All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!

[Malvolio]

I suspect Trump runs his mouth for no other reason than to run his mouth.

Well, he has to tweet something, doesn't he?

[PaulBullion]

Democrats dropped their memo:

https://democrats-intelligence.house...DocumentID=358

The FISA warrant against Carter page was approved by four different federal judges: -2 appointed by George W. Bush -1 appointed by George H.W. Bush -1 appointed by Reagan

[Iron Maiden]

Melania's parents will soon be U.S. Citizens.....by way of chain migration

Viktor and Amalija Knavs' immigration attorney reports that they have a green card but they're aren't many details on how or when they got it.

There are only a handful of ways that immigrants to the US can obtain green cards, and the largest share of them each year are given out based on familial connections. A smaller number go to immigrants based on their employment, and other categories include refugees and other special cases. Advocates for restricting legal immigration have pointed to the imbalance in favor of family connections as evidence of the need for reform, calling for a "merit-based" system that would choose immigrants based on need in the US.

It's not been reported how long they've been living in the U.S. They list their address as Mar a Lago and have been seen at White House events recently. But more than likely they got their green card by Melania or Donald Trump sponsoring them. Guess they want to get it done before he wipes out that option and goes by a merit based system.

[WestPhillyPunisher]

Mexican President Cancels Trip To Washington After Heated Call With Donald Trump

Neither leader will back down from their stance on Mexico paying for Trump’s border wall. Good for President Nieto! Why should he waste his time with Dolt45 who keeps demanding that damned wall. I can't wait for former president Vicente Fox, a frequent and nasty critic of Trump to chime in on this development.

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NRA Blasts ‘Cowardice’ Of Corporate Partners Turning Away From Gun Group

The group blamed everyone but itself for this month’s Florida shooting. WAHHHHHHHHHH!! Cry me a river, you pathetic, ammosexual snowflakes. Your tears are sweeter than wine. Meanwhile....

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The Teens Are Coming For The NRA, And They Can’t Be Stopped

We are witnessing history. More power to those courageous, and ANGRY young people!

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Samuel L. Jackson Shreds ‘Mothaf***a’ Donald Trump Over Armed Teachers Idea

The Hollywood actor did not hold back. Brilliant, Sam! Brilliant!

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Tweeters Barf Over Sweepstake Prize Of Dinner With Donald Trump

“This a punishment or a prize?” My money's on the former.

[SquirrelMan]

Oh, hay, Sanders 2020 campaign!

Bernie Sanders promoted false story on reporting Russian trolls

Bernie Sanders is taking credit for action to combat the Russian incursion into the 2016 election that he didn’t have anything to do with — and didn’t actually happen.

Twice this week, in response to questions about whether he benefited from the Russian effort, as prosecutors allege, or did enough to stop it, Sanders said a staffer passed information to Hillary Clinton’s aides about a suspected Russian troll operation.

It turns out that the purported Sanders’ staffer who said he tried to sound the alarm was a campaign volunteer who acted on his own, without any contact or direction from the Vermont senator or his staff. When the volunteer, John Mattes of San Diego, said he communicated with the Clinton campaign in local press accounts, he was confusing it for a super PAC supportive of Clinton.

He also doesn’t know why Sanders is taking all the credit. “I’m going to send him a bill for my back pay,” Mattes joked.

“He could have called me,” Mattes added. “He maybe doesn’t have my phone number.”

Bye, Sanders 2020 campaign.

[Tami]

How an Obscure Conservative Theory Became the Trump Era’s Go-to Nerd Phrase

When Donald Trump descended his golden escalator almost three years ago to make a campaign announcement that decried the influx of “drugs” and “rapists” from Mexico, among other outrageous claims, he established the one aspect of his political project on which nearly everyone could agree.

Trump was shifting the Overton window.

Or was he expanding it? Opening it? Climbing through it? Smashing it wide open?

A once-obscure poli-sci concept is having its moment in the sun. Trump’s unexpected popularity has revealed a constituency for both policy ideas and personal behavior that were once verboten in American politics. But in casting President Trump as the agent of the Overton window’s expansion, pundits have misunderstood a crucial part of its meaning.

The concept of the “Overton window,” the range of ideas outside which lie political exile or pariahdom, was first batted around in a series of conversations by the late free-market advocate Joseph Overton in the 1990s. After Overton’s untimely death in a plane crash in 2003, his friend and colleague at the libertarian Mackinac Center, Joseph Lehman, formalized and named the idea in a presentation meant to educate fellow think-tank warriors on the power of consistent advocacy. Ring the bell loudly for your idea, no matter how unpopular, and back it up with plenty of research and evidence, so the thinking went. Today’s fringe theory can become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom by the shifting of the finely tuned gears that move popular opinion; to Overton and Lehman the role of the think tank was to at least familiarize voters with these ideas, giving them an institutional home when public opinion finally moved their way.

[Tami]

Emoluments Suit vs. Trump Now Personal as Well as Official

WASHINGTON — Attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia on Friday expanded their lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump of accepting gifts from foreign and state governments, suing him not only as president but in his personal capacity as a businessman.

Legal experts say the move takes the "emoluments" clause of the Constitution into uncharted legal waters, since it has been interpreted as only applying to presidents in their official capacity.

"The conventional understanding is that once the president is sworn in ... everything he does is official, so he doesn't have a personal capacity any longer. That's kind of the assumption, but that could be wrong," said Mark Brown, a constitutional law expert at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Maryland, is one of several recent cases challenging Trump's ties to his business ventures and his refusal to divest from them. The suits allege that foreign governments' use of Trump's hotels and other properties violates the Constitution's emoluments clause, which bans the president's acceptance of foreign gifts and money without Congress' permission. The clause has never been fully tested in federal court and Trump's Justice Department attorneys have argued that hotel room stays do not represent "foreign gifts."

[worstblogever]

Three years ago, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" ran a profile of Andy Tobin, a former member of the Arizona House of Representatives and failed Congressional candidate in the 2014 elections. Tobin, in his time as a legislator, had voted to legalize the use of gold and silver as legal tender, among a lot of other strange bills including a "religious freedom" bill to legalize discrimination against gays, and random, warrantless searches to be conducted of abortion clinics whenever law enforcement felt like it. Tobin is also decidedly anti-immigrant, having not only supported Arizona's controversial law, SB 1070, but also once telling the public that people sneaking across the U.S./Mexico border were bringing Ebola Virus with them (which isn't true, given it is an African virus). Tobin also sent out fundraising e-mails promising to hold President Obama accountable for "what happened in Benghazi”, so there's that, as well. Tobin currently does not hold elected office, and instead was appointed to a cushy job on the Arizona Corporation Commission by Republican Governor Doug Ducey.

Two years ago today, “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” posted a profile of Rick Berg, a former one-term Congressman from North Dakota who failed to win election to the U.S. Senate against Heidi Heitkamp back in 2012, mostly because Berg portrayed himself as a "centrist Republican", which is kind of hard to buy considering that as a state legislator he voted to make abortion a felony offense, even including cases where the pregnancy is from rape or incest, without exception. Looking back even further, to 2005, they found Berg supported the privatization of Social Security by the Bush Administration, in an assembly vote. As election day approached in 2012, Rick Berg was starting to sweat about how closely he and Heidi Heitkamp were polling, not just because of his record, but because of his business ties to a shady real estate company, Goldmark Property Management, that was the target of dozens of tenant complaints and fire safety violations. It also didn't look so good that he had missed 38 votes in his one term in office in the House. Berg grew desperate enough that in his final debate against Heitkamp, he decided to try and make up ground by attacking the Affordable Care Act, brazenly lying about its effects on the national debt, and claiming it took money from Medicare (when it actually cuts costs that caused less spending on Medicare, which wasn't the same thing). Berg lost by a few thousand votes to Heitkamp, and has yet to reemerge as a candidate for any office.

One year ago, "Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day" profiled Tom Price, the former U.S. House Representative from Georgia’s 6th House District for six full terms from 2005 through early 2017 who went on to become the not-long-tenured Cabinet Secretary for Health and Human Services in the Trump Administration. For those who weren’t paying attention to the Bizarro World way that Donald Trump picked his cabinet, in almost all instances he chose individuals who seemed tailor fit to destroy the government institution they were placed in charge of, who had made previous statements or dedicated their careers to acting as antagonists to the very post they were appointed to. While Tom Price is, at least, a former orthopedic surgeon with a medical background, is a founding member of the GOP House’s Tea Party Caucus, has been accused of violating the STOCK Act, and committing insider trading, and has long been touted as a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a conservative group that argues that the government should do NOTHING in regards to healthcare, whatsoever, and to allow socialized medicine is “evil” or “immoral”. That’s not even the weirdest thing about the AAPS, as its journal has published articles in the time Tom Price served in Congress with such fine topics as a discussion about rescinding the citizenship of so-called “anchor babies,” (the children of undocumented immigrants), who it falsely claimed were responsible for increased leprosy rates, others that pushed the myth of a link between vaccines and autism, another that suggested a link between abortion and breast cancer, and one that questioned the relationship between HIV and AIDS. The AAPS also once requested the U.S. Supreme Court should to release post mortem photos of Vince Foster, the Bill Clinton White House counsel whose suicide conspiracy theorists believe actually was an assassination. Oh, and the AAPS was a top source for all the rumors during the 2016 elections swirling about Hillary Clinton’s supposed “failing health”, as well. If you needed any other evidence that Tom Price is hanging out with a bunch of kooks, the AAPS website once published an article about how President Obama’s powerful oratory could actually be a form of hypnosis, and that he won the presidency by hypnotizing impressionable voters like young people and Jews. In any other Cabinet nomination process, Tom Price would have been laughed out of the Senate, but he’s somehow one of the more “normal” or “qualified” members of the Trump Cabinet, relatively speaking. Tom Price is also a bit of a homophobe, as virtually all of the Trump Cabinet is, and it’s not hard to find evidence to that fact even outside of his anti-LGBT voting record. When a guy releases a statement reacting to the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling and declared it a “sad day for marriage”, it’s a pretty open and shut case that he’s bigoted towards gays, you know? And as far as women’s rights go, well, Tom Price isn’t just anti-abortion, he’s against birth control. In fact, Price didn’t just co-sponsor the Right of Life Act that would have given Constitutional rights to zygotes, he argues that there’s no such thing as a woman without access to birth control in the country. Price’s voting record was, as you might expect, hyper-partisan, and his time as a member of the Cabinet came to a quick end when he was forced to resign after it was discovered he was abusing his travel budget at taxpayer expense to do things like fly to Nashville on the urgent business of having lunch with his son. Tom Price is now out of the political spotlight (although his wife is a state legislator worthy of being profiled), so we’ll set aside his CSGOPOTD profile at this time and go ahead and take a look at a different wacky Republican today instead. (Current crazy/stupid scoreboard, is now 651-25, since this was established in July 2014.)

[worstblogever]

Jon Stanard
Welcome to the 651st original “Crazy/Stupid Republican of the Day” profile, where today we’ll be discussing Jon Stanard, a member of the Utah House of Representatives from 2012-2018, and whose downfall will not take us very long to explain. You see, Stanard is a “family values” Republican, who quite predictably was caught cheating on his wife (allegedly). But wait, there’s more. He cheated on her with a porn star, Brie Taylor (pictured above). But wait, there’s still more. He cheated on his wife with a porn star who he was paying for sex, and therefore his name isn’t just Jon, he’s a now a john with a prostitute he frequents. But wait, THERE’S STILL MORE to make it worse… Jon Stanard was billing the taxpayers for the hotel he was banging an ex-porn star turned prostitute behind his wife’s back.

At this point, we’re just going to go through his voting record and laugh at the level of hypocrisy in Stanard’s votes to “defend marriage” and in other matters:

• March 13th, 2013: Jon Stanard votes against HB 391, which would have expanded Medicaid in Utah.
• March 11th, 2015: Jon Stanard votes against SB 296, which would prohibit discrimination against an individual based on their sexual orientation.
• January 31st,2017: Stanard votes for HCR 11, to ask the president to rescind the Bear’s Ears National Monument designation.
• February 5th, 2018: Stanard votes for HB 205, to prohibit abortions based on a fetal diagnosis of Down’s Syndrome.

As we like to be able to say here in CSGOPOTD profiles to close them out… “Good riddance.”

[SuperiorIronman]

I'm not sure if the dinner with Trump is desperate or not. I get it, Republicans need money for a new campaign, but you're very likely not getting much money from Democrats or Independents considering the last year in office. Burning enough bridges makes people less likely to give you money.

[Ragged Maw]

At this point, we’re just going to go through his voting record and laugh at the level of hypocrisy in Stanard’s votes to “defend marriage” and in other matters:

It's about defending the illusion or romanticized image of marriage as some esteem-boosting "badge of status" (mostly for men in a hetero relationship). Actually exercising the virtues of such advertised on paper isn't really the main sell (again, for dudes in a hetero relationship).

[Malvolio]

For those on this board who don't particularly like the more establishment wing of the Democratic Party, here's something interesting: the Democrats in California have refused to endorse Diane Feinstein:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/califor...ein-1519570716

[JBatmanFan05]

In fact, no endorsements for either big race:

Emblematic of the division dividing the nation’s liberals, the California Democratic Party decided not to endorse in the U.S. Senate or gubernatorial contests Saturday at their annual convention in San Diego.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...225-story.html

[Tami]

In fact, no endorsements for either big race:

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...225-story.html

That is not so unusual when there is a large number of candidates. That usually splits the vote and in the end none can get enough to obtain the endorsement. But, as soon as the primaries are over, whomever comes out on top will certainly get endorsed.

[Tami]

Trump's Official Portrait