I missed this creepy photo when it was first unearthed:
This is from last October. But there is something so twisted about Trump and his daughter’s relationship. In fact, there’s something bizarre about the whole family:
"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2021
We have many problems. But Trump’s buddy Netanyahu is making a power grab that is turning Israel into an ungovernable country:
In the end, it took only four days to settle a matter that has hovered over Israel for years: How far would Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu go to keep his hold on power?
His answer: Into the void.
In a staggering maelstrom of events that began with an attempted putsch against the judiciary and ended with 45 citizens crushed to death, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister showed his people exactly what life under a desperate and untethered leader looks like.
In less than a week, Netanyahu has twice attempted to subvert the rule of law to his advantage and pivoted, at the speed of light, to deflect responsibility for the nation’s worst civilian disaster — the fatal stampede at a Galilean religious pilgrimage in which 100,000 worshipers gathered, with no permit but with the permission of Netanyahu’s government, in a spot the size of a small park.
Israel has been without a functional government for more than two years. During this time, the country was dragged through four general election campaigns in which Netanyahu failed to win enough votes to form a stable governing coalition — but succeeded in preventing anyone else from doing so each time.
Stuck in political purgatory, Israel has no budget, and it’s at risk of losing its international credit ratings. The Knesset is not operational, with the prime minister’s allies scrambling to reshape every rule and motion into a parachute that will save his political life. And the cabinet is incapacitated.
The crux of the problem for Netanyahu is that he is on trial, accused of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. On April 5, the first day of witness testimony, Netanyahu slammed Israel’s judiciary, calling the proceedings “an abuse of the destructive power held by the prosecution.”
“This is what the illegitimate use of power looks like,” the prime minister thundered. “This is how you try to topple a strong right-wing prime minister! This is what an attempted coup looks like!”
But it is Netanyahu who seeks to perpetrate a coup — even as he has effectively given up on governing.
The will to power is profound and in Netanyahu’s case it’s also a matter of personal survival.
I think we all know what a central role Israel plays in world events, for better or worse. This is not good.
Read on if you can. The details are astonishing.
He’s proud of his murderous behavior:
Nearly two years after being found not guilty of killing an unarmed ISIS fighter, retired Navy SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher has made an earth-shattering admission: Neither he nor any of the other SEALs on the scene tried to save the wounded fighter’s life.
“The grain of truth in the whole thing is that that ISIS fighter was killed by us, and that nobody at that time had a problem with it,” Gallagher said during an interview for the finale of “The Line” podcast, which aired on Tuesday.
“We killed that guy,” Gallagher continued. “Our intention was to kill him. Everybody was on board.”
It is the latest unexpected turn in the Gallagher case, which received national attention when former President Donald Trump personally supported Gallagher by ordering him released from pretrial confinement. Three members of Gallagher’s legal team also had ties to Trump, including Marc Mukasey, the former president’s personal attorney.
A reminder of how that all came out:
In July 2019, Gallagher was acquitted of stabbing the ISIS fighter to death – a charge he continued to deny while speaking with Dan Taberski, host of “The Line.” During Gallagher’s court-martial, another member of his SEAL team – then-Petty Officer 1st Class Corey Scott – said that he, not Gallagher, had suffocated the fighter.
The case became tumultuous for both the special operations community and the Navy as Trump took a greater involvement. After Gallagher was convicted of posing with the ISIS fighter’s corpse and demoted, Trump restored Gallagher’s rank. The former president also ordered the Navy to revoke medals that had been awarded to the prosecutors in the case and he became personally involved when the Navy tried to take away Gallagher’s SEAL trident, ultimately leading then-Navy Secretary Richard Spencer to be fired.
The whole thing was grotesque:
It all began in May 2017, when Gallagher was the senior enlisted leader for Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7. The platoon was operating near Mosul, Iraq, which was then held by the Islamic State terrorist group, when Iraqi troops brought a young ISIS fighter who had been wounded by a U.S. airstrike.
Gallagher was initially charged with premeditated murder for allegedly stabbing the man in the neck. He was also accused of shooting at Iraqi civilians in separate incidents but was ultimately found not guilty of that as well.
While the circumstances of the ISIS fighter’s death have always been hotly contested, a consistent part of the narrative has been that the SEALs provided medical care to the young fighter.
Now, Gallagher has told “The Line” that the SEALs were not tending to the fighter’s injuries; rather, they decided to conduct “medical treatment on him until he’s gone.”
“I mean, he was going to die, regardless,” Gallagher said. “We weren’t taking any prisoners.”
This man is a psychopath and should not be out on thestreet:
He also claimed that every member of his platoon, including one SEAL who later reportedly described Gallagher as “evil” to investigators, all agreed to torture the ISIS fighter to death.
“Everybody knew what was going on,” Gallagher said. “It’s the only truthful thing to this whole process; and then the rest of it just is like a bunch of contorted lies to, like, pin that whole scenario on me.”
“I didn’t stab him,” Gallagher continued. “I didn’t stab that dude. That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done – and there was plenty of medical treatments that were done to him.”
When asked why he cut an emergency airway in the ISIS fighter’s throat, Gallagher replied: “Just for practice. I was practicing to see how fast I could do one in.”
Read on to see his lawyer try to argue that there’s nothing wrong with torturing and experimenting on prisoners and then attempt to explain that everyone already knew this. It’s unbelievable.
Trump’s glowing endorsement of war crimes and support for war criminals was one of the most repulsively authoritarian moments of his presidency. It said everything as far as I’m concerned.
The wealthiest family to ever hold office continues to grift off the taxpayers:
Trump’s adult children have cost taxpayers a lot of money over the years, but this time, it’s different. CREW got records from the Secret Service that show that in just the thirty days after Donald Trump left the presidency, his childrens’ travel cost taxpayers more than $140,000. That figure, however, does not include charges at Trump properties in Bedminster, Palm Beach and Briarcliff, New York, which would likely bring the actual total much higher.
The reason these charges are different is that they all occurred after Joe Biden’s inauguration, and, ordinarily, a former president’s children are no longer entitled to Secret Service protection. Donald Trump took the unusual step of extending the protection for his family members and three top appointees by six months, giving them that much more time to funnel money to his own properties. CREW filed a Freedom of Information Act request in February to get a snapshot of the costs.
An additional six months of protection was likely to be quite costly, because, as CREW previously reported, the Trump family took 12 times as many protected trips as the Obama family did per year. The new records reveal that in just thirty days, the Trump children maintained their breakneck speed of travel, and racked up significant hotel and transportation bills for the Secret Service. The transportation amounted to $52,296.75, and hotel costs totalled at least $88,678.39, according to the records.
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump went directly from their jobs at the White House to a ten day vacation in Salt Lake City with their three children, which cost $62,599.39 for hotel stays alone for their detail. From there, they went to Miami for the month of February, with a short stay at Trump’s Bedminster property from February 19-21. The Secret Service turned over no receipts for that leg of the trip, though it almost certainly funnelled taxpayer money to the Trump business.
Eric and Lara Trump spent much of the month of February in New York at the Trump Briarcliff property, with some short trips into Queens, one trip to Miami and two to Palm Beach, which cost the Secret Service at least $12,742. The Secret Service again did not turn over any spending records at Trump properties, though it seems almost certain that that’s where the Trumps were staying and where Eric was working, and therefore would have included at least some spending that went to bolster the Trump family bottom line.
Donald Trump Jr. also spent time in New York City, Long Island, and Upstate New York. He and Eric overlapped in Palm Beach. Don Jr.’s travel cost at least $13,337, and similarly does not include receipts for Trump properties.
If just one month of the Trump children’s extended Secret Service protection cost $140,000, then the full six months could cost taxpayers nearly $1 million.
It’s not as if they couldn’t afford to pay for their own bodyguards. Hell, they could get Eric Prince to pus some of his war criminal buddies on the payroll.
Lol:
Here are some posts so far:
He was obviously greatly helped by the 280 character limit on twitter.
Apparently, so far, Trump’s blog isn’t getting huge readership for this blog. It seems he needs those Russian bots on Twitter and Facebook to help push his message and he’s still banned from both platforms for being a lying propagandist. (Facebook has extended his ban for the time being and there’s going to be a tedious amount of discussion about it all day …)
The biggest news in Washington continues to be Liz Cheney’s ongoing refusal to bend the knee to the former president and formally repudiate her inexplicable fealty to the truth. It’s one thing to be investigated by the FBI for paying for sex with minors or to be a blatant white supremacist — these are human foibles that can be forgiven — but to unapologetically assert that Donald Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen is a Big Lie simply cannot be tolerated.
I’ve written before that I believe regardless of whether she is truly incapable of swallowing this election nonsense, Cheney also has a strategy. There is an open “lane” for a Republican woman, especially one with a pedigree like hers, to be the tough conservative who stood up to Trump in the event the magic veil ever falls from voters’ eyes. So far that lane looks like it gets narrower every day, but kicking her out of the leadership for telling the truth in the face of massive dishonesty can only add to her heroic luster in the long haul. The worst thing that happens is she is remembered as the Margaret Chase Smith of her day, after the brave senator from Maine who denounced the Wisconsin demagogue Joseph McCarthy long before anyone else had the nerve. There are worse fates for a politician than that.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Republican establishment continues to run around in circles clucking furiously like a brood of barnyard hens, trying to keep Trump and his cultlike following happy. They appear to have decided that their voters require human sacrifices for the cause so Cheney must be thrown over the cliff. (And to think “Democrats are in disarray” used to be a perennial trope. They’re amateurs compared to the GOP.)
But when I read Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye’s piece about former House speaker Paul Ryan, who reportedly really doesn’t care for Donald Trump and his shenanigans yet remains glued to his chair in the Fox boardroom, unwilling to utter a peep about what’s going on with his party, it occurred to me that it’s giving them far too much credit to simply call them cowards. They are much more craven than that. It’s not that they are afraid of their Trump-loving constituents who are metaphorically brandishing pitchforks and torches against anyone who dare call the Big Lie a big lie. It’s that they are seeing the upside for them personally.
While Washington officials clutch their pearls about Liz Cheney’s apostasy, consider all the anti-democratic activity that’s taking place around the country which these people are either explicitly or tacitly endorsing.
The Republican Attorney Generals Association has been in turmoil since January 6th when some members objected to the group’s sponsorship of the violent insurrection. The chairman resigned last month after being unable to handle the internal strife and is to be replaced this week by a hard-core Trump supporter who has promised to “take a blowtorch to Biden’s agenda.” In Florida, a state Trump won handily, they are nonetheless busily enacting voting restrictions which they belatedly realized might even suppress their own vote. They did it anyway. Ohio Republicans decided this week to censure Republican politicians who voted to impeach Donald Trump even though they are from other states. And the New York Times reports that the Texas GOP is now eating its own over “pandemic and voter-fraud conspiracy theories.”
But the big story is in Arizona, where the state Senate has hired an untried company led by a man with a history of floating vote fraud conspiracy theories to “audit” last November’s vote in Maricopa Country, which was won by Joe Biden. Despite the fact that the county was recounted twice by hand and found to match the machine count perfectly, Trump-supporting volunteers are laboriously examining the ballots without any proper monitoring, determined to prove that the election was stolen. The good news is that the Space Force is supposedly on alert to ensure that everything is done properly.
For his part, Trump is reportedly obsessed with this recount. He apparently believes it will prove the election there was stolen and that other states will follow. Here he is last week pontificating before his paying guests at Mar-a-lago:
What all these supposed successful “audits” would add up to is not immediately clear, but on Tuesday Trump did say, “I think people are going to be very, very happy when I make a certain announcement,” so perhaps he believes having a bunch of his loyal fanatics falsely testify that they finally “found” the votes he wanted will somehow launch him back into the White House in 2024.
According to Tierney Sneed of Talking Points Memo, the Trump team expect these audits to take place elsewhere, starting next with Georgia:
Peter Navarro, a Trump White House advisor and the author of several reports asserting mass election fraud, told OAN last week that he believed the Arizona audit could precede a similar audit in Georgia, where the scale of voter fraud was, in his universe, “much larger.” Speaking to Steve Bannon Thursday, Trump supporter Boris Epshteyn said that if the audit shows “even a small fraction” of what the former president’s devotees expect, “the freight train of audit is coming down the way. It’s on the train to Georgia.”
All of this may very well be why even the Republicans who obviously know this is nuts are all climbing on board that crazy train. If they can stage one of these “audit” pageants in a place like Georgia they might just juice their turnout for 2022 and take out newly-elected Democratic Sen. Rafael Warnock. And there are dozens of House districts where that dynamic could play itself out as well.
It isn’t new for Republicans to say that Democrats are illegitimate. They used to say that President Clinton only won with a plurality in a three-way race, so his presidency wasn’t really valid. And we all know that Trump himself pushed the grotesque Birther lie which claimed that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and was therefore not qualified to be president. But this is taking all that to a much higher level. Republicans no doubt realize that this flurry of anti-democratic activity in the states —ostensibly on behalf of Donald Trump and his Big Lie — is really going to pay off for them.
So the House GOP’s leadership apparent decision to purge Liz Cheney from their ranks is their way of telling all these rabid Trumpist activists in the states to have at it, the GOP establishment is with them all the way. They aren’t afraid of Trump voters. They’re grateful to them.
Just an hour ago from CNN, Facebook’s oversight board announced that the former president’s Facebook account will remain suspended for now:
CNN:
“Within six months of this decision, Facebook must reexamine the arbitrary penalty it imposed on January 7 and decide the appropriate penalty,” the board wrote in its decision. “This penalty must be based on the gravity of the violation and the prospect of future harm. It must also be consistent with Facebook’s rules for severe violations, which must, in turn, be clear, necessary and proportionate.”
The board also criticized Facebook for having made the suspension indefinite. “In applying a vague, standardless penalty and then referring this case to the Board to resolve, Facebook seeks to avoid its responsibilities,” the decision said.
Meaning the company and Trump understand each other.
The former president deserves all the blame he receives and more. The Republican Party is swirling the toilet bowl and threatening to suck American democracy down with it. Supposed conservative principles vanished down that hole years ago. Donald Trump’s tenure exposed the party’s rot to sunlight, but he did not begin it. Nor did QAnon.
Much as I usually ignore Thomas Friedman’s pietist ramblings, his disquisition on Donald Trump’s Big Lie further emphasizes how commentators credit this damaged man-child’s Big Personality for it. As many hoped, the Big Lie has not faded with Trump’s dimming spotlight. It has metastasized, spreading from the Capitol to state and local parties, Friedman warns. Indeed, pledging allegiance to it has become a prerequisite for Republicans running for office in 2022.
Gautam Mukunda, host of Nasdaq’s “World Reimagined”podcast, suggests that the lie means “a Republican Party where you cannot rise without declaring that the sun sets in the East, a Republican Party where being willing to help steal an election is literally a job requirement.”
Friedman adds, “There is simply nothing more dangerous for a two-party democracy than to have one party declare that no election where it loses is legitimate, and, therefore, if it loses it will just lie about the results and change the rules.”
But one does not have to be Rick Perlstein to know this view did not begin with the former president. Trump simply gave the Republican Party and its base license to be loud and proud about their distrust of popular sovereignty. They don’t want to govern. They want to rule. So long as that was a given whether or not Republicans controlled all the levers of power, they gave grumbling assent to letting a majority of Americans decide every two years how many political levers each major party controlled.
“[V]iolent anti-democratic sentiment is rampant in the conservative movement,” Rick Perlstein and Edward H. Miller observed recently, citing polls. But it is not new. The movement is not reverting back to its pre-Buckley paranoid roots. Those have been there from Buckley to Reagan and beyond. The late Rush Limbaugh opened his daily show during the Clinton years with “America Held Hostage: Day (no. of days in Clinton’s term)”. One college friend went from hanging out in Rush Rooms around 1990 to full tricorn-hat T-party when Barack Obama entered the Oval Office. Thomas Hofeller, REDMAP and targeting “African-Americans with almost surgical precision” followed in 2010.
QAnon and Trump are latecomers. For Republicans, democratic trappings are like the red, white, and blue bunting it hangs at campaign events and conventions — a political decoration but not a declaration of deeply held principle. The Party of Trump simply declares publicly what it has believed privately for decades: “how you play the game” is for losers. Being willing to help steal an election is literally a job requirement. Be sure to loudly accuse opponents of doing it to set up an excuse for your doing it.
Democrats under Joe Biden, Friedman notes, “are putting forth real ideas to try to address the real challenges that an increasingly diverse 21st-century America needs to address to become a more perfect union.” And the G.O.P. is “trying to cling to power by leveraging a Big Lie into voter suppression laws that leverage the party back to power by appealing solely to a largely white 20th-century America. Trump’s G.O.P. is making no effort to offer conservative alternatives to the issues of the day. Its whole focus is on how to win without doing that.”
“Things are not OK,” Friedman closes. He gets well paid for such sage observations.
But our not-okayness did not start with Donald Trump. Trump did not create a party where up is down, black is white, in is out and wrong is right. He exploited one. He didn’t start the fire, like Billy Joel sings. But he and his will gladly burn down the house if they do not get to rule it.
Oy Vey…
When the first press conference you cover in person in months is a recall event with a 1000 pound live bear… follow this thread for more
The bear has been let out without a leash, @BeastJohnCox has not made an appearance yet
“He wants to be lieutenant governor,” @BeastJohnCox says. “Put away your salmon and honey.”
California is beautiful, “we even have a beautiful governor,” @BeastJohnCox says, referring to @GavinNewsom. “But what’s going on in California is anything but beautiful.”
“We need to recall our pretty boy governor,” @BeastJohnCox says. “Over 2 million people literally put their name on the line to recall him. They said, we can’t take this anymore. … I don’t come from a political dynasty, my aunt isn’t @SpeakerPelosi.”
.@BeastJohnCox says his own background “is pretty ugly,” pointing out that he didn’t know his father and was raised by his mom, a schoolteacher. He adds that he’s not a pretty boy, but “my wife thinks it’s ok,” and adds it’s their 19th anniversary.
.@BeastJohnCox says the bear is there “because we have to be tough as beasts” to go against the political grain in California and fight special interests.
The bear appears to be running away
The bear is cleaning himself
“Integrity is the coin of the realm,” @BeastJohnCox says. “Our pretty boy governor has demonstrated he hasn’t done that, he gives no bid contracts all over the place to people who support his campaign. How’s this for a beastly idea – our legislators read bills before they vote?”
The bear is chasing a treat – bread?
“It’s a choice between the beauty and the beast,” @BeastJohnCox says. “It’s time to unleash the beast” as a trainer throws treats to the bear
“I’m not a household name,” @BeastJohnCox says, “it takes time to take a campaign… I got millions of votes in the 2018 gubernatorial election.”
The bear is lying down
The bear is running away again
Asked why people should take him seriously when he has a bear, he says “for better or worse, we need to get this message out,” @BeastJohnCox says. “I wish that didn’t need to be the case. You have to cut through the media. I’m going to talk about serious issues.”
.@BeastJohnCox says he had COVID-19 early in the pandemic and he “suffered along with other people.”
@BeastJohnCox says he would have protected the vulnerable early on in the pandemic and done better on testing, slams @GavinNewsom for being slow on allowing pharmacies to do Covid testing.
The bear has been lying down for a while at this point
“I started this campaign with $10M of my own money,” @BeastJohnCox says.
The bear is pacing restlessly
@BeastJohnCox says Donald Trump hasn’t reached out to him about his campaign.
@BeastJohnCox says the bear was born in captivity, so it couldn’t live in wild. “It’s had an absolutely wonderful life,” he adds.
@BeastJohnCox says the first thing he would do as governor is call a special session of the Legislature to address the housing crisis. “Housing is in every aspect of life in this state,” he says.
“When you’re in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging deeper,” @BeastJohnCox says. “We need for turn this state around and start climbing out.”
Press conference ends, and bear is petted and given water
He’s getting cooled off
Originally tweeted by Emily Hoeven💫 (@emily_hoeven) on May 4, 2021.
That poor bear …
A federal judge has ordered the release of a key Justice Department memo supporting former Attorney William Barr’s conclusion that former President Donald Trump should not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice over episodes investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson issued that ruling in a withering opinion that accused Barr of being “disingenuous” when describing Mueller’s findings and found that the Justice Department was not candid with the court about the purpose and role of the 2019 memo prepared by Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Justice Department attorneys argued that the memo was part of the process of advising Barr on whether Trump should be prosecuted, but Jackson said the analysis consisted of a post hoc rationalization of a decision already made.
“The review of the document reveals that the Attorney General was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” wrote Jackson, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.
Jackson linked Justice Department’s effort to keep the memo secret to Barr’s initial descriptions of Mueller’s conclusions, declaring both efforts misleading.
“Not only was the Attorney General being disingenuous then, but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege,” she wrote. “The agency’s redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum, and the excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the Attorney General to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time.”
Justice Department attorneys also argued that the memo is covered by attorney-client privilege, but Jackson said much of it didn’t seem to contain legal advice or conclusions. “The Court is not persuaded that the agency has met its burden to demonstrate that the memorandum was transmitted for the purpose of providing legal advice, as opposed to the strategic and policy advice that falls outside the scope of the privilege,” the judge wrote
Jackson noted that another D.C-based federal judge, Reggie Walton, previously criticized Barr’s early description of the Mueller report. She said that criticism was “well-founded.”
Jackson released her opinion in part Monday after reviewing the memo herself, a process which she noted that the Justice Department “strongly resisted.” She withheld some portions that include the details of the memo from the version of her decision that was made public.
[…]
While it is unclear if it influenced her ruling, Jackson had a close-up view of one of the biggest firestorms of Barr’s tenure as attorney general: his decision to overrule front-line prosecutors and effectively withdraw their recommendation of a seven-to-nine year sentence for President Donald Trump’s longtime adviser Roger Stone on charges of lying to Congress and witness tampering. Jackson — who was the judge in Stone’s trial — wasn’t openly critical of Barr’s move, but made clear in court that she believed it deviated from the administration’s stated policy on sentencing matters.
Jackson wound up sentencing Stone to three-and-a-half years in prison, but Trump commuted the sentence and eventually pardoned Stone outright.
Is it possible that somehow or the other Barr’s decisions regarding the Mueller Report will at least eventually be acknowledged as the hack decisions they were? That he will go down in history as the enabler of a useful idiot (as best) who was a disastrous threat to the security of the United States? I don’t know. Right now, it is an article of faith on the right and in some environs of the left that the Mueller investigations was bogus from the get and the gross obstruction of justice was merely understandable self-defense. I don’t know if the truth will ever be accepted by Republicans.