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onetexan's Journal4 progressive Democrats named to House Oversight Committee - AOC, RTlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ro Khanna
Source: Axios
4 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) — were named Tuesday night to the House Oversight Committee.
Why it matters: The influential Oversight Committee, led by Rep. Elijah Cummings, will serve as a powerful check on the Trump administration, which has accrued a laundry list of potential subpoena targets over the past two years. The four new members — all of which, besides Khanna, are freshmen — have been exceptionally outspoken in their criticism of the administration, with Tlaib in particular making headlines recently for her expletive-laced call to impeach President Trump.
Read more: https://www.axios.com/progressive-democrats-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-house-oversight-committee-a9baf
Take note: All 4 are MINORITY Reps
HELP! Need ammo for a trump-supporting sibling
Does anyone have a link to a site where a watchdog group is keeping track of all of trump's offenses/violations against the Constitution, ways he's devastating the government, the environment, our democracy, etc.? I need ammo to argue with my Fox-watching, trump-supporting sibling. She thinks trump is doing a damn good job with the economy and helping small business owners. She uses that to excuse his misogyny, his racism, and his ineptitude elsewhere.
My older sister (only by a couple of years) is a kindhearted and loving person, and a successful small business owner whose just a bit shallow in her thinking and have watched a bit too much of Fox news. I believe she is salvageable and can be led to "see the light" if i have enough ammo to make a reasoned argument with her.
Thanks, and happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Lawrence Tribe: "Trump running scared"
https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-trump-afraid-after-election-loss-1366792259542?v=raila&"every legal action Whittaker attempts to take now subject to a legal challenge in court...
Trump expects Whittaker to protect him. Whittaker knows he's publicly suspected as having been installed in order to commit crimes for Trump.
He is expected to commit multiple count of obstruction of justice if necessary like John Mitchell did for Nixon, and went to prison."
Quite a good episode of Lawrence Tribe. CHILLING.
NYT says a Blue Wave did happen
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/07/us/politics/how-democrats-took-the-house.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=HomepageSee the graphic; picture says a thousand words. I've seen alot of people post here and at other sites there wasn't a blue wave. As Joe Biden says, Malarkey! There was a wave, and it got us what we wanted - we won back the House, and we flipped governorships.
Problems at the polls? Here's what's happening now
Source: USA Today
An array of federal agencies is monitoring the election as it unfolds, including the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, intelligence officials and the FBI. Federal and state officials – who received $380 million this year to beef up their election systems – have deployed sensors on local networks to try and detect intrusions.
As of 9 a.m. Eastern, Homeland Security officials said there was nothing significant to report.
Arizona
Election Day got off to a rocky start when voters in one town outside Phoenix showed up to vote only to find their polling place had been foreclosed upon the day before.
Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes said the landlord of the building, which appears to be a strip mall, locked it overnight after workers had already set up the polling place. There are ballots inside the building, he said.
Fontes said his staff is working with the sheriff’s office to see whether they can forcibly enter the property to collect the ballots and equipment. In the meantime, he said poll workers set up a temporary polling place in the parking lot.
Ohio
Voters in Greater Cincinnati encountered long lines and a few technical glitches as they cast ballots Tuesday morning. Election officials said voters and poll workers were confused by a change in the voting machine system there that now alerts voters if they have "under voted," or left some races on their ballots blank. Electronic voting machines there reportedly rejected some ballots that had not been completely filled out.
Read more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/11/06/midterm-elections-2018-monitoring-
Please lock thread if this article has already been posted.
The "Enraged" Woman
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/28/politics/anderson-cooper-flake-protester-cnntv/index.htmlThis strong determined woman encapsulated all the indignance, the pain, the anger, rage, the hurt, and the feeling of betrayal by half of the Senate leaders on the judiciary committee that i felt yesterday.
KUDOS to Ana Maria Archila and her friend Maria Gallagher for cornering Flake and making him own up to the truth of what women throughout the country endure on a daily basis.
NYMag's The Intelligencer: The Endgame for Trump Comes Into View
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/trump-impeachment-the-endgame-comes-into-view.html"It is important to remember that the unrelenting lockstep loyalty of the feckless GOP leadership and the party’s base to Trump are not indicators of his fate. An occasional outlier in the Jeff Flake vein aside, Nixon’s party was wholly loyal to him too. Like today’s Vichy Republicans, they remained loyal despite the indictments of Cabinet members and aides as close to Nixon as Manafort, Cohen, and Michael Flynn have been to Trump. They remained loyal after the nation was riveted by the devastating Watergate hearings of the summer of 1973, which portrayed all the president’s men as counterparts to the mobsters seen in the previous year’s Hollywood hit The Godfather. They remained loyal even that fall, when Nixon’s firing of the special prosecutor in the “Saturday Night Massacre” attempted to blowtorch the Constitution and the rule of law.
As a counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the 1974 impeachment inquiry pointed out in a Times op-ed piece ten days ago, Nixon’s defenders routinely dismissed Watergate investigations as a political “witch hunt” intended to reverse the Democrats’ 1972 electoral defeat. As late as the end of July 1974 — less than two weeks before Nixon’s August 9 helicopter departure from the White House lawn — most Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee voted against all articles of impeachment. Many Republicans on the committee continued to support him even after the August 5 release of the “smoking gun” tape revealing that Nixon had ordered a cover up of the Watergate crimes. Had the Democrats not controlled both houses of Congress — and had the era’s Nixon-sympathizing conservative Southern Democrats not finally turned on him — Nixon might have held on until a few months more, until November 1974. But no longer than that. The Democrats gained 49 additional House seats and four Senate seats in the midterms. His doom was assured.
With all the debate about whether Trump could or should be impeached this very minute — a wholly theoretical debate as long as the GOP controls Congress — we tend to forget that Nixon was never tried for impeachment. He quit once he realized he didn’t have the votes to survive such a trial and when he no doubt realized that he was in criminal jeopardy. (A fear that would only be alleviated when his successor, Gerald Ford, granted him a pardon.) Trump, unlike Nixon, is out of touch with reality. He doesn’t know how to count votes, and he believes he can defy the law with impunity. (Nixon, a lawyer, could only lie to himself about his criminal exposure up to a point.) But, whether Trump recognizes it or not, the fact remains that his main and perhaps only hope for clinging to office is that Republicans hold the House in November. Polls — and the history of midterm elections inflicting damage against the party occupying the White House even during non-criminal presidencies — tell us that a blue wave is more likely.
If there is a shocking upset GOP victory in November, then all bets are off: America is in worse trouble than we already think and possibly in an existential fight for survival.
But the more plausible scenario is that Trump, even if he has to be pushed kicking-and-screaming by Ivanka and the possible jailbirds Donald Jr. and Jared, gets out of Dodge. As with Nixon, his administration is most likely not to end with impeachment but with a self-pitying and self-justifying resignation in which Trump lashes out against both Republicans and Democrats, declares another ersatz “win,” and flees.
Up until the ship of state hits the iceberg, the Vichy Republicans will not hit the lifeboats. Trump’s loyal supporters will remain loyal even then, still chanting, as they did during the president’s West VIrginia rally this week, “Lock her up!” and “Drain the swamp!” (Polls found that a quarter of the country still supported Nixon even when he resigned.) The exact timing remains unknown, and a little more perseverance and patience in the face of the torrent of Trump indignities will be required. But when this White House collapses, it will happen fast. As the Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew, who covered Watergate for The New Yorker, would conclude, “In retrospect, the denouement appeared inevitable, but it certainly didn’t feel like that at the time.”
_______________________________________________________________________________
The comparisons to Watergate are striking.
NYT Editorial Board: All the President's Crooks
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/opinion/manafort-cohen-guilty.html"On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishing split-screen moment involving two of those people, as Mr. Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes “at the direction of” Mr. Trump himself.
Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony.
As Mr. Trump rages on about the unfairness of the investigation, remember that Mr. Mueller has been on the job for just 15 months. For comparison, the Watergate investigation ran for more than two years before it brought down a president and sent dozens of people to prison. The Iran contra investigation dragged on for about seven years, as did the Whitewater investigation, which resulted in President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.
Also remember we still don’t know anything about the ultimate fate of several other Trump associates who have been under Mr. Mueller’s microscope, including Roger Stone, Carter Page and Donald Trump Jr. (“If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”).
For a witch hunt, Mr. Mueller’s investigation has already bagged a remarkable number of witches. Only the best witches, you might say."
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Love the headline
Yahoo article: Trump is making the Clintons look clean
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-making-clintons-look-clean-193314744.htmlDonald Trump won the presidency in 2016 in part because voters perceived his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to be a dishonest, self-dealing phony.
Trump has now pulled off the improbable: He makes Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill look like ethical exemplars, compared with the corruption endemic in Trump’s administration.
Trump’s knifing of American law-enforcement agencies, while on a podium at the Helsinki “summit” with American enemy Vladimir Putin, visibly raised the possibility that Trump might sell out his own country to appease a ruthless dictator who at this moment is working to manipulate the upcoming U.S. elections. Trump is now going even further to aid Russian attacks against the United States, by saying Russia is no longer targeting U.S. elections. Intelligence officials contradict Trump and say Russia is still at it. The president of the United States is defending a foreign government that’s attacking the United States. Right now.
James Comey, Longtime Republican, Tells 'All Who Care' To Vote Democrat In November
Source: Huffington Post
Former FBI director and longtime Republican James Comey has urged Americans to vote for Democrats in November.
“This Republican Congress has proven incapable of fulfilling the Founders’ design that ‘Ambition must … counteract ambition,’” Comey tweeted on Tuesday, quoting The Federalist Papers. “All who believe in this country’s values must vote for Democrats this fall.”
“History has its eyes on us,” he concluded.
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Read more: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/james-comey-vote-democrat-november_us_5b4ea2ede4b0b15aba89c148
Holy cow!
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