So the question of the hour is: does a Twitter blurt from the Toddler President equal a direct order to the military if it announces a new policy on who can join that military?

It seems to be blindingly obvious that it doesn’t, but not everyone agrees. Some say it’s a direct order and the military is disobeying a direct order by saying they’re not doing anything until they hear from the White House.

I just don’t see how it can be a genuine order to the military. It’s not addressed to them. It’s much closer to a “who will rid me of this meddling priest?” than it is to a direct explicit do it now order. Telling the world … Read the rest

Subtext: Yet again Trump shot off his mouth on Twitter as if he were three years old and having a meltdown at the supermarket checkout because he wants the candy bar HE WANTS IT WAAAAAAAH. Literal text: no change unless and until the White House talks to the Defense Department by a more reliable and discreet channel than fucking Twitter.

The nation’s highest-ranking military officer said Thursday that the Defense Department was making “no modifications” to current policy regarding transgender service members until President Trump gives more direction.

“I know there are questions about yesterday’s announcement on the transgender policy by the President,” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford said in a statement. “There will be no modifications

More from the latest fascist uprising speech:

So we’re going to start enriching our country. We’re going to start bringing back our jobs, and we will be fools no longer, folks. We’ll be fools no longer. Every single President on Mt. Rushmore — now here’s what I do. I’d ask whether or not you think I will some day be on Mt. Rushmore, but, but here’s the problem. If I did it joking, totally joking, having fun, the fake news media will say, “he believes he should be on Mt. Rushmore.” So I won’t say it, okay? I won’t say it. But every president — they’ll say it anyway tomorrow. “Trump thinks he should be on Mt. Rushmore.” Isn’t

Some horrors from Trump’s speech in Youngstown, Ohio yesterday.

Then yesterday I was in West Virginia with almost 50,000 of our most impressive young Americans. They are young men who learned to cherish words like duty, honor, god, and country, the Boy Scouts. Then only a few hours ago the senate approved a vote to begin debating the repealing and replacing the Obamacare disaster. [ cheers and applause ] Finally. You think that’s easy? That’s not easy. We’re now one step closer to liberating our citizens from this Obamacare nightmare, and delivering great health care for the American people.

…

I’m here this evening to cut through the fake news filter and to speak straight to the American people. Fake

The American Prospect tells us about Trump’s latest crowd-incitement, yesterday in Youngstown, Ohio.

On Tuesday evening, at a campaign-style rally in Youngstown, Ohio, President Donald Trump treated his audience to a bit of snuff porn involving high-school age girls and some bad hombres.

After painting all the people currently under deportation orders as drug-importing gang members, the president described their purported crimes. “So they’ll take a young, beautiful girl, 16, 15—and others—and they slice them and dice them with a knife because they want them to go through excruciating pain before any die,” Trump said. “And these are the animals that we’ve been protecting for so long.”

A more perfect encapsulation of the proclivities of the president’s poisonous psyche

Don is still making an exhibition of himself on Twitter, asking the world why Sessions does what he does when he’s the one who appointed him and we’re not. Dude why are you asking us?

But, you know, it’s all part of his cunning plan to bully Sessions into quitting, or inspiring Rod Rosenstein to jump up in the middle of the night and fire Mueller, or something. It looks like crazy but it’s actually fiendishly clever manipulation.

Or is it. The Post talked to people who say it’s just Trump being Trump.

President Trump renewed his attacks on Attorney General Jeff Sessions Wednesday, questioning on Twitter why the top U.S. law enforcement official had not replaced the acting FBI

Benjamin Wittes has thoughts on the effects of the current situation on people at the Department of Justice and on the rest of us.

The trouble is that remaining in office does not merely demean the individual dignity of the attorney general and the deputy attorney general when the President whines about the attorney general’s compliance with Justice Department recusal rules; when he attacks the attorney general for not investigating a political opponent; when he openly suggests that the Justice Department’s leadership should act in his personal interests; or when he suggests that the deputy attorney general is biased against him as a result of previous service as U.S. attorney in a Democratic-majority city. These are also degradations of the

But my favorite part of Trump’s Address to the Nations Boy Scouts is where he just veers off into telling them a long boring story about this one guy he met 50 years ago, like any other damn windbag you accidentally sit next to at a dinner or on a bus or in the dentist’s waiting room. You know those – the ones who just talk, regardless of who is next to them or what the likelihood is that anyone in hearing will give a damn.

In life, in order to be successful, and you people are well on the road to success, you have to find out what makes you excited. What makes you want to get up

Some parents of Boy Scouts are furious.

One parent wrote: “Done with scouts after you felt the need to have my kid listen to a liar stroke his ego.”

…

Responding to the criticism of the speech, the Boy Scouts of America insisted it was “wholly non-partisan and does not promote any one position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy”.

It said the invitation to Mr Trump was a “long-standing tradition and is in no way an endorsement of any political party or specific policies”.

Except that the way it played out, it was.

Many parents, lobbyists and politicians took to social media to cite the 107-year-old organisation’s values, and to suggest Mr Trump had failed them.

Lobbyist for

More on Trump’s confusion of the Boy Scouts with the Hitler Youth:

“Who the hell wants to speak about politics when I’m in front of the Boy Scouts?” President Trump asked the 40,000 people gathered in Glen Jean, West Virginia, on Monday for the Boy Scout Jamboree.

The answer is President Trump. The event, which occurs every four years, was attended by about 24,000 boys, ages 12 to 18, but Trump treated it like a raucous campaign rally. During a rambling, 35-minute speech, he playfully threatened a member of his cabinet about getting the votes to repeal Obamacare, recounted his election win in great detail, and attacked President Obama.

A post on the Jamboree’s blog had warned troops

The Post details how aberrant and wrong and narcissistic Trump’s speech to the Boy Scouts yesterday was.

For 80 years, American presidents have been speaking to the National Scout Jamboree, a gathering of tens of thousands of youngsters from around the world eager to absorb the ideas of service, citizenship and global diplomacy.

In keeping with the scouts’ traditions, all eight presidents and surrogates who have represented them have stayed far, far away from partisan politics.

I had assumed that, without knowing anything specific about it, because after all, it’s the Boy Scouts – it’s not a set of people you would expect to be interested in the minutiae of Donald Trump’s political biography and it’s also not a … Read the rest

Oh, brilliant – now we’re expected to rejoice that War Hero With Glioblastoma Is Returning to the Senate to Vote on Urgent Matter – in fact to add his vote to the other Republican votes TO TAKE HEALTH INSURANCE AWAY FROM MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.

I hate this country right now. Hate it. Trump’s performance in front of the Boy Scouts yesterday has pushed me over the edge.

John McCain has excellent health insurance, because he’s a senator, and he’s coming back to vote to take it away from people who don’t have the good fortune to get health insurance from their employers.

It was just five days ago that John McCain, the longtime Arizona senator, two-time presidential candidate and perhaps

Aw poor Donald. He’s cracking. For the first time he’s letting us know it hurts.

As the phony Russian Witch Hunt continues, two groups are laughing at this excuse for a lost election taking hold, Democrats and Russians!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2017

As if the laughter of the Russians were our fault and not his.

It's very sad that Republicans, even some that were carried over the line on my back, do very little to protect their President.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2017

Aw. If he weren’t such a sadistic monster, I might feel a little sorry for him at that. But he is, so I don’t. He’s earned his feelings of abandonment … Read the rest

On Friday the Post ran an editorial by Laurence Tribe, Richard Painter, and Norm Eisen, titled No, Trump can’t pardon himself. The Constitution tells us so.

Can a president pardon himself? Four days before Richard Nixon resigned, his own Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel opined no, citing “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.” We agree.

The Justice Department was right that guidance could be found in the enduring principles that no one can be both the judge and the defendant in the same matter, and that no one is above the law.

The Constitution specifically bars the president from using the pardon power to prevent his own impeachment and

Harvard professor of constitutional law Noah Feldman says no, Trump can’t pardon himself, not because it would break a rule but because it would be the end of the US.

Here’s some unsolicited advice for President Donald Trump: Don’t listen to any lawyers who might tell you that you can pardon yourself, or even that it’s a close legal question. You can’t — and no court is going to rule otherwise.

There’s a decent historical argument about why, but it’s beside the point. The bottom line is that if the president could pardon himself, we would no longer have a republic — nor a government of laws rather than men. We would be a dictatorship, not a democracy.

Trump was busy this morning.

A new INTELLIGENCE LEAK from the Amazon Washington Post,this time against A.G. Jeff Sessions.These illegal leaks, like Comey's, must stop!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017

A couple of days ago he was hanging Sessions out to dry; now he’s all indignant that a major newspaper dares to report his lies about contacts with Russia. He gets to shit on his people but no one else does, I guess.

The Failing New York Times foiled U.S. attempt to kill the single most wanted terrorist,Al-Baghdadi.Their sick agenda over National Security

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017

The “failing” New York Times that he spilled his guts to a few days ago. Ok … Read the rest

As many people have been noticing, this situation exposes a certain flaw in the US Constitution – one that can be boiled down to: what happens if the president turns out to be a shameless crook?

CNN looks at how difficult it would or wouldn’t be for Trump to fire Mueller and then the constitutional issue.

Even if Trump cannot dispense with Mueller easily, the very idea that he might try exposes an inherent flaw in the US Constitution’s design, says Harvard Law School Professor Noah R. Feldman.

Feldman points out that the president is ultimately in charge of law enforcement as the head of the executive branch — a structural arrangement that works just fine until the president or

Brian Beutler at the New Republic sums it all up chillingly: it’s an authoritarian crisis waiting to happen.

The scope of that crisis is much clearer now that the Washington Post is reporting that Trump is discussing the possibility of pardoning himself, his family, and his closest aides to short-circuit the sprawling investigation of his campaign’s complicity in Russia’s subversion of the 2016 election. Trump’s team is also, according to the Post and another Times story, digging up dirt on the special counsel investigators in an attempt to discredit them.

It’s not Sessions, he says, it’s Mueller, and Trump’s telling the Times he thinks Mueller’s investigating his financial doings crosses a line.

In a more rule-bound environment, Mueller’s

Spicey has had enough.

 Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned on Friday morning, after denouncing chaos in the West Wing and telling President Trump he vehemently disagreed with the appointment of the New York financier Anthony Scaramucci as communications director

Mr. Trump offered Mr. Scaramucci the job at 10 a.m. The president requested that Mr. Spicer stay on, but Mr. Spicer told Mr. Trump that he believed the appointment was a major mistake, according to person with direct knowledge of the exchange.

Scaramucci is a finance person and a commentator on Fox News.

His resignation is a serious blow to the embattled White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, the former Republican Party chairman who brought Mr.

The Times reports high anxiety in the White House.

The effort to investigate the investigators is another sign of a looming showdown between Mr. Trump and Mr. Mueller, who has assembled a team of high-powered prosecutors and agents to examine whether any of Mr. Trump’s advisers aided Russia’s campaign to disrupt last year’s presidential election.

Some of the investigators have vast experience prosecuting financial malfeasance, and the prospect that Mr. Mueller’s inquiry could evolve into an expansive examination of Mr. Trump’s financial history has stoked fears among the president’s aides. Both Mr. Trump and his aides have said publicly they are watching closely to ensure Mr. Mueller’s investigation remains narrowly focused on last year’s election.

Yes well see this … Read the rest