Day 810 Wednesday March 27, 2019
586 Days to the 2020 election and 664 Days to Inauguration Day
Okay, Well. Hum. What to say about all this?
The Attorney General gets a report from the Special Prosecutor and we don’t know what that report says but the AG says nothing to look at here in a four page letter. Somehow folks aren’t satisfied with his opinion. Congress demands to see the report and the AG say yeah okay but it will take me weeks to be able to do that. It only took him a weekend to conclude there was nothing to see here. People who have been prosecutors say this should take two to three days at the most.
Some are concerned about the AG’s reasoning. I mean he petitioned for the job, which is strange in and of itself, but his main point in his petition was that he thought the investigation was not legal. He’s also the guy who told Papa Bush to pardon everyone in Iran-Contra, perhaps that was one of the biggest miscarriages of justice this country has ever seen. So, based on his record some folks don’t trust him. Would you?
To celebrate this four page letter Trump has lied. No surprise there, but he lied. He said he was fully exonerated, which is a direct contradiction to what the AG’s letter said. Then Trump went on a media bashing twitter tour and he and Lindsey Graham are trying to resurrect the idea of going after Hillary Clinton again. The Republicans went after one Clinton or the other for most of the last three decades and found little or nothing, but hey maybe there’s a morsel of something to find? It would be hard to know given that they have a tendency, no a proclivity, to so slant things that simple truths are hard to figure out from their work.
But the Republicans are trying to move on, and move on they have! How to celebrate? Well, how about taking away health care from 21,000,000 Americans and cut the benefits for another 131,000,000? There ya go. Hurray! Strike up the band. Are you suffering? Well, fear not, the pain you feel now will be nothing compared to the pain you will have to endure now. Yeah, they couldn’t legislatively get rid of Obamacare but with there new AG and his Justice Department they figured out another way to do it. Don’t defend the law. Yeah. That’s right. Not only are they not defending the law but they are really siding with the other side. This is equivalent to what? The prosecutor telling the judge the murderer didn’t do it? I don’t know. It’s hard to come up with a good analogy.
Speaking of analogies, Barb McQuade came up with a good one last night. She said having the AG issue a report on what the Special Prosecutor did was equivalent to Bill Bellichick pulling Tom Brady on the last drive of the Super Bowl and putting himself in as QB.
The problem with the AG issuing an opinion and not releasing the report is that the whole question of what happened during the 2016 election has been thrown back into the political arena. The very thing the appointment of a special prosecutor is supposed to avoid. Some have speculated that Mueller gave the report to the AG, which is what he is supposed to do, and in this case there is a question as to whether a sitting president can be arrested and hauled off in chains (they have fancy words for this, like “indicted”). Rather than tackle that question, Mueller being a by-the-book kind of guy gave the report to the AG and probably thought that this question should really go to Congress. We won’t know until we see the report or until Mueller testifies to Congress.
Meanwhile, the nothing-to-see-here let’s move along celebration continues.
Trump was indignant that no one thanked him for arranging McCain’s funeral and that no one apologized to him about the whole collusion thing. Like so many things in Trump world this isn’t true. Well, it’s not false, and it’s not true. It’s somewhere in between. No one thanked Trump for arranging McCain’s funeral because as was pointed out by the arch-diocese of Washington they arranged the funeral and not Trump. But let us not let this stand in the way of thanking the president for something he didn’t do. I would like you all to think of something he didn’t do and thank him for that. (It is left to the student at lab time to come up with something.)
I would like to point out that immediately following the president’s declaration that no one apologized one brave American stood up and thanked the president. Yes, Stephen Colbert did. He even had a whiteboard wheeled out with all the investigations and potential crimes listed and he erased the line with the Special Prosecutor on it. So once again the president is wrong and apologies have been made.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the ad with Charles Barkley and the air horn but I think that such a thing should be brought into any news conference or public speaking that Sarah Sanders does and it should be blown every time she lies.
Then there’s the Green New Deal. There was a neat little chart that came out of all the discussion about GND. Yeah, it shows the jobs created in wind and solar versus those created by coal. Coal has 50,000 jobs total. That’s the number of jobs created in solar in 2018 alone. If you want to talk about growing industries for jobs – wind and solar lead the way. Coal is stagnate. That’s not to say that coal pollution has gone down. In fact, coal pollution went up in 2018. Yeah, there’s a few more good years of pushing sludge into our rivers.
You would think the Republicans would be all over this, well they are, taking the wrong side of history. Something they seem to be adept at doing.
And the guy that Trump wants on the board at the Fed? The guy who ran the economy into the ground for Kansas? The guy who says he really doesn’t understand how the Fed works? The guy who, like Trump, can’t say or do anything without getting it wrong? (I won’t say he lies, he thinks he right.) This guy can do a lot of damage to our economy in a hurry.
Think about this: If Gore had been awarded Florida, which he won but the votes weren’t counted. He would have been President. He wouldn’t have given back the surplus Clinton had piled up but would have put it toward Medicare or Social Security. We’d have two moderate Supreme Court justices (No Roberts or Alito). We wouldn’t have gotten into the war in Iraq and we’d have developed a strong solar and wind industry.
If Trump hadn’t gotten in we’d have two more moderate Supreme Court justices, the economy would be in better shape, we wouldn’t be a trillion dollars more in debt every year. We wouldn’t have the crisis at our southern border he created and …
Think about it.
We’d have a more reasonable world.
586 Days to the 2020 election and 664 Days to Inauguration Day
PS Shelby and Jay Ducote, of Next Food Network Star renown. We visited his taco stand, Government Taco, inside the White Star building in Baton Rouge. Jay is a big dude! And a nice guy. Shelby and Jay got to know each other when they were in a group of food bloggers promoting one of Emeril’s cookbooks. Jay came in second in his season of Next Food Network Star. He’s got a radio show, the taco stand, and selling barbecue sauces. He’s going to India to talk to food entrepreneurs. He’s a busy guy.
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