January 30, 2018

Trump said he won't impose the sanctions despite a veto-proof majority

This was the vote on Russian Sanctions:

House: 419-3
Senate: 98-2

Today, Trump said he won't impose the sanctions despite a veto-proof majority.

Congratulations, America. Laws are meaningless now.

There is a country whose leader is being investigated by an agency that's being investigated secretly by a legislator who was on the leader's transition team, which that agency is investigating for colluding with a nation that's subject to sanctions the leader refuses to enforce.

https://twitter.com/Pappiness/status/958164365051662336
https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/958149108694478848

January 30, 2018

Comey: "McCabe stood tall-when small people were trying to tear down institutions we all depend on"

@Comey
Special Agent Andrew McCabe stood tall over the last 8 months, when small people were trying to tear down an institution we all depend on. He served with distinction for two decades. I wish Andy well. I also wish continued strength for the rest of the FBI. America needs you.

https://twitter.com/Comey/status/958145125120663553

January 29, 2018

NBC's Pete Williams: FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe stepping down

https://twitter.com/JesseRodriguez/status/958028232372219905

https://twitter.com/JesseRodriguez/status/958028570403721216

https://twitter.com/ThePlumLineGS/status/958028865066106881


https://twitter.com/ByBrianBennett/status/958029620292608000

January 29, 2018

Someone should show this to The Stable Genius.

Congratulations to Mehul Garg,a 10-year-old Indian-origin boy in UK who has beaten Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking in Mensa IQ test.Mensa is said to be the High IQ Society in the world.His old brother too scored the highest last year.S




https://twitter.com/WithRV/status/957137711470583808

January 29, 2018

Natalia Veselnitskaya, who organized notorious Trump Tower meeting-Exposed In Swiss Corruption Case

CONSPIRACY
Trump Tower Russian Lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Exposed in Swiss Corruption Case
Natalia Veselnitskaya, who organized the notorious Trump Tower meeting, has been named in an explosive Swiss court case about bribery, corruption, and double-agents.

01.29.18 8:00 AM ET
LONDON—The Moscow operation behind the now-infamous Russian-Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 included a direct attempt to enlist a foreign country’s law-enforcement official as a virtual double-agent, according to a court case in Switzerland.

One of Switzerland’s top investigators has been fired after allegations of bribery, violating secrecy laws, and “unauthorized clandestine behavior” in meeting with the very same Russian actors linked to the Trump Tower encounter.

Details of the explosive case have been published by investigative reporters for the Tribune de Genève and Tages-Anzeiger newspapers in Switzerland. The officer, identified only as Victor K., traveled to Moscow—against the expressed wishes of his superiors—where he spoke to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower.

The meeting was reportedly set up by Russian Deputy Attorney General Saak Albertovich Karapetyan—from the same rogue department that was apparently responsible for offering intel on Hillary Clinton to be shared at the Trump Tower meeting and the Kremlin’s further plots to influence U.S. politics.

The reports, which are based on Swiss court papers, describe how K. was lured to Moscow during a call from Karapetyan before Christmas 2016. He was told not to go by his boss, ostensibly because he was working too much overtime, but he made the trip anyway, using his diplomatic passport to fly to the Russian capital. There, he was put up in a luxury hotel and asked to attend an unexpected meeting with Veselnitskaya.

In the case against K.—who had been entrusted with investigating the Swiss financial arrangements of the Russian mafia and oligarchs for decades—it emerged that he had previously met Karapetyan in Geneva and Zurich, as well as Russia “without the knowledge of his superiors.”


According to the Tages-Anzeiger report, the Swiss Federal Administrative Court ruled this amounted to unacceptable “unauthorized clandestine behavior” that brought the integrity of the Federal Criminal Police into question. “In particular, it gives the impression that they do not have their employees under control and thus creates an unpredictable security risk in their delicate field.”


https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-tower-russian-lawyer-natalia-veselnitskaya-exposed-in-swiss-corruption-case?source=twitter&via=mobile

January 29, 2018

BREAKING NEWS: Trump Is NOT A Feminist!

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Asked about his treatment of women, Trump says he has “tremendous respect” for women but does not consider himself a feminist.

“I think that would be, maybe, going too far,” he says.



MORE:
https://apnews.com/71e792661d924dbfa58eef7e5d315b4c?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=AP

January 29, 2018

Donald Trump has an unusual kind of power: He reveals weakness.

This quality he extends to all things — people, traditions, movements — and while you know all this by now, the way he traffics in lingering doubts (e.g., Lyin’ Ted) and the malleable dignity of those around him, in all the small compromises people make with themselves toward an end, what all these individual shortfalls do in the aggregate is to expose the fragility of our modern national institutions.

What exactly, for instance, is supposed to happen if the president wonders why we accept immigrants from “shithole” countries? Or says a group of white supremacists included “very fine” people? Backhandedly calls the North Korean dictator short and fat?

Nothing, of course. There’s no institution to guard against any of that. And since there’s no way to quantify the harm in any of it, either (no laws broken, no physical destruction), all these things that President Trump says just land in a weird rhetorical DMZ, where there is no recourse. That unease defined the last year. And it’s this kind of phantom feeling that something should’ve happened, but didn’t or won’t, that flows through each of the central stories of the moment: Trump’s presidency, the nightmare revelations of sexual abuse, and the accumulating problems of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. What brings all these things together is the assault, from the White House and from journalists, for worse and for better, on core institutions.

With Trump, it’s like constantly watching a fly ball fall between a shortstop and a left fielder — that kind of suspended anxiety free fall, where nobody really knows what to do, because there’s nothing to do. Morning in America is disorientingly open with possibility, because who knows where Trump will take things next?

“It’s oddly riveting,” George Saunders wrote during the campaign, nearly two years ago, “watching someone take such pleasure in going so much farther out on thin ice than anyone else as famous would dare to go.” Nobody ever decided whether that dynamic drove or hindered Trump’s success, but what it definitely did was expose the extent to which the American political system was relying on shame to keep it in check.

.................



the rest:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/katherinemiller/the-past-year-and-the-breakdown-of-institutional-power?utm_term=.ltmLJ603A#.qvWNXdve8

January 29, 2018

David Frum sets low bar for Trumps SOTU: You can train a seal to behave for an hour

“I don’t have any questions left about Donald Trump,” Frum said about the possibility of Trump’s polling increasing. “He has answered every question I have. And I think we all know who he is. We all know what he is, we all know why he’s president, and what got him into that job. So, I think the question for all of us is how do we protect the country during the remainder of the presidency. There are no serious questions left about what kind of person he is.”

Harlow was shocked Frum had no expectations of Trump, but the former George W. Bush speechwriter said you can train anyone to deliver a speech.

“You can train a seal to sit on the side of the pool for an hour and behave itself,” Frum said. “That doesn’t make it no longer a seal. If Donald Trump can get beyond an hour of good behavior, he has done that before, but that doesn’t tell you what will happen at an hour and five minutes.



MORE:
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/ex-bush-speechwriter-sets-low-bar-trumps-sotu-can-train-seal-behave-hour/#.Wm8UcfdyzCI.twitter

January 29, 2018

Warner Says Investigation Has New Information

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told Politico that Congress late last year received “extraordinarily important new documents” in its investigation of President Trump and his campaign’s possible collusion with the 2016 Russian election hacking, opening up significant new lines of inquiry in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the president.

Warner says “end-of-the-year document dumps” produced “very significant” revelations that “opened a lot of new questions” that Senate investigators are now looking into, meaning the inquiry into Trump and the Russia hacking—already nearly a year old—will not be finished for months longer.




https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/957951534419140608
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/29/mark-warner-global-politico-216545
https://politicalwire.com/2018/01/29/warner-says-investigation-new-information/

January 29, 2018

Germany offers INSPIRATION for those of us RESISTING Trump.

Düsseldorf. German carnival parades traditionally carry political messages. This year, the city of Düsseldorf specifically targeted US president Donald Trump: On one float, the president is seen raping the Statue of Liberty. On another one, Lady Liberty is beheading Trump.


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MORE:
http://www.rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/duesseldorf/karneval/donald-trump-mocked-by-german-carnival-floats-statue-of-liberty-beheads-president-aid-1.6638203