Category Archives: Viva!

NBC News Head Andrew Lack Relentlessly Pursued Women Who Worked for Him: Report

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Andrew Lack, who heads NBC News, reportedly aggressively pursued women who worked for him, according to Ronan Farrow’s new book, Catch and Kill.

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President Trump is at war with the rule of law. This won’t end well | Rebecca Solnit

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At the top there’s corruption, down below there’s dismantling and disarray. Americans are entering a period of immense danger

Do Americans still have a government? I do not know. What I do know is that President Trump and the upper echelons of the executive branch are at war with the legislative branch, the rule of law, the constitution, federal civil servants and the American people. It’s a conflict that pulls in many directions, and if the president threatened civil war the other day as something that could happen if he doesn’t get his way, we can regard the ordinary state of things as a low-intensity civil war or a slo-mo coup that’s been going on from the beginning. Tuesday’s White House refusal to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry only escalates their defiance and their chaos.

The chaos takes so many forms. Innumerable stories have made it clear that even the president’s own aides and cabinet members treat him like a captive bear or a person having a psychotic breakdown – like someone unstable who must be kept from harming himself and others. They have done that by heaping on the flattery, and by warping and limiting the information he receives, and often by doing their best to prevent his directives from being realized.

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Open Thread | Where Are We Now?

So,

Where are we now?

We’re at the point where the State Department is forbidding people who have been subpoenaed before Congress to come and testify. It’s past time that these people are held in Contempt of Congress and arrested. Period. Also, Chairman Schiff says that the State Department is refusing to turn over an electronic device with messages on it.

You always knew that their whining about Hillary’s private server was nothing but garbage. Now, we know that these people were conducting the business of the United States. National Security stuff – on the WhatsApp.

A freaking APP.

Da hail?

You can’t make this stuff up.

Maddow has pointed out that the Republicans are attempting to take the sting and obviousness out of Dolt45 and his corruption by throwing the word corruption around. All the GOP is now so interested in corruption. No dice. Every muthaphucka attached to this Administration is rotten. We found out this week that while Rudy was in Ukraine trying to dig up non-existent dirt on Joe Biden, it didn’t slow him or Rick Perry down from attempting to shakedown a local utility, so that they could put their own people on it, and loot it. THAT is corruption, and just another day for this Administration.

 

 

I knew, eventually, that our luck would run out -Geopolitically Speaking.

And, it did.

When Dolt45 tweets out that, basically, the United States is abandoning their support of the Kurds, and will let Turkey massacre them.

This can’t be seen as anything other than a complete betrayal of the Kurdish people. It has been the Kurds, who have been fighting ISIS on the ground in Syria, so that American troops don’t have to. They have done the hand to hand combat in fighting this terrorist organization and defeating it in Syria. It’s the Kurds who have the captured ISIS fighters in prison.

And, now, we have a President, who, without consulting the DOD or State Department, has changed American foreign policy on a dime. And, the Kurds might wind up slaughtered because of it.

Then, this dropped too:

Trump apparently wants to pull the U.S. from the Open Skies Treaty, and nobody knows why

3:52 a.m.

On Monday, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) released a letter to National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien expressing his deep concern about “reports that the Trump administration is withdrawing from the Open Skies Treaty” and urging the administration to abandon “such a reckless action.”

The treaty, in force since 2002 with 34 nations as signatories, “aims to increase confidence in and transparency of military activities, particularly in Europe, by allowing unarmed aerial observation flights over the entire territory of its participants for information-gathering purposes,” the Arms Control Association explains. Specifically, “the Open Skies Treaty allows the United States and our allies and partners in Europe to monitor Russian military deployment,” especially in Ukraine, Engels said, and “American withdrawal would only benefit Russia.”

OF COURSE, it would benefit Russia. Everything Putin’s flunky does benefits Russia.

The President of the United States is a threat to National Security.

And,he is offensive to the Constitution.

Proof?

The letter the White House sent to Congress this afternoon.

The letter, which is addressed to Speaker Pelosi, & Reps. Schiff, Engel, & Cummings says impeachment inquiry is “constitutionally invalid and violates basic due process rights and the separation of powers” & “seeks to reverse the election of 2016” & to “influence” 2020 election.

— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) October 8, 2019

Wow. This letter is bananas. A barely-lawyered temper tantrum. A middle finger to Congress and its oversight responsibilities.

No Member of Congress should accept it, no matter his or her view on the behavior of Pelosi, Schiff, or Trump.

Things are bad. Things will get worse. https://t.co/AesJ6cGHrl

— Gregg Nunziata (@greggnunziata) October 8, 2019

Greta Thunberg Greeted by Chief Arvol Looking Horse on Standing Rock

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Chief Arvol Looking Horse, Greta and Paula Hornem today on Standing Rock. Photos courtesy Greta on Twitter.

Photos and comments via Twitter Greta Thunberg@GretaThunbergThe last two days @tokata_ie and I visited Takini School, Standing Rock Community School and the beautiful Standing Rock Reservation. Thank you everyone for your leadership, your resistance and your incredible

A new India is emerging, and it is a country ruled by fear | Amit Chaudhuri

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Modi’s vision for the country is one that stifles dissent and difference, in defiance of its people’s history

Four months have passed since Narendra Modi and the BJP came back to power in India, and more seems to have happened there than in the last 40 years. The sense of severance that many experience today, of being divorced from the workings of the nation, exceeds even the helplessness felt during the suspension of civil liberties in the emergency of 1975 to 1977 and the political traumas that followed.

This is because – without the matter being explicitly articulated – citizen has been set against citizen: not just Muslim against Hindu or, say, Kashmiris against the rest of India, but those who subscribe to the BJP’s new conception of the nation against those who do not, leaving one without trust in the other.

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Brexit: Johnson poised to end talks after call with Merkel ends in deadlock – live news

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Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments, including German chancellor telling PM Northern Ireland must stay in customs union for a deal

11.34am BST

The government has just published a 155-page “No Deal Readiness Report” (pdf).

11.32am BST

This is from Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister.

The UK government’s attempt to shift the blame for the Brexit fiasco to anyone but themselves – today it’s Merkel – is pathetically transparent.

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UN human rights commissioner rejects Morrison’s attack on ‘internationalist bureaucracy’

Michelle Bachelet says Australia has been scrutinised according to international standards it helped create

The high commissioner for human rights has pushed back on Scott Morrison’s recent criticism of the United Nations, noting the scrutiny Australia has received is based on international standards it helped create.

In a speech to a human rights conference in Sydney, Michelle Bachelet also urged Australian parliamentarians not to repeal the medevac laws, and to roll back mandatory detention policies.

Related: Scott Morrison’s ‘negative globalism’ no echo of Trump, Josh Frydenberg says

Related: ‘Delicate moment’: was Scott Morrison’s Lowy speech a pivot towards Trumpism?

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‘In my great and unmatched wisdom’: Trump makes modest claim about his intellect

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Trump – the ‘very stable genius’ – is no stranger to narcissistic statements, and he was at it again on Monday afternoon

Donald Trump perhaps broke a record for aggrandizement on Monday, when he referred to his “great and unmatched wisdom” following his decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria.

Trump is no stranger to grandiose, narcissistic statements. He has frequently referred to himself as a “very stable genius” – and not tongue-in-cheek. He actually did so recently, in reference to his controversial phone call to the Ukraine president, Volodmyr Zelenskiy, which sparked an impeachment inquiry into him.

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