BuzzFeed: Trump Ordered Michael Cohen to Lie to Congress About Russia Plans Wanted 1-on-1 Biz Meeting with Putin: ’Make It Happen’
By Joshua Caplan
BuzzFeed, citing two anonymous sources, alleges that President Donald Trump directed his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to make false statements to Congress regarding a proposal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow and wanted to meet with Putin himself about the proposal.
The Thursday report claims that the president “supported a plan” arranged by Cohen to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election to “jump-start” negotiations on the real estate deal, telling his longtime attorney, “make it happen,” according to two federal law enforcement officials. Further, BuzzFeed’s report alleges that President Trump received 10 “personal updates” regarding the proposed project from Cohen, who according to the unnamed sources, requested that his lawyer tell lawmakers that his involvement in the project concluded earlier than it actually did. The sources also claim the president’s children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, received updates on the proposed tower.
Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, dismissed the report, telling The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker: “If you believe Cohen I can get you a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Several Democrats, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA), have said they will take action against the president, pending the claims made in BuzzFeed’s report are factual.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) called for the president to resign or face impeachment — again — contingent upon the report being true.
In an appearance on CNN’s New Day Friday morning, Anthony Cormier, who co-authored BuzzFeed’s report, stood by his story, even though he had “not personally” seen the evidence. Host Alisyn Camerota also pressed Cormier on the “dubious past” of the report’s other author Jason Leopold, who had a story retracted by Salon in 2002 for erroneous reporting. Leopold also wrongly reported in 2006 that Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief political strategist, had been indicted.
In November, Cohen stated in a guilty plea that he lied to Congress about a Moscow real estate deal he pursued on President Trump’s behalf during the heat of the 2016 Republican campaign. He claimed he lied to be consistent with President Trump’s “political messaging.”
Cohen was sentenced December 12 to three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to several charges, including campaign finance violations and making false statements to Congress. Prior to his sentencing, Federal prosecutors in Manhattan asked a judge to sentence Cohen to a “substantial term of imprisonment,” arguing that he had been motivated by “personal greed.”
The plea agreement made clear that prosecutors believe that while President Trump insisted repeatedly throughout the campaign that he had no business dealings in Russia, his lawyer was continuing to pursue the Trump Tower Moscow project weeks after his boss had clinched the Republican nomination for president and well beyond the point that had been previously acknowledged.
Cohen said he discussed the proposal with President Trump on multiple occasions and with members of the president’s family, according to documents filed by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the presidential election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign. Cohen acknowledged considering traveling to Moscow to discuss the project.
However, there is no clear link in the court filings between Cohen’s lies and Mueller’s central question of whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. And nothing said in court, or in associated court filings, addressed whether Trump or his aides had directed Cohen to mislead Congress.
Reacting to Cohen’s plea, President Trump called Cohen a “weak person” who was lying to get a lighter sentence and stressed that the real estate deal at issue was never a secret and never executed. Giuliani said that Cohen was a “proven liar” and that Trump’s business organization had voluntarily given Mueller the documents cited in the guilty plea “because there was nothing to hide.”
“There would be nothing wrong if I did do it,” the president said of pursuing the project. “I was running my business while I was campaigning. There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gone back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”
Cohen is slated to testify before the House Oversight Committee on February 7 on his work for President Trump.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Set To Party With Hollywood At Sundance… Medicare, free tuition for all! And she’s just getting started…
By
(Bloomberg Businessweek) — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might not have seen eye to eye with Joseph Overton, the late free-market advocate. But she has a firm grasp of the concept for which he is best known: the Overton Window. The term refers to the range of ideas that are at any given time considered worthy of public discussion. Thanks largely to her, the Overton Window on tax rates has just been moved significantly to the left.
Ocasio-Cortez, the mediagenic 29-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., is the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. In an appearance on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper that aired on Jan. 6, she was talking up the Green New Deal, a plan to move the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Cooper challenged her by saying the program would require raising taxes. “There’s an element, yeah, where people are going to have to start paying their fair share,” she replied. Asked for specifics, she said, “Once you get to the tippy tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent.”
Seventy percent! For perspective, the top rate under the tax law that passed in December 2017 is 37 percent. And now, suddenly, a number so extreme that no one in polite society dared utter it became a focal point of debate. Ocasio-Cortez’s fans—she has 2.4 million followers on Twitter alone—loved it. Some pundits dug up economic research defending rates in the 70 percent range. Others pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez was actually lowballing the historical comparison: Top rates were 90 percent or higher as recently as the 1960s. Defenders of low tax rates heaped abuse on her, which backfired on them by inflaming her supporters.
What Ocasio-Cortez understands is that getting an idea talked about, even unfavorably, is a necessary, if insufficient, step on the path to adoption. (President Trump also gets this.) “It’s the easiest thing to say, ‘No, we can’t change anything,’ ” says Eric Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who recently retired from Columbia University. “Most of the big ideas in American history started among radical groups who were told, ‘No, you’re never going to be able to achieve that.’ ” Foner sees parallels between the strategies of today’s left-leaning Democrats and the radical Republicans who fought slavery before the Civil War, “which was put out an agenda, be aware that you can’t just accomplish it all at once, obviously, but change the political discourse by pushing your agenda and then work with those who are willing to do some of it.”
Ocasio-Cortez was actually less radical than she could have been on 60 Minutes. She passed up the opportunity to move the Overton Window on another of her pet issues: budget deficits. She adheres to a doctrine called Modern Monetary Theory that’s catching on among young, left-leaning politicians and older policymakers alike.
Its counterintuitive core idea is that deficits don’t matter if you borrow in your own currency, just as long as they don’t cause inflation. Unless the economy is at risk of overheating, MMTers say, paying for a new government program doesn’t require cutting another or raising taxes.
Ocasio-Cortez could have said, “No, Anderson, we wouldn’t need to raise taxes to pay for the Green New Deal. But I want to raise taxes anyway, because I believe in redistributing money from the rich to the poor.” That really would have lit up the internet. Randall Wray, an MMT theorist who’s a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, wrote in an email that he was “a bit disappointed” that Ocasio-Cortez connected tax hikes to the Green New Deal. Stephanie Kelton, another MMT theorist and Bernie Sanders’s economic adviser during his race for the Democratic nomination in 2016, says she thinks reducing inequality is the real reason Ocasio-Cortez favors higher rates on the rich: “It’s kind of a recognition that levels of income and wealth inequality parallel those of the 1920s.”
Whatever the particulars, Ocasio-Cortez wants to raise tax rates—by a lot. Since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, Democrats have been almost as allergic as Republicans to raising taxes. Hillary Clinton didn’t advocate increasing rates on top incomes at all during her 2016 presidential campaign. Even Sanders, that wild socialist from Vermont, dared propose a top rate of only 52 percent when he ran for president.
But with Ocasio-Cortez, antitax conservatives immediately sensed that a taboo was being broken, that a crack has opened up in the dam they’d spent decades building and reinforcing. Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, who in 1986 devised the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge that commits signers to vote against any net increases in taxes, on Twitter likened her proposal to slavery. “Slavery is when your owner takes 100% of your production. Democrat congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez wants 70% (according to CNN) What is the word for 70% expropriation?” he tweeted.
Norquist now says he remains confident that tax rates won’t rise to 70 percent, because “it’s such a bad idea.” In fact, he says he thinks Democrats are hurting only themselves by entertaining it. Ocasio-Cortez, he says, is a “pied piper” leading her party to its demise. It’s not at all clear, though, that higher taxes on the rich are a losing issue for Democrats. A Hill-HarrisX poll conducted on Jan. 12 and Jan. 13 found that 59 percent of registered voters supported the idea of raising the top rate to 70 percent. That included 45 percent of Republican voters. Thanks perhaps to the presidential campaign of Sanders, who like Ocasio-Cortez calls himself a democratic socialist, even “socialism” is no longer a dirty word: Gallup reported in August that 57 percent of Democrats and those leaning Democratic had a positive view of socialism, while only 47 percent had a positive view of capitalism.
What would a 70 percent top tax rate do to the U.S. economy and businesses? The rap on high rates is that they discourage work and promote wasteful tax-sheltering. Even many economists who think the rich pay too little say the better solution is to eliminate loopholes—subjecting more income to taxation rather than taxing a narrow base at a high rate.
Norquist argues that a 70 percent top rate would trigger an exodus of high-earning individuals from the U.S., saying that the last time U.S. rates were that high, they were also high in other nations, reducing the incentive to move. The Tax Foundation, a right-of-center think tank, said on Jan. 14 that a 70 percent top rate on ordinary income (not capital gains) exceeding $10 million “would not raise much revenue.” “Not much revenue” in this case means an estimated $189 billion in total over 10 years—or $292 billion before accounting for the likelihood that people in that tax bracket would work less and invest less in their noncorporate businesses.
On the other hand, economists supportive of Ocasio-Cortez were quick to point out that Denmark has among the world’s highest living standards despite a 56.5 percent tax rate on incomes above about $80,000 a year, a far lower threshold than her $10 million. A 2011 paper by Nobel laureate Peter Diamond of MIT and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley advocated top total tax rates (federal plus state) for the richest Americans of 73 percent on ordinary income (again, not capital gains). They assumed that an extra dollar of income for someone in that bracket has very little value in comparison to a dollar received by a lower-income person. Critics of their research have said Diamond and Saez treat the rich as sheep to be shorn and underestimate how much high tax rates would discourage people from getting advanced degrees or starting businesses. Diamond rejects the criticism, cites the need for more public investment, and says, “I’m perfectly comfortable” with Ocasio-Cortez’s 70 percent rate.
One thing that most people don’t know about Ocasio-Cortez is that she was a science nerd in high school in Westchester County, N.Y. In 2007, out of almost 1,500 students from 46 countries competing in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, she was one of four second-place winners in the microbiology category. (Her research was on the effect of antioxidants on roundworms.) It’s a biographical detail that adds another dimension to the story of a young woman born in the Bronx to parents of Puerto Rican descent who became the first in her family to attend college. While she was away at school her father died, pushing the family to the brink of financial ruin. “When you come from a working-class background, it often feels like you’re just one disaster away from everything falling apart,” she said in an Instagram video about a year ago.
Like former President Barack Obama, Ocasio-Cortez became a community organizer after graduating from college, in 2011, and supported herself as a waitress and bartender. She worked for Sanders’s campaign in 2016. After that, things happened fast. She ran for the Democratic nomination in her Bronx-Queens congressional district and upset Joe Crowley. Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Crowley had been seen as a candidate to succeed Nancy Pelosi of California as speaker. He outspent Ocasio-Cortez 18 to 1 and had endorsements from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and both New York senators. She won huge.
No one shifts the Overton Window on any subject without strong communications skills, and Ocasio-Cortez is ninja-level in that department. She thrills supporters by going after critics hard on social media, which she uses the way an older generation used street rallies. “I’m a firm believer that organizing never stops,” she told Cooper in the 60 Minutes interview. One of her first acts after her election was to visit the office of Pelosi—not to seek her blessing but to support climate change activists who were occupying the soon-to-be speaker’s office. Now Ocasio-Cortez works two doors away from Pelosi—but not for her. She’s floated the idea of creating a progressive caucus among the Democrats, modeling it on the powerful Freedom Caucus on the right. Among her allies are new members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first Somali-American elected to Congress; New Mexico’s Deb Haaland, one of the first American Indian women elected to Congress; and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Palestinian-American in Congress.
“This is a movement; this is not me,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram video last year.
Both Ocasio-Cortez and Trump are social media virtuosos. They excel at turning back attacks on their credibility. Attempts to challenge them on facts come across to their supporters as mean-spirited and unfair—the knee-jerk reaction of an establishment trying to suppress outside voices. So it was when Ocasio-Cortez mistakenly said on social media last year that the Pentagon had lost track of $21 trillion in funds, a figure that was about 30 times the Department of Defense’s annual budget. Unlike Trump, she corrects her mistakes. “The thing that’s hard is that you’re supposed to be perfect all the time on every issue and every thing,” she said on Instagram last year.
Implicit in that statement: Ocasio-Cortez has plenty more Overton Windows to shift and no intention of slowing down for the critics. Aside from the Green New Deal and higher taxes on the rich, she favors Medicare for all, a federal guarantee of a job, abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, and tuition-free college or trade school. She also wants to slash military spending, ban assault weapons, and bring back Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks.
That may all sound like tail risk to American businesses, which have been enjoying deregulation under Trump. Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, says, “This is the kind of plan where you can’t go to Wall Street executives first to try to get them to buy into it. You gotta show ’em.”
The question is whether she’ll be able to show them, or anyone. A week after Ocasio-Cortez came to Washington, fellow Democrats complained that she was disruptive and not a team player. Chief among her sins: threatening to back the primary opponents of members of Congress who aren’t liberal enough for her. “I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, a Missouri Democrat, told Politico. “We just don’t need sniping in our Democratic Caucus.”
To pass any of their initiatives, Ocasio-Cortez and her allies will have to defeat the proven Republican strategy of using budget deficits as a justification for opposing new spending. That’s where Modern Monetary Theory comes in. It says a government can spend money without raising taxes—indeed, without even borrowing from the public via bonds. The government simply creates new money to pay its bills. The only constraint on spending under MMT is that the government could use up too much of the nation’s productive capacity, which would result in high inflation. As long as inflation remains low, as it is now, deficits are no problem. The usual reply from other economists is that even a nation that owes debt in its own currency can suffer a crisis if investors lose faith in its ability to service the debt without resorting to the printing press.
One precinct where deficits still matter, and MMT most certainly does not, is the office of House Speaker Pelosi. On Jan. 3, under Pelosi’s direction, the House passed a set of rules including pay-as-you-go, which requires legislation that would increase the deficit to be offset by tax increases or spending cuts. PAYGO, as it’s known, is contrary to the spirit of MMT and hamstrings liberal Democrats by making most of their spending initiatives impossible. Ocasio-Cortez was one of only three Democrats to oppose the provision, along with Ro Khanna of California and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.
Ocasio-Cortez had another setback when she was passed over for a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees taxes, Social Security, and Medicare. But she recovered nicely by getting a seat along with other progressives on the powerful House Financial Services Committee, headed by Maxine Waters of California. Carolyn Maloney, a fellow New York Democrat, says, “I was once that young woman who others tried to rein in. I certainly don’t believe in doing that to anyone else. Representative Ocasio-Cortez is bringing new energy and a new approach, and we should all embrace that.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s disregard for political niceties is both her strongest quality as an activist and potentially her Achilles’ heel as a representative. She shows no sign of dialing back. One way or another, says Kelton, the economic adviser, “the conversation is shifting. The space is opening up.” —With Allison McCartney
New York Times Slams Karen Pence for Christian Beliefs on Marriage, Gives Rashida Tlaib a Pass for Sex-Segregated Mosque
By
The fake news at its finest.
The virulently anti-Christian mainstream press was back at work Wednesday, trashing Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, for teaching at a Christian school that holds the standard belief that marriage should be held between a man and a woman.
“Karen Pence, the second lady of the United States, returned to teaching art this week, accepting a part-time position at a private Christian school that does not allow gay students and requires employees to affirm that marriage should only be between a man and a woman,” the former paper of record said, scorning the second lady.
Traditional marriage is not one of those religious liberties protected by the First Amendment by which the social justice warriors in the mainstream press can abide.
“How can this happen in America in 2019?” asked Washington Post editor and Politico writer Lois Romano on Twitter, attaching the hit piece on Pence.
However, in the name of “diversity,” which is now, and always will be, America’s greatest strength, the leftist press is willing to let the non-social-justice-friendly customs of Islam slide, which is exactly what they did when they wrote about freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) attending her sex-segregated mosque.
“The symbolic importance of her new role was only starting to sink in as Ms. Tlaib walked into the women’s entrance of her family’s mosque on Friday for afternoon prayers,” the Times wrote in a glowing piece about Tlaib.
“Inside, Ms. Tlaib joined her mother and other women to form a single line at the front of the room. For the first time, an American almost certainly on her way to Congress stood shoulder to shoulder with her Muslim sisters and bowed toward Mecca,” it continued.
The Times and the rest of the social justice media simply glossed over the fact that, “in America in 2019,” to use Romano’s terms, Muslim women can’t even use the same entrance as Muslim men at the local mosque. This practice is among many Islamic customs that aren’t social justice friendly. But the press sweeps those under the rug, because… diversity!
An honest press would would be just as appalled at this obviously-sexist Islamic custom as they are at the fact that some Christians don’t believe in gay marriage, which they call homophobic on a regular basis.
But we do not have an honest press in the country – only a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. So Tlaib gets a pass, and Pence gets bashed.
Our media is garbage.
VIDEO: STRANDED BUS with Pelosi and Democrat Lawmakers IS DRIVING CIRCLES AROUND US CAPITOL
January 17, 2019
On Thursday afternoon, President Trump informed Speaker Pelosi her “public relations” trip to Afghanistan, Egypt, and Brussels has been postponed so that she can stay in DC and negotiate with him.
The President canceled Pelosi’s flight just one hour before she was scheduled to depart — Pelosi and other lawmakers were on the bus en route to the airport.
Trump told her to fly commercial on her own dime.
According to Fox News reporter, Chad Pergram, furious phone calls are flying back and forth from The Hill to the State to the Pentagon and White House.
THE BUS IS DRIVING CIRCLES AROUND THE US CAPITOL!
GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN SPECIAL: PRESIDENT TRUMP CANCELS NANCY PELOSI’S INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT
President Trump steps up shutdown fight by grounding Pelosi
JANUARY 17, 2019
President Trump puts the squeeze on Nancy Pelosi over the government shutdown by cancelling a planned trip overseas on Thursday – just an hour before her congressional delegation was set to depart. The move is the latest shot fired by Trump as he urges Democrats to negotiate on a border security deal that would include funding for a border wall.
Rapper Cardi B Melts Down: Slams Government Shutdown, Calls Trump Supporters ‘F**king Racist Rednecks’
By Justin Caruso
Rapper Cardi B lashed out at President Trump again Wednesday, criticizing the government shutdown and calling supporters of the president “f**king racist rednecks.”
In a series of videos posted to Instagram, Cardi B attacked the president and his supporters in vulgar terms.
“I don’t want to hear any of y’all motherfuckers talkin’ ’bout, ‘Oh, but Obama shut down the government for 17 days.’ Yeah, bitch, for healthcare!” she said. “So your grandma could check her blood pressure and you bitches could go check y’all pussy at the gynecologist with no mother fuckin’ problem!”
“This shit is really fucking serious bro. This shit is crazy. Our country is in a hellhole right now. All for a fucking wall.”
In a previous video, the “Bodak Yellow” rapper said, “You promised these fucking racist rednecks that you was gonna build the wall, but you know that was impossible.”
“But they voted for you and you promised them this shit so now you have to do it,” she said.
In another video posted to her social media this week, the 26-year-old fantasized about beating up the president.
“Like I swear to God, if I was there, I would have punched the motherfuckin’–I would have motherfuckin’ punched the wig out of Trump, bro,” the New York rapper said in response to Trump serving McDonald’s to Clemson football players.
Rep. Ilhan Omar Furthers Homophobic Conspiracy: Lindsey Graham ‘Compromised’
By John Nolte
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is now spreading a homophobic conspiracy theory that originated with MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle about Sen. Lindsey Graham being blackmailed by Trump over “something pretty extreme.”
Using her verified Twitter account, Omar wrote of Graham, “They got to him, he is compromised!”
Earlier this week, and without any evidence, Ruhle closed a MSNBC segment about Graham’s support for Trump with the media/left’s latest form of McCarthysim: “It could be that Donald Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham. We’re gonna leave it there.”
Everyone knows what Ruhle is referring to, which is why she was comfortable saying she would “leave it there.”
For years now, rumors have swirled that the never-married 63-year-old Graham is a homosexual. Ruhle wanted to get this rumor swirling as a means to punish Graham for his energetic and effective support for Trump of late, and it worked…
And so on….
Ruhle was probably following the lead of Jon Cooper, chairman of the Democratic Coalition, who tweeted about Graham’s “pretty serious sexual kink” on Sunday:
Regardless, this coordinated smear is straight-up homophobia, the use of homosexuality as a pejorative and weapon.
And we know it’s a smear because 1) Graham has said he is not gay and 2) even if he was, no one would care.
How do you blackmail someone for being a homosexual when no one cares?
Joining the sexual McCarthyites this week is Rep. Omar, who decided to further this conspiracy theory without citing any evidence. But it could be she’s too busy supporting Louis Farrakhan and defending her anti-Semitic comments about “the evil doings of Israel.”
Fox News reports that the freshman congresswoman is facing some blowback for her homophobic smear of Graham, but it is obviously not coming from the establishment media:
Harmeet K. Dhillon, a national committeewoman for the Republican National Committee, slammed Omar’s comment for bigotry: “Breathtaking bigotry, homophobia from a member of Congress. It’s not funny, and puzzling why Dems get away with outdated stereotypes and dumb conspiracy theories like this.”
“Is this a reference to the prominent & pernicious homophobic rumor that is circulating the internet? Because I might expect that from a troll, but you’re a Congresswoman,” Jerry Dunleavy tweeted.
“Here’s an elected representative promulgating the homophobic conspiracy theory, without evidence, that Lindsay Graham is a gay, blackmailed, shill,” writer Tiana Lowe seconded.
Omar hangs with hate leader Farrakhan, spreads anti-Semitism, and is now joining a homophobic smear campaign. But our oh-so progressive media continue to cover up for her.
As far as Graham, he is up for re-election in 2020 and because our media never leave their provincial and bigoted bubble, they will always see southerners as hicks and actually believe their smear campaign will cost Graham votes.
PELOSI TAUNTS TRUMP: YOUR STATE OF UNION POSTPONED! SHUTDOWN TURNS WEAPON
18 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (AP) — The partial government shutdown threw a prime Washington ritual into question Wednesday as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked President Donald Trump to forgo his Jan. 29 State of the Union speech, expressing doubts that the hobbled government can provide adequate security. Republicans saw her move as a ploy to deny Trump the stage.
In a letter to Trump, Pelosi said that with both the Secret Service and the Homeland Security Department entangled in the shutdown, the president should speak to Congress another time or he should deliver the address in writing. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen denied anyone’s safety is compromised, saying both agencies “are fully prepared to support and secure the State of the Union.”
Inviting the president to give the speech is usually pro forma, and Pelosi issued the invitation in routine fashion, in consultation with the White House, several weeks ago. But with the shutdown in its fourth week, the White House and Democrats in a stalemate and the impasse draining the finances of hundreds of thousands of federal employees, little routine is left in the capital.
Pelosi left unclear what would happen if Trump insisted on coming despite the welcome mat being pulled away. It takes a joint resolution of the House and Congress to extend the official invitation and set the stage.
“We’ll have to have a security evaluation, but that would mean diverting resources,” she told reporters when asked how she would respond if Trump still intended to come. “I don’t know how that could happen.”
She added: “This is a continuation of government issue that we have the proper security for such an event.” She was referring to an occasion that brings all three branches of government together in the same room — the president, members of Congress and the Supreme Court justices who attend.
To Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the matter was less about security than about Pelosi feeling she has the upper hand in the budget standoff.
“She’s talking about canceling the State of the Union — this is not somebody who’s feeling any pressure,” Johnson said. “I think Republicans are getting the lion’s share of the pressure.”
Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., said he hopes Trump will proceed with his speech. Pelosi is “censoring this vital message for transparent political purposes,” he said.
The White House hosted a bipartisan group of lawmakers, followed by a group of Republican senators, on the 26th day of the shutdown, with no sign of breaking through the impasse over Trump’s demands for $5.7 billion to build a wall along the Mexican border. Democratic leaders are refusing to bargain over a border wall they oppose as long as the government remains partially closed.
On Wednesday, Trump signed legislation into law affirming that the roughly 800,000 federal workers who have been going without pay will ultimately be compensated for their lost wages. That was the practice in the past.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware are leading a renewed effort to persuade Trump to let the government reopen for three weeks in return for a commitment from lawmakers to try to address his concerns about border security in that period. They are seeking signatures on a letter spelling out the plan.
Trump rejected that approach earlier and the initiative was having trouble getting many Republicans on board.
“Does that help the president or does that hurt the president?” asked Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., among those who went to the White House. He has not signed the letter. “If the president saw it as a way to be conciliatory, if he thought it would help, then perhaps it’s a good idea,” he said. “If it’s just seen as a weakening of his position, then he probably wouldn’t do it.”
While Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she has signed, others said GOP support was lacking. “They’re a little short on the R side,” said Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., another leader of the effort.
Other lawmakers are floating additional plans, but Graham was skeptical any would break through.
“I am running out of ideas,” he said.
“The Democrats are not going to negotiate with the government shut down,” he said. “People in the White House don’t like hearing that. I don’t know what to tell them other than what I actually think.”
Even as administration officials projected confidence in their course, Kevin Hassett, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said Tuesday the shutdown is slowing growth more than predicted.
An economic shift could rattle Trump, who has tied his political fortunes to the stock market and repeatedly stressed economic gains as evidence that his tax-cut package and deregulation efforts are succeeding. Economic optimism had already cooled somewhat as Trump’s trade fight with China shook the markets.
Hassett told reporters the White House is doubling its estimate of the strain on the economy of the shutdown, and now calculates that it is slowing growth by about 0.1 percentage points a week.
With the shutdown in its fourth week, that suggests the economy has lost nearly a half-percentage point of growth so far, though some of that occurred at the end of last year and some in the first quarter of this year. Hassett said the economy should get a boost when the government re-opens.
Previous White House estimates of the impact did not fully take into account the effect on people who work for private companies that contract with the government to provide services, Hassett said.
‘When did the Democratic party become neocons?’– Tucker Carlson
After the mainstream media and establishment Democrats piled on President Trump for even considering pulling the US out of NATO, Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked when the doves became cheerleaders for war.
That Republicans love war is an easy assumption to make. President Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton has been howling for regime change in Iran since day one. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is equally hawkish and confrontational towards the Islamic Republic. Further back, George W. Bush’s cabinet was stuffed with war enthusiasts like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and the late Republican Senator John McCain never met a war he didn’t like.
But opposition to President Trump has seen Democrats – once considered the more peace-loving and diplomatic of the two parties – embrace war like never before.
The New York Times, citing its usual anonymous sources, revealed on Monday that current and former Trump administration officials concluded the president must be a Russian agent, because he discussed pulling the US out of NATO.
“This is a huge story,” said Carlson. “Or it would have been huge in 1983 when the Soviet Union still existed, and it was still clear what the point of NATO was. NATO, you’ll remember, was created to keep the Soviets from invading Western Europe…and did a very good job at that.”
Trump’s opposition to NATO is well documented, and the president has excoriated allies like Germany for failing to meet their spending obligations under the organization’s charter. In 2018, the US spent almost $700 billion on defense, over double the expenditure of all 28 other NATO states combined. Moreover, the idea of bankrolling western Europe’s defense needs also clashes with the president’s more transactional view of foreign relations than his predecessor.
“Vladimir Putin runs Russia now,” Carlson continued. “He does not plan to invade Western Europe. He can’t. So why do we still have NATO? Nobody really knows. In Washington you’re definitely not allowed to ask.”
After the New York Times’ article was published, Democrats took their turns thrashing Trump. Former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara stated that Trump should be “promptly impeached, convicted, and removed from office” for daring to question the alliance’s value to America.
Former US Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns called the mere idea of pulling out of the alliance “madness” that would lead to “one of the greatest strategic catastrophes in American history.”
“He can’t do that to this country,” Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier added in a news interview. “It would be a ground for some profound effort by our part, whether it’s impeachment or the 25th Amendment.”
“Did you catch that?” Carlson said. “The 25th Amendment. In other words, according to a sitting member of Congress…rethinking membership in NATO isn’t just treasonous and criminal. It’s prima facie evidence of insanity.” The 25th Amendment allows for a president to be removed from office for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office;” in other words, unfitness.
But is the left’s NATO cheerleading a partisan reaction to Trump’s ‘America First’ brand of 21st Century isolationism? After all, the left fact-checks his McDonalds orders and would declare breathing an impeachable offense if Trump came out in favor of air.
Not so. Among the handful of Democratic challengers who have announced presidential bids in recent weeks, Hawaiian Representative Tulsi Gabbard distinguished herself by focusing her campaign on America’s foreign policy. An Iraq war combat veteran, Gabbard has consistently questioned Washington’s bipartisan consensus on foreign wars and intervention, opposing Barack Obama’s air campaign in Syria, calling for an end to the war in Afghanistan “as soon as possible,” and sponsoring legislation to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia and defund the National Security Agency.
Gabbard was quickly labeled an “Assad sympathizer” for meeting with the Syrian leader in 2017. While Gabbard called Assad a “brutal dictator,” her opposition to military action rubbed the hawks in both parties the wrong way. The left and right piled on, christening Gabbard a “right-wing puppet of the Kremlin,” digging up past homophobic remarks she had made, and calling her a darling of the alt-right, the KKK, and even RT.
“She went, in 2017, Gloria — this is going to be another issue — to visit with Bashar al Assad in Syria,” said CNN’s Brianna Keilar. “This trip has already come back to bite her.”
“I think it makes her a less effective candidate,” contributor Gloria Borger responded. “She can’t position herself against Trump about meeting with dictators when, in fact, she’s done it herself.”
With the Democratic party circling the wagons against Gabbard, Trump, and anyone breaking from the endless war consensus, Carlson asked “whatever happened to the Democratic Party?”
“When did the anti-war people become florid neocons? When did it become the party of Bill Kristol and Max Boot and every other discredited hack still trying to replicate the Iraq disaster in nations around the world? Who knows when that happened? But that’s exactly what the Democratic Party is today.”
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