Miscellaneous Political Stuff - Part 14

TFG has no issue selling F Biden tee shirts.. signs etc..

TFG rants tonight on his truth social.... Not sure where he thinks he got full subpoena power from....

So now that I have full Subpoena Power because of the Freedom of Speech Sham Indictment by Crooked Joe Biden, Deranged Jack Smith, and the DOJ, it has just been reported that the Unselect January 6th Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs has illegally destroyed their Records and Documents," wrote Trump. "This is unthinkable, and the Fake Political Indictment against me must be immediately withdrawn."

"The system is Rigged & Corrupt, very much like the Presidential Election of 2020. We are a Nation in Decline!" Trump added.

Trump is referring to a Fox News report this week that House Republicans, led by Oversight subcommittee chair Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), are alleging the now-disbanded January 6 Committee failed to fully preserve records of their investigation, in violation of congressional rules. In particular, they claim that Democrats on the committee disappeared files relating to Capitol security failures, so that they could shift blame for January 6 onto Trump.

Former committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) has pushed back on this accusation, saying that Loudermilk's report is full of "factual errors" and that the only documents that weren't maintained were temporary documents that didn't advance the committee's investigation, while 4 terabytes of the committee's relevant information were turned over.

The former president has escalated his attacks on the legal process as the charges against him have advanced, in particular going after special counsel Jack Smith, whom he has called "deranged" and "crackhead"-like, and District Judge Tanya Chutkan, whom he has demanded be taken off the case.

www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-unthinkable/

Yeah, genius. 
Dark Brandon, completely disguises the guy who can't walk across a stage, get off a stage, walk up a set of stairs or ride a bicycle without falling off of it - while standing still, mind you,

Dark Brandon really sells THAT guy as some major badass.
Genius.
Just like Clark Kent's glasses. 

Dianne Feinstein suffered a minor fall in her home yesterday. She was taken to the hospital. All tests were negative. She is recovering at home.

I don't believe anything he promises, oaths he takes, or vows he makes. He is without the honor required for any of them to mean anything. But, I'm all for his leaving forever!

Remember how all those guys were going to save the children from child trafficking after a movie told them "The Truth"? The call is coming from inside the house..

Warrant for Trump's twitter account

www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/us/politics/trump-twitter-account-search-warrant.html

Special Counsel Obtained Search Warrant for Trump’s Twitter Account
The warrant, obtained in January, is the first known example of prosecutors directly searching Donald J. Trump’s communications in the federal inquiry into the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Prosecutors working for Jack Smith, the special counsel who has twice brought indictments against former President Donald J. Trump, obtained a search warrant early this year for Mr. Trump’s long-dormant Twitter account as part of their inquiry into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, according to court papers unsealed on Wednesday.

The warrant, which was signed by a federal judge in Washington in January after Elon Musk took over Twitter, now called X, is the first known example of prosecutors directly searching Mr. Trump’s communications and adds a new dimension to the scope of the special counsel’s efforts to investigate the former president.

But the papers indicate that prosecutors received permission from the judge not to tell Mr. Trump for months that they had obtained the warrant for his account. The prosecutors feared that if Mr. Trump learned about the warrant, it “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior [or] notify confederates,” the papers said.

The fact that prosecutors quietly obtained a judge’s permission more than seven months ago to peer into Mr. Trump’s Twitter account underscores how much of the special counsel’s work may have taken place out of public view. Much of the investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to maintain his grip on power and into his other federal case — the one related to his handling of classified materials — has been conducted in front of federal grand juries, which operate under strict rules of secrecy.

More on twitter

www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/09/twitter-fine-jan-6-trump/

Twitter was fined $350,000 for failing to turn over Trump’s data

The social media company Twitter was forced to hand over records from former president Donald Trump’s account to the special counsel investigating the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and pay sanctions for failing to do so more quickly, as disclosed in an appellate court ruling unsealed Wednesday.

A lower-court judge, Beryl A. Howell, ruled in March that Twitter, now renamed X, had to comply with a sealed search warrant issued by the special counsel and pay $350,000 for missing a court-ordered deadline by three days. The filing also reveals that Howell had found reason to believe that should the search warrant be made public, Trump might engage in obstructive conduct or flee prosecution

The appellate court also upheld Howell’s $350,000 sanction, saying it was reasonable “given Twitter’s $40-billion valuation and the court’s goal of coercing Twitter’s compliance.”
.

You're comparing Ivanka selling shoes and Biden's crackhead son selling access to the the VP/president?

You're comparing apples and bags of cocaine.

Conservatives and their ongoing feud with US Women's soccer

www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/us/politics/trump-womens-soccer-megan-rapinoe.html

When the United States lost to Sweden in the Women’s World Cup on Sunday, many American viewers saw it as a painful collapse on the grandest stage — the sort of agonizing moment that happens in sports.

For former President Donald J. Trump, it was a sign of national decline.

The loss was “fully emblematic of what is happening to the our once great Nation under Crooked Joe Biden,” Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform.

“Many of our players were openly hostile to America — No other country behaved in such a manner, or even close,” he added. “WOKE EQUALS FAILURE. Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA.”

The taunt was an extension of a longstanding feud between Mr. Trump and Megan Rapinoe, the retiring soccer star who once refused to visit the Trump White House, and whose missed penalty kick contributed to the team’s loss. (After the game, Ms. Rapinoe summed up the miss as a sort of “sick joke.”)

But it was also a striking example of the unforgiving moment in right-wing politics, when a former president will taunt an American team competing on the international stage and relish the agony of its defeat.

President Biden congratulated the team on Twitter: “I’m looking forward to seeing how you continue to inspire Americans with your grit and determination — on and off the field.”

“Your unwavering support means a lot to us,” the team said to its fans on Sunday. “Our goal remains the same, to win.”

Criticism of the team was common in the online right-wing ecosystem even before its loss.

Megyn Kelly, the podcast host, said that Ms. Rapinoe had “poisoned the entire team against the country for which they play” ahead of the game.

The right-wing activist Brigitte Gabriel wrote late last month, “I love America and that’s why I am rooting against the woke U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team this year.”

Richard Lapchick, the president of the Institute for Sport and Social Justice, drew a parallel between Mr. Trump’s attack on Ms. Rapinoe and his attacks in 2017 on N.F.L. players who, inspired by Colin Kaepernick, knelt for the national anthem to protest racial inequality and police brutality.

After Mr. Trump’s criticism six years ago, “what was seemingly a dimming protest movement in the N.F.L. was suddenly reignited so that they had even owners and coaches” expressing support, Dr. Lapchick said.

“I think that his doing this again this week will reinforce the base of athlete activism that I think has grown significantly stronger in the last couple of years,” he said.

The conservative criticism has been focused on both Ms. Rapinoe’s political statements — including her support of gay and transgender rights, which Mr. Trump has attacked — and the women’s national team’s fight for pay equity. Mr. Trump and others disparage these stances as “woke,” the right’s catchall shorthand for progressive views on gender, race and other issues.

A recent article in The Washington Examiner, a conservative publication, accused the women’s national soccer team of appearing “far more concerned pushing a woke agenda regarding equal pay for female athletes and the rights of L.G.B.T.

Ms. Rapinoe has been a target of the right since at least 2019, when she refused to visit the White House after the United States won the last Women’s World Cup. Mr. Trump criticized her at the time. She has long been outspoken, and she is among the athletes who have knelt for the national anthem.

While “anti-woke” attacks have reliably stirred the right-wing base, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll indicates that they don’t reflect most voters’ priorities.

A minority of the presidential candidates, including former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, have urged Republicans to focus on concrete matters like inflation.

Then again, so has Mr. Trump — to a point.

“I don’t like the term ‘woke,’” he said in Iowa in June, adding, “It’s just a term they use — half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”

Mary Jo Kane, a professor emerita and founder of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, suggested that the mere existence of Mr. Trump’s latest attack was “a reflection of the growth and the power and the significance of a cultural moment of women’s sports.”

“The fact that the former president of the United States is commenting on women’s sports — nobody used to comment on women’s sports,” she said. “The fact that this has become yet another arena that is culturally contested and commented on is, ironically and unwittingly, a demonstration of the role of women’s sports in our society.”

In relation to Ivanka and Jared, what documents are you talking about?

There are a lot of reasons to cheer for the US Women's Soccer team

Opinion U.S. Soccer supports working moms. Are you watching, America?
By Macaela MacKenzie
July 25, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDT

Macaela MacKenzie is the author of “Money, Power, Respect: How Women In Sports Are Shaping the Future of Feminism.”
Whether the U.S. women’s national soccer team continues to dominate the sport with a third-consecutive World Cup victory this summer, it’s already distinguished by a rare phenomenon on elite sport rosters: moms.
That story serves as a valuable case study for what can happen when employers start treating moms as assets rather than annoyances.
American companies are notoriously bad at supporting working moms. For most of their history, professional sports have been a particularly hostile workplace. Not for fathers. Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods — all professionals, all dads. But their fatherhood is a footnote, if it’s mentioned at all, in discussions of their performance at work.

“I never wanted to have to choose between tennis and a family,” tennis legend Serena Williams wrote when she announced her retirement in 2022. “If I were a guy, I wouldn’t be writing this because I’d be out there playing and winning while my wife was doing the physical labor of expanding our family.”
Against that backdrop, what’s happening in soccer as the U.S. women defend their World Cup title in Australia and New Zealand looks even more remarkable. A record number of moms were in training camps this spring, with Alex Morgan, Crystal Dunn and Julie Ertz making it onto the final World Cup roster, tying the record set by the 2015 World Cup team.

Pregnant professional athletes pose a particularly complex challenge for their employers. A nurse or a lawyer could theoretically work until the moment her water breaks, take four weeks of postpartum leave and be considered lucky. (As it stands, 1 in 4 working moms in the United States return to work within 10 days.) At minimum, many athletes need six months away from competition, considering most doctors advise against participation in contact sports after the first trimester.
Real support that can prevent a mass loss of talent means funding a robust paid-leave policy, resources to support the return to competition and ongoing child-care benefits.
U.S. Soccer — Morgan, Ertz and Dunn’s employer — is an unexpected leader in this arena.

The historic equal-pay deal signed by U.S. Soccer and its men’s and women’s players last year expanded on a solid foundation of support the federation had developed since 1999 in response to pressure from players. Prior to that, pregnancy was treated like a career-ending injury. Today, U.S. Soccer offers six months of paid parental leave to all national team parents, including adoptive parents, and benefits such as fully funded child-care during training camps and competitions that most working parents should have but currently only dream of.

Alex Morgan reaches to control the ball during a game against Brazil on Feb. 22, in Frisco, Texas. (LM Otero/AP)

Alex Morgan holds her daughter, Charlie, during an event at Audi Field in Washington, on Sept. 6, 2022. (Julio Cortez/AP)
“[The women’s national team] has something that other [soccer] players just don’t,” said Becca Roux, executive director for the U.S. Women’s National Team Players Association: paid-leave and child-care benefits.

For Jessica McDonald, the only U.S. mom during the 2019 Women’s World Cup, training with the national team was the only time in her career she’d gotten that kind of support.
“That part of it was really emotional,” McDonald told me for my book.
This kind of success shouldn’t stop at sports.

“If we can demonstrate how sports can change to better support working caregivers — with the unique aspect that professional athletes use their bodies for their jobs — it is easy for a Fortune 500 company to see how they can build supportive infrastructure for caregivers,” Alysia Montaño, an Olympian and seven-time national champion runner who called out the lack of maternity protections in sponsorship contracts in 2019, said in an email.
The United States remains one of only six countries in the world without a federal paid-leave program. But even when policies do change, it doesn’t mean the culture changes. It has been illegal in the United States to pay women less than men in the same job for 60 years, yet there’s still a gender pay gap. It has been illegal to fire a woman for becoming pregnant since the 1970s, yet women are still forced out of the workplace by a system that continues to penalize working moms, not dads, to the detriment of the entire economy. And nearly half of U.S. businesses plan to cut child-care benefits, and 28 percent planned to reduce paid-leave programs in 2023, according to a survey conducted by Care.com in December.

Vietnam's goalkeeper Thi Kim Thanh Tran, right, and United States' Julie Ertz go for the ball during the Women's World Cup Group E soccer match at Eden Park in Auckland, New Zealand, on July 22. (Andrew Cornaga/AP)

Julie Ertz is honored for her 100th international game with her husband, Arizona Cardinals tight end Zach Ertz, and their baby, Madden Matthew, during a game on April 8 in Austin. (Brad Smith/USSF/Getty Images)
That’s why we need to fundamentally alter perceptions about what the postpartum body is capable of and challenge the assumption that becoming a caregiver at home decreases a woman’s value at work. U.S. Soccer proves to other industries that it’s possible. But perhaps even more important than serving as a blueprint for how to support working parents, the presence of so many high-profile moms at the World Cup can remind employers why they should.

“This is for U.S. Soccer’s benefit as a program that wants to continue to be the best in the world,” Roux said. “Think of the loss of talent, among this group and for the past couple of decades, [without this support].” U.S. Soccer officials don’t have a cheat code — they simply recognize that they’re better off when they don’t count moms out.
When Morgan, Dunn and Ertz take the field, their skill will be the story. But their motherhood shouldn’t be a footnote.
“The more we can demonstrate how female athletes can thrive in both their careers and motherhood,” champion runner Montaño said, “the better we will be able to show other industries how it can be done.”