lees1975
lees1975's JournalNewsweek misses the point on Democrats and the 14th Amendment talk
https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/newsweek-misses-point-on-democrats-and.htmlIt's kind of funny that the article cited in the blog post from Newsweek is actually an article about another article and a quote that appeared in The Hill.
Democrats are obviously looking for ways to prevent the former failed President 45 from getting back into the White House. That's politics, folks. And within the limits the party imposes on itself when it comes to avoiding using conspiracy theories, sticking with facts, emphasizing policy, thinking rationally and logically and comparing what the party offers to the people in the way of government leadership as opposed to what the other party offers, we do a good job.
We do not think like, or act like Republicans. Maybe sometimes a little bit more of a drammatic flair like this would be a good thing. But it's not the Democrats who are speculating about the use of the 14th amendment, nor are the Democrats using the indictments and potential trials and verdicts as a plan to keep Trump from the Presidency. The Democrats' plan is very, very simple. It is getting behind Joe Biden's re-election campaign, supporting it, helping fund it, and running to win back the White House in 2024 against whomever the GOP nominates. That's the Democratic party plan. Everything else is just media speculation.
**snip**
The 14th Amendment was written after the Civil War, as a result of that experience. The "civil war" jabbering that the far right is now prolifically engaged in opens up the discussion about this issue regarding the former President. It's legitimate, and some of the best constitutional law experts in the country, like Lawrence Tribe, have made the case. So other than filling space to sell a few more ads, I don't see Newsweek's purpose in being a shadow for a Trump loyalist.
Kari Lake and supporters keep bringing cases to overturn the 2022 election without evidence.
https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/no-wonder-it-takes-courts-years-to-make.htmlNo matter how you shuffle the charges, or what order you put them in, the election in Arizona in 2022 isn't going to be overturned. In a backhanded way, the loser, Kari Lake, is helping Maricopa County prove just how accurate their ballot counting results are, and helping confirm that there was no election fraud and Trump really did lose.
This is, by definition, insanity. Another example of a Republican wasting taxpayer dollars.
I want to be this optimistic.
https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/i-want-to-be-this-optimistic.htmlBrian Karem, columnist for Salon magazine, says, "Trump can't come back from this: He will never be president again, and may well die in prison. The future awaits"
Thank you for the optimism, Brian Karem. It is encouraging to read such an upbeat piece. I share some of the optimism of this piece, and I would be really happy if it all turns out this way. There are always naysayers and Debbie Downers, right? And they turned out to be wrong about whether or not he was ever going to be indicted. I admit, there were times when I wondered that myself. Through all the long wait, while the Department of Justice was admittedly and deliberately dragging its feet, after being practically handed its case and evidence by Congress, we finally saw the indictments. And they've kept on coming.
I expected that the indictments in Fulton County, Georgia would take longer. They had to gather evidence, question witnesses and operate with a governor and secretary of state who are Republicans, and who, in spite of their being treated as Trump enemies, still can't pull away from partisan loyalty or be realistic and rational enough to understand that standing up for a free and fair election, which is the cornerstone of democracy and the bedrock of American patriotism, would be the right thing to do.
We still have a long way to go.
Democrats are the party of decency, integrity and honesty.
From https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/so-about-presidents-children-using.html
Democrats are not perfect people and everyone makes mistakes when their motivation and ambition becomes a driving force in their life. But, the contrast between the Presidency of Joe Biden, and that of his predecessor, with this particular issue serving as an example of the standards of conduct, it's no contest. President Biden hasn't used the powers of the Presidency on behalf of his son, something which, considering what he's been through in his private life, is an exercise of amazing restraint. Republicans wouldn't criticize one of their own who did this, so they have no valid complaint about this President or his children.
But the decency, integrity and honesty exhibited by most Democrats, and particularly by the President, stands in contrast to the opposition party, which talks a lot about it, but doesn't exhibit any of it. That's not painting with a broad brush either. I'm willing to acknowledge Republicans who are still people of integrity, aside from their political views. Well, go ahead, I'm waiting........
It will be very difficult to put this genie of political threats, animosity, and hatred, back into the bottle. And that's one reason I'm glad Democrats aren't giving in to the temptation to get down on the level of the opposition party and lose the integrity that they have in order to do it. We can win, and have won, without having to do that. We are good at grumbling, at complaining about and criticizing our party leadership, and we have a tendency to spend a lot of time justifying our position with endless minutia, which sometimes misses the point and allows the other side to control the agenda. But we are still the party of decency, integrity and honesty, and we are the best hope America has for staying free and democratic.
So, about the President's children using their family name to make money...
while their parent, or in-law, is in the White House........
https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/so-about-presidents-children-using.html
if I were a Republican, I'd be really disappointed in the fact that the party leadership can't come up with anything more than the name "Hunter Biden" every time indictments rain down on Trump. To have as little as they do for all of the noise they've made over it has to be a huge disappointment, especially when it no longer gets nearly the kind of attention the coverage of the Trump indictments is getting. If that's all they've got, and we know that if they had anything else we'd have heard about it a long time ago, it's going to be an uphill climb to convince any voter who isn't a hard core Trump supporter to make much of an issue out of it.
In the middle of hundreds of sound bytes from media during the course of the day, there are some things that catch your attention and then, sink in. It took just about ninety seconds of the Thom Hartmann program today to connect the dots for me and compare Hunter Biden to Jared Kushner, not in any way except in the fact that they may have something in common that, if Republicans are to avoid appearing politically motivated, and like hypocrites, needs to happen. And that's the fact that the former failed President's son-in-law, somehow managed to reverse his troublesome financial situation by benefitting from his in-law family name while his father-in-law was President of the United States. And he "earned" $3 billion, just a shade more than Hunter Biden [shade being a very relative term here], most of it from Saudi Arabia, a foreign power.
I'm not convinced we will ever have a Congress that will be genuinely interested in fairness, openness, or honesty. But that being said, it would seem to me that to avoid being labelled as politically motivated and hypocritical, the members of Congress should be as interested in where Jared Kushner got his $3 billion during his father-in-law's Presidency as they are about where Hunter Biden got his much, much smaller income during his father's Vice-Presidency. Just sayin' ya know.
No "Jill Steins" in 2024! Democrats must be united.
https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/no-jill-steins-for-democrats-in-2024.htmlAfter the 2016 disaster of an election, I was hoping that the Democratic party had learned its lesson and its leadership would become aware of potential problems along the party's fringes which, in the politics of our time, can be fatal to election campaigns, as the Green Party candidacy of Dr. Jill Stein did to Hillary Clinton. I still have trouble understanding what this fringe, third party thought they would accomplish by investing in the nomination of a candidate who undermined the only major party candidate in the election that would have actually addressed their interests. It's not inaccurate to say that the Green Party's nomination and support of Jill Stein caused a decisive defeat of their own interests.
It would have been insane, literally, for anyone to think that Stein would get enough votes in any state to carry it, not even close as it turned out. However, her presence on the ballot in at least three states, possibly four, was all that Trump needed to pick up the narrow margin of electoral votes he needed to win. What would have been in the best interests of the Green Party would have been for Stein and the party leadership to recognize where things stood in August or September of 2016, and then call a press conference and get as much media attention as possible while ending the campaign and endorsing Clinton. There's no question that Clinton represented the best chance for any of the Green Party's political goals to be achieved, electing Trump was a bigger defeat for them and for their perspective than it was for the Democrats.
Am I correct in assuming that the Democratic National Committee has people who stay on top of all of this and have the political savvy to figure out plans to neutralize stuff like this, or is that a false impression? Some of where the money is coming from suggests very strongly that the Trump campaign itself may be involved in helping make the No Labels party a reality, thinking that it may be able to pull of a Jill Stein scenario.
Messing with the jury pool
The orange headed buffoon has announced a press conference to give his own version of election fraud in Georgia on Monday.
He will keep pulling this crap until someone hits him with some consequences, like being held for trial, as anyone else who did this kind of thing would be.
Should we be surprised? I'm not.
https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/should-we-be-surprised-im-not.htmlRussell Moore, editor of Christianity Today magazine and staff member at Nashivlle's Immanuel Church is the former executive director of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission [ERLC]. He wound up having to step down from that job and leave his membership in a Southern Baptist Church because he has been one of the more prominent Evangelical voices in opposition to support for Trump. He's been consistent that Trump's worldliness, immorality and flaunting of the law is not something Christians should support with their votes.
He's recently noted a trend in Trump supporting Evangelical churches, most of them Southern Baptist churches, of members rejecting the teachings of Jesus as "liberalism." And he says that's an indication of a church in crisis.
I think Moore is very understated in that comment. It is definitely a crisis, one of the church's own making and it is leading congregations who are influenced by it down the road to apostasy.
American Democracy has turned a corner.
https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/american-democracy-has-turned-corner.htmlBe encouraged. The election in Ohio this week was a sign of good things to come out of the ballot box in 2024. Over three million Ohio voters turned out, and 57% of them voted no on a huge piece of legislation heavily supported by Republicans. Democrats got their people in deep red rural counties out to vote, which is what they need to win statewide elections. They also got the higher side of numbers they need to see in the bigger, metropolitan counties, to turn out as well.
I think this is one of several very encouraging signs that voters are tired of the negative nothingness of the Republican party, and will make the ballot box the means of preserving and protecting American democracy. I hope the juries in the Trump indictments take care of it long before it goes to trial, and render him not only ineligible for public office, but also for public citizenship.
Supporting Trump requires ownership of every bad thing he stands for or does
https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2023/08/supporting-trump-means-owning.htmlAnd that puts a lot of far right wing political Christians in a very, very bad place as far as their faith and doctrine teach.
From Rodney Kennedy, author of Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy
"He is a low grade fascist, a demagogue, a renegade populist, a rhetorical pervert, a serial liar, and a rhetorical arsonist who will not hesitate to light the fire and burn down the house of democracy."
That works for me. And I will add that he has already helped his conservative, Evangelical supporters burn down their faith, and their church, destroying its reputation, its ability to fulfill its evangelistic, Christian, biblical mission and purpose and he has created massive divisiveness and introduced heresy in the form of criticizing the person of Jesus Christ and rejecting his core teachings. If you need evidence for any of that, take a look at church membership and attendance records since Trump became President in 2016.
If you're a Trump supporter, you must own the things that he is and that's completely contrary to honesty, decency and the kind of faith that loves its enemies and turns the other cheek.
