April 14, 2019
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| The poll at 10 AM Pacific. Note this is from the very liberal Daily Kos |
Trump in a Cantonese opera, watch two minute segment below:
This begged for my photoshop addition:
If it's not one thing, it's another dept: We have become inured to such pronouncements from Trump and Co. but really, can you imagine if a Democratic presidential press secretary said, in all seriousness (not as a lame joke) this: Sarah Sanders: 'I don't think Congress' is 'smart enough' to look through Trump's taxes
Does she know anything about Richard Neal's record in the House?
With several influential committee posts, Neal has made economic policy the focus of his career, although his success has been mixed.
[2] He served his first two terms on the
House Banking Committee, where he served on the
Financial Services Subcommittee. As the banking reform law of 1991 was being drafted, he cautioned that President
George H. W. Bush's proposal could negatively affect small businesses and minority-owned businesses. He introduced an amendment to require reports on lending to these businesses, which was adopted.
[24]
According to
Congressional Quarterly's
Politics in America, one of Neal's longstanding legislative priorities is to simplify the
tax code.
[2] Neal has long advocated repealing the
Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), believing its effects have reached unreasonably low income brackets.
[28] He led an unsuccessful movement to reform the AMT in 2007.
[2] In 1998 he successfully pushed to exempt a child tax credit from being affected by the AMT, and in 2001 Congress made the exemption permanent at his urging.
[29] He voted against the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, saying they would force millions onto the AMT.
[30] Another priority of Neal's is to eliminate tax "loopholes" that favor higher-income individuals.
[2] He was the lead proponent of a bill to require federal contractors to pay federal taxes for workers hired through offshore
shell headquarters. The bill, H.R. 6081, passed both houses of Congress unanimously and was signed into law in May 2008.
[31]
In 2017 Neal and Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the Republican chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, played a key role in preserving the carried interest tax loophole lobbied by private equity, venture capital and Wall Street, against the election promises and legislative directions of President Trump.
[33]
In February 2019 Neal came under criticism for failing to promptly exercise his authority as Ways and Means Committee chair to subpoena
Donald Trump's tax returns.
[34] Citing a need to build a strong case in a potential lawsuit, Neal delayed taking this step until April 2019.
[35]
In 2019 the House Ways and Means Committee led by Neal passed a bill that would prohibit the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system.
[36] During his 2016 and 2018 campaigns, Neal received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block, two tax preparation companies that have lobbied against the creation of free tax filing systems.
[36]
April 13, 2019
This story managed to get on the "recommended list" which means that an actual person reviewed it and decided to give it this additional exposure. As a result so more than 1200 people took the poll and there are over 180 comments.
Exclusive: By Howard Covitz, PhD, Psychoanalyst
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| Pope Alexander VI |
Sheila Nielsen, one of our clearest thinkers and a hero of mine, just yesterday opined: "I wish our lawmakers had done a better job of cross examining Barr. Mostly they failed to pin Barr down sufficiently." I wish, too, Sheila but I wonder ... had the questions been tougher would there have been even one other defection from the Republican bloc ... One?
The Republicans heard exactly what they wanted ... what The Leader openly declared that he wanted ... "My own Roy Cohn." It seems obvious that they've concluded that the odds of them going down in 2020 are higher, now, if Trump goes down than if they come out of this triumphant ... don't even matter if it's "triumphantly delusional" in what they say ...
One sees this in many emotional disorders and diseases. The Obsessional-Compulsive-Prohibitive type who is potentially destroying body and soul responds to no "rational" explanation of the dangerousness of their behaviors. The anorexic? same. Even some folk suffering from hysterical psychoses, will learn that there is a less painful way to be ... if they're delusional, they may indeed know that there is a different way to parse their delusional thoughts ... but giving it up is not an option. I could go on. The majority of the person's power is in holding on ...
We who fear that another day -- nevermind another 5.9 years -- of Trump threatens the integrity of the Republic may pragmatically (and maybe Cummings and Pelosi and the others already know all this as obvious) need to recognize the strategy of the Republican Bloc ... Let's say it again ... Trump could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and lose barely a single vote in McConnell's Senate; he has already demonstrated this.
Indeed, that is the shift that happened in Weimar, in Cuba, in the Baltics, in Uganda, in Putin's Russia and Trump's Amerika ... ... the point, after they've made some initial unforgivable concessions to The Leader, when these Haves decide that they now have everything to lose by being in the opposition.
The Republican Bloc-- I think it is inarguable -- has passed this point of no return.
My version of the illustration from the Covitz essay:
Pope Alexander VI was known for his libertinism and nepotism. He fathered several children by his mistresses. His foreign policy was to be most advantageous for his family. Steve Bannon wants to make have Trumper replace Pope Francis so consider my version of the famous panting.
This must be the season for treason.
In the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, President Trump gave a lesson on American justice to the visiting South Korean president. Speaking about the Mueller investigation and its origins, Trump said: “This is actually treason.”
This wasn’t offhand. On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that the probe was a “Treasonous Hoax” and that “what the Democrats are doing with the Border is TREASONOUS.” That same day, boarding Marine One, he reaffirmed that what Democrats and Justice Department officials did in the Mueller probe “was treason.”
On April 6, he declared it’s “about time the perpetrators . . . start defending their dishonest and treasonous acts.” He added an injunction associated with the Holocaust: “Never Forget!”
This has become routine. In the past few weeks, Trump informed the NATO secretary general that the investigation of him could be “treasonous” and let Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu know that “a lot of people out there” have done “treasonous things against our country.” Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity: “It was really treason. . . . We can never allow these treasonous acts to happen to another president. . . . you are talking about major, major treason.” Minor treason is a thing?
Trump has publicly invoked “treason” or “treasonous” on 26 occasions, according to the Factba.se compilation of Trump utterances. That’s in addition to various and sundry “traitor” references. He began by accusing the likes of Bowe Bergdahl, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, then moved on to include the executives of Univision and Macy’s, Republicans who didn’t support him, Democratic lawmakers who didn’t applaud him, the failing New York Times, the media generally, people in his administration who leak, and Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Eric Holder, Loretta E. Lynch, Huma Abedin, James B. Comey, James R. Clapper Jr., Rod J. Rosenstein, Robert S. Mueller III, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.
Read: A good police chief in Houston
An infuriated Houston police chief blew up Friday on Twitter after an 11-year-old girl was ordered to be deported without her family. “This is heart-wrenching,” wrote Acevedo. “1,000 points of light? Family values? American values? Judeo-Christian values? If you’re a person of faith, speak out.”
When someone responded that the girl was apparently breaking the law, the police chief answered: “The Nazis enforced their laws as well. You don’t separate children from their families! Ever! You’d have to kill me to take my child from me simply because I was trying to get them to a better place for a better tomorrow. I am glad to be on the right side of history.”
April 12, 2019
My poll on Daily Kos
One of my Twitter followers suggested this addition to my Stephen Miller photoshop. Okay, it is a mixed metaphor, the devil and Dracula.
From The Washington Post, providing an excuse to use my photoshop of Stephen Miller, taking out the Dracula castle and adding a new background.
Positions like that of Miller — powerful but murkily defined White House advisory roles that don’t require Senate confirmation — tend to be beyond basic scrutiny and accountability.“Miller is effectively in charge of DHS,” Douglas Rivlin, the communications director at America’s Voice, told me. “If he’s running the show and pressuring agencies to take outlandish or illegal actions, he ought to face the same oversight that Cabinet secretaries face.” Democrats should use every single tool at their disposal to try to hold these people accountable.
When are Democrats going to try to summon Stephen Miller to Capitol Hill and grill him under oath about his direct role in so much of the chaos, incompetence and increasingly malevolent extremism gripping the Trump administration right now?
Miller, as the chief architect of President Trump’s immigration agenda, is a key figure behind Trump’s ongoing purge of the Department of Homeland Security and the president’s related embrace of ever-more cruel and radical policies. Miller’s views drew fresh scrutiny when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted that Miller is a “white nationalist” whose “influence on policy and political appointments” remains an “outrage.”
But, while Miller’s worldview has obviously been important in shaping Trump’s policies, his influence should be understood in another way, too: He is one of the leading figures pushing the Trump administration toward increasing venality, corruption and lawlessness.
Remarkable new revelations underscore this point — and the need for a tough Democratic reaction to it.
The (Washington) Post reports that White House officials “tried to pressure U.S. immigration authorities” to release detained immigrants into “sanctuary cities” to “retaliate” against Trump’s “political adversaries.”
The toady toad idea isn't particularly original so I added the flies. What's left to write about what a disappointment Barr has been? He's at heart an institutionalist, my sweet Aunt Tilly's inedible rocklike fruitcake. We should have known better.
Wash. Post: Greg Sargent:
President Trump openly fantasized about the prospect of U.S. troops unleashing violence on desperate migrants, many of whom are trying to exercise their legal right to seek refuge in the United States.
At a fundraiser in Texas late Wednesday, Trump
seethed that our military is constrained from getting “a little rough” at the border, because “everybody would go crazy,” preventing it from acting the way it would “normally act,” or how “another military from another country would act.”
In saying these things, Trump previewed an important component of his reelection strategy.
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It’s worth noting that painting migrants as criminals, and creating the vague impression that military force might be required to repel them, were also key in 2018. Trump
lied endlessly to criminalize them, and sent in the military as a prop to dramatize the supposed danger they posed. He even made this explicit by
saying things like: “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”
Thus, it doesn’t look like an accident that at the Texas event, Trump
also said that “I’m gonna have to call up more military,” while
claiming that Central American countries are “sending” the “tough ones” and “the gang members.” This telegraphs we’ll likely see more of the very same lies and hate-mongering in 2020
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Democrats are beginning to coalesce around such solutions. Trump obviously believes that the worse this gets, the more easily he’ll persuade swing voters that the migrants are a criminal “infestation” that must be repelled through cruelty or even force. There’s no need for Democrats to fear this argument, and one hopes they will engage it frontally.
Excerpts: George Conway has repeatedly questioned the president's mental state, tweeting that "Americans should be thinking seriously *now* about Trump's mental condition and psychological state."
On Wednesday, after Trump's latest tweet, George Conway, posted a link to the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality order, and wrote in response to Trump's latest missive: "You. Are. Nuts."
He also congratulated Trump Tuesday for having "guaranteed that millions of more people are going to learn about narcissistic personality disorder and malignant narcissism!"
"Great job!" he wrote.
A longtime chronicler of Washington's social scene, (Sally) Quinn couldn't recall a similar type of spat." People often will compare it to Mary Matalin and James Carville," she said, referring to the married political consultants from opposing parties. But she said it was not the same. "What they disagreed on was policy. I think this is a totally different situation. This is about morals and values and ethics."
Ecuador rescinded Assange’s asylum at its embassy in London. British police arrested him, citing a request from the United States.
NT Times: ROME — Breaking years of silence on major church affairs, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (he resigned in 2013) has written a lengthy letter devoted to clerical sex abuse in which he attributes the crisis to a breakdown of church and societal moral teaching and says he felt compelled to assist “in this difficult hour.”
The 6,000-word letter, published Thursday by a Catholic outlet and the Italian newspaper
Corriere della Serra, laments the secularization of the West, decries the 1960s sexual revolution, and describes seminaries that became filled during that period with “homosexual cliques.”
The pope emeritus, in emphasizing the retreat of religious belief and firm church teaching, provides a markedly different explanation for the abuse crisis than that offered by Pope Francis.
“Why did pedophilia reach such proportions?” Benedict wrote, according to the Catholic News Agency, which published the
full text in English. “Ultimately, the reason is the absence of God.”
April 10, 2019
I tweeted this story to the author of the OpEd. It included the photoshop I made of Steve Miller. She tweeted me back:
And then there's this.
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| I couldn't resist a little photoshopping - link above |
‘Attempted coup!’ In Trump's own words on the South Lawn today.
After $35 million with 13, increased to 18, angry Democrats, people that truly hated Donald Trump, truly hated Trump, they found no collusion whatsoever with Russia. After wasting all of this money and all of this time with people that were haters, people that worked on the Hillary Clinton Foundation, people that were absolutely haters of Trump, they found no collusion.
What has been found during this period of time are the illegal acts of getting this whole phony investigation started, and hopefully that is where people are going now. It was an illegal investigation. It was an illegal investigation. It was started illegally. Everything about it was crooked. Every single thing about it. There were dirty cops. These were bad people.
This was an attempted coup, this was an attempted takedown of a president. And we beat them. We beat them. So, the Mueller report when they talk about obstruction, we fight back. And you know why we fight back? Because I knew how illegal this whole thing was.
What I’m most interested in is getting started hopefully the attorney general, he mentioned it yesterday, he is doing a great job getting started on going back to the origins of exactly where this all started because this was an illegal witch-hunt.
What they did was treason, what they did was terrible, what they did was against our constitution and everything we stand for. So, hopefully, that will happen. There is a hunger for that to happen in this country like I have never seen before.
Below: Re-published under Creative Commons, this article originally appeared in The Conversation
Why it’s hard to remove, or even diagnose, mentally ill or unstable presidents
In the wake of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, members of Congress set out to update the procedures for handling an unable president. They soon realized that some situations would be far more challenging than others.
Famed political scientist Richard Neustadt emphasized one of the most ominous of those situations when he testified before the Senate. “Constitutions,” he warned, cannot “protect you against madmen. The people on the scene at the time have to do that.”
Congress’ reform effort culminated with the 25th Amendment. It provides essential improvements to the Constitution’s original presidential succession provisions. But a novel released in 1965, the same year Congress approved the amendment, makes a strong case that Neustadt’s insight was spot on.
The recently reissued “Night of Camp David” by veteran D.C. journalist Fletcher Knebel illuminates the daunting challenges that arise when the commander in chief is mentally unfit and unwilling to acknowledge it.
Flexibility an important part of 25th
The novel follows the fictional Senator Jim MacVeagh, who concludes that a paranoid President Mark Hollenbach is “insane” after he witnesses the president plot to abuse law enforcement powers and to establish a world government. Unbeknownst to MacVeagh, Defense Secretary Sidney Karper reaches the same conclusion. Karper remarks, “Congress did its best on the disability question, although there’s no real machinery to spot mental instability.”
The framers of the 25th Amendment did intend for it to cover cases of psychological inability. One of the principal authors, Rep. Richard Poff (R-Va.), envisioned a president who could not “make any rational decision.”
But the term “unable” in the amendment’s text was left vague to provide flexibility.
Additionally, the 25th Amendment is intentionally hard to use, with procedural hurdles to prevent usurpation of presidential power. Two-thirds of both houses of Congress must ratify an inability determination by the vice president and Cabinet when the president disagrees. Otherwise, the president returns to power.
Some believe these protections create their own challenges. As Harvard Law Professor Cass R. Sunstein observes in “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide,” “The real risk is not that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment will be invoked when it shouldn’t, but that it won’t be invoked when it should.”
This risk is heightened when the president may be psychologically unfit. Psychiatric assessment is descriptive and less evidence-based than other areas of medicine. In the novel, President Hollenbach’s doctor reports no evidence of a mental ailment. And there is a reason for that: Psychiatric illness is not beyond conscious manipulation.
A deft politician, President Hollenbach knew enough to hide his paranoia. While he seems overtly paranoid in the solitude of Aspen Lodge at Camp David when he is sharing his delusions with MacVeagh, he appears completely sane, dare we say presidential, in public appearances. There is a long history of presidents hiding their ailments from the public, including Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who both grew paranoid in private.
What psychiatry can contribute
To further complicate assessment, the more subjective nature of psychiatric diagnoses introduces potential political biases among clinicians who might be asked to evaluate a president.
As critically, the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Ruleexpressly prohibits armchair analysis by psychiatrists who have not directly examined the president. Those who had the opportunity would be equally constrained by patient confidentiality. This creates an ethical Catch-22.
Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee and colleagues in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” eschew this prohibition and feel it their ethical obligation to share their professional insights, invoking a duty to warn responsibility. One of us (Joseph) has suggested that while psychiatric diagnoses cannot be made from afar nor confidences breached, physicians have a supererogatory obligation to share specialized knowledge.
This is especially important when discussing psychiatric conditions, which may be hard to apprehend. The objective for mental health professionals is not diagnosis from afar but rather to educate the citizenry about these conditions so as to promote deliberative democracy.
Beyond these issues is the bias of any president’s advisers and allies. Their loyalty may blind them to presidential inabilities and have them protect an unfit president.
Then there could be the political disincentive to acknowledge what presidential incapacity means. After all, Cabinet members serve at the pleasure of the president. Beyond that, it is just too frightening to imagine that there might be a madman in the White House in the nuclear age. So the tendency is to look away.
Officials hoping to avoid a direct challenge to presidential authority might engage in harm reduction, a concept drawn from public health where certain harms are accepted to reduce more harmful consequences: for example, needle exchange. This is the workaround that the fictional Defense Secretary Karper takes in “Night of Camp David.” Instead of attempting to convince the president’s allies of his concerns and invoking constitutional means to remove the president, he convenes a top secret task force to consider checks on the president’s power to use nuclear weapons.
Karper’s steps to limit the president’s unilateral authority have real-world precedent.
Amid President Nixon’s emotional turmoil during the depths of Watergate, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger instructed the military to check with him or the secretary of state before following orders from Nixon to launch nuclear weapons. More recently, former Defense Secretary James Mattis was reportedly among White House officials attempting to frustratePresident Trump’s impulses.
The fictitious Senator MacVeagh goes down a different, more perilous and isolating path. He seeks the president’s removal and, as a result, experiences retribution. Top officials view him as paranoid, prompting them to order his involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Instead of worrying about an impaired president, Washington’s political elite punish the young senator.
The bottom line: it is almost impossible to reverse the results of the electoral process and oppose entrenched power even when one is paradoxically trying to preserve the republic.
In “Night of Camp David,” the nation’s fortunes only begin to turn when MacVeagh and Karper overcome the collective action challenge and the compartmentalization of knowledge. Officials can overcome these obstacles by coming together and realizing their common purpose.
It was only after a group of senior Republican lawmakers, led by Sen. Barry Goldwater – ironically of the eponymous Goldwater Rule – banded together and confronted President Nixon during Watergate that the 37th president resigned.
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More drama ahead?
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The current White House drama is still in manuscript form, but the plot has thickened. Worrisome tweets are prompting fresh concerns about presidential fitness, even from prominent members of President Trump’s own party.
Are these warnings the real-life equivalents of those from MacVeagh and Karper? Time will tell. But in this national drama, we are more than readers of fiction; we too are characters.
Richard Neustadt had it right. The “people on the scene” must be ready to place the interests of the nation above their own. Constitutions cannot protect against madmen, as he warned, because they create rules and institutions that are only as strong as the people tasked with protecting them.
Both the object of any intervention and its proponents are prone to human foibles, courage and timidity, grandiosity and prudence. When darkness descends, whether on Camp David or other halls of power, the nation is left to rely on the integrity and judgment of its leaders and its citizenry.
April 9, 2019
A few people pointed out that Stephen Miller is worse than Kirstjen Nielsen. I responded with another photoshop.
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| Some of the steps used to make this image |
We see signs that the president's abilities are declining, but the only way to find out for sure is to give him a full neuropsychological evaluation.
If Donald Trump were your father, you would run, not walk, to a neurologist for an evaluation of his cognitive health. You don’t have to be a doctor to see something is very wrong. “He reminds me of Uncle Bruce in so many ways,” said my aunt, who nursed her brother through Alzheimer’s disease. Joe Scarborough, who has known Trump for years, said in 2017 that Trump's mental confusion
reminded him of his mother, who had Alzheimer's for 10 years. “It's getting worse, and not a single person who works for him doesn’t know he has
early signs of dementia,” he said of Trump last year on his MSNBC show.
We shall soon see whether a lot of
signs will have to be taken down in Israel.
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| Click above to enlarge |
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Making these is a form of therapy for me. The parnoid image took many steps. This one was easy: with Kirstjen Nielsen image then find blood dripping from mouth & devil eye pictures and three steps to superimpose them.
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According to NY Times: "Mr. Trump, who talks with members of his own Secret Service detail, had soured on Mr. Alles a while ago, convinced that as an outsider he was not popular among the agents, officials said. The president even made fun of the director’s looks, calling him Dumbo because of his ears. But a Secret Service ally of Mr. Alles disputed the notion that he did not fit in, saying that the director was well liked among the work force." Anderson Cooper's retort "we're not in kindergarten."
Anthony Scaramucci forward Trump lies because it's fun. Trump administration employee says that the reason Donald Trump lies so much, it’s because it’s fun. Here’s the exact quote he said on scene and this past weekend, uh, he does it because he thinks it’s fun and he also does it because he likes the fact that you guys are talking about it. So Trump lies one because it’s just totally wicked awesome and too, because if he lies, then the media talks about him. But here’s the thing. Whenever the media talks about him, he also goes to Twitter. It says, ah, the fake news media saying bad, stupid things about me again. Oh, they’re horrible. Donald Trump’s the kind of guy who needs somebody to hate. So I don’t doubt that he does say and do sometimes crazy stupid things because he wants to see the media’s reaction show that he has a reason to go after them with his attacks. But I’d also don’t think that he’s lying because it’s fun. I think that Donald Trump is lying because he has some kind of personality disorder that causes him to lie about everything. Okay.
That’s the thing. These are not lies. Most of them are not lies that benefit him in any way. A lot of them are narcissistic lies like his lie about, no, my, my inauguration crowd was bigger than Obama’s photographs tell us otherwise. But sure. Go ahead and spread that lie. It doesn’t necessarily affect anything. We know you’re lying, but whatever makes you feel better. There’s other lies that serve no purpose at all.
Science/astronomy-
A picture of a black hole is one of those great, self-negating concepts, like the sound of silence, the presence of absence or the lives of the dead. The nature of one refutes the other. But a picture of a black hole is set to arrive nonetheless — two pictures of two black holes, actually, on April 10, in simultaneous press conferences to be held at 9:00 AM EDT, in six different locations around the world.
At those events—planned for Washington, Brussels, Santiago, Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo—astronomers will give humanity its first look at the black hole that sits at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. We’ll also see a vastly larger one at the heart of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, nearly 54 million light years from Earth. With that, astrophysics will have opened one more tiny crack in the wall of secrets that is the universe.
True to the nature of the science, what will show up in the pictures will not be the black holes themselves. The defining feature of all black holes is that they are so dense, generating a gravity field so powerful, that nothing, not even electromagnetic energy—which, of course, includes visible light—can escape their pull. What the pictures will reveal instead will be the black holes’ so-called event horizons, the swirl of gas and dust and stars and light itself, circling the black hole drain, before they’re sucked inside never, ever to reemerge. Time Magazine
April 8, 2019
There has been a significant uptick in the number people looking at my photoshops on Twitter. This could be a precurser of some of the going viral.
Featuring the ghost of Pancho Villa peering over Trump's fantasy wall
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| 421 people saw this on Twitter |
fired Secret Service chief. Office of the General Counsel's John Mitnick expected to be gone soon too, and the White House is eyeing others to be removed. Has Trump gone clinically paranoid? As therapists, we have a if he has.
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| 633 people saw this n Twitter and there were 13 media engagements. |
"In all seriousness, we have no competent, functioning president." George Conway tweet today
From the NY Times
Albany lawmakers are seeking state tax returns, not the federal ones at the heart of the current standoff in Washington. But a tax return from New York — the president’s home state, and the headquarters of his business empire — could likely contain much of the same financial information as a federal return.Under a bill that is scheduled to be introduced this week, the commissioner of the New York Department of Taxation and Finance would be permitted to release any state tax return requested by leaders of three congressional committees for any “specific and legitimate legislative purpose.” (NY has a Democratic governor and legislature)
April 7, 2019
