Acerbic Politics: October 2017

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Michael Moore’s Tweet Attack on Trump is EPIC!

POSTED BY: TODD FRANKLIN OCTOBER 29, 2017

If you follow Broadway at all, you’d know that Michael Moore’s show, ‘The Terms of My Surrender,’ which asked “Can A Broadway Show Bring Down A Sitting President,” closed last week after a limited run. While the show wasn’t a blockbuster by any means, it did rake in $367,634 in it’s final week. The President of the United States, however, used the tepid sales in order to perpetuate a lie against the film producer. In a tweet made yesterday afternoon, the President wrote the following:

“While not at all presidential I must point out that the Sloppy Michael Moore Show on Broadway was a TOTAL BOMB and was forced to close. Sad!”

The show ended on the date it was scheduled to end and clearly wasn’t forced to close early as the President indicated. Michael Moore caught wind of the President’s infatuation with his show and decided to go off on a multi-tweet attack which may just be one of the more scathing Twitter attacks on Trump that we’ve ever seen.

1) You must have my smash hit of a Broadway show confused with your presidency– which IS a total bomb and WILL indeed close early. NOT SAD.
2) Today, 1 U.S. service member was killed & 6 injured in our never-ending war in Afghanistan. You,our President, are not even aware of this.
3) You ARE aware I’m a “B’way star” & I guess this bothers you more. SAD.
4) Prosecutor Mueller’s GrandJury has just approved the 1st criminal indictments of your administration. R u trying 2 distract us from this?
5) 38 days after Maria, 3/4 of PR (our fellow Americans) have NO electricity. Yet u are more upset that so many ppl saw my B’way show. SAD.
6) They say Twitter “distracts” you from your presidency. But Twitter IS YOUR PRESIDENCY! It’s all you know how to do. #LOSER!
7) And now, for this weekend, I’m your latest distraction from your crimes. Ha! Raucous & joyous crowds every nite on B’way- & u missed out!
8) It was the highest grossing play (non-musical) of the summer, despite my offering $29 cheap seats + free student tix so ALL could afford.
9) As announced on May 1st, it was always a “12-WEEK-ONLY” run, due to my commitments to my upcoming primetime TV series & my new movie.
10) On Broadway, Donald, they call it a “LIMITED ENGAGEMENT” — just like we’re planning on making your presidency.

… and he ended his tweet attack with the best tweet of all, a picture of him and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, saying, “11) For now, at least, I know I still have one fan in the White House (thx for your unwavering support, Jared!)”

Moore certainly has a point here. Why the hell is the President of the United States using his time to attack his opponents, who happen to be civilians who he has promised to protect and serve? Meanwhile he completely ignores the death of an American soldier killed on the battlefield.

Let’s hear your thoughts on this story in the comments section below.

Source
http://ir.net/news/politics/128015/michael-moores-tweet-attack-trump-epic/

Republicans Have Stockholm Syndrome, and It’s Getting Worse

The GOP has stopped resisting President Trump and started accelerating his race to the bottom.

BY MAX BOOT | OCTOBER 19, 2017, 9:00 AM

The lobotomization of the Republican Party appeared complete last year when the same GOP paladins who had denounced Donald Trump as a “lunatic trying to get ahold of nuclear weapons” (Marco Rubio), as a bigot who was guilty of “the textbook definition of a racist comment” (Paul Ryan), and as a “narcissist,” “serial philanderer,” “pathological liar,” and “bully” (Ted Cruz) nevertheless endorsed him for the most powerful position in the world. Tragedy turned to farce (or is it the other way around?) after the emergence of the “grab ‘em by the pussy” tape on October 7, 2016. Republicans such as Sens. John Thune, Mike Crapo, and Deb Fischer called for Trump to leave the race on the grounds that he was unfit for office, only to change their minds and re-endorse him when it became evident that he was still polling strongly among base voters.

But the Republicans’ race to the bottom — to the absolute lowest moral and intellectual depths — wasn’t over last year, and it’s not over now. It’s still continuing, with even supposedly “normal,” “moderate,” “mainstream” Republicans increasingly echoing Trump’s know-nothing effusions.

In Virginia, Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman and counselor to “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush, is attacking his Democratic opponent for governor, Ralph Northam, for being too sympathetic to immigrants and too unsympathetic to Confederate monuments. One particularly incendiary commercial accuses Northam of “increasing the threat of MS-13,” a drug gang from El Salvador that is evoked with pictures of tattooed gang-bangers who actually belong to a rival outfit. Gillespie’s tendentious reasoning? As lieutenant governor, Northam voted against a bill in Virginia’s Senate that would have prohibited the establishment of any “sanctuary cities,” even though Virginia does not have any such cities. MS-13 has long been a favorite Trump target, symbolizing the supposed menace of Latino immigration.

Gillespie’s successor at the RNC, Ronna Romney McDaniel, has been equally eager to serve as a Trump echo chamber. Her Twitter feed gives sycophancy a bad name. Recent tweets: “No one recognizes the importance of women’s empowerment better than @IvankaTrump. She’s paving the way worldwide”; “Wonderful to finally have a @POTUS who isn’t ashamed to stand up for religious liberties”; and “Ratings for unpatriotic NFL declining? Shocked.” If Trump claimed the moon was made of Swiss cheese, McDaniel would be mocking anyone who said it was actually Camembert.

In her willingness to serve as a Trump enabler, McDaniel is matched, and perhaps exceeded, by the senior-most Republican officials in the land. Who can forget Vice President Mike Pence going to the Colts-49ers game on Oct. 8 for the express purpose of walking out to express disapproval of players kneeling during the national anthem? Trump has fixated on this non-issue as a way to mobilize his white, working-class base by anathematizing wealthy African-American athletes. And Pence is happy to play along. Just as House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is happy to vouch for Trump as a non-racist despite decades of Archie Bunker-style comments suggesting otherwise. “His heart’s in the right place,” Ryan said, making one wonder whether he has access to a super-secret EKG.

The leaders of Congress seem to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, which by now should really be renamed Republican Syndrome.The leaders of Congress seem to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, which by now should really be renamed Republican Syndrome. There, on Monday, was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell singing kumbaya with Trump in the White House Rose Garden only hours after the president disavowed any blame for “not getting the job done” legislatively. “I’m not gong to blame myself, I’ll be honest,” Trump said. (When has he ever blamed himself for anything?) “They’re not getting the job done.” In case there is any doubt about who “they” is, Trump has been explicit in calling out McConnell as a weak leader, tweeting in August, “The only problem I have with Mitch McConnell is that, after hearing Repeal & Replace for 7 years, he failed!” McConnell nevertheless pledged fealty to his abuser. “Contrary to what some of you may have reported,” he dutifully intoned, “we are together totally on this agenda to move America forward.”

Read more
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/19/republicans-have-stockholm-syndrome-and-its-getting-worse/

Everything you need to know about the “pee tape” dossier and its funders

By Alex Thompson Oct 26, 2017

The infamous 35-page “Steele dossier” that, among other things, claims the Russians have a kinky sex tape of then-businessman Donald Trump, roared back into the news this week with the revelation that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party paid for at least part of the research.

Trump and his allies used the news to argue that the dossier’s most serious allegations — including collusion with the Russian government during last year’s presidential election — are partisan slander and should not be taken seriously. Trump deemed the payments for the research dossier “the real collusion” in an interview with Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs this week.

“Everything the Clinton campaign and the DNC falsely accused this campaign of doing over the last year they were doing themselves,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders added in a Fox News interview.

Democrats rolled their eyes at the breathless outrage and suggested conservatives were faking it in an effort to discredit the ongoing federal investigation into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election and whether Trump & Co. were involved. Opposition research is usually funded by the opposition, after all.

The most damning details of the dossier have not been independently confirmed, but special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees have been looking into it.

Here’s a rundown of what was revealed this week and what it could mean (or not mean) for the Russia investigation:

HILLARY CLINTON’S CAMPAIGN HELPED PAY FOR THE “STEELE DOSSIER” PRODUCED BY FUSION GPS

The law firm Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS in April of 2016 to look into Donald Trump on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, according to the Washington Post. The research firm had already been investigating Trump on behalf of a still-unknown Republican donor trying to stop Trump during the 2016 Republican primary.

Fusion GPS then hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who compiled the reports and began feeding them to U.S. media outlets in the fall of 2016. Representatives close to Clinton claim she never saw the dossier during the campaign and wishes the information had gotten out before November. Former Clinton press secretary Brian Fallon agreed with that sentiment, tweeting: “If I’d gotten his dossier before Nov. 8, I may have tried to convince Mook & Podesta to let me hold a Comey-style press conference to read it.”

OPPOSITION RESEARCH IS NORMAL
Opposition research is normal, and it is not unusual for campaigns to hire outside firms to look for salacious and scandalous details about their opposition. In fact, most campaigns, especially presidential campaigns, consider it a necessity now — even the Trump campaign admitted as much in explaining why they met with Kremlin-linked operators who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.

It is, however, unusual for that research to involve skulking around all over Russia and other “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” kind of behavior. But Trump, with his complex web of international business ties, was also not a normal candidate.

DID CLINTON’S CAMPAIGN DO ANYTHING WRONG? MAYBE.
Hiring Fusion GPS is not a crime. It’s possible the Clinton campaign violated Federal Elections Commission (FEC) law because it was able to avoid disclosing that it had retained Fusion GPS by going through the Perkins Coie. The watchdog group Campaign Legal Center argued as much in a complaint to the FEC Wednesday.

Graham M. Wilson, a partner at the law firm, disputed the group’s interpretation of the law as “patently baseless,” and told the New York Times the firm complied with FEC regulations since research was done “to support the provision of legal services, and payments made by vendors to sub-vendors are not required to be disclosed in circumstances like this.”

But it’s what happened after the election that could get top Democrats in trouble. Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told Congress this past year that they did not know who paid Fusion GPS, according to a CNN report Thursday. If they lied to Congress and did know that the Hillary campaign and the DNC were paying Fusion GPS, then that is a federal crime.

Wasserman Schultz told CNN that she didn’t know that the DNC was paying Fusion GPS through the law firm. “I didn’t have any awareness of the arrangement at all,” she said. And the Washington Post had one source claim that Marc Elias, the lawyer who represented Clinton and the DNC at Perkins Coie, did not inform the campaign or the DNC about Fusion GPS.

Source
https://news.vice.com/story/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-pee-tape-dossier-and-its-funders?utm_source=vicenewsfb

The U.S. is struggling to stop a new civil war in Iraq

By Greg Walters Oct 25, 2017

Since 2014, the U.S. has rallied an unlikely coalition of allies, and adversaries, in the Middle East to fight against one common enemy: ISIS.

Now, with the terrorist group’s caliphate on the verge of collapse, the U.S. is confronting its next great challenge: How to keep members of the winning side from tearing each other apart?

“The anti-ISIS coalition is a victim of its own success. It’s losing the common enemy.”
Washington now faces tough choices between feuding allies, analysts said, while it tries to contain the rising influence of another power player in the region: Iran.

The Iraqi army, joined by Iran-backed Shia militias, surged north in a surprise attack to capture the oil-rich region of Kirkuk in a stunning defeat for Kurdish peshmerga forces, which had held effective control of the region ever since Iraqi forces abandoned Kirkuk while retreating from ISIS in 2014.

Early indications suggest things are not going Washington’s way.

“The U.S. is in a very difficult position,” Nathaniel Rabkin, managing editor of the newsletter Inside Iraqi Politics, told VICE News. “The anti-ISIS coalition is a victim of its own success. It’s losing the common enemy.”

This was immediately made evident last week, when fighting erupted between Iraq’s federal government and the autonomous province of Kurdistan, leaving the U.S. with little recourse but to implore both sides to use dialogue to resolve their differences peacefully.

The Iraqi army, joined by Iran-backed Shia militias, surged north in a surprise attack to capture the oil-rich region of Kirkuk in a stunning defeat for Kurdish peshmerga forces, which had held effective control of the region ever since Iraqi forces abandoned Kirkuk while retreating from ISIS in 2014.

In the face of military defeat, the Kurdistan Regional Government on Wednesday offered to “freeze” the results of their Sept. 25 referendum on independence from Iraq, which had enraged Baghdad, and enter dialogue. But as of this writing, the Iraqi government, which demanded the referendum be “annulled,” has yet to respond.

“We are disappointed in the lukewarm position of the United States in general.”
With their defenses overrun, Kurdish leaders are now fuming over America’s reluctance to do more to deter Baghdad’s assault — despite the Kurds’ willingness to shed blood in the name of the U.S.-led fight against terrorism.

“People are being killed here,” Safeen Dizayee, chief of staff to the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, told VICE News. “We expect the international community, particularly the U.S., to put pressure on Baghdad to cease its hostilities.”

The unrest has already resulted in civilian deaths, according to Amnesty International. The human rights group said in a report Tuesday that in the city of Tuz Khurmatu alone, hundreds of properties were looted and set on fire in “what appears to be a targeted attack on predominantly Kurdish areas of the city.” The report cited eyewitnesses blaming Iraqi government forces and the militias. At least 11 civilians were killed in “indiscriminate attacks,” and 35,000 people have fled the city since Oct. 16, the report said.

To Dizayee, the events came with an unsettling sense of déjà vu. He recalled America’s unwillingness to stop Saddam Hussein’s brutal assault on the Kurdish people in 1991 following the first Gulf War. Back then, the Kurds had responded to President George H.W. Bush’s call for the Iraqi people to rise up against the dictator. Thousands of Kurds were then slaughtered by Saddam’s helicopter gunships.

“We’re always saying the Iranians play chess and the West plays checkers. Well, the West just played chess.”

“It’s bringing back the negative images of 1991, when people fled from Saddam’s wrath,” Dizayee said, before adding, with tension in his voice: “We are disappointed in the lukewarm position of the United States in general.”

President Donald Trump had declared the U.S. would remain neutral, even though Baghdad’s forces cruised to victory last week atop U.S.-supplied M1 Abrams tanks.

Read more
https://news.vice.com/story/the-u-s-is-struggling-to-stop-a-new-civil-war-in-iraq?utm_source=vicenewsfb