Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) on Sunday said she is waiting to see what the Senate does with her first batch of articles of impeachment before confirming whether to issue new ones.
ABC’s This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Pelosi if the House might file new articles since she believes President Donald Trump is violating the Constitution "again and again."
"Well, let’s just see what the Senate does, the ball will be in their court soon," Pelosi said.
Pelosi on Saturday announced that next week, the House will finally vote to send its original articles of impeachment to the Senate for a vote. The announcements meant Pelosi had relented on efforts to push Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) to permit new witnesses during the Senate’s trial of Trump. The Senate’s Republican majority is widely expected to vote down House Democrats’ charges.
Rep. Al Green (D., Texas) pushed the idea for Democrats to impeach Trump again if the Senate doesn’t remove him. Last month, Rep. Karen Bass (D., Calif.) said Democrats would continue to push for impeachment if Trump is reelected in 2020.
"There’s a ton of information that could come forward," Bass said. "For example, we could get his bank records and find out that he’s owned 100 percent by the Russians."
Steve Bannon, the Former Chief Strategist of President Trump, went on with Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures this morning.
Steve Bannon brought his A-Game this Sunday morning!
Bannon argued that President Trump MUST forget about Senate decorum and use some of the House “fire breathers” like Zeldin, Gaetz, Jordan and Meadows on his Impeachment team.
Steve Bannon also called on Trump to delay State of the Union until the trial is over!
Steve Bannon: This is the nullification process to nullify his presidency. And you see why. They were wrong. They were the appeasers. He’s the Churchill figure. He has stood tall. That’s why this is the trial of the century. It’s about the crime of the century. It’s going to be on global television. That’s why I believe he has to have some of the House people like Lee Zeldin and Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan and Gaetz… He’s still got an opportunity to do that. I think the president needs that because these fire breathers need to be there. We can’t worry about the decorum of the senate. This is about the direction of the United States of America. It’s about the peace and prosperity of the world…
…She (Pelosi) purposely slow walked this because she wants the trial during the State of the Union… He has to be acquitted and then he should have the State of the Union Address because the whole world will watch this.
David Kris served as Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice under President Obama and Attorney General Holder. He drew on his prestige as a former senior official in the Department of Justice to disparage Rep. Devin Nunes in his exposure of the FBI’s misconduct in the Russia haox and assure anyone who would listen to him that all was in order. He is an apologist for FBI misconduct who gives the Department of Justice Inspector General report on the FBI’s FISA misconduct the stupidly credulous reading that absolves the FBI of political bias in the matter.
The once prestigious Lancet medical journal has published a bizarre book review asserting that “white Americans continue to mobilise to maintain or extend the exclusive advantages whiteness offers those who can become white.”
The Lancetselected Rhea W. Boyd, a Minority Health Policy Fellow at Harvard’s School of Public Health, to review a 2019 book called Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl, whose thesis is that “right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences — even for the white voters they promise to help.”
In his book, Metzl argues that white mortality is up in the United States ever since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, since in order to “maintain an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy,” white Americans who harbor “racial resentment” support policies that seem to limit the freedoms or resources available to non-whites, even though such decisions threaten their own wellbeing as well.
“From expansive gun legislation to broad divestment in government programmes, Metzl characterises white liberties that endanger white lives or imperil white futures as ‘dying of whiteness,’” Boyd observes.
While in her review Boyd fundamentally agrees with Metzl’s contentions, she believes that he is too soft on whites by attributing whites’ self-destructive white political actions to “racial resentment,” which “erases white agency through emotional euphemism.”
“At times, Metzl artfully articulates and historicises the racist origins of white interest in firearm fanaticism and ‘small government’ politics,” Boyd writes. “At others, he turns to ‘racial anxieties,’ racially charged ‘fears,’ or ‘racial resentment’ to describe white people’s political investment in white racial dominance.”
Boyd decries the “common practice” of mis-attributing “white self-destruction and violence to psychological states” or obscuring “the impacts of defending whiteness through emotional euphemisms.”
Drivers of white mortality such as suicide, chronic liver disease, and drug and alcohol poisoning have been described as “diseases of despair,” Boyd notes, while they should be classified as “diseases of disproportionate opportunity (to wield firearms) and access (to prescription opiates).”
The real focus should not be on “mental illness,” “distress,” or “white fragility” underlying increasing white mortality, she contends, but rather on the fundamental “legacy of death in whiteness’s wake.”
It is a mistake — she asserts — to “assert that resentment, despair, or any emotion that arises from being ‘left behind’ accounts for white Americans’ self-destructive actions, violent politics, or declining population health.”
The real population that has been left behind are blacks, she argues, but the difference is that blacks have consistently supported policies that benefit everyone while whites only support policies that benefit themselves.
And so, “despite suffering at every turn of every decade of every century in this nation, generations of Black Americans have sought political reforms that expand electoral participation, increase government protections, and extend public resources beyond their individual or group benefit,” she claims.
Reading between the lines, it seems clear that Boyd believes that the big government policies adopted by the Democrat party benefit the entire population, whereas policies enacted by the GOP only benefit whites.
Thus, she asserts that New Deal politics “forged the greatest advances in social benefits the USA has ever known — from social security and home loan assistance to the administrative precursors to welfare.”
Therefore, “scholars, the media, and the public” have failed to understand “the evolving ways white Americans continue to mobilise to maintain or extend the exclusive advantages whiteness offers those who can become white, even as those advantages place them in increasing proximity to death.”
The simple fact is that “despair isn’t killing white America, the armed defence of whiteness is,” she writes. Thus, death “is the inevitable consequence of the full realisation of structural racism and the exclusive rights and resources it offers those who can become white,” she continues.
Boyd goes on to propose a theory would challenge even the most race-obsessed, in part because it lacks any kind of rational intelligibility.
“For humans to use whiteness to manufacture access and privilege,” Boyd suggests, “they must engineer scarcity and loss. This entanglement between access and scarcity, privilege and loss, means white people’s unearned advantages have always been tethered to a legacy of untold deaths.”
Despite his noble efforts to understand the evils of structural white racism, Boyd suggests, Metzl fails because he anchors it to an emotional foundation, which leads him to conclude that more healthy and self-reflective frameworks of structural whiteness are needed.
In reality, Boyd concludes, the only real solution “is to eliminate whiteness all together.”
The fact that some people think this way is frightening enough. That the Lancet, which once represented serious medical journalism, would decide to publish it points to a devastating deterioration of the institutional academy as reasoned discourse gives way to incoherent ranting.
On Friday,Judge James Boasberg, the new head of the FISA Court, announced in an order that he has appointed Obama-era national security leader at the DOJ David S. Kris as amicus counsel to review the reforms the FBI will be making to its FISA application process.
In December presiding FISA judge Rosemary Collyer announced she would be stepping down early from the FISA Court due to ‘health issues.’
Chief Justice Roberts tapped Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee to replace Collyer.
The moves were in response to the FBI abusing the FISA process after it obtained a total of four FISA warrants on Carter Page.
David Kris is an anti-Trump activist who wrote several articles lying about Rep. Devin Nunes and President Trump.
And HE was picked to clean up the FISA process!
This is UNBELIEVABLE!
On Sunday Rep. Devin Nunes joined Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures to discuss the shocking development by the corrupt Department of Justice.
Nunes argued that this is even MORE OF A REASON to shut down the criminal FISA Court system.
Rep. Devin Nunes: So the fact that of all the people in the swamp… this is the guy that you come up with? A guy that is accusing me of federal crimes. A guy that was defending dirty cops at the FBI. That’s why I said it last night in a tweet, the court must be trying to abolish itself. Because there is long term damage, this is another misstep. Remember the judge from last year, that now was in charge of all of these FISAs She claimed at the end of the year, which is great, oh there is a problem here we need the FBI to do something. Well, that in and of itself was essentially a lie, or very close to a lie. Because she knew from the House Republicans that there was a fraud on the court. They had more information and evidence than we did. And so now you have a new judge who’s put in place and he picks one of the guys who was essentially covering up for the dirty cops. I guess we’re going to have to abolish this whole FISA system at this point and try to build something new. I don’t think the American people and Republicans in Congress, if this continues, you are going to have a continued concern amongst Republicans and conservatives that there is something wrong with the FBI… but this court is not acceptable.
Nunes made similar comments on Twitter on Saturday.
The WikiHow website, a hub for how-to information, has joined the other evil tech giants by going all-in with vaccine propaganda that poses a very real danger to the health and safety of children. The site now features a dangerous article that teaches children how to scheme against their own parents and stage fake cover stories to get vaccinated with toxic vaccines that even the U.S. government admits cause thousands of injuries, hospitalizations and even some deaths every year in America. (VAERS.HHS.gov and HRSA.gov)
The WikiHow article, entitled, “How to Get Vaccinated Without Parental Consent,” begins by warning children that their parents might “fall into rabbit holes of conspiracy theories” about vaccines, falsely implying that all evidence of vaccine dangers or vaccine injuries is a “conspiracy.” The article appears at this link:
The article goes on to teach children how to “get vaccinated in secret” and claims that anti-vaccine parents might “abuse you if they learned that you disobeyed them.”
President Donald Trump and journalist James O’Keefe hinted on Sunday that something big is about to drop on Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as the 78-year-old socialist has surged in recent polls.
Trump tweeted, “Wow! Crazy Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls, looking very good against his opponents in the Do Nothing Party. So what does this all mean? Stay tuned!”
O’Keefe quickly followed up to Trump’s tweet, writing, “Stay tuned everyone. Something very big is going to happen. The first bombshell tape is going to drop this week.”
Stay tuned everyone. Something very big is going to happen.
USA Today reported on Sunday that Sanders “is solidly second in most national polls behind Biden, and he either leads or is tied in recent polls in the first two states that vote, Iowa and New Hampshire.”
In a recent interview with Politico, Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, warned Democrats that if Sanders is the Democratic nominee that Democrats will struggle across the board in national elections.
“If I were a campaign manager for Donald Trump and I look at the field, I would very much want to run against Bernie Sanders,” Messina said. “I think the contrast is the best. He can say, ‘I’m a business guy, the economy’s good and this guy’s a socialist.’ I think that contrast for Trump is likely one that he’d be excited about in a way that he wouldn’t be as excited about Biden or potentially Mayor Pete or some of the more Midwestern moderate candidates.”
“From a general election perspective, socialism is not going to be what Democrats are going to want to defend,” Messina continued. “If you’re the Democratic nominee for the Montana Senate race, you don’t want to spend the election talking about socialism.”
Daily Wire Editor at Large Josh Hammer wrote the following about Sanders’ views on the economy and healthcare back in September:
Economy: Sanders holds far-left views on economics that place him barely, if at all, to the right of an authentic European-style socialist. He supports punitive taxation and massive redistribution to mollify the purported scourge of wealth and income inequality in America. He has consistently supported substantial tax hikes on income, capital gains, and estates alike. Sanders supports substantial regulation of the financial services sector and large-scale government spending on infrastructure programs. He has generally opposed free trade due to reasons of labor protectionism. He has been critical of the Federal Reserve for allegedly empowering the wealthy. Sanders supports increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15. He has taken a heavy-handed view of antitrust enforcement.
Health Care: Sanders is a longtime support of single-payer socialized medicine, and in many ways is the intellectual progenitor for the current Democratic Party candidate trend of favoring “Medicare for All.” He has often been critical of Obamacare for not going far enough with respect to health care coverage for all uncovered Americans. Sanders has never indicated any willingness to structurally reform fiscally ruinous health care-related entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.
This report has been updated to include additional information.
On Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week,” Washington Post congressional reporter Rachael Bade said congressional Democrats privately say House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) holding onto the articles of impeachment was a “failed strategy.”
Bade said, “She was clearly putting a positive spin on what a lot of Democrats have privately said was a failed strategy. I mean she and Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, set out to number one, try to get a commitment from McConnell on witnesses, firsthand witnesses to testify in a Senate trial. She said she wanted to see a resolution about, you know, how the whole proceedings would be governed. She got neither of those.”
She added, “I know her team has sort of said, look, she was able to hold out, there was a bunch of new revelations that happened over the holiday break. Bolton came out and said he’s willing to testify. She was holding the articles the whole time. Those things probably would have happened regardless of whether she was holding them. And, in fact, there might have even been more news focused on those things if everybody wasn’t asking what is Nancy Pelosi doing for the articles.”
In a recent interview, film director Terry Gilliam commented on his reluctance to embrace the #MeToo movement, referring to it as a “witch hunt.” This view certainly sets him apart from his peers in Hollywood, but that’s really nothing new for Gilliam. He’s always been a little different. The lone American member of Monty Python, Gilliam is an accomplished provocateur and, while I’m fairly certain his politics probably don’t line up with mine, his tolerance for mob mentality is extremely limited. He makes movies about loners and misfits who, like Gilliam himself, operate well outside the mainstream. Among his filmography are cult classics like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Time Bandits,” and Oscar-worthy fare such as “The Fisher King” and “12 Monkeys.”
But perhaps Gilliam’s greatest cinematic achievement is his 1985 science fiction film “Brazil.” The story of a naive dreamer oppressed by an authoritarian government will likely sound familiar to most, as it is the core idea behind George Orwell’s iconic “1984.” While obviously inspired by that novel, Gilliam here chooses to embrace his comedy roots and find the absurdity within the darkness, playing up the soul-crushing farce at the core of governmental bureaucracy. The result is a film akin to Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” acknowledging the humor amidst horror, bringing the inherent despair to the surface in a way that a straightforward drama never could.
“Brazil” features a premise that many conservatives will appreciate. While many science fiction films like “Alien” and “RoboCop” focus on the inhumanity of corporate greed, Gilliam instead presents the smiling evil of a government with absolute control over its populace. From the drudgery of endless paperwork (“This is your receipt… and this is my receipt for your receipt”) to the chilling assumption of government inerrancy (“Mistakes? We don’t make mistakes”), “Brazil” shows us a world where individualism is constantly, cheerfully suppressed in favor of mindless, banal provision.
Featuring delightful performances from Jonathan Pryce, Ian Holm, and Gilliam’s Python cohort Michael Palin, the nervous politeness of the characters underscores the complete lack of any real personality within this cold, gray world. There is no passion, no romance, no adventure. Everything that we yearn for – the things that make us human – are ignored by this government, replaced by comfort and safety. Of course, should any citizen decide that they’re not totally satisfied with what has been generously provided for them by their leaders, there is the ever-present threat of government force looming over the proceedings.
With “Brazil,” Terry Gilliam provides a funny, fascinating, but ultimately quite depressing image of an ever-growing government that would appear to care for its citizens, but is actually much more interested in retaining its own power. It is a cautionary tale about the travails of being an individual in an increasingly-monolithic society, where refusing to simply go along with the appearance of tranquility and tolerance can get you, shall we say, cancelled.
It is a brilliant film, and one that deserves to be revisited. Because, though it is now thirty-five years old, its themes are more relevant than ever.
