Friday, May 24, 2019

A New New Low

I don't post as often here as I should. Every crazy thing that happens is followed by a thing that is even crazier, and I hate to fall behind. The government has become so chaotic that you cannot keep up with the actual crimes committed, never mind the horrible policy decisions, the lies, the absurd things that are said. The standard is set low, and then every day they set it lower.

For example, yesterday the President was asked by an NBC reporter, “Sir, the Constitution says treason is punishable by death. You’ve accused your adversaries of treason. Who specifically are you accusing of treason?” The President thought for a few seconds and then mentioned James Comey and Andrew McCabe, and “People probably higher than that.”

This is nothing, just another day in Washington. Let's execute my political enemies, shall we?

Yesterday, too, Trump posted a video on the Internet that was heavily edited to make it seem to show Nancy Pelosi slurring her words, with his descriptor: “PELOSI STAMMERS THROUGH NEWS CONFERENCE.”

The Washington Post has a video showing how the video was altered. The voice was slowed down to 75 percent of its original speed, and then the pitch was shifted back up to Pelosi's natural range -- slowing the video, of course, lowers the pitch. WATCH HERE. This seems to be a pretty effective way to make somebody look bad. It is not a good way to run a government.

There was also another altered video of Pelosi speaking, which was shared online by Rudy Giuliani, and the edited videos were discussed on Fox News as if they were real, as if Pelosi was either drunk or maybe aging ungracefully.

By the time the President posted the video, the news had been out for hours that it was fake. He knew it was fake.

Millions of Americans have seen these videos. Since Trump followers are generally not people who follow the news outside their bubble, we can assume that many people who saw this stuff actually believe there is something wrong with Nancy Pelosi. In fact, she was extremely lucid and articulate in the briefing and had some important things to say about Trump storming out of the infrastructure meeting. Yes, she is trolling him, of course. She has completely gotten under his skin. Pelosi, it turns out, is the one politician who can stand up to Trump and win. She is not speaking drunkenly in public, and she is aging quite well, thank you.

The idea that the President of the United States posted a fake video of the Speaker of the House is off the rails. We have seen people twist words, misquote, misconstrue, and so on, this is old political stuff. We have even seen fake videos get traction in Washington, causing heads to roll. But this President sets a new low standard, posting this on his official Presidential Twitter account. No President before would have done this, and nobody thinks it's okay, to borrow Adam Schiff's wording. This sort of stuff embarrasses the whole country.

The Post's fact-checkers this week announced that Trump has made more than 10,000 false or misleading claims.

Ten thousand.

The President of the United States.

I understand the reluctance to impeach but hopefully as the public becomes aware of the contents of some of these ongoing investigations, impeachment will become a priority for Republicans as well as Democrats. This President's behavior is dangerous, it is embarrassing, and it undermines our American democracy.

227 Comments:

Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Jim said "I don't post as often here as I should.".

Perhaps its better the quality than the quantity - your posts are consistently an outstanding and accurate description of the dangerous issues facing us and fair and insightful analysis of the best way forward.

:)

May 24, 2019 1:51 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Republicans are constantly complaining about Democrats "playing identity politics" and by that I presume they mean any attempts to address societal inequity. They're so hypocritical.

Republicans like Tony Perkins and Wyatt/Regina identify first as white Christians. They're doing identity politics on a grand scale, far bigger than anything any Democrats are doing. Evangelical christians are doing everything within their power to entrench in law their superiority over minority groups they don't like. No one is doing identity politics more than the identity group (white christians) that now has society tailored to helping them succeed over everyone else and is driving madly to make the income inequality even worse.

May 24, 2019 2:05 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/Regina said "I just love our current [illegitimate] Supreme Court this is such a desperately sad bog......."

I'm pretty sure when you say "this is a desperately sad blog" what you mean is "They keep coming up with good points I don't have a response for.".

I see the veiled threats that illegitimate supreme court justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch will unjustly punish gays is back. Shame 'bout that.

May 24, 2019 2:09 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Trump is the epitome of what the founding fathers were thinking of when they provided for presidential impeachment in the American Constitution.

May 24, 2019 2:15 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

BRAZIL: High Court Outlaws Anti-LGBT Discrimination


Well, THIS is a surprising development.

The Associated Press reports:

A majority in Brazil’s supreme court has voted to make homophobia and transphobia crimes like racism, a decision coming amid fears the country’s far-right president will roll back LGBT social gains.

Six of the Supreme Federal Tribunal’s 11 judges have voted in favor of the measure. The five other judges will vote in a court session on June 5, but the result will not be modified. The measure will take effect after all the justices have voted.

Racism was made a crime in Brazil in 1989 with prison sentences of up to five years. The court’s judges ruled that homophobia should be framed within the racism law until the country’s congress approves legislation specifically dealing with LGBT discrimination.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The Supreme Federal Court is acting on two cases brought by an LGBTQ rights group and the Popular Socialist Party in 2012 and 2013, arguing that Congress was dragging its feet on criminalizing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The court considered the cases over four days in February, when four justices — short of a majority — said such behavior should be criminalized. The case was resumed Thursday, and two more justices agreed, creating a majority. The other five justices are set to vote on June 5, but they do not have the numbers to reverse a ruling.

The supreme court decision comes a day after the Senate’s Commission on Constitution Justice and Citizenship also voted in favor of a bill to criminalize homophobia and transphobia. It asked the high court to suspend its decision while the bill makes its way through the lower house, but the court voted 9 to 2 to continue.

May 24, 2019 3:33 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Society can't morally justify banning discrimination against christians if it doesn't also ban discrimination against lgbt people.

May 24, 2019 3:34 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

A Florida state Reprsenative says god told him to introduce an abortion bill which allows no exceptions

And if a person does not share a belief in his god? What rules, if any, are there in the United States on whether or not a person can be forced by law to adhere to the tenets of another person's religious beliefs?

No one does "identity politics" more than Republicans.

May 24, 2019 7:21 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

You love "religious liberty" but hate Sharia law?

What's it like to be a hypocrite?

May 24, 2019 7:27 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Tony Perkins Celebrates Trump Admin Plan To Allow Healthcare Providers To Refuse Transgender Patients

Tony Perkins is cheering on that emergency rooms can refuse to help transwomen and just let them die.

Tony Perkins likes to pretend being a christian means he's a good person when in reality his sole motivation in life is to punish harmless lgbt people.

May 25, 2019 12:04 AM  
Anonymous 'Til Tuesday said...

Evangelicals have dedicated their lives to making LGBT people's lives a literal hell on earth. And Trump appointed them to agencies throughout the federal government, including Health & Human Services. They're in the process of ferreting out every last federal protection and right for LGBT people and doing away with it. It was part of the "deal" Trump made with Evangelical leaders: they delivered the vote for him in their churches, etc. and he agreed to appoint Evangelicals to positions in federal agencies.

May 25, 2019 12:16 AM  
Anonymous Chucktech said...

Denying a person in need of healthcare and calling it "correcting an Obama era injustice" is beyond obscene and evil.

What a ghastly, god-addled pestilence religion is.

May 25, 2019 12:23 AM  
Anonymous Macbill said...

The Hippocratic oath has an exclusion for "ick" people.

May 25, 2019 12:24 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

To Tony Perkins, its not an injustice that an innocent trans woman dies needlessly. An injustice is when someone who makes a living serving the public is required to serve someone icky, as they normally would anyone else, and would rather let that person die as a symbolic objection to the existence of every trans woman in the world.

May 25, 2019 12:47 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

When people like Tony Perkins think that kind of gross disparity in treatment is the proper balance for all societies, their moral compass couldn't really be much more effed up, eh?

May 25, 2019 12:50 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Here's a human embryo at eight weeks

Its the size of a kidney been. It looks pretty much like the embryo's of a fish, chicken, or dog at this point. I don't see any brain. It sure doesn't look like a person to me.

That is what Tony Perkins says has a right to have someone support it despite that person's objection to doing so. That is what Tony Perkins says is sacred and infinitely more important than a transwoman like me. It can't think, it has no loves, no pleasures, no sorrows. And to Tony Perkins and Wyatt/Regina, it is society's most precious thing while things like me deserve to bleed to death in an emergency because a health care worker thinks I'm icky and deserve to die.

May 25, 2019 1:19 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

My earliest childhood trauma

For generations adults have teased young children about having opposite sex romantic relationships. I think I was between 3 and 5 when one day my family of 10 started teasing me about having a girlfriend. I felt assaulted, humiliated and overwhelmed. I recall running into the kitchen and grabbing a yard stick and bringing it into the living room waving it around and thinking I wanted to hit anyone making fun of me.


I resolved at that moment I would never be attracted to girls or have a girlfriend. For the next several years I frequently expressed my distaste for girls and denied insisted I would never be attracted to them. I tried to foster anger towards girls and make myself hate them.


Well, I did end up being attracted to girls despite my best efforts. In the meantime I resisted and rebuffed any attraction girls displayed to me and told them firmly , "I don't like girls". The whole thing messed with my mind and I think contributed to great difficulty in trying to "court" females I was attracted to that I never overcame. I'm pretty angry with my family for humiliating a little child like that with taunting and making me socially maladapted. I'm sure they thought it was all good fun, but it was pretty destructive for me.

Society accepts this child abuse as though its harmless good fun. And then Tony Perkins and Wyatt/Regina try to foment panic and hatred towards gays because allowing them to live openly will allegedly encourage children to try being gay or become gay when they otherwise wouldn't be.

Trying to direct or mold a child's sexuality or gender identity only messes that child up. Seeing everything that is natural for humans, including gayness, is necessary to allow all children to be who they are. Parents, you don't have the moral right to control who your children love or how they represent themselves to society and many children are damaged by parents attempting to do this.

May 25, 2019 1:46 PM  
Anonymous Rump isn't a FACIST, he just talks like one said...

Trump isn’t necessarily fascist, but his language is. “Goebbels talks about propaganda being best when it appeals to straightforward emotion: fear, suspicion, anger, and then it would be culminated with ‘we’re winning,’ ‘we’re going to get them,’ ” Stanley says. A speech of this method was often very long, “with extremes of paranoia and then praise of ‘us,’ ‘our’ greatness, and a desire for revenge for lost greatness. . . . When our emotions are being overwhelmed, it’s because people are trying to manipulate us and drive us toward a desired goal.”

May 25, 2019 2:19 PM  
Anonymous Rump is rather slow said...

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is patient, disciplined and resilient because she has had to be. No woman in U.S. history has ever risen to a more powerful office in government than the one in which Pelosi now sits for a second time.

In her first stint, congressional scholars say, Pelosi was among the most effective speakers in modern history. She masterfully engineered the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, seizing an opportunity that she knew might never come again, even though she knew it was likely to cost the Democrats their majority.

All of this has not come without a price. Pelosi’s adversaries have caricatured and demonized her, and even some of her allies have dismissed her. In polls last year, negative feelings about her often exceeded positive ones by 25 percentage points or more. The speaker-in-waiting found herself the target of what she estimates were 137,000 Republican campaign ads.

Much of what she faced was blatantly sexist, mocking her looks and demeanor, but Pelosi was not rattled by any of it. Where Trump explodes if a fellow Republican says a word of criticism, Pelosi let it be known during the 2018 midterm elections that if Democratic candidates felt it would be politically advantageous to distance themselves from her, they should go right ahead.

Pelosi reclaimed the speaker’s gavel by doing what it took to win in congressional districts where she — and her liberal party — are not particularly popular. Those are the seats she knows she must protect in 2020.

So far, her strategy of keeping one foot on the congressional oversight accelerator while tapping the brakes on impeachment is winning.

The prospect of unending scrutiny is getting to Trump. On Wednesday, he abruptly blew up a meeting that had been scheduled with Pelosi and other congressional leaders to negotiate an infrastructure package and stalked out to the Rose Garden to whine that he could not work with Democrats unless they drop what he called “these phony investigations.”

Even more bizarre was a scene a day later when, during an appearance with farmers, the president bristled at Pelosi’s characterization of that aborted infrastructure meeting as a “temper tantrum,” and pressed five different White House aides to attest he had been “calm” in his three-minute session with the lawmakers.

By Thursday night, Trump and his allies were reduced to the shameless gambit of circulating doctored and heavily edited videos suggesting it was the speaker’s mental stability that should be questioned. “I’ve been watching her for a long period of time. She’s not the same person,” Trump said.

But that’s the thing. Pelosi is exactly who she has always been. What’s changed is that Trump is beginning to understand what that means.

May 25, 2019 2:36 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The thing about Trump's vanity border wall that's been largely (entirely?) missed is that all those people leaving crime and gangs in Central America are doing so because American intervention in the area destabilized and destroyed any effective government there.

Years of American aid to central america had been paying off, the crime rate was dropping there. Now Trump has cut off the foreign aid that allowed that drop in the crime rate. This will leave people in the area increasingly dependent on, victims of, and crime and gangs.

May 25, 2019 4:55 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Since Korea, American foreign policy has focused primarily on short term gains in American interests at the expense of long term global stability. This harms the entire world, including the United States.

May 25, 2019 4:59 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And of course, looking out for short term American interests around the globe has gotten far, far worse under Trump. And Trump is using ever lever of presidential power for his personal benefit.

Ethical Republicans would stand up and oppose this. Democrats have no choice but to impeach Trump - Trump is demanding it and forcing their hand. He hopes there will be chaos which scares the public and then he'll tell everyone "I alone can fix it - give me supreme power, I want to be president for life."

That's why Trump is waging a ferocious war on independent truth. He knows his supporters like that he lies and just claims what he wants to be true, is. He wants to raise fear in the public so he can drive the most Americans possible to blindly support giving all power to Trump.

Trump's superceding indictments of Julian Assange drop the case aqainst him for helping Chelsey Manning breech a Defence Department classified computer.

Now Trump has issued a dozen or so counts of Assange allegedly breaking the espionage act merely by publishing the classified material, rather than because he attempted to steal it himself.

The United States has a long, preciously fought for tradition of journalistic independence. Now Trump is declaring it a crime for media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post and every other media outlet to publish confidential materials given to them exposing corruption like Watergate.

Trump is trying to make it a crime for any media outlet to publish anything he doesn't like. Bill Barr is assisting Trump in destroying American rule of law, democracy, and freedom of the press.

You guys fought a revolution to escape what Trump is trying to fence you into with your gleeful participation.

May 25, 2019 5:10 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Further to Good Anonymous's link about Trump's using the Nazi propaganda play book:

But if Trump is without peer in the American political tradition, he unfortunately has equals in another tradition. Such rhetoric is a hallmark of totalitarianism.

His supporters, lovingly embraced, feel as though they’re in on the joke; they know he often lies, but they believe he’s lying for them — lying to the liars. Us-vs.-them thinking becomes so powerful that the enemy’s humiliation can be more gratifying than one’s own betterment.

How to counter this extreme emotion? The evidence that not a single member of Congress comes close to Trump’s rhetorical excess raises hope that this will pass. The best opponents can do until then is to cling to truth. Emotion can overwhelm reason for only so long.

“It’s using emotion to circumvent reason, to overwhelm reason,” says Jason Stanley, a Yale philosopher specializing in language and author of the book “How Fascism Works.”

Americans, for example, would rationally have empathy upon learning that children have died in U.S. custody on the border. But if we fear that those crossing the border are a mortal threat to us, that fear overwhelms reason. This is what Wyatt/Regina attempted to do when they posted a couple of months back about anti-gay cake bakers "If society is going to choose between criminalizing christians or criminalizing homosexuals, I know which one I'd choose". Wyatt/Regina falsely portray the situation as one of equal imposition on the two parties in conflict when the reality is exactly the opposite.

What Wyatt/Regina proposes as a desirable ordering of society is that if society can't choose between punishing person "A" or perons "B"; and the punishment for person "A" is being required to perform a mildly annoying taks and the punishment for person "B" is a total disruption of their life and happiness; the proper balance for society is to destroy the life of person "B" rather than trivially offend person "A".

Wyatt/Regina try to falsely portray the cake baker conflict as one of opposing interests of more or less equal weight when in reality what they want is a society that trivially rewards them at the expence of destroying another person's life.

May 25, 2019 6:01 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...


Trump Can’t Be Trusted with The Espionage Act. We Can’t Trust a Country That Would Give It to Him.


From Esquire

Lawyer friends of mine like to refer to the case of Korematsu v. U.S., the Supreme Court decision that allowed for the dislocation and detention of Japanese-American citizens, as a land mine in the law in that, technically, it never has been repealed, although the Court did repudiate it while throwing out the original Muslim travel ban in Trump v. Hawaii. For me, and for the people in my profession, the land mine in the law always has been 18 USC 793, the Espionage Act of 1917, the immortal gift of that half-nutty professor, Woodrow Wilson, and his truly awful attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer.

Of course, it all came back this week when the president* had himself a nutty on consecutive days, threatened James Comey with execution for treason, and allowed his personal Palmer, the career Republican jackanapes William Barr, to indict Julian Assange on 17 counts of violating, you guessed it, the Espionage Act. It is true that Assange is a messianic nuisance who jacked around with the 2016 presidential election.

But this isn’t really about Assange who, in any case, may never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom. This is about Jane Mayer, and Charlie Savage, and Barton Gellman, and David Fahrenthold and every other dogged reporter who has made this president*’s life miserable by continuously pointing out what an incompetent, authoritarian crook and bunco artist this president* is. Weaponizing the Espionage Act on behalf of a Justice Department already weaponized to attack the president*’s political enemies is a signal and a warning. It is a monstrous abuse of power, but only because that power was there to be abused all these years and nobody was paying attention.

El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago is enabled not only by a supine Republican Party, and not only by his good friends among the Volga Bagmen, and not only by a Democratic Party that seems befuddled as to what to do about him. He also has been enabled in his great project of dismantling representative government by the fact that a succession of Congresses going back to the middle of the last century gradually ceded power to the Executive Branch and left it there, hoping that no future president would be crackpot enough to perceive the full potential of the gifts that Congress was dropping at his door. The current president* may be as dim as the light from Saturn, but he has a predator’s instinct for finding weapons to use against the people he chooses to make his enemies, and he has no compunction about using them to their fullest.

May 25, 2019 7:06 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And so, here we are. The Espionage Act should have been repealed decades ago. In 1971, John Mitchell, the only competition Barr and Palmer have for worst attorney-general in history, tried to use it to enjoin newspapers from publishing the Pentagon Papers. In deciding against Mitchell, the Supreme Court ducked the opportunity to declare the Espionage Act unconstitutional. So it continued to sit there in the statute book like a viper under a rock. It was used against authentic spies like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, and as a cudgel over the heads of innocent victims like Wen Ho Lee.

The Obama Administration, to its everlasting embarrassment, shined it up and used it against whistleblowers. Conspicuously, however, the Obama administration didn’t target the reporters to whom the whistleblowers blew the whistle, deciding quite sensibly that they didn’t want to stand the constitutional shitstorm that would blow in if they tried. (And, perhaps, also because they truly had First Amendment qualms about doing so.) Naturally, then, when this administration* came upon the act, they tightened the screws, polished the barrel, and sent it back into the kind of vicious political warfare that had birthed it in the first place.

The Espionage Act-and the Sedition Act that was its primary enforcement mechanism and was signed into law by Wilson, that idiot, the following year-was born of fear and anger. It was directed almost entirely against people who were opposed to the country’s entry and participation in the slaughter of World War I-pacifists, Quakers, genuine radicals, actual (or alleged) Communists. Eugene Debs went to jail under the Act partly for giving a speech in which he…wait for it… criticized the Espionage Act.

But the most ringing opposition to the Espionage Act at the time of its passage came from Robert LaFollette, the great Progressive senator from Wisconsin:

"The mandate seems to have gone forth to the sovereign people of this country that they must be silent while those things are being done by their government which most vitally concern their well-being, their happiness, and their lives....More than all, the citizen and his representative in Congress in time of war must maintain his right of free speech...."

This, remember, was a speech given during what was then the greatest war in the history of mankind, and a war that was reinforced at home by pernicious and anti-democratic politicians passing pernicious and anti-democratic war. Today, by and large, and despite the best efforts of some of the president*’s crew, we are at peace. But we are treated as though we are engaged wholly in war - the endless war in west Asia, certainly, but we are also being driven into a war against our own democratic heritage and our own rights, as well as a war against phantom enemies and spectral adversaries that exist only in the mind of a president* who clearly is coming unglued. The Espionage Act was born in a political context similar to this one, and it deserves to die an unmourned death for the same reason we gently take a firearm away from a toddler. The president* can’t be trusted with a weapon like that, and we can’t be trusted with a country that gives it to him.

May 25, 2019 7:06 PM  
Anonymous AP FACT CHECK: Trump and a tale of 2 sheets of paper said...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump held up and read from a sheet of paper in the Rose Garden this past week as he argued he's been hounded by investigators in the Russia probe for no reason. "Nearly 500 search warrants," says the page, from an ABC News graphic. "More than 2,500 subpoenas." And: "19 special counsel lawyers & 40 FBI agents worked the case."

If that sounds like overkill by the Robert Mueller inquiry, it's only half the story.

Trump did not show or quote from a second page that goes with the graphic, laying out the results of the investigation. Among them: "37 total indicted ... 26 Russians indicted ... 4 people sent to prison ... 7 guilty pleas." In Trump's telling, it's all a hoax.

Selective accounting like that has been a constant in Trump's rhetoric.

Read all about it here.

May 25, 2019 7:55 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

POLL: Support For Abortion Rights Climbs To 58%

Again and again, whether its a woman's right to her own body, gun control, or gay marriage bans, Republicans are grossly out of step with what the majority of Americans want. Republicans lie to the public about what they're going to do and then they implement authoritarian control over the majority who oppose it.

May 26, 2019 9:48 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Quinnipiac poll: 55% of Americans say the Surpeme Court is "mainly motivated by politics" while 38% say its "mainly motivated by the law".

On the appointment of supreme court justices, the American constitution says the Senate is to "advise and consent" the president's nominee. It does not say "and maybe consent", or "and consent if you feel like it", it says "and consent"

Mitch McConnell violated the Constitution by not refusing to consent on Merrick Garland.

Neil Gorsuch is an illegitimate Supreme Court justice. Brett Kavanaugh is an admitted criminal - his own calendar intended to exonerate him corroberated Christine Ford's testimony that he sexually assaulted her.

Republicans have politicized and destroyed public confidence in every American democratic institution they've touched.

May 27, 2019 1:57 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

On Thursday, President Donald Trump issued a memorandum directing the intelligence agency heads to comply and cooperate with “a review of intelligence activities relating to the campaigns in the 2016 Presidential election.” The memorandum also gave Attorney General William Barr the authority to declassify information pertaining to the investigation.

For several years, government officials from the Obama administration had alleged in anonymous leaks to friendly reporters that Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton. After nearly a year of investigation at the FBI, which included the use of wiretaps, national security letters, and overseas intelligence assets deployed against the campaign, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein launched a special counsel to further investigate the claim.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller ended his nearly two-year probe with a determination that neither Trump nor his campaign — and indeed no Americans at all — had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. That probe, whose overwhelmingly Democrat participants bristled at the charge they were engaged in a “witch hunt,” did attempt to show that Trump’s complaints against the false smear were tantamount to “obstruction of justice,” but was unable to do so.

Media who are implicated in perpetuating the false allegation that Trump was a traitor reacted poorly to the news that Barr was given authority to bring some transparency to the Russia collusion narrative that had been effective precisely because it was shrouded in secrecy.

As bizarre as it is for journalists to fight transparency — MSNBC’s Trump-bruised Joe Scarborough said declassifying documents is what an “autocrat” does — it matches the talking points of those inside the agencies who worry about their activities being exposed. With the implosion of the Russia collusion theory, neither the sources nor their compliant journalist buddies who promised “bombshell” after “bombshell” are covered in glory.

As the media carry water for their leaking sources who selectively released information to perpetuate a false conspiracy theory of Russia collusion, it is worth remembering other recent times they claimed that transparency would have devastating results.

May 27, 2019 7:46 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

1. Hiding Andrew McCabe’s $70,000 Conference Table

In May 2018, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed that unnecessary redactions of information requested by his Senate Judiciary Committee had gotten ridiculous. Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who was fired for lying about his leaks to the media in an unrelated probe, spent $70,000 on a conference table. The Department of Justice redacted that fact — obviously not for national security reasons.

“I am unaware of any legitimate basis on which the cost of a conference table should be redacted. Embarrassment is not a good enough reason. The manner in which some redactions have been used casts doubt on whether the remaining redactions are necessary and defensible,” Grassley wrote in a letter to Rosenstein.

2. HPSCI Report Was Supposed To End Republic
As the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence prepared to release information about abuse of the secret court that permit the government to spy on American citizens, the Justice Department released a letter to the press saying the action was “extraordinarily reckless,”would be “damaging” to “national security,” and would risk “damage to our intelligence community or the important work it does in safeguarding the American people.”

That was obviously not true. While the report revealed actions that embarrassed the FBI and Department of Justice, the revelations did not damage national security except insofar as they revealed to the world that law enforcement and intelligence were engaged in wrongdoing.

Justice and the FBI also have a pattern of redacting huge swaths of reports and letters to and from Congress as part of their oversight investigation into the spying on the Trump campaign. When the redactions are lessened, they reveal not sensitive information that affects national security so much as embarrassing details about how Justice and FBI have conducted business. Examples here and here.

May 27, 2019 7:46 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

3. Stefan Halper’s Outing By WaPo and NYT
Among the most bizarre tag-team actions by the media and their sources was the outing of Stefan Halper in the pages of The New York Times and Washington Post — all while claiming that others were doing the outing.

As Congress, performing oversight, began asking questions about the running of human informants against an opposing party’s presidential campaign, the media began quoting their sources saying that merely asking questions about this was tantamount to outing the individual.

They then began revealing more than enough information about the individual to determine that it was Stefan Halper, whose life they said would be threatened if it was revealed that he was in the employ of the U.S. government instead of the Cambridge academic he claimed to be.

While the claim rang hollow, it was true that the revelation of Halper’s identity was embarrassing for those agencies who were paying him millions of dollars to manufacture dirt on political enemies. And it was embarrassing, too, for the media who willfully swallowed those leaks and printed them even when told they were false, such as a Wall Street Journal story suggesting that Mike Flynn had an affair with a Russian woman.

The New York Times appears to be trying this game again by revealing information about another source that was used to perpetuate the false conspiracy theory. The leakers of this information to The New York Times would likely be very high level, perhaps from the previous administration.

Opposing parties’ political campaigns should not be spied on. False claims of conspiracies should not be weaponized by political opponents in government perches. To ensure that there is justice for those who engaged in this dangerous conduct — and to ensure it doesn’t happen against Americans and their president again — transparency is needed.

The implicated parties — whether in the media or in the government — have cried wolf too many times to be taken seriously again. It is time for some transparency about the spying use of overseas intelligence assets, wiretaps, national security letters, and other actions against the Trump campaign

May 27, 2019 7:47 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great. I look forward to reading the unredacted Mueller report.

I suppose we should be seeing it any day now.

May 27, 2019 9:17 AM  
Anonymous Lindsay Graham speaks with forked tongue said...

Fox News Host Chris Wallace on Sunday challenged Sen. Lindsey Graham over the South Carolina Republican's past comments on ignoring subpoenas being grounds for impeachment.

"You call all of what’s going on in Washington a political circus, but you took a different view back when you were leading the impeachment effort against [former President] Clinton back in the late '90s," Wallace said on "Fox News Sunday."

"At that time, you said that any president, and you talked specifically about Clinton and [former President] Nixon, who defied Congress when it came to subpoenas was in danger of impeachment," he added.

Wallace then played a video of Graham in 1998 saying, "You’re becoming the judge and jury. It is not your job to tell us what we need. It is your job to comply with things that we need to provide oversight over you.”

"Question: Why is it an impeachable offense for Clinton or Nixon back then to ignore congressional subpoenas, but it’s OK for President Trump to do now?" the host asked.

"Well, there’s two things here," Graham said. "The Mueller investigation was a special counsel appointed to find out if the president committed a crime, if he colluded with the Russians, if he obstructed justice. The president gave 1.4 million documents to [special counsel Robert] Muller. Everybody around the president was allowed to testify. He never claimed executive privilege. He complied, no cover-up, worked with Mueller. Mueller’s the final word on this for me."

"So if Clinton had stiffed Ken Starr, that’s different," Graham continued. "What [House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold] Nadler [D-N.Y.] is doing is trying to destroy the president and his family. If I were the president, I would fight back against this political revenge coming out of the House.”

Graham's defense of his previous comments comes amid a battle between Trump's White House and congressional Democrats.

Trump has refused a wave of subpoenas from Congress on a variety issues, including many tied to Russia's election interference.

Mueller's report did not find evidence proving collusion between Trump's 2016 campaign and the Kremlin but did not make a determination on whether the president obstructed justice.

May 27, 2019 9:51 AM  
Anonymous You thought it was fiction? said...

Prominent figures on the Christian right in the US ranging from religious magazines to authors to elected politicians have warned that the fight over abortion rights could lead to a new civil war.

Though such dire predictions are not necessarily new on the extreme right wing in the US, the passing of a wave of hardline anti-abortion laws in numerous states this year appears to have amped up the conspiracy-minded predictions that depict abortion squarely as a root cause of a coming conflict.

Republican lawmakers such as Ohio’s Candice Keller have openly speculatedthat the divide over abortion rights might lead to civil war. Last month, Keller drew explicit comparisons with the antebellum situation over slavery, telling the Guardian: “Whether this ever leads to a tragedy, like it did before with our civil war, I can’t say.”

Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed that the Washington state republican legislator Matt Shea had also speculated about civil war, and the “Balkanization” of America, predicting that Christians would retreat to “zones of freedom” such as the inland Pacific north-west, where Shea is campaigning for a new state to break away from Washington.

Asked on a podcast if the two halves of the country could remain together, Shea said: “I don’t think we can, again, because you have half that want to follow the Lord and righteousness and half that don’t, and I don’t know how that can stand.”

Shea has introduced a bill – unlikely to pass – which would criminalize abortion in the state.

Along with legislators, the notion of a civil war over abortion has been finding traction in the media organs of the Christian right.

In the past year, Charisma magazine, the leading media voice of Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, has run at least half a dozen articles contemplating the possibility of an imminent civil war in America. One recent article profiles pastor, broadcaster and author Michael L Brown, who blames a “coming civil war” on “militant abortionists”.

Brown told Charisma: “A civil war is coming to America, only this time, it will be abortion, rather than slavery, that divides the nation”.

An upcoming book from Brown also warns that abortion is among the signs that “the demonic spirit of Jezebel is powerful in America”. In another column this month Brown wrote: “A civil war is certain. The only thing to be determined is how bloody it will be.”

This year the Christian televangelist Rick Joyner has, on his ministry’s website and other Christian right outlets, been offering detailed descriptions of a civil war he believes to be coming on the basis of his own prophetic dream.

Abortion is one of the key reasons he thinks that war is imminent.

Joyner also turned to Charisma magazine at one point to describe a dream, which he says he had late last year. “We are already in the first stages of the Second American Revolutionary/Civil War,” he wrote. “In the dream, I saw that we had already crossed that line and it is now upon us, so we must change our strategy from trying to avoid it to winning it.”

André Gagné is an associate professor of theology at Concordia University in Montreal, who researches the religious right. He says that while Charisma magazine may be unfamiliar to secular and liberal Americans, it is “absolutely representative” of charismatic and Pentecostal Christians on abortion, and as such speaks for “millions of people”...

May 27, 2019 11:45 AM  
Anonymous You thought it was fiction? said...

He says that the idea that abortion may lead to civil war has percolated for some time on the Christian right. Gagné says that the Christian right’s fight against abortion is driven by real belief, and real fear.

“The Christian right believes that if they don’t engage politically, and try to influence social issues, God will judge America, and he will judge them,” Gagne said.

But is the possibility of an abortion-centred civil war likely?

Journalist Robert Evans hosts the breakout podcast It Could Happen Here, which canvases scenarios for a new American civil war.

He said that the Christian right “generate a lot of the extremist language in mainstream politics”, but that “there’s more talk about violent insurrection from the white nationalist right than the Christian right, because there’s less faith in politics”.

For now, as demonstrated by the abortion bills passed in several states in an apparent attempt to get a case to the supreme court and overturn abortion rights nationally, the Christian right is reaping dividends from engaging with the political process.

But, Evans notes, the danger may come if “they see victory slip from their grasp”.

And unlike the fractious and small subcultures of the racist far right, “the Christian right is really good at keeping people working together for years at a time”.

Keep in mind, that these are the most dedicated members of Trump's cult:
Trump consistently does better with regular churchgoing white Evangelicals than with less observant members of this group (70 percent of weekly churchgoers approve of Trump’s job performance, versus 65 percent of others). This finding suggests that MAGA people aren’t just a bunch of rednecks who identify as Evangelical but are as heathenish as Trump in their actual belief systems and conduct. The same is true, interestingly enough, of another relatively pro-Trump religious demographic, white Catholics. Being churchy and being Trumpy seem to go hand in hand (not so much, however, with white mainline Protestants, an at-best-lukewarm group for Trump)...

Two-thirds of churchgoing white evangelicals strongly approve of Trumps job performance.

If Trump doesn't win in 2020, one can imagine this group losing its grip and just going for it.

May 27, 2019 11:45 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Great. I look forward to reading the unredacted Mueller report.

I suppose we should be seeing it any day now."

You may never see it. There is no reason to release it. We appointed a special prosecutor. The Democratic resistance to our democracy spent two years deifying him and now they want to question his conclusions.

Investigations often include material not relevant to the conclusion that would be breach the privacy of unindicted individuals if it were released. That's not to mention national security concerns, which are also vital. There is no reason to discard our system to indulge the deep disappointment of Democrats that our President is not a foreign agent.

"Question: Why is it an impeachable offense for Clinton or Nixon back then to ignore congressional subpoenas, but it’s OK for President Trump to do now?" the host asked."

In the case of Nixon and Clinton, the more time went on, the worse the story got. It seemed there were daily revelations that went deeper and deeper.

The opposite is true for Trump. The more we find out, the weaker the case gets.

Further, it is clear there is no legislative purpose to the subpoenas, as court have ruled is necessary. If Dems don't like it, they can take it to the Supreme Court. They have no chance with impeachment. That would be a stunt and the voters know it. The Senate has made their view so it would be hollow gesture.

"Mueller's report did not find evidence proving collusion between Trump's 2016 campaign and the Kremlin but did not make a determination on whether the president obstructed justice."

That's because Mueller holds an extreme view of what constitutes obstruction and knew he would never convince anyone. There are no new facts to uncover, simply a debate about what constitutes obstruction. The voters have made clear they don't agree with Mueller's extremism.

May 27, 2019 11:47 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

As a vocal faction of House Democrats tries to pressure Speaker Nancy Pelosi into supporting impeachment of President Trump, it is getting reinforcements from left-leaning pundits who contend that Pelosi’s political calculations don’t add up. They generally argue that acting upon the moral imperative of impeachment is more likely than not to yield political dividends.

The constitutional and legal case for impeachment may be on firm ground. But the political case for impeachment is a flimsy, faith-based argument, not at all backed up by hard data. Moreover, impeachment proponents wrongly presume that forgoing impeachment amounts to tacit acceptance of Trump’s conduct before and during his presidency, when in fact, there’s a better path than impeachment for holding Trump accountable.

The debate over impeachment is mostly about politics, and not legalities, because of the high improbability that 20 Senate Republicans would ever join their 47 Democratic and Independent colleagues in convicting and removing their party’s standard-bearer. Granted, not everybody concedes conviction is impossible. Some point to the example of Watergate, such as The Atlantic’s Yoni Applebaum: “The process of impeachment itself is likely to shift public opinion, both by highlighting what’s already known and by bringing new evidence to light. If Trump’s support among Republican voters erodes, his support in the Senate may do the same. One lesson of Richard Nixon’s impeachment is that when legislators conclude a presidency is doomed, they can switch allegiances in the blink of an eye.”

In the words of “Dumb and Dumber’s” Lloyd Christmas, “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!” Sure, there’s a chance. But after so many scandalous shoes have dropped, it’s hard to imagine another shoe so heavy that it would actually catapult Republicans, who today compose a far more ideologically purified party than Nixon’s, into the impeach-and-convict column.

That’s why most pro-impeachment advocates concede that conviction by the Senate is not the objective. Instead, they argue impeachment will benefit Democrats politically. The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg warned, “Following public opinion on impeachment, as opposed to attempting to shape it, makes Democrats look weak and vacillating. Endless calls for further investigation send the message that the staggering corruption and abuse of power that Trump has already engaged in is somehow tolerable.” Similarly, The New Republic’s Matt Ford insisted, “Nothing could make Democrats look weaker than spending the next two years warning that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, then telling voters that it’s not worth the trouble to impeach him.”

May 27, 2019 12:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Another common argument is that current polling showing strong majorities against impeachment should be ignored, since it doesn’t account for how the impeachment process would impact public opinion. “The argument that this would hurt Democrats — or even just that it would be more likely to harm than help — is based on plenty of guesswork,” said The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake.

Fair enough. But the argument that impeachment is more likely to help than harm is based on more guesswork.

Impeachment doesn’t just poll poorly; it polls poorly even though most Americans already believe Trump has committed crimes. In this month’s Quinnipiac poll, 57% say Trump committed crimes before he became president, and 46% say he has committed crimes while he was president. Yet a paltry 29% support the mere “beginning of the process to impeach President Donald Trump.”

Clearly, there is a bloc of voters who believe Trump committed crimes yet blanch at impeachment-and-conviction. It’s an assumption without evidence that an impeachment inquiry will produce evidence of crimes not yet already presumed by most voters, and yet another assumption that any such evidence would move the public opinion needle. With the House Democrats’ caucus spanning a wide political spectrum, including democratic socialists from deep-blue districts and moderates from Trump-won districts, impeachment risks dividing Democrats while uniting Republicans.

Remember, if your end goal isn’t removing Trump by Senate conviction, but by the ballot on November 3, 2020, then you want to pursue political strategies that unify the anti-Trump majority. Trump only got into the Oval Office in the first place because the 54% of the voting public who opposed Trump (not to mention Trump critics who didn’t bother to vote) didn’t fully consolidate behind the Democratic alternative. Trump has yet to achieve majority support for his job performance in the RealClearPolitics poll average throughout the duration of his presidency, but what splintered before could splinter again. It’s true that we can’t know for sure how impeachment would alter public opinion, but since there is no current evidence that impeachment proceedings would help unify Trump opponents, why make a blind bet?

May 27, 2019 12:21 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Impeachment advocates assert that impeachment would make Democrats look strong and principled by trying to uphold the rule of law. But consider what the Trump counterargument would likely be. As Trump posted on Twitter earlier this month: “Dems can’t win the election fairly. You can’t impeach a president for creating the best economy in our country’s history.”

This is the kind of illogical, disingenuous non sequitur from Trump that drives Democrats mad. But however crudely the message is constructed, so long as the unemployment rate stays low this is a strong general election message for Trump: Democrats can’t touch me on the economy, so they want to distract you with an impeachment fight. In a choice between upholding one’s own bank account or the rule of law, a lot of people will choose their bank accounts.

This is why scandal politics often backfires on the opposition party. Those pushing a scandal narrative against their opponents, regardless of the legitimacy and the severity of the alleged scandal, don’t necessarily look principled, but self-serving — trying to score political points instead of articulating how they will make voters more prosperous and safe. And so, Iran-Contra did not give us President Dukakis. Abu Ghraib did not give us President Kerry. Solyndra and Fast & Furious did not give us President Romney. (Yes, George W. Bush won the presidency two years after the Bill Clinton impeachment, but the Supreme Court and Ralph Nader both played a role in that.)

Does that mean Democrats should cowardly ignore Trump’s transgressions? No. Democrats do need to build a political case for ousting Trump even if the economy is strong, and his devious, divisive and destabilizing behavior is the obvious place to start. It’s just doesn’t automatically follow that impeachment proceedings are the best way to make that case.

May 27, 2019 12:23 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Clinton, the more time went on, the worse the story got. It seemed there were daily revelations that went deeper and deeper."

Simply No. The more that time went on, it became more and more apparent that Clinton lied to cover up a blow job from a willing partner - not anything about what Starr was originally sent to investigate. Unseemly, yes. Bad for Clinton's marriage, certainly. A threat to the Constitution? Absolutely not. Starr had spent millions investigating Whitewater and came up with a wet cigar and a sticky dress.

"The opposite is true for Trump. The more we find out, the weaker the case gets."

The obsessive-compulsive need of the propagandist is to keep changing the narrative, dismiss all the relevant info, and to constantly distract attention.

None of that however changes the simple fact that Trump attempted to obstruct justice on multiple occasions with multiple officials. Most of them had enough brains not to go along and put themselves in legal jeopardy. Good for them.

That doesn't dismiss the Rumpster though.

May 27, 2019 1:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You simply need to face the fact that the Russian hoax charges against were a political attack by an administration seeking to prevent the election and, later, overturn the election, of their political opponent.

That's unAmerican, a threat to our democracy, and no one blames Trump for resisting.

When Clinton was found to be abusing his position as the most powerful man in the world to take advantage of a young girl just out of college, he degraded the Presidency by resisting. Any other President before him would have resigned.

May 27, 2019 1:46 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Here we go again, Wyatt/Regina can't deal with any of the posts I've made so the post a hundred cut&pastes to try and bury the truth I've posted. It won't work, anyone can easily scroll through and see my highlighted name in red while ignoring the propaganda Wyatt/Regina post.

May 27, 2019 2:27 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"You simply need to face the fact that the Russian hoax charges against were a political attack by an administration"

That's the story you want to believe.

It's simply not a fact. Trolling a blog with your conservative talking points simply doesn't make it true, or change anybody's mind.

"That's unAmerican, a threat to our democracy, and no one blames Trump for resisting"

The Russians flooding American social media to elect this fool is also unAmerican. It's telling how much conservatives ignore this fact. Since when did conservatives start giving free passes to Russian interference?

"Any other President before him would have resigned."

I give Bob Livingston credit for having some morals and resigning and not being a hypocrite for his infidelities. But he's the exception - Burton, Chenoweth, and Hyde should have resigned too after voting for Clinton's impeachment. But they didn't. Given the overt lack of any moral conscience that now pervades the Republican party, it's really not a surprise.

Clinton was impeached on two counts - one of perjury, and the other of obstruction - related to Monica L. and not anything doing with Starr's Whitewater investigation - which never found anything to prosecute the Clintons for.

The Rumpster, on the other hand has over a dozen instance of obstruction directly related to Russia the investigation:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/obstruction-justice-mueller-report-heat-map

People have gone to jail for obstructing less.

Clinton was actually impeached for obstructing less.

May 27, 2019 2:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The FBI’s investigation originated with George Papadopoulos, not Christopher Steele
We’ve known since December 2017 that the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign began in July 2016 — months before the FBI was even alerted to the existence of the Steele dossier.

The inciting incident, according to Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo at the New York Times, had to do with WikiLeaks, which published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in July 2016. Those emails prompted Australia’s top diplomat in Britain to inform his American counterparts about a conversation he had two months earlier with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.

During a night of heavy drinking in London, Papadopoulos bragged to the Australian about his knowledge that Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign,” as the Times put it. Papadopoulos has since agreed to cooperate with the Mueller investigation and was sentenced to just 14 days in jail, even though Mueller’s team in a court filing said he “did not provide ‘substantial assistance.’”

You don’t have to take the Times’s word for it. Even the so-called “Nunes memo,” prepared by then-House Intelligence Committee chair and staunch Trump ally Devin Nunes (R-CA) and released about a year ago, acknowledges that the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign was “triggered” by evidence presented to American officials about Papadopoulos having secretive contacts with Kremlin agents when it was released about a year ago.

In short, the Russia investigation would have existed even if the Steele dossier never did. But Trump and Fox News are not about to let the facts get in the way of their preferred narrative.

May 27, 2019 2:38 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The dossier is back in this news this week for a couple of reasons. First, a snippet of a deposition with Steele, the former British spy who put together the dossier, was unsealed last week. The deposition makes clear that Steele “used internet searches and unverified information to support details he had gathered about a web company mentioned in the dossier,” CNN reported — a revelation buttressing the notion that the document wasn’t reliable enough to form the basis of an FBI investigation.

But it’s also in the news because Trump is putting it there. He’s making it a central part of his bizarre, one-sided feud with the late John McCain — in which Trump has slammed him for the role he played in alerting the FBI to the dossier.

“They gave it to John McCain, who gave it to the FBI for very evil purposes. That’s not good,” Trump told Fox Business in an interview that aired Friday morning. “I’m not a fan.”

Last Sunday, Trump tweeted that McCain “sent the Fake Dossier to the FBI and Media hoping to have it printed BEFORE the Election.”

Trump’s tweet is incorrect. McCain did alert the FBI to the dossier, but he did that in December 2016 — one month after the presidential election, and five months after the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign was first opened.

While Trump and Fox News are now trying to revise history, the underlying facts of the FBI’s involvement in the 2016 election do not support the allegation that bureau brass had it out for Trump. Consider that during the 2016 campaign, the FBI investigated both Hillary Clinton and the Trump campaign. Yet the bureau only publicized the investigation into Clinton — a fact that’s now highly inconvenient for those who want to argue that anti-Trump bias motivated the bureau’s decisions.

Furthermore, if FBI higher-ups were so anti-Trump, then it’s hard to explain the decision then-Director James Comey made to send Congress a letter announcing the discovery of new emails pertinent to the investigation of Clinton’s email practices just days before the election. Prominent pollsters have concluded that Comey’s letters, which resulted in Clinton’s emails once again becoming a major story, may have cost her the election.

May 27, 2019 2:40 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "You simply need to face the fact that the Russian hoax charges against were a political attack by an administration seeking to prevent the election and, later, overturn the election, of their political opponent."

Obviously not, given that Republicans control the Senate. Democrats know if they impeach and don't have the most overwhelming case against Trump of all time (OJ Simpson anyone?) Republicans won't convict. So, if the House does impeach, Democrats will be obviously doing it out of a desire to defend the rule of law, not to make political hay.

For several decades the American Military and Law enforcement has been populated primarily by Republican supporters. Even Democrat presidents demurred to the legend that Republicans were the law and order party and appointed Republican supporters to top FBI positions - people like Robert Mueller and James Comey. Now a president who's lied over 10,000 times is trying to destroy the FBI with his hired henchmen Attorney General Bill Barr, Devon Nunes, and Lindsey Graham and suddenly we're supposed to believe 10's of thousands of Justice Department employees have all become democrats and are all lying and destroying the rule of law themselves instead of Trump. Eff you Wyatt/Regina.

There's are currently four Trump investigations into the people investigating Trump collusion with Russia and money laundering. The message Trump and Barr are sending to the entire justice department is "Oppose us for any reason and we will destroy your career". The Trump administrations attacks on the rule of law know no restraint. When you're trying to overthrow a democracy and become dicatator its an all out assault on the truth. And Wyatt and Regina Hardiman are right in there helping spread the lies as far as they can.

Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "no one blames Trump for resisting [being investigated]. When Clinton was [investigated], he degraded the Presidency by resisting."

Yep, that's Republican "logic" for you - If a Democrat resists being investigated he should be executed, if a Republican president resists being investigated there's nothing wrong with that. Clinton responded to every subpoena and supplied everything possible that the Republican investigation into him asked for. Trump has refused to honour even a single subpoena or document request, even those routinely done as a part of congressional oversight since 1776. Trump has announced he won't carry out the duties of his office unless the investigations itno his money laundering and collusion with Russia are dropped. There's no comparison between the almost total cooperation of Clinton and the zero cooperation of Trump. And let's not forget the standard conservative deception tactic:

Saying "no one blames Trump for resisting being investigated".

Wyatt/Regina know polls show a supermajority of Americans support the investigations into Trump, they all blame Trump for resisting. But what conservatives do when reality makes them look bad is fabricate a story that makes them look good and shamelessly scream from the roof-tops their lies are what's "really going on". "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening" - Trump, the man of over 10,000 lies. And there's Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous dutifully throwing away all their integrity to help Trump destroy American Democracy and become one of the dictators like Putin or Korea's Kim-Jong-Un that he admires so much. A consensual blow job by Clinton is "destroying the country" but somehow the Trump administration coverup of collusion with the United States most dangerous adversary isn't.

May 27, 2019 3:05 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Trump is the epitome of who the founding fathers were thinking of when they provided for presidential impeachment in the American Constitution.

May 27, 2019 3:07 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Good anonymous said "The Rumpster, on the other hand has over a dozen instance of obstruction directly related to Russia the investigation:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/obstruction-justice-mueller-report-heat-map

People have gone to jail for obstructing less.

Clinton was actually impeached for obstructing less."

And let's not forget the open letter signed by over 900 former federal prosecutors - they say that if any other American had done a fraction of what Tru8mp's done to obstruct justice, that person would be in jail. And in their vast experience it wouldn't even be a close call to convict a person doing what Trump's done - it would be a slam dunk case exactly like thousands they've prosecuted before for obstruction of justice.

May 27, 2019 3:11 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

I guess those 900 (and counting) former federal prosecutors must all be lying democrats too.

Funny how there's no comparable letter from Trump supporting former prosecutors saying he hasn't obstructed justice. I guess it must have gotten lost in the mail.

May 27, 2019 3:12 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/Regina didn't post this past weekend. Lately I've only been online on the weekends and posting then. Wyatt/Regina noticed this and decided they'd better not make any posts when I'm around to shred them.

They know their specious posts don't stand up to scrutiny.

May 27, 2019 3:16 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Hey Wyatt/Regina!

Did Tony Perkins tell you not to make any more posts on lgbt issues because you're making all you anti-gay christians look so immoral?

May 27, 2019 3:18 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Trump is willing to destroy the tens of thousands of loyal Justice Department employees who have done their best to work based on the rule of law. Trump is willing to do this for his own personal gain.

Over the decades congress has had a history of gradually ceding power to the presidency. Now Trump has grabbed all the levers of the presidency and is using their awesome power for his own personal gain and to destroy all who oppose him.

May 27, 2019 3:32 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And Wyatt and Regina Hardiman and their church want in on what they hope will be a Trump gravy train that punishes all the people they don't like. You know us people trying to promote fairness as society's highest priority.

May 27, 2019 3:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"The Russians flooding American social media to elect this fool is also unAmerican. It's telling how much conservatives ignore this fact. Since when did conservatives start giving free passes to Russian interference?"

The Russian effort was less extensive than that of most parties who had an interest in the election. So, calling it a "flood" is typical of the liberal hyperbole that has so alienated the American voter.

More important, it is protected free speech. The American way to counter it is with demonstrably truthful free speech.

May 27, 2019 3:47 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Fox News host Chris Wallace confronted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Sunday with the lawmaker’s own words captured on video lashing the president for ignoring a congressional subpoena. But he was talking about Bill Clinton — not Donald Trump.

"Graham also insisted at the time that ignoring a subpoena was an impeachable offense.

Wallace told Graham on Sunday: “You call all of what’s going on here in Washington a political circus, but you took a different view back when you were leading the impeachment effort against Bill Clinton back in the late ’90s. At that time you said that any president — and you talk specifically about Clinton and Richard Nixon — who defied Congress when it came to subpoenas was in danger of impeachment.”

In the 1998 clip, Graham angrily fumed in comments directed at Clinton: “You’re becoming the judge and jury. It is not your job to tell us what we need. It is your job to comply with things we need to provide oversight over you.”

At the time, Graham was a member of the House of Representatives and was leading the impeachment effort against Clinton.

Wallace piped up: “Question: Why is it an impeachable offense for Clinton or Nixon back then to ignore congressional subpoenas, but it’s OK for President Trump to do now?”

Graham said the difference between the cases is that the investigative report by special counsel Robert Mueller is the “final word on this for me.”

Mueller’s report said investigators could not establish “coordination” between Trump campaign officials and Russia’s interference in the presidential election. But the report also detailed 10 instances of possible obstruction of justice by Trump."

[priya - In legalspeak Mueller directed congress to look further into the entire report, not just the 12 potential counts of obstruction of justice against Trump.

Mueller never mentioned a word about Trump's finances or any money laundering investigation despite Deutshce Bank lending hundreds of millions to Trump, much of which he defaulted on yet the bank lent him even more. Deutsche bank paid astronomical fines for laundering money for Russian oligarchs tided to Putin, Trump's master.]

May 27, 2019 3:49 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/northdallasthirty/tony perkins said "The Russian effort was less extensive than that of most parties who had an interest in the election. So, calling it a "flood" is typical of the liberal hyperbole that has so alienated the American voter."

Oh dear.

Now there's some carefully crafted propaganda. Robert Mueller said there was "sweeping and systematic" attempts by the Russians to interfere with the American election. It was a multifacted, multidisciplinary effort that included organizing all manner of well funded efforts such as organizing opposing rallies in American cities for "black lives matter" and "support the 2nd amendment". If Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/northdallasthirty/tony perkins have evidence of an even larger scale effort by countries other than Russia then it is their duty as patriotic Americans to deliver all that evidence to the Congressional committes Constitutionally required to look into such matters, which includes the 2015/2016 election interference the Trump campaign/administration has welcomed and rewarded those interfereing on Trump's behalf.

May 27, 2019 3:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"More important, it is protected free speech. The American way to counter it is with demonstrably truthful free speech."

Alright comrade, show me in the constitution where Russian propaganda aimed at our elections is "protected free speech" in the US.

Just because it was indistinguishable from conservative propaganda out at the same time doesn't make it free speech.

I would have thought that if someone in the Republican party noticed that conservative propaganda and Russian propaganda were promoting the exact same things, SOME Republican would have taken a step back and said "Hey! Wait a minute! What the hell is going on?! How did we suddenly end up on the same side as the Russians?! Why are we using the same tactics as the Russians?!"

But no. Hasn't happened yet.

Not holding my breath.

How long will it be before Republicans start waving red, white, and blue flags with only 3 stripes?

May 27, 2019 4:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Alright comrade, show me in the constitution where Russian propaganda aimed at our elections is "protected free speech" in the US."

It's where all the rest of our free speech is from: the Bill of Rights. It's in the first amendment. Show us where Russian propaganda, or any other propaganda, is not speech.

Surely, you must have thought this through.

"Just because it was indistinguishable from conservative propaganda out at the same time doesn't make it free speech."

No, it's the fact that it's speech. btw, conservative political rhetoric is much less propagandistic than liberal political rhetoric

"I would have thought that if someone in the Republican party noticed that conservative propaganda and Russian propaganda were promoting the exact same things, SOME Republican would have taken a step back and said "Hey! Wait a minute! What the hell is going on?! How did we suddenly end up on the same side as the Russians?!"

You seem to be more spooked out by Russia than is justified. China, who has systematically degraded our economy by IP theft and unfair trade practices is a much bigger threat. Accumulating data on every person on the planet and employing monitoring techniques like facial recognition software will enable them to terrorize everyone on Earth eventually.

That should be our focus and a positive relationship with Russia could be a counter

"Why are we using the same tactics as the Russians?!"

Conservative didn't use "the same tactics as the Russians!"

May 27, 2019 5:33 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Surely, you must have thought this through."

Funny, I was going to ask you the same thing, Vlad.

In mid-December, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster was quoted as saying that U.S. officials were “increasingly concerned” that Russia was using
“sophisticated campaigns of subversion and disinformation and propaganda … to polarize democratic societies.” This would be consistent with allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But do such actions break U.S. law?

Congress has wrestled with questions of foreign interference with the U.S. electoral process for many years, including following the 1996 elections when the majority-Republican Senate organized hearings on Chinese influence in Bill Clinton’s reelection. The First Amendment allows some protection for foreign nationals to influence public opinion, but federal election law clearly prohibits political contributions to candidates by foreign nationals as well as candidates’ acceptance of anything of value from foreign nationals.

Federal election law, administered by the Federal Election Commission, prohibits contributions, donations and other expenditures by “foreign nationals” in any federal, state or local election as well an exchange of any “thing of value.” Most recently, Section 303 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act, strengthened the ban on foreign money in U.S. electioneering.

Six years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a decision by a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that Congress can ban individuals who lawfully reside in the U.S. and are neither U.S. citizens nor “permanent residents” from making donations or gifts related to any election. In that case, Bluman v. Federal Election Commission, a three-judge panel said the limitation was a legitimate tool for government to prevent “foreign influence over U.S. elections.” The decision specifically banned contributions to candidates and political parties as well as “express-advocacy” expenditures — those ads that clearly support or oppose a specific electoral outcome. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision without comment.

When the Russian intelligence service buys a bunch of political ads with the intention of favoring one candidate over another, puts out a bunch of "fake news" and gets thousands of followers to fake accounts, it simply isn't "free speech" as the founders intended it. That's why we have laws against it, doofus.

"No, it's the fact that it's speech. btw, conservative political rhetoric is much less propagandistic than liberal political rhetoric"

Well comrade, I seem to recall years of conservatives yelling for years about how allowing gays to get married would destroy marriage and even our country. And then you complain about "typical of the liberal hyperbole."

Did you ever find even 1 marriage that was destroyed by allowing gay people to get married? And as you keep reminding us, our country is doing great now. Hasn't been destroyed at all by gay marriage. And what about all those men that were supposed to be dressing up like women to rape little girls in bathrooms after gender identity got added to the non-discrimination class in MoCo?

Can you get any more over-the-top with your hyperbole?

(I know you can - that was just a rhetorical question. But feel free to prove my point if you like.)

"Conservative didn't use "the same tactics as the Russians!"

In this particular case, it may be more accurate to note that the Russians used the same tactics that conservatives have been using lately.

May 27, 2019 5:55 PM  
Anonymous doofus said...

"Federal election law, administered by the Federal Election Commission, prohibits contributions, donations and other expenditures by “foreign nationals” in any federal, state or local election as well an exchange of any “thing of value.” Most recently, Section 303 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act, strengthened the ban on foreign money in U.S. electioneering.

Six years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a decision by a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., that Congress can ban individuals who lawfully reside in the U.S. and are neither U.S. citizens nor “permanent residents” from making donations or gifts related to any election. In that case, Bluman v. Federal Election Commission, a three-judge panel said the limitation was a legitimate tool for government to prevent “foreign influence over U.S. elections.” The decision specifically banned contributions to candidates and political parties as well as “express-advocacy” expenditures — those ads that clearly support or oppose a specific electoral outcome. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision without comment.

When the Russian intelligence service buys a bunch of political ads with the intention of favoring one candidate over another, puts out a bunch of "fake news" and gets thousands of followers to fake accounts, it simply isn't "free speech" as the founders intended it. That's why we have laws against it, doofus."

Actually, I think all election laws that limit campaign activity or spending are unconstitutional. I'm confident an originalist Supreme Court will eventually make that clear as they did in Citizens United. We have the sufficient press and other institutions to counter any threat that someone's free speech might pose.

May 27, 2019 10:23 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Interview with Christopher Wylie

Christopher Wylie worked for a company that worked with Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica was used by Republicans to micro-target hundreds of thousands of Americans using Facebook data that was supposed to be, and which facebook users wanted to be, private. Christoper gives a well explained set of scenarios for how artificial intelligence in the hands of large companies like Google and Facebook threatens us and why they must be regulated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1vjNW01XCg

May 28, 2019 1:37 AM  
Anonymous Texas secretary of state resigns after failed effort to purge voter rolls said...

Embattled Texas Secretary of State David Whitley resigned on Monday after overseeing a botched effort to purge the state’s voter rolls of noncitizens, an effort voting rights advocates criticized as an attack on democracy.

Whitley had served in the role since December after being nominated by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R). In order to stay in the job, however, he had to be confirmed by the state Senate before the chamber ended its 2019 session on Monday. He needed 21 votes and garnered 19 from every Republican in the chamber. But all 12 Democrats voted against him after lambasting his efforts to purge the rolls.

Democrats’ frustrations centered on claims first raised by Whitley and Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in January that 98,000 noncitizens had potentially registered to vote, and that tens of thousands had illegally cast ballots since 1996. Critics quickly found, however, that many of those names were listed in error and thousands of people were actually naturalized U.S. citizens who were eligible to vote.

By then, President Donald Trump had already pounced on the news, parroting the claims on his personal Twitter account and deeming voter fraud throughout Texas “rampant.”

Officials said last month that they would end the controversial review of the voting rolls amid multiple federal lawsuits. The state said it would pay $450,000 in legal fees as part of the settlement and that officials would be unable to use any information gathered during the botched inquiry to cancel anyone’s voter registration in the future.

In his resignation letter, Whitley thanked the governor for his appointment but did not mention the inquiry that led to his departure.

“Working alongside the employees in the secretary of state’s office, county election officials, and representatives of our #1 trading partner, Mexico, has been my distinct honor and privilege,” Whitley wrote in the letter, first obtained by the Austin American-Statesman. “And to have your trust in doing so goes beyond what I ever dreamed of as a kid growing up in a small South Texas community.”

Texas Democrats celebrated Whitley’s departure, noting that he is the first gubernatorial nominee in modern history be blocked by an opposition party.

“David Whitley proved he wasn’t fit for the job the second he launched his failed effort to purge eligible Texas voters from the voting rolls,” Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the state’s Democratic Party, said in a statement. “It was long overdue for David Whitley to vacate his office and now it’s time for Governor Abbott to appoint a new Secretary of State who will respect our democracy and our great state.”

May 28, 2019 7:36 AM  
Anonymous Paul F. Haacker said...

Here in Canada, many of us believe we are witnessing the fall of the U.S. empire. Would a cvilized country limit health care or food assistance for the poor; leave crops rotting in the fields; destroy the educational system; target women and attemp to eliminate their reproductive rights while refusing to help resulting babies; abuse desperate immigrants; pretend to believe in Christianity while perverting and debasing its tenets; and refuse to protect the Earth from destruction? The world is watching.

Why America is NOT the greatest country in the world

May 29, 2019 8:53 AM  
Anonymous Mueller said...

"...Let me say a word about the report. The report has two parts, addressing the two main issues we were asked to investigate. The first volume of the report details numerous efforts emanating from Russia to influence the election. This volume includes a discussion of the Trump campaign’s response to this activity, as well as our conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy. And in the second volume, the report describes the results and analysis of our obstruction of justice investigation involving the president.

The order appointing me special counsel authorized us to investigate actions that could obstruct the investigation. We conducted that investigation, and we kept the office of the acting attorney general apprised of the progress of our work. And as set forth in the report, after that investigation, if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime.

The introduction to the Volume II of our report explains that decision. It explains that under longstanding department policy, a president cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office. That is unconstitutional. Even if the charge is kept under seal and hidden from public view, that, too, is prohibited. A special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider. The department’s written opinion explaining the policy makes several important points that further informed our handling of the obstruction investigation. Those points are summarized in our report, and I will describe two of them for you.

First, the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president, because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now.

And second, the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing. And beyond department policy, we were guided by principles of fairness. It would be unfair to potentially — it would be unfair to potentially accuse somebody of a crime when there can be no court resolution of the actual charge.

So that was Justice Department policy. Those were the principles under which we operated. And from them, we concluded that we would not reach a determination one way or the other about whether the president committed a crime. That is the office’s final position, and we will not comment on any other conclusions or hypotheticals about the president. We conducted an independent criminal investigation and reported the results to the attorney general, as required by department regulations..."

May 29, 2019 12:44 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The *second* there is a Democrat in the White House there will be a *massive* coordinated hysteria about the debt.

And Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous will be leading the charge screaming how there can't be any government spending until this millstone around the neck of future generations is removed.

May 29, 2019 1:54 PM  
Anonymous Bubba said...

My factory job was shipped to China. My new job can't pay the bills. I can't afford college and my Republican governor blocked my obamacare.


But I vote republican so everyone gets a gun. That's important to me!

May 29, 2019 1:57 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

126 million Americans were reached by illegal Russian attacks on the 2016 election.

Two Florida counties had their election computer systems taken over by the Russian government - that we know of.

The Russian government left all manner of malicious software behind on American computer systems they're now using, and will be using to defeat the voted will of the American public.

Trump not only has done nothing to prevent Russians from taking over American electoral computers, he has actually fired all the people charged with electronic election integrity and eliminated their departments.

Instead of taking the large steps necessary to protect American democracy Trump has weakened democratic protections even further, covered up Russian hacking, and invited Russia, and the Ukraine to attack the 2020 election on his behalf yet again.

Do you want you and your fellow Americans to chose who your 2020 president is, or Russia?

May 29, 2019 4:03 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

By American law,Russia can't take out ads in the New York Times, on CNN, or on Fox News to promote their favoured presidential and congressional candidates. But American law currently allows Russia to flood Facebook and other social media with fake news intended to get Russia's choices elected.

Facebook and other social media must be strictly regulated before the 2020 campaign gets really going if Americans are to have the luxury of choosing their own president based on truth about the candidates.

May 29, 2019 4:08 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Mueller: If my investigation had found Trump did not commit crimes, it would have said so.

May 29, 2019 4:09 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Without a doubt, Trump would not be president without the illegal aid of a sweeping and systematic Russian attack on the 2016 American presidential election. They're going to try and do it again in 2020.

And American democracy will slip away forever if they succeed.

May 29, 2019 4:51 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

While polls show VA voters overwhelmingly support abortion rights, @VA__GOP have made clear that they hope to further erode them...@BobThomasVA said...they intend to bring a near total abortion ban to VA

Over the decades on TTF Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous have delighted in telling us over and over how Republicans planned to force things on the public it doesn't want.

Republicans are now trying to destroy the rule of American law. They've gone from "the party of law and order" to "the party of constant lying".

May 29, 2019 6:01 PM  
Anonymous it's all over now, Baby Blue said...

Special counsel Robert Mueller on Wednesday broke more than two years of silence about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, saying he does not intend to testify to Congress.

I wonder if Nancy Pelosi will try to arrest him....

He said he would make "a few remarks" but that it was "important that the office's written work speak for itself."

"The report is my testimony," Mueller said.

The special counsel said he was speaking out because his "investigation is complete," his office is "formally closing" and that he is "resigning from the Department of Justice to return to private life."

With regard to whether the Trump campaign responded to Russian efforts to influence the election, Mueller said "there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy."

May 29, 2019 9:41 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

What Mueller said in his report is that there is A LOT of evidence of Trump/Russia collusion up until the 2016 election and its up to Congress to investigate further to see if Trump has committed the crime of a criminal conspiracy.

On the topic of obstruction of Justice, Mueller presented a complete case of 12 counts of criminal obstruction of Justice by Trump and said "Justice Department policy is that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. Here is the complete case with evidence, corrupt intent, and actions in furtherence of stopping or curtailing a legal proceeding. I was never going to charge Trump with any crime, its up to Congress to take this 12 count obstruction of justice case I've prepared and try the president for these crimes."

May 29, 2019 9:55 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Deutsche Bank has been fined astronomical sums for the crime of laundering the criminal proceeds of Russian/Putin Oligarchs.

When all American banks refused to lend any more money to the constantly defaulting Trump, Deutsche Bank stepped forward and loaned Trump hundreds of millions. Then Trump defaulted on those Deutsche Bank loans and sued Deutsche Bank for trying to get Trump to make his payment obligations.

After all that Deutsche Bank lent Trump hundreds of millions more. So many people wonder why Trump has nothing but praise for Putin and is implementing the Russian foreign policy agenda (destroy NATO, weaken U.S. global influence).

Its obvious why Trump is under Putin's control - Russia is using Trump to launder the proceeds of Russian crime through Deutsche Bank.

Trump threatened Mueller enough that Mueller didn't look at all at Trump's foreign finances. Its Justice Department mantra - follow the money when you're investigating a crime. It is now up to Congress to do so.

Trump is the epitome of what the founding fathers were thinking of when they provided for presidential impeachment in the American Constitution.

If Congress does not push back against Trump they will bit by bit allow him to establish a dictatorship before 2020.

May 29, 2019 10:05 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Over 900 Former Federal Prosecuters say Trump absolutely committed criminal obstruction of justice


They say if any other American had done what Trump has, that person would be in jail - no doubt about, its not even a close call.

May 29, 2019 10:14 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

“I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments, that there were multiple, systemic efforts to interfere in our election,” Mueller concluded. “And that allegation deserves the attention of every American.”

May 29, 2019 10:21 PM  
Anonymous I reeeeeeeeally like our Supreme Court.and the best is yet to come!!!!!!! said...

Amid the BS, remember this: With regard to whether the Trump campaign responded to Russian efforts to influence the election, Mueller today said "there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that Republicans would fill a Supreme Court vacancy even if it occurs during the 2020 presidential election.

McConnell was asked by an attendee during a speech at the Paducah Area Chamber of Commerce public policy luncheon in Kentucky what his position would be on filling a Supreme Court seat during 2020 if a justice died.

"Oh, we'd fill it," McConnell said to laughter from the audience.

hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!

The Senate GOP leader has viewed confirming judicial nominees as his top priority and one of the party's best chances at having a long-term impact. With 53 seats, Republicans could confirm a nominee over the objections of Democrats.

McConnell also used his official launch video for his 2020 Senate reelection campaign to highlight his work on helping confirm President Trump's two Supreme Court nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

"What can't be undone is a lifetime appointment to a young man or woman who believes in the quaint notion that the job of the judge is to follow the law," McConnell said in Kentucky on Tuesday.

Two of the current liberal justices on the Supreme Court are 70 or older: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 86, and Stephen Breyer is 80. Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are the court's two youngest justices, at 51 and 54, respectively.

May 29, 2019 10:30 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Baby Blue

May 29, 2019 10:30 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/Regina said "Amid the BS, remember this: With regard to whether the Trump campaign responded to Russian efforts to influence the election, Mueller today said "there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy.""

Which Republicans have grossly mischaracterized as "exhoneration".

As Mueller said today "If we could have cleared Trump of criminal wrongdoing we would have said so. We cannot say the president did not commit a crime".

Part II of the Mueller report was essentially a 12 count criminal indictment of Trump for obstruction of Justice. Mueller said because if Justice Department policy he cannot charge Trump with these crimes and its up to Congress to do so.

Part I of the Mueller report was a documenting of over 200 pages of Trump/Russia collusion. Mueller said he didn't have quite enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law Trump committed criminal obstruction of justice, but that congress should continue the investigation.

No doubt Congress will eventually find tons more evidence of Trump/Russia collusion as the 14 spin-off investigastions from the Mueller Report continue.

May 29, 2019 10:36 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

If Trump isn't using Deutsche bank to launder crime syndicate money for Russia, let him release his last ten years of tax returns and show how he accounts for the hundreds of millions that appeared out of nowhere in his financial statements that are available.

Its a gigantic hole in the Mueller Investigation and Report that he didn't look into Trump's highly suspicious finances.

May 29, 2019 10:49 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Justin Amash will go down in history as the courageous first Republican Congressman to call for Trump's impeachment.

May 29, 2019 11:19 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

American citizen Reality Winner: Sentenced to 63 months for exposing Russian spies.

Russian citizen Maria Butina: Sentenced to 18 months IS A RUSSIAN SPY.

May 30, 2019 4:15 AM  
Anonymous Kyle Griffin said...

Bret Baier on Fox after Mueller's newser: "This was not, as the president says time and time again, no collusion, no obstruction ... It was not anywhere as clear-cut as Attorney General Bill Barr— in fact, it was almost exactly the opposite: not clear-cut."

May 30, 2019 10:51 AM  
Anonymous Trump: I had no part in 'Russia helping me to get elected’ said...

"President Trump has long downplayed Russian interference in the 2016 election, often claiming it was an “excuse” invented by Democrats to explain how they lost an election they were favored to win.

But on Thursday, Trump briefly admitted Moscow’s involvement aided in his victory.

“Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax,” the president tweeted. “And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected.”

“It was a crime that didn’t exist,” Trump continued. “So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media, say he fought back against this phony crime that didn’t exist, this horrendous false accusation, and he shouldn’t fight back, he should just sit back and take it. Could this be Obstruction? No, Mueller didn’t find Obstruction either. Presidential Harassment!”

Speaking to reporters on the South Lawn, the president backed off his assertion that Moscow’s meddling helped him win.

“No, Russia did not get me elected,” Trump said. “You know who got me elected? You know who got me elected? I got me elected.”

“Russia didn’t help me at all,” he continued. "Russia, if anything, I think, helped the other side.”

The president’s comments came a day after special counsel Robert Mueller issued his first public statement on his investigation into the Russian election interference.

His report extensively documented the Kremlin's effort's to influence the general election in Trump's favor, most notably by releasing troves of emails — some of which were politically damaging — from hacked Democratic accounts. The special counsel’s report concluded that the Russian government interfered in the election “in sweeping and systematic fashion,” and his office indicted 34 individuals and three Russian businesses on charges ranging from computer hacking to conspiracy and financial crimes.

In his report, Mueller found no conspiracy between Russia and Trump’s campaign. But he chronicled at least 10 episodes of efforts by Trump or his staff to obstruct the federal probe. Although Mueller declined to charge Trump with obstruction of justice, he explicitly refused to exonerate the president.

“If we had had confidence that the president had clearly not committed a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said, adding: “Charging the president with a crime is not an option we could consider.”

Mueller’s statement, which he said would be his final word on the matter, immediately ramped up pressure on congressional Democrats on congressional Democrats to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has resisted calls from some members of her party for Trump’s impeachment in the wake of Mueller’s report, did not rule it out. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said “all options are on the table.”

Trump told reporters he couldn’t fathom his own impeachment.

“It’s a dirty, filthy, disgusting word,” he said. “It’s a giant presidential harassment.”"



Personally, I feel it is "accountability" Rump finds to be "a dirty, filthy, disgusting word."

May 30, 2019 11:58 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Mueller Effect: Bookmaker Slashes Impeachment Odds

May 30, 2019 Donald Trump, Idiocracy

The Hill reports:

An Irish sports bookmaker has significantly lowered the odds President Trump will be impeached following a Wednesday statement from special counsel Robert Mueller.

BoyleSports, Ireland’s biggest independent bookmaker, slashed the odds Trumps will be impeached in his first term from 8/1 to 2/1, according to an announcement from the bookmaker Thursday. The odds of Trump resigning in his first term were 6/1 while his re-election remained even money.

“The betting on a Trump impeachment had died down and was basically lying dormant before Robert Mueller threw a cat amongst the pigeons on Wednesday,” BoyleSports spokesperson Lawrence Lyons said in a statement.

May 30, 2019 12:13 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...



“Russia didn’t help me at all,” Trump continued. "Russia, if anything, I think, helped the other side.”

After Trump brazenly welcomed Russia's illegal interference, praised Russia for it, rewarded Russia for it, and then tried to cover up for Russia...this Trump lie stands as the symbol of all the over 10,000 obvious lies Trump has told to gaslight America.

May 30, 2019 12:15 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Jim said "Millions of Americans have seen these videos. Since Trump followers are generally not people who follow the news outside their bubble, we can assume that many people who saw this stuff actually believe there is something wrong with Nancy Pelosi."

I saw a great example of how complete the fox bubble is while watching a bit of Republican Justin Amash's recent Town Hall where he called for Trump to be impeached. He described what he read in the Mueller Report that convinced him Trump had committed crimes in his collusion with Russia. A woman being interviewed later said she was caught completely by surprise that the Mueller Report was full of evidence Trump had committed election crimes. "I thought the Mueller Report completely exonerated him." she said.

Most of Amash's Republican constituents at the town hall gave him a standing ovation for his courage to stand up to Trump.

The conventional wisdom is that Republicans will never convict if Congress impeaches. For me,anytime someone asserts a particular future outcome is certain, they lose all credibility.

Make no mistake about it, enough bad stuff can come out about Trump that Republicans will suddenly decide its too too much and they must now vote to convict Trump. And I believe it will.

May 30, 2019 12:25 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

There are no convincing arguments that its moral to punish people for being lgbt.

May 30, 2019 1:25 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

After tweeting this morning that "I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected," President Trump tells reporters that “No, Russia did not help me get elected. You know who got me elected? I got me elected. Russia didn’t help me at all.”

That's the exact same propaganda strategy as Wyatt/Regina have constantly used over the decades here at TTF - say whatever bullshit you think helps you in the moment, even if it contradicts your earlier statements. Just bullshit and bullshit until some bit of bullshit clicks with the people you want to con.

That's exactly how my brother behaved all his life. A large percentage of conservatives are like this. You know the type, the bully you knew in school - assaulting your innocent self and then intimidating the witnesses into agreeing "She started it!, You saw that, didn't you?.

May 30, 2019 1:33 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Cathy Garnaat, a Republican who supported Republican congressman Justin Amash and the president said she was upset about Amash calling for trump to be impeached but wanted to hear his reasoning. She said she will support Trump in 2020 but that Tuesday night was the first time she had heard that the Mueller report didn't completely exonerate the president.

"I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn't heard that before," she said "I've mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn't heard anything negative about that report and [thought] President Trump has been exonerated."

This is why Republicans lie unabashedly, continuously and bigly - they are gaslighting America because they know it works. And they are selfish dishonest people at heart.

May 30, 2019 6:42 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/Tony Perkins/Northdallasthirty are afraid to post when I'm here because I keep showing how their agenda is dishonest, illogical, and immoral.

May 30, 2019 7:20 PM  
Anonymous Evangelicals are the biggest liars said...

Franklin Graham: Bill Clinton Could Have Stopped The Rwandan Genocide If He Wasn’t Impeached [AUDIO]

May 30, 2019 Christianists, Hypocrisy

Scamvangelist Franklin Graham appeared on Tony Perkins’ radio show yesterday to promote his coming “national day of prayer” against Trump’s enemies, which now has over 250 sponsors of the usual nutjob variety.

The conversation digressed into the renewed calls to impeach Trump, leading Graham to declare that if Bill Clinton hadn’t been impeached, he could have stopped the infamous Rwandan genocide in which as many as one million were killed.

Take it away, Right Wing Watch:

In his comments on Clinton, Graham appeared to be trying to make the case that Democrats shouldn’t impeach Trump. “And so that impeachment process should have never happened with Bill Clinton. What he did was wrong, but it should’ve never had an impeachment—it distracted the country,” Graham said.

“We had Rwanda at that time, the massacre, the president was sidetracked, he was not paying attention, and he was trying to pray for his survival. And that’s what happens when the president gets distracted.” And yet, that would have been chronologically impossible. The Rwandan genocide happened in 1994. Clinton wasn’t impeached until 1998.

Tony Perkins jumped in to declare that had Clinton not been impeached, he also could have stopped Osama bin Laden. In fact, and as the above-linked report notes, Clinton’s air strikes on bin Laden were denounced by Republicans as a ploy to avoid impeachment. And then there’s Franklin Graham’s own 1998 Wall Street Journal op-ed supporting Clinton’s impeachment. Once again we see that there’s no hypocrite like an evangelical hypocrite.

May 30, 2019 7:26 PM  
Anonymous homosexuality never produces life, two of 'em ain't ever a marriage said...

"are afraid to post when I'm here because I keep showing how their agenda is dishonest, illogical, and immoral"

it's sad how desperate Priya is to suck me into her endless ramblings

months ago, I ended any discussion with this pathetic person when she accused me of causing her mental breakdown by harassing her, aka known as disagreeing with her on a blog

then, she was going to forward emails to lunatic fringe gay advocates about how I was harassing her, aka known as disagreeing with her on a blog, hoping they'd harass me

I'm sure she's now on watch lists of law enforcement worldwide

clearly, she regrets her actions and wishes she could go back

but it's no use

I'll never engage in any conversation with her again

May 30, 2019 8:56 PM  
Anonymous mighty glad Merrick Garland was stopped and we have a quality Supreme Court said...

It's not unusual to hear House Democrats vow to "get to the bottom" of the Trump-Russia matter — as if the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, with 500 witnesses, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search-and-seizure warrants, and nearly 300 records of electronic communications, was somehow unable to fully probe allegations that the Trump campaign and Russia conspired to fix the 2016 election.

What really concerns Democrats is that Mueller's investigation, conducted with law enforcement powers that Congress does not have, failed to establish any Trump-Russia conspiracy or coordination. And in doing so, Mueller exposed the fatal flaw of the Trump-Russia matter: It was driven entirely by the conspiracy/coordination allegation, which turned out to be false.

The backdrop of conspiracy and coordination made every Trump-Russia episode, including routine political activities, look sinister. The Trump Tower meeting looked ominous in the context of conspiracy and coordination. Donald Trump's public statements about Russia and its president Vladimir Putin looked incriminating. Michael Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador looked suspicious. And more.

If one believed that Trump and the Russians were conspiring or coordinating to influence the campaign, then any bit of information having anything to do with Russia and the Trump campaign looked portentous. The Russia frenzy became so intense that reputable news organizations published long stories cataloging all known "contacts with Russians" by anyone associated with the Trump campaign.

But it all depended on conspiracy or coordination. And when Mueller was unable to establish that any such conspiracy or coordination actually occurred, suspicious-seeming events could no longer be credibly cast as suspicious. The Trump-Russia bubble deflated.

That left Democrats with the allegation that the president obstructed the investigation. Some hope that will be enough to impeach Trump, but in recent weeks, they have discovered it might be a hard sell. While it is possible to pursue an obstruction allegation without an underlying crime, impeaching the president on that basis could prove politically difficult. So Democrats vow more investigation to "get to the bottom" of the Trump-Russia matter or perhaps find something else entirely unrelated to Russia to pursue against the president.

May 30, 2019 10:12 PM  
Anonymous mighty glad Merrick Garland was stopped and we have a quality Supreme Court said...

The post-Mueller debate on Capitol Hill shows just how critically important the conspiracy and coordination narrative was. Without it, everything has changed. So now that Mueller has formally closed his office and left the Justice Department, it is worth looking at how conspiracy and coordination — often referred to by the widely used word "collusion" — came to dominate American politics for the last three years. Was it a hoax? Hysteria? Or simply partisanship on steroids?

In June 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee." The paper also noted that "the networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some Republican political action committees." By the beginning of summer 2016, then, it was public knowledge that the Russians were up to something.

At the same time, and especially as the Republican and Democratic conventions approached in July, Democrats began suggesting that Trump might be up to something with the Russians. Candidate Trump had expressed admiration for Putin and indicated that, if elected, he would like to have better relations with Russia. Trump also vowed to press NATO countries to pay more for their own defense, a position Trump's adversaries interpreted as pro-Russian. Trump had also hired Paul Manafort, who had extensive business ties to pro-Russian candidates in Ukraine, as his campaign chairman.

In the days leading up to the Democratic convention, the Clinton campaign and its allies in the press saw Russia as a potentially valuable weapon for attacking Trump. On July 20, the New York Times' Andrew Rosenthal wrote a column headlined, "Is Trump Obsessed With Putin and Russia?" Two days later, Rosenthal's Times colleague Paul Krugman wrote a piece entitled, "Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate," in which he asked, "If elected, would Donald Trump be Vladimir Putin's man in the White House?"

That same day, July 22, Wikileaks released emails from the Democratic National Committee. Two days later, on the 24th, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook went on television to claim that not only was Russia behind the hack — that was later proven true — but also that the Trump campaign was in league with Russia.

"Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian," Mook told ABC News, referring to a just-published Washington Post story that reported, incorrectly, that Trump aides had weakened the portion of the GOP platform regarding Russia and Ukraine.

"He has praised Vladimir Putin," Mook continued. "It's troubling."

Also on July 24, the Times published a news story headlined, "As Democrats Gather, a Russian Subplot Raises Intrigue." "Even at the height of the Cold War," the paper reported, "it was hard to find a presidential campaign willing to charge that its rival was essentially secretly doing the bidding of a key American adversary. But the accusation is emerging as a theme of Mrs. Clinton's campaign."

In the next few days, there were reports that U.S. intelligence agencies had confirmed Russia's responsibility for the hack, followed by the first appearances of the C-word.

"Donald Trump said he has 'never spoken' to Vladimir Putin amid allegations that his campaign colluded with the Russian president," ABC reported on July 27.

"The Clinton campaign is basically saying that there's collusion between Trump and Russia," the New York Times' Maggie Haberman said on CNN on July 29.

The reporters did not present the allegation as fact but rather as news that Clinton people were accusing Trump of colluding with Russia. Over the next few months, the accusations grew and grew and grew.

May 30, 2019 10:15 PM  
Anonymous mighty glad Merrick Garland was stopped and we have a quality Supreme Court said...

At the same time, Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn retained the former British spy Christopher Steele to search for dirt on Trump and Russia. On June 20, 2016, Steele finished the first installment of what became known as the dossier. It was a blockbuster, alleging that Russia had been "cultivating, supporting and assisting" Trump for at least five years, that Trump had accepted "a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin," and that Trump was the target of blackmail since Russian intelligence services taped him watching a kinky sex act with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room in 2013.

According to Russian Roulette, the book by reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Steele sent the first installment to Fusion GPS in June 2016. Fusion, in turn, "gave Steele's reports and other research documents to Elias," according to a Washington Post account. And Elias briefed the Clinton campaign.

"We were getting briefings that were put together by the law firm with information," Mook recalled in an interview with CNN in late 2017. "So our internal team was presenting information, our lawyer was presenting information, you know, and we — and we sort of learned things in pieces."

So as Clinton and her aides pushed the collusion narrative, with the help of an enthusiastic press, campaign officials were also being briefed on the newest, freshest allegations from Steele.

The problem, of course, was that the allegations were not true. Steele also gave his reports to the FBI, which tried to verify them "line by line," according to former FBI general counsel James Baker. It did not succeed. Nearly three years later, the Mueller report failed to corroborate any of the dossier's serious allegations. It was wrong at best, a fraud at worst.

The public did not know what was happening behind the scenes. All they heard — if they watched cable TV — was collusion, collusion, collusion. After the election, the allegations consumed reporting on the Trump transition and then the Trump presidency — especially after the dossier was published in its entirety in January 2017, following the decision by the nation's top intelligence chiefs to brief President-elect Trump on parts of it.

After that, each new revelation that appeared in the press — Flynn, Manafort, Trump Tower, Michael Cohen, all of it — appeared in the context of collusion. Ordinary events became shady scheming against the backdrop of Trump-Russia collusion.

May 30, 2019 10:17 PM  
Anonymous mighty glad Merrick Garland was stopped and we have a quality Supreme Court said...

As that was happening, Mueller was trying and failing to establish that collusion ever occurred. From interviews with various players in the investigation, it now seems clear that by the end of 2017 Mueller knew that he could not establish conspiracy or coordination. That part of his investigation effectively ended when 2017 did.

Yet Mueller continued his investigation for more than a year, mostly focusing on obstruction allegations. Collusion as a topic of investigation might have been dead and gone by that time, but the fact that the Mueller investigation was still going on kept the collusion narrative alive. And that fed the public perception that events Mueller secretly knew were not part of a collusion scheme were still in some way suspicious.

The collusion narrative became so entrenched in the minds of some commentators that even when the Mueller report was made public, with its repeated statements that "the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities," some simply would not accept the verdict.

So now Democrats are promising to carry on, to find that thing — collusion — that Mueller could not find. At the same time, others, most notably Attorney General William Barr, have decided to find out how the whole unhappy episode started and what role the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies played in the process. It is time to know what happened.

May 30, 2019 10:19 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

SMOKING GUN: New Docs Reveal Census Citizenship Question Deliberately Written To Favour Republicans


The New York Times reports:

Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country.

But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats.

NPR reports:

Plaintiffs in one of the New York-based lawsuits over the question say that Hofeller later ghostwrote an early draft of the administration’s request for the question and helped form a reason for adding the question to forms for the national head count.

The Trump administration has maintained it wants census responses to the question — “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” — to better enforce Voting Rights Act protections for racial and language minorities.

But Hofeller’s documents uncovered through a separate lawsuit suggest administration officials were aware that including the question “would not benefit Latino voters, but rather would facilitate significantly reducing their political power,” argue attorneys with the law firm Arnold & Porter, the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union in a letter to U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman.

The Daily Beast reports:

A secret trove of documents was revealed Thursday showing that the Trump administration added a citizenship question to the 2020 census as part of a right-wing plan to change how voting districts are drawn in the United States—a plan hatched to benefit “non-Hispanic whites.” This is worse than anyone thought. This is white supremacy.

None of this was disclosed by Trump administration officials. On the contrary, they baldly lied about it, denying that Hofeller had anything to do with the citizenship question when in fact he had written the DOJ letter requesting it.

Indeed, senior DOJ official John Gore testified under oath that he drafted the letter, which we now know was copied from Hofeller.

May 30, 2019 10:27 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/tony perkins/northdallasthirty said "months ago, I ended any discussion with this pathetic person when she accused me of causing her mental breakdown by harassing her, aka known as disagreeing with her on a blog".

That's a lie Wyatt/Regina have been repeating to try to convince themselves I didn't totally humiliate them in the couple of months after chrismas 2018

What Wyatt/Regina is referring to is when I stated I was on the edge of psychotic break with reality, not from arguing with him/her (I absolutely destroyed them in the debate) but from the implications of sending my devastating critique on religion around the world, including the most anti-gay Muslims countries.


http://vigilance.teachthefacts.org/2018/12/flynn-free-trump-continues-to-march-off.html#comments


http://vigilance.teachthefacts.org/2018/12/drowning-accomplished.html#comments


http://vigilance.teachthefacts.org/2019/01/moco-hunkers-down.html#comments

You can see in in this thread how my fragile mental state actually did play out. When I said "Hey Wyatt/Regina, I put on a pretty good act, eh? Truth is I'm super stressed and if it weren't for the love of my husband I'd be having a psychotic break from reality right now."

I posted that because I thought it was hilarious that I was in this highly stressed mental state and I was still toying with you, just as I've done ever since. Later in that thread I said "Believe me, I am farrrr from done with you two." and you responded saying "I'm going on hiatus until Spring. Not sure I'll ever come back. " - lol, it was obviously you two who couldn't handle me.


I absolutely destroyed your anti-gay arguments and you were so humiliated you have ever since tried to save face by trying to spin my mental state at the time as due to your weak arguments when in fact it was me wanting to send the record of how I destroyed you around the world that was stressing me.

May 30, 2019 11:05 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Hang in there Sweety!
I'll be home in a bit over an hour.
Love you!
Ward

------ Original Message ------
From: "Priya Lynn"
To: "Ward ****" <*****@hotmail.com>
Sent: 18/01/2019 15:46:34
Subject: Re[3]: viddles

Yes I did Sweety. I'm super stressed. I'm emotionally and mentally drained from creating my debate-a-christian-conservative-troll masterpiece. As so much of the discussion was on Trump's wall and the shutdown, I'm overwhelmed by the feeling of pressure to get the links to these three comment threads out to as many opinion leaders as I can. I am certain I can make a big difference and yeah, I think I can change the world if I see this through. But I'm depleated and paralyzed with inaction and I just feel like I want to cry.

------ Original Message ------
From: "Ward Zintel" <********@hotmail.com>
To: "Priya Lynn"
Sent: 2019-01-18 3:28:24 PM
Subject: Re[2]: viddles

Sha Zam! Did you see the emails about pans for your pails?
XOX Ward

May 30, 2019 11:20 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

See folks, my fragile mental state back then had nothing to do with the pathetic argumentation of Wyatt/Regina I totally destroyed, it was the thought of sending the documentation of that destruction around the world that was stressing me at the time.

May 30, 2019 11:34 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Hey Wyatt/Regina, if you think arguing with you caused me a mental breakdown, why do you suppose I'm sending links to those debates between us around the world to show everyone?

Obviously I'm not sending links to our debates everywhere because I lost any arguments with you.

I LOVE showing the world how I humiliated Wyatt/Regina when they tried to argue their religion is moral. I'm still sending it everywhere :)

May 30, 2019 11:42 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Note how Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/Tony Perkins/Northdallasthirty didn't attempt to address any of the points I made. Instead they posted a bunch of long boring cut&pastes to try and bury the truth I posted. They have no response to my arguments, that's why they don't post any. They're afraid of what I post.

May 30, 2019 11:51 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

LOL, I've got Wyatt/Regina so frazzled, they referred to me as she/her - after they repeatedly said over the years they'd never acknowledge me as female.

Thanks anyway you two, lol!

May 31, 2019 12:23 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Michael Behenna was ordered to release an innocent Iraqi man they had no evidence to hold.

Behenna instead:

.dragged him under a bridge
.stripped him naked
.tortured him
.shot him dead
.set a grenade under his corpse to burn the body

Trump just pardoned him. To win the support of white supremacists.

May 31, 2019 1:52 AM  
Anonymous Shithole spellers win the Scripps National Spelling Bee said...

Congrats and $50K each to:

Rishik Gandhasri
Erin Howard
Saketh Sundar
Shruthika Padhy
Sohum Sukhatankar
Abhijay Kodali
Christopher Serrao
Rohan Raja.

May 31, 2019 7:52 AM  
Anonymous Documents expose political motivation behind census citizenship question said...

With the Supreme Court thought to be weeks away from ruling on whether a citizenship question can be included in the 2020 census, newly discovered documents suggest that the reason the Trump administration sought to add it in the first place was to provide political advantage to “Republicans and non-Hispanic Whites.”

Found on a computer hard drive of Republican redistricting expert Thomas Hofeller by his estranged daughter following his death last August, the documents appear to show the deep political roots of the citizenship question. They include a 2015 study concluding that a census count only of citizens would provide a better way to gerrymander congressional districts that favor Republicans. “Without a question on citizenship being included on the 2020 Decennial Census questionnaire,” Mr. Hofeller wrote in excerpts published Thursday by the New York Times, “the use of citizen voting age population is functionally unworkable.”

Since December 2017, when Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross formally requested that the Census Bureau add the citizenship question, opponents have argued that its inclusion would discourage immigrants and minority group members from participating, which would in turn result in a lower population count — and a reduction in political power — in areas more likely to vote Democratic. Ross’s statement that the question was necessary to better enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was just a pretext, those opponents have said, with the real goal being a political one.

Also found on the hard drive was a draft of a letter by Hofeller justifying the question as needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act. Some of the language of that letter later appeared in requests from Ross to include the controversial question.

Stephanie Hofeller turned the hard drive over to lawyers for the plaintiffs in a separate gerrymandering case, Common Cause v. Lewis, which involves controversial electoral maps in North Carolina. Those lawyers were also representing opponents to the citizenship question in the Department of Commerce v. State of New York, which is now before the Supreme Court.

“The evidence reveals that the plan to add the citizenship question was hatched by Republicans’ chief redistricting mastermind to create an electoral advantage,” Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn said in a statement. “This contradicts testimony by administration officials that they wanted to add the question to benefit Latino voters, when in fact the opposite was true.”

The census is conducted every 10 years in the United States as set forth by the Constitution, which requires an “actual enumeration,” in order to apportion seats in the House of Representatives based on “the whole number of persons in each state.”

The citizenship question has not been asked of respondents since 1950, and then was only asked of the subgroup that was randomly assigned the “long-form” version of the questionnaire. If allowed by the high court, this would be the first time in history that everyone living in the United States would be asked if they were a citizen.

Experts estimate that 6.5 million people would not be counted in the 2020 census if the question were to be included, and that several states — specifically Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas — would, as a result, lose seats in Congress and federal funding of programs based on population...

May 31, 2019 8:01 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Pence Tells Trudeau: “Democrats Support Infanticide”

Republicans are such scum, no qualms whatsoever about lying prolifically in their lust for power. Case in point - Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous.

May 31, 2019 8:22 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

So, Surprise!

Trump's lackey Attorney General Bill Barr is attacking Bob Mueller for not deciding if Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice.

If Mueller had put the decision in his report Barr would be screaming he shouldn't have done it, he violated DOJ policy.

It doesn't matter which way Mueller decided something, lying Bill Barr will claim it was not the right thing to do.

May 31, 2019 10:02 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The Barr Doctrine:

If the president of the United States asserts he is being unjustly investigated he can do anything he wants.

That is absurd.

May 31, 2019 10:35 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

If lying Bill Barr had wanted Mueller to make a legal decision as to whether or not Trump obstructed justice, he could have ordered Mueller to do so.

What Barr knew is that if he asked Mueller "If you didn't have the OLC memo saying a sitting president can't be indicted, would you indict the president for obstruction of justice if he were Joe Blow?" he knew the answer would be "Yes".

Barr obviously didn't want Mueller to say if the president should be indicted, he just wanted to falsely claim Mueller did it wrong, no matter which way Mueller went.

May 31, 2019 10:45 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

So, the one thing Trump could have considered a "win" is the NAFTA 1.1 version the U.S., Canada, and Mexico agreed to. Now Trump is destroying that minor accomplishment by putting new tariffs on Mexico which will blow up the deal and prevent ratification in all three countries. He really is that stupid.

Trump's agenda since being elected has been "I'ma undo everything Obama did". So he tore up the Iran Nuclear deal that would have prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for at least ten years. There was nothing wrong with the Iran deal except Trump couldn't handle that Obama had that success so he had to undo it. If he were able to reach a "new" deal with Iran it would almost certainly be virtually identical to the one he just reneged on. Doesn't matter to Trump, he wants to undo everything, redo it exactly as it was before, and then claim "I"m the world's greatest."

So, Trump's new NAFTA is just like the old NAFTA and now Trump's undoing that one little thing he could (falsely) claim was an accomplishment for him.

He's stupid and his ego is as big as a mountain and as fragile as glass. What a loser.

May 31, 2019 1:33 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Colorado Becomes 18th State To Ban Ex-Gay Torture

The Denver Post reports:

For years a group of Colorado lawmakers have tried and failed to pass two laws that would improve the lives of LGBTQ Coloradans. One bans mental health professionals from trying to change a minor’s sexual orientation or “sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same-sex,” and it would make advertising conversion therapy a deceptive trade practice under the Colorado Consumer Protection Act.

The second bill makes it possible for transgender Coloradans to update their birth certificates without having to prove they surgically changed their gender or submit a public notice. On Friday morning, Gov. Jared Polis signed them both into law in front of a cheering crowd gathered on the west steps of the Capitol. What made the bills successful this legislative session was Democratic control of the Colorado Senate.

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

There's just no way to make a rational argument in favour of forcing gays to live in society's shadows, as Wyatt/Regina say they want to do.

May 31, 2019 1:43 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Remember Republicans adding a question to the census about whether or not the respondee was a citizen?

Republicans claimed it was all innocent and on the up and up but they accidentally spilled the beans.

The Republican proposing this citizen ship question sold it to the party by telling them "A citizenship question is expected to deter many immigranta and Latinos from responding to the census. That especially if combined with an effort to exclude noncitizens from being counted in rediscricting would result in a huge transfer of economic and political power to whiter and more Republican areas."

This is who Republicans are. This is who Tony Perkins/Wyatt/Regina are.

May 31, 2019 3:06 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Excerpted from an email I sent to my friend Regan:

"Two white males who did so and would try and turn those tables of assault, were my own ex husband after he clocked me in the face for no reason."

I'm so sorry to hear you lived with a man like this. There's no reasoning with someone like that, they are just messed up and highly unlikely to change, all one can do is avoid him, which I presume you've done.

I can't know what its like to grow up a girl, but people like you can inform us. I remember during the 2016 election campaign several people on Fox News attacked Hillary for not smiling enough and said this would hurt her in the election against Trump. Some good individual went through public film of her and Trump and counted the number of times each smiled. Hillary smiled I think 3 or 4 times as much as Trump, yet the perception of men is that she, not Trump, needed to smile more. That has really stuck in my mind ever since.

Although I wish I had been born female at birth, in a way I'm glad I didn't have to tip-toe that mine-field of male expectations women have to deal with. But on the other hand, it was hard for me to always be in fear of being assaulted by boys/men who often want to prove their physical superiority, I was never a fighter. My older sister used to dominate me in our childhood. She would hit me whenever she could make up an excuse to do so, if we were passing each other in the house, I had to take a wide berth around her or she'd beat me up. My whole childhood was spent on edge trying to avoid her. I think the constant intimidation she established over me got me used to being abused and afraid to stick up for myself. Although I am very assertive online, in person that is not me at all, I've very shy and....I want to say "submissive" but that doesn't seem to be quite the right word.

My former wife Leane was baffled that I have this image of women as the symbol of goodness when my sister terrorized me throughout my childhood. It doesn't make sense to me either, perhaps I never really considered Sheila a female because she was so abusive. My early childhood experience outside the home was that girls were nice and boys were bullies and that stays with me today, I remain on edge and ill at ease whenever I'm around men in public, the fear has never really gone away, even now that I'm almost always perceived as female and treated much differently than I was pre-transition.

I am really surprised to hear how you had to regularly deal with men trying to physically intimidate you and assault you. Shocked, maybe is a better word. In my experience, most men are loathe to physically assault a woman. Was it mostly white men who tried to physically dominate and assault you?

May 31, 2019 3:09 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

I myself, before transition treated some women badly. When I was 17 I dated for the first time 14 year old Candy Hehn. I feel terrible in looking back. When I was with her I was constantly trying to stick my hands down her pants, feel her breasts and generally try to get her to have sex with me. At the time I didn't see anything wrong with it, I thought "nothing wrong with trying to have sex with her and feel her up, if she goes along with it fine, if not, oh well, better luck next time. I had no idea what kind of pressure I was putting on her, my actions at the time seemed trivial and innocent to me.

So, this is why I advocate teaching ethics in public school. Teaching children about sexual consent and dealing fairly with the opposite sex. Nowadays people like Jordan Peterson and right wingers get all bent out of shape about talk of toxic masculinity - "They want to feminize men!". Yeah I do.

Peterson promotes a world with men in power over women. He says this is the way it should be because that's the way we evolved to live back in cave man days and so this type of society will be what makes people the happiest. I agree with him we evolved with a psychology that encourages men to be dominate over and to exploit females. Where I adamantly disagree with him is that behaving according to our evolutionary psychological makeup will maximize happiness for individuals in society. Maybe men are happiest when they have dominant position and control over women but I'm sure that doesn't make for maximum happiness in women and I'm pretty doubtful it maximizes happiness in males either. Just because our psychology evolved to have certain tendencies does not mean we are happiest letting those tendencies have free reign, it means this is the psychology that is best adapted to the survival of humans in cave man days - whether or not living according to these psychological tendencies makes us happy is irrelevant to nature, as long as nature makes us reproduce maximally nature really couldn't give a shit if we are happy doing so. Evolutionary psychology isn't concerned at all with our mood, other than as it facilitates our maximum reproduction and survival in cave man days. So, fuck Jordan Peterson.

So, yeah, I want school children to be taught about toxic masculinity and society to take reasonable steps to make us happier and get along better in our modern world. I don't believe that can happen until society looks critically at male behavior and agrees we do need to....shape and control it so there's maximal happiness for all in an equal and fair way. So, yeah, I have no problem at all with our public schools "feminizing males". In fact I want that very badly for our society.

May 31, 2019 3:09 PM  
Anonymous Rump's buddy, Duterte said...

President Rodrigo Duterte implied during a speech on Thursday, May 30, in Japan, that being gay is a disease that needs curing.

It began with Duterte poking fun at his archcritic Senator Antonio Trillanes IV. He said someone gay had told him that based on the senator's movements, Trillanes is gay. Earlier in his speech, Duterte had "confessed" that he too used to be gay.

"Sabi ko, 'Totoo ka?' Sabi niya, 'Magtanong ka kahit sinong bakla at makita 'yan gumalaw, sabihin niyan bakla talaga.' Kaya pala. Mabuti na lang pareho kami ni Trillanes. Pero nagamot ko ang sarili ko," Duterte said.

(I said, "Are you sure?" They said, "You ask any gay person who sees Trillanes move, they'll say he's gay." No wonder. Good thing Trillanes and I are similar. But I cured myself.)

Duterte continued: "Noong kami na ni Zimmerman, sabi ko, ito na. Naging lalaki ako ulit. (When I began a relationship with Zimmerman, I said, this is it. I became a man again)."

He was referring to his former wife, Elizabeth Zimmerman.

Both the World Health Organization and American Psychiatric Association no longer classify homosexuality as a disease or mental disorder. It is now recognized as a legitimate sexual orientation.

Duterte has previously cracked jokes that he used to be gay and that Trillanes was gay too.

The President wrapped up his remarks on gays by saying he has no problem if he is a homosexual.

"Bakla nga si Duterte. Eh 'di bakla, wala akong ano diyan kung bakla ako o hindi (Duterte is gay. So I am gay, I don't care if I'm gay or not)," he said.

During his presidential campaign, Duterte had initially appeared to have liberal views on homosexuality, saying the Bible should have recognized gays, aside from the heterosexual genders.

But as president, Duterte has been inconsistent on his views on same-sex marriage, a key issue for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community in the Philippines.

In March 2017, Duterte said marriage was only for a man and woman, under Philippine law. But by the end of the year, Duterte told an LGBT gathering that he thinks the law can be changed to allow same-sex marriage.

Duterte has also often used terms like "bakla" and "bayot," words that mean gay, as insults to his political enemies. He has used those words to imply weakness in critics like Trillanes and former presidential candidate Mar Roxas. – Rappler.com

May 31, 2019 5:00 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Duterte has executed an estimated 6000 people without any legal process because he suspected them of using drugs. He has compared himself favourably to Hitler and says he wouldn't hesitate to murder millions of drug users if he could.

Trump is a big fan of Duterte and has repeatedly praised him for his "success" in dealing with recreational drug use in the Philipines.

May 31, 2019 5:55 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/Tony Perkins said "I'm sure she's now on watch lists of law enforcement worldwide".

Cool! I'm famous! I must be far, far more important than I thought!

May 31, 2019 6:04 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Trump “Celebrates” LGBTQ Pride Month While His Administration Continues Its Assault On LGBT Rights

May 31, 2019 Donald Trump, Hypocrisy

NBC News reports:

President Donald Trump on Friday recognized LGBTQ Pride Month — something he didn’t do during the first two years of his presidency.

Trump pointed to his administration’s efforts to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide that are being led by the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who is gay. But when Trump was asked about that effort shortly after its roll out in February, he said, “I don’t know.”

In the two and a half years since Trump was inaugurated, he has taken steps to curtail LGBTQ rights, from nominating judges aligned with anti-gay hate groups to banning transgender people from the military.

A disingenously supportive tweet from Trump is typical of Republicans. If he was serious he'd tell Mitch McConnell to bring up the Equality Act and pass it.

And let's not forget Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous who throughout the 2016 campaign assured lgbt people Trump was the most gay friendly presidential candidate ever and Hillary would punish gays. They of course knew the truth was the other way around but they took great delight in lying to lgbt people to get them to vote for their own punishment from Trump.

Pure, raw, unadulterated hate - there's Wyatt and Regina Hardiman for you.

May 31, 2019 6:12 PM  
Anonymous Ninja0980 said...

LGBT rights don't begin and end with us being jailed or killed.
If you think it's okay to deny us marriage equality and protections in housing,employment,health care,you aren't an ally.
If you are putting people on the courts who think every LGBT case handled by SCOTUS that gave LGBT folks equal rights was wrongly decided,you aren't an ally.
If you put anti-LGBT people in charge of all your federal agencies and agree to help them with policies that will make our lives worse,you aren't an ally.
Trump and the homocons cheering him on can go fuck themselves.

May 31, 2019 6:24 PM  
Anonymous Bubba in TX said...

Trump's “LGBT support” has always consisted of, “We will stand against OTHER countries that (NOTICE, ALL YOU LGBTs!) are worse than this country.”

In other words, we should just be thankful we aren’t stoned to death or thrown off a roof, and SHUT UP about the whole discrimination thing.

May 31, 2019 6:25 PM  
Anonymous Ragnar Lothbrok said...

" We have shot no homos for being..homo, so they should be happy!"

May 31, 2019 6:27 PM  
Anonymous Christopher said...

In other words "Be thankful we're not killing you."

To which I reply "Yet. I know you plan to put us in cages first."

May 31, 2019 6:28 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The Religious Right Is Intent On Criminalizing Gay Sex Again

Donald Trump promised he would put justices on the Supreme Court “in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia,” and he has done just that.

With Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, it’s important to underscore that some anti-LGBTQ leaders are going for the brass ring, far beyond just dismantling marriage equality. They’re signaling they want to see the Supreme Court allow states to once again ban sodomy.

Banning gay sex, as I noted in the lead-up to Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings, is something he likely believes is constitutional. Unlike Justice Anthony Kennedy, the leader on gay rights on the court, Gorsuch is, as the respected NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg and her colleague Lauren Russell described him, a “self-proclaimed disciple of [the late Justice] Antonin Scalia’s crusade” of originalism: taking the Constitution literally as those who wrote it in its time presumably intended. Which is exactly the opposite of what the Founding Fathers intended - they made it clear in their writings that they intended the Constitution to change with the times as they were smart enough to know they couldn't forsee what would be required, or no longer required in the future. The whole concept of "judicial originalism" is something the founding fathers adamantly opposed.

None of us should believe that even the legality of gay sex, like abortion, can’t be thrown back to the states.

And Tony Perkins, the head of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council and recently named a United States commissioner on international religious freedom ― and arguably among the most powerful evangelical leaders in the country, with direct access to the White House ― wrote a column last week in which he lamented that 2003 ruling overturning bans on sodomy.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell [was] the first major crack in the foundation of marriage and human sexuality,” Perkins claimed, referring to Bill Clinton’s deeply flawed 1993 compromise with Congress that allowed gays and lesbians to serve in the military as long as they remained closeted ― which opened many up to witch hunts, abuse and expulsion."

Perkins went on:

"Then, the next biggest shoe would drop — Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court ruling that struck down Texas’s ban on sodomy. The late Justice Antonin Scalia warned where their mistake would lead: “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are ... called into question by today’s decision.”

May 31, 2019 6:57 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

For Perkins and others on the religious right, these rulings are connected and inseparable: Overturning gay sex bans allowed for gay marriage and, eventually, for states legislating that a baker or a florist may not discriminate against LGBTQ people. They think the only resolution to what they disingenously claim is an assault of sexual morality and the family is to go back to a time before the Lawrence ruling ― when queer people and anyone else could be arrested for engaging in sodomy upon the police barging into homes and finding people in the act.

Let’s not forget that’s indeed what happened in the case that brought Lawrence to the Supreme Court: Two men were arrested in Houston in 1998 after the police entered the apartment of John Geddes Lawrence in response to a false 911 report of an armed man being present. They found no gun but did find Lawrence having sex with another man and carted both of them away. The other man, Tyrone Garner, was black ― a case similar to so many we’ve seen in which someone called 911 to report a nonexistent crime being committed by a black person, who then experienced the brutal repercussions of police harassment.

"Originalism" was an obscure theory in the 1980s but has since become mainstreamed into the conservative movement because it gives them an excuse to try to reverse freedoms Americans have won over the years in court. Once again, the Founding Fathers were adamantly opposed to this and said repeatedly that the Constitution was intended to change with the times because no one can forsee the future.

Disgraced Judge Bork’s insistence that the Constitution must be interpreted in light of the original understanding of its authors, a view Judge Gorsuch is said to share, was a fringe notion in 1987. [During his confirmation hearings] Justice Anthony M. Kennedy reassured the Senate by rejecting originalism; the Constitution’s framers had “made a covenant with the future,” he declared in his confirmation hearing.

May 31, 2019 6:57 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

As Totenberg and Russell noted, it was Kennedy’s sound rejection of originalism that paved the way for his taking the lead on throwing out sodomy bans:

Disagreements [among conservative justices] were never more apparent than in a series of decisions about gay rights written by the usually conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy ... In a decision striking down a Texas law that criminalized private, consensual “homosexual conduct,” Kennedy noted that the Founding Fathers did not specify all liberties because they expected that list to change [emphasis added].

He wrote that the founders “knew times can blind us to certain truths, and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. It is the promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.”

That thinking is a direct affront to originalist ideology. With sodomy on the minds of religious conservatives, who see gay sex bans as integral to stopping any and all advancement of LGBTQ equality, the current situation is perilous.

Trump promised them during the campaign that he would put justices on the Supreme Court “in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia” who support their agenda, and he is doing just that. None of us should believe that even the legality of gay sex, like abortion, can’t be thrown back to the states ― many of which, in the political grip of hard-line religious conservatives, would ban it in a heartbeat.

May 31, 2019 6:58 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

You can see with Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/Tony Perkins/northdallas's last comment to me the core of the conservative's debate strategy. My brother did this all the time,its pretty simple:

Make up whatever bullshit you want to be true, or which paints you in the best possible light and your opponent in the worst possible light and then just fucking bulldoze the liberals with it. Adamantly exclaim what you're saying is true and the truth is "fake news" and just use personality and aggression to bulldoze us milder mannered liberals, create a false reality that helps you get your way. Enrich yourself, punish those who criticized you. Its not sophisticated but its been unbelievably successful in the computer age despite how obviously immoral it is.

May 31, 2019 10:55 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The best example I've seen of this standard conservative tactic to derail debate was the disgraceful display by Lindsey Graham at illegitimate Supreme Court Judge Kavanaugh's nomination hearing. That was the most shameful and immoral thing I've seen next to Trump.

Shame Lindsey, shame.

May 31, 2019 10:59 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Republicans bulldoze with bullshit.

May 31, 2019 11:01 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Conservatives like my brother "win" debates with aggressive personality, dishonesty, and feigned sincerity where they bring up some obscure irrelvancy to distract from what's important; not through logical arguments. Same thing with the 40% of the population that is die-hard Trump supporters.

May 31, 2019 11:13 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

My brother was really an a-hole

I firmly believe 25-40% of the population is exactly like him:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view

May 31, 2019 11:30 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

MSNBC is the most watched news network in the United States.

I got all my smarts from MSNBC - check it out!

June 01, 2019 12:00 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Boy, Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/northdallasthirty/Tony Perkins/the Russians SURE were angry in the last post they addressed to me. I suppose I would be too if I was in their shoes.

But I wouldn't be in their shoes because I believe honesty and fairness are the hallmarks of a healthy society.

June 01, 2019 12:18 AM  
Anonymous the gay agenda was not originally in the Constitution, and it still isn't said...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had a budget approaching $10 billion during James Comey’s tenure as its director. Combined with budgets for the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, these agencies cost taxpayers around $30 billion annually.

Therefore, one would think that incriminating evidence derived from the FBI, NSA, or CIA could have linked Donald Trump to Russian hackers or Kremlin operatives, if that evidence existed. Instead, almost all the major findings used to justify investigations into Trump’s campaign are linked to Hillary Clinton or the Democratic Party.

The heads of America’s top intelligence agencies used a dossier linked to Clinton’s funding, a tech firm outsourced by the Democratic National Committee, and hearsay from Alexander Downer as the basis to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants and initiate sprawling probes.

The “evidence” leading up to the Robert Mueller probe was so specious that the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence reports compiled by James Clapper and others had warranty disclaimers. President Trump was investigated based on intelligence linked to statements like “(DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within” and “judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

U.S. Attorney General William Barr hired prosecutor John Durham to investigate the origins of the Mueller probe. A key issue for Durham to resolve is why the inciting information never originated within the U.S. government. Why has the funding from Democrats, along with other blatant conflicts of interest, been ignored by Comey, Clapper, and John Brennan?

June 01, 2019 8:13 AM  
Anonymous the gay agenda was not originally in the Constitution, and it still isn't said...

Although an estimated 70 percent of intelligence budgets go to private contractors, these private companies work with classified material and their workers hold security clearances. Fusion GPS, the firm Clinton and Democrats hired to compile the Steele dossier, did not provide the FBI classified intelligence. In fact, the Steele dossier is still unverified and anyone can read the document within the BuzzFeed article that publicized the allegations in early 2017. Crowdstrike, the third-party tech firm the DNC hired to analyze its servers (instead of the U.S. government) didn’t provide the FBI, CIA, or NSA any classified intelligence, since the DNC is a private entity that never allowed U.S. intel agencies near its servers.

Comey never used intelligence derived from U.S. sources to initiate or justify probes into Trump’s campaign. All the information Comey, Clapper, and Brennan used to justify investigating Trump was data linked to Clinton or Democrats in some manner. Barr explains that initiating a counterintelligence probe from the Steele dossier was “very unusual”:

"INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us about the Steele dossier and what role did it play?

BARR: Well that’s one of the questions that we’re going to have to look at, it is a very unusual situation to have opposition research like that, especially one that on its face had a number of clear mistakes and a somewhat jejune analysis. And to use that to conduct counterintelligence against an American political campaign… would be strange development.

I’m not sure what role it played but that is something we’re going to have to look at."

This explains why the Dems are pushing hard to have Barr removed. He's going to find out their crimes BEFORE the 2020 election and Americans will have a reason to flip the House back and re-elect Donald Trump.

Durham will no doubt investigate the intent behind these decisions, and the true reasons America’s intelligence agencies outsourced virtually all of the evidence against Trump.

June 01, 2019 8:19 AM  
Anonymous the gay agenda was not originally in the Constitution, and it still isn't said...

At a certain point, it can’t be mere coincidence that every major figure involved in probing Trump’s campaign is linked to Hillary Clinton in some manner. Christopher Steele was “desperate” to prevent Trump from becoming president and was paid $160,000 by Democrats before he compiled his infamous dossier.

DNC lawyers met with FBI officials before a surveillance warrant was granted, raising questions as to why the FBI would meet with a political party’s counsel, yet not inform Trump his campaign was under investigation. Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele, was paid by money from Hillary Clinton and the DNC, funneled through a law firm, to compile the Steele dossier.

Clinton allies gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the political campaign of Andrew McCabe’s wife, yet the former FBI deputy director only recused himself from Clinton’s email probe one week before the election. Even before the FBI obtained a FISA warrant on Carter Page, Bruce Ohr of the DOJ informed FBI officials that the Steele dossier was connected to Hillary Clinton and filled with political bias. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, worked for Fusion GPS and now her emails are linked to controversy.

Crowdstrike, the only entity to analyze the claimed DNC email hack, was outsourced and paid by the Democratic National Committee. Australian diplomat Downer informed the FBI of a conversation with George Papadopoulos, where Downer stated the Trump campaign official was given information by a Russian operative about the DNC emails. Downer isn’t mentioned in the Mueller report, was never interviewed during the Mueller probe, and is linked to the Clinton Foundation.

Along with the Crowsdtrike assessment that Russia hacked the DNC, the FBI used the Steele dossier to obtain a FISA warrant to surveille Page—without informing FISA judges the dossier was linked to funding by Hillary Clinton. Then of course, former FBI agent Peter Strzok texted “we’ll stop” Trump and wrote about an “insurance policy” that he had spoken about with McCabe.

Yet all of these conflicts of interests linked to Clinton, or intelligence linked to Democrats, failed to produce any evidence against Trump. In an article titled “FBI couldn’t prove Trump-Russia collusion before Mueller appointment,” John Solomon explains that Lisa Page admitted the FBI had nothing on Trump even before the Mueller probe:

‘It’s a reflection of us still not knowing,’ Page told Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) when questioned about texts she and Strzok exchanged in May 2017 as Robert Mueller was being named special counsel to take over the Russia investigation.

With that statement, Page acknowledged a momentous fact: After nine months of using some of the most awesome surveillance powers afforded to U.S. intelligence, the FBI still had not made a case connecting Trump or his campaign to Russia’s election meddling.

Page opined further, acknowledging ‘it still existed in the scope of possibility that there would be literally nothing’ to connect Trump and Russia, no matter what Mueller or the FBI did.

‘As far as May of 2017, we still couldn’t answer the question,’ she said at another point.

So why did the U.S. government investigate for two more years, only to find the same conclusion?

June 01, 2019 8:22 AM  
Anonymous the gay agenda was not originally in the Constitution, and it still isn't said...

In the event preceding the Mueller probe, Comey leaked at least one classified memo, and possibly more, according to Sen. Chuck Grassley. Four Mueller attorneys donated around $50,000 to either Obama, Clinton, or the DNC.

Durham already prosecuted an FBI agent linked to Boston’s notorious mob boss Whitey Bulger, so he’s no stranger to rogue government officials. At the heart of the matter, regarding the origins of the Mueller probe, is why Comey and others investigated Trump with information that would never be considered evidence in normal counterintelligence probes.

While intelligence officials outsource intelligence, they also use intelligence from U.S. government to conduct investigations and prosecute criminals. In Comey’s case, the former director never relied on the U.S. intelligence community for information to investigate Trump, since as Lisa Page testified, nobody had any evidence that Trump had committed crimes, or colluded with Russia.

When Durham finds out exactly why Comey and others ignored blatant conflicts of interest to use faulty and suspect intelligence, Americans will learn the truth about the origins of the Mueller probe

June 01, 2019 8:23 AM  
Anonymous heterosexuality generates life, homosexuality prevents it. any more questions? said...

In an interview with CBS News legal correspondent Jan Crawford, Attorney General Bill Barr explained why he wants to investigate how the FBI and DOJ handled the counterintelligence investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's suspected ties to Russia and wondered how it would have played in the media if "the shoe was on the other foot."

"I'm not suggesting that people did what they did necessarily because of conscious, nefarious motives. Sometimes people can convince themselves that what they're doing is in the higher interest, the better good. They don't realize that what they're doing is really antithetical to the democratic system that we have," Barr said.

"It's hard to read some of the texts with and not feel that there was gross bias at work and they're appalling," Barr said, referring to messages sent between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page. "They were very damning and I think if the shoe was on the other foot we could be hearing a lot about it."

He asked: "If those kinds of discussions were held, you know, when Obama first ran for office, people talking about Obama in those tones and suggesting that 'Oh he might be a Manchurian candidate for Islam' or something like that. You know, some wild accusations like that, and you had that kind of discussion back and forth, you don't think we would be hearing a lot more about it?"

June 01, 2019 8:29 AM  
Anonymous Christine Blassey Ford....LOL!! --- said...

It's gay pride week and the "celebrations" have become somber with the realization that the final nail went into the coffin of the gay agenda when Diane Feinstein betrayed the confidence of a woman to institute an offensive circus that convinced Susan Andrews that she didn't want to be associated with the embarrassing Dems and provided the swing vote to confirm the champion of originalism as the Supreme Court justice America would most like to have a beer with.

One sign of the rapid decline of the gay agenda:

Gay bars across America are shuttering up and going out of business. Even San Francisco, which once had over a hundred, now has only a handful.

RIP, gay agenda

June 01, 2019 8:43 AM  
Anonymous let Ruth Faker Ginsburg retire. She needs to take her daily nap at home not at the Supreme Court said...

The Walt Disney Company is considering boycotting Georgia over its new abortion law, even as Disney profits from doing business in China, a notorious human rights violator that is putting Muslims in internment camps.

Disney CEO Bob Iger told Reuters on Thursday the company is likely to cease filming in Georgia if the pro-life law takes effect.

“I think many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes in that regard,” Iger said. “Right now we are watching it very carefully.”

“If the bill becomes law, I don’t see how it’s practical for us to continue to shoot there,” Iger said.

Disney apparently has no issue with doing business in China, which has undertaken mass detentions of Uighur Muslims, placing them in internment camps.

Disney opened a $5.5 billion resort in Shanghai, China, in 2016. Iger called Shanghai Disney the company’s “greatest opportunity since buying land in Florida.” Disney partnered with a state-owned company, Shanghai Shendi Group, for the resort.

“With its growing middle class, China is a particularly important growth market for Disney,” The New York Times reported in November 2018.

Chinese authorities in 2018 “dramatically stepped up repression and systematic abuses against the 13 million Turkic Muslims, including Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs, in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region,” Human Rights Watch noted in its annual report on China.

“Authorities have carried out mass arbitrary detention, torture, and mistreatment of some of them in various detention facilities, and increasingly imposed pervasive controls on daily life,” the watchdog group’s report said.

Chinese authorities in March implied it would not cease operating its internment camps until the country has no more Muslims to put in the camps.

Disney’s press team does not respond to inquiries about whether the company sees any contradiction in potentially boycotting Georgia while continuing to profit from its Chinese partnership.

Disney also filmed movies in Middle Eastern countries with stricter abortion laws than the Georgia bill. Disney recently filmed movies in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

June 01, 2019 8:54 AM  
Anonymous remember: Obama said 2% annual growth and the decline of American manufacturing was the new normal and can't be stopped said...

The Dems in Congress are trying to stop the Attorney General from investigating the origins of the Russian hoax.

That's obstruction of justice!!

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Friday asked for in-person briefings from U.S. intelligence chiefs regarding President Trump’s directive that they comply with Attorney General William Barr’s inquiry into the origins of the Russia investigation.

Schiff sent letters to agency heads requesting “all documents, material, or information” provided or made available to Barr as part of his review so he can find out what Barr knows and, thus, warn, brief and coach witnesses and targets of the investigation.

The attorney general is reviewing the intelligence collected on the Trump campaign in 2016 — which Barr has described as “spying” — to determine whether it was adequately predicated.

Friday's letters to the Office of Director of National Intelligence, CIA, FBI and National Security Agency come roughly a week after Trump directed the intelligence community (IC) to comply with Barr’s review. The president also gave Barr broad powers to declassify and potentially release documents related to the inquiry.

Schiff asked intelligence officials to give the committee advance notice of any effort by Barr to declassify documents related to the probe. He also requested that officials inform the House Intelligence Committee if Barr plans to declassify documents.

Schiff demanded a response by June 6. He sent similar letters to the heads of the CIA, FBI and NSA.

The office if the DNI confirmed the office had received the letter but didn't comment further. An NSA spokesman also confirmed the agency received the letter.

Both the FBI and CIA declined to comment.

June 01, 2019 9:18 AM  
Anonymous John Dowd said...

"Hey, Rob, uhm this is John again. Uh, maybe, I-I-I'm sympathetic; I understand your situation, but let me see if I can't...state it in...starker terms. If you have...and it wouldn't surprise me if you've gone on to make a deal with, and, uh, work with the government, uh... I understand that you can't join the joint defense; so that's one thing. If, on the other hand, we have, there's information that...implicates the President, then we've got a national security issue, or maybe a national security issue, I don't know...some issues, we got to-we got to deal with, not only for the President, but for the country. So...uh...you know, then-then, you know, we need some kind of heads up. Um, just for the sake of ...protecting all our interests, if we can, without you having to give up any...confidential information. So, uhm, and if it's the former, then, you know, remember what we've always said about the President and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains, but --- Well in any event, uhm, let me know, and uh, I appreciate your listening and taking the time. Thanks, Pal."

June 01, 2019 10:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"One sign of the rapid decline of the gay agenda:

Gay bars across America are shuttering up and going out of business. Even San Francisco, which once had over a hundred, now has only a handful.

RIP, gay agenda"

Dude. In SF, there's no point in calling a bar "gay" anymore. You're in San Francisco, after all.

They just call them "bars" now.

June 01, 2019 3:03 PM  
Anonymous I reeeeeeeeally like our Supreme Court.and the best is yet to come!!!!!!! said...

"Dude. In SF, there's no point in calling a bar "gay" anymore. You're in San Francisco, after all.

They just call them "bars" now."

Amigo, the bars didn't change theme. They shut down. These gay shelterx are disappearing

Looking for some great weekend reading? Look no further than the transcript of the CBS News interview with Attorney General William Barr.

Calling it a bombshell doesn’t do it justice. The interview is chock-full of one explosive comment after another about special counsel Robert Mueller, the media and Barr’s own investigation of the investigators.

Here are some nuclear-grade examples of what the AG has to say:

“So it was bogus, this whole idea that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians is bogus.”

“It’s hard to read some of the FBI texts and not feel that there was gross bias at work, and they’re appalling.”

“The use of foreign-intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign to me is unprecedented and it’s a serious red line that’s been crossed.”

“The media reaction is strange. Normally the media would be interested in letting the sunshine in and finding out what the truth is.”

“One of the ironies today is that people are saying that it’s President Trump that’s shredding our institutions. I really see no evidence of that . . . From my perspective the idea of resisting a democratically elected president and basically throwing everything at him and you know, really changing the norms on the grounds that we have to stop this president, that is where the shredding of our norms and our institutions is occurring.”

There’s much more, making the interview, on top of other things Barr has said, like Christmas, July 4th and Thanksgiving all rolled into one. A new era in Washington has begun. Hallelujah!

The old era will not be missed. Recall a revealing moment on

Jan. 3, 2017, just weeks before Trump took office, when Sen. Chuck Schumer warned the president-elect against feuding with the CIA. “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” he said.

Perhaps Schumer knew then how far intelligence leaders under Barack Obama had gone in spying on Trump and how far they were willing to go to bring down a president they opposed. The effort continues to this day by those same people — James Comey, John Brennan and James Clapper — even though they are out of office.

While there is still much we don’t know, Barr seems absolutely determined to learn it all — and tell the public as much as he can.

June 02, 2019 5:11 PM  
Anonymous I reeeeeeeeally like our Supreme Court.and the best is yet to come!!!!!!! said...

Hence his mocking of the media for trying to quash his probe and the declassification of key documents by claiming he would reveal sources and secrets. The New York Times, the errand boy for the deep state, actually said in a news story that Barr could “weaken the CIA” and endanger the lives of sources.

It cited the example of one intelligence source it said was close enough to Vladimir Putin to tell Obama’s team that Putin had personally ordered Russian meddling in 2016.

The paper, quoting “former intelligence officials,” almost certainly including Brennan, wrote that the then-CIA chief “would bring reports from the Russian source directly to the White House, keeping them out of the president’s daily intelligence briefing,” and instead “place them in an envelope for Mr. Obama and a tiny circle of aides to read.”

But wait — didn’t the Times just give Putin a big clue about a CIA source in his inner circle? And didn’t the paper just admit that the agency’s conclusion about ­Putin’s role came from a single source?

The answer to both questions is yes, making the Times far more of a danger to CIA sources and ­secrets than Barr.

In the same article, the Times also buries a rather startling fact: The CIA and the National Security Agency took part in the “inquiry” into the Trump campaign.

Then again, the Gray Lady, The Washington Post, CNN and others long ago stopped being real news organizations. They were cheerleaders for the coercive liberalism of the Obama years and marched in complete lockstep with the assumption that Hillary Clinton would and should be the next president.

In the beginning, they laughed at Trump and looked down on his supporters as unwashed interlopers. Once he got the GOP nomination, they turned their blowtorches on him to make sure he never sat in the Oval Office.

After his election, they became part of the resistance or, in Steve Bannon’s memorable phrase, “the opposition party.”

Despite their abandonment of all journalistic standards to become partisan shills, the anti-Trump media remain a powerful force in American life. Democrats and the rest of the left, ranging from academics to late-night comedians, take their cues from the Times and its ilk.

For two years, the paper and its fellow travelers led the charge on Russia, Russia, Russia and routinely called Trump a traitor. Like crazed Dems Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters, the left-wing media are still dead-enders for a lost cause.

All the more reason why Barr must charge ahead. He knows the personal smears already thrown at him are just the start, but he told CBS reporter Jan Crawford he feels a sense of duty because, at 69, “it really doesn’t make any ­difference.”

“I realize we live in a crazy ­hyperpartisan period of time and I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them, that I would be attacked because nowadays people don’t care about the merits and the substance,” he said. “They only care about who it helps, who benefits, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits, everything is gauged by politics.”

His commitment to protect the rule of law is twinned with a fatalistic view of the future.

“Everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that immortality comes by . . . having odes sung about you over the centuries.”

Maybe not Homeric odes, but if Barr can get to the bottom of the insider plot against Trump, America will be forever in his debt.

June 02, 2019 5:11 PM  
Anonymous MSGR. CHARLES POPE said...

As I walk or drive through my Capitol Hill neighborhood here in Washington, D.C., I pass by more than twenty churches (all of them Protestant) that have been closed in the past decade. Many of them are grand and prominent buildings. (Click here to see four of them.) Most of the them have been converted to condominiums, likely due to historic preservation norms that seek to retain the exterior appearance of historic buildings.

A recent study by the local non-profit organization Sacred Spaces Conservancy confirms my anecdotal evidence about the large number of closures. On Capitol Hill, a growing neighborhood with a tremendous number of row houses, about 40 percent of buildings used for worship have closed [*]. Such a figure is shocking and demonstrates a collapse of religious observance. Our Catholic parishes have suffered as well, but thankfully none of them have closed.

As always, there is important detail behind the numbers. At the root is a dramatic demographic shift in the population of the District of Columbia. The once majority-black city is no longer so; African-Americans now make up less than 50 percent of the population. The new arrivals to the city are also younger. To say that the city is undergoing gentrification is not really accurate. The majority of the new residents are not gentry at all; they are largely young adults, saddled with college debt and unable to afford to own property. The median home price in this area is close to one million dollars. Because most of them do not have the means to buy a home, they rent, and even then must usually share with others to make it affordable.

This is the new demographic reality: A once solidly African-American area is now more racially diverse and younger as well. The new residents are in general less religiously observant and those who are “religious” are less tied to particular denominations or congregations. This is a challenge to institutions established in a very different world.

This has affected Protestant and Catholics in different ways.

The Protestant Experience:

There are reasons that the Protestant congregations have been more affected by the changes than the Catholic parishes. In general, Protestant denominations were and are divided in that they served specific groups defined by both racial and sectarian lines. For example, there might have been ten “Baptist” churches in a fairly small area, but they weren’t serving just different Baptist denominations; there were White Baptists, Black Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Free Will Baptists, and so forth. Add to this a slew of other denominations and distinctions such as African Methodist Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran, Missouri Synod Lutheran, High Church Episcopal, Low Church Episcopal, and Broad Church Episcopal. The city churches were built during a time when these distinctions mattered.

June 03, 2019 11:59 AM  
Anonymous MSGR. CHARLES POPE said...

As for the mainline (largely white) Protestant churches, I would argue that a collapse of faith has depleted them, at least collectively. Many of them ceased preaching the “old time religion” a long time ago, having largely assimilated to a post-Christian world and acclimated to the sexual revolution. Gone are the moral demands of the gospel, which have been replaced by a social “gospel.” Gone is the drama of salvation. Jesus is less Lord and Savior and more a good man and ethical teacher. For those who think the Catholic Church should chart a similar course, please note that as much as we have declined, the mainline Protestant churches have collectively seen an utter collapse in attendance.

That said, things are not nearly as good or strong as they should be in the Catholic Parishes of Capitol Hill. Not one of them has more than 1000 people in attendance on Sunday. The largest has just under 900; mine has 600; two of them have fewer than 200. Several of our schools have closed. Part of the reason for the smaller number of parishioners is that all these parishes were built before the advent of the automobile and thus are much closer to one another than is true in the suburbs. People in my neighborhood have three Catholic parishes within walking distance, with Masses offered at all sorts of different times, lowering the number in any one parish.

Yet, truth be told, all our Capitol Hill parishes were once much fuller. The parish schools were bursting with children and our rectories and convents were brimming. To some degree, the fact that all our parishes are still open is based on inertia from prior times. We were bigger than the Protestant congregations to begin with and so it’s taken longer to erode. The danger is that we are parking on someone else’s dime; the fuel that those of the past left us is dwindling to mere fumes. The generation that built our parish churches was poorer than we are in a monetary sense but seemingly richer in faith. There was a time when more than 80 percent of Catholics went to Mass weekly. Today it’s only about 20 percent and the figure has been dropping by the year. The current scandal has surely not helped, but the problem is deeper, older, and wider than that. Despite the steep drop in attendance, it has often been “business as usual”; our focus seems to be institutional more so than Christological or eschatological.

The problem is not a local one in Capitol Hill. This steep decline has occurred throughout the Western world. A secular world has, by definition, a worldly focus and little time or thought for God. The Catholic Church has not always responded well to this.

June 03, 2019 12:04 PM  
Anonymous Robert Mueller, May 29, 2019 said...

"If we had confidence the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so."

June 03, 2019 2:28 PM  
Anonymous Donald Ayer, Paul Rosenzweig, and said...

Former Republican Federal Prosecutors Speak Out Against Obstruction of Justice

Some highlighted quotes:

“Obstruction of justice and perjury are far more important than most normal crimes. They go to the absolute core of how the rule of law functions in this society.”

“This administration, in my view, has an absolute disregard for the law.”

“As a former prosecutor, I did not think it was even a close prosecutorial call as to whether the president obstructed justice.”

“Were the president anyone other than the president, he would have been subject to indictment.”

“In the Mueller report there is a damning case of obstruction of justice by the president.”

"One of the most disturbing things to me is the conduct of Republicans, in the Senate and in the House. These are actually smart people. They know that there is a damning case, in the Mueller report, of obstruction of justice by the president, and they are acting like it’s not. And that’s just flatly dishonest. And they seem to be doing it because they think Trump is the only game in town."

June 03, 2019 2:52 PM  
Anonymous Yet another swamp creature said...

A key witness in former Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian election interference has been indicted by federal officials on child pornography charges, according to court documents.

George Nader, who had a previous criminal record on such charges, was charged in federal court in Virginia, and is expected to make an initial court appearance in New York.

Nader played an unusual role as a kind of liaison between Trump supporters, Middle East leaders, and Russians interested in making contact with the incoming administration in early 2017.

Nader was known to Trump associates as someone with political connections in the Middle East who could help them navigate the diplomacy of the region.

He helped arrange a meeting in the Seychelles in January 2017 between Erik Prince, a Trump supporter who founded the private security firm Blackwater, and a Russian official close to Russian President Vladi­mir Putin. The purpose of the meeting was of particular interest to Mueller’s investigators, and some questions about it remain unanswered, even after Mueller issued a 448-page report on his findings.

A Lebanese American businessman, Nader was stopped by federal agents when he arrived at Dulles International Airport in January 2018. He was served with a subpoena, and eventually cooperated with authorities, providing grand jury testimony about his interactions with Trump supporters, according to people familiar with the matter.

Prince has insisted, both publicly and to Congress, that his meeting in the Seychelles with Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian government-controlled wealth fund, was a chance encounter that occurred because he happened to be meeting with United Arab Emirates officials at a luxury hotel in the Indian Ocean nation.

At the time, Nader had been working for years as an adviser to the UAE. Nader told investigators it was a meeting planned in advance, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Nader was convicted 28 years ago of transporting child pornography, a case in which he received a reduced sentence after influential figures argued privately to the court that he was playing a valuable role in national security affairs — trying to free U.S. hostages then held in Lebanon.

June 03, 2019 3:42 PM  
Anonymous Yes, birtherism is racist said...

SWAN: Have you ever seen him say or do anything that you would describe as racist or bigoted?

KUSHNER: So, the answer is un -- uh, no. Absolutely not. You can’t not be a racist for 69 years, then run for president and be a racist. What I’ll say is that, when a lot of the Democrats call the president a racist, I think they’re doing a disservice to people who suffer because of real racism in this country.

SWAN: Was birtherism racist?

KUSHNER: Um, look I wasn’t really involved in that.

SWAN: I know you weren’t. Was it racist?

KUSHNER: Like I said, I wasn’t involved in that.

SWAN: I know you weren’t. Was it racist?

KUSHNER: I know who the president is, and I have not seen anything in him that is racist. So, again, I was not involved in that.

SWAN: Did you wish he didn’t do that?

KUSHNER: Like I said, I was not involved in that. That was a long time ago.

So that’s four instances in which Kushner emphasized that he hadn’t personally participated in Trump’s effort to question the legitimacy of the nation’s first black president, and zero instances in which he denied the entire effort was racist.

June 03, 2019 4:37 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Dedicated to my Sweety:

"Before You"

Baby, before you
Well, I was bad news
In lettin' me love you
I think I can get through

Oh, baby before you
Well, I was so scared
I was a train wreck waitin' to happen
On the way to nowhere

And now I think it's kinda funny that you say you love me
You tell me that I'm crazy then you smile

And now I think I'll get through
The end of the world
And now I think I'll get through
Bein' a girl
Now I think I'll get through
Anything
And now I think I'll get through

Now honey around you
I'm feelin' so good
'Cause you picked me up out of the rough
And you polished me up and made me brand new

And baby before you, ho ho
There was just a black hole
Yeah I was beat down, blacked out
My darling you couldn't even know

But ever since I met you on a cloudy Monday
I can't believe how much I love the rain

And now I think I'll get through
The end of the world
And now I think I'll get through
Life as a girl
Now I think I'll get through
Anything
Now I think I'll get through

Ever since I met you on a cloudy Monday
I can't believe how much I love the rain

And now I think I'll get through
The end of the world
And now I think I'll get through
Life as a girl
Now I think I'll get through
Anything
Now I think I'll get through

Oh ... ho ...
Now I think I'll get through
Oh ....
Now I think I'll get through
Oh ... ho ...
And now I think I'll get through

And now I think I'll get through
Oh, and now I think I'll get through
Oh, and now I think I'll get through

June 03, 2019 11:29 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

A trans woman died in ICE custody on the first day of Pride Month, advocates report

June 04, 2019 12:44 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Republican Mike Hill's joking around about killing gay people is a symptom of GOP decline

Much like when Wyatt/Regina/bad anonmyousm/Tony Perkins "joke" about assaulting, imprisoning, and killing gay people, that kind of "joke" is a veiled expression of what a person hopes will happen.

June 04, 2019 12:55 AM  
Anonymous Dallas police ask for FBI help after third transgender woman killed said...

A passerby found her body Saturday evening floating in White Rock Lake, an urban preserve dotted with sailboats and kayaks in northeastern Dallas. With a thunderstorm bearing down, a game warden scrambled to pull out the corpse before it could sink beneath the wind-whipped waves.

On Monday, Dallas police identified her as Chynal Lindsey, 26, and said they’re investigating the death as a homicide, making her the latest transgender woman slain in a city where violence against that population has reached frightening proportions.

With at least two other transgender women killed since October — including Muhlaysia Booker, whose death drew national headlines last month — and another stabbed nearly to death, Dallas police have now asked the FBI for help.

“We are concerned,” Dallas Police Chief U. Reneé Hall told reporters Monday. “We are actively and aggressively investigating this case, and we have reached out to our federal partners to assist in these efforts.”

That’s a welcome message to activists and the LGBTQ community in Dallas, where complaints have long lingered that police haven’t taken seriously a rising tide of violence against transgender women.

“These women are victims of systemic abuse, and not just violence,” Paul Kalburgi, a playwright who recently spent two years interviewing transgender women in Dallas for a play, told The Washington Post. “From health care, to legal aid, to employment and housing, those doors are often closed to transgender women and particularly transgender women of color.”

Murders have plagued the transgender community nationally, with at least 29 such homicides recorded in 2017 and at least 26 last year, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Many of those cases go unsolved.

One such killing in Dallas sparked Kalburgi’s involvement. He’d moved from his native Britain to North Texas just before 22-year-old Shade Schuler’s body was found in a Dallas field in July 2015. Horrified to learn of the rising number of homicides of transgender women, he began interviewing dozens of members of that community for a play centered on Schuler’s death.

“I learned that African American transgender women are a marginalized, often forgotten part of society,” he said.

Indeed, Schuler’s killing remains unsolved four years later. Another act of brutal violence brought the plight of Dallas’s black transgender community back onto the national radar in April. That’s when Booker, a 23-year-old transgender woman, was filmed being viciously beaten as a crowd looked on outside an apartment complex.

A 29-year-old man named Edward Thomas was later charged with aggravated assault in that attack. Booker said she felt lucky to be alive and hoped the viral video would raise awareness of the violence transgender women face. “This time, I can stand before you,” she told reporters, “whereas in other scenarios, we are at a memorial.”

Just a month later, her words proved prophetic. Booker was found shot to death in the street on May 18. Police haven’t revealed a motive or any suspects in her killing.

But three days after Booker’s death, police announced that they feared her killing may be linked to at least two other attacks on transgender women. On Oct. 21, 2018, Brittany White, 29, was fatally shot in a parked car in southeast Dallas. Six months later, an unnamed 26-year-old transgender woman was stabbed multiple times and left to die in south Dallas, though she survived.

“These cases, though not directly related at this time, do have similarities the public needs to be made aware of,” Dallas Police Maj. Vincent Weddington told reporters on May 21, noting that two of the victims had been in a similar part of Dallas, and all three either got into a car with someone or allowed someone into their car before the attacks...

June 04, 2019 10:40 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Here's Chantel singing "Before You" So beautiful...

June 04, 2019 2:08 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Trump is re-writing the norms of American democracy into the norms of a dictatorship.

Starting with the constant brutal attacks on the free press.

And Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/northdallasthirty/Tony Perkins/Russia are lying their asses of to try and help Trump ram it passed a sleeping American public.

June 04, 2019 2:24 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

In the last angry response I got from Wyatt/Regina/tony perkins, where they said "I'm sure you're on the watch list of every law enforcement agency in the world", did I detect a certain sous-ance of Russian GRU psychological warfare unit?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Eff you, Vlad. Its obvious Trump is laundering money for you through Deutsche Bank. You know Deutsche Bank, the bank that was fined mega billions for ongoing criminal acts in furtherence of Russian money laundering.

Deutsche Bank lent Trump hundreds of millions after American banks refused to lend any further to the constantly defaulting Trump. And of course Trump defaulted on payment of the hundreds of millions he borrowed from Deutsche bank,and then sued Deutsche bank because he failed to make the obligatory payments he agreed to!.

Okay, yes, that's pretty bad but then consider, after that Deutsche Bank lent Trump hundreds of millions more! Why the hell would they do that unless Trump was helping Deutsche Bank launder Russian money for a cut and/or loan forgiveness.

If Trump isn't laundering Russian crime money for Vlad through Deutsche Bank, let him release the last ten years of his tax returns and show how he went from bankrupt to having hundreds of millions in networth and no visible means of getting that income.

Mueller didn't look at Trump's finances - this is a gigantic and inexplicable hole in his investigation of Trump collusion with Putin. From the very beginning its been law enforcment mantra that when you're investigating crime, follow the money!.

That Mueller did not do so is a gross oversight that Congress must address! Mueller's 400+ page report was a criminal referral to Congress to continue the Russia collusion investigation. Mueller said so very politely and indirectly through carefully crafted legaleaze. But make no doubt, that's what he said.

June 04, 2019 3:09 PM  
Anonymous Nasty Rump said...

He got nasty:

In an interview on Nov. 4, 1997, not even two months after Princess Diana was killed in a car crash, Trump bragged that he could’ve slept with her — but would have made her take a medical exam first.

What a disgusting asshole:

"Trump claimed that she was attracted to him and, when asked if he thought he could have “nailed” her, he said he “could have.”

Stern asked: “Why do people think it’s egotistical of you to say you could’ve gotten Lady Di? You could’ve gotten her, right? You could’ve nailed her.”

Trump responded: “I think I could have,” adding, “She was actually really beautiful. I thought she was supermodel beautiful.”

He continued, “She had times when she didn’t look great and she had times when she looked better than anyone in the world. But she had the height, she had magnificent skin, she was a great beauty.”

Trump also claimed that if Princess Diana had “been dating him” instead of Dodi Fayed, she wouldn’t have died in the fatal crash.

He shared, “I know that tunnel in Paris. It’s got, like, a 30-mile limit. If you look at this tunnel — and I really know that tunnel well, I’ve been through that tunnel many times — you can’t go more than like 30, 40 miles.”"

Princess Di was like 90% of women when it comes to Trump:

"Princess Diana didn’t find Trump all that charming, it turns out, despite his boastful claims that he believed he could have had sex with her.

Trump reportedly pursued Diana when her marriage broke up, with broadcaster Selina Scott sharing in the Sunday Times in 2015 that he borderline was “stalking her” because he thought he “had a shot” at winning her over.

Scott wrote: ‘He bombarded Diana at Kensington Palace with massive bouquets, each worth hundreds of pounds.” She described, “They were accompanied by handwritten notes expressing sympathy, his great regard for her and the suggestion that they get together.”

She added: “Trump clearly saw Diana as the ultimate trophy wife. As the roses and orchids piled up at her apartment she became increasingly concerned about what she should do. It had begun to feel as if Trump was stalking her.”

Scott noted that she became close to Diana after meeting her in the 1980s and Diana had said of Trump, ‘“What am I going to do? He gives me the creeps.”’"

Of course he did.

"Royal biographer Christopher Anderson told The Daily Beast in 2017 that, in light of the comments Trump made about Princess Diana, the Royals aren’t impressed, sharing: “When it comes to the younger royals, especially given his crude comments about Diana after her death, it is hard to imagine that Charles, William, Harry and Kate will view Trump as anything but crass and overbearing.”"

They would be right. He's lowlife garbage. That medical test crack is right up there with "grab 'em by the pussy."

June 04, 2019 4:37 PM  
Anonymous Pictures are worth thousands of words said...

Great Photo Thread About Those "Tremendous Crowds" in London.

Massive protests fill London's streets with opposition to Donald Trump

June 04, 2019 5:03 PM  
Anonymous More pics said...

Trump's London visit

June 04, 2019 5:13 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Alabama Mayor Defends Call To “Kill Out” LGBT People


Montgomery’s ABC affiliate reports:

Carbon Hill mayor Mark Chambers has responded about recent controversial comments he made in a Facebook post. The post written in all capital letters said: “We live in a society where homosexuals lecture us on morals, transvestites lecture us on human biology, baby killers lecture us on human rights and socialists lecture us on economics.”

Chambers faced strong criticism from his constituents for the post and also for a response to his Facebook friend who wrote: “By giving the minority more rights than the majority. I hate to think of the country my grandkids will live in unless somehow we change and I think that will take a revolution.”

Chambers responded to that comment saying: “The only way to change it would be to kill the problem out. I know it’s bad to say but without killing them out there’s no way to fix it.”

In his first phone call with the above-linked outlet, Chambers denied making the post and hung up. He called back minutes later to admit to writing it, but said it was meant for friends and is being taken out of context. After the reporter read the post back to him, Chambers said, “That’s in a revolution. That’s right! If it comes to a revolution in this country both sides of these people will be killed out.” His Facebook page is now private.

June 04, 2019 11:22 PM  
Anonymous Poll: 74 percent of Americans say former Trump officials should obey congressional subpoenas said...

President Trump's recent posture of blocking former White House officials from appearing on Capitol Hill in response to subpoenas from congressional Democrats is unpopular with the vast majority of the public, according to a new Hill-HarrisX poll.

Nearly three-quarters of registered voters, 74 percent, said they believe that former senior White House officials should be required to testify before Congress when they are subpoenaed, according to the poll. Just 26 percent said they believe that former officials should not have to testify.

Majorities of every demographic group sampled in the May 24-25 poll came down strongly against the idea of allowing ex-White House officials to evade congressional subpoenas. Even Republicans, by a margin of 61 to 31 percent, said that former administration officials should testify before Congress when they are asked to appear.

Independent voters overwhelmingly said that former senior White House employees should submit to congressional subpoenas, with 73 percent in support and 27 percent not. Among Democrats, 87 percent said former administration officials should testify while 13 percent said otherwise.

Voters who called themselves conservative also supported the idea, with 71 percent of respondents who said they leaned conservative in favor of the former officials testifying and 56 percent who called themselves strong conservatives agreeing.

The White House provided numerous documents and witnesses to former special counsel Robert Mueller and legislative committees examining Russia's involvement in the 2016 presidential election, but the Trump administration has in recent weeks rebuffed many congressional requests, claiming that Democrats are engaging in "presidential harassment."

On Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said that the White House had instructed former communications director Hope Hicks and former administration attorney Annie Donaldson to refuse to comply with congressional document requests and subpoenas for their testimony.

"The White House has instructed both Hope Hicks and Annie Donaldson not to turn over records in response to subpoenas issued by our Committee last month," Nadler said in a statement. "The President has no lawful basis for preventing these witnesses from complying with our request."...

Meanwhile, in Trumplandia: Trump loves record poll numbers — including ones he’s apparently made up

"President Trump joined British Prime Minister Theresa May for a news conference on Tuesday, the second day of his visit to the United Kingdom. During the event, the president broke some remarkable news: His approval rating among Republicans had just hit a record high.

“I have a 90 percent-- 94 percent approval rating as of this morning in the Republican Party," Trump said. "That’s an all-time record. Can you believe that? Isn’t that something? I love records.”

A remarkable stat, certainly. But one which should probably be accompanied by a few asterisks:

-94 percent approval among Republicans would not be an “all-time record.”
-A difference of a point or two in party approval ratings likely isn’t statistically significant and is therefore meaningless.
-Different numbers from different pollsters also make this claim fairly suspect.
-There was no public poll on Tuesday or any other recent morning we can find that offered that statistic.
-Trump and his supporters have made claims about 94 percent approval many times before.
Beyond that, though, quite an achievement...."

June 05, 2019 1:58 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Farther upstream Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous were optimistic that the regular closing of gay bars is evidence that society is successfully oppressing gays.

I'm sorry to tell you guys, but this is the opposite of what you think and its bad news for bigots like you:

Gay bars are closing and going out of style because public acceptance of gays has greatly increased over the last couple of decades. Gays are integrating into heterosexual society, blending in and no longer feel any need to seek out a public space that is dedicated solely to gays. So, gay bars are closing in droves.

And when you said "Gayness should happen in society's shadows"....the closing of gay bars is evidence that gays are blending into society and going mostly unnoticed. Isn't that what anti-gay christians want?

Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "heterosexuality generates life, homosexuality prevents it.".

Oh dear, that sounds like a bit of an exaggeration. Gayness prevents life? You'll have to explain that one to me, I don't see it. Please proceed:

June 05, 2019 5:09 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Tennessee DA Won’t Enforce Domestic Violence Laws For Same-Sex Couples: There’s No Marriage To Protect

June 5, 2019 Christianists, LGBT News

NBC News reports:

Craig Northcott, a district attorney in Tennessee’s Coffee County, a rural county between Nashville and Chattanooga, is facing calls to resign for saying he would not enforce domestic violence laws for people in same-sex marriages because he does not believe in same-sex marriage.

Northcott said he concluded, based on his own analysis and not on the fact that domestic violence charges also apply for unmarried couples, that “the reason that there’s enhanced punishment on domestic violence is to recognize and protect the sanctity of marriage. And I said, ‘there’s no marriage to protect.’ So I don’t prosecute them as domestics.”

Chris Sanders, executive director of statewide LGBTQ group Tennessee Equality, encouraged Northcott to step down. “He should explore resigning from office at this point, because he has expressed very clearly that he will not apply the law equally, and we think that’s his duty,” Sanders said.

As you’ll see in the clip, Northcott bases his refusal on his being a “good Christian man.”

This is just the sort of thing Republicans do. Its one attack after another on the citizenship of lgbt people with bigots like Wyatt/Regina/Tony Perkins constantly telling us "The gays are doing just fine." and Trump is the gay friendliest president ever, gays are lucky Hillary wasn't elected.

The truth is optional in Republican pursuits of self-interest.

June 05, 2019 6:25 PM  
Anonymous Slade7 said...

Chilling to hear the audience chuckle about it. They actually take delight in their bigotry.

June 05, 2019 6:26 PM  
Anonymous 'Til Tuesday said...

Unfortunately, with our Governor and the majority of the state legislature being Evangelicals like Craig Northcott, I doubt anything will happen to him. If you recall, a few months ago the Majority Leader in the State House said his plan was to re-write the laws of Tennessee to bring them into compliance with the Bible.

And don't just pick on Tennessee - all across the South legislators and others like this DA are working to bring Christian Sharia law into force.

June 05, 2019 6:34 PM  
Anonymous 'Til Tuesday said...

Most cops in Tennessee are anti-gay and wouldn't protect individuals who are gay. Even in the four major cities it's very dicey. We have a state law that prohibits any government entity from passing any laws or regulations protecting gay people.

June 05, 2019 6:34 PM  
Anonymous JKyle said...

The Supreme Court held back in the 60s that, "the decision to prosecute cannot be based on "an unjustifiable standard such as race, religion, or other arbitrary
classification." Emphasis added. That is based on protections in the 14th amendment for states and the 5th amendment for federal prosecutors. That said, it is notoriously difficult to prove selective prosecution to a court's satisfaction.

Here is a novel situation of selective NON-prosecution. One would think that the only people that might have standing to sue, under our existing framework (actually, no, I think this necessitates new "framework"), would be battered gay spouses and, interestingly, straight defendants charged with spousal abuse that could allege that they are selectively prosecuted unlike their gay counterparts. I have no idea how any of that would play out because this is an unusual legal situation to begin with.

[Edit to say this is off the cuff, and I would be interested to see whether my analysis changes after a chance to review Westlaw.]

[Edit further to say that I wonder whether Tennessee's governing ethics body for prosecutors has a rule for this.]

June 05, 2019 6:36 PM  
Anonymous Wynter Marie Starr said...

Since when do DA's get to pick and choose cases based upon their religion? This man needs to be fired for failing to do his job in addition to failing to be a decent human being.

June 05, 2019 6:38 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Republican Senators Warn Trump Against Tariffs On Mexico: “We’re Holding A Gun To Our Own Heads”



The New York Times reports:

Republican senators sent the White House a sharp message on Tuesday, warning that they were almost uniformly opposed to President Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on Mexican imports, just hours after the president said lawmakers would be “foolish” to try to stop him.

“I want you to take a message back” to the White House, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, told the lawyers, according to people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Cruz warned that “you didn’t hear a single yes” from the Republican conference. He called the proposed tariffs a $30 billion tax increase on Texans.

Texas would be hit the hardest by the proposed tariffs on Mexican products, followed by Michigan, California, Illinois and Ohio, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A 25 percent tariff would threaten $26.75 billion of Texas imports. “We’re holding a gun to our own heads,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

June 05, 2019 7:54 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Trump Offers New Excuse For Dodging The Draft: “At That Time, Nobody Ever Heard Of” Vietnam [VIDEO]



Mediaite reports:

President Donald Trump offered a litany of excuses for having avoided service during the Vietnam War, yet still claimed he “would not have minded serving” in the war that he has frequently compared with his own “brave” battle to avoid a sexually transmitted disease (STD).

Those excuses included not being a “fan” of the war, the claim that “at that time, nobody ever heard of the country,” pointing out that the North Vietnamese were not “Nazi Germany,” and that he had not moved to Canada to avoid the draft.

June 05, 2019 8:01 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

HHS Ends Funding For Research Using Fetal Tissue, Curtailing Work On HIV, Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Austism

This is what fetal tissue is actually used for contrary to fake Republican news that Planned Parenthood is "selling baby parts". Anytime a Republican says anything, assume they're lying. You'll be right far more often than wrong.

June 05, 2019 8:03 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

REPORT: Soldiers Charged In Death Of Green Beret Planned To Record Him Being Raped To Shame Him


The Washington Post reports:

Four elite U.S. Special Operations troops charged in the death of a Green Beret soldier in Mali plotted to record him being sexually assaulted as part of a plan to embarrass him through hazing, according to one of the accused service members.

Marine Staff Sgt. Kevin Maxwell said in a written stipulation of facts submitted for the case that the plan included bursting into Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar’s bedroom in the capital city of Bamako with a sledgehammer, choking him until he fell unconscious, tying him up and recording the sexual assault on video. The service members involved had just returned from a night of drinking, he said.

The four service members charged in the case were joined in the room by a Malian security guard and a British man who had befriended the Americans, Maxwell told authorities. The security guard was to carry out the sexual assault, while the British national planned to record it on a cellphone.

June 05, 2019 8:11 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Men have an innate tendency towards violence and sexual exploitation of others.

It will take a massive socialization effort for boys from kindergarten throughout high school to overcome the natural destructive tendency of males.

Jordan Peterson believes it is human evolutionary psychology that men tend to dominate and sexually exploit females. I agree.

Where we disagree is on the proper societal prescription for this problem. Jodan Peterson doesn't consider male domination and sexual exploitation of females to be a problem. His prescription for society is to "go with the flow", allow men to follow their natural abusive and violent psychological tendencies. I strongly oppose that.

If we are to have a society that maximizes happiness for all in and equal and fair way, we need to, for lack of a better word, make a massive feminization program for all males.

Males have a powerful tendency towards violence and sexual exploitation. Giving this free reign as Peterson wants to do is the exact opposite of what is needed to reduce crime and violence.

Last I heard, circa 1994 is that 95% of prison inmates are men. And most women prison inmates are in jail due to being caught up in their husband or boyfriend's drug dealing.

Let's face reality. The biggest problem facing the world is toxic masculinity. Yes, toxic masculinity is natural and normal for men, but accepting that instead of making a massive society wide effort to counteract this male destructive tendency will prevent us from from every having a just, fair, and healthy society. Boys need voluminous training and restraint if we are to ever alleviate society's chronic problems with crime and violence.

June 05, 2019 8:20 PM  
Anonymous Garland, Goresuch & Kavanaugh...two outta three ain't bad said...

“I’m amused,” Attorney General William Barr told CBS News’ Jan Crawford, “by these people who make a living disclosing classified information, including the names of intelligence operatives, wringing their hands about whether I’m going to be responsible in protecting intelligence sources and methods.”

He went on after further questions, “Well, the media reaction is strange. Normally the media would be interested in letting the sunshine in and finding out what the truth is. And usually the media doesn’t care that much about protecting intelligence sources and methods. But I do and I will.”

You don’t have to have been “in the business” for Barr’s nearly 50 years to understand what he means. Just flash back 13 years to June 2006 and read the New York Times’ revelations about the Swift bank procedures.

The Belgian-based Swift manages foreign currency transfers, and after 9/11, the CIA and Treasury conducted data searches to spot and ultimately stop terrorist financing. The Times’ story conceded that this program was successful in obstructing terrorist activity and it identified no abuses.

Top administration officials pleaded with the Times not to publish the story, and President George W. Bush said publication was “disgraceful.” Times editor Bill Keller’s justification: “the administration’s” — not the government’s, but the administration’s — “extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data ... is a matter of public interest.”

In other words, the Times didn’t care much about weakening America’s fight against terrorism by disclosing classified information and revealing intelligence sources and methods. It was more interested in letting the sunshine in on a program which, to the best of its knowledge, had infringed no one’s rights.

Some called for prosecution of the Times for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which criminalized the publication of classified information and was signed by President Woodrow Wilson two months after the U.S. entered World War I. But as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in his 1998 book Secrecy: The American Experience, the Espionage Act is over-broad and the government tends to over-classify information, including even newspaper articles.

Accordingly, successive administrations, up to and including George W. Bush’s, have declined to prosecute news media for publishing stories, including leaks of classified information, that seem clearly forbidden by the words of Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act.

June 06, 2019 9:02 AM  
Anonymous Garland, Goresuch & Kavanaugh...two outta three ain't bad said...

Abandoning that precedent was the administration of President Barack Obama, who described himself as “a strong believer in the First Amendment” and dismissed “stories about us cracking down on whistleblowers or whatnot” as “a really small sample.”

Actually, they were an unprecedentedly large number. James Risen, co-byliner on the Times’s original Swift story, wrote in December 2016 that the Obama administration “has prosecuted nine cases involving whistleblowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined.”

Obama’s Justice Department subpoenaed Associated Press phone records of AP trunk lines and 30 separate phones. It identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in an Espionage Act leak case. The supposedly liberal and pro-First Amendment Obama administration was actively pursuing what the Columbia Journalism Review called “a massive intrusion into newsgathering operations.”

It’s true that Obama did not emit as many tart words for the press in his eight years as president as Trump has in his two and a half. But Trump has come nowhere near to challenging Obama’s record as the president most inclined to sic law enforcement on the press since Woodrow Wilson himself. Liberal Democrats aren’t the best friends of press freedom.

Nor, it seems, are they necessarily friends of a citizen’s right of privacy or a candidate’s right to seek public office without government surveillance. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when Barr made the point that government “spying” had occurred on the Trump campaign, Democrats and the press expressed horror. You’re not supposed to say “spying,” apparently, even though Democrats and media such as the Times have routinely used that word as a conveniently short and understandable synonym for government surveillance.

As Barr told Crawford, spying is appropriate if it’s “adequately predicated,” and it’s unclear whether the spying on the Trump campaign was. Certainly, the contents of the partisan and unverified Steele dossier would not have provided legitimate grounds on their own.

Barr is old enough to remember when liberals did not take government legal or intelligence agencies’ word that spying on an administration’s opponents was justified, when they did not attack those who questioned it as unpatriotic.

He may be amused that such doings are self-righteously justified today. But it’s good that he’s willing to ask questions most of the media doesn't want asked, to determine how the Obama law enforcement and intelligence agencies set about spying on the opposite party’s presidential campaign

June 06, 2019 9:03 AM  
Anonymous drip...drip..drip.......Mueller's prosecutorial abuse said...

Veteran journalist Art Moore was editing a story on the Trump-Russia probe last October when he heard a knock at the door. He saw a couple of men in suits on the front porch of his suburban Seattle home and thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses making the rounds. But they weren’t missionaries there to convert him; they were FBI agents there to interrogate him, sent by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The G-men wanted to talk about WikiLeaks, specifically whether the Trump campaign had any connection to the hacktivist group’s release of thousands of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election.

The two FBI agents – cyber-crimes experts Jared Brown and Aleks Kobzanets, the latter of whom had a Russian accent – grilled Moore, an editor for the news site WND.com, for about 90 minutes. Among other things, they asked about former WND correspondent Jerome Corsi and whether he had any advance knowledge of WikiLeaks' dumps of Clinton campaign emails. Corsi, who is friendly with the president, had used Trump confidante Roger Stone as a source during the campaign.

“They were clearly on a fishing expedition,” Moore said, recounting the incident to RealClearInvestigations publicly for the first time.

“They seemed desperate to find something to hang onto the narrative” of Russian collusion, he said.

A former Associated Press and Christianity Today reporter who co-authored a best-selling book on homeland security, Moore said he believed the special counsel secretly looked through not just his personal emails and text messages, but also his phone records, even though the agents assured him he was not a target of investigation.

Weeks earlier, two other agents had shown up -- also unannounced -- at the suburban Virginia home of his boss, WND.com founder and editor Joseph Farah, asking similar questions about WikiLeaks. They focused on staff editorial conference calls Corsi had joined in August and October 2016. They asked who normally edited the stories filed by Corsi. Farah mentioned Moore, and another team of agents was deployed to Gig Harbor, Wash., where Moore works from home.

Not long after the interrogation, the 64-year-old Farah suffered a stroke and is still incapacitated. His nationally syndicated column has been suspended indefinitely as he undergoes therapy.

Now that Mueller has ended his probe finding no election collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, 10 witnesses and targets of his sprawling, $35 million investigation agreed to speak with RealClearInvestigations because they are no longer in legal jeopardy. They include several people who became household names during the two-year probe – including George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Roger Stone – as well as lesser-known figures whose lives were also upended and finances imperiled when they came into Mueller’s crosshairs. Only three of the 10, Papadopoulos, Stone and a political consultant named Sam Patten, were charged with a crime. Patten received three years probation but no jail time for failing to register as a foreign agent; Papadopoulos served 12 days for lying to federal agents; and Stone awaits trial on false statements, witness-tampering and obstruction charges.

June 06, 2019 9:18 AM  
Anonymous drip...drip..drip.......Mueller's prosecutorial abuse said...

Their firsthand accounts pull back the curtain on the secret inner workings of the Mueller probe, revealing how the special counsel's nearly two dozen prosecutors and 40 FBI agents used harshly aggressive tactics to pressure individuals to either cop to crimes or implicate others in felonies involving collusion.

Although they interacted with Mueller’s team at different times and in different places, the witnesses and targets often echoed each other. Almost all decried what they called Mueller’s “scorched earth” methods that affected their physical, mental and financial health. Most said they were forced to retain high-priced Washington lawyers to protect them from falling into "perjury traps" for alleged lying, which became the special counsel’s charge of last resort. In the end, Mueller convicted four Trump associates for this so-called process crime, and investigated an additional five individuals for allegedly making false statements – including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Some subjects of investigation said Mueller’s agents and prosecutors tried to pressure them into admitting things to give the appearance of collusion. They demanded to know if they had spoken to anyone with a “Russian accent.” They threatened to jail them "for life" and to drag their wives or girlfriends into the investigation.

Former special prosecutors say the tactics used by Mueller’s team appear excessive.

“You have to be particularly sensitive to preventing agents and prosecutors from becoming a runaway train of righteousness that might otherwise justify conduct that is questionable or unnecessarily gratuitous,” former Independent Counsel Robert Ray said.

Witnesses said Mueller’s office not only seized their emails and text messages, but also obtained their call records from their service providers, as well as their travel records, including flight and hotel information. His team literally poked around in their garbage cans, they said, and looked at their Google searches, among other invasive actions.

Some have formally complained to the Justice Department that their privacy was violated. Others have filed legal complaints, maintaining the Special Counsel’s Office abused its authority. Corsi, for one, is suing Mueller personally for millions of dollars for unconstitutionally spying on him and harassing him and his family, as well as allegedly leaking secret grand jury information about him to the press in violation of his privacy rights. Still others want to see Mueller’s office criminally investigated for prosecutorial misconduct.

“Leaking grand jury hearing information to the press is a crime,” said former Independent Counsel Sol Wisenberg. “It can never be justified.”

June 06, 2019 9:19 AM  
Anonymous drip...drip..drip.......Mueller's prosecutorial abuse said...

It’s not clear if Attorney General William Barr’s recently announced review of the Trump-Russia investigation includes looking into the conduct of Mueller’s team, which was assembled and led by Mueller’s chief prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined to comment beyond his final report. But Mueller in his press conference last week praised the professionalism of the prosecutors and investigators who helped conduct his probe, insisting they did so in a “fair and independent manner” and with “the highest integrity."

These 10 witnesses find it beyond ironic that some partisans are now faulting Mueller for not doing enough to find incriminating evidence against Trump and his associates – “He blew it!” liberal HBO political talk show host Bill Maher said. They find it chilling that, equally unsatisfied, congressional Democrats seek to re-interview Mueller’s witnesses. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., has sent letters to some of the peripheral witnesses interviewed for this story, demanding they produce more documents and testify before his panel, forcing them to relive their nightmare.

These witnesses complain that Democrats are simply retreading old ground. They note that Mueller sent agents hopscotching across the country as well as overseas to look for evidence that Donald Trump and his men were tools of the Kremlin.

His witness list, which grew to more than 500, targeted conservative journalists and authors, conservative think tank analysts and Republican congressional staffers. Witnesses were compelled to comply with more than 2,800 grand jury subpoenas and nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants. Casting an even wider net, Mueller also issued 230 orders for communications records and almost 50 orders authorizing use of “pen registers” – devices that record dialed numbers -- to collect phone records on individuals, most of whom turned out to be innocent.

But, the 10 witnesses swept up in the inquiry say those facts and figures, as well as the final determination that there was no conspiracy or collusion with the Russians, do not begin to account for the human toll of the Mueller probe.

They want their stories told as a public record of the broken lives Mueller’s team has left in its wake.

Details of each of the ten can be found here:

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/05/30/scorched_earth_lives_upturned_muellers_targets_speak_out.html

June 06, 2019 9:20 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...


If Tяump continues to succeed at installing himself as president for life, as he said he would do, the American Stock Markets will be worthless.

June 06, 2019 2:35 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

If you're scared now about your American Stock Market Portfolio, just wait until its obvious to the majority of Americans its too late and Trump has seized absolute power as Wyatt and Regina Hardiman and their church and Tony Perkins with his Russian alliance have been aiding him in doing.

June 06, 2019 2:38 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

That's what all this "investigate the investigators" thing that Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous/northdallasthirty/Tony Perkins/the Russians are pushing.

Trump worked his way through all the top Justice Department top people who, as rule of law demanded, had implemented a counter-intelligence investigation into how deep the Russian influence went on Trump and family. The Justice Department has buried that counter intelligence investigation. No one knows what it found, how it finished or why, its just never been heard from again.

So, Trump fired, by his own admission due to his being investigated, Comey, Sessions, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe and about a dozen other top Justice Department officials and replaced them with his lackeys who auditioned for their jobs by publicly praising Trump and saying he should be allowed to do whatever he wants, he's like Jesus.

The message to the tens of thousands of loyal Justice Department employees?

"If you oppose or expose our criminal actions in anyway to try and fulfill your duty to protect the constitution, Tяump & Co. are coming after you. We will smear you, we will destroy you financially and professionally."

June 06, 2019 2:44 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

What Trump and Wyatt/Regina/Tony Perkins are doing is systematically destroying the moral of every honest Justice Department employee by threatening to destroy them if they try to follow the rule of law.

Trump and his supporters are making their greatest effort to install him as dictator. Will Democrats and loyal Republicans defend American Democracy and say loudly to Trump and the Russians "NO MORE!"?

June 06, 2019 2:47 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

My first paragraph in my previous comment should have ended with "is all about.".

June 06, 2019 2:48 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

♫ Nazi America here we come... ♫

June 06, 2019 2:52 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The constitutionally authorized organization is investigating the Mueller investigators just as they did other investigators Republicans attack (and they exonerated those Mueller investigators of any wrongdoing that would have or could have biased the investigation into Trump/Russia collusion.

Since that time, Trump and his lackeys like hired thug AG William Barr, have opened another three investigations into the investigators.

Its obvious what Barr is doing for Trump here. He's going to keep demanding investigations from the Justice Department of the Mueller team until he gets the answer he wants. Something that will create the false impression Trump isn't guilty of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice in the cover-up many Republicans are helping Trump with.

June 06, 2019 3:00 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Think it over Republicans.

I know your tactic is to just blindly push for more and more power but think where its taking your country.

If Trump does succeed in becoming American Dictator, he's going to loot the country's wealth for him and his top supporters.

That stock market portfolio of yours will be worthless if Trump grabs enough power to subordinate congress and the judiciary to his will.

June 06, 2019 3:57 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Evangelical Americans have been long working with the Russians and other foreign countries to suppress and punish lgbt people, almost always opposing the repeal of laws that punish or execute people for being gay.

Evangelical Americans admire Russia and want to remake the United States in its form.

In Russia for all practical intents and purposes, it is illegal to be gay. Evangelical Americans helped Russian law makers draft the current Russian law that takes away the right to free speech from gays in Soviet Russia.

June 06, 2019 4:01 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Trump's appointment of gay basher Tony Perkins to a powerful foreign policy decision is a demonstration of the Trump administration's willingness to crush lgbt people in order to appease American evangelicals who, believe it or not, will sacrifice a large part of their own wealth in exchange for Trump punishing the people they hate most - harmless lgbts.

Read about the decades of research on Right Wing Authoritarians like Wyatt/Regina and their church:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view

June 06, 2019 4:04 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Make no mistake about it, Trump and evangelical christians like Tony Perkins will turn the United States into Russia if the rest of Americans don't stop them.

June 06, 2019 4:07 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Trump is using every lever of the awesome power of the presidency to increase his personal wealth and power. And he's constantly grasping for ever more power and control while using a flood of lies to turn his base into a blindly loyal mob enjoying the blanket mockery of truth. They will do anything he asks, even attack American democracy itself - look at the posts by Wyatt/Regina/Tony Perkins above.

June 06, 2019 4:19 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Evangelical Americans like Tony Perkins know the tide is turning against religious authoritarianism. They see the public increasingly favours fairness for all versus rigid hierarchical control that benefits only the most wealthy.

They see the share of the Republican vote has been continuously shrinking for decades as the public continues to reject the party's extreme heavy handedness.

So Republicans and their primary suppoorters, evangelical christians see this Trump power grab for dictatorial control of the United States as their last, best chance to impose their will on an increasingly liberal America and to profit from punishing the less wealthy who's poverty they see as a sign of moral failing.

June 06, 2019 4:30 PM  
Anonymous Garland, Goresuch & Kavanaugh...two outta three ain't bad said...

During the rise of Donald Trump, he would send out a tweet and tens of thousands of his supporters would line the streets. When Trump would mention Hillary Clinton, the crowd would erupt into a chant of “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

After his win, Trump could have followed through on that request from the faithful. Instead he was magnanimous toward his rival.

"I don't want to hurt the Clintons, I really don't," Trump said in an interview televised two weeks after his victory. "She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways."

Trump soon announced his pick for Attorney General. It was U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, a hapless hayseed from Alabama. Sessions promptly recused himself from any investigation into Clinton’s actions regarding that infamous email server.

I suspect things might have worked out differently if Trump had chosen as his AG an experienced and aggressive prosecutor like Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie.

At the Republican convention that year, Christie had elicited chants of “Lock her up!” from the crowd.

Here’s what Christie had to say in his recent book “Let Me Finish” about Sessions’ decision to recuse himself in the Clinton case as well as in the Russia controversy:

“If Jeff Sessions felt such a burning need to recuse himself because he had somehow been compromised by his role in the campaign, he certainly had an obligation to tell the president-elect before being nominated as attorney general.”

He did indeed. At that point Trump could have replaced him with an attorney general who had the common sense. There never would have been a Mueller Report.

There was, however, and it gave the Democrats two years of fun before America learned there was no “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

Still, many Democrats are insisting that their majority in the House should go ahead and impeach Trump anyway.

Here's my advice: Quit while you’re not too far behind.

June 07, 2019 8:39 AM  
Anonymous Garland, Goresuch & Kavanaugh...two outta three ain't bad said...

Many Democrats want to impeach Trump on the grounds that in that Russia inquiry the president put his thumb on the scales of justice.

But that’s exactly what he did when he publicly announced his Justice Department would not be going after Hillary Clinton.

Some Trump supporters complained about that. But I didn’t hear any Democrats do so.

It was a case of the shoe being on the other foot, which is a theme of the book “The Case Against Impeaching Trump” by Alan Dershowitz.

In the book, the Harvard law professor, who is generally sympathetic to liberal causes and is a zealous defender of civil liberties, cautions his fellow Democrats not to get carried away with their attacks on Trump.

Dershowitz argues that there’s nothing illegal or impeachable about a president giving orders to his appointees in the Justice Department.

He writes “under our constitutional structure the president may direct the attorney general and the head of the FBI as to who and what to investigate and/or charge with crimes as well as who not to investigate and charge with crimes.”

What the Democrats are calling “obstruction of justice” is simply the exercise of constitutionally permitted presidential powers, Dershowitz argues.

That hasn’t stopped people who should know better from baying for impeachment.

Dershowitz noted that among them was his fellow Harvard Law School professor, Laurence Tribe.

Normally a calm and collected commentator, Tribe got hot under the collar when the subject was Trump.

A month after the 2016 election, Tribe tweeted that impeachment proceedings should begin “on Inauguration Day.”

A week after the inauguration, Tribe tweeted that “Trump must be impeached for abusing his power and shredding the Constitution more monstrously than any other president in modern history.”

Trump gets that sort of emotional reaction from both sides of the spectrum. For every MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporter, there’s a committed liberal who believes Trump’s mere existence is an affront to our constitutional system.

That’s certainly their right. But if Hillary had won the presidency, there would have been just as many Trump supporters calling for her impeachment – at a time when both houses were in Republican hands.

This is a precedent that I for one don’t want to see set. Before long our presidential elections would become an endless game of musical chairs - with vice-presidents waiting in the wings for the music to stop.

There’s another means of replacing presidents. A mere 17 months from now, the voters will have that option.

I would urge the Democrats to direct their efforts toward the 2020 election.

But if they want to start an impeachment at this late date, all I can say is good luck.

You’ll need it.

June 07, 2019 8:39 AM  
Anonymous Woman And Girlfriend Beaten On London Night Bus ‘For Refusing To Kiss For Group Of Men’ said...

Police are investigating after a woman and her girlfriend were assaulted and robbed by a group of men on a London night bus.

Ryanair flight attendant Melania Geymonat, 28, from Uruguay, was on a date with a woman called Chris when the incident began to unfold aboard the N1 night bus in West Hampstead, after a night out on Thursday, May 30.

Writing in a Facebook post, accompanied by a picture of couple looking bloodied and distressed, Geymonat described how the group of four men targeted them after spotting them kiss.

She wrote: “They started behaving like hooligans, demanding that we kissed so they could enjoy watching, calling us ‘lesbians’ and describing sexual positions.

“I don’t remember the whole episode, but the word ‘scissors’ stuck in my mind. It was only them and us there. In an attempt to calm things down, I started making jokes. I thought this might make them go away.

“Chris even pretended she was sick, but they kept on harassing us, throwing coins and becoming more enthusiastic about it. The next thing I know is Chris is in the middle of the bus fighting with them.

“On an impulse, I went over there only to find her face bleeding and three of them beating her up. The next thing I know is I’m being punched. I got dizzy at the sight of my blood and fell back. I don’t remember whether or not I lost consciousness. Suddenly the bus had stopped, the police were there and I was bleeding all over. Our stuff was stolen as well.”

Geymonat is still waiting to learn if her nose was broken in the attack and remains off work.

She added: “What upsets me the most is that VIOLENCE HAS BECOME A COMMON THING, that sometimes it’s necessary to see a woman bleeding after having been punched to feel some kind of impact. I’m tired of being taken as a SEXUAL OBJECT, of finding out that these situations are usual, of gay friends who were beaten up JUST BECAUSE. We have to endure verbal harassment AND CHAUVINIST, MISOGYNISTIC AND HOMOPHOBIC VIOLENCE because when you stand up for yourself shit like this happens.

“By the way, I am thankful to all the women and men in my life that understand that HAVING BALLS MEANS SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. I just hope that in June, Pride Month, stuff like this can be spoken out loudly so they STOP HAPPENING!”

Both women were taken to hospital for treatment for facial injuries and a phone and bag were stolen during the assault.

The Met Police have confirmed they are investigating the attack and have appealed for witnesses to contact police.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has also appealed for witnesses, branding the attack “disgusting and misogynistic.”

According to Stonewall, one in five LGBT people have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their sexual orientation and/ or gender identity in the last 12 months, with four in five of those going unreported.

June 07, 2019 9:28 AM  
Anonymous New abortion laws are too extreme for most Americans, poll shows said...

Recent efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to enact some of the most restrictive abortion laws in decades go against the views of most Americans, according to the latest poll from the PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist, which could spark a backlash against the party in the 2020 elections.

Only 33 percent of Americans support so-called “heartbeat laws” that have gained traction in several states this year, the poll found. The laws prohibit abortions after cardiac activity is detectable at around six to eight weeks, which can be before a woman realizes she is pregnant.

Similarly, less than a quarter of U.S. adults support making it a crime for a doctor to perform an abortion — a provision included in a recently-passed Alabama law that bans nearly all abortions.

Sixty-three percent of Americans favor laws that allow abortions in cases of rape and incest. And 86 percent support laws enabling abortion if it protects the life or health of a woman. But a majority of Americans do not support allowing abortion in any circumstance, a sign that far-left positions on the issue — such as those being pushed by some Democratic lawmakers in places like Vermont — are just as politically risky as the conservative laws being passed in Alabama, Mississippi and elsewhere.

“The debate is about the extreme, and that’s not where the public is,” said Barbara Carvalho, the director of the Marist Poll.

There is some common ground among the majority of Americans who do not fall on the extreme right and left ends of the spectrum on the abortion issue. For example, roughly two-thirds of Americans are in favor of requiring women to wait 24 hours between meeting with a health professional to undergo an abortion procedure, and support requiring doctors who perform abortions to have hospital admitting privileges.

Those sorts of restrictions were routinely introduced by GOP-held legislatures in past years. But in recent months, conservative lawmakers from both parties have been more willing to push the boundaries, even at the risk of alienating some of their constituents who hold more nuanced views on abortion.

“I don’t believe in killing things but I think there are exceptions to almost everything,” said 77-year-old Elizabeth Clare Hunt, a Republican voter who identifies as pro-choice and lives in Nevada, where lawmakers recently voted to expand abortion rights. She said politicians are relying too heavily on politically-charged terms like “heartbeat” and “viability” that mean little to the average person.

Instead, many voters say their views are informed by personal experiences. Georgia resident Marques Wright, 37, said his mother decided not to have an abortion when she was pregnant with his older sibling and that has caused him to identify as pro-life.

“At the same time, I can’t tell a woman what I can and can’t do with her body,” he said.

Americans’ views on specific abortion policies tend to remain stable over time, historical polling shows, but whether Americans identify as pro-choice or pro-life routinely shifts based on the national discourse at the time.

When lawmakers “change the debate toward the most extreme position on the issue, they actually do the opposite of what they want to accomplish. They move public opinion in the opposite direction,” Carvalho said.

Nationwide, 57 percent of Americans consider themselves “pro-choice,” compared to only 35 percent who consider themselves “pro-life,” according to the NewsHour-NPR-Marist poll conducted in June.*

In February when much of the debate was around a controversial New York law that expanded access to abortion, an equal number of Americans, 47 percent, said they identified as either “pro-choice” or “pro-life.” Only one month prior, in January, the number of people identifying as “pro-choice” was 55 percent, compared to 38 percent who identified as “pro-life.”..

June 07, 2019 9:41 AM  
Anonymous Dr. John, Hall of Fame Singer Who Brought New Orleans to the World, Dead at 77 said...

RIP, Mac.

June 07, 2019 9:58 AM  
Anonymous Rickie Lee Jones said...

Good bye Mac. I still remember the day we met. I was 23 years old. I saw you coming on La Brea Avenue, sauntering toward me in your full on Mojo protection clothes, with the snake head cane, beret, and patchouli oil, me in my beret, 40's dress and and red mules. we fell for each other, didnt we? Then you came to my dads for Mardi Gras Gumbo, you
Tom Waits and chuck E.
That first day, we went directly round back of A&M records, to a piano in a bungalow, and I sang Since I fell for You. and My Funny Valentine. (same thing i sang with James Booker two years later for WOZ first fund raiser. when i first moved to New Orleans you said.." go listen to James. he is the real shit." and that was how James and I became friends.) we drove around that summer in your station wagon. over the canyon, back over the canyon.
then, ten years later you asked me to sing on your record,
and we had a big hit together.
You go now. I'll holla at you later.

June 07, 2019 10:24 AM  
Anonymous Makin' Whoopie said...

Thanks, Mac,

June 07, 2019 10:26 AM  

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