Sunday Long Read: Thirty Pieces Of Silver Flair

As Trump's post-White House financial and criminal woes grow, now that he's no longer plopped like a tumor in the Oval Office, the people that work for him are more than happy to share their stories of his gross imposition among the little people of his paper empire. Jessica Sidman at the Washingtonian got a hold of some real doozy stories in this week's Sunday Long Read and the people that gravitated towards Trump are even more awful than he is, it turns out.

Everyone knew Table 72 belonged to the President. The round booth in the middle of the Trump Hotel’s mezzanine was impossible to miss. It didn’t matter how many Congress members were clamoring for a reservation at the steakhouse or whether some tourist tried to slip a manager some cash (which they definitely did). No one sat at Trump’s table except the President, his children, and, occasionally, an approved member of his inner circle like Rudy Giuliani or Mike Pence.

In practical terms, the restaurant wanted to avoid the horror of turning away the leader of the free world if he happened to show up on a whim. But the seat also developed a kind of mystique. Sure, it may now be a relic in an underperforming venue. But for those four epic years, it was a carefully curated prop in the Trump Show.

And when the star appeared, you had to stick to the script. A “Standard Operating Procedure” document, recently obtained by Washingtonian, outlined step by step exactly what to do and what to say anytime Trump dined at BLT Prime, the hotel restaurant.

As soon as Trump was seated, the server had to “discreetly present” a mini bottle of Purell hand sanitizer. (This applied long before Covid, mind you.) Next, cue dialogue: “Good (time of day) Mr. President. Would you like your Diet Coke with or without ice?” the server was instructed to recite. A polished tray with chilled bottles and highball glasses was already prepared for either response. Directions for pouring the soda were detailed in a process no fewer than seven steps long—and illustrated with four photo exhibits. The beverage had to be opened in front of the germophobe commander in chief, “never beforehand.” The server was to hold a longneck-bottle opener by the lower third of the handle in one hand and the Diet Coke, also by the lower third, in the other. Once poured, the drink had to be placed at the President’s right-hand side. “Repeat until POTUS departs.”

Trump always had the same thing: shrimp cocktail, well-done steak, and fries (plus sometimes apple pie or chocolate cake for dessert). Popovers—make it a double for the President—had to be served within two minutes and the crustaceans “immediately.” The manual instructed the server to open mini glass bottles of Heinz ketchup in front of Trump, taking care to ensure he could hear the seal make the “pop” sound.

Garnishes were a no-no. Melania Trump once sent back a Dover sole because it was dressed with parsley and chives, says former executive chef Bill Williamson, who worked at the restaurant until the start of the pandemic. Trump himself never returned a plate, but if he was disappointed, you can bet the complaint would travel down the ranks. Like the time the President questioned why his dining companion had a bigger steak. The restaurant already special-ordered super-sized shrimp just for him and no one else. Next time, they’d better beef up the beef.

“It was the same steak. Both well done. Maybe it was a half ounce bigger or something, I don’t know,” says Williamson, who had previously run the kitchens of DC staples Birch & Barley and the Riggsby. The chef had always prepared a bone-in rib eye or filet mignon for Trump. After Steakgate, he switched to a 40-ounce tomahawk. Trump would never again gripe that he didn’t have the greatest, hugest, most beautiful steak.

One more thing. Don’t forget the snacks. A tray of junk food needed to be available for every Trump visit: Lay’s potato chips (specifically, sour cream and onion), Milky Way, Snickers, Nature Valley Granola Bars, Tic Tacs, gummy bears, Chips Ahoy, Oreos, Nutter Butters, Tootsie Rolls, chocolate-covered raisins, and Pop-Secret.

The whole SOP reads like a pop star’s rider, which is apt for a place that served as center stage for the Trump drama and its entire cast of characters. Now, though, the Washington hotel is in the process of figuring out its next act. In 2019, the Trump Organization started trying to unload it for a reported $500 million—a number that industry pros reportedly balked at even before Covid devastated the hospitality world. Between the pandemic, Trump’s defeat, and the fallout from the US Capitol attack, the hotel’s cachet has plummeted since then. A financial disclosure released at the end of Trump’s presidency shows that the property took a 63-percent hit to its revenue in 2020.

If the hotel is ultimately sold, the new owner would likely start from scratch. And for the people who popped the ketchup and bussed the ungarnished plates, that means their jobs would be done. Well done.

But hey, it was a wild ride while it lasted!

Now veterans of the place are opening up about what it was really like behind the curtains of “America’s Living Room,” where right-wing operatives were treated like celebrities and political power determined the seating chart. If you weren’t in the business of Making America Great Again, well, sweetheart, you quickly learned to fake it. Working for the Trump hotel meant putting on a performance every night—right down to the gummy bears and popcorn.

Imagine this carbuncle on the scrotum of America being the leader of the free world, wolfing down burnt-to-hell steaks and junk food and Diet Coke all the time. Don't feel too bad for the employees though.

 
The upper echelon of hotel management portrayed themselves as true Trump believers, but the majority of those who fed and cleaned up after the right-wing clientele were ambivalent at best. They clocked in because the place paid well. Really well. Michel Rivera, a former bartender at the lobby bar, says he pulled in more than $100,000 a year with tips (at least $30K more than he made at the Hay-Adams). He says it’s the best-paying job he’s had in his 25-year career, with generous health benefits to boot—a comment echoed by many other ex-employees.

“People would literally come up to me and give me $100 bills and be like, ‘You must be the best bartender in the world if you work here!’ ” Rivera says. “A group of three or four guys would come up, have a round of drinks—I could easily sell them over $1,000. You don’t see that at too many bars.” One restaurant manager says she’s never worked anyplace else where guests would so often try to grease her palm “like the old Mafia days,” angling for proximity to power. “I’d have people try to palm me to get closer to someone’s table, if a politician was in, or try to sit at Trump’s table, which is a big no-no,” she says. “I declined, obviously. I would get fired if we moved someone to Trump’s table.”

 

They were there for the money and the fame too, which is exactly why a chief executive of the US owning hotels and restaurants is a bad idea. 

Everyone was in on it.

They always are.

Last Call For The Return Of A Fat Stack Of Tubmans

After Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin made sure that putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 would take no less than twelve years, delaying the 2016 Obama-era decision until at least 2028 for "counterfeit safety reasons" and scrapping a 2019 redesign that was nearly finished, for the sole reason that racist Trump loved racist Andrew Jackson as his favorite president and wanted to keep Jackson on the bill, it seems President Joe Biden has come to fix yet another Trump mess.

President Joe Biden is looking to resume work to redesign the $20 bill to feature abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

“The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Monday.

She added that America's currency should "reflect the history and diversity of our country, and Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that.”

The effort, initiated late in former President Barack Obama’s second term, was backburnered by the Trump administration under former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Mnuchin has said that the delay was due to additional work needed on anti-counterfeiting security features, and that bills with her image on it were not likely to enter circulation before 2028.

A Treasury Department spokesperson confirmed that they are looking at ways to speed up the process but did not specify what those might be. When Mnuchin first announced the delay, he also said that the $10 and $50 bills would be refreshed ahead of the $20 denomination, and that work remains underway.

The redesigned note, on which Tubman would usurp President Andrew Jackson — a slaveowner who would be relegated to the backside of the note — was supposed to roll out in 2020. The timing of the design’s unveiling was initially supposed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which extended voting rights to women.

Jackson, the seventh president, proved to be one of former president Donald Trump’s favorite historical figures. Trump spoke of Jackson often on the 2016 campaign trail, deriding plans replacing him with Tubman as “pure political correctness” and suggested placing Tubman on the $2 bill instead.

The Treasury Department has previously denied that the delay was influenced by political considerations. In 2019 the department’s inspector general agreed to open an investigation into the decision to push back the redesign for several years.

 

I'm not sure how long the project will take, but it was supposed to be done last year. I'm hoping it can done sooner rather than later, especially before Republicans can add a poison pill to must-pass legislation that would kill the project completely.

Still, this is not a top priority, I'd rather have the $1,400 in my pocket today already, but it's something.

Wilbur Runs The Numbers

With all the drunken first year law student frat boy coup idiocy going on, it's important to note a quick reminder from Forbes Magazine's Dan Alexander that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross may actually be the most corrupt member of Trump's Cabinet, and that's actually a singularly amazing feat in the field of massive grifting in a field of massive grifters.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, one of President Trump’s longest-serving cabinet members, has been under investigation for most of his tenure in office, according to a report issued Thursday by the inspector general of the commerce department.

The report both revealed the investigation and published its findings. It concluded that Ross, who has served as commerce secretary since Trump’s first year in office, violated a federal regulation by failing to avoid the appearance of ethical and legal breaches. The report cleared him on other matters, including whether he lied to federal officials and engaged in insider trading.

The probe began in November 2017, after Forbes reported how Ross had been apparently fibbing about his fortune for years. The investigation eventually expanded, following revelations the next year about false ethics filings, conflict-prone meetings and suspiciously timed investments.

Thursday’s report catalogues a litany of inaccurate statements that Ross submitted to federal officials. He did not list all assets on his financial disclosure report. He claimed to have divested things he did not. He described stock distributions that did not happen. He said he sold assets that he actually shorted.

It’s not a crime to unintentionally provide false information to officials—only to intentionally do so. The report does not conclude that Ross knowingly lied.

The inspector general also documented several meetings that don’t look good at first glance. For instance, Ross was supposed to receive advice from ethics lawyers before dealing with issues involving China or energy. But in conversations about gas exports, the commerce secretary ignored that and talked to Chinese officials. Another example: While Ross’ wife owned stock in Boeing, he met with the company’s CEO and asked about subsidies to its rival Airbus. A third one: the commerce secretary met with the CEO of a railcar company even though Ross owned a hidden stake in the business.

The report concludes that the China energy talks violated the regulation meant to curb unethical appearances, while determining that Ross’ actions didn’t have a clear enough effect on his holdings to constitute a violation of the criminal conflicts-of-interest statute. Merely asking the CEO about Airbus, without taking some action related to the conversation, didn’t rise to that level either, according to the report. Nor did the meeting with the railcar CEO, which Ross claimed was “purely social.”

Ignoring the regulatory violations, the commerce secretary struck a triumphant tone. “I am pleased that the inspector general’s report puts to rest any notion that I violated the conflict-of-interest statutes,” Ross said in a statement sent shortly after this story published. “I have always been and will remain committed to adhering to the highest standard of ethics in the discharge of my duties.”

For all the insider trading Sonny Perdue and Kelly Loeffler ae accused of doing, it's Wilbur Ross who got away with enriching himself the most while just barely getting away with it.  I'm sure we're going to find out that between Ross and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that these two got away with billions in fraud while being much smarter than Trump was in the process of making it happen.

Trump will surely pardon the two of them on the way out too, if only to buy their silence.

Banking On Getting Away With It

Jason Leopold and the team at BuzzFeed News give us the "FinCEN Files", a massive collection of documents that show just how pervasive international money laundering by big banks, and the hundreds of billions of dollar that get moved each year by drug cartels, crime lords, and dictators through the global financial network. And under Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, the Trump Regime has made it harder than ever to catch these bad guys -- bad guys including Vladimir Putin.

A huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins.

And the US government, despite its vast powers, fails to stop it.

Today, the FinCEN Files — thousands of “suspicious activity reports” and other US government documents — offer an unprecedented view of global financial corruption, the banks enabling it, and the government agencies that watch as it flourishes. BuzzFeed News has shared these reports with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations in 88 countries.

These documents, compiled by banks, shared with the government, but kept from public view, expose the hollowness of banking safeguards, and the ease with which criminals have exploited them. Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.

Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations — and the banks play a key role. “Some of these people in those crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,” said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.

Laws that were meant to stop financial crime have instead allowed it to flourish. So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, is the agency within the Treasury Department charged with combating money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes. It collects millions of these suspicious activity reports, known as SARs. It makes them available to US law enforcement agencies and other nations’ financial intelligence operations. It even compiles a report called “Kleptocracy Weekly” that summarizes the dealings of foreign leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

What it does not do is force the banks to shut the money laundering down.

In the rare instances when the US government does crack down on banks, it often relies on sweetheart deals called deferred prosecution agreements, which include fines but no high-level arrests. The Trump administration has made it even harder to hold executives personally accountable, under guidance by former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein that warned government agencies against “piling on.”

But the FinCEN Files investigation shows that even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.

Suspicious payments flow around the world and into countless industries, from international sports to Hollywood entertainment to luxury real estate to Nobu sushi restaurants. They filter into the companies that make familiar items from people’s lives, from the gas in their car to the granola in their cereal bowl.

The FinCEN Files expose an underlying truth of the modern era: The networks through which dirty money traverse the world have become vital arteries of the global economy. They enable a shadow financial system so wide-ranging and so unchecked that it has become inextricable from the so-called legitimate economy. Banks with household names have helped to make it so.

And on top of it all is one underlying truth: there is ample evidence to believe that the current occupant of the White House is up to his neck in this mess. 

Stay tuned. There's a lot more here to come.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

Looks like Rudy Giuliani is being hung out to dry as the Trump regime has designated his main source of Ukranian evidence against Joe Biden as a Russian agent.

The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday placed sanctions on a member of Ukraine’s parliament for running an “influence campaign” against former vice president Joe Biden, dubbing the lawmaker “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who has maintained “close connections with Russian intelligence services.”
The sanctions against Andriy Derkach — who in an attempt to tarnish the Democratic nominee for president released pilfered and edited phone conversations that Biden had years ago with Ukraine’s leadership — come less than two months before the 2020 presidential election and mark the most aggressive public action the U.S. government has taken to date to stanch foreign interference ahead of the vote.

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani has met at least three times with Derkach since late last year and publicized the Ukrainian lawmaker’s claims on his podcast and elsewhere, elevating what the Treasury Department has now characterized as a foreign interference campaign by an active Russian agent aimed at influencing the 2020 election. Giuliani met Derkach in Kyiv late last year, just as the House prepared to impeach Trump over a pressure campaign orchestrated by Giuliani to induce the Ukrainian government into announcing probes of Biden. Derkach later visited Giuliani in New York, months before he began releasing the tapes of Biden at news conferences in Kyiv.
Derkach “and other Russian agents employ manipulation and deceit to attempt to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere around the world,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. “The United States will continue to use all the tools at its disposal to counter these Russian disinformation campaigns and uphold the integrity of our election system.”

The Treasury Department said Derkach had “directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.”

“Today’s designation of Derkach is focused on exposing Russian malign influence campaigns and protecting our upcoming elections from foreign interference,” the department said in a statement. “This action is a clear signal to Moscow and its proxies that this activity will not be tolerated.”

Adam Silverman over at Balloon Juice explains the scam.

What the Treasury Department’s press release does not say is who, exactly, Mr. Derkach is partnered with in his activities against the United States as a Russian Intelligence Services officer. We know the answer to that because Derkach and his American accessories have been very up front about their activities. Derkach’s two main partners in his endeavors, which The Department of the Treasury has now stated unequivocally are the endeavors of the Russian Intelligence Services, are Rudy Giuliani and Chanel Rion, the far too credulous reporter from One America News Network (OANN).

Rion has her own issues, which I won’t get into here, but quite simply she is the poster girl for the counterintelligence concept of MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Rudy Giuliani is definitely one of the poster boys for MICE! He’s constantly chasing money to maintain his lavish lifestyle and pay alimony; his ideology has been all over the map for years, but basically comes down to whatever benefits Rudy Giuliani; he’s carried on multiple affairs and tries to keep them secret and he’s constantly chasing shady security consulting contracts in the post-Soviet states and the Middle East, so there’s a lot of compromising information on him out there; and his ego is ginormous!

What the Treasury Department makes clear today in their press release announcing the imposition of sanctions on Derkach, is that both Rudy Giuliani, who is the President’s personal lawyer, and Chanel Rion, who is one of his favorite reporters, have both been compromised by a Russian Intelligence officer and are being used by him to interfere in the 2020 US election to the benefit of Russia. It is important to keep in mind that both Giuliani and Rion most likely believe that they are using Derkach, not being used by Derkach, though the reality is the direction of control runs the other way. The Russians have watched and assessed exactly what bait they needed to use to attract Giuliani and Rion, as well as others like Congressman Nunes and his catspaws Derek Harvey and Kash Patel, the latter of whom is now embroiled in the new DHS whistleblower allegations just as he got himself wrapped up in the Ukraine phone call when Nunes placed him on the National Security Staff during 2019. All of these people are convinced of their own superior intelligence and the righteousness of their cause and they are desperate to be important and be world changing figures, which makes them ripe for manipulation and easy to control.

It also means that the cornerstone of the President’s impeachment defense was supplied by the Russian Intelligence Services via Derkach to and through Giuliani as the President’s pro bono personal lawyer and Rion and her reporting. And which is also being used by Senators Johnson, Grassley, and Graham in their attempts to use their Senate committees to dirty up VP Biden prior to the election.

Rudy Giuliani – America’s Mayor, Mr. a Noun, a Verb, and 9-11, the first name in cybersecurity, coveter of the position of Secretary of State, and the President’s pro bono personal lawyer – is being run as an asset by Andrii Derkach, a US identified Russian Intelligence officer who is overseeing an ongoing, active measures campaign to subvert the 2020 US election to the advantage of Russia in a war that Putin believes Russia has been fighting against the US since at least 2014. Rudy Giuliani has betrayed his country. Rudy Giuliani is currently acting against the United States on behalf of Russia’s Intelligence Services. Rudy Giuliani is a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the United States.

Keep in mind also that this is happening on the same week as 9/11, where Rudy comes out of his gopher hole every year and reminds everyone that he's really famous for being in charge when thousands of people died 19 years ago.

He's also a Russian agent's pawn and active traitor, in a clear plot to interfere with the election, one so obvious that even the Trump regime is putting an end to it.

This should be the absolute end of Trump's camapign and a Biden landslide, but of course it won't be.

We've fallen that far in four years.  We have to climb out in November with Joe Biden, or we're all lost.

The Return Of The Revenge Of The Son Of Shutdown Countdown, Again

Government shutdown happens on September 30, and even in a Presidential election year, the Trump regime may still be incompetent enough to hand Joe Biden a guaranteed victory.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have tentatively agreed to use a short-term spending bill to avoid a government shutdown at the end of September, according to Capitol Hill aides.

The agreement on government funding comes even as the White House and top Democratic officials have been unable to reach a compromise on a new Covid relief package. Pelosi and Mnuchin spoke for more than 30 minutes earlier this week but remain hundreds of billions of dollars apart on additional stimulus efforts to help the slumping U.S. economy.

Yet separating the issue of government funding from coronavirus relief talks removes at least one nightmare scenario from the political landscape two months before Election Day — a stalemate on more economic stimulus coupled with federal agencies shut down and vital services halted in the middle of a pandemic.

“House Democrats are for a clean continuing resolution," Drew Hammill, deputy chief of staff for Pelosi, said in a statement.

Mnuchin may be confident, but I smell trouble in the Senate.

There is no consensus for how long the stopgap would extend government funding past Sept. 30, Hill aides said. House and Senate Democratic leaders haven't formally discussed the issue yet, although a mid-December deadline would be the traditional practice during an election year.

The Senate returns to session next week, while the House is not back from its summer recess until midmonth. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other top Senate Republicans are trying to gather support for a narrow coronavirus relief package that can get at least 51 GOP votes. Democrats will oppose the plan, so it's unlikely to get the 60 votes needed to advance.

The new Senate Republican proposal — costing as much as $1 trillion — is expected to include $300 in weekly federal unemployment benefits through the end of December, another round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses, $105 billion for education, and liability protections for companies, schools and health care providers amid the pandemic, according to a draft proposal. The bill would also provide billions to the U.S. Postal Service by converting an existing loan into a grant. The House has passed legislation calling for $25 billion in new funding for the Postal Service, but the White House has supported only $10 billion.

This territory is ripe for a Rand Paul special, or maybe even a Lindsey Graham special if the polls are any indication.  I just don't see a continuing resolution pass without something going wrong thanks to the Senate GOP, Mitch's election and Trump's both be damned.

And hey, Trump could just blow everything up himself.

Might want to pull up a chair for this one.

Last Call For Mitch Quits On A Deal

The Senate has adjourned for August recess with no deal.

The Senate left Washington, D.C., on Thursday until September — the latest sign that a deal on a fifth coronavirus relief package is, at least, weeks away.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had kept the chamber in session this week, which was technically the first in its August recess, as a last-ditch attempt to create space for the administration and congressional Democrats to get an agreement.

But with talks stalemated, senators argue there is little reason for them to keep holding daily, roughly 1 1/2-hour sessions. The House already left town and isn't expected to return until Sept. 14.

“We will have our regular pro forma meetings through the end of the state work period. If the Speaker of the House and the minority leader of the Senate decide to finally let another package move forward … it would take bipartisan consent to meet for legislative business sooner than scheduled,” McConnell said as he wrapped up the Senate until next month.

McConnell added that he hoped the Senate would be able to “act sometime soon.”

Senators will get at least 24 hours notice to return if congressional Democrats, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows are able to break the impasse and votes are scheduled. Otherwise, the Senate will formally reconvene on Sept. 8.

The House passed the HEROES Act three months ago.  The Senate GOP has blocked everything since then. This is one hundred percent the GOP's fault. They can't even pass a bill with their own majority caucus.  Nancy Pelosi is running the show and Senate Republicans, facing angry voters, will crack.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that the high-stakes talks between the White House and Democrats on coronavirus relief will resume only when Republicans come to the table with at least $2 trillion.
"When they're ready to do that, we'll sit down," Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol.

The comments foreshadow a rocky road ahead as the parties haggle over a fifth round of emergency relief designed to address the health needs and economic devastation caused by the pandemic, which has hit the United States harder than any other country.

Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) had huddled with the White House negotiators — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and chief of staff Mark Meadows — for a full two weeks when the talks broke down last Friday.

Quite aside from specific policy prescriptions, the sides have not yet agreed to the overall size of the next aid package.

Pelosi and House Democrats had passed a $3.4 trillion relief bill in May, while Senate Republicans responded late last month with a $1.1 trillion counterproposal.

The Democrats last week had offered to meet in the middle — somewhere in the $2 trillion range — but the Republicans refused the offer, ending the talks indefinitely.

Things are going to change rapidly for the GOP when the polls start showing them losing by double digits, would be my guess. 

Indepen-Dunce Week: Follow The Money

The two-thirds of a trillion or so in Trump regime "small business loans" that I told you was going to turn into massive corporate graft, sleaze, and outright theft was even worse than anyone could have known and in tens of thousands of cases not a single job was saved as they took the money and ran.

Data released Monday by the Small Business Administration show that businesses owned by members of Congress and the law practice that represented President Trump were among the hundreds of thousands of firms that received aid from the agency.

As part of its $660 billion small business relief program, the SBA also handed out loans to private schools catering to elite clientele, firms owned by foreign companies and large chains backed by well-heeled Wall Street firms. Nearly 90,000 companies in the program took the aid without promising on their applications they would rehire workers or create jobs.
The data, which was released after weeks of pressure from media outlets and lawmakers, paints a picture of a haphazard first-come, first-serve program that was not designed to evaluate the relative need of the recipients. While it buttressed a swath of industries and entities, including restaurants, medical offices, car dealerships, law firms and nonprofits, the agency did not filter out companies that have potential conflicts of interest among influential Washington figures.

Several major chains owned by big investment firms, including PF Changs, Legal Sea Foods, and Silver Diner, received millions of dollars, which may rekindle questions about whether large companies with Wall Street connections should accept the money or not. Over the past weeks, dozens of publicly traded companies returned money after they were told by the Treasury Department that the program was not meant for large, well-capitalized companies.
Companies applying for the money were required to certify that the money was “necessary to support the ongoing operations,” while taking into account “their ability to access other sources of liquidity," the SBA’s website states.

Treasury and SBA spokespersons declined to comment. Other administration officials declined to speak on the record about the data.

“We think we’ve done a reasonably good job of suggesting that those who were not going to be able to meet the certification should have returned money,” said one senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to follow the administration’s rules for releasing the information.

And of course, members of Congress outright looted the Treasury, nearly all of them Republicans.

Among some of those receiving relief were Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s family’s shipping business. In addition, at least seven members of Congress or their spouses received loans, including lawmakers who were directly involved in shaping regulations and also benefited from a blanket waiver of ethics concerns.

Among the loan recipients disclosed is KTAK Corporation, a Tulsa-based operator of fast food franchises owned by Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.). Hern had advocated to increase the size of loans available to franchises, including in a March letter to Senate leaders Mitch McConnell and Charles E. Schumer.
KTAK reported receiving between $1 million and $2 million to support 220 jobs. Hern spokeswoman Miranda Dabney said the letter was “a bipartisan idea meant to simplify the way loans were calculated,” and said the franchise rule that Hern advocated for did not benefit KTAK because it employs fewer than 500 people.

“These PPP loans are all about paying employees so any expansion or increased funding measures were aimed at helping employees of franchisees stay employed,” Dabney said. “The whole program was designed to keep people off of unemployment.”

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) benefited when three of his car dealerships, located outside of Pittsburgh, received a combined total of between $450,000 and $1.05 million to retain 97 jobs, according to the data.
Kelly is not involved in the day-to-day operations of his auto dealerships, said spokesman Andrew Eisenberger, and did not participate in discussions between the dealerships and the PPP lender. 

“Kelly’s small family business employs more than 200 western Pennsylvanians whose jobs were at risk because of [Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s] business shut down order,” Eisenberger said.

Several plumbing businesses affiliated with Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), all based in Broken Arrow, Okla., each received between $350,000 and $1 million. A spokeswoman said Rep. Mullin is not involved in the day-to-day operation of his businesses.

The rich took the cash, fired employees anyway, and pocketed hundreds of billions.

"But Zandar, they have to pay it back, right?"


Sure, they pull accounting tricks and write off losses.


Meanwhile, tens of millions of us lost jobs and the rent's due.

Retribution Execution, Con't

As the Trump regime continues to eliminate federal inspectors general and replace them with loyalists who will do nothing as far as oversight, the last bastion of the IG community is warning that the two trillion dollars in CARES funds being spent by the regime is ripe for massive abuse by Trump and his cronies.

The Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to block oversight of its coronavirus-related rescue programs are raising new alarms with government watchdogs and lawmakers from both parties amid concerns about the anonymity of companies receiving unprecedented levels of taxpayer funds.

Government watchdogs warned members of Congress last week that previously unknown Trump administration legal decisions could substantially block their ability to oversee more than $1 trillion in spending related to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a letter to four congressional committee chairs Thursday, two officials in charge of a new government watchdog entity revealed that the Trump administration had issued legal rulings curtailing independent oversight of Cares Act funding.
The letter surfaced amid growing bipartisan frustration over the administration’s decision not to disclose how it is spending hundreds of billions in aid for businesses. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appeared to bow to that pressure, saying he would work with Congress on new oversight measures. But some Democrats have said the White House is not taking disclosure requests seriously enough.

“They seem to be saying one thing while doing exactly the opposite,” said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee. “If the Trump administration is committed to full cooperation and transparency with taxpayer dollars, it is unclear why it is manufacturing legal loopholes to avoid responding to legitimate oversight requests.”

According to the previously undisclosed letter, Treasury Department attorneys concluded that the administration is not required to provide the watchdogs with information about the beneficiaries of programs created by the Cares Act’s “Division A.” That section includes some of the most controversial and expensive programs in the coronavirus response efforts, including the administration’s massive bailout for small businesses and nearly $500 billion in loans for corporations.

Mnuchin surprised many lawmakers last week when he announced he would not allow the names of Paycheck Protection Program recipients to become public after the Trump administration had said for months that the data would eventually be disclosed. 

The letter from the inspectors general and Mnuchin’s insistence that the PPP data will not be released come after the White House has repeatedly rebuffed efforts to scrutinize where the taxpayer funding is going.

In their letter, the inspectors general leading the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), an independent panel created to oversee implementation of the Cares Act, expressed concern about the administration’s legal opinions and their impact on oversight.

“If this interpretation of the CARES Act were correct, it would raise questions about PRAC’s authority to conduct oversight of Division A funds,” Michael E. Horowitz and Robert Westbrooks, the acting chair and executive director of the PRAC, said in a letter obtained by The Washington Post. “This would present potentially significant transparency and oversight issues because Division A of the CARES Act includes over $1 trillion in funding.”

Again, the inspectors general council is flat-out saying "Hey, the Trump regime refuses to let us monitor 12 digits worth of cash here, guys."

When we find out Trump and his gang stole the money, don't say you weren't warned.

Last Call For Mnuchin's Lootin' And Scootin'

So where's the accountability on the two-thirds of a trillion dollars of Treasury Department CARES/PPP loans? We'll never have it, and you're an awful person for asking, because Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin says nobody in America needs to know who got what.

Federal officials responsible for spending $660 billion in taxpayer-backed small-business assistance said Wednesday that they will not disclose amounts or recipients of subsidized loans, backtracking on an earlier commitment to release individual loan data.

The Small Business Administration has previously released detailed loan information dating to 1991 for the federal 7(a) program, a long-standing small-business loan program on which the larger Paycheck Protection Program is based.

The SBA initially intended to publish similar information for the new coronavirus-related loans. An SBA spokesman told The Washington Post in an April 16 email that the agency “intend[s] to post individual loan data in accordance with the information presently on the SBA.gov website after the loan process has been completed,” and it made a similar commitment in response to an April 17 open records request.

But the administration appeared to change course at a hearing Wednesday before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza declined to discuss specific borrowers.

“As it relates to the names and amounts of specific PPP loans, we believe that that’s proprietary information, and in many cases for sole proprietors and small businesses, it is confidential information,” Mnuchin said in the hearing. “The reason why we’re not disclosing the names and amounts, unlike in the 7(a) program, is because of that issue.”

The Post is among 11 news organizations suing the SBA for access to records on loan recipients, amounts of loans and other basic information the agency has previously released. In response to questions from The Post on Wednesday, a Treasury Department spokesman said that disclosing “loan-level data” would risk the confidential business information of loan recipients.

So this will be tied up in the courts for years most likely, and while there's a chance we may know, the Trump regime will simply run out the clock by running to SCOTUS.  The only way we'll ever find out is if Joe Biden wins in November.

Keep that in mind.  Otherwise, the Trumpies get away with literally stealing hundreds of billions of dollars.

Last Call For Going Postal, Con't

The White House is making its move to "save" the US Postal Service by amputating its limbs for a infected, festering wound that Republicans inflicted on it a decade ago. 

The Treasury Department is considering taking unprecedented control over key operations of the U.S. Postal Service by imposing tough terms on an emergency coronavirus loan from Congress, which would fulfill President Trump’s longtime goal of changing how the service does business, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Officials working under Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who must approve the $10 billion loan, have told senior officials at the USPS in recent weeks that he could use the loan as leverage to give the administration influence over how much the agency charges for delivering packages and how it manages its finances, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are preliminary.

Trump has railed for years against what he sees as mismanagement at the Postal Service, which he argues has been exploited by e-commerce sites such as Amazon, and has sought to change how much the agency charges for the delivery of packages. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Under the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus relief passed last month, the Treasury was authorized to loan $10 billion to the USPS, which says it may not be able to make payroll and continue mail service uninterrupted past September. Mnuchin rejected a bipartisan Senate proposal to give the Postal Service a bailout amid the negotiations over that legislation, a senior Trump administration official and a congressional official previously told The Post.

The borrowing terms have only been discussed among both agencies’ leadership and have not been made public because the Postal Service hasn’t officially requested the loan, the two people familiar with the matter said. Mnuchin could still decide not to pursue tough terms as the September deadline nears. The Postal Service would not have to use the entire $10 billion loan at one time, but could borrow up to that amount at any given time.

In discussions with senior USPS personnel, Treasury officials have said they are interested in raising rates on the Postal Service’s lucrative package business, its sole area of profitability in recent years. Treasury also could review all large postal contracts with package companies to push for greater margins on deliveries.

Treasury officials have said they may press the agency to demand tougher concessions from its powerful postal unions — among the public-sector unions that still retain significant leverage in negotiations with the government.

The officials have also said Mnuchin wants the authority to review hiring decisions at the agency’s senior levels, including the selection of the next postmaster general, a decision that until now has been left to the Postal Service’s five-member board of governors.

USPS spokesman David Partenheimer confirmed in an email that the agency and Treasury have begun “preliminary discussions” over the loan, but that the Treasury had not yet asked “to impose any of those conditions on that borrowing authority.” He declined to say whether these or any other terms were under discussion.

In 2006, Republicans rammed through the Postal Accountability and Enhacement Act, which mandated that unlike any other US corporation, the US Post Office was required to pre-fund all employee retiree benefits for 50 years.

The law requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056. This is a $5 billion per year cost; it is a requirement that no other entity, private or public, has to make. If that doesn’t meet the definition of insanity, I don’t know what does. Without this obligation, the Post Office actually turns a profit. Some have called this a “manufactured crisis.” It’s also significant that lots of companies benefit from a burden that makes the USPS less competitive; these same companies might also would benefit from full USPS privatization, a goal that has been pushed by several conservative think tanks for years.

Trump's plan is Hostage-Taking 101: either the House and Senate pass legislation to put the USPS under the control of the Treasury Department, or Trump stands by and watches the postal system fail. The collapse of the postal service would hurt Trump's voters the most, but so did Chinese and EU tariffs and they still love him for it.

We'll see very quickly if Trump is this deranged, and betting against "Trump being willing to go this far" never ends well.

Egghead Week: Check Out, The Name

To recap, Donald Trump's malignant, clinical narcissism is so completely pervasive that tens of millions of CARES Act COVID-19 relief checks will be delayed so that Treasury can print his fucking name on them.

I'm sorry.  This makes me livid.  The entire regime makes me livid, but this is just so completely idiotic, and not a Republican dares to say a word, mind you, that the whole lot of them need to be fired into the sun.

The unprecedented decision, finalized late Monday, means that when recipients open the $1,200 paper checks the IRS is scheduled to begin sending to 70 million Americans in coming days, “President Donald J. Trump” will appear on the left side of the payment.

It will be the first time a president’s name appears on an IRS disbursement, whether a routine refund or one of the handful of checks the government has issued to taxpayers in recent decades either to stimulate a down economy or share the dividends of a strong one.

Treasury officials disputed that the checks would be delayed.

While some people receiving the checks — the centerpiece of the U.S. government’s economic relief package to stave of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic — may not care, or observe, whose name appears on them, the decision is another sign of Trump’s effort to cast his response to the pandemic in political terms.

Trump had privately suggested to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who oversees the IRS, to allow the president to formally sign the checks, according to three administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

But the president is not an authorized signer for legal disbursements by the U.S. Treasury. It is standard practice for a civil servant to sign checks issued by the Treasury Department to ensure that government payments are nonpartisan.

And let's not forget, people won't be getting these checks in some cases until August or even September, because Trump is an absolute sack of garbage.  Oh, and if you owe your bank money?  They can take all of it.

Congress did not exempt CARES Act payments from private debt collection, and the Treasury Department has been reluctant to exempt them through its rulemaking authority. This means that individuals could see their payments transferred from their hands into the hands of their creditors, potentially leaving them with nothing.

Banks would be first in line to grab the payments to offset a delinquent loan or past-due fees. Even if the individual thinks their account with that bank is closed, if the payments post there, the bank could conceivably use them to cover old debts.

The Treasury Department effectively blessed this activity on a webinar with banking officials last week. In audio obtained by the Prospect, Ronda Kent, chief disbursing officer with Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, can be heard explaining that banks had posed questions to her about “whether these payments could be subject to collection from the bank to which the money is deposited, if the payee owes an outstanding loan or other payments to the bank.” She responded—twice—that “there’s nothing in the law that precludes that action,” while counseling that the banks’ compliance officers should consult with their legal offices about what policies their banks will implement. “You will want to know for your bank what your bank has decided to do,” Kent said.

Zandardad taught me that everyone is capable of good, because we're all human and all given free will.  But man, Donald Trump tests that theory daily. And you know what?  Trump isn't the only monster in the GOP.  Far from it.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

And immediately after singing the COVID-19 bill into law yesterday, Donald Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr made it clear that the regime considers that the oversight provisions Congress put into the law are pretty much null and void and that Trump would fight any attempts at oversight of that $500 billion corporate slush fund.

In a signing statement released hours after Mr. Trump signed the bill in a televised ceremony in the Oval Office, the president suggested he had the power to decide what information a newly created inspector general intended to monitor the fund could share with Congress.

Under the law, the inspector general, when auditing loans and investments made through the fund, has the power to demand information from the Treasury Department and other executive branch agencies. The law requires reporting to Congress “without delay” if any agency balks and its refusal is unreasonable “in the judgment of the special inspector general.”
Democrats blocked a final agreement on the package this week as they insisted on stronger oversight provisions to ensure that the president and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin could not abuse the bailout fund. They feared that Mr. Trump, who has previously stonewalled congressional oversight, would do the same when it came to the corporate aid program.

But in his statement, which the White House made public about two hours after the president signed the bill, Mr. Trump suggested that under his own understanding of his constitutional powers as president, he can gag the special inspector general for pandemic recovery, known by the acronym S.I.G.P.R., and keep information from Congress.

“I do not understand, and my administration will not treat, this provision as permitting the S.I.G.P.R. to issue reports to the Congress without the presidential supervision required” by a clause of the Constitution that instructs the president to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, the statement said.

Mr. Trump has a history of trying to keep damaging information acquired by an inspector general from reaching Congress.

The impeachment scandal began with the disclosure that a whistle-blower had filed a report about something that the intelligence community’s inspector general deemed to be an “urgent concern.” A federal law states that the director of national intelligence should send Congress such a complaint within seven days.

But the Trump administration decided it could lawfully withhold that report from lawmakers. It eventually reversed course under political pressure, bringing to light that an intelligence official had raised alarms about Mr. Trump withholding congressionally mandated military assistance to Ukraine to coerce that country’s government into announcing investigations that would give Mr. Trump personal political benefits.

The signing statement also challenged several other provisions in the bill, including one requiring consultation with Congress about who should be the staff leaders of a newly formed executive branch committee charged with conducting oversight of the government’s response to the pandemic.

Citing his understanding of his power to supervise executive branch staff positions, Mr. Trump said he would not interpret that as mandatory although he anticipated that they would be consulted anyway.

Mr. Trump’s legal team is led by Attorney General William P. Barr, who is known for his embrace of a maximalist interpretation of presidential power, including the so-called unitary executive theory. Under that doctrine, laws that bestow independent decision-making authority on subordinate executive branch officials are unconstitutional because the president wields total control over deciding how to exercise executive power over the government.

And again, House Democrats have not shown any indication of wanting a big Supreme Court fight over Trump ignoring the Constitution that they know they would almost certainly lose 5-4.

So yeah, the failed impeachment attempt earlier this year means Nancy Pelosi got played on this.  Trump will have Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin pick the winners and loser businesses that this half-trillion dollars is supposed to save, but they will all be Trump donors.

Those who didn't play ball with Trump's grift and graft before government public health closures?

They will not be spared.

Last Call For Trump's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Meanwhile, Chinese-Americans are now being openly assaulted thanks to the Racist-in-Chief.

Yuanyuan Zhu was walking to her gym in San Francisco on March 9, thinking the workout could be her last for a while, when she noticed that a man was shouting at her. He was yelling an expletive about China. Then a bus passed, she recalled, and he screamed after it, “Run them over.”

She tried to keep her distance, but when the light changed, she was stuck waiting with him at the crosswalk. She could feel him staring at her. And then, suddenly, she felt it: his saliva hitting her face and her favorite sweater.

In shock, Ms. Zhu, who is 26 and moved to the United States from China five years ago, hurried the rest of the way to the gym. She found a corner where no one could see her, and she cried quietly.

“That person didn’t look strange or angry or anything, you know?” she said of her tormentor. “He just looked like a normal person.”

As the coronavirus upends American life, Chinese-Americans face a double threat. Not only are they grappling like everyone else with how to avoid the virus itself, they are also contending with growing racism in the form of verbal and physical attacks. Other Asian-Americans — with families from Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar and other places — are facing threats, too, lumped together with Chinese-Americans by a bigotry that does not know the difference.

In interviews over the past week, nearly two dozen Asian-Americans across the country said they were afraid — to go grocery shopping, to travel alone on subways or buses, to let their children go outside. Many described being yelled at in public — a sudden spasm of hate that is reminiscent of the kind faced by American Muslims and other Arabs and South Asians after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But unlike in 2001, when President George W. Bush urged tolerance of American Muslims, this time President Trump is using language that Asian-Americans say is inciting racist attacks.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies are intent on calling the coronavirus “the Chinese virus,” rejecting the World Health Organization’s guidance against using geographic locations when naming illnesses, since past names have provoked a backlash.

Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he was calling the virus “Chinese” to combat a disinformation campaign by Beijing officials saying the American military was the source of the outbreak. He dismissed concerns that his language would lead to any harm.

On Monday evening, Mr. Trump tweeted, “It is very important that we totally protect our Asian American community in the United States.” He added they should not be blamed for the pandemic.

“If they keep using these terms, the kids are going to pick it up,” said Tony Du, an epidemiologist in Howard County, Md., who fears for his son, Larry. “They are going to call my 8-year-old son a Chinese virus. It’s serious.”

If it's not "Mexican rapists" or "The Blacks" or "Jewish globalists" it's now the "Chinese virus" among us who are the enemy we should hate in order to distract the people from Trump and the GOP literally looting the US Treasury.

After all, the White House position is that Americans are going to have to be sacrificed to the almighty Capitalist Mammon Machine.

Officials have said that the initial 15-day period for social distancing — limiting close contact between people by banning gatherings, closing schools and offices, encouraging remote work and urging people to maintain a six-foot distance from one another — is vital to slowing the spread of the virus, for which more than 30,000 people in the United States have tested positive. The 15-day period would end Monday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, an infectious diseases expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, has said in interviews that he believed that it would take several more weeks until people can start going about their lives in a more normal fashion. Other infectious disease experts suggest even harsher measures than social distancing are required to truly beat back the outbreaks in the United States.

But at the White House, in recent days, there has been a growing sentiment that medical experts were allowed to set policy that has hurt the economy, and there has been a push to find ways to let people start returning to work. Some Republican lawmakers have also pleaded with the White House to find ways to restart the economy, as financial markets continue to slide and job losses for April could be in the millions.
Vice President Mike Pence indicated on Sunday at a White House briefing about the virus that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would issue new guidelines on Monday, allowing some people who have been exposed to the coronavirus to resume working outside their homes if they wear masks.

The move could set the stage for states with relatively low numbers of cases to begin to unfreeze their economies, while large states like California and New York — where there are more cases and where state officials have ordered nonessential businesses to close for the time being — could continue remaining in a holding pattern.

The assumption that there are states with "small numbers of cases" means the Trump regime is more than ready to feed their corpses to the economy, and they already have their scapegoat to blame, the evil Chinese among us who "brought in this plague".

It's racism that's literally going to kill people.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Donald Trump addressed the nation last night, and it did not go well, but a speech written by Jared Kushner and Racist-in-Chief Stephen Miller was never going to be anything other than a call for racist isolationism and a promise to use the executive branch to harm the most vulnerable.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday he was "marshaling the full power of the federal government" to confront a growing public health crisis, including a month-long halt in travel from Europe to the United States. 

Trump said he was overseeing "the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history." 

Trump was speaking during a rare Oval Office address to the nation after facing harsh criticism for his response to the pandemic. 

Earlier Wednesday, Trump would not say whether the US would issue additional travel restrictions on Europe, nor would he answer whether he would issue a national disaster declaration. 

"We'll be talking about that later. All those things we're making a decision on," he added.
Trump's top advisers had discussed potential new travel advisories on Europe during meetings at the White House on Wednesday, according to two officials familiar with the matter. The advisers are considering raising travel alerts on Europe to recommend against all non-essential travel to the continent, which administration officials view as a new epicenter for the pandemic.

Nowhere in his latest hissy fit did he say anything about testing or health solutions and barely mentioned social distancing.  Instead, Trump blew up yesterday behind closed doors in a tirade at Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, who is almost certainly the next White House firing after stocks tanked again and have now fallen 20% since Feb 12.

President Trump, in an explosive tirade Monday, urged Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to encourage Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell to do more to stimulate the economy, two officials familiar with the exchange said, revealing the president’s mounting fury as his administration struggles to corral economic fallout from the novel coronavirus.

Trump has frequently complained about the Fed in public for at least two years, but his latest effort to pressure Mnuchin to privately push for action has not been previously reported.

During that tense Monday meeting in the Oval Office, Trump fumed that Powell never should have been appointed and is damaging the nation and his presidency

He then told Mnuchin, who had encouraged Trump to nominate Powell in 2017, to engage with the chair and ask him to take more dramatic steps to arrest the stock market’s plummet, according to three White House officials and a senior Republican. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to reveal the exchange.

Mnuchin has not commented publicly on this meeting, but he has said recently that he is in daily contact with Powell during the coronavirus crisis. Trump initially tried to brush aside concerns about the coronavirus’s impact on the economy, saying it would be short-lived, but the Oval Office meeting struck some of his advisers because it showed how furious he had become.

If Mnuchin wanted to arrest the stock market plunge, he'd convince Pence and the cabinet to oust Trump under the 25th Amendment.

Meanwhile, Republicans are doing their best to lose the Senate in November.

Democrats hoping to pass an emergency paid sick leave bill to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus were stymied by Senate Republicans on Wednesday.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) tried to speed the measure up for a vote on the Senate floor through a procedural maneuver, but an objection from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) prevented the bill from bypassing the Republican-controlled health committee.

Murray noted that many people who don’t have paid leave through their jobs will inevitably miss work due to being sick or quarantined in the coming weeks. She argued that guaranteed paid leave was important both for public health and the good of the broader economy.

“For many of our workers ― restaurant workers, truck drivers, service industry workers ― they may not have an option to take a day off without losing their pay or losing their job,” Murray said. “That’s not a choice we should be asking anyone to make in the United States in the 21st century.”

Alexander said that paid sick leave is a “good idea.” But if lawmakers want to require employers to provide it, then the federal government should have to foot the bill, he argued.

“Employees are struggling, our employers are struggling, and it’s not a cure for the coronavirus to put a big new expensive federal mandate on employers who are struggling in the middle of this matter,” Alexander said.

And when legislation that actually does do what Alexander wants is also blocked by the Senate GOP and never gets a vote, I'm sure all the folks who do have to choose between keeping their job and contracting a potentially lethal virus and spreading it will be fine.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The official position of the Chief Executive of the United States of America is that the Wuhan coronavirus has already been contained and that it's a hoax generated by Democrats in order to damage Republicans' chances in the 2020 elections.

President Donald Trump said Friday that Democrats are using the virulent coronavirus as a “hoax” to damage him and his administration.

“The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus,” he said from a campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina.

One of my people came up to me and said ‘Mr. President they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well.’ They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax that was on a perfect conversation,” he continued.

“This is their new hoax,” he said, referring to the coronavirus.

The coronavirus, which began in Wuhan, China, has now killed more than 2,800 people worldwide and infected more than 80,000. The latest reports from the World Health Organization show the pace of new cases in China slowing, but jumping in South Korea, Japan, Italy, and Iran.

The rest of the regime is now telling Americans that the virus is a hoax as well.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative activists, Mr. Mulvaney played down concerns about the virus that is spreading around the globe and panicking investors.

Mr. Mulvaney said the administration took “extraordinary steps four or five weeks ago,” to prevent the spread of the virus when it declared a rare public health emergency and barred entry by most foreign citizens who had recently visited China.

“Why didn’t you hear about it?” Mr. Mulvaney said of travel restrictions that were widely covered in the news media. “What was still going on four or five weeks ago? Impeachment, that’s all the press wanted to talk about.”

The news media has been covering the global spread of coronavirus for months.

But Mr. Mulvaney claimed that the news media was too preoccupied covering impeachment, he said, “because they thought it would bring down the president.”

The media’s focus switched to the coronavirus for the same reason, he continued.

“The reason you’re seeing so much attention to it today is that they think this is going to be the thing that brings down the president,” he added. “That’s what this is all about it.”

Following the president’s lead, Mr. Mulvaney also brushed off concerns over the virus; there have been 60 cases identified in the United States.

“The flu kills people,” he said. “This is not Ebola. It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS. It’s not a death sentence, it’s not the same as the Ebola crisis.”

Vice-President Pence and his task force are now laser-focused on the real problem: reinflating the stock market bubble that resulted in the worst week for stocks since the Great Recession.

Trump administration officials are holding preliminary conversations about economic responses to the coronavirus, as the stock market fell sharply again on Friday amid international fears about the outbreak, according to five people with knowledge of the planning.

Among the options being considered are pursuing a targeted tax cut package, these people said. They have also discussed whether the White House should lean even harder on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, though the central bank on Friday afternoon said it would step in if necessary.
No decisions at the White House have been reached on these options, and officials stressed conversations remained preliminary and extremely fluid.

Vice President Pence’s office is involved in the discussion of possible responses, two people said.

These ideas would not be designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, but they would seek to arrest the economic fears spreading through the economy. And some of the ideas would need cooperation from Congress or the Fed, as the White House has limited powers to unilaterally rewrite tax policy or direct the central bank to act. 

In short, shut up about the virus, it's a hoax, it's not Ebola, go about your business as normal, like climate change it's overblown by the evil Democrat party and the liberal Trump-hating media, buy the dip and you'll make a mint when this rocket goes back up again, don't miss out, chump!

Seems like a totally great federal government response.

Please address any questions or issues to Trump's White Supremacy Czar Stphen Miller and his new wife Katie, who is now the woman in charge of all coronavirus communications from the regime.

Do your part, citizen!  Buy stocks today!

Sarcasm aside, the Cult of Trump that see him as some sort of messianic figure, the true believers?  They're going to assume Trump will protect them from the virus.  When this starts killing people, significant numbers of people if epidemiologists' worst fears come true in a pandemic scenario, all bets are off as to what happens next.

The disease reappears in discharged patients because they are catching it again. 

A growing number of discharged coronavirus patients in China and elsewhere are testing positive after recovering, sometimes weeks after being allowed to leave the hospital, which could make the epidemic harder to eradicate.

On Wednesday, the Osaka prefectural government in Japan said a woman working as a tour-bus guide had tested positive for the coronavirus for a second time. This followed reports in China that discharged patients throughout the country were testing positive after their release from the hospital.

An official at China’s National Health Commission said on Friday that such patients have not been found to be infectious.

Experts say there are several ways discharged patients could fall ill with the virus again. Convalescing patients might not build up enough antibodies to develop immunity to SARS-CoV-2, and are being infected again. The virus also could be “biphasic”, meaning it lies dormant before creating new symptoms.

But some of the first cases of “reinfection” in China have been attributed to testing discrepancies.

On Feb. 21, a discharged patient in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu was readmitted 10 days after being discharged when a follow-up test came back positive.

Lei Xuezhong, the deputy director of the infectious diseases center at the West China Hospital, told People’s Daily that hospitals were testing nose and throat samples when deciding whether patients should be discharged, but new tests were finding the virus in the lower respiratory tract.

Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia who has been closely following the outbreak, told Reuters that although the patient in Osaka could have relapsed, it is also possible that the virus was still being released into her system from the initial infection, and she wasn’t tested properly before she was discharged.

The woman first tested positive in late January and was discharged from the hospital on Feb. 1, leading some experts to speculate that it was biphasic, like anthrax.

The world's not ready for this virus.  America is definitely not ready.  It's going to be a nightmare, and we're just in the opening few minutes of this horror movie.

Buckle in.  This one will test America like it hasn't been tested in your lifetime.

Trump's Constant Is Represented By The Poop Emote

Donald Trump continues to be awful in every possible way given any possible opportunity to be repugnant, like some sort of amoral version of Planck's constant or Avagadro's number.

While meeting with President Donald Trump, the parents of a British teenager who was killed in a traffic collision with the wife of a U.S. diplomat were offered money from the Treasury by the president, which they refused, according to The Guardian.

Harry Dunn, 19, was riding his motorcycle near the Royal Air Force base in Northamptonshire, England when he was involved in an accident with Anne Sacoolas. Dunn died of his injuries in the hospital while Sacoolas claimed diplomatic immunity and left the United Kingdom. Trump invited Dunn's parents, Tim Dunn and Charlotte Charles, to the White House to discuss the case.

Toward the end of the meeting, Trump intimated that he had Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin "standing by ready to write a check."

"It was almost as if he let it slip out," said family spokesman Radd Seiger. "When he said, 'We've got the driver here', he basically meant we're all going to have a big hug and a kiss and I'll get my Treasury guy to write a check. That's how it was. On the day it just didn't register with me, but the more I think about those words, the more shocking it is."

The asshole thinks the Treasury Secretary is his money guy, and that he can just write a check and make things go away, like he's Logan Roy from HBO's Succession.

Oh wait, that's what he actually did with Stormy Daniels.

Why is this man not in prison?

Greed Is Always In Fashion

Having a Treasury Secretary like Stephen Mnuchin, former Hollywood producer and Wall Street ace, basically guaranteed that Trump's tax scam was going to make everyone already rich even richer, even if they are convicted Reagan-era scumbags like Michael Milken.

These days, the Milken Institute is a leading proponent of a new federal tax break that was intended to coax wealthy investors to plow money into distressed communities known as “opportunity zones.” The institute’s leaders have helped push senior officials in the Trump administration to make the tax incentive more generous, even though it is under fire for being slanted toward the wealthy.

Mr. Milken, it turns out, is in a position to personally gain from some of the changes that his institute has urged the Trump administration to enact. In one case, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, directly intervened in a way that benefited Mr. Milken, his longtime friend.

It is a vivid illustration of the power that Mr. Milken, who was barred from the securities industry and fined $600 million as part of his 1990 felony conviction, has amassed in President Trump’s Washington. In addition to the favorable tax-policy changes, some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers — including Mr. Mnuchin, Jared Kushner and Rudolph W. Giuliani — have lobbied the president to pardon Mr. Milken for his crimes, or supported that effort, according to people familiar with the effort.

While the Milken Institute’s advocacy of opportunity zones is public, Mr. Milken’s financial stake in the outcome is not.

The former “junk bond king” has investments in at least two major real estate projects inside federally designated opportunity zones in Nevada, near Mr. Milken’s Lake Tahoe vacation home, according to public records reviewed by The New York Times.
One of those developments, inside an industrial park, is a nearly 700-acre site in which Mr. Milken is a major investor. Last year, after pressure from Mr. Milken’s business partner and other landowners, the Treasury Department ignored its own guidelines on how to select opportunity zones and made the area eligible for the tax break, according to people involved in the discussions and records reviewed by The Times.

The unusual decision was made at the personal instruction of Mr. Mnuchin, according to internal Treasury Department emails. It came shortly after he had spent time with Mr. Milken at an event his institute hosted.

“People were troubled,” said Annie Donovan, who previously ran the Treasury office in charge of designating areas as opportunity zones. She and two of her former colleagues said they were upset that the Treasury secretary was intervening to bend rules, though they said they didn’t realize at the time that Mr. Mnuchin’s friend stood to profit. The agency’s employees, Ms. Donovan said, “were put in a position where they had to compromise the integrity of the process.”

The opportunity zone initiative, tucked into the tax cut bill that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017, has become one of the White House’s signature initiatives. It allows investors to delay or avoid taxes on capital gains by putting money in projects or companies in more than 8,700 federally designated opportunity zones. Mr. Trump has boasted that it will revitalize downtrodden neighborhoods.

But the incentive, also championed by some prominent Democrats, has been dogged by criticism that it is a gift to wealthy investors and real estate developers. From the start, the tax break targeted people with capital gains, the vast majority of which are held by the very richest investors. The Treasury permitted opportunity zones to encompass not only poor communities but some adjacent affluent neighborhoods. Much of the money so far has flowed to those wealthier areas, including many projects that were planned long before the new law was enacted.

The Trump era, where the greed of the Reagan 80's and the grifts of the Clinton 90's meet to form the new hotness in kleptocracy.  But what did everyone expect from the Trump tax scam?  It's already tanking the economy and we're positing trillion-dollar deficits that suddenly don't matter.

Trump's looting the economy on the way out, and the next crash will have to be dealt with by whatever Democrat's in charge in 2021.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Trump regime continues to be breathtakingly, cartoonishly evil from the word go and the country will not survive a second term intact as America.

President Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale reportedly discussed using facial recognition technology at Trump’s campaign rallies to analyze reactions from supporters in event crowds, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Parscale discussed the move with political operatives, but he was told by at least one company that the technology is not reliable yet, according to people familiar with the conversations, the Journal reported.

A campaign spokesperson denied that Parscale ever pursued the technology.

The Trump administration has utilized other technology at campaign rallies, including collecting millions of phone numbers, email addresses and other personal information from rally attendants when they register for tickets or sign up for text alerts.

The Trump team reportedly uses the data to look up the rally attendees’ political registrations and the elections in which they have voted. They cross-reference it with the data on the attendee’s consumer habits, which is collected by the Republican Party to forecast how likely each attendee is to vote in 2020 and who they may support campaign officials told the Journal.

That's bad enough, and today's impeachable offense:

The Journal also reported that Trump himself lobbied to bring cabinet members to his June rally in Orlando, Florida. The outlet said that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney warned the president about potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from participating in political activities under their official titles.

Trump responded “I’m in charge of the Hatch Act” in a meeting with top aides and accused Mulvaney of being “weak,” according to the Journal.

"The enforcement of the law is whatever I say it is, and it doesn't apply to me" should again, be the immediate end of this regime, but of course it's normal behavior for the Chief Executive now, isn't it?  Oh, and "weak" Mulvaney is reportedly being replaced soon by either Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin or WH Advisor Kellyanne Conway.

Fun times all around.