Saturday Reads: The Magical Mystery tour in My Right Eye

Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!

My right eye has gone on a bit of an acid flashback that the Ophthalmologist called “ocular migraines” yesterday. Basically, I get flashes now and floaters. It’s a bit like my eye should be accompanied by Pink Floyd music while a nice astrophysicist shows laser shows and a simulation of a meteor shower from the Pleides. My brain is processing it a bit better but I’m extremely tired and a bit nauseous. I was lucky to find out that nothing is wrong with my retina and I have none of the headaches typical of migraines. Mostly I feel like I don’t process information very well like I’ve got a sensory overload or something so I apologize if this is a bit short or trippy.

As you may know, I’m making small donations to folks I want to see on the debate stage. My first thank you note came yesterday from Amy Klobucher so I thought I’d share it with you. I’m trying to remain open but you’ll recall I have a few that I’m an absolute no on.

I’m not sure what my criteria is going to be but I really would like to pull a woman through and a person of color. I think it’s time we retire the likes of Bernie and Biden although I know there are actually a few good white men in the line up. I think it’s just time we start changing out the starting team to younger and more diverse thinkers.

Biden is already showing how out of touch he really as I read this headline from the NYT: “Biden Thinks Trump Is the Problem, Not All Republicans. Other Democrats Disagree.”

As Joseph R. Biden Jr. made his way across Iowa on his first trip as a 2020 presidential candidate, the former vice president repeatedly returned to one term — aberration — when he referred to the Trump presidency.

“Limit it to four years,” Mr. Biden pleaded with a ballroom crowd of 600 in the eastern Iowa city of Dubuque. “History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration.”

“This is not the Republican Party,” he added, citing his relationships with “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

There is no disagreement among Democrats about the urgency of defeating Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden’s singular focus on the president as the source of the nation’s ills, while extending an olive branch to Republicans, has exposed a significant fault line in the Democratic primary.

Democrats, like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, see the president as a symptom of something deeper, both in a Republican Party overtaken by Trumpism and a nation cleaved by partisanship. Simply ousting Mr. Trump, they tell voters, is not enough.

It’s a debate that goes beyond the policy differences separating a moderate like Mr. Biden from an insurgent like Mr. Sanders, elevating questions about whether the old rules of inside-the-Beltway governance still apply. And it has thrown into stark relief one of the fundamental questions facing the Democratic electorate: Do Democrats want a bipartisan deal-maker promising a return to normalcy, or a partisan warrior offering more transformative change?

So, I really could spend the afternoon screaming wtf is transformative about Sad Old Man Sanders but I won’t. I’ll just conclude that Biden totally missed what the Republican Party did to President Obama while he was his Vice President.

Max Boot writes this at WAPO this morning: “This nation is at the mercy of a criminal administration”.

Imagine that you live in a town that has been taken over by gangsters. The mayor is a crook and so are the district attorney and police chief. You can’t fight city hall. But at least you know you can turn for help to the state or federal government. Now imagine that it’s not a city or state that has been taken over by criminals — it’s the federal government. Where do you turn for help? That is not a theoretical concern. After the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report, it’s our grim reality.

Even before Mueller’s probe ended, federal prosecutors in New York had implicated President Trump in ordering his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to violate federal campaign finance laws. Mueller then documented at least six ironclad incidents of obstruction of justice by Trump along with numerous instances of misconduct that, while not criminal, are definitely impeachable. The New York Review of Books reported that two prosecutors working for Mueller said that if Trump weren’t president, he would have been indicted.

Now the administration is obstructing attempts to bring the president to justice for obstruction of justice. William P. Barr isn’t the attorney general; he is, as David Rothkopf said, the obstructor general. We now know that Mueller wrote (in Barr’s description) a “snitty” letter objecting that Barr’s deceptive summary of his work, designed to falsely exonerate Trump, “threatens to undermine … public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

Yet when Barr testified to Congress after receiving the Mueller letter but before releasing the Mueller report, he claimed not to know whether Mueller disagreed with his conclusions. “He lied to Congress,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) charged. But even if it could be proved that Barr committed perjury (no sure thing), who would prosecute him? Is he (or his deputy) going to appoint a special counsel to investigate himself? Unlikely. And if he did appoint a special counsel, would he heed the counsel’s conclusions? Also unlikely.

Barr’s jaw-dropping performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday dispelled any lingering confidence in the impartial administration of justice — the bedrock of our republic. He actually testified that if the president feels an investigation is unfounded, he “does not have to sit there constitutionally and allow it to run its course. The president could terminate the proceeding and it would not be a corrupt intent because he was being falsely accused.” Given that no president has ever felt justly accused of any misconduct, this means that the president is above the law. Barr is endorsing the Nixon doctrine: “Well, when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Today in History:

Well, that fits with the acid flashback party my right eye is having. This is an open thread.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?