"All the news we deem fit to print"
Trump’s very big, beautiful military parade, scheduled for this November, has been cancelled, with the hope of holding it next year.
Yesterday, it was reported that the cost estimate for the parade had skyrocketed to $92 million — about $80 million over the original estimated budget.
The question everyone is asking is not whether the parade will somehow be cheaper next year but if Trump will still be president in 2019.
Photo | foxnews.com
Omarosa picked up so much from her mentor she is now beating him at his own game.
Photo | peoplespunditdaily.com
On July 8, 2017, former FBI Director, James Comey, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying Donald Trump asked him to go lightly on former National Security advisor, Michael Flynn.
At a private meeting at the White House, Comey told the senators that Trump praised Flynn as a “good guy.” Comey, testifying under oath, said Trump repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. According to Comey, Trump then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
Of course, if Trump asked Comey to quash the ongoing investigation into Flynn, that would most likely constitute obstruction of justice.
In an interview on CNN this Sunday, Trump’s mouthpiece, Rudy Giuliani, said, “There was no conversation about Michael Flynn.”
It appears Giuliani has gone full Trump.
Giuliani told ABC News on July 8 about the Trump-Comey conversation, saying, “What he said was, ‘Can you, can you give him a break?’” On July 30, Giuliani was even more explicit about that version of events during an interview with Fox News, saying, “He didn’t tell him, ‘Don’t investigate him, don’t prosecute him.’ He asked him to exercise his prosecutorial discretion because he was a good man with a great war record.”
If you thought Donald Trump was the only one who could change his own narrative in the face of video evidence to the contrary, you’d be wrong.
It’s safe to say Giuliani’s main objective as Trump’s TV attorney is to obfuscate and confuse … to muddy the waters, if you will.
Gene Robinson of the Washington Post has written, “There is madness in Rudolph W. Giuliani’s incoherence on behalf of President Trump, but there is also method. He’s following the Trump playbook: Confuse, distract, provoke and flood the zone with factoids and truthiness until nobody can be sure what’s real and what’s not.”
While the Giuliani strategy seems to be working, especially with Trump supporters, it will have no impact on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation.
But Trump and Giuliani are betting they can sway public opinion enough to get 45 off the hook.
Giuliani gave the game away when he told CNN on May 27, “To a large extent…what we’re doing here, it is the public opinion, because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach or not impeach.”
It is obvious Giuliani doesn’t care about his reputation or looking like a legal hack. As it stands, the former federal prosecutor has turned out to be one of the few effective Trump picks.
Photo| palmerreport.com
Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and later served as the third president of the United States, was a strong believer in a democracy’s need for a free press.
Here are some quotes, from famguardian.org, attributed to Jefferson regarding the Fourth Estate:
“The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves, nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”
“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.”
“Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”
“I am… for freedom of the press, and against all violations of the Constitution to silence by force and not by reason the complaints or criticisms, just or unjust, of our citizens against the conduct of their agents.”
“The art of printing secures us against the retrogradation of reason and information.”
It seems as if what Jefferson feared most has come to pass with the elevation of a self-serving, arrogant, incompetent, egotistical, narcissistic, pathological liar to the White House … paired with a compliant Congress.
As has been said, “The press is only an enemy to those who fear the truth.”
Photos | theimaginativeconservative.org, theatlantic.com
Got to hand it to Trump, he engages in obstruction of justice in plain sight!
Photos | daily signal, in these times
The “eyes” have it!
Photos | washingtontimes.com, washingtonpost.com
If you’re Donald Trump, what do you do after your meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin in Helsinki just a few days ago … a meeting that has been roundly condemned and denounced by both Democrats and Republicans?
What do you do after ex-CIA chief John Brennan says this of the press conference you held following your secret two-hour meeting with Putin: “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic,he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”
Why you invite the former KGB agent to the White House, of course!
Sticking to tried-and-true Republican tactics, when you’ve made an enormous mistake, you simply double down on your blunder. Admitting error is never an option for it is a sign of weakness.
Whether Trump will actually meet with the Russia Mafia boss responsible for the attack on our presidential election in 2016 (and who is poised to do the same in the 2018 midterms) remains to be seen.
But the sheer audacity!
I, along with many other writers, bemoaned the death of satire in the Age of Trump. When any snarky article you write can actually end up touching on reality, the jig is up. When obvious parody is believed by almost half of all Americans, what’s the point?
I doubt the Putin meeting will take place this fall, but not because Republican “leaders” will have a long talk with Trump. You know, something akin to, “Dear Mr. President the optics are so bad that maybe…”
No, I don’t think the meeting will take place because of what Robert Mueller is almost certain to make public soon about Trump and his criminal enterprise.
The man heading what Trump likes to refer to as a “witch hunt” is our last best hope for reclaiming many of the American values we’ve lost under the Trump regime.
Photo | taskandpurpose.com
Time to get out the popcorn!
Photo| cardschat.com
Many Congressional Democrats are asking Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, to follow his own rule concerning a president’s ability to nominate a new Supreme Court justice. McConnell prevented Barack Obama from nominating a justice to fill the seat of the late Antonin Scalia on the theory that a president should not be able to appoint a new Supreme Court justice during an election year.
Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, has asked McConnell to put off consideration for a new justice to replace the retiring Anthony Kennedy until after this year’s midterm elections. But trying to shame McConnell into abiding by his own rule seems like a complete waste of time. The man is incapable of self-reproach.
A better rule for Democrats to use in their effort to stop the consideration of the newly nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Court is the “Booker Rule.” Namely, there should be no Supreme Court pick while a president remains under criminal investigation.
Here is how Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) explained his position:
“President Trump is currently a subject of an ongoing criminal investigation, and any nomination of a Supreme Court justice while that investigation continues is unacceptable because of the clear conflict of interest inherent in the President installing someone who could be the deciding vote on a number of potential issues from that investigation that could come before the Court.”
Democrats need to keep repeating the “Booker Rule” until they’re blue in the face (no pun intended).
It is common sense that no person under criminal investigation should be able to literally pick his own judge. And on that matter, Kavanaugh has written, in a 2009 article for the Minnesota Law Review, that presidents should be immune while in office from “time-consuming and distracting” criminal investigations. “Like civil suits, criminal investigations take the President’s focus away from his or her responsibilities to the people. And a President who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as President.”
No, Democrats should not be playing the “shame” or “hypocrisy” card but the “conflict of interest” card. It is difficult to defend the idea that Trump should be able to choose a justice who may soon decide his legal fate. The “Booker Rule.”
Granted Dems don’t have the votes to block Kavanaugh’s nomination but if enough pressure is placed on a few moderate Republicans, and those Blue Dog Democrats, the day may yet be won.
Photo | Jack Gruber/USA Today
President Pelosi… the title has a nice alliterative ring to it, don’t you think?
Yes, while the possibility of the California representative ever moving into the White House is slimmer than a germ’s chance at a Lysol convention, it’s fun, and heck downright delicious, to consider!
Here’s the scenario. First, Democrats regain control of the House (and maybe the Senate, for good measure) after the mid-term elections. Following explosive revelations by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller of the Trump regime’s wrongdoing, the House impeaches both Trump and Pence. The Senate then votes to convict both and removes them from office at the same time. Of course, House Democrats would have to vote Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House once again. But as the next in line to the presidency, Pelosi becomes the nation’s 46th president.
If this farfetched scenario were ever to happen, it would not take place in 2018 but 2019, when the new Congress organizes in January. So the earliest this theoretical Democratic majority could consider articles of impeachment would be the start of the new year..
Hey, almost anything is possible, no matter how ridiculously unlikely. Remember when we all thought there was no way in hell we would ever mouth the words “President Trump?”
“Dreams, if they’re any good, are always a little bit crazy. ”
― Ray Charles
Photo | thehill.com