Dagny and Blake's mom and dad dress for a Halloween Party. They have to be offending someone because of their anti-PC costumes. At least they did not dress like MOANA.
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The co-ordinated Democrat response to The Trump Dossier, paid for by the DNC and Hillary, is that it was no big deal because it was only campaign opposition information gathering which every politician seeks to obtain. All of a sudden the words "Trump Collusion" have disappeared from their rhetoric.
The Trump Collusion boomerang is entering the anti-Trumper's safe zone and impeachment talk is back on the plate so as to turn the conversation away from Hillary's corrupt acts.
This kind of hypocrisy is what totally turns voters off and will bite the Democrats in their derriere come 2018.
C
Food for thought:
Trump should be impeached. Why? Because of his un-presidential behaviour. Why? Because he is the first president since Reagan, and like Obama who promised to transform America, who is actually doing what he said he would when he campaigned.
A second reason to impeach him is because of the Russian Collusion and FBI cover-up boomerang which is now getting ready to hit, not Trump, but Rice, Lerner, Holder, Lynch, Hillary, Bill,The Clinton Foundation and Obama, among others.
The final reason to impeach Trump, and probably the most serious, is because when you' read his lips' he wants to "Make America Great Again." No president of the United States should endeavor to strive for first place. He should apologize and seek to come in last. What arrogance. How can America be respected when it excels, the economy hums and people are employed? (See 1 and 1a below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++Yesterday there were displays of replica's of Trump's potential border walls.
What those who voted for Trump understand is that he is keeping his campaign promises against all odds. This certainly is non-presidential behaviour
AC
Good walls make good neighbors, as the saying goes, but for some reason this does not apply to Mexico.
Anti-Trumpers believe porous borders and flooding America with drugs and gangs makes for peace and prosperity. Sanctuary states and cities are in and peaceful /safe neighborhoods are out. Maybe I am missing something.
One thing I wish Trump would do is quit emphasizing his tax cut program is for the middle class. Whether he realizes it or not he is validating and perpetuating the Democrat's love of class warfare.
Tax cuts can be weighted but they should be for all tax payers.
Finally, the IRS was made to admit they acted unconstitutionally by depriving conservative groups of their rights. The problem is no one is being held accountable. The biggest liar is drawing a pension and the Head of The IRS is finally being dismissed but no one is being brought before a court of justice, no one is paying a damn thing for violating the law. No one's wrists are even being slapped.
This is why there will continue to be corruption and stonewalling. It pays. There is no serious cost for wrongdoing. (See 2 below.)
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Humor:
My parents told me I could name my new pet dog anything I wanted and since i was a mischievous little boy, i decided to name the dog Sex. It seemed funny at first until you understand all the confusion that this caused me in my later life.A DOG NAMED SEX
Like the day that I went to the town hall to get a dog license for Sex. The clerk asked me what I wanted. I told him I wanted a license for Sex.He said, “I’d like to have one, too.”Then, I said, “You don’t understand. She’s a dog.”He replied, “Look man, I don’t care how she looks.”“No no, I’ve had Sex since I was 5!”He replied, “You must have been an early bloomer.”
When I decided to get married, I told the minister I wanted to have Sex at the wedding. He told me I’d have to wait until after the wedding. When I protested that Sex had played a big part in my life and that my whole life revolved around Sex, he said he didn’t want to hear about my personal life.
After my wife and I got married, I took the dog with us on the honeymoon. When I checked into the hotel, I told the clerk that I wanted a room for my wife and wanted one for Sex. She replied, “Sir, every room in the hotel can be used for sex.” I said, “You don’t understand. Sex keeps me awake at night.” The clerk said, “Me too!”
When my wife and I separated, we went to court to fight for custody of the dog. When I told the Judge I had Sex before I was married, he grinned and said, “Me too.”
One day my dog Sex and I took a walk and he ran away from me. I spent hours looking for that dog. A policeman came by and asked what I was doing in this alley at midnight.
I told him, “I’m looking for Sex!” My case comes up next Tuesday.
Now that I’ve been thrown in jail, married, divorced and had more trouble with that dog than I ever imagined, I’m in counseling. My psychiatrist asked me what my problem was.I said, “Sex has left my life. It’s like losing a best friend and I’m so lonely.”He said, “Look, you and I both know that sex isn’t man’s best friend. Why don’t you go get yourself a dog...”
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Dick
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1)The Week Trump Won
One hundred years ago on Friday, John Reed was in St. Petersburg watching Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolsheviks take over Russia. It was interesting to read his account, “Ten Days That Shook the World,” this week — the week when Donald Trump and Steve Bannon solidified their grip on the Republican Party and America’s national government.
The big thing you notice from Reed’s reporting is how useful it is to have a secular religion. In the midst of the chaos of 1917, the communists alone knew exactly what they believed. They had a clear intellectual framework that they could use to explain events.Everything was a clash between noble workers and the corrupt bourgeoisie. They had a clear confidence that history was on their side. They offered lonely and downtrodden people a sense of fraternity and mission.
When the climax came, Trotsky was tough: “We won’t give way an inch,” he bellowed. “If there are comrades here who haven’t the courage and the will to dare what we dare, let them leave with the rest of the cowards and conciliators! Backed by the workers and soldiers we shall go on!”
The Russian democrats, on the other hand, had lost moral authority, and the trust of the people and faith in themselves. They wrongly thought the revolution would peter out. The head of the provisional government, Alexander Kerensky, came to the assembly “to plead passionately for national unity, once bursting into tears at the end. The assembly heard him coldly, interrupting with ironical remarks.”
Reed gives us a moment-by-moment description of what it looks like when one moral order collapses and another takes its place.
In less dramatic form, we’re going through that now. Communism never really took off in America because we already had a secular religion, or rather religious truths rendered in secular form.
Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of Britain, described that creed well in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute. He pointed out that the phrase, “All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights,” would have been unintelligible to Plato or Aristotle or anybody raised in a hierarchical society.The profound equality of every individual was an idea that flowed directly from the Hebrew Bible. The story Americans told about themselves was a biblical story — an exodus story of various diverse peoples leaving oppression, crossing a wilderness and joining together to help create a promised land.
The American social structure, as Sacks notes, was based on biblical categories. There was a political realm, but the heart of society was in the covenantal realm: “marriages, families, congregations, communities, charities and voluntary associations.”
America’s Judeo-Christian ethic celebrated neighborliness over pagan combativeness; humility as the basis of good character, not narcissism. It believed in taking in the stranger because we were all strangers once. It dreamed of universal democracy as the global fulfillment of the providential plan.
That biblical ethic, embraced by atheists as much as the faithful, is not in great shape these days. As Sacks notes: “Today, one half of America is losing all those covenantal institutions. It’s losing strong marriages and families and communities. It is losing a strong sense of the American narrative. It’s even losing e pluribus unum because today everyone prefers pluribus to unum.…”
Trump and Bannon have filled the void with their own creed, which is anti-biblical. The American story they tell is not diverse people journeying toward a united future. It’s a zero-sum struggle of class and ethnic conflict. The traits Trump embodies are narcissism, not humility; combativeness, not love; the sanctification of the rich and blindness toward the poor.
As other relationships wither, many Americans are making partisanship the basis of their identity — their main political, ethnic and moral attachment. And the polls show that if you want to win a Republican primary these days, you have to embrace the Trump narrative, and not the old biblical one.
The Republican senators went to the White House and saw a president so repetitive and rambling, some thought he might be suffering from early Alzheimer’s. But they know which way the wind is blowing. They gave him a standing ovation.
Even Alexander Kerensky didn’t abase himself so humiliatingly.
The people who oppose Trump make a big error: “Let’s Get Togetherism.” This is the belief that if we can only have a civil conversation between red and blue, then everything will be better. But you can’t destroy a moral vision with a process. You need a counter-moral vision.
The people who reluctantly collaborate with Trump make a different error: economism. This is the belief that Trump’s behavior is tolerable because at least Republicans can pass a tax cut. People who believe that value money more than morals. Trumpism is not just economic, and it can’t be thwarted by passing a bit of economic policy.
This is like 1917, a clash of political, moral, economic and social ideologies all rolled into one.
Frankly, I think America’s traditional biblical ethic is still lurking somewhere in the national DNA. But there has to be a leader who can restore it to life.
1a)
A judge may order Fusion GPS to give House investigators its bank records.
The confirmation this week that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid an opposition-research firm for a “dossier” on Donald Trump is bombshell news. More bombshells are to come.
The Fusion GPS saga isn’t over. The Clinton-DNC funding is but a first glimpse into the shady election doings concealed within that oppo-research firm’s walls. We now know where Fusion got some of its cash, but the next question is how the firm used it. With whom did it work beyond former British spy Christopher Steele ? Whom did it pay? Who else was paying it?
The answers are in Fusion’s bank records. Fusion has doggedly refused to divulge the names of its clients for months now, despite extraordinary pressure. So why did the firm suddenly insist that middleman law firm Perkins Coie release Fusion from confidentiality agreements, and spill the beans on who hired it?
Because there’s something Fusion cares about keeping secret even more than the Clinton-DNC news—and that something is in those bank records. The release of the client names was a last-ditch effort to appease the House Intelligence Committee, which issued subpoenas to Fusion’s bank and was close to obtaining records until Fusion filed suit last week. The release was also likely aimed at currying favor with the court, given Fusion’s otherwise weak legal case. The judge could rule as early as Friday morning.
If the House wins, don’t be surprised if those records include money connected to Russians. In the past Fusion has worked with Russians, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who happened to show up last year in Donald Trump Jr.’s office.
FBI bombshells are also yet to come. The bureau has stonewalled congressional subpoenas for documents related to the dossier, but that became harder with the DNC-Clinton news. On Thursday Speaker Paul Ryan announced the FBI had finally pledged to turn over its dossier file next week.
Assuming the FBI is comprehensive in its disclosure, expect to learn that the dossier was indeed a major basis of investigating the Trump team—despite reading like “the National Enquirer,” as Rep. Trey Gowdy aptly put it. We may learn the FBI knew the dossier was a bought-and-paid-for product of Candidate Clinton, but used it anyway. Or that it didn’t know, which would be equally disturbing.
It might show the bureau was simply had. Don’t forget that it wasn’t until January the dossier became public, and the media started unearthing details. And the more ugly info that came out (Fusion, Democratic clients, intelligence-for-hire) the more former Obama officials seemed skeptical of it. In May, former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper said his people could never “corroborate” its “sourcing.” In June, Mr. Comey derided it as “salacious and unverified.”
Yet none of this jibes with reports that the FBI debated paying Mr. Steele to continue his work. Or that Mr. Comey was so convinced by the dossier that he pushed to have it included in the intelligence community’s January report on Russian meddling. Imagine if it turns out the FBI was duped by a politically contracted document that might have been filled up by the Kremlin.
There’s plenty yet to come with regard to the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Every senior Democrat is disclaiming knowledge of the dossier deal, leaving Perkins Coie holding the bag. But while it is not unusual for law firms to hire opposition-research outfits for political clients, it is highly unusual for a law firm to pay bills without a client’s approval. Somewhere, Perkins Coie has documents showing who signed off on those bills, and they aren’t protected by attorney-client privilege.
Those names will matter, since someone at the DNC and at the Clinton campaign will need to explain how they somehow both forgot to list Fusion as a vendor in their campaign-finance filings. Some Justice Department lawyer is presumably already looking into whether this was a willful evasion, which can carry criminal penalties. It’s one thing to forget to list that local hot-dog supplier for the campaign picnic. It’s a little fishier when two entities both fail to list the firm that supplied them the most explosive hit job in a generation.
And there are still bombshells with regard to unmasking of Americans in surveilled communications. If the Steele dossier reports (which appear to date back to June 2016) were making their way into the hands of senior DNC and Clinton political operatives, you can bet they were making their way to the Obama White House. This may explain why Obama political appointees began monitoring the Trump campaign and abusing unmasking. They were looking for a “gotcha,” something to disqualify a Trump presidency. Of course, they were doing so on the basis of “salacious and unverified” accusations made by anonymous Russians, but never mind.
No, this probe of the Democratic Party’s Russian dalliance has a long, long way to go. And, let us hope, with revelations too big for even the media to ignore.
2)
Jay Sekulow: Victory! IRS admits Tea Party, other conservative groups were targets during Obama era
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++By Jenny Beth MartinIt took many years to resolve. But I am delighted to report that we have just obtained a resounding victory in our legal challenge to the IRS’s political targeting of conservative organizations.In an unprecedented victorious conclusion to our four year-long legal battle against the IRS, the bureaucratic agency has just admitted in federal court that it wrongfully targeted Tea Party and conservative groups during the Obama administration because of their political viewpoints and issued an apology to our clients for doing so. In addition, the IRS is consenting to a court order that would prohibit it from ever engaging in this form of unconstitutional discrimination in the future.In a proposed Consent Order filed with the Court yesterday, the IRS has apologized for its treatment of our clients -- 36 Tea Party and other conservative organizations from 20 states that applied for 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) tax-exempt status with the IRS between 2009 and 2012 -- during the tax-exempt determinations process. Crucially, following years of denial by the IRS and blame-shifting by IRS officials, the agency now expressly admits that its treatment of our clients was wrong.As set forth in the proposed Order:The IRS admits that its treatment of Plaintiffs during the tax-exempt determinations process, including screening their applications based on their names or policy positions, subjecting those applications to heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays, and demanding of some Plaintiffs’ information that TIGTA determined was unnecessary to the agency’s determination of their tax-exempt status, was wrong. For such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology.Throughout litigation of this case, we have remained committed to protecting the rights of our clients who faced unlawful and discriminatory action by the IRS. Our objective from the very beginning has been to hold the IRS accountable for its corrupt practices.This Consent Order represents a historic victory for our clients and sends the unequivocal message that a government agency’s targeting of conservative organizations, or any organization, on the basis of political viewpoints, will never be tolerated.This Order will put an end, once and for all, to the abhorrent practices utilized against our clients, as the agreement includes the IRS’s express acknowledgment of – and apology for – its wrongful treatment of our clients. While this agreement is designed to prevent any such practices from occurring again, rest assured that we will remain vigilant to ensure that the IRS does not resort to such tactics in the future.As we have previously detailed, in March of 2012 we began being contacted by literally dozens of Tea Party and conservative groups who were being harassed by the Obama IRS after submitting applications for tax-exempt status. Their tax-exempt applications were held up for years (over seven years in some cases), and they began receiving obtrusive and unconstitutional requests for donor and member information. That began a now more than five and a half year fight with the burgeoning bureaucracy at the IRS. Then on May 10, 2013, Lois Lerner, the then head of the IRS Tax Exempt Organizations Division, publicly implicated the IRS in one of the worst political targeting scandals of the century.This is an extraordinary victory against the IRS. And it sends a powerful warning to the deep state bureaucracy that it will not be allowed to violate the Constitution in order to silence and shut down the conservative agenda.In addition to the IRS’s admissions of and apology for its wrongful conduct, the Consent Order would specifically award Plaintiffs the following:· A declaration by the Court that it is wrong to apply the United States tax code to any tax-exempt applicant or entity based solely on such entity’s name, any lawful positions it espouses on any issues, or its associations or perceived associations with a particular political movement, position or viewpoint;· A declaration by the Court that any action or inaction taken by the IRS must be applied evenhandedly and not based solely on a tax-exempt applicant or entity’s name, political viewpoint, or associations or perceived associations with a particular political movement, position or viewpoint; and· A declaration by the Court that discrimination on the basis of political viewpoint in administering the United States tax code violates fundamental First Amendment rights. Disparate treatment of taxpayers based solely on the taxpayers’ names, any lawful positions the taxpayers espouse on any issues, or the taxpayers’ associations or perceived associations with a particular political movement, position or viewpoint is unlawful.In the Order, the IRS has also agreed that (unless expressly required by law) certain actions against the Plaintiffs– i.e. the sharing, dissemination, or other use of information unnecessarily obtained by the IRS during the determinations process (such as donor names, the names of volunteers, political affiliations of an organization’s officers, etc.) – would be unlawful. In addition, the IRS promises not to take any retaliatory action against our clients for exposing the targeting scheme.Finally, and of crucial significance, the IRS admits it targeted conservative and Tea Party groups based on their viewpoints (i.e., “policy positions”) and that such viewpoint discrimination violates fundamental First Amendment rights. This is the first time the IRS has admitted that its targeting scheme was not just “inappropriate” – as TIGTA found – but, as our clients alleged and we have vigorously and persistently argued for years, blatantly unconstitutional.To ensure consistency and uniformity within the agency’s operations going forward, the IRS is required, pursuant to the Order, to inform all employees within the Exempt Organizations Division, as well as the Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners within other divisions, of the Order’s terms.This Order not only validates our clients’ allegations about their treatment at the hands of the corrupt Obama-era IRS but also provides important assurances to the American public that the agency understands its obligation to refrain from further such discriminatory conduct. As Attorney General Sessions acknowledged in this regard, “[t]here is no excuse for [the IRS’s] conduct,” as it is “without question” that the First Amendment prohibits the conduct that occurred here, i.e., subjecting American citizens to disparate treatment “based solely on their viewpoint or ideology.” Sessions further confirmed his Department’s commitment to ensuring that the “abuse of power” in which the IRS engaged here “will not be tolerated.”It is impossible to overstate the importance of this victory. This marks the end of a years-long fight for justice in defense of the constitutional rights of our clients. This is an extraordinary victory against the IRS. And it sends a powerful warning to the deep state bureaucracy that it will not be allowed to violate the Constitution in order to silence and shut down the conservative agenda.Jay Sekulow is Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which focuses on constitutional law. He also serves as a member of President Trump’s legal team. Follow him on Twitter @JaySekulow.
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