Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op- eds.

Gee, we never saw this coming:

President Donald Trump said Monday after speaking with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman that “rogue killers” may be responsible for the mysterious disappearance of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 

″I just spoke with the King of Saudi Arabia who denies any knowledge of what took place with regard to, as he said, his ‘Saudi Arabian citizen,’” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn. “He firmly denied that.”  

Trump added: “Maybe these could have been rogue killers. Who knows."

To anyone who thought there would be any action coming from this utterly compromi$ed a$$hole:  we have some primo Saudi Arabian sand we'll sell you so you can go pound it.

Todd Purdum writes about Donald "Rump" Trump (a.k.a. Dolt 45) as "the man who isn't there," when it comes to his family or the national "family":

It is a poignant paradox of Donald Trump’s ubiquitous presidency—all tweets, all the time—that a leader who prides himself as omnipresent in digital public discourse is so often absent from national life in the hundred human ways in which the country has come to expect its presidents to perform. 

Latest case in point: After Hurricane Michael devastated parts of Florida’s Panhandle, Trump played host at the White House to Kanye West, who—in a ten-minute monologue in the Oval Office—dropped the F-bomb and praised Trump’s “Make American Great Again” cap as a hyper-masculine talisman that made him feel “like a guy that could play catch with his son.” 

But think about it: Have we ever seen Trump play catch with his own 12-year-old son, Barron? Without question, the president dotes on his children, especially his daughter, Ivanka. But he's an absentee father to the nation, or at least a majority of the nation. There have been no warm and fuzzy photos of Trump shopping for books or gifts, as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton did with their daughters. No images of him poring over a photo album, as Abraham Lincoln famously did with his son Tad, or tending to his stamp collection, as FDR did.  No visible evidence of the easy relaxation with friends and family that has become a standard part of presidential iconography.

He also spent his 210th day as "president" golfing while Hurricane Michael victims were trying to cope with that disaster. What more does one expect of a narcissistic sociopath?

Surprise!  Princeling Jared "Mr. Ivanka Trump" Kushner paid no Federal income tax for several years running:

Over the past decade, Jared Kushner’s family company has spent billions of dollars buying real estate. His personal stock investments have soared. His net worth has quintupled to almost $324 million. 

And yet, for several years running, Mr. Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser — appears to have paid almost no federal income taxes, according to confidential financial documents reviewed by The New York Times. 

His low tax bills are the result of a common tax-minimizing maneuver that, year after year, generated millions of dollars in losses for Mr. Kushner, according to the documents. But the losses were only on paper — Mr. Kushner and his company did not appear to actually lose any money. The losses were driven by depreciation, a tax benefit that lets real estate investors deduct a portion of the cost of their buildings from their taxable income every year.  (our emphasis)

That's a tax "benefit" that a Democratic Congress and future Democratic president need to close up real tight.

Gabrielle Gurley discusses transportation hurdles as a Republican voter suppression tactic (and what some jurisdictions are doing):

Some urban and suburban voters can experience polling place access challenges that affect turnout if they live in areas underserved by transit or are plagued by traffic congestion. Rural voters often have higher turnout rates, since traffic is not a factor in getting to a polling place—provided they own a vehicle. 

Lining up reliable transportation on Election Day matters because the votes add up. The harder it is to get to a polling place, the fewer people turn out to vote. A 2011 UC Berkeley study found that the consolidation of Los Angeles County polling places for the 2003 gubernatorial recall election produced a hefty drop in turnout in part because of transportation challenges. 

The highest transportation hurdles emerge from deliberate strategies to keep people from voting. In the voter-suppression canon, deterring a few hundred people can make all the difference in the world in determining who controls government and who doesn’t. Republican local and state officials work overtime to increase the transportation headaches of young people, the elderly, African Americans, Latinos, and others who want to vote.  (our emphasis)

Charles Pierce on the latest Republican/ Fox "News" GOTV fear- mongering about imaginary "mobs" of Democrats (a.k.a., people standing up for their rights), and how "mobs" played a critical role in the genesis of our country:

I've been thinking a lot about mobs recently. The word's been getting tossed around a lot these days, mostly by Republicans, who were inconvenienced over one weekend in their attempt to put a credible accused sex offender, and the Edward Scissorhands of the topiary of the truth, on the Supreme Court. The word is being tossed around even by the president*, who's been entertaining mobs ever since he rode down the golden escalator in 2015, and by his mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani, who once ginned up a police mob to intimidate the sitting mayor of New York City. 

An endless stream of Republican coat holders, hangers-on, cabana boys, and congressmen, but I repeat myself, have shown up on TV and in back of podiums talking about the angry mobs of women that made it hard for them to get to the cafeteria. And I was thinking how similar it was to this earlier exercise of mob rule.  

Dolt 45's slur of Sen. Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestry blows up.  Now we demand to see evidence that he doesn't have orangutan genes (and that he not renege on his pledge to donate $1 million to charity if proven wrong -- yeah, that'll be the day):

Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test that provides “strong evidence’’ she had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations, an unprecedented move by one of the top possible contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. 

Warren, whose claims to Native American blood have been mocked by President Trump and other Republicans, provided the test results to the Globe on Sunday in an effort to defuse questions about her ancestry that have persisted for years. She planned an elaborate rollout Monday of the results as she aimed for widespread attention. 

The analysis of Warren’s DNA was done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship, also known as a genius grant, for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis. 

You can check out Sen. Warren's video response here.  Meanwhile, someone who is intimately familiar with junk, gutter snipe and human canker sore Kellyanne "Con" Conway, is inferring Warren's DNA test is "junk science." They never stop, and neither should we.

Finally, we end with our weekly recommendation to check out the link round- up at Infidel 753. Always an interesting place to spend some time.