Sound The TRUMPets! A Thread for Presidential Pondering 2016-2020(?)

[arpeggio]

One of the elements of the Trump Movement that really bothers me is that they control most of the government.  They control the executive, the senate and the supreme court.  Except for a few years since the mid 1990's they controlled everything.  Yet at most they are only 30% of the electorate. 

They carry on as if they are the true majority in the United States and the Bill of Rights only applies to them.  The rest of us do not count.

[Karl Henning]

'It is a sign of the morally senseless times in which we live that the president of the United States threatened to "shut down" Twitter for taking a baby step toward checking the misinformation he spread about voting by mail. After President Trump falsely claimed in a tweet that "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent" and that "Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed," Twitter added a "get the facts" link to his post.

Even still, Trump continues to use Twitter without restraint to torture the family of a dead young woman by falsely suggesting she had been murdered by MSNBC host Joe Scarborough when she worked as his intern, even though police found no signs of foul play in her death. (The tweet was so beyond the pale that even the right-wing editorial boards of the Washington Examiner and the usually compliant Wall Street Journal denounced him; members of his party, naturally, did not.)

In normal times, we would not only wonder why the tweet regarding the deceased woman, Lori Kaye Klausutis, was allowed to remain on Twitter, but we would also collectively recognize the president is unfit for office, prevailing upon his own party to seek his removal (by 25th Amendment, resignation or selection of a different nominee). More to the point, in a politically rational time we would not allow Twitter to simultaneously enjoy exemption from liability (enjoying the designation of a platform not a publisher under federal law) for its tweets and to refuse to police the cesspool of racism, anti-Semitism and dangerous misinformation on its site."

[Karl Henning]

"Taxpayers, by extending protection from liability to Twitter, subsidize a morally reprehensible business model. Taking away the protection is not censorship of Twitter; it is leveling of the playing field that works not only to shield Twitter from legal responsibility but, because of that exemption, promotes the worst misinformation and hate speech in the media universe.

The retort to holding Twitter accountable for policing itself is that Twitter becomes a "censor," conveniently forgetting that Twitter claims to be a private company (not a regulated utility). That does not fly. Twitter should not to be confused with a government entity that could not legally remove objectionable speech on Twitter."

[SimonNZ]

Trump Administration Preps New Weapons Sale To Saudi Arabia

"When State Department inspector general Steve Linick was abruptly fired, one of the inquiries he was conducting concerned a massive, highly controversial weapons sale to Saudi Arabia. Now the Trump administration is preparing to sell Riyadh even more weapons, The Daily Beast has learned.

Two individuals familiar with the situation, including one with direct knowledge, said the Trump administration is drafting another request for a significantly smaller package of arms that includes precision-guided munitions similar to those Secretary of State Mike Pompeo approved in a highly contentious $8 billion sale in 2019.

Congress voted to condemn that sale, and is likely to strongly push back against a new one, too. The proposed sale comes less than two weeks after President Donald Trump fired Linick.

The prospective sale also demonstrates the entrenchment of the Trump administration's bond with Saudi Arabia, right as Riyadh's punishing war in Yemen and the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi has severely eroded Congress' trust in the Saudis. 

According to those sources, Saudi representatives have been pushing for a second arms deal for months now. That effort intensified in April when, in the midst of an already tanking U.S. economy as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump grew angry with the Saudi government over its oil-price war with Russia. According to a Reuters report, this included Trump teasing a threat to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that the U.S. may pull troops from the kingdom, if the price war were to continue.

In the top echelons of the West Wing, these sources said, Trump lieutenants who've advocated for further arms shipments to Saudi Arabia have included Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and a close ally of the crown prince, and Peter Navarro, Trump's trade adviser and one of the White House's more prominent China hawks. As The New York Times reported earlier this month, Navarro and Trump have for years viewed these types of arms agreements with the Saudi regime as a boon for American jobs, even when those weapons are used for widely condemned mass slaughter."[...]

[SimonNZ]

Tampa Bay Times:

Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has voted by mail 11 times in 10 years
The Tampa native has said it shouldn't be available to everyone.

"For a week, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has defended President Donald Trump's assault on vote-by-mail, insisting, like her boss, that it invites election fraud.

But, also like her boss, McEnany has taken advantage of its convenience time and time again.

In fact, the Tampa native has voted by mail in every Florida election she has participated in since 2010, according to a Tampa Bay Times review of her voting history. Most recently, she voted by mail in the state's March 2020 presidential primary, just as Trump did after he made Florida his new permanent home.

Last week, McEnany, 32, said vote-by-mail was OK for Trump because "the president is, after all, the president, which means he's here in Washington. He's unable to cast his vote down in Florida, his state of residence."

Meanwhile, McEnany, a graduate of South Tampa's Academy of the Holy Names and a Davis Islands homeowner, has voted by mail 11 times over the last 10 years.

In a statement emailed after the story published, McEnany said: "Absentee voting has the word absent in it for a reason. It means you're absent from the jurisdiction or unable to vote in person. President Trump is against the Democrat plan to politicize the coronavirus and expand mass mail-in voting without a reason, which has a high propensity for voter fraud. This is a simple distinction that the media fails to grasp."

However, Florida does not have absentee voting. Anyone can vote by mail here without a reason. The Times asked McEnany if Florida should change its law to restrict voting by mail to those unable to vote in person. The story will be updated if she responds."

[SimonNZ]

The Guardian:

Revealed: conservative group fighting to restrict voting tied to powerful dark money network
Honest Elections Project, part of network that pushed supreme court pick Brett Kavanaugh, is now focusing on voting restrictions

"A powerful new conservative organization fighting to restrict voting in the 2020 presidential election is really just a rebranded group that is part of a dark money network already helping Donald Trump's unprecedented effort to remake the US federal judiciary, the Guardian and OpenSecrets reveal.

The organization, which calls itself the Honest Elections Project, seemed to emerge out of nowhere a few months ago and started stoking fears about voter fraud. Backed by a dark money group funded by rightwing stalwarts like the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos' family, the Honest Elections Project is part of the network that pushed the US supreme court picks Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, and is quickly becoming a juggernaut in the escalating fight over voting rights.

The project announced it was spending $250,000 in advertisements in April, warning against voting by mail and accusing Democrats of cheating. It facilitated letters to election officials in Colorado, Florida and Michigan, using misleading data to accuse jurisdictions of having bloated voter rolls and threatening legal action.

Calling voter suppression a "myth", it has also been extremely active in the courts, filing briefs in favor of voting restrictions in Nevada, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota, among other places, at times represented by lawyers from the same firm that represents Trump. By having a hand in both voting litigation and the judges on the federal bench, this network could create a system where conservative donors have an avenue to both oppose voting rights and appoint judges to back that effort.

Despite appearing to be a free-standing new operation, the Honest Elections Project is just a legal alias for the Judicial Education Project, a well-financed nonprofit connected to a powerful network of dark money conservative groups, according to business records reviewed by the Guardian and OpenSecrets.

"These are really well-funded groups that in the context of judicial nominations have been systematically, over the long term but also the short term, kind of pushing an agenda to pack the courts with pretty extreme right wing nominees," said Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. "The infrastructure that they've built over the years has been a really important vehicle for them to do this."

For nearly a decade, the organization has been almost entirely funded by DonorsTrust, known as a "dark money ATM" backed by the Koch network and other prominent conservative donors, according to data tracked by OpenSecrets. In 2018, more than 99% of the Judicial Education Project's funding came from a single $7.8m donation from DonorsTrust.

The Judicial Education Project is also closely linked to Leonard Leo, one of the most powerful people in Washington who has shaped Donald Trump's unprecedented effort to remake the federal judiciary with conservative judges.

The organization has deftly hidden the changes to its name from public view. In December, the Judicial Education Project formally changed its legal name to The 85 Fund, a group Leo backed to funnel "tens of millions" of dollars into conservative causes, according to Axios. The Honest Elections Project is merely a fictitious name – an alias – the fund legally adopted in February. The change was nearly indiscernible because The 85 Fund registered two other legal aliases on the same day, including the Judicial Education Project, its old name. The legal maneuver allows it to operate under four different names with little public disclosure that it is the same group.

The Judicial Education Project is closely aligned with the Judicial Crisis Network, a group with unmatched influence in recent years in shaping the federal judiciary. The Judicial Crisis Network spearheaded the campaigns to get Gorsuch and Kavanaugh confirmed to the US supreme court, spending millions of dollars in each instance. It has also spent significantly on critical state supreme court races across the country.

There is a lot of overlap between the Honest Elections Project and the Judicial Crisis Network. Both groups share personnel, including Carrie Severino, the influential president of the Judicial Crisis Network. Both groups have been funded by The Wellspring Committee, a group Leo raised money for until it shut down in 2018. Both have also paid money to BH Group, an LLC Leo once disclosed as his employer, that made a $1m mystery donation to Trump's inauguration."[...]

[SimonNZ]

Republicans working on legislation to strip Twitter of federal liability protections

"Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) on Wednesday separately announced they were both working on legislation to strip Twitter of federal protections that ensure the company is not held liable for what is posted on its platform.

The lawmakers began work on legislation following Twitter's decision to add warnings to two tweets by President Trump this week in which he railed against California's decision to expand mail-in voting. Trump tweeted without evidence that mail-in voting could increase voter fraud.

Both Hawley and Gaetz argued that Twitter's decision to flag the tweets called its legal liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act into question. Section 230 protects social media platforms from facing lawsuits over what users post.

Hawley sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday questioning why the platform should be given Section 230 protections and tweeted that he would soon introduce legislation to end "government giveaways" under the legal shield.

"If @Twitter wants to editorialize & comment on users' posts, it should be divested of its special status under federal law (Section 230) & forced to play by same rules as all other publishers," Hawley tweeted. "Fair is fair."

Hawley questioned Dorsey on whether Twitter's "fact check" was part of an effort to "target the President for political reasons" and raised concerns that Twitter fact-checkers were biased against Trump.

Gaetz also announced the action on Wednesday against Twitter, tweeting that he was "working on legislation to revise Section 230 so we don't have election interference from companies like Twitter."[...]

[arpeggio]

May I ask where you get that idea?

I realize that this is anecdotal but I personally know many Trumpsters who think this way. My brother is one of them.

In order to keep peace in the family whenever he tries to provoke me I start talking about the weather.

[Herman]

It's rather obvious, not just an "idea", that the GOP controls the exec, senate and scotus. Add to this that for the past three years the courts have been packed with young judges for life who are often stronger on ideology than legal depth. This, too, because the GOP needs more than extreme gerrymandering to maintain its grip on power in the future.

[Todd]

More bad news for Trump and good news for Super-Creepy 46: Coronavirus Live Updates: 2.1 Million More U.S. Workers File for Unemployment Benefits

More than 40 million people — the equivalent of 1 in 4 U.S. workers — have now filed for unemployment benefits since the pandemic took hold.

AmPo and the failing New York Times sent breaking news emails within 60 seconds of each other.

[Karl Henning]

"I truly was fooled by Grassley into thinking he cared about this stuff," Walter Shaub, who resigned as head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics after clashing with Trump, told me Wednesday. "He would have ended his career as a true defender of inspectors general and now he's going to end his career being complicit in the greatest purge of inspectors general of all time." And now the White House counsel is "sticking his thumb in Grassley's eye."

[Karl Henning]

"There is a sizable group of Republicans, maybe even a majority, who have always understood President Trump is a liar, a narcissist and a bigot. They rationalized their support for him in 2016 on the grounds that Hillary Clinton was worse (a conclusion that was as unarguably wrong then as it is now), or that Republicans in Congress would restrain him (what an absurd assumption), or that it did not matter that the president was a rotten human being — because all politicians are rotten.

The strain of political nihilism — forget what Trump says or what kind of person he is because we get tax cuts and judges! — is unsustainable now for two reasons.

First, it turned out, NeverTrump Republicans were right when they warned (thereby earning the enmity of the Trump enablers) that Trump's personal qualities would render him entirely unable to govern. Someone who never puts the country's needs over his own, who cannot face reality and who remains willfully ignorant cannot make good decisions or govern competently. It was entirely foreseeable that when facing a significant national emergency, Trump would fail. A 1930s-style economy and 100,000 dead Americans prove the point.

Second, it is never the case that all politicians are the same. It certainly is not the case that Trump is on a level playing field with other politicians. Other politicians do not sell out the country to dig up dirt on a rival, for starters, as Trump did in the Ukraine scandal. They do not convert the Justice Department into a corrupt enabler of their political fortunes. They do not buddy up to ruthless dictators and then hide evidence of their meetings. They do not engage in public conspiracies about the dead."

[Karl Henning]

"There is a sizable group of Republicans, maybe even a majority, who have always understood President Trump is a liar, a narcissist and a bigot. They rationalized their support for him in 2016 on the grounds that Hillary Clinton was worse (a conclusion that was as unarguably wrong then as it is now), or that Republicans in Congress would restrain him (what an absurd assumption), or that it did not matter that the president was a rotten human being — because all politicians are rotten.

The strain of political nihilism — forget what Trump says or what kind of person he is because we get tax cuts and judges! — is unsustainable now for two reasons.

First, it turned out, NeverTrump Republicans were right when they warned (thereby earning the enmity of the Trump enablers) that Trump's personal qualities would render him entirely unable to govern. Someone who never puts the country's needs over his own, who cannot face reality and who remains willfully ignorant cannot make good decisions or govern competently. It was entirely foreseeable that when facing a significant national emergency, Trump would fail. A 1930s-style economy and 100,000 dead Americans prove the point.

Second, it is never the case that all politicians are the same. It certainly is not the case that Trump is on a level playing field with other politicians. Other politicians do not sell out the country to dig up dirt on a rival, for starters, as Trump did in the Ukraine scandal. They do not convert the Justice Department into a corrupt enabler of their political fortunes. They do not buddy up to ruthless dictators and then hide evidence of their meetings. They do not engage in public conspiracies about the dead."

Republicans in 2016 had some excuses (We didn't know he'd be this awful! Clinton was dishonest!). In 2020, they have none. A vote for Trump is not only to endorse his malicious policies, accept his rank incompetence and buy into his anti-democratic outlook. It is to embrace his character as worthy to represent the American people. Put more succinctly, as Clinton did, it makes one every bit as deplorable as Trump.

[Todd]

Trump leapfrogs back ahead of Obama in stock market gains

[Karl Henning]

In a normal world, the President would be leading us in public grief.  In Trumpworld, the president mostly worries about how many deaths he can survive and still win.

[JBS]

Trump leapfrogs back ahead of Obama in stock market gains

Which merely proves that the stock market and the real world have been out of alignment for quite a long time.

[JBS]

" At my request, the FBI and the Department of Justice are already well into an investigation as to the very sad and tragic death in Minnesota of George Floyd," he wrote. "I have asked for this investigation to be expedited and greatly appreciate all of the work done by local law enforcement. My heart goes out to George's family and friends. Justice will be served!"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1216026

Let's hope the AG gets to the bottom of it before the city gets destroyed by BLM and Antifa.

One of the four policemen involved was supposedly directly behind Trump on stage at one of his rallies.

[Todd]

Which merely proves that the stock market and the real world have been out of alignment for quite a long time.

It proves more than just that.

[JBS]

"Photos began circulating Tuesday purporting to show Derek Chauvin, one of the officers who was fired, on stage at President Donald Trump's campaign rally last October. Minneapolis Police Union President Lt. Bob Kroll, who spoke at the rally, said the officer in the photo is not Chauvin."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fox9.com/news/photo-of-officer-on-stage-at-minneapolis-trump-rally-not-officer-involved-in-george-floyds-death.amp

Thank you. You notice I put the word supposedly in what I wrote.

But the the police Union president being on stage can be just as damning.  It would be improper for him to be at any political rally, Republican or Democratic, because it makes it seem like the police are taking sides against some of their own citizens, no matter who the candidate is.

[arpeggio]

I guess it never occurred to you that the Dems do the same while in power? The SC had a serious liberal streak for about 40-50 years primarily thanks to FDR, among others; Clinton & Obama appointed liberal judges in the recent past, too.

And a solution that may help alleviate that problem is term limits for judges.