CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.
Oh, we are so very fucked. People in Iran are extremely upset with the Tiny Dictator, and there’s excellent reason for them to be. If Donny really wanted to do something about potential terrorists, he’d shut up, resign, and go back to watching teevee in Florida, at Mar a whatever it is. Unfortunately, he’s super busy, watching teevee in the white house. Seems to be where he gets all his information from, seeing as he doesn’t read, and his supposed intelligence briefings last around 20 minutes, while he’s preoccupied with super important shit, like how to be rude to a department store on twitter. Then there’s more teevee watching, and tweeting. Tweeting on his personal account, because apparently the POTUS account is beneath him. Or maybe it just reminds him of how fucking incompetent he is, and that he has no business in government of any kind.
On Friday morning, President Trump cited a Lawfare article in an attempt to build a case that the three judges U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit made a bad decision Thursday evening when they declined to reinstate his Muslim ban.
LAWFARE: “Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this (the) statute.” A disgraceful decision!
Indeed, the Lawfare article in question — entitled “How to Read (and How Not to Read) Today’s 9th Circuit Opinion” — does mention that the Ninth Circuit’s opinion didn’t cite a statute pertaining to “Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President,” a statute that “forms the principal statutory basis for the executive order.”
But had Trump read the article, he would’ve seen that the author — Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution — concluded that the court actually made the right decision.
[…]
Wittes concludes his piece by blasting the Trump administration’s “incompetent malevolence.”
“Eventually, the court has to confront the clash between a broad delegation of power to the President — a delegation which gives him a lot of authority to do a lot of not-nice stuff to refugees and visa holders — in a context in which judges normally defer to the president, and the incompetent malevolence with which this order was promulgated.”
Instead of coming across the passage he tweeted out from reading the article, it appears Trump was alerted to the Lawfare piece by watching Morning Joe.
“For a sense of what is happening outside, he watches cable, both at night and during the day — too much in the eyes of some aides — often offering a bitter play-by-play of critics like CNN’s Don Lemon,” the Times reported.
Lifting material from TV news for a tweet is far from unprecedented for Trump. As Fortune reported on February 2, “At least five times since he took office… Trump has tweeted about policy ideas and thoughts that seem directly related to news that was being shown on channels such as Fox News.”
Among the instances are a tweet Trump posted threatening to pull federal funding from public colleges that came minutes after a discussion of the same topic on Fox & Friends, another where the president threatened to send “the Feds!” into Chicago that came on the heels of a discussion of violence in Chicago on The O’Reilly Factor, and a tweet blasting Chelsea Manning as “ungrateful traitor” that came just minutes after she was called the same thing on Fox News.
Really, it’s bad enough he is such an ignorant idiot, he could at least try to pretend he’s somewhat informed. The full story is at Think Progress. As if all this wasn’t quite bad enough, “contempt of cop” is going to get a whole lot worse. Trump wants stormtrooper protections, bigly yuuuge ones.
In a vague executive order signed at the official swearing-in ceremony for new Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump instructed Sessions to work with Congress to establish “new Federal crimes, and increase penalties for existing Federal crimes” to protect law enforcement officers.
More signalling than substance, the order gives executive agencies a broad directive for change without naming specific policy preferences. But you don’t need a divining rod to see where Trump is pointing his team.
Republicans have already embraced the idea of extending hate crimes protections to police officers. Trump’s rhetoric both before and after his election win made clear he will default to the side of police in any dispute with the public they serve. And three recent high-profile, ambush-style killings of police officers — one committed by a Trump fan and Confederate flag enthusiast in Iowa — have generated a sense of political urgency around officer safety.
Yet rather than deterring such rare and devastating assassinations, Thursday’s order lays down fertilizer for a frightfully dank new crop of routine police abuses.
Oh yes. Anyone who has ever had experience with cops knows how much they love tacking on any fucking charge they can think of, even given no reason whatsoever. This is not going to go well, and of course, it’s going to impact people of colour the most. Full story at Think Progress.
Cop, Joe Cop -- now with a federal licence to kill.
I don’t know who that is in the background of the photo there, but he certainly doesn’t look pleased. Whether that’s coincidence or how he is actually feeling, I don’t know, but it’s certainly telling in the context of this post.
Wow, to call Trump an unsophisticated oaf is putting it mildly. Apparently his grand strategic plan to get around the court decision that overturned his ban is to re-issue the same order again. [BBC]
This must be why, for all the frustration they cause, you should want seasoned politiicans in office. So they don’t waste everybody’s time by throwing spanners into the gears of a nation.
Boxes of spanners.
Thrown in one by one, always the same size, always the same gear.
I can’t even imagine what kind of damage it would cause if travel to the US periodically stops because of the latest iteration of this ban. I guess it’s too much to hope that this will motivate some people to get the chief muppet removed from office? Surely even the most idiotic Republicans would eventually grow weary it if their pet spent his entire term just re-issuing the same doomed-to-fail orders?
I wonder what the court’s reaction would be? I mean, the court says, “No, your Executive Order may violate these laws so we are putting it on hold until you can argue your case.”
Trump: “Here’s a brand-spanking-new Executive Order that is very better and and addresses all of the problems with the old one.”
A week or two later, the court says, “No, your Executive Order may violate these laws so we are putting it on hold until you can argue your case.”
Trump: “Here’s another one. This one is better!”
A week or two later, the court says, “No, your Executive Order may violate these laws so we are putting it on hold until you can argue your case.”
How many times can he do this before the courts, and the American public, notice?
rq, oh I noticed that right away, you can’t miss the look on his face! I expect that look is on everyone’s face.
Komarov & Ogvorbis, I think it’s time all other nations get in on the game, and manufacture some reason to impose travel bans on all Americans. Sorry, your prez is being a mega-asshole, can’t come here! It wouldn’t be that long before the Tiny Dictator would have to admit defeat, after all, if world-wide travel bans were instituted on Americans, his business interests would suffer.