Caption Saturday.

 

I need a caption for this pic.

 

And this one. 

News time.

In case you haven't noticed, the DOW has dropped almost 2,000 points in two days. We can blame that damn Coronavirus for this one.  The president of the United States says that it is under control, but the CDC says that we have a problem. I think I am taking the word of the CDC when it comes to this issue.

Clearly the president and his administration has dropped the ball when it comes to this issue. Of course he will get a pass, because the American press, for some reason, is afraid to call him out.

Harvey Weinstein will be probably spending the rest of his life in jail. The me too movement finally caught up with him. It's amazing how Harvey lost his walker right after the verdict was read.

I know that somewhere in a prison in upstate Pennsylvania, Bill Cosby is saying that it's about time. Bill has been sitting in the big house for doing things that a lot of other powerful men have done, and he is not pleased.  This, by the way, includes the current president of the United States. 

The president went after the Jury Forewoman in the Roger Stone case, and he went after two sitting  Supreme Court Judges as well. For all the people who thought that impeachment would sober him up, please note that the president has actually gotten worse with his abuse of his office. No sitting president should go after a private citizen for doing what every good citizen does when they become a part of our system of justice in this country.

Mr. trump just keeps undermining the rule of law, and we just keep letting him do it.

Finally,the trump sports jinx continues. Now it has hit the poor people of India. 

Memo to the Indian people: I  know that cricket is a big deal in your country, so in the future, if you want to win at your favorite sport, do not invite Mr. trump to a large cricket stadium in your country. It will never go well for you. Just ask the people of Alabama and Washington D.C. 

Caption Sunday.

I need a caption for this picture. 

Image from nj.com

Mike and Roger's bad day.

If you are a Mike Bloomberg fan I hope you didn't watch the debate last night. It was ugly.

Elizabeth Warren acted like he stole her first born and lit into him from the get go. Imagine spending three hundred million dollars of your own money to qualify to get on the debate stage and to have that experience. Sorry Mike, what happened in Vegas last night will not stay in Vegas. It's time to open that checkbook again. 

Bernie seems to have been the big winner. Uncle Joe finally found a pulse (although he started to fade towards the end), and Mayor Peter and Amy just don't seem to like each other.

I actually enjoyed this last debate. Although I must say that this field of candidates aren't exactly knocking me off my feet. (Bring back Kamala). All the national polls have the democratic candidate who survives this primary beating trump, but don't believe it. MAGA cultists always lie to pollsters. They are still ashamed to openly say that they support the guy in polite company. I suspect that trump is up slightly, and if the election was held today, he would probably win the damn thing.   

Go easy on me Bernie Bros, I am just calling it like I see it. I love your passion, though. If Bernie does become the democratic nominee I will have lots of popcorn ready for his first debate against trump.

    Finally, Roger Stone, trumps right hand man, got a three and a half year prison sentence today.

I guess Bill Barr's attempt to help out one of the gang didn't quite work out as planned. Still, it could have been worse. The original prosecutors on the case were asking for a minimum of seven years. trump whined and complained so hard on twitter that his henchman, Bill Barr, had to step in and  have his crew at the Department of Justice reduce their sentence request.

Folks were yelling "traitor and lock him up" as Stone exited the courthouse.

Don't worry Roger, your boy has your pardon waiting for you. You will be home before you can say white privilege.     

Their law, and their order.

The following is the last article you will see by David Frum on this site. We are not exactly ideological soulmates, but when it comes to the dangers of this presidency we have found some common ground.

"Yesterday afternoon, Attorney General William Barr appeared on ABC to demand that President Donald Trump quit making him look bad. Trump’s tweets, the attorney general said, “made it impossible to do my job.” Barr has been intervening in cases in ways that work to protect the president. Those interventions become much more difficult when the president demands them—rather than trusting Barr to know what to do without being told.

At the law schools of the 1970s and ‘80s, a militant faction of professors taught a harsh lesson. Law, they argued, is a myth that property owners invoke to protect themselves and oppress those without property. The legal reasoning that we students were so frantically working to absorb was in fact a deception, an expensive drapery concealing the brute realties of political and class power.
Some students indignantly rejected this teaching. Others accepted that it contained some truth, mixed with much exaggeration and propaganda.

But young William Barr—George Washington University Law School, Class of 1977—seems to have absorbed the radical message with perverse enthusiasm: Alrighty then! Let’s do it!
As attorney general, Barr has focused on two missions: on the one hand, cracking down on crimes by the poor and the foreign-born; on the other, going easy on the crimes of President Trump’s associates. This administration likes to call itself “tough on crime” and to revile its Democratic opponents as “the party of crime.”

But toward its own many crimes, the Trump administration is genially indulgent. Like the gangsters around the table in the first Godfather movie, the Trump administration is able to convince itself that its victims are animals without souls—and that its own lawbreaking is a necessary, even honorable, accommodation to the facts of life. “The real crimes were on the other side!” Donald Trump tweeted after he heard the news of Roger Stone’s recommended sentence of seven to nine years—exactly in line with federal sentencing guidelines for Stone’s convicted offenses.

As attorney general, Barr has delivered a series of speeches about the importance of sternly enforcing the law against lower-class people. In a February 11 speech to county sheriffs, he warned against officials who refuse to comply with police work:

Another similar problem is the increasing number of district attorneys who have fashioned for themselves a new role of judge-legislator-prosecutor. These self-styled “social justice” reformers are refusing to enforce entire categories of law, including law against resisting police officers. In so doing, these DAs are putting everyone in danger.

In a November lecture before the Federalist Society, Barr argued that issues of police motive or bias are irrelevant to the enforcement of law against ordinary people:

The Supreme Court has traditionally refused, across a wide variety of contexts, to inquire into the subjective motivation behind governmental action. To take the classic example, if a police officer has probable cause to initiate a traffic stop, his subjective motivations are irrelevant.

In an October talk to Department of Justice employees, Barr spoke of the hardships endured in the pursuit of justice: “the long absences, the ever-present awareness of the risks.” But those hardships, he said, are required to sustain “a society where the law will be enforced and your fellow citizens will be protected.”

At the same time as Barr was pronouncing these stern words, however, he was also shrewdly rejiggering his department to enable him to do special favors for criminals of the highest rank.

When Barr was confirmed as attorney general on February 14, 2019, the Trump presidency faced two imminent prosecutorial threats: Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation and the office of the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Barr promptly moved to neutralize both.
First, he attacked Mueller. He took early possession of the Mueller report and held it for almost a month while publicly mischaracterizing its findings. Four weeks after the report’s release, Mueller resigned and Barr closed the special counsel’s office, moving all its remaining prosecutorial work to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

That office was headed by a prosecutor independent of the Trump administration, Jessie Liu. Liu was then deftly moved aside. In December, President Trump nominated her for an important job at the U.S. Treasury. Liu resigned on February 1. To fill Liu’s place, Barr turned to one of his closest aides, Timothy Shea, who was appointed to head the office on an interim basis. Once Shea was installed, Liu’s nomination was withdrawn.

That has produced a remarkable result. Barr and Trump have tightened their control of the U.S. attorney’s office without Senate questioning of either the outgoing or the incoming U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

These maneuvers have enabled Barr to bestow leniency upon Trump cronies convicted of crimes." [The entire article is here.]

When Americans finally realize that there has been a total takeover of the institutional norms and the rule of law in America, it will be too late. It happened before (See the civil rights struggles of the fifties and sixties.), and it will happen again.

Caption Saturday.

 

I need a caption for this picture. 

America will never be great without the rule of law.

  Today might be the day that democracy finally died here in America. It's been leading up to this moment for the past three years, and now, tragically, it would appear that the day has arrived.

If you don't know about those three US prosecutors quitting over the trump White House meddling in the Roger Stone sentencing, you might need to start paying attention. Today, in Washington, three brave prosecutors decided to follow their conscience and stand up to a corrupt Justice department and Bill Barr. 

Barr's Justice Department shockingly asked the Judge in the Roger Stone to reverse a sentencing recommendation made by his own prosecutors. He did this a day after his boss, Donald trump, tweeted to his millions of followers that what the justice department was asking for in terms of sentencing was too harsh. If you think about it it's probably one of the scariest things that trump has ever done (and he has done many things) to undermine the rule of law, and destroy America's institutions.

Roger Stone lied to Congress to protect Mr. trump, and he was convicted of multiple felonies by a jury of his peers, and he deserves every one of the seven to nine years of prison time that the prosecution is asking for in his case. But we all know that if the Judge ultimately sentences him to a "harsh" sentence, he will be pardoned by a president who has been his partner in crime for his entire life.

David Graham writing for The Atlantic wrote the following:

"The administration’s rush to aid Stone, especially set against the retributive firings, shows Trump newly willing to flex his muscles, and demonstrates how Pollyannaish the predictions of a chastened Trump were. The apology for firing Vindman goes this way: Vindman remains an officer, and Trump has a right to aides on the National Security Council whom he trusts. But Trump also said Tuesday that the military should consider disciplining Vindman, whose only offense seems to have been complying with a lawful subpoena from Congress.

The intervention on behalf of Stone is particularly disturbing because he was convicted of lying to protect Trump. Thanks to Stone’s stonewalling, we still don’t really know what happened between Trump and Russia in 2016. Stone had Trump’s back, and now Trump has his. So much for the law-and-order president."

Trump was never a" law-and- order President." He was always a con man, and so far the con seems to be working.





 

Caption Saturday

I need a caption for this picture.

(It's not a photoshopped)

"Nancy The Ripper".

All this pearl clutching by right-wingnuts over Nancy Pelosi's  little gesture last night is laughable.

So she ripped up copies of trump's manifesto of lies for all the world to see. I say good for her. Somebody had to channel our collective frustration over trump's orgy of lies. Where were they when that ignorant congressman yelled "You Lie!" in the middle of President Obama's SOTU address?
They are calling her actions crass and unbecoming, but they are forgetting who the leader of their party is. He refused to shake her hand for crying out loud.

Anyway, he (trump) told lie after lie last night. But there were a couple of very glaring ones.

Declaring that he inherited a bad economy from Obama when we all know that President Obama came to power when our economy was on life support, and that trump himself has been riding the wave of Obama's economy since he came into office, was his first one. His second most glaring lie was declaring that republicans are fighting to protect people with pre-existing medical conditions from being kicked out of their plans. This lie was particularly offensive because as I write this post the trump administration is going to court to do away with Obamacare.

Still, if I am going to be honest, the lies were not what offended me the most about trump's lying to the union address. I am quite accustomed to trump and his lies by now. What really bothered me about  his speech was when he took the time to give the highest civilian medal honor to a  racist misogynist pig, Rush Limbauugh, who for years has divided the country with his rhetoric and ignorance from his golden microphone.

But this is where we are in America. A Presidential medal is given to a racist pig by another racist pig, who just happens to be the president.

I am starting to think that Nancy Pelosi ripping up that manifesto of lies was not enough

News items. From the Super Bowl to Rush.

I have a few news items that I want to share my thoughts about with you.

First, I will start with the Super Bowl.

I want to congratulate Big Red on his Super Bowl win. I was cheering for him because he really did a good job as the coach of my Birds while he was here in Philly, and he deserved to beat the Cheatriots when we went to the Super Bowl under his watch.

President trump congratulated the Kansas City Chiefs as well, it's just that he declared that they were from Kansas. More proof that the president is losing his mind. The Chiefs play in Missouri Mr. President.

Right wing-nuts and conservatives are complaining and clutching their pearls over the halftime show. It was too racy and involved to much gyrating for their taste. They declared that they had to hide their children while J-Lo and Shakira was grabbing their crotch. "How will we explain what they were doing that to our children?" The same way you explained why your hero and the president was bragging about grabbing women by the pussy.

Speaking of right-wingnuts, they are also pissed because Jigga and Beyonce did not stand for the anthem. "How dare they? If they don't like America they can leave. I will never buy another one of their records again." More pearl clutching. Give me a break! I guess the millions of people sitting at home in their dens or living rooms need to leave America as well. I am quite sure that millions of Americans were sitting during the anthem. Including a bunch of folks sitting around the aforementioned power couple during the game. They didn't get called out because they are not wealthy black people who dare to do what the f**& they want.

I hope you all witnessed what happened in Washington on Friday. The republicans chose not to hear a witness who would tell them the truth about trump's actions and his criminal scheme to rig an election. By doing that they destroyed whatever shred of dignity they had left, and confirmed to us all that they value the Faustian bargain they made with a conman over the Constitution that they swore to uphold.

Finally, Rush Limbaugh has declared that he has advanced lung cancer.......

What's that old Jamaican saying? "God nah sleep."

Thoughts?

Caption Saturday.

 

I need a caption for this pic.

Image from mavenroundtable.io