What Do They Want?
So here's my question -- what do they want? We know what Democrats want. They want cheaper, better, or even free health care. Affordable and good education. They want lawful, regulated, and fair immigration. Equal treatment for all citizens regardless of who they are. Everybody votes. They want to promote democratic ideals in foreign policies and discourage authoritarianism, injustice, and genocide. They want to regulate guns in a way that protects gun-owners' rights but keeps insanely deadly weapons out of the hands of potential murderers. And so on.
And the Republicans, as far as I can tell, are ... against that. We don't all have to agree on everything, and I am sure there are reasonable alternatives to all of the above, but we just have not heard any of them. Say, Obamacare. Republicans are against it. Okay, I get that it's got "Obama" right in the name. Reminds them that they lost a few elections, and the black guy won. But what is their plan, instead? Deregulation is something they like, do they think insurance companies, pharmacy corporations, and big hospital conglomerates should operate without regulation? It looks like it. Do Republicans really like the idea of breaking up families and keeping children in cages, in violation of clear legal standards for seeking amnesty, traveling, and immigrating? Is that something they believe in? Do Republicans think that mass murder is just a fact of life and it is just fine to live with mass shootings nearly every day? Is that part of their platform? To them, the "gun problem" is that there are not enough guns.
They mutter about a civil war, like they are ready to rise up against the tyranny. But look, for two years the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Why would they need to rebel against that? Okay, now it's only one house of Congress. Still, they can do a lot with that, just look at the courts. The government is theirs, what's this civil war thing about? You've got it, you're running things, now show us what it is you want to do. Then we will be able to see if it works or not. The victim thing doesn't work when you are on top. Have Trump and his Republican Congress done anything? If they have, I can't think of it. And the deal is, if you can't run the country then you will have to get out of the way and let some professionals take it over.
The liberals are fighting back, of course. They are not threatening civil war, but instead are following Constitutional guidelines to hold the President accountable for "high crimes and misdemeanors." They are focusing on one serious violation and letting the others go. Of course the President realizes that whether he resigns or is kicked out, he will be criminally liable for all those crimes that are not included in the impeachment proceeding, and there are a lot of them. So impeachment is about one little ol' extortion scheme involving little ol' Ukraine. Trust me, the fraud and money laundering, racketeering, tax evasion, perjury, and crimes against the United States are coming. He might even get pardoned for the Ukraine stuff, if Pence is able to squirm out of the net. I am pretty sure President Pelosi will not pardon him. But in any case he cannot be pardoned for the things he was not charged with in the impeachment process. When he steps out of the White House the sheriff'll be waiting.
And I am just wondering, what is this for? Is it really that gratifying to own the libtards, such a great feeling that you would trash the whole country for a snort of it?
If there were such a thing as "conservative principles," I would love to hear about it. We could debate them, negotiate, compromise, give speeches about principles, comparing ours to the other guy's. But it does not seem that there are any. It is just greed, rudeness, lying, belligerence, and simmering resentment. Is that what they want?
And the Republicans, as far as I can tell, are ... against that. We don't all have to agree on everything, and I am sure there are reasonable alternatives to all of the above, but we just have not heard any of them. Say, Obamacare. Republicans are against it. Okay, I get that it's got "Obama" right in the name. Reminds them that they lost a few elections, and the black guy won. But what is their plan, instead? Deregulation is something they like, do they think insurance companies, pharmacy corporations, and big hospital conglomerates should operate without regulation? It looks like it. Do Republicans really like the idea of breaking up families and keeping children in cages, in violation of clear legal standards for seeking amnesty, traveling, and immigrating? Is that something they believe in? Do Republicans think that mass murder is just a fact of life and it is just fine to live with mass shootings nearly every day? Is that part of their platform? To them, the "gun problem" is that there are not enough guns.
They mutter about a civil war, like they are ready to rise up against the tyranny. But look, for two years the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Why would they need to rebel against that? Okay, now it's only one house of Congress. Still, they can do a lot with that, just look at the courts. The government is theirs, what's this civil war thing about? You've got it, you're running things, now show us what it is you want to do. Then we will be able to see if it works or not. The victim thing doesn't work when you are on top. Have Trump and his Republican Congress done anything? If they have, I can't think of it. And the deal is, if you can't run the country then you will have to get out of the way and let some professionals take it over.
The liberals are fighting back, of course. They are not threatening civil war, but instead are following Constitutional guidelines to hold the President accountable for "high crimes and misdemeanors." They are focusing on one serious violation and letting the others go. Of course the President realizes that whether he resigns or is kicked out, he will be criminally liable for all those crimes that are not included in the impeachment proceeding, and there are a lot of them. So impeachment is about one little ol' extortion scheme involving little ol' Ukraine. Trust me, the fraud and money laundering, racketeering, tax evasion, perjury, and crimes against the United States are coming. He might even get pardoned for the Ukraine stuff, if Pence is able to squirm out of the net. I am pretty sure President Pelosi will not pardon him. But in any case he cannot be pardoned for the things he was not charged with in the impeachment process. When he steps out of the White House the sheriff'll be waiting.
And I am just wondering, what is this for? Is it really that gratifying to own the libtards, such a great feeling that you would trash the whole country for a snort of it?
If there were such a thing as "conservative principles," I would love to hear about it. We could debate them, negotiate, compromise, give speeches about principles, comparing ours to the other guy's. But it does not seem that there are any. It is just greed, rudeness, lying, belligerence, and simmering resentment. Is that what they want?
posted by JimK at 7:18 PM
269 Comments:
Your ignorance is willful, Jim. Give it a little thought and you'll know exactly what conservative principles are. And maybe you've already done that, and this is just an attempt at a rhetorical throwdown.
Of course, I can understand some confusion. Donald Trump doesn't really have any principles. But his concern about making America great is sincere, just in a vague kind of way. He actually would be better as a mayor than a President. Right now, the economy is working for everyone and that's what people will primarily make their choice about. By this time next year, Trump will have made inroads into many Dem bases.
Impeachment is truly the Dems' only hope. It won't work. Trump is our President for the next five years.
President Donald Trump is expected to be in Tuscaloosa on Saturday for No. 2 Alabama’s critical matchup against No. 1 LSU, marking the latest sporting event for Trump in recent weeks.
Though he’s met plenty of Presdients before, Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban sounded excited about hosting a president at Bryant-Denny Stadium.
“It’s an honor, I think, that the President of the United States would be interested enough to come to the game,” Saban said, via the Montgomery Advertiser. “I’m sure we’ll do everything we can to welcome him.”
Saban has plenty of experience with presidents, having made the trip to the White House multiple times after winning national titles — when Trump, President Barack Obama and President George W. Bush were in office. He also had a run-in with President Bill Clinton while he was at Michigan State, and even offered up his office couch.
“Bill Clinton came to Michigan State to speak at the graduation commencement ceremony, and they actually headquartered in our facility building, so I had the opportunity to meet him and talk to him,” Saban said. “[At one point], the Secret Service guys came and got my couch and asked if they could take it to his office so he could take a nap, and I said, ‘Certainly.’”
The game will mark Trump’s third appearance at a major sporting event in as many weeks. He attended Game 5 of the World Series at Nationals Park last month. Trump then made the trip to UFC 244 on Saturday — becoming the first sitting or former president to attend an MMA bout — and received a enthusiastic reaction from the crowd at Madison Square Garden.
Efforts are being made to prevent any fringe student groups from ruining the visit. The Alabama Student Government Association issued a warning to students on Wednesday in a letter. Any students or organizations that “engage in disruptive behavior” during the game, the letter said, will be “removed from block seating instantly for the remainder of the season.”
Neither Saban nor LSU quarterback Joe Burrow seem concerned about a potential sideshow from lunatic resisters.
President Donald Trump is keeping his word and getting America out of a bad deal.
The poorly negotiated Paris climate accord imposed unfair, unworkable and unrealistic targets on the United States for reducing carbon emissions.
As the climate deal punished America’s energy producers with expensive and burdensome regulations, it gave other countries U.S. taxpayer-funded subsidies and generous timelines.
Countries like China got a free pass to pollute for over a decade. With abundant low-cost coal, China and India would put our manufacturers at a huge competitive disadvantage. Economic costs would be severe.
According to the National Economic Research Associates, if we met all of our commitments as part of the Paris climate agreement, it would cost the American economy $3 trillion and 6.5 million industrial sector jobs by 2040. We don’t need to cripple our economy to protect our environment.
America’s emissions actually continue to decline, and we are the world’s driver of innovative solutions. Since 2005, the United States has reduced its combustion-related carbon dioxide emissions more than any other nation in the world. Global emissions have moved in the opposite direction.
Our reduction in emissions was largely from new and innovative technologies from the private sector — not international agreements or punishing regulations.
Groundbreaking research into carbon capture technologies and advanced nuclear reactors hold the key to continued emissions reductions.
American free-market innovation can address a changing climate.
We all want cleaner air, but the Paris climate agreement, and the regulations that would come with it, put America at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world.
This was a bad deal. The president is right to get us out of it
The global warming true believers are convinced of their moral superiority. In their minds, they’re just better people. But better people don’t advocate thinning of the human population. The alarmists do.
A group of “more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world” has declared “clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” and recommends leaving fossil fuels “in the ground,” replaced by low-carbon renewable energy sources.
Nothing new there. Crackpots have been predicting the end of the world for probably as long as man has existed.
This group, though, also believes that because the global population is “still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 per day,” it “must be stabilized — and, ideally, gradually reduced — within a framework that ensures social integrity.”
By what authority do these scientists believe they have the right to reduce the number of humans? And through what mechanism do they propose to use to reach their goal?
Henry I. Miller, a physician, molecular biologist, and Pacific Research Institute senior fellow, says “the scientists’ assumption of a ‘climate emergency’ requiring policymakers imminently to introduce not only radical changes to energy, food, and economic policies but also population control, verges on the hysterical.”
Others have already crossed that line.
The urge to control human reproduction is more common than one might think. Wikipedia’s page for “population concern organizations” lists 12 groups just in the U.S., and another 11 around the world, with one network of academic researchers called Population Europe. These groups, and our 11,000 or so scientists, seem to have a common bond with the nasty people throughout history who have wanted to improve the genetic quality of humanity by selecting out less-desirable groups. In modern America, those groups might be the “deplorables” and “deniers” among us.
Don’t think it couldn’t happen here? In our not-so-long-ago past, the 20th century, in fact, “roughly 70,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized” in the U.S., says Chelsea Follett, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. It was done under the authority of “‘eugenic’ legislation,” and the horrors were justified as a means “to improve the population by preventing people thought to have inferior genes from having children.”
This makes us wonder: Who would the 11,000 scientists target for population control? Their manifesto tells us they “stand ready to assist decision-makers in a just transition to a sustainable and equitable future.” Do they already have a gene pool in mind that they wish to pare down?
Columbia University professor Matthew Connelly compiled a history of the population control movement that became “Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population.” Published in 2008, it is the story, says the author, “of how some people have tried to control others without having to answer to anyone.”
“They could be ruthless and manipulative in ways that were, and are, shocking,” Connelly wrote.
One striking example of the heartlessness behind population control comes from Garrett Hardin, an ecologist who supported sterilization. In 1968, he wrote an essay in which he declared “the freedom to breed is intolerable.” Decades later, he held out China’s population-control policy as something the U.S. might be able to learn from.
“There is no talk in China of a woman’s ‘right’ to reproduce or of married couples’ ‘right to privacy,'” he wrote. The coercion used in that country to slow population growth — when “a woman who gets pregnant without permission is pressured by her sisters to have an abortion,” for example — “should be compared to forcing a Westerner to pick up the litter he or she has dropped on the ground in a public park.”
Readers can draw their own conclusions as to whether or not he saw humans as no more than garbage dumped on the planet.
Naturally the 11,000 will deny that their methods will be “ruthless and manipulative,” and at the same time swear their motives pure. But population control has been historically sought out of “kindness,” says climate justice activist Simon Butler, who reviewed Connelly’s book. Its traffickers insist it’s “a benevolent measure that can lift people out of poverty, hunger and underdevelopment.”
The dirty little secret about wokeness is its lack of diversity. It’s a movement entirely comprising of white, college-educated progressives.
Therein lies the problem for the Democratic Party as it lurches left. It has wedged itself between the demands of an aggressively woke left flank and the more socially conservative, more religious black community. Since the party needs 85 percent of the black vote to win power, that’s a problem with lethal political consequences.
Which is why Democrats are nervous about President Trump’s embryonic popularity with African Americans, after he won just 8 percent of the black vote in 2016.
You can see the seeds in rising poll numbers, with one Rasmussen poll last year placing the president’s approval rating among black Americans at 36 percent. It was quickly dismissed as an outlier, but other polls since have confirmed a smaller upward trajectory.
The NAACP’s own poll in August showed Trump’s approval rating at 21 percent.
At rallies, Trump waxes lyrical about all he’s done for the black community: a record low black unemployment rate, “opportunity zones” bringing investment to poor cities, criminal-justice reform and his tough stance on illegal immigration.
But the red-pill phenomenon in black America is most visible in the rise of charismatic cultural leaders such as the conservative firebrand Candace Owens.
This Sunday, at a rally in Atlanta, you will see the power of the movement Owens has founded, Blexit.
Blexit means the exit by black Americans from a Democratic Party that takes their vote for granted.
“It’s an exit from political orthodoxy and from the left, which bases your worth on your skin color, sex and sexual orientation,” she says.
Her goal is to turn Blexit into a grass-roots political force. “Twenty points by 2020 is the dream.”
If the left is the Titanic, “I like to view myself as a little iceberg.” Owens says. “Blexit sits underneath that, with thousands of black people sick of being lied to by Democrats.”
Just four years ago, Owens was a liberal. Her awakening began in 2016 when she heard then-candidate Trump at a rally in Michigan asking black America: “What the hell do you have to lose?” by voting for him.
Owens realized the answer was: absolutely nothing.
“What do we have to show for 60 years of commitment to the Democratic Party?” she asks?
Her Blexit rallies feature the stories of ordinary people “who were on the left and woke up.”
“I tell them I support the president, but I’m not telling you to vote for him, just to vote your values,” she says. “It’s not a call to leave the left and run to the right. It’s a call to people to think independently.”
It’s a call to black people to break free from the “victim narrative” that the Democratic Party has spun for them.
Owens chose Atlanta for this weekend’s rally because it is the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., who she says would be a Blexiteer if he were alive today.
“He wanted a society where his children could grow up and not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” she says.
“We now live in a society where the left says people should only be judged by the color of skin. If you’re black, you must be underprivileged. If you’re white, you must have white privilege.”
You can gauge the extent of the threat she poses to the left by the ferocity of the libelous smears deployed against her. She’s been depicted in the media as a Hitler sympathizer and enabler of white supremacy.
The source of her courage and her inspiration is her 79-year-old grandfather, Robert Owens Sr., who raised her.
“He grew on a sharecropping farm picking tobacco in the segregated South, where there was real systematic racism,” she says. “He believed in faith, family and hard work. There were chores and there were rules. There are no handouts . . . That was the secret sauce.
“That will be my grandfather’s legacy. I fight so people don’t think I’m living through what he lived through.”
By far the greatest scourge for the black community is “fatherlessness, the breakdown of the family,” and she blames Democrats as the “author of that epidemic” through passive welfare.
Democrats have presided over a “systematic breakdown of family, as they did when we were on the plantation and it made it easier to sell us,” Owens claims.
“If they like to come on board with us, it will have to be with policy rather than emotion. Calling Trump a racist won’t work.”
Blexit is a ticking time bomb for the left because while half of white Democrats say they are “very liberal” or “liberal,” according to a Pew poll, only 26 percent of black people describe themselves that way.
Owens is not telling Blexiteers to elect Trump, who she understands is a pragmatic businessman who just wants votes, but she is offering an opportunity for the Republican Party to remake itself.
Who knows, she may even run for president one day. She doesn’t rule it out.
What a rebuke to Democrats if the first black woman president is a Republican. Bring it on.
JMA: Five Warmest Years (Anomalies)
1st. 2016(+0.45°C), 2nd. 2015(+0.42°C), 3rd. 2017(+0.38°C), 4th. 2018(+0.31°C), 5th. 2014(+0.27°C)
JMA: Five Warmest Months of September (Anomalies)
1st. 2015(+0.51°C), 2nd. 2019(+0.45°C), 3rd. 2016(+0.42°C), 4th. 2017,2014(+0.35°C)
Category 5 Super Typhoon Halong among strongest storms ever observed by satellite: On Saturday, it was a tropical depression with little prospect for development. Now it’s rivaling the strength of Dorian
Super Typhoon Halong is raging in the open waters of the western tropical Pacific Ocean right now, with satellite imagery estimating its peak winds at close to 190 mph. It’s every bit a Category 5 storm and then some, its extreme strength coming three days after it drifted lazily as a tropical depression...
Is the United States Really Leaving the Paris Climate Agreement?
Yes, but the process takes a long time. Final withdrawal will occur one day after the 2020 election—but Washington may still be able to get back in.
President Donald Trump has formally announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, which will leave America as the only country on Earth outside the accord, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep temperatures from rising to dangerous levels. Formal notice of the U.S. withdrawal comes just as global emissions keep rising, climate ambitions keep falling short, and climate scientists warn of increasingly dire consequences including drought, extreme weather, and rising sea levels...
Yesterday's big blue wave swept out more GOPers and the TTF troll is spinning like a ballerina!
Watch your toes!
"President Donald Trump has formally announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, which will leave America as the only country on Earth outside the accord, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to keep temperatures from rising to dangerous levels."
laughable spin
what you don't mention is that the accord aims to greenhouse mainly by American sacrifice and that, currently, the US is the only country to be incompliance with its goals
it will continue to be, regardless, because our reduction is the result of free enterprise and innovation freed from regulatory burden
"Formal notice of the U.S. withdrawal comes just as global emissions keep rising, climate ambitions keep falling short, and climate scientists warn of increasingly dire consequences including drought, extreme weather, and rising sea levels..."
if global warming is such a threat to the species, why aren't warming alarmists supporting massive investment in nuclear energy and fracking for natural gas?
"Yesterday's big blue wave swept out more GOPers"
you call that "big"?
how many states were involved?
you call that a "wave"?
liberal fringe lunatics sure have trouble with the English language
Kentucky, for example. elected all Republicans to statewide offices except the governor and he was a rogue that angered the Republican establishment there
wouldn't a wave cover all the offices?
"and the TTF troll is spinning like a ballerina!"
yes, I'm another Baryshnikov but yesterday didn't change anything
you just have to keep moving to counter TTF lies
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
LMAO
Rump is up over 13,000 lies
This is today's headline "State Department official says Giuliani was engaged in a campaign ‘full of lies and incorrect information’ about former ambassador"
And you think TTF lies!
Keep pirouetting darling but be careful darling.
Your tutu is bound to slip!
You should probably check the view in the mirror from time to time.
A New York judge has ordered President Donald Trump to personally pay $2 million to settle the state attorney general’s civil lawsuit against his now-defunct charitable organization, The Donald J. Trump Foundation.
New York State Supreme Court Judge Saliann Scarpulla’s order directs Trump’s damage payment to several legitimate nonprofit organizations.
Her decision is not the outcome desired by the president, who declared in a tweet last year: “I won’t settle this case!”
The lawsuit, filed in June 2018 by then-state Attorney General Barbara Underwood, alleged that Trump and three of his children ― Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump ― repeatedly took advantage of the foundation’s tax-exempt status to fund their political and business interests.
Trump, during his 2016 bid for the presidency, allowed his campaign to handle money raised by the Trump Foundation, effectively using his charity to help finance his candidacy, Underwood’s suit said. She said the foundation engaged in a “shocking pattern” of “repeated and willful self-dealing,” including buying a $10,000 portrait of Trump to hang at one of his golf courses.
“This amounted to the Trump Foundation functioning as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests,” Underwood said in a statement late last year.
The Trump family was ordered to dissolve the foundation in December 2018.
Attorneys for Trump and his family had argued that a “sitting president may not be sued” and attempted to have the case dismissed. Scarapulla rejected their request.
"And you think TTF lies!"
yes, I do!!
If impeaching President Donald Trump is truly about arriving at the truth, then the Democrats who have obsequiously lectured about this for the past several weeks should have no problem including Joe and Hunter Biden in the impeachment proceedings. Forcing the Bidens to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee would provide an opportunity for Americans to learn to what extent, if at all, former Vice President Joe Biden used his position to financially benefit several of his family members, most notably his son Hunter.
Less than a month ago, there were murmurs that the Senate Judiciary Committee, under the auspices of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was considering having the Bidens testify before the committee on their actions in Ukraine. Graham received some pushback for considering this move, Sen. Chuck Grassley declaring that he would support such a endeavor only if there were a certain level of precision in the line of questioning. “I’d want to know what he wants to accomplish by bringing [Joe Biden] before the committee,” Grassley stated, when asked about Graham’s potential plans.
Others, such as Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, expressed skepticism at the thought of having Joe Biden testify before the committee. “It wouldn’t be my highest priority. We need limited bandwidth if we need to try to focus on getting things done, not contributing to the sideshow,” Cornyn stated back in October.
Now, GOP senators are once again considering including the Bidens in Trump’s impeachment trial. There’s a legitimate (and arguably, well-founded) fear that involving the Bidens in the impeachment process is a “risky political ploy.” However, it’s more damaging to our democratic republic to have a class of politicians immunized from investigation because they happen to be running for president.
At one point, the Democratic field had 30 contenders. Did each of these individuals become vaccinated against possible accusations of corruption because they were in the running to become Donald Trump’s chief contender? Phrased differently, is there enough hatred of Trump swirling around Washington that we are not interested in determining whether the individual who held the second-highest office in the land for eight years allows his son to sell access to foreign governments?
Despite the media’s attempts to portray the accusations against Hunter Biden as mere “nothing burgers,” Hunter Biden unequivocally established relationships with foreign actors interested in shaping U.S. policy at critical junctures in his father’s career. The question at the base of these accusations is how aware then-Vice President Joe Biden was of such arrangements and whether the line between crony capitalism and sheer corruption was ever crossed. Although neither is particularly desirable, one is legal, while the other is not.
Hunter received a position on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company of Burisma with a salary of $50,000 per month, despite having no experience in the energy sector and at a time his father was the point-man on the United States’ Ukraine policy. His father eventually pushed to have the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma fired under the banner of waging an “anti-corruption” campaign in the country.
On a 2013 diplomatic trip to China, then-Vice President Joe Biden permitted his son Hunter to join him on Air Force Two. At the time, Hunter had recently teamed up with Chinese businessman Johnathan Li to start a Chinese-backed private equity firm, and during the Bidens’ time in China, Hunter eventually introduced Li to his father. It’s worth noting that prior to the trip, Hunter had been awaiting approval for a business license from the Chinese government. Within two weeks of the trip’s end, he had received it.
The strangeness does not end there. Less than two weeks ago, it was revealed that Joe Biden, while a prominent U.S. senator, had consulted various government agencies to advocate for specific agenda items that his son’s lobbying firm then happened to be pushing—a coincidence that miraculously occurred several times. Individually, each incident might seem benign or excusable; however, taken together, they paint a far more complex and alarming picture.
Based on recent testimonies, the question at the center of the impeachment inquiry is now whether, when President Trump withheld aid on the basis of encouraging Ukraine to fight corruption, he did so under the auspices of the correct authority. Answering this question will likely require ascertaining the legitimacy of the corruption accusations against the Bidens.
I penned the following reflection back in September, and it largely still holds true, whether you believe a quid pro quo took place or not.
…Much of the discussion of the whistleblower complaint has centered on amplifying and condemning Trump’s behavior without much mention of what Joe Biden’s son was doing in Ukraine. There’s a pervasive attitude among those in the media and on the left that if Trump improperly requested an investigation into Biden’s son Hunter, the impropriety of the request somehow makes the potential behavior of Hunter Biden and his father acceptable. This reaction is incoherent and bizarre.
It’s unfortunate that because President Trump is asking the questions, the behavior of those he seeks to investigate suddenly becomes palatable or eligible to be shoved under the rug. There are some disturbing coincidences that deserved to be investigated, whether it is Trump seeking to investigate them or not.
If it has to be under the banner of Trump impeachment, so be it. I, for one, would like to know if our executive branch was for sale from 2008 to 2016, and although Trump may present his own concerns, him asking the question doesn’t undermine the American public’s need to know the answer.
Throughout the testimony, top State Department official George Kent describes Rudy Giuliani’s active involvement in Ukraine relations, noting that Giuliani was "unmissable" starting in March of 2019.
He laid out that Giuliani was extensively involved in pushing a narrative surrounding Ukraine and Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where former vice president Joe Biden's son sat on the board, as well as the recalling of Yovanovitch from her position. She testified in October to lawmakers that she felt threatened by Trump.
Yovanovitch was damaged by a narrative pushed by former Ukrainian general prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, who Kent testified wanted “revenge” for Yovanovitch's anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine. That narrative was buoyed by Giuliani's media presence.
“Mr. Giuliani, at that point, had been carrying on a campaign for several months full of lies and incorrect information about Ambassador Yovanovitch, so this was a continuation of his campaign of lies,” Kent testified.
Kent reinforced that Yovanovitch was recalled because Giuliani and his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, “started reaching out actively to undermine” her and “were engaged in an effort to undermine her standing by claiming that she was disloyal.”
“So that's the early roots of people following their own agendas and using her as an instrument to fulfill those agendas,” Kent continued.
Additionally, Lutsenko traveled privately to New York City to meet Giuliani, according to Kent, who testified that during that meeting, Giuliani continued to “throw mud” toward Ambassador Yovanovitch, Kent and others.
Kent agreed with lawmakers that Ukrainian officials don’t typically meet with private citizens and that Giuliani wasn’t a “regular private citizen,” explaining that Ukrainian officials “understood that Mr. Giuliani asserted he represented Mr. Trump in his private capacity.”
Kent detailed four "story lines" that he said Giuliani pushed through the media. These started emerging after Lutsenko did an interview with The Hill in March 2019, according to Kent.
1. The first story line regarded attacks on anti-corruption efforts by the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, and others in Ukraine
2. The next was a theory pushed that Ukrainians or people at the U.S. embassy in Ukraine had "animus" toward Paul Manafort, Trump's 2016 campaign chair
3. The third story line was about an alleged relationship between Biden's pressure on Ukraine to fire its former top prosecutor and Hunter Biden's presence on the board of Burisma
4. The last, according to Kent, was about a claim that civil society organizations, such as the Anti-corruption Action Center, were funded by Democratic donor George Soros
Kent said the information given by Lutsenko was "if not entirely made up in full cloth, it was primarily non-truths and non-sequiturs."
Ukraine’s president was preparing to announce a groundless investigation into Joe Biden on CNN — against his better judgment — but managed to duck out of it when Congress pressed Donald Trump to release military aid he was withholding, The New York Times reported.
The last thing President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to do was become entangled in U.S. politics, the Times reported, but he was convinced that the only way he could finally get the appropriated $400 million in U.S. aid was to follow the president’s instructions for announcing an investigation of Biden and his son, according to interviews with Kyiv government officials.
If the money wasn’t released by the end of the fiscal year in September, Ukraine risked losing it for good. Zelensky was determined to do what he had to do for the money, even though avoiding partisan U.S. politics was the “first rule of Ukrainian foreign policy,” the Times reported.
Aides were arguing in favor of “bowing to what was demanded,” said Petro Burkovskiy, a senior fellow at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation with ties to Ukraine’s government, according to the Times. But the “cost was high,” he added.
Trump reportedly expected Zelensky to make a high-profile statement about launching an investigation of his 2020 presidential rival. A top U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, testified before House members that Gordon Sondland, Trump’s appointed ambassador to the European Union, told him the military aid was dependent on Zelensky making a “public statement” about initiating an investigation of Biden.
Sondland said that “President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations,” Taylor testified.
Zelensky agreed to an interview on CNN during which he was to reveal “investigations that would have played into domestic political affairs,” Taylor told lawmakers. But the military funds were released Sept. 11 after a congressional uproar, just two days before Zelensky was scheduled to appear on CNN. He quickly canceled, the Times reported.
The Times story, as well as Taylor’s — and others’ — testimony sharply undercuts Trump’s argument that there was no quid pro quo in his withholding of funds and his July 25 phone call pressing Zelensky for an investigation into Biden and his son. The president, however, is now saying there’s nothing wrong with a quid pro quo using military aid to press Zelensky to investigate his political rival, which would predictably affect the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
“The Zelensky team was ready to make this quid quo pro,” Burkovskiy told the Times. “They were ready to do this.”
Despite Dems' demonization of him as a racist, President Donald Trump’s approval ratings have drifted upward among nonwhites in the last two years. While it’s impossible to say exactly why, one reasonable explanation is that the U.S.’s long economic expansion has been particularly beneficial for minority workers.
In the latest Gallup poll of presidential job approval, Trump stands at 20% among nonwhites, up from a low of 14% in January. For comparison, the president’s approval ratings among self-identified liberals and moderates are 6% and 29%, respectively.
The economy is no doubt helping. As the president is fond of pointing out, unemployment rates among African Americans, Hispanics and Asians are all at historic lows (though it should be noted that data on Asian unemployment rates dates to only 2000).
Just as important, the unemployment gaps between both blacks and whites as well as Hispanics and whites have reached all-time lows. It’s not just that the job market has been good: For minorities, it has been historically good.
This pattern is not uncommon during economic expansions. The longer a tight labor market persists, the more willing employers become to consider applicants they once would have passed over. Social networks between employers and marginalized communities strengthen, and companies get better at attracting and retaining minority workers.
As opportunities for racial minorities grow, wages rise faster as well. Over the past 12 months, wage gains for nonwhites have been not only substantially higher than those of whites, but also higher than economists’ estimates of inflation plus productivity. That implies that minority workers are getting a greater share of GDP.
It is ironic, of course, that this is all occurring under a president who supposedly ran on a not-so-subtle campaign to revive the white working class. Trump’s policies, however, have worked against those goals. The effects of the administration’s tax cuts — and the strong consumer spending they spurred — have been felt most in metropolitan areas with a high proportion of wealthier households. The spending has gone largely to services, which are provided by local workers.
Rural areas and the industrial heartland, by contrast, are far more dependent on exports of agricultural and manufacturing products — and as such have been hurt by the president’s trade war.
Rhetoric tends to dominate the political narrative. Yet policy is far more important in determining outcomes for workers. Trump’s policy has been more favorable to minority workers than they expected — and less favorable to the white working class than he promised.
An attorney for the anonymous member of the intelligence community whose complaint about a call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine kick-started the unhinged partisan impeachment witch hunt now underway has been unmasked as a rabid Trump-hater who predicted a “coup” against the president.
As a result, attorney Mark Zaid – who represents the anonymous person now commonly described only as “the whistleblower” – has just become a witness in the case, which is really a Democratic coup attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election.
Reports Wednesday exposed Zaid’s furious Twitter tirade against Trump that began just days after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Zaid tweeted that a “coup has started” against Trump and that “impeachment will follow ultimately.”
Zaid tweeted in response to Obama holdover Acting Attorney General Sally Yates’ defiance of a presidential order over the new administration’s travel ban on people wanting to enter the United States from countries that are incubators for terrorism. The president imposed the ban as a national security measure.
Months after his original January tweet about an anti-Trump coup, Zaid tweeted the prediction that “@CNN will play a key role in @realDonaldTrump not finishing out his full term as president.” As if we needed more proof that CNN is nothing more than an arm of the Democratic National Committee.
In response to these new revelations, President Trump confronted the situation head-on Wednesday by repeating his mantra that the left’s sick obsession with trying to remove him from office is “all a hoax.”
The president is right and has been right all along. The left has been trying to destroy him for three years and will never stop, because they hate him more than they love our country.
On Thursday the president tweeted to call for an end to the impeachment inquiry, writing: “Based on the information released last night about the Fake Whistleblowers attorney, the Impeachment Hoax should be ended IMMEDIATELY!”
The president’s hard shot caused Zaid to issue a weak and defensive statement that read in part: “The coup comment referred to those working inside the Administration who were already, just a week into office, already standing up to him to enforce recognized rules of law.”
Zaid is so impeachment-crazed that he confirmed the existence of a coup in a statement that was designed to deny it.
If House Democrats are going to force the president’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to testify in their farcical impeachment investigation, then Zaid is fair game as well.
The American people must hear from Zaid about who he’s been conspiring with on this coup attempt, as well as who is financing the coup attempt and who authorized it to move forward in the first place.
The revelation of Zaid’s tweets comes at a time when the credibility and motives of his client – the anonymous so-called whistleblower – are being justifiably questioned as well.
Allegations have been published that this informant is an anti-Trump partisan who used to work with former Vice President Joe Biden and with Trump-hating former CIA Director John Brennan. This has caused impeachment leader Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. – chairman of the House Intelligence Committee – to backpedal and now claim this all-important figure does not need to testify before his committee.
Every day, it’s becoming more and more apparent that this fraudulent impeachment scam is just a political effort by the Democrats to meddle in the 2020 election because they know they can’t defeat President Trump at the ballot box based on his outstanding record of achievements for the American people.
So instead of simply campaigning to overturn Trump polices, the Democrats are engaging in a dishonest smear campaign against the president with false accusations claiming misconduct that doesn’t really exist.
The impeachment of a president is one of the most serious undertakings our country should be confronted with outside of war.
The American people witnessed how President Trump was attacked by the left over the past three years with the fake Russia collusion story that turned out to be a complete lie. Now they have the right to know if the current impeachment inquiry was born from a political act by bad political actors.
Impeachment must not be a political campaign stunt. Questions suggesting political motivations must be answered in a thorough and transparent way – not swept under the rug.
The American people have had the chance to read the transcript of the call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But it’s quite remarkable that in the midst of this impeachment inquiry over a routine telephone call we still don’t know everyone who listened in on the call.
The people listening to the Trump-Zelensky call are all fact witnesses and their names must be known if there’s going to be a thorough investigation. This is critical information that must be made public without delay.
Perhaps Schiff doesn’t want to reveal this information – just like he doesn’t want the whistleblower to testify.
Let’s remember, the whistleblower wasn’t on the Trump-Zelensky call. He received the information to file his political complaint from someone (or more than one person) who was listening in on the call.
It’s important that Schiff understand that his investigation will never gain any legitimacy without the American people learning about the whistleblower and his motivations, as well as the identity of the person (or persons) on the call who leaked to the whistleblower.
Is it possible that the whistleblower’s informant on the call was from the Ukrainian side?
Of course, the Democrats in Congress want to make everyone believe we must protect the identity of the whistleblower from public disclosure. However, this is not a typical whistleblower case.
This whistleblower is attempting to spark the impeachment of a president who was chosen by 63 million American voters to lead our nation. The accuser’s identity must be made available for public scrutiny.
It’s becoming more and more obvious that the reason Schiff’s fake whistleblower hasn’t testified yet is because he doesn’t pass the smell test. If the whistleblower is an anti-Trump political operative, the American people deserve to know the truth about his background. Schiff must allow the whistleblower to testify so the American people can decide if his yarn is to be believed.
what a world we live in. A confidential asset of a hyper-political CIA director, likely handpicked by the director to spy on the Trump White House, is now called a “whistleblower.” The son of a former vice-president and a current Democrat nominee was apparently eyeball-deep in corruption in Ukraine, and the Left screams that the president—for daring to broach the issue with Ukraine—should be impeached. Political pygmies, otherwise known as the Democrat 2020 field, prance about the country offering up program ideas tallying up to over $200 trillion in the first ten years of operation (against the roughly $44 trillion the government would bring in over the same time). Such programs would cost us millions of jobs, among other bad consequences. Yet we are expected to believe these are serious people.
All the while the mainstream propagandists gaslight us by shrieking that Trump is the corrupt one, that Trump’s ideas are destructive as the economy soars and unemployment remains at 50 year lows. When the Washington Post intones that “Democracy dies in darkness” they evince no apparent awareness of irony. They’re knifing democracy to death every single day.
In the meantime, as our constitutional republic faces the wrecking balls of the Left and is asked to endure as they smash away at every norm that has made this country great, many Republicans find themselves conveniently absent from the action. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), for example, sure does love himself a TV hit—and I have to tell you, his super-duper “enthusiasms” while on TV almost make me want to believe him when he says he is serious about being effective. But then another day goes by and it’s clear he lacks the stones actually to hold hearings and subpoena the corrupt cabal that has massively abused our surveillance state and law enforcement regime.
Richard Burr (R-N.C.)? Well, he’s been off in “la-la land” for quite some time. At some point, for decency’s sake, he should just give the title of chairman of Senate Intel to Mark Warner (D-Va.) so as actually to reflect reality. One would think confronting injustice and illegal behavior should be pretty standard, common sense sort of stuff. But then again, Swamp Creatures are hardly paragons of truth and justice. So let’s assume until things change that Graham and Burr have zero problem with what has happened over the last few years; heck, they might be implicated in what could be uncovered.
This all leads us to a serious problem that we as a country are facing: we’ve been losing trust in our institutions for quite some time. All that the last few years have done is to reinforce that kind of thinking.
Seriously.
Ask yourself:
Do you really trust the FBI? I don’t. With the recent reports from Michael Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, apparently senior FBI agents tampered with 302s, falsifying information to get the results they wanted which had nothing to do with the truth. This was the FBI—supposedly the world’s greatest law enforcement agency. I don’t think so. Until those senior officials go to jail for their abuse of power my distrust of the FBI will continue.
Do you really trust the Justice Department? Maybe. I’ll see what Attorney General Barr and John Durham pursue and actually accomplish. I can assure you, however, if there are not prosecutions with jail time, scratch that institution off the list. The CIA? Forget about it. Congress? You mean the inept worthless institution that sits on its hands and has ceded massive control of the lawmaking function of government to the administrative state? I have to tell you: is there really a point to Congress in its current form? Serious question. It gets slapped around every single day by the administrative state and the courts. Then they have the gall to tell the people, “By golly, we’re out here working so hard you gotta send us back to Congress so re-elect us.” Why precisely? So they can rubber-stamp more spending, tack on a few more cool trillions to our exploding debt?
Ask yourself: do you really think the halls of Congress are mostly populated with intelligent people? Or just functioning idiots? I’m kinda leaning towards the majority of them being functioning idiots. Prove me wrong.
What about the values Americans are supposed to believe in? Rule of law is a farce. And at this point, the idea of Lady Justice being blind and meeting out justice even-handedly borders on the absurd. Quite frankly, speaking of Lady Justice, I haven’t seen her lately. I assume she got mugged in some seamy back alley of the Swamp or offed herself, Epstein-style. Until I actually see the equal application of the law I’m just going to safely assume the current bifurcated legal system has us on a fast track to Banana Republic USA.
So what are we to do? When faith is gone, both of the spiritual and the political variety, what remains? People seek peace and prosperity, and will happily live with an untold number of illusions so long as they have those two things. Perhaps we’ve been doing that for a while.
But what happens when those are gone?
History shows us that when the ruling class and elites refuse to do what they should and instead do what they can, creating a government rigged in their favor, destroying the rule of law, and papering over corruption and injustice, the peasants pick up pitchforks and torches and they come for those who have behaved so abominably. Perhaps our elites should read more of that history.
"IF GLOBAL WARMING THREATENS LIFE ON OUR PLANET, WHY DO DEMS OPOSE (sic) NUCLEAR ENERGY AND FRACKING?"
https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article225229730.html
Because nuclear is too damn expensive:
RICHLAND, WA
A $110 billion increase in the estimated Department of Energy cleanup costs across the nation is being blamed largely on the Hanford nuclear reservation.
A new DOE estimate increases the cost of remaining environmental cleanup at Hanford by $82 billion, bringing it to $242 billion, according to unaudited information in DOE’s fiscal year 2018 financial report.
“When we see numbers like this it forces us to take a hard look at what we can reasonably expect Congress to appropriate every year, and where that leaves us if we don’t get all the funding that’s required,” said David Reeploeg, Tri-City Development Council vice president for federal programs.
The increase is not surprising, given the challenges and complexity of Hanford cleanup, but “we are concerned by the very large number,” he said.
“We’re not sure what appetite the administration and Congress will have to fund Hanford at the necessary levels for decades to come,” he said.
The issue is Hanford’s underground tanks holding 56 million gallons of radioactive waste.
New estimates refine the costs of retrieving waste from the tanks, closing or otherwise disposing of the tanks, completing construction of the $17 billion vitrification plant and then decades of plant operations to turn much of the tank waste into a stable glass form for disposal.
Cleanup and maintenance work is being done this year at Hanford with $2.5 billion from the federal budget.
At $2.5 billion per year, that $242 billion dollar price tag is 96.8 YEARS of bills - assuming the costs never go up again. (LOL)
And that doesn't account for ANY of the costs of remediating and storing the (many tons) of nuclear waste at dozens of plants all across the country. Of course, none of that expenditure actually goes to generating electricity.
$242 billion would by BOATLOADS of wind turbines and solar panels. And Uncle Sam wouldn't have to keep pulling taxes away from workers to clean up nuclear messes.
As for fracking, while it releases less CO2 than coal, it still doesn't address the problem that we're putting WAY too much CO2 into the atmosphere.
"Because nuclear is too damn expensive"
damn it all, the future of life on our planet is at stake!!!!
technology will increase the safety and reduce the cost of the damn clean-up
but, even as is, it's a bargain compared to the cost of the damn New Green Deal
"$242 billion would by BOATLOADS of wind turbines and solar panels."
damn it all, it wouldn't buy anywhere near enough of those to generate the electricity o one nuclear plant
"And Uncle Sam wouldn't have to keep pulling taxes away from workers to clean up nuclear messes."
right now, solar is only vaguely feasible because it's heavily subsidized by pulling the damn taxes of workers!
"As for fracking, while it releases less CO2 than coal, it still doesn't address the problem that we're putting WAY too much CO2 into the atmosphere."
what damn world do you live in, where using less doesn't address too much?
truth is the US is the only nation meeting the goals of the damn Paris accord and it is doing so solely because of fracking
you do favor the goals of the damn Paris accord, don't you?
because that's what the hell we were discussing?
DAGNABIT!!!!!!
"technology will increase the safety and reduce the cost of the damn clean-up"
They have been working to clean up the mess at Hanford for decades, seeing multiple generations of new computer systems, better material science, new advances in chemistry, and the costs to clean up the mess have only INCREASED over the years. Don't believe me. There are news articles all over the web documenting how costs at Hanford keep going UP.
"damn it all, it wouldn't buy anywhere near enough of those to generate the electricity o one nuclear plant"
In 2019, the average national solar panel cost is $2.99/watt - before tax credits.
(https://news.energysage.com/how-much-does-the-average-solar-panel-installation-cost-in-the-u-s/)
$242 Billion would buy 80.94GW of solar panels.
In 2018, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,972 kilowatthours (kWh).
(https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3)
Assuming an average of 4.75 peak sun hours per day (the middle of the range from: https://www.wholesalesolar.com/solar-information/sun-hours-us-map )
Those solar panels would produce about 80.94GW * 4.75H/day * 365 days/year = 140.33x10^12 WattHours/year.
To put that in perspective, we can divide that by the average 10,972 KWH/year usage of US households, (140.33e12 / 10.972e6) and find that is enough to run 12.79 Million households - for the life time of the solar panels - expected to be 25 years on the low end:
https://www.sunrun.com/go-solar-center/solar-articles/how-long-do-solar-panels-really-last
Assuming an average of 2.63 people per household: (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/01/the-number-of-people-in-the-average-u-s-household-is-going-up-for-the-first-time-in-over-160-years/)
That's 12.79e6housholds * 2.63people/household = 33.64 Million people.
The estimated population for Texas is 29.2 million people (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population)
So the expected expenditure to clean up at JUST HANFORD, is enough to buy electricity for the entire state of Texas for the next 25 to 30 years.
"There are 60 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 98 nuclear reactors in 30 U.S. states (the Indian Point Energy Center in New York has two nuclear reactors that the U.S. Energy Information Administration counts as two separate nuclear plants)."
(https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/what-status-us-nuclear-industry)
There are only 50 states, 98 reactors that will need to be cleaned up, and cleaning up Hanford alone will cost as much as solar as it would take to run Texas (the second most populous state) for 25 years.
"right now, solar is only vaguely feasible because it's heavily subsidized by pulling the damn taxes of workers!"
Stop parroting right-wing talking points and do some research yourself:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2018/12/03/plunging-prices-mean-building-new-renewable-energy-is-cheaper-than-running-existing-coal/#7fa11e5831f3
Dec 3, 2018, 07:40am
Plunging Prices Mean Building New Renewable Energy Is Cheaper Than Running Existing Coal
A new report reveals 42% of global coal capacity is currently unprofitable, and the United States could save $78 billion by closing coal-fired power plants in line with the Paris Climate Accord’s climate goals. This industry-disrupting trend comes down to dollars and cents, as the cost of renewable energy dips below fossil fuel generation.
Across the U.S., renewable energy is beating coal on cost: The price to build new wind and solar has fallen below the cost of running existing coal-fired power plants in Red and Blue states. For example, Colorado’s Xcel will retire 660 megawatts (MW) of coal capacity ahead of schedule in favor of renewable sources and battery storage, and reduce costs in the process. Midwestern utility MidAmerican will be the first utility to reach 100% renewable energy by 2020 without increasing customer rates, and Indiana’s NIPSCO will replace 1.8 gigawatts (GW) of coal with wind and solar.
Lazard’s annual Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) analysis reports solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind costs have dropped an extraordinary 88% and 69% since 2009, respectively. Meanwhile, coal and nuclear costs have decreased by 9% and increased by 23%, respectively. Even without accounting for current subsidies, renewable energy costs can be considerably lower than the marginal cost of conventional energy technologies.
In other words, customers save money when utilities replace existing coal with wind or solar.
And clean energy generation costs will only continue to fall. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory projects utility solar PV costs will decline 60% by 2050 under mid-level forecasts assuming continued industry growth, and technological breakthroughs could cut costs up to 80% by 2050. Similarly, its onshore wind analysis forecasts a 30% cost decline by 2050, which could be up to 58%-64% with breakthroughs.
Did you notice that part about the cost of nuclear INCREASING by 23%?
Coal and nuclear plants struggle to remain economic
While declining wind and solar prices have caused renewable energy capacity to surge, they are also dimming the prospects for struggling coal and nuclear plants. The U.S. is on pace for a record 15.4 GW of coal closures in 2018, could close an additional 24.1 GW of coal capacity by 2024, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects a 65 GW decline through 2030. Carbon Tracker forecasts that by that time, 100% of U.S. coal capacity will have higher long-run operating costs than renewables.
In light of these changing economics, the Trump administration proposed a bailout for certain coal and nuclear plants. The plan was dropped after intense scrutiny from multiple fronts due to billions in estimated new annual costs, but it represents a backward-looking approach to keep dirty and expensive energy sources online instead of embracing clean and cheap energy sources.
Several states are also grappling with uneconomic nuclear plants. Two federal appeals courts have upheld state nuclear subsidies in New York and Illinois, while New Jersey and Connecticut are currently considering how to keep unprofitable nuclear plants open. While the court decisions help prop up uneconomic nuclear, they also set an important precedent for states looking to put a value on carbon emission reductions through subsidies.
"truth is the US is the only nation meeting the goals of the damn Paris accord and it is doing so solely because of fracking"
Still steeped in right-wing media I see...
We, as the 2nd largest current emitter (historically the largest) we are currently at the bottom of the list:
https://www.axios.com/paris-agreement-countries-meeting-pledges-1261f497-3ec7-4192-ba21-83ae339762be.html
https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/04/interactive-chart-explains-worlds-top-10-emitters-and-how-theyve-changed
The data here is old, (2016) but sobering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production_from_renewable_sources
Country % Renewable electricity generation
Iceland: 100%
Guatemala: 51.7%
Italy: 37.3%
Kenya: 90.7%
Kyrgyzstan: 86.7%
New Zealand: 83.9%
Norway: 97.2%
Panama: 66.6%
Uruguay: 96.5%
Sweden: 57.1%
Switzerland: 59.8%
USA: 14.7%
China: 24.5%
India: 16.9%
Good anonymous, thanks for your great work debunking Wyatt and Regina's constant flood of lies. I really appreciate it!
UKrainian President Was Set To Announce Biden Probe On CNN, Then Congress Pressed For Aid: Report
Ukraine’s president was preparing to announce a groundless investigation into Joe Biden on CNN — against his better judgment — but managed to duck out of it when Congress pressed Donald Trump to release military aid he was withholding, The New York Times reported.
The last thing President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to do was become entangled in U.S. politics, the Times reported, but he was convinced that the only way he could finally get the appropriated $400 million in U.S. aid was to follow the president’s instructions for announcing an investigation of Biden and his son, according to interviews with Kyiv government officials.
If the money wasn’t released by the end of the fiscal year in September, Ukraine risked losing it for good. Zelensky was determined to do what he had to do for the money, even though avoiding partisan U.S. politics was the “first rule of Ukrainian foreign policy,” the Times reported.
Aides were arguing in favor of “bowing to what was demanded,” said Petro Burkovskiy, a senior fellow at the Democratic Initiatives Foundation with ties to Ukraine’s government, according to the Times. But the “cost was high,” he added.
Trump reportedly expected Zelensky to make a high-profile statement about launching an investigation of his 2020 presidential rival. A top U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, William Taylor, testified before House members that Gordon Sondland, Trump’s appointed ambassador to the European Union, told him the military aid was dependent on Zelensky making a “public statement” about initiating an investigation of Biden.
Sondland said that “President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations,” Taylor testified.
Zelensky agreed to an interview on CNN during which he was to reveal “investigations that would have played into domestic political affairs,” Taylor told lawmakers. But the military funds were released Sept. 11 after a congressional uproar, just two days before Zelensky was scheduled to appear on CNN. He quickly canceled, the Times reported.
The Times story, as well as Taylor’s — and others’ — testimony sharply undercuts Trump’s argument that there was no quid pro quo in his withholding of funds and his July 25 phone call pressing Zelensky for an investigation into Biden and his son. The president, however, is now saying there’s nothing wrong with a quid pro quo using military aid to press Zelensky to investigate his political rival, which would predictably affect the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
“The Zelensky team was ready to make this quid quo pro,” Burkovskiy told the Times. “They were ready to do this.”
It’s three full years since President Trump was elected.
Among those who predicted he could never win the election — or that he might have been conspiring with Hillary Clinton all along, worked for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, would crash the U.S. stock market his first week in office, would ban all Muslims, would send illegal immigrants home en masse on buses and trains, and would start a nuclear war — there have been real concerns.
But to others, there are different concerns that have borne out. We continue to get evidence of an orchestrated effort among government insiders and the well-connected to take down President Trump at all costs. The public evidence indicates that the effort was hatched even before he took office.
Trump critics would argue that there was good reason to devise plots against him before he was inaugurated. His supporters would argue that the opposition has crossed the line into unlawful actions involving wiretapping and attempts to frame Trump and his associates.
In any event, we can build an oversimplified timeline to make the point:
Aug. 15, 2016: After FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page met with Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok texts Page that they couldn’t take the risk of Trump getting elected without having “an insurance policy” in place.
October 2016: Benjamin Wittes, founder of a left-wing liberal blog called “Lawfare” — as in the “use of law as a weapon of conflict” — writes, “What if Trump wins? We need an insurance policy against the unthinkable: Donald Trump’s actually winning the Presidency.” Wittes writes that his vision of an “insurance policy” would rely on a “Coalition of All Democratic Forces” to challenge and obstruct Trump, using the courts as a “tool” and Congress as “a partner or tool.” He even mentions impeachment — two weeks before Trump is elected.
Wittes has acknowledged being a good friend of fired FBI Director James Comey. He spoke to a New York Times reporter about Comey’s interactions with President Trump right after Robert Mueller's appointment as special counsel.
October 2016: The FBI begins a yearlong secret wiretap on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which would have allowed intel officials access to information and conversations involving other Trump associates and possibly Trump himself. Page was never charged with any offense. The FBI never apologized for the unwarranted privacy intrusions. The lawfulness of the wiretap has been questioned.
Jan. 3, 2017: Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) publicly warns Trump that if he took on the intelligence community, it has “six ways from Sunday to get back at you.”
Jan. 11, 2017: A Politico investigation concludes that Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump in the 2016 election with help from a Ukrainian American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee.
Jan. 30, 2017: Days after President Trump takes office, attorney Mark Zaid tweets that a “coup has started” and “impeachment will follow ultimately.” Zaid often deals with government investigations and clients in the intelligence community.
A few months later, still in 2017, Zaid tweets: “I predict @CNN will play a key role in @realDonaldTrump not finishing out his full term as president” and “We will get rid of him, and this country is strong enough to survive even him and his supporters.” Zaid also tweets that “as one falls, two more will take their place” and the “coup” would occur in “many steps.”
Zaid went on to represent the alleged whistleblower in the Trump impeachment effort. (Zaid has stated, in his own defense, that his mention of a “coup” simply referred to what he saw as a lawful attempt by attorneys to remove an unlawful president from office.)
May 17, 2017: Special counsel Robert Mueller begins investigating Trump.
August 2017: Trump critic and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is hired as an analyst at CNN. He attacks Trump regularly, at times with incorrect information.
Jan. 23, 2018: Former Vice President Joe Biden publicly brags that he got Ukraine to fire its top prosecutor by threatening to withhold U.S. aid. The prosecutor was investigating Burisma, an energy company where Biden’s son had served on the board since 2014, when his father was vice president.
Feb. 1, 2018: Trump critic and former CIA Director John Brennan is hired as an analyst for NBC and MSNBC, where he attacks Trump regularly, at times with incorrect information.
March 22, 2019: The special counsel’s probe ends without concluding that Trump or his associates conspired with Russia, despite what critics such as Brennan and Clapper long had claimed. Democrats are unable to unite on an impeachment push over the findings.
April 2019: Ukraine elects a new president. Former Vice President Biden’s son Hunter Biden steps down from the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
July 25, 2019: President Trump calls the newly elected president of Ukraine and asks for cooperation in a probe involving long-standing corruption in Ukraine along with alleged ties to U.S. Democrats and the 2016 campaign.
Aug. 12, 2019: Someone alleging to be a whistleblower files a complaint about the phone call with the intelligence community’s inspector general. The anonymous person alleges President Trump sought political dirt to use against Biden in 2020 as part of a “quid pro quo.” Quids pro quo aren’t inherently illegal or improper and are, in fact, a key component of most foreign aid. However, the whistleblower claims Trump is improperly withholding military aid from Ukraine for his own political purposes.
Sept. 9, 2019: The inspector general notifies the House Intelligence Committee about the complaint. Although Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) initially denies doing so, it turns out that he and his staff already had met with — or conspired with, depending on your view — the alleged whistleblower.
Sept. 24, 2019: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announces an impeachment inquiry based on the alleged whistleblower’s claims.
On the same date, President Trump releases the transcript of his call with Ukraine’s president. There is no mention of a quid pro quo, political dirt, withholding aid or campaign 2020. Trump’s critics counter that these things were implicit. There is no evidence, however, that Ukraine provided Trump with "dirt” on Biden — a necessary component of an alleged quid pro quo.
Sept. 25, 2019: The president of Ukraine says he did not feel pushed by President Trump to investigate Biden or to take other action.
Oct. 31, 2019: The House approves impeachment process rules. The vote is largely along party lines, with two Democrats siding with Republicans.
It could be a coincidence that so many key names in this timeline — from John Brennan and James Comey, to Ukraine and CNN — factor into the Trump impeachment push. And, further, it could be a coincidence that we have ended up where some Trump critics said they hoped to be, even before he was sworn in.
On the other hand, in retrospect, the biggest surprise might be that, all things considered, it took them so long to get to this point
Would you look at all those right wing BS pirouettes?
I sure won't read a word of any of them.
Judges don't like BS either.
WHEN THE Trump administration announced a new rule to give greater protection to health-care workers who refuse to be involved in certain procedures for religious or moral reasons, it cited a reason: The number of people complaining that they had been pressured to act against their faith had increased dramatically, officials said. For a decade, there had been on average just one complaint a year, so the administration’s assertion of a jump in complaints last year to 343 was startling.
And, as it turns out, bogus.
Given how President Trump and his administration regularly traffic in deceptions and untruths, maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise. Nonetheless, it remains shocking to see an administration submitting such falsehoods in court. A federal judge called it out this week as he voided a rule set to go into effect later this month. The broadly written rule, challenged by New York and nearly two dozen other, mostly Democratic states and municipalities, would have allowed medical providers to decline to participate in services to which they morally object, such as abortion or assisted death. In a 147-page decision, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan declared the regulation unconstitutional, ruling that the Department of Health and Human Services had exceeded its authority and “acted arbitrarily and capriciously.”
AD
“Flatly untrue” is the label he applied to the administration’s central justification of a supposed “significant increase” in complaints related to conscience violations. Nearly 80 percent of the complaints provided to the court were about vaccinations and would not have been affected by the regulation in question.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has relied on fiction in judicial proceedings. Notoriously, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and the Justice Department fudged the motivation for a new citizenship question on the 2020 Census. Thankfully, the courts saw through that lie as well, albeit by a 5-to-4 majority, with four conservative justices willing to overlook the falsehood.
Lies helped Mr. Trump get elected, and in 993 days since taking office, he had made more than 13,000 false and misleading claims, according to the latest count by The Post’s Fact Checker. So frequent are the lies, there is the danger of becoming inured to them, treating them just as business as usual and forgetting the real harm they can cause. Since Republicans in Congress refuse to be any kind of check on Mr. Trump and his dishonesty, let’s hope the courts continue to do their job.
"Lies helped Mr. Trump get elected"
"if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor"
"Obamacare will reduce the deficit"
Obamacare DID reduce the deficit. By some 300 million if I recall correctly.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "heterosexuality is how life is perpetuated and it has a privileged status"
Human population growth is exponential. If we continue this way there will be a massive collapse of resources which will result in most of the population dying.
Its time to stop "privileging" heterosexuality and start privileging those who refrain from having more than 2.1 children.
Hillarious how once I show up Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous start posting under the various "I hate gays and we should destroy them" pseudonyms :)
Those two really hate me.
Its because the can't refute that the way for us to have the best possible society is for our highest priority to be maximizing the happiness for all in an equal and fair way.
Its destructive to put your religion before that.
Dear Wyatt/Regina, if Republicans had a shred of evidence of any wrongdoing by the Bidens the American Justice Department under Trump'S henchman Bill Barr would be investigating it.
Republicans are trying to do to Biden what they did to Hillary - 6 years of Benghazi investigations, 8 committee hearings where she (unlike Trump) answered hour after hour of questions under oath. And of course after spending millions and millions of dollars of taxpayer money they found NOTHING.
Because there was nothing to find, Hillary is squeaky clean, just like Biden.
The truth is not on the side of Republicans so the entire team is gaslighting the American public.
Trump on the other hand, used 400 million in taxpayer funds to try to strongarm the Ukranian president into lying and committing a crime to help Trump personally at the expense of America.
A professional referee says in a lawsuit filed Thursday that disgraced doctor Richard Strauss masturbated in front of him in a shower after a wrestling match at Ohio State University, and he reported the encounter directly to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who was then the assistant coach.
“Yeah, that’s Strauss,” Jordan and then-head coach Russ Hellickson replied, according to the lawsuit, when the referee, identified in court papers as John Doe 42, told them about the incident. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Ohio, implies that Jordan's response to the incident, which the referee said happened in 1994, was essentially a shrug.
John Doe 42 is the second person to say he told Jordan directly about either being approached or molested by Strauss, who was found by independent investigators to have sexually abused 177 male students over two decades.
Jordan, a powerful Republican congressman and a top defender of President Donald Trump in the ongoing impeachment inquiry, has repeatedly denied knowing anything about what Strauss did to the wrestlers he helped coach from 1986 to 1994. He has said the allegations against him were politically motivated.
John Doe 42 said that when he informed Jordan and Hellickson about what happened, their response was, “Yeah, yeah, we know.”
“It was common knowledge what Strauss was doing so the attitude was it is what it is,” he told NBC News. “I wish Jim, and Russ, too, would stand up and do the right thing and admit they knew what Strauss was doing, because everybody knew what he was doing to the wrestlers. What was a shock to me is that Strauss tried to do that to me. He was breaking new ground by going after a ref.”
Former Ohio State wrestler Dunyasha Yetts was the first person to say he spoke to Jordan directly about Strauss. He previously described how he went to see Strauss for a thumb injury, and when the doctor tried to pull down his pants, he stormed out and complained to Jordan and Hellickson.
“It’s good that people are starting to come forward and say the truth, which is that Jordan and the other coaches knew what was going on and they blew it off,” Yetts told NBC News.
Other former Ohio State wrestlers have said Jordan had to know about Strauss because he shared a locker room with them and took part in discussions about the doctor, who died in 2005.
Jordan’s spokesman, Ian Fury, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A year or two back a couple of guys in the Corvette Forum asked me to post a picture of me and my car which I was reluctant to do. I did decide to post it recently, so if you want to put a face to my name, here I am.
A year ago I started trying to adjust the position of the passenger side rear bumper on my car. It took me a year to get it ideally positioned. This is my victory picture after the year long struggle to get the rear bumpers right.
Fiona Hill, President Donald Trump's former top adviser on Russia and Europe, told House investigators that her time in the Trump administration was marked by death threats, “hateful calls” and “conspiracy theories,” a harassment campaign she said was revived after it was learned she would cooperate with the impeachment inquiry, according to a transcript of her deposition released Friday.
"I received, I just have to tell you, death threats, calls at my home. My neighbors reported somebody coming and hammering on my door," she told investigators in closed-door testimony of her time in the White House. "Now, I'm not easily intimidated, but that made me mad."
The transcript confirmed NBC News’ reporting that Hill told Congress that Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, sidestepped the National Security Council and typical White House process to advocate for a shadow policy on Ukraine, while revealing new details about how Giuliani's work undercut and derailed the diplomats charged with overseeing Ukrainian-U.S. relations.
Hill, who transitioned out of her role in July before officially leaving her job in early September, testified that the ousting of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was a turning point for her. Yovanovitch, she said, was subject to a similar campaign of harassment and "defamation," which she credited to Giuliani.
Asked about her conversations with Ambassador John Bolton about Yovanovitch, Hill testified that Bolton's "reaction was pained."
"And he basically said, in fact he directly said: Rudy Giuliani is a hand grenade that is going to blow everyone up," she told congressional investigators.
The transcript of her deposition was released alongside the transcript of testimony from Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council. It's the latest in a series of witness transcripts House Democrats have made public as the impeachment inquiry into Trump enters a new phase.
Transcripts of testimony from other key figures released this week have largely established a narrative that suggests Trump directed officials to tie nearly $400 million in military and security aid to Ukraine to demands that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announce probes that could benefit Trump.
Text messages obtained as part of the impeachment inquiry into Trump showed Sondland, Giuliani and former U.S. envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker working to facilitate Trump’s goal of getting Zelenskiy to commit to investigate the president’s political opponents including former Vice President Joe Biden — and making a White House visit for Zelenskiy contingent on such a commitment. Official notes from Trump’s July call with Zelenskiy released by the White House showed Trump asking the Ukrainians to work directly with Giuliani, and NBC News has reported that Sondland was also in direct contact with Trump about Ukraine.
The White House sought to limit how much Hill could say, according to letters between the White House and her attorney obtained by NBC News last month. The White House did not tell her not to testify, but said she was responsible for guarding against unauthorized disclosures and outlined areas where her testimony might run up against executive privilege, like direct communications with the president or meetings with other heads of state.
Hill’s lawyers argued that executive privilege did not apply, in part because some of the information has already come into the public sphere and thus was no longer confidential. They also argued that executive privilege disappears when there’s reason to believe there was government misconduct.
Thanks for sharing Priya Lynn.
That looks like a difficult job and you are making great progress!
Congratulations!
Ahhh, gee, thanks Good anonymous!
During the 2016 campaign, candidate Donald Trump stood in front of largely white crowds and asked black voters to consider, “What the hell do you have to lose?”
Four years later, the president has a new message for black voters: Look what I’ve delivered.
Trump and his campaign launched a new “Black Voices for Trump” outreach initiative in Atlanta on Friday dedicated to “recruiting and activating Black Americans in support of President Trump,” according to the campaign. Much of that effort will focus on highlighting ways that African Americans have benefited from the Trump economy.
“The support we’re getting from the African American community has been overwhelming,” Trump told the crowd, which included supporters wearing red “BLACK LIVES MAGA” hats.
He predicted victory in 2020, and said, “We’re going to do it with a groundswell of support from hardworking African American patriots.”
Shortly after landing in Georgia on Friday, Trump retweeted a call from one black supporter for submissions for a ”#MAGACHALLENGE” competition featuring Trump-friendly rap songs. Trump said he would be announcing the winners and inviting them to the White House to meet with him and perform.
Before launching the new effort, Trump met with supporters at a fundraiser that was expected to raise about $3.5 million for a joint committee benefiting the Republican National Committee, the Trump campaign and the campaign of Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga.
The campaign has launched similar coalitions for women, Latinos and veterans.
Darrell Scott, a black Ohio pastor and a longtime supporter of the president who is co-chair of the new coalition and spoke at Friday’s event, said that in 2015 and 2016, supporters trying to sell Trump to black voters could only point forward to share things they anticipated from Trump.
“Now that it’s 2020, we’re able to point backwards and to some very definitive accomplishments that the president has done,” Scott said.
The campaign and White House point to a list of achievements, including passage of bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation, which Trump signed into law last year, along with his ongoing support for opportunity zones in urban areas and new investments in historically black colleges.
“I don’t know anyone who’s done that kind of work outside of the president on attacking those big issues or trying to stop drugs from coming into the neighborhood and, at the same time, giving people second chances,” said Ja’Ron Smith, deputy assistant to the president and one of the White House’s few minority high-ranked officials.
Some analysts have pointed to a precipitous drop in black turnout in 2016 as one of the reasons Trump beat his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, who was far less popular — especially among black men —than former President Barack Obama.
history of Biden using the influence of his office to get special favors for friends and family:
https://www.thenation.com/article/biden-delaware-way-graft/
Trump blocked congressionally approved taxpayer funds intended to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia and he did it to benefit himself personally to the detriment of the United States.
This kind of corruption cannot stand if American democracy is to survive.
When you've got nothing to hide, you testify at investigations into your behaviour. Hillary testified, Trump refused to.
Careful Wyatt/Regina, or I'll post a picture of you two and let everyone see who's ugly.
Blacks for Trump
President Trump launched an initiative called Black Voices for Trump with a speech in Atlanta Friday to recruit and engage the black community.
“The Democrats have let you down,” the president said to the hundreds of people in attendance. “They’ve dismissed you. They’ve hurt you. They’ve sabotaged you for far too long.”
Our coalition of black leaders discussed the unique challenges faced by the black community with the president. Urban areas with large black populations have suffered from historically high levels of unemployment, poverty, and dependency.
Crime is higher and the quality of education is lower. Black students – young men in particular – have lower high school graduation rates than the general population.
Progressive policies have failed the black community.
It’s painful to watch Democrats use and abuse the black community every four years. They make promises to help black Americans overcome generational poverty and strengthen our communities, then disappear the day after Election Day.
Our black forefathers did not go through all that they went through simply so that we could be black. They paid the price so that we could be free. And thanks in part to President Trump’s accomplishments, we want to keep it that way.
When President Trump made several promises to the black community in 2016, the strangest thing happened – he kept them.
President Trump promised jobs.
Since 2016, the economy has added more than 6.7 million jobs. As the White House pointed out, that is more than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Montana combined.
Black unemployment has fallen to 5.4 percent, which is about one-third lower than when President Trump took office.
President Trump promised opportunity.
In the historic 2017 tax cuts, President Trump fought to include Qualified Opportunity Zones to incentivize companies to bring jobs and economic development to distressed communities.
The program has been a life preserver for people like Roy James, the plant manager of the Vicksburg Forest Products lumber facility. Roy was notified the facility would close its doors after working at the sawmill for almost three decades.
Workers believed all hope was lost – until Vicksburg was designated an Opportunity Zone. Thanks to this Trump administration initiative, the plant reopened, and jobs were saved.
President Trump promised justice reform.
Perhaps the most impactful reform of President Trump’s first term was the First Step Act, the most significant criminal justice reform America has achieved in a generation.
The legislation reformed overly harsh federal sentencing laws enacted during the Clinton years that disproportionately harmed back families and communities. It also provided nonviolent offenders with a second chance to rejoin society as productive citizens.
Since President Trump signed the First Step Act, thousands of inmates have returned to their families, including nearly 1,700 people convicted of crack cocaine offenses. The first inmate released was Matthew Charles, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for selling crack cocaine in the 1990s.
Matthew dedicated his time in prison to serving others. He studied the Bible, taught GED classes, and mentored fellow inmates. Every day, Matthew took steps toward redemption. And thanks to President Trump, he now walks free.
The Democratic Party has invested decades into organizing the support of black voters. But what have we gotten in return? They have taken us for granted, and we deserve better representation in Washington.
President Trump offers something new to black families, business owners, and communities. He is a leader who keeps his promises. He accomplished more for the black community in four years than the Democratic Party could deliver in the last 40 years.
The Black Voices for Trump coalition is committed to spreading this message far and wide in the black community. Our best days are ahead – but only if we can recognize who is really fighting for us in Washington, and who isn’t
As House Democrats begin the public phase of their impeachment hearings into President Donald Trump this week — over a presidential phone call to Ukraine — I’m forced to use a dirty word.
If you melt easily, please cover your eyes and ears, or clutch your pearls and gird yourself. Here comes that dirty word:
Fairness.
To a politician, “fairness” is nothing more than a shiv, to be slipped between the ribs with a smile. Politics is never fair. It’s not about who deserves what. Politics is the hand, and government is the club in that hand.
Americans are realists. What keeps us going isn’t belief in the fairness of Washington media or Washington politicians. What keeps us going is our belief in the ultimate fairness of our fellow Americans. If we lose that, we’re done.
So, I propose that, if nothing else, fairness should rule the televised impeachment hearings run by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
He wants to call diplomats to testify about the phone call, to give their impressions of the call, though the transcripts have been released and anyone can read them. Calling the diplomats in isn’t about beginning at the beginning. Calling the diplomats is about not beginning at the beginning.
It begins with the “whistleblower.”
If the Democrats want to be fair about this, two witnesses must be called and sworn in under oath to testify and be questioned by Democrats and Republicans so that Americans, now focused, can also begin at the beginning.
The first witness should be the so-called “whistleblower,” the government employee who brought the complaint to Schiff about that phone call to Ukraine.
And the second witness should be Schiff himself.
There is no way, really, around this. To do otherwise is to admit that all this is about, really, is overturning Trump’s 2016 election, which caused the bipartisan Washington establishment to break out into hives and TV news anchors to cry on air.
Politicians and media play a role, but there’s more to it. The American people play a role too. This is their country. They voted. And Trump was elected.
The impeachment of a president a year out from a presidential election, with all the animosity and chaos that would bring, is serious business.
The worry for Democrats is that if it is just a partisan exercise, Trump Impeachment Theater will be seen as a lame addendum to the Mueller Russia Collusion investigation, which failed to find evidence that Trump or anyone else colluded with Russia over the 2016 election.
This week’s first witnesses shouldn’t be diplomats.
The first witness, ideally, would be the “whistleblower” himself.
It was the “whistleblower” who brought the complaint to Schiff and his committee staff, alleging that Trump had committed an outrage during that phone call to the president of Ukraine.
Is the whistleblower a heroic patriot fighting against overwhelming odds to save the republic, as Democrats insist?
Or is he a Democratic operative and pajama-boy tool of former CIA boss and Trump loather John Brennan, as Republicans have alleged?
Who is he? What’s his name? Does he have allies on Schiff’s committee? Why is he doing this?
When you hold hearings to take out a president, you want to know how it all began, don’t you?
You might want to read the fascinating and important piece in RealClearInvestigations by Paul Sperry. It discusses the “whistleblower” in detail.
If you don’t want to read it, then please just admit that all you want is just another steaming platter of “Orange Man Bad” analysis.
After the whistleblower is questioned about Brennan and who he met in Schiff’s committee and whether he was indeed booted out of the White House for partisan leaking, as alleged in the RealClearInvestigations story, then Schiff should take the stand.
And Schiff should testify, under oath, about how all this was orchestrated and what he did and whether he told the whole truth.
If the whistleblower is not compelled to testify under oath, Democrats risk a self-inflicted wound. And wounds become dangerous when infected in a swamp.
Trump’s call to Ukraine was clumsy, and it gave his opponents an opportunity. I don’t think it was impeachable, but then, you might differ with me. That’s OK. I won’t shun you.
It’s still OK to have different views in this country, isn’t it?
Democrats insist Trump was involved in an illicit effort to use American foreign aid to get Ukraine to dig up dirt about Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. They shout “quid pro quo.”
Republicans insist there is nothing impeachable in the call and that all foreign aid, by definition, is about a this for a that.
They note, correctly, that Democrats were playing in Ukraine in 2016, and that Joe Biden was America’s diplomatic point man in that country, even as son Hunter cashed in with a $50,000-a-month gig with a Ukrainian natural gas company.
That’s quid pro quo too, isn’t it?
But all that will come at us from Washington begins with the whistleblower and Schiff pulling the strings. To pretend otherwise is an insult.
Some of you will think that America doesn’t deserve what’s happening. But think again.
In the great western “Unforgiven,” Clint Eastwood’s character explained the facts of life this way:
“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
The impeachment hearings aren’t about what America deserves. This is about what it’s always been about: power.
"The first witness, ideally, would be the “whistleblower” himself."
The only reason Republicans want to know the whistleblower's identity is so that they can smear him, and provide another distraction from Rump's crimes.
The whistleblower's allegations have been corroborated by multiple sources now, and it is clear that people were acting on Rump and Giuliani's illegal scheme.
Rudy Giuliani’s scheme to open a shadowy back channel with the new Ukrainian government in order to damage Joe Biden was so ham-handed that even John Bolton, the mustachioed former national security adviser to President Trump, reportedly called it a “drug deal” and Giuliani himself “a hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up.”
Rump's apologists are now desperately trying to throw that hand grenade onto someone else and hope it doesn't blow up in Rump's face.
Too late. Trashing the whistle blower isn't going to help you.
Tuesday’s election was a night of dramatic upsets, with Democrats winning the Kentucky Governor’s race and claiming control of the Virginia legislature. It also marked a wave of openly queer candidates winning public office. The LGBTQ Victory Fund, an organization that provides fundraising support for queer candidates at each level of government, had endorsed 111 candidates this election cycle. Eighty of those candidates won in Tuesday night's election.
While 46 of the candidates were cisgender gay men, there were also candidates who identified as lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, or queer. Five of the winning candidates were transgender women, and one openly identified as nonbinary.
One of those transgender candidates was Danica Roem, who became the first openly transgender person to be reelected to a state legislature. Roem made waves when she was elected to represent Virginia’s 13th House District back in 2017, beating an incumbent GOP delegate who was known for his anti-trans policies. While she was widely reported to be the first transgender person elected to a state legislature at the time, Snopes reports that the claim isn’t completely true—but of the two trans women elected before her, one wasn’t out as trans during her candidacy, and the other resigned before taking office.
It’s easy to understand why so many queer people are now running for office. Under Donald Trump’s presidency, the LGBTQ community has faced dozens of attacks on their rights to access healthcare, receive protection from workplace and housing discrimination, adopt children, and much more. The majority of these new candidates are running for local offices, where they will be able to implement inclusive policies and enact protections for other queer members of their communities.
This year’s victories follow the “rainbow wave” of 2018, when a whopping 610 queer candidates ran for office across the US at all levels of government, with 164 of them winning. Last year brought eight LGBTQ leaders to the House and two to the Senate. The incoming freshman class of House Democrats was nearly 10% LGBTQ—much more in line with the proportion of queer people in the general population, which has been estimated at anywhere from 4.5% to 12%. The race also saw Jared Polis of Colorado become the second openly queer governor ever elected in the U.S. Kate Brown of Oregon was the first, in 2015.
There are now 765 openly LGBTQ elected officials serving nationwide. While this may seem like an encouraging number, only 0.15% of elected officials in the US are LGBTQ, showing that there is still work to be done before our government truly reflects the diversity of gender and sexual identity within our country.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem"
When Republicans say this, what they mean is that they want to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and to take away people's right to health insurance even if they have pre-existing health conditions.
Republicans make sure to turn "government is the problem" into a self-fulfilling prophecy at every opportunity.
During the 2016 election Republicans tried to gaslight Americans by falsely claiming the Clinton Foundation was corrupt.
The truth is it was the Trump foundation that was corrupt. Trump was recently convicted of using his allegedly charitable foundation for his own personal benefit and fined $2 million while his children have been required to enter into study into the legal requirements for running a charity.
Imagine a country where its president is fined $2 million for stealing money from a charity and nobody cares?
Okay, Wyatt/Regina, tell us how Trump stealing money from his charity is all fine and "everyone does it".
"The only reason Republicans want to know the whistleblower's identity is so that they can smear him,"
actually, what needs to be unveiled is repeated attempts to start false stories to undo the 2016 election
it's a threat to our democracy
we need to know who's behind to consider if they've done anything illegal or, conversely, if we need laws against what they've done
the whistleblower law is to protect those who witness something illegal or unethical
this individual didn't
"and provide another distraction from Rump's crimes."
Dems have yet to demonstrate that Trump committed any crimes
"The whistleblower's allegations have been corroborated by multiple sources now, and it is clear that people were acting on Rump and Giuliani's illegal scheme."
actually, all that's been corroborated is that certain people interpreted the language of Trump's phone call the same way that the whistleblower did
so what?
other people, who, as opposed to the whistleblower, actually listened to the call, didn't agree with the whistleblower's interpretation
"Rudy Giuliani’s scheme to open a shadowy back channel with the new Ukrainian government"
everything about international relations is shadowy
the world would be a much more dangerous place without "shadowy back channels", you imbecile
"in order to damage Joe Biden"
Biden damaged himself. Did he really think that he should serve as American's main point person in Ukraine while his son took a huge salary from interests under investigation for corruption there?
That misjudgment alone is disqualifying for presidential nomination
We also need to consider some legislation forbidding presidential children from selling their parent's influence
"Rump's apologists are now desperately trying to throw that hand grenade onto someone else and hope it doesn't blow up in Rump's face."
Need I remind you that Trump is in no danger of removal from office.
When this is all over, voters will be reminded that Dems wasted the last three years in dubious attempts to overturn the 2016 election rather than solve the problems of their country.
Meanwhile, Trump's policies have helped the disadvantaged and restored justice.
"Too late. Trashing the whistle blower isn't going to help you."
Thanks for the advice but you know what they call people who take advice from imbeciles: imbeciles...
"Tuesday’s election was a night of dramatic upsets, with Democrats winning the Kentucky Governor’s race and claiming control of the Virginia legislature."
neither of those could be called an upset, certainly not dramatic ones
"It also marked a wave of openly queer candidates winning public office"
the GOP doesn't oppose queers from serving in public office
"It’s easy to understand why so many queer people are now running for office."
There are probably no more than there ever were. They're just known because gays have become so exhibitionist
"Under Donald Trump’s presidency, the LGBTQ community has faced dozens of attacks on their rights to access healthcare, receive protection from workplace and housing discrimination, adopt children, and much more. The majority of these new candidates are running for local offices, where they will be able to implement inclusive policies and enact protections for other queer members of their communities."
well, I would oppose those queer candidates that are looking to provide special benefits and protections for queers
are there any polls showing queer public officials favor such inane policies?
Judicial Watch has released White House logs from the Obama administration, raising questions about Obama, Biden, Ukraine, the origins of the impeachment farce, and Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst who worked with Biden on Ukraine policy and who is the whistleblower. Liberal social media sites, like Facebook, are currently trying to erase Ciaramella's name from the internet.
Too late
https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-releases/judicial-watch-white-house-visitor-logs-detail-meetings-of-eric-ciaramella/
"actually, what needs to be unveiled is repeated attempts to start false stories to undo the 2016 election
it's a threat to our democracy"
Where were you in 2008 when people were saying Obama was born in Kenya and secretly a Muslim?
And what has been released about Rump's phone call has been proven false?
Just because the Cult of Trump doesn't believe he committed a crime, doesn't mean that he didn't - no matter how many times you try and fill up this blog with your lame excuses.
"When this is all over, voters will be reminded that Dems wasted the last three years in dubious attempts to overturn the 2016 election rather than solve the problems of their country."
It seems you need reminded that all the conspiracy theories and slander against Obama, and even Moscow Mitch's promise to undermine the will of the American voters with "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president" didn't manage to overturn Obama's first or second election.
Obama was born in Hawaii, which isn't a crime, and he wasn't a Muslim - which isn't a crime either.
If the Rumpster wants to stay in office, he should stop doing things that look like, and probably are, crimes.
Republicans like to try and spin this as "Democrats trying to overturn the last election," but Republican behavior during Obama's tenure is the very definition of that.
Legally investigating and prosecuting elected officials for crimes while in office is part and parcel for keeping our democracy safe.
"Judicial Watch has released White House logs from the Obama administration, raising questions about Obama, Biden, Ukraine, the origins of the impeachment farce"
Government employees signing the log book before entering the White House isn't a crime.
But obviously, if you throw the names of enough Dems in there along with George Soros, you've got all the threads you need to weave a whole new conspiracy theory.
Go ahead, investigate another nothing "hamberder."
What about those 3 million illegal voters that voted for Hillary? Didn't Rump set up an investigative committee for that?
How many did they find?
3 million?
3 thousand?
3?
"Where were you in 2008 when people were saying Obama was born in Kenya and secretly a Muslim?"
I was withholding judgment
you should try it
most of the Republicans in Congress at the time didn't support the theory
"And what has been released about Rump's phone call has been proven false?"
well, how about the quid pro quo
not in that call
that's why Dems are frantically trying to find some other intance
the call didn't show what the whistleblower claimed it did
"Just because the Cult of Trump doesn't believe he committed a crime, doesn't mean that he didn't - no matter how many times you try and fill up this blog with your lame excuses."
I hate to break it to you but the American justice system, where one is innocent until proven guilty, is not a cult
the whole "Just because you don't believe he committed a crime, doesn't mean that he didn't" line is scary to think there are people who actually think that way
it's a rationale of banana republics and medieval witch trials
let's try it:
just because the commmenter who calls himself "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime" says he's not a monkey, doesn't mean he isn't one
"It seems you need reminded that all the conspiracy theories and slander against Obama, and even Moscow Mitch's promise to undermine the will of the American voters with "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president" didn't manage to overturn Obama's first or second election."
well, if your characterization is true, the fact that Obama won re-election anyway would indicate that the same will happen with Trump
"If the Rumpster wants to stay in office, he should stop doing things that look like, and probably are, crimes."
your only hope of removing Trump from office is to drop the impeachment farce and, quick, find a centrist who is not corrupt and not the wife of a sexual predator former President, to run against him
but, thanks so much for telling us what Trump should do if he "wants to stay in office"
ROFL!! LOL!!!!!!!
"Legally investigating and prosecuting elected officials for crimes while in office is part and parcel for keeping our democracy safe."
well, it should be rare and there should actually be a feasible case of a crime committed
"Government employees signing the log book before entering the White House isn't a crime."
no one said it was
"it's a rationale of banana republics and medieval witch trials"
It's also the rationale of petty criminals who find themselves in prison who think they shouldn't be there even though they did the crime.
"well, if your characterization is true, the fact that Obama won re-election anyway would indicate that the same will happen with Trump"
Well, you don't believe anything the TTFers say here is true, so by your "logic," that would indicate Trump isn't going to win reelection.
Past history is not a guarantee of future performance.
Republican's only hope of winning the next election is putting someone forward who can behave like an adult and not continuously put his own interests above the country.
But it's fun watching you believe your own twisted "rationalizations" for all of Rump's bad behavior.
Keep 'em comin! It's good for a laugh at least.
"no one said it was" (a crime)
Yeah, it was just another right-wing conspiracy theory. Call us when someone finds evidence of an actual crime.
Republicans have been saying Obama's investigation of the Rumpster was a crime for years now. It seems that 3 years is plenty of time for Republicans to find some evidence and charge somebody for some crimes by now. What are they waiting for?
Don't tell us this is another episode where Republicans spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money slandering Democrats and finding nothing criminal to charge them with.
"your only hope of removing Trump from office is to drop the impeachment farce and, quick, find a centrist who is not corrupt and not the wife of a sexual predator former President, to run against him"
I didn't have anything to with starting the impeachment investigation, and I'm sure I won't have anything to do with stopping it.
That's above my pay grade.
But thanks so much for telling us how to defeat the Rumpster. It will be dutifully ignored.
This is not a presidency.
This is a crime spree by a con artist who is repaying his Russian debts and lining his own pockets.
Nikki Haley "This is a decision for the American people."
Jon Favreau "The President extorted a foreign goverment in order to influence that decision, which is why he should be impeached."
People, for god's sake, don't forget this when you hear that Republican bullsh*t.
The last time unconstitutional moves were up to the people, we got the Third Reich.
"It's also the rationale of petty criminals who find themselves in prison who think they shouldn't be there even though they did the crime."
a complete non sequitur
if you don't believe in the concept of innocent until proven guilty, you don't believe in American values
"Well, you don't believe anything the TTFers say here is true, so by your "logic," that would indicate Trump isn't going to win reelection."
he is going to win because he has demonstrated that he can promote the peace and prosperity of the country and Dems have demonstrated they believe in an economic framework that has failed, every time it's been tried, everywhere around the globe
the Dems focus on overturning the 2016 election rather than trying to win the 2020 election will be a factor in their downfall but, ultimately, it's that capitalism is superior to socialism
"Republican's only hope of winning the next election is putting someone forward who can behave like an adult and not continuously put his own interests above the country."
no one is going to vote based "adult behavior", you fool
and we are a country of aspiration, not envy
so, no one begrudges Trump capitalizing on his office if he takes care of the country
which he's done
repeat after me: lowest minority unemployment in history, economic growth a point about Obama's new normal, minorities unjustly imprisoned by our sexual predator former President have been released, inner city opportunity zones are flourishing, black colleges are getting grants, 85% of jobs created since Trump took over have gone to minorities, China is on the run, illegal immigrants are no longer taking jobs from our poorest citizens
"But it's fun watching you believe your own twisted "rationalizations" for all of Rump's bad behavior.
Keep 'em comin! It's good for a laugh at least."
well, stop complaining then
and please keep laughing and feeling confident until November 2020
hope Elizabeth won't take until the next day to come out of her hotel room, like Hillary did
"Republicans have been saying Obama's investigation of the Rumpster was a crime for years now. It seems that 3 years is plenty of time for Republicans to find some evidence and charge somebody for some crimes by now. What are they waiting for?"
actually, the investigation has been going on a few months
until Mueller issued his report, Trump was careful to cooperate with his investigation and this would have complicated it
Dems are trying for a sequel to protect themselves right now
"That's above my pay grade."
well I, for one, am in favor of fast food workers getting higher pay
"This is not a presidency.
This is a crime spree by a con artist who is repaying his Russian debts and lining his own pockets."
read Mueller's report
you must have been on vacation when it came out
"if you don't believe in the concept of innocent until proven guilty, you don't believe in American values"
I do believe in innocent until proven guilty, and many other American values. What has come out of the impeachment investigation has shown that multiple people in Rump's own administration corroborates the whistle blower's report that the Rumpster tried to get a foreign entity to interfere with our election process... again.
That is a crime. Only fools would deny that, but those are a dime a dozen in the Republican party.
"he is going to win because he has demonstrated that he can promote the peace and prosperity of the country"
Rump has promoted the rise of white nationalists, whether he did it intentionally or not may be up for debate, but he has not been promoting peace. The prosperity he has supposedly promoted has only been a continuation of the forward moving Obama economy, and would be even better if he hadn't started an unnecessary trade war.
"and Dems have demonstrated they believe in an economic framework that has failed, every time it's been tried, everywhere around the globe"
Ahh... complaining about the whole "socialism" thing again, as if every democrat wants to go full Russia or full Venezuela into the socialism regime. You never mention the fact that the socialism Democrats are advocating is the kind that has provided health care, decent wages, child care, and even decent vacation times for all of Western Europe for decades. God forbid we have the best education system in the world like Finland. Instead, we're down at number 20, and Russia is number 5.
https://www.edsys.in/best-education-system-in-the-world/
The "socialism" practiced by our NATO allies in Europe and Canada has served them quite well over the decades, and they show no signs of turning into a collapsed socialist empire.
"no one is going to vote based "adult behavior", you fool
and we are a country of aspiration, not envy"
Well, given your posts, I'm not surprised that acting like an adult is not high on your priority list for a president. But for the adults in the room, it is.
And I don't know any Democrat that envies Rump. They are sickened by his behavior.
"so, no one begrudges Trump capitalizing on his office if he takes care of the country
which he's done"
One word: Emoluments.
"repeat after me:"
No. Just No.
Mindless repetition is how children are indoctrinated into religion and adults are expected to behave as Republicans. I'll take my own analytical thinking skills over right-wing brainwashing any day.
"and please keep laughing and feeling confident until November 2020"
Same to you buddy, same to you.
"until Mueller issued his report, Trump was careful to cooperate with his investigation and this would have complicated it"
If this were a sitcom, that's where the laugh track would kick in.
"well I, for one, am in favor of fast food workers getting higher pay"
Funny, I don't ever recall you advocating for the $15 or $22 minimum wage - I seem to recall Republicans insisting that the market should decide their wages. But if I missed that somewhere, please let me know.
OCRACOKE, N.C. — On any normal late-fall day, the ferries that ply the 30 miles between Swan Quarter and this barrier island might carry vacationing retirees, sports fishermen and residents enjoying mainland getaways after the busy summer tourist season.
But two months ago, Hurricane Dorian washed away all signs of normalcy here. After buzz-cutting the Bahamas, the giant storm rolled overhead, raising a seven-foot wall of water in its wake that sloshed back through the harbor, invading century-old homes that have never before taken in water and sending islanders such as post office head Celeste Brooks and her two grandchildren scrambling into their attics.
Ocracoke has been closed to visitors ever since. Island-bound ferries carry yawning container trucks to haul back the sodden detritus of destroyed homes. And O’cockers — proud descendants of the pilots and pirates who navigated these treacherous shores — are faced with a reckoning: whether this sliver of sand, crouched three feet above sea level between the Atlantic Ocean and Pamlico Sound, can survive the threats of extreme weather and rising sea levels. And if it can’t, why rebuild?
“That’s the unspoken question. That’s what nobody wants to say,” said Erin Baker, the only doctor to serve this community of 1,000. “It’s a question of how do we continue to have life here.”
Scientists have long warned that Ocracoke’s days are numbered, that this treasured island is a bellwether for vast stretches of the U.S. coast.
“Virtually everyone from Virginia Beach south to the U.S./Mexico border is going to be in the same situation in the next 50 years,” said Michael Orbach, professor emeritus of marine affairs at Duke University. “And it’s only going to get worse after that.”
If Ocracoke’s ultimate prognosis is grim, Tom Pahl, the township’s county commissioner, remains committed to its recovery.
“Is this really sustainable? The answer is pretty clearly no,” he said. “But what’s the timeline? No one has been able to say, ‘You’ve got 15 years, 40 years, 100 years.’ The clear-eyed vision is resiliency then retreat.”
The disaster has in some ways shortened people’s outlook.
“I don’t think we’re thinking that far ahead right now,” said Monroe Gaskill, 64, echoing in the distinctive island brogue the immediate concerns of many “ol’ toimers”: whether the island will be open in time for duck-hunting season later this month; where students will study next semester when they have to relinquish their temporary classrooms in the old Coast Guard Station; and what will become of all the displaced residents, who are holed up in rental units, once the tourists return next Easter.
Even as some houses are being bulldozed, neighbors are working together to raise others.
“Now I know there is no such thing as high enough,” said Janet Spencer behind the counter of the hardware store, which reopened without power right after the storm. She and her husband jacked up their home 18 years ago — just one cinder block too few to keep out Dorian. Still, she said, long-term residents won’t leave.
“It’s the only thing we know,” she said...
President Donald Trump says he lifted his freeze on aid to Ukraine on Sept. 11, but the State Department had quietly authorized releasing $141 million of the money several days earlier, according to five people familiar with the matter.
The State Department decision, which hasn’t been reported previously, stemmed from a legal finding made earlier in the year, and conveyed in a classified memorandum to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. State Department lawyers found the White House Office of Management and Budget, and thus the president, had no legal standing to block spending of the Ukraine aid.
The White House freeze on assistance to Ukraine -- including a separate $250 million package of military aid from the Defense Department -- has become a central issue in House impeachment hearings, where witnesses say Trump ordered the assistance halted to force Ukraine to announce investigations into Joe Biden and other Democrats.
The words “investigation, Biden and Clinton” were to be required elements in a public announcement by Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the new Ukrainian president, to get the aid, State Department official George Kent testified in the Democratic-led impeachment probe. Ukraine ultimately didn’t make the announcement, and Trump says there was never a quid pro quo.
The freeze on funds Ukraine sought for its continuing war against Russia-backed separatists was opposed by many in the administration. Alexander Vindman, director of European affairs on the National Security Council, has testified that he understood Pompeo, then-National Security Advisor John Bolton and Defense Secretary Mark Esper all recommended releasing the funds in an Aug. 15 meeting with Trump.
The OMB has argued all along that the congressional notification by the State Department was only one step and it still had the power to hold the money after it was sent because of its authority to apportion -- or distribute -- the funds.
“At no point was this pause inappropriate, let alone illegal,” OMB spokeswoman Rachel Semmel said Saturday in an email.
But the State Department disagreed. Taylor, the envoy to Ukraine, said in his testimony that it was remarkable that the legal offices at the State and Defense departments had decided “they were going to move forward with this assistance anyway, OMB notwithstanding.”
This article was originally sent to The Washington Post for publication, but for reasons that will become obvious as you read on, they rejected it.
Here’s the back story. Several weeks ago, non-liberal media sources reported on the very large increase in median household incomes under Donald Trump. Based on Census Bureau monthly data, from January 2017, when President Trump entered office, through August 2019 middle-class household incomes had risen from $61,000 to an all-time high $66,000. These numbers are in 2019 dollars — that is, they are adjusted for inflation. Mr. Trump has repeatedly cited these numbers.
The left freaked out for understandable reasons. They are especially agitated because median household incomes have risen by $5,000 under Mr. Trump, compared to $1,100 in seven years under President Obama. The data also undermines the case against Mr. Trump — which as Elizabeth Warren likes to say in every speech: “the middle class has been left behind by Trump’s policies.” That’s flat out wrong.
The self-proclaimed “fact checkers” on the left went to work to try to discredit the numbers. This includes The Washington Post, PolitiFact and others. As an aside, we have a big problem in America when the “fact checkers” are all playing for the liberal team. A case in point is the liberal PolitiFact, which declared in a screaming headline: “Trump’s Shaky $5,000 Boast.” The Washington Post gave Mr. Trump two Pinochhio for claiming these income gains and said “Trump Inflates His Economic Record.”
A standard complaint is that these numbers are assembled by a private organization called Sentier Research. But the two Sentier statisticians who analyzed this monthly Census Current Population Survey data — the gold mine of economic information — are probably the most knowledgeable people in the country on this survey data.
The two of them worked on the income division of Census Bureau for a combined 40 years. They are scrupulously nonpartisan and no one has ever challenged their integrity. “We just report the data,” says Gordon Green of Sentier.
The Washington Post challenged the reliability of this data even though on numerous occasions The Post (and The New York Times) have cited Sentier’s research. So apparently, Sentier is reliable when it tells the Trump haters what they want to hear, and wholly unreliable when the data supports Mr. Trump.
Admittedly, these monthly numbers are a first estimate of what is happening with incomes over time and up to the moment. They catch the trends over time. In the absence of this data, the latest income data is far lagged by at least a year and so this tells us with about 90 percent accuracy what is going on in real time.
Next, The Post complained that the income data needs to be adjusted for inflation. Actually, all the Sentier data is inflation-adjusted.
Next, they quoted Lou Jacobson of PolitiFact, who claimed that “even taking the expected 2019 statistics into account, the increase under Trump in the official data … should be smaller than the increase Sentier’s data shows.” Sorry, Lou, we already know this was a fumble in your own end zone. The latest data that has come out just last week shows the income numbers rising to $5,200, not falling.
Then, the skeptics whine that we shouldn’t compare Mr. Trump’s record with Mr. Obama’s because Mr. Obama inherited a deep recession. That’s true, of course, but incomes continued to plummet for two years after the Bush recession ended. Moreover, it was The Washington Post which editorialized before the 2016 election that a Trump presidency risked ruining the U.S. economy and causing a “global financial calamity.”
So it is more than a little hypocritical for The Post to now claim the Trump boom that they never saw coming is simply a continuation of the Obama recovery. Every fair-minded person knows that if the economy were in recession now, liberals would be shouting, “aha, Trump’s policies failed.”
Here’s one of my favorite ridiculous claims by The Post. In attacking Mr. Trump’s “rumbling distortions” on income gains, the reporter noted that the middle class isn’t doing that well because: “On an inflation-adjusted basis, Americans families are earning just 2.7% more (in 2016) than they did in 1999.”
But the flat family income between 1999 and 2016 is exactly what makes the Trump surge in incomes so impressive. Yes, it is true, incomes barely budged during the Bush and Obama years — up less than $1,200. Does Mr. Trump get the blame for that lousy record too?
If The Post and others in the liberal media really cared about middle-class families, they would be cheering these gains for scores of millions of households. But the left hates Mr. Trump, and so they feverishly root against the economy. It’s not that these facts aren’t true. It is that the left doesn’t want the good news to be true.
This is why The Post refused to allow anyone to correct the record. The grand irony of all of this is these are the people who assign Trump Pinochhio noses. But he isn’t the one guilty of rambling distortions.
"That is a crime. Only fools would deny that,"
yeah, fools like Alan Dershowitz, Harvard legal professor and life-long Democrat
also, here's some thoughts from a former independent counsel, from back when the independent counsel statute was still in effect:
As the U.S. House of Representatives hurtles toward impeachment ahead of the holidays, it is appropriate to consider, in as dispassionate a way as possible, what really is at issue for the country to decide. One must begin with the words of the Constitution. The removal of the President from office necessarily proceeds only with a determination, through House impeachment and upon conviction by a two-thirds majority in the Senate following trial, that “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” have been proved. What constitutes a “high” crime? Alexander Hamilton provided the answer in the Federalist papers: only those offenses within Congress’s appropriate jurisdiction that constitute “the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
So while it is fashionable at the moment for some to argue that President Trump is removable from office simply if it is proved that he abused the power of his office during his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, the Constitution requires more. To ignore the requirement of proving that a crime was committed is to sidestep the constitutional design as well as the lessons of history. A well-founded article of impeachment therefore must allege both that a crime has been committed and that such crime constitutes an abuse of the President’s office.
The problem for those pushing impeachment is that there appears to be insufficient evidence to prove that Trump committed a crime. Half the country at present does seem prepared to conclude, on the basis of the summary of the Trump-Zelensky call released by the White House on Sept. 25, that Trump at least raised the prospect of an unlawful quid pro quo. The theory seems to be that Trump proposed an exchange of something of personal benefit to himself in return for an official act by the U.S. government. On one side of that alleged quid pro quo would be the public announcement of an investigation by Ukraine into a rival presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden, and a member of Biden’s family. On the other: the release of temporarily withheld foreign aid, including military assistance.
The problem with this legal theory is that an unlawful quid pro quo is limited to those arrangements that are “corrupt”–that is to say, only those that are clearly and unmistakably improper and therefore illegal. But in the eyes of the law, the specific, measurable benefit that an investigation against the Bidens might bring Trump is nebulous. There is a serious question as to whether it could ever constitute a criminally illegal foreign campaign contribution of personal benefit to President Trump. Indeed, the Office of Legal Counsel and the Criminal Division at the Justice Department apparently have already concluded it couldn’t. Just as important, the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts have struggled since at least the early 1990s with application of the federal anticorruption laws to situations like this, where an “in kind” benefit in the form of campaign interference or assistance is alleged to be illegal.
A fair and better legal argument can be made in this context that only an explicit, as opposed to an implied, quid pro quo would be sufficient to find criminal illegality as the result of President Trump’s words on the call with President Zelensky. What’s the difference? Instead of President Trump saying to his counterpart in Ukraine in words or substance, “Do me a favor …” he would have to have said, “Here’s the deal …” and followed up by explicitly linking an investigation of the Bidens to the provision of U.S. military assistance. None of that, of course, is what was said.
Importantly, we have also learned in a little-noted aside to the widely reported Oct. 17 press conference by acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney that the Administration recognized that it had no authority through the Office of Management and Budget to permanently withhold congressional appropriation of aid to Ukraine beyond the 2019 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.
Taken together, these facts mean that whatever your view of whether the President’s call was, in his words, “perfect” or not, the race to impeachment is moving forward on an arguably flawed legal theory of an implied quid pro quo of temporarily withholding foreign aid. It doesn’t help those arguing that the implied and temporary attempt at a quid quo pro necessitates impeachment that the aid was eventually released and disbursed on Sept. 11. Nor does it help them that Ukraine never publicly announced an investigation of the Bidens.
An investigation into the origins of the probe into Russia’s 2016 election meddling, including any Ukrainian matters relating to it, is under way. It is being handled through appropriate channels and with built-in independence by a career prosecutor, John Durham, the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut, and presumably outside of political interference at Main Justice in Washington. If Durham finds actual evidence warranting investigation of the Bidens, that would be entirely appropriate, unless one is prepared to argue, speciously, that a presidential candidate enjoys absolute immunity from investigation during the course of a campaign. So things are finally in the right hands.
That is not to say that the “no harm, no foul” argument excuses the evident lack of judgment exhibited by the White House in attempting to spur action by a foreign government outside of proper channels to investigate a political rival. But it is another thing altogether to claim that such conduct is clearly and unmistakably impeachable. If recent polls are any guide, many fair-minded Americans seem prepared to accept that even if such conduct was wrong, it was not so seriously wrong as to warrant removal from office.
At this point nothing appears to stand in the way of the House’s intemperate and unreasonable vote to impeach. In Hamilton’s words, events are proceeding “more by the comparative strength of parties than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” It will be left instead to the U.S. Senate sitting as a court of impeachment with the “requisite neutrality” and the nation’s best interests in mind to render judgment and put a stop to what is an undeniably, and all but exclusively, partisan effort to remove this President from office. Only then can the country return to the business at hand, which is the fast-approaching 2020 election, now less than a year away, and the other important and pressing matters before the nation.
"Rump has promoted the rise of white nationalists, whether he did it intentionally or not may be up for debate, but he has not been promoting peace."
actually, Trump never did any such thing
the media has pushed this line which emboldened certain psychos to make them think they won the election
it's worth noting that the media made the same accusations against both John McCain and George W Bush, who are both now revered by the media
"The prosperity he has supposedly promoted has only been a continuation of the forward moving Obama economy,"
three years down the road, that's a pretty ridiculous statement, especially since Obama and his legion of lunatics predicted that Trump would destroy the economy
"and would be even better if he hadn't started an unnecessary trade war."
Trump has had the guts to take on what other Presidents feared
China is a threat much graver than the Third Reich, since they have the tools of technology to assist their totalitarianism
if they became the dominant world power, freedom would disappear around the world
imagine if Americans chose not to fight the Nazis because of the effect on the economy
you should find another country
this is the land of the free and the home of the brave
"Ahh... complaining about the whole "socialism" thing again, as if every democrat wants to go full Russia or full Venezuela into the socialism regime. You never mention the fact that the socialism Democrats are advocating is the kind that has provided health care, decent wages, child care, and even decent vacation times for all of Western Europe for decades."
Europe is not healthy
"Well, given your posts, I'm not surprised that acting like an adult is not high on your priority list for a president. But for the adults in the room, it is."
"One word: Emoluments."
Trump has never a bribe or received compensation from a foreign government
"I'll take my own analytical thinking skills over right-wing brainwashing any day."
oh, the thinking that pants for an economic collapse instead of celebrating that our historically disadvantaged citizens are finding jobs, experiencing wage growth, and opportunity
"analytical thinking" without a moral basis is how the Nazis came up with their eugenic theory horrors
"Funny, I don't ever recall you advocating for the $15 or $22 minimum wage - I seem to recall Republicans insisting that the market should decide their wages."
here is the Dem fallacy epitomized
if you favor something, you must favor government enforcing it
try to think outside your cage
Nice right wing spin.
Here's the simple truth:
House Republicans acknowledged that they have no witnesses and no documents to dispute the main facts concerning President Trump’s impeachable conduct: a demand from Ukraine for dirt on a political rival; withholding of aid vital to Ukraine’s defense against Russia; concealing evidence of the scheme by moving a transcript to a secret server; and threatening the tipster who alerted Congress to gross malfeasance. They admitted all that? Well, in a manner of speaking they did.
House Republicans sent Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) a list of witnesses they want to testify in the impeachment inquiry, including former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and the anonymous whistleblower who filed the initial complaint against President Trump. ...
Schiff is likely to reject many, if not all, of the witnesses from the Republicans’ wish list.
Hunter Biden lacks any direct knowledge of anything that occurred in the Trump White House, and hence he cannot rebut evidence of Trump’s demand that Ukraine interfere with our election. By Republicans’ own admission, the whistleblower lacks first-hand knowledge of events. (“Witnesses who testified out of public view have corroborated the crux of the case against Trump — that he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rivals — so the Democrats see no need for the whistleblower, who heard the story secondhand, to testify. Three career State Department officials are returning next week for the public hearings.”)
All Republicans have are distractions, stunts to generate claims of unfairness, and gimmicks to threaten the life and career of the whistleblower. It’s remarkable, really, that they could stipulate to every fact about which the witnesses testified under oath.
Republicans implicitly admit that there is no disputing Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s testimony. Vindman testified that, in the July 25 call, “there was no doubt” Trump made a demand of the Ukrainian president to initiate an investigation of a U.S. citizen, a “deliverable” to help his presidential reelection. “When the president of the United States makes a request for a favor, it certainly seems — I would take it as a demand,” Vindman testified. There are apparently no witnesses to contradict his testimony and none to dispute it was of such concern that Vindman went to John Eisenberg, the top national security lawyer in the White House.
Republicans apparently have no evidence to contradict the testimony of Fiona Hill, who served as a top Russia adviser to the White House. She testified that former national security adviser John Bolton, in a meeting following an exchange between U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Ukrainian officials that made explicit that any White House meeting was conditioned on an announcement of an investigation into the Bidens, “basically said — in fact, he directly said: Rudy Giuliani is a hand grenade that is going to blow everybody up. He did make it clear that he didn’t feel that there was anything that he could personally do about this.” In other words, the national security adviser knew hijacking foreign policy for Trump’s political gain was wrong and likely illegal.
Likewise, there is nothing to undermine Vindman’s testimony that the Office of Management and Budget put a hold on funds appropriated by Congress to Ukraine, an action contrary to U.S. policy, injurious to Ukraine and a function of the Trump-Giuliani campaign smear operation. (“Basically we were trying to get to the bottom of why this hold was in place, why OMB was applying this hold. There were multiple memos that were transmitted from my directorate to Ambassador Bolton on, you know, keeping him abreast of this particular development.”) Republicans have no evidence to dispute that...
Republicans have no evidence to dispute Hill’s complete debunking of the nutty conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Republicans have no evidence to dispute that Giuliani and his cronies obtained the removal of Marie Yovanovitch, the competent and respected U.S. envoy to Kyiv. Republicans have yet to disprove evidence that Sondland, Giuliani and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney were acting as agents of the president.
Republicans cannot dispute the testimony of George Kent that “POTUS wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to microphone and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton.” Republicans cannot produce evidence to contradict Kent’s conclusion that “Mr. Giuliani, at that point, had been carrying on a campaign for several months full of lies and incorrect information” against Yovanovitch, or was dispatched by Trump to obtain dirt on Biden.
Sure, in demanding irrelevant witnesses and continuing their campaign of intimidation against the whistleblower, Republicans threaten to make the entire proceeding a three-ring circus, something Schiff will try to prevent. However, it is a helpful reminder that Republicans should be able to stipulate to all of the facts presented by all of the witnesses Schiff has summoned. There is no factual defense to articles of impeachment that would include bribery, extortion and obstruction of justice.
Good to know, and good to know that the Republican Party stands foursquare behind a president soliciting a bribe, endangering U.S. national security and attempting to intimidate witnesses and cover his tracks.
"and would be even better if he hadn't started an unnecessary trade war."
Trump has had the guts to take on what other Presidents feared
China is a threat much graver than the Third Reich, since they have the tools of technology to assist their totalitarianism"
China got to their place in the world by providing extremely cheap labor and no environmental laws for American companies (and others) to exploit. Rather than keep paying decent wages to American workers, corporations took their jobs and moved them into the most populous socialist country on the planet. No one forced them to do that, in fact American workers frequently protested the shutting down of their factories only to have the owners build new ones in China.
The American public then bought all those products that cheap Chinese labor was producing, thinking it was a good deal because it was so cheap.
China took all the money that American corporations and people sent to them, and pulled 300 million Chinese poor up into the middle class. Apparently that's what socialists do.
No one forced American companies to move their operations to China, Taiwan, or even Mexico. Corporations did it to pay their CEOs and stockholders more, and their workers less.
No one forced American citizens to start buying most of their manufactured products from China, but now, you can't find an RCA radio or a Zenith television anywhere but museums or in dusty old attics.
All that money that Americans have been sending to China for the past 4 decades has built China into a world power, and hollowed out the American middle class. That money would have been better spent here building a better America, and we could have left China a rural backwater struggling to feed itself.
What did you expect the largest socialist country on the planet to do with all that money? Give it back to us?
China didn't create this problem - they played the global capitalism game to its fullest, making sure to put China first, and make China great again.
China didn't create this problem, American corporations did. If you want to solve it, they need to bring those jobs back here, and give them to American workers at decent wages. It will mean their CEO and boards won't make as many millions of dollars, and they may have to reduce some dividends.
But more American workers will have more dollars in their pockets to spend on more American products.
Trump blaming the problem on China is a distraction to keep idiots busy looking over there while American wages drop to be on par with cheap Chinese labor. Just where American corporations would like it to be to maximize their profits.
That's the way capitalism works.
"oh, the thinking that pants for an economic collapse instead of celebrating that our historically disadvantaged citizens are finding jobs, experiencing wage growth, and opportunity"
I have never panted for the collapse of the economy. That idea comes from your astoundingly limited mindset that apparently sees every "liberal" (here at least) as some kind of evil that must be expunged, rather than citizens who have a different and yet perfectly valid viewpoint. No one was panting for Bush's collapse of the economy in 2008 either, but Voodoo economics (what Bush 1 called Reagan's plan) has a history of causing boom and bust cycles that could be avoided, if conservatives didn't keep deregulating the banking industry and sending ever more tax cut money into stock markets without enough real tangible capital to justify the monetary influx - setting the stage for yet another bust.
"analytical thinking" without a moral basis is how the Nazis came up with their eugenic theory horrors"
You obviously have no idea what analytical thinking is, but that didn't stop you from trying to paint me as some kind of immoral Nazi.
How moral is that?
But I'm used to that kind of treatment from Christians.
I have never promoted eugenics, but I must admit, the more I learn about conservatives from their posts here, the more I understand why people would be tempted to use it.
Here are some references so you can understand what analytical thinking is all about:
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/analytical-skills-list-2063729
https://www.job-interview-site.com/analytical-skills-example-what-are-analytical-skills-and-how-to-improve-them.html
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/resumes-cover-letters/analytical-skills
What the Nazis did was NOT analytical thinking. It was a hateful ideology that was spread by propaganda to develop a fully indoctrinated society willing to bend to the will of their leader.
Analytical thinking is the antidote to indoctrination. That's why people who disagreed with the propaganda were marginalized and / or executed.
So I have to ask. Were you indoctrinated to slander liberals with veiled accusations of Nazism, or did you come to that all by yourself?
Donald Trump Jr. and Trump campaign senior adviser Kimberly Guilfoyle came prepared with snappy rejoinders for liberal protesters who might taunt them on Sunday at the University of California at Los Angeles, where they promoted Trump Jr.'s new book, “Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us.”
But when unruly heckling drowned out the couple’s answers, leading the pair to walk offstage, it wasn’t leftists who cut the event short. Instead, the rebukes came from a crowd of young people who rank among the most ardent and extreme supporters of President Trump.
As first reported by the Guardian, a number of conservatives — some in telltale “Make America Great Again” caps and pro-Trump attire — began to shout at the president’s son and political adviser 20 minutes into an event moderated by Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, after learning a question-and-answer session had been canceled.
Video from the event showed a chant that started out as “U-S-A! U-S-A!” turning quickly into angry cries of “Q-and-A! Q-and-A!” Minutes later, Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle stormed off the stage.
The chaotic scene contradicted Trump Jr.'s central thesis that liberals have grown so intolerant of dissenting voices, conservative politicians can no longer engage in civil discourse. It also exposed an increasingly hostile fissure between conservative student groups like Turning Point USA and a hard-right faction of young Trump devotees who have flocked to self-professed “American Nationalist” Nicholas Fuentes and his “America First” movement...
“Name a time when conservatives have disrupted even the furthest leftist on a college campus,” he said to the crowd. “It doesn’t happen that way. We’re willing to listen.”
A member of the audience interrupted with a shout: “Then open the Q&A!”
“See what I mean?” Trump Jr. answered. “And that is the problem. And the reason oftentimes it doesn’t make sense to do the Q&A is not because we’re not willing to talk about the questions, cause we do. No. It’s because people hijack it with nonsense looking to go for some sort of sound bite. You have people spreading nonsense, spreading hate, trying to take over the room.”
The roar of the crowd shouting “Q&A!” grew louder, threatening to completely overpower Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle inside Moore Hall on UCLA’s campus.
Guilfoyle lost her composure. She shouted back at the young men, insulting their appearances and manners.
“No, it’s because you’re not making your parents proud by being rude and disruptive and discourteous,” she responded. “We are happy to answer a question. Respect the people around you so that they can hear.”
When the crowd continued to demand a chance to ask questions, Guilfoyle snapped, “Let me tell you something, I bet you engage and go on online dating because you’re impressing no one here to get a date in person.”
That response only inflamed the protesters, whose loud chants soon led the pair to leave the stage....
Longtime GOP Rep. Pete King (N.Y.) will not seek reelection in 2020 after more than 25 years in Congress, he announced Monday.
King has long dominated his Long Island district, which leans Republican. But in 2018, he won reelection by his narrowest margin since his 1992 election, defeating Democratic challenger Liuba Grechen Shirley by just 6 percentage points.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pete-king-retiring-gop-congress_n_5dc9510fe4b0fcfb7f69d077
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Seattle voters, in a rebuke to heavy corporate campaign spending by Amazon.com, have kept progressives firmly in control of their city council, reviving chances for a tax on big businesses that the tech giant helped fend off last year.
Amazon poured a record $1.5 million into a Super PAC run by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce to back a slate of candidates in the Nov. 5 council elections viewed as pro-business, or at least more corporate friendly than the incumbent council majority.
Amazon, the world’s leading online retailer whose chief executive is billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, accounted for more than half of nearly $2.7 million raised by the Super PAC, a group allowed to accept unlimited sums from wealthy donors in support of their favorite candidates. Four years ago, Amazon donated $25,000.
By comparison, labor unions spent more than $1 million on the council race.
The unprecedented level of spending in a Seattle municipal race drew national attention, with Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders accusing Amazon of trying to buy the council.
The outcome for most of the seven council seats at stake in Tuesday’s election was too close to call until Friday night, when a tally of 97 percent of votes cast showed that progressive candidates had won five of the seats, including two incumbents.
One of them was Kshama Sawant, a self-described socialist and Amazon’s fiercest critic on the council, whose re-election bid was seen as the bellwether contest.
Just two of the seven candidates endorsed by Amazon and other companies through the chamber’s Super Pac emerged winners, one of them an incumbent.
The overall progressive balance of the nine-seat council was little changed. Two other seats come up for re-election in 2021.
“The election results are a repudiation of the billionaire class, corporate real estate, and the establishment,” Sawant said at a press conference on Saturday, flanked by supporters holding a “Tax Amazon” banner.
Sawant led the council in May 2018 in approving a new per-employee “head tax” on 500 of the city’s largest companies, aimed at combating a housing crisis attributed in part to a local economic boom that has driven up real estate costs.
The tax was designed to raise at least $45 million a year to build more affordable housing and help support a homeless population that is the third-largest of any U.S. metropolitan area.
The measure passed the council unanimously, despite threats from Amazon, Seattle’s largest employer, to freeze planned expansions in the city.
But just four weeks later, the council repealed the tax altogether in the face of a well-financed campaign by Amazon and other businesses to mount a referendum drive against the measure.
On Saturday, Sawant characterized the latest election as a referendum on the head tax and pledged to pursue the policy with the new council.
Its backers argue that Seattle’s biggest businesses should contribute to easing a shortage of low-cost housing they helped create through an over-heated real estate market that left many working poor and middle-class families unable to afford to live in the city.
Opponents have branded the measure a “tax on jobs” that would spark an economic backlash.
Corporate reaction to the election outcome was muted.
“The business community stands ready to work with the new Seattle City Council,” the PAC’s director, Markham McIntyre, said in a statement on Friday. “How our local government chooses to partner – or create division – matters.”
On Wednesday, before the outcome was known, Amazon said it was “pleased with the direction” of the election and looked forward “to working with the new city council, which we believe will be considerably more open to constructive dialogue.”
Amazon has since not responded to further requests for comment.
WASHINGTON, Nov 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt a blow to the firearms industry, rejecting Remington Arms Co's bid to escape a lawsuit by families of victims aiming to hold the gun maker liable for its marketing of the assault-style rifle used in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre that killed 20 children and six adults.
The justices turned away Remington's appeal of a ruling by Connecticut's top court to let the lawsuit proceed despite a federal law that broadly shields firearms manufacturers from liability when their weapons are used in crimes. The lawsuit will move forward at a time of high passions in the United States over the issue of gun control.
The family members of nine people slain and one survivor of the Sandy Hook massacre filed the lawsuit in 2014. Remington was backed in the case by a number of gun rights groups and lobbying organizations including the powerful National Rifle Association, which is closely aligned with Republicans including President Donald Trump. The NRA called the lawsuit "company-killing."
“A sitting president secretly tried to get a foreign government to announce an investigation into his chief political rival. In essence, Trump was using the awesome powers our Constitution gives presidents not to benefit the nation, but to benefit him personally.”
“It doesn’t matter whether the plot succeeded. It was a grave offense (and one that opened the president up to blackmail). The other questions, like whether or not there was a quid pro quo (there was) and whether or not there was a coverup (there was), are gravy. They are important questions, but the case for impeachment is even more straightforward. Asking us to wait until the election to remove him from office is like asking to resolve a dispute based on who wins a game of Monopoly — when the very crime you’ve been accused of is cheating on Monopoly.”
"Placing himself above the law and jeopardizing national security, Trump withheld an ally’s military aid to demand foreign interference in the 2020 election on his behalf, then he and aides tried to cover up these illegal actions."
Watch today's public impeachment hearing on PBS (WETA) from 10AM-2PM or tonight from 8PM-Midnight.
No one is going to confuse President Trump’s remarks Tuesday at the Economic Club of New York with anything approaching eloquence. He is at his worst when he stiffly reads the teleprompter or flies widely off script.
Worse: His insistence that the Federal Reserve is to blame for any economic turbulence the country faces. Sorry, Mr. President, that award goes to how you’re conducting your trade wars, particularly with China, through tit-for-tat tariffs.
But his delivery and trade quirks aside, the speech was a strong argument as to why Americans may well believe that the president deserves a second term — particularly when they consider the alternative: a cast of lefty candidates vowing to destroy an economy that’s actually working for most people.
The speech was delivered against the backdrop of the strongest economy in years, and not just for the rich. Trump rightly pointed out how, through tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, jobs are growing, and so are wages.
He’s done much better than his predecessor. Yes, President Barack Obama inherited a financial meltdown in 2009, but he also produced an economy that had middle-class incomes plummeting to levels not seen in years.
Wall Street flourished under Obama, while the wealth and wages of average Americans stagnated. Trump has delivered what Obama couldn’t on the economy.
As Trump pointed out, the Congressional Budget Office projected that fewer than 2 million jobs would be created by this time in 2019. He delivered 7 million. People aren’t leaving the workforce in droves as they did in years past; they’re coming back in.
Trump was most impressive when he explained how excess regulation has contributed to the hollowing out of Middle America. My guess: He was influenced here by his economic aide, the free-market guru Larry Kudlow, who was sitting at his side during the speech and has made a career exposing how nanny-state regulators have stifled the animal spirits of our economy in ways that hurt ordinary Americans.
Trump called it an “unethical regulatory assault on American people,” carried out in large part by “bureaucrats” who would gain new strength under any of the Democrats running for the 2020 nomination.
Environmental regulations sound good on paper — until you see the human cost. Family farms are shut down because puddles in central California are deemed protected marsh lands. Towns in West Virginia are ravaged by unemployment and the opioid epidemic because the war on coal has devastated the local economy.
Trump sounded a not-so-subtle warning that his economic progress can easily be reversed by the Democratic Party’s new front-runner, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is running on economic and social policies — Medicare for All, massive tax increases and lots more regulation — that are far to the left of even Obama’s.
The good news is she probably won’t win, because she can’t make the logical case that Trump’s economic plans aren’t working. People may not like Trump — despite the strong economy, his unfavorable ratings remains high. This leaves an opening for a moderate like former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, which is why he’s moving toward entering the race on a platform that, while he’s not like Trump, he’s also not going to nuke the system.
Bloomberg knows what the progressives in the Democratic Party either don’t know or won’t admit: that most Americans are probably not going to change what’s working just because the president can’t stop tweeting.
Trump’s speech on Tuesday made that case, so look for him to make it again and again.
Is that it? Is that all they got?
Day One of impeachment was not exactly must see TV. Sure, it was interesting and substantive at times, which would be compliments if this were a graduate school seminar about the lonely lives and confusing experiences of far-flung diplomats.
But this was a congressional hearing to determine whether to file charges against and ultimately remove the president of the United States. By that standard, the Adam Schiff show was a flop.
I would call it a sensational flop, except that would suggest a sense of drama the day never produced. A five-hour slog that doesn’t hit pay dirt or end up anywhere meaningful can’t be sensational.
The Schiff show was more of a quiet, methodical flop. Imagine a slow leak in a big balloon and you’ll get the picture.
Still, the impact is significant. At the start of the day, impeachment was a one-party fever, and so it remains.
Nothing that happened Wednesday changes that critical dynamic. At this point, time and public patience are not the impeachers’ friends.
The lack of surprising or even new developments are major strikes against them. They have the burden of proving their hatred for President Trump is based on something other than resentment over his election or his tweets. That should be a fairly low bar, but they couldn’t get over it.
Although the hearing wasn’t as deadly as special counsel Robert Mueller’s hapless final appearance, it certainly didn’t move the Dems closer to their goal of running Trump out of town.
If Schiff, the zealously crazed California chair of the intelligence panel, has a compelling vision about how to persuade the public that the president committed crimes or anything approaching crimes involving Ukraine, it escapes me. The first day of hearings and the first witnesses should have at least been able to produce facts and tantalizing hints that would leave viewers wanting more.
Instead, the performances of acting Ukraine Ambassador William Taylor and State Department official George Kent left the impression there is little or nothing more to want. Everything to come likely will offer only more detail about the things we already know.
As several GOP members argued, it is impossible to prove the allegations of a quid pro quo when Ukraine got the American aid even though it never promised to investigate that country’s role in the 2016 election or the hiring of Hunter Biden by an energy company for $50,000 a month when his father was vice president.
That idea was captured best when Ohio Republican Jim Jordan got Taylor to acknowledge he had three meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over a 55-day period after the Trump phone call. Not once, Jordan said and Taylor agreed, did Zelensky complain that Trump was pressuring him to do the investigation or that there had been a holdup in aid.
“And you’re the star witnesses,” Jordan said, which got a laugh out of Taylor and many in the room.
It was a compelling moment that underscored the difficulty — and maybe the insanity — of what Democrats are trying to do. Moreover, even if they could prove a quid pro quo, would the American people find it impeachable just 11 months before an election? Would the Senate convict and remove Trump on such thin gruel?
Schiff seemed to sense the problems with his case and tried to argue that Zelensky had to fear retribution from Trump. It was a clear suggestion that the Ukrainian president was lying when he repeatedly said publicly he felt no pressure from Trump.
As Republican John Ratcliffe of Texas put it, if Dems believe that, they would have to impeach two presidents — Trump and Zelensky.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) trotted out the most ridiculous argument of the day, saying the fact that the investigations into the Bidens and 2016 didn’t happen doesn’t really matter.
“Is attempted murder a crime,” he asked the witnesses. Perhaps he was joking, but I’m afraid he was serious.
Unfortunately, Schiff is also serious about not wanting to hear the other side of the story. He refuses to summon the so-called whistleblower and his party shows absolutely no interest in learning why Hunter Biden got rich while his father was visiting Ukraine repeatedly.
Republicans kept bringing up both topics and Kent acknowledged that he had raised concerns nearly four years ago about the “perception of a conflict of interest” with the State Department and Biden’s office, but got no response.
Similarly, Dems and their media handmaidens mock Trump’s interest in what role Ukraine played in 2016, deriding it as a wild conspiracy theory.
But in fact, it is well established that Ukraine’s Washington embassy helped spread dirt on Paul Manafort when he was Trump campaign chairman and that some Ukraine officials met with Hillary Clinton aides and other Democrats in 2016. Among them was Alexandra Chalupa, a former Democratic National Committee contractor who worked with Ukrainians to get dirt on Trump.
According to Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican at Wednesday’s hearing, Dems took her name out of the testimony transcripts before releasing them. That’s curious.
All of which points to the biggest problem with the Schiff show. Dems obviously fear a fair and complete investigation of all the facts, one that reveals their contacts with the whistleblower, his political connections and all the events involving Ukraine and the Bidens.
What are they hiding?
In his fine book Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), Harvard Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein, a prominent Democrat who served in the Obama White House, stresses a key point about impeachment: grounds for impeachment should be neutral in the sense that we would be willing to apply them equally to politicians with whom we agree as well as those whom we despise.
A general principle of law, enshrined among other places in the 14th Amendment, is that norms are valid only if we are willing to apply them to everyone; that’s why the statue of Justice is blind. Professor Sunstein is right, however, that the neutrality test is particularly important for impeachment, because the constitutional standard is necessarily vague and turns on judgments such as whether or not misdeeds are sufficiently serious to justify removal from office.
If we would not be willing to apply the same rule to someone with whom we agree politically, we should doubt whether it is a valid basis to kick someone out of office with whom we disagree. Or, in the immortal words of Vinny, the homespun legal philosopher in the movie My Cousin Vinny, “It won’t hold water” to say that something is an impeachable offense when the other side’s guy does it but it is perfectly okay when our own guy does essentially the same thing.
Joe Biden has admitted to doing almost exactly what the House Democrats accuse President Trump of doing in their impeachment inquiry: using his position in government to obtain private political benefit from a foreign government. We should all be asking, “Why isn’t Biden also the target of a second impeachment inquiry?”
Some people might think that is because Biden has left office, but according to both William Murphy, professor of American History at the State University of New York, and every other expert I know who has addressed the issue, former officials like Biden may also be impeached after they leave office. Impeaching a former official is not a meaningless gesture because impeachment may prohibit someone from holding office in the future, including the presidency in Biden’s case; in the words of the Constitution, impeachment may disqualify a person “to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.”
As vice president, Joe Biden threatened to hold up a billion dollars in aid to Ukraine unless that country fired a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, the energy company that was paying his son $600,000 a year to serve on its board of directors. All these facts are detailed here and don’t need to be repeated. There is no dispute about them. You can even watch Biden on YouTube bragging to the Council on Foreign Relations that he did it: “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor [Shokin] is not fired, you’re not getting the money [a $1 billion loan guarantee].’ Well, son of a b-tch.… He got fired.”
As a result, the investigation of Burisma was suspended, at least until Trump tried to get it restarted, a move for which the Dems want to impeach him.
Despite the eerie similarity of Biden’s actions to those that are supposed to constitute “high crimes and misdemeanors” warranting the impeachment of President Trump, Biden and his supporters dare anyone to find anything illegal in his use of his official position to threaten to withhold aid to Ukraine unless it stifled a criminal investigation of his son’s company.
I think I have solved that riddle. An Office of Government Ethics regulation prohibits all government employees from using their offices “for the private gain of friends, relatives, or persons with whom the employee is affiliated in a nongovernmental capacity.” That would seem to be directly on point, but alas, the definition of government “employees” to which the regulation applies specifically excludes the president and vice president. That exclusion is apparently because the president and vice president are subject to impeachment, which is likely the exclusive constitutional remedy for their misdeeds while in office.
Unless a majority of the House is willing to investigate impeaching former Vice President Biden for doing something very similar to what they want to impeach President Trump for doing, we should all question the legitimacy of the impeachment inquiry against President Trump as partisan and one-sided.
Admittedly, there are distinctions between what Biden did and what Trump did. Trump was trying to restart an investigation by a foreign government into plausible violations of its laws, but what Trump asked for never actually happened. Biden, on the other hand, successfully killed an investigation into possible violations of Ukrainian and U.S. laws against bribery by Burisma. Biden appears to have misused his government position to obstruct the criminal justice system of another country so that an ongoing investigation would not embarrass him politically, whereas Trump is accused of trying to induce a foreign country to interfere in our elections by making information about those misdeeds by his rival public.
Arguably what Biden did was worse, but both come within the same theory that abusing governmental power for private political gain is an impeachable offense. The Democrats base their impeachment inquiry against Trump on the legal theory that threatening to withhold aid as a quid pro quo to get a foreign government to investigate a political rival is an illegal campaign contribution and an abuse of power. Why wouldn’t Biden using his official position to withhold aid as a quid pro quo for obstructing an ongoing criminal investigation that might embarrass him as a political candidate in the future also satisfy the same test?
Too bad it's too early for spring planting.
Yeah, facetious comments won't rescue Dems. If you don't like Trump, you need to find a reasonable alternative. And quickly. Things are going to well for the working class and minorities for them to risk it all on liberal PC BS.
WINCHESTER, Ky. (AP) — A Kentucky principal who once made headlines for trying to ban books with what he deemed inappropriate content has been indicted on child pornography charges.
News outlets reported Tuesday that a grand jury charged 54-year-old Phillip Todd Wilson, principal of the Clark County Area Technology Center, with 17 child pornography possession and distribution charges. Kentucky State police filed 15 counts each of the charges against Wilson in August.
Clark County Schools officials told news outlets they were “shocked and dismayed” at the accusations. WKYT-TV reports the education department no longer employs Wilson.
The Lexington Herald-Leader says that when Wilson was the principal of Montgomery County High School in 2009, he fought to ban books with what he labeled “homosexual” or otherwise inappropriate material, including sex, abuse and drugs.
It's not to late yet for Republicans to come up with a candidate who hasn't engaged in serial sexual assaults, isn't a pathological liar, and hasn't tried to get foreign governments to interfere in our election process.
If you want a Republican to stay in the White House, you need to come up with a reasonable alternative, and quickly.
Most Americans can see right through all the conservative attempts at spin, and it simply doesn't hold water.
"It's not to late yet for Republicans to come up with a candidate who hasn't engaged in serial sexual assaults, isn't a pathological liar, and hasn't tried to get foreign governments to interfere in our election process."
you're confused
the GOP won't nominate Bill Clinton
"If you want a Republican to stay in the White House, you need to come up with a reasonable alternative, and quickly."
tell that to the working poor and minorities that things are finally looking up for
there is nothing about Trump that makes him unacceptable
you'd think we could do better but his management of the economy makes up for any personal failings
"Most Americans can see right through all the conservative attempts at spin"
and by most Americans, you mean the coastlands
the vast sweep of Middle America and the South don't support the impeachment coup attempt
The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal wrote (apparently not joking): “Many people in the Administration opposed the Giuliani effort, including some in senior positions at the White House. This matters because it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), for instance, said: “Name me one thing that Ukraine did to release the money. Nothing.”
In an interview with The Washington Post, Nikki Haley reasoned: “There was no heavy demand insisting that something had to happen. So it’s hard for me to understand where the whole impeachment situation is coming from, because what everybody’s up in arms about didn’t happen.” In the end, “the aid flowed.”
Yep, GOPers are now relying on the Sideshow Bob defense of his conviction for attempted murder:
“Attempted murder,” now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for “attempted chemistry”?
"GOPers are now relying on the Sideshow Bob defense of his conviction for attempted murder"
what you jackasses fail to understand, in your crazed desperation for an explanation for your 2016 loss, is that the call transcript doesn't show any clear quid pro quo, so the fact that nothing happened is further indication, that was no serious attempt at anything
yes, attempted murder is a crime but saying "I want to kill you" isn't
"the vast sweep of Middle America and the South don't support the impeachment coup attempt"
"and by most Americans, you mean the coastlands"
No I don't.
The Rumpster had nearly 3 million less people vote for him than Hillary. Hillary won over more people. The Rumpster won over more dirt.
This is why Republican work so hard to push people off voter registrations - they know they can't win over hearts and minds, but thanks to the electoral college, they don't have to. Dirt doesn't care about your moral character.
Why don't you tell us again about McCain and Romney's "inevitable" wins.
"you're confused
the GOP won't nominate Bill Clinton"
"there is nothing about Trump that makes him unacceptable"
You undermine your own argument. If Rump didn't do anything unacceptable, then neither did Clinton, and he deserves the same obsequious defense of his behavior that you give to the Rumpster.
But we've never, ever seen that. Both Clinton and Obama improved the economies they inherited. It remains to be seen whether it will take less than 4 years for Rump to drive the economy down again, or if he gets reelected, less than 8.
He's pushing farmers into bankruptcy, and Iran into concentrating uranium. What could possibly go wrong?
WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s been his drumbeating demand: “Read the transcript!”
“Just read the transcript.”
“Can’t we read English?”
“Just read the Transcript, everything else is made up garbage.”
“READ THE TRANSCRIPT!”
Heading into public hearings this week, people have read the transcript , and that’s why President Donald Trump has an impeachment problem.
The whistleblower, the rough transcript of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s leader, and the words of a succession of career civil servants and Trump political appointees brought before Congress are largely in sync.
Together they have stitched an account that shows Trump pressing for a political favor from a foreign leader and, as key testimony has it, conditioning military aid on getting what he wanted.
Trump’s defense, as the House prepares to open its hearings Wednesday on the matter, has been to point to his own problematic words in the Ukraine phone call, declare them to be exonerating, and repeat.
In the face of abundant evidence that the whistleblower remains engaged, Trump suggests the whistleblower has skulked away. Political loyalists who tried to do Trump’s bidding with Ukraine are lumped with career diplomats as “Never Trumpers.”
He assails the whistleblower’s account of the phone call as “sooo wrong, not even close,” even though the official White House account of the call that came out afterward showed the whistleblower got the details right.
“Once I released the actual call, their entire case fell apart,” Trump said of Democrats. The rough transcript actually helped fuel the inquiry because it affirmed and fleshed out the whistleblower’s account.
Trump has approached the spectacle of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry with understandable frustration but also a flawed account of the circumstances behind them.
A look at recent remarks by the president and his allies on this and other matters:
IMPEACHMENT
TRUMP: “It was just explained to me that for next weeks Fake Hearing (trial) in the House, as they interview Never Trumpers and others, I get NO LAWYER & NO DUE PROCESS.” — tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: The hearing is a hearing, not a trial, and it is unfolding according to the usual process.
Trump is correct that he and his legal team are excluded from public hearings that begin Wednesday, but he hasn’t been charged with anything and has no constitutional right to be represented by a lawyer in this proceeding.
In that sense, his position is not much different from criminal suspects who are being investigated but haven’t been charged, or from past presidents at this stage of impeachment proceedings.
The coming public hearings led by the House Intelligence Committee are akin to the investigative phase of criminal cases, generally conducted in private and without the participation of the person under investigation.
But in future House Judiciary Committee hearings that presumably would result in the drafting of impeachment articles, Trump would be invited to attend and his lawyers could question witnesses and object to testimony and evidence, similar to the process in the impeachment proceedings against Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
If there is a Senate trial, Trump’s legal team would defend the president against impeachment articles approved by the House in an environment that would look like a typical trial in some respects...
TRUMP: “The whistleblower disappeared.” — Louisiana rally on Wednesday.
TRUMP, speaking about the period after he released a rough transcript of his phone call with Ukraine’s president: “You haven’t heard about the whistleblower after that, have you?” — Kentucky rally on Nov. 4.
THE FACTS: The whistleblower did not disappear after the White House, in late September, released a rough transcript of Trump’s call with Ukraine’s president. In fact, the whistleblower is offering to answer written questions by GOP lawmakers, but so far Republicans have rebuffed him.
Trump’s suggestion is that the whistleblower’s account is false, and so the person has vanished, but key details have been corroborated by people with firsthand knowledge of the events who have appeared on Capitol Hill.
The rough transcript of the July 25 phone call also showed that the whistleblower had accurately summarized the conversation in the complaint sent to the acting director of national intelligence.
The whistleblower has offered through his or her lawyers to answer questions directly from Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee “in writing, under oath & penalty of perjury.” But House Republicans, who are interested in exposing the whistleblower’s identity, want that official to appear at the public hearings .
U.S. whistleblower laws exist to protect the identity and careers of people who bring forward accusations of wrongdoing by government officials. Lawmakers in both parties have historically backed those protections.
___
TRUMP, on the whistleblower: “He must be brought forward to testify. Written answers not acceptable!” — tweet on Nov. 4.
THE FACTS: Trump’s stance on providing written answers in a federal investigation is a turnabout from a few months ago.
Trump himself refused to provide anything but written answers in response to limited questions during the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 election.
___
TRUMP, on Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee: “How about Schiff? He makes up a conversation, he gets up before the United States Congress, he repeats my conversation with the head of the Ukraine ... it was a total lie, and then I actually went and released the actual conversation.” — Kentucky rally on Nov. 4.
THE FACTS: He’s exaggerating the episode and botching the timeline.
Schiff delivered what he called a parody of Trump’s remarks in the president’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s leader.
Schiff did so after the White House released a rough transcript of the call, not before, as Trump states. So people who read the official account knew Schiff was riffing from it, not quoting from it.
___
SEN. RAND PAUL, R-Ky., arguing the whistleblower should be made to come forward so Trump can engage with that official: “Enshrined in the 6th Amendment is the right to confront your accuser.” — tweet Tuesday.
THE FACTS: Paul omits key words from the start of the Sixth Amendment: “In all criminal prosecutions.”
Trump is not facing an accuser in a criminal proceeding. The hearings are a political proceeding.
Moreover, the whistleblower’s account has been substantiated by multiple on-the-record accounts of government officials and the rough transcript of Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s president that the White House released.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees a lawyer for criminal defendants and the right to confront their accusers. As it happens, the impeachment process also is outlined in the Constitution and it gives the House the sole power to impeach and the Senate the sole power to remove an official, including the president, from office.
you know, a lot of imbeciles have made comments here, by there's a new one who really takes home the crap cake
he pouted:
"Most Americans can see right through all the conservative attempts at spin"
so, I gently tried to help him see what a fool he was making of himself and I said:
"and by most Americans, you mean the coastlands"
failing to reflect on the error of his ways, the imbecile ranted:
"No I don't.
The Rumpster had nearly 3 million less people vote for him than Hillary. Hillary won over more people. The Rumpster won over more dirt."
apparently, the imbecile doesn't read too widely, or he would know that Hillary won California by 4.2 million
meaning, if you take California away, Trump won the "popular" vote by 1.2 million
meaning my comment about the coastlands, that sent the imbecile into spasms, was completely correct and supported by cold hard facts!
the founding fathers cleverly designed our election process so one populous state couldn't trash the rest of the country
as for Hillary, it's amazing what you get when you drag a dollar bill through a trailer park
"You undermine your own argument. If Rump didn't do anything unacceptable, then neither did Clinton, and he deserves the same obsequious defense of his behavior that you give to the Rumpster."
actually, my imbecile pal, you undermine yours
I didn't attack Clinton. You attacked Trump and I pointed out that you could say the same about Clinton
then, you say I'm undermining my argument?
you realize everything thinks you're an imbecile?
"Both Clinton and Obama improved the economies they inherited."
let's take Clinton first
he had a disastrous first two years and the GOP took over Congress
give Clinton credit for realizing he had to follow the lead of the GOP but don't act like he was the driving force
he didn't exactly win the Nobel Prize for economics
now, Obama
he inherited a recession that was exacerbated by the Dems for electoral gain at the expense of their suffering fellow citizens
our economy always bounces back
Obama presided over the weakest recovery since Ronald Reagan ended the Dems' Jimmy Carter economic horror
"It remains to be seen"
that pretty much sums up all Dem theories
their predictions always remain to be seen
The stage is set for a “high stakes hearing.” Washington braces for “dramatic testimony.” Local bars are opening early with happy-hour specials for “blockbuster congressional hearings.”
If this all sounds familiar, it should. It’s sweeps for the swamp. Think your favorite reality show, just with lower ratings. It’s the same formula to maximize drama, but with “new characters and plot twists,” as NPR recently headlined the Democrats’ latest impeachment ploy.
For Democrats, it is always narrative over substance. Instead of facts, we get poorly written scripts from wannabe screenwriters who couldn’t make it in Hollywood, trying their best to bring their (alternate) reality series to Washington. Democrats’ first star was Robert Mueller, until he and his team of anti-Trump attorneys and FBI agents came up empty.
“The Mueller report renders thousands of T-shirts irrelevant,” lamented Vox.com after the Mueller operation against President Trump ended in a bust. If only we could get our 22 months and $32 million back.
Of course, it wasn’t just T-shirts. Sales of Mueller prayer candles have plummeted. But the Resistance would soon have a team of brand new folk heroes to put their faith in: un-elected bureaucrats, some whom the media refuses to name, working in and outside the government to overturn the results of an election less than a year before the next one.
In fact, the latest impeachment sham marched from Russia into Ukraine (as Putin did during the Obama years) only one day after Mueller’s woeful performance on Capitol Hill, which was the last, as The New York Times put it, “blockbuster that wasn’t.”
“Democrats argued that hearing from Robert S. Mueller III on television could transform the impeachment debate,” the Times noted.
Democrats have been working hard to “transform the impeachment debate,” since 12:19 p.m. on Inauguration Day. Democrats are working so hard they retreated behind closed doors for six weeks into a hot, crowded room in the basement of the Capitol. Adam Schiff annexed the SCIF (the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) to hold his unclassified inquisition, where the few members of Congress who are allowed to participate describe it as “excruciating” and smelling like a “locker room.” If only Democrats were that dedicated to working for the country.
Schiff is the new star of the Resistance. “His Ukraine investigation has now been invested with all the hopes and dreams that Democrats once placed in the special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s Russia probe,” the Times reported in a glowing magazine profile eerily reminiscent of other ghosts of Resistance past (Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti). “In Schiff … Democrats believe they have found a more reliable vessel than the cipherlike Mueller and an opportunity for a do-over of sorts.”
Ah, the do-over. Only this time Schiff is no Mueller-like figurehead, but fully in command of a team of even angrier Democrats who have spearheaded this operation from the beginning.
But no matter how many times Democrats try to re-do 2016 -- this time based on what an unelected bureaucrat told an unelected bureaucrat who heard it from an unelected bureaucrat staffer -- they will never accept the result. The longer voters witness Democrats working tirelessly against the president, instead of for the people they represent, the sooner this will become yet another Resistance flop.
"Dems want the poor to get living wages for their work"
the catch is they only get it if they have a job
under Trump, more of them have jobs than ever before
and wages are rising
it's kind of like the US being the only country in accordance with the Paris accords even though we aren't in it
it's a lot like that!
"apparently, the imbecile doesn't read too widely, or he would know that Hillary won California by 4.2 million
meaning, if you take California away, Trump won the "popular" vote by 1.2 million"
You've spouted that ridiculous trope multiple times here. Apparently it came up on the "Wheel of Conservative Talking Points" again tonight. If you selectively leave out states you can make any result you want. I previously pointed out that you could remove the 3 states that the Rumpster won the extra 77k votes in, and Hillary would have won the electoral college, you'd remove fewer people from the US, and the one you did remove from those 3 state produce less GDP combined and per capita than California. But that requires you to do math to get the result, and we no that's not conservatives' strong point.
It's called the UNITED STATES for a REASON. You just don't get to pull out the 5th largest economy in the world because it suits your twisted "logic." Your argument is a waste of precious electrons.
“The economy, stupid” is a phrase coined by James Carville in 1992. It is usually mistakenly rendered as “It’s the economy, stupid.” Carville was a strategist in Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign against incumbent George H. W. Bush. His phrase was directed at the campaign’s workers and intended as one of three messages for them to focus on. (The less-memorable others were “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care.”)
"let's take Clinton first
he had a disastrous first two years and the GOP took over Congress"
Let's look outside your selective memory for a moment, and remember why Clinton got into office in the first place:
"It's the economy, stupid"
Clinton's campaign advantageously used the then-prevailing recession in the United States as one of the campaign's means to successfully unseat George H. W. Bush. (Republicans held the White House for 12 straight years.) In March 1991, days after the ground war in Kuwait, 90% of polled Americans approved of President Bush's job performance.[1] Later the next year, Americans' opinions had turned sharply; 64% of polled Americans disapproved of Bush's job performance in August 1992.[1]
"now, Obama
he inherited a recession that was exacerbated by the Dems for electoral gain at the expense of their suffering fellow citizens"
It was Republicans that made the economy take a back seat during Obama's term with:
"We need to say to everyone on Election Day, “Those of you who helped make this a good day, you need to go out and help us finish the job."
(National Journal): What’s the job?
The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
That included making sure none of Obama's jobs bills got passed, and purposely hobbled the economy to score cheap political points at the cost of millions of people's economic life.
The recovery was slow because Republicans kept dragging their feet to keep the country down, putting "sequestration" in place to limit spending because it would increase the budget deficit and lead to unsustainable debt. Without this extra spending, the economy was forced to limp along without any help from the Republicans.
Shortly after Obama left office though, suddenly sequestration wasn't necessary, and Republicans stepped on the economic gas pedal, and suddenly, magically even, all those Republican concerns about exploding the debt disappeared.
The big advantage Republicans have here is that most of their voters have bad memories and are easily distracted by trigger words like "socialism" and "Obama" and "e-mail" server and don't recognize that the Republican elites are playing them like the fools they are.
It's no surprise the economy is doing better - Republicans didn't have to put sequestration in place in 2013 and stifle the economy.
Republicans like to poo-poo Keynesian economics, but their behavior shows they are happy to use it to their advantage when they are in control, and wield it as a weapon when they are not.
You can't sit there and believe everyone is going to be fooled by this. But if you hang around a bunch of conservatives, I could see why you'd think a LOT of people would.
"it's kind of like the US being the only country in accordance with the Paris accords even though we aren't in it
it's a lot like that!"
It doesn't take too much looking outside your bubble to see the US ISN'T meeting its Paris accord obligations.
Why do you think people believe anything you post?
"You've spouted that ridiculous trope multiple times here. Apparently it came up on the "Wheel of Conservative Talking Points" again tonight. If you selectively leave out states you can make any result you want. I previously pointed out that you could remove the 3 states that the Rumpster won the extra 77k votes in, and Hillary would have won the electoral college, you'd remove fewer people from the US, and the one you did remove from those 3 state produce less GDP combined and per capita than California. But that requires you to do math to get the result, and we no that's not conservatives' strong point."
you seem to have forgotten what we were discussing
you said Americans hold your point of view on the impeachment hoax
I said not in the heartland
you said I was wrong and cited the "popular" vote
rather than my usual (and correct) observation that we don't hold a popular vote, I pointed out why I was right
the facts aren't your friend
just be careful what you say in the future and you won't be embarrassed
"“The economy, stupid” is a phrase coined by James Carville in 1992. It is usually mistakenly rendered as “It’s the economy, stupid.” Carville was a strategist in Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign against incumbent George H. W. Bush. His phrase was directed at the campaign’s workers and intended as one of three messages for them to focus on. (The less-memorable others were “Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care.”)"
Carville is a Dem version of Trump, without the charm
basically a nasty-acting redneck
he was actually wrong
HW lost because he raised taxes after promising not too
"Clinton's campaign advantageously used the then-prevailing recession in the United States as one of the campaign's means to successfully unseat George H. W. Bush. (Republicans held the White House for 12 straight years.) In March 1991, days after the ground war in Kuwait, 90% of polled Americans approved of President Bush's job performance.[1] Later the next year, Americans' opinions had turned sharply; 64% of polled Americans disapproved of Bush's job performance in August 1992.[1]"
so your defense of Clinton's economic record is that he promised, during his campaign, to do a great job?
the prosecution rests
"It was Republicans that made the economy take a back seat during Obama's term with:"
unbelievable
Obama borrowed more money than all other Presidents combined and he had zero interest rates
how much would he have borrowed without sequestration?
the economy should have boomed
it didn't because his anti-business attitude and hyper-regulatory regime destroyed confidence
much of the stimulus that passed when he first took office went to help overseas interests, not Americans
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
by defeating him in an election
Dems should try it
"Shortly after Obama left office though, suddenly sequestration wasn't necessary, and Republicans stepped on the economic gas pedal, and suddenly, magically even, all those Republican concerns about exploding the debt disappeared."
Obama borrowed more than the GOP has
"It's no surprise the economy is doing better"
it surprised Dems
they predicted economic collapse if Trump was elected
"Why do you think people believe anything you post?"
why else does my every word produce such rage at Teach the Faleshoods (TTF)?
you know I'm right and it infuriates you
"you said I was wrong and cited the "popular" vote"
No, you knuckle-dragging ignoramus, follow the thread, that citation was a quote, and it was in quotes, and the quote was by "homosexuality never produces life, two of 'em ain't ever a marriage," which I assume is you, or your sticky sock puppet. It was quoted to provide context for the response. I never referred to it as a "popular" vote - one of the conservatives did. I guess he didn't get the message about your playing semantic games.
For future reference, it is easy to tell what the 4th graders are posting here because they haven't learned how to use capital letters at the beginning of their sentences, or periods at the end.
"the facts aren't your friend"
(That was an example.)
"HW lost because he raised taxes after promising not too"
It should be "to" followed by a period, actually.
Maybe you should learn some more English before trying to argue about facts people can look up for themselves.
"Obama borrowed more money than all other Presidents combined and he had zero interest rates"
Technically true, but that comparison doesn't take into account the effects of inflation, (and as such the dollar amounts aren't equivalent from different presidents) or the fact that thanks to the Bush collapse, tax revenues dropped by 0.5 trillion dollars per year - so no matter who was in office the balance sheet was going to bleed red.
GWB went into office with a good economy, and nearly a budget surplus, and managed to increase the debt by 101%, and tank the world economy.
Regan went into office with a relatively weak US economy, little debt, and managed to increase the debt by 186%.
Obama went into office with the economy in freefall, tax revenues down by 50%, yet still managed to bring the economy back up with only a 74% increase in the debt.
https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296
Trump may well exceed that - he's borrowing money at a rate comparable to that during the recession, and not paying enough of it to keep farmers going out of business because of his stupid trade war.
"much of the stimulus that passed when he first took office went to help overseas interests, not Americans"
Indeed, but what did you expect when Hank Paulson, under GWB took over the failing banks and insurance companies? He wanted to make sure his Wall Street friends were protected from the ridiculous lack of regulations that had previously kept investment banks out of the home mortgage market, and also required banks and insurance companies to hold sufficient reserves to cover a reasonable portion of their liabilities.
Conservatives hate socialism - at least for American citizens - but if their banking buddies start taking too many losses, they're happy to jump in with taxpayer dollars to bail out those private corporations. That's why a lot of that money went overseas - to bail out rich investors playing in the credit default swap market. It would have been better to just pay off the mortgages. But then the rich guys would have suffered.
That's the America we live in today - cold cruel capitalism for the average Joe, and privatized gains and socialized losses for the corporations. Republicans have been voting for politicians that would do that for decades.
"they predicted economic collapse if Trump was elected"
Republicans did the same for Obama, despite the fact that GWB had actually just collapsed the economy.
"you know I'm right and it infuriates you"
You couldn't even recognize your own quote.
Maybe we should take a "popular" vote and see how many people think you're right.
"No, you knuckle-dragging ignoramus, follow the thread, that citation was a quote, and it was in quotes, and the quote was by "homosexuality never produces life, two of 'em ain't ever a marriage," which I assume is you, or your sticky sock puppet. It was quoted to provide context for the response. I never referred to it as a "popular" vote - one of the conservatives did. I guess he didn't get the message about your playing semantic games."
hmmm...the rage is becoming more and more evident
since you're saying I've misinterpreted you, let's try again
try no to let your anger get the best of you
I say that it is only in the bastions of liberalism on the coasts that most people think that the Dems impeachment charade has any merit
across the heartland, Americans want Dems to drop the investigation blitz of Donald Trump's entire life and work on solving our problems and running an honest campaign to make their case for their agenda
"For future reference, it is easy to tell what the 4th graders are posting here because they haven't learned how to use capital letters at the beginning of their sentences, or periods at the end."
man, you guys are really committed to Elements of Style
perhaps if you were as committed to the welfare of your fellow citizens, you'd realize that Donald Trump's economic policies have been a godsend for minorities and the working poor in our country
or you could accomplish something to deliver justice to the oppressed, like when Trump reformed the justice system that Bill Clinton had messed up so bad
next up: school choice to give poor children a hope of the same high-quality education that middle class liberal children benefit from
or you could get out of the way, if you can't lend a hand
the times they are a-changin'
""HW lost because he raised taxes after promising not too"
It should be "to" followed by a period, actually."
glad, for your sake, that you didn't try to argue that HW lost because of "the economy, stupid" again
he lost because he raised taxes after promising not too
"Maybe you should learn some more English before trying to argue about facts people can look up for themselves."
oh, I think I can play around with the King's English a bit and still talk facts to the folks at Teach the Falsehoods (TTF)
that's going just fine
"Technically true"
sorry, didn't mean to get to technical for you
here's another one, though:
everything that Obama said was the "new normal" has been blown to smithereens by Trump and Americans have confidence in our economy again
"GWB went into office with a good economy,"
not true
the economy was entering a recession at the time and economists cite Bush's tax cut for reversing the tide
"and nearly a budget surplus,"
the kind of surpluses Clinton was running were unhealthy
it means the government was taking more money than they need out of the economy
further, he did it partly by slashing military spending and leading hostile foreign powers to believe we could be attacked and costing us much more in the long run
"Regan went into office with a relatively weak US economy, little debt, and managed to increase the debt by 186%."
if you are talking about Ronald Reagan, the economy was more than "relatively weak" when he came into office and he managed to win the Cold War, a benefit to countless people across the globe, as well as Americans
that cost less than winning WWII, and was well worth it for a country that will pay any price and bear any burden to secure the blessings of liberty for all mankind
"Obama went into office with the economy in freefall, tax revenues down by 50%, yet still managed to bring the economy back up with only a 74% increase in the debt."
Obama's economy was so bad that four years later, Dems at their 2012 convention were still blaming it on George Bush
"Trump may well exceed that"
Dems spend a lot of time saying "may"
arguing by crystal ball is par for the course for those who don't want to get too "technical"
"Indeed, but what did you expect"
well, we the people expect our President to design economic stimulus to benefit Americans
it isn't a defense that he had no idea how to do that without sending most of taxpayer stimulus overseas
"Conservatives hate socialism"
it's actually more dispassionate than that
we have observed that socialism has brought economic ruin everywhere it's been tried
confiscating wealth, as proposed by the current crop of ascendant Dems, will destroy us
"Republicans did the same for Obama, despite the fact that GWB had actually just collapsed the economy."
unemployment rose and labor participation sank for most of Obama's first four years
we eventually experienced cyclical rebound because Congress restrained him and the Fed kept interest rates near zero
but there was much suffering from Obama's "new normal"
"Maybe we should take a "popular" vote and see how many people think you're right."
if you mean on this blog, no need
this is a fringe site, not representative of our country
Republican Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin finally conceded to Democrat Andy Beshear during a Thursday afternoon press conference, more than one week after the Nov. 5 election.
“We’re going to have a change in the governorship based on the vote of the people,” Bevin said in a press conference.
“I truly wish the attorney general well,” he added.
Last week, Kentucky voters elected Beshear to be the next governor by a roughly 5,000 vote margin. As allowed under Kentucky law, Bevin, who served just one term as the state’s governor, requested a recanvas, a process to ensure all votes were properly reported.
In his press conference Thursday, Bevin admitted that the recanvas, which was set to be completed Thursday afternoon, would not alter the outcome of the election.
“I’m not going to contest these numbers that have come in,” he said.
GREAT ADIVICE FOR RUMP IN 2020.
The Trump Organization is trying to sell the Trump International Hotel in Washington by pitching investors on the millions they can make from foreign governments, according to a copy of a sales brochure obtained by CNN.
The Trump Organization last month began exploring a sale of its hotel in the nation's capital, which has led to multiple lawsuits accusing President Trump of profiting from doing business with foreign governments. “People are objecting to us making so much money on the hotel, and therefore we may be willing to sell,” Eric Trump told The Wall Street Journal, which reported that the company was seeking $500 million to sell the lease to the hotel.
n an investor pitch obtained by CNN, the Trump Organization tells potential buyers that there are millions to be made from foreign government business at the hotel.
"Tremendous upside potential exists for a new owner to fully capitalize on government related business upon rebranding of the asset," the pitch says, according to the network.
Roger Stone guilty on charges of lying to Congress
WASHINGTON ― Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign official and longtime practitioner of the political dark arts, was found guilty on Friday of lying to Congress.
Stone was accused of intimidating a witness and lying to congressional investigators who were looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election. He was found guilty on all seven counts he was charged with, including witness tampering and giving numerous false statements to lawmakers about his communications with WikiLeaks.
Both publicly and in communications with Trump campaign officials, Stone purported to have connections to WikiLeaks, which released stolen information that was damaging to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. WikiLeaks published emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee in July 2016 and published Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails in October 2016.
A federal prosecutor told jurors that Stone lied to Congress about his interactions with WikiLeaks intermediaries and Trump campaign officials “because the truth looked bad for Donald Trump.” Other members of the Trump campaign testified that they believed Stone had inside information on WikiLeaks, with one former official testifying that Trump indicated WikiLeaks would be releasing more information after he got off the phone with Stone in July 2016.
Prosecutors also said Stone tried to intimidate Randy Credico, a radio host he tried to convince not to cooperate with government investigations.
Trump attacks ambassador on Twitter as she testifies that his words in Ukraine call made her feel threatened
President Donald Trump lashed out at former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Friday as she testified in a public impeachment hearing that his words about her in a phone call with the Ukraine president “sounded like a threat.”
...The time stamp on the tweet is 10 a.m., 30 minutes after Yovanovitch started her opening statement at the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearing.
Yovanovitch, whose career of service to the U.S. spanned more than three decades, was asked at the hearing about the tweets.
“I actually think that where I served over the years I and others have demonstrably made things better for the U.S. as well as for the countries that I served in,” she said.
“It’s very intimidating,” she added when asked again about the president’s tweets.
“I want to let you know, ambassador, that some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously,” said House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
Yovanovitch had served the U.S. in Ukraine from August 2016 until May 2019, when Trump ousted her. She testified that she “had no agenda other than to pursue our stated foreign policy goals” during her tenure and said she was the victim of a “smear campaign” pushed in part by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani...
"The Trump Organization is trying to sell the Trump International Hotel in Washington by pitching investors on the millions they can make from foreign governments, according to a copy of a sales brochure obtained by CNN.
The Trump Organization last month began exploring a sale of its hotel in the nation's capital, which has led to multiple lawsuits accusing President Trump of profiting from doing business with foreign governments. “People are objecting to us making so much money on the hotel, and therefore we may be willing to sell,” Eric Trump told The Wall Street Journal, which reported that the company was seeking $500 million to sell the lease to the hotel.
In an investor pitch obtained by CNN, the Trump Organization tells potential buyers that there are millions to be made from foreign government business at the hotel.
"Tremendous upside potential exists for a new owner to fully capitalize on government related business upon rebranding of the asset," the pitch says, according to the network."
you guys are too much
after whining for years that Trump should divest getting rid of the hotel because when foreigners stay there, it's an emolument, he's considering getting rid of it
and now you're whining about it
"Roger Stone guilty on charges of lying to Congress"
well, yeah, he did that
but the real question is why Mueller didn't indict James Comey when he lied to Congress
I know, I know..
it's because they are deep state bromancers!
Of all the supposedly shocking revelations that have emerged from the impeachment hearings this week, here’s one that the Democrats in Congress hope you don’t hear about: The Obama White House knew that Hunter Biden’s extremely lucrative appointment to the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which occurred the month after his father was named the administration’s “point person” on Ukraine, reeked of corruption — and they didn’t do anything about it.
In Congressional testimony Friday, former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch confirmed for Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), that in 2016 the Obama State Department privately ran her through a series of practice questions and answers to prepare Yovanovitch for her Senate confirmation hearing.
Stefanik confirmed that one specific question Yovanovitch was asked to prepare for was, “What can you tell us about Hunter Biden’s being named to the board of Burisma?” Incredibly, Yovanovitch later testified that the State Department told her to deflect any questions she might get about Hunter Biden and Burisma by referring Senators’ questions to the vice president’s office.
This admission regarding her senate confirmation prep session was startling, and it flatly contradicted a prior statement Yovanovitch had made in the hearing: “Although I have met former vice president several times over the course of our many years in government service, neither he nor the previous administration ever raised the issue of either Burisma or Hunter Biden with me.”
Rep. Stefanik proceeded to hammer this point. “For the millions of Americans watching, President Obama’s own State Department was so concerned about potential conflicts of interest from Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma that they raised it themselves while prepping this wonderful ambassador nominee before her confirmation,” Stefanik said. “And yet our Democratic colleagues and chairman of this committee cry foul when we dare ask the same question that the Obama State Department was so concerned about.”
This is not a trivial point. Central to the case for impeaching Trump is the assertion he was targeting a political rival and had no legitimate basis for investigating Biden’s potential corruption.
If the Obama administration thought the vice president’s son as much as a $1 million a year and, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported, dropping Hunter Biden’s name to get meetings at the State Department was a problem, well, the case for impeachment is much harder to make.
It also speaks to the circumstances which triggered the impeachment hearings. Various national security and State Department bureaucrats have emerged from the woodwork to condemn Trump’s alleged quid pro quo with the Ukrainian president. If the State Department was concerned about corruption in the vice president’s office in 2016, why were they directing bureaucrats to avoid answering questions about it? Where were the whistleblowers and patriotic truth-tellers then? One unavoidable conclusion is that congressional Democrats and federal bureaucrats developed their sudden interest in White House corruption only after Trump won an election.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards was elected to a second term on Saturday, overcoming opposition from President Trump and an increasingly polarized state electorate to hand Democrats their second major victory in a governor’s race over the past two weeks.
Edwards, 53, was running against Republican businessman Eddie Rispone, 70, in a runoff election after neither candidate won an outright majority of votes last month.
The Associated Press declared Edwards the winner at about 10 p.m. local time. He defeated Rispone with about 51 percent of the vote, leading by roughly 40,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast.
“How sweet it is,” Edwards told a crowd of cheering supporters at a victory rally late Saturday at the Renaissance Hotel in Baton Rouge.
Edwards said he had spoken with Rispone earlier in the evening. “We both agreed that the time for campaigning is over,” he said, “and now our shared love for Louisiana is always more important than the partisan differences that sometimes divide us.”
“And as for the president, God bless his heart,” Edwards added mockingly.
Edwards’s victory is another setback for Trump, who traveled to Louisiana twice over the past month to campaign for Rispone and sent a series of tweets urging Republicans to vote. The president’s popularity in the South has failed to prop up GOP candidates in two of the three states that held gubernatorial elections this year, allowing Democrats to gain governorships for the third consecutive year.
In Kentucky, Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear unseated Republican Gov. Matt Bevin this month. In January, 24 of the nation’s governors will be Democrats, up from 15 at the end 2017.
When Kentucky’s Republican governor lost his bid for reelection two weeks ago despite President Trump’s active endorsement, the president and his allies brushed it off by declaring that Trump had nearly dragged an unpopular incumbent across the finish line.
On Sunday, a day after another Trump-backed GOP gubernatorial candidate fell in Louisiana, the president and his surrogates barely mounted a defense.
In a barrage of 40 tweets and retweets by Sunday evening, Trump didn’t mention Eddie Rispone’s loss to Gov. John Bel Edwards (D), even though the president had held two campaign rallies in the state in the 10 days before the election aimed at boosting his chances.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel — who had publicly praised Trump after the Kentucky elections in which the GOP won five other statewide races — also was mum on Louisiana.
On Fox News Sunday, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) couldn’t avoid weighing in after host Chris Wallace asked him whether the loss made Trump look bad.
“What he said was he’d be made to look bad whether he came in the state or not,” Scalise responded, before crediting Trump with helping Rispone, a businessman, force a runoff election with Edwards after holding a rally in the state on the eve of the bipartisan primary last month.
For Trump, however, the back-to-back losses of GOP gubernatorial candidates in red Southern states is more than just a bad look. It’s a warning sign that the president’s strategy of focusing strictly on maintaining the strong support of his conservative base might not be enough to help fellow Republicans or even himself in 2020 amid the House Democrats’ impeachment probe, which has imperiled his presidency.
Trump campaigned hard for Rispone and Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R), who lost to Democrat Andy Beshear, turning their races into something of a referendum on his own standing as he seeks to demonstrate strength amid a near-daily onslaught of disclosures that he sought to leverage the U.S. bilateral relationship with Ukraine for his own political gain.
“What Trump did in Louisiana was increase voter participation. While he increased the pro-Trump turnout, he also increased the anti-Trump turnout. That’s kind of the lesson here,” said Ron Faucheux, a nonpartisan political polling analyst based in New Orleans...
The Supreme Court halted a lower court order Monday requiring the president’s accounting firm to turn over his tax records to House Democrats in their impeachment probe.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. granted the administration’s request to stay the federal appeals court ruling against the president
The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily blocked a ruling that requires President Donald Trump’s longtime accounting firm to turn over his tax returns to Congress.
The temporary stay order signed by Chief Justice John Roberts gives the Democratic-controlled House Committee on Oversight and Reform until Thursday to respond. The document did not note any public votes or dissents.
The move was expected and does not provide new information about how the justices may ultimately vote on the matter. It generally requires five votes to grant a stay, though in some cases one justice may do so pending review by the full court.
Earlier in the day, attorneys for House Democrats said in a letter that they would not oppose a temporary delay in enforcing the subpoena to allow the court time to consider arguments from both sides. The committee said in the letter that it would provide its response on Friday.
Today's parade of impeachment witnesses is impressive:
Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman
Jennifer Williams
Kurt Volker
Tim Morrison
Popcorn is loaded and ready to pop!
BOSTON — By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, more young voters support than oppose the impeachment of President Donald Trump and his removal from office, according to a new national poll released Monday by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The poll, which isolated voters ages 18 to 29, found 52 percent of all eligible youth voters and 58 percent of likely youth voters in the 2020 presidential general election believe Trump should be impeached and removed from office.
Twenty-seven percent of all youth voters and 28 percent of likely general election voters disagreed that he should be impeached and removed. The remaining said they did not know, didn't care or declined to answer the question about impeachment.
The findings show a stronger preference for Trump's impeachment among young people than older voters. It's consistent with the leftward political shift of young voters, who supported Democratic candidates in record numbers during the 2018 midterm.
"Clearly, the majority of support for impeachment and now removal is coming from younger cohorts," said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. "That's been consistent over the course of the summer and it remains consistent."
Public hearings are set to continue this week in the Democrat-controlled House impeachment inquiry into Trump's dealings with Ukraine.
An ABC-Ipsos Public Affairs poll of Americans — not just youth — released Monday found 51 percent believe Trump should be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate. That's compared to 25 percent who said Trump did nothing wrong related to Ukraine, 13 percent who said Trump's actions were wrong but he should neither be impeached nor removed, and 6 percent who said he should be impeached but not removed...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/11/18/young-voters-overwhelmingly-want-trump-impeached-removed-office-poll-finds/4228474002/
If coup-coup Nancy Pelosi has a panic button, now would be a good time to lean on it. With signs that Americans are tuning out the impeachment hearings, the clock is ticking on Democrats’ chance to make their case.
Pelosi is clearly worried, telling fellow Dems it’s a “weak response” to “let the election decide” whether President Trump should be removed.
“That dangerous position only adds to the urgency of our action, because POTUS is jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020 elections,” the speaker wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter to her House members.
The letter seemed strange enough when it became public Monday, but Tuesday’s hearing more than justified her fear and desperation. With her party now having failed to hit anything close to pay dirt after three long days of public testimony, she is trying to keep her members on board the impeachment train, lest the whole effort crash in failure and disgrace.
Alas, Tuesday wasn’t much help. As they did in the first hearings last week, Dems again failed to make the Ukraine issue the crime of the century or even of the Trump presidency. Their hyperbolic descriptions are not even close to the pedestrian evidence they’re producing.
Their problem last week largely centered on the fact that none of the witnesses were actual witnesses to any relevant events, including the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
They solved that problem early Tuesday with the day’s first two witnesses, Jennifer Williams and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, both of whom listened to the call in the White House. Finally, the impeachment zealots had someone with firsthand knowledge, as opposed to the second- and third-handers last week.
They got even closer in the afternoon, with former officials Tim Morrison and Kurt Volker higher up the food chain. In contrast to all the other witnesses, both had actually met Trump!
But still the end zone proved elusive. The closest Dems came was when Williams, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, said she found the July 25 call “unusual.” Vindman declared it an “inappropriate and improper” demand and reported it to lawyers.
Quickly, though, Republicans cleverly succeeded in contrasting those two reactions, with Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe saying, “There is no consensus about what you heard,” and that any impeachment case “must be clear, overwhelming and compelling.”
Earlier, Ratcliffe had stacked the transcripts of 10 long depositions and noted that not a single witness had accused Trump of “bribery,” the focus-group-tested word Dems have now adopted as their battle cry.
The cumulative effect was to create a sense of doubt about the heart of impeachment. Was there really a crime, or was it just a difference of opinion? And how much of it is purely partisan?
The doubts took a leap when Vindman conceded that lawyers said it was legal for Trump to temporarily withhold more than $400 million in aid to Ukraine.
Once fair-minded Americans seriously entertain the question of whether the actions involved even amount to a crime, most will probably find it difficult to conclude Trump represents an urgent threat and must be removed immediately. All the more so when they can read the call transcript for themselves, as well as learn that Ukraine got the promised aid and never launched any of the investigations Trump requested.
And so Day Three of the public hearings went pretty much as the first two. Long hours of testimony, some it interesting and relevant, punctuated by mutual expressions of contempt between Democratic Chairman Adam Schiff and Republican members.
Vindman was a strong witness, but a strange one, too. He presented himself as an Alexander Haig-like “I’m in charge here” figure, when he was actually far down the pecking order.
His inflated sense of self-importance seemed to be key to his alarm over the phone call. As he put it, he believed “that if Ukraine pursued an investigation in the 2016 elections, the Bidens and Burisma, it would be interpreted as a partisan play” and Ukraine would lose bipartisan support, which in turn would “undermine US national security and advance Russia’s strategic objectives.”
He conceded, smugly, that he even advised Zelensky “to stay out of US domestic politics.”
He said Trump would be acting against US policy if he got the investigations. Although he later conceded that Trump as president could change the policy, he didn’t seem to mean it.
And yet Vindman, wearing his Army uniform and medals, including a Purple Heart he was awarded after being injured in Iraq, was the Dems’ star of the day.
He could be a major figure in the secretive run-up to the hearings, a notion bolstered when Vindman, with Schiff running interference, refused to name a person in the intelligence community he told about the call.
Because the so-called whistleblower was a CIA officer, some in the GOP believe Vindman set the whole saga in motion and helped to shape the Dems’ case.
Adding to the surreal quality of the hearings is a crucial fact that gets too little attention: Trump’s policy toward Ukraine has been far stronger than President Barack Obama’s. Providing Ukraine with antitank weapons to counter Russian invasions is a direct slap at Vladimir Putin, a move Obama rejected because he feared it would provoke Putin.
Thus, removing Trump would benefit Russia, proving that, for Dems, Ukraine’s security is just another pawn in their war against the president.
“Operation Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI’s code name for its investigation into Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, blew through the United States in 2016 and did more damage to our national security institutions than any real hurricane could. The upcoming report from the Department of Justice’s Inspector General may well conclude that high-level Obama Justice Department and FBI officials knowingly lied to obtain top-secret surveillance warrants that were originally designed to target foreign spies and terrorists, and used them to monitor a U.S. citizen whose only crime appears to have been acting as an adviser to the Trump campaign.
While lying to a federal court is a crime, lying in the context of using our nation’s most secret — and most constitutionally intrusive — counter-intelligence assets as part of a false narrative to oppose a political candidate is downright dangerous and should strike fear in the average citizen who now is left to wonder what protects them from such seemingly unchecked power of the state.
Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, a rich hotel mogul who gave $1 million to President Trump’s inaugural committee, provided devastating testimony Wednesday morning, implicating Trump, Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and numerous other people in a “quid pro quo” arrangement of a White House visit for an announcement of investigations, not the investigations themselves. The sequence of events he testified to eviscerates the defenses that Trump was not directly involved in the scheme, that there was no quid pro quo, that Ukraine did not know about the deal and that Sondland was a rogue actor.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of Sondland’s testimony was the degree to which he implicated Pompeo in the scheme. He pointed to emails sent to Pompeo and Pompeo aides that pointed to his ongoing effort to steer Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky into providing the assurances Trump was looking for. As The Post recounts: “‘I would ask Zelensky to look him in the eye and tell him that once Ukraine’s new justice folks are in place mid-Sept, that Ze should be able to move forward publicly and with confidence on those issues of importance to Potus and to the US,’ Sondland wrote in the Aug. 22 email, using an acronym for president of the United States. ‘Hopefully, that will break the logjam’ on funding.”
Sondland also made clear the degree to which Pompeo is participating in the obstruction of the investigation. Sondland said he was directed by the State Department and the White House not to testify, and further, he stressed that the State Department and White House refused to make documents available to him and the committee. This undoubtedly was raised to account for his changes in testimony, but it also clearly hammered home Pompeo’s self-interest in preventing incriminating documents from surfacing.
The stunningly candid testimony made clear that, in a May 23 meeting with Trump, Sondland, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker were told “talk to Rudy,” meaning Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani. From there on out, his communications with the Ukrainians, with Trump and with other State Department officials made clear no White House visit (an official act) would transpire without an announcement of investigations that we know would smear the former vice president and help Trump’s reelection campaign. Sondland explicitly testified that he understood there was a quid pro quo — a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation of the 2016 debunked conspiracy theory and Burisma, which he later learned meant the Bidens. (Throughout he maintained he did not understand this was about the Bidens, although news accounts of and TV appearances by Giuliani made clear this was about the Bidens.
Sondland also confirmed that in a July 26 call Trump brought up the investigations, something he had been hearing all along from Giuliani. He does not dispute telling the State Department official who overheard the call that Trump did not care about Ukraine, only the “big stuff,” meaning investigations.
Asked by House Intelligence Committee counsel if he figured out the aid was conditioned on the announcements because “two plus two equals four,” Sondland said though the connection between an announcement of investigations and the aid hold was not specifically communicated from Trump, it was the only logical explanation and “everyone” understood this by September....
...The impact of Sondland’s account cannot be covered up, obscured or spun. If Republicans continue to insist Trump did nothing wrong or that he did not sacrifice our national security for political gain, it will be because they willfully reject facts that demonstrate Trump violated his oath. As for the public, anyone who cares to can see that the Republicans who do so are simply enablers in a corrupt scheme that harmed our national security.
"as well as learn that Ukraine got the promised aid and never launched any of the investigations Trump requested."
If you conspire to have someone killed - like pay a hitman to get rid of your spouse - and it doesn't go through because the hitman turned out to be an FBI agent, you still go to jail even though your spouse wasn't murdered.
The Simpsons are credited for predicting a lot of things over the course of the show's 31-year run—including the Trump presidency.
And according to one former writer, you can add "one of the GOP's defenses against impeachment" to that list.
In an op-ed published Sunday in The Washington Post, Bill Oakley—a writer and show-runner during the series' golden years in the '90s, who moved to Portland a decade ago and now has a burgeoning career as a fast-food critic—wrote that Republicans are using "the Sideshow Bob defense," which argues that a crime is not a crime if the perpetrator ultimately fails to commit said crime.
It's a reference to 1994's "Sideshow Bob Roberts," in which the titular former Krusty the Clown sidekick turned ex-con runs for mayor of Springfield. Early in the episode, Bob—voiced by Kelsey Grammer—dismisses his unsuccessful attempt to murder Bart Simpson, saying, "Attempted murder? Now honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?"
In the Post, Oakley, who wrote the episode along with Josh Weinstein, points out several recent real-world examples in which Trump apologists have tried to defend the president's "quid pro quo" with Ukraine using more or less the same argument. That includes House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy ("Name me one thing that Ukraine did to release the money. Nothing"), the Wall Street Journal editorial page ("[I]t may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it") and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who told the Post, "[I]t's hard for me to understand where the whole impeachment situation is coming from, because what everybody's up in arms about didn't happen."
"That the GOP has taken a cue from Sideshow Bob is shrewd, on one level," Oakley writes. "He's savvy enough to know that in Springfield—and, perhaps, elsewhere in the United States?—a middle-aged white male wearing a tie and saying anything with some conviction will be believed by at least 55 percent of people, especially if they already want to believe it."
Oakley writes that he doesn't believe the "Sideshow Bob defense" of Trump will be long-lived, however, since "it fails to stand up to even the slightest scrutiny." In fact, it even got shut down at last week's impeachment hearings, when Rep. Joaquin Castro half-seriously asked ambassador William B. Taylor, "Is attempted murder a crime?" Taylor answered in the affirmative.
As we enter week two of the House impeachment inquiry, it seems pretty clear that Democrats are suffering a massive ordnance failure. Their “bombshells” are not exploding.
The first unexploded bombshell came when acting ambassador to Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr. testified that a member of his embassy staff had overhead a cellphone conversation between President Trump and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, in a Kyiv restaurant in which Trump discussed the need for Ukrainian officials to pursue “investigations.” Aha, Democrats cried! A firsthand witness could now testify they heard Trump pressing the Ukrainians for investigations.
Um, so what? Trump had already released a rough transcript of his call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he had pressed him for investigations. The overheard call told us nothing we did not already know. Indeed, the only one likely to get in trouble from this revelation is Sondland, who violated operational security by calling the president in public on an unsecure cellphone.
How about former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony? We learned that Trump fired her without explanation (which as president he had every right to do) and besmirched her reputation. Yes, Trump treated her horribly, but being a jerk is not an impeachable offense.
Then, as though to prove the point, Trump attacked her on Twitter as she was testifying, writing, “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad.” Democrats pounced, trying to turn Trump’s blunder into a new charge of “witness intimidation.” Please. Witness intimidation is defined as “the threatening of a crucial court witnesses by pressure or extortion to compel him/her to not to testify.” Yovanovitch had already been fired as ambassador and was in the process of testifying. No bombshell there, either.
Then on Tuesday, Democrats asked Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman about his assertion that Zelensky had mentioned “Burisma” in his call with Trump, even though the word was not in the transcript released to the public. The suggestion was that the transcript had been doctored. Vindman testified that it was “not a significant omission” and that the career staff who produce the transcripts simply “didn’t catch the word.” In other words, there was no bombshell scrubbing of the transcript.
They got nothing damaging from Vice President Pence’s Eurasia adviser Jennifer Williams, who testified Tuesday morning that investigations never came up in Pence’s meeting with Zelensky in Warsaw. They got nothing from former special envoy Kurt Volker or former National Security Council staffer Tim Morrison on Tuesday afternoon. So after three days of hearings, Democrats have failed to produce anything remotely explosive.
That means they are losing. Polls show the vast majority of Americans agree with Vindman that the Trump-Zelensky call “was inappropriate.” They agreed with Vindman before he testified. But only a minority of Americans say Trump’s conduct warrants impeachment and removal. And the hearings are not changing their minds. Indeed, support for the impeachment inquiry has ticked down since the hearings began, as has the number of Americans tuning in to watch.
That means Democrats are failing to convince Americans that Trump’s misconduct rises to the level of treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. In blackjack, the tie goes to the dealer; in impeachment, the tie goes to the president. If Republicans fight Democrats to a draw, Trump wins.
Indeed, Republicans increasingly seem to believe impeachment will help them at the polls next November. A few weeks ago, Senate Republicans were discussing the possibility of a quick dismissal of any charges sent over by the House. They suggested they might follow the precedent set by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) during the Clinton impeachment trial and offer a motion to dismiss the charges soon after the trial begins. They would need just a simple majority to end the proceedings.
Now, Republican senators appear to be moving in the opposite direction. The Post has reported that there is discussion of drawing out the impeachment trial to keep the six Democratic senators who are running for president trapped in Washington and off the campaign trail. If Republicans thought impeachment was hurting them, there is zero chance they would be talking about an extended trial. As long as they show they are taking their jobs as jurors seriously, an impeachment trial can energize their base and help them keep the Senate and hold the White House.
Indeed, impeachment could be to the 2020 election what the Brett M. Kavanaugh hearings were to 2018 Senate midterms — except GOP voters see Democrats smearing not just Trump’s Supreme Court pick but Trump himself.
That is a message on which Trump will happily run.
Will Democrats upset more faith voters in tonight’s debate?
A new extensive study released today suggests they better not.
In the last debate, Beto O’Rourke said that churches that espouse traditional marriage should be taxed. When asked, “Do you think religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities—should they lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage?” O’Rourke didn’t flinch. “Yes,” he replied. “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone, or any institution, any organization in America that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us.”
Two weeks later, O’Rourke ended his campaign.
The resounding backlash to O’Rourke, was a striking example of a reality that a report from the pro-bono law firm The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty makes clear -- namely, that Americans of all stripes still deeply value religious liberty and don’t want to see people of faith and their institutions punished for their beliefs.
The report, a statistical index that gives extensive coverage to nearly every corner of the issue of religious liberty, finds that support for a broad interpretation of religious liberty remains strong, despite having weathered a battering in the culture wars. Eighty-seven percent of respondents, for example, believe in the “freedom to practice a religion in daily life without facing discrimination or harm from others.”
The index authors note a particularly strong desire among respondents for a “hands off government approach” when it comes to the treatment of religion in society. Overwhelming majorities support allowing religious organizations and groups to make their own hiring and leadership decisions (an issue that recently played out at the Supreme Court in the case of Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC) and oppose penalizing individuals or groups for their religious views about marriage (an issue that is still playing out in the Court and is bound to be for years to come).
Above all, the index finds that religious liberty is a point of consensus in a deeply divided nation, a conclusion that is also backed up by a report released just days ago from the Pew Research Center. While respondents in that survey disagreed about the mixing of religion and politics, majorities agreed that religion is a force for good in society and is something that generally brings people together.
In short, though we may be becoming less religious as a country, we still value the role of religion and value the principle of religious liberty even more.
And while Democrats may pay lip service to these ideas in tepid statements, the reality is that the party walks a different line. Democrats are only increasing their efforts to punish charities like adoption agencies for their religious views about marriage, to force healthcare workers to perform procedures that violate their religious beliefs and religious employers and taxpayers to pay for them, and to exclude religious schools and charities from public funding programs, yet another issue currently before the highest court. The party talks like Buttigieg but acts like Beto.
The American people strongly agree that Americans should not pay a price, literal or figurative, for their faith. And they deserve to know in clear terms that their potential president does too. A perfect task for a primary debate moderator.
Trump now leads Dem field in Wisconsin
tee-hee-hee....
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/general_election/
If you can’t beat him, impeach him. That has been the left's mantra since the American people elected Donald Trump as their president in 2016.
While Democrats have spent the last three years practicing the politics of personal destruction, President Trump has been delivering results for the American people.
Nearly 7 million jobs created. The lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. Transformative tax cuts for hardworking American families. More than 150 conservative judges confirmed, including Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. A Veterans Administration that is undergoing major reforms and is now more accountable to the brave men and women who have served our nation. A bold trade strategy that is producing fairer trade deals for America and holding China responsible for ripping off American workers and businesses.
With the president’s strong record of rebuilding America’s economy and military, it’s no surprise that congressional Democrats have been trying to change the conversation and ultimately overturn the results of the last presidential election.
It started with Democrats accusing the president of colluding with a foreign government and obstructing justice. Democratic talking heads like Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., repeatedly claimed they had smoking-gun evidence and continually drummed up the likelihood of impeachment. Two years later, the Mueller report was released and we learned the truth: there was no collusion and no obstruction.
With the findings of the Mueller report repudiating their meritless allegations, Democrats have been searching for another angle to appease their base and justify impeaching the president.
In September, House Democrats seized on a supposed “whistleblower” complaint based on a phone call between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart.
Before even reading the transcript, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her support for an impeachment inquiry.
Later that same day, the transcript was released to the public, which revealed there was no "quid pro quo" and certainly no justification for impeachment. Then we had the chance to read the complaint written by the initial accuser, a complaint that relied entirely on second-hand information and again failed to outline an impeachable offense.
What Democrats care about is paving their path to the White House in 2020, which they have determined requires the president's personal destruction.
We’ve since learned that Ukraine didn’t even know that assistance had not been released until more than a month after the call. The president’s political rivals also refuse to acknowledge the fundamental fact that the lethal assistance was delivered to Ukraine in early September, which required no action on the part of Ukraine. There was no quid pro quo, which explains why Pelosi is now desperately shifting to an even more ridiculous and completely unfounded allegation of "bribery."
With the facts not on their side, it’s no surprise that the Democrats’ opening salvo of the impeachment process was Schiff starting a hearing by shamefully reading a fabricated transcript to impugn President Trump's character and motivations.
That moment summarized their total lack of credibility and cynical strategy to bring down the president using any means necessary.
It explains why Democrats have denied the president basic due process rights, breaking with centuries of historical precedent from previous impeachment proceedings.
Democrats have refused to allow the president’s legal team to participate in the impeachment hearings and cross-examine the witnesses Democrats are calling.
Democrats have also denied the president another basic tenant of legal fairness: allowing the accused to face their accuser. They won’t even agree to allow the president’s lawyers to question the initial accuser or so-called “whistleblower” in a confidential setting.
It’s clear that Democrats don’t care about the facts. They don’t care about fairness. They don’t care about due process rights. They don’t care about doing their jobs and passing legislation like the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement or legislation to stop dangerous sanctuary cities. They don’t care about whether they drag our country through a bitter and partisan impeachment process.
What Democrats care about is paving their path to the White House in 2020, which they have determined requires the president's personal destruction.
If Pelosi is able to find enough Democratic votes to impeach the president on a partisan basis in the House, the process will move to the Senate, where the president will finally be provided with the due process he deserves. I expect that will include calling in the initial accuser to come before the Senate and testify under oath.
What the American people want are results, something President Trump is delivering on every day. They will reject the left’s brazen political posturing, and they will not allow their baseless allegations and partisan impeachment efforts to become the new normal.
A conservative group hopes its new ad campaign will educate Republican voters on the actual facts of the Ukraine scandal that prompted the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.
Republicans for the Rule of Law released its first ad, featuring footage of EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland implicating Trump during his congressional testimony, online Wednesday. The spot will air on Fox News’ flagship morning show “Fox & Friends,” which Trump often tunes into, on Friday.
“In the hearings this week, the American people have heard damning testimony from credible, patriotic witnesses that the president of the United States abused his power,” Republicans for the Rule of Law executive director Sarah Longwell said in a statement.
“Rather than fulfilling his oath to defend the Constitution, he tried to use the power of the government to strong-arm a friendly government into interfering on his behalf in the 2020 election,” Longwell added. “If the Republican Party claims to stand for national security, law and order, the rule of law, and accountable government, they can’t let this abuse stand.”
The group’s other recent ads have urged GOP lawmakers to stand up to and speak out against Trump, and accused the president and Vice President Mike Pence of corruption.
"Apparently a handful of Republicans actually care about facts... who knew?"
there are no facts in dispute
just a disagreement about what is proper in foreign relations
if the Dems recognized that, I'd be on their side
it's nothing to overturn an election about
Obama and Biden did similar things
and Hunter Biden's involvement in Ukraine was corrupt influence-peddling
“In the hearings this week, the American people have heard damning testimony from credible, patriotic witnesses that the president of the United States abused his power,”
"abused" is probably going too farf
“Rather than fulfilling his oath to defend the Constitution,"
he did nothing unconstitutional
you may remember Obama's record on constitutional challenges
he regularly failed to defend it
"he tried to use the power of the government to strong-arm a friendly government into interfering on his behalf in the 2020 election"
"his behalf"?
he did it on behalf of Americans who need to know about the Bidens
but also "political" is not synonymous with personal, as much as that misunderstanding might be to the advantage of Dems
"political" is on behalf of those who believe in the agenda pursued
the whole impeachment coup rests on a bunch of fallacious assumptions
"Longwell added. “If the Republican Party claims to stand for national security,"
assuming Ukraine is some vital national security issue, the truth is Trump has provided actual hardware to the Ukrainian government, as opposed to Obama's empty rhetoric
"law and order, the rule of law, and accountable government, they can’t let this abuse stand.”
no law was broken and we hold government accountable in elections
Thank you Trump U law school student for your bogus legal analysis.
Meanwhile, in the real world
Former NSC official Fiona Hill looked these morons in the eye and laid it out in clear and unambiguous terms:
I thought I could help them with President Trump’s stated goal of improving relations with Russia, while still implementing policies designed to deter Russian conduct that threatens the United States, including the unprecedented and successful Russian
operation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
This relates to the second thing I want to communicate. Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.
The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies, confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. Itis beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified.
The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today. Our nation is being torn apart. Truth is questioned. Our highly professional and expert career foreign service is being undermined. U.S. support for Ukraine—which continues to face armed
Russian aggression—has been politicized.
The Russian government’s goal is to weaken our country—to diminish America’s global role and to neutralize a perceived U.S. threat to Russian interests. President Putin and the Russian security services aim to counter U.S. foreign policy objectives in Europe,
including in Ukraine, where Moscow wishes to reassert political and economic dominance.
I say this not as an alarmist, but as a realist. I do not think long-term conflict with Russia is either desirable or inevitable. I continue to believe that we need to seek ways of stabilizing our relationship with Moscow even as we counter their efforts to harm us. Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are
running out of time to stop them. In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.
As Republicans and Democrats have agreed for decades, Ukraine is a valued partner of the United States, and it plays an important role in our national security. And as I told this Committee last month, I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine—not Russia—attacked us in 2016. These fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes. President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a Super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives. When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each another, degrade our institutions and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.
I appreciate Hill breaking through the bullshit to inform the Trumpies they are being duped.
Now that we've watched three long days of hearings it's pretty clear that the Republicans aren't just interested in challenging witnesses or offering a defense of the president's actions. They see this as an opportunity to advance the same conspiracy theories that Trump and Giuliani were pressing the Ukrainians to announce they would investigating.
Despite being thoroughly and repeatedly debunked, largely on the basis of a timeline that refutes their premise, the bogus corruption scandal around Joe and Hunter Biden remains a live issue, as far as Republicans are concerned. The facts of the case are of little interest to them. They simply want to keep talking about it in order to justify the president's actions and keep the so-called scandal viable as a political weapon should Biden win the Democratic nomination. It is the patented "but her emails" strategy, which you have to admit was highly successful.
It's somewhat more interesting that Republicans are spending a lot of time talking about the other investigation Trump so desperately wanted. That would be the alternative narrative in which the Ukrainians framed the Russian government for the 2016 election interference in an effort to help Hillary Clinton, what Trump referred to as "CrowdStrike" in the infamous call. I won't go into the details here. If you are unfamiliar with the so-called details of this loony conspiracy theory, you can read about it in this Salon article by Bob Cesca. Suffice it to say there is no basis for any of this and the main people who benefit from its continued dissemination are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
This isn't just another crazy right-wing distraction, however. The consensus in the American intelligence community, as well as that of our allies, is that it was the Russians who hacked into Democratic emails and had them distributed, much to Trump's delight. The president and the Republican Party are spreading this counter-narrative blaming Ukraine — a narrative allegedly planted by Russian agents — as a green light to Russia to interfere in the 2020 election.
I'll say that again: The entire Republican Party is now acting as a Russian ally, eager to spread Putin's lies blaming Russia's regional adversary for what his own agents did. Even if Trump doesn't win next year, the Russians will have successfully pumped these toxic narratives into the American body politic, and made it very ill.
In the hearing on Tuesday, Republicans repeatedly slandered Speaker Nancy Pelosi with this doctored quote:
Donald J. Trump✔
@realDonaldTrump
Nancy Pelosi just stated that “it is dangerous to let the voters decide Trump’s fate.” @FoxNews In other words, she thinks I’m going to win and doesn’t want to take a chance on letting the voters decide. Like Al Green, she wants to change our voting system. Wow, she’s CRAZY!
12:15 AM - Nov 19, 2019
That's not correct. What Pelosi actually said was this:
"The weak response to these hearings has been, “Let the election decide.” That dangerous position only adds to the urgency of our action, because the President is jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020 elections."
Trump doesn't have a lot of running room to set up any more foreign shakedown schemes before 2020, so the impeachment process is probably doing some good in keeping him confined. But Republicans have taken the baton and are running with it as best they can in these hearings, basically saying, "Russia, if you're listening, we have your back." Indeed, they are sending that signal to anyone who wants to interfere.
November 21, 2019 at 4:39 p.m. EST
“Secretary [Rick] Perry, Ambassador [Kurt] Volker and I worked with Mr. Rudy Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the president of the United States. . . . We followed the president’s orders. . . . Everyone was in the loop.”
With these words, Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union, did his country the favor of candor and clarity. This does not mean that elected Republicans will yield to reason and evidence. But it does change conditions on the ground in significant ways.
First, President Trump can no longer employ his go-to method of damage control — throwing subordinates beneath the presidential limousine. Trump, according to Sondland’s testimony, personally directed the Ukraine squeeze. And if underlings are to be sacrificed, they would have to be underlings of the highest order. According to Sondland, Vice President Pence was informed of the extortion attempt and said nothing. Both acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were closely involved in the effort. Trump would not hesitate to fire all three men if it would put him one point higher in the polls. But shedding your vice president, your chief of staff and your secretary of state is not a strategy of containment; it would be the complete collapse of the executive branch into recrimination and chaos.
The impeachment investigation has gained additional fuel by uncovering broad complicity at the highest levels of government. Some stories, such as the involvement of Attorney General William P. Barr, are yet to be fully told. Why did Justice Department prosecutors dismiss the possibility of campaign finance law violations after such a narrow and cursory examination? Why did Trump, according to the rough transcript of the July 25 phone call, say (twice) that Barr would be in touch with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or his people to cooperate in a Burisma/Bidens investigation? Is it really plausible that the most politicized attorney general of recent memory was an innocent bystander in these events?
Congress now has every reason and right to hear directly from Barr, Pence, Mulvaney and Pompeo, given their implication in public corruption. And their refusal to testify compounds their apparent corruption with cowardice...
Second, we have once again seen evidence of Trump’s mobster mentality. The president surrounds himself with a bodyguard of rotters — fixers who are willing to do his dirty work based on hints delivered with all the subtlety of a silent film actor. Any leader who would depend on Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone for service and counsel is not a bad judge of character; he is a good judge of useful knaves. As president, Trump has created an environment in which his fixers can work unchecked by institutions and individuals with ethical standards. Public servants such as Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and William B. Taylor Jr., the acting ambassador to Ukraine, raised concerns about corruption up the normal lines of authority. But at the top of those lines Trump has placed people such as Mulvaney, Barr, Pence and Pompeo, who are morally neutered. In a perverse form of political Darwinism, leaders in the executive branch have been selected for traits of turpitude and tractability. It is the survival of the unscrupulous.
Third, the Sondland testimony — along with the testimony of other witnesses — has stripped away the last, semi-rational arguments advanced by Republican defenders of the president. No quid pro quo? No longer tenable. Secondhand hearsay? Not anymore. A “deep-state” plot? Tell that to Vindman and Taylor. The president as anti-corruption crusader? Give me a break.
None of this is likely to change the minds of most elected Republicans on impeachment itself. It does, however, place their motivations out in the open. In the face of serious charges against the president, Republicans have no exculpatory evidence to offer. Their true appeal — their only appeal — is tribal. Republicans would certainly support impeachment for a Democratic president who sought foreign help in rigging an American presidential election, particularly in a manner that strengthened an international rival. But no matter. Tribalism dictates that Republicans stick together in their opposition to impeachment because, well, you can’t give aid and comfort to an enemy intent on ruining the country. The only thing that matters in the end? Using power to keep power.
Some, such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), are surrendering their integrity eagerly, almost happily. Other Republicans will want to appear more reluctant. But anyone who puts power above truth and character is doing a nasty disservice to their country. And it won’t be forgotten.
“Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country — and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did,” she testified in the accent of her native northern England. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
She continued her scolding, at length: “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternative narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”
Stay tuned.
Let's look at the testimony of Fiona Hill, who TTF says broke through the BS:
"I thought I could help them with President Trump’s stated goal of improving relations with Russia,"
well, you could have, Fiona, if Dems had not poisoned relations with Russia in an attempt to deny that Hillary Clinton lost because of her personal failings and Americans don't see the world the same way Dems do
"while still implementing policies designed to deter Russian conduct that threatens the United States,"
Russian attempts to propagandize and feed disinformation to the American public wasn't any more of a threat in this election than it's ever been
"including the unprecedented"
hardly
they've been doing this since the Bolsheviks chased off the Mensheviks
"and successful"
not in the least
you comment is ignorant
"Russian
operation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election."
"interfere" is an ambiguous meant to mislead
what they did to "interfere" is what countless other actors, both domestic and foreign, did
spread lies and slanted truths in order to convince the electorate to vote their way
what's really scary is that the Dems in government are trying to bully social media companies into banning such speech
if grassroots citizen don't like what a company is doing, or allowing, they are free to take their business elsewhere
if elected government officials, however, threaten Facebook and other into suppressing certain speech, that's unconstitutional
"This relates to the second thing I want to communicate."
thanks for tying it all together for us, Fiona
"Based on questions and statements I have heard, some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—"
could you be specific on how you came to this fallacious inference?
I think everyone there knew Russian tried to sway voters
so did a number of countries, groups, and others
that's how democracy works
"and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did."
who said that?
"This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves."
i don't know if that's true but, if so, the remedy is to tell the truth
"The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016."
ah, they were "systematic this time out
as opposed to them old random attacks
"This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies,"
well, you know great they are at finding things out
Iran, North Korea, et al
"confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. Itis beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified."
if it's "beyond dispute". why do you seem so worried?
"The impact of the successful 2016 Russian campaign remains evident today. Our nation is being torn apart."
Russian didn't do that
their campaign wasn't successful
"Truth is questioned."
yes, Adam Schiff and his accomplices in the irresponsible media have caused this
"Our highly professional and expert career foreign service is being undermined."
past presidents never held them accountable before
their reaction is undermining themselves
"The Russian government’s goal is to weaken our country—to diminish America’s global role and to neutralize a perceived U.S. threat to Russian interests."
thanks for sharing, Capt Obvious!
"President Putin and the Russian security services aim to counter U.S. foreign policy objectives in Europe,"
such brilliance..
no wonder they call you an eckspert
"including in Ukraine, where Moscow wishes to reassert political and economic dominance."
really? whatever gave you that idea?
"I say this not as an alarmist, but as a realist. I do not think long-term conflict with Russia is either desirable or inevitable."
you're a "real" something, that's fer sher!
"I continue to believe that we need to seek ways of stabilizing our relationship with Moscow even as we counter their efforts to harm us. Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election. We are
running out of time to stop them."
oh no!!!!!!!!!
what if we can't stop them from posting facebook ads?
the consequences are too horrible to think about!
"In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests."
why should Dems be the only ones allowed to do it?
"President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a Super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives."
truthfully, many others do the same, but to a greater extent
the Russians are a minor player
"When we are consumed by partisan rancor,"
thank your new Dem friends
"we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each another, degrade our institutions and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy."
I, for one, have faith in our democracy
that's how I know Dems will lose on 2020
As two weeks of televised impeachment hearings and wall-to-wall coverage came to a close, a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll showed that a majority of registered voters believe Donald Trump abused his powers as president of the United States. But the country remained divided over the question of whether he should be impeached as a result.
The poll was conducted Nov. 20 to Nov. 22. There were five days of televised House Intelligence Committee hearings, ending Thursday, Nov. 21.
When asked to say whether they believe Trump did or did not commit specific acts in connection with Ukraine — the subject of the House impeachment inquiry — 58 percent of registered voters said they believe the president “asked a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent”; 51 percent said they believe he “withheld military aid to Ukraine until they agreed to conduct the investigations he wanted”; and 51 percent said they believe he “abused his powers as president.”
Yet only 48 percent of registered voters said they favor impeaching Trump or removing him from office — less than a majority.
Republicans and Democrats have largely made up their minds about removal — 83 percent of Republicans oppose it; the same percentage of Democrats are in favor.
Americans are even divided by party over what they believe the likely outcome of the impeachment inquiry will be. Overall, only 11 percent believed that Trump will be removed from office.
Regardless, Americans say impeachment will play a big role in how they vote in next November’s congressional elections. Asked to rate how important their current representative’s impeachment vote will be in their decision about casting their own vote for Congress, Democrats and Republicans were in rare agreement, with 74 percent in both parties saying it will be either “very important” or “somewhat important.”
And Republicans are more likely to vote.
President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani gave a wide-ranging interview on Saturday in which the former New York City mayor attacked numerous figures involved in the impeachment hearings and claimed for the second time to have "insurance" that guaranteed the president's loyalty.
"I've seen things written like he's going to throw me under the bus," Giuliani said in an interview with Fox News' Ed Henry about the characterizations and comments made in the media about him and his relationship with the president. "When they say that, I say he isn't, but I have insurance."
"This is ridiculous," he added. "We are very good friends. He knows what I did was in order to defend him, not to dig up dirt on Biden."
Giuliani's comments, the second time he has mentioned an unnamed form of "insurance," come after the conclusion of two weeks of impeachment hearings in which the former mayor's name has been invoked multiple times by State Department officials who are testifying before a Democrat-led inquiry into whether President Trump improperly withheld military aid to Ukraine.
Multiple senior diplomats said during the public hearings that Giuliani spread debunked conspiracies that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and attempted to pressure the Ukrainian government to announce investigations into Burisma — the Ukrainian gas company that Hunter Biden joined as a board member in 2014.
Democrats in the House of Representatives have engaged in an impeachment inquiry to uncover whether Trump was attempting to force an investigation into Burisma as a means to harm his political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden appeared in a recent interview with CNN to discuss some of these issues, and Giuliani described Biden's performance as a "poor impersonation of the Godfather."
"You'd have to be a fool to not know your son was under investigation," Giuliani said, later claiming that Biden was "lying."
Meanwhile, two of Giuliani's associates — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman — were charged with funneling money from foreign entities to U.S. candidates to buy influence. Giulani has previously said that they were involved with him in an effort to encourage Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.
When asked whether he feared that his associates' criminal charges would extend to him, Giuliani became fiery.
"You think I'm afraid?" Giuliani said. "You think I get afraid? I did the right thing. I represented my client in a very, very effective way. I was so effective that I discovered a pattern of corruption that the Washington press has been covering up for three or four years."
The interview at times became contentious, particularly when Giuliani claimed he was being used as a scapegoat by the media and various political figures.
Giuliani didn't stop there, however, also taking aim at former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
During the testimony of Fiona Hill, President Trump's former top adviser on Russia and Europe, Hill said Giuliani had created a shadow Ukraine policy team, engaged in a smear campaign against former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and spread false information on television.
All acts, she said, that ultimately led former National Security Adviser John Bolton to describe Giuliani as a "hand grenade."
Giuliani was also quick to push back on that characterization and fire back at Bolton.
"For John to say I'm a hand grenade, then he's an atomic bomb," Giuliani said.
New documents from the State Department obtained by an ethics group show, however, that Giuliani reached out personally to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to further his smear campaign against Ambassador Yovanovitch who was removed from office in April.
The former New York City mayor maintained during the interview though that everything he did related to Ukraine was done in the defense of Trump, and that Bolton wouldn't understand because he was not involved in Giuliani's role as a defense lawyer.
"I didn't go tell the White House what I was doing as a defense lawyer," Giuliani said. "I did it privately. What I did there had nothing to do with his foreign policy, good or bad. I didn't get involved in foreign policy. I was involved in gathering very, very significant evidence to exculpate my client."
Trump defended Giuliani on Friday, calling him "a great crime fighter" during an interview with "Fox and Friends" and lauding him as "the best mayor" and "a very legendary figure in our country."
The pair apparently remain very close, according to Giuliani.
"You can assume I talked to him early and often and have a very, very good relationship with him," he said.
Yeah, they are a couple of good fellas.
While the media remains obsessed with an increasingly pointless impeachment by the House and the even more dubious removal of the president by the Senate, political news of genuine electoral importance has slipped in under the rug. According to two new polls, Trump has now gained popularity with African Americans—and the numbers are significant, even “bigly.”
Both polls—Rasmussen, which usually tilts Republican, and Emerson, which is considered even-handed—came out almost exactly the same, putting Trump’s support among blacks at a surprising, almost astonishing, 34 percent. Typically, Republicans poll in single digits among blacks.
“Game changer” may be one of the great clichés of our our time, but this would actually be one. If even remotely true, Democrats should be having a nervous breakdown. They depend more than ever on African Americans for success in elections. If Trump were to garner even 18 percent of the black vote, he would easily win in 2020. If he had anything close to the 34 percent, it would be a runaway, a disaster for the Democrats.
But is this accurate? Polls are fickle, as we know, and are often distorted by the skewed nature of the questions; but in this case, several factors lead me to believe there is truth to this.
One is of course economic. Due in great part to Trump’s policies, African American unemployment rates are the lowest on record, even for teenagers, and wages are rising, as they haven’t in years. This is likely not being overlooked at the kitchen table.
Almost equally important and working in tandem is the Kanye West factor. Wildly talented and justifiably one of the most popular entertainers in the world, the rapper has made a sensation wearing a MAGA hat while telling an obvious truth: No group, blacks or anybody else, profits by putting all its political eggs in one party’s basket. That group is setting themselves up for exploitation.
African Americans may not want to hear that—it’s painful given their history—but coming from West, they can and do listen, particularly young people. The times, they are a-changin’. Being a Republican, even and possibly especially a Trump supporter, can be cool, if West does it.
Which leads to the Al Sharpton factor. How much longer will blacks follow the likes of the Rev Al, exploitation artists who obviously prosper when other blacks fail, indeed prosper because they fail? Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the rest of the victimologists (Larry Elder’s great term) are vultures who prey on their people, raising money off their economic and social problems and, in essence, perpetuating them. This is the exact opposite of progress, masquerading under the rubric progressive.
In West’s world, the right approach is not to see yourself as a victim, but to improve yourself as an individual, to work hard, go to school, be entrepreneurial, and, of course, as we know from his latest hit and endeavors, believe and trust in God.
Would you follow West or would you follow Sharpton? The results of the decision are obvious, irrespective of the extreme differences in their talent.
Meanwhile, Trump has been doing his part, quietly (for him) going about wooing black voters with his message of economic opportunity at their schools and churches. He’s been having success that’s either been ridiculed or, more often, deliberately ignored by the mainstream media. They are loath to report what he is doing for fear that it might be good. Nevertheless, he is continuing and increasing his efforts going into the campaign.
In the larger political schema, what this is about is a turning away from the “identity politics” (actually a new form of segregation) so beloved by the Democrats and back to the color-blind society envisioned by Martin Luther King Jr. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the idealism of those days was finally realized with the help of Trump or an alliance of Trump and West? Stranger things have happened
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume1.pdf
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume2.pdf
Volume 3 to come
"As part of this investigation, the committee has also been examining whether there was U.S. coordination with foreign interference — by the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns.
The committee’s findings on that front are currently in the beginning stages of getting written up into a report, a Democratic aide on the committee tells me.
And so, if [any GOPer Senator] is uncertain about whether Ukraine, too, interfered in 2016, he should just ask his colleague who chairs the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, what he has found.
Burr himself already signaled this would be extensively investigated. In October 2017, he said the committee would examine “collusion by either campaign during the 2016 elections." Because Republicans will be Republicans, the alleged Clinton collusion would also be examined.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee, recently dropped a tantalizing hint about what this has turned up, suggesting the committee was “wrapping up” this part of the investigation, and that it wouldn’t even “remotely” support various Trump narratives."
The House Intelligence Committee is in possession of audio and video recordings and photographs provided to the committee by Lev Parnas, an associate of President Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who reportedly played a key role in assisting him in his efforts to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell ABC News.
The material submitted to the committee includes audio, video and photos that include Giuliani and Trump. It was unclear what the content depicts and the committees only began accessing the material last week.
"We have subpoenaed Mr. Parnas and Mr. [Igor] Fruman for their records. We would like them to fully comply with those subpoenas," House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff told CNN Sunday, with a committee spokesperson adding they would not elaborate beyond the chairman's comments.
An attorney for Parnas, Joseph A. Bondy, also declined to comment, directing ABC News to a statement released earlier in the day Sunday reading in part, "Mr. Parnas has vociferously and publicly asserted his wish to comply with his previously issued subpoena and to provide the House Intelligence Committee with truthful and important information that is in furtherance of justice, not to obstruct it."
The statement goes on to say, "His evidence and potential testimony is non-partisan, and not intended to be part of a battle between the left and the right, but rather an aid in the determination by our government of what is in the best interests of our nation."
Sources tell ABC News the tapes were provided as part of that congressional subpoena issued to Parnas, and the former Giuliani ally also provided a number of documents both in English and Ukrainian to the committee in two separate productions, sources told ABC News.
However, some of the material sought by congressional investigators is already in possession of federal investigators within the Southern District of New York and thus held up from being turned over, according to sources familiar with the matter...
Five days of public hearings hasn’t moved the dial on public support for ousting Trump from the White House, a new poll finds.
Fifty percent of adults say Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 43 percent say he should not be, according to a CNN poll conducted by research firm SSRS. Those number are identical to those in a CNN-SSRS October poll.
The finding is at odds with an unsubstantiated claim by Trump on Monday that support for impeachment is “dropping like a rock.”
The poll also finds that more people now believe Trump improperly used his office to gain political advantage than a month ago. That figure has increased to 53 percent from 49 percent in October.
Still more, 56 percent, say Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine to launch investigations into the Bidens, a Ukrainian energy company and the 2016 election was more to benefit himself politically than to fight corruption in Ukraine.
The new poll was conducted between Nov. 21 — the final day of public hearings before the House Intelligence Committee — and Nov. 24.
A former Republican member of Congress has fiercely criticized what his old party has become under President Donald Trump, calling it one “without conviction” over its members’ willingness to push disinformation spread by Russia’s security services that it was Ukraine and not Russia that interfered in the 2016 election.
“Republican senators, Republican members of Congress tonight are being used by Russia because they are unwilling to look at the truth,” former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) said on MSNBC’s “The Last Word.”
Jolly explained how, during his time on the Hill in the ’90s before he became a lawmaker, he had argued for the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton “because I believed in a certain law and order principle that a president shouldn’t engage in perjury or obstruction of justice and I thought I belonged to a party that agreed with that.”
He had also later argued against former President Barack Obama’s executive order on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program because “I thought I belonged to a party that opposed that on constitutional grounds.”
But “in retrospect, what I’ve learned these last three years is it wasn’t a law and order party, just a party that hated Bill Clinton,” said Jolly, who served in the House from 2014 to 2017 and announced his resignation from the GOP in October 2018.
“It wasn’t a constitutional party when Barack Obama was in office,” he added. “It was just a party that hated Barack Obama.”
Jolly said “what we’re seeing now is a party that is embracing Donald Trump because they have a quest for power, proximity for power and they want within their reach the ability to self-deal. This is a party today without conviction and they are willing to be used by Russians.”
“We put our trust in our elected leaders,” he concluded. “The Republican Party today through its leadership has abandoned truth and has failed the American people and frankly failed themselves and one day they will recognize that and regret it.”
"A former Republican member of Congress has fiercely criticized what his old party has become under President Donald Trump, calling it one “without conviction” over its members’ willingness to push disinformation spread by Russia’s security services that it was Ukraine and not Russia that interfered in the 2016 election."
I really don't hear much about this theory "that it was Ukraine and not Russia that interfered in the 2016 election" from Republicans
Trump has said something about it, but has only asked that it be looked at
I think TTF and a few other lunatic liberal Dems keep bringing it up because they want to divert attention from the obviously corrupt arrangement where Hunter Biden was paid significant funds from a Ukrainian company that was being investigated while his father, Joe Biden, was tasked with driving our policy in Ukraine
Dems are seeking to delegitimize any potential investigation into the Biden arrangement
Dems also euphemistically use the phrase "interfered in the 2016 election" but all it means is that someone ran ads and posted on social media negatively about Dems
everyone, whether it's Russia or Ukraine or anyone else has a constitutional right to "interfere" in that way
it's something we quaintly call "freedom of speech"
if it's false information, we have adequate opportunity and resources to counter it with truth
that's the magic of free speech
America's a big wikipedia page
"“Republican senators, Republican members of Congress tonight are being used by Russia because they are unwilling to look at the truth,” former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) said on MSNBC’s “The Last Word.”"
sad what someone who was once a public figure will do to get some attention from the biased liberal media
"Jolly said “what we’re seeing now is a party that is embracing Donald Trump because they have a quest for power, proximity for power and they want within their reach the ability to self-deal. This is a party today without conviction and they are willing to be used by Russians.”"
they are achieving the agenda they promised their constituents to pursue
lower taxes, decreased regulation, appointing constitutionalist judges, formulating pro-life and pro-family policy, confronting China, reducing unemployment among minorities
in Ukraine, they have provided military hardware to the government to counter Russian aggression, something Obama refused to do
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/nyregion/charter-schools-democrats.html
Dems' embrace of teacher union opposition to charter schools is causing them to lose black support
Impeachment is a political process. No sentient being, after all, believes that Adam Schiff or Nancy Pelosi are good-faith guardians of constitutional order. And judging the process strictly on political grounds, it hasn’t been a success for Democrats.
For one thing, impeachment, if it happens, will effectively end up being a partisan censure of the president. Democrats haven’t gotten any closer to convincing a single Senate Republican to contemplate removing the president. Certainly not Mitch McConnell, who says there will be a quick trial. Not even Mitt Romney, who, at this point, is aptly troubled but uncommitted.
It’s highly probable, in fact, that a Senate trial run by Republicans, with new witnesses and evidence, would further corrode the Democrats’ case. Liberals, of course, will pretend that Senate Republicans are members of a reactionary Trump cult, putting party above country, but if there had been incontrovertible proof of “bribery,” a number of them would be compelled to act differently. No such evidence was provided. Adding an obstruction article, based on the Mueller Report, would only make the proceedings even more intractably partisan.
In any case, what we can look forward to in a Senate trial is more Ukrainian drama. Far from weakening Trump in 2020, the story might end up dragging Joe Biden into a defensive posture. Journalists perfunctorily refer to anything related to Ukrainians or the Bidens as a “conspiracy theory,” but it’s clear that Hunter Biden was cashing in on his father’s influence and still unclear what Joe Biden did about it. Republicans have already requested transcripts of conversations between Biden and then–Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko over the vice president’s requests to fire Viktor Shokin. It’s going to become a difficult story to ignore. (How long before the hard-left contingent vying for the Dem nomination starts asking questions about Biden’s cronyism?)
So what is the upside? At first, Democrats claimed that polls were irrelevant because impeachment was a moral and patriotic imperative. Once national support spiked, numbers suddenly mattered very much, and the usual suspects couldn’t stop talking about them. What most polls now confirm is that while Americans were paying attention to the breathless media coverage, public support for the inquiry is at best stagnant and probably declining.
The FiveThirtyEight average for support among independents topped out at 47.7 percent in late October. It sank to 41 percent during the hearings. Last week’s Politico/Morning Consult poll found that voter opposition to the impeachment inquiry is at its highest point since it started asking the question: “Today, 47 percent of independents oppose the impeachment inquiry, compared to 37 percent who said the same one week ago.” Put another way, more people — not just independents, but everyone — viewed the construction of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border as a higher priority than impeaching Trump.
Even the best poll for impeachers, one conducted by CNN, saw no change during the dramatic hearings. Today’s Morning Consult poll “didn’t do much to move the needle,” and still finds support below where it was before the hearings. Will support for impeachment miraculously surge upward in places such as Wisconsin as the election approaches? It seems unlikely.
In a deep dive into recent polls for Vanity Fair, Ken Stern summarizes the perspective of independents: “Impeachment reflects the agenda of the political establishment and the media,” and represents “a continuation of the partisan bickering and media excess that began even before his inauguration.”
Democrats and the media have covered every development of the many investigations into Trump, tending into histrionics. That has, in many ways, obscured legitimate criticism of the president. By constantly overpromising and under-delivering, Democrats have guaranteed not only skepticism but apathy from voters outside their own tribe.
Take Schiff, who once claimed to be privy to hard evidence — which never materialized — of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and the Russian government. In his closing statement in the impeachment hearings, he argued that Trump’s actions toward Ukraine go “beyond anything Nixon did.” At first Democrats set out to prove a quid pro quo charge, which has since been revised to “bribery.” The rationale was that it was a criminal concept that Americans could more easily grasp. Indeed, most people understand what constitutes “bribery,” but Schiff couldn’t provide the evidence for it. Instead, he offered a slew of witnesses that depicted a self-serving, volatile, and impulsive Trump.
None of that is a surprise to anyone who’s ever heard the president speak.
If lame-duck Republicans such as Will Hurd, who hasn’t been afraid to be critical of the president, saw no “compelling, overwhelmingly clear, and unambiguous” evidence of “bribery or extortion,” who are you convincing exactly? To be sure, it’s possible that Hurd will change his mind. It’s also possible that vulnerable Democrats will change theirs first. Yesterday, representative Brenda Lawrence (D., Mich.) said she favored censuring, not impeaching, Trump: “We are so close to an election. I will tell you, sitting here knowing how divided this country is, I don’t see the value of taking him out of office.”
Today, she backpedaled. But she may have stumbled onto a solution. If Democrats back out of impeachment, they will be scorned by the base as a bunch of simpering cowards. But the anger of the resistance fighter can never be satiated anyway. With censure, Democrats would be able to continue to condemn Trump without putting their vulnerable members in danger.
Here is a pertinent question someone might want to poll: “Based on everything you have seen, read, or heard about the allegations against President Trump and Ukraine, which of the following is the best way for Democrats to proceed? 1) Impeach. 2) Censure. 3) Nothing.” It's likely Lawrence’s position would be the most popular.
"I think TTF and a few other lunatic liberal Dems keep bringing it up because they want to divert attention from the obviously corrupt arrangement where Hunter Biden was paid significant funds from a Ukrainian company that was being investigated while his father, Joe Biden, was tasked with driving our policy in Ukraine"
This is the kind of "wishful thinking" motive lunatic conservatives have to dream up to sell Rump's corruption to misinformed Republicans.
Last I heard they had already started the investigations.
Democrats aren't worried though. We've watched Republicons pull this kind of stunt before. After nearly a dozen Benghazi hearings, they came up with zilch to convict or even censure any one with.
And that Republicon investigation into the millions of illegal voters in the 2016 election? Nada. Disbanded due to lack of evidence.
Republicons don't want or even need answers. In fact they don't even like the answers - they have a habit of NOT finding the criminal activity they purport to be looking for. And that doesn't help them push their agenda forward.
It's much better to push a conspiracy theory that can never be proven or unproven, allowing them to believe whatever they want - it's a religion - the one where they get to cling to their most heartfelt beliefs, no matter what the evidence.
Believing Obama was born in Kenya was far more effective as a conspiracy theory and motivator for the lunatic Republicon base than actually acknowledging his real birth certificate.
Investigate the Bidens until you're blue in the face. Have some covfefe while we wait until it turns into another predictable "nothing-berder."
Jim said "If there were such a thing as "conservative principles," I would love to hear about it. We could debate them, negotiate, compromise, give speeches about principles, comparing ours to the other guy's. But it does not seem that there are any. It is just greed, rudeness, lying, belligerence, and simmering resentment. Is that what they want?"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Your ignorance is willful, Jim. Give it a little thought and you'll know exactly what conservative principles are."
Oh, bee-yotch please!
We all know what principles conservatives have claimed to follow over the decades but you've rejected all those principles with copious hypocrisy.
Fiscally conservative?
You all claimed under Bush "Deficits don't matter". You bitched about Obama raising the deficit but Trump has raised the deficit 5 times as fast as Obama did and you have nothing but praise for him.
Sexual conservatism?
You demonstrated you couldn't care less about moral sexual behavior, fully supporting Trump the adulterer and pedophiles like Roy Moore - you have no claim to sexual morality.
Law and order?
You've shat all over the rule of law and insisted Trump has the unchecked power of a king and is free to use the entire federal government for his personal benefit.
We all know what principles conservatives falsely claim to follow, but Jim is correct to ask, what principles do you really adhere to? Clearly there are none beyond greed, rudeness, lying, belligerence, and simmering resentment over liberal's insistence on acknowledging reality.
Law & Crime reports:
"Thomas Bowers, identified as a former Deutsche Bank executive who signed off on controversial loans to President Donald Trump, died last week after apparently taking his own life at 55.
According to Forensic News‘ Scott Stedman, “One source who has direct knowledge of the FBI’s investigation into Deutsche Bank said that federal investigators have asked about Bowers and documents he might have.
Another source who has knowledge of Deutsche Bank’s internal structure said that Bowers would have been the gatekeeper for financial documents for the bank’s wealthiest customers.”
By tomorrow, Hillary will have done it.
American banks stopped lending to Trump in the 80's due to his repeated bankruptcies and refusal to repay loans.
DeutscheBank which has been fined mega millions for money laundering the proceeds of Russian criminal/Putin organizations. DeutscheBank decided it wanted to lend millions to Trump when no other bank would touch him.
And of course Trump stiffed DeutscheBank and refused to repay his loans from them and actually sued DeutscheBank for his own failure to repay the loans he took out.
So, what did DeutscheBank inexplicably do? They lent mega millions more to Trump. It's obvious that Trump is helping launder the proceeds of crime from Russia and Putin.
The mantra of law enforcement has always been "Follow the money". Why did Bob Mueller refuse to follow standard law enforcement investigative procedure and look into Trump's obviously corrupt finances?
"This is the kind of "wishful thinking" motive lunatic conservatives have to dream up to sell Rump's corruption to misinformed Republicans."
wishful?
Biden's corruption is already apparent, the only question is how deep it went
his son was given ludicrous sums to help a Ukrainian concern that was being investigated for corruption get access to Biden, who was Obama's point man in Ukraine
several officials of the company have been photographed palling around with the VP at the time
Biden has bragged about getting the prosecutor fired
who knows what else he did
"We've watched Republicons pull this kind of stunt before. After nearly a dozen Benghazi hearings, they came up with zilch to convict or even censure any one with."
that sounds like the Mueller investigation
what you don't say, however, is that was known about Benghazi before the investigations was bad enough
Hillary was derelict in her duties, causing loss of American lives
Obama lied to cover up, causing riots and loss of lives worldwide
"And that Republicon investigation into the millions of illegal voters in the 2016 election? Nada. Disbanded due to lack of evidence."
showing the investigation was done with integrity, unlike Adam Schiff's kangaroo court
"Republicons don't want or even need answers. In fact they don't even like the answers - they have a habit of NOT finding the criminal activity they purport to be looking for."
that's called conducting an investigation with integrity
a habit of finding whatever criminal activity one purports to be looking for is how it's done in North Korea
"It's much better to push a conspiracy theory that can never be proven or unproven, allowing them to believe whatever they want - it's a religion - the one where they get to cling to their most heartfelt beliefs, no matter what the evidence."
why are you bringing up global warming?
"Believing Obama was born in Kenya was far more effective as a conspiracy theory and motivator for the lunatic Republicon base than actually acknowledging his real birth certificate."
actually, not many Republicans ever thought that
extrapolating anything any Republican says to all Republicans is standard liberal lunatic fallacy
"Investigate the Bidens until you're blue in the face. Have some covfefe while we wait until it turns into another predictable "nothing-berder.""
as has been stated, it's already something
that's why Dems are trying hard to make it illegal to even ask any questions about Biden's activities in Ukraine
he's their only hope because all the other Dems are lunatics to the left of Lenin
Jim said "If there were such a thing as "conservative principles," I would love to hear about it. We could debate them, negotiate, compromise, give speeches about principles, comparing ours to the other guy's. But it does not seem that there are any. It is just greed, rudeness, lying, belligerence, and simmering resentment. Is that what they want?"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Of course, I can understand some confusion. Donald Trump doesn't really have any principles."
Some "confusion"???
When you unconditionally accept and support a man with no moral principles as your leader, you have no credibility claiming you stand for any moral principles.
You are the company you keep.
Problems with society's recent acquiescence with the transgender movement continue to surface. Transgender-ism has always been recognized as sexist, embracing stereotypes to define gender. Then, there is the horror of divorced and separated parents battling over what gender a young child should be raised as and whether the child should be "treated" with drugs to artificially enforce psychotic delusions of gender confusion. But the big crash will arrive next summer, right in the middle of the presidential campaigns.
Next year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics may spell the swift death of the transgender movement as a dominant politically-correct touchstone. Biological men, self-identifying as women, are poised to make a clean sweep of the Women’s Olympics, triggering a very public debate on this third-rail subject. That firestorm, pitting pro-women feminists against extreme pro-transgender progressives, will begin July 24th, just as the Presidential sweepstakes moves into its sprint to the finish line.
The International Olympic Committee -- the IOC -- recently admitted they couldn’t come up with fair guidelines governing how and when transgender women can compete as women, against biological women. Currently, the IOC says self-identified women can compete, so long as their testosterone level remains below 10 nanomoles per liter (nm/l) for 12 months. Typically, men have between 7.7 and 29.4 nm/l of testosterone, while women have between 0.12 and 1.77 nm/l. Under those IOC guidelines, hormonally-restricted men can still maintain nearly 500 percent testosterone advantage over women.
However, the real benefit transgender women experience, according to recent studies by Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, a leading medical university, is found in their masculine bone structure and upper body strength. This develops throughout puberty, making current testosterone levels largely insignificant. These masculine genetic benefits are the very reason for women’s athletics.
“Not every male advantage dissipates when testosterone drops” according to Alison Heather, a physiologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “Some advantages, such as their bigger bone structure, greater lung capacity, and larger heart size remain. Testosterone also promotes muscle memory. Transgender women have a heightened ability to build strength even after they transition,” Heather explained.
Olympic Gold Medalist Paula Radcliffe called it “naïve” not to think transgender women “will become a threat to female sport, asserting “people will manipulate the system.” She tweeted that “If you are born and grow up male you cannot be allowed to compete in female sports simply because you ‘identify’ as female. It makes a mockery of the definitions of male and female sports categories.”
High-profile tennis phenom and outspoken lesbian advocate Martina Navratilova, concurred, raising concerns over the equity of transgender women competing against biological women. “A man can decide to be female… win everything in sight, earn a small fortune, then reverse his decision. Letting men compete as women - simply because they change their name and take hormones -- is unfair.”
British Olympics Silver medalist Sharron Davies agreed. “There is a fundamental difference between the binary sex you are born with and the gender you may identify as. To protect women’s sport, those with a male sex advantage should not be able to compete in women’s sport.”
This potentially devastating trend has shown up in recent pre-Olympic international sporting competitions, where men identifying as women took the Gold. These recent routs generated a howl from outraged feminist groups, though the mainstream media -- siding with transgender interests over traditional feminist interests -- have largely shut them out. Without a media voice, this controversy has had all the dynamics of a tempest in a teapot. One feminist activist, Women’s Liberation Front board member Kara Dansky told Fox’s Tucker Carlson that CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post had all shut her group out. Only Fox had the courage to give them a voice.
However, that suppression can’t last. This internecine brouhaha will really hit the fan next July, when men competing as women start racking up Olympic Gold – at the expense of biological women who physically can’t compete with larger, stronger men. When the 2020 Summer Olympics arrive, media suppression of feminist concerns will change.
In fact, the change has already begun.
One controversial case involves a bio-man now calling herself Laurel Hubbard. Before conversion, he’d competed as a man in Olympic-caliber weightlifting events, well into his 30s, before he transitioned at age 35. Recently, she took two Golds and a Silver at the games in Samoa, dominating three women’s heavyweight lifting categories. In response, New Zealand-based Speak Up For Women is demanding that males be barred from competing as women, regardless of their claims of transgender womanhood. While a similar feminist sports advocacy group in Great Britain also spoke out against Hubbard, the IOC proved unable or unwilling to address the issue.
Hubbard isn’t an isolated example. Wired.com reports that, in the United States, transgender college competitor CeCé Telfer recently won the NCAA Division II National Championship in the 400-meter run. Last month, transgender athlete June Eastwood’s victory helped her Montana State Grizzlies team finish first at the Montana Invitational.
Transgender girls are also competing in high school athletics, shutting out other girls at every turn. For instance, Terry Miller recently won the girl’s 200-meter dash at the Connecticut State Open track championship. Miller and fellow transgender athlete Christiana Holcomb dominated Connecticut, winning 15 state championship titles -- as girls -- this year.
These self-identified women are all on the fast track to Olympic Gold. Helen Carroll, who worked on the NCAA Transgender Handbook, estimates that, although only three tenths of one percent (0.3%) of Americans identify as transgender, there are 200 transgender women in NCAA sports today. That disproportionate representation ensures that there’s a lot of Olympic Gold out there that young women won’t have a prayer of winning. This reflects the state of transgender women in sports here and worldwide. The mainstream media has kept a very PC lid on the outrage expressed by some feminist groups, but the 2020 Olympics will change that.
This quadrennial competition will take place live in millions of homes next summer. The Olympics are typically watched by more than a billion people worldwide – including more than 25 million Americans at any one time. Many of these viewers will, for the first time, be confronted by biological men “identifying as women,” competing as transgender women, taking advantage of their huge natural advantage, allowing these biological men to dominate women athletes.
Since the core purpose of the feminist movement has always been to help prevent women from being dominated by men, this transgender inclusion in competition will inevitably create a huge rift within progressive circles. Lines will be drawn between those feminists -- and other progressives -- who hold fealty to all politically-correct causes, seeing them as more important than their own cause. They will be pitted against other feminists who feel that biological women athletes should not have to compete with men. These feminists will be joined by millions of fair-minded Americans, who will watch, horrified, while transgender women capture the medals and marginalize true women athletes.
This internal debate may come down to numbers. Traditional feminists will demand, “do you support we who make up 51 percent of the population -- or do you support the dominant rights of a minority that includes fewer than a third of one percent of the human population?” When that split comes, it could deconstruct the entire progressive coalition. Currently, that umbrella of competing needs appears to be held together by duct tape and baling wire.
Worse for them, this disastrous inner debate will occur in public, during the titanic political face-off between an extreme progressive who’ll be running against the more traditional Trump. This controversy is sure to deepen America’s left-right rift, shattering the Democrats’ fragile progressive coalition into a myriad shards of small hyper-special interest groups. Especially hard hit will be those who insist that they’re truly special and actually deserve -- demand -- support from all progressives.
AS Colin Kapernik discovered, Americans will tolerate a lot. Just don't mess with their sports. Transgender-ism is about to lay down on the third rail.
Sayanora, transgender fools!
To put it mildly, House Democrats’ impeachment scenario hasn’t gone as planned. According to the Real Clear Politics polling aggregation, since the end of October, Trump’s approval rating has ticked up a little, while his disapproval has ticked down. And according to FiveThirtyEight, support for impeachment has declined slightly over the last month.
These small shifts might not seem earth-shattering, yet the failure of the hearings to dump Trump seems to have been shattering to some Democrats. Hence this November 22 headline in Politico: “Vulnerable Democrats panic amid GOP impeachment ad onslaught.” Trump foes have been disappointed to discover that “Ukraine-gate” hasn’t been the Watergate II they were hoping for.
To be sure, the Democrats and their allies fervently believe they have made their case, that President Trump attempted to manipulate U.S. foreign policy for political advantage—even if, of course, he ultimately delivered to Ukraine the very military aid that the Obama administration had denied.
Nevertheless, that legal case, such as it might be, has been obscured by poor optics—which are obvious to see. As Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican though hardly a partisan barnburner, observed on Meet the Press, “I think the Democrats had a bad week.”
Of course, with Trump, one dreads making any prediction about what could come next. There’s always another bombshell about to go off—and who knows where the shrapnel will fly.
Still, it is possible to look back at the hearings and assess what went wrong for Team Impeach. In a nutshell, House Democrats gambled that a procession of witnesses, most of them careerists—or, if one prefers, foreign service and military officers, yet still careerists—would deliver a knockout blow to Trump. Yet what emerged from their testimony was that, well, they were bureaucrats.
As Mark Hemingway wrote for The Federalist, these people were mortified by the fact that Trump administration policy was made by…Trump. In the words of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, Trump’s Ukraine policy was “inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency”—that is, the interagency process of which Vindman was a part. Yet as Hemingway added tartly, “Nobody elects an ‘interagency consensus.’”
Indeed, as Byron York of The Washington Examiner pointed out, Vindman’s perspective “is a classic bureaucrat’s view of government and the world.” York then added, speaking of the fabled interagency process:
Needless to say, Trump does not do that sort of thing. The president is remarkably freewheeling, unbureaucratic, and certainly not always consistent when it comes to making policy. But he generally has a big goal in mind, and in any event, he is the president of the United States. He, not the interagency, sets U.S. foreign policy.
In the words of Harry Truman, “The buck stops here.” Here, that is, at the desk of the commander-in-chief, not in the cubicles of bureaucratic functionaries.
So now we begin to see how the Democrats made their mistake. Having gotten their inspiration in the first place from that Deep State whistleblower, they then assumed they could carry on their “investigation,” relying on still more Deep Statists. But these individuals don’t typically make for good witnesses—at least up to the level of convincing people to think, okay, having heard these second- and third-hand allegations, I now agree we should impeach Trump.
On November 25, Congressman Matt Gaetz poured acid on the political effectiveness of the Democrats’ chosen witnesses:
In the State Department…people think there’s only one way to do things. That they have to do it through their precise diplomatic channels & only in the way they all learned going to the same schools & working at the same think tanks.
Thus we can see a wide cleft here, between the delicate and precise culture of the bureaucracy and the churning and heaving culture of the anti-bureaucracy, led by you-know-who. For their part, the Democrats made the mistake of siding with the bureaucrats—and when was the last time a bureaucrat won an election, to say nothing of a national election?
In fact, if we peer down into that wide cleft, between bureaucratic super-ego and presidential id, we see something even deeper than the Deep State—we see the fundamental workings of the human brain.
Here we might summon up the work of Roger W. Sperry, who in 1981 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Sperry argued that two hemispheres of the brain are responsible for different functions: the “left brain” deals with words, facts, and sequences, while the “right brain” deals with visuals, emotions, and intuitions. The theory further holds that for most people, one hemisphere or another is stronger; thus left-brainers are more words and facts driven, while right-brainers are more visuals and emotions driven.
Now it must be footnoted that as a matter of medical physiology, the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy is debatable. Yet as a matter of pop psychology, it’s even more debatable, in that the duality is seemingly irresistible as a matter of parlor discussion. Why? Because each of us can see see the dueling personality types all around us—and there’s nothing more compelling, of course, than human nature.
For instance, the left-brain/right-brain concept helps explain the rise of political correctness. According to Greg Piccionelli, a Los Angeles-based attorney-inventor-biologist, the hard categorical thinking of left-brainers can easily turn into hard-left dogma.
Dogma isn’t new, of course, and it’s always been spread across the left-right spectrum. But these days, left-brained PC dogma has received an enormous reinforcement: from the PC. That is, political correctness has been bolstered by the personal computer—and by supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and big data.
Of course, when everything is online, it’s hard not to be cyber-immersed. And that’s the point: to borrow a phrase from Marx, computers are the dominant mode of production, and so it’s no surprise that thinking machines are affecting our thinking. (Last year, this author wrote about PC/PC dogma in regard to the censorship of the Monty Python comedy troupe, as well as re: Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearings.)
Of course, in this world, everything has its dialectical negation. And for left-brained culture, that dialectic is Trump, who is obviously strongly right-brained. Whatever else one might think of him, Trump is real and raw, the exact opposite of ordered and dogmatic. No wonder he and Marie Jovanovitch didn’t hit it off.
It’s this mental cleft, left-brain versus right-brain, that provides the ultimate backdrop for the impeachment battle. As brain-pundit Piccionelli puts it, “If there was a personification of left-brain-ism, it’s Adam Schiff, and most of the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. And those witnesses—they were even more left-brained.”
Of course, one could say that it’s in the nature of such hearings to be dry, procedural—and left-brained. To which Piccionelli answers, “Okay, but nobody told Trump and the Republicans they had to play by those rules. They were emotional and passionate—right-brained—and it worked better for them.”
What the Democrats needed, Piccionelli says, is some right-brained passion of their own. “They needed someone to look directly into the camera and say, ‘This is wrong!’” Piccionelli says. “They needed someone—Member of Congress or witness—to connect with the ordinary right-brain emotions of Americans.”
To be sure, practicing politicians, in both parties, tend to be pretty good at connecting to voters—that is, after all, how they got elected. Yet Piccionelli speculates that the Democrats, as the tech-ier party—if anyone in Silicon Valley likes Trump, he, she, or they hide it well—have been more influenced by politically correct modalities.
That is, without even realizing it, Democrats have slipped into the sort of PC consciousness that makes for cold dogmatism, the attitude that just can’t believe that everyone can’t see the obvious truth of its argument. And here we might pause to note the baleful influence of ultra-woke college campuses, which provide up-and-coming Democrats with great skill in one-way preaching, but less skill at actual debating.
Meanwhile, lower-tech Republicans—who probably didn’t go to Woke U.—are more in touch with right-brain humanity.
So lotsa luck, Democrats, if you pass impeachment in the House. That Senate trial, dominated by Trumpy right-brained Republicans, won’t be in the least bit woke, but it sure will be lit.
For those of us who spend far too much time following the news these days, it is easy to feel that everything is falling apart. Regardless of your political ideology, there is no doubt that this country is politically divided and facing serious challenges. To make matters worse, we are entering an election season. Politicians will be trying their best to convince us that we are one vote away from choosing between Nazi Germany and Venezuela.
Yet, as we gather with friends and family this Thanksgiving, it is worth remembering that, beyond the headlines, things are actually pretty darn good. As both individuals and a country, we really have more than enough to be thankful for.
Start with the economy. We can debate who — if anyone — is responsible, but we can’t argue with the fact that unemployment is down and wages are up. Unemployment is at the lowest level since 1969. There were 2.3 million more full time, year-round workers this year than last. And those workers are earning more. Median earnings for full-time workers rose by more than 3 percent last year. Since 2009, average hourly earnings for all employees is up 5.6 percent, while real average weekly earnings rose by 6.9 percent.
Inequality remains a big political issue, but poverty rates continue to decline. In 2018, the official Census Bureau poverty measure fell to just 11.8 percent, down a full half percentage point from the year before, and the lowest rate since 2001. Using other, arguably more accurate poverty measures shows even better results. Consumption-based poverty measures put the real poverty level at as low as 2.8 percent.
Of course, too many people still struggle, but we are doing our best to help them. Last year, Americans donated $427 billion to charity, and more than 63 million people gave their time and talent to help others — over 8 billion volunteer hours.
Politicians also like to conjure up images of crime and carnage. But we are safer today than we’ve been in decades. Violent crime has declined by 51 percent since 1993, while property crime has declined by even more (54 percent). The United States still imprisons far too many people — almost twice the incarceration rate of any country except the Seychelles. However, between falling crime rates and Trump's criminal-justice reform of Clinton's disastrous policies, 100,000 fewer Americans will spend this Thanksgiving in prison than did ten years ago.
Health care is another issue the politicians fight over, and with good reason. Our health-care system is deeply flawed for many reasons. Yet we are healthier than ever. Infant mortality has declined by 14 percent since 2007. Death from cancer has dropped from 168 per 100,000 people in 2000 to just 146 per 100,000 today. More Americans are exercising and eating healthfully, and smoking is at the lowest level since 1965.
Even in those areas where we still have improvement to make, we should not ignore how far we’ve come. Racism and other forms of bigotry are still far too prevalent, but let’s remember how much progress we’ve made. The alt-right and their fellow travelers are noxious and noisy, but they are still a tiny minority. The worst forms of overt discrimination have largely been consigned to the dustbin of history, and there is a growing push for still more fully realized justice and equality. Within my lifetime, both interracial and gay marriage were outlawed. Today all Americans are free to marry the person they love. Almost 9 percent of Americans have two or more races in their background. It may be halting and uneven, but we are making progress toward a more inclusive society.
Politics are not our life. The people we love, our faith, our families, the things we do that bring our lives joy and meaning — these things are far more important than politics. As George Will has pointed out: There are 357 million Americans; 350 million of them did not watch cable news or listen to talk radio yesterday.
So, as we begin to carve our turkey — which costs 4 percent less than last year — let’s tune out the politicians and their doom and gloom. It is a wonderful time to be alive. We really have so much to be thankful for.
Ooo, suddenly after I post Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous "coincidentally" post a bunch of anti-transgender stuff.
They really hate me, because I propose society's highest priority should be maximizing the happiness for all in an equal and fair way.
I hate them because they oppose that. But they can become my friends, they just have to verbally sign onto the social contract - you treat me fairly and I'll treat you fairly.
Republican Group Hits Donald Trump With Critical Ad: 'What Is He Afraid Of?'
[HuffPost]
Lee Moran
HuffPostNovember 28, 2019
Scroll back up to restore default view.
Conservative organization Republicans for the Rule of Law has called out President Donald Trump with yet another critical ad.
In its new 32-second clip released online Wednesday, the group questions the White House’s refusal to allow key witnesses in the Ukraine scandal to testify before Congress in the impeachment inquiry that targets Trump.
“These witnesses must testify,” the voiceover says of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
“What is Trump afraid of?” the narrator adds.
The ad is slated to air on Fox News’ flagship morning show “Fox & Friends” for several days.
Republicans for the Rule of Law executive director Sarah Longwell said in a statement that the House impeachment hearings “have presented startling evidence” that Trump “abused his power, strong-arming a foreign government to interfere on his behalf in the upcoming election, and damaging national security in the process.”
“The president denies the allegations, but won’t let key administration officials ― including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney ― testify to Congress,” Longwell added. “If the president did nothing wrong, what does he have to hide? If they tell the truth, what is he afraid of? Most importantly, will Republicans in Congress allow the president to simply ignore their constitutionally mandated oversight role?”
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Health care is another issue the politicians fight over, and with good reason. Our health-care system is deeply flawed for many reasons. Yet we are healthier than ever."
Actually that's not true, the life expectancy of Americans has been declining, Americans are in poorer health than they were years ago.
One of the reasons for this is that Republicans have taken away health care from tens of millions of Americans, sentencing thousands of them to death.
As we speak, Republicans are trying to take away the right to health insurance for the 100 million Americans with pre-existing conditions.
Don't let Republicans take your health care away from you, vote Democratic.
Overall, the U.S. and comparable countries have seen a decrease in infant mortality rates in recent years, but the U.S. has been slower to improve its consistently higher average rate of infant deaths.
The United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than in Canada - by far.
The reason for this is universal health care in Canada. Something Democrats want to give to all Americans and Republicans want to take away and reserve for the rich.
The headlines and data emanating from China and from America in recent days illuminate the diametrically opposed trajectories of these two great powers. For China, young freedom fighters in Hong Kong continue to demand the independent rights of their island, thwarting the Communist Party’s efforts to quash them. Concurrently, economic malaise spreads as China’s command-centered growth model sputters, partly because of the confrontation forced by President Trump.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific in America, the policies of that same leader have created expanding wages and burgeoning optimism. In direct contravention to the unrest in China, America this week welcomes a calendar that captures the essence of our national potency. On Thanksgiving, we gathered to show appreciation for the blessings bestowed upon us, as a country and as individuals. The day centers on family and feasting. Then, Black Friday kicks off a frenzy of consumption as holiday shopping dominates our land. Unlike any other country on Earth, America celebrates this apparently incongruous juxtaposition. We are, at once, a deeply idealistic and religious people – and also one thoroughly committed to capitalism and material prosperity.
This Black Friday, the outlook for America’s economic success brightens, and portends well for a robust Christmas shopping season. In the dynamic realm of business, confidence begets confidence. Thankfully, the American consumer presently displays a level of belief unseen in decades. For example, the widely followed University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment recently exceeded expectations with a reading above 95.0 for the 30th month out of the past 35, a record of sustained optimism unmatched since the height of the late-’90s Internet boom.
It’s no wonder consumers project confidence, because their paychecks and labor market options grow apace. In fact, wage growth has now exceeded a 3% annual rate for 15 straight months, a level achieved in only three months of the Obama presidency. In addition, not only is wage growth much faster overall, but it broadens too, as minorities and workers in the lower segments of the income ladder now lead in income gains.
Financial markets also reflect these Main Street gains, as Wall Street indices set records almost daily. Capital markets’ dizzying ascent reveals that many of the so-called experts on economic matters are too incompetent or just too biased to properly assess the efficacy of Trump’s policies of tax relief, regulatory restraint, and demands for fairness in trade. Consider Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who predicted a global recession because of Trump’s 2016 triumph. In his New York Times opinion piece, he bloviated: “If the question is when will markets recover, the first-pass answer is never.” Instead, consider that builder-related companies that constitute the massively traded XHB Housing ETF have risen 46% in the three years since Trump was elected. By comparison, that sector rose only 6% in the three years under President Obama prior to Trump’s 2016 win. So much for the idea that Trump simply enjoys leftover prosperity from his predecessor.
Another area where the economic pundit class has been proven remarkably wrong is on China. Widespread predictions of doom emanate from the halls of academia and think tanks because President Trump dares to actually implement his campaign promises and demand reciprocity and respect in trade with China. But instead of suffering due to trade negotiations, America thrives, as outlined above. At the same time, it is China that’s feeling the pain as a resurgent America no longer accepts the mercantilist abuses of the Chinese Communist Party.
Consider, for example, that since Trump’s election the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained an astounding 53% while the Shanghai Composite Index is down 8% over the same period. Reflective of this weakness, last week China reported a stunning 9.9% October drop in industrial profits, the worst reading since 2011. That plunge seems to validate China’s third quarter GDP growth at the slowest pace in nearly 30 years.
Consequently, the appeasers who preach accommodation with the communist junta in Beijing are wrong on three fronts. First, the regime represents the greatest threat globally to America’s economic and national security, and should be approached as an adversary. Disregard the inane lies of China doves such as new 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg, who declared that “Xi Jinping is not a dictator.” Xi most certainly is a dictator, and a skilled and ruthless one at that. Second, America continues to prosper in the face of present trade tensions. We should ignore the naysayers. Third, we must seize the present opportunity to press the Chinese for fairness and symmetry. Their seriously decelerating economy, plus intense unrest in Hong Kong, put China in an incredibly weak negotiating posture relative to the United States.
We should not blink. For decades, America has played the global game of managed trade “poker” as if we hold a pair of 8’s, when in fact we’ve held a full house all along. Considering the present strength of the U.S. consumer on Black Friday and beyond, perhaps we even have the economic equivalent of a straight flush now. It’s high time we act like it.
There's a significant gender gap in the American public's support for President Donald Trump's impeachment and removal as overall support for impeachment has stagnated in recent weeks, according to recent Insider polling.
The majority of women — 52% — said they either "probably" or "definitely" want the president to be impeached and removed from office, while just 34% of women said the president shouldn't be impeached and removed. This 18-point gap is twice as large as the gap between men who do and don't support impeachment and removal.
Among men, Insider's polling found that 46% think Trump should be impeached and removed, while 43% think he shouldn't be.
This comes as support for impeaching the president has plateaued following two weeks of televised impeachment hearings.
Overall, 46% of Americans now support impeachment, while 33% oppose it, according to Insider's polling this week. Support for impeachment among the general public reached a high of 50% in late October, according to Insider polling.
Other recent polling has found a similarly dramatic gender gap concerning impeachment. A CNN poll released this week found a whopping 61% of women support impeaching and removing Trump, while 53% of men oppose impeachment. That number marked an increase over CNN's previous numbers. In October, CNN's polling found 56% of women supported impeaching and removing Trump.
Women — particularly women of color — are much more disapproving of Trump's presidency than men are. About 64% of women disapprove of his job in office so far, according to an October Washington Post/NBC News poll.
let's follow TTF "logic"
1. The majority of women — 52% — said they either "probably" or "definitely" want the president to be impeached and removed from office,
2. Among men, Insider's polling found that 46% think Trump should be impeached and removed
3. Overall, 46% of Americans now support impeachment,
we can only conclude from these three statements that TTF is insane
For decades, there was an unvaried rhythm to life in America’s suburbs: Carpool in the morning, watch sports on weekends, barbecue in the summer, vote Republican in November.
Then came President Trump.
The orderly subdivisions and kid-friendly communities that ring the nation’s cities have become a deathtrap for Republicans, as college-educated and upper-income women flee the party in droves, costing the GOP its House majority and sapping the party’s strength in state capitals and local governments nationwide.
The dramatic shift is also reshaping the 2020 presidential race, elevating Democratic hopes in traditional GOP strongholds like Arizona and Georgia, and forcing Trump to redouble efforts to boost rural turnout to offset defectors who, some fear, may never vote Republican so long as the president is on the ballot...
The erosion of support among suburban women began during the 2016 campaign — for many the breaking point was the “Access Hollywood” video, in which Trump boasted of grabbing women by their genitals — and increased dramatically in the 2018 midterm election, costing Republicans control of the House.
The trend continued in the recent off-year elections, in suburbs from Wichita, Kan., to northern New Jersey to DeSoto County, Miss. Democrats won two of three gubernatorial contests, in Kentucky and Louisiana, in good part because of their strength in those Republican redoubts.
The sentiment extended down ballot as well. Outside Philadelphia, Democrats took control in Delaware County for the first time since the Civil War. In suburban Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., the party won every state House seat in Fairfax County, a shift nearly on a par with the 2018 Democratic sweep of congressional seats in Orange County.
“It’s amazing the change, in just the last few years,” said Q. Whitfield Ayres, a pollster who has spent decades strategizing for Republican campaigns and causes. “It’s not any one place. It’s everywhere.”
That includes Arizona, where in 2018 Kyrsten Sinema, a congresswoman from the Phoenix suburbs, became the first Democrat in 30 years to win a U.S. Senate seat. She ran as a centrist focused on bipartisan problem-solving, a direct appeal to pragmatic suburban voters, and her success is seen as a model for turning the state from red to blue in 2020 — or at least making Arizona competitive in a way it has not been in decades.
With 11 electoral votes, Arizona is a bigger prize than Wisconsin — a Midwestern battleground both parties view as a key to the election — and the Grand Canyon State is expected to draw lavish attention and a fortune’s worth of advertising over the next year. Visiting last month, Vice President Mike Pence said he and Trump “are going to be in and out of Arizona a lot.”
The ancestral home of conservative icon Barry Goldwater and John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, Arizona has undergone a slow but steady transformation as the growing Latino population and a flood of newcomers from places like California erode Republicans’ long-standing hegemony.
The movement has been accelerated by Trump and his alienation of voters in typically Republican suburbs like Scottsdale, Gilbert and here in Mesa, which has grown from a far-flung satellite of Phoenix into the state’s third-largest city.
The exodus stems not so much from his policies — many of which are standard GOP fare, like cutting taxes and regulations — but rather the president’s behavior: the bullying, belligerence and ad hominem insults.
"The exodus stems not so much from his policies — many of which are standard GOP fare, like cutting taxes and regulations — but rather the president’s behavior: the bullying, belligerence and ad hominem insults"
yes, his behavior, as hyperbolized by the media
in a national election, people aren't going to vote for socialism just because they don't like the demeanor of the current leader of capitalism
as you say, they aren't fleeing from his policies
policies that once again have indicted socialism and vindicated minimalist governmental capitalism
which should reassure Repubs in the long-term
expect the wave of minorities, that realized how the Dems have duped them for years, to rise significantly by this time next year and vote for their best interest
as for suburbanites, the election of the President is a choice not an endorsement
they, too, will choose their best interest
just think....it could all be different if Dems hadn't nominated Hillary in 2016
they now bitterly regret that fateful error................
America’s Central Intelligence Agency in concert with foreign intelligence services manufactured the myth of Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, argues Andrew McCarthy, a distinguished federal prosecutor turned public intellectual.
A prolific writer, McCarthy well knows how to build a case and argue it before a jury. His latest book Ball of Collusion should be read carefully by everyone with an interest in American politics. It is exhaustively documented and brilliantly argued, and brings a wealth of evidence to bear on behalf of his thesis that an insular, self-perpetuating Establishment conspired to sandbag an outsider who threatened its perspectives and perquisites.
The constitutional issue is paramount: The American people elected Donald Trump, and it is horrifying to consider the possibility that a cabal of unelected civil servants supported by the mainstream media might nullify a presidential election.
But this sordid business has deep implications for America’s allies as well as her rivals. Trump is not a popular president overseas, except in Poland, Hungary, and Israel. In the eyes of polite opinion, McCarthy writes, “Donald Trump was anathema: a know-nothing narcissist – as uncouth as Queens – riding a populist-nationalist wave of fellow yahoos that threatened their tidy, multilateral post-World War II order.” China views Trump as a bully who presses American advantage at the risk of disruption to the global economy.
Donald Trump has one quality for which the rest of the world should be grateful: He really does not care how China, Russia, or any other country manages its affairs. By “America First,” he simply means that he cares about what happens in America, and is incurious about what happens outside America unless it affects his country directly. That stands in sharp contrast to view of all the wings of America’s political Establishment – progressive, “realist” and neoconservative – who believe that America should bring about the millenarian End of History by bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, by expanding NATO into a giant social-engineering project, by pressing China to transform itself into a Western-style democracy, and so forth.
McCarthy reports in persuasive detail how the spooks set up the president. There is more to be said, though, about why they did it. Here's a summary McCarthy’s findings and, afterward, a discussion of the motivation.
The FBI’s investigation of alleged Russian links to the Trump campaign required the FBI to present evidence of foreign intelligence activity to a secret court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The sole evidence the Federal Bureau of Investigation brought to bear was a concoction paid for by the Clinton campaign and assembled by a Washington consulting firm, Fusion GPS.
McCarthy notes:
“The only thing resembling evidence – ie made to look like authentic intelligence reporting – was the Steele dossier.… The blanks were filled in by unverified tales from the unidentified sources of Christopher Steele, a British spy who perfectly reflected the transnational-progressive pieties of his Fusion GPS collaborators, his Obama-administration admirers, and his global network of current and former spooks.”
The Fusion GPS team already had told their tale to the Obama Justice Department.
“Christopher Steele and his dossier co-author, Glenn Simpson, informed Bruce Ohr, a high-ranking Justice Department official, of their Trump-Russia allegations that summer…these conversations occurred both before and after the FBI formally opened ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ in Late July. The allegation against Trump cannot have been much of a surprise to Ohr; Not only were Steele and Simpson longtime acquaintances of his, Ohr’s wife Nellie – a Russia scholar, CIA contractor, and Hillary Clinton supporter – had been hired by Simpson as a Fusion GPS contractor. She was collaborating with Simpson and Steele on the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump project.”
Steele and Simpson provided the only written documentation for the FISA court, but the CIA had been drawing on confidential reports from the British and other European intelligence services for months.
“In late 2015, after Trump entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination.… [Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters] began taking note of suspicious ‘interactions’ between Trump associates and ‘suspected Russian agents.’ This information was passed along to the American intelligence community as part of the allies’ regular exchange of information. Other European spy services followed suit. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Estonia and Poland were all contributors, as was Australia. In Senate Intelligence Committee testimony, Obama National Intelligence Director James Clapper later confirmed this ‘sensitive’ stream of European intelligence, originally reported by The Guardian’s Luke Harding.”
As it turned out, the case for contact between the Trump campaign and the Russians depended on unsubstantiated reports about two young, low-level campaign aides, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Trump’s detractors never got their story straight. Page surveilled under a FISA warrant because of his connection to the Trump campaign. On April 20, 2017, a team of six New York Times reporters claimed that Page, a former US Navy officer who had visited Moscow on business, “got the FBI’s attention.” The Times wrote: “From the Russia trip of the once-obscure Mr Page grew a wide-ranging investigation, now accompanied by two congressional inquiries, that has cast a shadow on the early months of the Trump administration.”
But Page disappeared from the press after the credibility of the Steele dossier collapsed, and The New York Times seven months later wrote that another junior aide, George Papadopoulos, became “the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump Administration.” McCarthy is outraged that this sort of thing was used by the FBI to obtain a warrant to surveil the Trump campaign as an espionage target. Not only that: As McCarthy explains on the strength of his direct knowledge of FISA procedure, then-president Barack Obama and his top aides had to know about this.
It is all the more outrageous after the Clinton Foundation – run by Bill Clinton while his wife Hillary was secretary of state – arranged the sale of a fifth of America’s uranium production to a Russian state company.
In short, Trump’s enemies did all the things they accused Trump of doing. They conspired with foreign countries to influence the outcome of a US presidential election. The story seems improbable and outrageous, but in McCarthy’s masterful account, it’s something that one could put before a jury in a court of law.
McCarthy believes that the spooks went after Trump to protect their cozy post-World War II order. I think the reasons go much deeper: Trump threatened to turn over the rock and expose the creepy-crawlies underneath to the harsh light of day. A strict accounting of the intelligence community’s actions over the past two decades would leave heads rolling and pensions canceled. The peasants were marching on Dr Frankenstein’s castle, and their leader had to be put down.
The great American catastrophe of the 21st century came about because America wasted its resources and depleted its moral pursuit of unattainable, utopian goals, and left a gigantic mess in its wake. Washington’s support for majority rule in Iraq destroyed the longstanding Sunni-Shiite balance of power in the region and unleashed a new Thirty Years’ War, with devastating consequences for Syria.
The Clinton-Bush vision of NATO expansion to include countries in which the United States has no strategic interest and no capacity to defend. As Professor Walter McDougall of the University of Pennsylvania wrote this year, “The nations admitted in the second round of NATO enlargement were of another order altogether. They included Balkan countries inside Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, or else heirs to Eastern Orthodox civilization, or else – in the case of the Baltic republics – had been integral and strategic parts of Russia since Peter the Great.… In 2008, Putin finally pushed back, ordering the Russian army to occupy the Georgian provinces of Ossetia and Abkhazian in support of local rebels.”
The Syrian debacle brought Russia into Syria in 2015; the American-backed jihad had turned into a Petri dish for Russian Muslims from the Caucasus, as well as Chinese Uighurs and a motley assortment of foreign militants. Russia had interests of opportunity, for example, a warm-water refueling station for its Mediterranean fleet, but the risk of blowback from the Syrian civil war was the most urgent motive for President Vladimir Putin’s intervention.
After the heavy hand of the Obama State Department was visible in the 2014 regime change in Ukraine, Putin seized the Crimea, which had been Russian territory since Catherine the Great took it from the Tartars. McCarthy quotes US Representative Devin Nunes, a Trump ally, complaining that “the biggest intelligence failure we’ve had since 9/11 has been the inability to predict the leadership plans and intentions of the Putin regime in Russia.”
In 2016, Donald Trump’s message of busting political correctness won him the White House. Rejecting the Democratic Party’s identity politics run amok was a sneaky good strategy, working like a charm among working-class voters in America’s heartland. Trump, though he had just become a Republican five minutes ago, better sensed than the party’s established leaders the emotional needs of rank-and-file Republicans.
For all his faults, this is Trump’s superpower — sensing cultural undercurrents and reflecting the emotions of his target audience. He often says what regular folks are thinking but don’t feel they are allowed to verbalize.
Today, a great many Americans feel angst about their children inheriting a country that allows for the indiscriminate destruction of reputations via “cancel culture” and promotes narratives over truths in the name of political correctness. In 2020, Trump can rekindle his old strategy by giving voice to these concerns to overcome serious political headwinds.
Extreme uneasiness exists in middle America over cancel culture, the practice of journalists and woke activists unearthing old utterances of celebrities, athletes, and even some regular people for the purpose of embarrassing them and ruining their lives.
Do some human beings say or tweet dumb things? Yes. Does it often happen when a person is younger, less experienced in the world and not enlightened enough to know that at some point in the future someone might find their thoughtless tweet offensive? You bet.
If there’s anyone in America who could rally the canceled to his cause, it's Trump, who faces cancellation attempts every day. Heck, several Democrats have proposed taking his Twitter feed for violating the platform’s terms of service.
But that’s the point — why should we tolerate a society in which a group of inquisitors is given carte blanche to silence people they don’t like, banish political thoughts that aren’t welcome in liberal enclaves and ruin people’s lives over things uttered years ago? Never one to eschew affiliation with the controversial, Trump is uniquely positioned to make this a voting issue in 2020.
In Washington, D.C., when a 12-year-old African American girl claimed that three white boys at her private Christian school pinned her down and shaved her dreadlocks, the media predictably fell for it hook, line and sinker, demanding answers of Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, Karen, who teaches at the school.
The account was too perfect for media types who crave stories confirming their own political biases: white-on-black violence, Christian school, connection to Trump. Instead of seeking the truth, however, the media — just as it did with the Covington Catholic and Jussie Smollett stories — was blinded by a narrative instead of approaching the fantastical claim with caution.
After a few days, the little girl confessed to making it up. I don’t blame her; in America these days, a good narrative is better than the truth when you want attention. Just ask the liberal politicians seeking the Democratic nomination for president.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, for instance, falsely tweeted a debunked allegation that Michael Brown was “murdered” by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, never mind that President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice disproved the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative long ago. In doing so, Warren and Harris cravenly served their political ends without regard for the societal damage done by spreading falsehoods on such tragic stories.
Warren’s use of false narratives extends to her own origin story, which now includes multiple fabrications including that she is Native American and was once fired from a teaching job for getting pregnant. Last week, she misled a voter about sending her children to private school (she did, but claimed she didn’t).
Warren is not a “woman of color,” despite allowing employers to describe her as such, nor was she fired in the 1970s for becoming pregnant, according to recently discovered school board documents. But being a plain old white woman who declines job offers and is wealthy enough to send her kids to private school doesn’t sell in today’s Democratic Party, so she conjured a put-upon alter ego and rocketed to the top of the primary field.
No wonder our kids are inventing plights of their very own.
Americans are rightly worried about their children inheriting a sick culture. President Trump can jujitsu his political problems by relentlessly focusing on the need to defeat this cancer; he’ll get a lot of Amens in flyover country (think Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) if he does, and no Democratic contender has the wherewithal to stop him.
That is the background to the mutiny in the US Intelligence Community against the elected commander-in-chief. McCarthy avers, “The inquiry came to include the Trump-Russia angle, thanks to the exertions of CIA Director Brennan and his counterparts in British and European intelligence services – likeminded in their transnational-progressive alarm at Trump’s NATO-bashing and overt infatuation with Putin.” This does not quite capture the state of play in 2016. Instead of a glorious march towards democracy through the transformation of NATO into a grand NGO, the US had landed in a nasty confrontation with Russia over Crimea. Instead of the dawn of Arab democracy, we had the Syrian slaughterhouse.
America’s noble – or perhaps narcissistic – intentions did more damage than Trump’s indifference. The world is better off with an America that does not choose to play Don Quixote. The problem is not that the emperor has no clothes but that the empire has no tailors. Both the left and right wings of the American foreign policy share the End of History delusion in one form or another, as they made clear with their unanimous support for the 2011 overthrow of an American ally, Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak.
This is hard to explain to people who don’t understand the depth of American narcissism.
“General Petraeus created ISIS in order to destabilize China,” a senior Chinese military official informed me over dinner in 2015. The individual in question appears, incidentally, as one of China’s masterminds of so-called unrestricted warfare in Michael Pillsbury’s now-celebrated book The Hundred Year Marathon.
“That’s ridiculous,” I replied.
“It is not ridiculous in the least,” the Chinese soldier continued in the benevolent tone in which one instructs low-aptitude recruits. “There are ISIS leaders whom we have identified and tracked who were trained by Petraeus during the ‘Surge,’” the counter-insurgency campaign that David Petraeus conducted in 2008-2009 to contain a Sunni rebellion against the majority Shiite government that the United States had helped bring to power in 2007.
The Petraeus surge was one of the most destructive things any military leader ever undertook, but it stands as a symbol of the Establishment’s collective reputation. The Republican Establishment had hailed Petraeus as the savior of George W Bush’s failed Iraq policy, and they are sticking to their story. When Bush took office in January 2001, the United States was the world’s sole hyperpower. Russia had defaulted on its foreign debt in July 1998, and China was a small dark cloud in the geopolitical sky. US government debt was a manageable 55% of GDP, compared with more than 100% of GDP today. America had more than 17 million manufacturing workers, vs only 12 million today. It still dominated high-tech manufacturing, including computer chips and telecommunications equipment. Fast-forward to 2019: China is challenging American pre-eminence in a range of civilian and military technologies, while Russia has returned to the world stage as a major power, notably in the Middle East.
Donald Trump was obnoxious enough to declare that the emperor had no clothes. Breaking with the iron discipline of the Republican Establishment, he told voters that the United States had wasted $7 trillion, thousands of dead, and millions of lives disrupted in the disastrous nation-building campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The only other Republican candidate to repudiate the “Bush Freedom Agenda” was Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. That is why the 2016 Republican primary became a two-man race between Trump and Cruz. The whole of the American Establishment had signed on to a utopian crusade to impose the liberal world order on the Muslim world. After nine years of frustration in Iraq, it saw in the so-called “Arab Spring” demonstrations of 2011 a second chance to bring its agenda to fruition. The result of this was the near-collapse of Egypt and an eight-year civil war in Syria that killed half a million people and displaced 10 million refugees.
That is what makes the case of Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn so central to the mutiny against Trump. As chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Flynn had warned that American support for Sunni jihadists in Syria had the unintended effect of supporting the new caliphate movement, that is, ISIS. Among all the heads and former heads of the 17 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, Flynn was the only one who had objected to the disastrous covert intervention in Syria and foreseen its baleful consequences. Obama fired him, but Donald Trump hired him as a top campaign aide and then appointed him national security adviser.
McCarthy reviews evidence that is still before the courts showing that the FBI set Flynn up in a White House interview, in order to claim that the distinguished general had lied to federal investigators about his contacts with Russians. Flynn’s lawyers have now produced evidence that the charges against him stemmed from an FBI forgery – FBI officials appear to have altered the interview report to put his remarks in an incriminating light. I have written about the CIA’s witch-hunt against Flynn here and in other locations. Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell claims that the CIA sandbagged him to stop an audit of its operations – the first audit since its founding.
Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, the possibility should be horrifying that the world’s oldest continuous democratic constitution might be subverted by a cabal of spies with the support of the major media.
Environmental journalists and advocates have in recent weeks made a number of apocalyptic predictions about the impact of climate change. Bill McKibben suggested climate-driven fires in Australia had made koalas “functionally extinct.” Extinction Rebellion said “Billions will die” and “Life on Earth is dying.” Vice claimed the “collapse of civilization may have already begun.”
Few have underscored the threat more than student climate activist Greta Thunberg and Green New Deal sponsor Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The latter said, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.” Says Thunberg in her new book, “Around 2030 we will be in a position to set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.”
Sometimes, scientists themselves make apocalyptic claims. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that,” if Earth warms four degrees, said one earlier this year. “The potential for multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” said another. If sea levels rise as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts, another scientist said, “It will be an unmanageable problem.”
Apocalyptic statements like these have real-world impacts. In September, a group of British psychologists said children are increasingly suffering from anxiety from the frightening discourse around climate change. In October, an activist with Extinction Rebellion (”XR”) — an environmental group founded in 2018 to commit civil disobedience to draw awareness to the threat its founders and supporters say climate change poses to human existence — and a videographer, were kicked and beaten in a London Tube station by angry commuters. And last week, an XR co-founder said a genocide like the Holocaust was “happening again, on a far greater scale, and in plain sight” from climate change.
Climate change is an issue I care passionately about and have dedicated a significant portion of my life to addressing. I have been politically active on the issue for over 20 years and have researched and written about it for 17 years. Over the last four years, my organization, Environmental Progress, has worked with some of the world’s leading climate scientists to prevent carbon emissions from rising. So far, we’ve helped prevent emissions increasing the equivalent of adding 24 million cars to the road.
I also care about getting the facts and science right and have in recent months corrected inaccurate and apocalyptic news media coverage of fires in the Amazon and fires in California, both of which have been improperly presented as resulting primarily from climate change.
Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public. There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people. And exaggerating climate change risks distracting us from other important issues including ones we might have more near-term control over.
I feel the need to say this up-front because I want the issues I’m about to raise to be taken seriously and not dismissed by those who label as “climate deniers” or “climate delayers” anyone who pushes back against exaggeration.
With that out of the way, let’s look whether the science supports what’s being said.
First, no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species. “‘Our children are going to die in the next 10 to 20 years.’ What’s the scientific basis for these claims?” BBC’s Andrew Neil asked a visibly uncomfortable XR spokesperson last month.
“These claims have been disputed, admittedly,” she said. “There are some scientists who are agreeing and some who are saying it’s not true. But the overall issue is that these deaths are going to happen.”
“But most scientists don’t agree with this,” said Neil. “I looked through IPCC reports and see no reference to billions of people going to die, or children in 20 years. How would they die?”
“Mass migration around the world already taking place due to prolonged drought in countries, particularly in South Asia. There are wildfires in Indonesia, the Amazon rainforest, Siberia, the Arctic,” she said.
But in saying so, the XR spokesperson had grossly misrepresented the science. “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause”
What about “mass migration”? “The majority of resultant population movements tend to occur within the borders of affected countries," says IPCC.
It’s not like climate doesn’t matter. It’s that climate change is outweighed by other factors. Earlier this year, researchers found that climate “has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential.”
Last January, after climate scientists criticized Rep. Ocasio-Cortez for saying the world would end in 12 years, her spokesperson said "We can quibble about the phraseology, whether it's existential or cataclysmic.” He added, “We're seeing lots of [climate change-related] problems that are already impacting lives."
That last part may be true, but it’s also true that economic development has made us less vulnerable, which is why there was a 99.7% decline in the death toll from natural disasters since its peak in 1931.
In 1931, 3.7 million people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did. And that decline occurred over a period when the global population quadrupled.
What about sea level rise? IPCC estimates sea level could rise two feet (0.6 meters) by 2100. Does that sound apocalyptic or even “unmanageable”?
Consider that one-third of the Netherlands is below sea level, and some areas are seven meters below sea level. You might object that Netherlands is rich while Bangladesh is poor. But the Netherlands adapted to living below sea level 400 years ago. Technology has improved a bit since then.
What about claims of crop failure, famine, and mass death? That’s science fiction, not science. Humans today produce enough food for 10 billion people, or 25% more than we need, and scientific bodies predict increases in that share, not declines.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) forecasts crop yields increasing 30% by 2050. And the poorest parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa, are expected to see increases of 80 to 90%.
Nobody is suggesting climate change won’t negatively impact crop yields. It could. But such declines should be put in perspective. Wheat yields increased 100 to 300% around the world since the 1960s, while a study of 30 models found that yields would decline by 6% for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature.
Rates of future yield growth depend far more on whether poor nations get access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, says FAO.
All of this helps explain why IPCC anticipates climate change will have a modest impact on economic growth. By 2100, IPCC projects the global economy will be 300 to 500% larger than it is today. Both IPCC and the Nobel-winning Yale economist, William Nordhaus, predict that warming of 2.5°C and 4°C would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) by 2% and 5% over that same period.
Does this mean we shouldn’t worry about climate change? Not at all.
One of the reasons I work on climate change is because I worry about the impact it could have on endangered species. Climate change may threaten one million species globally and half of all mammals, reptiles, and amphibians in diverse places like the Albertine Rift in central Africa, home to the endangered mountain gorilla.
But it’s not the case that “we’re putting our own survival in danger” through extinctions, as Elizabeth Kolbert claimed in her book, Sixth Extinction. As tragic as animal extinctions are, they do not threaten human civilization. If we want to save endangered species, we need to do so because we care about wildlife for spiritual, ethical, or aesthetic reasons, not survival ones.
And exaggerating the risk, and suggesting climate change is more important than things like habitat destruction, are counterproductive.
For example, Australia’s fires are not driving koalas extinct, as Bill McKibben suggested. The main scientific body that tracks the species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, labels the koala “vulnerable,” which is one level less threatened than “endangered,” two levels less than “critically endangered,” and three less than “extinct” in the wild.
Should we worry about koalas? Absolutely! They are amazing animals and their numbers have declined to around 300,000. But they face far bigger threats such as the destruction of habitat, disease, bushfires, and invasive species.
Think of it this way. The climate could change dramatically — and we could still save koalas. Conversely, the climate could change only modestly — and koalas could still go extinct.
The monomaniacal focus on climate distracts our attention from other threats to koalas and opportunities for protecting them, like protecting and expanding their habitat.
As for fire, one of Australia’s leading scientists on the issue says, “Bushfire losses can be explained by the increasing exposure of dwellings to fire-prone bushlands. No other influences need be invoked. So even if climate change had played some small role in modulating recent bushfires, and we cannot rule this out, any such effects on risk to property are clearly swamped by the changes in exposure.”
Nor are the fires solely due to drought, which is common in Australia, and exceptional this year. “Climate change is playing its role here,” said Richard Thornton of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre in Australia, “but it's not the cause of these fires."
The same is true for fires in the United States. In 2017, scientists modeled 37 different regions and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Of the 10 variables that influence fire, “none were as significant… as the anthropogenic variables,” such as building homes near, and managing fires and wood fuel growth within, forests.
Climate scientists are starting to push back against exaggerations by activists, journalists, and other scientists.
“While many species are threatened with extinction,” said Stanford’s Ken Caldeira, “climate change does not threaten human extinction... I would not like to see us motivating people to do the right thing by making them believe something that is false.”
I asked the Australian climate scientist Tom Wigley what he thought of the claim that climate change threatens civilization. “It really does bother me because it’s wrong,” he said. “All these young people have been misinformed. And partly it’s Greta Thunberg’s fault. Not deliberately. But she’s wrong.”
But don’t scientists and activists need to exaggerate in order to get the public’s attention?
“I’m reminded of what [late Stanford University climate scientist] Steve Schneider used to say,” Wigley replied. “He used to say that as a scientist, we shouldn’t really be concerned about the way we slant things in communicating with people out on the street who might need a little push in a certain direction to realize that this is a serious problem. Steve didn’t have any qualms about speaking in that biased way. I don’t quite agree with that.”
Wigley started working on climate science full-time in 1975 and created one of the first climate models (MAGICC) in 1987. It remains one of the main climate models in use today.
“When I talk to the general public,” he said, “I point out some of the things that might make projections of warming less and the things that might make them more. I always try to present both sides.”
Part of what bothers me about the apocalyptic rhetoric by climate activists is that it is often accompanied by demands that poor nations be denied the cheap sources of energy they need to develop. I have found that many scientists share my concerns.
“If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070 you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,” MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel said.
“It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have fewer children, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon, you might be better off in 2070.”
Emanuel and Wigley say the extreme rhetoric is making political agreement on climate change harder.
“You’ve got to come up with some kind of middle ground where you do reasonable things to mitigate the risk and try at the same time to lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient,” said Emanuel. “We shouldn’t be forced to choose between lifting people out of poverty and doing something for the climate.”
Happily, there is a plenty of middle ground between climate apocalypse and climate denial.
Look up to see the aftereffects of the TTF troll going of its meds.
Monthly Global Average Temperature Anomalies in October
Five Warmest Years (Anomalies)
1st. 2015(+0.53°C), 2nd. 2019(+0.42°C), 3rd. 2018(+0.38°C), 4th. 2014(+0.34°C), 5th. 2017,2016(+0.30°C)
Dear Spineless,
Did you even read the article by "adam schiff: why we need psychological screening before one can be in Congress"?
His sage comments never denies that global warming is continuing. Indeed, he mentions several times that it is. What is discussed is that scientific evidence, and the scientific community, does not support the new alarmists that say the global warming occurring will cause human extinction, or even the current weather anomalies, like Amazon wildfires, attributed to it.
Greta Thudberg and Alexandria O-C are liars.
Their lies are hurting legitimate climate research.
Now, read the article and then try to make an intelligent comment.
But, get your homework done first.
Graduating sixth grade is more important than wasting your time commenting on lunatic fringe blogs!
Martin Hyde is a Florida Republican politician and businessman who dropped out of the race for the Sarasota City Commission after he was accused of making racist statements while confronting a teen Puerto Rican tennis player at a club. Video of part of the confrontation was posted online and led to the 54-year-old Hyde being banned from the tennis club, where his son was receiving lessons, Latino Rebels reports.
The incident occurred on Tuesday, November 26, at Sarasota’s Bath & Racquet Club, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports. Video of the incident involving Hyde and Sergio Dilan, a junior tennis player who was at the Sarasota club for a tournament, was posted to Facebook by Alvin R Couto de Jesus on Friday.
According to Dilan and Cuoto de Jesus, Hyde yelled at Dilan for speaking Spanish and told him to leave the club. The original confrontation was not recorded on video. He is also accused of telling Dilan and other Hispanic teen boys to “go cut the grass.” Hyde appeared to admit using that phrase on the video, but he has since denied it. He has also denied being racist.
Michael Brandon, the manager of the tennis club, told Latino Rebels, “I am super disturbed at seeing that video. I was actually the coach that was on the court. I knew that there was some type of incident but had no idea to what degree this actually went down. After watching the video, the member is going to be removed this afternoon so I’m going to be notifying him that he’s no longer a member of the club. Bath and Racquet definitely or any of the staff here does not stand for racism whatsoever or any type of actions like that at all, especially towards children or obviously anyone. He will be removed from the club this afternoon, and thank you for reaching out. We’re so sorry that happened but we have rectified the situation.”
Hyde was running for the District 2 Sarasota City Commission seat held by Commissioner Liz Alpert, a Democrat...
Hyde, denied being a racist but said he was dropping out of the commissioner race, telling the Herald-Tribune, “I hold myself to a higher standard though than engaging with noisy teenagers in public places, and it for this failing and this alone that I’ve decided to stand down from public life..
Once again, a GOPer has shown his ignorance and racism...
Somewhere, GOPers should be taught that Puerto Rico is a US Territory, and has been for over a century. Children born there are automatically US citizens, the same as anyone born in a US state.
It would only take a few seconds for a GOPer with the Google to figure that out. But what comes out of their mouths is basically "shoot first and ask questions later."
Of course it would never occur to a white GOPer to consider the irony of him telling someone to leave the land that his white ancestors stole from the people living here.
If Hyde really doesn't want Spanish speaking Puerto Ricans in his local tennis club, perhaps he should work on passing a law for the to cede Puerto Rico back to Spain.
What ever happened to history class? Or is that something just the much-maligned "elites" take in college?
https://twitter.com/Otter_News/status/1200139981894934530
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