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Issues and events that stink to high heaven
Video of trump’s speech to the troops! Sets the record straight on WWII and Vietnam.
"I'd have done the Christmas bombing by Thanksgiving."
EXCLUSIVE video of Trump's speech to the troops. Sets the record straight on WW2 and Vietnam.
Posted by GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on Thursday, December 27, 2018
December 27, 2018
It was true in 1993 and it’s true now: the time is long long overdue for the United States to join the rest of the industrial world and have a universal health care system.
Bernie in 1993: The United States Needs Universal Health Care
It was true in 1993 and it is true now: the time is long, long overdue for the United States to join the rest of the industrialized world and have a universal health care system.
Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday, December 27, 2018
December 27, 2018
As the stock market careens like a roller coaster, it’s time to worry about the next crash. The same imbalances that brought about the financial collapse that caused the Great Recession are back.
As the stock market careens like a roller coaster, it's time to worry about the next crash. The same imbalances that brought about the financial collapse that caused the Great Recession are back.
Posted by Robert Reich on Thursday, December 27, 2018
Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root December 27, 2018
Before taking office President Donald Trump shouted from the rafters about his ability to get deals done. He truly sold white America on his business acumen and ability to seal the deal. Now we all realize that his business methods are equivalent to a goon holding a debtors kids in a seedy basement until he gets his money.
With the tact of a rhinoceros in a bong shop, president Trump seems to have totally forgotten that he has complete control of Congress until January rolls around. He doesn’t need Democrats to push anything through, including funding for his dumb-ass wall that no one wants.
There are enough Republican and Democratic votes in the House and Senate to pass a bill that funds the government without money for Trump’s anti-Mexican Night’s Watch border wall. But, as we’ve learned over the past two years, when has Trump ever let the truth get in the way of stoking the flames of his gas fueled base.
Now, the president voted most likely to end the world as we know it, is back on Twitter like a teen who learned that his date is going to senior prom with a boy without bone spurs, to claim that the shutdown is all the work of the evil democrats.
Donald J. Trump: Have the Democrats finally realized that we desperately need Border Security and a Wall on the Southern Border. Need to stop Drugs, Human Trafficking,Gang Members & Criminals from coming into our Country. Do the Dems realize that most of the people not getting paid are Democrats?
We know that the above tweet was written by the president himself just by looking at his random use of capitalization and “gang members.” As we’ve learned over time, much like Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, the president is convinced that all Mexicans are “bad hombres.”
It might be nice if someone inside the White House told the president that he doesn’t need Democrats to get funding for his wall. This assumes, of course, that said White House aides know how to get to the presidential tomb where the president’s sleeping coffin is kept.
All of this comes just days after the president claimed that furloughed workers told him directly that they’re fine with not getting paid.
Wait… Full stop.
The president is lying and I have proof.
No one in the history of ever has ever said that they are fine with not getting paid. Not ever. Maybe one guy, one really racist rich guy who was handed an empire by his father is ok with not getting paid for working. But no furloughed government worker is ok with working around the holidays and not receiving a paycheck. That’s just a full-on lie., one of the president’s ad-libs in which he just randomly spouts shit and acts as if it’s true.
Also, let’s examine the president’s declaration that many furloughed workers are Democrats, which is probably true and speaks to two issues. First, I know the president’s intentions was to shame Democrats as if their reluctance to sign a bill that awards the president $5 billion for his Lego wall is the reason that they aren’t getting paid, which we know is false.
Secondly, the president has proven time and again that he is the president of rich white Republicans and as such, he doesn’t care that his gun-to-temple style of governing is affecting people he doesn’t want to govern. He’s not the president of the people he’s hurting so, in short, he doesn’t give a fuck.
This is why the president has proudly proclaimed that the government shutdown can last until his eternal resting place freezes over because the people directly affected by it aren’t his voters.
As it stands the government has been shut down for six days and Trump has declared that he’s not budging until his wall is fully funded.
According to NBC News, “Democrats have said they won’t provide Trump with that funding and indicated they won’t go beyond the $1.6 billion that has already been allocated for border wall purposes. Republicans and Democrats reached an agreement last week on a stopgap spending measure to prevent a shutdown — a deal that the White House signaled Trump would sign. But at the 11th hour, Trump scuttled the agreement because it did not provide additional funding for a border wall.”
Democrats are most likely going to blink first and give into the president’s demands, not because they are soft but because you can’t negotiate with a kidnapper who doesn’t care if all of his hostages die.
Maybe the president does know what he’s doing. Maybe there is an art to his negotiating tactics. Maybe holding America over a cliff with a gun its head is the way to get deals done. Maybe he’s saving the country from gang members, drugs and human trafficking. Perhaps there are people who want him on that wall. Maybe we need him on that wall. After all…
The White House is dark and full of terrors.
Read more
By Eugene Robinson, Columnist December 24, 2018
It has become a cliche to quote William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” written almost 100 years ago in the aftermath of World War I. But no one has said it better:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
We should acknowledge such apocalyptic thoughts so that we may conquer them. For many millennia, this has been the season of hope and renewal — the time of year when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the daylight hours begin to grow longer and the promise of spring, still months away, is assured. While Christians celebrate the birth of their savior, others mark the turning of a page and the coming of a brighter tomorrow.
So we must be realistic but never hopeless. Much has gone wrong. But it is in our power to put things right.
It is difficult, at the moment, to fully assess the damage Trump is wreaking. We have never had a president like him, so history is a poor guide. For his racism, we can perhaps look back to Woodrow Wilson; his general unfitness to hold the nation’s highest office recalls the hapless Andrew Johnson. Maybe Andrew Jackson was as impetuous, maybe Richard M. Nixon as venal.
The past week has seen Trump manifest all those characteristics and more.
After a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump suddenly announced the withdrawal of the roughly 2,000 U.S. troops who are fighting in Syria. The Islamic State is basically defeated, Trump claimed — another of his myriad lies.
It is debatable whether the United States should have sent forces to Syria in the first place, but there was widespread agreement among military and foreign policy experts that abruptly pulling them out now is unthinkable. It will leave the Syrian Kurds — loyal U.S. allies — at the mercy of Erdogan and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. It gladdens the hearts of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the mullahs in Iran. And, like so many of Trump’s decisions, it stems not from analysis but from caprice.
Mattis had gone along with Trump’s ridiculous pre-election deployment of troops to the U.S. border with Mexico — a transparent ploy to stoke fervor among his base. But the Syria move was a bridge too far, and Mattis resigned with a blistering letter outlining U.S. values and interests as he sees them and making clear that Trump has very different views. Angry about being called out, Trump advanced Mattis’s departure date from Feb. 28 to Jan. 1.
Also last week, Trump reneged on a deal that would have kept the government funded through Feb. 8, demanding $5 billion for his imaginary border wall instead of the $1.3 billion that Congress was willing to provide. The president was evidently responding to right-wing commentators who warned that his base would not forgive him if he surrendered. So now we’re in a partial shutdown, with no end in sight.
The financial market indexes have plummeted. On vacation in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had the bright idea to call the leaders of major banks Sunday, quiz them about their liquidity and assure them everything would be all right — which helped send markets into another dive on Monday.
As multiple investigations close in, including the one led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump will surely lash out. I believe things will get worse before they get better.
However, Psalm 30:5 tells us that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” All of us, believers and nonbelievers, must somehow summon faith that we will survive this trial. Please start by having a very merry Christmas.
Shane Boyle died because he fell $50 short of raising enough money on GoFundMe to pay for his insulin supplies. We should not be having people die in this country because they can’t afford the high cost of their medication.
$50 Short on GoFundMe For Insulin
Shane Boyle died because he fell $50 short of raising enough money on GoFundMe to pay for his insulin supplies. We should not be having people die in this country because they can't afford the high cost of their medication.
Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Friday, December 21, 2018
In case you missed it, the entire executive and legislative branches of the government have descended into the lowest rungs of Chaos.
Over at the Justice Department, William Barr is preparing for his confirmation as the next attorney general. As such, of course, he will be in nominal charge of the Robert Mueller Probe Into Practically Everything. So along comes the New York Times to give the confirmation process a nice little nudge toward the abyss:
In a 19-page memo, Mr. Barr sharply criticized an apparent aspect of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that Mr. Trump may have committed a crime by trying to get the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to quash the criminal investigation into his first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and later by firing Mr. Comey.
Mr. Barr argued that the Justice Department must not accept the notion that a president can violate a statute that criminalizes obstruction of justice by exercising his constitutional authority in an otherwise lawful way – such as by firing a subordinate, pardoning someone, or using his “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding” – but with a corrupt motive.
And in case Mueller wasn’t hearing loud enough footsteps already, comes now CNN with the news that Matt Whitaker, the temporary, handpicked, interim replacement AG consulted with the DOJ lawyers who told him he didn’t have to recuse himself from overseeing Mueller’s operation. If you see ducks lining up in a row, you’re not wrong.
“At this moment, the President does not want to go further without border security, which includes steel slats or a wall. The President is continuing to weigh his options,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement announcing the meeting. People attending the meeting included Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, R-N.C., and former Freedom Caucus Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
The announcement came shortly after Ryan left a Thursday morning GOP conference meeting to take an emergency phone call from Trump, two people in the room told NBC News, with one member saying Ryan had been gone from the room for at least 20 to 30 minutes.
“Build Those Slats! Build Those Slats!” Not exactly a rip-roarer at the next rally.
One lawmaker told NBC that another member in the meeting stood up to say that Trump’s refusal to say in public he’ll sign the continuing [resolution] has left even rank-and-file Republicans “twisting in the wind.” Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., left the session saying he felt worse about the resolution than he had going in, with member concerns ranging from the lack of disaster relief funding to continued worries over whether Trump would actually sign the measure. “I think the next few days could get complicated real fast,” he said.
But NBC’s Kasie Hunt shared the money quote on the electric Twitter machine shortly before noon on Thursday:
On the House floor, leaders scrambling to see if they can pass $5 billion in wall funding as Republicans say they want President Trump to tweet before they say “yes.”
“That’s what the fuck serving in Congress has come to,” one GOP member of Congress tells me.
My heart bleeds. Hope that tax cut was worth it to your donors because you’re going to be paying for it for the next decade, one way or the other.
Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.
I was in Georgia on Other Business over the weekend, and I was lucky because the Atlanta Journal-Constitution broke a brilliant story that pretty much shreds what was left of the credibility of both the recent gubernatorial election and the new governor it produced, Brian Kemp. The Republican candidate, you may recall, also was serving as Georgia’s Secretary of State and, therefore, was tasked with overseeing a close election in which he was one of the candidates. The AJC added yet another big window into the veritable Plato’s Retreat of ratfcking that was that election:
It was Nov. 3, a Saturday, 72 hours to Election Day. Virtually tied in the polls with Democrat Stacey Abrams, Kemp was in danger of becoming the first Georgia Republican to lose a statewide election since 2006. And, now, a new threat. The secretary of state’s office had left its voter-registration system exposed online, opening Kemp to criticism that he couldn’t secure an election that featured him in the dual roles of candidate and overseer. But by the next day, Kemp and his aides had devised one solution for both problems, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.
They publicly accused the Democratic Party of Georgia of trying to hack into the voter database in a failed attempt to steal the election. The announcement added last-minute drama to an already contentious campaign. More important, it also pre-empted scrutiny of the secretary of state’s own missteps while initiating a highly unusual criminal investigation into his political rivals. But no evidence supported the allegations against the Democrats at the time, and none has emerged in the six weeks since, the Journal-Constitution found. It appears unlikely that any crime occurred.
To recap: Kemp was overseeing his own election, and he was so bad at it that, three days before the polls opened, it was discovered that the registration system was ridiculously hackable. This called for some serious hackery in response. Kemp already had proven to be up to the task:
In 2015, Kemp’s office accidentally sent political organizations, media outlets and others a trove of confidential information about every Georgia voter. Kemp blamed a single employee, whom he fired. The following year, Kemp was one of just seven state election directors who rejected the federal government’s help to secure their voting systems. Kemp called the offer an “overreach” by the administration of President Barack Obama after hackers stole emails from the Democratic National Committee. “It seems like now it’s just the D.C. media and the bureaucrats, because of the DNC getting hacked – they now think our whole system is on the verge of disaster because some Russian’s going to tap into the voting system,” Kemp said…At that moment, the computer servers that ran Georgia’s election system were wide open to potential intruders. Voters’ personal data, passwords that poll supervisors used on Election Day, the coding for memory cards with which voters cast ballots – all of it was readily accessible.
Meanwhile, a guy named Logan Lamb, a specialist in cybersecurity from Kennesaw State, where Georgia’s servers are located, spent several months ringing the alarm bell before anyone in Kemp’s office deigned to get involved. Have I mentioned that Kemp was running for governor at the time, and that a story about incompetence centered on the office he already held might have proven to be a drag on that effort?
But it wasn’t until seven months later, when Lamb and a colleague found that the data still had not been secured, that officials shut off unauthorized access to the servers. Kemp said at the time that he expected the FBI to catch the “perpetrators.” “There were no perpetrators,” Lamb, who works for the Atlanta-based online security firm Bastille, said recently. “We are computer security professionals. We were trying to go through the process of responsible disclosure to make sure the system was secure.” For months, Lamb said, “anyone could just have downloaded” – or manipulated – all the state’s election files.
At this point, it might have become obvious to all but the dimmest voter that Kemp shouldn’t be entrusted to manage anything more complicated than a food truck. A new strategy was needed because, after all, those rats won’t fck themselves.
On Dec. 8, 2016, Kemp wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, demanding to know why the federal agency “was attempting to breach our firewall.” Kemp said a computer traced to Homeland Security had executed a “large unblocked scan” of the secretary of state’s website. The intrusion, Kemp suggested, was in retaliation for his refusing the government’s help before the 2016 election. Johnson replied four days later. He said a worker at his agency’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, had merely verified the professional licenses of job applicants – “a service, as I understand it, your website provides to the general public,” Johnson wrote.
Kemp wasn’t satisfied with Johnson’s response. “I will be elevating my concerns to the incoming administration,” he wrote back, and the same day, he asked Trump, then the president-elect, to investigate the Obama administration’s “failed cyberattacks” on Georgia. Republicans in Congress warned Johnson not to destroy evidence of what Rep. Jason Chaffetz, then chairman of the House Oversight Committee, called a possible breach of “state sovereignty” and a violation of state and federal laws. Finally, in June 2017, a report by Homeland Security’s inspector general said a digital forensic investigation found no evidence of a cyberattack.
This is pure bubblespeak, aimed at an audience conditioned for decades to believe anything that strokes their ideological G-spots. (That Jason Chaffetz had a cameo in this farce was almost comically predictable.) And it roped in the Department of Homeland Security, which had to hunt all the snipes Kemp had set loose in the minds of his voters. Was it time to turn things up to 11? Of course, it was.
Kemp’s aides broke their silence early Sunday. At 4:47 a.m., Candice Broce, the secretary of state’s spokeswoman, received a message from the online news site WhoWhatWhy, which says it practices “forensic journalism.” Its reporters had heard about Wright’s email and were preparing to post a story at 6 a.m. The website said it told Broce its story would describe a security breakdown in the secretary of state’s office, not a failed hack by the Democrats.
Exactly one hour later, a statement appeared on the secretary of state’s website, on the same page where voters search for sample ballots, find their polling place or check their registration. In all-capital letters, the headline announced: “AFTER FAILED HACKING ATTEMPT, SOS LAUNCHES INVESTIGATION INTO GEORGIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY. “While we cannot comment on the specifics of an ongoing investigation,” Broce was quoted as saying, “I can confirm that the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes.”
This is great work by the AJC, especially the survey of how so many news operations, both in Georgia and nationally, ran with the phony accusation. Kemp’s people did what they did full in the knowledge that there wasn’t enough time before the election for them to get called on it. (That it also was picked up by Sputnik, the Russian misinformation laundromat, is even less surprising than Chaffetz’s appearance in the story was.) The Democratic party in Georgia admits in the story that its rapid-response operation wasn’t nearly as rapid as it should have been. But, in general, the AJC’s story is another one to add to the now towering pile of evidence that the Republican party has become unmoored from any attachment it still had to actual democracy.
Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page here.
In the days leading up to Georgia’s hotly contested 2018 gubernatorial election, Brian Kemp—who, you may recall, is both the winner of that election and also the state official who was in charge of administering it—made a shocking accusation about the Democratic Party of Georgia and, by extension, his opponent, Stacey Abrams. They had, he said, attempted to hack into the state’s voter-registration database, and his office planned to launch an investigation into this serious case of misconduct.
According to a bombshell investigation published last week by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, there is still absolutely no evidence that any such partisan election meddling took place. Meanwhile, there is a good deal of compelling evidence that Kemp—who at the time was slipping in the polls, putting him in real danger of suffering an embarrassing loss for the Republican Party—might have just made the whole thing up.
The problem, as the AJC explains it, is that Kemp had learned that the state’s voter information systems were laughably vulnerable to hackers, which opened him up to charges of rank incompetence. Earlier this year, while checking his registration status online, a Georgia voter named Richard Wright discovered that nefarious actors could use the web site to download any file on the system, and to access any voter’s personally identifiable information. Experts told the AJC that hackers could, in theory, exploit these flaws to do things like delete people from the rolls, render them ineligible to cast ballots, or even “systematically target” political and/or minority groups.
Wright reached out to an election law attorney in Washington, and on Friday, November 2, four days before election day, he also summarized his findings in an email to Rachel Small, a volunteer with the Georgia Democrats’ voter protection hotline. Small forwarded that email to her supervisor, who asked their own cybersecurity experts to take a look. “That,” says the AJC, “appears to have been the extent of the Democrats’ involvement.”
From there, Wright’s emails made their way to law enforcement agencies, and then to reporters. On Sunday, when Kemp learned that a media outlet planned to publish a story on the subject, he did what all self-respecting Republicans do when confronted with evidence of their failures: panic, and blame someone else. Minutes before it posted, the secretary of state’s web site posted an all-caps headline announcing a forthcoming investigation into a “FAILED HACKING ATTEMPT” by Democrats. Kemp’s spokesperson began talking about Rachel Small, who is part of this narrative because she forwarded an email, as if she should be considered armed and extremely dangerous by anyone who approaches her:
“The FBI is looking for information on ‘Rachel Small,’” Broce wrote [to reporters]. “We welcome any information about this person’s identity or motives to provide to federal authorities.
“Who is Rachel Small?” Broce continued. “Is that her real name, and for whom does she work? Why was she talking about trying to hack the secretary of state’s system…?”
A few days later, Kemp won the election with 50.2 percent of the vote, narrowly avoiding the prospect of a runoff with Abrams. Strangely, since the result became official, Kemp’s office seems to have forgotten all about the investigation it had vowed to conduct, back when breaking the news of said investigation was politically expedient.
More than a month later, state Democratic officials say no law enforcement agency has been in touch about the alleged crime. Lawyers and others involved in the episode say they’ve heard nothing, either. The agencies won’t comment on their investigations.
In other words, when a floundering candidate learned about a last-minute story that would reflect poorly on him, he seized on the thinnest imaginable shred of evidence to concoct an elaborate conspiracy theory that implicated his political opponents, and then used his official position to make it seem credible to the credulous. Throughout the campaign, Kemp endured persistent criticism for scoffing at the notion that supervising an election in which he was a candidate gave rise to any problematic conflicts of interest. It was a calculated bit of shamelessness all along, and apparently, it was worth it.
December 17, 2018
I asked Trump’s budget director—his new Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney—a very simple question: Why is it more important to give the Walton family, the wealthiest family in America, a $52 billion tax break than to fund programs that provide health care to millions of Americans?
What do you think of his answer? (from 2017)
Why Do Billionaires Need Massive Tax Breaks?
I asked Trump's budget director—his new Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney—a very simple question: Why is it more important to give the Walton family, the wealthiest family in America, a $52 billion tax break than to fund programs that provide health care to millions of Americans? What do you think of his answer? (from 2017)
Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Monday, December 17, 2018
