I'm sure Trump thinks this is an excellent idea. Certainly he likes Putin's tactic of banning his political rivals from running against him by trumping up charges and then saying he's disqualified from running due to his criminal record. Trump's DOJ put a bunch of American on trial for protesting his inauguration but it didn't work. And he is still pushing for his former political rival to be put in jail.

Russian protesters shouting slogans including "Putin is a thief!" gathered briefly around the Russian government's headquarters while marching through central Moscow.

The lengthy march Sunday by the mostly young group of several hundred protesters came after a large gathering at Pushkin Square dispersed. The rally was among protests nationwide in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny's call to boycott the March 18 presidential election.

The marchers headed down Novy Arbat, one of Moscow's widest and busiest avenues, to the riverside government building colloquially known as the Russian White House. They shouted slogans and some threw handfuls of snow through the high, spiked fence surrounding the building before moving on.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was detained by police en route to an unauthorized protest rally in Moscow, is expected to be charged with a public-order violation.

That charge could bring a punishment of 20 days in jail.

Navalny called for nationwide demonstrations Sunday to support a boycott of Russia's March 18 presidential election, in which Vladimir Putin is seeking a fourth term. Navalny has been barred from running in the election.

Navalny was seized by police Sunday while walking to the Moscow protest. Russian news reports cited police as saying he was likely to be charged with violating a law on calling public demonstrations.

I was afraid that The Post would give us a Hollywood film version of the publication of the Pentagon Papers and manage never to say what was in the Pentagon Papers. I was afraid it would be turned into a pro-war movie. I was afraid we'd be told that the Washington Post was a courageous institution while Daniel Ellsberg was a dirty traitor. I am pleased to have had no reason for such concerns.

The Post is not exactly an anti-war movie, Ellsberg is not a main character, the peace movement is just rabble scenery, and the major focus is split between journalism's struggle against government and Katherine Graham's struggle against sexism. But we are in fact told in this film that the Pentagon Papers documented decades of official war lies and the continuation of mass-slaughter year-after-year purely out of cowardly unwillingness to be the one to end it. The Post leaves Ellsberg looking like the hero he is and Robert McNamara looking like the Nazi he was. And I'm left to complain that I have nothing to complain about.

Well, except this: We're supposed to believe that the fact that the U.S. government had been blatantly lying about its motivations, actions, and analyses of its warmaking for decades came as a shocking revelation to every intern, reporter, editor, and publisher at the Washington Post, that they all had simply had no idea, bless their hearts, and that they all immediately believed that this brand-new truth needed to be told (with the only hurdle being the willingness of the publisher to stick to the obvious course of action when faced with legal threats from the Justice Department).

This story obscures the fact that senators, Congress members, independent reporters like I.F. Stone, and many others had been exposing the lies in real time for years. And, of course, many statements appeared to be lies without the need for any exposure. We're expected to overlook the willful suspension of disbelief required to believe, for example, that predicting imminent success in Vietnam over and over again for years was all driven by honest reflection on facts. The peace movement was the massive recognition of the lies. The peace movement persuaded Ellsberg to act. The people running the Washington Post cannot have been quite as oblivious as we're led to believe.

The same tale of innocence also may leave the moviegoer with the entirely false impression that the Washington Post has instinctively challenged the most blatant war lies ever since the days of Tricky Dick. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ellsberg has said that Trump should see this movie. I'd rather Jeff Bezos and each of his employees at the current Post see it.

Here are some of the wars that the Washington Post has helped to promote since the moment the credits rolled: Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War (the Post outdid itself promoting a fictional account of babies being taken out of incubators), Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, and drone wars in general.

Here are the wars I am aware of the Washington Post having opposed: _______________.

The current U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen is unusual for the Post's pretense that the U.S. military isn't actively engaged in it, even while admirably asking the U.S. to ask the Saudis to open the ports.

Here's an excerpt from my book, War Is A Lie:

In May and June 2005, the most repeated excuse by U.S. media outlets, including the Washington Post, for not covering the Downing Street Minutes and related documents demonstrating the dishonesty of the planners of the War on Iraq, was that the documents told us nothing new, that they were old news. This conflicted, of course, with the second most common excuse, which was that they were false.

Those of us trumpeting the story as new and important scratched our heads. Of course we'd known the Bush-Cheney gang was lying, but did everyone know that? Had corporate media outlets reported it? Had they informed the public of confirmation of this fact in the form of memos from top government officials in the United Kingdom? And if so, when? When had this particular piece of news been new news?

At what point did it become stale and unnecessary to report that Bush had decided by the summer of 2002 to go to war and to use false justifications related to weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism? Judging by opinion polls in spring 2005, we hadn't reached that point yet. Much of the public still believed the lies.

If you went back, as I did, and reviewed all the issues of the Washington Post that had come out in June, July, and August 2002, you found that, while what was happening behind closed doors in Washington and London may have been known to the Washington Post, it certainly never informed its readers.[i] In fact, during that three month period, I found a flood of pro-war articles, editorials, and columns, many of them promoting the lies the debunking of which was supposedly old news.

On August 18, 2002, for example, the Washington Post ran an editorial, an ombudsman column, and three op-eds about a potential U.S. attack on Iraq, as well as three related "news" articles. One article, placed on the top of the front page, reported on a memo that Secretary of "Defense" Donald Rumsfeld had sent to the White House and the media. "Defense" officials were worried that countries such as Iraq or Iran could use cruise missile technology to attack "U.S. installations or the American homeland."

The article contained the admission that "no particular piece of new intelligence prompted the warning." What prompted the "reporting"?

The second Post article - by Dana Milbank - urged Bush to hurry up and argue for an attack on Iraq before opponents of such an attack raised their voices too loudly. The headline was, "White House Push for Iraqi Strike Is On Hold: Waiting to Make Case for Action Allows Invasion Opponents to Dominate Debate." While the article did touch on some of the opponents' arguments, it mainly focused on arguments about how best to persuade the American public and European politicians to support a war.

A third article - by Glenn Kessler - was called "Rice Details the Case for War With Iraq." It began:

"The United States and other nations have little choice but to seek the removal of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said. 'This is an evil man who, left to his own devices, will wreak havoc again on his own population, his neighbors and, if he gets weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, on all of us,' Rice told the BBC. 'There is a very powerful moral case for regime change. We certainly do not have the luxury of doing nothing.'"

The Post's editorial on August 18 urged the White House to make its case for war, and advised it to do so on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had refused to get rid of weapons. Here's the last paragraph of the editorial:

"A preemptive war carries another danger: that it will seem to legitimize aggression by any stronger nation against a weaker regime in disfavor. It has long seemed to us that targeting the weapons of Saddam Hussein carries a legitimacy that other such attacks would not, because the U.N. Security Council more than a decade ago demanded that he rid himself of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, and he has refused to do so. That is also a case that the administration must make more persuasively."

The Post's ombudsman column on the same day was titled "Covering the War Before it Starts," and lamented the Post's biased coverage in favor of attacking Iraq. Unfortunately, this admirable observation was overshadowed by three much longer op-eds on the next page.

The best of them, David Broder's, questioned the accuracy of CIA information on Iraq, briefly mentioned a few concerns, and then joined the chorus urging Bush to make his case.

The worst of the op-eds - which was placed at the top and center of the page, illustrated by a clenched fist with an Uncle Sam sleeve pounding on a map of Iraq - was by former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. The title was "If We Must Fight . . . ." It didn't call proponents of peace "assisters of terrorism," as a Post column had done some months earlier, but it did assume there was no reason to work for peace.

Brzezinski offered advice to the President in a list of five recommended steps to war: First, Brzezinski joined the chorus in suggesting that the President must articulate some sort of reason for attacking Iraq. Second, Brzezinski suggested that the reason the President articulates must be that Hussein is producing weapons in defiance of the Security Council. (Brzezinski was good enough to add that Hussein did not use chemical weapons in the last war and that some reason must be provided to believe he would use them in the future). Third, the United States must take the lead in a new proposal for weapons inspections. Europe would support this, and Hussein would not, giving the United States a good excuse to attack. (Here we have Brzezinski plotting publicly as Prime Minister Tony Blair was privately to "wrong-foot Saddam" - the phrase Britain's ambassador to the United States used privately in March 2002 to describe a process of manipulating Hussein into refusing inspections, thereby creating an excuse for war). Fourth, the United States must work for peace between Israel and Palestine, so that an attack on Iraq is not viewed together with the U.S.-backed Israeli assaults on Palestinians - a combination bound to anger quite a lot of people. And fifth, the United States should plan to occupy Iraq after demolishing it.

The Post's final op-ed was by Charles "liberals are stupid" Krauthammer. He attacked the New York Times for its allegedly biased coverage against attacking Iraq. Krauthammer was upset that the Times had covered some of the stories that the Post's ombudsman criticized the Post for not covering - including the expression of opposition to or concern about attacking Iraq on the part of various legislators and officials.

Remember this was the same "objective" media that had been so upset with President Clinton for missing a chance to launch a war on Iraq in 1998. This was the same media that didn't blink when Bush's Chief of Staff Andrew Card explained the delay until September 2002 of the most aggressive war propaganda by remarking "You don't introduce new products in August."

The war would be built on a planned marketing campaign, not resorted to as a last resort. This fact was not a scandal to be reported in the news or to legal authorities; this was what the Washington Post had repeatedly and publicly requested. The Post wanted war but wanted the President to sell the war well.

This was the same Washington Post that had written of the rising pro-war fever in the country in 1918: "In spite of excesses such as lynching [peace activists] it is a healthy and wholesome awakening."[ii]

Nowhere has the assault on voting been as thoroughgoing, or as creative, as it has been in the newly insane state of North Carolina. The Republicans in that state's legislature have been remarkably flexible in adapting to changing circumstances that might screw up their plans to disenfranchise inconveniently Democratic voters-such as, for example, the election of a Democratic governor name Roy Cooper.

In 2017, as Cooper was taking office, the Republicans suddenly got it into their heads that it would be a good idea to merge the state's elections commission and the state's ethics commission. This was a pre-emptive response to Cooper's promise to roll back existing voter suppression measures that had passed when the Republicans had control of the whole state government. The new policies almost guaranteed a permanent partisan gridlock which would maintain the status quo. Cooper saw that and vetoed the plan. The legislature overrode his veto and Cooper sued. A state court upheld Cooper's case so the legislature changed a few commas and passed the thing again. Cooper sued, again, arguing that the legislature had violated the state constitution. (As Mark Joseph Stern explains in Slate, the N.C. constitution is uncommonly rigid on separation of powers.) On Friday, as the Raleigh News & Observer reports, the North Carolina Supreme Court decided it had had enough of this ridiculous finagling.

In a 4-3 ruling that breaks down along the court's partisan lines, the justices found that a law passed in 2017 that merged the state Board of Elections with the state Ethics Commission and limited Cooper's power to appoint a majority of its members violated the state Constitution's separation of powers clause. The ruling, in a case that has attracted national attention, means that the governor's party will control elections boards at the state and county levels, as has been the case for decades before Cooper defeated one-term Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. That could have implications for voting hours and poll locations in this year's elections.

The state supreme court's decision, written by Judge Sam Ervin IV, was quite clear that the state legislature had gone completely renegade in its attempts to suppress the franchise in North Carolina.

"The General Assembly cannot, however ... structure an executive branch commission in such a manner that the Governor is unable, within a reasonable period of time, to 'take care that the laws be faithfully executed' because he or she is required to appoint half of the commission members from a list of nominees consisting of individuals who are, in all likelihood, not supportive of, if not openly opposed to, his or her policy preferences while having limited supervisory control over the agency and circumscribed removal authority over commission members."

It's 4 am in New York. Federal agents in tactical gear confront the police department's mayoral security detail outside Manhattan's Gracie Mansion. After a tense standoff, the NYPD stands down and steps aside as the bedraggled mayor is removed in handcuffs. Across the nation, carefully coordinated pre-dawn raids sweep up the mayors of Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle, and the governor of California. Two hours later, President Trump tweets victory.

Paranoid conspiracy thriller? Feverish dystopian fantasy? Hardly. This is a plan that the Trump administration is actively considering. On January 16, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen told the Senate Judiciary Committee that, at her department's request, federal prosecutors are "reviewing what avenues might be available" to arrest and prosecute mayors of sanctuary cities for harboring unauthorized immigrants.

Nielsen's testimony wasn't even the first time in January that the administration floated the idea of arresting mayors and governors. Two weeks earlier, Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Thomas Homan told a Fox News host, "We gotta start charging some of these politicians with crimes."

This is dangerous, dangerous talk.

It's important to understand what a sanctuary city (or state) status means. While local policies vary and there is no universal definition of the term, in sanctuary cities, local police stick to enforcing local and state law, not federal immigration law. That frustrates federal authorities, but it's not obstruction, let alone nullification. Federal officers can still enforce federal immigration law. They just have to do it on their own.

The question here is not whether sanctuary policies are wise. The question here is whether our constitutional democracy can survive mass roundups of mayors and governors for refusing to use local resources to help enforce federal immigration.

To be sure, elected officials are not immune from the law. Many have spent time in the federal penitentiary for corruption. And elected officials who deliberately violate court orders can be subject to criminal contempt of court. For example, in the 1960s, Mississippi's governor was charged with criminal contempt for defying a court order to desegregate the University of Mississippi. And former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted for disobeying a court order to stop unconstitutional policing practices. (President Trump pardoned him, but that pardon is the subject of ongoing and potential future litigation.)

It's possible that administration officials are performing elaborate theater for an audience of one -- the president. Trump himself often says "We're looking into it" as a way to dodge an awkward question.

Or perhaps the Department of Justice chuckled at the request for criminal prosecution of mayors, but is considering narrower options to punish sanctuary cities. There aren't many, partly because most sanctuary policies don't even violate any federal statute. More importantly, as the late Justice Antonin Scalia explained in 1997, the Constitution prohibits the federal government from "commandeering" local law enforcement to enforce federal law. Even Congress's power to condition federal funds is limited; as Chief Justice John Roberts explained in 2012, Congress cannot use its spending power to "coerce" a state "to adopt a federal regulatory system as its own." That's partly why a federal judge issued a permanent injunction against Trump's earlier attempt to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities.

But let's not lose the forest for the trees: The United States government is contemplating a mass arrest of US mayors and governors for refusing to help the president's agenda.

We've seen this before in other countries. Mass purges of dissident local officials are moves from Putin's Russia (if not Stalin's) or Erdogan's Turkey. But nothing in our own history has prepared us for this moment.

Is this a red flag for autocracy? Some take comfort in Trump's disorganization and distraction. On this theory, breaking the republic is a full-time job, not something you squeeze in between golf and live-tweeting morning television. But as longtime Putin critic Masha Gessen notes, the first rule for survival in an autocracy is to "believe the autocrat. He means what he says." And even if Trump himself doesn't know how to achieve his goals, the people running the president's immigration enforcement policy -- Secretary Nielsen, Acting Director Homan and, of course, Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- know what they are doing, and how to achieve what they and the president want.

Maybe it won't happen. Maybe cooler heads will prevail. But we should reflect on the chilling fact that President Trump's handpicked appointees to run immigration enforcement openly discuss prosecuting the mayors of US cities. We must prepare for the day when the administration makes good on its threat.

"He was a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks." ~~~ John Randolph

Since this all began more than a year ago, it has been my sworn duty as a citizen of this country and member of the human race to remind people of one core fact as often as possible: None of this is normal.

All the pomp and circumstance of every other State of the Union address was present last night -- the introductions, the stage-managed applause, the honored guests -- and this: Donald Trump giving the crowd his profile like Nero, sneering and gesticulating at the Democrats, clapping and clapping and clapping into his own microphone to keep the applause lines going like some starving seal in a two-bit circus. Standing under the lights last night, he looked like a new penny at the bottom of a truck stop toilet bowl, all copper sheen and the stink of ammonia.

There were a hundred moments I could point to yesterday evening to underscore the "Not Normal" qualities of Trump's first SOTU speech, but one stands out in gruesome relief. He pointed out four guests in the gallery -- Evelyn Rodriguez, Freddy Cuevas, Elizabeth Alvarado, and Robert Mickens, parents of two teenage girls brutally murdered by the MS-13 gang -- and proceeded to grind their demonstrable agony under his heel for all to see.

Why? Because it was Trump's intention to conflate the vast majority of immigrants in this country, particularly those who are undocumented, with vicious killers in the mind of his audience. He even managed to dismiss the Dreamers, who were protected by DACA until he stripped them bare, by claiming that "Americans are dreamers, too," as if these young people were somehow stealing from the rest of us. White House adviser and famous fascist Stephen Miller was in charge of the crafting of this speech, and his truncheon hand was all too visible in this passage.

I am not alone in my assessment of that moment. "Most revolting of all, though," writes Kevin Baker in the New York Times, "was the moment when Mr. Trump sank to using the weeping parents of two murdered teenage girls on Long Island to associate the MS-13 gang first with the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who seek refuge in the United States every year from the violence in their home countries and then by implication with Latino immigrants and even the Dreamers. His turning on the Dreamers like this even as he supposedly advocated for them was a blood libel beyond anything I have heard from an American president."

Beneath the treacly bromides and tread-worn rallying cries, however, lurked an overarching strategy of sorts. In the days leading up to the speech, the newspapers were filled with speculation on how Trump's far-right white nationalist fascist base would react to a speech that was anything other than Hitler in Munich circa 1920.

While the white nationalists got their fair share of red meat last night, Mr. Miller appears to have opted for a different and potentially effective tactic: Aim, above all, for the people who vote with their wallets and bank accounts. Trump did this by exaggerating -- and sometimes brazenly lying -- about the state of the US economy, and the goal of the effort was plain.

Trump has his base locked down tight, but that's all he has. By appealing to the "I got mine, screw you" instinct of voters, he is hoping to broaden his support with a truly venal arrangement: I'll deport millions of people, plunder the Treasury for my wealthy friends, ravage the environment, humiliate the nation and drag us to the brink of nuclear obliteration, but I won't hurt your bank account. Don't laugh: Ronald Reagan rode a similarly crass ethos into two terms, managing in that time to do damage we're still digging out from.

Nary a word was spoken about Special Counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing Russia investigation, leaving one to ponder the metaphysical question of what lives in the silence between the words. Richard Nixon brought up the Watergate inquiry during the 1974 State of the Union speech, his last as it turned out. I suppose the venue wasn't appropriate. How do you tell a thousand people and a televised audience your next bigly idea is to have Jeff Sessions investigate Mueller, so Mueller can no longer investigate you? Had Trump dropped that brick, Lindsey Graham would need a fainting couch permanently stapled to his back.

Last night, all the common components were there: the fan of seats filled with swells, balconies bustling, TV anchorpeople jockeying to win this year's Van Jones Overgush Award by being the first to say "Trump became the president tonight" ... except for the man in the middle. Like some blighted prism, he threw all the lights askew and turned a well-worn event into a genuinely distressing spectacle.

Dear Wissenschaft guy Nye,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your leading your name to give Trump some science cred, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Rethuglican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 03-17-2018. We salute you Herr Nye, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence