A Threshold (Trumping Transformation)

#trumpswindle | #wellduh

There is breaking report today via NBC News explaining that Donald Trump’s lawyers are reportedly negotiating with Robert Mueller and the Office of Special Counsel, both for the terms of a presidential interview and in hopes of avoiding one altogether. We ought to mark the point simply as a matter of threshold: Last year, or, that is to say, last month, we heard from the president’s lawyers an expectation that Mueller and OSC would be wrapping up their investigation and clearing the president. Today we hear chatter that they are maneuvering to drag out the inquiry by trying to keep Special Counsel Mueller away from President Trump.

Say what we will about inevitability, but the transformation would seem to mark a threshold.

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Image note: President Donald Trump reacts to the song as he arrives at a rally at the Phoenix Convention Center, Tuesday, 22 August 2017, in Phoenix, Arizona. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP Photo)

Welker, Kristen, Carol E. Lee, Julia Ainsley, and Hallie Jackson. “Initial talks underway about Trump interview in Mueller Russia probe”. NBC News. 8 January 2018.

The Message in a Bullitt

[#rapeculture]

The permeating sense of inevitability of Akela Lacy’s report for Politico—

A Kentucky lawmaker died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound on Wednesday evening after facing allegations that he molested a 17-year-old girl in 2012.

Dan Johnson, a Republican state representative, shot himself on the Greenwell Ford Road bridge in Mt. Washington, Kentucky, according to the Bullitt County coroner. The apparent suicide came after his Republican colleagues called for him to step down following reports that he assaulted a young woman on New Year’s Eve of 2012.

—is its own curious, unhelpful beast. The the former self-described “pope” of Heart of Fire, later elected to the Kentucky House, was accused after the incident several years ago, but police closed their investigation without charges. The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting spent seven months investigating the legislator, leading to a report Monday; on Tuesday, Rep. Johnson (R-KY49) denied the charges during a press conference.  

A Murmur Before the Buzz

Of course this feels inevitable:

Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.

(Sherman)

Two important caveats from New York magazine:

• It would take overturning the results in both Wisconsin (10 Electoral College votes) and Pennsylvania (20 votes), in addition to winning Michigan’s 16, for Clinton to win the Electoral College.

• The academics so far have only a circumstantial case that would require not just a recount but a forensic audit of voting machines.

There is a reason this feels inevitable. Still, though, neither are these signals that should be raising or dashing hopes, nor sounding alarms from sea to shining sea that the Russians have finally won.

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Image note: Photo by Charles Mostoller/Reuters

Sherman, Gabriel. “Experts Urge Clinton Campaign to Challenge Election Results in 3 Swing States”. New York. 22 November 2016.

Extraneous

This is the question: Inevitability, or innovation?

That is to say, the whole anime/card-game declaration of a super power really does seem an amusingly inevitable innovation of an inevitable and probably overused joke.

Or perhaps it is not a question of innovation per se, but simple jealousy, rationalized and potentially with formed reaction, because I didn’t think of it first.

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Weiner Zach. Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. 16 April 2015.

Inevitable (¡Phleorg! Mix)

“It has nothing to do with God; I don’t have the balls to describe a god to anybody.”

―Bill Levin

File under … um … you know … er … ah … dude, where’s the filing cabinet, again?

Indiana’s new “religious freedom” law has been widely criticized and condemned by many, but an innovative marijuana activist in the state is using the bill’s legal protections as a means to set up a new religious sect — the First Church of Cannabis, where members would aim to use marijuana freely as a sacrament in a state where the substance remains banned.

“It’s a new religion for people who happen to live in our day and age,” Bill Levin, the church’s founder, told The Huffington Post in an interview Monday. “All these old religions, guys walking across the desert without Dr. Scholls inserts, drinking wine out of goat bladders, no compass, speaking Latin and Hebrew — I cannot relate to that shit. I drive by Burger Kings, bars and corn fields. I cannot relate to an antique magic book.”

It’s, uh … you know, like somebody would have thought of it already, you know, like, in yo’ mama’s piehole! … I mean, er, right.

Sorry.

Couldn’t fuckin’ see that one comin’, eh?

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Ferner, Matt. “Church Of Marijuana Gets Boost From Indiana’s Anti-Gay ‘Religious Freedom’ Bill”. The Huffington Post. 30 March 2015.

Palmetto Cruelty, or, Traditional Virtues in South Carolina

So, this happened today:

The South Carolina Supreme Court is ordering state probate courts not to issue same-sex marriage licenses until a federal judge decides whether the state constitution’s ban on the unions is legal.

(Jeffrey Collins)

This is actually quite an interesting development. After all, as we learned yesterday:

A South Carolina court has accepted a same-sex couple’s application for a marriage license despite the state’s constitutional ban against the practice and the attorney general’s pledge to defend it.

(Associated Press)

The brief summary: The Supreme Court rejects appeals against marriage equality, with several states having lost their fedral court bids to uphold marriage bans. South Carolina accordingly begins issuing marriage licenses. South Carolina filed a motion in the state Supreme Court five minutes before the close of business, asking the Court to quash the licenses before the twenty-four hour waiting period required of all marriage licenses expired. The state Supreme Court accepted the motion and quashed licenses already issued.

It is true that the decision by the Charleston County Probate Court to begin issuing marriage licenses included the hinge of state Supreme Court approval, but here’s the thing about the court’s rationale: The state Supreme Court wants to wait for a federal ruling in another case, one that was put on hold by the SCOTUS decision to refuse the appeals. That case is an Article IV claim; the marriage ban will be struck.

In the end, this is just a deliberate delaying tactic in South Carolina, a wailing, gnashing effort to fend off the inevitable for the sake of simple human cruelty.

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Collins, Jeffrey. “South Carolina Supreme Court Halts Same-Sex Marriage Licenses”. The Huffington Post. 9 October 2014.

Associated Press. “South Carolina Supreme Court Halts Same-Sex Marriage Licenses”. The Huffington Post. 8 October 2014.

Smith, Bruce. “SC high court asked to halt gay marriage licenses”. The State. 8 October 2014.