Overcast and gray this Monday evening on California’s north coast — low clouds and darkness coming pretty-quickly. Earlier in the afternoon, Little River State Beach was nice, though, even in a kind of brown, drab, near-colorless setting. A beach dog-romp is always nice, no matter the weather.
Sunshine expected tomorrow, so there’s that…

Once again, to the left, my favorite pug-side-mug-shot of the T-Rump, titled ‘Basic Shapes,‘ by caricaturist/illustrator Chong Jit Leong (found here), and it nails the basics of the orange-coated turd — bloated with nefarious and arrogant ugliness.

A word not used often, ‘nefarious,’ but it fits.

As time goes on, day-by-day, the T-Rump becomes more and more nefarious — right out in the open, too. I don’t know if Americans really grasp the situation this country now faces.
The next few weeks will tell the tale. The election is still a long ways off, and with the T-Rump that could be like a lifetime, forever away. Although, T-Rump is a corrupt, heartless asshole.

And even the near-about-laid-back Nancy Pelosi is concerned:

In a New York Times interview published Saturday, the Speaker told reporter Glenn Thrush that she was concerned about Trump refusing to accept a close defeat come November 2020.
“We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi revealed she had harbored similar thoughts in the run-up to November’s midterm elections.
At that time, she recalled, she had thought, “If we win by four seats, by a thousand votes each, he’s not going to respect the election…He would poison the public mind. He would challenge each of the races; he would say you can’t seat these people.”

And in light of the T-Rump’s playbook, this today is, Duh!

"Mnuchin Juggles Day Job Alongside Shielding Trump’s Tax Returns"https://t.co/wke5HBBRdP

— Rachel Maddow MSNBC (@maddow) May 6, 2019

Background to the scenario from CBS News this evening:

The Treasury Department will not release President Trump’s tax returns to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, citing guidance from the Department of Justice, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin wrote in a letter Monday.
“In reliance on the advice of the Department of Justice, I have determined that the committee’s request lacks a legitimate legislative purpose, and pursuant to section 6103, the department is therefore not authorized to disclose the requested returns and return information,” Mnuchin wrote.
…
Neal said in a statement Monday he would “consult with counsel and determine the appropriate response.”

In another plot-point in the same story-line:

Congressional Democrats moved closer on Monday to citing Attorney General William Barr for contempt of Congress over his failure to give them an unredacted version of the Mueller report, escalating a showdown with the White House.
The Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee released a report citing Barr, an appointee of President Donald Trump, for contempt of Congress after the expiration of a second deadline to produce the full report. Barr also skipped a hearing before the committee last week.
The panel will vote on whether to move ahead with a contempt citation on Wednesday, and if it does so, the full House will vote on the issue.

Something has got to be done, and quickly.

Also today was this — via Vanity Fair, also this evening:

In a statement released Monday, over 400 attorneys who worked in every Democratic and Republican administration going back to Eisenhower said that Mueller’s findings quite obviously demonstrated obstruction.
“Each of us believes that the conduct of President Trump described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice,” the former federal prosecutors wrote.
“We emphasize that these are not matters of close professional judgment,” they added.
“Of course, there are potential defenses or arguments that could be raised in response to an indictment of the nature we describe here…But, to look at these facts and say that a prosecutor could not probably sustain a conviction for obstruction of justice — the standard set out in Principles of Federal Prosecution — runs counter to logic and our experience.”

There’s never been a T-Rump type before, I don’t think anywhere close…