Puerto Rico braces for political upheaval involving governor

Puerto Rico braces for political upheaval involving governorPuerto Rico’s governor denied allegations of obstruction of justice late Monday as the main opposition party demanded she be investigated and hinted at a possible impeachment process in what could be the latest round of political upheaval for the U.S. territory. In a brief statement, Gov. Wanda Vázquez for the first time acknowledged an alleged investigation that the island’s Department of Justice is supposedly conducting against her, saying she was never told about it. The details of the alleged investigation were not immediately clear.


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Guess who’s even more unpopular in Maine than Donald Trump? That’s right, it’s Susan Collins!

The Maine primary is next week, July 14 (delayed a month by coronavirus), when Sen. Susan Collins will finally have an official Democratic opponent. That is almost certainly going to be Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, who's led the field from pretty much the beginning of the cycle. Gideon also continues to lead in the general election, according to the latest Public Policy Polling (PPP) polling in the state.

Back in March, PPP polled the state and found Gideon had a 47-43 advantage. This month Gideon has the same four-point advantage, leading 46-42. That's no movement in four months, with Gideon not being able to fully campaign against Collins, and Collins throwing everything she's got at reelection. Collins is deeply underwater with just 36% of voter approval and 55% disapproval. That leaves her 9% to try to sway to her side against the headwind of the Trump pandemic. In comparison, Gideon is holding at 37-37 approve/disapprove, with 26% of voters still to woo.

Let's make sure her time is up. Please give $1 to help Democrats in each of these crucial Senate races, but especially the one in Maine!

Collins has lost Democrats and Dem-leaning independents, with just an 8% approval rating from 2016 Clinton voters, down from 32% last year. Impeachment, PPP's polling memo says, "effectively shut off the bipartisan appeal she had for years." She's also tied with Gideon with independents at 44-44. Collins has achieved this fall mostly on her own by deciding she was sticking with Trump. In fact, 46% of voters say Collins is "more a partisan voice for Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell" than "an independent voice for Maine," compared to 42% who say she's looking out more for the state than the party.

More bad news for Collins comes with Trump's numbers, because he's not even as disliked as she is. He has 41% approval to her 36%. But they share the disapproval of 55% of the state's voters. Joe Biden leads Trump by 11 points there, 53-42. Notably, Collins still hasn't said whether she voted for Trump in March's presidential primary in Maine when his was the only Republican name on the ballot. As if she can play coy with that one.

Collins, who famously pledged to serve just two terms in the Senate when she first ran in 1996, is seeking her fifth term. Seems like Maine has decided that's three terms too many since she made her promise.

Iran's hardline lawmakers move to summon Rouhani – Tasnim

Iran's hardline lawmakers move to summon Rouhani - TasnimIran's hardline lawmakers plan to summon the president for questioning, a move that could ultimately lead to impeachment, media reported on Monday, amid growing discontent over the government's economic policies. Iranians' daily struggle to make ends meet has become harder since the reimposition of U.S. sanctions in 2018, and the economy has been further damaged by rising inflation, growing unemployment, a slump in the rial and the coronavirus crisis. A motion to question President Hassan Rouhani was signed by 120 lawmakers out of 290 and handed to the presiding board of the assembly, Iran's semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.


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Sen. Joni Ernst says 130,000 American deaths show Trump is ‘stepping forward’

Though it is a holiday weekend, the Sunday news shows continued on in mostly the usual fashion. Trump ally Sen. Joni Ernst, one of the corrupt man-child's most ardent defenders as the Republican Senate nullified impeachment charges against Trump without investigation, once had a lot to day about two (2) Americans dying of Ebola under President Barack Obama, saying it showed "failed leadership." CNN host Dana Bash asked Ernst whether 130,000 Americans dying in the (now fully out-of-control) COVID-19 pandemic also is showing "failed leadership."

Sen. Joni Ernst replied with yet another response seemingly hand-tailored to show just how corrupt, incompetent, and buffoonish the Republican Party has become. After a long filibuster resulting in Bash repeating of the question: "No, I think that the president is stepping forward," she clowned.

CNN's Dana Bash: You said in 2014 that Obama showed "failed leadership" with Ebola, when only 2 Americans died. Would you say Trump's showed failed leadership with coronavirus as 130,000 Americans have died? Sen. Joni Ernst: "No, I think that the president is stepping forward" pic.twitter.com/WQqSC82OSt

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) July 5, 2020

Lord, now that was just pathetic. I’m embarrassed for both of them.

Again, the whole premise of so-called "news" programs is invalidated if political leaders are simply allowed to bullshit their way through each with no repercussions. Bash's question was spot-on, probing whether a sitting senator's supposed outrage at one pandemic would translate to the next. Clearly, it did not.

What, then, should the repercussions be for being so transparently a hack? Should a buzzer sound? Should a duck drop from the ceiling? During the pandemic itself physical solutions are largely out of bounds, as most of the people praising Donald Trump's brilliant handling of a pandemic now expected by the White House to result in at least a quarter million dead are praising him from inside their own homes because it is simply too unsafe to travel to the studios as usual. That means the best solution is, for now, right out; nobody is going to agree to have a pie-throwing machine installed in their den.

Hecklers, then. I'm going to propose the "news" shows liven up their broadcasts with professional hecklers. If any politician says something as egregiously tawdry as Joni Ernst says regularly, ninety seconds of interview time will be given to a team of hecklers to point it out and roast their target into oblivion.

Hey, it's more news than what's currently being broadcast. If the nation's top political reporters are incapable of bringing shame to those that quite transparently deserve it, we need to bring in people with more appropriate skills.

US supreme court gives conservatives the blues but what's really going on?

US supreme court gives conservatives the blues but what's really going on?Donald Trump’s nomination of two justices seemed to have tilted the balance decisively but recent rulings have raised eyebrowsFor all the ominous twists of Donald Trump’s presidency, his placement on the US supreme court of two deeply conservative justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, inspired a special kind of foreboding for many liberals.With three conservatives already sitting on the court, the creation by Trump of a seemingly impregnable, five-vote conservative supreme court majority appeared to pose a generational threat to essential American rights and freedoms.But as the first full term with the two Trump “supremes” draws to a close, a curious development has taken hold. Last month, the court handed down a trio of rulings that clashed directly with Trump’s agenda on the hot-button issues of abortion, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights – angering the president, tentatively pleasing progressives and leaving many court watchers to scratch their heads.There never was any doubt about the kind of supreme court that Trump and his sponsors set out to build. But suddenly there is doubt everywhere about how close – or far – their project has come to success.“I’ve referred to this past month at the supreme court as Blue June,” said Josh Blackman, a conservative court analyst and professor at the South Texas College of Law. “It seems as if almost all the big cases went to the left, and it’s made conservatives blue – that is, sad.”First Gorsuch wrote an opinion destroying the Trump administration’s argument that a 1964 law prohibiting employment discrimination “because of sex” does not apply to homosexual or transgender employees. “Today, we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender,” Gorsuch wrote. “The answer is clear.”Then Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W Bush appointee, found that the government had failed to make its case for ending a program protecting so-called Dreamers – undocumented immigrants who arrived to the US as children.“Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?” Trump tweeted after the decision was released.Roberts struck again later in the month, vacating a Louisiana anti-abortion law on the grounds that the supreme court had vacated an identical law in Texas just four years earlier, before the arrival of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.Roberts’ defection eliminated the law in a narrow 5-4 ruling.Daniel Goldberg, legal director at the progressive Alliance For Justice, called the victory on abortion surprising, but not because it demonstrated some unforeseen liberal bent on the part of the justices.“You know what surprises me, is that it wasn’t 9-0,” said Goldberg. “What does it say that four justices were completely willing to ignore precedent just four years old?“The response to these decisions just epitomizes how extreme the conservative legal movement is in this country.”Legal analysts cautioned the recent unexpected rulings were not signs of real moderation, and they said the court had moved unmistakably to the right under Trump.Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were willing to expose about 700,000 Dreamers to deportation, and both justices argued in favor of upholding the Louisiana abortion law, which was seen as posing an existential threat to the landmark Roe v Wade decision. Even in tipping that case to the left, Roberts emphasized that he was not doing so on the merits.“He has been consistently not supportive of abortion rights,” said Gillian Metzger, a professor of constitutional law at Columbia University, of Roberts. “I would not read into his decision any signal that, if confronted with a new kind of abortion measure, or even potentially if confronted with an effort to really rethink reproductive rights generally, that Roberts would necessarily be a very sympathetic respondent.”The court has advanced other conservative causes this term, expanding presidential power and challenging the separation of church and state by releasing public funding for religious schools.In one case, the four most conservative justices, including Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, ruled in favor of forcibly reopening California churches, against the will of state officials, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, so that Christians could celebrate Pentecost. Again, with Roberts’ defection, they were overruled.Multiple analysts said Trump’s failure, despite having a sympathetic court, to deliver on his promises to dismantle Barack Obama’s healthcare law and roll back abortion rights, could lie partly with flaws in his own administration’s legal strategies.In a series of cases, Trump lawyers have advanced arguments that Roberts has found to be pretextual or beside the point, as when administration lawyers said they wanted to include a question about citizenship on the US census because they wanted better data to ensure protection of voting rights.Roberts, whose light touch as the presiding officer in Trump’s impeachment trial just seven months ago was seen as aiding Trump’s expeditious acquittal, doubted the argument. “Reasoned decision-making calls for an explanation for agency action,” he wrote. “What was provided here was more of a distraction.”A similar objection – not to say exasperation – was detectable in Roberts’ recent ruling to leave in place the Dreamers program. Lawyers defending immigrants in the case said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was trying to pretend that it might want to keep the program, but its hands were tied because parts of the program had been thrown out in court.Again, Roberts detected a note of disingenuousness. “An agency must defend its actions based on the reasons it gave when it acted,” he wrote. “This is not the case for cutting corners to allow DHS to rely upon reasons absent from its original decision.”“You see Roberts much more willing to push back on that side of the Trump administration, and so I would say that’s been a shift,” said Metzger. “Over time the Trump administration is losing a little bit of the benefit of the doubt.”Rulings remaining in the current term – there are eight outstanding cases – could include powerful conservative decisions that could yet erase any memory of the court’s recent moderation.In Trump v Mazars USA, the court is expected to rule on whether financial and accounting firms that have worked with Trump must hand over tax records subpoenaed by Congress, in what analysts say is a major test for the balance of powers in the US system of government.“Although Trump v Mazars is about the tax records, it’s actually about a more basic constitutional principle, which is whether or not Congress can take meaningful oversight of the executive branch,” said Metzger. “And if Congress cannot do that, then we really are moving much more towards an authoritarian presidential regime.”Just a few months after the last ruling of the term is issued, a much larger ruling will be handed down, with much broader implications, by some 140 million voters in the November presidential elections.If Democrat Joe Biden can defeat Trump, he appears likely to have the opportunity to appoint at least two justices, with the octogenarian liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, nearing retirement. The Democrats would have to win the Senate too to ensure a smooth confirmation process and preserve the court’s current ideological balance.“If the Democrats have the Senate, I think it’s very likely that Ginsburg retires immediately and Breyer retires the next year, two back-to-back,” said Blackman. “That wouldn’t affect the composition of the court, unless Justice [Clarence] Thomas becomes ill, so I think the court would more or less stay the same for a while.”But if they win a strong majority, Democrats could attempt to pass reforms to bring the court more in line with the popular will, by adding seats to the court or imposing time limits on justices.Whatever the election outcome, the last court term of Trump’s first term seems likely to be noted for its unpredictable twists.“This is a very strange term,” said Blackman. “I don’t remember one quite like it.”


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Hillary Clinton: I Would Have Done a Better Job As President Handling Coronavirus

Hillary Clinton took a swing at President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, saying she would have done a “better job” in managing the crisis.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Clinton even claimed she would have done a better job in handling the economic fallout.

“We wouldn’t have been able to stop the pandemic at our borders the way that Trump claimed in the beginning, but we sure could have done a better job saving lives, modeling better, more responsible behavior,” she claimed.

“I don’t think we necessarily should have had as deep an economic assault on livelihoods and jobs as we have,” Clinton added. “So I know I would have done a better job.”

RELATED: Hillary Clinton Says It’s Time For a ‘Real President’

She Crazy

She’s a two-time failed presidential candidate, failed to implement new health care as First Lady, failed to protect Americans as Secretary of State, but we’re supposed to believe she could have done a better job than Trump.

It’s hard not to imagine Hillary locking down the entire nation if she had the power of the presidency behind her, meaning an economy in utter shambles. She celebrated Governor Cuomo, after all, who has done the very same thing – ruined his state’s economy, led the nation in COVID-19 cases, and personally sent thousands of seniors to nursing homes resulting in their deaths.

While locking down Americans, she likely would have never shut down travel from China or other nations that were hotspots for the virus, meaning many more lives lost.

Not to mention, we know all about her crisis management skills from Benghazi. Perhaps she could have blamed the pandemic on a YouTube video.

RELATED: Rep Dan Crenshaw Lights Hillary Clinton Up Over Her Latest Attack on Trump

Fantasy Land

This isn’t the first time Hillary openly fantasized about being the President, and it certainly won’t be the last time.

Several weeks ago, Clinton criticized Trump’s coronavirus response by saying, “We need a real President.”

“Donald Trump isn’t responsible for the coronavirus,” she tweeted recently. “But he is responsible for the disastrous lack of leadership that has led to 122,000 deaths in the U.S. and counting.”

And in April, the former First Lady shared a Washington Post story and quote with her social media followers which falsely alleged the President took over two months to treat the pandemic seriously.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw slammed Clinton when she mocked the President for America becoming the leader in coronavirus cases, a fact only possible if you believe nations like China and Iran had accurately reported their numbers.

“Delete your account. This isn’t the time,” Crenshaw replied. “This can’t be the new normal, where American tragedy is applauded for the sake of political opportunism.”

Additionally, Clinton told the Hollywood Reporter that she would beat Trump if she were on the ballot again in November, but added that running again was “not in the cards.”

The post Hillary Clinton: I Would Have Done a Better Job As President Handling Coronavirus appeared first on The Political Insider.

Pelosi Looking At Second Impeachment Hoax Against President Trump

To make sure Trump doesn’t win the presidency again or to make him pay if he does, Nancy Pelosi and DC Democrats are considering at least three new articles of impeachment against the president, media and political sources report.

House Speaker Pelosi is considering a broad front strategy and will possibly make the announcement next month or soon afterward in an attempt to steal thunder from the GOP convention and Trump’s fall campaign.

She may consider articles of impeachment, which the House Judiciary Committee will dutifully bring up, on COVID, the riots, and the new Democrat talking point on Russian bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan. The charges would break down this way:

COVID- The Democrats would charge that the president, out of incompetence and failing to listen to his public health advisors, failed to respond to COVID in time and by such is directly responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 Americans.

Yes, it is absurd and is especially so as Joe Biden called the president’s initial travel ban “xenophobic.” But this country passed the boundaries of the surreal some time ago regarding charges against the president.

There are approximately 45% of the public who will believe anything negative about Trump, no matter how ridiculous. Democrats can call them out at will to make it seem there is consensus for a new impeachment drive. Collusion with China on the virus is another facet of this charge: that the president, for personal and national economic gain, ignored the virus to curry favor with the Chinese.

The riots- This article would essentially charge the president with the constitutionally vague high crime and misdemeanor of “racism” and would thus hold him responsible for the deaths and riots associated with the George Floyd shooting.

This makes no sense and it’s not supposed to make sense. None of it is. The Democrats know they can never get enough votes out of the Senate to convict even if the Senate flips to them in November. The goal is to make the president look guilty, or sparing that make voters tire of his controversies, to depress his strength with swing voters.

This specific ploy would be to increase black Democrat turnout by luridly replaying scenes of the riots and blaming Trump. Though as Democrats are at this point held more responsible on the riots than the president, this could backfire on them.

Russian bounties- Democrats will charge, again, that the president is somehow compromised by the Russians and that’s why he ignored alleged intelligence reports on a Russian military intelligence unit paying the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan.

Given all intel agencies have publicly disavowed the reports, this would be the hardest case to make. Remember, none of these are designed by Democrats to convict Trump in the Senate, only to hurt him, and the nation, between now and election day and even after that if the president wins reelection.

This piece was written by David Kamioner on July 3, 2020. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

Read more at LifeZette:
Fox News fires host Ed Henry for sexual misconduct allegations: Fans stunned
Wisconsin college students demand Lincoln statue be torn down because while he was ‘anti-slavery,’ he wasn’t ‘pro-black’
Biden pops off on reporter, calls him a ‘lying dog face’

The post Pelosi Looking At Second Impeachment Hoax Against President Trump appeared first on The Political Insider.

Terrorism experts fear outbreak of violence by pro-Trump ‘Boogaloo’ fans around 2020 election

It’s not a secret that Donald Trump has been winking and nudging his True Believers with the suggestion that maybe they should start using their guns and other kinds of violence to defend his presidency. So it probably is no surprise that terrorism experts believe some of those same people are indeed preparing to engage in domestic terrorism around the 2020 election.

“Both the anti-quarantine protests that the far-right orchestrated in April and May and the recent civil unrest have accelerated the potential for more violence,” Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security terrorism analyst, told Judy Thomas of the Associated Press. “I think it will pick up over the summer and especially into the fall as we head into the election.”

According to Johnson, much of the violence emanating from the radical right is being fueled by fears frequently promoted in right-wing media: of civil unrest, black protesters and left-wing radicals, the novel coronavirus, stay-at-home orders, and job losses.

“The fear is just feeding this radicalization and recruitment,” he said. “And that’s why they’re booming.”

Trump himself has been fanning those flames. An April 17 tweet directed at the anti-stay-at-home protesters to encourage them suggested a broader agenda: "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!; LIBERATE MINNESOTA!; LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!" he wrote.

LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2020

That also was a reference to a January gun rally in Richmond, Virginia, attended by thousands of gun-toting “Patriots” protesting looming gun-control legislation in the state, and vows to revolt violently if the laws are enforced. Trump and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam have feuded on Twitter over the laws.

Trump has a history of rhetoric like this. In 2019, as impeachment proceedings were being discussed, he warned in an interview that thuggish elements might swing into action on his behalf: “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad," Trump said.

The American far right in fact has within its ideology an embedded mythos about a civil war or race war, dating back to at least the 1980s, and in recent years has been taking such rhetoric seriously, especially when it comes to defending Trump. Cesar Sayoc, the “MAGABomber” who targeted a list of Trump critics with pipe bombs that failed, was the apotheosis of this trend.  

So was Christopher Hasson, the Coast Guardsman who planned and prepared for a series of terrorist attacks against similar targets, expecting to be triggered to action in the event of a Trump impeachment.

Indeed, as impeachment approached, Trump himself again encouraged the talk by tweeting about a “civil war” if he should be removed from office. At the Twitter account of the far-right Patriot group Oath Keepers, founder Stewart Rhodes posted a long thread in support of Trump’s tweet: “We ARE on the verge of a HOT civil war. Like in 1859. That’s where we are.”

Again, when impeachment itself happened, the talk among right-wing extremists became extraordinarily violent. “Lock N Load, PATRIOTS, the demonrats just told us what they want for Christmas: #CivilWar2,” wrote one. “Let’s make the demon rats live on the streets of their own districts!”

Since then, these extremists have coalesced around the concept of a civil war under the online moniker of “Boogaloo,” often merging ideologies—radical white nationalists and less extreme Patriot militiamen alike—under the Hawaiian-shirted body armor and igloo-icon banner of the so-called movement. And as the protests against COVID-19 stay-at-home orders have progressed, their efforts to make their shared violent fantasy into a reality kept spiraling upward.

The anti-police protests surrounding the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May have provided opportunities for the “Boogaloo” to become manifest: Vehicle rammings at protests, massive turnouts of armed militiamen responding to hoax claims of “antifa buses” arriving in small towns, “Boogaloo Bois” driving to a Floyd protest in Las Vegas with a full complement of Molotov cocktails. In Oakland, a pair of Boogaloo Bois assassinated a federal officer at a Floyd protest and wounded his partner; two days later, the same gunman killed a Santa Cruz sheriff’s deputy.

Daryl Johnson considers the spiraling rhetoric and behavior not merely ominous, but positively dangerous in the context of the November election. He urges Americans to take action to prepare for such terrorism.

“We should all be on guard and vigilant, reporting suspicious activity, contacting legislators and forming or joining citizens organizations against hate,” he told Thomas. “This is all hands on deck.”