Vuld Edone
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.
Thursday October 17, 2019 · 10:27 AM EDT

Hi’.

It has become an habit of mine for the foreigner I am to talk about the studies done on Medicare-for-All. I talked about its pricetag and then briefly felt the need to remind people of the keyword that is cost control.

With Elizabeth Warren being grilled on “how to pay for a plan to reduce health care costs”, CNN relied on the Urban Institute’s second study (2019) to once again say M4A will bankrupt everyone and their grandma. I personally rely on Pollin et al. (2018) — or “the PERI study” — but, as the idiotic centrist that I am, I wanted to check if my preferate study was wrong.

So let’s try to forget about my prejudices towards a study whose bibliography is two pages long (compared to Pollin et alii’s thirteen, let me be petty), we’ll just look at the numbers.

(As a reminder, there are other studies out there, I’m just singling those two out.)

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/10/17/1893079/-Medicare-for-All-cost-studies-PERI-vs-the-Urban-Institute?utm_campaign=spotlight

Mark Sumner
Daily Kos Staff
Friday October 18, 2019 · 10:45 AM EDT

When Ambassadors Marie Yovanovitch and Gordon Sondland appear on Capitol Hill to testify before the House impeachment inquiry, the media pays attention. But just because Friday doesn’t bring a big in-the-news name to sit down before the combined committees, that doesn’t mean the testimony being given is trivial. Because Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper knows the details about the military aid that was slated for Ukraine—including when that aid was halted, and what the Pentagon was told.

What Cooper has to say could be particularly important because of what the inquiry is not getting from the rest of the Defense Department. On Wednesday, Trump-appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert Hood refused to turn over subpoenaed documents after making the claim that the impeachment inquiry did not actually have the power to authorize subpoenas, along with an assertion that the DOD was covered by a kind of blanket executive branch privilege.

Without those documents, it’s difficult to verify the dates of everything involved with the military aid slated for Ukraine. When did the Defense Department inform the White House that it had completed its actual review of the proposed aid? When did Trump let the Pentagon know that he was blocking the aid under claims that the review had not been completed?

As Yahoo News reports, it was Cooper who actually had charge of the aid package and sent Ukraine a video address almost a year ago saying, “You can count on the United States to remain your strong partner in strengthening Ukraine’s military to defend Ukrainian democracy.” But the aid that Cooper promised was on its way didn’t come. Not that winter, or the next spring, or over the summer. It wasn’t until the White House was aware of the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s actions that the funds were finally released. Trump continued to hold up the money, despite a letter from the Defense Department saying that Ukraine had “taken substantial actions” toward decreasing corruption and improving accountability.

https://www.dailykos.com/

Hey Hood maybe you should go into at least Webster dictionary and look up subpoena, here I'll make easy for you since you think you are above the rule of law:


Definition of subpoena

(Entry 1 of 2)
: a writ commanding a person designated in it to appear in court under a penalty for failure

subpoena verb
subpoenaed; subpoenaing

Definition of subpoena (Entry 2 of 2)

transitive verb
: to serve or summon with a writ of subpoena

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/subpoena

By Kate Riga
|
October 18, 2019 9:49 am

Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Friday that he had no qualms being directed to work with Rudy Giuliani on matters related to Ukraine, since he “trusted him.”

“I’ve known Rudy since 2008. I endorsed him for President in 2008,” he said on Fox News. “I worked with him. I trusted him.”

When asked if he thought it was strange when President Donald Trump instructed him to talk to Giuliani about a potential meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Perry shrugged.

“As a governor of Texas, I used people outside of government all the time to give me information,” he said. “I respect the State Department. But I happen to know people in the energy industry who are smarter than the State Department folks. I didn’t see a problem with that at all.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/perry-giuliani-ukraine-trump

First and foremost Perry your a fucking idiot, and your a disgrace to ever have worn the uniform of the United States Airforce. Second, when you said this:

“As a governor of Texas, I used people outside of government all the time to give me information,” he said. “I respect the State Department. But I happen to know people in the energy industry who are smarter than the State Department folks. I didn’t see a problem with that at all.”

People inside the energy field, have brought this country to war based on a fucking lie for starters, I keep thinking of Bush /Cheney.
And in the current event that you are complicit in, did you at anytime think that you were / are committing treason.......................or are you still trying to figure out what departments you would have eliminated if you became president........................you really are a idiot

By Tierney Sneed
October 18, 2019 6:00 am

In a scandal whose reach is getting wider and wider, the role that a top White House lawyer played in the events surrounding President Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign stands to be a key focus of the impeachment investigation.

John Eisenberg — a deputy White House counsel who serves as legal counsel to National Security Council — keeps popping up with growing prominence, as Congress seeks to understand the full extent of Trump’s push for a Ukraine smear campaign against his political rivals.

There are many questions about how he handled the initial allegations of an inappropriate pressure campaign — and why he sought to restrict access to a phone call record where Trump spoke explicitly about his demands. Was Eisenberg a careful lawyer being extremely careful or was he complicit in trying to conceal the President’s conduct? Or something in between?

Experts in the inner workings of the White House’s national security apparatus tell TPM that Eisenberg’s legal exposure is potentially significant, even if he was put in almost impossible situation of fielding claims of presidential misconduct that White House’s legal system is not designed to handle.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/why-does-one-white-house-lawyer-keep-coming-up-in-the-ukraine-scandal

-snip-

John Gans, the author of “White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War,” noted the irony of Eisenberg’s current circumstances. Eisenberg is now in the middle of a scandal that has parallels to the Iran-Contra controversy, the Reagan administration covert arms-for-hostages operation that led to the creation of the NSC role Eisenberg now occupies.

“His office is the direct result of the last big misguided foreign policy operation run out of the White House,” Gans told TPM.


I have another solution for Eisenberg.........................LOCK HIS ASS UP..................

Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.

by Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel Oct. 17, 5 a.m. EDT

Last fall, Intuit’s longtime CEO Brad Smith embarked on a farewell tour of the company’s offices around the world. Smith had presided over 11 years of explosive growth, a period when Intuit had secured its place in the Silicon Valley pantheon, and the tour was like a long party.

In Ontario, employees wore T-shirts with Smith’s quasi-spiritual sayings: “Do whatever makes your heart beat fastest” and “Repetition doesn’t ruin the prayer.” In Bangalore, India, workers put on Smith face masks as they posed for selfies with the man himself. Fittingly, the tour culminated in San Diego, the home of TurboTax, the software that transformed the company’s fortunes. There, Smith arrived at his party in a DeLorean, and as he walked a red carpet, cheering employees waved “Brad is Rad” signs. To Smith’s delight, his favorite rock star, Gene Simmons of Kiss, emerged. The two posed for pictures, Simmons clad in black and the beaming CEO flashing the “rock on” hand sign.

Intuit began in the 1980s as an accounting software company focused on helping people with their bookkeeping. Over time, the company, like the other giants of Big Tech, cultivated an image of being not just good at what it did, but good, period. In a recent Super Bowl ad, Intuit portrayed itself as a gentle robot that liberates small-business owners from paperwork. The company stresses values above all, urging employees to “deliver awesome” and pursue “integrity without compromise.”

Intuit’s QuickBooks accounting product remains a steady moneymaker, but in the past two decades TurboTax, its tax preparation product, has driven the company’s steadily growing profits and made it a Wall Street phenom. When Smith took over in 2008, TurboTax was a market leader, but only a small portion of Americans filed their taxes online. By 2019, nearly 40% of U.S. taxpayers filed online and some 40 million of them did so with TurboTax, far more than with any other product.

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free

The president’s businesses made themselves appear more profitable to lenders and less profitable to tax officials. One expert calls the differing numbers “versions of fraud.”

by Heather Vogell

Oct. 16, 4 a.m. EDT

Documents obtained by ProPublica show stark differences in how Donald Trump’s businesses reported some expenses, profits and occupancy figures for two Manhattan buildings, giving a lender different figures than they provided to New York City tax authorities. The discrepancies made the buildings appear more profitable to the lender — and less profitable to the officials who set the buildings’ property tax.

For instance, Trump told the lender that he took in twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities during the same year, 2017. He also gave conflicting occupancy figures for one of his signature skyscrapers, located at 40 Wall Street.

Lenders like to see a rising occupancy level as a sign of what they call “leasing momentum.” Sure enough, the company told a lender that 40 Wall Street had been 58.9% leased on Dec. 31, 2012, and then rose to 95% a few years later. The company told tax officials the building was 81% rented as of Jan. 5, 2013.

A dozen real estate professionals told ProPublica they saw no clear explanation for multiple inconsistencies in the documents. The discrepancies are “versions of fraud,” said Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley. “This kind of stuff is not OK.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-inc-podcast-never-before-seen-trump-tax-documents-show-major-inconsistencies

Congress
5 hours ago

“When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked…what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?”

When Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, testified last February before the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the panel’s chairman, closed the hearing with a seemingly extemporaneous eight-minute speech. Expanding on his own earlier statement that, “we’re better than this,” in reference to the president’s impact on the country, Cummings remarks were strikingly empathetic to Cohen, openly emotional, and morally urgent.

“I know that this has been hard,” Cummings told Cohen. “I know that you face a lot. I know that you are worried about your family. but this is part of your destiny and hopefully this portion of your destiny will lead to a better Michael Cohen, a better Donald Trump, a better Untied States of American, and a better world.”



https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/10/what-democrats-lost-with-elijah-cummings-death/

Published 1 min ago
on October 17, 2019

By Sarah K. Burris

Veteran Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald outlined in a thread that EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland delivered testimony to the House that was devastating for President Donald Trump whether Sondland wanted it to be or not.

“While wrapped in diplomatic-speak and hemming-and-hawing, the statement of Gordon Sondland, U.S. ambassador to European Union, is devastating to Trump and Giuliani,” Eichenwald said. “Given the surrounding evidence, either Giuliani has to say he lied to Sondland, or Trump has to be impeached it is important to dig through it, because, while quite clear on most dates, it takes jumping a bit around in the statement to figure out the date of the key event.”

He outlined a timeline of Sondland’s involvement in the Ukraine scandal:

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/10/heres-why-sondlands-testimony-is-devastating-to-trump-whether-he-wants-it-to-be-or-not/

In my opinion he broke the law and was aiding and abetting in this act of treason against the Constitution..................LOCK HIS ASS UP.....................................

Published 1 min ago
on October 17, 2019

By Brad Reed

Gordon Sondland, the man whom President Donald Trump appointed to be his ambassador to the European Union, told congressional investigators on Thursday that he didn’t understand that President Donald Trump might be holding up establishing direct contact with Ukraine’s government unless the government agreed to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden.

However, given that the president did ask him to run all Ukraine policy through attorney Rudy Giuliani, and given that Giuliani was already publicly boasting about trying to get Ukraine to probe Biden, Sondland’s testimony raises the question of what he actually believed the president’s intentions were in withholding aid to the country this past summer.

National security policy reporter Marcy Wheeler believes that Sondland is employing a similar defense to the one that helped get Donald Trump Jr. off the hook in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election: Namely, that he is too ignorant to have a full understanding of the law.

“Sondland, adopting the strategy that helped Don Jr avoid an indictment: he was too stupid to know he was breaking the law,” Wheeler writes on Twitter, after surveying Sondland’s prepared testimony.

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/10/trumps-eu-ambassador-is-using-the-don-jr-defense-of-being-too-dumb-to-break-the-law-national-security-expert/

I guess this "guy" thinks that he can play stupid...........................criminal intent is still criminal intent and knowing what happened does not make you look innocent.....................far from it................aiding and abetting in conspiracy and knowing about trying to extort anything.................is a crime........................LOCK HIS ASS UP

I really do hate traitors............................

Published 3 mins ago
on October 17, 2019

By Tom Boggioni

Comments made by attorney and law professor John Yoo on Fox News on the Founding Father’s intentions about impeachment received a brutal debunking by two historians — including one of his colleagues at UC Berkeley.

Appearing with Fox News personality Laura Ingraham, lawyer Yoo — who is infamous for providing President George W. Bush’s administration with legal justifications for the torture of prisoners of war — claimed that the Founding Fathers would object to the president being impeached in an election year.

According to Yoo, Democrats are getting it all wrong when they say the Constitution compels them to hold impeachment proceedings against Trump just one year before the election.

“I’m glad they’re reading the Constitution and citing the framers for once but they’ve got it exactly backwards,” Yoo asserted. “What the framers thought was the American people would judge a president at the time of an election, they would have never wanted an impeachment within a year of an election, it’s up to the American people.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/10/historians-demolish-john-yoo-for-claim-founding-fathers-wouldnt-want-trump-impeached-in-an-election-year/

How does this "guy" have job teaching.............................and teaching Federalist Society...................... BS