After reading Kristi Noem’s sickening story bragging about shooting her puppy, I thought we needed a pure, feel good dog story today. From the Dodo: Messi, an 8-year-old Labrador retriever, has worked as a professional Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent for most of his life. Since his first day on the job at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, he’s enjoyed nothing more than screening luggage for explosives and keeping the airport safe. But after years of hard work, Messi recently became eligible for retirement — and his beloved team of agents decided to celebrate him with a special surprise.[…] The professional good boy trotted into work each day with his handler, Peter, excited for another shift of scent-tracking. As much as he loved sniffing bags for explosives, Messi’s favorite moments involved the celebratory tennis balls he’d receive whenever he did a great job. So, for his last shift ever, his doting team showered him with an avalanche of tennis balls, which surprised the unsuspecting boy.
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As of April 26, 2024 Donald Trump hasn’t stopped violating his Judge Merchan gag order. Until the punishments are strong enough to make him stop, we need to take steps to stop and punish his followers, who make threats on his behalf. Marcy Wheeler was on the Nicole Sandler show last week talking about Donald Trump’s systematic threatening of his critics and how normalized political violence is for anybody who comes up against Donald Trump. I’ve written about, and asked a lot of questions about, how threats online and on social media have an impact and what can be done about them. It was great to hear from Marcy about the scope of the problem, how it involves the legal system, the media, social media and learn some names of major players who make threats on social media and get away with it. “There is nobody who is on the wrong side of Donald Trump who is not stalked, who does not face mob violence, and it is systematic. There’s a group of these people, Jesse Watters, we talked about. Jack Posobiec is always involved. Mike Cernovich is always involved. These are people in Roger Stone’s world.
You gotta laugh to keep from crying The country’s taking crazy pills. Back in table-waiting days when the evening’s business and customers got weird, we’d run out the back door to check the night sky. What was it? The full moon? I did the same online this morning (the sun is up). The full moon was the 23rd. Maybe that’s when these bits that popped up first thing were crafted. People need to let off steam. Bette Midler’s on the job. Notice the name of Denver Riggleman’s podcast: Coalition of the Sane. Then there’s the Lev Parnas story. It’s not just that Trumpublicans are trying to transport the entire country into Alice’s Looking Glass World. They’re working both sides of the mirror as it suits them, as if no one will notice. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did. They’re thinking it over So did Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times: It was a farce befitting the absurdity of the situation. Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it.
A “reign” of morons is the collective noun Charlie Pierce was right. In his usual understated way. Lest you think the Republican rot started with Donald Trump, as early as 2013, Charlie Pierce attributed the spreading madness (mockingly) to prion disease. Even then, Pierce suggested Republicans ate the monkey brains back during the Reagan administration: The Reign of Morons Is Here OCTOBER 04, 2013, 5:00am By Charles Pierce, Esquire Only the truly child-like can have expected anything else. In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees.
The Trump campaign inexplicably decided to put Trump on TV IN the greater Philadelphia area to say this: It looks like that’s what he’s going with. Everyone’s thrilled with the repeal of Roe v Wade because that’s what the whole country always wanted. This is the most clear cut example of “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes” since the Big Lie. He’s obviously decided that this is going to be his line: I can’t blame him, honestly, He managed to make the entire Republican Party believe that he won the election in a landslide (or at least pretend they believe it) and that January 6th really was just an outpouring of love that his enemies have turned into a fake picture of a violent mob. He was able (with the help of his party) to convince his cult that there was nothing to the Russia investigation or any of the other cases against him. So why wouldn’t he do it again?
Tom posted one short CNN video of Bill Barr’s utter pusillanimity earlier but I wanted to show the whole interview so you could get the full picture of a typical establishment, Fox News brain-rotted Republican’s worldview. It will shock you: Some excerpts from the transcript: BILL BARR: So it’s not about me. I think that, that I’ve said this all along. If faced with a choice between two people, neither of which I think should be president, I feel it’s my duty to pick the person who I think would do the least damage to the country. And I think Trump would do less damage than Biden. And I think all this stuff about a threat to democracy, I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement. And in the Biden administration. KAITLAN COLLINS: The Biden administration, or President Biden himself. BILL BARR: Biden’s, Biden’s support for the progressive agenda. KAITLAN COLLINS: I think a lot of people hear that. And the case that we just talked about that went before the Supreme Court, essentially, and say, how can you see that and say that Biden is a greater threat to democracy? BILL BARR: Well, where are we losing our freedoms?
A little bit of hope: Rosenberg says this about the swing states which are still showing Trump ahead: Here’s what I am seeing in the battlegrounds – MI, PA, WI are our best states right now, and in the 538 averages they are close and competitive. There are polls in each of these three states showing us ahead in recent weeks. Winning these three gets us to 269 Electoral College votes. As I wrote on Tuesday I am very optimistic that the extremism of the GOP in AZ and NC is giving us real opportunities in both states to win and make serious down-ballot gains. Nevada is always close, and we have work to do in Georgia. The campaign continues to monitor what’s happening in Florida, as Rs there will soon have to defend a newly implemented 6 week abortion ban, something that is currently polling in the lows 20s – a level of unpopularity on something that matters that is not often seen in politics. I have no idea if he’s right but I do agree about those three midwest swing states and I think Arizona looks better every day because of that draconian abortion position of the GOP and their choice of that nutball Kari Lake for the Senate.
“There is no failsafe system of government, meaning, we have a judicial system that has layers and layers of protection for the accused in the hopes that the innocent will go free. We fail. Routinely. But we succeed more often than not. In the vast majority of cases, the innocent do go free. But we still fail. We’ve executed innocent people. Having said that, Alito went through a step by step of all the mechanisms that could potentially fail. In the end, if it fails completely, it’s because we’ve destroyed our democracy on our own. The argument today was depressing. It seems clear that the cult of Unitary Executive is very intrigued by the idea of granting full immunity to a president. That cult is a majority of the court. He seriously said that. This was a terrifying Supreme Court argument. It’s clear that the majority actually favors Trump’s argument that a president must have immunity. Whether they are willing to go that far remains to be seen but it’s almost certain now that the J6 trial will likely not likely see the light of day before the election. We are in big trouble, people. Big. Trouble.
Today’s Supreme Court argument on presidential immunity was profoundly depressing. It really sounded like the majority is persuaded that they must protect criminal president Donald Trump (and any like him in the future) from any kind of accountability for his crimes. I don’t know if they will think better of it as they deliberate (probably over a period of many months) but it appears that this court has not been chastised at all by the country’s reaction to their radical actions in Dobbs or anything else. So, if they do what it looks very likely they will do, which is to at least give Trump the delay he seeks and possibly upend the constitutional order at his behest, he could get off scott free whether he wins or loses. But there are further ramifications that I don’t think any of us have contemplated in light of this case. Greg Sargent has and it’s chilling: But there’s another way to understand Trump’s move: It’s about what comes next.