The benign prerogative of mercy

Aug 26th, 2017 9:05 am | By

Adam Liptak in the Times reminds us that there’s nothing we can do about it. Ford’s outrageous pardon of Nixon taught us ancients that long ago.

But in the process the Times included an elaboration that is bleakly funny.

The courts, Congress and the public have few avenues to take action against a president who issues a contentious pardon. Legislation, for instance, is not an option.

“This power of the president is not subject to legislative control,” the Supreme Court said in 1866. “Congress can neither limit the effect of his pardon nor exclude from its exercise any class of offenders. The benign prerogative of mercy reposed in him cannot be fettered by any legislative restrictions.”

“The benign prerogative … Read the rest



Evil

Aug 25th, 2017 5:56 pm | By

This country has been pulled into the filth and it will never get all the way out. Never. This is terminal.

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There is no law now

Aug 25th, 2017 5:45 pm | By

He did it. That racist lawless sack of shit pardoned Arpaio. Judges might as well not bother while he’s in the White House.

Arpaio, who was a sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona, was found guilty of criminal contempt last month for disregarding a court order in a racial profiling case. Arpaio’s sentencing had been scheduled for October 5.

“Not only did (Arpaio) abdicate responsibility, he announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise,” wrote US District Judge Susan Bolton in the July 31 order.

Including a federal judge, and that sack of shit in the oval office just endorsed him. It’s a dictatorship. A racistRead the rest



They feared for their shoes

Aug 25th, 2017 4:56 pm | By

Ah, the poor snowflakes of the far right don’t want to be wading through a sea of dog poop tomorrow. They’ve canceled the rally.

A right-wing group on Friday canceled a “freedom rally” it had planned for Saturday near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, removing one major source of feared violence for city leaders, though others remained.

The group, known as Patriot Prayer, instead planned a news conference at a park in the city on Saturday to explain what its leader Joey Gibson called the failure of police and elected officials to keep the group safe.

Safe from dog poop.

Earlier in the day, hundreds of people rallied raucously and danced against hate at City Hall. They

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“Get the protester plow”

Aug 25th, 2017 4:31 pm | By

The grand old party.

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Read it again

Aug 25th, 2017 3:36 pm | By

Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist who wrote a rather disorganized book about Hitler nearly 20 years ago, has a lot of scorn for Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem…but he also has a mistaken idea of its contents. Maybe if he’d read it more attentively he’d have less contempt for it.

I’d been asked to write an introduction to a fiftieth-anniversary edition of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a longtime bestseller first published in 1961, a book that had shaped my and subsequent generations’ picture of Hitler and the war for some time thereafter. I don’t think I would have reread it if I hadn’t been asked by its publishers to contribute an introduction, but I

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To remove words such as “climate change”

Aug 25th, 2017 10:45 am | By

This happened.

On August 24, the Trump administration’s Department of Energy censored a Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science proposal from Dr. Jennifer Bowen, an associate professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

She posted a screenshot of the email on Facebook, writing, “This just happened. I’m just going to leave this here for people to ponder.”

In the email, Dr. Bowen was told, “I have been asked to contact you to update the wording in your proposal abstract to remove words such as ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change.’ This is being asked as we have to meet the president’s budget language restrictions and don’t want to make any changes without your knowledge or

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A tribute to Saint Francis

Aug 25th, 2017 10:20 am | By

Some far-right “activists” are holding a march tomorrow in San Francisco. The tricksters of San Francisco are responding with dog shit.

Hundreds of San Franciscans plan to prepare Crissy Field, the picturesque beach in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge where rightwing protest group Patriot Prayer will gather, with a generous carpeting of excrement.

“I just had this image of alt-right people stomping around in the poop,” Tuffy Tuffington said of the epiphany he had while walking Bob and Chuck, his two Patterdale terriers, and trying to think of the best way to respond to rightwing extremists in the wake of Charlottesville. “It seemed like a little bit of civil disobedience where we didn’t have to engage with

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Dog eat dog world

Aug 25th, 2017 9:30 am | By

Philip Bump at the Post has drawn up a master list of all the protections and rules Trump has undone.

We’ve seen most of them before but a master list is always good to have.

Samples:

Revoked an executive order that mandated compliance by contractors with laws protecting women in the workplace. Prior to the 2014 order, a report found that companies with federal contracts worth millions of dollars had scores of violations of labor and civil rights laws.

Cancelled a rule mandating that financial advisers act in the best interests of their clients.

Repeal of a bill that mandated that employers maintain records of workplace injuries.

Rescinded an Obama effort to reduce mandatory sentences. Attorney General Jeff

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Willful defiance of a federal judge’s lawful order to enforce the Constitution

Aug 24th, 2017 1:39 pm | By

Noah Feldman at Bloomberg says pardoning Arpaio would be an attack on the judiciary itself.

Arpaio was convicted this July by Judge Susan Bolton of willfully and intentionally violating an order issued to him in 2011 by a different federal judge, G. Murray Snow.

The order arose out of a civil suit against Arpaio brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, accusing him of violating the law by detaining undocumented immigrants simply for lacking legal status.

Snow issued a preliminary injunction that ordered Arpaio to stop running so-called saturation patrols — police sweeps that essentially stopped people who looked Latino and detained those who were deemed undocumented. The basic idea was that the profiling, warrantless stops and detention were

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She described Trump as a generous, humble man of “character and integrity”

Aug 24th, 2017 1:06 pm | By

Who knew that Trump had a “spiritual adviser”? Let alone more than one, so that one among them is the chief. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a more of the earth earthy human. This is a guy who talks about “beautiful chocolate cake” in the same breath with missile strikes. But apparently he does.

Televangelist and pastor Paula White has known Donald Trump since the early 2000s, and she is thought to be the president’s closest spiritual adviser. She prayed at his inauguration, appeared with him when he signed his executive order easing restrictions on pastors engaging in politics, and told evangelical TV host Jim Bakker she is in the White House at least weekly these days. This

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They’re all gonna laugh at you

Aug 24th, 2017 12:48 pm | By

The Guardian collects some Trump covers:

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Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth

Aug 24th, 2017 12:24 pm | By

The Guardian reports that Exxon learned a useful trick from the tobacco business:

Read all of these documents and make up your own mind.

That was the challenge ExxonMobil issued when investigative journalism by Inside Climate News revealed that while it was at the forefront of climate science research in the 1970s and 1980s, Exxon engaged in a campaign to misinform the public.

Harvard scientists Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes decided to take up Exxon’s challenge, and have just published their results in the journal Environmental Research Letters. They used a method known as content analysis to analyze 187 public and internal Exxon documents. The results are striking:

  • In Exxon’s peer-reviewed papers and internal communications, about 80% of the
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An alternative politics of memory

Aug 24th, 2017 11:20 am | By

Richard Vallely in American Prospect notes that we could always start putting up statues to something else.

Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee have vanished from Baltimore and New Orleans. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the truly infamous part of the Dred Scott decision, is gone from Annapolis. So many have come down—or are up for possible removal—that The New York Times posted an interactive map to chart them all.

But there is an alternative politics of memory that Americans can also practice, and it might help to keep fascists out of public squares and do something concrete, literally at the same time: honor Reconstruction. Remembering Reconstruction ought not to shunt aside the politics of Confederate memorials. Yet

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The mind totters

Aug 24th, 2017 10:33 am | By

Trump retweeted this.

He’s a grown man, and a head of state, and he retweeted this.

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His speech was without thought, it was devoid of reason

Aug 23rd, 2017 6:07 pm | By

Don Lemon is knocked sideways.

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All the finesse you’d hear in a middle school gym

Aug 23rd, 2017 5:35 pm | By

Hillary Clinton’s thoughts on being bullied on stage by Trump during the second debate:

“This is not okay, I thought,” Clinton said, reading from her book. “It was the second presidential debate and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we were on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces.

“It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck. My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, ‘Well, what would you do?’ Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he

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Could we please just stick to reporting what he said?

Aug 23rd, 2017 4:57 pm | By

Trump’s bestie the editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal wants his reporters to report JUST THE FACTS dammit, like “Trump said some words this evening,” not this stinking opinion crap. Objectivity, god damn it!

[Gerard] Baker, in a series of blunt late-night emails, criticized his staff over their coverage of Mr. Trump’s Tuesday rally in Phoenix, describing their reporting as overly opinionated.

“Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Mr. Baker wrote at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday morning to a group of Journal reporters and editors, in response to a draft of the rally article that was intended for the newspaper’s final edition.

He added in a follow-up, “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said

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One angry rant after another

Aug 23rd, 2017 12:31 pm | By

The Post has more on the horror in Phoenix.

Before the Gilded Nazi took the stage, four stooges told the audience that he’s a great, lovely, loving, spiritual guy who loves all god’s children. Then he made a liar out of all of them. (They were Ben Carson, a niece of Martin Luther King, Franklin Graham, and Pence.)

Trump spent the first three minutes of his speech — which would drag on for 75 minutes — marveling at his crowd size, claiming that “there aren’t too many people outside protesting,” predicting that the media would not broadcast shots of his “rather incredible” crowd and reminiscing about how he was “center stage, almost from day one, in the debates.”

“We

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Nullification

Aug 23rd, 2017 12:13 pm | By

The rise of fascism scores another victory.

A federal jury in Las Vegas refused Tuesday to convict four defendants who were retried on accusations that they threatened and assaulted federal agents by wielding assault weapons in a 2014 confrontation to stop a cattle roundup near the Nevada ranch of states’ rights figure Cliven Bundy.

In a stunning setback to federal prosecutors planning to try the Bundy family patriarch and two adult sons later this year, the jury acquitted Ricky Lovelien and Steven Stewart of all 10 charges, and delivered not-guilty findings on most charges against Scott Drexler and Eric Parker.

So there you have it. If you’re right-wing enough and white enough and male enough you can hold federal … Read the rest