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Category Archives: My Opinion

Who Do We Owe?


It seems that politics is about owing and paying debts. Who do we the voters owe? Voters are assailed daily by political fights about issues that are fabricated and true. The truth is always readily available but the fabrications more often than not take center stage. The possible reason for this upside-downness is our aversion to pursuing the truth when we hear something that sounds wrong or perhaps the laziness caused by the entertainment value of ridicule. We are in the grip of a political clique that has violated their own oath of office which demands allegiance to the United States ergo the voters. This clique has defiled the offices they hold to the extent that a “Samson” like effort will be required to make it clean. Our Senate is decidedly one-sided and pursuing the agenda of their own and the right-leaning conservatives who under the guise of  “American Values” has installed extreme and sometimes unqualified judges in the lower courts who will certainly shift our democracy away from any sort of  fair hearings on many issues that will affect us for years to come. Some issues that will surely come about: Abortion rights, right to work and Firearm laws. It is legal to bring these issues to these courts as necessary but the Judges in place can surely slant the outcomes. We (voters) need to be aware of the harm already done by our Congress particularly by the Senate lead by Botch McConnell. Mr. McConnell has quietly installed these judges while not bringing attention to his actions. His own home constituents are recipients of his poor legislation and it apparently does not matter to him. It is our duty (voters) to have proper representation and the way we get it is to vote and know who we are voting for, so far our Congress,( in general) has failed to give us what we deserve. Who do we owe? We owe ourselves the best possible representation and the way to get it is to educate ourselves on currently serving representatives and aspiring candidates, then vote on facts, not rhetoric.

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Trump border wall $400 million contract handed to company owned by Republican donor who promoted firm on Fox News


Politricks- Usual Trump deal, “what’s in it for me?” MA

Conrad Duncan, The Independent 1 hour 27 minutes ago

A construction company owned by a Republican donor has been given a $400m (£308.5m) contract to build sections of Donald Trump’s border wall.
The Department of Defence has announced Fisher Sand and Gravel Co, from North Dakota, will build new barriers in Arizona following reports that Mr Trump repeatedly pushed for the company to be given the contract, despite concerns from engineering officials.
Mr Trump had urged officials from the Army Corps of Engineers to pick the company, according to Washington Post reports, and is a fan of the company’s CEO, Tommy Fisher, who has appeared on Fox News to promote the firm.
However, he was apparently told that Fisher Sand and Gravel’s bid did not meet the standards required for the project.
The company has also been supported by senator Kevin Cramer, a Republican from North Dakota, who was given $10,000 by the Fisher family for his Senate campaign in 2018.
Mr Cramer said he was “glad to see more progress being made” on the border wall and “grateful” that Fisher Sand and Gravel had been awarded the contract.
“I know they will do very well, performing high quality work at a good bargain, all for the security of the people of the United States,” he said in a statement.
The Republican senator took Mr Fisher as his guest to the 2018 State of the Union address but said he has not pushed Mr Trump to pick the firm, even though he welcomed the idea of a North Dakota company winning the contract.
Mr Cramer said in May that the president “always brings [the company] up” in conversations and Mr Trump likes Mr Fisher because he has seen him advocating for his firm’s plan on TV.
Fisher Sand and Gravel has claimed it can build the wall faster and cheaper than other companies.
It also has a record of more than $1m in fines for environmental and tax violations, according to CNN, and its former co-owner pleaded guilty to tax fraud and was sentenced to 37 months in prison in 2009.
When asked by CNN about these violations and legal problems, the company said the issues were “resolved years ago” and had “nothing to do with the excellent product and work that Fisher is proposing with regard to protecting America’s southern border”.
In April, Mr Trump mentioned Mr Fisher on Fox News after the company offered to build 234 miles of the border wall for $1.4bn – a fraction of the $8bn cost projected for the project.
When Fox News host Sean Hannity asked about the bid, the president replied that his administration was “dealing with him [Mr Fisher]” and said the company was “recommended strongly by a great new senator, Kevin Cramer”.
Fisher Sand and Gravel has worked with a number of Trump allies, including former adviser Steve Bannon, to build border fences on private land using donations.
Mr Trump has pledged to build 450 to 500 miles of new border barriers by the end of 2020 but so far his administration has only built about 85 miles of new fencing, which has mostly replaced smaller old structures that existed before he took office in 2017.

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The ‘most dangerous politician of my lifetime’ may not be Donald Trump: Robert Reich


If you have not been paying attention, look again. MA

Published 23 hours ago on December 2, 2019
By Robert Reich
He’s maybe the most dangerous politician of my lifetime. He’s helped transform the Republican Party into a cult, worshiping at the altar of authoritarianism. He’s damaged our country in ways that may take a generation to undo. The politician I’m talking about, of course, is Mitch McConnell.
Two goals for November 3, 2020: The first and most obvious is to get the worst president in history out of the White House. That’s necessary but not sufficient. We also have to flip the Senate and remove the worst Senate Majority Leader in history.

Like Trump, Mitch McConnell is no garden-variety bad public official. McConnell puts party above America, and Trump above party. Even if Trump is gone, if the Senate remains in Republican hands and McConnell is reelected, America loses because McConnell will still have a chokehold on our democracy.
Happy Holidays! As a special thanks for your support this year, you can get Raw ad-free for just $2 a week. Now until Dec. 31.

This is the man who refused for almost a year to allow the Senate to consider President Obama’s moderate Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland. When Trump became president, this is the man who got rid of the age-old Senate rule requiring 60 Senators to agree on a Supreme Court nomination so he could ram through not one but two Supreme Court justices, including one with a likely history of sexual assault.
This is the man who rushed through the Senate, without a single hearing, a $2 trillion tax cut for big corporations and wealthy Americans – a tax cut that raised the government debt by almost the same amount, generated no new investment, failed to raise wages, but gave the stock market a temporary sugar high because most corporations used the tax savings to buy back their own shares of stock.
McConnell refuses to support what’s needed for comprehensive election security – although both the U.S. intelligence community and Special Prosecutor Mueller say Moscow is continuing to hack into our voting machines and to weaponize disinformation through social media. McConnell has earned the nickname “Moscow Mitch” because he’s doing exactly what Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump want him to do – leave America vulnerable to another Putin-supported victory for Trump.
McConnell is also blocking bipartisan background-check legislation for gun sales, even after the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, El Paso and Odessa, Texas.
So even if Trump is out of the White House, if McConnell remains Senate Majority Leader he will not allow a Democratic president to govern.
He won’t allow debate or votes on Medicare for All, universal pre-K, a wealth tax, student loan forgiveness, or the Green New Deal. He won’t allow confirmation votes on judges nominated by a Democratic president.
The good news is McConnell is the least popular senator in the country with his own constituents. He’s repeatedly sacrificed Kentucky to Trump’s agenda – for example, agreeing to Trump’s so-called emergency funding for a border wall, which would take $63 million away from projects like a new middle school on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee.
McConnell is even cutting funding for black lung disease suffered by Kentucky coal miners. I know from my years as labor secretary that coal mining is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and the number of cases of incurable black lung disease has been on the rise. But when a group of miners took a 10-hour bus ride to Washington this past summer to ask McConnell to restore the funding, McConnell met with them for one minute and then refused to help them. No wonder Democrats are lining up in Kentucky to run against Moscow Mitch in 2020.
The not-so-good news is that McConnell is up for re-election the same day as Donald Trump, and Trump did well in Kentucky in 2016. This means we have to help organize Kentucky, just as we have to organize other states that may not be swing states in the presidential election but could take back the Senate.
Consider Georgia: Republican Senator Johnny Isakson is retiring, meaning both of Georgia’s Senate seats are now up for grabs. And this one extra seat—in a state that is trending blue—could be the tipping point that allows Democrats to win enough seats to end GOP control of the Senate.
Trump has to go, but so does McConnell.
Here’s what you can do: Wherever you are in the country, you can donate to McConnell’s challengers. If you live in or near Kentucky, you can get out and knock doors or make calls. Or if you have friends or family in the state, encourage them to get involved.
As to the question of who is worse, Trump or McConnell — the answer is that it’s too close to call. The two of them have degraded and corrupted American democracy. We need them both out.

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The Change Required For Progress


We already know how poor an administrator TOTUS is yet we have lost sight of how poor our Congress is. This Congress has allowed a poor administrator to make poor decisions while using the public outcry over those decisions to cover their own nefarious actions. The Congress has been placing their own judges in lifetime positions to the detriment of us all. There is no reason for poor government except our (the voters) failure to see that our long-serving representatives are serving themselves. A few items to consider:

The ACA which was derisively dubbed “Obamacare” provided a way to provide healthcare for most if not all Americans. This was criticized by Congress yet that same Congress took parts they liked and incorporated it in their own healthcare. They (Congress) shortened the enrollment period to 45 days from 90 days which effectively shut many out of the healthcare system and creating an artificial drop in enrollment. This drop was then used to show that not enough people were enrolling and therefore the oft-cited “American People” were not on board with “Obamacare”. This callous act by our elected officials benefitted their narrative which is to show that the ACA is a failure in spite of the fact that approximately 20 million people participated. The underlying truth on any insurance is numbers. The more people enrolled the better the coverage and the cheaper the premiums, by keeping the enrollment numbers down (artificially by shortening the enrollment and keeping public awareness down)  our Congress has attempted to make a good thing bad. This action or nonaction by our supposedly “esteemed” Congress indicates where our elected officials focus lies. The opportunity to improve the ACA went fallow like unattended farmland due to the party politics of our Congress.

The onus is on the voters since we are deciding factors in ALL elections. Politics should not be an entertainment outlet as it has real consequences for all of us. If we refuse to engage in active and serious examinations of the candidates for Congress, we doomed to have the same poor governance we are currently experiencing. Congress is our check on the administration’s poor policies and if they (Congress) are complicit then they need to be replaced.

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Pompeo says documents confirm China committing ‘very significant’ Xinjiang abuses


World Reuters
Pompeo says documents confirm China committing ‘very significant’ Xinjiang abuses. Recently leaked documents confirm China is committing “very significant” human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims and other minority groups in mass detention, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.

While it is all well and good to report the Chinese human rights abuses buy what about the Human rights abuses here and those caused by the Administration’s immigration policies. This is indicative of the current administration’s lack of engagement in its own actions on human rights. TOTUS’s henchmen have been following the guidelines of a pseudo-intellectual abetted by a cadre of miscreants.

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Trump Laments Not Hosting G-7 At His Golf Resort Weeks After Backing Off The Idea


Again “DUDE, It is not about you! The idea that You saved the government $35,000,000 indicates that the several meetings with other leaders held previously did cost the country (voters) money. MA

Allan Smith
7 hrs ago
President Donald Trump on Sunday complained that “very stupid people” were opposed to holding next year’s Group of Seven summit at his Miami golf resort in a tweet that came just weeks after he publicly backed away from the proposal.
“Too bad we didn’t have the G-7 here,” Trump tweeted, noting that Trump National Doral Miami was named Golf.com’s resort of the week. “I offered to pick up the entire cost, would have saved at least $35,000,000 for the USA. Best location. Very stupid people thought I would gain. Wrong! Looking at Camp David. Will announce soon.”
Last month, Trump announced that the Miami resort was no longer under consideration to host the international summit, tweeting he “thought” he “was doing something very good for our Country by using Trump National Doral, in Miami, for hosting the G-7 Leaders.” The president added that Doral had many advantages, including “tremendous ballrooms & meeting rooms,” and that hosting the event would come “at ZERO COST to the USA.”
Trump first floated the idea of holding the G-7 in Miami during this year’s summit in Biarritz, France. The idea came under immediate criticism that he was seeking to personally profit off the presidency, an issue that has come up repeatedly during Trump’s tenure due to his frequent visits to Trump-owned and Trump-branded properties.
Trump is the subject of multiple lawsuits and congressional investigations accusing him of either using his office for financial gain or violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution, which bars any cash or gifts from foreign government officials to the president that are not otherwise approved by Congress. In August, the House Judiciary Committee announced it would probe efforts to hold the G-7 at Doral.
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told “Fox News Sunday” in October that Trump “still considers himself to be in the hospitality business,” and that the president was “honestly surprised at the level of pushback.”
“At the end of the day he still considers himself to be in the hospitality business and he saw an opportunity to take the biggest leaders from around the world and he wanted to put on the absolute best show, the best visit that he possibly could, and he was very comfortable doing that at Doral,” Mulvaney said. “I think we were all surprised at the level of pushback. I think it’s the right decision to change and we’ll have to find someplace else and my guess is we’ll find someplace else the media won’t like for another reason.

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‘I said sure’: Lindsey Graham Blocked Armenian Genocide Resolution At White House Request.


Again this administration is serving its own interest in the world and at home. The world’s biggest sucker is again being played by other world leaders who recognize the fact that his ego will allow them to use him as a pawn. As we all know pawns are expendable. MA

 
Carlin Becker. The Examiner
11 hrs ago
Sen. Lindsey Graham confirmed that he blocked a resolution that would have formally recognized Turkey’s Armenian genocide at the request of the White House.
After Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with President Trump and a group of Republican senators in the Oval Office on Nov. 13, Graham rushed back to the Senate floor and blocked the resolution. Prior to his return to the Senate, a senior White House official told him that Sen. Bob Menendez was planning to present the resolution and asked if Graham could “please object.”
“After the meeting, we kind of huddled up and talked about what happened,” the South Carolina Republican told Axios on Sunday. “I said, sure. The only reason I did it is because he [Erdogan] was still in town. … That would’ve been poor timing. I’m trying to salvage the relationship if possible.”
When asked if he was uncomfortable with the request, Graham said, “Yeah. Because I like Bob [Menendez]. He’s been working on this for years, but I did think with the president of Turkey in town that was probably more than the market would bear.”
He added, “I’m not going to object next time.”
Erdogan likely would have been infuriated had the resolution passed, but senators got their chance to do just that last week when Menendez and Sen. Ted Cruz introduced the resolution again. This time, the White House asked Republican Sen. David Perdue to block it.
“Senator Perdue objected due to concerns that passage of the resolution would jeopardize the sensitive negotiations going on in the region with Turkey and other allies,” a Perdue representative told Axios.
The Trump administration has been trying to convince Turkey to surrender its Russian-made S-400 air defense system. As the negotiations continue, White House officials are trying to block Congress from condemning Turkey’s human rights atrocities. Despite the delay in the Senate, the resolution passed in the house last month.

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The Rise Of The Tyrants


Across the world, we have experienced the rise of dictatorial leaders in many previously tolerant countries. These phenomena have been in the making for at the least 10 years while we have been among the moderating forces as well as leading in some cases, we have also failed to take a leap of faith in others. The current administration in “draining the Swamp” has replaced normal actions with bizarre actions that have exacerbated the exodus of immigrants from countries where we previously provided support for the people and their governments against the baser elements of those countries. We must be reminded that this withdrawal of support with no examination or concern over the effect on those countries and ours appears to be an underthought action. The actions of denying or decreasing the financial and backup military aid has definitely caused an increase in the outflow of immigrants from our “partners” to the south. The several “dictatorial” leaders in the southern continent have taken heart with the actions of the current administration as well as several similar regimes overseas bordering our European allies’ boundaries. TOTUS seemingly has envisioned himself as a “king and Kingmaker”, in reality, he has become a pawn to the more seasoned strongman leaders we (the United States) have opposed and held in check for years. Insults used as retorts are the tools of small minds, not statesmen or leaders. The” dealmaker” has proven his ability to fail is greater than his ability to create.

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Hiding In Plain Sight


The Result of politicians being beholding to the Party rather than the voters is the current proceedings of impeachment. TOTUS was never the best candidate for President yet rather than accepting and training him in Presidential duties, they have allowed he and his miscreants to run roughshod over the Constitution. Meanwhile, they are busily doing their own “shadow” work using the ill-placed President as a cover. It is not inconceivable that this effort towards better government will end up on the cutting floor as it were, while the execution of poor governance practices continues. It is well that a Leader is popular but not popular as a source of entertainment. The office of President is a serious job requiring serious execution yet we have our current situation of “tweet diplomacy” which is aided and abetted by 535 plus seat fillers. While TOTUS  entertains, the country suffers as the Congress, for the most part, continues to hold or push legislation that benefits their big-dollar donors not the voters who elected them to office. This is simply a band of pirates hiding in plain sight under the banner of patriotism. All for the good of the party and not the voters.

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Honestly?


There was a time when the phrase “honest politician” was liberally used to describe candidates for office. Perhaps the phrase was true or a sound bite yet it appears to be laughable today. What is considered “modern” politics along with the advent of National newspapers to now mass media of all types indicates there are no honest politicians per se, merely degrees of honesty. We have become inured to the truth and that plays into the game plan of the political “influencers” as their objective is to cover their true goal with mystical utterances (lies) until they appear to be true. Once a title or label is affixed to someone, an action, activity or something repeatedly, it becomes public domain and ersatz believable. This is the baseline of our current administration and his loyal party and public supporters. The truth is the victim and voters are not far behind.

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