I won't be able to get over here tomorrow, I'm baking all day. But we should have known after listening today to Biden blast Trump over the Russian Hack (and "blast " is being too kind, I should have said he fuc*in blasted Trump) and promised the people of the U.S. that the present standing Stimulus Bill was really just a down payment and that more help was on the way after his official swearing in that Trump would finally implode like a ten ton balloon.. Just remember, the Democrats always wanted two grand from the get go and the GOP refused to let them have it.
So, was it all just a plot ? Was the GOP already aware of what Trump was going pull and simply stringing the Democrats along ?
Here's the scoop and am adding the Cuomo review from earlier this evening - wanted to get the entire interview he had with Sam Donaldson but couldn't find it; and of course more words of wisdom from William Rivers Pitt.
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~ From The Washington Post via MSN: (with videos on the link)
The video landed like a sonic boom in Washington. His own aides were stunned. Congressional aides were stunned. Stock market futures quickly slumped on the prospect that the economic aid could be in doubt.
And the implications for what happens next could be severe. If he refuses to sign the bill, the government will shut down on Dec. 29. The $900 billion in emergency economic aid will be frozen, and the race for the two Senate seats in Georgia could also be upended.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), however, quickly responded to the Twitter post by saying congressional Democrats would move as soon as Thursday, when the House is scheduled to meet for a brief pro forma session, to advance the $2,000 stimulus checks.
“Republicans repeatedly refused to say what amount the President wanted for direct checks,” she posted on Twitter on Tuesday night after Trump’s message. “At last, the President has agreed to $2,000 — Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent. Let’s do it!”
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) also tweeted that he supported the idea of larger stimulus checks, but he blamed Republicans for preventing them from being included in the bill.
“We spent months trying to secure $2000 checks but Republicans blocked it,” Schumer wrote. “Trump needs to sign the bill to help people and keep the government open and we’re glad to pass more aid Americans need. Maybe Trump can finally make himself useful and get Republicans not to block it again.”
Logistically, though, it could prove difficult for Democrats and Trump to amend the bill and approve $2,000 checks in the next few days, or even weeks.
If any Republican in the House opposed Pelosi’s effort on Thursday, it would not pass. Such a change would also require Senate Republicans to pass the measure unanimously, something that is unlikely to happen.
Tucked into Congress’s stimulus bill: Tens of billions of dollars in special interest tax giveawaysSeveral White House aides spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the chaotic and secretive process that unfolded Monday and Tuesday, when many of them were kept in the dark about Trump’s motives and the video. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, kept the video very closely held on Tuesday, several of them said, with aides involved in the negotiations learning of it only an hour before it was posted. Even Trump’s legislative affairs office, which is responsible for dealing with Congress every day, was caught unaware, they said.
The $600 direct payments added roughly $167 billion to the $900 billion package, according to Ernie Tedeschi, an economist and former Treasury Department official in the Obama administration. Tedeschi estimated that increasing the payments to $2,000 per adult would grow the cost of the bill by $370 billion.
The 5,593-page package was introduced Monday afternoon and passed the House and Senate late with broad bipartisan support, clearing the Senate by a 92-to-6 margin. Republicans had insisted on keeping the economic relief portion at less than $1 trillion, and larger checks would have pushed the final tally higher.
Trump’s aides had made positive comments about the bill lawmakers passed, but Trump had largely stayed out of negotiations. Last week, he had complained to some aides that the $600 stimulus checks were too low and that he wanted them raised to $1,200 or $2,000, but aides had convinced him not to intervene, saying it could scuttle the whole package.
Some aides were stunned that Trump weighed in the way he did after his economic team had publicly praised the bill.
But administration officials had negotiated in the final days without explicitly securing Trump’s approval, aides said. He had largely been distracted with overturning the results of the presidential election.
Trump had long wanted to do more than $600 in checks and kept asking aides why they couldn’t agree to a bigger number, an official said.
He released the video Tuesday after a number of his aides, including Meadows, were already out of town.
“So dumb,” one administration official said. “So, so dumb.”
As the coronavirus pandemic began to move rapidly through the United States in March, Congress passed a $2.2 trillion relief bill to limit the economic impact. That law included the first round of one-time stimulus payments, pegged at $1,200.
Many of that law’s other measures expired over the course of the year, and the recent spike in cases — and the end of the election campaign — sparked a bipartisan coalition to seek a new bill. The measure that passed Monday night promised $900 billion in new assistance, including the $600 stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment aid for 11 weeks, small-business assistance and a range of other measures.
Trump’s top economic advisers had not signaled that he was unhappy with the bill. In fact, they had suggested they approved of the way the package came together.
“I am pleased that Congress has passed on an overwhelming bipartisan basis additional critical economic relief for American workers, families and businesses,” Mnuchin tweeted seven hours before Trump’s video was posted.
Mnuchin gushed about the stimulus bill Monday, and he serves as Trump’s key negotiator with Congress on spending and economic matters.
“Mnuchin (your Treasury Sec) represented YOU during extended negotiations on this bill package. We are Republic not a monarchy,” retiring Rep. Paul Mitchell of Michigan wrote on Twitter Tuesday night in a message aimed at Trump. Mitchell had served as a Republican lawmaker before announcing that he was disassociating from the party in part because of Trump’s antics since the election.
Aides told reporters all day that Trump would be signing the bill, but they later learned that he taped the video at least five hours before it was released, officials said.
Not all aides were supportive of the measure, though some kept their criticisms closely held.
Aides who dislike the bill used the fact that some of its unrelated spending provisions included foreign aid as a way to turn Trump against the measure, knowing that American money going to other countries raises the president’s ire. There was also a backlash to the bill among conservatives on Twitter, something Trump tends to monitor carefully.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) tweeted Tuesday night that Trump was “conflating” the government spending portion of the bill with the economic relief portion.
“HIS TEAM negotiatiated [sic] this, and blessed combining the two! But since twitter erupted, he erupted,” Kinzinger wrote.
Virtually all of the complaints Trump made in the four-minute video — including foreign aid agreements, aid to the Kennedy Center, fish management language and more — are not part of the $900 billion covid relief agreement but rather included in other, separately negotiated parts of the legislation, including a $1.4 trillion omnibus appropriations bill and a measure authorizing $9.9 billion in water projects. These bills and many others were packaged together.
Two congressional aides who had been involved in the negotiations said they were unaware of any problems the White House had with the bill. On Sunday, Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Meadows, said publicly ahead of the bill’s release that Trump supported the legislation and would sign it.
Trump’s refusal to publicly embrace the bill as it moved through Congress made some aides nervous, raising the prospect that he would once again cannonball into the pool at the end with a public declaration.
“This is what happens with a president who places more trust in conservative fever swamp Twitter than his own Treasury Secretary. His administration helped negotiate this bill, and he just pulled down the pants of every Republican who voted for it,” said Brendan Buck, a former top aide to onetime House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan and Buck often struggled with the president changing his mind.
Trump has also not shared the fiscal discipline that some of his aides, such as Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, have and has told advisers that doing only $600 would not be “popular,” in the words of one senior administration official.
The House and Senate passed the bill with such large margins that they could probably override a veto if Trump tried to block the measure. But that process could take weeks. Two aides said Trump might still sign the bill, noting he did not explicitly say he would veto it. Whether he goes to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday remains unclear, several advisers said, even though it is on his schedule.
Some of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill even tried to defend the economic relief bill Tuesday night, raising questions about who had convinced the president to turn against it.
“The #COVID19 package, while imperfect, will save jobs and lives,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) tweeted. “The sooner the bill becomes law — the better.”
Some White House officials were scrambling late Tuesday to discern who got in Trump’s ear and helped make the video, along with giving him erroneous information about the bill."
- Jeff Stein contributed to this report.
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The Audacious Pardons....
Not to mention Trump's audacious "pardons" of criminals and murderers. Well, this is a Maggie fact ...but when San Diego East County gets wind of the Duncan Hunter's pardon they will be the first ones to start a new campaign for the bum to have him re-elected. In fact, they have already started ! See, even though San Diego is my home town, this is one of the main reasons I find it so distasteful. But I digress.
Update 12/23: One poppy seed booze cake in, two to go (let me know if you want the recipe, these are dynamite). Naturally best reaction to the Blackwater pardons:
~ From Informed Comment: (with video on the link)
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On Tuesday, Trump the Mad pardoned 4 Blackwater mercenaries who killed 14 Iraqi civilians, including a nine-year-old boy, with indiscriminate fire at Nisour Square in downtown Baghdad on September 14, 2007. The four were convicted at then VP Joe Biden’s insistence, and were serving jail terms.
WaPo says, “Investigators for the military and the FBI later described the shootings, in which the contractors unleashed a blaze of gunfire and grenade explosions in a busy Baghdad square, as unprovoked and unjustified. Federal prosecutors said that many of the victims, including women and children, some with their hands in the air, “were shot inside of civilian vehicles while attempting to flee.”
The 14 victims killed by the Blackwater guards on trial were listed as Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia’y, Mahassin Mohssen Kadhum Al-Khazali, Osama Fadhil Abbas, Ali Mohammed Hafedh Abdul Razzaq, Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, Qasim Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, Sa’adi Ali Abbas Alkarkh, Mushtaq Karim Abd Al-Razzaq, Ghaniyah Hassan Ali, Ibrahim Abid Ayash, Hamoud Sa’eed Abttan, Uday Ismail Ibrahiem, Mahdi Sahib Nasir and Ali Khalil Abdul Hussein.
Trump’s four years in office have been one big effort at running interference for white supremacy, and it is the real reason for these pardons.
Blackwater was owned by Trump crony Erik Prince, the brother of plutocrat/ secretary of education Betsy DeVos.
The US still has 50,000 civilian contractors (performing various tasks, including security) in the Middle East, with 30,000 in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
I thought it might be interesting on this day, which will live in infamy in Iraq, to go back to see how Informed Comment covered this crisis as it unfolded in fall of 2007. Here was my attempt to catch history on the run:
“The Blackwater Shooting (2007) | The New York Times”
McClatchy reports from Baghdad that Iraqi eyewitnesses maintain that Blackwater security guards fired at civilians without provocation on Sunday, in contrast to the company’s own story about the incident. Probably they were firing at a car that neglected to stop when told to, or neglected to stop fast enough. Since such vehicles might be driven by suicide bombers, American military and civilian security forces have often opened fire on innocent Iraqis who just did not hear or did not understand the command to halt their vehicles, or who panicked and sped up. The offending car in this instance had a family of three in it, including a toddler who ended up being melted to his mother’s body in the resulting conflagration.
Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that Condi Rice personally apologized to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki for the killing of 10 Iraqis by Blackwater guards and promised that steps would be taken to ensure the tragedy was not repeated. The Iraqis are from all accounts absolutely furious about the Blackwater cowboys running around their country armed and dangerous and acting with impunity. The State Department, which employs Blackwater, is highly embarrassed and has ordered State Dept. personnel in Iraq not to circulate for the time being. Debate is raging over whether Iraq has the right to try the apparently trigger-happy civilian security men of Blackwater.
McClatchy reports that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has suspended the license of Blackwater to operate in Iraq while it is under investigation for recklessly killing civilians. Al-Maliki pointed to seven discrete incidents. An aide said that the Americans seemed shocked that the Iraqis were making a stand on the issue. Apparently sympathy with Iraqis about their innocent civilians being shot up by cowboys hired by a private American firm is not widespread in the Green Zone.
One experienced reader wrote me that the Iraqi government stance is reasonable, that foreign security guards should be accountable in some legal system. If Iraq cannot try them (by virtue of a fiat issued by American Viceroy Paul Bremer), and if they are not all Americans and so can’t all be tried in US domestic courts, then they are essentially operating beyond the reach of any court of law. That situation is unacceptable to anyone who cares about the rule of law.
By the way, complaints about the immunity of foreigners to prosecution in local courts (called ‘extra-territoriality’ by historians) were among the grievances that fueled the Khomeini movement in Iran from the 1960s (servicemen on bases in Iran had such immunity, and Khomeini used the unpopularity of this injury to national sovereignty to whip up anti-American sentiment). Paul Bremer and Donald Rumsfeld appear not to have learned any lessons from all that.
The US Congress may attempt to intervene by passing legislation on accountability for private US firms operating in Iraq. There are some 180,000 private individual contractors in Iraq, mostly working for US firms or subcontracting from the US government.
Iraqi authorities said Saturday that they have a videotape of the shootings in Nisur Square last Sunday by Blackwater security guards, which shows that they fired without provocation. The company has maintained that its personnel were responding to incoming fire. There is now talk in Baghdad of trying the guards, though a decree by US viceroy Paul Bremer may hold the US nationals harmless.
Meanwhile, charges surfaced that Blackwater employees had shipped weapons to Iraq without proper paperwork, which could be interpreted as a form of arms smuggling. The company denies the charges.
The Iraqi government is backing off its demand that the Blackwater security firm be expelled from Iraq in the wake of apparently unprovoked shootings that left 11 Iraqis dead, according to the LAT. Apparently the argument has been made to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that the 1,000 Blackwater guards who escort US embassy personnel would have to be replaced by troops, who would have to be pulled out of their current attempt to drive Sunni Arab militants out of Baghdad neighborhoods . . .
A big feature of the literature on decolonization is the delight leaders such as Gamal Abdul Nasser and Ruhollah Khomeini took in abrogating laws bestowing ‘extra-territoriality’ on colonial personnel and even just civilians from the metropole, while in the subject country. Now extra-territoriality is back with a vengeance; and, of course, no colonial enterprise can be run without it. One can’t have persons of the superior race hauled before a native judge; bad show, old boy, to let the wily oriental gentlemen get the upper hand that way.
Iraqi authorities are not only accusing Blackwater guards of an unprovoked shooting of 11 persons at Nisur Square on Sept. 16, but also of engaging in an hour-long firefight with Iraqi police later that day. The firm appears to have deployed attack helicopters in the firefights.
The NYT reports that a new congressional report on the Blackwater security firm in Iraq reveals many instances of guards killing Iraqis, and sometimes trying to cover it up. They are said to have been involved in nearly 200 shootings since 2005. Congress slammed the State Department in Iraq for exercising virtually no oversight over the private firm, which has a contract from State. In fact, State appears to have been part of the cover-ups.
The LA Times reports that Blackwater has fired 121 of its guards in Iraq, mostly for weapons-related issues, during the past 3 years. It has a little over 800 employees in Iraq.
P. W. Singer at Salon.com suggests that the use of private armies has harmed the US ability to win wars, including Iraq.
Although many commentators seem to find the use of private armies strange, they have been a feature of colonial wars all along. It is now often forgotten that the paramilitary of the British East India Company conquered North India in 1757-1764, not the regular armies of the British government. It has been argued that the Mughal Empire appointed the East India Company as its revenue minister (Divan), and that in essence this part of the government swallowed the rest. Once the company had much of India, the British government gave it a seat on the cabinet (so it went from being Divan of the Mughal Empire to cabinet minister in the British Empire). Don’t tell Bush and Cheney, or they’ll create a Secretary of Blackwater for the US government.
Postscript:
Juan Cole in The Nation, “The Age of American Shadow Power”, 4/20/2012:
Although the Iraqis managed to compel the withdrawal of US troops by the end of last year, Washington is nevertheless seeking to remain influential through shadow power. The US embassy in Baghdad has 16,000 employees, most of them civilian contractors. They include 2,000 diplomats and several hundred intelligence operatives. By contrast, the entire US Foreign Service corps comprises fewer than 14,000. The Obama administration has decided to slash the number of contractors, planning for an embassy force of “only” 8,000. This monument to shadow power clearly is not intended merely to represent US interests in Iraq but rather to shape that country and to serve as a command center for the eastern reaches of the greater Middle East. The US shadow warriors will, for instance, attempt to block “the influence of Iran,” according to the Washington Post. Since Iraq’s Shiite political parties, which dominate Parliament and the cabinet, are often close to Iran, that charge would inescapably involve meddling in internal Iraqi politics . . .
“The increasingly frequent use of civilian “security contractors”—essentially mercenaries—should be a sore point for Americans. The tens of thousands of mercenaries deployed in Iraq were crucial to the US occupation of that country, but they also demonstrate the severe drawbacks of using shadow warriors. Ignorance about local attitudes, arrogance and lack of coordination with the US military and with local police and military led to fiascoes such as the 2007 shootings at Baghdad’s Nisour Square, where Blackwater employees killed seventeen Iraqis. The Iraqi government ultimately expelled Blackwater, even before it did the same with the US military, which had brought the contractors into their country.”
Wow.
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Whether you agree or disagree with him, he's nearly almost always right:
~ From Truthout:
What Will Trump Attempt In His Last Days? We Must Prepare For Anything
- Published
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Stay Safe Y'all !