Category: Uncategorized

Go and Do Likewise.

ALEXANDER: You said today that you had the biggest electoral margin since Ronald Reagan, 304, 306 electoral votes. But President Obama had 365….
TRUMP: Well, I’m talking about Republicans.
ALEXANDER: George H.W. Bush, 426 when he won as president. So why should Americans trust you?
TRUMP: Well no, I was given that information. I don’t know, I was just given—we had a very, very big margin.
ALEXANDER: I guess my question is why Americans should trust you when you use information…
TRUMP: Well, I don’t know, I was given that information. I was given—I actually, I’ve seen that information around.
Lemkin: See how fucking effective one simple fact deployed in the moment can be? The man has a stable of four or five lies he constantly goes back to. Go and do likewise. You don’t, I got no sympathy for you.

The 25th Amendment

Just one excerpt from today’s Trump press conference, presented without editing and straight up from the Times of New York transcript of the event:

QUESTION: (inaudible) …for those who believe that there is something to it, is there anything that you have learned over the last few weeks that you might be able to reveal that might ease their concerns that this isn’t fake news? And second…

TRUMP: …I think they don’t believe it. I don’t think the public – that’s why the Rasmussen poll just has me through the roof. I don’t think they believe it. Well, I guess one of the reasons I’m here today is to tell you the whole Russian thing, that’s a ruse. That’s a ruse. And by the way, it would be great if we could get along with Russia, just so you understand that.

“Now tomorrow, you’ll say “Donald Trump wants to get along with Russia, this is terrible.” It’s not terrible. It’s good. We had Hillary Clinton try and do a reset. We had Hillary Clinton give Russia 20 percent of the uranium in our country. You know what uranium is, right? This thing called nuclear weapons like lots of things are done with uranium including some bad things.

"Nobody talks about that. I didn’t do anything for Russia. I’ve done nothing for Russia. Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium. Hillary Clinton did a reset, remember? With the stupid plastic button that made us all look like a bunch of jerks. Here, take a look. He looked at her like, what the hell is she doing with that cheap plastic button?

"Hillary Clinton – that was the reset, remember it said reset? Now if I do that, oh, I’m a bad guy. If we could get along with Russia, that’s a positive thing. We have a very talented man, Rex Tillerson, who’s going to be meeting with them shortly and I told him. I said “I know politically it’s probably not good for me.” The greatest thing I could do is shoot that ship that’s 30 miles off shore right out of the water.

"Everyone in this country’s going to say “oh, it’s so great.” That’s not great. That’s not great. I would love to be able to get along with Russia. Now, you’ve had a lot of presidents that haven’t taken that tack. Look where we are now. Look where we are now. So, if I can – now, I love to negotiate things, I do it really well, and all that stuff. But – but it’s possible I won’t be able to get along with Putin.

"Maybe it is. But I want to just tell you, the false reporting by the media, by you people, the false, horrible, fake reporting makes it much harder to make a deal with Russia. And probably Putin said “you know.” He’s sitting behind his desk and he’s saying “you know, I see what’s going on in the United States, I follow it closely. It’s going to be impossible for President Trump to ever get along with Russia because of all the pressure he’s got with this fake story.” OK?

"And that’s a shame because if we could get along with Russia – and by the way, China and Japan and everyone. If we could get along, it would be a positive thing, not a negative thing.

A Foolish Consistency…

Rand Paul, Tuesday: I just don’t think it’s useful to be doing investigation after investigation, particularly of your own party. We’ll never even get started with doing the things we need to do, like repealing Obamacare, if we’re spending our whole time having Republicans investigate Republicans. I think it makes no sense.
Rand Paul, 2012: You need to have people within your own party that have the wherewithal to stand up to you. If a Republican does injustice, I’ll be up on the floor saying the same thing.

Forget it, Donny, you’re out of your element!

Donald Trump: When I am President, Russia will respect us far more than they do now.
New York Times: In a move that U.S. officials say violates a major 1987 arms-control treaty, Russia has secretly deployed a cruise missile […] violating the 1987 treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. Signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the treaty bans missiles that can fly between 300 and 3,400 miles.

If the Republicans in the Senate were really as concerned about a renegade presidency as they claim to be on Twitter and in anonymous mumblings to various reporters, they’d join with Democrats to block [Mnuchin’s] nomination. It only takes three of them, and they all could cite Mnuchin’s dubious testimony to the committee as a very plausible reason for doing so.

There was absolutely no chance of that ever happening, however. Nobody—except Bernie Sanders, who said it all the time—wants to get up and state flat out that the business model of people like Stephen Mnuchin, the people who immiserated millions out of sheer animal greed, was plain vanilla bunco fraud. This was really the last chance to make that point before these gombeen yahoos do it all over again.

Charlie Pierce, writing about the Mnuchin confirmation for Treasury Secretary. Yep. Great Recession II is coming, and if these yahoos are still in charge when it happens they’ll merily let the global economy burn to the ground Hoover style. The Market will sort all that out, don’t ya know? So get ready for your haircut, Wall Street, because it’s coming sooner than later; the great reckoning that should have been bailout and jailterms back in ought-eight will instead be no bailout, total ruin for you, and a decades long recovery for literally everyone else. And, of course, the end of the GOP. So we’ll have that going for us.

Eichenwald: Neil Gorsuch is supremely qualified, and must not be confirmed

Well reasoned article by Kurt Eichenwald, starts thusly:

Gorsuch [though well qualified in terms of the “traditional norms”], unfortunately, must be sacrificed on the altar of obscene partisanship erected by the Republicans in recent years. Temper tantrums designed to undermine the Constitution for naked political purposes cannot be rewarded. Our government cannot survive the short-term games-playing that has replaced fidelity to the intent of the Founding Fathers’ work in forming this once-great nation.

But I have to say, his solution is an odd one, basically force a vote on Garland, which, of course, would simply be a party-line “no” based on the current Senate, then renominate Gorsuch:

So even though Garland would not have won a Senate confirmation vote, a precedent needs to be established: the Senate’s confirmation responsibilities under the Constitution are not a joke, are not something where absurd rationalizations that pass for smarts on Fox News can be used to circumvent history and precedent. Nominees must be given hearings and votes. And yes, if that means letting the Republicans blow up the filibuster, let them do it.

Honestly, I don’t see how that’s “punishment” or is in any way reseting the Constitutional norms. His final paragraph, however, does break the glass on what I would definitely agree is true and lasting retribution for this act (and that also presumes the inevitable end of judicial filibusters he alluded to above):

Then, when a Democratic president is in office, the Democrats control the Senate, and there is no filibuster, show the Republicans a real exercise in raw power: revive Franklin Roosevelt’s plan to pack the Supreme Court and fill it with the most liberal justices around. If the Republicans insist on turning the judiciary into a political plaything, play the roughest game of hardball they have ever seen.

That is nothing if not serious hardball. It is amazing to see it suggested in print by someone like Eichenwald. Trump voters wanted change. They’re getting change alright.

Eichenwald: Neil Gorsuch is supremely qualified, and must not be confirmed

Sorry, Neil Gorsuch. The Supreme Court Seat Was Already Filled

Geoffrey Stone makes as good a case as I’ve seen:

Anyone who cares about the proper and legitimate functioning of our American democracy must oppose Judge Gorsuch’s nomination, not because he is necessarily unqualified, but because of the undermining of our American democracy by Senate Republicans. Anyone who cares about the rule of law should must oppose this nomination. If we fail to take this stand, the Senate Republicans will have succeeded in placing a justice onto our highest Court who has no business being there. They will have undermined the credibility of the Supreme Court as an institution, an institution that is critical to the functioning of our Constitution.

Judge Gorsuch’s nomination should be withdrawn, and the President should nominate in his place a genuinely moderate justice who is acceptable to Democrats and Republicans alike. Only then can we move on with a sense of institutional integrity. Short of that, every decision of the Court decided by a margin of five-to-four with Neil Gorsuch in the majority will justifiably be castigated as fundamentally illegitimate.

Simply saying you’re holding the seat for at least four years isn’t going to fly. Preemptively declaring a blanket filibuster on all candidates isn’t going to fly; that sort of thing is perfectly okay if you’re a Republican, but otherwise you can forget about it. But the Democrats must find a way to extract a political price over the Garland theft, but have to do so in a “serious” way that also placates the recently ascendant Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. Maybe you can manage to hold until mid-terms? But you have to have an end game and start talking about it today; good thing the Democrats are known for their excellent coordinated messaging machine…

Sorry, Neil Gorsuch. The Supreme Court Seat Was Already Filled

The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much merriment.  It is not funny.  Astrological gibberish, which means astrology generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government.  Unlike comics, which are part of a newspaper’s harmless pleasure and make no truth claims, astrology is a fraud.  The idea that it gets a hearing in government is dismaying.

George Will, noted Serious Person, writing in 1988. What I wouldn’t give for an astrologer and a Serious Person that noticed.