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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I wish that people actually would laugh in his face whenever he's trying to act like a tough guy and bully others into submission.
Donald Trump is really a boggart from the Harry Potter universe. He tries to assume the form of whatever he thinks will intimidate people the most. The only way to defeat him is with the Riddikulus spell, turning him into something nonsensically harmless — like the idiotic blowhard that he actually is; a big fat gasbag full of hot air.
Edited by pwiegle on Sep 25th 2018 at 10:04:54 AM
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.My take from today;
Orrin Hatch makes an ass of himself so thoroughly the Coachman from Pinocchio would be baffled.
I think he'd say something like...
Orrin Hatch: those snot nosed brats! How dare they accuse a good, strong and handsome lad like Bryce Walker of rape.
And Donald Trump goes to the UN, does his very best impression of Hitler...and gets laughed at. You saying everyone is laughing at us is one big self fulfilling prophecy, Don the Conman.
And over on Right Wing Watch the prophecies get loonier, this woman named Kat thinks she is Storm from the X Men, and David Chase Taylor becomes incomprehensible.
Edited by NickTheSwing on Sep 25th 2018 at 10:04:54 AM
Various news stories, some of which I've been meaning to post, some are new:
A Supreme Court ruling from the summer may mean thousands of deportation cases will be invalid
Long story shortish: in a case over the summer, the deportation of a man was halted and deemed invalid because his notice to appear in court did not include the court to appear in or the time to do so. If one has been in the country, even undocumented, for 10 years or more and never gotten in legal trouble or gotten a legal notice to appear in immigration court, they can be eligible to stay.
Since the error in paperwork mentioned above is apparently quite common, and many of the people the Trump administration is cracking down on meet the description laid out, it could be the difference between deportation and staying in the country for thousands, even tens of thousands.
"I'm not sure if the Supreme Court knew what they were doing," said Marshall Whitehead, an immigration lawyer in Phoenix. "But the end result of this is a major impact."
The Supreme Court's decision in the case known as Pereira v. Sessions didn't get much attention when it was announced in June, partly because it seemed so technical. The court ruled 8 to 1 that immigration authorities did not follow the law when they filled out the paperwork in that case. They served an immigrant with a notice to appear in court but didn't say when and where the hearing would be held.
"Basically the Supreme Court decision said look, you're not following the statute," Whitehead said. "So this notice to appear was ruled as being invalid."
That seemingly minor technicality has big implications.
Consider the case of Whitehead's client, Jose Silva Reyes, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. He was living in Arizona, under law enforcement's radar, for years — until 2010, when he ran a red light and got into a car accident.
Since then, Silva Reyes has been fighting in immigration court to stay in the country with his wife, a green card holder, and two kids who are citizens. He was due in court for his final deportation hearing last month, when the case against him was suddenly thrown out.
"When they told me that my case was terminated, I felt good," Silva Reyes said, speaking through an interpreter.
Like many undocumented immigrants caught up in President Trump's recent crackdown, Silva Reyes has been in the U.S. for more than 10 years. If you've lived in the U.S. for a decade without getting into trouble, and without ever getting a notice to appear in immigration court, you could be eligible to stay. Now, thanks to the Supreme Court, these immigrants can argue they never got a valid notice to appear in that 10-year time frame.
But the Supreme Court ruling could have an even wider impact.
Immigration lawyers are arguing that if any immigrant received a defective notice to appear, the whole deportation case is invalid. Silva Reyes' lawyer, Marshall Whitehead, says he has already gotten dozens of cases tossed out using this line of reasoning.
"I'm only one attorney, and I've got 200 cases I'm looking at," Whitehead said. "So you can see the massive numbers that we're talking about across the United States."
Rand Paul is set to introduce an amendment to end sanctions on Russian lawmakers
PDF of the amendment is in the article.
The amendment, which will be introduced at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting on Wednesday, stipulates that existing U.S. sanctions on members of the Russian Federal Assembly will be lifted if Moscow agrees to lift its own sanctions on certain American members of Congress.
Paul’s amendment is not likely to go anywhere on a foreign relations panel that is overwhelmingly skeptical of Russia and unwilling to lift sanctions in exchange for such a concession as the one Paul has outlined. At least one fellow senator—who herself is banned from traveling to Russia—is already objecting.
“Thanks, but no thanks. As a senator who has been sanctioned by the Kremlin, I see absolutely no need for this amendment and strongly believe that sanctions should continue to be enhanced for Russian leadership rather than weakened,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who was denied a Russian visa last year, told The Daily Beast. “As the Kremlin continues to attack our institutions and democracy, this amendment would be a capitulation to Putin’s aggression.”
Paul has made sanctions relief a cause of his since returning from Moscow last month. During that trip, which he took without any of his colleagues, Paul met with Russian officials and delivered a letter from President Donald Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin, which the White House later said was written at Paul’s request. In addition to meeting with former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, Paul had an hour-long sit-down with Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s legislature. During that meeting, according to Paul’s office, the senator invited Kosachev, who himself is banned from entering the U.S., to send Russian lawmakers to the U.S. Capitol to meet with their American counterparts. Paul’s amendment would be the first step toward allowing those Russians to travel to the U.S.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, paid for Paul’s trip.
The Kentucky senator has long been a proponent of President Donald Trump’s strategy to establish a better working relationship with Russia and with Putin. He has criticized his colleagues for their tougher stances on Russia, arguing that the U.S. should be promoting dialogue with Russia. And upon his return from Moscow, he openly questioned the purpose of the NATO alliance during a foreign relations committee hearing.
Putin's all consuming need to get around or destroy the Magnitsky Act
continues.
During his Fox News interview, Kavanaugh tried to claim that he has never had so much to drink that it would impair his memory. (I guess to cut off the angle of someone saying he might have done things while drunk and not remembered them later?) Some of his past classmates of all political persuasions and his own statements are calling bullshit on that claim
. While some of his friends and supporters are trying to say he only drank moderately, quite a few say otherwise.
Liz Swisher, who described herself as a friend of Kavanaugh in college, said she was shocked that — in an interview focused largely on his high school years and allegations of sexual misconduct — he strongly denied drinking to the point of blacking out.
“Brett was a sloppy drunk, and I know because I drank with him. I watched him drink more than a lot of people. He’d end up slurring his words, stumbling,” said Swisher, a Democrat and chief of the gynecologic oncology division at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “There’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out. . . . But it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess.”
Lynne Brookes, who like Swisher was a college roommate of one of the two women now accusing Kavanaugh of misconduct, said the nominee’s comments on Fox did not match the classmate she remembered.
“He’s trying to paint himself as some kind of choir boy,” said Brookes, a Republican and former pharmaceutical executive who recalled an encounter with a drunken Kavanaugh at a fraternity event. “You can’t lie your way onto the Supreme Court, and with that statement out, he’s gone too far. It’s about the integrity of that institution.”
Kavanaugh’s credibility will be tested this week as the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to hear sworn testimony from him and Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who alleges that he sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers decades ago and he was, in her words, “stumbling drunk.” As Thursday’s hearing approached, three Yale Law School classmates who had endorsed Kavanaugh called for an investigation into her claims and those of the other woman, and Yale Law professor Akhil Amar — who taught Kavanaugh and testified on his behalf before the committee — called for a probe into what he described as “serious accusations.”
...
Years before his Supreme Court nomination, Kavanaugh acknowledged heavy drinking in a 2014 speech to the Yale Federalist Society. He recalled organizing a boozy trip for 30 of his Yale Law classmates to Boston for a baseball game and a night of barhopping, complete with “group chugs from a keg” and a return to campus by “falling out of the bus onto the steps of Yale Law School at about 4:45 a.m.”
Another former classmate who has publicly supported Ramirez, James Roche, said Kavanaugh frequently drank to the point of incoherence. “He hung out with the football players and soccer players, and they drank a lot and were bros,” Roche, who briefly shared a room with Kavanaugh during their freshman year, said in an interview this month. In a statement Monday night, after the Fox interview, Roche described Kavanaugh as a “notably heavy drinker” who “became aggressive and belligerent when he was very drunk.”
Meanwhile, three Yale classmates who along with others endorsed Kavanaugh last month in a letter to the Judiciary Committee called Tuesday for an investigation into the sexual assault claims.
...
Kavanaugh hinted at his drinking in his 1983 Georgetown Prep yearbook entry. He identified himself as the “biggest contributor” to the Beach Week Ralph Club, an apparent reference to vomiting, and treasurer of the Keg City Club. “100 Kegs or Bust,” his entry says, referring to a campaign by his friends to empty 100 kegs of beer during their senior year.
Yeah, I'm about at the point where I don't believe a word out of the guy's mouth.
The Trump admin says it wants a merit based immigration system with skilled workers coming in. But it's making it harder to get or renew the visas that go to highly skilled workers, (most notably the H1-B) and also looking at revoking an Obama era reform that allows the spouses of H1-B visa holders to work while they apply for a green card
But critics say that rhetoric is at odds with the administration's actions.
"Show me any policy that's come out so far that has actually made it easier for highly skilled immigrants," says Doug Rand, who worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama.
"I haven't seen any," Rand said.
In practice, critics say the administration is making high-skilled immigrants' lives harder, in all sorts of ways. It has gotten tougher to get or renew an H-1B visa, a program that brings in tech workers, doctors and other professionals. And the administration is getting rid of other visa programs altogether.
That includes a special program for the spouses of H-1B guest workers that has been widely embraced by immigrants like Neha Mahajan. She hosts and produces a TV talk show in Edison, N.J., that's targeted mainly at Indian expats like her.
"This is the kind of work I always wanted to do," said Mahajan. "I am picking up topics that typically don't get talked about in the South Asian community. So I'm trying to be a change-maker in my community."
Mahajan has a master's degree in English literature and worked as a journalist in India. It never occurred to her that she would have trouble finding opportunities in the U.S. But Mahajan was not allowed to work when she first got here.
"So here I am in the U.S., the most advanced nation on this Earth," Mahajan said. "But I'm in a cage. A metaphoric golden cage."
Mahajan moved here with her husband and daughter in 2008 when he secured an H-1B visa to work as a software developer. But she wasn't able to work legally until 2015, when the Obama administration launched the H-4 EAD program. It allows the spouses of H-1B guest workers to get work permits once they've been approved for a green card. About 100,000 people have signed up — mostly women, and mostly from India, which has a years-long waiting list for green cards.
Now the Trump administration is poised to end the program, which it considers an overreach.
"For me, one of the main reasons for proposing to rescind that is because I don't think it's appropriate," said Lee Cissna, the head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of legal immigration. "I don't think that Congress intended for the spouses of H-1Bs to work."
Cissna did not respond to requests for an interview. But he did speak last month to the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower levels of immigration.
"Everything we do is guided by the law," Cissna said. "That's all we're doing."
The administration is also trying to kill another Obama-era program known as the International Entrepreneur Rule, which Doug Rand helped create.
"This was designed for entrepreneurs from other countries to more easily come to the U.S., or stay in the U.S., build companies here, create jobs for U.S. workers," said Rand, who now runs a firm called Boundless Immigration.
...
Nonetheless, immigrants like Neha Mahajan wonder whether the administration is serious about "merit-based" immigration.
"I don't know what to think," Mahajan said. "Hypocrisy, maybe? They want us to stay. They don't want us to stay. Why put people's lives into a limbo?"
Mahajan and other spouses of guest workers are pushing to save the H-4 EAD program that allows them to work. The Trump administration is expected to announce the official end of that program any day.
By the way, as is too often the case with NPR, it's far too polite when it makes reference to the Center for Immigration Studies, which is the alt-Right's favorite anti-immigrant "think tank" and whose founder was a racist that often made common cause with White Nationalists and Eugenicists. So that's who the official head of Citizenship and Immigration Services voluntarily gave a speech to.
Edited by TheWanderer on Sep 26th 2018 at 4:02:13 AM
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |Oh, and awhile ago Dinesh D'Souza (completely batshit right wing polemicist and racist
, btw) was being an ass on Twitter and insinuating that Puerto Rico provides nothing of worth to the US, so even calling the US actions towards it colonialism aren't right, since colonies usually provide something their empires want.
For those who don't want to click on twitter links:
D'Souza: Normally colonies provide resources for the nation that rules them. What does Puerto Rico provide the US?
Occasio Cortez:
- Hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the US military
- Nat’l supply of hospital IV bags & medical supplies
- Historically, sugar, coffee, crops
- A strategic port in the Atlantic
- & Importantly for the 1%, one of the biggest loophole tax havens for the super-rich.
It is revealing that this question:
- a) comes from quite the colonial mindset of “what value is this territory providing us anyway?” (Do we ask that about Appalachia, etc?)
- b) implies that PR’s current status is somehow an act of charity - also a sentiment rooted in colonialism
Senate news, Nelson has now pulled slightly ahead in the polling average for the Florida senate race (according to Real Clear Politics).
Dems are also ahead in Nevada and Arizona, but behind in North Dakota and Missouri (by 0.6% in the later case and with only a single recent poll in the former case), with Tennessee being tied.
Edited by Silasw on Sep 26th 2018 at 8:34:55 AM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranUS warns Europe of ‘terrible consequences’ if Iran links maintained
“We do not intend to allow our sanctions to be evaded by Europe or anybody else,” US national security adviser John Bolton said in a speech on Tuesday at a forum in New York sponsored by a group intensely critical of the Iran nuclear accord.
Mr Bolton threatened “terrible consequences” for anyone who continuedto do business with Iran after November 4th, the day the United States will reinstate the remaining sanctions it had lifted under the deal.
Many European countries, including Britain, France and Germany, have announced their intention to continue doing business with Iran. The European Union has passed a law forbidding European companies from complying with US sanctions.
Lol (no other word seems appropriate) at the Trump administration wanting Europeans to always concede to their ridiculous demands while constantly insulting them and suggesting they wouldn't bother with russian aggression on the smaller countries.
Life is unfair...When you roll a 1 on a diplomacy check but try to lead anyway?
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |Reposting this unanswered question from the previous page: What's the standard procedure if a Congressional candidate dies before winning the candidacy?
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.I am a little bit surprised that the American media doesn't pay a little bit more attention to what Trump did at the UN. It is not just that everyone was laughing at him. It was not just that he attacked Germany and other allies again. He went up there, a body which is all about co-operation between nations and told them that he doesn't belief in it at all.
He's been quite open about that.
Like, I think he's been harder on the UN than NATO, which is saying a lot.
And the thing is, it's one of his more reasonable positions (which is damning by faint praise). A lot of Americans don't have a great deal of respect for the UN so his position isn't nearly as outlandish as it is on... most things.
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.Aventtati third client claims she was gang raped by Kavanaugh and Judge
Like I knew he wasn’t bluffing but holy shit !
New Survey coming this weekend!

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45644559
Trump just made his day at the UN.
His speech is mostly thanks to North Korea for disarming, calling Iran out for being a terror supporter and violating the previous treaty signed and bad, bad multilateralism.