US Politics, March 2020 — There’s a very good chance you’re not going to die.

it would have zero effect on anything if it happened

be hilarious when he misspells his own name on the checks

ok im relatively fine w/ Pence

so lets do it

it would have zero effect on anything if it happened

no, lots of people who don't pay attention to politics but get a $1200 cheque "directly from the president" are more likely to vote for him in a few months

be hilarious when he misspells his own name on the checks

if you can determine any letter from this to begin with, you should get a job as the country;s leading codebreaker

https://cms.qz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/trump-signature-16x-9_colorcorrected.jpeg

Murt Dummy

that's what it looks like at first glance

fucking performance art.

it is again the "It's a Good Life" episode from The Twilight Zone, w/ the all-powerful child

Aren't 90% of the $1200 'checks' going to be direct deposit anyway?

sorry to dance on a grave here, but

remember all the arguments about trump a year ago, about the "damage" that he had caused, or more pointedly, that he had NOT caused, in the eyes of some? bush and nixon? all one could do, sheepishly, was point out that he was WHOLELY unequipped to deal with a crisis of any nature, that he was in fact enjoying a bizarre string of non-crisis, that he was lucky as he has always been lucky, a string of insanely good luck somehow balancing out the biggest dipsihit that has ever walked the earth and been remembered afterwards. this fucking guy, with 10 months left in his term, is going to wind up killing as many americans as the wars he faked injuries to get out of and the ones he pretended to oppose

the way to look at a current president is not what he has already done, but for what you can expect them to do from the point on. that's why trump has always been a complete fucking nightmare from day one. he has no idea what is doing

would that voter shame cascades down on his craven apologizers and the senate now gets flipped

after this horror a record of excusing Tump shoud be prima facie disqualifying

Also good luck to you and your kids w/ standing trial in NYC under even the most favorable conditions or ever selling a single fucking thing with your stupid name on it

i'd buy a copy of his tax returns

good morning!

It's a shame that the most competent people working for Asshole are so astoundingly good at keeping their boss in his job or out of jail, and not, say, at coordinating a pandemic response. Like, just saw this in the WaPo:

President Trump on Friday took a step to immediately try to curb oversight provisions in Congress’ $2 trillion coronavirus spending package, seeking to assert presidential authority over a new inspector general’s office.

It's remarkable that even in the midst of this miss, someone in his circle of malevolent goons is clearly, absolutely *on it.*

Fox News poll

TRUMP JOB APPROVAL
48% 👍
51% 👎

GENERAL ELECTION
Biden 49%
Trump 40%

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) March 28, 2020

A key takeaway from the Fox News poll: improvements in Trump's approval rating are having no real impact on voting intentions in trial heats with Biden, and haven't dented Biden's lead.

— Geoff Garin (@geoffgarin) March 27, 2020

Just ceremonial, I know, means nothing, but definitively telling that Trump had no Democrats at the signing. CNN was comparing that to important bills from the past and the people who'd been invited.

Trump's signing statement is pointless. they carry no legal weight, they're just a signal of intent/interpretation, and we all know how it will play out. he'll try and violate the terms of the bill, he will get sued, and eventually either a federal judge will tell him to stop or say "hey this is ok". he'll probably lose on this one as it's actually written into the bill itself, not an obscure thing that requires Constitutional interpretation or case law. unless somehow he got SCOTUS to hear it and strike down parts of the Bill as unconstitutional.

it's how he does business, it's how he acts as President.

signing statements do need to be outlawed though.

He has stacked the courts and the language that Schumer and Dems negotiated is weak. No subpoena power for oversight panel, etc. I think he will get away with this:

Signing statement also says Trump will ignore requirements that congressional committees be consulted before reallocating funds

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/27/trump-congress-coronavirus-relief-oversight-152560

And just like that, the Congressional oversight provisions for the 1/2 TRILLION dollar Wall St slush fund (which were *already* too weak) are tossed away the day the bill is signed," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. "This is a frightening amount of public money to have given a corrupt admin w/ 0 accountability."

Not a Naomi Klein fan but this tweet/

One of the major profiteers from the last global financial crisis, whose was nicknamed "The Foreclosure King," is running the bailout for Trump. Sure he foreclosed on elderly people who were pennies behind in their payments, but I'm sure he has their best interests at heart.

waiting for the Calm Down ILX faction to retract the "HuffPost story is bullshit" verdict; it appears it was not, and the slush fund will operate with toothless "oversight."

Trump has lost in federal court, even SCOTUS (census). The victories he tends to win are those where there is ambiguity to exploit in terms of the extent of Executive power. Usually his executive orders.

He is actually saying he'll ignore the law that is explicitly written, so it'll require federal courts deeming restrictions imposed on him as unconstitutional, or agreeing with his alternate interpretations.

He has stacked the courts, but though he's won a number of bullshit victories for his travel ban, deportation, and his wall, he's lost a lot in federal court too.

I ain't saying it's not going to happen, just to stop treating it like a foregone conclusion. And that's why, though I adore AOC, I would have hoped for a stronger statement here, saying something like "Nah bruh, we're going to enforce that law, soz", like Nancy did.

AOC's statement feels like a concession, like they won't challenge him. I know that's not true and that she will be a loud voice in that fight, just wish she'd used it here

HuffPo was bullshit. It said Mnuchin alone had the ability to direct the money and left out the oversight committee and inspector general.

That's empirically wrong - there's no debating it.

Had they said "Although there are protections in the bill, we think the Oversight Committee will be toothless and easily upended", then ok. But they said something was written into the bill and it quite definitively was not.

And I'm a little tired of these gotchas which require posters to be soothsayers

The language in the bill itself is too weak for Dems to get anything enforced by the courts. The oversight board doesn’t have subpoena power and even if it did, the Trump administration ignored Ukraine subpoenas, so why would this be any different.

Yes there’s an inspector general but Mnuchin is gonna do what he wants first, and then after the fact the oversight folks will raise concerns.

just waking up. long night of drinking, etc.

so wait - is the gist that trump added a bullshit provision in his signing statement so he can enrich his family and friends' corporations on his way out of office (rosy future lenses: because he's literally holding people hostage now, in states both blue and purple, micro-anthropomorphizing those states and people down to just their governor's name or even just their gender ("the michigan woman") and withholding obviously desperately needed aid), knowing that he get away with it while the signing statement's legality is tied up in courts (which may be packed with federalist society goons)?

good morning!

If we're just going to judge bills not by their content, but by how Trump is likely to react to them, legally speaking, then we aren't really judging the efficacy of bills at all, especially since Trump tries to flout the law on almost any non-GOP passed bill, regardless of how ironclad it is.

What if Trump states he will block States from granting federal unemployment?

What if Trump cancels the stimulus checks?

What if what if what if

https://prospect.org/economy/repeating-the-mistakes-of-the-2008-bailout/

in any case, it's my least favorite part of the bill, and was probably the most the Dems could get given they're the minority party, even if that minority had shrunk to one member.

at the moment, my bigger concern is withholding of federal aid from states simply cos their governors were mean to him.

thousands of people will fuckin' DIE over this.

Folks who were involved in Tarp and who studied it are saying the content of this bill is inadequate. Damon Silvers and David Dayen are not just pointing at Trump and Mnuchin, they are analyzing the wording of past bailouts and this one, and they’re saying the bill itself is not worded strongly enough. They wanted a board to get the role of giving out money, not Mnuchin with a weak advisory group. They wanted an oversight group with subpoena power and a funded staff . We didn’t get that.

didn't say it was a well-written provision, but saying that what HuffPo reported was factually inaccurate, because in their report, there was zero oversight at all, IG, or committee. mediocre or bad as what got passed might be, that is inarguably worse because then there isn't even a chance of malfeasance making it into the news, to hammer with as we march to November.

I rarely cited Huff Post articles; henceforth I won't.

"US Politics"

At a White House briefing on the coronavirus on March 20, President Trump called the State Department the “Deep State Department.” Behind him, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dropped his head and rubbed his forehead.

Some thought Dr. Fauci was slighting the president, leading to a vitriolic online reaction. On Twitter and Facebook, a post that falsely claimed he was part of a secret cabal who opposed Mr. Trump was soon shared thousands of times, reaching roughly 1.5 million people.

A week later, Dr. Fauci — the administration’s most outspoken advocate of emergency measures to fight the coronavirus outbreak — has become the target of an online conspiracy theory that he is mobilizing to undermine the president.

That fanciful claim has spread across social media, fanned by a right-wing chorus of Mr. Trump’s supporters, even as Dr. Fauci has won a public following for his willingness to contradict the president and correct falsehoods and overly rosy pronouncements about containing the virus.

An analysis by The New York Times found over 70 accounts on Twitter that have promoted the hashtag #FauciFraud, with some tweeting as frequently as 795 times a day. The anti-Fauci sentiment is being reinforced by posts from Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group; Bill Mitchell, host of the far-right online talk show “YourVoice America”; and other outspoken Trump supporters such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who has falsely claimed to be the inventor of email.

Many of the anti-Fauci posts, some of which pointed to a seven-year-old email that Dr. Fauci had sent praising Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of State, have been retweeted thousands of times. On YouTube, conspiracy-theory videos about Dr. Fauci have racked up hundreds of thousands of views in the past week. In private Facebook groups, posts disparaging him have also been shared hundreds of times and liked by thousands of people, according to the Times analysis.

One anti-Fauci tweet on Tuesday said, “Sorry liberals but we don’t trust Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

and now that you've been fully prepared on the background, you are ready to see this. look out - this is one of those delimiting moments in your life, before and after you saw what he did. here we go:

https://i.imgur.com/JPP7XaY.jpg

(left, the treasonous hand, right, the forehead of benedict arnold)

(counterpoint: at least half of those likes/retweets/shares were probably bots)

And who’s knows better that in this climate, touching your face is simply suicide?

The Democrats are the Washington Generals.

People compare politics to professional wrestling, but that's a disservice to wrestling, which can have some pretty surprising plots.

American politics is a Globetrotters game. One team to win, the other to make a good show at losing

— Nobody/Nothing 2020 (@DevourerRose) March 28, 2020

if your awful politics caused you to believe we need a giant corporate slush fund to rescue the markets, and that rigorous oversight could lead to dangerous populist outrage, but also knew your core constituents would balk at a blank check for corporations, how might you proceed

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) March 28, 2020

It does suck to only control one chamber.

stfu

it's their fucking fault they don't control the other one. no convictions, no courage.

I know grumbling is your means of distraction, darlin', so please proceed.

The bill's far better than it looked last Saturday, let alone two weeks ago when I thought Pelosi 'n' Schumer would fold. It doesn't go far enough, nor would it have because you have a lawless president and a Senate controlled by the other party. Our best hope is to win the Senate and the presidency and, if I had my druthers, abolishing the Senate.

But I know you know this because you're a smart boy and you've watched Advise and Consent

What are the odds that Trump's signing statement that negates key concessions was prearranged secretly between McConnell and the WH at the very same time that McConnell was negotiating those concessions with Schumer? That depth of that man's duplicity never fails to stun me.