NATO is a good thing and not obsolete but I don’t agree with the relentless expansion of NATO eastward that has been promoted by some. If you wouldn’t be proud to die protecting Montenegro from foreign invasion then you shouldn’t want Montenegro to be part of NATO.
As somebody who spent a lot of time in Crimea on the mission I gotta say, that place was very much Russian. Thank goodness Ukraine wasn’t part of NATO when Putin decided to take Crimea back.
"Guitar groups are on their way out, Mr Epstein."
Upon rejecting the Beatles, Dick Rowe told Brian Epstein of the January 1, 1962 audition for Decca, which signed Brian Poole and the Tremeloes instead.
From Putin's perspective the Baltics are part of his kingdom also, I'm sure, even though they were independent countries before WW2. He doesn't probably care that much about the other former Soviet republics because most of them are under his thumb pretty much already, and he's invaded any of them already that get out of line, as he sees it (ie, get too democratic).
Damnit dems... the GOP'ers gave you a gift and put your bill on the floor so now you pull your support?!?
https://www.mediaite.com/online/thre...-to-the-floor/Three House Dems Introduce Bill to Abolish ICE… Then Pull Their Support As It’s Brought to The Floor
Talk about put up or shut up.
In the recent far-left demand to abolish ICE, three congressional Democrats introduced a bill called the Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement System Act that would do just that.
Reps. Mark Pocan (D-WI), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) are the lawmakers who authored the bill.
“President Trump’s blanket directive to round up and target all undocumented immigrants underscores the unchecked power which ICE has used to terrorize our communities,” Pocan said. “From conducting raids at garden centers and meatpacking plants to targeting families outside churches and schools, the president is using ICE as a mass-deportation force to rip apart the moral fabric of our nation.”
Shortly after the bill was introduce, GOP House leadership announced they were planning to bring the bill to a vote, which seems to have been a politically-motivated decision ahead of the 2018 midterms in November.
“Democrats have been trying to make July 4th about abolishing ICE, which is a radical, extreme position that would lead to open borders and undermine America’s national security,” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) told The Hill. “I think it’s the wrong approach. I think everyone ought to be on record about where they stand on that issue.”
However, the three Democrats who authored the bill appeared to have had cold feet.
[...]
Dems are not the brightest bulbs in the knife drawer.
OK...
abolish ICE
So what else do you got on your list of smart ideas?
"If there is one thing I am, it's always right." -Ted Nugent.
"I honestly believe saying someone is a smart lawyer is damning with faint praise. The smartest people become engineers and scientists." -SU.
"Yet I still see wisdom in that which Uncle Ted posts." -creek.
GIVE 'EM HELL, BRIGHAM!
Trump's numbers had been improving for a while but appear to be headed the wrong way for him again since about the 3rd week of June when the family separation at the border became a big issue.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ep...oval-6179.html
Yeah, Drumpf needs to get those poor kids back with theirabusers"parents" ASAP...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ocial-facebookGovernment says parents of nearly HALF of kids younger than 5 taken at the border can't have them back because they're child abusers, kidnappers and murderers – and others aren't actually parents
- President tweeted this week that Democrats in Congress should help stop illegal immigrants gain entry to the U.S. by bring children with them
- 'Traffickers know how it works,' he claimed; 'They are just using children!'
- Homeland Security Department has cited 'many instances where human traffickers have used children to cross the border to gain illegal entry'
- Now DOJ and DHS say 46 of the 103 children in custody who are under 5 years old wouldn't be safe with the adults who brought them across the border
- Some weren't actually their parents; others are in prison for kidnapping, child abuse or murder; another is wanted for murder in Guatemala
- Still others gave phony birth certificates or planned to house a child with a known child sex abuser
- A dozen were deported but declined to take their children with them
The Trump administration said Thursday that nearly half of the children ages 5 and under who were separated from grown-ups at the U.S. border can't be reunited with their parents, mostly because many of the adults are violent criminals – and some lied about being the minors' parents.
[...]
What the hell is he waiting for?!? The dems are right... ICE should be abolished!
"If there is one thing I am, it's always right." -Ted Nugent.
"I honestly believe saying someone is a smart lawyer is damning with faint praise. The smartest people become engineers and scientists." -SU.
"Yet I still see wisdom in that which Uncle Ted posts." -creek.
GIVE 'EM HELL, BRIGHAM!
"If there is one thing I am, it's always right." -Ted Nugent.
"I honestly believe saying someone is a smart lawyer is damning with faint praise. The smartest people become engineers and scientists." -SU.
"Yet I still see wisdom in that which Uncle Ted posts." -creek.
GIVE 'EM HELL, BRIGHAM!
Sorry Frank... how's this?
VdDWlOVwaWZboD5J5JKPll0spPFGsYGhxq9adF1VRmw.jpg
"If there is one thing I am, it's always right." -Ted Nugent.
"I honestly believe saying someone is a smart lawyer is damning with faint praise. The smartest people become engineers and scientists." -SU.
"Yet I still see wisdom in that which Uncle Ted posts." -creek.
GIVE 'EM HELL, BRIGHAM!
I loved how some of the Republican congressmen would ask Strzok a crazy loaded question, then when he'd answer it and start sounding credible they would immediately cut him off lest anyone would think he was coming off pretty well.
What a freaking joke.
It's frustrating how unwilling the Congress is to push back on Trump's stupidity even when they know he's being stupid, as with the tariffs. The Senate just passed a non-binding resolution 88-11 stating their desire to constrain the president's ability to cite "national security" as justification for his tariffs, yet Clown Speaker Ryan who is not a pro-tariffs guy in the least says they won't try to pass anything in the House to remove tariffs because the President wouldn't sign it. Hello moron, have you ever heard of a veto override? Heaven forbid pass something that might upset the baby in the White House.
https://www.npr.org/2018/07/13/62857...trumps-tariffs
Also, never mind the fact that things he's putting tariffs on now have clearly nothing to do with "national security." It's just another example of executive overreach. The justification is based on a very stretched interpretation of a 1962 law that is Constitutionally dubious anyway. A tariff is a tax. The Constitution says taxes can only start in the House of Reps.
Let's tax America to greatness. How "conservative" of him.
Last edited by BlueK; 07-13-2018 at 10:05 AM.
Let's drop the euphemisms: Donald Trump is a racist president
Watching this pinball president ricochet around Europe, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s no method to Donald Trump’s madness.
Nato is both a rip-off and very strong. Theresa May’s Brexit plan is both pathetic and terrific. Trump’s interview with the Sun was both fake news and generally fine. Trump has all the consistency of Katy Perry’s Hot N Cold, except when it comes to two things: immigrants and Vladimir Putin.
Immigration is where Trump’s journey begins and ends: the message running all the way through this stick of rock. Trump told the Sun that immigration in Europe was “a shame”. Why such concern? “I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was and I don’t mean that in a positive way.”
Don’t worry, Mr President. We didn’t think you meant it in a positive way. There was a time when politicians like you preferred to use a dog whistle, but those days seem quaint now. There’s something to be said for using a foghorn to blast your racism across the continents. At least we all know what kind of politics you represent.
But just in case anyone had any doubts, Trump took his explicit nativism several steps into more sinister territory on Friday while standing next to the British prime minister. When asked about his “fabric of Europe” comments, Trump began by talking about terrorism, before explaining his thinking.
“I just think it’s changing the culture. I think it’s a very negative thing for Europe. I think it’s very negative,” he said, as if we didn’t hear him the first time with the foghorn. “And I know it’s politically not necessarily correct to say that. But I’ll say it and I’ll say it loud. And I think they better watch themselves because you are changing the culture.”
They better watch themselves because you are changing the culture. There’s a polite way to say this, but the time for good manners has long gone. The president of the United States just threatened the safety and security of immigrants the world over.
Not just in Europe, he made clear, as he continued to talk about American immigration. “We have very bad immigration laws and we’re, I mean, we’re doing incredibly well considering the fact that we virtually don’t have immigration laws,” he explained.
So now we know. The reason Trump ordered the separation of thousands of immigrant children from their parents – some never to be reunited again – was because they better watch themselves. They are changing the culture and it better stop or else they’ll get hurt.
Trump has mused before about how good it would be to deport people without judges messing things up. He doesn’t consider his own country’s ample immigration laws to be actual laws that he respects. It’s one short step for a president – but one long step for democracy – to go from disrespecting the laws to ignoring them.
This is the language and mentality of so many extreme-right and neo-Nazi parties in Europe. So in the Trump spirit of saying it loud, it’s time to drop the euphemisms: Trump is today’s first major government to be led by the racist far right. It’s not some kind of new populist politics; it’s the old National Front.
It’s more than “not normal” – the media’s favorite phrase for expressing disapproval with the way Trump is blowing up the old norms. Trump personifies the kind of extremist policies that were the wet dreams of the John Birch Society and George Wallace.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. This is a president who started with racist conspiracies about the birthplace of America’s first black president, before launching his campaign with a racist rant about Mexican rapists. Once elected, after losing the popular vote, he rushed out his Muslim travel ban and has since unleashed his long-promised deportation force on anyone looking faintly Latino.
At this point, there are many previously respectable leaders – at home and overseas – as well as administration officials and journalists who have fooled themselves into thinking they are some kind of moderating influence. They have failed. They are a cheap veneer of respectability on an explicitly and punitively racist president.
The moral choices that Trump poses to anyone with a conscience or love of country are only made more clear by the ludicrous irony of his own story.
The grandson of a German immigrant, Trump has married not one but two immigrants. He knows full well how hard it is to be an immigrant: his family was so ashamed of its German roots through two world wars that Trump continued to pretend he had Swedish roots at the time he put his name to The Art of the Deal.
As any TV psychologist might observe, it was a continental-sized giveaway when Trump lied about his immigrant roots to the press after trashing Nato on Thursday. “I have great respect for Germany,” he said, after attacking the German government for months. “My father is from Germany.”
Fred Trump, father to Donald, was born in the Bronx.
If you make a herculean effort, you can just about understand what Trump means when he complains that the culture is changing. It’s true: the world is becoming more integrated and diverse right before his eyes.
That diversity is not just a source of talent for America and Europe, but has long been the core test of our decency: the standard by which we judge ourselves. America’s founding freedoms were in part to protect religious minorities persecuted elsewhere: the kind of people we’d call asylum seekers today.
Or, as Theresa May gamely put it on Friday: “The UK has a proud history of welcoming people who are fleeing persecution to our country. We have a proud history of welcoming people who want to come to our country to contribute to our economy and contribute to our society. And over the years, overall immigration has been good for the UK.”
Even the Brexit-leading prime minister, after an anti-immigrant Brexit campaign, has to admit the obvious. Another foreign leader might recognize those words as a rebuke. But not this president.
Trump is the kind of person who digs around the darkest corners of the extreme-right internet to come up with some England First nonsense. “You don’t hear the word England as much as you should,” he told the Sun, spouting the kind of drivel that gives skinheads a bad name. “I miss the name England,” he said.
If he read one of his many unexamined briefing papers, he might know that one of the likely conservative successors to Theresa May is the immigrant-sounding Sajid Javid, born Muslim in the north of England. His family shares a Pakistani heritage with the immigrant-sounding Sadiq Khan, the left-leaning London mayor Trump thinks is a terrorist sympathizer.
Perhaps next time Trump visits London, he’ll have to remember whether the bad guy is called Sajid or Sadiq. That’s the problem when the culture changes. You better watch yourself, Donald.
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...acism-uk-visit
"Just watched the speech. He lit up both sides. I loved it." -Shaka
OMG!... DRUMPF SAT IN WINSTON'S CHAIR!!!
eAQuhEQX6Z01eEZvrEutoHut7EBi4BBYrADZy29yGaM.jpg
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"If there is one thing I am, it's always right." -Ted Nugent.
"I honestly believe saying someone is a smart lawyer is damning with faint praise. The smartest people become engineers and scientists." -SU.
"Yet I still see wisdom in that which Uncle Ted posts." -creek.
GIVE 'EM HELL, BRIGHAM!
Some of the British protests against Trump have been pretty funny, including the Baby Smallhands blimp and a large poster: "We Shall Overcomb!" Apparently earlier today a Greenpeace paraglider sailed very close to Trump at the Turnberry Golf Club, pulling a sign reading, "Trump, Well Below Par. #Resist!" Apparently the sign conspirators aren't golfers; Trump probably thought it was intended as a compliment, when in truth he has never been well below par.
Wow, these are the kind of cases Trump is seeking clemency for? Tommy Robinson is a racist, anti-Muslim goon. This isn't even a racist dog-whistle, it's a trumpet. The EDL is a disgusting and vile hate group.
Trump’s Ambassador Lobbied UK On Behalf Of Jailed Right-Wing Activist Tommy Robinson
Sam Brownback complained about how the anti-immigrant campaigner was being treated.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b022fdcc59bf6fSam Brownback, the U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom, complained to the British ambassador in Washington D.C. about the treatment of an English right-wing activist who is in jail for disrupting a trial, according to three sources familiar with the discussion.
Brownback raised the case of the activist known as Tommy Robinson in a June meeting with Sir Kim Darroch, Britain’s Ambassador to the United States, according to a British official and two sources close to the organizers of a pro-Robinson demonstration planned for London on Saturday.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, though he also uses other aliases, is a founder of the English Defense League, which has organized violent demonstrations against Islamic immigrants in the UK in the past decade. More recently, Robinson has branded himself a journalist and campaigner against Islamic extremism, a move that won him contacts with American anti-Muslim activists.
Robinson was arrested in late May outside a courthouse in Leeds, England, while making video recordings about a trial related to child molestation and jailed for 13 months for violating English law limiting publicity during criminal trials.
Brownback raised the jailing of Robinson during a meeting with Darroch that covered a range of “religious freedom issues,” the British official confirmed earlier this week.
Brownback told Darroch that if Britain did not treat Robinson more sympathetically, the Trump administration might be compelled to criticize Britain’s handling of the case, according to the two sources in contact with organizers of the planned pro-Robinson demonstration.
The sources said Robinson’s supporters, who have also been in touch with the Trump administration about the issue, were concerned that he could be attacked by other prisoners.
Reuters was unable to determine why the top U.S. official responsible for defending religious freedom would try to intervene with the British government on behalf of an activist who has expressed ant-Islamic views.
Brownback, who is a former governor of Kansas and former U.S. senator, was not available for comment. However, on Thursday a U.S. State Department spokesman said the “characterizations” of Brownback’s meeting with Darroch by Reuters sources were “completely false” but the spokesman did not elaborate further.
The British Embassy had no comment on further details of the discussion.
Last week, the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia group, said it was sponsoring and organizing a “Free Tommy Robinson” demonstration in London near the British Parliament on Saturday in collaboration with British and European groups.
The event was expected to merge with a demonstration in support of U.S. President Donald Trump, who appointed Brownback, according to the British newspaper The Independent.
Demonstration organizers said in a leaflet which circulated in London this week that Republican U.S. Congressman Paul Gosar and Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders were scheduled to speak at its rally. U.S. Congressman Gosar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But Wilders tweeted on Thursday that he would not attend the rally because the U.K. Ambassador to the Netherlands, Peter Williams, told Dutch authorities Britain would not provide security for him.
British police said they were imposing restrictions on the event to “prevent serious disruptions” after protesters at a previous event made Nazi salutes and threw bottles at officers.
A spokesman for Hope Not Hate, a British anti-racism group, said, “In the week President Trump comes to the UK, his hand-picked diplomat allying himself with a far-right convicted fraudster perhaps shouldn’t be too much of a shock.”
"Just watched the speech. He lit up both sides. I loved it." -Shaka
You're actually pretty funny when you aren't being a complete a-hole....so basically like 5% of the time. --Art Vandelay
I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace, than to risk peace in pursuit of politics. --President Donald J. Trump
Anyone can make war, but only the most courageous can make peace. --President Donald J. Trump
You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. --William Randolph Hearst
Just remember, you can't put a price tag on 2 supreme court picks. MAGA!!!!
What the fuck, ya'll? Is there anybody not super embarrassed who wants to stick their neck out and defend this shit?
"I'm anti, can't no government handle a commando / Your man don't want it, Trump's a bitch! I'll make his whole brand go under,"
From two weeks ago:
SUwish! I also want everyone's praise for my prediction that the sun would rise this morning. Anyone who isn't embarrassed by Trump's tweets and press conference this morning is the type of person Trump was talking about when he said he wouldn't lose their support if he shot someone in the face on Fifth Avenue.
I suspect at least two posters here have no problem with Trump's conclusion that the U.S. is just as bad as Russia, but I also assume everyone else here is ashamed of how spineless Trump was this morning.
omg. Words fail me. Worst president in history.
"There is no creature more arrogant than a self-righteous libertarian on the web, am I right? Those folks are just intolerable."
"It's no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it's sanctimony." -- Guy Periwinkle, The Nix.
"Juilliardk N I ibuprofen Hyu I U unhurt u" - creekster