Trump Floats Election Delay Shiny Object

Today's distracting, shiny object from a lying shitgibbon who knows he's going to get buried in the November election:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020

A law on the books since January 23, 1845, tends to differ.  The Great Depression, World War II, 60's civil unrest, etc., also tend to differ on being able holding elections in extraordinarily difficult times.  The Twitterverse reacted with appropriate anger but no great surprise at this latest attempt at distraction/ subversion.  Even one of the Trumpiest Republican Senators quashed the idea within hours. (Others, not so much.)

So, no, the idea may bounce around in Trump's empty, fevered head for a while, but there's going to be an election on November 3 come hell or high water.

So, let's stay vigilant but move on.

A Government Of One

With the confirmation that, after days of evasion, loathsome Secretary of State Smug Mike Pompeo, did indeed sit in on the infamous call between Donald "The Chosen One" Trump and the president of Ukraine, the Washington Post takes a moment to reflect on the ever- clearer turn toward authoritarianism by the Trump regime, specifically it's bending of executive agencies to the will of The Chosen One:

The Justice Department has prioritized a probe that the president hopes will discredit a finding by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help him win. As part of that effort, Attorney General William P. Barr has met overseas with foreign intelligence officials to enlist their aid in “investigating the investigators,” as the right’s rallying cry goes, and dig into the president’s suspicions.

The State Department, meanwhile, has been investigating the email records of as many as 130 current and former department officials who sent messages to the private email account of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Trump’s 2016 opponent. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defied Congress on Tuesday by attempting to block the depositions of five department employees called to testify in the impeachment inquiry.  [snip]

“Barr and Pompeo are stuck in the fog machine. They seem captives of the president’s perverse worldview,” said Timothy Naftali, a historian and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “Authoritarian regimes have this problem all the time . . . when all government activity is the product of the id of the leader. But in a republic, that’s unusual.” [snip]

... Trump’s moves represent a fundamental reorientation of American democracy, said Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of “On Tyranny,” a resistance guide to what he describes as America’s turn toward authoritarianism.

“Rather than having the boring system we take for granted, where you have laws based on facts, instead you have a personality who makes up his own reality,” Snyder said. “At first, that reality is just confusing and seems to gum up the works, but after a while, the leader starts to draw people into that reality by making them defend it or making them prove it. This is what’s happening here.”

This passed norm- busting years ago.  As Snyder says, it's a fundamental reorientation of American democracy.   Fighting back against this is an all hands on deck effort by every citizen who values the rule of law.

As far as Pompeo and fellow co- conspirator AG William "Low" Barr go, they're not to be seen as victims of Trump's mania, but rather as cynical enablers and enthusiastic messengers. They're true believers who bubbled up from the miasma of the ultra- right (Pompeo from the tea bagger movement and Barr from the Iran-Contra coverup and radical Opus Dei Catholic movement). Trump is the vessel to achieve their ends, so they're willing and active co- conspirators in his corruption and authoritarian actions.

A Day In The Life

A brief, incomplete digest of just one day's worth of Trump's dystopian, brainless authoritarianism.

"Break the law! Take the land!":

President Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.

He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.  (our emphasis)

"Suck on it, hurricane victims!":

The Trump administration is pulling $271 million in funding from the Department of Homeland Security, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Disaster Relief Fund, to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum-seekers who have been forced to wait in Mexico, according to department officials and a letter sent to the agency by a California congresswoman.

To fund temporary locations for court hearings for asylum-seekers along the southern border, ICE would gain $155 million, all from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, according to the letter from Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., which was seen by NBC News. (our emphasis)

"Clear-cut the motherf*cker!":

President Trump has instructed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Alaska’s 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions imposed nearly 20 years ago, according to three people briefed on the issue, after privately discussing the matter with the state’s governor aboard Air Force One.

The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it to potential logging, energy and mining projects. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the “roadless rule,” which has survived a decades-long legal assault.

Trump has taken a personal interest in “forest management,” a term he told a group of lawmakers last year he has “redefined” since taking office. (Ed.: by "forest management," he means "raking.")  (our emphasis)

"I'm the best negotiator!":

BEIJING - President Trump may think he’s keeping Chinese negotiators guessing with his whiplash-inducing remarks about the U.S.-China trade war.

But he’s not fooling anyone here.

More than a year into the deepening commercial conflict, Chinese officials and analysts say they’ve got a handle on the tweeter-in-chief and are no longer fazed by his unpredictable initiatives.

“There is a lot of fatigue with President Trump’s ‘art of the deal,’ ” said Wang Huiyao, president of the Center for China and Globalization and an adviser to China’s cabinet. [snip]

Trump’s claim to have the upper hand at the negotiating table does not appear to have convinced the Chinese.

“They’ve decided Trump is a vacillating guy who can’t figure out what he wants and gets spooked every time the stock market goes down or someone accuses him of not being tough,” said Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Gavekal Dragonomics, a consultancy in Beijing. “Although there are problems in China, they believe they have their economy under control, more so than Trump. They think he is more vulnerable to a slowdown and that they can afford to wait him out.”  (our emphasis)

Rest assured, tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, there'll be more because this is the worst reality TV show we've ever lived through.

Monday Reading

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

Several writers discuss the drift toward authoritarianism by neo- fascist nitwit Donald "Rump" Trump, starting with E.J. Dionne, Jr.:

The past week has shown that those who feared Trump’s despotic inclinations were neither deluded nor alarmist. His shameful indifference to the killing and dismembering of the Saudi journalist and Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi was an act of cold collaboration with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s coverup. [snip] 

On the same day Trump was standing in solidarity with a regime implicated in assassination, the New York Times reported that the president told White House counsel Donald McGahn this spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and former FBI director James B. Comey. 

McGahn held Trump off, but nothing could be more autocratic than proposing to corrupt the criminal-justice system by weaponizing it against political opponents.

Karen Tumulty focuses on the appointment of Rump stooge Matthew Whitaker as "Acting Attorney General following the revelations about Rump wanting to prosecute Clinton and Comey:

The presidency is an institution invested with enormous power and enormous leeway for how to use that power. Trump’s two years in office have revealed how few legal and political tools there are for curbing a chief executive who does not feel constrained by norms — or, for that matter, by shame, ethical standards or fear of public backlash. 

Nowhere is the potential for overreach more dangerous, however, than in the application of our laws. Using that power to reward friends and punish adversaries marks the dividing line where a president becomes a tyrant — and it is one that Trump seems determined to cross.  (our emphasis)

The more he feels threatened, the closer we are to him crossing that line.  We each need to be prepared to do what our consciences tell us to do when that time comes.

You know who else has been emboldened by Rump's kowtow to Sawdi Crown Prince Bone Saw?

Russian warships seized three Ukrainian naval vessels on Sunday in a narrow waterway that provides access from the Black Sea to the much smaller Sea of Azov near Crimea, ramping up already bitter tensions between the two countries. 

On Sunday, Russia dispatched warplanes to patrol the area after the Ukrainian navy tried to send the ships through the Kerch Strait, a waterway with strategic significance for both countries that passes under a newly built Russian bridge. 

In May, President Vladimir Putin personally opened the bridge over the Kerch Strait, connecting the Crimea peninsula — which Moscow seized in 2014 — to Russia's mainland. 

The 12-mile-long span has been touted by Russia as a claim to Crimea. Ukraine, along with nearly every other country in the world, refuses to recognize that claim. 

Russian vessels rammed one of the Ukrainian boats and opened fire on the other two before seizing all three, along with their crews. Ukrainian officials have said six of its sailors were injured; Russia has said three. The boats were towed to a nearby port.

Putin knows full well that Puppet Rump isn't going to intervene in any meaningful way to stop Russian aggression.  The Putin Puppet will deny, delay and defuse any actions the U.S. government might take to constrain Putin's expansionist designs on Ukraine (see "Sanctions, Trump dragged kicking and screaming").  The 2016 election is the gift that keeps on giving for Putin.

On the day that the Nazi pig who killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville goes on trial, there's a WaPo analysis of global terrorism that shows, well, you probably already have guessed:

Over the past decade, attackers motivated by right-wing political ideologies have committed dozens of shootings, bombings and other acts of violence, far more than any other category of domestic extremist, according to a Washington Post analysis of data on global terrorism. While the data show a decades-long drop-off in violence by left-wing groups, violence by white supremacists and other far-right attackers has been on the rise since Barack Obama’s presidency — and has surged since President Trump took office. 

This year has been especially deadly.Just last month, 13 people died in two incidents: A Kentucky gunman attempted to enter a historically black church, police say, then shot and killed two black patrons in a nearby grocery store. And an anti-Semitic loner who had expressed anger about a caravan of Central American refugees that Trump termed an “invasion” has been charged with gunning down 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history. [snip]

Terrorism researchers say right-wing violence sprouted alongside white anxiety about Obama’s presidency and has accelerated in the Trump era. Trump and his aides have continuously denied that he has contributed to the rise in violence. But experts say right-wing extremists perceive the president as offering them tacit support for their cause. (our emphasis)

"White anxiety."  So, it's not "economic anxiety" any more?

We close with our usual recommendation to check out Infidel 753's outstanding link round- up.  Among our many favorites, check out the slingshot (that's all we're saying -- you have to go find it!).

"This Is What A Constitutional Crisis Looks Like"

The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2018

Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added...does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 18, 2018

Mark Sumner at Daily Kos reacts:

What does a constitutional crisis look like? If you’re waiting for the the secret police to come knocking on your door, or the maybe a few tanks in the streets, or perhaps a few of the more vocal people around you to suddenly disappear, that’s not it. That’s not the crisis. That’s what comes after. 

The constitutional crisis comes when an authoritarian leader demeans the free press and the judicial system. It comes when that leader destroys the ability of the judicial system to act as a check on his actions. It comes when the legislature surrenders it’s authority. It comes … already. The constitutional crisis isn’t something that’s looming in the future, not even the near future. It’s here. We’re in the midst of it. This is what it looks like.

Make no mistake.  This is all prelude to firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller before he can implode the entire Trump criminal enterprise and expose the hold Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin has on him. The signs this is coming are unmistakable. Be prepared to act.

Nobody is above the law.  

"Lock Her Up," Russian-Style

Earlier today, Russian police detained Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny after he appeared at a rally in Moscow to urge people to boycott the March elections that autocratic Russian thug Vladimir Putin is expected to win. Putin has held power for 18 years. The crowd of several hundred had been shouting anti-Putin slogans, including "Putin is a thief," before police broke up what they claimed was an "illegal" protest. Navalny had just arrived in Pushkin Square when he was jumped by uniformed police, who forced him to the pavement before hauling him off in a police vehicle.

At the same time as the Moscow protests, several hundred people protested in cities across Russia, with some 180 protesters detained by police. Putin is fearful of a recurrence of last year's protests:

"Navalny emerged as a threat to the Kremlin’s tight grip on power on June 12 last year, when thousands of his followers defied police prohibitions to protest in cities across Russia. The scale of the protests, some of the biggest in six years, took the Kremlin by surprise."

Putin clearly doesn't want to be surprised in the March elections. This is what an America under an unfettered demagogue and autocrat like Donald "Rump" Trump would look like. It's no surprise that Rump admires Putin as a "strong" leader, unbound by messy things like the rule of law and democracy. It's no surprise, either, that he wanted to jail Secretary Clinton if elected. It's what dictators like his role model "leader" Putin do.

(photo: Putin in the good old days)

Trump Needs To Go - Exhibit 238,954

The dangerously unhinged buffoon is making dangerously unhinged threats again:

James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

Read this tweet again & process the fact that almost no one who voted for this man regrets it in the slightest. And no GOPer will stop him. https://t.co/dKfJZttCtw

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) May 12, 2017

I hope someone is talking to hardscrabble blue collar workers about how threatening the former FBI director will bring jobs back.

— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) May 12, 2017

The danger level of Trump's presidency has just accelerated rapidly. https://t.co/ylUs6UpAZV pic.twitter.com/RDEJwnm6yg

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) May 12, 2017

Trump's words and actions since day 1 have screamed "consciousness of guilt," and this is just one more example of that.

This is all normal behavior, of course.

Empowering Bullies In Trump's America (UPDATED)

It appears the inner Himmlers of some U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers have been unleashed for some unknown and completely inexplicable reason.  Here are a few examples rounded up by Dana Milbank:

You can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, but you can’t come in if your name is Ali. 

That’s the way it was looking for Muhammad Ali Jr., son of the late boxing legend, when he returned home to the United States last month from a black-history event in Jamaica. Ali, who is American born and an American citizen, was detained for hours by Customs and Border Protection and interrogated about being a Muslim.  

But if border officials have gained newfound zealotry under President Trump, they appear to have lost all sense of irony. Also last month, they detained Australian Mem Fox, who writes children’s books about — wait for it — tolerance and acceptance. She told the Guardian that she was treated with “shocking insolence” and “monstrous” and “horrible” behavior by people “gone mad.” 

Henry Rousso knows about monstrous and horrible: He’s a leading French scholar on the Vichy regime and its collaboration with Nazi Germany. And Rousso, an Egyptian-born Jew, said he was detained for more than 10 hours after arriving in America last month to give a lecture. “The United States is no longer quite the United States,” Rousso wrote in the French Huffington Post.  (our emphasis)

Then there were these folks caught in a CBP dragnet:

The detention of a former prime minister of Norway coming for the National Prayer Breakfast. 

CBP requiring identification from all passengers arriving in New York on a domestic flight. 

An undocumented woman seeking a protection order against her boyfriend arrested in the courthouse by immigration officials. 

A NASA scientist, an American-born citizen, detained and directed to turn over his phone. 

Canadians alleging they were turned away at the U.S. border after telling U.S. officials that they were coming to participate in anti-Trump protests. 

A British Muslim schoolteacher traveling to New York with a group of children ordered off a plane on instructions from U.S. authorities. 

Then there's the story of Celestine Omin, a software engineer from Nigeria who was detained for several hours because, well, you know =cough= Nigeria =cough=:

It was Sunday, Feb. 26, and the 28-year-old software engineer had left his home in Lagos, Nigeria, to come to the United States for the first time. It was a work trip. For the last six months, Omin had been working for Andela, a startup that connects the top tech talent in Africa with employers in the U.S. Andela accepts less than 1% of applicants into its program and is backed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. For this particular role, Omin was helping NYC-based fintech startup First Access create a JavaScript application for emerging markets and had secured a short-term joint B1/B2 visa. 

After landing, Omin waited for 20 minutes and then reached the front of the line, where a Customs and Border Protection officer asked him a series of questions. It was here that Omin realized that the job might be challenging, but getting into America could now be impossible. No one at Andela had prepared him for the new reality.

After a few minutes of grilling him about the job, the border agent escorted Omin into a small room and told him to sit down. Another hour passed before a different customs officer came in. (our emphasis)

(In our fantasy world, Omin would have told the interrogators to "byte me.")

Go to the link above to find out how the crack CBP interrogators finally determined Omin might be okay to let into the US of A (but they were still suspicious!).  It'll make you proud of American genius at work.

As far as the seeming increase in these "aggressive" tactics by the CBP folks?

[I]t appears that border officers, feeling emboldened by Trump, are taking it on themselves to act more aggressively. 

And where would they get such an idea? Well, perhaps from the president’s tweet saying “I have instructed Homeland Security to check people coming into our country VERY CAREFULLY.” Or White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s claim that Trump wants to “take the shackles off” deportation officials.  (our emphasis)

The President's national security actions vill not be kvestioned!  

Most of us have had experiences with good law enforcement and bad. As with any other profession, there are some people who have no business being in law enforcement because they see it as an opportunity to grind axes or simply feel powerful. We don't know about you, but these anecdotes seem more to be examples of empowered bullies than trained officers doing their jobs professionally. But maybe empowered bullies will become the rule rather than the exception in an America with a bully as the "president."

UPDATE:  It's not just the boys at CBP;  there are some real hard asses (emphasis on "asses") at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Trumpers Shut Out "Opposition" Media At Press Briefing

In a crude, rinky- dink authoritarian gesture intended to intimidate, silence and delegitimatize media criticism of their ongoing shitshow, several news organizations were prohibited from a White (supremacist) House briefing today:

The New York Times and CNN, both of which have reported critically on the administration and are frequent targets of President Donald Trump, were prohibited from attending. The Huffington Post was also denied entry.  [Ed.: as was the Los Angeles Times and Politico]

Both the Associated Press and Time magazine, which were allowed to enter, boycotted out of solidarity with those news organizations kept out. 

Just who, then, was invited?

The White House also invited journalists from conservative outlets such as Breitbart News, The Washington Times and One American News Network, sparking concerns that the administration was playing favorites with certain politically aligned outlets.

This behavior on the part of the little Goebbels in the Press Office tells us that, as part of the "media is the opposition party" strategy of real President Steve "Loose Cannon" Bannon, the goal is to delegitimatize those who eventually will be bringing to light the facts of neo- fascist Putin poodle Donald "Rump" Trump's treasonous ties to the Kremlin. It's the old Nixonian "modified limited hangout" strategy updated and pre- weaponized for today's foaming- at- the- mouth right wing media machine (see paragraph above).

A number of news organizations have responded to this strong arming tactic, as well as the White House Correspondents Association (which might see a lot of empty tables at its annual ethics challenged schmooze fest with the Stormtrumpers on April 29).  Here's CNN's response:

CNN was blocked from WH @PressSec's media gaggle today. This is our response: pic.twitter.com/8SfY2uYKEI

— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) February 24, 2017

As Masha Gessen pointed out in her prescient "Autocracy: Rules for Survival" back in November, this is straight out of the Putin playbook:

The national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims of Trumpism. There is no law that requires the presidential administration to hold daily briefings, none that guarantees media access to the White House. Many journalists may soon face a dilemma long familiar to those of us who have worked under autocracies: fall in line or forfeit access. There is no good solution (even if there is a right answer), for journalism is difficult and sometimes impossible without access to information.

They're following the script so far.

BONUS: 

Note to media: If you’re still in the room, that means the WH approves of your tone and content. https://t.co/8neThbuR2X

— Seth Masket (@smotus) February 24, 2017

Assault On Liberty Cartoons of the Day

(click on images to enlarge)

Tom Toles, Washington Post

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A flurry of executive actions -- many of which are likely to be challenged in court -- have issued from the White House of delusional autocratic narcissist Donald "Rump" Trump. From punishing "sanctuary cities," to muzzling Government climate science findings, to manufacturing a bogus "voter fraud" effort both to cater to Rump's fragile ego and to suppress anti-Trump votes, all point to the beginning of an authoritarian regime that will curtail civil liberties (starting with the First Amendment) and quell dissent. It's a regime that must be resisted if we want our democratic republic to survive.