Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

PUTIN SUMMARY
https://claytoonz.com/2019/04/10/putin-summary/

I’m a cartoonist which means I don’t do math well, but I do know two plus two equals four. Here’s another equation that’s not difficult to decipher: When Donald Trump goes from “release the Mueller Report” to “don’t release it,” and his toady Attorney General William Barr won’t confirm if the White House has seen it yet, that means Trump has seen it. At the very least, someone has read the parts to him that aren’t flattering.

The Trump team is celebrating that the Mueller Report, according to Barr’s four-page memo, clears Trump of committing crimes when it comes to collusion with Russia. What they’re overlooking are the parts where Trump and his campaign was sleazy, corrupt, unethical, and disloyal to their nation. But, yay. No collusion.

Barr is still holding back from giving the report to Congress two weeks after it was turned in to the Justice Department by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Keep in mind, the Starr Report was handed over in two days. Barr is now “promising” to give it to Congress next week with heaps of redactions. If you get off on looking at sentences full of black boxes, this report is for you.

Donald Trump has falsely claimed the report exonerates him, which means his lying, stupid, simplistic, idiotic, kook-aid drinking, cultish, sycophantic followers are claiming he’s exonerated. Even Barr’s memo states the report does not totally exonerate him.

Trump doesn’t just deny his campaign colluded with Russia. He has denied many times in the past that Russia even meddled in the campaign, despite the fact every American intelligence agency had made that determination and his own campaign manager, son, and son-in-law were dancing with Russians in Trump Tower. Another person who loves to continue the lie is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Tuesday, at the International Arctic Forum in St. Petersburg, Putin said the investigation was “complete nonsense” that had been invented by President Trump’s political enemies for “an internal audience.”

Putin also said, “It was clear for us from the start that it would end like this. A mountain gave birth to a mouse.” If Putin is correct and actually knows what he’s talking about regarding the report, that means he’s seen it too. I don’t know if unplanned Russian mountain sex produces rodents, but if anything, the entire situation is full of rats.

Neither Putin or Trump gets the irony of shouting “no collusion” while also echoing each other with the term “witch hunt,” which Putin used Tuesday while attacking the investigation.

While Barr is doing Trump’s bidding, he’s also doing Putin’s. While testifying to Congress on Tuesday, the same day Putin was talking about Mueller and polar bears (he was), Barr said, “The Office of the Inspector General has a pending investigation of the FISA process in the Russia investigation.” Yes. Trump’s handpicked Attorney General is investigating the investigation. He’s following in the footsteps of Congressional Trump poodles Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan, and Devin Nunes and politicizing the Justice Department to go after…wait for it…Trump’s enemies. This is something Trump has been screaming for since he came into office…and promised to do as a candidate.

Our government is now going after people for investigating suspected Russian spies. The Trump administration and the Republican Party are more interested in defending and protecting Russian spies than our Democratic process. Protecting Vladimir Putin is more important than protecting Americans.

I have a spoiler for you about this investigation into malfeasance in the FISA requests and the investigation into Trump. They’re not going to find any criminal conduct. Even the Nunes Memo stated that investigators did not break the law in acquiring FISA warrants (EXONERATED!). But, the lesson here is if law enforcement agents do their jobs of protecting our nation against a corrupt president, then they will be punished for it. We’ve already seen numerous people fired for investigating Trump.

The Mueller Report says Trump didn’t break the law with collusion with Russia. It didn’t say Trump was clear on obstruction. Then, Robert Mueller turned the report in to Trump’s man who’s working with him to obstruct justice.

Vladimir Putin, who helped steal an American election and install the world’s biggest Cheeto shitgibbon dumbass into the presidency, is laughing his Vodka drinking, critic killing, Russian off ass.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has gathered more evidence than previously known in its criminal investigation of hush payments to two women who alleged affairs with Donald Trump, including from members of the president’s inner circle.

Prosecutors interviewed Hope Hicks, a former close aide to Mr. Trump and White House communications director, last spring as part of their campaign-finance probe, which ultimately implicated the president in federal crimes.

They also spoke to Keith Schiller, Mr. Trump’s former security chief. Investigators learned of calls between Mr. Schiller and David Pecker, chief executive of the National Enquirer’s publisher, which has admitted it paid $150,000 to a former Playboy model on Mr. Trump’s behalf to keep her story under wraps.

In addition, investigators possess a recorded phone conversation between Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen and a lawyer who represented the two women.

The prosecutors’ campaign-finance investigation is based on the theory that the secret payments to keep women quiet were illegal contributions, because they were intended to influence the election. New details of the investigation—gleaned from interviews with 20 people familiar with the probe and from nearly 1,000 pages of court documents—show prosecutors had gathered information about Mr. Trump’s alleged involvement in the payments weeks before Mr. Cohen asserted it in open court.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The Trump administration, however, has transcended cronyism and declared a war on expertise, in which unbiased knowledge is itself somehow politically suspect if it does not accord with President Trump’s beliefs and assertions—and especially if it conflicts with his personal interests. In this administration, complicated issues are not problems to be solved or tasks to be administered for the public good, but threats to be hammered down by alert sycophants. As Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro once put it: “My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”

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There is plenty of politicization of expertise in the United States already. This is a hazard of democracy, in which neither the public nor their elected leaders want to be told things they do not like. We have multiple, tragic examples, from Vietnam to the Great Recession, of the toll taken when policymakers bend experts to their will by demanding the right answers in the service of a political agenda.

Deforming expertise and displacing experts for personal interest is rarer and even more dangerous. It is one thing to rely on experts who will sometimes make errors in good faith, and who can—and should—be held accountable for their bad judgment. It is another entirely to nominate putative experts with the overt expectation that they will act in bad faith, and against the national interest, in the service of one man. Such appointments are yet another in Donald Trump’s many attacks on our democratic institutions, and we will have to endure their effects long after he has left the White House.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Mr. Trump has escalated a misleading defense of his administration’s practice of breaking up families to outright revisionist history. There is no law that mandates family separation, let alone a law enacted under Mr. Obama. The practice is the result of a policy enacted by the Trump administration, and ended by Mr. Trump last June.

Last year, as the Trump administration faced backlash over its policy, top officials countered that Mr. Trump’s predecessors had also separated families at the border. That was misleading. While previous administrations did break up families, it was rare — for example, in cases where there was doubt about the familial relationship between a child and an accompanying adult, according to former officials and immigration experts.

Neither former Presidents George W. Bush nor Barack Obama had a policy that had the effect of widespread family separation, Sarah Pierce of the Migration Policy Institute told The Times last June. “Nothing like what the Trump administration is doing has occurred before,” she said.

The Bush administration introduced a program in 2005 that also referred for prosecution immigrants illegally crossing the border, but it made an exception for parents with children. The Obama administration in 2014 detained families together, drawing its own criticisms and lawsuits.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

March 2016 ...



In 1991, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islam Karimov was elected Uzbekistan’s first – and heretofore only – president. His transition to the presidency was seamless: Karimov, a long-time communist apparatchik, had served as first secretary of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic since 1989, and the 1991 election, like every election that would follow, was a rigged process that forbade the meaningful participation of opposing parties.

Backed by military might and a vast surveillance system inherited from the Soviet KGB, Karimov maintained dominance as Uzbekistan transitioned from communism to “democracy,” from enforced atheism to a narrow but heavily promoted vision of Muslim cultural identity. The repressive Soviet power structure, glossed with a nationalist sheen, was easy to preserve. More difficult was making Uzbeks believe in the legitimacy of the new nation and assuring them that the chaos they had endured would have a happy ending. By 1992, Karimov had found it: a slogan, ubiquitous, recited in schools and plastered on billboards throughout the country:

“O’zbekiston – kelajagi buyuk davlat!” “Uzbekistan – a state with a great future!”

In other words, Karimov was making Uzbekistan great again.

The rise of Donald Trump has spurred a resurgence of the study of comparative dictatorship. Most comparisons emphasize the West’s famed fascists: Adolf Hilter, whose command of the crowd and proposed persecution of ethnic minorities prompt obvious parallels with Trump (with cable news taking on the role of propagandist Leni Riefenstahl); and Benito Mussolini, whom Trump approvingly cited in a retweet of a Gawker-run Mussolini fan account, “IlDuce2016.” Others have noted parallels between Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who similarly capitalized on ethnic tension; Russian leader Vladimir Putin, for whom Trump has expressed admiration, and the authoritarian dictators of the Middle East.

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It is irresponsible to rule out his rule. The greatest and perhaps most depressing difference between the Central Asian and Trump models is the latter’s rise to power. When I asked an Uzbek friend to compare Trump to the Central Asian leaders, he replied: “Dictatorship is something that was done to us. But you – you’re doing this voluntarily?”

What would a Trump presidency look like? It is difficult to imagine given Trump’s preference of spectacular rhetoric over specific policy objectives – yet another trait he shares with Central Asian leaders. The best corollary for America under Trump may be Kyrgyzstan, the most restive of the Central Asian states. Like its neighbors, Kyrgyzstan shares an affinity for pageantry, spectacle, and proud displays of national heritage, but its population is far more likely to publicly air their dissatisfaction. Kyrgyzstan used to be called an “island of democracy in Central Asia” – democracy, here, used as a relative term – but it is more accurately described as a place of unrest, whether expressed in sudden acts of mass violence and protest (as in 2005 and 2010) or simply by citizens venting the daily frustrations of life. The latter has become harder to do, as Kyrgyzstan becomes increasingly authoritarian.

But it is likely that, if Trump rises to the top, America will not go down easily. With the largest unfavorability rating of any presidential candidate, he faces at least as many detractors as he does admirers. The question is what kind of tactics he will use to silence the former. So far, his greatest asset has been the U.S. media – financially desperate, hungry for ratings, and eager to embrace a potential dictator to rescue their corporate model, subjecting their countrymen to unprecedented over-coverage of a single candidate in the process.

America, like the countries of Central Asia, is a spectacular state. As news and entertainment converged in the 1990s, never to part, it became a tabloid state, and Trump has always triumphed as tabloid fodder. He is good for bad business. From a platform of media power rivaling that of any dictatorship, he vows to “make America great again.” Let us not forget how the leader of Uzbekistan, and the leaders of many other impoverished authoritarian states, have made the same promise. Let us also not forget how that turned out.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

He asked Pompeo if the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which allowed for U.S. troops to fight entities responsible for the 9/11 attacks and associated forces, included Iran.

Pompeo declined to directly answer the question, saying he’d defer to lawyers, but stated that there is “no doubt there’s a connection” between the Iranian government and al-Qaeda, the terrorist group behind the 2001 attacks.

“You do not have the permission of Congress to go to war with Iran,” Paul responded, while chiding Pompeo for trying to deflect the question. “Only Congress can declare war.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

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[Michael Scally MD]

President Trump’s older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, has retired as a federal appellate judge, ending an investigation into whether she violated judicial conduct rules by participating in fraudulent tax schemes with her siblings.

The court inquiry stemmed from complaints filed last October, after an investigation by The New York Times found that the Trumps had engaged in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the inherited wealth of Mr. Trump and his siblings. Judge Barry not only benefited financially from most of those tax schemes, The Times found; she was also in a position to influence the actions taken by her family.

Judge Barry, now 82, has not heard cases in more than two years but was still listed as an inactive senior judge, one step short of full retirement. In a letter dated Feb. 1, a court official notified the four individuals who had filed the complaints that the investigation was “receiving the full attention” of a judicial conduct council. Ten days later, Judge Barry filed her retirement papers.

The status change rendered the investigation moot, since retired judges are not subject to the conduct rules. The people who filed the complaints were notified last week that the matter had been dropped without a finding on the merits of the allegations. The decision has not yet been made public, but copies were provided to The Times by two of the complainants. Both are involved in the legal profession.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

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[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]