Back in the day when Democrats could actually run as Democrats, we never had to ask questions like the ones we are looking at today: How can we get Democrats elected to offices since a Teflon President has apparently passed on that mantle (now usually referred to as IOKIYAR) to an entire guilty party, which people CONTINUE TO VOTE FOR?
I got an email last week from another Progressive who is running as a Progressive. This one is running for Senator, opposing (Republican) Senator Dean Heller, who, having been elected in 2012 in his own right after having assumed the seat in a Special election, is now up for re-election on 2018.
Here's what Jesse Sbaih has to say (again, fundraising delinked. I will be delinking fundraising regularly when I write about these fols. Heaven knows it's no trick to find fundraising links should the spirit move anyone):
If progressives are going to take back the Majority and block President Trump’s hateful agenda, Nevada is simply a must-win.
That’s why I’m running a fiercely progressive campaign.
I’m furious that families are barely scraping by on a minimum wage that is far too low. I’m furious that our children can’t afford to go to college. And I’m furious that Americans can’t afford health care.
GOP Senator Dean Heller won’t stand up for what’s right. He’s propped up by billionaire donors, and takes orders straight from Donald Trump’s White House.
In the Senate, I’ll fight the dark money seeping into our political system. I’ll fight for Medicare for All. I’ll fight for you….
Donald Trump has declared an all out war on our American values. Whether you’re an immigrant, a single mother, a member of the middle class, or a proud LGBTQ American — Donald Trump has attacked every single person in this great nation.
As an immigrant to and adopted son of this great nation, I am ready to fight back and restore the progressive American dream.
A successful national campaign is a massive undertaking — especially when we’re taking on billionaire Donald Trump, corporate special interests, and the Republican fear machine.
Republicans will spend every dollar they have to protect this seat — and maintain control of the Senate.
But I’m determined to go up against them and fight for a better future for my children — for all of our children. Together, we can show every young person out there that a Muslim immigrant can come to this nation and represent the best that America has to offer.
He also has a petition on expanding Social Security up. Like most online petitions, it will take you to a fundraising page after signing, but you can just close it.
I have not posted in a while as I deal with my mother's passing and preparing her estate. There is still much to do and it will get done eventually. This week is very busy with numerous meetings all crammed into 4 days because yesterday was Victoria Day, a statutory holiday in most of Canada (Québec calls it Patriot's Day). Today's big adventure is taking my 3 furbabes to the vet's for their annual checkup and shots. They love their vet (he's their godfather) and he loves them. By the time I get them home, the car and me will be covered in cat fur, literally!
Short Takes
CBC— A jawbone discovered by German troops in Athens during the Second World War could be evidence that apes and humans diverged 200,000 years earlier than the current theory says.
Chimpanzees and bonobos are the nearest known relatives to humans, sharing 99 per cent of our DNA. It's believed that we split between five and seven million years ago.
However, researchers analyzing two fossils — a jawbone from a German museum and an upper premolar from a collection in Bulgaria — concluded their ages to be roughly 7.2 million years, and belonging to a pre-human.
But there's another significant finding: that human split occurred in the eastern Mediterranean and not Africa, as it is believed.
Well doesn't this just bite if you're an evangelical creationist who believes the earth was created only 6,000 years ago and that God created humans, and humans did not evolve from apes! While the 7.2-million-year-old pre-human fossils might challenge current evolutionary theory, it certainly slams creationists. Let's hear it for science!
Business Insider UK— For most in the hospitality industry, the odd bad review is part and parcel of the trade, but one venue appears to be determined to silence its critics.
According to The Mirror, Sarah Gardner, a 44-year-old mother and part-time nurse, has been threatened with legal action after posting a negative review on TripAdvisor of the Tunbridge Wells-based High Rocks restaurant and wedding reception venue.
The review posted on March 22 has since been taken down, but according to a screenshot obtained by the Daily Mail, it said: “Visited here with my family, been coming here for years. I have found the staff more and more rude each time."
“They have an arrogance that should not exist in a service industry, particularly the management. It’s as if they are doing you a favour, I found dealing with them frustrating and perplexing."
Click through for the rest. Don't let Drumpf see this or he'll try to sue everyone and anyone who speaks negatively about him whether it comes under freedom or speech or not!
Washington Post— President Trump asked two of the nation’s top intelligence officials in March to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government, according to current and former officials.
Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.
Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.
Trump sought the assistance of Coats and Rogers after FBI Director James B. Comey told the House Intelligence Committee on March 20 that the FBI was investigating “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”
How many ways are there to say "obstruction of justice"? Drumpf keeps digging a bigger and bigger hole with no end in sight until he is actually impeached or he resigns. I agree with those that say Drumpf thinks he is untouchable. If he resigns the presidency as Richard Nixon did back in 1974 before he could be impeached, I understand that he could still face criminal charges. I guess things are going to get worse before they get better.
YouTube — Last Week Tonight with John Oliver 5/21/17 : Stupid Watergate
John always has something to say and he does it with humour. With the state of US politics right now, if we don't laugh on occasion, we might cry excessively!
US News and World Report — Like most things in politics, impeachment is not as simple as one might think.
The U.S. Constitution lays out impeachment powers for Congress, allowing the governing body to put certain government officials on trial and remove them from power. When an official is impeached, he or she isn't necessarily removed from office – that's a separate step in the procedure.
The process takes on the form of a trial, but the trial takes place in the House of Representatives and the Senate, not the courts.
The result is a blend of law and partisan politics in an often months-long process.
1. Who can be impeached?
According to the Constitution, at the federal level "the president, vice president and all civil officers of the United States" can be removed from office. There have been 19 formal impeachment proceedings at the federal level in the U.S., which ended in seven acquittals, eight convictions, three dismissals and one resignation.
State legislatures can impeach state officials, including governors.
This is a very simple look at the impeachment process. It is not as simple as "kick the bumb out!" no matter how we wish it to be. Some of us remember the Richard Nixon resignation in 1974 when he thought he would be impeached.
Need I comment further? The Drumpf administration is the worst administration I can think of. Nixon was bad, but Drumpf has him beat.
YouTube — The Young Turks — BREAKING: Eric Trump Is Staggeringly Stupid
I have always felt that Eric Trump was on the clueless side. From confirming his like of nepotism to his comments on Russian money in the family real estate business, he might actually be a prosecutor's best friend. And Drumpf wanted a security clearance for this rube?
My Universe— In the video, which was posted to Youtube by Vancouver’s Michael Fujiwara, the sea lion surfaces near the dock, and swims about looking harmless. No doubt it was drawn by the fish — this is an area, after all, that was once nicknamed Salmonopolis.
But after surveying the area and discovering no fish, the sea lion surprises everyone by approaching a young girl, then suddenly, biting down on her dress and dragging her backwards into the water. …
“The sea lion actually attracted a lot of attention from the visitors there, including the young girl,” he said. “She and her family, I guess, they came, they started feeding the animal bread crumbs or whatever it was, and then I guess the animal got a little too comfortable.”
Fortunately, the young girl was pulled from the water immediately by a family member. The young girl was unharmed, albeit a little soggy, and with a newfound, healthy fear of sea lions.
This happened at the Steveston Wharf which is where many fish boats are docked, so it would be quite normal for seals and sea lions to be around the wharf area. People need to respect wild creatures for the potential harm they can inflict. Seals and their bigger cousins, sea lions, can be dangerous. Nobody should be feeding any wild animal. Here is an additional CBCarticle about the incident with a little more detail. Fortunately, this story has a happy ending.
I figure I can get this started before leaving to my Oncologist and finish up when I return. This is today’s only article.
I was very pleased with my Oncologist. His preventive strategy is exactly what I wanted and expected. I’ll set up the cat scans and his office will call me the next day with the results. Here he is.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:30 (average 4:46). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From NY Times: A large crowd of students walked out of the Notre Dame commencement ceremony on Sunday in protest of the speaker, Vice President Mike Pence, who delivered a speech that mixed platitudes about bright, dream-filled futures with a lengthy rebuke of political correctness on college campuses.
As several dozen students in caps and gowns quietly exited the graduation ceremony, the vice president praised Notre Dame, one of the nation’s most prominent Catholic universities, as “a vanguard of freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas…
…The protest began as Mr. Pence began his remarks at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Ind., where degrees were conferred on 2,081 students. Online video of the ceremony showed a large number of young people filing out of the stadium as the vice president began to congratulate the graduates and their families. Around them, the audience erupted into a mixture of boos and applause.
Kudos to the students. Follow their example. RESIST!!
From Daily Kos: 26 Year Old H.S. Teacher Wins Primary Against Democratic PA. Mayor Who Backed Trump.
Click Through for details. Kudos! Wonderful!! This, not voting for Russia’s tools like Jill Stein, is how to RESIST!!
From Washington Post: U.S. Rep. Al Green said the phone calls came in not long after he called for the impeachment of President Trump.
“Hey, Al Green, we got an impeachment for you. It’s going to be yours,” one caller said. “Was actually gonna give you a short trial before we hang your n—– ass.”
“You’re not going to impeach anybody, you f—— n—– … You’ll be hanging from a tree,” another one said. “I didn’t see anybody calling for the impeachment of your n—– Obama when he was born in Kenya. He’s not even an American. So f— you, n—–.”
Aha! Reaching out to minorities, the way Republicans do it. I bet AG KKK Beauregard squealed with hooded glee! RESIST!!
I seem to be spending most of my time documenting Trump scandals involving his status as Putin's [R-RU] Pervert Pawn, and that is a full time job! However, there is one area in which Trump's performance is as bad as it is for treason: incompetence. The following article by Jefferson Morley lists and documents six things the Fuhrer does not know about his job.
For President Trump's admirers, his disregard for the traditional ways of Washington is just his way of getting things done. “To the new president, Washington niceties are cobwebs on a summer porch, distracting, inconvenient, in the way of his higher purposes,” writes Robert Charles on Town Hall.
But in the past week, Trump’s “higher purposes” have been all but eclipsed, by a week of low deeds that mired his already embattled presidency in a swamp of dysfunction. He fired former ally James Comey as FBI director, all but admitted obstruction of justice by saying he acted to end the FBI investigation into his dealings with Russia, and then shared classified information with the Russian foreign minister. Along the way, he contradicted his own aides’ explanations of his actions, confirming that White House statements cannot be trusted.
All of a sudden, the cobwebs of Washington seem more like spiderwebs, and Trump resembles nothing so much as the fly who can’t extricate himself from its sticky strands.
What Charles calls “niceties” are, in fact, a set of laws and customs that empower and constrain the American president. Imagining that these arrangements are liberal trickery, Trump thinks what he has thought all along: that he can ignore them and achieve his goals.
That was true when his goal was winning the presidency. Now that he is trying to deliver action for his voters and allies in Congress, Trump is learning the price of ignorance: he cannot achieve his “higher purposes" because he doesn't understand the nature of his job.
1. The president is not a CEO.
Trump seems to believe what UN Ambassador Nikki Haley told ABC’s “This Week": “The president is the CEO of the country. He can hire and fire whomever he wants. That’s his right."
Actually, the president is not the chief executive officer of the government. Unlike a corporate CEO, Trump has no ownership rights in the enterprise he runs, the federal government. The executive branch is not a family business, despite Jared Kushner’s determination to give Chinese investors a different impression.
The president does have the right to fire the director of the FBI, but the Bureau’s employees do not work for the president. As James Hohmann of the Washington Post notes, FBI agents swear to uphold the U.S. Constitution, not serve the president. The Bureau’s website explains why:
“It is significant that we take an oath to support and defend the Constitution and not an individual leader, ruler, office, or entity. … A government based on individuals — who are inconsistent, fallible, and often prone to error — too easily leads to tyranny on the one extreme or anarchy on the other. … The American colonists were all too familiar with the harmful effects of unbalanced government and oaths to individual rulers.”
In other words, the authors of the U.S. Constitution wanted to make sure the president was not a king or a CEO. Oblivious to this historical truth, Trump fired FBI director Comey, transforming a man who helped him get elected into an enemy who now wants to go public.
83° is forecast today, and the humidity is now 88%. The sun hit my window at 7:00, and by 8:00, the wall had heated up enough to make me turn on the AC for the day. Wendy will be here in about 30 minutes, so before I finish writing, I’ll be breaking from this until after lunch. Tomorrow, please expect no more than a Personal Update. I will be consulting with an Oncologist about annual exams to make sure my malignant choroidal melanoma, now in remission after radiation, did not metastasize to other parts of my body. I expect that he will set up thoracic and abdominal Cat Scans with contrast. That’s where they inject the dye and make me drink half a gallon of cat pee.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 4:55 (average 7:30). To do it, click here. How did you do?
From The New Yorker: In a notable shift of public opinion, a substantial majority of Americans now favor a travel ban on a person who has recently visited a Muslim country, a new poll shows.
According to the poll, if such a person travelled to a country in the Middle East, for example, he should be subjected to extreme vetting before he is allowed to return to the United States.
If, in the course of such vetting, the person is found to have recently engaged in activities to undermine or even destroy American democracy in collaboration with a foreign enemy, he should be barred forever from entering the U.S., poll respondents agreed.
Amen Andy! What a fabulous idea! RESIST!!
From The Washington Post: Democrats are heading into the homestretch of three special elections over the next month amid a national frenzy over the investigation into the possible connections of President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian interference in the election.
Yet in all three races, Democrats have made a tactical decision not to turn the contests into a referendum on Trump’s alleged scandals and instead are focusing on policy decisions by the president and congressional Republicans.
Democratic strategists privately say that this might be the recurring theme through the November 2018 midterm elections. Democrats say that they have learned a lesson from the 2016 elections, in which House Democratic candidates relentlessly focused their campaigns on trying to tie Republican incumbents to the personal scandals of Trump or some of his more outlandish policy statements.
Trump is just the worst symptom of the Republican disease. Therefore, I think this is a good strategy, with the caveat that demonstrating what Republicans are doing wrong is not enough. We must also present our own policy alternatives, and convince voters that those alternatives are the best ones possible. RESIST!!
We’ve all enjoyed the Bribe & Emoluments Light Show that artist Robin Bell projected onto the Trump Hotel in Washington, DC this past week. But in case you missed it, a quick review
While it's great to know where to send the Bribes – the Bigger Question we have is: Where do we send all the upcoming subpoenas?
This is not the first time Artist Bell has entertained the public with a creative political light show message for the masses. In fact Bell is so dedicated that he has designed a specially-equipped van from which he projects his light shows, after creating them with Photoshop and his projection-mapping software.
And so happens there actually was a more recent one involving Attorney General Sessions – “Sessions Must Go” – at DOJ)
NOTE: You have to click on the little movie projector icon, and then click to run the video below]
The Bribe-Emoluments light show at the Trump Hotel lasted just about 10 minutes before security personnel from the hotel asked him to quit. And when he didn’t, they physically moved to stand in front of the projection, blocking it. But I was wondering if Bell’s provocative and creative light shows are legal. Could he be charged with criminal trespassing?
You may remember it was just a week ago that reporter Dan Heyman was arrest for “willful disruption of government processes.” Heyman tried to ask Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price a question about how the GOP AHCA would impact victims of domestic violence. The criminal complaint accused him of a misdemeanor — “willful disruption of governmental processes” — and said he was “aggressively breaching the secret service agents.”
So there is clearly a legitimate concern by the media if Trump thugs trying to shut down the press’ First Amendment rights.
Fortunately for Mr. Bell to the question of criminal trespassing charges, the answer is “Probably not.”
The court ruled that while the union had no First Amendment right or labor law right to project a message onto an employer’s wall, it also held that the projection itself is not against the law.
Trespassing cases generally revolve around if there were “invasion of land through a physical, tangible object” – or torts “when intangible matter, such as particles emanating from a manufacturing plant, cause actual and/or substantial damage to the [property].”
But virtually all “light trespass” cases involved ambient light “leaking or diffusing” onto private property – like from construction lighting or drive-in movie theater.
But a projected light show is designed to send a specific message, so it could not be considered “ambient”. But the court ruled that unless a light show lasted an excessively long time, or happened to shine into the room of a paying guest – it would not meet the criteria of criminal trespassing.
However, it would most likely reach the standards for a tort of nuisance.
But Mr. Bell proudly has announced that other light shows will continue to follow.
Seems appropriate to end with a message from our own creative Light Brigade last winter in Madison, WI:
I had another night with very little sleep. The humidity is extreme, and it will take time to get used to the noisy AC again. Tomorrow it will reach 85°, and on Monday, the day of my Oncologist appointment, 90°. The last time I was out of my building, I was bundled up with a heavy shirt, a sweater and my hoodie. I also have a Prosthetist appointment on Thursday, so I’ll be a bit scarce next week.
Jig Zone Puzzle:
Today’s took me 3:02 (average 4:39). To do it, click here. How did you do?
Short Takes:
From The New Yorker: Robert Mueller, the former F.B.I. director named to investigate the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, will have broad discretion to prosecute any crimes he uncovers. But an equally important part of his mandate is lesser known: his duty to write a report on his findings.
In this respect, Mueller, as a special counsel designated by the Justice Department, differs from other federal prosecutors. Most U.S. Attorneys operate by a rule of put up or shut up—that is, they either bring criminal prosecutions or say nothing at all.
Click through for much more. That’s one report I can’t wait to read! RESIST!!
From NY Times: President Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office this month that firing the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a document summarizing the meeting.
“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”
He bragged about it to his owners. How little the fool knew. He’s under far more investigation now than before. RESIST!!
From The Rachel Maddow Show:How might Donald Trump try to end the special investigation?
Rachel Maddow looks at some ways by which Donald Trump could try to get in the way of the Trump-Russia special investigation or eliminate it entirely.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Stay tuned. RESIST!!
