Grasswire2
Grasswire2's JournalCommon Dreams: SHUT DOWN the Senate!
The tactic that put Gorsuch on the Court was extreme but constitutional. The tactic that blocks Brett Kavanaugh is no more extreme, and no less constitutional.
It’s this: First, if Republicans don’t agree to table the nomination until 2019, every Democratic senator but one will boycott the Senate chamber for the rest of the year. Then the one remaining Democrat, a rotating position, will rise to deny unanimous consent on every matter the Senate tries to take up, including each quorum call. This means all 50 Republicans (with the passing of John McCain) must be in or near the chamber on any day Republicans wish to do business.
Even if Democrats execute this perfectly though, and Kavanaugh is confirmed, they will nonetheless prove that the “constitutional revolution” his confirmation guarantees — which even Republican voters will come to hate — is entirely of Republican doing.
They could still win every vote they want to win — 50 Republicans and one Democrat does constitute a quorum — but the price would be high. No single Republican senator could stray far from the chamber on days the Senate was in session — she could not go home, fundraise outside of DC or lunch with lobbyists away from the Capitol. Business as usual would end, and only votes Republicans deemed crucial could pass. The life of a Republican senator would drastically change.
This isn’t just a threat to disrupt the Kavanaugh vote. If Democrats do only that, they will lose. This is a threat to disrupt the Senate itself, and the life of each Republican senator, for the rest of the year — unless Republicans table the nomination until the next Senate is seated.
Papadapapap 14 days jail and 1 year supervision. nt
tabby has gotten extremely needy and weird
Her history. We rescued her from shelter almost three years ago. They told us that she was eight years old, that she had lived with five other cats whose owner could no longer afford to care for them, that she had not been spayed until in the shelter (from that we assumed she had cared for many litters of kittens in adulthood) A very sweet, loving cat. Very affectionate. In the last year or so, she has grown increasingly needy and odd. She spent most of ten months until mid summer burrowed under blankets 90 percent of the time. Since then she only wants to sit on my lap or hide. Mostly sleep on my lap. Obsessively. I am wondering if she is lonely for other cats. She's fixated on me. Not at all on other family.
Any thoughts?
What if it's PENCE??
What if the author of the NYT piece is PENCE.
Think about it.
This is how the inauguration was protested. But there's no similar pushback against Kavanaugh?
Between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people participated in the Women's March in the United States,[26] or approximately 1.0 to 1.6 percent of the U.S. population. In total, worldwide participation has been estimated at over seven million.[11][12][27] At least 408 marches were reported to have been planned in the U.S. and 168 in 81[11] other countries.[28] After the marches, officials who organized them reported that 673 marches took place worldwide, on all seven continents, including 29 in Canada, 20 in Mexico,[13] and one in Antarctica.[29][30] In Washington D.C. alone, the march was the largest single political demonstration on record.
Kavanaugh will provide the opening for all the issues that were so passionately repudiated and feared in the Women's March. He is the key.
And his likely betrayal of the bedrock principle that no man is above the law may very well be the mortal blow to our republic. Finding that would grant Trump carte blanche to run wild. No constraints.
And no one will lay down a marker for history that we objected? Just like when Al Gore would not stand with the Black Caucus when they begged him to challenge the certification of the Florida vote. Cry the beloved country.
In HUGE TYPE re: Kavanaugh papers!!
"These days Burck represents White House counsel Don McGahn, former White House adviser Steve Bannon and former chief of staff Reince Priebus in the Mueller probe."
Burck is the attorney reviewing the Kavanaugh papers for release.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Read more here: [link:https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article217734385.html#storylink=cpy|
NYT 9/1 Agents Tried To Flip Russian Oligarchs. The Fallout Spread To Trump
WASHINGTON — In the estimation of American officials, Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin, has faced credible accusations of extortion, bribery and even murder.
They also thought he might make a good source.
Between 2014 and 2016, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department unsuccessfully tried to turn Mr. Deripaska into an informant. They signaled that they might provide help with his trouble in getting visas for the United States or even explore other steps to address his legal problems. In exchange, they were hoping for information on Russian organized crime and, later, on possible Russian aid to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, according to current and former officials and associates of Mr. Deripaska.
In one dramatic encounter, F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced and uninvited at a home Mr. Deripaska maintains in New York and pressed him on whether Paul Manafort, a former business partner of his who went on to become chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign, had served as a link between the campaign and the Kremlin.
The attempt to flip Mr. Deripaska was part of a broader, clandestine American effort to gauge the possibility of gaining cooperation from roughly a half-dozen of Russia’s richest men, nearly all of whom, like Mr. Deripaska, depend on President Vladimir V. Putin to maintain their wealth, the officials said.
NY Books: The Flynn Tapes: A New Tell
[link:https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/08/29/the-flynn-tapes-a-new-tell/|
In early February 2017, a senior White House attorney, John Eisenberg, reviewed highly classified intelligence intercepts of telephone conversations between then-National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, which incontrovertibly demonstrated that Flynn had misled the FBI about those conversations, according to government records and two people with first-hand knowledge of the matter. It was after this information was relayed to President Trump that the president fired Flynn, and the following day allegedly pressured then-FBI Director James Comey to shut down a federal criminal investigation into whether Flynn had lied to the FBI.
Eisenberg reviewed the intercepts on or about February 2, 2017, according to confidential White House records and two former White House officials. Despite the fact that not only Eisenberg but presumably also other senior White House officials learned this information, they apparently took no immediate action. Only on February 8, 2017—after The Washington Post contacted the White House to say that it was about to publish a story about the intercepts showing that Flynn had lied about his conversations with Kislyak—did administration officials do anything. That same day, confidential White House records indicate, then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, White House Counsel Don McGahn, and Eisenberg directly confronted Flynn about what they learned from the intercepts. On February 10, Vice President Mike Pence, Preibus, and McGahn spoke to Flynn again, but received no satisfactory explanations from him, and recommended to President Trump that Flynn be fired. On February 13, 2017, Flynn resigned.
A former senior White House official, with first-hand knowledge of the matter, expressed disbelief at the inaction: “You have a White House lawyer learning that the national security adviser to the president of the Untied States has possibly lied—about his contacts with Russians—not only to his own White House, but also to the FBI, which is a potential felony, and nobody does anything?” The person added: “I have no reason to question John Eisenberg’s integrity or that he is an exceptional attorney. I guess I buy into narrative that this was a White House in disarray, because the alternative is too painful to contemplate.”
Aside from the unexplained, six-day delay of the White House to act on Eisenberg’s information, these new disclosures, building on my July 31 reporting for the Daily, constitute the strongest evidence to date that President Trump may have obstructed justice. Perjury and obstruction of justice cases depend largely on whether a prosecutor can demonstrate the intent and motivation of the person they want to charge. It’s not enough to prove that the person attempted to impede an ongoing criminal investigation; the statute requires a prosecutor to prove that the person did so with the corrupt intent to protect himself or someone else from prosecution. The president’s legal team has claimed that Trump did nothing wrong because he did not understand that Flynn was in criminal jeopardy when, according to the former FBI director’s testimony, he asked Comey to go easy on Flynn. The new information that Trump and others in the White House were aware that the intercepts revealed that Flynn had lied to the FBI directly contradicts those claims.
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