Elitism and Education
It was a cool move for the House Judiciary Committee to invite a panel of law professors to their first hearing. It seems obvious on the face of it, we are talking about impeaching a President, we should understand the legal standards and precedents as we consider our decision.
With this gesture the Democratic majority gave the Republicans an opportunity to state, clearly and on the record, their hypocritical support for ignorance and disrespect for education. Remember that fifteen of the seventeen Republicans on the committee are lawyers, they have been to law school themselves. But, for instance Rep. Matt Gaetz -- who holds a JD from William and Mary -- told Stanford Law School Professor Pamela Karlan that she was unable to see from “the ivory towers of your law school,” and how condescending she was being to “actual people in this country.”
Paul Taylor, the chief counsel for Republicans on the committee (Harvard Law '94), suggested that liberals control the legal profession as a whole -- which to me is an amazing accusation. He claimed, and we don't know if this is true, that 97 percent of 2016 presidential campaign campaign contributions from lawyers went to Hillary Clinton while Trump received only 3 percent. To them, this means that lawyers are biased against them. To me it means that if you understand how the country works you will tend to hold so-called "liberal" beliefs. A good education teaches you to seek out facts and reject old wives' tales, and the result is a liberal belief system. It is just weird to suggest that some group called "liberals" is controlling them.
This is why Betsy DeVos is so important. If the Republicans want to win future elections, it is in their interest to keep the public uninformed and uneducated. They need to make education as expensive and as ineffective as they can, because education is the enemy of conservatism as it is known today.
Their line in the sand is "us" versus "elites." Def: "A select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society." Think for a minute about what it means to oppose superior abilities and qualities.
Even the mainstream press plays along with this, tossing the concept of "elites" around as if it meant snobs or some kind of lace-cuffed, powder-wigged aristocrats. There's nothing wrong with working with your hands for a living, but there is also nothing wrong with being smart, with speaking clearly, with keeping yourself informed of objective facts. These two things are not opposed.
Kellyanne Conway said this on Fox yesterday:
And ... I know hypocrisy is not something that conservatives worry much about but Kellyanne Conway herself earned a Juris Doctor with honors from the George Washington University Law School. She is counting on Fox watchers to be too dumb to look that up.
Our country has a Constitution and a couple hundred years of history to test it and toughen it up, and the ordinary doofus like you and me doesn't know the details. We don't have time to know everything about everything; we need some elite professors to come in and tell us how the vague wording of the founders came to be, what they intended, how it has been interpreted in the centuries since the words were first composed. You don't have to make fun of them. It is not "boring" or irrelevant. The actual problem is that our President is himself an ordinary doofus when it comes to these things, but does not respect the elites, the academics, people who are knowledgeable, well enough to ask their opinion before he shoots his mouth off. He doesn't know and he doesn't care. Doofusism is not better than actual knowledge.
Last summer, Trump said “I have an Article Two where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” In a country of uneducated people who resent expertise and knowledge, that is, to Republicans, this might hold water. But in fact Article Two is written where anybody can read it, and we are lucky to have educational institutions full of elite professors who can explain the nuances to us. Article Two defines an executive who is not a king, who cannot do whatever he or she wants. You can count on Fox viewers to be too dumb to look that up.
With this gesture the Democratic majority gave the Republicans an opportunity to state, clearly and on the record, their hypocritical support for ignorance and disrespect for education. Remember that fifteen of the seventeen Republicans on the committee are lawyers, they have been to law school themselves. But, for instance Rep. Matt Gaetz -- who holds a JD from William and Mary -- told Stanford Law School Professor Pamela Karlan that she was unable to see from “the ivory towers of your law school,” and how condescending she was being to “actual people in this country.”
Paul Taylor, the chief counsel for Republicans on the committee (Harvard Law '94), suggested that liberals control the legal profession as a whole -- which to me is an amazing accusation. He claimed, and we don't know if this is true, that 97 percent of 2016 presidential campaign campaign contributions from lawyers went to Hillary Clinton while Trump received only 3 percent. To them, this means that lawyers are biased against them. To me it means that if you understand how the country works you will tend to hold so-called "liberal" beliefs. A good education teaches you to seek out facts and reject old wives' tales, and the result is a liberal belief system. It is just weird to suggest that some group called "liberals" is controlling them.
This is why Betsy DeVos is so important. If the Republicans want to win future elections, it is in their interest to keep the public uninformed and uneducated. They need to make education as expensive and as ineffective as they can, because education is the enemy of conservatism as it is known today.
Their line in the sand is "us" versus "elites." Def: "A select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society." Think for a minute about what it means to oppose superior abilities and qualities.
Even the mainstream press plays along with this, tossing the concept of "elites" around as if it meant snobs or some kind of lace-cuffed, powder-wigged aristocrats. There's nothing wrong with working with your hands for a living, but there is also nothing wrong with being smart, with speaking clearly, with keeping yourself informed of objective facts. These two things are not opposed.
Kellyanne Conway said this on Fox yesterday:
If you went to work today to manicure nails, to manicure a lawn, if you went to work with a jackhammer or a welding machine or mechanic's tools or a carpentry belt and not three degrees from Yale, that woman yesterday looks her nose down on you. She thinks that you are less than her. And I've had it. Do you know why that man ran for President in the first place, for the forgotten man, the forgotten woman? You know why I'm still here at the White House? For you. For people who are looked down upon by people with three Yale law degrees had the audacity, the audacity to say that liberals like to cluster together and live together while conservatives can't even stand to be together, that's why they're scattered. Who the hell are you, lady? Look down at half of the country."To which the Fox & Friends guy said, "That's a good point."
And ... I know hypocrisy is not something that conservatives worry much about but Kellyanne Conway herself earned a Juris Doctor with honors from the George Washington University Law School. She is counting on Fox watchers to be too dumb to look that up.
Our country has a Constitution and a couple hundred years of history to test it and toughen it up, and the ordinary doofus like you and me doesn't know the details. We don't have time to know everything about everything; we need some elite professors to come in and tell us how the vague wording of the founders came to be, what they intended, how it has been interpreted in the centuries since the words were first composed. You don't have to make fun of them. It is not "boring" or irrelevant. The actual problem is that our President is himself an ordinary doofus when it comes to these things, but does not respect the elites, the academics, people who are knowledgeable, well enough to ask their opinion before he shoots his mouth off. He doesn't know and he doesn't care. Doofusism is not better than actual knowledge.
Last summer, Trump said “I have an Article Two where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” In a country of uneducated people who resent expertise and knowledge, that is, to Republicans, this might hold water. But in fact Article Two is written where anybody can read it, and we are lucky to have educational institutions full of elite professors who can explain the nuances to us. Article Two defines an executive who is not a king, who cannot do whatever he or she wants. You can count on Fox viewers to be too dumb to look that up.
posted by JimK at 2:46 PM
208 Comments:
The conservative/Republican debate strategy is simple:
Given the apparent situation, make up whatever story is most favourable to you and what you want and most damaging to those you oppose and what they want and then adamantly, loudly, and frequently insist your story is unconditionally true.
Conservatives like Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous don't believe in good faith debate. They see society as a contest to see who can dominate whom to one's exclusive benefit. You can see it in how they for months angrily posted about how Republican's supreme court was going to punish gays for opposing the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Like the pharisees, Wyatt and Regina take delight in having manipulated the letter of the law to defile the spirit of the law and democracy.
I believe in a society where everyone's highest priority is to maximize the happiness for all in an equal and fair way. That's going to give us the best society possible.
Kelly Anne Conway is telling Trump supporters "Ignore the facts, evidence, law and logic these law professors are talking about. Tell yourself they are looking down on you and that's all that matters, you should blindly oppose them if you don't like being looked down uppon. Ignore what the people in the legal profession say the law is, believe anything you make up in your head about the law is just as valid as anything they are saying. Imagine they are looking down their nose at you and hate them for that and ignore everything they say."
That's conservative ideology.
Evangelical christian Tony Perkins is the face of hate in America. Wyatt and Regina are his foot soldiers.
Defend Biblical marriage.
Sell me your teenage daughter for some goats.
Breaking:
The Washington Post reports that Trump has routinely communicated with Rudy Giuliani and other individuals speaking on cell phones that can easily be monitored by Russian and other foreign intelligence services.
The hypocrisy of Republicans is mountainous - they screamed for Hillary to be imprisoned because she had a private email server despite it being thousands of times more secure than how Trump discusses national security secrets every day.
There's no evidence Hillary's email server was ever hacked but its a certainty that the Russians and other adversaries are listening into to Trump discussing national security issues every day.
Hillary was no security risk while Trump is a massive security leak every day. But Republicans couldn't care less about national security when its a Republican constantly breaching it.
the election just keeps getting closer...
U.S. hiring surged in November, as the economy added 266,000 jobs and unemployment returned to a half-century low, a sign the U.S. is powering through a global slowdown.
The payroll number easily topped the estimate of 180,000 from economists surveyed by Refinitiv, who also saw the unemployment rate holding steady from October's 3.6 percent.
Unemployment ticked down slightly to 3.5 percent as more people were looking for work, matching a 50-year low. The labor force participation rate was little changed at 63.2 percent. Average hourly earnings, meanwhile, rose by 3.1 percent over the past year to $28.29.
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Revisions, meanwhile, added 41,000 jobs for the prior two months, bringing the three-month average to 205,000. (September increased by 13,000 to 193,000, and October jumped by 28,000 to 156,000).
“This is a blowout number and the U.S. economy continues to be all about the jobs,” said Tony Bedikian, head of global markets for Citizens Bank.
The blockbuster report provides further evidence that the Trump economic expansion will continue and reinforces the Federal Reserve's characterization of the labor market as "strong."
A 2015 study says that tax exempt churches in the United States are costing its citizens $71 billion each year in tax breaks.
According to the Secular Policy Institute, religious groups receive $35.3 billions in federal income tax subsidies and $26.2 billion in property tax credits. They also enjoy $6.1 billion in state income tax, $1.2 billion of parsonage and $2.2 billion in faith-based initiative subsidies.
SPI reports that if “religious organizations (ie. churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) were taxed like for-profit agencies, it was found that this could generate upwards of $71 billion per year in tax revenue.”
“…even if churches were merely held to the standards of other non-profit agencies, this could generate $16.75 billion in tax revenue per year.The report estimate for the total subsides enjoyed by religious organizations, but they do not account for tax credits like sales taxes, local sales and income taxes volunteer labor subsidy, and donor-tax exemptions.”
Many Americans believe religious organizations require these heavy tax breaks for use in their charitable works. However, researchers at Secular Humanism report that many popular churches are in fact using far less of their funds compared to non-profits.
The Mormon Church, for example, spends roughly .7% of its annual income on charity. Their study of 271 congregations found an average of 71% of revenues going to ‘operating expenses’…Compare this to the American Red Cross, which uses 92.1% of revenues for physical assistance and just 7.9% on operating expenses. The authors also note that Wal-Mart, for instance, gives about $1.75 billion in food aid to charities each year, or twenty-eight times all of the money allotted for charity by the United Methodist Church and almost double what the LDS Church has given in the last twenty-five years.
While some churches actually participate in charitable works, they do not perform half as much humanitarian aid as a true none-profit organization.
According to Patheos, “churches should be entitled to the same tax breaks as other charitable groups, as long as they are held to the same standard, and not given the free pass to tax free status they currently enjoy.”
While Dr Lee and her colleagues have previously offered themselves to be consulted by impeachment investigators, she told The Independent they felt it necessary to come forward once more because the US president is “is ramping up his conspiracy theories” and “showing a great deal of cruelty and vindictiveness” in his “accelerated, repetitive tweets,” which she explained are signs that he is “doubling and a tripling down on his delusions”.
“I believe that they fit the pattern of delusions rather than just plain lies,” she continued, pointing to the claim he made during a meeting with Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary-general, that “many legal scholars” were “looking at the transcripts” of his 25 July phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and agreeing with his description of the call as “absolutely perfect” as an example of his pathology.
Dr Lee, an expert on violence prevention, acknowledged that members of congress – especially Republicans who are supportive of the president – might dismiss the warning she and her colleagues are delivering as just a product of differences of political opinion, but stressed that the fact that they should be taken seriously because their training enables them to recognise Mr Trump is exhibiting “definitive signs of severe pathology of someone who requires an advanced level of care” and who “meets every criterion of lacking a rational decision making capacity”.
“The one thing that we are trained to do is to distinguish between what is healthy and what is abnormal, and when the pattern of abnormality fits, then we recognise that it is pathology and not part of the wide variation of which healthy human beings are capable,” she said. “What we recognise is a pattern of disease and that may look like another political ideology or another political style to the everyday person who is unfamiliar with pathology, but to us it is a very recognizable pattern.”
Dr Lee explained that the president’s continued embrace of conspiracy theories was actually a public health issue because of his ability to draw members of the public into a “shared psychosis at the national level”.
“His detachment from reality... his pathology is actually gaining ground more quickly than the ability of rational actors to bring up the facts,” she said, adding that the House should consider these issues in the same way they are examining the legal and constitutional aspects of impeachment.
Dr Zinner, a former National Institutes of Mental Health researcher who has taught about and consulted with intelligence agencies on narcissistic personality disorders, told The Independent that members of congress need to be warned about the danger impeachment poses when the presidency is held by someone of Mr Trump’s pathology, which he described as a textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
“Impeachment is the greatest threat to his self esteem that he’s experienced so far, and we’re very worried that his rage will be even more destructive than it’s been in the past,” he said.
He also dismissed Republicans who defend Mr Trump by claiming that his style is that of a blunt-talking New York businessman as “simply ignorant about the whole area of psychology that pertains to him”.
“These aren’t alternative viewpoints,” Dr Zinner explained, calling one “the product of very sound psychology... that comes from mainly from psychoanalytic theory, but is very established and sound and studied,” and the other “just ignorance and dismissiveness”.
Dr Zinner said the goal of the petition is to reach legislators to educate them. “Most people don’t really know this is a coherent, well-studied, well-defined condition,” he said.
“Even those that don’t dismiss [the diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder] say, ‘well, you know, these are just a lot of random bad, insane behaviours,’ but they don’t see how it coheres around the self esteem issue,” he continued.
“And others, they say, ‘well, he’s a liar and he’s a cheat and he exploits people and all of that stuff,’ but those are just random traits, whereas all of it hangs together around his developmental deficiency of not having an internal stable self-esteem.”
Dr Post, who created psychological profiles of Israel’s former prime minister Menachem Begin and Egypt’s former president Anwar Sadat for former president Jimmy Carter to use when negotiating the Camp David Accords, and who founded the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, told The Independent that evidence of Trump’s lack of self-esteem and the danger that impeachment will bring by exacerbating his precarious mental state can be found in the way he pardons convicted war criminals like Navy Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher and labels them heroes.
“He’s identified with these war criminals because he knows that he’s being seen as a criminal. So he’s trying to redefine them as heroes, just like he is. People challenge his intelligence, so he accuses Maxine Walters of being ‘low IQ’ and says, but I’m a stable genius,” said Dr Post, who founded George Washington University’s Political Psychology Center after his retirement from the CIA.
Dr Post warned the strong connection between Mr Trump and his followers means the possibility he would call for violence against his perceived political enemies “cannot be discounted”.
“Watching his rallies, there’s an almost palpable connection between Trump and his followers, who have taken his invitation to externalize and project their problems upon [other groups],” he said. “He’s basically saying he understands where their problems are coming from and he will rescue them, so to hurt their rescuer is very painful [for his followers] indeed.”
Any challenge to Mr Trump’s power, whether impeachment or an election loss next November, could be a significant trauma for him and his supporters, Dr Post said.
Asked for a prediction of how Mr Trump would react to either, Dr Post invoked the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas: “He will not go gentle into that good night, but will rage, rage at the dying of the light."
Its a lie that the economy under Trump is doing well. It's way worse than under Obama. We're seeing the same mid-range 2% annual growth, low inflation, and slow wage growth that we've had consistently for over a decade since the Great Recession*. The only thing different now is that unemployment is at half-century lows. That's because there hasn't been much wage growth and people are filling more jobs and because the way we calculate unemployment has changed since we last hit numbers this low.
A good part of the wage growth is because of DEMOCRATIC-sponsored $15 minimum wages kicking in.
And all of the above fair to middling results -- not quite as good as Obama but not that far off -- BUT WITH ALMOST $2T in stimulus. That's a heck of a lot borrow to produce meager improvement.
Here's a 1/2 hour fascinating video on how abusers such as family members and the abrahamic gods force people to fake their emotions and the needless damage it causes humanity
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman are zealots.
It's not left versus right
or Republican versus Democrat.
It's corruption versus the Rule of law.
"BobSF_94117 said..."
oh, hi Bob!
how are you, this fine evening?
"Its a lie that the economy under Trump is doing well."
Bob, did you take your meds today?
remember the doctor said you need to take them every day or you'll start having delusions again
"It's way worse than under Obama. We're seeing the same mid-range 2% annual growth, low inflation, and slow wage growth that we've had consistently for over a decade since the Great Recession."
Bob, it would be a good idea to do a sanity check before you say things
you know, to make sure the things you say aren't insane
take this, for instance:
first, you say "it's way worse"
then you say "it's the same"
it can't be both
"The only thing different now is that unemployment is at half-century lows"
see, Bob, sane people wouldn't call that "way worse"
and they wouldn't say "it's the same"
sane people would say that's wonderful and MUCH better than Obama
"That's because there hasn't been much wage growth and people are filling more jobs"
yes, that second one would tend to make unemployment go down
you might say, by definition
what other little bits of wisdom would you like to share?
"the way we calculate unemployment has changed since we last hit numbers this low"
did one of the other residents at the nut house tell you that?
remember how the doctor said you should be careful not to believe everything insane people tell you?
"A good part of the wage growth is because of DEMOCRATIC-sponsored $15 minimum wages kicking in"
really?
how much?
ROFL !!!!!
"And all of the above fair to middling results -- not quite as good as Obama but not that far off"
there you go again
before, you said it was "way worse"
now, it's "not that far off"
for sake of yourself
and for the sake of your very patient family
take your meds !
"-- BUT WITH ALMOST $2T in stimulus. That's a heck of a lot borrow to produce meager improvement."
uh, Obama borrowed more
and he enjoyed near zero interest rates that should have produced a boom
like Trump's
how did Obama mess up so bad?
Throughout the last couple of years of the Obama administration Trump ranted about how the excellent unemployment rate was fake and the Obama administration fabricated the numbers.
As we've seen time and again with Trump, he insists others are guilty of his own behaviors. Trump asserting Obama faked the unemployment numbers is indicative of the fact that this is what Trump would do if president.
The unemployment numbers under Trump are fake news. He's appointed his henchmen to fabricate the numbers to make himself look good.
The real unemployment rate under Trump is much higher than it was under Obama.
Good anonymous said "And all of the above fair to middling results -- not quite as good as Obama but not that far off -- BUT WITH ALMOST $2T in stimulus. That's a heck of a lot borrow to produce meager improvement."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "uh, Obama borrowed more".
That's a lie of course. Obama ran a deficit of 1 trillion in the first year to produce the stimulus that dropped the unemployment rate by six percentage points. After that the deficits were around the 300 billion mark.
Trump has run a 2 trillion dollar deficit in just a couple of years, he's adding to the deficit several times as fast as Obama did, for a meager (if even that) improvement.
This is standard Republican "management" - run up the deficit when they're in power and then wen a Democrat gets elected blame him/her for it and demand that the government stop all spending. The hypocrisy is massive.
If you can believe the Trump admin claims about the current unemployment rate( and you shouldn't), it dropped 1 percentage point under Trump and 6 percentage points under Obama - its obvious Obama was a far, far more effective president on the economy than Trump.
Remember how during the Obama presidency when the unemployment rate dropped 6 percentage points and Wyatt/Regina screamed it didn't matter because the labour participation rate was "terrible" and the economy was a "disaster"?
Now the labour participation rate hasn't changed under Trump but suddenly its no longer "terrible" or even of the slightest concern.
That's the non-stop gas lighting of American by Republicans like Wyatt/Regina
More Than 500 Legal Scholars Say Trump Committed Impeachable Acts
A group of more than 500 legal scholars has signed an open letter to Congress declaring that President Donald Trump “engaged in impeachable conduct” as the impeachment proceedings against him continue.
“We do not reach this conclusion lightly,” stated the letter, dated Friday.
Trump “betrayed his oath of office” by attempting to pressure Ukrainian leaders to help him “distort” the 2020 election “at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress.”
“The Founders did not make impeachment available for disagreements over policy, even profound ones, nor for extreme distaste for the manner in which the President executes his office. Only ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ warrant impeachment,” the scholars asserted.
The signees include professors and other experts from an array of academic institutions such as Columbia, Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, George Washington University and the University of Michigan, among many others. Their message was spearheaded by the Protect Democracy Project, a nonprofit created in 2017 with the goal of holding the White House “accountable to the laws and longstanding practices that have protected our democracy through both Democratic and Republican Administrations.”
According to sworn testimony from U.S. foreign policy officials, Trump threatened to withhold millions of dollars in military aid in exchange for fake investigations that would help his reelection campaign, and conditioned a White House meeting with Ukraine’s president on a public announcement of those fake investigations.
In their letter, the legal experts said Trump’s “conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the Founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution.”
They also noted that “conduct need not be criminal to be impeachable.”
“Whether President Trump’s conduct is classified as bribery, as a high crime or misdemeanor, or as both, it is clearly impeachable under our Constitution,” the signees concurred.
Rachel Maddow Nails Hypocrisy Of GOP, Newt Gingrich's New Case Against Impeachment
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Friday demolished a new argument that Republicans and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) are putting forward against the impeachment of President Donald Trump by issuing a stark reminder of their actions during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Gingrich this week on Fox News suggested the impeachment process against Trump should not be taking place because it is the holidays. “And really, on the eve of Christmas it is really sad to see the dishonesty and the partisanship that the House Democrats are displaying,” he argued.
Maddow sarcastically responded:
ÈOn the eve of Christmas? It is Christmastime you guys, which is no time for an impeachment. I mean, any other time of the year this might be OK, but not, what is it, it’s 19 days before Christmas. This is the new objection, if there’s one rule that all Americans should be able to agree on, or Republicans at least have the decency to adhere to, it’s the rule that you don’t pursue impeachment proceedings against an American president in the holiday season, not while the Yule log burns in the hearth, not while the sleigh bells ring, not while people are decorating their Christmas trees. It’s just against the rules.È
Maddow then reminded viewers how it was House Republicans and Gingrich who, in December 1998, released the draft articles of impeachment against Clinton as he was “in the act of lighting the national Christmas tree.”
The then-GOP-controlled House voted on the impeachment on Dec. 19, the timing of which “the Republican Party now believes was just unconscionable,” Maddow concluded.
WASHINGTON ― There’s no documentary evidence that the FBI’s decision to open an investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia in 2016 was influenced by political bias, according to a Justice Department inspector general report released Monday. But the report said FBI attorneys failed to properly vet applications to monitor the communications of former campaign official Carter Page.
The report, titled “Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” examines applications that federal law enforcement officials made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during the 2016 campaign. It finds that the FBI “had an authorized purpose when it opened Crossfire Hurricane to obtain information about, or protect against, a national security threat or federal crime, even though the investigation also had the potential to impact constitutionally protected activity.”
The report also found “serious performance failures by the supervisory and non-supervisory agents with responsibility over the FISA applications” and that FBI personnel “fell far short of the requirement in FBI policy that they ensure that all factual statements in a FISA application are ‘scrupulously accurate.’”
The report raises broader issues with the FBI’s process for FISA applications.
“That so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations that was briefed to the highest levels within the FBI, and that FBI officials expected would eventually be subjected to close scrutiny, raised significant questions regarding the FBI chain of command’s management and supervision of the FISA process,” the report states.
Attorney General William Barr disagreed with a key aspect of the investigation: the FBI’s decision to launch “an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.”
U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is separately investigating the origins of the Trump investigation, said Monday in a statement that his office does not agree “with some fo the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.”
The U.S. government deficit rose by 12 percent in the first two months of the 2020 fiscal year, hitting $342 billion, according to new estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.
The deficit is on track to surpass $1 trillion in the 2020 fiscal year, which began on October 1. CBO has called the deficit path "unsustainable" and warns that the increasing debt burden will push down economic growth and could worsen future financial crises.
In the first two months of the fiscal year, CBO estimated that spending increased $49 billion to reach $813 billion, largely due to increases in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Defense Department. An increase in the cost of subsidizing education loans also contributed to the increased outlays.
Meanwhile, revenues only increased half as quickly, rising $12 billion in comparison to last year and reaching $471 billion.
Income and payroll tax revenue grew 4 percent. CBO noted that a 14 percent spike in corporate tax income was not representative of most corporate taxation, as most companies don't have to pay their taxes until December 16th.
The deficit has ballooned since President Trump took office, as the GOP tax law cut into revenues and bipartisan spending agreements pushed up funding for both defense and domestic priorities.
"Rachel Maddow on Friday demolished a new argument that Republicans and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) are putting forward against the impeachment of President Donald Trump"
LOL!!!!
The Dems say things like this as if the case for impeachment is rock solid and the GOP is desperately seeking to avoid it
Gingrich was merely pointing out how sad the Dem partisanship at the expense of the nation's interests is
as it turns out, impeachment will greatly help Trump's cause because the trial would be conducted by the GOP Senate and presided over by the Chief Justice Roberts
by the end, Americans will be disgusted by the Dems
"A group of more than 500 legal scholars has signed an open letter to Congress declaring that President Donald Trump “engaged in impeachable conduct” as the impeachment proceedings against him continue."
500, you say?
the legal scholar that testified to the contrary in Congress last week has received death threats and calls for him to be fired from his university
many legal scholars are cowards in the face of a vicious mob of liberal lunatics
"“We do not reach this conclusion lightly,” stated the letter, dated Friday."
yeah, well, ignorance is pretty heavy
"Trump “betrayed his oath of office” by attempting to pressure Ukrainian leaders to help him “distort” the 2020 election"
an investigation of the Bidens would reveal truth
truth is not a distortion
any chance the endless Dem witch hunt against Trump is distorting the election?
“at the direct expense of national security interests as determined by Congress.”
a little far-fetched, don't you think?
"“The Founders did not make impeachment available for disagreements over policy, even profound ones, nor for extreme distaste for the manner in which the President executes his office. Only ‘Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ warrant impeachment,” the scholars asserted."
OK, cool
no, impeachment is called for them
"The signees' message was spearheaded by the Protect Democracy Project, a nonprofit created in 2017 with the goal of holding the White House “accountable to the laws and longstanding practices that have protected our democracy.”"
ah, so they sought out these scholars to say what they wanted
"According to sworn testimony from U.S. foreign policy officials, Trump threatened to withhold millions of dollars in military aid in exchange for fake investigations"
there's no reason to say he wanted "fake" investigations
he wanted real ones
"that would help his reelection campaign,"
if Biden's family was engaged in influence-peddling during his vice-presidency, that should help Trump in any race against Biden
"and conditioned a White House meeting with Ukraine’s president"
among the most surreal of Dems notions is that agreeing to meet with someone is bribery
"on a public announcement of those fake investigations."
he was asking for real investigations
those investigations would be in our national interest since Biden is asking to be considered for our highest office
Americans need to know what Biden considers OK ethically
"In their letter, the legal experts said Trump’s “conduct is precisely the type of threat to our democracy that the Founders feared when they included the remedy of impeachment in the Constitution.”"
"precisely"?
these guys may be scholars but they aren't experts
meanwhile the Dem nightmare keeps getting worse and worse:
Will African Americans abandon the Democratic Party in 2020? Not a chance. Black voters still have deep ties to the party that finally agreed with Republicans on passing the Civil Rights Act in 1965 and continues to extol “multiculturalism” and black “identity” politics at every turn.
Every time members of the GOP appear to be coddling prejudice or failing to condemn racism against blacks, Democrats’ message that Republicans are the “enemy” of ethnic minorities resonates, dashing the GOP’s hopes of making gains with black voters. But in 2020, Donald Trump clearly has an opening with African Americans that Republicans have not seen in some time.
Despite condemning Trump publicly as a bigot, Democrats are privately worried about this.
They should be.
Two recent and highly reputable polls have registered an extraordinarily high “favorability” rating for Trump among black voters – about 34-35 percent, far exceeding the 8 percent of the black electorate that actually voted for Trump in 2016. That’s a huge jump from the 9 percent favorability rating among African Americans he earned in 2018 and the 13 percent he achieved earlier this year.
Of course, a 35 percent favorability rating may not translate into 35 percent support in the 2020 election, but it doesn’t have to. Even a substantial gain to double-digit support could provide the margin of difference in key swing states, such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, sealing Trump’s reelection.
Trump’s 8 percent of the black vote in 2016 was a notable improvement over Mitt Romney’s 6 percent in 2012 and John McCain’s 4 percent in 2008. But it’s a far cry from where Republicans once stood with African Americans nationally or at the state level, where a GOP candidate sometimes earns 25 percent or more of the black vote.
The last time a Republican presidential candidate achieved double-digit support from black voters came in the Nixon-Ford years (1968-1976). President Richard Nixon, much like Trump, saw appealing to black voters as critical to his election hopes.
With Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace fanning the segregationism flames, Nixon tried to appeal to moderates in both parties and among whites and blacks alike with a message of support for black economic aspirations and social mobility coupled with support for police and “law and order” in the face of riots and other forms of urban violence.
That crossover message didn’t give Nixon majority black support. But it did give him 16 percent of the black vote in 1972, which was unprecedented in the modern era. No Republican — except Jerry Ford in his losing bid to Jimmy Carter in 1976 — has ever come close to achieving that level of support after African Americans switched their support from Abraham Lincoln’s new, antislavery Republican Party to eventually supporting Democrats in the next century. Indeed, modern Republicans since Nixon and Ford have not even done much to try — until Trump, that is.
Standing outside the medial examiner’s office Monday, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo waited to escort the body of a fallen police sergeant to a funeral home. Just two days earlier, Sgt. Christopher Brewster was killed in the line of duty while responding to a domestic violence call.
But to Acevedo, the fatal incident could have been prevented if the suspect who police say pulled the trigger, Arturo Solis, never had access to a gun in the first place.
In blistering remarks to reporters outside the medical examiner’s office, Acevedo slammed Republican leaders for failing for months to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, specifically calling out Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Texas Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn for not supporting a provision that would prohibit dating partners convicted of domestic violence from possessing firearms — like Solis.
Acevedo accused McConnell, Cruz and Cornyn of being too afraid to support the provision because of retribution from the National Rifle Association.
“We all know in law enforcement that one of the biggest reasons that the Senate and Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are not … getting the Violence Against Women Act [reauthorized] is because the NRA doesn’t like the fact that we want to take firearms out of the hands of boyfriends who abuse their girlfriends,” Acevedo said Monday.
“And who killed our sergeant? A boyfriend abusing his girlfriend,” he added.
Solis, who is suspected of beating his girlfriend the night Brewster, 32, responded to the 911 call, has a past domestic violence conviction involving a partner in 2015, records show.
President Trump, who soundly beat the Dems in 2016, continues to have an approval rating that exceeds Sir Barack Obama at the same point in his presidency
you won't hear that in the mainstream media but you will here at TTF!
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_vs_president_obama_job_approval.html
Constitutional law expert and Harvard professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz harshly criticized the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump presented by the Democrats as unconstitutional and damaging to the rule of law in an op-ed on Tuesday.
Neither of the two articles - abuse of power and obstruction of Congress – presented by the Democrats “satisfies the express constitutional criteria for impeachment,” as both are not crimes or even mentioned in the Constitution.
This means that the Democrats are placing themselves above the Constitution, he wrote.
Dershowitz argued that both articles of impeachment “are so vague and open-ended that they could be applied in partisan fashion by a majority of the House against almost any president from the opposing party.”
He added this notion is exactly what the framers sought to avoid – a decision to impeach based on “the comparative strength of parties,” rather than on “innocence or guilt.”
Dershowitz stressed that the duty of legislators in the House should be “to support, defend and apply the Constitution as written, not as it can be stretched to fit the actions of an opposition or unpopular president.”
He went on to contend that if the House votes for impeachment on these articles, it should be declared “void,” because as Alexander Hamilton stated in Federalist 78, “no legislative act… contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.”
The Democratic party is dying from its hatred of President Trump. The impeachment fiasco is just the latest symptom. After weeks of testimony, Democrats have not been able to come up with any charges more concrete than ‘abuse of power’ and ‘obstruction of Congress.’ Abuse of power is certainly a serious thing — but only if it’s real. Partisans think that almost anything a president from the opposing party does amounts to an abuse of power. For impeachment to amount to anything more than partisan harassment, an actual crime ought to be found somewhere along the line: an act of wrongdoing objectively contrary to the law. Otherwise, any procedural or policy disagreement — or any pretext whatsoever — can be construed by a party out to get an enemy president as an ‘abuse of power.’
Adam Schiff discovered that ‘bribery’ was a crime that polled well in focus groups. But Democrats fell so far short of the mark of proving that bribery took place in President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine that they dared not even make the accusation in their articles of impeachment. Instead, they used abuse of power simply to refer to actions they didn’t like, and they whipped up a new non-crime, ‘obstruction of Congress’, in an act of desperation. But Trump’s refusal to let administration officials play along with the Democrats’ pantomime impeachment proceedings is simply a bold assertion of the Constitution’s separation of powers. Congress can demand testimony, but it needs the executive branch to enforce the demand. And the executive branch is constitutionally independent — it can exercise its own judgment about the legitimacy of the demand and whether it must be enforced. There is no crime, and while the majority in Congress may be piqued by executive defiance, pique makes a lousy basis for impeachment. If voters think that Congress is right to demand cooperation and the executive is wrong to refuse, then voters can take action by voting out the president or voting in a larger congressional majority. But Democrats don’t want Trump’s fate to be decided by voters in November 2020. They want it to be decided by Congress.
Now Democrats are going to regret getting their wish. Trump’s acquittal in a Senate trial is a virtual foregone conclusion, and there are several indications that the humiliating failure of impeachment will hurt Democrats in November 2020. Some moderate Democrats have been quietly pushing for a vote to censure the president rather than impeach him. They know that they risk alienating voters in battleground districts by voting for impeachment. But Nancy Pelosi’s leadership in the House is now more responsive to the activist wing of the Democratic party — the wing driven above all else by hatred for Donald Trump — than to the moderates who stand to pay the price for the activist left’s vendetta. Trump’s own poll numbers in key battleground states have risen as the impeachment process has dragged on without uncovering plain criminal wrongdoing. Instead of removing Trump from office or putting Senate Republicans from battleground states in a tough position in 2020, impeachment may wind up guaranteeing Trump’s re-election and endangering vulnerable House Democrats. The electorate in 2020, after all, will almost certainly be more Republican than the electorate in 2018 was — midterms are always better for the party in opposition to the White House, while presidential elections maximize turnout for everyone. That puts the congressional Democrats’ marginal victors from the midterms in serious jeopardy. Impeachment has only hurt them.
But the Democrats have a bigger problem. Their party has lost its identity, and only Trump-hatred keeps its factions — the McKinsey consultants and the Democratic Socialists of America — together. Republicans have been here before: in the late 1990s, the party was excessively defined by its opposition to President Bill Clinton, in place of any positive program or vision of its own. The result in 2000 was the nomination of a bland and apologetic Republican — George W. Bush — as party’s presidential contender. Republicans stood for nothing except not being Clinton, and Bush embodied that nothingness. He was a ‘compassionate conservative’ — implying that other conservatives were not compassionate — and he promised a bipartisan education-driven agenda. Right-leaning Republican voters, especially conservative Christians, stayed home in droves that November. As a result, he came within a Florida recount (or a single Supreme Court justice) of losing the election.
The GOP did not learn its lesson. In 2004, Bush seemed to be a victorious war president, and Karl Rove worked like the devil to get the missing ‘values voters’ from 2000 to come out and re-elect Dubya. But Bush’s re-election in an environment still in the shadow of 9/11 only disguised the continuing weakness of the Republican brand. The 2006 midterm elections, the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, and ultimately Donald Trump’s destruction of the old GOP and its champions in the 2016 primaries (and ever since) showed how weak and unappealing the GOP and its self-embarrassed conservatism had become. Only having another Democratic president to oppose — Barack Obama as the new Bill Clinton — gave the pre-Trump Republican party a jolt upright in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. But the 2012 presidential election showed that the party and its ideology were still basically a corpse.
Democrats will be just as dead if they continue to let Trump-haters define their party. Democrats are struggling to adjust to the 21st century, with superannuated 2020 front-runners such as Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders as a case in point. Sanders, nearly 80, is in fact the most forward-looking candidate: his socialism might be a relic of the 20th century, but he recognizes that this outmoded idea has a new chance today because what passes for capitalism is even more obviously past its expiration date. (Socialism’s decrepitude is something Americans haven’t had to think seriously about in a long time, while the senility of the quasi-capitalist, post-industrial economy is something they live with every day.) Joe Biden stakes his appeal on nostalgia for Barack Obama. Pete Buttigieg is a cipher. And Elizabeth Warren has managed the feat of failing to win over the Sanders vote even while seeming too far to the left economically to appeal to the center. But as philosophically fractured as the Democratic field may be, the activist base of the party is less concerned with choosing a clear direction than with hyperventilating about Trump.
Sanders is the most ideologically focused Democratic contender. But that focus and the devotion it inspires on the left are set to run headlong into the anti-Trump mania of the party’s other activists. There is a parallel here to Pat Buchanan’s position on the right in the 1990s. He pointed the GOP toward the nationalist future it would embrace under Trump, but in the Bill Clinton era his nationalist conservatism could never overcome those Republicans who preferred to squelch philosophical considerations and focus on partisan opposition to the Democratic president. Now Sanders and his supporters may find themselves in the paradoxical position of holding the Democratic Party’s future while being powerless to claim its nomination in the present. Anti-Trump Democrats will vote for Biden or Buttigieg (a young old man) just as fervently as anti-Clinton Republicans voted for Bob Dole in 1996. But just as that anti-Clinton vote wasn’t enough to elect Dole president, a merely anti-Trump vote will not do it for Biden or Buttigieg. And in Congress, the solidarity that Democrats derive from opposing Trump only masks the contradiction of an increasingly hard-left party led by establishment figures like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
Trump has already won the impeachment war, but it’s only the beginning of the defeats that are in store for Democrats if they continue to be a party defined by their rage against him.
An EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research poll finds Catholics open to re-electing President Trump.
A little less than one year out from the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump faces a potentially grueling reelection campaign, while 53% of American Catholics plan to vote for him or are open to the possibility. That is just one finding in the first-ever EWTN News/RealClear survey that focuses on America’s Catholics.
“The importance of polling Catholics before an election, and in general, is to understand where those who self-identify as Catholics stand on important issues both inside the Church and those that impact the Church from outside,” noted Dan Burke, president and COO of EWTN News. “In the case of an election, when Catholics clearly express beliefs contrary to the faith, it is vital for Catholic leaders to understand and seek to better inform and form the hearts and minds of Catholics who will shape the future of our nation.”
The purpose of this polling effort is to better understand the mindset of self-identified Catholics and to assess and report on the implications of those views to the Church and the nation.
Catholics have been a crucial voting bloc in every election of the last 60 years, and 2016 was no exception. The Donald Trump/Mike Pence ticket nearly split the Catholic vote with the Democratic ticket of Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine -- and Republicans will have a very difficult time regaining the White House without it
An EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research poll finds Catholics open to re-electing President Trump...53% of American Catholics plan to vote for him or are open to the possibility.
Trump has never been above 50% approval rating, its been a constant parade of scandals in the Trump administration that has bit by bit chipped away at his already dismal approval rating over the years. There isn't a forseeable event that could change the trajectory of Trump's decline, he's almost certain to lose the 2020 election (assuming the vote count isn't changed by Putin).
On top of that, indictment after indictment is being issued to Trump's staff and supporters and its very likely enough Republicans will join Democrats to convict Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors in the Senate.
The odds against Trump being in office after 2020 are very, very slim indeed and yet delusional Wyatt/Regina are talking about "Dem's nightmare", lol!
First men go on trial under Nigeria's anti-gayness laws
- All 47 men deny offence of same-sex displays of affection, which carries 10-year jail term
Over the years Wyatt and Regina Hardiman have regularly praised this kind of persecution of harmless gay people and lamented that its not happening to this degree in the States.
They are truly evil people.
There's a reason why Trump is begging one foreign country after another to corrupt the 2020 presidential election - Trump knows he's going down to a humiliating defeat if its fair and free.
The conservative/Republican debate strategy is simple:
Given the apparent situation, make up whatever story is most favourable to you and what you want and most damaging to those you oppose and what they want and then adamantly, loudly, and frequently insist your story is unconditionally true.
Conservatives like Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous don't believe in good faith debate. They see society as a contest to see who can dominate whom to one's exclusive benefit. You can see it in how they for months angrily posted about how Republican's supreme court was going to punish gays for opposing the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Like the pharisees, Wyatt and Regina take delight in having manipulated the letter of the law to defile the spirit of the law and democracy.
n an interview with NBC News, Attorney General William Barr vociferously contested the findings of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Russian investigation. Barr seemed displeased by the way the Horowitz report debunked right-wing talking points about a “deep state” conspiracy against Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The Horowitz report didn’t exactly give the FBI a clean bill of health. It found “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the initial application sent to the FISA court that set the stage for the surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz came to the conclusion that “the surveillance of Carter Page continued even as the FBI gathered information that weakened the assessment of probable cause and made the FISA applications less accurate.” This is a genuine civil liberties violation, one that deserves universal condemnation.
Unfortunately, Barr went well beyond the legitimate evidence of FBI misconduct to spin the familiar Trumpian fantasia of an Obama administration conspiracy to spy on the Trump campaign. This florid story flatly contradicts the findings of the Horowitz report. Asked about Russian interference in the 2016 election, Barr suggested that the Obama administration’s actions were far worse. Barr told NBC, “I think probably from a civil liberties standpoint, the greatest danger to our free system is that the incumbent government used the apparatus of the state, principally the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence agencies, both to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.”
Barr’s words were rightly castigated by many commentators as partisan mudslinging. As Adam Serwer of The Atlantic noted, Barr’s complaint is ironic given that Trump is currently being impeached for acts that amount to orchestrating interference in the 2020 election. “Not only does Barr know [what he accuses Obama of] did not happen, but it also reveals that he completely understands why Trump’s extortion of Ukraine is impeachable but does not care,” Serwer tweeted. “If Barr were consistent, he would argue Obama using the FBI to interfere with the election (didn’t happen) is fine just like Trump extorting Ukraine is fine, because the president can do what he wants. That’s not his position. His position is *Trump* can do whatever he wants.”
Writing in The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin argued that Barr’s “false—deliberately false—assertions were jaw-dropping.” Among those false statements were claims that the Russia investigation generated only “exculpatory information” and was “based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by an irresponsible press.”
Contrary to Barr’s claims, even though the Mueller report found no conclusive evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, it certainly documented many examples of highly irregular contact. Beyond that, leading figures of that campaign like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone have been convicted of serious crimes, which argues against the narrative Barr is presenting of innocents being targeted by a witch hunt.
Barr undercut the Horowitz report in another way, by saying that it will be supplanted by the findings of another investigation done under his own direction by US Attorney John Durham. Unlike the inspector general, Durham isn’t working for an independent body at arm’s length from the White House.
With his partisan bile, Barr is doing his best to whittle away the impact of the Horowitz report. This is regrettable even beyond the fact that the attorney general shouldn’t be using his position to provide political cover for the president.
Trump used congressionally approved defensive aid for Ukraine for his own personal benefit to corrupt the upcoming election.
Senate Republicans will have a critical choice to make, will they stand with American democracy or for a man trying to become dictator.
Any Senate Republicans in close races in 2020 will have a very tough go of it if they refuse to stand against the dictator Trump and for continued American democracy.
The Guardian headline reads: “DOJ Internal watchdog report clears FBI of illegal surveillance of Trump adviser.”
If the report released Monday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz constitutes a “clearing” of the FBI, never clear me of anything. What a clown show the Trump-Russia investigation was.
Like the much-ballyhooed report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Horowitz report is a Rorschach test, in which partisans will find what they want to find.
Much of the press is concentrating on Horowitz’s conclusion that there was no evidence of “political bias or improper motivation” in the FBI’s probe of Donald Trump’s Russia contacts, an investigation Horowitz says the bureau had “authorized purpose” to conduct.
Horowitz uses phrases like “serious performance failures,” describing his 416-page catalogue of errors and manipulations as incompetence rather than corruption. This throws water on the notion that the Trump investigation was a vast frame-up.
However, Horowitz describes at great length an FBI whose “serious” procedural problems and omissions of “significant information” in pursuit of surveillance authority all fell in the direction of expanding the unprecedented investigation of a presidential candidate (later, a president).
Officials on the “Crossfire Hurricane” Trump-Russia investigators went to extraordinary, almost comical lengths to seek surveillance authority of figures like Trump aide Carter Page. In one episode, an FBI attorney inserted the words “not a source” in an email he’d received from another government agency. This disguised the fact that Page had been an informant for that agency, and had dutifully told the government in real time about being approached by Russian intelligence. The attorney then passed on the email to an FBI supervisory special agent, who signed a FISA warrant application on Page that held those Russian contacts against Page, without disclosing his informant role.
Likewise, the use of reports by ex-spy/campaign researcher Christopher Steele in pursuit of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority had far-reaching ramifications.
Not only did obtaining a FISA warrant allow authorities a window into other Trump figures with whom Page communicated, they led to a slew of leaked “bombshell” news stories that advanced many public misconceptions, including that a court had ruled there was “probable cause” that a Trump figure was an “agent of a foreign power.”
There are too many to list in one column, but the Horowitz report show years of breathless headlines were wrong. Some key points:
The so-called “Steele dossier” was, actually, crucial to the FBI’s decision to seek secret surveillance of Page.
Press figures have derided the idea that Steele was crucial to the FISA application, with some insisting it was only a “small part” of the application. Horowitz is clear:
We determined that the Crossfire Hurricane team’s receipt of Steele’s election reporting on September 19, 2016 played a central and essential role in the FBI’s and Department’s decision to seek the FISA order.
The report describes how, prior to receiving Steele’s reports, the FBI General Counsel (OGC) and/or the National Security Division’s Office of Intelligence (OI) wouldn’t budge on seeking FISA authority. But after getting the reports, the OGC unit chief said, “receipt of the Steele reporting changed her mind on whether they could establish probable cause.”
Meanwhile, the OI unit chief said Steele’s reports were “what kind of pushed it over the line.” There’s no FISA warrant without Steele.
Horowitz ratifies the oft-denounced “Nunes memo.”
Democrats are not going to want to hear this, since conventional wisdom says former House Intelligence chief Devin Nunes is a conspiratorial evildoer, but the Horowitz report ratifies the major claims of the infamous “Nunes memo.”
As noted, Horowitz establishes that the Steele report was crucial to the FISA process, even using the same language Nunes used (“essential”). He also confirms the Nunes assertion that the FBI double-dipped in citing both Steele and a September 23, 2016 Yahoo! news story using Steele as an unnamed source. Horowitz listed the idea that Steele did not directly provide information to the press as one of seven significant “inaccuracies or omissions” in the first FISA application.
Horowitz also verifies the claim that Steele was “closed for cause” for talking to the media, i.e. officially cut off as a confidential human source to the FBI. He shows that Steele continued to talk to Justice Official Bruce Ohr before and after Steele’s formal relationship with the FBI ended. His report confirms that the Steele information had not been corroborated when the FISA application was submitted, another key Nunes point.
There was gnashing of teeth when Nunes first released his memo in January, 2018. The press universally crapped on his letter, with a Washington Post piece calling it a “joke” and a “sham.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed Nunes for the release of a “bogus” document, while New York Senator Chuck Schumer said the memo was intended to “sow conspiracy theories and attack the integrity of federal law enforcement.” Many called for his removal as Committee chair.
The Horowitz report says all of that caterwauling was off-base. It also undercuts many of the assertions made in a ballyhooed response letter by Nunes counterpart Adam Schiff, who described the FBI’s “reasonable basis” for deeming Steele credible. The report is especially hostile to Schiff’s claim that the FBI “provided additional information obtained through multiple independent sources that corroborated Steele’s reporting.”
In fact, far from confirming the Steele material, the FBI over time seems mainly to have uncovered more and more reasons to run screaming from Steele, to wit:
The “Steele dossier” was “Internet rumor,” and corroboration for the pee tape story was “zero.”
The Steele report reads like a pile of rumors surrounded by public information pulled off the Internet, and the Horowitz report does nothing to dispel this notion.
At the time the FBI submitted its first FISA application, Horowitz writes, it had “corroborated limited information in Steele’s election reporting, and most of that was publicly available information.” Horowitz says of Steele’s reports: “The CIA viewed it as ‘internet rumor.’”
Worse (and this part of the story should be tattooed on the heads of Russia truthers), the FBI’s interviews of Steele’s sources revealed Steele embellished the most explosive parts of his report.
The “pee tape” story, which inspired countless grave headlines of Russian “sexual blackmail” and plunged the Trump presidency into crisis before it began, was, this source said, based a “conversation that [he/she] had over beers,” with the sexual allegations made… in “jest”!
Steele in his report said the story had been “confirmed” by senior, Western hotel staff, but the actual source said it was all “rumor and speculation,” never confirmed. In fact, charged by Steele to find corroboration, the source could not: corroboration was “zero,” writes Horowitz.
Meanwhile the Steele assertions that Russians had a kompromat file on Hillary Clinton, and that there was a “well-developed conspiracy of coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russians, relied on a source Steele himself disparaged as an “egoist” and “boaster” who “may engage in some embellishment.” This was known to the FBI at the start, yet they naturally failed to include this info in the warrant application, one of what Horowitz described as “17 significant errors or omissions” in the FISA application.
Finally, when the FBI conducted an investigation into Steele’s “work-related performance,” they heard from some that he was “smart,” and a “person of integrity,” and “if he reported it, he believed it.”
So far, so good. But Horowitz also wrote:
Their notes stated: “[d]emonstrates lack of self-awareness, poor judgment;” “[k]een to help” but “underpinned by poor judgment;” “Judgment: pursuing people with political risk but no intel value;” “[d]idn’t always exercise great judgment- sometimes [he] believes he knows best;” and “[r]eporting in good faith, but not clear what he would have done to validate.”
The Crossfire Hurricane team got all of this, but, again, didn’t pass it upstairs or include any of it in its warrant application.
I’ve written about how reporters used sleight of hand to get the Steele dossier into print without putting it through a vetting process. What Horowitz describes is worse: a story about bad journalism piled on bad journalism, balanced on a third layer of wrong reporting.
Steele in his “reports” embellished his sources’ quotes, played up nonexistent angles, invented attributions, and ignored inconsistencies. The FBI then transplanted this bad reporting in the form of a warrant application and an addendum to the Intelligence Assessment that included the Steele material, ignoring a new layer of inconsistencies and red flags its analysts uncovered in the review process.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.
The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.
As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
“Put your own narrow interests ahead of the nation's, flout the law, violate the trust given to you by the American people and recklessly disregard the oath of office, and you risk losing your job.”
USA TODAY’s Editorial Board wrote those words two decades ago when it endorsed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat. Now, in graver circumstances with America’s system of checks and balances at stake, they apply to another president facing impeachment, Republican Donald Trump.
The current board has made no secret of our low regard for Trump’s character and conduct. Yet, as fellow passengers on the ship of state, we had hoped the captain would succeed. And, until recently, we believed that impeachment proceedings would be unhealthier for an already polarized nation than simply leaving Trump’s fate up to voters next November.
Trump leaves Democrats little choice
Unless public sentiment shifts sharply in the days and weeks ahead, that is the likely outcome of this process — impeachment by the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives followed by acquittal in the GOP-controlled Senate. So why bother? Because Trump’s egregious transgressions and stonewalling have given the House little choice but to press ahead with the most severe sanction at its disposal.
Clinton was impeached by the House (but not removed by the Senate) after he tried to cover up an affair with a White House intern. Trump used your tax dollars to shake down a vulnerable foreign government to interfere in a U.S. election for his personal benefit.
In his thuggish effort to trade American arms for foreign dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, Trump resembles not so much Clinton as he does Richard Nixon, another corrupt president who tried to cheat his way to reelection.
This isn’t partisan politics as usual. It is precisely the type of misconduct the Framers had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton supported a robust presidency but worried about “a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper” coming to power. Impeachment, Hamilton wrote, was a mechanism to protect the nation “from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”
Approve articles of impeachment
Both articles of impeachment drafted by the House Judiciary Committee warrant approval:
►Abuse of power. Testimony before the House Intelligence Committee produced overwhelming evidence that Trump wanted Ukraine’s new president to announce investigations into the Bidens and a debunked theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election.
To pressure the Ukrainian leader, Trump withheld a White House meeting and nearly $400 million in congressionally approved security aid, funding that was released only after an unnamed official blew the whistle.
To former national security adviser John Bolton, the months-long scheme was the equivalent of a “drug deal.” To Bolton's former aide Fiona Hill, it was a "domestic political errand" that "is all going to blow up." To Bill Taylor, the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, “it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.” And to Ukrainian soldiers, fighting to fend off Russian aggression in the eastern part of their country, the money was a matter of life and death...
...►Obstruction of Congress. Trump has met the impeachment investigation with outright and unprecedented defiance. The White House has withheld documents, ordered executive branch agencies not to comply with subpoenas and directed administration officials not to testify.
Allowing this obstruction to stand unchallenged would put the president above the law and permanently damage Congress’ ability to investigate misconduct by presidents of either party.
The president’s GOP enablers continue to place power and party ahead of truth and country. Had any Democratic president behaved the way Trump has — paying hush money to a porn star, flattering dictators and spewing an unending stream of falsehoods — there’s no doubt congressional Republicans would have tried to run him out of the White House in a New York minute. Twenty-seven Republicans who voted to impeach or convict Clinton remain in Congress. If they continue to defend Trump, history will record their hypocrisy.
Our support for Trump’s impeachment by the House — we’ll wait for the Senate trial to render a verdict on removal from office — has nothing to do with policy differences. We have had profound disagreements with the president on a host of issues, led by his reckless deficits and inattention to climate change, both of which will burden generations to come.
Policy differences are not, however, grounds for impeachment. Constitutional violations are.
Bill Clinton should be impeached and stand trial “because the charges are too serious and the evidence amassed too compelling” to ignore, the Editorial Board wrote in December 1998.
The same can be said this December about the allegations facing Donald Trump. Only much more so.
Both articles of impeachment drafted by the House Judiciary Committee are bogus:
►Abuse of power.
A completely subjective and utterly unprovable charge because it is utterly undefined. Such a case could be made against any President. Whether their actions are appropriate are determined by voters, not the opposition party in the legislature.
►Obstruction of Congress.
Because he didn't comply with a politically motivated kangaroo court? Presidents have regularly defied subpoenas by Congress. Again, such a case could be made against any President. These disputes have always be settled by the courts. Trump has never defied a court ruling.
The fact that Dems have resorted to these dubious and vague charges demonstrates clearly they could not prove any laws were broken.
Sad.
House Democrats' public hearings have thus far failed to move the public majority to support impeachment of President Donald Trump, according to Monmouth University polling.
Before the public hearings moved to the House Judiciary Committee this week, just 45% of Americans backed the impeachment and removal of Trump, while a majority remains against it (50%).
"Opinion on impeachment has been rock steady since news of the Ukraine call first broke," Monmouth pollster Patrick Murray said. "Any small shifts we are seeing now are likely to be statistical noise."
The numbers in previous Monmouth polls are nearly identical.
November poll results:
51% against impeachment and removal.
44% for impeachment and removal.
Late September poll results:
52% against.
44% for.
It’s official. Partisan Democrats in Washington, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (Calif.) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), have filed articles of impeachment against President Trump.
During their announcement this week, Nadler and Schiff recklessly justified charges of obstruction of Congress and abuse of power. They’ve done so based on testimony from second- and thirdhand sources, assumptions, presumptions and political opinions provided by the nation’s most liberal law professors. Only one Democrat throughout this process, George Washington University Law professor Jonathan Turley, called for due process during the inquiry. He did so not to protect President Trump, but to protect the country.
“There is no good time for an impeachment, but this process concerns the constitutional right to hold office in this term, not the next,” Turley stated during congressional testimony. “It is wrong because this is not how an American president should be impeached. For two years, members of this Committee have declared that criminal and impeachable acts were established for everything from treason to conspiracy to obstruction. However, no action was taken to impeach. Suddenly, just a few weeks ago, the House announced it would begin an impeachment inquiry and push for a final vote in just a matter of weeks.”
But rushing is the only way to get this done and to put a black mark of impeachment on President Trump before 2020. Process be damned.
“The argument, ‘Why don’t you just wait?’, amounts to this: ‘Why don’t you just let him cheat in one more election? Why not let him cheat just one more time? Why not let him have foreign help one more time?’ That is what that argument amounts to,” Schiff argued during the announcement of charges on Tuesday morning.
With this statement Schiff is again saying, with much evidence to the contrary, President Trump is a stooge of Russia who cheated during the 2016 presidential election. Not only that, he’s bound to do so again in 2020. To say the vote of any American is in jeopardy if President Trump isn’t impeached does an extraordinary disservice to the country and sets a dangerous precedent for any president, Republican or Democrat, in the future. It’s a justification with zero factual basis and yet Schiff used it anyway. President Trump received more than 63 million votes and won the Electoral College through a savvy campaign, not because he cheated with the Russians. Former special counsel Robert Mueller, someone Schiff regularly praised as credible and honorable, proved this after two years of a special counsel investigation.
“The investigation did not establish that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” the Mueller report states.
Impeachment will further tear the country apart. Schiff knows it and is moving forward anyway. Pelosi certainly knows this fact because she admitted as much.
“I’m not for impeachment. This is news. I’m going to give you some news right now because I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it,” Pelosi told The Washington Post in March.
Ironically, as Schiff continues his charade, he’s the one doing Russia’s bidding. This of course is exactly the accusation he repeatedly lodges against President Trump. In addition to disproving Democrat claims of “collusion,” the Mueller report also gave insight into the goals of Russian agents during the 2016 election.
“The Internet Research Agency (IRA) carried out the earliest Russian interference operations identified by the investigation—a social media campaign designed to provoke and amplify political and social discord in the United States. The IRA was based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and received funding from Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and companies he controlled. Prigozhin is widely reported to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin,” the final Mueller report states.
In other words, the goal of the Russians was to pit Americans against each other and to further stir political unrest in the United States. The constant “resistance” to President Trump and the continued efforts to delegitimize his election does just that.
Democrats continue to argue impeachment of President Trump isn’t political but rather a constitutional duty. That is a lie. The left has been leading the charge on impeachment since the day Trump was elected. That effort hasn’t stopped. In the meantime, Russia laughs as its mission to sow discord becomes increasingly successful.
RCP Average 11/21 - 12/10 -- 47.2 46.2 Yes/Remove +1.0
Economist/YouGov 12/7 - 12/10 1209 RV 47 43 Yes/Remove +4
Quinnipiac 12/4 - 12/9 1553 RV 45 51 No +6
Politico/Morning Consult 12/6 - 12/8 1994 RV 50 41 Yes/Remove +9
Monmouth 12/4 - 12/8 838 RV 44 51 No +7
CNN 11/21 - 11/24 910 RV 50 45 Yes/Remove +5
Astute readers will note Monmouth uses the smallest sample
Inspector General Michael Horowitz finally damned the FBI during his testimony Wednesday when he said he would be “skeptical” that there was anything accidental in the egregious catalog of errors the FBI committed in its spying operation on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
It took five hours of questioning about the FBI’s motivations but Horowitz, prudent and impartial as he is, finally delivered the money shot.
Asked by Republican Sen. Mike Crapo if the 17 “significant errors or omissions” he found in the FBI’s surveillance operation could possibly be “accidental,” Horowitz said: “I would be skeptical.”
He went on to explain “the answers we got were not satisfactory [so] we’re left trying to understand how could all these errors have occurred over a nine-month period on three teams hand-picked, on . . . the highest-profile case of the FBI, going to the very top of the organization, involving a presidential campaign.”
Horowitz described the conduct of the FBI as “inexplicable” when its operatives bent the rules to try to prove Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia.
But sadly the FBI’s conduct is all too explicable. It can be explained by the proven anti-Trump bias of its personnel, hand-picked to run Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI operation to spy on the Trump campaign using salacious opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Horowitz’s testimony confirms suspicions that the Russia-collusion hoax amounted to an attempted coup against Trump and laid the groundwork for impeachment.
“It’s Trump today,” Sen. Lindsay Graham said in a blistering opening statement before he began questioning Horowitz. “It could be you or me tomorrow . . . if they can do this to the candidate for the president of the United States, what could they do to you? The Trump presidency will end in a year or five years . . . but we can’t write this off as being just about one man or one event. We’ve got to understand how off the rails the system got.”
The Horowitz report is the absolute opposite of ‘vindication’ for Jim Comey’s FBI
As evidence of FBI motivation for coming after Trump, Graham read aloud text messages between lead agent Peter Stzrok and lead lawyer Lisa Page.
March 3, 2016, Page: “God, Trump is a loathsome human.”
Strzok: ‘‘OMG, he’s an idiot.”
July 16, Page: “Wow, Donald Trump is an enormous douche.”
July 19, Stzrok: “Trump is a disaster.”
Aug. 8, Page: “He’s not ever going to become president, right?”
Strzok: “No. No, he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
Aug. 15, Strzok: “I want to believe the path you threw out in [their then-boss Andrew McCabe’s] office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Aug. 26, Strzok: “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could smell the Trump supporters.”
These were the people in charge of the Trump spying operation.
Horowitz was not willing to speculate about their motivations. But Graham gave it a shot: “They were on a mission not to protect Trump, but to protect us from Trump . . . to protect all of us smelly people from Donald Trump.”
This was the FBI run by James “J. Edgar” Comey who sees himself as a superior moral being. Maybe it was true once. But he lost his way. Terrible things happened on his watch.
After Horowitz’s testimony, the conclusions are inescapable.
The FBI knowingly and fraudulently obtained warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. In one instance, an FBI lawyer doctored an e-mail to trick the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into authorizing the surveillance. The FBI used the Steele Dossier, a farcical farrago of salacious stories about Trump cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow, as a “central and essential” justification in its lengthy wiretap of Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The FBI knew the dossier, written by discredited former British spy Christopher Steele, had been paid for by Clinton’s campaign, and knew there were “significant questions about [its] reliability,” yet never told the court.
This is all in Horowitz’s report and you would have to be deaf dumb and blind not to acknowledge a deliberate campaign to damage Trump.
It is just not in Horowitz’s job description to make that leap. He properly says that his report lays out the evidence and “people are free to consider, evaluate what they think people’s motivations were.”
When it comes to FBI misconduct in applying for warrants to wiretap Carter Page, Horowitz wasn’t certain whether it was “sheer gross incompetence that led to this versus intentional misconduct and anything in between.”
“What the motivations are I can’t tell you as I sit here today because I don’t have enough evidence to reach that conclusion.”
Either way, it was shocking.
We owe a debt of gratitude to then-House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes, maligned by Democrat patsies as a hick dairy farmer when he wrote his February 2018 memo about the FBI’s misconduct. He has been thoroughly vindicated by Horowitz.
But his Democratic counterpart, current chairman Adam Schiff, shamelessly continues to defend the sham and malign Nunes. He even subpoenaed and published Nunes’ phone records gratuitously in the impeachment inquiry last week.
Last year, Schiff read aloud from the Steele Dossier during a House hearing into allegations of Trump’s Russia collusion. He pretended Steele was a credible figure.
Schiff is a darling of the Beltway media, but a liability to the Democrats, making them look like two-bit scam artists acting in bad faith.
His boss, Nancy Pelosi is as bad. Every chance she gets she says, “all roads lead to Putin,” when it comes to Trump. It is the very basis of her impeachment gambit, but the Horowitz report has exposed it as another tawdry sham.
the Dems' impeachment of Trump on vague and dubious charges show they found no evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor like bribery
it's the biggest mistake Dems have made yet!
but the election is still 11 months away
they are sure to provide more hilarity before it's all over
When Joe Biden was America’s point man for Ukraine policy, an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, started paying his son Hunter $50,000 a month to sit on its board. By Hunter’s own account — and that of another board member — Hunter would never have been offered this lucrative gig had he not been the son of the U.S. vice-president.
This much is beyond dispute: By taking the job at Burisma, Hunter exploited his father’s public power for private gain in a manner that undermined U.S. interests, according to several Obama-administration officials. The State Department’s George Kent testified last month that Hunter’s role at Burisma risked creating “the perception of a conflict of interest” that could undermine America’s standing when it pushed for anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine. Kent says he raised this concern with the vice-president’s staff in 2015. Another Obama-administration official, Amos Hochstein, says he raised the issue with Joe Biden himself that same year.
Whether Hunter’s influence peddling actually did undermine U.S. interests is unclear. But his work in Ukraine is unquestionably undermining his father’s campaign. President Trump sees Burisma as the “emails” of 2020: A story that energizes the GOP base and conveys a vague impression of Democratic corruption to swing voters. Thus Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine will be a fixture of Republican messaging.
For all these reasons, if Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee in 2020, he will be confronted with questions about his son’s role at Burisma on a near-daily basis. That much has been clear for months now. Yet Biden has not bothered to prepare credible, coherent answers to those questions. In fact, the Democratic front-runner can’t even respond to the most predictable queries on the issue without flying into a barely concealed rage.
This became apparent at a campaign event in Iowa last week, where a voter suggested Biden had “sold access to the presidency” by sending his son to work for Burisma, just as Trump has done. The voter’s narrative was inaccurate in multiple respects. But the voter’s perspective was an eminently reasonable one given America’s media environment. Biden cut the man off before he could turn his comments into a question, but the query implicit in the voter’s remarks was straightforward and should not have been difficult for a competent presidential candidate to answer: How are you any different from Trump on the issue of personal corruption?
But it was difficult for Biden. The Democratic front-runner did not politely tell the man that — while his concerns about corruption were valid — he had actually been badly misinformed. Biden did not patiently explain how Hunter’s conduct differs from that of the Trump children or how he would differ from Trump in his handling of potential conflicts of interest as president. Instead, Biden called the voter a “damn liar,” challenged him to a push-up contest, and appeared to implicitly mock his potential constituent for being overweight. In between these Trump-esque displays of strained machismo, Biden made the patently false claim that “no one has said my son did anything wrong.” In truth, not only have many, many people said Hunter Biden was wrong to take the job at Burisma, Hunter is himself one of those people.
His father held up no better in an interview with “Axios on HBO” on Sunday night. Mike Allen asked, “What’s your understanding of what your son was doing [for Burisma] for an extraordinary amount of money?”
Biden replied, “I don’t know what he was doing. I know he was on the board. I found out he was on the board after he was on the board, and that was it.”
“You’ve had a lot of time. Isn’t this something you want to get to the bottom of?,” Allen countered.
“No,” Biden said, “because I trust my son.”
In other words, Biden’s message on Burisma boils down to “I don’t know what Hunter did, but I know he did nothing wrong because I have personal trust in my son. Ergo, if Hunter does something, it is by definition not wrong because a trustworthy person did it.”
Pressed further, Biden attempted to pivot away from the subject, saying, “If you want to talk about problems, ya know, let’s talk about Trump’s family.” This would have been a sound enough diversionary tactic, but Biden did not proceed with a litany of the first family’s indiscretions. Instead, he simply stopped speaking — having ostensibly failed to prepare any talking points on the subject — and then, after a pause, said merely, “I mean, c’mon.” Biden began saying something else but once again found himself bereft of words and thus pretended to laugh while saying contemptuously of the media, “You guys are amazing.”
One might describe this exchange as Trump-like. But then Trump is actually more eloquent than this. The president will say a lot of dishonest and ridiculous things when asked hard questions in interviews, but when Trump tries to derail an interrogation with “whataboutism,” he does not typically have trouble generating more than one sentence on the subject he’d prefer to discuss.
By itself, Biden’s tolerance for his son’s garden-variety influence peddling may be forgivable. And the fact that Hunter’s activities provide Trump with a potent attack line may not indict Joe’s “electability”; given that Trump is not constrained by reality, he should have little trouble engineering defamatory attacks against any of the Democratic candidates.
But the fact that Biden still can’t answer reasonable questions about his candidacy’s chief liability is completely disqualifying. To nominate him despite that fact would be akin to employing a waiter who takes offense at being asked, “What are tonight’s dinner specials?” As the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer, reciting polite, polished talking points about Hunter and Burisma will be a core responsibility of Biden’s job. And by all appearances, he is unable or unwilling to do that.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said Wednesday that his lengthy investigation into the origins of the probe into Russia and President Trump’s campaign didn’t vindicate the former FBI chief James Comey — or anyone else.
“I think the activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this,” Horowitz said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Russia probe when asked by GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham about Comey’s comments that Horowitz’s report cleared him of wrongdoing.
You can sure tell by all the long, boring cut&pastes by Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous they're scared of what I post and scared of others reading it.
If a religion has a belief in hell then that religion is itself a moral abomination. Our instinctive morals tell us that when someone commits a wrong, the punishment must be proportional to the crime or the punishment is injust - we don't chop off a child's hand for stealing a chocolate bar. No finite human action can be justifiably punished by eternal torture. Please put fairness first.
As we near the one year Crismas anniversary to my awakening to the fact that for two decades Wyatt and Regina Hardiman have argued in bad faith with me while I have been sincerely trying to address their every objection. As you may recall I got extremely angry and wound up about that for two or three months, these two pretending to be my moral superior but instead playing the troll for two decades and by their own admission intentionally posting outrageous hate to upset specifically me.
For those of you who have followed along with most of my intermittent posts in the past several months know, I've completely turned the tables on Wyatt and Regina now that I know their entire debate strategy is insincere and solely intended to derail good faith debate and the search for truth. Wyatt and Regina are now afraid to respond to me and usually won't even post any time I'm making posts, preferring to wait for one of the weeks long time periods where I am not posting on teach the facts.
How did I come to so completely dominate the debate on morality and global warming with Wyatt and Regina? By recognizing that they were insincere and they were trying to obscure rather than find out the truth and by making my highest priority maximizing the happiness for all in and equal and fair way.
So, dear Teach The Facts readers, please help me demonstrate to others how I went from being a dupe sincerely trying to answer Wyatt and Regina's every bad faith argument to making them afraid to try to debate me at all. Please send a link to these three Teach The Fact threads (I've included my suggested wording template) which started it all to anyone you know with an interest in morality and lgbt people:
"Religion never has and never will unite the world. Humanity faces existential threats from Human Caused Global Climate Warming to nuclear holocaust. We need a united humanity to address these threats and will only have it if all religious willingly subordinate themselves to the highest moral imperative of society - "To have the best society we can, society's highest priority has to be maximizing the happiness for all in an equal and fair way."
http://vigilance.teachthefacts.org/2018/12/flynn-free-trump-continues-to-march-off.html#comments
http://vigilance.teachthefacts.org/2018/12/drowning-accomplished.html#comments
http://vigilance.teachthefacts.org/2019/01/moco-hunkers-down.html#comments
To access the #200 and higher comments, go to the bottom of the blue page and click on th red "Post a comment" icon. When the white comment window page comes up, click on the "Newer" icon.
I know most are too busy to read all this (the anonymous religious conservative's lengthy posts you can mostly ignore as they are designed to bore you to indecision and obscure), but I think this is important to making the world a better place so please pass on these links to anyone you know with an interest in LGBT issues and morality. Morality is the ground which greatly favours LGBT people. As I did in the comment threads above, you can't lose with an anti-gay conservative when you put the only rational moral code first - "Do whatever you want, but harm no one"."
Trump used for personal gain 500 million in congressionally approved taxpayer funding for Ukraine to defend it itself from the United States of America's foremost adversary. Trump broke both American and Ukrainian law demanding that Ukraine announce a fake investigation intended to turn the 2020 election for him against the candidate he fears most, Joe Biden.
Trump has lied and claimed that "Article II of the American Constitution let's me do anything I want." - he believes as president he has absolute power like a king or a god and can shoot someone on fifth avenue and nothing can be legally done about it. If you've ignored Trump's 13,000 + other lies in the last three years, you best pay heed to this one if you want America to continue as a democracy.
30-40% of Americans are unconditionally devoted to Trump, they will insist any lie he tells is truth. He could shoot someone on fifth avenue and Wyatt and Regina would post "Oh, every president has done that, its nothing to worry about. Vote Trump!"
The United States is in danger of losing its democracy to those who want to help Trump become the first dictator of America - Moscow Mitch McConnell, corrupt Attorney General William Barr, modern day Benedict Arnold Lyndsey Graham, propaganda ministers Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan. Not to mention Tony Perkins and his evangelical anti-gay zealots like Wyatt and Regina.
You Republican Senators, you can take the chance of refusing to convict this existential threat to democracy based on the likely fact that he will lose badly at the election box in 2020 but keep in mind you are putting the very future of democracy in America at risk of becoming a Trump dictatorship. Read the decades of psychological research that show this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
Remove from office the man trying to rig the 2020 election, don't risk your democracy by giving him a second shot at dictatorship.
My American friends, please do not take the chance, do not put Trump above the law.
You can't have both Trump and the rule of law.
In this online book, read about the decades of psychological research that show how right wing authoritarians help overturn democracies and put dictators like Trump in power
The same link is in Cut&paste into your browser form in my above posts.
The Inspector General's report on the origins of the investigation into Russia/Trump Campaign collusion found conclusively it was all based on solid evidence and standard law enforcement practice well executed.
The exhaustive report found no evidence of bias against Trump or Republicans in either the initiation of the investigation or its execution. In fact the Inspector General found there were even more FBI agents expressing support for Trump to win the election than than for Hillary.
What really needs to be investigated is why this legally pointless sham investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server was instigated. 8 committee investigations and millions of dollars spent for years and not one shred of evidence of wrongdoing was found on Hillary Clinton.
Obviously if any investigation was motivated out of political bias, it was the one into Hillary's emails which of course turned up absolutely nothing.
Republicans demanded Hillary be jailed merely because it was theoretically possible that her private server had been listened into by the Russians.
And yet Trump uses an unsecured cell phone every day to discuss classified information of the utmost importance to American security with every one knowing all foreign adversaries can easily and are listening in.
There's the massive Republican hypocrisy and double standards for you. They chant for Hillary to be locked up just because its theoretically possible Russia might have gotten a tidbit of info from her server and they look the other way when day after day Trump gives classified information to Russia and other foreign adversaries.
Don't forget when Trump met with Soviet Minister Lavarov in the Oval office he spilled critical classified information that destroyed a critical intelligence source the United States and Israel had.
Similarly, the United States had to pull out the greatest intelligence asset they ever had in Russia, who even got pictures of what was on Putin's desk, because they knew it was likely Trump would reveal who it was and get him killed.
Trump has irrevocably damaged American intelligence gathering capabilities and made American allows doubt the U.S. can be trusted with critical intelligence information.
Every day Trump is in office is a day America becomes more damaged and less safe.
John Bolton, a Trump appointed top official has presciently stated that if Trump is re-elected in 2020 he will pull the United States out of NATO, thus turning global dominance over to Russia and China.
In an encouraging bi-partisan effort, Senators passed an order that requires Trump to get the approval of Congress before taking the United States out of NATO.
Let's hope this is an awakening of Republican Senators to the existential threat Trump is to the American democracy and they will not take the chance of letting Trump rig the 20202 election. Senators, by all that your country has stood for since its inception, do the right thing and remove Trump from office now.
Trump Celebrates Senate Confirmation Of Former Hate Group Staffer Lawrence VanDyke To Ninth Circuit Court
Lawrence VanDyke’s confirmation represents the latest affront to the LGBT community by an administration that revels in its disdain for LGBT people and our families.
Mr. VanDyke’s long history of working to diminish the civil rights of the harmless lgbt community renders it wholly implausible that he is capable of administering fair and impartial justice.
In fact, it is precisely this concern that led the American Bar Association (ABA) to rate him as ‘Not Qualified’ for this lifetime position of public trust.
For our legal system to have credibility, people must have confidence that judges will follow the facts and the law, and yet Mr. VanDyke has refused to disavow his prior statements promoting harmful and unfounded myths about harmless lgbt people.
Now that the Horowitz report is out, revealing all those lies told by the FBI as it worked to hamstring a presidency with a debunked Russia collusion theory, here’s a question:
Where do U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff — the Inspector Javert of Trump Impeachment Theater — and Schiff’s eager handmaidens of the Washington Democratic Media Complex go now to get their reputations back?
Nowhere. There is no place for them to go.
It really doesn’t matter where Schiff goes. The Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee will be blamed when impeachment boomerangs on the Democrats.
Schiff’s Washington Beltway establishment media enablers, those who’ve carried his water for years, may ignore the impact the Horowitz report has on Schiff’s reputation.
They might just spin it all away. And the more witless among them have already reverted to their default positions: tribal hooting, while comparing anyone who disagrees with them to Hitler. If you want the short version, just scroll through Twitter for the angry disembodied cartoon heads.
But there are many intelligent, thoughtful liberal members of the press who, when it comes to Schiff, must be thinking, “My God, what have I done?”
Because if there’s one thing that comes through in the report from Obama-appointed Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, and from his testimony on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, it is this:
Schiff is a dissembler, a prevaricator, a distortionist, a spreader of falsehoods. In Chicago we use the short word: liar.
It was Schiff who insisted all along that FBI and Department of Justice officials did not abuse the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts or hide information from judges.
But according to Horowitz, that’s what the FBI did.
The “DOJ met the rigor, transparency and evidentiary basis needed to meet FISA's probable cause requirement,” insisted Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, in a 2018 memo that should be carved in marble.
But the FBI didn’t meet those rigorous standards. It didn’t offer transparency. Officials hid evidence from the court, or fabricated evidence to get what it wanted.
It was Schiff who insisted that the FBI didn’t heavily rely on the so-called Steele dossier, the salacious Democratic Party-paid-for oppo research against Trump.
But Horowitz shows that the FBI relied heavily relied on the salacious dossier — and even made up evidence to keep the dossier useful before the courts, though key officials knew that what was in it wasn’t true.
We now know from the Horowitz report that the dossier played a “central and essential role” in obtaining warrants to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign.
We also know that Schiff lied to the public about what had happened, as his media handmaidens protected him and trashed his fellow House Intelligence Committee member, U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican, who tried to warn the country of the FISA abuse.
Why is FISA abuse relevant beyond whether Trump wins reelection or not?
Because faking evidence and lying about it to the courts to continue receiving surveillance warrants on Americans is a threat to all our liberty.
If they can do this to a presidential campaign, they can do it to you.
The FISA abuse also weakens Congressional support for the FISA court, which has been used in terrorism investigations. I don’t like secret courts. And I don’t like putting courts in an oversight role over the executive branch, a job that properly belongs to Congress.
But there are bad actors out there who want to kill Americans, and such courts can be necessary. And for the FBI to create a climate where these law enforcement tools could be thrown out is unconscionable.
When the Horowitz report was released a few days ago, some media and Democrats claimed it was a vindication for the FBI, because he did not find that the Russia-Trump investigation was a political hit job ordered from on high.
Some of the headlines I read as the report was about to be released were quite ecstatic, almost giddy.
So was former FBI boss James Comey. He prattled on in an emotionally turgid Washington Post op-ed bragging that he’d been vindicated.
Yet in an exchange Wednesday with Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R.-S.C., Horowitz said his report vindicated no one.
“The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this,” Horowitz said.
Did Comey touch it? Or is he such a Washington silkie that he would know how to avoid direct responsibility, but be able to smile the moment an underling else slips in the knife?
Horowitz could only interview current FBI and DOJ employees. Determining who slipped in the knife wasn’t Horowitz’s job. That is the job of respected U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is conducting a criminal investigation as to how this all began.
Durham was asked to do that job by Attorney General William Barr, who doesn’t agree with Horowitz that there wasn’t any political motive in the FBI for what happened.
“I think our nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press,” Barr told NBC. “I think there were gross abuses … and inexplicable behavior that is intolerable in the FBI.”
And Schiff preens, makes speeches about virtue and shows no shame. Who’s going to call him out on his lies?
The FBI sought a warrant to wiretap a U.S. citizen and, in effect, a U.S. presidential campaign, based on a shoddy Democrat-funded pile of conspiracy theories known as the Steele dossier. The dossier's allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump were based on "multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay," and the document also took seriously comments made in jest.
In other words, the origins of the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign was exactly as partisan and shoddy as Republicans said it was, according to the information released by the Justice Department's inspector general. The inspector general released a report detailing a shocking account of rampant misconduct at the FBI. Agents there misled and lied to the FISA court to authorize and reauthorize their spying on Trump's 2016 campaign.
It doesn't matter what you think about Trump, the precedent these crooked agents set with their misconduct is horrifying.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz wrote in his report released this week that although there were a number of "errors and omissions" that occurred during the FBI's bizarre investigation, he found no evidence of "political bias" and that the investigation was otherwise legitimate and justified.
But "errors and omissions," a quote that was repeated over and over again in headlines, sounds like minor missteps that could have been taken care of with a little Wite-Out. It hardly covers the blatant wrongdoing that Horowitz described in his report — corrupt law enforcement officers abusing their power.
Both in his report and during congressional testimony on Wednesday, Horowitz admitted that he didn’t know why the FBI was so keen to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page, who was in fact not a Russian agent after all; that he didn’t know why they continued to spy on Page, even after the FBI was informed by the CIA that Page had actually been working for them as an informant; and that he didn’t know why, when the FBI continually sought to have its investigation reauthorized by the FISA court, it routinely withheld information from the court or straight-up misled about things that might have undermined the investigation.
In his report, Horowitz said he found seven times where FBI agents relied on “inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported” information in order to continually seek reauthorization for the surveillance of Page and others in the campaign.
In one instance, Horowitz noted that the FBI’s original theory (since debunked) that Page was a Russian agent was complicated by his denials to intelligence sources about having met with a pair of Russian oligarchs, who the FBI believed had in fact been in touch with Page. When the FBI wanted reauthorization to continue spying on Page, it concealed Page’s denials from the court.
When relying on information provided by Christopher Steele, the former British spy and author of the Steele dossier, to seek surveillance reauthorization, the FBI told the FISA court that Steele’s reporting was “corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.” As Horowitz writes, this characterization was misleading. The FBI “overstated the significance of Steele’s past reporting,” and the intelligence provided by Steele had not even been approved for use in the reauthorization application by the agent who supervised him.
Horowitz also admitted in Wednesday's hearing that one lawyer with the FBI actually doctored an email to make it say something that it didn't say in real life.
There are sins of omission and sins of commission. The FBI didn't just fail to do right here. The agents involved in this investigation did evil. They used their power as law enforcement agents in pursuit of a perceived political enemy.
That's not an error. That's corruption. And it's frightening to think what they could do next because they could do it to anyone
the Dems' impeachment of Trump on vague and dubious charges show they found no evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor like bribery
it's the biggest mistake Dems have made yet!
but the election is still 11 months away
they are sure to provide more hilarity before it's all over
Horowitz says the FBI falsified documents to obtain a FISA warrant on an innocent US citizen
James Comey should look for a consultant to advise him on how to survive prison life
Adam Schiff repeatedly lied about the Russian hoax and the Steele dossier
he should get dancing lessons so he isn't thrown the first week on Dancing with the Stars
the Dems couldn't find any evidence Trump committed a crime so they said he abused his power and was in contempt of Congress
well, every opposition has claimed every president "abused" his power
every President has had disputes with Congress about what information they are entitled to
the Senate trial will show what a buffoon Nadler is
he should look for a trailer park in North Florida to retire to
Canadian Conservative Party leader, Andrew Scheer, resigned his position today.
The Canadian Conservative party has been emulating the Republican party for the past several years. This past election they even hired Republican consultants from the States to help them get elected. Fortunately Canadians rejected their attempted gaslighting of Canadians and hopefully the Conservative Party will re-evaluate trying to deceive Canadians the way the Republican part has deceived Americans.
Like your typical Republican, Andrew Scheer had been fradulently using donations to the Conservative Party of Canada to pay to send his children to private school.
Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security
The network’s furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth have gotten downright dangerous.
Fox’s bubble reality creates a situation where it’s impossible to have the conversations and debate necessary to function as a democracy.
Monday’s split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department’s inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI’s handling of its 2016 investigation into Trump’s campaign, made one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States.
The facts of both dramas were clear to objective viewers: In the one instance, there’s conclusive and surprisingly consistent evidence that President Trump pushed Ukraine to concoct dirt on a domestic political rival to affect the 2020 presidential election, and in the other, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI was proper to investigate Trump’s dealings with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.
But that set of facts is not what anyone who was watching Fox News heard. Instead, Fox spent the night describing an upside-down world where the president’s enemies had spun a web of lies about Trump and Ukraine, even as Horowitz blew open the base corruption that has driven every attack on the president since 2016.
If what Trump has done is not grounds to remove a president from office, then nothing is.
If Trump has any evidence of illegal actions by the Bidens let him have his corrupt Attorney General Bill Barr bring charges.
You know if there was the slightest bit of evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Bidens, Bill Barr would have opened an investigation into them. That even the Trump henchman Bill Barr hasn't announced an investigation into the Bidens is rock solid proof they are squeaky clean, just like Hillary.
What needs to be investigated is why the FBI decided to investigate Hillary's emails when she was using a private email server just like Republicans in the Bush administration had done, Colin Powel, Condoleeza Rice and so on.
There wasn't a shred of evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Hillary, why did the FBI open an investigation into her email? Its obvious if there was any political bias against a presidential candidate it was the FBI being biased against Hillary.
And now Republicans are hoping to duplicate the gaslighting of America that they did with Hillary with someone who like her is an honest and clean person.
Meanwhile Republicans ignore Trump's criminal withholding of congressionally approved aid Ukraine needed to protect itself from the United States number one adversary, Russia.
Honesty must win out if the United States is to survive as a democracy.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on the origins of the investigation into Trump/Russia collusion concluded there was valid legal reason for the investigation and evidence that Trump was conspiring with Russia to rig the 2016 election.
Horowitz said, contrary to Trump and the Republicans constant gaslighting, there was no bias against Trump by the FBI.
Horowitz pointed out correctly that many FBI officers expressed anti-hillary sentiment during the 2016 election and were elated when Trump won. But no one accused them of letting their personal choices interfere with the honest implementation of the rule of law. And the same is true of Lisa Page and Peter Strozk who Trump falsely accused of wrongdoing merely because, like their Republican leaning counterparts, they had personal desires to see someone else win.
Trump has attacked the entire Justice Department despite the honest hardworking people working there doing the best they can every day to impartially carry out law enforcement.
Trump is demanding personal loyalty from the Justice Department to him, rather than to the people of the United States and the Constitution.
Inspector General Horowitz noted some criticisms of procedure that have been brought up by Democrats for years while Republicans blocked any action on them. Now Republicans are disingenuously pretending this shows Trump's been done wrong.
Standard debating tactic for Republicans is to make up whatever story paints them in the best possible light and the people they oppose in the worst, regardless of the facts.
Trump's told 13,000+ lies as president and Republicans have tried to excuse every one of them.
If American democracy is to survive truth must win out.
Regan: 15M jobs
Deficit: INCREASE $79B to $159B
Bush: 2M jobs
Deficit: INCREASE $153B to $255B
Clinton: 23M jobs
Deficit: DECREASE $255B to $128B surplus
W. Bush 1.5M jobs
Deficit: INCREASE $128B surplus up to $1T debt
Obama: 12M jobs
Deficit: DECREASE 1.16T to $585B
Trump: 5M jobs
Deficit: INCREASE $585B to 1.1 trillion and counting.
How's that Republican Trickle-down economic policy working out for you, America?
While campaigning in 2016 Donald Trump repeatedly said:
"I'm not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I'm not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid."
His proposed 2020 budget cuts:
$26 billion from Social Security.
$845 billion from Medicare
$1.5 trillion from Medicaid
If you still believe anything Donald Trump says it will be better for all Americans if you refrain from voting.
The federal deficit is exploding. Nearly 1 trillion dollars! Shrugs of shoulders and yawns from many so-called "deficit hawks." Apparently deficits from tax cuts for the wealthy don't count, but spending on something like school lunches...
Everything I do during this, I'm coordinating with White House Counsel. There will be no difference between the President's position and our position as to how to handle this.
Shorter Mitch McConnell: "I'm totally in the bag for full authoritarianism now. Forget checks and balances, I'm at the service of Dear Leader."
The House Judiciary Committee abruptly postponed a historic vote late Thursday on articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, shutting down a 14-hour session that had been expected to end with the charges being sent to the full House for a vote next week.
Approval of the charges against the president may still happen Friday in the committee. But the sudden turn punctuated the deep split in the Congress, and the nation, over impeaching the president. The committee clashed for all day and into the night as Congressmen engaged in lengthy debate on amendments designed to kill the two formal charges.
Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the committee would resume the session at 10 a.m. Friday.
“It is now very late at night," Nadler said after presiding over the two-day session. “I want the members on both sides of the aisle to think about what has happened over these past two days before they cast their final votes.”
Trump is accused, in the first article, of the vague charge of abusing his presidential power, and, in the second, of obstructing Congress by blocking the House's efforts to probe his actions.
Congressmen on the panel, blindsided by the move, were livid. Congress was set to be out of session on Friday and many lawmakers had other plans, some outside of Washington.
"This is the kangaroo court we’re talking about” stormed Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia. “They do not care about rules, they have one thing, their hatred of Donald Trump. ”
After slogging through the two days of hearings, Democrats didn’t want to jammed into late-hour voting, a dark of night session, that could later be used politically against them. The Democratic majority decided they would prefer to pass the articles in the light of day, the aides said.
Trump is only the fourth U.S. president to face impeachment proceedings and the first to be running for reelection at the same time. Republican allies seem unwavering in their opposition to expelling Trump, and Trump is sure to receive a swift acquittal in a Senate trial.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that she thinks Democrats will have the votes to impeach the president. But, interestingly, she said it was up to individual lawmakers to weigh the evidence.
Democrats contend that Trump has engaged in a pattern of misconduct toward Russia dating back to the 2016 election campaign that special counsel Robert Mueller investigated. And he must be prevented from "corrupting" U.S. elections again and cheating his way to a second term next year.
"It is urgent,” Pelosi said.
Mueller's report found no evidence of this and the IG report released this week shows that the FBI falsified evidence of this to get the FISA court to allow Obama to spy on the oppositon party!
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said late Thursday, “There is zero chance the president will be removed from office.”
that's right!
zeeeero
Aaaaand of course a bunch of desperate lies from Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous
Mueller documented 140 pages of Trump collusion with Russia and 12 instances of obstruction of justice by Trump that 1000 career prosecutors testified would put any other American in jail. Mueller's report was a referral to Congress to take action on the 12 counts of obstruction of justice Trump committed as the Department of Justice policy is that a sitting president can't be indicted.
Mueller laid out a prosecution road map in his report for each of the 12 counts of Trump's obstruction of justice, just as one does when preparing to go to court to try the accused He laid it out for Congress exactly as required to pursue impeachment of Trump because that's what he and the legal authorities all felt must be done.
The Inspector General's report found that the investigation into Trump/Russia collusion was all done without any bias towards Trump and was all started based on sound evidence that the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia to subvert the 2016 election results.
Republicans Are Pushing a “Fairness for All” Bill That Would Hurt LGBTQ People
A Christian-supported bill introduced in the House of Representatives supposedly aims to protect members of the LGBTQ community as well as the people who “disagree with their lifestyle.”
Which is another way of saying it will do absolutely nothing useful.
Introduced by Rep. Chris Stewart, a Republican from Utah, the “Fairness for All Act” supposedly add protections for sexual orientation and gender identity under the Civil Rights Act… while allowing religious business owners, groups, and health care providers with the ability to discriminate against LGBTQ all they want.
Among the problems with the bill:
By allowing religious business owners to discriminate against LGBTQ people, while saying racial discrimination is always unacceptable, the bill effectively creates two tiers of protection. LGBTQ people get fewer protections than others.
It would also allow taxpayer-funded, faith-based foster homes and adoption agencies to discriminate against prospective same-sex couples or Jews/atheists/Muslims or single parents. This isn’t just discrimination; it’s a way to deprive children of potential parents, in the name of faith.
Ultimately, if your religious beliefs prohibit you from offering your services to all customers, you should find a new career. It’s that simple. The irony is that many of these businesses would presumably chafe at the idea of having a sign on the door (or an indication on their website) saying “We don’t serve gays here.” Yet that’s what they privately want.
It’s impossible to have fairness for all while, in the same bill, creating license for Christians to discriminate in the public square. As always, when Republicans claim to be advocating for fairness, they’re actually making sure the conservative Christians who make up their voting base get an upper hand.
Republicans are nothing if not extremely deceptive in an attempt to be covertly cruel and injust.
The conservative/Republican propaganda strategy is simple:
Given the apparent situation, make up whatever story is most favourable to you and what you want and most damaging to those you oppose and what they want and then adamantly, loudly, and frequently insist your story is unconditionally true.
Conservatives like Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous don't believe in good faith debate. They see society as a contest to see who can dominate whom to one's exclusive benefit. You can see it in how they for months angrily posted about how Republican's supreme court was going to punish gays for opposing the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Like the pharisees, Wyatt and Regina take delight in having manipulated the letter of the law to defile the spirit of the law and democracy.
The nation of Gabon has passed a law criminalizing gay sex. It has a population of 2.1 million, around 88% of whom are christians.
This is the sort of thing hate group leader Tony Perkins is encouraging around the world since Trump appointed him to a powerful foreign policy position and has given him the funding and authority of the American government to promote pogroms against lgbt people around the world.
Persecuting lgbt people doesn't make the lives of evangelical christians any better yet nothing is more important to them.
Think of the good christians could do if they spent the tremendous resources they put into persecuting gays into something productive and worthwhile.
‘Ex-Gay’ Lobbyists On Capitol Hill Should Be Taken with a Mine of Salt
It was déjà vu when a cluster of “ex-gays” lobbied Capitol Hill in late October. They arrived in Washington to oppose two bills, one that would protect LGBT people from discrimination, and another that would ban the discredited practice conversion therapy for minors. While the messages delivered by the “ex-gay” lobbyists were not new, the faces disseminating them certainly were. So, what happened to all the “former homosexuals” who previously visited Washington to proclaim that they had “prayed away the gay?”
Most of these individuals now identify as former “ex-gay” leaders. They have apologized for the harm they have caused and renounce their past claims of sexual transformation. John Smid, for example, used to run the “ex-gay” organization Love in Action. In a video interview, Smid said, “I’ve never seen a real success story of anyone who has changed from homosexual to heterosexual.” Smid now lives in Texas with his boyfriend.
In the past year, two significant “ex-gay” leaders have come out of the closet. The first is David Matheson, a Latter Day Saints therapist who helped write the instruction handbook for the “ex-gay” program Journey into Manhood. The second, McRae Game, led a well-known conversion ministry in South Carolina for two decades. Additionally, a third conversion counselor, Norman Goldwasser was caught using the screen name “hotnhairy72” on Manhunt and Gay Bear Nation.
To no one’s surprise, the Family Research Council is behind the onslaught. They worked directly with Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) to book a room inside Capitol Hill to hold an “ex-gay” forum. If any group in America should be skeptical of the efficacy of “ex-gay” programs it’s this organization. FRC was a key coordinator of 1998’s failed Truth in Love campaign. This high-profile $600,000 effort highlighted the stories of “former homosexuals” in major newspapers, as well as releasing a series of television commercials. Hopes for this campaign ran so high, that an FRC spokesperson, Robert Knight, called it the “Normandy landing in the larger cultural wars.”
Michael Johnston was a star of a television ad, where he said, “A decade ago, I walked away from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.” In 2003, he also walked into a motel room to engage in indiscretions with men that he met online. Johnston stepped down from his ministry for what the American Family Association referred to as a “moral fall.”
The other stars in the 1998 campaign were John and Anne Paulk, who worked for Focus on the Family and appeared on Oprah and on the cover of Newsweek under the headline, “Gay for Life?” In 2000, I photographed John Paulk in Mr. P’s, a now closed gay bar in Washington, DC. While his wife Anne remains in the “ex-gay” world, John has apologized for his role in the “ex-gay” movement and is living with his boyfriend.
Yvette Cantu Schneider is a former “ex-lesbian” leader, who was a high profile spokesperson with The Family Research Council. In a video session, she said, “You know what I spent my time doing? Dealing with leaders in ‘ex-gay’ ministries who were having sex with the people who were coming to them for help.”
Today’s version of the Truth in Love campaign is the “Changed” movement. In an effort persuade lawmakers on Capitol Hill, a Changed movement spokesperson, Jim Domen, declared, “I changed my orientation.” It’s reminiscent of a 1998 ad headlined, “We’re standing for the truth that homosexuals can change.”
The men and women who appeared in the ad were part of Exodus International, which closed in 2013. The organization’s former President, Alan Chambers, has apologized and said, “I gave you the wrong information…I’m sorry to the parents who believed what I said, that they could change their kids.” The former Vice President of Exodus, Randy Thomas, is in Tallahassee this month lobbying for a state bill to ban conversion therapy for minors.
The dishonesty and cynicism of the Family Research Council is mind-blowing. They are rebooting and rebranding a failed experiment, hoping that Americans have amnesia and forgot the Truth in Love catastrophe. Sadly, they don’t seem to have much concern for the victims left in its wake.
The Southern District Justice Department of New York says Russian president Putin transferred money to Trump associate Lev Parnas, including $1M in September. Parnas donated to many Republican senators and house representatives.
When the evidence is made public we will have direct proof that the GOP is on Putin's payroll.
On the slim chance that the Senate does not convict Trump, this sort of thing will keep coming out all the way through the 2020 election. Trump can't win without Russia rigging the election for him. This is why he's desperately pleading with foreign countries to subvert the 2020 election on his behalf.
A president could (and should) be impeached if he watched TV all day and failed to fulfill his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
"failed to fulfill his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed"
Barb, could you fill us in on when Trump didn't "take care that the laws be faithfully executed"?
thanks
"It was déjà vu when a cluster of “ex-gays” lobbied Capitol Hill in late October. They arrived in Washington to oppose two bills,"
they are exercising their constitutional right to petition the government
any problem with that?
"one that would protect LGBT people from discrimination,"
LGBTsters don't face any discrimination of significance large enough to justify governmental intervention is personal relations
the constitution guarantees equal protection under the law, not special protection for those suffering from perverted desires
any problem with that?
"and another that would ban the discredited practice conversion therapy for minors"
laws that ban conversion therapy violate constitutional guarantees of free speech and freedom of religion
the constitution guarantees that you can say whatever you want and promote any religious belief you want
any problem with that?
say, you don't believe in the Constitution, do you?
The inspector general of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz. His report released Monday purported to believe that those who initiated the investigation of the president were not motivated by partisanship. Unfortunately, he did not offer an alternative motive for a staggering sequence of frauds and felonies committed by the Obama Justice Department and FBI. The following is a faithfully representative selection of the inspector general’s concerns.
The conduct of former deputy attorneys general Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein “were inconsistent with or undercut the assertions contained in the FISA applications” (to conduct surveillance on Trump-campaign helper Carter Page). They contained “inaccurate information,” i.e. the applications were fraudulent. Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Steele Dossier, a pastiche of defamatory fabrications that was paid for by the Clinton campaign and was the principal basis of the FISA applications, thought he was answerable to paying clients (the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, through a law firm and the dirty-tricks operation Fusion GPS), while the FBI thought he was answerable to the Bureau, despite having closed out Steele for cause for assisting Fusion GPS in getting his false allegations into the media. Yet he continued to feed information to the FBI through the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr; she was contracted to Fusion GPS. Steele met 13 times with Mrs. Ohr after Steele’s termination by the FBI, and his information was fed to the FBI. Steele continued to supply information to the FBI that director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe wanted to include in the Intelligence Community Assessment of these matters (at least that outrage was not approved, but their effort incites intense curiosity about Horowitz’s imputation of motives). “Ohr committed consequential errors in judgment” and a (prolonged) “lapse of judgment,” Horowitz writes.
The FBI “failed to reassess” Steele’s information and denied to the FISA court that Steele had “directly provided” information for a false Yahoo story linking Trump and Russia on September 23, 2016, for which the Bureau fired Steele as a “confidential human source.” Steele played a “central and essential role” in obtaining the FISA authorizations and was represented to the court as “a reliable source” even though his own handler warned Comey and McCabe that Steele was not reliable and was uncorroborated, and that his principal sub-source was “a boaster, egoist . . . [who] embellishes,” according to Steele himself. Yet the source was asserted to the FISA court to be “truthful and cooperative.”
The FBI omitted to tell the FISA court that Carter Page was an approved “operational contact” with another branch of government and had loyally supplied any information he had about Russian activities. George Papadopoulos, another victim of the Comey-McCabe Keystone Kops smear operation, was cited in FISA applications, but not his repeated assertions that there was no evidence of any Trump involvement with Russia. Carter Page was selectively and misleadingly cited to the court throughout the period when he was under surveillance. His helpful reports of financial irregularities in the international soccer federation were misrepresented as evidence of Page’s untrustworthiness; he was shamefully traduced, as Horowitz demonstrates in great detail. The FBI’s Validation Management Unit debunked Steele as, inter alia, “minimally corroborated,” but he continued to be reverently invoked in FISA court filings. There were a number of confidential human sources who happened to be working loyally for the Trump campaign, but none of them were consulted or questioned, though they were proven FBI resources.
Horowitz concluded that there were “17 significant errors” in the FISA renewal applications, but he was unable to discover when Comey, McCabe, and Yates became aware of all these problems, only that they “did not have accurate information when they approved supplementary FISA applications.” It is impossible to imagine that he made a very strenuous effort to answer that question. He limply concludes this hair-raising revelation of scandalous and massive official wrongdoing by urging senior Justice and FBI officials to take “any action they deem appropriate.”
It is clear from the statements of demurral from Horowitz’s absurdly bland conclusions by attorney general William Barr and special prosecutor John Durham that they do not share his confidence in the motives and probity of a broad swath of the Justice Department and FBI, from the highest ranks to quite junior people. It is obvious from the report itself that horrifying misdeeds were committed, and that the FBI was careening out of control and meddling in the electoral process illegally as well as incompetently. Since this is his second effort to string out and partially whitewash with humdrum verbosity the revelation of shocking violations of law and duty by senior Justice officials, Horowitz’s head should roll with the others in due course, and be replaced by someone more energetic in scorching out such monstrous misconduct as he thoroughly reports.
James Comey’s smug tweet of righteous victory on Monday was particularly galling, given that even Horowitz lambastes his unprofessional and implicitly dishonest performance. That over-righteous stuffed goose should now have cackled in public self-praise for the last time. Comey and his compulsively belligerent lawyer, former prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and McCabe, whom Horowitz accused in his previous report of lying under oath, should all now take their turn in the dock. This psychotic attempt to pretend the 2016 election did not happen should flounder to a contemptible end in time for the reelection of the administration next November.
here's a fun article about how nervous Dems are that they will lose in 2020:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/elections-2020/democrats-agree-on-one-thing-theyre-very-very-nervous/ar-AAK5nO8
In a criminal trial — a trial that would send a person to prison, or worse — we insist on a proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s highly unlikely that any of those who believe impeachment is justified would say that the evidence is sufficient to conclude that the charges against him are true beyond a reasonable doubt.
In a civil case, where a person is sued for doing wrong to another, the standard is a preponderance of the evidence. That means the evidence should be examined and weighed to determine liability. That standard — preponderance of the evidence -- would appear to be the minimum requirement for the finding of any wrongdoing, particularly when the question is the impeachment, conviction and removal of the president.
The full House is about to debate the impeachment of President Trump on a charge of putting his personal political interests ahead of the interests of the United States. There are reasonable grounds to debate whether this is an impeachable offense, but at this point the real question is whether the House has the evidence to take such a fateful step for the country.
Oddly, this question arises precisely at the time that the inspector general of the Department of Justice has issued a report on the actions of the FBI in investigating whether the president colluded with Russia in his 2016 campaign. The IG concluded that there were 17 egregious errors by three separate groups of FBI officials — errors of such significance that they raise the question as to whether they were motivated by political bias or hatred of the president. On this question, the IG refused to make a decision. As he said in the Senate hearing, he did not find any “documentary or testimonial evidence” to charge the members of the three FBI groups with anti- Trump bias, and had forwarded his report to the attorney general for that purpose.
The IG’s statement that he had not found any “documentary or testimonial” evidence of bias was seized upon by many Democratic senators, and by the media (the New York Times headline was “Report Debunks Anti-Trump Plot in Russia Inquiry”) as evidence that the whole idea of a conspiracy against the president at senior levels of the FBI was refuted.
As many former prosecutors have made clear, even guilt in a criminal trial can be shown by the acts of the accused, whether or not they have stated or written that they intended to engage in a crime, and the gross errors of members of the FBI would be sufficient to prove criminal guilt. Attorney General William Barr, to whom the IG report was referred, has said that he believes there could be criminal intent underlying these unusual and unauthorized actions.
Compare the evidence in the IG’s report with the evidence that would be used in the House to impeach the president. It may be true that he withheld funds from Ukraine for the reasons claimed, but there is no direct evidence of this. What the brief investigation by the House Intelligence Committee showed was that there was a general belief among many people in the U.S. foreign policy establishment that the president’s motive for withholding the funds was to pressure Ukraine into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden and his son’s taking of a highly paid position in a Ukraine company at a time that Biden was serving as the Obama administration’s lead official on Ukraine.
However, there is no documentary or testimonial evidence of this. All of the evidence is what would be called hearsay in a court of law, but apparently it will be the only evidence of wrongdoing by the president that will be presented to the House. On the other hand, the president’s defenders have argued that there could be many other explanations for what he had in mind, including that he would have liked to see the investigation done but never actually told the new Ukrainian president that he was withholding the funds until an investigation was started — what became known as the absence of a quid pro quo. Most people will agree that hoping something will be done, but not acting to get it done, is not an impeachable offense.
Yet, on the basis of this evidence — far less than the preponderance of the evidence that would be required in a civil trial, and without any documentary or testimonial evidence that they consider so important in the FBI case — the Democratic members of the House seem prepared to vote for the president’s impeachment.
This is a startling inconsistency. The Democrats have accepted the statement of the DOJ inspector general that he found no “documentary or testimonial evidence” of anti-Trump bias at the FBI as sufficient to dismiss the entire question of an FBI conspiracy against the president, while accepting a collection of presumptions and rumors — without documentary or testimonial evidence — about Trump’s Ukraine intentions as a sufficient basis for impeaching him.
Rick Wilson, the anti-Trump political consultant most famous for his 2016 meltdown, believes Democrats have really screwed up their freak show of an impeachment. He’s right about that, but not for the reasons he gives.
Wilson wrote this week in a column for the Daily Beast that Democrats are “blowing” impeachment because they don’t “fight.” He is specifically unhappy that they took a moment to reach an agreement on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which, in addition to being good for American workers, may have the added benefit of being politically good for President Trump.
To start, the USMCA deal was as good for all Americans. Labor unions got everything they wanted. And second, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would rightly take issue with the notion that House Democrats don’t know how to fight. Having initiated the most drastic measure constitutionally possible against a sitting president of the U.S., based on what he said in a phone call, she knows how to fight.
If that’s not fighting, then Rick Wilson isn’t bald.
The real issue, as the polls show, is that impeachment has not at all gone the way Democrats hoped. Support for it in swing states has fallen since the hearings last month, and it has done nothing to help the flailing cast of Democrats running for president.
But it’s not as if Democrats slipped on a banana peel while dribbling toward a slam dunk. This impeachment effort was always going to be a sticky mess for them, and a big reason they’re in it is precisely because of hysterics from people such as Wilson.
The push for impeachment started among Democrats and liberals in the news media literally on Inauguration Day, and it hasn’t quit since then. Democrats took the House and thought they’d have their chance with the Mueller report, but then that turned up nothing. Then September came around, and with the party’s presidential candidates embarrassing themselves, and with the Wilsons of the media calling Trump the Antichrist, Pelosi knew she needed to do something fast.
Unfortunately for her and the rest of the Democrats, the issue they picked for impeachment was stupid. It's also proving nearly impossible to explain to the average voter without a flowchart, timeline, and an intermission.
The “Trump called for Ukraine to interfere in our election” slogan is ridiculous on a bumper sticker, and it also raises a million questions, none of which have answers that are good for Democrats.
Why Ukraine? Because it appears Joe Biden and his adult son were involved in some corrupt business there.
If Democrats, with a big assist from people such as Wilson, hadn’t been so eager to impeach, we wouldn’t be here right now. But "shoulda, coulda, woulda."
Rick Wilson has no one to be mad at but himself.
Exxon knew. That was the takeaway from a trove of internal documents from the oil giant that reporters for InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times unearthed in 2015. The investigations showed that ExxonMobil understood, from its own research, the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change as early as 1977, yet helped to manufacture doubt about climate science in public. The investigations amplified a question the climate movement was already asking: Could Exxon be held accountable for climate change and spreading misinformation about it, much as tobacco companies had been for their efforts to conceal research on smoking and cancer?
On Tuesday, the first climate change case against a major oil company to go to trial ended with a ruling in Exxon’s favor. The case was initiated by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who subpoenaed Exxon for financial records and other documents shortly after the 2015 news reports broke. Officially filed in 2018, the case was shaped to fit the contours of the Martin Act, a state anti-fraud law. The state accused Exxon of misleading investors in its calculations of the costs that potential climate regulation could pose to its business. Specifically, the lawsuit alleged that the cost of carbon Exxon told investors its calculations were based on was higher than the estimate used in the company’s internal economic models. As a result, according to the lawsuit, Exxon “created the illusion that it had fully considered the risks of climate change regulation and it had factored those risks into its business operations.” The discrepancy “exposed the company to greater risk from climate change regulation than investors were led to believe.”
The Martin Act gives the state attorney general broad powers to investigate corporations, and as a result Exxon was forced to turn over millions of pages of internal documents, which showed, among other things, that former CEO Rex Tillerson used a “shadow” e-mail account under a fake name to communicate about climate change and related business risks. But to win the case, the attorney general had to prove not only that Exxon made false statements in its public disclosures to shareholders, but also that those statements would have been considered important by investors when making decisions about buying and selling stock.
The judge, Barry Ostrager, ruled that the state failed to provide sufficient evidence on both counts.
The climate change alarmists lost.
Big-time!
Does Boris Johnson’s stunning triumph presage a victory for Donald Trump in November 2020? Johnson rolled the dice, defied the odds and hit the jackpot with the biggest Tory victory since 1987, which was the year when Margaret Thatcher rolled to victory for a third term in office. Johnson’s true hero isn’t the Iron Lady, however, but Winston Churchill. Churchill was the subject of Johnson’s most recent book, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History. Now Johnson has made bold to follow in his footsteps by extricating the United Kingdom from the European Union.
At least one American who views the EU with disdain was elated by Johnson’s win. Donald Trump tweeted, “Congratulations to Boris Johnson on his great WIN! Britain and the United States will now be free to strike a massive new Trade Deal after BREXIT. This deal has the potential to be far bigger and more lucrative than any deal that could be made with the E.U. Celebrate Boris!”
For Trump the most significant lesson may have been that Johnson was able, not to crack, but to smash the Labour Party’s so-called “Red Wall” in northern England. Just as Trump won in the Rust Belt states in 2016, so Johnson cruised to victory in working-class areas that supported Brexit and want to see a rebirth of their traditional industries. For Trump, it’s a sign that his strength in the Rust Belt was no fluke. These results should also fortify the resolve of Democrats who do not want to run a left-wing candidate, ala Jeremy Corbyn in 2020, and who are focused on regaining Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Trump is also chalking up a win with his China trade deal. Heading into the 2020 election, Trump had to able to demonstrate some progress to the Midwest farmers who have suffered a body blow during the trade war with Beijing. Trump tweeted, “We have agreed to a very large Phase One Deal with China. They have agreed to many structural changes and massive purchases of Agricultural Product, Energy, and Manufactured Goods, plus much more.” The tariff rate currently imposed upon Chinese wares will drop from 25 percent to 7.5 percent and a new round scheduled for December 15 will not be imposed. Had the December 15 round been enacted, the risk of a recession would have increased. China has committed to purchase $50 billion of American farm products next year and to stiffen its intellectual property laws. Together with the new trade deal with Mexico and Canada, Trump will be able to tout his deal-making prowess as he heads into the election.
Then there is impeachment. The House Judiciary Committee has passed two articles of impeachment, but Senator Mitch McConnell has already promised on Fox News that the trial will go nowhere. He explained to Sean Hannity, “Everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with the White House counsel. There will be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.” He added, “There’s no chance the president will be removed from office.” Zip, nada, zero. This isn’t surprising. The question will be whether McConnell, as astute a tactician as they come, will be able to minimize any political damage to Trump. Trump reportedly wants to turn the trial into a media circus, complete with testimony from Joe and Hunter Biden, but McConnell sees it differently. He wants to quash the entire episode as rapidly as possible so that it becomes a mere afterthought. So far, the GOP has assembled around Trump as steadfastly as a Roman Legion warding off invading tribes.
This perduring fealty to Trump has dumbfounded many NeverTrumpers. Writing in the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin assesses impeachment and urges Democrats to work overtime to oust Trump. “The alternative,” she writes, “is unimaginable.”
Actually, it isn’t.
Much will depend on whom Democrats nominate to challenge Trump. But Trump appears to be on increasingly solid political terrain. If current trends continue, Trump is on a firm path to re-election.
Thanks to the Department of Justice Inspector General's report, we now know for certain what has been, for those paying attention, fairly obvious. The Steele dossier played a central role in the genesis of the Russia hoax and was used to justify extensive spying on former naval officer and Annapolis graduate Carter Page.
The top two leaders of the FBI were closely involved in this fiasco. Other powerful people knew what was happening and lied to cover it up. That all was confirmed by the IG report. The report was a disaster for the credibility of top leaders in Barack Obama's FBI, and it's also a big problem for the American news media.
For example, in early 2018, Washington Post intelligence and national security correspondent Shane Harris lectured Kim Strassel of The Wall Street Journal about how little she knows about the story.
"Yes," he wrote, "I am telling you the dossier was not used as the basis for a FISA warrant on Carter Page." That's false. And yet, Harris hasn't apologized or even acknowledged his incompetence.
Or take NBC News's so-called intelligence correspondent Ken Dilanian. In the summer of 2018, he smugly tweeted, "Trump is wrong about Carter Page, the dossier and the FISA warrant." But it looks like Trump was right, and he was wrong.
CNN Newsroom anchor and chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto did admit the Steele dossier might have been used for the warrant. But don't be impressed. He lectured readers that "the FBI would corroborate information in the dossier on its own before using such intel to justify the FISA warrant." Of course, that didn't happen. In fact, the FBI hid information showing the dossier was false. Did Sciutto issue a correction? Of course not. But it does seem a little unfair to focus on Jim Sciutto. He was merely following the lead of almost everyone else at CNN, all of whom were frantically trying to convince us that the dossier was irrelevant:
Evan Perez, CNN senior justice correspondent: "You know, a lot of people will focus on the dossier, a lot of people will focus on a FISA, of Carter Page, and they'll say they were spying on a campaign. But at the beginning, this is all about what Russia was doing."
Shimon Prokupecz, CNN crime & justice correspondent: "Now Republicans were trying to claim that the dossier was key to getting the FISA, the surveillance warrant for Carter Page. But the Democrats memo clearly shows it wasn't key."
James Clapper, CNN national security analyst: "Even the earlier version of the redacted FISA authorization to me had enough information in it to indicate that the dossier was certainly not used as the primary source."
Everything you just read turned out to be wrong. Has CNN retracted the comments or apologized? That's a rhetorical question. Apologies require introspection and integrity. At CNN, they're doubling down. CNN's Don Lemon explained that, by definition, everything CNN reported was true:
Lemon: "So how is the White House and the Republican Party dealing with the articles of impeachment and an inspector general report that debunked conspiracy theories? Gaslighting. ... The FBI obtained proper warrants. You should read the report. Facts first. None of that is true. The report found that the launch of the Russia investigation was legally sound, unbiased and that no spying occurred."
In Lemon's world, facts are delicious. Mere opinion has no place. CNN's Chris Cuomo agrees.
CHRIS CUOMO: "'Trump is the victim.' All right, that was what was promised from this IG's report, 476 pages. No Trump as victim. Trump even says that that's what this says. It doesn't. He's lying to you about the report. Please, do yourself the favor, do the homework. He's lying to you."
Do the homework, demands Cuomo. Read the IG report! But you have to wonder if Cuomo himself read the report. Or did his assistant promise to read the report and give him a summary, but then got stuck in a super-long holiday season line at Starbuck's and forgot to do it? And then maybe, in a last-minute panic, which is understandable under the circumstances, told a few white lies to Chris about what the report says? We're not sure that's what happened of course, and we're not going to judge. We can surmise that, unless he's a pathological liar, Chris Cuomo didn't read the IG report himself. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to sit in a TV studio, stare into the camera and pretend that the Justice Department's inspector general just confirmed what CNN has been telling you for three years.
Because that is absolutely not what happened.
Not even close.
Trump used for personal gain 500 million in congressionally approved taxpayer funding for Ukraine to defend it itself from the United States of America's foremost adversary. Trump broke both American and Ukrainian law demanding that Ukraine announce a fake investigation intended to turn the 2020 election for him against the candidate he fears most, Joe Biden.
Trump has lied and claimed that Article II of the American Constitution "Le'ts me do anything I want." - he believes as president he has absolute power and can shoot someone on fifth avenue and nothing can be legally done about it. If you're ignored Trump's 13,000 + other lies, you best pay heed to this one if you want America to continue as a democracy.
30-40% of Americans are unconditionally devoted to Trump. He could shoot someone on fifth avenue and Wyatt and Regina would post "Oh, every president has done that, its nothing to worry about. Vote Trump!"
The United States is in danger of losing its democracy to those who want to help Trump become the first dictator of America - Moscow Mitch McConnell, corrupt Attorney General William Barr, modern day Benedict Arnold Lyndsey Graham, propaganda ministers Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan. Not to mention Tony Perkins and his evangelical anti-gay zealots like Wyatt and Regina.
You Republican Senators, you can take the chance of refusing to convict this existential threat to democracy based on the likely fact that he will lose badly at the election box in 2020 but keep in mind you are putting the very future of democracy in America at risk of becoming a Trump dictatorship. Read the decades of psychological research that show this:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
Globalizing Hatred
In August 2018, a six-year-long court process against notorious anti-gay, evangelical pastor Scott Lively came to an end. In 2012, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit in the state of Massachusetts against Lively on behalf of Sexual Minorities Uganda, a non-profit umbrella organization for LGBT advocacy in Uganda. The suit alleged that Lively, who had traveled to Uganda in the early 2000s, sought to deprive LGBT individuals in Uganda of their fundamental human rights. In the lengthy court process that followed, U.S. District Judge Michael Ponsor opined that there was no question that Lively’s actions “in aiding and abetting efforts to demonize, intimidate, and injure LGBTI people in Uganda [constituted] violations of international law.”
However, given that the most significant parts of Lively’s conduct occurred on foreign soil, Ponsor decided that the court did not have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the case and dismissed it. In August 2018, Lively sought to have the pieces of Ponsor’s opinion affirming his crimes stricken from the record but was unsuccessful.
Cases like Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Scott Lively provide insight into the bitter history involving American evangelicals and the extreme homophobia they have helped cultivate in African countries like Uganda. Though nearly a decade has passed since the most prominent interventions by American evangelicals, LGBT individuals in Uganda continue to face intense persecution stemming from the rhetoric once used by these evangelicals. With ongoing efforts to repress LGBT individuals and U.S.-based evangelical groups continuing to intervene, activists warn that only a human rights approach — as opposed to an ideological one — can aid LGBT Ugandans’ struggle.
Evangelizing Hatred
Christianity has a troubling history with anti-gay sentiment in Uganda. As prominent human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell told the HPR, British colonizers created the first anti-sodomy laws in Uganda as early as the nineteenth century: “Colonizing nations, most notably Britain, exported and imposed anti-gay laws on the people they conquered.” They also “sent out fire and brimstone Christian missionaries who preached against same-sex relations,” according to Tatchell. The colonial effort was thus bolstered by proselytizing Christians who sought to ‘civilize’ the once tolerant nations they encountered — in Tatchell’s words, “the existence of gayness in Africa was often used by missionaries and colonizers to justify what they described as a ‘civilizing mission.’”
When Uganda’s colonial period ended in 1962, these British anti-sodomy laws remained, but went largely unenforced. It was not until the early 21st century that, following interventions by evangelical individuals and groups, anti-gay sentiment in the country became what Reverend Kapya Kaoma, a Zambian pastor, human rights activist, and scholar, refers to as “militant homophobia.”
As early as 2002, Lively traveled to Uganda to meet and coordinate with Martin Ssempa, an anti-gay activist and minister. Ssempa later became a prominent advocate for the Ugandan Anti-gayness Act of 2009 that sought to punish gay acts with life imprisonment or, in some cases, the death penalty. Later, in 2009, Lively returned to Uganda and spoke at a three-day conference on gayness hosted by the Family Life Network, a New York-based Christian radio network. Throughout his talks, Lively framed himself as a human rights defender, a lawyer, and a theologian, warning that LGBT individuals wanted to “prey upon” and recruit Ugandan children in order to “defeat the marriage-based society.”
“What Scott Lively was doing,” Kaoma explained to the HPR, “was to misrepresent, or demonize, a community of people who are already at the margins of society.” But, because the three elements he used to present himself in Uganda were all “very, very respected across the continent,” he gave himself a powerful platform and then “exploited it.”
During his visit, Lively was also invited to private briefings with political and religious leaders and addressed the Ugandan parliament. Following this visit, Lively continued to fight against LGBT equality in Uganda, even discussing and providing suggestions for the 2009 Anti-gayness Act through email exchanges with Ssempa and Ugandan MP David Bahati, the individual who introduced the bill before the Ugandan Parliament in 2009.
As chronicled in the 2013 documentary God Loves Uganda, the early 2000s also saw an influx of Christian missionaries from evangelical Christian organizations like the International House of Prayer. In 2010, Lou Engle, a former senior leader at IHOP and the founder of TheCall Ministries, traveled to Uganda to host a rally discussing the alleged evils of gayness. Engle also used his platform to praise Ugandan politicians’ “courage” and “righteousness” in promoting the Ugandan Anti-gayness Act of 2009.
Unfortunately, individuals like Lively and Engle do not act in isolation. As Kaoma writes in Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia, American evangelicals in Africa like World Vision and Five Talents, “present a demonizing, and misleading, position on gayness” to the Africans they serve.
Of course, not all evangelical missionaries who travel to Uganda and other African countries present similar narratives or maintain similar beliefs. According to a 2015 Pew Research poll, the percentage of American evangelicals who believe that gayness should be accepted by society is steadily increasing, rising from 26 to 36 percent between 2007 and 2014. The sensationalized anti-gay rhetoric delivered by extreme evangelicals like Lively, though widely dismissed in the United States, thus dominates the politics of gayness in countries like Uganda.
“Having lost the battle against LGBT rights in the U.S.,” Tatchell summarized, “some evangelicals turned their attention to fighting against LGBT equality in African nations. They went to countries like Uganda and promoted a sensationalist and often fabricated account of gay life in order to provoke African people to turn against their LGBT sisters and brothers.”
From Bully Pulpits to Parliaments
The messages of hardline American evangelicals resonated in the Ugandan Parliament. In October 2009, just months after Lively’s second visit to Uganda, Bahati introduced the aforementioned Anti-gayness Bill of 2009. The bill did not pass through Parliament in its original form but was later revised, replacing capital punishment for more than one act of gayness with life imprisonment
The law built upon existing anti-sodomy laws in Uganda, adding punishments for any individual or group who offers counseling to LGBT individuals and thus threatening numerous LGBT rights groups in Uganda. Lawmakers in support of the bill argued that gay lifestyles threatened to destroy family units by recruiting Ugandan children into these “lifestyles,” echoing statements Lively made during his visit to Uganda in 2009. “All of the talking points that Lively delivered in Uganda [in March],” Kaoma confirmed, “were in the original bill, which was introduced in April.”
Emboldening Violence
Lawmakers, however, do not pose the only threat to LGBT Ugandans. The rhetoric of American evangelicals has also contributed to the dangerously homophobic sentiment that pervades day-to-day life in Uganda. According to the Human Rights Campaign’s September 2015 assessment of life for LGBT people in Uganda, LGBT Ugandans — not the Ugandan government — were blamed for the cutbacks in foreign aid that resulted from the passage of the 2014 Anti-gayness Act. As such, in a country where 96 percent of individuals believe society should not accept gayness, openly LGBT Ugandans “confront stigma, discrimination, legal restrictions, harassment, intimidation, violence and death threats” in their day-to-day lives.
A 2016 report by Sexual Minorities Uganda, for example, documented 264 “verified cases of human rights abuses against LGBT Ugandans” between May 2014 and December 2015. One hundred sixty-two of these reported cases occurred between December 2013 and May 2014, the four-month span that saw the Anti-gayness Act passed through Parliament and signed by the president of Uganda. In comparison, only eight human rights abuses were reported in all of 2013. The passage of the Anti-gayness Act, fueled by the religious anti-gay rhetoric of years prior, immediately encouraged increased persecution of and violence against LGBT citizens of Uganda by both state and non-state actors.
A 2016 report by a consortium of NGOs at the Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum confirms this increased violence by non-state actors in particular. According to the report, non-state actors were responsible for 54.4 percent of verified cases of human rights abuses against LGBT individuals in Uganda. This percentage represents a striking change from the findings of previous reports, which show that state actors have historically committed the majority of verified violations. In the words of the 2016 report’s authors, the increasing treatment of LGBT individuals as “outcasts” is the “accepted norm,” and “this could be emboldening property owners and other non-state actors to violate rights of LGBTI persons.”
The Politics of Being
Evangelical groups continue to have a political presence in the region. According to Kaoma, despite extensive media coverage and criticism of the actions of individuals like Lively and Engle, some American evangelicals feel that now is “the time to stand up for their beliefs — so rather than retreating, they [continue to] go in there and support what Scott Lively had been doing.”
A decade ago, extreme ideologies rooted in religious principles exacerbated LGBT Ugandans’ struggle. Today, only appeals to LGBT individuals’ human rights can help improve it. Lawsuits like Sexual Minorities Uganda v. Scott Lively do just that, affirming that efforts to demonize sexual minorities constitute crimes against humanity.
When we saved the ozone layer, we saved ourselves from even worse climate change
"CFCs didn't just eat the ozone layer, they were also powerful greenhouse gases"
"Without the Montreal Protocol, we would have reached 1.5 degrees
above pre-industrial levels already, and we would have no chance of
meeting the Paris Agreement"
Obamacare has given the 100 million Americans with pre-existing health conditions the right to health insurance at the same price as everyone else.
Republicans are fighting in court to take away the right to health insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.
Remember that when you vote.
remember when ignorant liberals said that Mueller provided them with a road map to impeachment?
why, you may ask, are the Dems not planning to impeach him for those charges which Mueller laid out so carefully for them?
a few weeks ago, Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi were saying Trump had to be impeached because he committed "bribery", a specifically mentioned grounds for impeachment in the Constitution
what? no bribery in the articles of impeachment?
face it, they found nothing to impeach Trump for but they've come to realize, as the first primaries are imminent, there is no Dem that has a chance of beating him next November
we have a guy presiding the best economy in decades ad who is winning the trade war
and the beneficiaries of that economy and that trade war are virtually every citizen
from the farmers in Kansas to the black families in Detroit to the stock brokers of Manhattan
who's left to vote against him?
the deep state elites, Dems and RINOs, who have run our country into the ground for decades
there aren't that many of them!
and who would they vote for?
someone whose main qualification is they can get along with Trudeau and Macron?
Dems see the future, and unless they can get Trump removed from office, it's grim for them
that's right!!
it's grim for them Dems!!!!!!!!!!
A Fox News poll shows the majority of Americans want Trump impeached and removed from office.
This is one in a string of polls showing the majority of Americans want Trump removed from office since it was revealed that he used 400 million in congressionally approved taxpayer funds for his personal benefit and to the detriment of U.S. national security.
This comes after the Mueller Report was released with 140 pages documenting Trump/Russia collusion to subvert the results of the 2016 election.
Mueller documented 12 counts of obstruction of justice by Trump and laid out the complete plan for prosecuting this in court which he referred to Congress for action as Justice Department policy is that Trump can't be charged with a crime until he's out of office in 2020.
Republicans in Congress blocked action on the 12 counts of obstruction of justice Mueller recommended Congress charge Trump with.
Over 1000 former and current prosecutors signed an open letter and said the findings in the Mueller report would have landed any other American in jail. It is only an offhand comment in an old memo dealing with a separate issue that is keeping Trump from being charged with 12 counts of criminal obstruction of justice.
And as we speak, Republicans are fighting in court to take away health insurance from the 100 million Americans with pre-existing health conditions.
Obamacare currently gives these people the right to health insurance at no additional cost over what other Americans pay.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "someone whose main qualification is they can get along with Trudeau and Macron?"
Wyatt and Regina made that passive aggressive comment because they're afraid to directly challenge me on Teach The Facts.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Dems see the future, and unless they can get Trump removed from office, it's grim for them"
"grim for them" you say?
Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million in 2016 and only squeaked out a win because of the election attacks he asked Russia to do.
Since he got "elected" Trump has never been above a 50% approval rating and its been a constant flood of scandal and outrage that has bit by bit chipped further away at his support as the months and years have gone on. Those criminal entanglements and revelations of Trump corruption will continue all the way up until the election.
There is nothing foreseeable that could change Trump's downward trajectory. And Wyatt/Regina are telling us its "grim" for Democrats, lol :)
As we can see again and again, the picture Wyatt and Regina paint here at TTF bears no resemblance whatsoever to reality.
Their propaganda strategy is just prolific lying.
Wyatt/Regina said "who would they vote for? someone who can get along with Trudeau and Macron?"
The vast majority of Americans would rather have a president that gets along with Trudeau, Macron and other American NATO allies rather than dictators like Putin, Erdogan, and Duterte who has killed thousands of his citizens in extrajudical killings.
Trump rails against "politically correct" Fox News for booking interviews with Comey and Schiff
President Donald Trump says Fox News is becoming too "politically correct" and he doesn't like it.
To the would be dictator, political correctness is allowing those who oppose his corruption to speak.
Free speech is a bad thing to Trump and all dictators.
Trudeau Moves Forward On Ex-Gay Torture Ban
The Independent reports:
LGBT+ conversion therapy could soon be banned across Canada after Justin Trudeau made this one of the priorities for his new government.
In a letter to the country’s justice secretary on Friday, the prime minister stated that banning the controversial practice of attempting to forcibly change people’s gender or sexuality must be a “top priority”.
He said the Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti must work to ”amend the Criminal Code to ban the practice of conversion therapy and take other steps required with the provinces and territories to end conversion therapy in Canada”.
The world is watching Canada's leadership
"The world is watching Canada's leadership"
the world has always been fascinated by Queen Elizabeth
the Queen has been a pretty good leader of Canada but she hasn't supervised the Trudeau brat very well
first he goes to India and insults the population by dressing in some stereotypical outfit
then, he mocks black people by putting shoe polish on his face and muggin' around
now, he wants to make it illegal for people to speak against homosexual perversion
the Queen should summon him to the palace for a stern lecture on how leaders of civilized societies should act
"she hasn't supervised the Trudeau brat very well"
speaking of brats, that Greta Thunberg has now apologized for advocating violence against those who don't buy into her warmist alarmism
that's a good first step but she also she be sent to bed without her supper
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said " for millennia, society has known that two genders are necessary to make a marriage"
That's another fantasy evangelical christians have. You can't blame them for not knowing what reality is as they have to tell themselves a Jesus that tortures people for eternity is loving and just. When you've got to twist your mind into fantastical gyrations to tell yourself your god is moral you naturally lose the ability to accurately perceive reality.
The truth is that gay marriages have been recorded throughout history. The catholic church had a semi-secret "brotherhood" ceremony where two men pledged to love and care for each other and sealed it with a kiss.
If you read the Wikipedia entry on gayness in ancient rome you can see gayness was always an intregral part of society. Similarly in Greece gay romantic relationships were historically present as they are in every society throughout history around the globe.
My husband and I just watched a show on the formation of the Sacred Band of Thebes who were made up of pairs of gay lovers on the theory that no one would fight more doggedly or fanatically as a man trying to protect his lover. The idea for the Sacred Band of Thebes came from the legend of Hercules who's lover and he were great warriors (Hercules lover was his charioteer).
Gayness evolved because heterosexual male sexual desire and violence are often enmeshed. Gayness evolved early on in the complex animal kingdom as a way to lessen sexual and childbearing demands on females. Gayness is deeply embedded in the evolutionary genetic history of not just animals, but all the great apes like man.
I explain this in more detail Why gayness can never be eliminated or even reduced in the human race.
The essence of morality is "Do whatever you want, but harm no one".
OUr sense of morality is innate and can be seen in infants as young as 3 months.
There's no rational justification for persecuting harmless lgbt people like Tony Perkins and Wyatt and Regina Hardiman are trying to bring about.
Barring new information that could convince him otherwise, Democratic Rep. Collin Peterson said Saturday he will vote against impeaching President Trump when the issue comes for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Peterson, a Democrat who has not yet announced whether he'll seek a 16th term representing western Minnesota's 7th District, said he expects other Democrats will do the same.
Peterson made the comments Saturday while attending the annual meeting of the First District Association, a dairy cooperative in Litchfield.
After the House Judiciary Committee voted to approve two articles of impeachment on Friday, the full House is set to vote on the articles in the coming week. Peterson said he normally doesn’t make a decision until an issue — and all the information — is on the floor for a vote but said “unless they come up with something between now and Wednesday,” he will not support the articles of impeachment.
“Maybe something will change. I doubt it,” he said.
Peterson said Trump “has not committed a crime” — and that most people in the 7th District don’t think the U.S. should provide foreign aid, so they are not troubled at all if Trump withheld funds to Ukraine. Peterson also said the case against Trump only includes "second-hand" information about Trump's questionable phone call.
DUH!!!!
Peterson said the “biggest problem” he has with this impeachment process is that people decided in advance they were going to impeach Trump “and now they’ve spent a year trying to figure out how they can make a case for it. That’s backwards. I just don’t agree with this.”
“This is dividing the country for no good reason because he’s not going to be thrown out of office,” he said. “Why are we doing this?”
Peterson said the issue should be settled at the ballot box.
“If people don’t like Trump, they can vote against him,” he said.
DUH!!!!
By Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous's own metrics, the economy is a disaster under Trump.
When the unemployment rate under Obama dropped six percentage points Wyatt and Regina were unequivocal that was not in any way good news because the labour participation rate under Obama was "disastrously low".
Well, the labour participation rate under Trump is unchanged from what it was under Obama. According to Wyatt and Regina Hardiman this is proof the economy is a disaster under Trump.
You heard that right, Wyatt and Regina said the low labour participation rate under Trump is proof the economy is a disaster.
The Salvation Army is NOT a charity.
They are an evangelical protestant church that uses donated money to actively oppress gay rights.
The have threatened to close New York soup kitchens if they are required to adhere to civil rights laws when dealing with gay employees.
They spend your money lobbying governments to deny harmless lgbt people the rights everyone else has.
Please research a charity before giving.
Happy Holidays!
The Salvation Army claims they help all in need
However their decades of discrimination show otherwise:
Refusals to take in homeless gay couples unless they agree to end their relationship
Refusals to allow gay parents to stay with their children in shelters
Refusal to shelter a homeless transgender woman, resulting in her death by exposure
Explicitly requires ministers to be heterosexual
Policy that employees are never penalized "if they happen to discriminate"
Regularly refers gays seeking assistance to "conversion" "therapy", a practice the American Psychiatric and American Psychological Associations condemn as "unethical and pseudo-scientific"
Fires employees who are determined to be gay or bisexual or requires them to never have a romantic relationship to keep their employment.
A big party in the middle of winter is the reason for the season :)
A commercial Hallmark movie showed a scene of two gays kissing
a group called One Million Moms let Hallmark know their disapproval of showing this on a what is considered a family network
Hallmark stopped showing the commercial
the cancel culture legions howled
liberals and Hollywood actresses threatened to boycott Hallmark
now, they reversed course, apologized to LBGT troublemakers, and promised to air the commercial
the lunatic fringe gay advocates think they won a big victory by bullying Hallmark
but what is the lesson other family-friendly entertainment companies will take from this?
Hallmark would have been better off to never have produced the gay scene to begin with
there is no upside to trying to normalize homosexuality
After watching the partisan impeachment railroad run out of steam, and simultaneously seeing many Democratic presidential candidates doing the same, I am more confident than ever about Donald J. Trump securing a historic second term.
Let’s start with the polls. I’ll admit even I was surprised when a recent round of surveys showed the president firmly ahead of each and every one of his Democratic opponents in the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Did someone paint the blue wall red?
Maybe it was Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, who hijacked Congress and tried to use it as a political weapon to short-circuit the electoral process. To paraphrase von Clausewitz, “Impeachment is the continuation of electoral strategy by other means.”
Though the people of the great state of California may be happy to see President Trump impeached for coloring outside the lines, the people of the Midwest, South and Mountain West who voted for him to be the Great Disruptor no doubt see things very differently. After watching Congress do nothing for two years except try to unseat the people’s president on a host of trumped-up charges, it is very likely that there will be hell to pay in 2020. That means not just a Trump victory, but also a larger Republican majority in the Senate and very likely a House of Representatives that will flip from the Democrats to the Republicans.
The Democrats, however, did not have to impeach President Trump to seal their doom, at least in presidential politics. The cake was already baked, and the icing on it is Trump’s just-won’t-quit economy. In 1980, Ronald Reagan asked Americans to vote based on whether they were better off than they were four years ago. For the vast majority of folks today, the answer to that question is a resounding yes. Sure, lots of voters still don’t like Trump’s bluster and bravado, but God help the Democrat who comes between them and their 401(k).
Even if you take both the impeachment hoax and the economic renaissance off the table, Trump would still be the hands-down favorite for reelection. That’s because there has always been a clear path to victory for him in 2020, and it goes straight through the Supreme Court. There are several other issues that will boost Trump’s chances for reelection, but none quite as ripe as Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The octogenarian justice is locked in a life-or-death battle (literally) with President Trump to see who can outlast the other.
Trump’s ally, of course, is time. Ginsburg, 86, has beat the clock on numerous occasions, surviving multiple bouts with cancer and other ailments to which the flesh is heir, but actuarial statistics give voters a reasonable expectation that were Trump reelected, he would be appointing a successor to Ginsburg at some point. This also goes to a lesser extent for Stephen Breyer at age 81 and possibly Clarence Thomas at age 71 and Samuel Alito at 69.
Almost everyone agrees that Trump’s promise to appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court energized his base in 2016 and helped to cement his victory. Although liberals will also use this issue to their advantage, it is a safe bet that taking the court back from activist liberal judges will play well for the president in the battleground states.
Another factor that makes Trump the favorite next year is that he has proven himself to be a problem solver whereas the Democrats are living up to their party symbol and acting like obstructionist donkeys.
The president has not always succeeded in delivering on his promises, but no one has ever doubted his hard work trying to find solutions to the border crisis, the opioid crisis, the trade imbalance and much more. Meanwhile, what have the Democrats done? Take a moment to make your list, because you won’t need more than a moment.
Oh, sure, the Democrats in the House announced — on the same day they announced that they were going to impeach President Trump — that they would pass the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal, but that was just window dressing. They should have passed that important agreement months ago.
Honestly, the only thing the Democrats have going for them is the media trying to whip voters into a frenzy with the constant drumbeat of anti-Trump news, but doesn’t that ultimately play into Trump’s hands, too? If everyone is throwing haymakers at him, and he keeps getting up off the mat, doesn’t he start to attain folk hero status? It’s no accident that the Hong Kong protesters were hoisting posters that depicted Trump as Rocky when they marched through the streets last month.
Finally, you can’t overestimate how important it is that President Trump has connected to minority communities in ways that are extraordinary for Republicans. Rasmussen Reports announced on Nov. 22 that 34% of blacks now support the president. The same result was confirmed by Emerson Polling just a few days later. If that holds true, it would be impossible for him to lose reelection. Remember, he only got 8% of the black vote in 2016.
There are multiple reasons why Trump is polling well among blacks and other minorities, including Hispanics. You can start with the record low unemployment among African Americans. The president famously asked blacks in 2016 when he was soliciting their votes, “What the hell do you have to lose?” The answer is now clear — they could lose their decades-long poverty under Democratic policies.
The president also got a big boost among minorities when rapper Kanye West endorsed him. Throw in Trump’s support for criminal justice reform, his grant of clemency for great-grandmother Alice Johnson (serving a life sentence for a minor drug crime), his intervention with the Swedish government to free rapper A$AP Rocky, and his pardon of boxer Jack Johnson more than 100 years after he was railroaded for having a white girlfriend, and you can easily understand why blacks might agree with Trump’s campaign slogan, “Promises made, promises kept.”
Since President Trump likes to go big and bold, I would expect him to put his reputation for solving problems to use in 2020, especially with the minority community. We have seen attention increase in 2019 to the plight of American cities, from Baltimore to Los Angeles and San Francisco, as the murder rate has spiked in the former and the homeless are taking over whole neighborhoods in the latter two cities, terrorizing businesses and families with an onslaught of drug paraphernalia, defecation and crime.
President Trump has suggested he might skip debates against his Democratic opponent in 2020. If he does, I hope he schedules appearances in Harlem, Watts, and the south side of Chicago on the dates in question. It is time for the president to reinforce the words of his inaugural address with action:
“Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
If all the Democrats have to run on in 2020 is a failed impeachment, and the president can point to successes in the economy, trade, and foreign affairs as he promises a renaissance for our beleaguered cities, then his victory is not just likely, it is assured.
Dems know it, that's the explanation for the rushed impeachment on nebulous charges.
Remember during the 2016 election and Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous were falsely claiming there was wrongdoing at Bill and Hillary Clinton's charity?
Well of course it was all on the up and up but ironically, it was the Trump charity that Trump and his family were using corruptly.
Trump started up a charity and then he used the money people donated to the poor for his own benefit, using it to pay his fines, legal fees and personal expenses.
Well no surprise, Trump lost a lawsuit over his stealing money from charity and has been fined $2 million and banned from ever pretending to run a charity again.
Trump's three eldest children were forced to undergo training in how not to steal from a charity you're running as part of the settlement.
This man is unfit to be president. The right thing to do is to remove him from this demanding job he is failing miserably at.
Speaking of lawsuits Trump has lost, he was also fined $25 million for running a fraudulent "Trump University" which conned people who believed in them out of money they could ill afford to lose.
Trump even coerced many of these people to pay for his fraudulent university by maxing out their credit cards at the abusive interest rates he lets banks charge Americans.
100 million Americans have pre-existing health conditions. For the first time in history, President Obama gave these people protection under the law that allows them to buy health insurance despite having pre-existing conditions.
As we speak, Trump and the Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to take away the legal protection for those with pre-existing health conditions.
Trump and the Republicans are using the courts they stacked with their henchmen to take away health care from 100 million Americans.
Remember that when you vote. If your health care is a concern, you need to vote Democratic.
The conservative/Republican debate strategy is simple:
Given the apparent situation, make up whatever story is most favourable to you and what you want and most damaging to those you oppose and what they want and then adamantly, loudly, and frequently insist your story is unconditionally true.
Conservatives like Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous don't believe in good faith debate. They see society as a contest to see who can dominate whom to one's exclusive benefit. You can see it in how they for months angrily posted about how Republican's supreme court was going to punish gays for opposing the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Like the pharisees, Wyatt and Regina take delight in having manipulated the letter of the law to defile the spirit of the law and democracy.
While campaigning in 2016 Donald Trump repeatedly said:
"I'm not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I'm not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid."
His proposed 2020 budget cuts:
$26 billion from Social Security.
$845 billion from Medicare
$1.5 trillion from Medicaid
If you still believe anything Donald Trump says it will be better for all Americans if you refrain from voting.
Trump is the only president in American history to never have had a positive job approval rating at any point in his term.
Polls show the majority of Americans want Trump impeached and removed from office.
Trump used $400 million in defence aid the Ukraine desperately needed to halt America's number one adversary, Russia, for his own personal benefit and to the severe harm of American national security.
Trump is using his office to line his pockets and cede international dominance to Russia and Putin. Its up to Republican Senators to do the right thing and remove this damaging man from office.
We know there are 20 to 30 Republican Senators who want to do the right thing and remove this dangerous man from the presidency. We are behind you and you will be praised throughout history for voting to remove this con man from power.
Trump boasted that his polls are “through the roof.” Fox News quickly proved him wrong.
New polling conducted by the president’s favorite cable network contains almost nothing but bad news for him.
Dec 16, 2019, 11:05am EST
Since the news broke about Trump trying to bribe the Ukranian president to attack the 2020 election to help him get elected the polls have consistently shown a majority of Americans want him removed from office. The Fox news poll confirms that.
Only 41% of Americans do not want Trump impeached.
The vast majority of Americans support implementing further gun control measurements.
This is yet again another way in which Republican politicians violate the will of the people. The first thing Republicans did when they got into power was to pass a law that gave the mentally ill access to guns.
The National Rifle Association is being criminally investigated for funneling Russian money into the 2016 election campaign to benefit Trump.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous disingenuously posted "Gun control is not a cure for mental illness".
How profoundly hypocritical coming from a Republican. Ronald Regan started the Republican war on the mentally ill by eliminating funding for mental health care and forcing people in treatment for mental illness onto the streets where most became homeless
Republicans have since opposed every measure aimed at helping the mentally ill. Their method of "helping" the mentally ill was to let them buy guns they previously could not.
Ever since Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon, a not-so-secret appeal of journalism has been the possibility that you, too, could bring down a president. Get a press pass and, presto, you’re another Woodward and Bernstein.
Donald Trump just spoiled the fantasy.
If, as expected, the Democrats’ impeachment dies a quick death in the Senate, it’s not just Speaker Nancy Pelosi who will have been thwarted. Presidential scalp-hunting by a biased media will be another Washington game disrupted by Trump.
Backed by a press corps eager to get Trump, Pelosi felt confident to authorize the flimsy effort to remove the president from office. She assumed media bullhorns would push the public into her camp and that would win her Republican votes for a bipartisan takedown.
She certainly got the media support, but the public and the GOP aren’t following. Indeed, the harder that Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler push and the louder the anti-Trump media scream, the more the public resists impeachment over the Ukraine piffle.
That was true even before last week’s sensational revelations that the FBI was both corrupt and incompetent in the Russia collusion probe. The report and testimony by Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Justice Department, further undermined impeachment by revealing the rampant misconduct in the earlier case.
The fact that Trump was unfairly targeted then buttresses his claim that Ukraine is just a second-rate sequel.
Thankfully, the accountability fallout from the Russia misconduct has started, with Attorney General Bill Barr suggesting possible prosecutions of FBI agents and perhaps others.
But what of the media? After all, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and the broadcast networks were spectacularly wrong in their coverage.
And not just once or twice. For years they were the faithful errand boys of the slimy Jim Comey and the odious John Brennan, using anonymous FBI and CIA sources to heap certainty on Trump’s guilt.
As Barr put it, “the nation was turned on its head for three years based on a completely bogus narrative that was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press.”
Pulitzers and other journalism prizes lionized some reports that are now as discredited as the Steele dossier. Yet the news organizations still protect the secret sources who misled them and act as if they themselves did nothing wrong.
One glaring example. The Times reported last May that the FBI sent a female investigator “posing as research assistant” to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016. The woman, who called herself Azra Turk, met with George Papadopoulos in a London bar.
In his memoir, “Deep State Target,” Papadopoulos described Turk as a “sexy bottle blonde in her 30s” who “isn’t shy about showing her curves — as if anyone could miss them.”
He also said “she acted and looked like CIA.”
The inspector general’s report doesn’t identify by name or agency affiliation the informants sent to spy on Trump associates, but the Times knows much more about Azra Turk than it told readers.
The day after the paper’s story on her appeared, one of its bylined reporters ducked when CNN asked if Turk was an FBI agent.
“I’m just, what I’m gonna, I’m just gonna leave it at right now as a government investigator,” reporter Adam Goldman answered.
“I use that, I use that, I use that wording for a reason, and I’m going to leave it at that.”
The Times’ story also says Turk and another informant, Stefan Halper, “failed to glean any information of value” from several meetings with Papadopoulos, but that is not true, according to the inspector general. He says one of the FBI’s most significant “inaccuracies and omissions” was the failure to tell FISA judges that Papadopoulos repeatedly denied to Halper and Turk that the campaign was collaborating with Russia or WikiLeaks.
Did the Times reporters know about that exculpatory information, or did their FBI sources lie to them? Either way, the paper now knows its May story was wrong on key points, yet it remains uncorrected.
Days after the 2016 election, the Times issued an apology of sorts to subscribers for failing to realize that Trump could win. “Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?” the publisher and editor wrote.
Though they claimed that “we believe we reported on both candidates fairly” (a line later deleted), they pledged to “rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.”
That never happened, as the paper immediately ramped up its assault on Trump and hasn’t stopped.
So now it’s time for a second apology — a sincere one. And an honest inquiry into how the paper continues to get the big stories so wrong.
My view is that top editor Dean Baquet made a disastrous mistake by eliminating the traditional standards of fairness and impartiality in a bid to stop Trump and upend his presidency. Supposedly straight-news stories are corrupted by bias and ambition, with the goal of taking down Trump oozing from every page.
There may also be other reasons why the Times continues to go off track, but that’s why an inquiry is essential. As several media companies did with #MeToo investigations when charges implicated top managers, the Times should hire a law firm or outside adviser to examine what’s wrong with its newsroom.
Because of its prominence, other media organizations would confess their own mistakes, both of omission and commission. When it concerns Trump, what the media don’t report reveals their bias as much as what they do report.
To its credit, the Times articles on the inspector general didn’t flinch from his devastating findings on the FBI. But the paper must also admit the obvious corollary: Its coverage was deeply flawed.
As part of its admission, it should name the sources who falsely painted the president as a traitor and reveal what it knows about Azra Turk, Stefan Halper and others who were sent to spy on a presidential campaign.
Only then can the Gray Lady begin to repair her shredded credibility.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem".
When Wyatt, Regina and Republicans say that, what they are really saying is that they want to take away your government Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and force you to pay for your own police and fire department out of your pocket if you want to be safe.
Seeing as Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous brought up gun control (the vast majority of the American public wants further gun control measures implemented), I should address that.
Actually, I don't need to because back in this thread Good anonymous posted an epic smackdown of a litany of right wing lies about gun control.
This masterful recounting of the truth of gun control and U.S. gun violence is incredibly informative and presents a complete picture of the truth unlike the common right wing tropes Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous trot out starting at February 18, 2019 9:55 PM where they tell the lie "Congress, back in the days before Columbine, declared schools in America a "gun-free zone" before that, no shooting in public schools since then, dozens"
What Wyatt and Regina get absolutely crushed by the vast knowledge of good anonymous on the gun control issue. Good anonymous destroys lie after lie by evangelical christians Wyatt and Regina Hardiman.
A link to this thread is definitely something you should pass on to anyone you want to inform about gun control. If you need to counter right wing lies about gun control and gun violence in the United States you need to read this lop-sided debate. Here's the link you can post into your browser:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?postID=1674996456275180390&blogID=9797121&isPopup=true&page=2
Remember, Wyatt and Regina start with the right wing lies at February 18, 2019 9:55 PM
Trump is not being impeached for no reason. He used $400 million in congressionally approved taxpayer funds to try to extort the Ukrainian president into subverting the 2020 election to get Trump elected.
Trump broke both Ukrainian and American law to try to rig the 2020 election in his favour.
If there is to be a free and fair election in 2020, Trump must be first removed from office.
Don't believe Wyatt/Regina's lies and attempt to distract from the truth.
The Trump appointed Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz released a report on his extensive investigation into the beginning of the investigation into Trump/Russia collusion.
Contrary to the lies of Republicans and Trump, Horowitz found no evidence of wrongdoing, said there was no spying on the Trump campaign and the investigation was predicated on sound evidence and good reason to believe a crime had been committed.
And a crime was committed. Trump openly solicited the help of a foreign country to change the election results in his favour. Robert Mueller's investigation documented 140 pages of Trump/Russia collusion.
Mueller then referred a 12 count criminal indictment fully prepared for prosecution in court and asked Congress to handle it because a Justice Department memo implies a sitting president can't be charged with a crime while currently in office.
Over 1000 former and present criminal prosecutors have signed an open letter saying that if any other American citizen had done what Trump did with Russia to subvert the 2016 election, they'd certainly be in jail
Okay Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous - your turn :)
Time for you to go find another tedious right wing propaganda article to cut&paste in a vain attempt to hide the truth about America's most corrupt president ever. Trump is attacking American democracy and freedom of the press like the dictator he wants to be.
Wyatt and Regina aren't smart enough to think and write for themselves, so they have to rely on right wing propaganda web sites to tell them what to think and post.
The Trump appointed Inspector General Michael Horowitz released the report on his investigation into the Trump/Russia collusion investigation.
Horowitz concluded there was no spying on the Trump campaign, that was a lie, and that the investigation into Trump/Russia collusion was all proper and based on significant evidence of wrongdoing by the Trump campaign.
Boy, when even your own handpicked inspector general, who owes you his cushy job, says the handling of the investigation into Trump/Russia collusion was all proper you know its obvious Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors in asking Russia to tilt the election to himself.
The inspector general report just blew up Trump’s lies. So his corrupt Attorney General is rushing to the rescue
The Justice Department’s inspector general has released his long-awaited report on the FBI investigation of Russia’s 2016 effort to help elect Donald Trump president. The report torpedoes the endless claim by Trump and his propagandists that the entire Russia investigation was a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.”
It’s important to reiterate right up front the actual argument that Trump World made for literally years. Not just that mistakes were made in the launching of the investigation. Not just that applications for this or that wiretapping warrant were mishandled.
No, the Trump argument has been that the entire investigation was built on top of deeply nefarious motives — that is, that the “deep state" was corruptly conspiring to prevent Trump from being elected president — and that it all was illegitimate. This was the argument of the president of the United States: that a law enforcement investigation into a foreign attack on our democracy was a “hoax" and a “witch hunt.”
Implicit in this position is the idea that when law enforcement officials learned that Russia was trying to sabotage a free and fair U.S. election, they shouldn’t have done anything. But it’s worse than that: Trump World’s story has been that law enforcement was riddled with corruption from top to bottom, and that they were the ones trying to corrupt and rig the election — that is, the real crime wasn’t Russian sabotage of our election but the effort to investigate it.
The inspector general report just wrecked numerous claims that Trump and his propagandists have made to justify that narrative.
Perhaps this is why Attorney General William P. Barr, who has been himself working to invalidate that investigation, rushed to Trump’s rescue. He released a statement that said this:
"The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken."
But that’s not at all what the IG’s report makes clear.
Let’s begin with the origin of the investigation, referred to as “Crossfire Hurricane.” It was triggered when the Australian government contacted U.S. government officials to alert them that a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, had bragged to an Australian official that the campaign was in contact with the Russian government, which had promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.
The report from the Australian government, the inspector general writes, “was sufficient to predicate the investigation. This information provided the FBI with an articulable factual basis that, if true, reasonably indicated activity constituting either a federal crime or a threat to national security, or both, may have occurred or may be occurring.”
The fact that it involved an ongoing presidential campaign obviously made this a sensitive matter. However, the inspector general adds:
"We also concluded that, under the AG Guidelines and the DIOG, the FBI had an authorized purpose when it opened Crossfire Hurricane to obtain information about, or protect against, a national security threat or federal crime."
The inspector general also completely knocks down the constant claims from Republicans that the entire investigation, which was authorized by then-Counterintelligence Division Assistant Director Bill Priestap, was the product of an anti-Trump conspiracy:
"We concluded that Priestap’s exercise of discretion in opening the investigation was in compliance with Department and FBI policies, and we did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced his decision."
How about the claim Barr has made that the bureau was “spying” on the Trump campaign? The inspector general writes:
"We found no evidence that the FBI placed any CHSs [confidential sources] or UCEs [undercover agents] within the Trump campaign or tasked any CHSs or UCEs to report on the Trump campaign. Finally, we also found no documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivations influenced the FBI’s decision to use CHSs or UCEs to interact with Trump campaign officials in the Crossfire Hurricane investigation."
Remember, Barr didn’t merely claim there had been “spying” on Trump’s campaign, Barr tried to imply that numerous law enforcement leaders had failed by permitting this, which was obviously designed to feed the “deep state” conspiracy that Trump wanted Barr to validate.
The inspector general does suggest that this aspect of the process could benefit from reforms, so that oversight of monitoring of potential “constitutionally protected activity” is strengthened. To be clear, this and the other reforms it suggests to the handling of sensitive monitoring operations are good things. We want the inspector general to be focused on this type of reform.
But what the inspector general emphatically did not conclude is that anything deliberately untoward occurred, anything even remotely like what Trump suggested and Barr subtly validated. And — surprise, surprise — Barr has suddenly popped up again to suggest that the investigation might not have been legitimately launched.
The inspector general also addressed the opening of four individual investigations, into Papadopoulos, Page, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort: “We did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations." Three of the four have been convicted of or pleaded guilty to crimes.
Barr is in the process of completing his own “review” of the investigation, and it’s plainly obvious that he is going to try to use it to cast doubt on these inspector general conclusions. Let’s remember that Barr put out a profoundly dishonestly summary of the special counsel’s report, one clearly designed to game media coverage of it in advance.
There is no need to grant Barr even the slightest presumption of good faith this time around. It isn’t just that history on the special counsel’s report; it’s that he already told us what his intention is, by implying at the outset with his “spying” comment that there just might be something to that “deep state” plot, and, now, by telling us exactly how he’s going to try to dishonestly dispute the inspector general’s findings, as well.
As you can see, Wyatt and Regina and their right wing propaganda sites are lying and falsely claiming the Inspector General's Report says the opposite of what it actually does:
There was nothing untoward about the Russia investigation, it was started based on sound evidence a crime had been and was being committed.
Which of course has been proven repeatedly to be the case. Its been one crime after another by Trump and his administration.
Anti-Gay Church Leader Accused Of Using Grindr To Solicit Young Men Into Prostitution, Screen Name “DILF”
The Kirksville Express reports:
A Truman State University professor and elder with the Kirksville Church of Christ is facing a misdemeanor prostitution charge amid allegations he sought sexual favors from male college students. Barry Cole Poyner, 57, of Kirksville, has been charged with a class B misdemeanor count of patronizing prostitution.
Documents state the Truman State University Police Department received a tip that Poyner has been “harassing male Truman students for sexual contact as well as offering to pay for items for sexual favors by using the app Grindr.”
Over at The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta notes that Poyner’s church rants against homosexuality on its Facebook page and posts memes about how we’re all going to burn in hell for eternity. His name has mysteriously vanished from their website.
About 400 of America’s largest corporations paid an average federal tax rate of about 11 percent on their profits last year, roughly half the official rate established under President Trump’s 2017 tax law, according to a report released Monday.
The 2017 tax law lowered the U.S. corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but in practice large companies often pay far less than that because of deductions, tax breaks and other loopholes.
In the first year of the law, the amount corporations paid in federal taxes on their incomes — their “effective rate” — was 11.3 percent on average, possibly its lowest level in more than three decades, according to a report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank.
From 2008 to 2015, under the previous tax code, the corporations’ effective rate was about 21 percent, according to ITEP’s prior research.
The report also found that 91 corporations in the Fortune 500, many worth billions of dollars, paid no federal taxes last year.
For most of these companies, their effective federal income tax rate was much lower than the statutory corporate tax rate of 21 percent. This is by design.
When drafting the tax law, lawmakers could have eliminated special breaks and loopholes in the corporate tax to offset the cost of reducing the statutory rate. Instead, the new law introduced many new breaks and loopholes, though it eliminated some old ones.
Several breaks and loopholes allow companies to report taxable income that is much smaller than their actual income. Other special breaks allow companies to reduce their tax liability after they apply the rate to their taxable income.
See the report here: https://itep.org/wp-content/uploads/121619-ITEP-Corporate-Tax-Avoidance-in-the-First-Year-of-the-Trump-Tax-Law.pdf
17 Antigay Leaders Exposed as Gay or Bi
Not every anti-gay crackpot is actually gay, but there's no shortage of those who actually are — especially in the Republican Party. Here is a list hypocrites who just couldn't practice what they preached.
"Using Grindr To Solicit Young Men Into Prostitution".... isn't this in the Christian youth group job description?
Schumer Rips McConnell: We Want A Fair Senate Trial
CNN reports:
In an interview with CNN’s John Berman on “New Day,” Schumer blasted McConnell for coordinating with the White House ahead of the trial.
“For him to talk to the President is one thing. For him to say, ‘I’m going to do just what the President wants,’ is totally out of line,” said Schumer, a New York Democrat.
“As I said, discussion in this kind of situation is not out of the question at all,” Schumer said Monday. “Saying you’re going to do just what the President wants is totally out of line and Mitch McConnell has received a lot of justified criticism for that.”
A Russian oligarch has built a big aluminum plant in McConnell's home state. McConnell's wife is being investigated for corrupt dealings with Russian oligarchs. Mitch McConnell is in the tank for Russia, just like Trump.
Every move Trump has made on the international stage has been to benefit Russia and harm the United States NATO allies.
Trump is a national security threat that is doing long term damage to national security as each day passes. Corrupt Mitch McConnell wants the Senate to pretend to try the case and just go through the motions of doing so.
Americans deserve a real Senate trial on Trump's bribing foreign officials, not a fake one run by Trump.
Let's not forget the other major corrupt player trying to help Trump become dictator - Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook.
Zuckerberg has announced Facebook will let Republican politicians run ads where they lie to the public. His excuse? "The public should get to hear what politicians are saying."!
Hey Mark, just how is it a public good for the public to hear the politicians lie to them? How does it benefit the public to be lied to?
Trump recently called Zuckerberg to the WhiteHouse. Zuckerberg claims nothing of significance was discussed, that they were just "shooting the breeze". Clearly Zuckerberg is just as big a liar as Trump. Trump doesn't demand a visit from the head of Facebook without asking for favours.
Zuckerberg is being paid off by Trump to allow the GOP to lie to the public on a massive scale using Facebook as the platform.
Zuckerberg is selling out American democracy for money he doesn't need.
Lindsey Graham Won’t “Pretend To Be A Fair Juror”
NBC News reports:
The Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee said, “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.”
On CBS’s Face the Nation, Graham, who’s grown quite incurious about basic details of recent White House scandals, added, “I don’t need any witnesses.”
Senate rules require members to take a specific oath before an impeachment trial gets underway: “I solemnly swear (or affirm) that in all things appertaining to the trial of ____, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God.”
Lindsay Graham has announced he's loyal to Trump first and not the Constitution he took an oath to uphold. He's a modern day Benedict Arnold.
Moscow Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are trying to be bad examples to the rest of Republican Senators.
If you're a Republican Senator you know you want to do the right thing and history will praise you for it.
Tell Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham that, unlike them, you will not put yourself before your country.
"About 400 of America’s largest corporations paid an average federal tax rate of about 11 percent on their profits last year, roughly half the official rate established under President Trump’s 2017 tax law, according to a report released Monday."
Please allow me to explain this to you.
No corporation should pay the "official rate".
The way our government controls the behavior of taxpayers, including corporations, is to give them tax breaks to do what the government wants them to. Corporations that behave pay less.
"The 2017 tax law lowered the U.S. corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, but in practice large companies often pay far less than that because of deductions, tax breaks and other loopholes."
The deductions and tax breaks aren't loopholes. They all have a purpose. They modulate corporate behavior to the mutual benefit of all parts of our society.
"In the first year of the law, the amount corporations paid in federal taxes on their incomes — their “effective rate” — was 11.3 percent on average, possibly its lowest level in more than three decades,"
And, just coincidentally, mind you, the unemployment rate is the lowest in decades. Indeed, minorities and the working poor are sharing in the economic boom for the first time in decades!
Since Dems are always advocating for minorities and the working poor, they must be so tickled that Trump's tax cuts have produced such a robust trickle-down economy!!
"From 2008 to 2015, under the previous tax code, the corporations’ effective rate was about 21 percent,"
Man, oh man, did the economy suck back then!!!
"The report also found that 91 corporations in the Fortune 500, many worth billions of dollars, paid no federal taxes last year."
That's a step in the right direction. Corporations should not pay tax at all. Their stockholders pay tax on the dividends. It's not fair to tax corporate earnings twice!!!!
"For most of these companies, their effective federal income tax rate was much lower than the statutory corporate tax rate of 21 percent. This is by design."
You betcha!!!!!
How about that!!!!!!
"When drafting the tax law, lawmakers could have eliminated special breaks and loopholes in the corporate tax to offset the cost of reducing the statutory rate."
Well, that would have been stupid.
Then, there would be no net boost to the economy.
"Instead, the new law introduced many new breaks and loopholes, though it eliminated some old ones."
Nice!!!!!!!
"Several breaks and loopholes allow companies to report taxable income that is much smaller than their actual income."
Cool!!!!!!!
"Other special breaks allow companies to reduce their tax liability after they apply the rate to their taxable income."
That's fascinating, it really is.
But people who now have a job and whose wages are rising would rather go back to Obama Lane.
Thank you very much!!!!!!!!!
Lower taxes, lower unemployment...
It's like magic !!
It's amazing how well everything has turned out for the President!
Robert Mueller gave Congress a "road map to impeachment" for obstructing justice.
Why wasn't Trump impeached for that, then?
Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff were ranting about bribery a couple of weeks ago.
Why wasn't Trump impeached for that, then?
I'll answer fer ya.
They couldn't find any evidence he was guilty.
Instead he will be impeached on the solemn charge of "abuse of power".
Of course, they've said the same about every President.
First time anyone was impeached for that!!
Oh, and "contempt of Congress"'
ROFL!!!!
Every President has had some dispute with Congress over what information can be shared.
First time anyone was impeached for that!!
Right now, Trump is pushing to have the longest impeachment trial possible.
It's helping his approval numbers tremendously in the swing states!!!!!!!
Whistleblower to IRS: Christian church has amassed 100 billion in tax exempt fund rather than supporting charitable works.
Unlike real charities that spend 90% of the money they take in on charitable work and 10% on operational costs, Christian churches spend well over 90% of the money they take in on the church itself and at best a few percent on charitable works.
It is a myth that churches deserve tax exemption because they do charitable work that benefits society.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Robert Mueller gave Congress a "road map to impeachment" for obstructing justice. Why wasn't Trump impeached for that, then?"
Republicans refused to hold Trump accountable - how stupid are you? Over 100 former and present prosecutors signed an open letter saying if any other American did what Trump did with Russia to pervert the 2016 election they'd be in jail.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff were ranting about bribery a couple of weeks ago. Why wasn't Trump impeached for that, then?"
You really are dense, aren't you?
Trump IS being impeached for bribery, its all under the Abuse of Power article of impeachment. This covers the bribery of a foreign official as well as the multiple crimes Trump committed to try and subvert the 2020 election.
Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the United States. His company also paid nothing in income tax.
The vast army of ordinary workers are the people that created all the wealth Jeff Bezos pays no income tax on. Bezos does essentially nothing for the trillions his employees give him every year.
Its time corporations started paying their fair share, for god's sake, at least half of the percentage rate your average middle class taxpayer pays is NOT too much to ask.
Obama dropped the unemployment rate six percentage points and turned around the economy. Under Trump the unemployment rate dropped another 1% - all Trump had to do was not mess up the economy he inherited from Obama, instead he's added $1 trillion to the deficit and the deficit is forecast to be be above $1 trillion each year Trump is in office.
The only significant thing Trump has done in office is blow up the deficit and take health care away from millions.
The moral crisis of our age has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion; it's insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street's continued gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy.
TV channel Rossiya 1 aired a segment entitled "Puppet Master and 'Agent'-HOw to understand Russian minister Lavrov's Meeting with Trump."
Russian commentators note, rightly, that "sooner or later the Democrats will come back into power," and they're already joking about offering Trump asylum.
"The moral crisis of our age has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion; it's insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street's continued gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy"
Thanks, Robert. Weren't you part of the Carter administration? The worst economic performance by any President ever?
The real moral crisis of our age is that blacks and other minorities have been fooled by Democrats for decades, who said they would advance their interests. Instead, the Dems focused on the welfare of illegal immigrants and homosexuals. It took a billionaire takeover of our democracy to actually improve the economic lot of our most disadvantaged citizens.
"TV channel Rossiya 1 aired a segment entitled "Puppet Master and 'Agent'-HOw to understand Russian minister Lavrov's Meeting with Trump."
Russian commentators note, rightly, that "sooner or later the Democrats will come back into power," and they're already joking about offering Trump asylum."
Very interesting. Nice to see Russians and Dems are still buddies after all these years.
"Instead, the Dems focused on the welfare of illegal immigrants and homosexuals."
Don't forget their obsession with legalizing the murder of young children!
Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade made a remarkable admission early Monday morning.
“The Fox poll came out — and I was stunned by this,” Kilmeade said on “Fox and Friends.” “This says 50 percent of the country want the president impeached. I was stunned to see that that’s the number, because I thought that things were trending away.”
Actually, the Fox News poll released Sunday said that 54 percent of Americans want to see President Trump impeached. Fifty percent support impeaching him and removing him from office; an additional 4 percent support impeaching him but allowing him to remain on the job. Forty-one percent don’t think he should be impeached at all.
What Kilmeade is comparing these results to, though, is the conservative media narrative that emerged in recent weeks. It’s one that was espoused by Trump himself last week, when the president declared that his poll numbers had gone “through the roof” — especially, he said, “with independent voters and especially in swing states.”
As we noted Friday, that’s not true. The reality is that the polls actually haven’t changed that much. Since Fox News’s last poll in late October, for example, support for impeachment is essentially unchanged, once you consider the margin of sampling error. The same holds true for Trump’s job approval, which was at 42 percent in October and is at 45 percent now, a nonsignificant shift.
That didn’t stop Kilmeade (or the headline writers at Fox) from comparing the approval and the impeachment numbers.
“I thought that things were trending away,” Kilmeade said, then adding, “although the president’s approval rating did tick up in the same poll. So it’s almost like a split personality.”
Nope. Same personality: Views of Trump haven’t really moved at all.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone, much less shock them. For weeks, we’ve tracked impeachment polling and found that things hadn’t budged...
What the Fox News poll showed was, in fact, the opposite of shocking. It reinforced what other polls have shown — though, as expected, there is some deviation (like the lower support for impeachment in Suffolk’s poll). But Kilmeade, one of the foremost denizens of the Fox News universe, may not be exposed to that objective reality. Nor may many of his fervent viewers.
Including Trump.
A CNN poll released Monday night shows that support for impeachment and removal has plummeted five points in the last week.
The latest average by RCP shows more are opposed to impeachment than favor.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/public_approval_of_the_impeachment_and_removal_of_president_trump-6957.html
"A CNN poll released Monday night shows that support for impeachment and removal has plummeted five points in the last week."
That's funny!
I think the turning point was when the public saw that, after all the bombastic statements, the House wasn't going to charge Trump with obstruction of justice or bribery. They know that means there was no proof of either.
You can't fool Americans. They know Dems are trying to void their votes!
Donald Trump's presidency is a roller coaster everywhere except in his approval rating.
There have been ups (the economy, the killing of an ISIS leader) and there have been downs (the Mueller investigation and impeachment inquiry, to start) in his presidency. Through it all, though, the president's job approval has remained steady across all polls, the NBC News/Wall Street Journal’s included.
Trump's approval rating has hovered within the same nine-point range (upper: 47 percent in the Oct. 14-17, 2018, poll; lower: 38 percent in Oct. 23-26, 2017) since his inauguration in January 2017.
In the most recent poll, 45 percent approved of Trump's job performance. That's 2 points higher than the previous poll, taken October 4-6, 2019.
He currently has a higher approval rating than Obama did at this point in his presidency. Obama had soaring approval ratings for the first few months of his term until Americans got to know him.
Attorney George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, and three other prominent Republicans have launched a new campaign aimed at ensuring President Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.
Outspoken Trump critic Conway, GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, and Republican strategists Steve Schmidt and John Weaver announced The Lincoln Project super PAC in an op-ed in The New York Times in which they bashed Trump and his enablers for replacing conservatism “with an empty faith led by a bogus prophet.”
“Over these next 11 months, our efforts will be dedicated to defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box and to elect those patriots who will hold the line,” they wrote in the column published Tuesday, titled “We Are Republicans, And We Want Trump Defeated.”
“We do not undertake this task lightly, nor from ideological preference. We have been, and remain, broadly conservative (or classically liberal) in our politics and outlooks,” they added. “Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain, but our shared fidelity to the Constitution dictates a common effort.”
They summarized their strategy:
Our efforts are aimed at persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts to help ensure a victory in the Electoral College, and congressional majorities that don’t enable or abet Mr. Trump’s violations of the Constitution, even if that means Democratic control of the Senate and an expanded Democratic majority in the House.
Trump has “neither the moral compass nor the temperament to serve,” they added.
The op-ed also accused congressional Republicans who continue to defend Trump amid the impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine scandal of doing “far worse” than marching along to his beat.
“Their defense of him is imbued with an ugliness, a meanness and a willingness to attack and slander those who have shed blood for our country, who have dedicated their lives and careers to its defense and its security, and whose job is to preserve the nation’s status as a beacon of hope,” they wrote.
“We look to Lincoln as our guide and inspiration,” they concluded. “He understood the necessity of not just saving the Union, but also of knitting the nation back together spiritually as well as politically. But those wounds can be bound up only once the threat has been defeated. So, too, will our country have to knit itself back together after the scourge of Trumpism has been overcome.”
Speaking at a private event in Singapore, where he’s travelling with former First Lady Michelle Obama, former President Barack Obama implied the front-runners from both parties should step aside for a female candidate.
“Women, I just want you to know, you are not perfect, but what I can say pretty indisputably is that you’re better than us,” Obama reportedly said Monday. “I’m absolutely confident that for two years if every nation on Earth was run by women, you would see a significant improvement across the board on just about everything."
The 44th president’s comments were reported by the BBC. Obama also gave something less than a ringing endorsement for Democratic candidates Joe Biden, 77; Michael Bloomberg, 77; Bernie Sanders, 78, or GOP incumbent Donald Trump, 73.
“If you look at the world and look at the problems it’s usually old people, usually old men, not getting out of the way,” Obama continued.
“They cling to power, they are insecure, they have outdated ideas and the energy and fresh vision and new approaches are squashed,” he said.
Late last month, the media floated the idea Michelle Obama could be a strong presidential candidate, even though she’s not on the 2020 ticket and has repeatedly said she has no interest in seeking public office.
Michelle Obama compares Donald Trump to a ‘divorced dad’
During her 2019 book tour for her best-seller “Becoming,” Michelle said she was “not interested in politics” and was looking forward to enjoying civilian life after eight years in the White House, according to Newsweek. In August, the former first lady clearly stated again there was “zero chance” she’d run for president.
A USA Today poll published Oct. 30 showed nearly one-in-five Democratic voters would like to see their party’s list of 2020 presidential candidates expand and 10% of those surveyed chose Michelle Obama as the newcomer they’d support.
“Over these next 11 months, our efforts will be dedicated to defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box and to elect those patriots who will hold the line,”
that's nice but you idiots should have settled on a GOP or independent alternative to Trump long ago
best wishes but it's kind of late now
and, no, expanded Dem majorities in Congress is not acceptable
but, no worries
this movement is unlikely to have any effect at all
You can always tell by the flood of boring cut&pastes Wyatt/Regina do that they're afraid to respond to what I've written and desperate to hide my posts from everyone else. Sad!
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "only five years left of the most gay friendly President ever. And, then: MIKE PENCE TAKES OVER."
Sure, just like you were going to enjoy the 16 years of the Romney/Ryan presidencies. And "President Huckabee, President Huckabee".
Hahahahahahahahahaha!
Trump used 400 million in congressionally approved taxpayer funds for his personal gain.
Trump broke multiple U.S. and Ukranian laws trying to extort the Ukranian president to open a fake investigation into the Bidens.
If American democracy is to survive Trump must be removed from office.
100 million Americans have pre-existing helath conditions.
Obamacare gave those people the right to health insurance at the same price as everyone else, regardless of their pre-existing health conditions.
As we speak Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to remove health coverage for those 100 million Americans.
Trump repeatedly promised that he would repeal Obamacare on day one and replace it with "something terrific, that will cover everyone.
Its been just one massive lie after another from Trump and the Republicans about how they're going to make the life of Americans better and then they turn around and do everything in their power to harm the American public.
The conservative/Republican debate strategy is simple:
Given the apparent situation, make up whatever story is most favourable to you and what you want and most damaging to those you oppose and what they want and then adamantly, loudly, and frequently insist your story is unconditionally true.
Conservatives like Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous don't believe in good faith debate. They see society as a contest to see who can dominate whom to one's exclusive benefit. You can see it in how they for months angrily posted about how Republican's supreme court was going to punish gays for opposing the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. Like the pharisees, Wyatt and Regina take delight in having manipulated the letter of the law to defile the spirit of the law and democracy.
I believe in a society where everyone's highest priority is to maximize the happiness for all in an equal and fair way. That's going to give us the best society possible.
Hey Wyatt/Regina, do you two even read these long boring cut&pastes you post?
Cause it seems like you're just posting for quantity and any B.S. you come across from a right wing propaganda site you just blindly post.
People here often refer to Wyatt/Regina as "the TTF troll", and for good reason.
Then Wyatt and Regina adamantly insist, they are not trolls, but someone else is. Psychologists call this "projection", where one accuses others of the things they don't like about themselves.
If there was any doubt about the trollishness typical of their comments, look at this one:
"only five years left of the most gay friendly President ever. And, then: MIKE PENCE TAKES OVER."
Most people are well aware that Trump has waged a war on harmless lgbt people but Wyatt/Regina post that the opposite is true, obviously because they hope to upset or anger me - that's the definition of a troll.
And let's parse that comment of there's further, because when you analyze it, Wyatt and Regina Hardiman are pretty scary people.
Note how they angrily emphasized about a theoretical Trump second term:
"And, then: MIKE PENCE TAKES OVER."
Not "and then Mike Pence wins the next election". Not "the people elect Pence", its "MIKE PENCE TAKES OVER".
Wyatt and Regina exposed their true heart with that comment - they don't believe in democracy and they hate democracy. There's no room for choice in what they envision for the future, there's no election in what they envision, its just "MIKE PENCE TAKES OVER" with an iron fist, with no choice, the presidency being passed from one dictator to the next.
If you don't believe that's who Trump supporters like Wyatt and Regina and Tony Perkins are, read in this online book what decades of psychological research on right wing authoritarians (like Wyatt and Regina) shows:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
Speaking of trollish comments by Wyatt/Regina, let's deal with one of their favourites, which again reveals a lot about who they are:
"Merrick Garland......LOL!!"
Now, if you've read much of Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous's posts here, you recognize that first and foremost they post this in the hope that it will upset/anger liberal readers here. Again, they claim they're not trolls when they obviously are. Research shows internet trolls like Wyatt and Regina Hardiman are sadists
But why is the corrupt blocking of Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland so important to Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous?
Obviously part of it is that this means a right wing partisan has been appointed to the Supreme Court who will force a theocratic vision on the public against their democratic will.
But their delight in having corruptly blocked a supreme court nominee Republicans had previously roundly praised and lamented that Obama had not nominated someone like Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court?
That delight they're experiencing is because they deceived the public and behaved immorally to get their way. It's not just that they got their way, they're delighted primarily because they did so by deception and immoral behaviour.
This psychological tendency is deeply embedded in the evolutionary psychology of many conservatives like Wyatt/Regina. Their/humanity's psychology evolved in a time when humans lived in autonomous tribes with sporadic warfare between them.
The psychology of perhaps 20-40% of conservatives is such that they have a natural psychological tendency to want to f*ck over others to better their own lives. That was evolutionarily adaptive for a tribe back in cave man days. But its maladaptive in our modern technological society.
You can see from Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous's most prominent statements, they really hate gays. Really nothing is more important to Trump supporting evangelical christians than persecuting harmless lgbt people.
Naturally, innocent lgbt people need to spend a lot of resources fighting back against this irrational religious hatred. The religious spend a lot of resources trying to persecute us. Its all just a huge waste of resources for society as a whole.
When social groups like this work at cross purposes to each other it diminishes the amount of good we can do for everyone, it means there is less good in the world as a whole in total than there would be if we worked together.
That's all I'm asking of evangelical christians like Tony Perkins and Wyatt and Regina Hardiman - sign on to the social contract:
You treat me fairly and I'll treat you fairly.
You started the war on harmless lgbt people, you're obligated to come back into compliance with the social contract before we have any obligation to treat you fairly. Please do so.
This comment has been removed by the author.
The philosophy of fairness is better for humanity than any religion.
We are no longer living in caves where its evolutionarily adaptive for a tribe to try to make their lives better at the expense of others.
We live in a global technological community where our actions have effects on our neighbours halfway around the world.
The world can never be united under any religion, it can only be united under the philosophy of global fairness.
Working together will give us more total good for the globe than working against each other will. Please, stop this senseless war on harmless lgbt people - we'll all be better off then.
Here’s the most unsurprising study result you’ll see this week (month…year…decade). A new study published in a psychology journal concludes that online trolling correlates with sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. Here’s the abstract:
In two online studies (total N = 1215), respondents completed personality inventories and a survey of their Internet commenting styles. Overall, strong positive associations emerged among online commenting frequency, trolling enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the measures. Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an Internet manifestation of everyday sadism.
Caitlin Dewey responds to the study:
But the intriguing thing about this new study by researchers from University of Manitoba, University of Winnipeg and University of British Columbia is the idea that trolling behavior springs not from the opportunity provided by the Internet, but from innate characteristics people possess both online and off.
That bodes poorly for efforts to tame the trolls. It also suggests, somewhat ominously, that there are lots of “everyday sadists among us.”
Of course there are. The anonymity and distance of online communication provides the opportunity for them to show their true nature in ways that they cannot do in their everyday life. I have always maintained that there’s nothing fake about this kind of thing. If you spend your time acting like an asshole online, you are an asshole.
Slapdash and rushed.
Mitch McConnell said it best. A short slogan all Americans can agree with
Trump used $400 million in taxpayer funds to try to extort the Ukranian president into opening a fake investigation into Biden to help get Trump re-elected.
Foreign countries have no business in deciding who the leader of the United States will be.
Schiff did the right thing. Moscow Mitch is in with the Russians ever since they built a big aluminum plant in Kentucky to buy Mitch off.
If you want a dictatorship in the U.S., Moscow Mitch is your man.
If you want democracy and the rule of law in your country, Adam Schiff is your man.
Every day Trump is in power is another day he and Putin work to destroy American democracy and make Trump a puppet dictator who reports to Russia.
Russian state television now regularly describes Trump as their "agent" and "puppet". Trump doesn't dare contradict them because he's laundering the proceeds of Russian crime for Putin.
That's why even though Trump repeatedly promised to release his income tax returns he's fought tooth and nail to keep them secret - he knows if they become public they'll reveal his criminal ties to Putin.
Moscow Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and Lindsey Graham are traitors to the ideals the United States was founded on. They've all been bought out by Putin.
Its up to the Republican Senators who want to do what is right to stand up to these sell-outs and remove Trump from office.
History has shown that strongmen who become dictators tell the public up front that they're going to seize dictatorial control. Trump has referred to "my supreme court" and said "I have the supreme court.." and therefore that things will go his way.
Trump believes he is the State, a king. When the president of China became president for life Trump expressed envy and said "Maybe we'll have to try that here.".
That there was no massive outrage gave Trump the sign that Americans are open to giving away their democracy and making Trump another right wing dictator.
He absolutely will be emboldened if Republicans don't do what's right and remove this existential threat to America from power.
Let's not forget that the day after corrupt attorney General Bill Barr came out and lied that there was nothing to the Mueller Report, Trump got on the phone with the Ukrainian prime minister and told him if he wanted to get the military aid they needed to hold off Russia, he needed to announce publicly a fake investigation into Joe Biden.
Trump was obviously emboldened when the man who's supposed to be the attorney for the people lied to protect Trump by claiming the report exonerated him - the next day he took his quest for foreign interference in the 2020 election way beyond the law.
If your Republican Senators do not remove Trump from power he will be much more emboldened and you can bet he will break more laws trying to fix the 2020 election in his favour.
Republican politicians blocked efforts to protect the integrity of the vote count for the 2020 election. Trump fired the chief computer/internet security people who were there to protect the election from foreign hacking.
Do not give Trump a second chance at turning America into a dictatorship. Get rid of him as soon as possible.
We all know the man is mentally unwell.
And this is not the sort of benign dementia like Reagan had where adults in the room were running the show and Reagan didn't cause any harm.
Trump is driven to line his pockets and maximize his power. Putin obviously has compromat on him and Lindsey Graham and little doubt has Mitch McConnell on the Russian payroll as well.
After all, just before one of the people Trump hired to "persuade" the Ukranian prime minister to help get Trump elected Putin sent him $1 million.
Lev Parnas also illegally contributed hundreds of thousands of other Russian money to Republican politicians in the 2016 election.
A long string of close Trump associates have either been convicted of crimes, pleaded guilty, are currently being prosecuted for crimes or under investigations for crimes, like Rudy Giulianni.
Trump's financial disclosure forms require him to reveal any donations he gets such as free legal work. Giuliani charges thousands an hour and Trump never declared that gift on his financial disclosure forms. That's a crime.
Nor did Trump disclose the campaign funds he used to buy the silence of two women he had sex with while married to Melania. That was required by law as well and Trump didn't declare it even though his lawyer pleaded guilty to campaign finance crimes Trump directed him to carry out. Everyone goes to jail but Trump. Mitch McConnell and William Barr are doing their best to help Trump destroy the rule of law.
Its been a lifetime of corruption and law breaking for Trump and its getting worse and worse.
On the eve of his impeachment, a stain that obviously torments him more than his enablers have let on, President Trump issued a rambling, unhinged and lie-filled letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). It is difficult to capture how bizarre and frightening the letter is simply by counting the utter falsehoods (e.g., repeating the debunked accusation that Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired for investigating Burisma; claiming Congress is obstructing justice; arguing he was afforded no rights in the process), or by quoting from the invective dripping from his pen.
What is most striking is the spectacle of the letter itself — a president so unhinged as to issue such an harangue; a White House entirely unable to stop him; a party so subservient to him that it would not trigger a search for a new nominee; a right-wing media bubble that will herald Trump for being Trump and excoriate Democrats for driving the president to this point; and a mainstream media not quite able to address a public temper-tantrum (resorting instead to euphemisms such as “scorching,” “searing,” etc.). The letter and the response (or lack thereof) is the perfect encapsulation of the state of American politics — in which one major party has bound itself to the mast of a raging, dangerous narcissist while the other cannot uphold the norms and institutions on which our democracy depends.
On one side, you have Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) methodically responding to Republicans’ false talking points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOLLFspy03Y&feature=emb_logo
On the other side, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declares: “I’m not an impartial juror. This is a political process,” and defends his stance as though “signing up” for your own side is the expected course of action.
On one side, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) points out in a floor speech that McConnell did not provide “a single sentence — a single argument — as to why the witnesses I suggested should not give testimony. Impeachment trials, like most trials, have witnesses. To have none would be an aberration.” Schumer points out that "the American people want the truth, and that’s why we have asked for witnesses and documents, to get at the whole truth and nothing but.”
On the other side, McConnell bizarrely says a trial is not about getting to the truth. "If House Democrats’ case is this deficient, this thin, the answer is not for the judge and jury to cure it over here in the Senate,” he said. “The answer is that the House should not impeach on this basis in the first place.” Actually, trials are where all available and relevant evidence is put forth.
To say the process is “partisan,” or that the two sides are “unable to agree,” misleads average Americans who think there is some shared responsibility for the result of one party’s willingness to subvert the truth and the Constitution. Trump brought impeachment on himself and has become, like his Fox News information source, untethered to reality. Republicans are refusing to live up to their oaths. That is the reality; the solution comes in 2020.
I take some solace in noting that female voters — who disfavor Trump’s performance and would vote against him by nearly 30 percentage points according to some polls — recoil from such outbursts. Many are rightly concerned by the damage an unfit and deeply disturbed president might wrought. Perhaps the experience of having abusive spouses or angry male bosses makes women particularly sensitive to fits of fury and evidence of irrationality. If only male voters were as concerned, and as unwilling to see Trump as some sort of champion of the downtrodden white male in America, we could be assured of his defeat in 2020. Maybe the president’s meltdown (and we suppose it will get worse with time) will help open their eyes.
The Military Times reports:
President Donald Trump received a loud ovation when he participated in the coin toss ahead of Saturday’s Army-Navy football rivalry game in Philadelphia. But troops’ actual feelings about the commander in chief appear much more ambivalent in the latest Military Times survey.
Half of active-duty military personnel contacted in the poll held an unfavorable view of President Trump, showing a continued decline in his approval rating since he was elected in 2016. Trump’s 42 percent approval in the latest poll, conducted from Oct. 23 to Dec. 2, sets his lowest mark in the survey since being elected president.
Some 50 percent of troops said they had an unfavorable view of him. By comparison, just a few weeks after his electoral victory in November 2016, 46 percent of troops surveyed had a positive view of the businessman-turned-politician, and 37 percent had a negative opinion.
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