Demovictory9
Demovictory9's JournaltRump teleconferences with troops from resort
https://twitter.com/ColMorrisDavis/status/1065444345220919296The myth holds that Trump is a tough guy who fights back. In fact, he is a fragile man
Our fragile President
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/20/opinions/trump-is-our-fragile-president-dantonio/index.html
The fiction that Donald Trump is a "counter-puncher" is getting a workout as his defenders try to justify the President's attacks on everyone from US Rep. Adam Schiff ("little Adam Schitt"] to the special counsel Robert Mueller ("gone absolutely nuts."] The myth holds that Trump is a tough guy who fights back. In fact, he is a fragile man running out of safe places to hide.
Like so much about Trump, the counter-puncher theme is a clever marketing ploy used to obscure obvious flaws. In the past he promoted himself as a business titan to cover the shame of multiple massive bankruptcies. Today, as a politician, he poses as a victim when he's actually a frightened bully. No one is ever on equal footing with the President of the United States, which means that whenever he "punches" anyone, he lowers himself.
Who does Trump fear? He fears the independent counsel, whose investigation of Russia's interference in the 2016 election threatens to expose the inner workings of the campaign and of Trump's opaque business empire. He fears Schiff and other House Democrats he's belittled because they will soon chair powerful committees that will launch their own investigations into Trump's administration and, perhaps, his long-hidden tax returns.
The President's insecurities all seem to revolve around his fear of being unmasked as a fraud. The tax returns, for example, would allow everyone to compare his claims to great wealth -- in 2015 he said he was worth $10 billion -- with black-and-white reality. More to the point, we could all see how he has benefited from various tax maneuvers and discover just how much corporate welfare the Trump Organization has lapped up over the years.
Beyond his finances, Trump fears being revealed to be a naïf who has been outplayed by others with power. In the case of the Saudi killing of American-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump seems afraid to listen to the audio evidence Turkish officials handed over to the United States. He seems to be in denial about what his brutal pals are willing to do.
Trump's first overseas trip as President began with a stop in Riyadh, where he joined in a ceremonial dance and went all in with one of the most repressive regimes on Earth.
The desperation in Trump's denial, whether it has to do with Khashoggi's killing or domestic politics, can be seen in the tortured effort he makes to persuade us that what we see with our own eyes isn't true.
McDonald's Manager Kicks Black Teens Out After Racist Allegedly Threatens Them With a Gun
https://twitter.com/snatchingedgess/status/1064745606655209472McDonald's Manager Kicks Black Teens Out After Racist Allegedly Threatens Them With a Gun
"I don't give a f**k, get out of my store now," the manager told the teens.
What started out as an ordinary trip to a Minnesota McDonald's ended up with a racist pulling a gun on a group of Somali-American teens and a manager yelling for the the group to get out, despite their lives being at risk.
In videos taken by one of the teenagers and posted to Twitter, a group of Somali-American teenagers can be seen confronting the man, who is leaving the store after yelling a racial slur at one of the kids. The man brandished his pistol threatening the teenagers. The group, immediately, turns to run away from the man and one of the teenager yells, "he has a gun." The gun cannot be seen in the video.
What started out as an ordinary trip to a Minnesota McDonald's ended up with a racist pulling a gun on a group of Somali-American teens and a manager yelling for the the group to get out, despite their lives being at risk.
In videos taken by one of the teenagers and posted to Twitter, a group of Somali-American teenagers can be seen confronting the man, who is leaving the store after yelling a racial slur at one of the kids. The man brandished his pistol threatening the teenagers. The group, immediately, turns to run away from the man and one of the teenager yells, "he has a gun." The gun cannot be seen in the video.
It took an older white gentleman who was a customer at the restaurant to explain to the "manager" that putting the the group out would be putting directly in harm's way. He then instructed her to call the police which is what should have been done on the first place.
"Don't send them off there when a dude just pulled a f**king gun on them," he says. "You've got to call the f**king cops is what you've got to do."
https://www.diversityinc.com/Organizational-Misbehavior/minnesota-mcdonalds-black-teens?utm_source=WhatCounts&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=wc-ip+1121
https://twitter.com/snatchingedgess/status/1064712479031332865
Democrats won House popular vote by largest midterm margin since Watergate Nationally, 53.1% to 45.2
Democrats won House popular vote by largest midterm margin since Watergate
Nationally, Democrats have 53.1 percent of all votes counted while Republicans took 45.2 percent.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/democrats-won-house-popular-vote-largest-midterm-margin-watergate-n938996
Not since the Watergate scandal have Democrats run up such a large margin of victory in midterm House races, NBC News data showed.
With votes continuing to be tallied more than two weeks after Election Day, Democrats hold a lead over Republicans in the House popular vote by more than 8.6 million votes.
That's the largest total victory in a midterm House election since Democrats defeated Republicans by more than 8.7 million votes in 1974, just months after President Richard Nixon resigned from office in disgrace.
And the number is continuing to inch up.
As of noon on Wednesday, Democratic House candidates won 58,990,609 votes while their Republican counterparts pulled in 50,304,975. That means that, so far, Democrats won 53.1 percent of all votes counted while Republicans earned 45.2 percent.
One Couple's Brutal, Infuriating Story of Debt in America
NEWSER) – Tom and Kate live in quite the neighborhood in a northeastern suburb, surrounded by people "who have seven cars and fly off to Italy for three weeks." They don't. They're broke, or, more accurately, so deeply in debt it's staggering. In a lengthy interview for Wealthsimple, the couple were granted anonymity in exchange for laying bare "the brutal details of their life in the grip of an epic cycle of debt." The two, 48 and 46, respectively, have three kids, work in insurance, make upwards of $160,000 combined, and "have an insurmountable amount of debt." That's no understatement: They owe $18,000 for a loan, $60,000 on their credit cards, $360,000 on a home worth that same amount, and somewhere north of $120,000 on loans for Kate's unused law-school degree.
"We’re always broke. We shop at Goodwill. We have a garden so that we can have fresh vegetables instead of going out," says Kate. That may sound prudent, but the two then proceed to detail a series of bad decisions. In the next breath, Kate describes spending a "crazy amount" on organic food, and not "reeling in" their kids from doing things like buying $15 of sushi from Whole Foods. Short on cash, they bought their son a tux for prom, because it could go on a Nordstrom card. They send their kids to a $32,000-a-year private school (they pay only a fraction of that, but took out loans to do so). They cashed out a $70,000 401(k) without anticipating the tax penalties of about $20,000, some of which went on, yep, a credit card. Five years ago, they borrowed $40,000 from Kate's parents and paid off all their credit card debt—then built it right back up. Read the full piece, which ends with Tom explaining why they'd be "better off dead." (Read more Longform stories.)
http://www.newser.com/story/267577/one-couples-brutal-infuriating-story-of-debt-in-america.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_top
Kate: I’m Kate. I’m 46. I have a law degree. I don’t practice law though. When I got pregnant with our first, I took the highest-paying job I could find that still allowed me to stay home and be close to my kids when they were growing up. So I work for an insurance company, paying claims. I make about $70,000 a year. We live in the suburbs of a city in the northeast of the U.S. We have three kids: ages 11, 14, and 18.
Tom: My name is Tom. I have a graduate degree in advertising. I’m 48 and I’m an insurance claims manager. I earn about $90,000 a year doing that, but I also work a second job as a bartender a couple times a week catering in private homes. I make between $100 and $250 a night doing that.
Kate: We have an insurmountable amount of debt. I’m not even exactly sure how much it is anymore. We have $60,000 in credit cards, $18,000 in a loan, and then there’s our mortgage and the second mortgage we took out, which is about $360,000 all together. And that’s not even counting our student loans. How much are those, Tom? Are you at home? Can you look it up?
Tom: Yeah, I’m at home, but I have no idea how to even look it up. The only time I go on the site is to ask them to push back when we have to start paying it. I know that’s irresponsible and horrible, but that’s really, truly what I do. I think it started at about $90,000.
Kate: Now, with interest, the law school debt is at a hundred and something. It’s either around $120,000 or $140,000, somewhere in there. We’ve almost never paid my law school loans — every year we ask them to put us in a financial hardship status so we don’t have to pay. But the interest keeps building.
Tom: I think education loans probably started us on this path. But credit cards got us in trouble.
Kate: It all dates back 20 years. Tom and I were living together in Boston, where I was in college and he was in grad school. We started to get into a little bit of credit card debt at that point. We got married in 1997. Initially we put my loans in forbearance thinking that we would buy a house and then earn more money. But we just keep putting off the loan. I actually read something about how Betsy DeVos has been saying that she wants to collect all the student debt that is in forbearance, and I said to Tom, well, here we go.
Tom: We bought our first house in 1997 for $195,000. It was fine, but then we tried to go big on the house we live in now. We bought a house that we probably couldn’t afford.
https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-us/magazine/money-diary-couple-debt-us
with that salary, they could get out of debt with a major focus on it. in Southern Calif, 360K mortgage aint bad
Whitaker is sicker than Jeff Sessions. As US attorney sought longer-than-usual drug sentences
Raeanna Woody’s crimes hardly seemed like they would add up to a life sentence in prison. She had two nonviolent drug convictions, for possessing marijuana and delivering 12 grams of methamphetamine. But when she was arrested in a third drug case, she said, the office of U.S. Attorney Matthew G. Whitaker decided to make an example of her.
Under Whitaker, who is now acting attorney general, Woody was given a choice: spend the rest of her life in jail, or accept a plea bargain sentence of 21 to 27 years, according to court records. She took the deal.
Federal Judge Robert W. Pratt in the Southern District of Iowa later accused prosecutors of having “misused” their authority in her nonviolent case. He urged President Barack Obama to commute her sentence — and Obama did shorten her term , after she had served 11 years.
Woody’s case highlights one of the most controversial if little-known aspects of Whitaker’s career: his efforts to obtain unusually stiff sentences for people accused of drug crimes.
Whitaker spent nearly five years as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa. His office was more likely than all but one other district in the United States to use its authority to impose the harshest sentences on drug offenders, according to a finding by a different Iowa federal judge, Mark W. Bennett, who it called a “deeply troubling disparity.”
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Trump last week announced his support for legislation that would give judges more discretion in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders and reducing prison terms. Sessions had opposed the bill. Now Whitaker, as acting head of the Justice Department, is in a powerful position to try to influence the outcome.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-us-attorney-whitaker-imposed-longer-than-usual-drug-sentences/2018/11/21/a66dfaf2-e9de-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html?utm_term=.6b8fa12ef8f3
The rate at which Whitaker’s office and another one in Iowa sought the harshest possible sentence was a “jaw-dropping and deeply troubling disparity compared to the vast majority of federal courts in the nation,” Bennett said in a statement to The Washington Post. Whitaker never appeared before him, and he declined to comment about Whitaker’s term as U.S. attorney.
Whitaker’s Southern District of Iowa used enhanced sentences in 84 percent of relevant cases, compared with 26 percent nationwide, Bennett’s finding said. Bennett concluded that a defendant in the Northern District of Iowa — which had a rate of filings similar to Whitaker’s district — was 2,532 percent more likely to be subjected to an enhanced sentence compared with someone convicted of a similar offense in a Nebraska district.
Whitaker was paid 1.2 million as only employee of mysterious nonprofit
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/conservative-nonprofit-with-obscure-roots-and-undisclosed-funders-paid-matthew-whitaker-12-million/2018/11/20/25ff987e-e9db-11e8-bd89-eecf3b178206_story.html?utm_term=.501d49c7d437In the three years after he arrived in Washington in 2014, Matthew G. Whitaker received more than $1.2 million as the leader of a charity that reported having no other employees, some of the best pay of his career.
The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust described itself as a new watchdog nonprofit dedicated to exposing unethical conduct by public officials. For Whitaker, it became a lucrative steppingstone in a swift rise from a modest law practice in Iowa to the nation’s top law enforcement job. As FACT’s president, he regularly appeared on radio and television, often to skewer liberals.
But FACT’s origins and the source of funding used to pay Whitaker — now the acting attorney general — remain obscured. An examination of state and federal records, and interviews with those involved, show that the group is part of a national network of nonprofits that often work in concert to amplify conservative messages.
Contrary to its claims in news releases and a tax filing, the group was created under a different name two years before Whitaker’s arrival, according to incorporation and IRS records. At least two of the organizers were involved in another conservative charity using the same address.
In its application to the IRS for status as a tax-exempt organization, the organizers reported that the group would study the impact of environmental regulations on businesses, records show. In that incarnation, the group took no action and “only existed on paper,” one man named in IRS filings as a board member told The Washington Post. Another named in a state filing as a board member said he never agreed to be on the board.
Door-to-door canvassers tell stories of husbands who bully, silence & control their wives votes
Door-to-door canvassers tell stories of husbands who bully, silence and control their wives into voting conservativeProgressive organizer Annabel Park told the story that made me start to wonder. “I can’t stop thinking about this woman I met while doorknocking for Beto in Dallas,” Annabel wrote on social media a few days before the midterm elections.
“She lived in a sprawling low-income apartment complex. After I knocked a couple of times, she answered the door with her husband just behind her. She looked petrified and her husband looked menacing behind her. When I made my pitch about Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, her husband yelled, ‘We’re not interested.’ She looked at me and silently mouthed, ‘I support Beto.’ Before I could respond, she quickly closed the door.”
Annabel told me afterwards, “It’s been on my mind. Did she get beaten? That was my fear.”
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Wives asked their husbands directly who the two were going to vote for. Many seemed cowed. Husbands answered the door and refused to let the wife speak to canvassers, or talked or shouted over her, or insisted that she was going to vote Republican even though she was a registered Democrat, or insisted there were no Democrats in the house because she had never told him she was one. A friend in Iowa told me, “I asked the woman who answered the door if she had a plan for voting, and a man appeared, behind her, and said, quite brusquely, ‘I’m a Republican’. Before I could reply, he shut the door in my face.”
Another friend reported, “A woman I texted in Michigan told me, ‘I am not allowed’ to vote for the candidate.” Many canvassers told me those experiences were common. I did not find stories of the reverse phenomenon – wives dominating their husbands, or husbands pushing their wives to vote for the Democratic candidate. Of course I talked to people canvassing for Democrats, and domestic violence takes place across the political spectrum, but the bullying seemed to be mostly either to oblige the wife to lean to the right or to not participate at all.
“The wife spotted me and jumped up from her table to intercept me at the door before I could knock,” one canvasser from California told me.
Without saying any words, the wife softly put both hands out in front of her body, palms facing me. She moved her hands from side to side as though to tell me, “No thank you, please go away without making a noise.”
She was one of many who appeared to be afraid of their husbands.
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Yet another canvasser reported that one of those husbands, this time in Turlock, California, told her, “And if she needs to know how to vote, I’ll just take her in the back and beat her.” He was sort of joking but sort of not.
This ordinary, ugly scenario raises another question, about whether voting by mail takes away the privacy of the voting booth and the ability for women to act on their beliefs without consequences. And it’s a reminder of why women’s long quest for the vote in the US and elsewhere was such a radical thing. Insisting women should vote was insisting that we should be equal and independent participants in public life, with the right to act on our own behalf and in our own interests.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/19/voter-intimidation-republicans-democrats-midterm-elections
"The California Republican Party isn't salvageable at this time. The Grand Old Party is dead,"
LOS ANGELES — In the wake of a near-political annihilation in California that has left even longtime conservative stronghold Orange County bereft of a single Republican in the House of Representatives, a growing chorus of GOP loyalists here say there’s only one hope for reviving the flatlining party: Blow it up and start again from scratch.
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“The California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time. The Grand Old Party is dead,” wrote former state GOP Assembly leader Kristin Olsen, who startled fellow Republicans with a brutally frank op-ed this week saying Republicans must acknowledge their “serious problem” in California, particularly the effects of toxicity of President Trump.
GOP strategist John Weaver, who has worked California races and also has represented the presidential campaign of Ohio governor John Kasich, seconded Olsen’s view, tweeting that the effects of the Trump presidency have doomed any chance of resurrection. “In one fell swoop Trump & Republicans who willingly handcuffed themselves to him have turned Orange County into a GOP wasteland,’’ he tweeted this week. “You want to see the future? Look no further than the demographic death spiral in the place once considered a cornerstone of the party.”
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Madrid argues that many California Republican leaders remain in complete denial of the fact that their continued support of Trump presidency has sealed the fate of the GOP — and last week’s midterm elections revealed the true extent of the GOP’s rot in California, where the state party has now shrunken to third party status.
“Now, it’s just open warfare. The barbarians have broken through the gates. The army is in full retreat,’’ said Madrid, who adds there’s no hope left for a party that for years has been on a path toward destruction. “Burn it to the ground. I want to reconstitute.’’
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/17/rip-california-gop-republicans-lash-out-after-midterm-election-debacle-1000481
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