“Kids, this-piece-of-paper’s-got-47-words-37-sentences-58-words-we-wanna-know-details-of-the-crime-time-of-the-crime-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-crime-I-want-to-know-arresting-officer’s-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say”, and talked for forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there, and I filled out the massacre with the four part harmony, and wrote it down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read theollowing words:

(“KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?”)

I went over to the sargent, said, “Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I’ve rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I’m sittin’ here on the bench, I mean I’m sittin here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” He looked at me and said, “Kid, we don’t like your kind, and we’re gonna send you fingerprints off to Washington.”

And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints.

So someplace a little dim bulb is flickering that it’s not really a good look to be paying the wife of a Supreme Court Justice (Ginny Thomas) mega bucks to run a Stalinist Purge of your Administration.

So is the solution to stop doing that, apologize, and promise never to do it again?

C’mon.

Trump slams Sotomayor and Ginsburg, says they should recuse themselves from ‘Trump-related’ cases
By Meagan Flynn and Brittany Shammas , Washington Post
February 25, 2020

President Trump went after Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a pair of tweets and at a news conference in India on Tuesday, days after Sotomayor issued a dissent critical of the Trump administration’s legal strategy and the court’s majority for enabling it.

Tweeting just before appearing at a welcome ceremony at the Indian president’s ceremonial residence in New Delhi, Trump cited a Laura Ingraham segment on Fox News titled, “Sotomayor accuses GOP-appointed justices of being biased in favor of Trump.” He then called on Sotomayor and Ginsburg to recuse themselves in all Trump-related matters.

“Trying to ‘shame’ some into voting her way?” Trump said of Sotomayor. “She never criticized Justice Ginsberg when she called me a ‘faker’. Both should recuse themselves on all Trump, or Trump related matters! While ‘elections have consequences’, I only ask for fairness, especially when it comes to decisions made by the United States Supreme Court!”

He doubled down on his criticism during a news conference Tuesday in New Delhi, telling reporters that the basis for his belief that the justices should recuse themselves was “very obvious.”

“I always thought, frankly, that Justice Ginsburg should do it, because she went wild during the campaign when I was running,” he said. “I don’t know who she was for — perhaps she was for Hillary Clinton, if you can believe it —but she said some things that were obviously very inappropriate.

“She later sort of apologized. I wouldn’t say it was an apology, but she sort of apologized. And then Justice Sotomayor said what she said yesterday. You know very well what she said yesterday. It was a big story. And I just don’t know how they can not recuse themselves for anything having to do with Trump or Trump-related.”

Trump’s comments targeting Sotomayor and Ginsburg come as he has faced criticism for targeting sitting judges and injecting politics into the judiciary.

Among Those Pressing Trump to Weed Out Disloyalty: Clarence Thomas’s Wife
By Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
Feb. 24, 2020

For the past 18 months, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, and other conservatives have plied the White House with memos and suggestions about which people to fire — and who should replace them.

President Trump has generally treated Ms. Thomas’s suggestions coolly, passing them off to advisers, according to people familiar with Ms. Thomas’s efforts. But since the end of the Senate impeachment trial, the president has become more distrustful of the people filling the ranks of government and has been giving those recommendations a closer look.

The memos from Ms. Thomas were first reported by Axios.

Among Ms. Thomas’s top targets have been officials at the National Security Council, the former head of the White House personnel office, Sean Doocey, and other top White House aides. Another target was Jessie K. Liu, who recently left her job as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for a job in the Treasury Department that was later withdrawn by the White House.

Ms. Thomas, a politically active conservative who for nearly seven years has led a group called Groundswell, also successfully lobbied for a role for Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the former attorney general of Virginia who is now the acting deputy secretary of homeland security.

Another conservative, Becky Norton Dunlop, an official at the Heritage Foundation, has also repeatedly passed names of possible appointments to personnel officials, administration officials said. A Heritage official did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump recently shook up the personnel office, replacing Mr. Doocey with John McEntee, who was fired from his previous job at the White House, with a mandate to look for “bad” people, according to multiple administration officials.

Some administration aides have long been suspicious that people like Ms. Thomas and Ms. Dunlop are less interested in pro-Trump purity than in appointments for their own networks of friends. White House officials have privately questioned Ms. Thomas’s lobbying on personnel, and have said Mr. Trump — who is facing several decisions before the Supreme Court personally and in terms of administration policy — has made clear he is conscious of whom she is married to.

Recuse? You so funny.

So, ready for some more Debate? Basically everyone is going to be live tonight with reactions but here’s what was said about the events of the weekend.

Trevor

Stephen

Seth

Your Vote Matters!

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Ferdinand Marcos flees the Philippines; Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounces Josef Stalin; Samuel Colt patents the revolver; Muhammad Ali becomes world boxing champ; Musician George Harrison born.

Katherine Johnson August 26, 1918 – February 24, 2020

Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. Sometimes they have more imagination than men.

Katherine Johnson

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I’m sorry, but for the last 12 hours (and 12 hours before that) I have been hearing nothing but wailing and moaning and rending of garments by New ConservaDem, 3rd Way, Blue Dog, DLC, Coffee Party United, Bowles-Simpson Catfood Salesman Radical Moderate Centrists and their Villager Mouthpiece Puppets.

Like it or not Bernie Sanders is really popular, and not just with Democrats. Were I to channel Hillary ’16 I might say, shut up, get with the program, give me all your monies and your donors and here’s the first week of your 127 city bus tour telling people how Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being you’ve ever known in your life.

However it’s only 3 States. There are 54 more contests.

Putin’ on my Pundit Hat (I want you all to know I’m handsomely remunerated by the IRA, no, not the Irish ones) I honestly wonder why the Never Trump Institutional Democrats are sticking with Jeb who is hemorrhaging his solid Black 45 – 65 support even in Firewall South Carolina to Bloomberg and (shudder) Sanders when you have a just as Conservative, much, much younger Marco Rubio standing around actually, like, you know, in Second Place?

Could it be because he’s Gay and the country is just not ready for the picture of two guys kissing?

And what the heck is wrong with Warren? Third Place (take that Jeb) and probably the only candidate who could actually have crossover appeal.

Could it be because she’s a woman?

But what about Bernie? Well, what about him? Beats the Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio by the largest margin head to head Nationally and in the Battleground States. Running margin of error behind Klobuchar in Minnesota of all places and nobody else reaches viability.

Regular Democrats Just Aren’t Worried About Bernie
by Peter Beinart, The Atlantic
February 18, 2020

Among ordinary Democrats, Sanders is strikingly popular, even with voters who favor his rivals. He sparks less opposition—in some cases far less—than his major competitors. On paper, he appears well positioned to unify the party should he win its presidential nomination.

So why all the talk of civil war? Because Sanders is far more divisive among Democratic elites—who prize institutional loyalty and ideological moderation—than Democratic voters. The danger is that by projecting their own anxieties onto rank-and-file Democrats, party insiders are exaggerating the risk of a schism if Sanders wins the nomination, and overlooking the greater risk that the party could fracture if they engineer his defeat.

Strange as it sounds, Sanders may be the least polarizing candidate in the presidential field, at least according to surveys of ordinary Democrats. A Monmouth University poll last week found not only that Sanders’s favorability rating among Democrats nationally—71 percent—was higher than his five top rivals’, but also that his unfavorability rating—19 percent—was tied for second lowest. Sanders’s net favorability rating was six points higher than Elizabeth Warren’s, 16 points higher than Joe Biden’s, 18 points higher than Pete Buttigieg’s, 23 points higher than Amy Klobuchar’s, and a whopping 40 points higher than that of Michael Bloomberg, whom more than a third of Democratic voters viewed unfavorably. (By contrast, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—whom Sanders’s critics often cite as a cautionary tale—enjoyed the support of only 56 percent of his own party members in the months leading up to December’s British election.)

A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month found similarly favorable results for Sanders. Among Democrats nationally, only Warren enjoyed higher net favorability ratings; on that measure, Sanders outpaced Biden, Buttigieg, and Bloomberg. (The pollsters didn’t ask about Klobuchar.) And according to a recent USA Today/IPSOS survey, Sanders is the candidate who Democrats say best shares their values.

Although political handicappers sometimes presume that centrist Democrats are hostile to Sanders, the Quinnipiac poll suggests that Sanders enjoys widespread affection even outside his ideological lane. Among self-described moderate or conservative Democrats, Sanders boasts a net favorability rating of 43 points—far higher than Biden or Bloomberg fares among the “very liberal” Democrats who compose Sanders’s ideological base. Ninety-eight percent of Warren supporters, 97 percent of Buttigieg supporters and 92 percent of Biden supporters say they would back Sanders against Donald Trump. Only among Bloomberg supporters does that number dip to 83 percent. Overall, Sanders voters are significantly more likely to say that they won’t back one of his rivals in the general election than the other way around. Sanders’s critics within the party may resent his supporters for threatening to stay home in November. But most Democratic voters, including most centrist ones, have little problem with Sanders himself.

None of this means Sanders would necessarily beat Trump. His ultra-progressive policies and socialist self-identification could energize Trump’s base and alienate the independents and Republican moderates who backed Democratic candidates in 2018. But the evidence does suggest that, if Democratic elites let him, he’s capable of unifying his party’s rank and file behind his campaign. He’s far better positioned than Trump was at this point in 2016, when his net favorability rating among Republicans was almost 20 points lower than Sanders’s is among Democrats today.

Oh, not John. Modi.

World’s Largest Democracy!

Lewis Black? Did Somebody Say Lewis Black?

“The Rant Is Due” Live from Wilmington Delaware last night.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

President Andrew Johnson impeached; The Nazi Party holds its first major meeting; Manila liberated during World War II; Britain’s Prince Charles, Lady Diana Spencer engaged; Lauryn Hill’s Grammy feat.

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.

Martha Gellhorn

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