Boris Johnson is definitely Trump’s kind of guy

The British prime minister Boris Johnson lost yet another major vote in parliament today when it voted 306-289 against a government motion to suspend parliament so that the Conservative party could hold their annual conference as scheduled from September 29 through October 3. This is the seventh consecutive vote he has lost and he has not won a single one, an astonishing record because in the British parliamentary system, the government almost never loses a vote. Add to that the strong rebuke that the UK Supreme Court handed to him two days ago and you can label him a major loser.
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Of course there was a quid pro quo

Now that we have the notes of the conversation between Donald Trump and the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump’s defenders are using the argument that while he did urge that the president to investigate Hunter Biden, there was no explicit quid pro quo tying that request to the release of the military aid that Trump had halted just the week before.

This is laughable. Kevin Drum posts an abridged version of the conversation and the quid pro quo just leaps out and slaps you across the face because after Zelenskiy says, “We are ready to buy more weapons from you”, Trump immediately responds, “I would like you to do us a favor though” and first asks him to look into the DNC server hack and then to investigate Joe Biden’s son. He says that his attorney general and Rudy Giuliani will be contacting him about the matter. Remember, Giuliani is Trump’s personal lawyer, not a member of the administration.
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Shaming hospitals to do the right thing

A ProPublica report from back in June exposed the fact that a nonprofit hospital system in Memphis, Tennessee that was affiliated with the Methodist church had been aggressively suing poor people who had not been able to pay their bills. It had created its own aggressive debt-collection agency that had gone to the extent of garnishing the wages (i.e., deducting money from paychecks) of those who owed money, even though the money they were earning was barely enough for them to live.
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Compare and contrast Trump and Rouhani

First up, listen to Donald Trump speak at the United Nations. He looks like someone who is sedated. It is true that Trump always looks stiff when he is reading from a teleprompter but this seems pretty extreme.

It is also well worth listening to this interview by Fox News’s Chris Wallace with Iranian President Rouhani who is also in New York for the UN General Assembly. It is rare that we get to hear directly from the leaders of designated enemy countries. Usually we only get short paraphrases distilled through the filters of western journalists.

Why the Democrats decided to open impeachment proceedings

Ryan Grim gives the detailed background that led speaker Nancy Pelosi to finally back calls to open an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump. He says that the 44 so-called ‘frontliners’, those congressional Democrats who said that impeachment proceedings would harm their own re-election chances and who, along with Pelosi, had been attacking the Squad (Aleander Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley) and other progressives, had received a shellacking from their constituents when they went back home for the recess and heard that they were going to be primaried for not standing up to Trump.
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Can Trump’s usual strategy succeed with the Ukraine scandal?

Donald Trump has a strategy for dealing with bad news that has worked for him so far in retaining Republican support, especially in Congress. When news starts breaking about some major transgression, what he does is to first deny that there is anything there and then slowly but steadily concede the truth of elements of the story until the full story (as far as we know) is out in the open. The strategy works on several levels. One is that when he does say that something did happen, his supporters assume that it cannot be that bad if he is willing to publicly acknowledge it. Also since each little bit, by itself, is not seen as too bad, his supporters go on record publicly still supporting him for that little bit until finally they are on the hook for the whole awful mess and there is no going back. They then say that this is old news that ‘everyone’ knew about so it cannot be that bad. It is like the metaphor of the frog in slowly heated water. (I know, I know, that the basis for the metaphor is false and frogs do jump out of slowly boiling water.)
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UK Supreme Court emphatically slaps down Johnson’s prorogation of parliament

The UK Supreme Court today unanimously ruled that Johnson’s prorogation of parliament, which was clearly a move by him to limit the time that parliament had to thwart his attempts to force through a no-deal Brexit, was unlawful.

The UK has a tripartite system, where parliament, the government and the courts each have a defined role in balancing out the others’ decisions. O’Neill successfully persuaded three senior Scottish judges 13 days ago that Johnson was abusing the government’s powers to suspend parliament to prevent it from carrying out its constitutional duties to scrutinise and approve the government’s decisions on Brexit.

Yet judges in London and Belfast had ruled in two very similar cases that Johnson did have the power to do so: they supported the government’s views that prorogation was a political decision and that courts had no right to interfere.

The competing English and Scottish court decisions were immediately sent to the UK supreme court on appeal; the judges rushed back from holiday to fast-track the hearing, allocating 11 judges – the largest number they can convene, to hear the case. (There are 12 judges on the court, but it must have an odd number sitting on the bench to prevent deadlock.)
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Advice for people if they are questioned by the police

Two lawyers who call themselves the Pot Brothers At Law give advice on what you should do if you are in the marijuana business and get questioned by the police. Their advice is applicable to almost any police questioning situation actually, not just those that are pot-related. (Language advisory)

I believe that the reasoning behind their advice is that when people talk, they tend to say things that are incorrect or mistaken and then they can get charged with lying to law enforcement and that charge can be used to put pressure on them to admit to other things.

(Via Rob Beschizza)

Kareem Abdul Jabbar weighs in on the Shane Gillis/SNL issue

The basketball star who has become one of the sharpest social analysts has an excellent take on the firing of comedian Shane Gillis from Saturday Night Live soon after his hiring was announced, when it was revealed that Gillis’s past comedy routines indulged in sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia.

I will excerpt just two paragraphs to whet your appetite to read the whole thing.

It’s tempting to open this column by repeating Shane Gillis’ homophobic, anti-Asian and misogynistic slurs that got him fired from Saturday Night Live to show just how desperately unfunny, derivative and dripping with flop sweat they are. But their level of funniness is not the point. Comedians have the right to be unfunny sometimes, just as athletes have the right to lose games, and actors to be in bad films. But when a comedian makes hate-based comments, as Gillis did on his podcasts, we do have an obligation to take a closer look to see whether they are insightful provocateurs of culture and the human condition, or just another middle-schooler blowing milk out their nose for a quick laugh, not caring who they spatter with milky snot in the process.

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Trump suffering from memory loss would be worse than being a brazen liar

It is a given that Donald Trump lies brazenly. It is assumed that Trump’s lies are done deliberately to serve his immediate needs. But Robert Mackey provides a recent example that suggests that Trump may be showing alarming signs of memory loss.

AS HE THREATENED to bomb Iran at Saudi Arabia’s behest, President Donald Trump also intensified his battle with objective reality on Sunday, by railing against what he called “The Fake News” media for “saying that I am willing to meet with Iran, ‘No Conditions.’”

Since there is video of Trump saying exactly that in June, and at a news conference last year, there are only two possible explanations here: The president is either suffering an alarming memory loss or flat-out lying.

It is easy to put the blame for aberrant behavior on some sort of cognitive malfunction, as we can see with the NRA and its supporters who are quick to put the blame for mass shootings on mental health problems and shift the attention away from the easy availability of guns.

I have been reluctant to fully accept that Trump may be suffering from some form of cognitive degeneration and is not just a lying, manipulative, narcissist. But it may be time to face that that is a real possibility.