joan1984 · 281646
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Quote from: Katiebee on February 05, 2019, 05:02:43 AMOh, for heavens sake, Joan. Do you even know what border security is? Do you understand what the cartels do and how much ccontraband they smuggle? It’s a business, and businesses use cost effective means in their logistics. John lives over 1,700 miles from the Southern border and has likely never visited. He gets this vital information, and forms his opinions, based on a steady feed of Fox claptrap delivered by bleach blond vixens selected to stimulate Trump’s medulla oblongata.
Oh, for heavens sake, Joan. Do you even know what border security is? Do you understand what the cartels do and how much ccontraband they smuggle? It’s a business, and businesses use cost effective means in their logistics.
Illegal is Illegal. Period. What is unclear about that?
If that’s truly an issue for your hero, then why did he hire so many of them?Who do you think has but putting up drywall, cleaning his hotel rooms and watering his golf courses?
Jonathan White, who leads the Health and Human Services Department’s efforts to reunite migrant children with their parents, said removing children from “sponsor” homes to rejoin their parents “would present grave child welfare concerns.” He said the government should focus on reuniting children currently in its custody, not those who have already been released to sponsors.“It would destabilize the permanency of their existing home environment, and could be traumatic to the children,” White said in a court filing late Friday, citing his years of experience working with unaccompanied migrant children and background as a social worker.
Both Senate and House Republicans, and Democrats, should be forced into a on the record vote of their individual positions, regarding respecting a Presidents Emergency Declaration, so Voters are quite clear about who is for curbing the illegal invasion of our Southern Border, once and for all. Each of them will be before the Voters at some point, and many have led their constituents to believe they are with them about protecting our Nations borders.Such a vote will allow them to announce proudly their individual position, or allow each to cave into acting on behalf of their political handlers and financiers. Whatever they do, however they vote, the ability for the House and Senate to Override a Presidential Veto is unlikely, for the exact same reasons. National Emergency Declarations have been made around 50 or more times, since the beginning of the process, the passage of laws by Congress in this regard. A wide variety of reasons and actions have been taken using such power by the Executive Branch, for the very reason that Congress has limited ability to pass the necessary legislation in a timely way, and a limited ability to override a Presidential Veto, in such regard. This President was elected, over 17 Republican contenders in the Primaries, as the only ONE to show leadership on this issue, and the only one trusted not to take NO for an answer by Democrats and RINOs in Congress. By any means necessary, President Trump MUST drive construction of a WALL, a EFFECTIVE BARRIER that blocks illegal entry along our Southern Border, even when there is no human Customs, Border Protection Officer in place with the means to STOP such illegal behavior. Add the drones and electronics and backup fences and whatever it takes, on top of enough and then some additional CPB and other armed personnel to get the job done in a thorough and professional matter, at whatever cost there may be involved. Anticipate that Democrats/Rinos, the enemies within, domestic enemies of liberty, may from time to time find ways to turn off the effective use of any process or system to which they can get access, and STILL, need a Barrier that STOPS the invasion PRIOR TO ENTRY. With that task DONE, interior enforcement can become the focus, one illegal alien at a time, to rid our Nation of this problem.
“It’s not going to change a damn thing,” the President of the United States told an assemblage of news anchors at an off-the-record White House meeting some weeks ago. “But I’m still doing it.” To a certain extent, that groaning is just standard Trump shit—his signature all-caps triumphalism is balanced by an equal and opposite tendency towards teenish mopery when he doesn’t get what he wants fast enough, or hot enough, or served with proper deference. But there was something a bit different about this. He was referring to a trip he’d make to the Rio Grande Valley later that week, during the early-middle part of the 35-day federal government shutdown, at the point when various assholes were putting on barn jackets and getting themselves photographed squinting at arroyos outside of McAllen, Texas. It was just before a televised speech that Trump would make in primetime that night.There was some concern about that speech, because Trump had been doing that Trump thing where he gets bored and flutters his eyelids and then veers psychedelically off-script and begins drawling about some bizarre shit that no one can quite place or even parse. For a while, that meant interrupting himself to explain how smugglers bring women across borders into Texas and California and Arizona with specific types of tape over their mouths—he would list the types of tape that the smugglers used, usually mentioning that it was blue. “They get off the road and they drive out into the desert, and they come on, they make a left turn,” he told a media gaggle on January 4. “Usually it’s a left, not a right.” The Washington Post dutifully attempted to run down where Trump might have been getting this, and mostly failed. It could have been a chopped-and-screwed remix of something a border patrol agent told him, it could have been from the sequel to Sicario, some poreless beige security goblin might have leered it out from within a box next to Lou Dobbs. Joan Collins might have whispered it to him in a dream.The “left turn” thing and the tape thing kept coming up. For weeks it went on like this—syntactically erratic tweets at unholy times of day about things no one understood, weird sneering answers to unheard questions issued while a helicopter whined a few yards away, photo opportunities in which grim-faced white people in suits or uniforms stood around behind Trump while he described the situation at the border as if recapping the plot of Cannonball Run.But Trump read the nationally televised speech as written, which meant that it was both more egregious and more boring than usual—heavier on terms like “humanitarian crisis” than his off-the-cuff statements, with notably less action-movie color around the margins. It was the sort of performance that used to get him called “presidential” by certain clammy professional types. He had some more meetings and they didn’t go anywhere; he convened a meeting with Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Charles Schumer and some other powerful people and then theatrically walked out of it after saying “bye bye,” then tweeted that he had just done as much. “The president walked into the room and passed out candy. It’s true,” the vice president told reporters after that one. “I don’t recall him ever raising his voice or slamming his hand.”I don’t remember how long ago that was. It could be two weeks. It could be a year. On Friday, when Trump’s TelePrompter froze during a brief appearance announcing the end of the shutdown—or, anyway, announcing that it would at least be three weeks before a second one—he was left to ad-lib about illegal immigration and the wall he wants to build to stop it. He talked about the tape again.What most bears repeating and is most readily forgotten about Trump, even after his shutdown stole paychecks from 800,000 government employees and more than a million contractors for reasons even he never seemed to understand, is that he has no idea what he’s doing. There were certainly ways in which Trump’s shutdown reflected both traditional reactionary values—bullying and stiffing vulnerable working people are core to both Trump and his party—and Trump’s unique determination to leverage his every ugly belief to the max, but also there was never the sense that any of this was happening by design. On Friday, he agreed to the same deal that he rejected 35 days ago for the same reason that he rejected it then, which is that he decided it was the right thing to do. The belief, however inchoate and incoherent, is the thing.He believes the bit about the smugglers and the duct tape because he believes it, and because he believes it now he will never stop believing it. In the last days of the shutdown, Trump and members of his cabinet explained, with the blithe confidence God gives only to people who have never considered the possibility that they might be wrong, that furloughed government employees could simply “work something out” with their local grocers and debt-collection agencies. When he says something confusing or stupid or glaringly wrong—something that can’t be explained by any existing set of facts or system of beliefs, something that even the embalmed-looking juche vendors on his favorite television channels haven’t dared put up for sale—it’s because he believes it.This is also true, and maybe even especially true, when Trump is obviously lying. Even before he banged his own personal left turn and began his full-tilt drive into the desert of cognitive decline, Trump was not an especially nuanced or strategic person. His mind is not what it was, and at its peak it was more of a Magic 8 Ball than a supercomputer. He can’t learn anything because he can’t listen to other people if they aren’t speaking from inside a television; he can’t remember what he hears there because he can’t really care unless it’s about him. These deficits are clear when Trump is extemporizing on furloughed workers cutting deals with the milkman or imagining cartoon coyotes piloting sedans full of duct-taped women across the Rio Grande, but they are even clearer when he tells knowing lies. The former tend to be about other people, and so tend to be both lurid and half-assed; he only really ever applies himself when the lies involve himself.This gives these lies the advantage of being heartfelt, but it also strips them down. The stories he tells about workers gladly giving up their paychecks for his drowsy racist fantasies and the villains working against him are mostly just sounds he makes to keep himself interested; he might have noticed that they drew louder-than-usual hoots from the seething grandparents and dead-ender rubes at his rallies, but he also might not have. His lies, though, are more elemental. They are never anything more than the opposite of truth. If Trump keeps insisting that he’s not being investigated for his relationship to Russia in gratuitous and unconvincing ways, it’s not because he’s trying to leverage some advanced placement Dealpoint or exploit some hidden businessman’s trick or angle. It’s because he’s literally fucking being investigated for his relationship with Russia and because he very much wants people to think he’s not, and because that’s honestly the best he can do because his brain is an old donut bobbing around in a toilet.Trump is so relentlessly dishonest and so plainly diminished and so sorely overmatched that, at this point, he can only be taken at his word. This isn’t to say that you should believe what he’s saying, although you surely don’t need me to tell you that. It just means that what he does, from here until whenever his helicopter leaves the White House lawn for the last time, will never be anything but what it appears to be.If he appears to be confronting an emerging truth that makes him look bad with a flailing childish insistence that Actually The Opposite Is True, it’s because he is. If it looks like he’s numbly ventriloquizing the rancid words of one of the aspiring genocidaires tasked with writing his more high-flown addresses, it’s because he is. If it appears that he is taking some cruel promise made idly at some point in the past and then spinning stupid stories to justify seeing that promise through, it’s because that is just what he’s doing. Trump repeats the same five or six phrases like a defective Teddy Ruxpin not because he’s trying to brainwash or brand but because he can only hold like 175 words in his head at one time and is just kind of mushing the button that seems most appropriate for the situation over and over again. There will be no new work done until he’s out of this job, not just because the venal and idiotic criminality that has defined his life belatedly appears to be catching up with him but because it simply isn’t in him to do new work, and because his current job transparently doesn’t matter to him at all. He’ll believe that he’s getting away with it—that he’s winning and commanding and leading—until the cuffs close or the lights go out, and he will always act that way. He will spend the rest of his life trying to demonstrate that he was right about whatever it was that he said or did before.There is no reason to overthink any of this. Trump himself surely is not. He will not fix any of it, of course; that’s not what he does. Instead he will just say that it is not broken, or already fixed, or that it was always supposed to be that way, or that someone else did it. Nothing will ever matter more to him than that work, and yet he’ll never work any harder at it than he is right now. When the time comes to stand and deliver, he will extrude the first trembling clot to clear his platinum-plated cloaca, and then he’ll point at it. When something else lands on top, he will point at that. That’s mine, he will say, I made that. And then, sometime later, he will say someone really made a mess.
He can’t learn anything because he can’t listen to other people if they aren’t speaking from inside a television; he can’t remember what he hears there because he can’t really care unless it’s about him.
" Russia, Russia , Russia "
The House Intelligence Committee’s new Democratic leadership will scrutinize “credible reports of money laundering and financial compromise” involving the businesses of President Trump and those closest to him, the panel’s chairman said Wednesday, in what will be one of several priorities as lawmakers open a fresh investigation into the president’s alleged Russia ties.Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) outlined a five-point plan for the committee’s investigation, encompassing Russia’s election interference and the question of whether foreign governments have leverage over Trump, his relatives or associates. Schiff indicated the panel uncovered evidence of such vulnerabilities while under Republican leadership but neglected to pursue it.“For the last two years, the Republican majority has essentially been missing in action when it comes being a coequal branch of government,” Schiff said Wednesday, promising that Democrats are “not going to be intimidated or threatened” by Trump’s warnings against the Democratic-led investigations. “That ended with the midterms. We’re going to do our jobs.”But not without pushback from Trump, who railed Wednesday against the idea of Schiff pursuing an investigation into his finances, accusing him of “presidential harassment.”“Under what basis would he do that? He has no basis to do that,” Trump told reporters when asked about Schiff’s plans. “No other politician has to go through that. It's called presidential harassment. And it’s unfortunate. And it really does hurt our country.”Schiff retorted on Twitter, saying he could “understand why the idea of meaningful oversight terrifies the President.”“Several of his close associates are going to jail, others await trial, and criminal investigations continue,” he added, repeating that the panel “won’t be distracted or intimidated by threats or attacks.”The committee published its investigative plan after members voted unanimously Wednesday to give special counsel Robert S. Mueller III copies of all the interviews the committee conducted during its GOP-led probe. Democrats have long questioned whether some witnesses lied to lawmakers during those interviews, and they plan to make obstruction of justice another focus of their planned probe. In the meantime, members have said, they think Mueller is best equipped to determine who is telling the truth.The committee heard testimony from more than 50 witnesses, including the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and others close to the president and deeply knowledgeable about his campaign and business dealings.Schiff told reporters that the transcripts, which would be sent to Mueller immediately, include material that the special counsel’s office has not seen previously. Mueller “will now have access to those transcripts for any purpose that will facilitate justice,” Schiff said.The panel has previously released select transcripts to the special counsel, including those from interviews with Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone and Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen, who is expected to begin a three-year prison sentence next month for lying to Congress and committing financial crimes, was due to appear before the Intelligence Committee for a closed-door interview Friday. But that session has been postponed until Feb. 28, Schiff said Wednesday.This is the second time Cohen’s planned testimony has been delayed or canceled. Last month, the House Oversight Committee scheduled a public hearing with Cohen for Feb. 7, but Cohen canceled, citing threats Trump had made to his family. Cohen is still expected to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee for a closed-door interview Tuesday.Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee had hoped to release to the public transcripts from its unclassified interviews — which account for the vast majority — but the motion was voted down, said Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), who ran the committee’s GOP-led Russia probe.Last year, Republicans and Democrats voted to release all of the transcript materials to the public, pending a review by the intelligence community. But that vote took place in September, and the interview transcripts still have not been cleared in the declassification review — a delay Republicans called “unacceptable” in a statement.Schiff said Wednesday that the intelligence community had estimated it would finish vetting the transcripts by May or June but that he was trying to get them to hurry the process by releasing some of the less sensitive records first.“There’s no need to wait until they are all finished to release any of them,” he said.The panel also voted down a GOP request to subpoena “witnesses whose testimony Democrats previously sought,” according to a statement from Republican members. They did not specify which witnesses, however.Democrats complained forcefully last year that Republicans had blocked their effort and denied their request to subpoena key witnesses. But Schiff stressed Wednesday that while Democrats wanted to accommodate GOP requests, they would not begin firing off subpoenas before potential witnesses were given a chance to appear voluntarily.
His client, Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.
Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.
As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it.
Now President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta, 49, oversees a massive federal agency that provides oversight of the country’s labor laws, including human trafficking. Until he was reported to be eliminated on Thursday, a day after this story posted online, Acosta also had been included on lists of possible replacements for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned under pressure earlier this month.
Despite substantial physical evidence and multiple witnesses backing up the girls’ stories, the secret deal allowed Epstein to enter guilty pleas to two felony prostitution charges. Epstein admitted to committing only one offense against one underage girl, who was labeled a prostitute, even though she was 14, which is well under the age of consent — 18 in Florida.
Mike Fisten, a former Miami-Dade police sergeant who was also a homicide investigator and a member of the FBI Organized Crime Task Force, said the FBI had enough evidence to put Epstein away for a long time but was overruled by Acosta. Some of the agents involved in the case were disappointed by Acosta’s bowing to pressure from Epstein’s lawyers, he said.
Acosta has never fully explained why he felt it was in the best interests of the underage girls — and their parents — for him to keep the agreement sealed. Or why the FBI investigation was closed even as, recently released documents show, the case was yielding more victims and evidence of a possible sex-trafficking conspiracy beyond Palm Beach.