Two Sides
Recently in the news, a fairly unsurprising type of story. Some women had to sue in order to get their rape kits processed. Instead of pursuing the cases, police and judges had been saying things like, "You shouldn't have been out alone at night."
I know, I know, but I want to think about it for a minute. The country right now is in a state of deep division, and it is because some people think like this, and some people think you should blame the rapist and not the victim.
These are two very different ways of thinking, two assumptions about why we are here and how we should handle ourselves as citizens and as human beings.
First is the belief that bad people are an inevitable reality of the world, and it is commonsense to avoid being hurt by them. For instance, if women stayed indoors and dressed modestly and avoided alcohol and went out in groups there would be fewer opportunities to rape them, and they would be safer. If gay people stay closeted it is less likely that rednecks will harass them. Also black people, if they stayed "in their place," stayed on their side of town and worked in their kind of jobs, police wouldn't shoot them so much and white people wouldn't keep dangling nooses near them. If Mexicans just stayed in Mexico, you get what I'm saying. There is danger, and the solution is to avoid it by staying where you belong and doing what you should do.
To many, it is simply realistic to assume that there are bad people who will do bad things, and the rational approach is to take care not to provoke them. Some of those bad people are very powerful and, again, the smart thing is to be careful not to upset them. To people who think this way, that's just reality, and it's crazy not to accept it.
The other view is that bad behaviors should be eliminated or reduced, and bad people should be responsible for what they do. Say a gay person or a black person, a Hmong or a Sikh or a Jew, ventures into a hostile suburb and gets beaten up. From this second point of view you would blame the racists or homophobes who committed the violence, and take steps to stop them from behaving in this way. If this sort of thing is a common problem you could address it as a social issue and try to change it through norms or even laws. The idea would be that people should be able to walk around in public and do what they need to do without being harassed or discriminated against. From this point of view it seems that the problem is intolerance, and society's goal is to reduce activities based on intolerance that affect the recipient (aka victim) of such behaviors.
Two different points of view, and we all see it both ways, depending on context and our own motives. Life is frightening and we should be careful, life is good but it could be better.
I know, I know, but I want to think about it for a minute. The country right now is in a state of deep division, and it is because some people think like this, and some people think you should blame the rapist and not the victim.
These are two very different ways of thinking, two assumptions about why we are here and how we should handle ourselves as citizens and as human beings.
First is the belief that bad people are an inevitable reality of the world, and it is commonsense to avoid being hurt by them. For instance, if women stayed indoors and dressed modestly and avoided alcohol and went out in groups there would be fewer opportunities to rape them, and they would be safer. If gay people stay closeted it is less likely that rednecks will harass them. Also black people, if they stayed "in their place," stayed on their side of town and worked in their kind of jobs, police wouldn't shoot them so much and white people wouldn't keep dangling nooses near them. If Mexicans just stayed in Mexico, you get what I'm saying. There is danger, and the solution is to avoid it by staying where you belong and doing what you should do.
To many, it is simply realistic to assume that there are bad people who will do bad things, and the rational approach is to take care not to provoke them. Some of those bad people are very powerful and, again, the smart thing is to be careful not to upset them. To people who think this way, that's just reality, and it's crazy not to accept it.
The other view is that bad behaviors should be eliminated or reduced, and bad people should be responsible for what they do. Say a gay person or a black person, a Hmong or a Sikh or a Jew, ventures into a hostile suburb and gets beaten up. From this second point of view you would blame the racists or homophobes who committed the violence, and take steps to stop them from behaving in this way. If this sort of thing is a common problem you could address it as a social issue and try to change it through norms or even laws. The idea would be that people should be able to walk around in public and do what they need to do without being harassed or discriminated against. From this point of view it seems that the problem is intolerance, and society's goal is to reduce activities based on intolerance that affect the recipient (aka victim) of such behaviors.
Two different points of view, and we all see it both ways, depending on context and our own motives. Life is frightening and we should be careful, life is good but it could be better.
posted by JimK at 1:53 PM
120 Comments:
Fox News Analyst Andrew Napolitano: The President Is Prepared To Commit A Felony To Get Reelected
What Andrew should have said is "Trummp is prepared to commit MORE felonies to get reelected.
Let's not forget that Trump's fixer Cohen was convicted of a campaign finance felony that Trump directed him to commit. Trump would have been charged with this crime and several others if he wasn't president.
Trump said in an interview he would accept dirt on his political opponents from foreign powers.
He added he might not tell the FBI.
"He added he might not tell the FBI."
I beg to differ. He said he would NOT call the FBI - "You don't call the FBI.". He was very clear that he would never call the FBI for anything.
Federal Election Commission Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub released a statement Thursday making clear that candidates for public office may not receive help from a foreign government, in what appeared to be a warning to President Trump, who said he would consider taking information about an opponent from another country.
Tweeting her statement, Weintraub wrote, “I would not have thought that I needed to say this.”
The head of the agency responsible for campaign finance laws clarified that any campaign that accepts help from a foreign government “risks being on the wrong end of a federal investigation.”
“Let me make something 100% clear to the American public and anyone running for public office,” Weintraub wrote. “It is illegal for any person to solicit, accept, or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with a U.S. election. This is not a novel concept.”
Weintraub put out the statement 24 hours after Trump told ABC News on Wednesday night that he would not necessarily report to law enforcement if a foreign national offered him political information.
President Trump: Okay, let’s put yourself in a position: you’re a congressman, somebody comes up and says, “Hey I have information on your opponent.” Do you call the FBI?
Stephanopoulos: If it’s coming from Russia you do.
President Trump: You don’t-- I’ll tell you what. I’ve seen a lot of things over my life. I don’t think in my whole life I’ve ever called the FBI. In my whole life. I don’t--you don’t call the FBI. You throw somebody out of your office, you do whatever you do—
Stephanopoulos: Al Gore got a stolen briefing book. He called the FBI.
President Trump: Well, that’s different. A stolen briefing book. This isn’t-- this is somebody who said, “We have information on your opponent.” Oh, let me call the FBI. Give me a break, life doesn’t work that way.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/abc-news-oval-office-interview-president-donald-trump/story?id=63688943
Looks like I scared away Wyatt/Regina/northdallasthirty/Tony Perkins/the Russians for good with my debating based on honesty and fairness.
Hee Hee Hee!
After letting outrage bubble for a couple of days, President Trump went into his safe cocoon on Fox News to try to tamp down on the blowback to his remarks that he would listen to oppo research from foreign governments, which wouldn’t be interference but would only be “information.”
Yet his walk-back was so incoherent and lacking in self-awareness as to be laughable, if it were not all so terribly frightful. Despite the fact that Russians repeatedly offered his campaign “dirt” on Hillary Clinton (and that Trump defended his son’s meeting in Trump Tower under the impression that he would be receiving such dirt), the president insisted, “I don’t think anybody would present me with anything because they know how much I love the country.”
Please. He loves America so much that he’d lie about doing a real estate deal during the campaign. He loves it so much that he encouraged Russia to release Clinton emails and proclaimed his love for the Russian cutout WikiLeaks. He loves it so much that he wouldn’t dissolve his businesses or stop take foreign monies. He loves it so much that he never expressed outrage that former members of his campaign committed felonies.
Trump continued in his mangled syntax: “Nobody’s gonna present me with anything bad, and No. 2, if I was — and of course, you have to look at it, because if you don’t look at it, you won’t know it’s bad, but, of course, you give it to the FBI or report it to attorney general or somebody like that.” He added: "But of course you do that — you couldn’t have that happen with our country, and everybody understands that and I thought it was made clear.” No, it wasn’t “made clear.”
Trump must have realized or someone close to him must have finally convinced him that his stated intention to break the law and renunciation of his oath to defend the Constitution would be a problem. He therefore spewed gobbledygook in an effort to wipe away the memory of his appalling comments.
Let’s keep in mind a few things. First, legions of Trump loyalists were willing to defend his original statements, statements so awful that even Trump now has walked them back. These hapless lackeys reveal daily how little moral or intellectual integrity they possess.
Second, you can see why Trump would never testify under oath to Robert S. Mueller III. Trump doesn’t know what is incriminating and what is not, who lies to cover up his own egregious remarks and who, in any case, is practically indecipherable.
Finally, despite daily evidence of his abject unfitness, no elected Republican — save perhaps Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) — would dream of denying him the nomination for another four years of his constitutional rampage. As is often the case, Trump’s defenders wind up getting their legs cut out from under them when Trump finally does an about-face. They, like Trump, are without shame. The only way to protect our democracy (not to mention our collective sanity) is to vote them all out.
The just-announced departure of White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders means very little. It’s not like she’s conducting the daily briefing; she stopped doing that more than three months ago. Reporters say the briefing room, which once bustled with jousting journalists and administration figures every single day, is now dusty and forlorn—a metaphor for the state of truth and justice under the Donald Trump administration.
Sanders lied so routinely it’s tough to make a list of her greatest hits. One big one came out in Robert Mueller’s report, when she told reporters she’d heard from “countless” FBI agents who were happy that Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. That was pretty clearly untrue; Comey was popular with FBI staff. Then she lied about her lie, telling Mueller it was a “slip of the tongue,” even though she was reading from a prepared text.
As recently as Monday, Sanders did not deny reports that Trump told his aides to lie about recent state polling showing him trailing Joe Biden in a 2020 matchup—maybe that was progress, that she didn’t lie—but she essentially defended Trump even if he did so. “Look, I think the polling got it completely wrong in 2016, I don’t think it’s right now,” she told CNN.
Of course, sometimes she got caught lying because Trump hung her out to dry. She tried to stick with the cover story around Comey’s firing—that it had to do with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s finding fault with his handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation. But hours later Trump told Lester Holt, “I was gonna fire him regardless of the recommendation,” and linked it to the Russia investigation.
Veteran ABC newsman Sam Donaldson called Sanders the most mendacious of all the press secretaries he’s seen going back to the John F. Kennedy administration. “She deserves a lifetime achievement Oscar for lying,” he said.
No doubt Sanders will be missed by the president because of her loyalty, but he has other staffers ready for their lying closeup. On Thursday, Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley tried to deny that Trump told George Stephanopoulos that he would welcome opposition research from a foreign country, even though video of the brazen and possibly treasonous claim was running every 20 minutes on cable news all day long. “He was very clear,” Gidley told Fox’s Shep Smith, the best journalist at the network. “If he got information and it was nefarious or ill-gotten in any way and it was wrongdoing he would absolutely take it to the FBI.”
“The president responded the FBI Director is wrong,” Smith countered. Smith was right; Gidley was lying. Maybe he was auditioning for Sanders’s role.
Also Thursday came the news that the US Office of Special Counsel said Kellyanne Conway should be removed from her White House role for multiple Hatch Act violations, essentially conducting partisan politics on government time. The head of the office, a Trump appointee, also was disturbed that Conway routinely publicly disparaged the investigation. “If you’re trying to silence me through the Hatch Act, it’s not going to work,” she told reporters. “Let me know when the jail sentence starts.” Of course, the White House is rejecting the counsel’s conclusion.
This is an administration of brazen liars, and they won’t get any less brazen or mendacious with Sanders’s departure. She’s told friends she’s interested in becoming governor of Arkansas, as her father did. That’s bad news for the people of Arkansas—they deserve a governor who’s good at honesty—but at least her toxicity will be confined to one state.
Mediaite reports: President Donald Trump took time to praise Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for blocking a Democratic bill that would have mandated reporting foreign election interference. Blackburn blocked Sen. Mark Warner’s (D-VA) attempt to pass a bill requiring campaigns to report any offers of foreign assistance to the FBI.
If Trump completes his dictatorial powergrab Mitch McConnell will have been the man who could have stopped it but chose to abet Trump in killing American Democracy instead.
The media’s tunnel vision and failure to pursue the natural line of questioning about foreign influence in the 2016 campaign are surreal. Think for a moment if Hillary Clinton had to answer truthfully about her activities. If she were honest, she would have to answer something like, “Why, yes, my campaign would, through the general counsel’s law firm, employ a foreign national to contact sources in the Russian government and try to develop opposition research to use against my opponent, and then take it to the FBI and the media in order to disrupt my opponent’s campaign.” Is there something about this I am missing?
Doesn’t the pearl-clutching over Trump saying that he might listen to whatever another government wants to share with him mean that those same pearl-clutchers should also be taking what Clinton’s campaign actually did very seriously? And yet, they are not. Instead, the Democrats and their allies in the media are savagely attacking Attorney General William Barr because he has rightly pledged to get to the bottom of how opposition research obtained and produced by foreigners for the sole purpose of disrupting one of the two viable presidential campaigns made its way into our system.
This is not just a case of two competing parties swapping blows. Nor is it just a case of “you investigate me, I’ll investigate you.” We need to know what happened within the Democratic campaign when it came to using foreign resources to concoct a story that then was used to trigger the power of government institutions for the purpose of damaging their political opponent. It is not enough just to conclude that Trump’s campaign did not collude with a foreign power. Just because Clinton did not win in 2016 does not mean we should not know the extent of what was done by her campaign and whether individuals in the Obama administration may have tried to help impact the election.
It is easy to complain of Russiagate fatigue; after all, we have been watching this saga unfold for nearly three years. But it is important to remember that the rest of the world has been watching, too – and not just Russia, but China and Iran and others. If our strategic adversaries see America open the Pandora’s box of a question like this and then never fully answer it, our weaknesses will be exposed, and they will be exploited again, and again. Learning the truth is not just a partisan excursion. The events of the last several months of the 2016 campaign still impact our politics today. The best chance there is of discouraging future actors from engaging in similar activity will be a thorough, transparent investigation and accounting of any wrongs that were committed and whatever harm was actually done.
And then, to lock her up. Just like you would anyone else.
"Recently in the news, a fairly unsurprising type of story"
unsurprising to TTF morons, that is
"Some women had to sue in order to get their rape kits processed. Instead of pursuing the cases, police and judges had been saying things like, "You shouldn't have been out alone at night.""
where did this happen?
"I know, I know, but I want to think about it for a minute. The country right now is in a state of deep division, and it is because some people think like this, and some people think you should blame the rapist and not the victim."
actually, there are so few people who think that rape shouldn't be prosecuted just because a woman was stupid enough to not take sensible precautions, that they could fit in a phone booth and still leave room for Superman to change and help fight crime the old-fashioned way: x-ray vision
"The country right now is in a state of deep division and it is because some people think like this"
no, it isn't
it's in deep division because Democrats are mad they lost an election and will do or say anything to overturn that election
"These are two very different ways of thinking, two assumptions about why we are here and how we should handle ourselves as citizens and as human beings."
there's a third way of thinking and it's a view most people hold: you should take sensible precautions against attacks by evil people and still prosecute them when they commit a crime
wonder why TTF doesn't think like that..
"For instance, if women stayed indoors and dressed modestly and avoided alcohol and went out in groups there would be fewer opportunities to rape them, and they would be safer. If gay people stay closeted it is less likely that rednecks will harass them. Also black people, if they stayed "in their place," stayed on their side of town and worked in their kind of jobs, police wouldn't shoot them so much and white people wouldn't keep dangling nooses near them. If Mexicans just stayed in Mexico, you get what I'm saying."
I see what you mean. so, if people didn't run campaigns against liberal progressive Democrats, those Democrats wouldn't have to lie about them
it's an idea as old as Marx himself
"Say a gay person or a black person,"
this is a tiresome ploy by lunatic fringe gay advocates but it's worth debunking
it is defamation to equate minority racial identity with perversion
being black is a physical characteristic
engaging in homosexual behavior is a choice, just like any other behavior
If President Trump is victorious again in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest, his path will likely go through abortion and climate change, two issues on which the Democrats are most inflamed, confident in their righteousness and willing to embrace radical policies that appeal to their own voters much more than anyone else.
Joe Biden, the relative moderate, has released a climate plan clearly derived from the “Green New Deal.”
Climate is a watchword among the Democratic presidential candidates — and an enormous downside risk. Once everyone on your own side agrees about an issue, and once you are convinced that you are addressing a planet-threatening crisis that will become irreversible in about a decade’s time, prudence and incrementalism begin to look dispensable.
There’s no doubt that climate is a top-tier issue for Democrats. In a CNN poll, 96% of Democrats say it’s very important that candidates support “taking aggressive action to slow the effects of climate change.”
It’s also true that the public is adopting climate orthodoxy. According to a survey by climate change programs at Yale and George Mason, 70% believe that climate change is happening, and 57% believe that humans are causing it.
It’s easy to over-interpret these numbers, though. While a big majority of Democrats see climate change as a problem, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found only 15% of Republicans and — more important — 47% of independents do.
Of course, saying climate change is a problem doesn’t cost anyone anything. An AP/University of Chicago poll asked people how much they were willing to pay to fight climate change, and 57% said $1 a month, or not even the cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
The political experience of other advanced democracies is a flashing red light. In Australia last month, the opposition lost what was supposed to be “the climate change” election, against all expectations. Polling showed that about 60% of Australians called climate change “a serious and pressing problem” and thought the government should address it “even if this involves significant costs.”
It turned out that it was one thing to tell that to pollsters and another to vote to make it happen. The opposition promised a 45% reduction in carbon emissions with no serious pain, while the conservative governing coalition focused on the cost — and won.
In France, gas hikes as part of a government plan to reduce carbon emissions by 75% sparked the yellow-vest movement in car-dependent suburbs and towns and had to be ignominiously reversed.
The politics of climate change are bound to remain problematic. The voters most opposed to the costs of climate action tend to be the kind of “deplorables” most easily dismissed by center-left parties at their own peril: voters in rural Queensland in Australia, economically distressed residents of unfashionable areas of France, working-class voters in the American Rust Belt.
The real felt urgency of climate change won’t anytime soon match the rhetoric of the advocates. There’s currently an effort to make every US drought or flood, tornado or hurricane, a symptom of an alleged climate emergency. This approach may pay some dividends, but it hardly reflects a careful accounting of the data.
According to Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute, the Palmer Drought Severity Index doesn’t show a trend since 1895, and the pattern of US flooding over the past century doesn’t track with global warming; there has been no trend in US tornados since 1945, and little trend in tropical storms and hurricanes since the early 1970s.
Bearing real costs for the sake of the climate will always be a sucker’s game for any one country so long as there isn’t a global regime mandating emission reductions (and, thankfully, there isn’t anything remotely like the political will for such a regime). It was supposed to be a disaster when Trump pulled out of the Paris accords, but G-20 countries haven’t been on pace to meet their goals regardless.
Finally, whatever the costs, no one is going to feel any climate benefits anytime soon; even the radical Green New Deal wouldn’t make much difference. All this should counsel caution rather than apocalyptic rhetoric and policies, although Trump has every reason to hope it doesn’t.
To What extent does the two-year political investigation into Donald Trump and his top aides and family members, based on suspicions of treacherous “collusion” with the Russian government, represent a kind of McCarthyism? Most people involved in that investigation no doubt would be aghast at the question. After all, they might say, they were only trying to save the country from an obviously bad man who had both motive and opportunity to scheme with the Russians for his own nefarious purposes. Even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller made clear that his two-year investigation could find no evidence of collusion to justify any legal action, many on the anti-Trump Left continued to insist that it had happened and they would continue the assault.
But Mueller’s finding of no collusion does raise questions about the propriety of an inquiry based on suspicions and fragments of evidence that never added up to any serious proof of such cravenness. That was a frequent complaint about McCarthyism back in the days of its greatest menacing influence. And, just as Senator Joseph McCarthy sought to leverage his allegations of communist collusion into partisan political advantage, so too did Trump’s accusers seek to bring down a president and curtail his range of executive action.
TO EXPLORE the issue further, it’s helpful to explore what is meant by McCarthyism. Webster’s defines it as “the use of indiscriminate, often unfounded, accusations, sensationalism, inquisitorial investigative methods, etc., ostensibly in suppression of communism.”
The motive of suppressing communism no longer applies, of course, as the primary sources of anticommunist anxiety in McCarthy’s day—the expansionist Soviet empire and its Chinese counterpart—no longer exist. But today’s obsession with Russia as a threat, although it represents hardly a fragment of the old postwar capacity for menace, could be considered a stand-in for the anti-Soviet obsession of old.
What about “indiscriminate, often unfounded, accusations”? The Russia collusion episode certainly qualifies on that count. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee (now chairman), said he had “plenty of evidence of collusion or conspiracy”—and, he added, this was “more than circumstantial evidence.” Given Mueller’s ultimate conclusion on the same question, with all of the investigative resources at his command, one has to wonder what evidence Schiff was talking about. Meanwhile, another California Democrat, Eric Swalwell, accused Trump of being an “agent” of Russia. He added, by way of elaboration, “he certainly acts on Russia’s behalf.”
These accusations also comport with Webster’s definitional element of “sensationalism.” But it’s even more sensational and damaging when coming from former top-level intelligence officials, such as James Clapper and John Brennan. Brennan said that “Watergate pales really, in my view, compared to what we’re confronting now.” He described Trump’s claim of no collusion as “hogwash,” which was a roundabout accusation of treason. He dispensed with the circumlocution when he called Trump’s performance in Helsinki, Finland, following a summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin, “nothing short of treasonous.”
Clapper, meanwhile, invoked the constitutional definition of treason when he said Trump was “essentially aiding and abetting the Russians” though he later said he used the term “only in a...colloquial sense,” whatever that means. Asked if Trump was a Russian asset, as former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe had suggested was possible, Clapper said, “I completely agree with the way Andy characterized it.” He added a “caveat” that it could have been “witting or unwitting.”
Here we get to a fundamental element of McCarthyism, which can be illustrated by an exploration of the real McCarthy and his followers back in the early 1950s. These days we often see, in Hollywood movies and intellectual history, a view of the Wisconsin senator as coming out of the blue, roiling a serene nation with utterly false and brutal accusations of communist activity when there was no such threat at all.
Not so. A couple weeks before McCarthy’s first anticommunism rant, Alger Hiss, accused of passing secret U.S. documents to a Soviet spy when he was a high-level government official, was convicted of perjury. It was a signal victory for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the communist-hunting panel of Congress, and a great embarrassment for members of the country’s Northeastern elite who had testified on behalf of Hiss’ integrity and patriotism. Two weeks later, the government reported that Klaus Fuchs, a British physicist who had worked at the Los Alamos atomic-weapons facility during the war, had been arrested as a Soviet spy. This was powerful stuff when most Americans believed, correctly, that the U.S. nuclear monopoly had been the margin of security in saving Western Europe from being overrun by the Soviets.
IN OTHER words, McCarthyism is about how people behave even when there is reason for concern or even alarm, as there was in McCarthy’s day. If there was reason to be concerned about Trump’s possible relationship with the Kremlin, that doesn’t excuse abuses of political discourse any more than Hiss and Fuchs served as excuses for McCarthy’s.
Further, in McCarthy’s day, the matter was complicated by the fact that the West’s greatest postwar threat, Bolshevik Russia, had been the West’s great ally during World War II. It was natural that there would be many Soviet sympathizers during that period of close collaboration between America and the Soviet Union. Afterward, of course, everything changed, and many of these sympathizers were caught in the crosswinds. The lingering question was whether some of these people still harbored sympathies toward the Soviets to an extent that constituted a danger to the republic.
No doubt some did, but it was important to draw a distinction between those who had engaged in innocent folly and those who still represented security and loyalty risks. Here we get to Clapper’s “witting or unwitting” caveat regarding Trump.
Clapper, it seems, was seeking to expand the definition of official wrongdoing to ensnare Trump even without any evidence of corrupt intent—in other words, unwitting wrongdoing, like, say, suggesting that it would be good if America and Russia could have cordial relations. We know, based on Clapper’s public pronouncements, what he thinks of that idea. He abhors it because he considers Russia to be a clear and present threat to America. Trump, by contrast, thinks whatever threat Russia poses could possibly be mitigated through efforts to assuage tensions between the two countries.
Here we have a difference of outlook on a fundamental foreign policy issue. But Clapper’s construction of unwitting treachery allows him to leverage that difference of outlook into a brutal allegation of treason even absent any proof of intent. The outlook in itself constitutes prima facie evidence of nefarious behavior—or, as Swalwell and others put it, acting on Russia’s behalf.
HERE WE come to an essential element of McCarthyism, illustrated crisply by one of the first great political conflicts unleashed by the Wisconsin senator and his followers. It concerned the so-called China hands who influenced State Department thinking about Chinese Communism during World War II. The China hands derided the Middle Kingdom’s Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek as a hapless and corrupt figure stuck in China’s unsavory past. They glorified Mao Zedong’s communist cadres as disciplined and unsullied “agrarian reformers” who could lead China into the future.
With the advent of the Cold War, however, and with China falling to Mao’s Communist Party in 1949 and aligning itself with Moscow, a rancorous debate ignited over who had allegedly “lost” China.
One of the first to weigh in was the columnist Joseph Alsop, who produced a widely read three-part series on the subject for the Saturday Evening Post, one of the country’s most influential magazines of the day. Alsop had spent most of the war years in China, working for General Claire Chennault, and he had played a major role in the bureaucratic drama centered on U.S. policy toward China amidst war, intrigue, inscrutable motives, mendacity and civic hatreds. He knew what he was talking about, and he faulted the China hands for supreme wrongheadedness. As he summed up his thesis:
Throughout the fateful years in China, the American representatives there actively favored the Chinese communists. They also contributed to the weakness, both political and military, of the Nationalist Government. And in the end, they came close to offering China up to the communists, like a trussed bird on a platter, over four years before the eventual communist triumph.
It’s noteworthy, though, that Alsop took pains to maintain a certain fair-mindedness on the issue. These China hands, he wrote, may have been “injudicious,” but their advocacy was at least “logical, defensible and not indicative of disloyalty” . But ultimately, wrote Alsop, these men undermined the Nationalist regime so thoroughly that any kind of workable, noncommunist government became impossible.
It was a devastating series that, however, avoided any hint of nefarious intent on the part of the men whose actions he disparaged and whose influence he lamented. Thus did he avoid what soon would be dubbed McCarthyism.
Just days after Alsop’s third installment appeared, McCarthy stepped into the breach with his now-famous inflammatory speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he decried the existence of 205 or 57 communists (his precise stated number was later disputed) in the State Department. That unleashed the McCarthy era, characterized by, first, a frenzy to root out communists from government (and later from other walks of life); and, second, by a progressive erosion in the standards of proof that previously had been viewed as necessary for the kinds of allegations that McCarthy tossed around so promiscuously.
That erosion in standards of proof lay at the heart of McCarthyism. When an ex-communist-turned-red-hunter named Louis Budenz testified before the McCarthyite McCarran subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee and identified China hand John Carter Vincent as a onetime member of the Communist Party, Alsop perked up. Budenz had testified earlier without issuing such an accusation against Vincent. More significantly, Alsop had been involved when Vincent, traveling through China with Vice President Henry Wallace during World War II, had helped Wallace draft a memo to Franklin Roosevelt recommending the dismissal of America’s top military man in China, Joseph Stilwell.
Stilwell hated Chiang Kai-shek and couldn’t get along with him at all. In his naivete, he considered Mao’s communists just the ticket for China’s stability and modernity, and he worked to undermine Chiang at every turn while bolstering Mao for the internal struggle sure to emerge between the two men at war’s end. Thus Stilwell, though not a communist, was serving the Communist cause. And Vincent, now in McCarthy’s crosshairs, had worked to get Stilwell fired, hardly the actions of a Communist Party member.
Alsop asked to testify before the McCarran subcommittee on the matter and got Wallace to do the same. This was a dangerous endeavor for both men, given that the committee surely would seek to ensnare them in perjury traps. It was particularly dangerous for Wallace, a muddle-headed liberal who harbored sympathetic views toward the Soviet Union. But they got through their testimony and managed to nullify the Budenz accusation.
In the end, that gave Vincent merely a temporary reprieve from the pressures of McCarthyism, and he was forced out of the State Department two years later. With impressive agility, Budenz and others altered their story: the real point, they now said, wasn’t whether the communists liked Stilwell but rather their position on his removal. The Kremlin had had advance notice of his likely recall, the new story went, and hence official instructions to party sympathizers were to acquiesce in that policy.
WAS VINCENT a communist? The question was never answered definitively, in part because of the difficulty in proving a negative. But the key matter was standards of proof. The erosion in that hallmark of evenhanded justice was what allowed McCarthy to spread his havoc over the next four years.
And standards of proof certainly went out the window in the Trump collusion frenzy. Not only the government figures noted above but many journalists and commentators, cable news talking heads, editors and writers for major publications, Democratic members of Congress: all assumed the worst and spread the nasty word with abandon, absent any serious proof. After Mueller dispelled the notion of Trump collusion, John Brennan stepped up and acknowledged that he had been operating perhaps on the basis of “bad information.” He added: “I am relieved that it’s been determined there was not a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government over our election.” But he certainly hadn’t refrained from his accusatory zeal pending that outcome, which translates into a view that Trump was guilty at the bar of public discourse until proven otherwise. And even after the Mueller report many other anti-Trump figures eschewed the Brennan approach and took the Budenz route, merely altering the story to keep the accusation stream flowing. It’s a case of plus ca change if there ever was one
In the past 60 years, blacks have given 90% of their vote to Democrats.
Did you know that if that dropped to 80%, the Democrats wouldn't have won an election since then?
So, Donald Trump has done the following:
-supported school choice so that inner city kids won't be stuck in dangerous hellholes called public schools
-supported the elimination of mandatory sentencing laws imposed during the racist Clinton administration
-overseen an economy that has produced the lowest unemployment among minorities EVER
and now this:
Imagine if Donald Trump announced he would change his longtime opposition to public funding of abortion in order to ensure that black, Hispanic, and poor women can kill their babies. Would liberals need even 10 seconds before foaming at the mouth screaming that he’s a racist?
Last week in Atlanta, Joe Biden, Democrat presidential frontrunner for 2020, said: “For many years as a U.S. senator, I have supported the Hyde amendment as many, many others have because there was sufficient monies and circumstances where women were able to exercise that right to abortion, women of color, poor women, women were not able to have access…. But circumstances have changed.”
Thus, said Biden, “I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s zip code.”
In response, the crowd of wealthy white liberal women went wild, applauding ecstatically.
It was an incredible moment. A sick moment. Think about what Joe Biden said, to liberals’ roaring approval: He’s reversing his long-held position so “women of color, poor women” can get abortions — that is, have their abortions publicly paid for. He’s changing specifically because of women of color and poor women. He wants them to be able to have their abortions. He wants to make sure money isn’t an issue. He wants no obstacles to them securing their desire to abort their child. This change is prompted wholly on their behalf: “women of color, poor women.” Even long-held religious objections should be no barrier. Your belief in God, and your conviction that God would shudder at you helping to finance others’ abortions, plays second fiddle to the greater goal of these women getting abortions.
Naturally, liberals will recoil when seeing Biden’s comments framed that way. Biden, after all, is their boy, and Roe v. Wade is their baby. The hallowed “right to choose” is a sacrament in the liberal church. That abortion far and away disproportionately annihilates minority and especially African-Americans is dismissed in light of their ultimate highest good.
Then, there is the awful history of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, her work with the “Negro Project,” her commitment to racial eugenics for what she called “race improvement,” her May 1926 speech to the Silverlake, New Jersey chapter of the KKK, which she openly wrote about in her memoirs. Liberal cult-hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s assessment to the New York Times Magazine: “I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.”
Biden’s birth state of Pennsylvania is a state he hopes to take away from Donald Trump. The vast majority of Planned Parenthood clinics in Pennsylvania and throughout the nation are located among African-American populations. Looking strictly at Pennsylvania, the latest statistics show that 43% of abortions were to African-American women and 10% to Hispanic women. More remarkable is the sheer disproportionality: only 11% of Pennsylvania women are black and 7% are Hispanic.
Abortion in Pennsylvania, like everywhere else in America, victimizes minorities by leaps and bounds. The national figures show that abortions by black and Hispanic women outpace white women by 4.5 times. Some civil rights leaders, including Dr. Alveda King, have called this “Black Genocide.”
Well, America’s minorities should know how much Joe Biden has their back: he wants to make sure they get free abortions. In fact, it’s so important to Biden that he’s willing to suddenly abandoned his three-decade-long support of the Hyde Amendment for this grand objective. And progressives cheer mightily.
Biden, of course, is hardly alone in this among liberals. Quite the contrary, he’s caving on the Hyde Amendment because not doing so is heresy in the liberal church. The Democratic Party once supported the Hyde Amendment, just as it once defined marriage as between a man and a woman. But progressives, you see, have since progressed. They’re now more enlightened. Hyde must be aborted, so Americans can support abortions for poor women, women of color, black women, Hispanic women.
“The problem is, the Hyde Amendment affects poor women, women of color, black women, Hispanic women,” says Patti Solis Doyle, who served as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign manager in 2008, and who has also worked for Biden.
And whose lives are eliminated in this equation? The answer: Poor babies, babies of color, babies of black women, babies of Hispanic women.
Planned Parenthood, naturally, is thrilled with Joe Biden hopping on the progressive bandwagon. Minority women are its biggest customers.
“Happy to see Joe Biden embrace what we have long known to be true: Hyde blocks people — particularly women of color and women with low incomes — from accessing safe, legal abortion care,” said Leana Wen of Planned Parenthood.
You can’t make this up. And it’s no laughing matter. Just ask Elizabeth Warren. Choking back tears, filled with anger, she insisted to an audience of clapping, stomping women that Hyde be reversed: “Understand this,” said Warren, voice trembling. “Women of means will still have access to abortions. Who won’t will be poor women.”
This is the prevailing position of today’s Democratic presidential candidates and the party generally, with the party’s old men no longer summoning the intestinal fortitude to oppose the hysterical pack. Biden is merely the latest Democrat man without a chest, an ongoing line of lily-livered gutlessness that the late Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Bill Casey foresaw over two decades ago. The Joe Biden of 2019 is selling his soul for the political approval of today’s unhinged Democratic Party, which has completely lost its mind on moral-cultural issues.
What’s especially sad is that Democrats are hellbent on this policy at a time when the number of abortions have been in decline. For those who hoped and prayed that the scourge of black abortion would likewise decline, well, too bad: the Democrats are doing their damnedest to ensure that when it comes to public funding of abortion, no child is left behind.
Liberal Democrats tell us they love blacks and the poor. They are just oozing with compassion for them. So much so that they will strive to ensure that you — as a taxpayer, and regardless of your religious or conscience objections — are forced by the state to help ensure that every black or poor woman who wants to terminate her child will not be financially prohibited.
Wow, what compassion.
Pretty sick, folks. Pretty sick, Joe.
Democrats have quite a racist history
they sacrificed their lives in the Civil War to try to save slavery
they started the KKK
they devised Jim Crow laws
in the early 60s, they blocked the doors to prevent blacks from going to school with whites
in 72, George Wallace was winning Democrat primaries until he was gunned down in Maryland
they passed laws on the 90s that led to a large swath of young blacks permanently incarcerated
in the 21st century, they have resisted giving inner city black parents the same kind of choice to educate their kids as they want that most whites have
and, now, they want to make sure that blacks aren't even protected in the womb
sick, sick, sick
Let’s not mince words. President Trump and his loyalists were dead right. His threat of tariffs pushed Mexico to work harder to stop the Central American caravans, and the migrants who hope to exploit immigration law loopholes in order to receive asylum in the United States.
And the bipartisan, Trump-loathing political, business and media establishments were all dead wrong. They warned that his strong-arming would ignite a trade war, disrupt the thick web of supply chains linking the American and Mexican economies, and risk a recession. Equally off-base was the establishmentarians’ angst that Trump’s gambit would endanger the revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) that he has sought and which Mexico and Canada recently signed.
Trump busted a ballyhooed — but entirely phony — globalist policy norm. Immigration and trade policy must kept completely separate? Seriously? When one of Nafta’s selling points is a promise that prosperity in Mexico will keep Mexicans home? All the same, I hope Trump doesn’t whip out the tariff threat again. Not because Trump’s tactics were ‘bullying’ — a childish charge that pretends coercion plays no part in international relations. And not even because further actual or threatened levies will undermine Nafta’s intended replacement, the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
Instead, I hope Mr Trump doesn’t use this weapon again because the further down the tariff road he travels, the likelier he is to forget the big picture. He should be seeking a trade overhaul with Mexico, as with the rest of the world.
Trump’s gambit vividly illustrates a fundamental truth about the global economy. For all the bloviating about interdependence and international supply chains, and commerce being a win-win proposition by definition, Trump gets that the United States needs foreign economies much less than foreign economies need the United States. He fully understands this, but the establishment doesn’t. Most journalists and politicians simply don’t understand economics. Most business and financial interests want to keep this dark, because their top priority is restoring the pre-Trump trade policy of offshoring.
Hard times for farmers got tougher with President Donald Trump’s trade war. Now Midwestern farmers are filing the highest number of bankruptcies in a decade, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data.
And farmers aren’t hopeful about this year.
ice as many farmers in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin declared bankruptcy last year compared to 2008, according to statistics from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Journal reported. Bankruptcies in states from North Dakota to Arkansas leaped 96 percent, according to figures from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Farmers are being battered by sinking commodity prices — and stiff tariffs from China and Mexico in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs on imports.
The new 11-nation Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) treaty last year slashed tariffs — but not for U.S. farmers since the Trump administration pulled out of negotiations. That drove customers to farmers and ranchers in competitive countries, like Australia, serving another dunning blow to American operations.
Farmers fear it will take years to rebuild those trading relationships.
According to figures from the U.S. Agriculture Department, farm income last year was about 50 percent of what it was in 2013, the Wisconsin State Farmer reported.
The dairy industry was hopeful about meeting growing demand in China, but now trade is a major stumbling block. “The problem is that both nations have stubborn leaders,” Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said at an agricultural forum last week in Madison.
Soybeans were also a major victim. “Agriculture prices live and die by exports. In all commodities, we’re heavily dependent on China, especially for soybeans,” Kevin Bernhardt, agribusiness professor at the University of Wisconsin in Platteville, told the Milwaukee Independent.
Government subsidies to farmers were up 18 percent last year over the previous year, due to the $4.7 billion in tariff aid and $1.6 billion in disaster payments for farmers impacted by hurricanes, floods and other disasters. But it wasn’t enough to stave off the end for some.
"Hard times for farmers got tougher with President Donald Trump’s trade war. Now Midwestern farmers are filing the highest number of bankruptcies in a decade, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data."
China has engaging and winning an economic war for decades and Trump is the first President with the balls to fight back. We should do whatever is necessary to help farmers get through it. In the long run, we'll all be better off. And will the rest of the world. A world where China dominates, at least with the current leadership, will be an Orwellian nightmare. Meanwhile, for political purposes, Dems act like Russia is our #1 threat. Trump was right to try to build good relations with Russia to counter this threat. Dems have crassly interfered.
Those committed to our values will, as JFK said, pay any price, bear burden.
There's no easy way to be free.
But, standing united will assure victory.
Look at the TTFtroll spinning like a top, trying to rewrite history and having to reach all the way back to 1972 to find a racist Democrat who ran for office.
And here's a newsflash for the racist Trumpette: Giving poor women autonomy over their bodies will help them reach economic and social equality.
GOPers are scared to death of Deomcrats' polling numbers over Trump.
In fact according to FOX News polling at this early date:
Biden beats Trump by 10
Sanders beats Trump by 9
Warren beats Trump by 2
Harris beats Trump by 1
Buttigieg beats Trump by 1
2018 started the blue wave.
2020 will show how large it has grown.
"China has engaging and winning an economic war for decades and Trump is the first President with the balls to fight back."
Dude, China has been practicing capitalism. US corporations have GIVEN AWAY jobs to China in pursuit of bigger and better profits for their owners. Corporations didn't have to send all those jobs to China, they could have stayed here. The owners wouldn't have been quite as rich, but more workers here would have remained employed, and much of China would have stayed an economic backwater.
Marx believed that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. He described how the wealth of the bourgeoisie depended on the work of the proletariat. Therefore, capitalism requires an underclass. But Marx predicted that the continued exploitation of this underclass would create great resentment.
US capitalists saw the opportunity to better exploit an underclass - in China. It was getting too hard to keep exploiting middle class Americans, so they took it. Since then, US workers' wages as a portion of productivity has dropped, as well as the real value of their wages. As Marx predicted, this has led to a lot of resentment in the American worker, and Rump's election showed that the risk of blowing up the system was better than keeping things the same in the minds of many voters.
Unfortunately, much of the Rump proletariat completely ignored the fact that Rump was one of the bourgeoisie that prefered to exploit workers in China for 85% of his products rather than produce here in the US with American workers.
And while Rump was blaming China for the "hoax" of climate change, China built itself into the world's largest supplier of solar panels, bringing down the cost so much that it can now compete - and win on price - against coal. Meanwhile, Rump campaigned on bringing back all those wonderful black-lung causing coal jobs.
China is doing capitalism better than the US because US (and other) corporations have been helping to build all the necessary infrastructure China needed to do it - so the bourgeoisie could get cheaper labor. China brought 300 million people out of poverty and into the middle class with jobs from western corporations. 300 million people just happens to be about the size of the US populace. Just think how much that money could have done here in the US instead.
There is one thing Rump is good at though: Pointing the finger of blame at someone else and having conservatives believe it's really his target's fault.
China and Mexico didn't steal any jobs from the US. US corporations GAVE those jobs away to them. And US corporations seem to be hell-bent on proving Marx right.
"Dude, China has been practicing capitalism."
Dude, China has been stealing our intellectual property because their dreary society can't produce innovation. Their unwillingness to stop doing this is why a trade deal has yet to be completed.
They have also been manipulating currency and engaging in monopolistic practices that aren't tolerated in capitalist society.
"Look at the TTFtroll spinning like a top, trying to rewrite history and having to reach all the way back to 1972 to find a racist Democrat who ran for office."
if you're calling me a troll because I post a few facts inconvenient to your worldview, you're only making yourself look like a fool
I mentioned 1972 but gave examples of Dem racism from the civil war to the present
did I forget 1976, when Southern Dem Jimmy Carter said it was important to maintain the "ethnic purity" of America's neighborhoods?
or the 1920s when Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, was pushing birth control to reduce the number of blacks in America?
in the 90s and 21st century, Dems have resisted policies that make inner city black neighborhoods safe, have resisted giving inner city blacks the same educational choice that wealthy whites have, devised mandatory sentencing laws that have imprisoned large swaths of young blacks, resisted economic policies that have produced the lowest black unemployment in history, and now are pushing to have the government pay to help "women of color" kill children of color
civil rights leaders, Dr. Alveda King, calls government support for killing children of color “Black Genocide”
that sounds racist
in fact, Dem history is riddled with racism
"And here's a newsflash for the racist Trumpette: Giving poor women autonomy over their bodies will help them reach economic and social equality."
hasn't worked so far
"Giving poor women autonomy" is quite a euphemism for paying for the killing of poor black children
"GOPers are scared to death of Deomcrats' polling numbers over Trump.
In fact according to FOX News polling at this early date:
Biden beats Trump by 10
Sanders beats Trump by 9
Warren beats Trump by 2
Harris beats Trump by 1
Buttigieg beats Trump by 1"
elections are processes, not snapshots from 15 months before Election Day
the only of those with a chance of winning is Biden, and that chance is slim
"2018 started the blue wave.
2020 will show how large it has grown."
it'll show Americans don't appreciate Dems wasting time investigating Trump when this country has problems that need attending to
and, by 2025, there will be few liberal unconstitutional judges left
"China has been stealing our intellectual property because their dreary society can't produce innovation."
China didn't have to steal it - US companies gave them everything they needed to know to build products for us. The US companies knew that going in. Nobody held a gun to their head and forced them to do business in China. They could have said "no," we'll keep all our intellectual property and production in the US. But they didn't. But keep believing Rump's propaganda if you like being spoon-fed all the answers.
And if you think American culture is unique or special in innovation, you need to check out other parts of the web.
There's all sorts of advanced software on GitHub, SourceForge and other places that you can download (free) to do machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, image processing, computational physics (including fluid dynamics, electromagnetics, heat flow, etc.) and just about anything you'd need to start developing new, high-tech projects.
The other day I stumbled upon the YouTube channel of a young black guy that started teaching himself how to program video games as a young kid. In one of his recent videos he explained how he applied machine learning algorithms to a Forest Gump themed maze game he built. All apparently without formal education in the topics. All using code you can download for free.
If you pop open any electronic device, you will find part numbers or other identifiers on most (if not all) of the parts in the system. It doesn't take rocket science to duplicate that. The only thing stopping most people from building things themselves (besides ignorance) is that economies of scale mean that the original factory can sell it to you cheaper (and faster) than you can build it yourself.
Back in the 70s, Japan was known for their cheap products and lack of "innovation." Americans liked to pride themselves on how superior they were, and how inferior Japanese products were. Then they started building pocket calculators; and tiny little gas-sipping cars. Now there are litteral boatloads of Toyotas and Hondas sitting in American driveways.
I know you're old enough to remember that.
But given how old you are, I don't know if you'll be around long enough to see China do the same thing. It is that mistaken notion that Americans are inherently superior to other cultures that has made many Americans lazy and sent them looking for scapegoats while they pat themselves on the back, rather than do things like "build more reliable, fuel efficient cars" to compete head on with the Japanese.
China isn't going to sit back and wait while you wallow in how "innovative" American culture is. While America is trying to dig more black rocks to burn, China has turned itself into the world's largest producer of solar panels, and a major wind turbine supplier as well.
Modern solar cells were invented in the US. Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House. Reagan had them removed. They now sit in a museum in China, where Chinese people laugh at our stupidity and ignorance.
You should get a job promoting the virtue and nobility of the People's Republic.
Just be careful to memorize the party line closely. They don't tolerate deviance and will increasingly use Orwellian technology to find and eliminate enemies worldwide.
You know why they have hacked and downloaded the personnel files of millions of Americans?
btw, thanks for not giving me any backtalk about how racist Dems are.
knowing when you're wrong is an important quality
Pete Buttigieg, a breakout 2020 Democratic candidate, said that it's "statistically almost certain" the US has had a gay president in the past.
Speaking to "Axios on HBO" on Sunday, Buttigieg defended himself against critics who say he would be too young, liberal, or gay to be elected commander-in-chief.
"People will elect the person who will make the best president," he said. "And we have had excellent presidents who have been young. We have had excellent presidents who have been liberal. I would imagine we've probably had excellent presidents who were gay — we just didn't know which ones."
"Statistically, it's almost certain," he added.
According to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, 9.8% of Washington D.C. identifies as LGBT, the highest of any US state. Gallup estimated that 4.5% of the US population identifies as LGBT in 2017.
When asked whether he could point to historically which president may have been gay, Buttigieg said his "gaydar" was not well tuned.
"My gaydar even doesn't work that well in the present, let alone retroactively." he said.
Pete Buttigieg is a rising star in the leadup to the 2020 elections, with recent polls indicating that most voters find him more "electable" than many other more established Democratic candidates.
Buttigieg would be the first openly gay nominee for either party. The 37-year-old said he and husband Chasten, who celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary on Sunday, would be open to raising kids in the White House.
"I don't see why not," Buttigieg said. "I think it wouldn't be the first time children have arrived to a first couple."
"btw, thanks for not giving me any backtalk about how racist Dems are."
Your twisted worldview of how racist Dems ARE is laughable. The history of Dems going back to the Civil war doesn't define who they ARE now.
You could make the argument that they have a history to be ashamed of - just like Christians and their long history of things like genocide, slavery, and child abuse. News reports show Christians are still abusing children and blaming gay people for it.
Black people today can see for themselves who the most racist people are. They don't need Republican propagandists telling them what they can see with their own eyes - like who was at the "Unite the Right" rally.
"knowing when you're wrong is an important quality"
This would be an excellent idea to familiarize yourself with something called the "Dunning-Kruger" effect.
"You should get a job promoting the virtue and nobility of the People's Republic."
No thanks. I know that I'd look like a rank amateur compared to how well you do extolling the virtues of being friendly with Russia.
"You know why they have hacked and downloaded the personnel files of millions of Americans?"
Probably the same reasons Russia hacked our computer systems - to enhance the targeting of their propaganda, and may even influence our elections. Then of course, there's all the tempting bank fraud, if you're into that kind of thing.
"Your twisted worldview of how racist Dems ARE is laughable. The history of Dems going back to the Civil war doesn't define who they ARE now."
no, what they do now does
but it's notable that they ave always worked against the interest of African-Americans
in the 90s and 21st century, Dems have resisted policies that make inner city black neighborhoods safe, have resisted giving inner city blacks the same educational choice that wealthy whites have, devised mandatory sentencing laws that have imprisoned large swaths of young blacks, resisted economic policies that have produced the lowest black unemployment in history, and now are pushing to have the government pay to kill children of color
not to mention that they consider Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, to be a liberal saint while she is one of the most racist public figures of the 20th century
indeed, she was dangerous
IIt was four years ago (plus one day) when Donald Trump descended his golden elevator at Trump Tower and announced to the world that he was running for president to make America great again. It was a memorable day, although I don't think anyone believed at the time it would be more than a bizarre blip in presidential campaign history.
It was a patented Trumpian spectacle, ridiculous and over the top. Needless to say, the speech itself was offensive and absurd. He called Mexicans rapists and criminals, bragged about his allegedly enormous wealth and said that the U.S. had never beaten China and Japan at anything. He lied about the crowd size and insulted the press. In other words, it was the template for all the speeches that were to come, throughout his campaign and his presidency.
The immediate reaction among the media was incredulity mixed with smug condescension. Most apparently assumed this was one of those laughable gadfly campaigns, like former Sen. Mike Gravel's 2008 Democratic run, or the 2012 bid by Republican businessman and flat-tax fan Herman Cain. After all, Trump had feinted toward running for years, even launching a short-lived bid for the Reform Party nomination in 2000. And the GOP primary of 2016 was already proving to be one for the books. On the day Trump announced for president, the man leading in the polls was Dr. Ben Carson, a political neophyte who had recently declared that the United States is "very much like Nazi Germany."
I wrote about the announcement for Salon and I saw it a bit differently than most. To me, this mixture of Tea Party right-winger and wealthy showbiz celebrity seemed like a potentially potent combination. He had enough money to self-finance, which meant he could stay in for the long haul. I looked up the numbers for his TV show and found that he had reached millions more people with his various iterations of "The Apprentice" than Fox News could ever dream of. He had the potential to reach a far bigger audience as a right-wing blowhard than most professional politicians.
While Trump's guy-at-the-end-of-the-bar style was flamboyant, nothing he said was anything that a person who watched Fox News or listened to Rush Limbaugh wouldn't nod along with in agreement. In fact, the headline for my piece was "We must take Donald Trump seriously: Yes, he's a right-wing blowhard. But he's rich & famous, and his kooky ideas fit snugly in the Tea Party mainstream."
But there was something much darker happening that I didn't see coming. That piece didn't run as planned on the day after the Trump Tower announcement. It ran the following Saturday. That's because on the evening after Trump's announcement a 21-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof went into a prayer meeting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and murdered nine African American church members, injuring three more. He confessed that he was hoping to start a race war...
...That tragedy necessarily meant that any snarky pieces about Donald Trump were suddenly inappropriate. But looking back on it four years later, those two events were psychically connected.
Roof was not motivated by anything Donald Trump said in his announcement speech, of course. He probably didn't even know about it. According to the FBI, he was "self-radicalized" on the internet and through contacts with other white supremacists. The manifesto he posted on a website called "The Last Rhodesian" featured derogatory opinions about African Americans, Jews, Hispanics and others, and featured pictures of him posing with the Confederate flag. He explained that the 2012 shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin made him "racially aware" because Martin's killer, George Zimmerman, had been right to shoot him.
But there are threads of similar ugly thought processes at work in these two events that took place within a day of each other. When Roof began to open fire on those people at the prayer meeting he reportedly said, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."
One day earlier on a stage in his golden Manhattan tower, Donald Trump announced his campaign for the presidency by saying, "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people ..."
These racist ideas have been with us a long time, and America's history is full of the violent horrors that result from them. Neither Trump or Roof said or did anything that hasn't been said or done before. Indeed, Trump himself had quite a history of racist activities, from the disgraceful rhetoric in the Central Park Five case to his "birther" crusade against Barack Obama.
But looking back, it feels as if something shifted in that 48-hour period four years ago this week. A rock was overturned and something truly grotesque crawled out, something that hadn't seen the light of day for quite a while. Since Trump announced his candidacy, white supremacist violence has surged. That's not limited to the U.S., although when it comes to racist violence, Trump has succeeded in making America No. 1. The president's shameful reaction to the racist violence in Charlottesville, and his inflammatory rhetoric about the border — which clearly inspired the massacre of Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh — are just two incidents among many that illustrate how the white supremacist movement has taken on new life in the last four years, drawing strength and motivation from the leader of the most powerful nation on earth.
When a man gunned down 51 people in a pair of mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, this March, he too left a manifesto. In it, he claimed he supported Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity.” When asked if he thought white nationalism was a problem, Trump responded, “I don't really."
The president is holding a big rally on Tuesday in Orlando to announce that he's running for re-election. I don't think anyone will be surprised if he says the same things he said four years ago. He's been repeating them almost daily ever since then. People still laugh and roll their eyes, just as they did back in 2015. But now we've seen the results of his rhetoric, and we know how he reacts when those results inevitably turns violent. It's not a joke. It never was.
KUSHNER REFUSES TO SAY WHETHER TRUMP'S BIRTHERISM CLAIMS, MUSLIM BAN WERE RACIST: 'I WASN'T REALLY INVOLVED'
Steve King’s White Supremacy Remark Is Rebuked by Iowa’s Republican Senators
Paul Ryan: Trump made "textbook definition of a racist comment"
Fox Business host: 'No question' white supremacists see Trump as 'kind of on their side'
Georgia election fight shows that black voter suppression, a southern tradition, still flourishes
Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2019
Trump praises 'great general' Robert E. Lee, defends Charlottesville comments
TRUMP'S RACIST REMARKS HELPED BOOST DOWN-BALLOT REPUBLICANS IN 2016
2013 Donald Trump Tweets About The Central Park 5 Surface After The Release Of ‘When They See Us’
The Supreme Court dismissed the challenge to a lower court’s findings that some of Virginia’s legislative districts were racially gerrymandered, saying Monday that House Republicans did not have legal standing to challenge the decision.
The decision could give an advantage to the state’s Democrats. All 140 seats in the legislature are on the ballot this fall, and the GOP holds two-seat majorities in both the House (51 to 49) and the Senate (21 to 19).
Democrats have been hoping that a wave of successes in recent Virginia elections will propel them to control of the legislature for the first time since 1995.
The party that controls the General Assembly in 2021 will oversee the next statewide redistricting effort, following next year’s census — potentially cementing an advantage in future elections.Primaries were held last week in the new districts.The case split the court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in the 5 to 4 case, saying that House Republican leaders could not challenge the court ruling because they did not represent the commonwealth.
The state’s attorney general declined to continue the case, Ginsburg wrote.
The case split the court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion in the 5 to 4 case, saying that House Republican leaders could not challenge the court ruling because they did not represent the commonwealth.
The state’s attorney general declined to continue the case, Ginsburg wrote...
She was joined in an unusual alignment by Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Neil M. Gorsuch...
Because the state did not draw a new map after the decision by the panel of judges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the judges had an outside expert draw a new map.
It realigns a total of 26 House districts as it remedies the 11 under court order. Six Republican delegates would find themselves in districts with a majority of Democratic voters, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project...
"He called Mexicans rapists and criminals,"
no, he didn't
that's a lie
"I wrote about the announcement for Salon"
OK, now it makes since why you're lying
"He confessed that he was hoping to start a race war..."
Charles Manson said that too
do you think the Beatles were racist?
"Four years ago this week: Trump's escalator ride and the Charleston shooting. It's not a coincidence said"
actually, it is
oh look:
"Roof was not motivated by anything Donald Trump said in his announcement speech, of course. He probably didn't even know about it."
so, you admit it was a coincidence
"Trump himself had quite a history of racist activities, his "birther" crusade against Barack Obama."
being black doesn't exempt anyone from the type of things all Presidents have endured
nothing racist about it
"But looking back, it feels as if something shifted in that 48-hour period four years ago"
that feeling is the vain desire for wish fulfillment
"clearly inspired the massacre of Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh"
Trump's daughter and grandchildren are orthodox Jews, Israel has named streets after Trump
I guess you know more than them
"the white supremacist movement has taken on new life in the last four years, drawing strength and motivation from the leader of the most powerful nation on earth."
actually, it has gained strength by a fiction created by the media that deluded these Nazi psychofreaks into believing they are ascendant
"The president is holding a big rally on Tuesday in Orlando to announce that he's running for re-election."
more than anyone will ever say about Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders (LOL!), or Elizabeth Warren (ROFL!!), or Pete Buttah-jig (yuck!!!)
Here are hate crime statistical facts reported by FBI
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/topic-pages/offenders
Race
In 2017, race was reported for 6,370 known hate crime offenders. Of these offenders:
50.7 percent were White.
21.3 percent were Black or African American.
7.5 percent were groups made up of individuals of various races (group of multiple races).
0.8 percent (49 offenders) were American Indian or Alaska Native.
0.7 percent (42 offenders) were Asian.
3 offenders were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.
19.1 percent were unknown.
More data about hate crimes in the US:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses
Race/ethnicity/ancestry bias (Based on Table 1.)
In 2017, law enforcement agencies reported that 4,832 single-bias hate crime offenses were motivated by race/ethnicity/ancestry. Of these offenses:
48.8 percent were motivated by anti-Black or African American bias.
17.5 percent stemmed from anti-White bias.
10.9 percent were classified as anti-Hispanic or Latino bias.
5.8 percent were motivated by anti-American Indian or Alaska Native bias.
4.4 percent were a result of bias against groups of individuals consisting of more than one race (anti-multiple races, group).
3.1 percent resulted from anti-Asian bias.
2.6 percent were classified as anti-Arab bias.
0.4 percent (17 offenses) were motivated by bias of anti-Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.
6.5 percent were the result of an anti-Other Race/Ethnicity/Ancestry bias.
Religious bias (Based on Table 1.)
Hate crimes motivated by religious bias accounted for 1,679 offenses reported by law enforcement. A breakdown of the bias motivation of religious-biased offenses showed:
58.1 percent were anti-Jewish.
18.7 percent were anti-Islamic (Muslim).
4.5 percent were anti-Catholic.
3.2 percent were anti-multiple religions, group.
2.4 percent were anti-Protestant.
1.8 percent were anti-Other Christian.
1.4 percent were anti-Sikh.
1.4 percent were anti-Eastern Orthodox (Russian, Greek, Other).
0.9 percent (15 offenses) were anti-Mormon
0.9 percent (15 offenses) were anti-Hindu.
0.8 percent (13 offenses) were anti-Jehovah’s Witness.
0.5 percent (9 offenses) was anti-Buddhist.
0.5 percent (8 offenses) were anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc.
4.9 percent were anti-other (unspecified) religion.
Sexual-orientation bias (Based on Table 1.)
In 2017, law enforcement agencies reported 1,303 hate crime offenses based on sexual-orientation bias. Of these offenses:
58.2 percent were classified as anti-gay (male) bias.
24.6 percent were prompted by an anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (mixed group) bias.
12.2 percent were classified as anti-lesbian bias.
2.8 percent were the result of an anti-heterosexual bias.
2.1 percent were classified as anti-bisexual bias.
Supreme Court says states can continue to prosecute for same crime as federal government
"In a 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday has upheld an exception to the Fifth Amendment's ban on "double jeopardy," allowing a state and the federal government to each prosecute an individual for the same action if it violates both state and federal laws.
The case could have incidentally expanded the presidential pardon power by ending the exception, but the court did not take that step.
"We have long held that a crime under one sovereign's laws is not the 'same offence' as a crime under the laws of another sovereign," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion. "Today we affirm that precedent."
"It is difficult to conclude that the people who ratified the Fifth Amendment understood it to prohibit prosecution by a state and the federal government for the same offense," said Justice Clarence Thomas in a concurring opinion.
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says that "no person shall ... be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life of limb," or double jeopardy.
For more than 150 years, however, the Supreme Court has treated state and federal governments as separate -- each with a distinct set of laws that can each be enforced, even when there's overlap. It's known in legal circles as the "separate sovereigns" exception to the Constitution's protection against double jeopardy.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Neil Gorsuch dissented in the case...
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in. Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people.......
9:20 PM - Jun 17, 2019
ICE agents are shocked that Trump just went ahead and tipped off the entire world to an upcoming law enforcement operation. When Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf alerted city residents about upcoming ICE arrests last year, [Rump's ICE director] Homan was apoplectic. Schaaf, he told the hosts of Fox & Friends, was no better than a “gang lookout.” Now Trump has done the same thing.
From ICE’s perspective, there are two problems with telegraphing arrests. First, ICE agents feel it could put their safety at risk, since people will be expecting them. (No ICE agent has ever been killed by an immigrant during an enforcement operation.) Second, the targets of the operations now have time to hide. "
"Here are hate crime statistical facts reported by FBI"
did they define hate crime?
if some bored JD scribbles on the side of a bathroom stall is that a hate crime?
"0.4 percent (17 offenses) were motivated by bias of anti-Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander"
about time someone stood up for those 17 Hawaiians
"0.5 percent (8 offenses) were anti-Atheism/Agnosticism/etc."
glad to see this is recognized as a religion
now, we can start work on getting public schools to stop violating the Constitution by promoting it
"58.2 percent were classified as anti-gay (male) bias.
24.6 percent were prompted by an anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (mixed group) bias.
12.2 percent were classified as anti-lesbian bias.
2.8 percent were the result of an anti-heterosexual bias.
2.1 percent were classified as anti-bisexual bias."
couldn't we break this down little further?
according to the lunatic fringe liberal media, there are seventy-some genders
"For more than 150 years, however, the Supreme Court has treated state and federal governments as separate -- each with a distinct set of laws that can each be enforced, even when there's overlap. It's known in legal circles as the "separate sovereigns" exception to the Constitution's protection against double jeopardy."
150 years?
so why is this ruling getting so much attention?
it's hard to see why the SCOTUS took the case
"Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented in the case..."
a phrase you'll be hearing a lot
"ICE agents are shocked that Trump just went ahead and tipped off the entire world to an upcoming law enforcement operation."
oh, illegal immigrants already knew this was imminent and were taking measures to aviod being found
"When Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf alerted city residents about upcoming ICE arrests last year, [Rump's ICE director] Homan was apoplectic"
so, this is how they always react
why is this a story?
btw, that was a local action not nationwide
a little different
"the targets of the operations now have time to hide. "
hard to believe TTF sees that as a problem
On Tuesday night President Trump launched his re-election campaign with a by now classic rally in Orlando, Florida. It was a “Greatest Hits rally” in which he accused the Democrats of undermining democracy (by trying to impeach him), talked about the many threats to “this country as we know it”, and even railed against Hillary Clinton (for old time’s sake). In short, Trump’s message for 2020 is: “I made America Great Again, now vote for me so I can Keep America Great.”
Democrats will dismiss the speech as fearmongering, while reveling in recent polls that have virtually every major primary candidate defeat Donald Trump in 2020, sometimes by a significant margin. They believe the president is weakened by a broad range of issues, including the Mueller report, the treatment of immigrants at the southern border and the various scandals surrounding key cabinet members.
Remarkably, given the traumatic experience of 2016, many Democrats have still not learned the key lesson of US democracy: elections are not won by passive majorities but by mobilized minorities. And while the passive majority might be with the Democrats, or at least not with Trump, the mobilized minority is. There are (at least) four reasons why, at this moment, Trump is cruising towards re-election.
The first reason is, of course, the economy. While we can argue about how meaningful and solid the current economic growth is, there is no denying that, in terms of the conventional economic indicators, the state of the US economy is excellent. Consequently, prediction models based primarily on economic indicators, which correctly predicted the 2016 elections, predict a resounding Trump victory in 2020.
Second, Trump has so far delivered to his non-traditional base. The average Republican, commonly referred to as the “moderate Republican”, is still not a fan of President Trump, who is seen as too confrontational and vulgar, but got the one thing they care about: a tax cut. Scared of a “socialist backlash” within the Democratic party, they will come out to protect their new gains by voting Trump.
Similarly, the Christian right will once again come out strong. While the support for Trump by religious voters puzzles liberals, it is pretty straightforward: the supreme court. Here, again, Trump has delivered. He has appointed two staunchly conservative anti-abortion judges to the supreme court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and promised to appoint more. And with the possibility of (at least) one position possibly becoming vacant in the next presidential term, ie Ruth Bader Ginsburg (perhaps also Clarence Thomas), the Christian right mobilization will run on full cylinders again. The reward for the faithful: overturning Roe v Wade!
Finally, there is the real Trump supporter, the mostly blue-collar and lower-middle-class white voters who want to “build the wall” (nativism) and “drain the swamp” (populism). So far, they have not really gotten what they wanted. The swamp has barely been drained – rather, it has been expanded by corrupt Trump appointees – while, despite all of Trump’s grandstanding, the wall is still mostly a fence-in-building. In short, the real Trump voter is left wanting – as is at times loudly proclaimed by their media voices like Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson. But where can they go? To the most diverse party in US history? The party of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Stacey Abrams and Elizabeth Warren?
But maybe they will stay at home, disappointed? Not really. They have not been betrayed by Trump. He can rightly claim that he has done all he could to keep the wall on the political agenda and push through a brutal anti-immigration agenda. He will claim that he has been “sabotaged” by the “deep state” and their corrupt helpers in Congress (including “weak” Republicans). Hence, he needs a second term to break the last resistance so that can make good on his promises.
Third, against this mobilized minority stands a majority of Americans unhappy with Trump but largely uninspired by the Democratic party. They see a party without a clear profile, divided over more than 20 primary candidates, who differ on more than they agree on. Moreover, with still some 500 days to go until election day, Democrats are already turning against each other – with anti-Sanders donors trying to co-opt candidates, while Democratic insiders are feuding with the Sanders camp, which is fundraising against the Democratic establishment.
All of this is putty in the hands of the Trump campaign, the fourth reason the president is set for re-election. As should be clear by now, Trump actually ran a good campaign in 2016 – clearly much better than Clinton, who misread the rust belt states, among others. Trump has been running a “permanent presidential campaign” since his inauguration, which has picked up financial steam more recently. The campaign has been raking in money by the tens of millions, including from key Republican campaigners and donors who had spurned him in 2016.
Trump may be historically unpopular, but he is popular enough to be comfortably re-elected. His supporters have agency and urgency, the two things the Democrats are still lacking. They have 500 days left to create this, together, rather than apart.
Few have ever heard of “Health Reimbursement Accounts,” but they could fundamentally change the nation’s health care system — for the better — and destroy the Democrats’ case for socialized health care.
Late last week, the Trump administration finalized rules that will let companies put money into tax-exempt HRAs that their employees could then used to buy an individual insurance plan on their own. Seems like no big deal, right? Except it will start to unravel a 77-year-old policy mistake that is largely responsible for many of the problems the health care system suffers today.
Back in 1942, the Roosevelt administration imposed wage and price controls on the economy. But it exempted employer-provided benefits like health insurance, and the IRS later decreed that these benefits wouldn’t be taxed as income.
The result was to massively tilt the health insurance playing field toward employer-provided insurance. Today 88% of those with private insurance get it at work.
The massive tax subsidy — now valued at more than $300 billion — also encouraged overly generous health plans, because any health care paid by insurers was tax exempt, while out of pocket spending had to come from after-tax dollars.
So not only did this Roosevelt-era mistake create an employer-dominated health insurance market, it made consumers largely indifferent to the cost of care, since the vast bulk of it was picked up by a third party.
But while health care experts across the political spectrum recognize this mistake, Democrats’ response has been to get the government even more involved in health care, with the latest proposal a total government takeover under the guise of “Medicare for All.”
Republicans, to their credit, have been pushing in the opposite direction. The introduction of Health Savings Accounts — a GOP reform idea Democrats fiercely opposed — 14 years ago helped to remedy one of the tax distortions, by allowing some people to pay out of pocket costs with pre-tax money.
Even with all the restrictions Congress put on HSAs, the market for high-deductible HSA plans exploded — climbing from nothing in 2005 to nearly 30% of the employer market today. By the end of last years, consumers had saved up $10 billion in these accounts.
The rise in these “consumer directed” plans was at least partially responsible for the slow-down in health spending in recent years, according to official government reports, as consumers increasingly started shopping around.
Trump’s HRA rules will have a far more profound impact.
Under the plan, employers will be able to fund tax-free Health Reimbursement Accounts for their workers, who can then use the money to buy an individual insurance plan — thereby taking another step toward fixing the 77-year-old tax distortion. The rule also lets employers fund a different account to buy cheaper “short-term” plans.
“This subtle, technical tweak has the potential to revolutionize the private health insurance market,” wrote Avik Roy, one of the smartest health care experts around, in the Washington Post.
The administration figures that 800,000 employers will eventually move to HRA plans, and 11 million workers will get their benefits this way.
At the same time, Trump also loosened the federal rules that had needlessly impeded “association health plans.” These are plans that let members of various groups band together to buy insurance. The result will be more competition, and more affordable choices for millions of people.
The Democrats’ response? Attack these changes as another attempt by Trump to “sabotage” Obamacare. What they really fear, however, is that the two new rules will destroy their case for socialized medicine.
As Roy put: “Together, over time, these changes would give workers more transparency into — and more control over — the health-care dollars that are now spent by other people on their behalf. That transparency and control, in turn, would create a powerful market incentive for health-care payers and providers to lower prices and increase quality.”
Once that happens, the last thing these millions of newly empowered health care shoppers will want is to be shuffled into a one-size-fits-all government plan designed for the masses by socialists like Bernie Sanders.
Peace crosses are constitutional!!
The World War I Peace Cross erected in Bladensburg, Maryland in 1925 has been allowed to remain in place.
No other monuments were adjudicated by the Supreme Court today.
Roy Moore, Former Judge Accused Of Sexually Assaulting Teens, Running For Senate
Disgraced former Alabama Judge Roy Moore, who has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault, is running for the U.S. Senate again.
He previously ran for Senate in a 2017 special election but lost to Democrat Doug Jones after Moore was accused of sexually assaulting multiple teenage girls. Jones is running for election to a full term in 2020.
Multiple women came forward in 2017 to accuse Moore of sexual assault. One of them was Beverly Nelson, who said Moore groped her breasts and attempted to get her to perform oral sex on him when she was 16 and he was in his 30s.
“He looked at me, and he told me, ‘You’re just a child.’ And he said, ‘I am the district attorney of Etowah County, and if you tell anyone about this, no one will ever believe you,’” Nelson said of the encounter.
Moore has denied any wrongdoing, and said Thursday the allegations had “very little” to do with his previous loss.
In 2017 Moore underperformed Trump’s 2016 results by 14 percentage points in the north and central region, by nine points in the Black Belt and by 11 points in southern Alabama.
Typically reliable and sizable Republican wins in the rural north and south of the state evaporated into razor thin margins. Between that and an increased margin in the Black Belt, Jones was able to eke out a 21,000-vote victory, while Republicans normally win by more than half a million votes.
These swings can be seen in counties majority white and black, Republican and Democrat. And that means it couldn’t have just been a surge in African American turnout, or just rural Trump voters staying home, or just Republicans crossing over to vote for Jones. Jones’s campaign was able to achieve a combination of the three that drove him to victory. Despite it being an off-year special election in December, Jones got 92 percent of Clinton’s vote total. Moore just got 49 percent of Trump’s.
The Senate repudiating a president of the majority party on a matter of national security would be unusual under any circumstances. That it comes at a time when tensions with a major international foe are boiling over is nothing short of astonishing, a sign of how far President Trump has fallen as commander in chief even among Republicans.
The Post reports on the Senate’s vote to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia:
"Trump has cited rising tensions with Iran as justification for using his emergency powers to complete the deals.
A bipartisan group of senators, led by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), had initially filed 22 resolutions of disapproval against the sales — one for every contract the administration had expedited by emergency order, effectively sidestepping congressional opposition. But after weeks of negotiations, Senate leaders agreed to hold just three votes, which will encompass the substance of all the blocking resolutions, congressional aides said."
In other words, senators don’t believe the president is playing it straight on the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which set off a firestorm regarding the Saudis on Capitol Hill. They do not believe in Trump’s policy of making Saudi Arabia a proxy in a battle with Iran over regional dominance. And, moreover, the Senate is willing to undercut Trump at the precise moment his credibility and judgment are under fire in a standoff with Iran.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) declared from the Senate floor: “I must say, even in closed-door briefings with senators, the administration doesn’t spell out a strategy. This is not how democracy is supposed to work, and this is not how even the CEO of a major company should behave — with no articulated strategy. The president needs to explain to the American people why he is driving us towards another endless conflict in the Middle East.” On Saudi Arabia specifically, Schumer explained that the Senate was denying “the transfer of tens of thousands of precision-guided munitions that the Saudis have previously used to bomb innocent civilians in Yemen.”
The votes come after the United Nations issued a report far more revealing — and damning — about the grotesque Khashoggi murder and dismemberment. As Schumer said, “Last night, the United Nations issued a report that documented evidence that the Saudis meticulously planned the murder of U.S. resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi and ‘forensically' disposed of the evidence. According to the report, the Saudis referred to Mr. Khashoggi as a ‘sacrificial animal’ and that dismembering the body would ‘be easy.’ ” And now, of all times, the administration wants to give Saudi Arabia access to weaponry that can slaughter more civilians in Yemen.
The president once more has gone to the well claiming “emergency” powers as a way to do an end run around Congress. The only emergency we have, however, is an utterly unfit commander in chief who has earned no deference from Congress, no trust from allies and no respect from foes.
"The World War I Peace Cross erected in Bladensburg, Maryland in 1925 has been allowed to remain in place.
No other monuments were adjudicated by the Supreme Court today."
nor will they be
the Supreme Court has spoken
7-2
meanwhile, more gay violence:
DENVER (AP) — A high school student charged in a classmate's death during a Colorado school shooting told police that he planned the attack for weeks and intended to target classmates who mocked his gender identity.
Written summaries of police interviews with the two suspected shooters portray 16-year-old Alec McKinney as the leader of the attack, enlisting 18-year-old Devon Erickson in the plan to kill the students who mocked McKinney, who identifies as male.
Both teenagers told police that they broke into a gun safe at one of the teenager's homes before walking into the STEM School Highlands Ranch on the afternoon of May 7 with a guitar case and a backpack concealing four guns.
McKinney "said he wanted the kids at the school to experience bad things, have to suffer from trauma like he had had to in his life," the document said. "He wanted everyone in that school to suffer and realize that the world is a bad place."
Both teenagers are charged with murder and attempted murder in the shooting.
Prosecutors charged McKinney as an adult; his attorneys have said they plan to ask a judge to move the case back to juvenile court. Neither has entered a plea yet, and their attorneys opposed the unsealing of records associated with the criminal cases.
On the one hand, a new Fox News poll spells doom for Donald Trump, with a fistful of Democratic presidential candidates beating the incumbent. Former Vice President Joe Biden cleans Trump's clock by 10 percentage points, 49 percent to 39 percent. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) wins 49 percent to 40 percent. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) ekes out a 43 percent-to-41 percent victory. And Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg both squeeze out a 1-point margin, 42 percent to 41 percent.
On the other, more consequential hand, that same poll underscores why Trump is almost certainly going to win reelection in 2020. One of the questions asked Democratic voters whether they will vote for a candidate with a "bold, new agenda" or one "who will provide steady, reliable leadership." Fully three-quarters of respondents want the latter, with just 25 percent interested in the sort of "bold, new agenda" that virtually all Democratic candidates are peddling so far. This finding is consistent with other polling that shows that Democratic voters are far more moderate than their candidates. Even allowing for a doubling of self-described Democrats who identify as liberal over the past dozen years, Gallup found last year that 54 percent of Democrats support a party that is "more moderate" while just 41 percent want one that is "more liberal."
Yet with the exception of Joe Biden (more on him in a minute), all of the Democratic candidates—certainly the leading ones—are pushing a massively expansionist agenda, thus putting themselves at odds with their own base. Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All would cost $37 trillion in new spending over a decade and his free-college plan would cost the federal government about $47 billion a year. He plans to spend much, much more, as does Elizabeth Warren, who is running on promises to spend $3.3 trillion over a decade in new giveaways that will be paid for by an unworkable, probably unconstitutional "wealth tax" that will at best raise $2.75 trillion.
To greater and lesser degrees, the other Democratic candidates are also offering variations on the big government or "bold, new agenda" theme. For this, they get massive online attaboys, which makes it seem as if there is a groundswell of support for such positions. Based on data from The Hidden Tribes Project, which uses polling and survey data to get a truer sense of voter and partisan ideology, The New York Times reported that the "outspoken group of Democratic-leaning voters on social media is outnumbered, roughly 2 to 1, by the more moderate, more diverse and less educated group of Democrats who typically don't post political content online." That same dynamic plays out in the more-traditional commentariat as well. Writing in The New Republic, Alex Pareene takes it as a given that the Democrats should nominate a big-spending president and effusively praises Elizabeth Warren especially for demonizing specific individuals and companies. Despite her weak poll numbers, Politico claims that Warren is now a "potential compromise nominee," a fantasy belied by the small number of actual Democrats interested in anything resembling a "bold, new agenda."
But what about Joe Biden, who is leading the Democratic field by a large margin, despite being about the least-woke candidate out there? The Fox News poll has Biden at 32 percent, Sanders at 13 percent, and nobody else even in double digits. At The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger suggests that Biden is in fact an existential threat to the incumbent precisely because he might be as "sleepy" as Trump recently called him:
Mr. Biden may be doing so well in the head-to-heads against Mr. Trump because many voters simply want respite from the nonstop Trumpian atmosphere of disruption and volatility. For them, "Sleepy Joe Biden" may not be an insult. Political belief still matters, but maybe not as much as neurological relief from political and personality overload.
This assumes, of course, that Biden survives the nomination process. As the far-ahead leader of the massive Democratic field, he is the target not just of Donald Trump but of all his fellow partisans too. He's already been dinged over his creeping and his decades-old plagiarism is now being relitigated. It seems as if every day brings a new crisis or controversy, such as Biden's warm statements toward segregationists in the 1970s, his eulogy of racist Sen. Strom Thurmond in 2003, and the emerging narrative that his son Hunter, whose personal life is a total shitshow, appears to be an international grifter who allegedly used dad's connections to make shady deals with Chinese and Ukrainian interests. Whether such charges are true in a serious way is a lot less important than the fact that Biden will be facing such attacks from now through at least the end of the primary process. Even if he manages to win the nomination, he will emerge bloodied as hell. In many ways, that's the lesson from 2016 that the Democrats might want to revisit. Although Hillary Clinton ultimately beat back Bernie Sanders' insurgency, Sanders' constant attacks (and revelations from leaked emails) definitely weakened her against Donald Trump in the general election.
Under the best circumstances, Trump is almost certainly not going to win 50 percent of the vote in 2020. Despite a robust economy, his approval rating peaked at 46 percent shortly after he assumed office. His path to a second term will look a lot like the path to his upset victory in 2016. He will need to scratch out a victory where virtually every vote and every insult counts. But here's the thing: Trump knows how to do this, has the power of incumbency, and things, short of a massive economic downturn, really can't get worse for him. He has weathered every disturbing revelation, every tempest over unprofessional or unethical behavior, every lapse in taste or decorum. His numbers aren't going to get any lower. Earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference and more recently in a Florida mega-rally, he's shown an ability to go big and fire up his already intense following. Less than a week away from the first Democratic candidates' debate and a year-plus away from the general election, Biden, whose history of gaffes and awful legislation is legendary, has nowhere to go but down
As someone who has spent the better part of my life as a writer who understands the power of words, I regret and apologize that mine have potentially hurt young people and members of the LGBTQ community ,including my friends and colleagues in that community.
Thirteen years ago, I founded the Epiphany School of Global Studies anchored in the commandment to love God and your neighbor as you love yourself. I am currently engaged in a several years-long lawsuit with a former headmaster of the school. As a result of that suit, several e-mails from me have been released to the public that on the surface, portray me as someone intolerant of having an LGBTQ club at the school. Unfortunately, the ongoing lawsuit constrains what I can reveal about the specific circumstances six years ago that gave rise to these emails, but I very much want to articulate my beliefs and share where my heart is on this matter.
I believe in the school’s founding principle of loving God and thy neighbor as thyself, and that includes members of the LGBTQ community. I believe in and unreservedly support the principle that all individuals should be free to love, marry and have children with the person they choose, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation. This is and has always been a core value of mine. I am an unequivocal supporter of gay marriage, gay adoption, and equal employment rights and would never want to discourage any young person or adult from embracing who they are.
When in one of my emails I used language such as “there will never be an LGBT club” at Epiphany, l was responding heatedly to how the headmaster had gone about initiating this club – like most schools, Epiphany has procedures and policies for establishing any student club. My concern was that if a club were to be founded, it be done in a thoughtful, transparent manner with the knowledge of faculty, students and parents – not in secret, and not in a way that felt exceptional. I only wish I had used those exact words. Similarly, when I referred to a prior headmaster addressing the presence of gay students “quietly and wonderfully,” I meant that he supported them in a straightforward, unambiguous way – NOT that he in any way encouraged students to be silent about their gender identity or sexual orientation.
In 2013 I was embroiled in a rapidly escalating conflict and besieged by vociferous complaints about a wide range of incidents involving the headmaster’s behavior. Ironically, as a writer I should have understood the power and enduring nature of my words, but like many people sent emails off in haste under stressful and tumultuous conditions. My greatest regret, however, is not my lack of deliberation, but first and foremost that I failed to be more unequivocal about my support for the students in question.
It’s never been my intent to be unresponsive to the needs of the LGBTQ or any minority community. In fact the opposite is true, and I trust my actions moving forward will confirm that.
Sincerely, Nicholas Sparks
One of the big legal issues facing our country is where and how we are going to draw the line between religion and the government. And church and state arguably got a bit closer this week — before the end of the decade, we may find them in a full embrace.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled on the contours of the Establishment Clause, a portion of the First Amendment that provides “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The court has previously interpreted the clause to mean that the government cannot promote one religion over another religion, or promote religion generally over nonreligion, or vice versa.
The question in American Legion v. American Humanist Association violates that clause. But it involves not just any 40-foot cross, but a war memorial honoring veterans of World War I.
This week, the court ruled that the cross could stand, but in doing so, it provided some answers about how much the government can support or promote religious symbols. The decision showed us what we really have on the Supreme Court — a group of justices coming to some consensus on only the most macro issues. Look behind the curtain and we have justices putting forward opinions that would fundamentally re-shape our understanding of the Establishment Clause.
We have our longest-serving justice, Clarence Thomas, arguing that the Establishment Clause doesn't even apply to actions by states and localities, but instead only applies to laws passed by Congress. We have one of our newest justices, Neil Gorsuch, arguing that if you’re offended by a religious display on government property, you should just look away, not go to federal court. In other words, we have at least two members of the court ready to defang the Establishment Clause. And we have our most recent member of the court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, arguing that the Establishment Clause only applies when the government does something relatively extreme like forcing people to support religion.
Alito’s opinion was that established monuments, even when in the form of religious symbols, do not violate the Establishment Clause. “The passage of time gives rise to a strong presumption of constitutionality,” Alito wrote. Alito found that if the court ordered the cross removed or altered, it would actually look like the court was being hostile toward religion. Alito also relied on the fact that there was no evidence of discriminatory intent in the creation or maintenance of the cross on government land.
The decision Thursday is consistent with a 2005 Establishment Clause decision in which the court said it was constitutional for the Ten Commandments to be displayed in the Texas state Capitol. In that case, as in the American Legion case, the court relied heavily on the idea that the display had a historical meaning.
Gorsuch wrote a separate concurring opinion arguing that people who are offended by religious symbols lack standing to sue in court. Essentially Gorsuch is arguing that an individual or a group in Establishment Clause cases like these does not have a sufficient, concrete injury that could be remedied in federal court. Gorsuch argues that people offended by the cross should avert their eyes. This significantly reduces the power and force of the Establishment Clause. Thomas joined this portion of the opinion.
Thomas, for his part, wrote separately to reiterate his belief that the Establishment Clause is relatively narrow. He argued that it should not apply to the states at all, and does not apply to things like monuments, but only laws that would promote religion. This means that states are only bound by state constitutions regarding the promotion of religions or nonreligious beliefs, like atheism. The federal Constitution is inapplicable in a situation in which the city of San Francisco, for example, decided to erect an enormous cross in the middle of Union Square.
Kavanaugh, in his separate opinion, appeared to put forward the idea that the Establishment Clause only prevents activities that are seen as coercive, such as government laws that would force people, against their desires, to support religion. Like the arguments put forward by Gorsuch and Thomas, this significantly limits the scope of the clause.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor were the only justices to dissent from all portions of the court’s opinion and Ginsburg clearly won't be on the court long.
Thursday's decision means that not only can the cross in Maryland stand, but also that other religious symbols on government property do not violate the Establishment Clause. This has clear implications for symbols like the Ten Commandments and even religious holiday scenes on government property like public schools, public libraries, public parks and courthouses.
All of this as a win for old religious symbols everywhere.
The era of the expansive reinterpretation of the establishment clause to attack religious activity, began in the 1963 O'Hair case, is over.
The final nail went in its coffin last summer.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/man-charged-with-abduction-sexual-battery/2019/06/15/fb07c458-8fa6-11e9-8f69-a2795fca3343_story.html
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/06/14/report-teammates-avoided-kellen-winslow-jr-because-of-porn-obsession-and-lewd-behavior/23749634/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/14/three-decades-after-childs-brutal-murder-police-made-an-arrest-his-neighbors-werent-surprised/?utm_term=.e24fdb866089
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/kathua-rape-and-murder-case-verdict_in_5cfde91ae4b04e90f1cbb75f
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/06/11/bloodhound-helps-cops-find-woman-chained-in-basement/23747122/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/06/13/rosalynn-mcginnis-henri-piette-predator-stepfather-oklahoma/?utm_term=.8a0bed6305ef
A religious school in Indiana broke with the archdiocese after refusing to fire a teacher who was in a same-sex marriage.
Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School announced in a statement Thursday that they had a "sincere and significant disagreement" with the Archdiocese of Indianapolis over the issue.
"Brebeuf Jesuit has respectfully declined the Archdiocese's insistence and directive that we dismiss a highly capable and qualified teacher due to the teacher being a spouse within a civilly-recognized same-sex marriage," the letter from the school states. The teacher's name and gender were not identified.
The regional Jesuit community appears to be supporting the decision, with Brian Paulson, the leader of the Jesuits Midwest Province, writing a letter about the "disappointing development" posted to the group's website.
Paulson noted that the teacher's same-sex union has been known within the community since the summer of 2017 when "this act became publicly known via social media."
The Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Paulson wrote, "requested verbally two years ago that Brebeuf Jesuit not renew this teacher's contract because this teacher's marital status does not conform to church doctrine."
The disagreement appears to have now come to a head as the archdiocese is expected to formally withdraw support from the school.
The issue has drawn national attention, and the school is getting support from one of the best-known Jesuits, James Martin, a Jesuit priest and outspoken supporter of greater inclusion within the Catholic Church.
Martin, who regularly speaks publicly about the church, tweeted that he supports "my brother Jesuits who stand with our LGBT colleagues and stand against the relentless targeting of LGBT people."
"Other employees do not conform to, or agree with, church teaching: straight couples living together before marriage, practicing birth control, etc.....as well as employees who are not Catholic, not Christian, or not believers. Yet they are not targeted. The targeting of LGBT employees must cease, and Brebeuf and the Midwest Province are here standing with the marginalized. This is the most Catholic thing that they could do," he wrote in two tweets.
June 21 (Reuters) - The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) apologized on Friday for previously treating homosexuality as a mental illness, saying its past errors contributed to discrimination and trauma for LGBTQ people.
It may be the first U.S. medical or mental health organization to issue such an apology. Although psychiatrists declassified homosexuality as a disorder in 1973 and psychoanalysts came around nearly 20 years later, the APsaA say sit is unaware of any related professional group that had apologized.
“It is long past time to recognize and apologize for our role in the discrimination and trauma caused by our profession and say, ‘We are sorry,’” said a statement by Dr. Lee Jaffe, president of APsaA. The group uses that abbreviation to distinguish it from the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
Jaffe announced the apology on Friday at the opening session of the group’s 109th annual meeting in San Diego, drawing a standing ovation from about 200 people present, witnesses said.Jaffe said his group has long been active in promoting LGBTQ rights but had yet to put its contrition into words.
“It’s hard to admit that one has been so wrong,” Jaffe said.
One Los Angeles-based analyst said the audience interpreted the moment as significant.
“As someone who comes from a long line of analysts who have been fighting for LGBT people, this felt like a watershed moment,” Dr. Justin Shubert said.
In 2012, psychiatrist Dr. Robert Spitzer on his own apologized for authoring an influential study 11 years earlier that supported reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality.
Today, APsaA and other professional organizations view being gay as a normal variant of human sexuality, but until now have yet to express how wrong they were before, Drescher said.
“They did the work of apologizing but they did not say the words,” Drescher said. “If the police commissioner of New York City could do it, why couldn’t we do something similar?”
Oregon’s top lawmakers will shut down the state capitol after receiving threats from militia groups, who authorities say are planning to demonstrate there in support of the 11 Republican senators who fled the state to dodge a vote on climate change.
State Senate President Peter Courtney (D) told his colleagues on Friday that Oregon State Police had informed him there was a credible threat to him, the rest of the remaining senators — all of whom are Democrats — and the building’s staff.
“It was obviously a credible threat because Sen. Courtney wouldn’t close it down for no reason,” Courtney’s spokeswoman Carol Currie told The Washington Post.
State police confirmed the danger in an emailed statement.
“We have been monitoring information throughout the day that indicates the safety of legislators, staff and citizen visitors could be compromised if certain threatened behaviors were realized,” wrote Capt. Timothy Fox.
Friday night’s menacing escalation was the latest in a bizarre feud between the state’s Democrats and Republicans, who have clashed repeatedly during this year’s legislative session.
Early Thursday morning, every GOP senator bolted, reportedly for the Idaho line, rather than sit idly in the chamber as their opponents passed a sweeping cap-and-trade bill. Gov. Kate Brown (D) responded by directing state troopers to corral the Republicans and return them to the state house.
Democrats have a supermajority in Oregon
and the GOP would rather shut down the legislature than do their tax-payer funded jobs.
"and the GOP would rather shut down the legislature than do their tax-payer funded jobs."
That's because Republicans have fundamentally given up on democracy. They no longer believe that people voting in their legislators and letting them work out their differences in a reasonable compromise is the way a country should be run.
For them, it has become "my way or the highway," and "by any means necessary." Whether it's shutting down the government by letting spending bills lapse, holding up Supreme Court nominees for nearly a year without a single hearing - much less a vote, gerrymandering districts, and suppressing minority voters over the perpetual suspicion of massive voter fraud that is never found, but then engaging in ballot fraud, Republicans have shown that their only interest in "democracy" is in how they can use and abuse it to achieve their own goals - everyone else be damned.
The Oregon legislature should hold new emergency elections to fill the seats that the Republicans abdicated. Let's see if the people of Oregon really support these slackers and vote in new Republicans likely to do the same, or if they vote in people who actually believe in democracy and in the oath they took to do the job.
“Thank you very much for coming. These four very courageous women have asked to be here and it was our honor to help them. And I think they’re each going to make just an individual, short statement. And then will do a little meeting, and we will see you at the debate.”
With those words, candidate Donald Trump kicked off a news conference just hours before the second presidential debate on Oct. 9, 2016. The brainchild of Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s campaign chairman, the gathering was an effort to blunt the impact of the now-notorious “Access Hollywood” tape, unearthed two days before, on which Trump had boasted of grabbing women by their genitals and doing “anything” to them that he liked.
Sitting with Trump were four women, three of whom claimed to have been subjected to Bill Clinton’s unwelcome sexual advances. One, in particular, was sitting just to Trump’s right.
Her name was Juanita Broaddrick. And she made an accusation of criminal sexual assault.
“Mr. Trump may have said some bad words,” she said, “but Bill Clinton raped me.”
The next night, at a campaign rally in Ambridge, Pa., Trump quoted Broaddrick as saying “Hillary Clinton threatened me after Bill Clinton raped me,” and called Bill Clinton “a predator,” “the worst abuser of women ever to sit in the Oval Office.”
Broaddrick had told her story nearly two decades earlier, first to the media, and then later in a book. She had recounted how, in 1978, Clinton asked her up to his hotel room. How he allegedly forced himself upon her. How she tried to pull away. How he allegedly bit her lip, then later told her to put ice on it. How she sobbed. How she told some of her friends. How she didn’t tell the police. Clinton denied her accusations.
Republicans and conservatives rallied to her cause then, and they did so once again in 2016. Democrats and liberals, not so much — although in the wake of the #MeToo movement, some have since acknowledged the credibility of Broaddrick’s claim.
But today there’s another woman with a similar allegation, against a different powerful man. Her name is E. Jean Carroll.
She, too, says that she was raped — by Donald Trump...
...She, too, tells a story about how she was alone with a man. How in 1995 or 1996 that man, Trump, allegedly forced himself upon her. How she tried to fight back. How she tried to push him away and tried to stomp on his foot. How he penetrated her. How she ran out the door. How she told friends. How she didn’t tell the police. Trump also denied the accusations, calling them “fake news” and adding, “She is trying to sell a new book — that should indicate her motivation. It should be sold in the fiction section.”
But Trump called Broaddrick “courageous,” and if Broaddrick was courageous, then certainly Carroll is as well. For Carroll’s story is at least as compelling as Broaddrick’s — if not more so.
And that is because Carroll’s claim, for a number of reasons, actually rests upon a significantly stronger foundation than Broaddrick’s.
For one thing, before she went public with her story, Broaddrick had repeatedly denied that Clinton had assaulted her, even under oath: In an affidavit she had submitted in Paula Jones’s sexual harassment case against Clinton, Broaddrick had sworn that the allegations “that Mr. Clinton had made unwelcome sexual advances toward me in the late seventies … are untrue,” that the press had previously sought “corroboration of these tales,” but that she had “repeatedly denied the allegations.” (Disclosure: I provided behind-the-scenes pro bono legal assistance to Jones’s lawyers.)
For another, Carroll’s account is supported by the sheer number of claims that have now surfaced against Trump — claims in which women have accused Trump of engaging in unwelcome or forcible sexual conduct or assault against them. These claims — all denied by the president — far outnumber the publicized sexual misconduct incidents that involved Clinton, which mostly concerned rumors or allegations of consensual affairs.
And as if to bring things full circle, Carroll’s account is also of course supported by Trump’s depraved remarks on the “Access Hollywood” video, of which there was simply no equivalent in Broaddrick’s case. Whatever else he may have done, Clinton never made a video like that. What Trump described on the video is exactly what Carroll says he did to her.
Finally, no controversy involving Trump would be complete without at least one utterly brazen, easily disprovable Trumpian lie. In his statement denying the rape allegation, he added the claim that “I’ve never met this person in my life.”
If Trump had even bothered to glance at Carroll’s published account, he would have seen a photograph of himself and his then-wife, Ivana, from 1987 ― in which he was amiably chatting with Carroll and her then-husband. By making the absurd and mendacious assertion that he never even met Carroll, Trump utterly annihilates the credibility of his claim that he didn’t assault her.
Republicans or conservatives who promoted Broaddrick’s charges would be hypocritical if they fail to champion Carroll and condemn Trump.
All across the country, people are talking about Scott Dittman's hugs.
The Pennsylvania dad, wearing a "Free Dad Hugs" shirt he bought on Amazon, gave more than 700 hugs at the Pittsburgh Pride Parade last week, offering tenderness to those who wanted it and to many who seemed they needed it.
"There were a lot of folks who were super-happy, who grabbed you and squeezed you and gave you a slap on the back. But there's a segment of folks that held on so long, where the hug was so deep, who started to hug and began to cry," he said.
"A lot of these folks were having a great time, but you can see how damaged deep down so many of them are. In such a festive environment they see a shirt, and it's like a complete gut punch, and it reflects the pain that's always there, the pain that they're carrying all the time."
Dittman, who attended the event with a friend working with the LGBTQ advocacy group Free Mom Hugs, posted about his experience on Facebook, imploring parents of LGBTQ kids to accept and love their children. The post went viral, highlighting the problem of parental rejection among LGBTQ people...
When Dittman returned home from Pride, his wife asked how it went.
"I told her it was an incredible experience, but it also made me feel so pissed off," he said. "As a parent, you saw them take their first steps, you cried when they first said 'I love you,' you were there for those milestones. Then you're going to cut them off because they love someone? Whether it's religion or personal beliefs, I just can't see any justification for that."
It's what drove Dittman, who lives in the small, conservative town of Karns City, Pennsylvania, to post about his experience on Facebook. One of the photos he shared was of a man whose family kicked him out at 19. Thirty years later, he still hasn't spoken to them. Dittman said that when they embraced, the man sobbed so violently it felt as though Dittman was holding him up.
Advocates say hugs are a start. But kindness from strangers is no substitute for family support.
"It was a beautiful story, a beautiful image," Owen said. "Those viral moments are super-important – we help elevate them as well – but the next step is thinking about how we go beyond the hugs."
While many families are affirming of their LGBTQ children, others are conflicted, and PFLAG has more than 400 chapters around the country that offer peer-to-peer support to those who may be struggling with a loved one's identity.
"We tell people to lead with love," Owen said. "It's not about you, it's about your LGBTQ loved one. As scary as it is to hear, it is 10 times scarier to have to be the one to say it. They're likely worried about losing your love, their home, their support system. Even though there's no perfect way to respond, positive responses lead to healthier outcomes."
The ultimate goal, she said, is for parents to not only accept their kids, but to fight for them.
"We want to get parents to say, 'I'm here for my kid, I love my kid, don't you dare come for my kid with legislation that harms my kid,'" she said.
Dittman said there's no way he'll miss the parade next year. His hope is that people will stop making assumptions about who LGBTQ people are. He hopes they'll stop making assumptions about him, too.
"I don't identify as Republican or Democrat. I'm an Independent," he said. "I've gotten a lot of hate mail calling me a leftist. I hunt, I fish, I carry a weapon, I'm a member of the NRA, but I'm out there hugging people, because I don't care who you love."
Department of Justice attorney Sarah Fabian was trending on Twitter Saturday, but not in a good way. Fabian was the lawyer who stumblingly tried to convince clearly taken-aback Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal judges that the federal government should not be required to provide detained immigrant children with soap, toothbrushes — or even beds.
Last year Fabian rebuffed a court request to immediately address release of some immigrant children because she had to return home to dog sit. She has also argued for the Justice Department that detention authorities should have the power to put immigrant children in solitary confinement.
Her latest arguments on Tuesday — and the three-judge panel’s stunned responses — shocked many Americans who watched her performance on a video of the proceedings provided by the Ninth Circuit.
Fabian argued that the government could provide “safe and sanitary” conditions for detained children — an agreement reached in a 1997 settlement — without being required to provide soap, toothbrushes or even beds. Judge A. Wallace Tashima — who spent years in a Japanese internment camp in America — said that “everyone’s common understanding” is that such requirements are necessary for safe and sanitary conditions. “Wouldn’t everyone agree with that?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you agree with that.”
Fabian answered: “Well ... maybe ...”
The Trump administration has buried dozens of studies by the US Department of Agriculture warning that climate change will impact US farming in coming decades, Politico reported Sunday.
The studies assessed the impact of rising temperatures, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and volatile weather on agriculture rather than being focused on the causes of global warming,
The outlet reports that scientists used the studies to warn of the consequences including increased carbon dioxide levels making rice less nutritious, and, separately, an extended allergy season.
According to the report, the studies have been kept off the department's website and have not been publicized.
"The intent is to try to suppress a message—in this case, the increasing danger of human-caused climate change," Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, told the outlet.
Agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue has in the past denied climate change. In a 2014 article he wrote that "snowstorms, hurricanes, and tornadoes have been around since the beginning of time, but now they want us to accept that all of it is the result of climate change."
A spokesman for the department denied to Politico that climate science reports had been suppressed.
"Research continues on these subjects and we promote the research once researchers are ready to announce the findings, after going through the appropriate reviews and clearances," a spokesperson told Politico.
President Trump has also expressed doubts about the reality of climate change, and his administration has moved to stifle federal government reports on the impact of climate change.
In May the administration acted to prevent the National Climate Assessment — which is produced by 13 federal government agencies – from describing worst-case scenarios on the consequences of climate change in its reports.
In an interview on “Meet the Press,” President Trump repeated a whopper of a lie.
"PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
Separation, President Obama, I took over separation. I'm the one that put it together. What's happened though are the cartels and all of these bad people, they're using the kids. They’re, they’re, it's almost like slavery.
CHUCK TODD:
But let's not punish the kids more.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
No this has been happening —
CHUCK TODD:
Aren’t you — the kids are getting punished more.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
You’re right. And this has been happening long before I got there. What we’ve done is we’ve created, we’ve, we’ve ended separation. You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it. Now I said one thing, when I ended it I said, “Here’s what’s going to happen. More families are going to come up.” And that’s what’s happened. But they’re really coming up for the economics. But once you ended the separation. But I ended separation. I inherited separation from President Obama.
The Post’s fact-checkers back in April explained: “The Obama administration rejected a plan for family separations, according to Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top adviser for immigration. The Trump administration operated a pilot program for family separations in the El Paso area beginning in mid-2017.” Trump’s claim that “Obama did it first” is both morally vapid and completely wrong: “The Trump administration implemented this policy by choice, exercising its discretion to prosecute some crimes over others. But no law or court ruling mandates family separations. In fact, during its first 15 months, the Trump administration released nearly 100,000 immigrants who were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, a total that includes more than 37,500 unaccompanied minors and more than 61,000 family-unit members.” In short, “The zero-tolerance approach is worlds apart from the Obama- and Bush-era policy of separating children from adults at the border only in limited circumstances, such as when officials suspected human trafficking or another kind of danger to the child or when false claims of parentage were made.”
Jake Tapper at CNN showed the right way to confront administration members on Sunday, when he went right after Vice President Pence’s misrepresentations about the dismal condition of children still held. After playing a clip of administration lawyers arguing in the 9th Circuit that there was no responsibility to provide basic necessities to children such as toothbrushes, Pence tried to claim that he didn’t know what the lawyers were saying. Tapper kept after him:...
...”But this is going on right now,” Tapper said, adding “This is the wealthiest nation in the world. We have money to give toothpaste and soap and blankets to these kids in this facility in El Paso County. Right now, we do.”
“Well, of course — of course we do,” Pence said.
“So why aren’t we?” Taper asked.
Pence again dodged the question with a snicker, replying “My point is — my point is, it’s all a part of the appropriations process.”
Tapper then had to cut Pence off from the lengthy digression that followed in order to force the question again.
“But I’m talking about the kids — I’m talking about the kids our custody right now,” Taper said. “Just listen to this. This is ‘The New Yorker’ citing a team of lawyers who visited a border facility.”
Pence tried to interrupt him again, but Tapper insisted “I just want to quote this.”
“The conditions the lawyers were found were shocking,” Tapper read. “Flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated. Children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, taking care of each other because of the lack of attention from guards.”
“I know you. You’re a father. You’re a man of faith. You can’t approve of that,” Tapper said.
“Well, I — I — no — no American — no American should approve of this mass influx of people coming across our border,” Pence stammered. It is overwhelming our system at the southern border.
“But how about how we’re treating these children?” Tapper asked, again, and Pence deflected, again.
“I was at the detention center in Nogales just a few short months ago. It is a heartbreaking scene,” Pence said, but then added These are people who are being exploited by human traffickers, who charge them $5,000 a person to entice them to take their vulnerable children…”
“But now these kids are in our custody,” Tapper said.
Pence continued to blame Democrats in Congress, but Tapper again reiterated “But I would say that I’m talking about the kids on our southern border right now.”
He told Pence “you have the power right now to go back to the White House and say, we need to make sure that these kids — first of all, that there are people taking care of them, so it is not 12-year-olds taking care of 3-year-olds, and, second of all, that they have soap, that they have toothbrushes, that they have combs, that we’re taking care so they don’t all get the flu.”
Pence once again tried to blame Democrats, to which Tapper replied “I think Democrats would argue that they want to do a deal with President Trump, but he hasn’t showed any inclination.”...
That’s precisely how reporters need to go after Trump and his morally deficient administration. This is the Trump administration’s policy. This is the Trump administration’s doing. This is the Trump administration’s refusal to address basic humanitarian needs (while raiding the Defense Department to build a useless wall that has nothing to do with asylum seekers presenting themselves at the border).
Allowing Trump and his ilk to bluster and flat-out lie their way through interviews might be the path of least resistance when trying to cover a lot of ground. However, if Trump and his teammates are not stopped dead in their tracks, the media become a platform for deceiving voters.
Headlines that echo the president — “Trump says Obama did it first” — are equally reprehensible. (It should be “Trump falsely blames Obama for his own policy.”) Trump, Pence and the rest are accustomed to running through their ridiculous talking points (e.g. the United States has the cleanest water and air in the world) without objection on outlets such as Fox. Other media can and must do better. And when the general-election debates roll around, moderators must be willing to correct misstatements of fact. (Or follow up by asking, “But that’s not true, is it Mr. President?")
We’re at risk of losing not only a shared set of facts but also a uniform belief that there are such things as facts. That’s straight out of the autocratic playbook — one that the media cannot facilitate.
Voters choosing among the Democratic presidential contenders have no real policy options when it comes to one issue – abortion. The field is in lock-step agreement that taxpayers should have no choice but to be in business with Planned Parenthood.
And that rare, if controversial consensus was on full display as 20 Democratic Presidential contenders descended this weekend on Columbia, S.C., for a Planned Parenthood Action Fund event, as the nation’s No. 1 abortion vendor puts on a display of political power and backroom access.
But voters paying careful attention could also see a meeting of those who have financial incentives to push past the comfort level of ordinary Americans, forcing funding and blocking commonsense limits on abortion. Big abortion is big business.
Consider that Planned Parenthood already pulls in more than half-a-billion dollars in taxpayer funding, a significant part of its overall budget. And the would-be presidential candidates are all also fully aware that in the last election cycle the abortion Goliath spent millions on aspiring abortion advocates like them.
In fact, in the 2018 mid-term elections, Planned Parenthood spent more than $50 million in federal races in favor of Democrats. And some of those coming to the candidate forum know that first-hand. The Center for Responsive Politics notes that 12 of those trying for the Democratic nomination have received Planned Parenthood donations.
With all that money at stake, is it any wonder that Planned Parenthood and their Democratic allies now want to put an end to the Hyde Amendment, which limits federal spending on abortion to only cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is in danger?
Yet that move for expanded taxpayer funding of abortion is too extreme for even most Democrats. A Morning Consult poll found that only 45 percent of Democratic Party primary voters wanted to see Hyde repealed. In fact, 38 percent did not agree with that radical agenda.
The Hyde amendment provides a rare thing indeed in politics – bipartisan truce that has held firm for years. During the debate over Obamacare, a Quinnipiac poll found that more than seven in 10 Americans – self-described as pro-life or pro-choice – said they did not want their tax dollars to pay for abortions. And as Students for Life of America meets daily with students on college and university campuses in all 50 states that consensus holds firm.
In fact, SFLA commissioned a poll earlier this year finding that only 7 percent of millennials can stomach the abortion extremism of the Democratic Party – abortion through all nine months, for any reason whatsoever, and sometimes with taxpayer funding.
While Planned Parenthood tried to push a stark picture of crisis with their version of abortion as “healthcare,” pregnancy is not a disease cured by abortion.
The kind of care that Planned Parenthood wants to offer brings misery and sells women short, as abortion vendors tell women that without abortion they can’t succeed in life. The abortion industry seeks to create a civil war between a woman’s family and career life, insinuating that both are not possible and pushing women to choose work over relationships, rather than equipping women to achieve across the board. Instead of a pro-woman ethos that embraces and celebrates a woman’s unique gift of fertility and life-giving capacity, that part ourselves is painted as a problem to be conquered and corralled -- out of mind and out of sight of society.
Tragically, Planned Parenthood profits from an updated misogyny that tries to keep women at work by rejecting their full potential. And they want taxpayers to pay for it.
But women should consider the source of this defeatist messages.
Planned Parenthood is in the abortion business, and abortion is NOT healthcare. There would be no issues here at all to discuss if Planned Parenthood really did want to focus on life-affirming healthcare, rather than cutting back on just about all real medical care they once offered in favor of abortion. Even when it comes to pregnancy, Planned Parenthood ended 83 lives in abortion for every one adoption referral.
Students for Life of America was outside of the abortion-centric event reminding people that there is another side to the abortion industry’s pitch that they alone “help” women. Our team reminded reporters and attendees that federally qualified health centers outnumber Planned Parenthood by 20 to 1, offering real, full-service care, including family planning.
Still, there is one number that Planned Parenthood’s President Dr. Leana Wen likes to mention – that about one in five women will visit a Planned Parenthood at some point.
But Wen and the Presidential prospects should take a hard look at that statistic. Clearly, four out of five women already know they don’t need Planned Parenthood. And that last women may have been harmed by the kind of “services” the abortion mega vendors sells.
It’s not too late for the candidates who came to Planned Parenthood’s forum to choose to support both mother and preborn child. There is room for pro-life Democrats in this debate in which the vast majority of Americans want a different kind of world, with healthcare that extends life, rather than ending it.
It becomes more obvious daily that the final nail went into the gay agenda last summer.
Gay bars are shutting down across America.
Chik-Fil-A, which gays tried to shut down for supporting pro-family groups, was behind only McDonald's and Starbucks in total sales last year.
The Supreme Court is poised to correct the "gay marriage is a constitutional right" absurdity of a couple of years ago.
And, now, polls show that millenials, who considered themselves pro-gay-rights a few years ago, have now met more gays .... and they are not enchanted!
The LGBT community in America has more special rights today than at any other point in history. But a recent report discovered that those advancements aren’t sitting well with the country’s youth — the very group thought of as the most tolerant around.
This year’s Accelerating Acceptance report looked at how LGBT Americans are perceived by their straight peers.
Among those aged 18 to 34, only 45 percent said that they were comfortable interacting with LGBT people in 2018. That’s down from 53 percent in 2017 and from 63 percent in 2016, USA Today reported.
The big driver of this downward spiral? Young women. Women in this age group were accepting of LGBT people in 2017 at a rate of 64 percent — a figure that dropped to 52 percent in 2018.
“We count on the narrative that young people are more progressive and tolerant,” John Gerzema, CEO of The Harris Poll, the company which conducted the poll on behalf of LGBT advocacy group GLAAD, told USA Today. “These numbers signal a looming social crisis in discrimination.”
The line from Donald Trump's reelection campaign kickoff rally that most stuck with most was: "Don't ever forget this election is about you. It's about your family, your future and the fate of your country."
That sentiment -- that voters should be thinking about themselves and their families when they vote -- is the key to illustrating how the healthy economy, which has blossomed on Trump's watch, has tangible effects on the lives of voters. While the media and Democrats will relentlessly focus on Trump and whatever they perceive as the outrage of the day, the President's idea to get voters to think of themselves is a way around the Trump treadmill we've been on for four years. It's a brilliant argument: All they care about is destroying me, and I just care about building your future.
After achieving 46% of the popular vote in the 2016 election, Trump's job approval has stubbornly fluctuated just below that mark for most of his first term. At the same time, Trump's approval rating when it comes to his handling of the economy has often been above 50%, causing political strategists to wonder what it will take to connect the two numbers.
Perhaps all Trump was lacking to bridge that gap was a campaign -- a chance to lay out the stark differences between his policies and the Democrats' alternatives. In the abstract, while weathering numerous other storms, including Robert Mueller's probe and corresponding congressional investigations, Trump has often been distracted from narrowing in on a message about our undeniably strong economy.
But during this kickoff speech, he spent time focusing on the thing that all Americans want -- a good life for themselves and a better life for their kids. And he started to draw a contrast between his performance and what he says the Democrats would do: raise taxes and redistribute wealth.
Sure, Trump hit the other notes -- immigration, chiefly -- but his reelection will hinge on whether he can keep people focused on what they love about his presidency instead of what makes them question it.
Trump also began to lay out how he intends to assail his eventual opponent -- no matter the nominee -- and perhaps cause problems inside traditional Democratic constituencies. He hit Democrats on their party's lurch toward socialism, tried to shore up senior citizens' support by promising to protect Medicare and Social Security, continued to promise to protect health care coverage for preexisting conditions, and touted the lowest unemployment rate for African-Americans in US history.
While Tuesday's speech was billed as a kickoff rally, Trump's campaign has been underway for months, taking advantage of the power of incumbency and setting a clear path to his party's nomination. As the Democrats settle in for a long nomination fight, the President's campaign and the Republican National Committee already had $82 million in the bank, according to Politico, and raised another $24.8 million online Tuesday, GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel claimed. That's more than Joe Biden says he has raised for his entire campaign effort. On the other hand, the Democratic National Committee, which will be waiting another year for a nominee, "spent more than it raised and added $3 million in new debt" in the first four months of 2019, according to a Bloomberg report.
And from a political organizing perspective, the Trump apparatus' move to integrate its operations with the RNC is already paying dividends. According to a memo released this week by Trump's campaign political director, Chris Carr, and described by David M. Drucker in the Washington Examiner, around 12,000 Trump supporters planned to attend more than 700 "MAGA meet-ups" to watch the kickoff speech. The campaign is also preparing 254 grassroots training seminars nationally, says the memo, while a Trump-aligned nonprofit group began a $20 million voter registration drive outside the event in Orlando.
Incumbent American presidents usually win reelection, but not always. Trump faces great challenges, not the least of which are Democrats targeting soft Sun Belt states that traditionally vote Republican but seem potentially wobbly on Trump this time around.
But Trump has a record, a message and the advantages of incumbency to drive home the simple choice: No matter what you think of me personally, you are better off today than you were four years ago. And we just can't afford to roll the dice on a socialist scheme that will fundamentally change our nation's free enterprise system and, more importantly, threaten your families' prosperity.
Should rural and small-town Americans be reduced to serfdom? The American Founders didn’t think so. This is one reason why they created checks and balances, including the Electoral College. Today that system is threatened by a proposal called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPV.
Rural America produces almost all our country’s food, as well as raw materials like metals, cotton and timber. Energy, fossil fuels but also alternatives like wind and solar come mostly from rural areas. In other words, the material inputs of modern life flow out of rural communities and into cities.
This is fine, so long as the exchange is voluntary — rural people choose to sell their goods and services, receive a fair price, and have their freedom protected under law. But history shows that city dwellers have a nasty habit of taking advantage of their country cousins. Greeks enslaved whole masses of rural people, known as helots. Medieval Europe had feudalism. The Russians had their serfs.
The Electoral College is undemocratic? Of course. That's why it works.
Credit the American Founders with setting up a system of limited government with lots of checks and balances. The U.S. Senate makes sure all states are represented equally, even low-population rural states like Wyoming and Vermont. Limits on federal power, along with the Bill of Rights, are supposed to protect Americans from overreaching federal regulations. And the Electoral College makes it impossible for one population-dense region of the country to control the presidency.
This is why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016. Instead of winning over small-town Americans, she amassed a popular vote lead based on California and a few big cities. She won those places with huge margins but lost just about everywhere else. And the system worked. The Electoral College requires more than just the most raw votes to win — it requires geographic balance. This helps to protect rural and small-town Americans.
Now a California millionaire named John Koza is trying to undo this system. He is leading and funding the National Popular Vote campaign. Their plan is to get state governments to ignore how their own citizens vote in presidential elections and instead get them to cast their electoral votes based on the national popular vote. If it works, this will be like getting rid of the Electoral College but without actually amending the Constitution.
"The Electoral College is undemocratic? Of course. That's why it works."
That's why it works for REPUBLICANS. It has never worked for the Democrats. Republicans don't care about being popular as long as they can enforce their agenda on the majority by any means necessary. And they've found that keeping a minority of ignorant and angry voters under their control is highly advantageous to them.
Gerrymandering, purging voter rolls, leaving the state so bills they don't like can't get passed, refusing to hold hearing for judicial nominees, or shutting down the entire government by starving it of necessary operating funds. These have become de rigueur for the Republican party these days, not the enforced checks and balances brought about by reasoned debate and submitting to the will of the vote as envisioned by the founding fathers.
Republicans gave up on democracy when Ronnie Raygun declared "government IS the problem." When Newt Gingrich stepped into office, it was clear that Republicans simply weren't interested in fixing the problems, but preferred twisting it to their own self-serving ends.
Some idiots think Trump is "showing strength" to the rest of the world. They have no idea the difference between belligerence and real strength, and that much of the rest of the world knows Trump is a barely-literate, lying fool. They may fear him, but they certainly don't respect him - or us.
There are a lot of farmers losing money now because the Rumpster started unnecessary trade wars with their biggest customers. They've learned their lesson. There will be a lot fewer of those rural voters willing to be burned again in 2020.
Trump was warned (or would have been warned if he read the vetting documents) that:
Former interior secretary Ryan Zinke “was accused at least twice of misusing taxpayer funds for personal travel”; former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt appeared to be improperly cozy with energy interests; former health and human services secretary Tom Price had been accused of improperly blending campaign contributions and his legislative record; Kris Kobach, tapped to run Trump’s voting-fraud commission, was criticized for his alleged ties to white-supremacist groups and racially inflammatory rhetoric; businesses owned by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross included an investment company fined for misleading investors and a coal mine that had hundreds of safety violations and a deadly explosion; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was seen as “looking to make profits from the ruins of the housing bust”; Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao had potential conflicts of interest because of her “large network of business associations”; and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s “foreign entanglements” (even a paid speech to a group that had been listed as a “foreign terrorist organization”) were detailed at great length. And there were several others.
Trump evidently ignored the warnings. Since then, he has had to part with Zinke, Pruitt, Price and Kobach, while headlines about Ross, Mnuchin, Chao and Giuliani have caused headaches for the White House.
You
reap
what
you
sow.
Donald Trump buried a climate change report because 'I don't believe it'
President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed a study produced by his own administration, involving 13 federal agencies and more than 300 leading climate scientists, warning of the potentially catastrophic impact of climate change.
Why, you ask?
"I don't believe it," Trump told reporters on Monday, adding that he had read "some" of the report.
On one level, this shouldn't be surprising. Trump's views on climate change at this point are very, very well established.
Just over eight years ago, he tweeted this: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." In 2014, he penned this tweet: "It's late in July and it is really cold outside in New York. Where the hell is GLOBAL WARMING??? We need some fast! It's now CLIMATE CHANGE."...
Potentially historic and deadly early summer heat wave to roast Europe, peaking midweek
An intense heat wave is set to bake Europe in coming days, and it could be historic, potentially shattering records across a large portion of the continent.
The heat wave is expected to peak in the middle part of this week, when a swath from Spain to Poland is expected to see temperatures at least 20 to 30 degrees (11 to 17 degrees Celsius) above normal. Actual temperatures should surge to at least 95 to 105 degrees (35 to 40 degrees Celsius) over a sprawling area, with some spots hotter.
Weather Underground’s Bob Henson notes that this projected heat wave is “unusually strong for so early in the summer.”
Early summer heat waves can be especially lethal, as people have not yet had time to acclimatize to the higher temperatures. Older adults, the homeless and those without air conditioning are most susceptible to heat-related illnesses.
“Heat waves are silent killers,” tweeted Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at Postdam University. “The 2003 European heat wave has caused about 70,000 fatalities. Last year’s hot summer in Germany has been estimated to have caused at least 1,000 excess deaths.”...
“Heat waves are silent killers,”
and, yet, they've always happened
truth, cold snaps are much more deadly
at least, if you believe scientific studies
"There are a lot of farmers losing money now because the Rumpster started unnecessary trade wars with their biggest customers. They've learned their lesson. There will be a lot fewer of those rural voters willing to be burned again in 2020."
actually, Trump's support remains strong in he vast land between the coasts
those "deplorable" people are wiser than the elites that try to manipulate them
if you think they'll support he socialist utopia the dumb Dems are hurtling toward, you've lost touch with reality
"Republicans don't care about being popular as long as they can enforce their agenda on the majority by any means necessary."
we are a country that has long protected the aggrieved minorities from the "popular majority", aka mob rule
this is why slavery has been outlawed, low IQ persons are no longer sterilized, and homosexuals are no longer arrested for sodomy
Teach the Crap needs to put away their pitchforks
An appellate court in London on Monday pulled England’s justice system back from the brink of Chinese- and North Korean-style barbarism — but only at the 11th hour. The Court of Appeals held that doctors can’t forcibly perform an abortion on a pregnant woman with intellectual disabilities.
The overturned decision was among the most morally repugnant decisions ever handed down by a Western court, right up there with US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1927 ruling in Buck v. Bell upholding the compulsory sterilization of an intellectually disabled woman on the ground that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Justice Nathalie Lieven of the Court of Protection had agreed with doctors seeking to abort a woman’s 22-week pregnancy against her wishes and that of her family and social worker. The unnamed woman, Catholic and of Nigerian descent, reportedly has the intellectual capacity of a grade-school child and lives under the care of Britain’s nationalized health service.
But her ruling in this case was evidently a bridge too far for the Court of Appeals, moving the justices to act — and not a minute too soon: A pro-life activist familiar with the case said the procedure was scheduled to take place this week, perhaps as early as Monday. The prospect that forced abortions would be found legal in England has mercifully been averted.
For now.
Meanwhile, say a prayer for the woman and her child.
Joe Biden’s self-inflicted wound praising segregationists led to the sharpest criticism from his fellow Democrats in this still-young campaign season. For the former vice president, the blunder was the equivalent of an own goal in soccer. Comments at closed-door fundraisers should never drive news cycles. They are entirely avoidable. For his opponents, it was an easy lay-up in their quest to bring the frontrunner down to earth.
There are longer-term implications from Biden’s head-scratcher, the biggest of which being the undeniable comparisons between Biden’s bid and the last failed Democratic candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Both Clinton and Biden sought to be the standard bearer of a party that had moved past their brand of politics. The 1990s era culture of triangulation and a pro-business Democratic Party that Biden and Clinton thrived in have been replaced by a 2019 edition more focused on ideological purity and identity politics.
Just as Clinton was forced to renounce her former position on trade under political pressure, so has Biden buckled the debate on taxpayer-funded abortion. Backtracks driven by political expediency don’t sell well. Like Clinton, Biden has a long paper trail of votes and quotes for his opponents – on all sides – to sift through for contradictions and dish out to political reporters eager to make news.
Even Biden’s obstinance and refusal to apologize was reminiscent of Clinton’s unwillingness to admit wrong-doing when faced with nettlesome queries about her private email server. Biden has yet to engage in the free-wheeling and unscripted high wire that is today’s political arena. No longer can candidates expect to hide behind emailed statements issued through spokespeople. Scripted speeches far from the prying questions of the traveling press corps no longer pass muster.
Biden’s candidacy is grounded in a return to the days of yore. He embodies a prior era and political climate.
Tellingly, the most notable names rushing to his defense this week were the 79-year-old House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the 78-year old House Whip Jim Clyburn – both respected figures with party bosses, but hardly representatives of the future.
Ironically, the furor around Biden’s segregation comments distracted from a potentially more damaging storyline that also emerged this week. The conflicts of interest between Joe Biden’s diplomacy in Ukraine with his son Hunter’s business interests in the same country is a story with legs.
Four years ago, using the levers of government to enrich the family foundation proved to be the scandal Hillary Clinton couldn’t shake. The stench of corruption was too much for voters to stomach. Her answers were vague and defensive and never passed the smell test. It’s what led her to create a private email server and the impetus for a never-ending political headache.
Now, Biden faces a similar predicament. You can bet his fellow Democrats are strategizing about the best way to weaponize the attack. Biden will not be able to dismiss the allegations as a figment of the right-wing attack machine. Even progressive watchdog groups – and fierce critics of President Trump – said that Hunter Biden’s work represented a “huge appearance of conflict.”
Biden’s support is soft and getting softer, and all this comes before he faces his first big test: surviving the treacherous open waters of a nationally-watched debate stage.
"Four years ago, using the levers of government to enrich the family foundation proved to be the scandal Hillary Clinton couldn’t shake. The stench of corruption was too much for voters to stomach."
Look who's ignoring what Trump is doing:
https://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/all-the-ways-trump-cashes-in-on-the-u-s-presidency.html/
When candidate Donald Trump said he was gong to “drain the swamp,” most people thought it meant he would stop corruption in Washington D.C. That means limiting access of lobbyists, curbing deals with foreign governments, and refusing to profit off the White House.
Well, that never happened. In fact, since Trump got to D.C., America has seen an unprecedented attack on presidential ethics. We’ve witnessed Trump campaign donors get cushy White House jobs, Goldman Sachs bankers write the GOP tax plan, and a spokeswoman promote Ivanka brands on TV.
Call it Swamp 2.0, or “The D.C. Swamp on Steroids.” But no one is profiting like Trump himself. Since the president continues profiting from his businesses, each of the 110 days Trump spent at his properties in 2017 was a marketing event. Likewise, every time someone stays at the Old Post Office in D.C., Trump gets paid.
But these are just a few examples of Trump and family monetizing the presidency.
The Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending and politicians’ finances, published Trump’s financial disclosures in late 2017. From the public records and other reports, it’s clear where and how Trump is making money off the office.
Here are the ways Trump is cashing in on the presidency.
1. Trump’s hotels
Trump hotel income jumped from $33.8 million in 2016 to $60.5 million in 2017.
According to financial disclosures, Trump hotel revenue soared over the past few years. In 2015, records show just $16.7 million in hotel and resort revenues. However, that amount doubled to $33.8 million during the campaign and election year. Since Trump began occupying the White House, hotel income jumped about 80%, reaching $60.8 million in 2017.
These extraordinary numbers appear easy to explain. After all, Trump opened the Old Post Office hotel in D.C. late in 2016 despite the clear guideline that “No elected official of the Government of the United States…shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease.” Since then, it has become the go-to hotel for any foreign visitor looking to win favors from the Trumps. It’s also become the headquarters of GOP activity in D.C.
2. Trump campaign events at Trump properties.
Various Trump properties banked at least $720,000 from Trump’s own campaign events.
The Center for Responsive Politics sorted the spending of political committees at Trump properties, and Trump’s own campaign events topped the list. In 2017 alone, Trump’s 2020 campaign spent $720,064 at buildings Trump owns. Right here is an example why U.S. presidents are expected to divest from their businesses. Since Trump still holds these properties, he and his family make bonus money every time he holds a fundraiser.
3. Golf club memberships
After Trump was elected, Mar-a-Lago doubled member fees to $200,000 before taxes.
This one was straightforward. After the election, Trump signaled he would spend a great deal of time at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. So the club simply doubled its membership fees to $200,000 before taxes. USA Today found that executives from 50 government contractors and 21 lobbyists hold memberships at Trump clubs.
In the first eight months of 2017, two-thirds of those executives and lobbyists played golf on days Trump was there. The swamp was never so convenient for doing business, and the president was never so obvious about how to find him before.
4. Trump’s own golf trips
Secret Service golf-cart rentals alone cost taxpayers $137,000 in nine months. The payments go to Trump’s business.
Not only do Trump’s frequent golf trips burn taxpayer dollars; they also make the Trumps lots of money. The system is rather simple and, once you see how it works, you can see why Trump spent over 25% of his first year in office at his own golf clubs.
Overall, the easiest mark is the U.S. Secret Service tasked with the job of protecting Trump. As the law stands, the agency cannot receive payments from presidents. This law exists to limit potential conflicts of interest (irony alert). So the Secret Service paid $137,000 to Trump’s Florida and New Jersey properties for golf cart rentals in just the first nine months of 2017.
5. Republican fundraisers
The Republican National Committee (RNC) spent over $300,000 at Trump properties in 2016 and 2017.
Since the Trump D.C. hotel is a block from the U.S. Justice Department and close to the White House, anyone who wants to make a contribution to Trump’s pockets simply books events there. The same goes for Trump Tower in New York and Mar-a-Lago. In 2016, the RNC spent $146,521 at Trump properties. The RNC topped that figure in 2017, when it spent $173,416. Have a policy you want Trump to support? Hold a fundraiser.
6. New real estate investors
Disclosures reveal 2017 real estate income at $168.5 million, the highest amount recorded of any listed year.
After Trump won the election, prices of real estate at Trump Tower in New York began to skyrocket. Demand cooled off as people got to know the new president, but that didn’t stop Trump business from recording $168.5 million in revenue in 2017 — the best of any year disclosed. According to a report by USA Today, about 70% of Trump’s buyers were LLCs, so we don’t know the identity of them. Who’d want to hide such a thing?
7. The Trump online store
The Trump Organization opened an online store in November 2017.
Want to show your #MAGA pride? Buy a made-somewhere-other-than-the-USA polo shirt that says “Trump” on the front. You can find one ($90) at Trumpstore.com site that launched in fall 2017. (It’s proudly “decorated” in America, too.) We won’t know until next year how much Trump makes off his own apparel site, but we list it here as an obvious money grab by the president and his family.
8. Holiday parties
Mar-a-Lago’s New Year’s party tickets jumped to as much as $750 per person in 2017.
Want to rub shoulders with one of the most powerful men in the world? Any Mar-a-Lago member or guest can do so for $600 and $750 per person, respectively, at the Trump resort on New Year’s Eve. According to Politico, thos prices represent as much as $175 more than the 2016 prices. The only difference between 2017 and the prior year is Trump sat as POTUS the second time around.
It’s yet another cash grab in what was a year of monetization of the U.S. presidency. When they say America is in decline and becomes more like a Third World country every year, examples like this one don’t help. Some day, historians may call the GOP of 2017 the part of “Banana Republicans.” Actually, the conservative National Review already does.
NO KIDS IN CAGES
An Indiana Catholic school that is under fire for terminating a gay teacher received over $1 million in public funding in 2018, according to a report reviewed by HuffPost. The school said it fired the teacher so that it would not be forced to cut ties with the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
Cathedral High School announced its decision to fire the employee in a letter it posted on its website Sunday. Though the institution is private and religious, student scholarships to the school are heavily subsidized with public money through the state’s school voucher program. Over 230 students received $1,136,258 in taxpayer dollars to attend the school during the 2018 - 2019 school year, according to a report from the Indiana Department of Education. In total, over the past three years, the school has received $3,457,075 through the voucher program.
Indiana’s voucher program, called the Choice Scholarship Program, provides low and middle-income students with publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools. But the program does not require that participating schools prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or sexuality when it comes to students or employees. Public schools, on the other hand, are beholden to more rigorous anti-discrimination rules, of which religious institutions are exempt ― even those receiving public funding.
Indeed, Indiana’s voucher program is hardly unique in allowing such discrimination. A previous HuffPost investigation from 2017 (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/discrimination-lgbt-private-religious-schools_n_5a32a45de4b00dbbcb5ba0be?2b9) found that at least 14 percent of religious schools in voucher programs across the country maintain policies that explicitly discriminate against LGBTQ staff and students. Another previous analysis (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1113051) found that not a single voucher program prohibited discrimination based on gender identity or sexuality...
"An Indiana Catholic school that is under fire for terminating a gay teacher"
they're not under fire
the community in Indiana supports the action
"received over $1 million in public funding in 2018, according to a report reviewed by HuffPost."
Huffpost is wrong. The funding went to the parents who can use the money to send their kids anywhere they want to. To say they can send their kids anywhere but a religious school violates the Constitution.
If you don't believe me, ask our two newest Supreme Court justices, both of whom attended a Jesuit school here in Montgomery County.
Nice attempt to teach the crap though. The liberal tactic of using the Constitution to attack religious belief ended last summer when the last nail went in the coffin of the gay agenda.
"The school said it fired the teacher so that it would not be forced to cut ties with the Archdiocese of Indianapolis."
Yeah, Catholics believe homosexuality is wrong. Why would a homosexual want to teach there? The individual needs psychotherapy.
"Though the institution is private and religious, student scholarships to the school are heavily subsidized with public money through the state’s school voucher program. Over 230 students received $1,136,258 in taxpayer dollars to attend the school during the 2018 - 2019 school year, according to a report from the Indiana Department of Education. In total, over the past three years, the school has received $3,457,075 through the voucher program."
Nope, the money was granted to the parents who used it to pay for their child's education. The parents of those kids paid taxes to support education. The voucher problem isn't a gift.
"Look who's ignoring what Trump is doing:"
we weren't talking about Trump
we were talking about Biden whose corruption rivals Hillary's
lock him up!
like you would anyone else
It would seem tantamount to insanity to suggest that Donald Trump could win, or even make a sizable dent in, the African-American vote in 2020, but I submit that it's not quite as crazy as it sounds and he should give it a serious shot.
He should go into the black community as often as possible and make his case. This would be using identity politics in order to destroy it.
Trump clearly has a good case to make — black and Hispanic unemployment are at their lowest numbers ever. These stats have been repeated so often a good portion of these minorities already knows them. But there's no harm in repeating and making sure.
There's also no harm in repeating that for a human being, any human being, a decent job is far better than welfare, better for the soul and better for the pocketbook.
Trump might want to point out, as many have, how Democratic Party welfare programs have caused the break-up of the black family to a shadow its former self. The only way to change that sad state of affairs is to create real-work opportunities.
And speaking of work, I think it's safe to say that Trump, over his lifetime, has created more jobs for African-Americans than all the Democrat candidates added together and cubed.
So Democrats have no choice but to continue to exploit African Americans the way they always have, since long before LBJ's famous use of the n-word.
Over the last few days, we have seen the Democrats go race crazy, outbidding each other with asinine proposals. Reparations are back, ratified by nearly all the candidates to one degree or another.
That is insane. And racist. Over 850,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, the majority on the Union (i. e. Republican) side. It was by far the greatest military loss in the history of our country, all to free the slaves, the only such war of this magnitude ever conducted, a deeply moral war that succeeded. Imagine telling the families of those people they have to pay reparations. They already did — and then some.
But that's not all. Many people immigrated to this country throughout the twentieth century, years after slavery. They include Armenians fleeing their Holocaust that cost 1.5 million lives; Ukrainians escaping the Holodomor when Stalin starved somewhere between one and two million of their citizens; the Nazi Holocaust with the death of six million Jews and on and on.
I knew Cambodians in Los Angeles escaping Pol Pot. Do these people owe reparations? Are you crazy?
I can only say, as I did in my book, that this is "nostalgia for racism," a desire to create it where it doesn't exist. It's despicable beyond words and reason enough never to vote Democrat.
But back to Trump and what he can do to gain more of the African-American vote. Unlike virtually all the Democratic candidates, Trump is an upper. He has humor. My guess is African-Americans — many of them anyway — are dying to have him come into their communities. (Watch how many show up compared to the Democrats.) He's much more their kind of guy than any of the Dems. (Look at the problems Buttigieg is having. And Biden's appeal is paper thin. Do you think Warren would make it with black people? How about the semi-black or whatever he is Cory Booker who is so scared of his shadow he can't even diss the most famous anti-Semite in America? Way to go Cory. And then there's Bernie, who thought the Soviet Union was so great in the Eighties (the same time I was there and Soviet writers were begging me for help to get out — I couldn't) that everything he ever says sounds like the second coming of Eugene V. Debs.
Not much help to black people and they know it.
Drag queens danced under rainbow flags in Hendersonville on June 15 as the small rural town celebrated its first gay Pride Day.
With the imprimatur of a mayoral proclamation and the support of many local businesses in this Republican-dominated county, the event was yet another sign of how North Carolina, and America, continues to become more inclusive and welcoming.
Those dancing drag queens also gave the lie to the drumbeat alarms about the ascendance of bigotry and hate during the age of Trump.
That left-wing narrative is false. It uses cherry-picked data (the recent rise in relatively low rates of hate crimes) and analysis by anecdote (turning the racist Charlottesville marchers into representatives of white Americans) to smear our country. It pushes misleading numbers to trumpet phony “wars” on women, blacks, immigrants, gays and lesbians. It dismisses the obvious and indelible gains achieved by once marginalized groups – as well as the rapid growth in our foreign-born population – to make the bizarre claim that little has changed since the 1950s.
The Hendersonville celebration, for example, reflects the remarkable increase in support for same-sex marriage in North Carolina just since 2009 – rising to 62% from 37%.
So what’s really going on? Ironically, this left-wing propaganda is largely a reflection of white privilege.
Studies shows that white liberals – whose money and position give them inordinate power to shape the national discourse – have moved far to the left. From their perches in academia, the media and Silicon Valley, they espouse an intolerant form of identity politics driven by the psychological need to confirm their own virtue by damning other whites.
In his must read article in Tablet, “America’s White Saviors,” Zach Goldberg mines a broad range of polls of surveys to show that the leftward lurch of white liberals actually began around the year 2000 — well before the emergence of Trump (or Obama).
Since then, white liberals have shown the greatest increase of any group in their support for affirmative action, for the idea that government should ensure “equal income across all races” and the belief that white people have “too much” political influence. Indeed, white liberals are the only group of Americans, Goldberg writes, “that expressed a preference for other racial and ethnic communities above their own.”
White liberals are much more likely than black and Asian Democrats to embrace heretofore radical ideas regarding social and gender issues.
These findings dovetail with a 2018 study by the liberal group More in Common that found that progressive activists — an almost uniquely homogenous group of rich, highly educated whites — are the only group in America who do not consider political correctness to be a problem.
Many forces are propelling the Great Awokening, including the left-wing bent of American education. But, Goldberg notes, social media is a main driver. White liberals spend more time in their virtual echo chamber than any other group, reinforcing their views and shaming those who question the party line.
This mindset is amplified by publications like The New York Times, which has sharply increased its use of terms such as patriarchy, privilege, racism and implicit bias.
White liberals will interpret all this as evidence of their enlightenment. But that doesn’t negate the fact that these champions of equality are using their power and privilege to impose their views on the rest of us — views that smear America so they can feel good about themselves.
Poverty, prison, parole. Repeat. It’s a vicious cycle that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden helped perpetuate by co-sponsoring the 1994 Crime Bill – and has yet to repent for, even as President Trump tries to right its wrongs in a bipartisan push.
“We do everything but hang people for jaywalking in this bill,” then-Sen. Biden said in 1992, urging its passage.
Indeed.
The 1994 crime bill led to mass incarceration rates across America – especially within African American and Latino communities — by incentivizing states to raise mandatory minimum sentencing and build new prisons. It included a “three strikes” provision that dictated life sentences for criminals after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes.
In the early 1970s, about 100 out of every 100,000 U.S. residents were incarcerated, whereas after the bill was passed, that number spiked to 387, 478, and 655 per 100,000 residents in the years 1994, 2000, and 2016, respectively, according to an analysis by the Washington Post.
The bill also discontinued the use of Pell grants for inmates, a means by which they received federal funding for tuition and educational supplies while in prison. The grants helped prepare inmates for life after incarceration, to break out of poverty, to escape the cycle of reoffending.
A year after the bill passed, the number of inmates who received post-secondary education plummeted 44%, according to a study published by Ithaka S+R, a higher education nonprofit.
President Trump has chastised Biden for the role he played in shepherding the legislation through Congress as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and for continuing to defend it this day.
Indeed, President Clinton, who signed the measure into law, apologized for its failures in 2015 and admitted it worsened the nation’s criminal justice system by increasing prison sentences.
But not Biden.
He’s denied that the bill’s earmarking of funding for states to build more jail cells, curb paroles and enact harsher mandatory minimum sentencing led to mass incarceration.
He’s cast blame on the states for the spike in incarceration rates and has used misleading figures to defend his stance.
Biden is out of step with both his own party on the issue and the White House.
President Trump is slowly but surely righting the wrongs of that 1994 legislation. Last year, he signed the bipartisan First Step Act, which revised sentencing laws, expanded opportunities for inmates to pursue vocational training and earn time credits to apply toward early release.
On the eve of the presidential debates, Democrats have a massive problem brewing. They all want to oust President Trump. To pull it off, they desperately need to woo back middle America, though they no longer conceal their contempt for Americans’ deeply held social values. On no issue is this clearer than on abortion.
Every leading Democrat has taken a position that, according to more than a decade of polling from Marist and others, is guaranteed to repulse and alienate at least 60 percent of Americans. They assure themselves the nation is racing left along with their extreme base. There’s a word for this: delusional.
In the wake of radical efforts to expand abortion in New York and Virginia, and Gov. Ralph Northam’s now-infamous description of how doctors decide whether a vulnerable baby born alive in a failed abortion receives medical care or is left to die, every sitting U.S. Senator running for president on the Democratic ticket voted against compassionate legislation – backed by 77 percent of Americans – to stop infanticide.
With supposedly “moderate” frontrunner Joe Biden’s reversal on the Hyde Amendment, a longstanding policy that prevents tax dollars from being used to pay for abortions, the Clinton-era mantra of “safe, legal, and rare” is officially defunct among the leaders of today’s Democratic Party. Not only that, anything less than full-throated endorsement of unlimited taxpayer-funded abortion, according to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is equivalent to racism.
Both sides agree the Hyde Amendment saves lives – more than two million overall or 60,000 each year, the Charlotte Lozier Institute found, making it one of the most consequential federal policies in existence. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute estimated a decade ago that a quarter of women receiving Medicaid choose life for their babies because of Hyde, and in recent days, the liberal site Vox reported on a new study showing an even greater state-level impact. Looking at just the state of Louisiana, the journal BMC Women’s Health found Hyde protections prevented 29 percent of abortions. Where there is partisan disagreement, it now centers around whether saving those children is a good thing.
Other left-leaning publications are urging caution. Last week, Slate columnist William Saletan systematically destroyed every myth about public opinion that Democrats who support forced taxpayer funding of abortion hold dear. Significant numbers of rank-and-file Democrats oppose it. Women oppose it just as much, if not more than men. About half of self-identified pro-choice individuals oppose it. Low-income Americans were twice as likely to oppose it as those with incomes above $50,000.
“Why would the gender gap on reproductive health care dissolve when the question turns to abortion?” Saletan writes. “Apparently, something about abortion bothers a lot of women in a way that birth control and STD treatments don’t.” Agreed – it’s the part about killing an innocent human being.
Saletan argues compellingly that Biden and others will pay a political price for their extremism. Indeed, every time they open their mouths on the topic, they remind voters how radical and out of touch Democratic Party leadership has become. President Trump wins by condemning abortion extremism and championing consensus policies like stopping late-term abortions when unborn babies can feel pain, contrary to the mainstream media narrative that middle ground no longer exists. The more Democrats talk about their agenda of abortion on demand through birth and even infanticide, paid for by taxpayers, the more they lose.
This hasn’t stopped 16 top candidates from lining up to compete for the heart – and money – of the nation’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood, like an episode of "The Bachelor: Extreme Abortion Edition." Planned Parenthood ends the lives of more than 332,000 unborn children each year and vowed to spend at least $60 million to sway political races in the last two election cycles combined. Planned Parenthood may be the only group in America that can find any daylight between these contenders.
Susan B. Anthony List’s pro-life team will be working through Election Day to educate millions of voters about the stance of the Democratic Party and the stakes of this election for unborn children and their mothers. Extremism may win these candidates accolades from the abortion industry, but reality says that the vast majority of Americans are just not that into them.
"gave the lie to the drumbeat alarms about the ascendance of bigotry and hate during the age of Trump"
What lie?
I suggest you look in the mirror to find the liar here.
Here are facts about the ascendance of bigotry and hate during the age of Rump from the FBI:
Rollcall: House to probe rise in hate crimes since Trump was elected
"...The number of incidents involving hate crimes increased for a third straight year in 2017, according to FBI data released In November. Hate crime incidents rose by 17 percent in 2017 compared to 2016. From 2015 to 2016, the FBI reported a 5 percent increase..."
https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses
Mr. Trump has boasted about assaulting women — grabbing them, as he said during a 2005 conversation on an “Access Hollywood” bus, “by the p---y.” In this context, Ms. Carroll’s allegation is consistent, credible — and horrifying. She writes in her essay published last Friday, “He opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me.” Recall Mr. Trump’s words: “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
Carl Cameron, the former chief political correspondent at Fox News once known as “Campaign Carl,” is calling out his old network.
Cameron, who left Fox News in 2017 after 22 years, announced he’s joining the new progressive website called Front Page Live. And he didn’t hold back on his old employer.
“I was one of Fox’s first hires. The idea of fair and balanced news appealed to me,” he says in a clip announcing his new gig. “But over the years, the right-wing hosts drowned out straight journalism with partisan misinformation. I left.”
He said that gives him “unique insight and understanding of how the right operates.”
Cameron also didn’t mince words for “con man” Trump.
“He did collude and coordinate with Russia to get elected,” Cameron said. “And recently he said he’d accept their help again because he sees nothing wrong with it.”
Cameron called it a “state of emergency” and wants to inform voters before the next election.
“Make your own decisions,” he said. “Just please be accurately informed.”
“Hey, asshole, if someone asks you if you raped that woman, and you say, ‘No, she’s not my type,’ that’s not a defense. That’s a confession. It’s like if you asked Hannibal Lecter, ‘Did you eat that guy?’ and he said, ‘No, he looked a little bony.'”
“No one believes you when you deny this stuff, because you already admitted to it. Remember, you were on a bus with Billy Bush, bragging about assaulting women like some sort of Port Authority pervert. Trump’s headshot shouldn’t be hanging at the White House; it should be hanging at every Greyhound bus station in the tri-state area.”
Later, Meyers pointed out that Carroll is at least the 22nd woman to come forward with allegations against POTUS. The sheer number, he said, makes it hard to believe that Carroll is being dishonest.
"Who do you think is lying to us in this [E. Jean Carroll vs Rump] situation? All 22 women who have nothing to gain by lying, and are showing incredible courage in the face of these kinds of attacks, or the known liar who called climate change a Chinese hoax, said three million people voted illegally in the last election, and once told Eric Trump, ‘I enjoy spending time with you’?”
NRATV is shutting down and its critics on Twitter are sending “thoughts and prayers.”
According to The New York Times, the NRA plans to announce on Wednesday that it will pull the plug on production at the network as it severs its relationship with the marketing firm, Ackerman McQueen, which runs NRATV.
Ostensibly created to promote the Second Amendment, the network was better known for advancing conspiracy theories and pulling stunts, such as putting “Thomas the Tank Engine” characters in KKK hoods in response to the children’s show adding a train from Africa.
The NRA and the marketing agency have been embroiled in a souring relationship marked by a lawsuit that accuses the company of attempting an “executive coup” at the gun group.
As of Tuesday night, NRATV was still streaming prerecorded content, and the Times said its archives could remain online. However, the network will end live broadcasting and new production, and its on-air personalities, such as Dana Loesch, “will no longer be the public faces of the N.R.A.”
Oh
and
Embattled NRA Loses Its Political Power Broker on Eve of 2020
Excerpt from link above:
"As the National Rifle Association’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox pumped more money into the unlikely election of Donald Trump than anyone else. Now, Cox won’t be around to oversee its effort to re-elect him."
In related news:
"During the National Rifle Association’s May 2016 convention, where Donald Trump won the organisation’s coveted endorsement, board member David Keene hosted a private dinner that drew three Russian lifetime NRA members: a since-convicted Kremlin influence agent, her handler and mentor, and a previously unreported Russian who chairs a defense industry foundation, the Guardian has learned.
For the powerful 5 million-member NRA, the Russia ties of Keene and other NRA bigwigs are political and legal headaches that won’t go away – not with the FBI and congressional panels pursuing lengthy probes into the Kremlin’s alleged scheme to influence the pro-gun giant’s top brass, other conservative groups and US politicians."
It makes one wonder how Russia is going to get money to the Rump campaign this time around.
"gave the lie to the drumbeat alarms about the ascendance of bigotry and hate during the age of Trump"
Pro-Rumpettes make violent threats and that's no lie.
"The biggest forum for supporters of President Trump on Reddit has been “quarantined” following months of incitements to violence and other offensive behavior, the tech giant said Wednesday, in a move that could further inflame conservatives’ claims of social-media bias.
The forum, called “r/The_Donald,” has long served as a highly trafficked and controversial gathering place for supporters of Trump and Republicans on Reddit, the United States’ fifth-most popular website.
The move comes amid persistent allegations from Republicans that leading technology platforms, most of which are headquartered in the liberal bastion of northern California, are unfairly squelching conservative voices online. This partisan battle also is playing out amid a broader debate over whether private technology companies should be mediating free speech and whether widely accepted standards — such as prohibitions against incitements to violence — are being consistently and transparently applied.
Created in 2015, “The_Donald” counts roughly 750,000 followers and advertises itself as “a never-ending rally dedicated to the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.”
Reddit officials said on Wednesday that the “r/The_Donald” board had allowed or encouraged months of “rule-breaking behavior,” including the “encouragement of violence towards police officers and public officials in Oregon.”
“We are clear in our sitewide policies that posting content that encourages or threatens violence is not allowed,” Reddit spokeswoman Anna Soellner said in a statement to The Washington Post.
“We are sensitive to what could be considered political speech,” Soellner added, but “recent behaviors including threats against the police and public figures is content that is prohibited by our violence policy.”
The quarantine action will effectively demote the forum on Reddit, removing key features and restricting how its content is shared across the site, including blocking it from appearing in searches or recommendations. It is not an outright ban, but will conceal the forum behind a warning and require viewers to verify they are sure they want to view its contents.
“It’s a really positive step,” said Becca Lewis, a researcher at Stanford University and the think tank Data & Society. The forum “r/The_Donald,” which Lewis has studied extensively, “has been a bastion of hate speech and harassment for years.” She said there are numerous other forums on Reddit where conservatives can share their views and express support for Trump and other political figures.
Quarantines are rare punishments imposed on only the forums Reddit has deemed most offensive or upsetting. Past quarantines have been imposed on forums devoted to white supremacy, Sept. 11 conspiracy theories and videos of fatal violence..."
"...The number of incidents involving hate crimes increased for a third straight year in 2017, according to FBI data"
and what are these "hate crimes"?
graffiti is vandalism
vandalism is a crime
does that count?
btw, a 17% increase from "hardly any" is still "hardly any"
"In this context, Ms. Carroll’s allegation is consistent, credible — and horrifying"
yes, this woman comes up with this two and half years after his inauguration, 25 years after the alleged incidents, and we have the press marveling at how credible it is
that's horrifying
if you're not liberal, anyone can accuse you of anything and the press will say "they have no motive to lie"
seems unAmerican
"calling out his old network"
this a curious new liberal buzz phrase
every time AOC, the moron bartender who cost her constituents the Amazon HQ, disagrees with someone the media marvels how she "called them out"
you never hear use the same phrase to describe discourse from conservatives
do you think they may be biased?
“He did collude and coordinate with Russia to get elected,” Cameron said.
not according to the special prosecutor, Cam
“And recently he said he’d accept their help again because he sees nothing wrong with it.”
actually, he said he'd consider and evaluate any information from any source
there's a phrase for people who don't do that: ignorant morons
you do know Hillary paid for information from Russian sources, right, Cam?
"“Hey, asshole, if someone asks you if you raped that woman, and you say, ‘No, she’s not my type,’ that’s not a defense. That’s a confession."
actually, it's not
it's pointing out he had no motive to commit the alleged crime
It’s like if you asked Hannibal Lecter, ‘Did you eat that guy?’ and he said, ‘No, he looked a little bony.'”
"All 22 women who have nothing to gain by lying, and are showing incredible courage"
so, in other words, the mere fact that someone is accused makes them guilty
did anyone ever tell you the difference between the American and French revolutions?
"Cox won’t be around to oversee its effort to re-elect him."
oh, not to worry, the NRA will endorse Trump
did you watch the Dem debate last night?
"It makes one wonder how Russia is going to get money to the Rump campaign this time around."
Russia can barely afford Putin's bar tab
to think they have the money to affect our election is delusional
Joe Biden won the first Democratic Party primary debate, y ni siquiera tuvo que aparecer.
Now, at his present political trajectory, Biden may end up promising to perform late-term abortions on transgendered Guatemalan migrants with his bare hands by the time the debate rolls around on Thursday. But really, all the former vice president needs to do to maintain his lead position is not turn completely insane.
Because while Sen. Cory Booker might believe that most Americans agree with the policy objectives of the Democratic Party, this is not a Democratic Party that anyone would recognize ten, or even four, years ago.
It unlikely, for example, that most Americans believe the United States should be an effectively borderless nation. Yet a whole bunch of Democrats on the debate stage this Wednesday came awfully close to proposing that absolutely no person be stopped from entering the United States — outside drug and sex “traffickers” (although one wonders how they propose we weed them out).
That’s around 144,000 migrants they would have let in just last month. A large number of these newcomers won’t show up in court to have their cases adjudicated, compounding an already growing problem.
There will be many more on the way, because Democrats keep offering added enticement for thousands of Central American migrants to risk their lives, and the lives of their children, crossing deserts and dangerous rivers to enter an already overtaxed immigration system. While Democrats on the stage (and the ones posing as moderators) were busy blaming the horrific deaths of Oscar and Angie Martinez on Donald Trump, they were ignoring the fact that hundreds of similar tragedies have occurred over the past decade, and, not that long ago, even progressive Democrats like Barack Obama were warning that this kind brand of anarchy was a killer.
So however poorly Republicans have handled the immigration issue, or however cold-hearted you believe aggressive enforcement is, the idea that most Americans prefer lawlessness to some semblance of order is an untested theory, at best.
Do Americans really believe that abortion should be a right until the moment of birth, without any single restriction — all of it funded by taxpayers on demand? Polls don’t bear this out. When asked if she believed in any constraints on abortion, Sen. Elizabeth Warren refused to answer, dropping an array of platitudinous statements about reproductive rights instead. The other candidates, though, tripped over each other to claim support not only for unlimited “reproductive health,” but for “reproductive justice,” as well. Don’t forget state-funded abortions for “female trans” people, Julian Castro reminded the crowd.
That’s a lot of wokeness to shoehorn into one issue.
Warren had already dropped “Latinx” on the crowd — the gender-neutral alternative to Latino — promising to “fight” to take away the private health insurance all both sexes. The senator was, however, unable to explain how she was going to come up with approximately 6.5 gazillion dollars needed to fund universal child care, free college, student debt cancellation, free health care, and a deconstruction and rebuild of the entire economy based on windmills and solar panels.
To be fair, Warren was quickly made to look like a lightweight. Although nearly every candidate proposed abandoning our fossil-fuel based economy, Jay Inslee announced that the United States needed to adopt a new set of “organizing principles” — don’t worry, no one mentioned the Constitution –that would be propelled by electric-powered cars and such.
How much would it all cost? The mayor of America’s largest city, Bill de Blasio, explained that whenever anyone asks him how he’s going to pay for his quixotic plans, he just tells them there is “plenty of money,” the real problem is that it’s in “the wrong hands”—which doesn’t sound authoritarian, at all.
The Gen-Xy Beto O’Rourke, who had kicked off an entertaining arms race in Spanish proficiency, promised to fund “resiliency” — the cost unknown. The one-time darling of the media also promised that as president he would instruct his Justice Department to prosecute his predecessor for “potential crimes,” which didn’t even provoke a murmur from the commentariat, although it’s the same kind of rhetoric that elicits high indignation when used by Trump.
Even beyond all the socialistic policy prescriptions and progressive moralizing, listening to these Democrats one might have been under the impression that the nation was in the midst of a dystopian nightmare, ravaged by hunger, poverty, and slave-driving corporate masters. Do most Americans view the state of the economy this way? It seems unlikely.
There were some candidates, to be fair, like Amy Klobuchar and John Delaney, who sounded something in the vicinity of a traditional Democrat. Neither has the kind of organization or support to be the leading candidate in 2020. Biden, it seems, is the only real hope for those who believe in relative temperance on the left.
And even he’s a long shot
Section 1325! Section 1325! For a few crucial minutes in the middle of the first Democratic presidential debate, Julián Castro (polling average: 0.8 percent) took over the proceedings by challenging his fellow candidates to endorse the repeal of Section 1325 of the Immigration and Naturalization Act.
What’s it about? Don’t ask.
He yelled at Beto O’Rourke about it and expressed his deep disappointment that O’Rourke wasn’t joining him in supporting the repeal of Section 1325.
O’Rourke is at 3.3 percent in the Real Clear Politics polling average, so you can see why Castro thought it was so important to nail him. If he really cuts into Beto’s support, Castro might rise to a whole 1.5 percent.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren — poll average 12.8 percent — could barely get a word in edgewise.
Later, Tulsi Gabbard (0.8 percent) got into a kerfuffle with Tim Ryan (0.6 percent) on whether we should even have gone into Afghanistan in the first place. Gabbard, who seemed to be bidding for the goth vote with her dramatic shock of gray hair, said the Taliban didn’t attack us, al Qaeda did. Ryan’s expression was like Mugatu in “Zoolander” asking if he’d been taking crazy pills.
Meanwhile, Warren — remember, with a poll average of 12.8 percent — still wasn’t getting a word in edgewise.
Bill de Blasio (poll average: 0.4 percent) argued that Americans who support a tough line on immigration had basically been brainwashed by corporations to give corporations a pass. His condescension aside, the mayor was expressing a consensus view on the stage that our immigration policies at the border are evil and that the evil emanates from the White House.
They weren’t just immigration doves. They were immigration antinomians, who disapprove of the enforcement of the laws passed laboriously through our democratic process. At one point, the mostly silent Warren declared that we “must make this Congress reflect the will of the people” — as though it can’t possibly have been doing so because the policies it enacted or refused to enact did not comport with her views.
All in all, Democrats spent far more time talking about how they would help illegal immigrants than about how they would help the voters they most need to win over — the white working-class Obama voters who pulled the lever for Trump in 2016.
Only Tim Ryan, a congressman from Ohio, centered his efforts through the night on the “forgotten” American in the white working class, and he didn’t do a very good job of it.
If I were Brad Parscale, Donald Trump’s campaign manager, I would be dancing a jig — because if this is the way the Democrats and the media want to discuss the economy and immigration, he is going to have a field day with the quotes they will generate from now until the election.
Some random observations: O’Rourke really needed a shave. While delivering an answer in which she inadvertently mentioned she had voted for the first piece of legislation Donald Trump had passed, Amy Klobuchar began to rush and speak in a monotone that made her sound as incomprehensible as Charlie Brown’s teacher.
I kind of liked what John Delaney was saying on health care, so I’m going to assume he is wildly out of step with the Democratic electorate and will have to drop out soon.
Jay Inslee had a good haircut.
Cory Booker did OK most of the night, except for when he broke out in Spanish and reminded us of El Bloombito — the Twitter feed by Staten Island wag Rachel Figueroa that made such hilarious fun of Michael Bloomberg’s dreadful Español.
And Warren is still waiting to speak. That’s probably for the best, since her most substantive point was to suggest we needed to do a lot of research and gather loads of data on gun violence in order to solve it. Not a great moment.
The thing is, by seeming to speak hardly at all, she won the night.
If the premise of an argument is false, what does that tell you about its conclusions?
This is the problem facing Elizabeth Warren and other leading Democrats after the first presidential primary debate. Warren, Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke, and other candidates all apparently believed that in order to sell their socialism, they needed to establish the premise that the Trump-era economy simply isn’t working for anyone besides the filthy rich.
Warren says that the U.S. economy is “doing great, for a thinner and thinner slice at the top." O’Rourke and Booker made a similar claim: that the wealthy are pulling away and leaving behind the working class in today’s economy.
But this premise is false. Yes, the past 60 years have seen deadly stagnation for the working class. But over the past few years, the U.S. economy has been lifting all boats. It's been a remarkable thing to watch because it is so unusual.
Hourly wages have risen by 7% since President Trump took office. And the hourly wage has risen far more among blue-collar workers. Production and nonsupervisory workers have seen an 11% increase, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This is just one telling data point undermining the claim of supposed wonk Elizabeth Warren. There are plenty of others.
For starters, the unemployment rate is a startlingly low 3.8%. That means fewer people are out of work. Since the low rate has persisted for many quarters, there has been a bidding war for labor. Throw in the expanding size of the labor force, and suddenly employers are desperate for workers. That’s good for workers, better than it's been in anyone's recent memory.
We don’t believe that Trump’s tariffs are helping. We don’t believe presidents control the economy. We do think tax cuts and deregulation help.
But regardless of the causes behind the boost to the working class, the fact that this economy is good and is working not only for wealthiest Americans is indisputable.
So how is it a winning tactic to tell the blue-collar workers, who are seeing their lots improve, that in fact their lives are going downhill? Will they believe the candidates who make such claims?
We have our suspicions, but maybe the answer is this simple: To sell bad policy, you need to start with a false premise.
"and what are these "hate crimes"?"
FBI link (https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/topic-pages/incidents-and-offenses) provided, asshole.
"...By offense types (Based on Table 2.)
Of the 8,437 reported hate crime offenses in 2017:
27.6 percent were destruction/damage/vandalism
27.1 percent were intimidation.
20.7 percent were simple assault.
11.7 percent were aggravated assault.
The remaining offenses included additional crimes against persons, property, and society.
Offenses by crime category (Based on Table 2.)
Among the 8,437 hate crime offenses reported:
60.3 percent were crimes against persons.
36.9 percent were crimes against property.
The remaining offenses were crimes against society. (See Data Collection in Methodology.)
Crimes against persons (Based on Table 2.)
Law enforcement reported 5,084 hate crime offenses as crimes against persons. By offense type:
44.9 percent were intimidation.
34.3 percent were simple assault.
19.5 percent were aggravated assault.
0.7 percent consisted of 15 murders and 23 rapes. (See Methodology for more details about changes in the definition of rape in the UCR Program.)
1 offense was reported as human trafficking, commercial sex acts.
0.5 percent involved the offense category other, which is collected only in NIBRS.
Crimes against property (Based on Table 2.)
The majority of the 3,115 hate crime offenses that were crimes against property (74.6 percent) were acts of destruction/damage/vandalism.
The remaining 25.4 percent of crimes against property consisted of robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, and other crimes.
Crimes against society (See Table 2.)
There were 238 offenses defined as crimes against society (e.g., drug or narcotic offenses or prostitution)...."
Two women who say famed advice columnist E. Jean Carroll confided in them after President Donald Trump allegedly raped her in the 1990s spoke out publicly for the first time in a New York Times interview released Thursday.
Carol Martin, a former TV news anchor in New York, and author Lisa Birnbach joined Carroll on Wednesday for an interview with Times reporter Megan Twohey.
Birnbach said Carroll called her one day after leaving Bergdorf Goodman in New York City, minutes after the alleged rape had occurred. She said Carroll told her what happened ― an account that has made headlines across the world since New York magazine first published it last week.
Carroll has alleged Trump recognized her as she was leaving the luxury department store that day, stopped her and asked her to advise him on a gift he planned to buy for a woman. They allegedly ended up in the lingerie department of the store, where he told her to try on what she has described as a “bodysuit.”
She said she refused but suggested he do so. That’s when they ended up in a dressing room where, she has alleged, he pinned her against the wall with his shoulder, aggressively pulled down her tights with one hand, undid his pants with the other and and forcibly inserted his penis into her vagina briefly.
“You did say, ‘He put his penis in me,’” Birnbach told Carroll during the Times interview. “And I said ... ‘What? He raped you?’ And you said ... ‘He pulled down my tights. He pulled down my tights.’”
Birnbach said she strongly encouraged Carroll to go to the police but her friend refused. Carroll told the Times on Wednesday that she felt she had encouraged Trump to act in this manner and felt responsible for her own rape.
Between one and three days later, Carroll said she confided in Martin about the alleged assault.
“It wasn’t like she started crying or nothing that was a frantic kind of response to it,” Martin told the Times. “It was like, ‘I can’t believe this happened.’”
Martin said she told Carroll not to tell anyone about the alleged assault because she worried Trump, a powerful New York real estate mogul, could essentially use his team of lawyers to make her life hell.
Carroll, one of more than a dozen women who have accused Trump of sexually assaulting, groping or forcibly kissing them since the 1980s, followed Martin’s advice ― up until recently.
Her rape accusation against Trump became public on Friday when New York magazine published an excerpt of her book, “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal,” in which she described the alleged incident.
Trump has denied sexually assaulting anyone, including Carroll. And despite the fact the magazine story includes a photograph of Carroll with Trump, the president claimed Friday that he had never met the writer.
Asked whether she had a specific motivation for going public with her story more than 20 years after the alleged assault, Carroll said no.
“I had no expectations,” she told told the Times. “I’ve learned as a woman of 76 years to have absolutely no expectations because if you have even half of an expectation, you will be disappointed.”
"We have our suspicions, but maybe the answer is this simple: To sell bad policy, you need to start with a false premise."
That's how Rump and Fox News sold his economic plan, saying Obama's unemployment rates were absolutely miserable and the country was going down the drain. Very shortly after Rump was in office, the economy was "fantastic!" and "booming!"
It was 4.7% for the last 2 months of Obama's term, and 4.7% for the first 2 months of Rumps term. 6 months later it dropped by a barely noticeable 0.3%.
So far, Rump has manage to improve unemployment by a whopping 1.1%.
Obama inherited an economy in free-fall from disastrous Bush (Reaganomic) policies, and unemployment at 7.8%. He then had to contend with a Republican congress intent on undermining him at every turn and cutting of all hopes of revving up the economy by sequestration. He still managed to drop the unemployment rate 3.1% Nearly 3 times better than the Rumpster.
Ms. Dean. What extent do you now know of the context between the campaign and Russia? Could you summarize maybe or guesstimate the number? Are we talking dozens or are we talking 50? Are we talking 100? Are we talking more?
Ms. Hicks. I think someone mentioned upwards of 100 earlier today. I don't know if that's accurate or if that's an accurate arecollection.
Ms. Dean. Are you surprised to learn that?
Ms. Hicks. Yes, very surprised.
Ms. Dean. Why?
Ms. Hicks. Because I, like I said, wasn't aware of any contacts during my time on the campaign.
Ms. Dean. And when you made the statement to the press -- this will be my final question so other people can get to the things that they're interested in learning about. But when you made the statement to the press that there were no contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia -- I'm paraphrasing a little -- I appreciate that it's November the 8th of election year. Did you have a conversation with the President before or after that statement?
Ms. Hicks. I did not speak to him before. I spoke to others on the campaign, other senior officials.
Ms. Dean. And what was their guidance in terms of making that answer?
Ms. Hicks. That there were no contacts.
Ms. Dean. And who was it who told you there were no contacts
Ms. Hicks. I believe I spoke to several people. Jason Miller, Jared Kushner. I believe Jason Miller may have reached out to Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon.
wowee, wow!!
Jared lied to Hope Hicks!
Whadda crook!
OSAKA, Japan — UPresident Donald Trump touted his "very, very good relationship" with President Vladimir Putin on Friday before telling Putin with a smile: "Don't meddle in the election, please."
Trump's meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the Group of 20 Summit in Japan was their first since last year in Helsinki, which left lawmakers of both parties aghast at the president's coziness with Putin.
As the 2020 election approaches, Trump has been under increasing pressure publicly put Putin on notice that the U.S. won't tolerate election interference again.
As they sat together in Osaka, Trump relished the attention of reporters and camera crews eagerly capturing every moment between the leaders of the two former Cold War foes.
"It's like the Academy Awards," Trump said to the Russian president. Then he called it a "great honor" to be with Putin, praising their "very, very good relationship" and predicting "a lot of very positive things" would result.
Over the din of reporters shouting and cameras clicking, Trump cocked his head when asked by NBC News whether he would tell Putin not to interfere in the vote next year.
"The answer to the question is, of course I will. 'Don't meddle in the election, please,'" Trump said. As Putin smiled broadly, Trump briefly raised his finger toward Putin before turning away and repeating: "Don't meddle in the election."
Charlottesville attacker sentenced to life in prison
The white supremacist who was convicted for ramming a crowd of protesters with his car in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017 has been sentenced to life in prison.
James Fields Jr. was set to be sentenced Friday for the killing of Heather Heyer, who died after he steered a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of demonstrators.
Fields was sentenced to life in a federal prison, The Associated Press reported. He apologized before he was sentenced, according to the AP.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell likes to boast that he's the "grim reaper," bedeviling a chamber where progressive legislation from House Democrats comes to die. Funny guy. But the joke sours fast when the languishing proposals include sensible, bipartisan measures to protect America's elections from another "concerted attack," like the one special counsel Robert Mueller found was launched by Russia in 2016.
As Mueller meticulously detailed, Russian operatives not only conducted a vast disinformation campaign through Twitter and Facebook, and hacked documents from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, but also tried to penetrate 21 state election-related networks. In congressional testimony on Wednesday, former FBI officials detailed some of the textbook Russian spy craft used in the election interference effort.
The 2020 presidential election is the next target. And any Russian desire to influence that contest received a gift Wednesday when President Donald Trump stunningly asserted he'd accept dirt on a political opponent from a foreign country.
“Make no mistake," FBI Director Christopher Wray told a Senate subcommittee last month about the risk of foreign assaults on the next election, "the threat just keeps escalating, and we’re going to have to up our game to stay ahead of it."
Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are working to do exactly that. One plan — the Secure Elections Act sponsored by Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. — would toughen voting systems by enabling federal intelligence services and state election officials to more easily share cyber information. It would also speed up security clearances, allowing those state officials access to the information, and ensure a paper-trail audit of elections. Five states — Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina — still can't audit election results.
Other bipartisan Senate proposals would criminalize any hacking of voting systems and lock in severe sanctions should Russia again attempt to interfere in a U.S. election.
Stanford University just published a comprehensive review of weaknesses in the U.S. election process and offered solutions, including an endorsement of the Honest Ads Act, originally co-sponsored by the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
That proposal would require the Federal Election Commission to publicly archive social media political ads and who paid for them. "American voters must choose their leaders," the Stanford authors said, "without help or interference from outsiders."
As it stands, however, these and other worthwhile reforms remain interred in the grim reaper's graveyard. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a senior Republican in the Senate, said that passage of any election security proposal is unlikely, and that McConnell "is of the view that this debate reaches no conclusion."
"Sixty-three percent of Americans express a great deal of concern about at least one form of foreign interference into the 2020 U.S. presidential election, whether it's tampering with election results, influencing candidates or voters, or stealing information."
Declaration memorializes Capital Gazette shooting
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — To honor the lives of the the five people shot and killed at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, June 28 has been proclaimed “Freedom of the Press Day,” in Maryland, Governor Larry Hogan announced Thursday.
The day marks the anniversary of the mass shooting at the state capital on June 28, 2018. In the attack, a man with a vendetta against the paper burst into the office and shot five journalist with a pump action shotgun he was allowed to purchase despite previous complaints and warnings about him potentially posing a threat to the newspaper’s staff. The alleged shooter currently faces a litany of criminal charges in the mass shooting, including several counts of first-degree murder.
Four stalwart journalists died in the attack – Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, and Wendi Winters – as well as a newly-hired sales associate, Rebecca Smith. The resolution to honor the day in the name of these journalists and the democratic ideal of a free press was passed by the General Assembly and approved by Hogan during the last legislative session.
“One year ago, in a horrific attack, we lost five Marylanders who were doing their job as journalists,” said Governor Hogan. “Today, as we honor those we lost and all who have lost their lives in the pursuit of informing our citizens, we recognize the vital role that the freedom of the press has in our democracy and our duty to honor and protect this constitutional right.”
Despite the horrific attack against their colleagues, the Gazette’s remaining staff continued to put out the paper.
No
"Trump: ...I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."
Bush: "Whatever you want."
Trump: "Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.""
invited!
On Friday, France recorded the highest temperature ever experienced at any location in that country. The 44.3° C reading (about 111° F) at the town of Carpentras is an all-time record, but it’s just part of a massive heat wave that has been baking much of Europe. The heat wave has closed schools and businesses unequipped to deal with such temperatures. It’s sparked record wildfires in Spain and led to water-rationing across several nations.
The five hottest European summers in the last 600 years have all come in the last twenty years. And 2019 is looking like it may provide not just the hottest day, but the hottest week, month, and year as the radically destabilized weather system continues to draw scalding air farther and farther north. Germany is experiencing it’s hottest June ever. Temperatures in Italy have turned deadly. And records have been shattered across at least six nations. The wave of hot air is also bringing up dust from the Sahara, prompting health warnings because of both temperatures and air quality.
And it’s not just Europe. The United States is also looking at record temperatures for June. Heat has spread across every region of the country, bringing triple-digit temperatures from the Southwest to the East Coast. The record heat follows record flooding. Record fires. Record storms.
And all of it is part of the climate crisis. All of it is coming because the Earth is now saddled with a level of carbon in the atmosphere that hasn’t been seen in the whole time that human beings have existed as a species. This is a whole new world—one that is distinctly inimical to the lives and civilization we have constructed.
That’s why European leaders are determined to come away from the G-20 with actual, enforceable progress on the climate crisis. And why Donald Trump is likely to find that Vladimir Putin and Mohammed bin Salman are his buddies in more than just their love for getting rid of journalists. The United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia are likely to be the three nations that stand in the way of taking serious action on the climate—a toxic trio fueled by ignorance and greed.
Thanks to Trump, the United States is on the wrong side of history. And also thanks to Trump, history itself is at risk.
We have eleven years to make a massive effort to stop the emission of greenhouse gases and get deforestation under control.
Obviously, conservatives like Wyatt and Regina Hardiman and their fellow evangelical christian's at their church won't allow that to happen, democracy or not.
Earth's climate has massively changed in a period of a few hundred to 1000 years in the past. We are going to make this happen again as the combination of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions is going to result in a massive flip of climate to something more like Venus where the surface temperature is 400 degrees.
In 300 to 1000 years all life on earth will go extinct.
A social media request for a quick handshake turned historic Sunday when President Donald Trump became the first U.S. president to set foot in North Korea during a meeting in the Demilitarized Zone with Kim Jong Un.
"It's just an honor to be with you and it was an honor that you asked me to step over that line," Trump told the North Korean leader. "And I was proud to step over that line."
Trump added that it was "a great day for the world."
Trump had said the duo would merely conduct a brief handshake, but they met for almost an hour. Afterward, Trump said each leader will provide a team of negotiators for talks aimed at persuading Kim to dismantle a nuclear weapons program that has kept the Korean Peninsula on edge for years.
If Twitter helped kick-start history, social media wasn't all rainbows and flowers for Trump on Sunday. "Otto Warmbier" was trending, with tens of thousands of tweets criticizing the president for making nice with the man whose government imprisoned the college student before sending him back to the U.S. in a vegetative state. He died days later...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/06/30/trump-makes-history-north-korea-what-we-know-now/1611165001/
okay.
so Otto was imprisoned and tortured for some 24 months during the Obama administration during which time his parents were told to keep quiet that the Obama administration was "working it".
Trump got Otto released in about 15 days. shades of the Iran hostages....
I don't know what to say about NK, I think in general making nice with terrorists emboldens them, but are you going to start two more wars with Iran and NK ? I don't have all the facts so I am not wading into this one.
However, that was not what triggered my post. This did.
I would really like to hear Priya's opinion on this.
I intend to bring it up with my very liberal daughter next weekend. This I think, shocks even liberals out of their mindset. Not sure how you justify it.... but hey, you guys justify everything.... so I would love to hear your spin....
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/jessica-yaniv-transgender-from-bake-my-cake-to-wax-my-balls
Post a Comment
<< Home