The only thing that you should quit is posting do you miss me and follow him.
: “As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him.”
“The loose alliance, which was once thought of as the G.O.P. establishment, for months has been engaged in a high-stakes candidate recruitment campaign, full of phone calls, meetings, polling memos and promises of millions of dollars. It’s all aimed at recapturing the Senate majority, but the election also represents what could be Republicans’ last chance to reverse the spread of Trumpism before it fully consumes their party.”
Like I have a saying for twenty years, lets discuss policies instead of being a cultist.
He can't be prosecution but it should never happen again.
From time to time, presidential records or other public property have gone missing from the White House. In December 2009, for example, President Barack Obama’s administration recovered 22 million “missing" emails from President George W. Bush’s White House that had been mislabeled. And White House aides, under Republican and Democratic administrations, have long found ways to keep their communications and meetings private, from meeting lobbyists at coffee shops off the White House grounds to the use of party email servers and apps that automatically erase messages.
"You are going to have mistakes," said Trudy Peterson, who served as acting archivist of the United States during the first two years of President Bill Clinton's administration. "What I think is unusual this time is the volume."
Peterson said that it is a matter of "good governance and democracy" for the White House to create and preserve documents. "Records make it possible for the citizen to know how the government operated and to hold the government accountable for its actions," she said.
But the law contains no enforcement mechanism. There is no penalty for violating it, and the National Archives cannot compel a president or his aides to comply with it.
"The archivist has no legal authority; all they can do is advise," said Anne Weismann, a public-interest lawyer who sued the government over the Bush White House emails when she was chief counsel for the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Weismann said federal courts have frowned on civil suits involving the Presidential Records Act on the grounds that they have no role in a separation-of-powers fight that rests between the executive and legislative branches of government. But she said Trump's behavior could amount to criminal conduct under two separate laws banning the destruction of federal property and doing so in a federal building.
"Both statutes apply, but they are criminal statutes which means the conduct has to be willful," she said. "I think the evidence here strongly suggests willful conduct."
Historians say that past presidents have treated their records with respect for a variety of reasons, including the law, a public interest in understanding how and why decisions were made, and the smooth transition of wisdom and knowledge from one president to the next. What Trump has done, some of them say, represents a departure from the standard practice of presidents in the post-Nixon era.
"The presidential records act was created so that this would never happen again," said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.
SIMON: Well, tell us how. What are Russian aims as regards to Ukraine in your judgment?
YILMAZ: The real target is not Ukraine, but Moscow wants to force Western countries to finally sit down for negotiations on issues of European security because since 1991, this is the first time the West has engaged seriously with Russia to discuss European security things in a way to the strategy that they're pursuing. And Moscow wants arrangements to be made on several issues, but these are European security matters, including halting the development of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe and limiting military exercises in close proximity to Russian borders because if you go back a little bit, in October 2018, the Trump administration decided to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev. And that treaty prohibited both parties from possessing, producing or, you know, flight testing intermediate-range nuclear forces. Now we don't have that agreement.
So in other words, Moscow, they understand that Ukraine will not enter NATO, and that's not the issue. In fact, the issue is if NATO enters Ukraine in the form of American missiles or missile defense elements. That's without any international regulations that limits missile deployments in Europe.
SIMON: Let me ask you this finally. At some point, does Vladimir Putin have to use military force if his threats to use military force are going to be taken seriously? I mean, if every time there's a troop deployment people sense it's a bluff, won't they begin to dismiss it?
YILMAZ: I think there are more options. I think Moscow sees this as a long process. And we might be moving from stage one to stage two, and there might be a stage three, but they're not necessarily a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Of course, the recent claims are obviously important, and military analysts work on certain scenarios based on the intelligence they receive, which is natural, which is normal. However, I would say the ongoing process still shows that Moscow pursues a cost-efficient policy when it comes to hard power using geopolitics. And full-scale invasion of Ukraine does not fit into Moscow's cost-benefit calculus. I mean, it's irrational, and it's just - we might be moving from stage one to stage two. So it's not a matter of days or weeks. We might see further stages of a long process and negotiations and some military maneuvers.
SIMON: Harun Yilmaz, academic editor with Routledge, whose research focuses on Ukraine in Central Asia, thank you so much for being with us.
February 12, 2022 at 10:29 PM Honest, decent, truth telling Reverend said... I hope he's right, but fear he may not be.
SUNDAY FUNNY --- DEVIOUS DONALD Trump’s Phone Habits Pose Problem for Investigators February 13, 2022 at 9:28 am EST By Taegan Goddard 9 Comments
CNN: “The difficulty for the committee in tracking down just whom Trump spoke with — and when — is dealing with his unorthodox phone habits while in office: According to multiple sources formerly in the administration, the ex-President often used other people’s telephones (or multiple phones of his own, sometimes rotated in and out of use) to communicate with his supporters — and even family.
“One former staffer blamed the former President’s habit on an aversion to anyone listening to his calls (which, in the White House, is hard for a president to avoid if he calls from a desk phone). So he would, frequently, grab the cell phone of a nearby aide or even a Secret Service agent to make calls.”
Sanctions Won’t Include Severing Russian Banks February 13, 2022 at 9:32 am EST By Taegan Goddard 2 Comments
“U.S. and European officials are finalizing an extensive package of sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine that targets major Russian banks, but does not include banning Russia from the SWIFT financial system,” Reuters reports.
“The sanctions on the table also include export controls on components produced by Russia for the tech and weapons sectors, and sanctions against specific Russian oligarchs.”
I'm beginning to hope that he is the candidate next time because.
'They don’t like Donald Trump. They never liked him': GOP leaders want 'weakened' Trump gone
Tom Boggioni
February 13, 2022
According to a report from the Washington Post, pollsters and Republican campaign consultants see Donald Trump's political future rapidly fading as mainstream GOP voters -- and donors -- are ready to move on from the "weakened" former president.
Using a battle in Michigan between the GOP leadership and Trump's pick to be the state's attorney general candidate, the report illustrates the growing disconnect between Trump's demands and Republicans' need to move on.
"Similar clashes between Republican leaders and the candidates Trump has embraced have been playing out across the country with growing ferocity in recent months, a chaotic sign that Trump’s once unchallenged hold on the party and rank-and-file supporters is waning, even if by degrees," the Post's Josh Dawsey and Micheal Scherer wrote before adding, "The former president’s power within the party and his continued focus on personal grievances is increasingly questioned behind closed doors at Republican gatherings, according to interviews with more than a dozen prominent Republicans in Washington and across the country, including some Trump advisers."
RELATED: Mitch McConnell 'desperately' working to crush 'unelectable goofballs' championed by Trump: report
Adding, "As a result, Trump and his endorsees now find themselves fighting against some elected GOP leaders, donors and party officers intent on navigating the party slowly away from him and his false election claims. Among voters, polls have shown Republican-leaning independents turning from Trump," the report quotes attorney and Trump supporter Matthew DePerno saying the recent turn of events has given Republican leadership in his state an opening to dump Trump.
"There are a lot of people in the state party who — they don’t like Donald Trump. They never liked him," he explained.
According to the report, Republican donors are already turning their backs on the former president, with Art Pope, a prominent North Carolina donor who supported the former president through this four years admitting, "My preference would be he not run again for a variety of reasons and let there be a good primary going forward."
One senior Republican, who did not want to go on the record, said Trump's diminished presence on social media is making it easier to move on without him.
“People aren’t necessarily seeing his messaging as much. They just say he’s not on Twitter, they don’t really know what he’s doing,” they explained. “A lot of people now say to me: 'He did great things, he was a great president, but it’s time for something new.’”
One Trump adviser admitted that even some Trump supporters are feeling Trump-fatigue.
For Sloppy Joe to actually "beat" him again he'd have to have beat him the first time.
And if you scumbags truly thought Biden could easily beat him, you wouldn't be working around the clock to disqualify Trump from running.
Watch the out takes from Lester Dolt's interview with Joey Sprinkles. The guy's a fucking MESS. Just like you alky, with your C+ grades and your 490 SAT score.
Even your high school teachers thought you were a fucking loser way back then, as you find yourself today locked down in a fucking looney bin with the 5th Beatle.
Credit Scott he hasn't gone down the crazy Trumpets on the American Thinker.
The establishment is the deep state according to this ---'z To jump into the river an' drown .”
The not-so-great notion in recent years, in my view, has been that of the ruling elites of the western nations now heading for political suicide. They seized upon the unknown consequences of the new and fast-spreading Wuhan virus for political gain. They used it to exceed their constitutional powers -- locked down their citizens and demanded compliance with various vaccine mandates and treatment protocols and then clung on to those powers long after the deleterious effect of those mandates exceeded the virus’s harm. Never, to my knowledge, has any country before this quarantined the healthy along with the sick. Never. (And I remind you that while locking down the young, the robust, and the otherwise healthy New Yorkers, Governor Andrew Cuomo went so far as to quarantine the stricken with the healthy but most vulnerable elderly -- the result was thousands of deaths of oldsters otherwise far less likely to have become infected.)
Never to my knowledge has the public health establishment so ruined its own credibility. Doubt me? Look to our own country for a prime and early example: The CDC endorsing lockdowns while cheering on the BLM protests. It was, in short, a clear example of the political nature of the public health establishment’s pronouncements. It has seriously damaged them, and I hope they suffer the consequences with a sharply reduced budget and a clear restriction of their activities, if not an abolition of the agency altogether. That we funded -- under the table through a cut-out entity -- the Wuhan lab activity, even when expressly forbidden to do so and despite being fully apprised of that lab’s safety shortcomings, just adds to my disgust for their actions and continued broad scope of authority. Naturally, the public-health establishment spent a great deal of time and effort discrediting sound research (and researchers) who believed the evidence showed the virus was not created in nature, but in the lab and spread as a result of a lab leak. Incompetent, disingenuous and clearly political -- that’s our generously funded runaway public-health establishment.
WE CAN "THANK" TRUMP FOR Trump’s China Trade BUST February 13, 2022 at 9:59 am EST By Taegan Goddard 26 Comments
Axios: “It was only two years ago that former President Trump struck a mega trade deal with China, containing commitments by the Chinese to purchase vast sums of American exports. So how’s it going?”
NOT SO GOOD:
“U.S. exports to China have only been 57% of what was pledged as part of the deal, BELOW LEVELS BEFORE THE TRADE WAR EVEN BEGAN."
New York's Mayor, Eric Adams, paid an emotional tribute to the latest victim of the city's gun violence, an 18-year-old aspiring rapper, Jayquan McKenley.
McKenley who went by the name Chii Wvttz, was shot dead outside a recording studio in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on Sunday.
Adams struggled to hold back tears as he blamed the shooting on a 'broken system that 'continually fails black and brown New Yorkers.'
He had been arrested several times since 2017 including once for attempted murder, last year.
An Indiana man who declared himself a member of “Trump’s army” before entering the U.S. Capitol through a broken window and taunted police once inside on Jan. 6 has a new place to report — a federal penitentiary.
His short 30-day sentence, recommended by prosecutors and granted by a judge on Friday, reflects the relatively meager misdemeanor count of conviction for parading, demonstrating or picketing inside a Capitol building.
Joshua Wagner, 24, drove from Indiana to Washington with two friends—including co-defendant Israel Tutrow, who received a non-jail sentence—to attend Donald Trump‘s so-called “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6. They arrived late and missed Trump’s speech, but they joined the crowd of supporters heading toward the Capitol, as Trump himself had encouraged.
On the way, Wagner and Tutrow commented on the scene around them and wondered how serious things would get as the crowd looked to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden‘s win in the 2002 presidential election.
“This is Trump’s army, dude,” Wagner said. He later asked Tutrow: “You think shit’s really gonna get fucking real here today, dude? Maybe, bro?”
Once he reached the Capitol building, Wagner crawled in through a broken window near the Senate Wing door. Once inside the Crypt, he joined the crowd in chanting “U.S.A.” and “fuck Joe Biden.”
When a police officer asked him to move, Wagner initially responded “This is our house,” but eventually followed the officer’s instruction to move toward the center of the room.
But as he later made his way toward the exit, Wagner was a bit more confrontational.
He questioned whether an officer “was on our side,” and suggested that if the officer was not on the rioters’ “side,” the officer would be failing to fulfill his oath to “protect this country from enemies foreign and domestic.”
Even as he climbed out a broken window to exit the building, Wagner encouraged other rioters to enter the Capitol and “fight,” vowing to come back.
“Let’s stop paying our taxes,” he yelled repeatedly.
Wagner pleaded guilty in November to a single misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. Prosecutors recommended a sentence of 30 days’ incarceration followed by three years of probation, along with $500 in restitution. Wagner asked for three years of probation only.
At Wagner’s sentencing hearing on Friday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson emphasized that Wagner’s political views are not the reason for his punishment.
“You are not here today because of your heartfelt view that you supported the former president,” Jackson said, calling back to a statement from Wagner’s lawyer that Wagner came to Washington because he had a “heartfelt political view.”
“You are not even here today because you used strong language in chanting about the current president. You are not being prosecuted for your speech,” Jackson continued.
Instead, Jackson said, Wagner was facing the consequences of being an “enthusiastic participant in an effort to undermine the electoral process.”
“America’s standing in the world may never recover,” Jackson, a Barack Obama appointee, continued. “The one thing we’re supposed to stand for is the peaceful transition of power. That foundation of our existence is now badly cracked.”
Although Wagner did not engage in violent or destructive behavior inside the Capitol, Jackson said that he knew he wasn’t allowed to be there in the first place.
“Going in through broken windows is not how you enter a federal building,” she said.
Jackson said that she would allow Wagner to self-surrender after his place of incarceration is determined.
During the hearing, Jackson briefly touched on the issue of so-called “split sentences,” a potentially looming legal issue in Jan. 6 cases. Prosecutors in some of the Jan. 6 misdemeanor cases have recommended a period of incarceration followed by probation, but this may stand on shaky legal ground. It’s unclear whether the federal probation statute allows for such a sentence, and no judge on the D.C. circuit has ruled definitively on the issue so far.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan recently said he didn’t believe he had legal authority to issue a split sentence to a Jan. 6 defendant who pleaded guilty to the same parading and picketing charge, and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly amended a split sentence after Jan. 6 defendant Virginia “Jenny” Spencer challenged it.
On Friday, Jackson kicked the matter down the road, saying that since she had a “variety of options that don’t involve this issue, I will leave this for another day.”
19 comments:
Good selection this week.
The only thing that you should quit is posting do you miss me and follow him.
: “As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him.”
“The loose alliance, which was once thought of as the G.O.P. establishment, for months has been engaged in a high-stakes candidate recruitment campaign, full of phone calls, meetings, polling memos and promises of millions of dollars. It’s all aimed at recapturing the Senate majority, but the election also represents what could be Republicans’ last chance to reverse the spread of Trumpism before it fully consumes their party.”
Like I have a saying for twenty years, lets discuss policies instead of being a cultist.
He can't be prosecution but it should never happen again.
From time to time, presidential records or other public property have gone missing from the White House. In December 2009, for example, President Barack Obama’s administration recovered 22 million “missing" emails from President George W. Bush’s White House that had been mislabeled. And White House aides, under Republican and Democratic administrations, have long found ways to keep their communications and meetings private, from meeting lobbyists at coffee shops off the White House grounds to the use of party email servers and apps that automatically erase messages.
"You are going to have mistakes," said Trudy Peterson, who served as acting archivist of the United States during the first two years of President Bill Clinton's administration. "What I think is unusual this time is the volume."
Peterson said that it is a matter of "good governance and democracy" for the White House to create and preserve documents. "Records make it possible for the citizen to know how the government operated and to hold the government accountable for its actions," she said.
But the law contains no enforcement mechanism. There is no penalty for violating it, and the National Archives cannot compel a president or his aides to comply with it.
"The archivist has no legal authority; all they can do is advise," said Anne Weismann, a public-interest lawyer who sued the government over the Bush White House emails when she was chief counsel for the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Weismann said federal courts have frowned on civil suits involving the Presidential Records Act on the grounds that they have no role in a separation-of-powers fight that rests between the executive and legislative branches of government. But she said Trump's behavior could amount to criminal conduct under two separate laws banning the destruction of federal property and doing so in a federal building.
"Both statutes apply, but they are criminal statutes which means the conduct has to be willful," she said. "I think the evidence here strongly suggests willful conduct."
Historians say that past presidents have treated their records with respect for a variety of reasons, including the law, a public interest in understanding how and why decisions were made, and the smooth transition of wisdom and knowledge from one president to the next. What Trump has done, some of them say, represents a departure from the standard practice of presidents in the post-Nixon era.
"The presidential records act was created so that this would never happen again," said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.
Want a Sunday Funny?
Donald Millhouse Trump
Another Sunday Funny?
MISS ME YET?
NO, STICK AROUND AND KEEP CAUSING HEADACHES FOR THE GOP!
RETURNING TO THE REAL WORLD
Roger Amick said...
Makes sense.
SIMON: Well, tell us how. What are Russian aims as regards to Ukraine in your judgment?
YILMAZ: The real target is not Ukraine, but Moscow wants to force Western countries to finally sit down for negotiations on issues of European security because since 1991, this is the first time the West has engaged seriously with Russia to discuss European security things in a way to the strategy that they're pursuing. And Moscow wants arrangements to be made on several issues, but these are European security matters, including halting the development of intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Europe and limiting military exercises in close proximity to Russian borders because if you go back a little bit, in October 2018, the Trump administration decided to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev. And that treaty prohibited both parties from possessing, producing or, you know, flight testing intermediate-range nuclear forces. Now we don't have that agreement.
So in other words, Moscow, they understand that Ukraine will not enter NATO, and that's not the issue. In fact, the issue is if NATO enters Ukraine in the form of American missiles or missile defense elements. That's without any international regulations that limits missile deployments in Europe.
SIMON: Let me ask you this finally. At some point, does Vladimir Putin have to use military force if his threats to use military force are going to be taken seriously? I mean, if every time there's a troop deployment people sense it's a bluff, won't they begin to dismiss it?
YILMAZ: I think there are more options. I think Moscow sees this as a long process. And we might be moving from stage one to stage two, and there might be a stage three, but they're not necessarily a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Of course, the recent claims are obviously important, and military analysts work on certain scenarios based on the intelligence they receive, which is natural, which is normal. However, I would say the ongoing process still shows that Moscow pursues a cost-efficient policy when it comes to hard power using geopolitics. And full-scale invasion of Ukraine does not fit into Moscow's cost-benefit calculus. I mean, it's irrational, and it's just - we might be moving from stage one to stage two. So it's not a matter of days or weeks. We might see further stages of a long process and negotiations and some military maneuvers.
SIMON: Harun Yilmaz, academic editor with Routledge, whose research focuses on Ukraine in Central Asia, thank you so much for being with us.
February 12, 2022 at 10:29 PM
Honest, decent, truth telling Reverend said...
I hope he's right, but fear he may not be.
SUNDAY FUNNY --- DEVIOUS DONALD
Trump’s Phone Habits Pose Problem for Investigators
February 13, 2022 at 9:28 am EST By Taegan Goddard 9 Comments
CNN: “The difficulty for the committee in tracking down just whom Trump spoke with — and when — is dealing with his unorthodox phone habits while in office: According to multiple sources formerly in the administration, the ex-President often used other people’s telephones (or multiple phones of his own, sometimes rotated in and out of use) to communicate with his supporters — and even family.
“One former staffer blamed the former President’s habit on an aversion to anyone listening to his calls (which, in the White House, is hard for a president to avoid if he calls from a desk phone). So he would, frequently, grab the cell phone of a nearby aide or even a Secret Service agent to make calls.”
SO MUCH TO HIDE!
Sanctions Won’t Include Severing Russian Banks
February 13, 2022 at 9:32 am EST By Taegan Goddard 2 Comments
“U.S. and European officials are finalizing an extensive package of sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine that targets major Russian banks, but does not include banning Russia from the SWIFT financial system,” Reuters reports.
“The sanctions on the table also include export controls on components produced by Russia for the tech and weapons sectors, and sanctions against specific Russian oligarchs.”
MY GOODNESS!!!
Republican and Republican-leaning voters are about evenly split between wanting their party to nominate Donald Trump again, 50% to 49%.
Catturd ™
https://twitter.com/catturd2/status/1492487989276164103
Joe Biden needs a cognitive test.
People who voted for Joe Biden need two cognitive tests.
I see the lying POS "pastor" and his butt buddy are still flailing away
ROFLMFAO !!!
I'm beginning to hope that he is the candidate next time because.
'They don’t like Donald Trump. They never liked him': GOP leaders want 'weakened' Trump gone
Tom Boggioni
February 13, 2022
According to a report from the Washington Post, pollsters and Republican campaign consultants see Donald Trump's political future rapidly fading as mainstream GOP voters -- and donors -- are ready to move on from the "weakened" former president.
Using a battle in Michigan between the GOP leadership and Trump's pick to be the state's attorney general candidate, the report illustrates the growing disconnect between Trump's demands and Republicans' need to move on.
"Similar clashes between Republican leaders and the candidates Trump has embraced have been playing out across the country with growing ferocity in recent months, a chaotic sign that Trump’s once unchallenged hold on the party and rank-and-file supporters is waning, even if by degrees," the Post's Josh Dawsey and Micheal Scherer wrote before adding, "The former president’s power within the party and his continued focus on personal grievances is increasingly questioned behind closed doors at Republican gatherings, according to interviews with more than a dozen prominent Republicans in Washington and across the country, including some Trump advisers."
RELATED: Mitch McConnell 'desperately' working to crush 'unelectable goofballs' championed by Trump: report
Adding, "As a result, Trump and his endorsees now find themselves fighting against some elected GOP leaders, donors and party officers intent on navigating the party slowly away from him and his false election claims. Among voters, polls have shown Republican-leaning independents turning from Trump," the report quotes attorney and Trump supporter Matthew DePerno saying the recent turn of events has given Republican leadership in his state an opening to dump Trump.
"There are a lot of people in the state party who — they don’t like Donald Trump. They never liked him," he explained.
According to the report, Republican donors are already turning their backs on the former president, with Art Pope, a prominent North Carolina donor who supported the former president through this four years admitting, "My preference would be he not run again for a variety of reasons and let there be a good primary going forward."
One senior Republican, who did not want to go on the record, said Trump's diminished presence on social media is making it easier to move on without him.
“People aren’t necessarily seeing his messaging as much. They just say he’s not on Twitter, they don’t really know what he’s doing,” they explained. “A lot of people now say to me: 'He did great things, he was a great president, but it’s time for something new.’”
One Trump adviser admitted that even some Trump supporters are feeling Trump-fatigue.
Even Sleepy Joe Biden could beat him again.
Republican and Republican-leaning voters are about evenly split between wanting their party to nominate Donald Trump again, 50% to 49%.
According to...
...wait for it...
...a XiNN poll.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/13/politics/cnn-poll-biden-trump-2024/index.html
LMAO.
So the pederast provides a real knee-slapper on the Sunday Funnies post.
James Putin is pursuing on a path to reconstruct the Soviet Empire
Even Sleepy Joe Biden could beat him again.
For Sloppy Joe to actually "beat" him again he'd have to have beat him the first time.
And if you scumbags truly thought Biden could easily beat him, you wouldn't be working around the clock to disqualify Trump from running.
Watch the out takes from Lester Dolt's interview with Joey Sprinkles. The guy's a fucking MESS. Just like you alky, with your C+ grades and your 490 SAT score.
Even your high school teachers thought you were a fucking loser way back then, as you find yourself today locked down in a fucking looney bin with the 5th Beatle.
Heh.
Credit Scott he hasn't gone down the crazy Trumpets on the American Thinker.
The establishment is the deep state according to this
---'z
To jump into the river an' drown .”
The not-so-great notion in recent years, in my view, has been that of the ruling elites of the western nations now heading for political suicide. They seized upon the unknown consequences of the new and fast-spreading Wuhan virus for political gain. They used it to exceed their constitutional powers -- locked down their citizens and demanded compliance with various vaccine mandates and treatment protocols and then clung on to those powers long after the deleterious effect of those mandates exceeded the virus’s harm. Never, to my knowledge, has any country before this quarantined the healthy along with the sick. Never. (And I remind you that while locking down the young, the robust, and the otherwise healthy New Yorkers, Governor Andrew Cuomo went so far as to quarantine the stricken with the healthy but most vulnerable elderly -- the result was thousands of deaths of oldsters otherwise far less likely to have become infected.)
Never to my knowledge has the public health establishment so ruined its own credibility. Doubt me? Look to our own country for a prime and early example: The CDC endorsing lockdowns while cheering on the BLM protests. It was, in short, a clear example of the political nature of the public health establishment’s pronouncements. It has seriously damaged them, and I hope they suffer the consequences with a sharply reduced budget and a clear restriction of their activities, if not an abolition of the agency altogether. That we funded -- under the table through a cut-out entity -- the Wuhan lab activity, even when expressly forbidden to do so and despite being fully apprised of that lab’s safety shortcomings, just adds to my disgust for their actions and continued broad scope of authority. Naturally, the public-health establishment spent a great deal of time and effort discrediting sound research (and researchers) who believed the evidence showed the virus was not created in nature, but in the lab and spread as a result of a lab leak. Incompetent, disingenuous and clearly political -- that’s our generously funded runaway public-health establishment.
WE CAN "THANK" TRUMP FOR
Trump’s China Trade BUST
February 13, 2022 at 9:59 am EST By Taegan Goddard 26 Comments
Axios:
“It was only two years ago that former President Trump struck a mega trade deal with China, containing commitments by the Chinese to purchase vast sums of American exports. So how’s it going?”
NOT SO GOOD:
“U.S. exports to China have only been 57% of what was pledged as part of the deal, BELOW LEVELS BEFORE THE TRADE WAR EVEN BEGAN."
ANOTHER "PROUD" TRUMP LEGACY.
I just love a story with a happy ending -
New York's Mayor, Eric Adams, paid an emotional tribute to the latest victim of the city's gun violence, an 18-year-old aspiring rapper, Jayquan McKenley.
McKenley who went by the name Chii Wvttz, was shot dead outside a recording studio in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood on Sunday.
Adams struggled to hold back tears as he blamed the shooting on a 'broken system that 'continually fails black and brown New Yorkers.'
He had been arrested several times since 2017 including once for attempted murder, last year.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10500291/New-York-City-Mayor-Eric-Adams-tears-pays-tribute-18-year-old-Bronx-rapper-gunned-down.html
Trump's legacy.
An Indiana man who declared himself a member of “Trump’s army” before entering the U.S. Capitol through a broken window and taunted police once inside on Jan. 6 has a new place to report — a federal penitentiary.
His short 30-day sentence, recommended by prosecutors and granted by a judge on Friday, reflects the relatively meager misdemeanor count of conviction for parading, demonstrating or picketing inside a Capitol building.
Joshua Wagner, 24, drove from Indiana to Washington with two friends—including co-defendant Israel Tutrow, who received a non-jail sentence—to attend Donald Trump‘s so-called “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6. They arrived late and missed Trump’s speech, but they joined the crowd of supporters heading toward the Capitol, as Trump himself had encouraged.
On the way, Wagner and Tutrow commented on the scene around them and wondered how serious things would get as the crowd looked to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden‘s win in the 2002 presidential election.
“This is Trump’s army, dude,” Wagner said. He later asked Tutrow: “You think shit’s really gonna get fucking real here today, dude? Maybe, bro?”
Once he reached the Capitol building, Wagner crawled in through a broken window near the Senate Wing door. Once inside the Crypt, he joined the crowd in chanting “U.S.A.” and “fuck Joe Biden.”
When a police officer asked him to move, Wagner initially responded “This is our house,” but eventually followed the officer’s instruction to move toward the center of the room.
But as he later made his way toward the exit, Wagner was a bit more confrontational.
He questioned whether an officer “was on our side,” and suggested that if the officer was not on the rioters’ “side,” the officer would be failing to fulfill his oath to “protect this country from enemies foreign and domestic.”
Even as he climbed out a broken window to exit the building, Wagner encouraged other rioters to enter the Capitol and “fight,” vowing to come back.
“Let’s stop paying our taxes,” he yelled repeatedly.
Wagner pleaded guilty in November to a single misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building. Prosecutors recommended a sentence of 30 days’ incarceration followed by three years of probation, along with $500 in restitution. Wagner asked for three years of probation only.
At Wagner’s sentencing hearing on Friday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson emphasized that Wagner’s political views are not the reason for his punishment.
“You are not here today because of your heartfelt view that you supported the former president,” Jackson said, calling back to a statement from Wagner’s lawyer that Wagner came to Washington because he had a “heartfelt political view.”
“You are not even here today because you used strong language in chanting about the current president. You are not being prosecuted for your speech,” Jackson continued.
Instead, Jackson said, Wagner was facing the consequences of being an “enthusiastic participant in an effort to undermine the electoral process.”
“America’s standing in the world may never recover,” Jackson, a Barack Obama appointee, continued. “The one thing we’re supposed to stand for is the peaceful transition of power. That foundation of our existence is now badly cracked.”
Although Wagner did not engage in violent or destructive behavior inside the Capitol, Jackson said that he knew he wasn’t allowed to be there in the first place.
“Going in through broken windows is not how you enter a federal building,” she said.
Jackson said that she would allow Wagner to self-surrender after his place of incarceration is determined.
During the hearing, Jackson briefly touched on the issue of so-called “split sentences,” a potentially looming legal issue in Jan. 6 cases. Prosecutors in some of the Jan. 6 misdemeanor cases have recommended a period of incarceration followed by probation, but this may stand on shaky legal ground. It’s unclear whether the federal probation statute allows for such a sentence, and no judge on the D.C. circuit has ruled definitively on the issue so far.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan recently said he didn’t believe he had legal authority to issue a split sentence to a Jan. 6 defendant who pleaded guilty to the same parading and picketing charge, and U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly amended a split sentence after Jan. 6 defendant Virginia “Jenny” Spencer challenged it.
On Friday, Jackson kicked the matter down the road, saying that since she had a “variety of options that don’t involve this issue, I will leave this for another day.”
[Images via FBI court filings.]
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