Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

TRUMPY’S LITTLE BUNNY
https://claytoonz.com/2019/04/21/trumpys-little-bunny/

The Attorney General should act independently of the president. Trump’s first AG was Jeff Sessions, a man who was on Trump’s campaign team and had during his confirmation hearing. Sessions was actually giddy while announcing the policy of separating children from their families. But even Sessions was more independent and ethical than William Barr.

Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation and it was Assistant AG, Rod Rosenstein, who made the appointment. Trump publicly screamed and complained about Sessions recusing himself. He didn’t hide his anger. He said that if he knew Sessions would recuse himself, that he wouldn’t have given him the job. That’s Trump saying he wouldn’t have given Sessions the job if he had known he wouldn’t use the position to protect Trump.

Trump ordered people in his administration to force Sessions to un-recuse himself, but the orders weren’t followed, either out of direct refusal or the minions just hoping Trump would forget about it. This was a direct attempt to obstruct justice. Fortunately for Trump, he eventually fired Sessions and got an AG who wouldn’t rule his obstruction is obstruction.

Trump often said to his staff, “where’s my Roy Cohn?” Roy Cohn was a very unethical lawyer who was close to Trump’s family, was Trump’s legal (haha) mentor, and had helped Joseph McCarthy during his crusade to destroy anyone, personally and professionally, who vaguely looked like a communist. Roy Cohn was eventually disbarred.

In William Barr, Trump found more than his Roy Cohn. He found his little bunny.

Before Barr was Trumpy’s little bunny, he was hopping for George H. W. Bush. He recommended pardons for several individuals in Iran/Contra and he’s proud to this day to have done so. Casper Weinberger had been set to go on trial for charges about lying to Congress. Barr said later that he believed Bush had made the right decision and that people in the case had been treated unfairly. Who had described Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn as being treated “unfairly?”

Before he became Trumpy’s little bunny, Barr was criticizing Robert Mueller for hiring people who had made donations to Democrats. But here’s the thing, people. It’s Justice Department policy that politics is not to play into hiring decisions. You know who should know this better than a blogging political cartoonist? Anyone who has served as Attorney General and that includes William Barr.

Before he became Trump’s little bunny, Barr wrote a memo criticizing the legal basis upon which Mueller might have been looking into whether Trump had obstructed justice. During his sham of a confirmation hearing, Barr promised “full transparency” in regard to the Mueller Report. This is where Barr first laid an egg.

Barr ruled that Trump did not obstruct justice and that Mueller left that decision to be made by him. Barr sat on that egg for three weeks. Now that we have the Mueller Report, we see that’s not the case. Barr misled the public and Congress. Mueller wanted Congress to make the obstruction decision and had cited at least ten instances where Trump may have obstructed justice. Barr never mentioned these instances, or the constant lying, or the many connections to Russia, or Trump’s eagerness to benefit from Russia, etc.

Barr issued a four-page summary that focused on collusion where the nearly five-hundred page Mueller Report barely mentions collusion. Now, those of us who have read the bulk of the report gets to be screamed at by Trump defenders who didn’t read all four pages of the Barr summary.

There are now calls for impeachment, not for Trump but for Barr. William Barr acted as Trump’s personal attorney and used the position of Attorney General to defend a man who obstructed justice and was disloyal to the United States. Keep in mind that all the Republicans defending Trump once impeached a Democratic president for lying about receiving oral sex.

William Barr has disgraced himself. He couldn’t have less dignity if he was wearing a bunny costume.

William Barr is Trumpy’s little bunny.

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Laissez-faire capitalism works very well in theory. The government sets clearly-defined rules, within which corporations compete for profits. Companies win by providing the best products at the lowest price; investors win by allocating scarce capital where it can be put to best use; the country as a whole reaps the benefit.

In an age of corruption anxiety, however, laissez-faire often means that companies themselves get to set the rules.
  • The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has lost all its teeth, as Nicholas Confessore reports in today's NYT Magazine. The agency was created to work for and be answerable to consumers, but then Mick Mulvaney took over, and now it seems to answer mostly to payday lenders.
  • The CFPB's new head, hand-picked by Mulvaney, is Kathleen Kraninger. (Mulvaney himself has moved up to become the White House chief of staff.) Kraninger's first big speech this week was described as "the latest nail in the coffin of the CFPB" by LA Times consumer advocate David Lazarus.
  • Kraninger referred 11 times to "stakeholders", including "a continued commitment to engagement with all of our stakeholders". Those stakeholders emphatically include financial institutions, who don't need to worryabout being sued: the CFPB's rules "are not best articulated on a case-by-case basis through enforcement actions," says the agency's new head.
  • A group of payday lenders called NDG Enterprise illegally threatened borrowers with arrest and imprisonment, per Confessore. The CFPB recently settled its three-year prosecution of NDG; the fine was exactly $0.
The big picture: When corporations capture their regulators, laissez-faire fails.

Driving the news: Corporations must not be allowed to influence bankruptcy proceedings without fully revealing their conflicts. But that's exactly what McKinsey is being accused of. Now, McKinsey itself has been given the job of drawing up new conflict-of-interest guidelines — guidelines that "could serve as a model for all bankruptcy practitioners". A spokeswoman for McKinsey told the WSJ that the firm is looking to address "ambiguities" in the existing rules.
  • Corporations literally write laws now. An investigation by USA Today, The Arizona Republic, and the Center for Public Integrity found at least 10,000 bills drafted by corporate interests being introduced in the past 8 years, of which more than 2,100 were signed into law.
Why it matters: Regulatory stakes are high, sometimes life-and-death. Ali Bahrami, for example, the top safety regulator at the FAA, got that job after previously urging the agency to allow Boeing to self-certify the safety of it jets. (Boeing is back in the news this weekend, with a report of safety lapses at its North Carolina Dreamliner factory.) More insidiously, corporate capture of the government apparatus reduces faith in all institutions.
 
THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH RUDY
https://claytoonz.com/2019/04/22/theres-something-wrong-with-rudy/

Just in case the Trump team’s defense of all of Donald’s transgressions documented in the Mueller Report wasn’t stupid enough, they trotted out Rudy Giuliani on Sunday for all the talk shows.

For months, Mayor Rudy went on the talk shows and defended Trump by saying, “He didn’t do it.” Then, he changed that position to, “If he did it then it wasn’t wrong.” It’s like when he flipped from defending former Trump lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen from respectable lawyer and family man to lying betrayer. If only he could delete his pro-Cohen tweets like Sean Hannity did.

On Sunday, Rudy told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.” That’s his position because that’s exactly what the Trump campaign did and it’s laid out in Mueller’s report. Not only did the Trump team use information that was obtained illegally by Russia, they asked for it and were eager to get it.

Rudy was responding to Mitt Romney’s statement that he was “sickened” by what he read in the Mueller Report and “appalled” that “fellow citizens working in a campaign for president (Trump) welcomed help from Russia, including information that had been illegally obtained, that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement.” What sickens and appalls me is that Mittens is the only Republican sickened and appalled so far from what he read in the report. All Americans, including Republicans and Rudy should be disgusted by the actions of the Trump Campaign. But they’re not because they’re no longer Republicans or even Americans. They’re cultists.

Rudy went on to imply that Romney was a hypocrite because he wanted dirt on Obama during his presidential campaign. He said, “Man, if I could tell you the things Romney wanted to do,” regarding the 2012 presidential campaign. He said Romney needed to “stop the bull” and to “stop this pious act that you weren’t digging up, trying to dig up dirt on people, putting dirt out on people.”

After being pressed by Tapper, Rudy admitted he didn’t know if Romney had obtained any information from foreign governments, which means he didn’t. But, Rudy went on to say more stupid stuff like all the stuff Russia was hacking became available in every major newspaper, so it wasn’t wrong to use it.

Rudy needs to stop the bull. All the stuff the media was reporting on was obtained by a foreign government to help the Trump campaign. It only took the Russians five hours to start hacking into the Democrat’s systems after Trump publicly asked them to. The media’s access to the hacked material was only made available after it was published publicly by Wikileaks. The media was reporting about the material. Trump was using it politically.

The other nonsense from Rudy is saying any campaign would use illegally obtained material from a hostile foreign government. He makes this claim based on campaigns using dirt against their opponents. Yes, campaigns want dirt and they hire people to conduct opposition research. There’s probably not a campaign in American presidential history that hasn’t looked for dirt on their opponent. The difference here is that the Russians approached the Trump campaign and instead of contacting the FBI, they said, “I love it.”

I feel kind of bad for Jake Tapper and Fox News’ Chris Wallace (who also tangled with Rudy on Sunday). Trying to rationalize with Giuliani is like debating a Trump sycophant on social media. You’re quarreling with a tinfoil-hat-wearing fucknut who hasn’t even read William Barr’s four-page summary, less enough Mueller’s nearly-500 page report, yet they know every detail about it that doesn’t exist. At some point, you realize you’re not the dumbass whisperer and it’s actually not important what they believe. You can’t fix stupid. You’re totally free to leave the discussion and move on with your life. But poor Tapper and Wallace are in Giuliani’s presence and the only way to get rid of him before the allotted time is over would be to take a fire hose and spray him out of the studio.

Rudy’s mind went bye-bye a long time ago. Talking to him is like having your crazy grandpa over for Thanksgiving, then realizing that his ride, Grandma, left without him and she’s not answering her phone. And your aunts, uncles, and cousins aren’t any help because they all snuck out while you were trying to call Grandma. Quite frankly, I keep waiting for Rudy to show up for one of these interviews in nothing but tinfoil, a diaper, and a snorkel. No, I don’t know what the snorkel is for.

If you don’t think Rudy’s lost his mind, look at this exchange.

Giuliani: They couldn’t find a single piece of evidence for anything, hacking, dissemination.

Jake Tapper: There’s an entire volume of evidence.

Giuliani: There is an entire volume of stuff, of stuff, not of evidence.

Damn you, Grandma.

Now, every lawyer in American can counter by claiming the evidence against their client isn’t evidence, it’s stuff.

It makes you wonder what kind of “stuff” Rudy and the sycophants are smoking.

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