Month: May 2018

Resist normalizing criminal behavior in the age of Trump

by

This is not normal and should not be happening. Period. Full stop.

Today the FBI and intelligence agencies will provide a briefing in an ongoing criminal investigation of the Trump campaign’s “collusion” with Russia to Midnight Run Devin Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee chairman who previously had to recuse himself from his own committee’s Russia investigation because he was caught conspiring with the Trump administration to fabricate the conspiracy theories that the Obama administration surveilled Trump Tower and inappropriately unmasked the identities of Trump campaign officials picked up on signal intelligence to undermine the Special Counsel’s investigation; and Trey “Benghazi!” Gowdy, who spent years promoting Benghazi conspiracy theories against Hillary Clinton that amounted to nothing according to the findings of his own committee reports. These are two of the least credible partisan members of Congress.

More importantly, this meeting is going to occur without the presence of their Democratic counterparts. This is entirely improper and unacceptable. Moreover, Trey Gowdy does not possess the necessary security clearance for this classified intelligence briefing (he is not a member of the Gang of Eight).

There is no doubt that this meeting is certain to result in Nunes and/or Gowdy selectively leaking cherry-picked classified intelligence (a crime) to FAUX News aka Trump TV as soon as today to support the new conspiracy theory of “Spygate,” a label that Trump and his propaganda machine have concocted in order to undermine the Special Counsel’s investigation. The Special Counsel should be considering charging them as accessories to Trump’s conspiracy to obstruct justice, which is what this briefing constitutes.

Read more

Congress Made it Harder to Give Teachers Raises

by

Distributed via OtherWords.org

[Note to readers: Due to technical difficulties, I’ve not been able to post for awhile, but the problem seems corrected. This is a piece I had published at our free syndication service. OtherWords.org, two weeks ago, for those who’ve not seen it elsewhere]

In just a few months, we’ve seen teachers in five states walk out of the classroom to protest their abysmal pay.

Stingy state budgets are mostly to blame for low teacher pay and poor school conditions, but there’s a federal tax connection, too. Unfortunately, last year’s Republican tax plan could make keeping good teachers in the classroom more difficult than ever.

Raising teacher pay requires money, which at some point requires new state tax revenue.

Now, most state taxpayers will tolerate tax increases when they know those taxes will fund education. But in many places, state lawmakers have only so much room to raise taxes before voters express their displeasure come election time.

The jam state governments may find themselves in is that Trump and his Republican friends in Congress effectively just increased state income and property taxes. A lot. Which means voters won’t be too keen to see another increase so soon.

How can Congress increase state taxes? By increasing the real cost of state taxes people already pay, that’s how.

Read more

GOP Congress Candidate Lea “Chapter 7” Peterson Squirms on Trump Question

by
Lea Marquez Peterson filed for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy to unload $3.2 million in debt, tax liens and a judgment.
Lea Marquez Peterson filed for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy to unload $3.2 million in debt, tax liens, and a judgment.

Lea “Chapter 7” Marquez-Peterson spent most of a recent MSNBC interview ducking questions — at first disavowing Trump because she is a “local candidate,” then later saying she would be “honored” to have him visit Tucson.

Peterson is a Republican candidate for Congress in Tucson’s CD2. There are 7 Democratic candidates vying for the chance to run against her.

No criticism of anti-Hispanic ex-sheriff

She played dumb when it came to Trump’s pardon of convicted ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio. “I really don’t have a position on President Trump’s pardoning of Sheriff Joe.”

REALLY? Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt of court for refusing to obey court orders to stop his immigration roundups based on racially profiling Hispanic people.

She runs a ring of Hispanic chambers of commerce that she says has 1,800 members, but they serve as platforms for Governor Ducey and other Republican officials.

She said she’d likely support a discharge effort in House of Representatives to force a vote on legislation to support Dreamers. She defended Trump’s calling immigrants as “animals,” because she said he was referring to gang members from Mexico.

Read more

The GOP’s war on the Department of Justice and the rule of law

by

When President Trump publicly demanded that the Justice Department open an investigation into the F.B.I.’s scrutiny of his campaign contacts with Russia, he crossed over a well-established bright line norm of constraint on executive power: The White House does not make decisions about individual law enforcement investigations. The independence of the Department of Justice is to be respected and preserved.

This is especially true when the president himself is the subject of a criminal investigation, or he would abuse the Department of Justice and use it as a weapon against his political opponents. This is what authoritarian despots do in a dictatorship or a banana republic.

This is precisely where the authoritarian Donald Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress are taking this country. They are engaged in the destruction of our long-cherished democratic institutions and norms, and the rule of law.

Charlie Savage writes at the New York Times, By Demanding an Investigation, Trump Challenged a Constraint on His Power:

“It’s an incredible historical moment,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School who helped write a coming scholarly article on the limits of presidential control over the Justice Department. Mr. Trump’s move, she said, “is the culmination of a lot of moments in which he has chipped away at prosecutorial independence, but this is a direct assault.”

Almost since he took office, Mr. Trump has battered the Justice Department’s independence indirectly — lamenting its failure to reopen a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton that found no wrongdoing, and openly complaining that Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia inquiry. But he had also acknowledged that as president, “I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” as he told a radio interviewer with frustration last fall.

Read more

Right-wing media outs U.S. intelligence asset in pursuit of bogus Trump conspiracy theory

by

Just as I predicted on Saturday, it did not take long for the conservative media entertainment complex to out the U.S. intelligence asset who was the “informant” who contacted members of the Trump campaign who were in engaged in suspicious contacts with the Russians.

It is a crime to reveal the identity of a classified intelligence asset. Scooter Libby was convicted for outing Valerie Plame as a CIA NOC.

This intelligence asset, his family, and his entire network of contacts are now in jeopardy, and any other intelligence projects he was working on have now been compromised as a direct result of President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress and the media seeking to out this “informant” in pursuit of their wild conspiracy theory in their efforts to discredit and to undermine the Special Counsel’s Russia investigation.

Axios.com has a good tick-tock of events that led to the outing of this FBI informant (revised):

Read more