"We command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now" -- Special Adviser to the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative Paula White pic.twitter.com/gtdZyGfkxy
— Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons (@GuthrieGF) January 25, 2020
[O]n Saturday, Trump's lawyers seemed to bolster Democrats' case by repeatedly claiming that they hadn't heard from a single witness who had "direct contact" with the president.Although their statements were misleading (Gordon Sondland, the US's ambassador to the European Union, was in frequent touch with Trump and testified to Congress that the president engaged in a quid pro quo with Ukraine), Democratic lawmakers noted that their statements underscored the need to hear from more firsthand witnesses.It's worth noting, too, that though the president's lawyers complain of not hearing testimony from witnesses who spoke to Trump directly, the defense team led by White House counsel Pat Cipollone could easily solve that problem by retracting the Cipollone's sweeping directive last year which barred all executive branch officials across six agencies from cooperating with the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry.Multiple senior administration officials in the president's inner circle -- like acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former national security adviser John Bolton -- cited Cipollone's command, which he made at the president's direction, as the reason they would not testify or provide relevant documents.Bolton, who was at the center of a number of episodes investigated in the inquiry, has since said that he will testify if the Senate decides to subpoena him."Now, the first point that I would like to make is that the president's counsel did something that they did not intend: They made a really compelling case for why the Senate should call witnesses and documents," said Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer."They kept saying there are no eyewitness accounts, but there are people who have eyewitness accounts, the very four witnesses and the very four sets of documents that we have asked for," he said. "But there are people who do know. Mick Mulvaney knows. In all likelihood, Mr. [Robert] Blair, [an aide to Mulvaney], knows. Mr. Bolton may know. 'Why shouldn't we have witnesses and documents here?' I thought."Sen. Joe Manchin of Virginia, who is widely considered a Democratic swing vote because he represents a deep-red state, told CNN he thought Trump's team did a "good job" of "making me think about things." He added, "One thing that stuck in my mind is they said there isn't a witness they have had so far that had direct contact with the president. I'd love to hear from Mulvaney and Bolton."
The program, called the T.R.U.S.T. Fund for America (short for Tomorrow's Retirement for the U.S. Today), looks like this: when born, every baby receives $7,500 in an account managed by an independent agency of the federal government. The money is placed in a new type of EE Savings Bond, called the "T.R.U.S.T. EE" Bond, which would be issued by the Treasury Department. The total amount of bonds issued would be about $29 billion a year, assuming about 4 million babies are born, and would be self-funding, he said.At age 70, the account would begin generating monthly income to be, on average, equivalent to Social Security benefits. The benefit is meant to supplement Social Security. [...]Most Americans can only begin saving for retirement in their 20s and 30s, if they're starting early, but by beginning their contributions at birth their eventual nest egg would increase exponentially. Someone saving $100 a month for 20 years would have contributed $24,000 in total, and have an account grow to $52,000 with a 7% rate of return. If that same person were to save $100 a month for 60 years with the same rate of return, she'd eventually have an account balance of $1.1 million. The T.R.U.S.T. EE proposal would generate about $650,000 by age 66 with a one-time contribution at birth.
Former Saudi minister of justice, Mohammed Bin Abdul-Karim Issa, has announced that his country will stop funding mosques in foreign countries, Arabi21.com reported on Friday.According to the Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, Saudi Arabia is to establish local administrative councils for each mosque, in cooperation with the local authorities, in order to hand over these mosques to "secure hands". [...]It is worth noting that the minister led a delegation on Thursday to visit the Auschwitz camp on the 75th anniversary of its liberation.
steven mnuchin's wife, the actress Louise Linton, posted this on Instagram after his comments on Greta Thunberg. pic.twitter.com/1T1a38LzFQ
— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) January 25, 2020
Given its importance to our national interest, we provided the entire 4/30/18 recording of the .@realDonaldTrump and Lev Parnas dinner to the media, for universal access and downloading. Stay tuned. Call the witnesses. Hear the evidence. #LevRemembers #TrumpTapes #LetLevSpeak pic.twitter.com/Aia8K3KoDT
— Joseph A. Bondy (@josephabondy) January 25, 2020
Matthew Albence, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said on Thursday that ICE will deport immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program if the Supreme Court strikes that program down later this year. That statement seems to contradict Chief Justice John Roberts's understanding that such deportations will not happen.
Mike Pompeo has proven to be a blowhard and a bully in his role as Secretary of State, and nothing seems to bother him more than challenging questions from professional journalists. All of those flaws and more were on display during and after his interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly today. After abruptly ending the interview when pressed on his failure to defend members of the Foreign Service, Pompeo then threw a fit and berated the reporter who asked him the questions:Immediately after the questions on Ukraine, the interview concluded. Pompeo stood, leaned in and silently glared at Kelly for several seconds before leaving the room.A few moments later, an aide asked Kelly to follow her into Pompeo's private living room at the State Department without a recorder. The aide did not say the ensuing exchange would be off the record.Inside the room, Pompeo shouted his displeasure at being questioned about Ukraine. He used repeated expletives, according to Kelly, and asked, "Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?" He then said, "People will hear about this."People are certainly hearing about it, and their unanimous judgment is that it confirms Pompeo's reputation as an obnoxious, thin-skinned excuse for a Secretary of State.
The Guardian studied leaked materials relayed by the whistleblower and pursued other lines of inquiry to exclusively reveal the real identity of the Base's secretive leader as Rinaldo Nazzaro, 46, from New Jersey.Nazzaro is currently living in Russia with his Russian wife. Until the Guardian's exposé little was known about his background and he was only known by the alias "Norman Spear".The exclusive materials show how the group has planned terror campaigns; vandalized synagogues; organised armed training camps; and recruited new members who extolled an ideology of all-out race war. The cache of documents and recordings gives a rare insight into how such neo-Nazi terror groups operate.The Base - an approximate English translation of "al-Qaida" - began recruiting in late 2018 and pushing for both the collapse of society and a race war. Members of the group stand accused of federal hate crimes, murder plots and firearms offenses, and have harbored international fugitives in recent months.It was the very real threat of violence that convinced the whistleblower to infiltrate the Base and stay undercover for months, gaining the trust of other members, only to later contact the Guardian to expose them.The Guardian's source said that in recent months "the pieces were coming together to build the infrastructure for a strong, neo-Nazi militant underground, with places to train, to make connections and expand the network." He felt he had to act to stop it.The source said: "The 'Norman Spear' I spoke with told me in no uncertain terms that the purpose of the Base is to cause the collapse of our society, not survive it."The Guardian's source, an anti-Nazi activist, rose to a position of trust within the group, which allowed him to take thousands of screenshots in chatrooms used by the Base since 2018.In November 2018, those chats were infiltrated by antifa activists, and members were outed, or "doxxed", amid early media reporting. At this point, the Base tightened up vetting processes and moved their chats to an encrypted platform called Wire.Under the motto "there is no political solution" the group embraces an "accelerationist" ideology, which holds that acts of violence and terror are required to push liberal democracy towards collapse, preparing the way for white supremacists to seize power and establish an ethno-state. [...]Although inside the group Tobin was vicious, militant and angry, a custody hearing attended by the Guardian in Camden, New Jersey, revealed the defendant as a pale, nervous, overweight teenager.None of his former comrades had made the journey to the gloomy courtroom in downtown Camden, but he was attended by an older female relative dragging an oxygen canister behind her, several prosecutors, and one man identified as an FBI agent.After the court heard about his fantasies of violence - including "suicide by cop" and machete attacks - and how a mental health crisis and infighting in Atomwaffen Division and the Base had driven him to talk to special agents, he was refused bail.His profile seems to be typical: new recruits are disproportionately younger men. The official age limit is 18 but this is frequently relaxed, and several members are 17. Many are in their late teens and early 20s.
Consider James Otis's The Rights of British Colonies Asserted and Proved, one of the most widely read pamphlets in the opening stage of the debates. Responding to the Stamp Act, Otis countered the idea that Parliament was an unlimited, absolute sovereign, rooting his argument in a natural law theory of morality and first principles.Otis argued for the existence of an objective moral order accessible to all human beings. He stitched his argument with the golden thread of the natural law tradition, which was well summarized by Paul Sigmund: "There exists in nature and/or human nature a rational order which can provide intelligible value-statements independently of human will, that are universal in application, unchangeable in their ultimate content, and morally obligatory on mankind."This moral order provided the ground for the range of precepts of traditional morality as well as the ground for political equality. Therefore, Otis argued, "by the law of nature we are free born, as indeed all men are, white or black." He then asked, rhetorically, "Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature?"For Otis, political equality was as important to a healthy civil society as marriage and family. Consequently, the authority of Parliament was bounded by a higher moral law by which it was required to serve a common good constituted by flourishing families. For this reason, the Stamp Act was an unjust violation of the colonists' inalienable equal right to property--the essential material of flourishing households--which could not justly be taken without their consent.Another important pamphlet, Alexander Hamilton's "The Farmer Refuted," was written as a critique of the Royalist bishop Samuel Seabury. Hamilton responds to Seabury's caricature of liberalism as one in which individuals are bound by nothing but their own will, leaving power dynamics as the only natural reality. Hamilton insists, by contrast, that "the deity, from the relations we stand in, to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensibly, obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institutions whatever."In other words, natural rights are derived from, and find their limits in, the law of nature. No man has "any moral power to deprive another of his life, limbs, property or liberty; nor the least authority to command, or exact obedience from him; except that which arose from the ties of consanguinity."This framework simultaneously stands as a rebuke of arbitrary power--whether exercised by kings or masters--without affirming an unmoored individualism that would undermine the natural authority of parents over children or the integrity of the family.TWO LESSONS FROM THE PAMPHLET DEBATESSo the pre-Founding Pamphlet Debates contain two lessons for us.First, the political principles of the American Founding were not wool over the eyes of marginalized groups in order to give power to white males. In fact, their principles marked the beginning of the end of oligarchy and slavery, what Allen C. Guelzo recently called the 1863 Project and Forrest A. Nabors detailed at length in his award-winning book, From Oligarchy to Republicanism.Second, the principles of liberty and equality did not inaugurate an order of autonomous individualism destructive of families and the environment. Rather, political equality was tethered to a moral order that simultaneously bound governments and people with a range of duties and virtues. The natural law principles of social morality were seen not in tension with, but corroborative of, liberal political principles. This appeal to a binding moral order as the very ground of equal political liberty can be seen across the Pamphlet Debates in the writings of John Dickinson, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Wilson, among many others.
Donald Trump has been using his pardon power lately, leading to speculation that he will also use it if and when impeachment action takes place. But it turns out that the Framers of the American Constitution thought of everything. When it came to the pardon power they even thought of Donald Trump.Under Article II, sec.2, the president was given the "power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment." After the Constitution was drafted in the summer of 1787, it had to be ratified by at least nine of the states before it would take effect. Nearly everyone agreed that the president should have the power to pardon; some thought, however, that no one should be pardoned in the case of treason without the concurrence of at least one of the two houses of the legislature, because, in the marvelous phrase of Alexander Hamilton, "the supposition of the connivance of the Chief Magistrate ought not to be entirely excluded."The possibility that the president might use the power to pardon as a means by which to protect those with whom he had conspired to do harm to the United States by "adhering to," or giving "aid and comfort" to, its enemies, led to one of the most important, but least remembered, exchanges in debate over whether the Constitution drafted in Philadelphia should become the Constitution of the United States. The exchange demonstrated that not only are there serious limitations on the president's power to pardon, but that a president's threat to use that power may itself be grounds for impeachment.On the afternoon of Wednesday, June 18, 1788, George Mason rose from his chair on the floor of the Virginia Ratifying Convention deeply troubled by what he thought of the convention's failure to understand--the president of the United States might not always be someone of sound character and high intelligence. There would rarely, if ever, he reminded the delegates, be a commander in chief with the courage and rectitude displayed by George Washington during the War of Independence. There might even be a president who would try to change our form of government. The president, argued Mason,"ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself. It may happen, at some future day, that he will establish a monarchy, and destroy the republic. If he has the power of granting pardons before indictment, or conviction, may he not stop inquiry and prevent detection? The case of treason ought, at least, to be excepted. This is a weighty objection with me."Some of the most famous men in American history were there that day as delegates to the Virginia convention. Patrick Henry, afraid that a national government would destroy the states, was leading the fight to reject the Constitution. John Marshall, who, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, would do more than anyone to make the Constitution the foundation for the kind of strong national government Henry feared, was one of the leaders in the fight to ratify it. But there was no one--no one in Virginia, nor in the country--with a deeper understanding of the Constitution and what it meant than James Madison.Madison understood immediately the force of Mason's objection, but he had a response--a response in which he described limitations on presidential power that, to our great misfortune, have for too long been forgotten. Was there a danger in giving the president the power to pardon? "Yes," replied Madison, but there was a remedy for the danger in the Constitution as drafted."There is one security in this case to which gentlemen may not have adverted: if the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty."
As U.S. President Donald Trump's lawyers begin three days of opening statements in his impeachment trial on Saturday, they'll push a widely disputed theory: that abuse of power is not an impeachable offense.The first of two articles of impeachment against Trump alleges that Trump abused the powers of his office by asking Ukraine to undertake investigations of his political rivals that would benefit his 2020 re-election. While Democrats say the president's conduct meets the constitutional threshold for impeachment, Trump's lawyers insist Trump didn't commit a crime and can't be impeached.However, some of the president's own allies, including former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Attorney General William Barr, have espoused the opposite view in the past, arguing that presidents can be removed from office for abuse of power even if they haven't committed a crime.The issue was underscored by House impeachment manager Jerrold Nadler on Thursday as he argued for Trump's removal from office for abuse of power. "Everyone except the president and his lawyers believe that presidents can be impeached for abuse of power," Nadler said.In August 1998, as a federal grand jury was investigating then-Democratic President Bill Clinton, Dershowitz went on CNN to argue that impeachment did not require criminal conduct."It certainly doesn't have to be a crime," Dershowitz said then. "If you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of the president and who abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don't need a technical crime."
The podcast was hosted on YouTube and on Giuliani's new website, which offers 'Insight on leadership, courage and the most pressing issues of our time,' but also appears to have elements copied from another website touting him as a public speaker, saying: 'Offering a dynamic and lively presentation accompanied by Q&A, Giuliani reminds audiences that eternal vigilance and leadership are required to protect freedom.'On the podcast, during which car horns could be heard, Giuliani offered a lengthy, and at times hesitant, discussion of why he did not believe Trump should be impeached and eventually turned to his claims.'This of course is an unfolding story,' he said, sitting in front of books which included his memiors, turned face-front to be more visible.'We will follow it in more detail. I particularly look forward to bringing to you many of the facts that I have discovered that no-one knows yet, that are quite dramatic and that clearly support every single thing that we've talked about.'I found those facts in my role as counsel for President Trump in order to defend him and I can think of no more appropriate thing to do than share them with you. They're somewhat startling so don't,' he said then trailed off.'Get ready for it. I hope to see you very shortly.'The podcast was published a few hours before a tape of his client, the president, demanding Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch be fired and saying 'take her out, do it!' to aides surfaced.The tape was made at a dinner with Trump by Igor Fruman - who along with Lev Parnas were Giuliani's long-term Soviet-born sidekicks until they were indicted on campaign finance charges.On Fox & Friends Giuliani had been very specific about what he would offer his listeners and viewers. 'I was given information about Ukrainian corruption,' he said without revealing who the two informants were.'They told me that there was a great deal of collusion going on in Ukraine to fix the 2016 election in favor of Hillary Clinton. That what happened in Russia was a big hoax. That, actually, it was the Democrats projecting what they had actually done in Ukraine.'I don't know if it's true or not. They gave me witnesses. I have since interviewed 10 of them. I've got eight of them on tape. I'm going to start a podcast at noon today.
American Jewish philanthropist George Soros has announced an investment of $1 billion in a new international educational initiative to promote liberal values and free societies.Soros announced the Open Society University Network at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling it "the most important and enduring project of my life."Details on the project were scant, but a statement said it would aim "to reach the students who need it the most and to promote the values of open society -- including free expression and diversity of beliefs."It will also seek to assist "institutions in need of international partners, as well as neglected populations" and help "politically endangered scholars."The initiative describes itself as seeking to "strengthen foundations of open society amid authoritarian resurgence" around the world, and to "counteract polarization by promoting global research collaboration and educating students to examine issues from different perspectives and advance reasoned arguments."
Yes, thousands of people came to protest -- peacefully (and cleanly). But General Assembly Democrats went back to work, spiking GOP bills to loosen gun regulations, while advancing their own proposals to further tighten them.This is going to be the state of affairs at least until after the 2021 elections -- assuming, of course, Virginia Republicans are able to stop the bleeding in their former suburban strongholds. That would be an exceedingly tall order for any political party, and that's doubly so for Virginia Republicans, who continue to suffer under the burden of an unpopular president and a bizarre insistence on defending the indefensible.Consider the Senate's vote Tuesday to eliminate the Lee-Jackson state holiday and make Election Day a state holiday, instead.A bill co-patroned by Sens. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) Adam P. Ebbin (D-Alexandria) eliminates Lee-Jackson Day, created, according to the existing law's text, "to honor Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) and Thomas Jonathan (Stonewall) Jackson (1824-1863), defenders of causes."The "defenders of causes," in this case, were heroes of a mythological Lost Cause that sought to destroy the union to perpetuate chattel slavery. Their holiday was slowly dying before the bill won Senate approval and may have disappeared on its own over time.But Democrats are hastening its demise, passing the bill through the Senate on a 22-18 vote.
In recent days, the Scottish Parliament, Senedd and newly gathered Northern Ireland Assembly have all voted against giving assent to the Withdrawal Agreement Bill. This is not mere symbolism. It matters. The directly elected legislatures of the three parts of the UK that are not England have all rejected the most significant constitutional change since Irish independence. The legislation they have opposed will have a profound impact on Britain's politics, culture and above all, its economy. It has been granted assent by just one of the UK's four elected parliaments. That is the House of Commons, a chamber constituted 82 per cent from England: an English parliament in all but name, and in all ways that count.Britain has always fudged its national settlement. A political and emotional story which began with England's conquest of Wales in 1284 has never been completed or resolved. The UK had no modern revolution, nationwide civil war or external coloniser to force it to define itself afresh. Every change, from England and Scotland's 1707 Act of Union to 1990s devolution, has represented a slow, incremental addition to a centuries-old palimpsest. The UK is neither centrally governed nor federal, and sticks with the compromise. But a compromise can be a euphemism for a lie.