At least there won't be any more Trump's in the president's office. Not for a while, anyway (never, I hope).

Reuters - Trump pardon of Blackwater Iraq contractors violates international law - UN

30 Dec 2020

GENEVA (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s pardon of four American men convicted of killing Iraqi civilians while working as contractors in 2007 violated U.S. obligations under international law, U.N. human rights experts said on Wednesday.

 

Nicholas Slatten was convicted of first-degree murder, while Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard were convicted of voluntary and attempted manslaughter, over the incident in which U.S. contractors opened fire in busy traffic in a Baghdad square and killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians.

 

The four contractors, who worked for the private security firm Blackwater owned by the brother of Trump’s education secretary, were included in a wave of pre-Christmas pardons announced by the White House. ...

 

The Geneva Conventions oblige states to hold war criminals accountable for their crimes, even when they act as private security contractors, the U.N. experts said. ...

 

Happy New Year!

Hopefully 2021 will be mostly Trump-free  (I'm an optimist)  🙂  ...

Damn you, Orange Turd. Doom you.

"‘Covid, Covid, Covid’: In Trump’s Final Chapter, a Failure to Rise to the Moment"

 

t was a warm summer Wednesday, Election Day was looming and President Trump was even angrier than usual at the relentless focus on the coronavirus pandemic.

 

“You’re killing me! This whole thing is! We’ve got all the damn cases,” Mr. Trump yelled at Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, during a gathering of top aides in the Oval Office on Aug. 19. “I want to do what Mexico does. They don’t give you a test till you get to the emergency room and you’re vomiting.”

 

Mexico’s record in fighting the virus was hardly one for the United States to emulate. But the president had long seen testing not as a vital way to track and contain the pandemic but as a mechanism for making him look bad by driving up the number of known cases.

 

And on that day he was especially furious after being informed by Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, that it would be days before the government could give emergency approval to the use of convalescent plasma as a treatment, something Mr. Trump was eager to promote as a personal victory going into the Republican National Convention the following week.

 

“They’re Democrats! They’re against me!” he said, convinced that the government’s top doctors and scientists were conspiring to undermine him. “They want to wait!”

 

His explicit demand for a vaccine by Election Day — a push that came to a head in a contentious Oval Office meeting with top health aides in late September — became a misguided substitute for warning the nation that failure to adhere to social distancing and other mitigation efforts would contribute to a slow-rolling disaster this winter.

 

His concern? That the man he called “Sleepy Joe” Biden, who was leading him in the polls, would get credit for a vaccine, not him.

 

His own bout with Covid-19 in early October left him extremely ill and dependent on care and drugs not available to most Americans, including a still-experimental monoclonal antibody treatment, and he saw firsthand how the disease coursed through the White House and some of his close allies.

 

Yet his instinct was to treat that experience not as a learning moment or an opportunity for empathy, but as a chance to portray himself as a Superman who had vanquished the disease. His own experience to the contrary, he assured a crowd at the White House just a week after his hospitalization, “It’s going to disappear; it is disappearing.”

 

Weeks after his own recovery, he would still complain about the nation’s preoccupation with the pandemic.

 

With the pandemic defining the campaign despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to make it about law and order, Tony Fabrizio, the president’s main pollster, came to the Oval Office for a meeting in the middle of the summer prepared to make a surprising case: that mask wearing was acceptable even among Mr. Trump’s supporters.

 

[But what set off debate] that day was Mr. Fabrizio’s finding that more than 70 percent of voters in the states being targeted by the campaign supported mandatory mask wearing in public, at least indoors, including a majority of Republicans.

 

Mr. Kushner, who along with Hope Hicks, another top adviser, had been trying for months to convince Mr. Trump that masks could be portrayed as the key to regaining freedom to go safely to a restaurant or a sporting event, called embracing mask-wearing a “no-brainer.”

 

But Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff — backed up by other aides including Stephen Miller — said the politics for Mr. Trump would be devastating.

 

“The base will revolt,” Mr. Meadows said, adding that he was not sure Mr. Trump could legally make it happen in any case.

 

That was all Mr. Trump needed to hear. “I’m not doing a mask mandate,” he concluded.

 

Mr. Trump never came around to the idea that he had a responsibility to be a role model, much less that his leadership role might require him to publicly acknowledge hard truths about the virus — or even to stop insisting that the issue was not a rampaging pandemic but too much testing.

 

“I’m going to lose,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Kushner during debate preparations. “And it’s going to be your fault, because of the testing.”

 

If there was a bureaucratic winner in this West Wing cage match, it was Dr. Atlas.

 

He told Mr. Trump that the right way to think about the virus was how much “excess mortality” there was above what would have been expected without a pandemic.

 

Mr. Trump seized on the idea, often telling aides that the real number of dead was no more than 10,000 people.

 

As of Thursday, 342,577 Americans had died from the pandemic.

 

The author of his own misfortune, really. No sympathy from me.

The Washington Post - Opinion - Jan. 6 will be a glorious tribute to Trump’s failure

today

For a while, it appeared as though President Trump might have a hard time finding a senator who would join in a challenge when Congress receives the votes of the electoral college on Jan. 6 ...

 

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), positively incandescent with ambition for 2024, has now announced that he will bravely raise his hand and cry, in the words heard on elementary school playgrounds everywhere, “No fair!”

 

This is a fitting end to the 2020 election: pointless, insincere, performative outrage, promising the eternally aggrieved GOP base a victory Trump can’t deliver, contemptuous of the majority of Americans, and propped up by Republicans whose opinion of their own voters could barely be lower. ...

 

The Washington Post - Pence seeks rejection of lawsuit that aimed to expand his power to overturn the election

breaking

Vice President Pence asked a judge late Thursday to reject a lawsuit that aims to expand his power to use a congressional ceremony to overturn the presidential election ...

 

The filing will come as a disappointment to supporters of President Trump, who hoped that Pence would attempt to reject some of President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college votes and recognize votes for Trump instead when Congress meets next week to certify the November election.

 

The filing came in response to a lawsuit from Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and a number of Republicans in Arizona, who argued that ... the Constitution gives the vice president, in his role as president of Senate, sole discretion to determine whether electors put forward by the states are valid.

 

A wise move by Pence.  😶

The New York Times - Senate Overrides Trump’s Veto of Defense Bill, Dealing a Legislative Blow

breaking

WASHINGTON - The Senate on Friday voted overwhelmingly to override President Trump’s veto of the annual military policy bill, mustering bipartisan support to enact the legislation over the president’s objections and delivering him the first such legislative rebuke of his presidency.

 

The 81-to-13 vote, the last vote expected in this Congress, is the first time lawmakers have overridden one of Mr. Trump’s vetoes. 

 

It reflected the sweeping popularity of a measure that authorizes a pay raise for the nation’s military and amounted to an extraordinary reprimand delivered to Mr. Trump in the final weeks of his presidency. 

 

The margin surpassed the two-thirds majority needed to force enactment of the bill over Mr. Trump’s objections. The House passed the legislation on Monday, also mustering the two-thirds majority required. ...

 

Sideface:

 

The New York Times - Senate Overrides Trump’s Veto of Defense Bill, Dealing a Legislative Blow

 

 

The 81-to-13 vote, the last vote expected in this Congress, is the first time lawmakers have overridden one of Mr. Trump’s vetoes. 

 

 

The Art of the Deal. The greatest dealmaker. The Orange Idiot.

Russell Vought

The Washington Post - Opinion - Meet the Trump saboteur in charge of undermining Biden - and America

01 Jan 2021

If, in the new year, pandemic vaccines aren’t available as promised, Americans can’t return to work because economic relief isn’t delivered or an adversary successfully attacks the United States because national security agencies couldn’t pay for new defenses, a hefty share of the blame should be placed on a man you’ve probably never heard of: Russell Thurlow Vought.

 

As President Trump’s budget director, he conspicuously failed in his stated goal of controlling the debt.

 

Despite his efforts, the debt increased by $6 trillion on his two-year watch as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the biggest jump in history. ...

 

But what Russ Vought is very good at is sabotage. 

 

He’s sabotaging national security, the pandemic response and the economic recovery - all to make things more difficult for the incoming Biden administration. 

 

That he’s also sabotaging the country seems not to matter to Vought, who has spent nearly two decades as a right-wing bomb thrower.

 

He has blocked civil servants at OMB from cooperating with the Biden transition, denying President-elect Joe Biden the policy analysis and budget-preparation assistance given to previous presidents-elect, including Barack Obama and Trump himself. ...

 

Now Vought is intentionally botching the transition, without regard for the dire consequences Americans could suffer. This is what happens when you put an arsonist in charge of the fire department.

 

Wow, that bloke is only about six months older than me, and he's already basically a complete jerk (whereas I think I'm only a partial jerk).

Sideface:

The New York Times - Senate Overrides Trump’s Veto of Defense Bill, Dealing a Legislative Blow