Yes or No?

  

Should Biden debate Trump?  Why/why not?

(My opinion is buried somewhere in the commotion below.) 😉

Thanks for recommending.  Can I slice you off a nasty piece?  😈

 

WHAT DOES GOP STAND FOR?

 SOME THEORIES:

Greedy Oppressive Pricks

Golf, Oil and Prostitutes

Gluttons Of Power

Growing Our Portfolios

GREEDY OLIGARCHY PLUTOCRATS

GANG OF PROFITEERS

Greedy, Overweight, & Pathetic!

Gasbags on Painkillers

Gluttonous Old Pigs

Also up for Consideration:

BUT I AM SURE:

Y'all can do better than me. (Or is that y'all can do better than I?)

HAVE FUN WITH THIS ONE.!

Whistle Blower Miles Taylor and His Story

Miles Taylor

This frightening story is from Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the president’s Department of Homeland Security. It is from the Washington Post today:

“In a video for a Republican anti-Trump group on Tuesday afternoon, the former chief of staff at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, confirmed reports that Trump had offered officials pardons in exchange for possibly illegal actions at the border. Legal experts have argued this would, in fact, be illegal.

In a video for a group called Republican Voters Against Trump released Tuesday, Taylor said he personally witnessed Trump in April 2019 offering officials pardons if they were criminally charged for their actions in stemming illegal immigration at the border.

“The president said to the senior leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, behind the scenes, ‘We should not let anyone else into the United States,’ ” Taylor says in the video. “And even though he’d been told on repeated occasions that the way he wanted to do it was illegal, his response was to say, ‘Do it. If you get in trouble, I’ll pardon you.’ ”

Taylor summed it up: “The president offered to pardon U.S. government officials for breaking the law to implement his immigration policy.” Taylor said he decided at that point to quit.

In a Washington Post op-ed last week, Taylor said that Trump routinely tried to use the department in which Taylor served for his “political benefit” — and often explicitly so: ‘He insisted on a near-total focus on issues that he said were central to his reelection — in particular building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico. Though he was often talked out of bad ideas at the last moment, the president would make obviously partisan requests of DHS, including when he told us to close the California-Mexico border during a March 28, 2019, Oval Office meeting — it would be better for him politically, he said, than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border — or to “dump” illegal immigrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overload their authorities, as he insisted on several times.’”

In a different video, Taylor claimed Trump that asked for withholding disaster aid when California was suffering from wildfires. California didn’t support him politically and thus needed to be punished. Taylor said: “On a phone call with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he told FEMA to cut off the money and to no longer give individual assistance to California. He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire, because he was so rageful that people in the state of California … didn’t support him and that, politically, it wasn’t a base for him. .... A lot of the time, the things he wanted to do not only were impossible, but in many cases illegal. He didn’t want us to tell them it was illegal anymore, because he knew that there were — and these were his words — he knew that he had ‘magical authorities.’ ”

If what Taylor is alleging, it is clear that the president is not president for all Americans. He is only interested in service to people in states that support him. That is the case even if it mean he screws his supporters in states that do not support him.

What a rotten, evil, failed leader. He has no magical authorities, just lies, hate, corruption and incompetence in service to himself.

GOP Arrogance and Disrespect for the Rule of Law

“Today's Republican Party...is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no paragon of civic virtue, is more ideologically centered and diverse, protective of the government's role as it developed over the course of the last century, open to incremental changes in policy fashioned through bargaining with the Republicans, and less disposed to or adept at take-no-prisoners conflict between the parties. This asymmetry between the parties, which journalists and scholars often brush aside or whitewash in a quest for "balance," constitutes a huge obstacle to effective governance.” ― Thomas E. Mann, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the Politics of Extremism

The New York Times is reporting that the White House is blowing off criticisms that the president's blatant use of government resources for his personal political gain is illegal under the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while they are working in an official capacity. It also prohibits civil servants from running for political office or using their titles in political activities. The White House just does not care. The NYT writes:

“Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares,” Mark Meadows, President Trump’s chief of staff, said in an interview with Politico. “This is a lot of hoopla that is being made about things mainly because the convention has been so unbelievably successful.”

Mr. Meadows made his comments the morning after the Republican National Convention aired two official ceremonies staged earlier on Tuesday on the White House grounds — a pardon performed by Mr. Trump and the naturalization of new citizens performed by Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, as Mr. Trump watched and chatted with them.

During the convention, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a speech from Jerusalem, in an apparent violation of separate State Department rules, and the first lady, Melania Trump, delivered a speech from the Rose Garden.

Arrogance, irrationality and untruthfulness

Meadows assertion that nobody outside of the Beltway really cares is arrogant, irrational and not true. Some people still do care about respect for the rule of law, even if the president and most of the GOP leadership does not. Clearly, the president and his administration do not. Meadows was also quoted as saying that “you can’t break the law — you shouldn’t do it,” but then suggested that the Hatch Act was outdated. That seems to imply that breaking the law somehow isn't breaking the law because it is allegedly outdated. The irrationality of the Meadows ‘rationale’ is obvious and undeniable.

Apparently, Meadows and the president are both unaware of the facts that (1) an outdated law is still the law, and (2) outdated laws need to be repealed or amended by congress, or invalidated by a court of competent jurisdiction. They just blow that off and break the law as if it no longer exists and pretend that breaking it is not breaking it.