“The looming U.S. government shutdown could play into Russian President Vladimir Putin's hands as Ukraine battles to peel back Russian control along the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine.
The race is on to reach a spending deal to stop what would be a fourth federal government shutdown in the past five years ahead of midnight striking at the end of the fiscal year on September 30. But the rippling impacts would be felt further afield than U.S. territory—a shutdown could hinder Ukraine's ability to fight Russian forces in its grueling counteroffensive, handing the Kremlin an advantage Kyiv can ill afford.
The shutdown will impact "almost everything," from domestic U.S. services to the war in Ukraine, and is an "impending disaster" for Kyiv, Bill Browder, the head of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign and prominent Kremlin critic, told Newsweek on Friday.
"Putin is looking for any chink in our armor, any weakness, and this is a self-inflicted weakness which is totally unnecessary," he added.”
“Kristin Welker’s disastrous Trump interview just offered a new unknown gift to prosecutors: 9 minutes of the Trump interview that NBC edited out, including another version of Trump’s election fraud lies that the prosecutors will likely use against him at his trials.”
But the footage aired during Meet the Press didn’t tell the whole story — not even close. The full interview ran 78 minutes, the first 9-10 minutes of which vividly showed the challenge Welker faced, as she spent most of that tine trying to get Trump to “move on” from a lie that she repeatedly told him had been debunked...
FMR. PRES. DONALD TRUMP: The election was rigged. There’s no question about that. There’s so much proof on it. Even if you go to the more modern-day proof with the — they call it Twitter Files, FBI and Twitter, or you take a look at the Amazon stuff or the Google stuff, or you take a look at “2,000 Mules,” you take a look at all of the ballot stuffing that’s on tape, you take a look at the fact that the legislatures didn’t approve a lot of the things that were done in the elections, and they had to approve. And we could go on forever. We could go on forever. But, but no. I want somebody that’s going to be strong, respected, tough, and fair.
KRISTEN WELKER: Just to go back to a couple of the points you said, the ballot stuffing. That’s something that’s been debunked.
FMR. PRES. DONALD TRUMP: It hasn’t been debunked. It’s on camera.
KRISTEN WELKER: As you know, let’s — But I do want to keep moving forward.
“McCarthy’s latest proposal is for lawmakers returning Tuesday to begin the process of considering and amending bills that would fund four government departments for all of fiscal 2024. However, it remains unclear if Republicans have enough support to overcome a procedural vote to even start debate on these bills, which is the same hurdle that five Republicans blocked twice this week.
Leaders hope that by amending the Defense and Homeland Security Department bills on the floor, they can appease certain objectors with policy concerns. Most notably, McCarthy said the House would remove any funding for Ukraine from existing legislation and put it up as a separate vote, a singular concession to earn the support of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
In a video posted Friday on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter, Greene said she was mad at leadership because she has consistently said she would not support spending any money on Ukraine, only to be finally taken seriously after she voted against starting debate on the Defense Department bill Thursday.
‘All week long I have been saying, ‘Take the money out and I will vote for it.’ But they didn’t respect me, they didn’t respect other people, they didn’t respect the American people,’ she said. Greene voted Tuesday to advance the Defense Department bill, but switched her vote to no on Thursday.”
Keith Gargus who worked with me in Coatesville PA for several years. Keith gave me his ATF hat as a gift. He was leaving Coatesville PA.
Keith shaking hands with Gov. Rendell
Keith walked up to my front door said, “I know you like the ATF. Don’t wear it in public. You’ll go to prison 5 years.
It was his going away gift to me.
Why he had this ATF hat & an FBI hat is a long story for another time.
Trumpers make Most PATHETIC ARGUMENT in Court and Prepare for COLOSSAL LOSS
96,222 views Sep 22, 2023
Indicted Fake Electors and former Georgia Republican Party officials make their case to convince a federal judge that since they were impersonating an elector they get to go to federal court for their criminal trial. Michael Popok of Legal AF explains why electors aren’t federal officers to give them a right to federal court, and fake electors aren’t either.
“The federal judge overseeing Donald Trump’s frivolous $500 million civil lawsuit against his former attorney Michael Cohen ordered that the disgraced ex-president must show up to be deposed on October 3rd at the time and location of Cohen’s choosing.
Cohen wondered how Trump, with his very short attention span, would even be able to handle the 9-hour deposition, which is rapidly approaching. ‘What I will say is that he has to appear at the at the location and at the time that we designate and we have him…for a maximum of 9 hours. I don't know how he intends to sit — forget about 9 hours — the guy has the attention span of a peanut, ‘Cohen remarked.”
"We can't let him trash the GOP," Ryan fumed, noting that Donald Trump
was not representative of the policies or the people in the Republican Party.
House majority leader Kevin McCarthy nodded in agreement.
When it was his turn, McCarthy joked that Trump had switched parties so many times he couldn't tell a donkey from an elephant.
Party leaders had failed to knock out Trump early, so now they were trying to coalesce around someone who could stop him. In the mean-time, Paul Ryan wanted House Republicans to distance themselves from the New York businessman, who they all expected would lose any-way. It wasn't just that Trump was hostile to GOP orthodoxy; he was breathtakingly ignorant about the rule of law, the Constitution, and the democratic system. The select group of lawmakers and staff were tasked with developing a platform that was the antidote to Trumpism.
"We can't let him trash the GOP," Ryan fumed, noting that Donald Trump was not representative of the policies or the people in the Republican Party.
House majority leader Kevin McCarthy nodded in agreement.
“When it was his turn, McCarthy joked that Trump had switched parties so many times he couldn't tell a donkey from an elephant.”
That was Kevin McCarthy in 2016.
Kevin McCarthy today!!
"Deep Republican divisions erupted onto the House floor on Tuesday as a handful of far-right conservatives blocked a Pentagon spending bill from coming up for debate, dealing an embarrassing setback to Speaker Kevin McCarthy as he struggled to round up votes to prevent a government shutdown in less than two weeks.
In a development rarely seen in the House, five Republicans broke with their own party and refused to allow the usually broadly bipartisan military funding measure to be considered, registering their objections to Mr. McCarthy’s strategy in an escalating fight over federal spending. It left the chamber paralyzed for the moment, with little time before a Sept. 30 deadline to avert a government closure.
The stunning setback sent Mr. McCarthy and his lieutenants scrambling for a way forward both on their yearlong spending bills and a temporary funding bill that had already run into a buzz saw of opposition from the far right as the speaker faced fresh threats of an ouster from detractors in his own party. Even if it could make it through the House, the temporary spending measure stood little chance in the Democratic-led Senate, where its combination of deep spending cuts and stringent border policies was seen as a nonstarter."
The floor defeat underscored the G.O.P. resistance Speaker Kevin McCarthy was facing as he struggled to round up votes to avoid a government shutdown.
Sept. 19, 2023
***
"The long-awaited federal indictment of Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election may be necessary to contain the threat to American democracy that he has unleashed. But it’s unlikely to be sufficient.
The germ of election denialism that Trump injected into the American political system has spread so far throughout the Republican Party that it is virtually certain to survive whatever legal accountability the former president faces.
With polls showing that most Republican voters still believe the election was stolen from Trump, that the January 6 riot was legitimate protest, and that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 results did not violate the law or threaten the constitutional system, the United States faces a stark and unprecedented situation. For the first time in the nation’s modern history, the dominant faction in one of our two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests.
The most telling measure of that dynamic inside the GOP is that Trump remains the party’s central figure. Each time GOP voters and leaders have had the opportunity to move away from him—whether in the shock immediately after January 6, or the widespread disappointment over the poor performance of his handpicked candidates during the 2022 election—the party has sped past the off-ramp.
Polls now show Trump leading in the 2024 GOP presidential race by one of the biggest margins ever recorded for a primary candidate in either party. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has been exploring ways to expunge his two impeachments and/or block the investigations he faces. Even the other candidates ostensibly running against him for the 2024 GOP nomination have almost uniformly condemned the indictments against him, rather than his underlying behavior. Prominent conservatives have argued that Trump cannot receive a fair trial in any Democratic-leaning jurisdiction.
All of these actions measure how much of the GOP is now willing to accept Trump’s repeated assaults on the basic structures of American democracy. While the key state-level Republicans rejected Trump’s direct demands to invalidate the results in their own states,most House Republicans voted to reject the election results and most Republican state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to decertify the outcome in the key swing states won by President Joe Biden. In the election’s aftermath, the majority of Republican-controlled states, inspired by Trump’s baseless claims of endemic voter fraud, passed laws on a party-line basis making it more difficult to vote, or increasing partisan control over election administration.
Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian who specializes in American politics, told me that U.S. history has no exact precedent for a party embracing a leader so openly hostile to the core pillars of democracy. Presidents have often been accused of violating the Constitution through their policy actions, he said, but there is not another example of a president moving as systematically to“manipulate the apparatus of government or elections in order to subvert the will of the people.”
The closest parallel to Trump’s actions, Wilentz said, may be the strategies of the slaveholding South in the decades before the Civil War. Those included violent attacks on abolitionists, suppression of antislavery publications, and the promulgation of extreme legal theories such as the denial of basic rights to Black people in the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, all of which were designed to protect slavery against the emerging national majority dubious of it. That decades-long “antidemocratic thrust” from the South, Wilentz noted, “finally culminated in the greatest violation of the American Constitution in our history, which was secession.”
By contrast, Wilentz added, the GOP’s continued embrace of Trump amid the evidence of his misconduct contrasts sharply with the party’s refusal to defend Richard Nixon in the final stages of Watergate. “When Richard Nixon was about to be impeached, he didn’t storm the Capitol to get rid of Barry Goldwater,” Wilentz said, referring to the conservative Republican senator who warned Nixon that he would lose a Senate vote to remove him. “He resigned.”
All of this suggests that personal accountability for Trump is unlikely to erase the tolerance for antidemocratic actions that has spread in the GOP since his emergence. Yet many experts who study the health of democracy still believe that prosecuting him remains essential.
Kristy Parker, a counsel at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group that focuses on threats to democratic institutions, says it is crucial to show the “silent majority” of Americans who support the constitutional system that no one is above the law. “They need to see that the Department of Justice prosecutors are willing to take the risk of indicting Trump,” Parker told me. “They need to see the election workers ensuring that people get their vote counted. They need to see the police officers standing up to the rioters. They need to see people within the system working.”
Also be sure to watch a very entertaining Mea Culpa Podcast, with Michael Cohen & Harry Litman below.
Sep 18, 2023
"Donald Trump on Meet the Press just did two things: destroyed his reasonable “reliance on counsel” defense and helped Special Counsel Jack Smith prove the required criminal intent. Michael Popok of Legal AF also takes down Trump’s attempt to rely on Federalist Society “journalist” Molly Hemingway as part of his defense."
In 1966 the Art Museum area was rundown. The leader of the 'Green St. Counts" gang was murdered across the street from us in 1965.
Harvey Welker lived across the street. He was an engineer at Sunoco (If my memory is correct). Harvey testified at Philadelphia School Board meetings and was an early civil rights white guy. He met his future wife Julie at the school board meetings.
In 1976 Betsy & me spoke to Harvey & Julie at a Berger King in East Falls.Their newborn daughter Kristen Welker,
My first encounter with Kristen Welker as an adult TV news reporter at a City of Coatesville City Council meeting.
Patsy Ray and Kurt Schenk changed a scheduled Coatesville City Council meeting at the City of Coatesville City Hall City Meeting Room into a full blown Christian religious service.
Call and response with Richard Legree in the first row saying "Amen". Everything but the choir.
I think the political plan was that It's hard for some people to criticize a minister of Christ.
I was telling people and sending emails to people about the insane and allegedly illegal stuff going on at Coatesville City Council meetings but no one paid any attention. The Daily Local News ignored the crazy possibly illegal stuff. Most people said in a condescending manner that this stuff goes on in many local government meetings.
I decided to bring a pocket tape recorder, the kind Donnie Brasco used in the film. I began recording the Coatesville City Council meetings. I still have maybe 100 archived on my Box account. I learned how to create audio files that could be attached to emails.
Unfortunately I lost the recording of the Coatesville City Council/Church Service meeting in a computer crash.
When I sent an audio recording of a Coatesville City Council/Church Service meeting in my emails to about 35 people, including Deanna Durante, the entire U.S. began to pay attention to the Coatesville City Council.
Deanna Durante of Channel 6 WCAU and her cameraman visited me at home in the afternoon. I played my pocket tape recorder. Her cameraman recorded it on his camera. At the Coatesville City Council meeting that night several TV news vans were parked outside.
Kristen Welker was at that meeting.
Back then as now the Coatesville City Council members take an oath before becoming city council members:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support, obey and defend the Constitution of the United States…
COATESVILLE, PA - The Coatesville City Council heeded warnings from the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and backed down from Council members' statements that they would "never" stop using Council meetings to witness to their faith as Christians.
The Council drew public attention at its February 12, 2007 meeting, when Council President Ray, a minister, ordered everyone in the room to stand and hold hands. Councilman Kurt Schenk, also a minister, then delivered a Christian prayer.
The Freethought Society's president, Margaret Downey, asked Ray and Schenk in a February letter to apologize for the prayer. Ms. Downey also asked that City Council adopt a neutral policy on religion. Despite the request, the City Council opened the next meeting on February 26 with The Lord's Prayer, and Schenk and Ray refused to apologize, stating instead that they would continue to witness for their faith from the Council podium.
The ACLU then joined the Freethought Society in demanding an end to sectarian prayers at Council meetings. "Coatesville Council members must cease using their elected positions to promote their personal religious views. That is not only the law - which every elected government official has sworn to uphold - but is also the only way to show respect for the beliefs of all Coatesville residents, regardless of religion or creed," wrote Mary Catherine Roper, staff attorney for the ACLU.
