Been observing videos and photos of Hurricane Harvey. Hell of a lot of white guys (volunteers) with their own boats saving people regardless of skin color. Think they’ll get any recognition?
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Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Monday, August 28, 2017
L-O-V-E to see this happen
Fresh Off A Pardon From Trump, Arpaio Floats A Primary Challenge To Flake
(Flake...they named him right)
(Flake...they named him right)
Just a few days after President Donald Trump issued a pardon for Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County sheriff hinted that he could mount a primary challenge to Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who’s up for re-election next year.
Arpaio, who was convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a court order to stop holding people solely on suspicion of being undocumented, told the Washington Examiner on Monday that he may run for office again.
“I could run for mayor, I could run for a legislator, I could run for Senate,” he said.
“I’m sure getting a lot of people around the state asking me” to run against Flake, he added. “All I’m saying is the door is open and we’ll see what happens. I’ve got support. I know what support I have.”
It’s not clear how serious Arpaio is about challenging Flake. He lost his bid for a seventh term as sheriff of Maricopa County last year and was later convicted of contempt of court. The sheriff was notorious for holding inmates in “tent city,” an open air jail he once referred to as a “concentration camp.”
Arpaio, who is now 85 years old, told the Washington Examiner that despite his age, he does not plan to fully retire yet.
“I’m proud to be my age. I work 14 hours a day. If anyone thinks my age is going to hold me back, I’ve got news for them,” he said. “The bottom line is there’s no way I’m going to go fishing. I have no hobbies.”
Clinton on "tell all" nationwide tour about her run up to the election with tickets selling for up to $1,200
I'm sending my check right away. I can't wait to hear what was actually in those 31,000 emails she deleted, what Bill really said to Lynch on the tarmac, and how money flowed in from foreign donors for favors into the slush fund she calls The Clinton Foundation.
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Hillary Clinton will be back in the spotlight this fall for an unprecedented, big-ticket book tour for her new book What Happened, with tickets priced as high as $1,200.
On Monday, the ex-Democratic nominee announced 'Hillary Clinton Live,' a 15-city tour, which includes stops in a handful of states she lost in the election last year.
Promotional materials for her first stop, at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C., promises Clinton plans to 'let loose' and tell her audience a 'personal, raw, detailed and surprisingly funny story' of her election loss and recovery.
Former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is going on a 15-city book tour this fall, where she'll promote her new book What Happened
The website promoting the tour, which is being called 'Hillary Clinton Live,' features a quote from the ex-presidential candidate, where she promises to let her guard down
The website promoting the tour, HillaryClintonBookTour.com, features a quote from Clinton too.
'In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I've often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net,' she said. 'Now I'm letting my guard down,' she pledged.
Hillary Clinton's newest book will hit bookshelves on September 12
The tour kicks off on September 18 in D.C. and continues on all through fall.
Republicans Completely Own Trump’s Arpaio Pardon
If they don't hold the president accountable for this abuse of power, where will the pardons end?
Are you kidding me "Abuse of Power"? What president has not pardoned someone?
Check it out:
Arpaio was doing his job which through the eyes of a liberal is racism.
Want to talk egregious?
Where was the outrage when Barry released thousands, that's thousands with a T, of crackheads and drug dealers (composed mostly of his own race) from prison. Remember Gitmo mass release program, the Taliban 5, Oscar Lopez Rivera the KSM of the Hispanic community? Then attempted to declare amnesty for million of illegals.
And what about this sweetheart?
And to top that off:
The Army provided Manning with weekly psychotherapy, including psychotherapy specific to gender dysphoria; cross-sex hormone therapy; female undergarments; the ability to wear prescribed cosmetics in her daily life at the USDB; and speech therapy.
I was waiting for... [shortly thereafter he got his period and they gave him a pack of Kotex]
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Brian BeutlerAugust 28, 2017
This article reeks of more bias than rain from Harvey leaving no doubt who he voted for in the last election.
Oh... and can't wait to see challenges to the Republican hierarchy in 2018.
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If news reports are to be believed, President Donald Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the racist, inhumane former Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, not for any strategic purpose, but out of some deeply personal desire to help an immigrant-hating friend in need.
According to the Washington Post, Trump—in what was by then his umpteenth attempt to obstruct justice—approached Attorney General Jeff Sessions this past spring about dropping the federal criminal case against his partner in birtherism, only to be brushed off, leaving clemency as his only option.
But whether he intended it or not, Trump’s decision to grant the pardon on Friday night—an unconscionable abuse of power, delivered under the cover of a biblical hurricane—creates a three-pronged moral hazard.
First, it gives fresh hopes to abusive law-enforcement officers across the country, teaching them that they can proceed with impunity.
Second, it further boosts the morale of white supremacists, who are already over the moon for their advocate in the White House.
Third, it stretches the muscles that Trump will have to use if he decides to pardon his aides and family members for crimes uncovered in the course of the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, all while reaffirming his sense that Republicans in Congress will let him get away with it.
Personally, I am convinced that the Arpaio pardon is one of many reasonable grounds on which Congress could initiate the impeachment process, and that even in the absence of high crimes and misdemeanors, Trump should be removed from office because he is unfit to serve. Republicans, by contrast, want you to think that while they strongly oppose Trump’s behavior, they are powerless to do anything about it. But they are not powerless, and now they must confront the questions raised by their own post-hoc objections to something Trump all but announced he would do several days in advance. If Republicans in Congress are not going to do anything to stop Trump, what will they do to contain the damage?
Arpaio was a public figure in good standing on the right for two decades, not in spite of the fact that he made life hell for prisoners and immigrants living in his jurisdiction, but because of it. Republicans stood by as Arpaio built his infamous “tent jails,” where temperatures sometimes exceeded 115 degrees. They stood by as he made a woman give birth while shackled to a bed. As the country’s demographics shifted over the years, some Republicans started treating Arpaio less like a celebrated hero and more like an embarrassing racist uncle, but by then, their lots had been cast.
Trump’s decision to pardon Arpaio, like Trump’s success in the Republican primary, is an outgrowth and an emblem of the GOP’s decision to foster the intellectual and cultural climates of Fox News across the country—concentrated in heavily gerrymandered congressional districts—to help them win elections. On its own terms, that project has been an incomparable success, but it has also been a moral abomination, forcing one of America’s two major political parties into complicity with the worst actors in the country. Conservatives finally discovered a vocal distaste for Arpaio after Trump pardoned him, but for decades they have done nothing to kick Arpaioites out of the coalition. Some Republicans may be genuinely uncomfortable with this arrangement, but nearly all of them represent parts of the country that are walled off from dissent.
Thus, the best Arizona’s self-styled rebel senator Jeff Flake could muster on Friday was a tweet saying he “would have preferred” for Trump to withhold the pardon.
House Speaker Paul Ryan delegated his response to a spokesman, who raised a valid concern: “Law-enforcement officials have a special responsibility to respect the rights of everyone in the United States. We should not allow anyone to believe that responsibility is diminished by this pardon.”
The obvious problem is that if Trump faces no consequences for pardoning Arpaio, then Arpaio wannabes everywhere will know, with more certainty than ever before, that they have the official blessing of the president and his party to abuse prisoners and terrorize immigrants.
Ryan has famously little appetite for contravening Trump in any meaningful way, but as long as that’s the case, he is just as responsible for the consequences of Trump’s depravities as Trump himself. The pardon power is unqualified and vested solely in the president, which creates a real challenge for lawmakers confronting a president intent on abusing it. Unlike other kinds of corruption, which can be countermanded with new laws, subpoenas, and other legislative tools, there is no direct way for Congress to stop Trump from pardoning anyone and everyone. But the fate of the rule of law is not in Trump’s hands alone. Just because Ryan likes to pretend his hands are completely tied doesn’t make it so.
The ethical questions Trump is raising aren’t new, because questionable pardons aren’t new. What is new is that Republicans, by watching dazed and glassy-eyed as a president abuses the pardon so early in his term, are empowering him to make a habit of forgiving and incenting the kind of lawbreaking that he hopes will shore up his power. In 1925, Chief Justice William Howard Taft—a former president himself—opined on behalf of the Supreme Court that the proper remedy for a hypothetical president using the pardon power to serially undermine legal proceedings wouldn’t be for the Supreme Court to crimp the pardon power, but for Congress to remove that president.
“If it be said that the President, by successive pardons of constantly recurring contempts in particular litigation, might deprive a court of power to enforce its orders in a recalcitrant neighborhood, it is enough to observe that such a course is so improbable as to furnish but little basis for argument,” Taft wrote. “Exceptional cases like this, if to be imagined at all, would suggest a resort to impeachment, rather than to a narrow and strained construction of the general powers of the President.”
Ryan and other Republicans will for all these reasons face difficult questions. What do they intend to do if Trump extends pardons to people who broke laws in the course of getting him elected president or of impeding the investigation of his campaign? If they pretend, as Ryan does, to care about equal protection of law, will they investigate the events leading up to the Arpaio pardon, and will they pass any laws that will make life harder for those who see Arpaio as a role model?
I am certain we’ll be disappointed by the answers.
Sunday, August 27, 2017
McCain, Democrats blast Trump's transgender ban
The title of this article implies there's a distinct difference. The "maverick" is nothing but a traitor in sheep's clothing doing for Trump what Benedict Arnold did for Washington.
Imagine you're in the military under fire in Afghanistan:
The paradox for me is Trump won AZ... the same state that has been re-electing asshole McCain since 1987!
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WASHINGTON — Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain on Friday sharply criticized President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender individuals serving in the military, saying it could hurt the military.
“It would be a step in the wrong direction to force currently serving transgender individuals to leave the military solely on the basis of their gender identity rather than medical and readiness standards that should always be at the heart of Department of Defense personnel policy,” the Republican Arizona senator said in a statement released just before midnight.
“The Pentagon’s ongoing study on this issue should be completed before any decisions are made with regard to accession.”
Earlier in the evening, White House officials announced details of the military’s new transgender policy, broadly outlined by Trump in a series of tweets earlier this month.
A presidential memo sent to the Pentagon on Friday reverses the previous policy of allowing transgender individuals to serve openly and receive medical care for treatment of gender dysphoria or related issues.
Instead, Trump’s order directs that the Pentagon (and the Department of Homeland Security, in the case of Coast Guard personnel) halt the use of any funds for sex reassignment surgery, and bars entry of any transgender recruits into the services.
It also directs Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to determine whether currently service transgender personnel should be allowed to stay in the ranks, using “military effectiveness and lethality, budgetary constraints and applicable law” as standards for dismissal.
House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., called the move “a cravenly opportunistic act of discrimination against men and women who volunteer to defend the United States.” Iraq War veteran Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said the move will be “disruptive to our military” and harm unit readiness.
But as the senior Republican voice on military matters in Congress, McCain’s criticism carried more weight. The former Navy pilot and 30-year senator has sparred with Trump increasingly in recent weeks, including casting one of the deciding votes to shelve plans for a repeal of the Affordable Care Act.
McCain in his statement of opposition said the armed services committee will conduct oversight on the issue in weeks to come. Congress returns to Capitol Hill from a summer legislative recess in early September.
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