or 6' 3" frame (see:
5/2/18), wiggles his toes and ponders his busy schedule (executive playtime till 11:00 a.m. and no public events scheduled
all day). Finally, he rises from bed and lumbers to the bathroom. There, he
puts paste on his toothbrush and gazes fondly at his reflection in the mirror.
His reflection gazes back—fondly, for sure—and both Trumps think: “I look great—great hairdo, beautiful orange
tint, sexy jowls.” (See: 2/2/19.)
Trump eats breakfast, watches Fox News, and
plays around with his iPhone until playtime ends. (See: 2/3/19.)
A “big, fat war in Asia.”
Unfortunately, at 11:00 top aides and cabinet
members expect him to do something besides tweet. The president does have sweet letters from Kim Jong-un, the murdering
despot in charge of North Korea’s repressive regime. Sources say he loves to
show them to White House visitors, fanning them out on his Oval Office desk for
all to see, admire and praise. In fact, Trump has just received what he says is
another “great letter” from Kim, who tells him that they should get together
soon.
The president is proud, because he tells
everyone that if he hadn’t been such a fantastic leader there would have been a
“big, fat war in Asia,” because some lunatic had threatened the North Koreans
with “fire and fury” and “destruction like no one had ever seen,” and…oh, wait…that
was himself.
Well, then, let’s see what else we can find
in the news and see how the president is doing. The federal government remains in
a partial shutdown on Day 13. And the guy who said he’d be “proud” to own it,
is now insisting the Democrats own it instead, and whoever said it was going to
be President Trump’s baby to burp told a foul lie. Diplomacy may be hard (to be fair it’s hard for
every president—and it’s just that Trump is different because he always has to
brag about how great he is). But there’s always the Midas touch he brings to the
art of governing—the booming job numbers—the fabulous tax cuts—and the soaring Dow-Jones.
Damn!
Before the day is over, the Dow sheds another
660 points, extending heavy losses from the end of last year.
Well, then, the tax cuts! Those are great—and
they’re not going to add to the deficit, because …
God damn! Trump took over in January 2017, insisting
he could wipe out the deficit (just under $19 trillion at the time) if voters
would give him eight years. Now he’s down to six left to get the job done. It’s
going slower than he and Paul Ryan and Milksop Mitch promised. In fact, the
U.S. Treasury Department announced that the federal deficit has
ballooned to $21,974,000,000 in two years, with the “fiscally responsible”
Republicans in control. So, let me check my math.
(Sound of calculator buttons being tapped.)
Yeah, the deficit is NOT going down.
You can check out the National Debt Clock for
fun and watch the debt rise by $1 million every 30 seconds. (Boy, I remember
when Republicans used to love to watch that clock and blame every last blink on
President Obama.)
You can watch and wonder what will be left
for your kids’ government to spend (not much) and for your grandkids’ (nothing
at all).
Plus, with Trump in charge, the damage from
climate change will be much worse in the end.
FOR ADDITIONAL READING ON CLIMATE CHANGE:
Consult the posts for 1/12/19 and 1/20/19; also the following days in 2018:
4/15; 5/17; 8/6; 9/18; 10/4; 10/11; 11/17; 11/23; 12/12 and 12/16.
“Against the
assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”
Mark Twain
1/4-5/19: Our topic for the weekend
is “The Trump Stupidity Index” which seems to reach new levels daily, if not hourly.
I am striving to keep posts shorter this year,
but when it comes to presidential stupidity there is always a great deal to
discuss. Stupidity spills from Trump’s lips like pig manure from a North
Carolina industrial farm inundated by hurricane flood waters.
(Yeah, that happened for real.)
Probably Trump’s stupidest comment this week came during
a contentious meeting with Democratic leaders, regarding funding for the Great
Wall of Trump. When Dems made it clear they weren’t interested in spending $5
billion plus on the president’s pet project, Trump said he was willing to keep
the government shutdown going “for a very long period—months, or even years.”
You wondered why he didn’t say “eons.”
This epic burst of stupidity followed hard on
the heels of other impressively stupid comments, as in, Trump saying he would
be “proud” to own the shutdown. Then you had Trump tweeting, “The Democrats now own the shutdown.”
Then Trump changed his mind like a four-year-old changing his mind about what
socks he wants to wear. The president kicked the Stupidity Index up a notch,
telling reporters he didn’t care what they called the shutdown, Trump Shutdown,
the Tooth Fairy Shutdown, he could care less. “It’s just words,” he said.
“Some of them told me.”
He went on to defend his decision to shut
down the government by claiming that everyone except drug dealers, gang members
and human traffickers wanted him to build the Great Wall of Trump. He told reporters this “should’ve been done
by all of the presidents that preceded me.”
“They all know it,” Trump insisted, “some of
them told me.”
Since “some” is plural and the only living
former presidents are Obama, Bush 43, Clinton and Carter, everyone listening to
the president figured—with mathematical certainty—that he was lying again.
(As a former American history teacher, I started
wondering if James K. Polk had visited Mr. Trump in a dream.)
The Stupidity Index went up several more notches
when a CNN reporter asked the president if he still believed Mexico was going
to pay for the wall. Trump said Mexico was
already paying, because of the great trade deals he has worked out. (Well,
then, let’s just open the government back up, if Mexico is paying, and call it
a Trump win.) The CNN reporter wondered if he hadn’t failed on the promise to
build a “concrete wall.” First, Trump said he never said he was going to build
a “concrete wall.” (He did.) Then he rambled on for a full minute about how a
wall made of steel slats would be more “beautiful” and, “frankly, stronger.”
Did you know you can’t see through a
“12-inch” thick concrete wall, he asked? I suspect the reporter did.
Another pesky media type asked Mr. Trump if
he was at all concerned about the 800,000 federal workers going without pay.
What about their financial safety net? Trump claimed that most
furloughed workers loved the concept of the Great Wall of Trump. If it was made
of concrete—not that it would be—tens of thousands of would probably visit the
border, stick a hand or foot in the wet concrete and use a stick to write their
names, or maybe, “Trump is the Best!”
“The safety net,” for furloughed federal workers,
he continued, “is going to be having a strong border because we’re going to be
safe.”
Friday, hundreds of Transportation Safety
Administration employees were so happy to hear about this new safety net, and so
thrilled to be working without pay, they decided to call in sick.
The Stupidity Index shot up again when Trump told
reporters watching and a stunned cabinet, that Russia was right to invade Afghanistan in 1979. “The reason Russia
was in Afghanistan,” he explained, “was because terrorists were going into
Russia. They were right to be there,” he said.
We cannot recall a more absurd misstatement.
This was news, for sure, to U.S. military
leaders, assorted NATO allies, random Afghans in and around Kabul and even the
Russians. The editorial board of the Wall
Street Journal roasted the president. The president’s remarks, the Journal said, were “absurd” and “reprehensible.”
“Right to be there?” the editors fumed. “We cannot recall a more absurd
misstatement of history by an American President. The Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan with three divisions in December 1979 to prop up a fellow communist
government.” Both the Carter and Reagan administrations began supplying weapons
to the Afghans in a fight to drive the invaders out.
Trump’s additional statements, mocking the
contribution of NATO allies to our fight after 9/11, proved not only incredibly
stupid but grotesque. “They tell me a hundred times, ‘Oh, we sent you soldiers. We
sent you soldiers,’” Trump whined. He insisted NATO allies had to kick in more
dough.
So let’s be clear. Trump was epically stupid when it came to the history
of the Russian invasion.
He was mathematically stupid when he ignored the contribution of NATO
partners (130,000 troops sent to Afghanistan in years following the 9/11 attacks).
He was morally stupid, when it came to current affairs, ignoring the over-arching
fact that 16,000 NATO troops were putting their lives on the line, beside our
own forces, in Afghanistan, now.
And for a man who has always been reluctant to shed a droplet of blood
in defense of the nation, he was grotesquely stupid when he discounted the sacrifices
made by NATO troops. Thousands have been wounded or maimed in Afghanistan and
1,141 have lost their lives there since a day seventeen years
ago, when the United States was attacked and our NATO allies rallied to our
defense.
In fact, so much stupidity has cascaded from
Trump’s lips in just a few days, you really wonder, “Can this guy say something that isn’t stupid, by
pure happenstance, the way a blind squirrel trips over a tasty nut?” In a rambling
95-minute-long cabinet meeting, he goes on to explain why he no longer needs advice from all the great generals he
originally hired, “his generals,” as he used to call them. That was before they
were convicted of felonies (Flynn), fired (H.R. McMaster), pushed out (John
Kelly), or resigned in disgust (James Mattis). Trump now insists he knows more
about the military than anyone or all of them put together.
“I think I would have been a good general,
but who knows,” he adds.
This is reminiscent of the time the president stupidly claimed he’d have been a
hero if he had been present when a former student opened fire at Marjory
Stoneman Douglass High School, killing or wounding 34. “I really believe I’d
run in there,” he told an audience, “even if I didn’t have a weapon.”
(Do we need to point out the fallacy of that
comment, considering that both careers—general and hero—would have been halted before
they began by Mr. Trump’s crippling bone spurs?)
1/6/19: The U.S. government remains
closed. Trump is bored and needs something to do with all his free time.
He could work out and get in shape.
Or he could just lounge around in his
pajamas, like a 239-pound lump. So, that’s what he does. (See: 2/3/19.)
1/7/19: Trump’s first tweet of the day
comes at 7:56 a.m. Even by Trump standards, this one is nuts:
Many have become crazed lunatics.
With all of the
success that our Country is having, including the just released jobs numbers
which are off the charts, the Fake News & totally dishonest Media
concerning me and my presidency has never been worse. Many have become crazed
lunatics who have given up on the TRUTH!...
Thirteen minutes expire. (Does this man have
nothing better to do?) At 8:09 he
continues his thought:
...The
Fake News will knowingly lie and demean in order make the tremendous success of
the Trump Administration, and me, look as bad as possible. They use
non-existent sources & write stories that are total fiction. Our Country is
doing so well, yet this is a sad day in America!
(This from the man who said recently imaginary former
presidents told him they wish they had built the wall.)
His outrage has not abated when he tweets at 8:31
a.m. Once more, he attacks the free press: “....The Fake News Media in our
Country is the real Opposition Party. It is truly the Enemy of the People! We
must bring honesty back to journalism and reporting!”
Seven minutes later Trump fires off a fourth tweet.
This time he’s insisting he has the right to declare a national emergency. In
fact, he’s going to declare an emergency and have the U.S. Army build the wall.
I am thinking creatively here, and believe the U.S.
Navy and Marines should be tasked with adding a moat.
*
THIS NAKED POWER GRAB will not, oddly enough, scare
Republicans who used to believe Obama was
going to send imaginary troops pouring out of tunnels underneath shuttered
WalMart stores.
So, let’s play this out the way the president would
like to see it. First, he declares a national emergency and sends troops to build
the wall. Then he sends more troops to take over operations at CNN and place Tucker
Carlson in charge. Then he sends at least one airborne division to blockade the
Washington Post. No coffee or donuts will
be allowed through the lines.
Maybe the U.S. Air Force can get in on the fun and
bomb the offices of The New York Times.
The
list of “Enemies of the People” will be long.
Under his new emergency powers, Trump will order internal
enemies (i.e.: critics) arrested. Relying on the 1942 model, involving internment
of 110,000 Japanese-Americans, relocation camps will be set up in barren regions.
For instance: Kansas. This will mean more walls, creating more jobs for the
U.S. steel industry. Congress will need to give him more billions. That way, Americans
who love Trump and the Constitution will be protected from Americans who don’t
love Trump and fear he’s subverting the Constitution.
The following groups and individuals will be interned,
probably forever: Hillary, Mueller, Robert Mueller’s wife and children, Rep.
Adam Schiff (Schitt), F.B.I. agents who criticized Trump in emails and former
campaign aides who have “ratted” on Trump for breaking the law. Also packing
the internment camps will be: Muslim-Americans, Hollywood elites, Haitian
immigrants, General Mattis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—for
dancing—and anyone who has ever mocked Trump’s hair.
Sen. Milksop Mitch McConnell will sign off on the
plan and give Trump ten extra picks for the U.S. Supreme Court.
The highest court in the land will then vote, 15-4,
in favor of granting Trump the power to:
A)
Pardon himself.
B)
Cancel any taxes he owes, not that he
ever pays.
C)
Appear armed at press briefings and
shoot reporters who pose questions he doesn’t like.
With all that done, the GOP, now the Party of Trump, will
declare that by subverting the U.S. Constitution the U.S. Constitution has been
saved.
Ms. Campbell has already labeled Trump a “sexual
predator,” so I think we know what this means. Trump is going to want to build
a wall along our border with Canada. And if Nancy Pelosi won’t give him the
money?
He’ll have a tantrum for sure.
1/8/19: President Trump is schedule to
give a short speech tonight about why we really need to build the Great Wall of
Trump.
To help make that case, his surrogates have
been out talking all week. Pinocchio Sanders, for one, appeared on Fox News, Sunday morning. You
know she was expecting it was going to be perfectly safe to spew a few of her
patented lies. But Chris Wallace was hosting and asked her about a claim by
Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen, that more than 3,000 terrorist
suspects had been stopped trying to cross into this country from Mexico in the
last year.
Pinocchio did what Pinocchio does.
Pinocchio was excited to try to bamboozle the
fools who watch Fox News for news. “We know that roughly, nearly 4,000 known or
suspected terrorists come into our country illegally,” she told Wallace (one of
the few real journalists Fox employs), “and we know that our most vulnerable
point of entry is at our southern border.” If Pinocchio was a parrot,
squawking by rote, she’d have made just as much sense. She was repeating a
statement she made unchallenged on Fox two days before, that there were, “nearly
4,000 known or suspected terrorists that CPB [Customs and Border Protection] picked
up that came across our southern border.”
Wallace immediately put her in her place. “Do you know where those 4,000 people come [from],
where they’re captured? Airports,” he said.
Pinocchio was clearly rattled
by his response. But Pinocchio did what Pinocchio does. Sanders tried a
different formulation of the same lie. “I’m saying that they come by air, by
land and by sea,” she said. “I’m not disagreeing with you that they’re coming
through airports.”
Well, then, what good will a
wall do, viewers of even average intellect should have been asking themselves?
Wrong border, fool!
Meanwhile, various news agencies spent Monday
trying to uncover the facts. Wallace was one of the first. CBS cited statistics from the
Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. A total of 2,554
people on the FBI’s terrorist screening list were stopped trying to enter the
U.S. in fiscal year 2017. That’s the last year for which data is complete. A
handful, 49, tried to enter by sea. A whopping 2,170 were stopped at airports.
The other 335 were attempting to enter by land; but the State Department, CBS
noted, “said in September it had no indication that any terrorists had tried
entering the U.S. through Mexico.”
CBS further explained:
“At year’s end
there was no credible evidence indicating that international terrorist groups
have established bases in Mexico, worked with Mexican drug cartels, or sent
operatives via Mexico into the United States,” the State Department report said.
“Terrorist groups likely seek other means of trying to enter the United
States.”
Overall, 41
people on the Terrorist Screening Database were encountered at the southern
border from Oct. 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018, but 35 of them were U.S. citizens
or lawful permanent residents. Six were classified as non-U.S. persons.
On the northern
border, CBP stopped 91 people listed in the database, including 41 who were not
already citizens or permanent residents.
Damn, Fox News fans, wake up!
Your boy Trump wants to build his big
beautiful wall on the wrong border!!! We’ve got to be vigilant! Terrorists in
moose costumes may be flooding across the northern border, while we look foolishly
to the south.
God damn!!!!
White House aides say Trump will speak to the
nation for about 7-8 minutes tonight. That gives him five minutes for bragging,
two minutes for lying, and a minute to whine about “Fake News.”
To emphasize the danger, I really think he
should dress up as a moose.
1/9/19: The president’s big, beautiful Oval
Office speech, on the need for a border wall, lands with a Trump Thud.
No one is moved by what he says and most of
us know he’s lying from the start. He doesn’t mention terrorists pouring across
the border—because the “Fake News” folks have been catching his surrogates lying
about the numbers for a week. Was it 3,000 terrorists pouring in from Mexico?
Or 40,000? Or a billion? Trump and his toadies couldn’t make up their minds.
They all agreed, however, that it was a lot!
Meanwhile, if you were hiding in your Safe
Room, loading your weapons to repel
lepers and people carrying smallpox—you might have missed critical developments in the Russia
probe.
First, the Grand Jury empaneled by Special
Counsel Mueller has been extended for six months. That means when
Trump sticks his head out of the White House on February 2, he’s going to see
his fat shadow and know there’s six more months of Mueller ahead.
The Big Orange Enchilada.
Second, we learn that Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein has decided to step down when a new Attorney
General is in place. We know that William Barr, Trump’s choice to take over at
Justice, is scheduled for Senate confirmation hearings next week. At first blush, the president has
to be excited to think that another nemesis is bowing out of the Russia fight. Yet,
before the Big Orange Enchilda (see: Watergate, for reference) breaks out the
champagne he might want to puzzle out what this means. It’s a distinct
possibility that Rosenstein knows the investigation is guaranteed to draw Trump
blood—and copious amounts—and sees the chance to be a stronger voice in defense
of the rule of law on the outside of the government than in, giving warning about
what he, Mueller and many others already know.
In fact, the bullets so far keep flying past the
president’s head—and just missing. But the law of averages says,
metaphorically, that Trump can’t dodge them all. Democrats on the House
Intelligence Committee have announced that the first witness they call
back and place under oath will be his son, Don Jr.
Republicans helped stall that process till the end of January,
simply by refusing to name any of the members they’d be placing on HIC, meaning
no official business could be conducted until they did. They did, however,
attend to more serious matters, staffing up 23 other committees in short order,
including the critical Joint Committee on the Library, the one committee in
Congress almost certain never to come to the attention of President Donald J.
Trump.
In any case, we should expect the president’s
propaganda pals to start whining again about “perjury traps” in which poor Jr.
might inadvertently plant a foot. The problem is that Jr. almost certainly has both
feet in traps already, and maybe two or three other valuable appendages, plus
at least one ear.
Look for televised hearings soon and watch
live as the president’s son takes the Fifth. (I’ll take a couple of friendly
bets from conservative friends that Don Jr. gets indicted before the year is
out.)
Second participant in Trump Tower meeting indicted.
Why might Don Jr. be sweating more heavily of
late? We need to go back to the infamous Trump Tower meeting (June 2016), which
he and everyone else involved forgot about until the “Fake News” folks broke
the story in July 2017. One participant has already been convicted on ten felony
counts. Now a second, Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who attended—and
that would be the Russian lawyer with ties to top Russian officials—has been indicted.
If you’re a Trump lover, keep in mind this wasn’t Mueller’s call. This
investigation comes out of the Southern District of New York, a federal
attorney’s office headed up by a Trump appointee.
The Russian lawyer’s case may not be tied to
the Mueller probe but it hints at where Mueller is going. Veselnitskaya is
accused of obstruction of justice. Her motive: She was covering up a trail of Russian
money-laundering.
Ah, money-laundering! What else! A highly-secret
court challenge—believed to be related to a demand for documents filed by
Mueller and his team—has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The case involves
a “mysterious foreign-owned company” that has so far refused to comply with a
subpoena for documents. The lower courts have said that a fine of $50,000 per
day shall be imposed, as long as the company remains in contempt. So the
company appealed.
I try to be realistic in my assessments. I
still don’t see evidence to impeach the Big Orange Enchilada.
But I’m getting the sense Mueller may have seen
enough.
I will, however, venture a guess. I am
guessing the company is Deutsche Bank.
It could be the Bank of Cyprus, where Paul Manafort and Russian oligarchs used
to hide all their loot. Or it could be any number of Russian money-laundering
fronts. My money (never laundered) is on Deutsche Bank.
Get your senses checked: You may be dead.
I am definitely going to say this development
is NOT good news for President Trump and his pals.
That brings us back to Manafort once more. In
a filing blunder this week, his lawyers failed to redact portions of a court
document that offers a window into what
Mueller and his team already know. If you don’t read the documents—whereas I
do—you don’t know that Mueller always knows way more than the targets of
investigation think he knows. Now, we find that Manafort shared polling data
with the Russians, while leading the Trump 2016 campaign.
We knew long ago that he was deeply in debt
at the time—to a Russian oligarch, of course. Mueller allegedly has evidence
that puts Manafort in a secret meeting with Konstantin Kilimnick, a former Russian intelligence officer, in August 2016
and in another secret meeting in Madrid in early 2017. This passage of data would
likely have been meant to aid the Russians in refining their efforts to disrupt
U.S. elections.
I know, I know. “NO COLLUSION,” as the Big
Orange Enchilada likes to tweet. But if you don’t sense
CONSPIRACY, you had better
have your eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin checked.
None of your senses are working and you may already
be dead.
POSTSCRIPT: There are also reports that Manafort intended to be
paid as much as $2.4 million for the polling data in his hands. His alleged intent
was to feed it to two Ukrainian oligarchs, with whom he had previously worked,
who would kindly pass it on to their Russian pals.
Presto! Payday for Paul Manafort!
*
WARNING: Combined length equal to a
healthy book.
1/10/19: Mark your calendars. Set
your alarm. Schedule a day of vacation. Shit’s about to get real.
Donald Trump’s former fixer and longtime lawyer,
Michael Cohen, has agreed to testify voluntarily, under oath, before the
House Oversight Committee. Cohen, who will appear on February 7, has already
plead guilty to lying to Congress in a previous session and will return knowing
he’s headed for jail in March.
And here we should note: If this were North
Korea under Kim Jong-un or Iraq under Saddam or Russia under Putin, Cohen would
be dead. This might explain why President Trump is always eager to praise authoritarian rulers.
You figure he’s jealous of the powers they possess.
You know how he is. Trump said he admired the way Saddam took care of terrorists.
He said he and Kim “fell in love” and claimed
Kim “really cares about his people” ( including 120,000 political prisoners in
his gulag). He sent Putin congratulations after he
won his last election (by banning other candidates and ordering critics poisoned or beaten to
death). In fact, Trump used to be a fan of Najib Razak of
Malaysia. Then Najib got into a jam for stealing an estimated $1.7 billion from
his people, got booted out of office and sent to jail without passing “Go.”
What does Trump have to fear if his former
fixer spills six cans of beans in testimony before Congress? First, Cohen has tapes of conversations (a lawyer
may legally tape a client without his or her
consent in the State of New York). Second, we know investigators in the
Southern District of New York seized hundreds of thousands of pages of documents
in raids on Cohen’s home, office and safe deposit box. Third, Cohen knows where
the financial bodies are buried. He can testify about hush money payments during
the 2016 campaign and how Trump wanted those payments made, about the secret
company they set up, and the legal documents filled with pseudonyms they used. There
are rumors of additional hush money settlements, as well.
Trump didn’t come forward to correct his fixer.
Even more damaging, potentially, we now know
Cohen lied about continuing efforts to pursue a mega-million dollar deal to
build a Trump Tower in Moscow. When collusion was nothing more than a glimmer
in James Comey’s eye, we know Cohen had already started lying, insisting that negotiations
for a Moscow deal ended in January 2016. Trump didn’t come forward to correct
his fixer when it would have been easy to do so. He insisted that he had no
dealings in Russia, at all. He wouldn’t think of having such dealings because—well—that
would be a conflict of interest for anyone running
for president. (You can have fun and go back and listen to the “Fake News” story from
CNN, which we now know was very accurate and very non-fake.). Today we find that
Cohen and the president’s current lawyer, Horndog Rudy, agree. Negotiations
were continuing right up till Election Day and
the payoff might have been huge. Cohen once predicted the deal could be worth
“hundreds of millions” to Mr. Trump if it ever went through.
So what potential torpedoes can Cohen put
through the hull of the U.S.S. Trump?
Cohen admits he lied to Congress. Trump
surrogates will be going all out now, claiming we can’t believe Cohen, because
he’s an admitted liar. But what if Cohen can prove he lied to Congress because Trump ordered him to? That’s a torpedo
to the boiler room, right there.
Cohen has hinted that he knows about a
planning meeting—prior to the secret Trump Tower New York meeting with
Russians—and that Candidate Trump knew all about that earlier meeting, too. If
he can prove that Trump lied again that’s a torpedo that blows off the ship’s rudder.
Cohen can sink the U.S.S. Trump once and for all, with a shot to the bow, if he
reveals tax evasion by Candidate Trump.
In fact, on February 7, Democrats on the
House Oversight Committee might just want to ask, “Mr. Cohen, are there any matters
of illegality you would like to tell us about, involving Mr. Trump or the Trump
campaign?”
Then they should sit back and watch the
torpedoes strike.
*
IF YOU DON’T THINK the president is worried
about submarines, compare his initial reaction, when Cohen’s office was raided,
to his reaction once he realized Cohen was going to flip. When investigators
served a warrant on Cohen, Trump said it was an outrage that they “broke into”
his office.
It was an “attack on our country.” Cohen was “a good man.” (You can watch Trump say this right on Fox News.)
Then Cohen began to cooperate and the tune changed. Cohen was a “serial liar.” No
one should ever hire him again. In fact, when he really thought about it, Trump
realized Cohen was a “rat.”
How scared is the president? This week we
learn that the White House has hired 17 new lawyers to guard Mr.
Trump.
TRUMP FOR PRE$IDENT 2016
1/11/19: The New York Times reports that F.B.I. agents were so concerned by
all the Trump campaign contacts with Russia during the 2016 campaign that they
launched an investigation into whether or not the candidate was operating as an
agent of Vladimir Putin. Turning to Fox News to see what story they might be
covering instead, we find Laura Ingraham is furious because Democratic lawmakers have gone to Puerto Rico, where
they’re “spending time at the beach” and watching showings of Hamilton instead of working out a deal
to build the border wall.
Back in chilly Washington, D.C., poor President
Trump is trapped and suffering in the White House with only a skeleton staff to
cater to his every whim. None of Ingraham’s viewers will realize, of course,
that the Hamilton showing is intended
to raise money for hurricane relief. Ingraham then decides to talk to Sean
Hannity, who, for no apparent reason, refers to the Democratic mayor of New
York in passing as “Comrade de Blasio.”
I am left scratching my head. Did I miss the
story where Comrade de Blasio tried to land a huge deal to build a de Blasio
Tower in Moscow?
Because that would be suspicious in the
extreme.
1/12/19: The U.S. government
remains partially shut down, marking Day 22 of the Trump Tantrum Shutdown.
 |
| How Trump used to view shutdowns. |
That means the president can sit around in
his underwear and randomly tweet. At 5:36 a.m. he’s already running amok on
Twitter. Apparently he just read The New
York Times article from the previous day, which carries the headline: “F.B.I.
Investigated if Trump Worked for the Russians.”
We’ll come back to that in a few moments; but
Trump’s first tweet of the day (he deletes the post at 5:36 but repeats it at
6:05) reads,
Wow,
just learned in the Failing New York Times that the corrupt former leaders of
the FBI, almost all fired or forced to leave the agency for some very bad
reasons, opened up an investigation on me, for no reason & with no proof,
after I fired Lyin’ James Comey, a total sleaze!
Three hours later, he’s still tweeting madly about
Comey and Mueller and all the law enforcement officials out to get him.
*
PUT RUSSIA ASIDE for now and let’s catch up with
several stories you might have missed while you were busy worrying about the hordes
of murders, rapists, terrorists, rampaging hockey-stick-wielding Canadians and
people from “shithole” countries pouring across our border(s) and wondering
when Congress would finally wake up and give Trump the money he wants.
Oceans are heating up faster than scientists thought.
Is there anything else that might be truly worrisome
in the news? Yes, there is. Scientists now warn that the oceans of the world
are heating up faster than they thought. Relying on 3,900 floats around the
world, and measuring water temperatures down to 6,600 feet, they reported this week that the oceans were
hotter in 2018 than ever. “Global warming is here, and has major consequences
already,” authors of the report note. “There is no doubt, none!”
You know scientists are freaking
out when they resort to exclamation points in an otherwise dry report.
Unfortunately, if we get the big snow storm predicted
today, we can expect Trump to tweet something idiotic, where he mixes up
weather and climate again. His last tweet on the topic, November 21, reads: “Brutal
and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened
to Global Warming?”
Answer: check the records from the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, you fool. They rate 2018 the fourth hottest year on
record, trailing only 2017, 2016 and 2015, globally.
*
MEANWHILE, TRUMP is having a Louis XIV
moment. “I am the government,” the French king once said. And when he wanted to
spend one-fourth of French tax revenues on himself, that’s what he did.
President in a royal snit.
Currently, the president is in a royal snit
because he has discovered that the Founding Fathers wisely placed the “power of
the purse” in the hands of the U.S. House of Representatives, so that no president
could ever act like a king.
Unless he can circumvent the U.S.
Constitution—which we all know he’s ready to try—he won’t get his way.
So, here are a few of Trump’s authoritarian thoughts
in recent days:
A)
He can declare a national
emergency and do anything he wants.
B)
He can stop sending FEMA funds to
California to pay for catastrophic damage from forest fires (see: climate
change). Nobody in California likes him anyway, so screw them.
C)
He can divert money meant to help
California to building the Great Wall of Trump.
D)
If he can declare one national
emergency, without having reason, he can declare as many national emergencies
as he wants.
*
WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC of unlimited power, let’s
consider what caused the president to flip out early this morning. He got off
to a rousing start before the sun was up, labeling former F.B.I. Director James
Comey a “sleaze.”
So let’s examine these matters rationally,
whether we like James Comey or not. Comey was
a top law enforcement official for decaides, not someone you would imagine lies
with regularity.
Trump’s former personal lawyer is now a
nine-time convicted felon and Trump’s former campaign manager has ten felonies to
his name.
Trump says Comey is a “sleaze?” Did Comey cheat
on three wives in a row or was that Trump?
Yep. Trump is the sleaze.
As investigators continue to close in on his
inner circle, the president clearly feels he has no choice but to lay down a
smokescreen of furious tweets. By the time he’s done this morning (after four
hours), Trump has howled about “the rigged & botched Crooked Hillary
investigation.” He has complained that Clinton was guilty of the “Real
Collusion,” even though he insists that “COLLUSION” is no crime. (That doesn’t
even make sense.) He has insisted that, “My firing of James Comey was a great
day for America.” Then he pegs him as “a Crooked Cop.”
Finally, he screams about Comey’s “best
friend, Bob Mueller, & the 13 Angry Democrats,” and tries to brand that
entire bunch as “leaking machines.”
Here, again, it’s important to think rationally.
Mueller is a highly-decorated combat vet. He was once so highly regarded that
the U.S. Senate confirmed his appointment to head the F.B.I. by a vote of
100-0. The “13 Angry Democrats,” which Trump sometimes calls the “17 Angry
Democrats,” when he’s enraged, are 13 or 17 top legal minds at the Department
of Justice.
How about Trump? He was a serial bankruptcy
artist before he won office. He’s the guy who paid off a porn star, paid off a
Playboy Bunny, and bragged about grabbing women by the pussy whenever he liked.
He was the guy who said for months that he did not believe the Russians hacked the
election—because good old Vladimir told him they didn’t.
Yet, in another tweet earlier today, Trump
insisted: “I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton. Maybe
tougher than any other President.”
That’s almost too absurd to merit comment.
This is Trump! He’s the guy who told a young Russian woman (since indicted) at a
campaign event that once he took over he
didn’t think we’d need the sanctions Obama slapped on Russia for invading Crimea. He’s the guy who
praised Putin’s leadership, who said Putin wasn’t such a killer, who had a deal cooking—while he was running for
president—which would have provided Putin a free $50 million apartment if Trump
got to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
You know: like a bribe.
In a final morning tweet, the president summed
up his ridiculous case by blasting “Lyin’ James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter S [Strzok]
and his lover, agent Lisa Page, & more” and called them just “some of the
losers that tried to do a number on your President.”
You can argue that all those named in his
tweet made mistakes of judgment in handling this whole sordid Russia affair;
but none of them have been convicted of felonies or accused of colluding with a hostile foreign power,
possibly for the purpose of raking in piles of cash.
Do you see a pattern yet? Because you should.
Rationally, let’s consider “some of the
losers” that figure prominently in the investigation, so far:
You have Cohen, of course—who worked for
Trump for a decade—and now faces three years in jail. Let’s keep track of the
number of known felons:
Team Trump 1 Team
Comey 0
You have Felix Sater—a twice-convicted felon when he went to work for Trump—and,
with Cohen, directly involved on the Russian end in trying to broker the Trump
Tower Moscow deal.
Team Trump 2 Team
Comey 0
Then throw in General Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s
first choice for National Security Adviser, a gentleman who took a $45,000 paycheck
for giving a speech in Russia, who lied to Vice
President Pence about his contacts with Russians, and who then lied to the
F.B.I., too.
Team Trump 3 Team
Comey 0
Add in two more Trump campaign associates. We
know George Papadopoulos, who Trump listed as a foreign policy adviser, lied
about contacts with Russian agents. He pled guilty to a single felony even
though F.B.I. agents noted he lied repeatedly. Then include Rick Gates, who worked for the
campaign up through Inauguration Day, who now has multiple felonies to his name.
Team Trump 5 Team
Comey 0
Do you see a pattern yet? Because you should.
And we’re still not done. You have Roger
Stone (who says he expects to be indicted soon). Stone initially told a
congressional panel that he had never met with any Russians or even anyone
who sounded Russian during the campaign. Once he got wind that investigators
were closing in he suddenly remembered! He did meet with a Russian—who wanted
$2 million to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was going to “amend” his
previous testimony, he said.
Nor should we forget Carter Page, the first
man in the campaign to raise eyebrows at the C.I.A. and F.B.I.. Page first claimed he never met with top Russian
officials during a visit to Moscow in 2016. Then, well, what do you know!
He remembered.
He did!
We would certainly be remiss if we failed to
mention Don Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort (now a convicted felon), who took
a secret meeting with Russians in
June 2016. We should point out once again (for all the slow learners who watch
Tucker Carlson) that for thirteen months
all three fine citizens forgot they ever laid eyes on any Russians during the
campaign.
Team Trump 6 Team
Comey 0
The New York Times caught them lying about the meeting
twice. And that’s the same paper whose story touched off the latest presidential
tweet blizzard today. The opening lines of the Times article should give any loyal American pause; and if you are
one who likes Trump, you have to pray the Times
isn’t right, (as it has been before).
Reporters explain:
In the days
after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I.
director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s
behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of
Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials
and others familiar with the investigation.
The inquiry
carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to
consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to
national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was
knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s
influence.
Who exactly provided this information to reporters
remains unclear—so Trump can’t really know who the “leaking machines” are. In
fact, much of the Times article rests
on testimony before Congress.
So, for all we know, Rep. Devin Nunes could
have leaked it out.
One iron fact remains.
It’s not the sourcing that matters if what the sources indicate proves correct.
It may not. The Times is careful to say
as much. It’s unclear, they note, whether or not Mueller and his team are still
pursuing the “counterintelligence matter.” The story notes that some critics
feel law enforcement officials “overstepped” their bounds in opening this prong
of the investigation to begin.
One iron fact remains. The potential danger to
our country was clear and law enforcement officials had to try to make sure that
a president would not shut down an investigation in order to protect himself.
If that happened,
“Not only would
it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself
would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to
national security [emphasis added],” Mr. [James A.] Baker [former F.B.I.
general counsel] said in his testimony, portions of which were read to The New
York Times. Mr. Baker did not explicitly acknowledge the existence of the
investigation of Mr. Trump to congressional investigators.
Additional testimony by Lisa Page (who did indeed
leave the F.B.I. under a cloud, primarily because of emails she wrote
denigrating Candidate Trump) is also quoted, outlining the danger:
“In the Russian
Federation and in President Putin himself, you have an individual whose aim is
to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more
fractious in order to weaken our ability, America’s ability and the West’s
ability to spread our democratic ideals,” Lisa Page, a former bureau lawyer,
told House investigators in private testimony reviewed by The Times.
“That’s the
goal, to make us less of a moral authority to spread democratic values,” she
added. Parts of her testimony were first reported by The Epoch Times [another, multi-lingual publication in New York City].
If you’re a Trump supporter you can read what
Rudy Giuliani says in response. “The fact that it [the investigation] goes back
a year and a half and nothing came of it that showed a breach of national
security means they found nothing.”
You can believe that if you prefer.
Or you can try to be rational. Why wouldn’t
Page criticize Trump in a raft of emails—if she and other agents had cause to fear the candidate might be
working to advance Russia’s interests and not our own? I don’t know about
you. I’d criticize anyone I thought was doing the same.
A better than even bet, he’s not.
What do we know for sure by the time we reach
the last sentence of this latest story in the Times? We know we know only a small fraction of what investigators
know. We don’t know what Candidate/President Trump did or what he knew about
what his surrogates knew. We know the F.B.I. had reason for concern from the
start, first about his campaign, and later, about the integrity of the
president himself. We know that “four of Mr. Trump’s associates” were under
investigation before he was elected. We know all four lied about contacts with
Russians.
We know that Giuliani is whistling “The Hymn
of the Russian Federation,” when he says investigators have “found nothing.”
We know they’ve found plenty.
We know the search must continue, whether or
not it proves that the president was innocent in the end. He might be. At this
point, we have to find out.
So far, it’s a better than even bet, he’s
not.
1/13/19: Late last night, while one
evil entity in America was being vanquished (Satan’s team, the Dallas Cowboys),
the Washington Post broke another
damning story about Mr. Trump.
Trump said he believed Putin. Now we know he didn’t.
The story can be boiled down simply. Trump
has met with Putin on five occasions since taking office. Each time he has gone
to “extraordinary lengths” to keep the records of their conversations secret. After
meeting with the Russian strongman in Hamburg in July 2017, for instance, Trump
confiscated his interpreter’s notes. He also instructed the linguist not to
reveal what was discussed to other top administration officials—although
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (who sat through the meeting) did later offer
general comments on what the two leaders discussed.
The circumstances surrounding that meeting
were odd enough. But Trump’s interpreter later told reporters the president did ask Putin if the Russians
had interfered during the 2016 election. Putin said “no.” The interpreter
said the President of the United States responded, “I believe you.”
Trump then went in front of reporters and
repeated that line. He asked Putin about the interference. Putin denied it.
Trump said he believed him.
The secrecy was even more profound when Trump
and Putin met again in Helsinki in the summer of 2018. This time no one else was in the meeting but the
two leaders and their interpreters.
So why does this all ring bells now? Not till
today do we learn that Trump was destroying notes from these meetings. And that
first long meeting with Putin in Hamburg took place on July 7, 2017. Later that
day—aboard Air Force One, returning to the United States—Trump and top aides began
crafting a letter to explain away a secret meeting Don Jr. had with Russians in
Trump Tower the previous June.
The president knew The New York Times was about to break the story and he and his
people wanted to have an alibi ready. So they put together a cover story about
the purpose of the meeting. No problem! The
meeting was primarily about adoption policy.
Only The
New York Times was going to prove within days that the purpose of the
meeting wasn’t primarily about adoption policy. The purpose—and the Times had emails to prove it—was for Don
Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort to gather dirt—from the Russians—on Mrs. Hillary
Clinton.
In other words, the president was lying when
he said he believed Putin didn’t interfere in the election.
He already knew he did.
In response to this latest revelation, Press
Secretary Pinocchio insisted that this unusual cover-up behavior by the
president was simply a function of his desire to avoid “leaks.” She went on to
trot out the same old line. Oh, Trump has been harder on the Russians than
Napoleon.
But why did Trump lie—about the purpose of
the meeting (we’ve already counted that lie)—and why did he lie about believing
Putin?
And why has he been grabbing up all the
pertinent notes?
LIE #155: Trump already knew the Russians had interfered in the
election;
but he told reporters he believed Putin’s denial.
1/14/19: Like the world’s worst
heavyweight boxer, President Trump keeps taking shots straight to the glass jaw.
His decision to withdraw American forces from
Syria, decided via tweet, turns into a debacle. “Donald is right,” Vladimir
Putin says. But the Israelis freak. This,
they fear, will be tantamount to ceding control in Syria to the Russians,
Iranians and Bashar al-Assad. The Kurds (who have been fighting by our side
since 9/11) say they’ve been “betrayed.” Sen. Lindsey Graham warns that pulling
out immediately—as Trump says he is ordering—would be “disastrous to our
national security” and leave “a stain” on our honor.
Trump has to backtrack. He decides he won’t pull
out till the Turks, bitter enemies of the Kurds, promise not to attack. The
Turks indicate they can hardly wait to begin blasting the Kurds. National
Security Adviser John Bolton is forced to hop a flight to Istanbul to meet with
Turkish President Erdogan. Erdogan refuses to meet, leaving Bolton looking like
a chump. Trump threatens, again via tweet, to “devastate Turkey economically,”
if they attack the Kurds.
Apparently, no one has told him Turkey is our
partner in NATO and therefore an ally.
The Turkish Foreign Minister points out correctly
that partner nations should not threaten each other economically.
Also, one should not conduct diplomacy
through the medium of Twitter.
Meanwhile, we learned that Trump is thinking
about withdrawing the United States from NATO entirely, something Putin could
only have dreamed about, when Hillary was leading Donald in all the polls in
the summer of 2016. You know: right around the time Russians started talking to
the Trump campaign about…hey… how would you like dirt on Mrs. Clinton?
*
IT TURNS OUT that Trump policies might not
only be terrible in the Middle East, they might be terrible for penguins.
Bad news for penguins and our descendents.
Also: our descendants.
In another highly alarming report from
scientists at NASA, we learn that ice in Antarctica is melting at a rate nearly
six times as fast as during the years from 1979 to 1989. The melt rate forty
years ago was 40 billion tons annually. The melt rate, since 2009, has been 252
billion tons.
I won’t be around in the year 2100; but by
then, scientists warn, the oceans may rise by three feet—assuming we act quickly.
If we don’t our grandchildren may live to see
Miami, Florida (and other coastal cities) become uninhabitable.
Then again, Trump fans, we’re winning the
imaginary “War on Coal.”
1/15/19: If you weren’t able to
make time to watch the confirmation hearings for William Barr, the president’s nominee
for Attorney General, the sound you heard was the repeated bitch slapping Barr
was handing out to the president.
We already knew Trump was having a hard week/month/year/first
(and only) term in office. It couldn’t have felt any better if he was listening
to Barr answer questions before a Senate panel.
Not a witch hunt. Sorry.
Not all experts agree that Barr has managed
to put to rest the concerns of Democratic senators and voters. But only the
greatest suck ups (Hannity, Pirro) could be telling the president tonight that
what Barr said during the hearings offered validation of his basic positions.
Barr was asked if he believed Robert Mueller
was engaged in a “witch hunt.” Trump has ranted about a “witch hunt” a thousand
times since taking office and one might assume talks about the “witch hunt” in
his sleep.
Barr replied that he didn’t believe Mueller was
the type who “would be involved in a witch hunt.”
SLAP!!
Barr admitted that he met with Trump in the
summer of 2017 to discuss a role with the president’s legal defense team. He
said the meeting was brief. He declined to join. Trump asked him what Mueller
was like. “I said,” Barr told the senators, “Bob is a straight shooter and
should be dealt with as such.” He and Mueller were “good friends,” he assured
the panel. He and his wife “would be good friends” with Mueller and his wife
long after the Russia investigation ended.
Slap! Slap!
If Trump’s orange cheeks weren’t already stinging,
Barr was asked about former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to recuse
himself. Trump had howled about that for a year until, the day after the
midterm elections, he fired Sessions. Barr offered the opinion that Sessions “probably
did the right thing.”
SLAP!!
Well, then, senators wondered, did the
nominee think Trump’s current lawyer, Horndog Rudy, was correct that any report from Mueller should be handed
over to the White House “for correction” before it was submitted to
Congress?
“That’s not going to happen,” Barr responded.
SLAP!!!
The smacks kept coming. Barr said it was
“vitally important” that Mueller be allowed to complete his work. Would it be a
problem, a Democratic senator inquired, if the president offered a pardon in return for silence from a witness in this
investigation? Barr said that would constitute “obstruction of justice.” Would
he ever carry out an order to fire Mueller without good cause? “If any
president attempts to intervene in a matter he has a stake in to protect
himself that should first be looked at as a breach of his constitutional
duties,” Barr replied.
He posed what he described as an “easy”
hypothetical. If a president ever intervened to halt an investigation into his
family or business, “That would be a breach of his obligation under the
Constitution to faithfully execute the law.”
Finally, what would Barr do if ordered to
remove Mueller to shut down a legitimate investigation?
Barr said without hesitation, he would
resign.
Slap! SLAP! SLAP! SLAPPITY SLAP!!
SLAP!
We can’t know for sure, but I suspect, if Trump
was still listening at that point, that he fainted dead away. For the next twenty
hours not a creature was heard stirring in the White House.
Trump’s Twitter feed went silent.
*
IN RELATED NEWS, Special Counsel Mueller—who
is definitely not conducting a witch
hunt—filed another set of court documents. Rick Gates, former Trump
campaign adviser, is still cooperating in “several
investigations.”
Several!
“What it’s like to work for a madman.”
Finally, the Wall Street Journal reports that former Trump confidant Michael
Cohen plans to testify in front of Congress and air all the dirty laundry he helped wash, dry and
fold in the past ten years. Sources say
he will relate “the story of what it’s like to work for a madman.” “He’s going
to say things,” a person close to Cohen says, “that will give you chills.”
Or, as one liberal pundit put it, there are
now two parallel stories playing out related to the president.
Cohen’s story is a soap opera.
Mueller’s is a spy novel.
1/16/19: Day 26: The government
remains partially shuttered and the wall all Americans desperately want remains
unbuilt.
Yes, I said it. I am a pro-wall liberal. We need
a big, beautiful wall with electrified wire at the top and machinegun towers.
We need cannons! We need minefields! On the good side of the wall we could
chain man-eating tigers to stakes in case “illegals” managed to scale the wall
or dig under it or mail out prescription drugs to kill us all.
Build that wall in…Stamford, Connecticut.
We need a wall around the headquarters of
Purdue Pharma in Stamford, Connecticut. In the immortal words of Rep. Steve
King of Iowa, we need to stop these drug company execs with “calves the size of
cantaloupes” from bringing OxyContin into our homes and medicine cabinets.
You’ve heard Trump talk about terrorists
trying to sneak across our southern border. They are coming to kill and maim us
and give us smallpox and leprosy. That threat pales in comparison with the
threat out of Stamford. In fact, recent court filings in a case against Purdue
show company owners knew for years that OxyContin was easy to abuse and dangerous in the extreme.
So, what was a good money-making drug
manufacturer supposed to do? Richard Sackler, company president at the time,
wrote in an email in 2001 that something drastic had to be done. Namely: “We
have to hammer on abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the
problem. They are reckless criminals.”
We’re just selling pain relief—because we
care.
Meanwhile, court filings suggest that Mr.
Sackler urged sales representatives to push doctors to prescribe the highest
dosages of OxyContin possible because that meant higher profits for Purdue.
Trump can finally get his wall.
The more I think about it—when this kind of
story isn’t pissing me off—the more I realize I need to write Trump a letter. I
will share my brilliant plan. He can get his wall. The Democrats will pay. (I
don’t think Mexico will chip in, however) Tens of thousands of lives will be
saved. I am pretty sure I will be nominated for some key White House post, like
Grand High Keeper of the Tigers. I will be asked to appear on Fox News. Sean
Hannity will call me a “great American,” despite the fact I am a flaming
liberal and think Hannity’s an insufferable ass.
We’re not talking about drugs smuggled in
from Mexico, most of which come right through existing border checkpoints. We’re talking
about drugs mailed out to pharmacies in towns like Kermit, West Virginia (pop.
400). In one ten month period back in 2007 the town saw three million opioid pills pass through
its doctors’ offices and pharmacies.
We’re talking Wilmington and Hickory, North
Carolina, where, a decade later, 11.6% and 9.9% of adults, respectively, were
taking prescribed opioids for pain.
We’re talking Ohio, which ranks second in opioid-related deaths per
100,000 population (46.3) and 24 additional states that experienced at least
21.0 deaths per 100,000 in 2017.
That’s the damn reason we need to build the
right wall.
This isn’t actually funny.
This isn’t actually funny. We’ve tried other remedies.
From New Jersey to California, we’ve revoked doctors’ licenses
for pushing too many pills. We’ve indicted executives at Insys Therapeutics and
charged them with paying doctors kickbacks to push their
brand of fentanyl-based opioids. Federal prosecutors have fined McKesson, another distributor,
twice. A decade ago, Purdue Pharma and three top executives pled guilty to
misdemeanor charges of misrepresenting the dangers of OxyContin. Nobody went to
jail—because these were “drug dealers in Armani suits,” and it would be wrong
to throw rich, white collar guys in the slammer. Purdue paid a fine of $634.5
million, instead, and continued to pile up profits. The Sackler clan which owns
the company, waxed fat, amassing a fortune of $13
billion.
Purdue (and other pharmaceutical giants) kept
pushing doctors to push pills. Opioid-related deaths quadrupled. Yet, as noted
by the Center for Disease Control, something else was going on—or not going on.
The amount of pain Americans reported experiencing
did not increase.
The need for more pain relief was all in our
heads—or all in the slick advertising Big Pharma did.
These “pushers” kept touting their products’ virtues.
Purdue sales reps were instructed to tell doctors OxyContin had an addiction
rate of “less than one percent.” The company used “pharmacy discount cards” to goose
sales. Purdue and others drug makers richly rewarded doctors who published
scientific papers “proving” these powerful new drugs were safe and you should
pop some pills for breakfast.
In 1995, the Food and Drug Administration
allowed Purdue to claim that OxyContin
was nearly impossible to abuse. Sackler was ecstatic, predicting that “the
launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions
that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep,
dense, and white.”
Sales soon surpassed $1 billion per year.
The blizzard did result in a large number of
burials, just not the kind Sackler was excited about.
The problem was simple and the company knew all
about it. The pills were designed to offer long-lasting, slow-release pain
relief. But teens quickly learned to crush the pills into powder, which allowed
them to experience an immediate, powerful, and extremely dangerous high.
Still, Purdue and other companies with
similar scruples kept boosting these powerful classes of narcotics.
If we had to build only one wall, my wall would be best.
Now it comes down to this. While we know
there are illegal immigrants who sneak across our border and murder good
people, the scourge they represent pales compared to the scourge unleashed
inside our borders. Each and every death of an innocent human being—from Kate
Steinle, killed by an illegal immigrant on a San Francisco wharf, to the young woman
run down in Charlottesville, Virginia by a white supremacist driving a car, each
is a tragedy in itself.
But if we had to build one wall, my wall
would be best. “From 1999 to 2017,” the CDC reports, “almost 218,000 people died in
the United States from overdoses related
to prescription opioids.”
That’s roughly equal to four times the death
toll for American forces during the entire Vietnam War.
1/17/19: Day 27: The federal
government remains in shutdown mode and the president’s approval ratings are
cratering.
Those numbers aren’t likely to improve once Americans
awake to the latest news. During an appearance on Chris Cuomo’s evening show on
CNN last night, Rudy Giuliani got riled up about recent news coverage of his
boss.
“The amount of false reporting about this
case,” he shouted, referencing fresh revelations in the Russia investigation,
“is despicable.”
Cuomo disagreed with Rudy’s definition of
false reporting, noting that perhaps Rudy wasn’t the most accurate source of information,
himself. “False reporting,” he informed Rudy, “is saying nobody in the campaign
had any contact with Russia [as Trump said]. False reporting is saying that
there has been no suggestion of any type of collusion between the campaign and
Russians.
“Now you have Paul Manafort giving data to…”
“You just misstated my position,” Rudy bristled.
“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in
the campaign. I have not. I said the president of the United States.”
Cuomo raised an eyebrow like Rudy had just
claimed he had X-ray vision and could always tell what color underwear the
First Lady had on under her clothing.
Horndog Rudy was retreating.
Rudy was too busy wagging a finger to notice
Cuomo’s surprise. “There is not a single bit of evidence that the President of
the United States committed the only crime he could have committed here, conspired
with the Russians to hack the DNC.”
So there you had it and almost every news
outlet noticed.
Horndog Rudy was retreating. Where Trump and
his sycophants had once claimed that, no, no one on the campaign ever met with
any Russians, and, no, they hadn’t been working on a deal to build a Trump
Tower in Moscow during the campaign, and, oh, the F.B.I. was biased, and, oh, it
was sad that members of the campaign kept sticking their feet in perjury traps,
and, well, collusion isn’t a crime anyway—now Rudy was once again reversing
direction.
He wasn’t saying people working for Trump
during the campaign didn’t collude (which by the way = conspiracy).
He was only saying the president didn’t.
Cuomo and Giuliani then began arguing about what Trump, himself, had
previously said. Cuomo insisted Trump had said no one in his campaign colluded.
Rudy said, Nu uh. Trump never said that.
Cuomo wondered how it wouldn’t be collusion
if Manafort handed over polling data to the Russians, as Mueller’s investigators
now allege. Old Horndog said it wouldn’t
be collusion because all campaigns give polling data to other people.
Um…Russians?
Or to sum up the latest Trump defense:
Manafort might have colluded; but Trump didn’t know it. Cohen might have
colluded. Trump didn’t tell him to do it. Flynn and Gates and that “coffee boy”
guy might have been colluding. Maybe they all colluded; but the man in charge had no idea. And it
doesn’t matter. Collusion isn’t a crime, unless Hillary Clinton does it.
1/18/19: We learn that Karen Pence,
the nation’s Second Lady, is going back to work. She will soon begin teaching
art at Immanuel Christian School, located in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.
And…suddenly…it hits me.
Pence and “Mother” hatch diabolical plot.
For two years, her husband has stood loyally at
the president’s back, the sappy look of a dog waiting for its master to share a
biscuit plastered across his mug. And
it’s all a ruse!! Behind the smile the mind of an assassin has been plotting.
Vice President Jesus knows the foundation of the
Trump presidency rests on the backs of Evangelical Christians. So Mrs. Pence is
playing to that base. Subtly, she helps undercut the president. She goes to work for a school that bans
gays, lesbians and transgender students. In fact, students at Immanuel can be
expelled for “condoning” homosexual behavior, such as acting like any lesbians
and transgender youths they might know are human beings and deserve to be
treated as such.
Apparently, this is how Mr. and Mrs. Pence
think you avoid bullying such kids—per the First Lady’s favorite initiative.
You ban them instead!
This also “solves” the vexing problem of
which public bathrooms transgender students may use, since at Emmanuel
Christian they won’t be using any at all.
And Mr. and Mrs. Pence solidify their
standing with the Evangelical base.
The next step is so obvious we’ve all been missing
it. The VP suddenly announces that he’s going all Old Testament. Not only is he
in favor of banning young sinners from the schools….
He’s for prison reform! He’s calling for stoning
of adulterers, as per Leviticus 20:10. He’s going full-stoning.
If this works, Evangelicals desert Trump en masse.
Trump shows up for his next campaign rally. A hail of stones greets him and it’s,
goodbye Donald, hello, President Michael Richard Pence!
With that, a glorious day dawns in America.
Not only will you be able to say, “Merry Christmas,” to your Jewish and
non-religious friends, you will be free to punch them in the face if they don’t
respond. In Pence’s New Jerusalem, “spilling your seed,” as in masturbation,
will be criminalized, as per Bible recommendation. In fact, since the Good Book
calls for death for homosexual behavior, Emmanuel Christian won’t have to worry
about them coming through their doors ever again.
POSTSCRIPT: We already know self-professed
Christian and leading conservative thinker Ann Coulter is on board with a
“President Pence.” She’s starting to think Trump is weak. You do not want to
get on Coulter’s bad side because she’s got a tart tongue and a virulent mean
streak.
This probably has something to do with the fact
that she’s a “true” Christian; and since she’s never married, we have to assume
she has been saving her virginity till she meets Mr. Right. Mr. Far Right.
At age 57, you figure abstinence is a
tribulation for Ms. Coulter at this point.
1/19/19: President Trump is
floating a new plan to get the government back up and running, now that he’s
had it shut down for almost a month. If the Democrats will ignore the fact that
U.S. Constitution leaves the power to appropriate money in the hands of the House
of Representatives, and give him some dough, he will reinstitute DACA
protection for the 800,000 Dreamers.
Speaker Pelosi remembers who snatched away
that protection—or tried to till federal courts stopped him—two years ago.
So Pelosi says, “No.”
That means we’re stuck with Trump telling Democrats
that if they give him the cash he won’t have to wait for Mexico to send the check.
He will temporarily protect one
group of 800,000 hostages (Dreamers) and let the other 800,000 hostages
(federal workers) come back to work and get paid.
Meanwhile, the president has already agreed that workers not working will get their money in
the end. So their pain is temporary (I support the idea of back pay for the group).
In the end it means “We, the Taxpayers” will foot the bill even though the work
we wanted the government to get done—for example, keep parks open and clean,
check the safety of the meat we eat, and make sure psychos don’t board planes
carrying Uzis—has not gotten done for a month.
1/20/19: Of for the love of god.
It’s cold across much of the country, probably because it’s winter.
The Science-Moron-in-Chief tweets.
The Science-Moron-in-Chief starts his third
year in office tweeting just as stupidly as he always. Once again, this dunce proves
he still can’t tell the difference between climate and weather:
It’s sad, too, because if Trump spent 1/10th
the time reading NASA reports he spends on inane tweets, he could teach a
course on global warming to his idiot fans.
On the first day of his third year in office,
President Twitter Thumbs sends out forty tweets, a personal record for one day. He starts at 7:40
a.m., bragging about the great economy, offers up his thoughts (or lack of) on
global warming and manages to get in an odd dig at the City of San Francisco:
Nancy Pelosi has
behaved so irrationally & has gone so far to the left that she has now
officially become a Radical Democrat. She is so petrified of the “lefties” in
her party that she has lost control...And by the way, clean up the streets in
San Francisco, they are disgusting!
There’s the usual hint of serious delusion,
when Twitter Thumbs says his approval rating with Hispanics is up to 50%; and
then there’s this ominous tweet, which makes you understand why Speaker Pelosi
might fear the president more than “lefties” in the Democratic Party:
No, Amnesty is
not a part of my offer. It is a 3 year extension of DACA. Amnesty will be used
only on a much bigger deal, whether on immigration or something else. Likewise
there will be no big push to remove the 11,000,000 plus people who are here
illegally-but be careful Nancy!
You don’t have to be a genius to figure this
out. Trump is going to hold the DACA 800,000 hostage as long as he can. If he
wants “something else,” he won’t hesitate to shutter the government again.
Just after midnight, Trump turns in for bed
and Day 30 of the partial shutdown comes to an end.
1/21/19: Day 31 of the shutdown begins.
At three minutes after midnight, President Twitter Thumbs ends one day and
begins the next with a tweet. He’s thinking about the sacrifices Martin Luther
King Jr. made...
Oh, hell, no.
He’s thinking about himself—a process which
consumes his every waking moment, because he’s a sad man, with few friends.
“‘No President in modern times has kept more
promises than Donald Trump!’” he tweets with childish joy. “Thank you Bill
Bennett @SteveHiltonx.”
Pence says Trump is just like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
If you missed it, perhaps a ringing
endorsement offered up by VP Pence, will help improve the president’s mood for the
day. On Face the Nation Sunday
morning, Pence looked at what his boss had done—holding DACA kids hostage—making
hundreds of thousands of federal workers go without pay—a history of insulting
minorities—and said, you know, Donald J. Trump is just like Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr.
…the hearts and
minds of the American people today are thinking a lot about it being the
weekend we are remembering the life and the work of Reverend Martin Luther King
Jr. One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was, “Now is the time to make real
the promises of democracy.”
King, he added, “inspired us to change.” “You
think of how he changed America, he inspired us to change through the
legislative process, to become a more perfect union.” Pence paused to offer up
a beatific smile before closing his stirring oration with a flourish. “That’s
exactly what President Trump is calling on the Congress to do, come to the
table in a spirit of good faith.”
*
LUCKILY, TIME RAN OUT before the VP could
continue fawning, because he was just getting warmed up. I mean, we’ve seen
this before (see link below).
If he had had the chance he would have gone
on and on: “Donald J. Trump is to coaching Americans to strive for greatness as
Bill Belichick is to getting the Patriots to the Super Bowl every year.”
There would have been no stopping the fool.
“Trump is a hero to all patriotic Americans,” Pence would have said, “like
Audie Murphy during World War II and Alvin York during World War I, if they had
debilitating bone spurs.”
What Pence would do would be grovel at
Trump’s feet. “The president,” he’d add, “is leading the nation to greatness
again, like George Washington crossing the Delaware, like Teddy Roosevelt
taking on the Robber Barons, only if Teddy was on the other side, handing out tax
breaks.”
“Trump,” he would insist in full suck-up mode,
“could star as a male stripper, he’s so cut and well-built. If he grabbed
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—or even Pelosi by the p-word—they’d both get a thrill.”
(Pence wouldn’t use the p-word. “Mother”
would not be pleased if he dared.)
There’d be only one way to stop Vice
President Pence from going on and on about the greatness of his boss. Someone
would have to hit him upside the head with an iron frying pan.
POSTSCRIPT: The president and VP did make a
trip to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in D.C. to “honor” his memory.
They stayed roughly six minutes and Trump
gave a “speech” to no one in particular and failed to mention Dr. King by name.
More of a reality check, below: This is what Dr. King was
fighting about: the lynching (Emmett Till in 1955, for example), the riot at
Old Miss in 1962, when a single African American tried to enroll, George
Wallace blocking the door to the University of Alabama the following year, the
murder of three civil rights activists trying to register African Americans to
vote in 1964, and the belated decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, allowing
interracial marriage to finally become legal.
That doesn’t include the fight to get African Americans into
most schools, battles over Jim Crow blood banks, theater seats, swimming pools,
sporting events and even laws banning the playing of interracial checkers.
 |
| Peaceful sit-in demonstrators beset by mob. |
1/22/19: The delusional buffoon
in the Oval Office touts his rising approval
rating with Hispanics—up to 50% in a Marist poll—proving they “understand” the
need for a wall. If you check the poll, however, you discover that Trump
couldn’t have studied the results. If he had he’d have noticed his approval
rating was 40%. And you know he didn’t read the fine print—and none of the
sycophants surrounding him would dare tell him: 57% of those polled said they
would definitely not vote for him in
2020, vs. 31% who said they would.
1/23-24/19: Sometimes there’s so much horrible news
involving and revolving around Trump you can be frozen in knowing what to
address first.
Trump Tantrum Shutdown: Days 33-34.
We’ve now survived Day 33
of the Trump Tantrum Shutdown and there’s no resolution in sight.
That means 800,000
federal workers are still not being paid—even though nearly half have been ordered
to report for work, making it the no-pay-but-report-to-work-anyway-Trump
Tantrum Shutdown, which could go on for
years.
Who said “years?”
Trump!
Meanwhile, the damage done
grows daily. The FBI Agents Association warns the shutdown
has harmed the Agency’s ability to protect the nation from terrorists, MS-13 gang
members and other nefarious characters, such as pals of the President of the
United States. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association is suing the Trump
administration, warning of growing safety concerns. The national parks are
closed, although Trump doesn’t care because he’s never going to drag his lard
ass out to a national park unless you tell him there’ll be strippers dressed up
as park rangers. A protest outside the office of Sen. Milksop Mitch, led by
labor leaders representing federal workers’ unions, ends with a dozen
arrests.
Trump himself has ordered
36,000 IRS workers to return to their jobs—but not to be paid—so that he won’t look
like a moron and tax refunds can go out in good
time, rather than piss off every American expecting a check.
*
ON THE INTERNATIONAL
FRONT, Trump is taking a series of well-earned lumps because he creates foreign
policy in tweets. We have defeated ISIS he recently claimed. A suicide bomber immediately
killed four Americans in Syria. Lawmakers were so rattled by news that
President Twitter Thumbs might pull the U.S. out of NATO that the House of
Representatives voted to
strip him of the power to do so. The vote was 357-22. That means 60 members
decided to duck and cover rather than vote against Twitter Thumbs. But only 22
Republicans offered support. That includes Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, a man we
know is nuts.
Speaking of threats to America, is there
anything else happening round the world that we might worry about? Well, good
news, of a sort, as Trump and Kim Jong-un are scheduled to meet again next
month. It could be our “favorite President,” as he styles himself, will simply
declare the problem of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal solved and jet off to
Mar-a-Lago for a rest.
Phew!
Getting Kim to “give up all his nukes,” Trump
will tell reporters, was really hard work!! But he did it. He did what no
president had ever done before.
Alas, in the real world where most of us still
live, Kim has not given up any nukes
yet, even though last summer Trump declared North Korea was no longer a threat.
The North appears to be expanding its long-range missile
bases, instead.
Trump may say he loves Kim, and Kim loves him,
but, so far, Kim is cheating on Don the way Don cheats on his wives.
Oceans rise 0.03 inches per year.
As if North Korea isn’t bad enough, scientists
have now released another ominous report outlining the growing threat
of climate change. The ice cap atop Greenland, they warn, began melting
seventeen years ago. Between 2002 and 2016 the cap lost an average of 280
billion tons of ice annually.
If you’re a Trump fan, or the
Science-Moron-in-Chief himself, you can read one sentence in the report and
shrug off the rest. The melting so far has raised the level of the oceans a
mere “0.03 inches per year.”
So, we’re not going to “drown” in that extra
half inch.
It’s the cumulative danger that has scientist
sounding the alarm. The ice, says Professor Michael Bevis, lead author of the report,
is now melting four times faster than a
decade ago.
“The only thing we can do is adapt and
mitigate further global warming—it’s too late for there to be no effect. We are
watching the ice sheet hit a tipping point.”
If you were the President of the United
States—and not also a moron—you could read the report and note that if all the
ice atop Greenland melted the oceans would rise 216 feet. You could read reports
highlighting the problem of vanishing glaciers across the
Himalayas and the long term threat that represents to Southwest Asian water
supplies. You could read about glaciers melting in Antarctica. You could read
about 400,000 glaciers worldwide, including Iceland, and what happens if they continue to melt. If you
weren’t tweeting all day you could Google, “NASA climate change,” or “National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate change,” and read more reports.
You could even study the report released two weeks ago by the
Department of Defense, outlining future damage to U.S. facilities round the globe.
Or, if you’re a Trump fan, you could blindly
follow the guy who thinks global warming is a “hoax.”
As Day 34 of the Tantrum Shutdown draws to a
close we know one cabinet member has no earthly clue. For the life of him, Commerce
Secretary Wilbur Ross tells a reporter, he can’t understand why federal workers
are worried about missing two
paychecks in a row. The reporter notes that there are furloughed workers
showing up at food banks. Secretary Ross can’t see why these people have a
“liquidity crisis.” He wonders why they don’t just go out and get loans.
And besides, even if they never got their pay, it would represent a loss of only 1/3rd
of a percent of GDP.
That’s easy for Ross to say because:
A)
He has no more empathy than the
common wart.
B)
He never has to worry because he’s
a billionaire who has his loot stashed in offshore bank accounts.
At last, darkness descends on the capital.
Trump tweets one last time at 10:28 p.m., watches a little Fox News and the
last TV is clicked off in his bedroom and he drifts off to sleep.
Day 34 of the shutdown ends.
1/25/19: Day 35 of the Tantrum
Shutdown starts with a bang when F.B.I. agents raid the home of former Trump adviser
Roger Stone.
“F.B.I. Open the door!”
At 6:00 a.m. a caravan of law enforcement
vehicles pulls up in front of Mr. Stone’s Fort Lauderdale abode. It’s dark and dozens
of officers, some heavily armed and wearing tactical vests fan out to cover the
entrances, guns drawn.
An officer knocks at the front door. “F.B.I.,”
he shouts. “Open the door.” (Too bad he didn’t add, “You dirty rat!”)
Still no light inside—and the agent shouts
again, “F.B.I. Warrant!”
Moments later, Stone opens the door, is placed
under arrest, and led away in handcuffs.
*
A THOUSAND MILES to the north, in Washington,
D.C., the president is either sleeping late or hiding under his bed, because
when I check his Twitter feed at 8:07 a.m. he still hasn’t posted.
This is a rarity for a man who typically
tweets before the sun has peeked over the eastern horizon.
Once the president does catch up to the story,
you know he’s going to lose his shit. First, Stone has been indicted on seven felony counts. You have
obstruction of justice for the appetizer, five counts of making false
statements for the main course, and a count of witness tampering for desert.
Even worse for Trump and his pals, the
indictment makes clear that while Stone was allegedly breaking the law senior
officials in the Trump 2016 campaign allegedly urged him to continue. If you
dive into the indictment—which “Fake News” CNN was kind enough
to provide—you quickly realize that this is major bad news for Old Twitter Thumbs. From page 2, forward, we see
land mines that could explode as Trump and his top aides try to cross an
increasingly complex legal minefield without blowing themselves to tiny Trump
bits.
For example, a senior campaign official “was
directed” by an unnamed person to contact Stone and find out if WikiLeaks (“Organization
1” in the filing) was planning to dump more stolen emails to harm the Clinton
campaign.
Press Secretary Pinocchio will claim later in
the day that, “The charges brought against Mr. Stone have nothing to do with
this president.” But with that, Sanders’ nose only grows another inch. Reading
between the lines, the entire court filing is aimed at the president and his
campaign.
Who in that campaign could have directed a senior official—save a more important
personage? The suspicion falls immediately on Donald J. Trump. (There’s an
outside chance that Stone might have been directed by Don Jr. or Jared Kushner
or some other shady character, like Steve Bannon.) And for whose benefit was
Stone doing all this dirty work? Everything described in the indictment was
done to further the campaign.
In the summer of 2016, for example, the
indictment notes, “Stone was contacted by senior Trump Campaign officials to
inquire about future releases [of stolen emails] by Organization 1.”
Note the plural: “officials.”
As noted, “Organization 1” is WikiLeaks,
proud possessor that summer of thousands of stolen Clinton and Democratic
National Committee emails. These emails were hacked (as we now know) by
Russians and passed on to do harm to her campaign.
In other words: Russian interference in a
U.S. election.
Trump and top aides knew who was helping them out.
We know today how much of the rest of the
story unfolded. In those days, Stone could claim that he had no idea the
Russians were behind the hack. Yet, days after the first dump of damaging
emails, Trump could go on stage and say, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope
you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” a reference to Mrs.
Clinton’s now closed private email account.
Trump didn’t call for Julian Assange and
WikiLeaks to find the emails, which would have made sense if he didn’t know the
Russians were at work. He called on the
Russians for help.
Soon after Trump took office, the story of Russian
interference finally broke. Yet, the president insisted for more than a year that
there was no evidence the Russians interfered. Now, this indictment comes ever
closer to proving that Trump and his aides knew all along who was helping them
out. (See: false cover letter issued
about the Trump Tower meeting with Russians; 1/13/19.)
Eventually, Congress set to work. The Senate conducted
a fairly serious investigation. Mr. Stone was called to appear before the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), chaired by Rep. Devin
Nunes. (Nunes would later be labeled “Trump’s stooge” by his hometown
paper.)
During testimony, Stone was asked about any contacts
he had had with WikiLeaks or any Russian hackers. According to the indictment, Stone
“made multiple false statements” in an effort to obstruct justice. He “denied
possessing records that contained evidence” of interactions involving WikiLeaks
and the Trump campaign—and those records he still possessed.
Stone asks for specific emails damaging to Clinton.
The indictment is damning in multiple ways:
After the July
22, 2016, release of stolen (Democratic National Committee) emails by
Organization 1, a senior Trump Campaign
official was directed to contact STONE [emphasis added] about any
additional releases and what other damaging information Organization 1 had
regarding the Clinton Campaign. STONE thereafter told the Trump Campaign about
potential future releases of damaging material by Organization 1.
In other words, people close to Trump—and
possibly Trump, himself—knew what Stone was up to and urged him to keep up the
good work.
It is worth remembering, too, that a secret
meeting in Trump Tower with agents of
the Russian government had occurred just one month prior. It is also worth noting
that in May 2016, Stone had met with a Russian agent offering
dirt on Clinton; but that Russian wanted $2 million. We also know that Trump’s
personal lawyer was working on a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow all that
summer. So there’s no doubt Candidate Trump knew the Russians were willing to
help him.
“On or about August 2, 2016,” prosecutors now
allege,
Person 1 emailed
STONE. Person 1 wrote that he was in Europe and planned to return about
mid-August. Person 1 stated in part, “Word is friend in embassy [Julian Assange
of WikiLeaks] plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct.
Impact planned to be very damaging.”
(Jerome Corsi, a right-wing conspiracy
theorist has admitted he is “Person 1” and says that the information contained
in the indictment is substantially correct as far as his role is concerned.)
At one point, according to the indictment, Stone
goes so far as to request “Person 2” to contact the head of “Organization 1”
and ask him to provide “any State [Department] or HRC [Hillary Rodham Clinton] e-mail
from August 10 to August 30—particularly on August 20, 2011,” to support a
damaging narrative related to the Democratic presidential candidate.
In other words, Stone is putting in an order for specific stolen emails. He and “Person 2,”
now known to be Randy Credico, exchange a series of emails and text messages and
sometimes speak by phone. According to the indictment, on or about October 2,
2016, Person 2 assures Stone, “big news Wednesday….now pretend u don’t know
me.” Assange is about to drop another load of stolen emails. Two days later,
Stone is communicating with a “supporter involved in the Trump campaign.” That
supporter wants to know about other damaging info that might be coming. Stone
replies, “Yes - want to talk on a secure line - got Whatsapp?”
These guys know they’re up to no good—and,
from what we can tell—worry they’re breaking the law.
It will take months before the free press can
start digging up the truth. But by the spring of 2017, both the House and
Senate will have started investigations into Russian meddling in our election. Nunes’
panel will ask Stone for any records “that reasonably could lead to the
discovery of facts within the investigation’s publically-announced parameters.”
On May 22, Mr. Stone notifies Nunes and HPSCI
that he has “no documents, records, or electronically stored information,
regardless of form” that might help in any way. Happy to hear this wonderful
news, Chairman Nunes—who has zero interest in actually uncovering any info
damaging to Trump or his crew—wishes Stone a good day and prepares to send him
on his way.
“You have no emails, no texts, no documents whatsoever?”
Sadly, for Mr. Stone, before he can dash for
the exit, a Democratic member of the panel asks if he has any information about WikiLeaks, the timing of the email dumps, or the
stolen Clinton emails. “You have no emails, no texts, no documents whatsoever,
any kind of that nature?” his questioner asks.
“That is correct,” Stone responds. “Not to my
recollection.”
The indictment alleges that Stone was lying
at that point and would continue to do so for months:
In truth and in
fact, STONE had sent and received numerous emails and text messages during the
campaign, in which he discussed Organization 1, its head, and its possession of
hacked emails. At the time of his false testimony, STONE was in possession of
many of these emails and text messages…
Stone didn’t lie once or twice. He was asked
if he had ever communicated by email or text with Person 2. “He’s not an email
guy,” Stone explained. “No,” he added, there were no texts.
Mueller’s team includes a raft of emails and
texts between Stone and “Person 2” in the indictment.
Person 2 repeatedly warned Stone he was committing perjury.
Stone was asked by investigators if he had
discussed his conversations with “an intermediary” to Organization 1 “with
anyone involved in the Trump campaign?”
The indictment notes: “Stone falsely and
misleadingly answered, ‘I did not.’ In truth and in fact…STONE spoke to multiple
individuals in the Trump campaign about what he claimed to have learned from
his intermediary to Organization 1[.]”
Stone knew when he testified before Congress
that there were witnesses who might reveal his trail. For that reason, on or
about October 19, 2017, he began “urging Person 2…to falsely confirm” parts of his
testimony. Person 2 “repeatedly told STONE that his testimony was false and told
him to correct his testimony to HPSCI. STONE did not do so. STONE then engaged
in a prolonged effort to prevent Person 2 from contradicting STONE’s false
statements to HPSCI.”
In November, “Person 2” was invited to
testify. Stone and Credico talked and emailed frequently in days ahead. Stone
suggested that Credico say he “could not remember what he had told STONE,” or
“alternatively…invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination”
when called before the panel. On November 19, Credico notified Stone that his
lawyer wanted to talk.
Stone channels Richard Nixon.
According to the indictment, Stone made it
clear he wanted his friend to cover their tracks. Stone responded by quoting
that pillar of rectitude, Richard Nixon, from the worst days of the Watergate
Affair. “Stonewall it.” Stone suggested. “Plead the Fifth. Anything to save the
plan.”
As if citing Nixon wasn’t bad enough, in December
2017, Stone and Credico repeatedly discussed the latter’s coming testimony.
Stone channeled a character from The
Godfather: Part II. Credico, he said, should pull a “Frank Pentangeli.”
That is, like the movie character, he should tell the House panel he did not
know “critical information that he does in fact know.”
Stone was clear. If Credico turned anything
over to the F.B.I., he was “a fool.” Credico advised Stone, again, to correct
his own testimony before it was too late. Stone responded, “Because of tromp [Trump?]
I could never get away with a certain [sic] my Fifth Amendment rights but you
can. I guarantee you you are the one who gets indicted for perjury if you’re
stupid enough to testify.”
As events transpire, when called before
Congress, “Person 2” does assert a Fifth Amendment right. Still, Stone and Credico
realize they remain in danger and continue to discuss how to deal with ongoing investigations.
On December 24, Stone writes again to Credico,
“I’m not talking to the FBI and if your [sic] smart you won’t either.”
By the spring of 2018, Credico has weakened. When
he finally begins opening up to investigators Stone goes bonkers. “You are a
rat. A stoolie. You back-stab your friends,” Stone howls. He threatens “to take
that dog away from you,” a threat to Credico’s furry best friend.
“Prepare to die [expletive],” Stone adds to
hammer home the point.
A central theme in all six indictments.
And so, Friday, there it was. A sixth member
of the Trump 2016 campaign had been indicted; and a central theme ran through
all six indictments. Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick
Gates, Michael Cohen, and Stone, had all been convicted of or accused of lying
about contacts with Russian agents. The obvious question was: Why?
What were all six trying to hide?
In summary, this latest indictment alleges that
from May at least through December 2017, “the defendant, ROGER JASON STONE JR.,
corruptly influenced, obstructed, impeded, and endeavored to influence,
obstruct, and impede the due and proper exercise of the power of the inquiry”
of congressional oversight panels.
That meant seven felony counts for Stone.
Naturally, Pinocchio the Press Secretary was trotted
out early Friday morning to deny to reporters that the indictment had anything
at all to do with the “White House” and, no, no, no, there was no collusion and…
Roger Stone?
Sanders hardly recognized his name.
The President of the United States remained notably
silent—not tweeting once, till 11:16 a.m.
Then we got this: “Greatest Witch Hunt in the
History of our Country! NO COLLUSION! Border Coyotes, Drug Dealers and Human
Traffickers are treated better. Who alerted CNN to be there?”
In reality, the president’s problem was clear.
It wasn’t a matter of how CNN knew to be there when law enforcement officers
rolled up to Stone’s dark home. The problem was that Stone had been caught with
a Book of Spells in his mitts.
The next question investigators must answer is
profound: Was the author of that book Donald J. Trump?
1/26/19: The dumbest
government shutdown in history ends. For thirty-five days 800,000 federal
workers went without pay.
Finally, the president ended
the mess the way he began, with the same pile of cash for his Great Wall he had
the day he shut everything down.
That is: no pile at all.
President Twitter Thumbs’
performance is reminiscent of this famous play by Minnesota Vikings star
defensive lineman Jim Marshall.
1/27/19: While you were busy
watching Roger Stone get arrested at dawn and then try to explain away seven
felony counts, you may have missed several other important stories. Before moving
on, however, we should note that there are a lot of felons and accused felons
in the orbit of President Trump. If we count only those who had contact with Russians during his 2016 campaign,
we have:
Michael Cohen
Michael Flynn
Rick Gates
Paul Manafort
George Papdopoulos
Felix Sater (to be fair his felony
convictions predate the campaign)
…and Roger Stone.
Psychos: Illegal Immigrants or Not.
At any rate, while the president was talking about
building a giant wall to keep us safe from killer immigrants, we learned again
that psychos within our borders (and I don’t mean Stone) already stalk the
land. On January 23, a 21-year-old walked into a Florida bank and killed five
women, execution-style. The next day, a Georgia man killed four and wounded a fifth,
shooting his last victim in the face. Saturday morning a young Louisiana man murdered his mother, father and three others,
including a woman with whom he had been in a relationship.
None of the killers were immigrants, legal or
otherwise.
On the other hand a dozen illegals were recently
fired from jobs in New York. No word
yet, how many were dangerous psychopaths waiting to murder and maim. We do know
these men and women could have been plotting harm for years—to slit throats, vacuum
carpets, make beds and manicure greens at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster,
New Jersey.
So, what I am saying is that the Great Wall
of Trump is just what we need if we
all want to be safe.
POSTSCRIPT: The case of Margarita Cruz, who worked at a Trump golf club in West
Chester County, N.Y., for eight years, highlights the hypocrisy of the president
anti-immigrant screeds.
Cruz admits she bought false documents,
including a green card and Social Security card years ago, at a cost of $120.
So, could you excuse the Trump management—and
say, “Well, how could they know?” The flaw in that argument would be that Cruz
was never provided health insurance or pension benefits, like other workers. (The
more paperwork you file, the more likely you are to be caught.) Anibal Romero,
the lawyer who represents Cruz and fourteen other recently-fired employees,
including a head chef, is blunt. “I’m not buying they didn’t know,” he says. “This was a two-tiered system,” Romero said. “The
people who were legal and the people who are undocumented.”
And why would any employer
complain—if that employer could look the other way and not provide healthcare
or pension benefits?
One “dangerous” illegal had
worked for Trump for eighteen long years and Mr. Romero was asking state and
federal authorities to investigate.
Eric Trump, for one,
pretended shock and said the Trump Organization would redouble efforts to
ferret out all the illegals on the payroll.
Because, let’s face it. No
one wants to be murdered while golfing or eating an expensive dinner at a
private club.
1/28/19: Yesterday, we heard about psycho immigrants! In even scarier developments today, Fox News announces that Texas has found 95,000 non-citizens on its voter rolls. State officials say that includes 58,000 who voted illegally! Once again, this proves to fans of Donald J. Trump, who also love Fox News—which if we drew a Venn diagram would almost perfectly overlap—that what we really, need is a giant wall and maybe a voter ID law based on skin tones.
The president himself is quick to grab his iPhone and tweet: “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID! @foxandfriends[.]”
(Sound of panicked Fox News fans loading all their guns.)
A grand total of 33 prosecuted for voter fraud last year.
Then again, some of us remember these same kinds of scary stories from before. First, if you read the entire article, you find that a grand total of 33 people were prosecuted for voter fraud in Texas last year. That’s out of a population of 16 million and we don’t even know if any were illegal immigrants.
We do know “33” is not as scary as “58,000.”
You can read a bit further and see that between 2005 and 2017 there were 97 prosecutions for the same crime. (See: 1/31/19.)
Finally, the reported 58,000 illegal votes were cast in elections from 1996 through 2018. And if you’d like to see how “accurate” state records have been in such matters in the past, consider Florida.
Back in 2012, Florida announced that it was purging 186,000 non-citizens from its voting rolls.
I mean…186,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Feverish authorities went to work. First they checked their original scary list and discovered that the actual number of non-citizens registered to vote was…2,600. Still too many, by far!!!!
Then they checked again…and the list shrank to 198! Then they found out that among the tens of thousands of voters they had already purged was a Brooklyn-born, decorated World War II veteran.
That was embarrassing for everyone involved.
In fact, by the time Florida authorities cleaned up their records the 186,000 had been reduced to 85 cases—a not very scary number at all.
For additional reading, it can be a great deal of fun to consider the sterling record of Kris Kobach of Kansas, once the pillar of voter registration “reform.” Kobach was the foremost champion of purging voter rolls—weeding out millions and millions of illegals who went out and voted in 2016, in his state of Kansas and across the nation, very nearly throwing the election Hillary’s way.
Damn! There were millions and mill……
And it came to pass, that as Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach wielded the sword of righteousness and uncovered nine whole cases of people voting illegally over four or five years, at least one of whom did so by mistake.
And that nine included two Republicans at least.
 |
| This guy found nine illegal voters!!!!! Kobach, right. |
1/29/19: The six heads of U.S. intelligence, representing 17 agencies, testify publicly before a Senate panel. If the 42-page report compiled by experts can be seen as a grade card on Trump’s first two years in office, the best you could say was Old Twitter Thumbs deserves an “incomplete.”
Depending on your grip on reality, you might go as high as a “C.” (Diplomacy is always hard, no matter the president; and it’s probably impossible to bet more than a “B” in a chaotic world.)
If you’re paying close attention, however, you might give Trump an “F,” in part because he continues to insist he deserves an “A+.”
ISIS not defeated; North Korea still has all its nukes.
Had ISIS been defeated, as Trump recently claimed? Director of U.S. National Intelligence Dan Coats, picked by Trump for that job disagreed. “While ISIS is nearing territorial defeat in Iraq and Syria,” he told the senators, “the group has returned to its guerrilla warfare roots while continuing to plot attacks and direct its supporters worldwide. ISIS is intent on resurging and still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria.”
“We must keep our eyes on ISIS,” Coats said.
Trump had claimed, earlier this month, that the problem of a nuclear North Korea was also essentially solved. “Now, I say this: North Korea, we’re doing very well,” he told gathered reporters. “And again, no rockets. There’s no rockets. There’s no anything. We’re doing very well.”
Coats disagreed again: “We currently assess that North Korea will seek to retain its WMD [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities, and is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities because its leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival. Our assessment is bolstered by our observations of some activity that is inconsistent with full denuclearization.”
That is: there have been reports the North Koreans are building new missile launching sites even as they negotiate.
Gina Haspel, Director of the C.I.A. was asked about Iran—the country Trump would most enjoy bombing. Here’s how The Times of Israel sums up her testimony:
Iran is still abiding by the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal despite the US pullout from the multinational agreement, CIA chief Gina Haspel said Tuesday.
“At the moment technically they are in compliance” with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Haspel told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“I think the most recent information is the Iranians are considering taking steps that would lessen their adherence to JCPOA as they seek to pressure the European to come through with the investment and trade benefits that Iran hoped to gain from the deal,” she said.
Or you might put it this way. Iran still has zero nukes, just as Obama hoped would be the case when he and the leaders of Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia negotiated the JCPOA deal.
Probably the best news Trump hears all day.
Now that Trump has pulled out of the Iran deal, and expected economic benefits have not been accrued, the Iranians may decide to void the JCPOA entirely and begin working toward gaining nuclear weapons, themselves.
In other words, Iran may become a bigger problem than ever—and North Korea still has all its nukes—and the President of the United States still believes he’s the best deal maker in the history of our country.
Last, but not least, F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, like Haspel and Coats, a Trump pick for the job, says he expects the Russians to interfere in the 2020 election.
This is probably the best news the president hears all day.
1/30/19: Some of the best people I know are devoted Christians and follow the message of Jesus in their daily lives. So you wonder why so many professed Christians follow Donald J. Trump.
In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Sarah Sanders makes it clear that if her boss is having trouble here on earth there’s no cause for worry. He has one important celestial Fan. “I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times,” she tells her CBN hosts, “and I think that He wanted Donald Trump to become president, and that’s why he’s there.”
As a skeptic, myself, I found another segment of the CBN program highly informative, in an almost comical sense. Sanders was asked about several new Democratic lawmakers and others who seemed to be—at best—hanging out with anti-Semitic thinkers, like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Before proceeding, I should mention that Farrakhan is the kind of religious leader who keeps my skepticism burning bright, because I think he’s a fraud, and a hater, both. On that point, Sanders and I probably agree.
For her part, Sanders was horrified by Democrats who, she said, “take picture after picture” with Farrakhan and his kind. As even the Washington Post admits (because the Post tries to lay out facts), “Several leaders of the national Women’s March, held earlier this month in Washington, have refused to denounce Farrakhan, who is known for making virulently anti-Semitic remarks.”
 |
| Farrakhan is anti-Semitic. |
The CBN hosts ask Sanders if the White House is concerned. She pounces on that question like a true follower of Jesus, assuming that a true follower of Jesus had forgotten centuries of Christian theology and virulent anti-Semitism.
Think: Spanish Inquisition, for starters.
Sanders responded:
“I think it is outrageous that the leadership of Democrats haven’t called on these people to either take their comments back, they haven’t condemned them. Anytime somebody who’s not even associated with the president says something, the first thing is: ‘Will you condemn, will you say that this is terrible?’ Where’s the leadership on the Democrats’ side to call this out? I think it is disgraceful and I think that people need to know what these individuals have said and the type of people that they associate themselves with. The idea that they can take picture after picture and continue to support people like Louis Farrakhan is beyond me.”
So, let’s see if we can jog Sanders’ memory, going way back to April 2018, when Pastor Robert Jeffress spoke at the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. Yes, Farrakhan is an anti-Semite, but Jeffress is a pea from the same pod, and you’d think a good Christian lady like Ms. Sanders might know that too.
Jeffress, as I noted last spring, is an Evangelical firebrand. He has often made it clear he believes all Jews will someday burn in Hell. Mormons, he argues, are part of a cult. Hindus and Buddhists are just as bad. He has labeled the Catholic Church “the genius of Satan.” As for Islam, Jeffress calls that religion “evil,” “violent” and “false.”
As a bonus we learned that Reverend John C. Hagee gave the benediction at the opening, after Jeffress spoke. Hagee not only hates Muslims, he’s a bigot when it comes to gays. Hagee once claimed that God punished New Orleans and nearly drowned the city because a Gay Pride parade was scheduled. The day before the gays were set to march, Hurricane Katrina hit.
In other words, Hagee believes God drowned a major American city because He hates to see gays parading with floats.
 |
| Jeffress (with Trump) is anti-Semitic too. |
*
SPEAKING OF GOD, another Trump fan made it clear this week that we should not take any chances when it comes to His wrath.
Paula White, described as “the president’s spiritual adviser,” and the woman who delivered the invocation at his Inauguration, believes her supporters should, if they want God to bless them, pony up some cash.
“Each January,” she wrote in a missive to fans, “I put God first and honor Him with the first of our substance by sowing a first fruits offering of one month’s pay. That is a big sacrifice,” she admitted, “but it is a seed for the harvest I am believing for in the coming year. And God always provides!” (Certainly, God will provide for White—if her followers fall for this shtick.)
The results, White promised, would be “miraculous,” whether her followers sowed a month’s pay, a week’s pay, or a day’s. “First Fruits has impacted my life personally and the lives of countless others!” she wrote. “First Fruits is more than just an offering … it’s a principle.”
Best of all, if you sent Ms. White $75 or more (and hopefully one-twelfth of what you were going to earn for the year) you would get one of her books and a Paula White 2018 calendar thrown in.
Or you could NOT give and risk God’s wrath. “God lays claim to all firsts,” White insisted. “So when you keep for yourself something that belongs to God you are desecrating what is to be consecrated to God.”
“When you honor this principle it provides the foundation and structure for God’s blessings and promises in your life, it unlocks deep dimensions of spiritual truths that literally transform your life! When you apply this everything comes in divine alignment for His plan and promises for you. When you don’t honor it, whether through ignorance or direct disobedience there are consequences.”
In other words, I think she meant, you should send this lady a fat check—and you should send it quick—before God zapped you with a lightning bolt, or decided Trump should be reelected next year.
“Fighting against the hand of God.”
White, who preaches the “prosperity gospel,” is also famous for saying of the president in August 2017,
He is authentically—whether people like it or not—has been raised up by God. Because God says that he raises up and places all people in places of authority. It is God who raises up a king. It is God that sets one down. When you fight against the plan of God, you are fighting against the hand of God.
Here, then, you have Ms. White more or less restating the theory of “divine right of kings.” In the 1600s and 1700s, Christian kings argued that absolute power was vested in their hands and the common folk really had no right to complain, because God chose them to rule.
That doctrine, of course, was refuted by, among others, the Founding Fathers of this great nation in 1789.
*
ERIC TRUMP, son of President Twitter Thumbs, wraps another day in Trumpistan with an appearance on Sean Hannity’s show.
We report, as they say at Fox News…that the president is great, that Democrats are scum…and you decide we’re right.
Boiling down Eric’s message to its essence, we learn Democrats have been “radicalized.” They’re a bunch of “socialists” and if they aren’t stopped, the U.S.A. is going to end up like Venezuela.”
The Democrats, he insists, “don’t want law and order. They want to tax people to death. They want to get businesses out of this country. They want to let anybody in to this country. They want to bankrupt the system through free healthcare for all. America’s about hard-working people,” Eric assures Hannity.
“America’s about capitalism. America’s the greatest country in the world because people work for that American dream.”
In reality, Eric Trump is a jerk. Speaking as a fairly typical Democrat, myself, I can say, for example, that when his father was busy dodging the draft, I joined the Marines. Unlike his father, I volunteered to go to Vietnam twice; but by dumb luck never was sent. Unlike his father—and the Trump Organization—I do not hire undocumented immigrants to cut my grass or fold my laundry. I have nothing against immigrants, legal or illegal. But as a liberal in good standing—not a socialist—I believe in paying people who work for me a good wage. (See: 12/28/18.)
And screw it, I don’t think a loving God drowns gays because of parades or zaps us if we don’t send grafter preachers fat checks.
In fact, I don’t think God, in His infinite wisdom, has any real use for Louis Farrakhan, either.
Freedom of religion means you get excellent Christians, Jews, Muslims, Mormons and all the rest. You also get some nuts.
1/31/19: Well, that didn’t take long. Earlier this week, Fox News reported, and you decided, and the president tweeted. There were gazillions of illegal voters registered in Texas and America was being overrun. (See: 1/28/19.)
And…maybe, not!
David Whitley, Texas Secretary of State, has already gone silent on his claim that 95,000 illegals were registered to vote and 58,000 had done so (if we went back to 1996 and started counting from there) and we needed a giant wall to protect our voting booths.
When a coalition of 13 civil rights groups challenged Whitley’s shocking numbers he had to retreat and said he’d get back to them “within the next week.”
Meanwhile, officials in all 254 Texas counties went to work checking the lists Whitley’s office provided. Within days, Dallas County found that 1,715 people on the list the state provided were in fact citizens. Harris County quickly knocked 18,000 of 30,000 listed “illegals” off its list (meaning the State of Texas had an error rate of 60%) and Harris officials weren’t even close to done checking.
As the Dallas News reported, “Williamson County’s Chris Davis, president of the Association of Texas Elections Administrators, said more than half of the 2,033 voters on his county’s list were being removed after the state’s revision.”
Travis County officials told reporters they had already knocked 634 names off their list—and had barely started.
So: what President Trump had originally said was “the tip of the iceberg,” was starting to look more like just another Republican effort to purge legal, heavily-minority voters from the polls and scare the GOP base.
Now that this threat from illegal immigration was blunted, we could focus on how the case for the Great Wall of Trump was progressing.
Democrats don’t seem interested in paying for all the bricks Trump needs for his wall. But, Customs and Border Protection proves once again that we really need a wall 20, or 30 or 1,000 feet high. Thursday, CBP announces the biggest drug bust involving fentanyl ever, proving we need…
What!
It turns out this shipment, 254 pounds of fentanyl, and just under 400 pounds of meth, worth $4.6 million, came right through the Port of Nogales, Arizona, hidden in a truckload of cucumbers.
*
SPEAKING OF CRIMINALS, new court filings in the case of Roger Stone show that federal prosecutors have a vast trove of information seized in the raid on his home, offices and discovered on computers and other electronic devices.
Stone won’t be going to trial anytime soon and the Mueller investigation is far from over.
First, prosecutors will have to produce copies of any legally pertinent information they find to Stone’s defense team, a process called “discovery.” Second, they will have to examine the material they have and exclude any “privileged” information, such as client-attorney communications.
Finally, Mueller and his team will have to build up their case against Mr. Stone, and potentially others, as may be revealed:
This discovery is both voluminous and complex. It is composed of multiple hard drives containing several terabytes of information consisting of, among other things, FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results (e.g., Apple iCloud accounts and email accounts), bank and financial records, and the contents of numerous physical devices (e.g., cellular phones, computers, and hard drives). The communications contained in the iCloud accounts, email accounts, and physical devices span several years. The government also intends to produce to the defense the contents of physical devices recently seized from his home, apartment, and office.
Those devices are currently undergoing a filter review by the FBI for potentially privileged communications.
To keep this development in perspective, a single terabyte is equivalent to 75 million pages like the one you are (hopefully) reading.
*
IF WE GO BACK a few weeks, to November 2018, we already knew that an unusually high number of sealed indictments (as many as 36), had been filed with the federal courts in Washington, D.C. It was inadvertently revealed that one of those 36 listed Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Several legal analysists have suggested that Robert Mueller’s team, knowing the president might move to interfere with their work after the midterm election, filed the necessary papers in advance. In other words, the “winning” names would be revealed only when investigators finished their work—or whenever Trump and his minions moved to shut the show down.
Sealed indictments could not be revoked.
We know now that one of the 36 was filed in Stone’s name. We can be fairly sure another was aimed at Jerome Corsi, or so Corsi believed; but Corsi has since been cooperating with investigators. (See: 1/25/19.)
Axios also has an excellent story out this week, highlighting the granular detail revealed in earlier court filings. For example, on July 27, 2016, we know Candidate Trump issued his famous call, “Russia, if you’re listening…” It was that day he expressed the hope that the Russians would try to find Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
The very next day, Mueller’s team knows (as revealed in an earlier indictment of 12 Russian hackers), “the Conspirators ... attempted after hours to spear-phish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office.”
Mueller has remarkable...unexplained visibility.
As Axios explains, “That shows Mueller has access to much more intelligence than is publicly known. Remember, these are Russian government employees. So Mueller has remarkable and thus far unexplained visibility.”
Mueller has also hinted he has far more information than those outside the investigation imagine. In a court filing aimed at members of a Russian troll factory, his team reported that three employees of the Internet Research Agency—the troll factory—had traveled to the U.S. in 2014. Two have since been indicted.
But not the third.
Mueller has indicated in court filings, “that he knows the precise IRA official to whom this unnamed [third] male traveler filed his Atlanta expenses after the trip.”
As Axios notes, “The information could have come from U.S. intelligence or another country. But Mueller leaves the impression he may have a cooperator inside the troll factory.”
To put it plainly, then, Mueller knows way more than we know he does; and the more he knows the worse it is for Trump and his crew.
*
IN A POLL RELEASED TODAY, 62 percent of Americans believe the president knew that his associates, Cohen, Manafort, Stone, and others, were purposely misleading investigators and Congress.
Only 32 percent think he didn’t.
 |
| Roger Stone outside of court. |
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