Woman demands to see passports of Spanish speaking family at Virginia restaurant

© Telemundo 44

A white woman confronted a Spanish-speaking family last week at a Virginia restaurant and demanded that they "show me your passports" in video that has since gone viral.

The woman can be heard in the video screaming at a Guatemalan woman and her family, telling them to "go back to your fucking country." She also tells the family not to "freeload on America" and repeatedly asks for their passports.

Later in the video, the woman is seen continuing her tirade outside the restaurant, saying, "I'm tired of this shit."

The woman who was berated recorded the video and shared it with Telemundo 44 in Washington, D.C.

The confrontation occurred at Andy's, a restaurant in Lovettsville, Va. The restaurant denounced the woman in a Facebook post, calling her "a vile and loathsome individual."

"Thank you — and we mean this with all the aforementioned respect that you rightfully deserve—for never returning to Andy’s. You are not welcome," the restaurant wrote.

The confrontation is the latest video to go viral showing a white person berating Spanish-speaking people in public. In May, a man threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement on customers and employees at a restaurant in New York for speaking Spanish.

The man, an attorney named Aaron Schlossberg, was later kicked out of his office space.

 By Michael Burke - 10/22/18 09:19 PM EDT

Republicans want to take away your Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid

By Laurence Lewis

 

Mitch McConnell is disappointed:

After instituting a $1.5 trillion tax cut and signing off on a $675 billion budget for the Department of Defense, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that the only way to lower the record-high federal deficit would be to cut entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

"It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem," McConnell said of the deficit, which grew 17 percent to $779 billion in fiscal year 2018. McConnell explained to Bloomberg that "it’s a bipartisan problem: Unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future." The deficit has increased 77 percent since McConnell became majority leader in 2015.

New Treasury Department analysis on Monday revealed that corporate tax cuts had a significant impact on the deficit this year. Federal revenue rose by 0.04 percent in 2018, a nearly 100 percent decrease on last year’s 1.5 percent. In fiscal year 2018, tax receipts on corporate income fell to $205 billion from $297 billion in 2017.

The Republican tax cuts for the wealthy gutted federal revenues and exploded the deficit, just as the CBO said they would, but it's not the Republicans' problem. That's Republican logic for you. And of course their solution isn’t to undo the damage they inflicted but to inflict more. By gutting the budget. McConnell has some very specific spending targets:

McConnell said it would be “very difficult to do entitlement reform, and we’re talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid,” with one party in charge of Congress and the White House.

“I think it’s pretty safe to say that entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to achieve when you have unified government,” McConnell said.

Trying to follow his train of thought makes the brain hurt. He's saying he wants to slash Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, but he can't because his party controls all the branches of government. Democrats have no interest in destroying these popular and enormously beneficial programs, but somehow McConnell can only get it done with their help. The point seems to be that in order for an unpopular and disastrous Republican agenda to be enacted, Democrats need to be elected. Which may be his way of saying that if you don't want an unpopular and disastrous Republican agenda you need to keep Republicans in power.

Did I mention that trying to follow his train of thought makes the brain hurt?

But the point is clear. However he gets it done, he wants it done. Whatever the politics, his policy goal is to gut funding for Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid. And as for his reference to any objective standard as to the driver of the debt, well he seems to have a different standard of objectivity than reality. That the Republican tax cuts for the wealthy would explode the deficit was known all along. Both before they were passed:

The House Republican tax plan may have a deficit problem.
The GOP bill including some changes would increase federal budget deficits by $1.7 trillion over 10 years, according to an estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That includes money for additional debt service payments due to the bill.
Under the plan, U.S. debt would rise to 97.1 percent of gross domestic product in 2027, up from 91.2 percent under current CBO projections.

And after:

The deficit - the amount that Washington’s spending exceeds its revenues - will expand to $804 billion in fiscal 2018, which ends on Sept. 30, up from $665 billion in fiscal 2017, CBO said.

The national debt is on track to approach 100 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2028, said the nonpartisan CBO, which analyzes legislation for Congress.

“That amount is far greater than the debt in any year since just after World War II,” CBO said, adding that the debt is now about 77 percent of GDP, a measure of the size of the economy. The Republican tax legislation, passed by Congress without Democratic support, along with a recent bipartisan $1.3 trillion spending package, are expected to drive economic growth faster than initially expected, CBO said.

Of course, McConnell was lying about it all along:

Nearly a year ago, as the debate over Republican tax breaks for the wealthy was near its end, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) insisted that the tax cuts didn’t need to be paid for – because they’d pay for themselves.

“I not only don’t think it will increase the deficit, I think it will be beyond revenue neutral,” McConnell said in December 2017. “In other words, I think it will produce more than enough to fill that gap.”

Whether the GOP leader actually believed his own rhetoric is an open question, but either way, we now know the Kentucky senator’s claim was spectacularly wrong. The Republican tax breaks have, as Democrats and those familiar with arithmetic predicted, sent the nation’s budget deficit soaring.

And just last month the Republican House of Representatives was pushing through yet another round of tax cuts:

A second round of Republican tax cuts would add an additional $3.2 trillion to the federal deficit over a decade, according to a new report released by a centrist think-tank...

The GOP’s “tax reform 2.0” would make permanent many of the individual and estate tax provisions in the tax law Republicans passed last fall, which the Congressional Budget Office said would already add about $1.9 trillion to the deficit, factoring for interest costs.

The second round of cuts would cost $631 billion before 2028 and an additional $3.15 trillion in the decade after that, according to the Tax Policy Center. The finding was somewhat larger than the $2.4 trillion cost over 10 years projected by the Tax Foundation, a conservative think-tank.

The first round of Republican tax cuts for the wealthy exploded the deficit, leading the Republican Senate leader to call for cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid, and the Republicans already are pushing for yet more tax cuts for the wealthy, which would further explode the deficit, undoubtedly leading to more Republican calls for more cuts to Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and absolutely anything else that serves the interests of anyone other than the wealthy beneficiaries of the Republican tax cuts. For decades, this has been the Republican Party’s dream. If they retain control of Congress they can make it happen. As I wrote eight years ago, just don't call it class warfare:

It's not class warfare. Don't you dare call it class warfare. The Republicans may relentlessly pursue policies that favor the wealthy and hurt everyone else, but it most emphatically is not class warfare. The arbiters of appropriate political discourse will be most put out if you call it class warfare. You will not be welcome in the Village. You will not be invited to appear on the Sunday talk shows.

Class warfare is such an ugly term. To begin with, it suggests that we are a socially stratified nation, and that such stratification is at least to some degree based on money. Money is dirty. One shouldn't discuss money in polite conversation. And it's important that we be polite. And everyone knows that we are a melting pot. Everyone is capable of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, and don't even consider questioning the physics when there is neither a fulcrum nor a point of leverage. This is America. The land of opportunity.

Republican policies that hurt the less affluent and favor those that need no favors is not class warfare, but to discuss Republican policies that hurt the less affluent and favor those that need no favors is class warfare. The pundits will say so. The policies themselves are not class warfare, but raising awareness about them is.

This isn't new. It's a pattern. It's the basis of the Republican Party’s economic history. As I wrote more than seven years ago:

Ronald Reagan used the deficit as an issue when he ran against President Carter. As president, Reagan ran up the largest deficit in U.S. history. The Republicans of his era talked a lot about a Balanced Budget Amendment, while consistently voting to run up the largest deficit in U.S. history. Reagan's successor, the heir to the Bush dynasty, outdid his mentor by running up an even larger deficit. President Clinton raised taxes, eliminated the deficit and created a surplus, and just coincidentally oversaw an enormous economic expansion and near full employment. The next heir to the Bush dynasty cut taxes, eviscerated the Clinton surplus, and outdid both his father and Reagan by breaking their records for creating the largest deficits in U.S. history. He also all but broke the economy. This isn't complicated. This isn't difficult to explain.

Republicans never did actually care about deficits. They cut taxes, explode deficits, then use those deficits as a rationale to cut government spending. It's not complicated. It never has been complicated. It has, in fact, been transparent all along. And it's transparent now.

Underneath his bizarre, Byzantine gaslighting, McConnell revealed the Republicans' ultimate goal. He wants to blame the Democrats for what his policies have wrought, and he wants to make the Democrats complicit in his further goals of wreaking further economic havoc. But the Democrats want no part of it. But cut through the misdirections and circumlocutions, and one thread of truth runs through McConnell's rhetoric. He admitted what he wants to do. He admitted what the Republican Party wants to do. And make no mistake that if they retain control of Congress, Republicans will push it through. They will blame its disastrous consequences on Democrats, but it is their agenda. More tax cuts for the wealthy. More cavernous deficits. And their ultimate goal: eviscerating Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.

So much is at stake in next month's elections, and it's sometimes hard to focus when Trump, McConnell and the Republicans are burning down the republic in so many ways, but don't lose sight of this one. The existence of Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid are on the ballot this November.

Because the Republicans want to destroy them.

Eat At Home..You Vile Republicans....

By jodymarie aimee

poor Mitch and Elaine got hassled at chi chi restaurant...my elderly disabled and poor people in Wisconsin get a MAX of $15.00 a MONTH in FoodStamps...pennies a day....

Man dumps Mitch McConnell's to-go box on Bardstown Road, witness says

The Crisis

GOP Hypocrisy On Health Care

Republicans are talking up pre-existing conditions protections on the campaign trail after working for years to repeal health care. Lawrence discusses with Jared Bernstein and Ron Klain.

Alec Baldwin urges 'overthrow' of Trump government via voting

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Actor Alec Baldwin followed up his latest parody portrayal of resident Donald Trump with a serious call Sunday night for voters to use the Nov. 6 midterm elections to peacefully "overthrow" the government.

After reprising his role as Trump on "Saturday Night Live," Baldwin flew to New Hampshire, where he was the keynote speaker at the New Hampshire Democratic Party's annual fall fundraising dinner.

"The way we implement change in America is through elections. We change governments here at home in an orderly and formal way," he said. "In that orderly and formal way and lawful way, we need to overthrow the government of the United States under Donald Trump."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday night.

Baldwin said on issue after issue, Republicans are destroyers, not builders.

"There is a small cadre of people currently in power who are hell-bent on continuing a malicious immigration policy that has set this country up for human rights violations charges by the global community. This cadre has looted money from the federal treasury and deposited it directly into the bank accounts of their most ardent political supporters," he said.

He said Republicans "shrug" when it comes to gun violence, "spit in the face" at the rest of the world at the notion of changing outdated energy policies and offer neither hope nor solutions to people of color "who seek a decent seat at the American economic table but instead are issued a prison term, or worse, a bullet."

The recent confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh showed that Republicans view women as undeserving as the same constitutional protections as men, Baldwin said.

"They themselves are sons, husbands, fathers, and yet when the time arrived in the thick of the #metoo movement to set politics aside and establish that women's rights were more important than political expediency, they failed and it was ugly," he said.

Several of the political leaders and candidates who spoke before Baldwin praised survivors of sexual assault who were moved to tell their stories during Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing, saying they should inspire others to speak up and advocate for issues they care about.

"People raising their voices and sharing their experiences is what has been critical for our democracy and our capacity to move forward throughout our history," U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan said. "As difficult as the Kavanaugh battle was, those moments have been incredibly important and will continue to be as we move forward."

Congressional candidate Chris Pappas echoed that sentiment.

"If we're not hoarse by the time the election rolls around, we're not doing our jobs or we're not paying attention," he said. "It's about raising our voices and what we're all about as a country."

In 2016, U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster went public with her own account of a renowned heart surgeon reaching up her skirt during a business luncheon more than 40 years ago, when she was a young staffer on Capitol Hill.

"I want to say to everyone, to the survivors who have come forward and those who have not, I believe you and you are not alone," Kuster said Sunday.

Baldwin's appearance in the state that holds the first presidential primary came hours before the premiere of his new talk show. "The Alec Baldwin Show," which airs on ABC at 10 p.m., will feature one-on-one conversations with celebrities and cultural icons.

But Baldwin said it won't be overtly political. Asked Sunday if he'd consider running for office himself, he didn't rule it out but joked that his wife would likely divorce him.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/celebrity/baldwin-urges-overthrow-of-trump-government-via-voting/ar-BBOomeY

GOP Aims To Suppress ND Native American Vote To Hinder Heidi Heitkamp

Trump to travel to Florida to view Hurricane Michael damage at Mar-a-Lago

By Tommy_Carcetti

resident Donald Trump announced that he will be traveling to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida to get a firsthand view of the aftermath of the damage that Florida incurred after Hurricane Michael--a near Category 5 major hurricane--struck the state this week.

Trump will take an up close tour of the grounds of the club, which is located approximately 500 miles from the Panama City area where the storm made landfall. Palm trees at Mar-a-Lago reportedly lost multiple fronds during a Tuesday afternoon thunderstorm from one of Michael's outermost bands as it moved up the Gulf of Mexico towards the Florida Panhandle.

"From what I heard, damage to Mar-a-Lago was tremendous, the likes of which has never been seen before," Trump said to reporters as he boarded Marine One on his way to Andrews Air Force Base. "The amount of rain, which was wet, very, very wet, and some of the most incredible, powerful wind imaginable. I've heard estimates of winds in excess of 500 miles per hour, actually. It's really, really something."

Trump noted the "furious" work of groundskeepers to rake up fallen leaves and power wash muddied walkways to make sure the club was in spotless shape for the upcoming winter club season.

"It hasn't been easy," he noted. "For anyone. But especially for me. Of all the people out there, I have to say I've probably suffered the most because of this storm."

When asked if he had any thoughts for homeowners in storm ravaged areas like Mexico Beach--where houses were ripped from their foundations by devastating storm surge and obliterated into rubble by catastrophic winds--Trump replied, "Well, I'm certain any of those people would have to feel sorry for the situation I'm in. They'd very likely feel very, very bad for me. I'm sure if they had people wanting to pay $200,000 for access to them and their house, they'd know the type of situation I'm in, and they'd feel very, very bad. They wouldn't want to be in my position, believe me."

First Lady Melania Trump was expected to join her husband and pose for pictures alongside maintenance workers trimming hedges. The resident and First Lady would then reportedly sit down for a dinner prepared by banquet staff.

"We're going to have cake, chocolate cake, that most wonderful, magnificent chocolate cake like no other," the resident said. "No natural disaster is going to stop us from enjoying that wonderful, beautiful cake."

Details at Eleven.

Kanye West is what happens when Negroes don't read

Kanye West, you tap dancing, cant put 2 words together, foot shuffing, handkerchief head wearing Uncle Tom, 

Donald Trump can’t wait to talk with Kanye West about all the great things he’s done for minorities during his administration, especially in the African American community. #45 just spoke on his upcoming luncheon with Ye, and defended his decision to sit down with the rapper.

“He’s been a terrific guy … y’know he loves what we’re doing for African American jobs.” Trump says, “Kanye is a smart guy,” and apparently appreciates all the hard work the current administration has done.

Trump also revealed Kanye is bringing NFL legend Jim Brown to lunch, who the resident applauds as someone who also “gets it.”

Dyson Shreds Kanye-Trump: Blitzkrieg of Blathering Ignorance | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBC

Professor Michael Eric Dyson joins Ari to break down Kanye West’s surreal Oval Office takeover. West sounding off in a 10 minute rant with Donald Trump talking about politics, prison, racism and himself. Dyson, who knows West personally, demolishes his effort to bring Colin Kaepernick to the meeting and hammers his “interventions through media” adding Kanye can’t “engage about issues” that he doesn’t “ have sophisticated comprehension and knowledge” of.

Trump has been lying about Russia for years

On Monday, resident Trump and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein flew together on Air Force One. And while Trump said he had no plans of firing Rosenstein, he also reiterated his position there was no collusion with Russia. Joe Scarborough weighs in.

Detective In Chief

Native Women Opposed To Kavanaugh Swayed Murkowski

Posted by Rude One

One of the few pleasant surprises to come out of the extraordinary fuckery of the "battle" over Brett Kavanaugh (if by "battle," you mean, "a pre-determined outcome where everyone pretended the fix wasn't in, especially Susan fucking Collins") was when Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, actually voted against Kavanaugh. And one major reason for Murkowski opposing her own party was the plea from Native women survivors of sexual assault and violence.

"Alaska Native women continue to suffer the highest rate of forcible sexual assault and have reported rates of domestic violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the United States," according to the Indian Law Resource Center. And some of these women showed up in DC to lobby Murkowski, who, to her credit, met with many of them over the course of the week. 

But the pressure on Murkowski ran deep in the Alaskan Native community, whose support was at least partially responsible for her electoral victories in 2010 (especially) and 2016. 

In an open letter to Murkowski, Natalie Landreth, a senior attorney with the Native American Rights Fund in Alaska, reminded the Senator, "This is the same community who had wristbands with your name on them so they could remember how to spell it when they had to write it in," referring to Murkowski's 2010 run as an independent candidate. As Melissa Merrick-Brady, a Native American survivor of sexual assault, wrote, "It pains me to think that our country’s leadership might allow such a figure to ascend to the highest judicial office in this land, allowing him to opine on whether I should be protected from violence." One of Merrick-Brady's senators in North Dakota, Heidi Heitkamp, did vote against Kavanaugh.

The Bering Sea Elders Group issued a statement saying, in part, "Violence against our Native women and children in Alaska is not part of our culture, but is unfortunately an epidemic in Alaska...A person’s actions, beliefs, and ways of being show you who they are, and it is our way to know a person, their actions, their beliefs, and their way of being before elevating them to an important position in the community."

It wasn't just issues of sexual violence that drove the Native groups in Alaska to lobby Murkowski. Kavanaugh had issued decisions that opposed tribal sovereignty on a host of issues. The BSEG, for instance, continued their statement, saying that Kavanaugh "has demonstrated he does not understand the inherent status, rights, and roles of federally recognized Tribes and puts at risk the 229 federally

recognized Tribes in Alaska."

Kavanaugh was opposed by the Alaska Federation of Natives because of his view of the Indian Commerce Clause. He was opposed by the Central Council of Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska because of concerns about voting rights and tribal control of rivers. He was opposed by the the Republican governor and the Democratic (and Tlingit) lieutenant governor of Alaska because of fears of the Supreme Court gutting the Affordable Care Act and the Indian Child Welfare Act. That last fear is closer to reality since a district court struck down the law that said that Indian children without parents should be placed within their tribe.

But the movement in DC was led by Native women, who protested outside Murkowski's office and the office of Alaska's other senator, Dan Sullivan. The protesters there were arrested by Capitol police (although Sullivan denies calling them), and Sullivan proudly voted for Kavanaugh.

Murkowski, though, listened, and in her heartfelt speech from the Senate floor, she recognized the treatment of Native women in her state: "The levels of sexual assault that we see within our Native American and our Alaska Native communities, the rates are incredibly devastating. It is not something that we say we’ll get to tomorrow. We’ve heard those voices. We’ve heard those voices, and I hope that we have all learned something, that we owe it to the victims of sexual assault to do more and to do better and to do it now with them." She listened. For once. She listened to Native voices.

Powerful, Privileged White Men Will Not Win Forever

Brandi Miller

Columnist

 

Pool via Getty Images  

 

This has been a week of tantrums. The last 10 days have been a picture of what it looks and feels like when white men in positions of power feel themselves threatened by a loss of the authority they feel entitled to.

We watched Brett Kavanaugh cry, lash out, bully and deflect in the face of sexual assault allegations because he wasn’t getting what he felt like he deserved. We watched Sen. Lindsey Graham put on an indignant performance of morality at the hearing on behalf of his friend, disfiguring his face like a gremlin and claiming that listening to a woman’s story, was “the most unethical sham since [he’s] been in politics.” We watched thousands of people at rallies cheer on a president who continues to produce a less ethnically aware and inclusive America.

The past few days (years, really) may symbolize a battle lost for people who are hoping to dismantle white supremacy (and its commitment to patriarchy) and move toward a reality where the rights of women and nonbinary folks, people of color and people at the intersections matter. It seems that the more angry and petulant that powerful white men become, the more they get what they want.

But at the end of the day, all of the tantrums we’re seeing should be viewed as evidence that powerful white men can feel their power slipping away and are going to extremes to hold on to it. We who envision a more just America have the powers that be shook, and we may soon have them on the run if we can channel our anger and grief into action.

All of the tantrums we’re seeing should be viewed as evidence that powerful white men can feel their power slipping away and are going to extremes to hold on to it.

We’ve seen this same clinging to power before, in 2016, when white people overwhelmingly voted to elect a man accused of sexual assault (among other things) to the presidency of the United States. 

And we saw it again this weekend when an overwhelmingly white Senate confirmed a man accused of sexual assault to the highest court in the land.

When the vision of white-male-dominated America is thwarted or threatened in any way, the backlash is nothing short of desperate and infantile. They’ll do whatever it takes to maintain control over their way of life, even if it means putting unqualified and equally petulant people in positions of power. CNN’s Van Jones called this phenomenon “whitelash.”

Whiteness at large has a vision for America, one that holds the entrenched values of white, male supremacy that came through genocide, enslavement, land annexation and exclusionary practices. 

And while the majority of white people would not claim that we ought to return to those times, they look back on the formation of the U.S. with nostalgia for days when things were more simple and easy, especially if you were a white man.

NICHOLAS KAMM via Getty Images

The rallying cry “Make America Great Again” relies on that racist, sexist nostalgic vision that calls on people to pursue a mythological unity that is simply white domination in disguise. This vision manifests as Trump’s America, as a utopia that calls back to the better days of more protected and less challenged white supremacy.

And before someone slams in like the Kool-Aid man with a “not all white people,” sure, some white folks aren’t actively supporting the most openly white supremacist administration of my lifetime. Let me stand and applaud you. But the bar is too low. White supremacy requires no active support, only complacency or tacit approval through apathy.

It is easy to implicate people in power of upholding the structures of white supremacy without recognizing that progressives and conservatives alike passively and actively seek the normalizing of white supremacy. Those at the Trump rallies more actively support their white supremacy, but white liberals reap the benefits while also being able to claim a level of “wokeness” because they can identify structures and white people that they are not like.

Sens. Jeff Flake and Susan Collins are primary examples of people who, though they may critique and disparage Trump as a leader, are still willing to dive in the deep end of partisan politics while claiming to be moderate.

The lesson is that no matter how well intentioned someone is or how much integrity they have had in the past, people are pulled to powers that uphold business as usual. Their votes were not surprising, merely disappointing. Whiteness and patriarchy work together. In the end, they are so closely tied, that to refuse to dismantle one is to continue to perpetuate the other.

The social norms are being threatened and the privileged will cry and kick and scream and go to the extreme end to maintain dominance.

Despite complacency and outright support for the status quo, there is a growing number of people in this country actively trying to change things and relieve white supremacy of its power. While some on the right have been emboldened in Trump’s America to show their true supremacist colors, others are feeling empowered to stand up for their rights and dismantle the societal structures that have kept privileged white men in power for so long while keeping women, people of color and others without power disenfranchised.

It seems, as we approach the midterm elections, that we will once again have an opportunity to practice what freedom fighters before us have done: voting, resisting and using our interpersonal relationships to rally each other to systemic and social changes. Good intentions and right politics have never changed the world, voting and action has.

In this political season, it is more important than ever that those who are fighting for a more just and free world choose the revolutionary work of educating ourselves and each other, taking care of ourselves and each other, and then doing what we can to honor our ancestors and get out to the do the work of politics, systemic change and truth-telling. If they did it with extraordinarily less freedom than we did, then maybe we can choose to hope, day to day, that progress yields progress and that history never looks back fondly on those who seek to conserve oppression and hatred.

The social norms are being threatened and the privileged will cry and kick and scream and go to the extreme end to maintain dominance. But the more people they push to the margins, the stronger the marginalized become. If anything, the tantrums and whitelash from the privileged few are proving that maybe they’re too weak and immature to handle the upcoming fight and maybe the rule of patriarchal white supremacy is finally on its way to an end.

Brandi Miller is a campus minister and justice program director from the Pacific Northwest.

Raymond Arroyo Falls Out Of His Chair While Taking A Selfie With Laura Ingraham

20 Brutally Hilarious Memes Reacting To Trump's Residential Alert

http://politicalpunchline.com/presidential-alert/

Fraud Of Donald Trump's Self-Made Persona Exposed In Father's Financials

Trump Engaged In Suspect Tax Schemes As He Reaped Riches From His Father

Kavanaugh is lying. His upbringing explains why.

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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/kavanaugh-is-lying-his-upbringing-explains-why/2018/09/27/2b596314-c270-11e8-b338-a3289f6cb742_story.html 

 

Steve Schmidt Destroys Lindsey Graham

World Leaders Laugh At This Dotard, This Donald Trump - World Leaders Literally Laugh At Donald Trump's Complete Stupidity During U.N. Speech

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.

Angry Protesters Chase Ted Cruz Out Of Swanky D.C. Restaurant

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."

Cavalcade Of Kavanaugh

Senator Chuck Grassley Proves That Senator Grassley Is Lying

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.

Republicans Have No Intention Of Fair Hearing For Ford

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.

GOP Senators Already Have Minds Made Up

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.

#WhyIDidntReport: Victims Answer resident Donald Trump | The Last Word | MSNBC

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.

The Never Ending Story

Reddit bans QAnon subreddit

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.

Confirmation Hearing Highlights

Will Susan Collins sacrifice what's left of her dignity for Trump's Supreme Court nominee?

By Joan McCarter

Don't forget who you're doing this for, Senator.

Sign and send the petition to your Senators: Reject Brett Kavanaugh

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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.

Do you live in Maine? You have a powerful voice in stopping Trump's Supreme Court nominee. Click here to write Sen. Collins.

On this day — September 11

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)

Obama vs. Trump: The clash everyone's waited for arrives

But on Friday, at least, the current resident barely mustered a response to the blistering critique leveled against him by his predecessor.

By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE and ANDREW RESTUCCIA

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.

Obama aides were giddy to be back out, watching him give the speech that they have also been waiting for. They were all smiles as he stopped by a café afterward for a campaign stop with gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker, where Obama made a show of ordering tiramisu and telling people there that he couldn’t take selfies with all of them.

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.

“You saw that Governor [Bruce] Rauner ran away from his resident. I’m thrilled that we had President Obama here,” said Pritzker, needling his incumbent Republican opponent after Obama had left the café.

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 largely affluent 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.”

Obama, walking around the café after his speech, asked one student, “How did you become interested in actuarial science?” When he heard another person was getting a PhD in rhetoric, Obama leaned in and waxed about “the impact of the digital world, because it lowers restraints and empathy.”

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.”

But there’s always Twitter to say more.

Watch Trump Struggle To Say "Anonymous"

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 Blisters Lou Dobbs For Claiming Police Brutality Is Not A Problem In America

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."



 - Join us for #RolandMartinUnfiltered daily at 6PM EST! Visit www.RolandMartinUnfiltered.com to join the #BringTheFunk Fan Club to support independent fact-based journalism.

Charter members will receive a shout out on Facebook and Twitter as well as perks and exclusives.

I Am Part Of The Resistance Inside The Trump Administration

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.