MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
- Start date
This is what we know:
Trump has made every effort to obstruct Mr. Mueller's investigation. A solid obstruction of justice case has been built. The caliber of Mr. Mueller's team, their work ethic and the quality of their work product ensures a solid case against this administration.
What else do we know? There is no doubt that we have a dangerous, mentally unstable man in our nation's highest office. The damage he has already caused will take decades to repair. We also know that this Republican Congress will take no steps to remove this deranged tyrant from office.
What else do we know? It is a virtual certainty that Mr. Mueller will recommend that charges be brought against this administration (including the "president" himself). We know Trump will respond by firing Rosenstein or appointing a new Attorney General who will terminate this investigation -- effectively shutting down all further inquiry into the myriad of his unlawful actions.
We know all this will happen. We also know that the electoral map favors the Republicans this November. The likelihood that the Democrats retake either chamber is not great. This means that Trump's power is now literally unlimited.
It has been said that citizens in fascist states had no idea that their country's most recent election would be their last, before a dictator seized power. Those who believe 2020 will bring this nation's salvation are living in a fantasy world. Trump will not go voluntarily, and he will not go quietly.
Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation
After Trump Seeks to Block Book, Publisher Hastens Release
After Trump Seeks to Block Book, Publisher Hastens Release
WASHINGTON — President Trump threatened legal fire and fury on Thursday in an effort to block a new book portraying him as a volatile and ill-equipped chief executive, but the publisher defied his demand to halt its release and instead moved up its publication to Friday because of soaring interest.
Angry at the publisher’s refusal to back down, Mr. Trump took aim late Thursday night at the book’s author, Michael Wolff, and one of his primary sources, Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, whose derisive comments about the president and his family stirred deep resentment in the Oval Office.
“I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter shortly before 11 p.m. “I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!”
The president’s blast at Mr. Wolff came at the end of a day in which Mr. Trump’s effort to stop publication failed. In an 11-page letter sent in the morning, a lawyer for the president said the book, https://us.macmillan.com/fireandfury/michaelwolff/9781250158079/as excerpted in a magazine article, includes false statements about Mr. Trump that “give rise to claims for libel” that could result in “substantial monetary damages and punitive damages.”
“Mr. Trump hereby demands that you immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book, the article, or any excerpts or summaries of either of them, to any person or entity, and that you issue a full and complete retraction and apology to my client as to all statements made about him in the book and article that lack competent evidentiary support,” the letter said.
Undeterred, Henry Holt and Co., the publisher, announced that instead it would make the book available for sale starting at 9 a.m. Friday rather than wait for its original release date on Tuesday. “We see ‘Fire and Fury’ as an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse, and are proceeding with the publication of the book,” the company said in a statement.
After Trump Seeks to Block Book, Publisher Hastens Release
WASHINGTON — President Trump threatened legal fire and fury on Thursday in an effort to block a new book portraying him as a volatile and ill-equipped chief executive, but the publisher defied his demand to halt its release and instead moved up its publication to Friday because of soaring interest.
Angry at the publisher’s refusal to back down, Mr. Trump took aim late Thursday night at the book’s author, Michael Wolff, and one of his primary sources, Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, whose derisive comments about the president and his family stirred deep resentment in the Oval Office.
“I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter shortly before 11 p.m. “I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!”
The president’s blast at Mr. Wolff came at the end of a day in which Mr. Trump’s effort to stop publication failed. In an 11-page letter sent in the morning, a lawyer for the president said the book, https://us.macmillan.com/fireandfury/michaelwolff/9781250158079/as excerpted in a magazine article, includes false statements about Mr. Trump that “give rise to claims for libel” that could result in “substantial monetary damages and punitive damages.”
“Mr. Trump hereby demands that you immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book, the article, or any excerpts or summaries of either of them, to any person or entity, and that you issue a full and complete retraction and apology to my client as to all statements made about him in the book and article that lack competent evidentiary support,” the letter said.
Undeterred, Henry Holt and Co., the publisher, announced that instead it would make the book available for sale starting at 9 a.m. Friday rather than wait for its original release date on Tuesday. “We see ‘Fire and Fury’ as an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse, and are proceeding with the publication of the book,” the company said in a statement.
Michael Wolff’s tantalizing takedown of President Trump’s White House is so tightly packed with tales of political convulsion and personal betrayal that official Washington will be buzzing off its sugar high for weeks. But after the shock of Wolff’s account of Trump’s willful ignorance and intellectual incoherence fades, Americans will be left with the inescapable conclusion that the president is not capable of fulfilling his duties as commander in chief.
The GOP’s defense of this indefensible president appears even more preposterous following Wolff’s revelation, in his new book, “https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250158060/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1250158060&linkId=cb1956acdc27988cbb92e863739d8c4b (Fire and Fury),” of former adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s observation that members of Trump’s team, including his son, committed nothing less than treason. (Disclosure: I am thanked in the book’s acknowledgments and make an appearance in a handful of passages.) Republican politicians who have spent the past year eagerly wading through the slimy political backwash churned up by Trumpism will look even more foolish aping the former reality star’s attacks on the special counsel. Despite their desperate declarations that the Vietnam War hero is dragging his feet, Robert S. Mueller III has proved himself ruthlessly efficient in rooting out public corruption.
In just the past two months, the president’s first national security adviser and most trusted traveling companion pleaded guilty to federal charges; he is now cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. Trump’s campaign manager through the Republican National Convention was also arrested, charged and released only after posting $10 million in bail. A man Trump identified as one of his top foreign policy advisers has also pleaded guilty in federal court and is cooperating with the feds. Another Trump campaign aide was charged in a 12-count indictment. And with the release of “Fire and Fury,” we now know that yet another campaign official for the Republican president — one who subsequently served in his White House — believes that close Trump advisers were “treasonous” to meet with Russians during the campaign.
A cancer again is growing on the presidency, and few know whether the 45th president will survive a single term. Bannon has his doubts. “He’s not going to make it,” Bannon told Breitbart staffers, according to Wolff. “He’s lost his stuff.” But if Trump does escape legal prosecution, Wolff’s terrifying political tome adds weight to a growing body of evidence that the Manhattan billionaire is temperamentally unfit to serve. An emailWolff describes as “purporting to represent the views” of chief economic adviser Gary Cohn neatly summarizes what campaign workers and White House staff have been telling me about Trump for two years. He is an “idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better.”
Mika Brzezinski and I had a tense meeting with Trump following what I considered to be a bumbling debate performance in September 2015. I asked the candidate a blunt question.
“Can you read?”
Awkward silence.
“I’m serious, Donald. Do you read?” I continued. “If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?”
Taken aback, Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible given to him by his mother. He then joked that he read it all the time.
I am apparently not the only one who has questioned the president’s ability to focus on the written word. “Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to . . . He was postliterate — total television.” But “Fire and Fury” reveals that White House staff and Cabinet members believed Trump’s intellectual challenges went well beyond having a limited reading list: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called him an “idiot,” Cohn dismissed him as “dumb,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster considered him a “dope,” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson infamously concluded that the commander in chief was a “moron.”
TrumPsychopath, TrumpDelusional, TrumPOS ...
President Trump marshaled both his West Wing and his personal legal team Thursday against a new book that portrays him and his administration as incompetent and erratic — threatening possible libel charges against its author, its publisher and his former chief strategist, whose provocative comments pepper the book.
In https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-slams-bannon-when-he-was-fired-he-not-only-lost-his-job-he-lost-his-mind/2018/01/03/21fb158a-f0aa-11e7-b3bf-ab90a706e175_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_bannon-1137pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.90a24e9eca7c (an 11-page letter), Charles J. Harder, a Beverly Hills attorney representing the president, demanded that both Michael Wolff and Henry Holt and Co. — the author and publisher of the forthcoming book, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250158060?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=1250158060 (“Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”) — “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book,” as well as apologize to Trump. The president’s lawyers also requested a complete copy of the book as part of their inquiry.
Harder sent a similar cease-and-desist letter to Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist who runs the conservative website Breitbart News, alleging that he had defamed the president and violated a nondisclosure employment agreement he had signed with the Trump Organization.
The threats did not appear to work, at least as far as the book is concerned: Wolff and his publisher announced Thursday that publication had been moved forward four days to Friday because of what they described as “unprecedented demand.”
But legal experts and historians said the decision by a sitting president to threaten “imminent” legal action against a publishing house, a journalist and a former aide represented a remarkable break with recent precedent and could have a chilling effect on free-speech rights.
President Trump marshaled both his West Wing and his personal legal team Thursday against a new book that portrays him and his administration as incompetent and erratic — threatening possible libel charges against its author, its publisher and his former chief strategist, whose provocative comments pepper the book.
In https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-slams-bannon-when-he-was-fired-he-not-only-lost-his-job-he-lost-his-mind/2018/01/03/21fb158a-f0aa-11e7-b3bf-ab90a706e175_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_bannon-1137pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.90a24e9eca7c (an 11-page letter), Charles J. Harder, a Beverly Hills attorney representing the president, demanded that both Michael Wolff and Henry Holt and Co. — the author and publisher of the forthcoming book, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250158060?ie=UTF8&tag=washpost-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=1250158060 (“Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”) — “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book,” as well as apologize to Trump. The president’s lawyers also requested a complete copy of the book as part of their inquiry.
Harder sent a similar cease-and-desist letter to Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist who runs the conservative website Breitbart News, alleging that he had defamed the president and violated a nondisclosure employment agreement he had signed with the Trump Organization.
The threats did not appear to work, at least as far as the book is concerned: Wolff and his publisher announced Thursday that publication had been moved forward four days to Friday because of what they described as “unprecedented demand.”
But legal experts and historians said the decision by a sitting president to threaten “imminent” legal action against a publishing house, a journalist and a former aide represented a remarkable break with recent precedent and could have a chilling effect on free-speech rights.
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
https://goo.gl/3FUP5E
This item will be released on January 5th at 9:00 A.M. Eastern
With extraordinary access to the Trump White House, Michael Wolff tells the inside story
of the most controversial presidency of our time
The first nine months of Donald Trump’s term were stormy, outrageous—and absolutely mesmerizing. Now, thanks to his deep access to the West Wing, bestselling author Michael Wolff tells the riveting story of how Trump launched a tenure as volatile and fiery as the man himself.
In this explosive book, Wolff provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office. Among the revelations:
-- What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him
-- What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama
-- Why FBI director James Comey was really fired
-- Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room
-- Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing
-- What the secret to communicating with Trump is
-- What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers
Never before has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.
https://goo.gl/3FUP5E
This item will be released on January 5th at 9:00 A.M. Eastern
With extraordinary access to the Trump White House, Michael Wolff tells the inside story
of the most controversial presidency of our time
The first nine months of Donald Trump’s term were stormy, outrageous—and absolutely mesmerizing. Now, thanks to his deep access to the West Wing, bestselling author Michael Wolff tells the riveting story of how Trump launched a tenure as volatile and fiery as the man himself.
In this explosive book, Wolff provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office. Among the revelations:
-- What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him
-- What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama
-- Why FBI director James Comey was really fired
-- Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room
-- Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing
-- What the secret to communicating with Trump is
-- What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The Producers
Never before has a presidency so divided the American people. Brilliantly reported and astoundingly fresh, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury shows us how and why Donald Trump has become the king of discord and disunion.
Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University, likened Trump’s actions this week to those of Richard M. Nixon, whose White House unsuccessfully attempted to stop both the New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the government’s entanglements in Vietnam.
Though several presidents — including Jimmy Carter and Theodore Roosevelt — have sued for libel after leaving office, it is uncommon and potentially damaging for a current occupant of the Oval Office to try to use the powers of the presidency to take on personal and political rivals, Brinkley said.
“Trump is stealing a page out of Richard Nixon’s playbook once again,” Brinkley said. “When you get criticized by the press or a book that attacks you, you attack back with ferocity. . . . It’s a misuse of presidential powers.”
But Trump’s decision was a deliberate one, according to people who have spoken with him following the publication of excerpts from Wolff’s book and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments.
Trump released an initial, lengthy statement Wednesday saying that Bannon had “lost his mind,” but he remained dissatisfied, advisers said. The president was especially furious at what he considered several confidences Bannon had betrayed by sharing with Wolff, as well as some alleged falsehoods and exaggerations in the book, and wanted to consult with lawyers who were experts on the topic, one person familiar with his decision said.
Harder had previously represented Trump’s wife, Melania, in a dispute with Britian’s Daily Mail, as well as son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump was eager to retain the lawyer hailed by aides as someone you hire “to crush the media,” a White House official said.
...
The president’s approach to the claims in Wolff’s book, which includes criticism of both him and his family, follows a familiar pattern honed during Trump’s time as a combative New York real estate developer.
For nearly half a century, Trump has used lawsuits — and often just the threat of them — as a primary weapon in his arsenal against critics and competitors, deploying libel and slander allegations to push back against those who might embarrass or contradict him. He has had his lawyers threaten book authors, business rivals, attorneys, and critics of his real estate developments and political views.
Competing hotel owners, casino managers and voices in the news media have all found themselves in receipt of sharply worded letters promising legal action that in most cases never happened.
The pattern continued during his presidential campaign. Trump threatened to sue the Times over an article about his alleged unwanted advances on women — but he never did. He threatened to sue the women who said he made the advance — but he never did. And he said during the campaign that he might take action to make it easier to sue journalists — but so far he has not done so.
In one case he did pursue, Trump sued Timothy O’Brien, author of the Trump biography https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B0169GGSJU&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_f6StAbRDN09TX&tag=thewaspos09-20 (“TrumpNation,”) on the grounds that the book underestimated Trump’s wealth. Trump ultimately lost.
Time to give Trump what he really wished for
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/01/05/time-to-give-trump-what-he-really-wished-for/ (Opinion | Time to give Trump what he really wished for)
Whether Donald Trump really hoped to lose the election so that he could cash in on his campaign, or whether he merely expected it to turn out that way, is immaterial. He shouldn’t have won, and the nation and history took a very, very wrong turn when a perfect storm of black swans blotted out the sum of the actual ballots cast.
But that was then, and unfortunately, this is now. And so now we daily sink further down into the ever-deepening quicksand that President Trump has substituted for the now fondly remembered swamp water. And it’s time to use the last best democratic lever at our disposal to set this thing right.
How Trump has survived this long implementing his poison agenda of leveraging greed and grievance and wall-to-wall stupidity to ends such as planetary destruction, oligarchy and possibly nuclear warfare is simple. For venal reasons of its own, the Republican Party has signed on, wholeheartedly, to be his enablers and expensive-shoe lickers. Republicans have gone from bad to worse and have now triumphantly arrived at worst. What, for example, has been the reaction this week to Michael Wolff’s book saying that most everyone who has worked with Trump knows full well that he is a dangerously undisciplined idiot? They have decided to shoot the messenger and protect the idiot.
They have protected Trump from accountability, and they think they have likewise protected themselves from accountability by means of campaign money and gerrymandering and dishonesty and voter suppression. And maybe they have.
And maybe they haven’t.
There is still a cure to all of this at hand. We have watched and cheered as the dispossessed in other countries have swarmed out into the streets and polling places to effect change. It’s our turn now. And whether the forecast of a GOP strategist that a blowout election in 2018 will bring down the clown show is correct or not, it’s a chance we should be pleased to take.
It could be our last chance.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/01/05/time-to-give-trump-what-he-really-wished-for/ (Opinion | Time to give Trump what he really wished for)
Whether Donald Trump really hoped to lose the election so that he could cash in on his campaign, or whether he merely expected it to turn out that way, is immaterial. He shouldn’t have won, and the nation and history took a very, very wrong turn when a perfect storm of black swans blotted out the sum of the actual ballots cast.
But that was then, and unfortunately, this is now. And so now we daily sink further down into the ever-deepening quicksand that President Trump has substituted for the now fondly remembered swamp water. And it’s time to use the last best democratic lever at our disposal to set this thing right.
How Trump has survived this long implementing his poison agenda of leveraging greed and grievance and wall-to-wall stupidity to ends such as planetary destruction, oligarchy and possibly nuclear warfare is simple. For venal reasons of its own, the Republican Party has signed on, wholeheartedly, to be his enablers and expensive-shoe lickers. Republicans have gone from bad to worse and have now triumphantly arrived at worst. What, for example, has been the reaction this week to Michael Wolff’s book saying that most everyone who has worked with Trump knows full well that he is a dangerously undisciplined idiot? They have decided to shoot the messenger and protect the idiot.
They have protected Trump from accountability, and they think they have likewise protected themselves from accountability by means of campaign money and gerrymandering and dishonesty and voter suppression. And maybe they have.
And maybe they haven’t.
There is still a cure to all of this at hand. We have watched and cheered as the dispossessed in other countries have swarmed out into the streets and polling places to effect change. It’s our turn now. And whether the forecast of a GOP strategist that a blowout election in 2018 will bring down the clown show is correct or not, it’s a chance we should be pleased to take.
It could be our last chance.
Here's what the Times wrote:
The New York Times has also learned that four days before Mr. Comey was fired, one of Mr. Sessions’s aides asked a congressional staff member whether he had damaging information about Mr. Comey, part of an apparent effort to undermine the F.B.I. director. It was not clear whether Mr. Mueller’s investigators knew about this episode.
...
Two days after Mr. Comey’s testimony [saying the Russia investigation was ongoing], an aide to Mr. Sessions approached a Capitol Hill staff member asking whether the staffer had any derogatory information about the F.B.I. director. The attorney general wanted one negative article a day in the news media about Mr. Comey, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, flatly denied it. “This did not happen and would not happen,” she told the Times. “Plain and simple.”
But if it is true, it presents a wholly new subplot — and potentially a whole new front — in the Russia investigation.
Michael S. Schmidt’s report in the New York Times contains so many blockbusters that it’s hard to know where to begin. Here are the most critical claims:
- Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has evidence, including a memo from former chief of staff Reince Priebus, confirming at least some of the allegations that former FBI director James B. Comey made and documented in contemporaneous memos. For instance, Priebus documents President Trump’s attempt to get Comey to publicly clear him, something Comey recounted at the time.
- The original draft of the letter firing Comey reportedly contained an introductory statement claiming that the Russia investigation was “fabricated and politically motivated.” The president’s aides prevailed upon him not to send it, but Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein (cleverly) took an original copy of the letter. He nevertheless drafted a memo setting out entirely different grounds for firing Comey (i.e. Comey’s handing of the Hillary Clinton emails and the false allegation that FBI morale was low).
- Trump was frantic to keep Attorney General Jeff Sessions in place to protect him in the Russia probe, dispatched the White House counsel to lean on Sessions not to recuse himself and then blew his stack when Sessions did recuse himself. He demanded an attorney general who would protect him the way that he imagined Robert Kennedy protected his brother President John F. Kennedy and Eric Holder protected President Barack Obama.
- A Sessions aide reportedly went looking for dirt on Comey, going to a congressional office for evidence several days before Comey was fired. Sessions apparently wanted one negative story a day on Comey in the media.
- A White House lawyer, Uttam Dhillon, reportedly lied to the president, telling him he could not fire Comey without cause, because he was afraid of what Trump would do.
MELLOW HARSHING SESSIONS
https://claytoonz.com/2018/01/05/mellow-harshing-sessions/
I don’t like marijuana. A lot of people in my profession are afraid to admit they ever smoked the stuff in the past, just in case they’re going to transport to 1992 and run for president. I don’t care who knows it. I smoked it on a fairly frequent basis as a teen despite not really liking it.
It wasn’t so much a peer pressure thing as it was just what we did. If I was hanging out with one friend, pot didn’t turn up. If there was a group, then there was pot. At some point I decided I just wasn’t going to do it anymore. That was probably the day I gave a dealer a ride home and he lost a joint in my car and he wouldn’t leave until he found it. But, after I decided not to do it anymore I discovered something. Nobody cared.
I didn’t face a backlash. I didn’t lose friends. No one thought I wasn’t cool anymore, maybe because I wasn’t really cool to begin with, but my life didn’t change. At some point, when the doobie was passed around (do we still call them “doobies?”), everyone would just bypass me instead of asking if I wanted a hit. People who do pot tend to be very friendly and generous while smoking. While I have hung out with a lot of people while they were smoking (remember, I have been in bands), I never cared either. I usually liked the aroma and smelling it was a part of band practice.
While I don’t like pot I know I can’t debate you into not liking it. I don’t care if you love it. I think the stuff is mostly harmless, and more beneficial to people who need it for an illness. Marijuana should be legal, medically and recreationally. Voters in several states agree.
While marijuana is legal in states such as Colorado, Washington, and now California, it’s still illegal federally. Obama handled this situation by telling the federal government to chill out and leave those states along. Candidate Donald Trump said he would continue the same policy. Candidate Donald Trump is a liar.
While Donald Trump attempts to exert strict control over the Justice Department and Attorney General Jeff Sessions over investigations into his corruption, believing they exist to serve him, he hasn’t lifted a finger of the AG’s decision to end Obama’s policy on marijuana.
Sessions rescinded an Obama-era policy that discouraged federal prosecutors in most cases from brining charges wherever marijuana is legal. Sessions has long been a critic of marijuana.
I have never done illegal drugs in my life. I can say that because marijuana is not a drug. It’s organic. I’m not one to say everyone should try everything before they oppose it, but Jeff Sessions could use one good high. The experience would educate him that the stuff is harmless (even if he doesn’t like it), and you really shouldn’t worry about other people doing it. But, since they can’t freak out over what gay people do in their bedrooms anymore that doesn’t involve them, Republicans have this to scrutinize.
If anything, the legalizing of weed in states has proven wrong every fear there was about legalizing it. Crime hasn’t increased, people aren’t tripping off buildings, folks aren’t driving their cars into preschools, etc. It’s been a boom for state budgets and entrepreneurs.
It’s been far more expensive criminalizing marijuana over the decades. If the Charleston can go out of style from the 1920s, then why can’t prohibition?
It’s also very hypocritical for an old, Southern, racist redneck who used to stand up for state’s rights to now want to crack down on something that doesn’t hurt anyone.
Again, I’m going to advocate that Jeff Sessions needs to get high. Now, I don’t expect him to fire up a blunt, but perhaps we can put some into a Keebler cookie. That sounds like it’d be right up his tree.
Wouldn’t it be awesome to see a stoned Jeff Sessions doing the Charleston? That’s gonna be in my head all day.
https://claytoonz.com/2018/01/05/mellow-harshing-sessions/
I don’t like marijuana. A lot of people in my profession are afraid to admit they ever smoked the stuff in the past, just in case they’re going to transport to 1992 and run for president. I don’t care who knows it. I smoked it on a fairly frequent basis as a teen despite not really liking it.
It wasn’t so much a peer pressure thing as it was just what we did. If I was hanging out with one friend, pot didn’t turn up. If there was a group, then there was pot. At some point I decided I just wasn’t going to do it anymore. That was probably the day I gave a dealer a ride home and he lost a joint in my car and he wouldn’t leave until he found it. But, after I decided not to do it anymore I discovered something. Nobody cared.
I didn’t face a backlash. I didn’t lose friends. No one thought I wasn’t cool anymore, maybe because I wasn’t really cool to begin with, but my life didn’t change. At some point, when the doobie was passed around (do we still call them “doobies?”), everyone would just bypass me instead of asking if I wanted a hit. People who do pot tend to be very friendly and generous while smoking. While I have hung out with a lot of people while they were smoking (remember, I have been in bands), I never cared either. I usually liked the aroma and smelling it was a part of band practice.
While I don’t like pot I know I can’t debate you into not liking it. I don’t care if you love it. I think the stuff is mostly harmless, and more beneficial to people who need it for an illness. Marijuana should be legal, medically and recreationally. Voters in several states agree.
While marijuana is legal in states such as Colorado, Washington, and now California, it’s still illegal federally. Obama handled this situation by telling the federal government to chill out and leave those states along. Candidate Donald Trump said he would continue the same policy. Candidate Donald Trump is a liar.
While Donald Trump attempts to exert strict control over the Justice Department and Attorney General Jeff Sessions over investigations into his corruption, believing they exist to serve him, he hasn’t lifted a finger of the AG’s decision to end Obama’s policy on marijuana.
Sessions rescinded an Obama-era policy that discouraged federal prosecutors in most cases from brining charges wherever marijuana is legal. Sessions has long been a critic of marijuana.
I have never done illegal drugs in my life. I can say that because marijuana is not a drug. It’s organic. I’m not one to say everyone should try everything before they oppose it, but Jeff Sessions could use one good high. The experience would educate him that the stuff is harmless (even if he doesn’t like it), and you really shouldn’t worry about other people doing it. But, since they can’t freak out over what gay people do in their bedrooms anymore that doesn’t involve them, Republicans have this to scrutinize.
If anything, the legalizing of weed in states has proven wrong every fear there was about legalizing it. Crime hasn’t increased, people aren’t tripping off buildings, folks aren’t driving their cars into preschools, etc. It’s been a boom for state budgets and entrepreneurs.
It’s been far more expensive criminalizing marijuana over the decades. If the Charleston can go out of style from the 1920s, then why can’t prohibition?
It’s also very hypocritical for an old, Southern, racist redneck who used to stand up for state’s rights to now want to crack down on something that doesn’t hurt anyone.
Again, I’m going to advocate that Jeff Sessions needs to get high. Now, I don’t expect him to fire up a blunt, but perhaps we can put some into a Keebler cookie. That sounds like it’d be right up his tree.
Wouldn’t it be awesome to see a stoned Jeff Sessions doing the Charleston? That’s gonna be in my head all day.
One of the more alarming anecdotes in “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff’s incendiary new book about Donald Trump’s White House, involves the firing of James Comey, former director of the F.B.I. It’s not Trump’s motives that are scary; Wolff reports that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were “increasingly panicked” and “frenzied” about what Comey would find if he looked into the family finances, which is incriminating but unsurprising. The terrifying part is how, in Wolff’s telling, Trump sneaked around his aides, some of whom thought they’d contained him.
“For most of the day, almost no one would know that he had decided to take matters into his own hands,” Wolff writes. “In presidential annals, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.” Now imagine Trump taking the same approach toward ordering the bombing of North Korea.
Wolff’s scabrous book comes out on Friday — the publication date was moved upamid a media furor — but I was able to get an advance copy. It’s already a consequential work, having precipitated a furious rift between the president and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who told Wolff that the meeting Donald Trump Jr. brokered with Russians in the hope of getting dirt on Hillary Clinton was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” On Thursday the president’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Wolff’s publisher, Henry Holt, demanding that it stop publication, claiming, among other things, defamation and invasion of privacy. This move would be fascistic if it weren’t so farcical. (While some have raised questions about Wolff’s methods, Axios reports that he has many hours of interviews recorded.)
There are lots of arresting details in the book. We learn that the administration holds special animus for what it calls “D.O.J. women,” or women who work in the Justice Department. Wolff writes that after the white supremacist mayhem in Charlottesville, Va., Trump privately rationalized “why someone would be a member of the K.K.K.” The book recounts that after the political purge in Saudi Arabia, Trump boasted that he and Kushner engineered a coup: “We’ve put our man on top!”
But most of all, the book confirms what is already widely understood — not just that Trump is entirely unfit for the presidency, but that everyone around him knows it. One thread running through “Fire and Fury” is the way relatives, opportunists and officials try to manipulate and manage the president, and how they often fail. As Wolff wrote in a Hollywood Reporter essay based on the book, over the past year, the people around Trump, “all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.”
