Hit The Button

I guess we can hope they're having good conversations with the appropriate people at SCOTUS and others in their respective supervisory echelons.

With 45* and Barr and the asshole Republicans in congress all lined up to keep pressing towards a full blown constitutional crisis, somebody damned sure better have something up their sleeves besides sweaty armpits.

WaPo:

The head of the Federal Judges Association is taking the extraordinary step of calling an emergency meeting to address the intervention in politically sensitive cases by President Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr.

U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe, the Philadelphia-based judge who heads the voluntary association of around 1,100 life-term federal judges, told USA Today that the issue “could not wait.” The association, founded in 1982, ordinarily concerns itself with matters of judicial compensation and legislation affecting the federal judiciary.

The walls are closing in on 45* and his criminal gang, and Barr has been busy from the very beginning of his tenure trying to eat away at the system that keeps these assholes at bay.

Push is coming to shove.

Unfortunately, if this continues to go the way it's going - the way it's gone in other places - with the press and certain prosecutors getting closer to breaking things open, we can anticipate an "accident" befalling someone in the not-too-distant future, or maybe the "unpleasantness" will manifest itself as some kompromat.

Fake lord knows what's coming, but something's coming that.

And while that someone may not be seen as terribly important or central to the story, I guarantee whatever shitty thing happens to them will be meant as an unmistakable warning.

If there are still Republicans who aren't completely in the bag already, they'd best be finding their balls in a big fuckin' hurry.

Maybe it's not quite time to hit the panic button, but let's make real fuckin' sure we know where it is.

Today's Tweet

If you need a clear indicator of how weird it's gotten in American politics, you can hear at least one guy in this video booing women showing their tits.

There isn’t a clearer summary of Bernies Campaign than this 20 second video pic.twitter.com/Xz8l59J7n2

— Luca🐝🇸🇪 (@luca_vhc) February 17, 2020

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

1. The wall is not built
2. People looking to cross the border are going to the where sections are "completed"  because it's easier to defeat the wall than it is to go around it

"That's a bad sign when you're talking about the effectiveness of a fortification."

This Was A Long Time Comin'

The Founding Fathers Sing

Today's GIF

Dude - pick a different mnemonic.

Today's Tweet

"I will not be bullied"

translated: "I'm happy to hold your dick for ya, boss, but those tweets make it hard for me to deny that I'm doing it."

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the biggest chicken sh*t in all the land: Donald Trump's lackey Attorney General, William PEE Barr. pic.twitter.com/LNMhLbIyE5

— Paul Lidicul (@PaulLidicul) February 14, 2020

All For Show

This "presidency" is almost literally nothing but a dog-n-pony show for the purpose of distracting us, while the Rent-Seekers go from thinly-disguised embezzlement to looting the joint outright.

AP New York:

Tony Rankins, a formerly homeless, drug-addicted Army veteran, got a standing ovation at the State of the Union after President Donald Trump described how he turned his life around thanks to a construction job at a company using the administration’s “Opportunity Zone” tax breaks targeting poor neighborhoods.

But that’s not completely true.

Rankins, who indeed moved out of his car and into an apartment since landing a job refurbishing a Nashville hotel two years ago, doesn’t work at a site taking advantage of the breaks and never has done so. In fact, he started that job four months before the Treasury Department published its final list of neighborhoods eligible for the breaks. And the hotel where he worked couldn’t benefit even now because it’s an area that didn’t make the cut.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Rankins said he always considered the job that launched him on his new life two years ago to be in an Opportunity Zone and was honored to be invited by the White House to the State of the Union, with a prime seat in the balcony next to Ivanka Trump.

“After struggling with drug addiction, Tony lost his job, his house and his family. He was homeless. But then Tony found a construction company that invests in Opportunity Zones,” the president said in his Feb. 4 speech. “He is now a top tradesman, drug-free, reunited with his family.”

Days later, Trump doubled down on the Rankins story in a speech on his economic initiatives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and invited him up to say a few words.

“First of all, I would like to thank the president for signing this bill, because without it I wouldn’t be standing here before you right now,” Rankins said.

Trump also praised Rankins’ employer, R Investments, for “working to help 200 people rise out of homelessness every year by investing in opportunity zones.”

That is also not quite true.

CEO Travis Steffens said he has hired hundreds of homeless to work at the 400 buildings the company has owned over the years, taking advantage of various tax breaks. But when it comes to Trump’s Opportunity Zone breaks, he said, the company has only one building tapping the program now, a warehouse in Cincinnati where no one seems to be working, homeless or otherwise.

“We’ve not really worked there,” Rankins said, “but we’ve stored things over there.”

Steffens suggested that when Trump said R Investments was helping 200 people rise out of homelessness he was referring to the number the company hopes to teach construction skills to at the warehouse once it has been converted to a training academy.

Blue sky bullshit. And it's a great illustration of the typical Trump-style scam. I take tax money and use it to train people in certain trades. I get paid, and it costs me practically nothing, and 45* can make a bogus claim that he's created jobs for some poor people.

Don't get me wrong, job training is a huge thing. Programs aimed at helping people out of the cycle of poverty are to be celebrated, and I'll sing their praises all day long. But at the end of that training, if there's no real job with no real bennies and no real security, what's the fuckin' point?

All we've got here is a phony "president" and his scammy daughter crowing about what an amazing thing they're doing for us when actually, they're siphoning tax dollars into the pockets of a few of their rich cronies.

This is not a government

This is a robbery

Storm Warnings

Simon Whistler - TopTenzNet

• Housing Market 
• Income Inequality 
• Auto Loan Defaults 
• Gold Prices 
• Declining Truck Sales 
• Manufacturing Recession 
• Municipal Revenue Decline 
• Global Slowdown 
• Declining Heavy Industrial Sales 
• Retail Problems

Today's Today

☟

Today's Tweet

There's the usual fair chance that this is coming up again now because Jordan's drawn some pretty good challengers, but there's a much better chance that Jim Jordan is, in fact, the slug they say he is.

WATCH: “Jim Jordan called me, begging me to change my story. To go against my brother. I had to get my lawyer to tell him to stop. That’s the kind of cover up it is. He’s a coward.”

Trumpist Rep. @Jim_Jordan won’t outwrestle the sex abuse scandal demons. pic.twitter.com/M41CzBGbQq

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) February 13, 2020

 Democratic primary candidates OH-04

• Shannon Freshour
• Mike Larsen
• Jeffrey Sites