Wow! The White Supremacist Right is whimpering in outrage that a brown guy escaped their planned lynching.
As to Faux News and other racist white right outlets…Major meltdown. Even the Chumph had a few more racist comments to add.
And of course Michelle Malkin, the white wing’s favorite brown meat hole.
Chumph wants a special counsel to investigate the so called Russian Uranium deal.
The problem there is that there is no evidence of any wrongdoing by Clinton.
The whole thing is nothing more than a political ploy and an attempt to suppress dissent through abuse of power.
Appointing a Special Counsel to do so is in itself an Impeachable act.
This one is far out enough out on the edge to greet with some skepticism. If true, confirmation should be available in a few days.
The problem is, that between the Chumph’s collusion with the Russians, illegal and criminal business dealings, and unconstitutional actions…
It is impossible at this point to tell which crime he’s being charged with.
Was this the real reason for the Comey firing?
Blogger and fierce critic of President Donald Trump Louise Mensch and former Clinton White House official Claude Taylor are both saying that independent sources have separately informed them that a sealed indictment has been granted against the president.
“Separate sources with links to the intelligence and justice communities have stated that a sealed indictment has been granted against Donald Trump,” wrote Mensch and Taylor at the Patribotics blog.
They continued, “While it is understood that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution means that, until Mr. Trump is impeached, he cannot be prosecuted, sources say that the indictment is intended by the FBI and prosecutors in the Justice Department to form the basis of Mr. Trump’s impeachment. The indictment is, perhaps uniquely, not intended or expected to be used for prosecution, sources say, because of the constitutional position of the President.”
Mensch is known as something of a polemicist — some dismiss her as a crackpot conspiracy theorist — and yet, as GOP strategist and fellow Trump critic Rick Wilson pointed out on Twitter, she has been right on target with certain key findings in the secretive murk around Trump and investigations into his connections to Russia’s mafia underworld.
Remember: Louise was first and right on the initial FISA warrants. Claude was right on the EVDA etc. https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/863576083626688512 …
A Dutch TV documentary shed light this week on some of Trump’s connections to Russia’s lawless elite and explained how the intercepted communications between Trump campaign officials and Russian organized crime figures could have been discovered as part of a money-laundering and organized crime case.
Former California Attorney General, now Senator Kamala Harris want Sessions’ head on a pike…Sessions is a criminal, having committed perjury at his Senate confirmation hearings.
Having Sessions as the head of the DOJ, is no different than appointing Al Capone as Sheriff. Second, Sessions is actively involved in covering up the Chumph’s criminal activity. And as such is a criminal co-conspirator.
Charge him, arrest him, try him, convict him…And hang him for treason with Putin’s Bitch and the rest of the Chumph scum/
Speaking to CNN”s Jake Tapper on Thursday afternoon, Senator Kamala Harris of California renewed Democratic calls for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign over the firing of FBI director James Comey.
“There is good reason to believe that he was not truthful when he testified before Congress,” Harris said, in reference to Sessions’s confirmation hearing, during which he said under oath that he had no communications with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign.
It was subsequently reported that Sessions met on two occasions with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. Sessions had recused himself in March from the inquiry into improper contacts between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin. Yet it was Sessions, along with deputy Rod Rosenstein, who recommended that Trump fire Comey—who was investigating the Trump-Russia ties. (Kislyak met with Trump on Wednesday, just hours after Comey was fired.)
The public nature of the Russia investigation infuriated Trump, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal:
The more James Comey showed up on television discussing the FBI’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, the more the White House bristled, according to aides to President Donald Trump.
Harris, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump and is rumored to have presidential ambitions, told Tapper that Sessions’s complicity in the Comey firing “calls into question his objectivity, and his ability to keep his word.”
Her calls for Sessions to resign were seconded by her Democratic colleague Ron Wyden of Oregon.
This is a common sight in the fields around where I currently live. Immigrants, mostly undocumented, picking the crops. These guys disappear…Say goodbye to your spaghetti sauce and pizzas. The pick tomatoes green, and then turn the red by gassing them with nitrogen. Otherwise the tomato is so soft it rots before getting to market. Last year, the tomato field was planted with cantaloupes – the same crew (rounded up by an entrepreneurial ex-illegal – now citizen) was out there to pick them.
The Chumph’s Immigrant crackdown is getting ready to cost Americans greatly, and where it hurts – at the grocery store. We have become spoiled since the 50’s days to terrible TV Dinners and certain fruits and vegetables only being available during certain parts of the year. You don’t realize that until you go to a country which doesn’t have the agricultural infrastructure the US has.
A number of crops cannot be picked by machine. Tomatoes are too delicate. Add spinach, kale, cucumbers, lettuce, grapes, oranges, apples, pears, and a host of other fruit and vegetables which have to be picked by hand. Since the 60’s, and almost elusively now those crops are picked by undocumented immigrants.
That may be fine out there in the mid-west, where the principal crops of wheat and corn can be picked by machine. But unless you plan to subsist on a diet of popcorn and wheaties…
If the undocumented disappear, so do the strawberries, blueberries, and and damn near anything except bananas (they are gown in Latin America) to go with your cereal.
What happens to the independent farmer who provides those crops?
One last note…
Black folks don’t pick cotton anymore…
The line currently at the bookmakers on the Chumph being impeached before the end of his first term is 7/4. Pretty heavy odds with only 24 hours in office.
I am not sure that Impeachment is a legal necessity. I believe (but may be wrong), that the Election can be effectively annuled on a Court finding that he indeed accepted illegal monies and assistance from the Russians. This is all new territory here. But such an apprach would effectively make everything since the “election” null and void.
“Completely one-way traffic in betting.”
As Donald Trump prepares to be sworn in as the next president of the United States today, bookmakers are currently offering odds on whether Trump—the least popular incoming president in four decades—will get impeached or be forced to resign. Some even predict that he won’t survive the first six months in office.
That’s according to the online betting site Paddy Power, which has placed the odds of Trump failing to complete his first term at 7 to 4. The odds of Trump getting impeached in the first six months stand at 4 to 1. Other offerings include bets on the inauguration itself and the future of his marriage to Melania Trump.
To be sure, political pundits are still reeling from one of the worst-predicted election results in recent memory, and the mechanisms to impeach a president are far more difficult than one might hope. Yet, Matt Shaddick, who oversees the popular betting site, told the Independent that there has been “completely one-way traffic” in betting trends against Trump’s survival in office.
This from Bloomberg…
What tyey are saying is the Chumph has been under investigation for illegal under the table campaign funds from Putin since last spring…
And there is a Paper Trail.
I going to bet the Chumph saves his boy on this one should he take office.
The Justice Department’s watchdog has launched a sweeping review of conduct by the FBI director and other department officials before the presidential election, following calls from Congress and members of the public.
Top advisers to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton have blamed FBI Director James Comey, in part, for her loss in November. Now, federal investigators say they will examine whether public statements by Comey in July, October and November 2016 ran afoul of policies that caution officials not to influence the outcome of an election and to avoid making derogatory comments about people who haven’t been formally charged with wrongdoing.
Comey has previously told friends and employees that he had few good choices in the investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified information on her private email server.
In a statement Thursday, Comey said, “I am grateful to the Department of Justice’s IG for taking on this review. He is professional and independent and the FBI will cooperate fully with him and his office. I hope very much he is able to share his conclusions and observations with the public because everyone will benefit from thoughtful evaluation and transparency regarding this matter.”
Inspector General Michael Horowitz said he would not “substitute” his judgment on the declination to prosecute Clinton for that of prosecutors and the FBI. And he said the review could expand based on what his investigators encounter along the way.
Among the issues the IG will scrutinize:
- Allegations that Justice Department and FBI staffers improperly leaked details about investigations before the election.
- Claims that some “underlying investigative decisions were based on improper considerations.”
- Allegations that the deputy director of the FBI and the chief congressional liaison at the Justice Department should have recused themselves from the Clinton investigation.
- How the FBI release of information about an old investigation of Bill Clinton’s last-minute presidential pardons happened only days before the election and how an FBI Twitter account came to publicize the documents.
Former Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon called the inspector general’s announcement “highly encouraging and to be expected given Director Comey’s drastic deviation from Justice Department protocol.”
Fallon said the probe is “utterly necessary in order to take the first step to restore the FBI’s reputation as a non-partisan institution.”
The Drumph may well lose the Primary because all his Delegates are in prison!
A delegate for Donald Trump from Charles County, Maryland was indicted this week on charges related to illegal transport of explosives, possession of a machine gun and child pornography.
In a press release on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice said that ATF agents began investigating 30-year-old Caleb Andrew Bailey after postal inspectors discovered a package with .50 caliber cartridges with M48A1 incendiary projectiles and other ammunition with explosive projectiles.
On May 5, law enforcement executed a search warrant “at adjoining properties associated with Bailey, including his residence, and seized a machine gun,” according to the statement.
Court documents allege that Bailey also used a minor to produce child pornography, and that child pornography was found in his possession.
Bailey faces over 50 years in prison if found guilty of all charges.
The Maryland Board of Election currently lists Bailey as a delegate for Donald Trump.
I wonder if he would be willing to post that voter card rip up on YouTube for verification purposes…
“I’m not a football fan, I’m not a sports fan, but I’m surely a Donald Trump fan,” Joe Hornick tells NBC 4. The New Jersey man has been flying a Trump flag outside his home for months and he says he will go to jail rather than obey an ordinance in the town of West Long Branch against flying political flags more than 30 days before an election. New Jersey holds its primary on June 7, meaning it will be weeks before Hornick can legally fly the “Make America Great Again” banner. He has already been ticketed, and people have ripped down his flag at least five times. “I have a warehouse on alert, and I’ll put up a flag every time they tear one down,” Hornick says.
Hornick—who says that if Trump loses, he’ll rip up his registration card and never vote again—could get 90 days’ jail time or a $2,000 fine if he doesn’t take down the flag. Hornick says that he has a constitutional right to fly the flag, and the American Civil Liberties Union is supporting him, reports NY 101.5. According to Eugene Volokhat the Washington Post, Hornick is right: Banning political signs or placing similar restrictions on the content of signs violates the First Amendment, Volokh writes, though the city would be within its rights to apply content-neutral restrictions that applied to all signs. (Trump had a rough night Saturday.)
Kind of makes you wonder about those Made in China “Make America Great Again” fake baseball caps….
A Federal agency recalled around 20,000 scarves made under the Ivanka Trump brand on Wednesday for failing to meet flammability standards, the Houston Chronicle reported.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s decision affects Trump’s Brushstroke Oblong and Beach Wave scarves, both of which are made entirely of rayon.
The scarves, which bear her name, “do not meet the federal flammability standards for clothing textiles, posing a burn risk,” the agency said.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the scarves are also made in China. Trump’s father, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, has been criticized for following similar business practices, saying it is “impossible” to manufacture clothes in the US because China and other nations like Mexico devalue their currency.
The commission stated that customers will be entitled to a refund following the recall. The scarves sell for anywhere between $12 and $68.
Amazing!
“Don’t slow down for any of these idiots who try and block the street.”
A St. Paul, Minnesota police officer has been placed on administrative leave after allegedly telling drivers to run over Black Lives Matter protesters who planned to block traffic as part of a march on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Around 1 a.m. on Saturday, a Facebook user named “JM Roth” posted a comment on a Pioneer Press article about the scheduled protest that said: “Run them over. Keep traffic flowing and don’t slow down for any of these idiots who try and block the street.” The comment then suggested how drivers could legally justify hitting protesters with their cars:
Andrew Henderson, a local activist who maintains the Minnesota Cop Block Facebook page, first noted and reported the comment, which has since been deleted, to the St. Paul Police Department. In phone conversations he recorded anduploaded to YouTube, Henderson told Saint Paul Police Department officials that the “JM Roth” account belonged to Sergeant Jeffrey M. Rothecker. Henderson said Rothecker had admitted in previous comments that he was “JM Roth.”
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Police Chief Thomas Smith have denounced the comment and announced that an investigation into the matter is underway. Senior Commander Shari Gray, the head of the department’s internal affairs unit, also met with Henderson on Sunday, according to the Pioneer Press.
“There is no room in the Saint Paul Police Department for employees who threaten members of the public,” Coleman said in a statement released on Monday. “If the allegation is true, we will take the strongest possible action allowed under law.”
The St. Paul Police Federation, the union for officers, is representing Rothecker,according to the Star Tribune.
The news comes one year after motorist Jeffrey P. Rice struck a teenage girl who was protesting outside a Minneapolis police station. The girl was part of a November 2014 demonstration that took place after a Ferguson, Missouri grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. The girl suffered a minor leg injury. Last October, Rice, who is from St. Paul, pleaded guilty to a charge for failing to yield to a pedestrian. He was fined $575 and ordered to attend a driver’s education course….More Here…
I have to admit it is a lot of fun watching this bit of lowlife Republican crap come back to bite them in the ass. As you will recall for over a year after President Obama was elected the right spewed continuous vitriol about his birth certificate, and not being American.
Back at C’ya!
Fox News Latino contributor Rick Sanchez made a case this week that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was not eligible to serve as president of the United States because he is not a “natural born” citizen as the Constitution requires.
In a column for Fox News Latino, Sanchez declared that “Ted Cruz is not a natural born American, and neither am I.”
“He was born in Canada. Period,” Sanchez wrote. “His parents weren’t there because they needed to be. They were there because they wanted to be. Ted Cruz, by the letter and spirit of the law, cannot be president!”
Sanchez explained that he also had dreams of becoming president.
“Unfortunately, the law says I, Rick Sanchez, cannot be President of the United States,” he observed. “Most immigrants realize that when the moment they become naturalized — that it’s the one thing you simply can’t achieve.”
“Now along comes Senator Ted Cruz who seems to be saying, ‘I know I wasn’t born here, but guess what — I want to change the rules, I want it all,’” the former CNN anchor continued. “The problem for Ted Cruz is that we know what the spirit and letter of the law says… Common sense says ‘being born in the United States’ means just what it says.”
Sanchez noted that Cruz’s parents had voted in Canadian elections, which requires citizenship in Canada.
“It’s pretty simple, if Eleanor and Rafael Cruz were eligible to vote according to the Canadian election board, that means they were Canadian citizens,” he insisted. “Did you hear that? They were Canadian citizens, not American citizens. And that makes Ted Cruz’s argument about being a natural American citizen at the very least arguable. After all, he was likely born to Canadian citizens.”
“That’s a problem — a serious one at that for a man wanting to be president. Sorry Ted, as a fellow Cuban American, I feel your pain.”
Newsweek reported this week that a “growing number of constitutional law scholars are arguing that Ted Cruz’s birth in Canada makes him ineligible to become president.”
Below is a map of “Economic Opportunity” broken into the MSAs in each state. Economic Opportunity is the measure of how likely it is for someone born in the lowest income and social class to be able to rise. Or to put it another way – the lower the Economic Opportunity, greater the chance that a poor person’s child will also be poor, and their children and their children.
Notice that isolated red spot right around ST. Louis, Mo – and including Ferguson?
Which areas have the highest populations on welfare and disability?
Just for fun, let’s look at the states with or without minimum wage laws…
Tell you Something?
Political Corruption Level in States – (Provided by London School of Economics)
State Incarceration Rates –
Which gets us the The New Jim Crow – Virtual Debtors Prisons and Bail Bond Extortion
Like the majority of the nearly 750,000 people stuck in local jails across the United States, Rebecca Snow was not held in the Ascension Parish jail in central Louisiana because she had been convicted of a crime. The 33-year-old mother of three, who was charged with two nonviolent misdemeanors in late August, simply could not afford to post bail.
If Snow had the $289 set for each charge, she could have gone home to her family instead of sitting in jail. Many others arrested in the parish are able to post bail and go home, but Snow didn’t have the extra cash: She relies on public assistance and is indigent, according to a civil rights complaint filed against the parish’s sheriff and top judge.
The US Supreme Court and the Justice Department have both said that incarcerating someone solely because they can’t afford to post cash bail is unconstitutional, but that was the policy in Ascension Parish until just a few weeks ago.
Ascension sheriff deputies would set bail during booking using a court-issued “schedule” that matched the alleged offense with a generic bail amount, and some arrestees waited days before seeing a judge who could hear a motion to reduce it, according to the complaint. No individual factors such as prior record or employment were considered, and even those arrested for minor crimes like traffic violations were not released without posting bail.
In early September, civil rights attorneys filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the bail scheme, with Snow as the lead plaintiff. A settlement was reached within weeks. Now those arrested for misdemeanors in Ascension Parish are released on their own recognizance unless they are charged with assault, drunk driving or a list of other crimes that generally involve putting other people in danger. A judge must promptly set an individualized bail for those who are jailed.
“[The defendants] don’t really have any arguments,” said Alec Karakatsanis, a cofounder of Equal Justice Under Law, which worked with civil rights lawyers from southern Louisiana to challenge Ascension’s bail policy. “It’s a terrible policy in addition to being illegal. It’s expensive and it ruins people’s lives and it devastates them.”
Nationally, jails have twice the admission rate of state and federal prisons, and 62 percent of those locked up have not been convicted of any crime and are legally presumed innocent, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. Three out of four people in jail are being held on nonviolent traffic, drug, property or public order charges. In most jurisdictions, poor people facing minor charges are forced to stay in jail or plead guilty to get out while those who have money on hand often go free.
Using the Constitution to Force Local Reforms
Since January, Karakatsanis and local partners have filed lawsuits challenging secured money bail programs in seven cities across the South, and so far defendants in six cities quickly settled and agreed to end the practice of requiring bail for nonviolent misdemeanors. The first lawsuit, filed against the City of Clanton, Alabama, attracted a statement of interest from the Justice Department declaring that jailing people solely because of their poverty violates the US Constitution’s equal protection clause and is simply “bad public policy.”
Suing individual officials and jurisdictions has proved to be an effective tactic for civil rights advocates who argue that many of the nation’s 3,000 jails have become modern-day debtors’ prisons. Attorneys like Karakatsanis are going from county to county to shut down illegal secured money bail and court fine collection schemesthat fill courthouse coffers and keep private collection companies and bail bondsmen in business while poor defendants, who often cannot afford child care or to miss even a day of work, are caged without being convicted.
“We are going from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and asking them to change, and if they don’t, we certainly sue them,” Karakatsanis told Truthout. He added that his group would be filing more lawsuits across the country.
By definition, bail is not a fine or a form of punishment. The purpose of bail is, in theory, to ensure that arrestees show up to court. If you are jailed and a bail is set, you may wait there for weeks, months or even years for your trial to start – or you can post bail, which will be refunded when you appear before a judge. In some parts of the country, if you don’t have the money, you can hire a bail bonds agent to post bail for a fee, usually at 10 percent of the bail amount. You don’t get that money back even if you are found not guilty. (In the few states that have outlawed for-profit bail bond agents, a secured bond may sometimes be paid at 10 percent of the set amount as well.)
Money bail tips the scales of justice in favor of those who have cash on hand. For arrestees who can’t afford to put money down on their own freedom, jail makes it much more difficult to escape the deep maze of the criminal legal system. The Vera Institute reports that even spending as few as two days in jail can reduce economic viability, promote future criminal behavior, degrade personal health and increase the chance that a defendant is incarcerated if found guilty.
Pretrial incarceration also increases the likelihood that people will take a plea deal, and some people plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit just to go home and avoid losing their jobs and contact with friends and family. That’s one reason why activists in Massachusetts, New York City and Chicago have organized community bail funds to free low-income people from jail. Since bail money is generally returned once defendants appear in court, these grassroots bail funds can extend the benefits of a recyclable resource to many people who would otherwise be left to defend themselves from a position of incarceration….Read the Rest Here…
Still wonder why it is so hard to get that Economic Opportunity in some places?
Last Presidential election only about 48% of the eligible Hispanic voters in this country turned out to vote. Something between 71-73% voted for President Obama.
Due in no small part to the anti-immigrant vitriol and racism of Trump and other Republican candidates – this group, “Latino VIctory Project”, aims to rectify that situation. Hopefully other Hispanic groups in the country (Latino and Hispanic mean different things, although all Latinos are also Hispanic – the reverse is not true).
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Politicians Who Have Been "Elected" By 12 Jurors
The New Jim Crow, More Sneaky Than the Old
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