Dean Seal and Jody Godoy, - LAW360
Stephan: This is what the professional federal legal community of former DOJ officials and prosecutors has to say about what Trump is doing, and what they believe is the real truth about what he has done.
Donald Trump
Credit: Brendan Smialowski, AFP/Getty
More than 500 former federal prosecutors signed on to a statement Monday saying that, based on the evidence laid out in the Mueller report, only President Donald Trump’s protected position as head of state has saved him from obstruction of justice charges.
President Donald Trump at a ceremony honoring the U.S. Military Academy’s football team at the White House on Monday. (AP)
Former U.S. Department of Justice officials who served under every presidential administration since Dwight D. Eisenhower’s said in an open letter that Trump’s efforts to impede Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, as outlined in Mueller’s March report, amounts to “conduct that obstructed or attempted to obstruct the truth-finding process.”
Only the Office of Legal Counsel’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president has spared Trump from indictment, according to the letter, which said evidence of corrupt intent “is overwhelming.”
“In our system, every accused person is presumed innocent and it is always the government’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt,” the DOJ alumni said. […]
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Matthew Rozsa, - Alternet/Salon
Stephan: I see what Trump is doing with his tweets is laying track for an attempt to suspend the structure of American elections, Planting the idea and letting it slowly seep into the consciousness of his followers. That may seem hard to believe but so is the fact that Trump's approval rating is actually going up, not down. I just checked fivethirtyeight and he is at 42.7% approval.
Trump and Pelosi
Credit: screen capture
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi predicted this weekend that President Donald Trump may not step down from power if he is defeated in the 2020 election.
“We have to inoculate against that. We have to be prepared for that,” Pelosi told The New York Times on Wednesday after cautioning that unless Democrats defeat Trump by a margin “so big” that the legitimacy of the election is beyond dispute, the president could challenge the outcome.
After discussing how she felt the Democrats could best run up a large margin against Trump — by running a center-left campaign and avoiding impeachment, which she believes would hit a dead end due to Republicans controlling the Senate — the House speaker described her fears during the 2018 midterm elections that Trump would challenge individual House races where Democrats won unless the party prevailed by a large margin.
“If we win by four seats by a thousand votes each, he’s not going to respect the election,” Pelosi recalled thinking. “He would poison the public […]
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Jon Queally, Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan: I was just sent the most amazing climate change denier nonsense; it is hard for me to believe that people with IQs above their waist size actually believe what is put out by the carbon power industry and its Republican supporters, and their alternative media, but they do. A sure tip-off that it is crap is when they cite Al Gore's increase in wealth, and state that CO2 is a naturally occurring substance and its increase is good for plants, and totally ignore and dismiss fact-based reports like this.
The dried up bed of Wayoh Reservoir near Bolton as the heatwave continues across the UK on July 23, 2018 in Bolton, England. A United Nations report scheduled for official release on Monday will say that up to 1 million species face extinction as a result of human activity.
Credit; Christopher Furlong/Getty
A new landmark United Nations report on biodiversity set for release on Monday will say that a perilous and miserable future awaits the natural world and human civilization unless we rapidly bring an end to humanity’s destructive “business as usual” approach to the economy, food production, and energy usage.
Signaling the need for urgent “transformative changes” in order to save humanity and the natural world, the 1,800-page report and a separate executive summary will represent the first time the UN has published such an exhaustive report on the state of Nature.
As Agence France-Presse, which obtained a draft of the conclusions, reports Saturday that “The bombshell Summary for Policymakers… makes for very grim reading.”
According to AFP’s review of the draft report and the summary, […]
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Ashley Curtin, - Nation of Change
Stephan: This is the state of Donald Trump's EPA. Could it be clearer that he cares nothing for the people of the United States? But why don't people recognize that? How is it possible that, according to fivethirtyeight, his approval rating is actually up, at 42.6% across all polls? The answer I think, and it is hard to write this, is something over a third of the country aren't smart enough to understand or vote in support of their own self-interest. The sad truth is about 50% of the country is made up of people with IQs of 100 or less.
Credit: Charles Platiau/Reuters
The Environmental Protection Agency reaffirmed its 2017 findings and confirmed that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s weed-killer Roundup, does not cause cancer. The announcement made by EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Tuesday comes at the same time there are currently 13,400 lawsuits against the controversial weedkiller. (emphasis added)
While the World Health Organization (WHO) ruled glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans,” the EPA has “disregarded independent, peer-reviewed research that showed a link between glyphosate and cancer in favor of Monsanto-funded studies saying it was safe,” EcoWatch reported.
“EPA has found no risks to public health from the current registered uses of glyphosate,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said.
A California jury ruled in favor of one of the plaintiffs in 2018 awarding a Bay Area groundskeeper who repeatedly used Roundup, which he claimed caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma, awarding him $78 million in restitution. Another California man was awarded $80 million in a similar lawsuit in March.
And many environmental groups are weary of the EPA’s findings, saying “the EPA’s pesticide office […]
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Stephan: The sad truth is most Americans have no idea what the Founders were trying to do when they created the United States, perhaps because we no longer teach civics in public schools and American history is mostly about memorizing dates. Nothing makes this point more clearly then the absolute conviction most fundamentalist have that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Founders despised fundamentalist religiousity, and feared it as an enemy of democracy. This article is just a superficial bit of this history, but a place to start.
The Founders ate the signing of the Declaration of Independence
When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, almost no one in politics or everyday life went around proclaiming, “I am a Christian.” If indeed you were a Christian—that is, someone who considers Jesus Christ the Messiah—you identified yourself as a Lutheran, a Methodist, a Baptist, a Catholic, and so on in excelsis in order to let others know where you stood in the vast American religious landscape.
Calling oneself a Christian today, by contrast, has a special, politicized meaning. For most people in public life, this self-identification suggests a particular form of conservative Christianity, a brand of religion that seeks not only to proselytize but to impose its values on others through the machinery of the state. The huge exception to this rule is President Barack Obama, who has been forced by the birther-paranoids to advertise his credentials as a Christian in order to refute the lie that he is a “secret Muslim.”
Once upon a time (until around 1980, actually), […]
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