Let's get something straight. The resources of the Federal Government are not Trump's slush fund.

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Saturday March 28, 2020 · 5:22 PM PDT

2020/03/28 · 17:22

He doesn’t get to withhold them unless people are “nice to him”. He can’t tell Governors, “do me a favor”, the way he did with the Ukraine. But he’s trying.

Now he’s running TV ads of Governors saying “nice things” about him. That’s not right.

That is extortion, using our money, with the lives of American Citizens on the line. If the Ukraine affair was impeachable, this is far more so.

This cannot be tolerated. He seems to think they are his, not ours.

Is there GOP movement under the surface? I’m beginning to wonder. There are reasons to think so.

calebfaux

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Saturday October 05, 2019 · 5:50 PM PDT

2019/10/05 · 17:50

The common wisdom has been for quite a while now that if the House impeaches, the GOP Senate would be a solid wall of defense and it would all stop cold right there. For a long time that appeared true.

But there is at least some reason now to suspect that maybe, things are changing.

When the news of Whistle Blower complaint first surfaced, Trump and his people tried to stonewall. They tried call the Whistle Blower a biased deep state plant and a liar. People demanded to see the actual complaint.

Then the Senate voted 100 – 0 to call for release of the complaint. That vote did NOT happen without McConnell’s support and approval. The complaint was made public and it was solid and damning.

So then the White House decided (after internal contention) to release the “transcript” on the theory it would vindicate Trump. It didn’t, it confirmed the complaint. It was even more damning. Trump claims McConnell told him the call was “perfect.” Who knows what McConnell really said, but its clear it was anything but perfect. And McConnell had to know that.

Now Trump goes out on the Whitehouse lawn and repeats the crime in full public view and things just get worse. McConnell claims he will be the decisive defender in the Senate.

But now, we have several things. Two sources, (Mike Murphy and Jeff Flake) saying there are 30-35 GOP votes to remove Trump if they could vote in secret. Then we have Romney publicly blasting Trump, followed by Trump going ballistic, calling for Romney to be impeached. Note to Trump, Senators can’t be impeached.

Now, maybe that’s just Romney being Romney. But it would not surprise me at all to know that McConnell knew about that in advance and quietly gave it his blessing behind the scenes. Meant to send a message to Trump.

McConnell will continue to publicly say he’s rock solid behind Trump. But he’s also nothing, if not devious. And think what you want about him, he does think long term. If McConnell began to think the he had to chose between protecting Trump, or protecting his Senate majority, he would opt to try and protect the Senate, not Trump. That would require that he concludes that Trump is a lost cause, but his majority is not. The worst case for him would be to lose both.

Then one last added thing. Cracks are beginning to appear at Fox News. Most notably today with Tucker Carlson who found the public requests for foreign interference “indefensible.” He wouldn’t go so far as to say “impeachable” but he stopped just short. I’m also hearing that no Republicans want to go on the Sunday shows in the morning to defend Trump.

Add all that together and Trump right now may be on VERY thin ice. Much thinner than he realizes. And his usual tactic of lashing out, going “all in”, may now be working against him, but I don’t think he can stop himself. He’s driven away any advisors would try and stop him, so there is not much to hold him back.

It’s also clear that Biden is the candidate Trump most fears. Of course, if he self-destructs, that may not matter anymore.

We shall see. This could all move very fast.

Edit: And then we have this, Susan Collins today. “Susan Collins: Trump made 'big mistake' in asking China to probe Biden”

Edits made to the timeline here. A commentor (tamar) pointed out that I had the subject of the vote wrong. It was on the complaint, not the “transcript”. The “transcript” came later, but its also clear that the “transcript” is not at all complete.

Very interesting. The "whistleblower" may not be just one person, but rather a group working...

calebfaux

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Friday September 27, 2019 · 7:52 PM PDT

2019/09/27 · 19:52

Like most of us, I read a lot about what is going on.

I find this article from The Hill tonight VERY interesting. It suggests that the “whistle blower” is really more like someone willing to put their name behind the work of a group of people who have just had enough. People in a position to know.

I won’t steal the the whole thing, but a few key excerpts.

“Trump picked a fight with the wrong crowd. Now, they’re fighting back, with the Constitution in one hand, and evidence of Trump’s corruption in the other. Game on.

You might call this team, collectively, “Deep State Throat.” They’re a Deep State, alright, but not like Trump thinks. They’re not rogues. They’re patriots. Let’s just buckle up and watch how this plays out over the coming weeks and months.”

“I have never seen a more buttoned-up set of whistleblower allegations than these.

To me, the whistleblower appears to have taken a leadership role, sticking his neck out to protect subordinates in the intelligence community while conveying their information to appropriate authorities through appropriate channels. It’s easy to see how the ICIG steered it to the Congressional Intelligence Committees, under the cover of great credibility, through a gauntlet of resisters.”

“In this one brief complaint, the Whistle Blower managed to do what the Mueller investigation could not: ensnare the President of the United States himself in a shameful abuse of his power. Trump held back military aid to Ukraine then asked Ukraine for “a favor” — to dig up/create dirt on a political rival for the forthcoming election.”

This author seems to me to know what he’s talking about. Very strong credentials.

Go here.

This would also explain why Trump is going after the people who may have given the “whistle blower” information, on the assumption that the “whistle blower” is protected, but the other’s may not be.

A statement of principle to someone who wished me "peace."

calebfaux

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Saturday July 06, 2019 · 5:54 PM PDT

2019/07/06 · 17:54

He said —

”My friend, I have but one wish for you. One, entire day when you are focused only on things that make you happy and relaxed, and not on the endless list of issues and concerns over which you have little control”

-----------------

My response: “Well, I guess that depends a bit on how you define "peace," what "peace " is. For some it means letting go, letting the world pass you on by and not feeling much need to get involved. Acceptance if you will. "The world is what it is and I can't much change it."

My definition has always been a little different. My definition has always revolved around doing my best to make a positive difference. Which includes calling out, fighting against, things I think are very negative. My definition of "peace" would be that I did what I could, my best to make the world a better place, not just for me. Even when I lost. I still tried. If I didn't feel like I did that, I could not feel at peace.

And for other's it means "I took my chunk of life experience, my chunk of money, my chunk of security and good fortune for me and my family out of this world and I just don't give a damn beyond that. That was enough"

I cannot find "peace" with that way of thinking.

________

Crystallized a few things for me

Very impressive piece about Warren - well worth the read. "How Elizabeth Warren Learned to Fight"

calebfaux

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Monday June 24, 2019 · 6:42 PM PDT

2019/06/24 · 18:42

I’m still keeping an open mind, I want to see how candidates respond and perform. But I find this NYT piece tonight interesting and impressive.

It’s very much worth the read.

A few key excerpts, trying to respect fair use.

“

When she was 12, her father had a heart attack. Ms. Warren describes what happened next in “A Fighting Chance.” He came home from the hospital changed. He ate poached eggs with the yolks taken out and got yelled at if he tried to lift grocery bags. His job as a salesman for Montgomery Ward was downgraded to commission-only. Pauline, who was 50 then, had to go to work for the first time in her married life. The episode is now a staple of her daughter’s stump speech.

Her parents drank, her mother yelled and her father seethed. One day, her mother, crying in an upstairs bedroom, jammed her body into a formal black dress that no longer fit, and walked to a job interview at Sears.

“I stood looking at her while she tugged on the zipper,” Ms. Warren wrote. “She rubbed her eyes with another Kleenex and blew her nose. She stood still for a while. Finally, she lifted her head and looked straight at me. ‘How do I look? Is it too tight?’”

Writing about it as an adult, Ms. Warren would show that the experience had left her with a deep understanding of working-class pain: At its root is a feeling of worthlessness and an instinct to hide from the world.

Her father, she recalled, told her that the shame of failure had nearly killed him. “He wanted to die,” she wrote. “He wanted to disappear from our lives and from the earth and from everything that had gone wrong.”

----—

“

The conflict between her ambition and her family’s expectations came to a head in her senior year of high school. Her friends were all applying to college and she wanted to go, too. But her mother was against it.

------

“She had been yelling at me,” she wrote in her 2017 book, “This Fight Is Our Fight,” recalling an argument she had with her mother. “Why was I so special that I had to go to college? Did I think I was better than everyone else in the family? Where would the money come from?”

----—

By her senior year, her classmates recalled, she was a debate team star. Her exceptional ability to focus, rare among the teenage boys she was going up against, had made Northwest Classen one of the best teams in the state. Ms. Warren and her partner, Mr. Johnson, would go on to win the state championship their senior year. She was particularly good at rebuttal — taking apart the other side’s argument in four minutes.

We shall see how this all goes. I’m watching with interest.

Excellent analysis: Brace for a Voter-Turnout Tsunami (2020).

calebfaux

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Thursday June 13, 2019 · 5:30 PM PDT

2019/06/13 · 17:30

Washington, D.C., voters line up in the rain to cast a ballot in the 2018 midterm elections.Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

This seems like excellent analysis to me. From Ronald Brownstein, Sr. Editor at the Atlantic. I’ll post a few key excerpts, (its a long piece) but its well worth the read. I think this is on the money, well worth the read. www.theatlantic.com/...

“Signs are growing that voter turnout in 2020 could reach the highest levels in decades—if not the highest in the past century—with a surge of new voters potentially producing the most diverse electorate in American history.”

“In a recent paper, the Democratic voter-targeting firm Catalist projected that about 156 million people could vote in 2020, an enormous increase from the 139 million who cast ballots in 2016. Likewise, Public Opinion Strategies, a leading Republican polling firm, recently forecast that the 2020 contest could produce a massive turnout that is also unprecedentedly diverse.”

“the clearest sign that high turnout may be approaching in 2020 is that it already arrived in 2018. In last year’s midterm, nearly 120 million people voted, about 35 million more than in the previous midterm, in 2014, with 51 percent of eligible voters participating—a huge increase over the previous three midterms. The 2018 level represented the largest share of eligible voters to turn out in a midterm year since 1914, according to McDonald’s figures. Catalist estimated that about 14 million new voters who had not participated in 2016 turned out two years later, and they preferred Democrats by a roughly 20-percentage-point margin.”

“McDonald thinks the turnout surge in 2020 could shatter even older records, estimating that as many as two-thirds of eligible voters may vote next year. If that happens, it would represent the highest presidential-year turnout since 1908, when 65.7 percent of eligible Americans cast a ballot, according to McDonald’s figures. Since 18-year-olds were granted the vote, the highest showing was the 61.6 percent of eligible voters who showed up in 2008, leading to Barack Obama’s victory. And since World War II, the highest turnout level came in 1960, with John F. Kennedy’s win, when 63.8 percent of voters participated.”

“Unless and until Democrats can tip some of the potential Sun Belt battlegrounds, particularly Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina, the party can’t reach 270 Electoral College votes without recapturing some of the Rust Belt states least affected by demographic change.

Teixeira is one of many Democratic strategists who say the party’s top priority must remain regaining those Rust Belt states, because it cannot yet rely enough on the Sun Belt. “How can you possibly count on these states?” he says. “Democrats haven’t won Florida for a while. Arizona, they haven’t won in a million years. Georgia, Texas—are you kidding me? These are hard states. You cannot build a strategy around having to win those states.”

(Small note — since 2007 I have been posting, commenting as Newdealer. I took a job that year with the Democratic Party, so I felt putting my real name my own opinion was potentially a problem. I no longer hold that job, so I’m going back to using my own name.)

Graphic evidence of the Blue Wave - Actual votes.

calebfaux

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Saturday October 27, 2018 · 5:04 PM PDT

2018/10/27 · 17:04

This is only one County — Hamilton County Oh (Cincinnati) which is critical County in Ohio. These are votes at the Board of Elections through today compared with 2014 and 2010. Speaks for itself.

One thing that should be said about those — early voting in 2010 and 2014 was at a location harder to get to with little parking, but still…….

Two points of personal experience, worth hearing in light of the day's news.

calebfaux

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Monday September 24, 2018 · 8:40 PM PDT

2018/09/24 · 20:40

Two points of personal experience.

I graduated high school in 1970. I remember very clearly hearing of parties (more than one) where some girl "pulled a train." The boys who participated apparently felt "manly." At the time I thought the idea sad and horrifying. But back then, boys bragged about it. It happened. I doubt any of them would admit it now.

Second. My 92 year old mother a few years ago told me about an incident that happened when she was 12 years old. In the mid 1930's, the height of the depression. She was playing in the barn behind the house with local kids. At some point, an older boy (15) found a way to pin her down and rape her.

He was from a powerful local family, her parents at the time were struggling to get by. Her father was a wounded WW 1 vet who lived with serious disability the rest of his life. Fearing the consequences, she never told her parents nor her future husband. But it did affect the rest of her life. It still haunts her to this day.

She still wonders. What would have happened had she become pregnant?

And now all these years later she is watching this.

"I don't care, do U?" Is it possible that was really directed at...

calebfaux

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Thursday June 21, 2018 · 8:00 PM PDT

2018/06/21 · 20:00

US First Lady Melania Trump departs Andrews Air Rorce Base in Maryland June 21, 2018 wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words "I really don't care, do you?" following her surprise visit with child migrants on the US-Mexico border. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

The internet went nuts today about Melanias’s coat. And I totally understand why.

But, there is no evidence I’ve seen that Trump wanted her to go there today. She went anyway.

Is it not at least possible that the message really was, “I don’t care what Donald thinks, do you”?

I realize that is a bit off a stretch. But she’s had some pretty rough weeks, what with Stormy Daniels and all. Seems to me at least possible.

I know I will be accused of giving far too much benefit of the doubt, but consider, it was out of character.

Can we get real for moment? Enough already!

calebfaux

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Friday November 03, 2017 · 8:55 PM PDT

2017/11/03 · 20:55

First, neither Bernie nor Hillary will be the candidate in 2020. Nor will Joe Biden. At least none should be. I for one like all of them in their own ways. But….

There is plenty of blame to go around. And that includes Obama (OFA).

Right now we face a very real clear and present danger, not just with Trump but Pence too, the Supreme Court, issues that will resound long after I’m gone. It could hardly be more clear.

I’m out of patience with re-litigating 2016.

The question is what do we do now? Our very Democracy is at stake. Things this Country has stood for as long as I can remember are at stake. That’s what matters and we have to do something about it.

Anecdotal Evidence but....change seems to be in the wind.

calebfaux

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Friday July 28, 2017 · 12:15 PM PDT

2017/07/28 · 12:15

The phone calls that come to my office are often an interesting gauge of the political winds of the moment. This past week, they have been Republicans asking how to become Democrats in Ohio.

For the last 10+ years I’ve been the guy answering the phone at the Hamilton County Democratic Party (Cincinnati, OH). When I started Bush was still President. I’ve been through the elections of 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016.

Over that all time nothing like this last week has ever happened.

When the the ACA passed we got lots of angry phone calls from conservatives, someone even tried to throw a rock through our window.

The most recent call today came from a guy in a rural County east of Cincinnati. He wanted to know how to become a Democrat, said he’d been a Republican all his life and voted for Trump. But now he’s disgusted. And he is not at all alone.

In Ohio that’s a simply a matter of voting in the next Democratic primary. That is the only way Party affiliation is determined in Ohio.

Polls still show a majority of self identified Republicans supporting Trump. What they don’t measure so well i how many people there are like him, who not so long ago called themselves Republicans but no longer do.

Sadly the gerrymandering of Ohio is so severe that even this may not be enough to change seats in Congress. But I suspect Republicans are noticing the same thing I am.

Interesting image from Moscow.

calebfaux

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Sunday April 30, 2017 · 11:29 AM PDT

2017/04/30 · 11:29

This is a re-posting of something a good friend posted — I think it deserves wider exposure. Jerry, the source if this, traveled internationally on business including many trips to Russia.

“

"Friends - I have come into possession of the photo below, taken in Moscow, Russia this past week. It is not a fake photo, because I am aware of who took it, and how it was sent to me to translate.
It's a huge billboard on the side of a building advertising an upcoming seminar in Moscow, to be conducted by John Gray. He's the author who wrote "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", as well as 17 other books. The Seminar is titled "Men and Women in Business".
It advertises the site for buying tickets: www.johngray.ru.

This is all perfectly legitimate, and this is NOT Russia bashing on my part. I'm the last person to do that - I study Russian language and culture.

HOWEVER, the full length photo on the left of the billboard happens to be First Lady Melania Trump. Underneath her photo it says "Melania's Choice".
In full disclosure, neither the person who took the photo, nor do I, know if they are using her image with permission. Obviously, if they are, this is big time trouble for the Administration - a commercial endorsement by the First Lady for a paid seminar is at the very least, troubling.

The photo has been shared with some members of the Media."

www.facebook.com/...

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