26 Wednesday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on He Must Read TPC
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I’ll take the credit for lighting the fire under Trump with yesterday’s column. His nCoV presser is supposed to start at 6 this evening. More on that, after the fact and if warranted. The loyal opposition lamented earlier that he didn’t do enough. Now, maybe they’re getting what they want. Maybe it’ll be a little more – another state of emergency might help with some non-pandemic items. Hope.
25 Tuesday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Reality v The Washington Post
Read this post from Jeff Bezos’s blog. The way they see it:
Step back and think about all of the ways the preceding paragraph reveals the hollowness of key aspects of Trump’s rhetoric.
We can begin with Trump’s continued insistence that Russia didn’t assist him in 2016. It did, as established robustly in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s assessment released in April.
The truth, if Nunes is even partly correct, then there was massive falsification in the Mueller report. Er, robust falsification. Maybe with a little robust prosecution to follow? If so, the WaPo will spin that as climate change or something.
22 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Roger Stone Cold Sentencing and Assoc. Problems
So yeah, about that Constitutional crisis:
A funny thing happened, however, on the way to the courthouse. Two things, actually. First, the jury forewoman in Stone’s case outed herself as a die-hard Democrat who despises President Trump and his supporters as well as a former congressional candidate and far-left activist who still buys into the Russian collusion scam. She came out to defend the honor of the prosecutors in Stone’s case but ended up revealing that, while Judge Jackson silenced Roger Stone from speaking to the public during his trial, the forewoman of the jury was busy posting daily anti-Trump polemics. Second, rather than cowering in intimidation, President Trump took the opportunity of an “emergency meeting” of the federal judges to publicly ask that they look into the well documented FISA Court fraud and the Judiciary’s role in perpetrating the greatest political scandal in our nation’s history: President Obama’s use of the CIA and FBI to spy on the campaign of a presidential candidate from the opposing party and the subsequent use of such criminally obtained information to launch the Mueller probe and overturn the result of the 2016 election.
And, the branches were never coequal, being introduced in order. Congress having largely abdicated, that leaves the executive. Jump!
17 Monday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on They Just Keep Coming
Even when they’re caught, they still keep coming.
Despite propagating hardline immigration rhetoric, the Trump administration released nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants into the United States general population last year.
In fiscal year 2019, which ran from October 2018 to September 2019, Border Patrol agents detained 851,508 immigrants who illegally entered the U.S. via Mexico. Of those, more than half, 473,682, arrived with family members, Customs and Border Protection data showed.
But! They did not enter via that one-mile section with the new Trump wall! There’s that. Without it, there could have been like 851,508.5. Progress.
14 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on A Reliable Investigation v. Washington Lies
The charade in DC never stops, even as it endangers the entire world. Philip Giraldi on the (forgotten?) Iran attacks:
If the Iraqi investigation of the facts around the December attack on K-1 is reliable, the Donald Trump administration’s reckless actions in Iraq in late December and early January cannot be justified. Worse still, it would appear that the White House was looking for an excuse to attack and kill a senior Iranian official to send some kind of message, a provocation that could easily have resulted in a war that would benefit no one. To be sure, the Trump administration has lied about developments in the Middle East so many times that it can no longer be trusted. Unfortunately, demanding any accountability from the Trump team would require a Congress that is willing to shoulder its responsibility for truth in government backed up by a media that is willing to take on an administration that regularly punishes anyone or any entity that dares to challenge it. That is the unfortunate reality in America today.
Of course, an honest President, Congress, and press would only be demanded by an honest people. Honest people are a dying breed in a dying Empire.
13 Thursday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Limit the War Powers
Tags
law, Senate, Trump, War, war powers
That odd instance when one agrees with Tim Kaine.
“We should not be at war with Iran unless Congress votes to authorize such a war,” Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who introduced the resolution said, according to CNN. “While the President does and must always have the ability to defend the United States from imminent attack, the executive power to initiate war stops there. An offensive war requires a congressional debate and vote. This should not be a controversial proposition.”
It should not, but it’s not all that relevant anymore. It’s the age of the Empire and the Empire is almost finished. I smell another veto. But, the vote was nice.
10 Monday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on State of Emergency = One Mile of Wall
That’s all we have to show, o far, for all that chanting.
The White House budget document estimates the money would pay for approximately 1,000 miles.
Much of the construction would be slated for 2021 and beyond, presuming Mr. Trump wins a second term in office.
The administration has concentrated its construction efforts on federally owned land, where it faces the fewest legal hurdles. Across swaths of the border, particularly in Texas, the administration is meeting resistance from private landowners unwilling to forfeit their property so that new sections of wall can be built on it.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection said that through the end of January it has erected 104 miles of new fencing, though only one of those miles covers a portion of the border where no barriers previously existed. The administration has said it hopes to have 450 miles built or under construction by the end of 2020.
One down, 1,999 to go! I suspect the whole thing will be completed by the time Hillary is checking into the NY MCC.
10 Monday Feb 2020
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Looking Into or Behind the Coronavirus
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In the wake of mass speculation and gibbering, the White House asked experts to examine the possible origins of nCoV.
The White House on Thursday asked U.S. scientists and medical researchers to investigate the scientific origins of the novel coronavirus, as misinformation about the outbreak spreads online.
The director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in a letter to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, requested that scientific experts “rapidly” look into the origins of the virus in order to address both the current spread and “to inform future outbreak preparation and better understand animal/human and environmental transmission aspects of coronaviruses.”
The national academies consist of private, nonprofit institutions charged with providing scientific support to the federal government.
It’s obvious that this thing overwhelmingly predominately affects Asians, particularly Asian males. Some suggest it is a weaponization. I have a developing theory, based on questioning cui bono? I’ll keep that in the pocket for now. Interesting.
09 Sunday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on A Small Whirlpool in the Swamp
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And, now is the time – for a small start at least.
Exacting swift punishment against those who crossed him, an emboldened President Donald Trump ousted two government officials who had delivered damaging testimony against him during his impeachment hearings. The president took retribution just two days after his acquittal by the Senate.
First came news Friday that Trump had ousted Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the decorated soldier and national security aide who played a central role in the Democrats’ impeachment case. Vindman’s lawyer said his client was escorted out of the White House complex Friday, told to leave in retaliation for “telling the truth.”
“The truth has cost Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman his job, his career, and his privacy,” attorney David Pressman said in a statement. Vindman’s twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, also was asked to leave his job as a White House lawyer on Friday, the Army said in a statement. Both men were reassigned to the Army.
Next came word that Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, also was out.
Exiling the Vindman’s, Sondland, and Pressman, and all other dual nationalists would be a grand next step.
07 Friday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Now’s The Time
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For Trump to get serious about draining the swamp – if he’s going to do it.
Now that he’s been acquitted of two impeachment charges, they’re bracing for payback.
It may be about to begin. The White House is weighing a plan to dismiss Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council after he offered damning testimony in the House impeachment inquiry, positioning the move as part of a broader effort to shrink the foreign policy bureaucracy, two people familiar with the matter said.
“I’m not happy with him,” Trump told reporters Friday when asked about Vindman.
It’s not just the witnesses — such as Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, an NSC analyst — who could face retribution for speaking out. The deeper anxiety among many career national security officials is that Trump, feeling vindicated by the Senate’s acquittal, will act on long-harbored suspicions that bureaucrats at the State Department and the NSC are out to undermine his agenda.
Unburdened by impeachment, they fear that Trump could unleash his anger at the foreign policy establishment he’s long equated with what some of his advisers and supporters call the “Deep State.”
There’s no need for or point in negotiating now. They took their coup shot and failed. Now would be a great time to crank up “the storm.” A little rain and wind never hurt Washington.
PERRIN LOVETT 