John Elias and Aaron Zelinsky are scheduled to testify before Congress today. Elias, former chief of staff of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, will answer questions regarding AG Bill Barr’s crusade against legal marijuana businesses. Barr was not a fan of legal medical marijuana.
Aaron Zelinsky, former prosecutor working on the Mueller investigation, says that the White House pressured the Justice Department and the courts to go easy on Roger Stone. Unredacted sections of the Mueller report last week showed that Stone was the middle man between Wikileaks and the Trump campaign in obtaining Clinton Campaign hacked emails from the Russians. Mueller suspected that Trump lied to him with his written answers to Mueller’s questions about the hacked emails. Collusion might not be a criminal act but conspiracy to work with a foreign power to influence an election just might be. I think Richard Nixon resigned over less.
But let’s put that aside for a moment. The Mueller investigation seems so five minutes ago. It was THE THING that Democrats thought would put a stop to Trump’s reckless behavior. If anything, Trump was emboldened by the fact that he was able to get AG Barr to wrap it up and deep six the report. It was only days later that he tried to get dirt from Ukraine on Joe Biden.
This is not a convoluted conspiracy theory that requires a maze of improbable events. This is straightforward “I am able to fix this so that I’m unaccountable, therefore, I’m going to do it again” behavior. You don’t need to be a chess master to see what’s going on. Lisa Page didn’t make him do it.
As for Barr’s distaste for companies with licenses to produce legal, medical marijuana, just imagine how he feels about ordinary people with a few pot plants in their gardens. Barr wants you to be chaste until you marry, go to mass every Sunday and stay away from Devil Weed. It’ll make you want to rape and kill.
Freedom!!
You can read Zelinsky’s opening statement here and John Elias’s opening statement here. The hearing starts at 12pm.
In case anyone thinks people are just hating on poor Donald and he gets blamed for everything he does, let’s not forget that people in Arizona, Texas and Florida are now getting hammered by Coronavirus (you can check the numbers at 1point3acres) and Trump is still not wearing a mask. The Republican governors of those three states are starting to rethink that whole mask wearing thing and are now requiring them. Well, not in all of Florida where it depends on how enlightened your local public officials are but you get the point. It took a bit longer than expected for the red states to face their public health catastrophe but now it’s here. It’s probable the that there will be a lock down in those states again. Say what you like about the regional Democratic state alliances, our numbers are down, our residents are expected to wear masks and if we can keep Arizonans, Floridians and Texans out of our regions, we will probably do ok as our states continue to reopen for business. Thank you, Tom Wolf.
An ounce of prevention… a stitch in time…
Forget that trip to Scotland though. The Europeans won’t let us in until our numbers are under control. So as much as some of us in the blue states would love to disassociate ourselves from the red states, we are stuck with them like albatrosses around our necks. Guilt by association as far as the EU is concerned. Lovely.
Anyway, where was I going with this? Oh yeah, Trump has committed many unethical and probably illegal acts in the last three years. But I think the one that’s going to bring him down is acting like a strongman on TV, not wearing a mask and encouraging his disciples to not wear them either. And as far as I know, numbers are not Trump haters. Inquiring minds don’t just fixate on one set of statistics. They look for convergence. If all of them are pointing in the same direction, then we can probably conclude that it’s just nature putting a point on the Trump “presidency” asking us to consider if we want 4 more years of chaos, institutional breakdown, cronyism, and instability or do we want something more like normal.
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{{cringeworthy}}
https://twitter.com/brooklynmutt/status/1275582279289581571?s=21
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
This is not quite on topic, but It would have been nice to have had some hope that McConnell, who is not popular in Kentucky, might actually lose his Senate race. That has disappeared with the now almost certain victory of Booker over McGrath in the primary. Once again, Democrats led by Sanders have nominated someone who is much too far Left to win a Red state. McConnell will scarcely have to campaign now, he was given a gift by unperceptive Democrats who would rather feel righteous and lose, than possibly win with a candidate who doesn’t share all their idealized positions.
The idea, particularly in Red states, is to nominate the candidate who can actually win, unless he or she is somehow a terrible person. Amy McGrath, with a commendable military record, is certainly not. Yes, she said that she would have confirmed Kavanaugh, maybe you have to say that in Kentucky. So instead of possibly getting a senator who would vote with the Democrats 90% of the time, they will now surely get McConnell again, who will vote with them 0% of the time; and who , if he keeps the Majority Leader position, will block every single bill which a President Biden might propose, plus block any Supreme Court nomination. This is the kind of absolute purist stupidity which is beyond appalling.
Getting rid of Elliot Engel, endorsed by Pelosi and Hillary, was stupid, also, but these Justice Dem types would rather have Republicans run the country and outmaneuver the Democrats forever, as long as they can thrill to the defeat of Democrats whom they consider insufficiently Left. They got rid of Crowley, to get AOC, they got rid of Engel to get some other novice,and they stopped McGrath from mounting a credible challenge to the supremely evil McConnell by nominating a Sanders-endorsed candidate who has zero chance to actually be elected. It’s hard enough to fight the Republicans, when some of our worst impediments are within our own Party. I wonder what Florida would be like now if Gwen Graham had won that primary instead of the Sanders-supported Andrew Gillum. But being a Justice Dem means that you never apologize, never learn, just keep on trying to end the careers of moderate Democrats, while fantasizing about that glorious revolution which will surely come some century or other, while lining your own wallet with the money of credulous people.
Ky was always going to be hard to win. However like you say Booker makes it incredibly easy for Mitch to win. Gwen Graham would have beat DeSantis I’m sure.
Do you think that Osoff will win? That might make up for losing Kentucky.
No, Ossoff is a terrible candidate running a terrible campaign. The NRSC has already run ads against him and he’s basically ignored the attacks talking about how he’s not taking PAC money. Ugh. Look the guy couldn’t win a swing district with 27 million. Perdue polls higher than Trump in the state. We actually have a better chance in the jungle primary with Doug Collins who is universally loathed outside of tea party types. Whoever ends up in the runoff with him has a halfway decent chance of taking him out.
OH HELL YES.
https://digbysblog.net/2020/06/why-biden-is-doing-so-much-better/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-biden-is-doing-so-much-better
Ascended Madoka forgive me, but I would enjoy seeing a hypothetical leftist revolutionary government strip all the parasitic dudebro pseudo-journalists and media owners of their ill-gotten gains and ship them off to dig potatoes or something on a farm somewhere.
I did not say that would actually be a good thing, objectively. I just said I would enjoy seeing it. 😈
That is a great article by Digby and so true.
Misogyny had a lot to do with it; that plus the fact that the “liberals” in the media never stood up for her. I cannot think of one person on cable news who defended her, they barely put on her surrogates. The Right always hated her and her husband; the Left, spurred on by Sanders, decided to hate her, too. She became some kind of medieval projection: the Right thought that she would turn this country into a socialist state, and the Left thought that she would turn it into a haven for corporations to cheat the workers. Obviously, both cannot be true, but they somehow formed the staple of the media; that plus the necessary red herring of emails. When some debate host, was it Chuck Todd?, said, “Will you promise right now to release all your speeches at Goldman Sachs?,” it was obvious where we were. Sanders never even gave his tax returns, but they were demanding transcripts of Hillary’s speeches, as if somehow they would show something terribly damaging. They never got the speeches, but they made do with the emails, which weren’t even hers, but which they read all day on the air.
The other obvious thing is that Trump was a projective candidate in 2016, pushed by the media as something new and entertaining. Biden is set up as the necessary antidote to Trump. Carter only won because of Watergate; he could never have won any other election but that one. Obama won because people were sick of Bush, and because the economy collapsed, plus he was also a projective candidate. But the spectacle of the entire media; the NYT, women like Andrea Mitchell and Gloria Borger; macho men like Scarborough and Lauer: Obama guys like Axelrod, combining for a daily assault on Hillary, was just about the worst thing I have ever seen. And they amazingly managed to do all of this without ever discussing her policies and proposals, contained in detail on a website which they never looked at or cared about, and outlined in her rally speeches which they did everything they could not to cover