Kasich: The Trump Show Is ‘Winding Down’ — ‘He Has Jumped the Shark’
2:30
Friday on CNN’s “OutFront,” former Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) said voters were no longer interested in President Donald Trump’s “show.”
When asked about Trump’s lowering poll numbers, Kasich said, “I kind of think she’s jumped the shark. That’s ‘Happy Days’ when Fonz jumped the shark, and that was about the end of the show. I’ve been saying that I think he has jumped the shark. People wanted him to mix it up. They said, let’s take a chance on this guy. This is about our families. It’s about our kids going back to school. It’s about mom and dad. It’s about grandma, grandpa. The guy won’t wear a mask. We’re behind the curve on all this. He’s dismissing it. When you do that, you are now messing around with people’s lives, and people don’t like that.”
He added, “So, you can see the Republicans beginning to retreat, and we see independents retreating in mass. It’s a very hard thing to fix. It’s never over until it’s over. As Yogi said, it ain’t over till it’s over. But at this point, losing all these people, including increasing numbers of the religious faithful is very, very difficult. It’s a very tough thing to dig out of.”
Burnett said, “The president’s canceled his New Hampshire rally. He’s cited storms from Tropical Storm Fay. The weather forecast shows the storm will be past where the rally is by the time it was scheduled to start tomorrow. It comes as Kellyanne Conway downplayed crowd expectations. They recently canceled a rally in Alabama. In Tulsa, they were stuck with photos of a pretty empty stadium. Does this all say anything to you?”
Kasich said, “Yeah, he’s losing momentum. The thing about Tulsa that was interesting, Erin — I just saw a few of the clips. You saw people looking at their watches, and people were yawning and reaching across. And I would say four years ago, people were kind of transfixed by this show. But the show’s kind of — the show’s winding down. They canceled because they weren’t going to get the crowd. New Hampshire is such an interesting place. I’ve spent a lot of time up there. I did 115 town hall meetings. People are very independent, and they’re not looking on this favorably if had terms of what he’s done with corona and what he’s done with the virus, uh, not the virus, the protests. That’s another thing he’s missed. Both virus and the protests, strike two.”
Romney slams Trump for 'historic corruption'
after he commutes Roger Stone's prison sentence
|
July 11, 2020 09:46 AM
Sen. Mitt Romney tore into President
Trump’s decision to commute his ally Roger Stone’s prison sentence.
“Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president
commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that
very president,” the Utah Republican tweeted Saturday morning.
Unprecedented, historic
corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted
by a jury of lying to shield that very president.
— Mitt Romney
(@MittRomney) July 11, 2020
It was the strongest statement of disapproval yet from a high-profile Republican after the White House announced on Friday that the president was commuting Stone’s entire three-year prison sentence, which does leave intact his criminal record.
Romney, the Republican Party's presidential nominee in the
2012 election, became the first senator in U.S. history to
vote to convict a president from his own party during the impeachment trial of
Trump in February.
Stone, 67, was set to report to prison on Tuesday. An
emergency appeal to extend his Tuesday surrender date because of the pandemic
was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit prior to the
commutation announcement on Friday.
The White House statement said that Stone "would be
put at serious medical risk" if sent to prison and claimed that he was
"treated very unfairly" by the courts.
Stone, who maintained his innocence, noted to journalist Howard Fineman on Friday,
right before he was granted clemency, that he had stayed loyal to the president
after he was convicted of lying to congressional investigators, obstructing a
congressional investigation, and attempting to intimidate a possible
congressional witness.
“He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It
would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t," Stone said.
After being granted clemency, Stone said Trump "saved my life."
Washington Post: Trump commutation
of Roger Stone's sentence an 'unforgivable betrayal' of office
by Mike
Brest
|
July 11, 2020 12:41 PM
The Washington Post editorial board blasted President Trump's decision to commute Roger Stone's sentence.
The opinion piece, which declared the commutation to
be an "unforgivable betrayal" of his office, was published Friday
night, hours after the White House announced Stone would not be serving any of his three-year prison
sentence.
Stone, a longtime friend and associate of the president,
had been convicted of charges stemming from the U.S. government's investigation
into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Washington Post editorial
board called the president's decision "a perversion of justice,"
which amounts to "one of the most nauseating instances of corrupt
government favoritism the United States has ever seen."
"The president seems to be doing his best, within the
confines of the U.S. constitutional system, to emulate the gangster leadership
of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a man whose ruinous reign Mr. Trump has
always admired," read the editorial. "If the country needed any more
evidence, Friday confirmed that the greatest threat to the Republic is the
president himself."
Stone, 67, still keeps his criminal record because he was
not pardoned. He was convicted of lying to congressional investigators,
obstructing a congressional investigation, and attempting to intimidate a possible
congressional witness. Stone told journalist Howard Fineman on Friday, right
before he was granted clemency, that he was "under enormous pressure to
turn on" Trump but refused to do so.
The White House called Stone's sentence unjust. A statement
released Friday also noted that Stone, who had raised concerns about the
coronavirus, "would be put at serious medical risk" if sent to
prison. He was set to begin his sentence next week. After being granted
clemency, Stone
said Trump "saved my life."
Congressional Democrats and at least one Republican, Sen.
Mitt Romney, criticized the commutation as an act of "corruption."
WALL STREET BANKSTERS KNOW HOW WELL OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER SERVED AND
PROTECTED THEM DURING THE ECONOMIC MELTDOWN THEY CAUSED.
A remarkable article
in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports
Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for
Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”
In other words, Wall
Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23
million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16
million edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.
“According to figures
released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in
particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that
Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate
industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Wall Street, Republicans and militarists back Biden campaign
9 July 2020
Anyone who wants to
know what type of policies will be pursued by a Biden administration in the
event the Democrats win the November 3 presidential election has only to look
at the social and political forces that are rallying to his campaign.
BLOG EDITOR: BIDEN WAS
ENDORSED VERY EARLY BY WAR PROFITEER AND PARTNER FOR RED CHINA SEN. DIANNE
FEINSTEIN.
They include Wall
Street, prominent Republicans and veterans of the Obama national security team.
Thanks to strong
support from big business, the presidential campaign of the former vice
president outraised President Trump’s reelection campaign in June, according to
figures announced by the two campaigns last week. Joe Biden raked in $141
million, while Trump’s campaign took in $131 million.
It was the second
consecutive month that Biden collected more in campaign contributions than
Trump, following a $6 million edge in May, $80.8 million to $74 million,
according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The Trump campaign
still leads in cash in the bank, with $295 million on hand as of July 1, as it
had few expenses during the Republican primaries, where Trump had only token
opposition. Biden’s campaign was effectively broke at the time of his
breakthrough victories in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3, but he now
has amassed a war chest of at least $125 million, according to published estimates.
ActBlue, the online
fundraising vehicle for the Democratic Party as a whole, took in $392 million
in June, shattering all previous records, the bulk of it in smaller donations
and contributions from first-time donors. This is an indication of the widespread
popular hostility to Trump, exacerbated by his vitriolic attacks on the mass
protests against police violence that took place throughout the month, as well
as his refusal to take any serious action to stem the coronavirus pandemic.
BLOG EDITOR: THE RICH
KNOW WHO WILL SERVE THEM BEST! ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS. THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH
IN AMERICAN HISTORY OCCURRED DURING THE BANKSTER REGIME OF OBAMA-BIDEN-HOLDER.
But a major factor in
Biden’s fundraising surge has been a series of virtual events featuring former
President Obama, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris, at which
wealthy contributors were invited to give the maximum donation of $5,600
directly to Biden as well as much larger sums to the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) and the political action committee favored by the Biden
campaign, Priorities USA, which expects to spend $200 million by itself to
support his election.
Under the terms of an
agreement between the Biden campaign and the DNC, the Biden Victory Fund can
receive checks as large as $620,600 from wealthy donors. The money is then
distributed in smaller amounts to the campaign, the DNC and various state
parties in order to comply with campaign finance regulations.
According to figures
released this week by the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street in
particular is favoring Biden’s campaign over Trump’s. The group found that
Biden has raised $52.4 million from the finance, insurance and real estate
industries, of which $32.2 million came from “securities and investment.”
Trump raised $33.5
million from the broader category of finance, insurance and real estate. He was
competitive with Biden among the real estate moguls, who view Trump as one of
their own, but trailed badly, with only $7.8 million, from the “securities and
investment” subcategory.
In other words, Wall
Street favored Biden by better than four to one, and Biden’s $23
million lead among the financial elite accounted for more than his entire $16 million
edge over Trump in fundraising in May and June.
Along with the support
of the stock exchange and financial institutions, Biden is winning support from
sections of the Republican Party. This includes the well publicized Lincoln
Project, established by former Republican campaign operatives Reed Galen, John
Weaver, Rick Wilson and Steve Schmidt, with the support of other former party
officials like Jennifer Horn, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican
Party, and George Conway, a prominent Republican lawyer and husband of Trump
adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The Lincoln Project
began running television and internet commercials denouncing Trump from a
right-wing foreign policy standpoint, criticizing him as soft on China and
Russia. One ad, released after the New York Times launched
its fabricated and unsubstantiated charge that Russia paid bounties to Taliban
fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan, features a former Navy SEAL
who attacks Trump for not ordering military action to kill Russians. The ad is
titled “Betrayal.”
BLOG EDITOR: BOTH BIDEN
AND GEORGE W BUSH ARE GLOBALIST FOR OPEN BORDERS AND ENDLESS WAR. THE BUSH
FAMILY, LONG PARTNERED WITH THE 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS, STARTED TWO WARS AGAINST
IRAQ WHICH ARE STILL FILLING THEIR POCKETS.
Another political
action committee, “43 Alumni for Biden,” consists of hundreds of former
officials in the Republican administration of George W. Bush (the 43rd US
president). They declare they are “choosing country over party” in the
November election, stating: “We believe that a Biden administration will adhere
to the rule of law ... and restore dignity and integrity to the White House.”
As a Super PAC, the group can raise unlimited sums of money to run ads
attacking Trump or boosting Biden.
The final component in
the rapidly coalescing coalition of reactionaries supporting the Biden campaign
consists of former military-intelligence officials of the Obama administration,
who have made a killing in the lucrative business of “strategic consulting” and
now hope to return to power in a Biden administration. Several of them,
including former deputy defense secretary Michele Flournoy and former deputy
national security adviser and deputy secretary of state Anthony Blinken, have
signed on as Biden’s top national security advisers.
A remarkable article
in The American Prospect—a liberal publication that supports
Biden against Trump—makes a devastating exposure of these militarists for
Biden, under the headline, “How Biden’s Foreign Policy Team Got Rich.”
It documents the
creation of a strategic consulting firm called WestExec Advisors (named after
West Executive Avenue, the street outside the West Wing of the White House in
Washington D.C.). WestExec was founded by two lesser operatives, Sergio
Aguirre, former chief of staff to Samantha Power, UN ambassador under Obama,
and Nitin Chadda, a former aide to Obama Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
These two recruited
Flournoy and Blinken to serve as the group’s biggest “names.” Flournoy was
widely expected to become secretary of defense if Hillary Clinton won the 2016
election and she is once again at the top of the list for Pentagon boss under
Biden.
Under Trump, Flournoy
served on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, the President’s Intelligence
Advisory Board and the CIA director’s External Advisory Board, before leaving
once the 2020 presidential campaign heated up. She is a notorious warmonger,
and The American Prospect article details her
role in advocating continued US military support to Saudi Arabia in its war in
Yemen, which has resulted in $3 billion in weapons contracts for Raytheon.
WestExec principal Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary, is a member
of Raytheon’s board of directors.
WestExec quickly made a
splash in Washington with its launch party attended by top former Obama
national security aides such as Susan Rice, Tom Donilon and Denis McDonough. It
lined up a list of clients so potent that neither WestExec nor the Biden
campaign would release the names, for fear of exposing the fact that Biden’s
foreign policy advisory group is a wholly owned subsidiary of the big military
contractors.
One particularly
noxious principal at WestExec is former Deputy CIA Director Avril Haines, who,
as The American Prospect put it, “helped design Obama’s program
of using drones for extrajudicial killings.” In June, the Biden campaign
announced that Haines would oversee foreign policy for the Biden transition
team.
While the former drone
missile chief prepares plans for the future Biden administration, the current
advisers, with their lucrative “consulting” affiliations, are listed by The
American Prospect as follows: “Nicholas Burns (The Cohen Group), Kurt
Campbell (The Asia Group), Tom Donilon (BlackRock Investment Institute), Wendy
Sherman (Albright Stonebridge Group), Julianne Smith (WestExec Advisors) and
Jake Sullivan (Macro Advisory Partners). They rarely discuss their connections
to corporate power, defense contractors, private equity, and hedge funds, let
alone disclose them.”
This is what Senator Bernie
Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren and their various liberal and pseudo-left
apologists have embraced as the alternative to the fascistic Trump
administration—a government of warmongers and corporate shills, no less
committed to the defense of the interests of the American ruling elite.
Josh
Hawley: Counter China’s Plans for Dominance by Ending ‘Forever Wars’
7 Apr 202020
2:34
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) wrote on
Tuesday that the only way America can counter Chinese domination is to end the
“forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hawley said that the United States
has focused more on the response to the coronavirus outbreak than the country’s
engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, he charged that America cannot
respond to the Chinese Communist Party’s plans for “domination” by remaining
involved in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Our involvement in Iraq and
Afghanistan is currently taking a backseat to the #COVID19 crisis, but
let’s remember, the only way we are going to be able to focus on #China and counter
Beijing’s plans for domination is to end the forever wars,” Hawley wrote.
“Can’t have it both ways.”
Our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is
currently taking a backseat to the #COVID19
crisis, but let’s remember, the only way we are going to be able to focus on #China
and counter Beijing’s plans for domination is to end the forever wars. Can’t
have it both ways https://twitter.com/hawleymo/status/1247188890445910018 …
The Missouri populist’s commentary
follows as he said that the country must remain “laser-focused” on preventing
Chinese “domination.” He said that this proposal will involve revamping
America’s military posture towards countering an increasingly aggressive China.
China understands that the global
pandemic is an inflection point. They are trying to turn this to their
advantage. Make no mistake, they are still pursuing their global strategic
ambitions. The need for us to laser focus on China’s economic and military
ambitions is going to be more urgent once we beat this pandemic, not less.
Hawley’s commentary echoes his
foreign policy vision, which he unveiled in November
2019 at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). The senator’s foreign
policy vision would replace the bipartisan foreign consensus that he called
“progressive universalism” with a foreign policy that would benefit the
interests of the American working class.
Hawley said that the “burden of this
nation’s long wars had fallen disproportionately” on middle-class families.
He said during his CNAS speech that
instead of engaging in further conflict in the Middle East, America should
counter a rising and increasingly imperialist China, which threatens the
freedom of those in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He added that China has increasingly
deployed soft power to pressure American corporations such as Disney and the
NBA to “throw overboard free speech at the first sign of Beijing’s commercial
pressure.”
Hawley said that “the point of
American foreign policy should not be to remake the world, but to keep
Americans safe and prosperous.”
Patriotism vs. Globalism in 2020: A
Country Is at Stake
BY VERONIKA KYRLENDO
Given the extraordinary
pace of events in America and the world this year, it is not hard to imagine
that a bystander — perhaps a bug-eyed alien who has been following the series
"The Earth" — would be pleased with the dynamics of the show. But
he also would be puzzled at the rapid twists of the plot. The U.S.,
for example, enters a 2020 season in all its might and glory, with the strong
economy, where unemployment for everyone is low, where reduced taxes and
regulations promise further growth, and the basic indices of economic activity
spell "victory" for the funny-looking guy who made it
happen. Then — BAM! — a "deadly virus" hits — eh,
unimpressive...the mortality rate would have been much higher for the sake of
the show; 2 percent is a rookie number (would be even lower if the infected
were not placed in the nursing
homes). Nonetheless, America goes into lockdown, losing trillions of
dollars. Unemployment soars. Then — BAM! — massive
protests accompanied by rioting, looting, arson, vandalism, and sheer violence
erupt as a response to the incident of police brutality. The whole
system is declared evil and beyond repair. The crime rate
soars. American flags are burned — not in Iran or
North Korea, but in Washington, D.C. Some parts of the country that
were the envy of the world look like a war zone. Whoa, a
startled viewer would think — what just happened?
What is happening is that
November gets closer, and the country finds itself in a situation that may be
described with a mathematical catastrophe theory used to study discontinuous
processes. An example of a discontinuous process would be an arched
bridge to which more and more weight is added. At first, little
effect is seen as the weight on the bridge is increased — the bridge begins to
bend almost imperceptibly. At a certain point, however, enough
weight is added to the bridge that it collapses. A sudden change in
a discontinuous process is called a catastrophe.
The American model right
now has one active variable, the economic model, and one active parameter, a
necessity to choose one out of two courses of its
development. Speaking scientifically, we have reached a divergence
point that requires a system to follow one of the two possible paths that are
mutually exclusive. At this point, both of them are equally
probable, and the system "freezes" — to land on one of the paths, it
needs a push. It is difficult to accurately prognosticate the
system's behavior at this point, but one can model it. Once the
choice is made, the return to the divergence point is impossible — if you stand
before the abyss, you may either walk around it or take a step into it.
Which paths lie before
America? The first one is presented — and has been practiced for the
last 20 years — by the globalism aimed to secure America's leading place in
monopolar world. The main tools of it are supranational entities
such as international organizations, multinational corporations, and financial
institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. Even though
globalization has been pictured by academia and media as an endless pool of
growth, opportunities, and progress, it has been marked by substantial
shortcomings. For example, under the new regime of enhanced
financial mobility and power, with greater volatility of financial markets and
increased risk, real interest rates have risen substantially. This
has discouraged long-term investment in new plants and equipment and stimulated
spending on the re-equipment of old facilities along with a large volume of
essentially financial transactions — mergers, buybacks of stocks, financial
maneuvers, and speculative activities. This explains why overall
productivity growth in the member-countries of the Organization for
Economic Co-operation and Development fell. So did gross
fixed investment, and so did GDP growth. But the elites have done
well despite the slackened productivity. Because globalization
has helped keep wages down, while increasing real interest rates, the upper 5
percent of households have been able to skim off a large fraction of the
reduced productivity gains, thereby permitting elite incomes and stock market
values to rise rapidly. For the multinational corporations
that shaped foreign policy by
engaging in lobbyism, globalization has also been great. One of
their main objectives that they achieved was cheaper labor
sources. Labor is often cheapest, and least prone to cause employer
problems, in authoritarian states. Capital moves to such friendly
investment climes, shifting resources from the more expensive to the less
costly locale. (That is why the MNCs have vocally opposed the Trump
administration's escalation of trade tensions, tightening of immigration
restrictions, and disruption of global value chains.)
For the global majority,
globalization has been a whole different story. Income inequality
rose markedly both within and among countries. In the United States,
despite a great increase in productivity thanks to new technologies, inequality rose. Underemployment, job insecurity, benefit
loss — all increased.
The Trump administration
disdains globalization and practices a healthy and much needed
protectionism. It withdrew from free trade and other deals and
viciously attacked globalization structures nurtured by the previous
administrations: U.N., NATO, WTO, International Criminal Court, and now WHO,
which proved shockingly unprofessional and frankly hostile to the U.S.
interests.
If Trump gets four more
years as a president, he may get to the holy of holies of the economic
globalism — the IMF and the World Bank — which will undoubtedly face a debt
crisis due to the downfall of the world economy. Ironically, the
COVID-19 hysteria that became an act of desperation for the Democrats — whether
it was a projected event or a natural crisis that would have been a shame to
waste — now plays against the global financial leviathan and its
masters. According to none other than George Soros, the COVID-19 pandemic
is a one-two financial punch for developing economies. Not only has
it put extraordinary pressure on budgets worldwide, but it has also caused a
sharp exodus of capital from emerging markets. JPMorgan Chase &
Co. predicts that 1 in 5 emerging-market countries will default on their debt
obligations — meaning that the core banks may collapse. If some
federal reserve banks fail, the government may nationalize them — but no doubt
Trump would not save them, as Obama did in 2008. That would fatally
undermine the economic foundation of the Democrats for good; that's why Trump's
victory is not an option for them.
If Biden wins, he, as a
true O'Biden-Bama Democrat, will have to save the failing banking system by
unprecedentedly increasing the national debt in a weakened
economy. The previous model that
balanced emission with trade deals would not be possible to execute in a
severely damaged global economy. That is why Biden's victory would
lead to a delayed catastrophe, but with lower chances of surviving it, because
the condition of the country will deteriorate — his leftist policies will make
sure of it.
The choice we as a
country will make in November is clear: Trump and patriotism or Biden and
globalism. Development or decline. It is just that
simple.
Image: Fox News via YouTube.
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