What stupid shit has Trump done today?

[Don Troooomp]

Doesn't look at all suspicious

It does, honest

 

[Don Troooomp]

In other news, congress have held the AG in contempt. It's far from a shock he's refusing to release the report as we all know it's very l;ikely to show Trump broke the law on several occasions.

US attorney general held in contempt

A US House of Representatives panel has voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress amid a showdown over the Mueller report.

Democrats on the judiciary committee took the rare step after Mr Barr refused to submit an unredacted version of the special counsel's findings.

 

[Don Troooomp]

What really gets me about this is the massive stupidity of the republican party - They're putting political gain over the good of the country they were voted in to serve.
Frankly, they're an obnoxious bunch of bastards.

 

[Don Troooomp]

In interesting news, that being apart from Trump trying to set up a war against Iran, mini idiot Trump has been ordered to testify.
I wonder if he'll turn up and, if he does, will he lie?

Senate Intel Committee subpoenas Donald Trump Jr. in Russia probe

The Senate Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr. to answer questions about his contention that he had only limited knowledge of a project to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, a source with direct knowledge told NBC News.

The committee, led by Republicans, is nearing completion of its investigation into Russian election interference — a probe that is expected to result in a series of written reports.

 

[CRI]

In interesting news, that being apart from Trump trying to set up a war against Iran, mini idiot Trump has been ordered to testify.
I wonder if he'll turn up and, if he does, will he lie?

Senate Intel Committee subpoenas Donald Trump Jr. in Russia probe

Net is tightening though.

See also: New York Senate approves giving Trump's state tax return to U.S. House

 

[CRI]

The White House revoked my press pass. It’s not just me — it’s curtailing access for all journalists.

(Key points below, as is paywalled if you've used your freebies up.)

The White House eliminated most briefings and severely restricted access to official events. And this week came the coup de grace: After covering four presidents, I received an email informing me that Trump’s press office had revoked my White House credential.

I was part of a mass purge of “hard pass” holders after the White House implemented a new standard that designated as unqualified almost the entire White House press corps, including all six of The Post’s White House correspondents. White House officials then chose which journalists would be granted “exceptions.” It did this over objections from news organizations and the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Now, virtually the entire White House press corps is credentialed under “exceptions,” which means, in a sense, that they all serve at the pleasure of press secretary Sarah Sanders because they all fail to meet credentialing requirements — and therefore, in theory, can have their credentials revoked any time they annoy Trump or his aides, like CNN’s Jim Acosta did.

More important is that the White House is drastically curtailing access for all journalists. Briefings have been abolished in favor of unscheduled “gaggles” ( on the record, but impromptu and haphazard) in the White House driveway. The Pentagon and State Department have done similarly.

Will soon be just Fox News and Breitbart allowed in.

 

[gosub]

 

[Tankus]

In interesting news, that being apart from Trump trying to set up a war against Iran, mini idiot Trump has been ordered to testify.
I wonder if he'll turn up and, if he does, will he lie?

Senate Intel Committee subpoenas Donald Trump Jr. in Russia probe

""In a close-doors GOP lunch, Burr walked through the backstory of the subpoena for Don Jr and defended his investigation’s work, per to people directly familiar. McConnell also spoke up, the people said, offering his support for Mr. Burr and his handling of the committee"".

If "case closed" McConnell is on board something is a bit sus , trying to getahead of something perhaps ?? , surely it would have been better to wait for the full fat Mueller release with the non redacted evidence

 

[Tankus]

"The FBI has opened a public corruption investigation into Republican donor and South Florida massage-parlor entrepreneur Li 'Cindy' Yang, focusing on whether she illegally funneled money from China into the president’s re-election effort"

Feds open foreign-money investigation into Trump donor Cindy Yang

just another day

 

[CRI]

""In a close-doors GOP lunch, Burr walked through the backstory of the subpoena for Don Jr and defended his investigation’s work, per to people directly familiar. McConnell also spoke up, the people said, offering his support for Mr. Burr and his handling of the committee"".

If "case closed" McConnell is on board something is a bit sus , trying to getahead of something perhaps ?? , surely it would have been better to wait for the full fat Mueller release with the non redacted evidence

While I find it rather hard to believe that Junior HAS any allies . . . looks like the Trump regime is tightening the thumb screws on renegade GOP senators. Be interesting to see if they come to heel.
Allies of Trump’s Son Declare War on G.O.P.-Led Senate Panel After Subpoena

The broadsides included tweets targeting the Republican chairman, Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, calls from people close to the president to at least one vulnerable Republican senator, and a Breitbart story aimed at senators including the majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, according to multiple people involved in the effort.

Even President Trump got involved on Thursday, telling reporters he was “pretty surprised” his son — “a very good person” — would be subpoenaed after Mr. Burr had said publicly he had found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The main target of the pressure campaign appeared to be Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, a close ally of Mr. Burr’s who is facing a conservative primary challenger next year. Some of Mr. Trump’s allies said they anticipated that the president would tweet support for Mr. Tillis’s primary opponent if the senator did not speak out.

The extraordinary pressure campaign, taking place in public and private, is forcing the party’s senators to choose between their loyalty to the Intelligence Committee and to the president’s family as it attempts to quash any remaining investigations of the president after the completion of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

 

[spring-peeper]

trump-great-news-lands-thud

When President Donald Trump tweeted that General Motors Co. was on the verge of selling its idled car plant in Lordstown, Ohio, to a tiny electric truckmaker, David Green had no idea it was coming.

The president of United Auto Workers Local 1112 in Lordstown -- who Trump attacked on Twitter two months ago -- is among a handful of workers whose job is to do maintenance at the inactive compact car factory that made its last Chevrolet Cruze in March. He was left in the dark about GM’s talks to sell the factory.

“I haven’t heard anything about it,” Green said by phone Wednesday. “I’m out in the plant cleaning.”

Shortly after that conversation, GM confirmed it was in discussions with Workhorse Group Inc. to sell the 6.2 million square foot assembly plant it opened in 1966. The UAW wasted little time making its position clear: They aren’t interested in such a deal.

With just $763,000 in sales last year, Workhorse is probably a virtual unknown to GM’s union workers. The maker of electric pickup trucks and delivery vans lost $36.5 million in 2018 and secured $35 million in financing earlier this year from Marathon Asset Management, which invests in distressed companies. A Workhorse investor told Trucks.com in March that if it’s unable to raise another $40 million to $60 million from selling the design for its two-seat drone called Surefly, the company may have been one or two quarters from bankruptcy.

“This is not the economic engine that the Lordstown plant provided for the region,” Shaiken said by phone. “The key issue is GM’s decision to locate a product -- in this case, the Chevy Blazer -- that might have gone in the plant in Ohio, to Mexico.”

Workhorse does present some reasons for optimism. It makes trucks for the United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp., and is in the running for a lucrative contract with the U.S. Postal Service. Defense contractor Oshkosh Corp., Humvee maker AM General and Indian manufacturer Mahindra are going up against the company for an award of as much as $6.3 billion worth of business building 180,000 new mail trucks.

 

[gosub]

Donald Trump 'Won' Golf Club Championship After Stealing a Ball from the 11-Year-Old Child of the Actual Champion



Charlie Sheen for President in 2024!

 

[spring-peeper]

Trump really does not understand how tariffs work. I hope some one explains it to him....

Trump's claims of '$100 billion' in Chinese tariff payments just don't add up

President Donald Trump on Friday claimed a victory of sorts in an ongoing trade war with China, asserting that his latest round of import tariffs on Chinese goods will force China to pay "$100 billion" to the U.S. Treasury.

Not only is Trump overstating the amount of those payments, he's apparently unaware of who pays customs duties.

In fact, the burden of higher tariffs will fall on buyers of Chinese-made products and, ultimately, American consumers. That could end up costing every American household about $800, according to estimates from Oxford Economics.

U.S. and Chinese negotiators resumed trade talks Friday under increasing pressure after Trump raised tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods and Beijing promised to retaliate, escalating a trade battle that began last summer.

His whole twitter drivel:




click to see it all

 

[Don Troooomp]

Subpoenas issued for Trump tax returns

Legal force used to demand Trump's tax returns - can they ignore or fight this.

 

[Don Troooomp]

Trump really does not understand.....

The rest of the sentence was pointless - he doesn't understand anything

 

[CRI]

Ivanka Trump tweets, then deletes, photo with “National Security Strategy” document

Trump on Sunday night tweeted the photo showing her and Malpass, full body, with the cover of the national security strategy document on a small table in the foreground.

“Great catching up with my friend @WorldBank President David Malpass and discussing the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi),” she wrote in the tweet.

On Thursday afternoon, journalist Luke O’Neil noted on Twitter that Trump had since deleted the post. O’Neil shared screenshots of the post before the first daughter deleted it, including one zoomed in on the national security strategy document.

 

[Humberto]

You are carrying the military. Not your soldiers who serve, the leachers who leave them in danger and control the purse.

 

[Humberto]

But no mistake, the American military is bloated and is a massive ripoff exercise. Its never been worse. Except in the future.

Fuck it I'm posting it.

 

[Ming]

A question for the US posters. So Bill Barr gets held in contempt for not turning up. Trump gets subpoenaed for his tax returns and refuses. Is this stuff actually legal? And if not why aren't we seeing any consequences?

 

[Tankus]

So......the Ukrainians didn't want Giuliani to come as it would make their country look ...errr .... corrupt !

 

[Cloo]

The White House revoked my press pass. It’s not just me — it’s curtailing access for all journalists.

(Key points below, as is paywalled if you've used your freebies up.)



Will soon be just Fox News and Breitbart allowed in.

Thanks for quotes. One big worry is that this doesn't get reversed under whoever follows Trump.

 

[CRI]

This is a worrying development regarding the US Supreme Court.


Link to tweet, which includes a link to the decision, and responses from some very worried legal bods.

 

[a_chap]

You only just realised that the Supreme Court is Trump's ultimate triumph?

Debate, discuss, reason, research, squabble all you like - it's all eventually decided by Kavanaugh & co.

Have. You. Only. Just. Realised. THIS??!??

 

[petee]

A question for the US posters. So Bill Barr gets held in contempt for not turning up. Trump gets subpoenaed for his tax returns and refuses. Is this stuff actually legal? And if not why aren't we seeing any consequences?

the legal issues are pretty subtle and i'm no expert. however,

Practically, holding Barr in contempt is unlikely to change the landscape on the ground -- Republicans used the same maneuver against President Barack Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder -- but it is laying the groundwork for the brewing, multi-pronged court battle between the Trump administration and congressional Democrats.
House committee votes to hold William Barr in contempt after Trump invokes executive privilege - CNNPolitics

even some rightwing sites support the house's actions, rule of law, separation of powers and that.
Donald Trump Jr. Subpoena, Senate Intelligence Committee Proper, Warranted Oversight | National Review

as for why you're not seeing any consequences, basically you could get yourself killed by some "patriot" for daring to contradict the emperor in the white house.
Cesar Sayoc pleads guilty to mailing explosive devices - CNN

and if you go down this road, you don't want to fail, because that makes trump stronger. imho, it's better to float this sort of stuff and just leave it hanging in the air, which is exactly what muller did. from a political point of view this was more effective (= damaging to trump) than carrying through.

 

[CRI]

This is a worrying development regarding the US Supreme Court.

View attachment 170896
Link to tweet, which includes a link to the decision, and responses from some very worried legal bods.

You only just realised that the Supreme Court is Trump's ultimate triumph?

Debate, discuss, reason, research, squabble all you like - it's all eventually decided by Kavanaugh & co.

Have. You. Only. Just. Realised. THIS??!??

I knew this before he was elected - actually I knew there were risks to the Supreme Court full stop if there was a GOP president and majority in the senate in 2016, as the Republicans had already signaled they planned to control the court with their refusal to even hold hearings on the appointment of Merrick Garland, a relative moderate, nominated by Obama.

Trump and the GOP have gone so much further than nominating and approving candidates (at least Kavanaugh) with such obvious bias that they'd never get bipartisan support. They've subverted the process to pack courts at all levels with unqualified, inexperienced far right GOP loyalist judges. And of course we saw how they shoved through a patently inappropriate candidate to the SCOTUS when they made it Kavanaugh or bust.

Although decisions of the SCOTUS have generally fallen along political lines (and to a degree did even before 2016), this is something different. It's turning its back on legal precedent or "settled law." Basically, signalling that "anything goes," and just because something was regarded as constitutional, or unconstitutional by the SCOTUS in the past, it doesn't mean they'll refer to that going foward.

Not surprised, but still shocking to see the continued march of authoriarianism in real time.

 

[gosub]

Trump tower least least deirable luxury building in NY/URL]

 

[spring-peeper]

Trump tower least least deirable luxury building in NY/URL]

paywall

 

[spring-peeper]

paywall

https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/05/09/donald-trumps-tower-of-trouble/

Well, actually, your Trump Tower neighbors are as likely to be Medicaid cheats, coke dealers, mobsters, or those who may have gotten a touch too friendly with mobsters.

Take, for example, Verina Hixon, a strikingly beautiful Austrian divorcee with no visible income (or alimony), who, in 1982, bought six apartments on the tower’s 64th and 65th floors for about $10 million. (Trump Tower is really 58 stories high, but Donald had juggled the floor numbers, skipping 10 flights and renumbering it as if it were a 68-story structure.)

 

[CRI]

Good summary here of the wider significance of recent state legislation to ban abortion, how we got here, and why the US may never get out of this deep, dark hole.

The GOP Has Its Final Anti-Abortion Victory in Sight

GOP members across several states have said they’re “excited” to pass illegal laws that defy a settled Supreme Court ruling so that the current court can overturn it.

The point is this web-like convergence, across multiple states, that’s closing like a net around Americans capable of getting pregnant. Multiple states, with multiple paths to the Supreme Court.

70 percent of Georgians and 68 percent of Americans don’t believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned. It doesn’t matter. That isn’t stopping Georgia’s government. We’re long past democracy working, even if many have yet to realize it, because so much of its dismantling has been invisible to the public thanks to dark money, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and maneuvers like Ainsworth’s, all of which we’ve been encouraged to consider merely improper.

For decades, extremists have been seizing control through the kind of procedural malfeasance that gets continually mislabeled as assholery or poor etiquette.

There’s nothing Americans like less than detail-oriented bureaucracy . . . it has led many of us to think that the citizens’ groups and organizations that have been calling attention to these violations—and bringing lawsuits and doing their best in this whack-a-mole fight to stop a takeover by an extremist minority—are overreacting.

You’re supposed to “get over” Republican overstepping rather than, say, retaliate. You don’t feed the trolls, and when a jerk flips you off in a parking lot, you let it go. You rise above.

McConnell excels at . . . choosing battles too recondite and fiddly for the public to get angry about. For instance, he has now made a standard practice of defying the “blue-slip rule” when it comes to confirming judicial nominees . . . advancing nominees without the approval of their home-state senators, locking out the minority from the process, and stocking the judiciary with radical right-wing conservatives.

As the net closes in, we must remember how it was made, strand by strand, by extremists wishing to impose their religious doctrine on a country founded on the separation of church and state.

 

[CRI]

And wait, here's more - how policy is being changed by stealth.

Trump Administration to LGBT Couples: Your ‘Out of Wedlock’ Kids Aren’t Citizens

Last summer, the State Department issued new rules unilaterally changing the department’s interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a 1952 law that, along with the 14th Amendment, codifies eligibility for U.S. birthright citizenship.

“The U.S. Department of State interprets the INA to mean that a child born abroad must be biologically related to a U.S. citizen parent,” the State Department’s website says.

Under the policy, however, children born via gestational surrogacy and other forms of assisted reproductive technology (ART) are considered to be born “out of wedlock,” in the State Department’s words—even if their (same sex) parents, like Roee and Adiel, are legally married.

For parents of non-traditional families, the policy change has been a disaster, leaving them to navigate the labyrinthine immigration legal system with little guidance from the State Department and, at the moment, little recourse for appeal. Children of U.S. citizens are put at risk of deportation or even statelessness—despite no textual legal basis for the policy.