DUBUQUE, Iowa — As Joseph R. Biden Jr. made his way across Iowa on his first trip as a 2020 presidential candidate, the former vice president repeatedly returned to one term — aberration — when he referred to the Trump presidency.

“Limit it to four years,” Mr. Biden pleaded with a ballroom crowd of 600 in the eastern Iowa city of Dubuque. “History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration.”

“This is not the Republican Party,” he added, citing his relationships with “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

There is no disagreement among Democrats about the urgency of defeating Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden’s singular focus on the president as the source of the nation’s ills, while extending an olive branch to Republicans, has exposed a significant fault line in the Democratic primary.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/us/politics/biden-trump-republicans-2020.html?

James Comey's account of how Trump ‘ate the soul’ of Bill Barr is hysterical in every way

Even his most committed deputies would agree that working with the current US president (though probably some other bosses too) requires you to compromise and see things from his point of view.

Or as Comey calls it, letting him “eat your soul in small bites.”

How does Donald Trump exert such power that Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller to the Russia investigation, now ignores the collusion Comey can see so plainly in the Mueller Report?

In Opinion

James Comey writes, “Amoral leaders have a way of revealing the character of those around them” https://t.co/mMFe9nvxf5

The president is part hypnotist.

“Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set of facts, or delusions. I have felt it — this president building with his words a web of alternativ

Part dictator, who demands “public display of personal fealty” at the risk of… what exactly?

“While the entire world is watching, you do what everyone else around the table does — you talk about how amazing the leader is and what an honor it is to be associated with him.”

“Accomplished people lacking inner strength” like Attorney General Bill Barr and his former deputy Rosenstein “feel this happening” but instead of resigning with honor, compromise as “you convince yourself that you simply must stay, to preserve and protect the people and institutions and values you hold dear.”

But he’s already got you.

“And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.” Ta-da-da.

Or maybe James Comey, Barr and Rosenstein genuinely think there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, because they read the report which says that there wasn’t.

It’s not even that Comey’s piece has no merit – there is something in the psychological picture that he paints that is plausible, insightful even.

But in a desire to jack up the drama, he tips into purple prose, then bathos. He seems agitated, vaguely unhinged. No politician is a soulsucker. Not Trump. Not Obama. Not Putin. Not even Mao or Hitler

Fainting like a possessed schoolgirl in a over-ripe Southern Gothic novel at the mere presence of Trump evokes only sighs from Republicans and moderates, while inflaming further the already overactive imaginations of on-looking Democrats.

I mean, how do you even fight soulsuckers? Can you beat one in an election? Can Nancy Pelosi overpower Beelzebub? Is the Supreme Court full of zombies? Whose side are THEY on?

This is really no way to talk about politics.

What this is, however, is a chance for James Comey, a man with a distinguished public service career but small stores of public affection, to shed his dignity trying to stay relevant, as he stands on the street shouting “Listen to me! I’ve seen Satan himself and looked him in the eye! Only I can save you!”

By Igor Ogorodnev

Igor Ogorodnev is a Russian-British journalist, who has worked at RT since 2007 as a correspondent, editor and writer.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/458256-comey-barr-rosenstein-trump-soul/

The last thing the world needs is more of Robert Mueller’s commentary, but Congress is determined to have him hold forth at a public hearing.

It isn’t as though we don’t already have the special counsel’s version of events. He mustered enormous investigative resources and took two years to write a 400-page report that is available to the public and presumably carefully written (although not necessarily carefully thought through).

That should be enough for Mueller to stand on — and enough for Congress to make a decision to ­impeach or not impeach, or otherwise dispose of the matter as it sees fit. Instead, Mueller is going to be asked to expand on his already expansive report that not only blew through Justice Department regulations but inverted the longstanding burden of proof in the Anglo American legal tradition.

As a prosecutor, Mueller’s sole job was to decide whether or not the president was guilty of a crime. He declined to do this, choosing ­instead to write a nearly 200-page volume on obstruction cataloguing what he found in the course of not making the only decision he was supposed to make.

The relevant regulations say at the conclusion of the special counsel’s work he or she “shall provide the attorney general with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the special counsel.”

On obstruction, Mueller reached no such decision, and he didn’t write a confidential report, either — his report was clearly meant for public consumption. Besides that, he’s a sticker for the rules.

“Mueller’s action,” Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School writes at Lawfare, “seems inconsistent with what the regulations tried to accomplish, which was to prevent extra-prosecutorial editorializing.” Worse, as Trump’s special counsel, Emmet Flood, set out in an excoriating letter, by stipulating that the evidence prevented him “from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred,” Mueller stood the presumption of innocence on its head.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2019/05/06/bob-muellers-job-now-is-just-to-go-away/

Mueller did not find evidence of anything. Democrats, get a life. If you want to get rid of Trump, wait till next year with the new presidential elections. Present a candidate that has legs, not Biden, possibly Bernie or at best a woman, say Tulsi Gabbard... The others are nuts. They will help Trump by default.

The fifth female lawmaker to enter the 2020 presidential race officially announced her candidacy on Sunday — and remarkably, this historic moment doesn’t even seem like a huge deal.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) joined the ranks of top-tier Democratic women to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency, highlighting her working-class roots and wide regional appeal at a wintry campaign launch event in Minneapolis on Sunday.

Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard had all previously announced that they’re running for the Democratic nomination. You can also add to that list political outsider Marianne Williamson, Oprah’s spiritual adviser and self-proclaimed “bitch for God,” who formally announced her candidacy last month.

Read more: https://www.vox.com/2019/2/10/18219401/record-breaking-women-running-for-president

God help us against these bitches!!!

...

Last October, Attorney General William Barr appeared at Notre Dame Law School to make a case for ideological warfare [Gus note: all the presidents and their acolytes HAVE MADE IDEOLOGICAL WARFARE, one way or the other]. Before an assembly of students and faculty, Barr claimed that the “organized destruction” of religion was under way in the United States. “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values,” he said. Barr, a conservative Catholic, blamed the spread of “secularism and moral relativism” for a rise in “virtually every measure of social pathology”—from the “wreckage of the family” to “record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.”

The speech was less a staid legal lecture than a catalogue of grievances accumulated since the Reagan era, when Barr first enlisted in the culture wars. It included a series of contentious claims. He argued, for example, that the Founders of the United States saw religion as essential to democracy. “In the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people—a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order,” he said. Barr ended his address by urging his listeners to resist the “constant seductions of our contemporary society” and launch a “moral renaissance.”

Donald Trump does not share Barr’s long-standing concern about the role of religion in civic life. (Though he often says that the Bible is his favorite book, when he was asked which Testament he preferred, he answered, “The whole Bible is incredible.”) What the two men have in common is a sense of being surrounded by a hostile insurgency. A few days after Barr’s speech, Trump told an audience at the conservative Values Voter Summit, “Extreme left-wing radicals, both inside and outside government, are determined to shred our Constitution and eradicate the beliefs we all cherish. They are trying to hound you from the workplace, expel you from the public square, and weaken the American family, and indoctrinate our children.” As the effort to remove the President has gathered strength, Barr’s and Trump’s political interests have converged. Both men combine the pro-business instincts of traditional Republicans with a focus on culture clash and grievance. Both believe that any constraint on Presidential power weakens the United States.

Eleven months after being sworn in, Barr is the most feared, criticized, and effective member of Trump’s Cabinet. Like no Attorney General since the Watergate era, he has acted as the President’s political sword and shield. When the special counsel Robert Mueller released the findings of his inquiry into connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, Barr presented a sanitized four-page summary before the report was made public, which the President used to declare himself cleared. At the behest of the President, Barr launched an investigation of the F.B.I.’s Trump-Russia probe and the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia intervened on Trump’s behalf in the election. Rather than seek a nonpartisan commission, Barr appointed a federal prosecutor, reinforcing the President’s claims of a “coup.” When an exhaustive review by the Justice Department’s inspector general found no evidence of political bias in the F.B.I. investigation, Barr issued a statement misrepresenting its findings and arguing that the evidence in the Russia probe was “consistently exculpatory”—leaving out the fact that five people connected to Trump’s campaign have been indicted for lying to investigators.

Read more:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/20/william-barr-trumps-sword-...

Here we shall leave this declining article that has found its way into "The New Yorker" probably out of intellectual spite... Yes, five people connected to Trump’s campaign have been indicted for lying to investigators. But this does not mean anything about Russia. These five people had fiddled with a few untruths or fiddle their cash — nothing to do with Russia — AND HAD BEEN SPIED UPON BY THE FBI under false pretences. 

The purpose of this New Yorker article seems to be smearing Barr with "religious values". I would be the first person to point out the silliness of religious nonsense, but then Barr is treated as if he was a member of Opus Dei... which he is not. 

The article goes on and on... It is written by David Rohde — an executive editor of newyorker.com. He is the author of “In Deep: The F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the Truth about America’s ‘Deep State’,” forthcoming in April... We shall see what's in there...

Barr and Trump are (as far as we can judge) no menbers of the Deep State, and more or less both are anti-FBI and anti-CIA. To be fair, the FBI and the CIA have always been bête-noires for presidents... not just Trump. Without the lies of the CIA — lies which were requested by President Bush administration (Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc) to go to war — the war on Saddam Hussein would never have happened. Other presidents were weary of the FBI and the CIA, as their directors often acted like little dictators....

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