Situational Ethics, Case 1,999

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Trump has no problem endlessly insulting Canada over milk prices but he’s afraid to gripe about Saudia Arabia dismembering a journalist. Acosta is lucky they only tore up his press pass.

Trump makes up lies about NATO but denies the truth about a Saudi terrorist dictator who murdered a journalist.

Putin takes over Interpol. Traitor Trump again bows to his boss.

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38 thoughts on “Situational Ethics, Case 1,999”

  1. and don’t forget he wanted to hang and quarter Hillary over the same misdeed his Ivanka committed.

    see NY Times articles reporting as to Ivanka
    President Trump, who campaigned in 2016 by aggressively criticizing Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, dismissed as “fake news” on Tuesday questions about a similar practice by his daughter Ivanka Trump during her early days working in the White House. 
    A White House review showed that Ms. Trump sent dozens of government-related emails to and from a private account, and hundreds related to her West Wing schedule, in the first half of 2017.
    The review promptly caught the attention of House lawmakers. Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who is expected to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform next year, said on Tuesday he planned to investigate the matter, and the outgoing chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina, asked for details about the review’s findings.
     

    and as to Hillary:
    President Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
    The lawyer, Donald F. McGahn II, rebuffed the president, saying that he had no authority to order a prosecution. Mr. McGahn said that while he could request an investigation, that too could prompt accusations of abuse of power. To underscore his point, Mr. McGahn had White House lawyers write a memo for Mr. Trump warning that if he asked law enforcement to investigate his rivals, he could face a range of consequences, including possible impeachment.

  3. Patd, the idea that somehow a private account on a public email platform is a better thing than a private email on a private server. Neither compiles with records preservation requirements and I’d venture to say that the private server was more secure than ivankas private email – I understand it was a gmail account. If that is true I can tell you from the volume of unsolicited emails I get on my gmail account the threat to hacking it is very high.

  5. Regardless of which email provider you use every email you send resides in either a huge dedicated server or cloud based storage and on the device that the email was sent from and the one that received it.  Our IT guys tell me that the encrypted email storage in the cloud is safe – relatively speaking – and I suspect that same is true of any encrpted storage.  Not so sure about phones, etc.  If some enterprising youngster with a scanner can suck info off my credit card magstripe, I suspect there are ways to get info off my phone. Of course I’d guess the VA and Equifax IT guys thought their data was secure, too.

  6. craig, you might want to rephrase the next to last line in thread.  last line is still accurate though.

     

    from the guardian:  Interpol elects South Korean as its president, in blow to Russia

     
    South Korea’s Kim Jong-yang has been elected as Interpol’s next president, edging out a longtime veteran of Russia’s security services who was strongly opposed by the US, Britain and other European nations.
     
    The White House and its European partners had lobbied against Alexander Prokopchuk’s attempts to be named the next president of the international police body, saying his election would lead to further Russian abuses of Interpol’s “red notice” system to go after political opponents.
     
    Prokopchuk is a general in the Russian interior ministry and serves as an Interpol vice-president.
     
    Interpol’s 94 member states chose Kim at a meeting of their annual congress in Dubai. He will serve until 2020, completing the four-year mandate of his predecessor Meng Hongwei who went missing in his native China in September. Beijing later said Meng resigned after being charged with accepting bribes.
    […]

    On Tuesday, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, threw his weight behind Kim, who is the acting president of the global police body. “We encourage all nations and organisations that are part of Interpol and that respect the rule of law to choose a leader with integrity. We believe Mr Kim will be just that,” Pompeo told reporters.

    […]
    British officials made it clear that they were backing Kim, and expressed alarm at the prospect of Prokopchuk taking over. Lithuania’s parliament voted unanimously on Tuesday to consider leaving Interpol if Prokopchuk had won the vote.
     
    Prokopchuk will continue in his role as Interpol vice-president, the Russian interior ministry said. “As before, his work will focus on strengthening the position of Interpol in the international police community and increasing the efficiency of the organisation’s work,” spokeswoman Irina Volk said.
     
    Interpol’s president chairs its general assembly while day-to-day operations are handled by the organisation’s secretary general, Jürgen Stock.
    […continues…]

  7. According to Trump it is okay for a country to slice and dice a journalist for the sake of oil.  There is currently a glut of oil on the market and we get a great deal more of it from Canada than we do from SA.

    Just in case something upsets Trudeau, it might be best for reporters to stay away from Alberta for awhile.

     

  9. Poobah, he’d call for their heads.

    Looking at the paper Dana Milbank is calling for Nancy to announce her retirement.  I’m not boarding that train yet.  13 of the insurgent signatories pledging to vote against her are white males.  Look, I’m a white male and just over a decade younger than Nancy and I support her as speaker, but at some point she will retire.  I’m not sure now is the time – after all, I am struck by the fact that 3/4 of the insurgent signatories are either white men or from safe districts, or both.  Funny insurgents.  Are we sure we’re talking about the Dem party? Oh, right – if it was repubs it would be >90%.  But I digress.  Under Nancy the Dems lost 63 seats in 2010, gained 8 in 2012, lost 13 in 2014, and have gained about 45 in 2016 & 2018 (we won’t know for a couple more days what the final count is) under the same Dem House leadership that saw the 63 point loss in 2010.  From a power perspective I’d say she (and Steny & Jim) is (are?) doing well.  2020 will be critical, and no one has shown they can muster the fundraising and message discipline she has shown.  Maybe wait until then to announce her retirement – if she and the party are ready for that, but absent another disaster (like in 2010) it won’t be me telling Nancy what to do with her life.

  11. pogo, six of those signees are over sixty.  there are 5 signees who went to hahvahd .    not a picture here of new ideas.  mostly like an east vs west plus male vs female  [btw, my count was 14 men]

  13. This is what I was talking about other day – Court is primed to repudiate Trump (and Ruth in there pumping):

    After Trump blamed an “Obama judge” for temporarily halting his asylum ban yesterday, Roberts issued a statement to the AP saying that the U.S. doesn’t have “Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”

  15. It is raining here — we are very thankful.  Bad air gone for a while and we can have heat –fire in the wood stove

  16. Poobah, Roberts’ words are nice and all, but I give a shit about what SCOTUS does with its opinions.  If they vote along party (ok, ideological) lines, all the repudiation in the world does little but give them cover.  It is nice to see Roberts supporting the judges in the lower courts, though.

  18. There are some 56k new homeless people in Butte County and there is nowhere for them to go,  I think focusing the stories on the missing list is all wrong.  They should be focusing on all the people who have no place to go and have nothing.   In SR last year the missing list was long right after the fire but was cut to about 90% by the end of the searches.

    There is a group of Californians that think state utilities would be a better policy at this point.

     

  22. I’d like to translate Ms Hyde White’s apology

    The only people who are offended are people who wouldn’t vote for me in the first place

  23. Well he’s there for life so we can only hope he has some sort of transformative moment – RBG do your stuff

     

  24. What good is the executive privilege tradition, when you have an executive who hates and defies tradition ?

    Lock ’em ALL up.

  26. usatoday:
    Special counsel Robert Mueller on Wednesday urged a judge to deny a request from a former Trump campaign adviser to delay the commencement of his jail sentence, which is scheduled to begin Monday.
    George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI about his Russian contacts while working for the Trump campaign in 2016. In September, he was sentenced to two weeks in jail, a year of supervised release, 200 hours of community service and a $9,500 fine. His sentence was scheduled to begin Nov. 26.
    Papdopoulos is the first former Trump aide to be sentenced in Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
    Papadopoulos’ lawyers filed a motion on Friday asking a judge to allow their client to stay out of jail until a ruling is handed down in another case, which is challenging the constitutionality of Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. They said for Papadopoulos to “serve a sentence for a conviction that may be void, would be unjust.”

    Some of the arguments made in the case arguing Mueller’s appointment was unconstitutional echo those made challenging President Donald Trump’s selection of acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. They say the process that gave Mueller his authority violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution and that his powers make him a “principal officer” requiring Senate confirmation.
    Mueller’s team argued Papadopoulos has no appeal pending and that the deadline to file one expired on Sept. 25. They also said his lawyers’ point about waiting on the case challenging Mueller’s appointment didn’t wash because a court issued an opinion on the matter in August. They said his “newly raised argument has long been available to him.”
    [,,,continues…]

  27. At the risk of overblowing this the fact that Roberts issued that in a written statement, not some sort of off the cup response to a question, suggests to me that he probably consulted with other justices, if not all of them. I just don’t think he would have done that if even one strongly opposed it. That’s how those folks operate, especially a chief justice. I view this as a powerful signal to Trump to stand down before it’s too late, although we can all be sure he will ignore it. In the end, which is coming, perhaps Trump’s most consequential mistake has been his ignorant dismissal of the judicial system.

    In other words, this is the court trying to tell him, “Shut the fuck up”, or we will do it for you.

  28. one less, 15 more to go

    wapo:
    A House Democrat who signed a letter this week declaring his opposition to Rep. Nancy Pelosi as speaker reversed course Wednesday and said he would support her as Democrats enter the majority next year.
     
    Rep. Brian Higgins of New York said he had changed his mind after securing an “agreement in principle” that Democrats would undertake a “serious good faith effort” to advance legislation lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 50 as well as a trillion-dollar infrastructure blitz.
     
    Until Wednesday, Higgins had been an outspoken critic of Pelosi, telling reporters that she represented a serious obstacle for Democrats running in Republican-leaning districts. But he said in an interview Wednesday that he had come to terms after discussions with Pelosi as well as with Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), the incoming chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
    “There’s no alternative right now and there’s not going to be one,” he said. “And in the event this breaks down on the floor, somebody could grab the speakership that really doesn’t deserve it.”
     
    In a statement, Pelosi praised Higgins as “an extraordinary leader on the issue of achieving quality, affordable health care for all Americans” and said his proposal to allow Americans as young as 50 to “buy in” to Medicare is “central to this debate, as we work to build on the Affordable Care Act.”
    […continues…]

  29. In other words, this is the court trying to tell him, “Shut the fuck up”, or we will do it for you.

    I strongly approve of this message…

  31. Poobah, the Obamacare and Obergefell decisions are a good point to make re: Roberts.  I think he’s the swing vote on the court to the extent there is one.  So far this newly hardened court hasn’t had a chance to weigh in on a serious policy challenge to trump.  That day will come soon enough and we’ll see how the chips fall.

  32. My favorite thing about Thanksgiving is gravy and everything you can put it on and that includes mashed potatoes.  I don’t really care for yams or sweet potatoes.    I don’t like pumpkin pie or any other squash dishes either.

  33. Pogo, I can see the court conservatives, mostly country clubbers, disgusted by Trump, who is hardly one of them (including Kavanaugh) and Ruth exploiting that to full advantage. Reckoning day is coming. Unlike Republicans in Congress they have no reason to fear Trump’s deplorables.

  36. Ms Cracker,

    I agree about gravy. It is a great drink, although I usually drink coffee.

    I’ve come to like sweet potatoes as long as they aren’t sweetened. They made great sweet potato dishes in Viet Nam. The blue sweet potatoes of Okinawa are quite good, and allegedly very healthy-making, but they take forever to cook.

    True yams are only available here in the Asian groceries. The yams are as small as 3 lbs and as large as 10 lbs. Yams are all starch as far as I can tell, but they’re probably good as a gravy delivery system

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