Don’t you unhinged leftists know? Like his predecessor Dale Volker, Demented Dave DiPietro thinks he – not the electorate – gets to decide when his Assembly tenure is complete. Nothing sends the local right into a bigger frenzy than Facebook activism (no coincidence, the most preternaturally annoying and unreasonable right-wing trolls I’ve ever encountered are white men over the age of 50 on Facebook.)
Sure, it’s a “tiny” group by most measures, but I’m a member and from what I can gather, everyone’s showered, tolerant, and not remotely vile. Compared to, for instance, the crusty, faux-alpha freaks who show up to DiPietro’s gun raffle fundraisers, where they vie for the chance for them or their family to be the latest homicide or suicide statistic, we’re downright responsible and reasonable.
If these “leftists” “don’t stand a chance” to beat “Dave”, then surely this “tiny” group would hardly merit a mention from his attack dog. This is an example of a special kind of aggressive snowflakeism that is a hallmark of the MAGA radical set.
The anti-Trump left may not have – or ever have – its shit completely together. I mean, who does? Certainly not the West Wing. But it’s motivated af, and it’s coming for guys like Demented Dave and Creepy Chris Collins because the y’re Trump lieutenants, and they’re complicit in the rapid erosion of American democracy and values, which has motivated millions of people who had until recently taken these things for granted.
Like DiPietro, Collins also wears his public office like a title of nobility. Days ago, his endorsed Democratic challenger, Grand Island Supervisor Nate McMurray, bumped into Collins. McMurray wasn’t rude to him – he didn’t angrily confront him or anything else we vile, unshowered, intolerant leftists are wont to do. He merely introduced himself and invited Collins – who has never once held a town hall meeting to listen to constituents who may conceivably disagree with him – to a debate.
Here’s how it unfolded at the Pride of Wyoming County Agricultural Dinner:
Guess who I ran into tonight? Collins. I asked him for a debate. He said no. Actually he said never. Essentially, he said he’s too big for that. Does that seem right? It’s not.#natewantsadebatepic.twitter.com/YsX7j7Sn0b
— Nate McMurray for Congress (@Nate_McMurray) March 4, 2018
Collins laughed. He refused. He told McMurray he’s too big of a deal to “debate”. It’s the same thing as when County Executive Mark Poloncarz invited Collins to hold a public discussion about gun violence. Collins and DiPietro think that elections are mere formalities they have to endure every couple of years. They think they’re entitled to their seats in Congress and the Assembly. Even the tiniest suggestion of a credible challenge – regardless of how credible or organized it is – drives them to apoplexy.
Sure, unseating DiPietro and Collins may be an uphill battle, but elections aren’t mere formalities. These two need to stand up before the voters and defend not only their own scant accomplishments, but the degradation of American democracy under their leader, Trump.
I quipped before it began that politics in this country have become exhausting. Partisanship – even as deep as it is now – is neither unhealthy nor unprecedented, so that doesn’t bother me. What I mean is that every calendar day is packed with literally a month’s worth of scandal and breaking news. Every day brings with it limitless shitshow additur that it’s no wonder people are retreating to binges of Netflix and booze. I simply can’t keep up. I don’t even have it in me to give an example from Tuesday about the executive refusal to carry out duly enacted Russia sanctions, or the list of oligarchs – cribbed from Forbes – that the Trump administration used as its list of sanctioned Russians, or the brazenly partisan hackery of the memo regarding FISA warrants targeting wannabe Russian spy Carter Page that Rep. Devin Nunes – who had supposedly recused himself from all things Russia – is pushing like a bottle of Oxycontin in a back alley.
So, I watched. This man who commenced his campaign to be the leader of the free world by declaring undocumented Mexican immigrants to be rapists and murderers, who has taken to Twitter to pick fights almost exclusively with people of color, who makes up schoolyard nicknames for people he doesn’t like, who can dish it out but whose skin is as thin as tracing paper – this man now pleads for national unity.
Yes, Donald Trump, of all people, spent a few minutes on Tuesday calling for national unity; just before he exploited families’ grief to insinuate that undocumented unaccompanied minor immigrants are all members of a gang, or that the only gang violence in the US comes from immigrants; or that terrorism in the US is immigrant-driven; or that family reunification – Trump prefers the white nationalist term “chain migration” – has led to violence against Americans; or that MS-13 is somehow an existential threat to the United States.
While he agitates for $25 billion in taxpayer money for a wall that he said Mexico would pay for, he says in his State of the Union that when “there is a frontier, we cross it.” How droll.
Listen, just because Donald Trump didn’t pause in the middle of his State of the Union to pull his pants down, squat, and do a shit onto the Rostrum doesn’t make any of this Presidential.
All of us, together, as one team, one people, and one American family.
That’s what he said – he wanted to talk about Americans’ shared future; yet within minutes, he was back to dividing us – by race, as it relates to kneeling protests during the National Anthem; by religion and sexual orientation and gender identity, as he touted his moves to enable Christianists to discriminate against LGBTQ Americans; by immigration status, as he continually talked not of “Americans”, but more specifically of “citizens”, as if Green Card holders and refugees don’t count; and by using grieving families to illustrate how immigration is a scourge that kills innocent children, and must be severely restricted.
So tonight, I am extending an open hand to work with members of both parties — Democrats and Republicans — to protect our citizens of every background, color, religion, and creed. My duty, and the sacred duty of every elected official in this chamber, is to defend Americans — to protect their safety, their families, their communities, and their right to the American Dream. Because Americans are dreamers too.
The converse is true, as well; Dreamers are Americans, too.
As Trump went through the “four pillars” of his immigration reform proposal, one thing stood out – the most effective deterrent against immigration of any kind – legal and illegal, checked or unchecked – is Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric. “Chain migration” hurts no one; has hurt no one. The visa diversity lottery was put in place under the first President Bush to attract people from countries whose citizens had been under-represented in previous years’ immigration trends. Trump suggested that this was just a blind hand-out of immigration visas, as if these people didn’t go through the same background checks and vetting as any other visitor or potential immigrant. I’d be much more amendable to a switch to a Canadian-style merit-based system if Trump would stop lying and making stuff up about the current system.
As he cheered the abolition of the health insurance mandate, Trump called for drug prices to come under government control because of unchecked gouging. Hey, if other countries can do it – so can we. The difference, of course, is that every other country also offers its citizens a guarantee of comprehensive health insurance as a human right. We don’t; Americans think the people’s right to go into medical debt or bankruptcy is more important than a right to not have to worry about how one would pay for reasonable and necessary treatment.
What’s the point of less expensive medication if you have no health coverage and/or can’t afford to see a doctor to prescribe them?
Trump wants to let people take experimental treatments for illnesses – sounds good. He spoke of trade deals and how he’d make them more fair, as if they hadn’t already been carefully negotiated in the past to benefit all signatories; as if trade deals were a handout of some sort. He touted a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan; great! Our infrastructure is decidedly outmoded and poor.
But Donald Trump can’t spend 364 days and 22 hours of every year being a divisive shit, and then suddenly expect or receive plaudits for a contrived message of unity one night in January.
Tuesday night, after we watched the State of the Union, Maryalice Demler wanted to get a sort of local perspective on Trump’s speech. I honed in on immigration – it’s a topic that has intense, personal meaning for me, and one that this President has used to divide us since literally day one of his Presidential journey. I like the idea of a path for citizenship for Dreamers, but I don’t quite get the 12-year wait; we’re not Switzerland. I heard absolutely nothing about refugees or whether – or how – we might accept immigrants who aren’t, for instance, chemical engineers or computer scientists. Think about how much Buffalo and western New York have benefited economically and culturally from recent immigrants and refugees from places like Burma and Somalia. These new Americans are no different from your ancestors who came from the shitholes of yesteryear like Ireland or Germany or Italy. They come to this country because “American” isn’t a homogeneous ethnicity – it is a hodgepodge of people from all places, all religions, all backgrounds – all here, together, to make a better life for themselves and each other.
Every mass shooting – every school shooting – should be a massive scandal. Every one should be an emergency of grand societal and legal proportions. In any other industrialized first-world country, it would be. In ours, it’s just Tuesday.
Unless the perpetrator is ethnic in any way, in which case there needs to be a wall, a ban on immigration, or it’s an opportunity for the Kek-Trump cult to use the incident as proof of white male “Christian” supremacy.
Lügenpresse – lying press – “fake news” – is a distinctly German slur that the Nazis used to slam the Jewish, foreign, and opposition press. It’s a handy way to demonize any media that don’t follow the party line. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the mantras of the Trump Cult is “fake news”. Representative Chris Collins (NY-27), the Ti to Trump’s Do; the Krupskaya to Trump’s Lenin – started out an “interview” on WBEN Monday morning by referring to the “Buffalo ‘Fake News'”, most likely because of this article which helps cement the fact that Collins is a shit.
CNN is not fake news. Neither are the Buffalo News or the New York Times or the Washington Post. Anyone suggesting that they are is a propagandist; lying, wrong, and advancing some right-wing agenda. When Trump especially calls media outlets “fake news”, he is all but signing someone’s death sentence. It is unprecedented and un-American for a President to promote one media outlet – Fox News – and accuse others of being “fake”. Someone’s going to die.
In an arrest affidavit released Monday, FBI agent Sean Callaghan wrote that Griesemer “made approximately 22 total calls to CNN” between Jan. 9 and Jan. 10. Four of the calls resulted in threats. In the last message, the caller made disparaging remarks about Jewish individuals, before stating: “You are going down. I have a gun and I am coming to Georgia right now to go to the CNN headquarters to f — king gun every single last one of you. I have a team of people. It’s going to be great, man . . . You gotta get prepared for this one, buddy.”
I have no doubt that Trump’s appeal to the very worst in Americans – greed, hatred, selfishness, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, bigotry, the dismantling of democratic norms – will be a temporary aberration that will someday serve as a warning and reminder that it can happen here.
This is the same crowd that read some emails and decided that John Podesta and Hillary Clinton were running a pedophilic sex ring out of the non-existent basement of a DC-area pizza parlor. Naturally, a guy showed up there with a gun to shoot the place up. The idiots who instigated that attack and promoted those lies have only grown in stature within the “alt-right” axis.
No matter what, 30% of the electorate will support this petty would-be dictator no matter what he does. As he famously quipped, he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue – or pay six figures in hush money to a porn star to dummy up about their liaison in the days before an election – and not lose their support. Some people don’t want a functioning government, they just want to be ruled.
This time, the beneficiaries are a couple of former politicians, one who just lost his seat in the last election and another who sacrificed hers in an attempt to secure the top job at City Hall.
Thanks to the party higher-ups who provide taxpayer-paid safety nets, both have landed jobs at the Erie County Board of Elections.
This is wrong.
I don’t see anything in the editorial, however, that tends to prove that assertion. The board recounts how Ted Morton was sanctioned by FINRA, his former industry’s governing body, for improperly borrowing client money. That was known when he first ran for the legislature, and didn’t prevent him from being elected, so I can’t fathom why it would disqualify him from a $40,000 per year job pushing papers at the BOE. But at least with Morton, the News had some sort of malfeasance at which to point; Morton’s ethics are questionable, at best.
What about Betty Jean Grant?
There is no similar accusation that she acted improperly or unethically. By all accounts, she valiantly and competently served her constituents throughout her public career. What did she do wrong? Well, she was two years short from the 20 years in the system she needed for her state pension fully to vest. So, this BOE job helps her stay in so she can retire comfortably.
I think every American should have the right to retire comfortably. Good for Betty Jean.
In September, Betty Jean lost a quixotic primary bid to unseat Mayor Byron Brown. Had she not undertaken that effort or retired from the legislature, she would have easily sailed to a re-election victory. Instead, she’s got a job pushing papers at the BOE.
I don’t know what necessarily qualifies or disqualifies Morton or Grant from serving on the BOE, except that they’re former elected officials who no longer find themselves in office. It looks like the News’ main complaint is that their respective party bosses got them the jobs.
If a party boss can’t get a job for a failed or retired elected who served the people and the party well, what good is he?
With Betty Jean Grant, the Buffalo News doesn’t even go through an exercise in suggesting why Betty Jean Grant shouldn’t be working at the BOE. It’s as if serving in the Legislature for over 10 years automatically disqualifies someone from such a job. How silly.
Even more obnoxious, however, is this:
None of this bothers either political party. If it isn’t the Board of Elections, then it is the Erie County Water Authority. The authority has long been a dumping ground for the unqualified and politically connected who collect fat salaries on the backs of ratepayers.
I know it’s about the water authority and not the Board of Elections, but “dumping ground”? $40,000 is a “fat salary”? To whom? You put trash in the dumping ground, and Betty Jean Grant is most certainly not trash.
Patronage is a problem, sure, but placement of former electeds in jobs that already exist and are already budgeted-for doesn’t especially bother me, and this is not even in the top tier of problems that western New York’s political world faces.
Get back to me when the Buffalo News’ editorial board attacks our inherently corrupt electoral fusion system, rather than heckling former elected officials earning $40,000 in a state job.
Nominal President Donald Trump reached around the empty Fiji water bottles and McDonald’s wrappers to lurch for his phone to send this Tweet:
Reason I canceled my trip to London is that I am not a big fan of the Obama Administration having sold perhaps the best located and finest embassy in London for “peanuts,” only to build a new one in an off location for 1.2 billion dollars. Bad deal. Wanted me to cut ribbon-NO!
The decision to move the embassy from Grosvenor Square to Nine Elms was made in 2008 under George W. Bush, not Obama.
Trump literally couldn’t get the most basic detail of his slur – the Presidential Administration that decided the embassy had to move. He also omits the reason – the old embassy in Grosvenor Square was in a dense residential neighborhood and the security needs for American outposts have changed dramatically since 1960.
It would have been impossible to retrofit the aging concrete building with the security measures needed, officials said at the time.
Also? Wandsworth near the Vauxhall Bridge is not some “off location”.
Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, the embassy has caused controversy locally by installing blast walls in a wide perimeter around the building. Neighbors complained the walls were unsightly, and the walls caused the road in front of the building to be closed to traffic.
Finally, the US didn’t own the Grosvenor Square property in fee simple, but held a lease with the Duke of Westminster.
The Duke reportedly said he would only sell if the US government returned his family’s land, confiscated during the American War of Independence.
The US sold the remainder of its lease to the Qatari government for what is thought to be £500 million, or $681.5 million; not exactly “peanuts”.
Donald Trump is the shithole President who was essentially asked not to come because Londoners would have come out in their thousands to protest His racist, white nationalist Accidency.
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
He did nothing!!!” Justine Krasuski of Cheektowaga, who lost her husband, Jerry Krasuski, in the crash, said on Facebook in reaction to Trump’s tweet. “It’s us, the Flight 3407 Families that paved the way. Quite sad, to say the least.”
Indeed, some Republicans in Congress have recently been trying desperately to undo these hard-fought regulations as a gift to the industry and at the expense of consumer protection and passenger safety.
…it doesn’t surprise me one bit,” said [3407 family member Ron Aughtmon], who lost his uncle, John J. Fiore of Grand Island, in the crash. “He’s done absolutely nothing since coming into office to assist with airline safety, in fact he and his ‘party’ want to water down the standards that we have fought so hard for over the last 8 1/2 years.”
Unfortunately, the concept of “shame” is now obsolete.
Happy New Year, everybody! How are you feeling now that President Trump is golfing working feverishly to bring jobs back and lift up the economy after eight years of the Indo-Kenyan Muslim Communist?
Between the semi-lucid staccato of hate from our racist white nationalist kleptocratic would-be dictator of a President, and the Republican Congress’ bare attempt to cut taxes for their donors and raise them on the middle class, there are too many horrific things happening in and to this country to keep up. This is an annus horribilis for the United States.
Today, Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was being charged with – and would plead guilty to – a count of lying to the FBI. Flynn is a retired Army Lieutenant General, whom President Obama appointed to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012. Obama fired Flynn from the DIA in 2014, and Flynn started a private consulting firm. He later joined the Trump campaign as a surrogate and advisor, and served President Trump from January 20 – February 13th as a National Security Advisor.
The brief nature of Flynn’s tenure was unprecedented, and his dismissal was brought about because he had lied to Vice President Pence about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. In December 2015, Kremlin-controlled propaganda outlet RT paid Flynn $45,000 to attend a gala and give a speech about US/Russia relations. Russian President Vladimir Putin dined with Flynn and Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein.
Flynn’s company had been hired by businesspeople close to Turkish President Erdogan in order to, among other things, kidnap and exfiltrate one of Erdogan’s political foes, Flynn wrote this op/ed backing Erdogan without disclosing his financial interest in the matter. The HIll’s version of the op/ed adds this disclaimer:
On March 8, 2017, four months after this article was published, General Flynn filed documents with the Federal government indicating that he earned $530,000 last fall for consulting work that might have aided the government of Turkey. In the filings, Flynn disclosed that he had received payments from Inovo BV, a Dutch company owned by a Turkish businessman with ties to Turkey’s president and that Inovo reviewed the draft before it was submitted to The Hill. Neither General Flynn nor his representatives disclosed this information when the essay was submitted.
There exists in the West a recent, contemporary pattern of far-right parties and entities collaborating with Putin’s United Russia ruling party in an effort to undermine democratic institutions in those countries, to sow division, and ultimately to help break up international agreements such as the European Union and NATO, which pose financial and economic threats to Putin’s oligarchy. This informs why candidate Trump heaped scorn on NATO and cheered Brexit in 2016. Wikileak’s Julian Assange is part of this movement, and they have their myriad useful idiots in the United States, and at least one of them is the current occupant of the Oval Office. Marine Le Pen’s FN, Italy’s breakaway Lega Nord, Germany’d anti-immigrant AfD, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, UKIP, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang (VB) are all aligned with Putin. They are either ultra right-wing nationalist, anti-immigrant parties, and/or Euroskeptic; i.e., opposed to membership in the European Union. All of them oppose sanctions on Russia, and oppose closer EU ties with Ukraine.
This is all brought on by Putin’s loss of control over Ukraine, his annexation of Crimea, his invasion of eastern Ukraine, and the economic hit to Russia from US and EU sanctions and the effects of the Magnitsky Act on Putin and his court. This is “special war“, and the way it’s tearing apart the West makes it seem as if Ian Fleming’s SPECTRE wasn’t so much fiction as it was a glimpse into the future.
Flynn now stands convicted of lying to the FBI. The indictment to which he pled guilty establishes that Flynn lied to FBI agents on January 24, 2017. Specifically, he lied to the FBI about whether he asked the Russian Ambassador to not retaliate or respond to the imposition of sanctions by the Obama Administration arising out of Russian hacking and interference with the 2016 election, and that Kislyak had agreed to do so; that Flynn lied to the FBI about whether he asked Kislyak to delay or defeat a pending resolution in the UN Security Council, or that Kislyak told Flynn what Russia’s response was to that request. It is a violation of the Logan Act for private citizens to enter into negotiations with foreign governments over US relations.
Let’s now examine how karmic this all is. Here is Michael Flynn – convict – in July 2016 at the Republican National Convention.
We do not need a reckless President who believes she is above the law.
Lock her up. That’s right. Lock her up. I’m going to tell you what, it’s unbelievable; it’s unbelievable. Yes; I use — I use #neverHillary; that’s what I use. I have called on Hillary Clinton, I have called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because she, she put our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private e-mail server.
Lock her up. Lock her up! You guys are good. Damn right; exactly right. There’s nothing wrong with that. And you know why; and you know why? You know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth, a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today. So — so, Crooked Hillary Clinton, leave this race now!
She needs to go. Before — before I end — before I end, I will repeat my belief that American exceptionalism is very real. Let — let us not fear what we know to be true. Let us not fear what we know to be true. Instead, we should always remember that our country, our country, was built upon Judeo-Christian values and principles and instead, and instead, let us remember the sacrifices of those who have gone before us. America is unique. America is the greatest country in the history of the world. So – You’re darn right. So get ready, America; get ready. Now is the time to elect fresh, bold, leadership. (Chanting Trump! Trump!)
Trump! Trump! Trump! Let’s go. Come on. Get it going!
We are just beginning. I promise you, I promise you that Donald Trump, Donald Trump knows that the primary role of the president is to keep us safe. He recognizes — he recognizes the threats we face and is not afraid to call them what they are. Donald Trump’s leadership, decision-making and problem-solving abilities will restore America’s role as the undeniable and unquestioned world leader.
He will lead from the front, not from behind. He will lead with courage, never vacillating when facing our enemies or our competitors; and he knows, he knows that the advantage — Donald Trump knows that the advantage in life, in business, and in wartime goes to the competitor that does not flinch and does not broadcast his game plan. He, Donald Trump, will execute the fundamental tenet of peace through strength and there will be, and there will be no apologies for our American exceptionalism or leadership standing around the world.
So once again, once again, wake up, America. You cannot sit this one out. You cannot sit this election out. Get out of your houses and get out there and vote. And instead, elect Donald Trump as the next president of the United States of America. Thank you very much, and God bless America. USA! USA! Keep it going.
That didn’t age well, convict. Flynn’s agreement to this guilty plea is likely to be part of a deal struck with Special Counsel Mueller’s team to provide useful information, evidence, and testimony against others in the Trump campaign, transition, and White House.
