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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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(CNN) The Florida man who pleaded guilty to mailing explosive devices said in a letter to a federal judge that attending a rally for President Donald Trump "became like a new found drug."
Cesar Sayoc has admitted to sending pipe bombs to CNN, and various Democratic officials and donors. He pleaded guilty last month to 65 felony counts, including using weapons of mass destruction in an attempted domestic terrorist attack.
In the handwritten letter filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, he told a judge that "the first thing you here (sic) entering Trump rally is we are not going to take it anymore, the forgotten ones, etc."
At those events, he said, he came into contact with all kinds of people. "You met people from all walks life ... color etc," he wrote. "It was fun, it became like a new found drug."
He also wrote that Trump's self-help CDs reprogrammed his mind, and detailed the negative reaction he got for the Trump stickers on his car, including having his tires slashed and windows broken.
"I laughed at first. It was ridiculous how people were reacting and violence on both sides," he wrote.
VOTING FROM THE HOOSEGOW
https://claytoonz.com/2019/04/24/voting-from-the-hoosegow/
During CNN’s town hall on Monday night, Bernie Sanders said prisoners should be allowed to vote. The response from most people, even fellow Democrats, seems to be, “Uh, do what now?”
Sanders was asked the question by a member of the audience, and he replied, “I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy — yes, even for terrible people — because once you start chipping away … you’re running down a slippery slope. I do believe that even if they are in jail paying their price to society, that should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.”
To be clear, Sanders said this includes people like rapists, murderers, pedophiles, and terrorists, such as the Boston Marathon Bomber. Republicans replied to this with, “Thank you, Bernie. And it’s even gift wrapped.” Within minutes, the Republican National Committee sent out an email harping on Sander’s hoosegow vote policy.
Fellow candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren said the issue deserves a “conversation.” Mayor Pete Buttigieg was explicit in his opposition to it.
Voting rights is a huge issue in this country. For years, Republicans have been disenfranchising minority voters. They have engaged in gerrymandering, voter suppression, removing black voters from voting rolls in Georgia, creating new hoops to leap through for Native-American voters in North Dakota, and even voter intimidation in many cases. Even the Russians worked to discourage minority voters in their pro-Trump campaign in 2016.
The Trump administration is now pushing to remove undocumented immigrants from the census in order for blue states to lose congressional seats. That’s not a voting issue as much as it’s an effort for minorities to lose representation and give more to conservative voters. Republicans already believe white people deserve more representation than black voters. Don’t believe me? Go talk to one about the electoral college. They believe acres should have more representation than Democrats.
There are movements in several states to restore voting rights for felons after they are released from prison. Virginia and Florida have already passed laws restoring those rights (and Florida Republicans are trying to find a way to take them away again, despite the voters restoring those rights). Those rights should be restored as released prisoners are returning to society. They have a right to participate.
We should do more than have a “conversation” about how the American judicial system comes down harsher on black males, who make up around six percent of the U.S. population yet 37% of U.S. prisons. Serious reforms are needed. We can start by decriminalizing many drug offenses and making marijuana legal nationally. It’s stupid that it’s still illegal on the federal level. We could also stop calling the cops every time we see a black guy outside, walking down the street, cutting his grass, grilling, or just breathing.
As for those still in prison, Sander says we “should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.” No, we shouldn’t. But for most of those in prison, they took away their own right to participate in our democracy.
I accept that I’m more of a bleeding-heart liberal than the rest of the population. But even I don’t think it’s a rational idea to allow votes from prisons. Trump likes to call Sanders “Crazy Bernie.” With this proposal, that childish nickname will be echoed by people who aren’t just Trump sycophants. I don’t believe Bernie Sanders is crazy and I support a lot of his positions, but the jail voting idea is crazy.
Donald Trump belongs in prison more than he belongs in the White House. But if Democrats nominate Bernie in 2020, Trump will be back in the people’s house eating Big Macs instead of the big house eating nutraloaf.
When Trump is finally in prison, I’d like to think his influence and infection on our electoral process has ceased, and that will include him not voting. The lack of voting shouldn’t bother him too much since he never bothered to vote that much until he ran for president. His stupid kids didn’t even know how to register for the right primary and now one of them is a presidential adviser with a security clearance.
Let’s release more people from prison and restore their right to vote, and let’s put Trump in prison and take away his.
https://claytoonz.com/2019/04/24/voting-from-the-hoosegow/
During CNN’s town hall on Monday night, Bernie Sanders said prisoners should be allowed to vote. The response from most people, even fellow Democrats, seems to be, “Uh, do what now?”
Sanders was asked the question by a member of the audience, and he replied, “I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy — yes, even for terrible people — because once you start chipping away … you’re running down a slippery slope. I do believe that even if they are in jail paying their price to society, that should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.”
To be clear, Sanders said this includes people like rapists, murderers, pedophiles, and terrorists, such as the Boston Marathon Bomber. Republicans replied to this with, “Thank you, Bernie. And it’s even gift wrapped.” Within minutes, the Republican National Committee sent out an email harping on Sander’s hoosegow vote policy.
Fellow candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren said the issue deserves a “conversation.” Mayor Pete Buttigieg was explicit in his opposition to it.
Voting rights is a huge issue in this country. For years, Republicans have been disenfranchising minority voters. They have engaged in gerrymandering, voter suppression, removing black voters from voting rolls in Georgia, creating new hoops to leap through for Native-American voters in North Dakota, and even voter intimidation in many cases. Even the Russians worked to discourage minority voters in their pro-Trump campaign in 2016.
The Trump administration is now pushing to remove undocumented immigrants from the census in order for blue states to lose congressional seats. That’s not a voting issue as much as it’s an effort for minorities to lose representation and give more to conservative voters. Republicans already believe white people deserve more representation than black voters. Don’t believe me? Go talk to one about the electoral college. They believe acres should have more representation than Democrats.
There are movements in several states to restore voting rights for felons after they are released from prison. Virginia and Florida have already passed laws restoring those rights (and Florida Republicans are trying to find a way to take them away again, despite the voters restoring those rights). Those rights should be restored as released prisoners are returning to society. They have a right to participate.
We should do more than have a “conversation” about how the American judicial system comes down harsher on black males, who make up around six percent of the U.S. population yet 37% of U.S. prisons. Serious reforms are needed. We can start by decriminalizing many drug offenses and making marijuana legal nationally. It’s stupid that it’s still illegal on the federal level. We could also stop calling the cops every time we see a black guy outside, walking down the street, cutting his grass, grilling, or just breathing.
As for those still in prison, Sander says we “should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.” No, we shouldn’t. But for most of those in prison, they took away their own right to participate in our democracy.
I accept that I’m more of a bleeding-heart liberal than the rest of the population. But even I don’t think it’s a rational idea to allow votes from prisons. Trump likes to call Sanders “Crazy Bernie.” With this proposal, that childish nickname will be echoed by people who aren’t just Trump sycophants. I don’t believe Bernie Sanders is crazy and I support a lot of his positions, but the jail voting idea is crazy.
Donald Trump belongs in prison more than he belongs in the White House. But if Democrats nominate Bernie in 2020, Trump will be back in the people’s house eating Big Macs instead of the big house eating nutraloaf.
When Trump is finally in prison, I’d like to think his influence and infection on our electoral process has ceased, and that will include him not voting. The lack of voting shouldn’t bother him too much since he never bothered to vote that much until he ran for president. His stupid kids didn’t even know how to register for the right primary and now one of them is a presidential adviser with a security clearance.
Let’s release more people from prison and restore their right to vote, and let’s put Trump in prison and take away his.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he would turn to the Supreme Court if the House of Representatives moves to impeach him, though it is unclear what role the nation’s highest court could play if the president were to seek its help in such a situation.
Trump claimed in a tweet posted Wednesday morning that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report was written by a team biased against him with “unlimited money” for an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Still, he said, the report “didn’t lay a glove on me.”
“I DID NOTHING WRONG,” Trump said. “If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Although Trump claimed he would seek the Supreme Court's help if the House were to impeach him, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 1993 that authority for impeachment trials resides in Congress and ”nowhere else.”
President Trump has just under 60 million Twitter followers. This is a lot. Barack Obama has over 106 million. This is a lot more. The discrepancy is precisely the type of thing that would infuriate the current occupant of the White House and, according to the Daily Beast, it does.
“Trump has repeatedly griped to associates about how Obama has had more Twitter followers than he has,” two people close to Trump told the outlet, “even though — by Trump’s own assessment — he is so much better at Twitter than Obama is.”
So frustrated by his lagging Twitter ratings was Trump that he brought the issue up to CEO Jack Dorsey during a quasi-secretive meeting at the White House on Tuesday. The Washington Postreported that a “significant portion” of the meeting focused on the president’s belief that Twitter has been intentionally stripping him of followers. The Daily Beast similarly reported that Trump spent an “inordinate amount of time complaining about his lost followers.”
Dorsey replied by emphasizing that any decrease in followers is simply the result of the company purging bots and fake accounts.
On Tuesday, President Trump hosted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in the Oval Officefor a closed-door meeting, during which the leader of the free world spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about lost Twitter followers, according to a source familiar with the conversation.
The Twitter chief, for his part, tried to reassure the president that the company’s staff merely wants his follower count to be as bot-free as possible.
This is what the most powerful person in the world was preoccupied with Tuesday.
A large percentage of the meeting, which included senior White House officials such as Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino, was spent addressing the subject of @realDonaldTrump’s follower count. The president stated his belief that he had lost some of his roughly 59 million followers in anti-Trump, anti-conservative Twitter purges, according to a source familiar with the meeting.
Dorsey, according to this knowledgeable source, had to explain to the president that like other Twitter users, @realDonaldTrump periodically loses followers when the site deletes fake or bot accounts. Dorsey even said he himself had lost followers as a result of Twitter’s efforts to delete fake accounts.
SUNLAND PARK, N.M. — Their commander is in jail. The authorities are giving them until Friday to clear out and leave. But the United Constitutional Patriots, the right-wing militia under scrutiny over detaining migrant families at the border with Mexico, is digging in.
“It’s my God-given right to be here,” said one balaclava-clad militia member who gave his name only as Viper. Chafing at the hostile reactions to the militia’s actions, he said that he was an Army veteran and that he expected his group, if pushed out, to set up camp in another location along the border.
“The guys in Washington say one thing about not wanting us on the ground but no one from the Border Patrol here has ever told me they don’t want our help,” he said, squinting under the midday sun. “We’re here to protect Americans from the illegals violating our sovereignty.”
Iowa’s longest-serving Republican legislator, state Rep. Andy McKean, ditched the GOP on Tuesday as he offered a searing renunciation of President Trump, saying he could no longer support Trump as the party’s standard-bearer because of his “unacceptable behavior” and “reckless spending."
McKean revealed he would join the Democratic Party, a decision he described as “very difficult” after spending nearly a half-century as a registered Republican and 26 years in the legislature. But ultimately, he said, “I feel as a Republican that I need to be able to support the standard-bearer of our party.”
And “unfortunately,” he said, he could not bring himself to support Trump.
“Unacceptable behavior should be called out for what it is,” he said during the news conferenceat the Iowa Statehouse in Des Moines, “and Americans of all parties should insist on something far better in the leader of their country and the free world.”
President Trump suggested Wednesday that he would ask the Supreme Court to intervene if Democrats move to impeach him — a notion that legal experts said showed a misunderstanding of the Constitution.
It was unclear how Trump would legally justify such a move, since the Constitution delegates impeachment proceedings to Congress, not the courts. Trump mentioned the idea briefly in morning tweets in which he lashed out at Democrats who are continuing to investigate him following the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.
“I DID NOTHING WRONG,” Trump wrote. “If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court. Not only are there no ‘High Crimes and Misdemeanors,’ there are no Crimes by me at all.”
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request to elaborate on what the president would seek from the court.
The notion was ridiculed by several legal experts, including Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, who accused Trump of “idiocy.”
“Not even a SCOTUS filled with Trump appointees would get in the way of the House or Senate,” Tribe wrote on Twitter, adding that Trump apparently thinks his recent court appointments would give him a “ ‘get out of jail free’ card.”
Nancy Pelosi has rebuffed pressure to initiate an impeachment inquiry by arguing that there are other means of holding President Trump accountable for his corruption and wrongdoing — a goal that the House speaker herself has cast as imperative for protecting our democracy.
“We all firmly agree that we should proceed down a path of finding the truth,” the House speaker recently wrote in a letter to House Democrats. “It is also important to know that the facts regarding holding the President accountable can be gained outside of impeachment hearings.”
That’s true. But what happens if the White House will not allow Congress to get access to the “facts” that are necessary to carry out the task of “holding the President accountable”?
Trump, in a https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-says-he-is-opposed-to-white-house-aides-testifying-to-congress-deepening-power-struggle-with-hill/2019/04/23/0c7bd8dc-65e0-11e9-8985-4cf30147bdca_story.html?utm_term=.6ab21ad4e9ce (new interview with The Post), just made it overwhelmingly clear that he will henceforth treat the House and its reasonable oversight efforts as fundamentally illegitimate.
“There is no reason to go any further, and especially in Congress where it’s very partisan — obviously very partisan,” Trump said, referring to the latest round of oversight requests House Democrats have made.
Trump’s justification: The White House already fully cooperated with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation (Trump actually refused to testify and tried to get Mueller fired), so there’s no reason to cooperate “any further” with Congress.
Thus, the Treasury Department https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/treasury-likely-to-defy-tuesday-deadline-to-turn-over-trump-tax-returns/2019/04/23/daa7da46-653e-11e9-82ba-fcfeff232e8f_story.html?utm_term=.3a1fd66e5ef9 (just informed House Democrats) that it will not meet the deadline of their request for Trump’s tax returns. While it’s still possible that this could change, this looks extremely unlikely, as long as Trump does not want his returns disclosed, which he adamantly does not.
Meanwhile, the White House is https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-plans-to-fight-house-subpoena-of-former-counsel-donald-mcgahn-for-testimony-on-mueller-report/2019/04/23/2d48732a-65f1-11e9-83df-04f4d124151f_story.html?utm_term=.8a2acca91a31 (preparing to lean on) former White House counsel Donald McGahn to defy a subpoena to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, to elaborate on the https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/23/why-is-trump-raging-again-because-don-mcgahn-will-further-expose-his-corruption/?utm_term=.2011705a0fb0 (extensive testimony) he gave to Mueller supporting the case that Trump obstructed justice. The White House may assert executive privilege.
But here’s the thing: If the White House continues down this path, it will make it still harder for House Democrats to resist an impeachment inquiry. Because if they launch one, their legal case for doing things such as compelling McGahn’s testimony and getting Trump’s returns will get even stronger than it already is.
On Tuesday, the U.N. Security Council finally passed that resolution, but only in a watered-down version, diluted by the Trump administration.
European allies are furious.
France’s U.N. ambassador, François Delattre, lashed out at the United States for what he called an “intolerable and incomprehensible” stance.
U.S. allies abroad have grown accustomed to a U.S. administration with interests that are often diametrically opposed to theirs, including on trade, Iran and the European Union. But sexual violence in war? Really?
The move to water down Tuesday’s resolution followed weeks of U.S. objections to remove all references in that paper to reproductive and sexual health, which the U.S. delegation feared would be understood as support for abortions. Like prior Republican administrations, the Trump administration has rolled back much of the support granted to nongovernmental organizations for projects that support or facilitate abortions.
...
The approved resolution still supports measures to end the use of sex as a weapon of war, and Maas, the German foreign minister, carefully worded his response on Tuesday. “The resolution calls on all U.N. member states to support victims through better access to justice, medical and psychological assistance and reintegration into society,” he said.
But other U.S. allies were more blunt in their responses, suggesting that the U.S. objections were threatening the dignity of women worldwide.
“Women and girls who suffered from sexual violence in conflict, and who obviously didn’t choose to become pregnant, should have the right to terminate their pregnancy,” said Delattre, the French ambassador.
The initial version of the draft resolution had stated that victims of sexual violence should be able to access services, which specifically included “sexual and reproductive health.” Amid objections, a subsequent version referred only to “comprehensive health services” for victims of sexual violence.
But for the Trump administration, even offering vaguely defined “comprehensive health services” for sexual violence victims went a step too far.
