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Manafort & Stone have been partners in organized crime for decades. They had a firm referred to as the “Torturer’s Lobby” which took millions from dictators.
— Jim Stewartson, Counterinsurgent 🇺🇸🇺🇦💙🎈 (@jimstewartson) March 18, 2024
Manafort joined the Trump campaign when Mike Flynn did in early 2016 and his only real contribution was taking language…
HEALTH REPORTING IN THE STATES
Standard pregnancy care is now dangerously disrupted in Louisiana, report reveals
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/19/1239376395/louisiana-abortion-ban-dangerously-disrupting-pregnancy-miscarriage-care
MARCH 19, 20245:01 AM ET
By Rosemary Westwood
In the wake of Louisiana's abortion ban, pregnant women have been given risky, unnecessary surgeries, denied swift treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, and forced to wait until their life is at risk before getting an abortion, according to a new report first made available to NPR.
It found doctors are using extreme caution to avoid even the appearance of providing an abortion procedure.
"We were stunned by just how much regular medical practice for pregnant people has been disrupted," said Michele Heisler, the medical director of Physicians for Human Rights and one of the report's authors.
The report draws on interviews with 30 health care providers and 13 patients conducted in 2023, and was jointly supported by four groups that support abortion access: Physicians for Human Rights, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Lift Louisiana and Reproductive Health Impact.
It's among the most comprehensive research to date showing abortion bans are changing pregnancy care and worsening maternal health. It concludes that Louisiana's ban is impeding a federal law that regulates the provision of emergency health care, and is infringing on reproductive and human rights.
"There are going to be deaths that didn't have to happen. There are going to be severe complications that didn't have to happen," said Dr. Nicole Freehill, a New Orleans OB-GYN interviewed for the report...................
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Tesla took home $4.4 billion in profits as CEO Elon Musk carted off $2.28 billion in stock options. Meanwhile, Tesla has, during that same period of time, paid an effective tax rate of zero percent. https://t.co/12mrc62rz3
— The New Republic (@newrepublic) March 16, 2024
A Missouri family of four making $40,000 a year can’t qualify for free/reduced lunch.
— Jess Piper (@piper4missouri) March 14, 2024
A Missouri family of four making $166,500 a year can qualify for free/reduced private tuition. pic.twitter.com/bUOqAJMhNZ
Ex-FBI informant accused of lying about Bidens was called a "fraudster" in a prior case
cbs-mornings
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alexander-smirnov-fbi-informant-bidens-fraudster-in-prior-case/
By Daniel Klaidman, Scott MacFarlane, Jessica Kegu
Updated on: March 15, 2024 / 8:22 AM EDT / CBS News
Federal prosecutors were put on notice as far back as 2016 that Alexander Smirnov, the confidential FBI informant whose alleged lies about President Biden's business dealings fueled — and then damaged — a Republican impeachment effort, was a known "liar and a fraudster."
Smirnov, 43, was indicted last month for allegedly fabricating a story about President Biden and his son Hunter each accepting $5 million bribes from a Ukrainian energy company. It was a shocking turn of events, especially given that Smirnov's explosive allegations had been a key piece of the GOP's impeachment quest against Mr. Biden — and that Republican lawmakers had touted him as a highly credible witness.
A CBS News investigation reveals that serious doubts about Smirnov's credibility were raised almost a decade ago and are now prompting questions about why he remained on the FBI payroll as long as he did. CBS News has identified an earlier criminal case in which Smirnov provided information to the FBI that led to a prosecution. And in that earlier case, Smirnov was also accused of lying, just as he was about the corruption allegations against the Bidens.
"Having seen how much he lies, it's kind of surprising that he has been able to do it for as long as he has without anyone in the government stopping him," said Joseph Benincasa, a defense lawyer in that case. "They never should have used him again … it's shocking."
The FBI declined through a spokesperson to comment for this report.
Law enforcement experts told CBS News that the mounting questions about Smirnov's truthfulness should trigger an audit of every case in which he was involved.
"I think a review has to be done, either internally by the FBI or, more advisedly, by the Department [of Justice] to find out not only what happened here, but whether there is a systemic problem in the…supervision of informants," said Michael Bromwich, who is a former Justice Department inspector general.
That could require federal prosecutors to painstakingly re-examine every case Smirnov was involved in to determine whether they were tainted by his deceit, Bromwich said. Agents would likely have to make that effort known to defense lawyers and judges in those cases.
Smirnov's work for the FBI was a closely held secret until February, when the FBI indicted him for allegedly lying to agents about the conduct of President Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. The indictment claims that in 2020 he falsely told the FBI that Hunter Biden demanded millions of dollars for himself and then-Vice President Biden to shield a Ukrainian energy company from an investigation by the country's top prosecutor. Hunter Biden served on the board of the energy firm, Burisma.
According to the indictment, Smirnov told his handlers that Hunter Biden had promised to protect the company "through his dad from all kinds of problems." But FBI officials became suspicious of Smirnov's bombshell allegations when they realized the timeline of events he gave his handlers didn't add up. The indictment also revealed that Smirnov had connections to Russian intelligence services, raising the specter of a disinformation campaign.
The February indictment was not the first instance in which Smirnov was accused of lying in his representations to the FBI, CBS News has learned. Smirnov surfaced as a key secret witness in a sweeping racketeering case in California in 2015. In that case, the Justice Department brought charges against 33 defendants with ties to Armenian organized crime groups. Among the charges were money laundering, health care fraud and even a murder-for-hire.
Smirnov's information contributed to the case against a married couple, Tigran Sarkisyan and his wife Hripsime Khachatryan, charged with conspiring with others to use fake identities to collect tax reimbursements from the federal government. The couple eventually pleaded guilty to a single count of racketeering in May 2017. In a 2018 sentencing memorandum, the couple's lawyers flatly accused Smirnov of deceit.
"The [Confidential Human Source] was known to the United States as a liar and fraudster," the sentencing brief states.
A footnote in the document states that the government was provided with the notes of their private investigator's interview with a close associate of Smirnov who repeatedly called him a "liar."
Benincasa, a lawyer for Sarkisyan and Khachatryan, said his clients' case raises serious concerns about the FBI's handling of its confidential informant.
"Confidential informants will say things to their handlers to, you know, they're trying to get a benefit. Some of them are even being paid. They want to be useful," Benincasa said. "But this one was somebody who was really blatant in his lies."
"In this case," he said, "the FBI did not seem to be interested in reining him [in]."
A lawyer for Smirnov, David Chesnoff, said in a statement, "Our client stands behind his years of service to the Department of Justice and the United States." Smirnov has pleaded not guilty.
Criminal informants are rarely "pillars of society," Steve Laycock, a former FBI assistant director of the bureau's intelligence division who was in charge of its confidential human sources program, told CBS News. They have access to information that is valuable to law enforcement precisely because they inhabit a world of criminals and illicit characters.
Bromwich agreed that an informant's murky background can make it challenging to navigate their tips.
"It's a very tricky and difficult business," he said. "But it's really important for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency to do whatever they can to verify the accuracy and truthfulness of the information they obtain."
Laycock also said the FBI always has an obligation to take careful notice — and possibly take action — when it is alerted to potential problems with its informants.
The story behind the earlier accusations against Smirnov followed a twisted tale involving charges and counter-charges of fraud and deceit among a cast of unsavory if colorful characters.
Smirnov, a dual citizen of Israel and the U.S. who grew up in Soviet-era Ukraine, had insinuated himself in the Armenian community and befriended Sarkisyan and Khachatryan, Benincasa said. But when they were indicted, the couple quickly surmised that Smirnov was a government plant, according to their lawyers. Sarkisyan and Khachatryan claimed that they had their own dealings with Smirnov entirely unrelated to the underlying racketeering charges, and they told their lawyers they could prove he was a liar and swindler.
In 2018, as part of an effort to gain leverage in the sentencing of their clients, the defense lawyers filed a civil complaint on Sarkisyan and Khachatryan's behalf against Smirnov. In it, they alleged breach of contract and fraud.
The lawsuit used Smirnov's real name but did not identify him as the confidential informant in the criminal case because that information was covered by a protective order. Nevertheless, the government knew it was the same person.
Benincasa believes federal prosecutors realized they had a problem. According to Benincasa, the prosecutors had originally indicated they would be seeking a 10-year sentence as part of any plea deal. But after the lawsuit was filed, the government softened its position. Benincasa said he believes prosecutors wanted to avoid seeing Smirnov deposed in the civil case and possibly have his identity as an informant exposed. In the end prosecutors asked for 21 months, an unusually sharp reduction from the original 10 years that Benincasa says they were seeking. The judge ultimately sentenced the couple to 15 months.
Today, Sarkisyan and Khachatryan are out of prison, living and working in Los Angeles and trying to put the whole legal ordeal behind them. Meanwhile, Smirnov is sitting in a federal correctional institution awaiting trial for his alleged lies to the FBI.
In the criminal indictment of Smirnov, prosecutors point out that his FBI handler "admonished" him that "he must provide truthful information to the FBI" on more than 20 occasions since becoming a confidential informant in 2010. Benincasa said his clients are considering filing for a review of their case in light of the revelations about Smirnov.
Pat Milton and Clare Hymes contributed to this report.
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Ian Sams
@IanSams46
White House spokesman for oversight and investigations. Special Assistant to the President & Senior Advisor to WH Counsel’s Office.
NEW >> White House Counsel letter today to Speaker Johnson:
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) March 15, 2024
“It is clear the House Republican impeachment is over. It is obviously time to move on.”
“There is too much important work to be done for the American people to continue wasting time on this charade.” pic.twitter.com/OghBroWxT5
Lying has become a feature, not a bug, in American politics. Katie Britt proved that. Let’s demand better, my latest:https://t.co/3DDZ2PHhqs pic.twitter.com/2ZCdE17pWr
— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) March 15, 2024
No. He knew exactly what he was doing. The FBI told him how unreliable the source was and that he was likely compromised. The trumplecans set up and paid for the whole thing, and then they attacked the messenger (the FBI) with screaming "what do they have to hide" bs when the FBI was reluctant to source that to them, knowing full well that trump's people was paying for the witness to lie. Of course now they are attempting to project the fault back to the FBI now. Planned disinformation campaign and it has worked. Kept the true cult base believing and fed with the outright lies, injecting massive amounts of false equivalencies, keeping a lot of the attention away from the criminality of their own party. Purposely creating doubt and bothsidisms for the group from the the fence downward to the edge of the extreme cult.
No, not stupidity, just immoral and greedy, and using any brains for nefarious purposes. Doesn't matter if they take chunks out of America doing it as long as they can have a good big chunk for themselves.
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It's only one heat wave and we are now over the 365th day of every day record heat. Last year was a record year by a lot. Highest global sea surface temp was about around the end of Aug, Sept which is normal (not normal temp, normal time to be highest). We've already beaten that the first part of this year, get ready for a lot more heat, flooding, and wind coming.
3 days ago the latest data from CERES was just released and the 36-month running mean for the Earth energy imbalance is at yet another record high, at 1.6W/m², equivalent to 13 Hiroshimas per second or about 1.23B Hiroshimas of Earth heating over the last 36 months.
Push play for full effect.
As crazy as it may sound, Global sea surface temperatures have now been at all-time record warm levels for an entire year.
— Nahel Belgherze (@WxNB_) March 12, 2024
This is perhaps one of the most absurd and alarming graphs I have ever plotted. pic.twitter.com/5JzjT6IuR7
ok, done!https://t.co/yEOnkTckv6
— Brian McNoldy (@BMcNoldy) March 14, 2024
US firm that paid indicted FBI informant tied to Trump associates, records reveal
Alexander Smirnov was paid $600,000 in 2020 – the same year he allegedly began lying to FBI about Bidens’ role in Ukraine business
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/14/company-paying-fbi-informant-trump-connections
An American company that paid the now indicted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov in 2020 is connected to a UK company owned by Trump business associates in Dubai, according to business filings and court documents.
Smirnov is now accused of lying to the FBI about Hunter Biden and his father, President Joe Biden, alleging that they engaged in a bribery scheme with executives at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Smirnov’s accounts to the FBI, beginning in 2020, that federal prosecutors now say are fabrications, served as a major justification of the House impeachment investigation into the Bidens.
Republican lawmakers have repeatedly touted Smirnov as a reliable informant, and the chairman of the House oversight committee, James Comer, even threatened to hold FBI director Christopher Wray in contempt unless he “handed over” a June 2020 FBI form with Smirnov’s claims to the committee.
Back in 2020, Smirnov was paid $600,000 by a company called Economic Transformation Technologies (ETT), prosecutors said. That same year, Smirnov began lying to the FBI about the Bidens, according to the indictment........................
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Just the same reasons that Musk and the Saudi's bought twitter/x. Control social media, where musk controls the algorithms to suppress anything that isn't pro putin or pro trump, the algorithms with tick tock work a little different controlling what posts get displayed, not who one follows, and their algorithms don't have to suppress and they choose and control what is shown. Same results, just a little bit different path.
Conditional libertarianism, where my freedoms cancel out yours. Which, in my experience, seems to be what most self-described "libertarians" actually subscribe to. https://t.co/s0oVvFSHkW
— Alan W Stone 🟧🌻 (@crappy_diem) March 14, 2024
What a bunch of Malarkey. Got one for blocking trump ads.
— Two Cents (@2centssays) March 14, 2024
Yup. They do not pinpoint a single reason aside from "amplifying messages".
— & Justice for ALL?? (@sunflowerklo) March 14, 2024
If she's talking, she's lying.
I’m sure the fact that Trump recently meet with a billionaire Tik Tok investor and then announced he opposes a ban right after the meeting had nothing to do with why this April 20, 2023 Mace tweet is so different from the one today. pic.twitter.com/0SrUUVDpC5
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 14, 2024
First half of clip is Nancy Mace claiming she was always against banning Tik Tok because she’s a libertarian, and Trump recently coming out against the ban after meeting with a billionaire Tik Tok investor has nothing to do with it.
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 14, 2024
Second half is what she said Dec 31, 2022. pic.twitter.com/jliHqPlDiD
29 other high-profile, profitable corporations also paid their execs more than they paid in federal income taxes in at least two of those five years, including:
— Americans For Tax Fairness (@4TaxFairness) March 13, 2024
AT&T
General Motors
Chevron
Marathon
Charter
FedEx
Whirlpool
These firms all made billions of dollars in profits.
“How Come Everything the Republican Party Stands for Involves Other People Dying?”
Is there something in the GOP’s core beliefs and strategies that just inevitably leads to these outcomes?
https://hartmannreport.com/p/how-come-everything-the-republican-66c
THOM HARTMANN
MAR 13, 2024
According to a popular meme, comedian Noel Casler (the guy who worked on The Apprentice and outed Trump’s drug abuse and diaper wearing) asks, “How come everything the Republican Party stands for involves other people dying?”
He then goes on to note GOP support for assault weapons, opposition to masks and vaccines, opposition to saving the environment, and their all-out war on Obamacare and Medicare-for-All.
Casler may have just been being glib, doing the written equivalent of a standup routine, but his question deserves a serious answer, so let’s look at the evidence.
It’s undeniably true that Republican-controlled “Red” states, almost across the board, have higher rates of:
Spousal abuse
Obesity
Smoking
Teen pregnancy
Sexually transmitted diseases
Abortion
Bankruptcies and poverty
Homicide and suicide
Infant mortality
Maternal mortality
Forcible rape
Robbery and aggravated assault
Dropouts from high school
Divorce
Contaminated air and water
Opiate addiction and deaths
Unskilled workers
Parasitic infections
Income and wealth inequality
Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
People on welfare
Child poverty
Homelessness
Spousal murder
Unemployment
Deaths from auto accidents
People living on disability
But are all these things, along with widespread GOP support for dictators like Putin, Orbán, and Xi, happening because Republicans hate their citizens and worship poverty, death and disease?
Or is there something in the GOP’s core beliefs and strategies that just inevitably leads to these outcomes?
It turns out that’s very much the case: these terrible outcomes are the direct result of policies promoting greed and racism that the GOP has been using for forty+ years to get access to billions of dollars and win elections.
Using racism as a political strategy while promoting and defending the greed of oligarchs always leads to widespread poverty, pollution, ignorance, and death regardless of the nation it’s done in.
We’ve seen it over and over again around the world: it’s happening today in India, The Philippines, Brazil, Russia, and Hungary, for example. And the GOP has spent the past 40+ years marinating itself in both.
Here’s how it happened here in America:
The GOP first openly embraced racism in 1964 when the party’s presidential candidate that year, Barry Goldwater, proudly refused to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It was a huge shift for the party of Lincoln, and when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, the South did a collective “what the hell?!?”
As LBJ told Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”
So the newly publicly proclaimed belief in white supremacy became an official part of GOP ideology in the 1960s, leading directly to Richard Nixon’s explicitly racist 1968 “Southern Strategy.”
It was later replicated by Reagan speaking about “states’ rights” at his first campaign speech near the scene of the murder of 3 civil rights workers, George HW Bush’s Willie Horton ad campaign, and Donald Trump’s rants about Mexican rapists and people from what he called “shithole countries.”
But racism alone can’t explain the entire list above. There had to be something else.
The second element embraced by the GOP that filled out the rest of the list above happened in 1980 when they hooked up with religious grifters and greedy, morbidly rich people.
Prior to that election year, George HW Bush and his wife Barbara were big advocates for Planned Parenthood and a woman’s right to choose an abortion. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, had signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law and was also an outspoken supporter of Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood.
Similarly, the white evangelical movement prior to 1980 was largely supportive of abortion rights. They were furious, however, when the Supreme Court banned preacher-led school prayer and in the late 1970s Jimmy Carter pulled the tax exemptions of segregated schools run by white supremacist evangelicals.
Jerry Falwell had started his “Moral Majority” in 1978 and uber-Christian Paul Weyrich (co-founder of The Heritage Foundation and the guy who famously said, “I don’t want everybody to vote!”) signed up for the Reagan campaign.
As Donne Levy writes for George Washington University’s History News Network:
“Weyrich and Falwell realized that the tax exemption issue based on racial discrimination had limited value, but opposing abortion was a moral issue cutting across racial and religious lines. That was their thinking on the eve of the 1980 elections.”
The election that year saw the first major merger in American history between a political party and a religious movement largely run by grifters. Something that would have both shocked and horrified the Founders of our country and the Framers of the Constitution.
Republicans started talking about God (the word appeared in their platform for only the second time since the Party’s formation in 1856), and preachers and televangelists began to openly push GOP candidates from the pulpit in defiance of nonprofit law and the IRS.
The GOP also adopted Falwell’s call for a return to school prayer, hostility to sex education, rejection of women’s rights, reassertion of patriarchy, and open hatred of homosexuality.
Championing what today we’d call the “culture wars,” Republicans fully embraced the anti-science perspective of Falwell and his colleagues, questioning for the first time the theory of evolution, ridiculing global warming, and scoffing at concerns about pollution causing cancer and other diseases.
Within a decade they were even claiming, as Mike Pence wrote in a 2000 op-ed, “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill.”
As the GOP went deeper down their religion-induced rabbit hole, their hostility to science was logically accompanied by a hostility to education and educated people. George HW Bush and Rush Limbaugh began talking about “pointy-headed liberals in ivory towers,” openly trashing higher education to bring blue-collar voters into the party.
That was followed by a sustained Republican attack on public education itself by pushing for-profit privatized “charter schools” and vouchers, an ironic position in that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had probably done more to advance public education than any president in the 20th century.
Thus was set up the GOP’s 2020 hostility to masks and Covid quarantines, sex education and birth control, and their 2021 attacks on vaccination. And their continuous denial of global warming.
The other big turning point for the GOP in 1980 was Reagan’s open embrace of America’s oligarchs.
Just four years earlier, in their Buckley v Valeo decision, conservatives on the Supreme Court ruled that when a rich person showered so much money on a politician that that politician pretty much only voted the way the rich person wanted, that was no longer bribery but, instead, First Amendment-protected “free speech.”
In 1978, in a Republican-appointee-only decision written by Lewis Powell (of Powell Memo fame), the Court extended that right to buy politicians to American corporations (it was extended to international billionaires and corporations in 2010 by Citizens United.)
President Jimmy Carter had championed the average person and the rights of working class people: he even walked from the Capitol to the White House after his inauguration rather than take a limousine. Reagan not only brought back the limousine, he turned his inaugural balls into a high-dollar lavish celebration of wealth and economic power.
The Democratic Party was still, at that time, mostly funded by labor unions; the GOP, however, picked up the opportunity offered them by the Supreme Court four and two years earlier and put up a “for sale” sign, inviting into the party any wealthy person or corporation who’d put up enough money for a Republican candidate to win an election.
The result of this whole sad history is that Red states have been turned into sacrifice zones for Reagan’s racial and religious bigotry and the neoliberal raise-up-the-rich and crap-on-unions economic policies he inflicted on America.
In the years since the Reagan Revolution, TV preachers have become multimillionaires with private jets, their parishioners have slid deeper and deeper into poverty and addiction, and the unholy alliance of church and state that Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton warned us about is now arguably — behind great wealth — the second most powerful political force in America.
Turns out Noel Casler was right, but the story is a bit more detailed than the GOP just embracing death and disease. Those same policies also make the morbidly rich — from oil barons to televangelists — vastly richer, and those rich people and their businesses and churches return the favor by pushing their followers and cycling part of their profits back toward Republican politicians.
Now you know the rest of the story.
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WHEN A BUNCH of all-stars get together to record a song for a cause, the result can often be cringey. But “Tennessee Rise,” featuring the pulpit-ready voices of Brittany Howard, Allison Russell, Katie Pruitt, Amanda Shires, Fancy Hagood, Emmylou Harris, and more, hits all the marks.
The heavenly choir anthem was recorded to encourage Tennesseans to register and vote for Gloria Johnson, who is challenging Republican incumbent U.S. senator — and the state’s Darth Vader — Marsha Blackburn in the November election. Johnson is one of the lawmakers known as “The Tennessee Three,” the group that protested on the statehouse floor the inaction by their Republican peers to pass gun reform in the wake of the 2023 Covenant school shooting in Nashville.
Along with being a state representative, Johnson is also a former special education teacher who has spoken out in favor of gun reform, reproductive rights, and racial equality. When asked by reporters why her Tennessee Three colleagues, representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who are Black, were expelled from the House following their protest and she was not, Johnson replied, “I’ll answer your question; it might have to do with the color of our skin.”
Rev. Benjamin Cremer
@Brcremer
As a pastor, I’m much less concerned about those who question God or even doubt God than I am about those who claim to know the mind of God better than anyone else and therefore have the right to impose their beliefs on everyone else.
I realized a long time ago that politicians love giving lip service to Christianity in order to gain Christian support.
They will talk about God and quote the Bible, even claim to be our greatest protector from things we are supposed to fear, all so we’ll help them win. 🧵
Every time I hear a politician doing this now my heart sinks. It not only feels like pandering of the worst kind, but it treats us Christians as if we are some populist movement that can be stirred into a frenzy for a politician’s gain.
While that makes my heart sink, what actually breaks my heart is how often it works.
I’ve watched politicians claim to support Christianity, then I watch entire Christian movements become their staunch supporters, create paintings of them in the Whitehouse with Jesus praying over them, and even write books on why their rise to power fulfills Biblical prophecy.
It all seems so deeply self-centered for a people who claim to be “loving our neighbor as ourselves.”
We clamor over politicians who claim to be about us Christians, but shouldn’t we be paying more attention to what politicians are saying about our neighbors?
Instead of being preoccupied with their lip service to our faith group, shouldn’t we be more concerned about what their plans are to help the poor, the vulnerable, the hungry, the homeless, and those without access to healthcare among us? The very people Jesus talked about?
The culture is always watching how we Christians participate with power. It shapes our public witness. Would our culture be able to say, “look at how Christians love others” when it comes to political power, or would they say, “look how Christians love power for themselves?”
I’m so uninterested in how politicians talk about my faith group. I’m far more interested in what they plan to do for my neighbors.
Rev. Benjamin Cremer
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”-Philippians 2:3-4
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Strange the way arms always flow one way or another.
Biden administration sidesteps Congress again for emergency arms sale to Israel
The equipment is valued at about $147.5 million and comes as Israel faces increased scrutiny over the rising number of Palestinian civilian casualties.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-administration-sidesteps-congress-arms-sale-israel-rcna131661
Dec. 29, 2023, 8:55 PM MST
By Abigail Williams and Megan Lebowitz
Jacqueline Alemany
@JaxAlemany
Congressional investigations@washingtonpost. Contrib @NBCNews & @MSNBC
·
55m
Buck elaborated on his news w reporters just now: "We've taken impeachment and we've made it a social media issue as opposed to a constitutional concept -- this place keeps going downhill and I don't need to spend more time here."
Asked about the dysfunction he’s referring to specifically, Buck went out of his way to note the fact that he was the last person to question Hur today even though he’s the third most senior person on the committee.
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There's more than one way of pushing. I'm sure he is fed up with it and like other members of the old republican party that are leaving or left, being sick and tired of it is a pretty forceful push. Too many others have succumbed to being trump's cuck and whore. The magas have been doing some real damage suppressing the vote all over the US and they own the Supreme Court, rather their donor's do, so it's been a tough fight and will get a lot tougher. Hopefully somehow a democratic system will prevail.
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Maybe something to do with pushing out anybody but loyalist. Goes along with taking over the RNC and any of its' money. There is no republican party anymore, there won't be a dime going to any candidate that isn't a loyalist. Both things are standard in a totalitarian state and dictatorship. Right in Putin's policies and in the....whatever they are going to be called, the trumpian party's plan that they have been implementing in real time.
Buck already was not going for another term and he dared to speak out against the bs.
Republican US Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado won’t seek reelection, citing party’s ‘insidious narratives’
https://apnews.com/article/ken-buck-colorado-retire-republican-conflict-congress-3fb96d1e158405ab78892fdf71632b46
BY THOMAS PEIPERT
Updated 1:57 PM MDT, November 1, 2023
DENVER (AP) — U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, a conservative Republican who represents much of Colorado’s rural eastern plains, announced Wednesday he would not seek a sixth term in Congress, citing many in his party who refuse to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and to condemn the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
In a video message posted online, Buck said voters’ hopes that Republicans will take decisive action may be in vain, and that his party’s “insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans’ confidence in the rule of law.”
“Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, describing Jan. 6 as an unguided tour of the Capitol and asserting that the ensuing prosecutions are a weaponization of our justice system,” Buck said.
The 64-year-old former prosecutor, who has served in Congress since 2015, was one of the eight Republicans who joined with Democrats to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in early October. Buck eventually threw his support behind Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana for speaker, despite Johnson’s own efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election through a legal challenge.
Buck has a penchant for being a wildcard as a fiscal conservative, but he also has proven himself to be someone willing to push back against party leaders.
He spoke out against McCarthy’s launch of an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, saying that House Republicans were relying on flimsy evidence. He also has pointed to concerns about the process for approving spending and complained about stopgap spending bills.
Buck’s decision not to seek reelection came the same day U.S. Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, the Republican chairwoman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, said she would not seek reelection in 2024 after nearly three decades in Congress.
Granger, who at 80 is the nation’s longest-serving GOP congresswoman, said, “It’s time for the next generation to step up and take the mantle and be a strong and fierce representative for the people.
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Yes, every little bit helps, but so much more is needed. We're fighting a powerful enemy state that has recruited the Republican party and is attempting total control and destruction of our democracy. World War is not made with just guns and tanks anymore, in fact, Putin's war on the West is way more than the guns and tanks in Ukraine. Putin's personal representative and enabler is the Republican's hero and frequent guest and speaker and is their model of their political plans.
Very informative thread.
https://twitter.com/SmartUACat/status/1767290078890545217
https://twitter.com/SmartUACat/status/1767290085236511123
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Republicans causing violence and death of innocent children that have no fault the way they were born.
In states with laws targeting LGBTQ issues, school hate crimes quadrupled
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/03/12/school-lgbtq-hate-crimes-incidents/
The republican's gun culture war is the overwhelmingly the major cause of gun violence in schools, just collateral damage for their greed for power. Republicans teach the gun culture, and our children learn it. Comparatively rare instance of doing as they say and doing as they do.
New info: Female student at LeFlore High (AL) shot a classmate in the leg and then followed him down the hallway as he tried to crawl away.
— K-12 School Shooting Database (@K12ssdb) March 12, 2024
She then put the gun to his head but missed when she fired. The bullet struck a bystander student.
Unnamed girl is being charged as adult pic.twitter.com/rdlrtrR1bF
Bullet shatters a school window when shots were fired inside a Massachusetts high school yesterday afternoon.
— K-12 School Shooting Database (@K12ssdb) March 12, 2024
Gun violence at schools has become so normalized that it doesn't make national news anymore. pic.twitter.com/ZKptv3cXW9
Democracy Docket
@DemocracyDocket
BREAKING: North Carolina court strikes down power-grab law that transfers the ability to appoint members to the state board of elections from Gov. Roy Cooper (D) to the Republican-controlled state legislature. More to come.
https://www.democracydocket.com/cases/north-carolina-s-b-749-challenge/
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Ex-Hays County GOP official sentenced to 410 years in child sex abuse case
Bo Dresner pleaded guilty to 65 counts of sexual abuse and possession of child pornography.
https://www.expressnews.com/hill-country/article/hays-county-bo-dresner-abuse-sentence-18891536.php
By Liz Teitz, Barry L. Harrell,
March 11, 2024
The Fart of the Deal. lol People could tell him this for free. Hope Block got his $750,000 up front.
Sending my thoughts and prayers https://t.co/6MiUZBCTrs
— David Hogg 🟧 (@davidhogg111) March 11, 2024
State TV host Olga Skabeeva smirked and gloated about Viktor Orban's admission that Trump's "secret plan" to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours simply means not giving either money or weapons to Ukraine and MAGAs in Congress are already helping him do it.https://t.co/ouhuMzph6P
— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) March 11, 2024
🇺🇦FACTS: Ukraine is NOT Russia 🇺🇦
— COL (Ret) Jeff in 🇦🇹 (@JeffFisch) March 10, 2024
In 1994, Russian President Yeltsin signed the Budapest Memorandum, clearly accepting Ukraine sovereignty.
Your history maps are worthless. pic.twitter.com/8vytQmKlAY
Reverse image search is the most fundamental part of content verification - the process of searching to find if, and when, an image has appeared on the internet before, and in what context.
Google Lens, Yandex, TinEye and Bing are among the free tools that allow you to do this.
https://yandex.com/images?
https://lens.google/
https://tineye.com/
https://www.bing.com/?scope=images&nr=1&FORM=NOFORM
I wrote this thread a year ago today, a step-by-step guide on verifying images on the internet.
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) March 10, 2024
With major elections in the US, UK, EU, India and many other countries this year, learning to check the veracity of images you see on social media is paramount. https://t.co/Y2dkKpMKYB
Talk about two tier justice, Nothing recent, but I know of people that got more for a couple of joints, no other charges. This guy is whining about 4 easy months in a pokey for being a traitor and helping in an insurrection.
Peter Navarro ordered to prison on March 19
The former Trump aide is urging an appeals court to step in and block the sentence while he appeals.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/11/peter-navarro-prison-march-19-00146225
By KYLE CHENEY
03/11/2024 08:33 AM EDT
Former Trump White House aide Peter Navarro has been ordered to report to a Miami prison on March 19 to begin serving a four month sentence for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee.
Navarro, who is urging a federal appeals court to stay the sentence while he attempts to overturn his conviction, faces the prospect of becoming the first top adviser to Donald Trump to serve jail time for an offense related to the effort to subvert the 2020 election.
Navarro, 74, was convicted last year on two counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to provide documents and testimony to congressional investigators probing the root causes of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The committee subpoenaed Navarro in February 2022, and he quickly indicated he would refuse to comply, citing executive privilege. The House held Navarro in contempt two months later, and the Justice Department soon followed suit with criminal charges.
Navarro, an economist who advised Trump on trade issues, was the second former Trump aide convicted for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 panel. Steve Bannon was convicted by a jury in July 2022 for similarly blowing off a subpoena from the committee.
However, the judge in Bannon’s case, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, agreed not to enforce Bannon’s four-month sentence while he appeals his conviction to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Navarro’s judge, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, rejected Navarro’s attempt for a similar stay, and Navarro is now asking a three-judge appeals court panel to stave off imminent jail time.
“Dr. Navarro has now been ordered to report to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons, FCI Miami, on or before 2:00PM EDT on March 19, 2024,” his attorney revealed in court papers late Sunday. “Accordingly, Dr. Navarro respectfully reiterates his request for an administrative stay … Should this Court deny Dr. Navarro’s motion, he respectfully requests an administrative stay so as to permit the Supreme Court review of this Court’s denial.”
The Jan. 6 committee subpoenaed Navarro for testimony primarily about his efforts to work with Bannon on a strategy aimed at forcing delays in the Jan. 6, 2021 session of Congress where lawmakers were tasked with certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the election. Navarro also compiled a series of three election-related reports touting largely discredited claims of fraud, one of which Trump cited in a now infamous tweet calling his supporters to Washington for a “wild” protest.
Courts rarely permit convicted defendants to remain free while they appeal. However, Navarro contends that, like Bannon, his case presents unusual circumstances because of the complex intersection of his refusal to testify with executive privilege and immunity principles that have rarely been tested in court.
Navarro has claimed that Trump ordered him not to testify and instead to invoke executive privilege, but Mehta rejected this claim as well, noting that Navarro had offered no evidence that Trump in fact gave such an order. Trump had been far more explicit in ordering other former aides to assert the privilege.
Navarro is also fighting a civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department demanding he return hundreds of records the government claims he improperly declined to deliver to the National Archives after leaving office. Some of those records pertain to the 2020 election.
Daractenus
@Daractenus
What most would consider an insignificant piece of news, one of the so many that get lost, will forever stay with me.
OTD 2 years ago, shortly after the Russian invasion started, the residents from Pietroasa (Romania), a tiny and impoverished mountain village of 300 souls - most of them elderly, decided to help Ukraine with whatever little they had.
No NGO or humanitarian organization told them to. They didn't have to.
Nobody had much money to spare, but as pretty much everyone keeps a little garden to supplement their necessities, they did have potatoes. So that's what they stared with and gathered 1.5 tons of potatoes!
Then each household donated whatever other non-perishable items they had around, which amounted to about 2 tons of flour, rice, cooking oil and various cans.
And sweets, sweets for the Ukrainian children...
The problem remained actually sending it to Ukraine, so they went and looked around and very soon, a van owning volunteer from a nearby town decided to do his bit.
For every vile, wicked, hateful voice out there bent on bringing misery and suffering, there's hundreds of people like this.
For the sake everything good and kind, Russia will not win this war.
What are the trump magas hiding now? Hide, lie, or both, the only choices republicans think about. Just a review;
Judd Legum
@JuddLegum
1. Presidents should not have financial conflicts of interest
That's why Carter put his PEANUT FARM in a blind trust
Trump just signed an agreement that could create a massive financial conflict
And he's disclosing virtually NOTHING about it
2. In January, Trump was found liable for $83.3 million for defaming E Jean Carroll. It was based on a finding that Trump sexually assaulted Carroll in a dressing room in the mid-90s and then, when Carroll talked about it, called her a liar.
3. Trump tried to convince the judge to let him appeal without posting a bond, but it didn't work.
So he submitted a bond issued by Chubb in the amount of $91.6 million. (110% of the judgment to cover interest).
From popular.info
4. Trump has a history with Chubb. In 2018, Trump appointed Chubb's CEO, Evan Greenberg, to a White House advisory council on trade policy. In April 2020, Greenberg was named by Trump to a counsel of business leaders advising the president on how to reopen the economy after the…
5. Chubb also played a role in a separate civil case against Trump, brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, for financial fraud. Chubb sent an appraiser to Trump's condo in Trump Tower but was ushered out before taking measurements. Trump then inflated the size of his apartment by 3x, which facilitated the fraud.
6. Almost NOTHING is known about the terms of the $91.6 million bond agreement between Trump and Chubb.
Chubb is refusing to provide any details.
No one knows what assets Trump put up to secure the bond or, critically, if the bond is co-signed by anyone else.
7. If the bond is co-signed, that could make Trump financially beholden to a third party. Voters have a right to know the details of the bond.
From popular.info
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That did come to mind. But I believe Ivanka is the one left to be able to have her name in control on some of the trump's businesses, plus she might be testifying to some more grand jury investigations in the future. She holds the card to something important.
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Trump attends UFC 299 with daughter Ivanka after blasting Biden over Laken Riley at Georgia rally
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/trump-attends-ufc-299-with-daughter-ivanka-after-blasting-biden-over-laken-riley-at-georgia-rally-101710085021237.html