Donald Trump to Deputy Att Gen: "You're Fired!"

Well the suspense is over.  President Trump just nominated Judge Neil Gorsuch for Supreme Court Justice.  Gorsuch prevailed over the other finalist, Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania, also a federal appeals court judge, and Trump announced the nomination at a televised prime-time event at the White House.  Trump spoke of the dozen or more Supreme Court candidates he submitted to the voters and how he's keeping a promise to his supporters.  Gorsuch clerked for Justices Byron White from the Kennedy administration and a fellow Coloradan, and also Justice Antony Kennedy, who still is serving.  He got his undergraduate at Columbia and then moved on to Harvard.  He said all of the right things when Trump called him up to say a few words.  He’s just 49 years old and if confirmed would be the youngest man serving on the High Court and Trump expressed the hope he’d be serving for fifty years.  He made a good impression but since my TV screen was on the fritz I didn’t see what he looked like.  I know one of the two candidates was tagged “Scelia 2.0” and maybe that applies to Gorsuch.  Trump said that when on the appellate court he was confirmed without a dissenting vote.  My guess is that he’ll have an easy time in confirmation.

Yates was the deputy Attorney General under Obama and she was fired by Trump last night because she announced she wasn’t going to go along with this denial of visas coming in this country.  She was a 27 year veteran of the justice department.  So this amounts to kind of a mini Saturday Night massacre.  In Andrew Johnson’s day this was grounds for impeachment.  What’s to stop Trump from firing anybody in the Pentagon whom he disagrees with?  The many protests all around the country continue.   Trump’s Supreme Court nominee is narrowed down to two people in the media and Trump has says he’ll be strong on the second amendment and that fundamentalist Christians will love him.  That was never in doubt for a moment. 

Steve Muninchin has possible foreign conflicts in the Cayman islands and elsewhere and Democrats are now saying that he wasn’t sufficiently queeried on this when he was up for confirmation.  He’s up for Secretary of the Treasury and that’s a pretty important post.  I can’t think of a single person up for a cabinet post in the Trump administration that I would vote for at this point.  Certainly this guy is a prime candidate not to confirm.  Steve Mininchin is the guy known as the Forclosure King throwing veterans out of their homes.  The democrats have tried a new, dirty tactic involving denial of the Republicans as a quarum to even legally have a meeting under Robert’s Rules of order.  If it works I guess they are “making a statement”, but still I’d give a lot of thought to just how low they want to go in the way of “dirty tricks” if they don’t want them used on Democrats in the future.  I tried to download the article but ran into technical complications. 

President Trump scrapped plans on Tuesday to sign an executive action launching a government-wide cybersecurity overhaul. The White House did not immediately provide an explanation for the cancellation.  So far Trump hasn’t done anything to sabotage net neutrality but I think this is coming.  On the other hand maybe he’s just being smart for once and not issuing any half baked executive orders that aren’t well thought out. 

The term “extreme vetting” takes on a different meaning when you’re a Romulan on Sirius A and they would joke about “extreme vetting” but I was later told that the Romulans didn’t engage in “extreme vetting” but in fact this is an Orion Federation turn and it’s what they do there to inflict pain on various portions of the body to elicit information- - - basically though of applicants for some highly elite ‘special forces” operation and may even have the ‘heat box” they had on “Dune” where you’d be sure that your hand was fried off but it’s done by “nerve induction” or whatever.  The Federation are great at messing around with people’s brains. 

Just a reminder.  If you’re going to write your congressman use a hand written postcard.  Anything hand written gets more attention than a typed letter because they know it isn’t spam, and postcards get past security because after that Anthrax scare of the fall of 2001 they’re still diverting letters for examination lest something with anthrax get through.  

The Trump administration is caught lying again.  A far larger number of people were denied entry into the United States than President Trump initially said after defending his executive order on refugees, Department of Homeland Security officials acknowledged on Tuesday.  Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that only 109 people were denied boarding on planes to the United States after his order, but during a news briefing at theCustoms and Border Protection agency’s headquarters on Tuesday, officials said that 721 people had been denied boarding for the United States after it began enforcing the travel ban.  Homeland security officials said the White House was referring to the number of people denied boarding during the initial hours after the travel ban was signed when people were in transit to the United States, based on preliminary calculations.  The officials also disclosed that 872 refugees were granted waivers to enter the country, despite Mr. Trump’s executive order freezing resettlement. Customs officials said the waivers were granted because the refugees were “ready to travel.” They had already been vetted by the government, they said.  John F. Kelly, the secretary of homeland security, said that Mr. Trump’s order did not amount to a “travel ban,” adding, “This is a temporary pause that allows us to better review the existing refugee and visa vetting system.”  But Mr. Kelly also confirmed that, while he saw versions of the executive order, he did not see the final order before it was signed by the president.