A Day Off? [DOT 3/7/20]

3/7/20 MegMegMcGee 32

It’s Friday!! Good job you guys, you made it. And if you’re really lucky (like me), you have the day off work to celebrate Independence Day.

However, we do not get a day off from the world at large, unfortunately.

Let’s check out the fireworks, shall we?

I know Rip has some Opinions with a capital O on this topic, so I’ll leave it to him to expound later.

Ghislaine Maxwell, longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, charged in sex abuse case
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/ghislaine-maxwell-arrested-jeffrey-epstein/2020/07/02/20c74502-bc69-11ea-8cf5-9c1b8d7f84c6_story.html

Ghislaine Maxwell appears in court charged with aiding Epstein’s sex crimes
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/02/ghislaine-maxwell-arrest-jeffrey-epstein-charges-latest-fbi

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Why is this even an option?

‘Don’t come down to the Mall’: Officials urge caution over holiday weekend as virus cases flatline in D.C. region
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/coronavirus-dc-maryland-virginia/2020/07/02/f0c191f2-bc57-11ea-8cf5-9c1b8d7f84c6_story.html

Shady as hell.

CIA official chose not to tell Trump of Russia bounty report, top adviser claims
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/01/cia-official-trump-russia-bounty-robert-o-brien

#RIP

Hugh Downs, omnipresent television broadcaster, dies at 99
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/hugh-downs-omnipresent-television-broadcaster-dies-at-99/2020/07/02/434557f0-bc8b-11ea-8cf5-9c1b8d7f84c6_story.html

Sprots!

Daniel Snyder now has many reasons to change the team name. So why keep it?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/07/02/dan-snyder-now-has-many-reasons-change-team-name-so-why-keep-it/

Sterling and Foden star as Manchester City rain on Liverpool’s title parade
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jul/02/manchester-city-liverpool-premier-league-match-report

Stocks! (Are closed today.)

For markets in week ahead, investors will gauge the severity of the coronavirus spread
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/for-markets-in-week-ahead-investors-will-gauge-the-severity-of-the-coronavirus-spread.html

Have a good day!

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32 Comments

  1. …I guess I kinda might have some opinions about this one, at that…but I don’t want to wind up with a comment longer than your post…so I’m going to borrow a few from some folks worth listening to

    …but what really set me off yesterday was seeing people out there trying to shill a line that Barr’s attempt to displace Berman wasn’t a run at the same play that has unaccountably (& I use the term advisedly) led to Flynn & Roger Stone essentially skating – despite the preponderance of seemingly unassailable evidence (much of it from their own mouths) that demonstrates their clear & obvious guilt – which was then stymied by a refusal to resign that ensured the post would go to his logical successor at least long enough for this case to proceed

    …according to those assholes Barr should be getting the credit for removing the guy who was blocking progress & we should all be grateful that his thirst for justice remains such a driving force in this case…I won’t go on about it ad nasuseam since it’s pretty fucking nauseating to begin with…but just in case the variously apocalyptic news cycles have helped people forget how dubious the foundations are of any claim that Barr is unbiased in the matter (no really, it’s worse than just the can’t-talk-tongue-up-orange-ass thing he generally suffers from as AG) this is a pretty decent refresher?

    The ‘Epstein-Barr’ Problem of New York City’s Dalton School

    […on a somewhat related note…asking the UK to send over Prince Andrew to answer some uncomfortable questions is a) not likely to be a sufficient reason on its own to explain why SDNY is staffing the thing out of the Public Corruption Unit rather than one more usually associated with crimes of a sexual nature…& b) would probably go down a lot better if the US coughed up Anne Sacoolas like they’ve been asking…just saying]

    • That will be ugly massively ugly. China would like to fuck with the US, but it holds a lot of US debt? How the fuck is it China’s favor to ruin the nation that sucked up a lot of Chinese wealth?

    • Thom Hartmann has been talking about his theory on his show for months.  He asks every congressman & government guests about it and most just answer, “wouldn’t put it past him”.   This gave me a little bit of a better feeling about them anticipating some of the BS that is coming but I don’t know if they have an answer for that one. 
       
      https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-campaign-readying-hundreds-of-lawyers-in-expansive-vote-protection-effort/ar-BB16h2g0
       

      • …I still haven’t adjusted to the fact they no longer post podcasts under the Mueller She Wrote title but the hosts of those have been saying for a long time now that the key is “vote – & in numbers too big to manipulate”

        …so anything that stops them skimming any of those votes into the discard column I’m pretty sure I’m all in favor of?

    • The biggest issue I see with this theory is that Trump is a coward. It’s one of his most defined characteristics.
       
      That’s not to say that I don’t think Donald Trump will make a big fucking fuss about how he got screwed. That’s to be expected. But there’s just no mechanism in the Constitution that would allow Trump to remain President any longer than January. On Inauguration Day, he ceases to be President. Period. The Secret Service would no longer be required to protect him, he wouldn’t have access to the nuclear launch codes, his staff would be kicked out. He’d literally have no power whatsoever.
       
      If we can posit that we think that Donald Trump only wants to stay President because he wants to avoid getting arrested, it’s easy to extrapolate that he wouldn’t want to get arrested for staying in the White House either. And Joe Biden has been all but gleeful in the suggestion that he’d have Donald Trump forcibly removed with the White House if it came down to it.
       
      What is far more likely to happen is not Trump refusing to leave office and sending the country into chaos, upending our entire political system and bringing us one step closer to the end times. It’s Trump losing, him making a big fucking fuss over how he loss, threatening to get lawyers involved, launching a million bullshit investigations…and then leaving anyway because he doesn’t want this fucking job anyway. His cadre of simpletons will manage to convince Trump to go through the motions of a peaceful transition, and that will be that.
       
      If he doesn’t, he’ll end up leaving the White House in handcuffs. It’s pretty simple. Again, there’s nothing in the Constitution that states Trump has to concede, and nothing in the Constitution that gives him anything roughly approximating indefinite power just because he refuses to leave office. When the bell tolls at midnight on Inauguration Day, Trump is done. Finished. Period.
       
      And given how fast he’s shedding supporters with everyone except the hardest of the hardcore members of his base, there isn’t going to be a giant uprising over it either. Trump’s supporters finally got their glorious “race war” when people flooded the streets to protest BLM and all they did was stay the fuck home and write on Twitter and Facebook about it. They, like Trump, are cowards. 
       
      And as they did when George W. Bush left office after two disastrous terms, and McCain and Romney’s failed attempts to take down Obama, Trump’s supporters will simply pretend they never liked him that much to begin with, and that he’s not worth fighting for, because he’s a losing ass loser who lost. 
       
      People are fearful for this shit and I’m over here feeling like I must be in an alternate universe. Trump is a wuss, he’s always been a wuss, always will be a wuss, and as a wuss he’ll slink out of office and start crowing about how he’s going to buy OAN or whatever.

        • Those scenarios are basically about what if the GOP short circuits existing procedures and tries to force the issue to whatever other path works for them.
           
          Which is certainly theoretically possible. I think if they tried, they would basically have a million people besieging the White House, Capitol and Supreme Court, and probably whatever sites in the state capitols where they trying to rig things.
           
          At which point, we’d be in Death of Stalin territory. Obviously nothing is impossible, but I don’t think we’d go there. The most likely case would be razor thin margins in multiple states, which is possible, of course. But I don’t think it is likely if Trump continues to poll badly — McConnell is reportedly preparing to give at risk Senators the freedom to attack Trump in August if the polling doesn’t improve, and I think they are shifting their thinking toward repeating the 2009-10 attack plan in 2021.

      • …personally, it’s not so much that I fear he’d have the testicular fortitude to actually outstay his term…or that he wouldn’t want to cut his losses & find another way to cover his ass as far as the litany of charges that ought to drop on him once he’s out of office are concerned

        …I fear he aims to go back to plan A…that he’ll still be all over twitter &/or OAN (or his own network) & treating the thing like he’s the Svengali that can still whip up “the faithful” & fuck up whatever his replacement might try to do by providing the GOP with something akin to a force multiplier in Overton window terms…partly to sabotage the people he thinks of as having done him wrong because he really is that much of a fucking childish asshole…but also to keep the GOP in his corner when it comes to helping him skate on those charges

        …so he’d still be doing a lot of the more visible (to his chosen audience) stuff he’s doing now…which is basically to try to burn the system to the ground rather than face the music & get cheered on by assholes & morons alike as he does it…who he can continue to bilk for cash the way he always planned to…& if he can preload that with a bunch of crap about the election being illegitimate nothing about him suggests to me that he wouldn’t

        …& while I don’t think there’s any reasonable way for that to go entirely the way he’d like, either…I dread the possibility that even some of it might?

        I continue to be staggered by the degree to which he makes Nixon look like a man of honour & principles…even if he occupied 10% of the real estate he currently does in the media landscape he’d be a genuine threat to more than I care to imagine…& that’s a plausible probability for anything from months to years beyond next January…at least from where I sit?

        • I definitely don’t think he is smart enough to come up with any of this plan on his own but Bill Barr was brought in specifically to pull this kind of shit.  Trump’s ego will not allow him to acknowledge that he lost an election.  The rest of the Trump Cult will not tell him he lost and get the fuck out.  They will all do the only thing the GOP does well, scream and shout that the other side is doing exactly what you just did, cheat.  I will be ecstatic if I am wrong but this cult that is willing to let 100,000’s of people die, make our country look like a third world country, and believe that God wants them to keep power can NEVER be trusted to do the right thing. They also know that if they lose power now they have very little hope of getting it back again with the changes in the country’s demographics.   

    • The other part of this that doesn’t jive with me (sorry, I know I’m ranting a lot ) is that…all this talk presumes that Trump is a master manipulator that has already cast the die and has the kind of foresight to stage a massive coup of the entire United States government…but Trump has shown literally zero ability to think that far ahead.
       
      Trump can’t even articulate a vision of a second term to Sean fuckin’ Hannity. The most he’s been able to cobble together for why he should ge re-elected is “something something experience”. Trump doesn’t seem to know what he would do if he even got elected to a second term, but he’s concocted a Machiavellian supervillian plot that requires intimate knowledge of how all three branches of the government work?
       
      Let’s not forget that Trump’s surrogates frequently have to explain simple, basic shit about how government works to Trump, and that nine times out of ten he barely listens or hears any of it. This is the man who allegedly needs pictures in his daily briefs to keep him interested. This is a man who had to issue his Muslim Ban executive order three times before any of them stuck. This is a man who didn’t know that Germany was a nuclear power. A man who is repeatedly flustered by the thought that Presidency doesn’t allow him to act unilaterally. A man who didn’t understand why we couldn’t just nuke other countries, or that tariffs placed on foreign goods just get passed onto American consumers, or that he can’t just ask numerous other countries to openly interfere in elections.
       
      Trump isn’t just an idiot; he’s an idiot who’s unwilling to learn anything about how any of this shit works, who frequently steps on rakes and owns himself on things that would be so fucking simple to get easy points on. And that guy is going to mastermind a conspiracy to keep him in office?
       
      And even if he didn’t mastermind himself and one of the other ghouls in his administration came up with it…I mean, is there a single human being in the Trump administration you think could not only come up with that idea, but then sell it to Trump in a way that he wouldn’t almost immediately fuck up? The man has either fired or forced out anyone in his administration that would have that kind of insight into the political process.
       
      I think this is a case of us giving Trump too much credit again instead of taking him for what he is. He’s all instinct and no thought process, all talk and no fucking brains.
       
      We not to stop with this shit where we make Trump out to be better than he is when he continuously shows us how fucking stupid he is.

  4. Coincidence that Maxwell chose this exact time, when Barr removed Berman in an attempt to replace him with a trump pal, to return to the US where she was wanted? 

    • It’s shady AF. Though I vaguely remember reading about her staying with some boyfriend in New Hampshire like a year ago. So it’s not some mystery where she’s been all this time. I’d got back and look for it, but I’m off today yo! 

      • I suppose she could have been there all along and not in France as was speculated. Still, I’m guessing she’s had some contact with Barr or another trump toady.

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