If Mike Pompeo is considered a "disgrace," why is he still in the cabinet?

Mike Pompeo railed against NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly in a "mean-spirited outburst" that has resulted in widespread criticism, especially among liberals. "Journalist Shay Khatiri calls Pompeo out in a blistering article for the conservative Never Trump website The Bulwark." Here is her opinion of one of T-rump's highest Cabinet members...

“Mike Pompeo is a disgrace to the office he holds and the department he leads, And he goes on to explain why Pompeo’s ranting against an NPR reporter speaks so poorly of him."

 Khatiri continued...

"the secretary of state 'began cursing' at Kelly when she brought up the “Ukraine scandal” — and on Saturday, Pompeo pulled a 'McSally maneuver' and “attacked the media.”

The “McSally maneuver” Khatiri is talking about is...

"Sen. Martha McSally’s recent attack on CNN’s Manu Raju, who she insulted as a “liberal hack” when he asked the Arizona Republican whether or not witnesses should be featured in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial — which was a perfectly reasonable question."

 Khatiri calls it a Trumpian political stunt, which, knowing McSally from Arizona, is another ploy to get attention. She is desperate since former astronaut Mark Kelly is beating her in the polls, 46.3% to 43.7%. It is all moot because it has become clear that Mike Pompeo has become another clone of Donald Trump and this is just in the DNA.   READ MORE...

Lindsey Graham in the loop for Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden

Lev Parnas - Lindsey Graham

It is well known that Lindsey graham has become one of Donald Trump's biggest flunkey suck-ups, but Giuliani associate Lev Parnas claims that he is also mixed up in the Ukraine incident as one of the perpetrators who tried to influence President Zelensky to find out what he could about Joe Biden to help Trump's election. Here's the scenario...

"Lev Parnas, a Ukraine-born businessman charged with campaign finance violations, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° that Graham has a personal interest in keeping witness testimony out of President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial."

Parnas says Graham was definitely in the loop, a good relationship with Rudy Giuliani, maybe going back to 2018 or earlier. It is also known...

"he was the one Rudy Giuliani was supposed to bring Viktor Shokin [another Giuliani associate] to when the visa got denied, and I think he was even, if you check the records, involved in getting the request for the visa somehow.”

It was around a month later that Giuliani "tried to help Shokin, a former top prosecutor in Ukraine regarded as corrupt by the previous administration and U.S. allies, obtain a visa to meet with Graham in the U.S." Parnas said that Graham was definitely in the loop and must have known what was going on. But here's the clincher...

Parnas told CNN he was '1 million percent' sure that Graham was "aware of his and Giuliani’s efforts to press Ukraine to announce an investigation of Biden."

If Lindsey Graham doesn't lose the election in 2020, he is "statistically tied with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison," he should be put in line for impeachment.   READ MORE...

Donald Trump went to the White House riding the backs of lowlife like Roy Cohn

It all started with Roy Cohn, once an associate of Sen. Joe McCarthy, whom the Oval Office lunatic befriended back in the 1970s. From then on, Donald Trump has made it a habit of surrounding himself with sleazy characters that, somehow, have managed to move his political career to where it is today. This apparently opened the door to his gang of sordid characters, many of which are still around. From advisers to Cabinet members, the seedy group pushes him forward.

Michael Rothfeld and Joe Palazzolo have a new book, “The Fixers: The Bottom-Feeders, Crooked Lawyers, Gossipmongers, and Porn Stars Who Created the 45th President.” I could end this post here with the book title saying almost everything, but there really is much more. Salon calls it, "a veritable encyclopedia of the unsavory characters that have made Trump who he is, alongside some new reporting.

Donald Trump and Roy Cohn

Cohn gave T-rump a boost in the beginning but once it was learned that he was gay and had AIDS, poor Roy was dumped, and can you believe this, "after Cohn died in 1986 of AIDS-related complications, Trump ordered the staff at Mar-a-Lago to fumigate the silverware." The book starts with the parade of pathetics...

"He will use people as long as the person can help him and then discard them or, worse, demean and demonize them. Look no further than Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who had been a loyal blunt instrument for Trump since the mid-2000’s. But when Cohen got into serious trouble — apparently for running sleazy errands for Trump — the president turned his back on his longtime friend, which ultimately led to Cohen working with the authorities in the hopes of lessening his prison sentence."

Then came Rudy Giuliani, Bill Barr, Karen McDougal, who was paid off for Trump by the publisher of the National Enquirer, and Stormy Daniels who was paid off by Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer. AlterNet asks the question, "How do you have a president who has one guy paying off a porn star and another guy paying off a Playboy model?" You have to look back decades to see a pattern of "how Trump had people surrounding him who were just kind of willing to do his dirty work for him."

This is how the authors explain their book...

"That’s how we came up with the idea of writing “The Fixers.” It’s the seamy underbelly of the Trump presidency. It’s a world that most people probably don’t know about, but where you have muckrakers, paparazzi, porn stars and all this, and they helped him refine the tactics that he took to The White House."

It may be a world that most people don't know directly, but it is a world that the world has come to know as Donald Trump' oligarchy. There is much more to this article which I highly suggest reading.

Just how involved is Bill Barr in the Ukraine investigation?

AG William Barr

It has apparently become impossible to separate Attorney General Bill Barr from the impeachment of Donald Trump, particularly the Ukraine incident. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent reports a recent “damning new audio recording” has far-reaching effects...

"reportedly features Trump telling his associates that he wants then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired could be a significant development in Democrats."

 In the recording, Trump clearly says, “Get rid of her!” in reference to Yovanovitch. Then he says, “Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it.” 'Take her out?' This idiot sounds like a mafia boss, but. then, he has been compared with Don Corleone before. Well, Yovanovitch is out and the video confirms Lev Parnas' version of the firing. Parnas told Rachel Maddow...

“I do remember me telling the president the ambassador was bad-mouthing him and saying he was going to get impeached, something to that effect.”

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent reports...

"the recording reveals “how involved Trump was in the campaign to oust Yovanovitch” in order to “clear the way for the corrupt scheme that Giuliani was preparing to orchestrate in an effort to extort Ukraine into announcing investigations that would help Trump politically.”

Then Sargent closes with this re. Barr...

“All of which is a reminder that we still have only the foggiest understanding of the role Attorney General William P. Barr is playing. Is Barr allowing this investigation — whatever it’s examining — to proceed wherever the facts lead?”

For some time now the suck-up Attorney General has directed all his energies protecting the White House maniac instead of the citizens of this country he swore to protect when taking office. Chalk up one more to dump.
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Our Founding Fathers would probably have impeached Trump...so what is the Senate waiting for?

Facebook friend, Neil Schneider, brought this article to my attention, something that all Americans, liberal or conservative, should consider. The answer to the above photo is a resounding YES! Robert Reich's video, below, gives a running timeline from the meeting of the Founding Fathers right up to the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

The Fathers were pretty sure they had George Washington as a sure bet for president, and they were right. But at the time, Benjamin Franklin made this comment...

“The first man put at the helm will be a good one,” but “Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.”

And then, of course we ended up in 2016 with the Oval Office lunatic, who has turned out to be the worst president the United states has ever known. The Founding Fathers decided quickly there must be a way to remove a president that was a disgrace to his office. James Madison and others argued they needed specific reasons to do this. They decided on “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The delegates to the Constitutional Convent were "also concerned that a foreign power might influence the outcome of an election." This leads to...

During the Virginia ratifying convention, Edmund Randolph explicitly connected impeachment to foreign money, saying that a president “may be impeached” if discovered “receiving emoluments [help] from foreign powers.” George Washington, in his farewell address, warned of “the insidious wiles of foreign influence.”

Bingo! Donald Trump holds the offer of over $400 million in aid to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in abeyance until Zelensky comes up with dirt on Trump's political opponent, Joe3 Biden. With a number of cases where this has been confirmed, from former U.S. Ukraine Ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch. to Trump's former National Security adviser, John Bolton, there is no doubt T-rump violated the emoluments clause.

Yet a cowardly Republican Senate is so far refusing to convict Donald Trump in the Senate trial. I highly recommend watching the above Robert Reich video, and the article is a must read.

Looks like millennials could put Bernie Sanders over the top

There are 71 million millennials in the United States ages 24 to 39. 26 millennials voted in 2018. Bernie Sanders is ahead in the Iowa Caucuses and he leads in the New Hampshire Primary. So what does this say for the Bern...

"Democrats will need high turnout among young, left-leaning voters in November, and Bernie Sanders is overwhelmingly popular with such voters."

Joe Biden has been the front-runner on the left since he entered the race, with other candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg running up and down the rankings. Sanders has continually hovered around second position throughout the Primary competition, but lately has been surging...

"According to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday, Bernie Sanders boasts the support of 53 percent of Democratic voters under 35 nationwide, while Joe Biden lays claim to just 3 percent. That poll’s margin of error is 3.4 percentage points — which means that the percentage of younger voters who support the Democratic Party’s current front-runner could, technically, round down to zero."

The fact of the matter is that Joe Biden just does not appeal to the younger generation even though he is younger than Bernie by two years. The Intelligencer reports...

"Although Sanders’s 2016 backers did not sit out (or defect) during the general election in aberrantly high numbers, the age gap between Biden and Bernie backers this year is even larger than the one that prevailed between Clinton and the Vermont senator four years ago."

And then you have Michael Bloomberg entering the race who seems to be syphoning off support from all the candidates but Bernie Sanders. As I have said earlier, I am not sure Bloomberg is running to win or just to make sure Donald Trump doesn't win. The next couple of months will certainly be interesting.
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Why don't GOP lawmakers who trash president behind his back come out in the open and do it?

Michael McFaul

Well, it is now established that Republican lawmakers detest Donald Trump as much as the American public. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul told host Bill Maher on HBO’s “Real Time that the Congress trashes him behind his back. And it sounds like Bill Maher also dislikes T-rump prompting McFaul to say...

“What really bothers me about folks like this,” he began while speaking to the host who has just ripped into the president, “They don’t like Trump. They talk like you. I mean, they all talk like you.”

Maher countered  “The Republicans?” Then McFaul again...

“All those guys,” McFaul shot back. “When they’re talking in the family, that’s what they say among the family. And yet when they come out in the public, then they care about taxes and other issues and maybe power, but they just forget about all this other stuff — and that is what I can’t respect.”

Respect from the American public is exactly what Congress currently does not have today with their job approval rating at 23%. And the whole lot is simply too dumb to realize just how lousy a job they do. McFaul is a Democrat, but he is also an American academic and professor of political science who served as the United States Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. Although outside the circle of the Trump administration, apparently he is still a part of the "family." 
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