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Philadelphia Regional Anti-War Network
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Info, articles, etc. The blogger here usually tries to be sober, fair and even-handed. He very rarely describes anyone as just plain, outright offensive, but does so here. Joe Arpaio's actions, the ones that he was pardoned for, are not part of the "rule of law" that Americans rightly and properly cherish. VP Pence disgraces himself by describing Arpaio as someone who respects the law. Also, VP Pence made it clear. When conservatives talk about "law and order," they don't mean what liberals mean. Good! Golf course that called the police on black women loses business, faces call for state investigation. It was an incredibly stupid call to make. The guy deserves every bit of grief he gets for it! “This is how bad the press in this country is,” Hannity said. “They are being fed lies and misinformation. ” No, I really don't care that officials of the younger George Bush Administration felt they were under pressure to authorize torture. It was an immoral choice that didn't have to be made. Those who made that choice should be behind bars. Yeah, Sarah Sanders says it's entirely normal, but the apparent forcible seizure of Trump's medical records does not sound at all like anything in the HIPAA medical procedures! And, from President Trump's former doctor: Used to be that Palestinians could depend on their fellow Arabs to defend them. No more, apparently. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told a collection of Jewish leaders: “In
the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one
opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was
given.” The Crown Prince made it clear that Palestine was a relatively minor issue and that Iran was more important, but this statement makes it clear that Palestinians can't look to Saudi Arabia, a long-time close US ally, for anything resembling a fair deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a presentation of what he claimed was "proof" that the nuclear agreement with Iran was a bad one. He
missed only one thing: Crucial dates that could prove Iran has actually
done anything in contravention of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA) since it was signed in 2015.
What he had wasn’t a smoking gun but a photograph of a smoking gun taken years ago. April"Marco Rubio: Corporations aren't investing tax cuts" Uh, duh! You mean any of that wasn't obvious when the tax cut was passed back in December?!?!?! Rubio should have known all of this back then! And yeah, Speaker Ryan in the video is just spouting gibberish. Our local paper published a piece that criticized the protest against Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, I found the piece to be vague and simplistic. The charge of anti-Semitism is completely unsubstantiated and I have seen many times where people confuse anti-Semitism with criticizing the policies of the Israeli government. Comedian Michelle Wolf does the White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD). Uneven. Lots of hits and lots of misses. Several pundits accused Wolf of making jokes about the looks of Sarah Huckabee Sanders. That would indeed be a bad thing if that had actually happened. But they were asked to show just when Wolf had made an such jokes and couldn't. The phrase that Wolf used "smokey eye," is a make-up procedure to give one's eyes a certain appearance. Leonard Pitts is one of those columnists where the bloggers say "Read the whole piece. Trust me, it's worth your time." Agree! The question today is "What does Senator Marco Rubio stand for?" During the 2016 campaign, Rubio had a lot of valid criticisms of the President. Trump hasn't changed one iota, but Rubio is now "all-in" on him.
Donald Trump Jr. and other top members
of the Trump campaign met with a number of Russians, including lawyer
Natalia V. Veselnitskaya. There's evidence that she's been working
with the GRU (modern day successor to the KGB) and has high-level
contacts in Russia's government. So Trump is now asserting that
Veselnitskaya is just, ah, *pretending* to be connected to Russia's
government because, y'know, Russia is opposed to Trump's "vigorous"
anti-Russian actions! Uh, yeah. Well, yeah! In response to: "What thing from your teenage years do you think should make a comeback?" Lots of culture-nostalgic answers, but "The concept that Nazis are not 'good people.'" Yeah, definitely that! Hmm. So the Fox News host Sean Hannity owns a 152-unit apartment complex. Under the previous owner, 12 people were booted out of their apartments for various acts of malfeasance. Under Hannity, who claims he's not involved in managing the complex, the number of people booted out has been 61. That's a 500% rise! Nah, I'm sure there's an innocent explanation. Heh! Interesting theory! The Korea handshake is not nothing. But the irony is that Trump's unhinged behavior and nutty tweets may have been the space Kim need to look *reasonable* by comparison. In other words, Trump's claiming a win when in fact Kim is walking off with all the chips on the table. Mike Pompeo, now the new Secretary of State, starts making war-mongering comments right out of the gate. All of the many, many ways in which the Diamond & Silk hearings were a waste of time and attention. On March 12, Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) closed their investigation of the President and his involvement with Russia. Democrats on that same committee have now put out their counter-report. Also, comments on NRA role in moving money from Russia to the US. Donald Trump Jr. had a series of phone calls in June 2016. In between the two phone calls, Trump Jr. spoke with someone using
a blocked phone number, which may have been his dad, Donald Trump,
according to the Democrats. Sounds like some pretty obviously-guilty behavior to me. Update: Katy Tur of MSNBC says she receives calls from President Trump and he uses a blocked number.
EPA Administrator Pruitt gives us a very vague and fuzzy pictures
of who bottom-lines, who has final approval of, his agency's
expenditures. Funny, but there just doesn't seem to be anyone
responsible for, or in charge of this process. “I gave
direction to my staff to address that and out of that came a $43,000
expenditure that I did not approve. That is something that should not
have occurred,” Pruitt told the House Energy and Commerce
subcommittee on environment..,. “Career individuals at the agency
took that process through and signed off on it all the way through.”
President calls into Fox & Friends and rambles and carries on and gets himself into trouble by saying stuff he shouldn't say. Opposition lawyers are thrilled. Lawyers on his side? Ehh, not so happy. And yeah "'We're running out of time' Doocey says to Trump. On what planet would a TV host end a freewheeling interview with a president?" Good heavens! Out of nearly 8,000 undocumented immigrant children who were placed with caretakers (usually the child's relative), the bureau that does so has lost track of nearly 1,500 of them!!! And yes, human trafficking has been a problem with this bureau. Wow! Unhinged rant from the President! And yeah, he's clearly only admitting now that he spent the night in Moscow because flight records prove he did't leave until the following day So Ronny Jackson didn't make it. The real problem here is that the President has been in office for over a year and still has absolutely NO idea how to vet people! He has absolutely no clue as to what makes for a proper candidate for an office. The argument of Chief Justice Roberts reminds me of the pro-torture arguments of 2006. It just piles wildly unlikely possibilities on top of each other.
Woo hoo! I like this ruling here! Judge John D. Bates, in his
ruling, called the government's decision to end DACA “virtually
unexplained” and therefore “unlawful.” He also said that the
decision to end the program “was arbitrary and capricious because
the Department failed adequately to explain its conclusion that the
program was unlawful.”
Mick Mulvaney, running both the OMB and the CFPB, appears to be running hard for the "Dirtbag of the Year" contest. “Trump likely to end public access to a web portal that lets hundreds of thousands of consumers each year file complaints against financial companies. “I don’t see anything in here that says I have to run a Yelp for financial services,” CFPB’s Mulvaney says
Good for James Shaw! Very happy to see a true American hero saving the
lives of strangers and I hope lots of people contribute to his
GoFundMe. But yeah, why isn't the President's use of an unsecured cell phone worthy of press-wide condemnation? What brings these two issues together is the selective silence. Conservatives and evangelists don't seem to want to praise the black, unarmed fellow who stopped a mass shooting because obviously, he didn't need to be a "good guy with a gun," he just needed to be a good guy, period. Great hue and cry and sturm und drang about Hillary Clinton's private email server. Where's the commentary about the President's use of an unsecured cell phone? James Shaw did great damage to the messages that our President likes to send. First off, that a black man would be a hero, acting in a noble and selfless manner. This interferes with the dehumanization of non-whites. Second, the NRA slogan of "a good guy with a gun" was shown to be irrelevant. Shaw was a "good guy," but having a gun was beside the point. Well, the big tax cut passed back in December doesn't appear to be having the desired effect and the GOP has no other plans for any other legislation this year. So the Wall St Journal is getting concerned. Wow! Justice as seen by an occupier (to be fair, this lawmaker was disciplined for his statement).This Palestinian teenager took on a heavily armed and armored soldier who was, after all, charging into her backyard and hit him with an open hand. This lawmaker thinks she should have been shot for that. Our amateur President tries to swim with the North Korean shark. The Hillary Clinton private email server story was reported on very badly by the NY Times, just as, back in the early 90s, the Whitewater case was very poorly reported on with very bad consequences for the Clintons. The then-FBI Director Comey is a great deal at fault here too, but our blogger covers why the Times very, very badly messed up and really should have sat on their "scoop" and really should have talked to more people before publishing it. President keeps saying things like "No collusion, no conspiracy, not working with Putin to deliver America into foreign hands." But the whole Republican Party is seriously slacking off on protecting the vote. The last Obama State Dinner had 350 guests. The Trump State Dinner, to welcome French President Emmanuel Macron next week, will have only 150 and wil be held in a smaller room. Democrats and media were shunned. Apparently, only Republican politicians represent America these days. Despite a stubborn leadership in the US, great progress is being made in renewable energy. The treatment of an aide of Laura Ingraham demonstrates yet again that the decision to have or not have an abortion never was and never will be as simple as "Let the child live!" Having the child doesn't end in the hospital with the delivery. For Ingraham, for the aide to have the child meant she had to make arrangements for the aide to be temporarily replaced and that was a real inconvenience for Ingraham. Again, the important question is why the President doesn't appear to have anything to say about a foreign country interfering in a US elections, either the 2016 one or the one coming up this November. If nothing else, Kim Jong Un's offers of dramatic scale-downs in North Korea's nuclear posture make it very difficult for President Trump to say he'd rather play golf that to meet with the NK leader. So Mike Pompeo's been inflating the ol' resume, eh? Have to say, I'm extremely unimpressed with Pompeo's questioning of Hillary Clinton over Benghazi. "Why don't you fire someone?" Pompeo said at the 2015
congressional hearing. "How come no one has been held
accountable to date?" I find this conversation fascinating for what it reveals about how these two think. According to them, people don't make decisions on a rational basis, but decide according to propaganda. It's "the fashion" to be in favor of socialism, so people believe in socialism. Never mind that free-market capitalism may have serious problems. And hey, maybe people have a problem with how income is distributed? Nawww! Ya think? People tend to be consistent across the board. Sean Hannity actively sought to keep his legal relationship with Michael Cohen a secret. Does Hannity have other secrets? I'm guessing he does. Republicans had been pushing for Comey memos for months. Once they had them, it took only 39 minutes to decide to leak them. It's far from clear that they've gained anything by doing so since seeing the whole set of papers means we can examine it for what isn't there. One question that very clearly didn't get asked by President Trump or any of his people is "How can we protect America's electoral integrity seeing as it's under assault by foreigners?" Natalie Portman has criticized BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction) with Israel and reports are that she doesn't wish t oshare a stage with Prime Mnister Benjamin Netanyahu, but she's also apparently disgusted by how Israel has responded to protests at the Gaza-Israel border. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani joins President Trump's legal team. Ehh, why not? The President has such trouble retaining staff. Hope Giuliani isn't expecting a paycheck out of this as Trump has a well-documented history of stiffing people. Also, Giuliani has always been a prosecutor, never a defense attorney. Yeah, a more excitable local, right-wing columnist wondered if liberals would have the "courage" to boycott Starbucks. The Starbucks corporation has made it quite clear that the store manager engaged in a race-based overreaction and she was relieved of her duties. Whether she was re-located to another store or fired is unknown, but she's no longer running that store. Took a look at the comments to this piece and a commenter wonders why the two black men didn't just order something. Their statement that they would, but they were waiting for a third man to join them before they ordered anything should have been entirely sufficient for the staff to have said "Oh, okay" and to have turned their attention to other matters. Again, the President using Twitter so much makes it really obvious when he just couldn't care less about an issue. Puerto Rico, over six months after Hurricane Maria, suffers a total, island-wide blackout, not that you'd know anything about that by reading the President's Twitter feed. In December, Congress passed a big tax cut. How's that working out? CNBC concludes: "The GOP tax bill is now even less popular; only 27% think it's a good idea. Most people foresee higher deficits and most benefits going to the wealthy and corporations." There were enough other things going on in the administration of the younger George Bush that liberals gave him a completely free hand to try abstinence-only policies. Those policies proved to be pretty useless. Abstinence-only can successfully get young people to delay sex for a year or two, but they're useless once the young person has had sex. There's nothing you can say after that unless you're talking about safety, prevention and harm reduction. John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, wants to create a Sunni Arab patrol in Syria to take over US functions there. The blogger and I agree this is an absolutely crazy idea. I think the US needs to limit itself to very modest goals in Syria, but there's zero chance any other military force can replace US troops. The effort to pass legislation to protect Robert Mueller’s job as special counsel appeared to hit a dead end as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would not allow the bill to come to the floor for a full Senate vote. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms one could make about former FBI Director Comey, one being that he's "a pompous, egotistical, patronizing, condescending holier than thou political operative trying to redeem [his] reputation..." but there are also a lot of untrue assertions here. The Steele Dossier is hardly "discredited." It was admitted the very first time that it was reported and was admitted repeatedly afterwards that it was unverified. That didn't make it false. In fact, elements of it have been verified since it was published. Did Hillary Clinton send or receive classified messages on her private email server? Comey initially suggested she did, but later had to admit she didn't. Does Sean Hannity deserve a right to privacy? Well, if you're a reporter and your personal relationships are involved in a story, no. He needed to say, every time he had Cohen on his show, that he'd been getting legal advice from Cohen or that Cohen had been acting as his lawyer. D'oh! Kellyanne Conway slips up and admits the truth, President Trump owes his electon to FBI Directr Comey's jumping all over Clinton's emails right before the election. Speaker Ryan is convinced that the current deficit was
inevitable, so
the latest tax cut is no big deal. Sorry, but I was around in the
Clinton yers, when we balanaced the budget. Former FBI Directr Comey's concern is probably an exaggerated and overheated one, but frankly, if I had to choose between a "destroyed" FBI and the last 14 months under the current president, I would have preferred to have lost the FBI. Further commentary on Comey's new book. Woo hoo! Exxon has to turn over 40 years of records on their response to climate change! The President launches an airstrike
against targets in Syria. All sorts of problems with
the legal rationales
for those strikes. Especially problematic is the idea that the 2001
AUMF applies here. It was intended to punish the perpetrators of 9-11.
That charge applies, in a stretched and roundabout way, to ISIS because
ISIS is a successor to al Qaeda, but the Syrian government has never
been accused of doing anything to facilitate 9-11, so there's not even
an indirect connection there. RONNA MCDANIEL: "I think [Comey's] book is salacious, and when you read it, he discredits himself." TAPPER: "Have you read it?" MCDANIEL: "No, I haven't read it." Jake Tapper's expression at McDaniel's admission is priceless. Tucker Carlson wonders why law enforcement is picking on President Trump's lawyer. The Democratic guest replies that, unlike the Kenneth Starr inquiry that turned into an inquisition on Bill Clinton's sex life, the Mueller inquiry found evidence that Michael Cohen conducted illegal behavior and referred it to New York rather than to handle it themselves. Just in case anyone would like to get a "warm and fuzzy" on the intelligence and integrity of Robert Mueller, this is from the fellow who was his intelligence briefer when Mueller was head of the FBI. So why did the US, along with Britain and France, bomb
Syria? "In
our age of politics as reality show..." The Steele Dossier claimed that President Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, travelled to Prague to meet with a Russian during the 2016 campaign. That meeting has apparently now been verified. "RNC flak Kayleigh McEnany told host Eric Shawn that
even
several Democratic leaders once criticized Comey for his handling of
the Clinton investigation..." Thing I like about this conversation is that both participants are concise and to the point. Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mulvaney, who tried earnestly to destroy the CFPB, keeps saying that there were other institutions that could have performed the same good things. Senator Warren keeps pointing out that those other institutions didn't do so even though they had the opportunity to do just that. First few minutes of this clip are classic! Can't properly summarize them! Former FBI Director James Comey's book is out. Good evaluation: This is the most important news so far out of the Comey book: Trump, as president-elect, didn't give a damn about the Russian attack on the US and was unconcerned about preventing a repeat. That is a profound dereliction of duty. In assessing Paul Ryan as Speaker, this is a good start. A look at the proposed pardon of "Scooter" Libby. President Trump's two other pardons and this proposed one all fit a pattern. These people all violated the law in order to achieve right-wing goals. And Libby is now pardoned. Valarie Plame is brought forth to explain why Libby was busted and deserved to be treated as a criminal. Deepthink piece on the pardoning power. Newt Gingrich compares the utterly legal, by-the-book, polite gathering of evidence on Michael Cohen (Yes, Cohen was treated as a "mob lawyer," as someone neck-deep in criminal activities) to how citizens were treated under Stalin and der Fuhrer. But hey, back in 2005, Senator Dick Durbin accurately described the torture program under the younger George Bush and that called for censure! Why, Durbin crossed a line by comparing US military personnel to Nazis! Even though in 2005, the comparison was entirely accurat Good! Hard-line Trump-supporting right-wingers appear to be really unenthusiastic about going to war for Syria. On this one issue, I agree with them completely! Thanks to climate change, Atlantic currents are at their weakest in 1,600 years. A deeply unready, amateur president has an
extremely bad
Twitter habit. His overall use of Twitter really does him far
more
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