All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Gray Lensman]

Which is ironic considering that Trump often forgets his own kids most of the time. And I'm not talking about Barron, who's not old enough to be part of the political discourse but in any other time period would be of that age where gossip magazines would eagerly await his 16th birthday.

In news that's likely forgotten about by most, the administration finalized their last phase of their plan to enforce employment for non-disabled adults, effectively kicking off close to 700K Americans. However, that's not enough for them, as there's plans to eliminate another 3 million off of programs nationwide, with the argument being "If they can work, they gotta work if they wanna eat". The problem is; for a good portion of those people, it's not like they want to be on food stamps in the first place, as it's something that is supplemental to their survival, not just the only thing they live off of. It doesn't help that the USDA has been in favor of big corporations and against common sense since Sonny Perdue (who I hope WBE has done articles on) took over.

And the working stiff thought they were treated poorly before...just wait until employers know they have someone who is basically a captive over supplemental income.

[Tendrin]

And the working stiff thought they were treated poorly before...just wait until employers know they have someone who is basically a captive over supplemental income.

It is important to note that this is another form of voter suppression. The poorer you are, the less you vote. They know this. There are scientific studies on it. By inflicting maximum cruelty on the already impoverished, they hope to further entrench their own power by shaving off marginal voters who might otherwise vote democratic.

[Malvolio]

What do you think Republicans will do in states with Democratic governors?

They could go county by county and district by district. Having a Republican governor makes it easier, but it's not impossible even with a Democratic governor.

[Tendrin]

They could go county by county and district by district. Having a Republican governor makes it easier, but it's not impossible even with a Democratic governor.

We've already seen them strip authority from Democratic governors and use parliamentary shenanigans like they do in North Carolina. A democratic governor is not alone enough to protect the right to vote from GOP efforts to disenfranchise voters.

[worstblogever]

Republicans want us to be very concerned about Hunter Biden while pretending the Trump kids don't exist. Whether or not there was any wrongdoing with regards to Hunter (there wasn't, of course) does not alter the facts over which Trump is being impeached. The willingness of some to demand we take seriously every bad faith argument that the GOP can muster up remains one of its strongest assets
.

They also seem want us to pretend that the proper way to investigate Hunter Biden is "send Rudy Giuliani and two Russian nationals, none of whom have national security clearance".

And then they're surprised when we reject these ideas for the gaslighting bulls*** that they are, and that they might just be parroting because they're that easy for the heads of the party to manipulate.

[worstblogever]

On this date in 2014, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" ran a profile of Charles Bishop, a former Alabama State Senator who lost his damned mind in the middle of the state senate and straight up went Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out on State Senator Lowell Barron, only regretting later that he didn’t take the fight outside and finish it. Bishop also regularly spoke in front of the white nationalist organization the Council of Conservative Citizens and was proud to oppose Alabama’s resolution to apologize to African Americans for slavery because “atonement equals reparations”. Bishop lost way back in the 2010 GOP Primary and hasn’t resurfaced in politics.


In 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted profiles of Vice President Mike Pence, who for a while, was considered to be an early establishment candidate for president that the Republican Party thought they would be able to rally behind in the 2016 elections. He was a sitting six-term Congressman from 2001 through 2012, establishing conservative bona fides without any scandals or major gaffes while winning elections comfortably. He actually won a 2010 Straw Poll at the Value Voters Summit where they thought he was their best choice to run against Barack Obama in 2012, but Pence opted instead to run for re-election as Governor of Indiana, and bide his time for what was to be a run in 2016. Then Gov. Pence, the insane true believer in the American culture wars that he is, went and signed Indiana's "religious freedom" law to allow for the legal discrimination of the LGBTQ community, then denied that the point of the bill was allowing discrimination (and making many send him the literal definition of "discrimination" since he seemed unable to understand it) and claiming he was incapable of discrimination because he once participated in an anniversary walk in Selma, Alabama. That only made critics note that during his time in the U.S. House, he actually campaigned on an agenda to "oppose any effort to recognize homosexual's as a 'discreet and insular minority' entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws similar to those extended to women and ethnic minorities," or that he called for “an audit to ensure that federal dollars were no longer being given to organizations that celebrate and encourage the types of behaviors that facilitate the spreading of the HIV virus" and instead, "Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior". If you’re unclear as to what that means, it’s that Pence wanted money redirected towards gay conversion therapy, which doesn’t actually work, and is considered a human rights violation. But that’s not all. Pence responded to the Matthew Shepherd Hate Crimes Act by making the ludicrous claim that it would allow intimidation towards or even charges to be filed against pastors who expressed a Biblical worldview critical to homosexuality, and also tried arguing that the 2010 repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would, in his words, “weaken unit cohesion” of our military, and once voted for a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as only between one man and one woman.

Factor in the time Pence is awful enough to women that he voted against all equal pay legislation including the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, railed against the Disney cartoon Mulan for implying that women might be able to honorably serve in the military, and actually had an Indiana woman arrested for having a miscarriage because his obsession with cracking down on reproductive rights is that over-the-top insane. We're talking that he voted for for the Terry Schiavo Incapacitated Persons Protection Bill extreme, here. We're saying that he was a sponsor of the legislation that tried to defund Planned Parenthood back in 2011, and his "evidence" of wrongdoing was a DIFFERENT doctored fraud of a video produced by friends of Breitbart News hacks like James O'Keefe.

Pence also compared the Supreme Court upholding the Affordable Care Act to 9/11, and in early 2015 decided state taxpayer dollars should be allocated towards “JustIN’, a state-run news service with two employees being paid $100,000 salaries to present a point of view where Mike Pence could do no wrong (cancelled after taxpayers called him out on wasting their money on him lying to them). Pence denied a link between smoking an cancer as late as 2001 (he was accepting money from the big tobacco lobby, of course), and denies climate change is a thing to this day.

Mike Pence is so enthralling that after Donald Trump decided that Mike Pence should be his running mate on the 2016 GOP ticket as his vice president, he apparently tried reneging on the offer at the last minute. And then Trump botched the announcement and roll out to get the GOP hyped. And then the campaign logo for the new ticket was openly mocked because THIS is what Trump's idea men came up with:


Pence spent most of the VP debate pretending Donald Trump didn't actually say all of the wildly deranged things he says out loud, and on social media, which was far better than the forgettable speech he gave at the RNC (he was clearly overshadowed by Ted Cruz telling people to "vote their conscience"). Maybe Pence's speech would have been better if he wasn't distracted by the inclusion of AIDS Activists in the proceedings.

And what a great campaigner Pence wasn't. When he couldn't help look like he was mildly aroused by the thought of, as he put it,
sending Roe v. Wade to the "ash heap of history". Hell, he even managed to take on some of Donald Trump's worst habits... like falling all over himself to not say disparaging things about white supremacist David Duke, or praising Vladimir Putin. Heck, trying to defend Donald Trump isn't easy, like say when you have to spin how he isn't a fascist for talking about jailing his opponent during a presidential debate, but Pence was kept on his toes by girls as young as eleven years old trying to make excuses for Trump around the time the tape of him talking about "grabbing women by the p***y" hit.

[worstblogever]

And, in spite of Donald Trump being Trump, and Mike Pence being the coalesced nightmares of the LGBTQ community and women everywhere, they defied all the odds, and all the polling, and inexplicably won office. And then, suddenly, everyone finally got properly scared that with a Republican president, Republican House, and Republican Senate, that things like gay marriage, or reproductive rights would be fair game. Oh, and then they remembered that Mike Pence also has talked about wrecking Social Security, too. Or that he casually can talk about resuming a torture program at Guantanamo Bay Prison.

So maybe that's why we don't feel bad for Mike Pence when people donate to Planned Parenthood in his name (and still are), or the fact hat he’s so afraid of women he won’t have dinner alone with one unless his wife is there (who he calls “Mother”), or when he showed up at a performance of Hamilton, and acts surprised when the audience boos him, or that he gets a lecture from a cast of minorities, gays, and even an HIV Positive lead actor to remind him that he's spent his whole career making legislative and executive decisions to slight anyone who wasn't a straight rich white male.

Mike Pence has continued to be a witless turd throughout the Trump administration, trying to simply not be as corrupt as Trump and hope he inherits the presidency… but even at that, he hasn’t kept his nose clean. Where do we even begin with Pence? Let’s just hit the big points… by the end of the first month of the Trump administration, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was fired, after several FBI investigations into the fact that he had been illegally operating was a foreign agent of other countries came to light. The official story about Flynn’s firing kept changing rapidly, including that Acting Attorney General Sally Yates got fired after hearing Mike Pence go on Fox News and give a story that seemed to indicate he wasn’t aware of Michael Flynn’s activities. Also, he assured the public that no one in the Trump campaign was talking to Russians (he was). Well, as of December 1st, 2017, we know Mike Pence was just deliberately lying, as he is prone to doing, and he knew about Michael Flynn talking to Russians under the radar. In fact, per Flynn’s testimony to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Pence and Jared Kushner directed Gen. Flynn to do that specifically.

This would be similar to how back in October of 2016, Mike Pence went over to Fox News for an interview/tongue bath and scoffed at the idea that the Trump campaign had any communication with anyone from Wikileaks. Except, y’know, we now know that for almost the entire campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. was talking to Wikileaks, and was even getting advice on which of their stories the Trump campaign should share more on social media. And Roger Stone was talking to Wikileaks, which he lied to Congress about.

This isn’t to say that all Mike Pence did was alternate between lying and hiding since becoming vice-president. He still surfaces to waste taxpayer dollars to do things like try to defeat Kim Jong Un’s regime by impotently staring angrily at the Korean DMZ, to lick Donald Trump’s boots in televised Cabinet meetings, or the time he attended a Colts game with the intention of angrily kneeling if anyone protested by kneeling during the national anthem at taxpayer expense.

In the past few months, he’s been called out for helping funnel money towards Donald Trump’s businesses by manipulating his travel itinerary to stay at Trump resorts and bill American taxpayers for a small fortune. He's also using his office to again direct money towards Christian groups, similarly to what he did with groups that supported gay conversion therapy while in Congress.

In 2018, Pence started to ape Trump’s bigoted rhetoric more, as he praised disgraced former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio,defended the Trump White House for banning CNN reporters from covering events (because what’s the big deal about the First Amendment, right?), cited false statistics about how people from the Middle East were sneaking across the U.S./Mexico border with refugees from Central America, or appeared with a fake rabbi who claims Jews who don’t accept Jesus go to hell at an event to honor Jews slain by a Neo-Nazi in Pittsburgh.

He has been rewarded for his loyalty by Trump by being thrown under the bus, completely, and as Trump’s corruption began to be laid bare in his dealings with Ukraine, and the impeachment inquiry began… Trump responded on September 25th, 2019, by telling the media that they should also ask Mike Pence about the times that he has demanded quid pro quos. Pence did push back on that, but hardly enough to convince us that there might not be some truth to it… and then EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified, and Mike Pence is going to be busy denying, denying, denying all the facts for the foreseeable future (which he is practiced in doing, but still).

The Senate GOP doesn’t likely have even the backbone to convict Donald Trump for his obvious crimes… so we don’t know if we’ll ever have to live in a world with a President Pence. We don’t know which situation is more abominable.
 

[TheManInBlack]

Trump is trying to cover his crimes up with conspiracy theories about Ukraine that started with the Kremlin. Which I'll say it again... American intelligence agencies have confirmed their origins, and they have proven the claims patently false.

So, I read the section in that link about Burisma several times, and I can't see how that information in any way debunks the claim. If anything it lends significant credence to it... It makes it clear that:

- Hunter Biden was given a lucrative job with a corrupt company in a country he knew nothing about, doing a job he knew nothing about, but they were paying him $50,000 per month to do a job he's never been able to properly detail... This even raised eyebrows in the Obama administration, as the article correctly notes.

- The company was being investigated by Viktor Shokin (Ukraine’s former prosecutor general) who vowed to keep investigating Burisma.

- Joe Biden (then vice president) strong-armed Ukraine by withholding money from them until Viktor Shokin (the man in charge of investigating Burisma) was fired. (Biden then bragged about it on video with a surprisingly Trump-like level of arrogance, unequivocally stating he withheld money in a quid pro quo until Mr. Shokin was fired.)

- The prosecutor who replaced Shokin swiftly cleared Burisma of wrongdoing and dropped the investigation.

If that doesn't sound fishy as hell to you, I know a few Nigerian princes that need your bank account information...

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Sailor At Pearl Harbor Shipyard Fatally Shoots 2, Injures 1 Before Killing Himself

The active-duty Navy sailor shot three Defense Department civilian workers, according to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, which was on lockdown for hours.

**********

Democrats Hint They’re Mulling Impeaching Trump For More Than Just Ukraine

Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler drew a link between the current hearings and the Mueller report. Good to know!

**********

Trump’s Actions ‘Worse Than Misconduct Of Any Prior President,’ Law Prof Testifies

“If Congress fails to impeach here, then the impeachment process has lost all meaning,” UNC law professor Michael Gerhardt told Congress. Even worse than Bill Clinton's infamous Oval Office get together with Monica Lewinsky? GASP! Say it ain't so!

**********

Hillary Clinton Hits Donald Trump Devotee Lindsey Graham With ‘Brain Snatch’ Dig

“I don’t know what’s happened to Lindsey Graham,” the former secretary of state told radio show host Howard Stern. Oh, I know, Hill, Trump has something embarrassing on Grouchy Graham.

**********

The Latest Biden Campaign Ad Is A Supercut Of World Leaders Laughing At Trump

A squad of world leaders was caught on a hot-mic video mocking the president at the NATO meeting in London this week. Two words----SICK BURN!

[numberthirty]

Worth noting, even if it was to be expected...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/h...nsparency.html

Hospitals Sue Trump to Keep Negotiated Prices Secret

[Tendrin]

We've already seen them strip authority from Democratic governors and use parliamentary shenanigans like they do in North Carolina. A democratic governor is not alone enough to protect the right to vote from GOP efforts to disenfranchise voters.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/30/u...-machines.html

And tmy above post isn't even getting into the nightmare that is our 'voting' machines.

[Tendrin]

So, I read the section in that link about Burisma several times, and I can't see how that information in any way debunks the claim. If anything it lends significant credence to it... It makes it clear that:

- Hunter Biden was given a lucrative job with a corrupt company in a country he knew nothing about, doing a job he knew nothing about, but they were paying him $50,000 per month to do a job he's never been able to properly detail... This even raised eyebrows in the Obama administration, as the article correctly notes.

- The company was being investigated by Viktor Shokin (Ukraine’s former prosecutor general) who vowed to keep investigating Burisma.

- Joe Biden (then vice president) strong-armed Ukraine by withholding money from them until Viktor Shokin (the man in charge of investigating Burisma) was fired. (Biden then bragged about it on video with a surprisingly Trump-like level of arrogance, unequivocally stating he withheld money in a quid pro quo until Mr. Shokin was fired.)

- The prosecutor who replaced Shokin swiftly cleared Burisma of wrongdoing and dropped the investigation.

If that doesn't sound fishy as hell to you, I know a few Nigerian princes that need your bank account information...

You're missing a whole lot, especially about Biden's supposed 'strong-arming'. I bet you also were very concerned with 'her emails'.

[Tami]

The Traitors Among Us

America once used the words “treason” and “traitors” only in cases of actual betrayal of our nation’s most vital secrets or interests. They were profound words, deep with meaning, grim in import, carrying with them the knowledge that the penalty for treason was death.

Be honest: The words “traitor” and “treason” don’t have the sting they once had; they’ve been devalued from mis- and over-use by this president. For Donald Trump, any opposition, either personal, ideological, or political is treason. Anyone who stands in his path betrays the Great Leader. Anyone who fails to take the knee is a traitor.

Like hearing an insult too many times drains it of its potency, Trump has diluted the power of that approbation. He has labeled loyal, dedicated Americans who served this country in the military and law enforcement as traitors, so much so that we could almost give in to the temptation to excuse it as “Trump being Trump” and let it slide like any of the other insults he vomits forth on the daily.

Traitors from Benedict Arnold to Klaus Fuchs to Aldrich Ames to Robert Hanssen sold out this country for a host of reasons, all explicable and unforgivable. The intelligence community even has a handy acronym for the motivations of traitors, and one that applies readily to known cases. The acronym is MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Pick a traitor and one of those reasons will underpin their betrayal.

Add a new one to the acronym. Call it, MICE-T, with the “T” naturally standing for Trump.

Their treason isn’t executed in the old ways of secret meetings, furtive brush passes, or encrypted messages. No, the traitors of today show us their cards on cable TV, laughing and giggling over their betrayal of the oath they swore, and the security of this country, all for the political service of Donald Trump.

[Tami]

Trump Toady William Barr Is Still Trying to Undermine the Russia Investigation

Last March, after Robert Mueller submitted the results of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and obstruction of justice by Donald Trump and his campaign, but before the world got to see it, Attorney General William Barr sent a summary of the findings to Congress. In it, Barr wrote that the Mueller probe did not come to a conclusion about whether the president had obstructed justice, leading the A.G. to decide on his own not to charge him. Trump, naturally, was thrilled by this assessment, but others, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were not content to take Barr’s word for it, saying, effectively, that Barr was a bootlicking hack who could not be trusted, in light of the fact that the guy literally got the job by sending an unsolicited 19-page memo to the Justice Department in which he called the special counsel’s inquiry “fatally misconceived,” described Mueller’s actions as “grossly irresponsible,” and insisted “Mueller should not be permitted to demand that the president submit to interrogation about alleged obstruction.”

Pelosi, of course, turned out to be right: Mueller’s report, in fact, found numerous instances of obstruction by Trump that, were Mueller’s hands not tied by Justice Department guidelines that say you can’t indict the president, could have resulted in Trump being charged with a crime, a far cry from Barr’s rosy interpretation of the findings. That didn’t stop Barr from continuing to undermine the almost two-year-long investigation by his good friend, likening it to the birther movement, claiming that, actually, it’s “not a crime” for the president to demand that staffers lie to investigators, and coordinating with the White House to make Trump look good. And now it appears that Barr is still trying to discredit the entire Russia investigation, even if it means going against the word of his own agency, according to the Washington Post:

[worstblogever]

So, I read the section in that link about Burisma several times, and I can't see how that information in any way debunks the claim.

Then for whatever reason, you're ignoring the American intelligence community's conclusion, and accepting the Kremlin's version of events. Two dozen corruption investigators in Ukraine found no evidence.

Should we start addressing you as comrade, or...?