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riversedge

riversedge's Journal
riversedge's Journal
November 2, 2019

Washington Nationals player says he won't visit Trump White House: 'I just can't do it'

Source: the Hill




By Justin Wise - 11/02/19 07:24 AM EDT



Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle will not visit the White House with his teammates when President Trump hosts the club to celebrate their World Series victory.

Doolittle, a relief pitcher who joined the Nationals in 2017, told The Washington Post on Friday that he will not attend a White House ceremony scheduled for Monday because of his opposition to Trump.

“There’s a lot of things, policies that I disagree with, but at the end of the day, it has more to do with the divisive rhetoric and the enabling of conspiracy theories and widening the divide in this country," Doolittle said.

"My wife and I stand for inclusion and acceptance, and we’ve done work with refugees, people that come from, you know, the ‘shithole countries,' ” he added, referencing remarks Trump made in 2018 about immigrants coming from Haiti and other African nations.

Doolittle went on to say that "as much as I wanted to be there with my teammates and share that experience with my teammates, I can’t do it.".............

Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/468659-washington-nationals-player-says-he-wont-visit-trump-white-house-i






https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1190591648973164544?s=20

DiannePreece
@diannepreece
·
1h
Replying to
@thehill


Has Drump called him a name yet?
Phatz Nc
@Fmessia0
·
1h
Replying to
@thehill
This man brings me hope.


https://twitter.com/girlsreallyrule/status/1190589984971132928?s=20

November 1, 2019

Republican stunt backfires when Capitol Police are called to investigate their 'suspicious' package








Apparently the NRCC sent some frontline Democrats “moving boxes” after the impeachment vote, but because the boxes looked like suspicious packages, Capitol Police were called to investigate.


https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/1189986399849721858?s=20








Republican stunt backfires when Capitol Police are called to investigate their ‘suspicious’ packages


https://www.rawstory.com/2019/10/republican-stunt-backfires-when-capitol-police-are-called-to-investigate-their-suspicious-packages/

Published 12 hours ago on October 31, 2019



The House of Representatives voted on the rules for impeachment Thursday, setting up the House investigation. However, the mockery of Democrats by Republicans turned into a serious incident for the GOP.


According to congressional Huffington Post reporter Matt Fuller, the GOP sent moving boxes to some Democrats who voted on the rules bill. The boxes appeared outside of Congressional offices with bows on them, which ended up being a huge security flag to the Capitol Police. .....................


https://twitter.com/MEPFuller/status/1189985309162921985?s=20

November 1, 2019

Conservatives Outraged Over Dem Dressing Up As 'Batman' On Halloween

Katie Porter has more intellect in the tip of her batwoman finger than any of these have in their entire hypocritical bodies. Made me think of their outrage at Obama wearing a tan suit.



Conservatives Outraged Over Dem Dressing Up As ‘Batman’ On Halloween


By Cristina Cabrera October 31, 2019 1:21 p.m.


Conservatives simply cannot believe Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) dared to wear a costume on Halloween.
........................


.........................


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“Democrat Rep. Katie Porter is making a mockery of the House of Representatives,” complained Steve Guest, the Republican National Committee’s rapid response director.

But multiple reporters confirmed the congresswoman only wore the costume during a Financial Services Committee session, not to the widely anticipated House vote on the impeachment resolution.

Porter shrugged off the outrage.........................................


.........................................


Earlier in the day, Porter had one other correction for her critics: She’s not dressed as Batman.

“Batgirl,” she told Washington Post reporter Mike DeBonis. “It’s not Batman. It’s Batgirl.”









https://twitter.com/NRCC/status/1189916583440867333?s=20








https://twitter.com/RepKatiePorter/status/1189996983349645313?s=20
No time for BS @observantjulie
·
Replying to @NRCC and @RepKatiePorter

You go Katie!




Rhonda Harbison @rhonda_harbison
·
6h
Replying to @NRCC and @RepKatiePorter
And Republicians remain as criminals.





October 31, 2019

Justin Amash votes with House Democrats to pass resolution supporting impeachment inquiry

Source: alternet






Written by Alex Henderson October 31, 2019

A resolution supporting an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump passed in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday, with Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan joining most House Democrats in voting for it.

“The resolution is adopted,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared after the votes were counted.

Amash has been among Trump’s most vocal critics on the right, and he left the Republican Party earlier this year after coming out in favor of Trump’s impeachment.

The vote went down along largely partisan lines. 232 House members, almost all of them Democrats, voted in favor of the resolution, while 196 House members (mostly Republicans) voted against it.............................

Read more: https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/justin-amash-votes-with-house-democrats-to-pass-resolution-supporting-impeachment-inquiry/






https://twitter.com/AlterNet/status/1189934744357744640?s=20
October 31, 2019

Ivanka Trump brutally mocked after tweet comparing her father to Thomas Jefferson




https://twitter.com/AlterNet/status/1189973773082091522?s=20





Ivanka Trump brutally mocked after tweet comparing her father to Thomas Jefferson

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/ivanka-trump-brutally-mocked-after-tweet-comparing-her-father-to-thomas-jefferson/


Written by Alex Henderson October 31, 2019


On Thursday morning — as the House of Representatives was preparing to vote on a resolution to proceed with an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump — his daughter, White House senior adviser Ivanka Trump, took to Twitter and made a Donald Trump/Thomas Jefferson comparison. And it wasn’t long before she was lambasted for it by fellow Twitter users.

In her Halloween 2019 tweet, Ivanka Trump quoted a letter that Jefferson (the third president of the United States) wrote to his oldest daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, in 1801 during an election crisis: “…surrounded by enemies and spies catching and perverting every word that falls from my lips or flows from my pen, and inventing where facts fail them.” Jefferson was describing the state of politics in Washington, D.C., and after quoting him in her tweet, Ivanka Trump wrote, “Some things never change, dad!”


The implication was that just as Jefferson (who served as president from 1801-1809) was unfairly smeared by politicians in his day, so is her father in 2019. And not surprisingly, many Twitter users disagreed strongly with the comparison.

@ HoarseWisperer angrily responded, “You are the most vapid tool ever to step foot in the White House,” and @Amy_Siskind tweeted, .........................
00:33


Journalist David Rothkopf explained why a Donald Trump/Thomas Jefferson comparison was wildly inappropriate, posting, “So, Ivanka, couple things: a.) Jefferson worked his whole life to ensure the president was not above the law b.) Jefferson was the first top official to call for the impeachment of a president (Washington) for being too close a foreign nation (when he approved the Jay Treaty).”

Twitter user @maydaymindy9 described the president’s daughter as “an empty vessel in a plastic casing,” while @RobinMadel posted, “Sorry, Ivanka doesn’t history very well.” And @Emolclause explained, “White House staffers didn’t throw up their hands in exasperation over Thomas Jefferson’s LIES.”...............................
October 31, 2019

Top Military Officers Unload on Trump--even the Brass are speaking out!

Long article but to the point.



Top Military Officers Unload on Trump

The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?




https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360/


Mark Bowden November 2019 Issue Politics



For most of the past two decades, American troops have been deployed all over the world—to about 150 countries. During that time, hundreds of thousands of young men and women have experienced combat, and a generation of officers have come of age dealing with the practical realities of war. They possess a deep well of knowledge and experience. For the past three years, these highly trained professionals have been commanded by Donald Trump.

To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app.
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Military officers are sworn to serve whomever voters send to the White House. Cognizant of the special authority they hold, high-level officers epitomize respect for the chain of command, and are extremely reticent about criticizing their civilian overseers. That those I spoke with made an exception in Trump’s case is telling, and much of what they told me is deeply disturbing. In 20 years of writing about the military, I have never heard officers in high positions express such alarm about a president. Trump’s pronouncements and orders have already risked catastrophic and unnecessary wars in the Middle East and Asia, and have created severe problems for field commanders engaged in combat operations. Frequently caught unawares by Trump’s statements, senior military officers have scrambled, in their aftermath, to steer the country away from tragedy. How many times can they successfully do that before faltering?

Amid threats spanning the globe, from nuclear proliferation to mined tankers in the Persian Gulf to terrorist attacks and cyberwarfare, those in command positions monitor the president’s Twitter feed like field officers scanning the horizon for enemy troop movements. A new front line in national defense has become the White House Situation Room, where the military struggles to accommodate a commander in chief who is both ignorant and capricious. In May, after months of threatening Iran, Trump ordered the carrier group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln to shift from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. On June 20, after an American drone was downed there, he ordered a retaliatory attack—and then called it off minutes before it was to be launched. The next day he said he was “not looking for war” and wanted to talk with Iran’s leaders, while also promising them “obliteration like you’ve never seen before” if they crossed him. He threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” and dispatched a three-aircraft-carrier flotilla to waters off the Korean peninsula—then he pivoted to friendly summits with Kim Jong Un, with whom he announced he was “in love”; canceled long-standing U.S. military exercises with South Korea; and dangled the possibility of withdrawing American forces from the country altogether. While the lovefest continues for the cameras, the U.S. has quietly uncanceled the canceled military exercises, and dropped any mention of a troop withdrawal.

Such rudderless captaincy creates the headlines Trump craves. He revels when his tweets take off. (“Boom!” he says. “Like a rocket!”) Out in the field, where combat is more than wordplay, his tweets have consequences. He is not a president who thinks through consequences—and this, the generals stressed, is not the way serious nations behave.

The generals I spoke with didn’t agree on everything, but they shared the following five characterizations of Trump’s military leadership.


I. HE DISDAINS EXPERTISE


Trump has little interest in the details of policy. He makes up his mind about a thing, and those who disagree with him—even those with manifestly more knowledge and experience—are stupid, or slow, or crazy.

As a personal quality, this can be trying; in a president, it is dangerous. Trump rejects the careful process of decision making that has long guided commanders in chief. Disdain for process might be the defining trait of his leadership. Of course, no process can guarantee good decisions—history makes that clear—but eschewing the tools available to a president is choosing ignorance. What Trump’s supporters call “the deep state” is, in the world of national security—hardly a bastion of progressive politics—a vast reservoir of knowledge and global experience that presidents ignore at their peril. The generals spoke nostalgically of the process followed by previous presidents, who solicited advice from field commanders, foreign-service and intelligence officers, and in some cases key allies before reaching decisions about military action. As different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in temperament and policy preferences, one general told me, they were remarkably alike in the Situation Room: Both presidents asked hard questions, wanted prevailing views challenged, insisted on a variety of options to consider, and weighed potential outcomes against broader goals. Trump doesn’t do any of that. Despite commanding the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatus in the world, this president prefers to be briefed by Fox News, and then arrives at decisions without input from others.

One prominent example came on December 19, 2018, when Trump announced, via Twitter, that he was ordering all American forces in Syria home.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump presidency,” he tweeted. Later that day he said, “Our boys, our young women, our men, they are all coming back, and they are coming back now.”

This satisfied one of Trump’s campaign promises, and it appealed to the isolationist convictions of his core supporters. Forget the experts, forget the chain of command—they were the people who, after all, had kept American forces engaged in that part of the world for 15 bloody years without noticeably improving things. Enough was enough..........
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October 31, 2019

Trump lures GOP senators on impeachment with cold cash

Source: Politico




The president is tapping his vast donor network to buck up lawmakers whose support he badly needs — but who also need him.


By ALEX ISENSTADT 10/31/2019 05:00 AM EDT



President Donald Trump is rewarding senators who have his back on impeachment — and sending a message to those who don't to get on board.

Trump is tapping his vast fundraising network for a handful of loyal senators facing tough reelection bids in 2020. Each of them has signed onto a Republican-backed resolution condemning the inquiry as “unprecedented and undemocratic.”




Conspicuously absent from the group is Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a politically vulnerable Republican who’s refused to support the resolution and avoided taking a stance on impeachment. With his new push, Trump is exerting leverage over a group he badly needs in his corner with an impeachment trial likely coming soon to the Senate — but that also needs him.



Republican senators on the ballot next year are lagging in fundraising, stoking uncertainty about the GOP’s hold on the chamber, and could use the fundraising might of the president. Trump’s political operation has raked in over $300 million this year.

On Wednesday, the Trump reelection campaign sent a fundraising appeal to its massive email list urging donors to provide a contribution that would be divided between the president and Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, and North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis. Each of the senators are supporting the anti-impeachment resolution despite being endangered in 2020.

“If we don’t post strong fundraising numbers,” the message warned, “we won't be able to defend the President from this baseless Impeachment WITCH HUNT.” ..................................

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/31/trump-impeachment-senators-donor-062084




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