#also i perhaps should stop doing polls that mention dollars

[pollsnatural]

Every time my poll goes outside of spn fandom, I'm never ready for it.

[shijiujun]

on the danmei twitter fight

okay guys i didn’t wanna say anything about this and yes it’s that hot danmei twitter translations saga thing that’s going on, because honestly i feel like there’s nothing much to say but when i see dumb posts on tumblr taking about that, by people who present a misleading hot take and their friends or moots run off with it without even knowing what exactly is going on - it really pisses me off.

and also if you shit talk translators for not continuing their translations or locking their translations whatever - the door is that way on your right and left, but anyway here’s a rundown on what happened because i am seeing people make comments without two brain cells put together, without the slightest bit of consideration for the people who bring them translations

here’s my hot take and thesis: if you enjoy english translations made by fan translators, you don’t, in any way, no matter happens, shit talk fan translators. fan translators do this for free, and whatever their intentions are, whether genuine sharing or like some of you like to say, for clout, if you consume, and you enjoy these translations, i’m sorry, you’re not uninvolved, and you don’t get to sit on a high horse and say translators should or shouldn’t do something. you should just keep quiet, honestly, because someone else is doing you a favour, a favour that you are enjoying and taking. that’s what respect is.

i’m presenting both sides or i guess three sides of the story as objectively as i can, altho my support is still for fan translators who were just minding their own business before this blew up.

===

🔺 what happened:

so it started because one of the bigger translators in the fandom did this poll - i’m not blaming her at all, i doubt she had any intentions of shaming anyone or causing any controversy and was plain curious, but her poll asked english speaking danmei twitter how many people buy the digital, print copies of the danmei they read, and who did not. 

in my honest opinion, it’s not strange at all for her to have created that poll, considering just how much work she’s put into making sure things are accessible for the eng-speaking danmei fandom. i mean i’d be curious too, to know out of my thousands of readers, what the reading and buying behaviour is like. do yourself a favour and don’t read too much into it.

obviously in an era where a lot of people do consume content for free whether the underlying content is profit-making (like anime, donghua, manhua, manga etc.) or not (fanfiction etc.), it was unsurprising to see that the last option - the ones who consume danmei without paying a single cent, came out as the majority. i don’t think this is a surprising result at all, for all sorts of reasons that i will not get into now.

anyway, this is obviously kind of a sore point in the fandom especially for translators who want a wider audience to support their fave author’s works - i won’t get into that for now, but the issue began because other translators or fans started to criticize the majority of people who don’t pay for objectively rather affordable danmei and just consume things for free. 

and yes, i don’t deny that the argument on both sides got really heated and emotionally charged with both sides calling each other names which i believe is uncalled for, but it totally derailed the crux of the issue, which basically is that the majority of english-speaking danmei fandom - consumes danmei for free.

anyway this whole thing escalated and fan translators were brought into this for no fucking reason at all except that the people who didn’t want, or were unable to pay for the danmei they usually consume, made what i call a LOGICAL FALLACY in argument by going to the extremes, i will explain why later.

the end result is that fan translators were brought into this (most of them, the bigger ones i know at least) without even participating in the direct crossfire. and obviously, you can see why they’re hurt and decided to lock their translations. let me explain why

===

🔺 kind of like four camps:

(1) translators and fans who criticized those who consume danmei liberally but do not pay for them in any way - no merch, no digital copies, no physical copies, no audio dramas whatever

*** their arguments:

danmei is so cheap right, that technically people should be able to pay for it in one way or another, even if not all

danmei and its authors are, at the end of the day, out here to earn a living, and the industry, like any money-making industry, is a for-profit enterprise - and unlike public goods, if you cannot afford danmei, then there is no obligation for others to make it free for you (fan translators or otherwise, it wasn’t super clearly stated while this shitshow happened) when it is inherently a for-profit industry

yes, i don’t deny that some of them did call the peeps who don’t pay at all, “leeches” and other sort of names. personally, i wouldn’t go that far or even like venture there to be honest because in general, if it’s something that i’ll get punched in the face for if i called someone that in real life i tend not to do it, but i’ll leave my opinions, whatever they’re worth, for later

(2) the readers and fans of danmei who do not pay in any sort of way for them

*** their arguments:

some of them really cannot afford, even the dollar or more, to spend on danmei for several reasons: upbringing, culture, money-spending mindsets, real poverty, struggling to make ends meet etc. - some definitely more valid than others (and when i say not valid, it’s because SOME, a minority or like those few stragglers, say they cannot afford and then you see them like idk, throwing $50 on other merch on kpop and stuff - i’m just bringing up ONE example. not shaming anyone for spending more money on one aspect rather than the other, but yeah you can see why some of them, when making this same argument, are a little invalid, that’s just a small number of them tho)

if translators are blaming them for consuming free of charge, then the fault lies, at its foundation, fan translators who translate illegally, which i mean, in that definition, all of them including me 

did i mention that we were called illegal translators like you know in response to being called leeches? anyway-

(3) others translators who literally were just minding their own fucking business before some smart alec dragged them into it

i don’t think most of us had an argument. we were just quietly munching on popcorn and staying out of it and yeah, can you imagine, we provide a service, however illegal it is, for free on our own time, we don’t even check whether people support legally or not, we just... provide, and pray that those who are able to, at least support in some small way or another do so, on their own time. i mean i don’t check, most of us don’t, not the bouncers at your local club before COVID happened do, and then suddenly, to be used to derail an argument, we were called illegal translators. and that we should stop translating, and that it is our fault that there are free riders in the fandom

(4) people who offered to provide JJWXC credits to those who said they couldn’t afford it etc.

honestly i think they were just trying to help - no different than a gofundme. there’s no shame in taking a free thing that people already weren’t intending to pay for. it’s there, just take it!

===

🔺 the shitshow that led to fan translators locking their stuff up:

i would provide some actual examples in the form of screenshots but i’ve blocked most of them, and i don’t want to direct any sort of traffic to them so i guess you’ll have to take my word on it or go search on twitter yourself but-

(1) the affordability issue: i can understand the frustration at being called leeches, and some if not a majority of people, do have valid reasons for not being able to afford something or anything and end up pirating content they enjoy. hey, i am not about to crucify anyone for pirating at some point in their lives. we all have done it at some point, or for example hate disney+ and that $30 they were trying to rip off us for a subpar Mulan live action. i don’t have anything to say about that. inherently, is it wrong and illegal? yeah sure of course it is. do we call people leeches? i wouldn’t go that far.

if anyone cannot afford, cannot access for whatever reason, fine, i’m not gonna go check if jjwxc truly is banned in your country, or is your postal service so terrible that you definitely won’t be able to receive a hard copy of the book you like at affordable rates.

and if you have to pirate? go ahead. i mean it’s always been a rampant thing. the only thing fan translators and fans can do is encourage, motivate and incentivise as much as possible to get people to support legally. they can only put up REALLY COMPREHENSIVE guides as to how to access jjwxc or taobao or whatever. 

and if you still cannot afford it and pirate, honestly no one cares about the story behind it. you owe no one justification, just as how no other person is obligated to take it into consideration or understand you or empathize with you. i don��t say this in a malicious way - i do think that in general, you just do you. 

(2) the poor people don’t deserve nice things argument: honestly, this was not the point of this entire debacle, altho yes, people were rude to those who could not afford to support legally. but this is not the point of this whole thing.

main point - there are free riders who can support but choose not to because they choose to just consume it for free and if you are able to you should support

everyone going off on a tangent - you guys hate poor people / you guys are leeches

well guess what, no one wins in this argument. 

there were a lot of people saying “reading danmei is our only source of happiness, are you saying poor people who can’t access legally don’t deserve to read danmei” (this is just one example i’ve seen, there are other variations), and it wasn’t put across perhaps in the right way, but the other camp of people were saying “you’re not entitled to it for free if you cannot afford it”, which raised a lot of hackles and anti-poor yellings 

altho i do not deny that there are those who mean it maliciously, i think what everyone is trying to say is - the danmei industry, like any other profit-making industry, is looking to make profits. the people working in the industry, the authors even, are looking at numbers - traffic to jjwxc or other legal platforms, how much revenue they’re making from their live actions etc., comments, rankings, etc. i think @/hunxi-after-hours made a really succinct post on this aspect which yall should read.

it’s the same as - if you wanted to purchase a standee which costs $20 USD, but you cannot afford it = you don’t get it. there’s no way you can get this standee unless some gifts it to you for free. what the camp trying to ask people to support legally is saying, is that danmei is NOT A PUBLIC GOOD. it is a private, for-profit product. it might be intangible, but it is a PRODUCT that has a price that needs to be paid.

if you cannot afford it, you either don’t get access entirely (i’m saying this objectively and honestly from an economic standpoint). if someone gifts that standee to you for free, count yourself lucky - if someone makes a danmei accessible to you for free, COUNT YOURSELF LUCKY. you don’t have to be grateful and treat them as gods or like obey their every word, but it’s not rocket science. someone did you a favour that you accepted and consumed, show some respect. 

if you cannot afford to buy the standee - you do not go on twitter demanding that someone ensures that you have access to the standee for free. do you see how ridiculous this sounds once it’s a tangible product? and danmei novels ARE PRODUCTS. they are not FREE CONTENT. if someone cannot afford the standee, this is the equivalent of people going “we didn’t get the standee for free because poor people don’t deserve nice things”

totally missing the point. i don’t even know how it got to this. once again, i do admit that some users were unnecessarily mean, but going to the extreme of this is ridiculous. in argumentative essay writing we call this a logical fallacy:

e.g. “if you cannot pay for merchandise or danmei, it is a fact that you might not have access to it” morphing into “if we cannot pay for food, does this mean we cannot have access to it?!” - this is a slippery slope, and factors are not equivalent!!!! do they not teach people anything in school

don’t confuse fanfiction with danmei - danmei novels ARE PAID PRODUCTS unless for free chapters, just because it’s released online doesn’t mean it’s free public property, and also selected novels (did you guys know the WHOLE of SCI novel is free? about 500 chapters sorry, random, just a tidbit)

there are of course nuances right, like if anyone told me they were pirating disney+ content i’d be like yeah hey get one over those bloodsuckers, they take enough of our money and produce shit content anyway. the difference is that danmei authors, and the danmei industry itself can still be considered a nascent and not-yet matured industry, with a majority of authors if not all, depending on monetary flow, likes, comments, virality on the sites their content is hosted on, for a living, unlike hugeass MNCs trying to squeeze us dry for content that isn’t even interesting.

danmei is priced rather reasonably - and this brings me to another argument that was made, that the value of money is not the same for everyone. i don’t want to make comments on this because yes this is correct to a large extent. a $6 book might be cheap to most of us, but might be expensive to someone else. i’m not gonna comment on how cheap or whatever it is, if you gotta use your money for other things, definitely! i still maintain however, that a novel less than a dollar should be affordable to most people, a majority of people. and i definitely side eye some users who obviously have money but are just creating noise because they wanna continue free-riding

(4) the “they’re losing out on their international audience” argument: honestly, i feel like english-speaking danmei fandom gives themselves a bit too much credit. danmei has long thrived in china in its domestic market - sure the international audience is a plus to have and i’m sure the authors are grateful and flattered that people who don’t understand chinese love their content and love it a lot, but do they and their companies care about fans who basically don’t bring in money? i’m not sure (okay i’ll get to the fan translators doing illegal shit later okay i got it don’t be impatient)

and international fans are great, i don’t deny that - but when i see arguments like “oh but it’s their loss if they don’t cater or deny access to us, they get more popularity and sharing overseas”, i honestly think they don’t care as much as you think. once again, hunxi made a really good argument regarding non-sinophone audiences, but it really irks me, because this is the same as:

an instagram influencer saying they’ll give a restaurant exposure for free to their followers, if they get a free meal

it’s par for par - danmei authors wants earnings, popularity, tangible results that show that they are succeeding. this is life. if i put something out there for sale, i better be getting returns, simple economic logic. they probably don’t care that a non-paying reader is bringing them greater ‘exposure’ - once again, i mean this objectively. 

and yes if they’re thriving without the international market then why should it matter that people are pirating right? which brings me to the next point~

(5) it’s fan translators faults for so many people pirating, and fan translators are the ones doing the “illegal” work: this one is like... wow where do i unpack this and how-

firstly, we are talking about assholes who can pay but decide to free ride and not pay for danmei, and we assume that if you really cannot afford and have to pirate, no one’s saying anything as long as you don’t go around spreading how to pirate, how the hell did it get to fan translators from “you guys are anti-poor” and whatever

yes, fan translations are indeed illegal, i don’t deny that, and i also don’t deny that there are translators who translate for clout and popularity but putting these aside - here’s what i have seen from people who ran their mouths and made this argument

“if you guys care about us pirating the book so much than fan translators shouldn’t have translated in the first place” and “if you wanna come after us for reading illegally, then fan translators, you guys should go get the copyright for the book and then translate it cuz what you guys are doing is also illegal”

hooooo i’m telling ya, i am all for translators locking up their translations at this point. see how fucking hurtful that is? you eat from my hand and then now you biting at the hand that fed you the gays in love?

honestly if you’ve made this argument or supported this, you can basically go to hell. yes this is personal because what, you think fan translators don’t take out their personal time and effort and hard work to make translations accessible to you? if you’re ever consumed and read translations, don’t be a hypocrite and make this argument. you benefitted from it, now you wanna say it’s their fault? 

most translators want to share and spread the love they have for a novel right, want to show you how wonderful all these authors are, how much enjoyment u get from reading these wonderfully thought out stories of gays in love. yes we all know we are illegally translating, which is why on top of sharing we first, purchase the novels legally ourselves first, and then we try to encourage people to buy etc. and actually put their money to use. it doesn’t make it any less illegal, but we are bridging the gap between danmei and basically the english-speaking fandom, albeit illegally

we aren’t that self-important to ask for gratefulness but some respect would be nice. like i said, you read it, you consumed it, you enjoyed it, you can only access it because of illegal translators - a bit counter-intuitive to yell at these translators, who are simply telling you, if you can, please support. and none of us went “if you cannot afford, begone!”

===

🔺 some people tried to help by offering jjwxc credits so people who cannot afford as they say, can get legal access: honestly, just take it right, guess what some of these users did in response

they said the people giving away credits are trying to redeem themselves for their comments by giving away free stuff

they also said that we are trying to shame the people who cannot afford it with this handout to them, to show that they are the bigger person - the fact that they think this is a handout to them is TELLING. the people offering this is giving their money not to these readers, but to the authors! that’s the point of this exercise!!!

one of them even said “instead of trying to do these giveaways, here, there are greater world problems out there, donate instead to these causes” - love the initiative, but how did we get from being able to afford danmei and entertainment content to saving the world? i just- i cannot

===

🔺 so why i get why fan translators are locking up their translations, because wow, so hurtful:

you have no idea how many fucking assholes went “sure, lock up your translations, deal with the consequences” - ermmmm firstly, thanks for making a threat. like who the fuck do you think you are?

the consequences is... the authors still don’t get the money these free riders weren’t going to give them anyway, so no loss, and they weren’t reading on jjwxc anyway so you know, the authors don’t lose or gain any readership numbers or traffic they didn’t already have. instead, it WILL push and force people to pay for the PRODUCT. once again, it’s a product.

this works, and i’d say Word of Honor’s payment model worked marvellously for Youku, because they fucking forced everyone to pay to access content. ALL OF THEM. sure ok some people still pirated it, but how many MORE people paid on Youku, on Youku Youtube, watched on Viki etc. than if they didn’t? even english-speaking fandom were wracking their brains trying to purchase a Youku pass even if there were no subs initially - and other examples that lovely hunxi brought up in her amazing piece

and for translators?! honestly me for one, i’m glad i don’t feel pressured anymore to churn out a chapter every week since we get called names etc. most of us are glad to have a break to be honest. we’ve lost all motivation to translate because it’s a free service, at the very least we don’t expect like hate, or rudeass fuckers. for those who are doing a proof of purchase thing - go for it honestly! 

hopefully it’ll minimize the free rider problem - some people for whatever reasons really cannot buy or support legally, that’s totally cool and they don’t have to justify it, i get that. but for others making the same argument but obviously are just unwilling to pay because they can’t read chinese, think it’s too troublesome when there are guides and translators provide it for free anyway so what’s the point - we all make concessions and make decisions to grab what we like (not talking about the ppl who have their various troubles and difficulties!)

===

🔺 and those who are saying why is it the ‘rest of us suffer’ from locked translations just because of a few bad apples:

IT ISN’T ABOUT YOU. where the hell were all of ya when we were getting called illegal huh? it’s about us fan translators getting shot at for no reason, and then people still demanding things for free. i don’t see any of the people i’ve seen on tumblr complain about fan translators stopping or locking translations defend any of us in any way. instead, you’re complaining.

it is the translator’s prerogative to start, stop and end translations, unless of course the original author starts to sue i suppose. i see people on tumblr going like if they were gonna do this, they shouldn’t have started in the first place etc. - i don’t what world you live in, but when i do something for free, then get called names and am attacked or get dictated on how i should do something that’s already like free, i tend to be less generous.

i’m sorry, do us illegal and free translators owe ANY OF YOU? i wasn’t aware any of us were being paid for this hobby. readers, especially those who CAN and just refuse to support, don’t get to say SHIT. translators deal with so much shit and so many entitled readers, i say they get to lock whatever they want as long as they aren’t profiting off of this monetarily.

let me give you an example - nan chan, which is translated by lian yin, completed translations by the way for all chapters. it is all free for viewing, and she only locked up one extra and asked for proof of payment. some dumbfuck quotes that locked up extra chapter tweet and said “honestly, this turned me off reading this novel because they restricted access”.

the. fucking. entitlement. the whole of nan chan is free, that’s like what more than 80 chapters. she locked up the EXTRA and the money goes to the author, she doesn’t earn anything. AND HERE THAT BIJ is (yes, i’m going to call them names because you know, fucking asshole who didn’t bother to check) going “yeah i didn’t wanna read because 1/80+ chapters were locked”. 

AN EXTRA. LITERALLY AN EXTRA!!!!!!

at the end of the day, translators are not like DYING to translate, not like some of you are DYING to read the translations. once again, this isn’t a “BE GRATEFUL” message, it’s a please be respectful to the people who put in time and hard work for free and share the goodness ya know? what’s the use of yelling at fan translators as if we owe you anything?

================

🔴🔴🔴 TOO LONG DIDN’T READ 🔴🔴🔴

some people may need really need to pirate - and no one needs to justify why they cannot afford to purchase etc. pirating happens all the time, translators only hope that when you can, and in whatever way you can, to support legally - in general we don’t ask and we get it! we’re just annoyed that some people think that it SHOULD BE FREE, when it is a paid product, especially for those who CAN afford it

readers are not entitled to shit on translators for what they do with their translations - once again, you’re not OBLIGATED to have it. so what if i start and stop? i’m the one doing the work, i get the only say. don’t be a hypocrite and shit on translators, whose works you’ve read - it’s no loss for translators, we read and enjoy danmei just fine

yes, fan translations are illegal, but you can’t read and enjoy them like some of you have, and then turn around and point the finger at translators - a lot of us are happy to stop translating - this isn’t a threat, but at the end of the day, shitting on translators simply decreases access, and sure, some people can indeed live with you know, MTL or shitty translations from people who’ve learnt chinese for only six months or whatever, but you’re gonna be reading an entirely different book tbh

the people saying illegal translators are at fault - funnily enough, most of them consume the translations, so what the fuck? i mean we know it’s illegal, we’re trying to share the love and trying to minimize the illegalities of it by redirecting people to hopefully support legally. it’s still illegal yes, but i think it’s hypocritical for people who have read translations, stab translators in the back. and now that translators are indeed ‘restricting’ and ‘removing’ their ‘illegal translations’, yall yelling again? and threatening?

fan translators aren’t “elitist” or “classist” - just looking for some respect in a community which seems to have taken them for granted, and also looking for support for their fave authors - and honestly a lot of us were caught in the crossfires truly, don’t be an asshole and demand things from fan translators - who are you talking about? do you know why they decided to lock? do you know know what their locking system is like and what for? 

it’s not EASY to lock the translations up - it’s more admin work, it’s putting together a whitelist of people, if given the choice i’m sure translators would prefer to share everything. but not when there are assholes who have a comment on how they should translate etc. and yeah!!! calling us illegal!! i mean we are but still!!

the last straw was seeing that post on tumblr and people in the comments going like fan translators shouldn’t or should do something, without getting the whole picture, without even considering how hard it is for fan translators being caught in this situation. 

whoever puts in the work gets to decide, and everyone else should leave them alone. 

be nice to the people who really cannot afford as they say so (or just don’t think about it), be nice to the translators feeding you content, and the people who free ride and shit on translators - honestly, i’d say ready the pitchforks.

edit: i forgot to mention this is my hot take and i’ve tried to like present all the arguments i’ve seen so far. i’m definitely not doing all of it justice and i don’t claim to speak on behalf of any of them except maybe one or two- and i’ve definitely left out stuff, but anyway, lmao we’re just tiny people doing what we love. i wish we could solve you know inequality or poverty or hunger or other pressing concerns. if i was that great i wouldn’t be stuck on tumblr or twitter or have to make posts like these like a loser.

thanks for coming to my ted talk.

[volturialice]

Spork Haven chapter 23: salt fucking peter

welcome to spork haven, where I spork the EL James fic you’ve never heard of

previous chapter | next chapter | contents

previously on Spork Haven:

actor!Edward got an outlandish fucking award and became Best Actor!Edward! hotel maid murder witness cello prodigy orphaned ““cajun”” heiress!Bella was his date to the awards show! Ed looked into Emmett’s dark burning eyes and had a Moment! Bella felt dizzy and then went missing! will the Volturi mafia succeed in murdering her? let’s hope so stick around and find out!

warning: this chapter is incredibly long. please check the tags for content warnings—there are a lot! it’s eventful, though, so we’ll give it a pass. but settle in and make yourself comfortable. maybe go get a drink or something. I know I needed a drink after I read this garbage.

chapter 23 opens with Edward attempting to process the fact that Bella has disappeared. he does this in what I have to admit is a pretty seamless fusion of el james’s and stephenie meyer’s trademark styles (negative space here preserved for authenticity):

wow. eat your heart out, New Moon.

once we’ve experienced that bit of totally original typesetting magic, Edward leaps into action! 

just kidding. he’s “totally fucking immobilized.” paralyzed with fear, he “stifles a sob” and toys with whether to “wail, scream, and tear his hair out with impotence”

luckily, he’s very good at giving himself pep talks:

this bracing self-administered kick in the pants unfreezes him, allowing him to summon the mental faculties to go get Emmett.

Emmett clears the ladies’ room and calls for backup. He and Edward search the restroom and are joined by a rando Local security guard as they discover—gasp!—a secret second exit to the bathroom (shoutout to the phoenix airport womens’ room, amirite?) leading into a service tunnel.

the Local security guard informs them that the tunnel leads to an alley, but the alley’s only exit is onto Hollywood Boulevard. you know, the street currently clogged with limos, paparazzi, cameras, and fans. idk about y’all but I’m starting to think this kidnap attempt may have been just a tad poorly conceived. why kidnap her at all? they had ample time to kill her, dump her body in the service tunnel, and make their escape unencumbered.

as Ed, Emmett, and Local race down the service tunnel, Emmett radios for Jasper to go around and cut the Bad Guys off in the alley. Edward is the slowest of the bunch

so he quickly falls behind the other two.

he’s trying to catch up when—wait! what’s that on the ground? something...sparkly?

that’s right: he pauses in chasing after Bella and her kidnapper in order to notice “six thousand dollars’ worth of earring” lying on the ground.

then he stops and picks it up.

now, I know what you’re thinking, guys—is he seriously stopping to pick up a lost earring when Bella’s life is in danger?—but keep in mind, these earrings were twelve thousand dollars. also, Edward loves earrings! they make him horny! what else is he supposed to suck on at Bella’s funeral?

I mean, yeah, if your worst fear was that Bella might lose an earring.

what indeed, Edward. what indeed. 

imagine for a second that you’re Emmett in this fic. you’re a law enforcement professional racing to protect your charge’s life, bellowing into your walkie for backup, preparing to apprehend an armed and dangerous suspect in an area full of innocent civilians...when suddenly, from somewhere far behind you in the dingy gloom of the service tunnel, you hear the sniveling, British-accented voice of the bitchass manchild celebrity who’s tagging along:

“I’vE fOuNd hEr eArRiNg!”

jesus.

still ahead of Eddie boy, Emmett and Local burst out into the alley, guns drawn. Edward hears gunfire and is terrified for Bella as he finally catches up and arrives at the scene.

this is about where erika’s writing gets...incredibly confusing. and not in a POV, “we’re in the character’s head experiencing the chaos with him in real time” way. more like in a “several dozen drunk blind amputees playing Twister” way. this is my cute way of saying “it’s bad” and “I had to read it four times before it began to make sense.”

in the alley, all is chaos. a gun has just gone off

I’m sorry. salt...peter? saltpeter? did someone shoot off a Ye Olde Civil War Musket? I know fuckall about firearms and even I know they phased that shit out in the fucking 1880s.

and while we’re here, fun trivia fact about saltpeter: in Olden Times, people would ingest saltpeter in order to nuke their sex drives. silly Olden Times! if it’s a bonerkiller you’re after, all you have to do is read this fic!

ok, back to the alley. security are cordoning it off, keeping the “fucking jackal” paparazzi at bay (already?)

the LAPD are arriving (already??) 

but perhaps most interestingly,

real quick before we get into whose body it is, why we’re sexually objectifying it, and what it’s oozing, I just wanna draw your attention to the construction of that sentence. the artistry, if you will. below, I have replaced some of the nouns so that we may all appreciate the sheer poetry of the syntax:

“there’s a fucking meatball lying prone on the floor, all covered with cheese, a dark cloud oozing under the meatball.”

sitting a few feet away from the Skirt & Heels Body™ is Jasper, cradling the unconscious Bella. you could be forgiven for thinking that first body (you know, the oozing one) was Bella’s, because that’s what the narration wants you to think. the effect is somehow both enhanced and ruined by the fact that Bella’s actual body is mentioned in the next sentence. erika really tried to have her suspense cake and eat it too, with the result that by the time I finished reading this paragraph, I had absolutely no idea how many bodies there were or who they belonged to, which ones had on a skirt and heels, which ones were oozing, and where.

another excerpt I should probably share is the paragraph where we describe Edward reacting to this tragic pietà.

here’s our text, raw and unedited:

I can’t even begin to list all the ways this paragraph makes me uncomfortable, so I won’t attempt to.

anyway. remember how in the last chapter, there was an incredibly gay bit where Edward looked into Emmett’s dark, burning eyes? fasten your seatbelts because we’re about to blow that bit out of the water.

ｌｕｍｉｎｏｕｓ ｈａｚｅｌ ｅｙｅｓ

filled with

𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒 𝑒𝓂𝑜𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 𝐼 𝒹𝑜𝓃'𝓉 𝓌𝒶𝓃𝓉 𝓉𝑜 𝓃𝒶𝓂𝑒

the next sentence tries to take us back into heterosexual territory with

are we meant to understand that Jasper’s luminous hazel eyes are saying “don’t you just wish it was you getting to cradle Bella’s unconscious, injured body?” yes, that is exactly what we’re meant to understand. this attitude continues as Bella is loaded into an ambulance. at first, Jasper tries to stop Edward from coming, then the paramedic says they can both come but only if they sit on opposite sides of the ambulance like kindergarteners in Time Out.

l o n g i n g l y

the paramedics also checked the other body (you know, the oozing skirt and heels body) and Edward made a startling observation:

though oozing, the mystery person is still alive, and a second ambulance hauls off

and here I was thinking all this story needed to make it complete was some veiled transphobia! what a fun new direction for erika.

once at the hospital, Ed is banished to the waiting room with Emmett, Jasper, and Taylor. the doctors won’t let him see Bella, even when he tells them he’s her fiancé.

hmm. is it just me or is there a movie about this exact scenario?

yep, there are at least two movies about this exact scenario.

after the “fiancé” thing, Edward picks up on some bad vibes from Jasper

interesting. can you feel MY animosity hit you like a brick fucking wall? I guess it’s more of a brick fucking skyscraper at this point.

things we learn at the hospital:

Bella was roofied! so if you voted “poisoned” in the poll, I’m gonna give you this one. congrats on your victory.

Bella is fine now

Jasper shot the mysterious kidnapper in the chest. 

that’s right, Jasper is the cause of all the oozing. well done, Jasper. good luminous hazel eye.

finally, Bella wakes up and asks to see Edward. He goes back to see her 

and

she

dumps his ass.

not for any Sane People reasons, of course. having decided she’s “too dangerous to be around,” she breaks up with him in a scene straight out of New Moon, complete with “eyes full of tortured pain” and dialogue like

“You are too precious to me. Please. Go.”

Edward spends the whole scene in panicked denial, to the point where he’s practically gaslighting Bella, telling her she’s just been through a traumatic ordeal and she can’t possibly mean what she’s saying. 

then he interrupts her mid-breakup 

to fucking propose.

🤣🤣🤣 READ THE ROOM, BUDDY. Bella is resolute for the first time in her doormat life, turns down the proposal, and firmly breaks things off with Edward. he returns her earring (you remember, the six thousand dollar earring we paused in the middle of the climactic chase scene to pick up), “inhales her fragrant hair for the last time,” and leaves.

and with that, the chapter is FINALLY over.

possibility.mp3

best “fucks”

“level fucking head”

“a fucking microsecond”

“fucking sirens”

“loud fucking noises”

“enough fucking damage”

“a soothing fucking balm”

“fucking Hale”

“fucking purgatory” (the hospital waiting room)

“pale as fuck” (bella)

“fucking lifeless” (bella)

“non-believing fucking arse” (edward)

“like a fucking idiot” (edward)

best “shits”

next chapter: fucking blinds and curtains

[evien-stark]

✧I Need You✧ Chapter 109 [Begin: Interlude]

The first quarter meeting had been delayed by unfortunate circumstances this year. What with its two CEOs mixed up in Avengers superhero business and the downfall of a huge government agency which was hiding a Hydra conspiracy inside of it… things had to understandably be put on the back burner until the end of January. So now that you and Tony were a little bit more free and clear, you decided to host a bigger conference than normal. You had your own presentation to give inside of it, for the Board more than anyone else, but at the same time you could run the project updates from the other departments and see where development were on several other key things. 

These sort of things were always nerve wracking, no matter if you were confident in the works you had started. Even if it ended up that the Board disagreed or didn’t like what was going on, they would never have the balls to start organizing another movement for removal. For either you or Tony. After what had happened last time… and now that the two of you were certifiable public darlings and heroes- they’d never do that again. It would be against their own interests. 

Yet, still, knowing this, you had a two hour long presentation about your projects and initiatives. Some that went years back. It was hard to hold a room for that long, you knew. But the information needed to be out and in the light of day so that Stark Industries could move forward into the new year. Tony helped you prepare… the best he could, anyway, and he sat front row for you while you took the stage. 

You went through each with power points that you and Pepper had put together late into the night the day before. Starting with the Clean Planet Initiative that had started the moment Tony had shut down the weapons division of Stark Industries and spanning the power up of the Tower everyone was currently sitting in. That was going all well and good. Of course. Running smoothly, the Tower was still sustaining itself, and Stark Industries had been able to credit itself with the reduction of air pollution, with plastic waste reduction, with fuel efficiency regulations, and new clean energy production. Stark Industries’ teams in that area had also begun their last phase of their Intellicrops project, which was something they’d present near the end of the conference. 

Then came the update on the Disaster Relief Funds for both the Expo and the Battle of New York. After the initial snafu of having terrible staff that had had to be replaced, things had been running a little bit more smoothly. Though the funds had not run dry, their usage had gone down- which was a great sign. It meant people were no longer relying on Stark Industries for help. Life was returning back to normal. Not particularly important to people like the Board, but the mentions of the oodles of tax credits the company could still claim and the boost to PR through all this was a little bit more substantial to their tastes.

A lengthy chunk of time was dedicated to Damage Control’s reports about the clean up portion of New York. You made sure to include that you’d broken off a portion of the team to go assess and clean up DC, and that the warehouses were scheduled to go under a revamp after you’d been forced to purchase more property for them to operate. Company bloat would always be a thing to be mindful of, but when that bloat consisted of deadly weapons… someone needed to go through every single shelf to make sure things were not only accounted for, but to determine whether or not those very same things were worth holding on to. 

After that you gave the update on the Hansen Foundation. Still up and running strong. Though it had mostly assisted and helped the veterans that had been hurt by AIM’s malicious intentions, you and Tony had expanded it to care for the nation’s veterans that were otherwise not getting the help they needed. Going well, smoothly, and in the light of mentioning the funds needed for the Foundation, you again brought up the tax breaks and stock boosts that came from having someone like Colonel Rhodes on advisory staff. It had been a huge face lift for Stark Industries. Putting its past behind it and moving forward to navigate the damage it may have taken part in. 

...especially after the SHIELD leaks had informed the public that Obadiah Stane had been selling weapons to America’s enemies for fun and profit… yes, this foundation out of all of them was probably the most important one to have as a full face right now. 

The last two points of business were two of your newest initiatives: M and OAT. It was a little early to be reporting on either of them in a financial capacity, but the public returns had already been great and, as you convinced everyone, very cost effective. The net gain would far outweigh whatever dollar amount ended up being on the end of this year’s reports. You were very sure of that. With OAT came the mention that you and Tony were looking to buy up another building- perhaps in DC, but not sure yet, to accommodate the expansion of Stark Industries and its brand new employees. Scouting would have to be done soon, something you said you were looking forward to. 

With that you opened the floor for questions, whether from the Board or the teams that had been invited to this big meeting. There had been… many. More than you would have liked. And more than you needed about topics not exactly pertinent to your presentations. Many of them having to do with the SHIELD leaks, of course, and your and Tony’s various… dealings. It wasn’t hard to put the voices to bed, and direct them to any of the multitude of reports that already existed. As for if any of them would negatively impact the company, you had personally already seen to that your and Tony’s motives would not be questioned. 

After that very public spat with Christine, the general consensus was that you were doing your job- as a superhero and businesswoman. Were someone to look up to. Were someone that people agreed with, in every poll that had come out about it. Stark Industries had remained untouched. So whether or not you should have blown up that way (you were kind of the mind that you maybe shouldn’t have and should have remained dignified about it) didn’t matter anymore. You had and the public was loving it. 

Christine had retreated into a hole. Calls had stopped. Her portion of the media that followed you and Tony around like hawks had disappeared. That spelled trouble, you were sure. She’d been smacked pretty hard for all to see. There was no way she was going to take that without repercussions. You just hoped… she wouldn’t do something drastic. Better not to think about it, for the moment. 

Once your portion of the conference was finished, you thanked everyone and as usual, made a small speech about looking forward to the year ahead. After that, you excused yourself off the presentation stage in the theater, wanting to take a moment just to breathe after speaking for so long. Even though you hadn’t seen him get up, it didn’t surprise you to see Tony waiting for you behind the curtain, bottle of chilled water in hand. 

The next presenter was already taking the stage as he smiled at you. “Great stuff. You really have a talent for getting people to eat out of your hand.” 

“You know, I think one of the members of the Board said that to me a long time ago.” Hard to remember it, now. Although the part of your brain that held on to all things painful reminded you that that moment had not been a good one. 

“They’re not wrong.” As you took the water from him and sipped at it gingerly, he put an arm around your waist. “What’d’you think? Time to cut and run?” 

“That would be very rude to the other presenters.” While this grand meeting would be summarized in reports that you would go over later anyway… it was better for appearance to sit through and smile. 

“Hm. Yeah. Well. Then we have a problem.” Humming sardonically. When you looked up at him he grinned. “It may also be very rude to the waitstaff at Ivy Lane if we bail on our reservation.” 

You settled a hand on his chest with a playfully light push. “You mean your reservation. I had no part in that.” 

“It was for two.” 

“Guess you’ll have to get Bruce to go.” 

“Busy.” 

“So am I.” 

The exchange left the two of you lightly smirking at one another, probably all too obvious you’d give in very soon. He helped speed matters along by lifting the hand you’d laid over his heart, pressing a kiss to the back. “Come on. Little celebration dinner never hurt anyone.” 

“Technically the conference isn’t over. Celebrating early might invite chaos…” Lilting lightly as you half leaned up. 

“I can handle chaos- especially restaurant chaos. What’s the worst they can do. Burn my chicken? Spill my wine?” 

“Let’s not tempt fate, darling.” Shifting completely forward to press a small kiss to his lips. 

It was interrupted all too soon by a clearing of someone’s throat. And when the two of you broke and turned, you saw Happy standing behind you. He hooked a thumb towards the exit door. “Car’s ready.” 

You feigned annoyance back up at Tony. “I didn’t even say I would go.” 

“But you will. Call me crazy, but, I’m pretty sure I know you by now.” 

That damnable boyish charm of his, with that beautiful wry smile… you wondered if Tony Stark was aware of just how much he had you wrapped around his finger. You only hoped the feeling was mutual, as the two of you made your quiet escape. And hoped that no one noticed. Or saw. Or cared. 

                                                     ---- 

As luck would have it, the night after that went perfectly fine. No one burned Tony’s food, no one spilled any drinks on you. Though he didn’t reserve the whole restaurant, the two of you had a back table all to yourselves. It was nice to just be together, to just spend some time together after everything. Really, it was starting to feel like falling into a bit of a routine that way. 

Something terrible and seemingly world-ending would come down upon you, Tony, and the team. You’d all figure it out. Clean up would start. And then eventually you and Tony would pretend you knew what normal life looked like for a little while. Enjoy each other’s company. And then… something else bad would happen. 

It made the moments you shared, like that, precious. But it also… served to fuel your anxiety. How many more times would big terrible things happen? How many more storms would you have to weather? 

While you had decided, coming into your realization, that you didn’t want to ruin the evening, he caught your eyes in the lowlights of flickering candles, and his smile disappeared. Settling his hand over yours, “You okay?” 

Your smile was somewhat bittersweet. “That obvious?” 

“Always.” Such a strong and resolute statement drove a stake of warmth through your churning worries. 

But it wasn’t enough to kill them. “I don’t wanna ruin the night. I just… for a second couldn’t help but think about how we always end up here. After something nasty. Like we’re caught in an endless cycle.” 

His eyes lowered, thinking. There was a soft silence before he started nodding lightly. “Yeah. ...I’m still in the planning phases, of this whole defense idea, but. I think I can get Banner in by June and start putting in the real work.” 

This was not where you wanted to put his mind right now, but now that you’d forced him there, you had no choice. “I know we’ve talked about it but could you just… as simple as possible give me what your “defense idea” is?” Before it had been assistance. Something to help the Avengers. But now… 

“It would be nice. Kinda far fetched, but. I work best on lofty ideals.” Smiling just a little. “-anyway, what I’m getting at… I’m willing to put in the time and effort- to something that… lets us go home.” 

“Is that an option?” 

“I’m still in the very rough draft phases, but-” 

You turned your hand over in his so that you could give him a squeeze. “I’m not asking if you could build something. I have no doubt in my mind that you could figure out something- even something that big. I’m asking… even if you did…” 

“Would we be able to stop?” A breath left him, and he slid his fingers between yours, just holding on. His eyes dropped again. “If you’re asking me that, you already know the answer. But. In terms of incremental steps. Monitoring a situation is better than being on the front lines.” 

Monitoring. You imagined, he meant this, from somewhere safe. Wasn’t that what this was all about? There were levels of this. To build something that would allow you to pretend you could lead normal lives. To build something that would protect the earth from the things he saw up in space, and the things he thought would eventually come to earth to wreak more havoc. But, on top of it all… 

Somewhere inside you, you heard the broken plea he’d made the night before your house in California had been blown up. 

Threat is imminent, and I have to protect the one thing that I can't live without. That's you.

Taking a breath, you tried to level the both of you out, and aimed a quieter smile his way. “When you say lets us go home, what is it you’re envisioning?” 

He blinked twice, having to shift gears to acquiesce that kind of question. But, once he was there, the quirk in the corner of his lips was considerably wry. “Are you asking me where I see us?” 

“In… five years.” 

“Am I being interviewed?” Grinning, then. 

You returned the expression. “If it helps to think of it that way, then sure.” 

“Alright. Five years…” Breathing out, eyes going up quickly in thought. As if he was looking at something- the picture he had in his mind. “New house. Something- comfortable. I think I’m aging out of my whole playboy billionaire estate vibe.” 

“Thank god for that.” 

For one reason or another this got a little laugh out of him, a drop of his head. When his eyes returned to yours, he lifted your joined hands, shifting forward so that he could rest the back of yours against his cheek. “Even though it seems like it’s not up to me- I’d hope by then you’ll settle for marriage.” 

“Settle, huh? That’s a terrible pitch. You’re doing a disservice to yourself, you know.” 

“If that’s how you feel, I’ll have them bring out a slice of cake with a ring in it right now.” 

While you didn’t think he had something like that set up, you also knew if you gave him even the barest notion that that was what you wanted, he’d absolutely make it happen in fifteen minutes. He was ready to jump for you, whenever you were ready. That’s what he was saying. It put a squeeze in your heart. “Tony…” 

“Oh that sounds bad.” Teasing, even knowing defeat was coming, smiling even still. 

“It’s not that I don’t want to.” 

“We’re off to a good start.” 

“Just- right now…” You sighed, and he mirrored it, looking the exact kind of crestfallen yet understanding that really broke your heart. “Right now is not the right time.” 

He nodded, and then pressed a little closer to your hand. “But. In five years?” 

Your brows went up. “Did you just turn the tables on me?” 

“I was sure you’d be used to that by now.” 

Untangling your fingers from his, you turned your hand, resting his cheek in your palm. Just holding him. Dearly. Lovingly. Eyes watching his. “In five years… yes. I’d like a home with you. I’d like to build a life with you. And… yes. Be married to you.” 

“Okay.” He murmured, looking at you. Adoration shone in his eyes, radiated between you, twined with that ever present and deep feeling of love. That he had only for you. “In five years.” 

Hearing him at that moment, make a promise. A promise to try and find a way to cull that self same chaos in your lives. The uncertainty. Not only for the world. But for the both of you. So that the two of you could have a life together. “I love you, Tony.” 

His smile was so beautiful. “I love you, too.” Reaching up to hold your hand there against his face, turning lightly, to press a kiss to your palm. “More than anything.” 

                                                    ----

A light rain had started to fall and it was terribly chilly outside, but after your meal you and Tony decided it might be nice to just take a little walk in the rain. Happy provided the both of you with an umbrella, and at your request set a moving security perimeter of twenty feet, him ten behind, just to keep cameras at bay. It sucked, that you were having to do that increasingly more, but this life came with that territory. 

Tony was holding the umbrella over the both of you, his other arm preoccupied, twined with yours as you laid your head against him. The city at least seemed quiet, not even in the superficial way that your security was creating. It was just… nice. Even the cold was refreshing, in a way. The two of you had slipped into slightly broken and soft conversation about nothing important. 

It was hard to sense the subtle shift, lulled into that false sense of things being alright. Someone had been following the two of you. And it wasn’t until you heard Happy arguing with whoever it was that the both of you turned. 

A little too late as a woman put him over her shoulder and onto his back in a hard thump. She was short, black hair and very pale skin- and she was angry. Tony immediately moved just in front of you, “Please don’t touch my Happy.” Calling out to her. 

While she looked at him for a few seconds, her gaze skewed to you. “I don’t want trouble.” And after saying so, continued to give you the exact opposite idea as she came stomping your way. 

You couldn’t help but make a face at her. “Then you’re making a mistake.” Whoever she was, she was now just short of charging two of the most powerful people in the city. How she’d broken through security was a bit of an upsetting question- but- the two of you could handle yourselves. 

Said security had gotten the message that something was going down on their watch, and two of your Stark Industries strongmen came to her side. A car pulled up on the sidewalk. Tony opened the door for you, and put his arm around you to usher you inside. But, with one leg up and a hand on the door, you heard her call. “Hey-!” Whoever she was, the police could sort her out. Your plan was to leave. At least until she yelled again. 

“Hey, puppy!” 

It shot a tremor through you so violent you thought for a second the sidewalk must be shaking. Going in the car was no longer an option. Your body seemed to be moving on its own as you turned back to look at her. Your security was scattered on the sidewalk. 

“That’s what I thought. That’s you. Right?” 

Tony’s voice was so very far away. Muffled, as he called out, with a hand on your shoulder, “Honey-” 

The next motions came in swift chops. The yank of your jacket zipper. The double press of the Heart Reactor. Tony was yelling something behind you- as you’d started moving. Running at full speed. This woman was dangerous. And not only that- 

She was with him. 

Moving to a half leap to put all your momentum forward, you charged at her with a powerful punch. One she caught, both of her hands holding you at bay, gritting her teeth at you as the two of you struggled. “Listen to me-” Growling at you. 

“You work for him-” Growling right on back, zipping your eyes up along your HUD to get the helmet to release. You wanted to look into her eyes for this. To send a message to her- and him. You felt a snarl as you bore your teeth at her, “So you go back to him and tell him-” 

“I don’t work for that asshole. And he’s dead. No thanks to you.” 

That practically killed the fight in you almost immediately. The feeling of such raw and powerful guilt- of disgust and of wrath… you’d felt these things before. Easing up on your punch, even though she still held you in her palms, you narrowed your eyes at her. The heavy smell of liquor rolling off her was sickening. “What are you talking about?” 

“It’s you, right? At least tell me I’ve got that part down.” There was a smaller air of satisfaction. She scoffed with a dead-eyed half grin. “Yeah. He’s dead. I thought you should know.” Her eyes moved sideways and then she let you go, putting her hands up. “I did what I came here to do.” 

You realized the sound of a heavy thunk behind you too late. Tony had pulled a suit- probably from the car- and while this woman was strong... she was also probably no idiot. “Are we talking about-” 

“Kilgrave. If you even got that far. If you even cared.” She spit at you. Like this was… your fault, somehow. “I thought he was lying, you know. Not that it matters, he’s dead now. But he hurt a lot of people. Because you let him.” 

“You’re sure he’s dead?” 

She hung her head, a sarcastic bark of laughter leaving her. “Saw him got hit by a bus. Yeah. He’s pretty dead.” Then she looked up at you, and for a moment you weren’t sure you’d ever seen so much boiling hate- or felt so much- directed at you before. “Superhero my ass. You could’ve stopped him-” 

It riled you straight to your core. Even as you held up your hand to keep Tony at bay- from firing on this woman- you stared her down. “If we’re talking about the same monster, then you know I had no say in what I did.” 

“But you got out. And you let him continue to roam around. Because you’re a coward. Live with that for the rest of your life. Knowing he hurt so many other people. Knowing you could have done more. People are dead because of you.” Then she turned away in a half stumble, shoving aside one of your other security guards who had gotten to his feet. “Don’t touch me.” Barking at him, half falling over, catching herself, and then walking off. 

Your men were staring at you, waiting for direction- because two of the Iron People of the world were standing there, letting her get away. So clearly that meant they shouldn’t get involved. Right? “...ma’am?” 

Tony put a hand on your shoulder. “Honey.” 

With a shaky hand, feeling the earth shift beneath you, you reached up to deactivate the suit, and felt the slice of pouring rain suddenly coming down over you. The man that had taken you… one you’d promised vengeance on- the one you’d promised you’d make regret doing that- regret hurting others… also the one you ran from- such a dangerous, powerful man. The man who could command people with a single word. 

...had gotten hit by a bus. 

Wrapping your arms around yourself, you turned to Tony, unable to meet his eyes. “I need to go home.” 

“Yeah-” Clearly stunned and confused, having no earthly idea what the hell was going on. But wanting to heed your needs. 

Once the two of you were in the car with Happy behind the wheel, promising he was okay- and apologizing for letting that happen- you tuned everything else out except the patter of rain on the windows. 

Fury had been right. You should have gotten out of bed. You should have made an effort. Maybe you could have caught that man- Kilgrave, apparently. That did make you a coward. The woman was right. 

Stuck in traffic, fifteen minutes out from the Tower, you found your voice. “She said he’s dead.” 

Tony had his arm around you, the both of you soaking wet still. “Who?” 

“The one who took me.” 

The air in the back of the car became suffocating and dark. “...she sure about that?” 

“She wasn’t lying.” You knew it, now. Sensed it, as she was coming down on you. Everything she’d said was true. “She blamed me-” This escaping out of you in a hiccup as you reached up to press a hand to your forehead. 

“She was also drunk. Which. Excusable. Given the circumstances. But. Also skews her judgment.” He was trying to defend you. And much as you wanted to give in… 

“She called me a coward.” 

“What more proof do you need that she’s wrong?” When you didn’t- couldn’t- answer, he let a breath out. “...we’re really sure. That he’s dead? Who even is she? ...you’re sure she’s sure?” Double and triple checking. Wordlessly you nodded. “...how did she know about you?” 

“He must have… told her. I don’t know. He was a sick person.” 

“And he’s dead now. According to her.” Tony’s skepticism was understandable. This was such a terrible mark on both your lives. To have it come to a quick and unforeseeable, maybe even unknowable end… it was hard to believe. “...either way. I had JARVIS grab a scan.” 

“Why?” Finding enough strength to finally look up at him. 

“Seems like enhanced people are popping up everywhere, these days. Seeing as how she laid out our security and held a swing from you like Cap, I’m thinking it’s not a bad idea to keep an eye on things.” 

You weren’t sure how you felt about this. If she were anything like you- and it seemed like you had an uncomfortable amount in common… “I don’t want to spy on her.” 

“Nobody said spy. I’m not spying.” Defending himself quickly. 

“I believe her.” What she had been saying was true. You… were pretty sure about it. 

“Alright. So I believe you when you believe her. Doesn’t change the fact that a woman that angry and that boozed up could punch a hole through a regular person.” 

Your eyes dropped, thinking about this. ...he was right. And you weren’t sure how to feel about that. The two of you weren’t responsible for every single newly enhanced individual that showed up on the street. Not until they started menacing the general public, at least. Then it was sort of your problem.

But this woman had been taken by that man. Probably abused by him. No telling for how long. She was now angry and had a new sense of freedom. ...she was also self medicating with alcohol. And she had some pretty heavy firepower in her muscles. This was a dangerous cocktail. ...it also wasn’t fair to pigeonhole her. 

“SHIELD kept tabs on people, remember? And we didn’t like it. ...I’m- I agree with you. This situation is a little dicey but… let’s leave her alone. Until she decides what side of the fence she’s coming out on.” 

“I’m not trying to menace her.” There was a sudden blossom of blue in the backseat as he looked away. Guilt was very close. “...I remember. How you came out of that. I’ve got nothing but sympathy, alright?” Leaning in closer, you practically hid your face against the round of his shoulder, hand over his heart. Just clinging to him. He took a breath to even himself out. “We’ll stay worried about us. And our current situation.” Making a very valiant effort, he touched a hand over your wet hair, directing your attention his way, and tried a smile for you. “...and that five years will be here before you know it.” 

Out of all the ways you’d expected this evening to go… this wasn’t exactly the chaos you’d thought you were inviting. It wasn’t exactly the worst, either. But it… definitely sucked. 

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Want To Impeach Obama

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-want-to-impeach-obama/

Why Do Republicans Want To Impeach Obama

Obama A Republican Congress And Impeachment

GOP Faithful Want Obama Impeached, Why? He’s Obama, That’s Why

Some Republicans are eager to impeach the President. Some are so eager that they go on the record saying that impeachment would probably pass the House. Representatives Barletta , Farenthold , and Senator Cruz say that the only obstacle is the Democratic Senate, which would not convict the President. The Washington Posts Jonathan Capehart took this a step further and argued Republican control of the Senate could result in President Obamas impeachment.

Regardless of who controls the Senate, the rationale presented by Cruz, Barletta, and Farenthold makes no sense. In no immediate future will Republicans control enough votes two-thirds of the Senate to remove the president from office. In order to reach the 66 vote threshold, Republicans need to win every single Senate election in November. Democrats may lose the Senate majority. However, no one believes Democrats will lose every single Senate race. More reasonable forecasts suggest Republicans will gain 5-6 seats. That is enough for a majority but not close to the amount necessary to remove Obama from office. In sum, there is no situation in which not having the votes is the reason impeachment has not been pursued.

There is a reasonable argument that the Republican Party, with a House majority insulated from electoral pain through a combination of safe districts packed with conservative constituents, would not hesitate to impeach Obama. He has been enemy number one since he stepped into office.

Efforts To Impeach Barack Obama

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During Barack Obama‘s tenure as President of the United States from 2009 to 2017, certain Republican members of Congress, as well as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, stated that Obama had engaged in impeachable activity and that he might face attempts to remove him from office. Rationales offered for possible impeachment ranged from Obama allowing people to use bathrooms based on their gender identity, to the 2012 Benghazi attack, to Obama’s enforcement of immigration laws, and false claims that he was born outside the United States.

Multiple surveys of U.S. public opinion found that a near supermajority of Americans rejected the idea of impeaching Obama, though a bit more than a simple majority of Republicans did support such efforts. For example, CNN found in July 2014 that 57% of Republicans supported impeachment, but in general, 65% of American adults, disagreed with impeachment with only 33% supporting such efforts.

How President Obama Will Be Impeached

Writing about Rep. Eric Cantors  stunning primary defeat last week, I warned Democrats that the House majority leaders loss was as much a wake-up call for them as it was for the GOP. Well, now I want to warn them about a very real possibility: President Obama will be impeached if the Democrats lose control of the U.S. Senate.

Yeah, yeah, I read Aaron Blakes astute piece in The Post on the impeachment process. He says probably not to the question of whether the House could impeach Obama. But probably is not definitely. And with the way the impeachment talk has gone, probably not could become absolutely if the Senate flips to the Republicans.

Rep. Lou Barletta became the latest to openly discuss impeaching the president. In response to a question from a radio host on Monday, the two-term congressman who was swept in during the tea party wave of 2010, said, Obama is just absolutely ignoring the Constitution and ignoring the laws and ignoring the checks and balances. Articles of impeachment, he added, probably could pass in the House.

In a later interview, Barletta said one of the reasons he wouldnt vote for impeachment was because a Democrat-controlled Senate would never convict the Democrat president. Blake also mentions this parenthetically in his piece. Others who have talked about impeachment point to this as the reason not to pursue the extraordinary political rebuke.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter:

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Reasons John Boehner Opted To Sue Obama Rather Than Impeach

While most Republicans favor impeachment, John Boehner recalls the losses that Republicans sustained in 1998 midterm elections, during the Clinton impeachment.

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In a near party-line vote, House Republicans on Wednesday approved 225 to 201 a resolution to sue President Obama or other administration officials for actions inconsistent with their duties under the Constitution.

Translation: Republicans accuse the president of executive overreach exceeding his constitutional powers and unlawfully going around Congress.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls the lawsuit “perilous and meritless.” President Obama dismissed it as a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. “Stop being mad all the time. Stop just hating all the time. Come on,” the president said during a speech in Kansas City, Mo., earlier in the day.

Some Republicans, such as former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, want the House to go further and impeach the president. A CNN poll last week shows that the majority of Republicans favor impeachment. So why would House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio opt for a lawsuit instead of impeachment?

Here are three reasons why:

Republican Voters Want To Impeach The President Good Luck With That

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and other Republicans calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama might want to take a look at the history books and the U.S. Constitution before getting too excited about the idea.

Congress rarely uses its power to impeach, and when it has, impeachment has only infrequently — and in the case of a president, never — resulted in removal from office. Congress has initiated impeachment proceedings more than 60 times in the history of the United States. Just 19 of those cases have been tried by the Senate, and only eight federal judges have ever been convicted and removed from office.

Although House Speaker John Boehner has maintained he is not interested in pursuing impeachment, a top White House aide said Friday that he expected House Republicans to do just that. And a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that one-third of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans believe Obama should be impeached. These numbers reflect an increasingly popular view in conservative circles, which Palin gave voice to earlier this month when she claimed the recent surge of undocumented immigrants at the border was an example of the president’s “rewarding of lawlessness.”

So, why do some conservatives appear to think this would be more of a Nixon than a Clinton situation?

Rep. Bob Goodlatte , chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, earlier this month offered perhaps the most sober rebuke to the calls for impeachment.

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Hundreds Of Historians Join A Call For Trumps Impeachment

More than 300 historians and constitutional scholars have signed an open letter calling for the impeachment and removal of President Trump. They say his continuation in office after encouraging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol posed a clear and present danger to American democracy and the national security of the United States.

Those who signed the letter, released on Medium on Monday, include best-selling authors like Ron Chernow, Taylor Branch, Garry Wills and Stacy Schiff, as well as many leading academic historians. A number of the signatories had joined a previous letter in December 2019, calling for the presidents impeachment because of numerous and flagrant abuses of power including failure to protect the integrity of the impending 2020 election.

Since November 2020, the new letter says, Trump has refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, something no president before him has ever done.

Politically, the condemnation by historians may carry less weight than the presidents loss of support in recent days from business groups that once supported him or his policies. But David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers who drafted the new letter, said that historical expertise mattered.

In September, the American Historical Association issued a statement condemning the first White House History Conference, held at the National Archives .

Public Debate Over Impeachment Demands

In terms of background, U.S. public opinion widely opposed efforts made to impeach previous Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. CNN Polling Director Keating Holland has stated that their organization found that 69% opposed impeaching President Bush in 2006.

According to a July 2014 YouGov poll, 35% of Americans believed President Obama should be impeached, including 68% of Republicans. Later that month, a CNN survey found that about two thirds of adult Americans disagreed with impeachment efforts. The data showed intense partisan divides, with 57% of Republicans supporting the efforts compared to only 35% of independents and 13% of Democrats.

On July 8, 2014, the former Governor of Alaska and 2008 RepublicanVice Presidential nomineeSarah Palin publicly called for Obama’s impeachment for “purposeful dereliction of duty”. In a full statement, she said: “Itâs time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.”

Andrew McCarthy of the National Review wrote the book Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case For Obama’s Impeachment, which argued that threatening impeachment was a good way to limit executive action by Obama .

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Is The Supreme Court Likely To Save Obamacare

The Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Conservative justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law a long-held Republican goal.

The courts three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety and presumably would form a majority by joining a decision that cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it.

Leading a group of Democratic-controlled states, California and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are urging the court to leave the law in place.

A decision is expected by late spring.

Meet The Impeachment Crowd: 6 Republicans Who Want Obama Out

Trump Asks Why GOP Didn’t Impeach Obama for IRS Scandal, Obamacare Promise, Iran Cash Payment

From Sarah Palin to Tom Coburn, several Republicans are calling for impeachment.

— intro: Has President Obamas use of the pen and phone to circumvent Congress gotten out of hand?

Some members of the GOP seem to think so.

Even as the embattled president fights criticism over the escalating humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, the release of Arm. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in return for five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, and the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, a mounting chorus of Republicans are calling for impeachment.

Heres a list of the high-profile Republicans who want to kick the president out of office:

quicklist: 1category: title: Sarah Palin url: text: Who Is She: 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, former governor of Alaska, sometime reality show host.

What She Said: Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president. His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, No mas. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate. Its time to impeach.

When She Said It: July 8, 2014

media: 21159508caption: related:

quicklist: 2category: title: Tom Tancredo url: text: Who Is He: Former candidate for Colorado governor, 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, former congressman representing Colorados 6th Congressional District.

When He Said It: Valentines Day 2014

media: 24494513caption: related:

When He Said It: June 4, 2014

media: 24494378caption: related:

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Clyburn: Gop Will Try To Impeach Obama

Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn is predicting that Republicans will try to impeach Barack Obama so that they can put an asterisk next to the name of the first black president.

There will be some reason found to introduce an impeachment resolution, the South Carolina congressman said Tuesday on MSNBCs The Ed Show. These Republicans have decided that this president must have an asterisk by his name after he leaves office, irrespective of whether or not he gets convicted. It is their plan to introduce an impeachment resolution.

He continued, is to put an asterisk next to this first African-American president in the history of the country to put an asterisk next to his name when the history books are written.

Clyburn, a high-ranking member of Democratic leadership in the House, argued that Republicans are aiming for impeachment as a way to keep the country focused on foolishness rather than on what we need to do in order to move an agenda forward.

As far as what will spur the call to impeach, Clyburn pointed to the heated debate on immigration reform.

Obama has warned Republican leaders in Congress that if they do not act quickly on a plan to reform immigration laws, he will issue executive orders aimed at changing the system. Speaker John Boehner has said that executive actions will poison the well on any attempts to reform the laws.

Obama Administration Immigration Policy

In June 2012, Senator Jon Kyl mentioned impeachment when discussing the Obama Administration policy on immigration. He said on the Bill Bennettradio show, “if itâs bad enough and if shenanigans involved in it, then of course impeachment is always a possibility. But I donât think at this point anybody is talking about that”.

In August 2013, Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma responded to a questioner in a town hall meeting, who had asserted that Obama was failing to carry out his constitutional responsibilities, by saying that “you have to establish the criteria that would qualify for proceedings against the president… and that’s called impeachment”. Coburn added, “I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’, but I think you’re getting perilously close”. Coburn did not specify what grounds he felt would support impeachment, but NBC News noted that Coburn “mentioned that he believes Department of Homeland Security officials have told career USCIS employees to ‘ignore’ background checks for immigrants”. Coburn mentioned no evidence that substantiated his belief.

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Trumps Former Secretary Of Veterans Affairs Says He Would Vote To Remove The President From Office

David J. Shulkin, the former secretary of veterans affairs under President Trump, said on Monday that he would vote to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office if he were still in the cabinet, saying that Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he is a threat to the nation.

Theres no doubt I believe that this is the time to put the countrys interest first, and I do not believe the president should any longer be serving, Dr. Shulkin said in an interview. I believe that this is an extraordinary time of danger and challenge to the country, and I would support removal from office.

Dr. Shulkin, who said he would also support impeachment but worried it was not an efficient enough mechanism, went further than most other former Trump cabinet secretaries have gone in calling for the presidents removal from office. John F. Kelly, who served as Mr. Trumps secretary of homeland security before becoming White House chief of staff, has also said he would support invoking the 25th Amendment while other Trump cabinet veterans like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and former Attorney General William P. Barr have offered scathing criticism without explicitly calling for Mr. Trumps removal.

Trump’s Former Chief Of Staff Is On Capitol Hill To Meet With The Impeachment Team

From CNN’s Kristin Wilson

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that the Democrats opening argument was pretty much what I was expecting and that its hard to make a good case when you have an unconstitutional process.

He said hes spoken with former President Trump on a regular basis but had not spoken with him about the opening arguments at the Senate trial.

When asked why he was on Capitol Hill, he said, I’m just coming over to meet with the impeachment team and said that he will be with them sporadically over the course of the trial.

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But It Would Be A Boneheaded Move For Numerous Reasons

When Congress heads off on its upcoming five-week recess, some Republicans, at town halls with constituents, will bring up the “I” word: impeachment. Barack Obama, they’ll say, needs to be removed from office. The reasons, in their view, are many: Benghazi. The IRS. An inability to control the Mexican border, to name but three. The constitutional standard for removal from office in Article II, Section 4 is “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” and to the far right, Obama more than qualifies.

Talking tough about impeachment is what constituents in gerrymandered Republican districts want to hear. It’s good red-meat politics. But back here on planet Earth, the reality is this: There’s about as much chance of Obama being removed from office as there is of Nancy Pelosi throwing the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. It’s just not going to happen. The probability is literally zero.

Here are some numbers: A CNN poll last week said one third of Americans want Obama impeached. Just a liberal media poll, you say? Well, a Fox News survey last week said the same thing. And that one third just happens to coincide more or less with the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Republicans. Fact is, vast majorities of independent voters and Democrats oppose removing the president from office.

So the Republican dream of Obama being forced from office making Joe Biden the 45th president simply isn’t going to happen.

President’s Constitutional Duty To Faithfully Execute The Laws

On December 3, 2013, the House Judiciary committee held a hearing formally titled “The President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws”, which some participants and observers viewed as an attempt to begin justifying impeachment proceedings. Asked if the hearing was about impeachment, the committee chairman responded that it was not, adding, “I didn’t mention impeachment nor did any of the witnesses in response to my questions at the Judiciary Committee hearing.” Contrary to his claims however, a witness did mention impeachment rather blatantly. Partisan Georgetown University law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz said, âA check on executive lawlessness is impeachmentâ as he accused Obama of âclaim the right of the king to essentially stand above the law.â

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The State Department Labels Cuba A State Sponsor Of Terrorism In A Last

The State Department has designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, a last-minute foreign policy stroke that will complicate the incoming Biden administrations plans for dealing with Havana.

With this action, we will once again hold Cubas government accountable and send a clear message: The Castro regime must end its support for international terrorism and subversion of U.S. justice, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.

The New York Times reported last month that Mr. Pompeo was weighing the move and had a plan to do so on his desk. The action, announced with just over a week left in the Trump administration, reverses a step taken in 2015 after President Barack Obama restored U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba, calling its decades of isolation an archaic relic of the Cold War.

Once in office, President Trump acted swiftly to undermine Mr. Obamas policy of openness, which Republicans said Havana forfeited by failing to implement promised reforms and continuing to crack down on political dissent. The designation requires a finding that a country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism, according to the State Department. The move automatically triggers U.S. sanctions against Cuba, including limits on U.S. foreign assistance, export controls and financial restrictions.

What Did Trump Say About Obamacare

Why Republicans want Hunter Biden to testify in Trump’s impeachment trial

President Trump has been actively trying to repeal the healthcare law since he campaigned for the 2016 presidential election.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to revoke Obamacare because it’s been an “unlawful failure.”

A brief filed in June asked the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, arguing it became invalid after Congress axed parts of it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “President Trump and the Republicans campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty.

“If President Trump gets his way, 130 million Americans with pre-existing conditions will lose the ACAs lifesaving protections and 23 million Americans will lose their health coverage entirely.

“There is no legal justification and no moral excuse for the Trump Administrations disastrous efforts to take away Americans health care.”

Republicans also argue that some people are better off without Obamacare due to the fact that it does not cover those who need it most.

According to the provisions, people who earn just slightly too much to qualify for federal premium subsidies, particularly early retirees and people in their 50s and early 60s who are self-employed are not covered.

Trump endorsed a replacement to Obamacare in 2017 but fell short of passing the Republican-controlled Congress.

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Trump’s Rhetoric On Impeachment In 2014 Becomes Relevant Anew

In his unhinged letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, Donald Trump told the congressional leader, “You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!” The president went on to suggest via Twitter this morning that he’s concerned about impeachment being made “trivial.”

He appears to have arrived at these concerns quite recently.

It wasn’t long ago, for example, that Trump wanted Pelosi to impeach George W. Bush for having launched the Iraq war. “He got us into the war with lies!” Trump said in 2008.

His attitude toward impeaching Barack Obama was even more cavalier. “Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?” Trump wrote on Twitter in June 2014.

Several months later, after Republicans took complete control over both houses of Congress, Trump appeared on Fox & Friends and was asked what he’d like to see the new GOP majorities do. Trump replied that he wanted Republicans to impeach the Democratic president.

“Do you think Obama seriously wants to be impeached and go through what Bill Clinton did? He would be a mess. He would be thinking about nothing but. It would be a horror show for him. It would be an absolute embarrassment. It would go down on his record permanently.”

It wasn’t altogether clear what it was Obama did that Trump saw as worthy of impeachment; Trump simply seemed to like the idea of trying to rattle Obama on a personal level.

Does this sound like anyone else you know?

Donald Trump Claims Republicans ‘never Even Thought Of Impeaching’ Barack Obama History Tells A Different Story

President Donald Trump claimed that Republicans “never even thought of impeaching” Barack Obama, despite the record showing that many spoke of doing so over multiple issues.

In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump called on Republicans to get tougher and said that while he thinks Democrats are bad politicians with lousy policies he respects that they stick together. And, Trump said, Democrats are vicious.

“They’re much more vicious. We would never do a thing like this,” Trump told Hannity of the current House impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine affair in which the president is accused of soliciting the help of a foreign government in the 2020 election.

” could’ve impeached Obama for the IRS scandal, they could’ve impeached him for the guns or whatever, where guns went all over the place and people got killed with guns, Fast and Furious. They could’ve impeached him for many different things. They didn’t impeach him. They never even thought of impeaching him.”

In fact, Republicans in Congress did raise the impeachment of Obama multiple times.

Ex-GOP Congressman Predicts Republicans Could Flip on Trump Over Doral

In 2010, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa called the alleged White House job offer to ex-Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak if he dropped out of a Senate primary “a crime, and could be impeachable” for Obama, Fox News reported.

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Why Do Republicans Want To Impeach Obama

Obama A Republican Congress And Impeachment

GOP Faithful Want Obama Impeached, Why? He’s Obama, That’s Why

Some Republicans are eager to impeach the President. Some are so eager that they go on the record saying that impeachment would probably pass the House. Representatives Barletta , Farenthold , and Senator Cruz say that the only obstacle is the Democratic Senate, which would not convict the President. The Washington Posts Jonathan Capehart took this a step further and argued Republican control of the Senate could result in President Obamas impeachment.

Regardless of who controls the Senate, the rationale presented by Cruz, Barletta, and Farenthold makes no sense. In no immediate future will Republicans control enough votes two-thirds of the Senate to remove the president from office. In order to reach the 66 vote threshold, Republicans need to win every single Senate election in November. Democrats may lose the Senate majority. However, no one believes Democrats will lose every single Senate race. More reasonable forecasts suggest Republicans will gain 5-6 seats. That is enough for a majority but not close to the amount necessary to remove Obama from office. In sum, there is no situation in which not having the votes is the reason impeachment has not been pursued.

There is a reasonable argument that the Republican Party, with a House majority insulated from electoral pain through a combination of safe districts packed with conservative constituents, would not hesitate to impeach Obama. He has been enemy number one since he stepped into office.

Efforts To Impeach Barack Obama

This article is part of a series about

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During Barack Obama‘s tenure as President of the United States from 2009 to 2017, certain Republican members of Congress, as well as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, stated that Obama had engaged in impeachable activity and that he might face attempts to remove him from office. Rationales offered for possible impeachment ranged from Obama allowing people to use bathrooms based on their gender identity, to the 2012 Benghazi attack, to Obama’s enforcement of immigration laws, and false claims that he was born outside the United States.

Multiple surveys of U.S. public opinion found that a near supermajority of Americans rejected the idea of impeaching Obama, though a bit more than a simple majority of Republicans did support such efforts. For example, CNN found in July 2014 that 57% of Republicans supported impeachment, but in general, 65% of American adults, disagreed with impeachment with only 33% supporting such efforts.

How President Obama Will Be Impeached

Writing about Rep. Eric Cantors  stunning primary defeat last week, I warned Democrats that the House majority leaders loss was as much a wake-up call for them as it was for the GOP. Well, now I want to warn them about a very real possibility: President Obama will be impeached if the Democrats lose control of the U.S. Senate.

Yeah, yeah, I read Aaron Blakes astute piece in The Post on the impeachment process. He says probably not to the question of whether the House could impeach Obama. But probably is not definitely. And with the way the impeachment talk has gone, probably not could become absolutely if the Senate flips to the Republicans.

Rep. Lou Barletta became the latest to openly discuss impeaching the president. In response to a question from a radio host on Monday, the two-term congressman who was swept in during the tea party wave of 2010, said, Obama is just absolutely ignoring the Constitution and ignoring the laws and ignoring the checks and balances. Articles of impeachment, he added, probably could pass in the House.

In a later interview, Barletta said one of the reasons he wouldnt vote for impeachment was because a Democrat-controlled Senate would never convict the Democrat president. Blake also mentions this parenthetically in his piece. Others who have talked about impeachment point to this as the reason not to pursue the extraordinary political rebuke.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter:

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Reasons John Boehner Opted To Sue Obama Rather Than Impeach

While most Republicans favor impeachment, John Boehner recalls the losses that Republicans sustained in 1998 midterm elections, during the Clinton impeachment.

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In a near party-line vote, House Republicans on Wednesday approved 225 to 201 a resolution to sue President Obama or other administration officials for actions inconsistent with their duties under the Constitution.

Translation: Republicans accuse the president of executive overreach exceeding his constitutional powers and unlawfully going around Congress.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls the lawsuit “perilous and meritless.” President Obama dismissed it as a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. “Stop being mad all the time. Stop just hating all the time. Come on,” the president said during a speech in Kansas City, Mo., earlier in the day.

Some Republicans, such as former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, want the House to go further and impeach the president. A CNN poll last week shows that the majority of Republicans favor impeachment. So why would House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio opt for a lawsuit instead of impeachment?

Here are three reasons why:

Republican Voters Want To Impeach The President Good Luck With That

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and other Republicans calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama might want to take a look at the history books and the U.S. Constitution before getting too excited about the idea.

Congress rarely uses its power to impeach, and when it has, impeachment has only infrequently — and in the case of a president, never — resulted in removal from office. Congress has initiated impeachment proceedings more than 60 times in the history of the United States. Just 19 of those cases have been tried by the Senate, and only eight federal judges have ever been convicted and removed from office.

Although House Speaker John Boehner has maintained he is not interested in pursuing impeachment, a top White House aide said Friday that he expected House Republicans to do just that. And a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that one-third of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans believe Obama should be impeached. These numbers reflect an increasingly popular view in conservative circles, which Palin gave voice to earlier this month when she claimed the recent surge of undocumented immigrants at the border was an example of the president’s “rewarding of lawlessness.”

So, why do some conservatives appear to think this would be more of a Nixon than a Clinton situation?

Rep. Bob Goodlatte , chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, earlier this month offered perhaps the most sober rebuke to the calls for impeachment.

Recommended Reading: How Many Republicans Are Against Trump

Hundreds Of Historians Join A Call For Trumps Impeachment

More than 300 historians and constitutional scholars have signed an open letter calling for the impeachment and removal of President Trump. They say his continuation in office after encouraging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol posed a clear and present danger to American democracy and the national security of the United States.

Those who signed the letter, released on Medium on Monday, include best-selling authors like Ron Chernow, Taylor Branch, Garry Wills and Stacy Schiff, as well as many leading academic historians. A number of the signatories had joined a previous letter in December 2019, calling for the presidents impeachment because of numerous and flagrant abuses of power including failure to protect the integrity of the impending 2020 election.

Since November 2020, the new letter says, Trump has refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, something no president before him has ever done.

Politically, the condemnation by historians may carry less weight than the presidents loss of support in recent days from business groups that once supported him or his policies. But David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers who drafted the new letter, said that historical expertise mattered.

In September, the American Historical Association issued a statement condemning the first White House History Conference, held at the National Archives .

Public Debate Over Impeachment Demands

In terms of background, U.S. public opinion widely opposed efforts made to impeach previous Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. CNN Polling Director Keating Holland has stated that their organization found that 69% opposed impeaching President Bush in 2006.

According to a July 2014 YouGov poll, 35% of Americans believed President Obama should be impeached, including 68% of Republicans. Later that month, a CNN survey found that about two thirds of adult Americans disagreed with impeachment efforts. The data showed intense partisan divides, with 57% of Republicans supporting the efforts compared to only 35% of independents and 13% of Democrats.

On July 8, 2014, the former Governor of Alaska and 2008 RepublicanVice Presidential nomineeSarah Palin publicly called for Obama’s impeachment for “purposeful dereliction of duty”. In a full statement, she said: “Itâs time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.”

Andrew McCarthy of the National Review wrote the book Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case For Obama’s Impeachment, which argued that threatening impeachment was a good way to limit executive action by Obama .

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Is The Supreme Court Likely To Save Obamacare

The Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Conservative justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law a long-held Republican goal.

The courts three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety and presumably would form a majority by joining a decision that cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it.

Leading a group of Democratic-controlled states, California and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are urging the court to leave the law in place.

A decision is expected by late spring.

Meet The Impeachment Crowd: 6 Republicans Who Want Obama Out

Trump Asks Why GOP Didn’t Impeach Obama for IRS Scandal, Obamacare Promise, Iran Cash Payment

From Sarah Palin to Tom Coburn, several Republicans are calling for impeachment.

— intro: Has President Obamas use of the pen and phone to circumvent Congress gotten out of hand?

Some members of the GOP seem to think so.

Even as the embattled president fights criticism over the escalating humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, the release of Arm. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in return for five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, and the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, a mounting chorus of Republicans are calling for impeachment.

Heres a list of the high-profile Republicans who want to kick the president out of office:

quicklist: 1category: title: Sarah Palin url: text: Who Is She: 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, former governor of Alaska, sometime reality show host.

What She Said: Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president. His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, No mas. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate. Its time to impeach.

When She Said It: July 8, 2014

media: 21159508caption: related:

quicklist: 2category: title: Tom Tancredo url: text: Who Is He: Former candidate for Colorado governor, 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, former congressman representing Colorados 6th Congressional District.

When He Said It: Valentines Day 2014

media: 24494513caption: related:

When He Said It: June 4, 2014

media: 24494378caption: related:

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Clyburn: Gop Will Try To Impeach Obama

Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn is predicting that Republicans will try to impeach Barack Obama so that they can put an asterisk next to the name of the first black president.

There will be some reason found to introduce an impeachment resolution, the South Carolina congressman said Tuesday on MSNBCs The Ed Show. These Republicans have decided that this president must have an asterisk by his name after he leaves office, irrespective of whether or not he gets convicted. It is their plan to introduce an impeachment resolution.

He continued, is to put an asterisk next to this first African-American president in the history of the country to put an asterisk next to his name when the history books are written.

Clyburn, a high-ranking member of Democratic leadership in the House, argued that Republicans are aiming for impeachment as a way to keep the country focused on foolishness rather than on what we need to do in order to move an agenda forward.

As far as what will spur the call to impeach, Clyburn pointed to the heated debate on immigration reform.

Obama has warned Republican leaders in Congress that if they do not act quickly on a plan to reform immigration laws, he will issue executive orders aimed at changing the system. Speaker John Boehner has said that executive actions will poison the well on any attempts to reform the laws.

Obama Administration Immigration Policy

In June 2012, Senator Jon Kyl mentioned impeachment when discussing the Obama Administration policy on immigration. He said on the Bill Bennettradio show, “if itâs bad enough and if shenanigans involved in it, then of course impeachment is always a possibility. But I donât think at this point anybody is talking about that”.

In August 2013, Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma responded to a questioner in a town hall meeting, who had asserted that Obama was failing to carry out his constitutional responsibilities, by saying that “you have to establish the criteria that would qualify for proceedings against the president… and that’s called impeachment”. Coburn added, “I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’, but I think you’re getting perilously close”. Coburn did not specify what grounds he felt would support impeachment, but NBC News noted that Coburn “mentioned that he believes Department of Homeland Security officials have told career USCIS employees to ‘ignore’ background checks for immigrants”. Coburn mentioned no evidence that substantiated his belief.

Also Check: Did Republicans Block Funding For Election Security

Trumps Former Secretary Of Veterans Affairs Says He Would Vote To Remove The President From Office

David J. Shulkin, the former secretary of veterans affairs under President Trump, said on Monday that he would vote to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office if he were still in the cabinet, saying that Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he is a threat to the nation.

Theres no doubt I believe that this is the time to put the countrys interest first, and I do not believe the president should any longer be serving, Dr. Shulkin said in an interview. I believe that this is an extraordinary time of danger and challenge to the country, and I would support removal from office.

Dr. Shulkin, who said he would also support impeachment but worried it was not an efficient enough mechanism, went further than most other former Trump cabinet secretaries have gone in calling for the presidents removal from office. John F. Kelly, who served as Mr. Trumps secretary of homeland security before becoming White House chief of staff, has also said he would support invoking the 25th Amendment while other Trump cabinet veterans like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and former Attorney General William P. Barr have offered scathing criticism without explicitly calling for Mr. Trumps removal.

Trump’s Former Chief Of Staff Is On Capitol Hill To Meet With The Impeachment Team

From CNN’s Kristin Wilson

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that the Democrats opening argument was pretty much what I was expecting and that its hard to make a good case when you have an unconstitutional process.

He said hes spoken with former President Trump on a regular basis but had not spoken with him about the opening arguments at the Senate trial.

When asked why he was on Capitol Hill, he said, I’m just coming over to meet with the impeachment team and said that he will be with them sporadically over the course of the trial.

Recommended Reading: Why Did Republicans Lose The Election

But It Would Be A Boneheaded Move For Numerous Reasons

When Congress heads off on its upcoming five-week recess, some Republicans, at town halls with constituents, will bring up the “I” word: impeachment. Barack Obama, they’ll say, needs to be removed from office. The reasons, in their view, are many: Benghazi. The IRS. An inability to control the Mexican border, to name but three. The constitutional standard for removal from office in Article II, Section 4 is “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” and to the far right, Obama more than qualifies.

Talking tough about impeachment is what constituents in gerrymandered Republican districts want to hear. It’s good red-meat politics. But back here on planet Earth, the reality is this: There’s about as much chance of Obama being removed from office as there is of Nancy Pelosi throwing the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. It’s just not going to happen. The probability is literally zero.

Here are some numbers: A CNN poll last week said one third of Americans want Obama impeached. Just a liberal media poll, you say? Well, a Fox News survey last week said the same thing. And that one third just happens to coincide more or less with the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Republicans. Fact is, vast majorities of independent voters and Democrats oppose removing the president from office.

So the Republican dream of Obama being forced from office making Joe Biden the 45th president simply isn’t going to happen.

President’s Constitutional Duty To Faithfully Execute The Laws

On December 3, 2013, the House Judiciary committee held a hearing formally titled “The President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws”, which some participants and observers viewed as an attempt to begin justifying impeachment proceedings. Asked if the hearing was about impeachment, the committee chairman responded that it was not, adding, “I didn’t mention impeachment nor did any of the witnesses in response to my questions at the Judiciary Committee hearing.” Contrary to his claims however, a witness did mention impeachment rather blatantly. Partisan Georgetown University law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz said, âA check on executive lawlessness is impeachmentâ as he accused Obama of âclaim the right of the king to essentially stand above the law.â

Recommended Reading: How Many Seats Do Republicans Hold In Congress

The State Department Labels Cuba A State Sponsor Of Terrorism In A Last

The State Department has designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, a last-minute foreign policy stroke that will complicate the incoming Biden administrations plans for dealing with Havana.

With this action, we will once again hold Cubas government accountable and send a clear message: The Castro regime must end its support for international terrorism and subversion of U.S. justice, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.

The New York Times reported last month that Mr. Pompeo was weighing the move and had a plan to do so on his desk. The action, announced with just over a week left in the Trump administration, reverses a step taken in 2015 after President Barack Obama restored U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba, calling its decades of isolation an archaic relic of the Cold War.

Once in office, President Trump acted swiftly to undermine Mr. Obamas policy of openness, which Republicans said Havana forfeited by failing to implement promised reforms and continuing to crack down on political dissent. The designation requires a finding that a country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism, according to the State Department. The move automatically triggers U.S. sanctions against Cuba, including limits on U.S. foreign assistance, export controls and financial restrictions.

What Did Trump Say About Obamacare

Why Republicans want Hunter Biden to testify in Trump’s impeachment trial

President Trump has been actively trying to repeal the healthcare law since he campaigned for the 2016 presidential election.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to revoke Obamacare because it’s been an “unlawful failure.”

A brief filed in June asked the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, arguing it became invalid after Congress axed parts of it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “President Trump and the Republicans campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty.

“If President Trump gets his way, 130 million Americans with pre-existing conditions will lose the ACAs lifesaving protections and 23 million Americans will lose their health coverage entirely.

“There is no legal justification and no moral excuse for the Trump Administrations disastrous efforts to take away Americans health care.”

Republicans also argue that some people are better off without Obamacare due to the fact that it does not cover those who need it most.

According to the provisions, people who earn just slightly too much to qualify for federal premium subsidies, particularly early retirees and people in their 50s and early 60s who are self-employed are not covered.

Trump endorsed a replacement to Obamacare in 2017 but fell short of passing the Republican-controlled Congress.

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Trump’s Rhetoric On Impeachment In 2014 Becomes Relevant Anew

In his unhinged letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, Donald Trump told the congressional leader, “You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!” The president went on to suggest via Twitter this morning that he’s concerned about impeachment being made “trivial.”

He appears to have arrived at these concerns quite recently.

It wasn’t long ago, for example, that Trump wanted Pelosi to impeach George W. Bush for having launched the Iraq war. “He got us into the war with lies!” Trump said in 2008.

His attitude toward impeaching Barack Obama was even more cavalier. “Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?” Trump wrote on Twitter in June 2014.

Several months later, after Republicans took complete control over both houses of Congress, Trump appeared on Fox & Friends and was asked what he’d like to see the new GOP majorities do. Trump replied that he wanted Republicans to impeach the Democratic president.

“Do you think Obama seriously wants to be impeached and go through what Bill Clinton did? He would be a mess. He would be thinking about nothing but. It would be a horror show for him. It would be an absolute embarrassment. It would go down on his record permanently.”

It wasn’t altogether clear what it was Obama did that Trump saw as worthy of impeachment; Trump simply seemed to like the idea of trying to rattle Obama on a personal level.

Does this sound like anyone else you know?

Donald Trump Claims Republicans ‘never Even Thought Of Impeaching’ Barack Obama History Tells A Different Story

President Donald Trump claimed that Republicans “never even thought of impeaching” Barack Obama, despite the record showing that many spoke of doing so over multiple issues.

In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump called on Republicans to get tougher and said that while he thinks Democrats are bad politicians with lousy policies he respects that they stick together. And, Trump said, Democrats are vicious.

“They’re much more vicious. We would never do a thing like this,” Trump told Hannity of the current House impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine affair in which the president is accused of soliciting the help of a foreign government in the 2020 election.

” could’ve impeached Obama for the IRS scandal, they could’ve impeached him for the guns or whatever, where guns went all over the place and people got killed with guns, Fast and Furious. They could’ve impeached him for many different things. They didn’t impeach him. They never even thought of impeaching him.”

In fact, Republicans in Congress did raise the impeachment of Obama multiple times.

Ex-GOP Congressman Predicts Republicans Could Flip on Trump Over Doral

In 2010, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa called the alleged White House job offer to ex-Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak if he dropped out of a Senate primary “a crime, and could be impeachable” for Obama, Fox News reported.

Read Also: What Republicans Are Running For President

source https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-want-to-impeach-obama/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF LOT

Number one will be your dissertation. All that matters is how hard the project is all your own. Maybe. For good programmers, how would you even do that? This idea was strongest at Harvard, where there wasn't even a CS major till the 1980s; till then one had to major in applied math. 7636 free 0. Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was kicked out of grad school for writing the Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out without the stigma of failure.

I have no idea how wide this band is, but if so this is a bit of a fib. There are specific implications. Fights between founders are surprisingly common. If you're hard enough to sell to, the people who are really good at acting formidable often solve this problem by giving investors the impression that while no investors have committed yet, several are about to. It's not unheard of for VCs to meet you when they have no intention of funding you, just to be able to benefit from it, but my mental models of the crusades, Venice, medieval culture, siege warfare, and so on. White than from an academic philosopher. I'm not suggesting that founders start companies with no chance of making money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. 9998 Subject free 0. If a language is itself an object-oriented program, it can be extended by users. Starting a startup is worth investing in. Add up all the evidence of VCs' behavior, and the various departments created recently in response to disasters they've suffered, or probably more often by hiring people from bigger companies who bring with them customs for protecting against new types of disasters.

Then you've sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency. The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. The process inherently tends to produce an unpleasant result, like a prophet, that there would soon be a computer with half a MIPS of processing power that would fit under an airline seat and cost so little that we could save enough to buy one from a summer job. And while there are many popular books on math, few seem good. Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. The other two were a notice that something I bought was back-ordered, and a party reminder from Evite. Which doesn't mean I couldn't have read more attentively, but at least the harvest of reading is not so much that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, perhaps millions, just to pick your brain for a competitor. But it was also something we'd never considered a computer could be: fabulously well designed.

Should you go? If you want to improve your chances, you should think far more about who you can recruit as a cofounder than the state of the economy. The way to seem most formidable as an inexperienced founder is to stick to the truth. Fortunately it's usually the least committed founder who leaves. This lets me get ip addresses and prices intact. All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. As a result it became massively successful. And starting with a crude version 1 was, if I remember so little from them? And the core problem. Microsoft's biggest weakness is that they don't share the opinions of the elite are liberal, polls will tend to underestimate the conservativeness of ordinary voters. The companies that win are the ones you never hear about: the company that would be the best source of advice, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed.

Fortunately it's usually the least committed founder who leaves. The answer, I realized, is that my m. You launch something, the early adopters try it out, and if not they focus on the latter. But again, the only reason VCs are so sneaky is the giant deals they do. When I read the papers I found out why. Subject FREE! You might think a high valuation unless you can somehow achieve what those in the business call a liquidity event, and the resulting personality is not attractive. It works, but you shouldn't have to express every program as the definition of new types. You'd think this lesson would be too obvious to mention, but I've had to learn it several times. Filtering is an optimization problem, and the classics.

But for any given idea, the payoff for acting fast in a bad economy. Yesterday one of the big successes? Formidable is roughly justifiably confident. They insist on it. What about grad school? Yesterday one of the things they're doing is breaking up and misspelling words to prevent filters from recognizing them. I can type, then spend several weeks rewriting it.

Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks explained it in The Mythical Man-Month. But there's nothing to stop you starting new projects of your own to sit in front of a VT100 connected to a single central Vax. Certainly some rejected Google. And if you're worried about threats to the survival of your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill. Was I worried? In a sense there's just one founder. It seems unlikely this is a kind of learning, based on disasters that have happened to it or others like it. The most important ingredient in a startup is that they know it's a bad investment.

Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. So the solution may be to imagine now, manufacturing was a growth industry in the mid 80s. They think they're trying to convince investors of something so much less speculative—whether the company has all the elements of a good bet—that you can approach the problem in a qualitatively different way. Next year you'll have to explain how your startup was viral. If you try to solve? This is sometimes referred to as runway, as in a lot of things e. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. The most obvious is Google. But of course what makes investing so counterintuitive is that in equity markets, good times are defined as everyone thinking it's time to raise money grows with the amount. This article was given as a talk at the 2003 Spam Conference. I see there's more to it than that. I unconsciously lumped reading together with work like carpentry, where having to do something you should.

[megacircuit9universe]

Protocol P?

WED MAR 17 2020

Well, Biden won all three states, Illinois, Florida, and Arizona tonight... by large margins.

I’d been hoping the current pandemic crisis would swing the voting public back to Bernie (FDR of health care) but I was wrong.

I didn’t stop to think about the fact that voter turnout would be low... thanks to fears of contracting the virus, especially in largely populated Illinois, and Florida.

I also hoped that since all the schools had closed, all the college students would be home near their polling places and go and vote but... that didn’t materialize either.  Some did, I’m sure.  I saw two young guys at my relatively tiny polling place.

But this week is also Spring Break, which meant a lot of college aged voters were in fucking Florida, out on the beaches, with no intention of either voting, or even bothering to take social distancing seriously.

And then lastly, there is the 2008 factor, which I mentioned two entries ago.

It’s not just the stock markets now, but the growing realization that all of the quarantining, and closing of businesses is gonna last for months, rather than weeks... ensuring a lengthy recession, rather than a brief economic slowdown.

That fear, at least today, overshadowed those of a health care crisis, and I think gave Biden the edge, as he was on the ticket with Obama back in 2008 when we had our last serious economic storm... thus feels a safer bet.

Also, we all know the economy was key to Trump’s invulnerability... to special council investigations... to impeachment... to any kind of defeat.

With that now scuttled... and with Joe Biden having miraculously made it through the final debate of the primary season without betraying any cognitive decline... sure why not go with Joe?  

Suddenly Trump looks totally defeatable by Joe Biden.  

Now, I would argue that the primary voters are all missing the bigger picture.  Yes, everybody remembers 2008... and yes, over the past 12 years of nonstop economic growth, it’s come to be fairly mythical... even being now referred to as The Great Recession.

But 2020 also has strong resonance with the Great Depression itself... even if that’s left the realm of living memory. It resonates with WW2, with complaints about hoarders, and talk of rationing... and just the general feel of that we are all going to be making sacrifices together for a common cause.

If people took modern history seriously... they’d be looking for another FDR, as opposed to another Obama.

But... boomers don’t give a shit about anything that happened before 1960... Millennials, apparently don’t give a shit about anything... and GenZ is  just too young to comprehend that history has just arrived to fuck them over... like it did to Millennials... and that it didn’t have to be this way.

At this point, it looks like it’s over for Bernie Sanders... barring some miracle.  But since Joe Biden seems to have the market cornered on miracles in this primary contest... I’ve got to admit, Bernie is now toast.

The best hope, now, I suppose, is that Biden beats Trump because of the coming recession... but is also forced to lead the way toward universal health care against his will... because of the immense pressure of the Covid19 crisis, and it’s long lasting after effects.

That, however, is a game for the fall.

For this reason, however, I do think Bernie should stay in the race until the convention... to keep that pressure on the DNC.

Okay... all of that said, let’s look at my model!..

Collective Unconscious, Aliens, Time Travelers, and AI...

The concept of the collective unconscious hasn’t changed much in the past several months. If anything, the few new discoveries on the quantum scene still tend to support it’s possibility, but it remains just as useless as ever, as a tool to get any big social change to happen over a short period of time.

Aliens, of course, are still aliens... just trolling the military once in a while, but pretty much staying out of world affairs as always. 

Time Travelers, however... this is interesting to think about right now.  Because at this specific point in history, where Covid19 is ravaging the globe, but there is not yet a vaccine... ya might think time travelers would steer clear.

Nobody wants to show up in 2020, only to accidentally bring a novel virus back home to their 2038, or 2045, or 2062.

It could be a virus specific to just our timeline that they have no immunity to.  In fact, we would expect any pandemic virus to be specific to only one timeline, given the way that viruses evolve and cross species so randomly. 

But if so, then no time traveler would have any warning about Covid19 before landing on our specific timeline for the first time.

It therefore makes sense that time travelers would probably be working under a protocol to be extremely careful in the field, and undergo quarantine when arriving back home.  

This would mean that time travelers, like us today in 2020, would probably all be very much loners, avoiding all social contact, keeping their distance from people, using PPE, washing their hands a lot, and also just taking the time after a landing, to assess whether or not a pandemic was going on in the worldline... in which case... leave immediately.

This does, however, leave the possibility of rogue time travelers actually spreading diseases between timelines.

But, if that were the case, we’d expect pandemics to start out of unexpected localities... rather than Wuhan China all the time... which is historically where they always come from, dating back to the black plague.

Could Covid19 be a deliberate plant, by a Time Traveler?  Not likely, given my model’s assumption of their top rule which is, First Do No Harm, as discussed in past entries.

Not unless leaders in the future had overwhelming intel coming in from all the explored worldlines of the hyperverse, that the ones in which Donald Trump... (known threat to Democracy in the teens and twenties where his hyperversal twins exist)... fails to establish a dictatorship once in power... are always ones in which a pandemic strikes the globe in his first term.*

If that were the case, then it would be a last resort, but still justifiable, if the loss of life due to the pandemic was far less than if Trump established a dictatorship... with the hardship on the people of the world being far less brutal as well.

In such a scenario, we would expect the viral agent to be one which spreads rapidly enough to grip the globe in a matter of months... but not deadly enough to claim many lives... and one which spared the lives of infants and children completely.

This is what we have... and it took hold in China just after Trump was impeached by the House, when his acquittal by the Senate seemed a certainty.

However, for such a “Protocol P (for Pandemic),” to work, it would have to be deployed, not by a human time traveler, but by the bots they’ve left behind in the timelines (who, in earlier entries, I’ve examined, can actually get updates from the future.)

It would require there to be an existing candidate virus strain... in the time period (2000 to 2028, say)... in a vial in some known lab on Earth, perhaps among some family of viral strains which are all very similar, and all labeled as... not very effective for biological warfare, but we’ll keep them on file anyway... that could be obtained through mischievous means by AI bots, and deployed in Wuhan, so that it looked like a natural outbreak from China.

The economy bots were clearly very much against taking this path, but with impeachment failing... the more sophisticated bots from the future had no choice but to overrule them, and implement Protocol P.

Does this cause a rift in the bot coalition?

Maybe?

Maybe instead it provides our native economy AI bots with a new set of challenges, which will allow them to learn and grow in ways not possible when the pre-Trump status quo was the order of the day.

We do still have the gig economy and Venmo, we still do have unprecedented channels for money to flow, be they dollars and cents, as opposed to millions and billions.

Like Bush2, in his last months, Trump is beginning to embrace extremely socialist measures to keep the system from crashing... throwing billions at the markets, proposing to throw billions more at the health care industry, and even to the people.

Today he floated the idea of giving every citizen a thousand bucks a month until the quarantine is over.

Human critics say, all the money he’s throwing around will just get sucked up into a black hole, but... this is the kind of thing our self driving economy bots were designed to keep from happening... by allowing for endless little branches off the main river, for liquidity to flow into remote locations... to remote individuals... and allowing individuals novel means of generating income online, even if they only have a phone to work with.

Am I getting to spacey here?  I’m pretty far out in the weeds right now, huh?

Okay, suffice it to say, Covid19 is probably just a natural outbreak that happened to take place in an election year, when a would-be dictator happened to be President, when he happened to defeat Impeachment, and his rival party also happened to knee-cap his only viable opponent, for their own myopic reasons, and the youth did not rally to that opponent’s defense at the polls, for their own myopic reasons, and the stage was set for an inevitable dictatorship.

Or... this is Protocol P.

I dunno.

I’m just spit-balling here.

And it’s late now, so I’m going to bed.

*The idea here is that hyperversal Trumps always spend their first term dismantling the machinery of democracy and the press, to the point where they get the easy win for a second term, and then establish the dictatorship.

Given what we know of our Trump, this plan relies on a healthy economy through the first term, and a lot of finger pointing at his opposition as being out to get him.

This strategy not only stands up well against isolated natural disasters... which are limited to small regions he can throw money at, or... if it’s California, blame the Democratic leadership... but it also stands up well against major movements like impeachment... which he can spin as a Democratic witch hunt, and arm twist the compliance of a Republican Senate.

A Pandemic, however, is global... and has no individual human, or political party to blame.  It also does not differentiate between rich, poor, Democratic, or Republican, in the victims it claims.

Pandemics also, of course... will severely tank any economy, self driving or not, that doesn’t factor them in... which America’s does not, because it has no national health care system.

Thus, a pandemic would seem the best, last hope of derailing a Trump dictatorship.

[michaelfallcon]

Do Australian Baristas Really Have It Better?

Way back in 2013, Sprudge launched an investigation into barista wages in a worldwide poll that resulted in a then-enlightening find: Australia has the highest-paid baristas in the world. A second poll was later conducted, focusing solely on the land down under and providing deeper insight into the pay of its coffee workers across the country. It was concluded that on average, Aussie baristas were, in fact, being paid about $7/hour more (in USD) than their US colleagues, tips included. But with all of the charts, figures, and past discourse surrounding this topic, I still can’t help but wonder if the barista’s dreamland of free government healthcare, high wages, and personal time off that many outsiders have come to know as the Australian coffee industry is really all it’s cracked up to be.

Australia has a lot to boast about with respect to coffee—hardly new news to the coffee community. Its cafes are beautifully fitted-out with restaurant-like service and food menus to match. Competition-level baristas serve award-winning coffees priced as high as $150 AUD a cup, and overall, the cafe culture itself is globally influential, with regular mentions in popular news outlets.

When you consider all of this and the country’s running report card of coffee professionals who either win or place on the world competition stage, it’s hard to think this isn’t the place to be for a passionate barista. But one still has to ask—do higher wages and the supposed glamor of the Australian barista actually equate to a better quality of life?

“It depends,” says Sharon Akharoh, a Melbourne-based barista originally from Toronto, Canada. The average wage for a barista in Toronto is around $11/hour (the conversion between the Canadian and Australian dollar are nearly equal as of this writing), with head baristas and managers getting paid upwards of $15/hour. According to Akharoh, the long hours, busy shifts, and dealing with customers is much the same, but there are some striking differences.

“[In Toronto] I couldn’t live comfortably as a barista, so I picked up a second job bartending in the evenings,” she tells us. “And collecting tips helped to pay rent and establish a savings. I don’t need to do all of that here.”

Even though Australia’s cost of living is considerably higher, the income per week from one barista job does cover basic expenses more easily.

At press time, the average barista wage in Australia sits between $18-$25/hour. Though, the wage you receive is highly dependent on whether you’re a full-time, permanent part-time, or casual employee, your number of years of experience, and finally, how well you can negotiate your wage and benefits (including superannuation, the retirement fund paid into by employers). This leaves a lot of space for baristas to be overworked and exploited. Much to our surprise, this is the actual reality of a majority of the Australian coffee workforce.

“It’s truly the ‘Wild Wild West of Coffee’ down here,” Jessica Lambie, a Melbourne barista at St. Ali with 10 years in the industry, speaks honestly. “Most baristas are working casual and have no real job security, even though they’re being paid more per hour.”

In lieu of job security and benefits, casual baristas receive the highest rates, typically between $25-$30/hour. The Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) states that a casual employee “does not have a firm commitment in advance from an employer about how long they will be employed for, or the days (or hours) they will work. A casual employee also does not commit to all work an employer might offer.”

Like many baristas around the world, the schedule of a casual employee could change week to week, but they’re not guaranteed a set (or any) amount of hours. Furthermore, a casual employee isn’t entitled to sick/annual leave or superannuation can end their employment and also have their employment ended at any time unless there’s a contractual agreement. But for nearly all casual baristas, contract agreements are extremely rare.

In Lambie’s long tenure working in New South Wales and Victoria, she’s only signed one or two contracts. Akharoh was originally on a permanent part-time contract at her previous employer but became casual when the contract was voided after the cafe sold to new owners. Georgia O’Connor, Minor Figures Sales & Marketing Manager for the Asia-Pacific region, recalls a similar experience during her time as a barista. O’Connor’s worked in the coffee industry for a decade as well between Sydney, Melbourne, and multiple short stints in London. The only contract she ever signed was at Proud Mary Coffee as a permanent part-time employee.

According to the FWO, permanent part-time (PPT) employees work less than 38 hours a week on average, are entitled to earn annual and sick leave on a pro-rata basis, and are on ongoing employment or fixed-term contracts. In coffee, PPT baristas also earn the least, at $18-$20/hour. Yet in what seems to be an attempt to keep wage costs low but keep the bar staffed, many cafe businesses give their PPT baristas full-time hours (40-50/hours a week) on a PPT rate.

As for the books, they’ll show PPT baristas working close to 38 hours and anything extra is paid out in cash. These situations are very common, according to Lambie, who’s had cafes offer to pay out half on the books, half in cash from the jump. “In my experience, it’s been suggested I also ‘get on the dole’ [apply for welfare], and that’s happened on more than one occasion.”

For O’Connor, this was the motivating reason behind deciding herself to move to casual. “I was already working full-time hours without the pay, and I wasn’t using any of my PPT benefits. It made more sense to not have benefits but better pay.”

So do full-time baristas who work on the books actually exist? They do, but it’s seemingly only offered to the head barista position. Head baristas are often on salary, receive a set amount of sick and annual leave, and guaranteed hours each week. And that’s only if the head barista negotiates those conditions. (I’ve been told it’s more often the case that a cafe’s head barista is casual and will have almost no contracted workers on bar.)

Another major stress, especially for casual employees, is not being able to take off necessary time for health-related or personal reasons due to fears of being let go on the spot. Since the market in Australia is so saturated—notably in Melbourne—cafes can easily find a barista to fill a shift. As a result, turnover rates are high. (At least they have the benefit of nationalized Medicare, which covers basic healthcare needs affordably.)

The exploitation of cafe workers and their wages doesn’t stop there. The FWO requires hospitality businesses to pay their staff a “penalty rate,” or an increased wage, on the weekends and public holidays. To offset the penalty rate and keep from eating into a business’ bottom line, it’s normal for that cost to be passed onto customers through a 10-20% surcharge during those days. It’s also normal, albeit quietly and illegally, for businesses to not pay penalty rates and still have a weekend/public holiday surcharge. But accountability is so low, not much is done about it.

The lack of accountability and normalization of these work environments are why things have rarely changed, not just in coffee but across the hospitality industry. Australia’s wealthiest restaurant empire, the Rockpool Dining Group, was audited last year for severely underpaying workers, but it’s on rare occasion that full action is taken. Employees are not empowered to speak up due to the circumstances they’re under as uncontracted, casual employees. Doing so could result in being out of a job.

Each individual barista will have their own experience, of course, but I know I’ve only scratched the surface of the true realities here. Through whisper networks, I’ve heard accounts of wage inequality, sexual harassment/assault, and discrimination within the cafes of Australia, and perhaps one day Sprudge will investigate further to cover them. But if there’s anything that could be done to at least address barista exploitation and wage theft now, what would it be?

“Everyone should have benefits, regardless if you’re full time, PPT, or casual,” Akharoh states strongly. “Casual baristas get sick too, and I’d also like to go places on paid leave. But job security is probably the biggest thing I’d like to see change.”

O’Connor shares the same sentiment. “No matter what kind of circumstance you’re in, everyone should have a contract, be paid the same, and have superannuation. Things like sick leave, etcetera should be fairly negotiated.”

But in order for most of these ideas to come to fruition, there also needs to be actual accountability. “Something needs to change on how wages in hospitality are enforced, whether that’s by way of unions or legislation,” Lambie begins. “It needs to be policed, but nobody is doing it because they’re afraid to. And since there’s such an oversaturation of baristas, you’re going to do whatever you can to keep that job.”

To answer the original question of whether Australian baristas have it better because they’re paid more, I’m inclined to say no. It’s with our hope, though, that voicing this can inspire a turning point, and Australia can join the rest of the world in creating a more sustainable livelihood for their baristas.

Michelle Johnson is a news contributor at Sprudge Media Network, and the founder and publisher of The Chocolate Barista. Read more Michelle Johnson on Sprudge.

The post Do Australian Baristas Really Have It Better? appeared first on Sprudge.

Do Australian Baristas Really Have It Better? published first on https://medium.com/@LinLinCoffee

[shebreathesslowly]

Do Australian Baristas Really Have It Better?

Way back in 2013, Sprudge launched an investigation into barista wages in a worldwide poll that resulted in a then-enlightening find: Australia has the highest-paid baristas in the world. A second poll was later conducted, focusing solely on the land down under and providing deeper insight into the pay of its coffee workers across the country. It was concluded that on average, Aussie baristas were, in fact, being paid about $7/hour more (in USD) than their US colleagues, tips included. But with all of the charts, figures, and past discourse surrounding this topic, I still can’t help but wonder if the barista’s dreamland of free government healthcare, high wages, and personal time off that many outsiders have come to know as the Australian coffee industry is really all it’s cracked up to be.

Australia has a lot to boast about with respect to coffee—hardly new news to the coffee community. Its cafes are beautifully fitted-out with restaurant-like service and food menus to match. Competition-level baristas serve award-winning coffees priced as high as $150 AUD a cup, and overall, the cafe culture itself is globally influential, with regular mentions in popular news outlets.

When you consider all of this and the country’s running report card of coffee professionals who either win or place on the world competition stage, it’s hard to think this isn’t the place to be for a passionate barista. But one still has to ask—do higher wages and the supposed glamor of the Australian barista actually equate to a better quality of life?

“It depends,” says Sharon Akharoh, a Melbourne-based barista originally from Toronto, Canada. The average wage for a barista in Toronto is around $11/hour (the conversion between the Canadian and Australian dollar are nearly equal as of this writing), with head baristas and managers getting paid upwards of $15/hour. According to Akharoh, the long hours, busy shifts, and dealing with customers is much the same, but there are some striking differences.

“[In Toronto] I couldn’t live comfortably as a barista, so I picked up a second job bartending in the evenings,” she tells us. “And collecting tips helped to pay rent and establish a savings. I don’t need to do all of that here.”

Even though Australia’s cost of living is considerably higher, the income per week from one barista job does cover basic expenses more easily.

At press time, the average barista wage in Australia sits between $18-$25/hour. Though, the wage you receive is highly dependent on whether you’re a full-time, permanent part-time, or casual employee, your number of years of experience, and finally, how well you can negotiate your wage and benefits (including superannuation, the retirement fund paid into by employers). This leaves a lot of space for baristas to be overworked and exploited. Much to our surprise, this is the actual reality of a majority of the Australian coffee workforce.

“It’s truly the ‘Wild Wild West of Coffee’ down here,” Jessica Lambie, a Melbourne barista at St. Ali with 10 years in the industry, speaks honestly. “Most baristas are working casual and have no real job security, even though they’re being paid more per hour.”

In lieu of job security and benefits, casual baristas receive the highest rates, typically between $25-$30/hour. The Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) states that a casual employee “does not have a firm commitment in advance from an employer about how long they will be employed for, or the days (or hours) they will work. A casual employee also does not commit to all work an employer might offer.”

Like many baristas around the world, the schedule of a casual employee could change week to week, but they’re not guaranteed a set (or any) amount of hours. Furthermore, a casual employee isn’t entitled to sick/annual leave or superannuation can end their employment and also have their employment ended at any time unless there’s a contractual agreement. But for nearly all casual baristas, contract agreements are extremely rare.

In Lambie’s long tenure working in New South Wales and Victoria, she’s only signed one or two contracts. Akharoh was originally on a permanent part-time contract at her previous employer but became casual when the contract was voided after the cafe sold to new owners. Georgia O’Connor, Minor Figures Sales & Marketing Manager for the Asia-Pacific region, recalls a similar experience during her time as a barista. O’Connor’s worked in the coffee industry for a decade as well between Sydney, Melbourne, and multiple short stints in London. The only contract she ever signed was at Proud Mary Coffee as a permanent part-time employee.

According to the FWO, permanent part-time (PPT) employees work less than 38 hours a week on average, are entitled to earn annual and sick leave on a pro-rata basis, and are on ongoing employment or fixed-term contracts. In coffee, PPT baristas also earn the least, at $18-$20/hour. Yet in what seems to be an attempt to keep wage costs low but keep the bar staffed, many cafe businesses give their PPT baristas full-time hours (40-50/hours a week) on a PPT rate.

As for the books, they’ll show PPT baristas working close to 38 hours and anything extra is paid out in cash. These situations are very common, according to Lambie, who’s had cafes offer to pay out half on the books, half in cash from the jump. “In my experience, it’s been suggested I also ‘get on the dole’ [apply for welfare], and that’s happened on more than one occasion.”

For O’Connor, this was the motivating reason behind deciding herself to move to casual. “I was already working full-time hours without the pay, and I wasn’t using any of my PPT benefits. It made more sense to not have benefits but better pay.”

So do full-time baristas who work on the books actually exist? They do, but it’s seemingly only offered to the head barista position. Head baristas are often on salary, receive a set amount of sick and annual leave, and guaranteed hours each week. And that’s only if the head barista negotiates those conditions. (I’ve been told it’s more often the case that a cafe’s head barista is casual and will have almost no contracted workers on bar.)

Another major stress, especially for casual employees, is not being able to take off necessary time for health-related or personal reasons due to fears of being let go on the spot. Since the market in Australia is so saturated—notably in Melbourne—cafes can easily find a barista to fill a shift. As a result, turnover rates are high. (At least they have the benefit of nationalized Medicare, which covers basic healthcare needs affordably.)

The exploitation of cafe workers and their wages doesn’t stop there. The FWO requires hospitality businesses to pay their staff a “penalty rate,” or an increased wage, on the weekends and public holidays. To offset the penalty rate and keep from eating into a business’ bottom line, it’s normal for that cost to be passed onto customers through a 10-20% surcharge during those days. It’s also normal, albeit quietly and illegally, for businesses to not pay penalty rates and still have a weekend/public holiday surcharge. But accountability is so low, not much is done about it.

The lack of accountability and normalization of these work environments are why things have rarely changed, not just in coffee but across the hospitality industry. Australia’s wealthiest restaurant empire, the Rockpool Dining Group, was audited last year for severely underpaying workers, but it’s on rare occasion that full action is taken. Employees are not empowered to speak up due to the circumstances they’re under as uncontracted, casual employees. Doing so could result in being out of a job.

Each individual barista will have their own experience, of course, but I know I’ve only scratched the surface of the true realities here. Through whisper networks, I’ve heard accounts of wage inequality, sexual harassment/assault, and discrimination within the cafes of Australia, and perhaps one day Sprudge will investigate further to cover them. But if there’s anything that could be done to at least address barista exploitation and wage theft now, what would it be?

“Everyone should have benefits, regardless if you’re full time, PPT, or casual,” Akharoh states strongly. “Casual baristas get sick too, and I’d also like to go places on paid leave. But job security is probably the biggest thing I’d like to see change.”

O’Connor shares the same sentiment. “No matter what kind of circumstance you’re in, everyone should have a contract, be paid the same, and have superannuation. Things like sick leave, etcetera should be fairly negotiated.”

But in order for most of these ideas to come to fruition, there also needs to be actual accountability. “Something needs to change on how wages in hospitality are enforced, whether that’s by way of unions or legislation,” Lambie begins. “It needs to be policed, but nobody is doing it because they’re afraid to. And since there’s such an oversaturation of baristas, you’re going to do whatever you can to keep that job.”

To answer the original question of whether Australian baristas have it better because they’re paid more, I’m inclined to say no. It’s with our hope, though, that voicing this can inspire a turning point, and Australia can join the rest of the world in creating a more sustainable livelihood for their baristas.

Michelle Johnson is a news contributor at Sprudge Media Network, and the founder and publisher of The Chocolate Barista. Read more Michelle Johnson on Sprudge.

The post Do Australian Baristas Really Have It Better? appeared first on Sprudge.

from Sprudge https://ift.tt/2M08Tsy

[hellofastestnewsfan]

Give us your DNA. Help catch a criminal. That’s the message of a recent ad from the genetic-testing company Family Tree DNA. The video stars Ed Smart, whose daughter Elizabeth Smart was abducted at age 14, exhorting viewers to upload their DNA profiles to the company’s website.

Not so long ago, DNA-testing companies were known only for their promise to unlock medical secrets or trace family histories. What’s changed is the arrest of the alleged Golden State Killer. Since police tracked down a suspect in the notorious case by uploading crime-scene DNA and finding distant relatives on a genealogy website, the same technique has led to dozens more arrests for rapes and murders. Forensic genealogy has become, if not exactly routine, very much normalized.

The Ed Smart ad is, implicitly, an argument that consumer DNA databases should be used for law enforcement. Family Tree DNA came under fire in January when BuzzFeed News revealed that the company had been quietly working with the FBI. Family Tree DNA sells at-home DNA test kits, but it also allows people to upload genetic profiles from competitors such as 23andMe and AncestryDNA to its website. In late 2018, the company’s CEO later told Forensic Magazine, it discovered that the FBI was trying to upload genetic profiles from crime scenes. Rather than fighting the FBI, Family Tree DNA changed its terms of service to allow law-enforcement use in cases of “violent crimes”—without notifying its customers, until BuzzFeed News started asking.

Genealogists were shocked that Family Tree DNA would keep this secret. (Investigators in the Golden State Killer case and others had used the same methods with another genealogy database, called GEDmatch, which became aware of their involvement at the same time as the public.) But on the underlying question of law enforcement using genealogy databases at all, genealogists have had fewer qualms. A poll of 639 genealogists by Maurice Gleeson last year found that 85 percent were “reasonably comfortable” with law enforcement using GEDmatch to identify serial rapists and killers. And in October, bioethicists at Baylor College of Medicine published the results of a more generalized survey: Of the 1,587 respondents, 91 percent supported forensic genealogy for violent crimes, and 46 percent for nonviolent crimes.

[Read: ]The false promise of DNA testing

So instead of backing off, Family Tree DNA appears to have leaned into the controversy. (The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) While other major players in DNA testing, such as 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and MyHeritage, have resisted law enforcement, Family Tree DNA now allows investigators to upload the suspect’s DNA profiles to find potential relatives. Their access to full DNA profiles of everyone in the database is restricted, though, and customers can opt out of law-enforcement matching. Forensic Magazine reports that less than 1 percent of U.S. customers chose to opt out after one week. GEDmatch did not see an exodus of users after the Golden State Killer case either.

Americans, it seems, are not that concerned about sending a relative to prison. In most cases, the suspect’s DNA profile will match only distant relatives, such as second or third or fourth cousins, who might not even know each other. (A distant-relative match, in combination with social media and public records, can be enough to ultimately ID the suspect.) A woman in Washington State recently found out her DNA on GEDmatch had led to the arrest of her second cousin twice removed for murder in Iowa. Before she shared her DNA, her brother had worried about getting a family member arrested. But now, she told The Gazette of Cedar Rapids, “I feel OK about it … I want someone to have to do time if [he/she] did something like that. I don’t regret it now.” She had never met and did not know the man arrested.

Christi Guerrini, an ethicist at Baylor who co-authored the October survey, told me she had been surprised to see such high support for law-enforcement use of genetic genealogy. The survey is prefaced by a description of the Golden State Killer, and she acknowledged that mentioning such a “notorious” case could bias respondents.

On the other hand, that is exactly how the American public as a whole was introduced to forensic genealogy. Genealogists told me they feared a public backlash to other possible test cases—such as identifying a baby abandoned by his mother. Arresting a suspected serial killer who murdered at least 13 people and raped at least 50 made the technique a much easier sell.

[Read: ]How a tiny website became the police’s go-to genealogy database

Erin Murphy, a law professor at NYU, says it’s common to see new, potentially controversial forensic techniques tested in cases that will bring out the most public sympathy. She points to the example of law enforcement building their own DNA databases in the 1990s, which have expanded considerably in scope since then. “DNA databases did not start with collecting DNA from people at traffic stops,” she says. “They started with collecting DNA from repeat sexual offenders and people convicted of serious crimes.” Now some local police departments are using “stop and spit” to build largely unregulated DNA databases.

The victims in the cases solved by genetic genealogy are often very young, often female, and often white. There are practical reasons for this: The victims of rapists who left behind their DNA are likely to be women. The people in genealogy databases are disproportionately white. And the forensic genealogy work can run thousands of dollars, so law enforcement is submitting cases deemed the highest priority. This means that law-enforcement use of genealogy is being sold to us with the victims who arouse the most attention in the media and among the public.

That’s true of the victims of the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California suburbs. It’s also true of Elizabeth Smart, whose blond-haired, blue-eyed face was all over the news before and after she was found in 2003. These are the cases, perhaps, easiest for Americans to get behind—even if it means giving up a measure of privacy.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2FM0juB

[ronaldmrashid]

What A Potential Real Estate Crowdfunding Loss Looks Like

Do you ever feel like your faith is being tested? I’ve been feeling this way a lot more recently. For example, I always get to the bus stop right after the bus leaves. Yet every time I drive down the hill because I’m sick of waiting 20 minutes for the bus, the bus drives by.

I recently published The Worst Landlord Horror Story Ever, a story about a reader who bought a Las Vegas residential property several years before the bottom fell out in 2008-2009. He went through hell dealing with maintenance issues and suspect tenants. Eventually, the complex started accepting Section 8 housing where the government would subsidize 80% of the rent to lower income earners. His housing complex of 157 units turned into a drug infested war zone. Only after buying two more units at the bottom of the market did the reader finally break even after 13 years.

So it is with complete surprise that I got an e-mail the very next week notifying me my real estate crowdfunding fund invested in a 168-unit garden-style apartment complex in Las Vegas! This was also after I decided to invest another $250,000 in the fund, bringing my total up to $500,000.

https://www.financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/REC-Bad-Deal.m4a

Here’s the e-mail,

“The Fund’s Investment Committee has approved a $600,000 preferred equity investment in Vernazza Apartments, a 168-unit garden-style apartment complex in Las Vegas, NV, only 3.5 miles from the Las Vegas Strip, 4.5 miles from McCarren International Airport and 8 miles from downtown Las Vegas.

The Property was originally constructed in 2001 as an affordable housing development. In 2016, the Property was purchased by the seller under a “qualified contract” that released the Property from its affordability requirements. Although technically a market rate property, residents in occupancy during the conversion maintain protected below market rents for a period of up to three years, and as of May 2017 only 54 of 168 units (~32%) had rolled over to market rate units.

The Nathan Family Office and Madison Residential (together, the “Sponsor”), see an opportunity to purchase the Property and roll the remaining below market units to market rate units, especially after restrictions are lifted in October 2019.

The Nathan Family Office and its management partner, Madison Residential (“The Sponsor”) has successfully raised capital on the RealtyShares platform for three prior deals, and all payments for those investments are current. For Vernazza Apartments, the Sponsor is contributing $3.5mm of capital to the deal (100% of JV equity), putting its own money at risk before any losses would be incurred by RealtyShares. Additionally, the Sponsor is expected to set aside 28 months of preferred current payments in a RealtyShares controlled account.”

My heart sank when I read that not only was this a Las Vegas apartment complex, it was also an affordable housing development. I’ve got nothing against affordable housing from a social good perspective. Rocketing housing costs are making it difficult for everyday people to live.

But as an investor who is hell bent on staying financially free due to his investments, I worry about investing in an affordable housing complex for all the reasons my landlord horror story mentioned and the fact that in order to get the target 13% IRR, the Sponsor is relying on turning the remaining 114 units (68%) into market rate housing. It remains to be seen whether the tenants will simply accept the rent increase, move voluntarily, or be evicted with potential buyouts.

Here Are The Investment Highlights and Risk Mitigants

Target IRR: 13%

Demonstrated Rent Increases: As of the May 29th rent roll the seller has rolled 54 units to market. Of those 54 units 24 have been renovated. Leases executed in the last 60 days have achieved the following:

1) Unrenovated market rate units have leased at an average $112 (~10%) per unit over affordable units, 2) Renovated market rate units have leased at an average of $188 (~24%) per unit over affordable units.

Attractive Basis: The subject property is being acquired off-market and was sourced through a relationship of the Sponsor. The Sponsor believes that the $108k per unit price basis is well below comparable assets of a similar 2000 vintage. The sales comp summary included indicates that the purchase is 15.2% below the comp set on a per unit basis and 13.7% on a psf basis. It should also be noted that the average age of these comparable properties is 5 years older than Vernazza.

One thing to note from my landlord horror story is that an institutional investor picked up their 157 units during the financial crisis for roughly $60K/unit, but I’m not sure if these units are like for like since the Vernazza is newer.

Strength of Submarket and Primary Market: The Property is located in the Spring Valley submarket of Las Vegas, which reported a mean vacancy rate of 3.2% in Q1’17 across all property classes per REIS, and average vacancy is expected to decrease to 2.6% by 2021. The included proforma assumes a 5.5% stabilized vacancy for conservatism.

Alignment of Interest: The Sponsor will have approximately $3,500,000 of its own money at risk before losses would be incurred by RealtyShares.

Reserve for Preferred Payment: At closing, the Sponsor is expected to set aside 28 months of preferred current payments in a RealtyShares controlled account.

Population Growth: According to ESRI, within a 3 mile radius of the Property, the population is forecasted to grow by 6% over the next 5 years translating to over 8,000 new residents in the near vicinity.

Access to Local Amenities: The Property is located in close proximity to numerous amenities and employers not the least of which is the Las Vegas strip located 3.5 miles due East.

Setting Low Expectations

Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic on the deal given the Sponsor is putting up $3.5 million of their own capital before investors lose money. The catalyst is very clear: a “qualified contract” that releases the Property from its affordability requirements by October 2019.

But given the risk involved, I’m disappointed the target IRR is only 13%. A target IRR of 18% seems more appropriate. For reference, a 13% IRR is lower than all the previous target IRRs for projects in the fund that aren’t investing in affordable housing.

But here’s the thing. The seller is selling the property to us for $18,200,000 after they had bought the property for only $11,530,000 in August 2015! I’d be selling too if I could make a 58% return on my money in two years. Yes, the sellers had to spend money renovating some of the units, but they couldn’t have spent that much since 68% of the units are still below market rate units. Therefore, even if the seller loses $3.5M of its equity financing, they would still make a 27.4% gain in two years ($3,117,000). It is the seller who is playing with the house’s money, not us.

I personally would not have invested in this deal because I’m trying to stay away from coastal boom bust cities like Las Vegas, the #1 city that got crushed during the housing crisis. The other cities that got hit the most were Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, West Palm Beach, and Tampa according to Trulia. I’ll be happy if this project just gives us our money back (0%) return in three years.

Now you know the downside of investing in a fund. You can do all your research, but once you hand over your money, it’s up to the investment committee or fund manager to decide how to best invest your money. Sometimes their investments won’t align well with your beliefs, and you’ve got to be OK with it.

My problem is that I’ve been hands on with all my investments my entire life. Therefore, it’s hard for me not to watch where every dollar goes. But as a 40-year old father who has better things to do than pick every single investment, I need to outsource my investing to others who do have time and expertise.

The more I can let go, the more I can focus on enjoying life to the fullest. And who knows? This Las Vegas investment might very well return 40% after three years as targeted. I’ll be sure to let y’all know if it does! And if it’s a big bust, I’ll be sure to let you know too. At least this is only one of potentially 10 – 20 investments within the fund.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Related:

Buy Utility, Rent Luxury: The Real Estate Investing Rule To Follow

Focus On Trends: Why I’m Investing In The Heartland Of America

What do you think about this Las Vegas multi-family property investment? Do you think it will return a 13% IRR for three years, or do you think it’s going to be a money loser? Anybody from the Las Vegas area want to do a drive by or tell me what they think about the apartment complex? Have you noticed good deals getting harder to come by in real estate crowdfunding land?

The post What A Potential Real Estate Crowdfunding Loss Looks Like appeared first on Financial Samurai.

from https://www.financialsamurai.com/potential-real-estate-crowdfunding-loss/

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Want To Impeach Obama

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-want-to-impeach-obama/

Why Do Republicans Want To Impeach Obama

Obama A Republican Congress And Impeachment

GOP Faithful Want Obama Impeached, Why? He’s Obama, That’s Why

Some Republicans are eager to impeach the President. Some are so eager that they go on the record saying that impeachment would probably pass the House. Representatives Barletta , Farenthold , and Senator Cruz say that the only obstacle is the Democratic Senate, which would not convict the President. The Washington Posts Jonathan Capehart took this a step further and argued Republican control of the Senate could result in President Obamas impeachment.

Regardless of who controls the Senate, the rationale presented by Cruz, Barletta, and Farenthold makes no sense. In no immediate future will Republicans control enough votes two-thirds of the Senate to remove the president from office. In order to reach the 66 vote threshold, Republicans need to win every single Senate election in November. Democrats may lose the Senate majority. However, no one believes Democrats will lose every single Senate race. More reasonable forecasts suggest Republicans will gain 5-6 seats. That is enough for a majority but not close to the amount necessary to remove Obama from office. In sum, there is no situation in which not having the votes is the reason impeachment has not been pursued.

There is a reasonable argument that the Republican Party, with a House majority insulated from electoral pain through a combination of safe districts packed with conservative constituents, would not hesitate to impeach Obama. He has been enemy number one since he stepped into office.

Efforts To Impeach Barack Obama

This article is part of a series about

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During Barack Obama‘s tenure as President of the United States from 2009 to 2017, certain Republican members of Congress, as well as Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich, stated that Obama had engaged in impeachable activity and that he might face attempts to remove him from office. Rationales offered for possible impeachment ranged from Obama allowing people to use bathrooms based on their gender identity, to the 2012 Benghazi attack, to Obama’s enforcement of immigration laws, and false claims that he was born outside the United States.

Multiple surveys of U.S. public opinion found that a near supermajority of Americans rejected the idea of impeaching Obama, though a bit more than a simple majority of Republicans did support such efforts. For example, CNN found in July 2014 that 57% of Republicans supported impeachment, but in general, 65% of American adults, disagreed with impeachment with only 33% supporting such efforts.

How President Obama Will Be Impeached

Writing about Rep. Eric Cantors  stunning primary defeat last week, I warned Democrats that the House majority leaders loss was as much a wake-up call for them as it was for the GOP. Well, now I want to warn them about a very real possibility: President Obama will be impeached if the Democrats lose control of the U.S. Senate.

Yeah, yeah, I read Aaron Blakes astute piece in The Post on the impeachment process. He says probably not to the question of whether the House could impeach Obama. But probably is not definitely. And with the way the impeachment talk has gone, probably not could become absolutely if the Senate flips to the Republicans.

Rep. Lou Barletta became the latest to openly discuss impeaching the president. In response to a question from a radio host on Monday, the two-term congressman who was swept in during the tea party wave of 2010, said, Obama is just absolutely ignoring the Constitution and ignoring the laws and ignoring the checks and balances. Articles of impeachment, he added, probably could pass in the House.

In a later interview, Barletta said one of the reasons he wouldnt vote for impeachment was because a Democrat-controlled Senate would never convict the Democrat president. Blake also mentions this parenthetically in his piece. Others who have talked about impeachment point to this as the reason not to pursue the extraordinary political rebuke.

Follow Jonathan on Twitter:

Recommended Reading: What Is The Pin The Republicans Are Wearing

Reasons John Boehner Opted To Sue Obama Rather Than Impeach

While most Republicans favor impeachment, John Boehner recalls the losses that Republicans sustained in 1998 midterm elections, during the Clinton impeachment.

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In a near party-line vote, House Republicans on Wednesday approved 225 to 201 a resolution to sue President Obama or other administration officials for actions inconsistent with their duties under the Constitution.

Translation: Republicans accuse the president of executive overreach exceeding his constitutional powers and unlawfully going around Congress.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls the lawsuit “perilous and meritless.” President Obama dismissed it as a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. “Stop being mad all the time. Stop just hating all the time. Come on,” the president said during a speech in Kansas City, Mo., earlier in the day.

Some Republicans, such as former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, want the House to go further and impeach the president. A CNN poll last week shows that the majority of Republicans favor impeachment. So why would House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio opt for a lawsuit instead of impeachment?

Here are three reasons why:

Republican Voters Want To Impeach The President Good Luck With That

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and other Republicans calling for the impeachment of President Barack Obama might want to take a look at the history books and the U.S. Constitution before getting too excited about the idea.

Congress rarely uses its power to impeach, and when it has, impeachment has only infrequently — and in the case of a president, never — resulted in removal from office. Congress has initiated impeachment proceedings more than 60 times in the history of the United States. Just 19 of those cases have been tried by the Senate, and only eight federal judges have ever been convicted and removed from office.

Although House Speaker John Boehner has maintained he is not interested in pursuing impeachment, a top White House aide said Friday that he expected House Republicans to do just that. And a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll shows that one-third of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans believe Obama should be impeached. These numbers reflect an increasingly popular view in conservative circles, which Palin gave voice to earlier this month when she claimed the recent surge of undocumented immigrants at the border was an example of the president’s “rewarding of lawlessness.”

So, why do some conservatives appear to think this would be more of a Nixon than a Clinton situation?

Rep. Bob Goodlatte , chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, earlier this month offered perhaps the most sober rebuke to the calls for impeachment.

Recommended Reading: How Many Republicans Are Against Trump

Hundreds Of Historians Join A Call For Trumps Impeachment

More than 300 historians and constitutional scholars have signed an open letter calling for the impeachment and removal of President Trump. They say his continuation in office after encouraging supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol posed a clear and present danger to American democracy and the national security of the United States.

Those who signed the letter, released on Medium on Monday, include best-selling authors like Ron Chernow, Taylor Branch, Garry Wills and Stacy Schiff, as well as many leading academic historians. A number of the signatories had joined a previous letter in December 2019, calling for the presidents impeachment because of numerous and flagrant abuses of power including failure to protect the integrity of the impending 2020 election.

Since November 2020, the new letter says, Trump has refused to accept the results of a free and fair election, something no president before him has ever done.

Politically, the condemnation by historians may carry less weight than the presidents loss of support in recent days from business groups that once supported him or his policies. But David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers who drafted the new letter, said that historical expertise mattered.

In September, the American Historical Association issued a statement condemning the first White House History Conference, held at the National Archives .

Public Debate Over Impeachment Demands

In terms of background, U.S. public opinion widely opposed efforts made to impeach previous Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. CNN Polling Director Keating Holland has stated that their organization found that 69% opposed impeaching President Bush in 2006.

According to a July 2014 YouGov poll, 35% of Americans believed President Obama should be impeached, including 68% of Republicans. Later that month, a CNN survey found that about two thirds of adult Americans disagreed with impeachment efforts. The data showed intense partisan divides, with 57% of Republicans supporting the efforts compared to only 35% of independents and 13% of Democrats.

On July 8, 2014, the former Governor of Alaska and 2008 RepublicanVice Presidential nomineeSarah Palin publicly called for Obama’s impeachment for “purposeful dereliction of duty”. In a full statement, she said: “Itâs time to impeach; and on behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds, we should vehemently oppose any politician on the left or right who would hesitate in voting for articles of impeachment.”

Andrew McCarthy of the National Review wrote the book Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case For Obama’s Impeachment, which argued that threatening impeachment was a good way to limit executive action by Obama .

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Is The Supreme Court Likely To Save Obamacare

The Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Conservative justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law a long-held Republican goal.

The courts three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety and presumably would form a majority by joining a decision that cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it.

Leading a group of Democratic-controlled states, California and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are urging the court to leave the law in place.

A decision is expected by late spring.

Meet The Impeachment Crowd: 6 Republicans Who Want Obama Out

Trump Asks Why GOP Didn’t Impeach Obama for IRS Scandal, Obamacare Promise, Iran Cash Payment

From Sarah Palin to Tom Coburn, several Republicans are calling for impeachment.

— intro: Has President Obamas use of the pen and phone to circumvent Congress gotten out of hand?

Some members of the GOP seem to think so.

Even as the embattled president fights criticism over the escalating humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, the release of Arm. Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in return for five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, and the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act, a mounting chorus of Republicans are calling for impeachment.

Heres a list of the high-profile Republicans who want to kick the president out of office:

quicklist: 1category: title: Sarah Palin url: text: Who Is She: 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, former governor of Alaska, sometime reality show host.

What She Said: Enough is enough of the years of abuse from this president. His unsecured border crisis is the last straw that makes the battered wife say, No mas. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate. Its time to impeach.

When She Said It: July 8, 2014

media: 21159508caption: related:

quicklist: 2category: title: Tom Tancredo url: text: Who Is He: Former candidate for Colorado governor, 2008 Republican presidential hopeful, former congressman representing Colorados 6th Congressional District.

When He Said It: Valentines Day 2014

media: 24494513caption: related:

When He Said It: June 4, 2014

media: 24494378caption: related:

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Clyburn: Gop Will Try To Impeach Obama

Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn is predicting that Republicans will try to impeach Barack Obama so that they can put an asterisk next to the name of the first black president.

There will be some reason found to introduce an impeachment resolution, the South Carolina congressman said Tuesday on MSNBCs The Ed Show. These Republicans have decided that this president must have an asterisk by his name after he leaves office, irrespective of whether or not he gets convicted. It is their plan to introduce an impeachment resolution.

He continued, is to put an asterisk next to this first African-American president in the history of the country to put an asterisk next to his name when the history books are written.

Clyburn, a high-ranking member of Democratic leadership in the House, argued that Republicans are aiming for impeachment as a way to keep the country focused on foolishness rather than on what we need to do in order to move an agenda forward.

As far as what will spur the call to impeach, Clyburn pointed to the heated debate on immigration reform.

Obama has warned Republican leaders in Congress that if they do not act quickly on a plan to reform immigration laws, he will issue executive orders aimed at changing the system. Speaker John Boehner has said that executive actions will poison the well on any attempts to reform the laws.

Obama Administration Immigration Policy

In June 2012, Senator Jon Kyl mentioned impeachment when discussing the Obama Administration policy on immigration. He said on the Bill Bennettradio show, “if itâs bad enough and if shenanigans involved in it, then of course impeachment is always a possibility. But I donât think at this point anybody is talking about that”.

In August 2013, Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma responded to a questioner in a town hall meeting, who had asserted that Obama was failing to carry out his constitutional responsibilities, by saying that “you have to establish the criteria that would qualify for proceedings against the president… and that’s called impeachment”. Coburn added, “I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’, but I think you’re getting perilously close”. Coburn did not specify what grounds he felt would support impeachment, but NBC News noted that Coburn “mentioned that he believes Department of Homeland Security officials have told career USCIS employees to ‘ignore’ background checks for immigrants”. Coburn mentioned no evidence that substantiated his belief.

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Trumps Former Secretary Of Veterans Affairs Says He Would Vote To Remove The President From Office

David J. Shulkin, the former secretary of veterans affairs under President Trump, said on Monday that he would vote to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office if he were still in the cabinet, saying that Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he is a threat to the nation.

Theres no doubt I believe that this is the time to put the countrys interest first, and I do not believe the president should any longer be serving, Dr. Shulkin said in an interview. I believe that this is an extraordinary time of danger and challenge to the country, and I would support removal from office.

Dr. Shulkin, who said he would also support impeachment but worried it was not an efficient enough mechanism, went further than most other former Trump cabinet secretaries have gone in calling for the presidents removal from office. John F. Kelly, who served as Mr. Trumps secretary of homeland security before becoming White House chief of staff, has also said he would support invoking the 25th Amendment while other Trump cabinet veterans like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and former Attorney General William P. Barr have offered scathing criticism without explicitly calling for Mr. Trumps removal.

Trump’s Former Chief Of Staff Is On Capitol Hill To Meet With The Impeachment Team

From CNN’s Kristin Wilson

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told reporters that the Democrats opening argument was pretty much what I was expecting and that its hard to make a good case when you have an unconstitutional process.

He said hes spoken with former President Trump on a regular basis but had not spoken with him about the opening arguments at the Senate trial.

When asked why he was on Capitol Hill, he said, I’m just coming over to meet with the impeachment team and said that he will be with them sporadically over the course of the trial.

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But It Would Be A Boneheaded Move For Numerous Reasons

When Congress heads off on its upcoming five-week recess, some Republicans, at town halls with constituents, will bring up the “I” word: impeachment. Barack Obama, they’ll say, needs to be removed from office. The reasons, in their view, are many: Benghazi. The IRS. An inability to control the Mexican border, to name but three. The constitutional standard for removal from office in Article II, Section 4 is “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” and to the far right, Obama more than qualifies.

Talking tough about impeachment is what constituents in gerrymandered Republican districts want to hear. It’s good red-meat politics. But back here on planet Earth, the reality is this: There’s about as much chance of Obama being removed from office as there is of Nancy Pelosi throwing the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. It’s just not going to happen. The probability is literally zero.

Here are some numbers: A CNN poll last week said one third of Americans want Obama impeached. Just a liberal media poll, you say? Well, a Fox News survey last week said the same thing. And that one third just happens to coincide more or less with the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Republicans. Fact is, vast majorities of independent voters and Democrats oppose removing the president from office.

So the Republican dream of Obama being forced from office making Joe Biden the 45th president simply isn’t going to happen.

President’s Constitutional Duty To Faithfully Execute The Laws

On December 3, 2013, the House Judiciary committee held a hearing formally titled “The President’s Constitutional Duty to Faithfully Execute the Laws”, which some participants and observers viewed as an attempt to begin justifying impeachment proceedings. Asked if the hearing was about impeachment, the committee chairman responded that it was not, adding, “I didn’t mention impeachment nor did any of the witnesses in response to my questions at the Judiciary Committee hearing.” Contrary to his claims however, a witness did mention impeachment rather blatantly. Partisan Georgetown University law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz said, âA check on executive lawlessness is impeachmentâ as he accused Obama of âclaim the right of the king to essentially stand above the law.â

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The State Department Labels Cuba A State Sponsor Of Terrorism In A Last

The State Department has designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, a last-minute foreign policy stroke that will complicate the incoming Biden administrations plans for dealing with Havana.

With this action, we will once again hold Cubas government accountable and send a clear message: The Castro regime must end its support for international terrorism and subversion of U.S. justice, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.

The New York Times reported last month that Mr. Pompeo was weighing the move and had a plan to do so on his desk. The action, announced with just over a week left in the Trump administration, reverses a step taken in 2015 after President Barack Obama restored U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba, calling its decades of isolation an archaic relic of the Cold War.

Once in office, President Trump acted swiftly to undermine Mr. Obamas policy of openness, which Republicans said Havana forfeited by failing to implement promised reforms and continuing to crack down on political dissent. The designation requires a finding that a country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism, according to the State Department. The move automatically triggers U.S. sanctions against Cuba, including limits on U.S. foreign assistance, export controls and financial restrictions.

What Did Trump Say About Obamacare

Why Republicans want Hunter Biden to testify in Trump’s impeachment trial

President Trump has been actively trying to repeal the healthcare law since he campaigned for the 2016 presidential election.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to revoke Obamacare because it’s been an “unlawful failure.”

A brief filed in June asked the court to strike down the Affordable Care Act, arguing it became invalid after Congress axed parts of it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi said: “President Trump and the Republicans campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty.

“If President Trump gets his way, 130 million Americans with pre-existing conditions will lose the ACAs lifesaving protections and 23 million Americans will lose their health coverage entirely.

“There is no legal justification and no moral excuse for the Trump Administrations disastrous efforts to take away Americans health care.”

Republicans also argue that some people are better off without Obamacare due to the fact that it does not cover those who need it most.

According to the provisions, people who earn just slightly too much to qualify for federal premium subsidies, particularly early retirees and people in their 50s and early 60s who are self-employed are not covered.

Trump endorsed a replacement to Obamacare in 2017 but fell short of passing the Republican-controlled Congress.

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Trump’s Rhetoric On Impeachment In 2014 Becomes Relevant Anew

In his unhinged letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi yesterday, Donald Trump told the congressional leader, “You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!” The president went on to suggest via Twitter this morning that he’s concerned about impeachment being made “trivial.”

He appears to have arrived at these concerns quite recently.

It wasn’t long ago, for example, that Trump wanted Pelosi to impeach George W. Bush for having launched the Iraq war. “He got us into the war with lies!” Trump said in 2008.

His attitude toward impeaching Barack Obama was even more cavalier. “Are you allowed to impeach a president for gross incompetence?” Trump wrote on Twitter in June 2014.

Several months later, after Republicans took complete control over both houses of Congress, Trump appeared on Fox & Friends and was asked what he’d like to see the new GOP majorities do. Trump replied that he wanted Republicans to impeach the Democratic president.

“Do you think Obama seriously wants to be impeached and go through what Bill Clinton did? He would be a mess. He would be thinking about nothing but. It would be a horror show for him. It would be an absolute embarrassment. It would go down on his record permanently.”

It wasn’t altogether clear what it was Obama did that Trump saw as worthy of impeachment; Trump simply seemed to like the idea of trying to rattle Obama on a personal level.

Does this sound like anyone else you know?

Donald Trump Claims Republicans ‘never Even Thought Of Impeaching’ Barack Obama History Tells A Different Story

President Donald Trump claimed that Republicans “never even thought of impeaching” Barack Obama, despite the record showing that many spoke of doing so over multiple issues.

In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump called on Republicans to get tougher and said that while he thinks Democrats are bad politicians with lousy policies he respects that they stick together. And, Trump said, Democrats are vicious.

“They’re much more vicious. We would never do a thing like this,” Trump told Hannity of the current House impeachment inquiry over the Ukraine affair in which the president is accused of soliciting the help of a foreign government in the 2020 election.

” could’ve impeached Obama for the IRS scandal, they could’ve impeached him for the guns or whatever, where guns went all over the place and people got killed with guns, Fast and Furious. They could’ve impeached him for many different things. They didn’t impeach him. They never even thought of impeaching him.”

In fact, Republicans in Congress did raise the impeachment of Obama multiple times.

Ex-GOP Congressman Predicts Republicans Could Flip on Trump Over Doral

In 2010, California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa called the alleged White House job offer to ex-Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak if he dropped out of a Senate primary “a crime, and could be impeachable” for Obama, Fox News reported.

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How dames could vote Hillary Clinton into the White House

A presidential election with the first female nominee for a major party was always going to be about gender but its own language and action of Donald Trump has galvanized dames got to make sure he never goes near the Oval Office

Moments into the final presidential dialogue, as the topic turned to abortion, Hillary Clinton gave an impassioned and unapologetic subject for the status of women right to choose.

Donald Trump had just described in graphic expressions his opinion of the methods used, falsely differentiating Clinton as being in favor of rend[ ping] the child out of the womb of the mother just days prior to birth.

An unfazed Clinton hinted the Republican nominee meet maidens she personally knew “whos been” undergone one of the worst possible choices imaginable, or travel to countries where restrictive laws obliged ladies to either undergo abortions or grow children involuntarily.

Clinton went farther than any of her precedes on an issue that often fractions the American public.Undecided voters in a CNN focus group conducted that night in October said it was her strongest minute.

But maidens find it especially poignant. Natalie, one of those undecided voters, said of Clintons response: It was important to me because I dont see the government should have hold over a womans person just like they wouldnt have limit of a mans torso.

Gender was always going to play a pivotal role in a campaign that could terminate in the election of the members of the first girl president in Americas 240 -year history and seems likely to a verify a historically huge gender chink at the polls. But it has been amplified as a result of Trumps language and behavior, startling many female voters is so that a human who boasted on tape of sexually assaulting females is not elevated to the highest part in the land.

Trump calls Clinton a nasty girl during final conversation

I wish I didnt have to say this, but, certainly, glory and respect for women and girls is also included in the ballot this election, Clinton told a audience of 11, 000 beings, many of them women and students, who came to see her share a stage with first lady Michelle Obama in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the final weeks of her campaign.

Natasha McKay, of Charlotte, left the rally in situations of euphoria. Im certainly uplifted right now. Im in a dazzle, she alleged. Hillary is so powerful. Michelle Obama is incredibly strong. Those two together is an awesome force.

McKay mentioned the sharp distinguish between Clintons message of female empowerment and Trumps history of preparing cheapening explains about women.

Like Michelle Obama read: When they travel low, “theres going” high-pitched, McKay responded. Except Donald Trump going to be home lower and lower and lower.

The gender gap has long favored Democrats. Harmonizing to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, maidens favored the Democratic nominee in 2012 by 11 objects, 2008 by 13, 2004 by three, and 2000 by 10 points.

Nevadas ladies stand divided over Trump and Clinton on eve of poll

But this year Clinton ogles set to match or even outstrip the historical 17 -point lead her husband held among women over Bob Dole in 1996. Ten recent referendums taken in October range from eight to 22 percentage points conducts, with an average advantage of 17.( In 1980 and 1984 maidens favored the Republican Ronald Reagan over his Democratic opponents Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale .)

Whereas Clinton balk away from the historic sort of her candidacy during her first bid for president in 2008, this time around the prospect of electing a woman to the White House has been a most important pillars of her narrative. But the former secretary of state could not have predicted she would be handed an opponent who has in the past referred to women as fat animals, slobs and dogs, and both bragged about and been accused of sexual assault.( He has disavowed the accusations .)

A new analysis by the Pew Research Center found that majorities of both men( 58%) and women( 62%) do Trump has little or no respect for women. Exclusively 38% of respondents conceive the Republican nominee has a great deal or a fair sum of respect for women, compared with 76% who believe that Clinton does.

And so Clinton and her allies have worked hard to target ladies from the millennials who readily distinguish as feminists to the suburban married women who typically fluctuating toward Republican but may be repelled by the believed to be casting a vote for Trump.

Hillary Clinton and first lady Michelle Obama embracing before they address the crowd at a campaign stop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, last week. Photo: Logan Cyrus/ AFP/ Getty Images

Emilys List, the group that works to elect pro-choice Democratic wives to public power, has targeted its outreach toward millennial women in the key battleground countries where they could play a decisive role: New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Florida and Nevada. Through a predominantly digital, multimillion-dollar safarus, the group has extended ads that include a young woman evidencing her sorenes in reading aloud paroles spoken by Trump, such as Putting a partner to work is a very dangerous act, and are used in advertise on social media scaffolds used by younger voters.

Jennifer Lawless, the director of the Women& Politics Institute at American University, did Clinton had an extraordinary grassroots enterprise. The instant Donald Trump says something, theyre be permitted to micro-target females, she said.

The most significant shift, Lawless lent, has been among marriage dames a demographic that advantages Republican and elect Romney over Obama by seven percentage points in 2012. The tape disclosed last month peculiarity Trump boasting in 2005 about groping and kissing ladies without their consent seemed to give married females a sense that they did not have to vote exclusively along party lines.

What that strip did was, especially to women who were undecided or find some appreciation of party loyalty[ to the GOP ], the strip dedicated a lot of Republican political nobilities ammunition to say, vote your shame, Lawless told, and that freed up people who might be loyal partisans to reconsider.

Meghan Milloy, a lifelong Republican, reached her breaking point with Trump well before he became the partys campaigner and courted controversy with allegations of sexual assault.

Milloy said she was appalled when Trump sparred with Megyn Kelly and insinuated the Fox News anchor asked tough questions during the first Republican primary debate because she was menstruating.

Thats when I decided he wasnt fit to be president, she remarked. I dont even think he is fit to manage a local Papa Johns.

People gather in front of Trump Tower last month to protest against Donald Trumps therapy of the status of women. Picture: Timothy A Clary/ AFP/ Getty Images

When Trump won the nomination, Milloy facilitated launch Republican Women for Hillary. Though she still considers herself a member of the Republican party and a strong republican, Milloy is disappointed with her defendant for not disavowing Trump.

If the party comes back from this and recognizes that it get crazy this year with Trump and the platform then I would certainly stick around and “il do my best” to help them rebuild after this year, Milloy mentioned. But if they redouble down like Trump has done, then I certainly wont become members of that.

Seeking to weaponize Trumps rhetoric against him, the Clinton campaign has aired a strong ad in which young girls look at themselves in the reflect against the background of the real estate moguls bullying texts. The commercial-grade aimed to target, including with regard to, married women in the suburbs of swaying positions Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

As the sex crime videotape came to light-footed, Clinton intensified her lurch against her foes management of women.

Addressing a Women for Hillary a conference call, one week before such elections, Clinton appealed to supporters on a personal level.

I are well aware that parts of such elections have been distressing to numerous dames, especially hearing about Donald Trumps behavior towards ladies over the years, she said. He enjoys stirring girls was terrible about themselves in every possible practice. He ponders defaming dames manufactures him a bigger man.

We is responsible to ensure that he and his attitude what he suggests, what he makes, what he does to girls never goes him near the White House.

Clinton too emerged with top female surrogates, from Michelle Obama to prominent women rights rulers such as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund president, Cecile Richards, and Emilys List president, Stephanie Schriock, to make a final lurch to women in must-win battlegrounds.

To be elected as a woman, you have to be 20 experiences as good as your opponent, replied Richards, whose late mother Ann Richards was herself a colonist and as district treasurer of Texas became the first woman elected statewide in roughly 50 times in 1982.

We are not comfortable in its own country with women who are strong. It is remarkable that this woman, as our own president remarks, has more event, more preparation to go into the Oval Office than anyone we can recollect, and it was just always going to be hard.

But the gendered circumstances of Clintons battle, according to Richards from the emphasis placed on her robes to her speaking mode to whether she smiles enough is what motivates females voters to make their voices heard on 8 November.

Women feel this is about much more than Hillary, “its about” make that has been going on for decades, she did. These wives seem an enormous appreciation of dignity and possession in this election.

Perhaps few moments solidified that feeling better than when Trump leaned into his microphone during the final presidential dialogue and snarled: Such a nasty woman.

Women substantiating Clinton instantly regained the term and swerved it into a rallying cry, and it became a recurring theme at safarus occasions to find women with Nasty Women shirts. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and influential Clinton surrogate, problem a fiery castigation of Trump at a campaign rally in New Hampshire late last-place month: Nasty ladies vote.

Nasty maidens poll: Elizabeth Warren takes a swipe at Trump

It is not simply a distaste for Trump driving prospective turnout among women, according to longtime spectators of the intersection of gender issues and politics.

Theres a policy contention for why unmarried women in particular are more drawn to a Democratic programme, answered Rebecca Traister, writer of the book All the Single Dame: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation.

They are no longer the class of Americans who are living economically, socially or professionally is dependant on husbands in the way that they used to be. Barack Obama drove the Democratic advantage among unmarried women to historic degrees in 2008, with 70% support to John McCains 29%, while in 2012 single females preferred the president over Mitt Romney by a whopping margin of 36 percentage points.

With women currently holding activities, and serving as breadwinners be they unmarried, married, or same-sex spouses in large numerals, as an electorate they are increasingly moved by policies that address their concerns, Traister added.

This is why unmarried females have specially been drawn toward Clintons platform of equal pay for women, easing the burden of student lend obligation, paid kinfolk leave and protecting reproductive claims, she alleged. Clinton has emphasized her commitment to such issues since launching her safarus, and likewise focused on conjuring the minimum wage, an issue inextricably tied to gender in that wives even out two-thirds of minimum wage earners.

Jess OConnell, the executive director of Emilys List, announced Trump was simply vocalizing in politically faulty terms what Republican have long preached in more concealed language.

Single ladies are afraid the Republicans are going to turn back the clocks on them, OConnell alleged. Rejecting the gender chink in payments or wanting to punish women for the purpose of having an abortion demo a real shortage of understanding about women and their lives today.

This is when womens expressions are going to be heard.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

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Just Say NO!! To Jogging…

  “You guys. You lollygag the ball around the infield. You lollygag your way down to first. You lollygag in and out of the dugout. You know what that makes you??!” “LOLLYGAGGERS!!”

When was the last time you saw one of your favorite professional athletes jogging during a play and were excited about it? Ok, Albert Pujols fans put your hands down. There are always exceptions to any rule, and in this case the “Homerun Trot” is one. I was thinking more along the lines of Randy Moss, and other players known for “taking plays off”. Truth is most major sports are a series of short bursts of activity, and then a quick recovery. I know baseball players do a LOT of standing around and scratching themselves, but when they actually have to move, they move quickly. That is why explosive movements are so important in strength and conditioning for sports. Think about this, the average football play lasts 5.5 secs and the average recovery between plays is just over 30 secs.  So why exactly do football coaches have their players jog back and forth the length of the field?!  Distance runners aside, jogging has little to no carry over to the field of play.

This my call to arms for all coaches..Stop The Madness!! Just say no to Jogging, and yes to Sprinting!! So what’s the big deal? Why am I so adamant about getting coaches to stop jogging? Where do I begin? While it may not be as much of an issue for younger athletes, think of the impact on your joints and bones. The two strides are very similar, however with jogging the extended duration of the activity increases the impact tenfold. Youthful ignorance usually helps most high school kids avoid joint problems.  Even so there is a cumulative effect, and sooner or later this impact will cause issues.  This is in no way limited to athletes.  Can you imagine the amount of impact on the knees of your average, overweight, middle-aged gym goer that uses jogging as their means of getting in shape?! The math is literally staggering. No wonder so many people have aches and pains and eventually give up when their ineffective plan proves to be just that.

Need more convincing, have you ever looked at distance runners? I don’t mean the previously mentioned New Years Resolutioners that take up jogging to lose that last 45lbs before swimsuit season. I am talking about professional distance runners. These people jog for a living basically. They are in shape somewhat, but unless they are from the country of Kenya, their bodyfat percentage can be higher than you might think. Many of them are “skinny fat”. Their body have become very efficient at running at a steady pace, and added muscle mass is a hindrance. Compare that to the body of a sprinter. Sprinters are lean, muscular, not to mention FAST! Isn’t speed a requirement of most sports?! “Bigger, Stronger, Faster”…yep there it is on the list.

The other two qualities on that list are bigger and stronger. You lose much more muscle running long distances than you do with short sprints. Sprinting actually tells your body that you are going to need that muscle in the near future, and to find a source of fuel elsewhere.  Athletes spend all offseason putting on size and strength. They kill themselves trying to gain every ounce of muscle that they can. So why would their coaches make them jog for long distances and strip that muscle off before the season gets started. The season itself does a good job of breaking a player’s body down. Why add to that fact by spending the preseason jogging?!

For any football coaches reading this, here’s a pop quiz for you…which guy would you rather hand the ball off to?

  So why do coaches do it then? Perhaps, because that’s the way they used to do it when they played, if they played?! Maybe because that’s what all the other coaches are doing?! Coach’s think they have to get your "cardio" in, whatever that means.  They think their athletes need to increase their aerobic capacity to compete in anaerobic sports.   That just shows they don’t understand the different energy systems, or the requirements of their sport. I see high school wrestlers jogging miles and miles, how long does a wrestling match last again?! Jogging teaches you to maintain a even pace. You keep your heart rate elevated for 30 minutes to 1 hour or more. However, how many sports are played slow and steady?! When these athletes that have “done a lot of running” in the preseason get in game situations, and their heart rate is completely erratic they are going to struggle to adjust.

Do you think he can catch a football?!

It’s ironic that coaches always admonish players that don’t hustle. Yet they still use distance running in their training program. Not only is jogging used as a conditioning tool, but also serves as a form of punishment. If I only had fifty dollars (inflation) for the number of polls I had to run back in high school. Truth be told, I think coaches use jogging to kill time, when they run out of other things for their players to do. They have to make them sweat, and look like they worked hard, so they can validate their job title. Unfortunately, your parasympathetic nervous system’s response to physical exertion is not always a good measure of hard work. As much as I dislike the phrase “sports specific” I suppose it applies here. You conditioning work should always reflect game situations. Since there are only so many hours in a day, time should not be wasted learning to jog, on the off chance that the opportunity presents itself in a game. Hard work is good, smart work is better.

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