Imagine the world in which Mueller’s report read as follows:

In this investigation, the evidence does not establish that President Clinton was involved in an underlying crime related to Iranian election interference. But the evidence does point to a range of other possible personal motives animating the President’s conduct. These include concerns that continued investigation would call into question the legitimacy of his election and potential uncertainty about whether certain events — such as advance notice of WikiLeaks’s release of hacked information or the June 9, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Iranians— could be seen as criminal activity by the President, her campaign, her family, or her family’s charitable foundation….

The evidence we obtained about the President’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate her.”

My response would be white hot rage at the Clinton team, including a demand that she leave office. My Republican friends would of course feel the same. That they do not here simply because Trump is “theri guy” tells you everything you ever need to know about the role of principles in their political lives. Never forget this.

Source: Mueller report: the case Trump obstructed justice, in one paragraph – Vox

That will be the key phrase in nearly every report written attempting to summarize the upcoming day’s events. Don’t stay glued to your TVs and Twitter and Facebook. Let the early part of the day pass without notice of the spin. Ignore it until until people have had time to read and digest the report. By the end of the day, central components of the morning and early afternoon’s conventional wisdom will have been obliterated. Until then, put your focus on places you can make a difference. Thats my advice for the day.

From over the weekend:

Days after he posted an edited video to Twitter trying to link Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to the 9/11 attacks, President Donald Trump made it through a Tax Day business roundtable in the first-term Congress member home state on Monday without mentioning her. Afterward, however, Trump told a local reporter he had no regrets about his incendiary, misleading, and dangerous tweet — even though she’s faced death threats from his supporters.

www.vox.com/2019/4/16/18395065/trump-ilhan-omar-death-threats

They don’t want unity. Or rather, they only want unity when it helps them get what they want. It’s not a genuine complaint, and it never has been. If a member of congress getting death threats thanks to the President’s comments doesn’t convince you of that, nothing ever will.

Y’all, this isn’t even close to hard. Congress created the IRS under its Article I, Section 8 constitutional authority. Of course it has oversight authority over the agency and the taxes and returns it collects. The executive branch only has the IRS and its returns because congress passed the laws that brought them into existence. And more to the point, since tax returns are only subject to privacy protections because of the will of congress, the idea that there’s some right to privacy beyond which congress cannot legally reach is absurd.

Trump tells border agents to ignore the law in order to block asylum seekers from legally entering the United States. Unsurprisingly, those same border agents were told by their bosses to ignore the president and follow the law, lest they themselves get arrested.

This too was predictable in a system with a strong, independent judiciary, no matter the partisan leanings of the judges. Why? Because no matter how much those judges share some of Trump’s concerns, their won self-interest is much more directed towards protecting the rule of law. And yeah, when the president starts telling people to ignore judges and their rulings, nothing is going to matter more to those judges than defending the rule of law. And yeah, the men and women who serve in the border patrol are smart enough to figure that out, no matter what anyone else might say.

talkingpointsmemo.com/news/report-border-agents-leaders-told-them-to-disobey-presidents-direction-on-migrants

In the long run, that will be history’s primary interpretation of this era. Because the law as it is written is the law, for better or for worse, with conservative justices or liberal ones. The rest of it is just noise.

And that, more than anything, is why I never know what to blog about anymore. We’ve reached the point in the disjunction during which everything ends up having been for nothing but suffering and exhaustion.

In case you were wondering what it was like to live through the Carter Administration in the late 1970s? It was like this. Only now it’s Republicans causing the chaos and Democrats preparing to figure out how in hell this mess gets addressed.

NY mafia edition!

TOMS RIVER, N.J. (AP) — The man charged with killing the reputed boss of the Gambino crime family wrote pro-Donald Trump slogans on his hand and flashed them to journalists before a court hearing Monday.

Anthony Comello, 24, was arrested Saturday in New Jersey in the death of Francesco “Franky Boy” Cali last week in front of his Staten Island home.

While waiting for a court hearing to begin in Toms River, New Jersey, in which he agreed to be extradited to New York, Comello held up his left hand.

On it were scrawled pro-Trump slogans including “MAGA Forever,” an abbreviation of Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.” It also read “United We Stand MAGA” and “Patriots In Charge.” In the center of his palm he had drawn a large circle. It was not immediately clear why he had done so.

talkingpointsmemo.com/news/anthony-comello-gambino-mob-boss-murder-hearing-pro-trump-slogans

You’re doing it wrong if they claim you as their own. You’re doing it wrong if you use the same phrases they use in the same contexts. Wrong, at least, assuming that you don’t want people to think you are one of them.

People Trump reflexively takes at their word:

Kim Jong Un

Vladimir Putin

Roy Moore

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman

Rodrigo Duerte

Abdel Fatah al-Sissi

Recep Erdogen

Jim Jordan

Sean Hannity

Rob Porter

Brett Kavanauagh

People Trump reflexively dismisses as untrustworthy

The current and former leadership at the FBI

The staff of the New York Times and Washington Post

The civil service staff at the United States Department of State

The Directors of National Intelligence

Federal judges

I could go on, but u think you get the point?

Context:

During President Donald Trump’s summit-ending news conference in Vietnam on Thursday, a reporter asked him if he’d confronted North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un about the treatment of Otto Warmbier, an American student who was imprisoned in North Korea for 15 months, only to return to the US in a comatose state in June 2017 and never recover. 

The reporter noted that despite Warmbier’s brutal death, Trump has called Kim “my friend” and repeatedly boasted about their “great relationship.” The journalist then asked him, “Have you in Singapore [during the first Trump-Kim summit] or here confronted Kim Jong Un about Otto Warmbier’s death, asked him to take responsibility, and what did he say to you?”

Trump confirmed that he had — but went on to say he takes Kim’s word for it that he had nothing to do with it.

“I really believe something very bad happened to [Warmbier], and I don’t think that the top leadership knew about it,” Trump said. “I don’t believe that [Kim] would’ve allowed that to happen. It just wasn’t in his advantage to allow that to happen.”

www.vox.com/2019/2/28/18244659/trump-kim-jong-otto-warmbier-death

“Something bad happened.” The man DIED after coming home in a conspiracy. He was in their custody for more than a year and he DIED. And the President’s take is that we can’t hold North Korean leadership responsible for this because Kim Jong Un says they weren’t responsible.