Sell The Whitehouse to Trump

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williatw
Posts: 1912
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:15 pm
Location: Ohio

Re: Sell The Whitehouse to Trump

Post by williatw »

In the wake of Robert Mueller's comical near meltdown during his testimony this is added good news:



Supreme Court allows Trump to use disputed military funds for border wall
Key Points



The Supreme Court on Friday allowed President Donald Trump to transfer billions of dollars of military funding in order to construct hundreds of miles of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, California and New Mexico.
The funding transfer was challenged by the environmental nonprofit Sierra Club and a border area advocacy group in February, shortly after Trump announced he would move forward with plans to construct the wall despite opposition from Congress.
The fight over border wall funding sparked the longest federal government shutdown in history.


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The Supreme Court on Friday allowed President Donald Trump to transfer billions of dollars of military funding in order to construct hundreds of miles of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, California and New Mexico.

The funding transfer was challenged by the environmental nonprofit Sierra Club and a border area advocacy group in February, shortly after Trump announced he would move forward with plans to construct the wall despite opposition from Congress. The funding had been frozen per lower courts’ decisions.


The country’s highest court voted 5-4 to allow the funding transfer, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissenting. Justice Stephen Breyer dissented in part, saying he would approve the transfer of funds but would not have construction of the wall begin just yet.

A brief order explaining the court’s decision said the government “made a sufficient showing” that the groups challenging the decision did not have grounds to bring a lawsuit.

Trump praised the court’s decision in a tweet Friday, calling it a victory for “border security and the rule of law.”

The fight over border wall funding sparked the longest federal government shutdown in history. Congress ultimately allocated about $1.4 billion in border wall funding to be deployed in Texas, far short of the $6 billion the administration sought.




Trump subsequently declared a national emergency at the southern borer and claimed that the declaration would make available the full $6 billion, including $2.5 billion transferred from the Department of Defense.

Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition challenged the $2.5 billion transfer, alleging that construction of the wall would cause environmental harm and permit the president to spend money denied to him by lawmakers.

A federal district court in California blocked the funds transfer in June. District Judge Haywood Gillium wrote that Congress “struck what it considered to be the proper balance — in the public’s interest — by making available only $1.375 billion in funding.”

The Justice Department asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to halt the lower court’s order, but it refused to do so, voting to reject the administration in early July by a vote of 2-1.

On July 12, the administration brought its case to the Supreme Court. In a filing with the justices, Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued that the wall funding is necessary “to stanch the flow of illegal drugs across the southern border.”

Those concerns outweigh “whatever aesthetic and recreational injuries respondents and their members may incur” if the wall is constructed, Francisco wrote.

Breyer, in a written opinion published Friday, said construction of the border wall would “cause irreparable harm to the environment,” but that denying the transfer of funding would constitute a final judgement on the matter. Breyer wrote:


“If we instead deny the stay, however, it is the Government that may be irreparably harmed. The Government has represented that, if it is unable to finalize the contracts by September 30, then the funds at issue will be returned to the Treasury and the injunction will have operated, in effect, as a final judgment. ... I can therefore find no justification for granting the stay in full, as the majority does.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/26/supreme ... -wall.html

williatw
Posts: 1912
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:15 pm
Location: Ohio

Re: Sell The Whitehouse to Trump

Post by williatw »

williatw wrote:In the wake of Robert Mueller's comical near meltdown during his testimony...


WaPo: House Dems grudgingly admit Mueller stunt backfired — big time


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Mueller’s six hours of testimony did not help their case, many Democrats said privately. Some wondered whether they had miscalculated in focusing so much on the former FBI director and less on subpoenaing witnesses in Mueller’s report and asking the courts to force them to testify.

“I didn’t see anything amazing. I mean, did you?” said centrist Rep. Jeff Van Drew (D-N.J.). “He looked tired.”

Among Democrats, perhaps the most disappointed in Mueller’s performance were members of the Intelligence and Judiciary committees, who questioned the former special counsel, according to conversations with several who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. Many felt blindsided that no one warned them how much Mueller had aged — and regretful that they had forced a decorated Vietnam veteran and longtime civil servant into testifying when he was so reluctant in the first place.

“I was beyond shocked,” one lawmaker said of Mueller’s occasional confusion and seeming unfamiliarity with details of the report.
Just how much were they “blindsided”? The New York Times had a report later that same evening discussing how Mueller had not been, shall we say, immersed in the day to day business of his special counsel office. According to the report, aides started asking questions about Mueller’s energy and ability almost from the start, as well as his decision to delegate most of his inherent authority to deputies. Mueller’s condition might not have been common knowledge, but the special counsel office was under the purview of the House Judiciary Committee as part of its oversight of the Department of Justice. Are we to believe that Jerrold Nadler never once checked in on the office’s operation, including whether Mueller was an engaged special counsel?

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrisse ... -big-time/

williatw
Posts: 1912
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:15 pm
Location: Ohio

Re: Sell The Whitehouse to Trump

Post by williatw »

Rep. Gohmert grills Mueller: Did you know Strzok hated Trump?
Published on Jul 24, 2019


Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert questions former Special Counsel Robert Mueller on his relationship with James Comey and the people he chose to hire to his team. #FoxNews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsPsfrkZxiE


Most interesting part starts at approx. the 4 minute mark.

williatw
Posts: 1912
Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 7:15 pm
Location: Ohio

Re: Sell The Whitehouse to Trump

Post by williatw »

Jeffrey Epstein, Red Pill

#8 -- Why this scandal should be just getting started.
Aug 30 Public post 5


Epstein’s Still Big! "Who cares?" is what somebody asked -- loudly -- at a dinner recently when I brought up the Jeffrey Epstein case. It's the same question, in the same tone, that I used to get when I argued that the staid L.A. Times should pay more attention to Lindsay Lohan’s bad driving. The objection to Epstein seemed to be this: ‘So there's this rich perv, and he exploited underage girls. Now he's dead and they’re suing his estate. BFD. Only someone who enjoyed tawdry gossip and cheap mystery novels would think this is still newsworthy.’

Point 1: You got a problem with cheap mystery novels? This is a great mystery, starting with whether Epstein really killed himself. The circumstantial evidence on that question is mounting: Epstein's roommate pulled from his cell the day before he died, guards falling asleep, jailhouse video cameras that, gee, unexpectedly malfunction. At some point, Occam's razor begins to cut in another direction.

Point 2. Epstein was way more than just a rich perv. Does anyone really think his troubling, immoral, and illegal conduct was confined to sex? For one thing, how did he get his money? Look at the possibilities on the list -- money laundering, espionage, blackmail, insider trading… . Nobody thinks he made his half billion legally the way he said he made his money: by brilliantly managing a hedge fund. The only legit possibility I can think of is if his patron, billionaire Leslie Wexner, somehow gave him the loot. (But why?)

Take the leading, money laundering, theory A laundering operation big enough to buy a Gatsby-sized place in New York society -- isn't that something we want to know about? That goes double for a possible blackmail operation that ensnared captains of industry and politics. Still more significantly, the espionage angle raises the prospect that some important American and foreign political figures were compromised. Even the League of Women Voters (or the old LA Times) might think that newsworthy.

We're in the middle of a global populist surge. There's a sense that elites are not playing by the same rules as everyone else. They might not even be playing the same game. It's pretty clear that Epstein was running some kind of a sex ring for the rich and well connected. How big a ring? We don't know until we try to find out. But there are reports out there [click if you dare] that it's bigger than we might think — bigger than old, familiar Prince Andrew, involving a non-trivial cross-section of business and entertainment leaders, plus some prominent Anglo-American families and maybe a handful of nation states.


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Do we live in a society where people try to get rich so they can build bigger houses, drive faster cars, wear nice clothes and send their children to the best schools. Or is that really a facade behind which they escape into a secret lawless world where they order up underage girls and boys to rape and abuse? Are we living in Disney movie or a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie?

Don't we want to know? If we follow the Epstein case to its conclusion, we might learn which is the reality. Epstein's the biggest red pill we've been handed in decades.

Certainly sociologists and historians of the future will want to know. It might be too late by then. But they'll get tenure if they find out. Why not beat them to it?

——-

P.S.: Landon Thomas, Fall Guy: The New York Times should be deeply embarrassed by its failure to adequately cover the Epstein scandal, which was largely happening in its back yard.

Vanity Fair’s Vicky Ward covered Epstein (to the extent Graydon Carter let her). Phil Weiss covered Epstein. Conchita Sarnoff covered Epstein. And finally the story was propelled out of the undernews by Julie Brown of the Miami Herald, who found a Trump Angle the MSM couldn’t resist. Meanwhile, what did the Times produce? There was a thorough, skeptical 2006 report by Abby Goodnough when Epstein was first investigated -- a report the paper buried on page A-19 under the most boring headline imaginable (“Questions of Preferential Treatment Are Raised in Florida Sex Case”). Then when Epstein was finally about to be (briefly) jailed in 2008, Timesman Landon Thomas produced a comically credulous, charitable profile (“He has paid for college educations for personal employees and students from Rwanda … Mr. Epstein gazed at the azure sea and the lush hills of St. Thomas … and tried explain how his life had taken such a turn.”)

Now we learn (from an excellent David Folkenflik report) that Thomas had been close enough to Epstein that years later, in 2017, he asked the pedophile to donate money to a Montessori School in Harlem. Epstein apparently gave $30,000 —a wise investment. But once Thomas disclosed this to his editors he was taken off the Epstein beat and soon was gone from the paper.

That's fine, but there will be the temptation for the Times to blame its pathetic Epstein record on Thomas, which would be absurd. The editors read Thomas’ 2008 piece and didn’t realize it was awful until 9 years later when they learned he’d violated an ethics rule? Why didn’t they commission other, better pieces (like Weiss’)?

Either Times editors didn't know a good story when they saw it -- a likely possibilitity at the old L.A. Times, but not at the NYT -- or there was something holding them back. What was it? It would be crude to suggest it was politics — that at some level they realized investigating Epstein would inevitably lead to embarrassment or worse for Bill Clinton and by extension Hillary Clinton, who was running for president or planning to run throughout this period. But sometimes the crude explanation is the right one. True, the Times did run a less explosive Bill Clinton sex piece in 2006 (“Nights out find him zipping around Los Angeles with his bachelor buddy, Ronald W. Burkle”). But that piece got so much blowback the paper may have decided not to go any further on its own — an editorial stance known around newsweeklies as ‘Get it first, but first get it second.’

Chasing girls is one thing, after all. Underage girls are another.

Maybe the Times’ editors — and not just the top ones (Raines, Keller, Abramson & Baquet) — can provide a more sophisticated account. They’ve got some ‘splainin to do.


https://kaus.substack.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-red-pill

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