The elite learn early that they’re special — and that they won’t face consequences.
Brett Kavanaugh is not telling the whole truth. When
President George W. Bush nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006, he told senators that he’d
had nothing to do with the war on terror’s detention policies; that was not true.
Kavanaugh also claimed under oath, that year and again this month, that
he didn’t know that Democratic Party memos a GOP staffer showed him in
2003 were illegally obtained; his emails from that period reveal that
these statements were probably false.
And it cannot be possible that the Supreme Court nominee was both a
well-behaved virgin who never lost control as a young man, as he told Fox News and the Senate Judiciary Committee this past week, and an often-drunk member of the “Keg City Club” and a “Renate Alumnius ,” as he seems to have bragged to many people and written into his high school yearbook.
Then there are the sexual misconduct allegations against him, which he denies.
How
could a man who appears to value honor and the integrity of the legal
system explain this apparent mendacity? How could a man brought up in
some of our nation’s most storied institutions — Georgetown Prep, Yale
College, Yale Law School — dissemble with such ease?
The answer lies in
the privilege such institutions instill in their members, a privilege
that suggests the rules that govern American society are for the common
man, not the exceptional one.
Poor Donald Trump just can't people to believe his total B.S. Even the
United Nations is laughing at him now. Sam Seder and the Majority Report
crew discuss this.
U.S. resident Donald Trump's speech at the United Nations General
Assembly drew laughs from those in attendance, as he once again touted
his 'America First' strategy.
Welcome to The National, the flagship nightly newscast of CBC News
US resident Donald Trump has made the delegates at the UN general assembly laugh - seemingly without attempting to do so.
Mr Trump told the assembly he was sharing the "extraordinary progress" of his administration, two years after taking office.
CNN's Don Lemon responds to resident Donald Trump's speech at the United Nations General Assembly.
During a speech at the UN general assembly this week, Donald Trump decided that it was a smart idea to brag about all of his “accomplishments” since becoming President. What the President didn’t realize is that the rest of the planet isn’t addicted to Fox News, and they knew he was lying.
So in the middle of his braggadocios speech, the entire assembly erupted in laughter. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains how Trump has made the US the laughingstock of the entire world.
Activists confronted Senator Ted Cruz and his wife at a restaurant in
Washington in response to the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and
sexual misconduct allegations, chanting "we believe survivors."
In 1991, The Senate Judiciary Committee pushed for the FBI to
investigate Anita Hill's claims against Clarence Thomas. But now,
Chairman Grassley is refusing the request by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford
for an independent FBI investigation into her allegation against Brett
Kavanaugh.
Trump has started questioning Dr. Ford's accusation against Brett
Kavanaugh and Mitch McConnell told an audience that he has the votes to
confirm Kavanaugh. Lawrence says that indicates Republicans do not plan
to treat Dr. Ford's hearing fairly.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford wants Senate Judiciary members and not
staffers to conduct her hearing with the Committee. Lawrence says that
is because the staffers are too biased and partial to properly question
her.
res. Trump attacked Dr. Ford by asking why she didn’t report her
alleged assault by Brett Kavanaugh when she was 15? Thousands of women
answered that question on twitter today. Lawrence shares their stories.
Reddit has banned a forum dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, saying users repeatedly violated its content policies.
"As
of September 12, r/greatawakening has been banned due to repeated
violations of the terms of our content policy,” a Reddit spokesperson
said in a statement to The Hill. “We are very clear in our site terms of
service that posting content that incites violence, disseminates
personal information, or harasses will get users and communities banned
from Reddit."
QAnon followers believe in a vague and far-reaching conspiracy theory that posits a “deep state” plot against resident Trump and a vast pedophile ring among elites.
Their theories are spurred by a poster or a group of posters that goes by the pseudonym “Q."
The
persona first posted on 4chan last year, claiming to be a high-ranking
security official in the Trump administration, and has led to groups
being created on Reddit as well as Facebook that boast thousands of
members.
Q has pushed the unsubstantiated theory Trump was
persuaded to run for president by military leaders and that together
Trump and the officials are planning the arrests of "deep state" members
in what Q and its followers call “The Storm.”
Q’s devotees
generally support President Trump. They’ve given Q’s posts a life of
their own, spinning off additional theories about who is behind Q and
what Q’s messages — which they call “crumbs” — mean.
The movement
initially began on the fringes of the Internet, on less trafficked
places like 4chan, but through Q theorists' ramped-up presence on Reddit
and Facebook, the conspiracy theories have gained a cult following
that’s spilled over into the real world.
Noticeable numbers of Trump supporters have shown up to his rallies clad in Q gear.
Reddit’s move to get rid of the critical Q group comes one day after it banned r/milliondollarextreme, according to BuzzFeed News,
a subreddit for the sketch comedy group Million Dollar Extreme that is
popular with the alt-right. The subreddit was one of the most popular on
the site, sharing white supremacist and white nationalist content.
Over the past year, Reddit has taken more general steps to clean up its platform amid abuse and problematic content.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is apparently so afraid of getting a
primary challenge from the right in 2020 that she's willing to lose all
of the moderates, the independents, and the Democratic women who have
supported her in the past. In order to save her own career, she's
seemingly willing to sell out generations of women, of people of color,
of LGBTQ people with a vote to put a young, hyper-partisan extremist
Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. How far right has she swung? She's
giving exclusive interviews to outlets like Newsmax, which hosts a white supremacist radio show host on it's multimedia channel.
That interview, by the way, is so that she can blow off the efforts
of two political action committees in her state—the Maine People’s
Alliance and Mainers for Accountable Leadership—who've teamed up with
healthcare activist Ady Barkan to crowdfund a warchest for her 2020
Democratic opponent, whoever that might be. Collins and her press
secretary sniff that this is just like bribery and she is so far above
that that it won't make any difference and that she will "will make up
her mind based on the merits of the nomination."
Which is utterly laughable. On the merits, this guy has lied to the Senate. This one got glossed over with the stolen emails and everything else, but in a confirmation hearing in 2004
he actually told Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) that "my background has not
been in partisan politics." This is the guy who almost single-handedly
created the Vince Foster was murdered by Hillary Clinton conspiracy
theory when he was working for Ken Starr, and who "argued internally for
the most-intrusive possible investigation and questioning of President
Clinton vis-a-vis the Lewinsky affair, and adopted a maximal view of
Clinton's legal liability and vulnerability to impeachment." He was part
of George W. Bush's legal team that bullied Bush into the White House
in Bush v. Gore. When Republicans decided to politicize the
most horrible thing one man had ever endured—Michael Schiavo's decision
to remove his brain dead wife Teri's life support—Kavanaugh woke Bush up in the middle of the night to intervene by signing "emergency" legislation.
He even lied to the Senate about being a partisan. It's a stain on
the Senate that they let him get away with it then, in 2004 when he was
Bush's right-hand man. And caught red-handed this time around as having
trafficked in stolen documents in order to advance Bush's partisan
agenda, Kavanaugh didn't even have the decency to apologize to Sens.
Durbin and Patrick Leahy whose emails were pilfered, or to the committee
for having misled them in the past.
It's a testament to just how unprincipled Collins has become, how
desperate to hold on to her Senate seat, that she is willing to
sacrifice everything up to and including her own dignity for Donald
Trump.
As if she's not going to get a challenge from the right in 2020
anyway.
The people of Maine need to call her on it. Directly. Every day. At
her office numbers: (207) 622-8414, (207) 945-0417, (207) 283-1101,
(207) 493-7873, (207) 784-6969, (207) 780-3575, (202) 224-2523. And
since she's ignoring calls, she needs to see them in person.
The
September 11, 2001 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist
attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda against the United
States on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
The attacks killed
2,996 people, injured over 6,000 others, and caused at least $10
billion in infrastructure and property damage. Additional people died of
9/11-related cancer and respiratory diseases in the months and years
following the attacks.More at Wikipedia
Location:New York City, New York, U.S, Arlington County, Virginia, U.S, Stonycreek Township near, Shanksville, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Date:11, 2001, 8:46 a.m. – 10:28 a.m. (EDT)
Target:World Trade Center, (AA 11 and UA 175), The Pentagon (AA 77), White House or U.S. Capitol, (UA 93, failed)
URBANA, Ill. — Barack Obama went hard. Donald Trump hardly responded.
Friday was the day Republicans and Democrats and pretty much every
reporter and political obsessive have been dreaming of — the two who couldn’t be more different, who are both the throbbing
hearts of their own bases and the nightmare of the others’ — going head
to head.
Six weeks before the midterms that are existential for both of their
visions of the future, Obama unleashed for the first time with an
indictment of Trump and Republicans that stopped just short of calling
them traitors to the American ideal. Trump, who’s been swiping at Obama
on Twitter and other appearances almost every chance he gets and months
ago said Democrats who didn’t clap for his state of the union address
had committed treason, made a joke about sleeping through it. A few
hours later, he congratulated himself for the joke.
“That seems to be the quote of the day, by the way, which I sort of figured," Trump told donors in South Dakota.
Obama delivered some choice quotes of his own during his speech at
the University of Illinois. “How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are
bad?” he asked. Later, he called Trump’s Twitter feed “electronic
versions of bread and circuses.”
People close to Trump say he has long complained about the fawning
coverage and adulation that he believes Obama has received, even after
leaving the White House. The dynamic has only bolstered his deep-seated
belief that he’ll never be treated fairly or given credit in
establishment Washington.
But Trump also sees Obama as a much more formidable political
opponent than Hillary Clinton, the one he actually beat, and Trump’s
allies have privately worried that the 44th president could get in his
successor’s head. Obama, while publicly dismissive of Trump, has been
vexed by Trump for years, from the lies about his birth certificate, to
the deliberate attempts to undo his signature achievements, to worries
about how much he's responsible for the backlash that helped Trump get
elected.
To Obama, Democratic and Republican voters need to band together to
overlook their differences and stand up for America against Trump and
complicit elected Republicans. To Trump, voters need to see Democrats in
office as a threat to America because they won’t work with him.
Where Obama appealed to civic duty and common decency, Trump focused on the hard-line planks of his agenda.
“We have to be tough,” Trump said.
Obama leaned back from the podium at one point and marveled about how
every country in the world has signed on to the Paris climate accords,
except America, because Trump pulled back from the international
agreement. Trump bashed NATO, the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and
all the other international norms that Obama holds dear.
Trump flew to North Dakota and South Dakota, where his party is
strongest, and gave another pair of speeches bragging about his record,
talked briefly about the candidates he was there to support and brought
them onto the stage.
Obama flew to central Illinois, spoke about American history and what
the country is supposed to stand for, then walked into a local coffee
shop and introduced his candidate one by one to the voters surprised to
see them there.
Asked what they had to say about Obama’s attacks on Trump — coming at
the end of head-exploding week in the middle of the darkest period of
his residency so far — multiple Trump White House aides and people
close to him said they didn’t want to get into it, letting the resident’s words speak for themselves.
Democrats have been flooding Obama’s office with requests for him to come see them.
Republicans, outside of the reddest states — which notably, include
several of those where Democratic incumbents are scrambling to hold on —
have been ducking questions on Trump for the entire year.
Trump’s public schedule on Friday put him at a disadvantage in terms
of hitting back at Obama. The resident had two speeches scheduled at
fundraising events in North Dakota and South Dakota, but neither were in
front of the massive crowds that reliably rev him up.
Still, “Isn’t this much more exciting than listening to President Obama?” Trump asked the crowd at his first event.
All three cable networks carried Obama’s speech live and in full,
including Fox News, which is often blaring in the resident’s cabin on
Air Force One, and replayed clips of Obama’s speech. CNN didn’t carry
Trump’s remarks in North Dakota live, MSNBC cut away quickly and even
Fox News went to commercial before the resident wrapped up. None of
them carried Trump’s full speech in South Dakota later in the day.
Trump was speaking to wealthy donors at the fundraising receptions.
Obama deliberately chose an auditorium full of students at the
University of Illinois for his address.
Trump, at one point, acknowledged he was speaking to a largelyaffluent
crowd, remarking that a coal mining executive he brought up on stage to
praise his efforts to revive the coal industry was likely rich.
“I signed his hat,” Trump joked. “The guy’s probably loaded and I’m signing hats.”
Trump riffed, as he always does. Obama spent the flight to Illinois
fiddling with a pen on a printed-out copy of the speech, changing words
and then changing them again.
Once it was done, Obama, per his custom, barely went off script —
though he said he couldn’t help himself from a digression to take credit
for the economy that Trump cites as his biggest success.
"Let’s just remember when this recovery started,” Obama said.
“Suddenly Republicans are saying, 'It's a miracle!' I have to remind
them that those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015, 2016."
Pushing back on that sensitive point was the only moment when Trump
brought out a pre-written document. He produced four sheets of paper
listing his accomplishments, running through them one-by-one in front of
the crowd to argue that he’d been the one who salvaged the economy.
“Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if
wrongly, fearful of change. More often it's manufactured by the powerful
and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and
keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep
their power and keep their privilege,” Obama said at one point. “It did
not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause.”
By the end of the day, Trump settled on this response to his
predecessor's critique: "If that doesn't get you out to vote for the
midterms, nothing will.”
Trump was trolled at his own rally! Cenk Uygur, Brett Erlich, Brooke
Thomas, and John Iadarola, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.
resident Donald Trump’s own tongue seemed to be working to thwart him at a rally in Montana.
resident Donald Trump appeared to have slurred the word "anonymous"
twice during his rally in Billings, Montana on Thursday (Sept. 6). The
Republican suggested the anonymous New York Time op-ed was written by a
woman during his rally in Billings, Montana.
Roland Martin took Fox Business' Lou Dobbs to task for his comments
about Nike's Colin Kaepernick campaign and for claiming that police
brutality is not an issue in America.
Dobbs said, "This is Nike endorsing the Kaepernick message which is that
police brutally exists in wanton measure across this country. And it
emphatically...does not. It is a disgrace, to me, that anyone would give
that message credence."
-
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The
NY Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed
essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official
in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job
would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay
anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our
readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our
vetting process here.
Resident Trump is facing a test to his residency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
It’s
not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is
bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party
might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
The
dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior
officials in his own administration are working diligently from within
to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To
be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the
administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have
already made America safer and more prosperous.
But
we believe our first duty is to this country, and the resident
continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our
republic.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.
The
root of the problem is the resident’s amorality. Anyone who works with
him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that
guide his decision making.
Although
he was elected as a Republican, the resident shows little affinity for
ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and
free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings.
At worst, he has attacked them outright.
In
addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the
“enemy of the people,” resident Trump’s impulses are generally
anti-trade and anti-democratic.
Don’t
get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative
coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation,
historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.
But
these successes have come despite — not because of — the resident’s
leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and
ineffective.
From the White House to
executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will
privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s
comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from
his whims.
Meetings with him veer
off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his
impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally
reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There
is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one
minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently,
exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the resident
flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.
The
erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung
heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast
as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great
lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they
are clearly not always successful.
It
may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that
there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And
we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
The result is a two-track residency.
Take
foreign policy: In public and in private, resident Trump shows a
preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin
of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little
genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded
nations.
Astute observers have noted,
though, that the rest of the administration is operating on another
track, one where countries like Russia are called out for meddling and
punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are engaged as
peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the resident was reluctant to expel
so many of Mr. Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a
former Russian spy in Britain. He complained for weeks about senior
staff members letting him get boxed into further confrontation with
Russia, and he expressed frustration that the United States continued to
impose sanctions on the country for its malign behavior. But his
national security team knew better — such actions had to be taken, to
hold Moscow accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
Given
the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the
cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex
process for removing the resident. But no one wanted to precipitate a
constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the
administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s
over.
The bigger concern is not what
Mr. Trump has done to the residency but rather what we as a nation have
allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our
discourse to be stripped of civility.
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter.
All Americans should heed his words and break free of the tribalism
trap, with the high aim of uniting through our shared values and love of
this great nation.
We may no longer
have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example — a lodestar
for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr. Trump
may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
There
is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to
put country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday
citizens rising above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving
to shed the labels in favor of a single one: Americans.
The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.
