Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Scientists discover DNA’s double-helix structure; The Branch Davidian standoff begins in Waco, Texas; Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme assassinated; U2 releases its ‘War’ album.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
I think people should be angry at things that are worthy of anger. Injustice is outrageous and deserves outrage.
The Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has said it several times, before and after, Donald trump’s Senate trial, “impeachment is forever.” One of the consequences of this, even though he wasn’t removed from office, is that Trtump can’t parson anyone who connected to his impeachment, even Roger Stone. Corey Brettschneider, a professor of political science at Brown University and visiting professor of law at Fordham Law School, writes at Politico that the Constitution makes this very clear.
Speculation that President Donald Trump might pardon Roger Stone has reached a fever pitch after Stone’s sentencing by a federal judge and the president’s repeated hints that he thinks the verdict unfair. But fortunately, the Constitution’s framers imagined this nightmare scenario—a suspected criminal president pardoning a co-conspirator—and they put in the Constitution language to legally prohibit the pardon power in exactly this kind of case.
Both the plain meaning of the Constitution’s text and the historical evidence show that once a president has been impeached, he or she loses the power to pardon anyone for criminal offenses connected to the articles of impeachment — and that even after the Senate’s failure to convict the president, he or she does not regain this power.
Under Article II, Section II of the Constitution, the president is given the “power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” Pardons are supposed to be used as acts of mercy. The framers thought of the pardon power as a “benign prerogative”—prerogative because it was mostly unchecked by courts or Congress, but benign because presidents would use it for the public good.
But the framers knew not to place blind trust in the president to wield the power justly. That’s why they explicitly forbade a president from exercising the pardon power in “cases of impeachment.” The clause prevents the worst abuse of the pardon power: a president’s protecting cronies who have been convicted of crimes related to the president’s own wrongdoing. [..]
The limit on pardons for co-conspirators wouldn’t affect many of the president’s pardons. Pardoning convicted criminals like former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich might be ill-advised, but it is still permitted. By contrast, pardoning longtime adviser Roger Stone would not be permitted, as his crimes relate directly to the impeachment case.
Stone was convicted on seven criminal counts centered around allegations that he had lied to Congress during his September 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee as part of the Mueller investigation. The investigation of Stone relates to the charges that the president abused power by soliciting foreign intervention into our election and that he obstructed justice in trying to hide that “high crime and misdemeanor.” The best evidence that Stone is tied to those charges is his own self-described role as a protector of the president. “I will never roll on [Trump],” Stone declared in one of many statements. That makes him exactly the type of person Madison had envisioned while limiting the president’s pardon power.
It is true that the Stone investigation concerned Russian involvement in the election and that the House charges focused on the more recent Ukraine accusation. But the articles of impeachment focused on the accusation of “abuse of power,” and it is that general high crime at play in Ukraine and elsewhere that links the impeachment and Stone. [..]
The framers deliberately used the phrase “cases of impeachment,” not “conviction.” One reason why is simple: A president convicted by the Senate would be removed from office, and thus unable to pardon anyone. As such, there would be no reason for the Constitution to curb a convicted president’s pardon power. No exception to the pardon power needs to be granted, because no such power exists.
Moreover, the framers provided no explicit avenue for him to regain the power they took away after a House impeachment vote. Time limits are common in the Constitution—think of the president’s four-year term—and the absence of one connected to the pardon power suggests that the power is not in fact lost for a limited duration. In the absence of an explicit reinstatement of pardon power in the text, the strong presumption has to be that it is still lost. [..]
The argument for a constitutional limit on the power to pardon co-conspirators is strengthened by the widely acknowledged implicit limit on “self-pardons.” The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, prompted by the possibility that President Richard Nixon would try to grant clemency to himself for his role in Watergate, argued that a president could not pardon himself. According to that office, no person should be a “judge in his own case”; therefore, no president could self-pardon. Although not technically a self-pardon, pardons for co-conspirators are similarly aimed at self-protection, so should also be barred.
The dangers of Trump’s pardoning someone “connected” to his own alleged high crimes in a “suspicious manner” have not abated after the Senate vote. They have, if anything, been amplified because he appears to have interpreted the failure of the Senate to convict him as evidence that he is unchecked in his power. Both constitutional law and common sense suggest that he loses the pardon power forever in cases related to the impeachment. But the Constitution requires people to enforce it. If the president attempts to pardon Stone, his own lawyers and those in the Department of Justice should inform him that such a pardon would exceed his powers as president, just as Nixon’s Office of Legal Counsel told Nixon he could not self-pardon. [..}
If Trump’s lawyers and advisers fail to stop him, and the president moves ahead with a pardon for Stone, it is incumbent upon any judge asked to enforce that pardon to deny it on constitutional grounds. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the meaning of the impeachment exception to the pardon power because such a pardon of a co-conspirator by a president who has been impeached is unprecedented. But the need to stop it is dire. Otherwise, the original purpose of the pardon power—to show mercy to others—will be turned on its head. Instead, the pardon power will be converted into a self-serving tool of an aspiring despot, precisely the danger Mason warned against.
Keep in mind, Trump has repeatedly said he can do whatever he wants according to Article II. He obviously hasn’t read it.
On May 10th 1865 Jefferson Davis was captured attempting to flee the last Seat of the Confederate Government, Washington Georgia. Reputedly he was dressed as a woman to avoid recognition, I see no necessity to slander him beyond his fundamental failures, it’s probably apocryphal. June 23rd Cherokee leader Stand Watie was the last Confederate general to surrender his forces.
Which is my way of saying-
The War’s been over for 155 Years!
The Myth of the Lost Cause, carefully crafted by bigoted racists, is persistent and some see nothing wrong with the open display of Traitorous Symbols.
The Marine Corps took a welcome step toward modernizing after the service’s top general ordered the removal of all Confederate paraphernalia from all Marine installations around the world. The directive from Commandant Gen. David Berger came last week, shortly after a congressional hearing on the rise of the racist ideology of white nationalism in the military. The directive did not specify what exact forms of paraphernalia would now be prohibited beyond, presumably, the Confederate flag. The move was a long time in coming and could draw the Marines further into what has been a divisive societal issue that has morphed into a political issue in the Trump years: the push for the removal of Confederate statues and iconography across American life.
The U.S. has witnessed a troubling rise of white nationalist extremism since Trump’s election, and the military is no different. Several Marines have been punished or kicked out of the service for racist social media posts, prompting Congress to push the Pentagon to better monitor extremism in its ranks. A survey published by the Military Times earlier this month found more than 50 percent of minority service members reported recently witnessing instances of ideological racism, like white nationalism. More than a third of all active-duty troops reported witnessing such instances of racism, including “racist language and discriminatory attitudes from peers, but also more specific examples like swastikas being drawn on service members’ cars, tattoos affiliated with white supremacist groups, stickers supporting the Ku Klux Klan and Nazi-style salutes between individuals.” Those types of extremist attitudes rose by nearly two-thirds from the previous year’s survey.
The debate over the appropriateness of the American military using Confederate names and allowing its symbols is not new. “Ten Army bases are named after leaders of secessionist states, a point of contention for many—especially after a 2015 racially motivated attack on a South Carolina church thrust the debate over honoring Confederate history onto the national stage,” according to Military.com. “But the military’s response to Confederate names, flags and other materials was less clear. The Defense Department didn’t take any immediate action on the issue, Military Times reported at the time, opting to leave it up to individual services to address.”
In addition to the ban on Confederate symbols, the general also ordered Marine leadership to work to deploy more women in combat roles, including positions leading infantry battalions. Directives also pushed the Marines to explore the possibility of yearlong maternity leave and to extend current parental leave benefits to same-sex couples in the service.
The EU has made it clear that if the UK wants a trade agreement, Chlorinated Chickens are right out.
Oh, that would be almost every Chicken produced in the US where we cram them into boxes, chop off their beaks so they don’t peck each other to death, pump ’em full of antibiotics so they don’t infect each other and wash them in Chlorinated Water to remove the remaining bacteria from their filthy carcasses.
Most people pay little attention to the chain of production that brings food to their plates. Americans eat tonnes of chicken every year, unaware of, or unconcerned by, the chemical rinse applied to its pre-cooked carcass. British consumers might also eat chlorine-washed chicken if they had acquired the habit, but since they haven’t the idea is unappetising. This is a problem in transatlantic trade talks because US agribusiness wants access to UK dining tables. The politics of serving food prepared to US safety standards is tricky on a number of levels. Alongside chlorinated chicken, the use of growth-promoting hormones and antibiotics in meat production are more tightly regulated in Europe than in many countries that want to export their surplus meat. After Brexit, the UK can abandon EU standards, but if it does so it will find its produce barred from continental markets.
Eurosceptics call that protectionism, and partly it is. European food safety standards have a scientific rationale – the idea is that hygiene should be maintained all along the chain, not dealt with at the last stage by blasting microbes with disinfectant. But those rules are bundled up with a system that insulates the sector from global competition. The EU subsidises farmers, recognising how destabilising it would be if a glut of cheap American produce was dumped on their markets. Some Eurosceptics embrace that destabilisation as an economic tonic, others deny it would happen. Pro-leave campaigners advertised cheaper food as a benefit of Brexit, omitting to explain that a price would be paid by farmers. That sleight of hand was easier to accomplish in propaganda than as government policy. The National Farmers’ Union vehemently opposes lowering regulatory barriers to American produce. The NFU president, Minette Batters, this week said doing so would be “insane” and “morally bankrupt”. Downing Street insists high standards will be maintained, but Boris Johnson wants a trade deal with the US and is not renowned for keeping his word. George Eustice, the environment secretary, tries to assuage farmers’ fears without giving them explicit guarantees.
The EU has been less ambiguous. Michel Barnier insists that the application of common standards across the single market will not be compromised as a favour to Britain. Access depends on alignment and, as Mr Barnier noted this week, the geographical proximity of the UK to the rest of Europe makes the enforcement of standards across post-Brexit borders all the more important. As the European commission sees it, such a near neighbour could easily become an entrepôt for substandard produce. That explains EU frustration at Tory MPs’ habit of downplaying or dismissing the requirement for controls at Irish Sea ports. The preservation of an all-Ireland regulatory space under the withdrawal agreement makes such checks necessary once mainland Britain diverges from EU rules. Northern Ireland’s Unionists hate that idea and Mr Johnson hates admitting that he let them down, but those are not grounds to renege on a treaty.
The prime minister can try persuading Mr Barnier to turn a blind eye to changes in UK food standards; he can try persuading British consumers to eat chlorinated chicken; he can try persuading farmers to accept being undercut by American imports. But he will struggle in two ways. First, standards are settled by law, not trust. Second, Mr Johnson has proved that he cannot in any case be trusted. The prime minister keeps serving up rehashed Brexit promises, but they get ever harder to swallow.
Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Germany’s Reichstag burns, giving the Nazis under Adolf Hitler a pretext to seize absolute power; A cease-fire ends the Persian Gulf War; Actress Elizabeth Taylor born; Children’s TV host Fred Rogers dies.
Breakfast Tunes
Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
I think that the thing that we learned back in the day of the civil rights movement is that you do have to keep on keeping on.
He executed Thousands (though for scale you really have to compare him to Batista), Packed a bunch more off to “Re-Education” Camps which are by definition much, much worse than a Political Prison.
Oh, and he stole all their Mafia and Graft money when they fled to Miami and started raising an Army of Catholic Cavaliers and Mercenaries to retake the stuff they stole first back from those Roundheaded Apostates and Atheists.
Sure the CIA thought that was a great idea, and they organized the Bay of Pigs which if it weren’t such a bloody defeat would be a farcical physical comedy of the Three Stooges type (Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Woo, woo, woo, woo. Said I didn’t like it, never said I didn’t know it).
We sent him an exploding Cigar!
I mean, how basic. Yeah it was actually poison something or other and we had this showdown draw over Nuclear Missiles (Mutually Assured Destruction works, 72 years and counting. Who wants a heap of glowey ashes?) and then Fidel killed JFK unless it was Sam Giancana or somebody else (Oswald? In the Book Depository? With a Sears Roebuck Rifle? Who’s naive now Kate?).
Finally we decided simmering hate and hostility rather than active aggression was the best course of action until Obama came around. I would have gone to Havana, still might at some point. They say it’s beautiful and it’s very historic in an Age of Exploration/Piracy/Colonial kind of way.
I must say I remember the bad old days quite well enough.
I also remember (120+ you know) all the Red Baiting from 1917 to 1940 when, after Hitler attacked, they became our temporary military ally, and then again from 1946 to 1989.
Besides Putin is our pal, he’s KGB not a Commie. Xi is a Commie right enough but we owe him money (not a lot in the grand scheme of things actually) so we’ll posture against him in meaningless economic ways that only harm United States Consumers, Farmers, and Manufacturers.
But heaven forfend you have a nice word about Cuban Literacy or their Global Humanitarian Health Care (not Insurance, actual Doctors, Nurses, Hospitals, Medicine, and Equipment) outreach.
There has been a lot of discussion over the past few days about Bernie Sanders’ comment on “60 Minutes” that the authoritarian Cuban leader Fidel Castro had boosted literacy among his people. Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist so I suppose it’s not surprising that this would attract some attention, but his comment really wasn’t anything a standard-issue liberal wouldn’t have made. In fact, the most revered Democrat in America, Barack Obama, said pretty much exactly the same thing when he moved to normalize relations with Cuba in his final years in office.
Nonetheless, the subject was raised again at the presidential debate on Tuesday night when the moderators asked Sanders whether Americans could trust that a socialist would give authoritarians a free pass. Seriously.
I don’t know whether anyone’s noticed this, but Fidel Castro is dead. It’s interesting that such a dull observation about literacy programs in communist countries would cause such hand-wringing when you consider that our current president’s favorite global leaders are all authoritarian strongmen who are very much alive. In fact, Donald Trump was being fêted and fluffed by one of those at the very moment the press was calling for the smelling salts over Sanders’ mundane comments.
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It’s easy to see why Trump would be anxious to please the leader of an enormous nation with a fast-growing middle class, and it isn’t because he is concerned with the geopolitical implications of a U.S.-Indian partnership.
Trump is likewise unconcerned with human rights violations, either in India or anywhere else. In the past he’s excused Russia’s authoritarian President Vladimir Putin’s killing of journalists, admired Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent crackdown on drug users and, of course, has relentlessly bragged about his bromance with Kim Jong-un, the sociopathic leader of North Korea. We can add to that list Chinese President Xi Jinping, Brazil’s thuggish Presidnt Jair Bolsonaro and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, all of whom know that Trump is a fool. Modi is just the latest of those to flatter him and shame America in the process.
It’s never been so starkly demonstrated how little Donald Trump cares about anything but himself as it was in India this week. As he was being unctuously massaged and fawned over by the Indian government, there was mass violence in the streets of New Delhi against India’s Muslim minority, spurred on by Modi’s recent decree that threatens their citizenship.
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Of course Trump didn’t say anything to Modi about his increasingly violent anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist movement. He doesn’t know the first thing about Hinduism, of course. But he agrees with a vicious crackdown on Muslims.
Trump had to water down his “Muslim ban” somewhat in order for the Supreme Court to put some lipstick on it and call it constitutional. But he got ‘er done. And he’s sent a message to every strongman in the world that the U.S. will reward them for such actions as well. You just have to give President Trump a little sugar and put on a little show.
Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.
Moderates and progressives have a lot to lose by ignoring each other on this crucial question.
Can Democrats diminish the bigotry that Donald Trump has unleashed in this country?
Stung by the success of Trump’s anti-immigrant, racist campaign themes in 2016, left-of-center advocacy groups — think tanks, unions, progressive academics and Democratic consultants — are developing tools this year to counter the continuing Republican assault on liberal values, based on the optimistic assumption that the reservoir of white animosity is not so deep that Trump is assured re-election.
These efforts on the left challenge the long history of Republican success in exploiting race and a host of ancillary issues — crime, welfare, social disorder, family breakdown, homelessness — a history that includes Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Donald Trump in 2016.
That history points to the relentless power of racial resentment in American politics. Despite polling that shows greater acceptance of racial equality, this issue is as potent a source of political strength for Trump today as it was for Nixon a half century ago.
In the midst of Tuesday’s brawl of a debate, there were illuminating, even hopeful, moments.
Dumpster fire, train wreck, meltdown — pick your unflattering metaphor and odds are that someone is using it right now to describe Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Charleston, S.C.
It was not a pretty scene. Anyone tuning in hoping to gain clarity about the field was instead treated to a two-hour collective panic attack. There was too much yelling and cross talk for a coherent discussion to emerge, and the moderators seemed helpless to impose order. The more punches that were thrown and the more blood spilled, the harder it was to tell who was getting the better of whom. As a result, it’s unlikely much damage was done to any particular candidate — as opposed to the field overall, which wound up looking frantic and fractured. And there was precious little fire focused on the current president. The whole fractious spectacle was like a scene out of Vladimir Putin’s anti-American fantasies. Or a Trump campaign commercial.
This is how democracy works. It’s messy, and it rarely runs like most people think it should — especially when the stakes are as high as they are in this race. But even in the midst of Tuesday’s brawl, there were a few illuminating, even hopeful, moments to be extracted, even if the effort left you with a headache.
The leaders of the world’s two biggest democracies are pursuing dangerous, nationalist visions at odds with their countries’ founding values
As the global tide of populism challenges the very idea of liberal democracy, Donald Trump’s visit to India highlighted how Trump and India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi – leaders of the world’s two largest democracies – are a central part of the problem, pursuing dangerous, nationalist visions that corrode the tenets of democracy. While the United States and India should exemplify the virtues of democracy and respect for universal rights, Trump and Modi are undermining those values.
In the last 20 years the US-India partnership has blossomed, and its potential continues to grow. Trump’s trip was intended to highlight this potential with defense equipment sales, talk of a future trade deal and big crowds at a rally.
Despite the show, the real story is how Trump and Modi’s divisive policies are undermining the three pillars of the US-India strategic partnership: shared values; a robust economic relationship; and an interest in building a peaceful Asia-Pacific in which China is a player, but not a hegemon.
Instead of an informed discussion, voters were treated to a bad-faith fiasco in the service of narcissism, dishonesty and petty grievance
For reasons that remain unclear, there was yet another Democratic primary debate on Tuesday night, the 10th such event of the presidential contest. The seven candidates who qualified convened in Charleston, South Carolina, ahead of the South Carolina primary on Saturday and the slew of Super Tuesday contests next week. It will not be the last debate that we are subjected to – yet another is scheduled for 15 March. Tuesday’s debate, hosted by CBS, was mercifully short compared to some others, wrapping up after just two hours. For my sins, I watched the whole thing.
Perhaps because there have been so many of these debates, the candidates seemed determined to make it dramatic television. At times, they seemed to be vying for ratings. Much of the evening was spent in shouting and cross talk. Biden pointed; Sanders threw his hands in the air in exasperation; Bloomberg delivered practiced jokes he had paid someone to write for him, exuding all the charisma of a rubber chicken. Everyone had grievances; everyone had accusations and recriminations to make against the others. Not that you could hear them: the shouting often made it hard to make out just quite what anyone was saying. The event was heavy on vitriol and light on substance.
The Democratic candidates seemed torn between attacking the Vermont senator and attacking each other. That benefited Sanders once again
Who is the happy warrior?
Apparently not a single one of the seven Democratic candidates locked in a doom-laden downward spiral in the final debate before Super Tuesday.
The last Democrat to win the presidency printed posters with HOPE slapped all over them. Judging from Tuesday’s debate in South Carolina, most of the party’s leading voices are either breathless or hopeless.
Yes, the stakes are high, after three years of the presidential dumpster fire called Donald Trump. But the stakes sound even higher if your presidential campaign is also on fire, as it seemed to be for just about everyone on stage.
CBS News, the host of the verbal calamity that was Tuesday’s debate, helpfully placed the two least appealing candidates on the outer edges of the stage.
He’s a news dude and you’re wrong fella. 38 foot is plenty to single hand without being unwieldy and if you need to sleep more than 4 you should consider your floating Hospitality Suite that you carry as a Business Expense.
Of course you need to pay the crew even just to bob in the water so it’s the marginal cost of gas for your Aircraft Carrier. I’d still tug around the Day Tripper just for fun though.
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