Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin today. What is happening in U.S. politics right now is beyond anything we have ever experienced as a country, with the exception of the Civil War.
A former president of the U.S. tried to overthrow his own government in order to prevent a transition to a new president after he lost an election. He incited an attempted coup; and when that failed, he tried to overthrow the results of presidential votes in several states.
Finally, when all that failed to keep him in office, he stole hundreds of government documents and stored them in his private club in locations in which all kinds of people could have access to them. He displayed some of the documents to people without clearance to see them and, for all we know, could have given classified information to other countries.
It’s simply breathtaking.
Now the former president has been indicted for serious crimes, and his political party is still supporting him and vowing revenge on our most important institutions. Could it get any worse? The answer is yes, of course it could. He could end up winning his party’s 2024 nomination and being elected president again, even if he is in prison by that time.
So that’s where we stand right now. I’ll share some reads, but there is no way I have the time or space to include everything that’s out there.
I think this description of the situation we are in by Tom Nichols at The Atlantic is very good. I could only read it in my email, because I’m not a subscriber. The title: Trump’s Indictment Reveals a National-Security Nightmare.
The charges—38 of them—are a big deal. And before the GOP gaslighting reaches supernova levels, let’s also bear in mind that what Trump actually did is a big deal too. He claimed that he declassified, by fiat, boxes of classified information, and then appears to have left all of that material sitting in ballrooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms. To this day, he insists that he had every right to do whatever he wanted with America’s secrets. Fortunately, the court has unsealed the indictment, because Americans need to know, and care, about the magnitude of Trump’s alleged offenses.
To understand the severity of the charges against Trump, consider a thought experiment: Imagine that Vladimir Putin is one day driven from the Kremlin, perhaps in a coup or in the face of a popular revolt. He jumps into his limousine and heads for self-imposed exile in a remote dacha. His trunk is full of secret documents that he decided belong to him, including details of the Russian nuclear deterrent and Russia’s military weaknesses.
Now imagine how valuable those boxes would be to any intelligence organization in the world. I spent the early years of my career analyzing Soviet and Russian documents as an academic Sovietologist, and I would have loved to see such materials. Small, seemingly trivial details—something as innocuous as a desk calendar or a notepad—might not mean much to a layperson, but to a professional, they could be pure gold. To get even a peek at such Russian materials would be an intelligence triumph.
By Timothy Adams Matthews
But of course, I would never have been able to lay my hands on them, because a cache of such immense importance, if U.S. operatives spirited any of it out of Russia, would have been secured in a vault somewhere deep in the CIA. Trump, meanwhile, left highly sensitive American documents lying around at a golf resort like practice balls on the driving range. According to the indictment:
“The Mar-a-Lago Club was an active social club, which, between January 2021 and August 2022, hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests. After TRUMP’s presidency, The Mar-a-Lago Club was not an authorized location for the storage, possession, review, display, or discussion of classified documents. Nevertheless, TRUMP stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club—including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.”
Actually, it might be harder to steal practice balls. “The Storage Room,” the indictment notes, “was near the liquor supply closet, linen room, lock shop, and various other rooms.” These are not exactly low-traffic areas. Worse yet, the indictment asserts that Trump had some of these documents at his club in New Jersey, where he showed files to people who had no business seeing them. (One of them, according to the indictment, was something Trump claimed was a plan of attack on a foreign country prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official.)
If you can access The Atlantic website, you can read more, but I think that is a good summary of the seriousness of what this country is facing.
Here are a some long reads that address various aspects of the Trump indictment and it’s possible effects on U.S. politics and national security.
One of my least favorite New York Times writers, Peter Baker, evaluates what the indictment means for President Biden and the U.S. justice system: Trump’s Case Puts the Justice System on Trial, in a Test of Public Credibility. Why am I not surprised that this is what Baker chose to write about? Still, it’s worth considering.
Classified documents found in a shower. A clumsy effort to move boxes and hide them from the FBI. A damaging admission, caught on tape. And Donald Trump’s own public statements, used against him.
Those are some of the details in the indictment charging Trump and a longtime aide with an extraordinary scheme to hoard national secrets that Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving the White House.
Here are some of the most notable revelations.
By Timothy Adam Matthews
Showing off military plans
On at least two occasions after leaving office, Trump displayed classified documents to others visiting him at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the indictment alleges. In July 2021, Trump showed a writer, a publisher and two staff members a “plan of attack” that he said had been prepared for him by the U.S. military, the charges say. The audio-recorded meeting reportedly involved a document that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley drafted about Iran.
Trump allegedly made a potentially damning admission at that session, saying he could have declassified the document while he was president but “now I can’t.”
A longtime aide turned co-conspirator
Trump isn’t the only person facing criminal charges over the classified documents fiasco: His longtime aide and “body man,” Walt Nauta, was also hit with six felony counts including obstruction of justice and making false statements to the FBI. The indictment says Trump instructed Nauta to move boxes containing classified documents in order to conceal them from both Trump’s own lawyers and the FBI.
Prosecutors accused Nauta of lying months ago and pressured him to cooperate in the investigation, a source familiar with the situation told POLITICO, but the charges unsealed Friday indicate that he and prosecutors didn’t come to terms on a deal – at least not yet.
Classified docs in a bathroom
The indictment says that Mar-a-Lago was a particularly vulnerable location for the classified documents because it’s “an active social club [that] hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests” – a far cry from the closely guarded “sensitive compartmented information facility,” or SCIF, that is typically used to store the most sensitive national security secrets.
Trump has railed at the FBI for spreading classified documents across the floor of a closet during a search of Mar-a-Lago last August. But prosecutors say Trump’s own storage of the documents was just as sloppy. The indictment says some of the classified records at Mar-a-Lago were stored in “a ballroom, a bathroom and shower [and] his bedroom.”
Spilling secrets, literally
Other details from the indictment emphasize the haphazard nature with which sensitive government documents were strewn around the estate. The indictment alleges that, on at least one occasion in December 2021, boxes containing a mix of classified and unclassified records “spilled onto the floor” of a storage room. Helpfully for prosecutors, Nauta allegedly texted a photo of the scene to another Trump aide.
One of the documents, classified “Secret” and marked for release only to U.S. officials and close allies, discussed “military capabilities of a foreign country,” the indictment says.
The 37-count indictment accusing Donald Trump of illegally hoarding classified documents used a wealth of surveillance footage, private conversations, employees’ text messages, audio-taped meetings, and witness statements to make a damning case.
But the 44-page document also included a half-dozen images of the documents themselves, stacked in boxes next to a toilet, spilling out onto the floor of a storage room, and piled up in rows on the stage of a ballroom at Trump’s resort in South Florida….
In one exchange outlined in the indictment and backed up with a photograph, Trump employees discussed moving some of Trump’s boxes of documents out of a Mar-a-Lago business center and into a bathroom instead so staff could use the business center as an office.
“Woah!! Ok so potus specifically asked Walt for those boxes to be in the business center because they are his ‘papers,’” one Trump employee texted to another, referencing Walt Nauta.
The two employees then went back and forth discussing what they could move to storage. “There is still a little room in the shower where his other stuff is,” one employee texted. “Is it only his papers he cares about? Theres some other stuff in there that are not papers. Could that go to storage? Or does he want everything in there on property.”
“Yes,” the second employee responds. “Anything that’s not the beautiful mind paper boxes can definitely go to storage.”
In another instance in May 2021, Trump told staff to move some of his boxes to a storage room, the indictment says. Images show the boxes stacked up in the storage room as well as a hallway leading to the room that prosecutors say could easily be reached from Mar-a-Lago’s pool patio. The storage room was right next to a liquor supply closet and a linen room.
In December 2021, Trump’s personal aide, Walt Nauta, found that some of those 80 boxes had fallen over and their contents spilled out on the floor.
Among the papers scattered around the storage room were, according to the indictment, a document marked “SECRET//REL TO USA//FVEY” which denoted information releasable only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
I’ve become convinced that what I will call the Mar-a-Lago indictment — because I doubt this will be the only stolen documents one — is a tactical nuke: A massive tool, but simply a tactical one.
As I’ve laid out, it charges 31 counts of Espionage Act violations, each carrying a 10-year sentence and most sure to get enhancements for how sensitive the stolen documents are, as well as seven obstruction-related charges, four of which carry 20-year sentences. The obstruction-related charges would group at sentencing (meaning they’d really carry 20 year sentence total), but Espionage Act charges often don’t and could draw consecutive sentences: meaning Trump could be facing a max sentence of 330 years. Walt Nauta is really facing 20 years max — though probably around three or four years.
New York Kitty, by Timothy Adam Matthews
Obviously, Trump won’t serve a 330 year sentence, not least because Trump is mortal, already 76, and has eaten far too many burgers in his life.
For his part, Nauta should look on the bright side! He has not, yet, been charged with 18 USC 793(g), conspiring with Trump to hoard all those classified documents, though the overt acts in count 32, the conspiracy to obstruct count, would certainly fulfill the elements of offense of a conspiracy to hoard classified documents. If Nauta were to be charged under 793(g), he too would be facing a veritable life sentence, all for helping his boss steal the nation’s secrets. And for Nauta, who is in his 40s and healthy enough to lug dozens of boxes around Trump’s beach resort, that life sentence would last a lot longer than it would for Trump.
And that’s something to help understand how this is tactical.
I first started thinking that might be true when I saw Jack Smith’s statement.
He emphasized:
A grand jury in Florida voted out the indictment
The gravity of the crimes
The talent and ethics of his prosecutors
That Trump and Walt Nauta are presumed innocent
He will seek a Speedy Trial
A Florida jury will hear this case
The dedication of FBI Agents
He packed a lot in fewer than three minutes, but the thing that surprised me was his promise for a Speedy Trial. He effectively said he wants to try this case, charging 31 counts of the Espionage Act, within 70 days.
That means the trial would start around August 20, and last — per one of the filings in the docket — 21 days, through mid-September. While all the other GOP candidates were on a debate stage, Trump would be in South Florida, watching as his closest aides described how he venally refused to give boxes and boxes of the nation’s secrets back.
There’s not a chance in hell that will happen, certainly not for Trump. Even if Trump already had at least three cleared attorneys with experience defending Espionage Act cases, that wouldn’t happen, because the CIPA process for this case, the fight over what classified evidence would be available and how it would be presented at trial, would last at least six months. And as of yesterday, he has just one lawyer on this case, Todd Blanche, who is also defending Trump in the New York State case.
There’s much more to read and think about at the link. Her main point seems to be that Smith wants to convince Walt Nauta to testify against Trump.
Walt Nauta, the only other person indicted along with former President Donald J. Trump, has been serving as his personal aide after previously working for him in the White House.
A native of Guam, Mr. Nauta enlisted in the military at some point and was a military aide working as a White House valet while Mr. Trump was president.
The valets in the White House have unusual proximity to the commander in chief, encountering them at moments of vulnerability, including at meals and on foreign trips.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta forged a bond during the Trump administration, and when the term ended, Mr. Nauta retired and went to go work for Mr. Trump personally.
A Closer Look, by Timothy Adam Matthews
He was one of the very few members of Mr. Trump’s post-presidential office when Mr. Trump first returned to private life at his club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla. There, Mr. Nauta resumed the kind of personal chores that he had helped Mr. Trump with while he was president.
Mr. Nauta has been seen as deeply loyal to Mr. Trump by other aides.
But he attracted the attention of the government for his appearance on security camera footage from the club, which was subpoenaed by prosecutors, moving boxes in and out of a basement storage room after a grand jury subpoena.
In interviews with government officials, according to the indictment, he gave false testimony about whether he had moved boxes to Mr. Trump’s residence earlier in the year. In reality, according to the indictment, Mr. Nauta brought several boxes to Mr. Trump’s residence from the storage room at a time when National Archives officials were seeking the return of presidential material, but he told investigators he didn’t.
Read the rest at the NYT.
As I’m sure you know, Republicans in the House are vociferously defending Trump. For example:
Former President Donald Trump’s indictment on charges of mishandling classified documents is set to play out in a federal court in Florida. But hundreds of miles away, part of Trump’s defense is well underway in a different venue — the halls of Congress, where Republicans have been preparing for months to wage an aggressive counter-offensive against the Justice Department.
The federal indictment against Trump, unsealed Friday, includes 37 counts, including allegations that the former president intentionally possessed classified documents, showed them off to visitors, willfully defied Justice Department demands to return them and made false statements to federal authorities about them. The evidence details Trump’s own words and actions as recounted by lawyers, close aides and other witnesses.
The Republican campaign to discredit federal prosecutors skims over the substance of those charges, which were brought by a grand jury in Florida. GOP lawmakers are instead working, as they have for several years, to foster a broader argument that law enforcement — and President Joe Biden — are conspiring against the former president and possible Republican nominee for president in 2024.
“Today is indeed a dark day for the United States of America,” tweeted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, soon after Trump said on his social media platform Thursday night that an indictment was coming. McCarthy blamed Biden, who has declined to comment on the case and said he is not at all involved in the Justice Department’s decisions.
Republicans “will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”
Republican lawmakers in the House have already laid extensive groundwork for the effort to defend Trump since taking the majority in January. A near constant string of hearings featuring former FBI agents, Twitter executives and federal officials have sought to paint the narrative of a corrupt government using its powers against Trump and the right. A GOP-led House subcommittee on the “weaponization” of government is probing the Justice Department and other government agencies, while at the same time Republicans are investigating Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
“It’s a sad day for America,” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio, a leading Trump defender and ally in the House, said in a statement on Thursday evening. “God bless President Trump.”
And of course, the MAGA crazies are calling for civil war.
The calls for violence appeared in comment threads, responding to posts on the front page of the forum Thursday night, after news broke of Trump’s latest legal troubles. The most extreme comments were written in response to a fanciful post insisting “the only solution” to DOJ’s efforts to lock up Trump would be to vote him back into the presidency, so Trump could “pardon himself and begin arresting those guilty of insurrection and sedition.”
A user named “Belac186” offered a far deadlier fix: “The only way this country ever becomes anything like the Constitution says this country should be is if thousands of traitorous rats are publicly executed.” Commenter “DogFaceKilla” quickly chimed in to offer supplies: “I got some rope somewhere in the garage…” And “Heavy_Metal_Patriot” added: “Hans says we can borrow the flammenwerfer” — a reference to a battlefield flame thrower used to by German soldiers in World War II.
The proposal for mass killing struck user “BlackPilledMAGA” as going too far: “Doesn’t have to be thousands, just a few dozen would do. Shit would STOP immediately.” But user “Nerdrem1” insisted taking out a few elites wouldn’t make the difference, suggesting the number of dead required was on a genocidal scale: “Millions. The real problem is the people that vote for them, as long as they exist the problem can’t be solved.” A user named “Heavy_Metal_Patriot” concurred: “Correct.”
It might be tempting to dismiss these calls for mass murder as loose talk among angry MAGAdonians. Yet there is dark history here. In a previous iteration, The Donald was used to help plot and promote the violence at the Capitol in 2021, as detailed in the final report of the House Jan. 6 Committee, including by users who “openly discussed surrounding and occupying the U.S. Capitol.”
In what is becoming a now all-too-familiar trend, former President Donald Trump’s far-right supporters have threatened civil war after news broke Thursday that the former president was indicted for allegedly taking classified documents from the White House without permission.
“We need to start killing these traitorous fuckstains,” wrote one Trump supporter on The Donald, a rabidly pro-Trump message board that played a key role in planning the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Another user added: “It’s not gonna stop until bodies start stacking up. We are not civilly represented anymore and they’ll come for us next. Some of us, they already have.” [….]
Trump supporters are making specific threats too. In one post on The Donald titled, “A little bit about Merrick Garland, his wife, his daughters,” a user shared a link to an article about the attorney general’s children.
Under the post, another user replied: “His children are fair game as far as I’m concerned.”
In a post about the special counsel conducting the probe, one user on The Donald wrote: “Jack Smith should be arrested the minute he steps foot in the red state of Florida.”
In addition to threats of violence against lawmakers and politicians, many were also calling for a civil war.
“Perhaps it’s time for that Civil War that the damn DemoKKKrats have been trying to start for years now,” a member of The Donald wrote. Another, referencing former President Barack Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said: “FACT: OUR FOREFATHERS WOULD HAVE HUNG THESE TWO FOR TREASON…”
More crazy at the link.
That’s just a sampling of what’s out there in the media today. What do you think? What stories have caught your attention?
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Dakinikat is a little under the weather, so I’m filling in today. Before I get to the news of the day, I wanted to share some images of the late Queen Elizabeth II from Twitter.
One more, a double rainbow appeared over Buckingham Palace after Elizabeth’s death.
Skies clearing over Buckingham Palace with the arrival of a double rainbow. Call me a sentimental fool but it looks like the sign of a heavenly reunion. pic.twitter.com/ywEy6dKDJP
As far as I’m concerned, the top story is the DOJ’s latest effort to reason with MAGA Judge Aileen Cannon, while at the same time perhaps saving her from the further public humiliation of having her decision overturned by an appeals court.
The Justice Department is seeking to overturn a federal judge’s ruling that blocked investigators from reviewing a range of highly-sensitive documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Prosecutors said in a new court filing that U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to temporarily halt the FBI’s ability to probe the ex-president’s handling and storage of classified materials would cause “irreparable harm” to efforts by the intelligence community to protect national security interests.
“[I]n order to assess the full scope of potential harms to national security resulting from the improper retention of the classified records, the government must assess the likelihood that improperly stored classified information may have been accessed by others and compromised,” Justice Department counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt argued in the filing. “But that inquiry is a core aspect of the FBI’s criminal investigation.”
The Justice Department delivered an unsparing assessment of Cannon’s contention that Trump might have a legitimate executive privilege claim over some of the seized documents, contending that a former president had no plausible right to assert ownership of classified records.
“That authority falls upon the incumbent President, not on any former President, because it is the incumbent President who bears the responsibility to protect and defend the national security of the United States,” Bratt wrote.
The DOJ filing amounts to a full-throated rebuke of the ruling by Cannon, a Trump appointee who was confirmed to a seat in the Southern District of Florida a week after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election. Prosecutors used the filing to describe her ruling as a danger to national security, one ignorant of the FBI’s integral role in modern counterintelligence work, and lacking in an understanding of the complexities of executive privilege.
Also notable that DOJ says disclosing classified docs to a special master would harm national security. Would seem to further confirm sensitivity of the docs since it would not be difficult to find an experienced jurist with a security clearance. These docs are different. https://t.co/1Jm6fWkc2t
The department, in forceful and foreboding language, argued that determining the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s retention of the documents was so intertwined with its criminal investigation that carrying out a separate risk assessment was impossible under the conditions imposed by the court.
Justice Department lawyers complained that the judge’s order was impeding efforts to determine whether there may yet be “additional classified records that are not being properly stored” and noted that the search had recovered empty folders marked as classified whose contents “may have been lost or compromised.”
In an order on Thursday evening, Judge Cannon directed Mr. Trump’s lawyers to respond to the government’s filing by Monday.
In an affidavit accompanying the filing, Alan E. Kohler Jr., the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division, wrote that the intelligence community’s assessment of the classified material was “inextricably linked with the criminal investigation.”
Department lawyers wrote that “uncertainty regarding the bounds of the court’s order and its implications for the activities of the F.B.I. has caused the intelligence community, in consultation with D.O.J., to pause temporarily this critically important work.”
The government and the public, the department added, “are irreparably injured when a criminal investigation of matters involving risks to national security” is frozen or delayed.
The DOJ brief criticizing the Special Master ruling is a work of art. I’ve read some great DOJ briefs but this is among the best. Garland brought the A team
(Now admittedly, it was an easy target. But still, just in tone & sophistication &clarity & law)https://t.co/LHJaai5T2v
Ultimately, the Justice Department said that a special master could be appointed to review personal documents and some other items seized by FBI agents on Aug. 8 in a court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago, setting aside materials as necessary.
But prosecutors argued that Cannon should prohibit the special master from reviewing classified documents — and should restore investigators’ access to those documents right away.
Barring the FBI from using the classified material in the investigation, even temporarily, “could impede efforts to identify the existence of any additional classified records that are not being properly stored — which itself presents the potential for ongoing risk to national security,” prosecutors wrote.
It was the first time they have suggested in court filings that there could be more unsecured classified material the government has yet to locate.
Allowing a special master to review the classified material would “cause the most immediate and serious harms to the government and the public,” prosecutorswrote in their Thursday filing, noting that those seized documents have already been moved to a secure facility, separate from the rest of the seized Trump papers.
Remember the empty folders marked classified that turned up during the search? The FBI needs to learn what those folders originally contained.
FBI Assistant Director Alan E. Kohler submitted a declaration saying that Cannon’s prohibition of investigators’ use of the seized classified material could prevent them from understanding what may have happened to the significant number of empty folders found with classified markings.
The FBI’s investigation, Kohler wrote, “could be instrumental in determining what materials may once have been stored in those folders and whether they may have been lost or compromised.”
Judge Cannon is on notice that she will have to choose between protecting Trump and protecting the national security of the United States of America.
One week ago, we learned an intriguing detail about the search of Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago: Along with the roughly 100 classified documents recovered, the government also found 48 folders with banners marked “classified” but which were nonetheless empty.
What we didn’t know was how significant the government considered that finding; the empty folders were merely listed on an inventory list.
On Thursday, though, the Justice Department served notice that the empty folders are of significant interest. And it argued that tracing them to specific classified documents is among the urgent reasons that its review should be allowed to continue….
Among the handful of reasons mentioned: the empty folders. And the Justice Department implies that it might indeed be able to use the folders to determine whether there are larger issues than Trump merely having possessed classified documents. Specifically, it cites the possibility that classified documents might have been “lost” or “compromised.”
“The FBI would be chiefly responsible for investigating what materials may have once been stored in these folders and whether they may have been lost or compromised — steps that, again, may require the use of grand jury subpoenas, search warrants, and other criminal investigative tools and could lead to evidence that would also be highly relevant to advancing the criminal investigation,” the DOJ’s filing states.
Later in the filing, the Justice Department again returns to the idea that classified documents might still be missing.
“In addition, the injunction against using classified records in the criminal investigation could impede efforts to identify the existence of any additional classified records that are not being properly stored — which itself presents the potential for ongoing risk to national security,” it says.
The idea that the government hasn’t recovered all classified documents is hardly far-fetched. Trump, after all, failed to return all the documents when they were subpoenaed months ago, even as his lawyer asserted that all requested documents had been returned, federal prosecutors said last month.
It’s already the consensus that abortion is going to be a good issue for Democrats in November.
What’s only now becoming clear — as Republicans scrub their campaign websites of prior positions on abortion and labor to turn the focus of the midterms back to President Joe Biden and the economy — is just how much the issue is altering the GOP’s standard playbook.
For the first time in years, Republican and Democratic political professionals are preparing for a general election campaign in which Democrats — not Republicans — may be winning the culture wars, a wholesale reversal of the traditional political landscape that is poised to reshape the midterms and the run-up to 2024.
“The environment is upside down,” said Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party. “The intensity has been reversed.”
It isn’t just abortion. Less than 20 years after conservatives used ballot measures against same-sex marriage to boost voter turnout in 11 states, public sentiment has shifted on the issue so dramatically that Democrats are poised to force a vote on legislation to protect same-sex marriage to try to damage Republican candidates. Following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Democrats from Georgia and Wisconsin to Illinois and California are running ads supporting gun restrictions, once viewed as a liability for the left, while openly engaging Republicans on crime.
In an advertising campaign shared with POLITICO, the center-left group Third Way said the PAC it launched last year to defend moderate Democrats, Shield PAC, will start spending at least $7 million next week on digital and mail ads in seven competitive House districts to counter Republican attacks on crime, immigration and other culture war issues.
The advertising push follows polling in Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s Virginia district that suggested counter-messaging by Democrats on public safety could blunt the effect of “defund the police” attacks by Republicans. As a result, while Spanberger is airing ads tearing into her Republican opponent on abortion, Shield PAC will be running a digital campaign bolstering Spanberger’s credentials on police funding.
On Thursday, POLITICO reported that Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) broke ranks with his Republican colleagues to help confirm Andre Mathis to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit — the first Black man to be confirmed to that court in nearly a quarter century.
“Mathis did so by one vote, clearing the Senate 48-47 with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) breaking from his party to give the nominee the votes,” said the report. “If Mathis’ nomination failed, Democrats would’ve had to bring it up again — burning valuable floor time during a time crunch before the midterms.”
The report continued: “When asked why he voted for the Biden-appointed nominee, Kennedy told reporters: ‘He did a great job in committee, in my opinion. He’s a partner at Butler Snow, which is a major national law firm. The criminal record that they talked about, that he forgot to face some traffic tickets, when they contacted him about it through a warrant, he just said, ‘It’s true, I forgot to pay them,’ and he paid up, but I just didn’t think that was disqualifying.”
athis’ unpaid traffic tickets were a point of contention for other Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) provoked controversy when she interrogated Mathis over the tickets, referring to them as a “rap sheet.”
“The conservative Kennedy rarely diverges from his party,” noted the report. “His vote only proved decisive with three Democratic senators out of office due to Covid — Sens. Jon Ossoff (Ga.), Jacky Rosen (Nev.), and Bob Menendez (N.J.)
I’m going to end there, and I’ll see you in the comments. Have a great Friday and a fantastic weekend!!
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I’m sorry to say that I saw very little of the first night of the Democratic National Convention. I wasn’t interested in watching a lot of Republicans and Bernie Sanders. I wanted to see Michelle Obama’s speech, but I fell asleep before she came on.
Democrats kicked off their virtual nominating convention Monday with a focused denunciation of President Trump, showcasing dozens of testimonials that culminated in lancing criticism from former first lady Michelle Obama, who cast Trump as incapable of meeting America’s needs and said Joe Biden would usher in racial justice and ease the coronavirus pandemic.
In the centerpiece speech of the night, a searing indictment of her husband Barack Obama’s successor, Obama declared that Trump has mishandled the pandemic and failed to respond to outcries over the deaths of Black Americans. She warned that the nation would suffer more if he is elected to a second term.
“Let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can: Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us,” she said, before quoting a line Trump used about covid-19 deaths in a recent interview: “It is what it is.”
She spoke passionately about protests over police brutality this year — and Trump’s response of declaring those in the streets to be anarchists.
“Here at home as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and a never-ending list of innocent people of color continue to be murdered, stating the simple fact that a Black life matters is still met with derision from the nation’s highest office,” Obama said, wearing a necklace that read “Vote.” [….]
Other testimonials against Trump’s stewardship ranged from democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to Ohio’s Republican former governor John Kasich, both of whom have pleaded with the country to set aside ideological differences to defeat Trump. The daughter of a covid-19 patient angrily blamed her father’s death on Trump during the broadcast, which repeatedly showed victims of the coronavirus.
The unprecedented virtual convention program, without crowds, floor fights or sign waving, reflected the extraordinary limits of current public health guidelines, as the country continues to keep socially distant in the face of a pandemic that has killed more than 167,000 Americans this year. Occasional live shots of Democratic delegates watching at home were cut in throughout the night to replicate some sense of a normal event.
Concluding the opening night of a Democratic Convention that until a few minutes earlier had felt overly platitudinous, centrist and bloodless, Michelle Obama delivered a speech that was the opposite—impassioned, uplifting and, at the same time, full of truths about America that this country rarely likes to acknowledge about itself. One of the most astounding moments in a speech filled with them came when the former first lady revisited a line that has been endlessly quoted since she uttered it 2016.
But this time around, the ex-FLOTUS—in tacit recognition of the toll that four years of Donald Trump’s bottom-feeding, “no low is too low” style of leadership has taken on the nation—necessarily amended her words to line up with the darkness of our times. It’s worth quoting her at length here: “Over the past four years, a lot of people have asked me, “When others are going so low, does going high still really work?” My answer: going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low, when we use those same tactics of degrading and dehumanizing others, we just become part of the ugly noise that’s drowning out everything else,” Obama stated. “But let’s be clear: going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty…. Going high means standing fierce against hatred while remembering that we are one nation under God, and if we want to survive, we’ve got to find a way to live together and work together across our differences.” [….]
She did not mince words, and instead spoke honestly about the cruelty of this president and his abettors with a full-throatedness we haven’t seen from her in the past. This was Michelle going after Trump, and to a certain degree, the voters that would prop up this president, in a way that was both eloquent and frank, relatable and empathic—all while showing how the current president lacks all of those traits.
In fact, a whole section of the speech was essentially a damning laundry list of the ways in which Trump’s endless narcissism and incompetence have damaged the country. She noted the 150,000 dead and the economic devastation that have resulted from “a virus that this president downplayed for too long.” She called out how Trump has tarnished America’s image abroad, destroying “alliances championed by presidents like Reagan and Eisenhower.” And she went hard at Trump for the most overt characteristic of this presidency, its unchecked, vicious racism.
In other news and opinion . . .
A former Trump administration official endorsed Joe Biden yesterday.
After serving for more than two years in the Department of Homeland Security’s leadership during the Trump administration, I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct result of the president’s actions….
I wasn’t in a position to judge how his personal deficiencies affected other important matters, such as the environment or energy policy, but when it came to national security, I witnessed the damning results firsthand.
The president has tried to turn DHS, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, into a tool used for his political benefit. He insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection — in particular building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Though he was often talked out of bad ideas at the last moment, the president would make obviously partisan requests of DHS, including when he told us to close the California-Mexico border during a March 28, 2019, Oval Office meeting — it would be better for him politically, he said, than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border — or to “dump” illegal immigrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overload their authorities, as he insisted on several times.
Miles Taylor
Trump’s indiscipline was also a constant source of frustration. One day in February 2019, when congressional leaders were waiting for an answer from the White House on a pending deal to avoid a second government shutdown, the president demanded a DHS phone briefing to discuss the color of the wall. He was particularly interested in the merits of using spray paint and how the steel structure should be coated. Episodes like this occurred almost weekly.
The decision-making process was itself broken: Trump would abruptly endorse policy proposals with little or no consideration, by him or his advisers, of possible knock-on effects. That was the case in 2018 when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced, at the White House’s urging, a “zero tolerance” policy to prosecute anyone who crossed the border illegally. The agencies involved were unprepared to implement the policy, causing a disastrous backlog of detentions that ultimately left migrant parents and their children separated.
Read the whole thing at the link if you haven’t already. Here’s video of Taylor’s endorsement:
NEW: Testimonial ad from Trump's Former DHS Chief of Staff @MilesTaylorUSA, declaring his support for Joe Biden and describing Trump's presidency as "terrifying" and "actively doing damage to our security."
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) August 17, 2020
Louis DeJoy, the man Trump handpicked to destroy the U.S. Postal Service will testify before House and Senate committees. That means Kamala Harris will have an opportunity to cross examine him.
On Sunday, Democrats moved up a request for DeJoy to testify to Monday, Aug. 24, calling it an “urgent” matter. The Oversight and Reform Committee hearing is likely to be tense, with Democrats loudly objecting to changes that have slowed mail delivery in numerous parts of the country amid President Donald Trump’s calls to restrict the use of mail-in ballots for the November election.
A number of Democrats have called on him to resign, and moderate House member Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), even said that he wanted DeJoy, a major Republican Party fundraiser, arrested by the House sergeant at arms if he didn’t agree to testify.
“Over the past several weeks, there have been startling new revelations about the scope and gravity of operational changes you are implementing at hundreds of postal facilities without consulting adequately with Congress, the Postal Regulatory Commission, or the Board of Governors,” House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) wrote to DeJoy on Sunday, giving him a deadline of Monday to respond to the testimony invitation.
“Your testimony is particularly urgent given the troubling influx of reports of widespread delays at postal facilities across the country—as well as President Trump’s explicit admission last week that he has been blocking critical coronavirus funding for the Postal Service in order to impair mail-in voting efforts for the upcoming elections in November.”
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing Friday with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on the U.S. Postal Service’s vote-by-mail financial requirements, according to two people familiar with the decision.
It will be DeJoy’s first opportunity to publicly answer lawmakers’ questions about the nation’s embattled mail service, which is experiencing delays as a result of policies DeJoy implemented cutting overtime and eliminating extra trips to ensure on-time mail delivery….
Democrats have alleged that DeJoy, a former Republican National Convention finance chairman, is taking steps that are causing dysfunction in the mail system and could wreak havoc in the presidential election….
The Postal Service is in the process of removing 671 high-speed mail-sorting machines nationwide this month, a process that will eliminate 21.4 million items per hour’s worth of processing capability from the agency’s inventory.
On Thursday and Friday, it began removing public collection boxes in parts of California, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Montana. The agency said Friday that it would stop mailbox removals, which it said were routine, until after the election.
A group of Democratic state attorneys general are now in the final stages of preparing legal action against the Trump administration for recent cost-cutting changes made to the United States Postal Service, a lawsuit that one official said could demand a halt to any cutbacks that could impede mail-in voting.
As many as 10 state attorneys general are now involved, two state officials involved in the effort told ABC News. Among them is New York’s Letitia James, who called recent changes at the postal agency “deeply disturbing” in a statement released Monday.
The suit is expected to mount two major constitutional challenges to the recent cutbacks, according to one of the officials, a state government attorney. States will assert that the federal government is trying to impede their constitutional right to oversee their own elections. And they will argue that the Trump administration is interfering with every American’s individual right to participate in the election.
The lawsuit will also argue that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy failed to follow administrative procedures when he made cuts to overtime and decommissioned equipment – steps the states will ask the courts to halt, the attorney said….
The attorneys general from Connecticut and New York have joined a growing list of state leaders including those from Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Minnesota and Washington — all Democrats — in discussing how to sue the administration, sources said. Those conversations remain ongoing.
I’ll add more news links in the comment thread. I hope you all have a nice Tuesday!
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The Nevada Caucuses will wrap up this afternoon, but thousands of people have already voted. Political pundits have already crowned Bernie Sanders the winner, but that may not be a sure thing.
Nobody really knows what’s going on in the upcoming Nevada Democratic caucuses. Sure, we have a little bit of polling to go on — the RealClearPolitics average includes three recent polls, and it shows Bernie Sanders leading the pack at 30 percent, with Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer and Amy Klobuchar all clustered between 16 percent and 10 percent of the vote. But it’s hard to nail down the electorate in a caucus state, and Nevada is flush with the sort of young, Hispanic voters that pollsters often have trouble contacting. So all we really know is that Sanders has a lead, but that he’s not invincible.
In a normal election, this lack of concrete information wouldn’t be a problem: Nobody ever died because they didn’t see enough Nevada polling. But primaries aren’t normal elections. The trajectory of the race is often influenced by media-created “expectations” and narratives about “momentum.” And in Nevada, many political pros will be setting those crucially important expectations using gut feelings and groupthink rather than real information. That’s a riskier undertaking for them than they might acknowledge — and for the voters who listen to them.
There have been just eight polls released publicly over the last three months. Two of those were internal polls. Only five of those have been taken since the primary season began a few weeks ago, and of those, a grand total of zero meet CNN standards for publication….
Put all together, Sanders is something around a seven in 10 favorite to win in Nevada. That’s based off of the prediction markets and how good the polling in Nevada has been since 2008 (the first year in which Nevada was one of the first four states to vote). Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg are next with somewhere around a one in 10 chance to win. Everybody has less than a one in 10 shot in Nevada.
Sanders clearly has a better shot than anyone else to win, but a seven in 10 shot is not an overwhelming favorite. It means that there’s a decent chance Sanders won’t win.
The lack of confidence we should have in the Nevada outcome is partially because of the lack of polling data, but also because the polling data has not been particularly predictive in the past.
Since 2008, Nevada has b een a polling wasteland. Looking at all candidates who polled at 10% or better after undecideds were allocated, Nevada polls taken after the Iowa caucuses have had an average error per candidate of 8 points. The 95% confidence interval for each candidate above 10% is something closer to +/- 20 points. That is, to put it mildly, a huge range.
Read the rest at CNN.
Cat Nap – A Pink Chair by the Window, Lara Meintjes
And we can’t forget that early voting has already been going on in many Super Tuesday states. I’ll be voting early here in Massachusetts next week.
Super Tuesday is still more than a week away, but almost 2 million ballots have already been cast — including in delegate-rich California and Texas.
More than 1.3 million vote-by-mail ballots have been returned in California since February 3, according to county data provided by Sam Mahood, a spokesman for Secretary of State Alex Padilla. That’s out of more than 16 million ballots sent out — a flood that allows the vast majority of the state’s more than 20 million registered voters to cast their ballots before March 3.
“The California presidential primary may be on Super Tuesday, but for millions of Californians, it is really Super February,” Padilla said in a news release earlier this month.
California, with 494 delegates at stake — the most of any single state — has taken on new prominence this year after moving its primary date up in the calendar. Democratic candidates need 1,991 to clinch the nomination.
The other big delegate haul up for grabs on Super Tuesday is Texas, with 261 delegates. Almost half a million ballots have already been cast since early and by-mail voting opened on February 18, according to the secretary of state’s office. Texas has more than 16 million registered voters.
Unfortunately, Bernie is also leading in California polls; and he’s so confident of winning Nevada that he has already left to campaign in CA.
Cat on a chair, Diane Hoepner
Two polls released this week in California show Bernie Sanders holding a comfortable lead. The latest poll from The Public Policy Institute of California, released on Tuesday, shows Sanders ahead at 32%, with Joe Biden (14%), Elizabeth Warren (13%), Pete Buttigieg (12%) and Michael Bloomberg (12%) closely knotted in a race for second. Amy Klobuchar stood at 5% in that poll, with Tom Steyer at 3% and Tulsi Gabbard at 1%.
Monmouth University also released a California poll this week. Their poll finds Sanders leading with 24%, Biden at 17%, Bloomberg at 13%, Warren at 10% and Buttigieg at 9%. Behind them, Steyer (5%) and Klobuchar (4%) were about even, with Gabbard at 2%.
U.S. officials have told Sen. Bernie Sanders that Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest, according to people familiar with the matter.
President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill also have been informed about the Russian assistance to the Vermont senator, those people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
It is not clear what form that Russian assistance has taken. U.S. prosecutors found a Russian effort in 2016 to use social media to boost Sanders’s campaign against Hillary Clinton, part of a broader effort to hurt Clinton, sow dissension in the American electorate and ultimately help elect Donald Trump.
So Bernie has known this for a month and did and said nothing about it. And he’s not happy with the media for reporting the news. He attacked the Post for reporting the story.
Very presidential. No, really, it's just like something Trump would say. https://t.co/BWeV9mDMNG
He is also furious with MSNBC for some reason. As far as I can tell, he is getting full support from Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Ali Velshi, but I guess he’s angry with some of the guests on the network. Page Six: Bernie Sanders calls out MSNBC over campaign coverage.
Bernie Sanders went ballistic at NBC and MSNBC execs ahead of the Democratic debate this week — jabbing one top TV exec repeatedly in the face with his finger and accusing the networks of offensive negative coverage.
Surging Sanders stormed through the walk-through for the Las Vegas debate, singling out one top producer at the end and aggressively sticking his finger in his face. One shocked witness said, “Bernie marched right up to NBC and MSNBC’s head of creative production and began jabbing his finger right in his face, yelling, ‘Your coverage of my campaign is not fair . . . Your questions tonight are not going to be fair to me.’ ”
Sanders did not hold back as he continued to rant about MSNBC coverage. According to the witness, “The NBC exec told Sanders he would be treated fairly.”
A separate insider confirmed the confrontation, saying Sanders was so steamed he also sparred with MSNBC boss Phil Griffin outside the green room moments before the debate began. “Sen. Sanders stated, ‘Phil, your network has not been playing a fair role in this campaign. I am upset. Is anything going to change? . . . I hope you will do better.’ ”
The Democratic front-runner has been left seeing red over repeated slights against him by liberal MSNBC pundits and hosts, including Chris Matthews, who suggested the senator might cheer socialist executions in Central Park. And Chuck Todd — a moderator of Wednesday’s debate — even quoted a story that described Sanders supporters as a “digital brownshirt brigade.” Todd was also tackled by seething Sanders onstage after the debate: “I do not appreciate your comment about my supporters,” adding the Holocaust reference was “offensive.”
Sanders’ campaign manager Faiz Shakir has said that even Fox News has been “more fair than MSNBC . . . which . . . is constantly undermining the Bernie Sanders campaign.”
There’s no doubt in my mind that Bernie is just a “socialist” mirror image of Trump. But Trump is actually president right now, and he’s undermining democracy in every way he and his thugs can think of. His latest efforts include a Stalinist-style purge of anyone who crosses him and a hostile takeover of the Intelligence community.
President Trump has instructed his White House to identify and force out officials across his administration who are not seen as sufficiently loyal, a post-impeachment escalation that administration officials say reflects a new phase of a campaign of retribution and restructuring ahead of the November election.
Maine Coon Cat Sitting On Chair, by Rosanne Olson.
Johnny McEntee, Trump’s former personal aide who now leads the effort as director of presidential personnel, has begun combing through various agencies with a mandate from the president to oust or sideline political appointees who have not proved their loyalty, according to several administration officials and others familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The push comes in the aftermath of an impeachment process in which several members of Trump’s administration provided damning testimony about his behavior with regard to Ukraine. The stream of officials publicly criticizing Trump’s actions frustrated the president and caused him to fixate on cleaning house after his acquittal this month.
“We want bad people out of our government!” Trump tweeted Feb. 13, kicking off a tumultuous stretch of firings, resignations, controversial appointments and private skirmishes that have since spilled into public view.
Richard Grenell’s tenure as the nation’s top intelligence official may be short-lived, but he wasted no time this week starting to shape his team of advisers, ousting his office’s No. 2 official — a longtime intelligence officer — and bringing in an expert on Trump conspiracy theories to help lead the agency, according to officials.
Mr. Grenell has also requested the intelligence behind the classified briefing last week before the House Intelligence Committee where officials told lawmakers that Russia was interfering in November’s presidential election and that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia favored President Trump’s re-election. The briefing later prompted Mr. Trump’s anger as he complained that Democrats would use it against him.
Joseph Maguire, the former acting director of national intelligence, and his deputy, Andrew P. Hallman, resigned on Friday. Mr. Grenell told Mr. Hallman, popular in the office’s Liberty Crossing headquarters, that his service was no longer needed, according to two officials. Mr. Hallman, who has worked in the office or at the C.I.A. for three decades, expressed confidence in his colleagues in a statement but also referred to the “uncertainties that come with change.”
The ouster of Mr. Hallman and exit of Mr. Maguire, who also oversaw the National Counterterrorism Center, allowed Mr. Grenell to install his own leadership team.
While vacancies and acting officials have become commonplace in this administration, the moves by President Donald Trump this week represent a troubling and potentially profound new danger to the country. There will soon be no Senate-confirmed director of the National Counterterrorism Center, director of national intelligence, principal deputy director of national intelligence, homeland security secretary, deputy homeland security secretary, nor leaders of any of the three main border security and immigration agencies. Across the government, nearly 100,000 federal law enforcement agents, officers, and personnel are working today without permanent agency leaders, from Customs and Border Protection and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.
All the posts, and many more top security jobs, are unfilled or staffed with leaders who have not been confirmed by the Senate. Trump has done an end-around, installing loyalists without subjecting them to legally mandated vetting and approval by Congress.
Trump’s surprise ouster of Maguire, who took over as acting director of national intelligence last summer, came apparently in a tantrum over a congressional briefing that outlined how Russia is already trying to interfere with the 2020 election and help reelect Trump.
But understanding the true cost of Maguire’s firing requires understanding how the role first came to be. The director of national intelligence position was created after 9/11 specifically to coordinate the work of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies and help “connect the dots” on disparate data and threats, work that wasn’t done before September 11, 2001. DNI is an immensely challenging job that includes serving legally as the president’s top intelligence adviser, and traditionally involves giving the president’s daily briefing on potential threats.
Graff also address Trump’s destruction of the Department of Homeland Security–including FEMA. I hope you’ll read the whole article.
Have a great weekend, Sky Dancers! As always, this is an open thread.
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Hurricane Dorian is finally starting to slowly move northwestward away from Grand Bahama Island. At 9 am Dorian was located 45 mi NNE of Freeport, Grand Bahama Island or 105 mi ENE of West Palm Beach FL. Max sustained winds were 115 mph and the central pressure 954 mb/28.17 pic.twitter.com/kHi0HhnwH5
Hurricane Dorian, now a Category 3 storm, finally began to slowly inch away from the Bahamas early Tuesday, after pummeling the islands with unrelenting rain and winds as the United States waited to see what destructive path it would take.
The storm, which hit the Northern Bahamas as one of the strongest on record in the Atlantic, remained stationary just north of Grand Bahama Island, delivering 120 mile-per-hour winds and ceaseless downpours that have flooded neighborhoods, destroyed homes and killed at least five people. The hurricane was expected to start turning north near Florida’s eastern coast by Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.
It is highly unusual for a storm of Dorian’s magnitude to halt and hover over land, bringing what officials fear could be catastrophic damage to the Caribbean islands. It crawled along at just one mile an hour on Monday before all but standing still, moving just 14 miles from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Some residents were able to send video from the Abaco Islands, which took the full brunt of the hurricane. Stunned residents could be seen among crumpled cars, smashed homes, piles of debris and contorted trees.
On Grand Bahama Island, the waters rose quickly over much of the main city, Freeport, trapping people on top of their houses. Messages pleading for rescue ricocheted over WhatsApp, a messaging app, but the wind gusts and racing currents made it impossible to reach many people.
Grand Bahama was set to endure another day of dire conditions on Tuesday, with wind gusts of up to 150 m.p.h., storm surges as much as 15 feet above normal tide levels and devastating flooding from up to 30 inches of rain, the National Hurricane Center said.
Amid Hurricane Dorian, one of the most powerful storms to ever hit the Bahamas, Chella Phillips opened her Nassau home to 97 homeless and abandoned dogs.
“It was either leave the dogs on the street to fend for themselves…or do something about it,” said Phillips on a phone interview with ABC News. “I just want these dogs to be safe. I could care less about the dog poop and pee in my house.”
Ugh. Oh well . . .
On Sunday, Phillips described her experience wrangling the dogs in a Facebook post, saying that 79 of the dogs were in her bedroom to ride out the storm.
“Each island has abundance of homeless dogs, my heart is so broken for the ones without a place to hide a CAT 5 monster and only God can protect them now,” she wrote.
Read more and see more photos at the link.
Meanwhile the Dotard-in-chief played golf, sent out idiotic tweets and pretended to be a weatherman.
As he has done during other hurricanes, Trump awaited landfall by assuming the role of meteorologist in chief, adding to his routine of attacking enemies, retweeting praise and critiquing the performance of his cable news allies. @katierogers https://t.co/7HANwWnQTB
Over the long weekend, President Trump monitored Hurricane Dorian from a golf cart at his club in Virginia, calling for regular updates from an aide trailing him around the course. By 8 p.m. Monday, as Dorian churned toward Florida and Mr. Trump’s boarded-up Mar-a-Lago resort, the president had golfed twice and since Saturday morning pelted the American public with 122 tweets.
As he has done during other hurricanes, Mr. Trump awaited landfall by assuming the role of meteorologist in chief, adding weatherman-style updates to a usual weekend routine of attacking his enemies, retweeting bits of praise and critiquing the performance of his cable news allies.
Starting with his first weekend tweet at 7:45 a.m. Saturday, Mr. Trump’s Dorian-related tweets were delivered with the speed of a hailstorm.
With his reality-show approach to the presidency, Mr. Trump has a habit of weighing in on the day’s most-covered news stories with his own running commentary. As Dorian approached, Mr. Trump switched into town-crier mode, updating the public on what he had learned — or, what he thought he’d learned — from government officials as Dorian threatened the coast of the state of Florida, where he has owned property for decades.
He’s such a useless idiot. Even Putin must be sick of him and Kim Jong Un is treating him like a doormat.
President Donald Trump is accused of being “played” by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as the Hermit Kingdom advances its weapons arsenal.
Trump has repeatedly downplayed North Korea’s missile test launches in recent weeks. But The New York Times reported Monday that U.S. intelligence officials now think Trump’s stance has actually allowed Kim to “test missiles with greater range and maneuverability that could overwhelm American defenses in the region.”
The development sparked anger on Twitter, where MSNBC political analyst Rick Tyler said it was “hard to know who deserves more credit: Kim for successfully completing tests of a rapidly-deployable solid-fuel rockets that threaten the region including American bases or POTUS for allowing it to happen.”
Joe Scarborough, the host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” tweeted it was “shocking how easily Donald Trump got played by the most tyrannical communist leader in the world.”
N. Korean dictator #KimJongUn greases #Trump like a fry pan-makes an omelet of U-S defense policy. All things possible when the commander in chief in the #WhiteHouse isn't in command of strategic thinking. https://t.co/oqqdd2t5oM@nytimes
As North Korea fired off a series of missiles in recent months — at least 18 since May — President Trump has repeatedly dismissed their importance as short-range and “very standard” tests. And although he has conceded “there may be a United Nations violation,” the president says any concerns are overblown.
Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, Mr. Trump explained recently, just “likes testing missiles.”
Now, American intelligence officials and outside experts have come to a far different conclusion: that the launchings downplayed by Mr. Trump, including two late last month, have allowed Mr. Kim to test missiles with greater range and maneuverability that could overwhelm American defenses in the region.
Japan’s defense minister, Takeshi Iwaya, told reporters in Tokyo last week that the irregular trajectories of the most recent tests were more evidence of a program designed to defeat the defenses Japan has deployed, with American technology, at sea and on shore.
Mr. Kim’s flattery of Mr. Trump with beguiling letters and episodic meetings offering vague assurances of eventual nuclear disarmament, some outside experts say, are part of what they call the North Korean leader’s strategy of buying time to improve his arsenal despite all the sanctions on North Korea.
You’d think Republicans would notice that Trump is endangering our national security, but all they do is shrug.
Remember last week when Trump tweeted that classified image?
The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One. pic.twitter.com/z0iDj2L0Y3
Amateur satellite trackers say they believe an image tweeted by President Trump on Friday came from one of America’s most advanced spy satellites.
The image almost certainly came from a satellite known as USA 224, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite-tracker based in the Netherlands. The satellite was launched by the National Reconnaissance Office in 2011. Almost everything about it remains highly classified, but Langbroek says that based on its size and orbit, most observers believe USA 224 is one of America’s multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance satellites.
“It’s basically a very large telescope, not unlike the Hubble Space Telescope,” Langbroek says. “But instead of looking up to the stars, it looks down to the Earth’s surface and makes very detailed images.”
The image tweeted by Trump on Friday, showing the aftermath of an accident at Iran’s Imam Khomeini Space Center, was so detailed that some experts doubted whether it really could have come from a satellite high above the planet.
Iran had been preparing to launch a rocket known as the Safir with a small satellite aboard, but experts believe it exploded during fueling. The image showed crisp writing painted on the edge of the launch pad, the scorched truck that had been used to move the rocket and other details.
Trump seemed to be using the sensitive reconnaissance image to troll the Iranians.
He has to go! But our alternatives seem to be three other septuagenarians: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren. I for one am not enthused. I’ll vote for Warren if I have to, but the other two . . . ugh. Bernie is an authoritarian and whiny press critic like Trump; and Biden not as careless with the truth as Trump, but his constant gaffes are disturbing–to me anyway.
Joe Biden wants voters to look at the big picture.
His campaign is focused on a mission to “restore the soul of this nation.”
That’s also why the former vice president does not think anyone should get bogged down in the small details he mixes up on the campaign trail.
“That has nothing to do with judgment of whether or not you send troops to war, the judgment of whether you bring someone home, the judgment of whether you decide on a healthcare policy,” Biden told the NPR Politics Podcast and Iowa Public Radio in a wide-ranging interview.
Biden is prone to flubs and gaffes, and has been for years. Most recently, the Washington Post reportedthat a dramatic story he told about the war in Afghanistan conflated and confused facts from multiple different incidents.
Biden has said that he was not intentionally trying to mislead anyone with that story, and he argues that kind of mistake has nothing to do with his ability to serve as president.
“The details are irrelevant in terms of decision-making,” Biden told NPR.
I don’t buy it.
So . . . what stories have you been following?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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