Civil Commotion

The Washington Post is reporting that the Trump administration is compiling dossiers whose purpose is to discredit Special Counsel Mueller and his investigators — and researching the power of the pardon.

Some of President Trump’s lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest and discussing the president’s authority to grant pardons, according to people familiar with the effort.

Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the probe, according to one of those people. A second person said Trump’s lawyers have been discussing the president’s pardoning powers among themselves.

The plain implication is that the Trump crowd expects the investigation to yield evidence of criminal behavior and are preparing an escape hatch for themselves.

It’s reasonable, too, to think they must believe the evidence will be in the public domain in the near future, for if they truly think they’re innocent of wrongdoing, or that their wrongdoing will remain obscure for another year or so, they wouldn’t be researching pardon now.

I can easily imagine Trump provoking a Constitutional crisis by challenging the Congress to send armed U.S. Marshals to remove him from office. I can’t imagine him prevailing in such a showdown, but I can imagine him provoking it. I can just as easily imagine him pardoning everybody in his orbit, including himself, declaring his work successful and finished and himself the most accomplished president in the history of the country, and decamping to some corrupt oligarchy where amoral and authoritarian buffoons like him are appreciated.

Whatever comes next, there will be no happy ending.

Hillary Clinton: How She Framed Donald Trump’s Family

The publisher of the National Enquirer, y’all should know, is a buddy of The Donald.

Seriously: This is banana republic stuff.

It has become a commonplace lately to link Donald Trump’s incompetence, conniving, dishonesty and corruption to the fulfillment of the ideals of Any Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Apparently, as William F. Buckley, Jr., freely admitted in his geriatric years, though he had trashed her for years, a lot of people have never actually read her books.

Atlas Shrugged imagines a world where the industrialists have gone on strike. Yes, they are obscenely wealthy, one and all — but they earned it by the honorable provision of products and services that people actually want. Trump is a living, breathing exemplar for the parasitic, dishonorable, and underhanded operators that Rand’s heroes — Dagny Taggart, Hank Rearden, and Francisco d’AnConia — fought against, Wesley Mouch and Ellsworth Toohey. You can think what you like of Rand’s ideas, but Donald Trump is exactly the person she spent her life attacking; she should not be linked to the ambulatory obscenity who now poses such a danger to us.

There is one criticism of Rand which might have merit — her treatment of sex, which in her books almost invariably borders on rape fantasies. The problem here is that anybody acquainted with the romance genre is aware that a huge number of American women are apparently spunky li’l things that Gary Cooper-like cowboys find nettlesome, and with whom they forcefully entertain themselves before stalking off to shoot some bad guys and feed the horses.

So it may be that Ayn Rand just had little skill, or a lot of discomfort, setting-up and portraying sex scenes; I don’t know, but think that’s a real possibility. There should be no confusion about her attitude toward such as The Donald, however: Rand loathed them.

Bruce Gerencser celebrated his 39^th-Anniversary in Kentucky and, while there, took some photos: Don’t miss them.

Our recent vacation found Polly and me in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. We were amazed (and disheartened) by how many downtown churches there were — mainly Baptist — and the seemingly ubiquitous homeless and panhandlers. I told Polly, “look at all these big, fancy, rich churches, yet hungry, out-of-work, homeless people abound. So much for taking care of and ministering to the least of these.”

It might help to put this madness in perspective by remembering that Mitch McConnell and Albert Mohler are from Kentucky … and they’re what passes for respectable there.

Now that everybody with a mind that functions normally has figured-out that it was the NIGRA-MOOZLIM-TROTSKYITE!! in OUR WHITE HOUSE!! who had the country’s back, could we please get over our latent racism and get this health care stuff figured-out?

We do not need repeal — the Republicans’ original promise — and we do not need Repeal & Replace, the promise that took hold as the 2016 presidential campaigns got underway. We need what every grownup in the universe knew would be a recurring agenda item for 20-years after the ACA took effect: Revise and Repair. It’s a big program, and it was crazy to think it could be got right the first time; tweaking and fine-tuning were always inevitable.

Let’s get busy with that.

The Republicans will deny it, and so will the simpletons they snookered, but …

1. The Republicans never had any plan but exploiting America’s latent racism by demonizing Obama, and …

2. A lot of Americans are racist idiots who got played like fiddles, and …

3. Many of them are going to die needlessly of inadequately or untreated illnesses.

The problems now in hand have been exacerbated by relentless Republican attacks, especially during the past 6-months; many of those problems should clear once Republicans commit to Revise & Repair and insurance companies have confidence that they’re not going to get a knife in the back. Some thoughts on what a sensible plan will include.

• It became national policy during the Reagan administration that emergency care would be guaranteed to everyone; that is the reason emergency rooms are now so crowded. The mandate is, in part, an effort to force “free riders” to ante up, and some form of it ought to remain in place.

• Pre-existing conditions must be covered, and the lifetime coverage limit must be repealed. (Disclosure: My son has a congenital heart condition, and the treatment of it has burned through about half of the former lifetime maximum before age 30.)

• The ACA relies upon a philosophical shift in the way health care is delivered; rather than merely treating disease, the strategy focuses on preventive maintenance. That shift should remain intact.

• However much it annoys the Pious, birth control and, when necessary, abortion, are indispensable elements of women’s health care; they should be part of all plans, without exception. Biology happens, and bodies are biological machines. That’s a fact. Grow up and get over it.

Why on earth is the ‘exceptionalist’ crowd determined to make America the only industrialized country on earth that can’t get health care right, rather than the country that makes health care best?