9/10/18
Barack is back, babies.
And just in time, too. Bob Woodward’s new book (he who helped expose Nixon’s Watergate scandal) shows that Donald is even more unhinged than we knew, with White House staffers scrambling to adapt to his ignorance, temper, and breaches of democracy. One day later, you may have heard that the NYTimes published a scathing op-ed by an anonymous senior staff member confirming that the mentally deranged dotard is…well, pretty much that. Donald lost his mind over it. This week alone he called for protesting to be illegal, the reform of libel laws to allow him to sue anyone who says anything he doesn’t like, and that NBC should lose its broadcasting license (same reason).
And after Donny’s vociferous denials that he ever used the terms “retarded” and “dumb Southerner,” language reported in Woodward’s book, video surfaced showing him saying the former, and a former deputy editor of the New York Post says Donald referred to his in-laws as “dumb Southerners.”
Among all his other own appointees who allegedly are turning on him, apparently Donny is most recently bent about Christopher Wray, the FBI director he himself named after firing James Comey. Apparently Donald doesn’t realize that appointing these men to do their jobs is likely to wind up revealing how thoroughly he cannot do his.
In other off-the-rails GOP administration news, last year Donny’s administration rejected an intelligence report that showed refugees don’t pose a significant security threat to the U.S., then created its own report this year that misstates the evidence, inflating the threat posed by foreign-born immigrants.
To the shock of no one, a government employee admits he cropped Donald’s inauguration photos to make the crowd look bigger, after fragile Don complained to the National Park Service about the photos.
Elections
A group of political activists supporting Latinx candidates raised money via a Go Fund Me drive to rent a billboard in Texas featuring Donald Trump’s denigration of Ted Cruz during the 2016 elections.
John McCain’s former chief of staff is considering running for Senate—as a Democrat.
Republicans Against the Law
Donny’s former campaign adviser George Papadopoulous was sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to Mueller’s investigation about Russia-related contacts, a suspiciously light sentence that leads one to wonder what he might have offered for such hospitable leniency… (In other Russia news, Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nelson finally—finally—called out Putin for meddling in our 2016 elections.)
Steve Bannon was summarily uninvited from the New Yorker festival/panel he was inexplicably invited to, with filmmaker Judd Apatow joining others in refusing to appear if Bannon was normalized by being included.
Donald instructed the DoJ to selectively prosecute people for political reasons, an egregious breach of democratic procedure and the separation of the executive and judicial branch.
A group of seven Senate Democrats formally asked the DoJ to investigate Rudy Giuliani’s work for foreign agents while in Donny’s employ.
A group of hospitals has formed a nonprofit generic-drug company, CivicaRx, with the goal of forcing Big Pharma to stop gouging consumers.
Social and Civil Rights Advances
After a five-day trial, a U.S. District judge struck down Texas’s barbaric, unconstitutional “fetal remains” law requiring burial or cremation of tissue from abortions and miscarriages.
India’s supreme court decriminalized consensual same-sex relationships.
Twitter (finally) banned conspiracy theorist and hatemonger Alex Jones and Infowars from the site permanently.
Colin Kaepernick is the new face of Nike. Get out there and buy you some swoosh—conservatives are feverishly destroying their Nike products (rather than, you know, give them to, say, homeless veterans).
Donny’s approval rating fell 5 points in a month from August to Sept—to 36 percent. Even Republican support fell from 83 to 76 percent.
A Miss America contestant called out Donald as “the biggest issue facing our country today,” while another contestant defended citizens’ right to kneel in protest of injustice and pointed out that the NFL players’ taking a knee is in protest of police slaying of black men.
Plaid Shirt Guy broke the Internet.