It's Not Nuthin'
The press is acting as if the Mueller investigation struck out. We don't know the details yet, since they have not released the report, but it appears that Mueller decided that he did not have evidence to charge anyone in the campaign with 1.working with the Russians to fill US media with fake news and propaganda, and 2.working directly with Russians to hack the DNC email system.
I think it is likely that we will discover there is more to the obstruction of justice issue than AG Barr is suggesting in his summary. But again, we haven't seen the report.
Also, remember, the number is not known exactly but twelve to nineteen other investigations have spun out of Mueller's narrowly focused project. These involve dirty business with the Russians as well as crime in Trump's real estate businesses, security violations in the awarding of clearances, fraud and money-laundering, emoluments and profiteering by the Trump family taking advantage of his political office, and more.
Many of us thought that Mueller was going to chase down the many criminal threads that he uncovered while investigating the narrow topic of Trump campaign collaboration with Russia, but instead he passed them off to other agencies. Republicans can crow that Mueller found "nothing" but that is not what history is going to remember.
In the meantime, here is a list culled from Buzzfeed of the people Muller has charged.
George Papadopoulos Charged: July 28, 2017As others have pointed out, if Mueller had saved these up and announced them when he released the report, nobody would be saying it's nuthin'.
Status: Sentenced and served 14 days in prison
Paul Manafort Charged: Oct. 30, 2017
Status: Sentenced and serving nearly seven years in prison
Rick Gates Charged: Oct. 30, 2017
Status: Cooperating and awaiting sentencing
Michael Flynn Charged: Nov. 30, 2017
Status: Cooperating and awaiting sentencing
Alex van der Zwaan Charged: Feb. 16, 2018
Status: Sentenced and served 30 days in prison
Internet Research Agency Charged: Feb. 16, 2018
(two other Russian entities, and 13 Russian individuals)
Status: One defendant fighting the charges
Richard Pinedo Charged: Feb. 7, 2018
Status: Sentenced and serving six months in prison
Konstantin Kilimnik Charged: June 8, 2018
Status: Charges pending, never participated in court
Viktor Netyksho and 12 members of the Russian intelligence agency GRU Charged: July 13, 2018
Status: Charges pending, never participated in court
Michael Cohen Charged: Nov. 29, 2018
Status: Sentenced and about to serve three years in prison
Roger Stone Charged: Jan. 24, 2019
Status: Fighting the charges
posted by JimK at 1:53 PM
202 Comments:
I said "So, you're going to abandon all pretense of arguing in good faith"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Priya, if you want to have a discussion with me, you know what you have to do".
Actually I'm not sure what you want, I'm going to take an educated guess its to do with all the whining you made over how my criticism of your destructive religious beliefs "disrespected" you and you wrongly think I owe you an apology for speaking the truth. Is that it?
But that raises the question, Why would I want to have a discussion with you?
I've tried sincerely and earnestly to have good faith discussions with you for the past 20 years. I'm a pretty slow learner, but I did catch on this year that you are utterly opposed to good faith argumentation and you admitted you bullshit and call for assaults on lgbt people in order to get a rise out of me.
Why the phuque would I want more of that sort of "discussion" with you?
Why would I respect someone like you who devote their lives to demanding gays pay ever more and more and get ever less and less?
"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked a resolution that called for Special Counsel Robert Mueller's full report to be released publicly, three days after he said he wanted "as much openness and transparency as possible" about the report.
McConnell blocked the non-binding resolution in the Senate on Monday, after it passed unanimously through the House..."
Jim's post is deceptive
it represents a jaded lack of commitment to democracy
The Russian-collusion argument was always an absurd, a practically insane proposition. The fact that it enjoyed the currency it did as long as it did illustrates the cognitive incapacity of the Obama-Clinton majority to accept that they were honestly defeated in 2016. Worse than that, while it was just mad partisanship by most Democrats and most of the political press, the collusion fraud was a crime, of extreme gravity, by its perpetrators.
Even today, main-line Democrats do not understand the country’s reservations about President Obama’s flatlined new normal of no growth in family purchasing power, evaporating “red lines” in foreign policy, approval of Iranian and North Korean development of nuclear weapons with which to blackmail America and, in Iran’s case, threaten to exterminate Israel, and generally to blame white male Americans for every evil under heaven.
Donald Trump is like a circus actor who excites laughter and only as he exits at the end of the program is his full talent recognized. He ran against the Bushes as much as the Clintons, and the congressional Republicans gave him no assistance at all for six months. There is little Never Trump and RINO sentiment left in Congress. But the Democrats signed on almost unanimously to some variant of the Russian-collusion fable, and stuck with it to the bitter end, to the point of not realizing that the end has come. The Democrats said Mr. Trump was protesting too much, and was acting like he was guilty.
When the hapless Jeff Sessions was replaced by the former Bush attorney general William Barr, preveniently bringing the Bush Republicans largely on board, Mr. Barr sagely retained Rod Rosenstein as deputy attorney general, although Mr. Rosenstein had supposedly canvassed the possibility of removing Mr. Trump from office for mental incompetence two years ago.
Mr. Rosenstein had approved the firing of James Comey as FBI director and then engaged Robert Mueller as special counsel, as Mr. Comey had hoped when he illegally leaked a self-serving memo to himself (that was probably both false and government property) to the New York Times. Mr. Barr was confirmed by the Senate after promising to get to the bottom of the false FISA surveillance-warrant applications and other skullduggery that had gone officially almost unnoticed as the Trump-impeachment bandwagon careened out of control for two years.
Mr. Barr attracted three Democratic votes in the Senate confirmation vote, a rare occurrence in this administration, and six weeks later, he finally strangled the mutant monster of fraudulent impeachment. Yet in febrile Democratic minds, it still lives. Much of America’s political and press community no longer knows the difference between truth and lies and political life and death.
Special Prosecutor Mueller identified Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election but declared the non-existence of any evidence that any American of any political persuasion had in any way collaborated with it. The president, in the unanimous company of his fellow citizens, was exonerated. Mueller did not find adequate evidence of obstruction of justice by the president to recommend prosecution. That was the extent of his mandate — to recommend prosecution or not.
It is Mr. Barr’s decision whether to prosecute, and he explained in his report to the bipartisan Judiciary Committee leaders that laying a charge of obstruction of justice would require proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the president had committed an obstructive act, with corrupt intent, and in contemplation of a real or apprehended legal proceeding, and that in his and Mr. Rosenstein’s opinion, that threshold was not met on any of the three required criteria.
It was genius to keep Mr. Mueller’s old sidekick and benefactor, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, up to this point, as he was responsible for setting up this absurd special investigation at the behest of Mr. Comey, whose firing Mr. Rosenstein had recommended.
Of all the audible Democrats on Sunday evening, the only one who had the intelligence to try to extricate his party from the cul-de-sac was Senator Chris Coons of Delaware (who two years ago assured us that Trump’s tax returns would prove the Russian collusion). He saw that the game was up and said it was time to change the subject. All the rest are, in terms of Tennysonian grandeur they do not deserve, “riding into the valley of death.”
Their flabby, Trump-hating House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler said it was “a lie” that Mr. Trump had been exonerated: “No surprise that these people lie.” Only a few weeks ago Mr. Rosenstein was being toasted and feted by the Democrats for having allegedly contemplated trying to evict Mr. Trump by spurious recourse to the 25th Amendment, meant to deal with mental incapacity.
This flushed the depressing spectacle of the ghost of Watergate, Carl Bernstein, out onto our television screens claiming there was a “constitutional crisis” over the president’s mental fitness to hold his office. The other prominent Democrats, including many of the announced presidential candidates along with Senator Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, Feinstein, and Congressman Schiff, implicitly attacked Mr. Mueller, their former hero, on whose behalf they kept presenting infantile congressional bills to protect him from the president, and Mr. Barr.
Mr. Nadler claimed that Mr. Barr had “auditioned” for the role of attorney general with legal articles approving the constitutional powers of the president, as if he had not served with distinction as attorney general before, and as if upholding the Constitution were reprehensible.
It is now confirmed, as many of us have been alleging for many months, that the original counterintelligence investigation was set up on the basis of information former intelligence and FBI chiefs John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe knew to be false.
The entire collusion claim was a political smear funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, and all of those just mentioned as well as Mrs. Clinton, former attorney general Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates, others who made false FISA-warrant applications, and a large group of smaller fry, are up to their eyeballs in criminal abuse of high offices and betrayal of the nation’s trust.
The Democratic cries for immediate release of the entire Mueller report is nonsense, as Mr. Barr informed them Sunday that he will release everything he can as soon as his and Mrs. Mueller’s staff have redacted out what is statutorily required to be withheld — basically grand-jury and national-security-sensitive material.
With a pause to avoid illegal indiscretions, the attorney general has promised to comply with the wishes of Congress and the President to make the report public. Allegations of spuriously invoked secrecy won’t fly. Collusion and obstruction are dead, bad, pigeons.
The president and his family have endured merciless torment by the intellectually corrupt national press and the lawless opposition. His restraint at the end of the story has shown more taste than his enemies would have thought him capable of; he is owed an apology. All those who said there was clear evidence of Trump–Russian collusion, including dozens of congressional Democrats and scores of prominent political-press figures, should be shamed and ashamed.
And the ringleaders in confecting this monstrous aggregation of defamatory lies should be legally punished, with the due process they tried to deny the nation’s leader. Attempts to drive a president from office on the basis of allegations of betrayal of the country that they knew to be false is as close as the United States has ever been to an attempted coup d’état. It is time for the legal system, which has ground slowly to a just verdict, to do the same to those responsible for this disgraceful episode. This must never happen again; not in America.
"WASHINGTON —The House on Tuesday failed to override President Donald Trump's veto of the Democratic measure to repeal his emergency declaration on the southern border."
the courts are swimming with originalists, the economy is booming, corporate and estate taxes have been slashed, Trump is innocent, and Michael Avenatti has been arrested
and now....the wall is coming!!!!!
I'm so sick of winning
You call this winning?
The GOtrumP controlled Senate would have never overridden the veto and everybody knew that.
Everybody also knows House GOtrumPers are expendable and easily replaceable. See "Democrats Retake House in 2018"
You call this a booming economy?
The Treasury announced the federal government spent $234 billion more than it brought in during February, 2019, breaking the record for the largest monthly budget deficit ever.
That's a booming deficit for our kids.
Democrats took the House by successfully running against Trump’s health care and tax policies in 2018, which run counter to the desires of most working families. Trump’s fondness for dictators, and white nationalists’ fondness for Trump, continues to disturb. Trump’s trade war is unnerving farm states. Democrats have plenty to say about Trump’s white whale of a border wall and his horrific policy of refugee child separation, and they are eager to challenge Trump on climate change.
In 2020 Democrats will keep the house and likely retake the Senate as there will be 21 GOtrumP seats in play vs. 12 Democratic seats.
Enjoy!
"You call this winning?"
yep
the gay agenda won't recover from the court appointments for a generation, if ever
That's it Wyatt/Regina, revel in the Republican success of subverting the will of the people.
As David Frum said "When conservatives can no longer win elections, they won't abandon conservatism, they'll abandon democray."
Your Hitler is doing his best to destroy American democracy and punish all who opposed him. Good people like me hope he fails.
The Trump administration’s surprise call for the courts to strike down ObamaCare upended Capitol Hill on Tuesday, putting Republicans in a bind while giving Democrats new talking points on one of their favorite issues for the 2020 elections.
GOP lawmakers for the most part were reluctant to even talk about the Justice Department’s decision to call for all of ObamaCare to be struck down in a court filing.
If the courts agree with the Justice Department, it would dramatically change the way health care is now delivered in the country, and insurance companies were among those criticizing the administration’s decision.
For the GOP, it shifted the political discussion from a more welcome storyline about the end of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe to health care — the issue Democrats see as helping them win back the House majority last fall.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) deflected a question about the ObamaCare case at his leadership press conference and told reporters to call his office. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office had no immediate comment.
Democratic presidential candidates, for their part, quickly denounced the move.
“In 2020, we need to elect a president who will make health care a right,” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) wrote on Twitter.
Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (N.Y.) said the administration’s move ties an “anchor around the neck of every Republican for the next two years.”
Many Republican lawmakers declined to take a firm position on whether they support or oppose the Trump administration’s move, but their guarded responses illustrated the difficulty of the issue for them.
Colorado To Become 16th State To Ban Ex-Gay Torture
The Denverite reports:
A bill banning conversion therapy across Colorado is a step closer to becoming law after the Senate on Monday voted to pass the bill, which would ban licensed professional from the discredited practice of attempting to “cure” LGBTQ youth.
Right Wing conservatives don't see children so much as people but as possessions they can do with as they please. Their theology is that god created humans so god can destroy all humans, innocent or not on a whim and it isn't an immoral action by the christian god.
Christians believe god is to man, as man is to woman, and parents are to children - the one higher in the hierarchy is justified in doing whatever they see fit to their "subordinate". And if its okay for god to kill his creations, it necessarily follows that its okay for parents to do whatever they want to their creations, even killing them.
"They are his creations, he can do whatever he wants with them." Wyatt/Regina told me about their god killing innocent people. They say they get their morality from this god, its no wonder they have nothing but contempt for those they see as beneath them.
--52 percent of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election believed blacks are “less evolved” than whites, according to researchers at the Kellog School of Management.
--In a 2018 YouGov poll, 59 percent of Republicans agreed: “If blacks would only try harder, they would be as well off as whites.”
--The same YouGov poll revealed that 59 percent of self-identified Republicans believe blacks are treated fairly by the criminal justice system.
--70 percent of Republicans agreed that increased diversity hurts whites.
--Republican-appointed judges give black defendants longer jail sentences, according to a Harvard study released in May.
--55 percent of white Republicans agreed “blacks have worse jobs, income and housing than white people” because “most just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty” according to the Washington Post’s review of data from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center.
--Nearly twice as many Republicans than Democrats (42 percent versus 24 percent) believe that blacks are lazier than whites, according to the same NORC poll.
"Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie, who was his own father, can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) unleashed an impassioned defense of her Green New Deal during a House committee meeting on Tuesday, the same day the landmark environmental proposal failed to advance in the Senate. Only four members of the Democratic caucus voted against it.
Josh Campbell
Verified account
@joshscampbell
Asked if there is an innocent explanation for why so many Trump associates were meeting with Russians, Rudy Giuliani replies "It wasn't that many," as a graphic showing 16 people flashes on the screen.
VIDEO showing
1. Paul Manafort
2. Rick Gates
3. Michael Flynn
4. Jared Kkushner
5. Ivanka Trump
6. Donald Trump, Jr.
7. Michael Cohen
8. Jeff Sessions
9. George Papadopoulos
10. Carter Page
11. Roger Stone
12. Erik Prince
13. J.D. Gordon
14. Avi Berkowitz
15. Michael Caputo
16. Felix Slater
2:24 PM - 26 Mar 2019
They just share a love for borscht
"Asked if there is an innocent explanation for why so many Trump associates were meeting with Russians"
did you know that a special prosecutor was given unlimited power appointed to investigate this?
TTers repeatedly asserted that this prosecutor had impeccable integrity and skill
they also said that to question him is to undermine our entire justice system
he said the campaign did coordinate or collude with Russia
some little-known trivia for you
Monica Lewinsky✔
@MonicaLewinsky
if. fucking. only.
Orin Kerr✔
@OrinKerr
Imagine if the Starr Report had been provided only to President Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, who then read it privately and published a 4-page letter based on her private reading stating her conclusion that President Clinton committed no crimes.
10:02 PM - 26 Mar 2019
Evangelical christian David Barton Accuses Democrats of Ballot Harvesting After Endorsing Someone Guilty of That
You gotta hand it to professional liar David Barton, the man has some chutzpah. He went on a show and ranted about Democrats harvesting ballots — collecting absentee ballots and then only turning in ones that voted for Democrats — without any evidence. This after endorsing a North Carolina pastor whose congressional race was voided because he was — you guessed it — harvesting ballots.
"Imagine if the Starr Report had been provided only to President Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, who then read it privately and published a 4-page letter based on her private reading stating her conclusion that President Clinton committed no crimes"
everyone, including Monica Lewinsky, would have been better off
but the situations aren't comparable anyway
Starr was appointed under a statute that no longer exists
Mueller was appointed and worked for the Trump administration
The above has been the Republican Media Strategy since Newt Gingrich convinced the party they had to stop allowing good Democratic legislation from being passed and unconditionally oppose everything when Democrats are in power.
Because the naked self-interest of this strategy is so obvious, Republicans lie profusely to con the public into supporting them and opposing Democrats who actually want to make everyone's lives better.
"Mueller was appointed and worked for the Trump administration"
Right, so you really can't trust anything positive about Trump that comes out of the Mueller report - the fix has been in from the start.
Mueller knows which side his bread is buttered on, just like the 97% of climate scientists who perpetuate a hoax out of the pursuit of money.
How Phariseeical of you Wyatt/Regina.
There's that mental compartmentalization of contradictory beliefs again. Just like decades of pyschological research shows Right Wing Authoritarians like Wyatt/Regina tend to be.
They actually believe their contradictory stance on fair play makes sense. It doesn't and they'll run and hide before facing that.
arbara Bush was literally watching the clock when it came to Donald Trump’s presidency, according to a new book.
Author Susan Page writes in her upcoming tome, titled The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, that the former first lady had a clock in her bedroom that counted down the days, hours, minutes and seconds that Trump had left in office.
A friend gifted the clock to Bush as a joke following Trump’s 2016 victory, Page noted in an adaption of her book that USA Today published Wednesday.
“It sat on her bedside table, where she could see it every day. It was there to the day she died,” wrote Page. Her book is slated for an April 2 release.
Page had access to Bush’s personal diaries and conducted numerous interviews with the former first lady in the six months before her death, aged 92, in April 2018.
Bush wrote in her personal diary in 1990 that Trump was the “real symbol of greed in the 80s,” per Page. Trump’s election win left the former FLOTUS horrified, she noted.
Page also detailed how Bush blamed Trump’s 2016 campaign attacks on her son (then-GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush) for causing her “angst” which resulted in her hospitalization.
Bush did not vote for Trump or his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, instead opting to write Jeb Bush’s name on the ballot. Her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, however, voted for Clinton. It was “the first time in his life that he had cast a ballot for a Democrat for president,” wrote Page.
By February 2018, Bush told Page that she would “probably say no” to being asked if she considered herself to be a Republican.
Of all the reputations in tatters now that Robert Mueller has exploded the Russian-collusion fantasy, Obama-era spy chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper stand out.
For the past two years, the men prominently insisted not only that President Trump had teamed up with Russian President Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 election but that Trump was Putin’s pawn.
“I don’t know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was”: That was Brennan’s pathetic response to Mueller’s findings — after years when he regularly traded on his status as former CIA director to defame Trump.
“When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history,” he tweeted at the president. Russia “may have something” on Trump, he told the world. Now he thinks he suspected he didn’t know as much as he’d thought?
Former Director of National Intelligence Clapper has yet to express even that much regret for his pointed comments, such as that ex-KGB officer Putin “knows how to handle an asset.”
These two weren’t average citizens: They spoke with the authority of having headed federal intel operations. Brennan even cited his training as an “intelligence professional” as the basis for his views.
By milking that status for brutal hits on Trump, they not only misled and divided the country, they damaged the credibility of the US intel community.
Of course, they were crossing the line while in office, running interference for President Barack Obama’s disastrous Iran deal and other policies.
But America’s top spooks are supposed to steer clear of politics completely once they leave office. By ignoring that rule (as well as basic honesty) for purely partisan ends, Clapper and Brennan violated their duty — despicably.
Barbra Streisand has made shocking comments about two men accusing Michael Jackson of sexually assaulting them as children.
The legendary singer and actress said that Wade Robson and James Safechuck — whose allegations against the late King of Pop resurfaced in the recent documentary “Leaving Neverland" — “were thrilled to be there” and that what allegedly happened to them “didn’t kill them."
Streisand, 76, made the strange comments to British newspaper The Times in a piece out Friday, in which she also said that Jackson’s “sexual needs were his sexual needs.”
She says she “absolutely” believes the allegations of abuse by Robson and Safechuck, but puts more blame on their parents than The Gloved One.
“His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has or whatever DNA he has," Streisand told The Times. “You can say ‘molested,' but those children, as you heard say , they were thrilled to be there. They both married and they both have children, so it didn’t kill them.”
Streisand, who crossed paths with Jackson during their careers, added that she feels sorry for both the alleged victims and Jackson.
“I feel bad for the children,” she said. “I feel bad for him. I blame, I guess, the parents, who would allow their children to sleep with him.”
The Washington Post:
Trump and Republicans 'on offence'? Nah, It's just the same old gaslighting.
Given how little we know about Mueller's actual findings and what went into Barr's decision-making, Democrats absolutely should be pressing for release of the former and intensifying scrutiny of the latter.
The whole point of the current offensive is to get Democrats to back down on all those fronts. That Trump and his allies claim themselves emboldened to do this by Muller's findings, while attacking Democratic efforts to get those findings released, perversely captures the true nature of the gaslighting we're seeing here. But if anything, this should emolden the Democrats to keep pushing forward.
--------------
A military poll of service members found that 30% believe that white nationalism is a bigger threat to national security than the wars in Syria, Afghanastan and Iraq.
As President Donald Trump travels to Michigan on Thursday to campaign for re-election, a new national poll shows that a sizable percentage of Americans say they already know who they plan to support.
According to a newNBC News|SurveyMonkey online poll, conducted before the release of a four-page summary of special counsel Robert Mueller's report, which exonerated Trump of charges that he colluded with Russia during the 2016 election, when asked who they would vote for, if the general election were held today, more than a third of respondents (34 percent) said Trump. Nearly three in 10 respondents (29 percent) said they would vote for the Democratic candidate. Another 17 percent of Americans said that it depends on who is nominated and nearly one in seven Americans (15 percent) said they don't know.
Although Trump gets more votes when people are asked who they will vote for, Americans are split on they think will actually win. 43 percent of Americans think Trump will be re-elected and 43 percent believe the Democratic nominee will win. Nearly one in 10 Americans — 9 percent — believe a third-party candidate will win the presidency in 2020. The poll was taken before the special prosecutor exonerated Trump on charges of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election.
Collusiongate is now history. Attorney General William Barr’s four-page letter released Sunday made it clear: “The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
This is not what you expected if you’ve been watching CNN or MSNBC or reading the New York Times or the Washington Post these past two years. Their viewers and readers have been savoring the prospect of Donald Trump being frog-marched out of the White House, on his way to prison, with the smirk wiped off his face.
Now it’s clear that’s not going to happen. Trump's fate will instead be decided by the voters in 2020. Perhaps his exoneration — not too strong a word — will improve his surprisingly stable poll numbers. Or perhaps not. Certainly he will have greater credibility any time he charges the press with spreading “fake news.”
For that, he could cite the leftish journalist Matt Taibbi, who is no Trump sycophant (Taibbi's last book is titled Insane Clown President). Mueller’s conclusion, Taibbi writes, “is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.” In exhaustive detail he lays out how major news organizations repeatedly and unrepentantly “broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.”
Clearly, many in the media thought Collusiongate was their generation’s Watergate, their road to fame and fortune, plus repudiation of a president and party they hated. Instead, it became a road to their own disgrace.
It has been a disgrace as well, as Taibbi argues, for our intelligence agencies. He compares their promotion of Collusiongate with their assurances that Saddam Hussein was seeking weapons of mass destruction. But he doesn’t note one important difference. On Iraq, the intelligence agencies were doing their job as best they could. They subjected the evidence to the pessimistic appraisal that is arguably appropriate in that line of work.
On Collusiongate, the CIA and the FBI were acting contrary to their usual rule of refraining from interference in domestic politics. Instead, as has become clear thanks largely to former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., they were relying heavily on a document bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee, to the point of presenting it as evidence to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court without identifying its provenance.
That, of course, refers to the now-famous Steele dossier, prepared by the former British spy Christopher Steele, purportedly based on telephone or email conversations with unidentified Russians. If much of it seemed far-fetched, Steele’s employer, FusionGPS founder Glenn Simpson, said Steele could judge the credibility of Russians from afar. But Steele recently confessed that he relied on comments by “random individuals” on CNN’s website, which are not verified by the network. Some sleuth!
“When I read the report, I was in shock,” Taibbi writes of Steele’s work. “I thought it read like fourth-rate suspense fiction.” This shoddy work was evidently the primary or only basis for federal government secret surveillance of an opposition party’s presidential campaign. I’m old enough to remember when liberals looked askance at this sort of thing and didn’t believe that citizens have a patriotic duty to believe every statement by an FBI official.
Some Democrats are now eager to fine-toothed comb Mueller’s full report for evidence against the Trump campaign and to emphasize Russia's undisputed shenanigans. Russians, after all, did indeed hack the DNC and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager’s email. They tried but failed to hack the Republicans too.
Democrats over-invested in Collusiongate and would be wiser to concentrate on other, forward-looking issues. Some Democrats are now urging just that. Put aside the dog-eared copies of the Steele dossier and safely dispose of the Robert Mueller votive candles. Everyone makes mistakes.
But the government officials who promoted Collusiongate should not get off so easily. I’m biased, in favor of respecting elections, and I think that a CIA or FBI director who tries to tilt them his own way should be held morally accountable.
Anyone disagree?
With unrestrained heterosexuality humanity has no future, this is why gays deserve preferences.
Without earth, humanity has no future, this is why earth deserves preferences over promiscuous heterosexuality.
When you believe one man above Science,above our Intelligence agencies, above former CIA directors and retired generals and revered journalists...when you believe that one man above even your own eyes and ears - you are fully indoctrinated
Wyatt/Regina, what's the deal with this obsession with "privileging heterosexuality?"
Is it because its the last lynch pin in your false justification for demanding that gays pay ever more and more and get ever less and less?
Or, is it because you two are, like I was at 19; struggling to suppress my same sex attractions and really angry I had been burdened with a societal strike against me I didn't ask for?
You remember, I told you about me meeting up with several male friends and in an effort to keep my anger at gays at a fever pitch (masking my own same sex attraction) I suggested to them we should go hang out at a gay bar and beat up some fags.
That's what self-loathing over same sex attraction does, just adds anger and violence to the world. I've speculated a lot about what might drive you two to put in several hours a day most every day promoting, yes a Republican agenda, but mostly having an undercurrent of a more important agenda to you two - punishing gays.
You two sound just like me at 19.
I think psychologists describe what I was experiencing at 19 "transference".
I think psychologists describe what I was experiencing at 19 as "transference".
See, Wyatt/Regina, I left my previous comment and its typing error instead of deleting it as I normally have over the past two decades here.
So, unlike you've been asserting over the years, there is no big conspiracy about me deleting prior posts, its just further edits of the same post. You know, kind of like science, it gets iteratively better over time. That's why its absurd to argue (like conservatives constantly do) because a minority of scientists were wrong in 1960 that that means the scientific conclusions of today are just as suspect.
The gun lobby now reportedly opposes the Violence Against Women Act because of a provision I authored in the Senate to help protect women from stalkers. Well, I won't apologize for putting safety first.
--------------------
The NRA opposes the Violence Against Women Act because the legislation could lead to firearm confiscations over misdemeanor domestic violence or stalking convictions.
Why are we letting the gun lobby write our laws?
Wyatt/Regina, do you oppose the Violence Against Women Act?
Do you think a few assaults and murders of women is an acceptable price to pay so society can maximize the number of guns the public owns?
Trump tells Hannity, extremely inaccurately, that you're only allowed to launch an investigation "legally" if there is a crime. "There was no crime," he says, obviously not mentioning Cohen, Papadopolus, Manafort, Gates, and Flynn.
Its the non-stop gaslighting of America.
Trump reassures Hannity that there's still a chance he will lock up: Hillary Clinton,
Comey, McCabe, and Brennan.
This is what dictators do when they think they've secured power - they use the apparatus of the state to take out prominent people who failed to swear blind allegiance to him.
France is on fire, England is in chaos, America is divided, Russia is a dictatorship.
Meanwhile, I'm sitting here in Norway, eating gingerbread dough and reading an article on how the White House warns against "Nordic socialism".
He's a stable genius - won't release his grades
He's a great businessman - won't release his tax returns
He's innocent - Won't release the Mueller Report
The gaslighting of America is the only election strategy that can work for crooked Republicans.
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When you are told by our intel agencies that Russia is attacking our election and you encourate it, that's collusion. When you attack the investigation and lie about it, that's obstruction. When you ram through an Attorney General that spins an unseen report, that's a cover up.
At this get-together, Manafort supplied Kilimnik polling data from the campaign. (Kilimnik, according to the New York Times, subsequently passed this information to two Ukrainian oligarchs, and it’s unclear if he shared it with others.)..
The Mueller indictment of George Papadopoulos—the Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who met with various Russian cut-outs and who was told that Moscow had dirt on Clinton in the form of thousands of purloined emails—noted that during the summer 2016 he was trying to establish a back-channel connection between the campaign and Putin’s office. And Papadopoulos was doing this with the approval of senior campaign aides. Here was another clear signal to the Kremlin: Trump and his team had no problem with the Russian attack on the election and still desired a secret hook-up with Moscow.
"House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) urged President Trump to hold off on pushing for a court-ordered destruction of the Affordable Care Act, advice the president ultimately ignored, according to a senior Republican official familiar with the conversation.
The unheeded counsel, which McCarthy recounted to fellow lawmakers in recent days, underscores the angst that has set in among Republicans now that Trump is pursuing the politically precarious strategy with no plan in hand to replace Barack Obama’s signature health-care law.
McCarthy has complained privately to donors that the GOP attempt to gut Obamacare — including its most popular provisions, such as protections for preexisting conditions — was the main reason the party lost at least House 40 seats in last year’s midterm elections.
Now, Republicans on both sides of the Capitol are worried that Trump is forcing them to confront a still volatile issue, with more potential to undercut the party than bolster it heading in the 2020 elections.
McCarthy’s misgivings were first reported by Axios. The official who described his caution to Trump to The Washington Post requested anonymity to share a private conversation.
Trump has put a brave face on the effort, proclaiming that Republicans will become “the party of health care” and promising a replacement that will be well-received by voters.
“If the Supreme Court rules that Obamacare is out, we’ll have a plan that is far better than Obamacare,” he told reporters Wednesday during an event in the Oval Office.
In a filing Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, the Justice Department argued that the ACA should be thrown out in its entirety, including provisions protecting those with preexisting health conditions and allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health-care plans.
If the case reaches the Supreme Court, it’s unclear how it would fare: Five justices who preserved the ACA during a previous case are all still on the court.
But if the law is struck down, Republicans fret that the party will be blamed for more than 20 million people losing their health insurance — and they fear that crafting an alternative would prove unwieldy in a deeply divided Congress.
“We’re going to have to double down on the fact that we need to protect people with preexisting conditions, and we need to find alternatives that work,” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).
“It would be really hard,” she acknowledged.
During a closed-door lunch on Tuesday, Trump relayed to Senate Republicans that he had come up with a slogan — “Republicans are the party of health care” — on the short ride over from the White House to the Capitol, said people familiar with the gathering, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Trump told the Republicans that he “owned” the issues of the economy and border security, but the party is vulnerable on health care. He said he wanted to get a new plan during the election, according to those familiar with the gathering.
Trump’s strategy has hardly been universally embraced.
“It’s the dumbest thing I have ever heard,” said a senior GOP aide, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “It is the equivalent of punching yourself in the face repeatedly.”
Beyond policy concerns, Republicans on both sides of the Capitol were also baffled by Trump’s decision to step on a rare news cycle that casts him in a positive light."
He believes he wins when he wreaks vengeance on his enemies. That is his operating worldview. Read his books. Listen to his speeches from long before he ran for president. That's what "lock her up!" is all about, after all this time.
He believes he needs to best John McCain in order to win the 2020 election. A dead man. Think about that.
Trump co-conspirator Betsy DeVos on cutting all funding to the Special Olympics:
"We had to make some difficult decisions."
Meanwhile, the Special Olympics cost around $18 million, or about the same as five of Trump's tax-payer funded golf trips to Mar-a-Lago.
That's not a difficult decision. It's an evil one.
Trump's hired defender Bob Barr released a whitewash of the Mueller report, a cryptic 3 page summary which only contained 18 words from Mueller's report. Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to keep the report secret while trying to gaslight America and falsely claim Barr's biased summary proves Trump innocent.
This is the high point of Trump's presidency. This is the most they'll be able to convince the public that Trump isn't evil. The public has been bullshitted to the max,Trump only goes down from here.
And even now, the public isn't buying the fake claims of total and complete exoneration,lies like that only remind the public of why Trump can't be trusted. Today's polls show the majority of the public still believes (correctly) Trump colluded with Russia to pervert the democratic process and become president.
Over the coming months, Trump's reputation can only decline from here as bit by bit Democrats pull the truth out of the Mueller report and Trump is pummelled week after week with damning evidence of his corruption and collusion with Russia. The public bit by bit will see that nothing's changed with Barr's kangaroo court judgement that Trump did nothing wrong, it will be abundantly clear Trump may not have been found criminally responsible, but the evidence was voluminous and if anything, fell just short of a criminal conviction.
That's not a winning message in 2020 - "Vote Trump, he's slightly less corrupt than a convict."
Obamacare wasn't popular when it passed because Republicans told all manner of outrageous lies about it. But its very popular now that people have had nine years to see what its done for them.
Republicans did everything they could to hobble it and tear it down, but despite their efforts, its still working pretty well. It is also part of the fabric of the entire American health care system, not just the insurance policies, but hospitals, doctors, medical equipment, it is threaded throughout, so you just can't uplift and remove it, that's absurd! Now, are there fixes, are there things that can be improved (especially after Republicans broke them!)? Absolutely, but you don't tear down something you've got that works pretty well in the reckless hope that Republicans will keep their promise for once and deliver something better. Republicans have never had a viable alternative to Obamacare, and they never will.
Republicans will claim to support protections for pre-existing conditions when the reality is they've mounted an all out legal assault to have the courts strike down protections for pre-existing conditions! Trump said "On day one I will replace Obamacare with something terrific, everyone will be covered and costs will be much lower." Don't fall for that lie again!
When you are told by our intel agencies that Russia is attacking our election and you encourage it, that's collusion.
When you attack the investigation and lie about it, that's obstruction.
When you ram through an Attorney General that spins an unseen report, that's a cover up.
Obamacare is only popular with people that don't work for a living.
For the working population, we have seen our primary care doctors disappear into concierge practices, our premiums sky rocket, our co-pays triple.
My health care costs for our family used to be about 5K a year total. Now they are 15K a year.
Everyone forced onto an HSA whether they wanted to be or not, the plan we had been on for 20 years cancelled.
With Raytheon pointing the blame squarely at Obamacare.
Jim, I dare you to repost your starting comment with the what the exact charges were for each person in the Mueller investigation. What, 70% were entrapment ? being caught in a "lie" after being grilled for 40-60 hours ?
The Flynn example is heinous.
There was no collusion, there were no charges remotely related to Russia, it was tax fraud, etc.
You are now twisting the truth and AS BAD as the fake news.
This from the woman who told the grotesque lie that the average single person on welfare gets $65,000 a year when in reality its about 6-7k per year for a family of 3. When you tell whoppers like that with no remorse, no one can believe a word you say.
Theresa, you and your $200,000 a year family income get no sympathy for the 80% of Americans that make less than you. Stop whining you don't have enough, people are able to get by on $600 a month for welfare for a family of 4. You're spoiled rotten and like the greedy people you are, its never enough.
The vast majority of Americans love their Obamacare and are dead set opposed to Trump and the Republicans sending them back to the bad old days when they could be refused health insurance because they had a pre-existing condition - as 133 million Americans under the age of 65 do.
At $200,000 a year, what you want for society doesn't count, you are irrelevant, you have far more than your fair share now.
At least 17 Trump campaign staff had over 100 contacts with the Russian government about helping subvert American democracy to help make Trump president. To a man/woman, everyone of those 17 Trump people lied and denied they had even a single contact with the Russian government. And then they continued to lie as the truth came out bit by bit and they were forced to admit they had lied and they tried to come up with a new lie and then that was debunked and so on.
People who aren't doing something treasonous with Russia don't have mountains of contacts they lie about profusely. There was non-stop collusion between Trump and Russia and its still going on.
Theresa, if there was no collusion, Trump and the Republicans wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail to keep anything from the actual Mueller report from coming out. Mens rea.
Two days after the Starr Report on the investigation into Bill Clinton was done, the entire unredacted report, almost 500 pages, and boxes and boxes of the evidence used to draw the conclusions was made available to both parties in congress and the public!
Now look how Republicans are doing everything possible to hide everything in the Mueller report other than the 42 words Barr quoted in his 3 page white wash of the mountains of evidence of Russian collusion and obstruction of Justice.
The complete lack of integrity and outrageous double standards Republicans demand is absolutely appalling.
That’s old news Priya ... I’ve been focusing on my work so has my husband it’s closer to half a million now sweetie ...
Kind of wonderful what a capitalist society can do when you work hard
The issue is Obama care didn’t do this for just people like Me it did it for everyone who is working
Pretty sure trump has been asking to release the Mueller report as well ... i’ll go check Twitter
Have a wonderful evening
Again and again, the Russians with corrupt intent made offers of assistance to help Trump subvert American democracy to their mutual benefit. Again and again Trump people made clear their openness to the corrupt aid of the Russian government.
Trump "Russia, if you're listening, please break American law to hack my opponent and help me."
Trump Jr. "If you're offering stolen information from Hillary and the Democrats that we can use against them, I love it.
Over and over during the 2016 Campaign Trump lied to the faces of the American public and said "I have no deals, no business, nothing of any sort in Russia that would compromise me." The truth was Trump was trying throughout the 2016 election to make a deal with Putin for Trump Tower Moscow which would have made Trump hundreds of millions of dollars.
Trump is hopelessly compromised by the Russians. If he or the Republicans had an ounce of integrity he would have resigned by now.
I’ve been writing checks to the federal government for my taxes in excess of $100,000
I pay far more than my fair share
Theresa, Trump has been gaslighting America, claiming he wants the report released but if that was true he could immediately order it released and it would be. He obviously is dead seat against that.
Theresa said "that’s old news Priya ... I’ve been focusing on my work so has my husband it’s closer to half a million now sweetie ...
The issue is Obama care didn’t do this for just people like Me it did it for everyone who is working".
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!
You're in the top 10% of earners and you're soo greedy you're whining its not enough! Your naked greed is only outdone by your black hearted desire to punish the poorest Americans who do you no harm.
The opinion of rich people like you on Obamacare and average Americans deserves no consideration whatsoever in the public square.
Theresa said "I’ve been writing checks to the federal government for my taxes in excess of $100,000".
After you demonized the poor by absurdly claiming the average single person on welfare receives $65,000 a year in benefits, I have no reason to believe what you claim you paid in income taxes.
Even if your claim was true, you're only paying a 20% income tax rate. You could easily pay a 40% rate and it would have no real effect on your standard of living.
You most certainly are NOT paying your fair share.
You didn't hit a home run, you were born on third base and too self-centred to realize how you've gotten more than your fair share from society. And yet its never enough with greedy conservatives.
Well I can’t find where trump has called for the release of the entire report but I agree with you they should release it. And someone should go talk to Wikileaks and figure out how they got the emails... they have said multiple times it was not a state actor.. they should know, right ?
And the FISA warrant request to spy on the trump campaign should be fully investigated.. who requested it and why? Was the obama White House really behind this using the Clinton campaign funded dossier? To quote James Comey... so many questions!
You are right let’s get to the bottom of all of it...
How would you react if obama campaign had been spied on by the bush White House?
Horrified?
And my brother drives for uber born into the Same family offered the same chances...
I know many other families with similar scenarios
You are right I am lucky but I chose to pursue a double major CS/me I chose to attend the best college I could get into I chose to ace my SAts and I chose to focus focus focus on my career
I chose to to work really hard
That might have had a little bit to do with it....
Just a little LOL
Why didn’t you choose to work hard Priya if you wanted to make more money? You are clearly very bright
My plane is taking off so I will need to say good night
Have a GREAT evening in our wonderful country... oops forgot you ate in Canada
Whistler is gorgeous BTw you should go see it if you haven’t already
Part of the reason trump won was Obamacare though I hate it, hit the working poor even harder
Same issues I was upset about the waitress at Olive Garden was also upset about.... don’t think she was quite in my tax bracket but was having to work into her mid 60s because of Obamacare
Theresa said "And the FISA warrant request to spy on the trump campaign should be fully investigated.. who requested it and why? Was the obama White House really behind this using the Clinton campaign funded dossier? To quote James Comey... so many questions!"
Jesus Theresa, the Fisa warrant process for observing Papadopalos was reviewed multiple times by multiple agencies and there was nothing out of the ordinary there. It had to be reviewed and approved by several judges and there has to be clear and compelling evidence of wrongdoing to get a Fisa warrant. The idea that multiple levels of review and approval by many authorites and judges in the Justice Department was somehow "improper" and no one can find any concrete evidence of anything improper? Come on!
"How would you react if obama campaign had been spied on by the bush White House? Horrified?"
I am horrified, horrified that people like you are still trying to get mileage out of this lie. The FBI replied to question after question by the Republican leaders of the House Intelligence Committee and the clear position of everyone asked that there never was any order to spy on Trump by Obama, there is no evidence of any such order and it would have been impossible to give such an order and leave no trace of it. It simply didn't happen.
This is just another example of Republicans like you making up dirt out of whole cloth to try and gaslight the public.
That you would try to bullshit me about Obama spying on Trump just show me your total disconnection from reality or total lack of integrity - it has to be one or the other or you wouldn't be still trying to foist this lie on people.
Theresa said "You are right I am lucky but I chose to pursue a double major CS/me I chose to attend the best college I could get into I chose to ace my SAts and I chose to focus focus focus on my career I chose to to work really hard That might have had a little bit to do with it....".
Lol, that's what I said about being born on third base and thinking you hit a home run. You deceptively left out that your parents paid for your university education, "hard work" had nothing to do with it.
If you had been born to a poor single black woman and had to go to a school that was failing because your country funds schools with property taxes thus giving an, in most cases, insurmountable obstacle to success, due to poor kids not getting anywhere near as good an education as rich kids, you most certainly would not be earning $500,000 a year. You'd be working at McDonalds, dead, or in prison. So spare me the bullshit about how you are successful because you "worked hard" - not even remotely the truth.
Theresa said "Why didn’t you choose to work hard Priya if you wanted to make more money? You are clearly very bright".
Lol, where on earth did you get the false idea I want more money? Does it make rich people feel good to imagine everyone is jealous of you?
You need to go back and read the posts I made after chrismas. I made it very clear, the last thing in the world I wanted was to work hard. I quit my high paying white collar job at 34 because I didn't want to work anymore - living on welfare for $600 a month was by far, my preference.
A desire for money, may be your thing, but its most certainly not mine. In my opinion you worked like a sucker all your life and I took it easy. Yes, it was a spartan life, but its what I wanted and I certainly have no regrets over the choices I made.
And now, married to my wonderful husband, I want for nothing. I live in the lap of luxury with nothing but free time to do with as I choose. Apparently you can't comprehend me not caring about money, I feel sorry for you, slave to the buck and its never enough.
Theresa said "And my brother drives for uber born into the Same family offered the same chances...".
Why is that a problem for you?
The nation of Brunei will begin stoning and whipping to death any of its citizens that are proved to be gay. Let that sink in. In the onslaught of news where we see the world backsliding into authoritarianism this stands alone. At the head of it all is the Sultan of Brunei who is one of the richest men in the world. The Big Kahuna. He owns the Brunei Investment Agency and they in turn own some pretty spectacular hotels.
Brunei is a Monarchy and certainly any boycott would have little effect on changing these laws. But are we really going to help pay for these human rights violations? Are we really going to help fund the murder of innocent citizens? I’ve learned over years of dealing with murderous regimes that you can’t shame them. But you can shame the banks, the financiers and the institutions that do business with them and choose to look the other way.
The rulers of Brunei and Wyatt/Regina/Tony Perkins don't differ in kind, they differ only in degree. Anti-gay Muslims and Anti-gay christians are ideological brothers. That gays should be punished is not up for debate, only the "appropriate" degree of punishment is. And you've seen many veiled threats from Wyatt/Regina how the anti-gay Supreme Court is going to come for and punish gays. Don't think for a second that American evangelical christians will stop at what punishment they now request for gays, if they take enough power they will easily slip into "death to gays" mode.
And my parents paid for my brothers university education so yes hard work always has something to do with it...
And I co-signed a student loan for my black and poor nanny whose parents died from aids in Zimbabwe... she worked really hard Went to school while working and she’s a doctor now....
Somebody has to pay your welfare check Priya so if you don’t want to work those of us that are working get more taken from us and taxes to pay for you not to work
That’s the model
If you’re not willing to contribute with your taxes you have absolutely no right to tell those of us who are working hard we should pay more ...
Just saying my plane just landed and I have an 8 o’clock conference call tomorrow morning so have a good evening
Bedtime reading for you https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/transcripts-of-lisa-pages-private-testimony-released
Page testimony unredacted enjoy
Theresa, I don't get a welfare check. You've repeated a lot of lies about me over the years, be a decent person and stop it.
If you had your way, I wouldn't be with my husband and I'd still be getting a welfare check. So, you need to re-evaluate your desired societal structure and decide which of your conflicting societal imperatives you want more.
I did contribute far more in taxes than I ever collected in welfare, so eff you and your lie that you paid for my welfare. I paid 30 effing percent income tax on my 50k a year, so don't effen tell me your 20% rate is too high.
I guarantee you don't work anywhere near as hard as my husband.
So, this unfounded assertion of yours that your salary is proportional to how hard you work is simply a lie undeserving rich people tell themselves to justify broken capitalism grotesquely overvaluing their "work".
Overpaid and underworked conservatives conservatives have this sick fantasy about how they are the victims of the poor.
Look at Theresa, insisting its true that Obama wiretapped Trump when it would be impossible to do without leaving a trail of paper/e-records and there is no evidence whatsoever to support this claim.
And somehow, despite open public collusion, Russia offering to help illegally elect Trump, Trump and co repeatedly saying they wanted to work with Russia to tilt the American election in Trump's favour, Theresa amazingly claims there's no evidence of collusion! And that's not even counting Manafort giving Trump campaign polling data to Russia to assist them with their massive social media disinformation campaign!
Republicans are just making up an insane story that paints them as 100% innocent and pure and the American intelligence agencies and the Justice Department as massively corrupt and all top staff guilty of a criminal conspiracy to fake evidence and deceive the public. Its the gaslighting of America.
Imagine if during the 2012 campaign, Obama and his campaign staff had over 100 contacts with the Iranian government who engaged in a massive effort to help elect Obama in return for everything Iran getting a nuclear deal more favourable to them. Just imagine how Republicans would have reacted.
This is the kind of gigantic double standard and dishonesty that is at the core of who Republicans are. Read the research:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
and denying the overwhelming evidence their claims have no relationship to reality.
Democracy was not under threat in 2016. Russia's efforts to influence the election were paltry and non-consequential. Over the last two years, however, a liberal-media-deepstate complex has made a serious attempt at a coup, to overturn the results of the 2016 election:
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-real-costs-of-russiagate/
Russia is not a substantial threat to the US but regardless of that, Trump's campaign didn't collude or coordinate any effort with them. Hillary's did.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/03/28/campaign-colluded-russians-2016-hillary-clintons/
Adam Schiff had access to classified intelligence information so when he said he had see evidence Trump colluded with Russia, many assumed he was telling the truth. He lied. He should lose access to classified intelligence information. He's not alone:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/marc-thiessen-the-trump-russia-collusion-hall-of-shame
The media misled the American people and failed to carry out their mission and duty. Americans should boycott the media outlets that did this and support honest journalism.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/03/29/four_lamest_excuses_for_the_medias_russia_coverage_139893.html
Betsy DeVos wants to kill funding for the Special Olympics. It likely won't happen, but that's not the point. The point is that neglecting the disabled is a positive virtue — for a certain sort of person.
It's the reason why Trump openly mocked a disabled reporter. He knew exactly who (and what) he was appealing to. He was appealing to this kind of mentality:
"Soon after Hitler took power, the Nazis formulated policy based on their vision of a biologically "pure" population, to create an "Aryan master race." The "Law for the prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases," proclaimed July 14, 1933, forced the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression), retardation ("congenital feeble-mindedness"), physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism."
In short, defunding the Special Olympics and mocking the disabled is part and parcel of a deliberate program to win the hearts and minds (such as they are) of American white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. It's what they expect Trump to do. And he is nothing if not obliging.
"Deplorable?" No. Despicable.
Wyatt/Regina said "Hillary colluded with Russia, not Trump".
Oooo, there's that classic conservative "debate" tactic of just shamelessly asserting reality is almost 180 degrees opposite from what it really is. Don't you people have any honest debate tactics?
If requesting the information from the Steele Dossier was collusion with Russia, why aren't you hammering Jeb Bush, Republican, as much as Hillary? He was the one that first paid for the Steele Dossier, Hillary just completed the work he started.
The truth is, what deceivers like Wyatt/Regina claim is Hillary's (and Bush's) "collusion" with Russia amounted to getting information from private citizens of Russia - nothing unusual,unethical, or illegal about that.
The private citizens who contributed information to the Steele Dossier didn't do any cyber-attacks on election computers, they didn't embark on a multi-media campaign from a 1000 strong troll farm to flood American social media with disinformation, they did nothing, but told Steele what they knew about Trump and Kremlin wrongdoings.
With the Trump campaign, they met with representatives of the Russian Government. That is why what Trump did is a betrayal of his country and Hillary did is not.
The Russian government representatives made one effort after another to let the Trump campaign know the Russian government wanted to attack American Democracy to elect Trump. And the Trump campaign again and again signaled to the Russia government they very much wanted Russia to attack the election and subvert the will of the people.
Trump's ringer for Attorney General Barr may have skimmed the Mueller report and deceptively claimed all the collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign fell just shy of being a crime, but make no mistake about it, Barr and the Republicans know there was massive collusion between Trump and Russia. They may pretend its not quite enough collusion to have been a crime, but they know its a massive betrayal of the American people and their country.
"Betsy DeVos wants to kill funding for the Special Olympics."
the government doesn't pay for the USOC, why would they pay for the Special Olympics?
"It likely won't happen, but that's not the point. The point is that neglecting the disabled is a positive virtue — for a certain sort of person."
you don't know that she doesn't personally contribute to the Special Olympics or other charities to help the disabled
she just doesn't favor forcing other people to
you are among the dregs of society that believe they are helping someone by forcing other people to
if all the Dems using the disabled for political ends would make a modest contribution, the Special Olympics would be fine
"It's the reason why Trump openly mocked a disabled reporter."
he mocked a disabled reporter as retaliation for unfair journalism by the guy
I'm not saying that was justified but it was almost three years ago
obviously, nothing like it has happened again or else you'd bring it up
move on
"He knew exactly who (and what) he was appealing to. He was appealing to this kind of mentality:"
you're so full of crap, it's coming out of your mouth
"Soon after Hitler took power, the Nazis formulated policy based on their vision of a biologically "pure" population, to create an "Aryan master race." The "Law for the prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases," proclaimed July 14, 1933, forced the sterilization of all persons who suffered from diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness (schizophrenia and manic depression), retardation ("congenital feeble-mindedness"), physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism."
well, Hitler is a leading candidate for history's most despicable creep but, unfortunately, the action you cite above was widely endorsed by the settled science crowd at the time Hitler was rising to power
Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, is one who would have heartily endorsed sterilization of the disabled
"In short, defunding the Special Olympics"
is an attempt to properly delineate between the public and private
"and mocking the disabled"
it happened one time to one individual, not disabled people as a whole
"is part and parcel of a deliberate program to win the hearts and minds (such as they are) of American white nationalists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. It's what they expect Trump to do. And he is nothing if not obliging."
you're a liar
""Deplorable?" No. Despicable."
those who use the disabled or political games are both
If Hillary is guilty of collusion, why should we care? She has no current influence or control over the country, Trump does. She doesn't present a threat.
Why should we ignore Trump's collusion to focus on Hillary when Trump has a great deal of power over America, where it goes, and who we end up indebted to and so on?
Theresa makes $500,000 a year and its not enough for her, she doesn't want to pay any taxes, contribute anything to the society that enabled her wealth. And even the poorest amongst us buy things and pay sales taxes and help the economy.
When I was on Welfare I got, if I remember correctly, around $600 a month. After bills I generally had $120-$130 to buy whatever I wanted, be it food, or if I was willing to eat nothing but spaghetti and peanut butter for a week or 10 days I could buy a gram or two of weed if I had a crop failure. I was was content and grateful for the $120 I had to spend on whatever I needed. Thankyou so much to the tax payers of Saskatchewan and Canada - you kept me alive to have now found the abundant happiness I have with my husband who now supports me.
Just look at the gigantic chasm between Theresa and me. Me, happy and wanting for nothing with $120 a month, for her and $500,000 a year, its not enough, they're barely scraping by because of welfare leeches like me - "Do you know how much milk growing boys go through?! It costs a lot!"
But, hey Theresa, assuming you actually are working hard for your salary (and very, very many of you rich people aren't) and that's what maximizes your happiness, more power to you. But just remember, that's not for me, and there was a vast society behind you that enabled you, you owe back to that society. For you to contribute 40% of your income in taxes would have no effect whatsoever on how you live. If I were to have received no welfare, I wouldn't be here today. You may say that's the way it should be, but if that is the way society wants it to be, society owes me a doctor assisted medically unnecessary suicide at any time I want. If society demands I live a life I can't cope with, society owes me the right to an easy death(Fentanyl overdose?) for any reason I choose.
Theresa you fat cat, just leave people on welfare alone. For god's sake, when is enough enough!
Republicans have no endgame in mind, their strategy is just keep continuously pushing for lower and lower taxes and cuts to everything the government does for the not-wealthy. The inevitable course of that endgameless strategy (if you can call it a strategy) is that there is no government whatsoever, raw capitalism makes all the rules and life gets ever harsher and for more and more people, and ever better for a continuously shrinking number of people with virtually all society's wealth.
The psychological research over decades bears this future out if Republicans continue to win elections by subverting the will of the people:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
I really have no idea what Atlas Shrugged is about, but given that conservatives so love it, I'm going to guess its a story about a world with no government, where corporations rule. Did I win?
Just look at the non-stop gaslighting by conservatives here. Just one shameless complete fabrication of "reality" after another, a total lack of integrity and contempt for the truth.
"If Hillary is guilty of collusion, why should we care?"
it's because her deceit has hurt the country for two years and steps have to be taken to prevent this ever happening again
I wold actually prefer she not go to jail, but the truth needs to uncovered
"She has no current influence or control over the country, Trump does. She doesn't present a threat."
not anymore
"Why should we ignore Trump's collusion to focus on Hillary when Trump has a great deal of power over America, where it goes, and who we end up indebted to and so on?"
Trump didn't collude with anybody.
He does have a new approach to Russia than his predecessors but he was clear about that before he was elected.
This is a contrast to Obama the Worst who told Russia he would be more "flexible" after he fooled Americans into re-electing him.
I missed this earlier:
Theresa said "You are clearly very bright".
Why thank you : )
I think its the estimated 10 lbs of marijuanna I estimate I've smoked in my life ; )
and the thousands and thousands of hours I spent staring out the window at the bald prairie and nature, high as kite, thinking about all the injustice in the world.
Polls over the time period after Attorney General Barr released his deceptively short whitewash of the Mueller report shows the majority of Americans still correctly believe the Trump camapaign colluded with Russia, and the Trump administration continues to collude with Russia (blocking legislation and efforts to protect computers used in elections, and aiding the Kremlin's efforts to again subvert the 2020 election by repeating Putin's official state lie that Russia has not and is not attacking American elections).
Trump publicly invites Russia to commit cyber crimes against his opponents, makes it easier for them to do so, and then lies on behalf of Russia to con the Amnerican public into thinking no crime is being committed and no collusion is happening.
The Trump Administration did, and is still colluding with Russia.
I go back and forth between wondering if Wyatt/Regina put such massive effort into making anti-gay comments over two decades because they are demented, or they're being paid to do so.
Both seem equally plausible!
I remember years ago, arguing about hell with Timothy Kincaid, or at least as much as Timothy would let you argue with him about his religion.
It really stuck in my mind when he tried to justify his god creating hell and sending people there. He said "Everyone deserves to go to hell, so its incredibly magnanimous of god to not send everyone there."
Imagine the nicest people you know, and christians like Timothy Kincaid think its moral for their god to eternally torture them, that they deserve this infinite punishment for their incredibly trivial and finite crimes. That's toxic christianity and toxic Islam.
I'm struck by how Timothy Kincaid angrily opposed hate speech laws, always saying free speech was sacred and it was immoral to prevent people from saying anything, even if it was advocating for genocide against lgbts.
But when it came to his religion, Timothy admanatly opposed free speech, he got explosively angry if you were strongly critical of his religion. When you pointed out this hypocritical behaviour of his he, like the pharisees, fell back on the technicality that he was moderating a private web site, not a government web site.
Timothy portrayed himself as a great champion of free speech when in reality he crapped all over the spirit of free speech to censor free speech when it suited him and hide behind him technically not breaking the law. No wonder I have such ongoing hatred for him.
How come Wyatt/Regina is constantly calling for Hillary to be locked up for paying for the Steele Dossier but not Jeb Bush?
They both paid for the Steele Dossier, but you only hear "Lock Hillary UP" but never "Lock Jeb UP". They're both "guilty" of the same crime and again the Republican double standard - If we do it, its not a crime, if you do the exact same thing, it is a crime.
Again and again with Republicans, there's one set of permissive rules for them and a completely different set of very harsh rules for Democrats - Republicans just the epitome of constant hypocrisy.
Priya you’re too funny
I’m not saying people who generally need to be on welfare shouldn’t get it
They should ... For a period while they get back on their feet it shouldn’t become a lifestyle
When those people in the same breath say that people who are working hard should give 90% of their income to tax, well I am going to beg to disagree
I actually think if you’re not paying taxes you shouldn’t be able to vote on tax policy
Someone famous said otherwise people will vote themselves the treasury
I would go nuts posting all day on social media though I’m sure it makes you happy so whatever floats your boat dear
I actually like my job !
It’s challenging and fun
I suspect as the Trump economy continues Storming along and those of us that like working hard float right along with it life might get more depressing for you ...
Chin up and I’m glad you’re happy
As the revelations about what actually happened with Obama and the Trump campaign come out and when Trump wins in 2020 please stay happy
Look out your window there’s more than politics
Theresa
Before Robert Mueller submitted his report to Attorney General William Barr, many people thought of Mueller’s work as a kind of Watergate investigation, with everything that means about presidential accountability. Now that his investigation, at least according to Barr, has ended inconclusively, were we wrong to think of it that way?
No one thought Mueller’s work was more of a Watergate investigation than Donald Trump, who outdid the Nixon template in trying to derail it, to the point of vilifying his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, because he didn’t prevent it. But given that Mueller’s narrow brief was to determine if Trump and his campaign had conspired with Russia’s efforts to sabotage the 2016 election, it was never in the cards that he could adjudicate all the wrongdoing of a kleptocratic administration laced with grifters and liars from the top down. And if you believe, as I did and do, that there was a near-zero chance that the Vichy Republicans of the Senate would convict Trump in an impeachment trial, it is arguable that Trump might have escaped even if Mueller had recommended prosecution for conspiracy. His base would have rallied around him as a victim of a deep-state conspiracy, with Mueller and James Comey as co-conspirators taking orders from George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Jussie Smollett, and the ghost of John McCain.
Of course, Mueller had an ancillary brief as well: to investigate possible obstruction of justice. The verdict of Not Guilty has been rendered by Trump’s own appointee, William Barr, without letting any independent authority, including Congress, see whether the evidence meets a prosecutorial legal standard or not. Meanwhile, those looking for presidential accountability must rely on other law enforcement agencies, starting with the Southern District of New York, as they investigate and, if warranted, indict any in the Trump White House, Trump Organization, the Trump Inaugural Committee, or Trump family who committed un-Russia-related crimes. I still believe that if Trump leaves office prematurely, it will be according to the Al Capone model — not for capital offenses but for tax fraud or other financial crimes that might encourage him to strike an omnibus deal rather than spend the rest of his post–White House life in court fighting to save his company, fortune, and possibly his children (if he gives a damn about them).
Meanwhile let’s be grateful for the good news. I accept and am relieved by Mueller’s finding that Trump didn’t conspire with Russia when it attacked the very heart of American democracy. The bad news is that Trump still is colluding with Russia as he attempts to destroy NATO, soften sanctions, and fulfill other items on Vladimir Putin’s to-do list. Trump may already be colluding, passively if not illegally, with Russia’s attack on the 2020 election as well by mounting, at most, a nominal effort to combat it. And there’s no reason to doubt that he will continue to ignore, deride, and delegitimize the American intelligence agencies which are tracking it. Surely his biggest takeaway from Mueller’s verdict is that, as in 2016, he can openly reap and celebrate Russia’s efforts on his behalf without having to be a participant in them. As Cold War parlance would have it, he’s a useful idiot for the Russian cause even if he’s not a Russian agent. It’s not for nothing that the Kremlin has been celebrating the Mueller report with the same hyperbolic enthusiasm as Sean Hannity.
In the wake of the Mueller report, the debate over the Russia investigation has, in some corners, turned into a debate over the role of the press — both the new facts reporters dug up, and the expectations journalists and outlets have set. Looking back, did the media play too much of a role?
Had it not been for the press, we never would have known about any of Trump’s dealings with Russia or those of his convicted cohorts. That Mueller determined that these corrupt activities did not rise to the level of an illegal conspiracy does not mean that they didn’t happen and didn’t include other crimes. The facts remain the facts. The efforts of the White House and its allies to overstate Mueller’s report — or, more accurately, Barr’s four-page spin on a document that runs over 300 pages, not including mountains of supporting documents — as complete exoneration for Trump is evidence that they know well that the exoneration is far from complete.
Where the media went overboard, myself included, is when its punditry shifted into premature adjudication and raised the expectation that the walls were soon to close in on Trump. In cable news, there was an added systemic issue that needs to be addressed. When reporters covering stories like the Mueller probe appear on cable news programs that have a partisan point of view and are populated by anchors, experts, and opinion journalists speculating on what may happen next, those reporters lend their imprimatur to the overall narrative being presented, even if that is far from their intent. On cable news, the border between reporting and punditry is not clearly demarcated as it is, say, between a newspaper’s news report and opinion pages. The criticism being heaped on the Times and Washington Post in particular is unwarranted — their investigative reportage on the Russia story was uncompromising, meticulous, and holds up — but it is easy for critics to stir them into the brief against cable hysteria, which reached a ludicrous peak in the week or so before Mueller turned in his report.
In what some observers note might be an attempt to move the Mueller report out of the headlines, the Trump administration opened a new attack on the Affordable Care Act just one day after Barr’s summary was made public. Will Washington return to business as usual?
It already has. Steve Bannon was surely correct when he used an implicit King Kong analogy this week in predicting that the president will now “come off his chains” and go “full animal.” (It’s sobering to contemplate that what we’ve seen thus far is only partial animal.) Without the “witch hunt” and Mueller to kick around anymore, a toddler like Trump has too much time on his hands and will cast about for any loud rattle he can shake. It’s a measure of how unleashed he is that his first big play would be to try again to blow up Obamacare, the very move that cost the GOP the House in 2018, and to declare that the Republican Party, which spent years failing to come up with its own health plan, “will soon be known as the party of health care.” Even Susan Collins, whose usual stance is to say she’s “concerned” by such Trump actions, declared she was “appalled.”
The first post-Mueller report week is not yet over, and already this liberated Trump has followed his health-care hand grenade by threatening to close the Mexican border, intervene in the Smollett case, and declare war on OPEC. He is appointing an unqualified political hack and IRS deadbeat to the Federal Reserve. His secretary of Education, the inimitable Betsy DeVos, has called for defunding the Special Olympics. The Mueller finding on collusion does nothing to alter the reality that we have a mentally unstable and lawless Putin-Kim wannabe running amok in the White House, perhaps more empowered than ever, with no one applying the brakes. What will happen next is anyone’s guess and everyone’s problem.
Hi Theresa
Been a while since you posted. Glad to hear you're doing well.
fyi, I don't know if you've been following but Priya has become very creepy the last few months. She admitted that she as had many mental breakdowns over the years and was under psychiatric care. She blamed me for "torturing" her and said I was to blame for her breakdowns. Then, she lost her psych in November and by December had another mental breakdown (but, of course, she claims she's happy as a clam.) She said she going to cut and paste blog posts I made and send them to lunatic gay groups all over the country to show how I tortured her. She said she was glad her brother was dead because he verbally "tortured" her too. Then she said I remind her of her brother. Then she said she thinks she knows who I am and has been stalking me on the internet, looking at pictures of me.
I told her I would no longer respond to anything she says and she continually tries to provoke me, hoping, I suppose, to be tortured again. That's why you don't see anyone responding to her.
Have a good one
Life is really good. I am really happy. I even made up with my siblings believe it or not after they did nothing to help my mom get through my stepfathers death...
I just plowed through it and settled the estate got my mom moved, found her a caregiver, and got through it somehow
When you really think it’s all going to come crashing down on your head you just pray ...
Whether it’s God or a higher power or whatever it is when you reach out it does seem like somebody is listening
It Was a really rough couple of years and if you’ve ever settled in an esstate it’s so much work
My stepsiblings who did not bother to show up until three days before their dad died then stole money from my mom
There are some awful people in this world
We all go through rough times and we should help each other
When it rains it pours as a RULE
Hopefully Priya is OK
I don’t wish harm on anyone
I don’t hate gay people I don’t agree with them but I wish them no harm
I know how I felt when Obama was president and everything I felt was right or wrong was being violated
Though I believe everything Priya believes is wrong... I am sure she adamantly believes it ...
It is just as hard for liberals to deal with the Trump presidency as it was for us to deal with an Obama one
We aren’t screaming in the streets however or violently accosting people Of an alternate political persuasion
And with that I’m going back to my job and will sign off again
Priya I truly wish you the best of luck
"We aren’t screaming in the streets however or violently accosting people Of an alternate political persuasion"
OMG, Theresa.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/27/neo-nazi-pleads-guilty-federal-hate-crimes-virgina-car-assault-heather-heyer-james-fields/3291835002/
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/429182-fourth-man-found-guilty-of-beating-black-man-at-charlottesville-unite
Theresa, you're a saint
keep praying, no one ever went wrong seeking God
“Our government,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”
Would that Brandeis could rise from the dead to oversee the investigation and likely prosecution of those whose determination to oppose Donald J. Trump was so fierce that they conspired to create a narrative of treason that has now been revealed to be a charade.
Let the reckoning begin.
I’m not talking about settling scores with the dozens of mainstream media figures who spent the last two years “informing” their viewers/listeners/readers that President Trump and his campaign had broken the law to conspire with the Russian government to fix the 2016 election. They were wrong, and they now have been proven wrong, by the very man in whom they placed their deep and abiding faith.
If, as we were reminded repeatedly during the last presidential administration, the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, those charlatans will lose their audiences, their sponsors, and, eventually, their livelihoods.
I’m talking instead about the reckoning for the current and former government officials – holders of a public trust – who deliberately abused that trust to lead their fellow citizens on what they knew from the beginning was a wild goose chase. They knew it was a wild goose chase because they were the ones who created it in the first place.
I’m talking specifically about former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, among others.
These are the people who, together, spun a fable about corruption and treason and international intrigue that led to horrific damage – damage to individuals caught in the cross-hairs of the “investigation” they launched, damage to their government, damage to their country.
Example: President Trump’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday was the first meeting Trump had had with a foreign leader who didn’t have just cause to wonder if and when Trump would be leaving office early as a result of the investigation.
That is, for more than two years now – in fact, for the entire duration of his presidency – President Trump has been handicapped in his conduct of foreign policy by the inevitable doubts among foreign leaders who couldn’t help but wonder about the value (and duration) of a deal struck with Trump, or a threat made by Trump.
That handicapping of our president doesn’t just hurt him, it hurts our entire nation.
It must not be allowed to happen again. To that end, a reckoning must ensue – not for reasons of revenge, but because punishing criminals for their criminal behavior is the best way to head off future criminal behavior, both by them and by others encouraged to behave criminally after seeing earlier criminal behavior go unpunished.
Congressional Democrats now insist that the entire Mueller report be handed over to them and made public, even though they know there are parts of it that must be redacted. Fine. I agree. Scrub the document and remove the national security information and any information that would violate grand jury secrecy, and let us see the rest of it.
But while we’re releasing the Mueller report, let’s also release the FISA warrant applications. Let’s release the testimony from the secret hearings. Let’s release the memoranda memorializing the opening of the investigation, and the “scope” memorandum Rosenstein issued in August 2017, months after he appointed Mueller (when he failed to cite a crime to be investigated by Mueller, as Justice Department guidelines require).
Let’s appoint a new special counsel to investigate those former FBI and Justice Department officials – along with Brennan and Clapper – who created this entire narrative. Have them interrogated by FBI officials. Let them hand over their new-found post-government cable TV pundit earnings to white-collar defense attorneys to help them maintain their innocence.
Wrote one of them recently, “The rule of law depends upon fair administration of justice, which is rooted in complete and unbiased investigation. We are best served when an investigation finds all relevant facts and illuminates the fullest possible view of the truth.”
I agree. I would add that we are best served when those upon whom we rely for the administration of justice actually do their jobs without fear or favor, and follow the law as written without regard to the last name of the subject of their investigation.
Just FYI, that quote was from Comey, writing last week in The New York Times. Like the blind squirrel, even he can find an acorn every now and then.
Distinguishing herself in a crowded field of Democrats running for president, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, called Robert Mueller’s decision not to charge Donald Trump with colluding with Russia during the 2016 election “a good thing for our country.”
Gabbard, who lags in 2020 polls behind nuttier rivals, said in a video posted to her Twitter account that “now that Mueller has reported that his investigation revealed no such collusion, we all need to put aside our partisan interests and recognize that finding that the president of the United States did not conspire with Russia to interfere with our elections is a good thing for our country.”
Joe Biden's spokesman said Friday that the former vice president does not recall non-consensual kissing of a Nevada political candidate in 2014.
The allegation was made in a New York Magazine article written by Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state representative and the 2014 Democratic nominee for Nevada lieutenant governor.
Flores' claim comes as Biden, the early leader in the nutty national Democratic presidential polls, is in the final stages of deciding whether to seek the 2020 nomination. Biden has been taking steps to assemble a political team in early-voting states such as Iowa and South Carolina.
In the article published Friday, Flores wrote that she and Biden were waiting to take the stage during a rally in Las Vegas before the 2014 election.
"I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. 'Why is the vice president of the United States touching me?'" Flores wrote. "He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head."
GAAARRRROSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!
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Flores said Biden's behavior "made me feel uneasy, queasy, gross, and confused," adding, "it was demeaning and disrespectful."
Biden spokesman Bill Russo said in a statement Friday, "Neither then, nor in the years since, did he or the staff with him at the time have an inkling that Ms. Flores had been at any time uncomfortable, nor do they recall what she describes."
Biden couldn't have done that - just ask his friends Brett and Squi!
we shouldn't be too hard on Joe
she probably targeted him because he's old
if a younger guy had made a move, she'd probably be all in
clearly, this ageism
and at least he didn't feed feces to his wife, like young Beto O'Rourke did
"we shouldn't be too hard on Joe"
Right... he's a heterosexual. He deserves special preferences.
Trump just gave a huge gift to an alleged billion dollar Medicare fraudster: Perhaps he should have listened to lawyers who actually know what they are talking about.
The Trump administration informed a federal appeals court on Monday night that it would no longer defend the Affordable Care Act after a judge in Texas declared that the entire law must be struck down. The judge, Reed O’Connor, is a former Republican Senate staffer with a history of striking down policies opposed by conservatives...
Trump reportedly made the decision to not defend Obamacare over the objections of Attorney General William Barr and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, himself a highly accomplished lawyer who clerked for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
The billion-dollar fraud case involves Philip Esformes, who ran a chain of skilled-nursing and assisted living facilities in Miami-Dade. Esformes’ business was apparently quite lucrative...
Prosecutors claim in Esformes’ indictment that the health care executive paid kickbacks to health providers “in exchange for medically unnecessary referrals” to Esformes’ facilities. Esformes and co-conspirators then allegedly submitted “false and fraudulent claims to Medicare and Medicaid in an approximate amount of $1 billion for services that were medically unnecessary, never provided, and procured through the payment of kickbacks and bribes.” All of Esformes’ co-conspirators plead guilty...
The crux of Esformes’ legal argument is that “the Due Process Clause will not permit the Justice Department to prosecute the Defendant based upon alleged violations of statutes and regulations that they have independently deemed and declared to be unconstitutional.” It’s an aggressive argument. Nevertheless, it’s an argument that puts the Justice Department in a terrible bind.
Thus, other individuals convicted of Medicare or Medicaid fraud under provisions amended by the Affordable Care Act could demand that they be released — including potentially Mr. Esformes’ co-conspirators. Indeed, courts could soon be inundated by petitions seeking these individuals’ release.
As a federal prosecutor who spoke to ThinkProgress on condition of anonymity noted, “Health care fraudsters are among the few federal criminals who can afford high powered lawyers.” So it won’t be long before these individuals’ legal teams start to realize what the Trump administration has done.
It’s difficult to say with certainty why the Supreme Court on Thursday night stopped the execution of a Buddhist inmate in Texas because he was not allowed a spiritual adviser by his side, when last month it approved the execution of a Muslim inmate in Alabama under the almost exact circumstances.
But the obvious place to start is new Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, who seemed to have a change of heart.
Kavanaugh on Thursday was the only justice to spell out his reasoning: Texas could not execute Patrick Murphy without his Buddhist adviser in the room because it allows Christian and Muslim inmates to have religious leaders by their sides.
“In my view, the Constitution prohibits such denominational discrimination,” Kavanaugh wrote.
But Kavanaugh was on the other side last month when Justice Elena Kagan and three other justices declared “profoundly wrong” Alabama’s decision to turn down Muslim Domineque Ray’s request for an imam to be at his execution, making available only a Christian chaplain.
“That treatment goes against the Establishment Clause’s core principle of denominational neutrality,” Kagan wrote then.
Kavanaugh and the court’s other conservatives did not address Kagan’s argument, saying only that Ray had brought his challenge too late.
Kavanaugh said in a footnote Thursday he was satisfied with the timing of Murphy’s litigation. But there was little difference in when Ray and Murphy brought their requests; if anything, it appears Ray was quicker than Murphy.
Some critics of the court wondered if the difference was one of race and religion. Murphy is white and turned to Buddhism in prison. Ray, who was executed within hours of the court’s decision Feb. 7, was black...
My colleagues might think it’s okay that the Russians offered dirt on the Democratic candidate for president as part of what’s described as the Russian government’s effort to help the Trump campaign. You might think that’s okay.
My colleagues might think it’s okay that when that was offered to the son of the president, who had a pivotal role in the campaign, that the president’s son did not call the FBI; he did not adamantly refuse that foreign help — no, instead that son said that he would ‘love’ the help with the Russians.
You might think it’s okay that he took that meeting. You might think it’s okay that Paul Manafort, the campaign chair, someone with great experience running campaigns, also took that meeting. You might think it’s okay that the president’s son-in-law also took that meeting. You might think it’s okay that they concealed it from the public. You might think it’s okay that their only disappointment after that meeting was that the dirt they received on Hillary Clinton wasn’t better. You might think that’s okay.
You might think it’s okay that when it was discovered, a year later, that they then lied about that meeting and said that it was about adoptions. You might think that it’s okay that it was reported that the president helped dictate that lie. You might think that’s okay. I don’t.
You might think it’s okay that the campaign chairman of a presidential campaign would offer information about that campaign to a Russian oligarch in exchange for money or debt forgiveness. You might think that’s okay, I don’t.
You might think it’s okay that that campaign chairman offered polling data to someone linked to Russian intelligence. I don’t think that’s okay.
You might think it’s okay that the president himself called on Russia to hack his opponent’s emails, if they were listening. You might think it’s okay that later that day, in fact, the Russians attempted to hack a server affiliated with that campaign. I don’t think that’s okay.
You might think it’s okay that the president’s son-in-law sought to establish a secret back channel of communication with the Russians through a Russian diplomatic facility. I don’t think that’s okay.
You might think it’s okay that an associate of the president made direct contact with the GRU through Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks, that is considered a hostile intelligence agency. You might think it’s okay that a senior campaign official was instructed to reach that associate and find out what that hostile intelligence agency had to say in terms of dirt on his opponent.
You might think it’s okay that the national security adviser designate secretly conferred with the Russian ambassador about undermining U.S. sanctions, and you might think it’s okay that he lied about it to the FBI.
You might say that’s all okay, that’s just what you need to do to win. But I don’t think it’s okay. I don’t think it’s okay. I think it’s immoral, I think it’s unethical, I think it’s unpatriotic and, yes, I think it’s corrupt — and evidence of collusion.
"I don’t think it’s okay. I think it’s immoral, I think it’s unethical, I think it’s unpatriotic and, yes, I think it’s corrupt — and evidence of collusion."
thanks for opinion, Adam
it's a nice attempt at spin but its' not going to save you
November 2020 you'll be looking for a different job, and you'll probably be forced off your committee soon
you misled and made false statements at the expense of your country and we need to get scum like you out of Congress
ASAP
I’ll keep this quick: I need you to pitch in $1 right away to help us fight back against Trump and his harmful administration.
Every day, this president does damage to our country and its institutions.
I won’t stand by and let Trump put American families and seniors at risk, and I know you won’t either.
That’s why I’m counting on you.
Will you rush in $1 to protect and expand our Majority before our first End of Quarter Deadline in 24 hours?
I’ll personally ensure your gift is triple-matched.
Triple match your $1 >>
Triple match your $35 >>
Triple match your $50 >>
Triple match your $100 >>
Triple match your $250 >>
Or triple match another amount >>
Thank you,
Adam "I can't close my eyelids" Schiff
Sigh.
I probably shouldn't go here, but I still do love politics.
If you are really trying to get to the heart of WHO gave the DNC emails to Wikileaks....
why don't you think Mueller interviewed Assange ?
Shouldn't he have interviewed Assange if he was really trying to figure out where the leak on the DNC emails came from ?
What am I missing ?
Seems like that would be the fastest way to get to the truth...
I think Assange would have entertained Mueller at the embassy but it might have been pointless
many reporters have visited him but he refused to reveal sources
but he did break usual policy and confirm it wasn't the Russians
say what you will about Assange, his veracity has never been in question
Mueller knew, with Assange under the protection of the Ecuadoran government, he couldn't use his standard prosecutorial abuse bullying techniques against him
what Mueller did "learn" was that Russian spent a paltry sum on fake facebook messages
so what?
Russia has been spreading disinformation since the time of the czars
did anyone imagine they desisted once the internet was created?
talk about non compos mentis
many other groups made more substantial efforts
personally, it seems like constitutionally protected free speech to me
as for the "dirt" on Hillary, since when is the media not in favor of printing any secrets it can uncover?
btw, hope you will find more time to post, Theresa
the blog needs balance and you've got more grace and patience than I
It must be tough dealing with Priya all by your lonesome.
Sad.
Priya's persona non grata
her idea of "sharing" is to fill up 90% of the posts so no one else can make an opposing argument
I'm irrevocably through talking to her but that strategy shows that she fears any honest discussion
the other side needs balance as well
As far as we know, no one is forcing you to waste your time here. It's your choice to read / ignore / fume / get annoyed by her.
You are free to leave at any time, and do something useful, like help promiscuous heterosexuals that have so many kids they can't take care of them without help.
Or help young women who have been forced to work in the sex trade.
Or you can stay here and complain to a bunch of gay people (and Jim, whom I would guess at his age is unlikely to have more offspring) about how they shouldn't have abortions.
"As far as we know, no one is forcing you to waste your time here."
Thanks for stating the obvious. What's your point?
"It's your choice to read / ignore / fume / get annoyed by her."
If you're talking about Priya, as you know, I've made a choice, I don't speak to her.
But I have noted that she posts excessively because she's afraid if she focused on one topic, she'd embarrass herself. I think that's obvious to everyone. It's detrimental to the blog, regardless of which side you're on.
"You are free to leave at any time, and do something useful, like help promiscuous heterosexuals that have so many kids they can't take care of them without help."
Thanks for granting me my freedom. Remember, every gay who gets married to woman means one less child being raised without a father. That's a societal negative.
"Or help young women who have been forced to work in the sex trade."
There's a great organization in town called IJM. They are evangelicals who are slightly left of center. They worked to end the sex trade globally. I've spoken with them a few times about their operation. Their entire staff spends a half hour praying every morning before starting work. You should send them a donation. That way you can feel less hypocritical than you do now.
"Or you can stay here and complain to a bunch of gay people (and Jim, whom I would guess at his age is unlikely to have more offspring) about how they shouldn't have abortions."
I don't recall ever complaining about gay people having abortions. Hey, why don't you show me where I did that!
"November 2020 you'll be looking for a different job "
California's 28th Congressional District election, 2018
Adam Schiff (D) 78.4% 196,662 votes
Johnny Nalbandian (R) 21.6% 54,272
Schiff won by 142,662 votes
California's 22nd Congressional District election, 2018
Devin Nunes (R) 52.7% 117,243 votes
Andrew Janz (D) 47.3% 105,136 votes
Nunes won by 12,107 votes
In 2020, House Intelligence Committee Ranking tЯump ass-kisser Nunes has the most to worry about regarding reelection though the weasel might squeak by again.
Chairman Schiff will win reelection with a high percentage of votes. He will easily crush any opponent.
California Has Become a Crisis for the Republicans
Excerpt: "When the next Congress convenes, Republicans will control at most eight of California’s 53 seats in the House of Representatives, down from 14 before the election. That number could fall to seven if GOP Representative David Valadao, who represents a Central Valley seat, cannot maintain a narrow lead over Democrat T. J. Cox that has steadily dwindled as officials have counted absentee and provisional ballots since Election Day. [he couldn't, Democrat T. J. Cox, won]
Even if Valadao holds on, which looks increasingly doubtful, the eight Republican seats would leave the GOP controlling only 15.1 percent of California’s congressional delegation [seven GOPer seats now comprise 13.2 percent of California's congressional delegation], the nation’s largest. That would be the smallest share of the state’s delegation that Republicans have controlled since 1883, according to figures provided by the California Target Book, a nonpartisan publication that analyzes state elections."
The party of trump took a beating in 2018 and will do so again in 2020.
"If you're talking about Priya, as you know, I've made a choice, I don't speak to her."
You've made a choice to not speak to posts you think aren't authored by Priya. Anyone can post under multiple names.
"Thanks for granting me my freedom. Remember, every gay who gets married to woman means one less child being raised without a father. That's a societal negative."
Ahh, I see. So your incestant posts berating them, calling them fascists, insane, and stupid are really just a clever ruse to subtly convert them to heterosexuality.
Brilliant.
"I don't recall ever complaining about gay people having abortions. Hey, why don't you show me where I did that!"
Try reading it again:
"Or you can stay here and complain to a bunch of gay people:
It says complaining TO not complaining ABOUT.
"Thanks for granting me my freedom. Remember, every gay who gets married to woman means one less child being raised without a father."
No it doesn't.
A gay guy is VERY unlikely to have sex with a woman - that's the whole reason they call him gay, remember?
What did they teach you in sex ed class?!?!
Maybe they'll adopt a nice pet from a shelter.
"You've made a choice to not speak to posts you think aren't authored by Priya. Anyone can post under multiple names."
does this comment make any sense?
try again
"Ahh, I see. So your incestant posts"
even a moron can use spell check
try it and you'll see that's true
"berating them,"
not sure it's possible to "berate" an entire group
maybe you weren't thinking right
try again
"calling them fascists,"
oh, you mean when I said lunatic fringe gay advocates are totalitarian because they are trying to get any speech that disagrees with them outlawed?
or when I noted that Hitler's SS was started by a group of gays in the Weimar Republic?
that's not to say all gays are fascists
indeed, the lunatic fringe gay advocates aren't even necessarily gay
"insane,"
let's just say the inability to perform normal biological functions is a disability
if you can't do it because of mental conditions, that's mental illness
and mental illness, at a certain level, is insanity
"and stupid"
I've never said gays as a group are stupid
a number of them have made substantial achievements
"are really just a clever ruse to subtly convert them to heterosexuality."
I don't care if they convert at all
I just think they should marry women and reduce the number of kids being raised by single mothers
being raised by single mothers is bad for society
"A gay guy is VERY unlikely to have sex with a woman"
oh, I think they could get there
but that's not the point
that need to contribute to society by help raising kids
even if they are marrying women who already have chidren
OOhhh, it looks like I hit a nerve.
"does this comment make any sense?"
Yes it does. But you have to be able to understand sentences that have more than one prepositional phrase.
"even a moron can use spell check"
Said the guy who apparently can't figure out where the period key is.
"that (sic) need to contribute to society by help raising kids"
Well, perfect typer, they do; in fact they've had to go to court for the right to adopt kids. Seems there are some religious people out there that think gay people shouldn't be allowed to do that. Haven't you been paying attention?
"I just think they should marry women and reduce the number of kids being raised by single mothers"
So gay guys should go in and save the day after straight guys have abandoned their child and shirked their responsibilities.
Wow, now I'm beginning to understand what you mean by heterosexual privileges.
Why don't you convince the straight guys to marry the mothers? Is that just too easy and logical for you? Or do you want the straight guys running around getting even more women pregnant?
You do know that those kids likely came from a heterosexual dude having sex with their mother, right? Or did you think the storks were dropping all those babies onto single mothers willy-nilly?
"OOhhh, it looks like I hit a nerve."
see a doctor, they have pills for that
Months before the 2016 election, the FBI opened its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation seeking evidence of possible collusion between Russia and a low-level staffer for the Trump campaign. Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey has since informed Congress that the probe initially targeted “four Americans,” but confirmed that neither Trump nor his campaign organization itself were among the targets.
That investigation eventually led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who finally concluded that no such collusion took place more than two years after President Trump took office. In the meantime, President Trump endured almost daily attacks from left-leaning journalists and Democrat officials based entirely on the now-discredited allegation.
Shockingly, according to other reports, President Obama was aware in more general terms of Russia’s planned effort to undermine American democracy for years.
If President Obama really had concerns that Russia might be working with members of the Trump campaign to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, then it is curious that his administration failed to coordinate with candidate Trump to investigate the FBI’s suspicions and take any steps that might be necessary to rid his campaign of Russian saboteurs. They certainly had ample opportunity to do so during the regular, high-level intelligence briefings that presidential nominees receive during the campaign as part of the presidential transition process.
Instead, Obama administration officials merely issued a vague warning to both Trump and Clinton to be on the lookout for Russian infiltrators, and Obama himself maintained public silence on the matter. The White House finally condemned Russia in October -- just a month before the election -- despite having been aware of Putin’s operation for months.
Were they trying to sabotage President Trump’s election bid?
The American people only learned of this significant delay a year later, when the Washington Post revealed that a “courier from the CIA” had delivered an “intelligence bombshell” to the White House in August 2016, containing “a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.”
Shockingly, according to other reports, President Obama was aware in more general terms of Russia’s planned effort to undermine American democracy for years.
“The Obama administration received multiple warnings from national security officials between 2014 and 2016 that the Kremlin was ramping up its intelligence operations and building disinformation networks it could use to disrupt the U.S. political system,” Politico reported in 2017.
The first real retaliation against Moscow, however, did not come until right after Donald Trump won the presidency, at which point the White House announced mild sanctions against several Russians.
When Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” with Moscow after the 2012 election, few expected the U.S. president would be this flexible with one of America’s greatest geopolitical foes.
Why didn’t President Obama take a tougher stance on Russia? Why did he wait so long to address Moscow’s election interference? Did he really mean it when he famously mocked Mitt Romney for viewing Russia as our biggest threat on the world stage? Why did the FBI keep candidate Trump in the dark if it did not believe he was personally involved in the suspected collusion with Russia?
America deserves answers.
President Donald Trump is "saving" a seat on the US Supreme Court bench for judge Amy Barrett in place of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Axios reported on Sunday.
Three sources, who are familiar with comments made by the president in private, told Axios that Trump said he was "saving her for Ginsburg," alluding to giving Barrett a seat on the bench when Ginsburg steps down.
The 47-year-old judge was originally shortlisted by Trump for the Supreme Court seat vacated by retired Justice Anthony Kennedy in 2018. The report noted Barrett was a favorite at the time among conservative activists.
Trump’s pick Brett Kavanaugh was ultimately nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court in place of Kennedy, a decision which prompted multiple allegations of drinking beer and liking girls.
Barrett, who was successfully nominated by Trump in 2017 to serve as a judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, scares the hell out of Democrats because of her conservative views, particularly around abortion
As a professor at Notre Dame, Barrett belonged to the University Faculty for Life until 2016, which promotes anti-abortion resource, according to her judicial questionnaire. She also expressed her views on abortion in a university magazine in 2013 describing her own conviction that “life begins at conception,” and has previously written on the possibility of reexamining the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade.
During her tense confirmation hearing for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017, democratic senators grilled Barrett with anti-Catholic bigoted comments.
"The dogma lives loudly within you," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) notoriously said during Barrett's hearing. "That’s of concern.
"Mueller, who finally concluded that no such collusion took place more than two years after President Trump took office."
That's not what Mueller wrote according to William Barr.
Barr cited what Mueller wrote as
“[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
And
“while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”
A Trump official has come forward with major concerns about security at the White House, according to a House Oversight and Reform Committee report.
Tricia Newbold, the adjudications manager in the Personnel Security Office, came forward with what the committee is calling “grave breaches of national security” at the White House that she has witnessed over the past two years, including 25 individuals who were allowed security clearance despite recommendations that their applications be denied.
“I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security,” Newbold told the committee, according to a letter from Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) to the White House counsel to the president.
The whistleblower’s report highlights the Trump White House’s inability to attract top-level talent. Previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic, were seen as prestigious places to work, giving hiring managers large numbers of applicants for every position and letting them screen out candidates with dubious work histories.
But highly qualified Republicans have largely avoided Trump administration jobs for fear that working for Trump would hurt their reputations and careers. Republicans who dislike Trump disparage many of those working at the White House and in top agency jobs as “C and D list” staffers who would never have been able to find work in a normal GOP administration.
A committee memo outlines Newbold’s claims while reiterating that she’s taking a huge personal risk by coming forward. Newbold says that she’s tried to come forward to her superiors about her security concerns — which she documented in a list of individuals whose “drug use and criminal conduct” made them unfit for security clearance — but was ignored or told to change her mind.
In one instance, she says, she drafted a security clearance denial for a “high-profile official” and brought it to White House Director of Personnel Security Carl Kline, who “called me in his office and asked me to change the recommendation. I said I absolutely would not.”
Ned Price, a former CIA analyst who served as spokesman for the National Security Council under former President Barack Obama, said he was not aware of anything similar happening during his time in the White House.
“The process was sacrosanct in the sense that career officials had the final say. There was a recognition that even the appearance of political pressure could raise concerns,” Price said. “But here’s the other difference: senior White House officials in the Obama era tended to be individuals who had served at high levels of career service or who had previously served in senior appointed positions. This administration is rather unique in the number of officials who have never held positions of public trust — or who haven’t done so in many years.”
brilliant anon:
"Mueller, who finally concluded that no such collusion took place more than two years after President Trump took office."
deceitful "facts without spin":
"That's not what Mueller wrote according to William Barr.
Barr cited what Mueller wrote as
“[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”"
here in America, you are presumed innocent of having committed a crime when there is no proof you did
so, yes, Mueller concluded that no such collusion took place
more from deceitful "facts without spin":
"And
“while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”"
as your deceitful self knows full well, the second statement you quoted referred to obstruction of justice
Mueller didn't "exonerate him" because he has a more expansive view of this law than most legal experts
to him, any action taken to discourage his investigation is obstruction of justice
that would lay waste to our constitutional right of free speech
as President, Trump is in charge of the justice department and is compelled to guide its decisions on what to investigate and prosecute
but, regardless of that discussion, Mueller did conclude that no such collusion took place
think about it and, if you agree about the presumption of innocence, consider applying for citizenship here in America
I think you'll find it a better life than your homeland of Russia
Last week, the San Antonio City Council voted to ban the popular restaurant chain Chick-fil-A from the San Antonio International Airport.
Chick-fil-A’s sin?
A history of religious activity that the city council found offensive.
A Chick-fil-A has now been yanked from the Buffalo Niagara International Airport in New York as well.
In response, First Liberty Institute has asked United States Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao, to investigate the Texas city’s council for religious discrimination.
The hostile message sent by San Antonio is clear: any business that does not agree with a local government’s religious preferences – or any government’s, for that matter – preferred opinions is not welcome to do business in that city. The problem is, of course, that the council’s action is blatantly illegal. Indeed, San Antonio’s unconstitutional and discriminatory position should alarm everyone, no matter their religious beliefs.
Councilman Roberto Treviño, who made the motion to exclude Chick-fil-A, said of the vote, “San Antonio does not have room in our public facilities for a business with a legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior."
Neither Texans nor Chick-fil-A should stand for such intolerance and bigotry by the government.
Everyone, it would seem, except those who hold views contrary to his and who donate to religious nonprofits. The City Council’s allegations stemmed from a report attacking the charitable giving of the privately-owned restaurant. Yet the officials certainly cannot criticize the restaurant’s customer service or business practices. Chick-fil-A’s renowned service and hospitality (which it extends to everyone with a smile) have paid off—Chick-fil-A is currently more profitable per restaurant than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Subway combined. And they have reached the top despite being closed on Sundays.
Ironically, the City Council members are brazenly breaking the very principle of nondiscrimination they claim to value. While Chick-fil-A happily serves anyone its delectable chicken sandwiches, the San Antonio City Council has discriminated against the restaurant because of religion.
Sadly, this is not the first time government officials have been hostile to businesses that operate according to religious views. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court in its decision in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case found that the state of Colorado had violated the religious liberty rights of cake designer Jack Phillips. Currently, First Liberty Institute represents Aaron and Melissa Klein, who were fined $135,000 by the state of Oregon and forced to close their businesses because they refuse to express a message regarding same-sex marriage that contradicts their religious beliefs. First Liberty has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Oregon’s unconstitutional actions.
Indeed, in San Antonio’s case, federal taxpayers should not be required to subsidize religious bigotry. The city council cannot operate in a way that brazenly violates the Constitution and federal law, but if it chooses to, then the federal government should pull its grant.
Americans agree that tolerance and inclusion are necessary in our diverse and pluralistic society. The government sends a dangerous message when it threatens businesses owned by religious people because they (or the organizations to which they donate) may not hold the opinions that the government prefers.
Neither Texans nor Chick-fil-a should stand for such intolerance and bigotry by the government. Anyone who stands for tolerance and equality should actively oppose the discriminatory action manifested by San Antonio City Council officials. Frankly, standing up for Chick-fil-A and any other religious organization subject to such outright discrimination would be my pleasure.
"[W]ait till you see the plans we have coming out, literally, over the next four weeks, we have great health care plans coming out.” — May 10, 2018, Elkhart, Indiana.
“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump said ... People covered under the law “can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.” — to the Washington Post, January 15, 2017.
"And it'll be great health care for much less money. So it'll be better health care, much better, for less money. Not a bad combination." — to Lesley Stahl on "60 Minutes," November 13, 2016.
“I am going to take care of everybody … Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” — on "60 Minutes," September 27, 2015.
“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” — on his campaign website, May 21, 2015.
Bernie Sanders✔
@BernieSanders
Trump in 2015:
"I was the first & only potential GOP candidate to state there will be no cuts to Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid."
Trump's proposed budget:
-Cuts Social Security by $25 billion
-Cuts Medicare by $845 billion
-Cuts Medicaid by nearly $1.5 trillion
3:11 PM - Mar 18, 2019
"Ironically, the City Council members are brazenly breaking the very principle of nondiscrimination they claim to value. While Chick-fil-A happily serves anyone its delectable chicken sandwiches, the San Antonio City Council has discriminated against the restaurant because of religion."
Ironically, Chick-fil-A actively funds groups that promotes discrimination against LGBT people, but doesn't want to be discriminated against itself.
If it REALLY wants to be included, it shouldn't fund efforts that keep others from being included.
Former federal prosecutor Chuck Rosenberg believes there’s likely plenty in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report that’s damaging — and possibly criminal — regarding President Donald Trump. “It’s never taken me 400 pages to say nothing happened,” he added, referring to the reported length of the Mueller report.
Rosenberg believes that, though crimes may have been committed by Trump, it’s likely Mueller didn’t believe he could file charges against him. It’s Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president because it’s too “burdensome” and “stigmatizing,” he noted.
“I imagine something happened, and that something, particularly with respect to obstruction, was quite serious. I can imagine Mueller not making a recommendation, because a recommendation to prosecute someone you can’t prosecute is equally burdensome and equally stigmatizing.”
Rosenberg added: “I don’t believe for a minute, if Mueller had facts that exonerated the president on obstruction, he would have hesitated to say so.” There may not be “a lot of evidence on the other side” that Trump didn’t obstruct justice, Rosenberg said.
“I imagine the facts ... [may] weigh heavily in favor of a prosecution — but for the fact that you can’t charge a sitting president,” he added.
"Ironically, Chick-fil-A actively funds groups that promotes discrimination against LGBT people"
that's not true unless you consider support for gender diversity in marriage to be discriminatory
if you do, you've basically excluded virtually all religious groups
it's this kind of overkill that dooms the gay agenda
polls show all of the dozens of Dems running or President losing to Trump except one: Biden
I'd just like to say how much I appreciate the looney left for taking care of him for us
hahaaahaaaaaahaaaaaahahaaaaaahaaaahoohohohohohohohohohoHEHEHHEHHEHHEEHHEEHEHHEHhahahahaaha!
Lori Lightfoot was overwhelmingly elected mayor of Chicago, becoming the first woman of color and LGBTQ person to hold the top job in America’s third largest city.
In Madison, Satya Rhodes-Conway convincingly won her race to become that city’s first LGBTQ mayor.
New Islamic criminal laws that took effect in Brunei on Wednesday, punish gay sex by stoning offenders to death.
The penalties were provided for under new sections of Brunei's Shariah Penal Code. Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah instituted the code in 2014 in the oil-rich monarchy of around 430,000 people, two-thirds of whom are Muslim.
Even before 2014, homosexuality was already punishable in Brunei by a jail term of up to 10 years.
But under the new laws — which apply to children and foreigners, even if they are not Muslim — those found guilty of gay sex can be stoned to death or whipped.
Christian homophobes LOOOOOOOVE Sharia law!
Alaska, the northernmost state is experiencing record-high temperatures earlier in the year than ever before, with multiple cities, including Fairbanks, having experienced its warmest March on record, according to the National Weather Service.
Last week, temperatures in the southeastern town of Klawock hit a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit. That unusually warm temperature was last felt on March 31, 2016, immediately before the planet experienced its warmest April on record, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
Meanwhile at the Anchorage International Airport, temperatures reached 50 degrees on Saturday, making the 18th straight day that the mercury rose above 40 degrees, CBS News reported.
From September to March of this year, the mean monthly temperatures at both the Anchorage International Airport and the Fairbanks International Airport were also the warmest on record, the National Weather Service Anchorage tweeted on Tuesday.
To put that into perspective, in the case of Anchorage, the maximum seven-month average temperature during those months was higher than any other year since 1952, when records for Anchorage began. In the case of Fairbanks, that same average was higher than any other year since 1929, when records for Fairbanks began, the NWS said.
According to the 2018 National Climate Assessment, Alaska “is among the fastest warming regions on Earth,” with it warming two to three times faster than the rest of the lower 48 states. This faces it with “a myriad of issues associated with a changing climate,” the NCA said, including a retreat of sea ice, a rise in storm surge, coastal flooding and erosion, and thawing permafrost and glaciers.
The NCA’s report noted that since the 1990s, Alaska has experienced high temperature records three times more than record low temperatures and in 2015 nine times more frequently.
And down under:
Temperatures in Australia Reach 121 Degrees in Extreme Heatwave
"Christian homophobes LOOOOOOOVE Sharia law!"
actually, they don't
but TTFers have raved about how tolerant Muslims are
can you be more unplugged?
"Alaska, the northernmost state is experiencing record-high temperatures earlier in the year than ever before, with multiple cities, including Fairbanks, having experienced its warmest March on record, according to the National Weather Service."
I'm happy for them
soon, they should be able to grow more crops and help feed the world
Two additional women came forward Tuesday to say former Vice President Joe Biden touched them in ways that made them uncomfortable.
The women, Caitlyn Caruso and D. J. Hill, recounted their experiences to The New York Times.
Caruso, 22, told the Times that Biden rested his hand on her thigh even as she attempted to show her discomfort by squirming in her seat during an event on sexual assault at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Caruso, who was 19 at the time, added that Biden hugged her "just a little bit too long."
She told the newspaper that the interaction was uncomfortable because she had just talked about her own sexual assault and expected Biden to be aware of physical boundaries.
Hill, 59, told the newspaper that while taking a photograph with Biden in 2012, the then-vice president placed his hand on her shoulder and began moving it down her back, something she said made her "very uncomfortable."
Hill's and Caruso's statements follow allegations brought by former Nevada state lawmaker Lucy Flores and Amy Lappos, a former congressional aide to Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.).
Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.
“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.
Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden’s account, though
they say there was one crucial piece of information that Biden didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.
Let us know when Biden has to pay off any one of these ladies via his attorney and when he has to ask the Pecker dude to catch and kill stories about them.
And by all means, keep reminding women voters of the schmucks who plan to run for PUSA and we will soon say "Welcome Madame President!"
Biden's mild behavior wouldn't hurt him in the general election
unfortunately for him, he will have to receive the nomination of Looney-tune Party first
here's an article explaining why Trump will win in a landslide:
https://spectator.us/donald-trump-win-2020/
believe me, no one in the Mid-West gives a crap that he had an affair and tried to keep it from his wife when manufacturing jobs are coming back, and at record pay
The date April 3rd has held a unique place in our history over the years. Theologians and astronomers will tell you that Christ was crucified on that date. On April 3rd Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan, arguably the greatest postwar intervention in the history of man. The first portable cellphone call was made on April 3rd. Marlon Brando was born on that day.
But this April 3rd will hold its own place in history. On this particular April 3rd the nation of Brunei will begin stoning and whipping to death any of its citizens that are proved to be gay. Let that sink in. In the onslaught of news where we see the world backsliding into authoritarianism this stands alone.
Brunei isn’t a significant country. Its population is less than 500,000 people, pretty small in relation to most of its neighbors, The Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia. But Brunei has oil. This year it was ranked as the 5th richest nation by Forbes. Good for them. Of course they haven’t had an election since 1962 and have adopted the most extreme version of Sharia law so, not so good for them. At the head of it all is the Sultan of Brunei who is one of the richest men in the world. The Big Kahuna. He owns the Brunei Investment Agency and they in turn own some pretty spectacular hotels.
A couple of years ago two of those hotels in Los Angeles, The Bel-Air and The Beverly Hills Hotel were boycotted by many of us for Brunei’s treatment of the gay community. It was effective to a point. We cancelled a big fundraiser for the Motion Picture Retirement Home that we’d hosted at the Beverly Hills Hotel for years. Lots of individuals and companies did the same. But like all good intentions when the white heat of outrage moves on to the hundred other reasons to be outraged, the focus dies down and slowly these hotels get back to the business of business. And the Brunei Investment Agency counts on that. They own nine of the most exclusive hotels in the world. Full disclosure: I’ve stayed at many of them, a couple of them recently, because I hadn’t done my homework and didn’t know who owned them.
They’re nice hotels. The people who work there are kind and helpful and have no part in the ownership of these properties. But let’s be clear, every single time we stay at or take meetings at or dine at any of these nine hotels we are putting money directly into the pockets of men who choose to stone and whip to death their own citizens for being gay or accused of adultery. Brunei is a Monarchy and certainly any boycott would have little effect on changing these laws. But are we really going to help pay for these human rights violations? Are we really going to help fund the murder of innocent citizens? I’ve learned over years of dealing with murderous regimes that you can’t shame them. But you can shame the banks, the financiers and the institutions that do business with them and choose to look the other way.
Below I’ve listed the nine hotels. It’s up to each of us what we want to do.
George Clooney
The Dorchester, London
45 Park Lane, London
Coworth Park, UK
The Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills
Hotel Bel-Air, Los Angeles
Le Meurice, Paris
Hotel Plaza Athenee, Paris
Hotel Eden, Rome
Hotel Principe di Savoia, Milan
Does the country need an awakening of the Christian left? Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg thinks so.
Mayor Pete, as he is affectionately called, is having a moment with a first quarter fundraising haul of $7 million and a third place showing in an Iowa poll at 11%. In January, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, held last place at 0%. In the intervening months, Buttigieg has wowed Democrats with his mastery of policy issues and Midwestern charm. He’s a military veteran who served in Afghanistan, a Rhodes scholar and speaks seven languages.
He has also stood out as a devoted Christian who is speaking against the dominance of the religious right in the public square. As Buttigieg told me in an interview Friday, “The left is rightly committed to a separation of church and state … but we need to not be afraid to invoke arguments that are convincing on why Christian faith is going to point you in a progressive direction.”
Buttigieg criticized right-wing Christians for “saying so much about what Christ said so little about, and so little about what he said so much about.”
Let’s parse this insightful formulation: “so little about what Jesus said so much about,” Buttigieg made this observation: “When I think about where most of Scripture points me, it is toward defending the poor, and the immigrant, and the stranger, and the prisoner, and the outcast, and those who are left behind by the way society works. And what we have now is this exaltation of wealth and power, almost for its own sake, that in my reading of Scripture couldn't be more contrary to the message of Christianity. So I think it's really important to carry a message to the public, knitting together a lot of groups that have already been on this path for some time, but giving them more visibility in the public sphere.”
He’s alluding to a burgeoning Christian left led by pastors and writers like Jim Wallis, the Rev. William J. Barber II, Rachel Held Evans, the Rev. James Martin, Lisa Sharon Harper, Diana Butler Bass and many others. But nonconservative Christians generally do not receive the same level of news media attention as the religious right, despite their deep understanding of Scripture and thriving faith traditions. Because most journalists are secular, they can be gullible in looking to the religious right as arbiters of biblical interpretation, especially as it relates to hot-button cultural and political issues. Because of this, many Americans aren’t even aware of the rich tradition of progressive Christianity.
When asked his favorite Bible verses, he cited a perennial favorite from the Book of Matthew: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these … you did for me.” Less frequently cited is his other choice of Matthew 6:5, in which Jesus says, “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.”
Buttigieg didn’t explicitly apply this passage to the religious right. Nonetheless, it’s hard to overlook the evangelical and fundamentalist Christian leaders who make a spectacle of praying publicly — in particular over President Donald Trump — as evidence of their holiness. Jesus himself warned against this kind of showy spirituality and said, “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father.”
There are so many other examples of how members of the religious right, who claim allegiance to a literal interpretation of the Bible, ignore the literal words that Jesus spoke. Hypocrisy, something Jesus railed against, has become perhaps the most prominent feature of the religious right in the Trump era.
Does Buttigieg think Trump is a Christian? “I'm reluctant to comment on another person's faith, but I would say it is hard to look at this president's actions and believe that they're the actions of somebody who believes in God,” he said. “I just don't understand how you can be as worshipful of your own self as he is and be prepared to humble yourself before God. I've never seen him humble himself before anyone. And the exaltation of yourself, especially a self that's about wealth and power, could not be more at odds with at least my understanding of the teachings of the Christian faith.”
While Buttigieg is a gay man, married in the Episcopal Church he attends, he urges those who support LBGTQ rights to “beckon people onto the right side of history rather than … drag people there. If someone feels harassed and put upon by us, at the very moment we're demanding tolerance and acceptance, one consequence is that we can leave them with nowhere to go but the religious right.”
How he could advocate showing so much grace to those who continue to perpetrate a biblical interpretation that has caused so much harm to gay people like him?
“Well, obviously, I want them to change,” he noted. “But I also want to recognize the struggle they might be having and get them there. And in getting there, I want some kind of healing to go on, so that they can recognize ... that our marriages are just as good as theirs. Because people who are on what I would call the wrong side of this issue and of history probably don't think of themselves as hateful. So we've got to make sure that they feel good about themselves in the process of coming to a more accepting view.”
What advice does Mayor Pete have for those struggling to be graceful toward those with whom we disagree politically? “Well, I think it starts with a certain amount of humility and recognizing that how you voted doesn't make you a good person or a bad person, and we shouldn't think of ourselves as better human beings because of how we voted,” he said.
In our pugilistic take-no-prisoners era, preaching grace toward those on the other side of the political fence is decidedly countercultural. Whether Mayor Pete becomes our nation’s first millennial president or not, he has already started a crucial conversation for the country.
"“My father is German — was German,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “Born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany.”"
No, Donald.
Your daddy was not born in Germany.
Fred was born in the Bronx because his father was avoiding the German service requirement to serve in the military.
Here's Daddy's Bronx birth certificate proving it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/03/another-trump-birther-conspiracy-debunked-with-birth-certificate-this-time-his-father/?utm_term=.13827e992bbc
Bone spurs!
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Thursday repealed rules unveiled in 2015 that banned baptisms for children of gay parents and made gay marriage a sin worthy of expulsion.
The surprise announcement by the faith widely known as the Mormon church reverses rules that triggered widespread condemnations from LGBTQ members and their allies and marked a jarring shift from the religion's push to carve out a more compassionate stance on LGBTQ issues.
The rules banned baptisms for children living with gay parents until they turn 18, disavowed same-sex relationships and received approval from global church leaders.
With the change, children of gay parents can now be baptized as long as their parents approve the baptisms and acknowledge that the children will be taught church doctrine, the church said in a statement from its highest leadership group called the First Presidency.
The faith said in a statement that it is not changing its doctrinal opposition to gay marriage and still considers same-sex relationships to be a "serious transgression."
But people in same-sex relationships will no longer be considered "apostates" who must be kicked out of the religion, the statement said.
"The very positive policies announced this morning should help affected families," the leaders said in the statement. "In addition, our members' efforts to show more understanding, compassion and love should increase respect and understanding among all people of goodwill."
The change marks the biggest move yet by church President Russell M. Nelson, who has made a flurry of changes to how the church functions since taking over the faith in January 2018.
Troy Williams with the LGBT-advocacy group Equality Utah called the announcement a big step forward.
"Clearly this is a great development for the church," he said. "I think this will go a long way toward healing Latter-day Saint families that have LGBT members."
"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on Thursday repealed rules unveiled in 2015 that banned baptisms for children of gay parents"
at first glance you look at this and say "what kind of screwed up religion blames kids for what their parents do?"
then you take another look and realize how fortunate those kids were to be excluded from that cult
They sided with the National Rifle Association over women’s safety. Not a good look!
The NRA has incredible sway over Republicans in Congress because of all the money it gives them ― and threatens to spend against them if they break from the group’s agenda. In the 2018 election cycle, it gave $690,950 to GOP congressional candidates versus $19,454 to Democratic congressional candidates. The gun rights organization spent nearly half a billion dollars in the 2016 election cycle, including $30 million on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign alone.
Keep showing women how you love guns more than protecting women from violence, GOParty of Trump.
most people oppose violence
how about some details of what's in this Act?
Job creation was solid in March, with nonfarm payrolls expanding by 196,000 and the unemployment rate holding steady at 3.8%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
That was much better than the Dow Jones estimate. The unemployment rate met expectations. Wage gains were 3.2% year over year.
"With a strong March employment report now in the books, we've gotten some reassurance that the labor market is still strong," said Steve Rick, chief economist at CUNA Mutual Group.
A broader gauge of unemployment that also counts discouraged workers and those holding part-time jobs for economic reasons also was unchanged at 7.3%. The measure, known as the "real unemployment rate" is down from 7.9% a year ago.
Job gains were fairly broad based.
Health care led with 49,000 new workers, professional and technical services added 34,000 and food and drinking establishments contributed 27,000. Construction rose by 16,000.
"The 196,000 jobs added in March shows the US economy is not stalling out. And other data in the report showed wages are rising but not at a rate which would spur inflation," said Chris Gaffney, president of world markets at TIAA Bank. "This was a perfect report for equity investors as it shows the US economy is still marching along while the wage numbers will keep the FOMC on the sidelines."
"believe me, no one in the Mid-West gives a crap that he had an affair and tried to keep it from his wife when manufacturing jobs are coming back, and at record pay"
Nobody believes your lies
Omitted from the TTF tЯoll's job's report:
Job gains were strong in health care, restaurants and professional services such as computer services. But blue-collar hiring decelerated in recent weeks with manufacturing shedding 6,000 jobs...The pace of construction jobs also slowed after months of robust gains. "
months of robust gains
MONTHS
as opposed to the neglect of Obama , the lazy, unresourceful President who said he was managing our decline
when the voters in the Midwest ask themselves the quadrennnial question in 2020: am I better off than four years ago?
the answer will be yes
so are minorities and women, and just about everyone else
"Nobody believes your lies"
I didn't tell any
are you one of the a-holes who have been lying by saying, for the last two years, that Trump was a Russian spy?
some of the people who said that lie to Congress will be going to jail
today, the lying Michael Cohen is trying to convince Congress to ask the judge to put off his jail sentence if he'll tell them more lies about Trump
but the king and queen of lying will be at DAR later in April on the "An Evening with the Clintons" tour
don't worry about snapping up tickets any time soon
they get cheaper around curtain time
those events are very unpopular
no lie
Bush recession
"The last year of Bush's second term was dominated by the Great Recession. GDP declined in the 1st, 3rd, and 4th quarters of 2008 by -2.7%, -1.9% and -8.2%, respectively. The recession officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, with the economy returning to consistent growth in Q3 2009, although civilian employment did not return to its December 2007 peak until September 2014."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_George_W._Bush_administration#Financial_crisis_and_Great_Recession
Obama job gowth
"There has been a fair amount of rhetoric about the job growth and lower unemployment rate seen since President Trump took office. Candidate Trump touted that there would be 25 million jobs created over 10 years if he was elected. In January 2017, I wrote that this was a fairly easy campaign promise when you analyze the data and realize that it will only take 2% annual growth of the workforce to hit this target.
President Trump started with a distinct advantage with a workforce of 145.7 million, 9% larger than when President Obama took office. If the workforce were to only grow by 2%, that would add just over 2.9 million jobs a year or 243,000 per month. Over the course of 10 years, there would be over 29 million jobs added.
Additionally, over President Obama’s last six and five years in office after the economy had recovered from the Great Recession, the average employment gains were 2.42 and 2.48 million jobs per year. Pretty much on track to add 25 million over 10 years. So it appears that Trump can reach his 25 million job growth goal even if the economy continued to grow at the pace under Obama ....
Bush’s last four years in office:
2005: 210,000 per month or 2.52 million for the year
2006: 175,000 per month or 2.09 million
2007: 96,000 per month or 1.15 million
Last six months averaged 55,000 per month
2008: Negative 297,000 per month (recession takes hold)
Lost 3.6 million jobs
Obama’s eight years:
2009: Negative 422,000 per month
Lost 5.1 million jobs (teeth of the recession)
2010: 88,000 per month or 1.05 million for the year
2011: 174,000 per month or 2.09 million
2012: 179,000 per month or 2.14 million
2013: 192,000 per month or 2.3 million
2014: 250,000 per month or 3 million
2015: 226,000 per month or 2.7 million
2016: 187,000 per month or 2.24 million
Trump’s through September 2018:
2017: 182,000 per month or 2.19 million
Through September 2018: 208,000 per month or 2.5 million run rate"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/10/30/two-charts-show-trumps-job-gains-are-just-a-continuation-from-obamas-presidency/#79df9cde1af3
And unlike Obama, Senator Mitch McConnell is NOT trying to make him a one-term president while he endeavors to lead.
you sure know how to spend the crap
had many swirlies?
Former DEMOCRATIC U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner has been ordered to register as a sex offender as he nears the end of a 21-month prison sentence for having illicit online contact with a 15-year-old girl.
A New York City judge on Friday designated Weiner a Democrat. a sex offender.
Weiner, a Democrat. must register for a minimum of 20 years. He's required to verify his address every year and visit a police station every three years to have a new picture taken.
Weiner, a Democrat, didn't attend Friday's court hearing. He's serving his sentence at a prison in Massachusetts.
Before being sentenced, the Democrat said he'd been a "very sick man."
Meanwhile from the stupidest president on on the planet:
"If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer," he said.
Windmill noise... causes cancer.
I suspect one has to actually burn off some of their own I.Q. points to actually believe what comes out of this idiot's mouth.
Was he always this stupid or is the senility starting to take over?
He wants to win the White House in 2020 and hasn’t released his tax returns.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of several front-runners early in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, has yet to make his tax returns public, despite promising to do so at a CNN town hall in February.
“It just was a mechanical issue,” he said at the time. “We don't have accountants at home. My wife does most of it. And we will get that stuff out.”
"I don't think it's sustainable to be a Democratic candidate for president and not release your tax returns," said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist and strategist.
Only four of the 17 official Democratic candidates have released tax returns: Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have released years of personal returns, along with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.
Others, such as Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, have previously released snippets of their financial history during other campaigns, similar to Donald Trump.
"In many ways, he's safe to consider the front-runner in the Democratic field right now," Brian Fallon, a Democratic strategist who served as national press secretary for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, told ABC News. "If he doesn't release his tax returns, that's disqualifying."
As he battled Clinton for the party’s nomination in 2016, Sanders released a brief summary of his federal returns from 2014. Under pressure from critics and the Clinton campaign, he eventually released his full 2014 federal tax return, filed jointly with his wife, Jane, providing a somewhat clearer picture of his finances from a single year.
"There was this sense he was kicking this can down the road until he was out of the race," Fallon said of Sanders.
Every page of the nearly 400-page Mueller report contains information that cannot be made public and must be redacted, Attorney General William P. Barr said Thursday, explaining why he won't comply with congressional Democrats’ demands for turning over the document to them.
Frustrated Democrats fired back, saying they suspect Mr. Barr was covering up for Mr. Trump and renewing their demands for a quick release of the report and for the Justice Department to provide all of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative files to Capitol Hill.
In the meantime, Democrats said, Mr. Barr should immediately turn over summaries that the Mueller team prepared but the attorney general did not release, instead writing his own four-page summary of the report’s conclusions.
“If there is significant daylight between his account and yours, the American people should know that too,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat and House Judiciary Committee chairman, said in a letter to Mr. Barr.
A federal appeals court on Friday tossed an obstacle in the way of grand jury information in special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report being released directly to the public.
In the new ruling, the panel majority concluded that federal district court judges lack the authority to order the release of typically secret grand jury material.
There is no exception that covers cases of intense political or historical interest.
A new poll of Wall Street insiders shows that a vast majority expect President Donald Trump to win reelection in 2020.
While Joe Biden was viewed as the most stock market-friendly possible Democratic candidate for the White House, more than 70% of survey respondents told global investment bank RBC Capital Markets that they expect Trump to be reelected.
"Most expect Trump to win in 2020," Lori Calvasina, RBC's head of U.S. equity strategy, wrote to clients. Sixty-seven percent "of our March 2019 survey respondents believe that Joe Biden is seen as the most acceptable Democratic candidate by the stock market for the White House. No other Democratic candidate got a significant number of votes."
In case the column spacing doesn't survive the post, you can see the RCP poll results here:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/general_election/
Basically, any Dem beats Rump in 2020:
Monday, April 1
Race/Topic Poll Results Spread
General Election: Trump vs. Biden PPP (D) Biden 53, Trump 40 Biden +13
General Election: Trump vs. Sanders PPP (D) Sanders 49, Trump 41 Sanders +8
General Election: Trump vs. Harris PPP (D) Harris 48, Trump 41 Harris +7
General Election: Trump vs. O'Rourke PPP (D) O'Rourke 47, Trump 41 O'Rourke +6
General Election: Trump vs. Warren PPP (D) Warren 48, Trump 42 Warren +6
General Election: Trump vs. Booker PPP (D) Booker 48, Trump 41 Booker +7
General Election: Trump vs. Buttigieg PPP (D) Buttigieg 45, Trump 41 Buttigieg +4
really?
what did the polls say in April 2015?
You think the Wall Street poll is better?
Rump didn't win 'cause he got all a lot of Wall streeters.
I think their guess, at this point, is more savvy than assuming the current polls will extrapolate to the election.
Basically, that never happens.
btw, you avoided the question:
what did the polls say in April 2015?
If you really want to know the answer to that question there's this thing called Google.
You can look it up.
Really, it's not that hard.
Why don't you tell us again about Romney and McCain's inevitable wins over Obama.
"Huckabee... LOL!"
nice you guys can still laugh in the face of your generational loss of the entire judiciary
the gay agenda is burnt toast
tell me: why do you lunatics always bring up Huckabee?
I know, btw.
I'm just giving you an opportunity to confess what a stupid-ass you are
"If you really want to know the answer to that question there's this thing called Google."
oh, I already know
I was just giving you an opportunity to confess what a stupid-ass you are
"You can look it up.
Really, it's not that hard."
clever and witty
how long did you have to hold your breath before you came up with that little piece of original brilliance?
"Why don't you tell us again about Romney and McCain's inevitable wins over Obama."
McCain, now a saint to the Trump resistance, the same people who demonized him as a Nazi when he ran
do ever make yourself sick?
oh, and the Romney campaign, where Obama the Worst weaponized the IRS to prevent his opponents from organizing
he may have gotten away with that but the investigation is continuing on how he weaponized the FBI and CIA against Trump
Obama the Worst may be the first President to go to jail
"McCain, now a saint to the Trump resistance, the same people who demonized him as a Nazi when he ran"
No one ever said he was a saint. You keep trying to set up strawman argument so you can "win" something, but no one made that comment. Try reading what's on the screen instead of listing to the voices in your head.
I just pointed out how you kept telling us of McCain's "inevitable" win even polls showed he was losing. Same thing with Romney. You kept insisting Rump would win too, even though the polls putting him on the losing side. Now you think you're some kind of brilliant prognosticator because you got 1 out of those 3 right. Then of course there's all the other races you keep insisting the Republican is going to win. That doesn't make you a prognosticator. That makes you a cheerleader.
Rah, rah, sis boom bah.
"Obama the Worst may be the first President to go to jail"
I'm sure Obama is as scared of that as Hillary was of all those Benghazi investigations. Maybe they can find his "real" birth certificate! LOL!
My money's on TRumplethinskin for that honor.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "If you're talking about Priya, as you know, I've made a choice, I don't speak to her. But I have noted that she posts excessively because she's afraid if she focused on one topic, she'd embarrass herself."
Lol, you made a choice to not speak to me because I've utterly destroyed you every time we've engaged. You don't have responses to my arguments about the destructiveness of your moral beliefs, or the fact that the earth's resources are not infinite as you absurdly keep asserting ("the amount of land for agriculture is elastic..." - it doesn't get any stupider than that). So, because you can't admit to yourself that your cherished beliefs are wrong and you've lost the argument you pretend you've got a reason beyond being utterly defeated for not engaging me. Sad!
Good anonymous said "Ironically, Chic-fil-A actively funds groups that promotes discrimination against LGBT people"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "that's not true unless you consider support for gender diversity in marriage to be discriminatory".
No one opposes gender diversity in marriage, I support gender diversity in marriage, I'm all for man/woman marriage as is every lgbt I know.
The problem is not your "support for gender diversity in marriage", it is your opposition to same sex marriages. If Chick-fil-a only supported "gender diversity in marriage", there'd be no problem, the problem is that is NOT what they are doing, they are opposing same sex marriage and doing nothing to support man/woman marriages.
This is a standard deception tactic of bigots like you - falsely claiming to be "merely supporting man/woman marriage" when what you are actually doing is opposing harmless marriages that benefit same sex couples and society.
"Supoort" man/woman marriages and "gender diverse" marriages all you want, none of us will complain. But falsely claim your attacks on marriage equality are merely "support for gender diverse marriage", then we have a problem you stinking liar.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "oh, and the Romney campaign, where Obama the Worst weaponized the IRS to prevent his opponents from organizing".
And yet another tired Republican lie. This was investigated to death and there was absolutely no evidence found that the IRS unfairly targeted conservative organizations - never happened. Just like you people constantly lie about Obamacare having "death panels". No matter how many times you're shown wrong, you just keep repeating the same old lies.
Republicans are entirely devoid of integrity, as decades of psychological research show:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
In a splooge of deception Wyatt/Regina said "Every page of the nearly 400-page Mueller report contains information that cannot be made public and must be redacted, Attorney General William P. Barr said Thursday, explaining why he won't comply with congressional Democrats’ demands for turning over the document to them.".
That is a lie.
Barr stupidly is claiming that because as a standard precaution printed on every page of an investigative report is "May contain grand jury information" that this means it can't be publicly released. The truth is that this warning does not mean any given page actually does contain such information and there is nothing legally prohibiting the release of such pages - Barr is doing what Trump hired him to do, hide the truth about Russiagate.
Every person with a bit of legal knowledge is shaking their head in disbelief at Barr's treasonous attempt to pretend he has a justification for blocking the immediate release of the Mueller Report. This is just another example of the legally nonsensical excuses Barr has used to try to keep the truth from the public - the Mueller Report is very damaging to Trump.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "A federal appeals court on Friday tossed an obstacle in the way of grand jury information in special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report being released directly to the public. In the new ruling, the panel majority concluded that federal district court judges lack the authority to order the release of typically secret grand jury material. There is no exception that covers cases of intense political or historical interest."
And there's that standard Republican tactic of grossly deceiving people while pretending its okay because you didn't "technically lie.".
What the appeals court ruled is that the lower court "does not have the inherent right to release grand Jury information, but does have the right to release grand jury information under the legal rules 6 (e).
And other appeals courts have ruled that federal district judges DO have unlimited authority to release whatever grand Jury information they want. Its not at all a given that the Supreme court will continue rule Trump is above the law, even for Trump's illegitimate S.C. appointees this will likely be a bridge too far.
So, contrary to the deception Wyatt/Regina just tried to pass on, the federal appeals court ruling did not say that federal district court judges cannot release grand jury information at all, it ruled that federal district court judges don't have unlimited discretion to release such information, they can only release it under the conditions laid out in rule 6 (e). And that most certainly does not prevent district court judges from releasing grand jury information to congress as Wyatt/Regina have dishonestly tried to get readers to believe.
Me correcting Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous on American law and politics is a never-ending job!
Hey Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous, if Trump is all innocent and stuff, why are you going on about how Barr can and should keep the Mueller report a secret?
Even Wyatt/Regina know Trump is a Russian asset.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
George Conway
@gtconway3d
I don’t really agree with this. Think of fish. Fish don’t swim because they think it’s fun; they swim because they’re fish.
The Hill
Verified account
@thehill
Anthony Scaramucci: President Trump lies "because he thinks it’s fun." http://hill.cm/XNBb8o8
7:58 PM - 5 Apr 2019 f
Alexandre Bissonette wore the hat.
A Canadian, Bissonette hadn’t voted for Donald Trump. He lived in a French-speaking province, far from the U.S. president’s campaign rallies and “America first” appeals. But some of the first photos to emerge of the 27-year-old after he stormed a Quebec City mosque and killed six Muslim men in January 2017 showed him wide-eyed with a slight smirk and a red “Make America Great Again” cap casting a shadow over his pallid face.
“Make America Great Again” has become more than a U.S. political slogan. For Bissonette and other white nationalist, radical right and anti-immigrant extremists all over the world, it’s a symbol; a kind of political messaging that transcends the specifics of country and language.
“The hat and the MAGA acronym have really become shorthand for this white nationalist movement,” said Barbara Perry, a professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and an expert on the far right.
Searching for MAGA symbolism is one of the easiest ways to notice online extremists and members of hate groups, Perry and other researchers have found — a game of “Where’s Waldo?” for racists. A 2018 study by extremism researcher J.M. Berger that analyzed tens of thousands of alt-right Twitter accounts found the most common word in their profiles was “MAGA” and the most frequent pairing of words was “Trump supporter.”
And this embrace of pro-Trump symbols isn’t limited to social media. MAGA hats and slogans have shown up in Britain at rallies supporting anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson, on banners in Australia following the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as an accessory for prominent European white nationalists who wear it to troll their fellow citizens.
Canada’s far right has a particular affinity for MAGA apparel. It often appears on white nationalist media personalities and far-right trolls attempting to disrupt anti-racism demonstrations. The head of the World Coalition Against Islam, a Canadian extremist group that openly refers to Muslims as “sewage,” routinely wears a MAGA hat at rallies.
“In Canada, the MAGA hat is widely seen as a hate symbol — a middle finger to other Canadians, especially to women and people of colour,” Evan Balgord, executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which monitors extremism, wrote in an email. The country’s oldest retailer, the Hudson’s Bay Company, recently apologized for selling “Make Canada Great Again” hats and removed them from its stores after public backlash.
MAGA symbols abroad aren’t solely the province of extremists, but they tend to attract a certain type. Anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim politicians, in particular, have adopted the Trump-associated slogans and paraphernalia.
Leader of Italy’s far-right League party Matteo Salvini posed with a MAGA hat on his office shelf and held an “Italians first” rally, while Islamophobic Dutch politician Geert Wilders promised to “make the Netherlands great again.” The anti-immigrant Alternative For Germany party’s deputy leader Beatrix Von Storch, whom German prosecutors investigated for inciting hatred against Muslims, wore a red “Make Germany Safe Again” hat during an election campaign.
Beyond mimicking Trump’s rhetoric to rile up nationalist sentiment in their own countries, the international far right embraces the U.S. president because he helps bolster the narrative of rising support for a global anti-immigrant, anti-establishment movement. When the most powerful person in the world says that “Islam hates us” and attempts to ban Muslim immigration, it’s proof that perhaps other world leaders can achieve a similar goal.
“Trump’s campaign was anti-Muslim, and he has enacted anti-Muslim policies while in office,” said Matthew McGregor, campaign director for the British-based anti-racism advocacy group Hope Not Hate. “He has given the far right encouragement and left them with the impression that things are going their way.”
Far-right extremists have also long attached themselves to symbols, slogans and anything that identifies them as an in-group separate from the broader public. Some extremist groups have taken up Nordic symbols; others use thinly veiled references to Nazism, such as “88” for “Heil Hitler,” as a wink to others in the movement. European neo-Nazi groups even sometimes carry Confederate flags in their demonstrations. In that sense, it’s natural that extremists who view Trump as a gateway to white nationalism have embraced his emblems.
“It gives them credibility that if this is from the president of the United States, then it must be all right to have those views,” said Amira Elghawaby, a human rights advocate and board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.
But if the support of mass shooters and violent neo-Nazis would make the average politician issue forceful condemnations and distance themselves from rhetoric and symbols that appeal to extremists, Trump has essentially done the opposite. He has claimed there are “very fine people on both sides” of Charlottesville’s white nationalist Unite The Right rally, helped promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros and broadcast white supremacist talking points from the Oval Office.
The Christchurch attacker’s manifesto included a section on Trump that encapsulates many far-right extremists’ views of the U.S. president. Although the attacker disagreed with some of Trump’s policies, he claimed he supported Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”
The day after the attack, however, Trump again dismissed the threat of white nationalism, even as he borrowed its language to describe immigration as an “invasion” that must be stopped. It was another example of why Trump’s symbolism still resonates with extremists — he has done little to convince them that his views are not their own.
Or, as Perry puts it: “He still wears the hats.”
Hey, what’s up . . . wait, where are you going?
Why the dark glasses? Did you dye your hair? What’s with all the deleted tweets and Facebook posts lately?
Oh, I get it. Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Ruskies to throw the 2016 election, you want to move on. Act like it never happened. Or at least pretend that you weren’t part of the whole damn hoax from the start.
But . . . not so fast.
It wasn’t just the entire American media infrastructure—every broadcast network, cable news outlet, opinion page, political website, blue-checked social media account, washed-up D.C. pundit, unhinged MSNBC host, irrelevant Bush hanger-on, complicit Obama lackey, and Clinton bitter clinger who fell for the Trump-Russia collusion fairy tale. It wasn’t just every Democratic lawmaker and candidate—and a good chunk of the establishment Republican elite—who peddled a bogus story for two years. It wasn’t just every Hollywood actress, producer, legend, fluffer, has-been and late night host who caterwauled for months about Trump’s treachery.
You did it, too, my fellow citizen.
For two years, you helped do the dirty work of the vanquished Hillary Clinton campaign and the sore-loser Democratic Party. You reposted memes on your Facebook and Instagram pages that depicted Donald Trump as a Putin puppet, even suggesting tongue-in-cheek (in a way that you’d call homophobic if the other side did it) that Trump was Putin’s gay lover. You warned your neighbors that Trump’s son was a traitor. You insisted to your co-workers that, yes, Trump’s campaign team was populated by Russian agents and that the president’s attorney general, his secretary of state, his education secretary, his national security advisor, his son-in-law—among others—were Kremlin plants in the new administration.
You actually believed that Carter Page was a spy. You actually believed that the FBI opened up an investigation into the Trump campaign because a drunken George Papadopoulos said he had Hillary Clinton’s missing emails. You actually believed that Trump urinated on a Russian prostitute at a Moscow hotel. You actually believed that a teeny tiny batch of Facebook memes and Twitter posts allegedly controlled by Moscow masterminds somehow convinced voters in Michigan and Wisconsin to vote for Donald Trump.
You believed that Michael Cohen went to Prague. You believed that Russia hacked the DNC email system and fed those emails to Wikileaks. You believed that Roger Stone orchestrated the release of those emails. You believed that Sam Nunberg and Jerome Corsi and Konstantin Kilimnik had the goods on Trump.
You tuned into Joe Scarborough each morning and Rachel Maddow each night, desperate to gratify your collusion urges with their passionate rants about Trump and Putin. Ditto for Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo. The pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post read like collusion porn every morning, teasing you and titillating you with erotic tales about secret phone calls and mysterious interpreters and raven-haired Russian lawyers.
You swooned over Adam Schiff. You suddenly believed every word of faux conservatives such as Bill Kristol and David Frum and Max Boot; people you had held in contempt prior to the 2016 election. You retweeted every post by the Krassenstein brothers, Kathy Griffin, and Alyssa Milano.
You bought prayer candles with Robert Mueller’s face etched across the glass and instead of sending Christmas cards last year, you sent everyone a weird video of washed-up celebrities singing “We Wish You a Mueller Christmas.” You signed every petition to “Protect Robert Mueller!” and reposted every commercial that warned Congress to “Save the Special Counsel!” You worried that Russian bot accounts were trying to mess with Mueller.
You bought James Comey’s book. You bought Andrew McCabe’s book. You donated to Peter Strzok’s GoFundMe page. You urged Sally Yates to run for office. You believed that Christopher Steele was just a former British spy whose dossier was totally legit. You were bummed Rod Rosenstein didn’t wear a wire while talking to the sitting president of the United States. You were equally bummed that Paul Manafort isn’t going to die in prison.
You were the baritone in the Trump-Russia collusion quartet, harmonizing along with the news media, the Democrats and the NeverTrump Republicans: “The walls are closing in!” “Trump’s days are numbered!” “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when!” “His cabinet is turning on him, ready to invoke the 25th Amendment!” “He’s brooding and angry and lashing out at staff as Mueller gets closer to finding out the truth!” “Trump won’t survive the week/month/year/term!”
Details and evidence were of no concern to you. You believed all of the following things for no reason other than that you wanted to. Trump told the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails before the election. (He didn’t.) Donald Trump Jr. colluded with Russia when he met in June 2016 for 20 minutes with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower. (The meeting was a setup between Russian lobbyists working with Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS which produced the dossier, and Trump’s campaign team. No “dirt” on Hillary Clinton was passed along.)
Mike Flynn promised the Russian ambassador that Trump would drop sanctions against Russia. (No such promise was made.) President Trump told James Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. (The only evidence that Trump suggested such a thing is Comey’s own memo; Trump was unaware of the investigation into his campaign at the time.)
And so on.
But the most compelling evidence that you refused to accept was right before your very eyes the entire time. In nearly two years, Mueller did not charge one person with so-called “collusion.” Not one associate tied to the Trump campaign was indicted or convicted of any crime related to the election.
I know you still have hope that the full Mueller report will contain some far-fetched nugget of collusion evidence to vindicate your gullibility/ignorance/foolishness. You’ve already moved the goalposts to an imaginary crime of obstruction of justice even though there was no underlying crime to obstruct.
History will not be kind to the Trump-Russia collusion truthers in Congress, the expert class, Hollywood, and the media. But history also shouldn’t forget the role that you, Citizen Collusion Truther, played in this. No matter how many tweets and Facebook posts you delete, it cannot erase your complicit stupidity in this scandal.
"You tuned into Joe Scarborough each morning and Rachel Maddow each night, desperate to gratify your collusion urges with their passionate rants about Trump and Putin."
Nope. We don't even get those channels.
"Ditto for Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo."
Nope. Don't get those channels either.
"The pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post read like collusion porn every morning, teasing you and titillating you with erotic tales about secret phone calls and mysterious interpreters and raven-haired Russian lawyers."
We don't buy newspapers in this household. It kills too many trees. And I'm seldom at their websites. The science news sites are more interesting... and kitten videos on YouTube.
Most of us were just waiting for the FBI do finish doing their job. And I'm quite sure that Rump getting rid Comey and Sessions (who Trump never forgave for recusing himself from the investigation) and replacing him with Barr, who for no apparent reason just happened to write a great big paper a few months before about not indicting a sitting president were all just unfortunate coincidences.
"No matter how many tweets and Facebook posts you delete, it cannot erase your complicit stupidity in this scandal."
I never even had a Facebook account, and haven't been on twitter in years.
So I'm thinkin' I'm not gonna feel nearly as stupid as the idiots who kept claiming Obama was (is?) secretly a Muslim (despite his well known attendance at a Christian church) and think his birth certificate was doctored up to cover his secret birth abroad.
A small army of whistle blowers from across the Trump administration has been working in secret with the Democrat led House Oversight Committee
The list of whistle blowers numbers in the "dozens," according to a senior aide from the committee.
"Republicans showing they're poor losers. Again."
gee, they don't get much opportunity
they don't lose much
they control the White House, Senate and Supreme Court
the courts are being converted for a generation, the wall is being built, corporate and estate taxes have been slashed, the individual Obamacare mandate was overturned, ISIS has been defeated, China is suffering major damage in the trade war and is negotiating terms of surrender, North Korea hasn't tested a nuclear missile in almost two years, the special prosecutor who the Dems deified has declared Trump innocent of Russian collusion
when are they gonna get a chance to lose poorly?
"Nope. We don't even get those channels.
Nope. Don't get those channels either.
We don't buy newspapers in this household. It kills too many trees. And I'm seldom at their websites. The science news sites are more interesting... and kitten videos on YouTube."
then, why are you responding?
you obviously weren't who I was talking to
"Most of us were just waiting for the FBI do finish doing their job."
you really are cut off from information, aren't you?
the FBI hasn't been doing an investigation for two years
Trump's attorney general appointed a special prosecutor, who worked for the DOJ
"And I'm quite sure that Rump getting rid Comey and Sessions (who Trump never forgave for recusing himself from the investigation)"
Trump fired Comey shortly after and pursuant to a recommendation from the DOJ
Comey should have been fired by Obama for his actions in the Hillary email scandal
further, he may wind in jail for perjury and his actions to pursue an investigation he has admitted had no basis in an attempt to drive the elected President from office
acquiescing in that conduct is a much greater threat to our democracy than Russians posting disinformation on facebook
as for Sessions, he should have resigned when it was discovered he lied about meeting with the Russians
"and replacing him with Barr, who for no apparent reason just happened to write a great big paper a few months before about not indicting a sitting president were all just unfortunate coincidences."
how did you find that out when you don't read the paper, watch TV, or look at news websites?
say, is all your information from reading TTF?
"So I'm thinkin' I'm not gonna feel nearly as stupid as the idiots who kept claiming Obama was (is?) secretly a Muslim (despite his well known attendance at a Christian church) and think his birth certificate was doctored up to cover his secret birth abroad."
hmmm, are you talking Obama the Worst, who attended a "church" where the pastor replaced the words of "God Bless America" with "God Damn America", whose wife said she was never proud to be an American until her husband was elected, the only President to have once attended a Muslim school, the first President since the founding father whose father was not American, who nominated a CIA director who once voted for the Communist Party, who didn't believe in American exceptionalism and said American decline was the new normal, who wouldn't utter the phrase "Islamic terrorism" or "Merry Christmas"?
gee, who would have been suspicious of that?
"A small army of whistle blowers from across the Trump administration has been working in secret with the Democrat led House Oversight Committee
The list of whistle blowers numbers in the "dozens," according to a senior aide from the committee."
remember how Dems kept saying Mueller was getting closer and closer to Trump's inner circle and soon would know everything: his campaign manager, his personal lawyer, the CFO of Trump International?
yes, a big revelation is always just around the corner if you believe the media
do you see a lot of pretty colors inside your bubble?
Former President Obama declared concern Saturday that Democrats are creating ”a circular firing squad” by embracing progressive socialists. He is right. Democrats are setting up a 2020 landslide -- for President Trump.
Some hope former Vice President Joe Biden will save the day, but it's unlikely. When he does declare his candidacy, what happens next will be fascinating.
What remains of the Kennedy-Truman-Clinton Democratic Party is in tatters. They imagine with relief that Biden, a seasoned — albeit perambulating, out-of-step candidate — can rise to the top. They are likely wrong.
The progressive-socialist wing of the new Democratic Party is powerful. But that will be the party’s downfall.
This new wing of the Democratic Party has no time for aging Joe Biden, a onetime law-and-order, anti-drug, pro-free speech, gun-owning, far-too-familiar Catholic. Biden is not hip, and could not be if he wanted to be. Biden is not woke. He is not lit, turnt, or fire.
Biden will be out-gunned and undone by the anti-American history wing of his own party. They are already out-raising him on mobile apps, using pro-socialist, anti-free market, pro-drug legalization, free college, free health care, anti-history rhetoric.
The new Democratic Party has contempt for Biden’s “white privilege,” faith, good fortune, old ways and salute of our flag. This ignorance and indifference will almost surely sideline the Democrats’ best shot. He has lived long enough to love his country, even if he borrowed a speech in 1988 from British Labor leader Neil Kinnock.
As Democrats feel their oats, they will coalesce around a photogenic pair of candidates. The majority of their party — labor unions, church-going minorities (of which there are many), hard-working and heartbroken parents of kids lost to drugs, families of pro-American veterans, cops and those who believe in Bill Clinton, never mind John Kennedy and Harry Truman — will be left behind.
Traditional Democrats will be left speechless, leaderless and party-less — sandcastles washed to sea by uninformed socialists.
Despite historical discriminators, this unchecked rush to an ill-informed, over-centralizing, oppressive ideology is exactly what happened in pre-1917 Russia, early 1930s Germany and Italy, Maoist China, 1950s North Korea, 1960s North Vietnam and Cuba, with violent leftists in Europe during the 1970s, Angola, Nicaragua and Grenada in the 1980s, and most recently the Socialist paradise of Venezuela.
Socialism invariably fails, spectacularly. Sadly, Democrats over 50 years old know this, but are not speaking up. As in all countries listed above, traditional Democrats hope what they see is not true, project their old values on new leaders, and ignore the reality around them.
Some may believe "powers that be" — such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — will sort this mess out. Others hope for the best, trust in old party labels, assume intergenerational party continuity, and think even if the worst happens, they will not be affected. Wrong. Restrictions on freedom, once begun, seldom retreat.
This is why historians say we are destined to err if we ignore history. So the Democratic Party is at an ideological tipping point. That endangers America. Americans are not socialists, progressive or otherwise. Americans are — by way of the Bill of Rights — anti-socialists. We are resilient, cussed individuals, not disposed to becoming a take-orders monolith.
Historically, we hate one thing — government or any force (including big data companies, overreaching states and runaway federal bureaucracy) telling us what to do, how to run our lives, or taking away personal choice.
Democrats are ignoring American and world history.
That is why the 2020 race is shaping up to be a landslide. Beyond President Trump’s orchestration of stunning economic results, less regulation, lower taxes, reassertion of sovereignty, national security, emphasis on free speech, second amendment rights, energy independence, and renewed moral compass, Trump is authentically defending individual liberty against accelerating centralization.
A coalition of level-headed, historically grounded, less emotional Democrats — sensitive to American "heartland" values — may yet emerge. They may show the courage to stop this horrific slide left. But time is short.
"you obviously weren't who I was talking to"
Who were you talking to then?
Yourself? Do you actually know that any of the handful of people still here actually fit that description, or are you just playing against your favorite stereotype to keep yourself from getting bored?
Rump's "renewed moral compass"... that's a good one. I'm guessing that's the one that is now pointing to women's crotches with a sign that says "grab this."
And I noticed you didn't mention the parts of the trade war that is hurting American farmers, and pushing China to new trade agreements to Russia - you know that place that Rump supposedly didn't collude with.
Rump wanted to shut down the border entirely with Mexico, but fortunately cooler heads prevailed and forced him to back away from shutting down trade with our 3rd largest trading partner and what would be devastating effects.
"say, is all your information from reading TTF?"
Nope. But if you wanted us to read another raging diatribe from the unbelievably biased Fox News opinion pages, you could have just posted the link for it, like this:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/robert-charles-obama-is-right-dems-are-set-to-give-trump-a-2020-landslide
Or you could have at least credited the partisan who spit it out - Robert Charles.
BTW, here's another interesting article. It's by William Poundstone:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/07/21/a-rigorous-scientific-look-into-the-fox-news-effect/#1a5143912abc
I'll just post the 1st paragraph here:
"In 2012, a Fairleigh Dickinson University survey reported that Fox News viewers were less informed about current events than people who didn't follow the news at all. The survey had asked current events questions like "Which party has the most seats in the House of Representatives?" and also asked what source of news people followed. The Fox viewers' current events scores were in the basement. This finding was immediately trumpeted by the liberal media—by Fox, not so much—and has since become known as the Fox News effect. It conjures the image of Fox News as a black hole that sucks facts out of viewers' heads."
"he may wind in jail for perjury"
Which is why Trump's lawyers never let him be interviewed by Mueller's team.
Giuliani has repeatedly warned that such an interview would expose Trump to legal danger, saying that if Trump made any misstep or if Mueller later determined that other witnesses were more credible than Trump about what he had said and done, the president could face accusations of perjury.
This is a remarkable position. What Giuliani really fears is that Trump will lie about conduct that Mueller is examining for potential obstruction of justice. Giuliani had previously expanded on this fear, insisting that Trump genuinely doesn’t believe he actually pressed Comey to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn — which could lead Trump to deny to Mueller that it ever happened — and that Mueller might conclude otherwise, subjecting Trump to charges of lying to investigators.
brilliant anon:
"say, is all your information from reading TTF?"
seeing pretty colors anon:
"Nope."
hmmmm...you say you don't watch TV, read the paper, or look at news websites
so, where do you get your "information"?
do you receive briefings from the CIA?
from wikileaks?
"BTW, here's another interesting article. It's by William Poundstone"
very interesting
an article from 3 years ago about a "rigorous" study from 7 years ago
I guess you actually kept up with the news back then but then things began to get grim and you tuned out, turned off and dropped it
here's how things are going:
the most uninformed readers today are those who watch CNN and MSNBC or read the Washington Post and NY Times or follow TTF
they have been deluded for 3 years into thinking our country was being run by a Russian mole
"Which is why Trump's lawyers never let him be interviewed by Mueller's team.
Giuliani has repeatedly warned that such an interview would expose Trump to legal danger, saying that if Trump made any misstep or if Mueller later determined that other witnesses were more credible than Trump about what he had said and done, the president could face accusations of perjury."
yes, this is part of Mueller's MO: conduct a grueling interview with someone, closely scrutinize the text for some inadvertent inconsistency, charged with perjury, and blackmail them into saying what you want to hear
he turned it into an art form
"This is a remarkable position. What Giuliani really fears is that Trump will lie about conduct that Mueller is examining for potential obstruction of justice. Giuliani had previously expanded on this fear, insisting that Trump genuinely doesn’t believe he actually pressed Comey to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn — which could lead Trump to deny to Mueller that it ever happened — and that Mueller might conclude otherwise, subjecting Trump to charges of lying to investigators."
you notice Mueller didn't press the interview issue
it's because there was nothing relevant that he didn't already know
as head of the executive branch, Trump informed his employee, Comey, that he thought a pursuit of Flynn was unwarranted
Trump was right
Mueller may believe that is obstruction, Trump doesn't
it's a matter of opinion and legal scholars have varied views
but there were no unknown facts
but back to Comey
he lied and tried to unseat a lawfully elected President by abusing his power
allowing that to go unpunished is a threat to democracy
democracy: a system Dems go no longer abide because they lose
In the past two weeks, two different airports have blocked Chick-fil-A from the premises. First, San Antonio banned the chain because, “everyone should feel welcome when they walk through our airport.” Then, two weeks later, it was announced that the Buffalo was prohibiting Chick-fil-A from its airport food court. Buffalo declared that “the views of Chick-fil-A do not represent our state or the Western New York community.”
The immediate justification for the bans was a ThinkProgress allegation that the Chick-fil-A foundation supported “groups with a record of anti-LGBTQ” discrimination.” ThinkProgress was resurrecting a 2012 controversy over Chick-fil-A contributions to an affiliated foundation that gave grants to conservative Christian groups, including groups that opposed same-sex marriage, and over comments by Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy supporting the traditional, biblical definition of marriage. There was no allegation that Chick-fil-A discriminated against gay customers or gay employees.
In 2012, Democratic city officials, including the mayors of Boston and San Francisco, threatened to block Chick-fil-A from opening restaurants, and Chick-fil-A’s customers responded with an immense “buycott” as a show of support. The storm passed.
Until now. San Antonio and Buffalo decided to act. And once again Chick-fil-A faces explicit, official retaliation not for any incidents of discrimination in its stores, but rather for the constitutionally protected freedom of expression of its associated foundation. This is intolerable on two counts.
First and most importantly, it is plainly and clearly unconstitutional for government officials to punish private corporations for the political or religious views of their owners or affiliates. This basic principle of constitutional law was recently reaffirmed in a federal court in California, when an Obama-appointed district judge protected a “living history” farm from public reprisal against the conservative views of its owner. When the local school district canceled field trips to the farm in protest of the owner’s private political views, the court’s ruling was clear: “Defendants cannot terminate the trips for unconstitutional, retaliatory reasons.”
There is a fundamental difference between enforcing a valid anti-discrimination or public-accommodations statute — such as a law prohibiting discrimination in the provision of services — and blocking a restaurant that complies with anti-discrimination law simply to punish the politics (and faith) of its owners.
Second, it’s worth pointing out the sheer extremism and intolerance of San Antonio’s and Buffalo’s actions. Chick-fil-A is being punished not for giving money to political or culture-war organizations, but rather for donations to the Salvation Army, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and a small donation to a youth home. The result is a declaration by government actors that even the most mainstream of traditional Christian organizations should be officially marginalized. Groups that are instrumental in the lives of the poor and in the lives of American youths are too toxic even for private donations, and donors should face economic punishment for having the audacity to support the charity of their choice.
Fortunately, a backlash is already building. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton has launched an investigation of the city council’s action, and Buffalo’s decision was condemned by the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the transportation authority is blaming the decision to block Chick-fil-A on an outside vendor.
The virus of public reprisal against private expression is spreading. For example, the Los Angeles City Council now requires contractors to disclose any ties with the National Rifle Association. or if they’d submitted bids to work on President Trump’s border wall.
It is the role of government to protect liberty, not promote ideological conformity by punishing dissent. San Antonio and Buffalo are on the leading edge of a dangerous trend, and if they don’t relent, then Chick-fil-A should sue. It’s time to make unlawful retaliation costly for America’s most intolerant cities.
"the most uninformed readers today are those who watch CNN and MSNBC or read the Washington Post and NY Times or follow TTF"
So do you have ANY study backing that up or is that just your worthless opinion again?
"they have been deluded for 3 years into thinking our country was being run by a Russian mole"
Now you believe you're reading minds again.
Rumpster't team was having interactions with Russia and it wasn't clear what was going on. It turns out some of what those folks were doing was criminal.
Rump didn't help himself either. He may not have been actually "colluding" with Russia, but for an ostensibly innocent man, he certainly acted like an angry guilty dude trying to cover something up.
Anyone who is really innocent will be happy to tell authorities "investigate what you like, you'll find everything we did within the law and above reproach." You don't fire the folks doing the investigation and then let people know you fired him because you didn't like him investigating you. That just BEGS for more investigation - and a pretty stupid maneuver. If you want to fire him, wait until AFTER he's found nothing and then you can legitimately fire him for incompetence and / or wasting taxpayer money. No one would bat an eye.
What we've learned from the Mueller report is that although Rump may not be as criminal as he might have been, he is even stupider than we gave him credit for.
Sad.
"yes, this is part of Mueller's MO: conduct a grueling interview with someone, closely scrutinize the text for some inadvertent inconsistency, charged with perjury, and blackmail them into saying what you want to hear
he turned it into an art form"
Mueller's an amatuer, and the Rumpter is a pathological liar. It wouldn't have taken much.
If he really wanted to get somewhere in getting someone convicted for something that wasn't a crime, he should have taken lessons from Ken Starr.
On Wednesday morning, residents of Norman, Okla., woke up to discover that their city had been littered with racist and anti-Semitic graffiti.
In front of a local arts center, a prominently placed sculpture of a young girl had been spray-painted to make it look like blood was pouring from the child’s head, the Oklahoman reported. The word “JEWESS” was scrawled across her forehead, and swastikas covered both her eyes. Two blocks away at an elementary school, someone had written that black boys “rape white girls,” using a racial slur. Meanwhile, at the headquarters of the Cleveland County Democratic Party, messages like “Gas the Jews” and “Hang n----- kids” were painted on windows and doors, next to swastikas and the words “Trump 2020.” A note tied to the door handle said, “White men have built this civilization. White men have been and still are the backbone.”
The collective damage horrified the community and brought one city councilwoman to tears. It also seemed to closely resemble a scene that had unfolded in Oklahoma City, about 20 miles to the north, just the week before. On the morning of March 28, Oklahoma Democratic Party and Chickasaw Nation employees showed up for work and discovered that the entrances to their respective offices were covered with Nazi symbols, homophobic slurs and messages like “White planet only,” as The Washington Post’s Reis Thebault reported.
Police now say that the vandalism spree in both cities was the work of one woman: Allison Christine Johnson, 45, who, during an interview with detectives, went on a lengthy rant about her racist beliefs and her efforts to “wake people up,” according to a police affidavit released Monday.
On Thursday, the day after the vandalism in Norman was discovered, Johnson showed up at the police department there and asked to turn herself in, according to court records obtained by KOKH. During an interview with investigators, she “described in detail committing all of the acts that had occurred in Norman and Oklahoma City,” police wrote. Detectives determined that her car, clothing and overall physical appearance all matched up with the suspect whom they had identified in surveillance footage.
Johnson “said that her intention was to scare Jewish people” and anyone who wasn’t white, the affidavit says.
In the newly released records, authorities in Norman also revealed for the first time that they had been fielding reports of “racial, religious, and ethnic threats” for four weeks. Written and spray-painted messages had been found at two churches, two public schools and two private homes, in addition to the arts center and the Democratic Party office, they wrote. Prosecutors have also said that the Junior League of Norman, a branch of the nonprofit service organization for women, was targeted...
SAD!
Lawn darts. Killer baby cribs. Pool drains that disemboweled children. Cars that exploded in low-speed fender benders.
Miss those?
Even though consumer advocates got rid of those deathtraps years ago, U.S. industry is back with jet planes that fall from the sky, strollers that will smash your kid’s face in and — coming soon to a store near you — pork that may or may not have fecal contamination.
Because we don’t need regulation, right?
“I think we’re going backwards,” said Bette Bommer, 68, a retired phys-ed teacher from Staten Island who was standing before a tribute to one of the biggest consumer safety scandals of 20th-century America — the Ford Pinto.
“It just feels like they’re moving everything, all these products, out so fast, without caring about safety and people. It’s just about business now,” Bommer said...
And then you have planes falling out of the air, as that attitude toward the Federal Aviation Administration gave Boeing more power to regulate itself.
It’s a trend that “may have unintended consequences for safety,” The Washington Post’s Michael Laris wrote last month, after the crash of a second Boeing jet within five months.
“The deaths of 346 people in the crashes of 737 Max 8 jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia have created a crisis for Boeing and the FAA, even as investigators continue delving into the disasters’ causes,” Laris wrote.
And then this week, The Post’s Todd C. Frankel reported on the case of a Britax jogging stroller that had been involved in hundreds of bloody accidents after the front wheel fell off.
But a recall? Not anymore. As the Trump administration took over the case, the Consumer Product Safety Commission was neutered and its recommendation to recall the faulty stroller was ignored. Baby Pinto?
If the throwback to the freewheeling of 1970s vehicles isn’t retro enough for you, looks like our pork industry may be taking a trip back to the good old days of American meatpacking circa 1900.
Our Upton Sinclair of today, Kimberly Kindy, reported in The Post this week that the “Trump administration plans to shift much of the power and responsibility for food safety inspections in hog plants to the pork industry as early as May, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees.”
Ready to say adios to your al pastor yet?
“Under the proposed new inspection system, the responsibility for identifying diseased and contaminated pork would be shared with plant employees, whose training would be at the discretion of plant owners,” Kindy wrote.
Fox, welcome to the hen house.
This says it all. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the rise of White Supremacy and this happened:
YouTubeInsider✔
@YouTubeInsider
Hate speech has no place on YouTube. We’ve invested heavily in teams and technology dedicated to removing hateful comments / videos. Due to the presence of hateful comments, we disabled comments on the livestream of today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing.
11:18 AM - Apr 9, 2019
The president thinks there are a few bad apples among all the nice anti-immigrant, islamophobe racists who love him.
Video here
There are many more. And he clearly does not want to offend even one of them by condemning their behavior. He knows he can't spare even one vote. And who knows? He may have to call on them for some ... action. Just in case.
remember the Dems crowing in November how they were going to investigate Trump to death
Trump's been found innocent but the investigation into Obama, Hillary, Comey, Brennan, Clapper and the rest of the gag is only beginning:
Attorney General Bill Barr testified Wednesday that he believes "spying did occur" on the Trump campaign in 2016, as he vowed to review the conduct of the FBI's original Russia probe.
"I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated. … I think it’s my obligation. Congress is usually very concerned with intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies staying in their proper lane," he testified before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, while noting that "spying on a political campaign is a big deal."
The comments follow a new report that the Justice Department’s internal watchdog also is scrutinizing the role of an FBI informant who contacted members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, as part of a broader review of the early stages of the Russia investigation.
Republicans LOVE investigating Hillary... they've already spent MILLIONS on her with nothing to show but a bunch of goose eggs.
These @$$ clowns never learn.
Texas lawmakers worked well into Tuesday morning as they listened to hundreds of Texans testify in support of a bill that would criminalize abortion and threaten the death penalty to any woman who undergoes the procedure.
In total 446 people testified in support of the “Abolition of Abortion in Texas Act,” or House Bill 896, which aims to outlaw all abortions “regardless of any contrary federal law, executive order, or court decision.” State Rep. Tony Tinderholt (R) introduced the bill in 2017, which would define abortion as murder which is punishable by death in the state of Texas.
“God’s word says, ‘He who sheds man’s blood, by man ― the civil government ― his blood will be shed,’” Sonya Gonnella, a supporter of the bill, testified in the hearing before the Texas House’s Committee on Judiciary and Civil Jurisprudence on Monday.
After quoting the Book of Genesis, Gonella implored the committee to “repent with us” by passing the proposed legislation.
>>>> Ummm... what ever happened to separation of church and state?
so, you think laws against murder are religious and people should be free to murder because it's a religious concept?
or, do you think people who testify at hearings of state legislatures shouldn't be permitted to quote the Bible?
to you, capital punishment is murder but killing an unborn child isn't?
when did you first develop psychopathic tendencies?
Nope.
There are plenty of good reasons not to murder people. But if religion is the only thing keeping you from murdering people, and you have to force other people to subscribe to your religious beliefs to convince them, you either haven't thought very hard, or you're too busy trying to force your agenda on everyone else.
It's this kind of obsessive focus on religion that has created groups like the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
Far too many people stop all of their thinking processes once they've come up with a religious excuse for whatever they want.
It wasn't until western cultures started putting reason ahead of religion that we started to advance, and confined kings "ordained by god" to duties that limited their destructive influence on society.
to begin with, the concept of separation of church and state was introduced by Jesus
in our Constitutional context, this means the government can't endorse one religion over another
individuals, however, are only exercising their right to religious freedom when they cite their own religious beliefs to inform their democratic decisions, who to vote for, what legislation to advocate
in the specific case we're discussing the TTFer commented that a person citing that murder was against God's law was somehow a violation of church and state
preposterous
"It wasn't until western cultures started putting reason ahead of religion that we started to advance,"
reason and religion aren't opposing forces
societies where religion has been aggressively suppressed, Stalinist Russia, China under Mao, the North Korea of the Kims aren't places of advance, of any sort
they are vicious regimes of widespread suffering
a person of supposed "reason" who has no place for religion is simply dishonest
places of Judeo-Christian heritage are the most tolerant and advanced in the world
these are places where people were free to express their religious beliefs and society flourished as a result
"and confined kings "ordained by god" to duties that limited their destructive influence on society."
America's foundational documents cite the Creator in limiting the destructive influence of kings
you need to actually apply some reasoning to your statements
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