Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Ladies and Gentlemen! The Republican Party 2.0.2.0:

In case you were wondering how it is that Republicans are so fond of Roger Stone, the photo in tonight's meme and the one at the end of this post go a long way in explaining that mutual love. And they are just two of the many photos of Roger Stone with members of the notorious Proud Boys white supremacy group that are available. Would it shock any of us if he has a few of Trump with some Proud Boys, too? Could that be one of many reasons Stone's jail sentence was lowered and then commuted altogether? I'm just supposin' but it's more than merely plausible.

Tonight's meme appears to be a proud tweet from Roger himself. This photo shows some good ol' republican Proud Boys with Stone at a Trump event in Dade County, Flo-i-duh. They're flashing the White Power hand sign too! Always classy, those Republicans! Hey! Where's Stephen Miller? Where's Sebastian Gorka?

The Stone twitter account was suspended by twitter two years ago but, among other things, this is what Roger Stone is. There's a reason why Stone has been a go-to advisor to Republicans for 50 years and it's no surprise how many of these white supremacists flock to Dear Leader Trump.

Yes Trump really does hire "the best people." Very fine people indeed.

Oh and by the way, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke has endorsed Trump for reelection but says Trump should replace Mike Pence on the ticket with... you guessed it, Tucker Carlson, ol' Tiki Torch Tucker himself! Says Duke, "Tucker Carlson now! We don't have four years!"

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

"He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn't."

-Roger Stone, implying that he could spill the beans, mere hours before Trump decided to commute his sentence.

More acceptance of their criminality leads to more contempt of us.

It's all very nice to tear down, burn and shatter the statues of dead traitors and racists but what about the living ones? America has a hell raising, lawless, traitorous devil of a president who viciously attacks the country by siding with its enemies, teargassing and steamrolling its citizens, shredding its Constitution, and laughing at the very idea that there are laws of any kind. All the political leaders of the so-called opposition to Trump and his republican troopers bring pencils, manicure knives, and erasers to the fight when the only effective countermeasure would be to have leaders that give like for like. Yeah, I know we allegedly still have a legal system to take care of these things but how did that work out with Impeachment-lite? A legal system is no good when one side soft pedals it against the other side that laughs at it dismissively with unrelenting cruelty and psychotic actions. In short, our legal system has atrophied and died for lack of use and nourishment. The commutation of Roger Stone's already ridiculously lowered sentence is just the latest example of that. Trump and his cronies get away with everything because they know they can. The countdown to shooting people on Fifth Avenue is well underway.

The leaders of the Democratic Party see this battle as a battle of just words and tedious do-nothing Impeachment-lite, mixed with half-hearted (at best) hearings and court cases full of endless parsing and posing. They refuse to call this situation what it really is and act accordingly. We are at war. The Civil War not only never ended, it has always simmered and flared from time to time. Now it has flared up anew, like never before. This war knows no borders. It's propaganda is broadcast nationwide 24 hours a day by people who are a virus all by themselves. The Republican Guard's armed militia parade in the streets, fire off their guns like their crazed middle eastern counterparts, and take over state houses as their Dear Leader tweets encouragement and talks up violence. Can you imagine if, in 1942, we had invited the troops of the Axis powers over to fight it out with loyal Americans here on our streets?

Our Democratic Party "leadership" can't even put together advertising that resonates and people want to see. They leave that to a small handful of disgruntled Lincoln Project republicans who have a long term agenda of their own. Instead, the best we can do is milquetoast semi-dweebs like Adam Schiff who act all nice and civil when we need a hell raiser of our own. You don't win a fight by keeping your hands at your side and trying to polite your opponent to death. The voters are no better. Apparently the American public would look at Idi Amin eating their fellow citizens and ask him, "would you like fries with that?"

As readers know, I've often compared what we now have in the White House to comic book villains. Lex Luther is generally my go-to villain of choice but I have used both The Joker, and The Penguin. Trump in a tux in particular reminds me of The Penguin. That's about how he walks and stands. Sadly though, the brutal comedy-tragedy we are living in demands attention, not escapism. What Trump is doing is real life villainy. He may not be manipulating the fabric of space and time but he is destroying what's left of our fabric of law and order and therefore the fabric of society itself. It's all very psychotically deliberate and planned of course, and if you think deliberately encouraging the chaos of the spread of a plague isn't part of it all, then you are a fool on your best days.

Giving Roger Stone a Quid Pro Quo "Get Out Of Jail Free" card mere hours after he implied that he might talk and employing a traitorous Attorney General to wreak havoc on The United States Of America is exactly what all those Republican House members and $enators so eagerly voted for when they voted not to impeach Trump and not to remove Trump from the White House. Instead, they willfully voted for the death of untold American citizens and the death of this country itself, all for the payoff of confirming a hundred federal judges and getting millions in Russian rubles and corporate dollars. The Trump cabinet is no better. They all kiss the rings of The Orange Menace and our nation's adversaries with enthusiasm in their hearts and the cash in their pockets. They do it in plain sight. If Sam Giancana or Vinny The Chin Gigante were in the White House, it would be the same. It is the same, and that is how they want it. Donnie The Chin.

Donnie The Chin is the stuff of Cosa Nostra chronicles. He and his crew of $enatorial earners and House wiseguys are what The Bush Crime Family dreamed of. They are also what we get for not demanding or choosing better candidates from our political parties and not demanding that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, be at the least, sent to The Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. Scooter Libby got his sentence commuted too and what he did led to people dying. The voters shrugged.

Barack "Too Much Mr. Nice Guy" Obama's relative silence about Russian election interference and Moscow MItch's bought and paid for part in that silence also helped lead us to where we are today, of course. Now, we have a president who is the stuff of third world dictatorships and we are on our way to being a third world country. And while I'm at it, let's definitely not forget that Trump's traitorous goon of an Attorney General was also Attorney General under George H.W. "Poppy" Bush and did legal work for Ronald Reagan. Clearly, he has an affinity for really bad presidents. We let the Bushes and their operators off the hook and sent a message that all is permissible with that and the acceptance of Poppy's pardons of his and Reagan's Iran Contra schemes and schemers, all on top of the ignored criminality of the October 1980 surprise. We turned a blind eye to Nixon's death dealing Paris treason and overall treachery, and we didn't demand that Gerald Ford be dragged off to prison for pardoning him and sentencing him to a full pension and life on a California beach; talk about your obstruction of justice! The seeds that bore the fruits of accepting criminality or not paying attention were sown long ago.

Shutting Roger Stone Up With A Commutation Of His Sentence-- Few Republican Elected Officials Seem To Mind

"The most corrupt act in recent history," is what Trump detractors are calling the big Roger Stone commutation. Legal author and CNN contributor Jeffrey Toobin said, specifically, that it was "the most corrupt and cronyistic act in perhaps all of recent history." After all, just hours before Trump announced it, Stone had admitted to Howard Fineman that he has the goods on Trump. Will it matter? The mask-free young woman in this Facebook video is a very typical Trump fan-- something she proudly admits. [Basically she is ALL Trump supporters rolled up into one-- the absolute essence of populist Trumpism.] Watch it a couple of times. Do you think anything about this commutation will bother her or her boyfriend or any Trumpist?

South Carolina closet queen Lindsey Graham, whose career Trump could destroy with one tweet, pulled his head out of Trump's ass Friday long enough to tweet that that Trump's commutation of Roger Stone would be justified because "Mr. Stone is in his 70s and this was a non-violent, first-time offense," apparently a dry run for the Republican congressional party line on what was about to happen. But it seems to have bothered Utah Senator Mitt Romney, quite a bit... enough to have stuck his neck out to tweet this:

I read yesterday that Trump may bring Flynn out on the road to his COVID-KKK rallies. I hope he brings Roger too. I asked some of the candidates for Congress what the Republicans they're running against are saying about the Roger Stone commutation. Or if Trump has anything on them too? Like many candidates, Kara Eastman pointed to Donald J. Bacon’s "silence on this travesty as an amplification of his complicity. He’s a Donald Trump rubber stamp and Trump’s top enabler in Congress in his shambling journey towards autocracy."

Like Kara, this is Julie Oliver's second swing at a ghastly Trump-devoted incumbent. She told me last night that "Political corruption in Congress isn't new. We see it anywhere from corporate lobbyists writing gigantic tax cuts in the margins of a Republican tax bill that incentivized shipping jobs overseas, to the pharmaceutical industry charging $3,000 for a treatment that American taxpayers subsidized. But commuting the sentence of a political ally who was convicted of 7 felonies, conspired with foreign spies to disrupt a U.S. election and helped cover it up seals Donald Trump's reputation as the most corrupt president in history. And those who have enabled this corruption, like Roger Williams, can never live this down." Neither Williams nor Bacon has said a word about Trump's blatant corruption in regard to Roger Stone-- or anything else. Neither deserves to be reelected.

History professor and Riverside County progressive congressional candidate Liam O'Mara said "It's just business as usual to forgive corruption in your own camp, so it is honestly surprising that any Republicans have spoken out. (I almost hate that I need to give respect to Mitt Romney and former GOPer Justin Amash for standing on principle, given how terrible many of their ideas are for America, but I do respect it.) People in both parties reflexively defend their own-- this is why so many New Dems and Blue Dogs hate progressives so much. But we all know the corruption is far worse in the Republican party, and has been for decades (look at all the indictments in Reagan's administration). That Republicans never care is just par for the course. Most Republicans stuck with Nixon all the way to the resignation, remember. Calvert won't say a word about this, because as much shady crap as he's been in, he might need a get-out-of-jail-free card himself some day. Or at least, he should, if this country's politicians cared half as much about graft and corruption as they claim."

#NeverTrumper Bill Kristof wrote late Friday night that members of Congress shouldn't be mute about this outrage. "Democrats certainly will not be. But what of Republicans? Will they cower? Probably. Or will some-- a few, a happy few-- step forth now, in light of this extraordinarily corrupt exercise of presidential power, and say: No second term for this president. Will some elected Republicans make clear that Donald Trump’s America is not their America, not our America, nor the America of patriots, not the America of our future? A healthy Republican party would feature dozens of members of Congress stepping forward to say this... Republicans had their chance a few months ago to vote to impeach, and then convict, Donald Trump. With one (one!) honorable exception, they chose not to stand up for the rule of law. Now Trump has carried through on promises even Nixon never had the nerve or opportunity to carry out. Trump has gone further than Nixon ever did. Will no elected Republican now stand up and say to the president: You chose Stone; I choose Biden."

So is it a done deal? Have Trump and Stone gotten away with this (at least outside of the history books?) Well, where better to seek an answer than from Ben Wittes at Lawfare? He wrote that "the predictable nature of Trump’s action should not obscure its rank corruption. In fact, the predictability makes the commutation all the more corrupt, the capstone of an all-but-open attempt on the president’s part to obstruct justice in a self-protective fashion over a protracted period of time. That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s actually not. Trump publicly encouraged Stone not to cooperate with Robert Mueller’s investigation; he publicly dangled clemency as a reward for silence; and he has now delivered. The act is predictable precisely because the corrupt action is so naked. In a normal world, this pattern of conduct would constitute an almost prototypical impeachable offense. But this is not a normal world. Congress is unlikely to bestir itself to do anything about what Trump has done-- just as it has previously done nothing about the obstruction allegations detailed in the Mueller Report."

Now, with Trump’s commutation, Stone has received the precise reward Trump dangled at the time his possible testimony was at issue.

“Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency,” the White House said Friday evening. In the White House’s telling, Stone was targeted by out-of-control Mueller prosecutors for mere “process” crimes when their “collusion delusion” fell apart. He was subject to needless humiliation in his arrest, and he did not get a fair trial. “[P]articularly in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial, the President has determined to commute his sentence. Roger Stone has already suffered greatly. He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!”

Indeed he is. But the story may not be over.

“Time to put Roger Stone in the grand jury to find out what he knows about Trump but would not tell. Commutation can’t stop that,” tweeted Andrew Weissman, one of Mueller’s top prosecutors, following the president’s action.

That’s most unlikely while the Justice Department remains in the hands of Attorney General Bill Barr. But it’s far from unthinkable should Trump leave office in January. What’s more, the commutation means that the story Mueller tells about potential obstruction vis a vis Stone did not end with the activity described by the Mueller Report. It is a continuing pattern of conduct up until the present day. That potentially makes it easier for a future Justice Department to revive at least one of the obstruction questions that Barr squelched when he closed the cases Mueller intentionally did not resolve. In addition to all of the facts reported by Mueller, including facts that have been redacted until recently, Trump has now consummated the deal he dangled before Stone.

That’s something the Justice Department may want to examine anew-- someday.

William Barr's Department Of Crime And Corruption

Before Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered, King Henry II was heard shouting "Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" Ever since, tyrants have adapted the phrase to make themselves clear about having something wicked down without having to resort to specificity. When Trump was screaming for "his Roy Cohn," the zeitgeist puked up William Barr. Trump has been delighted ever since. And with good reason.

Barr is destined to take his place, in the history books, along earlier Attorneys General like A. Mitchell Palmer, who served under Woodrow Wilson, Harry Daugherty, was served under Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, John Mitchell, who served under Nixon and one of his execrable Trumpist predecessors, Jeff Sessions.

Yesterday a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, voted 2-to-1 to order the lower court judge who tried Michael Flynn to dismiss the case. The decision was written by a fake judge appointed by Trump, Neomi Rao, and backed up by another Republican, Karen Henderson. Ttrump has sp polluted the federal judiciary that these fake judges didn't care that Flynn had plead guilty twice.

Yesterday, reporting for the Washington Post, Matt Zapotosky and Karoun Demirjian covered the politicization and perversion of the Trump/Barr Department of Justice. They tepidly noted that a federal prosecutor’s testimony yesterday that he was pressed by supervisors to offer a more lenient sentencing recommendation for a friend of Trump’s capped a remarkable four-month stretch in which Barr repeatedly bent the Justice Department to Trump’s political interests-- generating significant controversy but no personal consequence.

Since February, Barr has intervened in two criminal cases to the benefit of those who once advised Trump; ousted a U.S. attorney who is investigating Trump’s personal lawyer; and dutifully implemented Trump’s vision for a forceful crack down on demonstrators in the District protesting police violence.

Democrats and legal observers have decried the moves-- calling on Barr to resign or be investigated by his agency’s internal watchdog-- and morale inside the Justice Department has plummeted, according to several Justice Department employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter frankly. But lawmakers, who already held Barr in contempt last year for defying congressional subpoenas, seem to have little in the way of practical recourse.

Republicans, who control the Senate, would short-circuit any bid to impeach and remove Barr, who they have asserted is drawing ire because he is trying to ferret out the corruption of his Justice Department predecessors in a Democratic administration.

“I think Barr’s conduct has made it clear that he is not acting as the attorney general for the people of the United States, but as a private attorney to protect the interests of the president,” said former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade. “What can be done about William Barr? I really think the only thing that can be done is impeachment. And I think that this Republican Senate has shown it doesn’t really have any appetite for that.”

The tension over allegations of Barr’s malfeasance reached new heights Wednesday as the House Judiciary Committee took testimony from two current prosecutors, including one who had worked on the team of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The hearing came just as an appeals court panel dealt a blow to Barr’s critics, siding with the Justice Department and ordering a reluctant lower court judge to immediately drop the criminal case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, as Barr had sought.

Aaron Zelinsky, who formerly worked for Mueller and is now an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland, said political leadership had pressured him and other career prosecutors to issue a lighter sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend convicted of lying to Congress. Zelinsky made clear that he thought the reason for the pressure was inappropriate.

“What I heard repeatedly was that this leniency was happening because of Stone’s relationship to the president, that the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice and that his instructions to us were based on political considerations,” Zelinsky said.

Zelinsky’s testimony was buttressed by a different prosecutor, who works on antitrust matters and said that Barr had personally intervened to spur investigations of mergers in the marijuana industry, even when career officials thought such work was unnecessary.

The prosecutor, John Elias, said the reason seemed to be Barr’s personal distaste for the marijuana business. He also said the Justice Department’s antitrust division was made to investigate deals between the state of California and four automakers to limit emissions, a day after Trump tweeted his displeasure about the arrangement.

“Personal dislike of an industry is not a valid basis upon which to ground an antitrust investigation,” Elias said.

House Democrats said that the prosecutors’ testimony showed that Barr has politicized the Justice Department to help Trump and his friends. In a strident opening statement, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called Barr “the president’s fixer.”

“The cancer that we must root out is his decision to place the president’s interests above the interests of the American people,” Nadler said.

Legal analysts said the hearing itself was remarkable: prosecutors such as Zelinsky are virtually never permitted or willing to speak to Congress at all, let alone to describe the deliberations surrounding a particular criminal case. They negotiated their appearances independently of the Justice Department, but their lawyers conferred with department officials about limits on their testimony.

“Mr. Zelinsky’s courageous testimony makes more painfully explicit and shocking the brazenness with which the attorney general and other Justice Department officials now readily manipulate cases to serve the president’s political ends,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department counterintelligence official now in private practice. “And it also indicates how impervious these officials think they are to any meaningful accountability and consequences for their wrongful conduct.”

...In Barr’s first months on the job, Mueller’s team delivered to the attorney general its final report, and Barr stepped fully into controversy. Instead of quickly releasing the report’s executive summaries, Barr condensed the findings into a four-page letter he sent to Congress. The letter declared Mueller had not found evidence to substantiate a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election, and had not reached a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice. Barr said he had evaluated that question himself, and determined that Trump had not.

The bare-bones description so infuriated the special counsel team that Mueller sent a letter to Barr complaining that the attorney general “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the investigative report. Barr ultimately pushed to make public a largely unredacted copy of Mueller’s entire report, though on the day of its release, he gave a news conference characterizing it in a way that closely mirrored Trump’s talking points.

In recent months, critics have alleged that Barr has sought to undo the special counsel’s work. Zelinsky testified that career prosecutors initially won their fight over Stone’s sentencing recommendation and filed essentially the request they wanted. But early the next morning, Trump tweeted his displeasure, and Barr directed that a new memo be filed, prompting Zelinsky and three other career prosecutors to withdraw from the case.

Barr has said that he did not discuss the case with the president and that his intervention was not a result of the president’s tweet. In the episode’s aftermath, he gave a remarkable interview saying Trump’s social media missives “make it impossible for me to do my job.”

Barr asked U.S. Attorney John Durham in Connecticut to review the FBI’s Russia investigation and U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen in St. Louis to review the Flynn case-- unusual moves that critics say are meant to fuel Republican attacks on an inquiry that dogged Trump’s presidency. Last month, at Jensen’s recommendation, Barr had the Justice Department move to walk away entirely from the prosecution of Flynn, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI’s about his dealings with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Ryan Fayhee, a former Justice Department prosecutor now in private practice at Hughes Hubbard & Reed, said that Barr had “clearly participated in the systematic undoing of the Mueller investigation,” noting that-- in part because of coronavirus-related releases-- none of those Mueller charged are currently in prison.

“It’s thinly veiled and troubling to say the least,” Fayhee said. “Bill Barr is very bright, capable, and ran a Department of Justice that didn’t look anything like this the last time around-- and didn’t act like this the last time around. The only different factor is the person in the White House.”

Critics have noted that Barr, too, has taken other steps that have fallen in line with the president’s interests. Like Trump, he has voiced skepticism about mail-in voting, telling the New York Times Magazine it could be susceptible to a foreign operation, even though current and former election officials dispute that.

At Trump’s request, he led the law enforcement response to recent protests in the District over police violence and controversially ordered the pushing back of protesters from outside of Lafayette Square near the White House on June 1. That led to police using chemical irritant and horses against largely peaceful demonstrators, just before Trump walked across the square for a photo op at St. John’s Episcopal Church. Barr has said the events were not related.

Last week, Barr moved to oust Geoffrey Berman as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Berman’s office has been investigating Rudolph W. Giuliani, a personal lawyer to Trump, though the Justice Department has disputed that Berman’s removal is related to any particular case.

A spokesman for Barr said Wednesday that Barr had agreed to appear before the Judiciary Committee on July 28; he has not made such an appearance since Democrats took over the House majority in 2019. Though analysts note that he is unlikely to face any legal consequences for his various recent moves, he still has to answer to his peers, the public and his own department. Thousands of Justice Department alumni have endorsed various letters calling for Barr’s ouster, and this week, a group of professors at the George Washington University Law School, from which Barr has a degree, condemned his actions.

“At some point,” said McQuade, the former U.S. attorney, “you lose the room.”

Did Senior Military Officers Just Thwart Trump's Attempted Coup? Mad Dog Bites Trumpanzee

Trump never gave Roger Stone a cabinet position but Stone was more influential than most of Trump's cabinet. And now he's signaling he's about to pardon him for his criminal activities. This should come as no surprise to anyone since Stone held fats to the code of omertà Trump so admires. Stone's supposed to show up to begin his 3 year prison sentence this month. Trump's gaslighting tweet yesterday makes it pretty clear Stone won't be serving any time:

Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Bernstein noted how excruciatingly bad Donald "always hires the best people" Trump has consistently been in his hiring choices. As he's demonstrated since the earliest days of his campaign, he always hires the worst people. And not just in the eyes of rational people-- also in the eyes of Trump himself! "[T]he list of Donald Trump’s terrible personnel choices according to Donald Trump gets one name longer, as the president reacted predictably by bashing Mattis. That list now includes a defense secretary, a secretary of state, an attorney general, at least one national security adviser and at least two White House chiefs of staff. Again, there are very few people who are otherwise undecided about Trump who would be swayed by what an awful job-- according to Trump himself-- he has done appointing people for the most important positions in government. But it’s a remarkable record nonetheless."

Voters should make it clear that any senator who votes to confirm any Trump nominee for anything from now until he's driven from office will also be voted out of office, especially rubberstampers up for reelection in November, like Martha McSally (R-AZ), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Steve Daines (R-MT), Susan Collins (R-ME), David Perdue (R-GA), Cory Gardner (R-CO), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Joni Ernst (R-IA) and, of course, the architects of Trump's hiring practices, John Cornyn (R-TX) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

And now Trump wants to fire another Defense Secretary, reflexive lackey Mark Esper, who-- embarrassed by the fascism displayed this week-- strayed from Trump's plans to send in the troops. Jennifer Jacobs reported Trump confronted him over his anti-authoritarian comments and then started the process of finding a replacement.

In a separate Bloomberg piece she did with Josh Wingrove, Jacobs wrote that between Esper and Mattis, Trump is in a position no other presidents have even faced before. As Bernstein made clear, "It's hard to get across what a big deal it is that former Defense Secretary James Mattis has not only publicly criticized President Donald Trump, but done so in extremely strong terms. In a statement issued Wednesday, Mattis talked about 'those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution,' and said that 'We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.' He added that Trump was engaged in a 'deliberate attempt' to 'divide us,' something he says no other president in his lifetime has done. (For the record, Mattis is 69, so he’s talking about everyone since Harry Truman.)" Jacobs and Wingrove called it "a direct challenge to his leadership... The double-barreled rebuke from his current and former defense chiefs elevates the pressure on Trump as he falters in handling a pair of crises: a raging pandemic that has killed more than 100,000 Americans, and protests over a painful legacy of racial inequality, injustice and police brutality... Mattis’s criticism echoed attacks leveled on Trump by Biden, but the former defense chief’s key role in the president’s original national security cabinet gives him a standing few outsiders could ever claim... Trump lashed out in a pair of tweets mocking Mattis’s military service and his nicknames, calling him “the world’s most overrated General."

Mattis stepped down 18 months ago after Trump abruptly announced on Twitter that he wanted to pull troops from Syria, but he was a hugely influential member of the president’s first national security cabinet.

Trump was so eager to unveil his nomination of Mattis after the 2016 election that he announced the plans at a campaign-style rally. He introduced the former head of U.S. Central Command by a moniker-- “Mad Dog”-- and called him “one of the most effective generals that we’ve had in many, many decades.”

It remains to be seen if Mattis’s rebuke will have lasting political repercussions, but it strikes at the heart of what the president has pitched as one of his strengths: his fulsome praise of the military as part of his “America First” approach to the world, even while he frequently criticizes the national security establishment for allegedly trying to undermine his administration.

Despite Trump’s praise of Mattis when he took office, by the end of the defense chief’s tenure their relationship was shattered. Upon his departure, Mattis issued a blunt resignation letter that amounted to a rebuke of Trump’s “America First” mantra.

“We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances,” Mattis wrote at the time. “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

Days later, Trump lashed out at Mattis, saying “What’s he done for me?” Singling out the U.S. quagmire in Afghanistan, Trump added, “How has he done in Afghanistan? Not too good.”

Wednesday’s events unfolded in rapid fashion. Mattis’s scathing statement landed as Trump renewed his threat to send in the military to quash protests during an interview with Spicer, now a host for NewsMax TV, a conservative outlet. Trump called ongoing protests in New York a “disaster.”

“And we could help them a lot, they have to ask,” Trump told Spicer. “If they don’t get it straightened out soon, I’ll take care of it.”

For another generation of Americans K-Pop is a much bigger deal than James Mattis. And according to a report from the L.A. Times, Trump has lost the K-Pop community. "K-pop fans are famous for their persistent and creative ways to make online life miserable for people who demean their favorite artists and groups. But on Wednesday, the genre’s sometimes-toxic community harnessed its digital savvy and mercilessness for more noble causes: shutting down white supremacist social media and overwhelming police tip lines meant to identify Black Lives Matter protesters.

A planned day of social media action from white supremacists, which was being promoted with the hashtag #whitelivesmatter, quickly went sideways. K-pop fans, who on any given day control a meaningful percentage of the trending topics across social media, decided to flood the tag with “fancam” footage of beloved acts like BTS and Blackpink. They also threw in memes ripping anyone earnestly using the tag to search for white-nationalist news.

They took aim at several pro-Trump and police hashtags too, renderingmuch of #MAGA and #BlueLivesMatter Twitter useless for the day.

  K-pop fans also found ways to steer their ire toward police efforts to identify Black Lives Matter protesters. Several police departments, including those in Dallas and Grand Rapids, Mich., had established public digital tip lines where residents could send footage of protesters, which cops could then investigate.

“If you have video of illegal activity from the protests and are trying to share it with @DallasPD, you can download it to our iWatch Dallas app. You can remain anonymous,” the Dallas department wrote on Saturday.

Over the weekend, jokes about K-pop fandom’s capacity to flood the app with fancam footage quickly became a genuine direct action, as fans filed reams of “tips” that were really footage of Korean groups performing. The Dallas PD quickly pulled back its efforts: “Due to technical difficulties iWatch Dallas app will be down temporarily,” the department announced.

  A number of K-pop artists have been more plainly supportive of Black Lives Matter protests sparked by George Floyd’s killing, including Got7, Jay Park, Amber Liu, CL and others. They’ve acknowledged the debt that their music owes to black artists and advocated for protests that have swept much of the globe.

NBC News may be ignoring the K-pop generation, but they made sure Americans are aware Trump has been losing support from the officer corp, which seems to have nixed his attempted coup.

But here are three reasons why Mattis’ takedown of Trump matters.

One, Mattis was an eyewitness to Trump’s presidency. “In addition to the authority he’s earned over a long and distinguished career, he speaks as one of a handful of high-ranking officials who have been firsthand witnesses to the way Donald Trump has operated as president,” The Dispatch writes of Mattis.

Two, he was seen as one of the early guardrails/validators early in Trump’s administration.

And three, Mattis isn’t alone in respected military voices speaking out against Trump and his actions, joining former Joints Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen and Martin Dempsey, as well as retired Marine General John Allen.

“The slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020. Remember the date. It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment,” Allen writes.

It’s hard to say we’re at an inflection point, because public opinion of Trump rarely changes-- except at the margins.

But these are significant breaks with a president who routinely finds himself fighting unpopular battles.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Congratulations Roger Stone! You are now the 6th member of the Trump Crime Family to receive a jail sentence for what amounts to a crime against America. May you have the same kind of guards Jeffrey Epstein had. May your sheet be tied tightly, very, very tightly.

Extremely light sentence for witness intimidation and obstructing the Russia investigation aside (40 years or a firing squad would better fit his crimes against the United States on behalf of Putin's Treason Puppet), if Roger Stone ever actually does serve time in prison, he will need some protective friends. I'm hoping they're all named Bubba and they like gazing at the Nixon tattoo on Roger's back. That's a karma thing in more ways than one.

Meanwhile, as soon as Stone was sentenced, he whimpered and publicly asked his buddy Trump for his pardon. Trump, who earlier shared a clip of FOX's Tiki Torch Tucker pleading for him to pardon Stone, took a bash at the jury forewoman, whined about the very existence of the trial, spouted conspiracies, and disingenuously claimed to the press that he would watch the process carefully. In other words, yes, I will pardon anyone who has the goods on me as long as they keep quiet but I will chose the time because I am the all powerful orange menace to society.

In any event, the folks in Las Vegas who lay odds on such things wasted no time accepting bets on when the pardon from Trump would be forthcoming. These are the times we live in. this is our own sentence. How long will the unstable Trump think Stone can remain silent? What happens if Trump thinks he won't? Stone knows a lot of the really bad stuff about his boss. Technically, acceptance of a pardon is an admission of guilt and once you accept the pardon, you can be compelled to talk. Obviously, Stone will ignore subpoenas like most Trump Crime Family members do, but what if Godfather Trump gets too nervous that Stone will talk, pardon or not?

How Long Will It Take For Señor Trumpanzee To Pardon Roger Stone?

In preparation for pardoning some of his cronies-- particularly Roger Stone who has a lot of serious dirt on Trump-- Trump continued pardoning random corrupt people this week, yesterday San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo Jr., a real estate developer who was convicted in a huge gambling fraud scandal that sounds very much like something that could have been Trump. He also commuted Rod Blojojevich's sentence yesterday, four years early and pardoned Bernard Kerik and Michael Milken. Last week Caleb Ecarma, writing for Vanity Fair noted that "The standing pardon request line at Fox News, the pipeline through which Donald Trump has granted clemency to everyone from war criminals to racist cops, may be poised for another W. Since the outset of Roger Stone’s legal troubles, which started with the Mueller probe and culminated in conviction on charges of obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering, Fox’s Tucker Carlson has frequently aired segments vouching for Stone’s innocence and claiming that he’s the target of shadowy, Trump-hating federal law enforcement officials."

Over the past year, a revolving cast of Stone allies has appeared on the network, including his daughter Adria Stone, who used her time on Carlson’s show in November to directly address the president: “Donald Trump-- if you can hear me, please save our family. He does not deserve this. Nobody deserves this.” Carlson also appeared to cite his sway with Trump: “I honestly do think that after watching a series of people, some of whom are not deserving at all, get pardons from this White House, in effect or literally, you know I think people are going to be watching really carefully to see if your dad is pardoned. I’m going to be, that’s for sure.”

By all accounts, the ploy worked. After Trump tweeted on Tuesday that the Justice Department’s recommended sentence for Stone-- seven to nine years-- was horrifically unfair, the DOJ rescinded it, causing all four prosecutors on Stone’s case to withdraw. Sources close to Trump told the Daily Beast that Carlson seemed to have a direct influence on this chain of events: after watching Carlson’s pro-Stone segments, the president reportedly approached aides and confidants to ask, “What do you think?”—a phrase that a source noted is actually Trump “code for ‘I’m interested or looking into doing’ this.”

But Carlson isn’t content with a reduced sentence. On Tuesday night, he aired a segment condemning “so many on the left, howling for Roger Stone to die in prison. A 67-year-old man with no criminal record caught up in the Russia hoax, farce, caught up in an investigation that proved to be fruitless... this man needs a pardon.” For Stone, there may still be hope. Mere minutes later, the president posted a tweet ripping U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who Stone once seemingly threatened by posting a photo of her face under crosshairs, and who will ultimately decide his fate. “Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure?” Trump wrote. “How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!” The following day, Trump praised Attorney General William Barr “for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought” and took a shot at the four “rogue prosecutors” in a separate post tagging “@TuckerCarlson.”

Carlson’s influence over the president has already been proven; both his show and his personal conversations with Trump reportedly played a role in the White House not seeking further military action against Iran earlier this year. The Fox host also reportedly criticized former national security adviser John Bolton, whose interventionist bent is opposite Carlson’s, while speaking with Trump in the weeks prior to Bolton’s departure from the administration. But when it comes to lobbying Trump for judicial mercy, the appeals have become more and more blatant. Former Trump adviser Michael Caputo, who has appeared on the primetime show to defend Stone, told the Daily Beast on Tuesday that he intended for the president to hear him out. “Tucker has longer segments where he makes convincing arguments about issues the president’s base cares about,” he said. “Nobody knows that better than the president.” Caputo’s most shameless plug came in a Carlson segment that aired in March, in which he said, “Pardon General [Michael] Flynn. Pardon George Papadopoulos. And pardon Roger Stone right now, Mr. President… Do it right now. Do it right now on Twitter.”

Judge Amy Berman Jackson announced yesterday that she'll be sentencing Stone tomorrow, though, she said, "execution of the sentence will be deferred" while she decides whether Stone deserves a new trial. "I’m willing to make sure that there are no consequences that flow from the announcement of what the sentencing will be."

Despite all Trump's carrying on and lunatic assertions that the jury forewoman has "significant bias," yesterday DOJ prosectors filed a sealed motion-- with Barr's approval-- opposing Stone’s-- and Trump's-- request for a new trial that.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Now that Roger Stone is set to enjoy the corrupt fruits of the dictatorial, banana republic interference of Donnie Dirtbag and his lawless Attorney General in what's left of the American judicial system, I'm not surprised at all about the idea that A.G. William Barr would have a tattoo of his Godfather on his back, but what I want to know now is which of Roger Stone's body parts has a small tattoo of William Barr.

It's screw the judicial system, screw democracy; all in its final act. Just look at the people who voted to confirm Barr as Attorney General and voted not to remove Trump from office: Moscow Mitch's minions; Putin's western politburo. They did it knowing and hoping that all of the damage to America is happening would ensue. They are the Republican Party of 2020. They are traitors, every damned one, as are those who vote for them and support them in any way.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

The quote in tonight's meme comes from a tweet by MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell.

You can tell a lot about people by their tattoos-- like how utterly insane they are. Maybe Roger Stone should have just flashed his back to the court room and played for an insanity defense. Who knows? Maybe he has other tattoos, too!

Never-the-less, it's too late now. On Friday, Roger Stone was found guilty on all 7, count, 'em, 7 counts of witness tampering, obstructing Congress, and 5 counts of lying to Congress. Only the punishment remains in doubt. He stands to go to prison for 20 years or maybe more. That would be nice, if it ever happens. The aptly named criminal justice system is notoriously lenient when it comes to white sleazebags. I'm sure Godfather Don Trump would love to pardon him, but maybe only if Stone replaced that ugly tattoo of Nixon's face with one of his. Then there's also the very real possibility that Stone could quickly meet the same fate as another old "friend' of "The Don," a friend named Jeffrey Epstein.

So, it looks like Roger Stone might be the next of Trump's cronies to end up in jail. Michael Cohen is already in. So is Paul Manafort. Stone can take some solace in the fact that he beat Rudy Giuliani and his boss to the pen. The sad thing is that maybe both Roger and the nation wouldn't be in this predicament if our so-called justice system had made a chilling example of Tricky Dicky and thrown him in jail for the rest of his life back in '74.

Trump: No Path To Victory... Example: Pennsylvania

Damage Control by Nancy Ohanian

Why have a bunch of centrist assholes suddenly jumped into the Democratic presidential primary? Sure, they recognize Status Quo Joe is a terrible candidate, but each of them is as bad, if not worse. Some of them claim, the Democratic line-up won't win the states needed to kick Trump out of office a year from now. There's not a viable poll that indicates that. Among 2016 Trump states, his job favorability is down since election day in every single one of them and his net favorability is underwater in 13 of them. Trump has no legitimate path to even coming close to winning the electoral college.

• Wisconsin- minus 17
• Michigan- minus 13
• Iowa- minus 12
• Pennsylvania- minus 9
• Ohio- minus 6
• Arizona- minus 4
• Nebraska- minus 4
• North Carolina- minus 3
• Georgia- minus 3
• Utah- minus 3
• Florida- minus 2
• Montana- minus 1
• Alaska- minus 1

I wouldn't count on a negative job approval of minus 1 or 2 or 3 to mean he's going to lose Alaska or Utah. But a negative job approval or minus 14 in Minnesota and minus 18 in New Mexico does mean his bluster about winning over those states is either hubris or stupidity. Can he kiss states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Pennsylvania goodbye? Yes, he can-- and he has nowhere to go to make up for those losses.

Let's take a look at the most recent polling data from Pennsylvania, which is not substantively different from any other Pennsylvania polling. This one was done for the Morning Call by Muhlenberg College. This one shows Trump's net favorability at minus 11%-- 43% favorable and 54% unfavorable and his job approval even more underwater-- 56% disapproving and 40% approving. 51% of voters say they agree with the Democrats on the need for impeachment hearings and 49% have already made up their minds that Trump should be impeached. (48% have made up their minds that he should not be impeached.) 57% of Pennsylvania voters say he does not deserve to be reelected and just 42% say he does. The head-to-head matchups are terrible for Trump as well:

• Biden- 52%, Trump- 43%
• Bernie- 50%, Trump- 45%
• Elizabeth- 50%, Trump- 45%

The pollsters also asked an open-ended question: "What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump?" Enjoy:

And all this, even before the on-going developments in the impeachment case. For example, I find it amazing that Roger Stone hasn't been convicted of anything sooner. I wonder why its taken so long. But this morning, a jury convicted him of all 7 felony charges related to Wikileaks and the Trump campaign, including witness tampering, obstruction and lying to Congress, basically charges concerning an attempt to protect Trump. Steve Bannon and Rick Gates both testified against him. CNN: The verdict marks a stunning conclusion to one of the highest-profile prosecutions to emerge from special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation-- a case that began with one of Trump's most vocal supporters arrested during a pre-dawn raid as the special counsel's investigation wound down, and that since then has gradually revealed new information about the Trump campaign's positive reception to foreign interference in the 2016 election. Prosecutors asked the judge to take Stone into custody immediately. They alleged he violated his gag order and communicated with a member of the press last night. Judge Amy Berman Jackson declined, saying she 'will release him on his current conditions pending the sentencing date.'"

In Sleepy, Backward Part Of The Country, People Seriously In Need Of Dental Care Still Back Trump

Mark Green (R-TN)

Yesterday, little known far right freshman Republican backbencher, Mark Green, was on NPR's Here & Now for some reason, talking about Trump and Syria. The congressman from a backward west Tennessee district (where Hillary only scored 28.2% against Trumpanzee) is less unknown now, after saying, "Yeah, I disagree with what he’s doing now, I wish it wasn’t happening, but I still fully support it." In districts like Green's-- the PVI is R+20 and he was elected last year with 66.9% of the vote, winning all 19 counties. Many in Congress are beginning to panic about Trump's already disastrous and sinking poll numbers. The Fox poll this week-- showing that 51% of the countries already convinced that Trump should be impeached and removed-- was a wakeup call for congressional Republicans. As Jonathan Lemire noted in a piece he wrote for the Associated Press yesterday, "Trump has spent his time in office trying to bend the conventions of the American presidency to his will. Now he appears to be trying to override a core principle of democracy: that no one is above the law. Faced with an impeachment inquiry, Trump has openly defied the core constructs of the Constitution. He chafes at the idea of co-equal branches of government and rejects the House’s right to investigate him. He has deployed a convoluted logic in which he has declared that the courts can’t investigate him because as president he cannot be charged with a crime but also that Congress cannot impeach him because its inquiry is politically illegitimate."

Beyond Fox, the latest polls from Ipsos, YouGov, Quinnipiac and Marist all show support for dumping Trump rising. The Marist poll is the most recent and it shows that approval of the impeachment inquiry is now 52%, mostly because independent votes have had it with Trump and his antics. 54% of independents now approve of the impeachment proceedings, a huge swing since last September when only 44% of independent backed impeachment hearings. Yesterday, public radio listeners in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and other Trump bastions heard that "Republicans are dug in against the impeachment inquiry with nearly 9 in 10 disapproving of it. Two-thirds also say they would be less likely to vote for their representative from Congress if that lawmaker votes to impeach Trump. Despite the lack of enthusiasm for impeachment, Americans clearly don't approve of Trump's recent behavior, don't think he shares Americans' moral values and are pessimistic about the direction the country is headed. For example, 68% say it's not acceptable to ask a foreign country's leader for help investigating a potential political opponent; that includes 40% of Republicans. And 61% say Trump does not share the moral values most Americans try to live by; and just 35% say the country is headed in the right direction... Other answers in the survey should continue to raise red flags for the president and his reelection campaign team, including that 52% say they will definitely vote against Trump in 2020, and just 42% approve of the job the president is doing."

Asked if he would vote to impeach Trump if he were still in Congress, former Congressman Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) said "I would certainly be supporting the inquiry. I think it is important to see [the outcome of] the inquiry before reaching a decision on articles of impeachment-- and I think that applies to Democrats as well... Republicans are coming to the realization that this is different than the Mueller probe. This is a lot more radioactive. They are coming to terms with the fact that there is real political risk here for members in swing states and swing districts." That leaves out members like Green. He could lose every Democratic vote and every independent vote-- he won't-- and still be reelected. If the anti-Trump tsunami wipes out 50 or 60 Republican seats, which looks more and more possible by the day, Green and others from politically super-backward districts like his will still be reelected with big margins.

The most recent Tracking Trump survey shows there are just 9 states that still stand strongly with Trump in the way Green said he does-- and Tennessee is one of them. These are the AlwaysTrump states with their net approval numbers:

• Alabama +22%
• Mississippi +21%
• Idaho +20%
• West Virginia +20%
• Wyoming +16%
• Louisiana +15%
• Kentucky +15%
• Tennessee +13%
• Oklahoma +11%

Those are the only states left where Trump doesn't have to campaign and where Republicans can feel safe supporting him. Traditionally safe Republican states that are less safe for Trump and more scary for GOP Congress members include states where the GOP-- and individual candidates-- are going to have to spend millions of dollars to hang on:

• Ohio- minus 5%
• Arizona- minus 4%
• North Carolina- minus 3%
• Montana- minus 3%
• Utah- minus 2%
• Florida- minus 2%
• Nebraska- minus 2%
• Georgia- plus 1%
• Alaska- plus 1%
• Texas- plus 2%
• Indiana- plus 2%

These numbers are all from September, before the Ukraine scandal and the betrayal of the Kurds began shaking some GOP resolve to stick with Trump. Writing for the Associated Press yesterday, Nick Riccardi filed a report that demonstrates why all these numbers-- maybe not in Green's district but everywhere else-- are likely to continue going down.

A simple yes-or-no question keeps tripping up Senate Republicans: Should the president ask foreign countries to investigate political rivals?

A month ago the question was a legal and constitutional no-brainer. It’s illegal to accept foreign help in a political campaign, an action that also raises questions about U.S. sovereignty. But President Donald Trump last week forcefully defended his right to do so as he publicly called on both China and Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter. A private request for Ukraine to launch a probe triggered an impeachment inquiry in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

On Thursday, two Republican senators-- Joni Ernst of Iowa and Cory Gardner of Colorado-- repeatedly refused to answer reporters’ questions on whether a president should make such a request of a rival power. “I don’t know that we have that information in front of us,” Ernst said in Iowa, even though the president made the request in front of cameras on the White House lawn.

In Denver, Gardner likewise wouldn’t answer reporters’ variations on the question 12 separate times before an appearance with the Colorado Chamber of Commerce. Like Ernst, he tried to punt to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating the circumstances around Trump’s private call with Ukraine. “It’s an answer that you get from a very serious investigation,” Gardner told reporters when asked about the appropriateness of the president’s public comments.

The hesitance of the two senators, who are both up for re-election next year in competitive states, contrasted with the stances of two Republicans not facing the voters anytime soon. On Wednesday, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who is retiring next year, said in a statement that it was “inappropriate” for Trump to make his request. But, Alexander added, impeachment would be a “mistake.”

Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who was easily re-elected in 2016, told reporters on Tuesday that Trump’s request was “wrong” but argued it isn’t an impeachable offense.

Ari Fleischer, a former spokesman for President George W. Bush, who has often defended Trump, tweeted Thursday: “Trump doesn’t hide what he does. But it’s still wrong for Presidents and candidates to ask foreign governments to get involved in our elections.”

In contrast, Ernst and Gardner seemed to follow a pattern set by fellow Republican Arizona Sen. Martha McSally-- also a top Democratic target next year. On Monday, McSally also wouldn’t answer whether the president can ask for overseas help, instead referring to the Senate Intelligence Committee probe and taking swipes at House Democrats.

...The Colorado senator’s repeated dodging of the question may have made for awkward television, but it seemed to make one important viewer happy. Trump liked a tweet from a reporter describing Gardner’s refusal to discuss the appropriateness of the president’s requests.

Last night, Governor Larry Hogan (R-MD) was on PBS’ Firing Line where he said of the impeachment inquiry, "I think we do need an inquiry because we have to get to the bottom of it. I’m not ready to say I support impeachment and the removal of the president, but I do think we should have an impeachment inquiry." He's the third Republican governor to express those sentiments, following Phil Scott (R-VT) and Charlie Baker (R-MA). All those states are very far from Clarksville, Lawrenceburg and Bolivar in Mark Green's district.