Indict them.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results. -- NYT

Impeachment aside, if this isn't enough for the Attorney General and state prosecutors to put Trump, Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, and the rest of their co-conspirators behind bars for a decade or two, they should turn in their prosecutor badges and find another line of work. 

The latest...The acting head of DOJ's civil division spoke with Trump about a plan to overturn the presidential election and then told Acting AG Rosen that he was going to be replaced in order for the plan to be implemented. But then came the problem. DOJ senior leaders threatened to quit en masse and let the cat out of the bag. 

According to the NYT:

Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.

If Trump's plotting to fire Rosen, on top of his phone call to Georgia election officials, on top of his provoking the MAGA riot at the Capitol aren't indictable, what the hell is?

The real question here is, do Democratic leaders have the nerve to go after the grifter WH crew and the Trump family on criminal charges rather than, or alongside another impeachment trial down the road?

All I know is, if D.T. was Black and had filched some laundry soap from Safeway, he'd be rotting in jail. 

Capitol riot suspect Eric Munchel, dubbed "zip tie guy," to be released from jail pending trial.

As a public defender, I represented a client charged with stealing detergent. Held in on $3000 bail he could not afford.

Two. Systems. Of. Justice. pic.twitter.com/OhQaa8EKWJ

— Eliza Orlins (@elizaorlins) January 23, 2021

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

 “It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.” 

― George Orwell, 1984

"Truth is truth," Meet the Press host Chuck Todd interjected.

"No," Giuliani replied, "it isn't truth. Truth isn't truth."  -- Rudy Giuliani, 2018

Dr. Jeffrey Epstein upon being taken down by police

 As officers struggled to put him in handcuffs, Dr. Epstein was pepper-sprayed. Dr. Epstein, who is white, repeatedly yelled out “Oh, my God” and, in one profanity-laden line, that he was being treated like a “black person,” the video shows. -- New York Times

Sen. Elizabeth Warren trying her best to save capitalism from itself

My big new bill, the Accountable Capitalism Act, would restore the idea that big American companies should look out for their workers, not just their shareholders. Why do we need to pass this bill? Just look at what’s happened since the #GOPTaxScam passed. -- Twitter post

Corporate shill Bill George responds

Our system of capitalism is functioning well as evidenced by the plethora of U.S.-based companies that are dominating world markets and whose stocks are at all-time highs. -- CNBC

Larry Lewis, a housekeeper at Palmer House

“We’re tired of being stepped on, when these billion-dollar corporations are getting all this money and then they forget us. They forget that we’ve made these places five-star, world-wide-class hotels. …. They want to take our healthcare, they want to take our medicine.” -- Chicago hotel workers vote ‘overwhelmingly’ to authorize strike 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

CPS student, Tamara Reed

“I dreaded going to school. I cried every night." -- Chicago Tribune

Lori Lightfoot

 “This tragedy happened because of incompetency at the highest levels. Who are we as a city if we accept this as just another scandal du jour at CPS?” -- Politico

Study

This household-based survey suggests that the number of excess deaths related to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico is more than 70 times the official estimate. -- New England Journal of Medicine

John Boehner

“There is no Republican Party. There’s a Trump party." -- Politico

Rudy Giuliani

Trump could have shot Comey and still couldn't be indicted. “If he shot James Comey, he’d be impeached the next day. "Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him.” -- Huffington

Natasha Korecki on cost of IL gov's race

"How many Hulu ads can you buy?" -- Illinois Playbook

Chicago Public Schools has failed to protect students from sexual abuse and assault, a Tribune investigation has found. Reporters identified hundreds of cases in the last decade, attacks that left students feeling betrayed and wounded. https://t.co/396Q42bApm https://t.co/NDiwoWVtip

— Juan Perez Jr. (@PerezJr) June 1, 2018

WEEKEND QUOTABLES: The search for truth

Dana Milbank on the death of a border patrol agent

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it. -- Washington Post 

Porter’s ex-wife, Jennifer Willoughby

"Truth exists" whether Trump "accepts it or not". -- CNN

Tad O’Malley, conservative conspiracy theorist in the X-Files

“Truth is fluid and alterable.” -- The Verge

 Gary Younge

...before radical history can be embraced by the establishment it must be washed clean of whatever ideology made it effective. Radical change is most likely to come from below, be fiercely resisted by entrenched interests from above and achieved through confrontation. -- Guardian

On FOX Chicago, reporter Mike Flannery asks former Chicago top cop Garry McCarthy about the LaQuan McDonald shooting death and officer Jason Van Dyke's culpability. McCarthy, a Trump supporter and pal of neo-fascist Rudy Giuliani, is making noises about running for mayor.

Here's an excerpt of that interview. 

Mike Flannery: Many Chicagoans look at that (video of Jason Van Dyke shooting Laquan McDonald) and they see a murder. Do you?

Garry McCarthy: Um. He's gonna have a hard time, Jason Van Dyke, explaining why he did what he did. That's the bottom line. He gets his due process just like anybody else. But it's gonna be really difficult to make a case. There are cases -

Flannery: Do you see a murder?

McCarthy: You know (long pause)

Flannery: Why are you reluctant to say that?

'Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them.'
- Judy Blume, who celebrates a landmark birthday today. Happy birthday!#MondayMotivation pic.twitter.com/6QkZ2YERcL

— Waterstones (@Waterstones) February 12, 2018

WEEKEND QUOTABLES FROM A CRINGE-WORTHY DEBATE

Trump family women appear in self-defense mode.

TRUMP:-- 'It’s just words, folks. It’s just words...'

Last night, this happened...

COOPER: You called what you said locker room banter. You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?

TRUMP: No, I didn’t say that at all. I don’t think you understood what was — this was locker room talk. 

 TRUMP: I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.

Naomi Klein's 2007 book documented the rise of "disaster capitalism" Last night Trump used word "disaster" 17 times.

Giuliani compares Donald Trump to St. Augustine

"I hate to get terribly theological about it, but ever read the Confessions of St. Augustine? Sometimes going through things like this makes you a much better person." -- The Week 

One thing is sure, Trump is not cursed with an abundance of self-awareness.

— Tom Tomorrow (@tomtomorrow) October 10, 2016

Trump won last night because he didn’t grab anyone’s junk https://t.co/vFWxjw1fZX

— Salon (@Salon) October 10, 2016

Trump: "Stop and frisk" isn't racial profiling it's stopping "bad people."

"But we need — Lester, we need law and order. And we need law and order in the inner cities..." -- Trump

I actually would have found at least the second half of the debate entertaining, if the stakes weren't so damn high. The Daily Show's Trevor Noah summed it up this way:

"Welcome to the real-life version of Twitter, people," Noah said. "You know that at that point, Lester Holt wasn't even moderating anymore, he was just eating popcorn with everyone else."

I admit, after watching the poorly-run Clinton campaign slide so badly since the convention, I was concerned that Donald Trump would carry his momentum into the debate. Boy, was I wrong.

An apparently sedated Hillary Clinton, halting and self-constrained, waited patiently for her moment. Then she took her best shots, in response to Trump's never ending braggadocio (his word, not mine) about his mythical business acumen, deal-making artfulness and ability to avoid paying any taxes (a charge he never denied), Hillary laid it on him.

First on his unwillingness to allow us to see his tax returns.

CLINTON: For 40 years, everyone running for president has released their tax returns. You can go and see nearly, I think, 39, 40 years of our tax returns, but everyone has done it. We know the IRS has made clear there is no prohibition on releasing it when you’re under audit.

Then on taxes. Remember Trump has been maintaining that corporations are fleeing the U.S. to evade high taxes. But Trump seems to have done pretty well here.

CLINTON: Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes, because the only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax...So if he’s paid zero, that means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health. TRUMP: That makes me smart. 

On the financial crisis, Trump played the perfect disaster capitalist. Neither of them, for reasons of their own, mentioned that the global financial collapse happened under the Republican Bush administration.

CLINTON: In fact, Donald was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis. He said, back in 2006, “Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can go in and buy some and make some money.” Well, it did collapse.

TRUMP: That’s called business, by the way.

Alicia Machado

Then finally, the coup de grâce.

CLINTON: And one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest. He loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman [Miss Universe contestant Alicia Machiado]“Miss Piggy.” Then he called her “Miss Housekeeping,” because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.
TRUMP: Where did you find this? Where did you find this?
CLINTON: Her name is Alicia Machado.
TRUMP: Where did you find this?
CLINTON: And she has become a U.S. citizen, and you can bet...
TRUMP: Oh, really?

CLINTON: ... she’s going to vote this November.

It was over.

Well, not quite. Trump, fearing even further disintegration of his dwindling poll numbers among Latinos, went after Machado again this morning on FOX, claiming, she had "attitude" and calling her "the worst we ever had. The worst. The absolute worst."

"She was impossible.... She was the winner, and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem."

Trump was either an ill-prepared, out-of-control, chauvinistic, blustering, money-grubbing, nuke-waving racist buffoon (my take), or a great-white-hope, politically incorrect, law-and-order hero, depending on which America you occupy.

Clinton tiptoed cautiously around race and the latest in a string of police shootings of black men. Her best statement was:

Race remains a significant challenge in our country. Unfortunately, race still determines too much, often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they’re treated in the criminal justice system. We’ve just seen those two tragic examples in both Tulsa and Charlotte.

But she played it safe after that. Let's just say, the words Black Lives Matter, were never uttered.

Whereas the @realDonaldTrump let it all hang out. He started out by painting life in the black community as "living in hell" in need of "law and order" (code words for keep them in their place) and ended with his Rudy Giuliani-inspired call for more stop-and-frisk, racial profiling-- making Chicago his whipping boy.

Trump must not have known (and Hillary wouldn't say) that under the rule of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago had already become the nation's stop-and-frisk capital, well after stop-and-frisk had been ruled unconstitutional in N.Y.

In August 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that the hundreds of thousands of Stop and Frisks performed annually by the NYPD amounted to racial profiling and violated the 4th Amendment's protections from unreasonable search and seizure because they were based on generalized suspicion.

By the summer of 2014, Chicago cops performed a quarter million stop-and-frisks in just 90 days, without making any arrests. Shootings in the city (including those by police) continued to rise at a record pace before the policy was changed. Stop-and-frisk was proven to be a failed, racist policy.

Trump continued to insist that "stop and frisk" wasn't racial profiling. It was stopping "bad people." It amounted to his only plan for resource-starved black and Latino communities.

It was a desperately-needed win for Clinton. A big defeat for Trump who limped away, crying he had a "defective mic" and that Republican moderator Lester Holt was an agent of the "left-wing" media. His mentor, Giuliani even advised him to skip the remaining debates. Good advice.

DON'T ASK. DON'T TELL...As expected, public education never came up in the debate and the word education was only mentioned in passing three times -- all by Clinton. There was never even a mention of Trump University, school closings, common core, testing, unions, or charter schools.

Change is in the air in Chicago

You won't see a word about this in today's Trib or Sun-Times. But the Logan Square auditorium was packed last night. The mood, electric. It was in this same room a few months ago that we celebrated the election of Rep. Will Guzzardi and dealt a major blow to the  Emanuel/Daley/Madigan/Burke/Barrios/Mell... machine (or what's left of it). It was in this same ward, at the Norwegian Church across the street in 1983 that I remember that same energy and sense of power and unity as the crowd overflowed out onto the boulevard to hear candidate Harold Washington drive another nail into the old machine's coffin.

In the room last night, you could feel the power of a new movement for change. But last night's crowd also told a different story, one about the changes taking place in the make-up of our community and our city. The cheering crowd looked and sounded a bit different than the one at Guzzardi's rally and certainly than the one at the Harold rally 4 decades ago. So did the group of progressive candidates on stage. The both were largely Latino, including a 26-year-old newly-elected alderman in the 35th Ward, Carlos Rosa. Some African-American representation would have even made it better.

Carlos had not only handily defeated his machine rival a few weeks ago, but helped carry the ward for Chuy Garcia over Rahm Emanuel. Chuy got with 57% of the vote in the war. It reflected the the city's changing demographics and the emerging Mexican plurality which is largely under-counted by the pollsters (in case you're moaning over this morning's Tribune poll). It also holds the potential for a new, progressive rainbow coalition, the likes of which we haven't seen in the city since the Harold days. It was another hopeful sign that whether Rahm wins or loses this race, Chicago politics will never be the same.

Good riddance.

Chuy hit another home run with his speech last night, staying on his Chicago as tale-of-two-cities message. He's on a roll, even while up against tremendous odds and the power of LaSalle St. big money. I can't wait for Monday's face-to-face debate with the Little Emperor.

And the Racist Drivel of the Week Award once again goes to former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani for these pearls of wisdom: I wish President Obama were more like Bill Cosby and Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson Should Be 'Commended' For Shooting Michael Brown. Definitely GOP presidential timber. Or at least, a convention keynoter.

But pointing out and hammering the racists like Giuliani or the OU frat boys, while necessary, is too easy writes Zak Cheney-Rice at Identities.Mic.

The backlash against SAE was predictably swift: The frat's national headquarters shut down their Oklahoma chapter, while University of Oklahoma president David Boren severed all school ties with the organization. "You are disgraceful," he told its members in a highly publicized statement. What he didn't do was talk about racism.

Racism is bigger than a video. Racism is the legacy of being "the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South," with a Civil War-era membership class of 400, of whom 369 fought for the Confederacy. Racism is a school housing an organization with a documented history of racial abuse; SAE chapters in St. Louis, Memphis, Clemson, South Carolina and elsewhere have all been embroiled in racism controversies. Racism is the truth behind the frat brother's song, that there probably never was a "nig**r" at SAE, or at least none in significant numbers.

Why not blame torture on teacher unions?

OINK! -- Rudy Giuliani blames "liberal guilty whites", teachers, and their unions for violence in black community. He claims that by resisting vouchers, expansion of privately-run charters, and teacher pay based on test scores, teachers are fomenting black violence.

BTW,Giuliani is an admitted water-boarder (of Americans and Italians).

MIXED SIGNALS...And how about former Chicago cop Steve Mandel, sentenced yesterday to life-plus-5 years for plotting gruesome kidnapping and torture. I guess it's illegal -- unless the government does it. I doubt that even monster Mandel could have imagined rectal feeding.

Burge

The Chicago PD has an inglorious record of such stuff. And it's not just about Daley's guy Commander Burge. Last month, a U.N. committee addressed the issue of torture committed by Chicago Police Department Commander Jon Burge and other police officers between 1972 and 1991 and share its dismay that no officer has been “convicted for these acts of torture for reasons including the statute of limitations expiring.”

It acknowledged that a federal investigation had asserted there were no “prosecutable constitutional violations” uncovered, however, the committee criticized the fact that the “vast majority of those tortured—most of them African Americans—have received no compensation for the extensive injuries suffered.”

Now top U.N. officials are calling for  individuals responsible for the "criminal conspiracy" revealed in the torture report to be "brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes." Good luck on that one.

Maybe Burge, Giuliani, Brennan, and Cheney types will blame it all on the teacher unions.

BEST CHUY QUOTE...Chuy Garcia held a news conference at Dyett High School in Bronzeville where he embraced the community's plan to turn the school that has been on the chopping block for years into the Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School.

Emanuel’s handpicked school team recently reversed course and announced that Dyett would remain open. But instead of adopting the community plan, CPS is issuing a request-for-proposals from all comers.

Garcia likened the mayor’s decision to ignore the community plan for Dyett to his giveaway of 17 acres of precious lakefront parkland to movie mogul George Lucas to build a new interactive museum.

“You fly into Chicago from Hollywood. You give the mayor a lot of money and say, 'I would like to build a museum for Darth Vader.'” City Hall says, 'I like it. Here’s some of our lakefront. We’ll lease it to you for a $1. The mayor calls it 'bold,' " Garcia said.

“If you don’t live in Hollywood—if you have to take the bus downtown from Bronzeville—[but] still, you bring a plan supported by thousands of people to improve your community and save your high school. You bring a plan backed by the best institutions. City Hall says, 'You don’t know what’s best for your own kids. You’re not an expert. You don’t understand your own neighborhood.’ ”