Month: June 2017

American carnage

by digby

I don’t have it in me to write about this yet. Another shooter, another day, this one seems to be political, which is especially horrible, but we don’t know yet for sure. He was a violent individual, previously charged with domestic violence and he had a semi-automatic weapon. I’m just so sick of this.

I’ll say what I always say: whatever he motivations of the shooters, the fact that they can easily get a hold of a semi-automatic weapon, which has no purpose other than to kill large numbers of people in a crowd, is the fundamental problem. Humans have lots of disagreements. It shouldn’t be this easy for them to kill each other over them.

For now, I’ll just re-post this piece which I sadly have re-posted too many times in the wake of a mass shooting:

Shut down the pump: a little parable for our time

Here is an interesting story for you to read today:

British doctor John Snow couldn’t convince other doctors and scientists that cholera, a deadly disease, was spread when people drank contaminated water until a mother washed her baby’s diaper in a town well in 1854 and touched off an epidemic that killed 616 people.
[…]
Dr. Snow believed sewage dumped into the river or into cesspools near town wells could contaminate the water supply, leading to a rapid spread of disease.

In August of 1854 Soho, a suburb of London, was hit hard by a terrible outbreak of cholera. Dr. Snows himself lived near Soho, and immediately went to work to prove his theory that contaminated water was the cause of the outbreak.

“Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days,” Dr. Snow wrote “As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this irruption (sic) of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.”

Dr. Snow worked around the clock to track down information from hospital and public records on when the outbreak began and whether the victims drank water from the Broad Street pump. Snow suspected that those who lived or worked near the pump were the most likely to use the pump and thus, contract cholera. His pioneering medical research paid off. By using a geographical grid to chart deaths from the outbreak and investigating each case to determine access to the pump water, Snow developed what he considered positive proof the pump was the source of the epidemic… Snow was able to prove that the cholera was not a problem in Soho except among people who were in the habit of drinking water from the Broad Street pump. He also studied samples of water from the pump and found white flecks floating in it, which he believed were the source of contamination.

On 7 September 1854, Snow took his research to the town officials and convinced them to take the handle off the pump, making it impossible to draw water. The officials were reluctant to believe him, but took the handle off as a trial only to find the outbreak of cholera almost immediately trickled to a stop. Little by little, people who had left their homes and businesses in the Broad Street area out of fear of getting cholera began to return.

It took many more years before it was widely accepted that cholera came from the water. (In fact, it took a priest trying to prove that it was God’s will to finally do it!)

But here’s the relevant takeaway: they didn’t need to cure the disease to end the epidemic. What ended it was shutting down the pump.

Here’s another story for you to think about today:

From 1984 to 1996, multiple killings aroused public concern. The 1984 Milperra massacre was a major incident in a series of conflicts between various ‘outlaw motorcycle gangs’. In 1987, the Hoddle Street massacre and the Queen Street massacre took place in Melbourne. In response, several states required the registration of all guns, and restricted the availability of self-loading rifles and shotguns. In the Strathfield massacre in New South Wales, 1991, two were killed with a knife, and five more with a firearm. Tasmania passed a law in 1991 for firearm purchasers to obtain a licence, though enforcement was light. Firearm laws in Tasmania and Queensland remained relatively relaxed for longarms. In 1995, Tasmania had the second lowest rate of homicides per head of population.

The Port Arthur massacre in 1996 transformed gun control legislation in Australia. Thirty five people were killed and 21 wounded when a man with a history of violent and erratic behaviour beginning in early childhood opened fire on shop owners and tourists with two military style semi-automatic rifles. Six weeks after the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, this mass killing at the notorious former convict prison at Port Arthur horrified the Australian public and had powerful political consequences.
The Port Arthur perpetrator said he bought his firearms from a gun dealer without holding the required firearms licence.

Prime Minister John Howard, then newly elected, immediately took the gun law proposals developed from the report of the 1988 National Committee on Violence and forced the states to adopt them under a National Firearms Agreement. This was necessary because the Australian Constitution does not give the Commonwealth power to enact gun laws. The proposals included a ban on all semi-automatic rifles and all semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, and a tightly restrictive system of licensing and ownership controls.

Some discussion of measures to allow owners to undertake modifications to reduce the capacity of magazine-fed shotguns (“crimping”) occurred, but the government refused to permit this.

Surveys showed up to 85% of Australians supported gun control,but some farmers and sporting shooters strongly opposed the new laws.

This did not solve the problem of mental illness or end the primitive capacity of human beings to commit murder and mayhem. Those are huge problems that their society, like all societies, is still grappling with every day. But it did end the epidemic of mass shootings. They have not had even one since then. 

The lesson is this: End the epidemic and then we can — and must — talk about root causes, extremist ideology, mental health facilities and our violent culture. But first things first — shut down the damned pump.


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Rubbing their noses in humanity
by Tom Sullivan

Healthcare “lines” is political rhetoric. Here’s one for real Americans who have none. Wise, VA in 2016.

Health care is personal. Intensely personal. That for perverse reasons – money primarily and ideology secondarily – health care is a political football in this country is not just a tragedy. It is an atrocity. Perceive a threat to national security and our leaders stand at attention, salute the flag, and, without blinking, fire off a check for a trillion dollars for taking lives in foreign countries. But ask them in state capitols and in the nation’s capitol to see to it that, like citizens of more civilized world powers, Americans can get the health care they need to preserve their own lives and their loved ones’? It’s time to review donor lists, call think-tanks for talking points, lecture us on personal responsibility and “choice,” drone on about freedom, and publicly wring their hands about how to pay for it. Moral hazard? I got your moral hazard right here, pal. Look in the damned mirror.

Without going into a lot of detail, news of several friends’ life-threatening medical conditions all hit this week. Here’s just one that surfaced late in my Twitter feed:

I have stage 4 Hodgkin's lymphoma. 1st chemo today. Obamacare is literally keeping me alive & can get me cured. If it survives. #SavetheACA— Laura Packard (@lpackard) May 4, 2017

Word got out yesterday morning that the man with the veto pen is dissatisfied with the Republican Affordable Care Act repeal bill now in the U.S. Senate:

President Donald Trump told Republican senators Tuesday that the House-passed health care bill he helped revive is “mean” and urged them to craft a version that is “more generous,” congressional sources said.

Trump’s remarks were a surprising slap at a Republican-written House measure that was shepherded by Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and whose passage the president lobbied for and praised. At a Rose Garden ceremony minutes after the bill’s narrow House passage on May 4, Trump called it “a great plan.”

The president’s criticism, at a White House lunch with 15 GOP senators, also came as Senate Republican leaders’ attempts to write their own health care package have been slowed by disagreements between their party’s conservatives and moderates.

But not slowed so much that Republicans won’t ram through a secretive bill for taking health care coverage from 13 to 23 million Americans before the July 4 recess with less public debate than they afford a trillion-dollar foreign war. “Mean” or not, if the AHCA gets to the president’s desk, he will sign it with a flourish, hold a victory party, and move on to securing tax cuts for the richest one percent. That’s all his associates really want anyway. Cutting off millions of Americans’ health insurance is a bump in the road.

The disparity in healthcare coverage and availability in this country in an international embarrassment. Another friend had cancer surgery at Duke Medical this week. He’s expected to recover, mostly. His insurance is probably state-funded and he can afford to travel to the best hospitals. Yet another friend announced last night he has pancreatic cancer. Without Medicare (backed up by his spouse’s federal insurance), he says, he would be dead already.

Speaking of dead already, one of the fiercest healthcare advocates I know shared on Facebook yesterday her latest letter to NC Sen. Thom Tillis about her dead son. Her name is Leslie. Don’t mess with her. His name was Mike.

Senator Tillis,

I think you probably know who I am. I am the mother of a young man who died because he lacked access to health care. You had me arrested for trying to speak to you when you were Speaker of the House in North Carolina about the importance of access to health care. You were one of the leaders in the fight to withhold Medicaid from a half million people in this state, sentencing some 2,000 of them to death every year.

The ACA would have saved my son’s life because it forces insurance companies to not punish people who have pre-existing conditions.

My son had a birth defect. Like many young people, he decided to take a year off college when he was 19. Little did we know this common decision would be a fatal one for him. He was booted off my policy and then discovered he couldn’t buy insurance at any price because a birth defect is a pre-existing condition – as though he had decided as a zygote to have a birth defect.

This birth defect left him extremely vulnerable to an aggressive form of colon cancer, and he needed a colonoscopy every year. When he lived in New York, he had a doctor who would allow him to pay for his colonoscopies in monthly installments. By age 25, he had already had pre-cancerous polyps removed, so he had a near certainty of developing cancer if he couldn’t get his annual colonoscopies. But when he moved so he and his wife could go back to college, he discovered he could not get a colonoscopy unless he paid $2,300 in cash up front. No credit cards, no checks, no installments, nothing.

When he got sick he went to the ER three times and came away with three wrong diagnoses, three wrong medications and three large bills. You see – and I’m sure you know this – the emergency room only has to stabilize you; it does not have to look for the cause of your problem.

By the time anyone did anything, my son had stage 3 cancer. It was too late to save his life.

My son was a student, he worked 30 hours a week and he was a volunteer. He was an extraordinary young man.

But none of that mattered. He was sentenced to death – a slow and excruciating death – for having a birth defect. He had to leave his wife to get Medicaid and although he had applied for disability when he first became sick, his approval took 37 months and he was dead nine days before his first check arrived.

I tell you this story because, at the time he died, 45,000 Americans were dying every year from lack of access to health care, according to a study by Harvard Medical School that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The ACA has saved more than half of those lives. The uninsured rate in this country right now is at an historic low. The law is saving tens of thousands of lives every year, and to repeal it is tantamount to murder.

No, that statement is not overstating things. You are working on killing more than 25,000 innocent Americans every year. Those are human beings, Senator, and their lives matter a whole lot to me and to all the people who love them.

I have to face every damn day without my beloved son. I get up every morning longing to hear his voice again, devastated that I will never laugh at another one of his outrageous jokes or taste his cooking or have another late-night conversation about philosophy with him. I will never hear him tease me about being a Red Sox fan, or look for my chocolate stash only to discover he found it and left me just one little piece.

Perhaps it’s time to turn your back on your corporate overlords and become truly pro-life. Vote no on repealing the ACA. Vote to save the lives of the people who will die without insurance.

You have to know what you’re about to do is wrong.

If you go ahead with this, I hope and pray that you will burn in hell.

Leslie Boyd
Candler, NC

Yeah, healthcare is pretty damned personal. It is pretty damned personal to the thousands of citizens who sleep in their cars for a chance at treatment each year in Wise, Virginia (population 3,286). They get triage in animal stalls at the county fairgrounds. Most of the care there is dental. Dental school volunteers pull hundreds of bad teeth. Because while coverage for cancer and broken bones comes standard for those who can afford insurance, dental infections that can get into the brain and kill you are luxury coverage. Congress should take a field trip on July 21 instead of rushing to repeal the ACA before July 4th.

Remote Area Medical free clinic. Wise, VA in 2016.

And then there is mental health care, always under-resourced and stigmatized. We were at a local clinic for a routine procedure yesterday morning when the phone rang. A friend with severe depression committed suicide by jumping off the roof. If only. If only.

Senators, state electeds, must we rub your noses in humanity for you to show some?

The ACA has flaws. They don’t need replacing with worse ones. They need fixing. Better still, Medicare for all would save more American lives than all the freedom-crushing, counterterrorism fever dreams you would rather pass without regard to cost. Get off your assets and make America great in a way Americans can feel in their daily lives. And so you can feel human again.

Who’s secretly buying Trump properties?

by digby

I’m sure this means nothing, nothing at all:

Since President Trump won the Republican nomination, the majority of his companies’ real estate sales are to secretive shell companies that obscure the buyers’ identities, a USA TODAY investigation has found.

Over the last 12 months, about 70% of buyers of Trump properties were limited liability companies – corporate entities that allow people to purchase property without revealing all of the owners’ names. That compares with about 4% of buyers in the two years before.

USA TODAY journalists have spent six months cataloging every condo, penthouse or other property that Trump and his companies own – and tracking the buyers behind every transaction. The investigation found Trump’s companies owned more than 430 individual properties worth well over $250 million.

Since Election Day, Trump’s businesses have sold 28 of those U.S. properties for $33 million. The sales include luxury condos and penthouses in Las Vegas and New York and oceanfront lots near Los Angeles. The value of his companies’ inventory of available real estate remains above a quarter-billion dollars.

Profits from sales of those properties flow through a trust run by Trump’s sons. The president is the sole beneficiary of the trust and can withdraw cash any time.

The increasing share of opaque buyers comes at a time when federal investigators, members of Congress and ethics watchdogs are asking questions about Trump’s sales and customers in the U.S. and around the world. Some Congressional Democrats have been asking for more detail about buyers of Trump’s domestic real estate since USA TODAY’s initial report.

Their concern is that the secretive sales create an extraordinary and unprecedented potential for people, corporations or foreign interests to try to influence a President.  Anyone who wanted to court favor with the President could snap up multiple properties or purposefully overpay, without revealing their identity publicly.

The real estate cache, which Trump has never fully revealed and is not required by law to disclose, offers unique opportunity for anyone to steer money to a sitting President. The increase in purchasers shielded by LLCs makes it far more difficult to track who is paying the President and his companies for properties ranging in price from $220,000 to $10 million – or more.

The clear post-nomination shift since last year to more shell-company purchases is unique to sales by Trump’s companies, even in his own towers and neighborhoods. Condos owned by others in the same buildings, and sold during the same time period, were bought by LLCs in no more than 20% of the transactions. In some areas, the share was far less.

Sure, opaque LLC’s paying the Trump family millions of dollars while the president is in the White House isn’t suspicious in the least. And anyway, the president’s sons know who’s buying up their properties but they’ve promised not to tell their daddy so it’s all good.

Never mind.

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Fergawdsakes

by digby

Let’s hope this means something but it probably doesn’t:

Congressional sources say President Donald Trump has told Republican senators that the House health care bill is “mean” and that the Senate version should be “more generous.”

The remarks were a surprising critique of a Republican-written House measure whose passage Trump fought for and embraced. They also seem to undercut efforts by Senate conservatives to impose restrictions in their chamber’s legislation, such as curbing the Medicaid health care program for the poor and limiting the services insurers must cover.

The sources say the president did not say what aspects of the bill he was characterizing.

Trump’s comments were described by people who received accounts of a White House lunch Trump had Tuesday with 15 GOP senators. They spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal a closed-door conversation.

He’s so all over the place. Hopefully, however, it will give some wavering Senators the backup they might be looking for to reject the Senate bill.

But really, they’re all so malevolent at this point that they probably really want a “mean” bill so they can punish Americans who aren’t rich. Otherwise they wouldn’t be involved in this nonsense at all.

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Foghorn Leghorn and Forrest Gump

by digby

That pretty much sums up Sessions’ testimony today. My impression is that he wasn’t sufficiently protective of the King, but I guess we’ll see. If I’m right:

This could all blow up in his face. pic.twitter.com/E8DTm8GdtQ— lonewolfcub666 (@lonewolfcub666) June 13, 2017

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Another reality show celebrity weighs in

by digby

Via TPM:

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI), a longtime Trump supporter, on Monday night criticized the special counsel’s Russia probe and questioned why the investigation is still underway now that former FBI Director James Comey has said that President Donald Trump himself was not under investigation while Comey was at the FBI.

During an appearance on Fox News, Duffy claimed that Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller are “best friends” and complained that Mueller has hired people to work on the investigation who have donated to Democrats.

“This seems more like an effort to prosecute Donald Trump than it is to investigate,” he said.

“What the hell are we investigating?” Duffy then asked. “Why are we going through with this charade?”

Duffy noted Comey’s testimony that he told Trump earlier this year that he was not under investigation at the time. He also claimed that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he had not seen evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, peddling a favorite conservative talking point. However, Clapper has made it clear that he is not privy to the FBI probe.

This is one of the lamest wingnut talking points they’ve come up with. Mueller is looking into Russian interference in the election, not just the president. And they were only looking at him because they have information that his campaign was possibly involved in the interference and then he tried to shut down the investigation.

But they’ll keep going. They live in a totally alternate universe in which Donald Trump won a huge victory, almost by acclamation, and the disgruntled Hillary Clinton coven is trying to steal it from him. His presidency is a huge success and the only reason anyone’s talking about this Russia stuff is because the Deep State and the MSM are in cahoots with her. And Obama, something something.

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Getting beyond shock

by digby

Naomi Klein has been writing about the uses of shock to enact authoritarian, plutocratic agendas for a while now. Her book “The Shock Doctrine” was very important in understanding a lot of what we encountered during the Bush administration. And it’s even more relevant now.

Shock. It’s a word that has come up a lot since November— for obvious reasons.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about shock. Ten years ago, I published “The Shock Doctrine,” an investigation that spanned four decades from Pinochet’s U.S.-backed coup in 1970s Chile to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

I noticed a brutal and recurring tactic by right wing governments. After a shocking event – a war, coup, terrorist attack, market crash or natural disaster – exploit the public’s disorientation. Suspend democracy. Push through radical “free market” policies that enrich the 1 percent at the expense of the poor and middle class.

The administration is creating chaos. Daily. Of course many of the scandals are the result of the president’s ignorance and blunders – not some nefarious strategy.

But there is also no doubt that some savvy people around Trump are using the daily shocks as cover to advance wildly pro-corporate policies that bear little resemblance to what Trump pledged on the campaign trail.

And the worst part? This is likely just the warm up.

We need to focus on what this Administration will do when it has a major external shock to exploit.

Maybe it will be an economic crash like 2008. Maybe a natural disaster like Sandy. Or maybe it will be a horrific terrorist event like Manchester or Paris in 2015.

Any one such crisis could redraw the political map overnight, giving Trump and his crew free rein to ram through their most extreme ideas.

But here’s one thing I’ve learned over two decades of reporting from dozens of crises around the world: these tactics can be resisted.

And for your convenience, I’ve tried to boil it down to a 5-step plan.

Here’s the video:

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Sessions’ big test

by digby

“I pledge allegiance to Donald Trump …”

I wrote about what to expect in the Sessions testimony for Salon this morning:

People all over the country were riveted by James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week and it whet their appetites for more revelations. A friend of mine texted me after it was done and asked excitedly, “Who’s testifying next week?”

As it happens, on Tuesday Attorney General Jeff Sessions will appear before the same committee. It’s the first time Sessions has appeared before Congress since his confirmation hearings, and since he’s previously cancelled several scheduled appearances to speak about the Justice Department budget (and face unpleasant questions from Sen. Al Franken again) before the Appropriations Committee, it’s pretty clear he’s been dodging his former colleagues.

Sessions surprised the Intelligence Committee with his offer to testify, and when rumors began to fly that he’d only done it so that he wouldn’t have to appear in public, he sent word that he would testify in open session. Perhaps he always intended to do so, but at the moment it appears he was shamed into it.

This public testimony comes on the heels of numerous reports that Sessions was in the doghouse with President Donald Trump because he had recused himself from the Russia investigation and that led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Why Trump should be so concerned about Mueller is anyone’s guess, but that’s clearly the case. On Monday night the Beltway was all atwitter over rumors that the president is considering firing Mueller, at the urging of such legal geniuses as Ann Coulter and Newt Gingrich.

After refusing for days to say whether Sessions still had the confidence of the president, and amid reports that the attorney general had recently offered to resign, the White House press office finally gave a perfunctory “yes” at the end of last week. Perhaps coincidentally, the Justice Department also decided to defend the president’s right to accept personal payments from foreign governments, which was awfully nice for him.

On Monday, Sessions was among the most unctuous of the Cabinet members who sat around the table obsequiously pledging fealty to their liege lord Donald Trump at what CNN dubbed the weirdest Cabinet meeting ever, and New York Times columnist Elizabeth Williamson described as “a public display of affection more Pyongyang than Washington.” So perhaps Sessions has accepted that this desire for “freedom to do his job” is secondary to the necessity to protect President Trump, come hell or high water. The testimony he gives today will give us a hint about just how far he’s willing to go to do that.

This hearing will be just as much about the attorney general as the president, however. Right now, Sessions is very much a part of the Russia investigation himself, and since he hasn’t seen fit to testify before Congress as attorney general until now, it’s the first time the Senators charged with oversight of the intelligence community have had a chance to ask him about his numerous omissions of his own meetings with various players in the saga and his decision to participate in the firing of former FBI Director James Comey. Sessions is right in the middle of the whole thing.

It’s important to remember that Sessions wasn’t just the first senator to endorse Trump, he was the chairman of the Trump campaign’s national security committee. This was the same committee on which Carter Page, one of the central subjects of the investigation, served during the campaign. Considering that Sessions was involved in fashioning the Trump campaign’s foreign policy, it’s only natural that investigators would see him as someone of interest in an investigation of foreign meddling in the presidential campaign.

For that reason alone, Sessions would have had to recuse himself from having anything to do with the Russia investigation. But he’s gone way beyond that, including failing to disclose two meetings with the Russian ambassador during his confirmation hearings, allegedly because they were so routine he didn’t even remember them. That might be more believable if the issue of possible Russian interference hadn’t been all over the media at the time and if Sessions hadn’t been so closely involved with foreign policy during the campaign.

Be that as it may, Sessions is also under suspicion now for other reasons in the wake of the Comey testimony. He will be asked about Comey’s claim that he told Sessions he didn’t want to be alone with Trump after the FBI director’s one-on-one meeting with the president in which Trump said he hoped Comey would lay off former national security adviser Michael Flynn. According to Comey’s testimony, Sessions basically shrugged off his concerns.

And the senators will want to know Sessions’ reasons for recusing himself from the Russia investigation and what he thinks that means. According to Comey, high-ranking members of Justice Department knew that Sessions would have to do it and at least some of the reason has to do with classified information, which CNN reported was yet another undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador.

Even more problematic is the fact that Sessions involved himself in the Comey firing. Trump admitted on national TV that the Russian investigation was his reason for doing it and Sessions had recused himself from that inquiry. Sessions may say that he didn’t know that was behind the president’s thinking, and claim he thought the reason for the firing was Comey’s handling of the Clinton emails. Lest we forget, during Sessions’ confirmation hearing he had promised to recuse himself from that case as well. So there is really no excuse for Sessions having been in any meetings about this issue or weighing in with any opinion. And since the Comey firing was the culmination of a number of actions that may constitute obstruction of justice by the president, Sessions may be implicated in that as well.

Sessions is a savvy political player, so it’s unlikely he’ll be trapped into saying anything he doesn’t want to say. But he’s in an awkward position at the moment. He is obviously on precarious ground with the president and will have to find a way to exonerate him if he hopes to retain his confidence, however tenuously. But he’s also personally exposed and will have to walk a fine line if he hopes to protect himself as well. You can be sure that Trump will be watching this hearing closely, alert to any sign that his man is selling him down the river.

Trump has said that the worst kind of disloyalty is when someone fails to come to his aid. And when that happens he swears that he will “wipe the floor” with them:

If Sessions doesn’t properly cover for the boss today, Robert Mueller will not be the only person who needs to look over his shoulder.

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Picking off the prosecutors one at a time

by digby

This doesn’t surprise me but it’s really worrying that we are accepting this stuff as business as usual now:

Marc Kasowitz, President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in the Russia investigation, has boasted to friends and colleagues that he played a central role in the firing of Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, according to four people familiar with the conversations.

Kasowitz told Trump, “This guy is going to get you,” according to a person familiar with Kasowitz’s account.

Those who know Kasowitz say he is sometimes prone to exaggerating when regaling them with his exploits. But if true, his assertion adds to the mystery surrounding the motive and timing of Bharara’s firing.

New presidents typically ask U.S. attorneys to resign and have the power to fire them. But Trump asked Bharara to stay in his job when they met in November at Trump Tower, as Bharara announced after the meeting.

In early March, Trump reversed himself. He asked all the remaining U.S. attorneys to resign, including Bharara. Bharara, a telegenic prosecutor with a history of taking on powerful politicians, refused and was fired March 11.

As ProPublica previously reported, at the time of Bharara’s firing the Southern District was conducting an investigation into Trump’s secretary of health and human services, Tom Price.

Trump Tower and the Trump Organization was also in his jurisdiction.

The possibility of him firing Mueller is quite high, don’t kid yourself. He obviously feels he can more easily ride out the dismissal of prosecutors than whatever they are investigating. And he has a lot of help from unpatriotic Republicans who don’t care that they have a cretinous criminal in the White House as long as they get their tax cuts.

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All the predisent’s tweets
by Tom Sullivan

YouTube image capture.

A statement last week from Marc Kasowitz, “Predisent Trump’s personal lawyer,” blasted former FBI Director James Comey’s Senate testimony. If Trump had tweeted the thing, it would have become an official presidential record if the bill proposed by Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois had been law.

Sigh. Typo in first sentence: I am Marc Kasowitz, *Predisent* Trump’s personal lawyer.— Michael Barbaro (@mikiebarb) June 8, 2017

NPR reports:

Ladies and gentlemen, Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois presents: the Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement, or COVFEFE Act.

As Congress has taught us time and again, any legislative priority can be pretzeled into an acronym if you simply toss away the conventions of standard American English.

But like the best legislative acronyms, the Covfefe Act’s title points to its content. If you’ve forgotten, or you called in sick to the national conversation on May 31, President Trump tweeted simply, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”, which was retweeted more than 100,000 times before he deleted it. And a strange new word was born.

Quigley’s bill amends the Presidential Records Act to include the term “social media” among the materials that are documented, “ensuring additional preservation of presidential communication and statements while promoting government accountability and transparency,” according to a press release on Quigley’s website.

So along with the predisent’s other verbal finger paintings, dead-of-night insults he broadcasts in response to perceived slights would become historical record. American politicians used to address perceived insults with dueling pistols and canes. How far we have come.

A unanimous decision yesterday by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Trump’s second travel ban treats some if not all the predisent’s tweets as serious policy. The court determined that the travel ban’s second iteration both exceeds presidential authority and provides no rationale for why entry of persons from six designated countries “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” The court included a footnote citing the predisent’s tweeting habits:

14 Indeed, the President recently confirmed his assessment that it is the “countries” that are inherently dangerous, rather than the 180 million individual nationals of those countries who are barred from entry under the President’s “travel ban.” See Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Twitter (June 5, 2017, 6:20 PM), https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/871899511525961728 (“That’s right, we need a TRAVEL BAN for certain DANGEROUS countries, not some politically correct term that won’t help us protect our people!”) (emphasis in original);

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick explains:

In a new article on presidential speech and the courts, Cardozo Law School’s Kate Shaw notes that the judicial branch shouldn’t take casual presidential comments too seriously. She argues, however, that there is a subset of cases in which presidential speech reflects a clear manifestation of intent to enter the legal arena, among them cases touching on foreign relations or national security and those in which government purpose constitutes an element of a legal test. Based in part on Sean Spicer’s assurance that Trump’s tweets are official statements, the per curiam panel of the 9th Circuit has just ruled that the president’s Twitter commentary clearly falls in the category of speech that belongs in the legal arena.

Lithwick further observes:

We’ve been told by the White House at various points to take the tweets seriously, to take them seriously but not literally, and to take them not at all seriously. The courts now seem to have decided to go with door No. 1.

The Trump administration’s astonishing lack of message discipline — and his family’s — play’s hell with his staff, we know. Especially Sean Spicer. Trump notably stayed off his phone during the Comey hearings last week while his eldest took a turn at the undermining. It’s all fun and games, they say, until someone loses an eye. Now a federal court has taken Trump’s bleats as legally serious. They’ve just helped lose him a court case.

Careful with that axe, Eugene.