Donald Trump Sneers At Your Puny Constitution Number 12 And 35

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Who Knew Coups News?

Today at the NRA convention, Donald Trump made preposterous claims about a coup against his presidency that outranked NRA chief Wayne LaPierre's claims about a coup against his own presidency at the same convention. Lot of couping going on there.

***BREAKING*** Must Credit Quotidian

Apparently, in spite of months spent on the task, Donald Trump cannot be exonerated by the Special Counsel appointed to look into his dealings.

Counter-programing For An Otherwise Very Mueller February

Mick Mulvaney used Fox News Sunday morning to announce that Trump would use emergency powers to fund his wall. His comment was reinforced by the Wall Street Journal, reporting the president's words to the same effect.

This is the fuck Congress option of the many possible constitutional crises the body politic might suffer shortly.

"The RNC And Donald Trump, Sittin' In A Tree, K-I-S-S-I-"

Why, we ARE the grass roots! avers one member of the RNC, as the organization formally merges with Donald Trump's re-election committee.

Did Someone Just Says Insane Clown POTUS?

Trump and the Veterans revisit the smell of napalm in the morning.

In Other News. . .

Foreign Policy EXCLUSIVE: President Donald Trump pressed senior aides last June to devise and carry out a campaign to discredit senior FBI officials after learning that those specific officials were likely to be witnesses against him.

But his aides dissuaded him, and the Republic was saved.

Just kidding.

Invitation To A Racism

The fellow handing Trump a card the President seems unable to decipher wears a yellow t-shirt under a long-sleeved, wide-collared shirt neatly adorned with more than a dozen ribbons recognizing specific contributions he's made during the course of a career in the US Marines. He's one of the surviving Navajo Code Talkers of WWII.

Behind him hangs a scarlet battle banner celebrating the US Army's victory over the Nez Perce in 1877, and in the background, looming over the proceedings, a portrait of Andrew Jackson.

This is some insulting symbology when you're hosting an event meant to celebrate the deeds of Navaho warriors. Just saying.

The Precession of the Pleiades Enters The 21st Century

And I’ve done it well, I’ve done it really well, much better than people understand and they understand I’ve done well.

—A recent president's unforced evaluation is that though people understand he's done well, they don't fully get how right they really are: he's done it well, really well.

Who are the “special snowflakes” of early 21st Century America, the people whose underwear is too tight, who are too sensitive about everything, who can’t take even the least criticism? No, it’s not some exquisitely tuned 20-year old leftist at a selective private college. It’s the cultural right, the people who curl up into a Rush Limbaugh-endorsed fetal position every time anyone says even the slightest thing that perturbs the preciousness of their world. I get that everyone in all the wide world feels entitled to the integrity of the lifeworld in which they have grown and thrived as human beings. But that entitlement has its limits, and they are at a minimum the classic limits of liberalism: swing your fist if you must, but stop at my nose. In fact, stop well short of it. Right now we have a minority of people in the United States who insist that they can still flail wildly long after they have pummeled everyone else bloody.

If America is not great, it is not for a lack of attention to our sensitive right-wing snowflakes. They said: hands off our guns. Well, we stand now at the moment of the most intense judicial restraint on any attempt to restrict gun ownership and use in the history of this republic. They said: lower our taxes! We are the least taxed liberal democracy on the planet, we are 37 years into a national regime of ceaseless tax reduction. They said: cut the welfare state, get rid of the safety net! The safety net has been cut, the great revolution of the late 19th and early 20th Century in favor of public goods is nearly totally undone. They said: stop teaching our children what we don’t want them to know. Creationism is back in schools, the government is actively hostile to science, it’s ok for the top leaders of this country to endorse historical falsehoods and insist they be taught to the nation’s children. They said: we’re too free to see pornography and get divorced and live together outside of marriage and take drugs. And where is it that pornography is most popular and adultery flourishes and opoids and meth take hold? In Trumplandia, where people apparently need the Nanny State to stop them from doing what they blame on others who do it far less. They said: stop crime at all costs! And thirty years later, they’re still afraid in a country that locks up more of its own people than any other comparable nation, that allows cops to kill black men with impunity.

—Timothy Burke, Easily Distracted, November 6, 2017 via LG&M

Snarks On A Plane

New cover story: Trump is leading the most corrupt administration in U.S. history, one of first-class kleptocrats https://t.co/3KUQGPiOFR pic.twitter.com/wKvs93XsJ0

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) November 2, 2017

Annals of Defamation

Ralph Northam,who is running for Governor of Virginia,is fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs…

— Donald Trump, Tweet, October 5, 2017

1. A defamatory statement;

2. Published to a third party;

3. Which the speaker knew or should have known was false;

4. That causes injury to the subject of the communication

Multiple Pinocchios Cannot Tell Half The Politicfacts Of It

Reviewing these first months of the Trump presidency calls to mind this previously posted photo, sharing a ruinousness between them.

Mostly Harmful

What a crowd, what a turnout

What the fuck

The Quality of Mercy

Trump's pardon of Joe Arpaio interrupts an ongoing judicial process in federal court involving the ex-sheriff and, well, the federal court itself.

Arpaio's trouble was caused by his flouting the federal court's direct instructions: the court told "Sheriff Joe" what he needed to do and what he needed to stop doing, and he ignored the court and went on doing things the cruel stupid way he'd been doing them for years.

Implicit in Trumps' act was the assumption that the executive's Article II pardoning power in this case is inherently greater than the adjudicating powers of the judiciary under Article III.

Now, a presidential pardon may apply balm to the lash of criminal guilt that attaches to the individual accepting it, but a pardon does not carry with it the power to deny the court, the federal third-branch-of-government court in particular, any level of review, and indeed judgement, it should chose to bestow on the matter. That's not something it's in the power of the pardon to stop.

“He was extremely distressed with the mischaracterization of the conviction,” [Arpaio's attorney] Goldman said. “It was extremely hurtful and upsetting to him that it was being reported that he was convicted of racial profiling."

“The sheriff is not a racist and has never been a racist, and any type of such accusation was upsetting and extremely distressing to him,” Goldman said.

…

The racial profiling lawsuit was brought in civil court by the American Civil Liberties Union. The judge trying that case not only found that Arpaio's policies constituted racial profiling, he also found Arpaio to be in civil contempt of court and referred him to another judge for the criminal contempt.

—Kiefer and Wingett Sanchez, Judge won't vacate former Sheriff Joe Arpaio's contempt conviction without oral arguments, AZCentral.com, August 29, 2017.

In this nation it is enough to be a lifelong avowed racist and commit treason in defense of slavery to qualify for a statue downtown celebrating the noble Southern heritage of, well, racism and treason.

Arpaio's racism of the deed was duly noted by the court, which, according to his attorney, distresses Sheriff Joe. Admitted racism has become déclassé. What a difference a civil war makes.

Politifaction

In the first eight months of the Trump presidency, norms are being violated so frequently that it's hard, in the inevitable glare of the next new enormity in line, to pay particular attention to the fine spreading network of cracks accumulating in the body politic as a result of all this malignant activity.

The Gorka Gambit, Accepted

You can't resign. I fired you. You can't fire me, I quit!

On Many Sides. Many Sides

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn resigned his position as special adviser to President Donald Trump on Friday, saying he didn’t want “partisan bickering” to cloud the work of the administration.

—David Benoit, Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2017

Carl Ichan did what he came to Washington to do, and having done it, smartly absconded.

Cleverly, the WSJ's story of Ichan's perceived conflict of interest swallows itself into visual nothingness, Cheshire-Cat-like before the eye of the beholder

He Is Unfit to Be President

Let's hear it for the 25th Amendment.

Diplomacy!

"North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen... he has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before," he said.

Immediately following this pronouncement, North Korea let it be known it's seriously considering a strike on Guam, a major American presence in East Asia.

So, President Trump warned the North Koreans that a nuclear holocaust awaited them if they made any more threats, and immediately North Koreans responded by doing just that.

This is what's known as calling a bluff in diplomacy.

Number of Times Donald Trump Has Categorically Denied Any Business With Russia Shrinks

New details emerge on Moscow real estate deal that led to the Trump-Kremlin alliance