This is shitty within a shitty context occurring at a shitty time (CNN):

A federal appeals court on Friday dismissed a lawsuit by congressional Democrats alleging President Donald Trump violated the emoluments clause of the Constitution by refusing to allow lawmakers to review and approve his financial interests.
The ruling is a major triumph for the President, who’s intensely sought to keep his business affairs in private, just days after the Republican-held Senate voted to acquit him on impeachment charges for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The case’s dismissal effectively kneecaps one of several attempts Democrats have made to dig up more information about Trump’s business holdings.
…
The Democrats’ “claim is based entirely on the loss of political power,” the appellate panel wrote in the opinion.
“Our conclusion is straightforward because the Members — 29 Senators and 186 Members of the House of Representatives — do not constitute a majority of either body and are, therefore, powerless to approve or deny the President’s acceptance of foreign emoluments.”

Fuck you…

Insane-clown asshole who blubbers:

President Donald Trump continued to rant about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Friday and suggested that her decision to tear up a copy of his speech was a criminal act.
According to reporter Steve Herman, Trump said that Pelosi’s shredding of the president’s State of the Union address this week was “very illegal” and then called it “very disrespectful to the chambers and the country.”
…
“I think there’s a lot of evil on that side,” he said. “They’ve gone crazy, they’ve gone totally crazy.”

Again, fuck you, an unmitigated, unhinged turd. (Illustration at left found here).

One of the most-frightful aspects of the T-Rump is what’s happening to our system of government, the old ‘for-the-people, by-the-people’ routine that’s worked from more than 250 years or so. And what’s going ti happen now that the Orange Fartblossom is free to run amuck for at least the next nine months, and maybe longer.
An interesting, if not partially terrifying, view of this can be found here with the theme that the end of democracy is not so consciously clear-cut (h/t LG&M) — a snip:

Constitutions and laws, like other so-called “parchment institutions,” help to provide a structure for politics.
Given that there are many ways to have elections, our Constitution generates public, common expectations about how they might be conducted (see Carey [PDF]).
But laws do not constrain on their own. They constrain — and this is the essential bit — if people behave as if they are constrained by them.
Working from these two points — democracy is a pattern of behavior, and laws only constrain if people behave as if they are constrained — it follows that we would be correct to say that democracy has collapsed if the explicit or implicit patterns of behavior that govern access to political authority no longer operated.
And we would not look to the passage of a law, or necessarily even the outcome of an election, to determine if democracy had collapsed.
Democracy, in fact, makes it particularly challenging to know if democracy has collapsed.
That is because when democracy functions, challenges to it are usually hidden, and when they emerge in the open, they are processed through a system that presumes that challenges can be handled democratically.
Political actors invoke laws and Constitutions as if they were binding constraints.
Stresses that pose questions about the stability of the regime over time, therefore, are fundamentally ambiguous.
They may be regime-altering, or not. And the responses to them by those who hold power may be regime-altering.
Or not.
And that is why, if American democracy were to collapse, you almost certainly wouldn’t notice it.
Not right away, at least.

Go read the whole thing, etc. scary.
We might have already crossed the thresh-hold, or not…

(Illustration by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here)