2018 |
2015 | 2012 | 2009 | 2006 |
2017 | 2014 | 2011 | 2008 | 2005 |
2016 | 2013 | 2010 | 2007 |
Ivanka Trump attends G20 Summit as
though she had diplomatic qualifications. Embarrasses
herself.
"Trump
Blew Up The Iran Nuclear Deal. Now He Wants Allies To Help Him Get An
Iran Nuclear Deal"
So, a commenter who's writing about one of the pieces in the paper
is waxing eloquent about how Our Glorious Leader the President is
handling various policies. He mentions "increased sanctions on
Iran," suggesting that this is a good policy. Problem is, while
his aides hope that the President will "...engage with a number
of different international leaders, among our closest partners and
allies, to obtain their support...", he's busy antagonizing
those same allies by throwing around wild charges about them taking
advantage of the US on trade matters.
Not surprisingly, "US
gets no commitment from NATO for help on Iran threat"
Alies don't trust US and want deescalation more than they want to
confront Iran.
When the DNC tweets out the RNC's interview, you
know it didn't go well. RNC Chairwoman tried to suggest that
On the Democratic debate, I have to say I was very impressed by Senator Warren's wonkish command of the details of the issues, but Senator Harris can really do the face-to-face confrontations really well.
"SCOTUS Upholds Decision Blocking Census Citizenship Question"
A reasonably good SCOTUS decision on the Census citizenship
question. President very
upset as this was a major setback.
"Tulsi
Gabbard Wins Russia Bot Drudge Poll"
Well, there we go! Representative Gabbard's da winnah! On a
serious note, I was disappointed by her answer to the question of
whether she'd include Hezbollah in a new nuclear deal with Iran. She
answered the question she wanted
to answer instead of the question
she was asked. That happens a
lot, but the obviously correct answer was "No."
The Obama/P5+1 deal with Iran worked for both sides precisely
because it was limited to just a few issues. It did not try to
solve every single problem the P5+1 had with Iran.
"Attendees
Want No Publicity At Sarah Sanders' Goodbye Party, But We've Got The
List"
One true,Capital-J Journalist
refused to attend. April Ryan, we
salute you!
The question that the Trump Administration wants to add to the Census is running up against serious deadlines.
"GOP
congressman voted for tax cuts, now says America is too indebted to
pay for appropriations bill"
As with the President's policy on Iran, a Republican is dealing
with a largely self-created problem. “Our nation is more than $20
trillion in debt..." Yes. Yes, it is. And Republicans bear a
really large share of the blame for that, starting with the War on
Terror, launched after 9/11. That's
now $5.9 trillion.
The tax cut of 2017, pretty much the only
legislative achievement
of Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and
President Trump, cost the Treasury $1.5 trillion. The
deficit grew by
$1 trillion. Meaning that some
of the money was profitably
re-invested, but not nearly enough to pay for the tax cut.
Great title to the whole post here: "Kiddie
Concentration
Camps, Not Polling Well"
NAWWWW!!! Ya think!?!?!?!?!
I've said many terrible thing about Senator Sanders, but we are 100% on the same page here. The "crisis" with Iran is self-created by the President and there's no such thing as a "limited strike" here.
A look at news coverage of the President's reelection rally. 500
journalists for this? No news "hook," nothing meaningful to
report, nothing but him reviving all of his "greatest hits."
Reminds me of the race between the elder George Bush vs Michael
Dukakis (Governor of Massachusetts). Near the end, a TV newswoman
cheerfully chirped that she was going to review the campaign, going
over all of the highlights. In the meantime, the independent paper The
Boston Phoenix reviewed all of the important stuff the campaign didn't cover! The Phoenix was
engaged in real journalism!
Trump official tries
to argue
that detained children don't need toothpaste or soap. Man who was held
by Somali pirates for 32 months received toothpaste and soap. Here's
the video where she argues this.
Border Patrol agents keep wondering why Americans consider them to be Nazis.
Four Severely Ill Migrant Toddlers
Hospitalized After Lawyers Visit Border Patrol Facility: unresponsive,
feverish and vomiting, yet receiving no medical care.
One 2-year-old’s eyes were rolled back in her head, she was “completely
unresponsive” and limp.
Do we have "concentration camps" at the Southern border? Of
course we do! Conditions for
the children held at border facilities are
horrendous!
James Comey thought he was telling brand-new President Trump about the "pee tape" for the first time in January 2017. Actually, Hope Hicks tells us that Trump knew about it several months prior.
"50 Philadelphia Cops on Desk Duty Amid FB Investigation, Source Says"
"During this difficult climate in which police officers are constantly under attack, the FOP will continue to support" officers, police union president John McNesby said in a statement.
Heh! No, "free speech" doesn't enter into this and yes, the speech of public servants matters. When I was in the Navy, we were strictly forbidden from using disparaging terms for other genders, ethnicities, etc. There's good reason for that as speech encourages attitudes in both positive and negative ways.
Iran shoots down US drone.
An important detail is that the shoot-down occurred over the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Persian Gulf where the borders on the sea between Iran and international waters are very close to each other. Iran says the drone was in their airspace, the US says it was over international waters.
President suggests shoot-down may
have been an accident.
Putin tells his asset in the White House to cool it!
Reporter April Ryan takes a position I strongly agree with and yeah, if anything constituted a reason to do a press briefing, a shoot-down in the Strait of Hormuz where technical details like the exact location of the US drone in the hour before and during the shoot-down is extremely important, was a very good reason to open up the press briefing room.
Good! Trump Administration has suggested it can use the 2001 AUMF to conduct a war against Iran. Congress is saying "No, you need a proper declaration of war. Dragging that old one won't do!"
The problem with one-man rule. The President didn't think through his Iran policy, didn't develop any fall-backs or alternatives and his advisers are all neo-conservatives, who don't know any tactic except escalation. There's nobody who advises the President except for yes-men and sycophants. That's part of the reason I'm cheering on the Democrats in Congress so much!
As near as we can tell, the Universe is 13.8 billion years old. Photo taken of a pair of merging galaxies that's 13 billions light-years away. The total mass of the two galaxies is 770 million times the mass of our sun.
The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claims that the child porn found on his computer was just unopened email. The piece doesn't say exactly how the child porn was on his computer. If it was indeed just in unopened emails, it's hard to see why it was even mentioned as I'm sure celebrities of any kind get all sorts of unwanted emails! If it was opened or saved, that would warrant prosecution.
Okay, this says he was sending child porn to Sandy Hook parents, in which case he would definitely have had to have opened it up and to have saved it to his hard drive. Was he trying to get off on it? Doesn't sound like it. Would I bust his sorry ass for being a pervert anyway? Oh, Hell yeah!
Found
a paragraph here that sums up the Trump Administration's
entire Iran policy in a nutshell:
"Pompeo
vows proof coming of Iran attack"
Y'see, this is not the kind
of headline we should ever
see from any competent
bureaucrat! When you prepare to come out with an
accusation against a foreign country, you assemble your evidence, you
"get your ducks in a row," you perform "due
diligence," you make sure you have a
case. The Trump
Administration's actions here are those of a banana republic, not
those of a mature, great power.
Senator Tom Cotton says that if Iran attacked those ships in the Gulf of Oman, then it was an "unprovoked" attack. That may be true in a strictly military tit-for-tat sense, but the US has been sanctioning Iran so as to squeeze it economically, so I'm not quite sure that "unprovoked" is correct.
The Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is convinced Iran did indeed attack those ships in the Gulf of Oman.
"Please
Take Out Your Tiniest Violin for Donald Trump, the Most Mistreated
Person in U.S. History"
Yep. The President sure enough is treated badly. Uh huh. Sure is.
Never in the history of the US has anyone been treated as badly. not
the slaves, not the Native Americans, no one.
In his introduction
to this post, our blogger points out that no
one can recall the names of the Obama Press Secretaries because they
just did their jobs. They did
press conferences on a regular
basis, they gave out good, solid information and no one has recalled
them ever lying about anything.
Now personally, when someone has
died, I'll be a bit circumspect about dissing them for at least a
suitable interval. I feel no such hesitancy about someone who simply
leaves office. Sanders was an absolutely horrible Press Secretary who
seriously degraded and diminished the office.
Thinking of the soon-to-be-departed Press Secretary Sarah
Sanders, in
late March, she posted a set of brackets
where people could vote
for “which of the angry and hysterical” Trump haters “got it
most embarrassingly wrong” about the Mueller Report. This was when
all we had to go on was AG Barr's four-page summary-not-a-summary. No
one was "proven wrong" by such flimsy and incomplete evidence and no
one/s been proven wrong since.
Secretary of State “Benghazi Mike” Pompeo seems
to put
everything in the Middle East into two categories,
pro-US and
pro-Iran. Kind of a problem with that is that the Afghani Taliban is
neither. His analysis is straight out of the Vietnam War era, when
everyone was either pro-US or pro-Communist, an analysis that ignored
the growing rift between Red China and the Soviet Union. My own
analysis of the Vietnam War was that opponents of US occupation were
driven by nationalism and desire to own the land that they worked on.
The President was asked what would
happen if a foreign source offered him dirt on a campaign rival? "Trump
campaign: We'll handle foreign info on a 'case by case basis'"
This "solution" comes far, far short of adequate. The
Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee had it right the first
time. Someone offered Representative Schiff dirt on Trump, Schiff
replied that,
sure, bring your information in, but the FBI will be informed you're
doing so and they'll be sitting alongside me as you present your
information.
"Russia
is Calling Trump's Bluff on Iran and Syria, and Winning Big"
After two-plus years of bluffs, bluster, tariffs and sanctions,
Russia and Iran know that the President is a paper tiger and will
never initiate war. Russia and Iran have different interests, but are
united in opposing the US.
In the first video, at the 2:25 mark, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff asks Andrew McCarthy how the Steele Dossier is relevant to the Mueller Report. McCarthy can't come up with any way in which it's relevant. Note that at the 3:18 mark in the second video, Sean Hannity makes it sound as though the Dossier was extremely important to the numerous investigations of Donald Trump and company. Sorry, but the political left simply doesn't engage in this kind of flat-out dishonesty.
It's interesting that Sean Hannity accuses Rachel Maddow of being an extreme, untrustworthy radical. The interesting part is when he presents four clips that supposedly prove what wild, hysterical, radical charges she makes. Having watched Maddow for quite awhile, I can assure you she doesn't just come out and make a charge. She walks her viewers through the evidence, showing each step she takes in getting to her point. Nope. Sorry. None of Hannity's examples pass muster as a wild, unsubstantiated charge.
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders accuses Democrats of not wanting to work with the President on projects of national significance. 1. The President spent two years with a Republican House and Senate and essentially spent most of that time twiddling his thumbs and playing golf and 2. Democrats have passed bill after bill after bill, only to see them dying in the legislative graveyard of the Senate.
So former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is again telling us that he's deeply, deeply concerned about immigration reform and the federal budget deficit. Which would be very impressive if he hadn't actively worked to make both problems worse!!!
"Jon
Stewart breaks down in emotional testimony at 9/11 Victims Fund
hearing"
The First Responders to 9/11 did their jobs, they did them well,
they acted without hesitation or concern for their own safety. Why,
why, why is Congress so
lackadaisical and unconcerned about providing
funding for them?!?!?!?!
"Nikki
Haley: Backers Of Abortion Rights Are Forcing Their Values On America"
Her case is just as weird and confusing as it sounds. Nikki Haley
insists that pro-choicers must not force women into having a wide
range of choices concerning their own bodies. Keep in mind while
reading this paragraph that Haley is anti-choice:
“The idea that women must adhere to a particular set of values is one of the most anti-women ideas in today’s culture,” she said. “It is a rejection of the ideas of equality and tolerance that the women’s movement is supposed to be about.”
I guess it says something about today's peace movement that I
went to Philadelphia's
Gay Pride March today and didn't see any sign of the Veteran for
Peace. They used to be a real presence in that march.
"Iran
introduces 2,000 new morality police units in response to women's
hijab protests"
Wildly misplaced priorities is not just an American thing. Men
obsessively controlling women is a problem everywhere.
"Trump
caved to Republican pressure on Mexico tariff threat: Democratic
lawmaker"
The President puts out a view of reality that no one else can see.
He touts some extremely modest accomplishments as earth-shakingly
important. Very interestingly, "this is the one place that the
Republicans decided to take a stand.”
And actually, it was the former DHS Secretary, Kirstjen
Nielsen, who
deserves all the credit for the deal with Mexico.
"How
Trump's phony Mexico trade deal duped the press"
This is why I pretty much never trust the "breaking news"
from mainstream sources. They pretty much always just take the
Administration's word for everything without doing any analysis or
fact-checking. The blogger goes into AG Barr's summary-not-a-summary
of the Mueller Report as a particularly egregious example of the
mainstream media really falling down on the job by rushing their
stories.
So we apparently do have a winner in the credibility contest! Seems the President is right and Laura Ingraham held up 12,000 people for her interview with the President.
Iowans are starting to realize that caucuses are really terrible and need to be replaced with plain old elections.
*Sigh* It's just amazing that an ambassador can say something so blockheadedly stupid! Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the US, compared the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to the US occupation of Germany and Japan after World War II. Germany and Japan never had to deal with US colonies in their midst, pushing native-born peoples aside!
And BTW, just as white people have no business defining racism, so Americans, especially Jared Kushner, can't define what Palestinians want.
The current strategy of the Trump Administration, to deny that global warming is even taking place, is utterly unsustainable. 215 of the world's largest 500 corporations have identified $1 trillion in future losses via climate change.
The Trump borthers Don Jr. and Eric stopped off at an Irish
pub, called for a round for the house on them. They
didn't have any cash on them at the time, but told the pub to ask
the local Trump golf course to pay for the round, which
it did. The initial story was that the Trump brother welshed on the
tab and left it unpaid. The brothers were upset at this, but seriously,
it's not like their dad always paid his
debts. The brothers just don't have any credibility to fall back on.
Heartbreaking
chart comparing US gun deaths this year to deaths
from D-Day.
US deaths on D-Day: 2501
Allied deaths on D-Day: 4414
US deaths from gunfire this year:
6000
A short while ago, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner praised the
President, saying that he "...came in, brought in a ton of
people who never would've been in Washington before who were not
'qualified' by conventional standards..." (Example
#28)
The President
apparently likes this picture of himself as he declared to someone
writing about him that "There are those that say we have one of
the finest Cabinets." As with Kushner's remark, it's
far from
clear what's so awesome about the people Trump brought to
Washington
DC.
"Don’t
forget how the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler"
The Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942-February 1943) was the turning
point on the Eastern Front. The Battle of Kursk (August 1943) sealed
the fate of the Wehrmacht and the Soviets just kept advancing after
that. The Battle for Italy bogged down in September 1943, but
they Allies didn't just sit around until D-Day in June 1944. The
bombing campaign against German industries took an enormous toll in
that time period.
The blogger for this site, Informed Comment, is a History Professor and he provides a look at the many Muslims who fought against the Axis powers.
"ICE
detention centers had 'unusable toilets' and rotting food, 2018
inspections found"
And again comes the plaintive cry of ICE: "Why do the
American people think of us as Nazis?"
Good summary of the past month or so of reports on Iran. A dhow is a small ship, less than 100 feet in length, mostly made of wood. It can carry small infantry weapons, but would be very quickly blown to bits if it tried to attack a US or allied warship. Interestingly, what the report leaves out is that the Trump Administration is peeved at Democrats for warning Iran not to do anything aggressive.
Secretary of State Pompeo laments the difficulty of maintaining unity against the legitimate president of Venezuela.
"Team
Trump keeps taking the climate conversation backwards"
Hard to say what the real motivation in the Trump Administration's
climate change policy is. Even if the President was so clueless as to
believe his own rhetoric on climate change, what's everybody elses
excuse?
"ACLU
Seeks More Discovery In Heated Dispute Over New Evidence In Census
Case"
Oral argument have already been heard on the Census case, but new
evidence concerning motivations really needs to be considered.
GOP screams and hollers about Senator Warren wanting to "raise taxes," ignoring the question of "cui bono?" (Who exactly benefits? Which demographic groups will gain or lose?) Turns out she wants to raise taxes on the 1%.
I'm angry and disappointed that Biden has affirmed the anti-choice Hyde Amendment, but it's very clear how he came to support the Green New Deal. He wet his finger, put it up to the wind, saw that it was blowing in favor of renewables and said "I'm a renewables kinda guy!" That means Democrats don't have to worry about having to elect any candidate who will be wishy-washy on climate change. Everyone will be on the same page!
30th anniversary of the
horrifying bloodbath in Tiananmen Square.
Maggie
Haberman of the NY Times says
Uh, no. The Trumps will never be anything even remotely close to the Kennedys in US popular culture.
Jared Kushner is asked what
his father-in-law will be remembered for:
"What this President did is he represented an outsider who came in,
brought in a ton of people who never would've been in Washington before
who were not 'qualified' by conventional standards." All very fine and
well, but then he goes on to suggest that that was a good
thing!!!! I think of people like Ben Carson, who's been working on a
plan to improve the Department of HUD but who, after 2 1/2 years, still
hasn't mastered really basic aspects of his job. I think of Betsy DeVo,
who has never visited a school that she thought was doing poorly
because she just visits schools where she can have a cheerful,
feel-good celebration of them. She's simply deleted many pro-LGBTQ
guidances and has taken the side of sexual abusers.
Woo hoo! The $19 billion disaster relief bill finally passes the House!!!
"Trump
suggests the US should form a state-run, global news network to
counter CNN's 'unfair' coverage"
The President suggestd the same idea back in 2018. The idea went
nowhere. There have been suggestions that Fox News is state-run TV, but
between a strong Democratic President followed by a weak Republican
one, Fox is kind of a Frankenstein's Monster, running off on its own.
The President visits Britain. Crowds usually line the streets
to see a US President. Not
this time.
So it appears the news on the US relationship with Iran is that it's actually very, very good! The President appears to have realized that he hired an insane warmonger in NSC Adviser John Bolton and has decided that going to war with Iran isn't what he wants to do! Of course, that blows to pieces any strategy the US might have had to get concessions from Iran, but it's good to see the President is not completely insane.
Personally, I agree that in 2016, Wikileaks acted more like a hostile foreign intelligence service than it did like a press outlet, but as it never formally assumed such a role and as the current Trump Administration extradition request does enormous damage to press freedoms, I advocate dropping any case against Wikileaks. Assange is now serving a 50-week sentence for jumping bail, so extradition might have to wait until that sentence is served.
Senator Elizabeth Warren is running a good, solid, pro-active campaign. She takes the initiative by reporting on her own events rather than waiting for reporters to ask her questions about them.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo makes amazing admissions about Jared Kushner's "Deal of the Century." His last point is: "4. It stacks the deck for Israel so heavily that the Palestinians will refuse to play. Only an Israeli, Pompeo admitted, could love it." Which is entirely true, but it's amazing to hear Pompeo admit that.
Supreme
Court Justice Thomas writes a dissent that seeks to characterize
abortion as a “tool of eugenic manipulation.”
1. Yes, there
was a eugenics movement back in the 1920s, but there is no such
movement today. "[E]ugenic manipulation" can't occur today bcause
there's no one around to do the manipulating.
2. To say that forced sterilization and abortion
are the same is ridiculous. Abortion is an un-coerced choice made by
the woman as doctors can easily interview the woman to verify that
she's making the choice herself.
"Economist" Art Laffer being
awarded Medal of Freedom.
"Without
Evidence, John Bolton Blames Iran for Oil Tanker Sabotage"
See, the problem here is that NSC Adviser Bolton doesn't have to
prove things to us regular citizens. He does have to prove them to
elected Democrats with security clearances and to foreign diplomats!
Not for legal purposes, but for the sake of his own credibility. He has
to do a whole lot better
than: “Who else would you
think is doing it? Somebody from Nepal?” That answer just isn't
going to cut it.
Shooting
at Virginia Beach Municipal Center.
"No
end in sight as record flooding in Midwest, Southeast persists"
Problem with climate change is that it isn't waiting until the
capitalists who make money off of fossil fuels die off. It's hitting
the world NOW!
The President makes it very clear that he's really upset that Congress has so much power to investigate him. Recall, however, that presidents have a similar lopsided power over foreign policy.
A random voter is interviewed. What she says about right-wing media is important and disturbing. She shows an active interest in politics, but inside the Fox News bubble, she hadn't heard that the Mueller Report had contained anything negative about the President.
"How disinformation works: News outlets are filtering Mueller's statement through Trump's lies"Our local paper gives this story the soft-shoe treatment. Nah, this story shows without any doubt that the proposed addition of a question to the 2020 Census was clearly and specifically designed to serve the purpose of denying Democratic-leaning states their rightful share of federal representation and money.
Evidence appears to be that the Navy was not ordered to hide the USS McCain during a presidential visit, that officers on the scene volunteered to hide the ship and to also refuse to permit sailors from the ship to attend the President's visit as they would have been wearing the name of the ship on their ballcaps. Wow! How incredibly sad is it that we have such a volatile, easily-triggered Commander in Chief?!?!?!?!
Update: It wasn't the Navy's idea to cover over the name of the USS John McCain. The President's people felt that seeing the dead Senator's name would "trigger" the President to say something stupid.
Speaker Pelosi sets out conditions for impeachment.
The NY Times decided two years ago that they no longer needed a public editor and that Twitter users were sufficient to keep the paper in line. If they were serious, then they should follow the advice coming from Twitter users now. That clearly, the entire department or division within the NY Times that deals with regular, daily reporting on the President, and that includes ALL of the editors and managers as well as ALL of the reporters, needs to either be reassigned to non-political reporting jobs like hockey or gardening or they just need to be discharged. They have all very clearly been hopelessly compromised and corrupted beyond any possible hope of redemption. The recent story on Hope Hicks is just the latest and most egregious violation of reporting standards.
Update: A great many Twitter users agreed that the NY Times should toss out their whole presidential reporting department. The reaction of the NYT was very angry and defensive!
Media Matters argus that the NY Times very
badly needs to reinstate their Public Editor.
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao (and wife of Senate Majority Leader McConnell) still has stock that she should have sold off a long, long time ago. Her investment in a construction company netted her $40k recently.
Deputy White House spokesperson, Hogan Gidley bemoans
the fact
that the media "take whatever [Speaker Pelosi] says, you know,
lock, stock and barrel, I mean, it would be so nice if we had a
complicit, compliant media the way the Democrats do, and we
don’t."
Hmm, could this "media bias" exist
because the Trump Administration lies
all the time and Pelosi
doesn't?!?!?!
The President gives the North Korean dictator a pass on a missile test because otherwise he'd have to admit that his diplomatic strategy was a complete bust.
Former Trump aide Hope Hicks is subpoened. The NY Times tells us how she's considering how to respond. They say for her it's an "existential question." %&$*#@!!!! No, dammit!!! It's a question of law and order and of obeying the entirely legitimate instructions of Congress! They also supplied a glamourous photo of her when there are perfectly good ones available showing her being all buddy-buddy with the President.
More on the NY Times selling a kid-gloves approach to questioning the rich, pretty, white, connected woman who enabled Trump Administration crimes. Interesting quote from the NYT: "The likeliest possibility would be a compromise..." Why? Hope Hicks doesn't have any sort of legal leg to stand on. There's absolutely no principled reason for Congress to make any sort of compromise with her.
"Trump
Tower Residents Are Selling Their Condos at a Loss to Get Out"
Reminds me of the comedian's line "I don't admit to my folks
that I work for (fill in the blank), I tell 'em I'm a drug dealer
instead!"
Andrew Napolitano, who works for (!!!) Fox News (!!!) warns us about the President's violation of separation of powers.
"Shanahan,
Pompeo didn't convince House Democrats that Iran poses any new
threats"
The President says he wants to make sure Iran never gets a nuclear
weapon. That was already achieved in 2015. He says he wants Iran to
return to the negotiating table. Iran has absolutely zero interest in
doing any such thing as there's a 100% probability that the result
will be worse for them. The President has offered absolutely nothing
that they din't already have or weren't scheduled to receive.
A very serious
problem for the Trump Administration is their credibility. Democratic
senators and/or representatives or allied diplomats must be persuaded
that Iran poses a real and imminent threat. If the administration
can't do that, there is not the slightest chance that the American
people can be persuaded to take any warnings at all seriously.
Saudi Arabia is perfectly willing to fight to the last American in order to defeat Iran.
MSNBC's Chuck Todd has always been a poor interviewer and remains consistently bad here. To me, the question is not "When does life begin?" but "When does the life of the baby take priority over the welfare of the mother and other family members?"
Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian cavalry officer who served during the Napoleonic wars. His book "On War" was published posthumously and put out the thesis that war was "a continuation of politics through other means." Our blogger makes use of Clausewitz's theories to show that declarations of war serve very useful purposes for those who declare wars.
"Dozens
walk out before Mike Pence's commencement address at Taylor
University"
I can fully undersand why controversial speakers enjoy speaking at
commencement exercises, they get a large, well-dressed crowd that can't
speak back or ask questions. But it's an entirely one-sided deal and
doesn't serve any educational purpose for the students or their parents.
Yeah, we used to be concerned about the majority oppressing less popular people/viewpoints. Anti-choicers are very much a minority in this country, but appear to have the levers of power when it comes to the abortion issue.
The press corps still has no idea how to deal with a wag-the-dog scenario.
Needs saying. This morning I heard Andrea Mitchell basically say how wary the press is about repeating their Iraq mistakes and then go into a segment where much of the Trump administration Iran charges were taken at pretty much face value.
The President isn't specific as to what he means by "a
hell
of a lot more" than 120k troops, but it
would require 2.4
million troops to occupy Iran.
I saw this piece last night. The anti-choice legislator offered up a wildly incoherent defense of his position.
From Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign.
"I’ve been to countries where governments either forced women to have abortions like they used to do in China or forced women to bear children like they used to do in Romania,” she added. “And I can tell you the government has no business in the decisions that women make with their families in accordance with their faith, [and] with medical advice and I will stand up for that right."
This is a very interesting legal theory by the President' lawyer, that the perp can decide when he's been investigated enough. Kinda like Al Capone telling Elliot Ness "All-righty, that's quite enough with these annoying and bothersome investigations!"
TV star Tim
Conway dies.
Basic problem here is that it's nowhere near enough to say: "Don't have an abortion!" Anti-choicers have to consider the whole picture! Okay, so we insist that women have more kids. Then what?!?!?!
The President slams Representative Rashida Tlaib for a
statement. Is her statement anti-Semitic? Does it show that she "hates
Israeel"? No,
but you have to read the whole statement to undersand that.
Good! Georgia's near-total abortion ban has resulted in
a strong
backlash from Georgia's highly profitable film industry.
Huh! I
wasn't aware that Alyssa Milano has been featured in two seasons of a
Netflix show called "Insatiable." She's refusing to do a
third season as long as the show is produced in Georgia.
"Palestinians:
US is Imposing a Surrender Plan on us, not a Peace Deal"
A core disagreement over illegal Israeli settlements in the West
Bank is dismissed by the US Special Envoy to the Middle East Jason
Greenblatt as merely being an obsession by opponents of Israel and a
"farce." Greenblatt noted, “The Trump administration has
drastically cut its support for the Palestinians to try to spur their
return to negotiations.” As though this was an effective or
workable tactic to produce Palestinian compliance.
"Humanitarian
Aid Blocked from Entering Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C."
Concerning the protesters at the Venezuelan Embassy.
"John
Bolton Is Leading Donald Trump (and the Rest of Us) Into Conflicts in
Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea"
Back during the presidency of the younger George Bush, Bolton
accomplished zilch as the UN Ambassador. He doesn't appear to be
doing any better this time around.
Iraq refuses
to join the President's anti-Iran crusade.
To show obstruction of justice, one
must show corrupt intent. That
bar was arguably crossed with the President's instructions to the
then-White House Counsel Don McGahn. This is what the multiple
hundreds of former federal prosecutors are pointing to when they say
they'd bust the President on obstruction charges if he wasn't, as the
president, protected by an OLC opinion that a president can't be
indicted.
"Treasury
Refuses To Turn Trump Tax Returns Over to Congress"
The Treasury Secretary is on extremely weak
legal ground here. But hey, DOJ is telling him what to do and AG Barr
is clearly acting as the President's personal attorney.
"Trump
massively raises tariffs against China at the expense of the U.S.
consumer"
Saw a piece a short while ago on how the President's trade policy
was actually producing a success. Guess that was a false alarm.
"Pompeo
Floats US Military Intervention In Venezuela: 'No Option Is Off The
Table'"
Presiden Trump is obviously out of ideas for dealing with Venezuela.
Secretary of State Pompeo can just rattle off cliches about nothing
being off he table.
"Sanders'
dubious claim: Trump admin 'takes election meddling seriously'"
Simple question in response: Who is the "Czar" or "Field
Marshal" that's in charge of the response to Russian
cyber-meddling? If the Trump Administration appoints someone to
direct the overall response, then
I will believe that they're
serious about defeating this!
Stephen Moore is out as Federal Reserve Board member nominee.
Awwww! Candace Owens is out of a job! Yeah, it seems her comment on der Fuhrer was what did it.
House Judiciary Chair "Nadler
likens Trump to 'dictator,' threatens Barr with contempt after
hearing boycott"
Fox News piece. Interesting in that it repets what Nadler calle the
President, but doesn't explain why.
The result is that it makes Nadler look unhinged. Why was Nadler upset?
AG Barr boycotted the hearing and the AG has a wild and extreme theory
that a president should be able
to cancel an investigation based on nothing more than his own
personal theory that the investigation is biased against him or that
his
opponents are dishonorable. Barr's theory throws the whole concept of
checks and balances out the window.
Excellent
question-and-answer session between Senator Kamala harris and AG
Barr.
The NY Times uses very genteel, restrained language. Usually, that's fine. When the President openly uses the language of the Holocaust to smear a group, that's very, very wrong!!! Problem with soft-pedaling outright lies to say that they're "inaccurate statements" is that it becomes hard to describe genuinely outrageous statements when he or his people make them.
Why did a group of sailors appear to so enthusiastically greet VP Pence? They were ordered to act "like we're at a strip club."
Very, very interesting! Seems Mueller (Who is still a DOJ employee) was really, really annoyed at how his findings were characterized. The AG didn't have much credibility before, he now has zilch!
Joe Biden was in charge of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 for the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearing. If Biden were in charge of the same committee during the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh-Christine Blasey Ford hearing, would he have done it any better? The piece suggests no, as Biden doesn't appear to have learned anything during the intervening years.
"Beto
O’Rourke moves to establish himself as a climate candidate in a
crowded field"
Very cool that another candidate (Following Governor
Jay Inslee and several others) has established climate change as a
primary issue in their
campaign.
For some reason, the President doesn't seem to take the threat of Russian interference in our election seriously.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler wants to use lawyers to assist in questioning AG Barr. Barr is very unenthusiastic about that idea. Nadler is all like "I don't give a #$@%!!!"
The lone Democrat does well here, battling four Fox News people. She's right, of course. It is massively hypocritical for Republicans to complain about AG Barr being questioned by lawyers when GOP Senators did the same during the Kavanaugh hearing.
After reading the Mueller Report, "Sally
Yates: If Trump Weren't President, 'He Would Likely Be Indicted On
Obstruction'
"
Reminds me of a line from a 60s comedy movie where sailors were
caught engaged in wild partying: "Better men have been busted
for less."
Yep, the Dirty effin' Hippies were right...again! The NSA has conceded that mass phone data collection is useless, but the Republican Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee seems inclined to renew the program anyway.
Fascinating theory that the unsuitability of Trump for the office of President may have been a feature, not a bug, to white supremacists.
The logic of white supremacy means that the worse Trump is, the better. After eight years of Barack Obama, the message to people of color by the majority of white people who voted was simple: "I'd rather let the worst of us run this country than the best of you."
Jared
Kushnr was "Asked why the Trump campaign didn’t
reject Russia’s attempts to swing the election toward the
president, Kushner said, 'The notion of what they were doing didn’t
even register to us as being impactful.'" I don't buy this explanation
at all. Even if Russian interfernce had no impact, it was still
traitorous to use their assistance. Also, given the previous
history of attempted foreign interference in US campaigns, it was
incumbent on the Trump campaign to at least check with the government
to assess the possible impact of Russia aiding and assisting them in
2016.
Lara Trump (Wife of younger son Eric) states that Germany's influx of immigrants in 2015 was a disaster. Ehh, not so sure about that. It certainly resulted in some strains and stresses, but the terms "disaster" and "crisis" overstate the problems there. According to the Migration Policy Institute, what's impressive about Germany and immigration was the clear-eyed, common sense reforms that Germans undertook as early as 2001.
CNN examines the distinction between newspeople and propagandists.
One of the big chrages that Mueller makes in what we have of
his report is that of obstruction of justice. Senator Lindsey Graham
scoffs at this. Funny, but 20 years ago when he was talking about
President Clinton obstructing justice, he
demonstrated a very diffferent attitude.
The WaPo badly messed up in reporting this story by saying the Trump Administration ordered one of its people to ignore a "Democratic" subpoena. No, the Trump minion was ordered to ignore a "Congressional" subpoena. This is a direct Constitutional challenge.
Very interesting! Instead of working forwards, declaring the President is guilty and them proving it, Special Counselor Mueller appears to have been working backwards, eliminating possible innocent explanations.
"Trump
Sues To Hide His Financials? Good Luck With That"
The President is personally suing the head of the House Oversight
Committee to keep his finances a secret from Congress. Saw the Rachel
Maddow show later and she and the Fox News legal analyst are in
complete agreement. Congress has a pretty much unlimited right to get
the President's financial records. This is not a gray or fuzzy
area of the law.
Redacted Mueller Report released. Rolling Stone has a good round-up of videos and statements from both sides. Seems the President spiked the football and did a victory dance just a wee bit early.
Having read the redacted Mueller Report, Democrats
kicked back hard against
Barr and Trump. Democratic
reactions,
Redacted Mueller Report available as Nook Book.
Yeah, these are very seriously inadequate answers. The first set of questions concerns the Trump Tower meeting with Russians, including Natalia Veselnitskaya and the President claims not to recall anything about the meeting. Yah. Okay. Sure.
"Judiciary Committee issues subpoena for full Mueller report"
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was amazed that the public wasn't celebrating the lack of active coordination/conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. Problem is, they very clearly had the same goal, making Donald Trump the president.
Donald Trump's strategy to discredit negative journalist stories about him was to complain early and often about how their stories were always inaccurate. A comparison between Mueller's Report and the stories that the Trump Campaign/Presidency and the press corps put out shows that the press very largely got their stories right.
"Trump
vetoes Congress’s directive to end US involvement in bloody
Saudi-led war in Yemen"
This is very sad. The war in Yemen is very brutal and obviously
isn't serving any worthwhile purpose. I see no reason to doubt that
Iran is supplying Houthi rebels, but no one buys the idea that Iran
is playing any meaningful or significant role there.
Lengthy YouTube where Representative AOC questions Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. AOC very clearly does her homework and knows exactly what she's talking about. Ross just sits there looking and sounding confused.
Notre Dame went up in flames. A French billionaire has
promised to get it rebuilt. Americans, needing somewhere to send money,
remembered that several black churches have recently been torched, so
some good has come out
of this.
Woo hoo! As I said before, I favor Bill Weld running for president for the exact same reason I oppose Howard Schultz doing so. A split ticket generally means defeat, unity often means success. Besides, Weld was a good governor for Massachusetts. I think America in general could live with a Weld victory in 2020 far better then it can another term of Trump
As with the elder George Bush in 1992, Republicans today
simply have no legislative agenda to run on. If they regained the House
and retained the Senate and the Presidency, what would they do? They
don't know.
Congress has long had the right to examine anyone's taxes.
Press Secretary Sanders makes an
hysterical asserton that, by trying to get the President's tax
returns, this "would lead to a 'dangerous, dangerous road' for all
Americans."
Ah! This is why Senator Sanders has been so slow to release his taxes! He's a millionaire.
As expected, his railing against "millionaires and billionaires" rings a bit hollow now that he's a millionaire as well. Personally, I've never thought someone had to be poor in order to criticize the rich.
Representative Jerry Nadler says, quite correctly, that if anyone in the entire government should be editing the Special Counsel's report, it's the committee that he's head of, the Judiciary Committee. That committee would mke the decision on impeachment. The Attorney General has absolutely zero business editing anything in Mueller's report.
Chris Cuomo of CNN made the argument for having the President's spokespeople on air even though they lie a lot. Basically, these people make what the President considers to be his best, most compelling case. To Cuomo's credit, he's pretty good on pushing back on the BS. Here's another CNN host who has liars on his show, but does a good job of pushback.
A celebration of the scientist who took the lead in getting
a photograph of a black hole. A side-by-side
comparison of what it takes to get something complicated like this
done.
Now that AG Barr has thrown some red meat to the wolves ("spying," Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, et al), they're going to be putting pressure on him to come out with a whole series of indictments.
Growing consensus that arrest of Assange threatens press freedoms.
"In
Iowa, Bernie Sanders says states should allow felons to vote from
behind bars"
Hmm, I dunno. As much as I hate to agree with the Fox News
commenter Tomi Lahren on anything, she's
kinda got a point here. I certainly agree that ex-felons
should get voting rights immediately upon being free again. That brings
them back
into society and gives them a good motivation to brief themselves on
the issues of the day through the news. But give voting rights to
those currently serving time? Ehh, not so sure about that.
"Dallas
Police Chief Defends Decision to Charge Black Woman Seen on Video
Being Brutally Beaten in Assault
"
President Obama's whole idea of DACA was "prosecutorial
discretion." That doesn't mean the president/police have
complete freedom to ignore the law, but can choose among various
legal tools to reach the right conclusion. The police chief here
reaches a miserably poor decision that should get her fired.
A blogger I frequently agree with makes a couple of good points about Assange, the past history of Wikileaks and Assange's arrest. Not a simple up-or-down decision. In 2010, Wikileaks acted as a reporting service and exposed something really bad about the Iraq War. In 2016, Wikileaks acted as a hostile foreign intelligence service and helped to put the current president into office. These two things are both true.
Back when Paul Manfort was busted (He had been Trump's
campaign manager fo a few months during the 2016 campaign), people
around the President pretended that Trump barely knew the guy. Julian
Assange (Wikileaks) is
now getting the same treatment.
"U.S.
wants U.N. to revoke credentials of Maduro's government"
A supremely arrogant demand. Since when is the UN granted the authority
to pick political winners and loser?
Woo hoo! New Zealand passes gun reform, specifically against the type of gun that causes the most damage to human beings, in under a month after the Christchurch massacre!
"Netanyahu
won in Israel because his Rivals campaigned as Netanyahu Lite"
Yeah, during the 12 years of Reagan and then the elder George
Bush, Democrats tried running as "Just like Reagan, only less
so." Didn't work very well.
Treasury Secretary effectively says "Eff y'all." He of course
used
more polite language than that, but there's no question that he
really should just hand over the information that Congress has
requested.
Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange is arrested at Ecuador's embassy in London. There are some freedm of the press issues involved, but I lost all sympathy for this guy when it was revealed that he was a tool of Russia's foreign policy. Lost respect for Chelsea Manning when she decided to stand by him. Was Ecuador wrong to let him go? Maybe, but seven years is a long time to put up with an unwanted guest. I give them enormous credit for putting up with Assange for as long as they did.
I saw people making a comment yesterday that I found very puzzling. They said that Stephen Miller was accused of being a white nationalist. This is an entirely accurate description of Miller. It's not even slightly controversial. Yes, Miller is also Jewish. One has nothing to do with the other. Nixon was a Quaker yet he was also a warmonger. People claimed that because someone accused a Jewish person of being something that he very clearly was, they were being anti-Semitic. This shows a lack of understanding of what anti-Semitism is.
The last point here got a lot of commentary. AG Barr doesn't seem to be at all concerned about the consequences of killing off the ACA/Obamacare without having an adequate replacement ready to go. He gave that a very casual, quick dismissal.
Also "William
Barr uses misleading data on gun background checks in testimony to
Congress"
"Despite
the scandal, Trump hasn't given up on family separation policy"
Not at all clear why, but the President seems to really like this
family separation policy.
President demonstrates how much he believes that his policy is
moral and proper by
trying to blame the last president for it.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is planning to annex Israeli settlements in the West Bank, not the whole West Bank. Of course, as settlements have the West Bank split up into bantustan-like pockets, this would leave Palestinians in something that in no way resembles an independent state.
Georgia's extreme anti-choice law has alienated the film
industry. GOP State Representative Ginny Ehrhart whistles
past the political
graveyard as she says she doesn't see a contradiction between being
anti-choice and being pro-film industry. Piece
that discusses foster care vs being "pro-life."
"Coverage of the Barr debacle shows the media learned nothing from 2016 failures"
With news that some players on Mueller's normally tight-lipped team are privately grumbling that Barr has misrepresented the Russia report to the public, and that the report may contain far more ”alarming” evidence of obstruction of justice than Barr first suggested, journalists once again stand exposed, guilty of na�vely accepting the word of an official working for an administration that lies about everything.
"Kirstjen
Nielsen Out As DHS Secretary"
Eh, no loss.
Couple of interesting
footnotes on Neilson's resignation.
Yeah, just as many of us thought. Kirstjen
Nielsen was fired by
the President because she wasn't enough
of a Nazi. Stephen
Miller was not a supporter of Neilsen and called on her to find more
effective ways to seal the border. As is his usual schtick, the
President often called Neilsen early in the morning to holler at her
for not having gotten the problem solved. "She apparently
responded with attempts to explain the rule of law, which undoubtedly
enraged the authoritarian-minded president further still."
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is kind of like the American Marine Corps in that it's a component of the Iranian state. It is not an organization that's independent of the state of Iran. It's been recommended that they be declared a terrorist organization. That would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
US declares the IRGC to be a terrorist organization.
Many, many problems with trying to reform Iran from the US. Not the least of which is that we undercut moderates and strengthen radicals over there.
The NY Times columnist Paul Krugman explains why AG Barr doesn't have any credibility.
Here's some positive news for y'all! As they said back during the Obama Presidency, "We are the solution we've been waiting for!" When horrified liberals realized Donald Trump has been elected President, we got busy and worked on taking back the House. The result is that we are far more likely to see the results of the Mueller Report than we ever would have been had we not re-taken the House!
"A
week later, everyone is confused about Trump’s aid cuts to Central
America"
The President demonstrates the problem with casual, off-the-cuff,
shoot-from-the-hip policy-making.
Member of Human Rights Watch interviews people from Gaza over why they protest at Israeli border every week. The protests won't stop any time soon.
"Congress
quietly makes history with rebuke of key Trump foreign policy"
Good! Failed policy that's not doing any good.
Sadly hilarious! Fox News reporters wears bulletproof vest in border area in order to make it look like a dangerous combat zone. Real reporters Jacob Soboroff and Soledad O'Brien have reported from the same areas for years and have never worn such vests.
So, first the former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz blames
Democrats
for the failure of the younger George Bush's immigration plan. I knew
at the time that the Democrats had open minds on immigration, but the
issue didn't lend itself to demonizing anyone and would have instead
required listening to all sides and coming up with a real solution.
That obviously wasn't within Bush's limited governing skills set.
The
idea of bringing everybody into a room and having them not leave
until a problem is solved is exactly the sort of idea that Ross Perot
of the 1992 campaign was fond of suggesting. Funny
thing is, no one's
actually tried this idea, probably because it's a stupid and
unworkable one.
In an MSNBC interview, it becomes apparent that the problem here is that the former Starbocks CEO Howard Schultz just spouts one vague, woolly generalization after another. Ali Velshi, on the other hand, is a very good interviewer.
Good! 16 Republicans join all of the Democrats in the House to reject the war on Yemen. The war is being fought by Saudi Arabia with considerable US assistance.
Attorney General Barr has a very deeply serious credibility problem here. It seems that Mueller's investigators wrote chapter introductions that were specifically screened so that they wouldn't need to be redacted. They were designed for release to the general public. The AG needs to release them NOW!
I think Adam Schiff is 100% correct here. I find it highly doubtful that the Mueller Report even needs any redactions in the first place. We haven't seen the report because the Trump Administration feels it has a lot to hide.
Mar-a-Lago isn't properly screening visitors. But
that's not the Secret Service's job. The President either needs to
spend more time at Camp David or working in the White House or he needs
to spend his own money to upgrade security at Mar-a-Lago.
By invoking a particular law that House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) did, a subpoena shouldn't be necessary.
Happy to hear this. Glad to hear that the thought gives him nightmares.
Former FBI Director James Comey revealed that he's kept awake at night by the possibility that he helped Trump secure the 2016 election.
President claims he will soon unveil a new Republican health care plan. Very important to keep this in mind. There is no Republican health care plan to unveil. They had nearly a decade and failed to produce one that even their own party could pass in good conscience.
Yes, the President is currently
convinced that the noise
from wind
farms causes cancer. I wish that was something other people made up.
Very cool! A
company that had dumped major amounts of coal ash must clean up those pits at their expense! The ash was placed into unsecured
pits, from which they've leaked into the drinking water
supply and have overflowed during floods.
The bad news: Media
has assisted the Attorney General and the
President by asserting that Mueller Report contains only good news
for the President.
The good news: The
needle of public opinion
hasn't moved a millimetre because people are aware that the Mueller
Report has been embargoed by the AG.
Fox News runs
a chyron that states "Trump cuts U.S. aid to 3 Mexican countries."
AOC comments on that.
"Mick
Mulvaney Tells Shameless Lie: No One Will Lose Coverage If Obamacare
Is Overturned"
Interviews like this are much worse than merely useless. It was
made clear during the 2017 debate over replacing the ACA/Obamacare
that millions of people would be thrown off of their plans without an
adequate replacement. It was clear that the GOP hadn't figured out
how to cover pre-existing conditions (that was also made clear before
the 2018 midterm). Charging people a penalty for not getting an ACA
plan is a feature, not a bug. That's part of how the ACA covers
costs. The interviewer simply moves on to the next subject without
challenging his subject in the slightest, thereby giving viewers the
impression that they were just told the truth. They weren't.
"Will
Rachel Maddow face a reckoning for her Trump-Russia coverage?"
This was posted by a radical leftist Russagate skeptic. It
contained this sentence: "Still, it’s abundantly clear now
that many liberal outlets overdid it in their fervor."
Erm,
actually, it's far from clear
as we only have the word of a Trump
partisan that the Mueller Report says any such thing. All we have so
far is the Attorney General's summary that he now claims isn't a
summary. We will need much
more detailed evidence of specific errors
in the Russiagate coverage before we can agree with what the writer
claims.
With Russia offering to buy Venezuela's oil and China offering to help with their electrical grid problems, those two powers are seriously challenging the notion that Latin America is the "backyard" of the US.
"Trump
cuts aid for Central American countries, threatens border shutdown"
[What they must have been thinking]
"Hmm. So if people are coming to the US because their own
countries are in desperate shape...what to do? What to do? Ha! I got
it! We'll make their home countries even more desperate!"
The
President's analysis of the situation:: “They set up these
caravans,” Trump said at an event in Canal Point, Florida, on
Friday. “In many cases, they put their worst people in the caravan;
they’re not going to put their best in."
Good! Alex Jones claims that "a 'form of psychosis' made him believe mass shootings like Sandy Hook were staged." Sounds to me like the best answer to the "psychosis" that Jones experienced is to slap him with a really major monetary fine that'll leave him with a dingy apartment and barely enough food to get by.
A deep dive into the President's negotiating style. It might work IF the other party is really, really anxious to make a deal and is willing to give up just about anything. If the situation is anything like normal diplomacy where the two sides both have good reasons to come to the table, his style is worthless.
"Massachusetts
lawmakers pass conversion therapy ban"
Good! Conversion therapy clearly doesn't work as many subjects of
it have repeatedly testified.
The Director of the President's National Economic Council, who isn't particularly well-qualified for his post, decided on the strength of a single editorial that a Republican pundit named Stephen Moore would make a splendid member of the Federal Reserve Board. Yeah, still more of the usual Trump cluster$%#@.
This bum (The President decided to appoint him to Federal Reserve Board position after seeing him give an interview on TV) also owed $18k in child support payments. For some reason, he thought he could take that off of his taxes.
Wow! A poll says 36% of the population believes the President was cleared by Robert Mueller. How can people believe such a crazy assertion? Well, the blogger here points out that the media has done a very poor job of pointing out that the Barr 3 1/2 page summary is not the 300-1000 page Mueller Report.
Of the three groups, Republicans, Democrats and Independents, Republicans
are the least enthusiastic about releasing the Mueller
Report. but the percentage who support release is still 54%.
Oh,
and the length of the Mueller Report is now asserted to be around 400
pages.
Presidential candidate "Donald Trump on Friday "[in late
August 2016] continued his outreach to African-American voters,
presenting them with a stark question: 'What the hell do you have to
lose?'" Trump was of course speaking to an audience that was
about 99% white, but his question made him look as though he cared
about African-Americans.
I was reminded of this when I heard the
question about what Democrats will do, attack him with "partisan
investigations" or "join us to rebuild our crumbling
infrastructure."
The President has, of course, done absolutely
zip about infrastructure for his entire term as 1. Republicans don't
want to do anything that involves spending a lot of money and 2.
Democrats want to use an infrastructure plan to do something about
climate change.
The two offers are alike in that they convince
the followers of the President that he's serious about doing the work
that a president is expected to do. They're alike in that we can
reasonably expect that this work will never get accomplished.
Very good Rachel Maddow show last night as she details the history of how Special Counsel reports have been relayed. We have never had an Attorney General delay a report for any reason. Chairman Adam Schiff responds with righteous outrage to a demand that he step down and details the reasons as to why we think the President has been compromised by a foreign power.
Experts and research indicate that 15 students is a good class size. Larger classes means students don't get enough attention. Education Secretary DeVos is certain though, that students can thrive in al sorts of conditions. She's asked what research she has to back that assertion up and it's clear from her answer that she's got nothin'.
Research confirms that DeVos is mistaken. Larger class size does not
result in better learning.
"US-Mexico
border 'at breaking point'"
This is 100% a self-created problem. If there is a tragedy, the
Trump Administration will be wholly and completely responsible.
I completely agree with
Brian Kilmeade, who said: "The
Democrats are not buying the [Barr] summary. They still think the
president colluded just about to a person."
Right, because
the Starr Report of 1998 was released wholesale and the current
Attorney General has not provided a good reason as to why he provided
a summary to the Mueller Report and why the report is being delayed.
It's rather unreasonable for Senator Rand Paul to ask for an
investigation of "the Obama era officials that got this thing
started." As we don't know what Mueller found, on what basis
would we investigate the investigators?
Michelle Obama's autobiography has sold almost 10 million copies.
The big tax bill of December 2017 promised major returns in the form of repatriated money. Companies were supposed to bring profits back from overseas because that money was being taxed at a lower rate. Problem is, the younger George Bush promised exactly the same thing back during 2004. In both cases, the returns to the US were far less than advertised.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway is very, very upset that anyone could make accusations against the current White House and lists a whole series of charges. Hmm. Yeah, problem is, all of those charges are made on solid evidence.
Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams sounded like a great match-up until he started talking about Anita Hill.
Poor, poor Biden, wishing he could help Anita Hill but blocked by the Judiciary Committee chairman [checks notes]...Joe Biden
So how's our good buddy President Xi Jinping doing with the Uighurs? Sounds like things are great over there! [/snark]
Monica Lewinsky notes how differently the Starr Report was handled back then and how the Mueller Report is being handled today.
I'm sorry, but I agree with the blogger. Biden gave what is absolutely and unequivocally the wrong answer. He needs to stop using weasel words and the passive voice as though he was just a helpless bystander at the Anita Hill hearing.
Okay, let's say the President's coordination with Russian election interference didn't happen. That still leaves the fact that they DID attempt to sway the 2016 election and are ramping up to sway the 2020 election. What's the Trump Administration plan? What do they intend to do about that?
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders claimed that Democrats were calling for the President's execution, but Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s Communications Director, came up with a list of Democratic criticisms. And y'know what? Those criticisms fall considerably short of "Hang him!"
"Poll: Trump's Numbers Haven't Improved Since Mueller Ended Investigation"
Interesting to see that poll results on the President haven' changed. Yes, it's still early and next week may see big changes. But seems to me that the ambiguity of the Mueller findings is a big factor. If people more or less have their minds made up, that doesn't mean they're unpersudable, but it does mean it will take specific evidence to change those minds and there's just nothing specific yet.
Sanders asked ‘which of the angry
and hysterical’ Trump haters
‘got it most embarrassingly wrong’ about special counsel Robert
Mueller’s investigation...
I agree with one of the twitter posts. The Press Secretary's tweet is no way to unite the country. And no one got the story on Russian inerference "embarrassingly wrong."
Sorry, I've read a lot of good reporting by Glenn Greenwald, but for him to compare Rachel Maddow to Judith Miller and to compare Maddow's reporting on Russian interference with the 2016 election to Miller's reports on pre-Iraq War WMDs is just plain silly. No specific reporting by Maddow has been disproven and the piece in the comment shows Miller got the aluminium tubes story very, very wrong.
Appeals court in Gaza strikes back against authoritarian overreach.
Rachel Maddow has 15 questions on the Barr Memo.
Six House Committee Chairs want the Mueller Report released, ALL of it, by April 2nd.
Is the President still nursing a grudge against the mayor of San Juan who dared to criticize him, over the canceling of the sweetheart deal for a crony of his to fix the island's electricity or does he just hate brown people in general?
For people who say the President is innocent, they sure do act like guilty people! If the Justice Department is going through a process of deciding what can be made public, why aren't Democratic senators and/or representatives being made part of the process? Remember, the Attorney General has absolutely zero credibility!
"Trump's
Personal Lawyer Will 'Aggressively Fight' Release Of Trump's Written
Answers To Mueller"
The President took a "take-home test" as opposed to answering questions
from the stand or at a deposition. His lawyer has no intention of ever releasing those answers!
Funny, but for innocent people, Donald Trump and his lawyers sure don't act
innocent! Why would a non-guilty person hide this sort of
evidence!?!?
Some journalists are taking a look back at pre-war Iraq coverage to say about th AG Barr summary of Mueller's findings: "Hey, you guys should accept a poorly-sourced, vague, government document as the absolute truth!" 'Cause hey, that worked so well back in 2003!
Tensions around Venezuela escalate. "Moscow has also vowed to step in and prevent 'any provocations to shed blood.'”
What in Mueller's probe been proven beyond dispute.
Representative Adam Schiff is amused by Rudy Giuliani saying President is owed an apology.
What's behind the President's uncharacteristic twitter silence? My own guess is that the Mueller news is really, really bad. But that may be wishful thinking on my part.
Attornet General Barr drops his four-page memo on the Mueller Report. It says the President is exonerated, but doesn't provide the underlying evidence and there are many questions. Now, the AG simply hasn't been in his position long enough, we haven't seen him pursue any other cases, for anyone to give him the benefit of the doubt.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) has many questions about the AG's summary of the Mueller report.
Story of the investigation is far from over. Lots of information needs revealing.
A right-winger fears that for New Zealand to ban assault-type
weapons so quickly means they're "authoritarian." The
historical record is that taking
away people's guns is the last
thing
a dictatorship does. Taking away guns is never the prelude to
anything. It's either the only thing the government does and it
doesn't lead anywhere or it's the final step in a long political campaign.
Directly after the Kristallnacht, the possession of any weapons by Jews was prohibited through the Verordnung gegen den Waffenbesitz der Juden, enacted on 11 November 1938 (RGBl. I, 1573).
"Kamala
Harris plans an 'unprecedented federal investment' in teachers with a
nationwide pay raise'"
Good! It just amazes me that people think that they, as citizens,
can get something for nothing. Everybody wants to share our society
with educated citizens, right? It ain't gonna happen by paying
teachers as though they did work that doesn't take skills or brains.
You need to pay for that kind of performance!
The Trump Administration's habit of simply running ahead of the diplomatic process may excite Trump's electoral base, but does vastly more to legitimize our foes and de-legitimize the US as an "honest broker."
Woo hoo! Special Counsel's report has dropped! Heh! Reminds me that a few well-known scientists posed a few years ago as though they were a rock band. "Man, this group looks like they're about to drop an album so hot, it's temperature has to be measured in kelvin!"
Now that Mueller has submitted his report but before it’s made public, let’s take a moment to express gratitude for his public service. He and his team have worked tirelessly for nearly two years to find answers and bring to justice those who threaten American liberty. Kudos.
Very
true!
Also, someone points that if the report was
exonerating, the President "would have already had a press
conference, three dozen tweets, and made the report public."
The President's deadline for the disappearance of ISIS has come and gone. How we doin' on that? Ehh, not so good.
Our blogger is
absolutely mystified by the failure to ensure that
safety features were standard on Boeing 737 MAX jets.
Ari Fleischer tries to whitewash the Bush Administration's WMD and other lies that got us into the Iraq War. As the piece here points out, there was quite a bit of evidence at the time that showed the Bush Administration was completely full of %$#@. It wasn't the intelligence agencies that messed up. It was the younger George Bush and the people who worked under him that lied.
"Judge
Restores Wisconsin Governor's Powers, Strikes Down GOP Laws"
Very excellent! A truly awful abuse of power has been corrected!
Good, lengthy discussion on eliminating the Electoral College. Senator from North Dakota feels his state would be overlooked entirely with its three Electoral Votes, but that would change his state from those three EVs to 350k-plus regular votes, which once you eliminate the "base" votes, can mean up to 150k votes for either side.
My report on the pro-Venezuela/anti-intervention march on Saturday 16 March.
The
Fake News problem, my own solution.
"No
Exit: America's Senior Generals and the Trap of Infinity Wars"
No, General Petraues didn't solve the Vietnam question. Fact
remains that there's a limit on how much you can reshape another
country.
Whether or not Senator Warren gets close to winning, she'll
make a
mark on the race anyway by bringing up good ideas and taking a
womkish, policy-heavy approach.
Huh! Wow! Really? [Eye roll] When you delegate safety decisions to a profit-making company, those decisions may not be well-made? Naaaawwwww!!!!!
"Why
Obama Didn't Cure White Supremacy, Explained
"
Final bullet point here is "It’s hard to dismantle white
supremacy." Reminds me of the statement regarding President Bill
Clinton. He wanted a Cabinet that "Looked like America," as
the current Cabinet-equivalent of Canada looks today, "If the
job wasn't a back-breaker, it would have been done decades ago."
Clinton deserves credit for trying and his efforts were not in vain,
but the job is hard.
"When
it Comes to Actively Defending Religious Minorities, Trump is no
George Washington; but he Should Be"
Sorry Mr. President, but defending religious minorities is part of
your job description. Ya can't do your job, get the %$#@ out!!!
This is the President of the United States suggesting that the FCC should look into *checks notes* late night TV shows. If Obama did this, the GOP would launch hearings. The reason nothing happens is because no one takes the most powerful man in the world seriously.
The problem that the President doesn't appear to understand that has to do with late-night comedians is that comedians pay close attention to polls. They don't care about overall approval ratings. They care about the demographics that are 1. likely to be watching their show in the first place and 2. are likely to be valuable to advertisers. Republicans are likely to not fall into either category, so there's no point in a comedian trying to please them by telling pro-Trump jokes.
No matter how many times acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney laughingly dismisses the idea that the President is a white supremacist, liberals didn't just pick up the idea out of nowhere. No one just irrationally dislikes the President for reasons they don't understand. We dislike him because, among other things, he's a white supremacist.
A vote to override the President's veto probably won't get the 2/3rds majority necessary to override, but it will get Republicans on record as people who chose fascist tyranny over Constitutional democracy.
The Republican Party, and especially the President, appears to have this remarkably dumb take on the Jewish people and the President's policy towards Israel.
A lasting political fight in which Jews figure mostly as a passive, monolithic, two-dimensional, heavily stereotyped object doesn’t make me at all nervous because history has shown that this always ends well.
The New Zealand massacre was prompted by whaite nationalism. The President's Wall is prompted by white nationalism. During the same ceremony, he condemned white natioanlism in the case of New Zealand and praised in the case of the Wall.
The President and the New Zealand gunman sounded eerily similar when describing "invasions."
Trump Administration comments
on New Zealand Christchurch massacre. From a blogger at Balloon
Juice:
"There seems to be a lot of online radicalization of white
supremacists too, and they telegraph and now live-stream their
terrorist attacks. The New Zealand terrorist is just the latest. The
white supremacist who carried out the Pittsburgh synagogue terrorist
attack was also active online. So was the deranged Coast Guard
officer who was apprehended before he could carry out his massacre.
So was Dylann Roof, etc.
"It’s a real problem. But right
now, the POTUS has a pinned tweet of his interview with Breitbart
News, a racist hate site that has 'black crime' tag."
Mourning the loss of the people lost in the New Zealand ChristChurch massacre.
"New Zealand shooter called Donald Trump 'a symbol of white identity'"
"Candace
Owens LOL's After Being Named As Influence For New Zealand Massacres
"
The distinction between regular violence and "stochastic"
violence is that regular violence can be explicitly directed.
Stochastic violence is more in the nature of stating "Those gosh
darn bloody [ethnic group]!!! This would be a nice place if not for
them!!!" Random people get it into their heads that "If I
commit a horrific act of violence, [some group or person] will
consider me a hero!"
Candace Owens, along with President
Trump and Donald Trump Jr., was named in the New Zealand shooter's
manifesto. The Left didn't make anything up and didn't just draw her
name out of a hat at random.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was questioned about where the proposed Census question came from.
Hmm...okay. Let me get this straight. The President is complaining because Congress didn't send out enough subpoenas to catch Hillary Clinton performing her nefarious deeds? Huma Abedin was an important aide of Clinton's. Now granted, she's a brown-skinned Muslim, so that apparently made her a target. So she was called upon to testify on Benghazi. She spent six hours in testimony. According to Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD) "[Abedin], based on other testimony we have gotten, has no policy responsibilities, no operational responsibilities, was not with Secretary Clinton on the night of this phenomenal tragedy." Not surprisingly, her testimony was completely unenlightening. So if the Benghazi Committee was reduced to subpoenaing a person who had no direct connection to what they were investigating, I think the President is exaggerating just a bit on the question of subpoenas.
"House
passes resolution calling for public release of Mueller report 420-0
"
Now this is true, real and serious bipartisanship!
Disturbing
comment to get right before the President issues his
first vetoes. Surprising? No, I've seen him as a wannabe fascist
since way back when.
“I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,” Trump told Breitbart
Excellent! My Republican Senator, Pat Toomey, voted for our democratic and Constitutional Republic! That is, he voted against the President's Wall.
Pretty hilarious that Paul Ryan can't stand behind the words he posts and needs to "clarify" his comment. Yeesh! It's not like he's in any sort of rush these days.
"Advertisers
begin dropping Jeanine Pirro’s show"
Jeanine Pirro had earlier suggested that there
was something inconsistent about being both an American and wearing
a hijab. Good to see that advertisers took offense at that suggeston.
"Senate
passes bill demanding end to U.S. involvement in Saudi war in Yemen"
This is a very, very good thing! Obviously, the charge that Iran
is helping the Houthis of Yemen is not a compelling one or it isn't a
compelling reason to support Saudi Arabia in its murderous campaign
against Yemen.
Presidential pardons are not a bad thing, but the GOP has been screwing up by using it for really horrible people.
I was looking at Senator Toomey's website to see if he had
arrived
at a position on the President's desire to build a border wall by
using emergency powers. Nope. We still need to call him to have him
support our democratic and Constitutional Republic.
But
this
particular proposal below on emergency tariffs is a good one. The
problem, of course, is not tariffs. The current problem with trade
policy is a completely incompetent President who doesn't have a clue
as to how to conduct trade policy.
The proposed bill addresses
that problem well.
@LoriLoughlin & @FelicityHuffman indicted for lying and buying spots in college. They worried their daughters are as stupid as their mothers.
Yeah, the Trump Administration has a serous glass houses/throwing stones problem. Jared Kushner's dad gave $2.5 million to Harvard. Amazingly enough [/snark], Harvard accepted Jared as a student shortly afterwards.
"Trump
pledged to protect Medicare and Medicaid, but his 2020 budget calls
for major spending cuts"
In 2015, presidential candidate Donald Trump's promise that he wouldn't
touch Social
Security or Medicare/Medicaid as president was big news. Yeah, yeah,
we'll squeeze the waste, fraud and abuse out of the system. We've
been hearing that since the
early 80s. Usual result is that
some efficiencies can be made and some money saved, but it's never
anywhere near enough to make up for the cuts.
"Detained
kids were told they wouldn't be reunited with relatives if they
misbehaved, senator says"
Horrible! Just irredeemably, absolutely horrible! Everyone
involved with these child prisons needs to be locked up themselves
for many, many years!!!
So while the blogs were (correctly, IMHO) seeing the President's rambling two-hour CPAC speech as a sign of mental deterioration, the WaPo apparently saw signs of genius. The media is not our friend, never has been, never will be.
Wow! I'm in complete agreement with Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY)!!! She feels that no, allies do not wish to pay more to keep American troops in their country. I served for two years as a sailor in Gaeta, Italy (Halfway between Rome & Naples), We got along okay with the townspeople, but if we offered "Give us more money or we'll withdraw our base from your town!" The response would be "Oh, okay. See ya!" They would have had zero problems seeing us depart. It's hard to pass your town off as rustic and romantic to tourists when you've got an American warship smack in the middle of your harbor!
Hoo yah to this! "Speaker Pelosi: House Democrats reject Trump's 'toxic, destructive budget'"
All right! Again, Elections
Have Consequences! State Senator ""Collett
Introduces Gun Control Bill For Local Govs In PA Senate
"
Heh!
Well, yeah. I'm sure it's the most "environmentally conscious" fossil fuel around, but that's kind of like calling someone the most honest member of the Trump Administration, or a drink the most satisfying decaffeinated coffee, or the best-tasting lite beer.
Woo hoo! More on comics in general and Captain Marvel..
#CaptainMarvel has surpassed BLACK PANTHER's global debut of $430M last year by earning an impressive $455M this weekend.
Kathy Kraninger, the latest Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, proves that she really isn't the slightest bit qualified to lead the bureau. Hooray for Representative Porter! for making that clear!
I posted a piece yesterday wherein the President claimed that he was his own best press secretary, that is, he didn't really need Sarah Sanders. Yeah, hmm, kind of a problem with that. Trump's underlings keep having to "explain" that "What the President really meant was..."
I heartily and cheerfully agree with Judge Dana Sabraw! "But the Trump administration immediately fought back, essentially claiming it would be too much work to track them all down," is not a legitimate excuse to refuse to reunited families that were separated at the border!
*Sigh* Okay, the problem with the "infanticide" charge is that Democrats are just saying that the woman always takes priority over the baby when it comes to any birthing complications. The President has turned that into a wild, hysterical accusation that Representative Cheney is now repeating. Why is Chuck Todd incapable of pushing back on this?
Doubling down. The President increases his Wall request.
As you can see in these messages, we're getting super-duper, top-notch information from Senator Marco Rubio. who is "the top Venezuela congressional point man for the Trump administration." [/snark]
Why no, that's NOT AT ALL suspicious! Why, how could ANYONE suspect he's trying to hide something?!?!? [/snark]
Back during the 80s, it was actually news that Reagan zeroed out money for Legal Services (It often supported people who wanted to take legal positions against the government). Nowadays, the proposed budget just says "Ahhh, eff y'all!"
A Republican refers to the investigation launched by the House
Judiciary Committee with the sending out of 81 letters requesting
documents as a "fishing expedition."
Hmm, after the
Obama Administration was required to produce hundreds of thousands of
documents to respond to GOP requests on Fast and Furious, the IRS
denial of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status to political groups, Benghazi,
etc., all
of the sudden the GOP has spun on a dime and has abruptly
decided that fishing expeditions are no longer good things!
Problem for the GOP and HR1 is that it is in the self-interest of Democrats to push for a more open voting system, that is, as system more compatible with democracy. Republicans benefit from a constricted voting system, a system that permits less voting.
Yeah, very interesting how the Senate committees that were so
terribly, deeply concerned
about Hillary Clinton's email
protocols and Benghazi have now decided that, even as the House
committees have gotten really busy on investigating the Trump
Administration, that
gee, they're really tired of investigating a
president's activities.
Senator Warren describes a horribly, horribly inhumane and abusive system for processing unauthorized immigrants.
"Trump
Humiliates Palestinians by Closing Consulate, Dealing with them Via
US Embassy to Israel"
Gee, I wonder why Palestinians don't trust the US to broker a
peace deal between them and Israel.
"Evidence
shreds GOP argument that tax cuts pay for themselves"
This is one of those cases that was always more a matter of
wishful thinking than it was of actual evidence.
David Gregory plays into the classic "Both Sides" narrative that benefits the misbehaving side far more than it ever does the law-abiding side. He acknowledges some sensible points, such as that the GOP essentially twiddled its thumbs and put their feet up on the desk as far as oversight went, but he returns to the "optics" angle and complains that it looks as though Democrats are overreaching. But Democrats are really just playing catch-up to two years of very little oversight.
I very much appreciate that Speaker Pelosi didn't do that in the case of Representative Ilhan Omar and her allegedly anti-Semitic comment. Pelosi kept cool, took the temperature of her caucus on the issue and hasn't made a public statement yet. Reportedly, her people are busy re-writing the resolution.
And in still more evidence that Democrats listen to their people, the DNC was prepared to hold a Democratic debate hosted by Fox News. The grassroots said "Aww, hell no!!!!" and now that won't happen.
Some of the President's supporters noticed angrily that Republican Congresspeople did nothing to support Trump personally during the hearing with Cohen. Does the Press Secretary do so? No, not really.
Kind of interesting that the President is asked about Jared Kushner's security clearance and he immediately turns it into a question of politics, as though Democrats had no legitimate national security interests on the line.
North Korea apparently decided soon after the failed meeting with the President to start conducting nuclear tests again.
Back during 2015, anti-choice groups said they wanted to de-fund Planned Parenthood. PPFA said they were providing pregnancy-related health care to low-income women. A study was done to see if existing hospitals and other health care providers could pick up the slack. It was found that they couldn't as they were already working at full capacity. Nothing prevents anti-choice groups from starting up health-care providers that could replace PPFA clinics. Only problem is, PPFA is a non-profit organization that needs Medicare reimbursements to keep operating. Producing an alternative set of clinics to serve these clients would be a guaranteed money loser. Vox confirms that the situation hasn't changed. If PPFA is run out of town, low-income women who depend on PPFA clinics will simply be left without that health care.
This is an amusing game of false equivalence. A Fox News guy
named Larry Elder says,
if Democrats "...started an investigation to collusion, it's now
into the third year..."
Actually,
for all intents and
purposes, the Congressional investigation into the President's
misdeeds is now organized and is just in its beginning phase as
Republicans basically sat around twiddling their thumbs for two
years.
Let me say something about the Ken Starr investigation. To this day, Bill Clinton called it a witch hunt. There were 14 convictions.
Very true. Ken Starr was trying to "climb the ladder," to move from the "low level" people in Arkansas to the "bigwigs," Bill and Hillary Clinton. Problem was, there was no ladder, no conspiracy. Starr gave up after awhile and then latched onto the completely unrelated matter of Paula Jones and then eventually found Monica Lewinsky.
"Students,
Faculty Blacklisted by Canary Mission for pro-Palestine Views"
Up in Michigan, it's not a dating app, though it looks like one at
first glance. It's an app that identifies people who show
pro-Palestinian sympathies. A real problem with the site is that if
delivers dossiers on otherwise-anonymous people.
Hey, the President's good buddy Kim Jong Un wanted the military exercises to stop, so hey, y'know..."Trump: I Ended Military Drills With S. Korea To Save Money! Also, Kim Jong Un Wanted It"
"Detroit
man sues three white women who had him arrested for 'gardening while
black'
"
Good to see some serious pushback on idiocy like this.
In the history of the United States Congress, has there ever been a broad investigation into a sitting President's personal business and finances literally just looking for crimes? It's obscene.
Why yes. Yes there was just such an investigation. It was called "Whitewater." C'mon guy! It wasn't that long ago!
The press really needs to crank up the volume on the Russian collusion scandal so that it's at least as loud as it was on Bill Clinton's scandals during the late 90s.
"Nadler:
House Judiciary Will Send Over 60 Doc Requests To Don Jr.,
Weisselberg, Others
"
Woo hoo! Elections have consequences!
Don't know if there are interviewers that do well at
interviewing*
what a lawyer would call a "hostile witness," but Chuck
Todd does an incredibly crappy job of interviewing Representative
Jim
Jordan here. Jordan's answers really did call for incredulous
double-takes and "What are you babbling about?" looks.
One
thing Jordan said: "Think about the two years under President
Trump's leadership..." and then he went on about how marvelous
the last two years were. That really, really seriously called
for a "WTF?!?!?" reaction from Todd.
*Chris Cuomo is clearly much, much better when it comes to dealing with what lawyers call a "hostile witness."
Excellent overview/update on diplomatic situation between Israel, Palestinians and Iran.
Senator Rand "Paul
Indicates He'll Vote Against Trump's Emergency, Forcing President's
First Veto"
This is very good news! With Senator Paul being a firm "No"
for the Wall, the House bill will now get confirmed by the Senate.
President can still veto it, but that will make it absolutely crystal
clear that the President is acting as a tyrant who's overriding the
clearly-expressed will of the people.
"Chris
Wallace Calls North Korea Meeting A 'Failed Summit' To John Bolton's
Face"
What Ntional Security Adviser John Bolton defends here is a classic
example of an
under-resourced diplomatic effort carried out in a huge rush. As they
say, a good lawyer never asks a question he doesn't already know the
answer to, The President shouldn't have even considered having a
meeting with the head of another state unless there are already a set
of papers all ready and waiting to be signed. As far as I'm aware
North Korea has still not even
defined what they mean by
de-nuclearization!
It was obvious from the very beginning that for the First Lady to take up hatefulness in social media was going to be a real problem as her husband was someone who expressed lots of hatefulness on social media. Over two years later, she still hasn't figured out how to deal with the complete and utter hypocrisy of ignoring her husband's use of social media.
At CPAC, the President gives a rambling, ***TWO-HOUR*** speech (bleaugh!!!) Audience members leave in droves after awhile. President claims no one left.
This reminds me of someone a year or so back commenting on
Byzantine
emperors and how they'd ramble on and their courtiers would have to
pretend they were so
fascinated by all these pearls of wisdom that
were being dropped. The President's comments on North Korea shows a
really
disturbing disconnect from reality.
There are good reasons to have Representatives in safe districts. Democrats are fortunate to have such an energetic go-getter as AOC in just such a district. Obama also attended a lot of hearings because he wanted to learn as much as possible.
Jared Kushner says:
This is a non-story. The President was elected Commander in Chief, not John Kelly. Like it or not, as a constitutional matter, the President, and not his subordinates, is the final authority on what's classified and what's not--and who gets to see it.
Very true, but what makes this a story is that the President did not come right out and defend his decision. In fact, he hid his decision from everyone.
"RNC
Chair Says Government Did Not Create The Internet"
Not only was the early internet pretty much entirely a government
thing, but her two other examples, the car and the airplane, both got
very significant government enhancements. Cars and airplanes are
independent, but roads and airfields are usuallt built by the
government.
I was around and paying attention during Reykjavik (1987). Don't think the comparison does Trump any favors. Reagan walked away from a good deal so that he could preserve "Star Wars," a missile defense system. The “Star Wars” concept sorta, kinda works these days because it's very downsized and is used on much smaller, short-range rockets. Did the US gain any great benefit from Reagan’s walking away? Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev wanted to eliminate nuclear weapons entirely, so no, I don’t think it was better for Reagan to have walked away.
So March 16th is the deadline by which the Senate must either pass a bill to support what the House has done on the Wall or it must pass a bill that rejects it. Filibuster isn't an option and they're counting calendar days, not days the Senate is in session. The House appear to have the four Republican Senators needed to agree with them. Yes, the President can veto a bill that rejects the Wall, but polls are already clear that about two-thirds of the American people oppose the Wall and a veto will then make it crystal clear that the President is acting as a tyrant who is brushing the Constitution aside
Congressmen during the Cohen hearing didn't
rally to the
President's defense. .Problem was that Cohen described a lot of really
terrible behavior.
Commander in Chief is within his authority to grant security clearances even when subordinates disagree, but there were good reasons why intelligence agencies had to be pushed into giving the President's son-in-law Jared Kushner a security clearance.
Media is, was and always will be biased against the political left. The 2010 Republican take-over of the House got much more coverage than the 2018 Democratic one did. Also, 2006 was good for Democrats and 1994 was good for Republicans, but pattern of bias still holds.
Representative Mark Meadows is the one who had a black HUD employee stand behind his as he talked about Michael Cohen.
Mia Love on CNN is doing a terrible job of trying to defend Mark Meadows. You can have family members/friends of the opposite race and still be, say and do racist things.
Another Twitter user:
Thomas Jefferson had black children. He held them in slavery. Strom Thurmond had a child with his family’s black maid. He opposed every civil rights bill that came up during the 60s and 70s and was openly segregationist. So trotting put a black employee ain’t, excuse me, ish.
How far out does the Sun's gravity have an effect? It may go out to nearly 20 light-hours or 13.02 billion miles. Back in the old days, we thought our solar system extended to Pluto, 3.162 billion miles or 2.93 light-hours away.
A HUD official, who by total coincidence, just happened to be a black woman, stood behind one of the Republican Representatives at the Michael Cohen hearing when Representative Rashida Tlaid accused her of being a prop.
At that same hearing, if the Trump Administration and Congress were represented by teams of samurai, it was the Aonisaibushi, the youngest ones on the side of Congress, who made the deepest, most fatal cuts.
Hmm. So apparently, the real fear of the Green New Deal on the part of the GOP is that people on their side of the aisle might adopt a "Green New Deal-lite," which would of course, in their view, quickly become “Karl Marx’s Christmas list.”
Highlights of Michael Cohen's testimony yesterday.
Interesting commentary from Eric Trump. What exactly is so "historic" about the current talks between the President and the North Korean dictator? There's a reason other presidents refused to meet with any of the Kims prior to this.
Talks break down due to unacceptable demand that the US lift all sanctions in return for nothing. Well, one cheer out of three for the President not being a complete "light touch," patsy, "hat trick," etc.
"Woman
in ICE custody gives birth to stillborn infant"
And the people in ICE wonder: "Why do the American people
consider us to be Nazis?"
Venezuela is entirely correct to be wary of US "humanitarian aid."
"Conservative
Christians Just Retook the United Methodist Church"
Very depresssing. Absolutely zero intention on the part of liberls to
break away from the Church.
"House
passes measure to block Trump’s emergency declaration"
Excellent! Only the beginning, but an excellent start!
"Voter fraud" is a very specific term. It means that someone approaches a voting station with the intention of pretending to be someone they're not. That's not what happened in North Carolina. What happened there was "electoral fraud," which was an organized effort to not only "harvest ballots," but to "help" voters fill them out. Simply bringing in a lot of filled-in ballots in sealed envelopes is not bad by itself. In NC, voters testified that the harvester collected their ballot before it was completely filled out. The harvester filled in the ballot pretending to represent the voter.
"Trump
official admits he was warned about damage to separated migrant kids"
but did nothing about it"
Shorter agents of ICE: "Why, why do Americans think we're
Nazis?!?!?!"
In the Trump Administration's battle against the Green New Deal sponsored by Senator Ed Markey and Representative AOC, it's difficult to think of a worse, more irrelevant spokesperson than the third-generation rich person Ivanka Trump. Gotta love her comment about "I've spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years." Well yes, but she spent he whole time talking to fellow wealthy people or her father's most hard-core, fanatical supporters, so it's hard to say that she learned anything.
This is rather serious. The President says he's conducting a trade war. If he doesn't have a basic grasp of economic policy, how in the heck does he expect to prevail in that war?!?!?!
President draws false equivalence between unproven allegations of voter fraud and a real live, actual case of election fraud. No, the two are not the same.
Filmmaker Spike Lee made
a simple statement: "Make the moral choice between love versus
hate. Let’s do
the right thing,” President took that as a challenge. Hmm.
Just as with the Bill Clinton/Paula Jones case biting Republicans in the ass today, the release of thousands of Hillary Clitnon's emails is biting them as well. Justice Department can't claim confidentiality as they've already violated that. Many people pointed out at the time that for FBI Director Comey to comment on the Clinton not-guilty decision was a terrible idea that set an awful precedent.
Actually, proponents of the GND are suggesting a greater reliance on high-speed rail, but the piece here suggests we don't even need to do that.
The President finally comments on the Coast Guard Lieutenant who was stockpiling weapons and had a hit list of liberals to kill. Refuses to take responsibility for having provoked and encouraged the Lieutenant.
Press Secretary Sarah Sanders says: "I certainly don’t
think that the president, at any point, has done anything but condemn
violence – against journalists or anyone else..."
The
President has still not commented or tweeted about the Coast Guard
Lieutenant who had stockpiled weapons and had a list of Democrats
he
wanted to kill. Right before the midterm election, the President seemed
highly
irritated that the attempted mail bomb killer was taking press
attention away from The Caravan down in Mexico. Yeah, as the blogger
wonders, has Sanders ever met
the President?!?!?!
House of Representatives produces resolution to deny
President's "Natioal Emergency" that calls for Wall funding.
Good! This scum is going to jail! The perp, Jeffrey Epstein, operated a sex ring for underage girls. The question is why a current Trump Administration official gave Epstein such a light setence.
The Trump Administration's Labor Secretary reached an illegitimate deal back in 2008 and the judge has denounced that.
Uuh. Whut?!?!?! The President expects allies to fill the gap as US troops leave Syria?!?!?! And he's just now telling them he expects this?!?!
Update: In early June, the Northern border with Turkey is the
site of all sorts of actions. The
Southern border and Eastern portion of the country are both very quiet.
Al Jazeera reports great bloodshed and destruction, especially in the
city of Idlib. Russia
and Syria appear to be the only combatants other than Turkey and
occasional airstrikes by Israel.
The dangers in appointing amateurs into political positions. Ben Carson has been in his position for two years now and his grand, magnificent plans never seem to have gotten off the ground.
Yike! Coast Guard Lieutenant was planning a hit on lots of Democrats and liberals!
I don't have a problem with this person being a member of CNNs reporting team, but don't see why she's being made an editor. CNN shared the media-wide problem of having over-emphasized Trump speeches and of having seriously under-emphasizing Clinton's policy proposals during the last presidential campaign, so it's not at all clear why they feel the need to make sure right-wingers are represented.
Another view on the hiring of Sarah Isgur, a right-wing spokesperson with zero journalistic experience. CNN should admit that it's suffering from an organizational version of Stockholm Syndrome and should do some serious house-cleaning.
Sarah Isgur is a Republican political operative who was hired as a "political editor." Various people at CNN have said this is no big deal, but all of the examples of people being brought over from politics have been people brought over to be reporters not editors. The viewing public needs a much better explanation as what exactly Isgur will be doing at CNN.
"Ms. Isgur wouldn’t be making decisions about political coverage." So if she's not going to be makin decisions on political coverage, what is she, as a political editor, going to be doing?!?!?!
Update: Her
assignment was cancelled as of March 8th.
In 1976, the elder George Bush started up "Team B" to challenge intelligence agency assertions about Soviet nuclear weapons. In 2002, the younger George Bush started up a pressure campaign on intelligence agencies to agree that Iraq had WMDs. In neither case was the attempt to go around the existing agencies successful. In both cases, the competition to the intelligence agencies simply told policymakers what they wanted to hear. Now, the President wants to start up a competing committee to report on climate change.
So how is that "War on Terror," that was started in September 2001, doing lately?
To sum up: our completed map indicates that, in 2017 and 2018, seven countries were targeted by U.S. air strikes; double that number were sites where American military personnel engaged directly in ground combat; 26 countries were locations for joint military exercises; 40 hosted bases involved in the war on terror; and in 65, local military and security forces received counterterrorism-oriented 'training and assistance.
No, Senato Bernie Sanders is not "the inevitable candidate."
Republican Party would love to run against Senator Sanders! He was their dream candidate back in 2016 and remains so today.
Back when I was a young'un, I read a number of paperbacks by
and
about the German generals of World War II. General Guderian had a
serious problem for der Fuhrer's plans for the invasion of the Soviet
Union. The effort lacked what Guderian called a "schwerpunkt,"
a main focus of concentration. Guderian's leader wanted to seize
Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev
(later Stalingrad). The German Wehrmacht
was very powerful and capable, but it tried to do too much.
Same
problem with Senator Bernie Sanders. He wants to tackle "Wall
Street, the
health insurance companies, drug companies, the fossil fuel industry,
the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, and the
large multi-national corporations..." Were I in charge of his
campaign, I'd focus on climate change, I'd show voters how tackling
that problem would require that we get people employed and
productive. We'd have to move lots of money to those who actually
need it. Everything would follow from that.
Update: This is precisely
the strategy that Jay Inslee, Washington State Governor, is running
on. Climate change is the whole point of his candidacy.
The House Freedom Caucus guy makes a poor case that we need to toss aside the normal appropriations process for this "emergency."
Turns out there was another moment of silence, when VP Pence spoke with great apparent emotion about how the Trump Administration cared so deeply about the Iranian people. No one brought it.
So I puttered around a bit on the internet to check on Finland's "free money" experiment (Yes, I checked out the right-wing Bretbart News, among others). The woman pictured here did indeed take a job that otherwise would have provided insufficient income (and was desperate for what to do when the experiment came to an end), but no, there was no real effect on unemployment, meaning that people look for more than just money when they look for work. As my mom said, work "gets people out of the house each day."
The essential fact of the matter that Representative Jim
Jordan
(R-OH) dances around, is that there
is a long ago-established
procedure for getting more money for a project. The President can't
get "enough" through that procedure, so he is taking an
un-Constitutional shortcut that completely betrays everything that
Jordan allegedly stands for!
Fox Newsperson Chris Wallace asks an extremely good question that Trump Administration spokesperson can't answer. It was whether a national emergency really, truly had to be declared.
No. Sorry. Wrong answer. At absolutely no time did the President attempt to work with Democrats. Democrats were shut out, ignored and sidelined.
Not too happy about the fellow replacing Heather Nauert as the UN Ambassador, but very pleased to see Nauert won't be taking that position. At least Nikki Haley was a governor for a considerable period.
It's impossible to look at Trump Administration preparations for securing the 2020 election in any sort of innocent light.
There’s no way to avoid seeing this DHS move as a treacherous betrayal of American democracy by President Trump. He’s inviting hostile foreign powers to invade our elections, the heart of our sovereignty. His oath of office meant nothing to him.
What's amazing about a WaPo piece they quote extensively from here is how much of his policy work the President delegates.
Heh! Oh yeah! The Munich Security Conference is off to a real good start! Bwah-hah-hah! The Vice-President delivered greetings to the conference from the President and got a few seconds of dead silence.
Fox News was controlled by the younger George Bush, but the combination of eight years of a Democratic president, followed by two years of a weak Republican one, means Fox News has taken the initiative and has assumed command of the Republican Party.
Ahhh! Very, very good to hear this! Europe is fed up with the President trying to undermine the perfectly-satisfactory Iran deal.
"How
Trump's Off-The-Rails Presser Will Play In The Court Fight Over His
Border Move"
The President cites: “People that should have stepped up, did
not step up.” As I said over a year ago, the President appears to
see himself as a restaurant customer and the Speaker of the House as
a ma�tre d' who's there to deliver bills to the Oval Office to be
signed. He doesn't appear to recognize that he has a role in getting
bills passed.
I support Bill Weld's campaign for president for exactly the same reason I oppose Howard Schultz, the Starbucks executive who wants to run as a liberal independent. Both of them threaten to split the vote, Weld on the conservative/Republican side, Schultz on the liberal/Democratic side. Besides, Weld was a popular Governor of Massachusetts who foolishly gave in to the then-fashionable notion of term limits and thereby bowed out of running for several more terms.
"Trump’s
Emergency Declaration Shows He Is Unfit for Office"
Lou Dobbs, a Fox Business Network host who frequently speaks to the president both through the screen and on the phone, expressed the premise of using a emergency order to circumvent democratic debate. "I really believe that the way forward here is for him to declare a national emergency, and simply sweep aside the recalcitrant left in this country," he said on air last month. "They have obstructed, resisted, and subverted for far too long.” (emphasis added)
So the President is being counseled to choose between the country's version of what would keep us safe, that is, to defend the Constitution, or "Trump’s version of it invests in his own office unlimited authority to define security and carry it out as he alone sees fit."
A look back at the Obama presidency, when Republicans engaged in a lot of silly, overheated, hysterical language about Obama being "lawless" and an "imperial" president and engaged in Constitutional overreach. Yeah, good times!
"Republicans
distance themselves from Trump’s border wall ’emergency’"
Good! Let's hope Republicans put their money where their mouth is
and vote to defeat this "emergency."
This constitutes a rather serious legal problem, the President's admission that he really didn't have to make an emergency declaration, but just found it was more convenient that to go through the usual procedures of, y'know, building support, carefully designing the Wall so that it would cause as little disruption, etc.
Just because a Bedouin village is officially "unrecognized" doesn't mean that it hasn't been in existence since at least the time when the land of Palestine was part of the Turkish Empire. .
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly
said this morning, “You
can’t achieve peace and stability in the Middle East without
confronting Iran.”
No, I don't agree with that statement at all. The Trump Administration
is engaging in a lot of baseless
scaremongering.
Is the President really 6'3"? It would make him seem a bit healthier and in better shape, but Jeb Bush is 6'3" and if you look at pictures of the two of them together, Trump is clearly shorter than Bush. In any event, the President is now officially "obese." That is not a sign of good health!
"Curtailing
Trump War Powers, House Votes to End US Help to Saudi's Yemen War"
Woo hoo!
Republicans are trying really hard to embarrass Democrats over Representative Ilhan Omar, but Democrats and she have long since dealt with her statement and the Rs have a really serious hypocrisy problem over them.
With about 630 days to go until the election, the press is off to a poor start. It reminds me of a piece I read back in the 90s about celebrities and their wearing "day off" clothing. Back during the early days of movies, celebrities would appear in public as indistinguishable from their movie characters. During the 90s, they adopted comfortable, casual clothing to wear in public as these were their "days off" (Actually, they were still "on duty" and always ready with good quotes). No, you can't learn anything meaningful about a candidate by observing their personal quirks during campaign season.
Hoo boy! 630 days until the 2020 election and we're
getting So
stupid
SO early! A radio host asks Senator Harris a question and gets the
audience confsed as to when she smoked pot and when she listened to
Tupac. These two things did not occur at the same time. If one follows
the conversation carefully, she
didn't claim they did!
So who is the President likely to go with? The fellow who's been claiming for two decades without much evidence that Iran is a deadly and immediate threat or the intelligence agencies?
Update: So in a conflict between facts and evidence and what the President wanted to hear, what he wanted to hear won out
Republicans will pile on all kinds of horse**** in order to keep pumping carbon into the atmosphere. The fellow who talks at the very end is good but Representative Cheney (Daughter of Dick) proves the strength of the case aganst taking action on climate change by putting out lots of disinformation.
Many people from both parties criticized the remarks of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) as anti-Semitic, but six Republicans had some serious hypocrisy problems in doing so.
The two-year period of time when Republicans held the Presidency, the Senate and the House saw one big legislative achievement, a tax break that mostly benefited the wealthy. That one achievement is in serious public relations trouble right now.
"Trump
claims he is hard at work during ‘Executive Time’"
Let's examine the evidence, shall we?
Slurring candidate Elizabeth Warren with the name of a famouu Native American is seen as okay,
Some seem to think this is harmless, like Native Americans disappeared in the 1880s or something. There are over 5 million Native Americans today, roughly equivalent to the number of Jewish Americans.
With Virginians split 47% to 47% on the governors 80s blackface photo, he isn't going anywhere.
Heh! President tries to put himself on the side of African-Americans and against Virginia's Governor Northam. It does not go well!
"Reeling
from the shutdown and Trump’s tax law, Americans see 8.4% drop in
average tax refunds"
Realization is sinking in that the President made a lot of false
promises.
Sounds pretty accurate.
MSNBC just gave a precise explanation of Trump's thinking: 'He views The Rule of Law as presidential harassment' To comprehend this, remember Trump's life is built on the premise that there are no rules that apply to him. He even cheats at golf Everything follows from that
Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) teaches a master class
in how
to interrogate a hostile witness.
And the Representative is
correct. There is "Executive Privilege," which is a very
specifically-defined area where the president can keep certain
conversations confidential, but AAG Whitaker is claiming a general,
sweeping right of confidentiality that does not exist.
The President accuses Democrats on yesterday's committee of acting with "hatred and scorn" towards AAG Whitaker. I'd say they were severely provoked by Whitaker's insulting conduct.
Saw people on TV discussing this case last night. This is exactly how you'd describe the American idea of religious non-discrimination to a 3rd-grader (8-9 years old). People about to be executed should get their choice of religious representatives to comfort them in their final hour. That's just such a basic concept and so easy for everyone to understand!
Very happy to see that some conservatives are upset by the Ray decision. This is a very, very basic and fundamental legal principle, that all religions are equal under the law.
Very interesting. The former FBI agent figures Matt Whitaker was auditioning for the President to take on another role in the administration.
For the last two-plus years, Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner has had one item in his portfolio, the Israel-Palestinian peace plan. Piece looks at the complications and difficulties with that.
Republican Congresspeople make an extremely underwhelming case for presidential privacy. The Executive Branch is subordinate to the Legislative Branch, especially when the Chief Executive is suspected of having committed crimes. No, there's no "dangerous precedent" being set by insisting on transparency.
Sounds like the Green New Deal is off to a very promising start. The authors had to thread a lot of needles.
Fox News freaks out about the AOC plan to save the human race.
Wow! Candace Owens, a very, very deeply confused young woman says that Hitler would have been fine had he just stayed in Germany! Part of the problem is that she doesn't define nationalism versus globalism versus the Third Reich's nationalism versus what the marchers in Charlottesville were standing for.
Update: Candace
Owens says: "first, they ignore me and then they left
laughed at me now they're fighting me."
Heh! I can assure Ms.
Owens we're still very much in the laughing stage and are not going
to leave there anytime soon!
But the most gobsmacking, amazing
statement of all was that "I said the word nationalism is
wrongly attributed to Hitler because he was not a nationalist."
Erm, yes. Yes, Hitler most certainly
was a nationalist*! She was right
about that in her initial statement that she's trying to walk back
here.
*From Robert Paxton's The
Anatomy of Fascism: "the need for authority by natural chiefs
(always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable
of incarnating the group's historical destiny." This is about as far
from Globalism as one can possibly get.
Aww, but how do ya really feel about Hillary vs Donald?
remember how Hillary freaked the fuck out and threw a twitter shit-fit because the House was investigating her? of course you don't. she sat and calmly answered questions for eleven hours, because she hadn't done anything wrong and she's not an erratic whiny-ass bloated man-child
"The
House of Representatives Is Under New Management. They Aren't Wasting
Any Time."
Woo hoo! This explosion of committee investigations is exactly
what Americans voted for in the 2018 midterm election!
The President complains that the last president never received "presidential harassment." Actually, as the blogger documents, Obama got lots and lots of such investigations!
"House
Intelligence approves releasing Russia transcripts to Mueller"
These official transcripts are necessary for Mueller to undertake
prosecutions for things like lying under oath.
"Grand
Ayatollah Sistani Slaps down Trump: You may not use Iraq against its
Neighbors"
Grand Ayatollah Sistani is very highly respected in Iraq.
Thanks to Democrats being in control of the House, they held the first hearing on guns since 2011.
Good! House Democrats will re-open the Trump-Russia probe that House Republicans prematurely abandoned.
Speaker Pelosi gives a hilarious "Oh, he's so cute!" response to the claim of "ridiculous partisan investigations."
Still more SOTU reaction.
Interesting. No copy of the SOTU was distributed beforehand, making real-time fact-checking more difficult.
Huh! Wasn't
aware of this. President's big line of the speech was very similar
to that of Nixon's: “If
there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and
investigation. It just doesn't work that way.”
Yeah,
investigation and legislation, it's a bit difficult to have both at
the same time, but war has nothing to do with anything.
Very impressive! Stacey Abrams delivered the SOTU response and clearly wrote it all out beforehand, didn't change anything. Nice touch with having the people in the background. Lots of good ol' American sentiment.
Speaker Pelosi said it would take DAYS to fact-check all the lies in the SOTU. A factchecker: “Not much was new. We were done by 11:30."
Interesting criticism, reflective of the fact that the SOTU was written in a rushed manner. It was supposed to be about charging ransom for reopening the government. Lot of good critiques:
Good summary of the SOTU. Our local paper headlined: "Bipartisan call amid rancor," and there was a bit of softening, but lots of areas where the President let his partisan flag fly.
"Howard
Schultz Has A Sad About Being Called A Billionaire"
Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz insists that just because he's a
billionaire, that
doesn't mean he's beholden to "the two parties." Perhaps
not, but he is beholden to
conservative financial ideas that most
billionaires have in common. So yes, the "label" of billionaire is an
entirely accurate one.
"Welcoming
Girls, Boy Scouts Program Is Now Scouts BSA"
More evidence that the President's a wannabe dictator. Why, with a rubber-stamp Republican majority in the Senate, does he need "flexibility" for his appointments?!?!?!?!
I was just short of being 30 years old when the Berlin Wall
fell in
1989. During the time before then I was very much aware that for a
person to escape from Eastern Europe was a PR problem for that region
as it made it impossible to portray the people on that side of The Wall
as living happy, fulfilled lives. Saudi Arabia now
has that problem, compounded by the fact that the recently escaped
Saudi teenager, Rahaf Mohammed, is
transmitting pictures of her new, happy life in Canada.
Whoo wee! This is a "Baghdad Bob" level
of
obliviousness! What's the Press Secretary talking about "most
productive Pesident in modern history"?
Good! Democrats are making a fuss about climate change!
"U.S.
Announces Pullout Of Intermediate-Range-Nuclear-Forces Treaty With
Russia"
Granted, the problem started well before Trump got into office,
but was this really the best option?
"Trump
hands Putin gift in missile
treaty withdrawal"
Putin probably loves the idea.
“BREAKING:
Gov. Ralph Northam
yearbook page shows blackface and Klan photo."
Yes, it was many, many years ago, the mid-80s. But major problem
here, it was two decades after the Civil Rights Movement and he was
25, not just a stupid young fellow in his late teens.
Governor Northam will
try to stay in office. Democrats have zero
motivation to keep him there as he has a good Lieutenant Governor who
would make a perfectly decent replacement.
Northam's failure to
reveal his blackface/KKK photo many years ago shows a lack of good
judgement and foresight. Had he revealed it himself many years back,
there wouldn't be a problem today.
"AOC
to Howard Schultz: Billionaires who want to be president should run
for city council first"
Very true!
"Top
Ten Reasons Saudi Women are Running away from their Country"
This is one of the many reasons Saudi Arabia is finding it
difficult to modernize.
As a newsperson said the other day, this isn't just amazingly
unprecedented. We've
never had a president
who showed so little
interest in such an important presentation as the conclusions of
all of the intelligence heads. It's clear from reading
these other posts
that the President is getting all of his information on this second
and third-hand.
A look at the President vs our intelligence services. The UN sides with our intelligence services.
Long-time political journalist Ron Fournier has long been the punchline for "Both Sides," the idea that most political disagreements are unnecessary squabbles that can and should be settled by the "grown-ups in the room." Hey, whaddaya know? Fournier was a Republican all along!
Sure looks as though, as the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell just plain hates democracy. I sort of understand where he's coming from. When voting is light, that favors Republicans. When everybody and his brother votes, that favors Democrats. So the GOP is stuck with the bad optics of appearing to be against democracy.
Wow! The actor James Woods has some serious problems with misogyny! Also, this piece goes into the rumor that, before her political career started, Kamala Harris went out with a much older man. He probably did help her career a bit, but it was ultimately her own qualities that got her the first political position she ran for.
"Trump
administration’s claim that new sanctions won’t hurt ordinary
Venezuelans is ‘just a lie’"
Sanctions are a very blunt instrument. Of course regular
Venezuelans are getting hurt.
You know that someone's case is really weak when his examples are “Huey Long in Louisiana” and “the Black Panthers in Philadelphia.” Long was a prominent figure from the 1920s and 30s. The New Black Panthers (The old Black Panthers of the 1970s considered them to be pathetic jokes) were a really tiny group that was featured far more more on Fox News than anywhere else.
Speaker Pelosi is trusted more than the President is. Historically speaking, for a Speaker of the House to be more popular than a President is utterly unprecedented.
The last three leaders of the Soviet Union before Gorbachev were all really old men whose thinking was stuck back in the 1930s. Likewise, the US is now being run by really old men whose thinking is still stuck on fossil fuels, as though renewable energy didn't exist.
Congratulations to the new CIA Director Gina Haspel and frankly, all of the intelligence agency heads for telling it like it is and not confirming any of the President's talking points.
Fred Kaplan's a long-time military writer for Slate. I agree. Getting involved in Venezuela could be a really bad idea.
Hmm. Okay. Bad prediction on my part. SOTU is set for the 5th.
"Fox's
Jeanine Pirro Attacks Mueller For Supposedly Tipping Off CNN On Stone
Arrest"
Erm, the Rachel Maddow Show knew that something was up before the
raid occurred. It was pretty common knowledge that something was
about to happen. And we know from court filings that Mueller was
concerned that Roger Stone might try to destroy evidence if he was
given any sort of official warning.
Well yeah. Fighting for children is a great thing, but as people here point out, the First Lady's crusade suffers from serious problems of hypocrisy and double standards.
First off, the Center for Disease Control does
not agree with this
doctor's central assertion, that it's always unnecessary to have an
abortion during the third trimester.
"Remarkably there's a
group of female physicians and nurses who have come out very hard,
trying to threaten my career," Hamada explained. "I've
gotten some death threats, which I don't really take
seriously."
Sorry, but I find it very, very highly unlikely that any doctor, woman or man, would make a death threat to another doctor over an abstract disagreement. I just don't find that this guy is the slightest bit credible.
Concerning the confrontation between the Native American drummer and the high school kids, people say that we should watch the whole set of tapes. I know people who did and bloggers have commented on them. No, Pink is right. The rest of the tapes don't tell us anything that wasn't already obvious. The punks who jeered at the Native American veteran were also witnessed yelling at women earlier because they were involved with the anti-choice march.
The President is acting to protect natural gas pipelines at the very moment when we really should be building fewer of them. Natural gas is fine as long as it doesn't escape into the atmosphere prior to having been burned. Problem is, when it does escape, methane is an even worse greenhouse gas than carbon is. Enough escapes on an annual basis that we're really better off not using it at all. We need to replace all fossil fuels with wind, solar, etc.
Three cheers for Qatar! Very cool! "Qatar Convinces Israel, Hamas to let it Aid 94,000 Poor Gaza Families"
Hmm. I don't think what the President complains about is so much that Democrats are all loyal to their leader and Republicans were a bunch of "rats," but that Speaker Pelosi was able to convince her members that the President was playing a very weak hand and all they had to do was wait him out.
Very interesting. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was asked
to
brief the House Ways and Means Committee on the impact that the
shutdown was having and failed to show up. But it appears that the
shutdown was very
expensive.
Seems Speaker Pelosi knows more than she's allowed to tell us.
So the Fascism Watch is now set at five minutes of. That's actually GOOD news as the previous setting was at one.
An examination of the President's concession speech on the shutdown. Heh! “Smart walls.” Uh-huh!
If it wasn't obvious before, the appointment of Elliot Abrams makes it quite clear that US action in Venezuela have nothing to do with democracy or the will of the Venezuelan people.
Whether you think the 2016 campaign coverage was excessively focused on "Her Emails" or not, Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information and email protocols was absolutely sterling and highly professional compared to the Trump Administration's security clearance process. Some guy in the administration essentially just rubber-stamped at least 30 clearances for people who probably should not have gotten them. This is especially glaring for the President's son-in-law Jared Kushner. Fortunately, we now have a Democratic House and this will be looked into.
Talking about all of the stars of Fox News:
"Those prime-time personalities [on Fox News] for the most part have proven themselves over time to be more trouble than they’re worth."
So, why all the lies?
Seeing more of the "they are being arrested for lying, not for X crime" line. One, it's a start. Two, why lie about so many things if they weren't crimes? They lied because they knew the truth would get them in deep shit—and it probably still will.
A few weeks ago, the blog Daily Kos delivered a huge amount of roses for Speaker Pelosi. In this blog post, bloggers explain why. She gives off a flighty, confused appearance. Believe us, it's ALL appearance! Any appearance that she doesn't know what she's doing is all smoke and mirrors.
Nice, clear picture of Ultima Thule. That 20-mile long rock that's about six hours away at light speed.
Right-wingers furious.
Any appearance that Speaker Pelosi doesn't know what she's
doing is all appearance.
"FAA
Shuts LaGuardia Due To Trump Shutdown"
"Rally to
end the shutdown" took place in Philadelphia and many other cities.
Jared "Kushner's
security clearance was rejected by security specialists—until they were
overruled"
See, here's the problem. Immediately after World War II and
for a
substantial period afterwards, the US reigned supreme and was
unchallengeable. That's no longer the case. Russia
is warning the US not to try and overthrow the government of Venezuela.
Besides which, it's just as wrong for
the US to change the government of Venezuela by force as it was for
Russia to change ours by stealth and guile. It's now no longer the
case that the US can simply do as it pleases. Other countries "have
a dog in that fight" and will no longer watch helplessly as the US does
what it wishes.
Federal workers stage
a silent vigil Senate office building.
The President owns the shutdown says Fox
Business News.
Commerce Secretary shrugs
shoulders and wonders why federal workers can't just get a bank
loan.
"Colorado
Senator Is Tired Of Your Crap"
Senator who doesn't usually make speeches goes off on Republican Party.
Republican Senator blames Senate Majority Leader McConnell for
continued shutdown.
"Trump:
Pelosi Cancelling State Of The Union Is 'A Great Blotch' On The
Country"
The
President suggests that Pelosi cancelled the SOTU because she "doesn’t
want to hear the truth." But the SOTU can be delivered from anywhere. It can be delivered in
writing, from the Sean Hannity Show, the Rose Garden, etc.
A short while ago, a group of three people, Senate Majority Leader Mitchell, VP Pence and Jared Kushner, tried to come up with a solution to the shutdown. Democrats rejected their ideas out of hand. Now, the Trump Administration is trying to do in foreign policy what it did in domestic policy, to have a conference where only friendly participants are invited. It's working about as well as the previous proposed all-Republican working group did.
Lara Trump (Second son Eric's wife) says: "the president is
trying every single day to come up with a good solution here"
Problem is, the "solution" the President has come up
with is supported by only about four out of 10 voters. 60% of us
consider a wall to be a really stupid waste of money. And like a
pirate who has taken hostages, he's bypassing democratic procedures.
Like
Ann Coulter, who also feels hey, going without a paycheck or
two is a little bit of an inconvenience, Lara is a person who's
been
wealthy for, if not her entire life, then at least for several
decades and has absolutely no conception of what it's like for people
of modest income to miss a paycheck.
Were voters impressed with Lara Trump's speech? Hah! Not
in the slightest.
Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, puts
herself on the
correct side of the issue by visiting the place where furloughed
federal workers are being fed. No one on the Republican side showed
anywhere near as much common sense. Wher
was Mitch? Trying to pull a bait-and-switch.
The "Both Sides" framing of the shutdown is very helpful to the hostage-taking President. No one else is helped by it. This is one of those things that appears to be neutral, but only the side that's plainly in the wrong is helped by it.
An accounting of all of the unarned protesters from Gaza killed by Israel sniper fire since March.
The blogger watches all the video on the confrontation involving Native American activist and elder Nathan Phillips and a crowd of high school students from Covington, Kentucky. He concludes that the detailed picture drawn from all of the videos is a bit different from the picture drawn by the initial viral video, but not by all that much. Mostly, the whole incident shows a complete failure of chaperoning.
The behavior of the students before the confrontation shows
them to be just
a vicious set of thugs.
Sometimes, when I see someone in the media, I wonder a bit as to their ethnicity. I never worry too much about it. The "cosplay socialist" here gets all deep and serious about Senator Kamala Harris, who has just declared she's running for President. Is she an African-American? Ehh, close enough. I think when people meet her they assume she's black, so I just don't see much of a point in getting all specific about exactly what her ancestry is.
Sorry, I know that Representative Tulsi Gabbard gets lots of love from fellow progressives, but the blogger is right. Gabbard is a Joe Lieberman-style Fox News Democrat with a bad case of "Both-sides-ism."
"Trump,
Pence Honor MLK Day With Two-Minute Visit To Memorial"
Good to see this. Seems they're beginning to understand the
political world consists of more than just Republicans.
Situation for furloughed federal workers on 30th
day of shutdown. Not good. Not good at all.
Fox News person Tomi Lahren makes
a really stupid comment
about how "useless" marches and rallies are. Twitter user responds "I
would really like to know how you, a woman, think you got the right to
work and vote."
My own experience was that the marches against the Iraq War obviously
didn't prevent the war,
but by making it clear that the war didn't have all that much support,
Bush
never tried to start up a draft. That crippled the ability of the US to
expand the war and ultimately meant that US had to pull
out.