Today is the first day or Passover. It is framed by two Seders in which Jewish people and their friends gather to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt and celebrate freedom.
Passover has always been my favorite holiday because it celebrates freedom and includes family, friends, food, and wine. All my favorite things. 😉
But in the last few years it has become even more meaningful.
My kids are totally bored by it. “Every year???” they ask. “We have to sit through the story of the exodus? AGAIN. Why??? We know it already.”
Why do we retell this story every year? Because in retelling, we are asked, year after year, to remember that we were once strangers in a foreign land. We are asked to open our hearts to the strangers among us because they are us.
We are asked to remember a time when we were not free so that we don’t forget to treasure the freedom we currently have. If we take it for granted, it can be taken from us.
Our ancestors emerged from oppression to form a new life. It wasn’t easy. They suffered and fought for a long time. And even once they were free, they wandered for 40 years in the desert before they found a home.
They didn’t know what was ahead, but they knew that freedom was worth it. They knew that dignity and equality meant something. They knew living under tyrannical rule wasn’t healthy or right or good. The took enormous risks for a better world for their children — one most of them never saw.
So of course I love Passover. Passover is the story of all of us. It is the story of our fight against tyrannical rule. It is our story of our fight against the loss of freedom. It is the story of our refusal to forget that we were once strangers in a foreign land so that we love and protect the strangers and most needy amongst us.
Happy Passover to all who celebrate and even those who don’t. Happy Easter. Happy spring. Happy season of warmer days and increased energy.
Now onto the good news!
The Mueller Report isn’t the end — it is the beginning of more trouble for trump
the celebrating on the right is the fakest of all celebration. it is a show celebration in which they pretend that their lies are true so that they have something to feel good about.
But as our beloved chloris says, truth is truth. And we have a portion of truth and the democrats are fighting hard for the rest.
Will we impeach him with the truth? If we do: great. It is the right thing to do morally. If we don’t: great. It isn’t the best move politically. Remember impeachment is really just a word here. Trump won’t be taken out of office because the Rs won’t vote him out. So whether we call them impeachment hearings of not, the democrats are going to hold hearings bringing the truth. We own the house and will spend the next 18 months reminding America over and over again about who trump is.
For example:
Nadler pledges ‘major’ public hearings with ‘a lot’ of witnesses
Speaking to WNYC radio in New York, Nadler indicated that besides hearing from Barr and Mueller, he is planning to summon several figures key to the report’s findings.
“We will have major hearings,” Nadler said. “Barr and Mueller are just the first. We will call a lot of other people. We’ll see who they are. We will get to the bottom of this.”
Does the Mueller report exonerate Trump? I asked 12 legal experts.
spoiler alter: No. It did not. Here are some quotes from them, just for fun:
If this is what a complete and total exoneration looks like, I’d hate to see a damning report.
The headline of the report is helpful to Trump. The actual substance of the report is damning.
we now know that Mr. Mueller found abundant evidence of precisely such a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Whether or not that pile of evidence rises to the level of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” it is of grave concern.
The Mueller report paints a disturbing picture of President Trump trying to undermine investigations with a more reassuring portrayal of lawyers and aides seeking to preserve the rule of law.
The courtroom is probably not the right venue for calling the president to account for his actions, but the report leaves little doubt that the president does not appreciate the responsibilities of his office.
“Putin has won.” Election Day 2016, an intercepted message to Kirill Dmitriev, a Russian national “closely connected to Putin.” (On page 149 of the Mueller report.) This line says everything that the American public should remember about the Mueller investigation
Trump does, however, face potential prosecution after he leaves office. The political impact of the report also remains to be seen.
Removing Trump from our national life by defeating him at the polls in 2020 may be the best way to preserve our republic. He can always be tried for his crimes when he is out of office.
the report also confirms what many of us already knew:
and remember there are 14 referrals to outside office and only two are known. What does that mean?
AND this:
AND this isn’t over in other ways too:
The counterintelligence investigation of the Trump team and Russia hasn't stopped
Officials say they're still looking into whether any Americans helped the Russians interfere in the 2016 election, or are still compromised by Russia.
And this:
TRUMPWORLD RECKONS WITH THE MUELLER REPORT’S DEVASTATING IMPACT
William Barr couldn’t save them. In 448 pages, a deeply corrupt West Wing culture was revealed. And the real time bomb, says a Trumpworld insider, “is the S.D.N.Y.”
The mood began to darken during Attorney General William Barr’s stunning 22-minute news conference at the Justice Department, at which he defended his no-obstruction finding in the manner of a defense attorney and turned truculent at the first hint of hostile questioning before abruptly stalking off. “[Deputy Attorney General] Rod Rosenstein looked like a hostage standing there,” former Trump campaign official Sam Nunberg told me afterwards. “Barr even wore a Trump red tie.”
“A normal person would have been indicted for this,” said a Republican close to the White House. “The obstruction stuff is pretty damning,” Nunberg said
George Conway, published a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post calling for Trump’s impeachment. “White House counsel John Dean famously told Nixon that there was a cancer within the presidency and that it was growing. What the Mueller report disturbingly shows, with crystal clarity, is that today there is a cancer in the presidency: President Donald J. Trump,” he wrote. “Congress now bears the solemn constitutional duty to excise that cancer without delay.”
A former West Wing official made a more prosaic case. “Trump stinks,” the person said. “The report gives everyone a better whiff of the odor.”
“The time bomb has never been Mueller. It’s the S.D.N.Y.,” a Republican close to the White House said.
and Trump is not happy:
Trump frustrated with aides who talked to Mueller
Trump is venting frustration with associates who cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation after their notes and first-hand observations were used to paint a negative and damaging picture of his presidency.
Sources close to Trump say the change in tone over the Mueller report, which he has previously called a “complete and total exoneration,” is rooted in his hatred of the notion that he can be controlled by his own staff.
and this (hee hee)
Trump liked the Mueller report when it looked good for him. Today he called it “total bullshit.”
“Total EXONERATION” to total BS in less than a month.
Mueller also notes that he agrees with the Nixon-era opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that a sitting president cannot be indicted. So while Trump may have escaped prosecution, there’s no denying that Mueller’s final report paints a deeply unflattering portrait of a president who stopped at nothing in his efforts to thwart the special counsel’s work.
Hence, “TOTAL Exoneration” has now become “total bullshit.”
We WILL get the full report eventually:
It’s official: House Democrats will subpoena the full, unredacted Mueller report
House Democrats want to see special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report, and they don’t plan to settle for the redacted version released to Congress and the public by Attorney General William Barr.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said Thursday he will issue a subpoena to get the Mueller report in its entirety. Nadler was supposed to be among the select number of senior House and Senate Committee members who Barr promised would receive nearly full access to Mueller’s report, minus information from the grand jury. But Nadler said it hadn’t even been made available to him as of Thursday afternoon.
Again, don’t get hung up on the language of impeach or don’t impeach. It is the hearings that matter and my true love NDP is on the ball with those:
and this guy still wants to help us:
You know who isn’t happy about the report? These folks:
QAnon Believers Crushed After Mueller Report Fails to Lead to Hillary Clinton’s Arrest
While most of Donald Trump’s allies braced for the release on Thursday of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, believers in the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory approached the long-awaited publication with a sense of thrill.
For years, QAnon fans have been mocked for believing that Mueller was secretly in league with the president, working hand-in-hand to uncover Satanic rituals committed by top Democrats before shipping them off to Guantanamo Bay. They had been told it was ridiculous to base their entire political worldview on a series of anonymous clues posted on internet message boards—including one that claimed Hillary Clinton was secretly arrested in October 2017.
But when the Mueller report arrived on Thursday morning, it contained none of the bombshell, global pedophile cabal-destroying revelations QAnon fans had predicted.
On Voat, a Reddit-style forum alternative popular with QAnon fans, believers lamented the fact that they had been duped again.
“Trump is toast,” said one poster who said he wouldn’t vote in 2020 after the disappointment. “Lied to us to extend his re-election. Good luck Q peeps. I’m done here.”
and this: The Mueller Report Could Alienate the Voters Republicans Need
Beyond all the revelations about Russian entanglements and possible obstruction of justice, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report crystallizes two cardinal rules about governance in Donald Trump’s Washington. One is that Trump will shatter any boundaries of law, morality, or custom in his exercise of presidential power. The second is that Republicans—not only in Congress, but now also in the executive branch—will not restrain any of his excesses. The same holds true for both unwritten rules: They constitute a defining gamble for the GOP in future elections.
The electoral bet embodied in this choice is to bind the party’s fate tightly to Trump’s. His tumultuous presidency has accelerated and deepened three political trends that predated him. One is to solidify the Republican hold on what I’ve called the “coalition of restoration”: older, blue-collar, and evangelical whites. The second is to alienate the most ardent elements of the Democratic coalition: young people and minorities. The third is to weaken the Republican position with college-educated, white-collar white voters, particularly in the suburbs surrounding major metropolitan areas.
The Mueller findings—particularly around Trump’s systematic efforts to block the inquiry itself—and the Republican reaction may exert the most influence on that third group. A principal reason Trump’s approval rating is lower than might be expected, given the strength of the economy, is that many of those college-educated white voters who are thriving economically view him as personally unfit for the presidency in terms of judgment, temperament, and morals. In the midterm elections last year, they expressed that unease by moving in unprecedented numbers for Democratic congressional candidates and many statewide Democratic candidates, dashing the hope of Republican strategists who thought they would differentiate between their party and the president.
which leads us to the next section:
Great 2020 News
With hard work and UNITY we will defeat trump in 2020 and begin to save our democracy. I know it had already been reported but this will help:
and it won’t help because he will actually win the nomination (he won’t) it will help because now trump has to spend some of his resources fighting this guy and this guy will spend his time pointing out how awful trump is for us. primary challengers have always been the kiss of death for incumbents. so thanks Weld!
more good news is this fella NOT running
Ex-Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe will not run for White House in 2020
“I had full intentions of running,” McAuliffe said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But after February, when we began to have the issues that we had in Virginia, people began to call. … ‘We’re really in a bad way. We really need your help.’ ”
At least one Virginia lawmaker asked McAuliffe to forgo a bid and focus on helping state Democrats flip the General Assembly.
not that he wouldn’t be a good president (everyone running on our side — almost — would) but because we really need him in Virginia.
Trump’s own tax returns could figure into 2020. House Democrats are seeking them for their own legitimate legislative purposes, and Trump is resisting. Democrats will likely get them, but it’s not clear when or whether they will be released.
But Trump’s resistance will give Democrats a strong argument. Yes, Trump won in 2016 despite not releasing them. But now it’s different: Trump has since signed a tax bill that unmasked his 2016 economic populism as fraudulent, one that’s widely understood as a giveaway to the wealthy and corporations, and did nothing for Republicans in 2018. We still don’t know how much Trump personally profited. His continued refusal to release the returns will provide an entry into indicting his first-term economic agenda as a scam. Trump’s “rigged economy” rhetoric gave him a fresh, outsider aura in 2016, but he can’t credibly make that argument now.
More broadly, Sanders’s appearance illustrated that progressive economic arguments can be marshaled powerfully against Trump’s economic record.
I know cc covered this yesterday, but I wanted to bring it back because it is SO important. He not only didn’t get a boost from the Barr memo but his numbers went DOWN
and remember, his numbers have NEVER been above 50%. that has never happened to a president before.
A President of the People or a President of His People?
Mr. Trump is the only president in the history of Gallup polling never to earn the support of a majority of Americans even for a single day of his term. His approval rating in Gallup has stayed within a 10-point band of 35 percent to 45 percent throughout his presidency.
AGAIN, WITH HARD WORK, WE CAN BEAT THIS GUY!
Other Good News
The GOP changed the rules to polarize the federal bench, but that will come back to haunt Republicans.
Yet ironically, these changes will almost certainly come back to haunt the GOP even more.
The Senate stayed Republican in 2018 largely because of luck: it just so happened that relatively few vulnerable Republican incumbents were up for reelection in that year. 2020 is different, and if the Democratic nominee for president has even moderately long coattails, it’s easy to envision the Senate flipping at the same time as the White House.
That will put Democrats in control of the turbo-charged confirmation racecar that Republicans have built.
‘Not my Jesus’: Christian students protest Pence, alarming conservatives
The latest sign that even Christian colleges are not safe spaces for Pence came last week, when Taylor University, an evangelical school in rural Indiana, announced that Pence would speak at the commencement ceremony on May 18. As a former governor and congressman of Indiana, the vice president has a home-state advantage at Taylor, a school of about 2,500 located in Upland, about 75 miles northeast of Indianapolis.
A Change.org petition asking the school to rescind the invitation had garnered nearly 5,000 signatures by early Thursday, with copious commentary appended. Appeals to university leadership have been plastered across social media. Some are pledging to withhold donations.
Mayor Pete kissed his husband after he announced his campaign & it brought LGBTQ people to tears
Buttigieg is the first LGBTQ candidate in the Democratic presidential primary, and people noticed the historic moment when he kissed his husband on stage and posted an image of them holding hands on his campaign website, an act of defiance that results in harassment and violence for so many same-sex couples today.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo appeared on track Wednesday to win a second term, according to early vote counts, holding a 10 percentage-point lead over a retired general who had courted nationalist and conservative Islamic forces in a campaign waged on the country’s fault lines.
Before I go, check out this amazing video of Miranda performing some Hamilton at the WH before anyone had ever heard of this crazy idea of a musical about Hamilton. Listen to people laugh at the idea. Listen to them laugh when he says “Alexander Hamilton” during the song.
That laughter is our inability to see new things until they are here.
When we think “we can’t beat trump” “we can’t save the planet” it is because we can’t see new things until they are here. They are hard to imagine.
But imagine it. Imagine the kind of crazy world were millions of people could come together to save a democracy. Imagine a world in which we are all free.
It’s coming.
I remain so proud and so lucky to be in this with all of you ❤️ ✊ ❤️