Thursday, June 06, 2019

That litigious Congress

Another interesting column from Jonathan Turley:

With a crucial defeat in federal court this week, one would expect the House Democrats to be embarrassed at losing long protected precedent supporting legislative authority. Instead, as a federal judge in Washington was rejecting their challenge to the executive order by President Trump to build a wall along the southern border, House leaders have nonetheless moved ahead with an assortment of other inadvisable gambles.
The first step for compulsive gamblers is to admit they have a problem. Democrats have a serious and growing problem. The court defeat was particularly stinging to those of us who have tried repeatedly to persuade House Democrats to recognize that they are destroying themselves with reckless litigation. I have spent decades writing, testifying and litigating in support of congressional authority. A typical Madisonian scholar, I favor the legislative branch in court battles with the executive branch. We have seen the steady erosion of legislative power over the years, and many of us have indeed tried to steer Congress away from reckless litigation.
For more than a year, I have objected to a dangerous strategy of pursuing litigation in a wide array of conflicts with the Trump administration. As someone who has represented the House both as a body and as individual members, my concern was that Democrats would fritter away hard fought victories on congressional authority. Despite such warnings, politics has trumped good judgment. Now the bill has come due with the decision by District Judge Trevor McFadden tossing a challenge by Congress and, with it, the claim that the House has standing to bring such a lawsuit.
In a House Judiciary Committee hearing in February, I laid out various reasons why such a challenge was unnecessary and unwise. First, other groups could bring the lawsuit, so there was no need for the House to risk its hard fought precedent. As shown in California, various states secured an injunction against the construction of the border wall. While I remain skeptical of the prospect of barring all construction in the long term, the case showed why there was no need for the lawsuit.
Second, on the merits, it was doubtful that any court would protect the House from itself. Congress unwisely passed the National Emergencies Act, giving a president virtually unchecked authority. However, it reserved the ability to rescind such order. It did not do so in this case, for lack of votes in the Senate. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the House were asking a judge to order a result that they could not secure for themselves in Congress. Ironically, Pelosi was finally proven correct, in an odd way.
When I was asked to represent the House in challenging the payment of billions to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act without congressional approval, Pelosi and all of the Democrats opposed the litigation. They supported the circumvention of Congress and opposed contempt proceedings for withholding information from Congress. In our litigation, Pelosi insisted that the case was guaranteed to fail and that President Obama should be able to unilaterally order the payments from the Treasury despite a refusal of Congress previously to do so.
We not only won the case but created long sought precedent recognizing the right of the House to bring such a lawsuit as a question of standing. In bringing this lawsuit over the southern border wall, Pelosi and House leaders have now allowed a bad case to make bad law and undermined future sessions of Congress in efforts to rein in executive overreach. It is a high price to pay for a courthouse photo opportunity and sound bite.

I think the Congress has lost its collective mind.  How about you?


"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Thursday, June 6, 2019.  You're not going to understand people who think differently than you by imposing your values on them.

We need many things in this world, Jay Newton-Small is not one of them.  At THE LILY, she serves up her stupidity and entitles it "Female candidates running for president in 2020 have to overcome sexist beliefs -- held by other women."  Actually, that headline works as a self-disclosure for her -- she's the one with sexist beliefs.

First off, non-college educated White women have never been Hillary Clinton's base.  They have tended to be on the groups most opposed to her.  Hillary has  no one but herself to blame.  Time and again, she has come off like a tone deaf monster (I'm trying to clean it up today) to this group.

Her remarks are always insulting to this group.  Hillary's not Bill, she's never learned how to communicate with people.  She can preach to the choir, she just can't go beyond it.

Jay is too busy defending herself and her own choices to note or notice any other woman.

It may really be time for women to be doing rap sessions again so that they can grasp that we are all different and that feminism is not about fitting into a cookie cutter mode.

Cookie cutter.  Cookies were Hillary's first mistake.  She wasn't sitting home baking cookies and being Tammy Wynette, after all.  With that remarks he not only insulted country legend Tammy Wynette, she also insulted a lot of women who did become homemakers.  It was a stupid remark for a politician's wife -- for a politician's wife who had political ambitions of her own, it was a fatal mistake.

As a feminist, I am fully aware that we are judged, that we have to justify our choices, etc.  That is done by society.  But here's the news flash for Jay and other feminists, that happens to non-feminists as well.  It's what happens to all women in this society.

Hillary's crack may have been intended to be humorous.  I honestly laughed at it in real time and took it as a joke.  I thought it could be a potential problem but assumed she'd right her course along the way.  That didn't happen.

That long ago remark has haunted and followed her.

To a group of women, that remark came off judgmental and as an attack -- maybe on what their lives were, maybe on what their mothers' lives were.

Hillary never made it better.

We don't have time to review everything she's ever said.  But her ghost written book IT TAKES A VILLAGE was seen as another insult by these women.

'It takes a village?  That uptight woman doesn't think I can parent my child!'

With this and any other off-putting remarks by Hillary, she could have fixed them.  She never bothered to.  She just left it with 'It takes a village.'  At any time, she could have appealed to the women she was ticking off by adding to the remarks, by saying something like, "It takes a village and you know what I'm talking about, mothers, it is hard work and you do so much of it all by yourself.  Raising a child is a super-human task."

But she didn't make remarks like that.  Instead, the woman who insulted women who stayed home was now telling them -- in their view, to their ears -- you are bad mothers who aren't smart enough to raise your own children and only a village is going to save these poor, little children.

Hillary was not attempting to insult this group of women.  But what she intended doesn't really matter -- especially at this late date.  We are all on the defensive and all aware that we are judged so when someone is speaking about issues that directly go to how we're judged -- do we work outside the home or not, are we doing a good job raising our children, etc -- we are not just hearing their words we are asking where they stand -- friend or foe -- and are they attacking us and the choices we made (which were choices from a smaller list than the choices that men have and which were choices that were often imposed upon us).

Some insist that 'traditional women' -- whatever that is -- should have supported Hillary by the late nineties because, even after Bill's public cheating, she stayed in the marriage.  While some women opposed to Hillary would have stayed in marriages after their partner had an affair, some of those women would have inflicted damage publicly -- he would have shown with a bruise or injury, he would have shown up with his truck keyed on the side, etc -- and most wouldn't have endured multiple cheating that was in the public eye.  (There was his affair with Monica Lewisnky.  There is his affair with Gennifer Flowers.  There was his admission -- by settling -- to some sort of pass at Paula Jones.  Those are facts.  In addition to that, there were rumors of so many other affairs.)

Hillary came off like a doormat on that issue.  Never forget that Rosie O'Donnell, one of the biggest Hillary supporters, in the early '00s did a comedy routine/rant where she called Hillary every name in the book and spoke of how disappointed she was that Hillary did not leave Bill, that she thought for sure she was only staying with Bill to get in the Senate and she couldn't believe, after getting elected, that Hillary didn't leave Bill.

Hillary came off like a doormat and that inspires pity.  It does not speak to strength.

If we've followed the above, we can get to strength.  Jay Newton-Small thinks she can talk about strength but she can't.  She can only talk about herself.  I'm so damn sick of this.

Let's go to one of her many stupid remarks:

For women, it’s a thin line between proving oneself capable and being seen as a bitch — essentially unlikable.
This is the conundrum for the 2020 female candidates. On the competency side, those with law enforcement experience, such as Harris and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), have an inherent advantage. But Klobuchar has battled to balance her too-tough-boss image with “Minnesota nice,” while Harris is running on something of a unity platform. Warren has demonstrated her skills by providing the most detailed and comprehensive set of policy proposals among the candidates [. . .]

In what world do you live?  No one's worshiping Kamala or Amy but your, Jay.  You have defined their careers as strength.  The women you're writing about do not.  They might look at former-Senator Claire McCaskill as strong because Claire talked strong.  Her comments on rape, her comments on crime, she came off strong.

Kamala cannot do that.  She will lose support if she does because she's already under fire for having been a prosecutor.  She will lose support from her own ranks if she speaks the way she needs to in order to win the group of women (GOW is what we call this group for the rest of this entry).  To win GOW, she needs to talk tough on crime.  But she'll lose some of the Democratic base if she does that because she's already got a lurking shadow around her that she prosecuted unfairly and that some groups suffered because of her actions.

So Kamala's hands are tied on this with regards to her legal history.  But idiot Jay wants to pretend that it comes off strong and competent.  No.

Amy?  GOWs are aware of her image as a boss who attacks those working for her.  Most GOWs would see her not as a friend or a fighter but as someone who would turn that temper on them.  She can't appeal to them on work, she could win them by catering her messages around children.  'I'm fighting for clean water.  There's nothing more basic to our lives, as mothers, than clean water.  We bathe our children, we use it to cook our food . . .'  She could form connections that way and then GOWs might feel connected enough to support her (she becomes their friend they like even though she has that one flaw that we all overlook).

Elizabeth Warren does not come off strong to GOWs and there's no reason she should.  What has she done?  Her career?  GOWs feel she lied about who she was to advance her career.  Her oversight?  Doesn't she tend to notice a problem after it's too late fox it?

Jay Netwon-Small is impressed with college educated women and she expects everyone else to be.  She can't see past her own blinders -- she's not even aware that she's wearing them.

She poses as a feminist but she's not one.  And that's clear in the article too.  She never once mentions Tulis Gabbard.  Tusi's running.  Why the silence?

More to the point Tulsi is the only woman who appears strong to GOWs.  She is an Iraq War veteran.  That is strength.  That is also something they can relate to because they may have served or their sister or the daughter or their mother or a woman in the neighborhood.  They have a concept in their head of what being a veteran means someone did and it's not sitting behind a desk in an office or walking into a courtroom.

I'm not insulting attorneys, I'm explaining that Jay thinks this is strength, which is fine, but don't pretend to write about another group of women when all you do is impose your judgments on them. She doesn't understand them because she does not want to understand them.  That's a true of pollster she speaks with as well and that woman makes such an insulting remark about GOWs that we're never noting her again.  Not even if Ms. sends out a press release -- we will edit her name out of it.  I will never promote that woman at this space again, her words border on hate speech.  It makes me seriously question her interpretations of raw data (and it explains why she's been so wrong so very often).

To be clear, Jay Newton-Small had a solid topic to write about.  But she wrote about it very poorly.  She wants you to know what the GOWs think.  But she can't understand what they think because she doesn't grasp that every woman doesn't think like her.  What she values is not universal..  What I value is not universal.  And if you really want to understand another group, you need to understand what that group values.

Jay Small-Newton defines success and happiness differently than GOWs.  Until she grasps that, she's not going to understand why they vote the way they do.

There's also the issue of polling in her piece.  She doesn't really understand swing voters -- they're 'swing' because they go back and forth as the election approaches.  She chooses to focus on GOWs and insist that after the ACCESS HOLLYWOOD tapes of Donald Trump, they turned on Donald.

Based upon what?

Polling?

We made the point repeatedly and early on that the press was creating an environment where honest polling would not be available.  The press -- egged by Paul Krugman in print and by many others over the airwaves -- crossed lines that never should have been crossed.  And they tried to shame people.  Shaming people will not make them vote the way you want when they step up to a voting machine or draw a curtain at a polling station.  It will make them lie.  It will make themm lie to a stranger who has called them on the phone and asked them about an issue that the press tells them they should be outraged by.

Especially when the statement is being misinterpreted.  Did people on the left really not hear what Donald Trump said?  Maybe.  Maybe when we're looking at someone we can't relate to, we jump to the wrong conclusions -- that goes back to being on the defensive that we noted earlier but now applied regardless of gender.

'Donald Trump said he grabbed women by the p**sy!'

That was the lie that the press ran with.

He was talking about kissing, as the full quote made clear.  And you could have reported it honestly but the press didn't.  They initially reported the full quote (some did at least) and then it became, 'Trump said he grabs women by the p**sy!'

This is what he said: "I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her.  You know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them.  It's like a magnet.  Just kiss.  I don't even wait.  And when you're a star they let you do it.  You can do anything.  Grab em' by the pu**y.  You can do anything."

Donald Trump said he kisses women he finds beautiful, he just does it, doesn't wait -- apparently doesn't wait for permission or an invitation just kisses them.  That's creepy enough all on its own, no one needed to 'improve' on it. He gets away with it, he says, because he's a TV star.  Because he's famous, he can do it.  When you're famous, he boasts, "You can do anything.  Grab 'em by the pus**.  You can do anything."

When John Lennon said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ, some adults could hear that and still function.  Others were smashing the Beatles records and having meltdowns.  By the same token, many of us (including David Chappelle) grasped that Donald was not saying he did that, he was saying that you could do that.  What Donald confessed to was kissing women.

As the press refused to be objective and instead broke every rule to (mis)cover the election, the polls became meaningless.  Who you will support in a private vote and who you will pretend to support to a pollster can be two very different things -- especially if the media has declared that the candidate you support is intolerable and objectionable and blah blah blah.

We said the press crossed the line in real time.  We were warning that their actions were going to pollute polling.  We said that long before the election rolled around.  We said it because we saw polling and then we saw people as we traveled around the US speaking.  It was clear that Trump had far more support than the polls were indicating.  For a poll to work, the respondent needs to feel that they can answer honestly and that there will be no judgment against them for their answer.  The press destroyed any hope of that climate existing.



Our choice: more money for our families and communities, or trillions more wasted on regime change wars and the new cold war.
6:23
32.2K views
 
 






US House Rep Tulsi Gabbard, Iraq War veteran, is speaking to an important issue and it's one that many people can relate to.

It's also an issue that our press refuses to cover.  Look at the cost of the ongoing wars.  Grasp that the bill's not been paid.  It's a tab, the US government has set up a bar tab and it's open tab that's still running.  It gets bigger and bigger.

We can't throw all the dollars into war and still afford what is needed here in the US.

How does that issue not front page every newspaper?  How does it not lead every broadcast?

Global warming is real and it's a serious issue.  It's one that needs far more attention than it ever gets.

But spending our way into the poor house?  That's a domestic issue that gets no serious attention.

Find me the 'news' broadcast that opens with the cost of war on a daily basis or the newspaper that headlines the cost each day.

Each day, we are further in debt.  Each day, the bill gets higher.  The wars effect the entire globe, no question.  But we're talking about US choices on spending and how it impacts life here at home.  Trillions of dollars.  And it's not a story?

It should be the lead story every day.

The number should prompt articles about how X has been cut from national parks or from WIC or from this or from that.  The number should prompt articles about how the local highway/bridge/library whatever needs repairs but we won't spend the thousands or so needed on that because we're too busy spending millions each day on these wars.

Paul Krugman's calls himself an economist.  I wonder does he have a speech impediment?  Because it seems like he's trying to call himself an embarrassment -- and I think many of us could agree with him on that.  The paper has allowed him to write about everything except what he was hired to write about -- the only thing he had any expertise on.  Even he, 'the economist,' isn't doing regular columns explaining to the American people the true financial costs of these wars and how this cost impacts everything else we could have but can't afford.

Meanwhile, Margaret Griffis (ANTIWAR.COM) notes the following about yesterday's violence, "Relatives of a young man shot to death at his farm in Rabango, abutting the Turkish border, say that the shots were fired across the border by Turkish security forces. The man traveled with two friends to the farmland that the three of them own, when they came under fire. They may have been mistaken for smugglers or Kurdish guerrillas."  Shooting across a fence, basically, they can't tell the difference between civilians and terrorists but the same Turkish military bombs Kurdistan from war planes on high and can tell the difference?  No.  The slaughter needs to stop and Turkey needs to respect the sovereignty of Iraq.

Let's close with Sarah Abdallah schooling Weight Gain McCain.

John McCain voted for the Iraq War that killed a million human beings and gave rise to ISIS. Julian Assange exposed US war crimes in and elsewhere. Guess who’s going to rot in hell? 🤗
 
 




What happened to Meghan's ethics?  I believe she ate them.


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Wednesday, June 05, 2019

Excellent point

Donald Trump's Cuban nonsense?

Basically Americans will no longer be free to travel to Cuba, because Cuba is a communist country & therefore its’ people are not free. So now the Trump Administration, in the name of freedom, is taking away Americans' freedom. Make sense?


"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Wednesday, June 5, 2019.  Joe Biden continues to self-destruct and a new fellow steps up to defend  both Tammy Duckworth and the never-ending occupation of Iraq.

In the US, press favorite Joe Biden continues to be excused and pimped by so much of the press.  Case in point?


We're supposed to be mad at Biden because he copied a few lines of his climate plan from environmental groups? That's not "plagiarism." That's "agreeing." "





It's "borrowing"?  Is that Tweet supposed to be comedy?

We all know Michael Grunwald is a piece of trash, there's no debate over that.  He applauded the illegal murder of an American citizen in a 2011 drone killing and he called for a drone to assassinate Julian Assange.  He's unhinged, there's no doubt.  A functioning society would not employ him as a journalist.  POLITICO, however, thinks he's their cup of tea.

When not Tweeting, by the way, Grunwald hangs around with his thumb up his ass which is why his website that he links to on his Twitter feed?  It's up for sale.


MichaelGrunWald.COM is for sale

Please call 1-303-893-0552 for more information, or
Contact Us to inquire about the price for MichaelGrunWald.COM

Someone tell stupid he needs to make a payment.  Life is hard, and the cray-cray have trouble in our world, let alone managing to pay their bills.  Cray-Cray Gurnwald, about to lose his site for good.



Borrowing?  It's plagiarism and Joe Biden has a long history of it -- a previous run for the presidential nomination failed when he was found to be plagiarizing another person's speech.  And he plagiarized in college.  He insisted then he just didn't know better and he would learn.  He was an adult in college, and clearly, he did not learn.


This isn't even the first time he's plagiarized this campaign.  Just last week, Senator Bernie Sanders' speech writer David Sirota noted:



A week ago, got huge attention for releasing the most comprehensive K-12 education plan of any 2020 candidate. A week later, it appears just lifted key parts of Bernie’s proposal and is calling it his own “new” plan. The more the merrier, I guess...







This should be very troubling to everyone.  There's talk and speculation -- and it's gone on for years -- that Donald Trump didn't even want to be president.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi floats the idea that he wants to be impeached.  Why? Some of it is just idle gossip but some of it is comes from examining his behavior and trying to figure out what is going on?

Joe is reckless.

Not a little reckless, hugely reckless -- maybe more so than even Donald Trump.

He says he wants to be president.

Yet he knows his first run for the nomination ended because he was caught stealing sentences from a speech made by a British politician.  Just like in college, Joe insisted he would learn from it.

He hasn't.

And as May came to an end, he was facing charges yet again of plagiarism.  It so not bothered him that this week he's releasing a report that is -- yes -- plagiarized.

This should trouble anyone.

Now let's bring in another aspect.  Joe still can't keep his hands off women and girls.  And at his town hall yesterday, he was back to making jokes about it.



I’m just going to say it. is a disrespectful asshole and women have known these “nice guys” since the dawn of time. Just sexist enough to dismiss your feelings and your space but nice enough to make the discomfort your fault.





He is disrespectful.  Trina made that point last night in "Joe Biden is offensive."


The two topics are related.  Joe's bad behavior is called out and what does he do? He doubles down on it in both cases.  He says he's going to work on it and he never does.  He just keeps doing the same thing -- plagiarizing, disrespecting females -- over and over.  He won't change.  It's all a joke to him.


Of yesterday's 'joke,' Lily Puckett (INDEPENDENT) observes:

It’s not the first time Mr Biden has made light of the accusations that he’s engaged in inappropriate behaviour towards women, including a high-profile story from Lucy Flores, who ran for lieutenant governor in Nevada in 2014. During a campaign event, Mr Biden smelled her hair and kissed the top of her head, both of which were unwelcome.

After Ms Flores published her story in New York Magazine, Mr Biden appeared to joke about her accusations at a public event, saying he said he had “permission” to touch both a speaker introducing him and a child on stage later.

Marina Fang (HUFFINGTON POST) notes:

Biden, whose behavior renewed attention on his mixed record on women’s rights, also failed on several occasions to issue a direct apology to law professor Anita Hill for his role in the shambolic 1991 Senate hearing on her sexual harassment allegations against now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.


Lucy and Trina are calling it correctly.  And you better believe this will carry over if Joe gets the nomination.  His attitude will lower the turnout of women.  Now back in 1984, when Fritz couldn't connect with women, they added Geraldine Ferraro to the ticket.  Some are insisting that Joe can add Stacey Abrams to the ticket and that will address the problem.

Really?

Overweight or curvy (whichever term you prefer) Stacey?  Joe's going to be grabbing her like crazy at every event.  It will not play well.  We know Joe's not going to change and Stacey will 'good sport' it and just try to grin through it.  But it will not play well to women.

Let's note two more Tweets from David Sirota:


Here’s what and are doing today — it’s an interesting contrast...



So... is doing something no other presidential candidate has ever done: he is attending the shareholder meeting tomorrow & will be directly confronting the billionaire Walton family, demanding they pay their workers a living wage





Joe is the self-imploding candidate.  That's been the reality of every run he's ever made for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

Why should this time be any different?

'He's wiser!'

Is he?  He may be but he's still not wise enough.  A wise person listens when people object.  Whether he intends to creep people out with his fondling of women and girls or not, it has been made clear to him that it is creepy.  And yet he continues to do it and he continues to make jokes about it.

That's foolish, that's not wisdom.

He has a long history of plagiarism.  It killed his first attempt to be president.  Yet three decades later, he's already plagiarizing again -- twice in the last two weeks alone.  And this inability to learn is a pattern for him.  Jacob Weindling  (PASTE) offers:

I’m starting to think that Joe Biden cannot beat Trump. Sure, we’ve all been tricked into thinking that Biden is the “safe” candidate because he’s a white male in America who has the best name recognition in the race, but there’s a reason why Joe Biden never polled above 5% in a primary before this one. He’s an industrial-sized gaffe machine and a bad, cynical candidate who, like Trump, wants to return all of us to an idyllic period that never existed. Case in point is this jaw-dropping story from the 1988 presidential race, published yesterday in the New York Times:
“When I marched in the civil rights movement, I did not march with a 12-point program,” Mr. Biden thundered, testing his presidential message in February 1987 before a New Hampshire audience. “I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes. And we changed attitudes.”
More than once, advisers had gently reminded Mr. Biden of the problem with this formulation: He had not actually marched during the civil rights movement. And more than once, Mr. Biden assured them he understood — and kept telling the story anyway.

First off, the notion that the civil rights movement lacked a policy vision is insulting. Rosa Parks is famous for opposing a policy that forced black Americans to sit in the back of the bus. Martin Luther King Jr. constantly spoke about state power and how systemic racism creates outcomes which impoverish millions of people. Americans had separate water fountains and could not eat at the same counters. That’s all policy. This is stuff kids learn early in high school, and yet 1987 presidential candidate Joe Biden tried to characterize the civil rights movement (that he knowingly claimed to falsely be a part of) as simply one big group hug trying to “change attitudes.” 


This is not a leader and it's also not anyone you want to be stuck trying to drum out the vote for in November 2020.  He is a self-destructive person and he could take the party down with him in 2020 if he is the nominee.

Already, as Philip Elliot (TIME) notes, his campaign is having to manage him, "When Biden tried to take a sixth question, his staff started playing music, just as they do when an Oscar speech goes long. It was time to cut him off."

Joe voted for the Iraq War and he needs to answer for that as well.

Iraq remains a mess.  Senator Tammy Duckworth argued last week that the US military had to stay in Iraq.  Also last week, Kyle Rempfer (ARMY TIMES) reported:


The Army has identified the command elements that will be heading to Iraq to lead the fight against remnants of the Islamic State and to Afghanistan as peace talks with the Taliban continue.

The 1st Armored Division Headquarters stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, will be tapped to relieve 4th Infantry Division Headquarters as part of a regular rotation of forces in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, the Army announced Friday.

On those going to Iraq, KWTX notes, "Fort Hood’s III Corps Headquarters is headed back to Iraq this fall for a third time as part of a regular force rotation, replacing XVIII Airborne Corps Headquarters, as the headquarters of the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, the Department of the Army announced Friday."  But Texas isn't th eonly state from which they're deploying to Iraq.  Alaska's "Fort Wainwright Soldiers were in the Yukon Training Area this week completing their last certification before their upcoming deployment to Iraq."

As we pointed out Monday:

Mike's "Shut up, Tammy!" refutes Tammy's b.s. claims that US troops need to stay in Iraq because the Iraqi government is our ally.  No, it's not.

And let's say a big f**k you to Tammy and all of her other trans-partisans.  Tammy's a Republican posing as a Democrat.  Her argument was refuted 13 years ago by the Democratic Party.

That is why Democrats demanded benchmarks to measure success.

Tammy, like Republicans back then, rejects a call for benchmarks or a means to measure progress.  She just argues for open-ended and never-ending troops on Iraqi soil. 



Tammy's got a new suiter -- don't worry, Tams, I'm sure he won't get fresh with you (really, I'm sure of that).  Stepping out of whatever new closet he's in, Daniel Speckhard joins Tams in arguing for never-ending war:


Second, the U.S. should continue security assistance to the country. This includes training and supporting the Iraqi army — in no small part to ensure that it is neither taken over from within by political groups nor unduly influenced by the Iranians with the reintegration of militia forces. There must also be a sense that the U.S. will remain engaged on the security front for the longer term. Otherwise, the lack of commitment will result in a vacuum that will be filled by others, like Iran.

Sidenote, Danny, I won't ask you to tell us who you're really sleeping with right now if you'll tell us who you're really getting your funding from.

In the meantime, how dare you?

He should be publicly rebuked.  US troops have to be in Iraq to fight ISIS?

Why can't Iraq fight ISIS?

More to the point, why are US lives worth risking for a country that does not have a Minister of Defense or a Minister of the Interior -- those are the security cabinets and since October, there has been no leadership because there are no Ministers for either cabinet.

American lives are to be put at risk to protect a puppet government that can't even fill their defense posts?




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