Orange turd in the punchbowl

Merrick Garland solemnly intoned that we have one rule of law here, the same laws for the wealthy and the poor, the powerful and the powerless and so on.  The last few years have shown that is clear bullshit. 

A young military guy showing off a secret document on-line to impress his buddies, well after the FBI searched Mar-a-Largo and seized evidence that Trump illegally held on to classified documents, has already been convicted and is serving a sixteen year Espionage Act sentence. 

The young man committed a crime that is a small fraction of what the Orange Polyp committed in taking a trove of top secret documents, lying to government agencies about having them, storing them in public places around his gaudy country club home, insisting he had every right to keep the documents he rightfully took, or that were planted by the FBI, obstructing an investigation into whether he had them, instructing lackeys to destroy surveillance video of moving the boxes of secret documents and all the rest.

One big difference in the two cases, the kid who put the classified document on line surely doesn’t have $230,000 a day to spend on lawyers like the Big Guy does. Another big difference, he didn’t get to choose a judge he’d appointed to lifetime office who’d already demonstrated her fawning loyalty to him.

A NY appeals court did the Orange Turd a big favor Monday by reducing the bond he has to post to appeal his fraud case from close to a half a billion to a more manageable $175,000,000.  On the same day he got the news that starting on April 15 he will be sitting at the defendant’s table in NY criminal court four days a week until a verdict is reached in that trial, a trial that also involves his fraudulent business practices as well as election interference.   The boy is not holding up well.  In a late night rant he wrote “CROOKED JOE BUDEN MISINFORMATES AND DISINFOMATES ALL THE TIME”.   Point taken, Honest Don.

He’s going down, whether you buy his gold-painted high tops or his special Make America Prey Again Bible or any of the other bullshit he’s peddling.  On Fox they’re screaming about NBC firing discarded former Trump lackey Ronna Romney McDaniel who will be paid $600,000 by NBC per her contract, even though she won’t be on the air after massive pressure to get rid of her.  Fox insists people have the right to hear all sides, someone still claiming that the election of 2020 was stolen, and that the fake electors were real, and that the Republican party must pay all of a certain criminal defendant’s legal bills is just as entitled to those credible views as anyone who honestly stormed the Capitol on January 6th, or sincerely believes that Jewish space lasers are regularly employed to control the world.

We are living in disorientingly crazy times, just ask any of the elusive Buden superfans the NY Times was hunting for recently…

Benghazi Impeachment news

Heather Cox Richardson reports:

As Justin Rohrlich of The Daily Beast put it, “Comer…stepped on rake after rake during the hearing, consistently undermining his own conference’s case.” Finally, after Democrats had pointed out the many missteps of the committee’s Republicans, Bobulinski told Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) that “the American people are well aware of the Bidens’ corruption.” “Perfect!” Moskowitz replied. He told Bobulinski to ask Comer why he hadn’t asked for an impeachment vote. Moskowitz even offered to help the Republicans out by making a motion to impeach President Biden, urging Comer to second it. Comer declined.

Moskowitz said he wanted “to show the American people that they’re never going to impeach Joe Biden. It’s never going to happen because they don’t have the evidence. Okay, this is a show. It’s all fake. They just want to do these hearings. It’s not leading to impeachment. They’re lying to their base on Newsmax and Fox leading these people to believe that they’re going to eventually impeach the president. It’s not going to happen. At all. Ever. Period.”  

Heather

Trump calls on Manafort

Convicted money launderer, witness intimidator, tax and bank fraudster and all around good guy Paul Manafort, pardoned by his benefactor Trump six weeks after Honest Don Trump lost the election in 2020, gave sensitive polling data to a Kremlin agent allowing a foreign power to help swing the four states that gave Trump his 78,000 vote Electoral College win in 2016.  This is according to the Senate Select Committee Report (chaired by Marco Rubio, R- FL), which should be released in its unredacted form now that Trump is in talks to bring Manafort into his presidential campaign again.

What could go wrong with desperate, deranged, cash-starved Trumpie hiring this longtime Russian oligarch-connected lover of obscene luxury and enabler of corruption to raise and launder foreign oligarch money for his 2024 legal defense and campaign run? 

It’s not as though Manafort’s former partner and fellow rat fucker, Roger Stone, is in any way involved in MAGA’s 2024 campaign or ever had anything to do with any right-wing riot to achieve a political end with violence or the loud threat of violence, neither the 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot [1]  nor the MAGA/White Christian Patriotic Riot of January 6, 2021 [2] . Stone, Manafort’s long time partner in political crime, also pardoned by Honest Don, made sure to dismiss his Proud Boy body guard contingent and get out of town the night of January 5th.  USA! USA!!

[1]  The Brooks Brothers riot was a demonstration led by Republican staffers at a meeting of election canvassers in Miami-Dade County, Florida, on November 22, 2000, during a recount of votes made during the 2000 United States presidential election, with the goal of shutting down the recount. After demonstrations and acts of violence, local officials shut down the recount early.  Details

[2]  On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob[33][34][35] of supporters of then-U.S. president Donald Trump, two months after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. They sought to keep Trump in power by occupying the Capitol and preventing a joint session of Congress counting the Electoral College votes to formalize the victory of President-elect Joe Biden. The attack was ultimately unsuccessful in preventing the certification of the election results. According to the House select committee investigating the incident, the attack was the culmination of a seven-part plan by Trump to overturn the election.[36][37].        details

You can’t argue with Nazis

A Nazi has a closed mind and a simple, even if irrational, explanation for everything. They will repeat their mantra over and over again in response to any point you try to raise. It is futile to argue with Nazis, but it is essential to persuade anybody who is not a Nazi that Nazis are fucking Nazis.

If you are anti-Nazi, you might as well ask a Nazi why they never investigated Hunter Biden for taking $2 billion from the murderous Saudi dictator while Hunter’s father was the president of the United States. Or why their partisan six-year investigation into Hunter and the new Benghazi Commission for grounds to impeach Joe, based on a reliable source (now indicted) who spouted Putin‘s hand fed propaganda, does not turn up the heat to the boiling point to finally lower the boom on the evil Hunter Biden, and the hundreds of viciously anti-Christian billionaire Jews (not to mention Chinese communists and Ukrainian fascists) who prop him up.

If somebody’s last word in every discussion is a variation on “I will never listen to you, asshole, no matter what, because I am right and you suck cocks in hell, along with your so-called facts” I would say it’s time to talk to somebody else. You cannot persuade somebody who is a Nazi that there is anything wrong with being a Nazi. Anybody who can’t see that there is something wrong with being a Nazi is a fucking Nazi.

My best advice, once you see a door is closed with a fanatical insistence on the door slammer’s righteousness, and the endlessly asserted claim that you are a completely delusional asshole, if not also a poisonous fucking Jew, see that closed door as a very good thing and keep on walking.

Trump Riddle for a Saturday afternoon

Here’s one I really don’t get. Trump claims to be a mega-successful billionaire business genius. We know that’s a lie by how many millions of dollars he lost every year (take for example the $916 million in business losses he wrote off on his 1995 taxes), how virtually all of his ventures failed and/or were shut down for fraud, and how many times he declared bankruptcy. We all know he’s the most “transactional” president of all-time. He claims to be worth many billions.

He took cartons full of valuable classified documents down to his gaudy Florida resort after being dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. Putin would have gladly paid a billion for a pile of military secrets, so would Muhammed Bin Salman, or Trump’s North Korean BFF, or, for that matter, Hitler, if he was still alive. Trump would have had no hesitation to make deals with any of them, since everything is simply a transaction with him.

What happened to the money?

If he made the lucrative business deals anyone would assume he would have by selling the valuable government secrets, he wouldn’t be scrambling to put up bond for the over one half billion he owes as the result of recent court verdicts against him. He’d peel off that money from a fat billfold, announce confidently that he was going to win on appeal, and tell everybody to fuck off.

Leading to the obvious question: what happened to the money, Trumpie?

A Moment of Trumpenfreude 

A great one by Paul Krugman. We can talk about yesterday’s vote by at least four unaccountable, craven, fake Christian, extremist judicial fraternity member lockstep fascists later, this one is much more fun to consider.

OK, I have to admit it: I’m enjoying the spectacle of Donald Trump begging for a delay in the $454 million fine he’s required to pay for fraudulently inflating his net worth, for two reasons.

First, his inability to come up with the cash basically confirms the charges: He isn’t as rich as he claims to be. Second, his evident inability to get anyone to lend him the money is poetic justice for a man who has a history of bilking gullible investors.

One small addition to the Trumpenfreude: A GoFundMe set up to help Trump pay his bills has so far managed to raise about a third of 1 percent of the amount he owes.

You do have to wonder about how this will affect his psychological state. Trump’s speeches have become increasingly incoherent lately — a trend that has attracted sufficient attention that a few days ago he felt compelled to respond, telling an audience: “There’s no cognitive problem. If there was, I’d know about it.”

I think I’ll just leave that there.

A Moment of Trumpenfreude