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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
An interesting op-ed comparing Trump to Andrew Johnson. The major difference? Johnson's fellow Republicans in Congress stood up to him when he started violating the rule of law.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2018/07/26/day-553/
Day 553: "Enough is enough."
1/ House Freedom Caucus leaders introduced articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Reps. Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows introduced the articles of impeachment. "The DOJ is keeping information from Congress. Enough is enough," Jordan said in a statement. "It’s time to hold Mr. Rosenstein accountable for blocking Congress’s constitutional oversight role." The resolution is unlikely to pass, as top GOP lawmakers have not signed on to the effort, but it represents the strongest step that conservative allies of Trump have taken so far in their feud with Rosenstein and the Justice Department. (Politico / CNN / Washington Post)
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/25/house-conservatives-move-to-impeach-rosenstein-743238
2/ The government seized more than 100 recordings from Michael Cohen, which include conversations Cohen had with reporters and others who were discussing matters related to Trump and his businesses. Cohen made some of the recordings with an iPhone, without telling anyone he was taping them. Most of the recordings involve conversations between Cohen and reporters who asked him about Trump during and after the 2016 election. (Washington Post / The Hill)
3/ The White House banned network pool reporter Kaitlan Collins from the Rose Garden because of the questions she asked Trump during a photo op. In a statement, Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed the dis-invitation, claiming that Collins "shouted questions and refused to leave despite repeatedly being asked to do so." Sanders continued: "To be clear, we support a free press and ask that everyone be respectful of the presidency and guests at the White House." (CNN)
https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/25/media/white-house-kaitlan-collins-press-pool/index.html
4/ The Trump administration failed to document consent in the majority of cases where migrants were deported without their children. The new information contradicts repeated claims by the White House that migrant parents gave consent to leave their children behind, and has been a key talking point for Trump administration officials who have defended the separations and deportations. (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/07/25/deported-migrants-leaving-children-behind-712088
5/ Coca-Cola Company announced that it will raise prices in response to the financial strain caused by Trump's tariffs. Coca-Cola's CEO said they are increasing prices due to the rising costs of delivery and metal prices after the U.S. imposed $50 billion in duties on Chinese products earlier this year. (The Hill)
http://thehill.com/policy/finance/398926-coca-cola-raises-soda-prices-due-to-tariffs
6/ A multi-state lawsuit challenging the inclusion of a citizenship question on the 2020 census will be allowed to move forward in court. The suit, brought by more than two dozen states and cities and other groups, is the largest of six lawsuits arguing against the new citizenship question. In his opinion, U.S. District Court Judge Jesse Furman said the plaintiffs "plausibly allege that Secretary Ross's decision to reinstate the citizenship question was motivated at least in part by discriminatory animus and will result in a discriminatory effect." (NPR)
Notables.
Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos proposed rolling back Obama-era loan forgiveness rules for students who were defrauded by for-profit colleges. The proposal would require student borrowers to prove that they have fallen into hopeless financial straits or prove that their college knowingly deceived them in order to receive loan forgiveness. The proposal is set to go into effect a year from now. (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/us/politics/betsy-devos-debt-relief-for-profit-colleges.html
Someone untied Betsy De Vos' 163-foot yacht and set it adrift on Lake Erie. The captain of the Seaquest called the police to report that the yacht had been untied and set adrift. By the time the police arrived, the $40-million yacht had hit a dock, causing large scratches and scrapes that are estimated to cost between $5,000 and $10,000 to repair. The yacht is one of ten boats owned by the De Vos family. (Detroit News / Toledo Blade)
The man who used a pickax to vandalize Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this week was bailed out of jail by the man who vandalized Trump's star in 2016. Austin Clay was booked on suspicion of felony vandalism and held on $20,000 bail for the incident, but he was bailed out shortly after his arrest by James Otis, who pleaded no contest to felony vandalism charges in 2017 for a similar incident. (The Hill)
"The man who used a pickax to vandalize Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this week was bailed out of jail by the man who vandalized Trump's star in 2016."
Real recognizes real.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."As I and others have noted in the past (I don't remember where I got it from; I didn't come up with it), what Trump and his people do not understand is that non-violent protest is a pleasant alternative our society has come up with to move away from the practice of dragging business owners into the street and stabbing them.
Protests will get more violent as he and his people continue to demonize peaceful methods. That's inevitable. If the people cannot demonstrate civilly, then they will demonstrate uncivilly.
Between this renewed vandalism of Trump's star and the attack on DeVos's boat, I believe we may be seeing the beginning of more uncivil demonstration.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Mueller Examining Trump’s Tweets in Wide-Ranging Obstruction Inquiry
Those concerns now turn out to be well founded. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is scrutinizing tweets and negative statements from the president about Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey, according to three people briefed on the matter.
Several of the remarks came as Mr. Trump was also privately pressuring the men — both key witnesses in the inquiry — about the investigation, and Mr. Mueller is examining whether the actions add up to attempts to obstruct the investigation by both intimidating witnesses and pressuring senior law enforcement officials to tamp down the inquiry.
Mr. Mueller wants to question the president about the tweets. His interest in them is the latest addition to a range of presidential actions he is investigating as a possible obstruction case: private interactions with Mr. Comey, Mr. Sessions and other senior administration officials about the Russia inquiry; misleading White House statements; public attacks; and possible pardon offers to potential witnesses.
None of what Mr. Mueller has homed in on constitutes obstruction, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said. They argued that most of the presidential acts under scrutiny, including the firing of Mr. Comey, fall under Mr. Trump’s authority as the head of the executive branch and insisted that he should not even have to answer Mr. Mueller’s questions about obstruction.
But privately, some of the lawyers have expressed concern that Mr. Mueller will stitch together several episodes, encounters and pieces of evidence, like the tweets, to build a case that the president embarked on a broad effort to interfere with the investigation. Prosecutors who lack one slam-dunk piece of evidence in obstruction cases often search for a larger pattern of behavior, legal experts said.
That's hilarious
Edited by megaeliz on Jul 26th 2018 at 1:58:38 PM
Evidence Shows Hackers Changed Votes in the 2016 Elections.
Now keep in mind that despite the article's title, there isn't any proof that Russia actually changed the votes. But it's something to think about.
Fox News strongly supports CNN after a CNN reporter was banned from White House events.
Edited by tclittle on Jul 26th 2018 at 12:51:34 PM
"We're all paper, we're all scissors, we're all fightin' with our mirrors, scared we'll never find somebody to love."
That doesn't really make it better, strong circumstantial evidence matters but the title is misleading in that it outright implies there is hard evidence. Still the title was probably set by the editor and thus to be actually fair to the writer they probably aren't responsible.
No comment:
Trump Wants to Delay Putin Meeting Until ‘After the Russia Witch Hunt’
“The president believes that the next bilateral meeting with President Putin should take place after the Russia witch hunt is over, so we’ve agreed that it will be after the first of the year,” Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, said in a statement.
Last week, Mr. Trump unexpectedly said he would invite Mr. Putin to Washington in the fall — a move that some interpreted as a show of defiance by Mr. Trump after a storm of criticism over his meeting with Mr. Putin in Helsinki, Finland.
Mr. Trump directed Mr. Bolton to deliver the invitation. But the Kremlin had not yet accepted the invitation, raising questions about whether Mr. Putin was interested.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday in Moscow, Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin aide, acknowledged receiving the invitation but declined to say whether Mr. Putin would visit Washington this year. Mr. Ushakov said that the leaders had not discussed the future meeting while in Helsinki, but that Mr. Bolton had later conveyed the invitation to Russian officials.
Mr. Ushakov said Russian and American officials had reached “an understanding that a meeting must take place,” but that “practical aspects will be discussed later.” He said that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin would, in any case, have an opportunity to meet at a Group of 20 gathering in November in Argentina, and that “maybe there will be other international events which Trump and Putin will take part in.”
Edited by megaeliz on Jul 26th 2018 at 2:03:47 PM
I don’t know, some might think that provoking a violent response would be better in the long run since it allows for a much more through crackdown on dissidents, especially since American law enforcement is broadly on their side. Though that is getting into conspiracy territory.
Also, that whole thing about Gunn being fired? At least one person pointed out it's part of a larger smear campaign
.
In the wake of Gunn’s ouster, Cernovich, Posobiec, et al. began circulating a 2009 video that showed Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon pretending to sexually assault a baby doll. Harmon, who has ranted about Trump’s pandering to Nazis on his podcast, apologized and deleted his Twitter account. Adult Swim, which airs Rick and Morty, has stood by Harmon.
While Harmon reportedly filmed the video as a low-budget send-up of Dexter, Trump fans on public-facing platforms like Twitter said the clip was evidence of his perverse sexual fantasies and/or his lack of concern for survivors of childhood abuse. In the privacy of their own forums, they told a different story. The Guardian reported that a 4chan user defended the decision to publicize the video by referencing Roseanne Barr’s ouster from her eponymous ABC sitcom after she compared black Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape. “If they get to take scalps for someone making racist jokes,” the user wrote, “we get to take scalps for them making pedophilia joke.”
To understand the nature of these public and private conversations, start by looking back at Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that Cernovich and Posobiec helped spread just after the 2016 election. That myth, which took hold in the white-supremacist fringes of the internet, held that Washington pizzeria Comet Ping Pong was a cover for a pedophilic sex-trafficking ring led by Democratic Party leaders, including Hillary and Bill Clinton. The propaganda campaign eventually inspired a believer with an assault weapon to shoot up the pizza place, claiming he was there to free the captive kids. Since that incident, Cernovich has deleted his Pizzagate-related tweets, while Posobiec—who went to Comet to livestream an “investigation”—later claimed that he never believed the conspiracy theory.
The attacks on Gunn, Harmon, and Comet Ping Pong are all examples of the same bizarre phenomenon: a bad-faith, right-wing fixation on pedophilia as a panic-raising ploy to discredit and silence progressive celebrities. While the Pizzagate gunman had clearly convinced himself that something sinister was going on in the back rooms of Comet Ping Pong, we should take Posobiec at his word that he thought the rumors were “stupid claims.” Similarly, it’s impossible to imagine that Cernovich, Posobiec, and their ilk genuinely believe that Gunn’s tweets are anything more than bad jokes. Cernovich’s tweets comparing Barr and Gunn (“Roseanne made an accidental racial joke. Once. Gunn had a patter and history going back years”) made it clear he was playing a political game. Posobiec, meanwhile, started the hashtag #James Gunn Movie Titles on Tuesday morning—his own entries included “Illegally Blonde,” “Kinder Guardians of the Galaxy,” and “Mad Max: Felony Road”—seamlessly transitioning into making jokes about child rape after spending a couple of days decrying jokes about child rape.
Right-wing pedophile-accusers are simply grasping for the easiest way to tarnish someone’s name. While adult women are unsympathetic as a victim class—otherwise, Cernovich’s own history of rape tweets might have forced him to fire himself from his job as an inveterate tweeter—but imaginary children are just right. Once the word pedophilia is uttered, a risk-averse corporation like Disney is going to do what a risk-averse corporation does. (Adult Swim deserves credit for not falling for this ploy.) This is the same tactic Cernovich pioneered during Gamergate, the movement in which a group of mostly men targeted mostly women who wrote feminist analyses of the video game industry and gamer culture. In one case, Cernovich successfully lobbied Gawker advertisers to end their arrangements with the site after a Gawker writer tweeted an obvious joke about bullying gamers.
The same strategies that worked back then—target individuals critical of your movement, make their identities known to a large group of angry people, embarrass their employers—are still effective now. In both Gamergate and this current wave of pedophilia accusations, far-right agitators have ginned up legitimate-sounding pretexts (ethics in games journalism, child rape) to abet their goal of harming their political enemies. With the help of social media platforms that allow them to spread disinformation to millions of users and bots, these guys can easily win the numbers game that convinces companies that firing a progressive employee—like Sam Seder, who was briefly let go from MSNBC after Cernovich found a 2009 tweet joking about Roman Polanski—is the smart thing to do.
Pizzagate and pedophile-smearing also have something in common with the day care– and satanic-abuse hysterias of the ’80s and ’90s. “Moral panics function somewhat like parables: They validate a group’s anxieties in a dramatic way, they exonerate the anxious from culpability, and they assign blame,” wrote Richard Beck, author of We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, of the relationship between Pizzagate and those earlier conspiracies. Alt-right and men’s rights activists are nothing if not anxious—anxious about falling white birth rates, the increasing prominence of communities of color, the entrance of feminist rhetoric into mainstream discourse, growing visibility and rights for LGBTQ people, the election of a black president and the near-election of a female one, and mounting pushback against people who say racist and sexist things in public. By accusing progressives of pedophilia, men scared of losing power can convince themselves and their like-minded peers that they have legitimate reasons to orchestrate their opponents’ downfall.
The day care abuse hysteria, Beck noted, was similarly rooted in anxieties about gender equality and perceived threats to the heterosexual nuclear family. “As the institution that cared for the children of working mothers during the week, day care became an object of suspicion for people who believed that a woman’s proper place was at home with the kids,” he wrote. People who suspected that day care pedophilia rings were sweeping the country were partially preoccupied with the idea of gay people existing around children. Gay people like day care worker Bernard Baran and the lesbians of the San Antonio four were unjustly prosecuted on account of their sexuality under the guise of a crackdown on pedophilic abuse. Likewise, Pizzagaters latched on to Comet Ping Pong as a supposed site of child rape in part because the owner is a gay man, an easy target for accusations of pedophilia. The white supremacists who went after the pizza place dug up pictures of drag queens who performed there and presented a gay bartender’s personal Instagram post of two men sharing a slice of pizza as apparent proof that something depraved was going on there.
Cernovich, Posobiec, and the other right-wingers who have now made vocal anti-Trump comedians their main targets—including, in recent days, Patton Oswalt and Michael Ian Black—aren’t saying the so-called pedophiles they’re exposing are gay. But their followers have been quick to link one moral outrage with the other.
In a forum on HLTV.org on Sunday, users discussing Harmon’s video joked that the LGBTQ acronym should be changed to “LGBTP.” “Those people need to be slaughtered,” one person wrote. On FF Today Forums.com, a user who quotes Trump in his profile posted a link to the video under the title, “#Himtoo Dan Harmon next up for being a pedophile.” Farther down the thread, others commented that “this is the crew constantly moralizing at the rest of us” and that “Hillary spent half her campaign hanging out with them … they couldn’t trot enough of them out on the stage at the DNC.” It’s not entirely clear to whom them refers in that comment, but it’s most likely trans people. (The July 2016 Democratic National Convention was the first in history to feature a transgender speaker.) Another user explicitly linked pedophilia to the issue of trans bathroom access, which the GOP has tried to restrict through legislation: “You mean you are opposed to your little girl using the same restroom as a grown man who decides to take a little extra peek between the door crack when hes walking by and hears her going tinkle? Bigot.”
It’s tempting to dismiss the pedophile-pushers as fringe actors—nuisances whose fake pedophile hunts will peter out when they run out of bad tweets to trumpet. But they’ve already gotten themselves a sympathetic audience in Congress: Sen. Ted Cruz has tweeted multiple times that Gunn should be prosecuted “if he’s telling the truth” about molesting children in his joke tweets. Cernovich has been tweeting and retweeting requests for members of Congress to schedule a hearing on child sex abuse in Hollywood. It wouldn’t shock me if such hearings actually took place.
People on the right are hungry for a win on the family-values front, a morals-based excuse to vote and advocate for the profoundly immoral. Our Republican president allegedly liked to make surprise tours of his pageant dressing rooms to ogle the half-naked teenage contestants. He also once speculated about the size of his 1-year-old daughter’s future breasts and has told several young girls that he’d be dating them in a few years. That’s not to mention the more than 20 women who’ve accused the president of sexual harassment or assault.
With this unabashedly abusive man leading the GOP from the White House, and with a literal Nazi and a credibly accused child molester representing the party on the ballot, mainstream right-wingers are sick of holier-than-thou liberals scolding the GOP. Cernovich and his acolytes aren’t interested in the right developing a conscience. They’d rather do away with moral authority altogether than try to reclaim some semblance of it for themselves.
The thing about Gunn is pretty much the same conversation we had about Al Franken. When one of our own is exposed for abhorrent behavior, should we:
- Clean house, preserving our moral high ground by refusing to let our movement be defined by abhorrent people.
- Close ranks around and protect them, because there is nothing more abhorrent than allowing THEIR SIDE to have any kind of victory.
The Republicans decided on the second option a long time ago. The question is what kind of people do we, the Democrats, want to be? Which matters more: moral integrity or protecting our own? Country or party?
Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 26th 2018 at 12:36:44 PM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
Except no it's not the same situation, they were a comedian who made an off-color joke in the past and apologized about it later. That is completely different from a senator being revealed to be a sexual predator.
It's ridiculous that he was fired over it and sets a dangerous precedent that alt-right trolls can conjure up a manufactroversy to get someone they don't like fired.
So no he's not abhorrent and it's ridiculous to compare him to Franken.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jul 26th 2018 at 2:45:41 PM
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang

Wow this thread moves fast.
Anyway, you mean Buchanan from Democracy in Chains? Because holy hell, that book is a mess
.