Buttigieg: Trump tries to shock the conscience by siding with a 'murderous dictator' over Joe Biden

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on Monday slammed President Donald Trump for siding with “murderous dictator” Kim Jong-un over former Vice President Joe Biden.

Buttigieg made the remarks during a press gaggle on Memorial Day. CNN’s D.J. Judd pointed out to the presidential candidate that Trump had expressed agreement with Kim after he called Biden “low I.Q.”

“My thoughts on that are that Kim Jong Un is a murderous dictator and the Vice President Biden served this country honorably,” Buttigieg explained. ” It’s just one more example, though, of the way that this President tries to draw attention to himself by saying things that shock the conscience, to distract us from his deep unpopularity and the deep unpopularity of the Republicans’ governing agenda.”

https://twitter.com/DJJudd/status/1133027641550938115

Trump Encourages North Korea To Interfere In 2020 Election

By not condemning North Korea’s attack on Joe Biden, Trump is welcoming and encouraging their interference in the 2020 election.Trump said when asked if he was worried about being seen as agreeing with Kim Jong-un’s attack on Biden, “Well, Kim Jong-un made a statement that Joe Biden is a low IQ individual. He probably is based on his record. I think I agree with him on that.”

By agreeing with North Korea’s attack on Biden, Trump is encouraging Kim Jong-un to do more. No US president has sided with the world’s oppressive dictators as Donald Trump has. North Korea is trying to interfere in the 2020 election to for the same reason that Saudi Arabia and Russia want to keep Trump in office. Donald Trump is a corrupt, but useful idiot, whose presence in the Oval Office weakens the United States.

Trump just brushed off North Korea engaging in more missile testing as no big deal. Any other president would have condemned the North Koreans, but Trump is encouraging them to interfere in the 2020 election because foreign interference might be the only way for him to win.

Trump has been inaccurately throwing around the word treason a lot, but it is the president who is working against the United States and the interests of this country every single day all over the world.

MUST READ: The surprising lesson the Fugitive Slave Act can teach us about anti-abortion legislation

This article is very eye-opening and is something every Democrat should be aware of.

Neo-Confederate apologists have long claimed, with spurious reasoning, that the American Civil War was simply about “states’ rights,” and in one ironic sense they were arguably right. The war was precipitated by a violation of regional sovereignty – of northern states rights. Case in point: the afternoon of June 2nd 1854, Bostonians gathered along the harbor’s embankments to watch a ship bound southward. Onboard was a man named Anthony Burns, but for the captains of that ship and for those who owned it he was simply cargo to be returned to his “owners” in Virginia. A formerly enslaved man, now a Baptist minister, Burns had escaped from a Virginia plantation to the freedom which Massachusetts offered, only to find that with the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act the seemingly limitless and probing powers of the slave states had followed him to Beacon Hill’s environs, and that whether willingly or unwillingly the new law would implicate all of his white neighbors in the enforcement of that slavocracy’s laws.

According to the language of the Fugitive Slave Act, a New Yorker might dislike slavery, but if southern slave catchers did “summon and call to their aid the bystanders” witnessing a kidnapping, then it was required that the New Yorker must aid in that kidnapping. If a Vermonter or Rhode Islander found slavery distasteful, that was of no accounting if slave catchers were collecting a bounty in Montpellier or Providence, as all “citizens are hereby commanded to aid and assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law, whenever their services may be required, as aforesaid.” As historian Jill Lepore writes in These Truths: A History of the United States, “Nothing so brutally exposed the fragility of freedom or the rapaciousness of slavery.”


History might not repeat exactly, but there are certain themes that can be detected throughout, and there’s something clarifying in identifying those correspondences. Slavery was, among other things, an issue of violating bodily autonomy; of the state enabling one section of the population to declare to another “You do not have sovereign right over your own body – I do.” If one of the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act was that it enlisted the unwilling to aid the violator in that violation of another person’s bodily autonomy, then Georgia’s HB 481 bill passed by the state legislature and signed into law by Governor Brian Kempe last week does something similar. Under that draconian law, and allowing few exceptions, a woman who elects to have an abortion can be charged with “murder,” not to mention the possibility of criminal charges against women who’ve suffered a miscarriage. The possibility for such punishment does not end at Georgia’s borders.

Historian Mark Peterson explains in The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865, that the Fugitive Slave Act “demanded the active cooperation of every US citizen, on pain of severe punishment.” Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman living in New York, noted that the passage of the law was the “beginning of a reign of terror” to African-Americans living free in the north. While certainly anyone who understands slavery knows that that is the nature of that evil institution, for the vast majority of northerners such an arrangement south of the Ohio River was of little concern to them. With the passage of the 1850 legislation, such willful ignorance could no longer be countenanced, for those who wished no part in slavery were now directly implicated in its practice in an indirect manner. Northerners could no longer pretend that slavery was simply a “regional issue;” the plantations which supposedly stopped at the Mason-Dixon Line had a federally invested power that allowed them to arrest formerly enslaved people not just in Georgia or Alabama, but in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts as well.

In a similar manner, both patient and doctor, whether that abortion was performed in New York, or Massachusetts, or California, could be theoretically charged with murder under Georgia law if that procedure involved a state resident. Mark Joseph Stern writes in Slate that if a “Georgia resident plans to travel elsewhere to obtain an abortion, she may be charged with conspiracy to commit murder… An individual who helps… or transports her to the clinic, may also be charged with conspiracy.” Antebellum northerners were content to pretend that bondage was simply a southern problem; in a north that may have found slavery unsavory, arrests such as those of Burns had a galvanizing effect. As the activist Amos Adams Lawrence would write, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Million Dollar Donation To Trump's Inaugural Comes Under Scrutiny

Source: Huffington Post

WASHINGTON (AP) ― Real estate mogul Franklin Haney contributed $1 million to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee and all he’s got to show for the money is the glare of a federal investigation.

The contribution from Haney, a prolific political donor, came as he was seeking regulatory approval and financial support from the government for his long-shot bid to acquire the mothballed Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in northeastern Alabama. More than two years later, he still hasn’t closed the deal.

Haney’s hefty donation to Trump’s inaugural committee is being scrutinized by federal prosecutors in New York who are investigating the committee’s finances. Their probe is focused in part on whether donors received benefits after making contributions.

Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has given prosecutors information regarding Haney, his son and business associate, Frank Haney Jr., and the nuclear plant project, according to a person familiar with what Cohen told the authorities. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.




Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/million-dollar-donation-to-trumps-inaugural-comes-under-scrutiny_n_5cebe705e4b00e03657240e4

Redacted portions of Mueller's report might be made public this week

The federal judge in charge of the case of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has ordered that prosecutors make public documents related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to CNN.

Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court ordered that parts of the Mueller report that pertain to Flynn be posted on a court website by May 31.

The judge also ordered the public release of transcripts of Flynn’s calls with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and a November 2017 voicemail involving Flynn and Trump’s attorney.

“Each of the documents, once made public, could bring revelations about Mueller’s work. The transcripts alone could answer lingering questions about what exactly Flynn said to the Russians that caused so much concern among US intelligence and how a message that factored into the obstruction of justice probe into President Donald Trump played out,” CNN noted.

Read More: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/27/politics/michael-flynn-emmet-sullivan-mueller-report/index.html

Democrats Win Big as Trump is Battered in Court

Good analysis of Trump's court losses from The Hill:

President Trump took a beating in federal court last week, losing a pair of lawsuits aimed at hindering House Democrats' investigations into him and his administration. The decisions indicated that Trump will ultimately lose the fights: Both judges in the subpoena cases issued their rulings swiftly and decisively, underscoring the weakness of Trump's legal arguments.

The lawsuits were likely intended as Trump's attempt to delay Congress from being able to obtain the documents, taking advantage of the slow pace of the court system while keeping an eye on getting the cases up to the Supreme Court. But the court victories are providing Democrats with momentum as they accelerate their Trump investigations -- and providing fodder for party leaders to argue impeachment proceedings aren’t necessary as they make legal headways.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), whose subpoena for Trump’s financial records from the accounting firm Mazars was upheld in D.C. court, said that the judge had found Democrats’ arguments “a slam dunk.”

“I think the courts will look at this and say, ‘wait a minute...there is a role for the Congress, and their role is clear,’” Cummings told reporters this week.

The POLITICO photo of Bernie Sanders was not anti-semitic

Much has been written about how anti-semitic it was for POLITICO to wrote a story about Bernie Sanders' large increases in income and net worth over the past four years, and publish it with a photo of Bernie with money.

But I do not think this was anti-semitic. I'm pretty sure the fact that Sanders is Jewish was not mentioned by POLITICO. It wasn't until Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about it that I even thought about Sanders' religion.

It seemed like a normal and fair way for POLITICO to write a news story about what I believe is a very legitimate issue.

Here is the tweet from POLITICO

https://twitter.com/politico/status/1132076406761037826

Somebody tell Trump that China didn't steal our jobs -- corporations gave them away

"Trump's trade war points the finger in the wrong direction. China behaved normally; corporate CEOs betrayed us."

"Donald Trump loves to blame China for the job losses that have devastated American workers under globalization. But the truth is that Trump is blaming the wrong party. Trump’s reckless trade war against China is misguided and amounts to a colossal charade that will not solve the actual problem."

China was an underdeveloped nation with a large population of poor people willing to work for a fraction of the hourly wages of American workers. And then corporations came along and presented China with an attractive offer: We would like to build manufacturing plants in China and hire droves of your unemployed people to work there. What was China supposed to do? Naturally, China said yes.

This is hardly stealing. It is true that these new jobs in China were intended to displace American workers. But does that concern belong to China? Does China have the responsibility to care for the well-being of American workers? Is China supposed to prioritize American workers over its own workers? Of course not."

Nancy Pelosi treating Trump like an ill-behaved child is actually working

Pundits have spent the better part of the week comparing President Donald Trump to an ill-behaved grandchild of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The president frequently searches for ways to create a villain or an adversary he can fight with because it’s the only way he can appear tough or he thinks it’s the only way to garner results. Pelosi, however, doesn’t play that way. Axios reported Sunday that her plan might actually be working.

“Pelosi’s allies said her taunting of Trump now is intentional, designed to get under his skin and elicit an angry reaction,” the Washington Post reported.

“She’s succeeded in making three things very clear: 1) She’s interested in getting things done, and he walked away again; 2) She’s the only adult in Washington and is leading Dems with precision; 3) He’s a toddler who pays a price for attacking her because he resorts to such publicly infantile lows to attack her,” a senior Democratic aide told Axios.


Read More: https://www.axios.com/nancy-pelosi-trump-taunts-impeachment-8bbdc64f-dbf5-43c7-99d3-a38bd14012c2.html

NY Times: Fact-Checking Bernie Sanders on the Campaign Trail

"Fact-Checking Bernie Sanders on the Campaign Trail"

"Mr. Sanders has campaigned on his record of popularizing progressive positions and taking aim at President Trump. Here’s a fact-check of his remarks."



link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/politics/fact-checking-bernie-sanders-campaign.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage