THE FIRST ONE HUNDRED
DAYS, AND …
By Effey
It's absolutely not true that he did
nothing. He did something.
He came up with a tax plan that eliminates
the estate tax. This would benefit anyone whose inheritance is over 15 million
dollars. Some economists have looked at this plan in more detail and have
decided that his daughter Ivanka could benefit the most, by as much as $49
billion dollars! So far, he has only changed the rules that benefit him and his
family, personally.
He has kept his promise to his voters that
he would build the Wall and Mexico would pay for it. This was his promise.
However, the truth is that the Wall will be paid for by you, the American tax
payer.
He has promised to destroy NAFTA. Great! Is
he aware of the fact that the United States ships over 10,000 Goods and
Products manufactured in the United
States to Mexico! Mexico is our biggest customer!
According to the Wall Street Journal of May
1, 2017, “The Trump administration, looking to make its first major imprint on
U.S. banking regulators, is preparing to replace Comptroller of the Currency
Thomas Curry as chief overseer of federally chartered banks.“ This means that
the crooks of Wall Street will have more freedom to fleece the American Citizen
and that the banks’ rates for loans will go up again. I thought during his
campaign that Trump was looking to help the little guy. Another one of his
broken promises!
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Data, the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 4.5%, the lowest level since May 2007. The credit for these numbers
belongs to President Obama. These are only the Eddy Currents of the levers
President Obama still pulled in the last six months of his Administration.
This may be a good time to compare the two
presidents. President Obama had integrity and he and his staff were impeccable
compared to our Führer Donald Trump and his Storm trooper Sean Spicer.
All in all, the American people have been
duped by a Snake Oil salesman. They have bought a TV in a box with the parts
missing.
President Obama was a politician. President
Trump is a mixture of a clown and a street corner Three Card Monty Swindler.
I don’t know anybody who has gotten a job
from this blowhard. Announcements of the jobs he “created” in the first and
second months of his presidency, were in the pipeline well before President
Trump took office. And what about the infrastructure improvements? Another
broken campaign promise. I would not call this an administration but The Greatest
Show On Earth and Trump is the Ring Master
I very rarely quote other writers, but I
could not have said it any better than David Leonhardt, of the NY Times.
The Comey Controversy
Donald Trump Is Lying Again, Now About James Comey
The president of the United States is
lying again.
He is lying about the reason he fired James Comey,
the F.B.I. director. Trump claimed that he was doing so because Comey bungled
the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email, which meant that Comey was “not
able to effectively lead the bureau.”
There is no reason to believe Trump’s
version of the facts and many reasons to believe he is lying. How can I be so
confident?
First, it’s important to remember just
how often Trump lies.
Virtually whenever he finds it more convenient to tell a falsehood than to tell
a truth, he chooses the falsehood.
An incomplete list of the things he has
lied about include: Barack Obama’s birthplace, Obama’s phone “tapp,” John F.
Kennedy’s assassination, Sept.
11,
the Iraq
war, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment
rate,
the murder
rate,
the Electoral
College, voter
fraud,
the size of his inaugural
crowd,
his health care
bill and
his own groping
of women.
Second, Trump previously praised Comey
for reopening the Clinton email investigation, which was the core of Trump’s
rationale for the firing, as Igor
Volsky noted.
Third, Trump claimed that he was merely
following up on a Justice Department recommendation and released a letter from
the department to bolster his case. Yet the timing doesn’t make sense — and
Trump aides have already undercut their boss, by acknowledging that he wanted
to fire Comey.
As Bill Kristol pointed out, the
Justice Department letter was dated the same day as the firing, and the
official who wrote it has been on the job for just two weeks — not enough time
for a serious review that could have reversed Trump’s previous position.
“So there was no real recommendation from
DOJ,” Kristol wrote. “Trump wanted to do
it, and they created a paper trail.” Kristol, a conservative, added, “One can be at once
a critic of Comey and alarmed by what Trump has done and how he has done it.”
Even more damning, White House sources
also admitted on Tuesday night that Trump himself initiated the firing. The
White House charged Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, with coming up with a
reason to fire Comey, as The Times and others have reported.
Finally, and most obviously, Trump had
a very big motive to fire Comey and install a loyalist. Comey was overseeing
the investigation into the Trump campaign’s numerous strange ties with the
Russian government.
“The firing of James Comey as F.B.I.
director is a stunning event,” Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey, two of the
sharpest observers of the Russia case, wrote
for Lawfare.
“It is a profoundly dangerous thing — a move that puts the Trump-Russia
investigation in immediate jeopardy and removes from the investigative
hierarchy the one senior official whom President Trump did not appoint and one
who is known to stand up to power.”
The president is lying about firing a
top law enforcement official, and he is almost certainly lying to protect
himself and his aides from a full investigation into their own activities.
Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from
Hawaii, wrote on Tuesday
night, “We are in a full-fledged constitutional crisis.”
It’s now clear that Trump’s Justice
Department has no independence. Both Sessions, and Sessions’s deputy, Rod
Rosenstein, are acting like Trump enforcers. And now the F.B.I. is compromised
as well.
The only way to unwind the
constitutional crisis is an independent inquiry, completely free of Trump’s
oversight. Several Republican members of Congress expressed concern about
Comey’s firing, but words aren’t enough.
Members of Congress need to give
Americans reason to believe the Russia investigation isn’t a charade with a
predetermined outcome. They need to make clear that while the president may
think he is above the truth, he is not above the law.
he
American people — not to mention the credibility of the world’s oldest
democracy — require a thorough, impartial investigation into the extent of
Russia’s meddling with the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump
and, crucially, whether high-ranking members of Mr. Trump’s campaign colluded
in that effort.
By firing
the F.B.I. director, James Comey, late Tuesday afternoon, President Trump has cast
grave doubt on the viability of any further investigation into what could be
one of the biggest political scandals in the country’s history.
The
explanation for this shocking move — that Mr. Comey’s bungling of the
investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server violated longstanding
Justice Department policy and profoundly damaged public trust in the agency —
is impossible to take at face value. Certainly Mr. Comey deserves all the criticism heaped
upon him for his repeated misstepsin that
case, but just as certainly, that’s not the reason Mr. Trump fired
him.
Mr.
Trump had nothing
but praise for Mr. Comey when, in the final days of the presidential
campaign, he informed Congress that the bureau was reopening the investigation
into Mrs. Clinton’s emails. “He brought back his reputation,” Mr. Trump said at
the time. “It took a lot of guts.”
Of
course, if Mr. Trump truly believed, as he said in his letter of dismissal,
that Mr. Comey had undermined “public trust and confidence” in the agency, he
could just as well have fired him on his first day in office.
Mr.
Comey was fired because he was leading an active investigation that
could bring down a president. Though compromised by his own poor judgment, Mr.
Comey’s agency has been pursuing ties between the Russian government and Mr.
Trump and his associates, with potentially ruinous consequences for the
administration.
With
congressional Republicans continuing to resist any serious investigation, Mr.
Comey’s inquiry was the only aggressive effort to get to the bottom of Russia’s
ties to the Trump campaign. So far, the scandal has engulfed Paul Manafort, one
of Mr. Trump’s campaign managers; Roger Stone, a longtime confidant; Carter
Page, one of the campaign’s early foreign-policy advisers; Michael Flynn, who
was forced out as national security adviser; and Attorney General Jeff
Sessions, who recused
himself in March from the Russia inquiry after failing to disclose
during his confirmation hearings that he had met twice during the campaign with
the Russian ambassador to the United States.
We have said that Mr. Comey’s
atrocious handling of the Clinton email investigation, which arguably tipped
the election to Mr. Trump, proved that he could not be trusted to be neutral,
and that the only credible course of action would be the appointment of a
special prosecutor. Given all that has happened — the firing of the F.B.I.
director, on top of Mr. Trump’s firing of the acting attorney general, Sally
Yates, and his dismissal of nearly all United States attorneys — the need for
such a prosecutor is plainer than ever. Because Mr. Sessions is recused, the
decision to name a special prosecutor falls to Deputy Attorney General Rod
Rosenstein, whose memo, along with a separate one by Mr. Sessions, provided Mr.
Trump with the pretense to fire Mr. Comey.
This is
a tense and uncertain time in the nation’s history. The president of the United
States, who is no more above the law than any other citizen, has now decisively
crippled the F.B.I.’s ability to carry out an investigation of him and his
associates. There is no guarantee that Mr. Comey’s replacement, who will be
chosen by Mr. Trump, will continue that investigation; in fact, there are
already hints to the contrary.
The
obvious historical parallel to Mr. Trump’s action was the so-called Saturday
Night Massacre in October 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered the
firing of the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, prompting the
principled resignations of the attorney general and his deputy. But now, there
is no special prosecutor in place to determine whether the public trust has
been violated, and whether the presidency was effectively stolen by a hostile
foreign power. For that reason, the country has reached an even more perilous
moment.
We are
in trouble, and nobody seems to care. What we need is a grassroots movement to
impeach the President and his Vice President and to hold another election where
the popular vote counts instead of the Electoral College. But that too is
wishful thinking.
Good
luck America.
Stay
tuned,
Red
Beans and Ricely yours, Effey
