Voter Turnout Is Essential To Re-Defeating Trump

I voted Did you

Trump lost in 2020 by more than 7 million votes1 and hasn’t made much inroads into reducing that margin. Or even attempting to! Especially since the Republican agenda is very unpopular with a majority of eligible voters. Continuing to strip abortion rights is at the top of their list, but there are many other abominations in the GOP plan for America.

America is also one of those democracies that has been so stable that a plurality of eligible voters don’t bother to vote. Why bother when the country continues to plod along no matter what?

Agora

But I believe strongly the 2024 election is different, and thus participating in the voting process is more important for everyone. The oft repeated cliché, “If we want to keep our democracy…” has been chanted frequently enough, the key to keeping the violent, vulgar idiot Trump and his fascist bullies out of public office is voter turnout.

President Joe Biden has accomplished more than I expected, his administration should continue.

Footnotes:
  1. he lost the popular vote in 2016 too []

The United States vs Donald Trump, part 2

United States of America v. Donald J. Trump

The long awaited, long speculated upon indictment of Donald Trump for his attempted coup plot has finally arrived. January 6th, 2021 was a horrible day for all people who respect the United States Constitution, myself included. Trump and his cult did their best to end our country.

If you haven’t read the actual indictment, I urge you to do so. It is only 45 pages, and without much legalese or jargon to slow you down. Here is a PDF version, you can find it elsewhere with a simple web search.

After reading it yesterday afternoon, I had a few unanswered questions that I have found some answers for, and perhaps more will be available this morning. 

1. Who are the six unnamed co-conspirators? And will they have to face trial in the future?

Five of the six were fairly easy to identify by clues in the indictment itself.

Co-Conspirator 1 is Rudy Giuliani. 

Conspirator 1, an attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign attorneys would not.

…Co-Conspirator | responded with words to the effect of, “We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories.”

Co-Conspirator 2 is John Eastman, and his lawyer has already put out a statement confirming this.

Co-Conspirator 2, an attorney who devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election.

Co-Conspirator 2 conceded that he “[didn’t] know enough about facts on the ground” in Arizona, but nonetheless told the Arizona House Speaker to decertify and “let the courts sort it out.”

Also on January 4, when Co-Conspirator 2 acknowledged to the Defendant’s Senior Advisor that no court would support his proposal, the Senior Advisor told Co-Conspirator 2, “[Y]ou’re going to cause riots in the streets.” Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had previously been points in the nation’s history where violence was necessary to protect the republic.

Co-Conspirator 3 is obviously cuckoo-bananas Sidney “Kraken” Powell.

Co-Conspirator 3, an attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud the Defendant privately acknowledged to others sounded “crazy.” Nonetheless, the Defendant embraced and publicly amplified Co-Conspirator 3’s disinformation.

On November 25, Co-Conspirator 3 filed a lawsuit against the Governor of Georgia falsely alleging “massive election fraud” accomplished through the voting machine company’s election software and hardware. Before the lawsuit was even filed, the Defendant retweeted a post promoting it. The Defendant did this despite the fact that when he had discussed Co- Conspirator 3’s far-fetched public claims regarding the voting machine company in private with advisors, the Defendant had conceded that they were unsupported and that Co-Conspirator 3 sounded “crazy.” 

Ms. Powell famously told a Fox News producer that she had gotten the evidence from a friend who heard it whispered in her ear. I’ve never decided if Ms. Powell was serious, or being metaphorical, but I lean towards her believing that spirits or maybe even some god whisper bits of evidence about Hugo Chávez, Italian satellites and what not in receptive ears. 

Co-Conspirator 4 is Jeffrey Clark

Co-Conspirator 4, a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and who, with the Defendant, attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.

On the afternoon of January 3, Co-Conspirator 4 spoke with a Deputy White House Counsel. The previous month, the Deputy White House Counsel had informed the Defendant that “there is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House [o]n January 20th.” Now, the same Deputy White House Counsel tried to dissuade Co-Conspirator 4 from assuming the role of Acting Attorney General. The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.” Co-Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Mr. Clark was the EPA attorney who Trump was going to appoint as Attorney General, but the entire Justice Department threatened to resign if Trump did this, so after a tense few hours, Trump withdrew this plan.

Co-Conspirator 5 is probably Kenneth Chesebro, who I admit I don’t exactly recall his part in the coup attempt, but I do remember his name.

Co-Conspirator 5, an attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.

I just talked to the gentleman who did that memo, [Co- Conspirator 5]. His idea is basically that all of us (GA, WI, AZ, PA, etc.) have our electors send in their votes (even though the votes aren’t legal under federal law — because they’re not signed by the Governor); so that members of Congress can fight about whether they should be counted on January 6″. (They could potentially argue that they’re not bound by federal law because they’re Congress and make the law, etc.) Kind of wild/creative — I’m happy to discuss. My comment to him was that I guess there’s no harm in it, (legally at least) — i.e. we would just be sending in “fake” electoral votes to Pence so that “someone” in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the “fake” votes should be counted.

On December 13, Co-Conspirator 5 sent Co-Conspirator 1 an email memorandum that further confirmed that the conspirators’ plan was not to use the fraudulent electors only in the circumstance that the Defendant’s litigation was successful in one of the targeted states—instead, the plan was to falsely present the fraudulent slates as an alternative to the legitimate slates at Congress’s certification proceeding.

Co-Conspirator 6 is the hardest to ascertain, there aren’t quite enough bread crumbs, and it could be a few different people.

Co-Conspirator 6, a political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.

Could Number 6 be Peter Navorro? Or Michael Roman? Or some other criminal? We’ll find out soon enough.

2. Who are the Senators that were part of the plot?

From the indictment:

Co-Conspirator 6 attempted to confirm phone numbers for six United States Senators whom the Defendant had directed Co-Conspirator 1 to call and attempt to enlist in further delaying the certification.

During the Jan 6th Congressional hearings, this came out:

The Jan. 6 select committee’s final report said Giuliani placed calls that evening to Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), as well as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

Hawley, Cruz and Jordan all later voted to decertify Pennsylvania’s and Arizona’s presidential electors.

So either Congress got this wrong, Jack Smith got this wrong, or one of these Senators didn’t answer the phone, or something. Regardless, these Senators should have to be grilled about their part in the coup attempt, without fear or favor. If they were part of the coup, they should not serve in the Senate because they were insurrectionists. 

3. Who is the judge who has been assigned the case?

Perhaps to balance against MAGA Judge Aileen Cannon, the judge in the classified documents case, the universe assigned Judge Tanya Chutkan to this case. While she was appointed by President Obama, Judge Chutkan was confirmed in the Senate by a 95-0 vote, and she is not thought to be anything but impartial.

She was the judge who issued this noteworthy ruling in Civil Action 21-cv-2769 (TSC), Trump v. Bennie Thompson

"Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President"

 

She has already tried many of the Jan 6th “foot soldiers”, and is not sympathetic. In fact, per Josh Marshall of TPM, Chutkan is known for imposing longer sentences for guilty insurrectionists than the prosecutors ask for. 

The American Republic and the Constitution that sets out its rules and structure are the anchor of the law and the rule of law in this country. Attempts to overthrow the government, to overthrow the Constitution, are the gravest crimes since they challenge the basis of every other law. Murder may come with a stiffer sentence, but attempts to overthrow the Republic itself is still a graver offense.

I noticed this quote from Judge Tanya Chutkan, the D.C. district court judge who has drawn the Trump coup indictment: “It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transition of power and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment.” …Chutkan is known for her tough sentences for January 6th defendants.

4. Why is only Trump on this indictment, and will the case be tried before the election?

Informed speculation on this is that having multiple defendants necessitates longer trial times as the multiple groups of lawyers jockey and delay, file motions as is their right, etc. In other words, having a single defendant will probably speed the trial up. However, trials in America are ponderously slow, and take a long time to resolve. The courts already have over-full dockets, and we don’t actually know if this case will be tried and finished before November 2024. We as a nation can hope, but  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Have the co-conspirators flipped? Or will they have their own indictment(s) soon? Again, we don’t know this, yet, but I assume we will sooner than later.

Trump wants to delay all of his trials as long as possible:

John Lauro, a lawyer for former president Donald Trump, pushed back Wednesday on special counsel Jack Smith’s desire to hold a “speedy trial” on charges related to Trump’s effort to reverse the 2020 election results.

“Well, the speedy trial right is the defendant’s right, not the government’s right,” Lauro said during an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show. “So we’re entitled to understand what the charges are. We’re entitled to do our own investigation.”

“The special counsel or the Justice Department, the Biden Justice Department, has had three years to investigate this,” Lauro continued. “To take President Trump to trial in 90 days, of course, is absurd. The question is why do they want to do that. If you want to seek justice, then you need to offer … President Trump an opportunity to get a hold of all the evidence and understand what the facts are.”

Smith suggested the idea of a speedy trial — defined as 70 days in federal law — during a brief statement Tuesday after the four-count indictment against Trump was announced.

5. Are “Talking Indictments” sometimes called “Speaking indictments” good?

A lawyer guest on Ari Melber’s The Beat program on MSNBC made the point that he doesn’t like “talking indictments”. I guess he prefers court documents to be heavily footnoted with legal opinions and language only lawyers use. I understand his point, and I also think that Count 3 and Count 4 of this particular indictment are fairly sparse on details, I would like more here. Perhaps it was rushed out a bit to get on the judicial calendar before the Fulton County DA’s impending case? Or for other reasons? Or I am wrong because I am not a lawyer?

As a layperson, I appreciate “talking indictments” because they form a narrative, but there is no reason that subsequent superseding indictments cannot veer into standard legal tropes, citing case law.

A lot of the narrative was already established by the Congressional Jan 6th committee.

In taking the monumental step of charging a former president with attempting to steal an American election, Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel, relied on an extraordinary narrative, but one the country knew well.

For a year and a half, the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol introduced Americans to a sprawling cast of characters and laid out in painstaking detail the many ways in which former President Donald J. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. In doing so, it provided a road map of sorts for the 45-page indictment Mr. Smith released on Tuesday.

“In a lot of ways, the committee’s work provided this path,” said Soumya Dayananda, who served as a senior investigator for the House Jan. 6 panel. “The committee served as educating the country about what the former president did, and this is finally accountability. The congressional committee wasn’t going to be able to bring accountability; that was in the hands of the Department of Justice.”

Mr. Smith’s document — while far slimmer than the 845-page tome produced by the House investigative committee — contained a narrative that was nearly identical: An out-of-control president, refusing to leave office, was willing to lie and harm the country’s democracy in an attempt to stay in power.

(click here to continue reading Trump Jan. 6 Indictment Relies Heavily on House Panel’s Work – The New York Times.)

There are undoubtedly other questions I have, but this post is already over 2,000 words, way over my typical length, I’ll end here.

Trump And Nuclear Secrets-A-Lago

Peace in the Valley

It would be irresponsible not to speculate, right?

First: in case you missed it…

Devlin Barrett and Carol Leonnig report:

A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about classified material stashed in the Florida property.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs, according to people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.

(click here to continue reading Material on foreign nation’s nuclear capabilities seized at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago – The Washington Post.)

What it is

Wikipedia lists eight countries with nuclear weapons in their own arsenal, US, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Israel is probably the ninth, but refuses to publicly comment. There are also nations that allow other countries to store nuclear weapons1 though this is probably not as valuable information to sell, as presumedly the nation hosting the weapons already knows about it. 

Oh sure, why else would Trump want such a document? He’s long been known both as averse to reading and pro “transactional”. He wouldn’t have undertaken the effort and risk to evade government safeguards to steal all these sensitive documents without having a plan for selling the information in the future. He didn’t steal thousands of pages just to read them at his leisure.

So which country is this about? And who is the potential purchaser? Per the clues in the above cited Washington Post article and elsewhere, probably not the United States.

Putin would probably pay a lot to know what the US knows about Russia’s nuclear archive, and would probably like to know about all the other nuclear powers too.

China, the same. Are there US nukes on Taiwan still?

I don’t think the UK or France would be in the market for info on other nuclear powers, the US remains their ally, and the US has plenty of intelligence it shares with allies.

I’m not sure Trump knows much about Pakistan and India, nor would he have learned much over the years.

North Korea is certainly a prime Trump partner, they would find some way to pay Trump for information about all other nuclear states.

Israel is a very likely subject, there are plenty of potential purchasers for information about Israel’s nukes: every wealthy Middle Eastern kingdom, Syria, Russia, Egypt, plus many more.

Will we ever know? If Trump’s bumbling lawyers keep bumbling, maybe? 

Footnotes:
  1. Italy, Germany, who knows where else []

Trump Struggle To Find A Lawyer Continues

Same Sentiment

The Washington Post gives The Former Guy an unpaid advertorial regarding his never-ending search for competent and experienced legal advice.

The struggle to find expert legal advice puts Trump in a bind as he faces potential criminal exposure from a records dispute with the National Archives that escalated into a federal investigation into possible violations of the Espionage Act and other statutes.

“Everyone is saying no,” said a prominent Republican lawyer, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential conversations.

…Ordinarily, the prestige and publicity of representing a former president, as well as the new and complex legal issues at stake in this case, would attract high-powered attorneys. But Trump’s search is being hampered by his divisiveness, as well as his reputation for stiffing vendors and ignoring advice.

“In olden days, he would tell firms representing him was a benefit because they could advertise off it. Today it’s not the same,” said Michael Cohen, a former lawyer for Trump who was convicted of tax evasion, false statements, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress in 2018.

“He’s also a very difficult client in that he’s always pushing the envelope, he rarely listens to sound legal advice, and he wants you to do things that are not appropriate, ethically or legally.”

(click here to continue reading Trump is rushing to hire seasoned lawyers — but he keeps hearing ‘No’ – The Washington Post.)

I suppose competency and the ability to follow the news are often related, perhaps that is why TFG cannot seem to find counsel. I mean, a lawyer could get disbarred, or worse, have criminal exposure all without the certainty of being paid. Dream job! A legal firm could potentially bill a lot of hours working on the 381 cases currently being litigated, but again, with a high probability of not being paid in full. TFG expects to have the RNC pay for many of these fees, but this interesting arrangement might be unsustainable for the full docket, especially if The Lord God Emperor Tiny Hands does in fact declare a run for 2024. 

Trump - Mother of All Liars

Meanwhile, for an allegedly wealthy man, TFG sure does need to fundraise a lot. At least the money that he manages to skim from his sheeple won’t get spent on political races to benefit Republicans.

Compare and contrast…

Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf report:

Former president Donald Trump bombarded his supporters with more than 100 emails asking for money based on the FBI’s search of the Mar-a-Lago Club for classified materials last week. They paid off.

Contributions to Trump’s political action committee topped $1 million on at least two days after the Aug. 8 search of his Palm Beach, Fla., estate, according to two people familiar with the figures. The daily hauls jumped from a level of $200,000 to $300,000 that had been typical in recent months

(click here to continue reading Trump rakes in millions off FBI search at Mar-a-Lago – The Washington Post.)

vs.

Shane Goldmacher reports:

Online fund-raising has slowed across much of the Republican Party in recent months, an unusual pullback of small donors that has set off a mad rush among Republican political operatives to understand why — and reverse the sudden decline before it damages the party’s chances this fall.

Small-dollar donations typically increase as an election nears. But just the opposite has happened in recent months across a wide range of Republican entities, including every major party committee and former President Donald J. Trump’s political operation.

The total amount donated online fell by more than 12 percent across all federal Republican campaigns and committees in the second quarter compared with the first quarter, according to an analysis of federal records from WinRed, the main online Republican donation-processing portal.

More alarming for Republicans: Democratic contributions surged at the same time. Total federal donations on ActBlue, the Democratic counterpart, jumped by more than 21 percent.

The overall Democratic fund-raising edge online widened by $100 million from the last quarter of 2021 to the most recent three-month period, records show.

Exacerbating the fund-raising problems for Republicans is that Mr. Trump continues to be the party’s dominant fund-raiser and yet virtually none of the tens of millions of dollars he has raised has gone toward defeating Democrats. Instead, the money has funded his political team and retribution agenda against Republicans who have crossed him.

(click here to continue reading Republicans Confront Unexpected Online Money Slowdown – The New York Times.)

What Are You Hiding, Trump?

Footnotes:
  1. !!!!! []

Can Donald Trump Run for President Again If He Broke A Particular Law?

I Will Never Call Donald Trump President

Survey says…

Charlie Savage, The New York Times, reports:

Early reports that the F.B.I. search of former President Donald J. Trump’s residence in Florida related to an investigation into whether he had unlawfully taken government files when he left the White House focused attention on an obscure criminal law barring removal of official records. The penalties for breaking that law include disqualification from holding any federal office.

Because Mr. Trump is widely believed to be preparing to run for president again in 2024, that unusual penalty raised the prospect that he might be legally barred from returning to the White House.

Specifically, the law in question — Section 2071 of Title 18 of the United States Code — makes it a crime if someone who has custody of government documents or records “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys” them. If convicted, defendants can be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. In addition, the statute says, if they are currently in a federal office, they “shall forfeit” that office, and they shall “be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.” On its face, then, if Mr. Trump were to be charged and convicted of removing, concealing or destroying government records under that law, he would seem to be ineligible to become president again.

But there was reason for caution

several legal scholars — including Seth B. Tillman of Maynooth University in Ireland and Eugene Volokh of the University of California, Los Angeles — noted that the Constitution sets eligibility criteria for who can be president, and argued that Supreme Court rulings suggest Congress cannot alter them. The Constitution allows Congress to disqualify people from holding office in impeachment proceedings, but grants no such power for ordinary criminal law.

(click here to continue reading Can Donald Trump Run for President Again If He Broke This Law? – The New York Times.)

So, maybe? Can a law passed by Congress supersede a provision in the Constitution? And will states allow a criminal on the ballot?

Emails Reveal Details of Trump Fake Electors Plan

Impeach Trump

The fake electoral vote creator aka insurrectionists need to serve time in prison.

The New York Times reports:

Previously undisclosed emails provide an inside look at the increasingly desperate and often slapdash efforts by advisers to President Donald J. Trump to reverse his election defeat in the weeks before the Jan. 6 attack, including acknowledgments that a key element of their plan was of dubious legality and lived up to its billing as “fake.”

The dozens of emails among people connected to the Trump campaign, outside advisers and close associates of Mr. Trump show a particular focus on assembling lists of people who would claim — with no basis — to be Electoral College electors on his behalf in battleground states that he had lost.

In emails reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who had worked with the Trump campaign at the time, one lawyer involved in the detailed discussions repeatedly used the word “fake” to refer to the so-called electors, who were intended to provide Vice President Mike Pence and Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress a rationale for derailing the congressional process of certifying the outcome. And lawyers working on the proposal made clear they knew that the pro-Trump electors they were putting forward might not hold up to legal scrutiny.

In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” adding a smiley face emoji.

 

(click here to continue reading Emails Reveal Details of Trump Fake Electors Plan – The New York Times.)

Jan. 6 Hearing in Prime Time

No Puppet!

I am looking forward to this season finale of the Jan 6 Committee. Hope there is a second season airing this fall…

The NYT reports:

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol will hold its next public hearing on Thursday, returning to prime time for the eighth in a series of hearings that began in June.

The committee has spent more than a year investigating the events surrounding the riot. The forthcoming hearing is expected to focus on the 187 minutes during which President Donald J. Trump stood by while a mob of his supporters overran the Capitol, resisting repeated calls from those in his inner circle to tell the rioters to stand down.

(click here to continue reading How to Watch Tonight’s Jan. 6 Hearing in Prime Time – The New York Times.)

Trump Is Guilty of Insurrection

Despite how the majority of Republicans looked the other way, Trump is still guilty of inciting insurrection. His role in encouraging terrorists to storm the Capitol building will be remembered by history.

These Senators are all traitors to America:

  • Bill Hagerty (TN)
  • Charles Grassley (IA)
  • Cindy Hyde-Smith (MS)
  • Cynthia Lummis (WY)
  • Dan Sullivan (AK)
  • Deb Fischer (NE)
  • James Lankford (OK)
  • James Risch (ID)
  • Jerry Moran (KS)
  • Jim Inhofe (OK)
  • John Barrasso (WY)
  • John Boozman (AR)
  • John Cornyn (TX)
  • John Hoeven (ND)
  • John Kennedy (LA)
  • John Thune (SD)
  • Joni Ernst (IA)
  • Josh Hawley (MO)
  • Kevin Cramer (ND)
  • Lindsey Graham (SC)
  • Marco Rubio (FL)
  • Marsha Blackburn (TN)
  • Mike Braun (IN)
  • Mike Crapo (ID)
  • Mike Lee (UT)
  • Mike Rounds (SD)
  • Mitch McConnell (KY)

 

Mitch McConnell is the worst of these traitors, trying to have it both ways:

The top Senate Republican gave his most damning condemnation of Donald Trump, but said the Senate had no power to convict an ex-president. He had refused to try Mr. Trump while he remained in office.

Senator Mitch McConnell said he believed that Donald J. Trump was undeniably guilty of a “disgraceful dereliction of duty” on Jan. 6, when he incited and then failed to do anything to halt a deadly assault on the Capitol.

“There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” Mr. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, declared Saturday afternoon in an anti-Trump diatribe so scathing that it could have been delivered by any of the nine House prosecutors seeking a conviction.

But minutes before he spoke, when it came time for the most powerful Republican in Washington to hold Mr. Trump to account on the charge of causing the riot, Mr. McConnell said his hands were tied. It could not be done, he argued. He voted to acquit.

“We have no power to convict and disqualify a former officeholder who is now a private citizen,” Mr. McConnell, who said he reached that conclusion after “intense reflection,” said as he delivered a lawyerly explanation on the limits of Senate power.

Offering his most damning condemnation of Mr. Trump to date, Mr. McConnell accused the former president of spreading lies about a stolen election that he knew would stoke dangerous acts by his followers — though the senator said little about his own refusal for weeks to recognize President Biden’s victory, which helped create the conditions for Mr. Trump’s claims to continue to spread, unchallenged by top Republicans.

(click here to continue reading McConnell, Denouncing Trump After Voting to Acquit, Says His Hands Were Tied – The New York Times.)

What a coward.

Trump Is A Loser

These opening sentences in a NYT article by Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt made me laugh:

With four weeks left in President Trump’s term, he is at perhaps his most unleashed — and, as events of the last few days have demonstrated, at the most unpredictable point in his presidency. He remains the most powerful person in the world, yet he is focused on the one area in which he is powerless to get what he wants: a way to avoid leaving office as a loser.

Get Out Trump

A Loser. That is how Trump will be remembered.

He has been a loser for most of his life, but managed to fool some people, some of the time.

I cannot wait for 2021, probably won’t be until spring, but sometime in 2021, Trump won’t be in the news every goddamn day. Glorious silence.

He hasn’t been doing the job of president for most of his term, his lack of work ethic has gotten more noticeable recently:

He is almost entirely disengaged from leading the nation even as Americans are being felled by the coronavirus at record rates. Faced with an aggressive cyberassault almost surely carried out by Russia, his response, to the degree that he has had one, has been to downplay the damage and to contradict his own top officials by suggesting that the culprit might actually have been China. He played almost no role in negotiating the stimulus bill that just passed Congress before working to disrupt it at the last minute. It is not clear that Mr. Trump’s latest behavior is anything other than a temper tantrum, attention-seeking or a form of therapy for the man who controls a nuclear arsenal

A Loser by circumstance, and a Loser by deeds. In other words, Trump is for ever and ever a Loser!

Trump Is Unsuited To Be President – Part the 543,678,654th

One Scared Little Man

These are not leadership qualities for an executive of a business, much less the president of a nation.

The lost days of summer: How Trump struggled to contain the virus – The Washington Post:

In Trump’s White House, there is little process that guides decision-making on the pandemic. The president has been focused first and foremost on his reelection chances and reacting to the daily or hourly news cycle as opposed to making long-term strategy, with Meadows and other senior aides indulging his impulses rather than striving to impose discipline.

What’s more, with polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive feedback loop for the boss. They present him with fawning media commentary and craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting the virus.

A senior administration official involved in the pandemic response said, “Everyone is busy trying to create a Potemkin village for him every day. You’re not supposed to see this behavior in liberal democracies that are founded on principles of rule of law. Everyone bends over backwards to create this Potemkin village for him and for his inner circle.”

Government health officials are wary of saying anything publicly — even if they are merely speaking truth — that might be construed as contradicting the president or countering his rosy assessments.

One of the clearest examples of how fear and loyalty have infected the response came in Trump’s decision last month to begin formally withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. Many government officials hoped the president would not take that drastic step, but none had the courage to try forcefully to persuade him against a withdrawal by explaining that doing so would risk damaging not only the global response to the virus but also the U.S. response.
“Everybody is too scared of their own shadow to speak the truth,” said a senior official involved in the response.

What also has frustrated a number of the president’s allies and former aides is that he simply seems uninterested in asserting full leadership over the crisis, instead deferring to state leaders to make the more difficult decisions while using his presidential bully pulpit to critique their performances. He deputizes Pence to handle much of the actual communication with states and other stakeholders in the fight against the virus.
“If we want to return to school safely, we need not only adaptive safety practices at the schools but also lower amounts of virus in each community,” said Tom Bossert, a former White House homeland security adviser under Trump. “A suppression-level effort to shrink and not just mitigate the spread of covid requires a national strategy that includes standards and significant federal funding. Such a strategy is lacking right now.”

Trump used to flirt with anti-vaxxers. Now he is demanding a coronavirus vaccine

Needle Park

The Guardian:

Informing Fauci and other government scientists that they must clear all public comments with Mike Pence, the vice-president, is unacceptable. This is not a time for someone who denies evolution, the climate crisis and the dangers of smoking to shape the public message. Thank goodness Fauci, Francis Collins, the director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), and their colleagues across federal agencies are willing to soldier on and are gradually getting the message out.

While scientists are trying to share facts about the epidemic, the administration either blocks those facts or restates them with contradictions. Transmission rates and death rates are not measurements that can be changed with will and an extroverted presentation. The administration has repeatedly said – as it did last week – that virus spread in the United States is contained, when it is clear from genomic evidence that community spread is occurring in Washington state and beyond. That kind of distortion and denial is dangerous and almost certainly contributed to the federal government’s sluggish response. After three years of debating whether the words of this administration matter, the words are now clearly a matter of life and death.

And although the steps required to produce a vaccine could possibly be made more efficient, many of them depend on biological and chemical processes that are essential. So the president might just as well have said, “Do me a favor, hurry up that warp drive.”

I don’t expect politicians to know Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism or the Diels-Alder chemical reaction (although I can dream). But you can’t insult science when you don’t like it and then suddenly insist on something that science can’t give on demand. For the past four years, Trump’s budgets have made deep cuts to science, including cuts to funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the NIH. With this administration’s disregard for science of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the stalled naming of a director for the Office of Science and Technology Policy – all to support political goals – the nation has had nearly four years of harming and ignoring science.

(click here to continue reading Trump used to flirt with anti-vaxxers. Now he is demanding a coronavirus vaccine | H Holden Thorp | US news | The Guardian.)

The GOP’s decade long war against science, and experts in general, is finally bearing bitter fruit for all of us. Drink deeply.

I am also genuinely curious if the anti-vaxxer idiot crowd will accept this vaccine without complaint. Will they insist upon being first in line? Or will they block widespread distribution of it? We won’t know for a bit, and by then, the death toll will most likely be higher. A real test of their principles, or lack of them. Herd immunity and all that…

Sick people across the country say they have been denied coronavirus test, despite doctor’s advice

Forgive Yourself Trump Tower

The Washington Post reports:

Many Americans who are sick and seeking a coronavirus test continue to be turned away, creating a vexing problem for patients and health officials as the virus spreads. The problem persists, doctors and patients across the country say, despite increased production and distribution of the tests in recent days.

At a time when U.S. fatalities from the virus have risen, there remain limited numbers of tests and the capacity of laboratories is under strain.
The constraints are squeezing out patients who don’t meet rigid government eligibility criteria, even if their doctors want them tested, according to dozens of interviews with doctors and patients this week.

The gap between real-life obstacles to testing and President Trump’s sweeping assurances that “anybody that needs a test gets a test” has sown frustration, uncertainty and anxiety among patients who have symptoms consistent with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, but have been unable to find out whether they are infected.

(click here to continue reading Sick people across the country say they have been denied coronavirus test, despite doctor’s advice – The Washington Post.)

Having competent leadership really does matter. Trump’s people knew about the virus in early January, did nothing to ramp up the nation’s pandemic infrastructure, twiddled their thumbs, and now we are all paying the price, or about to.

If Trump had any love of America1 he’d resign in shame.

The vaccine won’t be available for a while in any case…

That Was What It Was For

 Los Angeles Times:

Nothing can stop a global outbreak in its tracks better than a vaccine. Unfortunately, creating a vaccine capable of preventing the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 will probably take at least a year to 18 months, health officials say.

“That is the time frame,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the House Oversight and Reform Committee this week. Anyone who says they can do it faster “will be cutting corners that would be detrimental.”

While there are about 10 vaccine candidates in the works — and at least one of them could begin clinical trials in April — it would still take about three more months to conduct the first stage of human testing and another eight months or so to complete the next stage of the trial process, he added.

New vaccines require copious research and time-consuming testing that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. There’s no guarantee of success, but even if everything goes well, the final product might not hit the market until after an outbreak has subsided.

Here’s a look at how vaccines are made and why the process takes so long.

 

(click here to continue reading Coronavirus vaccine: why will it take so long to create? – Los Angeles Times.)

Maybe We All Went Mad

Keep washing your hands, we are in for a long, bumpy ride…

Paul Krugman:

 Now, however, we face a much bigger crisis with the coronavirus. And Trump’s response has been worse than even his harshest critics could have imagined. He has treated a dire threat as a public relations problem, combining denial with frantic blame-shifting.

 His administration has failed to deliver the most basic prerequisite of pandemic response, widespread testing to track the disease’s spread. He has failed to implement recommendations of public health experts, instead imposing pointless travel bans on foreigners when all indications are that the disease is already well established in the United States.

 And his response to the economic fallout has veered between complacency and hysteria, with a strong admixture of cronyism.
It’s something of a mystery why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, normally a highly competent agency, have utterly failed to provide resources for widespread coronavirus testing during the pandemic’s crucial early stages. But it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the incompetence is related to politics, perhaps to Trump’s desire to play down the threat.

According to Reuters, the Trump administration has ordered health agencies to treat all coronavirus deliberations as classified. This makes no sense and is indeed destructive in terms of public policy, but it makes perfect sense if the administration doesn’t want the public to know how its actions are endangering American lives.

 

(click here to continue reading Opinion | It’s a MAGA Microbe Meltdown – The New York Times.)

Footnotes:

  1. haha I know []

With coronavirus, the Fox News-Trump feedback loop will get people killed

Dystopian Future Reading

Speaking of the danger of having a baby as president, Media Matters for America reports:

The U.S. was not prepared to respond to the coronavirus — in no small part because Trump had hamstrung the nation’s pandemic response capabilities. The Washington Post detailed Saturday the “many preventable missteps and blunders in the federal government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis — the embodiment of an administration that, for weeks, repeatedly squandered opportunities to manage and prepare for a global epidemic.” The problems started from the top: Trump “has undermined his administration’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak — resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear,” Politico reported the same day.

Trump’s lax response to the spread of the coronavirus mimics the reaction of his favorite network — and that’s no coincidence. The president is shunning aides who provide him with negative information about the epidemic and basking in Fox’s glowing coverage. On Friday afternoon, amid a rambling and incoherent press event at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Trump downplayed the threat posed by the disease, praised his administration’s response, lashed out at Democrats, and told reporters that he was getting information about the spread of the coronavirus from Fox.

“As of the time I left the plane with you, we had 240 cases — that’s at least what was on a very fine network known as Fox News,” he said. “I know you love it. But that’s what I happened to be watching.” This was not an anomaly. As coronavirus spread in February 2020, Trump sent more than twice as many live-tweets of Fox’s coverage as he did in February 2019. On Friday morning alone, he sent three tweets about coronavirus in response to Fox.

What was Trump learning from his regular Fox-watching? Roughly an hour before his comments, a Fox medical correspondent argued on-air that coronavirus was no more dangerous than the flu; a few hours later, the same correspondent argued that coronavirus fears were being deliberately overblown in hopes of damaging Trump politically. The network’s personalities have frequently claimed that the Trump administration has been doing a great job responding to coronavirus, that the fears of the disease are overblown, and that the real problem is Democrats and the media politicizing the epidemic to prevent Trump’s reelection. The president absorbs those narratives and parrots them to the public in tweets and statements; the network responds by continuing to push those talking points.

No one wants a public panic. But by downplaying the risks of coronavirus in order to rally to Trump’s defense, Fox is endangering its audience, which skews older and is most susceptible to the disease. It seems to be having an effect — both anecdotally and based on polling: Republicans are less likely to view the disease as a serious threat.

But the greater danger is that one of Fox’s older Republican viewers is the president of the United States. And when the network tells him that coronavirus is nothing to worry about, he listens.

As a result, a significant number of Americans are likely to die — prematurely and unnecessarily — because Trump is taking advice from Fox News. We are courting disaster, thanks to the Trump-Fox feedback loop.

(click here to continue reading With coronavirus, the Fox News-Trump feedback loop will get people killed | Media Matters for America.)

If only the virus cared whether or not individuals “believed” in it, this would be funny. But if a large percentage of MAGA cultists catch and spread COVID-19, the rest of us suffer as well.

How Trump’s insecurity is making the coronavirus crisis worse

Pip checks out the N95 particulate respirator

The Washington Post reports:

Put President Trump in a room full of scientists, and he’s going to start to feel very insecure. Put him in a crisis he can’t boast his way out of, and things are going to go very badly.
That’s what we now face with the coronavirus. The crisis is not happening only in a foreign country, or in just one spot in America. It threatens to touch all of us. By all accounts, the president’s handling of it so far has been somewhere between awful and disastrous. Worst of all, from his perspective, it threatens the reality distortion field he works so hard to maintain. 

Trump is plainly more concerned with how the virus affects his public image than how it affects Americans’ health. He blurted out that he wanted to keep a cruise ship off the coast of California “because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”

But when Trump feels the need to remind you that he is related to a smart person, it’s pretty obvious that he’s afraid people might not think he’s smart enough.

(click here to continue reading How Trump’s insecurity is making the coronavirus crisis worse – The Washington Post.)

Scary. Scary times, scary man to be in charge, scary time to be alive.

The Amazing Fall Of Donald Trump’s Wall

Walls Are Mirrors Multiplied

 The National Memo:

[The Dotard] trumpets that he is the most bodacious barrier builder of all, yet he can’t seem to get his one “big, beautiful wall” funded or even taken seriously, much less built. Throughout his presidency, Donald Trump has continuously stamped his tiny feet and demanded that Congress shell out more than 10 billion of our taxpayers’ dollars to erect a monster of a wall across some 2,000 miles of the U.S. border with Mexico. Like a flimflamming snake-oil peddler, he rants that his magnificent edifice would magically keep “aliens,” “rapists,” “murderers,” “terrorists,” “drugs” and “cartels” from entering the U.S. from the south. But even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress, the presidency and the courts, his grand scheme went unloved, unfunded and unbuilt.

Still, he kept insisting … and persisting. In January, he directed his Customs and Border Control officials to put up a short section of his 30-foot-tall wall on the border at Calexico, California, to show the world how effective the Trump bulwark would be. Alas, though, the thing blew over! Not from a hurricane-force storm but from moderate winds topping out at only 37 miles an hour. The metal panels flung over into Mexico. Embarrassing.

A month later, a climbing group in Kentucky built a replica of that wall and held an up-and-over competition. Winning time was 13.1 seconds! Sixty-five competitors easily topped it, including an 8-year-old girl and a guy who climbed it one-handed while juggling various items with his other hand.

(click here to continue reading The Amazing Fall Of Donald Trump’s Wall – The National Memo.)

Would be amusing if it wasn’t so sad. What else could Wall money be spent on? Nearly anything would be more useful…

Plus this:

El Paso Times reports:

 

Smugglers in Juárez have engineered camouflage hook-and-ladders made of rebar that blend in so well with the border wall that it can be hard to detect, according to U.S. Border Patrol. The ladders are the same rust brown color as the mesh panels or steel beams of the fence.

 

El Paso’s urban stretch of border is littered with the rusted rebar ladders at the base on both sides — ladders lying in wait on the Mexican side, ladders pulled down by border agents or abandoned by smugglers on the U.S. side. One of the rebar ladders was poking out of a dumpster in a lot near the Chihuahuita neighborhood on Thursday.

The ladders appear to be made with two poles of 3/8-inch rebar and four thinner poles, outfitted with steps and bent over at the end in a U, to hook on the top of the wall. It’s the sort of cubed rebar support structure used in construction in Mexico, called castillo. 

Six meters of castillo costs 99 pesos, or about $5.30, at the Hágalo — or Do It Yourself — True Value hardware store in Juárez. There is no indication that smugglers are shopping at that store in particular.

Romero said the rebar ladders started turning up in large numbers in the El Paso sector last year in May, around the time that construction of the most recent replacement wallfinished downtown. They’ve been a go-to method for scaling the fence in the urban footprint since.

 

 

(click here to continue reading Smugglers in Mexico use camouflage ladder to cross border wall.)