Trump's infatuation with the death penalty

Here Are the People Trump Said the Death Penalty Should Be Used Against This Year

“You know, the Chinese and Filipinos don’t have a drug problem. They just kill them.”

[by] Jacob Rosenberg December 25, 2018

Over the last year, President Donald Trump has repeatedly emphasized the death penalty in televised speeches, statements, and tweets. Sometimes, it was invoked in reference to certain groups, like drug dealers; other times, the president applied it to a specific individual, as he did just after the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre.

Trump’s infatuation with the death penalty isn’t new. Even before his foray into politics, he tweeted about cases where he thought capital punishment would be appropriate. He called for it when Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl made headlines for being captured after he deserted his post in Afghanistan and in the cases of the Boston Marathon bomber and the Aurora shooter. In comparison, a search of Barack Obama’s Twitter archive finds zero results for the words “death penalty.”

More famously, in 1985, Trump bought $85,000 in ads that called for the execution of the Central Park Five, who were ultimately exonerated through DNA evidence.

As president, Trump has clung to the death penalty as a tough-on-crime solution in specific circumstances, despite research that shows the death penalty has not deterred crime, and, in practice, is often arbitrary, racist, and imposed against innocent people.

Here’s a breakdown of how the president has discussed capital punishment in 2018.

Christmas at the border

Migrants stuck in Tijuana dream of US as they celebrate uncertain Christmas

Volunteers try to bring some cheer to Central Americans with traditional food and gifts but fear and anxiety haunt the holiday

[by] Sarah Kinosian in Tijuana 25 Dec 2018

“For us Christmas means tamales,” said Orbelina Orellana, mixing a cauldron of ingredients with a large wooden ladle.

In the background, punta music, from Honduras’s northern coast, played from a cellphone lying next to a pile of banana leaves that would later be used to wrap the traditional corn dish. “It’s more than food: it’s family, it’s home, it’s love, it’s us.”

Orellana is one of the thousands of Central Americans who arrived in Tijuana, just south of US border with the US state of California, in November. She came with the caravan of migrants and refugees who are spending their Christmas thousands of miles from home, in limbo, many of whom are unsure if or when they will ever make it into the US.

In preparation for 24 December, when Latin America celebrates Christmas, Orellana and three other women made 2,000 Honduran tamales in an empty dirt-floor lot with cinderblock walls, just around the corner from the old outdoor concert venue that is housing more than 1,200 caravan members.

“We wanted our new caravan family to be able to have our traditions. But being here is hard. I know my son and two daughters are sad right now. I keep reminding myself I’m here for their future,” Orellana, 26, says as she stirs, remembering her children back in Honduras. “They’re all pretty reserved kids, but on Christmas, they love to dance. I’ll miss that.”

[ ... ]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/25/central-american-migrants-tijuana-christmas

Senator "Public Hanging"

Irony Visits The Senate In The Form Of An Anti-Lynching Bill

As Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith presided, Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker got the Senate to agree to make lynching a federal crime for the first time in history.
By Karoli Kuns

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That's right. Senator "Public Hanging."

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https://crooksandliars.com/2018/12/irony-visits-senate-form-anti-lynching

25 45 now

It's time for the crazy man to get out of our White House, before he kills us all.

Amendment XXV
Section 4.

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxxv

Orange and Demented

Sometimes you just need to let off steam. If you don't like this, well, sorry, I did the best I could with no talent. If someone's done something similar already, also sorry, now you have another version.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oranges_and_Lemons

Orange and demented
Cry the people, tormented.

"For WALL, gi' me 5 billion,
Or I'll cage all the children."

"All your promises, you're failing!"
Say deplorables, all wailing.

"You're illegally rich,"
Say the Hunters of Witch.

"Your whole family's criminal,"
Say all Attorneys General.

Impeach or resign,
For your freedom, you'll pine.

Here comes a scandal, but truth will be said.
Here comes Bob Mueller to lead you to Fed.
Tick, tock, tick, tock, Four walls and a bed!

No wonder he's having trouble erecting it

I know the video has been posted, but it's worth a repeat.

Colbert does a wonderful job highlighting the Oval Office Smackdown -- the great tag-team match with Junk-puncher Pelosi and Chuck The Goad Schumer versus Screaming Drunk On The Subway and the Iced Corpse of Pence.

"one of the dirtiest fuel on earth"

The existing Line 3 is an Enbridge pipeline that ships crude oil from Alberta to Superior, Wisconsin. It spans northern Minnesota, crossing the Leech Lake and Fond du Lac reservations and the l855, 1854, and l842 treaty areas. And it is a ticking time bomb. It was built with defective steel in l96l, has had numerous ruptures and spills, and is running at half pressure because of severe corrosion. Instead of cleaning up this liability, Enbridge wants to simply abandon it in the ground forever, and cut a brand new energy corridor through our best lakes, wetlands, and wild rice beds, and the heart of Ojibwe treaty territory. They first proposed this new route for the Sandpiper pipeline in 2013, but years of fierce resistance in Minnesota drove them to cancel that project and buy a share of the Dakota Access pipeline instead.

At $7.5 billion, the proposed new Line 3 would be the largest project in Enbridge’s history and one of the largest crude oil pipelines in the world, carrying up to 915,000 barrels per day of one of the dirtiest fuel on earth, tar sands crude. They call it a "replacement" but it is larger, with higher volume, in a new corridor. First Nations, tribal governments, landowners, environmental groups, and communities across the Great Lakes have been fighting for 5 years now to stop this new corridor and #StopLine3. We are here to protect the water and our future generations.

Here are some of the major issues, and reasons to Stop Line 3:
(Click images or titles TO JUMP TO more information BELOW)

<snip>

https://www.stopline3.org/issues/

anthem, lest we forget

Still relevant after all these years.

Let's hear it for ActBlue!

ActBlue, the Democrats’ Not-So-Secret Weapon

By Lisa Lerer

There have been a lot of Democratic winners this election cycle. Many are historic firsts. More than two dozen are veterans. And more than 100 are women.

But all have at least one thing in common: ActBlue.

The online giving platform emerged as the piggy bank of the Democratic resistance in the 2018 midterms, funneling nearly $1.6 billion in contributions to Democratic candidates and causes. That’s more than an 80 percent increase over what it brought in four years ago.

And while ActBlue wasn’t the sole source of small-dollar donors for Democrats, it was certainly a powerful one: The candidates, committees and organizations who used the platform — more than 14,500 of them — paid credit card transaction fees and, in turn, got to outsource their financial collections to tested, easy-to-use software. (The group, a nonprofit, funds its staff of about 100 through donations.)

[...]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/on-politics-actblue-democrats.html

Republican group runs "protect Mueller" ad on Trump's favorite show

Republican group runs “protect Mueller” ad on Trump’s favorite show

Viewers of President Donald Trump’s favorite cable news network were in for a surprise on Wednesday morning. A Republican group aired what amounted to a negative Trump commercial — one that urged viewers to demand that the president’s openly anti-Mueller attorney general recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation.

“We need an attorney general who doesn’t play politics,” the ad’s narrator says, urging viewers to call their members of Congress and “tell them that [acting attorney general Matthew] Whitaker must recuse himself from the Mueller investigation.”

Republicans for the Rule of Law, a political nonprofit, paid for the ad to run in Washington, DC, and New York City during Fox & Friends — a show the president regularly live-tweets.

[...]

https://www.vox.com/2018/11/14/18094886/republicans-for-the-rule-of-law-fox-friends-whitaker-mueller