Cowardice
Afraid to defend the Constitution and American values.
et cetera
“The Republican party has got to get a grip on itself,” Former Secy. of State Colin Powell on the state of the current GOP. “Republican leaders and members of the Congress… are holding back because they’re terrified of what will happen [to] any one of them if they speak out."
Mike Murphy, a former senior adviser to Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and John McCain:
“One Republican senator told me if it was a secret vote, 30 Republican senators would vote to impeach Trump,” Murphy said.
"I heard someone say if there were a private vote there would be 30 Republican votes. That's not true," [Republican former Senator Jeff] Flake said on Slate's "What Next" podcast. "There would be at least 35."
“Nobody wants to be the zebra that strays from the pack and gets gobbled up by the lion,” a former senior administration official said in assessing the current consensus among Senate Republicans. “They have to hold hands and jump simultaneously … Then Trump is immediately no longer president and the power he can exert over them and the punishment he can inflict is, in the snap of a finger, almost completely erased.”
et cetera
posted by JimK at 6:34 PM
289 Comments:
Watch an Iowa resident ask Sen. Joni Ernst: "Where is the line?"
During a town hall event, Iowa resident Amy Haskins asks Sen. Joni Ernst: "Where is the line? When are you guys going to say, ‘Enough,' and stand up and say, ‘You know what, I’m not backing any of this?'" Following her answer on per-existing conditions, Sen. Ernst speaks about President Trump, "The president is going to say what the president if going to do…I can't speak for him." Watch complete town hall Friday at 8pm ET on C-SPAN.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVE7Vvuuno0
"Afraid to defend the Constitution and American values"
the President was elected under the Constitution and has committed no impeachable offenses
if Dems believed in the Constitution, they would try to replace someone they think doesn't uphold American values by winning the next election
it's not complicated
problem is that neither the Biden family's selling of influence nor the socialism of the remaining Dem candidates represent American values at all
elections aren't endorsements, they're choices
and Dems can't produce an acceptable one
"You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role. Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office."
Lindsey Graham, January 1999
"You don’t even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role. Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office."
Graham is a little weasel whose only convictions are whatever he thinks will benefit him politically. He's the GOP version of Biden.
As it is, "the body" he is referring to is the Senate. They haven't determined that Trump's conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in his role.
Dems in the House are very concerned that they won't win the 2020 election. Further, they are trying to stop Barr's investigation of the origins of the Russia collusion hoax by hindering DOJ's ability to collect information from foreign sources, by characterizing it as "election help"
interested in facts?
read this:
https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/06/the-madness-of-progressive-projection/
A former executive in the Trump Organization said President Donald Trump really doesn’t want to be impeached ― and that he may not let the process go much further as a result.
Barbara Res, who was vice president in charge of construction at Trump’s company, predicted that he will look for a way out first.
“My gut tells me he’ll leave office, he’ll resign or make some kind of a deal, even, depending on what comes out,” she said on CNN on Sunday.
Trump would leave office to save face, Res said, even if he’s unlikely to be found guilty by the Senate during an impeachment proceeding.
“I don’t think he wants to be impeached,” Res said. “I think that’s what this panic is about.”
She went into more detail on Twitter, predicting that Trump would warn of the “deep state,” spread conspiracy theories about the Democrats and claim he’s quitting to save the Republican Party.
Res said he may quit even before the House votes to impeach him.
“Trump is toast,” she wrote in one tweet.
See the full discussion below:
https://youtu.be/0deWxcvYgJY
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge rejected President Donald Trump’s challenge to the release of his tax returns for a New York state criminal probe, saying on Monday that he could not grant such a “categorical and limitless assertion of presidential immunity.”
Trump’s lawyers notified the judge that they will immediately appeal the ruling.
Judge Victor Marrero called Trump’s claim of a broad immunity “extraordinary.”
“As the court reads it, presidential immunity would stretch to cover every phase of criminal proceedings, including investigations, grand jury proceedings and subpoenas, indictment, prosecution, arrest, trial, conviction, and incarceration,” Marrero wrote. “That constitutional protection presumably would encompass any conduct, at any time, in any forum, whether federal or state, and whether the President acted alone or in concert with other individuals.”
The judge said he “cannot endorse such a categorical and limitless assertion of presidential immunity from judicial process as being countenanced by the nation’s constitutional plan, especially in the light of the fundamental concerns over excessive arrogation of power that animated the Constitution’s delicate structure and its calibrated balance of authority among the three branches of the national government, as well as between the federal and state authorities.”
Lawyers did not immediately respond to email requests for comment in responce to the ruling.
The returns had been sought by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. His office is investigating the Trump Organization’s involvement in buying the silence of two women who claimed to have had affairs with the president.
Trump’s lawyers have said the investigation is politically motivated and that the quest for his tax records should be stopped because he is immune from any criminal probe as long as he is president.
Last week, Justice Department lawyers in Washington urged Marrero to delay deciding the issue.
Vance began his probe after federal prosecutors in Manhattan completed their investigation into payments that Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, arranged to be paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal to keep them silent during the presidential race. The Trump Organization later reimbursed Cohen.
Cohen is serving a three-year prison sentence.
As many GOP lawmakers continue to defend President Trump amid an expanding impeachment inquiry, Colin Powell, the retired general who served under three Republican presidents, said the party “has got to get a grip on itself.”
In remarks broadcast Sunday on CNN, Powell criticized Republican members of Congress for staying silent as Trump’s efforts to pressure a foreign power to target a political rival were exposed.
Republican leaders, Powell said, “are holding back because they’re terrified of what will happen to any one of them if they speak out.”
He continued, “When they see things that are not right, they need to say something about it, because our foreign policy is in shambles right now.”
Last month, Trump altered a hurricane forecast chart, adding on to Hurricane Dorian’s projected path so it appeared the storm would reach Alabama. Trump had warned, incorrectly, that Alabama would be affected by the hurricane.
In the remarks broadcast Sunday and made earlier at the New Albany Community Foundation in Ohio, Powell mentioned the doctored map as an example of the Grand Old Party enabling and latching itself to the president.
“In my time, one of us would have gone to the president and said, ‘Mr. President, you screwed up, so we’ve got to fix it and we’ll put out a correction,” Powell said. Instead, he noted, the administration ordered the Commerce Department to back up Trump’s misstatement. “This is not the way the country’s supposed to run, and Congress is one of the institutions that should be doing something about this.”
Powell condemned the Republican Party’s paralyzed response to Trump, his conduct and the impeachment inquiry, which has become a talking point in the upcoming primary and general-election campaigns.
“Will they lose a primary? I don’t know why that’s such a disaster, but will they lose a primary?” said Powell. “We’ve got to remember that the Constitution started with, ‘We the People,’ not ‘Me the President.'”
Rump is scared because he knows he only won the 2016 election because a handful of votes happened to be scattered in just the right place to tip the electoral college in his favor, and he knows that only came about only because Russia was engaged in a massive misinformation campaign in his favor.
He knows how pissed of large portions of the country are at him, and many Dems aren't going to believe the polls and stay home when it comes time to vote next fall.
Foreign interference worked for him before - it's a winning strategy for him. And he's myopic enough to believe that it will work for him again.
For nearly three years, the mainstream media has struggled to cover a president who lies compulsively (over 12,000 times), cares virtually nothing for the nitty-gritty of governance, sycophantically ingratiates himself with dictators and is remarkably ignorant (for any adult, let alone a president). The presumption of good faith at times has driven the media to underplay or ignore President Trump’s outrageous lies. It has prompted some outlets to print laughable headlines and some producers to put on air over and over again unrepentant liars will to say anything to defend the president.
Just as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said Trump’s conduct leaves the House no option but to pursue the facts to impeachment, the mainstream media seems to have collectively decided it is no longer going to pretend the Trump conspiratorialists have “a view” or that some facts (e.g., former vice president Joe Biden’s conduct regarding Ukraine) are still to be explored. No, conspiratorialists are spinning lies (e.g., the Democratic National Committee’s server is in Ukraine, the CIA and FBI in concert with allies worked to prevent Trump’s election), and certain allegations have been disproved, so further propagation amounts to lying.
We saw the “Let’s come to our senses” attitude on several of the Sunday shows. There was NBC’s Chuck Todd shouting down Sen. Ron Johnson, (R-Wis.) who was peddling Fox News propaganda:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=117&v=MkGRqyBc5Ss
Likewise, on “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos was in no mood to let Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) air nonsense accusations or pretend the president was “joking” about inviting China to meddle in our election.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=440&v=4AEOJfNvNr0
And finally, Jake Tapper was unequivocal in his explanation after clips in which Republicans dissembled to correct the record. (“And to be clear, as I said earlier in the show, the Ukrainian prosecutor general says he has no evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.") He summed up:
"From the moment that Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy began his smear campaign in February 1950 up until his censure by the U.S. Senate in 1954. The story of McCarthy was not just the story of indecency, and lies, and law breaking. It was also the story about just how much Republican lawmakers were willing to take. After all, many of them knew that what McCarthy was doing wasn’t just wrong, it was corrupting the nation, but they were afraid of him turning his sights on them. They feared the wrath of his political power. You know, when you go back and read about that period, what really stands out is how much McCarthy’s contemporaries are judged today by how they handled him. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine, a hero of the current Senator Susan Collins of Maine, had a long trailblazing career but her obituary in “The Washington Post” referred to her moment standing up to McCarthy, her Declaration of Conscience in 1950 as her finest moments in politics.Conversely stands the example of Ohio Senator Bob Taft, the Senate majority leader who knew better. He ones called McCarthy reckless and McCarthy’s charges bunked, but Taft essential ended up casting his lot in with the smear artist from Wisconsin. . . .
There are empirical wrongs in the world. Smearing innocent people is one of them. Using your political office to force foreign nations to dig up dirt on your political opponents is another one. That is not what foreign policy is for. You know this. I know this. And I would bet that most Republicans on Capitol Hill know this. They would do well to remember the lessons of Senators Smith and Taft, because history will one day come looking for them, too. She will want to know what they said and did during this time. She will likely not be in a forgiving mood."
This is not “bias” or “taking sides." It is ending the false equivalence and the unearned respect for a president whose deceitful excuses change on an hour-by-hour basis.
I have but a few suggestions going forward. First, Trump’s son-in-law and daughter have made tens of millions of dollars while serving in the White House. This is a gargantuan scandal that should be followed and explored. Simply because Trump has raised falsehoods about an opponent’s child is no reason to ignore his own family racket. Indeed, looking into this is more essential than ever. Second, in addition to cutting off Republicans in the middle of provably false spin, interviewers should confront them as to why they think it is acceptable to persist in trafficking in loony conspiracy theories. Challenge them again and again as to whether it is morally and constitutionally acceptable to solicit election help from foreign governments. If not, why are they not joining the calls for impeachment? Third, it is time to confront Attorney General William P. Barr and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who know quite well that Russia’s interference in the 2016 is not debatable. (If it is, then former CIA director Pompeo is part of the conspiracy.) The CIA, FBI and career civil servants who serve under them know they are chasing phantoms. Have Barr and Pompeo justify using the corruption of our foreign policy to aid Trump’s reelection prospects.
The impeachment process is working as it should. The House is investigating and assembling more than enough information to sustain articles of impeachment. Now the media must work as it should — not to provide cover for deluded Republicans but to hold those in power accountable and to uncover and convey the truth. As Tapper said, “There are empirical wrongs in the world.” It’s good to see both Democratic lawmakers and respectable journalists say so.
"Trump is scared because he knows he only won the 2016 election because a handful of votes happened to be scattered in just the right place to tip the electoral college in his favor,"
no, he's pretty confident because he knows that Americans have always approached elections as a choice rather than an endorsement and they will choose a capitalism that has produced record low unemployment for ALL Americans rather than a socialistic model that has failed everywhere in the world it has been tried
"and he knows that only came about only because Russia was engaged in a massive misinformation campaign in his favor."
the Russian effort was minuscule compared to what the campaigns and various American advocacy groups spent
to say it had any effect is ridiculous
Russia has always played these type of games
"He knows how pissed of large portions of the country are at him, and many Dems aren't going to believe the polls and stay home when it comes time to vote next fall."
actually, the only reason Dems have won in the past is because of monolithic support from the African American community
a relatively small diminution in that support will doom them, and there are signs that all minorities are tiring of Dems' empty promises
"Foreign interference worked for him before - it's a winning strategy for him. And he's myopic enough to believe that it will work for him again."
he didn't ask for any "foreign interference"
he did ask for their help in investigating the foreign assistance Hillary received during the 2016 campaign
he had no choice, these are things that happened on Ukraine soil and involved Ukraine citizens
Hillary will not escape justice
despite this latest attempt by Dems to help her get away
In recent days, President Donald Trump has threatened the Ukraine whistleblower with the treatment meted out in "old times" to "spies," which means execution. He has suggested that Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.)—chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating the scandal—should be arrested and charged with treason for unfairly characterizing Trump's comments soliciting dirt about former Vice President Joe Biden from the Ukrainian president. And he has warned that if Democrats try to remove him from office through impeachment, they will trigger another "civil war" in the country.
This language may be spooky, but it is not surprising. Trump thrives on chaos. But the one constant in everything he does is that he will pull out all the stops to retaliate against anyone who crosses him—friend or foe, domestic or foreign. This would be a dangerous trait in a person with any degree of power, let alone the most powerful man on the planet.
Trump launched his politics of retaliation the moment he announced his bid for the presidency. He belittled his Republican rivals, inventing insulting epithets for them. He viciously attacked any conservative who stood up to him—publicly musing, for example, about whether Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) could be a genuine war hero since he got captured in Vietnam (never mind that Trump himself got a doctor's note to avoid the draft). He encouraged violence against protesters at this rallies and delighted in chants of "lock her up" against Hillary Clinton.
Any hope that the responsibilities of the office would temper such personal attacks after he was elected were dashed. And it isn't Republican lawmakers such as the neo-Nazi-courting Rep. Steve King of Iowa who earn Trump's wrath, but his critics, like former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford and current Michigan Rep. Justin Amash. He openly celebrated when Sanford lost his re-election bid, lampooning his romantic dalliance on Twitter, and he called Amash, easily the most principled and decent conservative around, not only "one of the dumbest" but also the "most disloyal" person in Congress.
The upshot is that Trump's Republican critics simply cannot survive with their integrity intact. This reality has forced many to quit or retire, turning the Grand Old Party into Trump's Own Party. Many state chapters of the GOP have already scrapped 2020 primaries to avoid weakening Trump, even though three Republicans are challenging him.
Trump has also never let up on his attacks on the press. Since he assumed office, he has averaged more than one anti-media tweet per day. He dubs all unfavorable coverage "fake news" and calls the media the "enemy of the people." But he doesn't merely stop at generic rhetoric. He names names and uses his power to go after individual journalists and newspapers he personally dislikes. He scrapped the press credentials of The Washington Post's Jim Acosta after he asked Trump some tough questions at a press conference, and he threatened to do the same to other journalists who "don't show respect." And as if eliminating access to the White House isn't enough, he wants to eliminate entire news outfits by scrapping the broadcast licenses of NBC and other television outlets whose coverage he dislikes.
What's even more alarming is that Trump isn't simply trying to retaliate against media critics and outfits that challenge him using media-related tools at his disposal. He deploys the massive regulatory powers of the state to go after them. He issued an executive order to explore raising postal rates to punish Amazon.com because its founder, Jeff Bezos, publishes The Washington Post, whose coverage Trump hates. He directed the Department of Justice to challenge the merger between Time Warner and AT&T because he dislikes how CNN, a Time Warner subsidiary, covers him. Much of this has become the subject of a First Amendment lawsuit against the administration by PEN, a nonprofit that defends free speech rights around the world.
In foreign policy, too, Trump has unleashed a new style of retaliatory diplomacy. After the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, when some countries overreacted and issued travel warnings against the United States, Trump responded that America would do the same to them—never mind that some of them, like Japan, might be safer for Americans than America itself. "If they did that, we'd just reciprocate," Trump declared. "We are a very reciprocal nation with me as the head. When somebody does something negative to us in terms of a country, we do the same to them."
Trump's worst retaliatory instincts come out on trade, especially against China. He has been locked in a tit-for-tat trade war with China ever since he fired his opening volley last summer and slapped tariffs on foreign washing machines and solar panels, major Chinese exports. But that failed to bring China's autocracy to heel, enraging Trump so much that he hilariously issued an "order" via twitter that American companies "immediately start looking for an alternative to China."
"The personal is the political" used to be a left-wing slogan, but Trump has given it new meaning. Settling scores is the only fixed principle in his presidency. Trump's tweet that impeachment will lead to a civil war is not a prediction—it's a warning that he plans to take his politics of retaliatory destruction to a whole new level.
"Hillary will not escape justice
despite this latest attempt by Dems to help her get away"
With at least a dozen more investigations of Hillary, I'm sure Republicans will find at least as many crimes to charge her with as they did with nearly a dozen Benghazi investigations.
BWAHAHAHHHAA!
Face it.
Either Hillary is a master criminal that out-maneuvers incompetent Republican investigators at every turn, or all the conspiracy theories that Republicans put out are fake news.
It was no great surprise that a federal court Monday morning rejected President Trump’s argument that, as a sitting president, he is immune even from being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney. Nor that the court of appeals swiftly granted a stay of the order, thus preserving its ability to hear an appeal.
...the district court’s scathing assessment of the implications of Trump’s argument is telling, and the tale it tells should greatly concern the White House in the looming impeachment battle.
...Notably, the 75-page opinion by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero came just two weeks after oral arguments, blindingly fast by litigation standards. Its length and complexity suggest that the court was already working on the opinion from the time Trump filed his hyperaggressive claim.
Most important, Marrero, who could have made quick and summary work of Trump’s argument, went on at substantial length to explain just how lawless and brazen the position was.
Marrero began the opinion by calling the president’s claim “extraordinary.” Things went steeply downhill for Trump from there.
He wrote that Trump was asserting a constitutional shield from judicial process that was “virtually limitless,” a notion of “unqualified and boundless . . . presidential immunity that stands at direct odds with the framers’ constitutional plan and the Supreme Court’s precedents on executive immunity.”
More: The president’s position was “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.”
At its core, the court wrote, the argument reduces to the “very notion that the Founders rejected at the inception of the Republic.”
And all that in just the first eight pages of the opinion, which continues on to demonstrate, using Supreme Court case law and basic political theory and history, the fundamental arrogance and lawlessness of Trump’s argument...
A stable genius? With great and unmatched wisdom?
More like just another disappointed Trump U Law School drop out.
"With at least a dozen more investigations of Hillary, I'm sure Republicans will find at least as many crimes to charge her with as they did with nearly a dozen Benghazi investigations."
the Benghazi matter didn't involve criminal matters, you fool
it was incompetence, dereliction of duty, and the deceit to cover them up that resulted in worldwide riots
the only sentence was elimination from consideration for future leadership roles
the sentence was carried out in November 2016
BWAHAHAHHHAA!
Face it.
Hillary is a master criminal but investigators have closed in on her activity in hiring a foreign spy to manufacture the Russian collusion hoax
which is why Dems are trying to create the impression that the investigation is improper, illegal, and impeachable
but she won't escape justice
"It was no great surprise that a federal court Monday morning rejected President Trump’s argument that, as a sitting president, he is immune even from being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney"
no, it isn't
the judge isn't a Supreme Court justice for a reason
"the district court’s scathing assessment of the implications of Trump’s argument is telling, and the tale it tells should greatly concern the White House in the looming impeachment battle"
really, why?
"He wrote that Trump was asserting a constitutional shield from judicial process that was “virtually limitless,” a notion of “unqualified and boundless . . . presidential immunity that stands at direct odds with the framers’ constitutional plan and the Supreme Court’s precedents on executive immunity.”
More: The president’s position was “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.”
At its core, the court wrote, the argument reduces to the “very notion that the Founders rejected at the inception of the Republic.”"
that's interesting because income taxes didn't exist at the time of the founding fathers
they had no idea this excuse would be created allowing the government to massively intrude on personal privacy
How’s this for hypocrisy?:
During former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the 90s, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned, “We’ve lowered the bar on impeachment so much…it will be used as a routine tool to fight political battles.”
His colleague Nancy Pelosi said, “It’s about a punishment searching for a crime that doesn’t exist.”
Jerry Nadler (D-NY) told us, “An impeachment of a president is an undoing of a national election.”
Now that Trump occupies the Oval Office they’ve thrown all that out the window and are leading the impeachment charade stemming from a partisan CIA operative who filed a whistleblower complaint over the president’s July phone call with the president of Ukraine.
And now we’ve learned the whistleblower filed the complaint after colluding with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s office.
No foul play there, huh?
Schiff is a well-known Trump foe and architect of the debunked Russian collusion hoax. His lying this week about his secretive contacts with the partisan whistleblower earned 4 Pinocchios from the leftist Washington Post.
But who’s surprised given the number of political operatives we’ve seen in the Department of Justice and U.S. intelligence agencies who’ve targeted the president from the get-go: trying at first to stop him from getting elected, and when that failed, deploying every dirty trick in the book to derail the current administration and remove him from office.
The yearslong effort amounts to an assault on our Democracy. Citizens are supposed to choose their representatives in free elections, not deep state spooks with unchecked power and an ax to grind.
First we saw the illicit spying and dubious counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign, orchestrated by former FBI director James Comey and his lieutenants Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and other snakes within the DOJ who were central players in Crossfire Hurricane the FBI’s code name for the operation targeting Hillary Clinton’s political opponents.
When that political hit job flopped, they tried to implement the “insurance policy” outlined in a text that disgraced Peter Strzok sent his lover alluding to the Russian collusion hoax — a propaganda campaign disseminated by Democrats and their mouthpieces in the #FakeNewsMedia.
What’s been torched is the left’s credibility — and that of the media — especially after the special counsel found no evidence of conspiracy following a costly, 22-month investigation.
So now instead of respecting our Democracy and letting the electorate decide Trump’s fate at the ballot box in 13 short months, Democrats and their co-conspirators in the intelligence community are trying to nullify the votes of 63 million Americans who elected Trump in 2016.
A disgrace no fair minded American should tolerate.
It’s time to drain the swamp once and for all.
All the Democrats have to do is act sane, for a little while, to have a chance at holding the House and winning the Senate and White House. It’s not a tall order – don’t be a drooling fool arguing with a mailbox and you have an even shot at winning in 2020. For Democrats, even if that bar were so low it was buried, it wouldn’t be low enough for them to clear. They’ve chosen to make Congressman Adam Schiff the face of it all.
Schiff is the type of Congressman who would be marginalized to the point of irrelevancy if Democrats hadn’t metastasized into the media. His lies are constant, many of them are childish in nature. But mostly they’re obvious.
Every lie that perfectly fit the liberal narrative about President Trump, even if it didn’t originate with him, has passed through Schiff’s lips. No Democrat with a press credential questions his words anymore and he won’t go anywhere near where the few honest journalists who might. Even the awarding of four Pinocchios this week by the Washington Post hasn't impacted his ability to lie.
The four Pinocchios, by the way, were for saying he and his staff had not spoken with the so-called whistleblower when they had, and he knew it. That is a blatant lie, not a misstatement, misremembering, or oversight: a lie.
To illustrate just how good it is to be a Democrat, Schiff was even defended by one of the “reporters” he lied to on national television.
The Daily Beast is about as much of a journalistic outfit as MSNBC, which is why the Beast’s politics editor, Sam Stein, is also on the MSNBC payroll as a Morning Joe regular. Schiff lied directly to Stein about his office’s contact with the whistleblower, saying his office has not spoken with the registered Democrat. When the truth came out, likely leaked by Schiff’s office to the New York Times to get the best possible spin on it (and it really was a gentle story considering), Stein downplayed Schiff’s lie.
“Schiff did appear to lie,” Stein tweeted. Then he accused people being bothered by Schiff’s lie of being “a hack.” The next day he wrote a slobbering kiss of a story entitled, “Trump’s plan to save his presidency: take a hatchet to Adam Schiff.” In it, Stein quotes Schiff as saying “I regret I wasn’t much more clear.” He was crystal clear, there is the truth and he knowingly said the opposite of it. Stein the referred to this lie as “nuance.”
Again, it’s good to be a Democrat.
Schiff didn’t even have to ask. Every liberal outlet snapped to his defense. Going on the word of an admitted liar, NBC declared there was zero evidence Schiff or his staff had any hand in drafting the complaint and reaching out exclusively to one of the most partisan Democrats in the Russian witch hunt was “routine.” Were journalists honest people themselves they’d be embarrassed.
Now we have reports of a possible second whistleblower considering filing their own complaint about the same non-event call. The reason they’re considering this is to obtain the legal protections that come with whistleblower status. This person is allegedly closer to the call, which means they’re one of the people who illegally leaked it to the original whistleblower. That would be an illegal leak of classified material, which makes this an attempt by this second person to protect themselves from the consequences of breaking the law to start this hoax in the first place. It also stinks of Adam Schiff-advised strategy. Can’t wait for the New York Times story on that in a couple of weeks; wonder how they’ll spin this one.
From his constant declarations of “proof of collusion” to his denials of any knowledge of the whistleblower before Congress was notified, Adam Schiff has a history of not only of lying, but of being caught doing so. Yet he has been chosen by Nancy Pelosi to be the face of impeachment: a dishonest man chosen to make a dishonest case to the American people.
It’s like OJ Simpson being asked to give the keynote address at a marriage counseling seminar.
It’s a testament to just how weak the case is that they’ve chosen someone with a shameless willingness to tell the public that up is down, that wet is dry, to be the mastermind of impeachment. That Adam Schiff is the one coordinating this attempted coup shows just how crazy Democrats are; that they lost that argument with the mailbox.
That ultimately, the Democratic Party has Schiff for brains.
The latest Census Bureau Current Population Survey data now show that middle-class incomes, after adjusting for inflation, have surged by $5,003 since Donald Trump became president in January 2017. Median household income has now reached $65,976 – an all-time high and up more than 8 percent in 2019 dollars under the Trump presidency.
This data was compiled by the statisticians at Sentier Research, an economic research group whose founders have more than 30 years of experience at the Census Bureau in analyzing the monthly income numbers.
These numbers contrast sharply with the 16 years prior to Trump’s presidency. In the eight years that George W. Bush was president, median income barely showed any gain, up just $401 thanks to the deep recession of 2008.
In the seven and a half years that Barack Obama was president, and not including the end of the recession, which Obama inherited, incomes inched up by $1,043 (June 2009 – January 2019). This means that in the 16 years before the Trump presidency, incomes rose by about $1,500 while in less than three years middle incomes have risen three times faster.
Joe Biden is horribly unsuited to be the Democratic standard-bearer in this election. Biden and his family have been involved in scummy, corrupt stuff across the world. Nominating him would seriously foul up Democratic messaging about Trump.
It is absolutely inconceivable that Hunter Biden was hired by Burisma — at a cool $50,000 per month — for his expertise in Ukrainian geological formations. At the time, he had just washed out of the Navy Reserve for failing a cocaine test. He got hired for his connections, obviously. Companies the world over keep failsons of the rich and powerful on their boards just in case it might pay regulatory or geopolitical dividends. It's just the price of doing business in a monumentally corrupt age.
Biden lied about not talking to Hunter about his businesses. A video displays a picture of Joe, Hunter, and a third man labeled "Ukraine gas exec" on a golf course. The third man is Devon Archer — an American who has worked with Hunter for years, but also sat on the board of Burisma Holdings. It provides another association between Biden and scummy Ukraine stuff.
Hunter tried to pocket a quick $1.5 billion from some Chinese investment fund. He helped create a fund in China while his father was vice president, which is ethically suspect. "In countries like Ukraine and China, regardless of what Hunter Biden might think or say, people want to do business with him almost entirely because of who is father is," Columbia University's Lincoln Mitchell told PolitiFact.
Hunter Biden is simply part of the rat's nest of corruption, logrolling, and favor-trading that winds through the globe-spanning plutocratic elite. And you can see why it might not even have occurred to the Bidens that this kind of thing is morally suspect. Barack Obama himself has scarcely been better, with his post-presidential buckraking career of speeches before Wall Street banks at $400,000 a pop — after stubbornly refusing to prosecute a veritable container ship-load of financial crimes by big banks as president.
Only chumps like Jimmy Carter forswear the hustle and live modestly — that is, just scraping by on a piddling $210,700 presidential pension, plus occasional floods of book revenues.
What is an ex-president supposed to do, serve as some kind of moral example of republican virtue?
How are you supposed to go windsurfing with Richard Branson if you act like Cincinnatus?
Rump's attempted cover-up continues.
Trump administration blocks testimony of Gordon Sondland, a central figure in impeachment inquiry
"...Text messages made public last week show that Sondland, whose portfolio does not include U.S.-Ukraine relations, inserted himself into the effort to obtain a commitment from Ukraine to launch the investigations. At the time, the government in Kiev was eagerly awaiting the release of nearly $400 million in U.S. military aid and the arrangement of a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
In one text message, Sondland wrote that Trump “really wants the deliverable,” referring to a clear demonstration from Ukraine that it would undertake the investigations..."
We've been here before:
"The Supreme Court case hinged on to what extent a president could withhold information from other government branches in the name of privacy, and the stakes for then-President Richard M. Nixon were high.
Seven of Nixon’s closest confidants had been indicted in the Watergate scandal, and the special prosecutor investigating the matter wanted audio recordings of some of the president’s phone conversations from the Oval Office. Nixon claimed executive privilege protected him, and he refused to release the tapes.
“Many people assume that the tapes [or witness testimony] must incriminate the president, or that otherwise, he would not insist on their privacy,” Nixon said in a speech in April 1974. “But the problem I confronted was this: Unless a president can protect the privacy of the advice he gets, he cannot get the advice he needs.”"
This is America. When the advice is criminal, it can't be private.
tax returns and advice are not the same thing
further, unlike Nixon, there is no criminal matter to investigate with Trump
Dems want Trump's tax returns to be made public and they will try anything to achieve that
Presidents are not above the law
they aren't below it either
our tax system relies on the privacy of individuals' tax filings
to beach that privacy, prosecutors need to show justification
Federal deficit estimated at $984B, highest in seven years
The federal budget deficit for 2019 is estimated at $984 billion, a hefty 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and the highest since 2012, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said on Monday.
The difference between federal spending and revenue has only ever exceeded $1 trillion four times, in the period immediately following the global financial crisis.
The deficit, which has grown every year since 2015, is $205 billion higher than it was in 2018, a jump of 26 percent.
The CBO has warned that the nation's debt is on an unsustainable path. Higher levels of debt increase borrowing costs, make it harder for the government to battle economic downturns and increase the share of future spending devoted to paying off interest costs.
"Federal deficit estimated at $984B, highest in seven years"
yes, the GOP did its part by reducing taxes
this has led to higher tax collections
problem is on the expenditure side
Dems refuse to discuss entitlement reform and cutting other domestic spending
GOP had no choice but to go along so we wouldn't have to shut down the government
vote GOP next year to reduce the deficit
Depending on your age now, your memory for anguish and your luck at the time, you may not recall the double-dip recessions that devastated so many in the early 1980s. For those who lost their jobs, or woke up daily fearing that they would, it was a soul-crushing passage. From the industrial cities of central New York state west to the taconite mines of Minnesota’s Iron Range, the insulting nickname “Rust Belt" overrode the proud phrases “Factory Belt” and “Steel Belt.”
Late in 1982, America’s unemployment rate surged to 10.8%. Rockford’s rate was an agonizing 25%.
So we greet with humility and gratitude the news that the U.S. jobless rate now has fallen to 3.5% ― the lowest in the half-century since 1969. What’s most heartening is that this jobs boom is helping the less-educated, low-skill Americans who’ve missed out on other, weaker jobs recoveries.
Mark this moment: Millions of American job seekers have prayed for it. The U.S. economic expansion now in its 11th year — having dodged that recession near-miss in 2015 — is bringing jobs to the long-jobless. The unemployment rates for workers without high school diplomas and for Hispanic Americans and African Americans are the lowest ever recorded. The rate for workers too discouraged to look for work — even in a jobs boom, they exist — and for underemployed Americans, typically part-timers seeking full-time jobs, is the lowest in two decades and near a record bottom. And wages nationwide, up 2.9% from a year ago, continue to outpace inflation.
All of which reminds us that while federal initiatives to reduce inequality produced slow economic growth for many years after the Great Recession, federal tax reform and deregulation have, by contrast, driven robust hiring. So many people are coming off the sidelines that U.S. employers haven’t yet run out of workers to hire. Cue the bromide that the best anti-poverty program is a job.
After Friday’s federal jobs report, The Wall Street Journal noted that, a decade ago, many economists thought a 5% jobless rate amounted to full employment, with the economy in balance and inflation neither rising nor falling. How long can 3.5% unemployment, with the economy still growing, continue? Beats us. The global economy is slowing, as is U.S. manufacturing.
That said, we’re amused by the doom-and-gloom economists and politicians who, in recent years, have confidently predicted five of the last zero U.S. recessions.
But we once again declare, with 100% accuracy guaranteed to NY Times subscribers, that America’s next serious recession truly is approaching! The only question is when it arrives. Maybe sooner, maybe later. Again, beats us.
For now, though, we’ll celebrate the fact that a record high 158,269,000 Americans have jobs. May we never return to the corrosive Midwestern joblessness that helped give the Rust Belt — a term now in welcome decline — its nickname.
as the Biden campaign continues to teeter on the Ukraine scandal and his family selling his vice-presidency and his general senility, and with the Bern's heart attack
it looks more and more like Elizabeth Warren will be the nominee
what did the GOP do to deserve this great fortune?
this will be another McGovern election
While running for president in 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned against the moderate growth economy in the last years of the Eisenhower administration. He appealed to Americans' highest aspirations by saying: "We can do bettah." JFK promised 4% and 5% rates of annual economic progress for the nation -- and he delivered.
Those were the days.
What a contrast to the proposals and rhetoric from today's presidential candidates. I've watched many hours of Democratic presidential debates and have yet to hear an impassioned plea for faster growth. Many of the candidates -- including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders -- seem far more designed to reduce "inequality" or hand out free things to voters rather than expanding the economy.
The policy ideas would divide the pie differently, rather than expand the size of the pie for everyone. So much for the JFK idea of a "rising tide lifting all boats."
The new economic message of progressivism is grounded more in envy and giveaways than prosperity and opportunity. Sometimes liberals seem so obsessed with income inequality they seem contemptuous of growth because it makes the rich, richer.
The Democratic national platform failed to even mention of the term "economic growth," and don't be surprised if that goal is absent from the 2020 party platform. Economic growth should be a universal and undisputed goal, regardless of political party or ideology.
This call for socking it to the rich may hold some political sway. Polls show that raising taxes on the millionaires and billionaires is popular with voters. But is this any way to make Americans more prosperous?
It rarely works. Milton Friedman once famously warned, "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither."
The green movement only reinforces the left's retreat from growth because higher living standards are seen as an obstacle to environmental salvation. The latest darling of the left, 16-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg, gained worldwide applause when she told the United Nations that our obsession with growth is "destroying the planet" and leading to "mass extinction." Evidently, the cure to what ails the planet is fewer people, less consumption and an end to capitalism.
All of this is disturbingly misguided. In almost every way, growth is critical to a better future for America. Faster growth of 3% to 4% makes solving so many other social and economic ills much easier -- whether it is homelessness, lousy schools, unemployment, pollution, hunger, health care coverage, climate change or the national debt.
The attached figure shows, for example, how the U.S. national debt is expected to explode in the next three decades to 150% or even 200% of our annual economy. But with growth above 3% and not the 1.9% federal officials are forecasting, the debt not only stabilizes, it falls as a burden each year. With spending discipline, we can and will grow our way out of the debt crisis.
We see in the United States in recent years that higher growth rates are now leading to higher wages for middle-class workers, very low unemployment, and low interest rates for Americans who want to take out a mortgage to buy a home. The benefits of growth are widely distributed. High growth has corresponded with gains in middle-income household incomes and a 50% rise in the stock market -- benefiting not just the rich but also the tens of millions of American families with retirement accounts and stock ownership.
Most surprising is that economic growth is highly correlated with environmental improvement. My Heritage Foundation colleagues have found that citizens of nations that are rich and economically free have nearly 25-year-longer life expectancies than those living in nations that are poor with strict economic controls. The Heritage Index of Economic Freedom also shows that wealthy nations have much cleaner air and cleaner water than poor nations. Socialism is no way to stop pollution.
The Beatles sang that "money can't buy me love," and they were right. But it buys a lot of human improvement and makes life on earth for the poorest people better. History proves it time and again. Someone please tell this to aspiring income-redistributor in chief, Elizabeth Warren.
in November 2020, voters will find Dems guilty of:
1. trying to incite racial tension
2. trying to undermine the economy
3. spreading the lie that Trump was working with Russia
the motive: political gain
Once again your fear is palpable.
It's beautiful.
Keep spinning.
And by all means, keep predicting, President Huckabee!
"Once again your fear is palpable."
that's the way things seem to the mentally ill
do you hear voices too?
"Keep spinning."
no need for spin
the truth is apparent to all
"And by all means, keep predicting, President Huckabee!"
I know you're still disappointed that your Hillary prediction fell through
also sad how much money she spent hiring that foreign spy to make up a hoax about Trump
what a waste, she should ask for her money back
I wonder why Hillary's not running again
hee-hee-hee!!
Hillary, again??
Well we can see why you and Rump are obsessed with her.
She did win the popular vote for President in 2016 by millions of votes.
Meanwhile Rump continues to impeach himself.
Enjoy!
OP-led panel endorses finding that Russia interfered to help Donald Trump
A bipartisan panel of U.S. senators Tuesday called for sweeping action by Congress, the White House and Silicon Valley to ensure social media sites aren’t used to interfere in the coming presidential election, delivering a sobering assessment about the weaknesses that Russian operatives exploited in the 2016 campaign.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, a Republican-led panel that has been investigating foreign electoral interference for more than two and a half years, said in blunt language that Russians worked to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton while bolstering Republican Donald Trump — and made clear that fresh rounds of interference are likely ahead of the 2020 vote.
“Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn’t start and didn’t end with the 2016 election," said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the committee’s chairman. “Their goal is broader: to sow societal discord and erode public confidence in the machinery of government. By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans.”
Though the 85-page report itself had extensive redactions, in the visible sections lawmakers urged their peers in Congress to act, including through the potential adoption of new regulations that would make who bought an ad more transparent. The report also called on the White House and the executive branch to adopt a more forceful, public role, warning Americans about the ways in which dangerous misinformation can spread while creating new teams within the U.S. government to monitor for threats and share intelligence with industry.
The recommendations call for Silicon Valley to more extensively share intelligence among companies, in recognition of the shortage of such sharing in 2016 and also the ways that disinformation from Russia and other countries spreads across numerous platforms — with posts linking back and forth in a tangle of connections.
“The Committee found that Russia’s targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated and ongoing information warfare campaign,” the report says. The Russian effort was “a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood... an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States."...
We all remember Rump's bogus belief about Putin: "He [Putin] said he didn't meddle," Trump said, answering questions in the press cabin on Air Force One. "I asked him again. You can only ask so many times. . . . He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did."
Trump said that he believed Putin was "sincere" in his denials, and that Putin seemed to find the question insulting. Suggesting that what he called the "artificial Democratic hit job" of investigations of his campaign were preventing U.S.-Russian cooperation on a range of issues.
“Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn’t start and didn’t end with the 2016 election,"
In a Democratic society, with a constitutional right to free speech, the only appropriate governmental response to misinformation is information. It is not, and should not, be unlawful or Russians to resent their on social media. If they make false statements, we have more than adequate resources to combat it. We don't need to ban speech.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a clear duty to call an immediate House vote to authorize an official impeachment inquiry — if she dares.
The White House informed her today that the Executive Branch won’t play along with the lawless “inquiry” that House Democrats have been engaged in — which President Trump has quite fairly termed “a totally compromised kangaroo court.”
White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s letter to Pelosi spells out the problems. While the Constitution clearly gives the House the power to begin impeachment proceedings, it does not give the speaker the privilege of declaring them all by herself.
Precedent is on the White House’s side here. Most recently, the full House voted to open impeachment inquiries against Presidents Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon — and in so doing set clear rules that gave presidential defenders full rights to participate, including the right to subpoena witnesses.
The letter even quotes Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler’s past remarks that “the power of impeachment … demands a rigorous level of due process” that includes such provisions.
As Cipollone notes, the investigating committees “must provide for the disclosure of all evidence favorable to the President and all evidence bearing on the credibility of witnesses called to testify in the inquiry. The Committees’ current procedures proved none of these basic constitutional rights.”
Pelosi’s Democrats are rushing to a final impeachment vote before Thanksgiving. They’re deposing witnesses behind closed doors and denying Republicans fair time to ask questions and the right to call their own witnesses — and won’t even release full interview transcripts.
Instead, they’re leaking negative info and withholding favorable facts — feeding fanatically anti-Trump media to repeat slanted interpretations as fact.
This is no constitutional effort to get at the full facts: It’s a rush to sell the public on a narrative of presidential wrongdoing.
The White House is entirely right to call out Pelosi’s game. And her only proper response is to treat her drive to impeach Trump the same way her Republican predecessors did their drive to impeach Clinton.
...in 2018 the average effective tax rate paid by the richest 400 families in the country was 23 percent, a full percentage point lower than the 24.2 percent rate paid by the bottom half of American households.
In 1980, by contrast, the 400 richest had an effective tax rate of 47 percent. In 1960, their tax rate was as high as 56 percent. The effective tax rate paid by the bottom 50 percent, by contrast, has changed little over time.
The analysis differs from many other published estimates of tax burdens by encompassing the totality of taxes Americans pay: not just federal income taxes but also corporate taxes, as well as taxes paid at the state and local levels. It also includes the burden of about $250 billion of what Saez and Zucman call “indirect taxes,” such as licenses for motor vehicles and businesses.
...The top 400 families have more wealth than the bottom 60 percent of households, while the top 0.1 percent own as much as the bottom 80 percent...
Warren has a plan to fix that!
ULTRA-MILLIONAIRE TAX
A two-cent tax on the great fortunes of more than $50 million can bring in nearly $3 trillion to rebuild America’s middle class. Add your name if you agree: It's time for the rich to pay their fair share.
For decades, the wealthy and the well-connected have put American government to work for their own narrow interests. As a result, a small group of families has taken a massive amount of the wealth American workers have produced, while America’s middle class has been hollowed out.
The result is an extreme concentration of wealth not seen in any other leading economy. The 400 richest Americans currently own more wealth than all Black households and a quarter of Latino households combined. According to an analysis from economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman from the University of California-Berkeley, the richest top 0.1% has seen its share of American wealth nearly triple from 7% to 20% between the late 1970s and 2016, while the bottom 90% has seen its share of wealth decline from 35% to 25% in that same period. Put another way, the richest 130,000 families in America now hold nearly as much wealth as the bottom 117 million families combined.
"...in 2018 the average effective tax rate paid by the richest 400 families in the country was 23 percent, a full percentage point lower than the 24.2 percent rate paid by the bottom half of American households."
the biggest reason for that is that you are probably including social security and sales tax
the bottom half of households pay no Federal income tax at all
are you in favor of changing social security?
not sure how sales tax rates could be made progressive
"In 1980, by contrast, the 400 richest had an effective tax rate of 47 percent."
that was year Reagan campaigned against Jimmy Carter's triple misery index
cutting taxes transformed our economy for the next quarter of a century
"In 1960, their tax rate was as high as 56 percent."
that was year JFK campaigned against Dwight Eisenhower's sluggish growth rate
cutting taxes, he capital gains taxes on the rich, transformed our economy until Dems messed it up with Great Society programs and war spending
"Warren has a plan to fix that!"
hardly a plan
simple income redistribution
most recent country to be destroyed by Warren's type of "plan": Venezuela
"A two-cent tax on the great fortunes of more than $50 million can bring in nearly $3 trillion to rebuild America’s middle class. Add your name if you agree: It's time for the rich to pay their fair share."
we already taxed the income when produced and the assets when they are bequeathed
now you want a third bite at the apple?
"For decades, the wealthy and the well-connected have put American government to work for their own narrow interests. As a result, a small group of families has taken a massive amount of the wealth American workers have produced, while America’s middle class has been hollowed out."
we have massive entitlement programs, created in the mid-60s
how is that government working for "the wealthy and well-connected"?
truth is the wealthy already fund most of our government as well as most of our private charities and cultural organizations
A Donald Trump supporter in Moorhead, Minnesota, was arrested on felony charges Monday after police say he trailed a woman with an Elizabeth Warren bumper sticker on her car and flashed a gun at her.
The 18-year-old woman was driving when the suspect, 27-year-old Joseph Schumacher of West Fargo, North Dakota, pulled up next to her in his own vehicle and yelled at her about the bumper sticker, according to a release from the Moorhead Police Department.
Wanting to make sure the woman knew where he stood on the political spectrum, Schumacher pointed toward his own pro-Trump bumper sticker while continuing to voice “his difference in national political views,” the statement continued.
The harassment continued for a few blocks, Moorhead Police Capt. Deric Swenson told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
“The victim initially thought it wasn’t going to be serious,” Swenson said. “Then things escalated seriously.”
The woman said when Schumacher drove ahead of her, he held up a handgun he had inside his vehicle, according to Valley News Live.
The woman then called 911 to report the incident.
A short time later, cops found Schumacher, searched his car and found a loaded handgun in the center console, according to The Smoking Gun.
Police said a passenger in Schumacher’s vehicle confirmed the story told to them by the victim.
Schumacher was arrested on two felony counts of making terroristic threats, as well as misdemeanor weapons charges.
He was booked into custody at the Clay County Jail and due in court on Tuesday.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-foreign-born-men-who-helped-giuliani-on-ukraine-arrested-on-campaign-finance-charges-11570714188?mod=hp_lead_pos1
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/465116-trump-asked-tillerson-to-interfere-in-doj-case-against-giuliani
Katie Rogers✔
@katierogers
Tonight, in Minnesota, state the campaign really wants to win, @SecondLady is on stage praising POTUS. She says she likes how he treats young women and sees the respect he has for his daughters. “As a mom, I was all in” after seeing how he interacted with her daughter, Charlotte.
9:27 PM - Oct 9, 2019
Bill Kristol✔
@BillKristol
Man, the Pences must really be worried Trump’s either going to dump Mike from the ticket or try to bring Mike down with him if he’s impeached. https://twitter.com/katierogers/status/1182080470428917765 …
Joel Benenson✔
@benensonj
I guess @secondlady missed the interview where @realDonaldTrump bragged about walking in on semi-naked contestants in the teen Miss USA pageant. You know, the recording all of America heard when it was replayed during the campaign. That’s how he treats young women. https://twitter.com/katierogers/status/1182080470428917765 …
marisa kabas✔
@MarisaKabas
Interesting thing to say the same day 43 more allegations of sexual misconduct against him are published: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a29391247/donald-trump-assault-allegations-karen-johnson-all-the-presidents-women-book/ … https://twitter.com/katierogers/status/1182080470428917765 …
“He Grabbed Me There in the Front”: Donald Trump Allegedly Hid Behind a Tapestry to Grope a Woman...
In an exclusive excerpt from 'All the President’s Women,' Karen Johnson, one of 43 women with new allegations against the president, tells her story.
esquire.com
Philip Rucker✔
@PhilipRucker
This is quite a departure from how Karen Pence felt about Trump’s treatment of women back in 2016, according to @TimAlberta’s reporting in “American Carnage” https://twitter.com/katierogers/status/1182080470428917765 …
Rob Gorski✔
@The_Autism_Dad
Replying to @shannonrwatts @KarenPence
OMG... They all need to go. He's been credibly accused of dozens of sexual assaults. Trump even sexualizes his own daughter. There's plenty of recordings of him says absolutely disgusting things about Ivanka.. @KarenPence this country deserves better than you.
Jïmm¥†ðLantern✔
@JimmytotheO
Karen loves to bury her head in the sand. How clueless can you be? Or she’s just as evil as the rest of them.
Kimberley Johnson✔
@AuthorKimberley
I think Mother might be lying for a man who bragged about grabbing women's genitals for partisan reasons... https://twitter.com/katierogers/status/1182080470428917765
Caryn Rose✔
@carynrose
Methinks the Second Lady doth protest too much https://twitter.com/katierogers/status/1182080470428917765 …
Moira Whelan✔
@moira
Didn't your husband want to end the campaign after the Access Hollywood tape?
Also �� https://twitter.com/katierogers/status/1182080470428917765 …
Cowardice
Describes the phenomenon where liberals are afraid they can't convince enough voters to support their policies in an open election and they make up impeachment charges and try to make changes to the Constitution to remove their opponent from office.
Former national security adviser H.R. McMaster said it was “absolutely” inappropriate for a U.S. president to seek foreign interference in an election when asked about the matter by a reporter on Thursday.
“Of course no. No, it’s absolutely not,” the three-star general told a reporter while speaking at an event at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on Thursday. The reporter had asked whether it was appropriate for the president to “solicit foreign interference in our political process.”
“And of course, what has to happen here is seeing our democracy play out, our separation of powers play out,” McMaster added. “And for the American people, through their representatives in Congress, to make a judgment of whether that happened.”
Cowardice
Describes the phenomenon whereby a rich kid gets a doctor's note for "bone spurs" which are bad enough to keep him out of military service, but not nearly bad enough to keep him off the golf course many decades later.
Cowardice
Describes the phenomenon whereby conservatives who have the strength to type reams of derogatory comments about LGBTQ people for over a decade, claim their religious rights are being trampled, but not have the courage to put their own name on the posts.
Cowardice
Describes the phenomenon where Republicans, many of whom earned the label "never Trumpers" during the primary season, now behave like obsequious toadies when their Sexual Predator in Chief engages in behaviors far worse than they've impeached a Democratic president for.
Cowardice
Describes the phenomenon whereby Mitch McConnell, fearful of how the Senate would vote, held up a Supreme Court nomination for nearly a year from President Obama. We are supposed to have a system of "Checks and Balances," not one of "Checks and Obstructions."
Cowardice
Describes the phenomenon whereby a President doesn't release his tax returns because he fears what the American public might find there, despite the fact that other presidents have done the very same for decades.
Cowardice
Describes the phenomenon whereby the President and his family have their goods manufactured in China for sale here in the United States, rather than risk making a bit less money and put more Americans to work here.
Cowardice
Describes the phenomenon whereby immigrant families with children are made the scapegoats as cover for rich American companies that have been sending jobs to China for decades. Republicans hope that if you can blame enough brown people for the problems of the country, you won't notice that American companies, of their own free will, shipped MILLIONS of jobs to China to make their investors richer and richer, keep wages here low, and avoid taxes. In the process, they have helped build up China's industrial base in hollowed out our own. Now they say that China is the problem - hoping you won't remember who made their industrial gains possible.
you really are afraid that Americans will compare Donald Trump's successes to the socialism espoused by Elizabeth Warren and decide they want to stick with the administration that risen hope and opportunity among all Americans but especially those who have been disadvantaged despite electing Dems for years, aren't you?
you see the future and it scares the hell out of you
show a little courage and try to win the election
Do the House Democrats run the risk of turning their impeachment “inquiry” into a kangaroo court by so obviously and repeatedly bending or breaking with the precedents of impeachments past?
The fix appears in with the House’s so-called impeachment inquiry. Hashtags are no longer as powerful as they once were, but President Trump might want to try out #KangarooCourtImpeachment, because the House “inquiry” is just that: a kangaroo court.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone laid out the argument for concluding as much on Tuesday. Cipollone’s entire letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the relevant Democratic committee chairs in the House should be read in its entirety, but three key passages stand out:
First, Cipollone argues that “precedent for the rights to cross-examine witnesses, call witnesses, and present evidence dates back nearly 150 years. Yet the Committees have decided to deny the President these elementary rights and protections that form the basis of the American justice system and are protected by the Constitution.”
Next: “In addition, the House has not provided the Committees’ Ranking Members with the authority to issue subpoenas. The right of the minority to issue subpoenas subject to the same rules as the majority — has been the standard, bipartisan practice in all recent resolutions authorizing presidential impeachment inquiries.”
Finally, the White House counsel adds: “It is transparent that you have resorted to such unprecedented and unconstitutional procedures because you know that a fair process would expose the lack of any basis for your inquiry.”
These are arguments that Democrats and their media supporters will dispute, but they are anchored in the recent past and the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton and Richard M. Nixon. That Democrats are abandoning these precedents — and the deeply embedded ideals of due process for the accused — is a terrible strategic mistake by Pelosi and her party.
Cipollone’s arguments are powerful because they are indisputably true. Repetition will drive these stakes deep into the American consciousness. And after the failed attempt to “get Trump” via the Mueller inquiry (and a laugh at people who don’t believe the special counsel’s probe is understood that way), fair-minded Americans will indeed note and refuse to forget that Democrats cheated when they could not persuade.
Secret hearings, witness tampering, refusal of basic and long-standing rights such as the minority party’s right to summon witnesses add up to a rush job, a con job and a collapse of the Democrats’ faith in their own assertions. U.S. Attorney John Durham and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigations into the origins of the Russia probe may further deepen suspicion of the Democrats’ pretend impeachment. Trump could hardly ask for more incompetent opponents than Pelosi, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). They have time to correct their ill-conceived rush to judgment, but not much.
"Former national security adviser H.R. McMaster said it was “absolutely” inappropriate for a U.S. president to seek foreign interference in an election when asked about the matter by a reporter on Thursday."
he must have been referring to the time Obama asked Russia to help him get elected and he would be more "flexible" after the election
he was probably very upset when Obama wasn't impeached for that
Team Trump said Tuesday that it wouldn’t cooperate with impeachment efforts in the House, and Dems have only themselves to blame: Rigging a hyperpartisan set of rules and choosing a manifestly unsuitable ringleader in Rep. Adam Schiff, liberals have prepared a charade that will only delegitimize the process.
First, to dispense with a recurring liberal myth: While dramatic, Team Trump’s action is hardly unprecedented. In 2012, the Obama White House rejected congressional subpoenas related to the investigation into the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal.
Unlike the scandal surrounding President Trump’s phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, whose potential consequences are wholly political, the Fast and Furious program led to the deaths of American law enforcement officers and dozens of Mexican nationals.
Yet Team Obama called the probe “political theater.” Then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi agreed that the White House didn’t have to cooperate with GOP demands. When the Republican majority voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for failure to cooperate, Pelosi walked off the House floor in protest.
Now Pelosi would have you believe the impeachment attempt she is pursuing isn’t political theater, and the White House is acting lawless by not participating.
What’s really unprecedented is this: House Democrats are pursuing impeachment without holding a vote to authorize an official impeachment inquiry. Impeachment is a political, not legal, process, and Democrats can rewrite the rules if they like. But the more political impeachment becomes, the more it justifies a political response from the White House, and the less credibility impeachment will have with the public.
The reasons for not holding a vote on opening an impeachment inquiry appear to be self-interested and craven, which only underscores the White House’s point. Authorizing an impeachment inquiry would give the Republican minority the right to call its own witnesses and otherwise participate in the investigation. And it would impose political accountability on House Democrats in swing districts that went for Trump in 2016.
House Democrats are also floating the idea of keeping the whistleblower’s identity a secret, even though the Intelligence Community inspector general has noted that the whistleblower has “some indicia of an arguable political bias … in favor of a rival political candidate” to Trump. More recent reports are saying that the whistleblower has a “working relationship” with a current 2020 Democratic candidate, and the candidate is Biden.
Telling the president he can’t face his accuser is unlikely to convince the public that this process is in any way fair.
Then there is Schiff, whom Pelosi has put in charge of the impeachment efforts. The integrity of the man leading this process isn’t a trivial matter, and Schiff has distinguished himself for untrustworthiness.
Schiff has already been caught lying on TV about staffers on his own intelligence committee being in contact with the Ukraine-call whistleblower before the formal complaint that led to the current impeachment efforts was filed.
Schiff’s conduct during the Russia investigation was also unbecoming of a member of Congress. He acquired a deserved reputation for saying outrageous, unsupportable things about the investigation on cable news. During Trump’s first year in office, a GOP news release noted Schiff spent 20 hours, 44 minutes and 49 seconds on television.
Schiff’s office has also been notorious for leaking. In 2017, CNN, NBC and CBS all erroneously reported that Donald Trump Jr. had been sent the hacked DNC Wikileaks emails in advance, potential proof of “collusion” with Russia. It turned out the date on the email was wrongly reported. Trump Jr. got the emails after they were already public and had done nothing wrong.
When asked about the source of this leak, a spokesman for Adam Schiff offered a non-denial denial, telling Politico “that neither he nor his staff leaked any ‘non-public information’ ” about Trump Jr.
Given the bad faith and lack of transparency and due process that have characterized this impeachment drive, opponents of the president will once more end up violating more important norms than Trump stands accused of disregarding.
Impeachment is a gravely serious step to take, as it threatens to overturn the will of voters. So far, Democrats aren’t taking the impeachment process seriously. So they should not be surprised that Trump isn’t taking it seriously, either.
The President is not above the law.
Facts are not made up, conspiracy theories are.
Rump brazenly violates the law and claims he is unidictable.
He will be held accountable.
"The President is not above the law."
neither are political candidates
Dems have a new theory that investigating Biden's family getting payments from Ukraine, while he was VP and Obama's point man in Ukraine, is off limits because Biden is running or President
gee, no need for perps to use the insanity plea any more
just run for office against anyone who is investigating you
but that's not the real point
most Dem voters favor someone other than Biden
the real motive of the Dem impeachment is to delegitimize and, thus, stop the DOJ investigation of the origins of the Russian collusion hoax
"Facts are not made up, conspiracy theories are."
actually, the media and Dems have made up several blatant lies in this matter
they are also not allowing the GOP or anyone defending Trump to call witnesses or issue subpoenas
it's pretty obvious who wants to avoid the facts
"Rump brazenly violates the law and claims he is unidictable.
He will be held accountable."
could you tell us which law he violated?
the actions that are being considered for impeachment are not crimes
the Dems allege they are violations of presidential duty, which is different
if the Dems impeach Trump, they will have to explain to America why Obama was not impeached when he blatantly requested Russian assistance for his re-election
"Facts are not made up, conspiracy theories are."
Trump foiled Dem plans to charge cover-up by declassifying and releasing both the transcript of the call and the whistle-blower's statement
since the WB only had second-hand knowledge, that means we all know more than he did
btw, the WB has ties to Biden and coordinated his complaint with House Dems before making it
What is an impeachable offense? Rep. Maxine Waters, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says the definition is purely political: “whatever Congress says it is—there is no law.” She’s wrong.
At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the Framers debated impeachment of a president. Some argued for the power of Congress to remove the president for “maladministration” or other open-ended terms that appeared in several state constitutions. Others, including James Madison, opposed such vague criteria, fearful that they would turn the republic into a British-style parliamentary system, in which Congress could remove a president over political differences—effectively a vote of no confidence. That, Madison argued, would be the “equivalent to tenure during pleasure of the Senate.”
The Framers wanted an independent president who could be removed only for genuine wrongdoing. So they agreed to the criteria that became part of the Constitution: “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”
In Federalist No. 65, Alexander Hamilton elaborated on the meaning of “high” crimes: “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself” (emphasis added).
Hamilton didn’t say the process of impeachment is entirely political. He said the offense has to be political. He continued: “The prosecution of [such offenses] will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties, more or less friendly, or inimical, to the accused. In many cases, it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side, or on the other; and in such cases, there will always be the greater danger, that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”
If Hamilton’s words sound prescient, it is because he foresaw how the process of impeachment and removal could easily be exploited for political advantage, as Democrats are attempting now and Republicans tried to do when they impeached President Clinton in 1998. Hamilton was concerned that the decision to impeach and remove “the accused” be based not on “the comparative strength of parties,” but rather on “real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” These words imply a quasi-legal process rather than an exclusively political one.
There is an inevitable political component to the decision to impeach and remove a president, but it should come into play only if the objective constitutional criteria are met. Even if a president did commit “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” the House could decide on political grounds not to move forward on impeachment. The constitutional criteria are necessary for impeachment, but they do not necessitate it.
The Framers didn’t want the impeachment power to become a political weapon. That’s why they designed both procedural and substantive protections against misuse of this important legislative check on the executive. The procedural protection is the requirement of a two-thirds vote for removal, which makes it impossible to remove the president without broad support. The substantive check is the list of offenses justifying impeachment.
The words “other high crimes and misdemeanors” does accord Congress some discretion, but not as much as the rejected term “maladministration” would have. The words would seem to require criminal-like acts of a serious nature, though precisely what would suffice is anything but clear. A sitting president would almost certainly be impeached if he committed murder, despite the historical precedent that Vice President Aaron Burr was not impeached for killing Hamilton in a duel. But if a president paid hush money out of personal funds to prevent his adultery from being disclosed—as Hamilton did when he was Treasury secretary—he wouldn’t be impeached. Adultery was a felony in Hamilton’s time, but nothing Hamilton did constituted a public crime. Perjury to cover up adultery—one of the offenses for which Mr. Clinton was impeached—is a closer call, although I believe it was not impeachable.
As for the allegations against President Trump, obstruction of justice is plainly a high crime, but a president cannot commit it by exercising his constitutional authority to fire or pardon, regardless of his motive. (It would have been an impeachable offense in Mr. Clinton’s case, but the facts were disputed.) Neither is it a crime to conduct foreign policy for partisan or personal advantage—a common political sin with no limiting principle capable of being applied in a neutral manner.
The Framers, by rejecting open-ended criteria such as “maladministration” and substituting more specific and criminal-like criteria, sent a message to future generations: Impeachment should not be a political measure governed by “the comparative strength of parties.” It should be based on “the real demonstration of innocence or guilt” of “the accused.” It is left to Congress to be reasonable and conscientious in interpreting the words “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors”—a tall order in our hyperpartisan age.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his dogged pursuit of democratic reforms and regional peacemaking efforts.
Abiy was awarded the prize “in particular, for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighboring Eritrea,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Nobel Committee, which decides the winner.
A peace accord between Abiy and his Eritrean counterpart, Isaias Afwerki, formally ended a 20-year military standoff that followed Eritrea’s secession from Ethiopia in 1993. As many as 100,000 people were killed between 1998 and 2000 when a border dispute flared into an all-out war.
Abiy, a 43-year-old former intelligence officer, has ushered in an era of hope for peace and greater freedoms in Africa’s second-most populous country, which has long been governed by authoritarian regimes. Upon taking office in April 2018, Abiy initiated the release of thousands of political prisoners, lifted bans on various political organizations, prosecuted former officials accused of torture and vowed to move Ethiopia toward its first free, multiparty elections in 2020...
Meanwhile Rump attacked Somali refugees who have settled in Minnesota.
Sad!
Congress can seek eight years of President Trump’s business records from his accounting firm, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled Friday in one of several legal battles over access to the president’s financial data.
In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld Congress’s broad investigative powers and rejected the president’s bid to block lawmakers from subpoenaing the documents.
The case is one of several clashes between the Democrat-controlled House and the Republican president over Trump’s data that is expected to reach the Supreme Court. In this case, the judges ruled that Trump’s arguments — that the subpoenas were invalid because Congress lacked a “legitimate legislative purpose” for its subpoenas — were incorrect.
“Contrary to the President’s arguments, the Committee possesses authority under both the House Rules and the Constitution to issue the subpoena, and Mazars must comply,” Judges David S. Tatel and Patricia A. Millett wrote for the court. Both were appointed by Democratic presidents.
The president was appealing a lower court’s decision that allowed a House Oversight Committee to move forward with its request for financial statements and audits prepared for Trump and his companies by the accounting firm Mazars USA.
The House sought these records months before the beginning of its recent impeachment inquiry, related to President Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrat Joe Biden.
This case, instead, was prompted by testimony from Trump’s former “fixer,” attorney Michael D. Cohen, that Trump had exaggerated his wealth in order to seek loans.
In her dissent, Judge Neomi Rao — appointed by Trump — said if the House wants to investigate possible wrongdoing by the president it should do so by invoking its constitutional impeachment powers not its regular oversight powers.
...It is unclear what will happen next in this case, but Trump seems likely to appeal — either to the full D.C. Circuit, or to the Supreme Court.
...In a separate case in New York, the president is trying to block Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance (D) from subpoenaing Trump’s tax records from the accounting firm. Vance is investigating hush-money payments made just before the 2016 election to two women who said they had affairs with Trump.
"you really are afraid that Americans will compare Donald Trump's successes to the socialism espoused by Elizabeth Warren and decide they want to stick with the administration that risen hope and opportunity among all Americans but especially those who have been disadvantaged despite electing Dems for years, aren't you?"
Nope. That's entirely projection on your part. The socialism scare card that Republicans like to play all the time - insisting we'll end up like Venezuela and/or the Soviet Union is just a scare card. Republicans don't want Americans to look at the map:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_universal_health_care
And realize that all the western democracies have universal health care - many of them for decades, and they haven't turned into a socialist disaster. Our lack of universal health care puts us in the same category as countries that Rump himself derided with a nasty comparison to a particular type of hole.
"you see the future and it scares the hell out of you"
Nope. That's entirely projection on your part again. Although I'm quite skilled at what I do, telling the future is not one of my abilities. I don't even read tarot cards. However, history can often be a good reference for gauging probabilities of what might happen in the future.
"show a little courage and try to win the election"
Not worried about that either. I know a lot of pissed off ladies with pink hats. They will be out in force the next time a presidential election rolls around. They don't want to see another sexual predator slink into office after losing the popular vote.
Every hypocritical, lying, self-serving greedhead who uses politics for the most cynical possible purposes leans on the fact that, as long as they are wearing their team colors, voters will forgive them for anything. The decrepit, oligarchal state of democracy can be attributed in part to the fact that – as any sleight-of-hand magician can tell you – it is easy to pick people’s pockets when they are so easily distracted by shiny symbols. Sometimes the distracting symbol that makes you dumb is the blue flag of the Democratic party.
The son of a longtime US senator gets his start as a lawyer with one of the biggest corporate donors to his dad’s campaigns; a friend of his dad’s gets him a job in the Clinton administration, and then as a lobbyist; later, while his father is vice president, he is given a $50,000 per month seat on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm, despite lacking any clear energy expertise. How does this all happen? It happened the same way that Chelsea Clinton became a “special correspondent” for NBC News, and Jenna Bush got a job as a Today show host. It happened the same way, for that matter, that George W Bush – objectively, a flailing dumbass – became the governor of Texas and then the president of the United States.
When you are the son of a famous and powerful politician, you are showered with opportunity, whether you deserve it or not. This is nepotism, but it is also, if we are being direct, a form of corruption. Moral corruption. Not only because these prestigious positions are not earned, and because these celebukids are taking something that rightly should have gone to someone more deserving; but also because, even though there is rarely anything so crude as a direct quid pro quo, this undeserved largesse is always motivated to some extent by a desire by some powerful interest to take advantage of the halo of influence cast by the parents. That influence should properly accrue to the public, who their parents work for. The lavish lives afforded to famous kids are, in effect, stolen from the American people. Each coveted job handed to a president’s kid represents a small quantity of subversion of the spirit of the democratic process.
This particular form of injustice is often waved off as just be the way of the world. Seven-foot-tall people get to be in the NBA, and the children of presidents and vice-presidents get sweet, lucrative gigs whether they’re qualified for them or not. We shouldn’t take this so lightly. We should, in fact, be enraged by it. Politics is not just another way to get rich. It is a public service field, and the more important the position, the more stringent the ethical requirements it should carry.
Hunter Biden and his unearned riches are a moral failure. The same moral failure infects Democrats and Republicans alike. (This is a simple demonstration of the fact that “class war” is a much more accurate lens on politics than “red versus blue”.) I don’t want to hear Democrats – members of the party that ostensibly stands for more equality and purer democracy – pretending that the fact that the VP’s son got a do-nothing $600k per year corporate handout is unremarkable. I want Democrats to demonstrate that we live our values. I want Democrats to send their kids to public school, unionize their workplaces and give money to the poor.
Send Hunter Biden and his peers right down to Family Dollar with name tags and a training manual.
Congress can seek eight years of President Trump’s business records from his accounting firm, two judges appointed by Democrats ruled Friday.
The case is has no effect because it will eventually reach the Supreme Court where it will be decided in Trump's favor. The Democrat judges ruled that Trump’s arguments — that the subpoenas were invalid because Congress lacked a “legitimate legislative purpose” for its subpoenas — were incorrect.
“Contrary to the President’s arguments, the Committee possesses authority under both the House Rules and the Constitution to issue the subpoena, and Mazars must comply,” Judges David S. Tatel and Patricia A. Millett wrote without addressing trump's argument. Both were appointed by Democratic presidents.
This case, instead, was prompted by testimony from Trump’s former “fixer,” attorney Michael D. Cohen, that Trump had exaggerated his wealth in order to seek loans.
In her dissent, esteemed Judge Neomi Rao sagely pointed out if the House wants to investigate possible wrongdoing by the president it should do so by invoking its constitutional impeachment powers NOT its oversight powers.
"Nope. That's entirely projection on your part. The socialism scare card that Republicans like to play all the time - insisting we'll end up like Venezuela and/or the Soviet Union is just a scare card. Republicans don't want Americans to look at the map"
the problem is that the socialist administration of FDR created a situation where most people didn't pay for their insurance for decades, causing an inflation
here in the US, health costs are too much for the government to absorb, contrasting with other countries
thanks a lot, socialists!
"Not worried about that either. I know a lot of pissed off ladies with pink hats. They will be out in force the next time a presidential election rolls around. They don't want to see another sexual predator slink into office after losing the popular vote."
sounds like they are cavalier about the welfare of the working class and minorities, who have had opportunities they never had before under this President
if you're not scared, why not focus on the election?
time is short for you find an acceptable nominee
elections are choices not endorsements
you won't win unless you come up with an acceptable one
which is why you're so scared
be sure and wear those pink hats on Halloween!!
"It happened the same way, for that matter, that George W Bush – objectively, a flailing dumbass – became the governor of Texas and then the president of the United States."
Someone forgot to tell this author how Ivanka and Jared got into the White House.
"the problem is that the socialist administration of FDR created a situation where most people didn't pay for their insurance for decades, causing an inflation
here in the US, health costs are too much for the government to absorb, contrasting with other countries
thanks a lot, socialists!"
Someone forgot to tell you that insurance is run by private companies here in the US. That's not socialist, idiot.
Our current insurance system is a side effect of the fact that corporations couldn't raise wages during WWII to attract more workers in a tight labor market, so they lured them in with insurance packages, which weren't wages. Capitalism did its job the best way it knew how.
The problem with capitalists running insurance companies is that market incentives are all wrong for corporations in that space. Corporations want to make as much money as possible - that means they will always charge as much as the market can bear, and if they can, get rid of sick people so they don't decrease their profit margin. They then raise prices for people who need it the most, making it unaffordable. These incentives are simply antithetical to keeping a large and diverse population healthy. But that's not insurance companies' main goal - it's profit - just like any other capitalist enterprise.
Insurance companies aren't strictly necessary for good health - doctors yes, but a large layer of private bureaucracy trying to extract as much profit as possible out of the healthcare industry? No.
"time is short for you find an acceptable nominee
elections are choices not endorsements
you won't win unless you come up with an acceptable one"
You're welcome to find a marginally competent, and less criminal replacement for Rump anytime. I'm rooting for you.
"which is why you're so scared"
There you go projecting again.
I'll be fine no matter who gets elected. I just don't like seeing our country turned into a banana republic by a narcissistic, white nationalist demagogue whose top priority is enriching himself, not taking care of our country.
If Rump wins a second term, the long term damage to the country and the Republican party will keep many people from voting Republican again for many years. It will be a painful lesson for our country to learn, but sometimes, horrible mistakes are the only way some people learn.
Even by the hyperactive standards of the Trump era, this week was a bit of a news overload. The White House "declared war" on the House of Representatives by declaring that impeachment is unconstitutional. The President impulsively gave the green light to Turkey to slaughter America's Kurdish allies. And the Southern District of New York arrested two of Rudy Giuliani's Ukrainian business partners and political associates as they tried to leave the country on a one-way ticket. There were at least half a dozen other stories of White House palace intrigue, members of the administration quitting and more and more details emerging that implicate the president, the vice president, the attorney general and the secretary of state in various aspects of the burgeoning Ukraine scandal.
So, perhaps it's not surprising that a significant story with serious political ramifications got overlooked. It wasn't sexy or exciting and it didn't contain a lot of new facts, but it stands out because it reflects a rare bipartisan congressional effort at executive oversight. I'm speaking of the second report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 Election.
Unfortunately for all the conspiracy theorists, like every single investigation that came before, this one found that Russia's infamous troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, "sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton's chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin." This must have come as no surprise to Robert Mueller's prosecutors, who found exactly the same thing and even indicted 12 Russian operatives for these crimes.
After two years of investigation, hundreds of interviews and a massive search of documents, this is the second piece of what is expected to be a five-part report about the full implications of the Russian effort in 2016. The first report found that the Russian government had launched a sophisticated disinformation campaign and a plan to attack the elections systems in various states. It too concluded that these efforts were designed to hurt Clinton's campaign and help Trump's. This report was about the Russian project to sow chaos and discord through social media.
There were no dissenters from the report's conclusions, even among the Trump supporters on the committee like Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has vociferously defended the president against those who say he abused his power in his call for the president of Ukraine to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden. Another Republican on the panel, Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, has said that Trump was joking when he called for China to do the same — but he signed the report as well.
The committee offered a number of recommendations that will obviously be ignored by Republicans, who seem to believe that foreign interference will accrue to their benefit, which is probably true. First of all, the report says the Trump administration should "reinforce with the public the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election," which literally made me laugh out loud. The most serious purveyor of disinformation, propaganda and the sowing of division is the president himself. The Russians surely take their lead from him.
As Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., put it, “It’s time for Trump to stop using Twitter to play into our adversaries’ hands. With every deranged tweet, he advances foreign interests by dividing Americans.” That would be a feature, not a bug, for this administration.
The Senate report also calls for campaigns to be on the alert for propaganda and be cautious about what they share on social media. It recommends that the administration create an interagency task force to deter and monitor any online interference from foreign actors. Unsurprisingly, they did not endorse Russian President Vladimir Putin's repeated offer to form a joint U.S.-Russia cybersecurity partnership, a prospect that seemed to make Trump very excited.
This report couldn't come at a worse time for Trump and his top consigliere, Attorney General William Barr, who has been traveling the globe seeking to prove that the "Deep State" spied on the Trump campaign without a "proper predicate." This stems from several right-wing theories claiming that the CIA and allied agencies engaged in a series of elaborate traps to frame Trump and the Russian government for the 2016 election interference.
There are a number of fringe right-wing figures who have made a tidy profit from spreading this theory, in various permutations, for the last couple of years. But the main popularizer is Trump's crazy sidekick, Rudy Giuliani, mostly in order to cast doubt on the Mueller investigation. This crackpot notion has been rattling around for a while, but once the Mueller report was released Giuliani went into overdrive, adding the embellishment that Ukraine was part of the conspiracy, likely because he was already working with the two goofballs arrested this week for campaign finance violations. In his usual restrained fashion, Trump now calls this "one of the biggest political scandals in history."
Judging from his congressional testimony and subsequent designation of another special prosecutor to investigate this "Spygate" conspiracy, Bill Barr is apparently a believer. He is now personally leading the investigation, with some assistance from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. (Barr reportedly met privately with Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch in New York on Thursday, with no explanation why. Perhaps it's a coincidence that Trump railed against Fox News polling that morning.)
Unfortunately for Barr — and for his overlord — just as the Mueller report laid out a trail of evidence that could not quite be ignored, this Senate Intelligence Committee Report does the same and reaches exactly the same conclusion. The 2016 campaign sabotage was a Russian government operation, and Donald Trump was the beneficiary. Rudy Giuliani's three-ring conspiracy circus couldn't convince a bipartisan Senate committee otherwise, and for good reason. It's nonsense.
Many of the allegations and fuzzy “facts” that President Donald Trump and his allies have cited to defend pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden gained traction in the press thanks to one journalist: John Solomon, whose stories and columns in The Hill have made him a Fox News regular (and now a contributor).
Solomon, who announced plans to leave The Hill last month, is now under fire ― as he has been in the past ― for deviations from normal journalistic practice. In search of a convenient narrative, Solomon has embraced questionable sources and even shared a pre-publication copy of one story with a Ukrainian American businessman who federal authorities now say was illegally trying to influence American politics.
Solomon’s articles are emblematic of the way the right-wing news pipeline to Trump functions: Shaky allegations get picked up by eager partisan journalists, who are then featured on Fox News where they grab the attention of the president.
Last week, Solomon defended his decision to send a draft of a March 26 story on a Ukrainian anti-corruption organization to three Trump-associated operatives hours before its publication. The draft of his story ― titled “US Embassy pressed Ukraine to drop probe of George Soros group during 2016 election” ― was shown to Lev Parnas, an Ukrainian American associate of Rudy Giuliani’s who was arrested Thursday on charges of campaign finance violation, as well as frequent Fox News guests Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing. Solomon suggested this was part of his fact-checking process even though the story did not appear to concern those three beyond their interest in potentially damaging information about Trump’s opponents.
“I typically spend a long period of time before any column or news story fact-checking information with numerous people,” Solomon tweeted.
But Solomon’s dedication to “fact-checking information with numerous people” didn’t appear to extend to a main subject of his story, the Anti-Corruption Action Centre, which he suggested was “collaborating with FBI agents” who were investigating Trump’s then-campaign chair Paul Manafort. Solomon also suggested that AntAC, a Ukrainian organization, avoided an investigation because of the support of the Obama administration and billionaire George Soros, a common bogeyman for conservatives and target for conspiracy theorists. (AntAC receives funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundations, as well as from the U.S. government and a range of other donors.)
Solomon never reached out to AntAC for comment about allegations made to him by former Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuri Lutsenko, according to AntAC’s executive director, Daria Kaleniuk. (Solomon’s story states that he repeatedly reached out to AntAC and Open Society Foundations, although he does not specify when.) And unlike the Republican operatives, Kaleniuk said AntAC received no draft of the article before The Hill published it.
“I wonder why the same approach was not given to me, as he was naming my organization and he was actually sliming it,” Kaleniuk told HuffPost...
Solomon’s reporting has been a cause of concern for newsroom staff at The Hill, who have criticized his work for bias and shared their unease at his close ties to Trump associates. Over a dozen staff members sent a memo to The Hill’s management complaining about Solomon’s stories and accusing him of leaving out important context that didn’t fit his theories, The Washington Post reported last year.
HuffPost last year debunked a misleading piece by Solomon that suggested FBI agents who’d exchanged anti-Trump text messages had leaked anti-Trump material to the media. They had not.
Solomon was shifted to the role of “opinion contributor” following the staffers’ memo, according to The Daily Beast, while Solomon claimed he had requested the change...
A man who claimed earlier this week that he had been paid for sex by presidential candidate Kamala Harris now says he was hired for an acting role.
Oh, and he claims now that he thought Harris was a fictional person, according to an exclusive interview with the Daily Beast.
On Wednesday, 26-year-old personal trainer Sean Newaldass participated in a news conference organized by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, two far-right conspiracy theorists who are already known for pushing fraudulent claims.
Newaldass read from a fact sheet about his alleged relationship with the California senator, and claimed he and Harris had a total of 11 “sexual encounters” in hotels in Iowa; Washington, D.C.; and New York City, according to the Daily Dot.
On Friday, Newaldass told a much different story than the one he told on Wednesday.
He said Wohl and Burkman hired him after he answered a CraigsList ad seeking a “male actor” for “performance art in DC.”
Newaldass said he believed the news conference was actually an audition for a Spike TV show that no longer exists.
In fact, he had no clue Harris was a politician, much less a potential presidential candidate.
“I thought I was acting for a role in a movie, like a role in a TV series,” Newaldass told the Daily Beast. “I thought everything was staged, I’m thinking everyone is an actor.”
Even more important: “I’m completely oblivious to who [Harris] is,” Newaldass told the Daily Beast.
Later in the interview, Newaldass admitted he’s researched Harris since the news conference and now says he plans to vote for her.
However, Newaldass said he regrets his part in the attempted smear because, like Harris, he is of mixed Indian and Caribbean ancestry.
“That’s what’s hurtful, because I’m hurting my own ethnicity,” Newaldass said.
Newaldass said he was supposed to receive $500 for his services but hasn’t yet.
The smear against Harris was the latest to backfire for Wohl and Burkman.
Earlier this month, the two dirty tricksters attempted to smear Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as a “cougar” by holding a news conference with a former Marine in his mid-20s who claimed he had a paid sexual affair with Warren, 70, that included bondage.
Warren got the last laugh with a witty response that embraced her “cougar” past, telling the world it made her who she is.
Elizabeth Warren
✔
@ewarren
It's always a good day to be reminded that I got where I am because a great education was available for $50 a semester at the University of Houston (go Cougars!). We need to cancel student debt and make college free for everyone who wants it.
While it’s true that Trump’s approval rating was climbing, and climbed to 45 percent in the Real Clear Politics poll of polls prior to the media and Democrats launching their coordinated impeachment blitzkrieg, as of now it sits at 43.4 percent, not even two points lower.
What’s more, Trump disapproval rating has barely increased, from 52 percent to 53.6 percent.
And as of late, in fact, Trump’s numbers have actually improved slightly: a half point increase in approval and a half point decrease in disapproval.
Overall, what you have here, with such a small amount of movement, is Trump holding remarkably steady during yet-another full-throated media and political assault, the likes of which we have not seen since, you know, the last one.
What’s especially fascinating is that during the Russia Collusion Hoax, Democrats and their media allies were able to drive Trump’s numbers down into the 30s, to as low as 37 percent back in December of 2017.
This time, even with the hysteria of impeachment added to the menu, not so much.
What I think this tells us is the voters are no longer jolted into dropping their support for Trump by a media that has cried wolf nearly once too often four years. In the past, the media could gin up enough hysteria to drive down Trump’s approval numbers, at least until the public figured out it was all fake news.
In fact, in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll, the most accurate poll of the 2016 presidential election, shows Trump’s job approval rating has not only climbed from 45 to 49 percent over the last four days, his approval rating is four points higher than Barack Obama’s was on this same day during his failed presidency.
Obviously, these numbers can change, but we are now in the second week of Ukraine Hoax Hysteria, so as these numbers stand today, they are worthy of note.
One conclusion you might make from them is that time is not on the side of the media and Democrats, is not on this side of this absurd impeachment inquiry.
The plan, obviously, was to blitzkrieg the public into backing impeachment, which would force Republicans to go along with public opinion.
For days and days and days we were hit 24/7 with screaming headlines and secret testimony that resulted in damaging (and selective) leaks… There is just no question the media and Democrats thought they had learned from the mistakes of the Russia coup and the plot to destroy Brett Kavanaugh: 1) Move fast, 2) hide your accuser’s (the whistleblower’s) true identity, and 3) do as much as possible in secrecy.
Trump, though, outsmarted them by releasing the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president, which none of his enemies expected him to do because they were sure it was a smoking gun.
Well, it wasn’t, but watching the media roll out their game plan as though the president had not released the transcript is more than a little amusing. I mean, now that we’ve seen the transcript, stories, like this, that were obviously written two weeks ago under the assumption Trump would never give up the transcript, actually make me laugh out loud.
Trump is also outsmarting the Democrats and the media by refusing to cooperate with what he correctly refers to as a kangaroo court. Good grief, this so-called whistleblower, who we already know is a registered Democrat, who we already know colluded with Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) to create the complaint, who we already know benefited by a sudden Deep State rule change to facilitate his complaint, who we already know is a crony of Joe Biden’s(!!!), wants to testify in secret — which is the stuff of banana republics.
This is not a legitimate inquiry, not even close. Somehow the media and Democrats came up with something that is even more of a partisan witch hunt than the Russia Hoax, and I just don’t see the American people seeing something so toxically partisan and perversely secretive as legitimate.
Furthermore, if Democrats actually had the goods on Trump, if the media actually had the goods on the Orange Bad Man, they wouldn’t have to play all these games in secret and spread all these lies.
If anything, Trump’s remarkably steady approval rating show us the public is in wait-and-see mode. Democrats might be consolidating their own voters to push up the polls backing impeachment, but the public at large appears to be waiting for the evidence…
And since there is none, Trump is smart to obstruct and delay, smart to treat this coup with the contempt it deserves, because the longer the public is forced to stare at this Potemkin Impeachment, the more they will see it is based on bluff, hysteria, media bias, a desire to meddle in the 2020 election, and stark-raving fear of what the upcoming Inspector General reports are going to say about the Obama administration’s appalling, illegal, and unprecedented spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, intends to tell Congress this week that the content of a text message he wrote denying a quid pro quo with Ukraine was relayed to him directly by President Trump in a phone call, according to a person familiar with his testimony.
Sondland plans to tell lawmakers he has no knowledge of whether the president was telling him the truth at that moment. “It’s only true that the president said it, not that it was the truth,” said the person familiar with Sondland’s planned testimony, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.
The Sept. 9 exchange between Sondland and the top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine has become central to the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into whether the president abused his office in pressuring Ukraine to open an investigation into his political rival Joe Biden and his son, who sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. The White House and its defenders have held up Sondland’s text, which included “no quid pro quo’s of any kind,” as proof that none was ever considered.
The person familiar with Sondland’s testimony said the ambassador “believed Trump at the time and on that basis passed along assurances” that Trump was not withholding military aid for political purposes.
But Sondland’s testimony will raise the possibility that Trump wasn’t truthful in his denial of a quid pro quo as well as an alternative scenario in which the president’s interest in the scheme soured at a time when his administration faced mounting scrutiny over why it was withholding about $400 million in security assistance to Ukraine and delaying a leader-level visit with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Whether he’s deciding it’s getting too hot to handle and he backs off whatever his position really was a month earlier, I don’t know,” the person said of Sondland’s understanding.
Hours before Sondland called the president, he received a text message from the acting ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor, raising questions about the aid holdup. “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign,” Taylor texted Sondland.
That’s when Sondland, according to the person’s understanding, called Trump, who then told him he didn’t “want a quid pro quo . . . didn’t want anything from Ukraine.” The call lasted less than five minutes, and Trump appeared to be in a foul mood, according to the person, who spoke to The Post with Sondland’s permission, an intermediary said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Sondland declined to comment through his lawyers.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/general_election/
Friday, October 11
Race / Topic............................Poll........Results................Spread
General Election:...Trump vs. Biden.....FOX News....Biden 50....Trump 40...Biden +10
General Election:...Trump vs. Warren....FOX News....Warren 50...Trump 40...Warren +10
General Election:...Trump vs. Sanders...FOX News....Sanders 49..Trump 40...Sanders +9
Last week the Equality Town Hall held by my network, CNN, plainly revealed the radicalism that drives the Democratic Party today. In stark terms, candidates and audience members advocated for wholesale government-compelled social engineering to comport with their liberal secular-humanist agenda. Such proposals contravene foundational protections of our Constitution and also imperil Democrats’ electoral prospects for 2020.
Robert Francis O’Rourke continued his steady philosophical assault upon the Bill of Rights. Apparently, O’Rourke is no longer content to merely eviscerate the Second Amendment with his plan to confiscate tens of millions of firearms from law-abiding citizens. Like most leftists who disrespect the Second Amendment, he also promotes hollowing out the First Amendment as well. CNN’s Don Lemon asked if religious institutions should “lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.” The candidate answered in the affirmative, stating, “There can be no benefit, no reward, no tax break for anyone, or any institution … that denies the full human rights, and the full civil rights of every single one of us.”
In a sense, O’Rourke did America a favor by stating plainly the true goal of social liberal activists: to bring private groups into full compliance with their postmodernist precepts, by compulsion if necessary. The practical application of such extremism would clearly bankrupt mosques, Catholic schools, and faith-based charitable service organizations across our land. But such destruction is not a side effect but rather the very goal of this fascistic statism.
Consider the perversion of the inverse policy: What if traditional conservatives had tried to revoke the tax-exempt status of pro-gay-marriage mainline Protestant churches before our laws totally changed the millennia-old definition of marriage? Liberals would have rightly condemned such an encroachment, and the courts would have surely protected the rights of progressive churches to privately define marriage according to their beliefs. After all, our government should have no more say in determining a faith’s doctrinal beliefs on marriage than it does regarding baptism or bar/bat mitzvahs.
Apart from the legal radicalism espoused during the CNN forum, candidates also promoted a cultural ostracism and public condescension toward Americans who dare to subscribe to traditional beliefs on core issues of family and faith. When leading candidate Elizabeth Warren was queried about a hypothetical male religious voter who believes in traditional marriage, the Massachusetts senator remarked with clear snark that she would tell such a man to simply marry a woman “if you can find one.” Such patronizing elitism suggests that the Democrats have still learned little about Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral upset. Political correctness surely made Warren popular in the faculty lounge at Harvard, but it hardly appeals to working-class voters, especially in the upper Midwest where 2020 may well be decided.
In fact, a common theme among those Americans – the Obama-to-Trump swing voters who provided the electoral difference in 2016 – was a revulsion regarding the disrespect constantly showered upon them by politically correct coastal elites. Warren’s haughty rejoinder earned roars from the event’s invited leftist activists, but it clearly jeopardizes her odds of winning over the kind of Rust Belt voters who might cheer for high school football games on Friday night and pray in churches on Sunday morning. Moreover, her sarcasm exposes her own sharp disconnect from many millions of Americans – including many women, by the way -- who subscribe to the traditional marriage practices of the three great monotheistic faiths.
As for the audience at the CNN forum, their behavior also showcased an important reality. The “woke” leftist mob cannot be placated with anything short of total submission to their agenda. Even though the format and the candidates provided an hours-long expression of fealty to social engineering, the radicals still found reason to take umbrage. Numerous program interruptions and agitations from audience members encapsulated the true extremism of the social justice warrior movement. For these militants, legal gay marriage is hardly enough. After all, Donald Trump was the first candidate ever elevated to the presidency who supported same-sex marriage, and yet he is still persistently pilloried by these fanatics.
In 2019 America, our country has reached an overwhelming determination that consenting adults can pursue their private intimate lives as they wish. But such liberty is not enough for the intolerant liberal mob. Instead they demand not just the freedom to act as they like, but also the positive affirmation and approval of all citizens, most of all from conservative Christians. Unfortunately, there has been a swift devolution from “let us love whom we wish” to “endorse our drag queen story hour for kindergarteners.”
Sadly, the Democratic Party stretches itself ever more leftward to placate such demands, even when this posture does violence to our most sacred constitutional protections, especially religious liberty. These are not the Democrats my grandparents supported, as the party of FDR and JFK turns harshly against middle Americans. Accordingly, Americans must ascertain the full extent of the Democrats’ radicalism. In this regard, last week’s televised circus of extremism unwittingly enhanced President Trump’s reelection odds for 2020.
Kathy Griffin and Meghan McCain called for action after a doctored video circulated online over the weekend, reportedly shown at a pro-President Donald Trump event last week at his Miami resort, that illustrates the president shooting a number of his critics including Griffin and the late Sen. John McCain.
The fake video, a clip taken from the 2015 action/comedy "Kingsman: The Secret Service," shows Trump's face superimposed atop actor Colin Firth's as his character opens fire on church patrons.
The edited version depicts various victims as media outlets, politically-active entertainers like Griffin and Rosie O'Donnell and Trump's political rivals like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama.
Meghan McCain slammed a response from Stephen Miller on Monday morning after the senior Trump adviser argued the video was covered by "free speech" and falls along the lines of controversial entertainment like the new "Joker" movie or heavy metal music, rather than a call to incite violence.
"No it isn't," McCain wrote. "One of the people in this video is my dad, sitting senators and congresspeople. Please don't insult me or them by insinuating this is anything like heavy metal. This could inspire violence towards REAL people."
"The View" host also retweeted her mother Cindy's messageon Monday, expressing outrage over the video.
"Reports describing a violent video played at a Trump Campaign event in which images of reporters & @JohnMcCain are being slain by Pres Trump violate every norm our society expects from its leaders & the institutions that bare their names," Cindy McCain tweeted. "I stand w/ (the White House Correspondents Association) in registering my outrage."
"Kathy Griffin and Meghan McCain called for action"
Meghan's outrage is justified
but Kathy Griffin?
does she worry about getting hit with lightning?
what a hypocrite!
as for Meghan, yes the video was very offensive, but what "action" are you suggesting?
"Meghan McCain slammed a response from Stephen Miller on Monday morning after the senior Trump adviser argued the video was covered by "free speech""
really?
it is free speech
that being said, perhaps the people who made should be on a watch list
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump, an ongoing eruption of self-refuting statements (“I’m a very stable genius” with “a very good brain”), is adding self-impeachment to his repertoire. Spiraling downward in a tightening gyre, his increasingly unhinged public performances (Google the one with Finland’s dumbfounded president looking on) are as alarming as they are embarrassing. His decision regarding Syria and the Kurds was made so flippantly that it has stirred faint flickers of thinking among Congress’ vegetative Republicans.
Because frivolousness and stupidity are neither high crimes nor misdemeanors, his decision, however contemptible because it betrays America's Kurdish friends, is not an impeachable offense. It should, however, color the impeachment debate because it coincides with his extraordinary and impeachment-pertinent challenge to Congress' constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the executive branch.
Aside from some rhetorical bleats, Republicans are acquiescing as Trump makes foreign policy by and for his viscera. This might, and should, complete what the Iraq War began in 2003 — the destruction of the GOP’s advantage regarding foreign policy.
Democrats were present at the creation of Cold War strategy. From Harry Truman and Dean Acheson through Sen. Henry Jackson and advisers such as Max Kampelman and Jeane Kirkpatrick, they built the diplomatic architecture (e.g., NATO) and helped to maintain the military muscle that won the war. But the party fractured over Vietnam, veering into dyspeptic interpretations of America's history at home and abroad, and a portion of the party pioneered a revised isolationism. Conservative isolationism had said America was too virtuous for involvement in the fallen world. Progressive isolationism said America was too fallen to improve the less-fallen world.
Hence Republicans acquired a durable advantage concerning the core presidential responsibility, national security. Durable, but not indestructible, if Democrats will take the nation's security as seriously as Trump injures it casually.
Trump's gross and comprehensive incompetence now increasingly impinges upon the core presidential responsibility. This should, but will not, cause congressional Republicans to value their own and their institution's dignity, and exercise its powers more vigorously than they profess fealty to Trump.
The president has issued a categorical refusal to supply witnesses and documents pertinent to the House investigation of whether he committed an impeachable offense regarding Ukraine. This refusal, which is analogous to an invocation of the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, justifies an inference of guilt. Worse, this refusal attacks our constitutional regime. So, the refusal is itself an impeachable offense.
As comparable behavior was in 1974. Then, the House articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon indicted him for failing "without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by" a House committee, and for having "interposed the powers of the presidency against the lawful subpoenas" of the House.
If Trump gets away with his blanket noncompliance, the Constitution's impeachment provision, as it concerns presidents, will be effectively repealed, and future presidential corruption will be largely immunized against punishment.
In Federalist 51, James Madison anticipated a wholesome rivalry and constructive tension between the government's two political branches: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected to the constitutional rights of the place." Equilibrium between the branches depends on "supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives." But equilibrium has vanished as members of Congress think entirely as party operatives and not at all as institutionalists.
Trump is not just aggressively but lawlessly exercising the interests of his place, counting on Congress, after decades of lassitude regarding its interests, being an ineffective combatant. Trump's argument, injected into him by subordinates who understand that absurdity is his vocation, is essentially that the Constitution's impeachment provisions are unconstitutional.
The canine loyalty of Senate Republicans will keep Trump in office. But until he complies with House committee subpoenas, the House must not limply hope federal judges will enforce their oversight powers. Instead, the House should wield its fundamental power, that of the purse, to impose excruciating costs on executive branch noncompliance. This can be done.
In 13 months all congressional Republicans who have not defended Congress by exercising “the constitutional rights of the place” should be defeated. If congressional Republicans continue their genuflections at Trump’s altar, the appropriate 2020 outcome will be a Republican thrashing so severe — losing the House, the Senate and the electoral votes of, say, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina and even Texas — that even this party of slow-learning careerists might notice the hazards of tethering their careers to a downward-spiraling scofflaw.
"The president has issued a categorical refusal to supply witnesses and documents pertinent to the House investigation of whether he committed an impeachable offense regarding Ukraine. This refusal, which is analogous to an invocation of the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, justifies an inference of guilt. Worse, this refusal attacks our constitutional regime. So, the refusal is itself an impeachable offense.
As comparable behavior was in 1974. Then, the House articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon indicted him for failing "without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by" a House committee, and for having "interposed the powers of the presidency against the lawful subpoenas" of the House.
If Trump gets away with his blanket noncompliance, the Constitution's impeachment provision, as it concerns presidents, will be effectively repealed, and future presidential corruption will be largely immunized against punishment."
Pelosi is not playing by the rules. Trump has stated that if she holds a vote on setting up a bipartisan impeachment investigation, he will comply with all their requests. Impeachment is not repealed in any sense if Trump "gets away with it". If he is not impeached, it is because the people's representatives in the House determined that the charges are not of a sufficient nature that their constituents would support the action.
They call it democracy.
Pelosi is not the proprietor of the House.
Similarly, Will speaks for few conservatives.
btw, Will is right that abandoning the Kurds was reprehensible. If any reasonable GOP or Democrat presidential candidate alternative arises, I'd vote for them
The former county chair for the Republican Party in Shelby County, Ohio says he’s done with President Donald Trump due to the trade war with China.
“I’m not going to vote for the president, and I’m on record as saying that,” Christopher Gibbs, who’s also a soybean farmer that backed Trump in 2016, told CNBC on Monday.
Gibbs said he doesn’t believe Trump’s claims he made a deal for China to buy up to $50 billion in U.S. agriculture given that the president made similar claims before that have never materialized, including claims of deals with Mexico and the European Union.
Indeed, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin admitted that the deal with China announced by Trump wasn’t actually a deal quite yet.
“There are still some issues that need to be worked out in wording,” Mnuchin said, per The Hill. “But I would say we have every expectation that phase one will close.”
Gibbs said Trump’s previous broken promises make him “dubious” of any new claims of a deal. And in any case, Gibbs ― who has 560 acres of farmland in Shelby County ― said he was done with Trump even if there was a deal:
“It doesn’t matter what he comes up with now. He could come up with this $50 billion, he could walk across my pond and not get wet, and I’m still not going to vote for him because, you know, at the end of the day my name is Chris Gibbs, it’s not Judas, and I’m not going to sell my political moorings for 30 pieces of silver. So no ― I’m out.”
Gibbs made a video for The New York Times last year pleading with Trump to end the trade war.
“I can draw a direct line from when the president started this tariff rhetoric in the price of my soybeans,” Gibbs said at the time, adding that those prices plunged 20 percent.
“I have to tell you, Mr. President,” he said. “This hurts.”
" If any reasonable GOP or Democrat presidential candidate alternative arises, I'd vote for them"
Sorry bud, but the GOP seems to be circling the wagons to go all in for Rump.
Five States Have Already Canceled GOP Primaries. Here’s What You Should Know
Looks like it was yet another favor to Rump's favorite Dicktator.
Abandoned by withdrawing U.S., Kurds turn to Assad and Russia as ISIS detainees escape
Russia says its units are patrolling between Turkish and Syrian forces following pullout of U.S. troops
Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, acknowledged that he exercised “poor judgment” by getting involved in something he called a “swamp.”
“Was it poor judgment to be in the middle of something that is...a swamp in—in—in many ways? Yeah.” said the Swampster.
Hunter Biden, desperately tried to save his father's teetering candidacy on Sunday by announcing he was stepping down from his position as a board director for Chinese investment company BHR Partners.
The President has urged foreign leaders, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Chinese government, to investigate Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, a potential Democratic candidate in the 2020 election.
Biden, as vice president, called for the removal of a prosecutor in Ukraine for the purpose of impeding an investigation into Burisma, a Ukranian gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board of directors.
Although Hunter resigned after it became clear the effect his influence-peddling was having on his father's campaign, questions abound about why Joe Biden tolerated and enabled the activity for so long, as well as the conflict of interest to his work in the Obama administration.
...At the heart of Congress' probe into the president's actions is his claim that former Vice President and 2020 Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden strong-armed the Ukrainian government to fire its top prosecutor in order to thwart an investigation into a company tied to his son, Hunter Biden.
But sources ranging from former Obama administration officials to an anti-corruption advocate in Ukraine say the official, Viktor Shokin, was ousted for the opposite reason Trump and his allies claim.
It wasn't because Shokin was investigating a natural gas company tied to Biden's son; it was because Shokin wasn't pursuing corruption among the country's politicians, according to a Ukrainian official and four former American officials who specialized in Ukraine and Europe.
Shokin's inaction prompted international calls for his ouster and ultimately resulted in his removal by Ukraine's parliament...
Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claim Biden did this to quash Shokin's investigation into Ukraine's largest gas company, Burisma Holdings, and its owner, oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.
They say this benefited Biden's son, Hunter Biden, who served on Burisma's board of directors – for which he was paid $50,000 a month.
Their assertion is contradicted by former diplomatic officials who were following the issue at the time.
Burisma Holdings was not under scrutiny at the time Joe Biden called for Shokin's ouster, according to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency set up in 2014 that has worked closely with the FBI.
Shokin's office had investigated Burisma, but the probe focused on a period before Hunter Biden joined the company, according to the anti-corruption bureau.
The investigation dealt with the Ministry of Ecology, which allegedly granted special permits to Burisma between 2010 and 2012, the agency said. Hunter Biden did not join the company until 2014...
There is no evidence Hunter Biden did anything wrong, said Yuri Lutsenko, the prosecutor general who succeeded Shokin.
However, Lutsenko, who's also faced criticism for his actions as prosecutor, supported Trump's claim before changing his story. He resigned as prosecutor in August....
But by all means troll, keep spreading your FAKE NEWS/CONSPIRACY THEORIES LIKE "Biden, as vice president, called for the removal of a prosecutor in Ukraine for the purpose of impeding an investigation into Burisma, a Ukranian gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board of directors."
...At the heart of the Democratic Congressional leadership's not-voted-on consideration of impeachment is thei claim that the President pressured Ukraine into investigating former Democratic VP Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden.
But sources ranging from Trump administration officials to the president of Ukraine say that never happened
But by all means troll, keep spreading your fake news LIKE "Ukraine was blackmailed by Trump into meddling in our election"
""It wasn't because Shokin was investigating a natural gas company tied to Biden's son; it was because Shokin wasn't pursuing corruption among the country's politicians, according to a Ukrainian official and four former American officials who specialized in Ukraine and Europe."
how would they know Biden's motive?
"Trump and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani claim Biden did this to quash Shokin's investigation into Ukraine's largest gas company, Burisma Holdings, and its owner, oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky.
They say this benefited Biden's son, Hunter Biden, who served on Burisma's board of directors – for which he was paid $50,000 a month.
Their assertion is contradicted by former diplomatic officials who were following the issue at the time.
Burisma Holdings was not under scrutiny at the time Joe Biden called for Shokin's ouster, according to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, an independent agency set up in 2014 that has worked closely with the FBI.
Shokin's office had investigated Burisma, but the probe focused on a period before Hunter Biden joined the company, according to the anti-corruption bureau."
that doesn't mean Hunter wasn't helping Burisma
"There is no evidence Hunter Biden did anything wrong,"
actually, there is
he took a job with a foreign entity that he was blatantly unqualified for while his father was American point man for that entity
the conflict of interest couldn't have been worse
that was something wrong
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., an ardent supporter of President Trump, got the boot on Monday when he tried to sit in on the testimony of a former top National Security Council expert on Russia who was appearing on Capitol Hill as part of the House impeachment inquiry into the president.
Gaetz, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, attempted to attend the testimony of Fiona Hill, a former deputy assistant to the president, but was told that because he was not a member of the House Intelligence Committee that he had to leave. The House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees are conducting the impeachment inquiry into Trump.
A frustrated Gaetz aired his disappointment to reporters after being told he was not allowed to sit in on the hearing, venting his anger over what he says are “selective leaks” by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and questioning why he was not allowed to be present during Hill’s testimony. Gaetz added that the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., was involved in the impeachment inquiry.
“It’s not like I’m on agriculture,” Gaetz said. “What are the Democrats so afraid of?”
Gaetz followed up his comments with a tweet calling the impeachment inquiry a kangaroo court and using one of Trump’s favorite nicknames for the intelligence committee chairman, “Shifty Schiff.”
"Judiciary Chairman [Jerry Nadler] claimed to have begun the impeachment inquiry weeks ago,” Gaetz tweeted. “Now, his own Judiciary members aren’t even allowed to participate in it. And yes - my constituents want me actively involved in stopping the #KangarooCourtCoup run by Shifty Schiff."
Other Republicans closely aligned with Trump continued on Monday to complain about Schiff and his handling of the impeachment inquiry – with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, also lambasting the California Democrat for excluding some congressional Republicans from the testimonies and for leaking “cherry-picked” information from the closed-door hearings to the press.
"he took a job with a foreign entity that he was blatantly unqualified for while his father was American point man for that entity"
Even if Biden was "blatantly unqualified" for the job - which you have provided no evidence for, being blatantly unqualified for a job isn't a crime, nor has it stopped people from getting the jobs.
Just look who's president.
Bush 2 got to be president even though he was unqualified, because his daddy was, and the Supreme Court interfered. It was what he did after he got into office that was criminal.
WASHINGTON – Former national security adviser John Bolton wanted no part of what he derided as the White House's "drug deal" to pressure Ukraine into investigating Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, a former White House official told congressional investigators on Monday, according to reports of her testimony from The New York Times and NBC News.
Fiona Hill, who served as the National Security Council's senior director for Europe and Russia, spent more than 10 hours fielding questions from three House panels behind closed doors.
Her testimony was part of an impeachment inquiry into allegations President Donald Trump used military aid as leverage to get the Ukrainians to dig into an energy company that included the former vice president's son, Hunter Biden, on its board. Ukrainian officials have said they uncovered no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Bidens.
Hill testified that Bolton told her to inform National Security Council lawyer John Eisenberg of the push for a fresh investigation by acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, the reports said.
Mulvaney, Giuliani and Sondland also wanted Ukrainian officials to explore the possibility of a Ukrainian role in 2016 election interference.
Hill said Bolton advised her to contact Eisenberg after a July 10 meeting with senior Ukrainian officials in which Sondland brought up the issue of investigations, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Bolton told her he wasn't part of "whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up," unnamed sources who witnessed Hill's testimony told the Times. He also reportedly referred to Giuliani as "a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up."
"I always liked and respected John," Giuliani said of Bolton in response to Hill's testimony, according to NBC News. "I’m very disappointed that his bitterness drives him to attack a friend falsely and in a very personal way. It’s really ironic that John Bolton is calling anyone else a hand grenade. When John is described by many as an atomic bomb." [AKA I know you are but what am I?]
Hill told lawmakers that Giuliani's role circumvented the normal national security processes and procedures for forming foreign policy.
The Times reported that she confronted Sondland about what she considered the rogue foreign policy he was instituting in Ukraine, which is not part of the EU and therefore not normally under the ambassador to the EU's purview.
Sondland told her that he was in charge of Ukraine. When she asked who had given him that authority, he replied that the president had, according to the Times.
Sondland is expected to testify on Thursday.
Former White House expert on Russia and Ukraine Fiona Hill testified before the House impeachment inquiry on Monday, and what she had to say appears to have further illuminated the extent of the scheme by Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani to extort Ukraine for personal gain. Hill’s testimony also sets up one of the most unlikely imaginable opponents for Trump—former national security adviser John Bolton.
Hill testified behind closed doors, and a day later the most amazing thing may be just how little is known of what she actually said. As with last week’s testimony from former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, those closed doors have been remarkably soundproof. But what little we do know is already explosive. HIll testified that meetings with Giuliani and his associates, along with their efforts to force Ukrainian officials to open investigations, were so disturbing that Bolton instructed Hill to talk with White House attorney John Eisenberg.
And NBC News reports that Bolton didn’t just instruct Hill to go to White House attorneys over Giuliani. The attempts to use military aid to force Ukrainian officials into producing political dirt that Trump could use against Joe Biden were clear enough that Bolton also told Hill to alert White House legal staff over concerns about U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, along with acting chief of staff and Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney. Mulvaney’s role with the OMB means that he would have been fully involved in Trump’s halting of assistance to Ukraine.
Impossible as it may seem, the corruption in the Trump White House was so great that John Bolton would apparently not go along with it. And Bolton’s disagreement may be key in convincing other White House staffers to come forward.
The most important point of all may be that Hill, like Yovanovitch, testified in spite of White House attempts to stifle her appearance before Congress. The days in which a command from Donald Trump could seal the lips of any former member of the executive branch and make a congressional subpoena optional appear to be past. In fact, the inquiry’s schedule appears to be filling with former members of the State Department and White House staff suddenly eager to make an appearance, as the line between willing witnesses and subjects of the investigation begins to be drawn.
Sondland is also set to appear this week, but one of the things that Hill reportedly said on Monday is at odds with the reported contents of Sondland’s opening statement. Those reports have indicated that Sondland will testify that when he was busily texting about finding officials who could be arm-twisted into opening an investigation, he didn’t realize that the investigation had anything to do with Biden or his son. That not-yet-delivered testimony appears to be at odds with what Hill told legislators and what Bolton was saying even before Trump put in his now infamous phone call to the Ukrainian president.
Witness, or accomplice … Sondland still has some time to try to leave one group and move to the other.
Liz Cheney✔
@Liz_Cheney
News from Syria is sickening. Turkish troops preparing to invade Syria from the north, Russian-backed forces from the south, ISIS fighters attacking Raqqa. Impossible to understand why @realDonaldTrump is leaving America’s allies to be slaughtered and enabling the return of ISIS
9:26 AM - Oct 9, 2019
The president has declared a national emergency over the crisis he helped create in Syria. In a letter to Congress on Monday, Donald Trump announced the issue of an executive order declaring a national emergency "due to the situation in and in relation to Syria, and in particular the recent actions by the Government of Turkey to conduct a military offensive into northeast Syria."
The same Turkish actions that got Trump's go-ahead last week are now described by him as "an unusual and extraordinary threat" to national security.
Last week, Trump seemed unconcerned about how Turkish actions would affect Kurdish people living there (they didn't help us during World War II, Trump told reporters).
This week, he says the Turkish invasion of Syria will "undermine the campaign to defeat" ISIS, put civilians in danger, and threaten the whole region's peace and stability.
But Kurds whose homes are being destroyed and whose families are being displaced and slaughtered can rest assured that Trump will tax Turkish steel! The president promised to raise the tariff back up to 50 percent, which is where it was before getting reduced in May.
Trump also said the government had stopped negotiations on a trade deal with Turkey, and that it would impose sanctions "against current and former officials" in the Turkish government.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said more sanctions were possible if Turkey is not willing "to embrace a ceasefire" and "come to the negotiating table" to "end the violence." Trump himself put it less delicately, saying:
I am fully prepared to swiftly destroy Turkey's economy if Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path.
Meanwhile, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken to The Wall Street Journal to argue that Turkey has "stepped up" where European countries failed. "The international community missed its opportunity to prevent the Syrian crisis from pulling an entire region into a maelstrom of instability," Erdogan writes. "The European Union—and the world—should support what Turkey is trying to do."
God Is Now Trump’s Co-Conspirator
Bigotry, both racial and religious, is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Listening to the speech William Barr, the attorney general, gave last week at the University of Notre Dame Law School, I found myself thinking of the title of an old movie: “God Is My Co-Pilot.” What I realized is that Donald Trump’s minions have now gone that title one better: If Barr’s speech is any indication, their strategy is to make God their boss’s co-conspirator.
Given where we are right now, you might have expected Barr to respond in some way to the events of the past few weeks — the revelation that the president has been calling on foreign regimes to produce dirt on his domestic opponents, the airport arrest of associates of the president’s lawyer as they tried to leave the country on one-way tickets, credible reports that Rudy Giuliani himself is under criminal investigation.
Alternatively, Barr could have delivered himself of some innocuous pablum, which is something government officials often do in difficult times.
But no. Barr gave a fiery speech denouncing the threat to America posed by “militant secularists,” whom he accused of conspiring to destroy the “traditional moral order,” blaming them for rising mental illness, drug dependency and violence.
Consider for a moment how inappropriate it is for Barr, of all people, to have given such a speech. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion; the nation’s chief law enforcement officer has no business denouncing those who exercise that freedom by choosing not to endorse any religion.
And we’re not talking about a tiny group, either. These days, around a fifth of Americans say that they don’t consider themselves affiliated with any religion, roughly the same number who consider themselves Catholic. How would we react if the attorney general denounced Catholicism as a force undermining American society?
And he didn’t just declare that secularism is bad; he declared that the damage it does is intentional: “This is not decay. It is organized destruction.” If that kind of talk doesn’t scare you, it should; it’s the language of witch hunts and pogroms.
It seems almost beside the point to note that Barr’s claim that secularism is responsible for violence happens to be empirically verifiable nonsense. America has certainly become less religious over the past quarter century, with a large rise in the number of religiously unaffiliated and growing social liberalism on issues like same-sex marriage; it has also seen a dramatic decline in violent crime. European nations are far less religious than we are; they also have much lower homicide rates, and rarely experience the mass shootings that have become almost routine here.
Nonetheless, William Barr — again, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, responsible for defending the Constitution — is sounding remarkably like America’s most unhinged religious zealots, the kind of people who insist that we keep experiencing mass murder because schools teach the theory of evolution. Guns don’t kill people — Darwin kills people!
So what’s going on here? Pardon my cynicism, but I seriously doubt that Barr, whose boss must be the least godly man ever to occupy the White House, has suddenly realized to his horror that America is becoming more secular. No, this outburst of God-talk is surely a response to the way the walls are closing in on Trump, the high likelihood that he will be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Trump’s response to his predicament has been to ramp up the ugliness in an effort to rally his base. The racism has gotten even more explicit, the paranoia about the deep state more extreme. But who makes up Trump’s base? The usual answer is working-class whites, but a deeper dive into the data suggests that it’s more specific: It’s really evangelical working-class whites who are staying with Trump despite growing evidence of his malfeasance and unsuitability for high office.
And at a more elite level, while a vast majority of Republican politicians have meekly fallen in line behind Trump, his truly enthusiastic support comes from religious leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., who have their own ethical issues, but have called on their followers to “render to God and Trump.”
Patriotism, Samuel Johnson famously declared, is the last refuge of scoundrels. But for all his talk of America first, that’s not a refuge that works very well for Trump, with his subservience to foreign autocrats and, most recently, his shameful betrayal of the Kurds.
So Trump is instead taking shelter behind bigotry — racial, of course, but now religious as well.
Will it work? There is a substantial minority of Americans with whom warnings about sinister secularists resonate. But they are a minority. Over all, we’re clearly becoming a more tolerant nation, one in which people have increasingly positive views of others’ religious beliefs, including atheism.
So the efforts of Trump’s henchmen to use the specter of secularism to distract people from their boss’s sins probably won’t work. But I could be wrong. And if I am wrong, if religious bigotry turns out to be a winning strategy, all I can say is, God help us.
Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
"Even if Biden was "blatantly unqualified" for the job - which you have provided no evidence for, being blatantly unqualified for a job isn't a crime, nor has it stopped people from getting the jobs."
no one seriously believes he got the job because of expertise, or other qualifications
that's not necessarily a crime
but it is if the reason you got the job was because you had personal access to the VP
in that case, you would be required to file as a foreign lobbyist
also, regardless of legalities, the American people have a right to expect families of their leaders to show more character
"Bush 2 got to be president even though he was unqualified, because his daddy was, and the Supreme Court interfered."
no one voted for him to get influence with his father
btw, despite Dem attempts to malign our constitutional processes whenever they lose, the election was, for all practical purposes, a tie
the Supreme Court simply made a ruling it was obligated to make
"It was what he did after he got into office that was criminal."
you mean that war that most Democrats favored?
was never a big fan of Bush but at least he didn't ask the Russians to help him win re-election, like Obama did
"Joe Biden's family is not above the law"
Neither is Rump's.
"at least he didn't ask the Russians to help him win re-election, like Obama did"
Look who is still trying the "I know you are but what am I?" excuse.
How's that working out for you so far?
Today it's going like this:
Newsweek: Trump's Approval Rating Drops in NC, Ukraine Affair Erodes GOP Support - Poll
Gallup: Congress Approval, Support for Impeaching Trump Both Up
Wikipedia reports: "Kansas, Nevada and South Carolina's state committees officially voted on September 7, 2019, to cancel their caucus and primary.[4] The Arizona state Republican Party indicated two days later that it will not hold a primary.[5] These four were joined by the Alaska state Republican party on September 21, when its central committee announced they would not hold a presidential primary.[106]"
In some of the reddest states, the GOP is even trying the nobody else can run against him.
The GOP used to be a political party.
Now it's just Rump's protection racket.
Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn were invited to a surprise meeting with the U.S. president at his office on Wednesday where they were further shocked to learn that Anne Sacoolas, the American woman involved in the fatal crash, was in the building.
Mark Stephens, the lawyer for Charles and Dunn, said national security adviser Robert O’Brien had the idea of overseeing a coming together of the families before they would then hug in front of an assembled media.
“(O’Brien has) heaped grief and pain on the family by making them go through this but not allowing them to get the closure they need by talking to Mrs Sacoolas before they can go onto the grieving stage,” Stephens told BBC radio on Thursday.
Harry Dunn, 19, died after a car driven by Sacoolas collided with his motorbike near RAF Croughton, an air force base in Northamptonshire in central England used by the U.S. military.
His parents want Sacoolas, who left Britain under a disputed claim of diplomatic immunity, to return to England to speak to the police. Through her lawyers, Sacoolas has said she is “devastated” and is willing to meet Dunn’s family.
Dunn’s parents said Trump had been responsive at their meeting but the planned encounter with Sacoolas had come as a bombshell.
“He said he was sorry about Harry and then he sprung the surprise that Mrs Sacoolas was in another room in the building and whether we want to meet her there and then,” Tim Dunn said.
“We said no because as we’ve been saying from the start we want to meet Mrs Sacoolas but we want to do it in the UK so the police can interview her. We didn’t want to be sort of railroaded, not into a circus as such, but a meeting we weren’t prepared for.”
While Trump and O’Brien had ruled out Sacoolas returning to Britain, Charles said Trump had taken her hand and promised to try to look at the issue from another angle. Stephens said that offer had left open the opportunity for a political solution.
“We have said for a long time the family needs to meet, they need to meet in private, away from the media and not curated by politicians, spies or indeed lawyers,” he said.
“Most sensible folk and not a nincompoop in a hurry would understand that.”
AZ Teacher Fired After Repeated Acts of Bigotry Against LGBTQ, Atheist Students
Dear Annella,
Just recently I had one of those tiny, little experiences that nobody but me would pay attention to. It shows what sort of person I am, the sort of thing I'm sensitive to. But it also shows the experience I've had in the world I was given to live in.
I was walking down a hospital corridor, trying to get from Point A to Point B, something that wasn't always easy in that maze of a building. It was a busy time of day. There were lots of people walking down that corridor at the same time. And I noticed that every last one of them was doing it free of any sort of bother or harassment. They were just walking down a hospital corridor. Then it occurred to me that I was doing the same thing. I was walking down that corridor free of any sort of bother or harassment. And it occurred to me to think, "I'm just like everybody else."
Does this sound strange to you? Probably, because you haven't had to live your life the way I've had to live mine. For many, many years, walking down a corridor free from bother and harassment wouldn't have been possible for me. Something that simple, that tiny, wouldn't have been a possibility in my life. It shows how narrow society made the confines of my life.
It was people like you who were doing this. You've decided that you don't like transgender people. And so you've gone after us. You may think it's merely a question of refusing to use certain pronouns. You may think it's merely a question of stating certain beliefs. In fact, your attack on transgender people extends down to the tiniest details of our existence--like walking down a corridor or going into a café for breakfast or doing your shopping or going to work or a myriad other details that make up a human life--tiny little acts that we've often been prevented from performing.
You stifle people, you stifle their lives. And of course you never really think about what you're doing. It never occurs to you to truly take a look at what you're doing to people and their lives. Because you can only see your beliefs. You can only see yourself. It doesn't occur to you to try to see other people, especially those you instinctively don't like.
Here you go:
Krom told the principal she does not condone the LGBTQ lifestyle and won’t assist in creating artwork that glorifies it . . .
You abstract people. You don't see them as real people just like yourself. You imagine an "LGBTQ lifestyle", rather than real (LBGTQ) people living real lives. And you imagine that our "lifestyle" must be something really sinister and worthy of suppression. And what exactly is my "lifestyle"? Well, walking down a corridor, going into a café for breakfast, doing my shopping, doing my work, etc. I.e., doing the same d*** things everybody else does.
Of course, you're an equal opportunity hater. You don't aim your wrath just at transgender people. You'll go after anybody who isn't like you. I always marvel at the arrogance of people like you: you've decided that you have the right to define people as "undesirable" in one way or another, and you've decided that that gives you the right to smother their lives, right down to the tiniest little detail. That is, you've decided that you have the right to make everybody else pay for your sickness, for your deep, underlying personality disorder.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Joe Biden's family is not above the law"
There isn't the slightest shred of evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens - that's why Trump is being impeached, for demanding a meritless investigation into them solely to warp the public's mind and give him a better shot at getting re-elected.
Unlike with the Bidens, its been one criminal act after another by Trump and his cronies like Attorney General Bill Barr and Mitch McConnell. This was documented back in the Mueller report which listed over 140 pages of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and which gave 12 counts of criminal obstruction of justice by Trump to prevent his criminal Russia collusion from coming to light. Mueller gave Congress a 12 count indictment of Trump and said because of an obscure memo it is up to Congress alone to hold the Trump administration accountable for his crimes.
And the crimes by Trump and his cronies just keeps stacking up as Republicans and evangelicals led by Tony Perkins try to elevate Trump above the law.
Trump withheld congressional approved aid to Ukraine in order to extort the Ukranian president into creating a fake investigation into the man Trump sees as his strongest political opponent.
Trump is trying to turn the United States into a dictatorship with the help of American evangelical christians who long for an anti-lgbt de facto theocracy similar to Russia.
The Hill
Verified account
@thehill
Reporter: "20 years ago, you said not complying with a subpoena was an impeachable offense."
Sen. Lindsey Graham: "Nothing's changed."
12:26 PM - 15 Oct 2019
Well that's good to hear Ol' Linds say.
But the way he slinks away behind the closest door is pathetic.
We sure wouldn't want Lindsey supporting Rump's efforts to stonewall the impeachment inquiry, would we?
Let's hope Lindsey sticks to his convictions and votes GUILTY for the coming article of impeachment about Rump's multiple attempts to obstruct Congress.
WASHINGTON – The House Wednesday overwhelmingly backed aresolution condemning President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, a rare bipartisan rebuke at a time when the president is trying to shore up GOP support to stave off impeachment.
Trump's decision to remove the troops near the Turkish border has allowed Turkey to lodge an attack on U.S. Kurdish allies who helped in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group, also known as ISIS.
The House vote was 354-60 with every Democrat and more than two-thirds of the Republicans supporting the measure.
Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a co-sponsor of the resolution, said the pullout has stained America's reputation as a dependable partner.
"We told them: 'Trust us. We have your back'," McCaul said on the House floor minutes before the vote. "And what is happening now? The Kurds are being slaughtered as I speak in northern Syria."
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., called Trump's action "shameful" and potentially harmful to the United States.
"It just opened the door for ISIS to reclaim some power," Hoyer said. "Any terrorist attack they now take will be as a direct result of this action."
The president tweeted last week that ISIS has been completely defeated and "it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home." In addition, Trump has downplayed the alliance with the Kurds, saying they did not fight alongside the United States in World War II.
Trump returned to that theme in a long exchange with reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday, saying that the Kurds are “not angels” and describing his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the region as “strategically brilliant.” The president dismissed reports that Russia had already moved into territory abandoned by the U.S. military.
“It’s not our problem,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, hours before Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were set to travel to Turkey to try to negotiate a ceasefire and avoid a humanitarian crisis.
Trump's Syria policy has created a rare rift with many of his allies in Congress who have denounced the move both as the betrayal of a key ally and a naive strategy that will allow ISIS to reform and wreak havoc.
Rep. John Shimkus, a conservative Illinois Republican and former Army veteran said the president's troop withdrawal undermines the nation's values.
"Walking away from friends is the sad indication of a policy that we don't want to support," he said on the floor. "Yes, we want America to be great. But we're also great because of our friends and our allies."
TTFers are forever citing the opinions of 98% of scientists on global warming and homosexuality
so, I suppose, with their extreme objectivity and dedication to science, they will be pro-lifers after reading this:
"Shortly after being awarded my Ph.D. by the University of Chicago’s department of Comparative Human Development this year, I found myself in a minor media whirlwind. I was interviewed by The Daily Wire, The College Fix, and Breitbart. I appeared on national television and on a widely syndicated radio program. All of this interest had been prompted by a working paper associated with my dissertation, which was entitled Balancing Abortion Rights and Fetal Rights: A Mixed Methods Mediation of the U.S. Abortion Debate.
I reported that both a majority of pro-choice Americans (53%) and a majority of pro-life Americans (54%) would support a comprehensive policy compromise that provides entitlements to pregnant women, improves the adoption process for parents, permits abortion in extreme circumstances, and restricts elective abortion after the first trimester. However, members of the media were mostly interested in my finding that 96% of the 5,577 biologists who responded to me affirmed the view that a human life begins at fertilization."
"TTFers are forever citing the opinions of 98% of scientists on global warming and homosexuality"
"However, members of the media were mostly interested in my finding that 96% of the 5,577 biologists who responded to me affirmed the view that a human life begins at fertilization."
I see... so since conservative trolls are consistently stating the global warming is fake news or part of a vast conspiracy of scientists and liberals. to destroy our economy, and the in the case of gays, scientist have succumbed to media and political pressure instigated by gays, it is only logical to assume that the 96% agreement among scientists about fertilization is also part of a vast liberal conspiracy to contort science to its own means, and must be thwarted on all fronts by an equally vast conservative propaganda war against the findings of scientists.
At least, that would be consistent with your stance against scientists to date.
Steve Jacobs' paper published by Quillette I Asked Thousands of Biologists When Life Begins. The Answer Wasn’t Popular is a riot.
Anon brought it to us, so Anon can go count how many time this bozo says "I."
This is not a scientific paper by any means.
Oh, and BTW, Wiki reports:
"Quillette (/kwɪˈlɛt/) is an online magazine founded by Australian writer Claire Lehmann ("She graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology and English from the University of Adelaide with first class honours in 2010 and was a graduate student in psychology, but dropped out after having a child." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Lehmann). The publication has a primary focus on science, technology, news, culture, and politics. It is associated with the "intellectual dark web"...
...In May 2019, Quillette published an editorial by someone purporting to be a researcher who had conducted a study which purportedly showed extensive ties between journalists who cover far-right activism and anti-fascists. The author was an established right-wing troll who would later be banned by Twitter for managing multiple accounts. When Quillette was asked about how it determined whether the troll's claims were legitimate and whether the editorial was fact-checked or editorially reviewed, Quillette founding editor Claire Lehmann declined to comment.[36] Subsequent to the publication of the Quillette article, the journalists who were mentioned in the article were harassed.[37][38]...
...In August 2019, the magazine published a hoax piece titled "DSA Is Doomed", and then quickly retracted it after being alerted to evidence indicating it was a hoax.[14][15][16] Democratic socialist magazine Jacobin reported that "Quillette was not only negligent in their fact-checking of [the hoaxer's] fabrication, they actually embellished his story with their own ideological fables."[17] Quillette's editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann has denied the accusations of embellishment.[18] She took full responsibility for the hoax having been published, and promised to "strengthen" the magazine's processes.[19]...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quillette
Anon sure knows how to pick 'em! LOL
https://www.princeton.edu/~prolife/articles/embryoquotes2.html
Life Begins at Fertilization "Development of the embryo begins at Stage 1 when a sperm fertilizes an oocyte and together they form a zygote." [England, Marjorie A. Life Before Birth. 2nd ed. England: Mosby-Wolfe, 1996, p.31]
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "5,577 biologists who responded to me affirmed the view that a human life begins at fertilization.""
In one of your typical deception strategies, you're conflating "life" with "person" - they are not the same thing.
I would agree a zygote is "life", just as a sperm cell and an unfertilized ovum are life. But none of these are a person.
A person thinks, feels, loves, hates, and desires. A zygote does none of this. A zygote does nothing we associate with being a person.
A zygote is life, in the same way my eyeball is life, but it is not in any sense a person anymore than my eyeball is a person.
Go back and ask those biologists when a pregnancy becomes a person and you'll find 96% say a zygote is not a person.
Trump is caging children and letting ISIS run free.
All to benefit himself personally at the expense of the American public and humanity as a whole.
The uproar in Washington over President Trump’s corruption in Ukraine and malfeasance in Syria has obscured a broader story. In little more than a month, virtually every other foreign policy initiative the Trump administration has pursued has imploded — thanks mostly to the president’s increasingly unhinged behavior.
The unraveling started on Sept. 7, when Trump abruptly announced that he had canceled a previously undisclosed summit with the Afghan Taliban due to be held the next day at Camp David, and shelved a draft peace deal that a State Department special envoy had spent a year negotiating. The immediate result was a spike in violence in Afghanistan — and at least the temporary shelving of Trump’s ambition to pull U.S. troops out of the country before the 2020 election.
A week later, Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran came undone. Following an Iranian-sponsored attack on a Saudi oil complex, Trump ruled out a military response; instead, he told French President Emmanuel Macron that he was open to a plan to meet Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations and lift sanctions on his government in return for negotiations. The gambit failed: Rouhani left Trump waiting on a phone line. But Saudi Arabia got the message: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has asked Iraq and Pakistan to broker a de-escalation with Tehran.
Just two weeks after the Iran debacle, Trump saw his nuclear negotiations with North Korea crumble — again. At a meeting in Stockholm, Kim Jong Un’s delegation rejected a U.S. proposal for an incremental deal — a far cry from the total disarmament Trump once sought — and walked away, refusing to agree to a date for future talks. Trump’s hopes for a Nobel Prize-securing breakthrough in 2020 now look vanishingly small.
All that led up to Trump’s Oct. 6 phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which he blindsided the Pentagon by facilitating a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. The most likely result, in addition to the betrayal of the Kurdish allies who fought with American troops for the past four years, will be the revival of the Islamic State, whose destruction was Trump’s most tangible foreign policy accomplishment.
Is there anything left to the “America First” agenda? Not really. The attempt to oust the socialist government of Venezuela flopped back in April. The plan for the “ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians has never been released, and Trump’s point man on that project, Jason Greenblatt, announced his departure last month.
True, Trump is still pressing his trade war with China and announced a partial deal on Friday. But most tariffs remain in place and the easy victory over Beijing he once promised is nowhere in sight.
This is the place in the column where I am supposed to identify the common thread that explains all these disasters. Only there isn’t one, other than Trump’s mounting erraticism. His explanation for pulling the plug on the U.S. mission in Syria — where just 1,000 U.S. troops were ensuring that Islamic State stayed down, while thwarting Russian and Iranian ambitions — is that he was determined to stop “endless wars.” But the deal he nixed in Afghanistan would have brought far more American soldiers home — 5,000 right away, and up to 15,000 by Election Day. The only explanation Trump offered for squelching it was that the insurgents had staged an attack that killed an American soldier — a strange reason for not ending an 18-year-old war...
...Trump’s reversal on Iran was even more startling. For two years he had ramped up pressure on Tehran: While his top aides talked about regime change, Trump threatened “the official end of Iran” if it mounted a military challenge. Yet when the Iranians started striking targets in the Persian Gulf, the only casualty of Trump’s response was his hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton, who had pushed him toward war. Now he appears desperate in his eagerness to open negotiations.
Of course, there’s reason for relief about some of Trump’s broken policies. The confrontation with Iran was unnecessary, and war in the Persian Gulf would be a catastrophe. The Taliban deal would have betrayed an Afghan government in which the United States has invested two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars.
But the carnage of Trump’s foreign policy likely isn’t over yet. Kim Jong Un has set a year-end deadline for getting what he wants from Trump — an end to sanctions — after which North Korea could return to testing nuclear warheads or intercontinental missiles. Iran may carry out further strikes in the Persian Gulf to try to force Trump to lift sanctions. And the Islamic State will probably regain its footing in eastern Syria. All that may not be as threatening to Trump as an impeachment vote. But it could do a lot of damage to U.S. national interests.
Oct. 1 may have begun as any other day at the U.S. Supreme Court, but it ended with a death knell to Dem hopes in 2020. The most powerful institution in Washington took action to end injustice.
At some point that day, as we learned in an order issued later in the week, four or more justices voted to hear a case that will test the legality of a Louisiana law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. This law is nearly identical to the one from Texas that the court struck down in 2016. Yet instead of all nine justices following court precedent and telling the Bayou State, via summary judgment, to take a hike, some subset of the nine thought it prudent to make this highly charged issue the linchpin of the 2019-20 court term.
Five or more votes determine the ruling at the court, but for a petition to be granted review, only four justices’ votes are needed. Like so much else hidden from view at the Supreme Court, the public never knows which four have voted for review — that is, until a case like this comes along and the votes become easily surmised.
For run-of-the-mill petitions, there is a combination of strategy and courtesy that goes into a justice’s vote to grant review. But in a petition as highly charged as the Louisiana one, a group of four justices would not risk bringing it to argument if they were not confident in the outcome.
The three dissenters in the earlier Texas abortion case remain on the court: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, whose anti-abortion views are clear, have been added to the bench since then. The “Rule of Four” has become the "Sure Thing of Five."
“We don’t go about our work in a political manner,” Chief Justice Roberts told a Manhattan audience last month.
Thanks for the heads up. It's time to increase my position in the wire coat hanger industry.
From now on, anyone going on a rant about how they are pro-Trump because they are “Christian” and “pro-life” are getting sent these photos by me---directly and with no warning. Why? Because they are responsible for supporting this carnage.
I decided not to show these four photos directly in the article, but I have links to them. It’s important you see them. These are Kurdish babies and toddlers who have been killed by Turkish forces and Turkish-backed proxy forces.
Warning: these are heartbreaking...and graphic.
https://twitter.com/TheSemDem/status/1184675756363919360/photo/1
https://twitter.com/TheSemDem/status/1184674858044739584/photo/1
https://twitter.com/TheSemDem/status/1184674793464979456/photo/1
https://twitter.com/TheSemDem/status/1184676704876421120/photo/1
The following video I will display: A father who is begging for death because all of his children were brutally massacred.
Sardar Mlla Drwish
@serdar_melah
They destroyed my family
I am finished.. Kill me please
One's child is precious
I have lost my three children
Three... Three
A father from Serê Kanîyê/ Ras Al-Ayn after he lost three of his children#KurdsBetrayedByTrump #Kurd #Syrian
Embedded video
5:26 AM - Oct 13, 2019
This is horrifying and disturbing. Yet the exact same people who claim to be “pro-life” and scream about the termination of a damn clump of cells are now justifying and excusing the murder of actual babies. This goes well beyond their glorification of assault rifles, or laughing at a stupid Trump video depicting a congregation getting butchered. This is downright depravity.
Ralph Reed recently went on a tear about how horrible abortion is, while in the same breath saying that evangelical Christians must obey Trump. He supports the Syrian slaughter because he literally argued that Trump was equal to God. His book was even entitled “Render to God and Trump”.
Paula White said opposing Trump was opposing God.
Robert Jeffress announced that he will submit and defer to Trump on his decision to allow the killing of the Kurds. He admitted what we already know: not one evangelical will change their vote over this.
Sure enough, at the so-called “Values Voter Summit”, which occurred after the Trump-approved genocide, all of the pastors prayed for Trump and commanded obedience to their Golden Calf.
And, as expected, reporters couldn’t find one right-wing evangelical willing to condemn him over this.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) pushed back on the idea endorsed by the Trump administration this week that withholding foreign aid to other countries for political purposes is a routine and appropriate way of doing business.
“You don’t hold up foreign aid that we had previously appropriated for a political initiative,” Murkowski, a senior appropriator, told reporters on Capitol Hill Thursday afternoon. “Period.”
During a stunning press conference earlier that day, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney acknowledged for the first time that President Donald Trump withheld foreign aid in order to get Ukraine’s help in a political probe.
“We do that all the time with foreign policy,” Mulvaney said at the White House.
“Get over it,” he added later. “There is going to be political influence in foreign policy.”
Mulvaney said that the Trump administration was withholding aid from Ukraine to pressure its government into investigating the Democratic National Committee’s server and alleged corruption in the 2016 election ― not Trump’s political rival former Vice President Joe Biden. Nevertheless, his comments appear to acknowledge that a “quid pro quo” did occur with respect to aid to Ukraine, despite many Republicans and Trump allies insisting otherwise.
The House of Representatives launched a formal impeachment inquiry last month following a whistleblower complaint concerning a July phone call in which Trump repeatedly urged Ukraine’s president to initiate an investigation into Biden and his son Hunter. Trump did so while holding up U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, also broke with Trump on Thursday, telling House impeachment investigators that he was “disappointed” in the president’s efforts to have his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, interfere in foreign affairs. Sondland also testified that Giuliani sought to link to a White House visit for Ukraine’s newly elected president to demands that Ukraine prioritize investigations targeting Trump’s political rivals, including the Bidens.
“Withholding foreign aid in order to pressure a foreign government to take such steps would be wrong,” Sondland said in prepared testimony. “I did not and would not ever participate in such undertakings.”
We are living through a phantasmagoric psychodrama generated by the dishonest national political press. This is the press whose Joe Scarborough of MSNBC did not show some of President Trump’s responses to his enemies because of “concern” for the president’s family, as he “seems to have lost his mind.”
This is a new frontier in American journalism, where a television news commentator who hates the president wishes to spare the president’s family a rerun of his entirely rational denunciations of his enemies.
The House of Representatives began considering impeachment because an anonymous Democrat and former political associate of Vice President Biden received a hearsay account of a conversation between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in which Mr. Trump encouraged the newly elected leader to find out if Mr. Biden and his son had done anything inappropriate in Ukraine. The president quickly made the transcript of the conversation public.
Partisan Democrats and formerly sensible commentators have portrayed Mr. Trump’s request as a demand for incriminating evidence on Mr. Biden, failing which he would not resume U.S. aid to Ukraine. In other words, this was a solicitation for a benefit of value to Mr. Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. The reference to a resumption of aid was 500 words earlier in the transcript, and not connected at all to the Biden question.
When Mr.Biden was mentioned, it was to request to know what happened — a neutral request for the facts. Yes, Mr. Trump said the appearance of the former vice president’s son $50,000-a-month sinecure as a director of a Ukrainian gas company, along with the elder Biden’s boast of having a Ukrainian prosecutor fired, was “horrible.” And so it was. But there may be uncontroversial explanations. If the Biden allegations are unfounded, Americans will want to know. If the facts are corrupt in themselves, Americans — and Democrats especially — will want to know that, too.
In reality, the whole episode is nonsense, a farce. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t hold a vote on a formal impeachment inquiry because she couldn’t win the vote. If there were such an inquiry, where the Republicans called and examined witnesses and subpoenaed documents, it would collapse as quickly as the Russian collusion fraud did when former special counsel Robert Mueller stumbled through his congressional inquiry.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff — who is usually lying when his lips aren’t moving and always is when they are — says we will not be hearing from a non-whistleblowing leaker, to give his hearsay evidence of a conversation that any person in the world can read and see has no legal implications whatever. But the investigation indomitably continues. It is like the last government of the German Third Reich, meeting in the week following the death of Hitler on the few thousand acres they still governed on the Danish border, discussing agriculture and immigration.
With no evidence of wrongdoing by the president, the Trump-hating press is now scrambling after Rudolph Giuliani, formerly one of the nation’s toughest prosecutors, as if they can pin something on him while he acted as the president’s private attorney. With Hunter Biden in hiding, this ludicrous mockery must end. Pompous commentators who don’t like Mr. Trump but have learned to live with their underestimation of him cannot go on indefinitely with wagging heads and furrowed foreheads, discussing the president’s “crisis.”
"With no evidence of wrongdoing by the president, the Trump-hating press is now scrambling after Rudolph Giuliani, formerly one of the nation’s toughest prosecutors, as if they can pin something on him while he acted as the president’s private attorney."
How do you know the right-wing media and its trolls are trying to gaslight America?
Look for the rats scurrying away from the sinking ship...
WASHINGTON — National security adviser John Bolton was so alarmed by Rudy Giuliani’s back-channel activities in Ukraine that he described President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer as a “hand grenade who is going to blow everybody up,” according to a former White House aide.
The aide, Fiona Hill, testified for more than 10 hours on Monday as part of the Democrats’ impeachment probe into Trump’s dealings with Ukraine. She detailed Bolton’s concerns to lawmakers and told them that she had at least two meetings with National Security Council lawyer John Eisenberg about the matter at Bolton’s request, according to a person familiar with the testimony who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential interview.
Those meetings took place in early July, weeks before a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump urged that Zelensky investigate political rival Joe Biden’s family and Ukraine’s own involvement in the 2016 presidential election.
A whistleblower complaint about that call, later made public, prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to launch the impeachment inquiry. Giuliani is Trump’s personal lawyer and was heavily involved in the effort to pressure Ukraine on the investigations.
Hill, a top adviser on Russia, also referred to U.S. ambassador Gordon Sondland and acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, the person said, telling the three committees leading the investigation that Bolton also told her he was not part of “whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up,” an apparent reference to talks over Ukraine.
She quoted Bolton, whom Trump forced out last month, as saying in one conversation that Giuliani was “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”
"The decision to abandon the Kurds violates one of our most sacred duties. It strikes at American honor. What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a blood stain in the annals of American history. There are broad strategic implications of our decision as well. Iranian and Russian interests in the Middle East have been advanced by our decision. At a time when we're applying maximum pressure on Iran by giving them a stronger hand in Syria, we've actually weakened that pressure. Russia's objective to play a greater role in the Middle East has also been greatly enhanced. The Kurds, out of desperation, have now aligned with [Syrian President] Assad."
Why it matters: Trump's expectation that Republicans would reverse their criticism of his Syria policy after Vice President Mike Pence struck a ceasefire with Turkey appears to have fallen short. The agreement — which Turkey insists is not actually a ceasefire — will force U.S.-allied Kurdish forces to evacuate the area that Turkey is conducting its military operation within 120 hours (five days).
Romney and many experts have argued that this gives Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan exactly what he wanted, but Trump has nonetheless touted it as a great success for all players involved.
“It’s been … suggested that Turkey may have called America’s bluff, telling the president they are coming no matter what we did,” said Romney, of Utah. “If that’s so, we should know it. For it would tell us a great deal about how we should deal with Turkey, now and in the future.”
“Are we so weak and inept diplomatically that Turkey forced the hand of the United States of America? Turkey!?” Romney said. “I believe that it’s imperative that public hearings are held to answer these questions, and I hope the Senate is able to conduct those hearings next week.”
The G7: The President's Latest Corruption Scandal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=66&v=wfSPew6jBUY
Candidate Trump promised to drain the swamp and tackle corruption. Now President Trump is using the U.S. government and taxpayer money to enrich himself and his family.
Republicans, condemn the president’s efforts to use the presidency for his personal enrichment.
Learn more at https://ruleoflawrepublicans.com.
Rump Takes On His Biggest Critic: Himself
Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to host the next Group of Seven summit at his own golf resort in Miami as a “direct and profound” violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
Trump has “bought himself an enormous headache now” with his choice for next year’s summit, Napolitano explained Thursday on Fox Business. “This is about as direct and profound a violation of the emoluments clause as one could create.”
The emoluments clause of the Constitution prohibits federal officeholders from receiving gifts or payments from foreign governments. It’s designed to prevent the president from being influenced by gifts or cash from foreign entities. The Doral setup is “exactly what the emoluments clause was written to prohibit,” Napolitano said.
Emoluments - it's not a fancy skin lotion!
Trump Rages at Pelosi, Mattis, and Communists During ‘Meltdown’ in White House Meeting
President Donald Trump invited Democratic Party leaders to the White House on Wednesday and proceeded to have what those leaders described as a “meltdown” in front of them. Before the lawmakers left early, Trump managed to rail against communists, his own former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom he called “a third-rate politician,” according to the Democratic leaders and sources’ descriptions of the meeting.
Shortly after the brief, cross-partisan meeting with the president in the Cabinet Room—which was convened to discuss Syria- and Turkey-related matters—Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) emerged to give a readout to reporters on what was, in Schumer’s words, Trump’s “nasty diatribe.”
“What we witnessed on the part of the president was a meltdown—sad to say,” Pelosi told reporters. “I think that vote, the size of the vote—more than two-to-one of the Republicans voted to oppose what the president did [on troops in Syria]—it probably got to the president, because he was shaken up by it [and] that’s why we couldn’t continue in the meeting because he was just not relating to the reality of it.”
Schumer asserted that Pelosi “kept her cool completely” even while Trump sniped that “there are communists involved [in Syria] and you guys might like that.”
The president even took a shot at his former defense secretary—who quit late last year over policy disagreements—when the conversation on Wednesday afternoon touched on foreign policy and a potential rejuvenation of ISIS fighters in Syria.
According to a Democratic source familiar with what happened in that meeting, Schumer at one point pulled out a piece of paper featuring quotes from Mattis’ interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. The Democratic leader began reading to the president the statement that Mattis made on that Sunday show, that “if we don't keep the pressure on, then ISIS will resurge. It's absolutely a given that they will come back.”
Trump, this source said, then interrupted Schumer, and insisted that Mattis was “the world’s most overrated general.”
“You know why?” the president continued, according to the source. “He wasn’t tough enough. I captured ISIS. Mattis said it would take two years. I captured them in one month."[it was actually in Trump's third year and ISIS was on the run during Obama's last year] Trump also repeatedly claimed that of the ISIS prisoners who escaped when Turkish forces invaded northeast Syria (an invasion Trump all but greenlit), only the “least dangerous” individuals got out.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, asked to confirm the president’s assertion that those ISIS prisoners who escape were the “least dangerous,” told Schumer he didn’t know, according to the source.
At one point, Trump is said to have claimed that “someone wanted this meeting so I agreed to it,” despite the White House having called the meeting.
Pelosi, for her part, told Trump that Russia has long wanted a “foothold in the Middle East,” adding that because of the president’s actions, the Russian government now has it. “All roads with you lead to Putin,” the House speaker jabbed, according to one senior Democratic aide.
Later in the day, Pelosi, in the escalating round of insults hurled between the West Wing and Capitol Hill, told reporters, “I think now we have to pray for [Trump’s] health. Because this was a very serious meltdown on the part of the president.”
There was even a point in this meeting, the Democratic aide said, that President Trump distributed to attendees the Oct. 9 letter he sent to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the one that read, “You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy—and I will.” Trump’s letter also includes the lines, “Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool! I will call you later.”
This was taken as an attempt by the president to demonstrate to all the Republicans and Democrats in the room that he was being sufficiently tough on Erdogan, and as an effort to convince those present that he did not greenlight the Turkish invasion, which is currently causing political backlash at home, and slaughter and mayhem abroad.
This wouldn’t be the first time this year that a meeting at the White House involving Trump, Pelosi, and Schumer completely degenerated so quickly. Early this year, during a Friday meeting on the government shutdown, President Trump started the gathering by launching a 15-minute, profanity-encrusted rant that included him demanding his border wall, and, unprompted, complaining about Democratic lawmakers who want to impeach him.
At the time, Trump told attendees that he was, simply put, too popular a president to impeach [Trump has never been above a 50% approval rating as president].
Today, Trump and his administration are currently fighting back against an ongoing, rapidly accelerating impeachment inquiry, with Democrats on Capitol Hill hoping to hold a vote on his impeachment before the end of the year.
""With no evidence of wrongdoing by the president, the Trump-hating press is now scrambling after Rudolph Giuliani, formerly one of the nation’s toughest prosecutors, as if they can pin something on him while he acted as the president’s private attorney."
lol! Talk about whistling past the graveyard :) Hee Hee Hee!
Giulinai's least concern is the press, its the multiple law enforcement investigations into his sleazy dealings with Ukraine and Trump that he needs to worry about.
Ditto for Trump, the press is the least of his concerns, its the criminal conduct of his being tried in Congress that's going to remove his stain from the presidency - the rule of law will be upheld in the United States of America.
"We don’t go about our work in a political manner,” Chief Justice Roberts told a Manhattan audience last month.
Actually, research shows conservative Justices are the most political of all:
Conservative Justices Are The Real "Judicial Activists".
If we judge "judicial activism" by some objective standard such as, say, how often they vote to strike down laws passed by the citizens' elected representatives, the more conservative justices have done so significantly more than the more liberal justices.
"[Professor Geoffrey] Stone concludes that the moderately liberal justices apply an approach in line with “the original concerns of the Framers of the Constitution and in their distinctive understanding of the special responsibility of courts in our constitutional system,” while the Court’s conservatives’ “votes cannot be explained by any consistent theory of constitutional interpretation” but are instead driven by their own policy preferences.
I've got to hand it to Mitt Romney. Recently, at least, he's been telling it like it is:
"The decision to abandon the Kurds violates one of our most sacred duties. It strikes at American honor. What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a blood stain in the annals of American history."
Trump's abandonment of the Kurds, who the U.S. relied on to do almost all of the fighting to subdue the Islamic State is a death blow to American credibility around the world. It will take generations of Democratic presidents to repair the damage Trump has done.
"the exact same people who claim to be “pro-life” and scream about the termination of a damn clump of cells are now justifying and excusing the murder of actual babies. This goes well beyond their glorification of assault rifles, or laughing at a stupid Trump video depicting a congregation getting butchered. This is downright depravity.
Ralph Reed recently went on a tear about how horrible abortion is, while in the same breath saying that evangelical Christians must obey Trump. He supports the Syrian slaughter because he literally argued that Trump was equal to God. His book was even entitled “Render to God and Trump”.
Paula White said opposing Trump was opposing God.
Robert Jeffress announced that he will submit and defer to Trump on his decision to allow the killing of the Kurds. He admitted what we already know: not one evangelical will change their vote over this.
Sure enough, at the so-called “Values Voter Summit”, which occurred after the Trump-approved genocide, all of the pastors prayed for Trump and commanded obedience to their Golden Calf.
And, as expected, reporters couldn’t find one right-wing evangelical willing to condemn him over this.
Ralph Reed, Robert Jeffress, Tony Perkins and all the other evangelical American religious leaders encouraged Russia to criminalize gayness and helped Russia write its law banning free speech for gays and making it illegal to be lgbt for all practical intents and purposes.
Ralph Reed, Robert Jeffress, Tony Perkins and all the other evangelical American religious leaders would dearly love to turn the United States into pseudo theocracy like Russia with Trump as dictator and start persecuting harmless lgbt people like Russia does and these Americans have pushed for countries around the world to do so as well.
Trump is obviously laundering money for Putin and Russia. This is why he's giving Russia everything its ever wanted.
DeutscheBank has been Trump's only source of funding since American banks stopped lending to the constantly defaulting man back in the 80's.
DeutscheBank has been fined mega billions for laundering the proceeds of Russian crime. But they were happy to lend Trump hundreds of millions, which of course he defaulted on.
In an action that can only be explained by a money-laundering relationship between Russia, Deutsche Bank,and Trump, after Trump defaulted on his loans from DeutscheBank he sued them for his own failure to pay the loan back. Then Deutschebank proceeded to lend Trump hundreds of millions more.
The corruption spreads beyond the Trump family to Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and former Justice Anthony Kennedy who bizarrely retired early.
Justice Kennedy's son was a big shot at DeutscheBank and deeply involved in the loans to Trump that almost certainly were a cover for laundering Russian crime/Putin money.
He retired unexpectedly just as Trump was pushing to put Brett Kavanaugh on the supreme court. Trump has since described how he "has the supreme court" and so no one can impeach him. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Anthony Kennedy retired at Trump's request in order to protect Kennedy's son, a Deutschebank employee up to his eyeballs in suspicious Trump loans.
Kennedy protects his son, and Trump gets a corrupt Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh he expects to do his bidding regardless of how it violates the rule of law.
Paula White said opposing Trump was opposing God.
Look at who Trump is and you see who the Evangelical christians' God is.
But what can you expect when a religion teaches that we are broken, fallen, evil and that even the best amongst us deserves eternal torture?
Everyone instinctively understands - The punishment must fit the crime or the punishment is immoral.
Any human crime is finite and yet the christian and Islamic god's punishment is infinite - it does not fit the crime, it is not proportional, it is not even remotely just.
Its no wonder Evangelical Americans absurdly revere a clump of cells that begins a human pregnancy above actual people and will gladly destroy actual babies in the name of unthinking unfeeling cells to create a facade that they are moral.
You can't get moral behaviour from a concept of god that punishes finite and often trivial crimes with eternal torture. How is it that this common sense escapes American Evangelical christians?
Dear Mr. President:
Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy — and I will. I've already given you a little sample with respect to Pastor Brunson.
I have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don't let the world down. You can make a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy of his letter to me, just received.
History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!
I will call you later.
----------------------
From Microsoft Word Reviewing Statistics
Averages:
Sentences per paragraph: 3.2
Words per sentence: 11.2
Characters per word: 4.2
Readability:
Flesch Reading Ease 77.8
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 5.1
Passive Sentences: 0.0%
Is the president smarter than a fifth grader?
No.
No he is not.
And he seems to like 4 letter words.
Having seen a lot of Trump over the past four years, I'm very confident his IQ is no higher than 85. I'm not joking if any of you clued out people thought that was a joke.
Trump: We've taken control of middle east oil
President Trump insisted Friday that Kurdish allies who were being forced from northern Syria to avoid slaughter are “very happy about the way things are going,” describing the already breached ceasefire brokered with Turkey like a business deal.
The president also said the U.S. has taken control of oil in the region, although it’s unclear what he meant by that. “We’ve taken control of the oil in the Middle East, the oil that we’re talking about. The oil that everybody was worried about. We have, the U.S. has control of that,” he said.
The Kurds were the biggest U.S. ally helping to defeat ISIS in northern Syria. Earlier this month, Mr. Trump ordered U.S. troops to pull out of the region. Shortly after, Turkey invaded, killing hundreds, displacing thousands and allowing ISIS prisoners to escape from detention facilities.
Trump clearly thinks people will believe whatever crazy thing pops into his head.
Trump is dangerously unstable.
so nice that Randy is back from his stay in the mental ward
12 straight posts that no one will read
some people just can't get better no matter how many psychs are assigned to his case
Another Anti-LGBT politician resigns after being 'caught having sex with man in his office'
An Ohio lawmaker who routinely touted his Christian faith and anti-lgbt views has resigned after being caught having sex with a man.
Over the past two decades, Wyatt and Regina Hardiman have made it clear that nothing is more important to them than punishing harmless lgbt people. Are they trying to destroy by proxy their own same sex attractions they won't accept?
Agree to the social contract and the world will be a better place for all:
"To have the best possible world we can, society's highest priority must be maximizing the happiness for all in an equal and fair way."
Both Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins have set off my "gaydar" for many years.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "so nice that Randy* is back from his* stay in the mental ward 12 straight posts that no one will read"
Gee, that's funny, in this thread at May 30, 2019 8:56 PM you two said "I'm sure she's now on watch lists of law enforcement worldwide".
So, which is it?: No one will read my posts or law enforcement worldwide is reading my posts?
Actually it was only 9 posts in a row, lol :)
*You can tell my posts in this thread really angered Wyatt/Regina by their reverting back to referring to me as male and by my former name, Randy Schimnosky.
If you'd like to witness how abusive and unreasonable conservatives like Wyatt/Regina are, you can go back in the Teach the Fact archives and read my oldest posts under "Randy Schimnosky" and see how for two decades I've been promoting fairness and honesty and Wyatt/Regina have been lying prolifically and promoting animus towards harmless lgbt people.
My legal name change to Priya Marie Lynn took place in 2008. I've always posted under my real name because I stand by what I write. Wyatt and Regina Hardiman have always posted anonymously (except that one time, lol!) because they don't want to take responsibility for what they say and their inhumane religious beliefs.
And Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous, the last time I was in the mental ward was sometime prior to 2006 :)
Overlooked fallout from Trump's betrayal of the Kurds who did most of the fighting to defeat ISIS:
Kurdish forces have 5 years of insight into U.S. Special forces & intelligence tactics: "Might these units be forced to spill their secrets to some of America's foremost global adversaries, in Assad, Russia, and Iran?"
The U.S. set the Kurds, faithful allies, up for slaughter. "Take down your good defenses at the border, dear allies. Don't worry--WE will protect you. Honest!" They trusted us and took them down, and we broke our word and abandoned them to slaughter. They BEGGED us for help, allies who fought by our side, who did the BULK of the fighting FOR us in Syria, to contain ISIS, and lost 11,000 of their soldiers in the process; and we did NOTHING but WATCH as they were being BUTCHERED.
State Department probe of Clinton emails finds no deliberate mishandling of classified information
Embarrassing Leaks Led to Clampdown on Trump’s Phone Records
The corrupt one is obvious.
"the last time I was in the mental ward was sometime prior to 2006"
good to know
yes, it's abominable that Canada, to save money on its bankrupt national health care system, is treating the mentally disturbed on an outpatient basis
everyone should keep in mind when you read a series of rants by Priya that this is a person with a long history of mental illness
I think it was last year around this time that Priya had a mental breakdown here on the blog and was saying that those disagreed with Priya here had caused the breakdown
it's a wonder that Priya's doctor allows Priya to continue to participate in blog activity
my advice to everyone is not to engage in any conversation with Priya
simply ignore Priya
it's for Priya's own good
The meltdown of the Democratic Party presidential candidate field continues apace. Unless someone else is found, say a non-sexual-predator version of Bill Clinton, look for four more years of the GOP
Hunter Biden has conceded he and his father were part of the swap and Hillary is accusing a Democratic candidate of getting help from the Russians and one of the top three candidates had a heart and the new leader in the polls has a Leninist plan to confiscate all wealth and redistribute it to provide reparations for homosexual grievances.
"When you think that you lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more"
Brace for the IG report coming soon, showing the origins of the Russian hoax.
Twelve Democratic presidential hopefuls took the debate stage Tuesday night and espoused a flurry of terrible economic policy proposals. While not a comprehensive list, here’s one concerned American’s thoughts on their seven most glaring mistakes and omissions regarding the economy.
1. No plan
Let’s start with a glaring omission: No one proposed a plan to grow the economy.
Not one candidate said anything like, “Here’s how I’ll encourage American entrepreneurs to grow their businesses, creating jobs and the competition for employees that drives wage growth for working Americans.”
Instead, every policy proposal boiled down to dividing our economic pie into smaller pieces. Rather than proposing to grow that pie, the candidates simply assumed economic growth would continue - as if it were a given. It’s not.
2. Grow the government
Every proposed solution was based on empowering government, diminishing our freedom, increasing our taxes, regulating our businesses and creating massive – unprecedented - government dependence.
No matter how benevolent they might sound, we should all be suspicious of anyone who asks us to sacrifice our freedoms, expand and empower the government and then put them in charge. Do we really trust our politicians that much?
3. Middle class to pay?
For example, Medicare-for-all. Even assuming we wanted to eliminate all private insurance, could we pay for it?
The Mercatus Center, a think tank at George Mason University, “conservatively” found that “Medicare-for-all” would cost taxpayers $32.6 trillion over a 10-year period, even with associated cost savings, an average of about $3.26 trillion per year.
The federal government’s total revenue for fiscal year 2018 was $3.3 trillion and even that was insufficient to cover the government’s existing expenses -- which totaled $4.1 trillion.
No wonder Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., refused to answer any questions about increasing taxes for the middle class. As Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., admitted, they would – and a lot.
4. $9 trillion per year
In addition to Medicare-for-all, we have the Green New Deal. In addition to severe restrictions on our freedoms and an unprecedented expansion of government power, a study by The American Action Forum, co-authored by the former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, found that the GND could cost as much as $93 trillion over a ten year period.
Again, that’s with current government revenue of $3.3 trillion that is already insufficient to cover $4.1 trillion in spending. Seriously, where do these candidates think this money will come from?
5. Back to taxing the middle class -- a lot
One proposal they all support is getting rid of those pesky Trump tax cuts to increase income taxes on the wealthy. Well, in 2016 (the most recent year for which the numbers are available), taxpayers making over about $500,000 had total income of $2 trillion. So, even a 100% tax on “the wealthy” would be insufficient to fund just “Medicare-for-all,” let alone the whole GND package.
And that’s assuming wealthy people would continue generating income if they had to pay it all to the government. Just an FYI, they wouldn’t. That puts us back to taxing the middle class – a lot.
6. Wouldn’t you move?+
How about an additional wealth tax on assets, as both Warren and Sanders propose?
Wealth taxes don’t work. In 1990, there were 12 countries in Europe that had a wealth tax. Today there are three. These taxes failed because, among other things, they push people - and their wealth – to other more tax-friendly countries. They are costly to enforce, and raise little revenue.
Think about it. Over 25 years, the cumulative effect of even a 2% annual tax on wealth (as Warren proposes) would result in taxes equivalent to about 40% of that wealth. If you could move to a more tax-friendly nation and keep that 40%, wouldn’t you move?
Wealthy people can - and do.
7. Working Americans left out
Perhaps the crowning mistake on the debate stage last night was the failure of any candidate to acknowledge that, under President Trump’s free market policies – the very policies these Democrats would reverse - things are actually going better than they have in decades for working Americans.
More Americans are employed than at any time in our nation’s history, the unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, and the competition for employees is driving wage growth. In September, workers’ wages increased 3.5% year over year, the 14th consecutive month workers’ wages have been at or above 3%. Prior to this streak, workers’ wages hadn’t hit 3% growth since May of 2009.
Given this wage growth, and despite what you heard on the debate stage, in September the Census Bureau reported that an analysis of household income -- that considered the actual size of each household -- showed a “significant” decrease in income inequality last year. The Census Bureau describes the survey supporting this finding as the “leading source” for national data on income and poverty.
Didn’t hear anything about that last night, did we?
This election is increasingly about a choice between continued economic growth and improved financial circumstances for working Americans or policies that we cannot pay for, that cannot work, and that ignore one truly American principal: Free individuals pursuing their dreams, create wealth and prosperity.
Big government does not.
"things are actually going better than they have in decades for working Americans."
I see you left out farmers... who are now getting middle class wealth (in the form of taxes) transferred to them to help cover some of the losses that Rump's failed trade wars have caused. It doesn't cover all of their losses though, and farmer bankruptcies and suicides are on the rise:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2019/08/30/amid-trump-tariffs-farm-bankruptcies-and-suicides-rise/#67613b482bc8
Walter Shaub, the former head of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, has doubled down on his scathing criticism of the selection of President Donald Trump’s Miami golf resort to host next year’s G-7 summit.
Shaub said acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s dismissal of fears that Trump could personally profit from the event were “a ridiculous thing” to say.
Trump has been accused of violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which prohibits federal officeholders from accepting gifts or profits from foreign states, with the decision.
“Essentially, it boils down to this, the president in the United States participated in a contract awarded to his own business,” said Shaub, who served under former President Barack Obama and the first six months of Trump’s administration until he resigned.
“This is the figurative equivalent of he reaches into the treasury, grabs a chunk of money and says ‘don’t worry, I’m not taking more than I’m spending,’” Shaub continued. “That’s no defense at all and certainly, if it had been Mick Mulvaney who owned this property, he’d be prosecuted and convicted of a felony and wouldn’t be able to say ‘don’t worry, I broke even.’”
Shaub later summed up the “the bottom line.”
“There is no definition of corruption that would not cover the president participating in a contract awarded to himself. So, if this is not corrupt, nothing is corrupt,” he said. “And that’s exactly what he wants and it seems to be exactly what the United States Senate is determined to have be the case.”
Shaub on Thursday claimed the decision to host the event at the resort was “so overtly corrupt that it can’t be viewed as anything but a loyalty test for Senators.” “If they are corrupt enough to look the other way, Trump will know he can do anything. In that case, he will do everything,” he added.
Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) said President Donald Trump should be impeached, a major switch for a former Republican presidential candidate who had previously said there was not enough evidence to impeach the President.
"But if you are asking me if I was sitting in the House of Representatives today and you were to ask me how do I feel, do I think impeachment should move forward and should go for a full examination and a trial in the United States Senate, my vote would be yes."
Kasich had previously said in interviews that he did not think Trump shoud be impeached because he didn't see a clear quid pro quo.
"In reading that transcript, I did not see a clear quid pro quo," Kasich said in an October 8 interview on "CNN Tonight."
The Ohio Republican said the events of Thursday afternoon -- Mulvaney's admission of a quid pro quo and the announcement of the resignation of Energy Secretary Rick Perry chief among them -- caused him to rethink his stance.
"The last 24 hours have really forced me to review this," Kasich said.
At a news conference, Mulvaney confirmed that Trump froze nearly $400 million in US security aid to Ukraine in part to pressure that country into investigating Democrats. He then attempted to claim that he did not admit to the quid pro quo a few hours later. This change in narrative, said Kasich, left him "uneasy."
"When I look at all the information that is coming to us, and all the craziness that is surrounding the operation of the White House, now the resignation sometime this year of Secretary Perry and his involvement, it just goes on and on and on and on."
"I fought with people on the air about 'Is there a quid-pro-quo?' and 'Does this rise to the level of impeachment?' I now believe that it does," he continued. "At this point, there is a big cloud and I think it has to be cleared."
While he admitted that it was "extremely difficult" for him to publicly announce support for impeachment, he called on other Republicans to do the same, saying he believes Republicans "should at least be calling for an inquiry."
"If Barack Obama had been doing something like this, Republicans would be going crazy," he claimed. "Now it's their own guy doing it. What's fair is fair."
"Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano criticized President Donald Trump’s decision to host the next Group of Seven summit at his own golf resort in Miami as a “direct and profound” violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
“This is about as direct and profound a violation of the emoluments clause as one could create.” Napolitano explained Thursday on Fox Business.
The emoluments clause of the Constitution prohibits federal officeholders from receiving gifts or payments from foreign governments. It’s designed to prevent the president from being influenced by gifts or cash from foreign entities. The Doral setup is “exactly what the emoluments clause was written to prohibit,” Napolitano said."
Andrew, Andrew, how much were you paid to spin this web of malarkey?
Having the G-7 at Doral does absolutely nothing to create a situation where the President might be influenced by foreign entities. It was the US turn to choose the site, foreigners had no input.
So, no, the Doral setup was not “exactly what the emoluments clause was written to prohibit,”
not even close
you need to think before you make up nonsense
e·mol·u·ment
/əˈmälyəmənt/
noun FORMAL
a salary, fee, or profit from employment or office.
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
The Framers' intentions for this clause were twofold: to prevent a society of nobility from being established in the United States, and to protect the republican forms of government from being influenced by other governments. In Federalist No. 22, Alexander Hamilton stated, "One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption." Therefore, to counter this "foreign corruption" the delegates at the Constitutional Convention worded the clause in such a way as to act as a catch-all for any attempts by foreign governments to influence state or municipal policies through gifts or titles.
"So, no, the Doral setup was not “exactly what the emoluments clause was written to prohibit,”
not even close
you need to think before you make up nonsense"
What are you doing here trolling a tiny little blog?
Obviously, very stable genius, you should be a Fox news consultant making millions of dollars explaining exactly why Judge Napolitano was wrong.
Jesses Lee Peterson, the right-wing commentator and pastor, used his radio program to declare, “that’s what happens when you mess with The Great White Hope”. (Peterson is black, and that is his nickname for Trump)
Peterson was so impressed by God’s homicidal abilities he added to the list
“If you notice, John McCain, he dead. Charles Krauthammer, he dead. And Elijah Cumming, now he dead. They all didn’t like The Great White Hope, they went against him, they talked about him, now they all dead. That’s amazin’.”
His is a very unChristian Christianity.
There were others. Dave Daubenmire declared that Cummings was an “enemy of the cross” — whatever that means.
Chris McDonald, vocal right-winger and conspiracy theorist, streamed a special edition of his “The MC Files” devoted to abusing the recently deceased. He and his guest, Pastor Stacey Shiflett, spent the entire program attacking Cummings as corrupt, unbiblical, and ungodly - and asserting that God had taken his life because of his opposition to Donald Trump.
‘The Terribly Tiny God of MAGA Christians’: “They passionately worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male — and perpetually terrified of Muslim, immigrants, gay children, Special Counsel reports, mandalas, Harry Potter, Starbucks holiday cups, yoga, wind turbines, science — everything.”
You could add to that: smart women, the gender fluid, foreigners, the UN, universities, Antifa, the EPA, atheists, and vegans.
At one time, man’s horizons were close. Most people didn’t know that the moon and sun were objects. They had no idea of other planets, galaxies, and the universe. At the other end of the scale, they did not know about microbes, cells, or atoms. In fairness, the ancient Greeks were making huge strides, but the people of the Bible were in an intellectual gloom.
But there is no excuse for this grinding ignorance anymore. I don’t know why knowing something is so scary, and thinking is so hard for so many. It takes a special kind of dumb to cling to ignorance. But the ranks of the Christian right are replete with the gullible being fleeced by the greedy.
And let us note, in closing, that Elijah Cummings was an active member of the New Psalmist Baptist Church. And if there is a God, Cummings is undoubtedly enjoying a warm welcome upstairs. The kind of welcome that the Bible says Jesus will deny to Peterson, Daubenmire, and Shiflett.
"What are you doing here trolling a tiny little blog?
Obviously, very stable genius, you should be a Fox news consultant making millions of dollars explaining exactly why Judge Napolitano was wrong."
typical TTF response
always very worshipful of credentials
when they support the gay agenda, that is
but Andy Nap negated his credentials by giving a reason for the emoluments clause
he said "It’s designed to prevent the president from being influenced by gifts or cash from foreign entities."
but since the foreign entities had no choice but to accept the location, no influence could be brought to bear
and, honestly, with the verbal abuse Trump has directed at these particular foreign entities, the G-7, it's ridiculous to say they are bribing him
as for you, TTF village fool, even you could be right if you'll just think before you talk
maybe someday FOX news will hire you !
"he said "It’s designed to prevent the president from being influenced by gifts or cash from foreign entities."
but since the foreign entities had no choice but to accept the location, no influence could be brought to bear"
Right... because no foreigner who comes to Rump's hotel is ever going to spend a dime on items that will line his pockets.
What part of "a salary, fee, or profit from employment or office" do you not grasp?
Or do you somehow think that the US taxpayer dollars going to line his pockets for this is somehow exempt from the emoluments clause?
Rump is using the American taxpayer to prop up his failing businesses and Republicans are providing cover for him.
But Republicans have always looked kindly on welfare for the rich, so it's not a surprise.
President Donald Trump late Saturday backed down from his decision to use his own for-profit golf course near the Miami airport for next year’s G-7 meeting, a move that would have put tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into his own cash registers.
Trump announced his decision not to use his financially troubled Trump National Doral resort in a string of tweets, blaming the news media and Democrats.
“As usual, the Hostile Media & their Democrat Partners went CRAZY!” Trump wrote.
Trump said the meeting would be held somewhere else, possibly Camp David.
“Therefore, based on both Media & Democrat Crazed and Irrational Hostility, we will no longer consider Trump National Doral, Miami, as the Host Site for the G-7 in 2020,” Trump wrote at 9:52 p.m. “We will begin the search for another site, including the possibility of Camp David, immediately. Thank you!”
Holding the event at his own property would have violated at least one and possibly both of the Constitution’s emolument clauses. One prohibits the president from receiving money from foreign entities, and the other prohibits him from getting money from the federal government or any state beyond his salary. Federal law also prohibits federal “officers” and employees from giving themselves federal contracts.
On its face, Trump’s insistence on giving himself a massive government contract was literally a dictionary definition of corruption – using one’s office to enrich oneself.
“He is the most corrupt president in modern times,” said Jennifer Horn, a former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party.
White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Thursday announced the Doral decision, claiming that of all the possible locations all over the country, Trump’s property was the best suited for the international conference.
The decision drew immediate fire from ethics groups, Democrats, a fair number of Republicans and even some European leaders who would be attending. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, said it was “not at all” appropriate for public money to be going into Trump’s pocket.
Trump’s Saturday night tweets announcing the decision also belie his January 2017 promise that he would separate himself from his family business, the Trump Organization, which operates the resorts and hotels that he continues to own through a trust he created after winning the 2016 election.
Trump’s staff has continued to repeat that false claim, and in fact used it to argue that Trump really could not benefit from holding the G-7 at Doral.
“The president has no involvement in the Trump Organization anymore,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told HuffPost on Friday.
Trump, however, wrote on Twitter: “I announced that I would be willing to do it at NO PROFIT or, if legally permissible, at ZERO COST to the USA,” suggesting he personally still fully controls his business.
"Right... because no foreigner who comes to Rump's hotel is ever going to spend a dime on items that will line his pockets."
oh, so now you're talking about the discretionary purchases at the gift shop
that's really a touch of lunacy
OK, Boris, I'll support you on Brexit if you agree to buy an umbrella from the pro shop
keep in mind, the countries at this summit are our allies, who liberals say Trump is always needlessly antagonizing
"What part of "a salary, fee, or profit from employment or office" do you not grasp?"
the part where Andy Nap said this is exactly what the Founding Fathers meant
that part is false
they clearly meant being paid by a foreign entity for compensation, not routine de minimus business transactions
"Or do you somehow think that the US taxpayer dollars going to line his pockets for this is somehow exempt from the emoluments clause?"
actually, I know you're probably smarter than this sounds but US taxpayer dollars are not funds from foreign entities
"Rump is using the American taxpayer to prop up his failing businesses and Republicans are providing cover for him."
got any numbers behind this ludicrous assertion?
"But Republicans have always looked kindly on welfare for the rich, so it's not a surprise."
you're chasing your own tail
the Trump administration has produced economic conditions that created jobs for lower income citizens and reduced income disparity; unemployment is down, income is up,
for everyone
"actually, I know you're probably smarter than this sounds but US taxpayer dollars are not funds from foreign entities"
Yeah... that's pretty obvious. It should have been pretty obvious to someone who likes to throw about the "originalist" Constitutional arguments and thinks they can correct Fox new lawyers that this refers to ARTICLE II, SECTION 1, CLAUSE 7 of the Constitution:
"The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them."
This is sometimes referred to the "domestic Emoluments clause", whereas the foreign Emoluments clause is Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8.
Section 7 accomplishes two things: it establishes that the President is to receive a "Compensation" that is unalterable during the period "for which he shall have been elected;" and it prohibits him within that period from receiving "any other Emolument" from either the federal government or the states.
The emoluments clauses of Constitution makes it pretty clear that the president shouldn't be getting ANY money - from foreign or domestic sources - other than his federal salary.
His ownership of some hotels and golf courses simply do not exempt him from the emoluments clauses of the Constitution.
Someone who pretends like they know so much about law and the Constitution should know that already - I shouldn't have to explain it to them.
"got any numbers behind this ludicrous assertion?"
Not yet - Congress hasn't concluded their investigation of US military flight crews spending the night at Rump's Turnberry Resort yet. It might take a while - Rump isn't known for releasing his business info to anyone.
ah, you've now morphed the whole argument
Andy Nap, the legal genius you who defer your entire mind to, said that the reason for the emoluments clause was "to prevent the president from being influenced by gifts or cash from foreign entities"
in the case of the G-7 summit that doesn't apply
the foreign entities had no discretion to avoid the expenditure
once, you've conceded that, we can move on to other discussions
but I haven't made any arguments about domestic emoluments so, right now, you're using the classic TTF straw man maneuver to disguise your previous erroneous assertion
"the legal genius you who defer your entire mind to"
Get a grip. Andy was quoted in one post by "It's about time someone mentioned emoluments", all of the other times he was quoted by your references to that post.
That doesn't make anyone's "entire mind" deferred to his "legal genius." And your obvious attempt to distract from your ignorance of emoluments laws doesn't mean the Rumpster wasn't trying to profit from foreigners coming to his hotel. That would be fine if he was just a businessman, but until he's impeached, or otherwise leaves office, that's a breach of at least one emolument law. That's something any Constitutional "Originalist" should know, and why politicians often set up blind trusts to handle their investments before they get into office.
A man wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap was arrested on Saturday after allegedly spraying bear repellant into a crowd of people protesting against President Donald Trump at the Santa Monica Pier in California.
NBC Los Angeles said five people were treated on-site, but no one was seriously injured at the pier, which is a popular tourist attraction featuring shops, restaurants and an amusement park. Bear repellents commonly include hot-pepper aerosol.
A police officer identified only as Sgt. D. Hicks told the Los Angeles Times the protesters were on the beach at first, but when they walked up onto the pier and encountered a group of Trump supporters, “everything went to crap.”
The footage was captured from several angles. One clip shows the suspect returning and appearing to spray again at someone who was already on the ground from the first dousing.
Bystanders brought the assailant to a police station, which was just steps away from the scene. KTLA identified him as 32-year-old David Nicholas Dempsey, who was booked on suspicion of illegal use of tear gas, assault with a caustic chemical and parole violations. The station said he was on parole from a weapons conviction.
Jail records from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department show Dempsey was being held without bail. He’s due in court on Tuesday.
Police are working to identify a second man ― described as older ― who also may have sprayed into the crowd, The Los Angeles Times reported.
In footage from the scene Dempsey can be heard telling police he was “attacked” by “libtards” and “flag-burning commies.” The crowd cheered as he was cuffed.
"Get a grip."
OK, got one. Your ignorance is so bombastic it could almost blow a man down.
"Andy was quoted in one post by "It's about time someone mentioned emoluments", all of the other times he was quoted by your references to that post."
and referred to repeatedly as someone who daren't be questioned by someone without his expertise
unfortunately for you, he explained his illogical position so it was easy to counter
"your obvious attempt to distract"
this is called projection
I stuck to the topic
it is you who have attempted to distract by trying to argue about a different type of emolument
it's a common TTF tactic
you'll feel better about yourself, and harbor less anger about the world in general, if you'll simply admit you were wrong
"That would be fine if he was just a businessman, but until he's impeached, or otherwise leaves office, that's a breach of at least one emolument law. That's something any Constitutional "Originalist" should know, and why politicians often set up blind trusts to handle their investments before they get into office."
Trump's sons run the business now
most politicians are lawyers and don't own businesses when they become president
we need to have successful businessmen run for office
Trump's sons manage the business while he's President
"A man wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap was arrested on Saturday after allegedly spraying bear repellant into a crowd of people protesting against President Donald Trump at the Santa Monica Pier in California."
a reprehensible act but what's your point?
anti-Trump "resisters" have trying to intimidate Trump supporters everywhere
they've created a politically divided nation
why don't you adopt a little patriotism and try to win the next election by rhetorical suasion rather than extra-democratic means?
"anti-Trump "resisters" have trying [sic] to intimidate Trump supporters everywhere"
Protesting is an American right - our country started out protesting - there was a whole big Tea Party incident - I'm sure you've heard of it.
It was the dude in the MAGA hat that did the intimidating - with bear spray. As always though, you tried to shift the blame to the innocent liberals. Or do you have some evidence the liberals were committing a crime we don't know about?
"they've created a politically divided nation"
No, that was Republicans - it really started to heat up when people like S. Palin started telling their supporters who "Real Americans" are - and that didn't include anyone who voted democrat, much less had some liberal ideas.
"it is you who have attempted to distract by trying to argue about a different type of emolument"
An emolument is an emolument whether it comes from a foreign source or a domestic one. They are both explicitly illegal in the Constitution. Emoluments are illegal, the source is irrelevant - unless you want to argue something like "extra-terrestrial" emoluments are fine because they somehow don't fall under the "foreign" category. You're trying to make a far bigger distinction between them to cover up your ignorance and failure to make a persuasive argument.
"why don't you adopt a little patriotism and try to win the next election by rhetorical suasion rather than extra-democratic means?"
You're projecting again here, and trying to change the subject.
But please, do tell us what "extra-democratic" means your twisted mind thinks I've employed - or will employ - to win the next election.
"Protesting is an American right - our country started out protesting - there was a whole big Tea Party incident - I'm sure you've heard of it."
I didn't say a word about protesting
I was talking about the intimidation the left has been employing
"As always though, you tried to shift the blame to the innocent liberals."
you talking about the liberals yelling death threats outside Mitch McConnell's house this summer because he wouldn't call Congress back into Session to consider an unconstitutional gun control bill
or the one that shot Steven Scalise?
or the crowd that got into a teenage tourist's face chanting and the innocent liberals in Hollywood were threatening to punch the kid out?
or when Susan Collins needed a police escort to get in her office during the Kavanaugh hearings?
"No, that was Republicans"
no, it was liberals
"An emolument is an emolument whether it comes from a foreign source or a domestic one."
yes it is but we were talking about foreign ones with Andy Nap saying the rationale is to prevent foreign interference
"But please, do tell us what "extra-democratic" means your twisted mind thinks I've employed - or will employ - to win the next election."
I didn't say you were doing it to win the next election
I said you were trying to overturn the previous election by means other than the next election
why don't you adopt a little patriotism and try to win the next election by rhetorical suasion rather than extra-democratic means
"why don't you adopt a little patriotism and try to win the next election by rhetorical suasion rather than extra-democratic means"
No problem!
Dems will win with our popular policies in 2020 just like we did in 2018.
Moscow Mitch will be able to retire to his homeland.
PRRI’s 10th annual 2019 American Values Survey released Monday paints a picture of a highly polarized electorate. Though health care is the highest rated issue overall (65 percent), followed by terrorism (54 percent), Democrats and Republicans do not share any of the top policy concerns. “Democrats are most likely to regard health care (77%) as critical. But Democrats rate climate change (72%) and foreign interference in presidential elections (63%) as the next most critical issues. By contrast, Republicans’ top three critical issues are terrorism (63%), immigration (60%), and crime (50%).”
Support for impeachment continues to increase, although the partisan divide is sharp. “Prior to the launch of the House impeachment inquiry, 47% of Americans said that Trump should be impeached and removed from office, compared to a majority (53%) of Americans who disagreed.” While “Republican white evangelical Protestants (99%) and Republicans who say Fox News is their primary source of news (98%) oppose Trump being impeached and removed from office,” an increasing share of Democrats and independents support impeachment and removal.
Trump is an effective party recruiter — for Democrats. “More than one in four (27%) say they have become more likely to think of themselves as Democrats, fewer than one in five (17%) say they have become more likely to think of themselves as independents, and only 13% report they have become more likely to think of themselves as Republicans.”
While Trump’s approval remains underwater, Democrats should exercise caution in their choice of a presidential nominee. “Almost two-thirds (65%) of Americans say they are certain about the candidate they will support in November 2020. Nearly four in ten (37%) say they will support the Democratic candidate over President Donald Trump no matter who the Democrat is, and nearly three in ten (28%) say they will support Donald Trump no matter who becomes the Democratic nominee. Notably, one-third (33%) of Americans say their vote will depend on who wins the Democratic primary.” Moreover, opposition to Trump is more intense and fixed than is his support, “with three in four (75%) saying there is almost nothing Trump could do to win their approval. … Americans who approve of Trump’s job performance are more open to the idea of changing their mind: Two-thirds (66%) say he could do something to lose their approval.”
The good news for Democrats is the high percentage of Americans overall who agree with their progressive policy stances — “making college tuition free at public institutions (68%), making recreational use of marijuana legal (67%), and a ‘Medicare for All’ plan that would replace private health insurance with government-backed health insurance coverage for all Americans (63%). About one in three Americans strongly favor each of these proposals.”
Right now, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leads the Democratic field in net favorability among Democrats and Democratic leaners with 55 percent. He is followed by former vice president Joe Biden with 46 percent and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) with 43 percent, then Sen. Kamala D. Harris (31 percent).
Whatever the issue (favorability, impeachment, personal conduct, stirring white nationalism), white evangelical Christians remain far more supportive of Trump than any other subset of the electorate. For example, “Nearly two-thirds (63%) of white evangelical Protestants say Trump has not damaged the dignity of the office. Majorities of all other major religious groups agree that Trump has damaged the dignity of the presidency.” Likewise, “Majorities of nearly every demographic group, with the exception of white evangelical Protestants and Republicans, say Trump’s conduct makes them less likely to support him.”
White evangelical Christians are much more likely to reflect male resentment (e.g., society is too feminine, society punishes men for being men) than any other group. In short, Trump (his personality, his prejudices, his anti-immigrant sentiment, his climate change denial, etc.) almost perfectly matches up with white evangelicals but runs counter to other groups in American society (e.g., nonwhites, non-Christians). His cultlike status among these voters contrasts with the animosity he engenders among most other segments of the population.
Opposition to child separation runs high (about 75 percent), although evangelicals are far less averse to it than are other Americans. “Nearly four in ten (39%) white evangelicals support this policy, compared to 57% who oppose this policy. By contrast, only 28% of white mainline Protestants, 22% of Hispanic Protestants and 18% of black Protestants.” A majority of Americans favor more restrictive immigration policies, but “white evangelical Protestants (85%) are more likely than white mainline Protestants (66%) to be in favor of placing restrictions on immigration, and both groups are remarkably more supportive of restrictive policies than are Hispanic Protestants (53%) and black Protestants (45%).” Big majorities think immigrants are hard-working and family-oriented, but white evangelicals are much less likely to believe so.
There are a few takeaways from the survey.
First, Trump (along with those who espouse his brand of right-wing nativism and know-nothingism) is hugely dependent on the overwhelming support of white evangelicals, but in doubling and tripling down on positions and conduct that pleases this core part of his base, he winds up turning off more of the electorate.
Second, that makes evangelicals out of step with the majority of Americans on everything from immigration to climate change to impeachment to beliefs about gender and race. If they feel like a minority on issues ranging from gender to climate change, they are. Their burning resentment toward “elites” masks a more fundamental alienation from a majority of all Americans.
Third, Trump and the GOP’s hyper-dependence on white evangelicals is an electoral problem, given the declining number of white evangelicals who are aging and seeing significant drop off among millennials. Each election it becomes harder to win outside deep red environs.
In sum, we may be “two Americas,” but they are not equal. Trump and Republicans’ segment is smaller than the rest and is shrinking over time. Republicans are playing a losing hand as the electorate as a whole becomes more diverse and identifies with progressives on policy and cultural issues. It turns out, math matters.
"you talking about the liberals yelling death threats..."
No, I was referring to the dude with the bear spray and MAGA hat, to which you replied:
"a reprehensible act but what's your point?
anti-Trump "resisters" have trying to intimidate Trump supporters everywhere"
One might assume that you had managed to stay on topic for a few microseconds, but no, the next chance you get you bring up a whole bunch of unrelated incidents as a distraction. I can do that too... let's talk about Timothy McVeigh's right wing proclivities and bombing, or the alt-right's "Jews will not replace us" tour while we're at it.
"yes it is but we were talking about foreign ones with Andy Nap saying the rationale is to prevent foreign interference"
In the grand scheme of things, Andy's reference to foreign rather than domestic emoluments in his discussion is irrelevant, but keep harping on it if you think it's distracting anyone from realizing the Rumpster really wanted to violate the law by hosting foreign guests at a hotel he owns.
"I didn't say you were doing it to win the next election"
Really?
Because anyone can look up what you (or your sock puppet) typed in at 10:12AM today:
"why don't you adopt a little patriotism and try to win the next election by rhetorical suasion rather than extra-democratic means?"
The only previous use of "overturn" in this thread was 10 days ago, and that wasn't part of this little tit-for-tat.
It must be hard keeping all your stories straight when you're spinning around so much.
And then you restate the 10:12AM blurb again at 2:11PM, but without the question mark: (Punctuation is SOOOO hard!)
"why don't you adopt a little patriotism and try to win the next election by rhetorical suasion rather than extra-democratic means"
It looks like your Wheel of Conservative Talking Points has gotten really small, or you forgot to spin it again.
But here on the Price is Right, you get to spin again!!!!!
(audience clapping)
Try again spinmeister!
The Shakedown
On September 25, the White House released a record of President Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, which paints a damning picture of Trump abusing his office by pressing a foreign government to interfere in our 2020 elections.
President Trump has betrayed his oath of office, betrayed our national security and be- trayed the integrity of our elections for his own personal political gain.
“I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine.... I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal neces- sarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.”
In President Trump's Own Words:
“I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine.... I wouldn’t say that it’s reciprocal necessarily because things are happening that are not good but the United States has been very very good to Ukraine.”
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.”
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.”
“I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I’m sure you will figure it out.”
The Pressure Campaign
"As I said on the phone, I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign." -- U.S. Ambassador Bill Taylor
In recent weeks, the nation has learned more about how President Trump abused the power of the presidency by using multiple levers of government – from Vice President Pence to the State Department, including Secretary Mike Pompeo, Ambassador Gordon Sondland, and Ambassador Kurt Volker – to advance a scheme to undermine our 2020 elections for his political gain, and then to obstruct the congressional inquiry into that scheme.
Vice President Pence is entangled in this scandal. According to press reports, in Sep- tember, Pence met with Ukrainian President Zelensky in Poland and “conveyed the news that hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid to Ukraine was not going to be released amid concerns about the country’s lagging efforts to combat corruption.” The withhol- ding of aid may have been an effort to pressure Ukraine into announcing investigations into President Trump’s 2020 political rival to help the president’s reelection...
...Secretary Pompeo was a fact witness to President Trump’s stunning abuse of power. The Secretary listened to the July 25 phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky in which Trump pressed the Ukrainian leader to interfere in our 2020 election by opening these sham investigations. Secretary Pompeo appears to have said nothing to stop President Trump from this inappropriate pressure campaign.
Text messages between Ambassadors Kurt Volker, Gordon Sondland and Bill Taylor paint the picture of a President who waged a months-long pressure campaign to shake down Ukraine for his own personal political gain, potentially using a White House presidential visit and critical military assistance to Ukraine as leverage:
The Text Messages Between U.S. Officials:
State Department officials discuss a White House visit in exchange for a Ukraine statement:
[8/9/19, 5:35:53 PM] Gordon Sondland: Morrison ready to get dates as soon as Yermak confirms.
[8/9/19, 5:46:21 PM] Kurt Volker: Excellent!!! How did you sway him? :)
[8/9/19, 5: 47:34 PM] Gordon Sondland: Not sure i did. I think potus really wants the deliverable.
Concerns About Ukraine Becoming an “Instrument” in U.S. Politics:
[7/21/19, 1:45:54 AM] Bill Taylor: Gordon, one thing Kurt and I talked about yesterday was Sasha Danyliuk’s point that President Zelenskyy is sensitive about Ukraine being taken seriously, not merely as an instrument in Washington domestic, reelection politics.
[7/21/19, 4:45:44 AM] Gordon Sondland: Absolutely, but we need to get the conversa- tion started and the relationship built, irrespective of the pretext. I am worried about the alternative.
Ambassador Taylor Sought Clarification and Expressed Concerns About Withhol- ding U.S. Military Assistance in Exchange for Launching an Investigation:
[9/1/19, 12:08:57 PM] Bill Taylor: Are we now saying that security assistance and WH meeting are conditioned on investigations?
[9/1/19, 12:42:29 PM] Gordon Sondland: Call me
...
[9/9/19, 12:37:16 AM] Gordon Sondland: Bill, I never said I was “right”. I said we are where we are and believe we have identified the best pathway forward. Lets hope it works.
[9/9/19, 12:47:11 AM] Bill Taylor: As I said on the phone, I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.
The Cover Up
The President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election... I am concerned these actions pose risks to U.S. national security...” -- Unclassified Whistleblower Complaint
On September 26, the House Intelligence Committee released the redacted version of a whistleblower complaint filed with the Intelligence Community Inspector vGene- ral, which the IG found to be of “urgent concern” and “credible.”..
...The White House’s record of the July 25 presidential call between Presidents Trump and Zelensky corroborates allegations made in the whistleblower complaint, in particu- lar that President Trump betrayed his oath of office by using the U.S. government and outside actors to advance his scheme to shake down the Ukrainian government to inter- fere in the 2020 elections.
The Whistleblower Complaint States:
“I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. ... The President’ s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.”
“I am also concerned that these actions pose risks to U.S. national security and undermine the U.S. Government’s efforts to deter and counter foreign interference in U.S. elections.”
“[S]enior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call... the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system... used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”
“One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective.”
## #
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump rejected suggestions Monday that hosting the G-7 summit of world leaders at his resort in Doral, Florida, would have run afoul of the U.S. Constitution.
Speaking to reporters in the White House Cabinet Room, Trump dismissed as “phony” a section of the Constitution that bars federal office holders from accepting gifts from foreign governments.
“You people with this phony Emoluments Clause,” he said.
Trumps remarks came as he was chiding Democrats for pushing back against his decision to host the G-7 at his Doral resort.
Democrats and some Republicans, as well as government watchdogs, decried the administration's decision to award the event to one of the president's properties. Under pressure, Trump announced Saturday on Twitter that he was reversing his decision to host the summit at Doral, suggesting Camp David could serve as an alternative site.
...The Emoluments Clause is an anti-bribery provision that forbids any U.S. president from receiving gifts from foreign leaders and is derived from the Latin word “emolumentum,” meaning “profit” or “gain.”
The Emoluments Clause is Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution. It prohibits any “Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States]” from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
In July, a three-judge of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit from Maryland and the District of Columbia that alleged Trump violated the Emoluments Clause by benefiting from his business while in office. The full appeals court, however, agreed last week to rehear the case.
The suit challenged the financial benefits Trump has reaped from government entities patronizing his businesses while he is president, pointing in particular to government bookings at his Trump International Hotel, a few blocks from the White House.
Its a great day in Canada :)
The liberals and NDP have a majority government between them. That means four more years of good government in Canada!
The Republican party was actually leading in the polls by 1% but in the end Canadians saw through their attempts to gaslight us. As has been the case for decades now, 2/3rds of Canadians voted for a liberal party.
Yeee Hawww!!!
Liberals win in Canada while the House GOP failed to get enough votes to censure Adam Schiff on The day that Irony died
"...Don Jr. and Eric, who owe everything they have to family money and favoritism, spoke out against nepotism — in the Biden family.
Surrounded by loving admirers, irony finally succumbed at 6:22 p.m. Monday, when Republicans attempted to force a vote in the House censuring Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and claiming the leader of the impeachment inquiry “misled the American people.”
So, after defending President Trump through 13,435 false or misleading statements as of last week (by The Post Fact Checker’s tally), Republicans are now thoroughly outraged because they think somebody misrepresented something Trump said..."
The bigger the liar, the more the GOP likes him.
The U.S. diplomat who called President Donald Trump's demand for Ukraine to investigate political rival Joe Biden in exchange for military aid "crazy" is set to testify Tuesday in the House impeachment inquiry. William Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, said in a Sept. 9 text to Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union: "As I said on the phone, I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign," Taylor said.
"No problem!"
such denial
if you're a TTF-style Dem, you have nothing but trouble
"Dems will win with our popular policies in 2020 just like we did in 2018."
if you're talking about the policies articulated in the Dem debates so far, I'd like to encourage Dems to keep pushing them
pretty please
"Moscow Mitch will be able to retire to his homeland."
so sad how Dems focus on Russia as primary enemy
news flash: they aren't that powerful - China is the biggest threat to the free world
"While Trump’s approval remains underwater, Democrats should exercise caution in their choice of a presidential nominee. “Almost two-thirds (65%) of Americans say they are certain about the candidate they will support in November 2020. Nearly four in ten (37%) say they will support the Democratic candidate over President Donald Trump no matter who the Democrat is, and nearly three in ten (28%) say they will support Donald Trump no matter who becomes the Democratic nominee. Notably, one-third (33%) of Americans say their vote will depend on who wins the Democratic primary.” Moreover, opposition to Trump is more intense and fixed than is his support, “with three in four (75%) saying there is almost nothing Trump could do to win their approval. … Americans who approve of Trump’s job performance are more open to the idea of changing their mind: Two-thirds (66%) say he could do something to lose their approval.”"
when they vote, it will be a choice and not an endorsement
"Right now, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leads the Democratic field in net favorability among Democrats and Democratic leaners with 55 percent."
I'd like to encourage Dems to nominate him
pretty please
"Whatever the issue (favorability, impeachment, personal conduct, stirring white nationalism), white evangelical Christians remain far more supportive of Trump than any other subset of the electorate."
funny how you just toss "white nationalism" is there
perfect example of propaganda
evangelical voters, of any race, do not support "white nationalism"
indeed, it's not a significant force in America, representing a microscopic speck of a fringe, rounding to zero
America is a land of remarkable racial harmony, despite Dem efforts to stir up racism
"Trump and the GOP’s hyper-dependence on white evangelicals is an electoral problem, given the declining number of white evangelicals who are aging and seeing significant drop off among millenials. Each election it becomes harder to win outside deep red environs."
actually, no
evangelicals are more likely to vote than other groups
evangelicals will vote for Trump until a pro-life Dem gets nominated
such people used to exist
"One might assume that you had managed to stay on topic for a few microseconds,"
there was a post about some trump supporter doing something reprehensible
that would only be relevant here if you are saying that is typical of trump supporters and my point was that it is much more typical of Dem resisters
"In the grand scheme of things, Andy's reference to foreign rather than domestic emoluments in his discussion is irrelevant, but keep harping on it"
I responded to a post of "Andy's" comments by saying he was wrong
you've said he was right and then changed the subject
admit he was wrong and we can move on
"if you think it's distracting anyone from realizing the Rumpster really wanted to violate the law by hosting foreign guests at a hotel he owns."
"Andy" explained the reason for the emoluments clause and he didn't apply to trump's action
"Really?
Because anyone can look up what you (or your sock puppet) typed in at 10:12AM today:
"why don't you adopt a little patriotism and try to win the next election by rhetorical suasion rather than extra-democratic means?""
out of context
why don't you adopt a little patriotism and try to win the next election by rhetorical suasion rather than extra-democratic means?
"there was a post about some trump supporter doing something reprehensible
that would only be relevant here if you are saying that is typical of trump supporters and my point was that it is much more typical of Dem resisters"
Yes, every bad thing that any single left-leaning person does is "typical of Dem resistors."
You've made your point quite well - hundreds of right-wingers can go marching at night with tiki lamps shouting "Jews will not replace us" and it's dismissed with comments like "it's not a significant force in America, representing a microscopic speck of a fringe, rounding to zero"
But a dude with a MAGA hat bear-spraying a crowd of people is "much more typical of Dem resisters"
It's obvious how you like to slime dems and liberals with broad generalizations and minimize all real harm done by rabid right-wingers by dismissing it as tiny, inconsequential, and statistically insignificant
But as of this past August, once again, right-wingers have been responsible for more deaths in this country than Jihadists:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/right-wing-terrorist-killings-government-focus-jihadis-islamic-radicalism.html
Aug 15, 2019 an excerpt:
When a white supremacist gunman killed more than 20 people at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart on Saturday, he claimed a dubious honor for his cause: Right-wing terrorism is once again responsible for more deaths on U.S. soil (107) than jihadi terrorism (104) since 9/11, according to data collected by New America. (In fact, right-wing violence had been responsible for more deaths for most of this period, but jihadis had been responsible for more since the Pulse nightclub shooting of 2016.)
Patrick Crusius’ attack itself was especially bloody, the most lethal right-wing attack since Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people. But the El Paso killings were a continuation of a bloody series of attacks in recent years, including the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the 2015 attack on a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, which killed 11 and nine people, respectively. And such high-profile attacks are few compared with regular incidents of low-level harassment and violence against blacks, Jews, Muslims, and other minorities...
But right-wing terrorism itself is changing. Part of it is 9/11 itself. The attacks highlighted fears of Muslims and gave far-right groups more credibility in their claims to be defending Christian civilization. Each jihadi attack, including highly publicized attacks abroad like the 2015 Paris killings by ISIS, bolstered their claim and created a cycle of recruitment and radicalization.
The rise of Trump both reflected the greater radicalization of right-wing voices and heightened it. Trump rode to power in part on anti-immigrant and racist sentiments. At the same time, he elevated these concerns, with a regular track record of racist statements and hostility to Mexicans and other immigrants. Many white supremacists embraced Trump. Radicalization expert J.M. Berger found that the top hashtag for the alt-right is #MAGA.
In contrast, jihadi terrorists do not have an ideology linked to any large political movement in the United States. There is no “Americans for sharia,” and those arrested for jihadi-related violence are not associated with any large movements. The American Muslim community is hostile to violence and regularly cooperates with law enforcement.
At the same time as it has claimed a champion in Trump, the white supremacist movement has globalized. In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in Norway, mostly youths associated with a left-leaning political party. Before his shooting spree, Breivik posted a manifesto warning of the dangers posed by Muslims and liberals, among other enemies. In March 2019, Brenton Tarrant killed 51 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand. Like Breivik, he posted a manifesto and even live-streamed his attack in an attempt to gain internet immortality. Both killers drew on “thinkers” and grievances from other countries and causes, presenting themselves as defenders of global European white civilization...
...Much of what explains why right-wing terrorism is so deadly while jihad at home is less bloody than expected is because of the government response and that of other important actors. The FBI devotes far fewer resources to right-wing terrorism than it does jihadi terrorism, and programs for countering violence extremism also focus largely on jihadis. Most social media companies are aggressive in trying to get jihadis off their platforms. They are far more cautious, however, when it comes to white supremacists, fearing political backlash. Legally, federal counterterrorism officials have far more power to go after those associated with international terrorist groups than they do for domestic terrorist groups, no matter how lethal. However, as terrorism expert Clint Watts points out, there is far more political attention in Congress to black identity movements and the left-wing antifa—neither of which pose remotely the danger of white supremacists—because of their political orientation.
"out of context"
No. The post is up there for all to see.
You just ran out of excuses.
"The American Muslim community is hostile to violence and regularly cooperates with law enforcement."
A manufacturing recession may already be under way in vulnerable swing states, challenging President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to deliver blue collar jobs to his base.
Out of the 21 states with manufacturing job losses so far this year, some of those experiencing the greatest percentage declines are states where Trump won by less than 5 percentage points. In Pennsylvania the manufacturing sector lost 8,100 jobs, in North Carolina it was 7,700 from that sector, and Wisconsin lost 6,500 jobs.
The closure of Wood-Mode, a 77-year-old family-owned factory among the farmland of rural Kreamer, Pennsylvania, was responsible for over 900 of the manufacturing jobs lost in that state this year, one of the most by a single company.
Manufacturing jobs in states Trump won by less than 5 percent
Change in jobs from January to September 2019
Arizona +6500
Florida +5000
Michigan -4700
N. Carolina -7700
Pennsylvania -8100
Wisconsin -6500...
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "I think it was last year around this time that Priya had a mental breakdown here on the blog and was saying that those disagreed with Priya here had caused the breakdown"
Lol, you'd really like to re-write that history, wouldn't you. The internet is forever and any one can go back and see your out of control rage and my reasonableness.
The truth is it was Wyatt/Regina who had the mental breakdown - they were in a rage and bringing the crazy, you can see for yourself here at May 30, 2019 8:56 PM.
They were ranting about how a little old lady in Saskatchewan was causing a global uproar with her thoughtful postings on a small Washington blog and "every law enforcement agency in the world has her on a watch list!!!".
Lol, oh dear!
The senior U.S. diplomat in Ukraine said Tuesday he was told release of military aid was contingent on public declarations from Ukraine that it would investigate the Bidens and the 2016 election, contradicting President Trump’s denial that he used the money as leverage for political gain.
Acting ambassador William B. Taylor Jr. testified behind closed doors in the House impeachment probe of Trump that he stands by his characterization that it was “crazy” to make the assistance contingent on investigations he found troubling.
Upon arriving in Kyiv last spring he became alarmed by secondary diplomatic channels involving U.S. officials that he called “weird,” Taylor said, according to a copy of his lengthy opening statement obtained by The Washington Post.
Taylor walked lawmakers through a series of conversations he had with other U.S. diplomats who were trying to obtain what one called the “deliverable” of Ukrainian help investigating Trump’s political rivals.
Taylor said he spoke to Ambassador Gordon Sondland, the U.S. envoy to the European Union.
“During that phone call, Amb. Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President [Volodymyr] Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election,” Taylor said in the statement.
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter had been a board member of Burisma, a large Ukrainian gas company. Joe Biden is a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
“Amb. Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelensky was dependent on a public announcement of investigations — in fact, Amb. Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance,’” Taylor told House investigators.
“He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.’
Taylor was called to testify before committees considering whether to impeach Trump because he had raised alarms about Trump administration interactions with Zelensky.
“It was just the most damning testimony I’ve heard,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said in an interview partway into Taylor’s testimony.
Taylor’s testimony had been expected to fill in some blanks about the activities of U.S. officials who appear to have sought Ukrainian help at the behest of Trump and his personal attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani.
At issue is whether the White House conditioned military aid and a meeting between the two presidents on Zelensky’s cooperation....
Trump retreats to Fox News for his 13th Hannity interview
Fox has accounted for 79% of all his (rump's) nationally televised interviews so far in 2019 and 70% of all such interviews of his presidency.
RCP Average 10/1 - 10/21 Support 50.4 Oppose 43.4 Spread Support +7.0
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Hunter tried to pocket a quick $1.5 billion from some Chinese investment fund."
This is the perfect example of the profound dishonesty of Wyatt and Regina Hardiman. The 1.5 billion went to the investment fund, not to Hunter Biden. Hunter Biden was a volunteer on the investment fund board and never got one thin dime from his work there.
And yet Trump and Wyatt and Regina are going around loudly and falsely claiming Hunter was given 1.5 billion when in fact he got NOTHING.
There's the truth, and then there's the absurd assertions of Republicans like Wyatt and Regina that don't even slightly resemble the truth.
They've been lying like this on this blog for two decades now. And they have the nerve to think they are morally superior to harmless lgbt people. If society has to choose between criminalizing the innocent or massive liars I know which I'm going to pick.
"RCP Average 10/1 - 10/21 Support 50.4 Oppose 43.4 Spread Support +7.0"
supporting an inquiry is not the same as supporting impeachment, is it?
how many support investigating the Bidens conflict of interest in Ukraine?
how many support investigating Hillary's hiring a foreign spy to manufacture a false narrative against Trump?
"how many support investigating the Bidens conflict of interest in Ukraine?
how many support investigating Hillary's hiring a foreign spy to manufacture a false narrative against Trump?"
Let us know how many polling places you find even bother to ask your stupid questions.
WASHINGTON – William Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, testified Tuesday before congressional committees conducting an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
According to Taylor, Trump's allies made it clear last year that aid to Ukraine and a White House meeting between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky would be conditioned on the opening of an investigation into a Ukrainian energy company. Former Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter was once a board member of that company.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said Taylor's opening statement drew a "direct line" between releasing the monetary aid and the opening of investigations into the Bidens. The allegation that Trump used his office to pressure Ukraine is what kicked off the impeachment investigation.
Taylor's 15-page opening statement was described as "explosive" by Democratic members of Congress present for his testimony. Republicans, on the other hand, said there was "nothing new."
Here are the key takeaways from Taylor's opening statement, obtained by the Associated Press and a source familiar with the statement confirmed its authenticity to USA TODAY.
'Two channels' of U.S. policymaking in Ukraine
According to Taylor, there were "two channels" of policymaking in Ukraine. One channel was the official State Department channel. The other involved other American officials and Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
"There was an irregular, informal channel of U.S. policy-making with respect to Ukraine, one which included then-Special Envoy Kurt Volker, Ambassador (Gordon) Sondland, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and as I subsequently learned, Mr. Giuliani," Taylor told congressional members and staff.
Taylor said the irregular channel began in May 2019 after an American delegation returned from Ukraine.
Taylor says he was told a White House meeting with Zelensky would be conditioned on the opening of investigations
Taylor said "during my subsequent conversations with Ambassadors Volker and Sondland, they relayed to me that the President 'wanted to hear from Zelenskyy' before scheduling the meeting in the Oval Office."
"By mid-July it was becoming clear to me that the meeting President Zelenskyy wanted was conditioned on the investigations of Burisma and Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections," Taylor said. "It was also clear that this condition was driven by the irregular policy channel I had come to understand was guided by Mr. Giuliani."
John Bolton called the situation a 'drug deal'
Taylor describes a July 19 phone conversation with National Security Council staffers Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman about a meeting they had with Ukrainian officials on July 10. Hill has already testified before the committees, and Vindman is scheduled to do so.
"They told me that Ambassador Sondland had connected 'investigations' with an Oval Office meeting for President Zelenskyy, which so irritated Ambassador Bolton that he abruptly ended the meeting, telling Dr. Hill and Mr. Vindman that they should have nothing to do with domestic politics," Taylor said. "He also directed Dr. Hill to 'brief the lawyers.' Dr. Hill said that Ambassador Bolton referred to this as a 'drug deal' after the July 10 meeting."
Bolton also thought a call between Trump and Zelenskyy would be a "disaster" and opposed it, according to Taylor...
...Taylor contacted Secretary of State Pompeo but didn't get a response
Taylor said that on Aug. 29, he sent a cable to the State Department expressing his concerns about the withholding of aid to Ukraine, but never heard back. At the time, Taylor was not yet aware that the withholding of aid might be tied to investigations.
"Ambassador Bolton recommended that I send a first-person cable to Secretary Pompeo directly, relaying my concerns. I wrote and transmitted such a cable on August 29, describing the "folly" I saw in withholding military aid to Ukraine...I told the Secretary I could not and would not defend such a policy," Taylor said. "Although I received no specific response, I heard that soon thereafter, the Secretary carried the cable with him to a meeting at the White House focused on security assistance for Ukraine."
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told ABC's "This Week" on Oct. 20 that he "never saw" the withholding of aid as tied to the opening of investigations.
Taylor was told aid would be conditioned on investigations
Taylor said he was not aware security assistance would be conditioned on investigations until Sept. 1, when he discussed the issue with Tim Morrison, a National Security Council staffer.
Taylor said Morrison described a conversation between Sondland and adviser to the Ukrainian president Andriy Yermak in Warsaw, Poland.
"Ambassador Sondland told Mr. Yermak that the security assistance money would not come until President Zelenskyy committed to pursue the Burisma investigation," Taylor said.
That same day, Taylor texted Sondland to ask if security assistance and a White House meeting were being conditioned on investigations, to which Sondland replied asking Taylor to call him.
"During that phone call, Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election," Taylor said. If Ukraine did not do that, there would be a "stalemate."
"Let us know how many polling places you find even bother to ask your stupid questions."
how sad that liberals believe media bias reinforces their point of view
bias is simply bias
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous claim to be christians but they break one of their god's ten commandments without restraint - thou shalt not lie.
Look at all of Wyatt/Regina's posts attacking gays. You have to wonder why they are so obsessed with people who have no effect on their lives.
Wyatt/Regina, did you two meet at a "pray away the gay" camp?
That would explain a lot. No completely heterosexual person cares about gays being gay.
The world is bursting at the seams from exponential human population growth and Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous are trying to justify persecuting gays based on the deadly idea that humans should procreate as much as possible.
The earth's resources are finite, you two. You do know what "finite" means, don't you? Because your constant push for reckless procreation suggests you don't.
WASHINGTON – Add a prestigious $1 million "thinkers" award to Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's fame and fortune.
The 2019 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture is given annually to "thinkers whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world."
Ginsburg, 86, who has served 26 years on the Supreme Court and survived four bouts with cancer, was chosen from more than 500 nominees, later winnowed down to five. She is the fourth recipient of the prize and the third woman.
The organization said Ginsburg will direct the prize money to charitable or non-profit organizations of her choice.
“I am delighted the jury has chosen to honor such a prolific leader in the field of jurisprudence," said philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen, founder and chairman of the Berggruen Institute, which seeks to shape political, economic, and social institutions.
"Throughout her career, Ginsburg has used the law to advance ethical and philosophical principles of equality and human rights as basic tenets of the USA. Her contributions have shaped our way of life and way of thinking and have demonstrated to the world the importance of the rule of law in disabling discrimination.”
The group cited Ginsburg's work in the 1970s with the Women's Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. From that perch she brought six cases to the Supreme Court that advanced the cause of gender equality.
In recent years, Ginsburg has become a cultural icon, the subject of an Academy Award-nominated documentary and a feature-length film as well as books, bobbleheads and workout regimens.
On Monday in California, in fact, Ginsburg told an audience at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law that she never stopped working out, even during her recent bouts with lung and pancreatic cancer.
I bet Rump can't plank like Ruth can:
https://finance.yahoo.com/video/photo-ruth-bader-ginsburg-planking-183418858.html
The Trump administration has sought repeatedly to cut foreign aid programs tasked with combating corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere overseas, White House budget documents show, despite recent claims from President Trump and his administration that they have been singularly concerned with fighting corruption in Ukraine.
Those claims have come as the president and his administration sought to explain away a July phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump pressured his counterpart to open investigations into Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and into a debunked conspiracy theory involving a hacked Democratic National Committee computer server.
“I don’t care about politics, but I do care about corruption. And this whole thing is about corruption,” Trump told reporters earlier this month when discussing the Ukraine issue. “This whole thing — this whole thing is about corruption.”[.....even though I have repeatedly cut foreign aid programs tasked with combating corruption in Ukraine and elsewhere.]...
“Numbers don’t lie,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “It’s even more clear now that President Trump is not the anti-corruption crusader he claims to be. The House impeachment inquiry must continue unimpeded so all the facts can come out.”
The administration’s professed interest in fighting corruption in Ukraine has not been reflected in its annual budget requests to Congress.
For example, the administration sought to cut a program called International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement. Among the goals of the program, as described in White House budget documents, is “helping U.S. partners address threats to U.S. interests by building resilience and promoting reform in the justice and law enforcement sectors through support to new institutions and specialized offices, such as Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau and Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.”
The program directs specific sums of money to individual countries. In 2019, $30 million was directed to Ukraine, after Congress rejected an administration request to cut the sum to $13 million. In its 2020 budget request, released in March, the administration again sought to cut the program’s spending on Ukraine to $13 million. Congress seems likely to once again reject the proposed cut...
Continues at https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/10/23/trump-administration-sought-billions-dollars-cuts-programs-aimed-fighting-corruption-ukraine-abroad/
Make no doubt about it, when Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous says "Gayness doesn't produce life and shouldn't be preferenced" what they really mean is that gays shouldn't have equal rights.
What they mean is that gays should be treated in the U.S. as they are in Russia where gays don't have a right to free speech and this is used to make being gay illegal for all practical intents and purposes.
When a gay paramedic saves someone's life I'd say that person HAS "produced life" contrary to Wyatt/Regina's lie. And gays deserve the same rights Wyatt/Regina have.
We don't deny rights to infertile heterosexual couples and they don't "produce life".
Its always a double standard with right wing authoritarians like Wyatt/Regina and the American evangelical leadership:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
Make no mistake about it, when Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous says "heterosexuality is how life is perpetuated and it has a privileged status" what they really mean is "Gays should be punished and forced to live in the shadows".
Give it a rest, guys. Human population growth is exponential - the last thing we need now is to encourage humanity to breed more.
It is immoral for a heterosexual couple to have more than 2.1 children.
If there was any doubt that Trump demanded a quid pro quo in that notorious phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Taylor put that to rest. He started his job at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv — technically as interim chargé d'affaires — in June of this year and immediately found that Ukraine policy was running on two tracks, one of them official and the other "highly irregular." That one was led by Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, with the assistance of U.S. ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, special Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker and Energy Secretary Rick Perry (who actually called themselves "the Three Amigos.")
At first they seemed to be heading in the same direction but by July Taylor knew that something was up. Zelensky was desperate for a meeting with Trump, preferably at the White House, and Taylor learned that it was "conditioned on the investigations of Burisma [the company that employed Hunter Biden] and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections."
Taylor added important new information about that demand:
"Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognized that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukrainian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelensky was dependent on a public announcement of investigations — in fact, Ambassador Sondland said, “everything” was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance. He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky “in a public box” by making a public statement about ordering such investigations."...
As it became obvious that Trump was withholding nearly $400 million in military aid in exchange for these public statements and bogus investigations, Taylor became even more alarmed. He said that both Sondland and Volcker at different times explained that "when a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check." From Taylor's opening statement:
"I argued to both that the explanation made no sense: the Ukrainians did not “owe” President Trump anything, and holding up security assistance for domestic political gain was “crazy,” as I had said in my text message to Ambassadors Sondland and Volker on September 9."
Taylor backed up the testimony of former National Security Council official Fiona Hill, who has testified that former national security adviser John Bolton didn't want anything to do with what he called Giuliani's "drug deal" and opposed the phone call between Trump and Zelensky because it would be "a disaster." Bolton told Taylor to inform Pompeo of his concerns, which he did, in a detailed cable. He never heard back.
Taylor's testimony, combined with that of all the others who were involved in Ukraine policy last summer, shows that after successfully obstructing the Mueller investigation and rendering the prosecutors unable to find enough evidence to prove a conspiracy in 2016, Trump believed he could get away with anything. The frightening part is that if it hadn't been for the as-yet-unidentified whistleblower, he very likely would have.
We know that Trump currently has his attorney general running all over the world looking for evidence outside the usual law enforcement channels to prove the Russia investigation never should have happened. How many other "irregular" projects do you suppose he's been running? I suspect the answer lies in that super-secret vault with all the other phone calls nobody is allowed to see.
What do super-secret papers in vault have in common with Nixon's White House tapes?
Compare for yourselves Inside the Supreme Court ruling that made Nixon turn over his Watergate tapes
This new ad from Republicans for the Rule of Law will be promoted digitally and will air on Fox and Friends on TV: Career diplomat Bill Taylor's testimony highlights President Trump's abuse of power, and the fact that the president has broken his promise to put our country first.
See it here:
https://tinyurl.com/y4exap9n
Or here if you prefer:
https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1186806866434809859?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1186806866434809859&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fopinions%2F2019%2F10%2F23%2Ffree-advice-compelling-ad-democrats-impeachment%2F
Mother Jones reports: “Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) released evidence on Tuesday that the Justice Department buried the whistleblower complaint about President Donald Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president by failing to refer the matter to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Klobuchar suggested the Justice Department violated a longstanding agreement between the agencies to share information about possible campaign finance violations for potential enforcement action.
To recap: The whistleblower complaint at the heart of the impeachment inquiry didn’t just contain evidence that the president pressured a foreign government to help him win reelection. It also contained evidence of a potential campaign finance violation. When President Trump asked for dirt on his political opponent, he likely illegally solicited a “thing of value” from a foreign national.
In August, Justice Department officials decided that rather than turn the whistleblower complaint over to Congress, department lawyers would assess the allegations against Trump, including evidence that the president had broken campaign finance law. After what news reports described as a cursory review, the department declined to launch a criminal investigation, finding that Trump had not asked for a “thing of value.” This was a stretch; campaign finance experts generally agree that opposition research damaging to an opponent, which campaigns can pay a lot of money for, is clearly valuable. The FEC also considers it a “thing of value.” Nevertheless, the department lawyers declared the matter case closed."
Trump nemesis Ellen Weintraub, democratic FEC Chairwoman, was involved….
“On October 18, the commission’s Democratic chair, Ellen Weintraub, confirmed to Klobuchar that the FEC had not been notified. “The refusal to inform the FEC and refer the matter regarding the President’s call to the FEC as required to do, as the Justice Department is required, undermines our campaign finance system and is unacceptable in a democracy,” Klobuchar said in Tuesday statement.”
Laurence Tribe✔
@tribelaw
Poetic justice: By declining to investigate as a crime what Taylor is now reporting, Barr thought he was protecting his boss. In fact, he gave up the chance to say Congress can’t look into this stuff because DOJ is doing so! If he had half a brain, Trump would be pissed!
6:16 PM - Oct 22, 2019
In June, Texas state House Speaker Dennis Bonnen had a meeting with far-right conservative activist Michael Quinn Sullivan. In July, Sullivan revealed that the meeting had happened. He also alleged that Bonnen had asked him to help win in 2020, offering Sullivan’s media organization access to the lower chambers of the state House if Sullivan would help oust 10 Republican state officials. Sullivan threatened to release an audio recording he made of the meeting, and Texas Rangers were asked to open an investigation into the alleged bit of corruption. Speaker Bonnen has maintained he is innocent of any crimes and called for Sullivan to release the audio for the last few months.
Sullivan, for his part, said he was wary of releasing the audio for fear it would hurt Republicans running this November. On October 15, Sullivan released a recording of the secret meeting, allowing Bonnen’s own words to sink him. Besides Bonnen’s clear quid pro quo offer, he also can be heard disparaging both Republicans and Democratic members of the legislature.
"Bonnen also made derogatory statements about North Texas Democratic Reps. Ana-Maria Ramos and Michelle Beckley and Houston Rep. Jon Rosenthal during the meeting.
He said that Rosenthal is a “piece of [expletive],” and that Bonnen’s chief of staff, Gavin Massingill, said, “His wife is going to be really pissed when she learns he’s gay.” He calls Beckley “vile” and Ramos “awful.”"
On Monday it was reported that five senior members of the state’s Republican House announced that they could no longer support Bonnen. State Reps. Four Price, Dan Huberty, Lyle Larson, Chris Paddie and John Frullo released a statement saying “As long-serving members of the Texas House, we informed Speaker Bonnen earlier today that we no longer support him as our Speaker.”
On Tuesday, Bonnen announced that he would not seek reelection in 2020. This would mark the first time in 22 years.
“After much prayer, consultation, and thoughtful consideration with my family, it is clear that I can no longer seek re-election as State Representative of District 25, and subsequently, as Speaker of the House,” Bonnen, who is from Angleton, said in a statement, which included a list of 43 House Republicans — a majority of the House GOP Caucus — that the speaker said "have made clear that it is in the best interest of both myself and the House to move on."
Much of these backroom shenanigans have been driven by the anxiety Republicans feel since last November’s blue wave elections. Cracks inside of the GOP seems to have led Bonnen’s move to rig the deck. Of course, he also has a president who leads by corrupt example.
And hooray for Ryan Zimmerman!!
HOUSTON — The moment hit Ryan Zimmerman as he rounded the bases. The original Washington National had just moonshot a home run off the best pitcher in baseball to tally the franchise’s first run in World Series history. He had been with this team for every topsy-turvy twist. He’d endured the 100-loss seasons. He’d played for eight managers. He’d watched a franchise savior come and go. He’d suffered all the playoff heartbreaks, lived and relived them in every excruciating detail. He’d always packed up his locker too early.
Then, one Tuesday night in October, on a baseball field in Houston, having nudged his team further from a clubhouse clean-out and closer to a parade, it all rushed back.
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