This Is a Constitutional Crisis, Act Like It.
In the face of an administration that is trying to amass dictatorial powers, Democrats need to bring to bear all the powers of their own. Trumpâs outright rejection of congressional authority makes impeachment proceedings necessary, but even impeachment alone is not sufficient.
Yes QUIT THE BOOK.
"The current state of the Department of Veterans Affairs is absolutely unacceptable,â presidential candidate Donald Trump said when speaking at a rally on Oct. 31, 2015, in front of the retired battleship USS Wisconsin in Norfolk, Va.
âOver 300,000 â and this is hard to believe, and itâs actually much more than that now â over 300,000 veterans died waiting for care,â said Trump.
Trumpâs strong condemnation of the Obama administrationâs handling of the backlog of hundreds of thousands of veteran benefits claims made him the overwhelming choice for many veteran voters in 2016.
But after two years in the White House, the Trump administration has decided to execute a plan to purge 200,000 applications for VA healthcare caused by known administrative errors within VAâs enrollment process and enrollment system â problems that had already been documented by the Office of the Inspector General in 2015 and 2017.
In purging this massive backlog of applications, the VA is declaring the applications to be incomplete due to errors by the applicants, despite the OIG findings and in violation of the promise Trump made to fix the system. This purge has the dual effect of letting the VA avoid the work of processing the applications and absolving the agency of any responsibility for veteransâ delayed access to health and disability benefits.
Disgraceful. Trump dodged the draft and then had the audacity to insult war heroes. Now he denies treatment to hundreds of thousands of veterans who were promised healthcare in return for serving their country. He just keeps on trashing his base. I hope they wake up by 2020.
Must read profile on Papadopoulos
My favorite passage:
I had been through many potential narratives of Papadopoulos, but now a simple one was starting to emerge: that an ambitious young man with a strong desire to impress people had most likely embellished his way into a world of trouble, relaying common rumors (e.g., that the Russians had damaging information about Hillary Clinton) as firsthand information to people like Alexander Downer. If this theory was true, then Papadopoulosâs story wasnât about how a vital campaign operative fell into traps laid by deep-state conspirators. It was about how, in a time of Trump-Russia hysteria, a minor player could set off global earthquakes because he wanted to look big.
Some searing words from Maureen Dowd
âWell, I donât know about the videos,â the president told reporters as he left on his trip to Japan.
âHe does outrageous, nasty, destructive things, knowing full well heâs crossing a line, and then he pretends he didnât,â said Trump biographer Tim OâBrien. âHe has spent five decades going to gossip columnists, radio shows, TV interviews and newspapers to stick a knife into almost anybody who crosses his path that he doesnât like and he revels in it. There is something amazing in the Energizer Bunny aspect of his nastiness and his ignorance. He doesnât care what people think about how mean or dumb he is. He just keeps going.â
OâBrien said Pelosi âhit on something that is core to his con. His whole life is about the cover-up. He has covered up his academic record, his health reports, his dalliances with women, his finances, his family history. Even while he was saying he was the most transparent president in history, his Treasury secretary was across town telling Congress, âIâm not giving you the presidentâs tax returns.â
âOne of the biggest motivating factors in Trumpâs life â other than food, greed, sex and revenge â is mythmaking. Deep down, he knows heâs a pathological liar and heâs not the person he says he is. But any time anyone pierces that veil, it sends him into a rage.â
Itâs wearing, not letting this petulant man wear us all out.
Some searing words from Maureen Dowd
Dowd nailed it. My favorite lines:
There is something amazing in the Energizer Bunny aspect of his nastiness and his ignorance.
Itâs wearing, not letting this petulant man wear us all out.
YesâŠit is all too bizarre, isnât it? To see in words what this con man is and how he operates.
Thanks for the individual quotes - I just put them in bold! 
This op-ed piece pulls no punches calling out the heartland for its hypocrisy.
Memo to all you âsmall governmentâ conservatives in the farm states: Send back your latest federal subsidy checks.
Go on. Tell Donald Trump â and all us taxpayers â that you donât want the money.
You donât want it. Donât need it. And, yes, donât deserve it. If you canât sell your products on the open market, isnât that your problem?
After all, youâve been railing for years against ârunaway federal spendingâ and massive federal budget deficits. Itâs time to put your money where your mouth is.
Or was all that Tea Party stuff just a big, fat lie?
Midwestern riches
The Ag Racket was in Washington on Thursday collecting another $16 billion of our money, courtesy of the man the farmers put in the White House. Apparently, itâs our job to compensate them for the effects of Trumpâs policies. (Trump doled out $11 billion in âaidâ last year.)
Donât you just love these people? Farmers lean Republican by about three to one. Trump swept the farmland states by wide margins. He won Iowa by 10 percentage points, Kansas by 21 and Nebraska by 25.
You can hardly throw a soybean anywhere in the Midwest without hitting small-government conservatives who rail against government spending, bailouts, âwelfareâ and âsocialism.â
But I guess itâs not âwelfareâ if youâre white.
Theyâre all in favor of âfree marketsâ â at least for something simple, like, say, health insurance.
Itâs when you start to deal with things that are really complex, like wheat or soybeans, that you need the government to step in.
Of course in a truly free market theyâd respond to plunging prices by, er, planting something else. But, then, weâll never know, will we?
Betting (on) the farm
It takes a lot of chutzpah to complain about poverty while making bigger returns than Wall Street.
But then, the Ag Racket has never been shy â at least when it comes to money.
The returns on farmland were a hefty 6.7% last year, according to the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries (NCREIF).
Howâd your 401(k) do? The S&P 500 Index of the biggest U.S. stocks dropped 7%.
But by all means, letâs tax the rest of us to help them out. Whereâs that violin?
Farmland returns havenât had a single negative year since at least the 1990s, according to NCREIF. Farmland was actually in the black in the year of the 9/11 attacks. They were up 15% in 2008, when the Lehman Brothers-induced stock-market crash wiped out half your savings.
This was no anomaly. Over 20 years, farmland has produced twice the average annual returns of the S&P 500: 12.4% versus 5.9%.
And $100 invested in U.S. farmland 20 years ago would be worth more than $1,000 today. The same amount in the U.S. stock market: Just over $300.
Farm revenues have doubled over that time, rising much faster than inflation.
Good for them, right? Well, sure. The laborer is worthy of the hire. Honest profits are a good thing.
Subsidies galore
But during that time theyâve been pocketing billions of subsidies from taxpayers. Since 1999 the direct payments alone have totaled an astonishing $370 billion in todayâs money. That figure, incidentally, is straight from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
So if we have to compensate them when thereâs a âtrade war,â why did we have to compensate them when there isnât one? And are we going to compensate everyone else too? Should the rest of us get federal credits when we buy a new iPhone?
No wonder Gladstone Land, a Virginia-based publicly traded farmland real estate investment trust, has actually risen during the past month â even while the rest of the stock market has slumped.
So much for the alleged trouble in âfarm country.â The stock, a useful proxy for the farming industry, is up 45% including dividends since Donald Trump was elected.
The S&P 500: Just 30%.
Who should be subsidizing whom here?
Brett Arends is a MarketWatch columnist.
âItâs the same the whole world over.
Itâs the rich what get the pleasure,
Itâs the poor what get the blameâ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqX5fRgvecs
We have the same down here
This article caught my eye this morning -
No problems with socialism and welfare when it applies to yours truly, but donât expect him to care about those who really need it.
Profile of Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He once prosecuted a FBI Agent for acting as a Soviet asset. This is a good read and maybe the reason heâs so hawkish on this issue.
This is a pretty fair characterization of Muellerâs press conference this morning in conjunction with our current political climate.
This last bit really drives the reality of the situation home.
First, Mueller was adamant that his team had not exonerated the president of obstruction of justice. âIf we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,â he said rather sternly. Mueller also implicitly rebuked those who dismiss obstruction as a mere âprocess crimeâ unworthy of attention, saying that it âstrikes at the core of the governmentâs effort to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable.â If he hoped this notion would take root in the Trump administration, it was in vain; Trump immediately claimed that Mueller found insufficient evidence of obstruction.
Second, Mueller seemed concerned that Americans have focused on what Trump did rather than on what Russia did. He described his conclusions about overt Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and closed by repeating that âthere were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election and that allegation deserves the attention of every American.â Muellerâs frustration is justified: Russiaâs aggressive misconduct seems to have been lost in the shuffle.
Mueller is a man out of time. This is the age of alternatively factual tweets and sound bites; heâs a by-the-book throwback who expects Americans to read and absorb carefully worded 400-page reports. Has he met us? His high standards sometimes manifest as touching naĂŻvetĂ©. âI hope and expect this to be the only time that I will speak to you in this manner,â Mueller said today, explaining that his report was his testimony and that Congress should not expect him to answer questions with any new information.
If he thinks that reprimand will deter Congress , he doesnât grasp why Congress would summon him to testify. Our representatives donât need the answers as much as they need to be seen on camera asking the questions. The rough beast of 2020 slouches toward us. Names can be made, primaries won and lost, and profiles elevated by those questions, whether they support Trump or condemn him. Washington is no place for a rule-follower.
[quote=âPet_Proletariat, post:383, topic:965â]
Second, Mueller seemed concerned that Americans have focused on what Trump did rather than on what Russia did. He described his conclusions about overt Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and closed by repeating that âthere were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election and that allegation deserves the attention of every American.â Muellerâs frustration is justified: Russiaâs aggressive misconduct seems to have been lost in the shuffle.
I strongly agree with this. It drives me nuts that no one, not the media pundits, nor our Congress seem to give a damn that our election was violated! And itâs going to happen again.
You know he has a pointâŠand plays him on TV. Whatever it takesâŠjust do it.
From The New York Times:
Robert De Niro: Robert Mueller, We Need to Hear More
You said that I your investigationâs work âspeaks for itself.â It doesnât.
Thereâs a lot of speculation about the president being tone-deaf to facts, but thereâs not much disagreement about the tone. Whether you take delight in it as his loyal supporters do or youâre the unfortunate target of his angry rhetoric, the hostile way he expresses himself registers with everyone. Nor is there much credible disagreement that the president treats lies, exaggerations and bullying as everyday weapons in his communication toolbox. These onslaughts of rhetoric aimed at his opposition mostly leave his antagonists sputtering in response, but I donât think an in-kind response will be very effective either.
Say what you will about the president â and I have â when it comes to that lying, exaggerating, bullying thing, no one can touch him.
He has set up a world where it seems as if those disapproving of him can effectively challenge him only by becoming just like him. Heâs bringing down the level of the entire playing field.
And here, Mr. Mueller, is where you come in â where you need to come in. In your news conference, you said that your investigationâs work âspeaks for itself.â It doesnât. It may speak for itself to lawyers and lawmakers who have the patience and obligation to read through the more than 400 pages of carefully chosen words and nuanced conclusions (with all due respect, as good a read as it is, youâre no Stephen King).
Youâve characterized the report as your testimony, but you wouldnât accept that reason from anyone your office interviewed. Additional information and illumination emerge from responses to questions. I know youâre as uncomfortable in the spotlight as the president is out of it. I know you donât want to become part of the political spectacle surrounding Russiaâs crimes and your report on them. I know you will, however reluctantly, testify before Congress if called, because you respect the system and follow the rules, and I understand why youâd want to do it away from the public glare.
But the country needs to hear your voice. Your actual voice. And not just because you donât want them to think that your actual voice sounds like Robert De Niro reading from cue cards, but because this is the report your country asked you to do, and now you must give it authority and clarity without, if I may use the term, obstruction.
Weâve learned our lesson about what can happen to the perception of your work when interpreted in rabid tweets by the president, dissected by pundits all over the map, trumpeted in bizarre terms by the presidentâs absurd personal lawyer and distorted by the attorney general.
And if, in fact, you have nothing further to say about the investigation, for your public testimony, you could just read from the report in response to questions from members of Congress. Your life has been a shining example of bravely and selflessly doing things for the good of our country. I urge you to leave your comfort zone and do that again.
You are the voice of the Mueller report. Let the country hear that voice.
With great respect,
Robert De Niro
This topic was automatically closed 15 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
Publisher of the NYT, A. G. Sulzberger takes issue with Tâs rhetoric, his malfeasance, and his targeted campaign to discredit the news makers. Use of the word TreasonâŠwell, goes far over the line. #ReadItAndWeep
Accusing the New York Times of âTreason,â Trump Crosses a Line
The Founders considered it the gravest of crimes. Tossing the charge around is irresponsible and wrong.
First it was âthe failing New York Times.â Then âfake news.â Then âenemy of the people.â President Trumpâs escalating attacks on the New York Times have paralleled his broader barrage on American media. Heâs gone from misrepresenting our business, to assaulting our integrity, to demonizing our journalists with a phrase thatâs been used by generations of demagogues.
Now the president has escalated his attacks even further, accusing the Times of a crime so grave it is punishable by death.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump said the Times had committed âa virtual act of treason.â The charge, levied on Twitter , was in response to an article about American cyber incursions into the Russian electrical grid that his own aides had assured our reporters raised no national-security concerns.
Few paid much attention. Many news organizations, including the Times, determined the accusation wasnât even worth reporting, a sign of how inured weâve grown to such rhetorical recklessness. But this new attack crosses a dangerous line in the presidentâs campaign against a free and independent press.
Treason is the only crime explicitly defined in the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers knew the wordâs history as a weapon wielded by tyrants to justify the persecution and execution of enemies. They made its definition immutableâArticle III reads: âTreason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfortââto ensure that it couldnât be abused by politicians for self-serving attacks on rivals or critics. The crime is almost never prosecuted, but Mr. Trump has used the word dozens of times.
There is no more serious charge a commander in chief can make against an independent news organization. Which presents a troubling question: What would it look like for Mr. Trump to escalate his attacks on the press further? Having already reached for the most incendiary language available, what is left but putting his threats into action?
Thereâs evidence thatâs already happening. The administration has waged an aggressive legal campaign against journalists. Leak investigations, which were already on the rise under President Obama, have surged. Government regulatory powers have been misused to retaliate against news organizations, such as the attempt to block AT&T from acquiring CNNâs parent company, Time Warner. Most recently, the precedent-shattering use of the Espionage Act against Julian Assange for publishing classified information has raised fears that the Justice Department seeks not merely to punish illegal hacking but effectively to criminalize standard reporting practices.
Meanwhile, the presidentâs rhetorical attacks continue to foster a climate in which trust in journalists is eroding and violence against them is growing. More than a quarter of Americansâand a plurality of Republicansânow agree that âthe news media is the enemy of the American peopleâ and âthe president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.â A world-wide surge of attacks has made this the most dangerous year for journalists on record. This is particularly true in parts of the world where pursuing the truth already carries great risks, as news reporters and editors experience rising levels of censorship, harassment, imprisonment and murder.
I met with the president in the Oval Office earlier this year and told him directly that authoritarian leaders around the world, with growing impunity, are employing his words to undermine free expression. The president expressed concern and insisted he wanted to be viewed as a defender of the free press. But in the same conversation, he took credit for the term âfake news,â a phrase that has now been wielded by dozens of leaders across five continents to justify everything from the passage of anti-free-speech laws in Egypt to the takeover of independent news organizations in Hungary to a crackdown on investigations into genocide in Myanmar.
Americaâs Founders believed that a free press was essential to democracy, and the American experience has proved them right. Journalism guards freedoms, binds together communities, ferrets out corruption and injustice, and ensures the flow of information that powers everything from elections to the economy. Freedom of the press has been fiercely defended by nearly all American presidents regardless of politics or party affiliation, and regardless of their own complaints about coverage.
There are moments when the press and the government are legitimately at odds, never more so than when the pressâs conviction about the publicâs right to know collides with the governmentâs assessment of the importance of maintaining secrecy. Journalists take seriously the concern that their reporting may jeopardize national security, and at the Times we have withheld details or delayed publication when government officials convinced us there was a danger of loss of life or damage to intelligence operations.
The story that prompted the presidentâs attack was no exception. As the Times prepared the story for publication, our reporter contacted officials at the White House National Security Council, the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command and gave them the opportunity to raise any national-security concerns about the story. They told us they did not have any. Shortly after publication, the president accused the Times of treason.
Over 167 years, through 33 presidential administrations, the Times has sought to serve America and its citizens by seeking the truth and helping people understand the world. There is nothing we take more seriously than doing this work fairly and accurately, even when we are under attack. Mr. Trumpâs campaign against journalists should concern every patriotic American. A free, fair and independent press is essential to our countryâs strength and vitality and to every freedom that makes it great.
Mr. Sulzberger is publisher of the New York Times.
Appeared in the June 20, 2019, print edition as âWith Talk of âTreason,â Trump Crosses a Line.â
Another calling out T by the New York Times for his malfeasance and utter disdain (read: Koch/big money allegiances) to working to solve the Climate Crisis.
Abdicating, Again, on Climate
President Trumpâs new energy plan aims to save coal-burning power plants and minersâ jobs. It wonât do either.
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
The contrast could not have been more pronounced. On Tuesday, New Yorkâs governor and legislative leaders agreed on an aggressive program to eliminate by midcentury emissions of most of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. The very next day, the Trump administration repudiated yet another of former President Barack Obamaâs initiatives aimed at reducing those same emissions. One day, Albany seizes a commanding role in the fight against climate change. The next, Washington scuttles from the field of battle, abandoning any pretense of taking seriously this most pressing of global issues.
âŠ
The Trump rule, by contrast, asks little of the coal industry, will keep some plants in business and will save jobs. But not for much longer. The industry is already on life support, battered by market forces â cheaper natural gas, the rapid growth in renewable fuels â and by intense public pressure from the likes of Michael Bloomberg, who recently pledged $500 million of his fortune to moving the electric power industry away from all fossil fuels, not just coal but natural gas.
Left to his own devices, Mr. Trump would simply have killed the Obama plan and been done with it. But he couldnât. As a result of a Supreme Court decision in 2007, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, and a later administrative action known as the endangerment finding, the E.P.A. is obliged to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act. What the new rule does is redefine how tough the agency will be in carrying out that duty.
Opinion | Abdicating, Again, on Climate - The New York Times
More NYT opinionsâŠsort of donât determine anythingâŠbut Maureen Dowd offers some praiseâŠ
The president blundered into the crisis by canceling the Iranian nuclear deal, tweet-taunting about the âend of Iranâ and hiring the hirsute Iran warmonger John Bolton. And our president is such a mercurial blowhard, he could screw it all up again before this column even hits The Times home page.
Iâve been at this treacherous juncture before with presidents. Once the gears in Washington get going, once the military-industrial complex is âcocked & loaded,â once the hawks around you begin Iago-whispering that if you donât go forward, youâll be unmanned, itâs awfully hard to reverse course.
âŠ
Cheney came back to haunt us in the form of his dagger-tongued daughter Liz, the Wyoming House member, who said Trumpâs inaction âcould in fact be a very serious mistake.â She lobbed the nastiest insult she could think of, comparing Trump to Barack Obama.Even âFox & Friends,â which can always be counted on to fluff Trumpâs ego, raised doubts. Brian Kilmeade warned: âNorth Koreaâs watching. All our enemies are watching.â
But maybe something new could work with the impossible child-man in the White House: positive reinforcement.
That was very smart, Mr. President, not to tangle with the Persians, who have been engaged in geopolitics since 550 B.C., until you have a better sense of exactly what is going on here. Listen to your isolationist instincts and your base, not to batty Bolton. You donât want to get mired in a war that could spill over to Saudi Arabia and Israel, sparking conflagrations from Afghanistan to Lebanon and beyond.
Just remember: The Iranians are great negotiators with a bad hand and you are a terrible negotiator with a good hand.
Girls to the front 
Profile in Vogue 
Watch 