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

[SimonNZ]

WaPo Opinion: Jeffrey Epstein's apparent suicide is unfathomable

"For anyone familiar with Bureau of Prisons standard operating procedures, Jeffrey Epstein's apparent suicide is more than mysterious; it is unfathomable.

The 66-year-old accused sex trafficker was found dead in his prison cell at the Metropolitan Correction Center (MCC) Saturday morning, apparently after having hanged himself.

The Bureau of Prisons, the federal agency that runs the MCC, has said the FBI will investigate.

It had better.

Epstein's death almost certainly means that astounding blunders occurred, perhaps by multiple personnel at the Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

If any prisoner in the federal system should have been a candidate for suspicion of suicide, it was the high-profile and disgraced Epstein. All administrative and structural measures should have been in place to ensure it could not happen. And yet it apparently did.

First, consider the MCC itself. It is a high-rise, forbidding administrative detention facility in the south of Manhattan. Its population consists almost entirely of prisoners, like Epstein, awaiting trial in federal court in Manhattan. It has been referred to as the "Guantanamo of New York" for its stringent security measures. It is the facility of choice for notorious federal defendants, often in special administrative segregation units, having previously housed John Gotti, Bernard Madoff, Omar Abdel Rahman and, recently, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

In other words, it is the very place to put a high-profile and potentially suicidal defendant such as Epstein.

Second, consider the BOP's suicide prevention protocol. Epstein was found last month unconscious in his MCC cell with marks on his neck. If he was not on suicide watch, it would be astonishing. Yet if he were on suicide watch, his death would be virtually inconceivable.

The BOP's suicide prevention protocol entails, first and foremost, human eyes on the prisoner 24 hours a day. It also requires a strict deprivation of anything — shoelaces, sheets, pillowcases — that could possibly be used to hang oneself. It also requires disabling anything that could be used to tie a noose — vents, sprinkler heads, etc.

Finally, we are not talking about inexperienced yokels. BOP personnel, especially at MCC, are the best professionals in the corrections industry, and they receive special training in administrating suicide prevention. Who better to guard against such a horrific development?

At this point, questions abound, and BOP has to address them promptly.

The first: Was Epstein on suicide watch, and if not, why not? Among the reports cascading out in the few hours since Epstein's body was found are anonymous statements that Epstein had been on suicide watch but was taken off it. If so, the decision to remove him appears to have been a colossal error that must be thoroughly probed.

The second: How exactly did Epstein manage to kill himself, and why exactly was it that he had access to the tools?

Third, is there a video of Epstein's cell at the crucial time? There should be, and it will reveal exactly how and when Epstein killed himself.

And none of this begins to address the royal mess it leaves in the efforts to take stock of Epstein's crimes and their prior slap-on-the-wrist treatment, nor the shambles in which it leaves Epstein's victims.

Almost certainly, we will know a lot more in a few days. But it seems certain that when the facts are known, this will stand as one of the biggest black eyes in the history of the Bureau of Prisons."

-

Trump retweets conspiracy theory tying Clintons to Epstein's death

[drogulus]

     The Epstein debacle reminds me of Murder On The Orient Express but with a crucial difference. Everyone wanted him dead except his victims.

     It also strikes me in an unconspiratorial way that Barr has no credibility left to blow. He might overcompensate and play this one straight.

[André]

Trump crosses Epstein's name from his list of 'fine people' to pardon...

[JBS]

I hadn't heard of "Gab" before. Do they make 8chan look like hippies by comparison?

No. But it's the place where all the bigots go as alternative to Twitter.*

*actually I have never looked at 8chan, and it's been a long time since I viewed anything at Gab, so I can't really say which is more toxic.

[drogulus]

     The Republican Climate Closet

In the coming debate, a Republican Party that came fully out of the closet on climate change would be liberated to play the role it naturally ought to play: arguing for a national climate strategy that does the least economic damage and makes maximum use of markets to find the solutions we need.

     What does "least economic damage" have to do with it? Like all big government programs, they provide the most economic benefit. We grow richer spending for our biggest problems, not by neglecting them to "save dollars". Only spent government dollars can be spent on, saved or taxed back. The Green New Deal or whatever it will be called will be a vast wealth creation project. That's how it works, that's how it always works. This country never got richer by not solving problems, problem solving is how it gets richer.

[Karl Henning]

"O'Rourke and Booker both made the key points that any responsible official should make. There is a simple formula for responding to these episodes: 1) Reaffirm that they are baseless, crazy theories; 2) Remind Americans that as president, Trump has access to the very best intelligence but instead prefers to spread dark, false conspiracy theories; 3) Trump's microphone is the loudest in the world, and whether he intends to, his words will stir some unstable and/or evil people to act; and 4) In putting Americans at risk, he violates his oath, and if he believes in what he's saying, he is also mentally unfit to lead."

[BasilValentine]

When is ICE going to raid Trump golf resorts and properties? Every business Trump has ever run, except maybe Trump University, has relied on the hiring and exploitation of undocumented labor. There is strong evidence and testimony of former and current employees that Trump's managers routinely helped employees obtain forged documents.     

[SimonNZ]

Julián Castro buys anti-Trump ad on Fox News – to ensure the president sees it
Democratic 2020 contender buys targeted ad on Trump's favorite network that accuses president of 'stoking the fire of racists'

"On Wednesday, a new ad from Julián Castro will air in which the Democratic 2020 contender will speak directly to Donald Trump. To ensure the president actually sees it, Castro's campaign has purchased ad time on Fox News, including on Trump's favorite program, Fox & Friends.

The ad buy in question is reportedly a small one of $2,775 for three spots during the day, to air specifically in Bedminster, New Jersey. The president is expected to be there at his golf club.

In the ad, now available online, the former mayor of San Antonio and the secretary of housing and urban development, places the blame for racial tensions in the country, and the ideology of the racist shooter in El Paso, at the feet of Trump.

"President Trump: you referred to countries as shitholes," he says in the ad. "You urged American congresswomen to 'go back' to where they came from. You called immigrants rapists."

"As we saw in El Paso, Americans were killed because you stoked the fire of racists," Castro goes on, referencing the striking overlap between language used by the shooter and the president, who regularly vilifies immigrants with language typically reserved for vermin.

"Innocent people were shot down because they look different from you. Because they look like me. They look like my family."

The concept for the ad echoes back to a stunt by comedian John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight, in which he bought ad time on Fox News in order to try to educate Trump on issues in a venue he knew he would be paying attention.

"Ya basta," Castro says in the ad, angered. "Words have consequences."

[SimonNZ]

Republican Steve King: if not for incest and rape 'would there be any population left?'

"Republican congressman Steve King has tried to defend a proposal for absolutist abortion restrictions on Wednesday by saying that without rape and incest the human race might long since have disappeared.

"What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled out anyone who was a product of rape or incest?" King told a breakfast meeting in Urbandale, Iowa. "Would there be any population of the world left if we did that? Considering all the wars and all the rapes and pillages that happened throughout all these different nations, I know that I can't say that I was not a part of a product of that."

King, who has been praised by Donald Trump as possibly "the world's most conservative human being", has sponsored a bill to ban abortion including in cases of rape and incest. Republican leaders, who earlier this year stripped King of his committee assignments after the congressman defended white supremacists, have mothballed the bill.

But Republicans in Iowa could send King back to Congress next year. Though he has lost his party's support and is losing the fundraising race against a primary opponent, King, a nine-term congressman from Iowa's fourth district, remains popular at home and is seen as tough to beat.

It was on the campaign trail in Iowa that King stepped into his latest controversy. In remarks first reported by the Des Moines Register, King told the breakfast crowd on Wednesday that abortion should not be allowed in any case.

"It's not the baby's fault for the sin of the father, or of the mother," King said.


Fury as Trump official says poem on Statue of Liberty refers to 'people from Europe'

"Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, has sparked a new wave of criticism about the promise of US immigration enshrined in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty by saying it was for "people coming from Europe".

The fresh remarks came after Cuccinelli originally triggered outrage by saying that the famous poem on the base of the statue – which starts "Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" – should be amended to reflect that immigrants coming to America should not use public benefits.

Following those remarks and speaking to CNN, Cuccinelli said the poem was "... of course referring back to people coming from Europe, where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren't in the right class."

[drogulus]

     Nine countries are in or nearing a recession, with fears the U.S. could follow

Many of the countries slowing down or in recession have a common problem: They are heavily dependent on selling goods overseas. And this is not a good time to have an export-driven economy. China's slump and President Trump's trade war are both undercutting with the global exchange of goods that had helped power the global economy for decades, and some of these countries are seeing sharp declines in exports.

     Just to be clear about the direction of causality, when the biggest buyer of goods in the world decides to cripple its own economy its trading partners go into recession, and if we adopt an expansion policy the world can recover.

     The US has the whip hand. If we decide to run fiscal policy for strong growth, not only do we avoid a recession, we help other countries pull out of theirs.

     

     

[steve ridgway]

Oh, Trump wants to buy Greenland. It wasn't clear whether this was to add it to the US or a personal investment and whether the inhabitants, being foreign, would be deported .

[71 dB]

Oh, Trump wants to buy Greenland. It wasn't clear whether this was to add it to the US or a personal investment and whether the inhabitants, being foreign, would be deported .

That's Trump's idea of the Green New Deal... 

[The new erato]

As if people from a welfare state would want to become American....

[SimonNZ]

Workers had 3 options: Attend Trump's speech, use paid time off or receive no pay


After Trump Fat-Shames him, supporter says "I love the guy"


Trump said he won an award that doesn't
President Trump has claimed for years that he was once named "Michigan Man of the Year," a title that does not exist.

[SimonNZ]

and from the "brainwashed" Washington Post":

Warning or threat? Democrats ignite controversy with Supreme Court brief in gun case

"It is rare that an amicus brief filed in a Supreme Court case is characterized as both a brassy reality check and unprecedented political bullying.
But such is the controversy that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and four other Democratic senators have ignited with a filing that instructs the Supreme Court to either drop a New York gun case it has accepted for the coming term or face a public reckoning.

"The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it," writes Whitehouse, who is listed as the attorney of record on the friend-of-the-court brief. "Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be 'restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.' " The phrase is from a poll question with which a majority of Americans agreed.

Democratic Sens. Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) Richard J. Durbin (Ill.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) joined the incendiary brief, which questions whether the court's conservative majority — nominated by three Republican presidents — is motivated by partisan intent and is in the pocket of the National Rifle Association and the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

"Out in the real world, Americans are murdered each day with firearms in classrooms or movie theaters or churches or city streets, and a generation of preschoolers is being trained in active-shooter survival drills," Whitehouse writes. "In the cloistered confines of this Court, and notwithstanding the public imperatives of these massacres, the NRA and its allies brashly presume, in word and deed, that they have a friendly audience for their 'project.' "
[...]

The Supreme Court in January said it would hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York, a case involving some unique-to-New-York restrictions on how gun owners with permits may transport their weapons. The rules were so strict that they forbade taking an unloaded weapon to a firing range outside the city or to a permit-holder's second home within the state.

It is the first Second Amendment case the court has accepted in a decade, and it came after the NRA-endorsed Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh replaced the more moderate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the closely divided court. Gun-control advocates worried that the case would provide a chance for the new majority to establish a right to carry a weapon outside the home, or impose heightened judicial scrutiny on gun control laws.

The city of New York rescinded the regulations that the gun groups and owners had objected to, and the state legislature passed a law prohibiting their reinstatement. The two sides are now sparring over whether that renders the case moot, something the court is scheduled to consider Oct. 1.
Whitehouse's brief is one of about three dozen filed with the court, and it is ostensibly on that issue of mootness.

Federal courts are restricted to deciding actual "cases and controversies" brought by plaintiffs who suffer real harms. Whitehouse said New York's actions have given the plaintiffs all they seek, and the court should not become a "partner in a 'project' to expand the Second Amendment and thwart gun-safety regulations."

But from there, Whitehouse's brief is more of a compendium of complaints that he and other Democrats have made about the court. He denounces the NRA's endorsement of Kavanaugh, the role of Federalist Society officials in promoting judicial candidates, and the "dark-money" campaigns to promote Kavanaugh and President Trump's other Supreme Court nominee, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

It accuses the court's conservative majority of toeing the "corporate and Republican" line in "areas like voting rights, partisan gerrymandering, dark money, union power, regulation of pollution, corporate liability, and access to federal court, particularly regarding civil rights and discrimination in the workplace."

[SimonNZ]

Is he interested in Greenland because of climate change? Is this him accidentally admitting climate change is real?

[BasilValentine]

Is he interested in Greenland because of climate change? Is this him accidentally admitting climate change is real?

Trump knows climate change is real, despite the public act, because his pal Vlad told him so. Both have in mind the exploitation of fossil fuel resources in the arctic. Given recent events like Oleg Deripaska's Rusal receiving a hundreds of millions deal to open an aluminum plant in Kentucky, presumably in return for having helped Trump get elected,* Trump would likely find creative ways to reward his Russian friends when exploration and development get going in Greenland.

*Deripaska's suit against Paul Manafort to collect a multi-million dollar debt provided the leverage by which the Russians extracted internal polling data from the RNC. The data was passed from Manafort through Konstantine Kilimnik, in return for which Deripaska forgave Manafort's debt. Moscow Mitch richly earned his new moniker on this one, enriching an election terrorist as payment for his attack on the U.S.   

[SimonNZ]

Trump confirms he is considering attempt to buy Greenland


"Donald Trump has confirmed he is considering an attempt to buy Greenland for strategic reasons, though he said the idea is "not No1 on the burner".

Trump's interest, reported earlier this week, was greeted internationally with widespread hilarity but with indignation in Greenland and Denmark.

The government of the semi-autonomous Danish territory insisted it was not for sale. The Danish prime minister called any discussion of a sale "absurd".

Nonetheless, on Sunday White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow first confirmed the story in an interview, before Trump spoke to reporters as he left New Jersey to return from vacation to Washington.

Saying the "concept came up" and he was "looking at it", the man who runs a notoriously leaky White House also questioned how the idea found its way to the press.

Trump sought to tie the idea of a US purchase of the world's largest island – not including Australia – to his own area of professional expertise, saying it would be "essentially a large real estate deal".

"Denmark essentially owns it," he said. "We're very good allies with Denmark, we protect Denmark like we protect large portions of the world. So the concept came up and I said, 'Certainly I'd be.' Strategically it's interesting and we'd be interested but we'll talk to them a little bit. It's not No1 on the burner, I can tell you that."

Denmark is a member of Nato, a mutual defence organisation frequently criticised by the US president. Trump believes member nations do not pay enough for the privilege of membership alongside the powerful US military.

Such American forces have operated for decades from Thule Air Base in Greenland, the northern-most US base which is part of a global network of radars and sensors for missile warnings and space surveillance.

"Well a lot of things can be done," Trump said on Sunday. "Essentially it's a large real estate deal. A lot of things can be done."

He then claimed without offering evidence that ownership of Greenland was "hurting Denmark very badly because they're losing almost $700m a year carrying it. So they carry it at a great loss and strategically for the United States it would be very nice and we're a big ally of Denmark, we protect Denmark and we help Denmark and we will."

Trump is scheduled to visit Denmark in September, as part of a trip to Europe.

"I'm supposed to be going there," he said. "We may be going to Denmark but not for this reason at all."

On Sunday, during a visit to Greenland, Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen told the newspaper Sermitsiaq: "Greenland is not for sale. Greenland is not Danish. Greenland belongs to Greenland. I strongly hope that this is not meant seriously."

In remarks to the Danish broadcaster DR, Frederiksen said: "It's an absurd discussion, and [Greenland prime minister] Kim Kielsen has of course made it clear that Greenland is not for sale. That's where the conversation ends."

[SimonNZ]

House speaker as US emissary: Pelosi emerges as force abroad

"There's an American leader whose words resonate on the global stage. Who draws attention in foreign capitals. Who carries a message from the United States by simply arriving.

It's not just President Donald Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is emerging as an alternative ambassador abroad, an emissary for bedrock democratic values and the promise of stability that some see as diminishing in the Trump era.

As the president heads to the Group of Seven summit in France next week with his "America First" agenda , Pelosi has been quietly engaging the world from another point of view. She is reviving a more traditional American approach to foreign policy, in style and substance, reinforcing long-standing U.S. alliances and commitments to democracy and human rights, at a time when the old order appears to be slipping away.

What's really important for people to know is, we're all in this together," Pelosi told The Associated Press in an interview. "This isn't about me. It's about our country and our shared values, to show our strength of who we are and what we believe."

Since retaking the speaker's gavel this year, Pelosi has led large congressional delegations abroad: to assure European allies at a Munich security conference; warn Britons of the pitfalls of Brexit; assess the migrant crisis in Central America; and mark the 400th anniversary of the slave trade in Africa with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including the immigrant congresswoman who became the subject of a Trump rally chant, "Send her back!"

[Wendell_E]

I believe the citizens of Greenland are safely white.

If we can believe Wikipedia (I know! I know!) 88% of the population of Greenland is Inuit, 12% Danish.