The sentimental mob boss

Asked about the arrest of Steve Bannon on charges he bilked donors to an online operation to crowd fund the Great Wall of Trump, he distanced himself from Bannon, claimed to have disapproved the project from the start repeatedly and publicly, and finished up saying the arrest made him sad.

Bannon and his associates illegally kept all the money for themselves.

And that's how arrests of his criminal minions always make the Boss feel. Sad. Or angry at the Untouchables of the Deep State.

Speaking of arrests that made him angry, Roger Stone, saved by presidential intervention from imprisonment, has dropped his very public fake efforts to get a new trial with the further lie that he cannot get a fair trial, ever, anywhere.

How Trump steals the election?

By not delivering mail in votes, or delivering them too late.

Fox not very sympathetic to these moves, reporting and in a degree sharing Steve's view that DeJoy's job is to steal the election and he is doing that.

He won't be leaving until January 20th at the earliest

Don Fatso, I mean.

There is no rush at all.

He can pardon everybody, including himself and all his family, on the 19th.

Mitt Romney Calls Trump's Commutation of Roger Stone 'Unprecedented, Historic Corruption'

President Donald Trump's commutation of longtime friend Roger Stone drew criticism from Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who called the move "unprecedented, historic corruption."

Stone was set to serve 40 months in prison after he was convicted last year on federal charges of witness tampering and making false statements to Congress. 

Trump on Saturday defended his decision to commute Stone's sentence, which he claimed was the result of an "illegal Witch Hunt."

He does not believe any of this horseshit, nor does any American with an IQ above 70.

I am tired of newsies on TV who repeatedly claim that he does believe these things for no better reason that he repeatedly says them.

He does not care that nobody believes what he says.

He just needs Republicans to echo his lies, pretend to believe him, and continue to protect and enable him as they have been doing since the election.

Supremes in 2 cases rule 7 to 2 against the president on the rule of law

A case of congressional subpoena and a case of subpoena by the AG of New York state.

The president's lawyers argued a sitting president cannot even be investigated and is not subject to subpoenas in state courts, nor must he respond to congressional subpoenas because that's all just "presidential harassment".

The Supremes said no to them both times but, like anyone else, the president gets to fight subpoenas in court and this will likely delay at least until after the election.

Neither case seems to have touched the question whether the Justice Department doctrine, based solely on a pearl-clutcher argument that it would be bad, bad, bad, that a sitting president cannot be indicted and perhaps not even subpoenad by federal authorities is valid or not.

Are you as tired of hearing about rage as I am?

Black rage, rioters' rage, Trump's rage, the rage of his base?

Go have a fucking stroke, ragers.

Trump is tweeting in giant capital letters on this, furious at the Supremes, though Roberts did lick his butt a little in the congressional case.

Both of his appointees and John Roberts and all the liberals voted against him, only Alito and Thomas dissenting.

Supreme Court blocks congressional subpoenas for Trump's financial records

The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked subpoenas from congressional Democrats for President Donald Trump's financial records.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in a 7-2 opinion, reversed a lower court decision upholding four congressional subpoenas for the records, saying that it failed to adequately account for "weighty concerns regarding the separation of powers."

But the decision pretty much told them how to do it right.

SCOTUS rules against Trump on financial records subpoena in NY criminal investigation

In the most recent time Chief Justice John Roberts has sided with the court's liberal side in a high-profile case, he wrote for the 7-2 majority, "Article II and the Supremacy Clause do not categorically preclude, or require a heightened standard for, the issuance of a state criminal subpoena to a sitting President."

Trump says he advised all his minions to fire IGs appointed by Obama.

For what reason?

For the reason that they were appointed by Obama.

If Mika says it it must be so, right?

She reported a rumor or a leak or a source or somebody said Pompeo visited Trump to ask him to get rid of the IG investigating him (Pompeo) and Trump made the call right them.

If I didn't mistake what she said.

"Some day, and that day may never come, . . . . "

I had forgotten how good Brando was in that role.

He does it better than Bozo does, eh?

Assuming the leak was not intentional this is a betrayal of confidence

I suppose a pol should know better than to say on the phone anything he'd much rather not become public, but anybody's allowed a gap between what is said entre nous and what is said in the hearing of all the world.

In leaked conversation Obama says US 'rule of law' at risk after Flynn case dropped

Not that that's the awkward part.

No surprise Barr as good as admitted he's a liar and his version of events is just a lie useful to the Bozo Gang.

Just softening us up for Manafort? How does it feel to live in a banana republic? We are such a shithole country, now.

How to get your crook friends out of jail without even using the pardon power.

'The Fix Is In': Ex-Prosecutor Rails At Bill Barr's Intervention To Drop Michael Flynn Charges

Why Trump won't give us testing

You know why.

He will force rollback without adequate testing so that the horrific results will not leap to the eye.

Or ever be known.

Expect a pardon

A favor by the mob boss for one of his soldiers.

Roger Stone, longtime Trump adviser, denied bid for new trial

A federal judge on Thursday denied a bid for a new trial by Donald Trump’s longtime friend and adviser Roger Stone after the veteran Republican operative accused the jury forewoman of being tainted by anti-Trump political bias.

Amy Berman Jackson, a US district court judge, rejected Stone’s claim that the forewoman was biased against Trump and therefore could not be impartial in deciding Stone’s guilt or innocence during the trial.

“There is zero evidence of ‘explicit bias’ against Stone, and defendant’s attempts to gain a new trial based on implied or inferred bias fail,” Berman Jackson said in an 81-page decision.

A warning from AG Barr of an impending constitutional clash?

If Bozo tells the states to knock off the lockdowns in, say, mid-May and they refuse, what happens?

Maybe this is a hint.

Laura Ingraham Very Concerned Americans Can’t ‘Freely’ Catch And Spread Coronavirus

She interviewed AG Barr.

INGRAHAM: 

Right now, we have no freedom of worship, public worship to go, to gather.  

We have no real freedom of assembly, not even freedom of movement, given what some of the states are doing.  

What can you tell our viewers tonight about what the Justice Department will do after this limited period to ensure that our civil liberties are balanced properly against the need to protect the public?

BARR: 

Well, you know, generally speaking there are occasions where liberties have to be restricted during certain emergencies such as war or, in this case, a potentially devastating pandemic but they have to be balanced.  

Whatever steps you take have to be balanced against the civil liberties of the American people and it cannot be used as an excuse for broad deprivations of liberty.  

So as things proceed, you know we're going to be interested in both what the federal government is imposing and also making sure that that's justified but also what the states do.  

The states have very broad well as you know what we call police powers they have very broad powers that the federal government doesn't have to regulate the lives of their citizens as long as they don't violate the Constitution. 

So we'll be keeping a careful, a careful eye on that.

But she wanted a more explicit commitment, so she continued with specific reference to events in New York.

INGRAHAM: 

Governor Cuomo spoke out this week very forcefully this holy week for Christians, obviously Passover as well for Jewish Americans, about the importance of not gathering together to celebrate and I want you to listen.

VIDEO CLIP OF ANDREW CUOMO: 

Now is not the time for large religious gatherings.  

I mean, we've paid this price already. 

We've learned this lesson. 

You do no one a service by making this worse and infecting more people.

INGRAHAM: 

At what point in time do Americans feel like they're going to be able to have that right back and that the federal government will stand up if local officials continue this all-out prohibition going forward?

Barr assured her that he is “very, very concerned” about such restrictions but he also acknowledged that government has the power to impose them during a time of public emergency, such as this one.

She went on.

INGRAHAM: 

I tweeted out something earlier today, just how, you know, these are inalienable rights. 

It means - and there's a lot of Americans today who are mourning those who've lost their lives in this horrible virus who also say the government doesn't have this right, to take this right, to take our rights away. even when the experts are saying this is a horrible time for us health wise.

Salus publica suprema lex est?

Barr explicitly agrees but she is flatly denying government - the state governments, in this instance - has the authority to limit these First Amendment rights in the interests of public health.

She evidently agrees with the claim of those who insist the lockdown is right now unconstitutional and has been from the start because the individual rights in question cannot be limited for the sake of public health.

[Aside: Napolitano, in quoting the Supremes, ignores that the public health emergency posed by the Coronavirus is not a war, despite propaganda and hyperbole to the contrary, nor is the public effort to deal with the danger. That means the quoted passages are simply not relevant to the problem at hand. And see this.]

Barr is not agreeing to that, at all.

And it seems noteworthy that the Duce himself, who has repeatedly, impatiently, and angrily denounced the lockdown as "worse than the disease", does not seem to share that view, either.

But the AG does seem to be signalling readiness to argue the need has passed and so continuing the lockdown is unconstitutional in court when Trump wants him to.

Interesting how far the parties have switched sides on the need for government imposed social discipline for the sake of public health since the time when Obama had to cope with Ebola and the Republicans were demanding more intrusive methods in the face of O's delicacy.

The Duce clearly wants his Coronavirus economics committee to run the rollback of the lockdown on a timetable of his choice - a choice incorporating their views as well as those of the public health gurus under Fauci and Birx.

Suppose his Coronavirus economics committee starts issuing rollback instructions to commence May 1 and the states tell them and Bozo to pound sand.

Will Barr go to the courts to attack the continuation of the lockdown as unnecessary and so a violation of the Bill of Rights, relying on the incorporation doctrine so often denounced by right wingers eager for a return of the "constitution in exile"?

Will Democratic state governments defend the need for a slower rollback as a legitimate limit to the individual rights in question, all which have always been understood to allow exceptions?

Will Barr insist that the duty of the president to enforce the constitution against the states both means his judgement must prevail over theirs as regards the timing of the rollback and legitimates the authority of his economic committee to control it in as much detail as they say they need?

Cuomo said today New York is developing it's own rollback plan.

Will the governors of surrounding states who followed New York's lead on the lockdown opt again to follow Cuomo's lead on the rollback?

Bozo refused responsibility (blame) for controlling or coordination the public health response to the virus, forcing the states to impose, define, and control the lockdowns.

Now he's getting ready to demand the authority (credit) for removing the lockdowns.

Behavior completely true to his opportunist and narcissist and even crooked presidency.

Cuomo on Pathways Nursing and Rehab lending the state 35 ventilators that have now been returned: "Thank you for your incredible generosity" and "Love conquers all".

Bozo has a considerable personal stake in easing the lockdown ASAP

Donald Trump 'lost $1bn in a month' from coronavirus lockdown

Donald Trump lost an estimated $1bn of his paper fortune in the past month as the coronavirus lockdown forced the closure of offices, shopping centres, hotels and golf courses he owns.

The US president’s fortune has fallen from an estimated $3.1bn (£2.5bn) on 1 March to $2.1bn on 18 March (at the height of stock market panic caused by the coronavirus pandemic) according to Forbes magazine’s annual billionaires list.

The Covid-19 induced collapse in global stock markets led to 267 of the world’s richest people losing their billionaire status, in the magazine’s 34th annual wealth ranking.

MSNBC says Sanders "has suspended his campaign"

Campaign for what?

Is there going to be an election?

When? How?

Wisconsin voting mess sends a message for November

I would urge online voting is better than mail-in but I don't trust its integrity in a nation so deeply subject to the power of Trump and his allies, domestic and foreign.

It is certain that Republicans, a party that is ever more openly a national criminal gang, in the federal government, in state governments, and in local governments would actively work to enable Russian and other foreign opinion-forming operations as well as outright hacking on behalf of the politically vicious mob boss in the White House.

And I am entirely sincere in saying that.

Update.

Sanders is going on TV to make a formal announcement.

He is not expected to endorse Joe Biden.

Well, no.

Who would expect that from the most personally spiteful and bitterly anti-Democratic candidate for the Democratic nomination, ever?

Oh, is Bernie positive for the virus?

Update.

Actually, he congratulated Biden, called him a good man, and promised to campaign for him and work together with him to defeat Donald Trump, "the most dangerous president in history".

Trump urges Republicans to 'fight very hard' against voting by mail

Compare the things Republicans have to do to help their chances with the things Democrats want to do to help their chances.

What the GOP has to do is racist, Nativist, white nationalist, homophobic, misogynist, often outright criminal, and deeply anti-democratic.

What the Democrats want to do is just the opposite.

An increasingly politically imperiled oligarchy confronts an increasingly cogent and united popular opposition.

This is the contemptible, criminal jackass the Electoral College - not the voters -put in charge of our country

Doctors Are Not Happy With Donald Trump's 'Cringeworthy' Medical 'Advice'

This is pretty frank push-back against the increasingly dangerous jackass and crime boss in the White House.

And it's not Fauci or Birx doing it.

They are still trimming their responses, still committed (apparently) to the idea that has silenced and seduced so many of the "adults in the room" in the White House since the Duce was appointed by the Electoral College, that they need to mollify the moron in order to keep their jobs in order to prevent him doing worse.

How has that worked out for their predecessors?

Nobody has tried really public, angry resignations followed by days or weeks of massively publicized denunciations of the wreckage and destruction brought about by the pile of stinking shit in the White House.

How badly does the Duce have to fuck up the medical, public health response to Coronavirus for that to be the only right and responsible thing for professionals of integrity to do?

Make of that what you will

Donald Trump Has Stake In Hydroxychloroquine Drugmaker

President Donald Trump reportedly owns a stake in a company that produces hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug he has repeatedly touted as a coronavirus treatment even though his experts say there’s no strong evidence it works. 

Trump “has a small personal financial interest” in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine, The New York Times reported Monday.

In addition, Sanofi’s largest shareholders include a mutual fund company run by major Republican donor Ken Fisher, the paper said. Trump’s three family trusts, as of last year, each had investments in a mutual fund whose largest holding was Sanofi, according to the Times. 

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross also had ties to the drugmaker, the Times reported.

Trump’s “assertiveness” in promoting the drug contrary to the recommendation of top health experts “has raised questions about his motives,” the Times noted.

But the actual numbers make the idea this provides a corrupt motive laughable.

The financial news site MarketWatch and The Washington Post later estimated Trump’s stake to be worth between about $100 and $1,500, though the Post noted his trusts may have amassed other investments since his most recent disclosure. 

“He does look to have more than that modest sum invested in Sanofi, because, unmentioned in the Times report, his trusts also hold broader European stock-market index funds,” MarketWatch pointed out.

Phooey.

Does Fauci really have no problem with pathetic suckers blowing their savings on useless and perhaps harmful medical scams?

There's as much reason to believe in this stuff as there was to believe in Laetrile, and as much to believe in either as to believe you can cure cancer by eating dog shit.

But Fauci is OK with letting desperate people do that? Really?

And he thinks money and time ought to be spent testing its safety and efficacy?

Fauci Destroys Fox & Friends’ Efforts To Play Coronavirus Doctors And Promote Unproven Drug

Fox & Friends tried – and failed miserably – to push Dr. Anthony Fauci into endorsing the experimental coronavirus treatment Dear Leader Donald Trump is promoting, hydroxychloroquine, along with the suggestion that the lack of its widespread use is to blame (i.e. not Trump) for the growing number of deaths in the U.S.

Early in Fauci’s appearance on Fox & Friends yesterday, a graphic was posted saying a Sermo survey of 6,227 doctors found that 37% found hydroxychloroquine to be “the most effective” COVID-19 treatment.

Cohost Steve Doocy added that “only about 23%” of U.S. doctors prescribe it, “far less than in other countries.” 

He played a clip of (discredited, except on Fox) Dr. Mehmet Oz, who wanted the Friends to ask Fauci about “the Chinese study that we discussed yesterday from Wuhan that reflected statistically significant improvement in recovery from fever, from cough, and in pneumonia as well.”

After gently debunking the preceding bullshit, Fauci said:

We still need to do the kinds of studies that definitively prove whether any intervention, not just this one, any intervention, is truly safe and effective. 

But when you don’t have that information, it’s understandable  - and I grant that it’s understandable - why people may want to take something anyway, even with the slightest hint of it being effective, and I have no problem with that.

People need him to be a voice of sanity and a moral hero, but he's not all that satisfactory at either job.

Responsible medical professionals and genuine scientists were not this soft on stupidity, soft on exploitation of ignorance, or soft on criminal snake-oil peddling when the FDA would not allow the use of Laetrile to treat cancer anywhere in the US, though criminals and indulgent fools demanded both that we be sympathetic toward idiots who wanted to throw away their life savings on quack scams and that the law be relaxed so these boobs could be fleeced right here in the US.

After a lot of wasted time, money, and scientific effort repeatedly proving Laetrile was worthless and even dangerous, legitimate medical researchers finally urged that no more time and resources - time and resources that could be usefully spent on other things - be wasted repeatedly proving bullshit was bullshit.

And still in many state legislatures elements of the Republican Party, in large part a coalition of fraudsters, their mostly libertarian ideological enablers, and their willing victims, were able for a good while to get their way, to the shame of other Americans.

This is the Duce, himself, using a Coronavirus briefing just yesterday to urge surrender to what so totally deserves to be called fake news.

And there is absolutely no telling, in this case as in so many others, whether the revolting public enemy in the White House is truly and sincerely as stupid as he seems or whether it's just his propaganda technique to pretend so.

In a rambling, hostile White House briefing on Saturday, Trump urged Americans worried about the virus to try hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, arthritis and lupus that has not been extensively tested for other conditions.

“Take it. What do you have to lose?” the president said, suggesting that he might do so himself after asking “my doctors”.

And even in this same story the journos are over-selling Fauci's shamefully weak and timid response as a full-throated and vigorous rejection of bullshit.

Yet this is really all he had to say.

“The data are really just at best suggestive. There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect.”

And the story immediately quotes somebody else, a doctor not in any way dependent on Trump, doing a better job rejecting this tripe.

But all the same the dismaying truth is that nobody has yet denounced the quack remedy as not only bullshit but harmful bullshit.

And far from urging with Fauci and these other cowards that its value be tested, responsible professionals ought to be insisting that legitimate researchers don't waste time and resources testing crap on nothing better than the say-so of irresponsible Republican propagandists and profoundly dishonest, criminally immoral politicians like the gang boss in the White House.

The Crime Boss is frank, at least

Trump not only commits crimes and impeachable offenses in plain sight, he almost daily admits to the basest motives and actually performs corrupt acts also in public.

Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote

Donald Trump admitted on Monday that making it easier to vote in America would hurt the Republican party.

The president made the comments as he dismissed a Democratic-led push for reforms such as vote-by-mail, same-day registration and early voting as states seek to safely run elections amid the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Democrats had proposed the measures as part of the coronavirus stimulus. They ultimately were not included in the $2.2tn final package, which included only $400m to states to help them run elections.

“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump said during an appearance on Fox & Friends. 

“They had things in there about election days and what you do and all sorts of clawbacks. They had things that were just totally crazy and had nothing to do with workers that lost their jobs and companies that we have to save.”

Such frankness is not common, but not unprecedented.

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, an influential conservative activist, said in 1980. 

“As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Trump’s Monday comments showed he saw voter suppression as part of his re-election strategy, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) said in a statement Monday. 

“Ensuring that Americans can vote during the Covid-19 crisis is fundamental to maintaining our democracy. It is shocking that Trump is essentially admitting that when the American people vote, Republican lose,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a DNC spokeswoman. 

“Trump knows that suppressing the vote is the only way he and Republicans win in November.”

Steyer is out, but will help defeat Crime Lord Bozo

Billionaire Tom Steyer quits Democratic primary race

That pig, Trump, wants to shut him and Bloomberg up.

Russian interference a forbidden subject

Trump decided to replace his top spy chief after his aide told Congress that Russia is interfering in 2020 to help Trump win

Just more authoritarian thuggery from the enraged and unrestrained Crime Lord in the White House.

Every line of the story makes the reader sick.

But it's real, of course.

The Trump standard

Trump angrily declared the Stone jury tainted because the foreperson was a woman who criticized Trump on social media.

A fact that came out during voir-dire and that fazed Stone, his lawyers, and the court not at all.

Trump was not on trial.

But Stone through his lawyers has moved for a new trial for exactly the reason trumpeted by Trump.

And the right wing noise machine is equally outraged.

Clearly, only a jury of Trump supporters or political neuters could be untained in a trial of any Trump ally.

The Trump standard.