Donald Trump will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to seven “distinguished individuals,” including the wife of the Republican party’s largest donor, the White House announced.
Philanthropist Miriam Adelson, the wife of billionaire Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, is set to be honoured at a ceremony later this week.
via Donald Trump to award biggest campaign donor’s wife medal of freedom | The Independent
It is no secret that—amid his whining, braggadocio, and staggering displays of self-pity—would-be Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh repeatedly perjured himself. Fact-checking articles in the days after the hearing identified well more than a dozen lies: lies about his high-school years, his college years, his drinking habits, his calendar, his yearbook, his judicial beliefs, the laws of Maryland, the testimony of his friends, and the meaning of words. It’s a wonder he gave his real name.
via Brett Kavanaugh Is a Liar—So Why Couldn’t Democrats Call Him One? | The Nation
Democrats urged the FBI to investigate Swetnick’s claims and voiced concern that the White House may be narrowing the scope of the agency’s work.
“I’m very concerned about this because the White House should not be allowed to micromanage an FBI investigation,” Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who sits on the judiciary committee, told CNN.
She added: “I think she [Swetnick] has to be interviewed by the FBI. I haven’t met her. I believe in due process, she did sign an affidavit.”
via Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick to be excluded from FBI investigation | US news | The Guardian
Just 24 hours after caving to pressure from the Senate and requesting an FBI probe into the sexual assault allegations against his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump is reportedly already working to impose strict limitations on the scope of the investigation—a move that has been denounced as a flagrant attempt to further rig the process in Kavanaugh’s favor.
“This is not just a secret society,” Moisey says. “It’s our society.”
One of the most stupid lies he has repeatedly told was that he didn’t drink much, even though all signs point to the opposite. Well, one of his Yale classmates and roommate of Debbie Ramirez (second accuser), Liz Swisher, went on CNN to directly contradict his ridiculous “I was a totally sober choir boy” story.
via Kavanaugh’s Yale Classmate Says He Lied About His Drinking | Crooks and Liars
Crystal Mason, the woman who became the poster child for voter suppression when she was sentenced to five years for casting a ballot in Texas, has gone into federal prison at the start of her ordeal.
Mason, 43, surrendered voluntarily on Thursday to authorities and was taken into federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas. She left her three children behind.
In her final Facebook post before she went inside, she wrote: “This fight is not over, I’m glad God choose me for this journey. I’m walking in there no tears and head hung high …”
via Crystal Mason begins prison sentence in Texas for crime of voting | US news | The Guardian
Trump told one lie after another– that his trade war with China had no negative effect domestically. That he cares about Yemenis. That the Houthi rebels in Yemen are solely a puppet of Iran. That he forestalled the planned assault on Idlib in Syria.
I don’t think it is realized the full impacts Trump’s falsehoods on America’s standing in the world. Trump could have a crisis like the Gulf War. George H. W. Bush handled the Kuwait crisis by working the phones and getting the major other powers to come together to face the aggression of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Bush senior put together a global force of 750,000 to confront Iraq’s ‘million-man army.’
Trump today could not do that. People would laugh at him. Literally.
via Trump’s Remarks on Kavanaugh ‘Con Job’ and Top 4 other Policy Lies that should be Disqualifying
This woman passed the polygraph test did Brett Kavanaugh (ODT)
“I believed he was going to rape me,” Ford, a California psychology professor, told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday local time, recalling an event she said occurred 32 years earlier. “It was hard for me to breathe and I believed that Brett was going to accidentally kill me.”
Kavanaugh responded with an angry, defiant and politically-charged defence, saying he had been the victim of “a calculated and orchestrated political hit fuelled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election”.
Trump had reportedly been disappointed by Kavanaugh’s performance in a Fox News interview earlier in the week, believing he was not aggressive enough in rebutting the allegations against him.
The consensus in Washington DC – including on Trump’s favoured television network, Fox News – was that Ford’s morning testimony was calamitous for the Trump administration and had badly damaged Kavanaugh’s chances of taking a seat on the nation’s most powerful court.
“This is a disaster for Republicans,” Fox anchor Chris Wallace said.
via Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford has no doubt he assaulted her
Trump: “You can check with Sean Hannity, you can check with Fox [News] because they covered it very strongly”
News Man Andrew Bolt seemed to have left a lot of facts go missing in his recent commentary on the matter in Australia. So has Fox News USA boosting the Trump SCOTUS nominee.(ODT)
The local newspaper in Montgomery County, Maryland, is reporting that investigators there are aware of a fourth accuser (counting attorney Michael Avenatti’s anonymous one). The Sentinel writes: “Government investigators confirmed Monday they’re aware of a potential second sexual assault complaint in the county against former Georgetown Prep student and Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh. While investigators weren’t specific and spoke on background, they said they are looking at allegations made against Kavanaugh during his senior year in high school after an anonymous witness voluntarily came forward to speak with them this weekend.”
This fourth witness is obviously corroborating the allegations of Professor Christine Blasey Ford, a prominent specialist in psychiatry at Palo Alto and Stanford Universities, who says that at a high school party in Montgomery County, Kavanaugh and a friend forced her into a room and down on a bed and then Kavanaugh lowered himself on her and attempted to rape her.
Kavanaugh vehemently denies the charges of all four women.
via A Fourth Woman has contacted Montgomery County with Kavanaugh Rape Allegations
During a lifetime of make-believe, Donald Trump has never pretended to be a conventional politician. When he finally decided to make a serious bid for office, he built his presidential aspirations on the flimsiest of foundations: a wild conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s birthplace. His leadership bona fides were equally laughable, having presided over bankrupt casinos and failed real-estate projects, fabricated the persona of a lady-killer, and created a reality TV show about a tin-pot entrepreneur.
via Complicit, Sidelined, Compromised: The American Elite is not Going to Save You From Trump
China has warned it will have no choice but to retaliate after US President Donald Trump announced he will impose 10 per cent tariffs on $US200 billion worth of Chinese imports.
(Foreign Policy in Focus) – Critics like that anonymous op-ed writer have no problem with how Trump’s actually hurting people. They just want the leader doing it to look more presidential.
The recent anonymous op-ed in The New York Times about the resistance to Trump within his own administration was supposed to reassure the American people. Don’t worry, the writer was saying: We the “steady state” are making sure that an unhinged president doesn’t blow up the world. Behind the scenes, the “adults in the room” are hoodwinking the president so that Americans can sleep soundly at night.
I’m still having trouble sleeping.
The anonymous author, after all, also proudly proclaims that his cohort of semi-dissidents “want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.”
Conscientious people applying appropriate methodology are always at risk of ridicule from right-wingers — it’s an extension of the right’s anti-science, anti-expertise bias. Conservatives regularly suspect researchers and experts of bad faith and political bias — see the climate change debate, or the smearing of the inspectors who correctly determined that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
Trump is wrong and the George Washington researchers are right — but they’re researchers, so of course they’re an easy target for conservative know-nothings.
and
A government photographer edited official pictures of Donald Trump’s inauguration to make the crowd appear bigger following a personal intervention from the president, according to newly released documents.
The photographer cropped out empty space “where the crowd ended” for a new set of pictures requested by Trump on the first morning of his presidency, after he was angered by images showing his audience was smaller than Barack Obama’s in 2009.
via Trump inauguration crowd photos were edited after he intervened | World news | The Guardian
“Trump has betrayed America’s workforce, sacrificing lives at the altar of industry profits.”
It looks like Donald Trump daily twitter rants, weekly rallies and unhinged interviews where he rants against the press, Robert Muller and the Special Counsel, Jeff Sessions and Democrats is falling flat with potential voters. A poll by ABC/Washington Post posted on Friday showed a marked drop in the polls for Trump – only 36% approve, while 60% disapprove! That is a shocking number.
In summary, none of these numbers are good for Trump. He is losing support of the Republican party across all areas and independents seem to be leaning more towards the Democrats. This is terrible news for him with under 70 days until the elections. But it is great news for the rest of us!
President Donald Trump’s disapproval rating has hit a high point of 60 per cent, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that also finds that clear majorities of Americans support the special counsel’s Russia investigation and say the President should not fire Attorney-General Jeff Sessions.
via Half of all Americans support Trump impeachment proceedings: poll
TRICKLE UP EFFECT (ODT)
“President Trump pushed through a tax scam that gave unprecedented handouts to billionaires and corporations—but believes it’s too expensive to pay hardworking federal workers a reasonable wage.”
Trump has lashed out at tech companies, accusing Google and others of “suppressing” conservative voices and “hiding information” and good news. He cited no evidence for the claim, which echoes both his own attacks on the press and a conservative talking point.
The land of the free where all citizens aren’t equal (ODT)
Fort Worth is suffering a crisis of democracy – just 6% of electors voted in the last midterms – so why is it aggressively pursuing those who mistakenly cast ballots?
Ed PilkingtonCrystal Mason, who is facing five years in Texas prisons because she mistakenly cast a provisional ballot when she was not allowed to do so.
Crystal Mason, who is facing five years in Texas prisons because she mistakenly cast a provisional ballot when she was not allowed to do so. Photograph: Ed Pilkington for the GuardianWhen Crystal Mason appears in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, this week she has been warned by her lawyers to be prepared for the worst. Pack a bag, they told her, talk to your children, be ready to go to prison.
As the clock ticks down to her court hearing on 30 August, she finds herself unable to take that advice. “No, I’m not prepared! I can’t go to prison. I’m not leaving my kids,” she said.
Mason, a 43-year-old mother of three, has been sentenced to five years in Texas state penitentiary – with extra time pending in federal lock-up. All because she committed the crime of voting.
On 8 November 2016, as the world waited with bated breath for the outcome of the Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton election, she walked to her local Fort Worth polling station to perform her civic duty as a US citizen. To her surprise, her name wasn’t registered on the voting rolls, so she cast a provisional ballot pending further checks.
Sign up to receive the top US stories every morningIn the small print of the form it read: “I understand that it is a felony of the 2nd degree to vote in an election for which I know I am not eligible.” She didn’t read those words, focused as she was on correctly entering her personal details.
via US voter suppression: why this Texas woman is facing five years’ prison | US news | The Guardian
Trump’s legacy is already showing (ODT)
America may be, it is no longer — in the phrase coined 20 years ago by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — the “indispensable nation.” Abroad or even at home, with the president facing increasingly strong headwinds on climate change at the state and local level, we’re entering a new world order on the heels of the collapsed American domination of the past three-quarters of a century.
Fact over Fiction
A hysteria around the end of white colonial rule in southern Africa has afflicted the American far right for decades. Recently the allegation in neo-Nazi circles has been that white farmers in South Africa are being genocided.
This damned lie, picked up by right wing commentators like Ann Coulter and by Rupert Murdoch’s phony news outlets like Fox, is going mainstream via Trump, who has asked Mike Pompeo at the State Department to look into the ongoing mass murder.
About 8.4% of South Africa’s population identifies as white. It has fallen from 8.6% in 2010. The South African population is 57 mn. so self-identified whites (mostly Afrikaners) are a little less than 5 million. The reduction in numbers of two tenths of a percent is owing to emigration, not genocide.
This is an important finding to underline. Most of the decrease in white ownership of farmland has come about because black Africans bought it from them, now that they are able to.
There were only 74 farm murders in 2016-17, out of 19,000 murders nationally. While that is up from 58 in the previous year, the numbers are so small as to make it absurd to speak in Trump’s exaggerated terms. Moreover, the victims are not reported by race, and many farm workers are Black, so it is impossible to know how many of the 74 victims were white.
To have a Dylann Roof foreign policy imposed on the Department of State by Trump, whose father was once arrested at a Ku Klux Klan disturbance in New York, is beyond shameful.
It should be remembered that Nazi Germany itself sought close relations with segregated South Africa in the 1930s on the grounds that there was a global groundswell of colored people and that the white nations had to stand together against it.
via With South Africa Conspiracy Theory, Trump is becoming Dylann Roof
When truth is just relative in the game of personal interest justice irigged against the elite according to Trump. “It’s not a fair thing” in Trumpland (ODT)
Donald Trump doesn’t like flippers, you know, people who cooperate with law enforcement to uncover crimes.
“It’s called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal … they go from 10 years to they’re a national hero. They have a statue erected in their honor. It’s not a fair thing.”
via Don ‘The Con’ Trump Say Flipping Should Be ‘Almost Illegal’ | Crooks and Liars
IN TRUMPLAND TODAY
When will Trump show his Tax Returns?
In one of the most dramatic days of the Trump presidency, the President’s former campaign chief was found guilty of eight charges including bank fraud and filing false tax returns while, in a separate case, Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer pleaded guilty to eight charges including breaking campaign finance rules.
However, on Tuesday Senate leader Mitch McConnell said there was an unlikely to be a vote any time soon on legislation imposing heavy sanctions on Russia if it were found interfering in November’s congressional elections.
via Dramatic day for the Trump presidency as Cohen and Manafort both guilty
