Who Stole Their Childhood? and Dr. Patrick Moore TEARS APART The Green New Deal
Dr. Spock helped wreck a generation now the "greenie end of the worlders" are doing the same thing to another generation.
Finally:
COURT DOCUMENTS: Roger Stone Russian Set-Up Agent Was An FBI Informant Under Mueller - Read More
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Several days ago I suggested a $50 minimum wage with my tongue in my cheek and now Steyer is up to $22. In time I have no doubt compassionate liberal progressives will get to my figure.
After all trees grow in the sky and lunches are free in la la land. (See 1 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I totally embrace this editorial. Trump is his own worst enemy and should allow those he appointed to do their job. (See 2 below.)
Meanwhile, Barr proves he is the right man, in the right place at the right time. Trump needs to understand he should zip it.
His first Attorney General was appointed because Trump felt an obligation and the Senator from Alabama proved weak and not suited for the job. Barr is one of Trump's better appointments.
If Trump wants to pardon his friend he has the right to do so. (See 2a below.)
And:
Now that Bloomberg has become the darling of frightened Democrat centrists the long knives will be unsheathed and his own sexual exploits will begin to come front and center topics. (2b below.)
as+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1)Tom Steyer’s $22 Minimum Wage
The billionaire takes an old conservative economic joke seriously.
The Editorial Board
“The fair number should be $22 an hour,” Mr. Steyer said at a campaign stop this week in Winnsboro, S.C. “That should be the minimum wage in the United States of America: $22. Think about what this country would be like if we had a $22 minimum wage: completely different.”
The cost of living in South Carolina is 90% of the U.S. average, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In Mr. Steyer’s California, it’s 115%. This still hides outliers, like skyscraper-high prices in San Francisco. How does it make sense for the federal government to say that sandwich artists in Spartanburg, S.C., can’t be paid less than in Fog City?
In an estimate last year, the Congressional Budget Office said that raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would lift earnings for at least 17 million people, “but 1.3 million other workers would become jobless.” A $22 wage floor would make that ratio worse, giving bigger checks to some workers, while harming more people and pricing many businesses and jobs out of existence because they can’t be run at that labor cost.
Mr. Steyer’s campaign pitch has been that he understands the economy and thus can stand up to Mr. Trump’s list of successes. But when Mr. Steyer calls for a minimum wage that’s $7 higher than what the socialist candidate is demanding, and more than triple the current $7.25, he is showing how easy it is for a billionaire to lose touch with the real world.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2)Trump’s Worst Enemy
He needs to stop tweeting about cases and let Barr do his job.
The Editorial Board
After his Senate impeachment acquittal, we wrote that President Trump’s history is that he can’t stand prosperity. Well, that was fast. The President’s relentless popping off this week about the sentencing of supporter Roger Stone has hurt himself, his Justice Department, and the proper understanding of executive power. That’s a notable trifecta of self-destructive behavior even by his standards.
Mr. Trump handed another sword to his opponents when he fulminated on Twitter about the initial recommendation of a seven-to-nine year prison sentence for Mr. Stone. He is right that such a sentence would be excessive. Mr. Stone was convicted of lying to Congress, which often receives minimal jail time. His conviction for witness tampering was more serious but involved a faux-macho threat (“prepare to die”) that even the witness said he didn’t take literally.
As it happens, senior Justice officials had concluded on their own that the sentence recommendation was excessive and had decided to rescind it before Mr. Trump’s tweet. But by ranting publicly as he did, the President gave Democrats an opening to claim that Attorney General Bill Barr was taking orders from the White House. Four prosecutors (two were part of Robert Mueller’s investigation) withdrew from the Stone case in protest, and Democrats had another Trump scandal to flog. Kim Strassel has more background nearby.
The uproar is obscuring that Mr. Barr had every reason and authority to reduce the sentencing recommendation. Up to nine years is extreme, as even some career prosecutors believed. All prosecutors ultimately work for Mr. Barr, and he is accountable to the voters through the President.
If the decisions of line prosecutors can’t be questioned by their political superiors, the chances increase of prosecutorial abuse. If career prosecutors are king, then why go through the trouble of nominating and confirming an Attorney General and his deputies? This erodes political accountability under the separation of powers.
But before Mr. Barr could explain any of this, Mr. Trump compounded his political felony by praising the AG for rescinding the sentencing recommendation. That gave more ammunition to Democrats and undermined Mr. Barr. The President then shot himself again by attacking Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding over the Stone case. “Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure?” he tweeted.
Mr. Trump makes no friends in the judiciary with such political attacks, and it can’t help Mr. Stone’s chances of getting a reduced sentence. If the President dislikes the sentence, he has his pardon power. Meantime, knock it off.
Mr. Trump doesn’t understand, or perhaps doesn’t care, that all of this hurts Mr. Barr, whom he can ill-afford to lose. The AG is smart, tough and independent. He will give Mr. Trump his candid advice on the law, which is more than most of his advisers do. Mr. Barr finally spoke up in frustration about this Thursday, telling ABC News that Mr. Trump’s outbursts are making it “impossible for me to do my job.”
The President should listen because he needs Mr. Barr more than Mr. Barr needs to be AG. The danger for Mr. Trump is that Mr. Barr will resign because he is tired of having his credibility undermined by a President who can’t control his political id no matter the damage it causes.
Mr. Trump won’t like to hear any of this, and no doubt his loyalists will blame Democrats, the media and Mr. Barr. But Mr. Trump is his own worst enemy. Time and again his need to dominate the news, to justify even his mistakes, and to rebut every critic gets him into needless trouble.
When he fired James Comey, he couldn’t live with the Justice Department’s cogent and correct explanation of the FBI director’s many mistakes. Instead he tweeted the idle claim that he had taped his private conversations with Mr. Comey. That led to Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation.
When the Mueller probe finally ended, Mr. Trump could have claimed vindication and moved on. Instead he unleashed Rudy Giuliani to play in the mud bath of Ukrainian politics and attack a U.S. ambassador. He ignored warnings from other advisers until it was too late, and he gave Democrats the opening to impeach him.
In the wake of his Senate acquittal, Mr. Trump should be campaigning for re-election and enjoying the disarray of his opponents. Instead he gives every appearance of wanting to settle scores with anyone who contributed in any way to impeachment.
He is helping the Democrats who are running against the Senators who voted to acquit. And he is making millions of voters ask if they really want to take a risk on giving him so much power for another four years.
2a)Attorney General Says Tweets Make It Impossible for Him to Do His Job
William Barr’s comments come after Trump tweeted about DOJ sentencing recommendation in Stone case.
By
Attorney General William Barr said President Trump’s tweets and public statements make it “impossible” for him to do his job, a striking criticism of the president in the wake of his complaints about the case involving Roger Stone.
“I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases,” Mr. Barr said in an interview with ABC Thursday, while adding the president had never asked him to intervene in any criminal case.
His statements came after days of political furor in Washington sparked by Mr. Barr’s decision earlier in the week to overrule prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington who had sought a prison term of between seven and nine years for Mr. Stone.
Mr. Stone, an informal Trump adviser, was convicted in November of lying to Congress and witness tampering, in a case filed by special counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The intervention on the sentencing—in which top Justice Department officials ordered prosecutors to tell the court that the earlier recommendation was excessive—prompted the resignation of one career prosecutor, the withdrawal of three others from the case, and criticism from Democrats and some in the Justice Department that Mr. Barr had gone out of his way to help an ally of the president.
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Mr. Barr one of the Trump administration’s “henchmen” and said his handling of the Stone sentencing “deeply damaged” the justice system.
In the ABC interview, Mr. Barr said he had already begun the process of amending the department’s sentencing recommendation when “someone walked in and told me…about the president’s tweet,” in which Mr. Trump criticized the sentencing recommendation, calling it a “disgrace.”
“That sort of illustrates how disruptive these tweets can be for the Department of Justice,” Mr. Barr said. He said tweets about the case and other criminal investigations “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.”
Other officials at the Justice Department said the prosecutors involved didn’t learn of any plan to submit a revised filing until after Mr. Trump publicly criticized the original recommendation, leaving them with the impression that Mr. Trump was driving the change.
The attorney general’s defenders say that in this and other sensitive decisions, Mr. Barr is making what he believes are the right calls while disregarding the political flak he knows will ensue in the heated environment of Washington—a point Mr. Barr made in the ABC interview.
“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody…whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board or the president,” Mr. Barr said. “I’m going to do what I think is right.”
In a statement, Stephanie Grisham, White House press secretary, said of Mr. Barr’s remarks: “The President wasn’t bothered by the comments at all and he has the right, just like any American citizen, to publicly offer his opinions.” She added: “The President has full faith and confidence in Attorney General Barr to do his job and uphold the law.”
Mr. Barr’s critics say his intervention in the Stone case and many other decisions strongly favor the president’s interests—such as when Mr. Barr publicly expressed his misgivings about Mr. Mueller’s report. Such moves, critics say, erode the department’s tradition of independence in law enforcement and potentially undermine prosecutors in future cases.
Mr. Barr, 69 years old, has told friends he isn’t driven by concern for his reputation. When a reporter asked him last year if he worried about his legacy, he responded: “Everyone dies.”
Still, Mr. Barr’s associates had become concerned in recent days about the perception that he was taking directives from the president on matters including Mr. Stone’s sentencing recommendation, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Prosecutors in the case made their recommendation in keeping with official guidelines, though they also have the authority to forgo a recommendation and leave it to the presiding judge to decide the sentence.
On Thursday morning, Justice Department officials contacted allies of the attorney general to ask them to make the case that Mr. Stone’s sentencing recommendation by the prosecutors had been absurd and that Mr. Barr “could not let this stand,” the person said.
The person characterized the message from the Justice Department as: “It would be good to rally around the flag a little bit.”
“He has a lot of credibility with the boss, so he can afford to be a little critical,” the person said of Mr. Barr’s statements about Mr. Trump. “It’s not a Sessions situation”—a reference to Mr. Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who was frequently the target of Twitter broadsides from the Oval Office.
Prominent Republicans also have defended Mr. Barr and expressed disapproval of Mr. Trump’s tweets. On Wednesday, Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) called the Stone controversy the result of an “unfortunate miscommunication” and nothing more sinister, but said Mr. Trump’s tweet “aggravated the situation.”
A national association representing assistant U.S. attorneys around the country issued a statement Thursday saying the Stone prosecutors had appropriately recommended a guideline sentence and warned against such decisions being made by political appointees.
Since being confirmed a year ago, Mr. Barr has intervened personally in a number of contentious issues. Neither Mr. Barr nor his handpicked deputy, Jeffrey Rosen, worked as a line prosecutor within the Justice Department, though Mr. Barr served a previous stint as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. Mr. Barr has long advanced an expansive view of executive authority and views himself as a defender of the office of the presidency against what he sees as an erosion of presidential power by congressional Democrats and other Trump opponents.
Much of Mr. Barr’s legal experience stems from decades of work as a corporate defense and telecom industry lawyer. The combination, associates say, has given him a disdain for government bureaucracy, a short fuse for indecision, and a tendency to find it more efficient to make a call himself.
“Bill Barr has the intestinal fortitude that comes with his convictions,” said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University professor. “If he believes that trial prosecutors have exceeded their instructions he is not someone who is going to be deterred by the optics of the moment.”
To some degree, Mr. Barr’s time on the job—Friday is the first anniversary of his confirmation—has brought to the fore the conflict inherent in the role of an attorney general, who is at once supposed to be the nation’s top law-enforcement officer free of politics but at the same time a backer of the president’s policy agenda. Democrats say he has strayed too far toward favoring the president.
Mr. Barr made waves early on by sending a March 24 letter to Congress summarizing Mr. Mueller’s report in a way that Mr. Mueller himself and many others said failed to describe the investigators’ account of the extensive efforts Mr. Trump took to curtail their inquiry.
Rather, Mr. Barr said only that Mr. Mueller hadn’t made a decision on charging the president, and that he and his then-deputy, Rod Rosenstein, had determined the president committed no crime.
He later defended the letter as an attempt to summarize a 400-page report in four pages, and pointed to his decision to release the full, redacted report as evidence that he wasn’t trying to hide anything or protect Mr. Trump.
In some instances, Mr. Barr has established parallel processes within the department led by his handpicked teams that can appear to overlap with rank-and-file work.
As the Justice Department inspector general was looking into the early stages of the FBI’s investigation in then-candidate Donald Trump and any connections to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Mr. Barr appointed the top federal prosecutor in Connecticut to pursue a similar avenue of inquiry, incorporating other agencies beyond Justice, such as the CIA.
When the inspector general in December found major missteps in a portion of the inquiry but said the inquiry itself was appropriately opened, Mr. Barr rejected that assertion and said the bureau had acted on the “thinnest of suspicions.”
2b) Why Is Bloomberg's Long History of Egregious Sexism Getting a Pass?
The surging Democratic presidential candidate has fielded some 40 sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits brought against him and his organizations over decades.
In December 2015, employees at Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control organization funded by Mike Bloomberg, arrived at work to find a holiday gift on their desks from their employer: the former mayor’s 1997 autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg. Flipping through the book, staffers found themselves uncomfortably reading their billionaire founder’s boasts about keeping “a girlfriend in every city” and other womanizing exploits as a Wall Street up-and-comer.
“A few people started immediately going through it and sending the cringe-iest parts around on email chains,” one former Everytown employee told me. “Hardly the most controversial things he’s said, but it’s still a bad look.”
Indeed, Bloomberg’s casual boasts about his sex life in his own autobiography are now some of the least problematic parts of the his candidacy for president. In recent days, the former New York City mayor’s track record on race is undergoing renewed scrutiny: Bloomberg oversaw and expanded the racist and unconstitutional “stop and frisk” program, and a newly unearthed video shows him blaming the end of a racially discriminatory housing practice known as “redlining” for the 2008 economic recession. But it takes a telling amount of gall and cluelessness to gift a book with anecdotes about your own womanizing to employees at your gun safety non-profit in the year 2015, especially for a politician with presidential ambitions who has been vigorously denying allegations of misogyny throughout his entire career—including some 40 sex discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuits brought against him and his organizations by 64 women over the past several decades.
All this, despite what’s already been reported and alleged for decades about Bloomberg’s behavior. As a recap, here are some examples: Sekiko Sakai Garrison, a former sales representative at Bloomberg LP, alleged in a 1997 lawsuit (one of four separate lawsuits in a two-year period) that when then-CEO Mike Bloomberg found out she was pregnant, he told her, “Kill it!” and “Great! Number 16!”—an apparent reference to the number of pregnant women or women on maternity leave at his company. She also alleged that when Bloomberg saw her engagement ring, he commented, “What is the guy dumb and blind? What the hell is he marrying you for?” and that he once pointed to another female employee and told Garrison, “If you looked like that, I’d do you in a second.” Bloomberg denied having said most of those things, but reportedly left Garrison a voicemail saying that if he did say them, he “didn’t mean it.”Bloomberg’s sexism, like that of fellow New York City billionaire Donald Trump, has been prolific and well-documented, but for some reason, the stories about him don’t seem to have taken hold. He is still being embraced by the Democratic establishment as a viable option for its presidential nominee. He surged to third place in several 2020 polls this week; the Democratic National Committee changed its rules to allow him to participate in the next primary debate; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said his presence in the primary is a “positive one.”
Bloomberg once described his life as a single billionaire bachelor in New York City to a reporter as being a “wet dream.” "I like theater, dining and chasing women," he said. On a radio show in 2003, he said that he would “really want to have” Jennifer Lopez, which he later explained away as wanting to “have dinner” with her. A top aide said Bloomberg frequently remarked “nice tits” upon seeing attractive women. Employees of his in 1990 put together an entire booklet of his some of his more egregious comments, including, "If women wanted to be appreciated for their brains, they'd go to the library instead of to Bloomingdale's,” and, of the computer terminal that made him a billionaire, “It will do everything, including give you [oral sex]. I guess that puts a lot of you girls out of business."
More recently, Bloomberg defended his longtime close pal Charlie Rose, who was fired from CBS and PBS in 2017 after multiple women alleged that he made unwanted sexual advances on his female colleagues and subordinates. "The stuff I read about is disgraceful—I don't know how true all of it is," Bloomberg told the New York Times. “I never saw anything and we have no record, we've checked very carefully.”
Bloomberg then took that opportunity to cast doubt on the #MeToo movement as a whole, saying the public should “let the court system decide” whether a man is guilty. "You know, is it true?" he said. "You look at people that say it is, but we have a system where you have—presumption of innocence is the basis of it." (He didn’t give men of color the same benefit of the doubt in 2015 when he was recorded as saying that minorities were arrested at a disproportional rate "because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods," and because “ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O.”) Rose, coincidentally, had once described his constant banter with Bloomberg about women in the office (which they shared in the 90s) as “a locker room thing”—the same defense Trump used to excuse his having boasted about “grabbing” women “by the pussy.”Bloomberg’s campaign, in reckoning with his long history of toxic frat-boy behavior, is essentially asking voters to try and focus on his political values instead. "Mike Bloomberg has supported and empowered women throughout his career—from appointing women to the very top positions in his mayoral administration to supporting women candidates for higher office to an industry-leading 26-weeks of paid family leave at his company," Julie Wood, a Bloomberg campaign spokesperson, told ABC News in October. "At the same time, Mike has come to see that some of what he has said is disrespectful and wrong. He believes his words have not always aligned with his values and the way he has led his life." Of course, at least through 2015, he was leading his life in such a way that he proudly passed out a narrative of his sexual exploits to the young people he hired to combat gun violence.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++If the Democratic Party wants to claim the moral high-ground on issues of misogyny and sexual harassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement, it has a moral obligation to reject as its highest leader a man who talks about women much in the same way Trump does. A half-hearted apology for behavior so egregious that it sparked 40 lawsuits by women is a bandaid on a bullet wound.Laura Bassett is a freelance journalist writing about politics, gender, and culture.
No comments:
Post a Comment