If you can spare a few seconds, please sign the Change.Org -“impeach the Chump” petition. They ask for a donation of $3, but you can refuse and distribute the petition to friends and family.
The target is to reach 2 million signatures. I think we can do a little better than that.
The Chumph wants to deport those brown folks who have been living here in the US, Legally for 20-30 years.
Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Elaine Duke plans to resign in protest over pressure from White House officials to expel tens of thousands of citizens of Honduras who are saying in the United States under protected status.
The Washington Post reports that White House chief of staff John Kelly called Duke into his office this week to pressure her to expel Hondurans who came to the United States as hurricane refugees.
“Duke refused to reverse her decision and was angered by what she felt was a politically driven intrusion by Kelly and Tom Bossert, the White House homeland security adviser, who also called her about the matter,” the Post’s sources claim.
The publication’s sources also say that Duke “has informed Kelly she plans to resign” in the wake of this week’s incident.
Although Kelly told Duke that she was responsible for making the final decision on extending the refugees’ residency permits, Duke still felt that it was an inappropriate intrusion into her work.
“They put massive pressure on her,” one administration official, who was familiar with the interactions between Duke and White House officials, told the Post.
Duke had wanted to proceed carefully with the case, as the Honduran refugees in question have now lived in the United States for two decades now.
Two of the three top Republicans in Virginia tied their double-wides to the Chumph. They lost..BIG.
There was a repudiation of the Chmph party across the nation as Democrats won in even solid Republican areas.
THE BIG IDEA: Tuesday was the best day for Democrats politically since Barack Obama won reelection in 2012. Remember, conservatives scored significant victories in the November 2014, 2015 and 2016 elections. Democrats desperately needed some wins after they went all-in on a House special election in Georgia this spring and lost. Last night, they got them.
Voters came out in droves. They braved the rain and the cold to send a message to President Trump. The results across the country represent nothing less than a stinging repudiation of Trump on the first anniversary of his election.
— Democrat Ralph Northam was elected governor of VirginiaTuesday by an unexpectedly large margin of nine percentage points. He won more votes than any previous candidate for Virginia governor.
Republican Ed Gillespie could not escape Trump’s unpopularity, despite his best efforts to thread the needle. Four in 10 Virginia voters yesterday approved of the job that the president is doing, according to preliminary exit polls. Gillespie received over 9 in 10 votes from Trump approvers, but among the larger group of Trump disapprovers, Northam had nearly as large an advantage: 87 percent.
Trump’s impact on the race was also clear from other questions in the exit polling: 34 percent of voters said expressing opposition to Trump was a reason for their vote, with almost all of this group favoring Northam, per our in-house pollster Scott Clement. Half as many (17 percent) sought to express support for the president, while 47 percent said Trump was not a factor in their choice.
— Women made the difference. White women with college degrees — a group that split evenly in the 2013 Virginia governor’s election — favored Northam by 16 points over Gillespie in preliminary exit polling, 58 percent to 42 percent. Northam’s margin is more than twice as wide as the margin Hillary Clinton won those voters by last year, 50 percent to 44 percent.
Married women voted for Northam by 10 points according to preliminary exit polls, 54 percent to 44 percent. In the 2016 presidential election, Trump eked out a one-point lead with this group, 48 percent to 47 percent. Married women consisted of 30 percent of Virginia voters this year, about the same share as in 2016 and 2014. (Check out our interactive exit poll graphic here.)
— Rep. Scott Taylor, a Republican who represents Virginia Beach, said both Democrats and Republicans registered their disenchantment with Trump. “I don’t know how you get around that this wasn’t a referendum on the administration, I just don’t,” he told reporters. “Some of the very divisive rhetoric really prompted and helped usher in a really high Democratic turnout in Virginia.”
“Ed couldn’t escape being a proxy for Trump, which killed him,” added Tom Davis, the former GOP congressman who represented Northern Virginia. “It’s a huge drag on the ticket,” he told Paul Schwartzman. “It motivated the Democratic base. Democrats came out en masse in protest. This was their first chance to mobilize the base. The lesson here is that Republicans have to get their act together. Ed did as well as he could do with the hand he was dealt.”
— Tweeting from South Korea, Trump quickly distanced himself from Gillespie — who he had embraced earlier in the day:
Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!
— But Democrats prevailed last night from sea to shining sea, up and down the ballot:
- Maine, where Trump won an electoral vote last year, became the first state to expand Medicaid via ballot initiative. Despite active opposition from the Republican governor and an influx of outside money, the measure passed by a nearly 20-point margin. This will mean health-care coverage for an estimated 70,000 low-income residents.
- Democrat Phil Murphy, a former banker and first-time candidate, won the New Jersey governor’s race by 13 points over Chris Christie’s lieutenant governor. That’s on par with Clinton’s margin a year ago, but it’s a remarkable turnabout from four years ago — when Christie got reelected with a 22-point margin of victory. It means that Democrats will have unified control of the Garden State’s government.
- By winning a special election, Democrats took control of the Senate in Washington State. This gives the party full control of all three states on the West Coast: a blue wall of sorts.
— Democrats didn’t just run up the score on blue turf, though:
- In Georgia, Democrats picked up three seats in the state legislature — replacing Republicans who stepped down to lead the state forestry commission, become a judge and run for governor.
- In New Hampshire’s largest city, Manchester, the incumbent Republican mayor went down. Joyce Craig is the first Democrat elected mayor there in 14 years.
- In the beating heart of Florida’s crucial Interstate 4 corridor, the former Republican mayor of St. Petersburg unexpectedly failed in a comeback bid after his Democratic opponent tied him to Trump and defined him as a denier of climate change.
- In North Carolina, the Republican mayor of Fayetteville lost his bid for a third term. In Charlotte, despite being heavily outspent, Democrat Vi Lyles will become the city’s first African American female mayor.
— For the first time, Democrats were winning because of Obamacare — not in spite of it. Maine approving Medicaid expansion by such a margin should be a warning sign for Republicans to tread very carefully when it comes to their continuing efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
In Virginia, the network exit poll asked respondents which one of five issues mattered most in deciding their vote for governor: 39 percent said health care, far more than any other issue. And health-care focused voters favored Northam by a giant 77 percent to 23 percent margin in preliminary exit polls. Gillespie won handily among those who named taxes and immigration as their top issue. The candidates split among those who picked gun policy.
— To understand the true magnitude of the Democratic victory, look to the down-ballot races in Virginia. Democrats, many of them unknown first-time candidates, are poised to pick up at least 14 seats in the House of Delegates. Unofficial returns showed Democrats unseating at least 11 Republicans and flipping three seats that had been occupied by GOP incumbents who didn’t seek reelection. Four other races were so close that they qualify for a recount, and results will determine control of the chamber. Democrats needed to pick up 17 seats to gain control of the House of Delegates. No one thought going into last night that it was seriously in play.
“The results marked the most sweeping shift in control of the legislature since the Watergate era,” writes Fenit Nirappil. “The biggest battleground for the House was Prince William, a Washington exurb where people of color constitute a majority of the population. A diverse group of five Democratic challengers hoped to channel demographic changes and Democratic energy to take seats held by white men — and all won.”
Virginia’s most socially conservative state lawmaker was ousted from office by a Democrat who will be one of the nation’s first openly transgender elected officials. The race pitted Danica Roem, a 33-year-old former journalist who began her physical gender transition four years ago, against Robert G. Marshall, a 13-term incumbent who called himself Virginia’s “chief homophobe” and earlier this year introduced a “bathroom bill” that died in committee. “Discrimination is a disqualifier,” Roem said in her victory speech, per Antonio Olivo.
“This is a tidal wave,” said David Wasserman, who tracks U.S. House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “It’s hard to … conclude anything other than that Democrats are the current favorite for control of the House in 2018.”
One ominous sign for congressional Republicans: Northam won the district held by Rep. Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) in the D.C. suburbs by 13 points.
Several other Democrats who won these down-ballot races are going to have national profiles: In southwest Virginia, former television news anchor Chris Hurst — whose girlfriend was fatally shot during a live broadcast in 2015 — toppled Republican incumbent Joseph Yost.
The results are a big validation for outgoing Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who is term-limited and could use the gains as a rationale to run for president in 2020. He was surprised by the scale of the pick-ups. “I always say you’re going to get it back because you have to say that politically, but in my mind I was thinking six to eight [seats gained] would have been a great night for the Democrats,” he told one of my colleagues.
Virginia’s General Assembly has a well-earned reputation as an old boy’s club, but the composition of the body changed bigly last night: All 14 of the seats that Democrats flipped are held by GOP men. Ten of their replacements will be women.
The reason Mueller is pursuing the Chumph/Russia case the way he is, is that he knows simply taking down the Chumph won’t solve the problem. VP Mike Pence is every bit as racist, and is likely far more dangerous to the country than the feeble minded Chumph.
Here s hoping that the victim’s lawyers find a route to prosecute Pence criminally.
Keith Cooper spent 10 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit. Even after being released for innocence, and with a unanimous recommendation from the state parole board, Pence Refused to sign the exoneration to clear Cooper’s name.
A 50-year-old Indiana man who spent 10 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit has sued, claiming that police framed him. Earlier this year, Keith Cooper, whom Mike Pence declined to exonerate while he was governor, became the first person in Indiana history pardoned for innocence.
An Indiana man who spent 10 years in prison for an armed robbery that he didn’t commit has sued the local police department, claiming they fabricated false evidence to convict him.
Keith Cooper’s case came into the national spotlight after Vice President Mike Pence, while still serving as Indiana governor, declined to pardon Cooper, despite a unanimous recommendation from the state parole board to exonerate him.
In February 2017, Pence’s successor, current Indiana governor Eric Holcomb, granted Cooper’s pardon, making him the first person in Indiana to be pardoned for actual innocence in the state’s history. Cooper waited six years for his pardon and three years for the governor’s office to act on the parole board’s recommendation.
Now Cooper has filed a civil rights complaint against the local police and the City of Elkhart, Indiana, alleging “egregious wrongdoing of manufacturing and fabricating all the evidence of his supposed guilt.”
In August 2016, BuzzFeed News reportedabout Cooper’s wrongful conviction of the 1996 robbery where one man was shot.
Twelve years after the incident, in 2008, shooting victim Michael Kershner and his mother, Nona Canell, gave videotaped statements claiming that they misidentified Cooper.
Canell said that during the initial investigation she requested “numerous times” to see a lineup of suspects, but the lead detective on the case, Elkhart police detective Steve Rezutko, assured her that they had “the right guy” in Cooper.
In 2006, after reviewing the new testimony from Kershner and Canell, along with new DNA evidence putting another man at the crime scene, the state court judge in Cooper’s case offered him a deal to resentence him to time served. Cooper was freed but the felony conviction stayed on his record.
Five years later, Cooper filed a petition to have the crime he didn’t commit erased from his record. It would take another three years, but in 2014 the state’s parole board unanimously recommended that Cooper be pardoned, sending the recommendation to then-governor Pence’s desk.
But Cooper’s attempt to formally clear his name stalled there, as Pence declined to act on the pardon for over two years. Then in the summer of 2016, while Pence campaigned alongside Donald Trump as his vice presidential pick, his general counsel sent Cooper and his attorneys a letter stating that “to our knowledge, Mr. Cooper has not filed a petition with the courts in Elkhart County to determine whether post-conviction relief is available.”
The letter added that Pence would not act on the parole board’s recommendation “out of respect for the judicial process.”
Despite Pence’s claims that Cooper had not fulfilled his obligations with the court, when Gov. Holcomb — who served as Pence’s deputy — took office, he acted on the board’s recommendation and granted the pardon.
Cooper’s lawsuit filed this week doesn’t name the governor’s office as a defendant, rather he is suing the City of Elkhart and the individual officers, including Rezutko, who investigated the robbery. Cooper claims in his lawsuit that they maliciously prosecuted him with false evidence. He says that to this day he suffers from ongoing depression and PTSD from the episode.
“It took more than two decades for Keith to finally get his name back,” said Elliot Slosar, staff attorney with the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago. “Today begins his much shorter journey towards rebuilding the life he once enjoyed before being framed for a crime he did not commit.”
Trump/Pence – Same racist shit …Different hair color
While white non-Hispanics make up 68% of Virginia’s population, black folks make up 20%.
Turnout for the 2016 race was low for black voters, With Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate supporting Trump and being against the removal of confederate statues and memorabilia, and the recent events in Charlottesville – it is looking like black turnout this election will be the highest since the Obama years.
Northam’s campaign has pursued the normal mamby-pamby Democrat losing attempt to appeal to white voters who aren’t going to vote Democrat in the first place. The threat of having a white supremacist like the Chumph as Governor has electrified the Minority vote for him this round, but his strategy may have costs should he win and pursue higher office.
Winchester Mayor David Smith (right) leads Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam ( second from right) and Lt. Gov. candidate Justin Fairfax (second from left) on a tour of downtown Winchester’s pedestrian mall during a campaign stop by Northam and Fairfax on Oct. 25.
Democratic activists expect a surge in black political engagement fueled by backlash to this summer’s violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville could tip the scales in Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial race.
Black voter turnout rates have been down around the country in the post-Obama era, from the 2016 presidential election through a string of special elections in 2017. It has been a long-standing source of concern for Democrats in Virginia, where up to one in five voters in recent elections has been black and where some have criticized Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam’s outreach to black voters.
But amid a toxic political environment, activists going door-to-door say they have seen African-American interest in voting spike since the summer, when low engagement alarmed Democratic pollsters hoping to elect Northam over Republican Ed Gillespie. Turnout already shot upward in heavily black areas during the Democratic primary, compared with the last contested primary in 2009, and Northam won big in those regions in June. Since then, black political groups have run a steady stream of radio and digital ads invoking Charlottesville and inequality in the criminal justice system, including NFL players’ protests of the issue. And they are talking with voters one-on-one in Norfolk and other African-American population centers to make a personal case about voting this year.
“They feel that it’s not politics as usual,” said Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, which has been working with the Northam campaign to turn out African-American voters in Hampton Roads. “They know that something else is going on here.”
When BlackPAC first polled voters of color in the state in August, what it found concerned it. The percentage who said they were extremely likely to vote was in the high 60s, and Northam was trailing Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s 2013 performance among voters of color.
But voters also said the political environment scared them. Fifty-four percent of black voters said they felt minorities were under attack, and 73 percent agreed with a statement that voting would “send a resounding message to [President Donald] Trump.”
Framing a vote as a way to stand up to racism increased willingness to turn out. Now, nearly 90 percent of those contacted by BlackPAC during door-to-door canvassing are willing to sign a pledge card to vote, and organizers said Gillespie’s ads accusing Northam of trying to “erase history” and take down “our statues” are part of the reason why.
As a BlackPAC canvasser went door-to-door in a majority-black Norfolk neighborhood on Halloween, voters mentioned crime, support for public housing, voting rights and the unfair criminal justice system as reasons they would be voting this year. But one issue loomed above all. Sharon Williams, a disabled middle-aged woman, mentioned how her mother used to talk about the Ku Klux Klan when she was growing up. Williams thought the stories were just to scare her, until one day she saw some hooded men drive down her street.
“They’re trying to start that all over again,” Williams said.
Democratic National Committee Vice Chair Keith Ellison, who recently campaigned with Northam in Prince William County, said he had a visceral reaction to Gillespie’s advertising promising to keep Confederate monuments up in Virginia.
“The people who erected them wanted to make a point about who mattered and who didn’t,” Ellison told reporters, noting many of the statues were built as African-Americans pushed for civil rights during the 20th century. “And so, my opinion? When somebody says they’re for keeping a Confederate monument in the middle of downtown, to me, that says ‘You are subhuman, you don’t have any right to do anything except serve others.’”
Ellison also said Gillespie’s campaign tactics, and Trump’s rhetoric, were alerting voters.
“When Trump makes false equivalencies about neo-Nazis and the KKK and when Gillespie stands up for the monuments, we all know what that means,” Ellison said.
BlackPAC’s ads in Virginia have also addressed Charlottesville directly, both on the radio and online. Another group, CollectivePAC, has run digital ads invoking former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who is alleging NFL owners colluded not to sign him following his protests of police brutality last year.
“The first time I saw those people in Charlottesville trying to intimidate people of color, it made me angry,” a female narrator says in one of BlackPAC’s radio ads. “Trying to take away our voice. Then when they came back, it made me determined. No one is going to take away my voice.”
BlackPAC’s closing-argument ad uses images of the violent protests in Charlottesville and the civil rights movement.
“White supremacy stormed into Charlottesville and is being used for political gain,” a female narrator says in the 30-second ad. “We’ve fought too hard for progress to watch it pushed back in the name of Making America Great Again.”
The Chumph’s Energy Secretary is as dumb as a rcok…
Even worse – this new found desire to prevent sexual assaults is rather questionable…
When the senior Democrat can’t get behind impeaching the penultimate danger to Democracy and public safety in America…Maybe it is time for a change of leadership.
Next round of indictments…
May include Kushner!
Special counsel Robert Mueller has obtained enough evidence to bring charges in the federal investigation into President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his son, according to NBC News.
Flynn would be the first current or former Trump administration official to be charged by Mueller’s team, signaling the team is closing in on the White House.
The special counsel’s office declined to comment on the report to The Hill.Mueller’s team is reportedly planning to speak with various witnesses in the next week to learn more about Flynn’s past lobbying work and whether he laundered money and lied to federal investigators.
NBC also reported that the special counsel’s team is probing whether Flynn attempted to remove from the U.S. to Turkey a rival to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in exchange for large financial sums.
Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, is also under investigation and could be indicted at the same time as his father or at another time, according to the report.
The younger Flynn often traveled and worked with his father during the campaign and took part in the transition.
Flynn could potentially be spared major legal consequences if he cooperates with investigators as a means of helping his son, according to the report.
The report that Mueller may be close to charging Flynn follows the indictments of Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his associate Richard Gates as part of the ongoing probe into Russia’s influence in the 2016 election as well as possible collusion between Trump’s campaign and Moscow.
The White House said on Monday those charges had nothing to do with the campaign.
The report also follows the revelation that former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty earlier this month to lying to FBI investigators about his contact with Russian actors during the campaign.
The revelations show that Mueller’s investigation is moving at a quick pace and closing in on those close to the president.
Flynn left his White House post in February after he misled key administration officials about his previous contact with Russian officials.
It indeed is a “Family Affair”
A former Prosecutor who had been working for Mueller lets the cat out of the bag.
This is some of the “news” propaganda used by the Russians to flood racist white wing sites like Breitbart and Alex Jones wh accepted the material as “fact” without doing any checking. Numerous Russian originated fake articles flooded white wing news sites explaining why the white wing is so disconnected with reality’
Yet another Chumph incompetent appointee bites the dust. The interesting thing here is his ties to the campaign and Russia.Clovis had to withdraw his name for a position as Chief Scientist at the Agriculture Department today. One of the odd things about Clovis’ appointment is the man has absolutely no Science background. Meaning the Chumph appointed his as a political plum.
That plum appointment appears to be because of Clovis’ work with George Papadopoulos on the collusion between the Chumph Campaign and the Russians.
Sam Clovis – yet another Chumph Campaign official connected to Russian Collusion
Sam Clovis, Trump’s dubious pick as USDA science chief, is also deeply entwined in Russian intrigue
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Russian agents and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign took a strange turn on Tuesday. (Not that it wasn’t strange already.) NBC News reported that Sam Clovis — a failed politician and far-right talk radio host from Iowa who had worked on the Trump campaign — was brought in last week to testify in front of the grand jury that Mueller has impaneled. As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted, it appears Clovis was central to the selection of the infamous five foreign policy “experts” Trump hired as advisers during his campaign.
“We now know that two of those five men immediately began trying to establish contacts between the Trump campaign and the government of Russia or spies working on behalf of Russia,” Marshall notes, adding that two of the other five were notable less for their expertise and more for being Islamophobic and reportedly anti-Semitic.
Clovis reportedly had direct communications with George Papadopoulos, the Trump foreign policy aide who recently pled guilty for lying to the FBI, and admitted in his plea that he had communicated with Russian agents about emails from Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. Leaked communications between Clovis and Papadopoulos indicate that Clovis was a big fan of Papadopoulos’ Russia work, though it remains unclear whether he was aware of any criminal hacking efforts.
Now here’s what makes this whole situation even more bizarre: As I wrote about not long ago, Clovis was already on the radar of scientists and environmentalists who are deeply concerned about the threat he poses to America’s food supply. That’s because President Trump appointed Clovis to be chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, even though Clovis has no scientific credentials and appears to have no relationship whatever to the agricultural industry, outside of being a dude from a Corn Belt state.
Even for the Trump administration, the pick was peculiar. Clovis’ hostile attitude toward the agency he would run and his refusal to accept the facts about human-caused climate change are both, unfortunately, par for the course when it comes to the Trump administration. But most of Trump’s appointments have some experience with the issues or industries their agencies are supposed to manage, even though they are largely industry insiders with an adversarial attitude toward government regulation. So even by Trump standards Clovis was a head-scratcher, since he has no known relationship to the food or agriculture industry in any capacity.
In fact, on the same day NBC News reported on Clovis’ grand jury testimony, a group of more than 3,000 scientists sent a letter to the Senate agricultural committee begging its members not to confirm such a wholly unqualified appointee. Their list of reasons to reject Clovis was long but, notably, did not include any mention of Russia. There’s little doubt that the signatories to the letter were unaware of Clovis’ role in the Russia scandal. Their concerns were strictly related to his total and confounding lack of qualifications to handle the job of chief scientist at the USDA.
As I reported in April, the job of chief scientist is not some meaningless make-work job, no matter what the Trump administration may think. That’s more true than ever as climate change threatens the stability of the American food supply. USDA-funded and managed science is critical for finding solutions to protect the ability of farmers to keep producing affordable food.
As Karen Perry Stillerman of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted, the position Clovis is in line for controls a whopping $3 billion in research grant money for agricultural scientists. As Dr. Mike Hamm, a Michigan State University professor and a senior fellow at the Center for Regional Food Systems told Stillerman, it’s “impossible to overstate the importance” of this grant money for “developing strategies to improve current yields while reducing environmental impacts of agricultural production, or identifying resilience strategies for increasingly prevalent issues.”
Before this week, the broad assumption was that Trump had nominated someone so wholly unqualified because the president simply doesn’t care about the USDA or science, and saw the role as an easy way to give Clovis a salary and an office as a reward for his support.
But now there’s reason for legitimate concern that something more troubling is going on. It seems inexplicable that the guy who coordinated a Russia-centric foreign policy agenda for the campaign has been appointed to an agriculture job. It’s worth noting that climate change could be opening up agricultural opportunities for Russian farmers that were previously limited by that nation’s wintry climate. For American farmers to remain competitive in the futures with northern countries like Russia and Canada, they need a USDA that backs them up with cutting-edge science and climate change adaptation strategies. Clovis is both incapable of doing that job and ideologically opposed to it.
Clovis’ confirmation hearing is scheduled next week. In light of the Russia scandal, the Senate needs to reject his nomination and demand that Trump appoint someone who is actually interested in promoting the needs of American agriculture — and who doesn’t have troubling connections to Russian interference during the election.
Next on the list of failed Chumph Administration officials…Betsy DeVos. Although unlike a growing list of her fellow appointees, she doesn’t appear to be headed out wearing an Orange Jumpsuit.
She is just quitting because of rank incompetence. I mean she is so bad she can’t even reach over the decidedly low low bar to get fellow Republicans to support her destruction of the public school system and white’s only Charter Schools.
resident Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is “one of the most ineffective people ever to hold the job,” say some insiders, and education officials are already starting to plan for a “post-Devos landscape” when she is removed or steps down.
In a comprehensive profile, Politico said billionaire evangelical Christian DeVos has found herself stymied by the bureaucratic restraints on her job, but that bringing about change in Washington requires “time, patience and government savvy — three things she does not have.”
DeVos, said Politico’s Tim Alberta, is on a “religiously infused journey to reimagine the relationship between government, parents, teachers and schools.”
The Secretary wants to allow parents more freedom to withdraw their children from public schools and enroll them in charter schools, religious schools and private schools. What makes DeVos radical is she wants federal tax dollars to follow those children out of the public school system.
One problem with implementing her plan is that public schools receive very little of their funding from the federal government. Another is her overall unpopularity and ineffectiveness.
Her first budget proposal for the department — one which would have slashed funding from multiple school programs and reapportioned that money to DeVos’ pet cause, “school choice” — was rejected by Congress. Now, with her agenda on the rocks and morale at the Education Department cratering, some predict that DeVos may return to the private sector sooner than she’d planned.
“She can talk about bureaucracy and how constraining it is for her, but a Republican-controlled Congress rejected her budget proposals. She can’t fill her senior staff slots. Morale is terrible at the department,” says Thomas Toch of FutureEd — an education think tank affiliated with Georgetown University’s McCord School of Public Policy. “And I’ll tell you, in Washington education circles, the conversation is already about the post-DeVos landscape, because the assumption is she won’t stay long. And for my money, I don’t think it would be a bad thing if she left. I think she’s been probably one of the most ineffective people to ever hold the job.”
This guy is a Chumphshit…He has just burned down any reespect or reputation he may have had.
Commentator Roland Martin delivered a scathing rebuttal to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s comments that the root cause of the Civil War was the “inability to compromise.”
Appearing on MSNBC’s Velshi & Ruhle, the popular political observer lashed out at Kelly, saying he needs to read a history book — later adding that Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who didn’t push back at Kelly’s comments during the interview, should brush up on her history too.
Responding to Kelly’s Civil War comment, that “men and women of good faith on both sides helped them make their stand,” Martin was off and running.
“History is history, but for fact’s sake, let’s tell the truth,” Martin began. “First of all, historic fact number one. The Civil War was fought over slavery. 11 southern states left the United States in 1860 and 1861 in order to protect the institution of slavery following the election of President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was an avowed opponent of the expansion of slavery that said he would not interfere with it where it already existed.”
“The debate over the future of slavery led to secession, and secession brought about a war,” he continued. “The first state to secede, South Carolina, on December 20th, 1860, approved of an ordinance of secession and offered an invitation to form a confederacy of slave holding states,” he added.
Turning specifically back to General Kelly, Martin insisted that his comments shouldn’t be allowed to go unchallenged.
“I’m not going to allow four stars stuck on stupid to simply go on,” he lectured. “Here’s a man who’s utterly clueless. For him to say, ‘well, we could have compromised,’ really? We did compromise. It was a thing called United States Constitution and you know what that said? If you’re a black, you’re 3/5ths of a human.”
“How about the Hayes/Tilden compromise that ended the 12 years of Reconstruction and ushered in Jim Crow, removed the federal troops from the last three remaining southern capitals?” he added. ” So I need John Kelly to actually go back and read a history book that my 12-year-old nieces are reading right now because clearly he fell asleep in history.”
“We have too many people in this country who are white who do not know history and who want to somehow glorify these Confederate leaders,” Martin continued. “I’m telling you right now, they ain’t my founding fathers and they’re not my leaders. We need to have real history. And I will say to John Kelly: shame on you.”
“Shocking that someone charged with defending their country, in some profound way, does not comprehend the country they claim to defend.”
White House chief of staff John Kelly claimed Monday that a “lack of ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” But the reality is that the path to civil war was marked by numerous compromises on slavery, as the author Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out on Twitter Tuesday morning. In fact, the war started because of the people who wanted to maintain and expand the right to own other people as property.
“I mean, like, it’s called The three fifths compromise for a reason,” Coates tweeted early Tuesday, referring to the constitutional provision that increased representation for slave states in the House of Representatives in 1787.
“But it doesn’t stand alone,” Coates said. “Missouri Compromise. Kansas-Nebraska Act.”
After the Civil War, he later tweeted, there was also the Compromise of 1877, which further disenfranchised black people once federal troops withdrew from Southern states.
President Abraham Lincoln, Coates noted, also compromised on several occasions. Not only did he not actually want to abolish slavery, but he “repeatedly sought to compromise by paying reparations ― to slaveholders ― and shipping blacks out the country.”
He didn’t even mention the Compromise of 1850, which among other things allowed the South to implement slavery in new U.S. territories gained during the Mexican-American War.
The enslaved black populations of the South, Coates said, “did not need modern white wokeness to tell them slavery was wrong.”
Kelly defended Gen. Robert E. Lee on Monday, calling him an “honorable man” ― a declaration that Coates compared to “some kid insisting his deadbeat dad is actually a secret agent away on a mission.” Lee, he said, was a “dude who thought torture was cool.”
“Even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black,” Adam Serwer, a senior editor at The Atlantic, wrote in June.
If Kelly can laud someone who sold human beings, Coates concluded, “you really do see the effect of white supremacy.” Last month, Coates said that President Donald Trump “might be a white supremacist.”
Chumph fans are congratulating themselves that the indictments of Manafort and Gates didn’t include collusion with the Russians…
However the Papadopoulos one did.
And there is no indication whatsoever that these are the only indictments Mueller will pursue, especially in light that this set of indictments did not include the Flynns, little Chumph, or the Chumph’s son in law…Not to mention Roger Stone.
Ergo, a lot more trees are going to fall in this diseased rotted forest of thugs and traitors.
Mueller would have not started chopping those diseased trees down unless he had an extremely strong triangulation and case against the biggest rotten stump in the forest – the Chumph himself, and just as importantly to take down Pence as well.
Trump fans upset about the indictment of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort are hanging their hats on the fact that special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment did not mention his work on Trump’s campaign in the charges.
However, Republican strategist Rick Wilson taunted Trump’s supporters on Monday by explaining that the case against Trump and his 2016 presidential campaign is far from over — and that there are many more shoes yet to drop.
In particular, Wilson zeroed in on the revelation that former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos reached out to Russian officials to arrange meetings with the Trump campaign — and even to help coordinate the release of what he believed were emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server.
“We now have confessed collusion and a complex electronic trail from Pap to his fellow Trump campaign members,” Wilson wrote. “These are serious people running a serious investigation and you’re either a cooperating witness or a target.”
He then went on to mock the Trump administration’s legal strategy, while noting that Mueller has hired a team of top-notch investigators.
“That the intelligence community has a royal flush,” he joked. “Team Treason has a pair of twos on their best day.”
Wilson finished off his Twitter rant by warning Trump supporters that the worst was yet to come for their favorite politician.
“Clutch that fig-leaf of ‘no collusion’ tight because if you think this is the worst day for you, think again,” he concluded.
1/ The great thing about this morning was you could see the Trump spin shaping up early…
2/ … they were going to build the entire defense around there being “zero evidence of collusion in the Manafort indictment”
3/ the special prosecutor knew this, and did an almost perfect bookend play from the media perspective and from the legal side
4/ we now have confessed collusion *and* a complex electronic trail from Pap to his fellow Trump campaign members.
7/ and if you haven’t inferred why it was so easy it was to bust Papadopoulos, may I remind you once again…
8/ … that the intelligence community has a royal flush. Team Treason has a pair of twos on their best day.
11/ so clutch that fig-leaf of “no collusion” tight because if you think this is the worst day for you, think again.
A little Blue Eyed Soul as a reminder…
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