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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@Charles Phipps: Strangely, I suspect he might actually be trying to be the political equivalent of a wrestling heel. Most politicians use deliberately vague statements to get people to agree; Trump uses vague statements to get people to argue. Likely an invocation of no such thing as bad publicity.
Leviticus 19:34Famously, Trump was offended by the sight of low (by comparison to him) income housing on the edges of his golf course in Scotland. He wanted them to invoke Eminent Domain on them to get rid of them despite, at least in that area, that didn't exist.
So guess what?
He built a wall around the golf course!
And it was beautiful....to no one.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2019/02/15/day-757/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/15/national-emergency-border-wall-trump-latest-news
https://www.rollcall.com/news/congress/capitol-police-crackdown-press-escalates-physical-altercation
The White House announced the national emergency by tweet using the iPhone Notes app. (Buzz Feed News)
Trump's national emergency press conference, annotated. (Washington Post)
Trump's bizarre, rambling national emergency announcement distracted from what the president actually did. (The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/trump-emergency-declaration/582904/
In November 2014, Trump called taking executive action on immigration dangerous, unconstitutional, and impeachable. (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/14/politics/kfile-trump-immigration-executive-action-2014/index.html
2/ The Justice Department warned the White House that a national emergency declaration is nearly certain to be blocked by the courts, which would prevent the immediate implementation of Trump's plan to circumvent Congress and build the wall using his executives powers. (ABC News)
3/ House Democrats plan to pass a joint resolution disapproving of Trump's emergency declaration, which would force Senate Republicans to take a public position. By law, if one chamber passes a resolution, the other one must bring it up for a vote within 18 days. While Republicans hold a 53-to-47 advantage, the resolution would only need a simple majority to pass. A White House aide indicated that Trump would "absolutely veto" any congressional efforts to interfere with his plan to declare a national emergency to secure funding for his border wall. (Washington Post / New York Times / NBC News / Politico)
4/ The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the Trump administration can add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census. A federal judge last month stopped the Commerce Department from adding the question, questioning the motives of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who claimed he ordered the question to be added in response to a December 2017 request from the Justice Department, which said that data about citizenship would help it enforce the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Judge Jesse Furman of the United States District Court in Manhattan issued an opinion saying that "promoting enforcement" of the Voting Rights Act "was not his real reason for the decision." The court is scheduled to hear arguments in April so that it can issue a decision before census forms are printed in June. (Washington Post / New York Times)
5/ Robert Mueller's team interviewed Sarah Huckabee Sanders in early fall of 2018 – around the time that Trump's former Chief of Staff John Kelly was questioned by Mueller's team. (CNN / CNBC)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/politics/sarah-sanders-robert-mueller/index.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/boyfriends-email-butina-manipulated-russian-spy-agency-for-nra-trip
A federal judge has placed a gag order on Roger Stone and attorneys involved in his criminal case, ordering the Trump associate to "refrain from making statements to the media or in public settings that pose a substantial likelihood of material prejudice to this case." (Politico / CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/politics/roger-stone-gag-order/index.html
https://apnews.com/ee79b8c8f3a8497eab4a54741612dec8
The top American general in the Middle East disagreed with Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria, and warned that the terror group was far from defeated. (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/15/politics/joseph-votel-troops-syria-intl/index.html
Pro-Israel lobbyists and donors spent more than $22 million on lobbying and campaign contributions during the last election cycle. Those same groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars through a variety of channels in order to influence American politics and elections in recent decades. The Guardian investigation found that the pro-Israel lobby is "highly active and spends heavily to influence US policy," but not as heavily as some U.S. business sectors. "I haven’t observed many other countries that have a comparable level of activity, at least in domestic lobbying data," said a senior researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics. The Guardian started examining the data after Muslim Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar claimed pro-Israel lobby money influenced U.S. policy. (The Guardian)
Trump claimed that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to broker peace between North and South Korea. The Japanese have not announced Trump's nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize. (Politico / Washington Post)
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/15/trump-shinzo-abe-nobel-peace-prize-1171831
At least 10 Trump judicial nominees in the past year have refused to endorse Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 ruling that abolished school segregation. (Mother Jones)
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To be fair Parliament doesn't technically have that right explicitly IIRC despite granting it to several other institutions, but they could just pass an Act saying "That's ours now, fuck you". As in fact they once did, to expropriate hospitals to form the NHS. This is obviously irrelevant in the Trump case since they'd never bother and I believe outright expropriation without compensation is outlawed under EU proportionality rules nowadays, as well as Article 17 in the EU charter of fundamental rights. I find declaring intellectual property a "fundamental right" slightly grandiose, but there you go.
Edited by DeathorCake on Feb 15th 2019 at 1:40:24 PM
Cross-posted from the Venezuela thread: in an interview with the Associated Press, Nicolas Maduro claimed his foreign minister recently secretly met the US special envoy in New York and invited them to Venezuela for talks.
There was a workplace shooting in Aurora, Illinois yesterday. 5 dead, and 5 police wounded, the lone shooter was shot dead. Early assessments suggest it was a workplace shooting, with the suspect being an employee.
Edited by Rationalinsanity on Feb 15th 2019 at 12:06:10 PM
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Not if they're locked up in Hell... and I mean one that isn't a Cardboard Prison, like so many works of fiction portray it as to justify The Legions of Hell escaping from it.
Without mentioning any disorders, Manafort and Stone have both proven to ACT like narcissists and pathological liars. Manafort had a cushy prison with its own gym and privileges but he violated his conditions that got him bumped down to a general cell. He fished for a pardon from Trump, got crickets chirping, and then turned to get a deal from Mueller.
Then he tried to intimidate witnesses and contact Trump with the threat of Mueller to get a pardon/intervention.
And Mueller found out...
The short version is Manafort is so USED to breaking the law that he can't stop.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 15th 2019 at 10:34:38 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

Huh. Talk about a pagetopper.
Edited by kkhohoho on Feb 15th 2019 at 6:10:36 AM