This is the only candidate who can beat President Trump? //
After Joe Biden’s stunningly stupid “you ain’t black” remark on Charlamagne tha God’s Friday morning show, he followed up with this little-noticed gem.
He told CNBC host Joe Kernan, “I’m prepared to say that I have a record of over forty years and that I’m going to beat Joe Biden.”
It's not just because he farted on national television. //
Rep. Eric Swalwell
✔
@RepSwalwell
Slight correction on your tweet: I trust FBI & Director Wray. I don’t trust @ODNIgov Directors @RichardGrenell or @RepRatcliffe. They’re the ones with the shovels burying evidence to protect @realDonaldTrump. https://twitter.com/noahshachtman/status/1263855239628648449 …
Richard Grenell
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@RichardGrenell
I’m letting the public see more info. You are the one who worked to hide the information you didn’t like. You listened to multiple people in classified hearings say they had no evidence and yet go on TV and say the opposite. Transparency is now a must! https://twitter.com/repswalwell/status/1263860933081870338 …
Rep. Eric Swalwell
✔
@RepSwalwell
Thanks for showing up on Twitter. You never once came to brief the Intel Committee (First DNI Director who failed to do so). If you have nothing to hide, why don’t you release Flynn’s call with Russia? #ShowUsTheTape https://twitter.com/richardgrenell/status/1263863419071090691 …
Richard Grenell
✔
@RichardGrenell
Those are coming. It’s very important for the public to see ALL of them. For too long the public has been misled. Just compare your committee’s transcripts to your public statements! #troubling https://twitter.com/repswalwell/status/1263865225973030912 …
Why doesn't Joe ever know what's going on? //
Today @SecretarySonny and @IvankaTrump announced the launch of a program which will spend $3 BILLION to purchase product from farmers for food lines, kitchens and the Farmers to Families Food Box program!
Cold. as. ice. //
Pompeo was asked about the issue at a State Department news conference earlier today, and again denied that the firing was retaliatory. While he wouldn’t go into too many specifics because it’s a personnel matter, he did take the opportunity to fire back at the office of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who Pompeo says is behind the leaks of this story to the press:
Here’s the last thing to think about as you see these stories leaked to you all, to the press. This is all coming through the office of Senator Menendez. I don’t get my ethics guidance from a man who was criminally prosecuted — case number 15-155, New Jersey Federal District Court. A man for whom his Senate colleagues, bipartisan, said basically that he was taking bribes. That’s — that’s not someone who I look to for ethics guidance.
And so, I’ll continue to do the right thing. Make sure the State Department is served by every employee, including our inspector general. And we’ll make sure the State Department continues to deliver on behalf of the American people.
It isn't the weight of the evidence but the seriousness of the allegation which demands an investigation.
The tapes meet the Steele Dossier standard and we know what that means //
Laocoon
2 hours ago
“… But we do have a solution. A special counsel. Department of Justice regulations say this about the appointment of a special counsel: …”
With all due respect sir, not only NO…but HELL NO!
I remain your #1 fan but this is crazy-talk. Special Counsels and Independent Counsels before them…with few exceptions…have proven to be complete disasters. They unilaterally expand their investigations, stretch their charter to the edge of the laugh-test envelope, inevitably abuse their powers, almost always shift their focus to finding even the most tangential wrongdoing by REPUBLICANS, and quickly begin to operate like the thoughtcrime police from 1984.
A Special Counsel on Biden will inevitably morph into an investigation of Rudy, his collusion with Russia to influence the 2020 election, and pressure the entire Trump administration brought to bear on the government of Ukraine to play ball with Trump. AGAIN. He/she will try to indict Don Jr. for obstructing their investigations of Rudy, Ivanka for having a Russian-sounding name, Jay Sekulow for opposing Trump’s impeachment, Sidney Powell for wearing white pants before Memorial Day, Kellyanne Conway for aggravated mopery, Rick Grenell for conspiracy to dawdle, and AG Barr for…whatever.
In my admittedly uninformed opinion, I think that doing another Special Counsel after 3 years of the Mueller/Weissman inquisition is pure crazy-talk. Remember…distinguished Republican former Judge Lawrence Walsh investigated Iran-Contra for 7 damned years producing nothing but 2 overturned verdicts against Republican NSC officials and an indictment of Casper Weinberger for lying to his freakin’ diary. Good Republican Patrick Fitzgerald studiously spent 4 years ignoring Republican-appointed State Department official Richard Armitage (who Fitzgerald knew about on day 1 of his “investigation”) to go after the innocent Republican Scooter Libby and convict him in a pathetic tilting-at-windmills attempt to get VP Cheney. I won’t even go into the serial horror-show that was the 3 year Mueller inquisition.
Special Counsels are an abominable extra-Constitutional perversion of justice. They have led to nothing but partisan hatred, financial ruin, broken lives, disillusion with the justice system, FBI corruption, and uncounted civil rights abuses. The worst of them are nominal Republicans who typically only consider criminal charges against Republicans. No more Special Counsels EVER…under any circumstances. Ceterum autem censeo Specialis Consiliator esse delendam!
The tapes meet the Steele Dossier standard and we know what that means
Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”
Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”
One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.” //
The acts at issue are calls Flynn made to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 29th, 2016 in which he told the Russians not to overreact to sanctions. That’s it. The investigation was about to be dropped, but someone got the idea of using electronic surveillance of the calls to leverage a case into existence.
In a secrets-laundering maneuver straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook, some bright person first illegally leaked classified details to David Ignatius at the Washington Post, then agents rushed to interview Flynn about the “news.”
“The record of his conversation with Ambassador Kislyak had become widely known in the press,” is how Deputy FBI chief Andrew McCabe put it, euphemistically. “We wanted to sit down with General Flynn and understand, kind of, what his thoughts on that conversation were.”
A Laurel-and-Hardy team of agents conducted the interview, then took three weeks to write and re-write multiple versions of the interview notes used as evidence (because why record it?). They were supervised by a counterintelligence chief who then memorialized on paper his uncertainty over whether the FBI was trying to “get him to lie” or “get him fired,” worrying that they’d be accused of “playing games.” After another leak to the Washington Post in early February, 2017, Flynn actually was fired, and later pleaded guilty to lying about sanctions in the Kislyak call, the transcript of which was of course never released to either the defense or the public.
Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer. //
On the campaign trail in 2016, I watched Democrats hand Trump the economic populism argument by dismissing all complaints about the failures of neoliberal economics. This mistake was later compounded by years of propaganda arguing that “economic insecurity” was just a Trojan Horse term for racism. These takes, along with the absurd kneecapping of the Bernie Sanders movement, have allowed Trump to position himself as a working-class hero, the sole voice of a squeezed underclass.
The same mistake is now being made with civil liberties. Millions have lost their jobs and businesses by government fiat, there’s a clamor for censorship and contact tracing programs that could have serious long-term consequences, yet voters only hear Trump making occasional remarks about freedom; Democrats treat it like it’s a word that should be banned by Facebook (a recent Washington Post headline put the term in quotation marks, as if one should be gloved to touch it). Has the Trump era really damaged our thinking to this degree?
In 1981, a Georgetown professor, Jeane Kirkpatrick, remaining a Democrat, became Ronald Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations. Reagan brought Kirkpatrick, as he did with many Democratic hawks who were dismayed with the dovish position of mainstream Democrats.
Kirkpatrick had worked closely with Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson. As an increasingly influential public intellectual in the 1970s, she criticized not only what she saw as President Jimmy Carter's soft and naive stance on communism, but also the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger "detente" policy of accommodating to the Soviet expansion.
And so for the first time since 1952, the 1984 Republican National Convention chose a keynote speaker who was not a Republican. Kirkpatrick delivered a blistering speech, dealing exclusively with foreign policy. She was appealing to large segment of Reagan Democrats who were terrified Progressive and Democratic Establishment did not understand the mortal danger of the Soviet threat.
Kirkpatrick ran through a litany of recent foreign policy controversies: Grenada, Lebanon, the Soviet walk-out from arms negotiations, and Central America. On every topic, said Kirkpatrick, the San Francisco Democrats "always blame America first." //
I heard Jeane Kirkpatrick give her famous speech. The UN Ambassador went on a tirade about the “blame America first” Democrats who had been meeting in San Francisco.
Kirkpatrick was a Democrat hawk who came into the Reagan Administration in reaction to a Democratic Party that had rapidly drifted left to the point Ted Kennedy would try to get the Soviet Leader Andropov to do an American media tour to defuse tensions in the run up to the 1984 election. Kennedy wanted to advise the Soviets on how to navigate the American media to show they meant peace as a way to undermine the strong “evil empire” stance Reagan had advanced.
In her speech, Kirkpatrick said of the Democrats who had convened to nominate Walter Mondale in San Francisco,
They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do - they didn't blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians - they blamed the United States instead.
But then, somehow, they always blame America first.
When our Marines, sent to Lebanon on a multinational peacekeeping mission with the consent of the United States Congress, were murdered in their sleep, the "blame America first crowd" didn't blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.
But then, they always blame America first.
When Marxist dictators shoot their way to power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies, they blame United States policies of 100 years ago.
But then, they always blame America first.
What was different between then and now is that while the media leaned left, it was still mostly run by men who had fought on the battlefields of Germany and the islands of the Pacific. They may have leaned left, but they were not really haters of America even if they thought Reagan was too belligerent.
Now, however, the American media is too willing to spread Chinese communist propaganda to own the President. Because Trump is President, the media would rather believe a tyrannical regime that ruthlessly murders dissidents and runs concentration camps.
When you look at the numbers of dead throughout the Wuhan virus pandemic, one pattern follows in almost every state. Namely, that nursing homes are the epicenters of the outbreak. We’ve seen incredibly large death rates among our most vulnerable populations.
But one state in particular did something that make the issue that much worse. New York instituted and enforced a rule which required nursing homes to re-accept COVID-19 positive patients back into their facilities. The toll for that has been enormous. New York added 1,700 more nursing home deaths to the fatality rolls in just the past few days. It’s a massive scandal that no one is talking about.
In fact, Gov. Andrew Cuomo went on CNN last night. Not once was even asked about why he put that order in place and its consequences. //
The sheer arrogance is incredible and it’s exactly why so many are looking upon New York with disdain right now. These people have cast aspersions and blame on states with that have only a fraction of the same issues, yet it took until last night for them to shut their subways down to clean them for the first time in 115 years. But when a major hot spot is identified such as the nursing homes, New York’s politicians doesn’t even want to change their practices while everyone else suffers.
To capstone his ridiculous answer, de Blasio then flips to his communist playbook and blames “for profit” nursing homes for what’s happened. These are facilities that have been overrun with the virus by order of the state and city. They contain hardworking healthcare workers barely making it, and New York’s mayor is suggesting they are letting people die to make more money. That suggestion is absolutely disgusting and deserves total condemnation.
That's going to sting...
Get ready to see a lot more of this //
Ironically, as well as hitting every conceivable Biden weak point–corruption, self-dealing, weak on defense, reflexive liar, subservient to China, and demented–This video demonstrates that absolutely no one in the media actually believed that President Trump was in any way obliged to Russia for his victory in 2016. In just one minute, the Trump campaign lays bare extensive links between Biden and China that seem to indicate the man is in bondage to Beijing in a way that no one was ever able to provide to link Trump to Russia. The fact that the media have not covered these links between China and Biden and Biden’s suck-up statements about China shows they do not take them seriously. If they don’t take these links seriously, there is no way they took the Russia Hoax seriously.
Expect to see more of this. //
on Wednesday evening following the publication of this report, the Defense Department provided a statement from Col. R. Shane Day, Director of the NCMI.” The statement read:
As a matter of practice the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters. However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists. //
I agree 100% that leaders must react quickly in the face of a threat. But I have a question for all of the:? What possible motive would President Trump or any other administration officials have to cover this up? They know that Trump is not afraid to confront China. He has done so numerous times. Why would he try to cover up something he had nothing to do with? There is no conceivable reason. Of course they would have acted if they had knowledge in November or even in December that a “cataclysmic event” was coming.
President Trump is not afraid to act. Go ask Qassem Soleimani if you need any proof. //
Streiff also provides a timeline of the crisis. It starts on December 10, when Wei Guixian, one of the earliest known coronavirus patients, starts feeling ill. Additionally, he includes a timeline of the Trump Administration’s response. I highly recommend it.
When even CNN is calling you out... //
Elizabeth Harrington
✔
@LizRNC
You know what you hand out pens for? Accomplishments.
Like, say, signing a historic trade deal with China.
So it's fitting that Democrats are handing out pens for their sole accomplishment: impeachment
Democrats have done NOTHING for the American people //
Your Congress at work: special pens made for signing articles of Impeachment.
She's blazing a trail. //
Nancy got flamed over her tweeted claim of an “alarming” incident in Wisconsin.
Here we go:
“It’s beyond alarming that more than 200,000 registered Wisconsin voters will be prohibited from voting. Less than a year from the election, we must ensure [Wisconsin Democrats] have the resources to respond with a massive voter registration effort. Don’t agonize. Organize!” //
Pelosi says these 200,000-plus people “will be prohibited from voting.”
That’s a major overstatement of how this actually works.
Yes, the pruning process — if allowed by the courts — could potentially remove more than 200,000 people from the voting rolls before the upcoming elections. But there is no punitive element that would ban future voting. Everyone can re-register, even on Election Day.
The use of the word “prohibited,” in particular, goes too far, in that it suggests there is no way to vote in the future.
We rate Pelosi’s claim Pants on Fire.
Maybe that’s why she wore black Wednesday — hides the soot.
Baby Yoda, the juggernaut character from Disney+'s Star Wars series "The Mandalorian," is driving almost twice as many average social media interactions on news stories about it as any 2020 Democrat, according to data from NewsWhip exclusively provided to Axios.
Why it matters: The internet's most memeable 50-year-old broke through the online conversation in a huge way since the show's Nov. 12 premiere — and its viral success should worry the 2020 race's late Democratic entrants, Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick.
The big picture: Both Bloomberg and Patrick staked their runs on the idea that voters would hungrily embrace a fresh face to shake up the 2020 race — but compared to Baby Yoda, they're not exactly capturing the public's imagination.
The guy at the center of the storm is not a whistleblower by any stretch of the imagination. Not only did he not witness any illegal behavior, he didn’t even witness any behavior. He’s a gossipmonger who is trying to damage the President because of what seems to be more personal animus than a policy basis. I hope Trump finds out this guy’s name and gives him the recognition on Twitter that he deserves. I’m not alone in my assessment of the whistleblower’s status, the Office of Legal Counsel agrees. I think everyone throws around treason and traitor a bit too freely, but after watching the Democrats and some people who used to write here in action, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m in a minority. If Trump has been accused of treason, he has certainly earned the right to repay that insult in its own coin. On the serious side, this shows that quite a few of the intelligence agency employees attached to the White House are openly partisan and will happily use their position to forward those goals. I’d be all in favor of Trump going after the people doing this with all the vigor that Bill Barr can wring out of the Justice Department.
On the merits, I’m not impressed at all with the whistleblower complaint. There is literally nothing in there that is illegal and, unless you’re a Democrat, there isn’t very much to object to.
Two thoughts here. Does anyone really believe that he made these statements in front of this audience without the intent that they’d be made public. Think about it. State Department employees in New York are not really a core Trump constituency.
Second... Trump [and GOP] have raised $13million this week off this...