Category: Daily Check-In

Daily Check-In 06/05/2018

Tuesday, June 5th.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

Once again, Paul Manafort shows that he’s an old man.  Just like how he got busted committing fraud by asking for Rick Gates to make a PDF for him (Daily Check-In 02/23/2018), Paul is up shit creek because he doesn’t understand technology.

Paul used WhatsApp’s encrypted text feature to communicate with former employees to suborn them to commit perjury.  WhatsApp includes a lot of features, including automatic backups to iCloud.

That’s right.  Paulie Walnuts was unknowingly uploading his encrypted, illegal communications to the cloud.  That’s where the FBI, literally, read his texts and mails.

We thus respectfully request that the Department of Justice confirm, in writing, by no later than 5 p.m. on Monday, June 11:

(1) that the following parties have not been given access to the classified information, which executive branch agencies briefed to the “Gang of 8” on May 24, 2018:

  • Rudy Giuliani, Jay Sekulow, or any other attorney who represents or has represented President Trump in his personal capacity;
  • White House staff, including attorneys from the White House Counsel’s office;
  • President Donald J. Trump;

(2) that DOJ and FBI have no plans to convey such information in the future to the President and his attorneys outside of an appropriate judicial proceeding; and

(3) that going forward, DOJ and FBI will not brief additional Members of Congress who are not part of the “Gang of 8” on these matters.

The stakes for McCabe’s appearance, however, are particularly high. The former No. 2 at the FBI is entangled in a separate criminal investigation stemming from an earlier report from the inspector general’s office that concluded he lied to internal investigators. McCabe has steadfastly denied wrongdoing, but any congressional testimony he provides could have serious implications for his criminal case.

“Mr. McCabe is willing to testify, but because of the criminal referral, he must be afforded suitable legal protection,” Bromwich wrote to Grassley. “This is a textbook case for granting use immunity. . . . If this Committee is unwilling or unable to obtain such an order, then Mr. McCabe will have to no choice but to invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.”

 

IMMIGRATION

WASHINGTON — Border agents and child welfare workers are running out of space to shelter children who have been separated from their parents at the U.S. border as part of the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy, according to two U.S. officials and a document obtained by NBC News.

As of Sunday, nearly 300 of the 550 children currently in custody at U.S. border stations had spent more than 72 hours there, the time limit for immigrants of any age to be held in the government’s temporary facilities. Almost half of those 300 children are younger than 12, according to the document, meaning they are classified by the Department of Homeland Security as “tender age children.”

 

#NEVERAGAIN

The family of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student David Hogg was “swatted” Tuesday morning, causing police to respond to their Parkland home.

A call came into the Broward Sheriff’s Office claiming a hostage situation at the home.

…

Swatting is the action of making a prank emergency call to bring about a response of armed law enforcement officers.

Since the shootings at Stoneman Douglas, Hogg has been a prominent advocate for gun safety. However, Hogg has been a lightning rod for controversy as some do not approve of his methods, such as holding a “die in” at a Coral Springs Publix last week.

 

NFL AND TRUMP’S FASCIST ‘CELEBRATION’

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

 

SCOTT PRUITT

Three months after Scott Pruitt was sworn in as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, his executive scheduler emailed Dan Cathy, chairman and president of the fast food company Chick-fil-A, with an unusual request: Would Cathy meet with Pruitt to discuss “a potential business opportunity”?

A call was arranged, then canceled, and Pruitt eventually spoke with someone from the company’s legal department. Only then did he reveal the “opportunity” on his mind was a job for his wife, Marlyn.

“The subject of that phone call was an expression of interest in his wife becoming a Chick-fil-A franchisee,” company representative Carrie Kurlander told The Washington Post via email.

Marlyn Pruitt never opened a restaurant. “Administrator Pruitt’s wife started, but did not complete, the Chick-fil-A franchisee application,” Kurlander said. But the revelation that Pruitt used his official position and EPA staff to try to line up work for his wife appears to open a new chapter in the ongoing saga of his questionable spending and management decisions, which so far have spawned a dozen federal probes.

Pruitt’s efforts on his wife’s behalf — revealed in emails recently released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Sierra Club — did not end with Chick-fil-A. Pruitt also approached the chief executive of Concordia, a New York nonprofit organization. The executive, Matthew Swift, said he ultimately paid Marlyn Pruitt $2,000 plus travel expenses to help organize the group’s annual conference last September.

Multiple current and former EPA aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations, said Pruitt told them he was eager for his wife to start receiving a salary. Two said Pruitt was frustrated in part by the high cost of maintaining homes in both Washington and Oklahoma.

EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox declined to comment on Pruitt’s overtures on his wife’s behalf to Concordia and Chick-fil-A.

 

In any normal universe, not only would Scott Pruitt have been fired by this point, but his criminal corruption trial would have already started.

In today’s episode of “How corrupt is Scott Pruitt?”, he used his office and staff to try to get his wife a job as a Chik-Fil-A franchisee.  This violates several federal statutes, including a few felonies.

What I really don’t like about him is that he’s not even the most corrupt member of the cabinet, but he’s taking the brunt of the attacks from the press, letting the rest of those crooks rob us blind.

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

MITCH McCONNELL

 

GOP:  THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

FIXING THE INTERNET

 

TARIFFS AND CORRUPTION

 

PUERTO RICO

 

#METOO

 

ELECTION 2018

James Allsup, 22, attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville,Virginia, where white supremacists chanted anti-Semitic slogans and one allegedly drove a car into a crowd, killing a protester and injuring more. Allsup was filmed marching with Identity Evropa, an anti-immigrant alt-right group. Fallout over the rally led to Allsup stepping down as president of the Washington State University College Republicans, a group he once boasted of taking over. Now he claims he’s on the way to taking over the local GOP.

 

RUMOR MILL

 

How does one say “Daughter Fucker” in Russian?

 

That’s it for today.  This is me taking it light.  It’s been a long day, and the days are only going to get longer from here.  I’m not burning out, but I’m in a bit of a rut.  This is what my weekend writings are usually used for, but I’ve missed the last couple to freshen my style up.  Unfortunately, I have no clue when I’ll get back to that rhythm.

June is going to be nuts, both personally and in the news.  We’re a couple days in, and so far we’ve seen a blatant attempt at becoming a despot, a former campaign manager about to get charged with even more crimes, and a fixer getting bitchslapped by the court.  It’s only Tuesday of the first full week.

I might need to skip a night or two in the next couple weeks.  I’ll have to play things by ear.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

Daily Check-In 06/04/2018

The weekend to Monday, June 4th.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who has been indicted by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, attempted to tamper with potential witnesses, Mueller said in a court filing on Monday.

Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, asked the judge overseeing the case in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to revoke or revise an order releasing Manafort ahead of his trial.

Witness tampering, that’s a felony.

According to reports, Manafort called, texted, and used an encrypted WhatsApp messages to talk with potential witnesses, in multiple attempts to get the witnesses to lie under oath to benefit Manafort.

 

ABUSE OF POWER AND CRAPPY LAWYERS

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s lawyers have for months quietly waged a campaign to keep the special counsel from trying to force him to answer questions in the investigation into whether he obstructed justice, asserting that he cannot be compelled to testify and arguing in a confidential letter that he could not possibly have committed obstruction because he has unfettered authority over all federal investigations.

In a brash assertion of presidential power, the 20-page letter — sent to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and obtained by The New York Times — contends that the president cannot illegally obstruct any aspect of the investigation into Russia’s election meddling because the Constitution empowers him to, “if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.”

Two letters, both from Trump’s legal teams, made their way to the New York Times this weekend.  They both have about as much legal standing as Cersei’s proclamations against the Targaryens.  In other words, it’s straight fantasy.

Which is precisely the larger game that Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and California Congressman Devin Nunes have been playing—undermining the F.B.I.’s reputation as a way of undercutting Mueller’s eventual findings. Rosenberg, though, wonders if the strategy could boomerang inside the bureau. “The attacks are unfair and unprecedented, and it gets tiresome,” he says. “But it can have an unintended effect. Imagine you had a bunch of special agents in the New York field office looking at certain real-estate developers and their deals going back to the 1980s. Maybe they were working six days a week—and now they’re working seven.”

Pursuant to Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, the “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment,” is vested in the President. This raises the question whether the President can pardon himself. Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, it would seem that the question should be answered in the negative.

So, here’s where we’re standing today.  The President of the United States of America is openly contemplating and arguing for a position where he is an absolute ruler, capable of ending all investigations into himself, and capable of pardoning each and every crime, no matter what.  At the same time, he’s calling the Special Counsel’s work unconstitutional, while simultaneously calling for another Special Counselor to investigate the Special Counselor.

These are not the actions of an innocent man.

Fuck Ted Cruz.  There are some days I’m not sure who I despise more, him or Paul Ryan.

Ted Cruz lied to the press today when confronted for his reaction against Trump’s Cartman-esque rant on pardons, claiming he never gave the issue much thought.

Remember, Ted Cruz was a major player in the Cambridge Analytica saga.

 

I’m pretty sure I’ve covered this in GTKYG-Pardon Limitations, but even Nixon’s own lawyers said he couldn’t pardon himself.  Three days after they returned their decision, Nixon resigned.  I’m counting down the days.

 

IMMIGRATION

 

COHEN:  LACK OF PRIVILEGE

162 privileged items out of 300,000.  That’s 0.054%.  If he were a baseball player, that’s a .000 batting average.  If Cohen manufactured cars, this wouldn’t be a high enough failure rate to qualify for a recall.  That amount is a statistical anomaly.

Remember on Daily Check-In 04/13/2018 when Cohen’s lawyers claimed they had millions of pieces of privileged information?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I feel like being a dick, so let’s do the math.  If 0.054% of pieces of evidence are privileged, for Cohen to get to “millions”, in this case at least 1,500,001 for rounding purposes, Cohen would have to have…2777779629.63 pieces of evidence.  Rounding that to the next integer up gives us 2,777,779,630 pieces of evidence.  2.77 billion, with a B.  If each iPhone and iPad had 150,000 pieces each, that would be…18,519 phones.

Or 18,504 more phones than the FBI seized from Cohen.

 

SCOTUS:  NOT AS BAD AS THE DECISIONS LOOK

In the unsigned opinion with no dissents, the justices threw out the appeals court decision on the grounds that the dispute became moot once the unnamed teenager had the abortion.

The justices, however, declined to take up the administration’s request for disciplinary action against the American Civil Liberties Union lawyers who represented the girl, who underwent an abortion in Texas last October. The administration had accused the ACLU lawyers of misleading the Justice Department over when she would have the abortion.

In this case, the Justices decided to throw the case out since it was a moot point after the girl had the abortion.  The lawsuit was for this specific girl, not any others in her situation.

On the surface, this seems pretty bad, but it’s not.  The SCOTUS took a very narrow part of the case, and ruled on the constitutionality of that.  In this case, they studied the initial civilian review board, and whether or not that board was biased for or against either of the parties.  In their findings, they determined that the board in Colorado was biased against the bakery ahead of time.

That is all they ruled on.  They did not rule on whether or not a business can legally discriminate, or whether a class of citizens can withhold services and goods from another class, but only on whether or not, in this specific instance, a review board was impartial as was required by the law.

So, let’s put the pitchforks down.  At least for this case.

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

The First Lady was seen from a distance, as the press were not allowed in the event.  She’s still cancelled her foreign trips, though.

Time to get ready for the first Presidential Divorce.

 

BLATANT CORRUPTION

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

GOP:  THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

“I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”  – Senator Margaret Chase-Smith, in 1950.

 

PUERTO RICO

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Barring an act of Congress, the responsibility of the Secret Service to protect a former president or first lady would not disappear because that person had been convicted of a crime.

This has never happened, though, and any potential details of such an arrangement are mysterious even to Secret Service veterans and other experts on the agency. A spokesman for the Secret Service refused even to address the issue. “It’s a road we would have to go down if it ever happened,” he told the Explainer. “It’s not something we’re going to think about unless it happens.”

 

BLATANT RACISM

 

TARIFFS AND ECONOMICS

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

FIXING THE INTERNET

 

NFL

This shit pisses me off.  I hate the Eagles.  Out of all of the Philadelphia sports teams, the Eagles might be my favorite, and I HATE the Eagles.  Shit like this makes me feel for them, and Philly sports fans don’t deserve any sympathy.

I’m still bitter about the 15 year long Penguins losing streak.  And the Flyers just being general asshats.

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Something’s off with Joy Reid.  I’m not as suspicious as Countercheckist is, but something just seemed off.  Maybe it’s the bots swarming around her and Malcom Nance that I don’t trust.

 

RUMOR MILL

 

 

 

 

 

That’s it for today.  And the weekend.

I didn’t publish a story last night.  Unlike most other nights off, I planned on writing.  I had the laptop ready, started writing up a post about the differences between the two parties, but I couldn’t go through with it.  I couldn’t get in the right mood.  I needed to be angry, but I just couldn’t get there.  There’s one person that is impossible to stay angry when they’re on television…Fred Rogers.

Last night, PBS showed a documentary about Mister Rogers hosted by one of Fred’s former employees, Michael Keaton.  Yes, THAT Michael Keaton.  He got his start doing puppets and voices on Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

Fred Rogers was the nicest, sweetest, calmest human being of the last century, and the world needs more of him today.  Especially today, with how crazy things are getting.

Trump talking about pardons like this is some desperate shit.  Something big is coming, and not just Cohen’s June 15th deadline to review the evidence.  His rants are some high-level projections about his crimes.

We’ll see where this goes.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

Daily Check-In 06/01/2018

Friday, June 1st.

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

WASHINGTON — A close friend of Jared Kushner has come under scrutiny by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for his proximity to some key meetings between Trump associates and foreign officials, according to five people familiar with the matter.

Richard Gerson, a hedge-fund manager in New York, was in the Seychelles in January 2017, less than two weeks before President Donald Trump’s inauguration and around the time Trump associate Erik Prince secretly met with Russian and United Arab Emirates officials, including Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, four of the people said.

While in the remote Indian Ocean island nation, Gerson met with Prince Mohammed — also known by his initials as MBZ — and communicated with a Lebanese-American businessman with close ties to the UAE, George Nader, who had organized the Erik Prince meeting, according to text messages Gerson sent at the time and a person familiar with the meeting.

…

Mueller’s interest in Gerson is another sign that he is examining connections between the UAE and Trump associates. Counterintelligence investigators have been scrutinizing UAE influence in the Trump campaign since before Mueller was appointed as special counsel, and the probe has continued in coordination with Mueller’s team, according to two people briefed on the investigation.

Surely this is the only crazy thing to come from this story, right?

Gerson had met Nader just weeks earlier when Trump officials, including Kushner, gathered for a secret meeting with MBZ at a Four Seasons hotel in New York, four people familiar with the meeting said. Trump’s incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn and chief political adviser Steve Bannon, as well as the UAE’s ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Otaiba, also attended the meeting.

The Four Seasons Meeting took place in December 2016, and served as the launching board for the Seychelles backchannel meeting.

The spokesman said Gerson’s involvement in the December meeting at the Four Seasons in New York was limited to escorting former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to the meeting

Tony Blair was at the December Four Seasons meeting?

Rick Gerson was Kushner’s man at the Seychelles meeting. He was at the Four Seasons meeting with MBZ in December, and was known to everyone involved.

I’m honestly not surprised that Kushner had someone at the meeting representing his interests. I’m amazed that it’s taken this long to hear anything about him.

Remember, George Nader has been a known cooperating witness since at least March. Everything he knows, Mueller knows.

 

PUERTO RICO

 

 

COHEN

Freidman pled guilty recently, and is a cooperating witness against Michael Cohen.  It looks like the lawyer who helped Freidman also flipped.  I’d wage dollars to donuts that this is for taking down Cohen.

 

TARIFFS, COAL BAILOUTS, INSIDER TRADING

The term for this is Insider Trading.  How much do you wanna bet that he contacted some of his buddies like Carl Icahn?

 

ZTE

And two weeks after it hired Bryan Lanza, an account manager at lobbying giant Mercury Public Affairson May 14, the White House announced that a tentative deal had been struck with ZTE to relieve the crippling restrictions, The Daily Beast reported on Friday.

Mercury Public Affairs is currently involved in the Manafort investigation for allegedly covering up his ties to Ukraine.  A “lobbyist” from the very same firm knee deep in the Manafort case and Mueller investigation helped coordinate the ZTE deal.

 

TRUMP MEETS NORTH KOREAN SPYMASTER IN OVAL OFFICE

As if this wasn’t stupid enough…

 

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

 

GOP:  THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

Former state Sen. Jim Barnett announced that Rosie Hansen is his pick for lieutenant governor. Hansen is a Kansas native and a former foreign services officer who has been posted at several U.S. embassies overseas.

 

IMMIGRATION

 

WTAF?!

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

 

RUMOR MILL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s it for today.  Looks like we’ve got a new name in the game with Rick Gerson.  Jared’s friend, and involved in multiple meetings, including the Seychelles meeting.

Rick’s role was very simple.  He was Jared’s stand-in.  There was too much heat on Jared for him to attend the meeting in the Seychelles less than two weeks before the inauguration.   There was no way he could go to this meeting without half of the journalists in America finding out.  Then, as soon as they found out where he was going, they’d look into who else was there, and BAM! backchannel blown.

Also, we might have a second cooperating witness against Michael Cohen for tax fraud in New York.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see charges against Cohen by the end of Summer, but part of that could depend on if and when New York modifies their double jeopardy standards to exclude presidential pardons.  To truly get around the possibility of a pardon, assuming Trump isn’t already under a sealed indictment (very likely) or at least an unindicted co-conspirator, the state double jeopardy exception would need to be stricken from law before charging Michael Cohen in Federal court.  If Cohen were pardoned in federal court with the protections in place, his lawyers could easily argue that any following attempts to prosecute him in state court would be an ex post facto action.

Ex post facto is a latin term meaning after the fact, or retroactive.  Per the U.S. Constitution, a person cannot be charged with a crime or punished for doing something that was legal at the time but made illegal afterward.  For example, there were many things “people that I knew” did with computers in the early days of the internet that were legal then, but became illegal later on.  Or like laws outlawing smoking in restaurants.  A woman can’t be fined today for smoking in a restaurant 3 years ago when it was legal 3 years ago.

The New York gameplan probably goes as follows; State legislature passes the change to the legal code concerning pardons and double jeopardy.  Shortly thereafter, Cohen gets charged with about 30 or 40 felonies.  He then makes a choice.  Cohen could either take his chances with a pardon, which only means that New York state would charge him with the same crimes, and probably more, or he flips on Trump.  Considering he’s already looking at a 7 figure legal bill, he might flip for that reason.

Finally, we might be on the verge of the first Presidential Divorce while in office.  Melania Trump hasn’t been seen in public in about 3 weeks, and the only peeps from here were tweets that didn’t fit her normal cadence.  Multiple rumors have her in New York City, and her and her son are not going to Camp David this weekend.  Not a glimpse in front of the press pool, not a single confirmed meeting.  Hell, not even an Instagram or Twitter Video post from inside the White House.

I’m wondering, did she flip on Donald?  A person cannot be compelled to testify against in New York, but that wouldn’t stop voluntary testimony.

I’ll try to write something this weekend, if just to stretch the writing legs.  I’m not sure about what, but I have about 20 or 30 things I could attack.  As far as the next couple weeks, I may have to disappear for a few days at some point.  I’ll explain why when it happens, but in those cases, I’ll try to do a “What’d I miss?” post for those days.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s all just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daily Check-In 05/31/2018

Thursday, May 31st.

 

SAY GOODBYE TO THE ECONOMY:  THE TARIFF EDITION

TORONTO (AP) — Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday he offered to go to Washington this week to complete talks on renegotiating the North American Free Trade agreement but that Vice President Mike Pence called and told him a meeting with the U.S. president would only happen if Trudeau agreed to put a five-year sunset clause into the deal.

Trudeau said he refused to go because of the “totally unacceptable” precondition. He made the comment while outlining Canada’s response to U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

In a call to President Donald Trump last Friday, Trudeau offered to meet Trump because he felt they were close to an agreement that only required a “final deal-making moment.”

Trudeau said Trump seemed agreeable before Pence called him on Tuesday.

 

 

PARDONTOWN

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he will pardon Dinesh D’Souza, a right-wing commentator, author and filmmaker was was convicted in 2014 of using a “straw donor” to make an illegal campaign contribution.

 

TRUMP HATES IMMIGRANTS

 

THE RUSSIAN INVESTIGATION

But in the meeting at the Justice Department, Mr. Rosenstein added a new detail: He said the president had originally asked him to reference Russia in his memo, the people familiar with the conversation said. Mr. Rosenstein did not elaborate on what Mr. Trump had wanted him to say.

Mr. McCabe’s memo reflects the F.B.I.’s early efforts to discern Mr. Trump’s intentions in firing Mr. Comey, an effort that continues today.

 

COHEN

 

THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE

Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt.  Feckless means lacking strength of character or irresponsible.  I take issue with Samantha calling Ivanka a cunt.  Ivanka Trump has neither the depth nor warmth of a cunt.

The second group, roughly speaking, is the culturally affronted crowd you see reflected on social media all the time.

These voters don’t think much about an economic future; they want a time machine that will take them back to an orderly America ruled by white dudes, where you could say whatever you wanted without being labeled a bigot or a sexist, where you didn’t have to worry about gay rights and women’s rights, and where black guys getting dragged out of a coffee shop for no reason was called Wednesday.

I’m a skeptic of reflexive political correctness, as I think a lot of mainstream voters are. The pseudo-intellectual bullying on college campuses today is enough to make any thinking person recoil.

But the cultural right isn’t really opposed to the silly lexicon of liberalism as much as to liberalism itself. What they call PC is really just the modern concept of tolerance.

These voters represent a shrinking slice of the electorate, if you take any kind of long view, and they’re hardly misunderstood. They have the loudest voice in America, in fact — a president who stars in his own round-the-clock reality show, a miner of nostalgia who lives only for their applause.

The problem for coastal liberals who run news and entertainment media is that in trying to speak to the economically disenchanted first group, they inevitably get dragged down into the netherworld of the culturally outraged second.

 

WHITE HOUSE CHAOS

 

COLD WAR 2.0

 

 

GOP:  THE PARTY OF LINCOLN IS DEAD

 

#NEVERAGAIN

 

PUERTO RICO

 

PROGRESS IS PROGRESS

The constitutional amendment, which declares that equality of rights “shall not be denied by the U.S. or any state on account of sex,” was first introduced in Congress in the 1920s. It was sent to the states for ratification in 1972, but only 35 states ratified the amendment by the congressionally set 1982 deadline — three states short of the 38 required to append it to the Constitution.

The issue languished in the intervening decades and was generally assumed to be a lost cause. But last year, debate around the amendment was revived when Nevada, in part spurred by the anti-sexual harassment #MeToo movement, chose to ratify it.

With Illinois now on board, just one more state is required in order to ratify the amendment. According to the State-Journal Register, Congress will then need to remove the deadline for it to be included in the Constitution.

The other states that have yet to ratify the amendment are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.

 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

 

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday dropped seven cases against people charged with rioting in Washington, DC, during President Donald Trump’s inauguration, after getting in trouble in court for how they handled evidence provided by the right-wing activist group Project Veritas.

The announcement came after a judge concluded last week that the government wrongly withheld the full version of a video of a pre-protest planning meeting secretly recorded by a Project Veritas operative. The revelation of that video led to the discovery of other undisclosed Project Veritas videos, prompting defense lawyers to protest and a judge to find that prosecutors committed a “serious violation.”

 

RUMOR MILL

 

 

That’s it for today.  Thankfully.

Today was exhausting, and not the good kind of exhausting from after a workout.  Watching things unfold today was stressful.  Enacting sanctions against most of America’s allies, while Dotard threatens to pardon every celebrity criminal he can think of.

This is bad, but these moves reek of one main characteristic: Desperation.

The tariffs are desperate attempts to either cash in and force bribes, or a desperate attempt to distract from all of the shit coming his way.  This is by far the stupidest thing he could have done.  If by some unholy miracle he doesn’t get removed from office by 2020, costing 150,000 Americans their jobs from areas that “voted” for him in 2016 and leading the country into a recession or worse is political suicide.

Pardoning Dinesh D’Souza and talking about pardoning others screams of desperation.  I’ve mentioned before in GTKYG-Pardon Limitations why Trump can’t pardon his way out of this, but here’s a quick recap; pardons can’t be used to cover up one’s own crimes, can’t be used for obstructing an investigation, and don’t work on state crimes.

It’s hard to stay positive in the moment as all of the craziness happens.  It’s harder when the craziness comes flying out at such an obnoxious pace.

I’m confident that we will get through this.  But we have to go through it first.

 

Thank you, and have a good one.

 

“Without Journalists, it’s just propaganda.”

– Katy Tur