All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[BeastieRunner]

That one e-mail... we already have heard numerous Kushner corruption stories. I mean, his father went to jail for political corruption in Jersey. But the Kushner family was offering Chinese nationals immigration VISAs for cash. Kushner reportedly leaked classified intel to Saudi Arabia to lead to the Crown Prince rounding up all his political enemies on trumped-up charges. Sure, one e-mail... but Kushner has just been sloppy and brazen about this whole misadventure.

As was Manafort. As was Don Junior.

Like, Stupid Watergate and all that... but these people left a trail of bread crumbs that you can see from space.

This isn't even the trial for the criminal charges and THIS piece of evidence, along with Manafort's translator being GRU, among numerous others, trading favors to get better loans, promising positions in the campaign for loans, ... I mean come on.

The criminal trial is going to be epic.

[BeastieRunner]

Final PM Manafort Update:

Judge returned to the courtroom after a short recess with his new proposed jury instructions related to his comments and questions during the trial.

Both sides reviewed the new language provided to them by the court officer before both agreeing with the judge’s revisions.

The new language was not shown to the audience nor read aloud.

Team Mueller also told the judge that they planned to request the jury be retained after the verdict in the event that they convict Manafort to deal with issues relating to forfeiture of his assets.

Defense said both sides were working together to address the forfeiture matter.

Dismissed till closing arguments tomorrow at 9:30AM.

[Malvolio]

I think you just figured out why Trump hired Giuliani.

LOL! This one made my day. Thanks, WBE.

.

[Kusanagi]

Strong, strong, defense of Trump from Sarah Sanders this afternoon.

Can't Guarantee there is no a tape of Trump using the N word

Lets be honest even if there's a clear HD video of him going on a ten minute tirade of N bombs, it will be dismissed by the right. Worse Trump can probably give the same rant at his next rally and be cheered. We all know what he is except those in deep denial.

[KOSLOX]

Strong, strong, defense of Trump from Sarah Sanders this afternoon.

Can't Guarantee there is no a tape of Trump using the N word

Lets be honest even if there's a clear HD video of him going on a ten minute tirade of N bombs, it will be dismissed by the right. Worse Trump can probably give the same rant at his next rally and be cheered. We all know what he is except those in deep denial.

Paris Dennard was on TV caping for him minutes ago.

[InformationGeek]

Just some election news from around the country. Jim Sensenbrenner wins Republican nomination for U.S. House in Wisconsin's 5th congressional district... again. I'm sure WBE will be happy to know he'll continue profiling him a bit longer.

Same extends to Tom Emmer of Minnesota's 6th congressional district, Scott Walker sticking on as the GOP nominee for Wisconsin's Governor, Sean Duffy for Wisconsin's 7th District (my neck of the woods), Glenn Grothman for the 6th district of Wisconsin, Jason Lewis for Minnesota's 2nd, and so on.


Also, Kris Kobach has sealed the GOP nomination for Kansas Governorship. Oh boy...

[Tazirai]

Justice Democrats tonight and Progressive wins are 3/3 tonight.
Not bad for an organization that's only been around for a little over a year.

[aja_christopher]

"He can’t talk about black people without mentioning unemployment, poverty and the ghetto. That stereotypical thinking is racist. Not sure how many black friends you have, but all of my black family and friends are gainfully employed and live in the suburbs. They still have a list of other issues that are specific to them that this administration seems to want to ignore."

[Tendrin]

Disgusting.

CINCINNATI, Ohio – A court fight last week over homeless camps in and around this city’s downtown raised a question that could take years to answer.

Can a community make it illegal to be homeless?

The debate arose in Cincinnati, as it has this year in cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and Nashville, after dozens of homeless people set up camp near the heart of the city. It started here on Third Street, just blocks from office buildings, the Bengals’ stadium and a major freeway.

Yikes.

fter the camp grew to include tents, mattresses and bins filled with personal belongings, a judge declared homeless camps a public nuisance and banned them in the affected part of downtown. When people from the camp moved to just beyond the boundaries set by the judge, he expanded the ban to include most of the city.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Black said the second order “effectively made being homeless in most of Cincinnati illegal.”
And he said that was OK, as long as there was enough room in local shelters for homeless people living on the streets.

Even bigger yikes.

This is disgusting.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/is...cid=spartanntp

[Iron Maiden]

Thanks for posting that interview, aja_christopher. I had forgotten about this former Trump executive Jack O'Donnell. Like Trump's ghost writer Tony Schwartz for the Art of the Deal, he knew and worked with Trump before he started whipping out the Non Disclosure Agreements that is his method of dealing with people since around the time of the divorce from Ivana. I believe that to this day hers is still in force. O'Donnell ran the Atlantic City casino and hotel operations for three years and then he was the president and chief operating officer of the business. He also mentions in this piece that there were 3 other executives in the Trump Organization at the time who were friends of his. They died in a helicopter accident around the time that O'Donnell left the organization. That is significant because it was after O'Donnell leaving and the deaths of these executives that what was formerly a successful operation in Atlantic City ended up going bankrupt when Trump started took over the operation.

O'Donnell lives in Arizona now but he ran Trump's Atlantic City operations for a while. Here is a key passage from an interview from the Arizona Star in August 2016

Back then, Donald Trump’s ego was as big as it is today. He was short-tempered, he was judgmental without facts, he judged people based on their clothes or the color of their skin. His attention span was so small it was almost impossible to have a strategic conversation with him about the business. He would say something one minute and change his mind the next. He would demand something be done one way, only to criticize that directive later, never taking blame. He never said he was sorry for anything. He was crude and sexist toward women, he was a philandering fool publicly. He would humiliate his wife without a second thought.

Donald Trump was humorless, cold and selfish. He would hurt the little guy if he could see even the slightest gain for himself. He refused to pay his bills, he sued anyone who got in his way. He threatened people like myself for telling the truth.
I am horrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency. I know first-hand that he lacks the intelligence, nor does he have the attention span to process the complexities of running our great country.

Pretty much the Trump we know today, isn't it. O'Donnells memories of working with Trump track pretty much with writer Tony Schwartz has said....the short attention span, short temper, blaming others and an unwillingness to admit when he is wrong. We also see how the Trump Organization had been successful in those days because Trump didn't control things directly and left it to others who were lucky for him far more competent. It is after O'Donnell left that Trump begins his run of 6 bankruptcies.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Trump Is Wreaking Havoc On Republican Governor Primaries

In Minnesota and Kansas, the victory of Trump-style candidates makes GOP wins less likely. The turmoil figures to be, well, BIGLY!

**********

Chris Cuomo Nails Why Trump Supporters Defend Everything He Does

CNN anchor warns Trump’s defenders: “He’s playing you.” Save your breath, Chris, the Trumpanzees won't listen.

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Sarah Huckabee Sanders: ‘I Can’t Guarantee’ Trump Never Said Racial Slur

“I haven’t been in every single room,” the White House press secretary said when asked if she’d heard Trump “utter the ‘N-word.’” Which leads to this....

Anderson Cooper Uses Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Own Words Against Her After N-Word Dodge

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Ilhan Omar Wins Democratic Primary For Congress In Minnesota

If she wins in November as expected, she’ll become one of America’s first Muslim congresswomen. That's sure to drive conservatives and right wingers batshit insane.

**********

Roger Stone Posted Swastika-Laden Image Of ‘Space Force’ Featuring Himself, Trump

Trump’s former campaign adviser shared the now-deleted image satirizing the administration’s newly created U.S. military “Space Force.” Lord have mercy. The idiocy! It BUUUUUURRRRNS!

[worstblogever]

Three years ago, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" ran a profile of Tom Tancredo, a man who is so xenophobic in his anti-immigrant fervor that he was banned from the White House by the Bush Administration, has been tied to various white nationalist groups to deliver speeches to them, and has advocated a nuclear strike on Mecca as a tangible strategy for stopping Islamic terrorism. Tancredo has been mostly irrelevant of late, but he did make the news back during the earlier part of the 2016 presidential primary to suggest that even Donald Trump should tone down his divisive rhetoric towards illegal immigrants (which really says something about how out of control Trump is).

It was two years ago that we published our original "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profile off Craig James, the former Southern Methodist University running back and and ESPN college football broadcaster who ran for U.S. Senate in Texas in 2012. The only real speech James had that found its way into the public eye prior to his entry into the race featured him denying the existence of climate change, and promising to do everything he could to make sure that not a single dollar went to the research into it, or what could be done to prevent it. At the GOP Primary debate, James asserted that being gay was a choice, and was overall such a spectacularly terrible campaigner that he only got 4% of the vote, including not even being able to get students of SMU to vote for him. ESPN chose not to have James back in the booth for his comments on homosexuality, and he tried unsuccessfully to sue the network for discrimination of his Christian beliefs. He was last seen playing up his supposed Christian victimhood to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council on one of his programs, but it unlikely to ever be elected to political office.



In both 2016, as well as 2017, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” presented our original profile of the U.S. House Representative for Florida’s 11th Congressional District, Daniel Webster, who first got swept into office in the 2010 Tea Party Wave after having previously served as the Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and Florida Senate Majority Leader during a 28 year career as a Florida state legislator (and not as an extra working in the background of a morgue in a horror movie, like you’d expect). Webster is, at the moment, the preferred voice of Republican leadership of the recalcitrant House Freedom Caucus, and has finished second in the past three votes for Speaker of the House as a result.

Now, given how much of a group of extremists the House Freedom Caucus is, you can bet it’s more than Daniel Webster’s resume that impresses them. His record on issues show’s he’s clearly of like mind. Case in point… how “pro-life” is Daniel Webster? Well, while we can’t be sure of if he supports exceptions for rape and incest in his anti-abortion stance, because he refuses to answer the question when asked, we do know he’s voted for virtually every pro-life measure that’s ever crossed his path, including even when Jeb Bush was working overtime in Florida to make sure a feeding tube stayed inside of the long-since brain dead Terry Schiavo, and forcing her to keep on living against her wishes… the central figure in the Florida state legislature trying to write creative laws to drag out that situation even longer was Daniel Webster, while he was in the Florida State Senate.

And that’s hardly the only conservative social position Daniel Webster had. There was also his 1990 sponsorship of a bill to legalize covenant marriage. The draconian measure would have only allowed couples to divorce if only one partner cheated on the other (if both were unfaithful, they must remain married), and did not even offer exceptions for situations involving domestic abuse.

Now, you might wonder where these extreme conservative views Webster’s got are coming from… there is a quite plain answer. Daniel Webster has close ties to Bill Gothard and Gothard’s ministry, the Institute of Basic Life Principles, repeatedly collaborating with the disgraced church leader who was revealed to have covered up scores of abuse claims from his flock, and has a disturbing habit of counseling female rape and sexual abuse victims to make them feel as though they’re to blame for what their attackers have done to them in an overall patriarchal agenda where women must submit to their husbands. One of the first legislative acts in Florida that Webster pushed for back in 1985 was to legalize homeschooling (which Gothard and his flock are big proponents of).The amount of degrees of separation between Daniel Webster and the disgraced Duggar family are also shockingly few, but is Rep. Webster a total fanatic, though? Well, according to some, he’s spoken before Bill Gothard’s flock in a way that seems to indicate he views the gerrymandering of his district as “God being on his side and opposing his opponents”. And that’s pretty nuts. As is the rest of his voting record:

• February 16th, 2017: Webster votes for HJR 69, to make it legal for hunters on wildlife reserves to kill several species of hibernating bears or wolves while they’re sleeping.
• March 16th, 2017: Daniel Webster votes for HR 1181, which would allow veterans deemed mentally incompetent to continue to own firearms, and not have them taken away without a judge's written order. We feel safer already.
• March 28th, 2017: Rep. Webster votes for SJ Res 34, which allowed internet providers to sell the data information of their customers' internet usage to businesses. Well, so much for privacy.
• May 4th, 2017: Webster votes for the House GOP's healthcare plan, that would kick roughly 24 million people off their health insurance plans, allow up to 28,000 more people to die a year, give $50,000 in tax breaks to millionaires, and would eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions which would include such medical conditions as pregnancy (current or past), postpartum depression, or prior sexual assault. Oh, and a provision in the bill would make sure that Webster would be allowed to keep his healthcare plan as it exists under the ACA, which would be repealed for the rest of the country. He and his Republican compatriots threw themselves a beer bash to celebrate taking away healthcare from millions and then gloated about it with Donald Trump at a White House press conference, as well.
• June 8th, 2017: Daniel Webster votes for HR 10, the GOP’s attempt to repeal Dodd-Frank financial reform, because what the country really needs is to allow the big banks to make the same mistakes that imploded the economy only a decade earlier.
• October 3rd, 2017: Webster votes for HR 36, the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, that would try to create an unconstitutional ban abortion at 20 weeks (even though medical science tells us fetuses do not have the capability to feel pain until 29 weeks).
• December 19th, 2017: Daniel Webster votes for HR 1, the GOP’s $1.7 trillion tax cut to benefit the wealthiest Americans and corporations permanently that coincidentally also removes the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate and kicks 13 million people off their health insurance.
• February 18th, 2018: Webster and his fellow Republicans decide that poor big businesses are suffering too much at the hands of the Americans with Disabilities Act too much, and vote for HR 620, which would strip most of the civil rights protections guaranteed by it.

Daniel Webster got to run unopposed in the GOP Primary this fall, and goes on to face Democrat Dana Cottrell in the general election this fall. Cottrell’s a teacher and a graduate of the University of South Florida. Cottrell’s got a big partisan disadvantage in Florida’s 11th, sitting at a +15 Republican. Webster’s evangelical support base also prop him up with donations, so conditions will have to be perfect for her to, if you’ll pardon the pun, teach him a lesson.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Whatever happened to the Freedom Caucus and the Tea Party? You don't hear much from either these days, not that I'm complaining since they were a boil on the ass of the country. Were they marginalized or just plain eliminated when the Republican Party became the Trump Party?

[catbellysqueezer]

Disgusting.



Yikes.



Even bigger yikes.

This is disgusting.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/is...cid=spartanntp

Assumed office
May 13, 2010
Appointed by
Barack Obama

[worstblogever]

Whatever happened to the Freedom Caucus and the Tea Party? You don't hear much from either these days, not that I'm complaining since they were a boil on the ass of the country. Were they marginalized or just plain eliminated when the Republican Party became the Trump Party?

Freedom Caucus exist to wash Trump's jock, and make Paul Ryan unable to do anything in Congress.

The Tea Party movement is dead. The original acronym was "Taxed Enough Already", and the Koch Bros. funded it to get control of Congress and have them rewrite the tax code to try to make them trillionaires, instead of just multi-billionaires. The accomplished their main goal and are cutting bait. Otherwise, the Tea Party has simply become the Party of Trump, and has proven itself incapable of governing in any way other than helping the rich get richer. Many of the 2010 wave of the GOP are about to crash and burn in the next 2-3 elections, tops.