Compare with South Korea, whose president was arrested mere weeks after his attempted coup, after a police stand-off with his bodyguards. Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon set a terrible precedent.

I think the Democrats not insisting on crucifying Reagan for his various federal counts of kidnapping was a worse one. Grudgingly letting Nixon die at home is one thing; letting the GOP commit any felony they want for power and then letting them keep it was the kiss of death for this country.

Which only led to nobody except the lowest level grunts facing any consequences for Bush's war crimes. Which led to here.

Yup; a plane crash made inevitable by Republican policies, blamed immediately on black people who weren't in the loop, by an administration who is trying to undo every anti-racist order and rule put in place since 1946. Perfectly Republican in every way, including the pissing on the dead from a great height.

One wonders if the Democrats will have the nerve to bring down Trump from Congress? All they have to do is let the government shut down indefinitely unless all (with a capital A) of the lawbreaking ends, and the minions involved are thrown out the door and prosecuted. Never mind this good government nonsense; the budget and the debt ceiling don't happen until Trump is broken.

Sad thing for Trump is: he can't survive without those, and only the Democrats can pass them. The Republicans in the House are worthless, and even he knows it.

Though on the way to that we may see the Republican judges in the Supreme Court, who tried to make him powerful enough to murder Democrats but not ignore the will of billionaires and Republican judges, find out he can murder Republican judges and billionaires too. Who's going to stop him once the DOJ, FBI, and etc have been purged? The Army? That's not something the Republicans can do; the Army will not be their friend come what may.

This may be amusing.

Mayor Adams, of NYC, is now Trump's bunk muffin. In exchange for having the Federal charges against him shelved (but not dropped), Adams has agreed to do whatever Trump wants. In, btw, a meeting with the number two at DOJ; who blew a gasket when one of his underlings actually dared to do his job and take notes of this criminal conspiracy.

Enter Governor Hochul(D). She's got the future of a dog dropping in the Democratic Party; she's one of those upstate Rockefeller Republicans with a Democratic party card from the Buffalo region, and everyone in the party who knows her outside of the state (few as they are) hates her. Her chances of getting reelected on the Democratic party line aren't great, either. But, and it's an important but, she has the legal right to fire Mayor Adams; which is to say she can publicly fire Mayor Trump. She'd go from nobody to somebody in a heartbeat, even if a fair number of her upstate buddies and the NY Times might not be dead thrilled. But will she? Ah, that's the question.

Ok, so Hochul temporized. No great shock. But the stooge from the Republican crime syndicate screwed up: instead of obeying her criminal superior, who wanted the charges dropped without prejudice; she said that the charges against Adams should be dropped because they were tainted on the evidence and law level. If the judge goes for it, then they're gone pretty much for good (it's mindbogglingly hard to press charges previously dismissed on the grounds that they're false, or so I hear); and Adams can then tell Trump and his little criminal scum underlings to pound sand.

As for why she did that? I suspect the minion in question is hanging her criminal superior out to dry instead of letting him do it to her, but that's just me.

Apparently, Senator Schumer is convinced that letting Musk go to court and say he has legal funding and permission to do his thing, courtesy of Senator Schumer, is better than having him do it overtly illegally. Equally apparently, Schumer (who had just been called a globalist and a Palestinian by Trump) thinks that eating their crap is the way to sway a Nazi.

I'm not even a little bit surprised he's now party to Trump's treason; Schumer's too weak and corrupt not to be. Heck, the genocidal monsters in the GOP around here keep pointing at old Chuck when they try their 'whatabout' garbage. But it's still kind of annoying to watch the rest of his caucus pretend he's relevant or in charge of anything (fellow travelers like Fetterman aside, who have never kept their contempt for Schumer a secret).

didn't stop Fetterman to vote like him though. At least now, Schumer is being openly criticized by the rest of his party.

The most generous reading of Schumer's actions is that he thinks it better to lay low and avoid negative publicity until the midterms, which uh, isn't working.

If you've ever asked how people can sit there and allow their country to slide into dictatorship, this. This is how.

So Trump, who was elected by lowlife garbage that would literally rather die than take on any inconvenience which is supposed to help someone else (like masking), is going to try to survive politically (and possibly literally) by selling those lowlifes that his massive hit to their economic status and standard of living is acceptable because...it will help someone else.

I'm not actually holding my breath on that one.

It's a shakedown. He wants other countries and corporations to kiss his butt in exchange for tariff relief. It'll be interesting to watch whether and how fast they capitulate.

Worthless nobodies might, but the big players have already had their play defined by Canada: cut the US out of the system completely. Build a free trade system excluding us, and let us rot.

And we don't have the cards, either. It'll take the EU only five years to simply replace us completely; and anyone who even considers not spitting in Trump's eye will be hanged by his own electorate. We'll be stuck with economic parasites like Russia and North Korea for 'trading' partners, living through the massive economic depression caused by our own retarded version of Brexit.

Gosh, sounds like fun. And that's the upside result, too. Glad to be living here, really I am...

I don't think it'll be that simple or fast, the US is the world's biggest consumer market. Nobody comes close to Americans on buying crap. A brief Googling says American consumers spend about $17,500 billion a year; the whole EU's worth of consumers only buy $9,600 billion worth of stuff. China' entire economy is built around keeping their rural people poor enough to work in low wage manufacturing, which means they're too poor to buy much of what China produces.

Which means that foreign countries will feel about as much pain as the US. I think most of them will have to white knuckle it because there are no concessions that would please the Trump administration; what they're demanding is incoherent, nonsensical and insane.

But keep an eye on the US corporations. Last time around, Trump subsidized farmers to insulate them from the impacts of his soybean tariffs; this time around, every corporate bigwig will be lining up for similar hand-outs.

Bailouts are not going to happen. Soybeans was chump change for a small industry. He's gutting the entire auto industry, and that's only one of the losers going forward; he doesn't have the funds available to steal to make good those kinds of losses.

But please forgive a bit of ruminating on today. The stock market (at least temporarily) made up a lot of the losses Trump and his party caused, when he formally admitted defeat in the 'dick waving' part of the trade war. But treasury bonds...well, they're the important indicator; and they're all still way up because lending us money remains a bad idea.

You see, the 'lawless Republicans sabotaging the economy' part of the trade war isn't over (especially with China and for cars); and so the US remains an unfit and untrustworthy subject for loans. Worse, the odds of a physical war with China over Taiwan have gone up; and if that happens then the US loses no matter what, because we can't replace their chips yet. Oh, and Trump's GOP is trying to make sure we never will because Biden would get the credit if we do. So...there are still underlying fundamental problems; all of which are the Republicans.