Trump's America

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The House voted 230-199 (with 11 Republicans joining all the Democrats) in stripping Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments.

[Inanna]

Excellent.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Excellent until the GOP takes the House back and strips Alexandria Cortez-Ocasio or (more likely) Ilhan Omar of her committee assignments in retaliation.

[Inanna]

But Greene is cuckoo.

[Frelga]

"Democrats shouldn't do anything for a legitimate reason because then Republicans will do it in bad faith" doesn't seem like a successful strategy.

[Dave_LF]

Especially since Republicans are going to act in bad faith anyway

[Voronwë the Faithful]

"Democrats shouldn't do anything for a legitimate reason because then Republicans will do it in bad faith" doesn't seem like a successful strategy.

I didn't say that they shouldn't have done it. Just acknowledging what is likely to happen.

[Frelga]

You are not wrong but neither is Dave. :|

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Interestingly, only three of the 11 GOP representatives who voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments were among the ten GOP members who voted to impeach Trump, Adam Kinzinger, Fred Upton, and John Katko. I would have thought that the two groups would have largely overlapped.

[RoseMorninStar]

Are they representatives from districts that have had mass school shootings? I think at least one of them is.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I don't know. I have not done a deep enough dive to answer that.

[RoseMorninStar]

I'll at least partially answer my own question. There are at least 2 who voted as they did due to proximity of constituents to mass school shootings.

Díaz-Balart, Gimenez, and Salazar all represent districts in South Florida, near the site of the 2018 mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school.

[Frelga]

Speaking of Parkland - not the Onion.

David Hogg launching competitor to Mike Lindell's MyPillow

[RoseMorninStar]

Speaking of Parkland - not the Onion.

David Hogg launching competitor to Mike Lindell's MyPillow

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Pillowtalk. Strange bedfellows.. or... anti-bedfellows? Hubby has had a field day with pillow puns.

[elengil]

Mr. Sandman?

[N.E. Brigand]

The AP is reporting that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have abandoned the investigation into the role of Donald Trump, aka "Individual 1," in the Stormy Daniels hush money payments scandal that sent Michael Cohen to jail for doing what Donald Trump told him to do.

If so, then Merrick Garland should probably order an investigation of the investigation, because SDNY heretofore had been arguing in official filings that the media shouldn't be allowed to see documents from the Cohen case because that would interfere with their ongoing investigations.

Did SDNY prevent those documents from being released on a false pretext? Were they really trying to keep embarrassing material about Trump from going public?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Or maybe they kept the documents private because it is in fact standard practice to keep documents private when there is an ongoing investigation. And maybe they actually concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict Trump of campaign finance violations (which are very difficult to prove) as a stand-alone crime (Cohen was charged with and pleaded guilty to that charge as part of an agreement that involved other much more easily proven crimes). As for Merrick Garland ordering an investigation of the investigation, he won't, and he shouldn't.

[N.E. Brigand]

Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking the law on the orders of "Individual 1." Sure he'd get some tough cross-examination because he was crooked generally, but if a hit man's testimony can put away the mob boss who ordered the hits, then surely Cohen's testimony could be used likewise for Trump, who has boasted repeatedly about how he knows the ins and outs of campaign finance law. As I recall, Trump has even been deposed on campaign finance matters before.

And I'd want a thorough internal review of the past four years at the Dept. of Justice -- and the rest of the executive branch -- regardless of this latest news. So I was wrong to tie it to this case in particular. But the public deserves to know, here and in other matters, which side of the "maybes" you cite holds the truth. No one who worked under Trump deserves the benefit of the doubt, and especially not where Trump himself is concerned. Trump did his utmost to turn the federal government into his personal kingdom. We need to know the details.

(My guess is that we know at most 25% of the wrongdoing that took place on Trump's watch, and even most of what we do know about went unpunished.)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

That is the job of the Justice Department Inspector General, Michael Horowitz,not of Merrick Garland. Fortunately, he is doing his job (though sadly there is too much for him to cover). For instance:

Justice Department inspector general investigates whether staffers sought to improperly overturn 2020 election result

Former Attorney General Sessions needs to answer questions on family separation, says DOJ watchdog

[N.E. Brigand]

I'm not saying that Q-Anon, which claims that liberals secretly run pedophile rings, was created to distract from actual pedophilia on the right, but:

"NEW: D.C. Police arrested Ruben Verastigui -- a former 'senior digital strategist' for the Senate Republican Conference -- on charges of distribution of child pornography resulting from a time span that allegedly included his time at the SRC."

The specifics of the charges are even more disturbing than that sentence suggests. I won't detail them!

Verastigui's social media shows him at the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018, at a social media summit in the White House in 2019, at the White House as recently as December, and in a post just three months ago he wrote that he was pleased to see Ronna McDaniel, the Republican Party chair, was still using a photograph he took as her avatar when calling into Fox News. He's also credited in a Time magazine story on McDaniel for providing the same or a similar photo in his capacity as "RNC Senior Graphic Designer."

He also touts his membership in several pro-life groups. Isn't there a joke about Republicans caring about children only until the moment of birth?