Day 597

Day 597 Saturday September 8, 2018 981 Days to Go

President Obama gave his first speech since leaving office yesterday. Boy, have I missed that guy. What a breadth of fresh air. What moral clarity. You can take all the scandals of his eight years in office and they don’t match one day of this administration.
Speaking of which, George Papadopoulos was sentenced to jail yesterday. He got two weeks. The judge would have given him a month but was moved by the fact that he seemed really sorry for what he had done. This should send a clear signal to anyone deciding whether to make a deal with the special consul. ( Man, two weeks or ten years? Hum. Maybe that windbag in the White House will pardon me? )
After sentencing he told a reporter that he didn’t remember saying any of that stuff about dirt on Hillary to the Australian diplomat while in London, and that he had only had one or at most two G&Ts. What? The thing that is claimed to have kicked off this whole investigation may not have happened? Trump said he doesn’t know the guy (Papadopoulos). That he apparently was sitting in on a few meetings but he didn’t know the guy.
It’s been said before and I’ll say it again – Running out of Coffee Boys.

But this is standard Trump talk. Remember when he was asked who his foreign affairs advisors were, way back at the beginning? He had a piece of paper and he read five names? None of which he seemed to have any idea who they were, but he said they were all outstanding? Carter Page was also on the list.

So then we get to the NYT Op-Ed piece. Trump calls it treason and that the Justice Department should investigate for “national security.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, alway a fountain of truth and dependability, (NOT) said the president was just opinioning. Is that a word? Apparently, it is. Or is it opin-ing? I don’t know. Is she part of the internal resistance or is she just trying to come up with something to explain his lack of understanding of how our government functions? Hard to tell.
Was Henry II opinioning when he said he was pissed off at Beckett? Once the knights who went over from France to England and killed Thomas B on the steps in the Cathedral with a mass going on, were they mislead by the King’s opinining? What should Henry II have said on the knights’ return, “Oh, it was just a late night tweet storm?”

So Trump, when questioned about his treason comment and his – Justice should look into this, comment said – and this is formulaic Trump: “We’re looking into it.”, “I’m looking into it right now.”, “We’ll see.”
Didn’t he say the same thing about the people he sent to Hawaii to look for Obama’s birth certificate?
Will we get a “You’ll be amazed at what they are finding” comment next?

Barrack pointed out that what is going on is: not normal, not American, not how our government works, not conservative, and not Republican.
What did Trump say? He fell asleep listening. Yeah right.

Meanwhile we got good job numbers and wages are up too! Well, that’s great … until you factor in inflation and it comes out a wash. Oh so we are back where we started? Not quite. Turns out the cost of health care keeps going up. Something about killing off the Affordable Care Act and the consequences of those actions kinda hurts the overall picture.

The New York Attorney General is investigating The Trump Foundation, Donald, Donnie Jr, Erik, and Ivanka for violating State and Federal charity laws. You mean you can’t use money that was given to you for charity on yourself or your business expenses? Why, who knew? Just ask that couple that ran a GoFundMe for a homeless person. They had to actually give the money to the homeless. Can you imagine?

Then we get to Brett Kavanaugh. People who closely followed the whole proceeding and have followed other proceedings of Supreme Court justices have said that he had the votes going in, but then something happened. He couldn’t seem to answer straight forward questions. He kept slicing and dicing his answers. While not completely false, depending on how you looked at them, or not completely true either, they were just in that strange space of “what isn’t he telling us?” Well, that came out too. The Republicans kept blocking the release of Kavanaugh’s paper trail while in the White House, but enough came out to show that Kavanaugh had not told the truth to the Senators when he was up for his current job, that he hadn’t told the whole truth about his involvement in the torture program, and that he had written that he thought Roe v Wade was not settled law when he was being coy in his testimony about that (and to Susan Collins.) It is clear that he wants to overturn Roe. He has also said that a sitting president can not be arrested until he leaves office. In other words, the president is above the law. Somehow all that doesn’t sit well with some folks.
What this all comes down to is he has been an insider in Washington and done the dirty work to get ahead, and now it’s coming out.
Aside from having views well outside the norms of even most conservative judges is this really the kind of person we want on the bench of the Supreme Court?

Looking at the House and Senate races coming up. It could be a big sweep if Dems get out and vote, which looks likely. The House could be a change of as many as 40 seats, and the Senate looks like it could flip, but the path is narrow. There are seven seats that are within 4 percentage points: four lean Dem, three Rep. Texas may actually be in play because Beto O’Rourke is a nice guy who is saying stuff voters like and Ted Cruz on a good day seems like a smarmy snake oil salesman. If the Dems can hold their four seats and pick up two Republican seats I think they have the majority.
Boy, wouldn’t that be fun?

981 Days to Go

PS Get Out and Vote!