They say politics makes for strange bedfellows. You can’t get weirder than this odd couple!
“The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.” – Will Rogers
Photo | archive.jsonline.com
"All the news we deem fit to print"
They say politics makes for strange bedfellows. You can’t get weirder than this odd couple!
“The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.” – Will Rogers
Photo | archive.jsonline.com
Oh sweet justice!
If you recall, at an event in Iowa, then candidate Donald Trump belittled John McCain’s Vietnam war record by questioning his heroism.
“He’s not a war hero,” said Trump. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
Both Democrats and Republicans roundly criticized Trump for his comment. Though it was suggested Trump apologize to McCain, he never retracted the statement.
And now that the U.S. Senator, often called “The Maverick,” has passed away at the age of 81, it is McCain who gets the last dig.
While almost anyone who’s anyone will be attending McCain’s funeral, there will be one very noticeable absentee … Donald Trump.
It was McCain’s wish that Trump be barred from his funeral.
To make matters worse, McCain left specific instructions that a former president, Barack Obama, eulogize him!
That’s got to hurt the man-child currently occupying the Oval Office whose main goal is to erase Obama’s legislative accomplishments.
As one observer, Bruce Lindner, has noted, “Other than Obama’s roast of Trump at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner seven years ago, I don’t think anything anyone has ever done to Trump will infuriate him as much as this.”
How humiliating! How perfect!
Thank you, Sen. McCain, for your years of service to our country. However, I do not think I will ever forgive you for unleashing Sarah Palin on an defenseless nation!
Now all we need is for some more justice to be shown to our incompetent, narcissistic, illegitimate president by another true American patriot … one Robert S. Mueller.
Photo | yahoo.com
Donald Trump’s TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told NBC’s Chuck Todd something quite extraordinary a few days ago. On Meet the Press this Sunday, Giuliani said to a stunned Todd, “Truth isn’t truth.”
Upping the ante on Kellyanne Conway’s infamous “alternative facts” comment, Giuliani doubled down on his Orwellian pronouncement the following day by tweeting: “My statement was not meant as a pontification on moral theology but one referring to the situation where two people make precisely contradictory statements, the classic ‘he said, she said’ puzzle.”
As crazy as it sounds, Giuliani’s statement does have some merit when it comes to political speech or when referring to some news outlets. The truth can be malleable.
As we found out yesteray, however, the truth is still the truth in a court of law. The bulwark of our democracy, our legal system, works.
A jury in Virginia convicted Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, on eight felony counts of bank fraud and tax evasion. At about the same time, in a New York court, Trump’s legal fixer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight counts of campaign finance violations, tax and bank fraud.
It didn’t matter what lies or fakery Manafort and Cohen engaged in prior to their day in court, once they stood in front of the man in the black robe, all the BS, the spin, the mangling of facts, ended.
It is said that justice is based on truth. Truth, in the law, means objective, reliable facts that can be admitted as evidence in a trial.
With what Cohen admitted to yesterday under oath, namely that Donald Trump directed him to violate campaign finance laws, it won’t be long before all of Trump’s claims of innocence, of “witch hunt”, of “no collusion”, will be put to the test … hopefully at an upcoming trial in the United States Senate after the House approves articles of impeachment.
Hey Rudy, when two people make contradictory statements, you know, the old he, said she said … one is telling the truth, one is lying.
Photo | nypost.com
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