There isn't anything solid to tie Trump to anything impeachable with respect to Russia. If there was a smoking gun in some CIA/NSA/FBI file it would have leaked by now. It is possible that somebody close to Trump will be indicted and squeal on him but I doubt it.
I can't get past the fact that there was enough damning evidence to cause most politicians to resign in shame almost a year ago...
Trump has no shame. If you simply ignore anything that reflects poorly on you shame never crops up. I've come to believe the man is a clinical narcissist. The type specimen. Apparently one of the ways it presents is in a complete inability to recognize that you might be wrong about something, which fits The Donald to a tee.
The Nunes stunt was a nice little erosion of legislative branch independence. (And he apparently went to Ryan first--would love to have been a fly on the all for that.)
I'm still furious about that fucking truck thing. It's never been more apparent that we elected a fucking baby.
AFAICT the Gorsuch ruling was that the trucker was obligated to die of hypothermia rather than seek shelter. Is that more or less it? I haven't been focusing much on Gorsuch because of outrage fatigue over the AHCA.
This here is actually somewhat interesting on the direction the admin might be going as the Enquirer has been generally tuned in to the lizard brain parts of Trumpism* (or at least a good place for trial balloons).
Cover story is "TRUMP CATCHES RUSSIA'S WHITE HOUSE SPY!"
The one man who can expose Russia's vast infiltration of America has been hiding in plain sight -- and now the KGB spymaster is telling all in the new issue of The National ENQUIRER, on newsstands now! The insider's shocking revelations about Kremlin spies on U.S. soil are backed by top White House officials who claim ousted Trump advisor Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn "was, in essence, the Russian spy in Trump's midst!"
Selfish of me to complain but I'm really pissed off about the new laptop ban from certain MENA airports as it affects me directly given that I live in one of those hubs. I was going to bring my laptop back with me to get a repair (cracked hinge leading to a line of broken/stuck vertical line of pixels on the screen, normally tolerable but that I watch a lot of TV in bed on my laptop). Between this and my Fox-news watching Trump-voting parents I may not go back to NY this summer after all.
I feel conflicted about the Russia collusion business. On the one hand, after reading the Masha Gellen piece scolding liberals for indulging in impeachment fantasies at the expense of limiting Trump's damage in more realistic ways, I find it hard to disagree. I mean if Clinton's impeachment compared to Reagan's non-impeachment doesn't convince you that impeaching a president has nothing to do with the gravity of the offence, I don't know what will. Given the current house and senate, Trump would have to get caught with Putin's dick in his mouth to get impeached. And it'd mostly be the fact of the dick rather than its owner that would push it over the top.
On the other hand, after reading Jane Mayer's piece on Robert Mercer, who believes every crazy conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton ever aired, and whose backing was apparently critical to Trump's win, it's hard for me to see a conspiracy theory that can't be proven but can be used to antagonise Trump for the next 4 years as such a negative thing. After all, even bullshit conspiracy theories can eventually produce major consequences as we now see.
So while I would agree that it would be a super bad thing If we did find out for sure that Trump had been colluding with Russia to subvert American democracy, I don't know if I care that much whether it can ultimately be proven. If it can't be proven, but can be talked about endlessly for the next 4 years, that feels like a pretty good consolation prize. But then I have a twinge of guilt about embracing the power of bullshit.
The thing that gets me about the Russia stuff is the parallel with the facts of Watergate, which is the paradigmatic case of what a president can be driven out of office over. Is stealing or attempting to steal internal documents of a political party for the purpose of influencing an election a big enough deal to drive impeachment? Yes, it definitely is.
The precise connection between Trump and the hacking isn't fully developed, but there's certainly enough to keep digging for a good long time.
The trucker was obligated relative to wanting to keep his job.
Job protections in the US are generally terrible; it doesn't seem crazy to me that there are situations that are hideously immoral (like this one) but entirely legal.
So Gorsuch might have been right. He was still being an asshole about it.
I'm surprised that it doesn't come under force majeure. If you don't fulfil a contract because doing so would result in your death, you aren't liable for breach of contract, surely.
So, last night I had this horrible vivid nightmare that I was Trump's personal assistant and lived in one of his hotels, and he had a habit of murdering prostitutes and young mistresses, and it was my job to cover this up. There was this one woman who I was supposed to prevent from leaving, and she bolted out of the room and I had to chase her, but she was a floor or two ahead of me, so I couldn't catch her taking the stairs. I jumped in the elevator and when I got to the bottom she wasn't there. I asked reception if a woman of her appearance had left, and they said she hadn't. Then somehow I got housekeeping to trace her to a room on the fourth floor, which was some sort of medical supply room. She was in a bathtub with her stomach slit open, and the bathtub was filled with blood. It was unclear if she'd been murdered for trying to leave or if she'd committed suicide so she'd no longer have to date Trump. The housekeeper and I were left having to deal with the body, and then Kellyanne Conway came in and yelled at us for being upset that she was dead.
Then I woke up in a cold sweat. The worst part is everything was so vivid, like the metallic taste in my mouth and the pain in my lungs from running too hard down several flights of stairs and long hallways, to the slight panic without surprise from finding her dead body in the tub.
Anyways, that was my literal Friday WTFery, because I woke up thinking, "WTF is wrong with my subconscious"
12: That's horrible. Not even a few inexplicable squid or raccoons to weird it up.
All cephalopods are self explanatory.
11: The trucker isn't liable for breach, he's just not protected from being fired.
The law being interpreted was a statute that protects a worker from being fired for refusing to do their job when doing their ob would be a danger to themselves or the public. The question was, when you're freezing by the side of the road with a broken-down trailer and your supervisor has ordered you to stay with your trailer and die awaiting rescue, is driving off in the tractor a protected refusal to do your job, or is it unprotected conduct that can be the basis for firing because with at-will employment, pretty much anything can?
12 Sounds like you've been watching Hannibal.
Russian weeds: https://twitter.com/RyanLizza/status/845300381630566401
16
The question was, when you're freezing by the side of the road with a broken-down trailer and your supervisor has ordered you to stay with your trailer and die awaiting rescue, is driving off in the tractor a protected refusal to do your job, or is it unprotected conduct that can be the basis for firing because with at-will employment, pretty much anything can?
Given that said statute exists, and applies to truckers in the winter, I don't see how the answer could be anything other than "protected refusal." Either you're misrepresenting things or I'm misreading them or Gorsuch really is as cartoonishly evil as left-wing firebrands would say.
1: I don't think everything that investigators could uncover (regardless of disclosure) has in fact been uncovered yet. It's a slow process at best.
Gorsuch is pretty cartoonishly evil. As far as I can tell, his holding is that if the trucker had left the truck and tried to walk to safety, he couldn't have been fired for it. Probably would have died, but would have died employed. Using his employer's truck to drive to safety is action rather than inaction, though, and if the employer says that's a firing offense, a statute saying you can't be fired for refusing to do your job when it's a safety issue won't protect you.
I can follow his hyperliteral reading of the statute, but it's pretty damn hyperliteral.
12 does sound like it would lead to waking up in a cold sweat. That's a vivid nightmare.
18 What? I need some more context as to the implications. And whether this increases or decreases the odds of impeachment.
21 When I was in law school, I used to get in arguments with Scalia-worshipping textualists, who could never get it when I would say that words are but a tool for conveying meaning, and an imperfect tool much of the time. While the actual words are very important evidence of the intended meaning, you have to look for the meaning. What are we trying to do here? -- we're trying to have a just balancing of interests. But no, they were just obsessed with whether they could win some sort of word game, especially if the result was plainly unjust.
As I've said at the other place, I don't think impeachment really gets onto the table until there's incontrovertible evidence of criminality on the part of Trump in hindering the investigation. No one is impressed with the WH counsel, but there are actually some smart folks on his team, and they just might have been able to keep Trump on the good sign of that line.
Nothing happens until tax reform, in any event. If it fails -- and it might! -- Trump's usefulness to Ryan/McConnell goes way down. Less if it passes, but then as well.
Honestly, though, I would think that 25th Amendment is always more likely than impeachment. A motivated decision-maker can easily make the case that the guy is too unstable for the job, and there are certainly fewer political risks in going that route. Can Pence turn Mercer? Not now, but maybe we get there if Trump fucks up tax reform as he seems to have fucked up ACA repeal.
19: You're forgetting the "Right to Work" state bit, though, I think.
IANAL, but Arkansas is a Right to Work state, and as the bosses here have represented it to the workers here, that means that workers can be fired for any reason and for no reason at all. So firing someone for leaving so they won't freeze to death is perfectly fine, because it doesn't matter why a boss fires you in a "Right to Work" state.
This is why "Right to Work" laws are so perniciously evil. The boss can order workers to work in dangerous conditions (my students have reported to me that this happens to them routinely) and if they refuse, they can be fired. "I don't have to give you a reason why I'm firing you," one of these guys told one of my students.
Here in Arkansas, this happens even on Union jobs, though the way it's done there is more duplicitous. There, the boss just keeps scheduling you less and less frequently, until you're not working at all; or he gigs you for ridiculous things, until now he has a "cause" for firing you not related to your refusal to work in those conditions.
As I said, not a lawyer, and all the information I'm reporting here I got secondhand.
(I learned all this when I taught a Working Class Lit class a few years ago.)
That's not what 'Right to Work' means. It has to do with unionization. I don't remember how many states are RtW, but many are not. The concept people are trying to explain to you is 'Employment at Will.' 49 states have that.
16, 21: ah, I see. Thanks.
It still sounds as though common sense would have called for a judgement that "if you do a thing because the only alternative was dying, you can't get fired for doing that thing".
Common sense would indeed call for that, but we're talking about US employment law. If there isn't a specific law restricting the employer from firing you for some reason (age/sex/race/religion, various kinds of retaliation prohibitions, the law in question here), then the they can fire you.
28: The doctrine, as Charley says, is at-will employment. And it means what it says unless, as Nathan says, you're subject to a specific law.
Republicans argue that people protected in this fashion receive an unfair advantage in the workplace.
Re: 25:
Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
So if I'm reading that correctly, Pence and a simple majority of the Cabinet can just decide that Trump is incompetent. That seems easy. On the other hand, Trump handpicks the Cabinet, so presumably the level of megalomania he had when they took the job was factored into the equation.
But no, they were just obsessed with whether they could win some sort of word game, especially if the result was plainly unjust.
The world would have been better off, and they probably happier, if they had become programmers instead of lawyers.
Manafort, Stone, and Page apparently willing to testify in front of House committee. A "lessons learned from Oliver North" ploy? Any chance Flynn is cooperating with FBI? (He's probably too unpredictable to be of much use.)
In other shocked, not shocked news of the day: After Promising Not To Talk Business With Father, Eric Trump Says He'll Give Him Financial Reports.
34 Wasn't a key Ukrainian witness against Manafort who had agreed to testify against him just assassinated?
29 That's not US employment law. It's only in 49 states. And the District of Columbia. I'm not sure about Puerto Rico, but I think the USVI doesn't have at will. LB, what's the law in Samoa?
It's only in 49 states. And the District of Columbia.
Only in 49 states (and the District of Columbia): so which state is the outlier?
Of course. I was wondering who was going to take the bait.
American Samoa also has at will employment. (Looking that up, I ended up down the rabbit hole reading an AS court decision relying in part on the Insular Cases. Should better head for bed.)
If American Samoa were an integral part of the United States, the constitutionality of the Samoan preference would depend on whether these concerns would qualify as "compelling state interests" sufficient to justify what would otherwise be an abridgement of the right to be free from racial discrimination. The courts have long employed a different standard, however, for applying the United States Constitution in the territories. Until the end of the Nineteenth Century all territories of the United States were intended for integration and assimilation with the rest of the country. At about the time of .the Spanish-American War, however, the United States acquired a number of territories about which there was no such intention, and whose cultures and legal systems differed markedly from the Anglo-American. In Insular Cases the United States Supreme Court held that in such "unincorporated" territories the Constitution applied only insofar as its tenets restate "those fundamental limitations in favor of personal rights" that are "the basis of all free government." Dorr v. United States, 195 U.S. 138, 146 (1922); see also Balzac v. Porto Rico, 258 U.S. 298 (1922); Hawaii v. Mankichi, 190 U.S. 197 (1903); Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901). Rights which are regarded as fundamental in the Anglo-American tradition but not in other free and civilized societies do not apply in an unincorporated territory, at least when they would tend to be destructive of the traditional culture.
So, Charley, how was Montana able to ban at-will employment, and how might other states emulate it?
Between Montana, Just Plain Jane, and Teo's Young Alaskans, it's clear that the presence of a reprobate on the field is worth ten divisions.
44 Just wait til we send our banjo player to Congress! (Guitar and lead vocals on this one.)
43 Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act, passed in 1987. http://leg.mt.gov/bills/mca/39/2/39-2-901.htm Employers aren't crazy about it, but employees outnumber them by a lot, I would think that Alaska would be a good place for this, since it's not like an out-of-state employer doesn't already have all the incentive it could want to set up operations somewhere else. On the other hand, your libertarian pioneer spirit didn't run aground with decades of control by the Copper Kings, as happened here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IoCmAIVOqU&list=PL4NsOvo3iX0JaKPatUYIK72C8w-Wob3i1&index=5
Out knocking doors today -- our ever helpful media ran a story on some debt issues, now resolved, the guy had. Who could have guessed that a local musician would have money issues?
Reading the majority and the dissent together it is clear Gorsuch is regarded as an unsympathetic ass by his colleagues on that panel. Franken got it exactly right - both sides laid out interpretations within the technical bounds of reasonable, which calls into question Gorsuch's judgment.
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